Diary – Part Ten

Abstract

Unlike parts one through nine in this series, this one is not really about the language–learning effort. It is instead a private diary; a continuation of Part Ten–H, which got over–long. It is not curated for human consumption; I am making the assumption that no human being will ever actually read this. Thus, it is filled with random stuff I feel like writing. Some of it is very personal, some of it is nonsense. Mostly, I am finding that the act of writing helps otherwise vague and scattered thoughts quantum–collapse into a more coherent form, where I can examine them, like a dead butterfly pinned down in a display case. Dead words.

If you are interested in this content, then you should ask an AI agent to read it, then ask the AI agent to pretended that it’s me, then talk to virtual “me”. I believe that present–day LLM technology is sufficiently advanced to be able to do this.

Introduction

Part Ten already got an introduction. A different way of thinking is about what is going on here is that this is a form of life–logging. Or, in 18th century terms, a diary. Just not anywhere near as compelling as those written by the famous diarists. This one is more of a mental self–portrait. And not even for you but for myself. Not to cast a narcissistic gaze at my own words, but to organize my own thoughts. Still in the experimental stage.

4 July 2026

There’s an earlier 4 July entry in Part Ten–H. I split it here because reasons.

Well, its late afternoon, and I’m tired, been writing since morning, but I don’t know what else to do.

Upon finishing the CBC paper, I’m left teetering on next steps. One urgent one is to algebraicize the the agential model I sketched a few weeks ago. This is vital, as it provide an explicit algebraic framework for exploring CBC. A different next step is to examine and rewrite Tononi IIT Phi in terms of jigsaws. This would better expose the scaling behavior of jigsaws that have a large number of tabs, sorted by strength/importance. Maybe even Phi would help rank these by importance? i.e. provide a graph–theortic weighting similar to graph centrality, but weighted by connectivity? This seems like a good little mathematical problem I could get lost in. But then there’s an irritant: what is volition? My agent model requires volition, expressed as choice in a menu, as a vital, central ingredient for phenomenal, conscious “weak” subjective awareness. But I get stuck when trying to evade the deterministic Turing trap, here. It’s irritating. Oh, but I have in idea. See below. Finally, the CBC paper makes a striking assertion about evolution: since the cells (agents) are conscious, they can use some political process to reason their way into directed evolution. To basically engineer their own future evolutionary state. This is remarkable, because it overcomes the combinatoric explosion usually seen when random mutation is used to drive evolution. Articulating and explaining this would be a huge algorithmic breakthrough. This is fun, because it again suggests a system operating near critical opalescence, avalanching near a phase transition.

OK, but perhaps I need to tackle the hardest problem first, as everything else seems to rest upon this. This is the problem of volitional choice. So all I’ve got is this hare–brained idea. Turtles all the way down.

So, lets assume a menu has appeared via some mechanism. To be concrete, in the case of my Atomese learning agents, the menu of choices are: (a) move to a different file in this directory (b) move to another directory (c) do word–pair counting on this file (d) do disjunct parsing and counting on this file (e) do clustering & classifiction (f) maybe other menu choices. Since Atomese is computable, this is all Turing deterministic, there is no free will. I can write some algo that will randomly pick one of these menu items, maybe by some weighted importance. Still, there is no free will. This is unsatisfying, so what can we do?

The goofball proposal is to posit an oracle of some sort, a Turing oracle, that will make the decision using some impenetrable logic. This is goofy, because its non–physical.

The remaining proposal is to posit quantum effects. This is in accordance with the physical world, except that the physical world is incompletely understood, viz. quantum collapse is magical. So now, we imagine the agent, and it’s menu of choices, in some quantum superposition. Let’s suppose the six menu items to be in some pure state, i.e. to correspond to state vectors with phases. Viz. the current menu is

| ψ_{χ} ⟩ = e^{i ϕ_{1}} | χ_{1} ⟩ + e^{i ϕ_{2}} | χ_{2} ⟩ + \dots

with each

| χ_{k} ⟩

being a menu choice (corresponding to a menu choice). These correspond to the eigenstates of a decision operator

Ξ

so that

Ξ | χ_{k} ⟩ = λ_{k} | χ_{k} ⟩

and the agent has made a choice when

Ξ

has been applied to the current menu, resulting in a wave–function collapse, which is interpreted as a choice. Because it is a collapse, it immediately enters the past, and is no longer a part of the present. That is, wave–function collapse marks the forward march of time. Time ticks because wave functions collapse; it is the originator and driver of time.

Whatever. But, at any rate, the agent itself would then be in some superposition, with the possible future motor actions entangled with the choice menu. That is, the agent state is

| ψ_{α} ⟩ = e^{i ϕ_{1}} | χ_{1} ⟩ | μ_{1} ⟩ + e^{i ϕ_{2}} | χ_{2} ⟩ | μ_{2} ⟩ + \dots

with each

| μ_{k} ⟩

being the motor movement associated with menu choice

| χ_{k} ⟩

. That is, the agent collapses to state

| χ_{k} ⟩ | μ_{k} ⟩

and performs movement

| μ_{k} ⟩

. Umm, I’m slightly confused: if this was a finite state machine, this says that the machine transitions to state

μ_{k}

Perhaps I’m doing my analysis wrong: I should be writing this out using the language of a quantum finite automaton (alternately, as a geometric finite automaton!?, but I don’t see that this mild generalization matters, for the moment, except as an OK intellectual exercise.) So lets do this.

But, before we do this, note that we skipped over avalanching as a purely classical but somehow non–deterministic means of choosing and making a selection. That is, the system sits on the verge of making a decision, and the menu of choices is somehow analogous to the abelian sand–pile. Most choices are small: e.g. “process the next word pair”. But sometimes, end of file is reached, and now the menu expands. The driver of the avalanche is some minor external event. It triggers the avalanche, interpreted as a state transition to a new state. Is it free–will–ish? Well, not quite, not conventionally, because a small external influence can trigger a large internal rearrangement, when the internal system is poised on the edge of stability.

OK, one last trick before this analysis can begin. By using the generic geometric finite state machine algebraic axioms and notation, we can use exactly the same notation to describe a DFA, PFA, QFA or other GFA, leaving most of the framework the same. (Here DFA==deterministic, PFA==probabilistic, QFA==quantum, etc.)

It’s 7:30 PM. I’m tired. Do I really want to start this now? Maybe I can lay down some basics?

5 July 2026

I just woke up. Well, 20 mins ago, but had to make coffee, whatever. I am now trying to ... not hurt myself. Didn’t work. Instead, I read six pages of Baltušis. Apparently, the thought of writing formulas first thing in the morning started to make my head hurt. What’s the problem? I had one cocktail last night, only one. And I’m dehydrated. Yesterday was the 4th of July. I hoped to find some Americans to celebrate with. I didn’t. One cocktail doesn’t make me drunk any more. Maybe it never did, but I have the feeling I’m less alcohol sensitive now, than when I was younger. I wonder what that is. Google AI says it should be the opposite: lower muscle mass and slower liver means higher blood alcohol percentage. Well, except I have higher muscle mass now, than when I was younger. Whatever. I still woke with ... I feel fine, but the thought of writing formulas raised a certain pressure in my head. The intellectual effort does create sudden sharp elevations in assorted synaptic fluids, and, I guess just like any motor slammed into gear, the shock can be harmful. Different mechanisms run at different rates, the fastest ones just have to wait for the slowest ones to come up to speed.

I’m ready for math now. Just a few words. Nothing interesting happened last night; alas. The night before, I wrote up, in part, above. What I did not write up was that I met a 53–year–old psychiatrist who seemed to marvel at my command of the language. Perhaps I made a strong first impression. I walked up to her, direct (the place was empty) and told her about the vatnik angel episode that occurred just moments earlier. She was actually the first to use the word “angel”, so I went with that. Presumably, psychiatrists are very good at observation. We had fun talking. The only issue was that she kept telling me how awesome I am, here and there. I don’t need to be told that. I’m fully self–affirmed. I guess I should have told her that. I’m confident. If I ever see her again, and if she ever complements me again, I will have to ask her if confirmation is a natural part of psychiatric help. Maybe she just says that out of habit? Hmm. Google AI says no. Psychiatrists just become normal when off duty. Maybe she just liked me. We had good rapport. For a while, I got to thinking that she was thinking “At last! A normal person! Without pathologies!” and was relieved.

Maybe I should start a “normal person club”. Invite her, and Lenonas. And see what happens.

Anyway. Time for work.

—————————-

Lets define a “measure–preserving finite automaton”. This will be inadequate for the agent model, but is one of the central concepts, so lets start.

Let

Σ = {a_{k} : k \in 1, \dots, N}

a finite set of symbols, the input alphabet. (I guess it could be countable:

N = ω

or maybe larger, bt for now just, uhh, countable?)

Let

B = (X, B, μ)

be space with a Borel algebra

B

and a measure

μ : B \to [0, 1]

. Let

T = {T_{k} : k \in 1, \dots, N}

be a collection of transformations

T_{k} : X \to X

that are measure–preserving

μ (T_{k}^{- 1} (A)) = μ (A)

for all

A \in B

For the case of

N = 1

this corresponds to the standard definition of a dynamical system. When there is only one

T

, it is interpreted as the forward–time evolution of the system. But here, it is curiously different. One possible interpretation is that there are

N

different time axes. But this is bunkum, since we will soon impose the requirement that for each time step, one and only one

T_{k}

must be chosen. This implies an interpretation that there are many possible futures ahead of us. The selection of just one

T_{k}

is the selection of one possible future, and mapping it into the present (here and now). Huh. Well, I think I just got lucky, here, because I wasn’t planning this in advance. Again, the universe sings.

So, now, we mention that this can be specialized to multiple common cases.

The point of the above was rather trite: by using notation for measure–preserving dynamical systems, we can cover both the classical and the quantum cases at the same time, instead of having to have distinct conversations about each.

OK, so that’s the base tool. Now for some issues. If we are to describe an agent, then an assortment of issues arise. First, the “input alphabet”

Σ

can be interpreted as the alphabet of sensory input from the external environment. However, by making it discrete, finite, we’ve forced the sensor to convert observations of the unbounded, uncountable external world into a finite set of discrete signals. This is OK for the perception of text, and maybe even OK for the perception of phonetic speech, but it’s problematic for music, and certainly for vision. I mean, both can be pixelated, but that’s hacky. It’s more confusing if the external world is itself quantum, and so, instead of sensing a “single thing” from the external world, the agent needs to sense a superposition in the external world. The algebraic language given above is inadequate for that. So, fixing this is a TODO item.

Next, for an agent with free will, the alphabet

Σ

needs to be split into

Σ_{s}

coming from sensor

s

and

Σ_{c}

corresponding to the menu of choices available at any given time. The stream of events

Σ_{s}

is fully deterministic: it is whatever the external world is raining down upon the sensors of the agent. The set of choices

Σ_{c}

is internal and context–dependent: a choice I had yesterday may no longer be available today; new choices may open up tomorrow. The notation is inappropriate. Then, as before, choice is itself problematic, as how does the agent “choose”? If the idea of a supernatural spirit making a choice is to be avoided, then the choice needs to be reframed as a system on the edge of criticality. If we do want to allow supernatural spirits or oracles making decisions, then we have to articulate algebra for for how these work: an algebra of the supernatural. It might be OK to do this, simply in the name of distinguishing structural elements, but I see no need for this right now. Wishing to have a supernatural description just make things harder, it seems.

A different issue is whether the Cartesian or the tensor product should be used. That is, should the transition functions depend on

Σ_{s} \times Σ_{c}

or on

Σ_{s} \otimes Σ_{c}

? The former has the problem of “who chooses”? The later says that the menu of current choices in intricately entangled with the external state of the external world ... and indeed it is. But just saying “oh it’s the tensor product” and “oh it’s entangled” is glib. This needs to be articulated. I don’t understand what this means.

Next, there’s an issue with “measure–preserving”. This seems correct if the agent to be described is a biological cell (eukaryote, prokaryote) and the measure is the baryon number. The cell contents are preserved, excluding ingestion of food, intake of water or ions. But for digital agents, the inside contains the world–model, and the complexity of that world model is generally increasing. If I think of the world model as some assembled sheaf of jigsaws, that assembly increases over time, so the measure cannot be the number of jigsaws, nor the number of connections. The measure can be something simpler, though: it can be just an ensemble. (A thermodynamic ensemble?!) The ensemble here is the analog of the mixed state in quantum: the measure allows us to track many “individuals” at the same time; each individual is a “pure state”; each individual is a single point in the space

X

. And so the interpretation of the measure is now clear: it is merely a trick, a technique, for working with an ensemble of individuals (who are otherwise getting the exact same sensory input).

Except this is wrong... because once two individuals make different choices, their life histories diverge, so their sensory experiences differ. This mechanism does not seem to offer a way of tracking different sensory inputs. So it would seem that I am totally and completely broken, now. Dead end?

Not quite? Because...

Maybe. Shit. This is a crazy idea, and serves only to resurrect a broken model. Or maybe resolve some fundamental issue? Perhaps every “individual” (in the sense of a single specific cell observed under the microscope) really is an ensemble of abstract individuals, existing in some meta–hyperspace? (micro–instances? micro–individuals?) This collective, this ensemble is subjected to the same sensory inputs, but the stretching and compressing applied to the collective by each successive transform

T_{k}

splatters the points

p \in X

out into some wild wacky fractal. This might be a way of resolving the free–will issue. Maybe. A choice in the “menu of choices” could be some subset

C_{m} \subset X

and then we look to see how much of the measure of the current state intersects with

C_{m}

. That is, if

s_{t} \subset X

is the current state of the system (at time

t

), then consider

μ (s_{t} \cap C_{m})

and the choice that is taken is

sup {μ (s_{t} \cap C_{m}) : C_{m} \in C}

where

C

is the set of choices. This then becomes a kind of “democratic vote” over all of the micro–instances. These micro–instances are then the “machine elves”, kind of cold, individualistic, determined (as long as we stay on the lowest rung of the Borel hierarchy) but they... vote. This would give a natural structure on the edge of stability: change a few votes, the whole thing tumbles in a different way.

I dunno. This seems ... hacky? A model born of desperation? In what sense might this be a model of quantum reality? In quantum, we, meaning me, are conditioned to think in terms of pure states, and the notion of a mixed state is an afterthought, meant to provide a technical tool to be applied in limited special cases. For example, an entangled state is a pure state. Schrodinger’s cat is a pure state. Electrons in hydrogen orbitals

| n l m ⟩

are pure states. But then we have the mysterious and intractable path inetgral

Z = \int [d φ] e^{- i ℏ \int d^{4} x L (φ, \dot{φ})}

and what is this field

φ

, is it a pure state? It kind–of–ish has to be because the

\int [d φ]

is meant to be interpreted as a coherent superposition of different fields with phase given by the action

\int d^{4} x L (φ, \dot{φ})

But what if instead, reality is fundamentally a collection of micro–instances, with no coherence between them? What if reality is fundamentally a mixed state? Would this solve any technical problem that we face? Well, this collection of micro–instances could be said to inhabit “the spirit plane”, and thus offer a place where dualistic spirits can live. However, as micro–instances, they are more or less entirely robbed of free will, and only through spiritual collective action, e.g. by voting

sup {μ (s_{t} \cap C_{m}) : C_{m} \in C}

can they make a choice, to give us, here in the subjective real world, the illusion of being guided by angels. Or is this all unadulterated nonsense? It’s a pretty picture, but a bit unhinged.

As I wrote the last few paragraphs, squirming in the back of my mind was the notion of collective action in the CBC paper. Or, more properly: that “life and conscious sentience are coterminus.” Free will in classical mechanics (and in Turing–computable domains) is impossible. Free will in quantum systems requires voodoo handwaving about wave–function collapse. But mixed states reify the problem to a different level, where is it more palpable. Poetically speaking, mixed states push us up a level in the Borel hierarchy, where there is more room for voodoo.

OK, I have to take a break. This is not particularly going anywhere. I very much like the idea of the

{T_{k}}

as the collection of transforms that take us into a collection of possible futures, one of which one must be selected. And, as before, the here–and–now seems to be a collection of possibilities. (viz here–and–now is quantum). But insofar as the

T_{k}

must be unitary, i.e. must be

U_{k}

then we have a bunch of distinct unitary xforms that take us into the future. What does that mean? Since “by definition”,

U_{k} = exp i t H_{k}

this implies that there are different, inequivalent Hamiltonians

H_{k}

that are compatible with the present, but take us to different futures. Since Hilbert space is diagonalizable, this says that all of these insoequivalent Hamiltonians

H_{k}

have equivalent spectra

E_{k} = E_{k^{'}} = E

and so the inequivalence must arise from degenerate eigenstates, having the same energy, but otherwise “indistinguishable”. Then free will is a selection of a future basis that breaks this degeneracy. Or something. My brain is fried. I need to take a nap.

5 July 2026 – Letter home

Wrote a letter home. Here’s the text:

9:30 PM (10 minutes ago)

to bobloblaw914, Wolf, indre, Betsy, Laima, Patricia

I don’t recall. Maybe 9PM. Sun sets 10PM, sunrise 5AM.

I went to a midsummer festival. I don’t think I wrote about that; I’ll write now. It was both interesting and boring. Sorry, no pictures, I left my camera at home.

Some background: The Midsummer festival, 22 June, is a real big deal in Lithuania. A much much bigger deal than, say, the 4th of July in the USA. Called "Jonines" (St. Johns festival) or the pagan "Rasos" (dew festival). People stay up all night, sitting around a campfire, till dawn. Vilnius clears out, everyone leaves (except the tourists who don’t know any better) to assorted country homes, farms, camps or organized festivals. Everything from cheesy pop music performers on large outdoor stages to a couple of friends out camping.

Milda, through her friendship network: Aivaras, an old boyfriend who I’ve also known for many years, got invited (or maybe just we invited ourselves?) to a pagan hippie celebration some 40 km out of town. The setting is awesome: a meandering small river cutting through reeds and swamp, a sandy beach. Meadows and pine, birch forests. A large crafted outdoor pavillion. Pagan symbolism and decor throughout. Traditional Lithuanian stuff. Look it up. A teepee with room for a fireplace plus thirty+ people inside. At least five treehouses that I recall. More, actually. Multiple jetties and piers into the river, and into the tributary creek(s). Lots of tree swings. A sauna, maybe three, four feet high, made of woven tree branches, but large, seats maybe a dozen. The kind you throw blankets and furs over to trap the heat. A cabana, like a food/drink cabana. A makeshift outdoor kitchen. Trails in the woods, leading god–knows where. This is private property, I assume the owners rent out the bits and pieces. Or it’s some commune, I’m not sure. Or both. Anyway, out in the woods. Indre, it reminds me ever so much of Wausaukee Wisconsin. The trees are the same, the sand is the same. The temperature is the same.

There are maybe 40-60 people there, mostly young or middle–aged couples, with several children each. If there’s a birth rate problem in Lithuania, it’s certainly not with the hippie pagans. They seem to mostly know each other. We are kind of the odd ones out, but there were some other hangers–on. Maybe a war vet or two. The men: all strong, fit, athletic, long hair in braids, beards, dressed like circus performers or hippies or pagans or commune members or whatever it is that they are. The women: over the top gorgeous hippie outfits, and again, long hair, flowers in their braids. The outfits are not traditional folk outfits, but rather cross over into the modern rave culture style. Sorry, no photos. And the children, of course, running wild and free.

First order upon arrival is to pick wildflowers and fashion a wreath. Oh, and the wildflowers are beautiful and plentiful. The whole place is a wild paradise. The women wear the wreaths, and, by tradition, these will be tossed into the river at dawn. (And they are.) At twilight, ceremonies begin. A priestess says some words, and then everyone lines up. We each get dusted, front and back, sides and head, with smoke from a large smoker and a large feather–duster. Then blessed water is poured into our cupped hands. which we wash ourselves, our faces with. Then, one by one, step through the sacred portal gate, and on to the (sacred?) firepit. The fire is lit; well, I’m not sure it was never not burning, so more accurately, a large amount of firewood is added, so that it roars up. And everyone sits around and stares into the fire. There’s drumming and chanting and these songs, part joyful, part droning, cyclical, with guitar–ish, sitar–ish accompanying instruments. I think the songs, they’re all originals, composed, written by the performers. Do–it–yourself folksong writing is a thing in Lithuania, this is hardly the first time I’ve been exposed to this. People love it. Well, some people love it. It’s something some people do in Lithuania.

At midnight, the next part of the ceremonies: a large pot of brew, magic mushroom brew, is passed around. Actually, there’s two flavors; one is vegan. (WTF, really!?) I’m sorry to report it is not very strong. I chewed up at least four or five mushrooms, and kind of like nothing happened. Well, OK, I kind of saw colors, sort–of–ish. Maybe. Not sure. Kind of like looking at the sky at sunset. If you have a trained artist’s eye, you can see brilliant colors when you’re 100% sober; you just need to actually look. It’s not hard. But anyway, the isolation deepens, as everyone sits and stares into the fire, broken by occasional drumming and chanting. At this point, I’m starting to realize just how utterly and completely bored I am. Out of my mind bored. I want to do something. Anything. But it’s like 3AM and everyone is zombified and I’m counting the hours till dawn, and I’m doing covert yoga and stretches to pass the time and to actually *do something* to keep me occupied.

I’m starting to develop this dislike for flower–child hippies. They’re introverts. I’m starting to think there is something wrong with them, some deep psychic wounds that they are trying to heal with this back–to–nature shtick. I mean, the nature is truly and sublimely beautiful. And the women are gorgeous and the men are handsome and the children are wild. And yes, there is this rave sound system and dance area set up. Except fucking no one knows how to dance. Like zero dance skills at all. Maybe lift a foot, wave a hand, and sway a little, but for a circus troupe, you’d think there’d be acrobats or something, but no. How can you possibly be fit, trim, athletic, and not know how to dance? It’s impossible I say. So I’m bored times two. And since everyone is shy and introverted, I’m like wtf, bored times three. You’ve all seen photos from raves, and how ... intriguing they look. I mean, it looks like the people at the raves are having a good time, right? Right? Well, what I see here is exactly like those photos. I conclude raves are mind–bendingly boring. That there’s something mentally wrong with people who go to raves. I will probably never go to one (again!?) even if I’m invited. Someone with a strong temperament would have to drag me to one. Frog–march me to the gates.

Well, OK, I’ve made tours of night clubs and music scenes and EDM festivals and techno festivals, and basically, Lithuanians can’t dance. They ain’t got the rhythm, they ain’t got the beat. I suspect all of Eastern Europe is like this, and probably Scandinavia too. Maybe growing up with black people in the USA means that white people in the USA know how to dance. Maybe it’s because we all grew up watching Soul Train with Don Cornelius, or maybe America’s Top Forty with Casey Kasem and they didn’t. I don’t know. People in Austin know how to dance. People in Vilnius do not. This includes the teens and the 20-somethings. Oh well.

Come dawn, the girls (women) throw their wreaths into the river. Then, first swim after the solstice. Naked. But since we are all shy and introverted, it’s like two or three women get naked, and jump in the water and cavort for a few minutes, while mostly no one looks and certainly no one stares, and people take turns, men in groups of two or three likewise. (the children are sleeping, passed out god–knows–where, in tents or teepees or treehouses.) I arranged to be dead–last through the ceremonial gate, and so likewise for the swim, which means I get to go longer, and no one is paying any attention. Dawn lasts a freakin–forever eternity, with just this awesome fog bank settled over the river and the swamp. It’s an absolute visual delight. And no, the mushrooms did not kick in, or anything. It’s just a visual delight, period. Since I work with arcane theories of AI and the nature of being–ness (Dasein, per Heidegger) I pondered how visual delight might be perceived by sentient digital machines. Cause, well, that’s what I do for a living, and dawn at Jonines is no reason to stop working, especially as I’m bored by the stunningly introverted pagan hippies. Oh well. Later, I catch some zzz’s in a tree house. Then go swim again, cause the water is nice and warm. And we kill time, and Milda and Aivaras and I sit around and talk till early evening before heading home. Actually, we leave Milda behind for a second night. Aivaras explains to me straight up: she is a government servant ("valstybės tarnautoja"). Don’t begrudge her a vacation.

This older Ukrainian lady, maybe in her sixties, hitches a ride home. She speaks Polish, Aivaras speaks Polish, I can understand one word out of ten. She designed some dice game that is partly some Tarot–card–type personality reading, but is also partly some kind of psychiatric help system employed in professional medical and social–work settings. The night before, she sat chanting and beating on a drum. I crouched next to her, doing my covert yoga. Cat pose and cow pose and downward dog. Seemed sacred enough for a supposedly sacred ceremony, so I figured, screw it, why not. Friggin hippies.

Well, thank god that is over. I would much rather spend 8 hours by myself tromping through the woods in Wausaukee, sitting on the beaver dam, coming back and reading one of Aunt Irena’s sci–fi books in a hammock. I really really really miss Wausaukee. It was the best.

On Wed, Jul 1, 2026 at 8:55 PM Patricia Wappner <pmjwappner@gmail.com> wrote:

Patrick: Are they laughing at us?

Sponge Bob: No, Patrick, they are laughing next to us.

5 July 2026 – Later

Before writing the above letter, I went to the 5PM Mass at the Pranciškaus Asyžiečio church. The big one next to Šventos Onos. Best Mass I’ve ever attended. Of course, the bar was set low: I’ve been to half–a–dozen Catholic Masses, and they’ve all been abysmally bad. The Bishop(?) giving the sermon spoke directly and plainly and connected. A mashup where he tried to twine banal everyday Summer vacation for banal everyday Lithuanians, and the spiritual wonderland that is magical existence. He connected because he spoke in plain language about the plain things that plain people do, and he spoke of divine spiritual being, something I’ve been thinking a lot about recently, as this diary amply attests. So .. it connected. And all of the prayers, too. Oh. I see. This is the foundation of the Catholic Church. I see it now. It finally made sense. Perhaps I just never got it before. Not perhaps, but for sure. Never thought of spiritual things before.

However, my mind wandered. To the 19th(?) century Tibet, where the King ordered the monasteries destroyed, out of frustration with the lack of economic progress. The monks had derived esoteric spiritual practices, but so what? They had no steam engines, no threshers, no mills. Spiritual enlightenment is fine and all that, but it is, in a sense, not enough. This is why I like some of the modern spiritual offshoots. Sure, Chair Tai–Chi is the basis for some modern–day click–bait, but it is actually healthy and healing. As is lots of the man–o–sphere culture. OK, some seems toxic, but it’s not vapid. It requires some amount of thinking. If only the Catholic Church could re–invent itself, and incorporate Chair Tai–Chi into it’s belief system. Yes, I now understand how and why Jesus is sacred, and yes, this is important. But you cannot run around just saying “sacred scared sacred” as a mantra. David Chapman’s insights provide additional levels of detail into sacredness that the Catholic Church appears to ignore. It’s no surprise that church attendance is dropping: they’re competing with MMA and Dancing with the Stars. And geopolitical debates. The Church needs to up it’s game. Or, maybe it doesn’t. It will be out–competed in the spiritual services marketplace. Unfortunate, because Catholicism does have a superior foundation as compared to Pyramid Power, Atlantis, Space Aliens and Tarot Cards.

What ever happened to Manicheanism? Why is Zoroastrianism shrinking? I guess they don’t proselytize...!? ideas like “Good thoughts, good words, good deeds” seem entirely compatible with Catholicism; why aren’t they merged in? What exactly is the point of persecuting heresy? Hmm. I sort of get it, I know the story of Laxism. Laxism was bad. But I also sort of don’t get it. Catholicism was damaged by Protestantism and by the Huguenots. Wars were fought... but the modern social media cauldron is melting all into one orgiastic fecund religious SBNR swampland. And That’s OK, I guess ... sort of OK. I guess I’m an optimist.

Well, OK, Manicheanism was exterminated.

The point is, I guess, the internet offers a rich fount of ideological pieces–parts, of all varieties, recombine–able in a rich variety of ways. I can no more say that this one is better or worse than another, than I can compare two proteins. Both have some reason for being. The difference is that proteins have a specific tertiary structure, they take up space in 3D space, whereas ideologies are these fractal graph structures in some ultra–high–dimensional space.

I keep saying shit like this over and over, as if I expect that the repetition will make it true. Maybe I keep repeating it, hoping that some specific idea will pop into my head? Dammit.

6 July 2026

So OK, the above cellular agentic model didn’t work; the core issue being the nature of decision making.

Lets try a different tack. Prusinkiewicz shows that a combination of Lindenmeyer systems (L–systems) coupled to (reaction–diffusion) differential equations are sufficient to explain plant morphology. There are no cells or agents in this model, beyond the base L–system state machines. There are no energy flows, no entropic considerations. But it works. The evolution, over time, is purely mechanistic, deterministic (except for any random events for the time of cell mitosis encoded by the L–system.) However, per the CBC claim, the combined system should be considered “sentient”. Is it?

Well, this model appears to be missing perception, missing a sensory organ. The plant develops per a pre–encoded genetic content, but is unaware of the current external world. Now, earlier I wrote that weak–self–consciousness arises due to the implicit placement of self with regard to motor actions. For example, when an ant crawls forward, it “knows” which way is “forward”, and this encoding of body–relative coordinates forms the foundation for weak self–knowledge or self–awareness. The word “weak” again implying only that actions are body–relative, and NOT implying that there exists some reasoning system having an explicit body–model within it. But this hypothetical ant has both sensory organs, and motor abilities. What of the L–system plant?

Well, the L–system rules are clearly a collection of motor action “choices”, in that they script the development of the system. In my agent model, these rules come under the heading of “world model”. This is only because I made no clear distinction between a “model of the world obtained by sensory perception” and “mechanical apparatus for guiding development and movement”. Perhaps these two components can be split apart? Perhaps they must remain tightly integrated, and unsplitable? Tononi would seem to suggest that they must remain integrated, even as our human reason suggests sticking them into distinct boxes with distinct labels.

So where did these L–system rules come from? Overtly, some human wrote them down. Evolutionarily, they must come from “perceiving” the world, and discovering motor strategies that can effectively harvest energy (viz, sunlight) from the external world. So here, evolution itself is acting as the sensory organ. That is, evolution attempts to create many different (all possible different) L–system rule collections, but only some of these are effective at harvesting the energy gradients available in the external world. Non–effective systems are discarded, or rather, are not incorporated into some existing prior rule–set. (I guess ab initio starting from the empty set, but I can’t see that yet, so lets ignore this.)

So, if evolution is the sensory organ, what is it sensing? Fuck me. It’s ingressing!! Damn!! So, each L–system rule is a jigsaw. Where does this jigsaw “exist”? It exists as a “Pure Platonic Form” in the mathematical abstraction of jigsaws. As a model of the axioms of a pre–sheaf, the axioms of which themselves are Pure Platonic Forms. (Huh, so model theory... I did not expect that, but OK.) So evolution is selecting Pure Platonic Forms, elements from out of this Platonic Realm, and placing them into the genetic encoding held in the L–system. That is, evolution is itself a sensory organ, that perceives models of axioms (or possibly axioms as well; the nature of recursion in model theory is opaque to me...) ... evolution perceives models of axioms, which exist in the “external world” of Pure Platonic Forms, and incorporates them into the “internal world” of the genetic content of a specific L–system. OK. My mind is blown.

My mind is getting blown a lot these days. I’d like my dick to be blown too, but one thing at a time.

This is not what I expected from the cellular agentic model. As originally conceived, the “external world” was intended to be the “physical universe” of atoms, or (“equivalently”) the “universe of forms arising from axiomatic descriptions that can sustain models that have interesting properties” i.e. as some kind of scientifically abstracted models capturing interesting aspects of the “physical universe”. Everything was meant to be either “directly physical” or an “abstract model of the directly physical”. I had implicitly overlooked the Platonic domain as being “a kind of universe”. For ordinary common–sense reasons: if, in the original development and formulation of an agent, I had made the universe be “Platonic everything”, I would not have been able to articulate anything meaningful or coherent. But now, I can articulate something meaningful and coherent: to repeat: evolution is a sensory organ that peers into the Platonic realm and extracts selected Pure Forms, and incorporates them into the genetic code of a physical individual (and, by mitosis, into a species. By ordinary mechanical physical mitosis.)

To be clear, this is the “ingressing” that Michael Levin speaks of. Except here, I present an explicit description, whereas Levin seemed to have been hand–waving. (Or maybe I was not yet at the correct stage of understanding to understand what Levin wrote. I’m now wiser and older. Perhaps he was already saying this explicitly!? But he was not using models of sensori–motor perception and action... and I am ...)