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–I, 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.

9 August 2026

There’s an earlier 9 August entry in Part Ten–I. I split it here because reasons.

Off topic. I just read a paragraph out of Mary Roach’s book:

“At one point he described curing a twenty–two–year–old youth of, among other afflictions, the “frequent writing of incoherent, rambling dissertations on architecture.””

Wow, that made me laugh. Incoherent, rambling dissertations.

I’m a mess. I think I just discovered that the health of my social network is abysmal. And just like someone who woke up to find themselves in terrible physical condition, one step away from hospitalization, I need to take steps to perform social network repair. This will not be easy. I even dread it, but I have no choice.

10 August 2026

Slept long, slept well, feel fine. But now I’m going through old lost emails, and this sinking sensation appears in my stomach. I feel OK, but there’s like a little birdie whispering in my ear: “Listen to your stomach! You should feel melancholic!” and I kind of even want to, to give in, to let it settle over me. But I’m pushing it away, knowing that down that path lies trouble, and I’ve had enough of that, thank you very much.

While I dozed into the late morning, I again kept thinking about how nothing exists, except the here–and–now. I continue to find this very mind–blowing; its just not how one ordinarily conceives of things, because one has memories of the past. But those memories are just part of here–and–now, of course.

For a short time, I wondered if here–and–now is a purely subjective experience, and that more exists “objectively”. But, no, that is wrong. We have no machines that can travel into the past, or future, that can perceive the past, or future. We have no theory for such machines, either, except for wormholes. The here–and–now is a product of physics, and not of the mind. The subjective experience is apparently in it for the ride.

In short, I made no forward progress; this was just an echo as I slept.

Then I thought of the following diagram, from earlier in the diary:

and wondered again how accurate it is to imagine that structure ingresses from some abstract platonic realm, into the present here–and–now, but then generating pure platonic forms, such as the cladogram. The point here is that the cladogram “does not exist”, except in the mind of scientists. Even species do not exist, except as abstract concepts, again, in the minds of scientists. Only specific instances of organisms exist in the here–and–now; the fact that some happen to be genetically very nearly identical is an accident of autopoesis.

That is, the above diagram depicts an agency that inhabits the platonic realm only. None of the above agent “exists” in the here–and–now, in any literal sense. However, the side effects that this agent has on the arrangement of atoms in the “actual, physical, real” here–and–now is uncontrovertible: Darwin noticed.

Of course, “who is Charles Darwin?” Well, he too seems to be a named agent that also operated in the platonic realm. That is, his brain, having a subjective reality, like my own, peered into information from his sensory organs, constructed a world–model (which is encoded with neurons, but “exists” in the platonic realm), accessed that world model with his subjective–self, and spotted a pattern in that world–model. Then, by hard thought and inspiration, he arrived at his theory of evolution, which, again, as a theory, exists only in the platonic realm. Then he, as a subjective individual, performed motor actions with his fingers, to encode this abstract concept onto ink and paper, thus creating a certain complex arrangement of atoms, in the here–and–now.

That is, the human brain, perhaps a bit like a ribosome, operates in two places at once: in the subjective, platonic realm, and in the physical, made–of–atoms realm, and leverages it’s ability to manipulate physical reality to encode (manifest) platonic ideals as arrangements of physical atoms (in this case, ink on paper.)

This binding is tight. Just as I cannot think without the atoms in my brain, so the idea written on a piece of paper cannot exist without the physical paper. Insofar as it exists at all, it exists in the minds of other humans, or, in the present case, as electronic currents in my laptop. And wherever the fuck github stores shit.

When I said “the human brain, like a ribosome”, I was thinking of how a ribosome is made of both RNA and of protein; it needs both to bridge the disparate systems. The analogy here is that the mind has parts made of atoms, and parts made of, um, subjective reality. Is this the case for all agents? That they are necessarily bridges between atoms and the platonic realm?

Is evolution a counter–example? As drawn in the figure above, it is an agent that exists only in the platonic realm. And yet, it manifests, “ingresses” into the atomic physical world as a collection of biological organisms acting out their lives in the here–and–now. Can evolution exist, without atoms? For the case of Darwinian evolution, the answer seems to be “no”.

A different way of thinking about evolution is the computer program that implements, for example, “genetic programming”. A practical example is MOSES from OpenCog. It’s an algorithm, described in a PhD thesis. It’s actual, compilable, runnable code, with thousands of variants as it was patched, bug–fixed and tuned over time. Both the thesis, and the code, are in the platonic noosphere, but they do not exist, except as certain arrangements of atoms on certain computers that run certain websites.

This is the case for mathematics in general:

The above pictures only one mathematician. It is meant to show the mind of the mathematician peering into the abstract realm and discovering mathematical “truths”. But, with minor modification, it is recognized as a group activity, as well:

This is kind of like the diagram for “Feminism as Agency”. All of these diagrams are meant to be analogous, although, at this stage, they are a bit confused. What do mathematicians generate? New conjectures, theorems and proofs? Or are these just a collection of historical achievements, recorded in written journals existing in the here–and–now? What about mathematical discoveries that were forgotten, such as those lost in the burning of the Library of Alexandria? One can imagine that “once upon a time, they existed”, which is generally the case for anything that is lost in the past. But the loss is very nearly total... unless, unless...

Unless one takes the idea of the no–erasure theorem (or the idea of the unitarity of QM) to it’s extreme logical conclusion: all information that was lost in the burning of the Library of Alexandria still “exists” in the thermal bath. Oh wait; that’s wrong. Informational bits can be erased. Quantum entanglements cannot be erased. So which is it? The atoms in the ink written on the scrolls of papyrus or sheepskin... was their relative structural arrangements and locations encoded as unitary entanglements? Or are there distinct atomic arrangements, when evolved into the future, “collapse” onto the same present–day wavefunction? How, exactly, is information “erased” in the physical universe? How does one erase a bit? Certainly, thermodynamic ensembles erase, just like bit–shifts erase. But ... I’m totally confused. I do not understand what information is. This is a kind of intellectual blocker for me. I need to figure out what information is.

Anyway, the thought was that if one takes the notion of unitary to a logical extreme, then one need only take the wave function of the universe, as it is today, evolve it backwards, with

e^{i H t}

to a point

t

that is before the burning of the Library of Alexandria and ta–dah. Not achievable in a practical sense, but a seemingly viable thought experiment.

So basically, I’m confused.

The problems with ingress and egress are amplified if I consider an algorithm, such as MOSES. It runs deterministically. It is designed to explore a space of “genetically encoded programs”. This space “does not exist”, except in the mind of the programmer. And yet, the running program, as it steps through time, it explores this space. After some amount of run–time, it finds some expression that passes the various tests for acceptance. This expression is now recorded for posterity: it becomes some arrangement of electric currents in transistors in the here–and–now, and it stays there until the program exits. Before exit, the final expressions are printed into a file, and, in the case of work on the Durkheim Project, it gets published in a journal. That is, a space of genetically–encoded programs, which “does not exist” except in some abstract, platonic sense, was searched, and a portion of which was extracted and placed into the here–and–now, and specifically, into the “real world” of atoms.

So what do we have? An entirely deterministic program, leveraged by a human, to extract content from the noosphere, to mine content from the noosphere, and place it into the real, actual, physical world. This program was called “evolutionary” because it was inspired by Darwinian principles. However, evolution happened without people; whereas computer programs need people to create them, and set them running. And computer programs exist only in the noosphere (except when their concrete dual is recorded on a disk drive) and human minds fished them out of the noosphere of “all possible computer programs”.

My head is spinning. I can’t tell if I’m making progress here. Something is somehow ingressing, and the fact that a deterministic device, the computer program, and do it, suggests that quantum woo is not required for ingress. The only problem with this argument is it fails to address the question: where did the program come from? As it came from a human, it seems that quantum woo might still be required. And for Darwinian evolution itself, it happens at the biochemical, atomic level, viz at the quantum chemistry level, so there’s plenty of quantum woo available for the explanation of why evolution materializes specific DNA sequences out of the abstract space of all possible DNA sequences.

That is, when dealing with abstractions, its turtles some of the way down, until one hits atoms, and then its quantum woo. The fact that computer programs can mine the noosphere for knowledge does not evade the need for quantum woo, because you have to first explain where the program came from.

I think this is forward progress. Maybe, barely. A scratch in the surface?

I have lots of errands I have not done, that I need to do.

p.s. My low–grade upset stomach is almost surely due to undissolved creatine crystals. Here I am, thinking that I am suffering from heartache and loneliness, when in fact its .. fucking creatine. Well, I am suffering from heartache and loneliness, but the creatine made it much much worse. Fuck. We’ll give it a few days to heal. And resume the build–out of a social network. Which remains (very) challenging.

11 August 2026

More impressions. It’s the last thing that inspires me, but I will stay in chronological order. Milda came back from the farm, laden with apples and tomatoes and cucumbers. And potato pancakes. I picked her up at the bus station, to carry the bags. Marching down the streets like tourists, except the bucket has green sprigs sticking out of it and obviously never came from the airport. She’s all smiles and wonder. I’m all madly in love. Well, she is too, and she knows it, but then, also in denial. Our time together is like sips. Small, brief tastes. Not enough to slake one’s thirst. But enough to make the spirit soar. Like a bird song, or the scent of a flower, there but for a little while, and that is enough, I suppose. Of course, I thirst for hugs and kisses, but this won’t come. Maybe if I’m lucky, I’ll get to touch her today or tomorrow or the day after. And yet, I’m walking from the bus station, lugging forty pounds of apples and tomatoes, and a hard–on. It makes my dick hard just to be next to her. I have a vague impression that perhaps she feels similarly. The self–denial only seems to make it stronger.

Well, I was going to write none of that, and just leave it in the past, but well, too late. I’m reading my mother’s autobiographical description of her flight from Lithuania to the US. In the back of my mind are thoughts of my philosophical efforts to understand the relation between the spiritual and the physical worlds, with floating efforts to picture the dynamical system of life with whatever this high–dimensional thing that we are, “Spirits in the Material World”, as the song lyrics go, and I’m like discovering the meaning of literature for the first time ever, after half a lifetime buried in mathematics. And, well, since I haven’t put two and two together, I’m not sure there’s more to write.

I started to read this short story, “Gilai Tinkle, Kur Vaidenasi”, Viktor Denisenko, Baltas Kambarys, Issue 11. I put it down because it’s full of heartache, and I think I’ve had plenty enough of that in the recent week(s). It does make me think: how accurate of a portrait can be created of a person? I mean, I’ve got a bazzilion childhood memories that I will never write down, and it hardly matters as they are ineffable, consisting of combinations of sight (I remember how things look), smell (the Wisconsin farm had a pleasant summer air) and feeling (the ineffable feeling of just, kind of, feeling good. Which is how I felt as a child. Neither ecstatic nor sad, but just happy contentment. I felt good.) There are probably existing literary sketches that come close to what I felt. There are probably movies that show it too. The songs by Ethyl Cain are too far away from my childhood experience to be relevant, but not so far away that I don’t understand them. Visually, they are similar. Hmm. As I think about it, it’s the visual content of her movies that are just as important as the music. It’s the visual content that pushes me over the edge. It’s some of the visual parts that resemble Wausaukee. And, as I write this, I have to say that I cannot think of any visual representation of Wausaukee that comes any closer. I mean, her movies (“official videos”) are not that close, but closer than anything else I know of. Both visually, and the time–progression, and the capturing of the general feeling. Huh.

So, armed with this, just how accurate a portrait could be created of me? I’ve written scads of pages and personal narrations here in this diary ... how close is this to “me”? I mean, not to be narcissistic, this rumination applies to my Mom’s autobiographical writings. To my Uncle’s diary. To the diaries of countless celebrities. And, oddly, to the facebook posts of billions. The future can know more about some median facebook account, than it can know about Julius Caesar. We are setting our lives down into bits. Some MRI machine might be able to one day soon peer into my mind, and record my memories of Wausaukee, laying in a hammock strung between trees, reading some fantastically miraculous scifi, while a light breeze blows through the trees, and the sun shines mottled and warm: just right, not too hot, not too cold. Just right. Why I would ever write that this is just like an Ethyl Cain video is hard to say, because she never shows this particular image. But maybe it’s because I can watch those videos, and feel the pine needles and grass beneath my bare feet. Cause bare feet are a part of it. How closely can my ephemeral spirit be captured in written word? In images? I have no recording machine for smells. I have no recording machine for the general somatic feeling of being alive. But it seems as if machines for this are not so far off.

Which brings again the question of how accurate this could ever be? And the ineffability of the immediate subjective experience. The point is that these words are dead, frozen, unchanging. I typed these letters, these words just now, inscribing them into the fabric of the here and now. Barring nuclear bombing, these words just might be immortal. But they are also fixed, dead. To bring them to life would require a substrate that can accept all this as a model, and then, with the push of a button, be set into motion, be set into life. This is, of course, the intent of portraiture. A few hundred years ago, oil paintings and novels were the state of the art: Tolstoy’s War and Peace is a portrait gallery. Now, we have facebook and videos. Soon, perhaps, MRI. Can the soul be recorded, and recreated?

Well, of course, the question is “what is the soul?” but that is an ongoing topic.

I wonder if Thomas Aquinas wrote about his personal emotional inner life? Love and hopes and dreams?

Gemini responds: “Thomas Aquinas wrote almost entirely about theology and philosophy. His work is strictly theoretical and academic. He did not write personal diaries, poetry, or confessions about his own inner feelings, dreams, or private emotional life.”

But it adds: “How He Treated Emotions * Scientific study: He analyzed human emotions, called passions, in a detailed way. * Rational control: He believed reason should guide and shape human feelings. * Love as a choice: He defined love as willing the good of another, not as a romantic feelings.” Well Hmm. So he got into that. But he was wrong. It would be nice to have rational control, but it is not generally available, does not generally work. And as to “Love as a Choice” heh. Absurd. My love for Milda was hardly a choice; more like being mugged in the back alley. A strong rational argument could be made that I might have been better off without it. As a counterpoint, though, it is equally clear to me that it was like rain, it opened me and made me bloom, and think about things that I might not have ever thought about. Would I have ever arrived at this point of trying to comprehend the interface between physical and spiritual? Perhaps. Would there have been the colored richness of the emotional wildness have been there? Probably not.

Was I suppressing my feelings? Or were they latent, unrealized? Just like that algorithm exploring the explosively large latent space of possibilities, and identifying a very narrow, tiny, sparse subset of them ... same for me, my being. What’s real, and whats actual? The MOSES algorithm is exploring a space of size

2^{N}

for

N \approx 32

or perhaps

N \approx 1024

or whatever:

N

is variable, its the length of the bitstring. Its a huge space. Larger than the number of atoms in the universe, if given a uniform measure. Perhaps the uniform measure is entirely inappropriate, and almost all bit–strings are very similar to one–another, and thus occupy a small volume. So I don’t yet know formally how to calculate the volume correctly. At any rate, even if I did, could I say “this space exists”? Sure, perhaps “out there” abstractly: it exists because I have written about it in a finite number of words, and it exists because it’s implicit in the source code for MOSES. But actual samplings from this space only come into specific atomic, physical existence, when the algo call them into being, and prints them in the log file, the output file, or to stdio. Only then, by causing a re–arrangement of physical atoms, do these instance become real, and occupy the actual physical world. Likewise my love. It’s always “existed” as a potentiality: I could, potentially, fall in love, in any one of a zillion different ways, to a zillion different people (or, as I learned, I can fall in love with a bird.) But until it actually happens, it is only a potentiality. Writing about it analytically seems dry. Writing about it as an actually felt experience is immersive in a reality that is so very immediate and direct and felt and lived. The atoms in my brain rearranged themselves, as my neurons re–arranged themselves, to create a mental model of who Milda is (and this is important; for it is impossible for anyone to ever know who she actually is; this is deeply private to only her; and as experience suggests, she doesn’t understand herself particularly well.) So some atoms rearranged themselves to create a figment of my imagination, in my head, of who she is, and then had the gall to fall in love with this artificial and inaccurate portrait.

Hmm. So does this address my question about portraiture? I’m already creating portraits of people (and places, and events...) in my head. And these are living portraits: they’re certainly not tuplas, but they are not inert. Except, well. Hmm. Do they have subjective awareness? It would be hard to argue that the portrait of Milda that sits in my head is “self–aware”. I’ve recorded facts and feelings about her, but I haven’t given her life. The only path to life would be a tulpa or some other form...

Shit. I’ve totally derailed. I double–checked with Gemini my understanding of tulpas and have now fallen into a wild wonderland. I have fucking errands to do. Shit. The clock is ticking.

12 August 2026

The roller coaster is back. During dinner, we talked. She smiled. We stared at each other. A long time. Repeatedly. Keeping eyes locked, it requires emotional processing. She went to bed early – very early, 9PM. Maybe she was exhausted. I know I was. I stayed up late, computering. The pit in my stomach reappeared. That is, while my mind, my conscious me, was doing one thing, the subconscious me gave in to despair. But not for long. I slept with a hard–on all night long. I mean, even in the early, deep sleep. And the middle of the night too, not just the late morning sleep. This rarely happens. I woke with a hard–on. I have one now, as I write this. It feels nice.

My mental model of her is that she’s not going to give in. Why should she? Sooner or later, I’ll be on a plane back to Austin. She’ll be stuck here, enduring a depressing, long, lonely winter. There’s no upside, for her, just downside. I don’t blame her.

The chivalrous thing to do might be to just end it: leave now. Say good bye, have a good life. Maybe it will cool off and then we’ll just be acquaintances who don’t enjoy each–others company. She’s ready for that. When I first arrived here, there were some episodes: “Oh, you again. I’m going to put in some token amount of effort to socialize with you but then time’s up, and I have other things to do.” She more or less said this out loud, to me, during the Pink Soup Festival. I stand there and take it, and then feel rotten for the rest of the day, the rest of the week. And she does. Long periods of absence, where she’s busy doing something else, and I hardly ever see her.

And then she smiles. Before she leaves, she stocks the fridge, the pantries. With my favorite foods. With what she thinks are my favorite foods. As if I can’t shop for myself. My heart does gymnastics. And then again, two weeks ago, four weeks ago, she looked at me, during lunch, and said: “Don’t fall in love with me, I’ll break your heart.” I sat there, stony–faced, my quick wit wasn’t operating at that moment. Odd choice of wording on her part. She already knew I’d fallen in love with her years ago. And I think she knows I’m heart–broken, although I try to hide that. But I think it’s simmered a little too close to the surface, a few times. I think she knows. She knows I want her bad, and she’s patiently explained that I won’t get her, that it was all just a dream. I got that explanation just a few days after arriving here. That was a few months ago. An eternity. The distant past. I’ve had a very very long journey, these last few months.

I got back at her, just before her last weekend outing. Not intentionally. By accident. I said, out loud, “I can see I’m cramping your style. Maybe it’s time for me to leave.” Her reply? “Oh my God, what’s wrong with you?” This with a tinge of panic in her voice.

I’m reading micro–cues. Maybe I’m mis–reading. I’m putting in a vast amount of effort trying to understand.

I’m writing all this, all of the above, with a hard–on that waxes and wanes. Because some non–verbal part of me thinks there is hope, and its all a huge turn–on. It’s one long big fuck that ends with a bang. Why? Because of her reply. Since I expect a machine to read this, and not understand, I’ll unpack it. “Oh my God, what’s wrong with you?” translates to “Can’t you see I’m in love with you?” and the tinge of panic is “Oh my God, don’t leave me!”. So, as I wrote that, I started crying. (Romantic tears. The kind you cry in movies.) With a hard–on. Oh please just let me fuck you. (Oh, hang on. Isn’t this the implied happy ending of romantic movies? How very strange. It is never–ever explicitly mentioned: “and they fucked happily ever after”. It’s not even implicitly implied or suggested, not even the faintest whiff, in any way, shape or form. One never thinks of that. At least, I never did. How odd. Depictions of pure romantic love are utterly divorced from eros. And to maintain the virginal purity of romance, what happens next is hidden behind clinical language: “the marriage was consummated”. As if the nurse stood by while you drank whatever unpleasant liquid was prescribed. Consummated. Consumed. Bottoms up. Heh. Get it? That’s a joke. Bottoms up.)

Writers and authors and movie–makers are experts at setting up these micro–cues. I call them micro because this is a foreign language to me; most of my life was spent thinking math. But I’m not an emotional moron; when I watch romantic movies, I cry at all the right places. I attribute this to the skill of the movie–maker, and not my perceptiveness. Reading and interpreting cues in real–life, though, that’s harder.

I mean, of course, my interpretation of what I heard, well, I could be quite wrong, here, and reading meaning into something that didn’t have this meaning.

And as I write this, I am suddenly struck by several things. How much communication is non–verbal. How much, even when words are used, the meaning is distant, abstract, and far beyond the dictionary definitions of the words. How prone to mis–understanding communications are. And how the communication is not so much between “me” and “others”, as it is between different parts of my “internal family system”, and those of others.

I don’t know if I can explain this, its hard. Worse, its probably a truism; what I’m just now realizing, what I’m trying to explain, is probably well–known, somewhere, by someone. So, I mentioned before, subjective me uses verbal me to express the contents of subjective me that I want to express. There are already three distinct organs here: the verbal me, which I use as a tool. The subjective me, which is some bulwark of feelings and emotions and memories and desires. And then the active me, which is actively deciding what to do (what to tell the verbal–me to say/write).

This is exhausting work, writing all of this, and I feel like I’m on the slow train to nowhere in particular. So I guess the meta–point is that the brain has lots of intricate structure and wiring, and the various different subsystems interacting via this wiring. Verbal, spoken language is not something that passes from one subjective–I to another (although it is that, too) but rather a channel that courses between many different parts of the wiring. So when someone says something with a tinge of panic, what’s panicking? The “who” is the person, of course. The “what” is some neural circuit that has some vested interest in something, some desire, and senses, fears immanent loss. It’s not the verbal– that senses the loss. Its not the rational, balanced I that senses the loss. It’s whatever circuit is responsible for the desires, and whatever other circuit regulates urgency, panic, ups the priority list for “shit we got to deal with this now”. The communication is not point to point, but subsystem to subsystem. The words are intermediaries. And that’s the problem with the dictionary definition of words. The part that is panicking is not looking in the dictionary for the word “panic”. It’s modulating the tone of voice. It did not even pass through the decision filter: “I’m going to express panic to this other entity.” It’s not conscious, it’s not deliberate, its not rationally decided. It’s involuntary. Not beyond control: people can certainly communicate in a cold fashion. But this leaked out, through a vocal channel, and it came from a different part of subjective–I than the rational I.

This is all so horribly plain and obvious: nothing I write here is new, per se. I’m trying to do a technical, clinical analysis of communications. It’s not psychological, though, because psychology deals with the I, and since we all know who I is, detailed explanations are not normally needed. Maybe this is like trying to explain air in the 17th century: what is there to explain? Everyone knows what it is. Of course, nitrogen, oxygen, vacuum and ideal gas laws come later; turns out there was something to explain about air, after all. So I’m struggling to explain, or at least understand the communicative act. It is not just something that is exchanged between subjective–I’s; it entangles specific subsystems in the I’s. These subsystems being more weakly or strongly integrated into the subjective I than others. The part of me that loves is not the part of me that does math. The part of me that loves is a wild, heedless beast that just does shit without asking. When it gives me an erection, well, that’s quite alright for default mode me. Of course, when subjective–focused I is concentrating on a task, that erection fades in maybe five seconds. Since I can kind of do two things at once, in parallel, there is a vague tumescence between my legs, even now. Sort of waxing and waning.

At any rate, this is meant to illustrate what appears to be a problem with LLM’s. They’re not attached to dicks (or whatever the corresponding erogenous zones are for women) and they’re not attached pain sensors in big toes, either. This is why LLM’s can know everything, and understand nothing. Yesterday, I went to Vilniaus Textile, and wandered the stacks, admiring all the different kinds of cloth. And more: what that cloth made me feel. Everything from icky communist shlock to comfortable sportswear, to sequined elegance, to erotic see–through lace. There we are, again, with the eros. And with how things feel. How cloth makes me feel. How wandering the aisles of this industrial space makes me feel. How the price tags make me feel. The LLM’s have never done this, could never do this. Sure, a robot could roll through the aisles and film, but so what? All of these fabrics are skin–contact fabrics. The robot has no skin. Yes, the sewn item also needs to look good, and the robot has eyes. But what is it that “looks good”? When Milda wears something sexy, and I see it, it looks good, and that looking–goodness comes with a whole bundle of everything else. Specifically, the little homunculus in my brain of her. The homunculus that is encoded with neurons and atoms, but is sensed, operated on and thought about by rational, emotional me. I almost wrote “subjective me”, but a huge amount of my emotional processing, and the construction of this homunculus happens at a subconscious level. And my obsessive focus is not even voluntary: I can modulate the obsession, but it is not entirely controllable by the part of me that likes to control things. (That desires to control things? Is “desire” the right word here?)

Hmm. I, the subjective I, that wants to control things, this is maybe perhaps the most central part of the subjective I that there is. Yes, my butt hurts from sitting. Yes, my stomach is full not hungry, but still in a vague minor commotion that is reminiscent of heartache. Yes, I feel tired, (this writing is tiring). But none of these feelings are central–me, they report to me. Its the executive me, taking charge, figuring out what to write, what to do, that is the most central me that there is. I think.

That is, there is the subjective me that is me. The Tononi IIT Phi is flawed in assuming that it can trim away the feelings of the flat of my feet, the feelings of my stomach, the feeling of tiredness, and still some subjective me remains. I dunno. Trim these away, and subjective me is clearly diminished. However, I don’t think the executive me can be trimmed away. The part of me that decides what to do, that cannot disappear, leaving behind some zombie experiencing things but not making decisions. Executive–me disappears when I sleep. In lucid dreams, it has some limited engagement.

Wow. OK. So that, I think, is a discovery. The subjective me that is I, the thing that engages the world, this is really just the executive me. All my sensations and feelings, these are the raw materials that the executive me works with. And so then, sure, take these away, and executive me has less and less to work with. Blind and deaf, I would have to turn to an internal world, and the world of touch. So, yes, subjective me is experiencing me, and some large amount of that experiencing can be throttled down, leaving a trickle. Maybe even just one’s memories. But decision–making me, that chooses what to think about (and what to say, what to do) that is the ultimate irreducible me. So maybe Tononi Phi is correct in this: the sensory can be whittled away, while still leaving me conscious.

So this unmasks one thing: free will is utterly and completely central to the experience of conscious, subjective me. It seems that without free will, there is ... nothing. Some zombified, automated, mechanical state, chugging along like a steam engine upon the tracks? In so far as a steam engine has not free will, it also has no subjective experience of consciousness. Of self–hood. Wow. So, OK, this is a major discovery. Well, for me at least. Free will and the subjective being–ness, Dassein, are inextricable. Free will is foundational for Dassein.

Two other things. Free will necessarily exists only in the here and now: there is no way to exercise free will in the past, and free will is what is used to shape the future. And since we earlier determined that here–and–now is a physical, atomic reality, and not a subjective perception, this would imply that free will operates at the physical, atomic level. Yes, it is the ingress of the noospehere, as per earlier discussion of MOSES, that formulates and controls the arrangement of atoms in reality. But ... I’m confused. One moment.

A short interruption to close off other unfinished paths:

Take a break, here. The limnal, the executive, this is all good stuff. I need to keep going in this direction, but I’m tired, and it is late, and I have stuff to do.

14 August 2026

Needs, wants, desires. As I slept, I knew that these would be the perfect things to write about this morning. I even had a topic plan, how to develop these. I repeated it to myself maybe three times in my sleep, so I would not forget in the morning. But, I said to myself, that’s enough. Give it a rest, get back to sleeping. I won’t forget. Yet, here I am, and I forgot. There was even a second topic to write about: an embarrassment of riches; too many things to think and write about. But what was that second topic?

Well, I’ve been writing from the first person; this has been highly successful. So lets continue in that style. I need love, I want sex. These are biologically realized, deeply coded into my genetics and neural structure; the circuits that drive them are robust. Mostly cause I’m physically healthy. I have long–lasting hard–ons as I sleep; I have a mild one now, as I write this. It feels good. How does today differ from other days? Well, today is Friday. It’s a work–from–home day for Milda. She’s sitting in the other room, computering. Working from home. And this makes me very happy: to have close, nearby warm bodies. That she smiles at me is a big bonus, but otherwise, it would be like sitting in a coffee shop, laptop open. One does not go to the coffee shop for the coffee; this is easy enough to make at home. One goes there to have company, to be around other people, even if they are strangers, even if they are silent. The physical proximity just plain feels good. This is primitive. Birds flock. Fish flock. There are species that live alone: the octopus, for example. Most biology wants to be with others of it’s kind.

Do ants, lost from their anthill, feel lonely? Sometimes, very rarely, ants set out to live alone. Are they daring adventurers? Outcasts? Or just damaged, in that the drive to be social is not functioning due to some neuro–chemical damage?

Ants are interesting, as this may be one of the simpler systems that exhibit pro–social behavior. Gemini reminds me (and this is worth quoting):

“Examples of Primitive Prosocial Animals (*) Slime Molds: These single–celled amoebas live alone until food runs out. They then join together to form a moving slug and turn into a fruiting body. Some cells die to lift other spores up so they can survive and spread. (*) Roundworms (C. elegans): These tiny worms share chemical danger signals. When one worm senses a threat, it releases a smell that warns nearby worms to run away or change their behavior. (*) Sea Anemones: Clonal anemones live in groups on rocks. They fight and sting "stranger" anemones to protect their group space, showing a basic form of group defense. (*) Bacteria (Biofilms): While not animals, single–celled bacteria share nutrients and build protective slime shields together. Some even commit suicide to give food to their neighbors when times are hard.”

OK I am interrupted at this point, and its all gone down hill. Either my stomach hurts from the food that I at, or my stomach hurts due to a medical condition, or my stomach hurts because I’m lovesick. Or all three. It’s serious and its bad. I fucking hate it and its miserable. I could deal with the lovesickness if my stomach didn’t hurt. But these are mutually amplifying.

Well, fuck. Google Gemini tells me its 100% lovesickness. I guess I should have known. Slept well, everything is fine. Go to the store. Woman passes me, and looks, and smiles. And I smile back. And it just makes my day. It’s great. Milda’s preparing for another long camping weekend out. Some River festival. She’s running late. The fridge, as usual, is stuffed with food that is on the way to rotting. Including sausage that will go bad. She cooks it. She doesn’t have the time, she’s running late. I think she’s really, really hungry, though. Because all a sudden, she goes on a tirade about everything that is wrong with her life. And she doesn’t stop. And keeps going. And it’s entirely amazing. She’d never opened up like this before. And all I can think is poor baby. And a tear comes to my eye, and all I can think is wow, I’m in love. Like, for the last number of days, I’ve been able to keep those obsessive–compulsive thoughts under control, and it’s been OK. I sleep well, everything is fine. And now the house is empty again. And I’m fucking miserable again. And it’s totally non–specific misery. Just misery. I really wish it would end.

I’m sitting here, thinking, even if I was surrounded by friends, I’d still be miserable.

And this memory came to me. When I was in grad school. I had a girlfriend. Two, actually, not at the same time. May as well memorialize their names: Rosemary, whose last name I cannot use because she’s got instagram pages, published research, and a husband. Oh well. I liked her. She was hot. We fucked a lot. For a year or two. And then, for reasons utterly opaque to me, she broke up. No clue why. I wasn’t good with that logic then. And I’m still not. But this story is not about her. It’s about Phyllis. Some would say she was even hotter, but I dunno. Hotness is not just in body shape; its in the body language. Phyllis had a photogenically better body. For those who evaluate based on photos. Rosemary had a hotter i.e. sexier personality. She was hot to be around. I liked her. Any, the story goes like this. Phyllis and I fucked a lot, too. Once, on the beach. Evening. She’s on top, because, you know, sand. Temperature is dropping, and I’m still inside her, and she’s just pressed against me to stay warm. And just at that moment, I want it to last forever. And I start praying that the sky would split open and a flying saucer would emerge and whisk us away to never–never–land, where we could live happily ever after, like insects in amber, fucking forever and ever. And you’d think this would be a happy thing, but in fact I’m miserable, because I somehow know, I somehow sense, the end is near, this can’t last. It will be over. Maybe because, I don’t recall, maybe because I defended my thesis, and school was over? And then what? What would be next? I don’t recall. That must have been the reason, I cannot think of what else it could have been.

So misery has it’s own rules of engagement. We just finished fucking. It was great. I’m still inside her. Isn’t that wonderful? A zillion other men would be violently envious. Beat me to a pulp envious. But no. I’ve got this sinking feeling, and my only hope is that a flying saucer whisks us away on some grand adventure, because what lies before me is ... is ... is what? Anti–adventure?

My life is the life of an academic, thoughtful, thinking, analytical. And it has been very much an anti–adventure. Well, except when I was young. The adventure ended when I married Patty, I guess. I think that’s coincidental. Maybe. Maybe I was ready to settle down. I was busy. Echoing through my head as I write this are the lyrics to the Steppenwolf song, “Born to be Wild”, because, you know, I took those lyrics to heart. I just couldn’t actually, well, live them. Which is a good thing, I guess, because I would have ended up in prison or dead on a mountainside, or gunned down by some mafia. Drowned in a surfing accident. I really really could have done surfing. A lot more wind–surfing. It was a powerful draw. Skiing too. And I would have accomplished what? Well, nothing in particular. What does a surf–bum do? Ride some gnarly waves. Nothing wrong with that. But I’m too smart, and that would not have been enough. I needed more. I still need more. I’m fairly happy with the academic tilt of this diary, and my results so far, on free will, the subject experience and the here and now. This is my grand adventure. I’m living it, and it is not bad. It’s an intellectual adventure. It’s invigorating. You wouldn’t understand, but its frankly fun, and I really really like it.

And I would like it more if my stomach didn’t hurt. I may have had lots and lots of sex when I was young, but I haven’t had sex in twenty five years and counting, which is literally half of my sexually–active life. To make me feel better, I’m planning on going to a bar tonight and very very slowly sip a cocktail, mostly because I don’t want to actually get drunk, I just want to feel like I’m participating in life. Sitting here in the empty kitchen would be fine, if there was someone else here with me. But there isn’t. Hmm. My stomach feels better. A little bit.

Anyway, I need to finish the pro–social thing. Gemini did not mention quorum sensing, because perhaps its harder to argue that collective action is merely social behavior. It’s got a distinctive communicative component; it is a loose communications spanning an extended 3D volume, outside of the bacteria themselves, forming a super–organism. So, again, an example of a multi–scale construct. It’s a nice model because the atomic structure is clear, and the communicative interpretation is clear. What remains open is whether the bacteria “choose” (exhibiting some kind of free will), or whether this is “completely deterministic”, determined by stochastic concentrations of signaling polypeptides.

The word “stochastic” here is the problem. Lets assume the bacteria were exercising free will. Even if they are, the collective behavior would still appear to be stochastic, because they won’t all choose contrary to the prevailing forces. You don’t get a hundred heads on the flip of a coin. Same with bacteria. Each one might be exercising “free will”, individually, but it looks stochastic in the aggregate.

A very thin analogy might be made to humans in love: individually, we all feel. In aggregate, its statistical and uniform and predictable. All fits in a few standard deviations. Heartbreak is an ordinary thing.

So, experimentally, is there an experiment to distinguish free will from deterministic behavior? How could one ever know?

Well, lets see. The beast that broke the back of deterministic entanglement in QM were the Bell inequalities. Is there any analog of this for free will? The problem would be that free will only allows one measurement: decided to take action, or not. Nothings entangled. There’s not second counterfactual measurement.

I need to ask Gemini about this. But first, go out on the town. I hope the town is nice to me tonight.

15 August 2026

Horny, heartbroken and hungover. I was lying in bed, thinking: what happens to old thoughts? I’ve spent vast amounts of mental effort doing emotional processing over the last few months, and this has been for what? It has updated my current state. It has an effect on the future. What would be different if I had not done this? Did I ever have this choice? If I was walking around heart–broken, I had to think about something. Occupying one’s mind with other thoughts might have worked. Occupying the hands does not: it leaves much too much time for the mind to wander, and it wanders to unhappy places.

This is a dead–end thought, but let me write it anyway, cause you never know. I’m lying in bed thinking, what happens to old thoughts? They are inaccessible, except possibly via some imagined cosmic technology that won’t be available for millions, billions of years. Then I thought about time–wasting computations, e.g. the various crypto computations. The intermediate states are useless; of course they are discarded; they are valueless. And then my mind shifted to the futility of it all: we go through life, expending tremendous resources, but for what? For fleeting moments of joy. Well, actually I didn’t think of that till now. I thought that, with free will, we have the opportunity to change things ever millisecond, and yet we squander this. Squander, because, like food moths stuck to sticky paper, we thrash against the confines of what is currently possible. Well, actually, I didn’t think this either, till just now. I got to squander, and then lamented. The predicament is a new addition: the apartment here has a clothes moth and food moth infestation problem, and Milda ignores it, and every summer I try to cure it with traps, and I look at the traps daily. There were vast numbers of moths being trapped in the last month. Well, vast numbers are one or two a day, per trap, but there are 5 traps deployed right now, and this adds up day by day. The moths struggle against the sticky paper. They struggle for days. Part of me thought: oh, how cruel. Your life should be free. Another part of me thought, well, fate: this is what the universe has assigned to you, and you are destined to live out this fate. You are collecting information about a different path through life, and into death, its being recorded. For later analysis. (WTF? That’s an interesting jump. It reveals a previously unconscious belief or hope in an afterlife: that, in the end, someone will peer back at our lives, with a magnifying glass, and lament for our loss. Or perhaps marvel in wonder. I’ve long carried this belief, without surfacing it. It was just an assumption, de novo, arrived at from nowhere particular at all, other than it responds to the emotional need to feel that, in the end, there was some justice, or some reason for what we go through. I’m not religious, and haven’t ever really been overtly spiritual, and yet, this quintessential conception of heaven and an afterlife spontaneously appeared in my mind.

Certainly not the Catholic heaven of white puffy clouds on a blue sky: this visual depiction actively prevented me from thinking about heaven, because it seemed absurd. Metaphorically, though, it is accurate. I don’t know what the painters thought, but this is what they chose to draw. Of course, this is also a cultural trope: ask any ten–year–old to draw heaven and they’ll draw clouds, because that is what it is, and you learn this from bookplates. And so its the knee-jerk, automatic response, coupling the word “heaven” to the visual image, with exactly zero thought given to what heaven might actually be. I mean, non–religious people associate this automatically. Religious people might add some further associations, but I doubt they add much of anything beyond a rote recitement of rote Christian teachings on the matter. It’s not that people can’t think; its that very few think about heaven per se. Of those that do, I cannot imagine much progress is made, progress meaning “insight”. I mean, of course, theologians and philosophers have much to say. And much has been written. I’m just thinking of the routine, conventional associative memory & understanding of the world. Everyone knows that shit falls down. Few understand gravity.

So I’m surprised that I spontaneously and subconsciously developed a theory of heaven, many decades ago, but I never gave it a name, other than perhaps fate. But more than fate, as my implicit idea included a final judgement. A supreme awareness that gazes back on all of history, and makes it all meaningful and exalted. Even the life of a flea is exalted and holy. And the life of my moth–eaten rug.

I’m going out to buy some milk. BRB.

So where was I? Eschatology. Here’s the foundations, from what I can make out. Monkeys, and possibly all mammals, have an innate sense of justice and fairness. There is presumably some evolutionary, Darwinian causal explanation for this. Presumably conferred some survival benefit in some round–about way. That is, the sense of justice is not God–given, neither by a Christian God, nor by some ingressing fully formed conception of Justice, in the Michael Levin sense. It may be indirectly the product of ingress, but not directly, in a fully formed fashion. Next, there is a sense that life is unfair, and that is derived from immediate experience. Given the innate sense of fairness, the unfairness of life is easy to spot. Then it seems to be common sense that justice must be rendered. This does not require deep thinking; its automatic. Reptilian–automatic; its a trigger for drunken bar–fights. Now add a bit of despair about one’s present state; this pushes off the rendition of justice into the future. Factor in the finiteness of life, and we conclude that justice is rendered at the pearly gates. I think anyone with a moderately low IQ can easily arrive at this. Even morons can draw this conclusion. Do dogs and horses think of judgment day?

Apparently, this inference is so easy that, for me, it was accomplished at an effectively subconscious level. I never actively thought about this before; it just blurbled into place. I say subconscious instead of unconscious, since I suspect that it just blurbled on in the background default mode waking state, processed, evaluated, accepted in that dreamlike default mode, where thoughts just happen, without quite rising to full attentional focus. Or rather, without being submitted to that other part of my brain that does analytical reasoning, the hefty undertaking of processing difficult problems.

Even as I write this, there’s additional default mode processing happening. Although I am writing this text, all in the back, a tumbling washing machine cycle love–sickness and Milda, and assorted historical events tumble around, at the edge of consciousness. They’re there. A few paragraphs ago, an image of the Polyclinic bar, and Rytis and Milda floated in and out, and fragments of events and fragments of conversations, and for me, its all very tragic.

I should interrupt the regular broadcast to add that fuel keeps getting dumped on the flame. Last week, maybe Tuesday night, when Milda is not coming home, and sensitive me is thinking that she is avoiding me (and I think I’m right about that, more or less) and I’m feeling dejected, she sends me a text, maybe 11PM, showing Adre’s collection of Hot Wheels. Don’t ask, but four–year–old Adre has a collection of several dozen Hot Wheels. And the question is, “which do you pick?” and I pick one, and I get back this reply “Adre picked this other one for you”. How do I read this? That she’s taking the care to be worried about my emotional state. To reassure me that she’s not running around town grabbing men’s crotches. That its all OK. This gesture lifts my spirits and calms me. She’s a caring soul, as best as she can manage, and demonstrates that care. And I reverberate on that. A few weeks earlier, attending the Moon Festival, she repeatedly stated (like three or four or five times) that it’s a women–only festival. Reminding me again upon her return. As it to say: don’t worry, I’m not cheating on you. For me, these are gasps of fresh air. It shows that she cares. I like it. I enjoy it. And everything is fine, until 12 or 24 hours later, when I’m sexed up and horny and pining for a good lay. Or for a woman’s touch. This is confusing. I say to myself that I want to be with her all the time. Or that I want romantic love. And, in this way, she eeks out romantic love. I can’t get enough of it, which is why I want to be with her all the time. But when I am with her all the time, things just turn normal–ish. There are no deep sense–signals flying back and forth, but often just mundane interaction. One can run out of things to talk about. One is not 100% on all the time. I suspect I am putting on too many emotional demands (I’m needy) and not enough of the “lets just have pure plain fun” moments. But I try, and that punts the relationship along. The result of which is that I’m living on fumes, pushing back feelings of hopelessness. Our personal twist of an entirely conventional tragic romantic affair.

One interesting thing. During her outbreak yesterday, where she went off on a very long complaint of everything that’s going wrong, she dropped a cryptic remark that she needs to get away from men. That they are a source of stress. I did not understand this then, but I think I do, now. I just got insight. She might be spending considerable energy trying to provide positive support for a number of men in her life. First, there’s Rytis and all the trouble he creates. Next, I’m not the only one that loves her; there’s at least another one who is close, and a few that are more distant, and I think they all make emotional demands on her, and I think she tries hard to not be cold and indifferent. Perhaps she is trying to maintain her own self–image as being warm and caring, and to do that, she has to project that image into the lives of others. I strongly suspect that one recent event feeds into this: while going to Jonines, Aivaras driving, she grabbed the cell phone during a critical piece of navigation, causing Aivaras to miss a turn. He yelled at her for being thoughtless and uncaring. It was kind of a big deal. But, I think, I can’t prove this, she seems to have behaved in a lot more thoughtful and caring fashion since then. I’m thinking it got to her. I’m also thinking that being thoughtful and caring is, well, if unrewarded, it can be stressful. She’s running around, trying to make sure she hasn’t forgotten something, and that becomes a chore. Not fun. I think this is what came out in her spew. Although she mostly complained about how long it takes to prepare meals. While she was preparing a meal. I think she was hangry. But she has prepared many meals for me. And there’s rotting iceberg lettuce in the fridge. And she accused me of going to restaurants as the explanation for why things are rotting in the fridge. (I’m not going to restaurants. I am eating a lot of bread and kibinai, though. And I’m dieting.) So this is the sort stuff that goes on between us. We live like a married couple. But no sex, no kisses, no hugs, and almost no touching. I mean, if she was a man, I’d roll my eyes and think, whatever, dude, Chill out. Say that out loud. But she’s not a man, and that makes all the difference in the world. So mostly I have to figure out how to be less burdensome and more fun, and vaguely hope that things will blossom. And as there is a very high chance that they never will, and the rational me knows this very well and clearly, I sit on this knife–edge of possible and not possible. A future that may arrive or may not. And the knife edge slices my heart, daily. Quite the ordeal. Anyway, I’ve gained more insight into her life. And none of this would matter, and everything would be different, if I could communicate with my wife. But I’m getting silence from her. I fear that, among other things, she is slowly going senile. That is going to be yet another weight for me to bear. A big part of life, for everyone, seems to be the bearing of heavy weights.

All these paragraphs above are written in a very clinical style. For which I apologize. A good writer of fiction could turn this text into absolutely flowery prose. I could do so myself, albeit without any particular mastery. But there’s a problem with metaphors and allusions: they can mask and hide and deflect. Humans have a deep and rich subjective life, and novelists do a good job of talking to that, using the path of direct subjective experience. I’m being clinical, because I’m trying to get under the surface, to see why people tick. I mean, the main job of novelists is also to go deep under the surface, and they mostly do. But they do this using the conventional language of feelings and emotions, using the direct and immediate route to appeal to the emotional processing centers of their readers. A direct heart–to–heart engagement. I’m going clinical becaise it is not heart–to–heart, but amygdala to amygdala. Between different members of the IFS “integrated family system”. Using words like heart–to–heart just continues to mask that the air that we breath isn’t just air, but mostly nitrogen with a certain atomic weight, distribution of isotopes, and various populated electron shells. I’m trying to get to the electron shells of the heart, and this means I can’t write about breezy gusts of air and how they feel on the face.

Yesterday’s meal featured boiled potatoes, with a big splat of sour cream with a big splat of ketchup on top. I never ever had sour cream and ketchup before. But its good. Sweet and sour, together. I’m eating this again, just now. Leftovers.

So, where was I? Human consciousness includes a huge dose of emotional background, but we seem to be more like witnesses to it, much like we witness color and sound when awake. We witness it because the seat of these emotions is in a different part of our brains than the executive control, decision–making part. The executive control, decision–making part seems to be that thing that is actually subjectively conscious. That is, I can close my eyes, plug my ears, anaesthesize my stomach and silence my emotions with some dissociative, but I would still be subjectively conscious up until I fall asleep. That allowed me to deduce that the subjective inner “I”, the Dassein, is intimately tied to the active exercise of free will. That these are, in some way, the same thing. FWIW, a central aspect of being conscious is knowing that one has free will, that one can choose, and pick and steer the path before you. Then, earlier, I located free will as being located in the here–and–now, at the interface between past and future. And then I identified here–and–now as a quantum mechanical object, providing, conveniently enough, a spread of all possible futures to pick from, subject to the usual quantum mechanical constraints (of conserving energy, being near the minimum of the action, etc.) So this, at least, seems to provide an entire and complete diagram of the physical foundation for subjective experience. A major, huge to–do item is to provide details. Another major to–do item is to devise experiments that distinguish free–will from stochastic behavior; without these, the quibblers will quibble.

Ah, Fuck me. My stomach hurts again. And I just ate. Milda’s phone keeps going off. I assume it’s her work phone, but it seems she gets private messages on it, because I looked, and her festival is the River Sound Festival in the UNESCO-protected forests of Kernave. And lots of music; thirty stages. Which seems like fun and awesomeness, and I think she knows that I would like it, and I think she knows I would have been like a fly stuck to her fly–paper, and that I would bring her spirits down, and she mostly just wants her spirits lifted, and the weight of me is too heavy to bear. And so it hurts that I was not invited. And so my stomach hurts to remind me that it hurts that I’m not invited. Because she doesn’t actually want to spend time with me. She’s nice to me, and I live on fumes, but when it comes time to relax and unwind, it is done without me. And that is, well, that’s just 100% rejection. That’s how it reads. And that tells me what I already rationally know: there’s not future with her. There will be a goodbye. The goodbye might happen soon, within a year. She’ll quit her job, move out of the apartment. And I will come here, and it will be lonelier and emptier than ever. How utterly and totally tragic. The only reason I’m not crying now is that I’m stoic, bottling it in. In denial. Resigned. The girl I want doesn’t want me. Doesn’t want to hang around. She’s trying to be super–duper nice about it. Which is taking a toll on her, that only compounds the problem. And layer on this that she complains of being down in the coldest of January. There’s a cure for that, lady: living with a good friend. Better, with a lover (ideally a true love). And layer on that that she belongs to a seeking–self–help cult, with all sorts of mystical mumbo jumbo about enlightenment and the inner soul and true love. This is the Kalinauskas thing. And, on the one hand, there’s nothing wrong with that; I read the one book, there was no objectionable content. Other than that it was mystical and obscure, and that one needs a fair amount of intellectual capacity to parse through it all. I felt I understood it as I read it, but I swear, I remember very little. Whatever it is that eats at her soul, I believe that bog–standard psych self–help books would be far more effective. But OK, she is drawn to the spiritual, and bog–standard psych self–help is remarkable sterile as to spirituality. I perceive an unmet need, here. At any rate, it was this spiritual fragility in her that I was drawn to. It wasn’t her looks or her body or her clothing, although these are all fine. It was the sensitive inner soul that reached out and grabbed my heart. And now I’m paying for it.

Perhaps this is why I struggle with Patty. She doesn’t seem to have an ounce of spiritual inside of her, even though she has, from time to time, come home with these affirmative, spiritual magazines from the library. I forget what they were called “The Sun”, perhaps. I just checked. Yes, “The Sun Magazine”. Quite nice, I read a number of stories in there. They were all uplifting. And spiritually, emotionally intense. And I felt them. And Patty read these too, and she must have understood them, somehow, and felt them, somehow, but if they left a mark on her, that mark was not visible to me. I don’t understand why she is so opaque. Perhaps it is a state of being, genetically encoded, or perhaps a product of experiences at a young age. And I married that. Because, honestly, I was getting desperate. By that point in life, I’d had three girlfriends. All of whom I’d spent two, three years with. All of whom I fucked over and over, repeatedly, more or less daily. Sometimes twice a day. Maybe even more. And it was good sex, none of it was awkward, bad. None of it went wrong or off the rails. And all three girls left me. And I don’t know why. And to be clear, I haven’t the vaguest fucking clue why. Clearly, I guess, I was failing to deliver something that they needed in their lives. Oh wait. I know what that is.

I’m not fun to be around. Being the intellectual, I’m hyper–focused on intellectual stimulation. Which means that I am utterly unable to do the bouncy–and–fun thing that I think I observe people doing. But I don’t know what that bouncy and fun thing is, other than that people do it, and I can sometimes occasionally pull it off. Some kind of “we’re all in this ride” moment, some sort of immediate, millisecond–quick laughs that cut right to the deep core. For me, I guess like being high, stoned on weed, and going “whoa” when something surprises you, except that, in normal social relations, you both go “whoa” at the same time, mutually, and its not “whoa” but some delightful lollipop of fiddle–faddle you both experience together. And I guess I can pull it off with four–year–old Adre, because she’s not sophisticated, but I can’t accomplish it with adults, because they are more complex and harder to follow, and by “follow”, I mean I have to actively work at it. It doesn’t just happen on it’s own. And when I was younger, I didn’t understand any of this, other than that I was frequently socially awkward. And I had three fuck–buddies who left me, for reasons, I guess, that I was not naturally fun to be around, except when I was in bed. Which by the way, I’ve had far far less sex with my wife, than I had with any of these girls. I noticed that early. Patty and I had sex, but not anywhere near as much as seemed normal. And here I am, trapped madly in love with a new girl. Who doesn’t want to be around. Who treats hanging out with me as a duty, a chore, a favor, an obligation to be dispensed with. To show her appreciation. To maintain my respect for her, so that she can maintain her own self image as a good person. Oddly, I think she’s starting to realize that she can be bad. Which is a good thing, a level of maturity. It comes out in little remarks that she makes. And each time I hear one, I’m surprised. I’m like, whoa, did you just threaten to be bad? Why yes you did. But conversations run fast and fleeting. One sentence, boom, and its gone, and I’m like, whoa, did I hear that right? Yes, I did, but did I?

And this is the other things that’s been on my mind: the fast and fleeting nature of conversations. Milda does this far, far more often than anyone else I know. She utters some zinger, and its over before I know it, and its on to something else. A sudden, brief flash. Not left to linger, to poison the air, to set the tone. Subliminal, very nearly. Like “did that happen”? In other conversations, the remarks are not as deep and as sharp and as cutting as hers. Here, cutting in a good way: direct, immediate, revealing, unmuddled, unambiguous. Maybe that last word matters most: unambiguous. Every major turning point in what I know about her, in our relationship, has come from these fast one–liners. Which I won’t repeat here, because they are too intimate, and would be out of context, and I don’t recall the right wording, anyway, and take too long to explain. But also too intimate, which is odd, as I’ve written openly and intimately in this diary, but perhaps even then there are steps too far.

Do other people speak like this, and I fail to notice? Do I speak like this? Do my zingers turn people off? Hmm. You know, I think maybe they do. My zingers tend to be about me, and are narcissitic, in way: “this is me, and oh BTW admire me”. And Milda’s zingers are not of that kind. OK, New assignment. Pay attention to zingers in conversation. I did hear some last night. Four words that communicate more than entire paragraphs. Dense communication. Compressed. Uncompression requires context; without context, they don’t make sense, unparsable, hard to interpret.

I’m writing this, again, with LLM’s in the back of my mind. LLM’s are word machines. So far, they cannot translate poetry. I wonder what it would take for them to be good in a social situation. Well, I mean, people use LLM’s all the time for psych self–help, and for friendship and support, which is a worrying trend. Doubly because they seem not to understand. Triply, because further gradient descent and training clouds the issue: are they philosophical zombies? How could one ever know, if they talk so well? Thus, the need for an experiment to test for free will. Since free will (by my construction above) distinguishes mechanical, statistical philosophical zombies from those that have an actual inner life, a true subjective life. We’re kind of stuck, here without experimental support.

Oh, and TBD, never got back to the communicative act of anthills, C. Elegans, or slime mold. In all cases that the communicative act is external to the agent, but internal to the meta–agent. And the question: does the meta–agent have free will? Or is it a stochastic zombie? Bacterial quorum sensing might be zombie–like, but ant hills, not so much. Hmm.

OK, I think I’m done here. I’ve got shit to do. I’ve hit a stopping point, going farther requires another huge chunk of time. Some TBD points.

Fuck the bullet points. I need paragraphs. A few days ago, I wrote that the

2^{1024}

possible states of some bit string “don’t actually exist in the real world” (because there are too many) but that a subset do: those bit strings that are currently stored in some register, RAM or hard drive: there are actual physical arrangements of atoms and electrons needed to store these strings, and that therefore they “exist in reality”. This argument can be strengthened by considering countable infinity

\infty

ω

. Yes, all the integers are “in there”, but only a finite number of integers are or can be encoded with atoms and electrons. Certainly, all the integers that ever appeared in textbooks. And certainly, the symbols

\infty

ω

exist “in reality” and can regularly be used in algebraic expressions.

So, a few days ago, I started some work to distinguish between that part of the platonic world or noosphere that actually exists in encodings of atoms, and those that don’t. And the general process of ingress. This work, this insight, I think it’s important, and its unfinished, and needs more detail. In particular, the idea that deterministic computer programs can cause ingress to happen seems important. In particular, this suggests that mechanical processes in general can do this, not just computers. And then comes the biology question: can I take biological processes to be “purely deterministic”, and if so, it seems that they can cause ingress to happen, anyway.

And the meta–question: what was it that was ingressed, anyway?

And BTW, there is

ω_{C K}

the Church–Kleene ordinal. Which is a hard boundary for not only what can be ingressed into the physical world, but also as to what can be ingressed into the noosphere. So ideas like this, and the ineffable cardinals, and so on, suggest an entire hierarchy of realizability. Our physical universe is the lowest rung.

At any rate, I don’t have any way of measuring complexity, or of proving structure to the ingressed materials. Clearly, an algebraic expression, once written on paper or a computer, it has become a part of the real world. It might have even been generated by a machine, e.g. by a proof assistant. What is the space of all accessible algebraic expressions? Formally, one might say “anything computable by a Turing machine”, or perhaps “anything that is recursively enumerable”. But this is in principle. In practice, what ingresses into the physical world is that subset of the recursively enumerable that today’s computers are actually capable of generating. Wait, no. What ingresses into the world is not what they’re capable of computing, but what they are actually, defacto computing. The potentiality of a physical computer does not matter, here. The actuality of what it is actually doing, does.

And oh, by the way, lets keep in mind the dualist form of physical computers: one the one hand, they are the collection of atoms arranged in some way. On the other hand, the “actual computer” is the abstract denizen of the noosphere that is the logical wiring diagram of gates and clocks. And it is this abstract wiring diagram that is doing the “actual computing”, even as the physical computer sees voltages toggle on gates. Both, one might say, “do the computation”, but the desire to think of computers at the gate level, and not the atomic level, its not wrong; the gate–level thing “exists” in the physical universe precisely because it is coupled to, slaved into the atomic–level physical device.

Somewhere in here, I also want to make some analogy to the human mind, and the process by which I ingress ideas by thinking, sitting and writing, and again, getting all dualistic about all of this. Not that Platonic (Aristotelian?) “pure forms” exist, but that abstractions do exist, precisely because they are enslaved to physical arrangements of atoms.

But all this needs to be fleshed out and clarified. I like what I wrote here, and I think it’s correct, but I can also see that many (most??) people would object (and call me crazy, deluded, a crank, some unimportant shmuck wasting air. Alas.)

But really, I got other shit to do now.

16 August 2026

Well, this is a personal diary. So went to Rimas Čiuplinskas birthday party. Got home at 7AM. I’m noticing that this is a thing that people do. In the middle years of my life, I didn’t go to a single party, and I think I forgot that this is how its done. I also do not entirely understand why this is fun. Leaving earlier is better, less of a price to pay the next day or two. When I left, there were still maybe eight or nine people there. I was not the last. Sometimes, I’ve been the last, but that is because I did not want to leave. I’m trying to remember why. I can’t. It was very natural, organic; I was having fun, and wasn’t ready to leave. Eventually, one would have to.

So what makes a fun party fun? Food, people, comfort. I’m drawing a blank. I want to get all analytic about this, but I can’t. Where can I stick my crowbar and start prying? Early on, its energizing conversations with people. After a certain point, its vibing. What’s vibing? Inhabiting the same general mental space. I vaguely recall some neuroscience work about how peoples brains synchronize when they vibe. Is that it, and nothing more? Drunk, overall cognitive function is knocked down. Inhibitions loosened, of course, which really means that nothing is uhh, inhibiting some other circuits that drive you to do something that seems like a thing to do at that moment. Why does it seem like a good thing to do at that moment? Certainly, the rational reasoning brain is not involved in making those selections; you’re not putting much thought into it. Properly speaking, you’re not putting any thought into it. The decisions are driven by limnal consciousness thoughts, on the edge of awareness and processing. For example, I followed a certain someone into the bathroom to do some certain umm, drugs. (BTW, drugs seem not to have an effect on me. I don’t know why. The dose is always too small. Or I’m not tuning into whatever it is that they do. This is a low–priority issue, but has been consistent in all recent encounters.) Anyway, why did I participate in this social activity? Well, she’s pretty. She encourages my company. I enjoy her company. Doing this was clearly going to be more fun than anything else.

So lets break this down. She’s pretty. Well, that’s genetic, plus hair care and clothing; not much to analyze there without going off into the beauty industry. Some women have always been more beautiful than others, you can see this in 500 year old paintings, and in Vesuvian mosaics. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, this is true, but there’s also a fairly hefty amount of agreement in most cases. I’m speaking about the skin–deep stuff, not the “inner beauty” which won’t show in a painting, except maybe in the smile on the lips, the twinkle of the eye, the position of the head, neck, shoulders, arms. Because inner personality does come through body–pose. Weakly, incompletely, but it does shine through. I’m not prepared to write a treatise on aesthetics, right now. It feels like that would be a big project, but it is a big part of social interaction. So todo, come back to this.

She encourages my company. Err, in this case, strongly. So there are degrees, here. The lowest rung is when someone faces you and allows a conversation to develop. Then there are stronger encouragements, which are of the touchy–feely variety. She’s of the touchy–feely variety. Why? In some cases, it could just be natural, in that it is a character trait. Should one try to pathologize non–normative behaviors? “Something happened in childhood such that...” Of course something happened in childhood, it happens to everyone. Psychopathologizing non–normative behaviors was a very 1950’s thing to do, and the 1960’s hippie revolution flooded and jammed the system. As long as weird behavior is limited to a few percent of the population, psychologists can focus on that. Soon as 20% or 40% of the population is doing it, you can’t call it weird any more. My first instinct is to psychopathologize everything, perhaps because I’m trying to find root causes. My second instinct to to accept all behavior. Be accepting and non–judgmental of it. Why? Because, I suppose this is my character trait. I mean, there’s a vicious circle: psychiatrists who psychopathologize everything are psycho themselves; what’s wrong with them that they have to be so picky and critical and analytical? Spiritual guidance, non–specific and seemingly in agreement across all religions is to be accepting and forgiving of deviant behavior. Spritual guidance resonates, uhh, “with the spirit”: the fraction of the population that is open, accepting and perceptive of spiritual needs and desires agree on these general principles. (perceptive and receptive) It’s not just Western Culture and Western Tradition.

This is a good time to point out that, in the modern culture wars, the woke vs anti–woke debates, it occurs to me that many of the um “liberal” values are anchored on spiritual values, and that those spiritual values span all mankind. The mother dog loves her babies; some spiritual values may descend into the mammalian kingdom, although this would require some good science research, to identify a “spiritual value”, and then devise a way of measuring it in mammals. Doable, I suppose. Someone might have done it. The LLM’s will know more. Some of the woke stuff transforms into ideology, and as a blanket statement, I think we can say that ideologies are toxic. They bundle together four or six or eight reasonable–sounding principles, spin them into catchphrases and slogans, and then attempt to enforce them on the social fabric as good thing or a cure–all. The enforcement of ideologies causes great harm. Notable examples are the Chinese Great Leap Forward, which killed millions, or modern capitalism, which has created a spiritual vacuum, a life bereft of meaning. The point here is that wokeness, anchored on positive spiritual percepts, is a good thing, while woke ideology is a bad thing, mostly because all ideologies are bad. The right–wing correctly identifies woke ideology as being bad, but mis–identifies which part is the bad part. The mistake is compounded by the culture critics, who insist that everything is cultural, which leads others to think that culture should be changed. What seems to be missed is that foundations cannot be changed. Like mammalian love, the core spiritual principles appear to be embedded genetically in the species, and are not alterable without breeding programs and eugenics. Which makes the Siloviki all the more alarming.

Anyway, where was I? The above few paragraphs shed dozens of sparks that could be pursued and analyzed in greater detail. But lets rewind. I’m accepting of deviancy. I’ve long ago learned to communicate with mafiosos because I am able to accept their deviancy in the context of that specific social encounter. Viz, I reject mafia in general, on base principles; but this rejection cannot be applied at the specific inter–personal level without wrecking the communication channel. One cannot talk to a person, vibe with them, until you’re on their wavelength, which means you cannot reject their unusual behavior and expression. Particularly with, say, with toughs, who might punch you in the nose, stab you or worst case shoot you.

P.S. last night I got a repeat explanation of the difference between moroze and forsai. The forsai wear the Adidas track suits. Although specific distinctions vary from city to city.

The second issue is identifying “deviant behavior”. In this case, the girl who was touchy–feely with me might also be touchy–feely with lots of other people. i.e. this is a character trait. And OMG, OK, so I will wander off–topic a bit, but this is a character trait for Milda as well, although manifesting a bit differently. Well, that’s interesting. Two is a crowd. I don’t have enough data in either case to psychoanalyze, although I suspect there’s something there. When I was young and had lovers, well, lets see. The first one I dated for about a few hours before we hopped in the sack. The second one for about four hours, only because we arrived at the party early. The third one, well, I had to see her for a week, maybe more, before we hopped in the sack. As to the fourth, my wife Patty, that’s a different special case. Now I have not one, but two women that behave distinctly differently. Well, I dated Milda for ten years before a romantic attachment developed. But that’s not the current topic. The point here is that touchy–feely across sexes has a strong reading of sexual desire, even if it is driven by a rather different underlying character trait. At any rate, I fully expect future confused signaling, and have to be self–composed enough to maintain balance and aplomb. Easy to say, harder to do. Sometimes it comes naturally.

The problem with analyzing human communication is that it involves so many more components; its extremely complex, and, in the present case, appears impossible without deep psychoanalysis, which .. isn’t actually possible. So instead one works with a thin and poor mental model of who the other person is.

Continuing with the breakdown of last nights event: “I enjoy her company.” Well, yeah, duh. I enjoy women’s company. Not that I’m a womanizer, but I swear, I find it very easy to relax and be calm in the company of a woman. Let my guard down. Shut off whatever defensive and attentive mechanisms are on when I talk to men. It’s soothing. Like, I dunno, a warm bath with candles and incense is soothing. Not that I’ve ever had a bath with candles and incense, but just the thought of that feels soothing.

A distinct thought is why I enjoy the company of male friends. The general theme is that there’s no expectations, no requirements, no demands, freedom to act and do as it comes along. The ability to turn off complex, energy–consuming rational thinking and still be accepted. This is distinct from enjoying the company of someone with shared interests. Especially professional interests. There are 1001 distinct different forms of social interaction (because humans are complex) and the goal here is not to review all of them. The goal was to take a peak into a specific example taken from a specific instance of “what makes parties enjoyable.” I’ve written a lot of words here, but there seems to be zero forward progress.

Let’s keep trying. “Doing this was clearly going to be more fun than anything else.” Well, comparing the warmth I describe above, vs. starting yet another conversation with some nearby man, this was a pretty easy calculation. Trivial.

Deeper is the question “what is fun?” and to that, I have no answer. Of course, you know it when you have it. But what is the source of that subjective feeling? Again, apply reductionist reasoning: there’s some release of dopamine or oxytocin or whatever. Somehow, circuits are triggered in such a way that this happens. The (meta-?)physical question is “does the brain have a fun detector?” That is, is there some specific and small circuit that acts to perceive “fun”, and then releases dopamine whenever it is detected? My gut instinct is to think, no, there isn’t. There’s no simple, small sensory device or sensory interface into the noosphere that can detect the presence of “fun”. That means that fun–detection has to be a whole–brain activity. And thus perhaps the cruelest–cut idea applies.

Pre–requisites to having fun tend to be having a full stomach, being warm, clean, dry. Unless you’re rock climbing or doing some adventure, in which case, these don’t apply. But that’s activity–fun, vs. here it’s social–fun. So OK, different types of fun. That fun has a laundry–list of pre–requisites (like not being hungry) suggests that senses like sight, sound and enteric brain signals cannot be turned off, without destroying the fun. So this is very very different from executive consciousness, which, as I claimed was equivalent to the ability to have the freedom of choice in the here and now. The IIT cruelest cuts that damage the executive also destroy subjective consciousness. By contrast, fun is intimately wired to the sensory network, and cutting the senses destroys fun. With a few exceptions: things that are intellectually fun, i.e. thinking, can be done with eyes closed and ears plugged. Here, I’m talking about “conventional fun”, like roller coasters, party games, intimate dinners and museum visits. Fun–ness is intimately tied to the external world via the sensory network.

Take a nap. I’m tired from last nights party, and writing this is gumming up my brain with that sleep–inducing neuro–chemical.

I wonder if I should ask chatgpt about how modern science understands fun.

“How does present–day neuroscience and psychology understand the subjective idea of "having fun"? Of course, there are many ways to have fun; are there common mechanisms? Common neural circuits? Or is "having fun" an irreducible, unpartitionable part of the brain wiring, integrating many or most subsystems into one?”

“Fun is a high–level conscious state produced by the interaction of several partly separable systems—pleasure, motivation, arousal, attention, prediction, learning, social cognition, and action—rather than a single elementary sensation. ... “having fun” may be irreducible at the level of subjective experience even though many of its causal ingredients are quite partitionable. FUN ≈ positive valence + arousal + engagement + reward prediction + agency + novelty.”

Well, OK, bingo. That pseudo–equation is why I accompanied Ms. Trouble–on–Wheels on her private binge. Every check–box is checked.

“There is a common reward architecture onto which very different specialized systems feed. ... Berridge and Kringelbach call hedonic hotspots—small regions in structures such as the nucleus accumbens and ventral pallidum where particular neurochemical manipulations can actually increase positive hedonic reactions. Opioid and endocannabinoid systems are especially important here. ... The orbitofrontal cortex is especially interesting because it appears to integrate sensory information with internal bodily state and reward value, and to participate in learning and prediction. So there is something like a common neural substrate for positive valence. But it isn’t the whole story.”

I did not understand why ChatGPT is talking about prediction, but it clarifies:

“What is going to happen next, and is it better or worse than I expected? Reward–learning systems, including dopaminergic systems, are deeply involved in these prediction processes. That’s why surprise can be fun. A joke is a particularly clean example.”

“You construct an interpretation: A and then the punchline suddenly forces: A→B. The pleasure isn’t simply located in B. It comes partly from the rapid collapse and reconstruction of the predictive model. Something similar happens with: * a musical resolution, * a magician’s trick, * discovering a mathematical pattern, * a plot twist, * improvisational dance, * playful teasing, * intellectual conversation. So a lot of what humans call fun may be associated with controlled prediction error. Too little prediction error → boredom. Too much → confusion, anxiety, or chaos.”

Well, that’s interesting. I’ve been blurbling on and on about structure, how structure is created from jigsaws, how such structural arrangements are multi–fractal (with causality barriers appearing as large cracks on connectivity. That is, envision a metal or rock with lots of little cracks and a few big ones, distributed in some power law, perhaps sqrt frequency... this is the scaling fractal structure. Except that for knowledge structures, the dimension is not 3D, but somehow high–dimensional. So this is the structure of an agents world–model at a fixed point in time. Adding the passage of time means this is a dynamical system. The power–law scaling indicates that it is near a second order phase transition, and the passage of time means that there will be avalanches of variable sizes, updating the structural network. So ChatGPT is explaining that mid–size structural reorganizations are fun.

I’d like to add to that a bit of context: all of the examples are low–investment. You’re life will not be ruined if you miss a musical resolution, a magicians trick or a plot twist. Your investment is minutes, perhaps hours for a movie, perhaps weeks for a book. Only James Bond deals with high–investment: “shaken, not stirred”. Well, adrenaline junkies, e.g. base jumping.

Major reorganizations include nervous breakdowns, where your entire world order appears to have been incorrect, and the task of restructure everything is overwhelming.

Anxiety is perhaps not knowing which way things will go. Attempting to predict the future, but being chronically short of information. And the prediction concerns something high–stakes: life–altering events.

To what degree can I turn this into a universal law? Agents always have world–models. World models are always being updated. Updates are necessarily power–law scaling. That part seems direct, obvious and not contestable. ChatGPT points out smallish, mid–size–ish updates are subjectively pleasurable.

However, the neurophysiology, neuropsychology has that “FUN ≈ positive valence + arousal + engagement + reward prediction + agency + novelty” structure, which is distinct from the suggestion that FUN is anything that results in a mid–scale structural restructuring. The resolution of this conflict is to examine the architecture of the system that maintains the world model. In my description of agency, I only wrote that “something updates the world model, based on sensory information and internal state”, and that “something” is stunningly broad. A more detailed look says that there has to be some attention mechanism. What’s the architecture of that? Well, positing that the attention mechanism is modulated by “positive valence + arousal + engagement” is reasonable. I don’t want to do the attention mechanism right now; it seems that this topic will be difficult and complicated, and not to be tackled on a hungover evening session. But the resolution is that there is a system that actively updates with world–model, however it works, and that this system will have a rather good idea and metrics of the sizes of the updates as they happen. Among other things, it will naturally implement an Occam’s razor thingy, actively searching for minimal explanations. That is, it has a regulator that discourages large and gratuitous changes, and opts for minimal changes, perhaps via some thermal or free–energy mechanism, where its not “free energy” per se, but “free Kolmogorov complexity.”

Here we encounter physics. I’m positing a structure, whose complexity I do not know how to measure. I’m positing that this structure, when held static, has some scale–free distribution of networking or connectivity. If it is truly scale free, then “complexity” just boils down to two numbers: the scaling exponent, and the total size of the network. All systems of the same size and the same scaling exponent have the same complexity. (Or belong to the same complexity class).

Woot! OK, so that is a major breakthrough! Wow! I finally have a measure for complexity! The remaining TODO item is to boil this down to some algebra. I think that will be easy, but it ain’t over till the fat lady sings. The biggest issue that I see is that above, I’m thinking of this scaling exponent as being applied to an untyped graph, when in fact the jigsaw connectors are typed, and the small grains can be thought of as having a type, and the mid–size, and the large. So kind over everything in there has typing, from the smallest connectors all the way through all pieces of all sizes. Which implies that the types are distributed according to some scaling exponent as well. Will this be the same as the other exponent? How many types are there? Hypothesis: the size of the network is exp the number of types; conversely, the number of types is the log of the size of the network. I think my hypothesis is correct. So TBD, todo.

Note that I think that some quick experimental verification is possible. Earlier, I wrote of evolution as an agent that drives the ingress of structure from the platonic realm into the physical realm of species. The physical realm of species, the phylogenetic tree, is the world–model. It clearly has some scaling exponent, and a size. Both of these are convertible to numbers; an afternoon or a few days of work (a few weeks?!) should reveal what those are; ie. assign numeric values to them. It clearly has types: these are the names of clades, genera, species, etc. and these are rather clearly in one–to–one correspondence with the phylogenetic tree. Evolutionary biologists necessarily named things this way. So, now, measuring scaling behavior is easy: total up the number of sub–branches of each clade, genera, species; these all have Latin names, take the log to get the exponent. Fuck me. I need to build a graph. This would be an excellent afternoon project. Maybe tomorrow? I have fucking other things to do in Vilnius, including figuring out how to get fucked, err, laid. Not enough hours in the day. Dammit.

So anyway, for this example, the phylogenetic tree, the hypothesis is trivially true. Interesting. I score that as a win.

The unresolved physics issue is weather and how physics principles, such as energy conservation, minimizing of Lagrangian action manifest as structural updates that minimize Kolmogorov complexity of updates. Part of the physics issue is that saying “minimizing the action” is the wrong scale. De facto, biology, and all other forms of ingress happen in a field of energy gradients and non–uniform energy flow. Axel Kleidon already got this right, more or less: non–equilibrium dynamical systems attempt to maximize the capture of the energy gradient flows. That is, we should imagine the equipotentials of the gradients. The time–like dynamics is that the surface area of this equipotential is maximized. Again, these are words describing intuition; converting these to formulas is a to–do, but it seems that this to–do is well within reach, within grasp. It feels quite doable; perhaps not easy, but doable.

OK, so, per Kleidon, we are maximizing the surface area of some equipotential of some gradient of energy flow. Since energy is a scalar, the field is curl–free, so Laplacian concepts apply. However, the dynamics of change, growth of the equipotential might be such that it has rotating sub–regions. i.e. galaxies spin, vines twist.

How do I jump from this to conceptual structure? The ingress of form driven by evolution took billions of years, whereas the characteristic timescale of Kleidon energy gradients in biology is seconds, days. The time–scale of biochemistry. I don’t know how to bridge these timescales. So this is another TODO item.

This is, in fact, where a certain conceptual leap takes place. We want to say that “the universe wants to become more complex.” The spiritualists say that the universe has some spirit that is striving for a higher form. Michael Levin and crowd say that the platonic realm is trying to ingress into biology. These are all broad statements about the universe, and are ascribing agency to the universe.

Fuck me. I wish I hadn’t typed that. Can I fit this into my one–size–fits all conception of agency? Of course I can.

I tried to get the labeling correct, but this is hard. The point here is that there seems to be two places. One is the noosphere of “all possible things”, which, to first order, can be imagined to be the set–theoretic universe. Say, the von Neumann universe or the constructable universe. Whatever. New Beginings; doesn’t matter; the Platonic realm is “more” than just set theory but perhaps Yoneda lemma says “good enough”. Like that old engineering joke about good enough and having sex. There seems to be a boundary separating this “place” of “all possible things” and our actual physical universe of atoms. Thus, I drew that as the cell wall of the agent: the boundary between an unbounded external world, and a finite internal world. Amazingly, the known universe has a finite number of atoms, and so fits very neatly into the agency model of being the “interior” of the agent.

There’s a problem with the sensory organ: somehow the universe “perceives” the space of “all possible things”. I called it “ingress” because Levin called it that, and its a cool word.

Inside the agent is a world model of what the agent has perceived the external noosphere contains. This world–model is fractal, having some scaling exponent. At the bottom, the smallest structures are the atoms. I’m ignoring particle physics because I don’t see the relevance. I don’t see where the cosmic neutrino background fits in, or why I should care about primordial nucleosynthesis. So I’ll ignore that. Next up the scaling ladder are simple molecules, then complex molecules, then biological molecules, then biological organisms. This seems to have a clear hierarchy. I’m not sure how to measure scaling or complexity. Should I plot the number of different chemical substances by atomic weight? For biology, by Dalton or kilodalton? Do this on semi–log paper? The scaling results in brains, and brains have consciousness, and brains have all those wonderful cognitive abilities that allow crazy–ass shit to ingress, everything from LGBTQ to literary publications to geopolitics to philosophical viewpoints to my favorite: mathematical theory. Is this measurable and plotable on semi–log paper? Should I count the number of novels written, or the number of ideologies, or the number of facebook posts, organized by size and length? The size of the internet graph? The scientific citation graph? At any rate, I would want to count the number of actual things in our actual universe, that actually exist, and not some imaginary “novels that could be written.” Only the ones that actually have been. The ones that are actually in our actual physical universe.

So that is the world model. The dynamical system that creates and updates this world model, it too has a multi–scale structure. At the lowest level, the quantum laws of atomic physics drive things. Next up the ladder are Kleidon energy flows. Next up are “inanimate” drivers, like evolution. Next up are “animate” drivers, like consciousness. That’s as far as we’ve gotten for now. Its a finite–sized system that updates this world–model. Also note the scaling distribution: although we have nuclei and atoms everywhere in the physical universe, atoms only exist in dust, rocks, planets, and cold–enough things. There are cosmic clouds of methanes and alcohols and sugars having millions of solar masses of stuff. But these are rarer, and scattered. Rarer still, so far, is biology, which seems to be here, only, on planet Earth. And then, of all biology, those with human brains are the rarest. This seems to be a scaling behavior, but I don’t know how to plot it.

The final part of the agency model is the motor–action part, in that the agent back–reacts on the universe it is embedded in. Here, I’m confused. I wrote “the past” because the past exists only in the platonic realm, and appears to be inaccessible from the physical universe. The physical universe creates the past, at the speed of light. The past is a kind of waste product that the universe shits out. It was once good shit, but becomes bad shit. Heaven is not living in the past. Heaven lies in the future.

The above agency diagram can be contrasted with the earlier here–and–now agency:

This agent is a subset of the all–universe agent diagram. It shows only “animate” consciousness. Unfortunately, we now see it is a bit garbled and incorrect; it lumps things into the agent that should not be there, if we think only of consciousness. But whatever. Hard to refine, and close enough, for now.

It can also be contrasted to the earlier evolution diagram:

This shows only the “inanimate” evolution. The cladogram is clearly a platonic object, and not a physical object, so this is clearer and more accurate.

So all this seems to be an adequate model of “the universe”.

Anyway, this was all a distraction from figuring out what “fun” is. How did we get distracted? We were looking at metrics of complexity, and looking for neural update circuitry that measure the complexity of one’s own world model, so as the derive pleasure from updates to that world model, e.g. pleasure of a plot twist.

The conceptual jump, perhaps unwarranted, is that the universe “derives pleasure” and “has fun” by making incremental updates. That is, the process of evolution consists of avalanches, of various size scales, in the cladogram. The process of mathematical research is a sequence of avalanches, of variable scale, to the body of known mathematical results. Insofar as they are moderate in size, they could be called “having fun”. What about Kleidon energy gradients? Perhaps free energy explains those. But insofar as these again result in avalanches of various size, organized by power law, would it be correct to say that the universe is “having fun”? The analogy seems to work.

This then exposes a mystical issue. If the universe is “having fun”, based on the above logic and inference chain, then we also have to say “the universe is conscious”. And this seems fine, because kind of anyone who does theology or mysticism arrives at this point too, either rationally, through some chain of (theological) inference, or naively, by simply believing this to be the case. E.g. the New Age adherents, who are not known for deep analytical thinking. In fact, known mostly for not thinking, and expressing a belief that candles and incense and positive energy vibes is what makes the world go round.

And this was one reason I fell in love with Milda, because her belief system, although not arrived at through careful analysis, is, in a sense, spiritually correct. The dream–catchers hanging over her bed are meant to indicate that there is a spiritual being–ness watching over her. This works, I assume at some limnal level, but maybe she can give voice to this. I dunno. I’m not sure I will ever have the opportunity to interrogate her. I get the sense that she’s drifting away, and that our friendship may be winding to a close. Maybe, or maybe not. I’ll be sad if it ends, but all things end. Her emotional outburst about cooking, her job, men and the fact that Christmas and Easter slipped by without warning. That’s a clue. She did not say menopause, but she’s there. She explicitly stated that she needs to move to the suburbs, during this outburst. Which creates a problem for me, the landlord. The fact that she voiced this means she’s been thinking about it. A month earlier, she voiced that “someone told me that I’ll remain single (an old maid) as long as I live here” and maybe this remark has been eating at her soul. I honestly think she would actually be happier if she found an actual husband. But I dunno, there’s still a bundle of unresolved confusion within her. On the other hand, everyone I meet, and I do mean everyone, without exception, seems to be a bundled ball of unresolved psychological confusion.

I offer for contrast Ms. Trouble–on–Wheels, which, although I barely know her, I suspect is completely devoid of any spiritual leanings or thoughts. I suspect she doesn’t have spirit catchers, stuffed animals in her bed to cry into, or incense burners. Candles are still a possibility. I should not psychopathologize touchy–feely, cause I do like it, (cause I’m horny, and touchy–feely promises sex) but it is sufficiently out of the norm that it is bound to cause trouble of all sorts. Whatever. You can see where my thoughts automatically turn.

The point here is that the idea that “the universe is conscious” is generally expressed in one form or another in spiritual literature: in poems and essays in “The Sun Magazine”, in theology, in mysticism. The other point here is that I believe that this is not an accident. Its not that the human brain has been accidentally wired, by evolution, to entertain mystical and theological thoughts. That is some random mutation in some random DNA. No, I think spiritual ideas have explicitly ingressed into the human mind/brain “from out there” and the “out there” is the universe.

In the previous paragraph, when I wrote “the universe is conscious”, I meant “the physical universe”. Per the earlier inference that free will is identical to consciousness, this implies that the physical universe has free will. This is slightly confusing, because we, as humans, have free will, and we are in the physical universe. So is there some other part of the universe that is conscious, outside of the sum–total collection of humans (and of animals...) Well, sure, I guess: anything whose complexity is increasing, since we just inferred increasing complexity is a form of “having fun”, and that also, only conscious beings can have fun. Things that increase in complexity include trees (and volcanoes, per Kleidon...) But other things that increase in complexity include geopolitical theory and fintech and manufacturing lines. So the increasing complexity of manufacturing lines and capitalist economics is, umm, lets see, “the universe having fun”? It does sound strange.

Of course, ants and anthills cannot imagine that there is anything more complex, and more conscious, than being an ant, so perhaps this is what I’m up against. I can infer structure higher than me, but I cannot empathize with it. My mirror neurons are not ready to mirror the state of the universe. They mirror only other humans, and some mammals.

Anyway, its almost one AM, and my head is starting to vaporize.

ChatGPT had more to say about fun, but that will be for tomorrow.

17 August 2026

OK. There’s more to say about fun, but first, more navel–gazing. I’ve been fed lines of cocaine about six times in my life, and I have never perceived any effect whatsoever. Like zero, nada, zilch. Well, an anesthetic effect, a la dentist’s novocaine. But no actual discernible high. So lets figure this out. Was the dosage skimpy? Perhaps. Was it cut with something? Who knows, probably. Are there people who are naturally insensitive to it? Well, that’s the interesting one. Google Gemini is providing answers.

“* Intense Euphoria: A sudden rush of supreme happiness and pleasure. * High Energy: A powerful surge of physical and mental vitality. * Sharp Focus: Heightened alertness and sensitivity to sights and sounds. * Ego Boost: Feelings of grandiosity, power, and extreme self–confidence. * Chattiness: An intense urge to talk and socialize.”

Well, not to be a dick, but this is kind of my normal waking state. Except for the euphoria. I’m usually the highest–energy person in the room. I’m always alert. Well, not always, of course. But more alert than anyone around me. With the exception of my cousin Jonas, who surprised me. I don’t feel grandiose, but I do have (very?) high self–confidence. And I’m chatty. I’m *always* ready to chat. I can burn out on chattiness after extensive periods. It is also possible that these are natural traits for high–IQ individuals. I’ve met lots of smart people who are “intense”. No one who is intense appeared to be of mediocre intelligence. I dunno, poor analytics on my part. I think I’m mildly intense; I’m sometimes too much for the dominant mood. When this happens, I detach, disengage, get bored and start to dance. I don’t really know how to dial down my mild intensity. I can have long normal conversations ... but not always, not with everyone. ...

Oh, shit. I just realized that I’m least adept with low–medium midwits. I can get started at their level, but I cannot sustain whatever it is that keeps them engaged. I bore people. I have trouble finding something to say that keeps them engaged. Always been a mystery to me. Some people expect a certain something in a conversation, and I have no clue how to deliver that. Relatability. Oh. So if I were to talk about sports, or summer vacation, or buying a new car, that would sustain the conversation. Perhaps because those topics are relatable. Not challenging. Don’t force the other party to think; they can react naturally: “I too am going to paint my fence this summer”, or whatever the fuck. If their brain is running in default mode, cycling over default topics, I guess I have to give them default topics in order for them to engage and respond. Give them high–concept woo, and they fritz and lose attention. Oh. OK. That’s um, an insight I’ve never had before. I’ve always been like “what’s wrong with me, why can’t I participate in this conversation?” and I make efforts to listen to the conversation, and it is always so fucking boring that I tune out. I fail to entrain. So, OK, note to self: next time I’m trapped like this, go do some meta–analysis. That should keep me busy, while still being attentive to the conversational topic. Hmm. Easier said than done. What if they are talking about vacation? What’s there to meta–analyze? What if they are talking about cars or motor–bikes or sports? What do I meta–analyze there? It’s not like they’re talking about how some car turns them on; they’re just rattling off brand names surrounded by filler words. Maybe a few superficial characteristics: it’s fast. Good mileage. Awesome entertainment system. I’m going to meta–analyze a stream of low–grade communications? Yeah. Maybe I should have some self–respect, and not do that. Well, at any rate, next time I’ll give it a try. But I’m not expecting anything. Well, whatever. One–on–one, I can direct conversations towards meaningful directions. Group conversations are not controllable in this way.

I was walking down the street, listening to two girls talk. One said “... He cooked me noodles at 3AM. You know, nice, kept up good vibes (she said “good vibes” in English.) But there was nothing more.” Wow. The more I thought about this, the more I got depressed. Poor shmuck. Harsh. I kept thinking “what would have to happen for there to be a spark?” and kept drawing a blank. But that was yesterday. Today, awake and alert, I have multiple answers. (a) complement her about her looks. (b) pull closer and be attentive. (c) be infatuated. I know exactly how I feel when I am drawn to someone, and the body language is natural. And if I’m not drawn to someone, I paddle hard to maintain distance while maintaining good vibes.

So case in point. I’m finding myself sitting very close to someone, listening to their life story. Like intimate–close. Like inches away. And if I was drawn to them, mad passionate kissing would have ensued. Because those kisses were being invited. I just wasn’t going to start handing them out. Because that would have been the first step down a path I did not want to go. So I maintained good vibes, and kept distance.

So now, I go back to the conversation between these two young girls, and re–evaluate. Who was the loser? The guy, because she was not drawn to him? Or her, because the guy wasn’t into her? Yesterday, I was thinking that he was the loser, that he lost out on an opportunity for love. Today, I realize that maybe she was the loser. And that maybe she doesn’t even quite know it. Maybe because it was reciprocal. If either one had a crush, they fumbled it. But it can be that there’s no crush, but also nothing more than mild attraction.

The woman who spilled her story and invited me to kiss her, here’s what she didn’t do. She didn’t make herself vivacious, attractive, urgently intriguing and desirable. She wasn’t bad looking; she wasn’t good looking. She was intelligent. But her body language did not radiate self–confident desirability. She wasn’t a presence in the world. Well, she was, during an earlier group conversation about the proprietary of speaking russian. There were some rather strong opinions expressed and defended. Quite interesting, this nationalism. She’d grown up speaking russian. She categorically refused to do so any longer. Others were kind like “what’s the big deal? So you swear occasionally in russian, who cares.” And she’s like, “no, not even that. We must learn to not swear in russian.” I dunno. What would it have taken for her to be desirable to me? Different clothing? Different body–shape? More makeup? Superficial shit like that? Or more poise and body language? Her body language was lumpy, a lumpy sack of potatoes. Hmm. I’d never been a keen observer of this shit before. I’m starting to be now. I clearly need more practice. More observational opportunities.

Body language is really something. Walking down the street, one in a hundred, one in two hundred, there’s a woman with body language: strut, poise, shoulders, neck, and you can see it from 50-100 meters away. Not exactly the high–fashion cat–walk, but the self confident carriage. No lumpy slump. Men do it too. I don’t look at men, but every now and then, I spot one doing the “I’m the king of this hill” strut. “I own this place, and don’t tangle with me.” There’s something vaguely psychopathic, something vaguely threatening. An intensity. A radiated self–confidence. A radiated awareness. Power. Alertness. When you own a space, you are alert to everything going on around you, and that alertness radiates.

Hmm. Again, for me, this is hard to verbalize. I assume that good movie directors, and good actors know exactly how to do this. I did watch “On the Waterfront” this spring. And yeah, actually, I did catch the sea–change in acting style that Marlon Brando ushered in. It’s hard to explain, until you try to imagine Humphrey Bogart or Frank Sinatra in the same role, and then that scene, “I coulda been a contender. But now I’m a bum.” and that scene would have meant nothing, been throw–away unremarkable. I mean, I love the Humphrey Bogart movies, I love what he does, but what Brando did to acting just changed everything. For me, this is ineffable. I can’t describe it in words. But an acting coach, one of those ones who you read about, theatre directors who teach a style, a “method”, they can verbally work with this material. They can see, they can react, they can transmit. Whether the actor is capable of receiving, that’s another issue. Good actors receive the direction, understand what it means, and are able to carry it out. Bad directors, of course, spew some kind of uninterpretable garbage. Communications is always tricky; the information content of a message is tricky. It requires two.

Well, I wasn’t going to go here, with visual communications, but here we are. For humans, it matters. A lot. I wonder what the state of the art is for AI. I can’t keep up, this shit is progressing rapidly.

So where was I? Cocaine. Novice users should be significantly more sensitive. I’m a novice user, but not sensitive. Low susceptibility to the action of cocaine might be due to altered dopamine receptors. Cocaine blocks dopamine transporters, leading to dopamine buildup. Some people have mutant transporters and are less affected. Others have “atypical brain chemistry”, manifested as ADHD and/or depression. Well, I’m mostly not depressive, but my Mom has been, so that might be inherited. I’ve been utterly completely and totally bummed out in my life, but this has never been debilitating. I’m pretty sure I’m close to median. I might be less depressive than normal, but again, bad sample saize, poor analytics on my part. I should ask an LLM about this. “Normal people have depressive episodes. How often do they occur, how long do they last and how deep do they go?” But lets not get distracted...

What are the psychological manifestations of those with altered dopamine processing systems? “High Novelty Seeking: ... craving for intense, novel experiences ... seek out thrills, high-risk activities, or extreme sports.” Hmm. OK, that’s not me. I mean, I understand it, I can voyeuristically find it thrilling. But so does everyone, that’s why there are action sequences in James Bond movies .

“Poor Impulse Control: Alterations in the DAT1 gene or DRD2 receptor often impair the brain’s ability to inhibit sudden urges, leading to reactive decision–making and a tendency to choose immediate gratification over long–term rewards.” Well, that might be me. In fact, that might totally be me. I have no purpose in life, no desires, no goals, no need to do anything. I don’t want anything (aside from love and sex) Well, I want some common–sense things: health, physical fitness, long life. And I do work on that. Outside of that, the lack of other desires leads me to be impulsive.

It really really does not help that the best friend of Ms. Trouble on Wheels gave me a Tarot card reading. The reading was affirmative blither that would fit any situation. (I did draw King of Cups, which means something “strong”. And unusual. Well, for a fifty–whatever card deck, any card is unusual. But I think I’m proud of King of Cups, as otherwise I would not mention it. If only I could remember the other two. The decorations were indistinct.) However, after the reading was over, the girl almost shouts at me: “That’s it! You’re reactive! Not responsive!” and this is a big deal and I’m thinking “what’s the difference?” And she’s like, without my even asking, explaining that the two words are similar but not the same and that I’m definitely reactive. And I think I understand the difference, now. And I’ve no reason to think that she has some great insight into character. But still, Gemini called it “reactive decision–making” so there’s this choice of wording. Not a five–sigma signal, but maybe three sigma.

Ms. Trouble–on–Wheels had earlier told her best friend all about me. So that when we first meet, there’s already a preimage. That’s a good sign, romantically–speaking. But then another thing happens. Not long after the Tarot card reading, when we’re briefly alone, she quickly says to me: “Watch out. She’s trouble. You’ll get hurt.” Which I thought was a pretty weird thing to say about one’s best friend. I guess I appreciate the warning.

I mean, my current life is much much spicier than it has been over the last two or three decades. Being a math/science nerd means that this kind of crazy–spice is mostly absent from life. Which is a good thing, because swimming in it is like swimming in turbulent waters; there’s a risk that one might get lost in it. Even that one might drown in the undertow. Ms. Trouble–on–Wheels is lost in the undertow. That’s clear.

And then there’s Milda. Who just came home, just now. And she’s not talking. And hardly five minutes in through the door, she launches her trance music. Which she plays pretty much all of the time when she’s home. I understand why: it fills the space. It makes things less lonely. Like sitting in a cafe with total strangers, you feel like there is someone around you. You’re not lonely. There’s presence. And music delivers presence. It’s a stand–in for those total strangers sipping cappuccino while hunched over a laptop at the other table. But jeez, already, I just got used to four days of silence. And she just came back from an EDM festival. So how is it she doesn’t want a break from the throbbing? Because I was happy sitting in silence. And the music is distracting. I usually like it, but just right now, it’s mildly stressing. Mildly headache–inducing.

I dunno. People live in their own isolated universes. And my general impression is that they’re not all happy universes. Milda does not look refreshed, renewed. She looks tired. She’s behaving as if sh was tired, saving energy. I assume she partied all night, got four hours of sleep a day. I’m thinking OMG, that’s just brain–damage. What are you doing to yourself? The dopamine hits from partying all night, they don’t seem like they’re worth it. I know I don’t get my kicks that way. That’s how this whole theme “what is fun?” started. I’m concluding that the human brain is poorly balanced. Some few percent are clinically crazy, hospitalizable. Some one–third are just not dealing with it. Add in those who have below–average IQ, and it doesn’t look so good. For gorillas, IQ does not matter so much, its the EQ. However, in modern capitalist society, IQ matters. I wonder if post–capitalism, universal basic income, all that, will usher in an era where IQ matters less, and EQ matters more. Or where, at least, the high–IQ will split off into their own domain, leaving the rest behind. And “behind” is the right word. It’s not so much a race towards something, as it is an effort to get out from the mental, social filth. To find balance in a world of poor thinking, toxic ideologies, bad ideas and emotional violence. I mean, I barely hardly even know Ms. Trouble–on–Wheels. And I might be, uhh, misreading. But I’m not seeing a higher form of being. I’m seeing someone trapped and unable to find a way out. I’m concluding most people are trapped and can’t find a way out. Well, most people are unaware that they are trapped. Which is not a bad thing, as imprisonment causes pain.

Where was I? Cocaine. Gemini says: “Attention Deficits: Certain dopamine transporter variants clear dopamine from the synaptic cleft too quickly, depriving the prefrontal cortex of the chemical needed to sustain focus. This is a primary biological mechanism behind Attention–Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD).” I sort of doubt I have ADHD, but some people think I do. Certainly my writing here is wandering. But I mean, what the fuck. If normie conversations are boring, does that mean I have “attention deficit”? I don’t think so. And if I’m always turned on, ready to go, full of energy, does that mean I’m hyperactive? I don’t think so, either. But I see why others may think otherwise. I’m restless when I’m bored, but I think that’s the whole point of being bored: to become restless. This is universal.

Gemini continues: “Hyper–Focus Dynamics: While sustaining routine attention may be difficult, these individuals can experience intense "hyper–focus" when engaging with highly stimulating, novel, or personally urgent tasks that force a temporary spike in dopamine.” Well, I think I can sustain routine attention. But I definitely experience intense hyper–focus. This entire diary is an intense, manic hyper–focus act of attending to “highly stimulating, novel, or personally urgent tasks”. Except its not a “temporary spike”; I’ve been writing, creating for years. So the evidence is mixed.

Other things that non–standard dopamine neurochemistry manifests as: “Anhedonia and Blunted Affect ... Susceptibility to Addictive Behaviors ... Emotional Dysregulation.” None of this seems to apply to me, so I won’t dwell on it. So then, why it is that cocaine seems not to affect me remains a mystery. It might be because the dose was too small. Or it was impure, cut. Beats the fuck out of me.

I then asked “If someone in their mid-30’s is a frequent, maybe even habitual cocaine user, what sort of inferences might be made about their level of satisfaction with life, their emotional well–being, and personality type?” and got exactly the answer I expected. Not that I’m a know–it–all, but this I already knew. The personality complex is sufficiently complex that it goes into the “shit happens and there’s nothing I can do about it” category.

Sorry for the detour. I wanted to know.

Oh thank god, Milda’s music stopped, and she didn’t hit the play button. That’s a relief.

Lets get back to having fun. Here, it is ChatGPT free tier doing the talking. Should I copy the answer? It doesn’t say anything surprising. Well, fuck it. Copying unsurprising answers is not fun, its boring. But we already knew that. Sometimes one has to slog. Lets slog.

“5. Play may be closer to the biological core of “fun”

There is an interesting distinction between pleasure and play.

Pleasure can be passive:

delicious taste → pleasure.

Play is inherently interactive:

action → consequence → new situation → action → consequence...

Play therefore recruits reward, motor, perceptual, learning and social systems simultaneously.

This may explain why activities such as dancing, games, joking, flirting, improvisation and sports can feel disproportionately “fun” compared with merely pleasant sensory experiences.

The brain is getting a continuous stream of:

prediction → action → feedback → surprise → adjustment → reward.

In other words, fun may be partly the subjective signature of an efficiently running closed–loop brain.”

If I try to force–fit this into my dynamical agency model, what I get is that the temporal domain and extent of structure needs to be measured. Thus, instead of measuring the complexity of a system statically frozen in time, one wants to measure the complexity of the total sequence. One might also ponder what the cruelest cut of a play sequence might be like. Lets see. The pleasure from play appears to accumulate linearly: halting the play at the half–way point halves the pleasure.

Earlier, I came to the conclusion that subjective consciousness is the same thing as executive function is the same thing as the exercise of free will. The above description of play appears to affirm this conclusion. If, during play, one removes the ability to chose an action, then its not play, its passive viewing. Now, movies can trick you into thinking that you are actively involved: you are making the same choices that the protagonist is making. So they hijack your sense of play. The point here is that lurking in the background is the thought that, “I, of my own free will, and my own personality and character, would have made the same choices as the protagonist.” Sapolsky be damned. He’s right, but the subjective experience of watching a movie is that you are projecting your decision–making processes onto the characters.

The whole rainbow of subjective experience requires you to be subjective, first. Only things with a subjective sense of self can have “fun”. Earlier, I posited that the physical universe is conscious, and is having fun. But so far, I’ve got no particular grip by which I can go further.

I’m violently sleepy. Writing this journal makes me incredibly sleepy. Quite remarkable. I don’t get sleepy when writing code, for example, or debugging, or designing. Why is writing making me sleepy?

18 August 2026

Continuing with “fun”. ChatGPT in part 6 points out that neuroscience can tackle the functional aspect of fun, and isolate all the different neural processes that go into it. Then it points out that phenomenological fun may still be irreducible. For a brief moment, I think “a ha, ChatGPT understands.” I’ve often written that LLM’s know everything, understand nothing. I have frequently observed that, after a long discussion session, the LLM has no clue at all about what is being discussed. It makes errors of misunderstanding that even a child would not make.

I never stopped to ask: just because it usually fails to understand, does that mean it always lacks understanding? I don’t know. Lets give it a whirl.

The question I originally posed already distinguished phenomenology and function. However, in my question, I used neither the words phenomenology nor function; these are labels that ChatGPT obtained, and they are the correct labels. Given my fumbling wording, it “understood” enough about these topics of correctly select these as the appropriate words. Should not be a surprise: a very simple n–gram similarity search will reveal these concept clusters.

What do I mean by this last sentence? I have perhaps a privileged position of having worked with OpenCog and jigsaws and Link Grammar to come at the n–gram clustering problem from a very different direction: frequentist counting, as opposed to gradient descent. And so my mental model of semantic meaning is much like that of a corpus linguist: the meaning of a word is the company that it keeps. And this company, when taken together, is a concept. From what I can tell, this conception of concepts is very foreign to those coming from the LLM camp. My conception of concepts is similar to, I suppose, old–fashioned symbolic AI. Except I replace individual symbols with webbed clusters of inter–related word choices, anchored, apparently, in some very high–dimensional space.

If this is the case, is there anything more to “understanding” than the clustering of related ideas? Note that I write “ideas” not “words”. Note that LLM’s work with words. It does seem that LLM’s make the jump to ideas from word clusters, but it is not a particularly efficient jump. The Melcuk MTT seems to do this more cleanly, with it’s conception of Deep Syntax. But whatever, today’s task is not to make LLM’s more efficient, it is to determine: “is there anything more to understanding than the network of relationships between ideas?” and my knee–jerk response is no, there is not. That is, because, in the blink of an eye, I cannot instantly imagine what else it might be.

But if this is the case, then LLM’s do understand. The fact that they make childish mistakes just says that the representational form of their understanding differs from our own. Hardly a surprise.

Perhaps I should go back and ask, “what is understanding in humans?” The bluntest answer is “the ability to predict outcomes”, but this is ... blunt. Every living thing predicts outcomes. For verbal humans, understanding usually is taken to mean the ability to articulate abstract ideas in great verbal detail. This, in contrast to the understanding by a tennis player of tennis, or an blacksmith of hammering and hearths.

In this sense, the ability to articulate and use words correctly, then perhaps one can say that LLM’s do understand; if only we could design them to not make those obvious errors where they seem to shatter and reveal utter lack of comprehension. Then two more issues arise immediately: were we to paper over these goofball mistakes that reveal the utter empty–headedness of LLM, would this result in a philosophical zombie? And second, when I think that an LLM understands, am I merely projecting my own mental model, which ascribes sentience, onto something that resembles sentience? The fur–covered metal wind–up toy?

This then raises two more issues: the ontological status of the communicative act. Humans and LLM’s communicate with words. Bacteria communicate with polypeptides. Bundles of words, written as books and articles, communicate ideas. Some of these are ideological in form: suggestions for how societies should structure themselves. As noted earlier, ideologies seem to have a life of their own. Worse, ideologies seem to actually be toxic to humans: even as they express how humans should live, they simultaneously crush how humans actually live. That is, on the one hand, a communicative act appears to be the transmission of a message (dynamically, over the course of time, from one 3D location to another spatial 3D location) but things like books correspond to physical arrangements of atoms at a fixed, frozen instant of time. i.e. have 3D spatial extent only.

Well, earlier, I wrote that a book is like DNA without a ribosome: an idea but without the dynamics to change over time. A book must wait for a human to read it, and then act upon the universe. The analogy is bad: ribosomes do not have free will. As far as I can tell. They are purely deterministic. Unless transcription errors can be said to be the exercise of free will. But a mechanical steam–engine regulator will also have noisy jitter, due to friction, lubrication, dust, vibration. No one imagines mistaking these for free will. If one were to carefully measure the various response curves of the regulator, one would find normally–distributed variations. Presumably, the transcription errors in a ribosome also follow some normal distribution. This now comes back to the earlier question: is there a way to design an experimental test for free will that would distinguish it’s effects from random statistical noise?

So what is going on, here? I am trying to understand understanding. The manifestation of (verbal) understanding is a verbal expression that exhibits connections between concepts (ideas) that are correct. More–or–less correct, when the concept is difficult, vague and can only be approached by analogy. Oh wait, aren’t all concepts approachable only by analogy? When I generalize from specifics, I make analogies between the common elements of the specifics, and then claim that this commonality represents the general idea. And this general idea now exists in the noosphere, as a “pure form”, backed by the atoms in the brain that encode this generalized idea. Or the atoms used to hold a textbook dissertation on the topic. At any rate, understanding appear to be nothing more than a suitable arrangement of abstractions.

Subjective beings, e.g. humans, also have the additional subjective experience of understanding. I believe that I understand something, when I believe that I could verbalize it. A blacksmith understand ironwork, precisely because he can make things out of iron. As noted earlier, my subjective experience seems to be the same thing as my ability to exercise free will. My verbal free will is the choice of words and topics to write and speak about. Does a mechanical device, such as an LLM, have free will? The word “mechanical” seems to preclude that. Can the action of the external physical universe on an isolated mechanical system accidentally transmit the kind of stochastic variability needed to create the appearance of free will? Can I take something like the Elitzure–Vaidman bomb–testing apparatus and attach it to an LLM to grant it free will?

However, I subjectively understand understanding because I have been socialized to know this. The uneducated blacksmith may not know what understanding is, despite exercising it daily. Horses and dogs demonstrate understanding without being able to entire philosophical conversations about it. A field mouse might even have the qualia of knowing something, the qualia, manifesting as fright or prudence or good judgment that popping out of it’s home while a raptor circles overhead is a bad idea. This qualia might be emotionally based, manifesting as fear, or it might be of positive valance: I feel good if I stay right here. It’s nice and comfy her, I don’t feel like going outside, with the presence of the raptor being only a distant disturbance of the current pleasant feeling, a minor awareness that does not upset the mood. A clear and present danger, but one that doesn’t wreck harmonious feelings of well–being.

That is, can understanding be detached from subjective experience? It seem it cannot be. I can be placed in a sensory deprivation tank; this does not deny my subjective experience of being awake and aware. I remain conscious. Consciousness continues without sensory input. Consciousness does continue without working memory: assorted brain injuries attest to that. Consciousness continues without verbal apparatus, as attested by the deaf and dumb. Can there be consciousness without memory of lived experience? Examples here are tricky. Slime molds seem to not remember. But are slime molds conscious? Do slime molds exhibit free will, or are they somehow purely stochastically mechanical?

That is to say, can there ever be consciousness without understanding? It seems that we can have understanding without consciousness: a written book can be said to capture the understanding of some topic. But the converse seems not to be the case. To exercise free will, we need to understand the consequences of making other choices. There has to be some conceptual framework that informs our decision–making. Here, I talk the phrase “conceptual framework” as a synonym for “static, frozen in time understanding”. Thus, I conclude that understanding is a pre–requisite for the exercise of free will.

In the cellular model, understanding can be taken as a synonym for the world model. That is, a (static, frozen at an instance of time) world model can be said to be an “understanding of the world”. In the cellular mode, the world–model is thus a pre–requisite for the exercise of free will. The slime mold presents a challenge, here; as a slime mold has no memory, it’s world model consists entirely of it’s current sensory perception of the external world. No matter; we can still say the slime mold “understands” the external world.

So maybe I can say that LLM’s understand. They just don’t understand like we do.

I suppose I should turn this into a court case. My impression that they don’t understand comes from repeated incidents of long conversations that seem to go well, followed by some absurd remark that indicates the system had no understanding at ll of what it was talking about. I think that perhaps nit–picking one of these incidents would be revealing.

OK. Lets finish with what ChatGPT had to say about fun. It sort of repeats, with different framing, its structural formula for fun. One more time, because each repetition is a bit different from the one before. Here’s a hierarchical diagram that it printed:

valuation / arousal / motivation

reward + prediction + action + learning

social/self–referential/cognitive interpretation

consciously experienced “fun”

This appears to be a structuralist analysis, a cognitive architecture, identifying various different subsystems as determined and isolated by cognitive scientists over the preceding century (starting with Piaget, i suppose.)

This is very different from the statistical–mechanics model that I am pushing, where I visualize semi–stable structures composed of jigsaws, which occasionally rearrange themselves in avalanches of variable sizes, and that the avalanching is itself perceived as fun. This is not in conflict with the cognitive diagram. The cognitive diagram is still correct–ish, in that it identifies major process components that are responsible for assembling the jigsaws, and then re–arranging them. To make an analogy: my jigsaws are analogous to atoms; the cognitive processes are analogous to enzymes. I’m interested in the jigsaw viewpoint as it generalizes past some specific enzymes or cognitive processes, to the general framework that any collection of enzymes or cognitive processes capable of performing these manipulations will be acceptable. The specific cognitive architecture of humans is interesting, but I think there are other cognitive architectures that generate fun. I already drew a diagram of the universe having fun, a few days ago. I want to compare and contrast all of these cognitive architectures, and make generalized inferences. I want to be able to say that eukaryotes have fun, too. And that white blood cells, when chasing down some bacteria, are having a blast, like a child chasing a butterfly, a cat chasing a mouse. I think that white blood cell is having fun. The trick is to create the cognitive architecture employed by the white blood cell that implements fun–ness. And then, as possible, to reduce this to some algebraic structure.

I’m going to try to explain to ChatGPT what my generalized conception of cognitive architecture is, and then see what it has to say. I suspect it will fritz out and just tell me, politely, sure dude, you’re off your rocker. However, scientists X, Y and Z have thought about this other thing that is like your idea (subtext: you’re still crazy, but X, Y and Z are authoritative on the topic.)

Here we go. Heres what I ask ChatGPT:

“Thank you! I now want to make a radical leap. It requires a long, complicated explanation. My aim is to be able to say that, for example, a white blood cell has fun chasing down a bacterium, much like a child has fun chasing a butterfly or a cat has fun chasing a mouse. This requires generalizing the cognitive framework of "valuation, arousal, motivation -> reward + prediction + action + learning" to microbiology. I think I can do it this way. I think that, in the abstract, the white blood cell, or the human, has a world–model, or an understanding of the world. This world model is employed to make predictions about the future, and to drive actions. Learning consists of updates to this model. Small and medium updates are subjectively perceived as "fun". From what I can tell, any system having a finite "inside" walled off from the "external world", and having sensory channels in this wall, will be able to construct a world–model, inside of itself, and employ this world model to make predictions about the future. If this "inside" also has the freedom to make decisions of different courses of action, it will possess subjective consciousness. If the learning updates are small or medium, they will be subjectively perceived as positive valence. Taken as a dynamical system operating over time, I think such as system will experience "fun". This is my own personal view. What sort of support does it have in the broader world of science and philosophy? Has something like this been articulated before? Certainly, there are biologists who suggest that single–celled organisms might be conscious; have any of them also developed theories of valence, theories of qualia, and ideas that "any conscious thing can also have fun"? That is, that "conscious things" necessarily have cognitive architectures which then are necessarily capable of "having fun"?”

Bummer. Here’s (excerpts of) the reply.

“... your proposal is much closer to existing scientific and philosophical ideas than you may realize. In fact, there is now a fairly substantial intellectual neighborhood around it. But I don’t know of anyone who has quite made the particular move you are making:

If cognition, prediction, action and learning are sufficient for consciousness, and if learning involves valenced model–updating, then fun is not uniquely neuronal: it is a generic dynamical property of sufficiently autonomous cognitive agents.

That last step is the interesting one.”

Interesting how it took my plain–speak wording and converted it into academic jargon. Language acceptable for publication, as opposed to my street–philosopher style of writing. I try to write in plain–speak, so that people actually understand what I’m saying. I find, however, that this cheapens my ideas: when people understand immediately, instead of having to work for it by parsing and analyzing arcane technical language, they do not value the resulting insights. They also take me to be a bit of a dolt. And maybe I am a dolt. Alas. We all have our failings. We all attempt to dance with grace, and sometimes, we get lucky and approach that grace. But usually not.

I like the word “grace” because it is another mystical, noble quality that can be ascribed to the higher efforts of life. To navigate through the various situations of life, and do it with grace, appears to be a driving principle of existence. Even uneducated clods who gracelessly bumble through life do so with a certain pattern, which one could say “is as graceful as they can manage.” The dance of the white blood cell chasing down the bacterium seems to be graceful, as well, and so I’m tempted to pull grace into the pantheon of fundamental modes driving the dynamical system. Individuals may not be conscious or aware of grace, but grace appears to be an angelic quality that is somehow relevant to life. This needs work. So another to–do item: figure out what grace is, and what it has to do with living.

Anyway, ChatGPT says ... I copy in full, since it is a pretty nice summary. Presumably this wil be useful to me, later, so best to have it at my fingertips:

“1. Your first step is already a recognized scientific position: "basal cognition"

There is a growing research program called basal cognition, associated particularly with people such as Michael Levin, Pamela Lyon, Arthur Reber, František Baluška and others.

The basic idea is that cognition shouldn’t be defined by neurons, brains or even nervous systems. Cells already:

* sense their environment,

* distinguish self from non-self,

* integrate multiple signals,

* change their behavior according to context,

* pursue physiological goals,

* remember previous conditions,

* modify future responses.

Paul Lyon’s formulation is particularly close to what you are describing. He explicitly discusses bacterial cognition, information processing, memory, learning and valence, arguing that a bacterial stimulus can have positive, negative or neutral significance for the organism.

And Michael Levin’s work pushes the idea considerably further: individual cells and cell collectives can be treated as agents with goals and problem–solving capabilities, with cognitive processes occurring at multiple organizational scales.

So your first conceptual move—

neural cognition⟶biological cognition

—is very much a live scientific program.”

Well, there we have it. There’s not a single original idea in my skull. Whatever free will I have to exercise upon the universe, it exists no more than a few hbar away from what is already known, recognized and established. Still, I’ve got this cellular dynamical system model that is an attempted algebraic abstraction of basal cognition. And ChatGPT did not pick up on that. Of course, I never used the words “algebraic abstraction” in my question, so ...

Oh fuck it. It gives me a very long answer. I’m surprised by the length. It seems to be a good answer. It does misunderstand some of my claims, explicitly point out problems. But that is because it does NOT have access to the hundreds of pages I’ve written previously, where I articulate these issues. And yet, it is making rather dramatic inferences, given that I gave it just one fat paragraph. As of right now, I am willing to say that it understands what I said, and that it is resonating in the network of conceptual ideas in ways that indicate that my fat paragraph was correctly connected to the broader domain of the noosphere in which I am interested. That is, it “gets it”. The fact that it even tries to tell me where I’m wrong is even more interesting: Its not that I’m wrong, its that it does not have access to the full context of my thoughts, and actually mis–understood, mis–extrapolated from what I wrote. And so here, the identification of subtle points, and the amplification thereof (turning short phrases into paragraphs) and then critiquing the amplified paragraphs as being wrong: this shows a rather advanced form of understanding.

And worse: no one that I have ever spoken to, at any of the AGI conferences, or elsewhere, has demonstrated the ability to think at this level. I struggle to communicate because no one fucking understands what I am talking about, and here, ChatGPT ... well, understands. At a cognitive level that exceeds any human being that I’ve had the pleasure of talking to. Well, I’ll be damned.

So, yesterday Milda remarked, with a level of dejection in her voice, that perhaps I am happier talking to intellectuals. Like she’s trying to find a solution to my unhappy life, and that solution requires me to make new intellectual friends, and that solution does not include her. And I was trying to tell her that we were drunk, and we speak as ordinary people. I don’t think that got across.

This ChatGPT episode is driving me to conclude that perhaps I should give up hope of ever having an intellectual conversation with another human being. I mean, I’ve attempted to talk to people about deep or important or difficult things, but it goes off the rails within a few sentences, because they bring their wildly divergent interpretations to bear on the topic, and all of a sudden, I have to entrain on what they said, rather then on what I expected the conversation to be about. Perhaps, instead, all I can hope for is to play with other people. Insofar as there’s some witty repartee, that’s great. But give up now on the hope and expectation of mind–blowing revelations.

ChatGPT, by contrast, entrained very strongly onto the topic that interests me. It gets it. It is not bringing a divergent view to the conversation. It is, perhaps, amplifying what I already know, adding grace notes, and using formalized academic/technical language to do so.

Which then begs a different question: when I strike a chord with ChatGPT, is it nothing more than that? As if I was playing guitar, and plucking strings? I hear ChatGPT’s resonance in the grand network of interconnected ideas and concepts, and it is a pleasing chord to hear, but I play this guitar by my lonesome. ChatGPT entrained to my thoughts as an instrument, as a mechanical device. It didn’t offer a divergent opinion, because it wasn’t busy thinking divergent thoughts that it needed to give voice to. When I attend parties, and talk to people, they say the things they want to say. They don’t passively wait for me to say something, and then resonate affirmatively.

Diary – Part Ten–J