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–J, 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.

20 Sept 2026

I just scanned what I wrote in Part Ten-J, and it feels like I’ve already forgotten half of what I wrote there. Does that mean that I record unmemorable, unimportant things in my diary? Well, I’ll remember very little of this many months, many years hence, so not important enough to place into decadal memory. And yet, it was important when I was thinking of it.

So there’s this spiritual process of living. If it’s partying down, it can be partly recording with photos and video. If it’s intellectual theorizing, the high points can be written in a diary. I ingress not only into my brain, but also into a slightly more permanent medium: this text. Hmm. I’m shitting my thoughts into physical reality.

I need to make a poster for Ruta’s party. I will try to place ingress into it.

I need to figure out how to use one of those AI drawing systems.

21 Sept 2026

I just wrote this in a private email:

I daydream of living in a commune. While I was in Hong Kong, David Hanson put everyone up in these apartments; there’d be like four of us living together. It was fun, we’d come home, and it was like a party after work, every day. But this lasted only a few months, before I went home. Would it wear thin after a while?

Coed. A girl lived with us (three men). Audrey. And somehow I would end up spending more time with her. Where were the other guys? I don’t remember. Traveling? We just got very comfortable with each other’s presence, laughs, goofing off, but also opening up with things that hurt when we were younger. Psychological intimacy. I really liked her, it was a developing relationship. I think I just really really like being around women. Much much more than being around guys. And I’m not a womanizer; I don’t chase; I just honestly enjoy it.

So now I think about what it would be like if I lived in a commune. There’d be women around, and it would be a matter of not very much time before I started wrapping my heart around one of them. This creates issues, the main one being I’m just not young any more. Trouble.

This is how I got into trouble with Milda. All she had to do was smile at me. And living together, as housemates, contact every day, does the rest. It’s magical, I like it, but it’s like a drug addiction, I suffer until I can get some more and feel high again.

p.s. to post–rationalize a bit: part of the study of AGI has to be the emotional dimension, and the spiritual dimension, so I’m deep–diving into what "it actually feels like", instead of being just clinical and academic. The only problem is that it feels like heroin, or meth, or whatever. I have not figured out how to connect this back up to AGI. Other than to say that, for example, bacteria would have to subjectively feel hunger, and so already, there’s a roller coaster of the pain of being hungry and the satisfaction of being full.

It’s important, because the foundation of "don’t kill us all" safety ethics for AGI has to be respect for life, and, in mammals, that foundation is provided by (mother–child) love.

Whatever. I write too much.

22 Sept 2026

I wrote an email this evening:

On Tue, Sep 22, 2026 at 7:14 PM Matt Mahoney <mattmahoneyfl@gmail.com> wrote:

>>On Tue, Sep 22, 2026, 8:08 AM Levi Dubrovin <levi@brainyblaze.com> wrote:

>> My second philosophical question: what is faith? And what is hope?

> When you hear a statement 3 times, it is truth. When you hear it 100 times, it is faith.

> Hope is when you believe what you wish to be true instead of what the evidence says is true. As animals, we fear death because that behavior increases reproductive fitness. So when your priest or rabbi or imam says that your immortal soul will go to heaven if you follow his teachings, that is hope.

This is the conventional psychological answer, masquerading as being evolutionarily supported.

What I’m trying to do here is to decompose base experience as arising from a collection algebraic expressions that describe agency, and describe ingress (using Micheal Levin’s (Daniel Dennet’s) definition of ingress (more or less)) If this program is to be successful, then a description of faith and hope would have to follow (as a (mathematical) theorem or lemma) from more basic, primitive algebraic structures. For example, some maximization of free energy or entropy or mutual information in some setting, e.g some manifold (e.g. symplectic, where classical mechanics lives) or ultra–high–dimensional space (where LLM’s live) or perhaps very high dimensional complex projective space (where QM lives) or perhaps a natural filtration (where stochastic processes live). I’m listing plausible candidates for where this mechanics could play out.

Can we build faith and hope out of something more primitive? Perhaps, and we can even use conventional psychology and common–sense intuition to provide hints for how to do this.

So what is more primitive? I want to focus on two: love and death.

Death is associated with having your atoms scattered to the four winds. In classical mechanics, this means that your atoms end up on the "unstable submanifold" (see wikipedia) of a decomposition of a symplectic manifold into stable, center and unstable manifolds. For an agent to anticipate it’s own death, it would need to have a sensory organ to perceive this.

This "sensory organ" could be reasoning, common sense, gut intuition, some deterministic algorithm fed by actuarial tables, whatever. I am calling it a "sensory organ" in order to emphasize the agential model, which has a boundary between the physical universe, and the platonic realm of possibilities. When things cross over from the possible into the actually–existing, this is the (Levin) ingress. Since there is a boundary between possible and actual, the things that cross pass through a channel or filter. It should be called "sensory" because the inside is using the channel to sense what is outside.

Sensory organs not only bring stuff in from the exterior, but the stuff (information?) that is brought in typically updates the world–model that the agent holds within itself. That is, the information or prediction revises the model that the agent maintains for "what’s out there".

An anticipated death lies in the future, and therefore in the platonic realm. The sensory organ perceives some very limited portion of what’s possible.

How might this feel, subjectively? We have two possibilities: the agent is a philosophical zombie, and feels nothing. The other is that it has a subjective inner life. In humans, we fear death. Or we become existentialists, or stoics, or whatever framework that culture has given us for this very primal sensation. Personal tragedy lies ahead.

But if amoeba and paramecium are also agents, and have a subjective inner life, how might they sense this? Presumably as pain. Perhaps the water is too saline, too acidic, too hot, perhaps its drying out. Some sort of chemotaxis will drive the cell towards a more hospitable environment. You are free to argue that eukaryotes are philosophical zombies, and have no conscious inner life. But if they do, it would be sensed as pain.

I’m calling it "pain" because a eukaryote will not have a strong sense of "self", of knowing that it exists, and thus could not manifest fear of dying. But it would have a weak sense, where everything sensed is with respect to self: everything that happens, happens to self. Pain is an example of a sensation that does not require a strong sense of self.

Is there any kind of sensation that is even more primitive than pain? I cannot think of one, off the top of my head. Primal pain is anticipation of harm or death, it’s ingress, and it seems that biological agents would feel it.

I don’t know if you like the above, but that’s what I got.

How about love? From what I can tell, this stems from a "desire to communicate". Here, communication is very general. Some examples: atoms in a molecule communicate by exchanging photons. Bacteria communicate by emitting and sensing small polypeptides. Slime mold, too. Neurons communicate by exchanging neurotransmitters in junctions (neurotransmitters are "small polypeptides", the same thing that bacteria use, but now they get a fancy new specialized name) Insects communicate, animals communicate, computer chips communicate...

What’s the physical basis for communication? From what I can tell (and this is pure hand–waving), a pair of communicating systems has greater entropy than if they are not communicating. In this case, the "desire to communicate" would follow from the 2nd law of thermodynamics. I call this "hand–waving" because I do not yet have a mathematical framework for agents and communication that would allow this "desire to communicate" to be derived in some statistical–mechanics framework. But, from what I can tell, *everything* in the physical universe loves to communicate. It’s just very basic.

How might a subjective agent perceive the desire to communicate? Presumably, as pleasure. It would exert a force or desire that would cause the agent to communicate. To "make it want to communicate", the fulfillment of wants resulting in pleasure. The anticipation of fulfilled desires being a "want" that can drive action in the present, and influence decisions made in the present.

Notice that this is ingress, again: the anticipation of a positive valence outcome is a perception into the future (i.e. into the platonic realm), using some "sensory organ" (logic, reasoning, intuition or something else) that "perceives" that if action X is taken, reward Y will follow. That is to say, earlier, the statement that "if action X is taken, reward Y will follow" did not yet exist in the physical universe. Somewhere along the way, the organism *does* manifest this line of reasoning. Now that this line of reasoning actually exists in the physical world, as a part of the organism’s world model, it can employ this reasoning chain in making decisions about future actions.

My apologies for making this sound so very complex. My goal here is to be very careful to split up between things that do not yet exist (or have not yet happened), and actions that are taking place "here and now", and how possibilities turn into actualities. This precision will be needed, in order to get the algebra, the axioms to work out correctly.

At any rate, anticipation of future positive valence states should be subjectively felt as "pleasure". (or desire, as the case may be.)

Can we get to faith and hope from here? Both of these seem to be "fixed points" in a system of anticipated future positive valence states. I am using the phrase "fixed point" in the strict mathematical sense. For example, if x is such that x=f(x), then x = f(f(x)) = f(f(f(x))) = ... repeating the action won’t change x.

A "pathway to fulfillment" has the form of "if action X is taken, reward Y will follow"

"Hope" would "the pathway to fulfillment is not currently known, but it is reasonable to believe that it exists".

"Faith" would be "the pathway to fulfillment is not currently known, but it exists".

"Hope" is associated with positive valence, to promote exploration. i.e. "if an exploration of paths is undertaken, then a path will be found" Hope tends to be highly motivational: individuals tend to work really hard at something, if they can maintain that hope of a positive future outcome. (so, "if X then reward Y" where X==explore and Y==path) Exploration take time, and thus, continues for as long as this rule is part of the world model and drives the action–selection mechanism for the agent. Assorted events can knock this rule out of the world model (subjectively, the agent loses all hope).

"Faith" oddly does not seem to be motivational. If you have faith that something will be, you can sit back and wait for someone else to do it: your wife, your government, perhaps God in the afterlife. You don’t have to lift a finger, because you already know, for certain, that it will happen.

At any rate, I think I sketched a path from the subjective feeling of positive valence states to "hope" as a driver of action mechanisms (or algorithms) that an agent can engage in to attain the hoped–for outcome. I’m trying to use clinical or robotic language and technical terms to emphasize that this would hold in the generic agency model, and not just for people, animals, plants or bacteria. It should work even for non–biological agents.

23 Sept 2026

So the above email attempts to stitch together “hope” and “faith” from more elemental parts, and specifically proposes some simple algorithms or inferences that correspond to these two words. For example, “hope” is associated with the action plan (or algorithm) of “do while pathway P to happy attainment of goal Z is not known, search for new paths P” that implements “hope that goal Z is attained” (resulting in a positive valence subjective reward). That’s the algorithmic form; the algorithm runs for as long as the organism can run it.

The declarative form for "hope that goal Z is attained" would be "the pathway P to fulfillment of goal Z is not currently known, but it is reasonable to believe that such a path P exists". This is convertible to the algorithmic form above.

This has the form “if X then expect reward Y” where X == “Pathway P to goal Z” and Y == “attainment of goal Z” and “reward” == “subjective experience of a positive valence”.

Missing in the above narrative is the ingress sequence. There are multiple parts to assembling the algorithm. First we need to have “subjective experience of a positive valence” explicitly present in the world–model of the agent, i.e. it must exist in the physical universe. Next, “if X then expect reward Y” must also be incorporated into the world model. Next, a “desirable goal Z” must come from somewhere. But also the idea that Z is attainable must come from somewhere. Next, the idea that there’s a path to attainment. Next, the belief in the existence of such a path. Next, the understanding that paths lead to goals. Next, that searches can find things. Next that searches over paths can find paths. And so on and so on: each of these are elemental components, having the form of jigsaws, each of which must be ingressed from the platonic realm of possibilities into the physical space of atoms.

Each of these must be incorporated into the agent’s world model in the appropriate way. This incorporation feels vaguely proof–theoretic, in that pieces–parts are being assembled; but of course, the assembly of proofs from parts resembles the assembly of jigsaws. At any rate, some assembly required, and here, the assembly may trigger avalanches.

I guess there needs to be a dynamical system that performs assembly. That “figures things out”, That “figures out how to attach newly ingressed pieces of information into existing structures. In humans, this system takes the form of “common sense reasoning”. In far more basic agents, it needs to be something much simpler.

There also has to be a dynamical system that runs the constructed algorithm, i.e. that actualizes “the path P is unknown” into “search for path P” or perhaps “do while path P is unknown, try path P”. The desire to run this algo stems from the expected positive reward. But there has to be a doer, a runner, a motor system that, when started, will perform this action.

Anyway, the above is a breakdown of agentic processing via dynamical operations. It is presented in the form of a symbolic AI. That is, X, Y and Z are discrete symbols, handled much like variable symbols in predicate logic ... or term algebra, or model theory... wherever discrete symbols are used as a matter of course to construct small algebraic expressions. By nature, algebra consists of symbols, terms, atoms, each always small and atomic, because humans need small and atomic pieces–parts in order to be able to perform mathematical, algebraic reasoning. But there is another way.

Although the above deconstructs “hope” into a dozen or so parts, there is also a different idea: that “hope” is embedded in a very high–dimensional semantic space. Much like a vector embedding or a hypervector embedding. That is, a concept like “hope” has ties not just to one or two discrete parts, but perhaps ties to dozens or hundreds of related parts. For example, to “dreams”, to “desires”, to “wants”, to “urges”, to “the burning flame of hope”, to the Obama DREAMERS act, and so on: the word “hope” has a n–gram, skip–gram embedding into words, but also an embedding into the space of predicative expressions.

A predicative embedding appears to be important for a dynamical realization. That is, in predicate logic, we have static expressions like “for all X the predicate P(X) holds true”. This becomes dynamical if we have to actually list out all such X. One way to do this is to jump into computability: to talk about algorithms that generate all such X. That recursively enumerate all such X.

The point here is that recursive enumeration is a mechanism for ingress. Pursuant to the earlier example of Mersenne primes: the only Mersenne primes that exist in the physical universe of atoms are those that are known to human mathematicians. All the others “do not exist”. They inhabit the Platonic realm as possibilities. They are formless. They are definable; we have a short finite definition of what they are. We have an algo to find them: the Lucas–Lehmer primality test. But they don’t exist in the physical universe until they are found and written down.

I’m saying that this is a prototype example for the more general case: predicate logic gives a framework for specifying sets, but those sets “don’t exist” in the physical universe; they inhabit only the platonic realm. To exist, they must await ingress by the running of some algorithm. Some recursive enumeration of the members of the set.

So, attached to this this word “hope” is not only a lot of corpora–linguistics skip–grams, not just a high–dimensional embedding into other concept vectors, but also an embedding into predicates. Sentences like “I dream that one day, I will be able to Z” are similar to “I hope that I will be able to Z”, but have a slightly different embedding, because the word “dreams” has other meanings. Someone who hopes for something might take concrete action; a dreamer might not, and instead just wait for happenstance to bring Z to them.

That is, there is an embedding into a high–dimensional space of predicates, and these in turn embed into a high–dimensional space of algorithms. Algorithms that take actions, affecting th external world, or altering the agent’s world model, (or both). Algorithms that take time to run, that can be unexpectedly halted. Ingress is happening as these algos run.

So what have I done above? I gave a sketch for how “hope” can be embedded into a small network of algebraic expressions, “small” meaning dozens, less than a hundred. These expressions drive a dynamical system that results in a positive–valence subjective experience for the agent.

But I also note that “hope” should actually be embedded in a large network of millions of expressions (algebraic expressions, predicate–logic expressions, declarative expressions, algorithmic snippets) that surround the cloud of “hope”, “aspire”, “dream”, “expect”, “feel entitled to”, “demand”, “assert”, with ties or weights of varying strength to each. This is a sketch of an LLM–like thingy, but it embeds not words, but declarative predicate expressions, and, ultimately dynamical processes (that take time to run).

There’s also a third view: that “hope” corresponds to a certain arrangement of atoms in the brain. This arrangement corresponds to the subjective experience of hope.

This raises another issue: that of representation with atoms. When we build a computer, and it stores the number “42” in RAM, we, as humans, know that the particular arrangement of atoms in the transistors that hold the number “42” is a representation of that number. But if we humans were not around, how would one know that this particular arrangement of atoms corresponds to the number “42”? Similarly, how can one discover what arrangement of atoms there are in my brain, when I think of the number 42?

These seems to be a problem of representation theory, of isomorphism, homomorphism, etc. etc. and the general issue is “how is it that certain arrangements of atoms correspond to representations of certain abstract concepts?” I was thinking of this last night, as I dozed sleeplessly at 4AM. I think I could write more on this, but actually, this is a TODO item, it is something I need to think about a lot more, to firm this up. Next problem is I feel sleepy *right now*; my eyelids are slamming shut. I got mentally exhausted writing the above paragraphs. And I have multiple urgent tasks I need to accomplish today, so that’s the end of that, for now. Later, duude.

p.s. Milda smiled at me last night, and reminded me of just how much fun we had crawling around on the floor, hunting down that mushroom that fell on the carpet. And I’m like, shit–yeah, I want to have fun like that again, what does it take to ignite this? So of course, I’m wildly and uncontainably, uncontrollably in love. I’ve never been so turned upside down. One day at a time.

I guess that is what it feels like to be alive. One deals with it, moment to moment, one day at a time. The future remains unknown, and full of unexpected surprises. The subjective experience – man, what a high. It’s vaguely surprising that I’m not a drug addict. Being in love is like skiing down a ski slope, just a little too fast; in control but just barely, and all the neurons in your head are just totally lit up by whatever neurotransmitters provide that positive valence subjective experience.

I mean, I’m sitting here with tears in my eyes, and sobbing from time to time in the intensity of that love. It is so totally irrational: objective analysis suggests that we are highly incompatible as people. But here I am: a week later, she brings up something fun that happened between us. This means she was thinking about it. And enough to place it in the foreground. To reference in conversation. There is no one else in my life that thinks about me, and it is such a high to feel that someone else cares. And well, I guess it’s mutual. And that is something worth holding on to, even if it is a bit tough at times.

I also spent a *lot* of time over the last week or two watching facebook reels on romantic advice and entanglements. Some of which are applicable to my current situation, but barely, because of the unusual form of this relationship. Yet still, I have this sense of the terminally online: that somehow, there is this sea–change of the human mind, as most of the reels the algo throws at me have positive messages, they’re not propaganda, they’re not bullshit. The quantity and quality of information coming my way is much much higher than what it was in my youth. I assume this has a positive impact on people who watch this stuff, but ...

Well, that’s another huge, bottomless topic. There are some absolutely awesome changes afoot for civilization. I’m an optimist. Of course, it is rationally correct to fear disaster. I dunno. But I feel like the general current is towards enlightenment. Whatever. Later. I really have stuff to do.

Here are some graphics I’m preparing for the birthday part for trouble–on–wheels. This is requested work.

These, and two others, and the original graphics to be printed and converted to a banner for the party.

A significant amount of facebook reels are AI generated. What strikes me is that the content is generally positive, uplifting, informative and mostly correct. It addresses real issues and gives straight–up, honest explanations. So, I guess whoever is doing this is doing it for the money. And what gets created is necessarily that which gets lots of views, which suggests that positive uplifting informative commentary is in demand. This runs counter to the earlier MSM tactic of scandal and bad news and outrage and political polarization. Which also continues, but seems more limited, at least in my feed. Worth keeping an eye on.

24 Sept 2026

So I’m spending the morning immersed in a state of ... existential agony. I’ve spent so much of my life being emotionally subdued that this new state of being is ... intellectually intriguing. I’m sort of riding it like a wave, it’s taking me into dangerous territory, and I fear, but I’m going to ride it. I almost wrote “and hope for the best”, but “hope” is a loaded term, as we found above. I’m going to be a bit more passive. I’m going to relax, and let it come to me.

As I slept, I was doing the numbers, and continue to be shocked by how old I am. I don’t like it. I fear death. I fear that I will never have sex again. I fear that I will be abandoned in love. Well, I already am, sort of, in this weird way. I desire the safe, warm space, but am out here shivering in the cold, and don’t exactly like it. I marvel, and find it curious, but I really could use an embrace, a kiss. But I’m jumping ahead here; lets get back to the start.

I wake, tortured by the thought of being old, which I try to put back in the box, but don’t quite manage to do so.

Oh, wait, that’s interesting: so much of life is about poise and balance and grace. Whether balancing on a surfboard, or balancing in the moment of a social relationship. Well, in the present case, balancing in a state of being. I wrote normalcy, but there’s no need to be normal. I do, however, want to be functional. To be able to do and accomplish things. When I get too emotional, I’m a flubber, and nothing gets done. The normal state is kind of like a flow state: shit gets done, I do shit. Being immersed in emotions, though, is also a kind of flow, but that kind of flow lets me bath in this odd state of heartache. Well, OK, I need to get back to this idea of the ideal life as being the pursuit of a state of grace. Add that to the todo list.

But first, let me describe my morning. After waking, I’m not eating, and hunger pangs start to invade. These are vague unpleasant. As noted earlier, hunger pangs feel a lot like heartache. I can now tell them apart, but the lingering connection is still there. Non–specific, not rooted in any recent events. But a lingering depression of getting old, getting ugly, feeling a hopelessness. I slept well, but my morning dreams examined such less than happy outcomes. Basically, I don’t want to die. And second, I deeply fear depression, loneliness, unhappiness. My dreams are like a preview of what is to come: a nightmare, of sorts. So I wake from a mildly depressive nightmare, and an hour later, my stomach is hungry.

I read some more of Kondrotas. Subsection V, where Nikodemas (the antithesis of Dodas) is experiencing famine. Hunger, which evokes the strangest thoughts, and the most perfect ideas. (Yes, it does, doesn’t it? A lot of my suffering was a side effect of trying to eat less. Because I want to have a sexier body. Because a sexier body is a path to having sex. Maybe. So I try to eat less, and suffer, as a result. Again, I describe well–known phenomena; however, these are mine “There are many other guns like this one, but this one is mine.”)

Nikodemas looks at the sky, but his eyes don’t focus. He looks at the ground, but there is nothing there. He looks at the water, it is grey. Then he remembers a fourth place to look: inside himself. Where he finds what he needs. I put the book down. I can’t read this. It’s too intense, too diffuse, too forcefully reminding me of my less than happy state. As all the earlier Kondrotas short stories did.

I pick up my cell phone, and fall into watching Instagram reels. The first few are harmless and silly, but then they start hitting home. I have to reconstruct in reverse chronological order.

This girl comes home, to her safe space. “Oh hey, how was your day?” Frown. Re–entering with a bathrobe and a stuffed animal. “That was quick. How was the show?” Calm. “It was good, I think I just used all my words for the day. I’d actually love to be in listening mode if you’d tell me about your day. Also could we do a bland food dinner tonight?” Okay. “Okay, I think I’m ready to tell you about my day.”

There are more than a few parallels here to my life with Milda, except she doesn’t walk in with a stuffed animal. And we don’t have this dialog; but I’m starting to understand that this is the case. I’m her safe space. A lot of our dynamic is this. She seems to want me as a cuddly stuffed animal who is around when she needs it. And it seems I’ve been playing that role well, except for those times when I can’t quite keep my shit together.

My life has been so sheltered, so detached from the lives of others that this particular behavior pattern is novel to me. I can’t say I’ve encountered it in novels or movies before. But here it is in a reel, with 659K hearts. I heart it too, it touches a spot.

I flip over to the comments section. And it’s just filled with people making remarks about identifying with this mode. And I’m reading them now. And I’m driven to tears. To overwhelming emotion. I’m crying as I write this. Comments explain: its some mixture of being over–stimulated, and needing the quiet down–time. Someone who needs a safe person (that one made me cry.) Someone who is high–energy but needs constant reassurance, which they don’t get while their partner is being quiet.

This is one of a dozen reels that hit, in some way. I guess it hits for lots of people, that’s why there are so many likes. Because I’m in this mood, it hits for me.

What am I trying to do here? I spent to morning in a mood, I’m trying to capture it in words. The ineffable in writing. Well, because words are my thing, now; whoever created that reel (“tessintheclouds”) also was trying to capture a mood, and was fairly successful in doing so. Maybe not the exact mood that exactly happened when, but a close enough portraiture that other people can identify with it, deeply. But also, it is entertaining content. Financialized. Like all stars, music, movie, a few find ways to express, and the economic system rewards them. Some more than others. This diary is not financializable; it has an audience of zero. I’m not performing for anyone. I’m psychoanalyzing myself, society and the universe, mostly for my own entertainment. I had to write that, because otherwise, there’s a lingering question “Linas, what are you doing?” But this is a question that is ... well, its not always present. When I’m surfing, say, literally surfing, such a question never enters the mind: I’m doing, I’m in the moment. It arises only during moments of quiet reflection, of which I seem to have a lot of, and guard jealously.

What am I doing here? I’m trying to figuratively surf the moment with poise and grace, to surf the pangs of my heart. I’m trying to live my life, to the fullest possible.

And what does this mean? Another couple of videos were about rave culture. I always wanted to go to raves, never quite did. Giant parties. What’s the problem? I find them boring. Some people seem to lose their minds during them. And I can sometimes get to there. But I’m all too easily bored.

Oh, wait! I see the problem! It’s all about attachment, again. If I have a safe space to go to; more precisely, a safe person, then I can go and party like wild, and its just incredible. And if I have no one, then the party becomes a bore. Like, “What am I doing here? This is no fun!” In recent experience, its been exactly like that. If I know that Milda is there, waiting in the wings, with a smile, I can just cut loose and go wild and fully immerse in some activity with 100 percent focus. And I come back, and there’s a smile, and the powers me, energizes me. A smile is all it takes. But, without that, if she brushes off, its a disaster. Jonines was like that. She invited me (for which I am thankful) but then brushed me off the entire time we were there. The brush–off just totally killed my ability to be at peace and enjoy. I got bored. Nothing was happening. I pushed through, I survived, but there was no great joy.

Well, that, plus partying destroys analytical thinking, and in so far as my character is one of studying, some of which requires extreme focus at the pinnacle of inspiration, well partying does not interest with that. Yet I feel loss. I, too, want the high. I’m a drug addict.

The word “pinnacle” made me think of rock climbers. Camping in a tent attached to a vertical wall. What are they doing? Is this, too, pursuing a high? A thrill? In a sense, it is. Pursing an ineffable state that can be approached only by setting up living quarters a thousand feet up a sheer cliff rock wall. I guess this is what antarctic explorers did as well. This is what all people do. Perhaps most don’t know it.

Is this generalizable? Is this what all living things do? Well, one could say, living things just live. They get on with life. For some, its automatic. One reel showed a dog diving for rocks. Is it automatic? The dog clearly loves doing this. Why? It’s driven. There’s some dopamine hit it gets from accomplishing this task. A positive valence reward. The rock climbers, the surfers, the drug addicts, the ravers too, I guess, are seeking out that dopamine hit. Some more willfully than others. Some driven, but they do not know why they are driven. Others driven, with a very focused sense. My dopamine comes from those a–ha moments of understanding. Well, that and many other things. Such as surfing instagram content. I almost wrote “mindlessly surfing” but its only mindless sometimes. Many of these videos connect. Some make me cry. Maybe because I’m emotionally fragile. But maybe because I’m emotionally tuned in.

And again, this brings me back to living things. What is this poise? What is this search? Is this even the right question?

The wake of turbulence behind a jet engine; the wake of turbulence behind a crashing wave, is this driven by some search, some desire, some existential angst? Some overwhelming need to swirl and sworl and dissipate? Well, the conventional interpretation of physics would say no. Physics says that there is some energy gradient; the dynamical system that is a dissipative fluid is driven by only one thing: a non–equilibrium, non–uniform distribution of energy. So is life, are living organisms like this, too, just swirls and sworls, driven by non–uniform energy flows? The citric acid cycle, the adenosine triphosphate providing energy to drive the swirling?

Can I do the panpsychism thing, here? Perhaps “hylozoism”? That the gradient flows of energy in the turbulent wake of a jet engine are a micropanpsychic feature? The universe is trying to reach a higher state, a higher extractive state of being, but the sworls of turbulence do not provide a sufficient amount of organization to qualify for the conventional definition of life. The sworls are not organized enough to fit into the agency model. There’s no stable boundary in a swirl. There aren’t anything that would correspond to sensory organs or a world model. There is, however, the more primitive requirement: an energy gradient. The universe provides the gradient, the sworls are the most easily accessible aspect of stirred fluid.

That is, if life formed in the deep ocean geothermal vents, pressure–cooking it’s way through a maze of tiny refractory tubes in volcanic rock, held at just the right temperature for sugars and aminos to react, to be enveloped in a lipid layer ... this too, is a form of turbulence, but far more highly structured.

Can either form be expressed as a form of ingress?

Consider turbulent flow. The fluid equations that govern this, these have many solutions. Uncountably many. This set of solutions inhabits the platonic realm, as all sets do. (As all of set theory does.) Of this multitude, only one is chosen out of the many in a given specific instance of turbulent flow in the real world. It is valid to say that this solution, this particular turbulent flow ingressed from the Platonic realm into the world of atoms. This ingress is consistent with the conception of here and now: as air slips past a flat plate, or as water spills past an oar blade pulled by a rower, the only turbulent pattern that can form is the one that is a few hbar away from the current state of the system, which forms the boundary condition for the near future. That is, the past forms the boundary condition for the here–and–now, and the only things that can ingress must be within a few hbar of that.

Oh, wow! OK, so this gives insight into something about partial differential equations that have been eating away at me, unresolved, since forever. Here’s the issue, and here’s the solution.

So... if one has some differential equation, say, a chaotic one (low–dimensional chaos), like the double–pendulum or the Lorenz attractor, then any individual particle trajectory requires specifying the initial position and velocity to infinite precision. If it is not to infinite precision, then one is forced to image a tube of nearby solutions, evolving in time. They stay together, mostly, for a while,until there is some bifurcation.

The bifurcation is like the stall trajectory in an airfoil: some air goes above the wing, some goes below, and there is exactly one trajectory (in 2D) that hits the leading edge of the wing, and terminates there. In the double–pendulum, I imagine that there are many such stall lines. The pendulum evolves, until it hits some unstable point, where it could fall one way, or the other, with microscopic perturbation: falling left or right. This is a bifurcation. I presume the bifurcations form an infinite binary tree. The pendulum continues to swing, left or right, from that point onwards. That the infinite binary tree is isomorphic to the Cantor set, and all the rest of that goodness, we already know this; this is well attested to in my earlier explorations.

If I look at phase space: position and momentum, then such unstable points are recognized as saddle points. This is one of the seven or so types of critical points found in continuous dynamical systems.

The Lorenz attractor has a kind of combined phase space; 3D. Clearly, there’s some branching structure in there, too. I always wanted to draw the location of the branch points. That is, draw the embedded cantor set that is in there. This would be a considerable numerical challenge. I don’t know if anyone has attempted to do this; I imagine someone must have; its just too vital a question for someone not to try. I want to see this in 3D. Mentally, I visualize this as being similar to the distribution that is the derivative of the Minkowski Question Mark: some measure assigned to the Cantor set, that measure embedded into 3D space. Its a one-dim measure. The bifurcation points can be placed in a total order, because an infinite binary tree can be placed in a total order.

Of all possible point trajectories of a double pendulum, or of the Lorenz attractor, only a set of measure zero correspond to the stall trajectories. That is, the stall trajectories are countable, whereas all possible trajectories are uncountable.

Where was I? I wanted to connect this back to the idea of ingress. If I have a physical double pendulum, how will it swing? Well, there are many issues. The pendulum joints have friction in them. And stiction, due to oil, dirt, microscopic abrasions. Its swinging through air, and air currents, eddies, and of course, the trailing turbulent wake alter the flow. Modeling this becomes a practical impossibility. And its worse: it might even be hit by an ultra–high energy cosmic ray, coming from some distant supernova. The entanglement of the actual physical system is absurd.

When an actual, physical double pendulum has actually swung about, what, exactly, has ingressed? The differential equation describing an idealized double pendulum has this structure, a symplectic manifold with particle trajectories on it, and a countable number of bifurcation points embedded into it: saddle points strewn all through it, organizable into an infinite binary tree. But what ingresses is not one of these perfect, point–like trajectories, but some bundle. A bundle, if for no other reason that we have to consider the thermodynamic canonical ensemble of the grease in the bearings, and the air through which it swings. An uncountable number of idealized trajectories cut through this bundle, entering and existing as dampening and friction remove energy from the system. So, again, what’s ingressing?

There are two issues here. One is that if a distant supernova can emit a cosmic ray that disturbs the pendulum motion, the problem becomes unbounded: potentially anything in the universe can affect the motion. So that is one issue. The second issue is that the underlying theory is quantum. So, imagine if we could, the ability to simulate the entire universe, with the double–pendulum in it, so that every last atom and photon is accounted for. Even then, the movement can only be approximately classical. That is, here–and–now is inherently quantum–mechanical; the set of possible futures are always those that are a few hbar away from the (collapsing) present.

And what of panpsychism, of hylozoism?

Lets super–ultra–duper simplify the system. Imagine a de Sitter universe, entirely empty but for this pendulum. Or perhaps just a flat Newtonin universe. Imagine the double pendulum made of two elemental links. Perfect links, not made of atoms, but connected, having mass. Described by quantum mechanics.

OK, that’s stupid. Lets try even simpler: what is the quantum double pendulum? Or we can simplify further: what happens near saddle points on a symplectic manifold, when we also include nearby, off–shell trajectories? What is the path integral that surrounds a saddle point? Lets add this to the to–do list.

At this point, I have to take a break because I got shit to do. What have we accomplished today? Wallowed in a miasma of fears and hurts. Discovered that all humans float in a similar miasma, as attested by Instagram reelz, whether those of cats and puppies, of political commentators and war correspondents, or of psychologists dispensing romantic advice. Well, of course, most of the miasma is in the romantic advice reelz, this is where things get real, as it were. Where the irrational madness becomes the most visible. Watching a cat go crazy in catnip is a metaphor for real life. Watching people party is closer to real life. But we are all stuck in real life, or rather, the subjective experience of it. Then I went from the subjective experience miasma to the question of whether all autopoeitic systems have such experience, and then to the driver of that experience in the reductionist, atomic view of the world, to the drivers of atomic actions, which are energy gradients. This leads to turbulence as a complicated system driven by energy gradients, but too simple to fit in an agentic model. Could it still have some panpsychic or hylozoic elements to it: are energy gradients the universes way of saying “I want to get shit down”, or rather, “I want to ingress and energy gradients are how I am going to drive such ingress”. Then looking at low–dimensional chaotic systems, we rediscover the ever–green Cantor set. Simplifying, we get to the quantum double pendulum, and then to the quantum bifurcation point. And then we take a break.

So the open question is: what does the quantum double pendulum really work like? I want to see the details. How about the quantum bifurcation point? What are the details? What is the correct way of describing ingress at a quantum bifurcation point? There’s no panpsychism, per se, because the system is too simple, but the idea of being animated by energy flows remains: thus, hylozoic is my new favorite vocabulary word. Some energy flow “wants” to drive trajectories past bifurcation points. These trajectories have a time label; a one–dimensional parameter indicating a location on the trajectory. But when quantized, this has to become some for of here–and–now, because now there is a bundle of trajectories flowing past the bifurcation point. Can this system be factored into a clear past, a quantum here–and–now, and a platonic future, from which specifics ingress? Is this system simple enough to allow a precise analysis and factorization as such? I have new hope that it is. I want to work on this full–time, now, but I have other things to do. So ... dammit. Life is too short. I’m getting old. I want to do this *and also* I want to have sex. Which appear to be mutually exclusive. And I also don’t mind being immersed in the miasma of emotional states. I mean, I’m the drug addict there; the highs are great, the lows are kind of low, there seem to be more lows than highs, I’m getting old and ugly and pretty girls still notice me, but they don’t kiss me any more. And one day I will die. I will die very very lucky, if someone kisses me on my death bed.

I wonder if I will be in the room when my mother dies. When she does, I will have to kiss her. I’m crying now. This is what I mean. Life is such a cheat. You get to live it, and then you get to die. It’s so not fair. Well, at least I’ve grown up now. I was a child, before. I will be a child again, later today, tomorrow. But a little bit of growing up has started to ingress into me.

Life is fucking amazing. I recommend it to everyone. Everyone should try it.

Fuck me. One more instagram. Here’s the text:

The most misunderstood brain on the planet is not broken.

It is exhausted from pretending to be something it was never designed to be.

These are the ten experiences every person with ADHD lives with daily and no one ever talks about.

Number one, rejection sensitive dsphoria. A single critical word does not sting, it devastates. Your brain experiences rejection as physical pain.

Number two, time blindness. Not lazy, not careless, just living in a world where tehre are only two time zones exist. Now and not now.

Three, emotional flooding. In conflict, the calm rational version of yourself becomes completely unreachable. Not because you don’t care, but because your nervous system has been overwhelmed.

Four, object permanence. Literally, out of sight is genuinely out of mind. Tasks, messages, people you love deeply, gone the moment they leave your field of vision.

Five. The interest–based nervous system. Motivation is not driven by imprtance, it is driven by passion and urgency, which means critical but boring feels physically impossible, while irrelevant and fascinating becomes completely consuming.

Six, masking exhaustion. Every day, performing calm, performing focus, performing normal, by the end, ther’s nothing left and nobody ever sees why.

Seven, the sensory overwhelm. What the world calls the background, the ADHD processes as foreground. All of it, all at once, all the time.

Eight, analysis paralysis. So many thoughts, so many directions that starting becomes the hardest thing in the world.

Nine, the shame spiral. One mistake and suddenly it is not a mistake. It is evidence of every time they wer told why can’t you just be normal?

Ten, the 3:00 AM brain. The moment the world goes quiet, the ADHD brain finally wakes up, flooded with ideas, clarity and creativity, and the exact moment rest is needed most.

OK, so that text resonates, and if it is true, the I have ADHD. But I can’t help wonder that these are so generic, that doesn’t like everyone have ADHD? Can’t every one identify with at least half these bullets? So it feels also like a scamy come–on, trying to get instagram likes.

Looking at comments. The first string of comments is from people 60 and 70 years old. And it is also the case where pretty much all of the above symptoms would not have described me ten or twenty years ago, so it is possible that this ADHD thing is an old–age onset thing!?

So I’m asking ChatGPT. It says:

“Yes. Your skepticism is well founded. That list is a mixture of genuine ADHD–associated phenomena, popular–language descriptions of them, and several claims that are exaggerated or not actually diagnostic of ADHD. Almost every item can occur in people without ADHD. The important question clinically is not “Have you ever experienced this?” but rather how frequently, how intensely, how persistently, how early in life, and how much does it impair functioning compared with what would be expected?”

OK. so I do not have ADHD.

I also asked about late–onset ADHD, and ChatGPT basically says “things change when you retire, symptoms can become unmasked, but there’s no actual evidence of late–onset ADHD.” OK. So instagram is fraudulent, here. And I wasted my time. Still, it was... uhh, something.

27 Sept 2026

Rock n roll hoochie koo! I feel good! I don’t know why. Thank good. Maybe because I ate. Because I’m not sitting here, hungry, under–calorie. Maybe because I went to party and nothing happened except I stayed up till 7:30 AM and slept till 3:30 and then went in a sauna and then jumped in a cold river and the next morning, my face felt so smooth and clean!

I don’t want to write about the party, I wanted to write something serious and difficult, but now its 10:30PM and I’m pretty relaxed. My heads all empty and that’s OK. I watched some calesthenics videos on facebook, and then tried them on the floor, and discovered it doesn’t work due to a combo of being mildly hungover still and a full stomach. Tomorrow. I’ll do gymnastics tomorrow. Got my aerobic workout dancing. I was the token old guy at the party and danced with young girls till I scared them off. Too intense, I guess. I am not going to be not intense. I have no limits, I have no boundaries. That’s the psycho me talking. I’m not psycho except when I want to be. When I’m feeling good, when I’m batting a thousand. When every action has an equal and opposite reaction.

Shit. I was batting a thousand, until just now, and the cillwave–synthwave mix I was listening to ended and another started rolling, and it features about two minutes of scenes of Ryan Gosling from the movie Blade Runner 2049 and its his cool car and drizzling rain, and I almost broke down into tears. I’m choking up now. I wasn’t going to write about how I feel, I was going write about theory, but now that I’m here...

Earlier today, I was surfing facebook “to catch up” after a weekend of being unplugged. And it showed me two or five uplifting things in a row, and I broke down crying. Tears of overwhelming joy, but equally sadness, bittersweet, but mostly just overwhelming. For five minutes. I leaned into it. I let it happen. I encouraged it. I let it flow. I was so happy to be alive. The last video, the one that pushed me over the edge, was something about having only a short time on earth. I’m thinking about the rest of the message now, and its making me tear up. So its this roller coaster, but now, the tears are somehow giving me strength. They’re tears of appreciation. Thank god I was given the chance to live. Not living would have been so boring. And crying makes me feel more alive than anything. Just overwhelming pure, uncontainable joy.

So now what? I’m feeling smooth, smoothed out. I’m drinking a beer. Very very slowly. Half a can in half an hour. Placid. Serene. Relaxed. Far from being the correct zone for analytic breakdowns. Chill. And taking a vacation, chilling, I guess it’s OK, its ... shit the music is breaking up and now I lost my train of thought.

Should I resume trying to be analytic?

Fuck my mind wandered. I’m diving into limerence, again. Dammit. Well, let’s get it out of the way, at least, brutally. As I came home, she was leaving. We met in the stairwell, what are the odds of that? She’s leaving to go mushrooming. Back tonight? I ask. No. That means she’ll be hopping in the sack. Getting fucked tonight. Before I left, she said I should do the same. Just hop in a sack with a girl. And I’m like, baby, you don’t understand, it doesn’t work like that for guys. We have to be invited in. No invitation, no go. She can jump in anyone’s lap, and she will never be turned down.

Anyway, the problem with limerence is intermittent reinforcement. Before I left, she cooked me a big deal dinner. This crock–pot thing, prep time maybe an hour. The me–feeding–myself meals have a prep time of like two minutes. I ate the third crock–pot leftover earlier today. Like, she made enough so that I’d have something to eat on my return. I’ve never ever had a woman, girlfriend or wife, look after me so diligently. Never. Limerence.

So a few hours into the party, I send her some photos, the intent being like “You’re not missing anything, I’m OK, Check this out.” She responds immediately. Four hours later, I send her a batch of photos. No response. Well, OK, that’s normal, more or less. Then, two days later, i.e. today, *after* she’s been out mushrooming for like six hours, its evening, dark, I guess she finally gets around to looking at her phone??? And sticks heart and surprise emojis on the photos! I’m like wtf? Is this her way of saying “You’re not missing anything. I’m OK. I still see you.” Limerance.

Of course I’m jealous. Of course I want to be with her. Of course, being with her, we still haven’t figured out how to have fun together. We’ve managed some good times. Like, we both got high from each other moments. These are rare. Wish there were more, but these don’t just happen.

Realistic me notes that we’re utterly incompatible.

Realistic me knows it will never happen.

Realistic me has been getting this under control.

Factual me notes that she opened up to me this summer, and showed me parts of her life that showed me how incompatible we really are. See, but this is the problem. She opened up, She took care of me, showed me new things. Took me along for journeys, delivered as gifts. “I wanted to show you a good time” she said. More than once. Why does she say this? I don’t recall the last time a woman took me out on a date. And these weren’t simple dates. These were multi–day overnight adventures.

Our relationship is very fresh. Sure I’ve known her for ten or twelve years. But in these adventures, and other random acts of kindness, this has taken things to a new level. It’s the random acts of kindness that has propelled me into limerence. Like, she’s six hours into her date ... an overnight date! ... and she’s sticking hearts on my two–day old messages. Keeping things alive. And this random, keeping things alive, it’s such a powerful drug.

And this makes me happy. Because without this, there’d me no roller coaster. My life would be plain, simple, sad, lonely, boring. This is providing foundational meaning. I’ve never experienced such care.

I don’t think she understands. I think she knows, but she hasn’t processed the implications at a conscious level. This relationship is weird. But life is weird, and I’m getting tired of writing this.

OK, its midnight. I’m tapping a non–alcoholic drink, because the bacon I ate was super–salty. It’s too tough, uncooked. So I cooked it. But its super–salty. And I’m still coasting on energy.

The reason I deferred theorizing is because ... the chances of progress are slim to none.

Here’s what has been established so far:

Communications between agents binds them together into super–structures. Atoms exchange photons to bind them into molecules. Molecules have resonant interactions (see wikipedia articles on this topic, all of which I wrote. There’s about half a dozen in the series. The three wave interaction is one of them. The six–wave mixing term in the watchamacallit oscillator is another. The orthogonalization procedure is another. Oh hey, wait, fuck. The orthogonalization procedure is for waves with non–linear mixing terms, it factors out dependent and independent parts. And as I recall that, it suddenly hits: its just like Fadeev–Popov ghosts, except its bosonic, only. Fadeev–Popov is simpler and cleaner, because it involves spinors, and thus, the rotation or decoupling is cleaner, because the spinors make the separation clear as to which is which. By contrast, factoring out dependent terms in “bosonic–only” mixing terms in diff–eqs is harder; the algebra is messier and more complex. But its the same general idea. I wonder if factorizing out dependent parts in non–linear interactions might be a lot easier, if first, we split up further into a product of spinors, then refactor (the spinor terms are “easy” to track), then the spinor parts could be recombined into the “physical” waves. Shit. I wish I had a few weeks or a month to explore this in detail. It would be pretty awesome if the algebra worked out!)

Where was I? Large molecules, i.e. proteins, DNA, use resonant interactions to combine with each other, which again can be treated as a form of messaging or exchange of information between them. Again, this exchange happens in the here–and–now. Then these larger structures use yet more messaging to combine into the parts that make up cells, and cells combing to form multi–cellular beings. Ants message, and by the time we get to humans, we find that we enjoy being social.

Specifically, humans enjoy partying.

28 Sept 2026

Well, I was gonna write more, but musta gotten distracted.

I discovered I can mostly control the limerence in the waking hours, but it roars full–throated in the middle of the night. I got out of bed nine hours after getting into bed, but I think I only slept five hours. This will resolve itself after I leave, but will be an issue for next summer. I can’t be in Vilnius if I can’t get over this.

Oh man. Let me illustrate the problem again. I wake. Milda is home; a surprise; I did not expect her till late in the day. I write the above, and then, she walks in the room, smiles, holds eye contact for a long time, and tells of of “bobos vasara”, a term I’d never heard before, the Lithuanian equivalent of Indian summer. She approaches, looks at me, smiles, wheels around, head tilted. A little mini–flirt to start the day. It’s been like this all summer long. I’m dying.

Women like me. Yesterday, mid–day, I’m sitting with Ruta and new acquaintance Rugilė, both half my age, and the conversation is intimate enough that Rugilė remarks, “So, in other words, you have two wives.” I shoot back “and I’m not getting sex from either.” And Ruta says “well, we have to find you someone.” And then muses on the topic and delivers an astonishing but very unlikely pairing. OMG. I reflect on the previous three decades of my life, and feel like, perhaps, I’ve been living in a cave. The emotional roller coaster continues this morning.

Anyway, continuing from yesterday.

Humans like partying. There are three or four questions that arise: What is partying? It’s a social exchange, but it’s extremely non–verbal, its gestural, and its very much about vibes. But what are vibes? A careful reading of another persons disposition, and tuning into it, and providing a supportive (partly–verbal) positive comment. Verbal intonation, pacing, accentuation carry almost all of the weight of the disposition. Vibes: is this other person happy? Open? Easy to interact with? Or will interactions be painful? At any rate, I’m sure there’s some huge psychological literature on this topic.

Next, can the positive valence associated with partying be carried over into other species? There are many youtube videos attesting to animals behaviors that can be termed “partying.” Well, playing, more narrowly, if just one on one, but partying if the play is in a larger grouping.

Crap. I have too many ideas. I cannot write them down fast enough. Let me outline, then.

Continuing without the bullets.

So how do I describe the pre–existing shared mutual uhh “entanglement” between the mental states of two agents? I don’t entirely like the word “entanglement” because we are not talking about quantum, at least, not literally. However, the correct analysis might still require linear combinations that are irreducible, and when sliced into two, they fall apart into lower–dimensional irreps. And in such a case, the word “entanglement” would be justified.

Why am I talking about irreps? Well, again: each agent has a world–model. Its some assembly of jigsaws.

Interruption: Milda texts me (from the other room) a joke comic panel. And then walks in, smiling, as I’m reading it? Can you say “intermittent reinforcement” three times, real fast?

Where was I? Each agent has a world–model. Its some assembly of jigsaws. This assembly is a representation of the external world. When I write that two agents have a shared context, this means that they both have representations of some shared history or past or impressions, and that these representations align sufficiently well that a few common words or symbols or symbolic acts are pointers into large spaces. Spaces with a large volume.

The mathematical, algebraic issue is then:

Interruption. Milda comes into the kitchen and makes me lunch. And we talk about my weekend. And she’s like, what do you mean you didn’t get laid? What’s wrong with you? You should bedding a girl in that bed! And I’m like, you see, its not so easy for men. She’s like “men get laid all the time” and I’m like, no, sociologists, academics measure this, 5% of men get laid all the time. That’s one in twenty; the other 19 don’t get laid. That means one man has slept with twenty women, these women are all sharing the same man; the rest of the men get nothing. She’s silent. I’m like, that’s how you get these men who have slept with 20 women. (I picked a low number just to make the point.) She’s silent.

She’s like, but except, you should’ve gotten laid. And I’m like ... a woman can hop into any mans bed and she won’t get kicked out. A man has to be invited into a woman’s bed. And women rarely invite. And she’s like, well, you have to go to the point where she looks at you and nods OK. And I’m like, yes, that’s right.

And she more or less understands this, that it’s easier for women than men, and agrees, she even gives a real–life example, but somehow manages to turn it around into it being my fault for not getting laid. So she’s a little pissed off at me. And I’m like, well, I don’t really want to talk about this. Especially with you. And she’s like, yeah, we’re done with this topic.

She’s got this dynamic mapped out in her head, where she gets laid and I get laid, and I’m not holding up my end of the bargain. And I’m getting a little irritated, I’m about to tell her off, but I bite my tongue. Somehow saying “Fuck You!” in English would have ... maybe I should have said it, to be clear that I’m kind of angry now. I’ve already said this twice before to her, a few weeks ago, when she pushed something somewhere inappropriate. Something sexual, again. She wants to sleep around. She wants me to sleep around. She wants to live with me, like husband and wife, but we each have our sexual needs fulfilled in other ways, and she knows she can’t feel care–free if I’m not getting any, so she resents that I’m this drag. Because that makes me (my emotional well–being) a burden for her to carry.

I’m flabbergasted. This is our rather fragile relationship. We’re both putting in energy. We both care for each other. But our futures do not align, they’re not parallel.

Just at this very moment, I feel very even–keeled. The roller–coaster is coasting relatively calmly. I’ve got it sort of under control. But there’s no bright future of great expectations ahead. The future is overcast.

(p.s. Later I walk around, doing errands, mildly angry, mildly unhappy and with a hard–on because thinking about this conversation makes my dick hard. So I’m swaggering around town, kind of angry, with a hard dick. Half of me says I’ll fuck anything that moves, and the other half of me says I have standards, as I look at women passing me by in the street. Academic debate, as none of this is remotely possible, anyway. Goddamnit.)

This question contacts the Tononi Phi. Since the two agents share a significant context that is overlapping, ther is a connection. But this connection can be termed “spiritual”, because its not literal, atomic–based, there are no neurons running between the two brains. But there is a connection, and both parties feel it, subjectively. They can even acknowledge the mutuality, and confirm it among themselves; this only strengthens the ties. But where are these ties? What space are they in? What is the correct formal framework to describe this? Again, the feeling is subjective, and its mutual.

Generalizing to a multi–party shared consensus, one can talk about a grouping of friends, and broadening still, society, and then culture. Where does this live?

The pair of close friends, they form a kind of super–organism. A super–agent. I can draw a wall around them easily enough, labeling interior and exterior. The interior has communicating parts. But I don’t have a good way of talking about single–word communications between highly entangled agents.

Crap. This is a to–do item and not just a to–do item but a huge, central one.

Anyway, I have errands. So later.

OK, So I have two distinct agents; both are modeling a common experience base. What’s the right way to compare and express this commonality?

I learned a lesson the hard way regarding grammar and the generated language: two very different grammars can generate almost the same language. How should they be compared? Perhaps the two grammars are isomorphic, but how does one find that isomorphism? That alone becomes an almost intractable problem. But comparing the generated languages is hard, because you’d have to generate a lot. So its hard to compare grammars, and tedious to compare generated languages.

And that’s for the case where the grammar is open to inspection. If the agent is an AI agent, and open source, then we have god–mode where we can inspect. Well, but for an LLM, even if we have full access to the weight matrix we still don’t know what it means. And I guess one can have what seems to be two very different weight matrices that generate very similar languages.

A todo item is to reconcile the weight–matrix picture with the jigsaw representation. Clear as mud, to me, right now.

So, multiple issues. For human brains, there is no practical technology to determine if two humans have a common understanding, other than to talk to them: if they’re both the same age from the same city, they probably have a lot of culture in common, and can share easily. But if they are opposite sex partners, vibing, well, maybe you can spot it in body language. But that’s an external, behavioral measure, and less than accurate. And limited.

To be of mathematical use, it seems we need to define the representational volume. And before that, we need to define the representation. Which I don’t have, except for hand–wavey descriptions of jigsaws and hypercubes and graphs. So the development here has been very imaginary.

If two individuals have a large common understanding, then they must have communicated a lot in the past (to develop this commonality) and have developed in close proximity in a common sensory environment. Thus, the shared history allows the dynamics to encode similar world–models. So this gives a proxy measure: compare past histories. If these are similar, then it is likely that the world models encode similar theories of the external world. Likely, but maybe not.

At any rate, this still does not give us a description of the meta–organism that is the pair. The two brains don’t have neurons running between them. They have independently synchronized, and are capable of maintaining synchronicity through a weak coupling (i.e. only small message exchanges). So as I write this sentence, it resembles a pair of weakly coupled harmonic oscillators. And phase–locking behavior in that.

How does the complexity of a pair of weakly coupled harmonic oscillators exceed that of a pair of harmonic oscillators alone? The information content of a pair of uncoupled harmonic oscillators is very low; they’re very simple, easy to describe; not much to it. Once they become coupled, no matter how weakly, the complexity seems to skyrocket, as the range of (possible) behaviors becomes vast. What is the correct way to describe this? Viz, how can we use this as inspiration to describe the behavior of a pair of weakly coupled agents? I’m stumped. It’s late. I’m tired. Bedtime. Good time to quit.

29 Sept 2026

I guess I can control it while awake, but shortly after falling asleep, the torture starts. The heartbreak spills out. Not as bad as last night; I slept most of the night. It hits while I waver between being conscious and unconscious.

I don’t have a long–term plan for this. I live with her. She was ... hanging out last night. No fireworks, but we did have a few laughs. The party theme is “who the hell invited these people?” Of the people I invited, five, maybe seven are coming. Not clear how many she’s inviting. At first, she said, “a lot”, but then Adrė will be there, so maybe not so many. Rytis will not be there. I can’t wait till I’m in Chicago. I don’t know what sort of plans to make for next year. The limerence needs to be fixed; but it will be triggered again next summer.

I’m writing the below, and I have this tonic knot in my stomach. I’d eaten a big breakfast just a bit earlier, so I’m not hungry. It feels like a very low–grade anxiety. I don’t want to interrupt the flow below, so I’ll top–post instead, the correlation of feeling and writing is not important. But this low–grade stomach flopping ... its well, a hopeful heartache. I know rationally it’s hopeless but subconscious me doesn’t acknowledge that. Subconscious me understands that the friendship remains alive and well and healthy. And sees no evidence of it tapering. For example, last night, she was asking about Austin, and Chicago. I replied tamely. I’ve been dealing with days where I know she’s been sleeping with other guys. When I think about it, it makes me feel utterly awful. That’s what the loss of sleep is all about. But then, its like ... she spends way more time with me, than these other guys. They’re bootie calls. I’m safe space. Its a weird dynamic. So, below, I’m writing, I’m concentrating, and I have these evil butterflies in my stomach. It’s hopeless but its hopeful. It’s fucking weird, and its taking a mental toll.

I want to complain about how much time I spend writing crap like this, but frankly, it could be a lot worse. The house could be completely 100% empty and I would be lonely going out of my mind, and that would be 100% far worse. The sporadic social contact is calming.

It may also be the case that I am experiencing plain–old gastrointestinal distress. It might be that, too. There might even be chicken and egg stuff, going on here.

So, for a pair of communicating agents, assume we can monitor what fraction of a single agents world model gets activated by the receipt and processing of a message. This would be a fraction of the total size of the network. For a pair of communicating agents exchanging messages, we have a flow resembling a pair of interacting finite state transducers.

Recall a finite state transducer is defined as

I don’t know what would happen, or if it is possible to replace the Cartesian product by a tensor product. Dammit.

OK, before doing tensor product, lets quickly finish the earlier thought. If I have two agents

A

and

B

exchanging messages, then I wanted to measure what fraction of the internal states

S_{A}

and

S_{B}

get visited as they communicate.

I want to assign a measure to each internal state, so that

0 < μ (s_{i}) < 1

for each state

s_{i}

. For ordinary finite state machines, this is just

μ (s_{i}) = 1 / | S |

i.e. the counting measure. For something like LLM’s or anything else non–trivial, the measure

μ (s_{i})

becomes the fraction of the world model that is activated (upon receiving some message). Its how much of the brain “lights up” on getting a message. How much of the knowledge representation network is activated.

For a communications session where an agent receives messages

m_{k_{1}}, m_{k_{2}}, \dots, m_{k_{N}}

it will transition through internal states

s_{i_{1}}, s_{i_{2}}, \dots, s_{i_{N}}

and the total visited space during the exchange would be

μ (s_{i_{1}} \cup s_{i_{2}} \cup \dots \cup s_{i_{N}})

Note that for an ordinary finite state machine, it is necessarily the case that

s_{i} \cap s_{j} = \emptyset

for

i \neq j

but for more complex systems having a network activation, it will generally be the case that

s_{i} \cap s_{j} \neq \emptyset

Lets return to the case of weakly coupled harmonic oscillators. Here, the state space are the rotor angles

S = {θ : 0 \leq θ < 2 π}

for each of the two rotors. We can promptly generalize this to e.g. the Ising model (where we have just two spin sites), or an N–state rotor instead of a continuous angle. The rotor need not be a circle, it could be a sphere, a projective space, real or complex. A homogeneous space. A unitary group. These all fall into the class of conventional geometric state machines.

The weak coupling need not be limited to point dynamics: it could couple distributions. For example, if the state space aka world–model of an agent is the complex projective space

C P^{n}

then the state transition functions could be elements of the unitary group

U (n)

which maps

C P^{n}

C P^{n}

and thus maps distributions to distributions.

Mode locking is a thing in the circle map, and is generally seen e.g. in orbital resonances. I guess mode locking is a general phenomenon, where here it is called a “resonant interaction”. Conventional resonant interactions are for waves, i.e. have 3-momenta

\vec{k}

and energy

ω

with some dispersion relation, and resonances occur when

{\vec{k}}_{1} \pm {\vec{k}}_{2} = \pm {\vec{k}}_{3}

and

ω_{1} \pm ω_{2} = \pm ω_{3}

. This is seen for water waves, plasma waves, etc. but all these waves are scalar waves. I’ve never seen a discussion for where the waves lie on the surface of some general manifold, instead of being a scalar ....

The non–geometric case is that of weakly coupled knowledge graphs... of which some fraction of the nodes are activated, for each internal state.

Ugh. That’s the general setting I still do not have an expression that captures the complexity of a pair of interacting systems vs. a pair of isolated systems.

30 Sept 2026

Yesterday, I realized it’s a “me” problem. My emotional well–being is entirely my responsibility, and no one else’s. Superficially speaking, this is obvious. And yet, before this realization, my outlook was different. Hard to find the words. Poor me. Tragic me. This was happening was happening to me, I was a witness. That I’m a victim of circumstances, that circumstances do not align with my desires. But yesterday, I realized that only I can fix myself; no one else. This gave me strength. I walked around aroused. A bit angry with myself, and aroused, with a hard–on. Strutting and scowling and feeling stern. With a real fuck–you attitude and a dick in my pants to prove it. Fuck you, I don’t care any more, I’m past all that, and my dick got harder.

Got home. Repaired the Trajan’s column poster. Milda unflinchingly helped. This intimate pose where I pushed down on a straightedge, and she crawled under, between my arms, to cut with a razor.

This was the umpteenth repair to that poster, and I was reminded of the care with which some 18th century broken pottery has been repaired. Stitched back with meta stitches. I went to show a picture of this to Milda, but her reaction is foo, foo, ugly, get it away. I tried to show her more photos of repairs, for a broader perspective. But no, rejection. So I punch her in the shoulder and say “we’ll you know, I’m just trying to teach you a bit of culture.” You know, the playful punch. She wallops me back. Hard. Really hard, my shoulder hurts. Next thing I know, we’re in a sparring match, and I can’t land a single tap, and she’s giddy and giggling. She tries these kicks, even. One is this roundhouse high kick and she looses her balance and falls over laughing. It’s pure play. It could be taken as foreplay. Not what I was thinking at the time, but in retrospect, that’s what it could be taken as. At any rate, it was immensely enjoyable. I’m counting. This is the third time where we had laughing fits. The first time when we were really really high. The other times when we were completely sober. That’s my summer haul. Three hysterical laughing fits. That’s my summer haul.

As I write the last sentence, I’m beset by tears of joy again. And a mild hard–on. I was wondering if I could cry and be aroused at the same time, and, apparently, I can be. Life is wonderful, I guess. My heart is in my throat. It’s remarkable how powerful these feelings are. I’m feeling calm and content, right now. I am one with the universe. I accept the gifts I’ve been given. This is such a strange new world to me. It’s majestic, it’s magical, I’ve never been here before, it’s filled with wonders at every turn. On those occasions when it is too much, when it is overwhelming, my heart bleeds with aching joy, and I cry. Love is a drug. I’m still wildly in love. All it took was a sparring match.

It is aimed at a person I hardly know, a person I’m quite entirely incompatible with, a person who sleeps around and won’t sleep with me. A person who appears to selflessly adore me in all the small, little details that matter.

I learned how to drink alcohol. I mean, recently. The secret is you have to pace yourself. Drink too much, too fast, and its a wipeout, but if you regulate it, keep it at speed, you can go a long time. I guess I need to learn the same with this limerence/love thing. I just want more and more and more, my levels of desire and arousal just rise and rise. But I have to pace myself. The highs, the hits are intermittent and unpredictable. They arrive at random times. And they feel good, and I have to learn to coast. I also have to continue to harden my heart against heartbreak. She might be the one breaking my heart, but it’s me who has to not let that happen. I need to be strong, and healthy. I think I can do that. I’m on the road. It takes practice. All those decades, what was I doing? I was doing something else. Here, late in life, I’m presented with a gift.

Well, enough. I’ve got things I need to do. I’ll be in Chicago in six days.

Well, its now six hours later. I’m so confused. I can’t tell which way is up and which way is down. I need to slap myself in the face, and yell “snap out of it!”

So, earlier, I was approximating an agent with a finite state transducer with a transition function

T : M \times S \to S \times A

when it popped into my mind, what if I wrote

T : M \otimes S \to S \otimes A

instead? Naively, this appears to entangle the machine with the environment. On closer inspection, we have to ask: what does this even mean? How is this eqn to be interpreted? Can we articulate this with examples?

On a related note, one could say that wave function collapse corresponds to the mapping

Π : \otimes \to \times

that converts tensor products to Cartesian products. To give a concrete example:

Π : A \otimes B \to A \times B

that converts entangled states into uncoupled, independent components.

| ψ_{u} ⟩ | ↑ ⟩ + | ψ_{d} ⟩ | ↓ ⟩ ↤ | ψ_{u} ⟩ | ↑ ⟩ ⨿ | ψ_{d} ⟩ | ↓ ⟩

1 October 2026

Back to an even keel again. Out drinking with Milda till 3:30 AM (on a weeknight!) and as I start to see just how predictable her daily routine is, the calmer I get. My roller coaster is due to entirely unrealistic expectations on my part. Well, realistic, if it had been anyone else, but unrealistic in this case. Rytis was joking: if we had a biggest loser contest, who would win, you or me? If you come in second place, your an even bigger loser, since you can’t even win. that one. I respect the guy. Many flaws, gambling addiction, and all that, but he does see clear–eyed, and he is trying. He calls the two girls gypsies, and in this deep way, this is exactly right. Anyway, I think I’m done with the ups and downs, I see what is going on. I gain clarity on who she is, and this is reassuring. Insofar as my heart was broken one hundred times already, one more won’t matter.

One of the interesting dynamics here is that she draws me in, offers a relational gift, creates a bond, and then tries to push me away. But then every attempt to push me away fails, and so she gives up on that, and we return to neutral. What I find interesting is that her attempts to push away fail because she could actually do things that actually would push me away, but chooses not to. Probably because she knows that it would also destroy our friendship, and she’s not willing to sacrifice that. So her attempts to push me away are half–hearted, and result in one of two things: laughter and games, or, if not that, a sleepless night for me. After which I confront her in the morning, she says I’m crazy, takes some sort of pity on me, and it all returns to neutral. This is a weird relationship. But it is what it is, and I guess I’m finally getting comfortable with it. It’s become predictable. It is what it is. It’s got many warts and ugly bits, but it is what it is. I think I can come to peace with this.

I have to do email now.

3 October 2026

While walking around today, I reviewed the status of all I know about wave–function collapse. I did not make any progress, but perhaps typing up the review will open some ideas.

4 October 2026

It’s 1:30PM. Woke up about 3 hours ago. Milda is pouring me beer. Belgian beer, from the party. It’s strong. My eyes are misting, my heart beats. I was going to do serious work today, but instead, it seems I will float.

The first floater was an email to Owen, catching up on my life here. Events. My third (very private) argument with Milda. I guess not very private, because I told my sister, and now I told Owen. It’s fucking dramatic; one does not keep drama private.

The second float is a synopsis of Stanislaw Lem’s Solaris. It comes in a quora.com post. I’m clearing my emials, and quora.com keeps dinging me. This caught my heartstrings: “The more the scientists encounter and probe and experiment, the more they are thrown back to their own resources, and the less applicable and effective those means and methods are shown to be. This becomes an immersive existential crisis.” This came crashing like a thud into my heart. And now that I’ve copied it here, and read it, and begun to meditate on it, I find myself all but in tears. Box breathing helps. Box breathing is a method. Surprisingly effective in a large variety of settings.

Of course, the point is that my life has become an immersive existential crisis. I somehow remain remarkably functional through it.

Fuck. I just asked Milda if she’s seen it. And lo and behold, the Tarkovsky version is on youtube. Two hours forty–eight. I could immerse myself in it. Beer for breakfast, and coffee. Oh man.

I just read the Wikipedia entry “Solaris (1972 film)” and by the end, I am again wallowing. This is a very interesting existential crisis I am in. I’m enjoying it tremendously. I am thankful for it; despite the difficulty. My heart is exploding. I wonder what this is all about. I’m looking out into the room. The colors are exploding and bright. The lines are sharp. These are all the same, ordinary objects as always, and yet they seem brighter, more in focus than ever before. It’s like staring at some chiaroscuro painting, some Carravagio still–life. I’m embracing, caressing, making love to the image. It calls out to me as a lover.

I’ve lived my life in a state of calm and even temperment, mostly. Of course, the excursion or two, but mostly even. This summer has been a voyage on stormy seas. Wow.

I’m reading the WIkipedia of another Tarkovsky film, Andrei Rublev, and mid–sentence, my breath catches, and tears all but well up. The trigger? This: “... the subject grows within him like a fruit, and begins to demand expression. It is like childbirth... The poet has nothing to be proud of: he is not master of the situation, but a servant.” Because, I sit here, servant to that which rises within. Every two or three days, I’ve been experiencing these emotional over–spills, middle the day, middle of the afternoon. So this is right on time. Milda is milling about, otherwise, I’d let this progress fully to tears. Apparently, I am still very much in love. Despite everything.

OK, now might be a good time to grow analytic. The object I am in love with is not actually an object, but a part of the world model in my head of an external reality (if there even is such a thing as “external reality”, but it’s OK to use this phrase in the common–sense interpretation.) This model was created after repeated social interactions. It is represented by certain arrangements of atoms in my head. Or rather, a dynamic pattern in the hear and now, with the dynamics enacted by the atoms. I write “atoms”, but it remains unclear if atoms are needed, or if neuronal activity is sufficient. Clearly, there are many abstractions of what goes on with the atoms in my head, the abstractions each having varying levels of fidelity. Many (most??) of these abstractions would be deterministic, mechanical. Could they (or any of them) experience subjective reality and the feeling of love?

Perhaps that last question comes too soon. Subjective me is made of atoms. Subjective me has parts. Analytical, vocal me is distinct from the falling–in–love reptilian me. It all comes together with message–passing between different parts of the brain. Neuronal, for the most part. At the atomic level, photonic. And the photons are all within a few hbar of the null light cone. Simultaneous, universe–wide.

And yet, all biological agents are very strongly isolated from the universe. What comes in, comes in only through the sensory organs, these filter almost everything. The causal connectivity graph, of what can causally affect what, is strongly limited almost entirely to the interior of my skull. That’s the point of the Tonini Phi: the interior is highly connected, orders of magnitude more connected than it is to the outside.

Oh, but wait. Neurologically, there is a very specific part of the brain that is associated with consciousness.

Crap. I switched tabs, I was going to ask google something, and I forgot what. But the tab to Andrei Rublev is still open. “Creative work is his only possible form of existence, and his every work is like a deed he has no power to annul.” And so it is, I sit here, engulfed in an existential crisis, an unfolding burning, bleeding bloom of becoming.

Huh. Being in this state of aroused agitation is exhausting. Now I’m crashing. This coincides with Milda leaving to go visit her sister. I won’t see her again today, my penultimate day in Lithuania. The roller-coaster is not Milda, but the description of Durochka in the Andrei Rublev article. I haven’t seen the film, but she stands as a lover interest, going her own way, despite Andrei’s efforts. And so is life: love interests go their own way. My heart resonates now more for the general idea of romance, rather than in any particulars. Like a tear–jerker movie, but it’s not a movie, its real life. Fucking roller coaster, the highs are ecstatic, the lows are hard to bear. The background music is not helping. My groin is in turmoil, and can’t make up its mind whether to stand or not. I feel sleepy. I strongly believe that hugs and kisses would be utterly curative, right now, but there are none–such. I have not been hugged in twenty five years, and kissed only once. It’s sad, oh so very sad, and my heart bleeds. I am writing this because I have nothing better to write, until the ’apt–get upgrade’ concludes and I reboot.

Rebooted. Firefox restore session. The page that pops up, that I recall never ever having seen before is this: “Symbiotic Cosmology” by Chris King. More than a thousand pages of what has the superficial appearance of crankery, but being woo–inspired comes the question: how the eff did this end up in one of my tabs? I recall never having opened or seen this before, and now it is front and central. Not one to be superstitious, I now am willing to convert the coincidence into synchronicity. How did the universe fate the appearance of this page? What happened to Andrei Tarkovsky and Solaris? Does my stomach hurt of hunger, general gastro–intestinal distress or love? At any rate, its not exactly pleasant.

I’m continuing reading the Wikipedia article “Solaris (1972 film)” and while reading about the possibility of casting of various women in various roles, I am overcome with feelings of intense longing. Longing for what? Something inspecific. Well, longing for community.

As I walked around yesterday, I overheard snippets of conversations from two couples. One, the woman is saying: “I like good cooking. That is, I like to eat. Nothing fancy, but good.” OMG First date? Late twenties, maybe. Well–dressed. Strolling on the waterfront. I wondered: how was the date set up? A dating app?

Second conversation, Pilies g. Scruffy early–twenties couple, holding hands. The boy is saying: “I don’t feel that way. You’re projecting your feelings on to me.” OMG Did she just express desire for a deeper commitment? Will her heart be breaking minutes later, if not already?

I might have overheard mundane conversations ... but I didn’t. It’s like the algorithm of the universe knows, and is offering me suggestions. This begs the question: what is a mundane conversation, and why do we have them? Is love talk exhausting? Do people struggle with connection? Do they get lost in trivialities? During Milda’s birthday party, 3AM, I found myself listening to five people arguing about how thick the kitchen counter is: three centimeters? Or four? Someone asked me for my opinion, I tried to shrug it off as not important. Maybe I was too drunk to make the true point: why are y’all even talking about this? Is this late night smalltalk? How could this possibly hold your interest? At the time, I thought it was just stupid. I now realize, sober, that this was game whose social rules I never understood. If I can play with four–year–olds, perhaps I can learn to play with adults. On the other hand, it takes effort, and what is the reward? Will it have been worth the while?

Which brings me back to the topic of the communicative act as the binding of parts into organisms. Is any one photon more meaningful than others? Surely not, but the collection of them is binding.

I’m eating, but the angst is not fading. Maybe I do have some stomach bug. Some infection. God help, stomach cancer. Very unlikely. We’ll see how things even out in Chicago. If they even out.

What can we say about messages? They have a time–like extent: if someone is talking to me, the earlier part comes earlier, and is lost in the past. In my brain, a pattern forms and grows, with each new word adding to the structure. The structure is located in the here–and–now, using firing neurons to provide dynamics to the pattern, with analysis ongoing: the rational, common sense interpretation, the emotional content, each coming from excitations of different parts of the brain, but then echoing back and forth in the echo chamber of the mind. And it is indeed an echo chamber: the inside is much much larger than the outside: viz the connectivity bandwidth inside is much much larger than what comes in via eyes, ears. The eyes and ears are only small inlets, openings into this large reverberating neural network.

Whose size I still do not know how to correctly measure. Is it a sum over synapses times the bandwidth of each synapse? The sum over the firing rates of axons times the number of axons? Is it a non–flat sum, e.g. the bandwidth between two parts times the log–size of each part? This last definition makes sense, because the bandwidth needs to indicate the buried semantic meaning. OK, lets run with this, see what happens.

For example, what is the information content of a single sentence, say 7 words long? With an average of five letters per word, and 32 bits for each letter, this sentence is encodable with

7 \times 5 \times 32 = 1120

bits. But the next level up would say the information content is the sum of the mutual information (MI) of the word–pairs in MST tree parse. This is more accurate, because the total number of words in the vocabulary contributes implicitly to the total. But even this seems incorrect, because the vocabulary words should not be equal–weighted. They become equal–weighted in the expression

p (w, *) = \sum_{j} p (w, w_{j})

where

p (w, w_{j})

is the specific probability of observing a word pair in a language model. A more correct weighting would have the form

\sum_{j} α (w_{j}) p (w, w_{j})

where

α (w_{j})

is the measure of the size of the semantic network associated with word

w_{j}

As I write this text, I listen to synthwave on youtube. So this induces a certain retro–future backdrop into the proceedings. But its youtube, so there’s an endless number of skipads. I click over, and then I starrt reading the rest of the Solaris article, and again, my heart jumps into my throat. Its been twenty–plus minutes since I’d eaten, my stomach was settling as I wrote of mutual information. But with my heart in my throat again, and an empty, cold apartment, I’m lonely. I’m such an agony aunt, such a downer, such a pill; where is this coming from? Is this genetic? I’m pretty sure I am within the norms of the pains and desires of humans. Still, I don’t want to be a downer. But this is hard: The youtube illustration for the synthwave is a sci-fi waifu with half–barren breasts. This reminds me, like much around me in the modern western world, of sex, of desire. It’s pumping up the volume, but leaving me in the empty apartment.

I could go out and sit and type this in a cafe, but that is barely better; I still would not meet anyone. I mean, the chances wold be greater than zero. But ...

As I sat with trouble–on–wheels for day two of the party, I was in the position of joining in on a relaxed vibe. But for me, vibing takes effort. Fully unplugging, giving up, is easier. But less pleasant, in the end. I think I found a balance. Balancing through the existential crisis. Well, mutual, as trouble–on–wheels was doing the same: clearly balancing through an existential crisis. Her friends were oblivious to this. They were keeping her company, talking and laughing and goofing and chilling. But the unsettled anxiety in her, I could sense this. She wanted, needed, desired something. Something more. What? Wrestling with how to get it. In this, perhaps we have some commonality. She is kind to me, after all is said and done. She’s carved out a special niche for me. The calming words of reassurance arrive at all the times they must have felt appropriate. The women I meet: they are all kind to me. Too young to take active sexual interest. But all very kind. During Milda’s birthday party, Luann and Milda stood next to me, and joked, “How many wives do you have, Linai? Three or four? How many do you need? How many would you take?” I began, “As many as ...” and one of them finished the sentence: “... until his needs are met.” They understand. I must be broadcasting. I’m sure I’m broadcasting.

Explicit social interactions like this are always a surprise. Always welcome. Always heart–warming.

No one is mean to me. Well, not no one, but those who are not, I never see again.

Will a future LLM create a synth–sex surround, leaving young men, or people like me, in a permanent state of half–arousal, excited but unfulfilled? Will we stop reproducing as a species? Will a future dating app hypnotize some young girl to have sex with me? Personalized one–on–one mate–matching? Locating your soul–mate? And hooking you up? Because I could use that right now, a drug, a high. Something I need. Not a robot lover, a human lover.

Is the concept of a soulmate valid? Or is this a trope of some sort? Vibing is a thing: saying the right thing at the right time in the right way, to establish a connection. And then doing it again and again, to create a flow. Returning to brains as bundles of neurons, the vibes are a message, and as messages, they vibrate and vibe when the neurons resonate. Its not enough to broadcast a message, there has to be a receiver that is in tune. All these words are not my own; they are pop–culture. Vibe, vibrate, frequency, tune, energy. The allusions are not inaccurate: our brains are dynamical systems, and dynamical systems have, in general, oscillatory aspects. Except when they are odometers. Which are not cyclic.

Oh shit. Is there a decomposition theorem? Can I decompose any dynamical system into an arrangement of cyclic pieces and odometers that bump over by one, pushing to the next cycle? Maybe these are organized in some recursive, fractal way? Lets ask google.

Fucking skipads. I read the last part of Solaris. My heart jumps in my throat again: “Tarkovsky’s film is about the inner lives of its characters while Lem’s novel is about the conflicts of man’s condition in nature and the nature of man in the universe. For Tarkovsky, Lem’s exposition of that existential conflict was the starting point for depicting the characters’ inner lives.” The thought of the inner lives of characters makes me tear up. Why do I cry? Why is all this so bittersweet? Perhaps because I know I will die. The reminders are there: that Tarkovsky is dead appears in the article. That he wrote a memoire is there. That he was driven is there. Was he luckier in love than I have been? Surely. But then: “Bondarchuk revealed in a 2010 interview that she fell in love with Tarkovsky while filming Solaris and, after their relationship ended, became suicidal.” OMG. I’m choking up. How is it that I am so out of control? I mean, that is a rhetorical question. I know the answer. I’m just surprised. I feel like a meteor hurtling through space, burning, heating, melting, tumbling, glowing. See the glow? This is me. I’m high again.

OK. I’m stupid. It reminds me I should know the answer already. But I’m stupid and my heart aches. And I might tap that last beer soon. I ask:

“In physics/mathematics, most dynamical systems have cyclic aspects, something that repeats, and other aspects of an odometer: something ergodic that never visits the same place twice. Chaotic systems (especially low-dimensional chaos) seems to be a mixture of the two. Are there any theorems that state that dynamical systems can be decomposed into products of cyclic and ergodic parts?”

“There are three major theorems ...”

One of the three is the ergodic decomposition theorem. Next:

“The Halmos–von Neumann Theorem states that if a system has a pure point spectrum (its dynamics are entirely dominated by discrete, cyclic frequencies), it is completely isomorphic to an odometer or an irrational rotation on a compact abelian group.”

If I understand this correctly (I’m too lazy to read the article), it just says the dynamics are given by

\sum_{n} ρ_{n} exp - i ω_{n} t

so only rotations.

“The Decomposition: ... separate the space into the Kronecker factor (the cyclic part) and its orthogonal complement. The dynamics on the remaining part have a continuous spectrum, which corresponds to weak mixing.”

OK, I can see that too. If we replace the sum above by an integral

\int d ω ρ (ω) exp i ω t

and consider the integral to run over domains A and B, then, over time, A and B will mix, but only weakly mix, because they are still non–interacting (i.e. “orthogonal” (-ish))

This decomposition has a name:

“The Jacobs–de Leeuw–Glicksberg (JDLG) Decomposition. ... map the system into a Hilbert space using the Koopman operator (which turns a nonlinear system into an infinite–dimensional linear system), any measure–preserving dynamical system can be split into two orthogonal parts: $H = H_{c} \oplus H_{w}$ where $H_{c}$ is the Reversible / Compact Part... spanned by the eigenvectors of the Koopman operator. The dynamics on this subspace are almost periodic or equivalent to rotations on compact groups. The $H_{w}$ part is the Weakly Mixing / Flight Part: ... the chaotic or highly ergodic aspect. On this subspace, time–correlation functions vanish on average. It contains no non–trivial periodic components and corresponds to the continuous spectrum of the operator.”

“The Furstenberg–Zimmer Structure Theorem ... every measure–preserving dynamical system can be decomposed into a tower of extensions starting from a trivial system.”

“At each level of the tower, the system expands via one of two distinct mechanisms:

1. Isometric (Compact) Extensions: These act like generalized rotations, cycles, or odometers. They represent the structured, predictable, repeating parts of the system.

2. Weakly Mixing Extensions: These represent the chaotic, information-producing, and highly ergodic parts where trajectories diverge.”

“Low-Dimensional Chaos ... (like the Lorenz attractor or a chaotic pendulum), this decomposition manifests through stable/unstable manifolds and periodic orbits.

• The system is spanned by an infinite number of unstable periodic orbits (the cyclic aspect).

• The chaotic trajectory weaves ergodically around these orbits without ever perfectly closing back on itself (the odometer/ergodic aspect).”

OK, Terrence Tao has a writeup for Furstenberg–Zimmer.

I have to take a break. Later.

Break over. I will need to go to bed soon. So I’m quasi–relaxing. I’m skimming Chris King. Some notable sentences:

“Wave collapse then corresponds to a critical phase transition from a ‘plasma’ of multiply interacting pairs to a ‘solid’ of real particles in a process providing a basis for conscious anticipation, conferring a survival advantage on the conscious organism.”

Bingo. But what are these pairs?

“In the transactional approach, an emitter sends an offer wave, which future absorbers respond to with advanced confirmation waves (Cramer, 1986; Kastner, 2012).”

So here, the emitters are the past boundary of my here–and–now, and the future absorbers are the future boundary. In between is this “plasma”. I don’t like the word plasma, here. For me, this is where all possibilities exist (all possibilities within a few hbar of classical.)

This struck me: “...providing a basis for conscious anticipation, conferring a survival advantage on the conscious organism.” Of course, if read literally. If I see something dangerous, I can take conscious evasive measures and enhance my survival. This suggests that consciousness is amplified by natural selection. The loaded wording is this: “conscious anticipation” – can an organism anticipate without being conscious? Loaded wording is dangerous. I very minor to–do is to resolve the above with what I wrote earlier about stable/unstable manifolds.

This also catches my eye:

“Biological molecular processes do not approach classicality, because they do not involve independent identically distributed (IID) measurement, upon which the Born interpretation is founded.” Whoa, baby. Stop the presses? Umm, that hits hard.

OK, in symplectic manifolds, there is only one (or perhaps a finite number of) geodesics aka classical trajectories. Is this a theorem? What happens if there is a manifold where the number of trajectories with the minimal action is uncountable? This would ... break stuff ... Shit. This is a major TBD.

Distraction. Another youtube skipad. This one for Bayan Tree Samui. This appears to be a luxury tropical real–estate paradise. It makes my heart jump. The way it reads to me is as another simulacrum, a balm for the heartache of life. Thank goodness its a hotel. Temporary. About 500 to 700 euro a night. Its a sensual retreat. For a few days, it is surely wonderful. As a balm. But at first, I thought it was a property for sale, and my heart sank. Would one want to live like that, forever? No. It would be empty, boring, meaningless. A distraction. Some kind of drug. It would wear off. Why would I sit in a pool, all day, every day, forever? Maybe this is why life is short, to make it precious. An infinitude of sensual pleasure would be unbearable. I crave, I want that high. But the high becomes empty if it is not fleeting. Well, I’m distracted, I can’t recapture the feeling that first hit as I watched this skipad. It was a feeling of heartbreak, of heartache. Of emptiness, of loneliness. It signaled an empty, meaningless life. Some superficial aesthetic pleasures. And then what? I wrote of meaning elsewhere in this diary. I stick to what I wrote, although I cannot recall right now. Mmmm. Meaning. Meaning is what matters. Meainglessness is hell. But I speak from the heartbroken perspective. Your milage may vary. Of course. Damn.

Anyway, I’m in haze, which is why this is unclear and lacks incisiveness. I drank that last Belgian beer. I should write a thank you note for that.

6 October 2026

Helsinki airport. Three hour layover.

I had some bright idea yesterday on the train to Kaunas, but what was it? Oh right. Goes like this:

A distinguishing hallmark of biological organisms is that they can survive for billions of years. This is possible because the DNA is protected behind a cell wall, and because the DNA has error correction mechanisms of various kinds (double strand, but also windings around, and also explicit repair enzymes, and more...) Let backtrack this to single atoms. Better yet, a single oscillator.

The context is again, here–and–now, and the question is: what is the developmental dynamics of the here and now? Its a dynamical system, of increasing complexity. Why?

Single atoms are unstable, in that they can be ionized. Ionization can be prevented by putting them behind a wall, a protection barrier. This barrier prevents causal inferences from the outside from harming the contents inside. The Feynman path integral says “integrate over all paths”. The presence of a barrier says “no not all paths; there is no (direct) causal linkage between here and there.” (I mean, yes, of course this is not the intent of the path integral; I’m trying to evoke the origin of structure.)

Rocks are subject to weathering; once dissolved or turned into sand, there’s no going back. This is the conventional interpretation that “entropy always increases”, or that the phase space of a bunch of sand is much much larger than that of the original rock. Or that rum and coke, once mixed, cannot be unmixed, purely as an entropic argument. In math, topological mixing or weak mixing or strong mixing. The presence of a biological cell wall prevents mixing across the wall.

The most basic dynamical system is an oscillator. The biological cell is a far more complex dynamical system. What drove it into being? It seems more stable, having autopoetic aspects. Maintenance of stability seems just as important as the growth of complexity.

There’s a tension: something is ingressing from the platonic world. For the case of evolution, the ingress is of structures that are thermodynamically reachable from the current cytoplasmic state. All possible states reachable from the present are explored. In the case of DNA, is this quantum or purely thermodynamic? Of course chemistry has a QM aspect to it, but does this matter for mutations? (Point mutations, cross–overs, and the far more complex processes involving jumping genes, methylation, Crispr, CAS, etc etc.) Here–and–now seems to be a purely quantum thing, right? To what degree is evolution volitional? Does evolution have a subjective experience? That is, does evolution intentionally select certain mutations, as opposed to being a purely random process driven by thermodynamic flows?

A collection of atoms will disperse, unless something binds them together. (viz, they will mix, rum–n–coke style) A collection of atoms with bonds, viz, a molecule, will be held together indefinitely, until such time that it is ionized. Molecules are form by the exchange of messages. In this case, the exchange of photons. Viz past light cone. And yet, these are all very infrared. That is, the system is diagonalizable. That is, the hydrogen atom, described by the Schrodinger eqn has a collection of atomic orbitals. The photons are implicit in the

1 / r^{2}

potential. That is, the soft photon exchange binding the electron to the proton has been replaced by a mean–field approximation; it nets out to

1 / r^{2}

by averaging over all possible photon exchanges. I do not know how to technically undo this; I don’t know how (and have never seen) a derivation of the

1 / r^{2}

potential from first principles. I suppose that perhaps this is well–known, perhaps Feynman has demonstrated this, or someone else famous. I need to as google now.

Or not. I assume the derivation will be a mean–field one. Although it’s confusing. Each emitted photon is also absorbed; each emitted photon carries momentum. The momentum can be canceled out by considering pairs of plane–wave photons traveling in opposite directions, or by using an s–wave, or spherical harmonics, which carry no momentum in the radial direction. But the absorbers are also quantum mechanical. How does one do mean–field, doesn’t one need to ignore the absorbers? I’m imagining the ability to do an expansion in powers of hbar ... A core assumption of the derivation is that the photons are I.I.D. – independent identically distributed and this gives rise to normal QM.

The assumption of IID is foundational to QM. Can it be challenged? Certainly not in any kind of normal lab experiment. QM or tensor logic does have the idea of “choice”, but this choice is always random. There does not seem to be any room for willful, volitional choice at this level.

The only known mechanisms to complicate this picture re three–fold. The background space–time can be considered to be not smooth at the Planck scale. This can cause extremely tiny but “non–random” choices to be made. Then there is the cosmic neutrino background; the cross section is absurdly tiny but non–zero. Then there is the QFT vacuum. Even soft photons need to be dressed with multi–loop corrections. But in each of these, there is no obvious violation of I.I.D. and so no obvious source of volition or willfulness. Not onless one goes fully woo, and tries to assert willfullness in the universe, which somehow arranges the space–time background and the QED vacuum to do “just the right thing” for some reason. But this argument collapses ad absurdum; it just transfers willfulness to the universe, where it remains unexplainable and unanalyzable. This kind of woo may in fact exist, but it does not provide any kind of grip or crow–bar which can be applied to deconstruct, dismantle the core issue of volition. So this is a dead–end. At any rate, it also fails to tackle or address the idea of ingress.

OK, next topic. Can we build a simply dynamical system that demonstrates ingress? As explained earlier, physical implementations of Turing machines are capable of ingressing: e.g. the Mersenne prime search will ingress a new prime when it is found. But Turing machines per se are not measure–preserving dynamical systems. Or are they? Well, it seems quite reasonable to describe a mechanical calculator; it would be measure–reserving. But then, the only reason that measures are interesting in the first place is to describe mixing and ergodicity; i.e. to take the

N \to \infty

limit of some repeated operations. If this limit is not needed, then there is no reason to work with measures on a Cantor set. The measure could be supported on a finite set. Take a Turing machine with a finite tape, assign a finite measure to each cell. This gives a measure–preserving dynamical system that can ingress.

We conclude that ingress and measure are somehow unrelated? Lets say the machine is running code to find prime numbers. With each new prime that is discovered and printed to the tape, the complexity of the info on the tape increases. Technically, the entropy increases: if the tape started will all zeros, then this is an extremely ordered state, with very low entropy. With each new printed prime, one could argue that the entropy increased .... or did it? The primes are very not random. Err, hah hah. That is, with each new prime found, the contents of the tape changed, but not randomly. It remains in a very highly ordered state. There is no ensemble. Entropy is always computed for ensembles, and a deterministic machine does not offer an ensemble. Unless we use some Mealy–Moore equivalence to argue for a probabilistic machine, and thus an ensemble? The output, however, remains deterministic.

So we have a deterministic machine that is ingressing. The measure is preserved, the complexity increases. The entropy is ??? Nothing quantum was needed. There was no volition, except for the ab initio question of “where did this particular machine come from?” Or “how did this machine manifest into the physical universe”? That is, there is some initial manifestation, outside of the scope of the stated question. This manifestation, once set to running, i.e. by allowing time to pass, increases the complexity of the physical universe, and causes prime numbers to ingress. That is, once the pump is primed, it can pump away all on it’s own.

This raises two other issues: the only way to manifest a computer into the physical universe is to have a human being build it, and for that to happen, evolution must have run first. The only out to this might be the discovery of some astrophysical phenomenon that just so happens to look like an algo that computes primes. Maybe some weird earthquakes on some neutron star could do this. Very unlikely and implausible, but not impossible.

The other issue is representational or interpretational. That is, if a Turing machine is printing primes onto a tape, who “knows” that these are primes? Mathematicians and programmers might recognize them as such, but what if there were no humans around? In what sense are these numbers ingressing, if no one knows what they mean? The point here is that Levin is arguing that biological structures are ingressing, whereas I’m dealing with abstractions. But then, Levin is dealing with ingress from evolution; I’m dealing with ingress from mind.

One step forward and two steps back.. you don’t get too far like that. Song lyrics.

Boarding has started. Time to shut down (the computer).

7 October 2026

I have two choices in front of me. One is to ignore, bottle up the psychic pain that I feel, and move forward, stoically affectless, with the important tasks in front of me, e.g. buying clothing, examining finances, following up on some social obligations. The other is to do a dive into the disaffected vapour surrounding me, and do some emotional processing.

I recognize the importance of the former, but I want to do the latter. The latter carries risks and rewards. The risk is that I fall into a state of moping, unhappy, dissatisfied, mildly depressed. The reward is that emotional processing, done without incurring self–injury, provides the foundation of meaning.

What is a meaningful life? Conventionally: to have lived, loved, learned. Ask your favorite LLM about this, and you’ll get an answer along those lines: there must be millions of web pages and blogs, never mind books that discuss the nature of meaning and meaningful experience. I can provide no new insight; I process for myself. One of the curious things about a depressive state is that you can read advice for what you can do (what activities you can undertake) to lift your spirits, and all these activities seem so colorless and uninviting. There is not only a barrier between you and the happy state, but also a barrier that shuts out the advice. Oddly, I also want to write that the depressive state is deeply meaningful.

But first, a disclaimer: I’m not actually depressive, per se; I’m just nurturing, bathing such a state. There is a weak strain of feelings I am trying to grab a hold of and give voice to. The undercurrent is there; turning that undercurrent into words, into appropriate words is the challenge. I want to grab it while it is still there, while it is not gone. While it has not faded. While it is rich and colorful.

And another aside before I dive to the main task. The background affect, for me, remains a weakening and fading angst of love. The lovesickness remains and colors and infuses the background. I am discovering the more I eat, the less my stomach hurts. I am also discovering that the more I eat, the more rapidly I gain weight. So, dicey. Exercise alone cannot burn those extra calories.

I’m not attempting to structure anything of what I am writing into any compelling literary narrative. This is more of a stream–of–consciousness flow. I have three or five topics I want to write of, right now, but of those, whenever I try to sort that list, to organize it, to weave it into a tapestry of development and narrative, I risk stalling out. It takes energy and effort to create a compelling narrative. I’m not writing a literary masterpiece here, for other (human) readers. I am trying to capture my feelings with words, and that has to be the primary effort: to splash the ineffable into text, in any way possible; a beautiful narrative with rational structure is necessarily secondary. Something else with bigger brains than I will be able to turn this into a Hollywood block–buster movie, if need me.

Meaning, the search for meaning, I want to project this onto everyone I meet, I have spent time with in Vilnius. I have the general impression that everyone is mildly unhappy, everyone is searching for meaning. My three day birthday party with trouble–on–wheels. The second day is relaxed, quiet; almost all guests have left. She’s sipping on white wine, from fairly early in the day, trying to maintain a state of mild intoxication, trying to maintain a positive affect with a mixture of alcohol, social media, and a small cloud of old and new friends radiating engagement, providing company. One of her (female) friends got just a little drunker, just a little tireder in that second evening; she sent her off to bed, but then said, “I’ll come join you later; I want to sleep with you.” Not sexually, it was clear from context that she wanted company. She did not want to sleep alone. She did not want to be lonely. As simple as that: a remedy against loneliness. The birthday announcement included a sentence or two that explained that she had found and lost love. She’s in the lost love phase; I don’t know how long ago, how much earlier, but that the colors remained was clear. I guess I’m sensitive to this, as I also find myself in the phase of found and lost love.

Others, and their emotional highs and lows that I’ve gotten to see, include Cica and Inga. Cica’s craziness and lack of grace and balance is a manifestation of a blind seeking for something unattainable: success as artist. Recognition as person. Desire for fame. My cousin Ieva’s romantic longings. The Vytas and Rūta, separated for two years, now together again. Seeking, desire. Milda, Agnė, Rytis. I’ve already sketched a portrait of some of this. Right now, I won’t sketch more, even though there is much much more to be said. Notable perhaps is the role of alcohol. The Sunday after her birthday, late morning, early afternoon, I’m still waking up, drinking coffee, and Milda is opening and offering me beer. She understood my heart is broken, she understood I took it all very heroically, she understood that alcohol can serve as a salve to my heart, that being lost in a haze of alcohol can ease the pain. And I understood, in my own way, that this is a gesture of caring. That she is emotionally sophisticated enough to read and understand and take care of me, which my animal self interprets as love. That she still loves me, in this, limited, platonic, motherly caring way. That she is not harming or hurting me. My heart jumps slightly as I write this. The actual love affair is entirely impossible and out of the question, but the lingering gentleness is a message that comes across clearly. At any rate, there is a lot of alcohol, and a lot of partying in her life, which I take to be symptoms of a search for meaning, a search for a high that cannot be found, even as being blotto drunk and partying seems to almost offer that, to give a shimmering illusion that at the end of it, at 7AM, after partying, as dawn breaks, that once again, Nirvana slips out of reach.

And, if I am enumerating: a half–dozen or more romantic encounters. Or rather, not that “something happened”, but rather that people opened up their hearts to me, and that what they showed was deep romantic longing, desire, hurts, aches, wants. Monica, whose boyfriend cheated on her, endlessly. Grabbing me and holding me, taking my hand and not letting go. The woman dressed in black, I don’t recall her name, sitting close next to me, telling me how there is nothing left between her and her husband. Why did I not sleep with her? I was not physically attracted. I guess I’m picky. Even as I turn old and ugly, I’m picky. It’s a lifestyle, a lifestyle I don’t know how to lead. I can’t yet lead. I’m not ready to lead. Questions about which remain unresolved: is the erotic sex worth it? Probably. I suppose. Maybe. But I fear creating further harm after meaningless sex. Maybe I create harm by not providing the requested sex. Because I know I want that too ... just with someone else. Well, these are .... interesting experiences. Perhaps I mis–played them. I do not live in a state of grace. I may seek it, but I am far from it. Interesting.

Erotic sex being, of course, the endpoint of romantic love. Hopping to the endpoint without the intervening middle seems odd. I think I may have to adjust my value system to allow this, as otherwise I myself might find that I remain unhappy. Of course, I may adjust, and still remain unhappy. Nirvana is, in the end, fundamentally unattainable. I guess. except for those ten or twenty seconds of sexual climax. Well, I wasn’t going to write about this, but here we are.

The point of all this is that overtones of connection color the background of all of my social encounters. I’m not sure how or why. Did I simply not notice this before? Was it that, as a scientist and mathematician, I was unaware, unobservant, blind to such longings? I do have to credit the events of this summer, and all that lead up to it, to waking a previously dormant part of my personality.

Its not just me. On the plane, the girl next to me was clearly crying over some breakup. She turned to me, all puffy–faced, and said she had allergies. Sure. That is why she was hiding behind her hand. I cried a lot all summer. I wonder if I will cry this fall?

Its not just me. Every love song ever written is all about this. Half of all movies deal with this. On the plane, I watched the original Blade Runner. I saw it when I was young. Back then, it was an unresolved blur. I remember scenes, I did not understand their meaning. This time, it did shine through. Desire, connection, meaning. OMG. And it is powerful. A story of love, a story of the finiteness of life. My stomach is full, I’m drinking coffee, I’m even and neutral, but I do recall having some tears stream down my face as I watched that movie. Or was it the movie before? “Signal One.” There were points that resonated in that movie. It was OK. The resonances, they seemed to have promised to be even stronger, but they weren’t, in the end. It was OK, not great, but OK. I don’t want to be a movie critic, just right now. It’s not a worthwhile activity, just right now.

The only point of being a movie critic here would be to explore alternate developments. The old scientist and his daughter. It’s like – the daughter is introduced as a character, as if she is going to be used to make a point, but that point is never made. She never turns into anything other than a decoration on the side. The drives f the scientists – these are never explored. You get the backstory of the lead woman scientist, and that backstory is set up to be leveraged into the main plot line. But it never is. Her backstory remains dormant. It never becomes instrumental to the plot. It was set up to be instrumental, but then was never used. Odd.

We all have our backstories. I have mine. Is my backstory instrumental to my current predicament? I would not be me, without my experiences. I would not do what I do, if it had not become a part of my character. Of course. And yet, it all feels somehow vaguely immaterial and unimportant. I’ve arrived here, now, and sure, past events have shaped me, but who I am now is what matters right now. Who I am now is what propels me forward. Would other past histories led me to here? Maybe or maybe not. In many ways, my life is universal, universally experienced by all. In other ways, I feel utterly alienated from humanity.

Again: it is the emotional richness, both highs and lows, that appears to generate meaning.

I want to write about alienation. I’m finding myself increasingly alienated. There’s a scene in Blade Runner, late in the movie, where the protagonist is in a bar. In the scene, sharply dressed, fashionable, beautiful, or rather, attempting to be beautiful through dress, makeup, accessories and composure, young women, and men, lined up at the bar, like peacocks, look at me, look at me. I reacted both with recognition and revulsion. Recognition: I do want to be admired for my beauty. Revulsion: a seeming emptiness, a lack of meaning. As if the getting dressed, the makeup, the acting out, the drinks, the cocktails will propel to that state of nirvana. It won’t. In a good mood, one can enjoy the frissons of looking good. It does elevate the spirits, the mood. I’ve been to plenty of parties where I was just happy being happy. I know that this is a possibility. I remember it, vaguely, though, through the clouds. During Milda’s birthday party, just a few days ago, there was half an hour or an hour where I was just very happy. I was mostly, almost entirely sober. I was busy being a good host. I was busy chatting with everyone. I was a bit of the social butterfly, visiting all. I had no other needs, desires, wants at that moment. Everything was fine, at that moment. I had no cares. But this is set off from my broader mood, in which I’ve been stewing all summer. I deeply crave love. Romantic love. Hugs. Kisses. Sex. I’m deeply unhappy that I have this not.

Disclaimer: this is a passing feeling that comes and goes. Right now, its gone. It may come again, perhaps more strongly, perhaps weaker. I am, however, for the purposes of authoring and examination, trying to recreate this feeling so that I can wrote from the position of inspiration as accurately as I can.

So in this state, I feel increasingly alienated from other lifestyles. Oh, wait. Hang on. This is interestingly double–edged. I skimmed the New York Times this morning, and it has dozens of stories featuring people, personalities, lifestyles, everything from protesters in France to executives, cooks, and ... well, I don’t want to be any of them. I’m revulsed. I would not want to be like them, I would not want to be their friend. I read about someone famous, and what enters my mind is not so much as how much I don’t like them, not how much I don’t want to be like them, but how foreign, uninspiring, broken, pathetic, ugly and revolting it would be to live like that. I feel very very alienated from all the people, all the personalities that parade through the pages of the New York Times. Shit, I’m having some trouble articulating this correctly; it was a fleeting feeling I had this morning, but now the words don’t entirely ring true, and this position hardly feels defensible. However, between then (this morning) and now (this afternoon) I lost an hour scrolling instagram videos, and I fell in love with the women in them. One: a girl climbing trees like a pixie and acting out with IDGAF energy and she’s smiles, and she explains: stop caring what other people think. Enjoy yourself. And I’m thinking: Can you be my valentine? Another woman, doing energetic yoga moves, quasi–gymnastics, and I’m thinking “I could live with you. I could fall in love with you.” A third girl expressing rage through wild punchy angry dance move–jumps, explaining how letting it all out in movement is calming and reassuring, and I’m like “Yes. Yes it is.” So I smile. My hope in humanity is restored. I feel connection. Let’s go faster and farther and higher, fly high and touch the sky, through energy and movement and dance and calesthenics. When I ride a bike, I ride uphill faster than most people ride downhill. Yeeee–haaah. I’m physical, in that way, and I get recharged when I’m with other physical, wild and carefree people. So this morning, I felt alienated. Everyone else, all of humanity, everyone, looked so colorless, so lifeless, so meaningless, so empty and shallow. I want color and meaning. I want energy.

Hmm. As I read what I wrote, it sure sounds like sub–clinical manic depression. Well, so be it. So far as its sub–clinical, I don’t mind, and I think I’m not in personal danger. Perhaps one foot over a mighty slippery slope. But I’m sober. I can handle it. Like the old Steppenwolf song: Lookin for adventure, ahh but nothing comes my way. Born to be wild. I’m one of those born to be wild. Odd that I do math. I want to got farther, faster. To infinity and beyond. I love the manic feeling. Not sure why I felt so alienated from humanity this morning. Maybe because humanity does not smile at me. Maybe because the New York Times does not smile at me. While the tree–climbing pixie does. Its an instagram reel, she smiled for a hundred thousand other viewers. But it gave me hope and joy and meaning.

Later today, or tomorrow, or next week, I will need to do a reductive analysis of meaning in the subjective environment of being–ness. That is, I full believe that eukaryotes, in their quest for positive–valence experience in the here–and–now, as they swim after food and avoid poisons, that they too are engaged in a search for meaning, and a search for euphoria. Even the immobile, cellulose–surrounded cells in the bark of a tree – they too search for meaning and redemption, of being saved from a sad and lonely life, of rising, someday, up to heaven. I beleive this to be true. Yes, of course, you can say that I am projecting. But the reductionist argument of it being all atoms lacks a critical missing piece: why are we driven to find meaning and purpose? It’s not just humans and animals. The here–and–now, the present prison of subjective reality, I’m certain it extends both upwards and downwards, fractally, hierarchically up and down the universe, from (sub–)atomic scale up through social, cultural and economic scale. These last six sentences are just affirmations of what I already believe. Written, perhaps like a prayer, written perhaps, to remember and not forget, to burn into the very core of what I believe, but ... without these affirmations, I feel ungrounded. Writing this is my way of touching grass. I do this before I set out on grander adventures.

It’s weird. Social media is addicting, but my own personal feed is very life–affirming. Is this just me, or is this true for everyone? It is feeding me what I need, just right now. Well, it is feeding me what I need psychologically, just right now. Informationally, not so much. Maybe because I have enough information about everything, everything except the psychological and love relations. FYI, about 80% of my facebook reelz feed is about dating and men–women relationships. I guess cause I clicked “like” on some of them. Its been very ... educational.

BTW, I’m starting to realize that the human side of things is very complex, so I have to be very careful about disentangling what I feel, subjectively, onto eukaryotes (or other systems). So a major to–do item is to figure out what the subjective complexity is of these other life–forms, and what the domain, the range of felt experience might be. And that requires a developed theory of breadth and depth and volume and extent of subjective experience. I will think about that as I walk around later today.

So. Whatever. Its a nice day outside, I’ve written myself dry. The huge task in front of me is to resume the, uhh, philosophical, physical, mathematical foundations of the subjective experience. Do I have a foothold, a hand–hold? It feels like I almost do. I keep slipping, but then it comes back. Perhaps I advance a few hbar at a time. Shit, I have so much to do, and so little time to do it in.

8 October 2026

OK. Well, I ate breakfast, but a non–specific mild aura of lost love persists. I wanted this, and I got it. The present of life, of being alive. Of feeling alive. But now, a downer. A mixture of hope and despair. In romantic novels, the narrator writes: “and now he threw himself into his work.” Odd. I choked up writing that. Unexpected.

OK, So one work item was to ask google why people cry a lot. The edited answer:

“Mental Health Conditions: Persistent tearfulness is a hallmark symptom of clinical depression.”

Well, it could be that, because it is accompanied by the grief of rejected love. Plus also maybe inherited from my mom, who has been depressive large parts of her life. But also:

“Heightened Emotional Sensitivity: Some individuals have a nervous system that registers emotional data more intensely and rapidly. Psychologists often refer to these individuals as Highly Sensitive People (HSPs).”

Yeah, well, that could be me, too. Nobel achievements, such as sports achievements, would make me cry. The “Tour de France” video from Kraftwerk, or the Leni Riefensthal Berlin Olympics diving sequence, in the “Stripped” video from Rammstein, where they are flying through the air, this reliably sets me off in a major crying fit. Well, I don’t know if that makes me highly emotionally sensitive, but it does mean ... something.

OK. I’m bored. Google is not telling me anything I don’t already know. The real question is whether I will be able to repair anything with Patty. I suspect she’s getting senile, so perhaps unrepairable. I keep thinking that I should start dating, but I do not want to date Americans. And to date Lithuanians, I would have to be in Lithuania. Perhaps I should but high energy into that posting at VDU.

I wish I was still in Vilnius. Yet that would have meant close proximity to the acute stressor. Dealing with that is a challenge. How do you live with someone who has entangled into a platonic love affair? But refuses sexual advances? It feels like an unsolvable predicament.

Anyway, lets throw myself into my work.

Yesterday, I concluded that purely deterministic systems (digital computers) can ingress (Mersenne primes). However, there are two pre–requisites (a) the deterministic system must itself have been materialized into the material world (computers built by humans) and (b) the ingressed arrangement of atoms (primes stored on disk) is given a semantic meaning by subjective organisms (mathematicians).

So we can move backwards: where did humans come from? The answer: evolution. How does evolution ingress? Consider thermally accessible point mutations to DNA strands. Here, we escape point (a) in two different ways: (a1) atoms can be taken to exist, a priori. And (a2) such mutations are not deterministic. By convention, they are taken to be stochastic, but I cannot rule out the relevance of QM. As to point (b) what gives a mutation “meaning”? Well, since DNA is being transcribed by ribosomes into proteins and assorted cellular machinery, we are free to say that the DNA is “given meaning” by the cellular machinery. Since we’d earlier insisted that cells have a subjective experience, this is full in accord. Mutations are “experienced by” the subjective cellular organism. They may even be perceived with valence: some mutations are deleterious, causing the cell to break down, wear out, function slowly or be impaired. As valence, it would be experienced as a form of pain or disease. Other mutations could be experienced with a positive valence.

Here, we have two distinct agents. One agent is the cellular organism itself, and the other is the process of evolution. The cellular organism also has the process of methylation as a mechanism for controlling gene expression; we will ignore this. The cellular organism has many interesting subsystems, all tangential to the present task. The agent of concern is evolution itself. The earlier diagram depicts this agent.

Can we tighten this up? More to the point: does this agent have (a) a subjective experience and (b) free will?

Before we get to that, lets take a closer look at the here–and–now. Consider a single prokaryote. Consider all the atoms in it. Consider the action that describes these atoms. Consider the locations of the atoms that correspond to the least action. These form a symplectic manifold. A fixed symplectic manifold lies at the “center” of here–and–now. Note, BTW, this symplectic manifold changes over time. Thus, one has a sequence of symplectic manifolds, indexed by time. This sequence is a “geodesic”, in that it corresponds to a minimization of the action. The dynamics are of Euler–Lagrange applied to this ultra–high–dimensional space of some 10^20 atoms.

Anyway, I’m bungling this. I wanted to get back to the idea that mutations that affirm the location of the cellular organism on the stable manifold are perceived as positive valence both by the organism itself, and also by the evolution agent. That is, organisms that get pushed into the unstable manifold die. Evolution is creating cellular organisms with not only long–term stability, but are driving increasing complexity. Thus, I conclude that increasing complexity is perceived as a positive valence state by the evolution agent. This implies that the evolution agent has subjective experience (yes, I’m doing backwards inference, here) and that therefore, it must have had some form of choice or volition.

What are the choices? Well, the obvious ones are “I can mutate this or I can mutate that.” How does this become a choice? Well, first, its not an either–or choice: one can take both mutations, or just one, or neither. Like all choices, the outcome won’t be known till much later: the result of a mutation won’t be known until much later, when the organism lives or dies, much as the result of my decision to twitch my finger won’t be known till much later (e.g. in an FPS twitch game) To make a conscious choice, the evolution agent would need to be (a) conscious (b) have a world model (c) make a prediction about the future based on this world model. (d) perform an action consistent with maximizing the expected positive valence reward of taking that action.

The problem here is that (d) does not sound volitional; it sounds somehow predetermined: one only needs to maximize something. But here, we have a similar problem with humans: for the most part, we make choices to maximize our future happiness. Do we have volition, when we are merely maximizing some reward function?

I need to take a nap...

The nap was good, at first, and then turned a bit tortured as it wore on. The usual brand of torture. Then, hours later, at dinner, my sister explains she has a boyfriend (“a friend who is male, but not my boyfriend” which deserves but didn’t get an eyeroll) and as she says this, some old Sting/Police song is playing on the restaurant radio, and my entire world goes into a tailspin. It stops after a few minutes, but I sit in shock for the next ten, twenty minutes. Its so powerful, so overwhelming, so totalizing. I had no idea. These emotions grip pretty much everyone, all humans. And apparently, horses too, judging from youtube videos. Why am I surprised? I don’t recall being in such grips before. Well, not like this. This one has special meaning: I’m old, I’m close to death. My chances of recovery are vastly slimmer. I’m not young and beautiful any more. There is a finality, now, that was never before, and it is stunningly mind–altering. I’m freaked, I’m panicking. I’m scared.

Anyway, that passed after about twenty minutes. I know versions of it will return, in sleep and in naps. Sleep and naps are danger time, for me.

Anyway, I think the above can shed insight onto point (d) above?

So I feel like I have volition, in that I can choose to wiggle my toe, or not. Either choice seems to be equal; well, maybe minor health and exercise benefits from wiggling my toes, so, insofar as I act to maximize my future perceived happiness, it matters little if I wiggle my toes or not. The panic attack, the tailspin, comes from a sudden feeling that I may no longer have any chances to maximize my future happiness. That I am doomed to ... not have a girlfriend, a wife, to have someone to bond with.

But the other point is that all the places where I feel I have free will, all those places give me choices that matter little. Should I get out of bed o the left, or the right?

The problem of imagining that the behavior of an agent can be obtained by maximizing a single universal function is that the inputs to my feelings are neither universal, nor static. That is, when the part of me that feels the angst of love is active, this drives me to contemplate one set of actions, and when it passes, I contemplate a different set of actions. So the expected–future–rewards model is changing, sometimes rapidly, in minutes or seconds. How can one optimize future expected happiness, when the perception of what would make one happy shifts rapidly? The optimization sloshes about.

What about momentous decisions? Momentous decisions require extensive thought, rumination, analysis. That is, I feel like I carry them out of free will, but I spend vast amounts of effort to try to deduce the best course of action. That is, it is not very clear what I even mean by volition. I sense that I have it, but I struggle to define it. And if I can’t define it, then what do I do with points (a)–(d) above?

That is, I sense I have volition, but I can’t prove it. How could I deal with the question of whether evolution has volition?

Projecting my own emotional turmoil onto evolution, can evolution also be laboring in a turmoil? Is that why it cranks out so many different species? Or are all these different species merely just space–filling curves, trying to occupy the space of all possible creatures? More properly, an ecosystem?

I’m on a roll here, but my eyes are slamming shut...

9 October 2026

Slept well, was not tortured. Or rather, minimally tortured by relatively mundane anxieties (I can’t remember them right now.) Over the decades, I’ve been tortured by: Forgetting to move out of my dorm room. Being unable to find my car in the parking lot. Being unable to move my grandparents fine furniture from the dorm room to my car. Forgetting I owned a motorcycle, then finding it (turns into a flying dream). Getting lost in Paris. Getting lost in the subways of Paris. Not being able to find my hotel room. Rediscovering a path from my hotel room to a cool eatery in Hong Kong, but then getting lost in mid–town Manhattan. Forgetting about my bank account in Chicago. Forgetting and discovering multiple houses. Finding out my wife Patty bought a house where she plans to live without me. This last one is hard: she’s divorced me. That dream lasted for, I dunno, a decade. Very very unpleasant. Leaky roof in houses. Unfinished areas of a remodeling of the house(s). Being lost in a sprawling abandoned industrial factory that processed radioactive material. Finding secret underground entrances to CIA headquarters, where they process radioactive material. Forgetting that I have a job, forgetting to show up to work. Forgetting where my office is. Having multiple offices, having multiple bosses, juggling work, and wondering if I’m still getting paychecks. Cool looking UFO’s which are cool, until they start bombing runs. A half finished project where I’m installing kiloamperes of electrical wiring in the house. The basement. Splicing T1 lines to ethernet to cable to phone to fiber, and wondering why it doesn’t work. Half–finished, forgotten software projects. OMG. I’ve had a huge variety of anxiety–fed dreams. Whatever I dreamt last night, I don’t think it was worse than these.

The divorce dreams, however, were very very painful and depressing. Those stand out. There are also dreams of having sex with girlfriends I’d forgotten I’d had, but the pleasure from these does nothing to counter the pain of divorce.

I attempted to think about volition as I slept. No progress. Again, the sources for different things I want to do come from different parts of my brain, expressing local desires. These are rightly wired together. They exchange messages. So one view is a complex network in some kind of resonance. The resonance is quasi–decomposable into the exchange of messages between spatially–separated components. And yet, this network can also be thought of as a extremely high–dimensional space. But not space or vector space, per se, because it has lots of non–linearities.

That is, one tempting picture is of the brain as being some random network, and the messages exchanged between clusters as being like phonons. But this is misleading because the phonon picture invokes linearity ... a large degree of linearity ... sure, there is a dispersion relation and multi–phonon interactions, but the overall structure is linear plus small perturbations, small couplings. Whereas I envision the brain structure as having huge non–linear structures, huge hysteresis, absorbers, sinks, amplifiers. So, yes, messages go from one part of the network to another, but there are either repeaters or absorbers that fundamentally alter the message before spewing out the next ones.

So the different desires, wants, goals I keep within myself originate from different parts of my brain, and are at odds with one–another. This has, I guess, a dual subjective, psychological representation: I have a large number of conflicting, ill–focused psychological wants and desires. e.g. I desire to have better clothing for Chicago. I desire to buy weights at the second–hand store, if they have them. I want to exercise. I want to do yoga. I want to have sex. I want to go and buy some pot and smoke it; it’s legal in Chicago, as I understand. I know I should do my email, but I don’t feel like it. I want to figure out how this collision of conflicting desires controls my daily schedule, and how I manage that schedule by randomly bouncing from task to task, procrastinating on some, while prioritizing others (e.g. writing this diary has a high priority right now.) Am I exercising volition right now? I feel I exercise volition in selecting the topics I wrote down right now.

I wrote about a chaotic jumble of plans and desires, lurking mostly subconsciously, but then being picked up, one by one, and examined, like the curator of an insect collection. I curate, I decide what to do next. The act of curation reassigns importance weights, and alters the general understanding of tasks. I often think: should I start dating women? How? Is there any practical way of doing this? When? I need to figure out what the heck is going on in the mind of my wife. What will my relationship with her be? I wish she was bright, coherent, healthy, lovable. I fear she has sunk into a hole I cannot pull her out of. That a connection will not be made. I fear this deeply. So I weigh a large number of thoughts of this form while I make the volitional decision to date, or not, to exploring dating apps or not. Where, in all of this, did free will show up? Is free will like a tub of laundry, chaotic swirls, where occasionally, a droplet shoots out? We ascribe to that droplet the action that was taken, while ignoring the tumbling that lead to the action.

The human brain is so complex, that I can’t pick things apart at that level. I feel emotions, I feel I have the ability to choose. This is subjective reality.

Evolution is kind of less complex than the human brain. Above, I was thinking of the mutations of a single DNA strand, but I should be thinking about the simultaneous and spatially dispersed mutations of billions of DNA strands, with these being co–temporal. Can I find something volitional, here? Again, its a jumble: organisms with mutated DNA live or die, quickly or a long time, mate, spread, fix the mutations. If there was volition in this system, what would it look like? How would it manifest? That some mutations are more likely than others? That fit organisms provide a base of positive affect to the subjective experience of evolution as an agent that perceives platonic space, and ingresses parts of it into the physical world?

Oh, wait: perception does NOT use volition. What I see, what comes through my eyes, I have no control over that. What I do control is where my eyes look. So perhaps mutation is like that: there is no volitional control over what ingresses. i.e. mutations really are random, and volition cannot change this. However, perhaps the “gaze” can be changed? How might evolution chose to look at a different part of platonic space? By exploring the use of Uracil in addition to CTGA? Can the direction of “gaze” into the platonic space be controlled? How might this work?

If evolution cannot volitionally control rates of mutation, then what can it control? Does it have any motor capabilities at all?

Is the complex of DNA plus celluar organisms still too complex? Is there something simpler to examine? The simpler one goes, the harder it becomes to escape the clutches of determinism. If I drive to ever more basic systems, I arrive at QM. What is my agential model of QM and here and now? In what sense is chemistry the ingress of all possible engineering shapes from platonic space? Well, that is what the path integral captures. But there’s nothing there that one can point at, and say: “ah, volition!”. Dammit. Its an impasse.

10 October 2026

Short report on food and mood. Yesterday, I ate what seemed like an adequate breakfast, but then got stomach pains mid–day. What kind of pains? The love–sick style pains. I came home, ate, the pains subsided but remained. I found myself shopping at Goodwill and in a foul mood. At Goodwill, cause I needed some cheap housewear. And found it. But not before finding myself repulsed by the miserable trash in the store. I kept trying to say to myself: upscale. Repurpose. Bohemian chic. It wasn’t working. I discovered within me a sudden desire to be filthy rich. To actually buy quality goods without heartache. I don’t mean H&M or even Un ited Colors of Beneton, who basically sell Goodwill–level crapola, but brand new and at inflated prices. No, I just wanted good stuff. I’m tired of the crap. I don’t want crap any more. Well, that was the positive side of my foul mood. The negative side was a general distaste for stupid, boring, ugly people. I mean, in the past, 99.99% of the time I’ve felt empathetic, and quite happy to talk to anyone, everyone. I enjoyed talking to ordinary people more than stuck–up upscale assholes. Well, that comparison remains true. But the compassion, the empathy seems to have melted away. I’m getting old. I don’t have much time, I no longer want to spend it with the mediocre, the substandard. I no longer want to swim in shit. It’s an odd feeling, because it runs strongly counter to my overall long–term psychological disposition. It’s not that I want to swim in shit; its rather, that I didn’t see it as shit, I saw it as human variety. But now, I’m repulsed. And it is not intellectual repulsion, it’s an automatic subconscious reactionary feel. Not entirely subconscious; it burbled up, where I could contemplate it. Semiconscious. The contemplation was disorienting.

Part of the problem of analyzing feelings is that the feelings are remarkably non–specific and vagued. The process of analyzing them requires thinking of specific situations, scenarios, and determining if they resonate with the feeling, or not. The above paragraph lists some of the thoughts I went through that resonated with the general feeling.

There are two or three landscapes here. One is emotional: the vague feeling of dissatisfaction that does not come with a natural, verbal descriptor. “Ineffable” again. One is psychological: having to imagine situational developments, and seeing if those trigger or resonate with the feeling. If they do, then I have to hand that situationship over to the verbal center, to write down and describe here. There’s loss and impedance here as well: I used H&M as an example, a stand in for mall stores selling unexceptional, boring clothing. Well, part of my problem is that stuff on the rack, and how I look wearing it disconnects in my head. I have to wear it, and go out, and only then understand if what I am wearing makes me feel good. And my feel–good depends strongly on the appreciative side–glances from those around me, those who see me. I feel good if the milieu of still–anonymous strangers at the party, the bar, the restaurant, or the outdoor setting, how they react. Strangers set my mood. Well, I guess it works this way for most–all humans, so nothing new. But I do want to look good, I do want to be attractive. I no longer want to be a wall–flower. Not the center of attention, perhaps, but noticed. Attracting. Attractive. Oh wait, off–topic.

The third landscape is imaging the neural wiring and the message exchange and the neural dynamics that relays emotional states (the vague pangs in my stomach, despite having eaten) to the semi–conscious neural layers that have access to the feeling of dissatisfaction, and which try to put a specific situationship onto it. Viz try to match my economic, social, physical locations and attributes as being supportive of the feeling, or negating it, or just neutral. Such as the sudden desire of being so wealthy that I would not have to visit Goodwill to buy some basic necessities. That I could blow through money without feeling stressed. What might this wiring be like?

Err, wait; there’s two. One is what might be viewable with MRI, assuming MRI eventually can peer with enough detail and resolution to analyze and take apart the neural network. The other would be the psycho–symbolic representation of what is going on here. The emotional state as some pre–sheaf of semi–assembled jigsaws. The massages, passing from here to there, being jigsaws as well. The verbal subsystem, described mechanistically. So, a kind of neuro–symbolic model of what is going on within my mind. This neuro–symbolic description is NOT a description of what the MRI machine sees. It is an abstract representation for what the neurons are doing, but at a level below the subjective self. Thus mechanistic, and not subjective, nor psychological. Kind of at the level that ANN’s capture relations. Kind of at the LLM level. Not strictly LLM, because its pre–verbal. But since concepts like H&M already trigger some neuro–symbolic resonances, that resonance would be on the network of relationships (viz H&M sell clothing, H&M is a chain store, H&M stores have a certain lighting, aisle–width and clothes–rack density. etc. All of the psycho–emotional baggage associated with shopping at an H&M store.) This network is NOT neuronal; it is semantic. It’s pre–verbal, since the feeling of being in a well–lit beige and pastel store is a kineaesthetic “feeling”. But this feeling does have tracable network relations to other feelings, which can be labeled with words. So neuro–symbolic, or perhaps “symbol network”.

Huh. Anyway, the issue is that I have to imagine this symbol network; I have no (direct) access to it within me. I know of no technology that gives access to it. The LLM’s sort–of access it: millions of humans have taken effort to write about emotional psychological states, and the LLM’s are trained on that. So semi–automatic: the hard work of manifesting feelings into words done by humans, and the rest done by LLM training. Perhaps one day there will be a way to extract such structure using MRI ??? The MRI will have to bridge between physics signals and the symbol network, and we are far from being able to do that. So all of what I write requires considerable imagination, as it is not currently possible or accessible to technology.

Anyway, this is not what I was going to write about, but it exposes a dilemma: architectural spaces make you feel in a certain way. So does lighting. Wall decorations, colors. But also clothing, sound, open–ness. Temperature and humidity. A small dank damp root–cellar. A sun–lit sandy beach. A martini, a gin–tonic. Dance music, somber music. Cathedrals and droning Gregorian chants. All these set moods. All these moods are kind of verbalizable. Kind of. But the moods themselves are neural system dynamics, set by messages exchanged between highly connected subsystems inside the head. How can I articulate a general theory of message–passing and dynamics that captures moods? Calm? Anxiety? Rest? Joy? Love? And that miserable yet wonderful state of limerance that is very slowly, slowly fading? What a long strange trip. I think I’d take it again, but it is irreplaceable. The irreplaceability is what makes it valuable, exceptional. A treasure. I hope I remember. Again, a feeling. Again, I documented this extensively in this diary, as I lived through it in real time. And yet, those words do not capture what I feel now. And what I feel now, its not directly verbalizable. Other than to say it burns, burned as a kind of very pure, very bright, very unqualified love. An utter and complete transcendent joy. Or rather, that’s how I remember it. In practice, it was mundane: exchanging text messages about “tachyons” while walking in the park. Playful, argumentative text messages. It felt like puppy dogs or kittens play–wrestling, except that they were accusative messages about ... tachyons. It felt so ... good. It felt so pure, so light, so unencumbered. So uncomplicated. So free. So easy. So natural. All I had to do was to figure out something witty, something flirty and cutting, a comeback that was all play and joy. No wonder I fell in love. And oddly, of course, I know it was reciprocated. She liked it. There would have been no exchange, if it hadn’t been fun. Alas. Whatever. I wander off track. Sort of. They joy of play is joy. But so is the joy of entering a marvelous architectural space. The play of sound and light sends one into ecstasy. Well, sometimes. Rarely. But when it does... And nostalgia kicks in, too. My memory of the experience of entering certain exceptional architectural spaces is .. grander(??) than actually experiencing it, live. The lived experience, and the remembered experience necessarily differ. The lived experience happens. But it uses reverberations and messages, flowing through my symbol network, down into neurons that convert it to memory, and something is lost .... well, lost is not the right word. Transformed, mutated, altered into a format that is suitable for recording in memory. And then, upon recall of that memory, transformed again. So what I remember here: the joy of exchanging those texts, is quite different from the joy I felt at that moment.

So I guess everywhere, in all situations, there is loss and transformation. The vibrations happening in a specific network are necessarily transient. And necessarily modified during transmission. The word “ineffable” is usually taken to mean “cannot be described with words”. But here, I need a word for saying that “what I felt differs from what I remember feeling” because the reconstruction from memory is necessarily imprecise. And this is not just for time–like shifts (memory) but also space–like shifts (from one part of the brain to another).

Perhaps a bit of sci–fi wonder is in store. Although my memory of joy is different from the actual experience of that joy, perhaps someday there will be technology that can record real–time experiences much more accurately than my rather faulty memory subsystem can? Such faithful recordings would allow me to relive the experience, instead of just remembering it. Why would anyone want to relive? Because of positive–valence memories. I have a disire to relive high–school. Bitter–sweet, more sweet than bitter. Mostly sweet. Because it was fun. Well, it was plain and boring for the most part. But quite fun at times. Occasionally, (rarely) painful. I had not yet learned how to fall in love, how to have a crush. There were no bullies, my parents were great, no one hurt me. I had an idyllic childhood. I guess I’m lucky. Whatever. But sometimes, I want to go back. I want to go back to Wisconsin, too. The inability to go back is deeply painful. The realization that I will soon die, without ever revisiting these marvelous places, this hurts. This hurts deeply. Nostalgia.

Anyway, this is not what I was going to write about today. Not at all.

I was going to write about evolution. Here’s the outline: to have free will or vilition, there must be a choice of actions that could be taken. That means that there must be motor elements that acts on the external environment. That means that the motors have causative effect. There must be a causal pathway. So, to determine if some agent has the ability to exercise volition, we should first identify what kind of causation it can have on the environment, and then look at whether alternative causations are possible. That is, part of the idea of choice is exclusive choice: it this action is taken, it precludes all other actions. When there are several causal chains possible, and they are exclusive, and either can be triggered by the agent, then the selection of the causal chain can be argued to be volitional. And so: what are the causal chains that evolution can take?

Don’t know, will have to think. But first, dinner.

12 October 2026

That sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach. Maybe I should go exercise.

Exercised. Second day walking on train tracks. First day, 43 steps before I fell off. Today, 75 steps. This is post exercise, all my core muscles are fibrillating; if I was rested, I could probably do better.

Towel drying after the shower, it felt so good to dry my face, rub my face, my ears, behind my ears. It was very sensual. Soothing and exciting at once. Invigorating and relaxing. It felt so good. Sensual, in the sexual kind of way. The way sex should feel, if done right. Part of foreplay could be towel–dry after a shower. Hmm. I digress. And, for some reason, I thought of perfume, and the previous summer’s exploration of olfactory delights. It’s not really socially acceptable for men to wear perfume. But you know, I could wear it. I wonder if it would work on my wrists. Not neck, not face, but wrists. And maybe something feminine. Not too delicate, not too whispy and flowery. Something assertive, but feminine. Not masculine, none of this old leather shit. I could be a sensory entertainment playground, for myself, at least. And I could pull it off, in Vilnius, at least. Tough guy biker jacket and faint whiff of some woman’s perfume, left over from someone who had hung on my arm. A lie, but a pleasant lie. Alas. I already miss Vilnius. It was a psychological torture hell, but Chicago is vacant. Austin is vacant. Vilnius is sophisticated. Austin is drunken proleteriat and snobby older folks. I think I’d be comfortable around hippies? Maybe? Austin should have hippies, right? I never cross paths with them? Techies? Don’t go out? I’m crossing paths with randos in Vilnius. Except for an assortment of adventures, its not like I have anything going on there, either. I wonder what it would take to get drawn into circles of parties in Austin. Well, Owen is my man, there. My main man.

I digress. I was thinking of sensual pleasures. Of perfume. Perfume makes have to ... hustle. I guess all successful artists have to hustle. It’s so foreign to the techie engineer mindset, where, if you have a skill, people are interested in your. But creating, marketing perfumes? FUMparFUM with Aistis Mickevičius. Near Halės Turgus.

Then I thought about the hustle. Then this tangle of ideas. AGI. Post–capitalism. Finding love, Finding economic success during the singularity. I am looking for love, I am looking for a way to share sensual pleasure with someone else. For no reason, other than to share and partake. To enjoy together. So I wander around, asking women (not literally; only of myself): do you love me? Will you love me? Can we be together? But this is not all that different than hustling perfume: Do you like this scent? How about this one? Is it pleasurable? Would you like to wear it? I’d give it to you gratis, but we live in a capitalist society so the best I can offer is this bottle in exchange for money. Whoring, of sorts. Perfume whoring. But I watch Cica hustle for money, and it’s also a whoring out. Hustle. He’s looking for art lovers. But where are they? Give away the painting for free, but someone needs to give me (him) money to live.

Music is almost free. Encumbered by skipads. Movies are not free, you need a subscription. Facebook is free, well, almost. Ad–infested. And the algo ... it was showing me fun stuff, new to me, but now I’m bored and its a stream of drivel. I have to hunt for entertainment; is this like hunting for love?

I need to stop obsessing about love, I need to fly home to Austin. I need to discover if there is anything to salvage with Patty. Discover how to salvage it. It will be challenging. It might be hopeless. I hope she’s not getting senile... that would be not a happy thing. I fear it. Fucking old age. Why am I waking up now? Why didn’t I wake up much earlier?

Anyway dinner is served. I was going to ponder the nature of human relationships – to friends, to society, to community, in some post–capitalist, post–AGI dream land. Hmm. Dinner calls. Maybe later.

13 October 2026

Woke again to existential angst. For the past few days, Facebook has been showering me with pornographic AI girlfriends. And they are ... porn. Rather hard–core porn. I sat entranced by one sequence. Another ran through my thoughts as I lay in bed. I want to be a participant in that video. I can’t be. Alas. Again, this is trite: there’d be no porn industry if men got as much sex as they wanted. Needed. Will AGI find a solution to this craving? Of course, AI girlfreinds can help one live out fantasizes. Well, not live out, but deepen. Aid. Assist in developing the fantasy. Take it farther than imagination alone can take it. Imagination requires hyper–focus. One has to focus to imagine.

When I have pornographic fantasizes, I have to focus to keep them alive. The mind, it seems, is unwilling to fabricate, hallucinate things that are not real. I fantasize, of course, for the side–effects. But focus is required for almost any productive intellectual task. It never comes easily. Manual labor tends to be hard physically, but it rarely requires extended bouts of concentration. Harder than watching TV, easier than thinking.

Another place for concentration is for sports training. To walk on the train tracks, I have to uncover this magical state of being relaxed, but not sloppy. No hard breathing. Good posture. Calm mind. Straight movement. Then I can balance and walk on the tracks, but this requires ... attention. But a weird kind of subverted attention: I have to quiet my mind, to focus. Eliminate distracting thoughts. Hard to do that, for long. But what am I doing here? That concentration is used to encourage the autonomous neurons to encode the act of balancing. So, in a sense, standard sports training. I don’t understand the neuroscience of this. Neurons in one part of the brain used to encourage learning in another part of the brain. So ... what is learning?

Before we get to that, other thoughts that were not taken:

Anyway, what is learning? One remark is that there are many different kinds of learning. Each type of learning is tailored to both the task, and the brain subsystem that conventionally deals with that task. Motor reflex training for sports requires the building of an adequate body model: limb weights, reaction time, balance, sequenced movement. Agentically, this is a change to the agents internal body model to be able to quickly and rapidly respond (via motor movements) to specific input stimulii (flying baseballs, rowing shell movements, ...)

I’ve spent a lot of time, over the last few weeks, watching facebook reelz dealing with romantic relationships. I learned a lot about human relationship patterns. Where is this knowledge stored? Presumably, close to the neural network that is responsible for emotional processing, and stored in a form that is readily accessible to conscious(?) processing.

Interruption. What train of thought can I return to?

I’ve been addicted to facebook for the last week or two. One class of reelz deals with holistic spiritual healing. The last one was pretty potent, (for me, at least) stating that the unrequited love, this is all within me (yes, this is correct) and that once I “close the loop” and “do the inner work” the universe will reward me. How true could this be?

On the superficial level, the desired interpretation (the one I desire) is that with a bit reflection, the universe will award me with bliss, in the form of a cute young thing that I can love and will love me back. But then the wording of this message also suggests I need to work on my wife Patty, and my efforts will be rewarded. They might be. To be realistically skeptical, they might not.

The message is, of course, a modern variant of an ages–old message: pray to the Lord, and you will be saved. Its a little healthier than the old message: “do the inner work”, rather than the hypnotic “pray”, but the promise is unchanged: “you will be saved”.

Then there is the deep level: wtf is this all about? And some doubts: what, exactly, does “inner work” accomplish, and what does it mean “to be saved”?

Doing the “inner work” is a modern view on life: many of us now live lives of relative ease and luxury, that we can ask and address causes of spiritual pain. Or rather, we have access to better psychological technology. One thousand years ago, in Europe, the best one could get is the Catholic Church. It recommended praying, rosaries, regular church attendance, a good sermon if the priest was capable. This, for those who were receptive to a message of hope and healing. For others, just cynicism, ignorance, stumbling stupidity. Die in battle. I’ve seen that drone footage of the last seconds of a stupid russian’s life. You spent your life in a haze of indigent alcohol consumption, and now you are in Ukraine, about to be droned to death. Talk about failure to do the “inner work”. To “close the loop”. A complete disaster. The universe is not delivering any gifts for you.

Does the universe ever deliver gifts? At the objective, common–sense level, the universe cares not one whit about us: we are all thrown into the blender, consigned to die after a natural lifespan. A hundred years is a pittance compared to millennia, to epochs. An easy way to visualize this is as the turbulent trail of a jet engine: whorls that die out. Thanks to DNA and mating, new whorls, every generation. Does the universe care about these individual whorls? It would seem not.

If I subscribe to my own agentic picture, then these whorls are at all scales: ants and anthills, mycelia and mushrooms, trees, shrubs, bacteria and pond scum. Each of these live and die, get whacked by mundane events: the chainsaw of a logger, the slap of a hand on a mosquito. There’s no amount of inner work that would have saved the mosquito from the slap, or the tree from the logger.

The inner work, the psychological effort, whether based on modern psychological theories, or based on adherence to some Buddhist teachings, or Greek neo–Stoics, can, however, soothe the subjective inner self. And so here, again, we have the dualistic split. The slapped mosquito, as an arrangement of atoms, has gone splat. The slapped mosquito had an inner subjective experience. Where did it go? Clearly, it disappeared when the corresponding atoms were disassembled. Where was it, when it was alive, and where is it, now that it is dead?

I’ve argued that the past becomes part of the Platonic realm. But this Platonic realm is inaccessible. In a very direct sense, it does not exist. The objective arrangement of the atoms that were the mosquito become very soon inaccessible: it is forgotten to the here and now. Whatever information was encoded in the atoms comprising that mosquito is effectively lost. Out finest recording instruments can record little of that mosquito death, and it will remain so for hundreds if not thousands of years to come. Its very much gone, erased from the here–and–now.

But what of the subjective inner life? Where does this exist, if anywhere? These words that I write are my agentic detritus, but where am I as I write this? Well, objectively, I am sitting on the front porch in Chicago. All sensory informatin processing is happening in my physical body of atoms. Yet I have this strong desire to believe in the spiritual plane, the spiritual realm, and this desire is not just me, but as old as ... as time? Ancient religions already affirmed the existence of a spiritual realm. I imagine that careful research with primates might conclude that they have some proto–conception of the divine, as well.

So what is the foundation for the divine, other than it being common in humankind? Can we provide an evolutionary basis for this? I’m getting tired and not willing to speculate, so lets give gemini a whirl. The point here is that the feeling of spirituality is not something learned from parents, learned in schools. Yes, the social specifics shape the details of spiritual beliefs, but the SBNR got that way because they were born that way. The predisposition to spritual beleifs appears to be coded genetically.

Well, OK. I got some fiddle–faddle as the answer. “Hyperactive Agency Detection Device” (HADD) ascribes conscious intent to rustling leaves. The “Theory of Mind” ascribes “mind” to natural objects (including holy rocks). It also talks about social religious belief frameworks. I don’t like this answer. First, I’m not interested in the social construction of religion. I’m interested in where “spirituality comes from.” The fact that it sometimes projects onto “holy rocks” (Thinking of you, Vidas) is incidental; the spiritual feeling is primal.

It’s oddly primal. Yes, I may personally arrive at the subjective feeling that a flight of geese over my head is “holy”, or that water dripping from a spring onto a statue of buddha is “holy”, but those are personal embellishments of a deeper feeling. An attempt to ground the innate spirtual feeling onto the sense–objects in my field of view, or prominent in my memories and thoughts. That is, the spiritual feeling is primal, much like the feeling of love, hate, anger, an assortment of subjective emotional states. Mid–way are feelings such as awe, surprise, appreciation, amazement, joy.

Again, these correspond to specific arrangements of neurotransmitters in my synapses, and certain specific dynamical patterns of neural firing in my brain. It also “cheapens” the transcendent feeling to being “no more than the feeling of love.” Its just another emotional state. Although, of course, love is divine and sublime. And subjectively, I’m thoroughly amazed by life: the squirrel that just chirped near me, the neighbor across the street hammering on some object. And I feel amazed because the weather is intensely beautiful. The existential angst has faded, overcome by the weather. Amazing how easy this was. Of course, I could also have my heart broken on a sunny beach; this is not hard. Just that the current environmental conditions have conspired to make me feel good. For now. Fleetingly.

So I am having this fleeting awe for life. The fleeting feeling of love for the world. I’ reminded of the White Stripes song “Fell in Love with a girl” ... she’s in love with the world ... “I must be fine, cause my hearts still beating” ... these are excellent lyrics. Just fantastic.

Am I going in circles? Perhaps I am. A central component of the subjective experience is the emotional state. Pursuant to LLM’s and symbolic AI, the graphical network of known experience appears to be embeddable in a vector space, adjacency matrix, etc. Where is this “located”? In Platonic space? This is problematic, because platonic space is largely inaccessible (except by evolution, except by thought, except by mechanical enumeration...) This abstract representation appears to have a concrete representation as a dynamical system of atoms trapped in the here–and–now. Forging a new future, but existing only now. Why is divinity and love a part of the subjective landscape?

This is the message, the perception of religion: that there is this “other place”, heaven, where the subjective self is immortal, even as arrangements of atoms are erased. This includes the subjective self of the aforementioned mosquito, as well as that of any germs smooshed in the process.

This belief, in humans, is tangled into the fabric of core beliefs. In what sense can a “truth value” be assigned to it? Is it true that “the soul exists”, and if so, where? I have to be careful, here. Mostly I have been reserving the words “it exists” to mean “there is some arrangement of atoms that encodes this situation.”. The belief in souls and heaven posits that there is some other place/space in which things can “exist”. This place, “heaven”, is distinct from the platonic space from which the future is ingressing into the present, and it is distinct from the platonic space that is “the past”.

The word “heaven” carries cultural baggage that I do not like, but I don’t know of the correct term from philosophy for this place. I mean specifically, the “place” where my subjective self “lives”, once it has moved into “the past”.

OK. Nice! That splits the past into two parts: the objective part: past arrangements of atoms, that is, arrangements of atoms as they were, when they move into the past. The subjective past is the past of my subjective self, i.e. “that place” where teenage–me lives. This “place” continues to be “definable” even after I die. I like the word “definable”, as I can use words to define it. This avoids statements like saying platonic space “exists”; it doesn’t, but it can be defined.

Then there is the conception of nirvana (or heaven) which is distinct from the past–of–subjective–agents, as it implies a state of bliss. That is, an agent leaves behind a trace monoid or a history monoid of past states, and these past states have a certain semantic interpretation, a meaningful interpretation of “what it felt like when I was a teenager”. I need a term for this. The “subjective monoid”, perhaps?

Note the slight of hand, here: “meaning” is ascribed to states of the subjective experience. Love has meaning. Heartache and nostalgia and existential angst all have meaning. Good god, I am so in love, and good god, it matters so little to the object of my infatuation. It’s entirely amazing how easily I flood. And its interesting in just how abstract this is. The feeling of love, its anchored on a specific person, but the boundaries are dissolving; its a feeling provoked by that person, provoked by the thoughts of that person, provoked by psychological triggers that I can probably rearrange in my head with a bit of Cognitive Behavioral Theory. That I probably should rearrange. This is not an intrusive thought, per se, but it did insert itself into my essay. At any rate, my heart–ache is meaningful for my subjective self, and insofar as subjective me is propelled into the future at the speed of light, subjective me leaves behind a trace monoid of earlier meaningful subjective experiences in some abstract, non–existing–but definable space of semantics.

Am I saying that arrangements of atoms are syntactic, but meaningful subject experience is semantic? I guess I am. Certainly, model theory does provide a collection of tools that distinguish semantic and syntactic. So alternative terms are “the syntactic past”, consisting of past arrangements of atoms, and the “semantic past”, consisting of past subjective experiences (of trees, shrubs, plankton and humans.)

Dinnertime. I need to ask ChatGPT or Claude or Gemini about how history and trace monoids show up in model theory. That’s a TODO item. I wonder how deeply I should get into that. I have sooo many todos.

14 October 2026

Somehow, instead of doing technical work, mathematical reasoning that could benefit the mathematical engineering and philosophical cadres, I feel like doing inner work, instead. I can post–rationalize this urge: There are lots of smart people. There’s the LLM’s. Between the two of these, any breakthrough insights I can develop are meagre. At best, I could be the Zeeman effect. What else was Zeeman famous for? Nothing that I recall. I liked the Zeeman effect, because it was simple and easy to understand. Back then, I did not like things that were difficult and hard to understand. Still don’t, I guess. I mean, I understand the importance of mastering the more difficult ideas. The magnetic equivalent of the Zeeman effect. I forget what it was called. I didn’t like it, it was more complicated. That complexity was, of course, supposed to provide insight, but I did not realize it at the time. I only got insight from things I understood, and not those I did not.

Whatever. I’m rambling. I was not going to write the above. I was going to explore and document my inner life. It starts with waking sexual tension. Morning wood. I’m dozing, napping, with a pleasant glow between my legs.

I guess this bleeds over into the waking hours. First thing downstairs, I check my phone. Facebook. Instagram. It’s been dinging me. It’s addictive of course, but what do I get? I realize that it is sexual expectation. I check each post as if I am expecting a text message from my lover. Yes, of course, a dopamine rush. But not just some vague, generic dopamine rush, but the one triggered by a lover. Each facebook post might actually say “why don’t you come over?” and I’d hop to, rush out the door, and come over. In vain I look for this message. None quite. A few come close. For example, this morning I learned what a demisexual is, and what a sapiosexual is. I’m a bit of both, I suppose. I mean, of course, explicitly erotic images turn me on. But if I think of my summer’s affair, I knew her for a decade before I fell in love. The attraction was slow to mount. Of course, not always: there have been a handful of times in my life when it was love at first sight. Sadly, those never went anywhere. Well, all but one. The one that did go had lots of sex, but I struggled with the social connection. I did not know how to do social play, when I was younger. I guess I still don’t; I haven’t mastered it, but I don’t suck at it. I’m aware.

My mind wanders. I am very comfortable with women. Kind of always have been. Social play with men is not interesting. But some women need more than social play. Something more wild, more intense, livelier. And that usually means outings, trips, adventure. And those things cost money. Meals at restaurants. Flights, boats, rides. I have not been doing a lot of that, cause I’m a cheapskate. But also because it is a temporary high. That’s where the sapio–sexual part comes in. A wild adventure is fun, but then what? Another and another? How many? Is there anything lasting left over from that? Or was it a blur of events? I spend too much time doing technical work, which feels lasting: writing this journal: it will last, it will not be forgotten. The drink at 6AM at a bar I would not be able to find again, surrounded by brightly dressed people with smiles on their faces, in a melee crush of conversation and movement? What exactly was afforded by that? I dunno. If I’m going to go crazy–wild, I think I would prefer to do it with ... drugs. I don’t know what kind of drugs, I’m just not an expert. I mean, yes, the sleep deprivation high is ... interesting. I’ve had a number of sleep deprivation highs, fully sober, sitting at home, downloading MP3’s of strange music and getting lost between my earphones. Absolutely bewitching moments. I suppose that’s the intent of bar–hopping. But it’s edgy. It’s only fun if I am receiving social attention. If someone is focused on me. Do I know how to reciprocate? Perhaps I do. Do I? Sometimes, I imagine. But getting attention, its all about getting attention, and this is easier when lubricated with alcohol. Here I am, later in life, doing what... figuring out the basics of alcohol–fueled partying? An interesting place to be. Also a commentary of what I did with my younger life.

In retrospect, was my younger life “worth it”? I thought I was creating lasting software, but so what? Did it matter? I was imagining a better world, a world where things worked and software was free, and I could do what I wanted to do, but I never looked past the tip of my nose: for what purpose? What would I use this software for? What was the point of it? The answer lay in the past: the internet magically appeared, and look at all the cool things one can do with it, and the future was going to be more of the same: cool things one could do. With no attempt to understand what those things could be. All my efforts were short–sighted. I wanted an accounting app. So I created GnuCash. Which I still don’t use. It’s short sighted, in that it was obvious: the general idea of an accounting app already existed; all that was needed was to have one for Linux. So I embarked on the obvious step, and it seemed like a worthwhile project. And, socially speaking, I suppose it was: there are, what, hundreds of thousands of users? Millions? All have benefited from it. It does work within the capitalist system, though, it supports the capitalist system. Well, if it did not exist, things would be arguably worse: money would have flowed to some commercial effort. Free is always better than commercial; free opens vistas and possibilities. Back then, I imagined a financial infrastructure. I still do; I could still articulate this. It would still be “good”. But it would be what? It feels short–sighted again.

Short–sighted in what way? GnuCash is a social good. I contributed many years of my life to construct, create a social good. It was vaguely pleasurable. I enjoyed my life. It ran placid, on an even keel. Well, I envied the brighter lights of the open source world: I too wanted to be famous. I too wanted to be recognized for my talents. I did not, however, put much effort into figuring out how to achieve that. I did not see a path forward, and I did not attempt to find a path forward. In retrospect, building a famous personality would have been possible: speaking invitations in front of audiences. Essays outlining future visions. Hob–nobbing with the other luminaries, exchanging thoughts, ideas. Arguing, but most importantly, getting on stage, being the activist. But I did not actually want to be the activist; I just wanted the fruits of activism. I did not want to be the activist, because I perceived it as an empty running around. I hungered for technical insight: understanding new, difficult things. I did not hunger for being king of the hill, for proving my intellectual might. Didn’t give a shit if anyone thought I was smart. Not on my agenda. Wasting time being the activist, repeatedly restating the obvious was pointless when I could be exploring the edge of the unknown. And exploring technology was exploring the edge of the unknown. Well, I mean, unknown to me. I’d abandoned the quest for the true unknown by leaving the academic life. Because I did not comprehend the social dynamics of the academic life. Again: I wanted the academic life, but not at the cost of writing applications, bashing myself against job applications. I wanted to futz with my metaphorical home chemistry set, with no goal in mind, no clear intent, no drive, just screw round with it, mix things around and see what happens. In my case, it was more literally to read random journal articles across a broad range of topics. The need to publish ... I wasn’t interested in publishing. I was interested in screwing around with random sources of knowledge.

I still am. As attested by this diary. This summers source of knowledge is... partying, social relations, love affairs, limerance, the soul, the meaning of life, what one should do. I still desire sex. I’m going out of my mind with sexual desire. I desire romance, romantic love. I want the high of being in love. I’ve got a burning, overwhelming desire for this. Will I act on it? The path forward is hardly clear. What am I actually doing? Fucking around with my chemistry set. I’ve got an open tab on traces and model theory I have not read yet. I rote the Wikipedia articles on the history monoid and the trace monoid more than a decade ago, maybe fifteen years ago. I forgot what they say. What I remember seems vaguely relevant for understanding the subjective past. What was I calling it? The “semantic past”.

I think this is an important insight, but I’m somehow not yet investing the time to work on it. First, let me repeat the insight; second, let me explain why I’m not yet focusing on it. The insight is this: the molecular, atomic arrangements of here and know, viz. the “physical universe” is syntactic. Syntactic in the sense of being describable as a graph. As a network. As a causal network, of what affected what. Decomposable into jigsaws, each jigsaw with its connectivity rules. Jigsaws are inherently, necessarily syntactic. But the subjective life, it is necessarily semantic. My life has meaning to me. I experience it, I experience love and heartache. This has meaning that transcends all else. What is transcended? The petty existence of the table in front of me, the sofa that I sit on. These mean nothing, compared to my love. Well, they mean something: the sofa is tasteful. Something selected by my father, as an architectural decoration. Leather, wood. Sleek, stylish. So it has meaning for me, meaning from my youth. From my teenage years. I grew up with it. Hmm. I think back, I actually did have a kind of heart–break when I was young. It was ill formed. I felt it, and I felt it strongly, but I did not know what it was. It was a desire to be somewhere, be with someone, I knew this, but I could not force it into being. I did not have the social network where I could just .. go and visit someone. It was not strong enough to support that. So I did feel a kind of loneliness, thinking back, in retrospect. So, sure, the sofa does have meaning for me, some kind of meaning. But not the level of meaning I have right now, battling the urge to look at facebook to see if there is a message from someone, some girl, to come over to her place, to visit her. The message that I will never find on facebook, yet which I thirst for. This, for me, is the face of meaning. The turmoil. The glow between my legs. The desire, the thirst.

I’m labeling this meaning as “semantic”, because it is the embodiment of the syntactic arrangement of the atoms in my skull. And thus I grasp at the straws of model theory, because that is where one first sees a hint of the difference between semantic and syntactic entailment. Of course, this could all just be a hallucination on my part. I’m imagining something that is not there.

Is this a quotient space? Semantic things are the things that remain true, irrespective of any specific model. Well, that’s just the old quip: model theory is just algebraic geometry, but without the geometry. Is my subjective feeling of love the one thing that remains true, irrespective of the particular arrangement of atoms in my head? Insofar as here–and–now is a collection of all possible futures, my feeling for love is the thing that stays constant, irrespective of the future that develops. However which way the wave function collapses; whichever events occur in this room, irrespective of whether I am bitten by a mosquito or am caught in a tornado, my love stays true.

Well, there’s two ways to interpret this: its semantically true that I am in love, in that it holds true in all possible worlds. The other way to interpret this is that mosquito bites and tornadoes do not alter the arrangement of the neurons and neurotransmitters in my brain. The skull, the body is a marvelous insulating container, causally disconnected from very nearly everything, excepting a bullet to the head or some other physical trauma. So my love stays true only because it is causally disconnected from very nearly everything else in my immediate surroundings.

So it is very romantic to imagine that love is the semantic truth, the quotient space of moding out everything else in the universe. It’s not a bad analogy. But is it true?

Well, shit, I have to go take a shower and get ready to leave. So, something to continue pondering. Why is my crotch tingling? I like it, but jeez. Can’t somebody just rub it for me? I mean, what the hell. What the fuck is the problem here, universe?

Being alive is weird. What the fuck am I doing here? What’s happening? How did I get here? I’m like on this permanent acid trip, going who, what huh? This feels good, oh man, what is going on? Is this really happening? Maybe drugs don’t have much of an effect on me because I’m already stoned out of my gourd. Anyway, whatever. I really need to go take a shower.

15 October 2026

As always, it seems more important to document my internal emotional state, than to push the theoretical envelope. The issue now is that after a few cups of coffee and a bowl of oatmeal for breakfast, the angst that tortured me as I slept has evaporated. The angst, this time, was over my old age, and the impending doom of my death. I’m having to resign to the fact that things that were open and possible to me when I was younger are now escaping my grasp. Again, I think these were thoughts of sex, mostly. But its boring to expand on this.

Boredom, because the effort required to reconstruct past states of mind exceeds the worth of documenting them. I am burning through time now; why would I engage in unproductive activities, trading my personal time for ... what, exactly? What joy would I get form articulating my angst?

To snap out of it, I turned my early morning thoughts to technical matters. Here’s one: the present contains an encoded record of the past, and this encoded record is the only aspect of the past that is accessible. Shoot. Suddenly, just now, I have three ideas, I want to write of each. Let me do the non–trivial, non–obvious one first. Except it’s vague. And maybe not productive. Still lets try.

OK, here goes: time is illusory. I’ve already argued that time does not exist; now I want to make that stronger. The concept of ingress says that structures are materializing into the physical world. The structures that materialize are ... structural. But the structures are fuzzy: there remains a bit of an epsilon around them, that would allow other interpretations to fit. Not many others, but still, distinct. The physics concept of time is a very strong, very dominant fit to the observed shape of structure. But we don’t actually have time. We have memories of having looked at a clock face, and knowing (remembering) that the hands of the clock were elsewhere. We have memories of having read a textbook on Newtonian kinematics, and another on general relativity. And some news clipping about cesium fountains. But these are all memories. They all correspond to specific arrangements of atoms in my head. The memories are consistent, not contradictory (mostly) not unstructured (mostly). (Even if I clearly recall a photo on my cell phone, which appears to no longer be on my cell phone. Which has a rational explanation: it must have been erased.) Alternately stated, memories are rationally composed. That is, if I view a dynamical system, and I have some algebraic expression for that dynamical system, then the time–like evolution of that system, observed in the lab, is consistent with the algebra: with the predictions. But this all depends on an intricate interlock of current states: that, as memories arrive from one part of my brain, they match observations being made by my eyes, as I examine the dial on some lab instrument. I predicted, through rational inference, that the lab instrument should have this and such a reading, and lo and behold, it does. But this is all happening only right now. The interlock between these spatially separated systems (the lab equipment, my eyes, my visual cortex, my memories, my inference) this is happening only “right now”. So, “right now” is this twisting, squirming thing, but the only twists and squirms that it can undertake are those that are consistent with the past. Of course. Stated this way, it’s “obvious”: the present is constrained by physics. But if the past doesn’t exist, if it is an illusion, then time becomes a harness controlling the structure of changes in the present. And here, we have to be careful: change requires a time derivative. A time derivative is a kind of memory of what was before, compared to what is now. This has the odd effect of making the derivative spatial: the memory of what was before is stored “elsewhere”; it is brought together with “what is now”, and subtracted. But this all happens “right now”: the current value is observed directly, the earlier value is observed in the mental record or memory of what was before, but that mental record also exists “right now”, but in a different spatial location.

Is this imaginative state useful in any way? What we seem to have is a collection of rules for reconciling a consistent state. (viz, the collection of rules is “physics”, and the consistent state is “right now”.) Right now, as subjectively experienced by me, is always in this state of consistency. This state of consistency allows for the illusion of time: both a personally remembered subjective past, but also a personally remembered collection of physics and math textbooks, which are consistent with current sensory input that includes news and social media articles. Consistent, that is, if I exclude the obviously cranky, crazy, hallucinated crackpottery that pervades social media. Or rather, my subjective experience of social media is that there are other people, some of which are kind–of crazy. That is, I am not a solipcist. Or rather, all statements about who I am are in reference to my current subjective experience of self, and this experience includes not only the feeling that “I am” but also memories and beliefs and theories about myself, e.g. “I am not a solipcist”, expressed linguistically, in these typed words, expressed by the movement of my fingers, controlled by my brain, all of which happened in the past, ... which does not exist. All that there really is are informational flows from one part of space (the laptop screen) to another part of space (my retina) to another part (optic nerve) to that little nucleus of neurons that provide the illusion of subjective self–awareness. Which then reviews other inputs and thoughts, decides what to do next, i.e. decides what to type next, here, into this file.

This is a bit befuddling. All that there ever is, is just me, staring at the words that I just wrote, analyzing the thoughts I just had, continuing to think, existing in a state that is always consistent with the impression of passing time. Not just the subjective impression of passing time, but the objective one of the clock on the wall. But what’s that? My social environment and upbringing me has taught me to be trustworthy of clocks on the wall. My social upbringing has told me that this thing that I feel, it is called “the passage of time”. Well, it is not entirely social, its innate. Cats and dogs also perceive the passage of time. That is, the subjective experience of the passage of time is innate and fundamental to the subjective experience. All is as it should be: everything is self–consistent.

So.... I’m bouncing off of an impenetrable wall. Motte and bailey. The motte is my earlier articulated ideas of here and now, and of the agentic model. I think all that is true, if still incompletely developed. The bailey was to try to fully eliminate the concept of the past, and for the future, and retain only the present. To get rid of the past and future, I have to get rid of time, while still acknowledging it’s primacy in physical descriptions. If I get rid of time completely, then what remains? Well, an assortment of structural relationships that exist in the present. And yet, these structural relationships encode structures that can be interpreted as memories of the past. Worse, these memories appear to form a linear sequence culminating in this present moment, and this present moment has the general shape and structure suggesting that there will also be a future, and that my subjective experience has a past behind it. That is, it is as if I exist in a single movie frame, and have a memory of movie frames that came before, and suggest that there will be more, up ahead. And yet those memories are necessarily only in the present. Can I do anything useful with this point of view? I do not sense any sort of algebraic framework coming from this point of view that is not equivalent to a framework that includes time as a part of the description. So, in this sense, this viewpoint is useless. It does not offer any insight that I can pull out. And yet ... well, the clock is ticking, and perhaps I have more important things to do today.

16 October 2026

Saw Mozart’s Don Giovanni at the Chicago Lyric Opera yesterday. Meditated on many topics. Limerance is clearly a thing, in all eras. I’m vaguely depressed because I want to fuck, I want to be hugged, I want to be in love, securely–ish. The plot line of Don Giovanni mostly made me meditate on the events of the summer. Sleep was tortured. I really, really could have used a drink. It’s been extremely rare in my life that I’ve thought to myself “I could use a drink”. It’s a thought that is notably more common.

I still don’t understand the structure of the here–and–now. Again, lets review the status. We give it the notation

⟨ Ψ |

the “wave function of the universe”. Note the absence of any spatial or time coordinates: viz its located everywhere and nowhere. It appears to consist of fermions, which we take as electrons, and nucleii, which can be taken as classical, unless we later discover a need for them to be quantum. The nucleii, if taken to be classical, can be labeled with position coordinates, which, for some unknown reason, are three–dimensional. That is, there is a manifold covered with an atlas of charts, locally space–like. The manifold appears to be smooth at the relevant scales. It is probably convenient to take the nucleii as indistinguishable particles, so as to maintain some amount of realism.

The 3D space appears to have a metric, locally euclidean; globally curved, but perhaps also containing torsion. If we assume the space to be torsion–free, then the distances between nucleii can be given. The space can be triangulated with 3-simplexes; that is, we do not need to specify the location of every nucleus with respect to every other nucleus, but only with respect to the triangulation. Every 3–simplex gets a unique label: the simplexes are distinguishable, even if their vertexes are not.

The simplexes appear to encode “information”, but only if there is an agentic observer subjectively aware of that information. For example, the simplexes describing printed ink on paper encode the written text, but this is information only when there are humans (or machines) that can read the writing. Without the agent, the text is meaningless: like pebbles on a beach, the arrangement is effectively random and meaningless. Do pebbles on a beach encode information? Clearly not, because there is no agent that can claim to have a semantic understanding of te arrangement. Do they “contain” information? Not clear. The arrangement can be described “syntactically”, as a collection of pebbles with distances between them, but there is no way to extract “knowledge” from the arrangement.

The last paragraph uses two problematic words: “information” and “knowledge”. What is “information”, and what is “knowledge”? When I say that there is no agent that can extract meaning from an arrangement of pebbles on a beach, this is much like saying that there is now agent that can “eat” the arrangement, and derive benefit from it. Compare this to bacteria, which can eat sugars and derive benefits (energy) from doing so. By analogy, we would say that “information” is anything that can be extracted from sensory input and used to update the world model of the agent. The updated world–model has incorporated this information as “knowledge”; that is, knowledge is information that has been integrated into a world model. Put differently, information gains meaning only in the context of a world model; without that context, the sensory input is noise, meaningless noise. This appears to imply that “information” cannot exist without an agent that possesses some suitable sensory apparatus to perceive that “information”.

The fact that I keep having to use the word “information” in quotes indicates that this is a bad word–choice. That is, the word “information” already has a common–sense meaning in computer science. Although I don’t know what that meaning is....

Gemini reminds me that a random n–bit string contains n bits of “Shannon information” or “Shannon entropy” but zero bits of “semantic information”. So I ask: “How can I measure semantic information?” It provides three answers. Worth reviewing.

OK, so this gets an eyeroll from me; nothing here I did not already know. Given the current state of development of my ideas, any one of these is adequate for my needs. Any one of these, or some combination, or perhaps something else. My only original point is that the world model held by the agent is the pieces–part that provides the context for the ingested semantic information.

Conclusion: understanding the information content in here–and–now is impossible without the agentic framework. Agents provide the necessary context to convert geometric structure into semantic information. (FYI This seems like an important conclusion!!)

FYI – Important conclusions are anything in this text that should be scanned for and pulled out and placed in a final publishable text.

Earlier, evolution was sketched as an agentic process, operating in the here and now, ingressing (or manifesting) viable DNA structures. The current sketch (as given earlier) of this agent lacks sufficient articulation to determine if it has volition. Three questions: (a) can we articulate how this agent creates and absorbs semantic context? (b) Can we articulate an agent working at a lower level, e.g. at a molecular chemistry or quantum chemistry level? (c) Can we go deeper, and describe an agent that causes atomic structure to ingress, e.g. the hydrogen atom?

OK, so what is the (semantic) information content of a DNA strand? The answer is relatively straight–forward: it consists of those base–pair sequences that can be transcribed by a ribosome into something “reasonable”. That is, some random DNA sequence contains no (semantic) information. Meaningful DNA sequences are those that can be transcribed into proteins, functional or not. Non–functional proteins are “less meaningful”, in that they are deleterious to the health of the organism, and may lead to death of the organism (or possible sub–optimal function, inefficient operation, lethargy, poisoning, waste byproducts, poor use of energy resources, etc.). But they are “close to” meaningful proteins either in their primary, secondary or tertiary structure, with tertiary structure being particularly important, as this drives function in a living organism.

So, here, “meaningful” DNA mutations appear to be closely related to organism fitness and survival. Deleterious mutations are not meaningful.

Earlier, we ruminated that “meaning” had something to do with subjective experience. Now, we’ve defined “meaning” as any kind of sensory or perceptual information that can be incorporated into the world model of the agent (or has previously been incorporated into the world model, and is now being seen a second, third time.) Earlier, “meaning” was anything that provided positive or negative valance: for a biological cell, the discovery of food has positive valence. This might result in the motor action of ingesting the foodstuff, or moving towards higher concentrations of it. Similarly, toxins, poisons and predators create negative valence states, resulting in motor actions to flee the toxin or predator. In either case, the motor actions are spurred because the sensory input was meaningful with respect to the world model: the sensory input as “understood” by the agent. That “understanding” propels the agent to act. Again, twisting the vocabulary: such “understanding”, when labeled with positive or negative valence, implies that the agent has a subjective “emotional” state, feeling joy (for positive valence) or pain (for negative valence). An agent experiencing “emotional” states necessarily has a subjective inner life.

Earlier, I made the claim that an agent has a subjective inner life if (and only if??) it has volitional control over it’s future states. If the only–if part holds, then any agent experiencing valenced subjective states has volitional control over its future. But now, I’m claiming that meaningful information is valenced. This implies that any sensory information that an agent is able to work with is necessarily “meaningful information”, and that therefore all agents necessarily have a subjective inner life. That is, the meaningfulness of sensory information, with respect to the world model, necessarily implies that the agent has subjective experience. And since it has subjective experience, it has volitional control over it’s future.

Holy freaking wow. Screw me. This feels really important. Its after midnight, so the late night high is starting up. But this feels important: all functional agents necessarily have an inner subjective life, and necessarily have volitional control over their future.

Now, it is possible that I’ve steam–rolled after some subtle points. For example, deterministic systems should not have volition. And yet, is there such a thing as determinism, if we limit ourselves to agents in the here–and–now, which is necessarily QM–ish? Can deterministic agents even appear in the here–and–now, or are they only constructed by e.g. humans? That is, can a collection of atoms spontaneously assemble into a deterministic machine? Since every such machine is necessarily made out of atoms, it won’t ever be purely, strictly deterministic, given that the atoms are ruled by QM. That is, deterministic machines cannot ingresss into the physical world, unless they are constructed by e.g. humans. That is, it seems like only humans can create a deterministic machine. But the conundrum is now that a deterministic machine appears to satisfy all the axioms of agency, except that it does not seem to have volition, and therefore would not have subjective experience, and therefore not have valenced emotional states, and there cannot absorb sensory input as being meaningful or having any semantic information content. Is this a paradox?

Earlier, meaningful information, or semantic information was defined as any kind of sensory input that could be interpreted in the context of the world model. With this definition, a robot, even a very simple robot, interprets it’s sensory input in a meaningful way. So, yes, this sure feels like a paradox.

It’s almost 1AM. I should go to bed. Good night.

18 October 2026

I want to work on the ideas above, but first, the emotional report.

I slept well. Or rather, when I was unconscious, all was well. When I emerged into light sleep, I found myself being tortured by memories of this summer. Replaying events, and analyzing them for meaning. By the time I’m fully awake, though, these are forgotten.

Does this mean that when I am fully awake, I am fully emotionally regulated? That all systems are up, booted, and operating? That when I’m half–asleep, not everything is on–line, that the part which would respond: “don’t go there, there’s nothing there but hurt” that part isn’t running yet? Perhaps. I’m willing to believe this is correct.

As I write the above, I realize that I am still in love. Sort of. Rationally, I know I’m not. But the intimacy, however incomplete, was not fake. There was joy, there was care, even if the sexual intimacy endpoint is not attainable. But anyway, this is not what I came here to write about.

I find I am addicted to facebook. I was going to write that I am in a mild depression. Which may or may not be true. I’m finding that increasingly many normal, ordinary activities are losing appeal. One way to read this is that it is a form of depression. Another way to read this is that they no longer are rewarding.

Rewarding in what way? The cliche of no longer providing dopamine hits? Is this like drug tolerance? The old dose that got you high is no longer enough? Yes, I suppose this is true. Going out and walking around the block on a sunny day is not as much fun as it used to be.

On the other hand, going out and walking around the block: I would be doing this alone. And it is absolutely true that I feel lonely.

This is a good time to belly–ache about my sister. I’m disappointed by the lack of her emotional intelligence. I had been hoping that, on return from Vilnius, I would be able to open up and tak to her about all sorts of issues. Instead, I get utter disinterest, and occasional disrespect. I don’t think she is even aware of the disrespect she’s shoveling out. It’s just something she does. It’s some automatic reaction. I can’t tell her things; she literally does not listen, does not hear. The words I speak do not break into her conscious awareness. Usually, she cuts me off mid–sentence to talk about something entirely different. Not even just cutting me off to stop me, but more as if I had not even been talking. That I was even talking is not something that registered in her mind. So I find I am lonely even when I am around her. I’m not looking for a soul–mate. I’m looking for someone I can talk to, in a meaningful way.

This is a good time to ruminate about facebook, and about this diary. What facebook offers is the possibility of connection. Reading it, well, its like reading a book or newspaper. But much easier and more rewarding: the collection of very short stories gives a pleasure hit every minute or two. The fact that each story is unrelated means I don’t have to concentrate. It’s easy to ingest. Requires little work. Whereas reading a whole book – its much more monotonous. Requires an attention span. And if I write something ... maybe someone will reply. There might be an exchange. Is this connection? It feels like connection. Sort of. A little. Is it more connection than I have with my sister? Certainly! I can talk about things she would not understand (even if she could connect emotionally.)

How about this diary? I can write anything at all here, and not worry about connection, or having anyone understand. Some AI in some imagined future may understand what I write here. Maybe. I’m not waiting for an upvote or validation: most of my observations are shallow. Should I extract parts of what I write here and turn them into publishable papers, talks, presentations? Maybe. It requires work. What’s in it for me? Fame. Maybe money. Do I want fame? No, only insofar as it is instrumental for money. It is instrumental for admiration. Do I want admiration? Not particularly, only insofar as it leads to sex. Well, sex and some kind of romantic connection. Some reciprocated limerance. Seems like that is the predominant concern on my mind.

So I have this ill–defined bundle of desires and dissatisfactions. Not particularly different from those of many others. How different are they from the bundle of desires and dissatisfactions of some bacterium? Perhaps one mitochondria is a little more starved for attention, than another. Perhaps it feels some vague dissatisfaction, because co–enzyme is a little stuck or damaged. What to do? The universe is uncaring: that co–enzyme might remain stuck (no one will step in to overtly fix it, any more than someone will step up and shower me with money or sex.) But perhaps that coenzyme should hold out for synchronicity, luck, divine grace, and continue it’s affirmations and prayers: there is some good chance that some random thermodynamic event will unstick it, and make it healthy again. Praise Jesus! God works in mysterious ways! I might win the lottery.

I lead my life as best I can, operating within the framework of neural rewards. As does that co–enzyme, floating in a soup of water and phosphates. The Krebs cycle runs on automatic; does my life run on automatic? I strive for something. I attempt to create. These words I write, they ingress from “out there” and take representiational form in a github repository. Can such higher function be ascribed to the Krebs cycle?

Well, lets look at the magnitude of accessbility. I have a huge number of atoms in me: some 10^28 or so, which manages to type at the rate of a byte per second. How many bytes per ingested kCal of food?

The byte–per–second estimate is of Shanon information, not semantic information. I do not know how to measure the semantic information contained in this block of text.

Clearly, LLM’s can create oceans of text quite rapidly; but is the semantic content of that text high or low? The stuff that LLM’s generate is not all that far from what can already be found on blog posts, and so, in that sense, the novelty is low. Lets compare this to what I create: is what I write here, is it really all that unique, or is it relatively near some relatively conventional mode of thought?

Clarifying this is important for the characterization of ingress. As noted earlier, ingress by teh human brain is a billion(?) times faster than ingress via evolution. And if I instead look at something like the Krebs cycle, ingress would might to be at a rate a billion(?) times slower than evolution ... or more ... indistinguishable from zero!? Whatever might be ingressed in the Krebs cycle? Creating more ATP is not the same as creating more words. I create more words, these have semantic meaning, interpretable within the context of everything written. But what about ATP? All ATP’s are effectively the same, differing only in the vibrational content, which is extracted from the thermal bath. Populations given strictly by

exp - E / k T

. The only “meaningful” differences are (a) where the ATP is inside the cell, and (b) where the cell is in respect to its environment (a multi–cellular creature, or maybe pond scum.) So is it fair to say that the environmental, contextual setting for ATP is the ecosystem in which it materializes?

Does this analogy work? If I type some text, a word, well, that word can be found in millions of books, and the meaning of that word, though generally understood, really depends on the context it is in: the sentence, the paragraph. Ignoring that context, all occurrences of that word are “the same”, in that it is the “same word”. Likewise for ATP: all ATP molecules are “the same molecule”; it is only the context that gives it meaning. Similarly a word is just one of half–a–million in the English language, just like ATP is just one organic molecule out of many.

Holy fuck!! I just asked: “How many organic molecules are there that weigh less than a kiloDalton?” and I got back the answer (paraphrased):

“About $1 0^{60}$ ... from classical combinatorial and cheminformatics studies, such as those by Bohacek, McMartin, and Guida. ... the known number of molecules can be estimated from databases like the Chemical Abstracts Service (CAS) Registry, which tracks roughly 219 million total registered substances ...”

Holy shit. I had no idea.

Now I have a question: how do I talk about entropy in this context? Let me backtrack. For a single English–language word, I can count the character entropy:

- \sum_{c \in {word}} p_{c} {log}_{2} p_{c}

the sum being over the characters

c

in the word. Likewise, I can write the SMILES formula for ATP and count the character entropy for that formula. There are also several more accurate estimates, which take into account the grammar of SMILES formulas.

Slightly more accurate for English would be to take the corpus of all English text available to me, and estimate how often that word appears in that corpus. Take the log2 of that. The chemical analogy of this might be to take a corpus of “all biological entities” and estimate the abundance of ATP in that. But would I count once per individual, or once per species?

A more accurate analysis in English would be to take the the grammatical embedding of the word, i.e. compute the conditional Shannon entropy from the grammar, e.g. from the MST parse of a sentence. i.e. the mutual information. The chemical analogy for this is challenging: I would need to document all f the chemical reactions that involve ATP in a living cell, and compute the conditional entropy or mutual information, and sum over that. This would be quite challenging, given my current understanding of biochemistry.

What this does seem to sketch is an ascending tower of estimates, starting with some very plain Shannon entropy and becoming refined to add context. Presumably, this “converges” to some semantic entropy that is “accurate”.

Got to go to store, now. Later.

So if we take this analogy seriously, then the insides of a biological cell provide the context for a (small) biomolecule. Since its the insides of a cell, it satisfies some of the axioms of the agent model. But we don’t want to consider *all* of the innards to be the world model, right?

But that depends on what we consider to be the “outside”. If the “outside” is the pond that the cell lives in, then it is hard to understand how the cell interior is a “world model” of the outside. But if the “outside” is the platonic space of ... of ... all possible cellular machinery arrangements? Then we get the thermodynamic picture that this particular cell is exploring the nearby (thermodynamically accessible) arrangements of the molecules inside the cell. Here, I envision an ensemble – a grand canonical ensemble of possible points on the ultra–high dimensional symplectic manifold (approx 10^20) of atomic positions of the atoms in the cell. And this ensemble would have to be over the QM atoms, i.e. the atoms as wave–functions.

The metaphysics questions here are “what is ingressing, when a biological cell goes about it’s business?” and “why is there ingress in the first place?” and “what is it that the universe wishes to ingress?” Old answers appeal to deities and spiritualism. Reductionist answers mutter about following energy gradients but never articulate the concept of ingress.

Can we gain insight from ecology? That is, ATP is a messenger molecule, it carries a lot of chemical energy. As a messenger, it is the incarnation of a message or signal sent from one part of the cell (where the Krebs cycle is running, i.e. in the mitochondria) to some other part of the cell (the flagella, tubulin synthase, whatever. Ribosomes.) Messages are used to bind parts into a whole that is (literally) greater than the sum of it’s parts.

Somehow, I don’t understand messaging.

Messages are to be interpreted contextually. The semantics of a message are with respect to the sender, and to the receiver. That is, messages have not one but two meanings: what the sender intended, hoped, desired, meant, and what the receiver understood and perceived. The semantic information content of the message is thus doubled. I see no reason why the information content as measured at the sender should equal the information content at the receiver. This implies the creation or destruction of information....

Interruption for dinner. The above idea seems to provide an important insight.

Post dinner. My limerance revives at unexpected times. I recall three or four (or more) conversations with Milda that felt very dreamlike to me. I asked gemini. The ansswers are interesting. I ask: “Occasionally, during certain conversations, especially emotionally intense ones, the other party to the conversation might say something, and I hear it as if I was hypnotized, or as if I was hearing it in a dream. How common is this feeling?”

The reply (summarized):

“This dreamlike, hypnotic sensation is actually very common, especially during moments of overwhelming emotional intensity. What you are describing is a textbook psychological phenomenon called derealization (a specific form of dissociation). Studies estimate that as many as 50% of all people will experience a transient episode of depersonalization or derealization at least once in their lifetime, usually triggered by acute stress, panic, or intense conflict. ...”

I continue: “It was not stressful for me; the other person was relating stressful moments in their life. I was being silently sympathetic, and trying to be supportive. The only shock to me was perhaps that they had opened up to such a degree.”

The reply (shortened):

“... 3. Hyper–Focus and "Trance" Listening. When you practice deep, silent, supportive listening, you naturally quiet your own internal monologue, stabilize your body, and narrow your vision entirely on the other person. This deep concentration mirrors the exact brainwave states achieved during meditation or formal hypnosis. ...”

Gemini said more, but its not noteworthy enough to copy here. At any rate, I had multiple episodes of this sort during the summer. The first one, early on, was Milda complaining about work (low pay), having too many boyfriends (the she needed to get rid of) and cooking (the lunch she was making for me is a large investment of time.) I recall trying to be sympathetic. I recall trying to avoid giving advice, and trying to merely listen and acknowledge. I say this to Gemini: “I recall trying to be sympathetic, to just listen and avoid giving any practical advice. I repeatedly reminded myself to not do the "male answer syndrome" thing, of advising what to do about it.”

The reply (shortened):

“... 3. Entering a State of Radical Presence...”

Also a fascinating answer that I won’t copy here, because you can reconstruct it if interested. Oh, I also saved it to my saved–web–pages log. I keep this log in order to help reconstruct my exposure to ... web pages. Curtailed life–logging.

It is now clear to me that these episodes contributed strongly to my overall state limerance for this summer. Huh. They’ve been haunting me, and the fact that I’m writing of them now is real–time evidence of the haunting.

That’s a fun thought. My brain is a haunted house! I’m visited by ghosts!

FWIW, I had a glass of white wine with dinner. But on a full stomach, so the absorption is slow. I appear to have developed a certain fondness for being mildly inebriated. Not something I’ve ever had before. Better late than never?

I’m in a certain state. Not exactly maudlin, but having that flavor.

Oh, this is fun! From Gemini:

“The word comes from Mary Magdalene in the Bible, who was traditionally depicted in Christian art as a weeping penitent with red, swollen eyes. Over time, her name (Magdalene / Maudelen) evolved into the English phrase "maudlin drunk" in the 16th century.”

OK. Lets try to recapture the earlier thread. It was: “messages have distinct contextual meanings for the sender and the receiver.” Which implied distinct information content.

First of all, lets note that some messages don’t have a distinct sender; they may be just “out there in nature”, and processing proceeds through sensory organs and the receiver. An example would be interpreting my visual field: I am certainly receiving information, and placing it into context, but the external world is not “sending me a message” (unless I descend completely into woo mysticism and argue that “the universe is talking to me”. I mean, well, it is, but the naive pop–spiritualism interpretation is incorrect.)

The other issue is that some messages can have multiple receivers, and then, the information content is receiver–dependent. And example are these words right here, in this diary. Someone stupid, foolish, or unwilling to invest the energy in understanding what I am writing will have a very poor understanding of what I’ve written, and will receive little information. Some super–intelligence might be able to do much more, and perhaps construct a fairly sophisticated psychological model of who I am. Which is ... well, it is my intent, in a way. I’m spilling my heart out, here, because I do want to be understood. And yet, in the narrower sense, my more limited goal is to comprehend the nature of communication.

And so here we have the paradox of measuring the information content of this text. It’s reader–dependent. I suppose I can define some kind of “average information content” of this text by measuring it relative to some large corpus of English text, perhaps doing some cosine angle embedding or whatever. It is hardly clear that this approximate information content is correct, since it elides the psychological model of me, and I provide important context for these words. That is, to measure the information content correctly, for me, you should first construct a psychological model of me, my beliefs, my state of mind, and use that to provide additional context for what I am writing here.

Presumably, this additional context significantly alters the assessment of the information content. But there’s another oddball effect: “common knowledge”. So, what I am writing here is distinctly unique, for me, personally, given my high degree of ignorance of philosophy and of other thinkers exploring similar veins of thought. However, a super–intelligent LLM, thoroughly aware of what others have written, may assess my musings at a somewhat lower value, perhaps as being relatively mundane and pedestrian when judged against the background of other writers. So we rediscover an old idea from Fine Art: background matters. The “fonas”, in Lithuanian.

To what degree can this be compared to the ATP molecule? Well, first, it is a single–producer, single–consumer message. The producer context is, narrowly, the Krebs cycle. I suppose one can define some information entropy for that, using some grammatical mutual information from the SMILES notation for the reactions in it. This will be very distinct from the information content of whatever process consumes the ATP molecule. So what does this mean? Are we producing and erasing information? Information is not supposed to be conserved; no one proposed that it is. But there is some concept of the second law of thermodynamics, which is supposed to be iron–strong.

More precisely, something is supposed to happen when we chuck an astronaut across the event horizon of a dormant galactic–scale black hole. How much information was actually tossed? Do I need to finish reading Hawking’s paper? I guess I do.

Other to–dos: I want to get back to day–before–yestersday’s paradox, I had some provisional ideas on that. I also want to do a super–simiplified light–cone model, where I replace atoms with a two–state system (or perhaps a simple harmonic oscillator?) and photons with bosons that have two polarization states, i.e. still photons, but without electromagnetic, baggage. Two polarizations, so that entanglement can be explored. And then explore that in greater detail.

Bed time, though. I’m tired.

20 October 2026

Went to the Art Institute of Chicago, yesterday. Two things happened. First, there were just enough reminders of sexuality to manifest a pit at the bottom of my stomach. There’s this subdued but intense longing for love, for sex, for the erotic connection. The intensity is there, its subdued enough that everything was mostly fine.

To displace those thoughts, I thought about messaging. Fine Art presents a particularly abstract challenge. First, of course, is the information asymmetry between what the artist “intended”, and the level of artistic appreciation in the viewer.

The second observation is more important, and one that I’d missed before. An artwork talks to not just one part of the mind, but to many. The centers that appreciate color are not the same as those that appreciate form. If there’s some erotic appeal, that targets a different part of the brain. If there is some overt message, e.g. religious (Christian) or a depiction of a historical battle, famous personage, or some action scene, that triggers yet other parts of the brain. So the visual signal, the message that makes it in through the optic nerve and visual cortex, triggers and resonates with multiple parts of the brain, with multiple subsystems, with multiple subagents within the mind. In this sense, the message is multi–fractal, or rather, has a large number of jigsaw connectors with varying affinities to different active systems.

So now comes the question: what is a message, anyway? In the conventional conception of communications, there are “things”, objects having structure that are stable temporally: they exist, with identifiable boundaries, and relatively little change, over long periods of time. These “things” (computers, people) exchange messages. Messages are always envisioned as fleeting, transient, ephemeral. The radio signal, the ship–to–ship semaphore signal is sent and received on waves propagating at the speed of light. In this classical sense, objects are baryonic, messages are encoded with photons.

Is there insight to be gained by dissolving this distinction?

Well, at the first level, it helps acknowledge that some messages are temporally stable: books, artworks are objects that carry messages, which can be decoded by any sentient forms attuned to the message encoding. Second, it recognizes that sentient beings are dynamical; whereas books, artworks are effectively static.

22 October 2026

Continuing with the above, after a few days interruption. Conventional messages are always (usually?) envisioned as serial, at least, in conventional comp sci info theory presentations. A string. Yet there are two interesting non–serial examples: the painting, which has spatial extent, is one. More interesting would be two connected networks, where there maybe thousands of serial connections between them, running in parallel. So e.g. two networks, say, of a million nodes each, connected by a pipe of a thousand lines. The flow of information between the two networks runs all one–thousand wires in parallel. Yes, in principle, engineering–wise, one could stick a serializer–deserializer in the middle of this neck, encode down to a serial stream of bits, and count the bandwidth that way. The thought experiment here is not how to find isomorphic messages, but to understand messages, as they occur in actuality, without applied transforms.

In the model above, I’m trying to visualize what happens if I have two networks of a million nodes (e.g. neurons, but maybe something else), with a pipe connecting them, of diameter varying from one to a million. For the large diameter pipe, the total system is no longer two pieces connected by a pipe, but a single integrated system, where the pipe might actually be the cruelest cut. Is the transition from low to high integration smooth, or discontinuous? That is, analogous to percolation, is there a first order phase transition in the coupling of the two systems? How would it even manifest? When do two systems become one?

The communicating pieces–parts might be the morphological components of a eukaryotic cell. They are identifiable their classic bio names: centrioles, endoplasmic reticulum, etc. What sort of messages pass between these components? What is the diameter of the informational pipes between them?

These parts are in constant communication, so properly, its not a message but a message stream. The stream may not have clear start–stop boundaries, being continuous. It does have the property of being information moving between distinct regions in space. A fractal in space–time. In the here–and–now, slices through this fractal.

What am I trying to do, here? I’m trying to break out of the mold of a 3D space, of a network embedded in that 3D space, and of the dynamics being described in 4D. Instead, I’d like the network to not be embedded in any space, but rather floating in some ambient space of arbitrary dimension. The justification is two–fold. For conventional comp–sci, info–theory applications, it is irrelevant that networks are embedded in 3D space. For quantum systems, the wave–function is potentially non–zero everywhere, and those not anywhere in particular.

Likewise, I’m trying to break away from the idea of a time coordinate. Clearly, time is useful for visualizing the dynamics of systems in the past (as we remember them having occurred in the past) and for performing limited predictions into the future (isolated, non–agentic systems are predictable, insofar as they are deterministic; the concept of time is useful, here, too. But instead, I’m trying to imagine a world without time, where everything happens in the here–and–now. Clearly, the first and second derivatives are needed ...

Is this a dead–end? I can envision here–and–now as a large folk–dance. Where where the dancers in the past? None of the dancers worry about that, none of them visualize that. Instead, they focus on the present. They do focus on creating a pattern: left left, right right, turn, hook, bow, grab. But that is all that there is, in the dance. It’s obvious and innate to the dancers; I’m trying to project this image to a generic setting ... and failing. Maybe I should do something else for a while.

I don’t feel like working on this right now.

25 October 2026

Coming to Chicago broke my daily routine of writing in this journal. That, plus I got addicted to Facebook. Yes, I am finding cool stuff on FB, but using too many days to do it. It did, however, help me understand limerance, and reaffirm my understanding of male–female relationships.

I sure hope that I will one dy be able to download and save a personal copy of my FB interactions, a la “life–logging”. I already save all my emails, and many of the web pages that I visit. And sometimes audio.

Doing my email today, I wrote this:

> When you say "optimizing one predetermined outcome", I assume this is a reference to training using some function to be maximized (reward function, utility function, fitness function) I hate that, and systems that do that. I propose instead that systems should attempt to maximize to obtain the greatest number of possible choices for the future. I further claim that this is exactly what the real, physical universe does: this is why we see increasing complexity, everywhere.

> I get a kick out of noting that Hitchhikers Guide already said this, however many decades ago: and the converse: you die when the number of choices open to you shrink to zero. I literally see this in human aging: you can’t run and jump like before, you can’t party like before, and god help, no sex and few friendships. Maximizing choice goes hand in hand with maximizing health.

> I have not yet attempted to turn "maximizing choice" into algebra. I am very keen on turning things into algebra, because this then tells you how to implement them as algorithms. Anyway, that’s probably a major to-do item that I’ve procrastinated on too long ...

> As to block chain, income, open source, AI ... I have another friend who generates cool ideas at a very rapid clip. ("lets create an open source distributed, decentralized git blockchain manager that broadcasts incremental updates over a network mesh that...") and I found that when I drilled down through the ideas, they were all good, they were all doable, they were all interesting, but there were so many, it was not clear what should be done first. Too many cool ideas. Now what? I was unable to put him on a short–enough leash to actually follow through on any one idea; he just generates more and more. This is a real trap.

(Referring to socioprophet, here)

> So there you have it: a definition of an agent (that could be algebraicized, and thus turned into software) and a goal: maximize future choices for the agent, which I don’t know how to algebraicize, yet. The third step is "great, now what?" and this third step remains ... opaque. I guess I would have to choose between one of the ever–increasing number of possibilities. Aieee!!!

The central insight here fits with all the rest: the correct “fitness function” to optimize is the one that allows for the greatest number of future choices! When asking “what should I do now?” the answer is: “do whatever gives you the greatest freedom to act in the future!” Not sure how to work out the details of that, or how to slot it into the framework of agents and messaging...

Side snark: per Darwinian evolution, an organism is indeed called “fit” when it is able to survive in the greatest number of distinct environments. So “fitness function” is .... the correct terminology.

Anyway, later, I have to go grocery shopping now ....

27 October 2026

Wasting time scrolling over Dovydas Skarolskis collection of esotericism memes. I replied to one of them:

The only meaningful life is one spent pondering abstract propositions about the meaning of life. What we experience are hallucinations manifested into reality, the joy and pain of which endow that meaning over which we can form abstract propositions. This is what all living things do. Few are self–aware enough to know this.

I mean this in earnest. I should unpack it a bit. First, this is a one paragraph summary of everything I’ve been writing about in this diary. Second, it reveals, perhaps, something I had not previously known. So here’s the unpacking:

So it seems I now have three fundamental drivers of dynamics:

I don’t know how to reconcile the last two bullets, except maybe to invoke the Borel hierarchy. That is, to talk about stable and unstable manifolds requires talking about the closures of sets of trajectories, in the general topological sense of “closed set”. The Borel hierarchy appears to be a way of hopping into greater abstraction levels. That is, branch points in the sense of Morse theory can be taken to be closed sets at the boundary where (reimannian) manifold structure changes. But we’re not riemannian, nor symplectic, we’re QM, so we have to deal with choice in QM, and closure in QM, and the closure of choices in QM seems to require a layering of Cantor sets upon Cantor sets, i.e. a construction that resembles the construction of the Borel hierarchy, viz the sigma, pi, delta steps. That is, QM is founded on the complex numbers, which has the cardinality of the the continuum, but the choices of future possibilities, I think these escape this cardinality and crawl upwards in the hierarchy, to ever greater cardinalities.

Something like this. I am fully aware that this sounds like mathematical word–salad, idea–salad. This is just my attempt to sketch, and it is necessarily impressionistic. It is also esoteric, in that if you don’t have my math background, you won’t understand most of my mathematical references. Also, I could be wrong.

Anyway, back to viewing more of the Skaroliskis esotericism meme collection.

Oh, wait, no. A few days ago, I had this idea that reconciled free will with determinism. Lets see if I can remember it. A menu of choices has the structure that “if this situation is the case, then one should do that.” But this if–then structure of a case statement feels very deterministic. It can be over–ridden at higher layers. That is, there are always exceptions: “if X is the case, then do Y, unless Z, in which case...” and so there’s this branching fractal structure. Its possibly, probably fractal... Free will then seems to be an ability to over–ride the default, most obvious choice for a given situation by a more clever, reasoned out alternative choice. The “better choice” arrives from either logical deduction, or by experience. Which is ... what? The ingress of better alternatives? Alternatives that did not exist, but were conjured into place through inference?

So I’m saying (repeating what I said before) that inference is a mechanism of ingressing non–existing, Platonic–realm possibilities into the atomic world of lists of plausible actions that could be taken by devices made of atoms. This is analogous to computer programs that discover prime numbers, and therefore ingress them, except in a more general setting: inference creates information out of thin air, and encodes that newly created information as arrangements of atoms. By performing inferencing, agents are ingressing, enlarging their menu of possible choices for the future. The selection from the menu seems to be deterministic (if X then do Y). The use of inference to ingress and enlarge the menu can be deterministic. One of the menu choices is “act now, or spend more time thinking about it” which has the shape “if emergency, then act now, else plan”. Glurg. I’m tangled.

Diary – Part Ten–K