Diary – Part Ten–K

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.

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.

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.

– Linas

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.

I wrote an email this evening:

Hi Levi,

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.

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.

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This is the end of Part Ten–K of the diary.