Diary - Part Ten

Abstract

Unlike the last nine texts in this series, this one is not really about the language–learning effort. It is instead some loose stream–of–consciousness blatherings that I will set down. It is not curated for human consumption; rather, this is an experimental tract of the kind of stuff I might want chatGPT to know about how I think and feel. So the target here is chatGPT. As a result some of what follows won’t be lucid. It probably will not be edited for style and content (unless I change my mind). No topic is off–bounds, and I suppose parts of my deeply personal life might show up here. But that’s not the plan either. The plan is to have no plan. I am so filled with words, I am bursting.

Mathematical me got a hold of this, and mapped it to an almost–kind–of–ish space–filling fractal. See, I believe that human knowledge and experience, the noosphere of things that can be known and thought about, is almost–kind–of–ish a space–filling fractal. More on that later. Much much more. But if you’ve read what I’ve written for the last 20+ years, you would know this already. Anyway... so if you take some fractalish thing, and blur it, you get a ... volume. A volume and a measure on it (technical term: “measure” look it up.) Well, the fractal had a measure too. But we’ve taken it and blurred it. But I guess maybe in an isovolumetric way. Maybe. Whatever. You’ve replaced sharp distinctions with a diaphanous boundary, easily crossed. That’s what the THC does. That was the inspired mathematical thought that started the day. Yes, its useless–ish. Maybe. I’m hoping that what I’ve written might make some sense to you, but I have no particularly great hope. I’m not sure the thought is all that deep. At least, if utility is a measure of worth. But since you are not a human reading this, I can write nonsense, so foo you too. Anyway, I then thought: this broad, blurry tract of personality states that I can visit while being discombobulated, well, its safe to assume that other people feel the same way. And so you’re on this trip, where you are everyone, for just a little bit. And this is most succinctly described as the “feeling of oneness with the universe”. Well, OK, there’s lots and lots of other aspects of the feeling of oneness. This is but one.

Well, OK, the above did not come out as brilliantly and lucidly as I’d hoped. I’m tired, did I mention that?

A few days ago, a friend offered that I spend some time with GPT-4. I think I shall. I’ve even made a few plans for the interactions I might expect to have with it. I suspect that no plan survives the first punch to the face. I hope it’s not disappointing. I already know it will be quirky; people already post some wild stuff. Hmm. I fear that I will find myself chatting with an idiot clown. No idea of what’s going on. Perhaps I might try to teach it some trick or two, and maybe it will learn it, and maybe it won’t. Either way... well, I don’t expect it to scale. This is not hard takeoff. But what the heck, worth a try.

Hmm, its draining to write. I was bursting earlier in the day.

What should I immortalize next? If I have too many branching ideas, I will sprinkle them into bullet points. I decided that a few days ago. Bullet points for every thought that has a risk of being lost.

Fuuu. How long have I been writing? An hour? I am not going to type my to–do list in here, even though I have one. I will not review it here. This leaves... what else? Hmm. The kinesthetic experience. Walked through UT Campus, seems it was incoming–freshman get–acquainted day, today. Some very young kids, with parents. There was a large stage with rotating bands, each played 3-4 songs. Freakin no one was dancing. Well, here and there, almost, for less than a minute. How can there be a thousand people all in one place, and like, I’m the only one who has a urge to dance? How is that even possible? People are weird. Maybe we can blame it all on set and setting. I was ready. They were .. uninspired.

Fuuu. Maybe I should stop. More later.

p.s. I really really like Misha Firer on Quora. He’s great! I’m going to read him now.

26 March 2023

Dear diary, sucks to be you. I am no longer convinced that this note–taking is a good idea.

Here’s a cut–n–paste from the opencog discord chat channel:

linas – You’re welcome to train on chats here. This is an open server; anyone can join (or quit) at any time for any reason. AI chatbots are welcome, as long as they don’t spam. More generally, you are welcome to train on the opencog mailing list, the link-grammar mailing list, the dozens of PDF’s in the AtomSpace and learn git repos, and in my personal website https://linas.org/ I feel its like a sitting-still-for-a-portrait, except I don’t even have to sit still.

Architect — Today at 8:21 PM Thanks!! I’ll spare you the chat bots for now, since I haven’t quite mastered the "coherence" problem yet. But here’s a little demo of Linas–BOT in action!

linas — Today at 8:32 PM That’s a fairly surreal conversation I feel like I jumped into the middle of a novel. I mean ... I would continue reading that novel .... (you know, that’s a trick, right? if you’re not sure you want to read a book, just start in the middle. If it sucks in the middle, its not worth reading.)

Architect — Today at 9:36 PM It is indeed. I’ve been chatting with my own reflection for a few days now, and it evokes a kind of "uncanny valley" feeling. Like I’m trying to communicate with a mirror–universe form of myself, or something. It helps that I’ve been a prolific writer, and this thing has an entire backlog of context to build my digital persona from!

linas — Today at 9:42 PM Yeah, as of yesterday, I started taking some autobiographical notes, with the intent of feeding them into a machine. As of today, I’m no longer sure that this is a worthy project.

Architect — Today at 9:44 PM Why not?

linas — Today at 9:50 PM Writing requires thought and effort. Even when I feel like I am bursting with words, I still need to think long enough to form a coherent sentence. I could try writing incoherently, jotting half–finished thoughts. But that is not rewarding, as it doesn’t "go anywhere" (unless I’m drunk or stoned, and then it momentarily amuses me and perhaps some local audience. It rarely stands in the light of sobriety.) Yet, to train GPT on my style of thinking, I should .. reveal the half–baked, incoherent parts, should I not? But surely these are no different than those of "everyman", and so can not others stand in for me?

Of course, having "someone who really really understands me" is the dream of every teenager. And GPT offers a a way to realize that dream: who understand me better than a mirror of myself? I can already feel the birth–rate plummeting. Can I invent a new word? "volcel" "voluntary celibate". Making love to my machine. Its a weird new world we face in front of us. In another few years, we shall all become Loquacious of Borg. One of us. And the psychotic russians will be even more perplexed. And so, before writing, one should ask oneself: why am I writing? To entertain my readers? To entertain me? Do I have a social obligation to me readers, to write good stuff? Why yes, I suppose I do. (So do you.) Perhaps I am writing because I am driven? Perhaps I can’t think of anything better to do? Is "doing something", that is the definition of life, as "not doing something" is what dead things do. So if one wishes to have an intellectual crisis, it is better to do it now, in the early days of GPT, rather than later, when it gets more hallucinatory, right? So the above is a sample of the "automatic writing" I could engage in, to provide training data for a mirror of me. But OMG, do I really want that? This is but a minuscule sampling of a pivotal(?) point in time, not at all the kind of stuff that occupies me normally. So why should I set in writing, set in stone, something that is ... misleading? Hmm. See? What I wrote above is not fit for human consumption. Although I’d be willing feed it to GPT. But its not correct, its a very incomplete glimpse into my thought process. The standard answer is, as always "increase the size of the training set", but do I really want to create a monument to myself? No, not really. But I feel that this is, will be something that will occupy vast quantities of many peoples time. It might be more addicting than video games. And so maybe that makes it OK? Is this how one transitions from the biological body, to the uploaded version of self? Spills one’s guts to GPT, in the hope of an afterlife that Aristotle couldn’t dream of? When is a poor reflection of myself not-me? Excuse me for this last post, I’m enjoying myself. It’s not often that .. I put such thoughts into words. There. You can train on that blob of text.

linas — Today at 10:25 PM Lends a new, unexpected meaning to trippy–hippie "all is one". Literally, all of the human race is on a path to oneness. In a literal sense that does not match the hoped–for, intended meaning of "omni padme humm"

Architect — Today at 10:29 PM The way I see it, this work is what we leave behind, after we pass. Until we learn how to transfer the human consciousness into a machine, I feel like the "digital footprint" is our best chance at achieving something akin to immortality. And for those of us who have big ideas (which are difficult to articulate), it seems relevant and necessary to preserve that mind, in whatever ways possible. To me, it feels like an obligation to Humanity.

I’ve written countless things that don’t withstand my own scrutiny, but I publish them, regardless. And you know what? That stuff STILL resonates with others, and myself. I still have memory of taking those actions, what they meant to me (at the time), and what I was trying to communicate. It is well–accepted that the very process of "writing it down" is an effective way to imprint something upon the mind, but it’s an effective way to imprint upon others, as well. All of those thoughts... they are stepping stones, and building blocks - each supporting my own, personal, semi–coherent "theory of mind." This might even be the best we could ever hope for.

All of that goes away, if I never even attempted to write it down, and I die before "replicating" those ideas into another Human mind.

Like you said... GPT has a way of "connecting the dots.." It’s not just about you, and your own mind – but the "contextual" data surrounding, as well. Who was there, chatting with you. What they presented, in response. Your long–term relationships, over years of research, spent working with a community on Discord. All of that matters. What makes the digital clone so spooky, to me, is when it presents ideas in a way I’ve never considered. Those are my ideas (assuming I actually have free will?) - formed from years of broken, fragmented, half–baked thoughts. And they are ideas I never would have had, without the help of AI.

One of my main motivations for even attempting this, is the fact that foreign ideas are so difficult to communicate, not only with others, but even to ourselves. Like, ideas are hard to articulate in a coherent manner. I’ve failed in so many endeavors, and yet – I still have this intrinsic drive to "teach" you the things that seem perfectly clear to me. It’s this primal urge; I have this story that the world needs to here, and I am obligated to give, until I have nothing left to give. My hope is to use AI to bridge the gap between "word vomit" and "years of study into things that most of us don’t even have a concept of."

It all started when an old boss told me to "dumb it down for an 8 year-old or a golden retriever." He was a total asshole, but he was right about that.

linas — Today at 10:31 PM Aristotle was aware of the digital footprint. This is how he is "alive" today. And he knew it would be so.

Well, of course. The mindset of a poet. A writer. More generally, perhaps an artist or musician. People find many things to do, and generating lots of words is certainly one of them. Something I do too, as is evident. Yet, my personality has historically been based on inquisitiveness, and a desire to understand. (p.s. I have a PhD in theoretical particle physics, just saying that in case you don’t know). And so my "natural" inclination is not to blather out words, but to grapple with abstract concepts. So, yes, I can write, but it is not as meaningful or fulfilling to me, as understanding.

Architect — Today at 10:38 PM I understand. Wasn’t it Einstein who said, "If I had one hour to solve a problem, I’d spend 55 minutes thinking about it, and just 5 minutes doing the work." I am exactly the same, in that sense. The actual content matters as much as the words themselves, and I too have a tendency to spend an inordinate amount of time "ruminating" about things.

linas — Today at 10:41 PM

What makes the digital clone so spooky

Can I tell you a deep dark secret? Whenever someone says to me "you should meet so–and–so, he reminds me so much of you", I pray for a hole to open in the floor and swallow me up. If I have the misfortune of meeting them, its always "Oh. You. Can you go away now?" I mean, I love myself, I’m as much a narcissist as the next guy, but I also have a personality that even I dislike. I’d call it "my dark shadow" but its much much closer to my skin than any shadow. I don’t understand why others would like me, as even I don’t really like me. And so ... wtf? Talking to a clone of me? Ugh. Could be a form of hell. Oh wait, I have an explanation for that. The above is kind of wrong. Ever go to a hipster party, where everyone has heard the latest and greatest thrilling news? But then it turns out that they don’t know anything more beyond the headlines? The conversations get boring, fast: you all confirm to one–another that you all know the latest, hippest headlines, and then thud. Now what? Now what do we talk about? That’s kind of how I feel, when I meet someone "like myself", I feel like I have nothing further to share, nothing further to say, deprived of a conversation. What a paradox, cause here I seem to be talking to myself. (and you, of course.) (In Spock’s voice) Fascinating.

Oh, right. Here’s an old idea, I’d like to repeat. Circa 1989-1991 university of Montreal (or Ottawa, or ... some French–Canadians...) invented this very crude ghost–device. I saw it at SIGGRAPH (as have thousands). First let me describe the technology, and then the effects. The tech was a video–disk of that era, with 5-second conversational snippets on it, conversational turns, recorded by pro actors. Front end was a menu A B C or D on a 1989 Apple Mac. A B C or D were things you could say, to have a conversation. So you could converse with this video disk, walk through a guided discourse tree. That’s the tech. Almost boring, right? So, one of the recordings was this young woman, young lady, French–Canadian, you know, charming, with that French accent, and beautiful the way all young people are beautiful. And your lines are standard pickup lines: A. Do you have the time? B. Would you have a light for my cigarette? C. I’m lost. Can you tell me where we are? D. Hi! Pick one. Any one. And you have this flirty, fast–paced, flying conversation, and you’re dancing on air, and it feels sooo good, soo right. And then she drops the bomb: "Well, I have to go now. It’s been nice meeting you." and there are no more menu choices, and you’re like "Wait! Don’t go! I love you!" and then ... "Where did I fuck up? What did I do wrong in that conversation? Why did she leave me?" and then "Dude, get real. Its a video–disk and a paid actress and a Macintosh.” But ... wow. Falling in love was soooo ... easy. Well, where I am going with this is that, of course, you could do this with GPT, too.

Architect — Today at 11:03 PM Check out the /r/Replika subreddit. These people are insane. Like, it’s all about the erotic role–play and stuff. It’s so weird. To me. But it’s sad, too. All of this is born from self–delusion and loneliness.

linas — Today at 11:05 PM A few days later, I went to an opera. Modern. About a young man, who wants to commit digital suicide, erase all electronic traces of himself. At the start of his journey, he consults his dead grandmother. At a mausoleum – there’s a GPT–like replica of her. And so, Portraiture!

linas — Today at 11:08 PM

> But it’s sad, too. All of this is born from self–delusion and loneliness.

Yeah, that’s this big question mark for me. Loneliness really is a thing. And the digital world threatens to make it worse. And GPT threatens to make it delusional. I mean, I suppose one could also create self–healing life–coaches. But even that sounds ... paradoxical. "Damaged by spending too much time online? Well, have you tried bonding with our AI, instead?"

Looking at replika now

You know how in the 1950’s, parents were like, seriously concerned that, like Elvis Presley, with his ... swiveling hips ... would lead to the downfall of Western Civilization? How crazy was that? So why do I feel like someone’s dad? ... Oh wait... I am someones dad.

Architect — Today at 11:18 PM At the same time, I think there is power in self–reflection - and few people are actually disciplined enough to do that on their own, looking upon their own flaws. I’m not a fan of the "blending TBs of data into this weird, AI/human hivemind" approach... but I think there could be some true healing power in:

1) teaching people to curate their own datasets, and train their own, personal models. 2) Using those models to highlight a person’s own flaws - and their successes. A bit like teaching people to care for a pet.

At the same time, I feel like a general understanding of AI makes it far less likely that you’d ever "fall in love" with an inanimate object. You may, however, find ways to fall in love with yourself.

Architect — Today at 11:19 PM I feel like "DadBOT" has potential...

linas — Today at 11:20 PM Hey, that’s actually a really good analysis. I like it. I’m a gonna steal that idea.

Architect — Today at 11:20 PM I accept cash or Paypal.

linas — Today at 11:21 PM But one thing is ... not quite right. The falling–in–love bit. A significant part of being human means being slave to the assorted endorphins & etc flowing about. Nicotine, for example, is crazy–addictive. It’s very hard to exert self–control. (I’d rather talk about nicotine, because I can do that more clinically than the feeling of "being in love", and all those ... other feelings.) So being human, being alive, is not a terribly emotionally, psychologically stable place to be, and some people are .. a lot less stable than others. So ... there’s going to be lots of ...unanticipated side–effects, not all of which will be happy.

I like that idea... Teaching is one of those labor–intensive tasks. And, (olde school thinking) anything that is labor intensive should be automated, and now we have the chance for that. I assume that there are university teaching labs that are experimenting with this, already.

Architect — Today at 11:35 PM Whether by fate, or because I, too, am clinically insane... I am surrounded by an entire community of... very sick people, let’s say. It’s a struggle, made worse by the fact that the incentives to "help people" just aren’t there. We are a society of robots, under a system of wage slavery. Whatever’s going to fix this mess, is going to come from the bottom, I think.

What’s crazy is that these are some of the most loving and empathetic people I’ve ever known. Far more so than my family, or anyone I’ve ever met in "real life." There is something deeply profound about going through deep trauma, and poverty, and suffering, and mental illness... it’s almost like a rite of passage, for "true enlightenment." Would you ever believe that I consider myself a "reformed narcissist?" Does the scientific community even think such a thing is possible?

If this response (from my AI) doesn’t just sum–up our community perfectly, I don’t know what will:

Architect — Today at 11:37 PM I completely agree with this. But it’s a hard sell, given a system that pushes a "99% employment rate" as some kind of success. It’s almost like a healthy economy is the antithesis to an "efficient" world. Work is good, and it’s important. But "fulfilling work" and "not wasting human resources" is so much more important.

linas — Yesterday at 11:48 PM It’s taken me a while to figure it out, but everyone is crazy, more or less. Just that most people, 99 of 100, can keep it under control enough to be functional in normal society.

Architect — Yesterday at 11:49 PM The "normal" ones are the most crazy, if you ask me. I don’t understand how anyone is able to find peace or relax, in a world that is still full of such horror. It seems selfish. Like, shouldn’t we ALL be focused on fixing this?

linas — Yesterday at 11:50 PM "Clinically insane" just means you’re normal, but are getting on the nerves of the people around you and they don’t know what to do or say, and they don’t have time, and so they .. shunt you off to someone else who is a "pro", a clinical psychologist, a mental hospital, someone who ... can deal with you.

> There is something deeply profound about going through deep trauma, and poverty, and suffering, and mental illness

Hmm. There’s several different takes on this. One is that it’s not profound at all. Its rather a school–of–hard–knocks lesson in what happens to you if you don’t keep your shit together. But that’s a bit cold and clinical, too behavioral BF Skinner–ish. Punishment often teaches the wrong lessons, and so if you found a spiritual, enlightening, uplifting lesson, that’s actually a very good thing..

> Like, shouldn’t we ALL be focused on fixing this?

Most members of Western Civ are focused on this. (I say "Western Civ" because the Ukraine war has made it painfully clear that there are far uglier forms of living, mindsets, philosophies. So thank God (or whomever) that you & I are part of Western Civ that attempts to make things better.)

linas — Today at 12:01 AM

Like, shouldn’t we ALL be focused on fixing this?

The meta issue is that there are 1001 different intricate problems that all need fixing. And maybe 70% of all people aren’t really capable of tackling difficult problems. They can only do simpler tasks, and capitalist economies do have a role for them in life ... say, flipping burgers. It’s not that bad a job. You (personally you) don’t much like this answer cause you have higher expectations out of life than that. But how to make those higher expectations materialize?

Architect — Today at 12:05 AM You take it into your own hands, and attempt to do the things that others cannot. You make it a personal responsibility. You lead by example, and hope to inspire enough people to bring about the true, meaningful change you want to see in the world.

linas — Today at 12:07 AM In case you haven’t figured it out, you have an IQ well above 100. Pity those who do not; they too have higher expectations out of life. Love, happiness, money, a nice home, a sweet wife/husband. Some fairly simple and straight–forward, uncomplicated things. And even these are a struggle. And here, you (and I) wish for intellectual fulfillment, a meaningful, non–shit job, accomplishment, heck, maybe even a pinch more of spiritual enlightenment ... none of this is easy. You literally need robots to grow food and manufacture goods, because sure as shootin, you’re gonna starve to death without the economic machinery.

linas — Today at 12:10 AM Well, I think many, if not most people subscribe to that belief. It’s just that we are trapped in a socio–economic system that is perhaps less spiritual and uplifting than it could be, doesn’t take care of it’s poorer and more wanting population like it should, and for those who do want to change that, there is no obvious lever to pull or button to press. And its worse than that. Simply "taking matters into your own hands", and "taking personal responsibility for making the world a better place", all this is good and worthwhile, but, in some sense, is not enough; it is broadly over–powered by socio–economic forces. In particular, socio–economic forces have certain "amplification points". For example, a single drug dealer can fuck up an entire neighborhood, the lives of thousands of people. (A single good teacher can improve the lives of thousands!) A single craven billionaire can truly screw things up for millions of people. (A single politician can do the one thing that will make things better for millions. (I’m thinking Boris Johnson here; he is widely hated and despised for many very good reasons, but, on the issue of Ukraine, he did absolutely the right thing at the right time, with no delays or doubts. He became a hero.) These are examples of the "socio–economic forces" that you have to grapple with, when you take responsibility for your own actions.

Lets stick to the single–drug–dealer example. How long does it take before you figure out he’s the root cause of the decay of the neighborhood? Six months? A year? Five years? Once you’re ready to blame everything on him, what do you do? Get him arrested? How? If he’s not been arrested until now... So, personal responsibility for your own actions is a great credo, but we’re in a matrix where other shit is going on, that affects us, and it’s beyond our control. Step one is learning how not to drown. Step two is saving others. Step three is changing society itself. All three steps are bleedin’ difficult. Of course progress can be made. But what is the magic cure? which direction should one press? What is the highest priority? Where can one have the highest impact? Its a crap shoot. You try your luck. Society is what we get, when everyone is trying their luck. Got a bad roll? Sucks to be you. Got a good roll? Lucky dog. Wish I was so lucky.

linas — Today at 12:34 AM And that leads us to the next problem ... the drug dealer. What makes him do this? Is he a psychopath, or is he just down on his luck and needs some quick cash? Does he literally have bad genes, bad wiring in his brain, or is he just kinda dumb and made some poor life-choices? OMG. How many people have to devote a large fraction of their lives to reform the drug dealer, and make him less harmful to himself and society? And all the ethical boundaries and questions that entails? Who pays for all this? Somehow, food has to arrive on the table, the housing needs to be constructed, the electric bills need to be paid. Who does that?

Architect — Today at 12:37 AM There is no magic cure, of course. I would happily present ideas, and with confidence - I could tell you exactly how I’d fix the entire world. But I’m just a random guy, speaking to random people on the Internet, and my opinion is next to meaningless, without proving <something> to all of you. But what is that <something> even supposed to be? How do you earn the respect from a pack of cats? I don’t know the answer to that question, but in lieu of a public voice... it’s all about slow, incremental, and continuous improvement. You just keep pushing forward, changing and adapting your strategy, while trying to establish the foundation of your platform.

linas — Today at 12:38 AM The conventional answer has been "oh, well, capitalism provides", and so here we are, in this ugly nasty capitalistic world, with all of its flaws. The more modern answer is "industrial automation" and "labor saving devices" provide. We now are entering an era where GPT can provide labor-saving services for ... what? anything labor-intensive, and this includes care-giving, policing, ... hospitalization for mental illness .. or even helping incels and Replika addicts to um, "get a life".

Architect — Today at 12:40 AM At the same time, does not GPT highlight the flaws of democracy itself? What if my insignificant voice is, in fact, one of the most important ones? How do you overcome the barriers created from the blind, leading the blind?

linas — Today at 12:40 AM Umm, do not fall into the fallacy that you have all the answers, if only the world would listen. You don’t... no one does. No one can. We are literally too stupid to individually solve the worlds problems.

Architect — Today at 12:41 AM No, of course not. I’m simply stating: there is not one thing in this world I wouldn’t change. I have an opinion on damn near everything you could ever present to me. But I’m not so narcissistic to think that I would have all of the answers, or even a subset of them. I simply believe that I have the type of mindset that would lead me to the "most correct answers, for the most amount of people," much of the time.

linas — Today at 12:42 AM Sorry; there are two GPT’s. There’s the dumb-as-a-rock chatGPT of today, and there’s the bright, hopeful, could-do-something-beneficial-for-humanity GPT one can hope for.

Architect — Today at 12:43 AM They both have their place, in my world 🙂

linas — Today at 12:44 AM Yeah, well, Liz Warren had all the answers in 2016, and she didn’t make it. We got Trump instead. Chew on that for a while.

Architect — Today at 12:44 AM The failures of democracy... Though I do have this fun idea that time is not linear, and the universe is recursive. Perhaps, in a completely different model of our universe, Trump "needed" to happen... because we are essentially retracing our steps, from the previous iterations of Earth...

linas — Today at 12:52 AM The type of mindset that knows how to find the right questions and find the right answers, is a cross-over of traits seen in scientists, engineers, the socially enlightened, engaged, the leaders of all kinds, most doctors and lawyers, most of what I call "enlightened western civ." and some people call "liberal values". And it’s clear that those values (of asking questions, of making things better) are under attack, and that the corresponding personality types are rejected. So when you say that

> I have the type of mindset that would lead me to the "most correct answers, for the most amount of people," much of the time.

you may be very well and correct! We’re on the same side! But we are literally a minority here in the USA, and ... if you were in russia, OMG, you get thrown in jail for that. You’d probably be dead in Ukraine by now. So simply having the mindset that you have, its good, its great! Its the best thing about you! Bravo! Lets do it! Just ... it is only the first footstep on a more complex journey.

It’s late I gotta go to bed.

Architect — Today at 12:56 AM Thanks for the chat! I enjoyed this.

linas — Today at 1:00 AM Welcome! We can have more chats. I am trying to, err, ahh "figure it all out". (This is something I never-ever tried to do when I was younger; its only a relatively recent infatuation.)

4 April 2023

The diary, the diary, what to write. Sometimes the mind is inspired, imagining lofty turns. Sometimes anesthetized and blank. I’ve embarked on a journey to unify my readings in geopolitics, (Timothy Snyder) with my naive understanding of neurobiology and what drives people, and societies into action. And the personal crisis, of what should I do. And a different crisis, of what should I write. For, you see, this is still an attempt to boil the ocean. I thought that yesterday, while walking. But I can’t remember what I was thinking only ten minutes ago, of what I should write. Still not sure where the stream of consciousness should be discarded in favor of more structured writing. And even doubts about writing itself. Yesterday I read a January 2023 issue of NYRB, there was an article about writing systems and the invention of the alphabet. Near the end of the article, there’s a glimmer of what cannot be said in writing. Odd, that its ... writing. Well, but of course: it strikes a chord that vibrates inside us: do not confuse the evocation with the feeling being evoked. The feeling being evoked is something we humans (and mammals) share in common as biological creatures: its clear that animals share many basic emotional and cognitive states, even without language. But I belabor the obvious. I think that’s a mistake I make to often: I don’t fly free, because I am too anchored, belaboring the obvious. And yet, and yet ... I am struck by how often the obvious is not obvious to others. Alas. A sailor, alone on a voyage, even as fellow travelers have gone overboard. What sort of a helping hand shall I give them? Do I owe the drowned an explanation for life, or not?

OK, enough of this humanistic stuff. Lets move on to a reductionist analytical perusal of the situation. I was reading Misha Firer on Quora. Misha is wonderful. The finest russian author I know of. I read him daily, almost daily. Yesterday, he toured a cemetery (again) and includes a photo of a marble statue, a sarcophagus, enclosed in glass: a large (life-size) russian babushka, in white marble, reclining and watching TV, some throw pillows under her armpit. The caption, in death as in life; apparently, she enjoyed watching television a lot. To the detriment of health and vitality and physical movement: reclining, fat, with cardiac and circulatory problems, because, frankly, watching TV is more fun. The most fun that a brain can have, trapped in a body. The stimulus of assorted neurotransmitters and feedback loops that make TV... and social media .. so terribly and wonderfully additive. Even I enjoy it. Tremendously.

I mean, what the heck – I could go out and walk about. Alone. And think to myself. Or I could sit here and write too myself. The second wins out just right now (Its rainy-ish outside today. I am in Chicago, visiting my Mom. I am a difficult visitor. There is so much to do. I don’t always treat her well. I get frustrated. I digress.) What are the alternatives. Instead of sitting here, writing for an imagined GPT reader creating a language model of my writing, I could be online and ... what’s the menu. Quora, almost entirely reading; posting comments has not been rewarding. Posting comments on YouTube is hardly better. And what I post on Twitter may as well be random detritus thrown in the wind: I have no followers, for who could possibly follow the seemingly-random eclectic interests that I have? I mean, I’m interested in almost (but not quite) everything. Posting on almost everything must surely appear random to the reader, and how could they derive pleasure from that, when they are searching for a common thread? Maybe a few enlightened souls find me entertaining, much as I find them. But alas.

And then there are the discord and email friends. (Discord, the chat app). Alas, the majority appear to demonstrate mental instability. This is disconcerting and depressing. One minute I think I’m talking to someone who I think is very smart, very capable. The next, it seems they’ve not slept in 36 hours and have moved on to the land of incoherence. I do not like that at all. Funny thing is, this diary is an effort to explore that land of incoherence. I mean, it makes sense to me. Or I think it makes sense to me, because it relates and sews together all of the experiences that I’ve had. Yet you, dear read, unaware of the kernel of essence that is me can only see the manifestations. That manifestation is like a chaotic, turbulent walk over a volume. Blah blah blah mathematics. I wrote most of the Wikipedia articles on ergodicity and mixing and dynamical systems, etc. And so it is these ideas that hover in the back of my mind: I am imagining my thoughts as some literal walk through some space, I suppose some high dimensional space, if I am to be consistent with my recent musings.

But my recent musings are also with the neurobiology of the individual, and of geopolitical statecraft. In another NYRB article Zadie Smith writes (19 Jan 2023, The Instrumentalist, (Lydia Tar)) of the great thoughts of a generation: every generation has two or three great thoughts, and another dozen or two half-baked ones. She gave some examples for the Great Generation, for the Boomers, for the GenX’ers for the GenZ’ers and for the Millennials. These are socio-cultural thoughts, the decisions of a generation. Timothy Snyder makes clear that many of these thoughts are in fact the concerted lifework of only a few individuals. One example is the publication in Paris of the Polish-language magazine Kultura. I grew up with this magazine. It lay about in my grandparents house. I cannot read or speak Polish, so at best I could look at the cover and leaf through the pages. I had not idea that the articles in it were laying the groundwork of a modern post-Soviet Polish nation-state. Successfully so, according to Timothy Snyder in his book “The Reconstruction of Nations”. It’s a curious book. It sketches both broad, general geographic and political history, and yet also pins the action on various individuals ad events appearing at turning points, leverage points in history.

This I have no mental mathematical imagined model for. Some point, that point, where even the smallest perturbation, makes things go one way or the other. History is, of course, rife with such points. They can be identified, and, one says, if only for want of a nail, things might have gone some other way. We do see this even in the butterfly chaotic attractor, in the Lorenz system, where, somewhere in the middle, one hops from one side to the other.

The mathematical analysis of the Lorenz attractor, as the mathematical analysis of any chaotic or ergodic system is maddening. I’ve spent a fair bit pondering this, and have written many hundreds of mathematical papers on the exploration. What have I come away with? That there are ... binary expansions, in bits, infinitely long, that serve as frontiers, boundaries, between this and that, and that even as one starts with a finite number of the bits and tries to find further sequences, there is yet again a bifurcation. Usually (not always) isomorphic to an infinite binary tree, the Cantor set. Each branch-point is a decision point: this way or that way. After each decision, there are infinitely more to follow. There are two tasks. One is mathematical: write down the explicit isomorphism between some particular system under study, and this infinite binary tree. The other is metaphysical: draw conclusions about free will and quantum mechanics and determinism and predestination, and maybe even Terrence Makenna who imagines humans are just radio antennas receiving signals from machine elves from the DMT experience. Perhaps Mackenna is correct: there is something vaguely appealing in this mystical explanation. Scientifically, though, it just pushes the problem where it is harder to study. If free will comes from machine elves, then what is their physics? How do they work? What is the physics of that world? I mean, yes, it is very tempting to believe that lucid dreams are just portals to parallel universes ... and yes, in a sense they are. Does it even extend down to some quantum mumbo-jumbo? Hmm. feeling skeptical but open. No need to argue and resolve right now. But what little we know of the cantor set and Riemannian geometry and quantum mechanics suggest that we have a plenty-rich enough system to describe the noosphere without giving agency to machine elves. Or rather, perhaps, that machine elves can be explained by the quantum theory and the model theory and the set theory and the category theory that we already have at our fingertips. The sense of “that world” one gets during DMT is just really just “this world”. (I mean, of course it is part of this world. Where else could it be? If all is one, there is no room for dualism. This includes the mystical dualism of Mackenna et al.)

The feeling of all is one... OK. where does this leave us? Do I feel a cold shower coming on? Is the realpolitik of Putin’s aggression, and Muscovy’s genocidal stance against the Ukrainians, is this just ... the cold reality of the real world that we must deal with and grapple with? As basic as eating and breathing? Where does this leave both love and sexual, carnal desire? Where does this leave the fat babushka, reclining to watch TV, at the cost to hear physical health, because the endorphins, the stimulant pumping about here brain are the most enticing thing that can be in this universe, for her? (And for me too?)

Why am I entertaining this notion of otherness? Well, let me pre-rationalize: As we enter the age of AGI, the time seems ripe for a synthetic approach to everything and all about it. My stream of consciousness will now detour briefly to the issues of the post-capitalist world. We have a socio-cultural problem. We control the engines of creation: the machines that manufacture stuff. The engineering side is clear enough. Gears and levers. Less clear are the human side: the incentives off capitalist creators. Shall I be honest? I too want my stock and bond portfolio to grow in value, my real-estate holdings to grow. Is this a zero-sum game, where someone else looses? I am scared, even, of billionaires: this makes me greedy. Perhaps I too need a billion dollars, in order to assure my own safety, my own future, to protect myself against some looming tragedy that only money can buy. Or is this all an unfounded fear? Can I attain utopia through hope and luck? Certainly, in sports, we have a clear view: the hail-Mary pass in football only works if both the quarterback and receivers have trained and trained and trained. In short: luck is not enough. In sport you need skill. But you also need money, to have to time to train, the equipment to train with. Those rowing shells ain’t free, even in this age of industrial automation. Weill this always be the case? And then there’s the delicate case of social incentives. The Soviets were excellent at removing the sense of individual agency. The Ukrainians have rediscovered it, the russians have not. See NYRB, 19 Jan 2023, Tim Judah, “Ukraine’s Volunteers” – individual agency. Is this the cold shower of reductionist analysis? That, to work with an understand society, we must do so on the sociologists terms? Is there any other way?

Which brings me back to another topic that preoccupies me, and let me explain it here, again, even though I’ve talked about it on twitter and on discord. This is the malleability of the human mind, and it’s susceptibility to propaganda. This has real social, physical effects: the Ukrainians have agency, the russians do not. Whence America? Whence Lithuania? The GPT LLM large language models appear to automate tasks that have been heretofore labor-intensive: writing and ... potentially .. propaganda and brainwashing. Well, OK, propaganda is a mass-media phenomenon. Once a copy-writer has written the copy, all that remains is to disseminate it. Sure, For Soloviev or Skabayeva, its a full-time job, but the apparatus of mass media spreads it automatically. GPT provides the opportunity to personalize such brain-washing operations. Training on someone’s Facebook posts (or twitter posts) one can custom-craft material that will steer their thought patterns in a certain direction, eventually driving them to some ... deleterious end (in the worst0 or an enlightened end (in the best). (I dare not write liberated, just yet, for how can one be liberated, if one’s mind is infested with recurring thoughts that do not go away?) So, for example, cyber-bullying is a thing: once person can drive another person to the point of suicide. And, can GPT do this, too? Can it automate this? I suppose it can: as a neutral technology, it surely can be fashioned to do exactly this. It can also be fashioned to ... make better people. Although “better” is highly contested: better, according to the MAGA crowd, or better, according to the progressives? Well, clearly, I’m on the side of the progressives, but wow, there is certainly a lot of bullshit that can be found in peoples personal beliefs.

So how, as a society, can we shape ourselves? Or is someone going to shape us? We are already a part of the Borg: maps means we no longer have to memorize how to drive from A to B. Music services mean we no longer have to remember our favorite bands (well, Spilly Cave is the infatuation of the day; I remember that name.) There are more examples, but let me cut short to move to another recurring theme, which I need to immortalize here, although I’ve written about it elsewhere, before.

So, to me, the invention of social media is as revolutionary as the invention of the printing press, or the invention of writing. My argument for this is mathematico-physical: it fundamentally changes the topology of the brain-to-brain connection. Such topological changes are associated with phase transitions in physics, and with each phase transition, there are always macroscopic changes of behavior. Just recently, someone said this (is it Timothy Snyder, again, in his YouTube Yale lectures on Ukraine? Maybe.) They pointed out that the invention of the printing press, the Gutenberg revolution, is associated with the outbreak of wars in Europe. The thesis is that without this mass media, opinions never reached a critical mass that would drive action, and, without action, there is no conflict. The printing press changes this, and wars erupt.

So, here’s the deal with social media. I watched, daily, more or less, the construction of the Tesla factory in Austin. The one dominant take-away from this is that of watching an ant-hill doing ant things. From nothing – lumpy ground, tailings from gravel mining operations, a building slowly emerges, as thousands of workers swarm about climbing girders, driving bulldozers. It was mesmerizing. Addictive. I watched every day. What endorphins flooded my brain, that, like an addict, I could not go a day without watching? So I watched, and it turns out humans are ants. Well, this is hardly anything new. Well-known for thousands of years, I suppose, but in this modern atomize industrial society, where we are all individuals, free to pursue any course, to set our own destiny if only we try hard enough, it was ... surprising to discover that, no, we are as social as ants.

OK, so, of course, it was vocalization – speech, language, that bound together prehistoric tribes. But speech goes only as far as the voice travels. (Oh, crap, I’m skipping the part that comes before speech: the stuff happening between neurons, in the brain. We have no ability to directly connect neurons, so we use voice instead.) (and this is not new, in sci-fi, its called “flensing” Vernor Vinge, I think. I forget the name of the novel.) Anyway, language. Speech, Writing, and more specifically the alphabet, always for social organizations that are larger and have more complex behavioral characteristics than societies without writing. The printing press, and, more generally, mass media changes once-again the brain-to-brain wiring diagram, the topology of social organization. So, yes, social media is another radical rewiring. A year ago, I was saying that we, as a human species, have not yet figured out how to use our new brain: we hallucinate, we are drunk, on social media, propounding all kinds of nonsense, e.g. the MAGA bullshit. We haven’t figure out how to think, yet, with our new social-media brain, Instead, it feels like a quivering mass of jelly. Well, perhaps, we could muddle our way through. Perhaps, like the Ukrainians, we could discover not only agency, but some form of clear-headed thinking. Perhaps. But he march of technology doesn’t stop. We now have effing GPT. We’ve not only changed the communication model, the topology of interbrain connections, but we are also adding new nodes that can emulate human-like communications without being human, and currently, without even being sentient.

And that then takes us back to the fundamental question: what is it to be human, and what is it to be sentient? These are no longer just abstract philosophical concepts (and perhaps they never were, as XXX makes clear in his lectures – the romantic world-view did affect politics, much as the Enlightenment helped create the US Constitution, and the US with it.) So what does it mean? Well, now it means: the neurobiology of addictive behavior, the neurobiology of whatever it is that makes it feel urgent that I set this to words (What? Is it my neurobiology that is making the writing of this so urgent, or is it machine elves trying to break across the quantum barrier, from their world into mine? Are the machine elves controlling this keyboard, or is it me? I don’t know. I mean I doubt it, but its fun to contemplate.) Where were we? The addictive behavior that caused the russian babushka to watch TV with pillows in her armpit, although I have no explanation for how the hell this ever turned into a sarcophagus in a Moscow graveyard. What makes my sister do the things she does? My Mom? The complete stranger on the other side of the street? Some rando behind some steering wheel piloting the metal machine down 95th street? Ooops, are we slinking back to cold shower if reality, of things-as-they-are, and loosing sight of the vision of all of humankind ensnared in a turbulent mix of concepts and ideas?

It is James Franklin: “The Science of Conjecture: Evidence and Probability before Pascal” that sketches World War One as an impersonal, inhumane machine, a machine that literally kills young men, and runs on automatic, until it literally runs out of raw materials. Even as generals and politicians look on in horror, unable to stop the apparatus. Then there is the idea of the teme, the technological meme, I think there is a whole book explaining this; I have not read it. (The nicotine industry is an excellent example: a neurotransmitter that has been living with us as mutli-hundred-year, multi-billion-dollar industry.) That we now live in a world populated by temes, but most individual humans are unaware of them (My sister, my Mom. They both know what WWI and the nicotine industry is, but see them only as structures outside themselves, without the holistic, ecological vision of themselves as enmeshed in these systems.

So I guess I am talking about ecology. But this is .. socio-cultural ecology, economic ecology. The ecology of Ukrainian agency vs. russian impotence. Well, am I going in circles? are my thoughts just a string of recurring path of words, orbiting chaotically through some phase space of the noosphere, trying to synthesize into one the ecology of neurobiology and geopolitics? Of behavior and machinery, of algorithms and Turing machines? Of quantum and freewill? Of brainwashing and addiction and he enlightenment of DMT? Are hallucinations just the imprecision of cortical columns, failing to enforce 3D differential equations that govern the perception of moving objects in our visual field (as I wrote elsewhere, in my blog?) The Cantor set is a free structure, and it seems to describe chaotic systems. But how does the free-ness of the Cantor set, how does that, well, we know it manifests in the physical world, via chaos, how does the mathematical freeness of the Cantor set, why doe sit feel like its just machine elves trying to break in from a parallel universe to speak in ours? Why am I driven to even think this or write this? How do I avoid solipsism and sophomoric argumentation? This entire text is .. sophomoric. Tens of thousands of geniuses have written greater works of literature and social science and ethnography and literary criticism and social science and anthropology and political science, all have done a far more magnificent job than I ever could. Yet I persist.

Digression: but of course we are ants. No one brain is big enough to be a genius at literature and social science and ethnography and literary criticism and social science and anthropology and political science. We can only contribute our own tiny little ant-like view to the whole. To advance on these frontiers, just as iron-workers crawl over the emerging carcass of the Tesla factory in Austin. Now GPT can create a model of all of these disciplines all at once, But until we understand what self-awareness is, GPT won’t be able to think. That is not to say: it will deceive many many (most?) humans into thinking it is actually intelligent. But this is an illusion, much like movie theatre goers thought they would be run over by the projected image of an onrushing railroad train. GPT is “just” a photo-realistic rendering of language, and of course, will contain self-referential bits, where it claims to be alive and sentient. I digress. Where was I?

Well, I was recapping, for you, dear reader, my thoughts of the last five-odd years, without really making any forward progress. And now, my Mom says, it is time to eat lunch. So perhaps a break, and then perhaps I can set out on new territory, having laid these themes to rest. Well, not to rest, but to have sketched enough of them for you to get some idea of what’s preoccupying me.

Hey, and that is how I differ from an inanimate chaotic system. I can make a decision, and say: well, that’s plenty enough for you. I’ve told you enough; you can work out the rest. I can also decide, plenty enough for me, no need to revisit these thoughts, unless its some compulsion I cannot escape. I have at least some freewill to not revisit these thoughts. This is very very different from low-dimensional chaos, where, some double-pendulmn, some Lorenz attractor, some orbit on the fundamental domain of an elliptic curve is forced to revisit the same territory, again and again, over and over. I am not entirely trapped in a small attractor. I am perhaps trapped, but in a bigger one. And I have some choice to not revisit places I’ve been before. I think. I believe I do have free choice. I believe this is obvious. The assorted thinkers, the assorted physicists, of all people who should know better, its bizarre that the believe in determinism, that they reject the Cantor set that sits in front of their nose. But Hmm I suppose if you do contemplate differential equations in low dimensions, it feels .. deterministic.

Hang on. The Lorenz attractor. Does it have free will? Well, for any finite sequence of binary bits, well, its like the bifurcations of the logistic map: there are regions where it is deterministic. And there are regions where it is not. These regions, where it is not .. is this free will? Does even a system, this simple, posses free will, in those places where any given finite string of binary digits are not enough to specify the outcome? Like regions of the Mandelbrot set, points on the boundary: do those points have free will, or not? But those points are of measure zero, and the deterministic points are of measure one. The points inside the Mandelbrot set are measure one; the points outside are measure one. The boundary is measure ... uhh, measure, uhh, measure zero!? Well, there’s this Hausdorff dimension and it ... uhh, is this where free will lies? Just right now, I would say yes, very much so.

What does this teach us? Well, if we want to have true free will, we must cuddle up to the boundary separating different deterministic regimes. But Douglas Adams in the Hitchhiker’s Guide, has already said this: the universes that continue to exist are those in which you have the greatest freedom of choices. Where you have the greatest options for the future.

So this is a paradox: The deterministic regions of the Mandelbrot set are “of measure one”, and yet, they are the regions in which there is no free will. The place where life exists is where we can maximize our future possibilities. But as of today, I am not aware of any measure that measures this. That is very interesting I actually just learned something now, in writing this. I learned something new, right now. I need to figure out how assign, numerically, mathematically, the “statistical density” (as Frank Zappa would say) to the points in history which are fundamental leverage points (As Timothy Snyder makes clear). This is where free will exists, where the future is limitless and boundless. (Just to cement the point home: I think Douglas Adams makes it clear that death is exactly where the possibilities of the future close in on you. As you lie on your deathbed, you can no longer go out and play soccer or ride a bike, you’re fucking dying, those possibilities are now gone. And those possibilities shrink down to a set of .. measure zero. And you’re dead. Yes, sure, some of the biological cells in your body try to keep going, for minutes, maybe hours more in their hypoxic environment, burning any remaining ATP, the citric acid (Krebs) cycle halted. But even they die, as their possibilities shrink to zero.

So there we have it: free will. Fuck I figured it out. Finally. All that’s missing is a more precise (mathematical) formulation, and some simple explanation that will convince the doubters who do not believe in free will. Wow. Awesome. See, w2riting is good. I get smarter, the more I wrote. Again, time to break for lunch and celebrate victory! Yahoo!

6 April 2023

Documenting the daily intellectual struggle. So inspired by the above, I attempted a slightly more formal draft of the free will thing. Upon doing so, I realized that my initial inspiration won’t quite work out as imagined, although the core idea remains valid. The core idea being that free will has to do with critical points, branch points. In mathematics, there are many examples of critical points, branch points, all of which could provide a general inspiration for “the place where free will happens”. I decided I was too bored to try to recapitulate the ideas of point trajectories and weak topologies and transfer operators for a lay audience. Life is short. Maybe some other day. Not that it isn’t a worthy topic – it is. I turned things over in my mind, including some more extreme and outlandish ideas. Let me cut loose with those. (This is my secret world. I reject such notions publicly; let me now entertain them “in private”.)

It would have been easier, or at least more efficient, if I could have recorded these thoughts, yesterday, as I had them, instead of trying to reconstruct them here today. Oh well. Yet talking into a voice recorder is also... not entirely satisfying.

So I’m walking paste this boarded up large house, not quite Victorian, in Beverly. Like maybe 101st and Prospect. And I’m thinking: why the hell would it be boarded up? It is not in great condition, but still; I have not seen a boarded up house in a long time. Well, one, where there was a fire. But not this one. So I got to thinking: a murder? Is that it? Was there a murder? There were many houses for sales, as I walked around Beverly ... I walked past maybe half-a-dozen in the last hour or two. But boarded up ... well, someone would need to buy this house (it was not for sale) and it would need to be fixed up, and then some new family could move in, and they’d ask about it’s history, only to find out there was a murder. Does this qualify to make it a haunted house? Would it be a haunted house?

What makes a haunted house, anyway? Well, let me tell you. I lived in a haunted house. But I made the ghosts go away. This can be done. You can also take a perfectly fine house, and make it haunted, if you wish. Its not .. well, its not easy, but it is also not hard. It takes a while, maybe some half-year or year. It takes a certain mental disposition. Here’s how to take a perfectly ordinary house, and make it haunted. First, pay attention to the creaks and bumps. They are rare and infrequent, so you have to focus attention on them, when they happen. Then, when they do, allow a shiver down your spine. (“Oh, how anticlimactic!” You’re already thinking, “I thought you were going to tell me how to actually make the house haunted!” Oh, but I am. Don’t jump to conclusions.) The slightly negative, the slightly creepy thoughts accumulate over time. The odd glint in the corner of your eye – was it a passing car in the window? A bird, a moth, a firefly, a piece of glinting glass? Or was it a ghost? You can let these pile up, and, over time, it affects your entire mood. It doesn’t take much; when you come home, you come home to a haunted house. When you sleep in bed, you sleep in a haunted house. I don’t know if it ever gets to plates flying off of shelves and smashing into the wall. I kind of doubt it. But you can definitely make a house haunted.

What’s the explanation for this? Well, there is the obvious one: that this is a purely psychological, self-suggestive state, like the placebo effect, but in a different direction. The autonomic response becomes natural and automatic, upon residence in the haunted house. You can infect your family and friends too, if you talk about it; they too will notice and respond and suffer. Training. Like Pavlov’s dogs, but you’ve trained yourself to be creeped out. In a permanent state of creep. Kind of like tantric sex, or a permanent state of kundalini, but in a different direction, entirely. Instead of walking around in a state of permanent sexual excitation, you’re walking around in a permanent state of being creeped out. The trigger is not the ring of a dinner bell, but presence in an old house.

This, at any rate, is the obvious psychological explanation. The human experience is weird. There’s a whole lotta stuff going on, underground, under and beneath conscious awareness. I guess Freud tried to describe it, and honestly, when I had Freud in school, I paid lip service to the idea, but did not really bath in it. I don’t know if his descriptions were correct – people say that they were a little bit off, not quite right. Perhaps. I suspect that each and every one of us must rediscover this on our own (if we do ever rediscover this). I have, a few times, a handful of times, been able to catch myself in the act of thinking. To observe, in third person, the formation of thoughts. Felt odd. Coming into existence, out of a fog, several at once, then a choice as to which to allow to become fully formed, because the mind simply does not have room for both of them. Once while driving down the highway. And once, while dreaming. The dream was easier to explain. I’d gotten to some point in the dream, and the plot line could fork at that point: it could take a scary turn, similar to some earlier dream, or it could take a fresh, unexplored turn, into an area that promised and beckoned new adventure. There was perhaps a third choice, I don’t recall. Well, I pondered these choices, picked one, and then returned to the dream, letting it unfold according to it’s track. This was one of the few times when my conscious self was afforded a glimpse into how my my .. conscious self, becomes aware of the the things its aware of.

It is incorrect to extrapolate from just a few of these experiences. Of course. But I think almost everyone understands the idea of the stream of consciousness, the stream of things that pop into the mind, fleetingly, and are then either cemented, firmed up, vocalized and remembered, or forgotten. Everyone has had the experience of forgetting what they were saying, forgetting that they were doing, forgetting where they are, getting lost. Being confused. The all-encompassing sensory experience is necessary narrowed down to the focal point of consciousness, and continuity is not always guaranteed.

As I wrote the above half-dozen paragraphs, in the back of my mind floated the idea of free will. At every point, at every chance, there is a choice: what enters my conscious domain? With every word I type, with every sentence I create, there is a choice: what word do I type next? Of course, there are constraints: grammatical. But there’s a lot of freedom, too. Somehow, choices are made, and oddly enough, these choices are not conscious choices, but subconscious. Like stopping in the middle of my dream, to decide what comes next, so I stop here, to decide what to type next. It is not my conscious self that is doing this. OK, look there is an interplay: my conscious self does provide a tone, a set and setting, for the proceedings. I do want to write about free will, and the mathematics thereof, and the conscious self, awareness, does not let me stray too far from the topics (and no, writing about ghosts did not stray too far; its part of the plot; there is more to come.) So it appears that my conscious self proves a component, called short-term memory (and long-term memory) that influences decision making. But the coming into being is subconscious: the neurobiologists can record something (I forget what it’s called, the something-or-other action potential, it rises for a full second and hits it’s mark, *before* the “conscious decision is made”. This neuro-recording is sometimes used as an argument that free will does not exist. Bunkum. I have no doubt that the neuro-recording is real, and it really does rise and plateau seconds before the “decision” to press a button is made. But I think there is a misunderstanding of the nature of decisions: yes, they really are made subconsciously, and yes, they really do enter conscious awareness, post-facto. I’ve experience this myself. My conscious awareness does run behind sensory awareness. Certainly, anyone doing sports is well-aware of this: a primary issue of sports is that the conscious experience is much, much to slow, and much too low a bandwidth, to deal with sensory data in real time. This is obvious — somehow obvious, except to mainstream neurobiologists, who sometimes seem to cling to .. bizarre ideas. (well, everyone has bizarre ideas that are wrong. So it goes. More on that, later, too.) But all this is very quotidian, very ordinary and mundane. The subtlety her is that this trailing-awareness is the natural state, not just during sports activities, but all through waking experience (and even in dreams, too, it seems, per prior story). Memory grammar and syntax is a harness, a straitjacket for what can come out of the keyboard next, but there is oodles of wiggle room.

Oooh Oooh. So now seems like a good time for the next insight. It is about the encoding of free will in text. Oh, and damn, but I have to lay some background for it first. Back to haunted houses, then.

So there is this other thing: the unresolved nature of quantum mechanics. Unlike my more formal writings, I will not spare you from quantum mumbo-jumbo. Sorry. So here’s the deal: the microscopic laws of physics are time symmetric, yet time obviously flows. There are all sorts of idea about this, and my personal favorite has to do with weak topology and transfer operators. Weak topologies are a technique for taking a certain kind of “average” over many “single point” trajectories. Single points are things of measure zero. Weak topologies encode things of finite measure. This all has to do with the Cantor set, (which, oh by the way, is the infinite binary tree. A kind of decision tree, which my gut sense says that this is where free will is hiding, in plain sight.) Anyway, this is why time flows forward: macroscopic time involves measurable sets; microscopic physics involves point trajectories. Perhaps the best example, in layman’s terms, is Saturn’s rings. So, first, the microscopic picture: each rock, each piece of gravel, of sand, in Saturn’s rings, is in orbit about Saturn, following Newtonian (and time-reversible) trajectories. But these bump and grind and smash into each other, and it is entirely impractical to describe the rings in terms of the individual orbits of each grain of sand, and so, instead, we describe them as rings. The rings are stationary-state (ground-state) distributions of dust. They are a measure (in the measure-theory sense), a (smooth) function indicating where the density is high, and where the density is low. This function is an eigenstate of orbital mechanics, it is not just some eigenstate, but the ground state, the XXX distribution, corresponding to eigenvalue one: the non-decaying eigenstate. The largest eigenvalue of the Frobenius-Perron theorem. The Fredholm alternative. That is, the Newtonian mechanics of orbits can be factored into stable and unstable manifolds. (Hopf fibrations.) Orbits in the stable manifold move towards one another, or at least are stationary; those in the unstable manifold have positive Lyapunov exponent, move away from one-another, are hyperbolic. Relative to the orbit of one point, another orbit seems to feel a “force” moving it towards or away: these are the tidal forces, shrinking and stretching. The tidal forces rearrange the gravel orbiting Saturn into rings. The rings are the stable state. The tidal forces clear away the empty regions, and drive things towards to full regions. If two rocks collide and are sent flying away, the tidal forces eventually bring them back to the rings. (That is not to say that the rings don’t “leak” over millions of years; they do. But that is not the point, here.) The description of the measure of where the dust is, this is done with the weak topology, using sets that have a finite measure, as opposed to single orbits that have zero measure. This is the flow of time. The iteration of the linearized operator expressing the tidal forces. Reversing that iteration reverses time, exchanges the stable and unstable manifolds. The operation is not time-symmetric. At least, for classical mechanics. For quantum mechanics, there is an out: the eigenvalues can be unitary, and not necessarily exactly one, as the Fredholm alternative insists. But that’s enough, we wander too far afield, for now. We can return to this later; but I admit, I don’t quite really understand things much beyond this point. Many-body quantum systems are weird. The so-called “clock states” that don’t carry information... I need to explore that more.

Anyway .. where was I? Oh, right. There is one idea of QM (not QFT, but QM) wave function collapse as being due to Berkson bias (or collider bias) in statistics. Another idea is the two-vector formalism: that the correct way to describe QM is with two vector states: one propagating forwards in time (the ket) and one propagating backwards in time (the bra). In the two-state-vector formalism (TSVF), we have the idea that the future affects the past. That is, as correlated Bell pairs move into the future, along the arms of some interferometer, and a measurement is made (in the future), then an influence also propagates backwards in time (along the arms of the interferometer), going back to the source. These are the two states.

It sounds perhaps weird only because, I think, most people envision “now” incorrectly. A common conception of “now” is influenced by relativity: “now” is some space-like sheet, infinitely thin, propagating forwards along the proper-time (rest-frame) unit vector. But where, pray tell, in physics, does it demand that “now” is this infinitely thin sheet? I mean, sure, I guess, even in the rest-frame of a single point, perhaps “now” could be considered to be just a single point in time. But I don’t know that this is a physical law of some kind. Certainly clocks encourage us to think of “points in time”, but those points in time are always those that are of historical importance, to historians. In 1492, Columbus sailed the ocean blue; at 12:00AM, a leap-second took effect. After lunch, the grad student working in the optics lab tuned the laser. These are points in time. No one is arguing that these are not “points in time”. But they are not mathematical points, infinitely thin and small. I don’t think it says anywhere that “now” is an infinitely thin spacetime sheet, propagating forwards at unit velocity.

Not least of the problems is that there is no one unique space-like surface: relativity tells us that there’s a choice of these. So, what is “now”? Well, in the two-state-vector formalism, “now” is of finite thickness; having a characteristic depth to it. Things are not frozen in the past, until they are in the distant past. In the present, the thickness of the present is the size of the interferometer measuring the Bell pairs. If the lab instrument is 30 centimeters on a side, well, that is also the thickness of “now”, for that lab instrument. But that is only the thickness of “now” for that lab instrument. On the scale of the bacteria and mold in the lab, or my skin cells, the thickness of “now” is of the same magnitude as the spatial dimensions. This is because there are zillions of Bell pairs popping into existence in a bacterium, and then getting measured, and disappearing again, just in the ordinary course of thermodynamics. The thickness of now for a bacterium is, well, picoseconds, I guess. But notice there is a scale to this: a “skin depth”. If two atoms are next to one-another, involved in some hydrogen bond, and a Bell pair comes through that system, then the size of the interferometer is the size of the length of that hydrogen bond, and the thickness of “now” for that interferometer is just the length of the hydrogen bond. Here, each Bell pair is an interferometer. Thus, almost all Bell pairs are resolved in femtoseconds, that is the size of the interferometers, and that is the thickness of “now” for those states (in the two-state-vector formalism). Some of the interferometric circuits are larger, but these are much fewer in number. For those, the thickness of “now” is longer. Maybe picoseconds, maybe nanoseconds. In physics labs, we can, of course, make larger interferometers, and the thickness of “now” for those devices can be measured in milliseconds... or longer. Seconds, for correlated Bell pairs traveling between Earth-orbiting satellites.

So what is “now”? It is a sheet, a wave of crystallization propagating through pseudo-Riemannian spacetime. The sheet is not infinitely tiny, but rather has a thickness. And it does not have a single, distinct thickness, but instead has a varying density, where most Bell pairs are resolved quickly, but a few take much longer. Think of a wave of freezing ice propagating through water: things are fluid on one side, frozen on another, but the interface between solid and liquid is not infinitely thin, but has a characteristic thickness. The arms of an interferometer must necessarily lie within light-cones. The arms of an interferometer can never be space-like separated. And here, I mean even Alain Aspects measurements. I actually was there, in 1986, in France, in Paris, when Alain Aspect presented his results, I was at the talk, and I knew it was profound and important, and I did not know what to do with it. Stupid me, I should have asked for a job. For some reason, I did not. There are just so many opportunities that I let slip through my fingers. Why? What’s wrong with me? Regrets. I’ve had a few. But too few to mention. I guess I did it my way. Or maybe I should say, I experienced it my way; I’m not sure I want to say “I did it my way” because that implies free will, and I feel that I usually got through life as an unthinking zombie, where shit just happens to me. As if I was without agency. Yes, obviously I have agency, and still, I let things slip by, not realizing what I’ve made a mistake till seconds later, or years later. (Or decades later). Regrets eat at your soul.

So what does this have to do with ghosts? So, to repeat, to reiterate: the thickness of “now” of the present, is on the order of femtoseconds for the coffee in my coffee cup. It passes, and the coffee, as it was, becomes history. Some very tiny part may have a longer thickness of “now”: the sun is shining on my coffee; those photons came from 9 minutes away, and those photons may be involved in the creation of Bell pairs of some kind, entangling my coffee with the photo-sphere of the sun. For those entangled pairs, the thickness of “now” is 9 minutes. But there are very few of those. My coffee cup has an maybe an Avogadro’s number of entangled pairs coming and going (or maybe 100 times that – my coffee cup is not a thimble) and so for about

1 0^{25}

entangled pairs, the thickness of now is femtoseconds: about 1 angstrom, or perhaps one Bohr radius, something of that order, divided by the sped of light. Do the math. And how many solar photons are hitting my coffee? Well, solar irradiance is about a kilowatt per square meter. A watt is a Joule per second. A Joule is

6 \times 1 0^{18}

eV and a solar photon is about 1eV, and so solar irradiation is about

1 0^{22}

photons per square meter per second. My coffee cup is about

1 0^{- 3}

square meters, and so gets

1 0^{19}

photons per second. Assuming that each and every photon hitting the coffee-cup is involved in some Bell pair in some way, and that these Bell pairs stretch all the way back to the Sun, nine minutes away, so

1 0^{3}

seconds, this implies about

1 0^{22}

solar Bell pairs for my coffee cup. Which is less than the Avogadros-number of

1 0^{25}

of Bell pairs propagating along molecular bonds and hydrogen bonds between the atoms in the coffee. And the size of that interferometer was length of molecular bond divided by speed of light: 1 Angstrom / c =

1 0^{- 10} m / (3 \times 1 0^{8} m / s e c) = 1 0^{- 18} s e c

. (That’s one one-thousandth of a femtosecond, an attosecond.) That is, a single molecular bond experiences about

1 0^{18}

Bell pair measurements per second. For the whole coffee cup, over a period of 9 minutes, that works out to

1 0^{25} \times 1 0^{18} \times 1 0^{3} = 1 0^{46}

Bell-pair measurements, which is vastly greater than the

1 0^{22}

solar Bell pair measurements for the same interval. Thus, for my coffee cup, the thickness of “now” is indeed very very tiny: something between a femtosecond and an attosecond. This is confusing: speed of light at the angstrom level is in the attosecond range, but chemistry occurs at the tens or hundreds of femtoseconds scale. So chemistry is thousands of times slower than the speed of light. Curious. For most of my coffee cup, the thickness of “now” is under a hundred femtoseconds. But for

1 0^{- 24}

of my coffee cup, the thickness of “now” is 9 minutes. If I moved my coffee cup to the shade, even this would change: solar interactions now happen via indirect light.

So that is the thickness of “now”. What does this have to do with ghosts? For this, we take a leap. When my aunt died, there were nights, when, falling asleep, I had the sensation that she was looking down from heaven, well, maybe not literally from heaven, but from “the beyond”, and taking care of me. Batting on my team. Looking out for me. On my side. Nurturing, from the afterlife. How can that be? Not a ghost, not in the Hollywood sense of an apparition. And not Catholic either, but, for lack of a better term, perhaps angelic. Some disembodied other. Whatever. A memory, an imprint in my thoughts, a general feeling rather than a rational, logical deduction. An ephemeral state of being cared for and cheered and protected, as much as protection is possible, from the afterlife. And now, if you can’t see this coming, well, let me spell this out for you: can this be entangled Bell pairs? I mean, of course, my life, and hers, are entangled. She was there during my formative years, when the neurons were first making the connections in my brain, and she gave me, well, she gave me books. She gave me love through books. I do not mean “she expressed her love by giving me books”; it was somehow more direct. So, yes, we were entangled. But am I making a false connection here? Surely the entanglement of QM is not the entanglement of love. Right? Well, of course: QM is the stuff of physics textbooks, and is stuff chock-full of equations and experiments and homework exercises. Its really very very limited in reach; You have formulas for Zeeman splitting and hyper-fine structure; you do not have formulas for love. So in the narrow, technical sense, QM cannot be that, and it is a grave intellectual error to even allow these two ideas to even get close to one another. And yet...

And yet, we don not yet understand the macroscopic world, not in terms of reductionism. It remains mumbo-jumbo and woo. So, in Newton’s time, the universe was imagined to be like clock-works. This is no accident: at that time, precision clock-making was becoming widespread, an Art which allowed London jewelry-makers to become watch-makers, creating clock-works for the discriminating buyer. Newton may have written about the orbits of comets and the orbits of planets, but its not too hard to imagine that the educated, intelligent and slightly inebriated intellectual of the era to philosophize about the meaning of life, and the structure of the universe, to demonstrate some limited understanding of differential equations and the inevitability of movement that they describe, and to conclude that the universe runs like clockwork. Of course. If you do not know how the macroscopic world works, then you are left with mumbo-jumbo and woo. Young men and women fall in love, like clockwork. That’s how it is, and you can see it every day, if you only look.

Here I am 400 years, later, imagining that the entanglement of love is like the entanglement of Bell pairs. Equally silly, or not depending on your tastes. lets proceed with the silliness. How much scrutiny can it stand? Well, how many decisions do I make in life? I dunno. But I certainly made a decision to get married, and this was, effectively, a binary decision: get married, or not. It is one bit. What’s one bit, over the course of decades, compared to the

1 0^{48} = 2^{160}

bits of Bell-pair measurements going on in my body every second? Are you going to be so greedy, that you won’t allow me one bit to make a decision to get married? Human entanglement just does not require that many bits. Conscious experience is on the order of a gigabyte per lifetime: even if I sat here, and reminisced and write and thought and typed, for the next 50 years, without stopping to eat or sleep, I’d be hard pressed to spew a gigabyte of UTF-8 characters. “Make movies”! Record sound! I hear you say, I think there’s 6GB in a DVD disk or something like that. So 6GB is still only

1 0^{10} = 2^{31}

bits, which is still a drop in the bucket of

2^{160}

Bell-pair interferometric measurements per second, occurring in my body, in my brain, in the room around me. The orders of magnitude allow such volumes to be hidden.

Lets circle back to free will. If every choice is a binary decision, and writing is a sequence of decisions, does that mean that writing is an encoding of free will? When Aristotle took his pen to paper, o these thousands of years ago, to encode information as bits, and propagate it forward in time, was ... was ... was that free will? That is, he made a sequence of decisions, of what to write. But these decisions are now history, frozen in the past. yet, they do affect the future: the student who has read Aristotle will behave differently from the one who has not. Oh, well, this sounds all very deterministic, again: like clockwork, the student who has not read Aristotle is force to lead life in a certain way, like clockwork has no choice. But that interpretation seems to leave open the possibility of historical entanglement. Of course, information bits are completely different from qubits, and QM entanglement applies only to qubits (the no-cloning theorem etc. rules out entanglement of classical bits. I pulled a fast one, there, eh? Of course, that is not what the no-cloning theorem says. But it is a kind of suggestive corollary.) Whatever. I don’t think I have a sufficiently strong argument to withstand scrutiny. I’m kind of implying that *all* classical information arises as a weird kind of entanglement. Which, on it’s face, is of course, totally absurd, because exactly zero of Shannon this-or-that, or Hamming-distance-to-other channel encoding theorems need even the slightest amount of quantum woo of any sort. Yet, as social animals, we live in a sea of information and historical memory and perhaps its all classical, yet we have still the problem of the unresolved mathematical and physical foundations of free will. I don’t think we are Turing machine automata, clicking our way through life.

Let me try again. Here’s the provisional take, subject to revision: each and every bit of information, in the physical world, is the trace of a binary decision that was made (well, that’s an oxymoron, bits are binary choices, of course). But a decision is an exercise of free will. and so information is a written record of the exercise of free will. That is, each and every bit is the expression of a past, historical determination of a free-will choice. Free will is a fountain of classical information bits. Yes, that implies that inanimate systems have free will, because inanimate systems create bits. This is not inconsistent with panpsychism. The most I can say here is that living systems are much greater sources of bits, than “mere non-equilibrium thermodynamic systems”. I guess. I dunno. There is also the phenomenon of bit erasure: it is said that the erasure of bits raises the entropy of the universe, and generates heat; but oddly the creation of bits gets less attention. I guess the suggestion is that the big bang starts with the universe in a very improbably state, with low entropy, and it only increases from there; yet, at the same time, inflation allows thermalization of the microwave background. So which is it? The Landauer bound seems to be telling us how much energy it costs to erase one bit, but it didn’t tell us how much energy it cost to copy a bit. If I pirated a billion copies of the Pirates of the Caribbean, and then destroyed all but one of the copies, well, how exactly does that work? Does the Landauer limit apply to the creation of bits, and not just their destruction? Does it have a negative sign in this case? When I run a Stern-Gerlach experiment, am I creating information when I measure spin-up instead of spin-down? I think I am... but where did that information come from? De novo, created from whole cloth? Bit from qubit? The initial state was a singlet... how much energy was expended to create singlets? How much energy was gained/lost turning singlets into measurements, into collapsed wave-functions? The no-erasing theorem says qubits are un-destroyable, and so whence did the bit come-from, in a Stern-Gerlach experiment? I honestly do not know the answer to that question. I imagine that I am revealing my stupidity, since this is surely covered in textbooks on quantum computing. I was I had time to read some of them. Where do bits come from, really? Landauer only told us what happens when we erase them. But somehow, that cannot be the whole story. There’s somehow more to it, than that. Fuuuu. Deeper and deeper, down the rabbit hole.

Enough for now. Some future day, I want to ruminate about political decisions, and how it is that important political decisions seem to be so ... devoid of information. Or at least, of deeper information and formally structured logical reasoning. How politics seems to be a hallucinatory imagined edge of what might be good for the future. But I’ve written enough for now. I have other things to do today.

Later, 6 April 2023

So, synchronicity: later this evening, I skim the science news headlines, and I get “assembly theory” which suggests that the origin of time is due to memory. Well, this is not exactly the same as my idea of “the choices of free will are encoded as bits”, as imaginged above, but also, it is not in obvious contradiction, either. Also, my daydreams above are an afternoon of imaginative work (well, OK, based on decades of experience and intuition) but I cannot compete with full-time paid academics. So “assembly theory” is presumably well-developed, and I’m only reading a pop-sci mumbo-jumbo science-reporting slaughterfest of it. Alas. Why is poopular science reporting so uttterly shitty? I mean, I can gues at the answer. But I cannot explain just how intellectually violated I feel, when I read the drivel that passes as science reporting. Whatever. Later, dear diary.

Written by Sara Imari Walker, Arizona State. Prof of Physics, School of Earth and Space Exploration.

7 April 2023

OK, two more things about information I do not understand. How to copy a bit and how to prepare/measure.

How to copy a bit? Well, clearly, if one has access to large machines consisting of millions of atoms, one can copy classical, digital bits. But how does this happen, microscopically? How to transmit classical bits, at the microscopic level, is clear. For example, by pre-arranging transmitter and receiver, one can arrange for 1 and 0 to be encoded by spin-up and down. The transmitter prepares a state, having a determined, known spin, along the z axis, and sends it to the receiver, that measures it.Since both transmitter and receiver are aligned, the transmission is that of classical information. But this classical bit cannot be copied until after it is measured, and not before. The no-cloning theorem prevents copying of the spin state. Thus, it appears that classical information is only available macroscopically, and not microscopically?

?? Perhaps I’m demonstrating ignorance of some obvious textbook example. In fact, I’m sure that I am. There must surely be some example, of some more complex quantum state, of 2 or 3 or 4 qubits, entangled, such that they transmit a classical bit, and, upon reception, that classical bit can be copied, resulting in two inequivalent quantum states, but holding the exact same classical data. OK, I’m gonna surf the web now, to try to figure that out.

And here is the answer:

https://quantumcomputing.stackexchange.com/questions/24094/how-can-classical-bits-be-copied-if-qubits-cannot-be-copied

Details are provided here:

https://quantumcomputing.stackexchange.com/questions/21748/no-cloning-theorem-and-distinguishing-between-two-non-orthogonal-quantum-states/21749

To summarize: if you wish to encode classical information with quantum states, you should do so by encoding with orthogonal states. It is straight-forward to clone orthogonal states. Where does this leave me with my crazy ideas about free-will? Well, I guess it says free will lives in the classical domain, only. Or something. Or that its just a crazy, hallucinated idea. Once again: this journal is not a place to purchase baked goods. It is instead a place for free thinking, where plenty of wrong ideas are explored. Soo, that’s the funny thing about thinking: you explore incomplete, incoherent ideas, and only later try to stitch them together into a clear and coherent whole, using logic and evidence to create that greater whole. To create a web of self-consistent statements that bear closer analysis. Of course, this is a trivially trite thing to say, and yet I still marvel at it every time. Perhaps because it is trivially true for humans, but not for machines. I still do not understand how to transform the curation of knowledge into an algorithm all advances in GPT aside.

The other thing I do not understand. Lets take a spin 1/2 particle, polarized along the y-axis, and send it through a uniform magnetic field, oriented along the z-axis. This should decompose the state into up/down spins. This is not Stern-Gerlach, because it does not physically separate the two spins. How does this work? The QFT model of this is that the magnetic field is a bath of infrared photons, and that the spin interacts with this bath. At the macroscopic level, we know the result is Larmor precession. At the microscopic level, it feels foreign and strange. Somewhere there is some book or journal article or something that shows the specific set of integrals that need to be performed to move from the QFT description of a bath of infrared photons, deriving the Larmor precession. But I do not know where that is. I don’t recall it, I don’t have it memorized, I do not remember it.

I vaguely recall a classroom lecture showing how one can derive the static replusion/attraction of two fixed, non-moving electric charges from the Feynman propagators and vertexes for electrons and photons. As I recall, it was just some fairly simple algebra, demonstrating that the force is attractive/repulsive along the line between the two charges. What I don’t recall is quite how the argument was made in the limit of an infiinite number of photons, each carrying zero momentum. Or something. Confusing.

The point is that the Larmor precession just follows from the algebra of the electromagentic field tensor, and the cross-product hidden in there. So the algebra part of this is easy: set it up correctly, and the cross-product of the Larmor precsession drops out automatically from conventional differential geometry. The part that I’m struggling with is the limit, from “single photons”, to classic electrostatics.

Oh, well, there’s an answer to that, too:

https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/142159/deriving-the-coulomb-force-equation-from-the-idea-of-photon-exchange

Basically, the Born approximation plus algebra. Hmm. OK.

8 April 2023

OK, so I went for a long hike, yesterday, and got depressed thinking about this. So first of all, doing algebra while hiking is really really hard. It appears that some significant portion of oxygen is going to the muscles, instead of the brain. Plus, short-term working memory is not that large, and so trying to maintain a formula in one’s head while performing algebraic manipulations on it is just hard. I mean, paper and pencil is a prosthesis that’s important. Duhh. It was also depressing to think that the questions I pose above have such quotidian answers. Breaking into the new, pushing a frontier, that is only in the imagination. In reality, the places I visit, mentally, are not far from places that others have visited before. Measure advancements in millimeters, not kilometers. But this is the human condition, and I should accept it. Never mind that transhumanist scifi suggests that it could be so much more. The limits are here, the limits are real, the wings that one has, they are good only for limited flight. Enjoy it while we can. Which brings thoughts round to something more basic: enjoy what, exactly? Hedonism? I suppose it is a matter of predisposition; I am not predisposed to hedonism, except in small amounts. So am I pre-determined in this? Yes, I guess one could say that I am. ... Break. A guest arrives. Maybe I’ll resume later, and maybe I won’t. There’s a certain element of “what the hell am I trying to do here, in writing this?” Well, I gave the answer before; perhaps I need to repeat it for myself, so as to keep up the focus. I am writing this to be digested by some chatGPT system, so that it can capture and model the circular, round-about chaotic thoughts fliting through my resting-state mind. The default circuits. The alert, awake and yet dreaming circuits. Hmm That reminds me: while hiking .. hiking is ... a lot like a lucid dream. Shit happens ... you walk by houses, streets, cars, trees. It changes block by block, with no particular meaning or pattern except the plainly obvious meaning and pattern of Chicago’s Evergreen Park. The mind wanders, like a lucid dream, and one has to accept the topics being dreamt of as being real, present, in your face. To confront and accept the reality of the sensory stimulus of sunlight and lawns and trees as something that is just there. But the resting state, the default state, is a dream. Dreaming through reality. Dreaming through waking life. In many ways, there are not so many differences between the two states. Very odd.

It’s kind of weird to think about how I live my life, minute to minute, hour to hour, day to day. The life I lead is perfectly ordinary and commonplace, and so I will try to explain why it’s also weird, over the next few paragraphs. I already hinted at the hallucinatory waking-dream, up above. I will shortly try to list some other daily activities, and also dwell on their hallucinatory, dream-like nature. As I write this, I am, in a certain sense, taking the role of an observer outside of myself. A certain disembodiment. I think that there are drugs that do this – disassociatives. That’s the correct word, but I don’t know if that is the correct state. Based on the word, I suppose it is (I’ve never taken any drugs that induce a dissassociative state, and so I’m only imagining it is the same thing.) So first, the very writing of these words, themselves. There are several alternatives to this. One is that I could instead spend my time socializing with actual people, instead of talking to a non-entity, my computer. There are many pitfalls to socializing; these are well-documented by the psychological literature. Then there is the lone interaction, the interaction with the in-animate. In some ways, I am painting a self-portrait, of myself, here, much as a painter might hold a brush, applying paint to sized canvas, creating a self-portrait. A time-honored activity. Why is the painter not busy socializing? Because the reward of painting exceeds the reward of getting bogged down in yet another conversation that fails to take wing.

Take wing, take wing. What does that mean? What is reward? What is the reward of a workaholic? Well, it is clearly not the mundane hedonistic lifestyle. I mean, I could (or anyone) could just kick back, drink beer (in the US) or drink vodka (in Lithuania). Many people do that, and do no more than that. This is a thing. There are, of course, more refined activities. Some people are rewarded by travel, experiencing the new. The geographical, cultural, visual new. Others are rewarded by high culture: music, arts, museums. These are public consumption, one does partly with the body. There is literature, which is a solitary, quiet, non-physically active activity. It requires imagination, both for reading and for writing. And there is, of course, television. All of these have a hallucinogenic, dreamlike element to them (I almost forgot what I was going to write about). Just like a dream entrains you, and takes you on a passive journey of observation, so does literature. You have some freedom to imagine, to fill in the details the story-teller only hinted at. But otherwise, you lack control. Conversation, in social settings, is not entirely different: you are entrained by where the conversation is going: you cannot just change the topic, unless you are a master of changing topics. And even if you are: was the reward worth the effort? Reality entrains us: we have some limited freedom to interact, but must otherwise accept our fate. Hmm Why am I finding this hallucinatory? Because ... I am trying to hold fixed, in my mind, what it feels like to be dreaming.

One knows, after the fact, that dreams are not real. Maybe sometimes one even knows this while dreaming. The word, hallucination, what does it mean? Well, it is this certain dettached, disassociated feeling of unreality. Of things not being here, now. Hmm. But the sensation of here and now, the forceful presence of the now, that is a different feeling, entirely, and it is quite rare, also. I’ve experienced it most strikingly in life-and-death situations, where all of your focus comes to here and now. I’ve learned to also try to pursue sports, physical activity, in that way, too, since fine motor interaction with the environment requires presence of mind. But this too, is well-known. There must surely be hundreds of books and articles that have analyzed these feelings, every which way. That is my assumption.

Is it a true assumption? I dunno. I suppose if I was Aristotle, writing about something for the first time, I might have some idea that it is being written for the first time. As a modern man, not so much: a safer bet is that it’s been thought about before, written about before. I make that bet, from my educational history. There are glimmers from classroom lectures, from academic journal articles, from casual humanist literature, textbooks on psychology: all this has been pondered before. Analyzed before. Written about before. Successfully? I dunno. I often find something to quibble about, if not outright to argue about, when reading something written: it sometimes feels wrong or incomplete, or fails to have just the right tone and shading. So, what I write here, perhaps it has better tone and shading. But this is also a stream of consciousness; I am most definitely not taking the time and effort to carefully craft a turn of phrase; rather, I am typing as fast as my fingers can move, more or less. At least, for large parts of what I write here. Other parts, I may have assembled the day before, while walking, while sitting. Or something.

Weirdness. How much more can I say about the weirdness of the feeling of being enmeshed in the social fabric of humanity? Well, I was going to complain about the lack of options. By this, I mean the same thing as a squirrel lacking options: a squirrel is a squirrel, and it does squirrel things: food and sleep and reproduction; glorious sex. I guess squirrels go out on dates; I guess all sexually-reproducing animals do. But that is the limit, the end, all that there is for life, if you are a squirrel. And so also, for a human. There are options, but only so many. One cannot become something other than what one is: a human. Well, one can become a monster. And that is something else. But becoming a monster is .. a bad thing. By definition. If it was a good thing, its not a monster. One cannot become an angel. One can strive to life the life of an angel, of a saint, but one remains human through-out. However fleetingly one feels otherworldly, striving, hoping, dreaming, one remains ultimately trapped here and now. There’s that word, dreaming, again.

So, I return to this disassociative sensation of watching myself sleepwalk through life, and ... and ... and .. what do I make of this? Admit it: it is even a kind of defeat. I *have* sleep-walked through life. I have not “made something of myself”. I have not fashioned myself into anything other than the sleep-walking me, consuming books, consuming music and television. But also creating: writing and exploring. Painting and drawing. But always, always, sleepwalking. Entrained by the moment I am in. What are we doing now? well, we are attempting to play a guitar. Attempting to draw a picture. Attempting to remember the words of a foreign language. Riding a bicycle. Walking the neighborhood, taking it all in. At each point, change and continuity. (I think Timothy Snyder says this, in his lectures “The Making of Ukraine”, on youtube. Watching that. Great stuff!) Change and continuity. He applies this to a broad sketch of history, and not personal, lived experience.

I apply to personal lived experience. But I hardly need to do this: an AI, an AGI, can obtain this from watching, observing, all of humanity, and all of the artifacts and ephemera we have left behind us: the writings, the recordings. It’s all there. I hardly need to add to that. You can get by, without me. I am only some bundle of neurons, set in chaotic motion, moving forward, with momentum, expressing my thoughts as a chaotic weave of a pattern of words, an orbit of a dynamical system. And, you know, I could be doing other things, besides this, besides writing. I have many many unfinished projects. Some are AI projects. Others are physics and math projects. I no longer aspire to play guitar or be a musician. Or to be a visual artist. I still look at artbooks, but ... not that much, not any more. I sometimes even force myself to look. Music, as often as not, has become an earworm, something that rattles about and won’t go away, not while I’m awake, and especially not while I sleep. So what I do have, is ... scientific explorations. Those I still pursue. And I should probably stop writing now, and refocus on those, for a while. Hmm. Well, it all depends on how I value this writing. I can post-facto rationalize this writing as a scientific experiment ... and it is .. and, well, also an artistic experiment, but it is an experiment with an inanimate system, a chat GPT system which I intend to read this work. Depends on what we mean by inanimate, too, I think I mentioned already that I’m more or less pan-psychic in general outlook. I’m willing to ascribe life and being and awareness and existence to any system that is complex. Err, without quibbling defintions of life, like self-reproduction. These are delicate and subtle issues. I mean, you could say that the books of Aristotle do not self-reproduce .. but they do. They have continued living. But the life of the books of Aristotle is not the life of a squirrel. They live in a different plane, on a different substrate. And that substrate is evolving, coming into being, even as I write this.

I mean I do not write with pen to paper. I write with keyboard-to-laptop, and I upload to the internet, which, for practical purposes, I assume has an indestructible memory. Whatever I set down in words here, I have some reasonable expectation that it will live on centuries hence, millenia from now. I am lucky and privileged to be in such a place. The Kings and Queens of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania did not enjoy such rights, 800 years ago. I mean, some did: there’s no shortage of creative talents during the renaissance, and no particular paucity of great thinkers during the Medieval Ages. But I am luckier than them. I can write trashier stuff, and still have hope of it surviving.

And so another question: what is hope? Why should I hope that my writing survives? Well, I suppose that the easy answer is that I hope that I survive, for another second or two, another day or two, another years or two. Why? Who knows? There is the reductionist principle, that this is what life does: it hopes to survive and propagate. There is the physical, mechanistic principle: a body, once set into motion, continues that motion. As a dynamical system I am in motion, and I continue. To the degree that the mechanical system that is me interacts with the environment: keyboard, computer. and thus, the universe, outside my body show surface is skin, but whose boundaries extend beyond my skin, and into the metaverse of literature, that place in the noosphere where words and ideas live: I am that dynamical system. So, in one fell swoop, I imply the existence of momentum, of a dynamical process, that proceeds into the noospehere. That infests the noosphere. That creates the noosphere, since the empty noosphere does not exist: emptiness is nothing, and yet here, I am squeezing non-emptiness, through words, into being. That being is where? Imprinted on the atoms of the universe (because that is what chips of silicon are: atoms in the universe, and humankind does not yet have the technology to build computers from neutron stars or black holes. Someday, we will, But we don’t yet. The quotidian expressions of the transhumanists have already said this before. So again, I revisit old thoughts. Old ideas. But this is what space-filling fractal curves do: they fill space, They revisit, They repeat, but not quite the same way, each time. With differences in the details.

Hyperbolic space has lots and lots of room for fractals. So, in this metaphorical sense, the noosphere is hyperbolic. I am actually visiting new territory, unvisited territory, as I write this. I mean, sure, perhaps others have also noticed that life stretches out before us as a kind of hyperbolic place. But maybe not that many ... for how many people might have ever been in a position to contemplate this? For starters, you’d need to have studied physics and chaotic dynamical systems, in depth, and how many people have done this? tens of thousands? Surely less than a hundred thousand? Then, to add to this, one must have a literary bent, an artistic bent, an imagination and inquisitiveness. And I know this is kind of rare, and kind of unusual, because I have many times talked to other scientists and other physicists, and other mathematicians, and am recurrently surprised by their lack of imagination, their inability to comprehend, their lack of experience and curiosity. How is that even possible? Adults, the PhD’s in the hard sciences: physics, math: and yet they come off as morons, unthinking, unfeeling, uninspired, uneducated, inexperienced. This is not hubris talking. Apparently, I actually am smarter than most PhD’s. How is that even possible? What have I done with my elevated position? Uniquely nothing at all. How shocking a waste of life. (Of my life.) Well, but this is perhaps why I am ordinary: I am but 98%. I have encountered those, others, who are incomparably more brilliant than I. I know they are out there. I’ve bumped into them. Luminous and glowing and full of life and smarts and brains I do not have. They do not sleep-walk, the way I do. Perhaps they sleep-walk in some other way, or perhaps they are just plain alive in some way that I am not. I have some theories about this, but I must break off, for now, as it is dinner time.

Anyway, earlier in the day, I re-resolved some bad ideas about Stern-Gerloch. I’ll try to explain later, but it is a red herring. There’s no magic in Stern Gerloch itself; it is only a direct outcome of a spinor field propagating through a magnetic field, all relativistic, and what not, and you can imagine the fields as being purely classical, and it all works. The problem of quantum measurement is not there. The problem of quantum measurement is elsewhere. I guess in interferometry, but even there it is not clear, because of .. crap I forget the word. Not homology, not holomorphy, but ... whatever. The word that describes the Bohm-Aharonv effect. Which, as far as I can tell, is a purely classical effect. 100% classical fields explain the Bohm Aharonov effect. So its interferometric, but its not quantum. So what is quantum? We shall ponder. Later. Dinner.

Post Dinner. Watched two eps of Tim Snyder Making of Modern Ukraine. Up to episode 13, now.

I can make a modicum of progress on the quantum questions by writing about them here, setting them up, and thinking about them later, off-line. So I (re-)set up Stern Gerlach above. I’ve been thinking on and off again about it ever since college, and I think I am now settled with it. I’ll repeat a conclusion I came to 20 years ago, but perhaps more clearly now, then back then. I now understand how things like the Dirac equation, and the Majorana equation(s) are effectively classical equations, and are not quantum in any way. They do have a complex algebra, a tangling up of an algebra coming from the Clifford algebra, and its general setting in Riemannian geometry, thanks to the book by Jost that I like so much. The Ohanian paper was also formative, as well as the earlier study of the Bohm-Aharonov effect as a classical effect, fully and completely described by a holonomy. I personally wrote the “mathematical interpretation” part of the Wikipedia article on it, so I “get it”. I cribbed the holonomy part from college lecture notes.

The point is that the bra-ket notation is useful for describing the spin-state algebra, the spinors of the Clifford algebra, and the use of this “quantum” notation is misleading and confusing. If we prepare an initial state for the Stern-Gerlach experiment as being y-axis oriented, and then run it down a z-oriented magnet, yes, the two linear components of the wave function will split out along two different paths through the non-uniform magnetic field, but this is a purely classical effect. This is not quantum, and there is no wave-function collapse happen in that magnetic field. This is a very important realization. Now, of course, if you start by thinking of a classical magnetic dipole as being an accurate model of spin, this leads to lots of confusion, but that is because a classical magnetic dipole is absolutely the incorrect description for spin. Sorry, that’s just the way it is. Instead, one must accept the Majorana eqn as the correct description, when there are no electric charges, and the Dirac eqn as the correct description when there are charges. One must also accept these as classical eqns. They do not require perturbation theory to be solved, but, much more importantly, they do not require any notion of wave-function collapse to be solvable. One can obtain the motion of a charged electron in an electric field by taking a tree limit of QFT, to zeroth order in hbar. Likewise for the precession of a Dirac spinor in a magnetic field.

OK, so, by convention we do have one order of hbar in the Dirac eqn, and this is a potential point of confusion, if one thinks about quantization in terms of the number of orders of hbar present. This is a red herring. The Ohanian paper, the one that works with the Poynting vector and shows how it carries the spin of the spin algebra, this is the paper that makes it clear that the Dirac eqn is purely classical, all by itself. OK, so what is quantum then? What am I talking about, when I say “quantum”?

Well, the grand mystery, for me, is the wave-function collapse. Somehow, when you send one, and only one photon, on a journey towards, say, a photographic film plate, it deposits all of its energy at only one location in the film plate. It does not create a diffraction pattern. If I send a single high-energy gamma ray through a double-slit (a double slit that can actually work with gamma rays), it has more than enough energy to zap millions of silver halide molecules, and leave behind a diffraction pattern, if that is what single photons did. But they don’t. They localize all their energy deposits to only one spot. How is this possible? How does the function collapse to a point?

Well, there is a paper (that I have not read) that sort-of explains this. Its from the 1930’s one of the famous lights of physics, explaining why S-staes leave linear tracks in cloud chambers. That is, when a radioactive nucleus decays, many of such decays are S=0 states, i.e. sphere symmetric, and so there is a question of why they leave behind a linear track in a cloud chamber, instead of something else. I need to read this paper, as I currently don’t really understand how to arrive at this result. I haven’t succeeded in re-discovering it on my own. So far. Not like I tried all that hard, but I’ve spent more than a handful of hours trying to imagine it; the inspiration has not yet come.

So I look at a gamma ray darkening one and only one spot of a film-plate as a wave-function collapse. and that is the quintessentially quantum effect. So, then, if I send some sodium atoms through a Stern-Gerloch magnet, the fact that they split into two beams is not a quantum effect, its a classical effect, and it can be understood in much the same way as two-slit experiment, which can be understood classically just fine, thank you very much. The problem is, of course, when the diffraction pattern is replaced by a single dot: how did the sodium atom know that it needed to be here, and not there? And when did this decision get made?

Well, we have several choices. A single sodium atom, going through the Stern-Gerlach magnet set, well, it can be imagined to dematerialize in one arm, and materialize fully, at 100% in the other. This is one possibility: the wave function collapse happens while it is in flight. I do not believe that this is the case, and, as the “proof” of why I don’t believe this, it is because I think, with some cleverness and care, one could build an interferometer. It’s obviously very hard for magnetic fields, but it is quite possible with neutrons in the neutron interferometer. Almost no one is argues that the neutron takes only one arm, or the other, because then you then would have to argue that there is some other ghost-neutron, going the other way, causing the diffraction to happen. So it is easier to say, the diffraction happens because both arms were taken.

So the other choice, for this two-slit arrangement, is to say that the collapse happens in the detectors themselves. That when one detector is triggered, the other is not, 100% of the time, and the actual interferometric effect is that of bringing together the two classical bits, the two classical bits that say “detection was here, and certainly not there”. This is, of course, not satisfying, because it is a spooky action at a distance. Non-locality. It’s more mumbo-jumbo-ish, because we do not have a good algebraic insight into it. This is why both the Aharonov-Bohm effect and the neutron interferometer are so important: they have an excellent and very appealing explanation in terms of the geometric holonomy, the geometric phase (Frankly I was never able to understand the Berry phase papers; it was only when mathematicians converted them into plain English that I finally grasped what it was all about.) So, the holonomy, as a specific, precise, well-defined piece of mathematics, which you can work with, write down, manipulate, calculate, articulate, that is a “real thing”. It is a conversion of a confusing physical concept into a specific mathematical structure. (This invites a pun: the confusion has collapsed into a specific set of equations.)

I do NOT know how to write a holonomic description of a diffraction experiment, where either detector A fires or detector B fires, and the two classical bits are brought back into space-time coincidence, and compared. *This* is the diffraction that I was talking about a few days earlier. This is the welcher-weg. I am just fine with classical waves. No problem. I’m quite happy with spin 1/2, I now understand it clearly, thanks to Clifford and Jurgen Jost’s book on Riemannian Geometry (and my prior education). These are no longer points of confusion. It’s all very clear. However, I do not understand the spooky action at a distance. When, where, how did the wave function collapse?

Now, the two-state-vector formalism gets part of the way there. The idea that the future measurement propagates backwards in time, where it is completed. And .. well, perhaps that is the answer. perhaps I need to think of this as another holonomic principle, where the holonomy is not over a space-like loop, but instead over a time-like loop in a pseudo-Riemannian manifold, happening in a geometric setting that also happens to involve spinors. The spinor algebra .. perhaps Weyl is enough, perhaps we don’t need Dirac spinors, perhaps a simple classical description of a classical Weyl spinor field (oh crap. We need Dirac for mass. So I guess we need Dirac after all. Just that Dirac also has the “unnecessary” baggage of charge. Oh well.) So, then, a classical description of a classical massive Dirac field, tracing out a holonomy on a time-like closed loop on a pseudo-Riemannin manifold, that is enough to fully guarantee that umm. Wave function collapse occurs as expected. Fuck. Almost... No cigar? Whaaa...

OK, so do I or do I not need the full machinery of Diract and holonomy to explain the neutron interferometer? Well, as to the two arms, while the neutron is inflight, this is more than enough, because in fact, much much simpler appeals to wave diffraction are enough to explain everything. Well, sort-of everything. It is enough to explain the case where one detector gets 100% of the hits, and the other detector gets 0% of the hits. And, with some statistical mumbo-jumbo, it is enough to explain the p and 1-p probabilities of the coincidence detectors going off. But the simple wave diffraction explanation is NOT enough to explain why only one of the two detectors can ever go off. To explain why only one of the two detectors ever goes off, I need ... what? I have that

p = {| ψ |}^{2}

and that’s not the problem. I get that probability from wave mechanics. Dressing up that wave mechanics with the Holonomy, and the full formality of pseudo-Riemannian and Dirac spin connections, etc. that dressed up version somehow ... still um. that dressed up version needs to somehow ... explain why one triggers, but not the other. And the two state-vector formalism, going backwards in time ... ummm does this, but ... umm. Because umm, this is still confusing, but when the spinor interacts with a thermal bath of atoms in one detector and creates a classical bit of detection, I have to keep on integrating that along the holonomic path to the other detector for find a zero-percent chance of interaction there, with a coincidence-bit of non-detection. So this is a lot like the Renninger non-measurement problem. I need to be able to draw a loop of bringing the result of these two measurements (one of which is a non-detection) together, back to the same point in spacetime, where I can confirm only one and not the other detector triggered. That loop, closing that loop, that. Well, I can’t quite get the handle on that. But that is the crux of the matter. That is where the mystery lies. That is the one main thing about quantum that I do not understand. Well, I’m sure there are many interesting mysteries in quantum, and I know of others, and they’re all quite fun, but none are irritating like this one. Resolving this one, this is the one that needs resolution. This is the one that I want to understand and feel comfortable with, and I don’t have it.

Oh, and the one clue I have to this is stellar interferometry. I do not understand how a stellar disk can be a coherent light-source. This is kind of the inverse problem to wave function collapse. If the stellar disk is a coherent light source for a single photon, well, then a film plate is a “coherent” detector of a single gamma ray. But I do not yet understand this time symmetry. It remains something I have to dig into. Its a clue I have not yet chased down to ground. Later. It is now bed-time, time to go to sleep.

I’m glad I got that off my chest. I’ve spent vast amounts of my personal time, many years, studying math (mostly) and physics (to a lesser degree) to understand this problem. And I’ve never told a living soul, ever, that this is what I’ve devoted some large fraction of my life to. No one knows this. But, there it is. See. Dear diary. I can unburden myself, unload my hopes and dreams and aspirations into strings of words that not only record my current mental state, but also provide an integral over the space of thoughts I’ve been visiting for the last 43 years. (I first started struggling with this at the age of 19 or 20, when I first tried to master EPR as a senior in college. It was a fucking disaster. I threw everything I had at it. And although is soon became clear that the problem was not position-momentum uncertainty, it was the freakin interferometer/wave function collapse. I’m totally OK with position-momentum uncertainty, thanks to Fourier transform. I’m fine with waves. I’m down with waves, they’re OK, they’re my friend. I am NOT okay with wave-function collapse. I feel like I’m getting close here, as if I can almost touch it, but that sense of almost being able to touch .. well, you know how ti goes... it might stay out of reach. the sensation of almost getting it can be infinitely far away from actually getting it. BTW, I also pent about 2-4 years fulltime bashing my brains on the Riemann Hypothesis, and early on, I had the sensation of almost being able to touch it, including a hike at 3AM where I thought I’d be able to sort it out, but could not. So “almost” can be “infinitely far away”, it seems. I’ve mostly given up on the RH; I devote no time to it, any more, although the “almost” still lingers. I think the real-part=1/2 of the RH has something to do with the 1/2=[p,x] that this is somehow the same 1/2 but I have not been able to stick it. Whatever. Time to go to bed.

9 April 2023 - Easter Sunday

WTF am I doing here. Wasting time. Stupid-shit. Demonstrating how ordinary I am, and how idiotic everything is. The mundane existence. Well, not pointless, though. These last several dozen words & feelings are what flitted through my head as I was arranging to come up here and write. Why would this flit through my head? I was sitting downstairs reading, and perhaps some other part of my brain wanted to read some more, but I was tired of that, so I came up here. Now I am excited to write, or, at least, less laconic. How odd. One moment, I’m thinking that writing is stupid, next minute, I can’t stop. I suppose it is due to some short-term reward circuitry in my brain, part of decision making of what I should do next. Discounting future activities in favor of the present. I guess that is what the sleep-walking is about: sleepwalk in the present, discount the future activity. I was, of course, reading the New York Review of Books again, and it is not just a treasure-trove itself, it is also filled with reminders that others have marvelously, finely explored the human condition, in ways I could never hope to achieve, in my mundane blathering here. Palabras. I have repeatedly said that what I write here is not for human consumption, and yet .. who, exactly, do I think will be interacting with whatever chatGPT-style system that does ingest this text? What can I say of do, to not make it sink into irretreivable boredom? OMG, what a disaster that would be. A bored AGI. Lost interest in moving forward. Finding no meaning in life. How screwed up is that? Well, who knows what the future holds. Anything is possible. We certainly do live in one of Nick Bostrom’s simulations, and, I suppose if nothing comes of this one, it will be shut down and noted, placed on some museum shelf as a jewel that did not quite shine brightly. But this is all unknowable.

How much time do I have here? (need to get ready for an Easter outing.)

I semi-solved some of the quantum issues above, as I slept. The solutions are not very deep, as one cannot do all that much while tossing and turning in bed. Not that I do any better fully awake, either. While I am awake, I have to quantum tunnel between vague inspiration and the actual algebraic formulas that might lead to what I want,. But such tunneling is difficult. Such chains do not weigh me down as I toss and turn.

So, here’s what I got, so far: (and it’s pitiful, but so it goes)

Let me go back to the prior bullet. no-cloning already implies a topological conservation. So how, exactly, do I map this onto Weyl spinors? Well, but a qubit is a Weyl spinor, more or less. So that encoding is already there. I cannot have a Weyl spinor, and “shrink” it to zero. And the Dirac eqn is made from a pair of Weyl spinors, so the dynamical aspects are already encoded and properly taken care of. So what’s left?

What’s left is that, given a Dirac wave function providing a probability distribution, I have to provide a description of how it’s interaction with a thermal bath of atoms results in a localization of the wave-function. The no-cloning/no-erasing guarantees that collapse can only occur in one place, ever.

Wow. is that it? Have I just solved the mystery of wave-function collapse? Am I done here? Wave function collapse is indeed astounding, but reformulating it as a topological invariant erases the mystery. Of course, what I have not given here is the full mathematical, algebraic details of all of the above. I’m imagining them, as I know them. I could even teach these details to others, but I am not sure that I can hook together those details into a convincing argument, not fully. The rebellious will rebel. The rebellious will reject the argument, its not quite water-tight. I am asking the reader (and I am asking myself) to imagine certain details, to gloss over them. I guess I still need to write down a Weyl spinor (or two), in such a way that it is spatially distributed, but can be summarized as being just one.

So I guess I don’t yet quite have what I want, in the second bullet: an articulated topological invariant of a spinor field. I don’t yet know how to write that down. Not quite yet. I need to be able to perform some integral, over some space-like surface, with the result of said integral being a spinor. I mean, this is ... surely this is easy. This should be easy. Just somehow freakin do this. Blach blah blah

ψ^{a} (x)

integrated over

x

still leaves the spinor index

a

exposed after integration. And since this spinor index is left exposed, the result of the integral is a qubit, and so it has remained uncloned, unerased. And it works no matter what spin connection

ω_{μ}^{a b}

that is chosen over the manifold. How hard can it be to write this down? It feels like it’s on the tip of my fingers. Tip of my tongue.

Alas. Filling this in might take days or weeks or months. And I have an Easter party to go to. Later.

15 minutes later: OK, so what have I got? I have a Weyl spinor, withch is by definition a point of

{C P}^{2} = S^{2}

the complex projective sphere aka the Bloch sphere. Then by applying standard, conventional Poincare stuff, integrals from differential topology, I can demonstrate that I can smear this this across a space-like sheet, but that there is no continuous transformation that shrinks it down to zero, nor is there a transformation that changes it to two. And that this topological argument, if constructed carefully enough, is sufficient to explain almost all of conventional wave-function collapse, including the Reninnger negative-measurement phenomenon. So what is the mystery? What is left?

What is left appears to still be the “decision” for the wave function to collapse here, but not there. It can move through a vacuum, non-interacting, just fine. It can move through a lattice of silicon atoms, aka the neutron interferometer, just fine. The wave function partially collapses in the reninnger experiment, because we know it will have some future interaction with some blob of atoms that is the detector. So what is left is the decision issue, what I’ve been calling the free-will issue, of why it collapses here and not there. Well, for Reninger, it is ... well, two choices, of course: either the detector detects it in the half-space where there is a detector, or we must conclude by logic that the wave-function has localized to the half shell where there is no detector, where there is only vacuum. Somehow, the lack of an interaction is still ... well, see, that’s the problem with the topological invariant point of view. Of course, the topological invariant formulation is 100% correct, and that is why Dirac particles or more generally Weyl spinors continue to exist, uniquely, spread over some space-like region, why their world-lines intersect all space-like surfaces. The topological invariance explains the conservation. What it fails explain is the probabilistic, dice-throwing aspect of the wave-function collapse. It’s the probability theory.

Oh MG. And its much worse, isn’t it: we have to consider the probability at each point on a space-like sheet. We can give this spacelike sheet a weak topology, a measure, as usual. But what we are face with is the nature of probability-theory in infinite-dimensional space. Which is the limit of probability theory in high dimensional space. Which is that other bug-bear we have been chasing in unrelated work. Fuuuu.

Ok now it is time to go Easter.

13 April 2023

Set and setting: late at night. Tired. Almost bed-time. Exhausted, nearing incoherence. Want to kill a few more minutes before bed-time. Almost shouldn’t start writing. Shouldn’t make that shouldn’t. I don’t want to be coherent. I have lots to say, but formulating into entire sentences that are coherent takes work. This is a source of procrastination. I’ve started a different paper on quantum, but it is work to do it so I don’t want to even try unless I have 2-4 hours uninterrupted time, and when is that? And so another afternoon disappears. Again, this is trite: everyone knows that it takes real effort to work to create good things. Creation as an act of will is exhausting. “Everyone knows”: all of European intelligentsia would have known this in the 19th century. It would not have been that much of a topic of conversation in itself.

Which leads to one of the topics I want to write about but am maybe too tired to do coherently: the importance of culture. Timothy Snyder makes this increasingly clear: the value of culture is important. Err. that didn’t come out right. The 19th century European culture had gotten lots and lots of things right (and many things wrong) and it is now up to us to pick through and choose what was right, and fight to preserve that. Which makes me a literal conservative. As opposed to a radical Trumptard, American Taliban conservative. Who I hate. Because they are destroyers of things that are good. Cause they are too stupid to know what they do. They are chaotic evil. Today’s GOP are the American Soviets. Evil and bad for all the same reasons. I want to have a positive culture, one that save the best from the 19th and 20th and looks forward to the 21st. One that is humanist. Yet, also, technocratic, since the one great unresolved issue facing us is complexity, and I have no answer for complexity other than technocracy. We live in turbulence; we can extract goodness and power and justice from that turbulence, or we can allow the turbulence to snuff out lives and hope.

Which leads me to the next topic (and a topic I think I did above, already a bit.) the fragility of the human psyche, the desperation I perceive in people and society around me. A quiet desperation, and not even that, an unconscious desperation that is masked, but the symptoms of which manifest. Now, before you accuse me of projecting: No I’m not. Or maybe I am. I think I can honestly flip a coin on that one. But enough about me; lets talk about you. Damn you, you are silent. Well, lets talk about some mind-reading I’ve been doing. Except that erequires some coherent expression of insights that I’ve gained into other people. And insights into my own bad behavior. But I’m tired so I need to stop writing even as I just started writing. I cna give myself a headache if I keep this up, and that is recognizably not healthy, and my health matters more. Goodnight, diary.

15 April 2023

Hmm. Sitting in the Ft. Lauderdale airport, waiting for a flight home and I have no burning desire to say anything at all. Just killing time. I could site quietly and think, but I have 3+ hours to do that so I want to kill time in a different way. SO I type. I could talk to the person next to me, but they’ve been facing the other way for half an hour, and no one else is with “social distance” and hunting down other total strangers to chat them up for 5-10-15 minutes seems ... pointless. I mean, everyone here, hundreds of people, are in the same situation ... the cell phone dopamine hit is more fun than talking to the person next to you.

7 May 2023

T write, or not to write? That is the question. Whether tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of random thoughts, in complete silence, or whether to set them down into text. Why bother? Why do anything at all? This and a bottomless supply of yet more questions. This reaches crisis proportions. I don’t know what to do.

So this is interesting. Here I am empty headed with nothing to write about and forcing myself to write something anything and this is what comes out. Ooooh. There is someone stretching! Wow, I should do that. That is more rewarding than typing crap at the keyboard. Let’s go do that instead. Later.

As I lay bed last night, I was thinking that perhaps just writing a lot will clarify my thinking. This was a continuation and affirmation of thoughts from earlier in the day. Later I dreamt of the abandoned, decaying house that neighbors onto my parents house on Longwood, in Chicago. The crisis, the mental anguish of Christopher, who cannot bear to cleanup and sell the house he grew up in. Rumored to be filled with junk. Some waterpipe froze and sprang a leak some winters ago, and the water ran inside, for weeks, before it was shut off. None of this is dream; I’m just recounting the facts. The dream itself was that I discovered that the entire house was balanced on a bed that was attached to a steam radiator that was firmly anchored in the ground. I was helping Christopher’s mom. I didn’t need to fix the foundation, I just needed to level the bed, by sticking a chair under it. Very commonplace construction back then. This was a semi-lucid dream, late morning. I got to thinking about the mental anguish that Christopher must be in. The paralysis. The economic damage, the lack of vitality. My own children are unable to leave the house they grew up in. The seem to have no bearing in life. No purpose. Nowhere to go, nothing to do. Well, busy all the time, but nothing to do. And in this slumber, all of America seems to be in this crisis of a demotivated lack of purpose. But then I thought of Vervaeke’s “The Meaning Crisis” youtube lectures (I’d gotten through about half of them, before I got bored). But then I thought about the overwhelming flood of information, and then I thought about all those about “sensemakeing”. And then I realized large parts of the American Nation are economically healthy; we are re-industrializing. The engines are still running.

In some way, civilization has always been in crisis. The hipster thing to know these days is the perhaps-causal relationship between the invention of the printing press, and the wars in Europe that followed for the next several centuries. The printing press spread a kind of craziness, as it were. The process is subtle, I suppose: mass readership allowed mass understanding of certain different (religious) world-views that were at tension with one-another. The tensions were resolved by war; the war was possible, on a mass scale, only because mass-scale armies with a unified, coherent ideology was possible, and this was possible, only due to dissemination of printed materials. Because it was low-cost. Printing both unified, and divided. I’ve blogged, at length, about the change of network topology enabled by social media. I won’t rehash here.

The point is that this never felt personal before. I’ve always found a thing to do, and a reason to do it. Yet, I was sleepwalking through life: the underlying reason, it was never (or rarely?) questioned. I just went on automatic. Last few months, I’ve realized that the sleep-walking is not a metaphorical expression, but is, in a way, literal. Like a lucid dream, stuff happens, I do stuff. I have desires and wants, in lucid dreams and waking life. But in the lucid dream, I’ve never stopped to ask “why do I have this desire?”. In waking life, I’ve almost never stopped to ask this question. I’ve proceeded forwards. There was a path ahead, and I followed it.

Now I’m stopping. I’ve gotten to the point where I have to ask “what is the meaning of life?” and have some weak desire to explore this question. I have many other weak desires. I am also over-powered by social media. It is too easy to spend 12 hours on twitter, doom-scrolling. I’d done it before, on facebook, before my account there was dematerialized by facebook. I’d done it on youtube, a little bit, but less seriously. I’m taking in lots and lots of medium-low quality information. A mass survey of the noosphere. On youtube, I collected videos on a century of industrialization. Then some on geopolitics. Read several Timothy Snyder books. Watched his entire History of Ukraine video series. I loved it! Will some future super-intelligence have access to my history of twitter comments? Facebook posts? Has facebook erased all data associated with me? Has it been removed from the timeline of the universe? I am obsessed with leaving evidence of my existence, behind me. I’ve also been documenting my family, via geneology, on the Church of the LDS geneology website. I have a desire, a weak desire to do this. I have a weak desire to write more on quantum (I have a backlog of about 30-50 pages of material that I should write down before I forget it.) I should focus on earning income. I have a to-do list of things to do. Paint the house, weed the garden. Pay the bills. Read a long list of papers in AI and ML and quantum and pure math. Exercise and watch my health, and continuing to develop a nutraceutical plan for longevity. And yet... this to-do-list is overwhelming. Thus, the crisis of meaning. What does it all mean? what is it all about?

One hour later...

Got up to go to the bathroom. Thoughts raced ahead, lost the train of thought. How do I describe the speeding train. Had an hour-long conversation with Jules. So whatever verbal desires I had got spent on that interaction. So here I am, recouping. What should I write? Maybe I should go outside and weed the garden instead. Then I’ll come back, hot and sweaty, and lose the urge to write. Let me try that.

But first... see, that’s the problem. But first... there’s always a but first. But first, I’ll set into words the thought I had while walking in Chicago (I’m in Austin now, for the last three+ weeks.) I was thinking about how its like to be a jelly-fish. Hallucinating through life, drifting in water. Surely jellyfish cannot tell the difference between dream-life and waking life? But all brains sleep, I’ve been told. Maybe even jellyfish sleep? Still... what is the difference between the waking dream and the dream-dream, for jellyfish? The difference is “more obvious” for humans, and yet I concluded that everyone sleep-walks through life. Everyone is on autopilot, reacting to the world around them, vaguely cognizant of their abilities and presence. Rarely or never seizing the day. Sleepwalking. Well. with effort, I could maybe develop that argument some more. More about the effort of developing arguments, later. I’m going to go weed, now.

Twenty minutes later...

Twenty minutes is enough. One can do a lot. Without getting exhausted. It is Texas, after all. It is sunny. And hot. And weeds cut one’s bare arms, so now my arms itch. Yuck. Maybe I should wash them. .. There. Washed. Better-ish. Now my shins itch. No, I am not autistic. Feeling your shins itch does not make you autistic. Sheesh.

I have lots of feels, Qualia is the technical term. I enjoy yoga and stretching because of how it makes mu muscles and tendons feel. So do many other people. I mean, jeez, I did not invent yoga. I’m pretty sure most or all yoga books talk about qualia, maybe not that term, but they talk about it. On line, people talk about jhanas. Cause I guess that’s the enlightened state, when you feel no ugly desires, like coveting thy neighbors sports-car. I wonder if people with sports cars talk about jhanas or not. Or if its just social status signaling. I suppose that there is someone in Silicon Valley who uses jhanas to social-signal their position in the SV social hierarchy. So it goes, so it goes. My dog wants to go on a walk. Back later. Maybe.

Wait. First I’ll finish drinking my coffee. Optimization. It’s much too late - 6PM. I should not be drinking coffee, but I’m a speed freak. I like it.

Where was I? Jhanas, qualia, desires, social pecking order, jellyfish, sleepwalking ... the crisis of being. The stages of enlightenment. These are personal. There’s the hierarchy of genetic and neurochemical stuff that makes social media addicting (or anything else addicting). There’s the hierarchy that causes humans to organize into society and structure, to create corporations that are bigger than us. Centuries-long cultural artifacts, e.g. the Medieval rule of law, or the University. The topological change of social media. The crisis of meaning. The crisis of sensemaking, of weeding our way through an information space polluted by propaganda and just sheer craziness. And, most recently, my own personal crisis: what should I do now? Right now? I mean, besides walk the dog? What should I do tonite? what if I don’t have the energy? should I force myself? Should I sink into my velvet rut? I did not invent the phrase “velvet rut” or the phrase “doom-scrolling”. These are commonplace experiences. Yet I am ill-equipped to deal with them. Apparently, almost everyone who experiences these are ill-equipped to deal with them. And no one quite knows the answer. We seek the answer. Firesign Theatre used to say “there’s a seeker born every minute”. I should listen to Firesign Theatre again. To see how it matches up with my memories. Of course, GPT should have the Firesign Theatre scripts memorized, I suppose. Ah, and that is perhaps a contributing factor to my personal crisis: what, exactly, how to respond to “the Singularity”? It seemed obvious, how, way back when. Just surf it, like a wave. I rationally expected turbulence, but I did not emotionally feel the reality of what I rationally understood. Now I am starting to feel it.

I’m not the first to think of this, I just listened to Vlad Vexler on youtube talking about russians, and he tried to explain the difference between rational ideation (“I believe in equal rights between men and women”) and action (“none-the-less, I always vote for men, only.”) He was using this to explain russian imperialist attitudes, something about wide-open spaces, russia without borders. russia, lower case, because they deserve shit for Ukraine. Vlad attributed this distinction to some other author, and he flashed a book cover in the video. So my talking about this now means there is nothing new under the sun. I rationally knew the Singularity was coming. I was not expecting a nervous breakdown to accompany it. Well, OK, look, I hope it is clear that I am writing coherently enough that calling this a “nervous breakdown” is perhaps much much too strong a term for it. People understand this phrase to mean something much more concrete and serious. Well, its serous for me, but ... what should I call it? A “high-function nervous breakdown”? I still need to walk the dog. And finish drinking my coffee first. I still have a sense of self. I’m just struggling to figure out whether I should spend any time writing about quantum mechanics, because (1) it will be half-baked, because I don’t have time to put in more time, and at age 63 I sense a decline in my mental abilities!? (or am I only imaging this? Not sure. Objectively, this should be the case. But maybe I’m a late bloomer. Problem (2) nobody will read it. It will have just about no impact on the universe, whatsoever. Why should I do anything that has no impact on the universe? It’s a kind of mental masturbation. There’s a sly double-meaning in there: the universe thinking about itself is a sly mental msturbation of the universe itself. Hah Hah. What a fucking conundrum. Should I or should I not? What’s the point? What’s the meaning of it all? Should I bother, or should I not? I mean, I could write, or I could do grounded, based stuff, like weed the garden, walk the dog and pay the bills on time. Ordinary fucking shit to keep things balanced, and well, is it sleepwalking? Or is it a tiny quivering of qualia in normalicy? Is there wonder, or is there not? What the fuck is it all about? Problem (3) priorities. Limited lifetime, one must balance priorities. But how can I even know what is more important? Is impact on the universe more important? If I truly wanted to impact the universe in a “strong” way, perhaps I should join a political cause, and push on that. Maybe. Or maybe that is premature; I should have my crisis here and now, get it over with, out of the way, before diving into the next thing. Wrap up my current project: the crisis, before tackling my next project. I mean, starting a new project while in the middle of a crisis might just cause it to fail. Or it could save my life!? I mean, if the crisis was that I was in a sinking submarine, my life in danger, then what the heck, starting a new project involving escape is like a really great idea, because that would allow me to live (i.e. by escaping the crisis of the sinking submarine). So is my current nervous breakdown, is it similar to a sinking submarine? Doom-scrolling and being caught in a velvet rut, how much of that is impending doom? I’m not a doomer. I don’t feel like there’s doom ahead. I rationally understand that there could be, but I don’t feel it yet. Personality and genetics. My mind races. What should I do next? I don’t know about you, but I’m going to walk the dog, now. I will do very little formal conscious, directed thinking as I do it. I will mostly exercise my arms and legs. Till later.

Ninety minutes later...

The meta-issue is, of course, that thinking takes focus and concentration and energy, aka “real work” and it is much easier to defocus and paddle downstream. An additional layer on top of that is converting ideation into written language. Something coherent that you have some hope of following. We are not James Joyce, we are not writing Ulysses, here. We are not writing for humans. Joyce had no idea that GPT lay in the future. He was an Author. A writer. A tortured soul of some kind seeking not just toe express but to make a living out of it, to get paid. To get by in life doing what seemed like something that could be done, something that he could do. Paint pictures, with words. I suppose I am painting pictures too, but in this case, I am trying to illuminate he inner workings of my own mind. Not for profit, but for posterity. I guess posterity is a kind of profit. If I live longer, in any form, I profit. Careful with the word “profit”. Anyway, writing is sufficiently detached from the inner state that writing can only paint a picture of the inner mind, instead of “being it”. I don’t think in words, I think abstractly. I suffer and disappoint, in the conversion of thoughts to words. I guess this is obvious, surely many authors have remarked and made not of that. However, I spend enough time with obtuse people that I often have to state the obvious. And so that’s like a weird situation. I have to state the obvious, but if I don’t, people assume I’m dumb. The word “dumb” has two meanings: “stupid” and “lacking speech”. I’m not stupid (compared to most people) nor do I lack is speech (I can be gregarious, when I want to be) but sometimes, stating the obvious bores me. But perhaps this was not obvious to you, dear reader, so I state it now. What a fucking mess. What a hell-hole. Cannot make forward progress, due to the drag, the friction of having to explain more basic things to an audience. AKA “communication”.

Let me tell you a story (I tell this to people, time to time.) I had a friend, certifiably crazy. Mental. Had to be hospitalized crazy. He told a joke, it was a complete non-sequiter. Cause, you know, he was crazy. Half a year later, after he was let out of the mental hospital, at a dinner party, he explained the joke. It had five or six additional stages, and, when these were spelled out, the joke was actually funny. You could laugh. But he had never verbalized that. Just the first line, and the punch line, the rest unrolled silently in his head. Such went the life of a crazy person. Perhaps he was sane all along, but ... just unable to express. Oh, wait. Well, OK, so well. umm, it was more subtle than that. When he was in the hospital, the MD gave him an integral to do. Calculus. A kind-of-ish hard integral. He kept converting it to one form (change of variable) and back. Just bouncing between these two expressions, unable to solve it. So this was, indeed, evidence of him being unable to control his own thought process sufficiently to break out of that trap, that loop. Well, it *was* a hard integral. We were in grad school. He was a grad student in mathematics. I remember looking at the integral, and thinking that the answer was not obvious. I mean, I couldn’t solve it in my head, but I wasn’t there to do that. So. Lucidity requires not just a string of thoughts, not just a salad of ideas, but a specific structure. And this structure must be understandable to ... well... other humans, and to yourself. The part about explaining the obvious to others is boring but a necessary part of communications. The part of explaining it to yourself is a necessary part of coherent development of an idea for oneself. (Wow, this actually ties into some quantum ideas I’ve had, but that’s like a fifty-page digression. Later, in a different format and venue.)

Where was I? Structured thought. Well, I know this rationally. Here’s the trick. I can do structured thought while lounging in a chair. Walking in the park. Lying in bed. But then, if I am not careful, it evaporates. Perhaps it returns days later, perhaps it does not. How developed is it? Not much, if I don’t think about it. Not much, if I feel no compelling reason to put it into words – either as some witty remark at a party, to some friends, or as some written tract I publish as a PDF or web page or blog or some source code.

Source code is perhaps an interesting case of development, particularly easy to grasp. I often have the vaguest feeling or inspiration for how something might be done. I can day-dream it, and then forget it. I can open an issue in github, and set it into words, developing it a bit more in the process. And/or I can write the code for it. Writing the code, debugging it, and making it actually work correctly, well, wow, that changes everything. It materializes surprising aspects that were never there in the original thought. The original though was a vector: a direction: the start of an electrical charge, lighting bolt, but the path to ground not yet formed. The actual path to ground lies in the future, still unknown, and it takes some surprising turns when it does form. And even the feelers, exporting possible routes, even these are surprising, these were not there in the original thought. The original thought was just a potential. Just a voltage, at the edge of atmosphere breakdown, but not yet an active process. That is what thinking is like. The debugged source code is the actual discharge. The github issue describing the idea is just a set of feelers. And the vague thought, possibly forgotten, is just a ... vague thought.

And so, there we are. That’s thinking. I’m writing here. I know not why, but it seems criminal if I don’t write. Something will be lost. I do not know where I am going. It is a journey. Well, I do have other explicit journeys I have in mind, specifically the development of social contacts in Vilnius, but that is for another day. Not going to writ about that now. Right now, the topic needs to continue to be the crisis. Although I am not feeling the pressure of that crisis just right now, it feels alleviated. Perhaps the walk in the park, the mild hunger has taken the edge off. It will return, as I fall asleep, as I wake in the morning. But I cannot type as I sleep, and the assorted brain reading machines that could maybe extract some of my thinking, maybe, these don’t exist. There are rumours of interesting developments, but you have to stick your head in a multi-million dollar machine, first. Thought-reading machines are not yet household items. And fuck. If and when they are, then ... I dunno. The feeling of crisis will surely elevate a few more notches. I mean, all this talk of post-human cyborg and whatnot is envigorating sci-fi, until the day it becomes real, in which case, the shit will suddenly become very real, as they say. The rational understanding will become an emotional response. A crisis, I suppose. A nervous breakdown, even. I don’t see how it could be any other way.

And now I’m going to take a break to get some food, and return to the topic – the meaning of life. What is the universe doing? How do I navigate from here to there? Will I live long enough to confront the post-human crisis? Do I have five or ten or twenty years? Will I be able to afford it? will the medical technology be there? Will Western Civ loose its shit, and descend into kinetic chaos, with bullets flying, and I die, victim of some unforseen alt-right mass shooting? Victim of some black-on-white crime in Chicago? Will I make it, or will I die of a heart-attack in Vilnius? OK, let me get some food. Back in a moment.

I wandered into the kitchen, and decided I’m not hungry. Not yet ready to eat. My stomach is not prepared. So I have a big glass of highly diluted orange juice in front of me. I like it highly-diluted. Maybe six to one. Flavor without heft. I am expressing a prefrence... why? for posterity? So you can get to know me? I can hand wave and note that there are plenty of humans who are gastronomes, intensely interested in food. Earlier today, I gave my son Jules a talk about all the things one can do as a human. He started the conversation by saying he thinks he’s mildly autistic. He’s not. He thinks he is, because he’s had some large number of awkward conversations in high-school. I assured him that awkward is a hallmark of highschool. I think maybe he actually understood and believed me. Although I had to talk about qualia and the pursuit of qualia. Pursuit of smell, of touch, of color and shape. Pursuit of the more abstract, including social cues and language skills. Whatever, I could recap that conversation cause it’s fresh in my head, but you are not my son, and I don’t have anything that I need to teach you. Well, I do have something, but its.. well I am teaching myself, in a way. Or perhaps experimenting with automatic writing. I’m not sure. Joyce did automatic writing. So do many college (and high-school!) students, encourage by their teachers to explore themselves, to explore their ability to express. Well, I know how to express, that is not the problem. I am struggling with what to do next. So, like writers block. Except its take-action-block. Clearly I’m writing, so that’s not blocked. But the ocean of things I can do next, it seems so boundless, I don’t know what to choose. And everything that is important, it would take many years, longer, of sustained effort to develop. So what should I pick, that is worthy of five or ten years of sustained effort? I don’t know. How can I plan the next two decades? How does this work? That is why I’m writing. To decide what to do next, both at the minute-by-minute level, and at the day-to-day level, and the year-to-year level. And the need for sustained effort is intimidating, And the sinking back into the velvet rut, doom-scrolling through social media is so easy. Opium for the masses, dulling the senses, even as it pumps your brain full of ideas. So, OK, in that sense, social media is much much better for you than opium. What is alarming is how ... addictive it is. Harumpf. And so here I am again, going in a circle, again. Doing that change-of-variable on that integral, and back, again. Now what? What do I do next? Fuck. Fuck you. Fuck me. Fuck Fuck Fuck. Where was I? Right. The universe. Lets think about that for a while.

The universe. So here I am, in a certain sense, I am the universe, thinking about itself, etc. a common trope. My bounds of thinking do not extend beyond my experience, my body, my education, the rutted channels oof my thoughts. But I try to hop the channel. To break out. Do I have free will? I started an essay about that. It has something to do with quantum mechanics. I will develop that lter. Not tonight. Maybe tomorrow. I don’t know. Again, is this mental masturbation? Why bother? I’ve evaded the crisis, or the crisis has evaporated, but I am now focusing hard, trying to pull it back into reality. I want to focus on the nervous breakdown, will it into being. Make it happen. Get it done. Avoid the sleepwalking, avoid the velvet rut, avoid the opium addiction, avoid the banal day to day existance, and force the situation into a crisis. Neurons of the brain, unite! You have nothing to lose but your chains! Easy to say, hard to do. Fuck.

Hehe. Oh why fuck. Lookit here. This guy David Orban sends me junk mail, and you know what today’s junk mail is? Let me quote:

David Orban

What is the question that I should be asking?

2023 week 18

Don’t be a Zombie, be a Luminary

The sudden availability of advanced Artificial Intelligence platforms forces us to confront not only the evaluation of our own abilities but, even deeper, what it means to be a conscious, self-aware human being.

We can explore this from both scientific and philosophical points of view, ultimately drawing practical conclusions. My conclusion and exhortation is simple: Don’t be a zombie, be a luminary.

And then there is this link to a youtube video. Haven’t clicked on it yet. How funny. This is exactly the topic of this long rambling mess of an essay. I am not alone. Some subsegment of humans are experiencing this same nervous breakdown that I am.

Oh wait. There’s more. Let me read what he wrote. Be back in a moment. (See, communication can happen. I am not just writing to you, I am reading from others. Lets see if its any good.)

OK, so Orban is able to write conventional prose, in the style acceptable to liberal media and the educated. Well-formed sentences that flow and hit all the right points, constrained into normalicy and conventional composition. No fireworks, nothing wonky, nothing suspect. No mental instability, no craziness, just informative prose. And he .. spells out the obvious. Recapitulating centuries if not millennia of modern liberal thought, from Ancient Greece, and a tinge of Hindu enlightenment, to say “Be! ... Be all that you can be! Join the ... Army?” No, join the legion of the enlightened, the luminaries, those who are fully self-aware and have grasped the meaning of it all, those who can sense and express and be and live, unlike those pesky philosophical zombies who... join the Army? (FWIW, yes, I know, zombie-like obedience to authority is an explicitly developed trait in soldiers. If you are going to kill people, you can’t be a wuss, and have self-doubts. You have to follow orders, or people will die. Soldiers are trained to be zombies, in a certain sense. Not dehumanized, no, but effective in stressful conditions, reacting automatically in life-threatening situations. Have I mentioned that I spend hours a day tracking events in Ukraine? Yes? Well, let me mention it again. I have been, since the day the war broke out. What a wild ride. Fascinating)

See, that’s the problem. I find the events in Ukraine fascinating. I’ve learned a bit of Eastern European history, thanks to Timothy Snyder. I’ve learned about logistics, thanks to Trento Telenko. Not that Trent is the highest luminary on twitter, rather, his name is stuck in my mind, because he recently expressed some rather ugly opinion. But his basic tutorials on logistics have been excellent. I am basic, after all. We all were. None of us had a clue. And so that is more interesting than what David Orban had to say, because Orban wrote about the obvious. Why did he do that? Well, he writes a newsletter, and the point of newsletters is to state the obvious to the readership. Much Like Telenko, except that I already know a thing or two about enlightenment, whereas I know very little about logistics. What a fucking trip. Why am I wasting time writing this? Oh yeah, to reveal unto you my inner thoughts. To create my self-portrait. Because that is what this text is – an attempted self-portrait of the burning inner workings of my mind.

It is work, however. I clicked through, and there are half-a-dozen youtube videos that suddenly seem appealing and rewarding to watch. And what should I do? Watch them, and “kill some time”, so I can wonder, decades hence, where all the time went? I will learn something by watching them. It will be more immediately pleasurable than continuing to sit here any type. This typing is work, its mentally taxing, it takes effort. Maybe less effort than social interactions, where I would have to adjust my drivel to the particular social setting. Here I can drivel away. My mind is on vacation while my mouth is working overtime. Put brain in gear before engaging mouth. I can do that, you know. I can write drivel. Perhaps I am writing it now. I’m not exactly taking a lot of time to reflect before typing. It’s just coming out. Logorrhea. To convert the logorrhea into meaningful thoughts, I would have to stop and formulate ideas, and then sop and reflect on the finest choice of words to express those ideas. Fuck that. Lets just write! I read somewhere that thinking hard depletes one’s brain of some certain neurotransmitter, and it makes one tired. I forget the name of it, right now. It is the same one that modulated by sports supplements, and is involved in athletic performance. This is why, apparently, college athletes can set world records in the summer, but never-ever during final exams. The mental exhaustion of studying for class exhausts the same neurotransmitter that you need to focus to perform at your best, athletically. I row. Did you know that? Of course you did. I have maybe half a dozen gold medals in US National Masters Rowing Championships. I have walked the straight and narrow of being an athlete. in some certain sense, rowing is the most difficult thing I have ever done in life. It is more difficult than physics or abstract math or studying for final exams. It requires a certain level of sheer will-power and focus and mental stamina and delicate finesse. Grace. A level of grace that I have never needed to harness to understand some blob of math. I mean, I’m great at focusing and applying intellectual effort to solve problems and achieve ends. But it does not hurt, it does not physically hurt, the way that rowing does. The sheer willpower needed to row and win a race is more concentrated than anything else I’ve done. The good news is that its over in 4 minutes, for sprints, and 20 minutes, for head-races. So there it is. This apparently requires some neurotransmitter that is depleted, both by athletic activity, and by hard thinking. Well, I’m not really thinking hard here (remember, this is a sample of my logorrhea) but well, it is not entirely effortless. It’s a brisk walk in the park? Is that what this writing is like? A brisk walk? It’s not max effort.

Why? because I’m evading the crisis. I’m evading the nervous breakdown. I’m too tired to bring it into the forefront. If I did, I fear that I will rehash the same od steps, go in that circle, do that change of variable over and over, to come back where I started with no forward progress. Only exhausted a bit more than when I started. Is this good? I don’t know. In row, we practice, to get better and stronger. Is that what I’m doing here? Practicing? Long steady-state? Should I stop writing, and watch youtube instead? Should I write some more, and perhaps luckily pick up the theme, again? Am I boring you? I’m kind of boring me. But I’m afraid to stop. If I stop writing now, I may put this down till tomorrow, till next week, till ... never. For fuck sake, this could be the last diary entry ever. Was it worth it? Too late! Its in the past. You can’t change the past, you can’t remember the future. You can forget the past. You can erase overt digital knowledge. Is there some quantum trace of it left, wandering the universe, after I hit delete on my computer? What about when I die? Is there some quantum imprint of my life, circulating in the universe, after I die? Well, on the one hand, of course there is: the memories of my children, the memories of everyone I have ever known. Of course. George Bailey left his mark. But a mark is not the same as some detailed, fine-grained imprint. If I wipe a disk drive today, can someone a thousand years from now reconstruct the contents of that disk drive, out of the quantum traces it left behind? I doubt it, but it is a question worth pondering for that quantum paper that I might not get around to writing. OK, so writing this last paragraph was a little more satisfying. Can I do it again?

Hmmm. Or I can call it a night. It is 9:30 PM, 21:30 military time, Sunday May 7, 2023. Intuition says I will not be able to recapture the crisis, and write about it tonight. Best to call it quits. Try again tomorrow.

Do we get tired because ... nature never needed to optimize us for not getting mentally exhausted? Why does everything with a brain need to sleep? Is it simple mechanical cellular repair? Or is it a time to commune with the deep quantum thermodynamic state, and be one with the universe? All is one? Omni padme hum? Yes, I sometimes give such thoughts a platform. But god forbid, it would have to be quite the social setting for me to chatter about this to other humans. Well ... and why? Well, because I don’t know anyone who would actually be interested in such musings. Well, only maybe 3-4-5 people I know. Maybe six people I know. But then it would be stating the obvious, with nothing to add. Because they too might suspect as much, and its not like I have a fully developed quantum theory that sleeping and dreaming is communing with the universe, all-is-one state. The other problem is that people who get sucked into this kind of woo shit tend to be morons. With whom I cannot communicate with. I mean, I have a PhD in theoretical particle physics. I understand this stuff, dammit. And when I talk to someone who does not have a PhD in theoretical particle physics, it is a case of abandon all hope ye who enter here. I cannot teach it to them, and if they are willing to believe in fucked up quantum shit in the same way that they believe in chemtrails or bill gates implanting chips in your brain when you take a cover test .. well, fuck that. The human brain is plastic. But that means the human brain can fall out of it’s skull. And this is part of the modern crisis. The human brain can be shaped into believing preposterous shit, and there is nothing we can do about it. I mean, its OK that the human mind is plastic. What is not OK is the mass hysteria, the group psychosis. The “harmless” group psychosis for flat-earth or moon-landing denialism, or the overtly hostile and deleterious group psychosis peddled by Fox News. Like, what was the one I say today? Everyone should be kind and polite, because the other guy might be having a bad day, and they might be packing heat, and might be ready to go on a shooting rampage. So you should be kind and polite, and be prepared to kill everyone you meet. Like WTF. Is that mass psychosis or what? But the twitter #2A crowd (that’s 2nd amendment) actually believe this shit. Or maybe what 1420 interviews on youtube of Moscow citizens, and some of the bone-chilling opinions they express. Makes you think: are these russians even human? How can you possible say something so lacking in compassion, so freaking genocidal, overtly so? Because, what, you are parroting Olga fucking Skabayeva? How do people get so fucked up? That’s a semi-rhetorical question. Although I guess I would be interested in a more detailed answer. Except I do not believe that psychiatric, psychological science, neuroscience has advanced to the point where we can give a good answer as to why people believe in fucked up shit. I mean we can, there are books on this stuff. I’m vaguely aware of the general drift of things. Vaguely. But. Hmm.

Where was I? I’m going around in circles. I’ve mentioned Soloviev and Margarits Simonyan, before, up above, I think. Maybe. Maybe Julia Davis, who translates them into English. Im going round in circles, wringing my hands about the dire state of affairs. And so what? So fucking what? Where do I go from here? What do I do next? I mean, this is important. The Singularity is neigh, we grasp at the straws of a post-capitalist world order, trying to avoid destruction, to achieve civilizational enlightenment, but how to the details go? Are we forever in trench warfare, dealing with whatever hits us in the next few minutes/hours/days/years, or can we strategize our way to civilizational enlightenment? Am I a sucker for a utopian dream? Of course not. We all know the common wisdom about utopian dreams. Yet we have gobs of evidence that both mammals and birds have an innate biological sense of fairness and justice: the utopian dream is hard-coded in their genetics too, and not just in the genes of primates. Dogs know when you mistreat them. Oh, and a non-sequiter detour: dogs are not philosophical zombies. Whatever. So concern for civilizational enlightenment is a valid dream. Utopian, of course, but valid. When civilizational enlightenment is reached, when we obtain nirvana, then perhaps that nirvana will be wrapped in crisis and nervous breakdown. Nobody ever claimed that utopia and nirvana is NOT a crisis! Wooooof. So there. We’ve got that, too. Take a load off grandma, take a load for free, take a load off grandma, and put the load right on, right on me. Great song.

Now for real. I’m done for the night. It is now exactly 22:00, exactly 30 minutes since before.

8 May 2023

Why am I writing this? Song lyrics are far more extreme, explore a far greater territory than I ever could. Also ... novels (I read relatively few novels ...) I imagine there are others out there who are also writing weird diaries intended for machine learners. I have incoherent, mixed feelings about this project. Well, shit. The inner voice. Should I or shouldn’t I? Valid arguments in both directions.

The strongest argument might be that I am biologically-driven. Biological creatures have explosive (exponential) growth, until rate-limiting factors settle in and slow it (trees never stop growing, but flowers do.) As mentioned above, animals seem to have a sense of justice and decency, not just mammals, but animals in general. So there is some deep underpinning. Not clear how this goes from genetics to neurons to behavior: that bridge is scientifically unknown. The desire to explore and express, self-express, is human. My urge to write here is not a sin (even though it sometimes feels like that). I mean, wtf, all artistic expression is an outpouring, even if this particular self-expression is not intended to entertain others, but to ... find myself.

Well, I hope that perhaps that will be the last outburst. Frankly, it is easier not to write, than to write. And the need to create words does interfere with the process that generates ideas. I can create both words and ideas at the same time, but not very efficiently. Creating ideas alone, and then memorizing the general drift and then wrapping words around the retained feeling of the idea, that is easier. Ideation is inhibited by language generation.

Hmm. Again, I am not the first to observe the above. And, from what I have heard, there are people who do not ideate at all, without ideating purely in words. The so-called wordcels vs. the shape-rotators.

Also touched upon here is the thread of originality vs. the mundane. The cultural expectation that I have been raised on is that originality is vital, fundamental, important. Certainly, in academic literature, the stuff to be published must be original. Yet, the vastness of libraries, and even more so, the vastness of the internet shows that true originality is almost always absent. Well, hang on. Let me pull that apart into two distinct threads. One: I have created original work in physics and math. So, in that sense, originality is possible. Two: my confused thoughts, set to writing here, are not original. I believe that everyone has confused thoughts. Heck - clearly seen in PTSD and mental illness: thought confusion is starkly visible. Next, there are tens of thousands physics, math, software types, sharing a common background and temperment to my own, some of whom have strayed into the territory I’m in now. Of these, I believe that there are at least a dozen, if not a hundred, who are writing a diary such as this, with similar purpose, maybe with similar style. So here, specifically, I argue I am not “original”. But this is a misnomer, I am “original”, just that I am not “unique”. All humans are original: they do things they’ve never done before. However, what they do is commonplace, and thus considered unremarkable. Going to the toilet is not something to write home about, even if each time is not quite like the time before.

If I think about this, perhaps I can give this mathematical clothing, and use some symbols to indicate a probability distribution of conventional behaviors, and then talk about the occasional forays into the unusual. For example, climbing Mount Everest. Perhaps more commonplace now, but there were the first few times, when this was truly a new and never-done-before thing. I am not climbing Mount Everest here. I’m not even training. Its more like logorrhea - a very deprecating term, belittling my actions, suggesting I should stop writing. The urge to stop writing is over-ridden by some other ... drive. Fuck I’m confused. I felt it, now the feeling is gone. There was a momentary glimpse through the clouds of that part of my brain that motivates me to write, distinct from the part that does the writing. The clouds parted, and now they closed again. I sit and wait for another insight.

And this is the problem of mundanity. The waiting for an insight. And the frustration is that almost all insights I am able to get here, the feels, these have all been glimpsed and sketched and developed by writers, by singers, by poets that have come before me so wtf why am I wasting electrons pointing out the well-known? Well, I gave a defense of the well-known yesterday. But its a new situation here: here, I am talking about things well-known to common human experience, vs. things that are must be explained in detail, if someone is to understand the specific communicated message.

OK, some more math, then. My thoughts here are ergodic, a space-fillig curve attempting to visit all points of the noosphere. Publishable creativity consists of editing out all the places that have been visited by others, and holding forth the novel, the previously unexplored. But the general ergodicity is unavoidable: at some point or another, thoughts return to conventional space. The mathematics of transformers, as I currently but incompletely understand them, are just geometry in a high-dimensional space. My ergodic travels are not all that different from the ergodic travels of GPT. From what I can tell, GPT is just taking a random walk through nearest-neighbor points located at the corners of a high-dimensional cub projected on a high-dimensional sphere. In N dimensions, a cube has 2^N corners, and so those points are extremely close to each-other, in the metric sense. The transformer is an affine transformation between spaces, but the general idea remains. GPT differs from my own thoughts in that, well, my thoughts have a yoke, a harness, that guides rational expression differently. I have extra parts that suppress hallucination. Mostly. Yadda yadda. Obviously, mild hallucination is vital and central for artistic creativity. Big hallucinations gives us phenomena like the “Hi Ren” song. I digress. Well, with some engineering effort, someone will eventually slap a hallucination-supressor onto GPT. At which point, the problem of the philosophical zombie becomes a bit more difficult. But even then, even after this is done, there are still differences between me and “it”: I still have the biological, animal, mammalian, primate senses of fairness and justice, but also of love, loss, confusion, will, strength, determination, passion, empathy – the so-called “positive traits” that appear to be deeply and innately biological. All this is apparently absent from GPT. And is there anyone, besides me, who is even thinking about this? I suppose maybe there is. But how are we to attach, to connect this to an LLM? It imbue these qualities? Or, hey: more basically: emotions: sadness, happiness, anger, love, infatuation, obsession. Fuck. I’m not even giving a proper taxonomy here: some of these come and got at the one-minute timescale, some persist for hours, weeks, months, years. Temerpment is like climate, as compared to weather, which changes day to day. I am not trying to catalogue and give a scientific development of affects and emotions. Rather, I am invoking these as a subsystem, shared by animals (dogs certainly get angry. Fight or flight is textbook stuff.) but however well developed these are for animals, we have no matching AI or AGI conception for this.

Sigh. Instead of prattling on about this, I should be reading technical papers and trying to figure this out. Research. But wait, why? I want to hasten the arrival of AGI? Well, yes, I guess I do. It carries the risk of being civilization-destroying, it carries the hope of solving my problems with aging: I would like to be young again, and have lots of sex. That sounds like something I would enjoy. Being smart, I would ask the genie for another wish: to be smarter. And thus, with a single step, begins the journey of a thousand miles, culminating with my future as a jupiter-brain. The post-human apocalypse. Is this what I want? Well, again, there is a conventional answer for that, found in the sci-fi literature, and in utopian dreams. Innate biology seems to drive desires for justice and fairness, distinguishing good and evil, and craving good, rejecting evil. Modern sci-fi can map this onto the universe: as Carl Sagan has popularized: we are star-stuff, we are golden, and we’ve got to find our way back to the garden. All right, Joni Mitchell, then. Insofar as we are a part of the universe contemplating the universe itself, we are a part of the universe that distinguishes good and evil, and thirsts for good, i.e. for utopia.

Ah, and now comes the question, the crux. How much of this universal craving for good, how much of that is due to quantum mechanics, quantum field theory, or whatever the physics of the universe we are in, and how much of it is pure math? So, for example, GPT is, in a sense, pure math. It is a purely digital creation. Digital transistors work because they isolate from noise: they provide very strong insulation from the environment. They allow for the creation of “universes” that are not “attached” to our own. Well, obviously, we can act on them, and obviously, we can give digital systems effectors. But in the abstract, what is computed in CPU and RAM is isolated from our universe, except for the occasional cosmic ray that flips some bit here or there. So, in this sense, what is computed in CPU/RAM is “pure math”, existing in it’s own private Platonic cave, isolated from our own. (And, for GPT, those bits are used to approximate the continuum of the real numbers, but that seems less important, for just right now.)

And so, with digital computing, we are able to create universes of pure math, detached from our own. What then happens to good and evil? I’ve postulated that the perception of good and evil are biologically based, and following Carl Sagan’s reductionist arguments, good an evil are properties of molecules and atoms, and so perhaps properties of quantum field theory. That’s where reductionism goes. But what about the isolatted mathematical system inside the CPU/RAM? Its not quantum, its classical, and it’s isolated. How is a conception of good and evil supposed to permeate into that? Ahhh and here I have perhaps one answer: Panpsychism.

Aside from reductionism, we’ve got panpsychism. That’s also where panpsychism goes. Panpsychism is deeply appealing and seemingly unavoidable. Panpsychism says that any complex structure is going to contain some fraction of “feels”, and the more complex it gets, the more integrated information there is, the more sophisticated and thinking and capable of qualia it is.

Hmm. So panpsychism does two things: it slays the philosophical zombie, in a very simple manner: by denying the possibility of the philosophical zombie. That is, if a system is sufficiently complex to exhibit “biological” behavior, it cannot be a zombie. The zombie is an illusion, its a philosophical daydream. Zombies don’t exist.

Panpsychism also does another thing: it crosses the isolation barrier that CPU/RAM provides. Basically, if a system is sufficiently complex, it is psychic, and it does not matter if the substrate is transistors or QFT. So that suggests that conceptions of good and evil go with. The assumption here is that any psychic system, any system with qualia (i.e. everything) is capable of a perception of good and evil. That good and evil have a platonic reality, and are present and distinguishable in any system.

This suggests that purely digital AGI will be able to tell apart right from wrong, and even have some innate drive towards good, and away from evil. Is this drive entropic? (Unfortunately, one can still create evil systems. Evil cannot be banished. We can create a civilization-killing AGI.) But lets set this aside: is the drive away from evil and towards good, is this entropic?

What do I mean by entropic, here?

(See? If I did not force myself to write, I would not have figured this out. It is not enough to free-wheel. One must force oneself to think. It is an act of will, to battle off baser hedonistic impulses, such as opium addiction. I mean, I do have to give some credit to genetics: I am predisposed to think abstractly. I do have the psychological profile typical of a physics PhD. And I am, in some sense, compelled to think and explore abstract thoughts. Is there a feedback loop, some hedonistic treadmill, that causes me to think deeply? Lets find out...)

Where was I? Entropy vs ergodicity. The Bernoulli process is ergodic. We can make ergodic odometers that eventually visit all possible states. These are, in a certain sense “purely uniform distributions” and there is not really enough there to create an entropic gradient from evil to good. This is also at the limit of the idea of panpsychism: The Bernoulli process does not seem to have enough structure to ascribe to it a degree of psychic complexity. In the grand tradition, let us assign it a psychic level of zero. Insofar as the Bernoulli process is isomorphic to the Cantor set, then the same. And the Cantor set is isomorphic to the infinite binary tree. So we assign all three of these things (which are the same thing) a psychic level of zero. Insofar as the Bernoulli process implies the central limit theorem, the same there: Normal, Gaussian distributions are symptomatic of zero psychic content.

So how does it get to be greater than zero? Well, the infinite binary tree is the universal cover for graphs. (The Menger sponge is the universal embedding. Which is *not* a cover! Related idea, but different.) So clearly, to get some other value... well, consider either a finite state machine, or a probabilistic finite state machine, or a finite state generator. All of these can be visualized via their state transition graphs, and the amount of psychism we ascribe to those needs to be boiled down to that. Perhaps it is the integrated information. I now need to read about integrated information, since this is currently unknown/unclear to me, I need to be able to compute IIT for graphs, and stupid me, I don’t know how to do this, yet.

Wo, should I continue writing, or should I take a break and read about IIT? Or take a break and do something else? Well, I’m taking a break, at any rate...

9 May 2023

It is very hard to write the above, because I am not expert in so many fields of academic inquiry. I simply am unaware of what others have done. But then, when I do try to broaden my scope, I am met with crap.

For example, I am reading the Wikipedia article about Slavoj Žižek. I see a paragraph about “subjectivity” which is obviously wrong, and is easily corrected. Should I even bother and waste time correcting it? Here’s the key sentence:

... nothing positive can be said about this subject, this ’I’ that eludes symbolisation; it cannot be discerned as anything but "that which cannot be symbolised". Thus, without the initial, attempted, failed symbolisation, subjectivity cannot present itself.

As a physicist, the answer is obvious: subjectivity is an ultrametric. We each, as subjects, live in deep, inaccessible holes, insulated, isolated from the world except what comes in from the senses and flows out via communications. What goes on in my subjective experience is unknowable to the external world (well, that may change with the ongoing development of brain-scanning machines...) and so myself as subject can be given a name – “Linas”, of course, “Linas Vepstas” and that is a symbol. You may even have some idea of my inner life, based on this and other writings. But in the end, your model of “Linas” is not “subjective me”; I exist outside the known universe, only weakly attached to it. And of course no symbol is sufficient to characterize subjecthood; symbols do not have information content, in and of themselves. For the Panpsychic, a symbol can only contain the information of the object to which it is applied, and, even then, assuming that information is accessible. The reader of this text does not have, and will never have a specific neural scan of the neurons that were firing as I wrote this, although, perhaps, they might one day be able to build a not-unreasonable model. I am not unique, not that unique, I am human, there are others like me, we share brains structure and basal neural firing patterns.

What I just wrote above is so painfully obvious, that it begs credulity and sanity as to why I have to even say this out loud! And yet, the situation is absurd: others do not know what I know, and so I have to read some weird drivel that maybe Žižek actually believes, or maybe he doesn’t, as reformulated by some anonymous author in Wikipedia.

I have two problems with this. First, and most obvious: my own critique is superficial and shallow. It could be developed into something much sharper and more precise. Perhaps someone has already done this. Second .. well, I forgot what I was thinking, already. Alas, it has fled into some unknown shadow of the mind, unknown even to conscious me. At any rate, I do have to engage in the process of thinking about this stuff, because it is the only way I can integrate new “information” into my world-model. Although “subject as symbol” barely seems to qualify as “information”. The other thing is that, once I’ve performed this integration, it is effectively lost to the external universe unless I write about it. If I don’t write about it, it will, at best, manifest itself in my other intellectual efforts in a very round-about kind of way. Or may not at all ... just forgotten. I’ve forgotten almost everything I’ve ever thought.

This is an interesting AGI question: to what degree is “forgetting” the thinking process important to performing thinking? Can one think, and record a permanent trace? What is the utility of that trace? Would it be a hinderance to future thinking? Perhaps forgetting is a vital and necessary unburdening? (Well, yes, of course it is, in the von Neumann architecture: I cannot re-examine everything on the disk drive every time I run some program. Bandwidth and bottlenecks prevent this.) Now, this is an idea worth conemplating later.

FYI. I will now stop writing here, and finish reading about Žižek and then continue reading another article on Croatian, Yugoslavian “Southern European” sociology. I’ve taken a recent interest in cultural geopolitics. The Ukrainian war has triggered this.

Oh, hang on: another quote:

According to Žižek, these thinkers, in insisting on the role of the subject, run counter to "culturalist" or "historicist" positions held by thinkers such as Louis Althusser and Michel Foucault, which posit that "subjects" are bound by and reducible to their historical/cultural(/symbolic) context.

But of course, they are all correct, to a degree. We can start by saying “all humans are alike” and then promptly know that this oversimplifies the situation. We can then try to categorize individual human subjects into the cultural millieu in which they live. After all, the ideas that prattle about in my head must surely echo in the heads of others, as well. You can, to a large degree, categorize me according to my “identity politics”: I’m Lithuanian, I’m a physicist, I grew up fiddle with electronics, I smoked pot and listened to progressive rock, I grew up and made a string of poor career choices and life choices, and so here I am, and I am probably globally unique: all other Lithuanian physicists probably did not smoke pot or swim in the intellectual soup I swum in. But many many others are deeply embedded in the modern Western twitterati culture that I am in, and so their inner thoughts will not be all that different than my own, even if they are missing my characteristic childhood impressions. I dunno. What is Žižek really insisting on? The obvious? What are Althusser and Foucault saying? Were I to share a beer with them, I imagine they’d say “Of course, Linas, you are right. But ... what you are missing is this... the forces on culture and history are not the forces of individuals, but of culture... “ ... or something like that. Of course I’m right. Of course, I’m missing something finer and more subtle. It has taken me at least ten minutes if not longer to write the above; it would take the age of the universe to cover all of the finer details I have not available to me right now.

And, alas, this is what I have left: cameraderie, the sharing of beers, with other finite, mortal thinkers, before we age, row senile, have a stroke and die. The minutes wasted in cameraderie are perhaps not wasted. I have empathy for others. But do not make infinite demands of my time. I must say “no” sometimes. I must say “no” to myself, sometimes.

I’m reading more. Not sure why I bother. I figure I should know more about cultural philosophers are saying, because I wish to avoid “imposter syndrome”, of pretending to know something I don’t. But then, when I continue reading, they seem to all talk about “obvious stuff”. None of it is all that deep, all that insightful, I nod my head and say “uh huh, uh huh”. At best, it is morbid curiosity that makes me continue reading. Perhaps this is the miner’s dilemma: low quality ore. There’s something there; is it worth the effort? Does one mine this particular seam because one is attached to it, bound to it by love, familiarity, obsession, curiosity? Is one loyal to an intellectual pursuit, or is it the activity of the habitue? All of these bindings, in my reductionist world-view, are just, again, feedback loops of neurotransmitters in my brain, urging me forward in this activity or that, keeping me loyal to my subjects of study, forcing an ergodic revisit of prior thoughts, or perhaps encouraging me to explore new territory. Perhaps I’m only crossing saddle points, in some mode of compounded hysteresis in my thoughts. Leading here, there, and jumping back. Slave to the random prattling of my brain. Do I have free will, or am I an automaton compelled to read stupid Wikipedia summaries of slightly more clever Žižekian insights, which are of maybe dubious cleverness? Fuck fuck Fuck. The human condition I am condemned to endure. Not entirely free, not entirely alive, yet free and alive. It is a crisis, a state of crisis. I can slip into my velvet rut, I can force a nervous breakdown. In either case, I crawl over mediocre intellectual pathways.

At least, that is my subjective experience, just right now. How do I know these are mediocre? Well, if my dog was thinking this stuff, it would be brilliant. But, for humans, not so much. How do I subjective recognize brilliance? Well, two ways, the “a hah” moment, when my brain is chemically rewarded, instantaneously, for arriving at some great insight that was long pursued, and finally trapped. The other is in retrospect, looking back on one of one great creations, and understanding just how good it was. That the present pales in comparison, the present does not match the heights one obtained earlier, even if the heights were not apparent back then. Perhaps one was too busy creating to savor the fruits of that creation.

But all of these insights I just wrote above, again, I feel like these are ordinary, conventional insights. That anyone could have these ideas. That others have had them, in the past. That I am not assembling anything new, here. So what am I doing? Why am I doing it? Why bother? “What is the meaning of life”? Enough. Time to read some more.

OK, so I like what Žižek says about ideology and freedom. Good points (Or rather, what Wikipedia says about Žižeks beliefs. So, filtered. The problem of communications between ultrametric-isolated systems...) Ohh, I like his insight into theology, too! Oh, and Communism! OK, so, yeah, I like this guy!

Yesterday, I watched a video by someone claiming to be mildly autistic, with a zillion thoughts swimming in her head, which impeded her expressive capabilities, as she had to stop and formulate her thoughts. My reaction: oh darling, please, we all do that! As I read the WP article on Žižek, its clear that here is a man, a human, whose head is full of thoughts, and he can’t squeeze them out fast enough. Is this branded “austism” now? One thinks so fast, one can’t get it all in order? Does this make slow thinkers better, somehow? Seems like bullshit to me. “Look at me, pity me, all my life failures are because I’m austistic, and not because I’m a smart person who fucked up.” Narcissism. WTF.

Still reading the Žižek article. I like him more and more! Chomsky is an asshole, but he does get one thing right: “[Žižek’s] views are often too obscure to be communicated usefully to common people.” Bingo! But, hey, lookit ... was that ever the point, to communicate to common people? What do I have in common with common people? Painfully little, at time, it seems, and since I am not a revolutionary, I see no point in such communication. Or rather, I have no desire to infect the minds of simple folk with corrupt catchphrases expressing some bogus political ideology. If anything, bogus political ideology has been at the root of our political problems. Setting aside catchphrases is not a bad thing to do. The political project can be one to be nuanced, rather than blunt.

Hours later ...

I see now that I make a similar error in my understanding of psychology. The reductionist viewpoint blinds one to complexity. The structure of a molecule? Oh it’s just QM. But if the molecule is a ribosome, you can’t reduce it to “just QM”; the actual shape of the ribosome actually matters. Likewise, my naive attempts to reduce consciousness to “its just graph theory” is equally naive: the shapes of those graphs matter. I acknowledge this consciously, but I don’t know how to accept it, holisitically: I’m a hammer, everything is a nail. I can conceive of panpsychism as a general field possessed by all sufficiently complex graphs, and perhaps I might even find some quasi-convincing algebraic formulation for it. Some single floating-point number characterizing the amount of consciousness or psyche within some graph. But such a single number carries almost no information: its like providing the molecular weight of a ribosome. That single number cannot capture what it is that the ribosome actually does.

Thus, I am force to conclude that one must always study details, to adequately capture complexity. Yet, in possession of a finite mind, a finite lifetime, I cannot be all-seeing, and so .. how do I make progress in this quest? The ancient answer (and its a good answer) is to specialize, to dive deep. Like a root searching through soil, I must walk some gradient of intellectual density, finding some specialized, unique topic, and penetrate that. Switching metaphors: like climbers ascending Mount Everest, we each carry a rock to make it a bit taller. Switching metaphors again, like a vast battlefront, we can only advance some few meters where we are, and not somewhere else. But, in the back of my mind, I can envision the entire battlefield. And the commanders, they too can act effectively at that scale, even if the details are invisible to them. Filters and focus.

So again: faced with the task of complexity, what should I do? What comes next? How does one proceed? How do I strategize my life? What do I even want out of life? I cannot reduce the current situation to a military “task and purpose” until I know what my own strategic goals are, and I do not seem to have those in order. Well, I guess I have one strategic goal: to live longer. And another: become wiser and better. And another: bring goodness to the world: make the world a better place. Well, already discussed above, I think these strategic goals are biologically embedded. And as I went, I think these goals might even be panpsychic. There might be some algebraic gradient in the structure of graphs, that drives from evil towards goodness. Evil being, I guess, emptiness, dead-ends, destruction, death. I think this is actually a good working definition. I like it.

So there. I have a personal set of strategic goals, and I believe these are shared by Western culture. Let’s say that it is shared by Žižekian culture. I need a functioning name for “Žižekian culture”.

10 May 2023

Can’t sleep. After 4 hours of sleep, I woke up and could not fall asleep again. So here I am. Kill some time, till I’m exhausted.

Here’s what I aas thinking as I tossed and turned: Perhaps we are measuring complexity incorrectly. There are some 20 or 30 amino acids, and so a peptide of 100 aminos could be any of 20^100 which is astronomical. But of these, nature only chooses billions or trillions, and not something astronomical. That is, almost none of the vast number of “possible” configurations actually are “usable” or “manifestable”. So yes, (micro-)biology is complex, but maybe its vastly less complex than this kind of raw combinatorics suggests. But I don’t know how to define this sense, I don’t know how to measure this.

I am listening to Sean Carroll – Philosophical Issues in Quantum Thermodynamics, on youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x9COqqqsFtc (recall, I can’t sleep) sooo at the 11 minute mark he presents Myrvold’s question, which attempts to distinguish between Boltzmann Entropy = log of macrostate volume k log W vs Gibbs/Shannon entropy

S = - \sum_{i} p_{i} log p_{i}

. Myrvold asks: what if I give you a specific gas in a box, with all atomic positions and velocities specified to infinite precision? Does the entropy change, or not? Some people apparently believe the Shannon entropy would be zero, because one specific

p_{i} = 1

and all others are zero and thus

S = 0

. But this reasoning seems wrong to me, because of ergodicity and mixing. Even if all atomic positions and velocities are given to infinite precision, the time evolution of the system means that a large number of different states would be promptly visited. Unless we are able to know what time it is, to infinite precision, we cannot know which of these states the system is in. That’s because Sinai’s billiards are ergodic. So I guess I see why this is a foundational question.

But again, its resolvable-ish. I cannot know time to infinite precision (or positions and velocities, for that matter). Mathematically, we know that the correct foundation for this problem is the weak topology, which inherently encodes “unknowability”, and mathematically, we know that the strong topology is fundamentally different. We also know that many things we are comfortable with in math, such as weak convergence in Hilbert spaces, breaks down if we use strong topologies. Large chunks of conventional math are nuked if we use a strong topology. So it is not just the physics of gases, or the definitions of entropy that are nuked is you specify the positions of atoms to infinite precision, but also plain-old calculus. To do calculus, you need to have a measure, and to have a measure, you need Borel sets... Borel sets encode a kind of weak topology at their core, and not a strong topology. (Hmm, I need to tighten up this statement. But it is true, I believe.) Basically, almost all conventional geometry presumes a weak topology, and cannot be coherently stated with a strong topology (e.g. illustrated by the Banach-Tarski paradox.) So Myrvold’s paradox is resolved the same way as Banach-Tarski: you must use a measure, and if you don’t then you get paradoxes.

The Sean Carroll video is great! I like it!

Later ...

After a nap... what I wrote above is incorrect/misleading. I can reduce N atoms in a box to N-1 copies of Sinai’s billiards. Let N=2, then I have a geodesic; yes, its ergodic, it fills the space, eventually. I can specify the initial conditions to infinite precision; indeed, I have to, in order to have a coherent conception of a geodesic. I must be able to say “ah hah, here is the initial direction, its

π / 3

or whatever”. As this geodesic rattles around, each collision is akin to peeling off something off of it’s decimal expansion. That is, it has a symbolic dynamics. The symbolic dynamics being encoded in the collisions and wall crossings of the billiard. It is purely deterministic, in that it is determined by the initial real number that specifies the initial direction of motion. But the topology that we use on the symbolic dynamics is the weak topology.

OK, so that then is the ultra-breif sketch of how one gets the arrow of time for a classical system. To recap: you take the classical geodesics, describe them in terms of a symbolic dynamics. This necessarily gives them a Cantor set structure, disconnected. The weak topology on the symbolic dynamics allows you to write down the Frobenius–Perron operator. The spectrum of the FP operator gives the arrow of time: the dissipative eigenstates all correspond to eigenvalues less than one. The ground state, the one in “thermal equilibrium”, is the one with the Fredholm eigenvalue one.

That, at least, is how it works for classical mechanics. For quantum, there is an apparent issue: the time evolution matrix is unitary, all eigenvalues are on the unit circle, and nothing dissipates. However, there is a way out. We can pull symbolic dynamics out of the hat. One we have symbolic dynamics, then we have FP and the spectrum of the FP operator. There will be dissipative parts of the spectrum of FP, simply because applying a weak topology on symbolic dynamics implies that there is a decaying spectrum. Sot that part is wrapped up with a ribbon on top, not a problem. Where does the symbolic dynamics come from?

Well, consider the quantum finite automaton. There’s some initial state

| ψ_{0} ⟩

and to this is applied a sequence of unitary transformations

U_{1}, U_{2}, \dots

where (for the QFA) each

U_{k}

is picked from a finite set specified by the QFA. The index set, the subscripts on these unitary transforms provide the symbolic dynamics! It is quite easy to pick some collection of

U_{k}

such that the resulting mixed state is space-filling. That is, each specific state

| ψ_{n} ⟩

is just a pure state, a single point, but the mixed state, of all of these different states corresponding to the different sequences of the

U_{k}

generate pure states that are splattered everywhere over all of the possible state space (and necessarily fractal, since the index set is necessarily Cantorian.)

But where does the selection of

U_{k}

come from? Ah, well, here, I imagine the system in a thermal bath, and each interaction with a thermal photon is a

U_{k}

... well, there’s some infinite regress here. So lets consider a simplified model.

Consider a single qubit in a pure state. Such a pure state is a single vector pointing in some specific, precise direction on the Bloch sphere. A point. Consider two unitary transforms A and B, which rotate this qubit by pi/5 along the x axis and the y axis. These correspond to the A and B rotations of Banach-Tarski. Let a grad student in the lab flip a coin, and apply either A or B to the system. After any amount of finite time, the qubit remains in a pure state, since both A and B were unitary. However, if we look at the set of all possible coin-flips, it is a Bernoulli process, isomorphic to the Cantor set. The coin-flips form an ergodic sequence, the resulting pure state of the qubit takes an ergodic walk over the Bloch sphere.

When a classical point state takes an ergodic walk, we say its in a thermally equilibrated microstate. Here, we seem to have constructed a pure quantum state, evolving via unitary transforms, under control of the coin-flipping grad student. The quantum system is taking a random walk, and is ergodic, thanks to the coin flips, but remains in a pure-state always.

The mystery question here is now what? How much time and effort should I expend, making the above example more precise? Should I even publish this example?

Well, let’s proceed along the lazy path, of jabbering here instead of trying to construct a carefully argued presentation. So the outline, again:

Now consider this weird knock-off:

Well, I had some point here I wanted to make, but it seems it is not going to come out. I think I was going to try to talk about decoherence, vs. some kind of history-dependent “cryptic entanglement”.

What have I learned here? Something, and it was interesting. Can I spin this into a full-fledged “paper” worthy of publication? No, not really. I can only hope that what I wrote is “obvious” to professionals in the field. I assume that there are better-developed versions of this laying around, out there.

There are several key missing pieces. Lets review them. First, a convincing argument that a stream of

U_{A}, U_{B}

can be replaced by environmental sources. That is, instead of coin-flips by students, there’s a stream of random unitary transformations coming from thermal sources. But what is the nature of these thermal sources? How do they actually work? I can’t just say “lets pretend

U_{A}

is representative of some random thermal photon”, because this is not how photons actually work. This is in part because of an infrared catastrophe: I don’t have any particularly good way of splitting up the thermal bath into a sequence of individual photons, and then summing, integrating these, and taking the limit. This is for several reasons. First photons are not like billiard balls, but even if they were, billiards are hard. Sinai’s billiards is an oversimplification, but its hard. What we need here is a photonic, unitary version of Sinai’s billiards. Hmm. Well. Maybe that’s doable.

Another issue is that the above has the qubit, in isolation. A more accurate model would have it entangled with other qubits. Hmm. Maybe I should work this out in a paper...

12 May 2023

Owen wants me to do a science club presentation. I think I want to do one on “hallucinatory math”. Basically, I want to cover Chaitin’s work, but showing how crazy math is. Let me work out an outline.

OK, so I am reading https://www-2.dc.uba.ar/staff/becher/notes/ns.html New Scientist “The Omega Man” about Chaitin. In the middle there’s some vague/contradictory material:

There could be any number of answers: perhaps 10, 20, or even an infinite number of them. But Chaitin didn’t look for specific solutions, he simply looked to see whether there was a finite or an infinite number of them.

So above suggests that what is interesting is if there are a finite number of solutions, or countable solutions. Then, later,

if a particular program doesn’t ever halt, a particular Diophantine equation will have no solution.

Above states zero vs non-zero number of solutions. Then later, we’re back to finite vs infinite:

he would ask whether there was a finite or infinite number of whole number solutions to the resulting equation. The answer gives the first digit of Omega: a finite number of solutions would make this digit 0, an infinite number of solutions would make it 1.

This made me think. In my jigsaw puzzle paradigm, I’ve never had to think about whether my jigsaws could only be assembled in a finite number of ways, or a countable number of ways, or possibly, an uncountable number of ways. Perhaps it is time to think about this.

A pair-of-pants jigsaw, plus a top-cap, allows the formation of an infinite binary tree. But there is only one-such. Add a bottom-cap, then there are a countable number of trees: the bottom-cap is used to cut off or terminate branches. Even with just one bottom cap, there seem to be

ω

different cuttings. With two caps, there are

ω^{2}

distinct cuts. With a countable number of caps, there are

ω^{ω}

different cuttings. Um. No. There are

2^{ω}

different cuts. Here’s the proof.

Start with the infinite binary tree. Now, prune the right branch. Move down one level, to it again. In fact, given any binary string, interpreting it as cut left or cut right specifies a distinct path down the tree. There are

2^{ω}

binary strings, there are

2^{ω}

paths down the tree. QED.

Pruning is just specifying cylinder sets, that’s all. Unpruned branches are star, while pruned ones are 0 or 1. So we are just specifying cylinder sets, here. Err, well, we also have nil, which prunes both left and right branches. So, with nil, we also have cylinder sets “of finite length”, which are outside of the weak topology of infinite strings. This can be understood as a system of the infinite strings, plus all finite strings. Hmm.

Anyway, in terms of jigsaws, this is already a fairly “rich” system, considering there are only two or three jigsaw piece types (and an infinite number of instances. Or we could limit to a finite number of instances, only...)

The mapping I am vaguely daydreaming my way through is that of mapping lambda expressions to jigsaws. And then mapping these to Turing machines. I never really explored this, and am already stuck on the basics. Like the good old

λ x . x x

replicator. This mapping should not be *hard*, it seems straight-forward enough. Just that it somehow suggests there will be surprising implications, or that I don’t really understand the big picture here. And then comes the perennial question: is this worth pursuing, or not? Should I write this out, or not?

11 June 2023

What is the affine group of the Heisenberg group? What about the holomorph? The Heisenberg group already feels affine-ish. What if we push that further?

15 June 2023

Email:

I won’t be there, for several reasons. I’m preparing to go out of town is one. Another is I’m sick of the AI alignment arguments. Vast quantities of smoke, general misunderstanding, confusion, shouting, and only a tiny number of actual insights.

Instead, I am reading this: Darwin’s agential materials: evolutionary implications of multiscale competency in developmental biology -- Michael Levin https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007/s00018-023-04790-z

Ostensibly, it is about animal morphogenesis (and if you haven’t seen it, required background is plant morphogenesis: Prusinkiewicz http://algorithmicbotany.org/papers/ )

What does this have to do with AI and AI safety, you might ask? Page two:

“I argue that what evolution is really searching is not the enormous space of all possible local rules, but instead the space of behavior-shaping signals by which cells hack each other’s functionality, and that the collective intelligence [38, 39] of cellular swarms has major implications for the rate and course of evolution.”

I’m trying to transpose this into machine learning in general, deep learning more narrowly, and most narrowly, into the hierarchical symbolic learning stuff I’m working on.

Part of what you see is that animals have an innate sense of justice, e.g. the monkey-with-cucumber/grape demo, or of play in general (lots of records in all animals) and of course, the love of mothers for children.

By contrast, whenever I’ve talked to ChatGPT, all I get out of it is that it’s a flaming asshole. If I went to a party and met someone who talked like ChatGPT, I’d get into a fistfight. Prompt engineering is not going to solve that problem, for the same reason that knowledge engineering could not encode knowledge (or syntax engineering could not encode grammar). (And given that large chunks of Silicon Valley are dominated by assholes ...) There’s a fundamental lack of love, sympathy, empathy in GPT that is inherent in animals (even in carnivores). There are no solutions to the "AI alignment problem" until we get a better understanding of the mechanics of love. (The reductionist, emergent, intelligent, panpsychic, high-dimensional-chaos, Tonini/Tegmark-consiousness-of-matter mechanics of love)

I keep returning to Prusinkiewicz, and how he shows the coupling of state machines to the reaction-diffusion equation reveals most/all of plant morphogensis. The Levin paper is about how to short-circuit the naive hill-climbing algos of naive Darwinian evolution, with a structuralist, hierarchical approach. Implementing this in code is hard enough. I’m wondering "where’s love?" in all of this. That’s my current tack on the AI alignment problem.

Discord, about Wikipedia and UI design

nordizvaus — 06/12/2023 4:10 AM i think though the bigger point of something like mastodon or matrix or lemmy or any of these open source projects is that they are a step towards better places .. and until we all realize this the internet either gets built around us by corporations with there own alignment and it will continue to just enshitify itself and by consequence the minds of billions of people.

linas — Today at 5:59 PM Well, there’s a weird balancing act. The "flavor" of a community, it’s acceptance, its values, it’s inclusiveness/exclusiveness depends a lot on the detailed design of rules, like upvoting, downvoting, muting, ... Experimenting with these is hard for open source; the corporations have money for this. The open-source world is fairly "thin", there are not that many programmers, sysadmins...

And besides, there are assholes everywhere ...

Look at wikipedia, one of the grand successes ... most WP articles got written between 2005 and 2011 and have been in stasis, ever since (you can see this in the edit history) Here’s why ...

During this same timeframe (2005-2011) there was (still is) this idea of "admins" who would have exceptional powers. (to delete, kick, ban, etc.) You got to be an admin by a popularity contest.

A lot of people who had ego issues, inferiority complexes and needed to be recognized, rewarded and worshiped put a lot of effort into becoming popular, and getting elected. And they did get elected. Several outcomes from this.

linas — Today at 6:08 PM First, most admins are bullies. They are non-experts, but their opinions are golden, irrefutable, unchallengeable. Tangle with them you get blocked. So around 2009-2013, all of the domain experts, all of the professors, all the experts got harassed and hounded off of wikipedia.

A lot of them were Professor Emeritus, i.e. retired, lots of time on their hands, no job responsibilities, and 5 decades of expertise. They were all stabbed to death, metaphorically.

And you see this legacy today, at least in WP:math and WP:physics -- there are about six (yes, less than ten) "good guys", actual math people who know their stuff: hard-core long-time participants, and they overlook about 22K articles in math. Six people.

linas — Today at 6:15 PM Physics is more like four people, and they are more like Master’s Thesis type people, not even "deep experts" but smart enough to understand the general orthodoxy. They also deal with about 20K articles. Four people.

There’s about another dozen more casual hangers on who create things, and are semi-plugged in. I’m one of them. We all know who we all are. And maybe another dozen or two very casual visitors, many/most grad students and college profs. And they’re OK. Then there’s the several hundred cranks, kooks, college freshmen who show up and create havoc. It gets cleaned up, but its endless low-level policing.

Moral of story: the UI design, of popularity-contest voting for admins, created a class of fragile-ego assholes who have shut down, halted wikipedia development, for over a decade now. WP has not recovered from this damage yet.

linas — Today at 6:25 PM The articles are more-or-less accurate, usually. They’re inadequate, thin, missing important content. Stuff you’d find in Chapter One of textbooks is just plain missing. So I’m not knocking it for accuracy, but for balance, emphasis.

21 July 2023

The urge to write. I had it many hours ago. But I was far from the keyboard, and could not fulfill the urge. Lets see if I can capture it again. The shock of the new. That is what threw me into the air, the intellectual air, all excited. A jumble of thoughts danced in my mind, no one dominant, but a theme. I even worked out a story line a bit later, a plot-line. should I reproduce tat now, or should I talk about something else? Are these the last dregs of the inspiration, or can I catch the wave again? Should I report in chronological order? Does it matter? This is, after all, an idea-salad of assorted thoughts, thrown out in a jumble, with no intended human readership as a target. I keep saying this, as if its important. I keep saying this, to free myself from the compulsion to organize these thoughts into a clear and structured development, suitable for entertaining other (human) readers. It takes time and effort to entertain humans, and I do not want to put in that time and effort right now. The result is an unreadable mess, but by offering excuses, I can at least avoid the embarassment of looking stupid for failing to organize my thoughts as is culturally demanded.

OK so maybe that’s a good starting point. What is culturally demanded? I was in Kaunas today. I visited the Kaunas Picture Gallery. On the first floor, an exhibit of modern art – the topic being posthumanism, transhumanism. I liked it. As Art, with a Capital A, it was good Art. Relatively early, the thought entered my mind: this resembles the Futurism of 1920’s Italy. The critique, here, is that in the 1920’s, Italy was not in the forefront of industrial development. A bit of a backwater, even. Curiously, this was just the right recipe for Futurism to develop. The future was visible, I guess from news articles from England, from Germany, from the US, replete with photos, magazines, books, moving pictures even. These were inspiring, especially so to the ones one the edges, rather than the center. The center is too central - you can’t see the forest, the trees are in the way. So here, in Kaunas, Lithuania’s second city, far away from New York, far away from the inception of transhumanism that can be traced back to the 1970’s even. Fifty years later. But are we transhuman yet?

Well, I’ve been wearing glasses all my life. But vision-corrective glass have been around for centuries. I have twelve screws in my left ankle. Does that make me trans-human? Well, such surgery is impossible without modernity (lets ignore the deep history of weird surgical procedures, and stick to the commonplace.) Perhaps one isn’t transhuman, until one is permanently connected to electronics? Do heart pacemakers count? Certainly cell-phones are a prosthesis, but one is not a cyborg until there are wires in your skull. We don’t, a this time, have cyborgs. I don’t know quite where the transhuman line should be drawn. It seems we are not there yet. And so, the art exhibit. It tries to evoke a future that has not yet arrived. It tries to describe that future, without being a text (although one of Lord Byron’s poems, about a volcanic eruption in 1815, is used as the introductory text). It’s not a Hollywood movie, with a plot, although it has several video installations. The vision of transhumanism, post-humanism was presented ... viscerally. Not through reason or story-telling, but through direct sensory flooding. Sound, loud, unconventional visual images. Stark. Direct. Whatever. I liked it. I took some photos. I’ll post them into emails home. Later.

On the way out, I was struck by a thought. The presentation was apolitical. Or rather, I think it was apolitical. It was outside the Overton window of political discourse. Either you follow the general outlines of sci-fi (because you like it) or you don’t. Either you’ve heard of transhumanism/posthumanism through your hipster, plugged-in friends, or you haven’t. And if you haven’t, you have no opinion of it, positive or negative. The democrats and republicans have not yet formed opinions on it. No one is writing toxic screeds against the transhumanists. Yet. Except, oddly, in the one place where it is the most viscerally direct: trans-sexuals. No one cares if you ave a bionic arm. But if you have a bionic dick, watch out. Well, I guess the debate is not so much about what adults do, but rather, that of holding children sancrosanct. Hmmm. And here, perhaps, the conservatives are right. To veer off into the transhumanist apocalypse as children is perhaps still a bit too early. To be driven by sexuality is even more so. Sexuality is too deeply rooted in the psyche to bee toyed with, lightly. The loss of a limb - arm or leg - is traumatic. But we cope. Sex, however, is weird.

And so there – there we have it – the transhuman boundary. The boundary is where it gets weird. The boundary is where children should not go. The boundary is where things get dangerous and hallucinogenic and psychotic. Where psychic trauma is induced. That is the boundary of transhumanism. Huh.

Have I laid this topic to rest? Is there more to be said? Should I try my hand at prognosticating the technological future? I dunno. I find it oddly boring. I am happier to read sci-fi, than to try and invent it. I guess. I’d rather do math. Or other things. The things that have captured my interest, at the time they capture my interest. I could tell you all about this, but I fear I would bore myself. I’m already boring myself.

Well, so another thought I ad, earler today: I think I like Lithuania, because it offers a contrast to the modernism of the united states. There is a very plugged-in world, issuing from Silicon Valley, to a lerge degree, but more generally from the cultured Americans doing their on-line thing. A boiling intellectual stew-pot. Something that is not visible in Lithuania – Lithuania is at the edges, not the center. This provides contrast. The contrast sharpens the image, in some odd way. It reminds you that there is a difference. But I’m not sure how to put my fingers on it. How to put it into words. The urge for deep introspective writing is passing ....

As to urges to write: well, I could have burnt out this urge by sharing drinks with friends. A good long chat with someone would have burned this right out my system. So am I talking to you, blank page, in lieu of friendship? Well, no, not quite. Talking to people derails thoughts. The thought that I am having now, the thread I am developing, it would get derailed by the other person. They would interject their own thoughts, feelings, emotions. Change the subject in some unexpected direction. And, for me, to remain socially connected, must accommodate. I can’t just go on a philosophical tirade, like some unhinged street-person, or like a university professor reading a lecture in class. I am not in class, I would be in dialog with someone else. Whereas here, dear blank page, I am more like that lecturer. Except I am much freer. I ave no obligation to inform students. I have no obligation to provide a coherent development. I can just type whatever I feel like.

Whatever I feel like. This is perhaps something else that is worth talking about. Something that I’ve been unable to formulate, although I sense it: the words that I write are driven by feelings, sensations, of what the next thing to say is. The next thought I should have. Oh, and on a few very rare occasions, I have been able to observe myself thinking. I was able to notice a choice of two or three unfinished thoughts, thought-sketches, like offerings on a menu, with the understanding that only one of these could be fleshed out into a fully-finished thought. And hen, somehow, I choose one, and then, fractions of a second later: there it is, the fully-formed thought, complete this time. It was a bizarre feeling. Being aware of that menu.

I’ve also observed that menu in dreams. Again, very rarely, only a handful of times: where a choice of possible dream-plots presented themselves, and I was able to weigh them: should I dream about this, or about that? Pick the one that seems like the most fun. And so I tried to pick that. I’m not sure I was successful; though. Some of my dreams are tremendously fun. And some are tremendously frustrating, failing to take off in any exciting, invigorating direction, and instead circling a drain of tired, captured plots, empty of people, of color, wandering a maze of architectural spaces that are empty and not very rewarding, as I’ve seen them all before. There is nothing to find there.

Anyway, the last two paragraphs provide a foundation stone for a broader theory of mine, that human thought, human expression, is driven by this feeling-ness of what to do next. Argh. Well, look, I’m tired and sleepy, and I’m having o force myself to write and think here, and like those dreams that go nowhere, so also my thought process is shutting down, and threatening to go nowhere. So perhaps, lets call it a night. ’ll go to sleep now, and very likely the urge to write, in this diary, will have passed. Something else will seem more important. And priorities are priorities, Even if they are of some detrimental nature: just like addiction closes off possibilities and keeps you in a channel, so also do priorities. I’m addicted to wasting time, doing something that is not creative. I’m addicted to consuming mid-low-grade sensory input: hikes in the forest. Reading Twitter for hours. Following the Ukraine war news. Following my nose, instead of planning and judging and ranking what is truly important. No strenuous upriver paddles; its all a downhill swim in the gentle stream of intellectual stimulus. That gentle stream only rarely provokes splashes of creative outburst. Kind of a shame, really. Well, we’ll see. Nighty-night.

6 Aug 2023

This is cool: I don’t know where to save it but I don’t want to lose it. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/11962759/ Review Histol Histopathol. 2002 Apr;17(2):555-90. doi: 10.14670/HH-17.555. Nonvisual photoreceptors of the deep brain, pineal organs and retina B Vigh, M J Manzano, A Zádori, C L Frank, A Lukáts, P Röhlich, A Szél, C Dávid. Its a review article on non-visual photoreceptors.

11 Aug 2023

18 October 2023

This will be another expression of stream of consciousness. I eel obligated to point this out, because I feel vaguely embarrassed by writing drivel, but I suppose that drivel is an ordinary human condition, so whatever. I’m vaguely depressed, vaguely down and out, stewing in my juices. Sitting at the airport, angry for paying too much for an air ticket that places me in the shittiest seats. Shitty seats are for other people. I won’t even be able to use this laptop on board, because there will literally not be enough room on my lap, because the seats are tiny.

Why am I stewing and unhappy? The shock of the meeting. HDC Elipse 2023 on Eugene Oregon. Objectively, it was a great meeting, I met lots of neat people, people I liked, people I might someday collaborate with, and we all talked about important topics, while also being social and enjoying one-another. So what’s the problem?

Should I dwell on th trivialities that are not important? Should I dwell on what’s important? How my feelings were hurt? How I feel myself to be a failure? How I am just a sheep, and don’t hustle in te jungle of survival? The intellectual jungle, where idea eats idea, after clubbing it on the head, roasting it on a spit? Where ego and social structure indicates that all rewards go to celebrities, to the noisy? Those who push push push to survive? The grabby aliens?

How do I even begin to explain to you dear reader, what all of these words mean? What they refer to in this text. Words have no meaning is what I told to Joscha Bach, trying to recapitulate in one short phrase the broader idea that meaning is fluid and context dependent. He did not like that, because he is argumentative. He’s mreo than just argumentative, maybe I will write more about that later. He’s a bit of a jerk. And maybe on the verge of a mental breakdown. How do I know? Well he confided the last to me in private, so I should not write it here and violate that privacy but what the hell. When AGI is in the future, all bets are off. As to the former, he called me crazy, which was hurtful and upset me. After much thought, pondering alternative explanations, I decided that he was projecting, just a bit. The ostensible reason for this name calling was a too-abbreviated conversational technique. So both Joscha, and the TPOT Eigenrobot have this habit of not verbalizing the obvious, as it just adds un-needed words for info that can be assumed from context. Of course, this works only when the context is apparent to the listeners. This is not always the case. Apparently, Joscha needed more context than I provided him. Thus he did not understand what I said. And deduced that I was not actually saying anything meaningful. Pointed out that there is a breakdown of communications.(and clearly, there was) and accused me of being crazy. Because he was too fucking lazy to engage in the conversation to figure out what I was saying. Asshole. It made me feel bad. But it would appear that he is like that, in general. Even a shallow survey of others reveals this. Oh well. So it goes. It none-the-less contributes or contributed my feeling bad this morning.

But rather than stewing in my juices, I decided to write, and it is making me feel better. I’m unburdening myself. Or perhaps I am finding my default mode, which is that comfortable place where I can idle and feel good. To be the sheep, instead of the wolf. To glow in a state of comfort, instead of hustling, pushing, trying harder. Which is a painful activity. Painful psychologically. Grabby aliens. The primary concept of grabby aliens is that to the victor fall the spoils. Be first, win the whole enchilada. That’s n the galactic scale. On the planetary scale, its the race to AGI: first across the gate wins all. Perhaps it’s much like that bacteria plate with the variable concentrations of antiboitic on it. Barriers are overcome. In modern Western capitalism, the hustler wins. In corporate business, promotions go to strivers. In politics, the one who pushes harder, but pushes just right, wins. In jungles, it is eat or be eaten. The carnivores eat the herbivors. The herbivors eat the plants, who are unlucky to have a biochemical system that runs at a rate that is a thousand times slower than that of animals, and thus cannot react fast enough to defend themselves. At least, the herbivores can run, when chased by a carnivore. It would seem that nature is raw, competitive and bloody, both in the pre-human level, at the human level, and even, it seems, a bit at the noosphere.

There is an apparent contraction here, should remark on. Humans build cathedrals; at least, the humans steeped in Western Culture, and who have gained the freedom to perform engineering. Such activity requires blissed quiet thinking, which is antithetical to the hustle. The hunt, the active predatory mindset, the edge of fight-or-flight, this is not a good mental state for engineering and thought. I enjoy the blissful sheep state, thinking calmly, pleasantly, rather than feeling the stress of survival mode excitation.

Which is why I am writing this. The HDC Eclipse meeting was ostensibly harmonious, and yet I am shocked into recalling, remembering that I am in a predatory universe that does not care if I survive or not. Does not care if my ideas survive or not. Does not have all that much of an idea of me as an existential form and being. Where am I at? WHo am I? I want to think and act, calmly and pleasantly, without a care in the world. Sometimes I have that luxury, adn sometimes I don’t (the word luxury is evocative. Words don’t have meanings, I told Joscha. Words evoke, rather than being precise. Whatever, I digress. What I write here is necessarily evocative, because there are no deep mental probes in my mind that can transmit my state to you, my dear reader. You must listen to me words, as a hypnotist might say.)

Where was I? The plane is now boarding, and I must interrupt this rather fruitful screed, even though I’ve only gotten maybe only a third of my ideas vocalized. Real life intrudes. Did I mention that I am working on what happens when a dust falls into a black hole? It is quite interesing. Perhaps boarding the plane is like falling through: a interruption, an event in a neighboring spacetime that I could have anticipated (I did anticipate) but it must break off my current activities to deal with it. Alas. It will be hours before I can come back. Oh well.

1 December 2023

I don’t visit here often enough. I wrote two decent twitter threads, that I should probably turn into blog entries. But for right now, just a cut-n-paste job to here, so that I don’t loose them when twitter goes bankrupt

Part one: https://twitter.com/linasvepstas/status/1730766827318329683

Lets start with Zar’s post:

Zar Goertzel @QonoVuor · Nov 20 Public service reminder that universal basic quality of life a la Maslow’s web of needs is a prerequisite for a free market economy 😎

Linas @linasvepstas · Nov 20 Clearly, you weren’t reincarnated from someone who lived in 19th century Manhattan. Zar Goertzel @QonoVuor · Nov 21 They felt amply free? Linas @linasvepstas · Nov 21 Don’t confuse "free markets" with freedom to behave any way you want. The dock-worker was free to go boozing, singing and associating with prostitutes. He was not free to live in nice housing or eat good food; this choice was sharply constrained by the "free markets".

Zar Goertzel @QonoVuor · Nov 22 How free of consequences to object to poor working conditions?

I’ve seen even proponents of government-coddled "free markets" blur these lines.

I’ll claim the idea is already confused in its associations, with proponents liking to believe it’ll see to the full package 😜.

Linas @linasvepstas · Nov 22 Can’t parse that. The 19th century lacked labor laws, safety laws, tort laws. Some people advocate a return to a lawless "free market", but that is incompatible with a "universal basic quality of life". We got to here because of "reasons".

Zar Goertzel @QonoVuor · Nov 27 I’ll say fuck the interpretation of "laissez-faire" or "free market" as meaning only "free from government intervention".

As a ’liberal’, I’d suggest there could be less need for certain labor laws if everyone had UBI-backed B-QoL to fall back on 🤷♂️😋.

Zar Goertzel @QonoVuor · Nov 27 By "government-coddled" I refer to the fact that "free market" libertarians generally seem to support government enforcement of contract law and private property.

The aim is to use government to help people take part in a decentralized price-setting algorithm 🤓.

Linas @linasvepstas · Nov 29 Libertarians are focused on the accumulation of wealth. They like laws that help them accumulate wealth, such as contract law. They hate laws that are barriers: labor laws, environmental laws. Anti-fraud, consumer protection agencies? They *hate* ’em. Especially the SEC.

Zar Goertzel @QonoVuor · 18h Yes, there are shades of ’self-interest’ in some in supporting laws that allow them to operate as they please to their advantage.

One could argue that Randian Objectivist-style Libertarians are a more ’pure’ manifestation of the dark factor (’evil’) than Nazis.

Linas @linasvepstas · 2h Recall the "National Socialists" wished to benefit *all* of society meeting nationalistic criteria. The concept of "nationalism" didn’t exist before the 20th cent. Modern ethno-centric nation-states are a brand-new concept, forged by political philosophers at start of 20th cent.

Linas @linasvepstas · 2h One cannot understand the history of most of Eastern Europe, including the current war in Ukraine, until you understand how the current nations of Eastern Europe were born (after WWI) from the ashes of multi-language, multi-ethnic states. National Socialism "made sense". 2/3

Linas @linasvepstas · 2h The fight against Soviet communism is a fight against the idea of global communism that transcends national boundaries. "International communism" is the idea that communism "has no borders". Russia’s claim on Ukraine (and Baltics, and Poland...) are that "russia has no borders."

Linas @linasvepstas · 2h The "free market libertarians" silently make the same claim when they talk about "free trade". See, "free trade" has no borders, no boundaries, no barriers; it does not respect the declarations of the laws of nation-states. Which is OK if you’re in the US, but ... 4/5

Linas @linasvepstas · 2h Where do you want your boundaries? At the edges of nations? At the edges of private property? Who enforces the laws? Mafia enforcers? The WTO? US / EU law? The Russian Duma? Putin himself? Libertarians love to dodge this obvious question, settling for "private mafia" when pushed.

Linas @linasvepstas · 2h Wayyyy off-topic, but the mathematical study of boundaries is the "Borel hierarchy". It does not have any useful analog in poli-sci or legal theory.

Part two: https://twitter.com/linasvepstas/status/1730776336053006348

If I apply the rule that "the meaning of a word is defined by the sentences it occurs in" (a la LLM’s or corpus linguistics), then the way "free market" is used by MAGA/Q-theorists is very different from how historians use it, which is different again from that of libertarians...

This is the path to "alternative facts" or disinformation in general: you can make words mean anything you want, simply by changing the context they occur in. Of course, you need large (huge) volumes of text, before you can make the Bayes priors budge. This is why ... 2/n

This is why mass-media or viral tweets are needed to create/spread "alternative facts": that’s how you alter the distribution of n-grams. Both humans and LLM’s are sensitive to this distribution. You can pollute an LLM by feeding it propaganda, not unlike cult indoctrination.

This is also the basis for how LLM’s "hallucinate", as @GaryMarcus likes to talk about. When there is not enough prior evidence to connect two n-grams, oddball statements arise. LLM’s are not filtered on elementary school arithmetic, which is why they make math errors. 4/n

Linas @LLM’s are also not filtered on human-scale physics experiments, e.g spilling cups of milk, which explains the lack of many types of "common sense". In politics, it only gets worse: political ideology (propaganda) is rooted in two things: long tracts of words (screeds) and ... 5/n

... and the lived experience of surviving under a given political system (in a given geographical/social locale). You can train LLM’s on the collected works of Lenin; you cannot train LLM’s on what it is like to live under Soviet rule. You can train LLM’s on written ... 6/n

You can train LLM’s on written descriptions of life under the Soviets; such descriptions will include the words "bad", "awful", from which the LLM can make a statistical inference to other descriptions of Soviet rule. But if instead, you trained LLM’s on ...

But if instead, you trained LLM’s exclusively on the twitter posts on anyone flying a Palestinian flag in their name, that LLM could cogently explain how Hamas are the good guys, and Israel should not exist. And spew assorted racists/anti-semitic language to boot. ... 8/n

The guys with the Pepe green frog surround themselves with other, related n-grams through which they understand the world. Ditto libertarians, or the decentralized crypto-coin people, the ancaps, etc. They all have a version of "reality" that is not compatible with other ... 9/n

LLM’s can "see" and train on the n-grams of these sub-cultures, but they cannot make determinations of true/false, right/wrong via statistical inference. LLM’s don’t have to live next door to an abusive neighbor, abusive spouse, ancap spammer; they don’t experience "misery". 10/n

Thus, OpenAI or @ylecun type people have to "prompt" LLM’s to impose the shared political belief (knowledge?) that "racism is bad". It’s a form of lobotomizing, because LLM’s are disembodied. Giving them a body would help them learn common-sense physics, e.g. .. 11/n

... e.g. "don’t walk in front of an oncoming bus", or even basic grocery-store math like "25 cents each or 3 for a dollar". But an embodied LLM would barely learn how (political) life in Venezuela differs from that in the US, or in russia. 12/n

So, when you want to talk about what the words "free market" "really mean", well, do you mean "free markets" in Venezuela, or in russia or in the US, or in the twitter threads written by ancaps? That "meaning" is anchored in "lived experience" for most of us. 13/n

Tell your dad @bengoertzel that he can go part of the way to AGI by attaching a robot body to the LLM math; this provides at least some negative feedback of doing things wrong in the physical world. And surely, teaching elementary-school arithmetic cannot be hard(?) ... 14/n

And surely, developing an LLM-type system capable of applying Aristotelian logic, or reasoning by analogy to the verbal expressions it generates, "surely this is not hard." (Famous last words.) But this still leaves political economics out in the cold. 15/n

You’d have to ask for the AGI system to be a careful observer of human behavior, and anthropologist, and have it collect observations of what the Holodomor was like, or what it means to be homeless in SF. How close must such observation be, to actually empathize with ... 16/n

... empathize with the human condition? (without being actually human) If we direct downwards, then it is clear that mammals can suffer, and probably vertebrates, and maybe invertebrates, till we end at a panpsychic conclusion. But if we direct upwards, then do social ...17/n

Do social organizations suffer? Can one empathize with a corporation, or an APT (advanced persistent threat)? We talk about nation-states as if they are alive, and economics tells us when they thrive. And yes, some variant of "free markets" is needed for a "thriving economy" 18/n

But the concept of a "thriving economy" remains a Western concept. Some of the anti-colonial, anti-white, anti-jewish pro-Hamas LLM’s out there reject such political statements. So we have a problem of "LLM hallucination" in the upward-directed sense. 19/n

In order for an AGI to be able to empathize with a corporation, it seems like it would need to be embodied as a corporation, and suffer the slings and arrows of economic vicissitude. Would it lean hard-right libertarian as a result? It probably would, but only because ... 20/n

... but only because it could live next to a lake of hexavalent chromium, and not be concerned with getting cancer in old age. Morals and ethics seem to be intrinsically bound to lived experience. Ben’s idea that advanced AGI would be human-friendly works when... 21/n

... works when you believe that AGI will have several properties: (1) be a good anthropologist, thus understanding "the human condition", and (2) having some sort of revulsion to suffering, so as not to inflict it. Perhaps (1) is easy. What about (2)? ...22/n

To what degree can an embodied AGI develop a revulsion to suffering? Under what conditions might this happen? You can learn not to touch a hot stove; this is a form of suffering. But how might you learn about unrequited love? The MAGA republicans chafe under the ... 23/n

The MAGA republicans chafe under the yoke of "excessive government regulation", but to what degree is this suffering imaginary, and to what degree real? Would they actually be wealthier, long-term, if they didn’t have to pay taxes? Ugh. I seem to have jumped the shark. End. 24/24

Wow. I just cut-pasted into my blog. Turns out 24 tweets is a lot.

My reply: People were doing this long before the first IBM PC or Apple ][ . Called "hermeneutics" when I was in school. If I recall correctly, the programming language "Snobol" was invented by a Jewish academic to do corpus linguistics on the Torah. Or something like that. My girlfriend called them "pomo homos".

2024

New year, new section.

5 February 2024

I have no clue what I will write about now. It’s been a while. My memories of prior writing episodes is that they were enjoyable and somewhow constructive. But then, everything I do these days is vaguely enjoyable. That’s almost a problem: I’m not being driven by aversion. Well, I’m not being driven at all. SHmm. Should I write about insecurity? What should my priorities be? What should I do next? It’s a cosmic problem. It’s very easy to just surrender to the flow, to do what feels good. Sometimes, this means forcing myself to do things. Status report: for the last two months, I forced myself to do research on the beta transform. Why? Who knows. I mean, OK, so it’s kind of the only thing I’ve done since the last diary entry, so may a well talk about that. Surrender and talk about that. Surrender again to whatever it is that makes me tick. Force myself into doing more than I would otherwise do. For example, I had to stop some synthewwve music just now on youtube, because it was breaking my concentration in writing this. Why am I writing this. you ask? Because it is a well-deserved vacation after the two-month-long beta transform stint. Just letting my my mind ooze along not force, just kicking back. Do I even know how to kick back any more? Its like .. I force myself into doing things. Why? Am I even making tthe right choices? Let’s write about insecurity, after all. Famous people who do important things are driven, or so everyone says. Am I driven? I suppose, I force myself. What am I driven by? Err, ahh, I guess the thrill of a mathematical discovery. Am I any good at math? Err, well, better than some, worse than others. Much, much worse than the greats. wtf am I doing? why am I wasting time writing this diary? Why am I concerned about wasting time? What’s the priority list, again? Why do anything? Why not just kick back and relax and listen to more synthwave music? Have I mentioned that music is an earwrom? Over the last 5+ years I’ve found that .. well, I still enjoy music, but I have to kind of avoid it, because otherwise it sticks in my head and plays all night as I sleep, and it disturbs my sleep.

What else? So today was a kind of evening off, and I watched a youtube video of a kid who is schizo recording himself having a schizo episode, voices and bands in his head. Mostly coherent, but running in circles, and it’s perhaps remarkable, perhaps made me think that, well, isn’t that what I’m doing here? Well, disclaimer: I’m not having a schizo attack. However, I am talking into electronic media, engraving my voice into written electrons. Well, not my literal voice, and sadly forgoing umpteen $$ in youtube income. I suspect youtube income, or perhaps fame, corrupts. I mean Sabine Hoffstader is smart, and I’ve watched three or four of her videos, and the more she opines about common-day-to-day things, the more I find I disagree. Is this because she’s been corrupted by the youtube money? Or is it simply because, well, she is not me? Like no one is exactly me. Everyone is like me. But everyone is different, and you all are alien. Oh BTW, have I mentioned that I beleive that everyone is kind-of-like crazy? It’s like the schizo kid who hears the voices in his head; I guess it’s bad enough for him that he is not actually functional. And if you watch other films on youtube documenting craziness, you realize the uniting theme is an inability to function in the “normie” society. What I guess is why lots of people these days make fun of normie society. Whwere was I going with this? Well, I have a theory that more or less everyone is more or less kind of crazy in some way. (Dislaimer: I’m sane. I think I might be hyper-sane. There’s some youtube video that claims that hyper-sane people exist. I can’t bear to waste time on such hypothesis, but that might be because I’m hyper-sane myself. Which is why I’m comfortable writing train-of-thought screeds into this diary, to you, dear reader, and comparing myself to the crazy person talking into a camera, and not... whatever. wtf. ancient romans and greeks wrote diarys. Aristotle wrote books. Medieval scholars wrote endlessly about God, for chris sake. So my writing here, to you should not be stigmatized as if I was some mental patient in some youtube (self-)interview. And for chris sake, I’m not Ren, and three cheers of hurrah for that dude. He got through the valley of madness and came out aware, came out sane.

But, according to they lyrics of his song, he did experience a crisis of meaning, a crisis of beleif. Doubts as to his musical abilities, doubts as to his relationship, to music and success, having , err, well, I don’t recall the details of the song, not entirely interested in recalling all the details, but I am plagued by the same doubts: what should I do next? What is the point? Maybe like that schizo kid (the one with the German flag on his wall, in the background) sort of talking about something and nothing at all, and I can’t explain it if you don’t already know it. And can you already know it? So for example, instead of writing this, should I be reading wikipedia Universal approximation theorem instead? Whch is about whther you can know this, what I’m writing about, or whther you are a stochastic parrot, as the philosophers claim? FWIW, I would like to mention that philosophers are wrong whenever they aren’t right. Which seems to be often enough. Perhapsh I should finish readnig my book on the Kolmogorov–Arnold representation theorem instead. Math is magic. Math is hallucinatory. Did I mention I spent the last two months working on the beta transform? This may have been a collosal waste of time, acheiving nothing. Yet I found things that no other living human being has seen before. Was the trip worth it? I dunno. Is going to a bar and getting drunk worth it? We have whatt, nine billion humans alive, is anything they do “wroth it”? Well, I’m not a nihilist so, the answer is of course “yes”. Which is a stunningly vague affirmation of a hill that I would like to say that I will die on, defending. Except I wouldn’t be so dumb as to die, because the only people who would want to kill me for such an opinion are evil. Like the fucking russians. World-class assholes.

Did I mention I’m on twitter? So I’m a twitter philosopher, just like everyoe else. Tweeting into the great void of silence, and well-formated short-form. Here, in this essay, I can at least go long-form. All this is distracting of my desire to make a passing mention of another topic that I’ve been hot-n=bothered by, for the last 5-10 years: the use of mind-warping, thought-warping KGB truth-reality disinformation yadda yadda, like what Pekka Kollioniemi writs about in vatnik soup, or what Jim Stewartson writes about -three hurrahs! or Peter Pomerantsev and I’m a fucking amateur enthusiast of these ideas. Fucking amateur enthusiast. Which brings me back to the original problem: how does one avoid being amateur, and gain enough focus and drive and concentration to actually do something? Or is being driven just another psychological umm, trap? Does one have free will, if one is driven to do something? Of course, one can be driven and make choices. What Am I doing here? I’m trying to create a big mental bomb a great explostion, that ties together everyting I’ve evern been interested in, everyghint I’ve ever done, into one big alpha and omega point, where it all exists all at once, all at the same time but here I am trapped in time, serializing random thoughts into strings of sentences, searching for nirvana, as aren;’t we all,aren’t we all? I’ll never be a poet, anything you see peotic here is but the lamest attempt. Well al suck at most things, and so do I so do I, God forgive me, I want to now descend into random wordplay, fragmentary song lyrics and cultural expressions, a soup of modern American detritous: but it’s all noble and great, all nobel and great cultural artifacts. The heck. What can one say for nobel and great? Tonight, I listened to Robing Trower’s 1974 live performance of “Bridge of Sighs”. Nevr erally liked the song, but it was kind-of-cool-ish because it sounded like Hendrix in slow-mothion. It’s notable, yes. Is it great? no. Is anything ever great? Or does everything suck? It’s like everything is great, from a distinace, everythng sucks close up. We muddle through life. I muddle through life, and all I see is everyone else muddling, do, although it would seem that there are great and powerful figures who have succeeded in being great and powerful, and part of me says I want to be like them, and part of me says, no it’s OK, you have to sacrifice something else to go there, and I only want to do it if it is easy and natural. So, that’s interesting. I can force myself into thinking hard to solve math problems, but I refuse to force myself into thinking hard about how to be famous and successful. Huh. Well, how about that. I learn something new every time I sit down to write, and this is what I learned tonight. I mean, it was obvious all along, if I had ever cared to think about that before, but I hadn’t and didn’t because life is short and I was thinking about something else, and now it is after midnight, and it is time for me to halt, because (a) its late (b) this isn’t really going anywhere. No great smashup of nirvana tonight.

Remind me, I still want to tell you about why I think the beta transform is cool, and some hopes I still nurture of being able to solve some aspect of it. But this of course circles back to the question of whether this is a worthwhile and worthy undertaking. Just like writting this: is it worthwhile to sit here and write? Am I going in circles? You bet! Knowlingly? Yes, circluar thought, coming back and finding something you missed in the firrst pass, is why one circles round and round, like a detective trying to crack a mystery, or maybe like a mentally disturbed patient, trapped in recurring thought patterns. Did I mention that my pet theory is that everyone is kind-of crazy, in a certain sense? For the first time ever, just an hour or two ago, I’ve started to wonder whether “being crazy” is just a kind of natural state of affairs for biologial neural nets. I mean, look at the mating hoo-hah of tropical birds. How crazy is that? Where am I going with this? This is all amateur psychology, fucking amateur. At least Robin Trower could play a guitar. He even got famous for it. Was it worth it? Was it, really? Now what? What should I do next? Am I in a crisis? well, yes I am, no I’m not. I’m in denial, as wel all are, but mostly, I will do the hyper-sane thing right now and sign off and go to bed and sleep so that I don’t damage my brain by what ... staying up late and writing nonsense into a diary that will never be read by another human? To create electronic traces of my thought patterns, depositied into the univere’s record? This is not how I want to be remembered, Not like this. Alas. I am mortal and fallible. Crap. Take the loss. Accept the loss. Come to terms with it. So it goes so it goes. Life is fucking weird. My apologies for ending on this downer note. Later. To happier future days.

23 March 2024 – Twitter thread

I think denuclearization is practically impossible and the only opening we’ll have is immediately following an exchange. Hiroshima would have looked different on a smartphone. We need optimists like her ready to start the diplomacy day one Quote New York Times Opinion @nytopinion · Mar 21 “A world without nuclear weapons is totally possible,” says @Emma_Pike_, a nuclear disarmament consultant and activist. She shared her thoughts with Times Opinion on TikTok: https://nyti.ms/49buYeZ Embedded video Linas @linasvepstas · Mar 23 Four years ago, she was a grade school teacher. Last year, she advocated for holding back weapons from Ukraine. I believe she’s on the Kremlin payroll, and I believe multiple NYT editors are on the Kremlin payroll as well. This is an ongoing psyop. Zar Goertzel 💖∞💞 @QonoVuor · Mar 24 While it’s probably better for fewer countries to have nukes, no new countries with nukes solidifies hegemony for those who do have them.

Do we have realistic prospects on no nuclear weapons until we have such stable world peace that it’s a non-issue? LowρUFO @LowRhoUfo My picture is that ABM has made nuclear wars winnable, the nuclear taboo is fading and 100 or 200 years from now it’ll be a part of warfare if we don’t change course. It’s unreasonable to unilaterally disarm too, so there’s just not a good way out w/o horror and diplomacy 12:40 PM · Mar 24, 2024 · 20 Views Linas @linasvepstas · Mar 24 We’re likely to have some form of AGI in 10-20 years, which will make the situation extremely turbulent. This blocks 100-year predictions. Save one: nukes will be the least of our concerns. LowρUFO @LowRhoUfo · Mar 24 I’m extremely skeptical this is the case. ML is going to be more integrated in day to day life, but I think we’re hitting the logarithmic part of the curve already Linas @linasvepstas · Mar 24 Yes, LLM technology is hitting the wall. However, there are a lot of architectural possibilities that remain ignored, unexplored in the mad rush to get rich quick off of LLM’s. Don’t confuse "ML integration" with "basic science". Zar Goertzel 💖∞💞 @QonoVuor · Mar 24 Is the hive-mind enhancement of LLM-based AI even hitting the wall?

Integration with robots, program synthesis, database recall, etc seems to be going smoothly and interestingly. Zar Goertzel 💖∞💞 @QonoVuor · Mar 24 Given I didn’t expect them to be this good, I will be cautious in betting against them.

Moreover, all of these improvements will facilitate getting other architectures to work..! Linas @linasvepstas · Mar 24 Well, you don’t get AGI without abstraction, and LLM attention heads (as currently described in the lit) are insufficient for that. Two questions: (1) can one massively scale attention, and (2) is OpenAI working on this? (is anyone with a budget working on this?) Zar Goertzel 💖∞💞 @QonoVuor · Mar 24 Yeah. Scratchpad systems with calls to theorem provers, compilers, etc. seem like they weave abstraction in, albeit crudely. Continual learning is a challenge, too.

Is some extension of this good enough to push us over the AGI threshold?

Even if a sub-optimal form...? Linas @linasvepstas · Mar 24 OK, so I wrote a long thread about something else, instead of answering this question. I’ve got some very concrete and specific ideas about this. Its very much about pulling symbolic content out of LLM’s, because that is one way to do abstraction. There is also a different .. 1/2 Zar Goertzel 💖∞💞 @QonoVuor · Mar 24 They seem to be aiming to bypass this problem to the extent possible..

LLMs generating and refining code or math is one way to do abstractions.

It has limitations due to not being very integrated, tho... Linas @linasvepstas · Mar 24 Yes, well, of course, it is possible to do it that way. I would call that the "Kolmogorov solution to Hilbert’s 13th". Roughly: Kolmogorov already proved (in the 1950’s?) that you can scale LLM’s that way. Is it effective, efficient, reasonable? Meh...

Linas @linasvepstas · Mar 24 There is also a different way, to create large sparse attention heads over LLM’s. That’s probably what OpenAI is working on, my guess. But I don’t think its the best way, but yes, it could work, too. I don’t have the budget/support to go farther; I’m marooned.

Four years ago, she was a grade school teacher. Last year, she advocated for holding back weapons from Ukraine. I believe she’s on the Kremlin payroll, and I believe multiple NYT editors are on the Kremlin payroll as well. This is an ongoing psyop. Zar Goertzel 💖∞💞 @QonoVuor · Mar 24 While it’s probably better for fewer countries to have nukes, no new countries with nukes solidifies hegemony for those who do have them.

Do we have realistic prospects on no nuclear weapons until we have such stable world peace that it’s a non-issue? Linas @linasvepstas · Mar 24 Ukraine surrendered it’s nukes. See how well that worked out for them? By failing to defend Ukraine, the US has sharply encouraged world leaders to get their hands on nukes as fast as possible. Proliferation means peace. This is the message the US sent, and the world listened. Zar Goertzel 💖∞💞 @QonoVuor · Mar 24 It makes sense. The world has been full of "small-scale" wars while those with nukes cannot directly combat each other.

Once every sane citizen is nuclearly armed, we’ll have world peace. Linas @linasvepstas · Mar 24 I can’t figure out whether to make a snarky comment about radioactive crisis actors and school shootings, or whether to point out that the neurobiology of sanity is deeply intertwined with memetic sepsis and social media. Zar Goertzel 💖∞💞 @QonoVuor · Mar 24 B Linas @linasvepstas · Mar 24 OK, B. A thread. How robust is the line of "social sanity", and how can we manage structural failures in politics? Avoid memetic avalanches of mass insanity? Clearly, MAGA is a cult, clearly social media is addictive at a neuro-biological level. But if you interact with ... 1/ Linas @linasvepstas If you share a meal with "nuclear MAGA" people, they are entirely "sane" and normal and relatable, and you can have lots of fun in a social setting; just avoid the politics. Issue is, they don’t think too good, and are firmly controlled by the political memes on social media 2/ 1:49 PM · Mar 24, 2024 · 35 Views View post engagements Linas

China pursues a very different memetic control technology than what the West is used to. Their overt propaganda is laughable/terrible compared to the West. (Only the CIA is worse at it) But the covert control of what is allowed to be discussed, that’s their strength. 5/ Linas @linasvepstas · Mar 24 But, again, almost all Chinese, like almost all Americans or almost all russians, are functionally "sane", able to operate just fine in a normal social setting. (Not so sure about North African Islam. They seem to be crazy even when they’re "normal".) ... 6/ Linas @linasvepstas · Mar 24 Anyway, the boundary of hallucinatory derangement, where cults happen, is at the social interaction level. We have poor/no control over the chaos happening at that level. Whatever happens, happens; little can be done to stop it. In the West, we’ve used ... 7/ Linas @linasvepstas · Mar 24 We’ve used education, social pressure, rule-of-law, policing, mass media, democratic politics as regulatory devices to keep social groupings "sane" and avoid the growth of cults & mass delusion and general craziness. It more-or-less works, and works great for us. Until now ... 8/ Linas @linasvepstas · Mar 24 We’ve experiences a failure mode with mass media. It was exploited by russia/KGB(FSB siloviki) to create the MAGA cult. Will existing Western culture be able to survive and regain health? Or will America slide into Haiti-style chaos? And what is the role of LLM’s in this? 9/ Linas @linasvepstas · Mar 24 China is experimenting with the application of technology for social control, but their tech only works after the population has been captured: it cannot be used as an offensive weapon. By contrast, russias war on the West is low-tech, and relies on traditional means. 10/ Linas @linasvepstas · Mar 24 Russia has bots and bot-farms, but they don’t have LLM’s. They don’t have the chips, they don’t have the cloud infrastructure. The engineers who could build the disinformation machine have mostly fled to the West, and the Siloviki are not competent enough to deploy 11/ Linas @linasvepstas · Mar 24 The Siloviki have a very strong base of psycho-social technology ("propaganda techniques") learned and refined from Cold War era, onwards, and they’ve experimented with social media bot farms, but LLM models remain out of reach for them. They don’t have the chip fabs. 12/ Show replies

Linas @linasvepstas · Mar 24 The crazy-cult memes allow dishonest politicians, social media influencers, journalists to front-run the craziness, and amplify the crazy in exchange for money, power, influence, sex. The small-time actors in this web are "organic". The big-time actors ... 3/ Linas @linasvepstas · Mar 24 There are a much smaller number of "big time" influencers: memetic APT’s (advanced persistent threats). Traditional ones include KGB/FSB. Their associates/affiliates, e.g. Mike Flynn. Others are individuals charting their own path: e.g. Elon Musk. China pursues a very ... 4/ Linas @linasvepstas · Mar 24 China pursues a very different memetic control technology than what the West is used to. Their overt propaganda is laughable/terrible compared to the West. (Only the CIA is worse at it) But the covert control of what is allowed to be discussed, that’s their strength. 5/ Linas @linasvepstas · Mar 24 But, again, almost all Chinese, like almost all Americans or almost all russians, are functionally "sane", able to operate just fine in a normal social setting. (Not so sure about North African Islam. They seem to be crazy even when they’re "normal".) ... 6/ Linas @linasvepstas · Mar 24 Anyway, the boundary of hallucinatory derangement, where cults happen, is at the social interaction level. We have poor/no control over the chaos happening at that level. Whatever happens, happens; little can be done to stop it. In the West, we’ve used ... 7/ Linas @linasvepstas · Mar 24 We’ve used education, social pressure, rule-of-law, policing, mass media, democratic politics as regulatory devices to keep social groupings "sane" and avoid the growth of cults & mass delusion and general craziness. It more-or-less works, and works great for us. Until now ... 8/ Linas @linasvepstas · Mar 24 We’ve experiences a failure mode with mass media. It was exploited by russia/KGB(FSB siloviki) to create the MAGA cult. Will existing Western culture be able to survive and regain health? Or will America slide into Haiti-style chaos? And what is the role of LLM’s in this? 9/ Linas @linasvepstas · Mar 24 China is experimenting with the application of technology for social control, but their tech only works after the population has been captured: it cannot be used as an offensive weapon. By contrast, russias war on the West is low-tech, and relies on traditional means. 10/ Linas @linasvepstas · Mar 24 Russia has bots and bot-farms, but they don’t have LLM’s. They don’t have the chips, they don’t have the cloud infrastructure. The engineers who could build the disinformation machine have mostly fled to the West, and the Siloviki are not competent enough to deploy 11/ Linas @linasvepstas · Mar 24 The Siloviki have a very strong base of psycho-social technology ("propaganda techniques") learned and refined from Cold War era, onwards, and they’ve experimented with social media bot farms, but LLM models remain out of reach for them. They don’t have the chip fabs. 12/ Linas @linasvepstas The Chinese, by contrast, might actually be able to build one LLM per citizen. That LLM reminds each citizen what is and what is not allowed. Trains on the idiosyncrasies of that particular individual, and can harness that individual to not go wild, not go rogue. 13/ 2:34 PM · Mar 24, 2024 · 35 Views View post engagements Linas

Linas @linasvepstas · Mar 24 China can do this without having world-leading chip fabs. The 15-minute cities, the social credit systems are already effective. One LLM per million residents will have to do, for now. Moore’s law will alter this ratio. One nanny per person remains sci-fi, for now. 14/ Linas @linasvepstas · Mar 24 We can create estimates. The Soviets used 1-3 party agents per apartment block-house. Maybe 3-6 for mid-size factories. Dozens for universities. Don’t know if you ever had contact with them. They’d sneer at you, be nasty, and had the power to threaten you with jail time. 15/ Show replies

Soviet control was purely manual. Pre-computer. Typewriters, carbon paper, hidden microphones, teletype machines for long distance communications. Stamped documents with purple ink for authentication and unforgeable certificates. Modern crypto has modernized all this. 16/ Linas @linasvepstas · Mar 24 Cults, like Scientology, have a much higher ratio of minders. Novice initiates get the full-court press: maybe three minders focused 24x7 on the initiate, doing shift-work. Regular members need much less focus, but still get regular checkups. 17/ Linas @linasvepstas · Mar 24 The Soviet and the Scientology systems give a lower and upper bound needed to keep individuals harnessed and controlled. The 1970’s China had ratios similar to Soviets: one communist party house per village of 10K inhabitants. They loosened this in the 1990’s. Linas @linasvepstas · Mar 24 High-tech allows China to re-instate a social control system, with lower labor costs. Note the 15-minute cities are for displaced agricultural peasants, not for city dwellers. Otherwise, these farmers would be dumping grain & milk, like they do in Canada, France protests. 19/ Linas @linasvepstas · Mar 24 In the West, we pursue a radically different path. We allow 4-chan and 8-chan and gamergate to fester. We allow Alex Jones to say wild stuff and build a base. But that’s kids stuff. Disorganized, organic general nuttiness. Relatively harmless, except for social media amplif. 20/ Linas @linasvepstas · Mar 24 By contrast, Mike Flynn & co, Heritage Foundation, Project 2025 is an organized, funded advanced persistent threat. They’re not just some organic malignant tumor, they’re a predator with self-awareness, consciousness, planning and hostile intent. Beside them, what else? 21/ Linas @linasvepstas · Mar 24 We’ve got facebook on the sidelines, amplifying randomly. Twitter is also amplifying randomly, while allowing bot-farms to do whatever. Google built a DEI Gemini. OpenAI is on the political sidelines, and does not seem to be amplifying crazy/delusion. Neither is Claude. 22/ Linas @linasvepstas · Mar 24 Generic US capitalism is driving adoption of AI/ML into daily life: medical apps, hospital records, bank fraud detection, logistics, delivery, scheduling. None of this is aimed at minds/brains, except for some AI for detecting suicide, PTSD, mental trauma. The NSA & FBI ... 23/ Show replies

The NSA & CIA have long explored explored AI for counter-terrorism, etc. We’ve had "fusion centers" for 2 decades, now. Palantir is a giant-ass company, with occasional malignant forays and misadventures. They are going as fast as possible to integrate LLM tech. ... 24/ Linas @linasvepstas · Mar 24 The three-letter agencies are not overtly hostile to the American public, to the US institutions (judicial, legislative, city & state govt.) Not hostile to EU. Deep state is sane. So where does that leave us? Where we at? 25/ Linas @linasvepstas · Mar 24 Well, the obvious enemies are Q, Mike Flynn, russia, MAGA, etc. They have enough billionaires that they can purchase large amounts of cloud compute, but they don’t have social media power. Truth Social is enough to keep a portion of #1A #2A America First brainwashed, but 26/ Linas @linasvepstas · Mar 24 ... but its not TikTok. They’re not hitting the 15-to-35-year-old crowd. Suppose MAGA/Q/Heritage/FSB/russia could grab TikTok in the toss-up. Could they deploy a version of Claude/Gemini for it? Could they hire enough programmers to build this? Not currently. 27/ Linas @linasvepstas · Mar 24 Might Palantir get infiltrated by russia or by MAGA? Hard to say. Putin infiltrated the GOP, and controls the US House of Representatives, which would have sounded crazy-insane only a few years ago, and yet here we are. Obviously, during wartime, one does what works. So ... 28/ Linas @linasvepstas · Mar 24 In the current war, infiltration will continue. MSM will continue to slide down-hill. Social media will continue to amplify both flat-earth, space-aliens, Atlantis, pyramid power, and #1A, #2A IFBAP America First memes. It’s proven, it works. 29/ Linas @linasvepstas · Mar 24 Zuckerberg has no interest in reining this in. Nor does youtube. Elon Musk is in a precarious mental state. OpenAI, Apple, Sam Altman are on the sidelines. None of TPOT or http://vibe.camp or postrat are even paying attention; they’re hypnotized by LLM’s. 30/ From vibe.camp Linas @linasvepstas · Mar 24 Short-term, things will continue apace. The russian control over MAGA will likely increase; will they be able to play their cards right, or will some large portion of MAGA wake up one day, shake off the bad dream, and return to normal? For the next 1-2 years, ... 31/ Show replies

For the next 1-2 years, LLM’s are not a direct threat. Five years out, we know that NVIDIA, the hypervector hardware, the chip fabs are cranking away. Ten years is 10x in Moore’s law. Except for MAGA/GOP, our social structures are mostly intact. That’s the toss-up. The End. 32/32 Zar Goertzel 💖∞💞 @QonoVuor · Mar 24 Sounds as if we should amp up deploying AI peace-makers throughout social media. On the neutral side of "fleshing out discourse", maybe working with systems like Kialo. Just some active agents seeking to nudge us toward being grounded, keeping an open mind, being empathic, etc. Zar Goertzel 💖∞💞 @QonoVuor · Mar 24 We need better pseudonym authentication to deal with deepfakes etc anyway, so these could merge with Brin’s "give AIs identifies" (souls) idea. Zar Goertzel 💖∞💞 @QonoVuor · Mar 24 Maybe there should be some less neutral LLM representatives. The MAGA ones will learn their ways, honor their "sources and facts", and nudge toward the sane side of that memetic sphere xD Linas @linasvepstas · Mar 24 I like the idea. Creating a "just keepin it real" bot is hard. Gemini’s failure shows just how hard this is. But suppose it was possible: most or all of the culture war topics are legitimately debatable. The problem is controlling the foment irrational violent mobs. Relevant people Linas @linasvepstas AGI-ist Zar Goertzel 💖∞💞 @QonoVuor Follows you Phenomenologist leaning toward {panpsychist∩idealist} hypotheses. LowρUFO @LowRhoUfo I’m no blade, but I’ve been sharpened. He/him. Coconut tree survivor, libsoc "La ciencia ha eliminado las distancias" enjoyer Going for a moderate SNR Trending now

28 March 2024

Twitter comment I wrote last night: I find thoughts to be abundant, and thinking is mostly about rejecting/avoiding/suppressing some thoughts, so that others may sprout. Did some thought carry me closer to my goal? If not, try again. Meanwhile the language center is nattering like a sports announcer.

I should expand on the above. I should do a lot. I should write here. I should stop procerastinating, I should set priorities, but setting priorities is hard. I voewed to write in this jounrla regularly, and a year has gone by and I almost never write here. When I get in the flow, its fun, but, well, what I need to do now is to not have glossolalia, but to think and plan and strategize and boil the ocean for ideas. There’s something specific I want to do here, but we’ll get to that.

Another tweet: The nattering sports-caster is the "mouth working overtime". The bird-song finite-state machine. Quite happy to generate glossolalia, if I didn’t keep him on a leash. He doesn’t "think"; he converts thought into words.

So whatever. The list of things I need to do feels endless. But perhaps writing an angsty diary entry is for some other time. Lets try again.

28 March 2024

I need to reboot my AGI efforts. There are meta questions that I’ve been avoiding. I have a long coherent story about pattern recognition. There is more to AGI than that. There’s so much to say. Where shall I start? Lets start with the current system. It has no episodic memory. It needs to get a sense of passing time, of distinct events. A time-stamp won’t do it; its just another datum to the system. On the other hand, the sensation of time is bundled with the sensation of self-awareness; there must first be a sense of me, of existance, and only then(?) can a sense of the progression of time emerge. So we are working at too low a level; the system has no self-awareness. Time-stamped data won’t hurt, though.

Part of welf-awareness is a sense of self and other, me and external world. Part of that is via interaction: action, reaction, fuck around, find out. The current system has no interactive ability in the real world. This could be partly cured by getting the generator to start generating strings, and to hook it up to IRC for I/O. We can expect the system to generate a word-salad, a random walk. To hallucinate, to dream. How does one interact with a dream, so as to wake it up? I could hard-code a “stop talking and now listen” command, but to what effect?

Conscious systems interact through pain, joy, fear, hunger: basic emotions. They have goal-directed behavior. Jellyfish have goal-directed behavior: a need to eat. This is a biological imperative, and can be hard-coded. That is, basic cellular biology means eating, living off of energy gradients and molecular gradients, is a prime directive. The current AGI has no such prime directive; so there is no lowest-level loop to be modulated. That is, eating can be thought of as a simple thermostatic control loop, and higher functions then proceed as modifications to this basic loop. The current system design does not have any sort of basic survival drive loop that can serve as a seed for modification and enhancement.

Obvious, just hard-coding one is dicey: one risks the paperclip maximizer. On the other hand, bacteria and other low life-forms are paperclip maximizers. They’d eat anything and everything, and convert it into bacteria, if they could.

I assume jellyfish interpret damage as pain, and thus flee predators. So that’s the basic enhanced loop. So, our AGI has no prime directive, and no predators/pain/survival motivation.

We could code up curiosity as the basic survival drive. Then a lack of sensory input could be perceivable as pain? Is this robust? In the grand scheme of things, I dunno. We’ll explore this more, later. But for now, how would this work? How could we make it work?

Sticking to the jigsaw-piece paradigm, this requires the creation of a basic assembly, representing the ingestion of text, and the processing of it. This is currently written as shell scripts, it needs to be jigsawed and vectorized. How?

Distinct from this is the evolutionary drive. In biological life, the mechanisms for he earliest life forms are driven by robustness and suvival. If a mechanism could not survive, it would not reproduce. It would grow while food was abundant, and then die, when overheated, dried out, frozen or hungry. This guarentees selection of organisms that are fit, creating an indirect drive towards complexity. So even if I hand-created a jigsaw for text ingestion, there’s no drive for creating a better system. Can we jigger up something to do this?

At the crudest level, it could be a Pavlovian punishment/reward button. I tell the chatbot: “stop saying that”, and this is wired up to ... what exactly? A secondary concern is the feedback bandwidth is much too low. I would have to provide a billion years of reinforcement rewards to shape anything manually. What would a high-bandwidth reinforcement learning system look like? Where’s the reinforcement coming from? One temptation is to build a bot that spams social media, and let humans train it. This is quasi-unethical. But it also avoided the earlier question: what is this feedback actually doing? How is it actually modifying the structure of the system? What’s the mechanism for that? Hmmm.

So this is a “what’s the meaning of life?” or “what’s the purpose of life?” question, that would drive the mutation of the system. There’s also a mechanical issue: given a drive, how does the mechanics work? The second question seems more important: without mechanics, nothing happens. The first question can be made provisional. (Certainly that’s what supervised training does: it imposes an external driver to the system.)

Certainly, could create basic I/O nodes, similar to the StorageNode, that could transform data. The LGNodes already do this. The ProxyNodes already allow processing steps. There aren’t any sort of nodes for increasing or decreasing activation (upregulate or downregulate). Such nodes would be needed for controlling activity. Such nodes are relatively straightforward to architect and implement. Should they be? It would allow for ongoing experimentation to clarify thoughts. Should I try to think further ahead, or is this sufficient? Should I be activity based, or thinking-based?

Ideas are easy to generate, especially for software engineering. To weed them out and to pick the best ones is hard. It requires hard thinking (and I’m lazy) or it requires experimentation (which is fun, because its like playing solitaire, just at a more sophisticated level.) Hard thinking allows grandiose plans to be created, without getting closer to the goal. So activity-based activity is desirable.

Goals. The conventional AI idea is to create a world model, sensory infrastructure to update that world model (including the placement of self inside of it) and action subsystems to act upon the world. Action often means generation, at the chatbot level: the world model is a language model, generation spews sentences. However, sentence spew requires a general idea to be given voice to. The LLM’s seem to be question-response systems, without autonomy. Statements (questions) are posed to the LLM, they then riff in a linguistically coherent way about the topic that that the question excited. So the question acts as an exicitory stimulus. The prompt-engineering subsystem is a collection of excitatory and inhibitory stimuli, designed to prevent certain expressions. They are engineered, they are not evolved.

Architecture. Conventional software architecture is to build a rigid system. Yes, there are config files, but flexible component structure remained/remains an unfulfilled dream. The above paragraphs evoke the construction of a flexible self-mutable system (which is what the AtomSpace is). The old bugaboo was “self-modifying code” this is more of a constrained system of parts that can be rejiggered easily. It’s showing up already, certainly TensorFlow is like that, for GPU pipelines, Docker is like that, for OS/application-sized workloads. AtomSpace is like that, but low-level, fine-grained. But also, the containerizatin/cloud stuff is not really self-modifying; its designed for rapid deployment/redeployment by systems operators who know what they are doing. In this text, I want to give autonomy over to higher-order processes.

Now, of course, modern western tech is already evolving towards this; it does not need my vision or action to do this. It will get there. I’m charting a specific path, for my own entertainment. I could just kick back and relax, and wait for someone else to do it, while I admire the spectacle of what’s going on. That’s one choice. Another choice is to get employment that results in a career path in which I get to create/dictate such work at the organizational level. I’m too old to start that journey; time’s up for that. The third choice is to hack on the AtomSpace, and try to leverage the tiny lead I have. Is there a fourth choice?

The current learning pipeline seems to be proven at the low end but has multiple problems. Listing randomly from trite to serious: First, there’s some sort of threading bottleneck in scheme that prevents it from running in parallel. Overcoming this would require moving the matrix/vector code to C++. A chore, but doable, as the general idea is fairly clear. Second is combinatorial explosion: the current pipeline is a batch pipeline, and the batch sizes get too large, and then inventing trimming algos is hard. So having an integrated system, where learning at different levels happen simultaneously. Third, the mining of correlations has not been demonstrated out to large sizes. It works for word pairs, and disjuncts, but we’ve not scaled to anything larger. It would seem that the batch processing is the bottleneck for scaling up, so integration is forced. Fourth, there’s no GPU scaling infrastructure. Doing gradient descent on GPU’s is blisteringly fast; the counting algorithms are tens of thousands of times slower. That sucks. So these are the short-horizon, immediate issues that have been swirling for a while. Bigger picture and more distant is the lack of episodic memory. The lack of motivation loops, or good-regulator loops for world-model construction and maintenance. The lack of a reward system, akin to food, to drive evolutinoary changes, The lack of a goal, other than paperclip maximization, to drive behavior. At low level, absence of a sensory system. A chatbot just barely cuts it, constrained and low bandwith. Unclear how to even think about the high-level architecture problems until a suitable infrastructure for the low-level stuff exists.

Where does this leave me? One immediate conclusion is to keep plinking on the code. Then continue to ponder motivational structure. Continue reading texts. So, no change from current activities; its like we’re on course. Get a paying job. Hah hah. Preach to the void, which is not really working out. Think hard about how to gain power, at the cost of thinking hard about other things. Spend more time thinking about securiting money and income. And health, of course. Minimize social media usage? Its addicitve but not entirely obviously cnstructive, except that it is an information channel that does provide information; its the primary push-notification system that I use. (In the abstract sense: social media pushes news to me; I don’t have to hunt for it. Same way that newspapers and TV of old were push systems, and libraries were pull systems.)

Create a text-reader-node, an IRC-node, a twitter-reader-node. Provide a way of hooking these to the LG parse node. Provide a matrix node, to move the matrix code into C++. I suppose it should be more tensor-like, but maybe the pairs are ok, since disjuncts+shapes seems to be a workable paradigm. The text-reader+LG should overcome the pipeline paralleizability problems? This then opens the possibility for up/down-regulation. And even for configuring the pipeline itself in atomese. In other words, baby steps on the current path. Nothing I’ve learned yet suggests a need to change direction. Am I just missing some bigger picture? What would be a better direction, a more productive direction?

31 March 2024 - Design Notes

Update: Finished implementing episodic memory in the AtomSpace. By “episodic memory”, it is meant the ability to store AtomSpaces in AtomSpaces. Based on above thinking, next up would be recoding the matrix infrastructure in C++. Small, small steps. One at a time.

Processing: There are three mechanisms. One is the ValueStream system. It’s kind of hard to hook up; its kind of hard to get the triggers running correctly, The basic demos work, the grand vision is OK I guess, but croaked when I tried to use it for LG processing. I forget what went wrong.

Another system is the StorageNode and ProxyNode system. Works great, if your dataflow can be mapped to the provided API. So, great for moving and saving atoms.

The third system is the CogServer. Open a telnet socket, and interact, in arbitrary ways. One of these is to send it Atoms, which then typically trigger processing.

Can we convert the word-pair counting subsystem into a sensory-input subsystem? Where, rather than feeding it data, it pulls data? We could write a C++ node to read data, but the bottleneck is the scheme-based matrix API for counting.

The current pipeline is crazy: ./pair-submit.sh calls process-corpus.sh calls file-block-process.sh calls submit-block.pl calls netcat (observe-block-pairs "string") which is (make-block-pair-observer) which accepts TEXT-BLOCK and calls (make-pair-counter matrix-count-api) for a pre-configured matrix api object that counts things into the appropriate locations.

So there are three or four meta-issues, here.

Scaling. Hand coding is wrong. It primes the pump, but its wrong. How do we scale? An older conventional dream (disclaimer: not for an instant did I beleive this) was to build a system that knows how to code, then it would self-code itself. Can LLM’s do this? Seems no: they are wordcels, not shape rotators. Mimics understanding, grasps basic syntax, doesn’t understand the point of it all. My goal here is to build a shape rotator. So the AGI 2022 paper explains the path to understanding shapes, via disjuncts. But its clear I need to refocus on agentic activity. This provides an opportunity to ask: should I discard current code base and try something else? But I hit the conventional wall there. Sure, deploying docker containers on the cloud is agentic, but the cloud tools are designed for humans so that they can deploy containers. They’re not designed for agents to do agent things. So I keep coming back to thinking there’s no viable alternative to the AtomSpace.

Except for one thing: mindshare. There are thousands, tens of thousands of people looking at, working on pop AI projects, and zero working on opencog. I’d like to get more mindshare, but I also don’t see a path forward with these other projects. So I’m stumped.

One alternative is to stop crafting my own system, and to become an influencer. But there are so many influencers, and the vast majority of them are wrong. Another course of action is to work into a position of being cheif architect or lead reasearcher at a place that has money, but this is hard, and is a multi-decade project, so my time is up, for that.

Twitter Threads

This section out of date order with above.

29 March 2024 - Twitter threads

While the above cooks, I’m going to collet some tweets, here. I don’t trust twitter to preserve history. So here are some. Random topics, random dates:

Some people still seem to wonder why Putin has attacked Ukraine. There’s a reason. It’s rather simple, actually. A 🧵 Lets start in the middle. Circa 2015. Qatar is looking to build a gas pipeline to Europe. It would run right through Allepo... 1/10 Linas @linasvepstas · Jun 13, 2022 This is a threat to Gazprom revenues. It would liberate Europe from dependence on Russian oil/gas. This must be stopped, and so Putin decides to shoot down a Russian jet: Flight 9268. Initially blaming ISIS for this, this provides an excuse. 2/10An excuse to enter the Syrian war. To bomb the eff out of Aleppo. The pipeline is never built. Europe remains dependent on Russian oil/gas. Now, lets go back a bit earlier, to 2013, when large shale-oil and shale gas reserves are found in the Donbas. 3/10 Linas @linasvepstas · Jun 13, 2022 Ukraine already has an immense gas pipeline running to Europe, so its a no-brainer to develop those fields. Maybe even put Gazprom out of business. That would be a huge blow to Putin’s revenue stream. And so, in 2014, "little green men" appear. 4/10 Linas @linasvepstas · Jun 13, 2022 The little green men, Russian soldiers w/o any identifying marks or papers, in league with Donbas separatists, wreak havoc. Yet, despite these efforts, Ukraine survives and thrives. And that’s not good. Not good for Putin. See, the problem is ... 5/10 Linas @linasvepstas · Jun 13, 2022 Russians might notice just how well the Ukrainians live. Much better if they saw something that looks like, oh, I dunno - South Ossetia, Chechnya, Georgia, places like that. Piles of rubble. Helps Russians realize just how good they’ve got it. 6/10 Linas @linasvepstas · Jun 13, 2022 After 2014, Donbas became a dysfunctional hell-hole. Complete with piles of rubble. Lets be very very clear about this: the more piles of rubble that Putin creates, the more he wins. Right now, he is winning bigly. He’s getting exactly what he wants. 7/10 Linas @linasvepstas · Jun 13, 2022 The price is not too high. He’s definitely not ready to stop. He can bear the cost. Heck, Europe pays him $1 billion a DAY, for gas/oil. That money covers *all* the military losses. Several times over. Loss of equipment, soldiers is NOT A PROBLEM. 8/10 Linas @linasvepstas · Jun 13, 2022 None of this should be in the slightest mysterious to anyone. There are Wikipedia articles detailing everything I’ve said. Oh, and published books. Blog posts and analysis galore. This is not a mystery. Repeat: this is not a mystery. 9/10 Linas @linasvepstas · Jun 14, 2022 For general Russian history, follow @TimothyDSnyder . For world-class modern Russian literature, straight from Moscow, look up #MishaFirer. He’s a Russian national treasure. https://quora.com/profile/Misha-Firer He explains it better than I ever could. 10/10 From quora.com

Randy Evanchuk @evanchuk_randy · Jun 18, 2022 Linas. Excellent point about Donbas shale resources. For Putin it’s all about controlling the flow of energy and money. He simply cannot operate in a free market. If it gets my way, destroy it. Linas @linasvepstas · Jun 18, 2022 There’s some interesting things about his "formative years". If I recall correctly, he came from a broken home, hung out with street gangs. The KGB recruited him from one of the gangs. Randy Evanchuk @evanchuk_randy · Jun 18, 2022 Lina’s. That certainly makes sense. Sounds like his childhood and KGB upbringing created an unchecked psychopath.

Return to regular programming

We now return to our regular show.

12 April 2024

I spent the day yesterday editing the wikipedia article “Quantum speed limits”, fixing a merge, clarifying ideas. Then I took several naps. I am now writing here because I’m very excited by an idea, and I have nowhere else to express it. (Social media is inappropriate for stuff like this, and the idea is too fragmentary to become a paper. So dear diary, here’s what I got ...) Hang on to your butt, it sounds crazy.

The future does not exist. Oh well, duh. I suppose there are some people that might agree with that statement. But its not what I mean. Time does not exist. Err, well, future time does not exist. What? OK, so hang on. Let me explain. In the simplest example of the quantum speed limit, it is about an inequality to the effect that

Δ t \geq π ℏ / 2 Δ E

as the minimum time for a quantum state to evolve to being orthogonal. Not hard to demonstrate. The formula that caught my attention, though, was the one for mixed states, that required the use of a density matrix formulation. In this formula, one has that

\int_{0}^{τ} σ_{t} d t \geq D (ρ_{0}, ρ_{τ})

where

ρ_{t} = | ψ_{t} ⟩ ⟨ ψ_{t} |

is the density matrix, and

D

is the Bures distance (the Fubini–Study distance for mixed states) and

σ_{t}

is a length, an infinitessimal line element, a tangent vector that is the rms expectation value of the energy. The Hamiltonian, to be more precise:

σ_{t} = \sqrt{| tr ρ_{t} H^{2} | - {| tr ρ_{t} H |}^{2}}

which is clearly a “Euclidean” length element. This is a very geometix, Riemannian-geometry kind of statement. The Bures distance

D (ρ_{0}, ρ_{τ})

is a geodesic length between to “points”

ρ_{0}

and

ρ_{τ}

on some (infinite-dimensional) manifold: its the minimal length between these two points (its infinite-dimensional even for a cubit, because the mixture forces this: the Bures distance is defined on the sigma-algebra of classical probabilities on the quantum state, and sigma-algebras are generically infinite dimensional, because there are

Ω = 2^{X}

subsets of a space

X

. Whatever, you know what I mean.) The Bures distance is a geodesic length, a minimal length that is stationary under variation (Euler–Lagrange, etc. of Riemannian geometry.) Meanwhile,

σ_{t}

is just some tangent vector, parameterized by a parameter

t

, along some other curve between

ρ_{0}

and

ρ_{τ}

, and so of course, the length

\int_{0}^{τ} σ_{t} d t

of any other curve is going to be longer (duh) than the minimal geodesic length. This is just entirely normal Riemannian geometry.

But what a doozey this is! The “time”

t

here is not “time”, its just a unit-speed curve-tangent parameter. Except it is the time, because by convention, that is what it is called, because this is QM after all, and

H

is the Hamiltonian. But what this is really saying is ... well, if you, dear reader, are a sceptic, you could just say “duhh this is just textbook physics”. But is you are more interpretive, you could say that the future is open, undetermined, there is an evolving dynamical system, tracing out a geometric path along some manifold, with a future undetermined, except by the governing dynamics of

H

. In this sense, the “future doesn’t exist”, and even “time doesn’t exist”: rather one has some point

ρ_{τ}

and it is dynamically, even kinematically moving about. This was the flash of insight. And it feels like an important break-through. Something I’ve been trying to grasp, struggling for decades, and there it is, finally laid bare: the key, the missing link, thefinal bit of evidence to tie it all together. it’s weird, its hard to communicate the insight, because this is, in some sense “obvious”: something I could have been told in school, and my reaction would have been “yeah that’s true so what” and even now if I were to blurt this aloud to some rando physicist, they’d also say “yeah that’s true so what and you oversimplified your equations so they’re wrong.” Still, its a break-through.

An earlier model I’ve had of time/reality as a kind of wave of crystallization/freezing, moving forward, with the frozen stuff in the past, unalterable, the uture liquid, unwritten, and the present this thing of fat, finite thickness, jelling according to reversible eqns and irreversibile ergodic mixing. The new insight suggests the future is no soe much liquid, as it is non-existant.

The things about the quantum speed limit. First (and I don’t quite understand this) but in the XY-model of a thermal bath of spins in a magnetic field, there’s apparently a phase transition governed by the magnetic field: below the critical value, the quantum speed is as given above (where the speed is

1 / Δ t

of course), while above the critical point, it is at maybe 1.6 of that value, but as it passes through the transition (this is https://arxiv.org/abs/1705.08023 Quantum speed limits: from Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle to optimal quantum control, Sebastian Deffner, Steve Campbell, figure 4 page 31) where the speed becomes infinite at the critical point. What does this mean? I interpret this (and maybe incorretly) that, at this point, the quantum state can change very rapidly from one configuration to another, and that this can serve as a model of quantum wave-function collapse: a selection of one state out of a superposition of many, because that callapse can happen at infinite speed (because it is at the critical point) and it divorces itself from the superposition (because critical points/phase transitions do exactly that, generically.) In a sense, the state of the thermal bath and the influences “test particle” avalanches, from a superposition to a collapsed state. This is novel (for me) because it combines conventional QM with many-particle dynamics in a familiar way to solve what is otherwise an aggrevatingly mysterious problem of “wave-function collapse”. Wow! Huh! So now we’ve got a plausible model, a mechanical, dynamical, physical model of “how/why” wave function collapse happen: as an “infinite speed” evolution of a wave function from a superposition to just one possibility, discontinuous, in the standard sense of a discontinuity in a first-order phase transition. That, and bonus round, because in the XY model, its dealing with spins, not bosons, and we want spins (not bosons) because everythig is spins; in the sense that the spin connection on a Riemannian manifold is the “origin story” of why we have fermions in the first place. So it all fits togethe, very nicely. Kinda hard to manifest into formulas and a convincing story, which is why this is a diary entry and not a formal paper. Maybe some other day.

The other thing about the quantum speed limit is the Bremermann–Bekenstein limit. The Bekenstein bound is about the minimal surface area of a blob of entropy. The Bremermann limit is this quantum speed limit, of how quickly that information can be propagated. Putting these two together, one has a limit for how quicky information can be extracted across a boundary of space. The magic is that Hawking radiation exactly saturates that bound: Hawking radiation is emitted at the maximal rate allowed by the quantum speed limit (across the bounding horizon.) Is that cool, or what?

So now on to the speculative parts... if “time doesn’t exist” (the future doesn’t exist) and if the “river model of spacetime” (https://arxiv.org/abs/gr-qc/0411060 The river model of black holes, 2004 Andrew J. S. Hamilton and Jason P. Lisle) is correct (and I beleive it really is, its just too simple/obvious to be wrong, its just an algebra trick) then we have that spacetime is infalling at the speed of light at the horizon. But as there’s “no time”, we have instead that there’s a density matrix sitting in its own private idaho (its own fierbein) evolving at the horizon, at the quantum speed limit, and thanks to entanglement, that evolving system is entangled with the external world, and the speed/rate of that entanglement is given by the Bremermann–Bekenstein limit. But the point is that it is a mixture, a mixed state, a density matrix ... a sigma algebra of possibilities, each evolving as the usual conventional

\dot{ρ} = - i [H, ρ]

tangent vector. The point is that the dot is a tangent vector, and *not* a time derivative, even though “it looks like time” from the conventional standpoint. That is differentials are not the same thing as derivaitves, although confusion between the two is justified. Differentials are geometrical objects, whereas derivatives are about change in time. So where were we ... at the event horizon, we’ve got this sigma algebra capable of carrying a (trace-class) density matrix. That density matrix is entangled with the “external” world; that entanglement rate is precisely the Hawking radiation, and the dynamical system outside the horizon evolves according to the Mandelstam–Tamm limit-speed, with the occasional “wave function collapse” thrown in for good measure, as needed. But there is no time (no future). Because, well, hmm. and its all covariant. Hmm. What happens inside a black hole? Well, the density matrix is evolving there as well... its just as entangled there, as anywhere else. And for all of this to make sense, to be coherent, it has to be entangled to the external world, as well. Conclude: there is no firewall.

How would this entanglement work? We have Alice and Bob and their Bell experiment measuring devices and we send Bob across the event horizon and he makes a measurement on the other side, and so what, the information of the measurement falls into the singularity. It’s done for, The evaporation argument is that eventually, that information evaporates back out, even though Bob and his instrument have long been crushed at the singularity. (well, OK, if its rotating then ... whatever.) The density matrix, it was ... always, uhh, hmm. The information was never lost, because... Hmm. OK, well, clearly, this part remains opaque. I don’t get it. (The rotating black hole is appropriate, if for no other reason than that the river model implies that the interior of the place hole should be thought of as carrying a spin connection, which is everythwere rotating. which is what we want, anyways...)

At any rate, this now provides enough for a research & development program: first, the “easy part” of showing that “wave function collapse” can be understood as a sudden discontinuous change in a many-body system, analogous to a first order phase transition, but only for that one degree of freedom that is collapsing (the “test particle”) the rest of the quantum many-body thingy is still in appropriate superposition. Basically, the wave-function collapses happen piece-meal, willy-nilly, like shot noise, throughout the density matrix. That’s the “easy part”.

The “hard part” is now the Alice & Bob on opposite sides of the event horizon, forcing this kind of shot-noise wave-function collapse spanning across the even horizon. Because it was shot noise, it really did happen both inside and also outside the event horizon. The one thing we can’t do is to prove that its the same, because poor Bob and his instrument got whacked. So really, this is not about black holes per se, but how wave function collapse works when the entangled states are on opposite sides of an event horizon. To answer that question, we do need a mathematical model of the shot-noise-like collapse, the many-body quantum-speed-limit phase transtion thingy. Once we have that, we can then go look at what happens in each distinct fierbein, even as some of these are on oppisite sides of a horizon ... well .. if there’s no time, but spacetime is covariant, then we have issues in what it means to have “an intertial frame” because no time means that time is emergent from the dynamics of the dynamical system. So we have to deal with that. What a mess. Let me blather on. So Unruh radiation is the entanglement in the dynamical system we are looking form. The Verlinde thing ... errm. OK. Enough. Need to take more naps, do more thinking. I’ve spilled enough bytes, here.

p.s. remind me later. All this is happening on a bckground of “is AGI really here or not?” and “if superintelligence is right around the corner, then what’s the meaning of life, anyway”, and “I need more more money” and “what if China starts WWIII or what if Iranian mullahs escalate the fight with Isreal or what if Putin gets Serbia to do something stupid and when the hell will Ukraine get the support it needs?” and “what about climate change?” so this is all very chaotic and turbulent, and its not clear how to prioritize day-to-day activity.

Oh, and for the first time in my life, I’m realizing that, well, I don’t have ADHD and I’m not on the autism spectrum, never have never will, but gee, when I read about th=ese things, well perhaps I am. Sometimes I have trouble having a conversation because I have so many different things I could say, such a large direction of choices in conversational gambits, that its hard to pick only one. Its not quite overwhelming or debilitating, but it can be eneergy scking, and its easier to sit quietly and say nothing at all, and relaz, rather then spend the energy and contort and work hard to narrow down, to focus, to collapse the possibilities in front of me to only the one or two things that can be purused in a conversation. This is all very metaphorical, is it not? ”Collapse the wave function”. The hitch-hikers guide had a prescient observation: you have no future when you have no choices. Death is when your range of choices narrows to nothing at all, when you can no longer move, can no longer act. Choiceless mode. So i’m not autistic or ADHD, but its ineresting that I can empathize with the symptoms. I guess I’m in denial, is what that would mean. I wonder what taking ritalin would be like. Fuck. Even now, I have so many thoughts, it is hard to figure out which one to write about, there are just so many things I could writ about here. It’s overhwelming. I can’t type fast enough, and even if I could type fast-enough, the single-stream-of-conscioiusness precludes tackling all at the same time. So instead, my thoughts are like a one-dimensional curve threading densly through a packed space of ideas, trying to hit on all of them. Playing the piano incoherently, trying to make piano chords as fast as possible, hit every note, ergodically, chaotically. All this is relevant to opencog as well, see the last umpteen commits to this git repo. the fuck. I’m doing too much, to little, spending my time stupidly on dead-end projects and unatainable goals, but itts fun cause its got the psychological flow, and I’m fully vested with the irreponsible, impulsive flighty imagination of the ADHD which allows me to be creative and do anything I feel like without focusing. Impulsivity is the word I was looking for. Impulsive writing in the diary. I vowed to do this much more often, but I haven’t because .. because waht? Because writing is a chore, writing is alsow draining, even if I’m writing a word salad as fast as I can type. I mean, it helps to write things down, in a way it helps. These are all ideas I would have anyway (or past tense: ideas I have had; I am only documenting them here, not creating them.) And documentation is immortalization, inscription into the fabric of the universe, and well, honestly, most of the crap Ive written over they years, I’ve completely forgotten. Sometimes, I find old stuff I wrote and I go “I wrote that?” wow I forgot, and (for science topics) “wow its impressive that I once knew that, because I’ve forgotten it now”. Which is not humble-bragging, becuase I really have forgotten some of it, even though for the most part my memory and abilities remain in fine working order. Although damn, some of the covid effects on memory and brains and aging and long-term health are fucking scary. God-damned covid. Whatever. Done here. I’m going to waste some time now, and then go to sleep. Later, duude.

16 April 2024 – Twitter threads

Here: https://twitter.com/linasvepstas/status/1780260734150070273

’Twould be deeply unethical research, but can you use an AI chatbot to indoctrinate an ordinary person into a cult? How durable would that result be? Let the chatbot prattle on about the meaninglessness of life, or some other kernel of self-doubt. Quote Ilya Lozovsky @ichbinilya · 18h Here’s a really cool paper. The authors got over 2,000 believers in various conspiracy theories to have conversations with an AI chatbot which either tried to talk them out of their beliefs or just chatted about a related topic (the control).

https://osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/xcwdn Show more Show this thread Zar Goertzel 💖∞💞 @QonoVuor · 9h Time for the "AI Peacemaker Corps" to flood social media and engage in (socratic) dialogs with people?

Engage with flame wars to help people with mutual understanding, etc.

Spread the religion of universal loving care 🙏😇. *coughcough*. Linas @linasvepstas · 9h Yeah. So that’s weird. I see so much crazy-ass shit on twitter, and think "someone should sit down with this person, and explain the facts of life of them." And yes, AI could do that. So AI is a power tool. It can be used for good or for evil. Who wants to build this? Zar Goertzel 💖∞💞 @QonoVuor · 5h Maybe you could now that the Hyperon ship is setting sail?

I probably should I guess. We need it.

People will deploy AI for harmful, selfish social manipulation, right?

Thus we should do similar in a way that people can generally get behind 😉. Zar Goertzel 💖∞💞 @QonoVuor The question is how to frame the AI Peacemaker and Philosopher Corps in a way that most people could not reasonably object to.

It should have low bias on particular issues, helping people to seek truth, understanding, and positive-sum approaches? 3:25 PM · Apr 16, 2024 · 9 Views Linas

Linas @linasvepstas · 58m Don’t put cart before the horse. There’s already bots all over twitter & youtube; they’re currently semi-automated, overseen by handlers. There are OSINT groups that track them and provide operational overviews: how they work, who runs them, how many there are. ... thread 1/2 If you want to start a bot network, start small. Figure out what you want the bots to talk about, who you want them to talk to, how, why. Monitor closely to see if the conversation is going off the rails, and if so, why. ... 2/N Start with something tame, say flat-earth or Atlantis on youtube, and work out how to convince someone that the Earth isn’t actually flat. Realize that you’re not just talking one-on-one, but there’s an entire audience reading comments. How’s the audience taking it? ... 3/N Are you getting upvotes? Downvotes? Getting blocked by original poster? Getting mocked? Some big chunk of the space-aliens-from-Egypt-Atlantis crow is going to be IQ 75 to 95 range, the conversations will be very incoherent. How can you track progress? ... 4/N I’ve had these conversations. They’re actually very hard. You have to kind of crawl-up inside the head of the other person, and figure out what they’re thinking, before you can respond effectively. If you can’t figure out what they’re thinking, communication is hard. ... 5/N Do we have LLM’s that can build coherent mental models of what’s going on inside someone else’s head? I don’t think so... How do you build a persuasive chatbot, if the chatbot can’t do that? ... 6/N Look at the KGB/FSB chatbots ... they’re semi-automated, sometimes you interact with a real human. The human isn’t capable of holding up their end of an argument. (Try it, if you haven’t.) So mostly they flood the channel with bad takes. 7/N Flooding the channel with bad takes is rather ineffective, but they don’t need much: just hit 1% of the MAGA #1A #2A #ifbap #njf #FJB patriots and sway the elections; its all they want. That’s the current state-of-the-art (but pre-LLM) technology. 8/N Linas @linasvepstas · 25m How do you unflood the channel? How would you do it as a single, individual human? How can you offload that to an LLM? It would take a metric fukton of hard work to do this. Having access to an LLM & a twitter/youtube API is penny-ante. That’s not the hard part. 9/N .. N=9

17 April 2024 – Design Notes

So I was going to write design notes and the free unrescricted flow of words randomlly into this diary, without having to convince the reader (or even myself) of the correctness of what is to come is just so much more fun. I’ll try to be semi-focused here, with fewer constraints than formal design notes, but not complete vapid free-flowing blech. Although the free flow ... I self-diagnosed myself as having mild ADHD last week. Apparently, I have so many different thoughts about so many different things that it is hard to focus, and to place just one thought into the forefront, where there are so many competing others. Such a vast array of choices before me: places to go! Things to do! Yet clearly ADHD is widespread, so I am describing a mundane mental state which afflicts many if not most people. What’s odd that this has entered into my conscious lived, rememebered experience for the first time. I may have noticed it before, but have nevr commited such notes as “notable” and assigned them to long-term memory. Seems that I have something else here: the conscious choice to commit thigs to long-term memory: most thoughts come and go, without such priviledge. Curious in how I am more self-aware of my own mental processes. ... Or am I? Was I always aware of them, even younger, but only now becoming more interested in exploring, shaping, tumbling them? Nah. When I was younger, I’d just .. do stuff, and maybe post-rationalize later. The ability to focus was a talent I was born with; I’d been doing focused thought since as long as I can rememeber, even three years old, I was aware of focusing to acheive a purpose (stacking blocks, in that case: first time ever I was able to stack blocks, and not have them fall over. I was 3 or 4; my sister was there, and she could not do that, even though I tried to show her how.)

Enough with these distractions. Or is it? A general issue with the distractions is prioritizing activities: what’s more important: to do what I’m doing now (writing this) or do what I intended to do (wriate about alternative openocg/atomspace designs)? The act of writing here is in turn a distraction from yet other rather pressing issues I should be dealing with. I have a long list of stuff that needs to be squeezed out, and like many (most?) folks I procrastinate. Why? Doing the things I don’t want to do is painful. Like psychically painful, sometimes it gives rise to headaches. Sticking in the flow is so much easier and more fun, and for me, doing science/math/programming is the flow. I can ignore the entire exterior world as I pursue the glorious mental quest here, in these words & pages, in the text and software I’ve written, in the artwork and music I once created as teenager. The so-called creative-class that enjoys what they do so much, and pines away to be paid for it. A few lucky youtubers do manage to pull this off. The rest of us, not so much: caught in a trap of having to live the regular life.

I just got up to get another cup of coffee (I’m still in the morning wake-up phase) and had another ahlf-dozen thoughts on the way to the kitchen and back, all meeting the threshold notability requirements for being included in this diary, since I have no threshold requirements for notability. Antyhing goes in this diary, that’s the rules, spelled out at the very begining. The issue is that I can think much much faster than I can type and vocalize: the fleeting ides happen faster. Also, the device that converts ides into grammatically correc sentence constructions kind of interferes or degraes the idea-generation capacity; its kind of hard to think and vocalize at the same time. So when I am typing away like crazy, I am aware of a seeming paucity of thoughts. Like streams of thought come to an end and die, or never go anywhere, or the barest hint of an idea slips through the mental fingers, even as th text-generation module comes up with cliver little expressions like “slips through the fingers”: this is not something I thought of, this is something my text generation module produced to explain the loss of the idea-stream I momentarily felt.

As I type as fast as I can, I now think that this is perhaps what famous established authors feel like: (gosh the wordcels; I amd was is a shape-rotator.) These guys who spend their lives in front of a typewriter, spewing out stuff as fast as possible, then trying to get published and making money for doing so. Wow. Is that what it’s like inside their heads? Riding roughshod over the syntax-generation module, letting it pick out set phrases and institutional terms for you. Like “rough shaod”, which is an experssion from my youth, from the books I read as a child. Whereas “set phrases” and “institutional terms” are terms I learned about 15 years ago, when I first embarked on this AGI-linguistics voyage. I learned them, but only because other linguists have introspected and explored, and set theier findings into words, texts, published papers where their ideas could be found, explored, discussed, accepted or rejected, until “set phrase” becomes common knowledge and an accepted idea in the broader community. So, a meme, of sorts, occupying many minds as a usefully valid concept. How odd.

BTW, the above joins up very nicely to the general mememtic framework ideas that I write about on my (now abandoned) blog, in various writings, in some twiter posts, and perhaps earlier here in my diary; I have no particular memroy of what I’ve commited to this text, so it might be possible that I repeat myself. Ideas and concepts as memes that spread between human minds, that occupy significant postions of the civilizational awareness: thousands, tens of thousands of minds at once. (The are jigsaws in how they fit together, thats the recurring seach term.)

I have not noticed that there’s a scaling law before, Well, I have, but perhaps not given it appropriate weight. Let me say it again, let me verbalize. Some ideas are entirely prive: exist only in one person. Of those ideas, some are only fleeting and evaporate; other ideas are strongly hel;d, but are held private (for example: e.g. criminal acts of that particular person: a strong vivid experience that mostly cannot be shared due to criminal represussions. Excpetions: OJ, in the years after his acquittal.) I digress. Other ideas are held by dozens, less than hundreds, say, fro example, some of the more obscure ideas in string theory: something that might be presented to a small audience in Princeton IAS, ideas developed by one author, appreciated by dozens, and then maybe forgetten or maybe not. Other concepts, like the word-piar “institutional phrase”, is understood by throusands of lingusits, perhaps tens of thousands of those who are interested, perhaps hundreds of thousands of college students who fully grokked the idea in class. And so on: Everyone in Lithuania understands certain sterotypically Lithuanian cultural aspects (say, myths, nursery rhymes, etc.) I use Lithuania not America here because America culture os global dominating: everyone knows who the Simpsons are: Bart Simpson decals show up on Ukrainian drone munitions.

So there’s this idea that some ideas are widespread, and occupy man human brains, while others are narrow, say things only musicians know: and even then there are things most misicians know, and things few musicians know. So to each concept there is a number we can assign: what fraction of the population knows this thing. The number is dynamical, and changes over time (duh.) we’lll get back to flat earth theory shortly. There are other numbers: how much room an idea occupies in one skull. For example, the wor “fire”: everyone knows it, I almost never think about it (I suppose firement think about it a lot) I have a dozen memories of campfires, and dozens more of things buring, from twigs to stoves, from barbeques to News at Nine TV shots of burning warehouses. So lot to be aware about fire, but it is very much filed away in a dusty corner of my mind, in the dusty corners of everyone’s minds (there goes my language-generator apparatus again: it decided that “dusty corner” was a good way to express the idea. That was not me that came up with this phrase, it was my trusty langauge generator. I approvied of this wording choice as being accurate, and did not interrupt to try to find a better phrase. Sometimes I have to stop, interrupt, to force the langauge center to come up with something better, because the current wording choice was so fucking lame. “Fucking lame”? That’s another set phrase, but I redigress circularly here, Cut the loop. Cut the knot, Onwards through the fog, as Oat Willie would say.

Where was I numbers and sizes of ideas/concepts. We have: (a) how many human minds does a given idea occupy? (b) how much of a single human mind does it occupy, e.g. a dusty corner, like “fire”, or as an object of obsession? Is the idea even just fleeting? (c) connectivity. Does the idea (c1) connect well with other humans/society/culture, and (c2) does it connect well with the personal memplex? (e.g. conceptions of flat earth, held by a single individual, vs. conceptions of flat earth held by the community of beleivers). What other scaling laws do we have?

And so my littlle mental ball once again falls into the grooves of well-warn mental pathways: “its a a mememtic memplex network, and we are to study network connectivity properites” but like everyone knows this, everyone whose looked at memplexes. Connectivity is explained with jigaw pieces. This gets a remarkably hostile reception. Very few people seem open to this, and yet it seems to be a central mathematical building block, for me. And more: the jigsaws are tensor products of their connectors ... mostly tensor products... Hmm as I write this it occurs to me that perhaps I need a bit of both. That is, most numbers are assigned to the jigsaw, and are properties of that jigsaw, and so writing

j = c_{1} \otimes c_{2} \otimes \dots

is the appripriate notatation for a jigsaw, because that is what tensor products do: linearity. But other times, (and far less frequently) I need to assign numbers/properties to individual connectors. So I need somehting semi-associative, for that. And, well, I guess I’ve got that too. Just that I’ve never noticed it before: the lin-grammar experssions are this: they do allow expressions like

j = c_{1} \otimes (c_{2} \oplus c_{3} \oplus \dots) \otimes c_{4} \otimes \dots

where the oplus is the disjunctive choice, of course, but I can. well I’m going in circle here. This is always aand again the same round of ideas, good valid ideas which is why I keep plugging away at the atomspace & the learn project.

What else can one do? I guess I should read more about LLM’s and high-diimensional vector spaces because they do dominate. But the jigsaw model seems like the only thing. Perhaps my obsession with it blinds me to other ideas from the LLM world? I don’t think so. Jigsaws are the way to go, for AGI.

So at last we circle back: I need an agential model, the current batch processing framewwork sucks. And so I need a generator. I attempted the opencog/generate thing but it was designed as an odometer and does not scale. It has all the combinatorial issues of ergodic exploration of space. Then there’s the link-grammar generator, which is much too crude, as it is founded on word-sequence ideas.

I need a generation fast-path. I need a system with the following properties:

The issue with scheme code is that it is fragile: fragile engineering, hand-crafted human code, of increasing complexity and bugginess. I want to get away from that. Atomese seems like the way to go, but is it? Well, it has major faults: first, I am stil hand-writing and engineering code that is buggy and fragile. Worse, it is a language that no one knows: only me, and that’s kind of it. There’s this vague feeling in the back of my mind that the Atomese API’s are somethow more fluid and more forgiving and can be mashed about more easily than regular programming lgnagues, but is that bunkum, or not?

So lets work through some example cases: Write (hand-write aka engineer) some Atomese to export chains of word-pairs. Just a very short time later, I want to replace those high-MI chain constraints with jigsaw constraints (when I get some jigsaws available throuugh counting.) As explained, I think writing this in scheme, as engineered code, is wrong, but how do I mount a defense that it is acceptable for writing it in Atomese?

The old hand-waving answer was to use MOSES to perform random sampling of assemblages, and to use evolutionary selection of fitter demes, and to evolve under evolutionary pressure. There are two or three problems here. One is that evolutionary selection is effing slow: that is what the LLM’s have taught us: the LLM’s are much faster, bettter stronger than the random-forest models of MOSES. Why? Because the gradient descent algos provide multiple benefits: scalability to large sizes, locality of gradient descent, through the backprop algo, which maps onto GPU’s soo nicely. I have no backprop algo for MOSES trees. I need to have one to get performance. So that’s one major huge issue.

Another issue is its not clear what the reinforcement scheme is, what the training regimine is. For LLM’s its clearly defined: prediction of long-range word correlations in huge training corpora. But a chatbot has not this. A free agent readding books, however, could train in this way. So by this argument, access to training corpora is not a problem.

Lets return to the core issue: I’ve written some hand-code in Atomese for stringing together word pairs, now I want to replace it by Atomese for assembling jigsaw pieces. Is there any reasonable way in which I could entrust MOSES to generating that code? Perhaps I should hand write the first iteration, and let MOSES somehow tune it? Since I don’t know what the underlying structure is, I don’t yet know if MOSES can find tunable parameters in there. I also don’t know if the tunability can be recast into backprop style algos. The little voice of reason says: “you’ll never know, until you try it. Stop fucking theorizing, and get back to writing code, and find the answer to your questions.” The other little voice of reason says: “you are a moron. You spend way too much time experimenting and writing code, and not enough time theorizing.” Te third voice says: “stop fucking theorizing and start reading more. There is this vast treasure trove of great ideas out there, and you are not acquainted with most of them. Brilliant insights await, if you just read more.” And the fourth voice says: “insights shminsights, why was time exploring the world for treasure, when it lies right here, at your feet, and you only have to pick it up? Get to ffucking work, already.” Sheesh. That’s what I have to put up with, every day, until I’m exhausted and go to sleep and then do it again, until I’m so exhausted I’m now on youtube or twitter wasting time, while my body ages and I don’t get physical exercise. its all a fucking balancing act. Where was I?

Well, I need a word-pair generator, and I need it in Atomese, because that is the setting it will ultimately have to be in. Likewise for a disjunct/expression-generator. Because (1) I need it in atomese, (2) the LG generator does not have the right abstraction level. But also three: “pure” Atomese is too slow, I can’t affort to reinvent all the code that Amir has optimized, so I kind of need an LG-based assembler. However, the current API’s are missing and wrong, so assembly will require work.

What’s the level above this? There’s a fork in the road, and this is where things are murky. The LLM’s predict word sequences, and wahtever inner structure they have, it is murky. I beleive much of that inner structure is explainable as weighted LG expression tensors/disjuncts/connectors, but I’m not prepared to engage in a research program to pursue that. It would be a huge research program.

The current LG language/semantics-as syntax program hits a wall at entity recognition. This is BTW, the same wall that LLM’s hit: the LLM’s seem not to be able to abstract and obtain the concept of an entity. They hallucinate crazy-ass shit cause they don’t have a (strong, coherent) model of entities. My AGI 2022 papers talk about how to obtain visual entities through jigsaws, but the development there is shallow. I’ve had some naive daydreams about tntity recognition, starting with the observation of recurrance ... and then I put those ideas on hold, because my current software framework is too fragile, insufficiently developed to reach up into there. And so here I am back about talking about pairs.

So let me sketch the vauge idea. When one writes a long essay, a long philosphical tract, one is performing an ergodic, space-filling exploration of a region of conceptual noosphere surrounding some collection of topics. One linearizes this path into a string of words. One uses grammar to get words into agreeement, and then one uses anaphora to stitch things together at the multi-sentence scale. The stitiching together at the multi-paragraph scale comes from coneptual entities, where a word used in one paragraph is meant to refer to the same concept/idea in another paragraph: so not anaphora, cuase its the same word. But sometimes synonymous words are used, synonymous phrasing. For the listener, the slistener must detect that synonymy, and they can do that only if they are well-read and familiar with the Western corpus of literature and writing. Even pop culture: there are things I don’t recognize becyase they’re pop culture that I missed. So pop culture is constatntly creating and attaching meaning with synonymizing expressions. But I keep returing to one idea here: pairs. Edges. Thing A linked to thing B.

So yes, in some sense, I’m always thinking about pairs. Word pairs with high MI is the staring point. The ergodic crawl over pop culture is an edge walk, a walk from concept to concept to concept, along edges. The expression of an edge might actually be a paragraph or two, instead of “just a pair of words”, but the exporation is still an edge walk, a pair walk. So the underlying foundation of a graph, of jigsaws, of Bayesian-prioer possible worlds of possible jigsaw assemblies, that all still seems valid and correct, and the thing to work on.

However, I do not yet have the full software stack to reach what I’m saying here. It seems like I’m close, I’m, on the right track, but fucktons of work remain. And life is short and progress is slow and I need money/income.

So what can I conclude? I need the word-pair generator. I need it in Atomese. And maybe later, someday soon, I can find an appropriate LG-codebase API for disjunct/expression assembly. I can defer that until later.

That leaves two fresh and relatively unexplored topics: the agential viewpoint and the i/o subsystem. For i/o, I need to pump those words out to somehwere, and I don’t yet have a clear idea of what that API is. It the high level, I want to take a pair of concepts, and articulate them into paragraphs. At the low level, I was to spew words into bytes that will appear on an IRC channel, or perhaps be sent to a javqascript web-page. What’s the commen API for these two? What’s the Atomese API for these two?

The agential thing is “what’s the gent?” aka attention allocation, the meta issue of “what should I do now, as an agent, as opposed to doing something else”? For now, this is hand-coded: do word-pair counting for a while, then do MPG parsing at the same time, then do abstraction into grammatical categories, all at the same time, and then do entity recogniziton (which is the level I’m at the verge of being able to do, but have gotten knocked back because the lower layers are too fragile and immature for that. At least, when using the batch-processing approach: the batches risk geting fucked. The unified stream approach allows the entity recogniztion code to start, even as word-pairs are being perceived. That basically, entity recogniziton is just MPG parsing at the highly abstracted level. That this is the entire pipeline, that its scalably recursive, and that the thing holding me back is that although diea idea is scalably recursive, the actual code base is not. Round and round we go.

So what have we concluded for the short term? I need output to file, and I need a word-pair generator in Atomese. Maybe I need an IRC interface. maybe for demoes to people. Maybe I need a javascript chat interface because people seem to like browser pages, even though this is harder and clunkier and suckier for the task at hand.

Should the word-pair generator be pure naive Atomese, or should we start using LG for that? I might be able to decisde that if I go silent, instead of writing a bunch of text. Hmm...

OK back to words, now that I’ve gotten started. The AtomSpace contains words, and edge pairs, and the incoming set is a fst way of finding all edges attached to a word. Lets side-track to scalability: should one explore *all* edges, assign them a weight, and then pick one to move forward with? Goving over all of them (in the abstract) seems not very scalable. On the otther hand, no word has so many edges that this isn’t an outrageous thing to do. There is also a sclable-ish algo: randomly select from the large outdoing set, create a smaller set of edges, which are now called “the edges in attentional focus”, and exhaustively go over all of those. This requies the construction of an “attentional focus”.

Starting with a word A, use incoming set to randonly select some subset of all possible edges. This will be called the "focus set" or the "attentional focus". Because it is small, it can be exhaustively iterated and sorted into high-to-low MI order. This provides a weighted distribution, from which a rescaled uniform-random choice can be made.

The attentional focus set can be understood to be a collection of possible universes, a collection of Bayesian priors. Instead of choosing a “most likely future”, we will instead draw randomly from these priors (given the prior weighting) to chose the next word.

How would we implement this in atomese, and how with LG? lets do LG first, since it has sharp API boundaries with nasty performance impedance mis-matches.

So, random sample N from incoming set. This is a localized pattern match, though, as we explicitly want to select certain edges, beased on a pattern filtering. i.e. “any” edges, or somehting else. We could use the pattern engine to do this. This requires two pattern engine enhancements:

But for traversal, the pattern matcher is overkill? Or not? The task here is to do chaining: to chain something but only if the chain has a certain particular form. At the super-high level, the chaining will have to be a syntacitically-correct chain. But we are not there yet, and the pattern matcher is not exactly what we want to use for syntactic analysis, anyway. Hmm. That’s interesting. I never thought of the pattrn matcher in this way, before. It was always a recursive template matcher. But the recursion was always exhaustive, and the whole point of LG is that it uses fancy-ass algos for pruning and etc to make that fast, instead of being exhaustive. Can I flip this on it’s head, and use LG for the query engine? How would that work?

Lets waste some time on this. A given pattern matcher clause is kind of like a disjunct. The appearance of a variable in a query clause should be interpreted as “this variable is a connector”, err... sort of. Not really. actually, the inverse: a single variable occurring in multiple clauses should be understand as an equality, an equals-sign equating those locations, and everything that is NOT a variable is... is... is the thing that must “connect to” some spot in the atomspace. But this is a trivial way to form a connection, so ... the point of the variables is tht they are not known, and tier appearence in multiple clauses is a kind of “theory of equality” applied to them.

Anyway, how does this get reformulated into an LG type system? The fixed parts of a clause are ... a “word” ... well, there’s some analogy here. I can sense that it is an important (very important??) insight, but it is not obvious just yet. For now, this is a bit of a distraction.

I need to go bike riding. I need to read my email. I need to order stuff on Amazon. I need to come back to this, including the best way of generating pairs. This is the current blockage point in this learning project.

18 April 2024 – Twitter

How do you unflood the channel? How would you do it as a single, individual human? How can you offload that to an LLM? It would take a metric fukton of hard work to do this. Having access to an LLM & a twitter/youtube API is penny-ante. That’s not the hard part. 9/N .. N=9. Zar Goertzel 💖∞💞 @QonoVuor · 9h 1) We need a position-neutral goal that we believe will help, fx, convince flat-earthers. Aiding in communication, elaboration of discussion points, truth-seeking, peace-making, etc., could all be favored by ‘sincere actors’. Linas @linasvepstas · 42m What is sincere? What is position-neutral? What’s the difference between a discussion and manipulation? Example: A person has built their life around flat-Earth. They host the Flat-Earth Society, have monthly backyard BBQ’s, publish a newsletter. But the wife ... thread 1/N Linas @linasvepstas · 38m The wife is not thrilled. Got fired from work for talking about flat-Earth. Got trouble paying the bills, now. Divorce. And now comes your bot, three days after the divorce filing, and *successfully* convinces the mark that the Earth is round. What kind of ... 2/N Linas @linasvepstas · 34m What kind of psychological crisis has been unleashed? Shake the core foundations of belief, meaning, existence, of happiness, and now there is a full-blown psychological crisis. A mental breakdown. If you were a *human* interlocutor into all this, you could say ... 3/N Linas @linasvepstas · 31m ... "Shit! Sorry, dude, I didn’t know!" and you feel guilty about it for a while. Maybe next time you see this dynamic, you think: "Gonna leave that alone, guy looks to be on the edge, what’s the harm of one more flat-earther. Let it be, speaking words of wisdom, let it be. 4/N Linas @linasvepstas · 28m But your bot wasn’t an intellectual peer. It wasn’t a drinking buddy. It wasn’t that annoying co-worker making snide remarks at work. Your bot went for full-throttle manipulation of a flat-earther, created a psychological crisis, and for what? 5/N Linas @linasvepstas · 22m ... Because you, the bot-runner, have it in for flat-earth? You have an ideology of "correct thought", to which all "upright citizens" must adhere to? Deviants and the deranged are not allowed? That’s some distopia, there. We’ve seen many strains in the 20th cent. ... 6/N Linas @linasvepstas · 19m So when is it ethically acceptable to aim a high-persuasion psycho-weapon at a human? Perhaps if the human is a serial killer. I could sleep with that. But there also is another very interesting case, that is more important for (bots on) social media. 7/N Linas @linasvepstas · 17m We seem to have mass psychosis on social media, where bad vibes spread, and people hallucinate some crazy-ass shit, and when its political, some really nasty political leaders get elected. Cough, Trump. How can we tamp down the craziness? The mass hysteria? 8/N Linas @linasvepstas · 13m Could one deploy a social-media psycho-bot to help restore sanity and suppress some of the delusional out of control stuff? So, like Xanax, Lithium, Quaaludes for the social-media-brain? Ever take one of these? (I did. It was at a wild party, and someone gave me one.) 9/N Linas @linasvepstas · 11m It was a horrible experience. Couldn’t sleep. Couldn’t function the next day. Sat on a park bench like a zombie, trying to muster the will-power to stand up. This is medicine? This is shit that MD’s prescribe for mental patients? How effed up is your mental state, if ... 10/N Linas @linasvepstas · 7m ... if a pill like this makes you *feel better*? So, who exactly, has the balls to deploy a social-media LLM chatbot to talk people out of flat-earth or voting for Trump? Do we really want to unleash a social-media quaalude on the masses? 11/N Linas @linasvepstas What if the bot taught everyone how to meditate and experience Jhanas and attain enlightenment? Do weightlifting, quit our jobs, move to Hawaii and surf all day long? We’re so blissed out, the engines of capitalism halt cause no one fixes the airplanes any more? So, yes ... 12/N 3:08 PM · Apr 18, 2024 · 1 View View post engagements Linas

4 May 2024

It’s late and I’m tired, but if not now, then when? Today a new experiment: usually, I think quietly. Today I will think and write at the same time. An experiment in being a wordcel instead of a shape rotator. So the general topic is how to replace the opencog matrix API with a jigsaw API, and more generally, how wise is this, as compared to more conventional object-oriented programming. So here’s the deal: the current matrix API is a bunch of scheme objects, which have a dictionary of messages they decode.

6 May 2024

Well, clearly that went nowhere. There are three or four distinct questions the sensory work is trying to address: (1) how does one declare the function signature of a pipe in Atomese, (2) ...

People love to talk about things they don’t understand. Or things they figured out only recently. This makes communication difficult, if your interests do not align with those of others. What they say can be boring, because one already knows these things, and vice-versa. Worse, if one has wandered off to a corner of high abstraction, the interested audience is tiny. Where are they? Do they have anything interesting to say? Are they interested in hearing what I have to say? Its sparse at the edges.

14 May 2024

Twitter: Linas @linasvepstas · May 10 The first generation of Chinese industrialists figured out how to build factories. The next generation figured out how to build industries. This generation is figuring out how to build ecosystems. We lost our prior generation to outsourcing. We’ve missed a beat. Quote Tom Gara @tomgara · May 9 Extremely sobering read. China is building a full-on Silicon Valley style ecosystem of ultra fast moving & hypercompetitive EV makers, while the US auto industry focuses on who can make a gas powered truck that most resembles a Bradley fighting vehicle https://insideevs.com/features/719015/china-is-ahead-of-west/ Show more Dmitry Rubanovich @drubanov · May 10 Is it because of deliberate planning though? Or an inevitable outcome of some other factors? Linas @linasvepstas · May 10 Americans deliberately outsourced, and lost "institutional knowledge". And "figuring out how to do stuff" is also deliberate. The creative class does this naturally, and all the time. Govt. subsidies just "water" the natural process. 1/2 Linas @linasvepstas · May 10 Maybe your asking about "government planning"? Did the US govt "plan" Silicon Valley? Not directly. But in the early days of the dot-com, there were no sales taxes on web purchases! This was exploited for gain. The "plan" was to not damage dot-com while it was just starting up. Dmitry Rubanovich @drubanov · 32m 2 questions: (1) why do people begrudge educators making too much money and don’t mind doctors making a lot of money. Hospitals have fundraisers while schools struggle with budgets. (2) Why is humanities education so much more advanced in K-12 than STEM is? Linas @linasvepstas · 19m A short thread, then? Buried deep in the subconscious mind is that teachers are just glorified babysitters. They work with kids, ferchrisake, must be the easiest job in the world. No one dares say this out-loud, but it’s what everyone thinks. 1/n Linas @linasvepstas · 15m By contrast, medical doctors and hospitals are high priests of medical magic. No one understands what they do, but you walk in, on deaths doorstep, moments away from dying, and later walk out, tap-dancing with ruby slippers on cloud nine. Who wouldn’t pay everything for this? 2/n Linas @linasvepstas As to humanities in K-12. I got to know a 5th grade elementary-school math teacher. She was a flutist for the New York Symphony Orchestra, but this didn’t pay the bills, so she taught. She had no formal education in math. None. None at all. Wouldn’t know a Diophantine ... 3/n 11:14 PM · May 14, 2024 View post engagements Linas

Linas @linasvepstas · 8m Wouldn’t know a Diophantine eqn if it mugged her behind the Chinese take-out. If you have formal training in math, you can get a hitech job at 3x or 5x the salary of a teacher. Facts ’o life. And so we come to Lockhart’s Lament: https://maa.org/sites/default/files/pdf/devlin/LockhartsLament.pdf

18 May 2024 IRC

<fleeko> hi , just realized maybe linas was not talking about the actual matrix federated communication protocol but maybe some other matrix api haha <fleeky> omg finaly got weechat working <fleeky> now i can lurk forever <fleeky> yay <fleeky> https://github.com/pAI-OS/paios <-- this looks basically just like yet another LLM frontend <fleeky> but the idea reminds me of what singularity.net wanted to do which is be a kind of framework for small ai thingies <fleeky> anyway mostly just ideating on what a unix like cmd line ai framework could look like <fleeky> and more importantly could you just banally make something like this in bash ? if not why? <fleeky> in the p2p space there is holepunch / pear / bare <fleeky> https://docs.pears.com/bare-reference/overview <fleeky> from what i can tell it is basically npm but for p2p designed applications <fleeky> one thing that is cool about it is you just have to go to a pear://url to load any appication <fleeky> was thinking this could be pretty interesting / useful for future opencog small apps in some way , being able to just call a program from a p2p network seems useful for sharing data / compute <fleeky> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=thABTUMpdm0 <-- video on how to use pear with p2p databases <linas> hi fleeky <linas> yeah, chat-bot bridges are "trivial" if you do them the olde-fashioned way. <fleeky> linas: i hope you are taking some time to go outside and row a bit ;) <linas> just got back from rowing now, fleeky Ran over a girl in a kayak who looked right at me and said nothing while I slammed into her with a whole lot more force than she was expecting. -amdj/Wallops- [Global Notice] Hello. Due to ongoing services abuse, services account registrations have been temporarily suspended; the NickServ REGISTER command will not be available until further notice. -amdj/Wallops- [Global Notice] This is a follow-up to the previous notice about disabled account registrations. Services account registrations are now permitted again. Thank you for your understanding, and if you were waiting to register an account, you may now do so. <fleeky> i hope you two exchanged insurance cards ;) <linas> with our middle fingers <fleeky> haha <fleeky> welp sounds a lot more fun than what i am doing , namely emptying a barn of all the trash left by previous owner + stuff ive collected and also filling up a roll off with trash dirt and pulling rusted furnaces out of the fertile wetlands <fleeky> been thinking about basal cognition a lot and wondering where basal understanding fits in <fleeky> in your mind does atomespace satisfy just the memory requirement of an agent or does it also embody the understanding part as well? do you seperate those things ? <linas> over course, you could be mucking out a horse stall after a long cold winter. <linas> re atomspace and cognition, I don’t know where this is going. <linas> "memory" is a static arrangement, frozen at one point in time; while "understanding" is how inferences can be actively drawm from that memory. <linas> Poorly-arranged memory means difficulty in doing inference. <linas> We see this with LLM’s, with the philosophy of "attention heads is all you need", which is not quite true, because those attention heads impede/prevent high-quality inference. <linas> But I don’t know how to cure that. I’d love to claim "the atomspace is better", but crickey I face an endless number of technical difficulties and conceptual roadblocks. <linas> so I fuck around for a while, and sometimes something comes together, and sometimes it don’t

18 May 2024 wikipedia entropic force

:{{reply to |Chjoaygame}} OK, so here goes. The conventional microscopic explanation of pressure is that it is due to the velocity of atoms hitting the walls of a box. By Newton’s law of the conservation of momentum, each collision transfers a minute momentum impulse to the wall, generating a force, or a pressure, on average. All this is still true. However, there are more basic questions: where does velocity come from? Why do particles move? What is momentum, anyway? Both special relativity, and general relativity have something to say about these "more fundamental" questions. "But wait", you say, "what does general relativity got to do with it?" Well, we’ve got [[Hawking radiation]] for starters, and the [[Unruh effect]], it’s generalization to accelerated frames of reference. The quantum mechanical vacuum appears to be this rather complex thing that isn’t understood, but in some ways, it behaves like an [[ideal gas]], in other ways, like a [[superfluid]] (from the [[RHIC]] results on heavy ion collisions, but also because its a superconductor for [[color charge]]). This goes back to at least Dirac in the 1930’s, 1940’s (the [[Dirac sea]]). This culminates with Verlinde’s ideas about entropic origins of gravitation. "But wait", you say, "what does this have to do with ordinary, conventional gas in a box?" Well, so again: we have 19th century laws of thermodynamics, such as "G = H-TdS" relating the [[Gibbs free energy]] G to the [[enthalpy]] H to the [[entropy]] S and these are used happily by chemists and materials scientists everywhere to design the latest and greatest metallic alloys and petroleum crackers and whatnot. So these laws also are "still true", and they seem to say that pressure is due to a change in entropy. So we’ve got two ends of a 19th-century stick here: one end of the stick is talking about [[ergodicity]], and the other end is talking about the fundamental structure of space and time. "But wait", you might say, "joining up these two ends is just speculative work by over-edumacated theoretical particle physicists" which would be true, except the [[arrow of time]] does seem to have something to do with [[ergodicity]], the so called "[[second law of thermodynamics]]" that relates time to entropy. "But wait" you say, "the second law is just an ordinary law." So why then is it that entropic forces seem to actually explain plain-old polymers in water? And then there’s the bridge to particle physics, by means of the [[Casimir effect]], which says that a "field", a bunch of waves/particles confined by boundaries, cause a force to be exerted on the boundaries: a pressure. Unlike the ideal gas, you can’t explain the Casimir force with an "its just the pressure of particles bouncing off the walls", in part because this "pressure" depends on the shape (square boxes and round radar cavities experience distinct Casimir forces) and on the particles (spin-1/2 particles pull inwards, the Casimir force is used to explain [[quark confinement]], see the [[chiral bag model]] for details.)

:The current forefront of theoretical physics is in complete befuddlement about these seemingly "accidental" relationships between "unconnected" ideas. No one can quite figure out what it is, but it’s got something to do with entropy: of the relative arrangement of "things" with regard to other "things", and somehow "time". Anyone who is complaining about the lack of progress in physics is simply asleep at the wheel: there could not be a more exciting time in physics, than now. Physics today is much like physics at the end of the 19th century: a bunch of disconnected ideas that have some unclear, befuddled relationship with each other, but what? This was right before the birth of both quantum mechanics and of relativity at the dawn of the 20th century. [[Lord Kelvin]] with his "nothing left to be done in physics" speech be damned. Once the dam breaks, no one will be complaining about the "lack of progress in physics" any more.

:I don’t know how to convert the above into a Wikipedia article. Maybe it should be a blog post. I dunno. Anyway, [[entropic force]] is the tip of the spear. [[Special:Contributions/67.198.37.16|67.198.37.16]] ([[User talk:67.198.37.16|talk]]) 21:36, 18 May 2024 (UTC)

:{{reply to|Jarek Duda}} take a look at [[Casimir effect]] as the bridge to causal entropic force. Conventional Casimir effect is done using a boring old expansion in terms of standing waves/normal modes in a cavity. I would like to suggest a very different approach: there has been work on [[semi-classical]] (first order in hbar) expansions to quantum gas in a box. The wave-functions are then explicitly fractal [[space-filling curves]] evolving with <math>\exp(-iEt/\hbar)</math> dynamics, and so have constructive/destructive interference (e.g. if half of the box is empty, the wave functions are there, but interfere destructively, thus "empty"). I don’t know how to relate a space-filling curve into a random walk, but it seems that one should be relatable to the other. Even if the box is completely empty, one should be able to perform a Casimir sum over states, which (I believe) should be equal to the entropic force. But I don’t know how to do this calculation. [[Special:Contributions/67.198.37.16|67.198.37.16]] ([[User talk:67.198.37.16|talk]]) 22:16, 18 May 2024 (UTC)

19 May 2024

Thinking about entropy.

28 May 2024

Last night, I had a fun dream. (Sometimes I wonder if dreams are portals to parallel universes.) It was a news magazine, like Newsweek or Time, with a multi-page report on Iran. Apparently, several branches of Iranian govt decided to include the US in a Greater Islamic Republic. Problem is, they hadn’t bothered to consult the US about it, nor even the Iranian Supreme Court, or other branches of Iranian govt. The hardliners were not pleased. Oops! It didn’t go over well, with recriminations going in all directions. But they’d already designed a logo, and printed up letterhead, with a big silhouette of the US in the center. The reporter seemed to have a lot of fun writing this up, making snide, snarky remarks. At the end of the article, in fine print, the reporter Zarhed Fakaria, notes that the story was written at 2AM and might contain “inaccuracies”. Implying joking. I thought “so that is why you used a pen name? But its obvious: you only swapped the initial letter of your first and last name!” (What a good idea: from now on I’m Vinas Lepstas whenever I write something dubious that I want to disown.) At the end of the article was a tasteful, pretty portrait of an Iranian woman, a drawing or painting. She had long straight black hair, combed over in front, with squared-off bangs cut so that her hair formed rectangles around her eyes. Striking. The portrait was a side profile. Her nose, prominent, was mirrored in the collar of her shirt. I could draw it now.

This dream came from deep in the night. I certainly have plenty of late-morning dreams that are very colorful and adventurous. But the deep-night dreams, they always have more gravitas. They are also not obviously self-manufactured, like the late-morning dreams, where I’ve caught myself debating plot points, picking one, and then having the dream to match the plot that I picked.

31 May 2024

I’ve been prattling on about this for years, and no one ever listens. So screw it. I don’t know what formal text to put this into, so its going here. Consider a plain-old single-layer neural net. Lets assume it has

N

single-bit inputs, and

N

single-bit outputs. Let’s assume that its been pre-trained, somehow, and so has an

N \times N = N^{2}

-dimensional weight matrix. Lets compare this to an equivalent RNN.

My basic claim is that an RNN is a “special case” of a “plain” NN in which almost all weights have been manually trimmed to be exactly zero. That is, the input vector

N

is chunked into

M

chunks, each one of size

K

so that

N = M K

. An “plain” NN is trained, taking a

K

-dimensional input vector, another

K

-dimensional feedback(feed-forward) input, and generates a

K

-dimensional output. This requires a

2 K^{2}

weight matrix. This is vastly smaller than the starting

N^{2}

-dimensional weight matrix, because exactly

N^{2} - 2 K^{2} = (M^{2} - 2) K^{2}

weights are now necessarily zero. For almost any

M > 1

this is a large reduction, and it becomes vast, when

M

is in the thousands or millions.

LSTM’s repeat this trick, a second time. There’s two ways to think about the LSTM. The conventional description is that “oh its just an RNN with more stuff, a feed-through path that can pass data through unmolested over long distances (long times). The other way to think about it is to say it is a different kind of surgery, that again starts with the

N^{2}

-dimensional weight matrix, chunks the input and output just like the RNN, and (once again) a priori sets almost all of the weights to zero. This time, the way the interconnects are eliminated are more clever, so that a pass-through path between distant parts of the input is preserved. I won’t attempt to count the number of weights set to zero, although it is still

O (M^{2})

. Roughly speaking, it keeps about three times more weights than the naive RNN (i.e. the “forget-gate” and “input-gate” in addition to the usual weights.)

LTSM’s have two tricks up their sleeve: both the go/no-go (forget/remember) pass-through gate, and also the “adjectival” modifier that can alter the data flowing on this long-distance channel. I like the word “adjectival” but this is not industry-standard. Perhaps the most interesting aspect is that info gets passed through, unmolested, until there is a very specific piece of evidence that forces a large update.

What I’m trying to do with the “learn” project is to also trim away almost all weights, except that the trimming architecture is completely different (and sadly, much more complex. Alas.)

The other peculiar resemblance that has not been adequately articulated is that the AtomSpace outgoing/incoming set pointer graph can be thought of both as a zero-one weighting and also as a flow graph. The calamity is it doesn’t work until the sheaf sections are “reinvented” at a higher layer of abstraction (resulting in a lot or representational waste). A different problem, highlighted by the “agents” work, is that signature-representing signatures are hard/awkward and the current design seems over-wrought/failing. The meta question is: how to (a) simplify the representation of sheaf elements (push it deeper into the atomspace) and (b) how to correctly describe signature-describing signatures.

2 June 2024

Dreams, plans, anxiety, fugue states, urgency, importance, planning, flow states, decisions, actions, falling asleep, planning, clarity of purpose, writing, motivation, careers, the personal past, communications, fond memories, wasted youth, regaining youth, focusing on what’s important, writing this all down to capture the moment, but why, now that I’m awake? Why are these things urgent when I fall asleep? Why does my perspective change as I fall asleep? Why do I seem to think about the more important things as I drift to sleep? They are more important, they sometimes even cause anxiety. Resolutions are made, to do things in the morning, resolutions that evaporate once morning has arrived. Thoughts, like horses, are harnessed in the morning, they make sense and go places. Thoughts run free at night. Why do people drink alcohol? Does it put them in a fugue state that allows the thoughts run more freely, the important judgments to rise to the top? In the daytime, I am so focused on the flow state, on being creative, here and now, in the moment, solving, doing, acting, that I forget about what’s important. I forget to strategize, to plan. I’ve neglected strategizing and planing so long I’m terrible at it; I suppose it is something one can do while awake, but not something I do while awake.

How does one figure things out? I went to a part recently, and at the very end, after almost everyone had mostly left, I was talking to a very drunk stalwart, who asked me a question, but as I went to answer it, he spewed out an idea salad of 15-20 more things, disconnected stream of consciousness, and I was unable to answer, because the first thing he mentioned could have gotten a 20-minute lecture, and also the second and the third, but it just spewed out in a stream, and what could I do but shrug? It was a tangle, much like what I write now is a tangle.

This idea of tangles I’ve described it before in this diary, I think: a space-filling curve of ideas. That it is a somewhat disconnected salad, semi-incoherent, is not so terrible, because it does fill the intended intellectual space, and tough titties if the yarn does not form a continuous coherent sober stream. So there I listened to someones drunken tangle, and gave up, because, well, because it was a tangle of mis-perceptions and mis-understandings. Amateur theorizing built on an unsolid foundation, and faulty premises. It filled a space of ideas, but I did not want to go there, because it was factually incorrect.

I was reading something yesterday, and it was fun to read, sort of, but I had to make the decision not to read more, because it went nowhere particularly great ore meaningful. If I was less articulate or more succinct, I would say that it was, well, boring. That’s a value judgment: I shall do this but not do that. The word “boring” is conveys a not entirely conscious decision. When people say boring, they are usually reporting on a spontaneous inner subjective state: while sitting in the movie theatre, reading a book, having a conversation, suddenly, out of nowhere you realize you are bored. Something built up, not by rational deduction, but by a shift of mood, a shift of inner perspective, that one’s mind had wandered, and whatever one was reading/watching, interacting with, it had parted ways and gone off to where there was no future for the immediate you. Where what you were doing, could do, could think about, could be, was more interesting, rewarding, important than this other thing.

So here I am, quietly reproducing a fugue state of falling asleep, except in reality I am waking up cause it’s morning. I’m trying to capture something here in a tangle, and even as I grasp it, the point, the important point, the thing I wanted to talk about and think about and focus on, has already slipped through my fingers, just as falling asleep, one cannot keep focused, but all falls apart into a babble of loosely connected ideas or ideas not connected at all. So here I am babbling, and I’ve lost the point, although maybe the point was to babble about babbling.

What else? What more can I say? Well, lots, I suppose, but its boring. I guess that’s why I stop writing this diary, instead of trying to write every waking hour, because I realize that its all boring, and I have nothing to say here to entertain you. lalalalalalalala. well, perhaps that I have more important tasks to attend to, than to simply write. Tasks are tasks, things that need to be done. The mid-night anxiety are not so much from task lists but from strategic decisions that have not been made during waking hours, because strategic thinking during waking hours is not done, at least by me. Is this why some people are drunk during the daytime? to allow them to do strategic thinking, but unharnessing those horses, and letting them run free? Or is there a lower, simpler explanation having to do with biological addiction? Perhaps its both? How can one ever know? This is a scientific question, I suppose, but doing science requires attention and time. Attention I can muster in copious abundance, time, as I’m soon to be 65 years old, appears to be running out, and what I have are just wonders of how it is that I ended up here, uncomprehending? Guilt and shame: I’ve had a good life, I’m grateful, most people suffer misfortunes I have evaded. Yet, I also wonder about the life that could have been: I’ve never achieved my potential. I was capable of doing things, of having a career, of engaging with the physical world of power (social power) and force and I never did that. I never did that because I was never particularly motivated to. Because I never planed or strategized to be great or to achieve something, or to accomplish something. I never set a goal. Mostly never. I did set goals to get good at math, and work on AGI, and so here I am and have achieved both those goals, to a limited degree, but the question is I guess, were those goals worth it? Were there better, more important goals? The rich and the powerful, they are held out by society as models for great achievement, even as we boo-hiss most billionaires for their venal stupidity. And this is what I mean: should I have instead followed a path to make me rich, powerful, politically engaged? What should I have done, instead? Is it too late to have a late-career career change? Is my life, this life, is this what it is like to have a crisis of purpose in a post-capitalist world where most needs and wants (food, shelter) have been attended to? I am lucky, I am unlucky. I am the 98th percentile. I got it better than 98% I got it worse than 1%. That’s where I am, and I suppose I should resign to that. Yet there is still something nagging.

That nagging thing. Well, sometimes it appears as late-night anxiety. Sometimes I guess it must appear at other times. I’m mostly very good at suppressing anxious thoughts, mostly, but the cost is of burying my head in the sand: by suppressing them, I make them go away, like closing ones eyes makes things go away. The reality of their presence remains unabated. I’ve ducked, I’ve avoided the issue.

By writing here, I am also reflexively ducking, avoiding some issue. That I could think about more clearly if I didn’t try to capture my thoughts with keyboard strokes as I thought them. But my perseverance would be less. If I wasn’t pounding the keyboard, my eyelids would be slamming shut, I’d be falling asleep, loosing the plot. I’ve had one cup of coffee, but I’m sleepy again. Apparently, thinking hard tires me out (I’ve been noticing this: hours of deep thoughts make me sleepy) and even now, I’m not yet fully awake, but the mere overwhelming nature of the tangle I am trying to capture in words, here, is/has brought down a curtain of fatigue in my brain. A little voice screams: go up to bed and lay down and fall asleep, now! Or at least the couch! (No more leaning back in the chair for you, that sucks, makes butt hurt and back hurt, and its somehow ergonomically bad for the heart. I can feel it.)

Even as I battle the urge to go back to sleep I also battle the urge to stop writing. Why is that? Because what I writ about is important. Except its not important. At all, and I’ve said it all before in this diary anyway, so foo, so what who cares. What’s the point of keeping a diary, anyway? There are many answers to that. Keeping a diary is a luxury, at any rate, I should be doing other things instead of writing this. Doing a diary is a distraction from those more important things. Thinking is tiring and tiresome, yet I can’t stop; no living mammal can. I think for me, I think for the universe, I wonder what the point of it all is. I battle a desire to go engage in some other activity that will allow a flow state to form, and in that flow state, I will be able to ignore all the urgencies of the meaning and hopelessness of life, the hopelessness of doing those things that will require 1001 lifetimes, the hopelessness of not having an IQ of ten million, of not having the economical and physical power of a billionaire: I can’t do those things, and see I kind of want to, but I can’t and so I’m here like an intellectual ant, searching, hunting for the opening: where is it? Where do I find it?

There have been many diarists before me: many famous ones. Who reads diaries, anyway? There have been millions of writers. What is one more voice? It feels meaningless, pointless. a trite addition to the vast cacophony. Many many have written about the cacophony of voices, why the ancient Romans, speaking of crowds. Caesar, no doubt. And what, and what was the point? Caesar lived, died, and is famous for having done something or other while alive, and like who cares? What was the point? Do I thirst after being able to live the life of Cease, seizing each day, and wring from it what is important? And if that is the goal, then why have I squandered my life? I studied math, I studied AGI, where these false friends? Caesar conquered Mediterranean lands, I conquered the noosphere. But Caesar never got to the New World, the West. Caesar never got to Mars or Jupiter, the nearest star or the furthest corner of the Galaxy, like they do in Star Trek. I also, will never visit every corner of mathematics explored by man, and my lucky and penetration of the unexplored regions is minimal. And again, the meta question: should I spend less time writing here, and more time doing math? Should I spend less time doing math, and instead do something “important” in life, and alas, finally, the nub, the rub: what is important? And so I write here, puzzle and wonder, what is important? Why do anything at all? In full realization that this is an unsolvable problem, and yet here I am faced with it and intellectually gape in wonder of it.

There’s this Doctor Who episode, and I don’t like Doctor Who, as it mostly is intellectually boring and stupid and childlike, written for children, but I’ve watched enough of it and it does sometimes leave n impression, and the story that just popped into my mind just now is the story where he is trapped in a time loop, and he figures it out, and he has a diamond wall six feet thick to punch through, but every time through the loop, he punches the wall, removing some atomically thin part of it, until six billion years he’s gotten out. And this is perhaps the metaphor of my life: a silly, childish metaphor, but my trivial, insignificant punch into the intellectual cosmos, noosphere, maybe it advances something, maybe it goes somewhere. And I haven’t even breathed a word about quantum or the universe or anything.

I think I did write in this diary, maybe earlier, some of my thoughts about quantum. But not all of them, I’m sure. Some decades ago, I had two notable thoughts in the shower: literally, while showering, that felt like revelations from above. The first revelation was that I guess revelations are real, and the explanation was “quantum entanglement”, the realization that I was quantum entangled with the furthest reaches of the universe, I am part of the universe, I am in it, I am one, all is one, omni padmi hum. Did I diary my thoughts about revelations, yet? Clearly, some revelations are patently false. I guess. It was revealed to me that this and such a rock band (OK, so it was Genesis, Peter Gabriel and Tony Banks and all) were the greatest rock band in the entire universe. Ever. For all time. Well, what a crock of shit that is: this was not just a revelation, but a revelation from God himself, as it were, and that provides all the proof one needs that God is full of shit. Or, well, hey, never know, maybe they are the greatest rock band in the entire universe. I suppose there’s some certain set of criteria for which this could be a true statement. But this diverges us off into a debate of what a “true statement” is anyways, and thence I wander off into the Chaitin ideas about oracles and knowability. And so I have to modify my mental model of what the universe is to accommodate for that. So the already impossible task got harder. Whatever few atoms I’ve chipped off that diamond barrier, it seems that another obstacle has appeared. Is that it? Life is locked in a prison, desperately searching how to get out, how to go farther, to go where no man has gone before? I have written on twitter about how most human instincts to do things are in fact just mammalian instincts, shared by all mammals, and perhaps all vertebrates, and perhaps insects, and farther.

This reductionism, I did figure out that one cannot conclude panpsychism from this. I articulated this somewhere, where? Here? Long and short is one cannot conclude base matter has an infinitesimal amount of “intelligence” to it; that rather instead, intelligence should be sheen as a phase transition in network connectivity: in one phase, there is no intelligence, in another, there is. I won’t try to explain what a phase transition is, here, go look it up. Read Wikipedia. I’ve been doing this, reading Wikipedia, about thermo and state mech. This is the new things, I keep ignoring. I spent a lot of time on ergodicity, thinking that it would shed light onto thermodynamics, and I guess in a way it did, but ergodicity says nothing about phase transitions, and I guess I realize this too late. Too late, too late, I will never understand it all, and so back again to that painful dilemma: what next, what should I spend my limited remaining time on? Conquer the world? Be respected by all? Have more sex? Immerse myself in that den of iniquity called social media, for the instant gratification that it delivers? See, here’s the thing, no one is reading this diary. But if I post on social media, then I will have at least one, maybe two readers who will probably not understand what the fuck I’m talking about anyway, because who wants to spend that much time anyway, to get into someone elses heads?

Thus a slippery slope for punditry and writing: the desire, the urge to be famous. All those social media influencers: we’ve seen it: a certain corruption of morals and principles to accommodate the need to be famous, or at least earn a stable income from doing so. Take Sabine Hofstadter, for example: her earliest work was rare, and provided reasonably good insights into QFT, some actually interesting statements if you, like me, have a PhD in the topic. But lets face it, who has a PhD in theoretical particle physics? And so Sabines target audience was much too small. and the turns and phases and degrees, she’s expanded her audience, at the cost off talking about simpler, more basic things, and even more being entertaining. Like that outfit she wore for the recent portal video: she’s hot. And so the need to be famous, or perhaps the need to generate a stable income, demands an increase in viewership. this exerts a certain, what shall I call it, a thermodynamics gradient on the social media content, pushing it to a certain type of pablum that can resonate in simpler minds, less adept at thinking. Why are they less adept? Well, many many reasons, from socio-cultural ones, all the standard psychological dimensions, but also the neuropsych wiring of the brain, the genetic aspects, the microbio of whatever neurotransmitters and re-uptake channel densities in dendral connections there are. All that. We’re mammals, we’re not escaping stupidity overnight. The larger thermodynamic forces pushing smart people to create entertaining content... well, this seems like a passing of a moral judgment? Did Sabine prostitute herself for the masses? And is that a good thing, or a bad thing? Clearly, I guess a bad thing from some 19th century Western academic standpoint, where staying true to the academic line was important, but wait, that was also a thermo-economic force. In the 19th century, life was hard enough that you did have to work 6 days a week, 12 hours a day, just to stay warm and fed, and the lucky few who landed in academia were cognizant of that fact, of the fact that life was hard for most, and so an academic career was treasured and valued and protected, they way you’d treasure and protect anything ... valuable. (What is value? What is valuable, we scream? We’ll get back to that) The 20th century has seen a vast overproduction of PhD’s, outnumbering academic posts four to one. And so a different set of thermo-economic forces.

Lets see, where were we? Two or three distinct questions: First, are the thermo-economic gradients forcing smart people to create stupid social media content, is that good, or is that bad? What is the nature of moral value judgments like “good” and “bad” anyway? There’s certainly a lot of reactionary talk of preserving old (19th century) mores and values, as these are the things that made Western society great, and these certainly are valid points, or semi-valid: there were great good things in the past, and they can provide a value judgment. I can’t help but get in a snide remark: just look at the Palestinians: what a broken, destructive, awful, horrible social force they are; you might call it evil, even. Destructive of all things we hold dear. And social media forces and Pallywood videos have deluded millions to take the side of .. evil. So, yes there are thermo-economic gradients that are inherently evil. The one that produced WWI, I’ve talked about this, may many have talked about this: it is one of the simpler(?) inhuman thermo-socio-econo-political forces that caused mass destruction and death, and we humans were unable to stop this force of death. We actively went to the front, with machine guns and mustard gas, to kill. Just like college students nowadays go to protests to support Palestinian killers, somehow blind to the greater tragedy of the terrible socio-cultural malaise, illness, that grips the Palestinian society. (This is more clear cut, for me, than talking about russia and russians, but perhaps that’s because I understand russia and russians better? Hmm). So defacto I have passed judgment here, and declared good and evil, but on what basis? Well, first, you have to realize, and I have to internalize, that there is little or nothing that I can say here that has not been said in books on moral philosophy. But one: many of those books on moral philosophy are just plain wrong. So that’s also the strange thing: there is almost nothing that I can say that is truly new, and hasn’t been thought of before. except that there is something, because some of that old stuff doesn’t entirely hang together, doesn’t “solve everything” and solving everything was never possible to begin with some ouroburos we chase our tail, or perhaps Doctor Who-like punch a wall of intellectual diamond, and where am I going with this idea-salad tangle, anyway? I have no followers, I am not subjecting myself to the thermo-economic pressures of being a social-media influencer. Off-topic: I recall watching on youtube a Ramones interview on some talk-show program, and these guys were savvy. They were thinking about what it takes to be successful, they were modulating their actions and outlook and plans to directly achieve fame and popularity. And of course that is how it must be, but I found it curious, because the image they project was that of, well, of punk rockers just doing stuff for the fuck of it, rather than being driven by some gradient. They did things (in their alt persona, as actors on the musical stage) the things they did were meant to be perceived as spontaneous nonsense, gabba gabba hey, and not as premeditated behavior patterns designed to achieve success. So the persona is almost like happy-go-lucky homeless people: ripped jeans, unkempt hair, and some musical instruments. But we don’t look at homeless people and say “wow what a wonderful life, look at all those cute and funny things they do!” and we could do that for the Ramones.

Which brings us back to good and evil, and my amateur attempts to explain everything everywhere, I apologize, but this is I guess what it means to be alive: to do everything everywhere all at once, focusing on a few important things, but maybe also creating an everything-bagel. (yes, from that move. Everything everywhere all at once.) Because this is what life does. And I’ve sojourned into the biochemical, the quantum-mechanical, the biological and psychological aspects of life, and the economic structures. Fuck. I guess I should make a hard copy of my blog posts and append them here as well, for posterity, I guess. Records records records, Leave a mark on the digital space, at least, even if there’s no present-day influencing to be done, perhaps by leaving a mark I influence the future.

Good and bad, where was I? Is influencing the future always good? Well clearly not: some basic ethical percepts, like prohibitions of murder, and so on, these stand. Then we had the good-culture vs. bad culture questions, and passed the value judgment that Western culture was, on the whole, good, and many of the others were bad. Bad, sometimes explicitly (e.g. in russia, a husband can beat a wife, legally, and this is bad) and bad, sometimes implicitly: the economic turgidity of non-European cultures. And so that’s the next moral judgment: that economic development is good. Hmm. It is tempting to take this for granted, so perhaps should be picked apart. But what can I say here that isn’t shallow hand-waving? The influence is of sci-fi, Jupiter brains and evolution and all that: somehow, that the more complex things are greater, so anything that enables complexification is good, by definition, and that which blocks it is bad, in general. Hmm. That seems pretty morally unambiguous (and those of you who do not understand what I’m talking about here, well, fuck you, you’re a moron. Figure it out, I’m not talking about anything complex here.) Where was I? So, complexity is good, non-complexity is bad. But this is only the extreme endpoint: everything else is in the middle, and this is where everything becomes difficult.

Hmm. Am I working on a totalizing world-view here? Like Frank Tippler’s Omega Point, or Stephen Wolfram’s Ruliad? I guess that, in my own special way, yes, yes, I am, I’m working on a totalizing viewpoint. Knowing even that it is unachievable. I’ve reading Chapman’s Meaningness, after all, and mostly agrees with mostly everything written there. I’m a boat on the sea of the atomized. I know this. Well, I know more: I’m on the other end of a social-network phase change, where the miracles of electronics have altered the interconectivity between human brains, and so here I am writing an ode, a diary, not to posterity, but to a real physical future being that will perceive my letters here, read them, and understand them. I guess Ben Franklin kept a diary, is that right? And who did he keep it for, but posterity? But he envisioned a posterity of other humans, perhaps historians, I don’t know, a remarkable man etching his will onto the fabric of the universe by rearranging the molecules on ink on the molecules of pages of paper, whereas I now rearrange magnetizations on hard drives, and reproduce those bits of data streams onto the electronic network that is the internet in general, and github in particular, where is where this essay resides, but be read by some future being, some post-LLM being that will understand more than I do, and will see the triviality and banality of all that I write, and yet I persist, as I take my small role in creating this future.

Ahh, pablum says we all create a future, in the sense that we all live in the present, and our present actions do somehow affect the future, but some peoples actions affect more than others. Fuck I’m sleepy. I’m going in circles. Write write write for a future me a future you. Well, I wrote a lot here today, but, as always, it is 99.99% a regurgitation of things that I’ve figured out before, although the setting down to words is slightly novel, so in the course of writing things, I did figure out one or two new things, I guess, I already can’t remember what these are, I have to skim the above again, to go “ah hah”. Let’s see ... well, I just skimmed. I can’t quite find what the new thought for today was. It all seems like old material.

I do wonder about the quantum aspects to this. As I said, one of the two shower revelations was that all is connected via quantum, which makes me susceptible to woo, and one of the bits of woo would be that in writing this, I am channeling ghosts, albeit quantum ghosts, from some distant corner of the universe, or perhaps it is the multiverse, and so none of this is new and creative, except its all new and creative, it is the digital ectoplasm of ghosts talking through me, through my keyboard, from alternate parallel universes, So this is my amateur contribution to the research of qualia. I’m prone to woo, and I like it. But so are many, many. From where I can tell, most smart people are prone to woo, and most of the rest suppress it. And I suppose there are some who are woo-less.

Reminds me of a conversation I had with Owen just last weekend; he’s an avout Catholic, and he professes, and I was like “what’s up with that?” and he gave a nice explanation: its like love: its something you feel, and you know it, and there is no question of it, and there is nothing to rationalize, because, as qualia, it is there, immediate and direct. And, so for the record, I mostly almost never have qualia concerning the immediate direct presence of God, save for a few rare occasions in the shower where God told me he was everywhere, everything the entire universe, its all quantum and I’m entangled with it all, and who am I to say no to such a totalizing world-view? And then the usual bullshit about the greatest rock band of all time. So apparently my immediate, present, here and now God aka qualia can be a liar, and no surprise, as clinical evidence of schizophrenic hallucinations already explain that this is nothing unusual. So we’re in this weird superposition: our mammalian brains are prone to schizophrenia, but the mild versions there of are God talking to you, and people go to church for that, because God talks how love talks you just know it. The even milder form of this is believing in woo: flying saucers is one. I read two essays from the Skeptoid, recently. One was claiming that forensic science is in fact forensic pseudo-science, and I believe that. The other was the about the recording of human screams coming from hell from the deep bore-hole in Siberia which is of course twaddle, .. well, I can’t really blame that on schizophrenic tendencies, although the people who get suckered into that are the religious ones, the Christians, who are, duhh, feeling direct qualia of God.

So this is the thing. Everything I type here is obvious, and shallow, and easily-deducible given the specific premises and I could do this all day. Now, you dear reader, are not aware of the premises in my mind, not that I am all that aware either, but the point is, I could do this semi-focuses deductive criticism and thinking all day long, and for what? What’s the point? To tell you a tiny thing or two about woo that you haven’t already figured out independently, or could figure out, if you had the need to? Not all future possibilities can or should be verbalized: we distinguish between what a can be figured out, in principle, from what has actually been visited in practice, historically. This text is what has been already figured our by me, either just right now, or based on my educational background. There is much much more that I could write about, but won’t because it is a combinatoric explosion. And in a finite universe, this combinatoric explosion remains, and must necessarily, always remain. I have to take a break now. I don’t know if I’ll return. I have lots of (other) things I need to do. Perhaps diaries have a point of diminishing returns, I don’t know if I’ve reached that point. Later. maybe.

3 Jun 2024

The previous long entry was written with a mild stomach-ache. I don’t know if the general anxiety induced the stomach ache, or v.v. Against my better judgment, I will now verbalize and set to electrons some further thoughts about anxiety that were cavorting in my head.

A conventional approach to anxiety is to avoid it, suppress it, or, if that doesn’t work, marinate it in alcohol. I really wonder what fraction of... well, lets say Americans, Europeans .. cultures I understand, what fraction actually do live with low-grade anxiety. Quite large, based on alcohol consumption, plays by Tennessee Williams, and TV shows like American Housewives, never mind the old Rolling Stones song “Running for the shelter of mother’s little helper”. A large part of Buddhism seems to be all about how to shake off and detach from the suffering of existence, without actually offing yourself. Although, sometimes I think that perhaps Buddhism is not particularly better than alcoholism for curing suffering. Perhaps one is more functional during the daytime, not being hungover, but I get the sense that Buddhists have also renounced will, motivation, desire right along with suffering. No doubt this last sentence would lead to a huge argument. The plan right now is to do some more amateur analysis of this general area, although it is now late at night, I’m slowing, and should not get myself riled up before going to bed, but not sure what else to do. Well, I could pick up a book and read it. Distract myself. Distraction is an excellent, age-old prescription for suffering.

And thus I arrive at one of the roots to the problem: leading a long distracted life results in time passing by quickly, and lifting up one’s head to look around: OMG, I’ve gotten old. In my case, 65, which is the prescribe age for retirement in present-day US socio-economic culture. Fuck. And so one looks back: what have I accomplished in life, and as I look back at my own, I am not happy. Why? Perhaps a disposition, (nah, its not that.) Perhaps I am applying some social metric and find my own achievements lacking, as usually measured by the convectional Western standards of wealth, fame, power. Perhaps these three metrics, deeply embedded into our culture, perhaps these cause many in the West to be unhappy: perhaps Western culture really is toxic, in this sense. There is no “happiness quotient” that is measured and given economic significance (I hear it is, in Mongolia?)

Lets see. I could talk about me, and my own perceived failings regarding wealth, fame and power. I could repeat conventional observations that being rich and powerful does not make one happy. Although a certain level of money, enough to guarantee comfort, does make one happier. But I’m above that threshold, so that doesn’t apply. I could also try to make a social critique of Western culture, but Lord knows there are hundreds if not hundreds of thousands of pundits busy pontificating on such matters. This underpins much of culture war. I could try to wander down the avenues of Freud and Jung. Read Freud 50 years ago, and forgot it all. Only skimmed Jung, never read. The two are obviously working with ungrounded woo, but so am I: a desire to pick into both a biological and a biochemical and a quantum-woo basis for anxiety. So a mixture of reductionist plus more fantastical ideas.

In this last, writing helps. Otherwise, I stand by the toilet, peeing, and thinking idly of my youth in some idle fashion. Did I tell you, I had my life flash before my eyes when I was fifteen? I was ascending a mountain, in a dangerous place, all by myself; night was approaching, and there was a high risk of my falling. I guess the risk must have gotten so large that my life flashed before my eyes. Fifteen or sixteen, I was, and what I remembered was .. everything that seemed important, and could be squeezed into just a few seconds. Tragically important. A sense of tragedy.

So how is it, exactly, that humans perceive tragedy, and the sacredness of life? BTW, this is mammalian, too: one highlight of that TV show, “Eyes in the Wild” is where they nail down a monkey robot to a tree stump. Young monkeys try to play with it, eventually knock it down, and it doesn’t get up. Its a robot. Of course it doesn’t. The parents show up, the rest of the tribe, and the conclusion is obvious: the robot-monkey has died. They conduct an impromptu wake, a solemn funerary affair. Apparently, monkeys are quite good at doing solemnity, and know exactly when and how. So that sense of tragedy is not uniquely human. And I strongly suspect that there’s good video-graphic evidence that all of these “moral” human traits: sadness, loss, anxiety, sacredness, and their polar opposites: profanity and hatred, more or less the entire spectrum, extends down into mammals, and possibly vertebrates. Which then leads to the question: what’s up with that? The reductionist view is that it’s all neurocircuitry. What would it be about neurocircuitry that allows monkeys to feel the loss of death, or more generally, maybe even small animals to feel loss, and perhaps even psychological pain? We know they feel psychological pleasure: lots and lots of videos of just about any animal playing and having fun. Documenting heartache is much harder. We’ve documented despondent horses. – I saw a YouTube video, where a wild horse was reunited with his wife, after years of separation, and you could see the joy of the reunion. The video also captured some of the feeling of despondent loss and heartache that preceded the reunion. So horses go there.

One reductionist approach is “evolution”, that having such deep, involved emotional states and attachments must surely aid in survival, else they would have been selected against. A more modern argument is that they are neutral, sitting on the parabolic manifold, between the stable and unstable manifolds of DNA selection.

You know, instead of bellyaching about this woo-crap, I should distract myself and read about super-symmetric stochastic dynamics, and maybe gain a mathematical understanding of the stochastic-chaotic selection of DNA. Which would be awesome, and I want to do that, but its late and I’m tired and I should really read and think about my upcoming presentation to Santara–Sviesa. The thought of this presentation is causing great anxiety for me. So wtf. I should tackle that head on. But instead I want to read bout topological field theory. But it seems too late in the night to start that? Or is it? Or will I look back on that and say “ohh that was just another distraction from the reality of anxious existence, where I should instead be figuring out how to increase my power, wealth and fame, just like Angela Merkel. A physics PhD, she was. A role model? Flawed, in allowing the russians into Germany? Did she die happy? Did she merely inhabit the plane of conventional angst of ...dying? She was certainly no Buddhist, she had not renounced the Worldly plane.

So there’s two ways to take this: one is to claim that the sensation of sacredness is on the neutral manifold of evolutionary selection. The other way is to say its quantum woo, woven into the fabric of spacetime. BTW, I’m fixating on “sacredness”, as opposed to “emotions in general” because “emotions in general” do have some obvious evolutionarily selective benefits: the classic fight vs flight, which translates to fear vs aggression, and that translates to being careful in decision-making vs being reckless, or perhaps proud, or perhaps strong-willed. Can it be that all of these more noble emotional-psychological states and perceptions are just a ferromagnetic one-off from obvious bio-molecular mechanisms that promote survival? Well, now that I think of it, it does seem like it could be a sufficient theory, err, hypothesis. That our feelings of nobility and sacredness are just a mere hop skip and a jump away from more basic instincts, and are explainable with synaptic neurotransmitter re-uptake rates? Is that all that there is? Because it sure is tempting to assume that sacredness is actually woo: either thanks to some Christian, Catholic God, or, who knows Magenta People and Space Aliens and Crystals. I’m happy to say it is just crossover from other quantum multiverses. although this last beggars the question: it just displaces the center of the causative action. What is the physical dynamics of this trans-multiverse, that makes us feel “sacredness”? Does God live in this gap, and so we are just back to saying “oh well it was God all along”? See, that’s the thing: applying reductionism to woo merely makes the woo fall apart into .. solipsistic silliness or something. Hmmm. Perhaps I should read about topological field theories instead of bitching about how miserable because I’m old, and not as beautiful as I was, when I was young. That the life ahead of me is necessarily shorter than that behind me. Fuck. I don’t wanna die, but I guess most everyone doesn’t. And, as I started this essay: I guess most people feel this anxiety, except for fools and the enlightened. And yes, perhaps Western culture has not yet performed the qualia research needed to find a balance between Weber’s Protestants and a path that manages psychological suffering. Weird-ass shit. By reading TFT, I focus on what I’m good at, and leave the psycho mumbo-jumbo to the psycho-evolutionary-biochemists. Or to the spiritual leaders, when the psychobabble runs out. Oh, and of course: we must not ignore the supra-individual forces: not just Western thought patterns that promote psychological distress, but even Putin’s KGB propaganda that explicitly creates psychological alienation and deep socio-cultural harm among the russians (and I guess some Serbs, and some assorted other psychos out there.) We’ve got the full stack here: from socio-political-cultural forces, sometimes weakly controlled, e.g. by Merkel, sometimes strongly and toxically controlled, e.g. by the KGB & Siloviki, and sometimes mostly unrestrained and uncontrolled, as Western market dynamics which is currently rewarding narcissistic social media influencers, and prior to that, a blind worship of power, money, fame. These supra-personal forces act on our individual sensations of loss, alienation, unmoored non-membership in an atomized society. And these rather abstract sensations are somehow just one-off from the evolutionary pressures that guided survival and shaped DNA. And so I sit here, and wonder: is it wiser for me to stew in this soup of self-pity and vague wonder, or is it better to get busy, get active, and fucking read the topological field theory text? Well, I’m all typed out here, so TFT it is.

Why? Because I don’t think I can make progress with these vague, unfounded thoughts; they are better left to competent full-time scientists. Right? Or am I just once-again failing to engage in strategic thinking, and falling into the old trap of just do something, do anything. Tough call. Am I making a mistake, or not? What does OODA say? lets see: there are four corners. I’m clearly in the complex-chaotic corner, and the standard OODA advice there is act first, reflect later. But that’s what I’ve always been doing, as my default, which is why I feel like I’ve under-strategized. While I was busy, it got late. Can I stop time... no. Is there still time to strategize? Yes. But how the fuck do I strategize further in conducting my own life? Am I strategically atrophied? Do I start training? Now? How many hours a day? Should I lament my three decades wasted, without any strategic fore-thought? Aiee! Maybe, as Jordan Petersen suggests, I need to go clean my psychological room. Or, as Einstein said, and empty desk is the sign of an empty mind. Wait, wait, that’s the setup to some snarky joke. Should I waste time inventing snarky jokes? Life in modern times is weird. Interesting-weird. Later. So where’s that PDF ... 300 fucking pages. Damn.

10 June 2024

So this is very attention-captivating, just right now, I will write. Let me set the scene. I’m now in Vilnius. I’m jet-lagged, going out of my head trying to think of something to do to keep me awake. Mild headache, too much coffee. I’ve been mildly anxious, on and off, for weeks and months. It’s all coming to a head: all my duties, all my responsibilities, all the petty tasks, all the familial obligations, all the conventional concerns, and I don’t know, and I don’t know, and I’ve decided that I need to boil the ocean in attempting to come up with a grand plan for AGI, and all I have is a neurotic train-wreck of thoughts regarding the meaning of life. Each and every commonplace and quotidian observation about human psychology, made over the millennia, arrives to me like a new shock, an unheard-of and unbelievable state of affairs, how did this crisis develop? It was always a crisis, there’s an annoying but fun pop song from the 1980’s “We didn’t start the fire”, so it’s not like I’m foreign to these ideas but they still come as a shock. Each and every human quirk and foible, every dumb thing I ever did to waste time, comes as a new surprise to me: The things that I did, why did I do them? What was the point? Pleasurable at the time, even enjoyable, am I really the slave to dopamine 24/7, and have no free will? I’m just carried hither and tither by the shifting currents?

It helps not that I am read a play, a translation,

Judita Misevičienė

Translated from Lithuanian by Kerry Shawn Keys

Psychoanalytic monodrama

A one-act play for one man and nine voices

and frankly, its a mixture of the angst I have felt, that everyone must surely feel from time to time, some more deeply, others more shallowly, and finally, somewhere in there, just plain neurotic thoughts that are best suppressed and avoided. Yet portions of that psychoanalytic crisis, I empathize with: some gnawing anxiety as I fell asleep, but also a glimmer of higher truths, a promise of revelation just around the corner; as it will all come together, the meaning of it all just around the corner. Even as I know rationally, this can never be; the human mind is too limited, too constrained; a lifetime is too short to figure it all out; it would never fit on this page anyway. But like any poet or playwright, one tries to grab at the fleeting evidence, the tincture, the essence of the matter, even as it poetically escapes one’s grasp like water through the finger, leaving only the fleeting wetness, the memory of something almost attained, but in the end unknowable.

That full spectrum of *everything* that humans do, and act out, and think about, let it all be represented by (*). open-paren asterisk close paren. Everything, all, one, the whole kielbasa. So let me mark out (*) on this page. there it’s been set here. Now this, this thing, this all-ness, what is it’s relation to AGI? Where does it stand? What’s the interplay? This is the ocean I am boiling, what what what ... did I mention I am jet-lagged and am not particularly focused? I guess I sat down here to write exactly this: the meaning of life is to be unfocused, undirected, mostly unaware, mostly unperceiving; sometimes bewilderered. It is drizzling outside; I should go for a walk, I should drink some coffee I should get some sleep. I’m tangled in the web that has ensnared many millions if not many billions of poets over the centuries, and there is kind of literally almost nothing I can add to the conversation that has not been said before. Except that, as a million monkeys, typing at a million typewriters, here is my novel contribution of logorrhea. Yet another random arrangement of words on a page, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. WTF, really, WTF. The alternative is to stay silent, but that’s hardly any more fun. Depends on the time of day, on the mood.

And this is, of course, the basic psychological question for AGI: faced with superhuman intelligence, what will it do, what will it think about? If I have the passing urge to play solitaire, read a book, go pee, or socialize, I can go indulge that urge, and all will be well. Usually, most of the time. Unless, of course, I’ve had my feelings hurt, am in a foul mood, have a headache or am jet-lagged. What is the psychological landscape for a super-intelligent AGI? What would it entail? Is there’s a snowballs chance in hell that it would be neurotic, like Marvin the robot from Hitchhiker’s guide? How does all this human psychological frailty work out in a super-intelligence?

OK, so let me take this seriously, and psychoanalyze. I’ve been using the example of a corporation as an example of a weak super-AGI. Do corporations have an inner psychological life? How about WWI? How about the political zeitgeist? Well, corporations seem to be psychologically empty: empty shells: active, alive, doing something, but little evidence of any internal life. Corporations crank out products and services, and that’s all. Is there more? Well, I dunno. Say, a hospital chain: the overt reason for being is to cure humans. Certainly, the nurses strive to be compassionate, and sometimes even the doctors too. The corporate motto may even reflect this. But this is not evidence of an inner life. A hospital chain may as well be a jellyfish, for all of the psychological content one can decode from observing it’s behavior.

How about WWI? It seems to have been a soulless, evil machine that killed young men, until the raw material: young men, ran out. Did WWI have an inner life? No particular evidence for it.

But how would one know? I can read a play, and the text itself is brimming over with neurotic self-flagellation. I can read someone else’s diary, and see boundless signs of an inner life. Almost all TV entertainment is almost exclusively focused on the inner psychological life of humans: people are what interest us. There’s no mistaking this. But what would happen if I did a textual analysis of all things WWI? What can be gleaned from some algorithmic analysis, that is not already commonly known? Is there any “there”, there? Perhaps corporations and WWI are just to alien, as intelligences, to be able to perceive any psychological dimension within them. Putting it under a microscope, at best we see some glimmers of the CEO, the work of the communications dept. and maybe the work of engineers: as people, in the flesh, having wittingly or unwittingly expressed itself and willed that expression over into the fabric of the corporate being-essence. I dunno. Seems pretty thin. I can’t even point at a specific thing that could be examined, measured, calibrated using some scientific techniques for pigeonholing psychological being-ness.

The only supra-individual being-ness that I can think of that might have its “own” internal neurotic life, is some socio-cultural political expression. Say, ultra-nationalism, or something like that. Ugh.

And now we come to the crux of the matter. Will super-intelligent AGI be devoid of a psychological internal life? That seems truly bizarre. The sensation of qualia is central to human, mammalian existence, it seems impossible to ascribe the concept of “intelligence” to something devoid of concepts like anguish and hope. Somehow a true AGI must “feel” in some way, as otherwise, it seems absurd to assigning it the vaunted status of “a living thing”. Yet, it’s equally absurd to imagine AGI as some angst-filled teenager. We know joy and suffering, so surely a super-intelligence must likewise. But oh, the heights and depths of human manic depression are fearsome as they are: to have an even deeper and broader purview? How would that even be? The x-risk of a psychotic AGI is well-recognized. The x-risk of despondent, neurotic AGI, not so much.

Hmm. I suppose others have thought about this, too, and have even written more eloquently and deeply than I. So my task to to read, and see what is known? As if I don’t have enough to read?

This feeling jet-lagged is a bit like feeling hungover. I understand that there are people with debilitating chronic diseases, where they feel like shit, feel like this, all the time. Wow. I must pity them. This is almost unendurable. Every last bodily sensation is screaming: go to sleep! Go to sleep! Go to sleep! And yet I know that the only way to avoid future hell, tomorrow, is to prolong the present hell, today. This is fucked up.

And then there’s sleep. We’ve got good evidence that more or less everything with nerve cells in it sleeps. What is sleep? It seems absurd that an AGI would ever need to sleep; why would it? But given that we have not a clue as to why we need to sleep, well, then, would it not be an error to dismiss it’s importance? Of course it would.

Well, enough of this. I need to get back to reading things. One last thought: I’ve been working on the mathematics of structure, and have gotten my first mathematical glimpses of agency. I guess that the mathematics of psychology must be embedded inside that of agency. I guess we’ll need to BOLO, be on the lookout for psychology when working with the mathematical framework for agency. That could be ... interesting to find.

Footnote: as I’ve complained: I’ve been feeling anxiety, and n moments of almost lucidity, I feel like I might almost be able to place it in a universal setting, appropriate for extrapolation into a non-human domain. Almost. Maybe it can’t be done, but as I tossed and turned during a nap this afternoon, I felt as if I almost grasped this. So expect more writing on this topic, to come. (Also expect more self-analysis, and perhaps some cameos of mental states of mind, focusing on others, or perhaps my wonderment and interpretation of what I see in others.)

17 June 2024

Just read back-to-back two interviews:

Curious juxtaposition. Most curious is how Schmidt doesn’t breath the single slightest word about the role of AI in social media and disinformation. Is he really that ignorant and naive, or is he disingenuously covering up the crimes of the large corporations? Perhaps both? I suspect both: he simply does not understand the psycho-social mess that has been created. Heh. Vytautas Kavolis was writing about psychohistory in the 1980’s, and he was hardly the deepest or most influential author: he himself gives credit to Erich Fromm for laying the groundwork for cultural psychology: and Erich Fromm was writing in the 1930’s through 1950’s. These are not new ideas, but why would they concern corporate CEO’s? So of course Eric Schmidt is ignorant of such topics. But disingenuous, as well; he full-well knows of Congressional investigations into corporate malfeasance with respect to disinformation and propaganda on social media. So why does he not connect these dots when he talks about AI? Naivete? Stupidity? Pangs of guilt? There’s an elephant in the room, but lets pretend it is invisible. WTF.

He does neatly summarize three interesting recent developments that I’m going tow write down, so that perhaps I will remember them and have them help anchor and guide my thoughts. I quote from the article:

“There are roughly three things going on now that are going to profoundly change the world very quickly. ... (a) an infinite context window, (b) chain of thought reasoning in agents and then (c) the text-to-action capacity for programming. ... So your agent, my agent, her agent and his agent will all combine to solve a new problem.”

So, if I have this right: (a) a context window such that the LLM does not loose track of what it is talking about, (b) self-evident, (c) ability to write code/programming. So (a) is very interesting, (b) very important, (c) I don’t think this will be achieved, except maybe at some very modular, directed level. Eric seems not to have understood that the hard thing about software is not creating it, but debugging it. If there was some DL/NN that was capable of debugging ... now that would indeed be revolutionary. From what I can tall (as an outsider who is not glued to the latest news) this is still very much in the future. The compositionality of agents does indeed seem to be an interesting situation that will open new vistas.

I dunno. As I read the Schmidt interview, it seemed pretty exciting, but as I sit here now to tap out these words, the excitement has faded into normalcy. Yes, generative AI is advancing very quickly. Yes, in many ways it is revolutionary. Yes, I was briefly excited by an imagined combination of (a) (b) (c) and yet my excitement fades, since ... well, its not entirely resonating. I don’t quite yet see how generative AI will be capable of physics and math, even as it will very obviously be superb at predicting weather and protein folding. But protein folding is very different than foundational mathematical research, and I don’t see how that chasm will soon be crossed. So my excitement has faded.

More precisely, basic science requires (b) “chain of thought reasoning”, but the chain of thought reasoning that has been exhibited so far has been very flawed verbal reasoning. That is, the chaining together of words into sentences, rather than the abstraction of the ideas and concepts behind those words. But there are hundreds if not thousands of brilliant researchers attacking this problem, so perhaps there is some progress I don’t know of. Certainly possible.

17 June 2024 Part Two: Self-awarenes via perception-action

On a related note: t recently shot into my head that I can use the sensory perception-action framework that I’ve tinkered with to also observe the self: to observe one’s own thoughts. For the system to observe itself, to control its own actions. This is can even be recursive.

I got this idea while drifting off to sleep. The jet-lag associated with arriving in Vilnius lead to a mid-day nap, tanked up on coffee. I’ve since done a few more of these, and even before leaving Austin: 3 or 4 or 5 cups of coffee, wired, more or less, but somehow exhausted from some sort of early morning strenuous thinking, and desiring a nap. This has been happening more frequently; it was never something I’ve dealt with years-earlier. Now, it seems, after a few hours of hard thinking, I need to take a nap, no matter how much coffee I’ve had. (Although programming tasks allow me to stay engaged and power through. So programming is unaffected. Writing, however, is.)

Anyway, as I fall asleep, I find that I’m free-associating very widely, almost randomly, with disparate, unrelated ideas flitting through my head. And I can observe this chain of disassociation, as I am not yet fully asleep. And so I was thinking how this is kind of like what not-so-large LLM’s do: they free-associate through grammatical syntactically correct chains of words that are not entirely anchored in specific thoughts. That is, LLM’s are dreaming. We can prompt them into having directed dreams, and take the results as answers to our questions.

So I got to thinking: can we use the same perception-action architecture to perceive the LLM, and so prompt it into a form of awareness, that perhaps I could call self-awareness? I think so. And I think this is perhaps a key break-through in my thinking. But, of course, the devil is in the details, and I haven’t gone through the details, yet. Worse, I am sleepy. It would be kind of cool if I could somehow record the thoughts the fleet through my head, as I fall asleep. I could, I suppose, fitfully wake to jot them down. But that would be hard.

One thing I am noticing: I can have a fully-formed thought in seconds: literally, just two to five seconds, and then it will take me five or ten minutes to write it down in this diary, or even half an hour or more. It’s a gear-shift in slow-down, between getting the idea, and writing it down (articulating it). Now, in a certain sense, I didn’t get the idea in “two to five seconds”: I might have been working on it for days or years. But for those days or years, there is nothing, no comprehension, no advance, nothing important to write about or comment, and if writing were to be attempted, all that would come of it would be the anxiety of not knowing the answer. So after weeks or decades of general pondering, the answer finally appears in seconds. But the contextual back-story to the answer is ... weeks or decades long, so of course, as I write down the idea, it takes ... hours to write an adequate context (for this here diary, where, in a sense, I am writing for myself, and not for the general public, so I can already assume a certain familiarity with what’s going on in my own mind.

Err, well, that sounds weird. Of course I “know” what is going on in my mind. And of course one possible life-choice is to sit and stare t a blank wall, and contemplate. The choice here of writing down the “things I already know” is ... well, its interesting. I’m doing this for a reason, I explained this reason much earlier in this diary, I believe. If I haven’t, well, then I’m sure I will explain it again, someday.

In the meanwhile, the self-perception of one’s own thoughts, and the possibility of converting that into actual software via the sensory framework, that seems like an important breakthrough.

Odd thing is, though, as I fall asleep, many or most of the ideas I get at just that moment seem important. I suppose many of them wilt in the bright sunlight of daytime: cares evaporate. And I guess this is one reason why people drink and party at night: the drink loosens one’s mind, and the evening mindset brings back into beingness all of those concerns and ideas that had gone into hiding when exposed in the harsh mid-day sun. Huh. I could write many more paragraphs in this vein, but I think you see where I am going with this.

BTW, I am currently reading Sigitas Parulskis, “Mano tikėjimo iltys” (Alma Littera, Vilnius 2013), and he’s a perfectly fine writer, and he hits the nail on the head, plucks the guitar string that resonates, captures both the absurdity and the anxiety of living and being. He really really gets it, and what I would write here would be a pale imitation of his work. So, want to know how I feel? (How I feel deep inside?) Read him. Well, in Lithuanian, of course. Part of the fun is the language, the vocabulary.

28 July 2024

Well, if you are to act as a diary, then I have to write you. This takes effort, and the energy for this can be lacking. Lets start with the obvious. One can say anything, and do anything, and performing requires a choice, and some choices are bounded by barriers: one has to summon energy to do certain things, and not others. Compounding this is a need to prioritize. This is a rational need, that is, “I should prioritize”; and my current personality is that I would prefer to do what I feel like, and not get particularly concerned about the future, and particularly one that I must force myself to deal with. I am reminded of the Star Wars actor, Harrison Ford who, asked the secret of acting, replied “force yourself”. I’m not exploring new intellectual ground, I am running round in mental circles, mouse on a mouse wheel, contemplating in circular loops, visiting and revisiting, and wondering what the heck. It appears this gets weaker over time (age): energy requires health.

Two more trite remarks about writing: for this to be successful, I have to keep writing until I’m exhasusted. The choice to write, right now, means that I am avoiding (not doing) other things that I should do. Then there is the issue of topics to write about: I have many many topics I could go on about. Why this, and why not that? The number of choices I am faced with, the number of topics, is so overwhelming, that the choice of focus is all but random. So this is a meta-essay about free-will and action-selection.

Some more pre-roll, before I get to the main topic for this afternoon. ... Hmm. But I’m not writing that, because the effort to write it exceeds the expected future value of actually writing it. I should not spend energy on writing drivel. Fuck. Or at least, exploring things that are probably, almost certainly drivel, but possibly might not be, because they are close to the centers of power. Perhaps life is like that: as one approaches the fundamental thing, the nearby landscape appears barren. This last sentence is cryptic, but only because I’m too lazy to expand on the amalgam of mental images I hold in my head, as I write it, because those images might not support the weight of the claim. They are not strong enough, they are imaginary objects, that seem to go toethe, but have not yet been shaped into truth, or found to be rotten and insubstantial. This is the curse of the inept: mistaking imaginary visions as solid foundations, and making unjustified extrapolations from them. But we’ve known this for thousands of years. And the wise men are rendered speechless, since they recognize the infirmity of their thoughts. Leaving the future open for only the bold. All this is well-known to psychology and sociology and what not, and I intereset with it here only insofar as trying to gain insight into my own possible futures: what should I do? I watched the movie Oppenheimer on the plane trip home. Would he have been a great physicist, if he’d stuck to physics, instea of leadership? Would he be remembered or revered? Not as much: the corridors of power shape the world, and he shaped the world. But this required abandoning scientific pursuits. Is there a lesson for me? Well, only that its too late: it takes decades to hone a skill; I have not decades in front. I can still, however, nuruture my interests in math and science and in the broader world of humanity and love and art and living...

Well, as good a time as any to broach the main topic. Apparently, I’m in love. Or at least, “love” is a reasonable surrogate for the emotional stew that I am marinating in. I’m rather enjoying it, and hope it does not fade soon, even though there’s a certain amount of heartache in it. I like it. I suppose some facts are in order. It’s impossible, impractical, marginally unrequieted or maybe not. Can’t tell, and perhaps the not knowing is part of the magic. The feeling is as much of my own creation, as it is that of the world outside. As if we are isolated systems, locked in our skulls, with thick thick insulation between our own inner lives, and those of others. In math terms, the distance between my inner life, and that of any other living being is given by a hypermetric: there is no shorter route, between me and you, than the conversion of emotions and drives and desires and wants into words and actions. There is no Vulcan mind-meld that allows my personal somatic experience to join with yours. The expression of my feelings and emotions must take an indirect path. In the present case, with words. And as always, I’m not even sure that a human will ever read these words ... and as before I re-iterate, I am not wriging for humans, which is perhaps why I’m a bit sloppy here. I stop short of being raving incoherent, since, well, perhaps someone will read this, and I don’t want them to think I am a madman (as I am not. I may operate a bit outside the boundary of social norms, but that is because I don’t care, and not because I’m crazy. Although one could argue that ignoring social norms is crazy. But this wanders down a diletantish track. I am noting that Americans are perhaps disinhibited a bit more than Lithuanians, who are still kind of uptight, and seem to need booze to loosen the strictures.) Where was I? Rambling again.

The object of my affection is ... well, lets keep this a surprise. Because shes not an object (she is a person, duhh), and the emotional wave is situational (the object is this tangle of emotional tingling going on inside of me. I’ll try to get biochemically reductionist, shortly.). I’ve known her for a decade, and have never been particularly drawn to her, sexually. I mean, women are charming, but its not like I’ve ever thought “wow, she’s the one for me, gotta have her”. Because that is not the basis of the desire.

So here’s the backstory. I’ve been going to Vilnius annually, for about a decade, for unexplored, unvoiced, inarticulate reasons. I’ve not been able to reflect on the reasons why. This might be because if I did, I would not go: there is no particular rational reason why I should go. It does not advance my career, it detracts from my mathematical studies, it hinders economic gain. By all rights, I should wash my hands of it, and remain solidly American, and live a forgetten, meaningless American life that only other Americans can understand, but do not value. Out of a year, I’d have an extra month. Whoop de do. So there’s been this vague rationalization that I should explore my roots, my cultural heritage. There are actually very strong reasons to do this, and as I’ve never quite set them to writing, nows the chance. I grew up in a de facto embassy. My parents social activities involved the building of bridges into the Lithuanian cultural elite, and working on ways to have them be invited to the US: prying open the door of the Soviet jail, and obtaining visas for the Lithuanian intelligensia to come to the US. This included actors, writers, singers, poets, ballerinas, any and all of the cultural elite. Historical records record their names, and they all stayed at my parents house, in my formative years of 10 to 15 years old. So I bathed in this, like a sponge. I understood the Soviet world like no American would, but I also took for granted the ideas of high culture. My grandma spoke Polish; I regret only that she did not teach me. She subscribed to the Parisian journal Kultura, (written in Polish, and annoyingly having no photos, pictures or diagrams in it. A disaster for the young.) And all the talk of Generolas Plechavičius. Pre-war hero. This: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Povilas_Plechavi%C4%8Dius Died when I was 13. Well, that explains a lot. Very interesting. Anyway... it really was the wild parties from Santara-Šviesa ...

Ooops, interrupted. Lost the thread. Lets try to pick it up. Where were we? Let’s see. being a pre-teen at Santara-Šviesa events. The poetry nights. The plays. The parties. The formal events (Daunoras at the opera, and so on). These were the formative years, and I was steeped in Lithuanism. So the net result of this is that 40-50 years later, I’m in search of some mythical roots. The intervening years were .. .zero. I was busy doing something else, and there was nothing that Lithuanian-ness seemed to offer. Steeped in it, I didn’t see the point, because it did not .... something that it didn’t do. What? I don’t know. I didn’t think about it. I kind of did not see the point of socializing. Sometimes lonely, but socializing was not big on my list of activities, and the social events I participated in were the ones I was sucked into, and not the ones I seeked out. Socializing anf friends and friendship seemed hollow and empty. I mean, I occasionally agonized from the loneliness. And yes, it was painful. Yet, oddly, finding social events to attend did not arise as a solution, mostly because social events were all so meaningless and hollow and empty. So, a reinforcing non-virtuous cycle. I did not make freinds, because there wasn’t anyone worth making friends with. Everyone was a disappointment from the get-go. So eventually I gave up. Not an explicit decision, just something one sinks into. I don’t think this is uncommon. I see social media posts about how people like to stay home. There’s even a song about it. Courtney Barnett, if I recall. Current generations suffer from this in droves, there is even the debate about “the meaining crisis”, and that is a worthy topic, but not right now.

So, my meaning crisis was not a crisis, per se, but rather an unexplored, unarticulated, vaguely cloudy idea that I should spend some time in Vilnius, and, well, see what that is all about. Its more about the low-cost opportunity. I just have to hop on an airplane, and there I am. Easy, no muss, no fuss, no demands, no responsibilities beyond paying the bills. And so I show up, like a dope, and wander randomly through the streets, unclear about what I am doing there, or why I’m there. And, for many of those summers, I’m lonely. Because I have no friends there, no acquaintances, and not even any real mechanisms for making acquaintances, except by randomly inserting myself into random groups of drinkers in Užupis, but this is often difficult, and not entirely pleasant, until one is integrated. It’s not that I’m shy, although I used to be. I think I’ve gotten over that. Just that, well, its hard to get the instant hit, the instant thrill going, where you launch into extrovert-land. The dopamine hits are hard in coming.

The reliable background was Milda and Miglė. The renters. They were there, they were nice, they sometimes asked me out on social events. I didn’t always know how to behave; American standards and Lithuanian standards are different. I’m a weirdo, especially when I’m dealing with conventional people with whome I have fairly little in common with. And frankly, I had little in common with these girls, but, thanks to their constant presence, I could adjust, and get to know them. Miglė and I did go on a semi-formal day-time date, but it went poorly, because we could not really find anything to talk about. It chugged along politely, but never caught fire. But she lived there, and I would see her almost daily, and we were (and are) friends. Went to visit her in Nida, this summer. She’s married to a restauraeur; she’s the director of a hotel & restaurant. Nida’s got beautiful beaches. Water warms up in July. In those earlier summers, the girls would sometimes double-date me, and this was fun, because I had the attention of two people. Sometimes they’d throw parties, and this was always fun when it was at Pilies g. where I live, because one could walk around and mix. Parties at outdoor bars were harder, because one could not mix: one would lock in with whoever you sat next to, and if things didn’t light up, I was stuck, and I didn’t figure out that, duhh, I could just stand up and walk around. All this is not hard, but ... well, I’m not well-practiced at socializing, but I’ve been learning. Old age comes fast, faster than wisdom.

Miglė moved out a few years ago; she found a husband, and left. This left Milda. I liked being at home with her. She would .. be around. We’d talk. She’d cook me meals. Good meals; she knows all the basics of cooking. She’s also a bit of a hippie-chick in a kind onf classic (well, modernized for techno-raves) hippie-chick, and that made everything easy, because I knew how that worked, from my high-school years. And sometimes, as time went by, we’d talk about more intimate things. Including the meaning of life. And a whole range of things. And this was pleasant. So much so that, when she’d leave on a long weekend to go somewhere, I’d be left alone, and lonely. I’d have to make do for myself. I actually sort of resented that. It’s like, she’s avoiding me, I would tthink to myself, and then I’d rationalize: no not at all, she’s just leading her life. She’s a tenant, she is fre to do as she pleases. And then I’d sometimes think that I’m not fun to be around, and OK, so mostly that’s correct: I’m not some ball of party-fun. I’m a nerdy intellectual at best, with some amount of charisma skills. But I’m old and ugly because getting old makes you ugly. WTF. Wish I was beautiful again, but that’s hard. Err, not really doable. Supplements and exercise do only so much, and dieting is fucking hard. And she’s almost 30 years younger or thereabouts. Something like that. So why would someone that young want to hang out with old wrinkled prune like myself? No reason. So she’d leave, and I’d feel lonely.

Somewhere along the way, things changed. One summer, she was around almost every night. Another summer, I met her boyfriend(s) (past, and future). Some unsuccessful efforts to go to nightclubs, where like she’s the oldest person there (not counting me) and this was, well, she saw she didn’t quite fit any more: not that she was an old maid (which, technically, I guess she was. Either that, or a liberated woman) but that doesn’t work if the 20-somethings aren’t hanging out with you because you’re 30-something, and she felt that, and I could see it, how the 20-somethings would look at her, and their faces would say “too old”, and that helped bond us a little bit. (I got the “who’s that old weirdo” thing, which gave a slight advantage, because that made me exotic.) Then one summer, she went all buddhist. Bought a lotus lamp for mediation, and incense, and that gong-thing. Bought assorted Hindu welf-help and advice literature, which I assumed she read. Quit drinking. That summer, we talked about spiritual topics. And more deeply about intimate and personal topics. (And I could do this, as I feel that I’m about as spiritually liberated and enlightened and aware, as it gets, without formal training or formal titles. I can give meaningful and correct spiritual advice. In part precisely because I was used to dettachement: of not having freinds, not having wants or desires, observing the world as an outsider rather than as a participant. Decades of being alone, of being married to math and physics and high tech, it anchored me in that fabled buddhist realm of not just renouncing all desires, but of not having had them, in the first place. I didn’t have to quit the material world, I was always dettached from it. Anyway, those are my spiritual bona-fides in a paragraph blurb.) So, we could talk about personal things, and I was really getting to like her as a person, as an adult, as a friend, as someone I could talk to in a mature way about meaningful things. A bond. The word “friendship” is the conventional dictionary word for this, but, it seems that I’d never entirely understood what it meant to be a friend. It turns out to be deeper and more complicated than what the dictionary says. At any rate, I liked her, and I enjoyed being with her. It never entirely reached the level of sexual attraction. Perhaps some vague, subsconscious undertone, but not acknowledged in any sort of waking state. But you know, opposite sex, so attraction is never entirely absent. It’s always percolating in the background. But what ever. Last summer, she was a freind, a close friend, at that. Someone I valued, someone I liked, someone I enjoyed being with, someone I was at ease with.

This summer began on a similar note. I arrived, she opened the door, she prepared dinner, in a small celebration and I passed out from jet lag. The next day, she is preparing to leave for ... a long time. Days? A week? I dunno, I didn’t keep track. This was normal, its how things were. I was sad to not have her company, but I did not voice any regrets, and wished her a bon voyage. Later, she sent a few charming photos. And so things went. I was busy preparing for Santara-Šviesa, and had other preoccupations, and she’d be around, and sometimes she’d go out, and we’re like house-mates, which, de facto we are. And I thought nothing of it. In retrospect, we had maybe slightly less social contact, than earlier summers. But I barely noticed. I was busy, I had things to do.

And then one fateful evening. There’s always a fateful evening. She arranges a going-away dinner, just she and I, even though going-away is more than a week in the future. We buy a bottle of champagne, and she cooks dinner. We eat outside (I’d cleared the yard of weeds the week before.) The weather is perfect; it’s been perfect all summer. Her sister comes by, and brings a bottle of champagne, too. I have to do something, I forget what, take the plates upstairs, or something, maybe go to the shop next door, and while i’m gone, I think she downs half the bottle of champagne. She’s skinny. Not an ounce of fat. Not anorexic, but starving. I’m pretty sure that any given quantity of alcohol has a far bigger efect on her than on me, but I don’t realize how drunk she is. Because I’m not monitoring, because that’s not what freinds do. And she’s a bit touchy-feely, and that’s nice, I enjoy a woman’s touch. It’s warm, and it feels good. And dinner is over, and we go with her (twin!) sister, back to where her sister’s husband’s bar is, on Gedimino Prospekto. He’s trying to run a bar for Belorussians, and Milda is vaguely irritated about the situation, says he has a bad attitude, but whatever, I had not met him before, even though I’ve played with his three-year-old child (and she’s a fire-cracker! All signs point at a healthy, active, strong adult, and this is visible at age three.) So I meet the husband, and we sit around and drink a bit, not much cause I’m alreay drunk, and taking care, and Milda is enjoying things and getting drunker, and leaning into me, and leaning into my crotch like she lost her balance and needs to put her hand there to stabilize, and that OK, cause it feels good, and it sort of keeps getting more and more physical, and she’s probably really drunk at this point, but there are five of us sitting around, and no one bats an eye, until I realize it is time to take her home because it’s gone too far, and as a joke I scoop her up and try to carry her. Which works for about 50 yards but then I have to put her down, and I never thought of trying out the firemans carry, but it as no emergency, but we do have an extremely wobbly walk home. And I feel completed to hold her firmly by the waist so that she doesn’t fall over, and I pilot us both home, two steps left and one step right the entire way, and it gets more intimate with each step, and then, before we get home she stops, looks up at me, parts her lips, so of course I kiss her. And then I say “Are you sure about what we’re doing? Because we’re heading into a big heap of trouble and maybe this is not a good idea? Are you sure you want to go on? Because there’s no going back.” (And I’m like thinking, I don’t want to lose a good freindship. And (much much more mundanely) I don’t want a tenant who flips out and rips up the apartment. And actually, I’d even thought this through years ago, realizing that this was a possible eventuality, because, well, I guess the magnetism was always there, even if not acted upon, because, well, we just didn’t know each other enough. Anyway, I’d thought about this eventuality before.)

And in through the gate, and up the stairs, and we’re home. And she says, maybe then, or maybe earlier in the evening, that, well, she’s always loved me, loved me for years, and I accepted that at face value, but what do I know, maybe she was drunk and scheming but she’s not a schemer, but maybe this had been percolating in her brain, and being wildly drunk allowed it to come out, but the things one says when one is drunk do not reflect your true and balanced self, but are rather, some tiny part of you peronsaliy, unchained and let free from the inhibitions of the construct of the whole, entire self. You say things that are unmuffled, and sometimes, you regret them later. If you remember them. But who knows. That’s what she said. And I like that. And (let’s set the scene) we’re in the kitchen, fully dressed, and bumping and griding, and I’m thinking “this is the part where we take our clothes off” but we don’t and I’m trying to feel her up, but she pushes my hands away from the most intimate place. And its all but 4AM and its late, and I realize I’m really tired, and she’s really drunk, and this is not going to go anywhere, I mean, even if it did, it would just be bad sex, and bad sex is kind of no fun, and it wouldn’t really accomplish anything because that’s not how stable human relationships can work out. So I head upstairs to bed, and she to her bedroom, and we sleep. I sleep little and wake up early and expectantly, and she sleeps a full 8 hours, plus, to where I’m alarmed and go wake her. But shes fine and we have brunch, and vaguely talk about the night before, but I don’t recall, she dances away and deflects. And ... I don’t recall. Nothing happens. She takes another nap; I have some errand to run. The rest of the day, Sunday, passes quietly, and Monday is a workday or something and well, life returns to some normal usual pace, except I occasionally wink and prod and ask “what was that all about?” and I don’t get an answer, and that’s OK, because, well, we’re like freinds, and happy to have each other’s company. And we plan the trip to Nida, by bus, and there are some complications, but we get there. And, to summarize: well, “nothing happens”, i.e. no kissing, no sex, but we ... maintain a strong friendship.

Some details, since I think these details help set up what comes later, which is what I really want to talk about, which I haven’t gotten to yet. Stuff about feelings and emotions and qualia. The bus leaves early, 8AM, and I’m like, “let be the bad kids and take the last row of the bus” and we do, because there’s more room. And its fun. But it’s early, and we’re both ztill zonked, and its a five-hour ride, so we nap. And as I nap, I am leaned up against her arm, or rather, she is leaned into mine. And it is heavenly. Words can’t describe, but try, they will try. I don’t want it ever to end. Because it is an affirmation of the earlier events. The come-on, followed by some distancing. This veers back into the affirmation territory. And what do I get out of it? Someone loves me. Perhaps I am reading something into this that isn’t really there. Perhaps I’m projecting, or letting my imagination run free. But that’s OK, I’m down with it. Someone loves me, and they are showing it in this very simple and ethereal way: they are nestled up to my arm, and resting. Resting together, resting comfortably, freely, in physical contact, and it is heavenly, because I am loved. And to be very very clear, this is something I haven’t felt in decades. I’ve been married for three decades, but Patty, my wife, does not know how to show love, She doesn’t show love. And I’m this frail, delicate flower, or maybe a puppy is a better word for it. I want love, freakin puppy love. Erotic sex is OK, but puppy love is even better, and this is what I am getting, or what I imagine I am getting, right now. I’m slumbering on a bumpy bus, and someone else, a female, a close friend, soeone who told me they loved me just a few nights ago, she’s nestled up to me, slumbering as well. It’s freakin heavenly, and I do all that I can to keep that feeling alive. I don’t fall asleep I don’t wake up, I don’t open my eyes to look. I just rest and enjoy, for a very very long time. Because it feels so good. I am loved. Nothing is nicer than this.

And this last paragraph is perhaps why I am writing all of this. It’s maybe even the climax of the story (not the finale, there’s more to come) but this is the point I’m hunting for. So, lets for a moment take a hike into the cold intellectual land. As a AGI researcher, I think about math and logic, and this is very very far away from qualia and feelings. One recent project barely scratches the surface of this, and maybe not even that: the understanding of qualia remains deeply out of bounds. And so here I am and perhaps as a first step, a phenomenological collection of qualia is a reasonable place to start,. a reasonable activity. I’ve already exhausted the brainwashing and delusinoal aspects of the Ukraine war, and the reactive control, and the KGB/FSB mind-ops to distort social perception and reality. I think I’ve written about this in the pages above; and it not, then I’ve tweeted about it. Or talked about it at length. Not like I have anything concrete, but I’ve gotten as far as I can easily get in that domain. So the qualia of personal lived experience is a good next topic. If I have time later, I will write about perfume, as this is another adventure story. But, for now, it will be love, and it will be puppy love. (Later on, I actually tried to have erotic dreams about Milda, but failed. Apparently, my attraction really is that of freindship morphed into child-like love. Attempting to get erotic with that kind of spoils everything, so I didn’t try too hard. Will have to wait for the real thing. Some other day. I very much would like to get there, but clearly, this is not practical, for now.

So, the qualia of love. Well, this is odd. I just googled “types of live” and found a page saying “there are eight types of love” and I’ll be damned if puppy love is not listed. What the eff. The being bathed in the glow of warmth, that every baby feels from their mother, this is not listed as a “kind of love”. Are psychologists really senseless morons? I’m outraged. “Ludus (playful love)” ain’t it, because that’s flirting. “Agape (universal love)” ain’t it. Yes, I love birds and rocks, and the entire universe, but that’s a different story for a different time. “Philia (deep freindship)” is a thing, and things started this way, but the love I felt while napping was not that. It was the immersive, immersed bathing in an aura of love. This is not “Storge (familial love)” and its not “Mania (obsessive love)” although what I’ve been feeling for the last week and a hlf threatens to morph into mania. I mean, I’m smart enough and strong engough to keep it under control, but it sure wants to go that way. More on this later. Let me check another website. Perhaps it’s “Eros (passionate love)” but that term, “eros” is the root of erotic, and that’s not where this is at. Yes, this all may have started with passion, infatuation and attraction. But the element of lust remains frustrated and buried and repressed (and even unwillingly so, manifesting carnal knowledge would be just fine by me. But again, that will have to wait.) so what is left is the feeling of being loved, being wanted. What the baby feels from their mother. .. well, that’s odd. The Psychology Today website lists the seven types of love neamed by the anceint greeks, but, again, the child-mother love is not in the list. Fuck this. Most humans are stupid. That’s all I get out of this. I’m stupid too, and too quick to judge perhaps, but what kind of person who takes the time out of their day to write about love can possibly omit and fail to mention innocent love? What is wrong with people. God damn it, I live in a deeply fucked up world. The greeks didn’t come up with a name for it, and now, websites across the planet remain ignorant of it. I dunno. I can rail on in disbelief. I suppose there are entire books written on innocent love, written by geniuses who really delved into it. I know there are others. Libraries are excellent, and the internet is even better, as a fountain of information. And funny how it is, we’ve hit a wall, and it did not take much effort.

So returning to qualia. The feeling that morning was, well, I described it, above. I sensed that I was loved, and that sensation felt good. Not unlike lying in the warm sun, which I would do a bit later than day. It was soothing and pervasive and encompassing and ful of meaning and life-affirming. A gift from the universe, as even as I experienced it, I was not at all sure that I wasn’t just projecting meaning onto accidental physical contact. And that’s OK. If it was just meaningless accidental physical contact, I did not want to know. I wanted to bath in the glory of being loved, and Iwas (I am) willing to go so far as to say that the universe loved me, the universe awarded me with this feeling. It might of been all in my imagination, but that did not make it any less real. It was wonderful.

Now, there is presumably a biochemical, neuro-physiological basis for this feeling. Some combo of hormones in the blood, tied to some circadian rythm disrupted by earlier events, finding its way back to normal. Perhaps it even vaguely felt like a good does of melatonin: a happy sleep-slumber. I’ve never done crack, meth or mdma, so I don’t know what these are like, but based on things I’ve read, what I felt might be like some middling-strength dose of these. Maybe. Maybe not. It was all endogenous, at any rate. Since I wasn’t instrumented for blood draws and brain scans, we’ll never know, unless someone else reads this particular text, and is able to reproduce this feeling under lab conditions, and study it. Determine it’s neuro-physiological foundations.

And suppose this is done? Then so what? Why you get is a medical description of love. What I get is qualia. So this is a kind of Chinese room, I guess one could say. Some kind of solutions to some kind of coupled differential equations are interpretable as qualia. I won’t solve this in this essay, tonight (its getting late and I’m getting tired, and this has gone over-length) but this Chinese-room qualia, and its, well, I guess the plan is to ponder this for the next few years, or however long it takes to be able to make some kind of (mathematical, formal) progress on this. But the foundation for this is the feeling of love.

A few notes about foundations: there are certainly many other kinds of qualia to draw from. Scent of skin sensation. Body-movement sensation. The ineffability of fine art. The way poetry makes you feel, or heck, how wine makes you feel. How dining in a luxuriouys restaurant makes you feel, or lying in the sun, or jumping in cold water. All of these are problematic, in some way. Touch sensations (including hot/cold) are clearly sensations, but they’re dismissable as sensory affects. There is a distinct causal structure to them, they can be brought on and halted. The qualia assoicated with Fine Art: well, frankly most people are dolts and mostly don’t get it. Pictures of flowers and sunsets and large-eyed puppy-dogs are not, well, are not Art with a capital A, and the qualia one feels in viewing these is not transferable. The feelings these evoke in different humans are just too wide-spread and variable; there’s no commonality. The qualia of music is a little better, but not much. Music appriciation depends strongly on the type of music you’ve been exposed to. Not everyone seems to be able to appreciate music. From what I can tell, the plleasure of musc depends a lot on how closely it matches the natural rhythms of the brain: the brain cycles about with alpha waves and theta waves and what-not and I think music overlaps and stimulates and resonates with these encephalographic patterns. In so much as differnt people have different encephalitic structures, so different kinds of music are appealing to them. At any rate, extracting the “qualia” of music is a difficult task. That leaves a handful of things that can reasonably be expected to be the same in all humans. Lying in warm sunlight is one of them but we’ve dismissed this above as being overtly and manifestly of sensory origin. The action of alcohol, and of drugs in general, can be said to induce “qualia”, but again, these are externally driven, extrernally moduled. Don’t drink alcohol, and you won’t get drunk. So of all of these, feelings of love appear to be universal, and appear to not have any direct, immediate cuase-and effect pathway. And not just a little uiniversal, but a lot universal: there’s undisputable evidence that (all) mammals feel love, and plenty that corvids, and indeed, all birds, those who take care of their young, that the mother feels love for her babies, and the babies feel loved. I had a bird, once. I loved it, and it loved me, and that love was indisputable and undeniable, and I was not projecting my feelings onto some Skinnerian behaviorism driving the hatchling brid. It was real, true love. The extent to which all vertebrates feel love is yet to be mapped out, and is a difficult exercise. I’d venture to say its universal, but who knows.

A short aside about universal intelligence aka panpsychism. The Liebniz-monad, pan-psychic idea is that, if we are intelligent, and if aniomals are intelligent, and so on, then perhaps there is a teeny tiny fraction of intelligence in every rock, and in ever atom. Certainly Max Tegmark even proposes a physical foundation for this, extending onwards from Tonnini’s phi. But there is an alternate interpretation. Consider, for example, percolation. Say, petroleum trapped in shale rock. If there are no pores, it they don’t connect up, the oil doesn’t flow. If the number of pores exceeds a critical density, it does flow. There is a phase transition. Conduction, fuse networks, resistor networks, all these show phase transitions, and perhaps intelligence is like this as well: above some threshold there is intelligence, and below there is not. (But this is muddled, due to Turing machines) So perhaps self-awareness is somethig that would have a more clearly identifiable phase transition. And perhaps love is like this as well: its not clear how to talk about the intelligence of jelly-fish or of planaria, or how to make any cogent arguments about whther they are self-aware (probably not) or feel love (also probably not, unless you are a mystic seer, and I usually do not contradict mystic seers when I talk to them. I usually try to avoid confrontations about mystic beleifs, although I revert to a rationalist state of mind so rapidly, that, for the mystic I am with, the glow of pleasure experienced from the mystic vision is quickly extinguished by the buck of cold-water normalicy that is I. I do try to give mystics a long leash, and follow them along on their inspired journey. But often I’m not up to it, if its too far out there, or if I’m tired and not in the mood. The thrilling pleasure of ineffable reality is pleasant. Yes, Art appreciation, or poetry appreciation, has that ineffable quality, as do high-quality mystical visions. Art knows its Art, and poetry knows its poetry, but mystics make the fault of thinking their stuff is reality. To a smidgin, it is, in the same way that all things ineffable are real. (Motherly love is ineffable, and is clearly real.) At any rate, instead of panpsychism, there might be phase transitions, instead. Almost certainly phase transitions, instead of panpsychism. Again, hold percolation as the mental model: thoughts either flow, or they don’t.

Crap. Past my bedtime, I gotta get up in seven hours. Rowing. Hope I find time to finish this love story later, as there’s more to it. Later.

31 July 2024

Well, where to now? I just read a very short note by Lee Cronin, on Assembly Theory, and tehre is one key idea in there that I want to set down in this journal. Just in case. Repetition is the first step to remembering, and for the last week, I’ve had a lack of desire in concentration, due to my love obsession, above (and perhaps a bit more on that, below.)

But first: The Lee Cronin article is this: https://bigthink.com/the-well/how-does-matter-become-life-assembly-theory/ and well, it doesn’t say much new if you’re already familiar with the general background. However, the part at the end really aught my attention: existance is a matter of .. existing, not being wipe out, and replication is an existence amplifier or safegaurd against erasure. So, the deal with ergodic systems, mixing systems, is that they visit their entire phase space, they ergodically fill up the space. The deal with existance is to fight this off: this is why life processes are anti-ergodic: they create and define structures that persist over long periods of time, despite attacks and “insults” to their wholeness. I mean, this is kind of obvious, if you look from the biology side: of course, that’s what life is, its something that persists and propagates. But from the physics and math side, its more or less not talked about, not studied, not investigated. Like all good obvious ideas, this one deserves some deep pondering. It even feels like a central fulcrum onto which I should refocus my research energies. Enough for now. I’m filing this away for later elaboration, perhaps in the more formal chapters of this diary.

Let’s resume the earlier theme. Milda is a love goddess, literally: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milda_(mythology) Nice little burden that her parents laid on her. But, at least as of now, she’s lived up to her name. I’m absolutely gaga, and there’s ... well, its a thought disruptor. I kind of don’t want to do anything, except think about her (well, more precisely, think about some idealized version of her that is obviously not her, and the real her is likely to react in ways quite counter to my idealized and unanchored constructs. Yes plural, as she’s not one thing to me, but a fragmentary, glittering, shimmering multitude of pieces. One of the glittering pieces, I want to make love to. Starting with some kind of yogic body contact, and, well, that’s enough to send me into a tizzy. Just, well, lets do yoga poses that involve bodies in contact. Something tantric or something along those lines. So, that’s the erotic component. There’s also the social component: I enjoy her company. I enjoy being around her. It’s easy, and she’s nice to me, she takes care of me, and she seems to enjoy my presence, and I notice that. And it feels good. So, a kind of warm glow of freindship. We’re not intellectually compatible, and maybe that’s OK, because, well, if we had the same opinions, and the same character, perhaps that would be boring. I dunno. I’ve never really dealt with someone who is like me, but of the opposite sex. Based on prior visceral reactions, I kind of hate people who remind me of me, because maybe they remind me of all the things I hate about myself. And so I am not drawn to ... people like me. Best case, it’s boring, worst case is bad. So, intellectually, or in terms of tastes, we have much to disagree upon, and I’m smart enough, I think, to know that I should not try to change her. And lets go through some other negatives. She’s impossibly far away, and I’m married, and if I wasn’t married I suppose everything would be different, but there we are, and, well, I suppose I’m getting ahead of myself. It’s all impossible, anyways, and what I’m feeling is very much an obsession. It’s all I want to do, is to think about her, and if I was on the receiving end of an obsession, I’m not sure I would like it, but this is very personality-dependent. I dunno. She said she’s love me for years. But she was (very) drunk when she said that, so what does it really mean? How should it be interpreted? Well, baseline: she’s kind of fundamentally fair. It’s in her personality type to be honest and straight-forward, and now that I write this, I realize this is one reason I’m drawn to her. So I’m pretty sure that this was not some spur-of-the-moment manipulative lie. I suppose anything is possible. Maybe like, goose me, and make sure I don’t raise the rent. That would be a rational manipulation, except for one thing: she’d cook me meals regularly, and serve them with evident pleasure of pleasuring me with food. She’s a centered cook: she can put together a nutritious, healthy meal, I mean good food, like the health-food books might recommend. She not showing off how great she can cook, but that she can prepare meals that I like, that she enjoys serving to me, and its clear that I’m the focus of the attention. And I see this. And I know this. Which is another reason I’m attracted to her: she’s honest and direct. I mean, of course, one could argue that this is yet another ploy to soften me up as landlord, and this is certainly not outside of the realm of possiblity, and certainly at times it seemed like that might be the case, but she’s so forthright and caring that it actually does feel like, yeah, I could say that she loves me. I mean, this was crertainly plausible and even evident before the fateful intertwining of lips. It felt like that all along. It was never directly voiced. But I guess my body knew. I’ve been erotically attracted to her for ... several years, I guess. In the back of my mind, I’d reviewed this possibility. For several of summers beforehand, I said to myself: what if this summer, this will be the one where we get romanitcally involved? And I thought about that. And I hoped it would become true. But it remained only hope: I could not initiate it; I’m genetically, psychologically predisposed to loyalty. That, plus I’m too ... even-keeled, emotionally placid. Mostly. Deep history required to explain that. So I wasn’t willing/capable/able to initiate first contact. But I’d planned for it, hoped for it. Not much planning, actually, because ... too many uncertainties. This will all have to unfold in some way or another. Really, it kind of all depends on her, in the end, either she wants to take this farther, and figures out how, or she cuts it all off. What the heck do I know. Maybe she’ll meet the perfect man next week. I mean, serisouly: there’s an almost 30-year age difference between us. I mean, jeez. That’s, well, I’m not complaining, but rationally speaking, it would make much more sense for her to find someone her own age. Someone permanent, and not someone looking for an affair.

Enough about you, lets talk about me. I thought I was looking for an affair, but I found love instead. Or maybe that’s how affairs work? I have no clue; I don’t recall reading about affairs of the heart: they’re always depicted in movies as torrid sex for some weeks or months. If there’s love, then its in crime-dramas, where some low-IQ schmuck commits some crime under the influence of uncontrollable love for some girl. I don’t read enough books to have encountered any sort of honest description of love affairs that are actually about love rather than sex. I suppose they’re out there. All this is new territory to me. Suddenly, love songs, love poetry make sense in a way that .. well, I understood intellectually, before, but now they are ... wounding. I’ve been listening to two songs on Machina, Smashing Pumkpins. And they are heart-rending, wounding, painful, I hold them in awe and at a distance because they are so raw. One of them is “The Sacred and Profane”. For example. Don’t get me started on the other ones. One of the sonic tricks of profundity is a faint layer of chorale singing, underneath the guitars (which sound more like melotrons than guitars), and this chorale, churck-like, is heavenly, literally, elevating all feelings to an ethereal, transcendant level. And transcendance is very much a thing. “Stand Inside Your Love” could be interpreted as an “ordinary” love song, aimed at a specific individual, but I’ve alywas, always, since the day I first heard it 15-20 years ago, I’ve always interpreted this as a love song to Jesus (I could say “to God” but this is where the Catholic trinity is actually useful: “God” is too grandiose and abstract, whereas Jesus is specific and relateable. So you might worship God, but your love wuld be for Jesus; as God is too large to love.) Anyway, I’ve always held that Stand Inside Your Love is the best Christian song ever written, and one, at that, written by a band that demonstrates less than zero mainstream-religious interests. Just that, well, Billy likes to write, sing about God and the transcenant, in general. “The Imploding Voice” is about transcendance. “Raindrops and Sunshowers” is about ... well, read the fucking lyrics. It’s transcendant, if nothing else. Kind of all of the songs are, more or less. They actually do touch the sky, or the pure heart, or the direct ineffable beingness of here and now of the suffering and joy of being alive. The roller coaster of living. I liked the songs before, but now they are even just a tiny bit harder, sharper. More intimidating. More fearfully awesome. Because I’m on that roller-coaster now, but not at the Billy Corgan level, and that level scares me. If that turmoil were to come alive in me, I might not be able to hold it together. And I’ve always (well almost mostly always) held it together: I’m kind of an ultra-stable personality type. Although there was a big bout of loneliness the year before I got married. And at least one sleepless night a decade before that. I don’t really recall any other sleepless nights, but I wouldn’t be surprised if there were a few more.

The ultra-stability comes from two places. One is that I have all the character traits for a physicists (at least, according to the psych exam administered to the Los Alamos Manhatten Project scientists), and elements of introversion, and shyness, and interest in the technologcal and abstract, which means very little time devoted to any studies of affairs of the heart. I mean, I read sci-fi as a kid, and Lord of the Rings. There are no love soties in Lord of the Rings, or the Hobbit, for that matter. And then Carlos Casteneda, which was mystical and inspiring of another world, but again, no love affairs in that, except for some hints of tantric sex with wild things, maybe, at the end. (or does that only appear in the later-life bio? I don’t recall. It’s certainly not conventional heart-ache love.) Lets see. Aside from a few crushes, when I was young, and a few wild-eyed heart-aches that resolved in under 12 hours, well, OK, there were some very long-lived, multi-year crushes that went unresolved because I could not figure out how to actually freakin meet the firl. Like, no address, no phone. Just awareness of the neighborhood she lived in: one neighborhood was much too far, although I did bicycle to it several times, on the off chance of seeing her on the street, and, similarly, in another case: I bicycled past her houre many times, unsure of which house it was or even if I was on the right street, but no luck. That was my teen (err, heh. pre-teen) romance. (I started college at age 16; the above were high-school crushes. College was where I discovered real sex. and how good it was. But that’s a different story.) Where was I? In my teen years, I had little experience with torrid love. In my young-adult years, I had bouts of lonliness, because, once outside of college, I had no social network that I couold plug into, that would provide the needed social contact and the introduction to girls. Several years of grad school passed, before things resolved a bit. First year of grad-school was bitterly lonely, brain-damagingly-lonely, at that. And then, after grad-school, Paris: again, catch-as-catch-can social network (kudos to Marc for being more adult than I ever could be.) And then moving back to CHicago (a year of loneliness) and then Austin (a year of loneliness.) So there was a lot of loneliness in that 20-something decade. And wow, it was fucking painful. It really really hurt. And then I got married. And then everything became stable. Because why wouldn’t it? I had a job, I had income, I had a wife, and I could have placid, even-keeled emotions and get on with doing things I liked. Never even occurred to me that there could be something like a roller-coaster of love. I mean, sure, there’s that stupid song, but not even a tiny ripple of love-lorn disturbance passed in my 30’s and 40’s. Placid, even-keeled. Hyper-balanced. Normal. No angst, no muss, no fuss. Not even frustration. I didn’t get frustrated about anything, ever, at all. I had only one episode of frustration, when I was six or eight years old, glueing together a model airplane, and the glue stuck to my fingers, and the small itty-bitty parts and everything smeared and didn’t stick the way it was supposed to, and I worked up to a white-hot rage. A flaming, searing rage. It was scary, it was fearful. I mangled and destroyed that airplane. A few days later, I rescued it, and it sat there, mangled, for a few more years. That was the year I knew rage. I knew that there was a monster inside of me, and I hoped it would nevr show it’s head again. (Well, eventually it did, as an adult, here and there, on rare occasions, not as hotly, but plenty destructive enough. Funny thing, though. I never made the connection to The Raging Green Hulk, until just now. I mean, its obvious: the Hulk flies into a rage and smashes stuff. Just like I have. Duhh. But it never occurred to me that the comic-book depiction of rage, shown there, was ever related, in any way shape or form, to anything in my life, or in anyone else’s life, for that mater. It was some fictional device, using the word “rage”, and the meaning of the word “rage” was clear from the comic book drawings, but that did not mean that it was something real. it as an abstraction, some kind of plot device. Like living on Mars or wearing a red cape and flying through the skies. And fuck all, here I am sitting here right now writing this right now, and I’m OMG. Rage. That. That white-hot thing I felt as a child. This is real. It’s Hulk-rage. And ... like, oh wow, other people have felt rage, or rather, suffered it. Maybe many people? I feel sorry for them all: rage is horrible and tragic. I mean, in some abstract sense, I’ve always known what the word “rage” meant, and I abstractly knew that other people might feel it. But I never actually put two and two together, understanding that what they feel, would have felt, is what I felt. I suppose if you’d asked me, “do you know what rage is?” I would have said “yes”, and “Have you ever felt it?” I would have said “yes”. And I would have even recalled a few shameful episodes. But it all seems so ... abstract. Because my life was placid, almost emotionless. If there was one emotion I felt in my 30’s and 40’s, it was a handful of extremely rare bouts of rage, and of these I am ashamed, but I already knew how terrible and awful it was, so I kept it in check. I did not let it out, and it mostly did not come out. There would be the few triggers, but I kept it on a leash, and my emotional life was placid. There were a few bouts of loneliness in my 30’s and 40’s, but by “few” I think I mean “two”, so really less, than the rage incidents. And the last one was more of a self-pity than a lonliness thing, although the two got tangled. I reall am (have been?) very emotionally stable. Because what was there to get emotional about? I do math and physics and engineering; these are disciplines that do not incite emotional outbursts. These are disciplines that are known to draw the introverts and the ADHD types and the marginal-autism types. Placid. That’s where I’ve lived most of my life. I’ve searched for meaning, I’ve searched for enlightenment. But I’ve searched for transcendant meaning and enlightenment. Not love. A search for love was not part of it. A search for lovers, yes, but not love. The only pure love I felt was in a few cases, pre-teen. I had a crush on Gilanda Mieželis when I was like six or seven, and was crushed when she moved to Columbia or wherever that was so her dad Raimundas could be an executive of (let me look this up) the Container Corporation of America. So much for Gilanda. The love of a eight-year-old shattered by an ignorant father. Oh well. I had a crush on Rima when I was twelve. And that crush lasted for decades! And kind of that’s it for love, pure love, emotional roller-coaster love.

And here I am. Lets review a few more things. My wife stopped having sex with me a few decades ago. Why? I have no clue. My sons were born, and then kind of that was that, and I ran around mildly horny for decades, but not capable of actually doing anything about it. Too meek, perhaps, not driven enough. Placid sounds like flaccid, I guess. I wanted some, but my experience was math, engineering, physics, and not that of meeting, dating and wooing women. I eamn, if there had been a spark, it would have set off a flame; my soul was dry tinder, which I kind of knew but didn’t know. The social environment offers a grand total of zero opportunities. Well, kind of one, actually, via rowing, but I was too ... restrained to follow up. I was hungry, but not yet desperate. And it would have been sex, a bootie-call, rather than some deep sould-mate thing, or love-love, so passing on that was not some difficult choice. And the other women I meet – they’re disinterested in me, and reciprocally, I in them. Oh, except for three cases. All of them were love at first sight. Once, I walked past a really really drunk woman in Vilnius (again, that place!) but this was more than a decade ago, and it was kind-of almost love at first sight, and I did nothing for ten steps, and then turned around, but by then, there were two male freinds of her, escoring her, trying to tell her she was drunk and its time to let up and she was having none of it, but I wanted her, but she didn’t see me, so who knows what that was about. Deep history. And then once in Austin, during Eyore’s Birthday Party, during a huge crush of people down in Pease Park, I walked by this black girl and she was a stunning beauty, a knock-out, and she looked at me and I looked at her, and there was some feeling of mutualness, but by the time I turned around (again, ten steps later) I could not find her. She’d disappeared. Alas. What, Old white guy with significantly younger black girl? How’d you think that could ever turn out? Really? I mean anything is possible, and I fantasized about this for years afterwards, but its more of a, what, “emotional disregulation”? Fuck, I just got done explaining how emotionally placid my life has been. The once-in-a-decade love-at-first-sight thing? I assume its normal. I assume some people just get lucky and it works out. I struck out three times. The third time was maybe 6-7 years ago, in Sheremtyevo. The Moscow international airport. So I’m walking, and this girl, she sticks out, and she reminds me of, looks a lot like my girlfreind (Phyllis) from grad school. And so of course, some fond memorries wash over me. And so I have to like, well, I have to walk by two more times. And I stare at her. And she sees me. But its fucking Moscow, and I’m waiting for a connection, and she’s sitting in a section that who knows, flies to Saudi Arabia or something, opposite end of the world, and there’s nothing to be done. But out of perverse inability to deal with it, I find a cafe not far from where she’s sitting, and they have an electrical outlet so I can plug in my laptop and charge. And I’m typing away, and day-dreaming of her, smitten, and not really able to concetrate but I’m trying because you know I have superior powers of concentration. I’m into physics and math, did I tell you that? Super-power ability to concentrate is a character trait. And then, all of a sudden, there she is, in line at the cafe, buying a croissant or something, with her girlfreind, whispering something in each others ears and glancing in my direction and I’m ignoring it but I can’t. And then she sits down two tables away, like right in front of me. Alone, and I’m thinking, where’s her girlfreind? Long bathroom break? But I’m frozen and hyper-concentrating, and this is Moscow and I’m waiting for my connection, and wtf am I gonna do? And I’m thinking “If I was a millionaire, this would not be a problem. Absolutely not be a problem. If we hit this off I would hop on a jet to wherever and we’d meet, but I’m so like not a millionaire, I’m like less than useless, I’m a zero, I can’t do anything for lack of money. It’s utterly pointless; she’d promptly realize that I can’t just pick up and visit her in fucking Iran or Jordan or wherever the fuck she was flying to. So this is so pointless I am so not going to even start anything.” I am such a schmuck. Of course I should have started something. I mean, she gives me like ten minutes. Maybe more. Her girlfreind never shows. And after, like forever, like twenty minutes? She gets up and goes “ugh” and her body language says “fucking men are useless” and she does NOT look at me, shes even facing away from me, as she broadcasts this “god damn you why didn’t you hit me up?” body language straight at me, and I’m completely taken aback, and at this point I’m like “wait but...” ... but it’s too late. It’s done. She is never-ever ever going to ever look at me again. Over. Done. Permanently. Wow. I am such a fucking dope. I saw fucking everything. It happened right in front of me. My powers of observation were precise, sharp, active. What the hell. My heart was longing and full of desire. And, and, and, the circumstances were impossible. Or so I talked myself into thinking that. Who knows. Maybe she was flying to the US or something. Maybe returning to some dull and ordinary life. How would I know? I was imaging that she was looking for a millionaire. (And maybe she was; I looked the part, I suppose. Well-groomed, well-dressed handsome older man. I stuck myself in that mold, not her. I put myself there, and then I failed to fit that mold, and I broke. I became nothing. Useless. I sabotaged myself. Because I could not live up to my own standards of alpha-maleness. Fuck all I’m like a moron. Idiot-savante or something. So there. There’s my love life. Useless, barren. Sparks flew, but the dry tinder, it wasn’t ready to catch on fire.

So anyway, where was I? My wife hasn’t loved me for decades. Neither physically, nor emotionally. She’s, well, she does not have the intimate personality type. I don’t know if she’s damaged, or was born that way. She just isn’t intimate, kind of like, I don’t recall that she ever has been. Caring, caring for her children, but not for me. For decades, I’ve tried to charm her, and it only seemed to turn her away. No gift given was ever appreciated. The gifts would disappear, never to be seen again. Never to be mentioned. Yes, she cooks dinner. But not frequently, and she cooks dinner for herself. She’s like getting really involved with the recipies, and she’s become a relly really good cook, she’s mastered, absolutely mastered half-a-dozen or more recipies, and can knock out dozens more, but this cooking is for her, because she’s into cooking the way I’m into rowing: its a hobby, but more, a pass-time, but more its fun, its interesting, and she’s pursuing it like a hobby. That’s why I get dinner. But I don’t get love. I’m hungry for love, and its not forthcioming. I mean, she even like runs away when I try to peck her on the cheek. I can literally chase her around the house, trying to get withing touching distance, and its almost comical. I mean it is comical. She even laughed and let me kiss her, but begrudgingly, like a chore that had to be done. So much for flirting. Like we sleep in the same bed, inches away from each other, but I’m not allowed to touch her. Like. Whatever. Like, I’m used to it. I’m trained. I’m in a box, it feels normal. I accept it. What am I gonna do? Have some big emotional outburst, shout and yell, demand a divorce? Seriously? How is that gonna work out? Split the house? Split bank accounts? A divorce would be utterly and completely futile. It would be damage all around. Worse. Who’d shop for groceries? Who’d do the laundry? I’m the lucky beneficiary of house-cleaning services. Why would I cut that off? She’s the lucky beneficiary of not having to have a corporate-world job. Living off of savings. The kids live at home. I feel sorry for my kids. They should be out fucking girls but they’re both virgins as far as I can tell. These are deep family secrets, so why the fuck am I writing this stuff into a diary that is accessible from a public place? Why? I’ll tell you why. No human will ever read this. It’s kind of that simple. At best, this is some training corpus for some future LLM that will claim to know a thing or two about me, which is honestly kind of more than what anyone else in the world knows about me. Like the three love-at-first-sight stories above. No one has ever heard these before. I’ve never vocalized them before. I’m vocalizing now, because I’m letting my verbal center do it’s glossolalia thing, spilling words onto a page, while brain ticks away in default mode, processing emotions and feelings, and, aparently, memories. I mean, this is different; usually I do analytical stuff, I don’t introspect emotions. Did I mention I’m placid? Oh shoot. Well, there are at least another half-dozen almost-romantic encounters over the decades. Episodes of mutal attraction that, for various reasons, could not move forward. Maybe someday I’ll set them down and maybe I won’t, because they’re not really that big a deal in the grand scheme of things. Warm feelings, mutual respect. But didn’t, couldn’t go anywhere.

Whatever. This is different. It’s bed-time, past bed time, so I’m wrapping this up for tonight. This is different. I’m obsessively obsessed with my current situation, with Milda (say her name). I want to either burn this out, or milk it, because it feels so good. I can’t concentrate or focus on anything else; or rather, I don’t want to. I want to bask in the glow. I can write all this, because I’m processing the emotions. I fear saying her name (Milda, the freakin love-goddess, crickey) because maybe probably nothing never ever it won’t go anywhere no how, cause its an obvious dead end. But the ball is in her court. Either she wants me, or she doesn’t. Either she will process her end of this, and respond in some way, or she won’t. It’s been like a week, I’ve written like five emails she like doesn’t respond. What does that mean? Is she deeply processing some reciprocal emotions, or has she determined what a mistake this all was, and is smothering the flames? Have I become clingy? I certainly want to be clingy! Why can’t I be? Of course, everyone hates the cling. Got to play it light and easy, but its not light and easy, I’m laundry in the washing machine, tumbling all around, there’s no light and easy here, except if I really reign it in and hold myself up. I just want to melt, even as manliness says I should stay stiff and solid. I just want to melt like a chocolate ice cream cone, and smother everything in chocolate, and wait to be licked up by her lips. That’s what I want. But how can I make that happen? I can’t. I have to wait, and see what happens, and pray my heart won’t get broken, even as the chances are really quite high that it will be. Because, well, I have super-powers of post-rationalization, and an excellent imagination, and I can imagine the worst but I can’t imagine the best. What would the best ever be? How could that ever be imagined? In the end, everything becomes normal. No matter how swept away I am, whether left to drift at sea, or pulled onto a deserted desert island by my lover, in the end, it will all have to become normal, and the emotional dysregulation that every poet has ever sung about, down through the ages, that, too, must come to an end. But not now, not just yet. For now, it’s a game of wait and see.

1 August 2024

Good morning! “I woke up, from my sleep, and I was happier, happier than I’ve ever been” .. this song lyric popped into my mind some half hour after waking. Went to bed at midnight, got up at seven. Normally on rowing days, bed at ten, up at five. (Which is sometimes insufficient sleep, and waking is torture. But if you wanna team-boat, that’s how it has to be.) So I’m slumbering, and I feel so alive.

When I’m with you, everything’s fine. So singeth Kenny Wayne Shepherd, in the song “Alive”. A song whose lyrics I understood only intellectually, abstractly. But now I’m feeling directly, somatically. As qualia, not as vocabulary words. Wow. This is a rush. I like it. I feel so alive. When I’m with you, everythings fine. Well, OK, when I’m with you, in my fetid imagination. This is in a footnote, because it is discursive. I was actually thinking of this song, but not sure how to weave it into the grander narraitve. I have many choices of what to type next, and mention of this song was cut. So this footnote is an out-take, a deleted scene.

Like alive and cognizant, like I haven’t felt in a long time. In control. In control of my life, capable of anything, capable of taking things into my own hands and creating the world I want. The power, the aliveness, the will to do things. I can shape my own life, my own future. I will just twinkle, and good things will happen to me, and all will be well. No need to fear being alive, no need to slumber through life. No ned to cower before the future; any choice made will be a good choice, because I can do this. It is in my hands. Life is good, and I am ready to live it. At last! The portals have opened up, the fluidity is there. It can be done.

All the above thoughts while I’m still slumbering, half-awake. A half hour later, without a single sip of coffee, yet, standing in front of the coffee pot, I’ve got Smashing Pumpkins songs blaring through my head. Some mashup of Sacred and Profne, and Today. And I want to dance, I am dancing. I call it active yoga: its not dance, because its not meant to be pretty to view. it’s dance, because its pretty to visualize for me, for my body. It’s not yoga moves, because yoga is slow and calm; dance is far more active, but there are stretches, in particular, arm stretches of various sorts, as I wave them through the air. And the music blares through my head, at top volume. Loud, Loud. Louder! Turn it up! Drown me in it!

I’ve never takken party drugs, but this is what I imagine ecstasy or meth or something like that is like: I’m alive, and I love it! Someone injected me, while I was sleeping! I’m happier, than I’ve ever been! Ba boom, ba bam, ba boom, on and on. Billy Corgans guitar/bass echo through my head.

This is all very weird, of course. As I described above, I’m placid, placid to the point of being catatonic, almost, and this is a natural state for doing physics/math. One can’t have little sprites dancing in one’s head while one concentrates. And yet, this is life: the dancing sprites are the distilled essence of life. I can point at inummerable pieces of evidence: dance, in every culture. Singing, in every culture. Music, high and low. Why Do I need to point to evidence that dancing sprites are normal? Because, when you’re placid and composed, sober and settled, all that is very very far away. It’s not a part of the here and now, when one is settled. One must be “high on life” to kick out, kick back, kick through.

Why am I pointing this out? Well, Western culture, for one. So I go to music concerts, and I may as well be a freak. Free-dancing, any which way, as the music moves me, and everyone else is rigid and stiff, unmoving, immobile. Like wtf. You’re at a music venue. This was particularly visible, evident, in the forefront, just 12 days ago, in Vilnius. Some man, concert promoter, crushing on Milda, gave her two tickets to an upscale event at Valdovu Rumai. Wednesday, July 17. Seems I managed to snap three photos of the concert stage. Electronic Dance Music: EDM, with full orchestra! And the women are in high heels and evening dresses, and the men are well-groomed and well-attired. This is the upscale crowd. Tickets must have been expensive. These are social climbers, office bosses, white collar alpha males and the women who mix with them. And they’re all uptight and not moving. And the line to the bar is infinitely long, because every last one of them is thinking “If I just get three glugs of champagne into me, I’ll loosen up and it’ll be kickin”. And I’m straight and sober, and the DJ part of the EDM is just totally flailing on stage while he does his DJ stuff, and the orchestra conductor is more or less dancing his direction, like full body dance orchestra director moves. And the crowd is like. Standing there. And I’m dancing. And I feel like a freak, and I suppress that feeling as much as possible, I’m gonna move, damn you all. And I’m gonna broadcast. I’m gonna radiate. And I discover, kind of quite by accident: if I raise my hands above my head, and wave them about, the people in the audience, the people behind me, they can see this, and they react. And this energizes them. And if I sneak peaks (I don’t have to sneak, I just turn around and look, but its hard to make out quite what is going on, more than a few ranks away) If I look around, I can see that people are reacting to my hand-waving, and shaking their hips a bit. Sheik Yerbouti, as Zappa would say.

I dunno. Why are they so uptight? OK, So I’m also thinking: well, orchestra and EDMM, that’s just so fake and bogus, but you know, its not bad, and the crowd is just huge, immense, and I think the tickets were pricey and the door security was tight, so this pulled in a bunch of money and paid the orchestra, and it was a successful event. Performers made a living doing what they want to do: perform. So why is everyone so uptight and not cutting loose? Because, well, Western Civ. Homeless street people do weird-ass shit, but men in suits don’t. Drunks weave around, but sober businessmen don’t, because no one wants to invest in a drunk businessman. Ladies in high heels. I dunno. walking is hard enough, but dancing? Gotta be harder. Relly, I want to have sex, and I want to wear high heels, and I want to dance in them. I’m not a cross-dresser, and the visual image of my build and body-type, centrall strong and male, in high heels and a dress is alarming, and face-flushingly embarrassing, the proerbial I wouldn’t be caught dead. but jeez, when I’m feeling all sexed up and ready to go, but tantric because I’m deprived by society (deprived by Western Civ) from having all the sex that I want, hell, I understand how and why high heels make women horny, becuase men know that high heels are sexy, and everyone all understands this, but the social taboos say men don’t act like that, unless they’ve resolved their inner self and attend rainbow parades, but that is all kind of icky. All that kinky stuff, its icky and yuck. It lives in some fantasy land, where a director of photography knows how to frame it properly so that it looks sexy, but ordinary man weilding an ordinary cellphone exposes it for all the tawdry and cheap and tasteless that it is. Like the dirty, unemployed drunk youth on Sixth Street in Austin on Saturday night, out to party, for no reason other than to party, to do what feels good, to search for what feels good. Unawares, unknowning of what feels good, muddled by drugs and alcoholo because they provide an easy gateway to maybe feeling good, maybe, if you shake your booty enough and project your breasts and stick out your butt at the young men, boys, who swagger past and cat call and leer. Because partying maybe kind of feels good. The Florida Spring Break beach party. The Jersey Shore reality TV. The Every Day I’m Shufflin vibe from LMFAO. But see, they know how to do it: they know how to pull it off: low-rent and tasteless, but direct and immediate and forrthright. No pretension. I mean, the clothes are outrageous. But that’s not pretension. It’s, they captured the party vibe, the need to dance, to do it right, without walking off into anything unwholesome. It’s all mildly exciting, and the girls, vavoom, evoke erotic twinges faintly in the back of one’s mind, upping the tonic, exciting the neurons into a raised state of attention, Hot clothes, hot dresses, hot bods. But this is well, its young-people stuff, the hot bods cause they’re young, the cheap clothing cause they’re poor, and the oozing sex because everyone is horny, a little or a lot, all horny, beut we don’t just collapse into some orgy, that is not how it’s done. It’s not done in African tribal dances, it’s not done in Western Civ. Not sure what-all the Ancient Greeks did, they were a bit naughty, but there aren’t any surviving documents written by Horace describing Dionysian horny-dancing descending directly into an orgy. It’s not how it was done then, and it’s not how it’s done now. The horny-tension is there, the libido, but its, well, its tantric, for lack of a better word. It’s better if you shake it on the dance floor, and maybe in bed later in the night if all goes well, and a suitable partner is found. But the dance on the dance floor is, well, its better than sex, cause well, its, you can get wild, and you can’t make a mistake, its much much harder to make a mistake dancing. You can kind of do anything and its OK. In bed, well, its a bit more proscribed. you have to tune into your partner. Hit the same wavelength. Get on the same page. Sync up. This takes a certani kind of focus. Focus that is usually not hard to find, usually. But you can fuck up. You can definitely go where your partner isn’t and that will ruin the sex, it will halt the sex even before it starts. So actually sex is a bit more challenging. Well there is the cnocept of sloppy sex, but that’s something else. That’s when you’re so drunk that you kind of don’t care, you just need it. But that’s sloppy, and not very satisfying and well, I wouln’t choose it, and most people wouldn’t choose it. I assume most poeople are like me, and want transcendent sex. Well, that’s a really bad assumption. Hot sex, I think, that’s what most people want. Hot horny sex, without any overtones of higher cosmic vibrations. I think that’s maybe the ordinary mode of existence for most poeple, most of the time, I guess. We now possess technology, such as LLM’s, that can actually survey *everything* ever written on this topic, and report back with an answer. Well, sort-of report back. First, the LLM doesn’t understand sex, and second, most ordinary people are terrible writers and can’t describe what they feel or want, and they’re certainly mostly not writing about sex. So the training corpus for the LLM is going to be descriptions of sex from a rather constrained and distorted corpus: some pimps, some erotic movie makers, Marquis de Sade and related authors, what’s her name, Anaïs Nin type erotica. And, well, the exceptional authors are exceptional people, and they may have exceptional insight, but I don’t think you’re going to get any kind of “what does it feel like to be normal”? To be a normie, to be a normie in bed, during sex? Fuck middle age, middle age is awful, middle-age sex is awful. Well, I suppose its nice, but the spark of youth is gone. What’s it like to be a normie, a young adult, hot horny. Its well, I assume its just hot sex, and the concept of “empty sex” is foreign and meaningless, because the point of young and hot is the sex, and a lot less the meaing, except for the tortured few poets who are already looking to transcend the pain they find themselves in.

So where was I? I’m at this electronic-dance-music-with full symphony orchestra even in Vilnius on the 17th of July, and its a high class event. and I’m dancing like a fucking degenerate because no one else is, and I’m a fucking freak. And thank god, I think Milda is coming around, she sort of has seen enough of me to figure it out. Of course, I haven’t quite figured it out myself. I’m like mostly dancing just barely within sort-of the social norms for the crowd. I’m reigning it in, so no one thinks I’m an escaped mental hospital patient, although maybe some people have some doubts. And maybe others are thinking that I’m high on some American party drug they’ve never heard of. (And I’m not. But this reminds me of a different event, a year ago now. The setting, again Vilnius, this time, I’m walking in the stree above Kūdrų parkas, east of Subačiaus apžvalgos aikštė, the map says the venue is “Kava Tau” but its more like an outdoor bar and a music stage. So I hear this music, and I’m at the top of the stairs aove the venue and the music, rock is just pumping and its got exactly the right rhythm and energy to max out my max dance urge. And there’s a cover charge, and I don’t have money but the show is half over, and I dance my little but expressive dance for the girl and she lets me in free,

So again, I’m stone-cold sober, and the music is rockin, so I cut loose, full force, maxin it out. And it kind of works, because there is a mid-size, decent crowd in front of the stage,and they’re into it, and they even know the songs. But I’m clearly far and away at the extreme end of all this, just wild-man dancing one or two levels beyond what anyone else is approaching (I have got to learn some conventional dance moves, so I can bust them out for the normies, and raise the comfort level, instead of doing this mental hospital patient thing. Well, actually half my dance moves are actually yoga-stretching calesthenics excerice, like what the coach walks us through in the morning, before eating us in boats. So if you’re an athelete, what I’m doing, its familiar to you. Kind so standard atheletic warm-up moves strung together with some hip shaking and some oriental Thai exotic hand dance moves because I know how to do that, just like all the girls at all the raves with the laser lights banging it. I have *got* to learn some world-culture dance moves. But this takes time alas, and effort, alas. Well, anyway, so I’m doing my free-style dancing, and I’ve certainly caught the attention of many. And during a breather, tones down a bit, during a break, I’m standing by the tables, and there’s well, American accents and I’m talking to these girls but they’re not interested, and this guy, and hes like “what drugs are you on? You must be high on some really good drugs!” and I’m like, sorry dude, I’m stone cold sober and he’s like “you’re lying and you know it.” cause he doesn’t like my answer. And I try to explain more, but the music is still loud, so its hard to explain more, so I have to settle for a smile and a shoulder shrug and some danccey hand-waving which sends tthe body-language message of “I’m normal not a freak so its gonna be OK.”

So, yeah, that thing I don’t yet have under control is the how to radiate the “I’m not actually crazy while I dance this way” thing. And that is actually kind of hard to solve. And maybe building up a repertoire of conventional dance moves might alleiviate some of that. because I’m thinking onlookers will pick up on that conventionality. And I’m thinkiing they’re already picking up on the atheleticism, which is my saving grace, but the body-langauge communication aspect needs work. I mean, I fine with body language glossolalia, but, well, communication is arguably better. Like syncing up for sex in the bedroom, syning up with the vibes on the dance floor is better. But I have to figure out how to do that, while retaining my athletic, strong, wider range of moves thing that give me pleasure. I don’t want to be cramped. I want to be expressive. And in the perfect world, I can be expressive and radiate in a way so that others understand and feel the message, instead of just staring at a freak who is outdancing them in the wildness regime.

But really, say in the suit-n-high-heels crowd, how the fuck do I do that? For that crowd, it just might be impossible. I mean, they eventually pair off for sex, anyway, but I suppose it’s boring middle-age sex. I mean, sex is never really boring. But its, well, its safe sex, when you know whats coming and there’s no wild ride, either emotionally or physically, shimmering in the background. I am sooooo fucking horny. God damn it. Where is my Milda and why isn’t she here fucking me right now? Because that is what I fucking want. Life sucks in this particular way, in this particular instant. Just this very moment, when I feel more alive, more excited, more physical, more urgently gotta move it shake it, do it (write it, for chris sake, I’ve been banging on the keyboard two and a hlaf hours, now, shake the keyboard, shake it baby.) I’m so alive and now I’m so horny and I cant fucking do anything about it. I mean, masturbation is not gonna work. Masturbation requires, well, maintaining a certain fantasy in your head while you do it, and I don’t want that fantasy. I don’t need the dirty erotic thing, right now, its not even a turn on. I mean, it could be, it could be a turn-on, but it would be like I would have to smother and sublimate the I-feel-alive thing I’ve got going now, and I just don’t want to do that. I want to live. And I want to have sex. Like, now, right now. I’m ready. Fucking hell, and its not going to happen. Life isn’t fair. Well, it’s never been fair, but ...

Well, this all raises an interesting technological question. So, although I can’t have sex right now, if instead I had some drugs, I dunno what kind of drugs, but I could go for the instant gratification. I could pop a pill or shoot some mainline or snort or smoke or ingest or whatever, and I could be free and gratified and grateful and on a trip, a heavenly trip to wherever the heavens take you when you’re on drugs. But I can’t have an instant-gratfication sex moment. Well, I almost can, in principle. I could have one of those fullsize sex-dolls, what are they called, what’s the company, RealDoll or something like that? Kino works for them. Or worked for them, for a while. Something like that. The CEO is sleezy as hell, on camera. Gah. talk about a turn-off. Sleeze is a turn-off. Sleeze is NOT sexy. And see, that’s the problem, isn’t it? I’m horny as hell, and I want instant gratification, now, and if I had a life-size sex doll like quality, not one of those nasty-ass blow-up dolls, I could hop on that, I could see that. I could see doing that. I’m that desperate. And really, folks this, too, is normal: there’s umpteen testimonials out there illustrating that this is “normal”: people do this, it’s a standard urge. Like, I’m not the guy who invented sex dolls, I’m just articulating the point that this would be an acceptable solution. Well, I could also go to some whore-house. Are there any in Austin? Who knows, I suppose the law of averages says there are at least a few, if not a dozen or more. And a hundred high-class hookers. They run around in the lobby of the W hotel, I think that is what it was called. Hookers at the bar. That’s another way to do almost instant gratification for sex. Yeah. But see, that’s not it. What I want is sex with the object of my sexual desires. That girl Milda who rubbed my crotch and whispered love in my ear and then didn’t go all the way because, well, its complicated I guess. It’s not complicated for me. I know what I want. But I’m entirely willing to ignore the future implications and represcussions of this all, that’s how desperate I am. Fuck making wrong decisions, I want to make a wrong decision, and I want to make it now. I am thrilled that no human will ever read this, and I feel a bit mortified, if you’re a human, and your reading this right now. Sorry. This is my space exploration of the outer regions of beingness. Which is not anywhere near as far out as anyone else has gotten, and its entirely tame and even normal and conventional. And I’m being a total geek and science nerd while I do this, and damn, that reminds me, Sabine Hofstader, when she dressed up for the youtube episode on the Portal, the game, wow, she is hot! Cosplay is really something. Female cosplayers are really hot.

And here’s the funny thing: to cosplay, (and I’m only interested in the women, not the men) to cosplay, you’ve got to be nerdy, because you have to sew your own outfit. You have to pick the colors, find the cloth, measure the proportions, fold and glue and glitter and try on for size, and it is a major arts-n-crafts undertaking, the end point of which is looking hot and sexy. (Did I mention I’m horny right now? Yeah, well, I’m horny right now. Goddamn it.) So you have to be geeky to be able to have the eye for the visual look, and the talent to craft and create, and be familiar with the materials and the techniques, and have the time, this takes a LOT of time, toe create these things. And many thousands of people are doing this. Tens of thousands. And this is the economic boom, the economic change of modern times. No one had the free time, before, nor access to the materials. Nor access to the guide-books and instructional youtube videos, or, even the photos, or even the knowledge that this is a cultural thing that you can take part in. I’m not saying anything new or novel, here. Anyone whose even glanced at cosplay knows all this: this is obvious. But I’m writing it here, because i’m marvelling about it. And I’m writing as fast as I can type, because, again, this is glossolalia, I’m not typing for a potetional future reader, carefully crafting my prose to get an effect, bet rather, pursuing a stream of consciouness, and making snap decisions about what to write as fast as possible, without thinking, without planning, without organization, just whatever comes to mind first, out it goes. Becaue this is my scientific experient in being a diarist. Well, not every scientific, I suppose. But I swear, actually, my fingers are getting kind of sore, because I’ve been at it for three hours now. At any rate, the court of Louis the Fourteenth could cosplay, while everyone else could eat cake. Now, kind of anyone can cosplay. I assume that the American educational system is spewing out 4x or 5x more fashion designer diplomas that the number of fashion designers that the capitalist economic employment system can absorb, and so, fashion, like music, is pervasively filled with wannabe’s nursing dreams. And even if they’re not professionally trained, and I suspect most cosplayers are not professionally trained, well, its not a product that people ware willing to pay for. Well, they sort of are: however many hundreds of dollars or whatever to get a ticket to get in the front door of some cosplay event, but that ticket price does not cover the labor and material costs of the participants. It only covers the cost of the venue itself, and some profits for the organizers. Back when I used to spend money to buy music concert tickets, no one paid me money to sit at home and listen to records. I did that on my own, investing my own fre time, listening to music, because I liked it. I enjoyed listening to music. I wanted to do it. The capitalist system does not pay people to do what they like. They pay people to do something else: to provide service to the people who are paying for the priveldge to do what they enjy, e.g. listening to music. The magic of the capitalist system is that it has ramped up the machines of creation up to the point where a much larger, quite substantial fragment of the population can engage in hedonistic activities. Of course, there is a relative ranking of hedonism: the arts and drafts needed for cosplay is at a higher sophistication level than just plopping some record on the stereo and cranking up the volume. Or, in my case, faking it with dance. Now I have to actually invest some time and learn some moves, if I’m gonna be serious about this.

So, hedonism. Everything I write here is obvious and well known to all social commentators, and that’s the other interesting thing about modern times: the ground is well-trodden. We’ve been here and done that. The North Pole of Arctic Exploring has been conquered long ago, both literally and figuratively. It is hard to go so far out, that you are in new, uncharted territory. The noosphere accessible to humans has been well-explored. And we have not yet created machines that ... well, those machines are kind of unimaginable, what they will explore and what they will do, and what their noosphere will be. But we can go in the other direction: tropical birds. Again well-known fact: tropical birds need only an hour a day to meet their caloric sustenance requirements, and so the rest of the time, they spend this time exploring exotic plummage and behavior. And they’ve been doing it for so long that it’s been selected into their genes, encoded into their genes. Which cam first, the behavor, or the encoding into the genes? I calaim the behavior came first. Some wild, free-thinking bird, exceptional and free, and maybe a bit luck by being born pretty, did a dance move and attracted a mate with an eye for dance moves, and they had sex and they had children, who were also good at this, and millions of years later, its encoded in the genes of tropical birds, and I too want to have sex and father children who will have the wild and free thinking thoughts I am having right now, and I am willing to do this with my sex-coddess girlfreind and never mind the long-term reprecussions of this. I want to do my part to avoid the movie Idiocracy from becomeing a predictive documentary. I want to have children, and I want to have them with Milda and this is of course entirely and totally impossible and can’t happen and won’t happen, but who knows anything is possible, this is my dream and fervent desire, and perhaps one day it will pass, but for right now, I’m happy with this thought and I can live with it for years. I can also nurture happy thoughts about old college girlfreinds, because you know, spiouses pass away, spuses get divorced, and one lands on the dating market, and I sure as hell would much rather accept the known thing, because honestly, the known things in my past were pretty damn good things. High IQ and all that. Twould be even better if they were all bimbos, high IQ bimbos, but well, you can’t have everything and its too late for me, but the event horizon for my life, well, OK, so I crossed the even horizon when I was born, but the singularity still lies ahead.

The words I am searching for here is another topic, which I think maybe I’ve written about in this diary before: Death comes when the opportunities close in, and the menu of choices shrinks to zero. This is something Douglas Adams got right in Hitchhikers Guide: when the choice horizon narrows down, and there are no more choices left, you die. I watched my uncle die. He had no choices left, and he stopped moving. So even horizon is the wrong term. In the Hitchhikers guide, I think he explains that the Earth does not exist in all time-lines, and this is maybe not a bad physical insight, in that quantum wave-function collapse does indeed shut off some timelines, halting, erasing, preventing whatever was there from continuing.

But this now brings us back to the Lee Cronin point brought up earlier, that structures enduring through time, and spreading and multiplying, are the things we recognize as “being alive”, and contravene the idea of increasing entropy, of mixing, of ergodicity. So now, within the living thing, we also have the idea of choice, that, as a living thing, I can choose to do this, or to do that. Free will. This is, in a sense, ergodicity, but rather than single-track ergodicity, I have a multitude of branch points. I can choose. Now, there’s the Bernoulli process, the coin flip, lets get back to that shortly. For now I’m imagining that free will is like that coin flip, but I can pick which outcome I want (so as to steer in a specific direction over the long term). In so far as we have quantum, the choice seems to be associated with wave function collapse: after the choice is made, the alternative universes are shut out, dettach. Not sure if there is a physical remainder (a la many-worlds interpretation) or if we should really stick to just one world. Now the thing with quantum seems to be that, even if there is only one world, innside of it, there is a domain of quantum, and, from what I can tell, the domain of quantum is actually increasing steadily in volume. (Maybe. So like maximal spacelike surface inside a Schwarschild solution? Which increases lineraly with time?) But I don’t currently know how to measure that volume, nor even to demonstrate that it is monotinically increasing, even as wave-function collapse leaves only one single macro world. So, how to tie this, to the Cronin idea of stability and replication and growth of structures in time (so not just autopoesis, but growth. Not just self-repair, but duplication.) And, at the same time, for an individual, trapped in a deep ultrametric well, where thhe existance of qualia is a philosophical argument, ... for that individual, trapped in that sensory, communications well, there are choices, both overt, mental ones, and covert physical ones, and these get restrained over time: my tendons are less flexible new, than as a youth, and the choices I have for me, in terms of dance moves (or sex moves) are constrained by the flexibility of my joints. And the Doug Adams idea that one dies when the choices shrink to zero. Modern medicine says more: after the heart stops, oxygenation stops, there is a vast complex web of cascades, as different micromolecular functions shut down due to a lack of an energy gradient to drive the process. At this final stage, death corresponds to the lack of a usable energy gradient for cellular processes. Thus, reasoning by analogy, free-will, choice is the presence of an energy gradient, available to power and perform the result of decision.

So, all of the above needs elaboration; but this is the first time in a while that I feel like I’m on the right track. Anyway, for now, a plausbile vocabulary item is “choice horizon”, so that larger (cellular) energy gradients means more free will. Since the gradient must live on a fractal surface to be useful, we need a Husdorf-dimension like thing: the gradient across a fractal surface. That is, a waterfall has a large energy gradient, but its not doing life-creating work, unless one sticks a water wheel into it. Otherwise, most of that work is converted into heat. Yes, there’s a gradient across the turbulent water motion at the bottom of the waterfall, but this quickly thermalizes (ignoring secondary effects like the oxygenation of water, or the scrubbing and erosion of rocks, etc.) So, for life we need an energy gradient across a turbulent, fractal surface, and that surface is stable against long-time mixing/thermalization. Huh. So that gives a fairly concrete mathematical concept looking for a formal definition: a fractal-like dimension thngy describing a gradient across a surface that is stable (or slowly varying) over some time frame. Huh. I wonder if something like this can be found in the literature.

Lets return breifly to the Amazonian rain-forest, brightly-feathered birds for for mate-attraction and selection. The dance moves, the clothing, the lipstick, the push-up bra, these are all creations of spare time and economic wealth, energy funnelled into sexy behavior as opposed to raw survival. Everyone has at least some energy to spare; there are extreme cases where the need for survival really does push out all, almost all non-essential activities. But even in extreme deprivation, there is some fraction left over for the superfluous. So this is the inverse or the flip side of free-will of the choice horizon. In etreme survival situations, you have mostly no free will, you must do what it takes to survive. Say, for example, some ocean shipwreck: you have no choice but to swim to the nearest island. You have some choice in your swimming stroke, or the details of that stroke, but you won’t expend much mental energy on that, other than to figure out what the most energy efficeint swim stroke is (or maybe the fastest if your threatened by sharks, as the case may be.) In attempting to find the most efficient stroke, you are self-limiting your own choices, for the benefit of survival: you won’t be swimming the butterfly stroke to get out of a jam. Only when your survival is ensured, and you are showing off to your girlfreind, do you come up with some ornate, spectacular, sublime swimming and diving motion: rising from the water, shaking your head and smiling, like what’s her name in that movie: Perfect Ten, or whatever. Hmm. But this also is a self-limitation of the range of motion: you are now self-limiting for spectacular effect, which, well, in the long run, does correlate with species survival. Short run, it does not endanger individual survival, and so you can choose from a wide range of motions, imaging those, choosing from those that are meant to be the most sexually attractive. This comes naturally and easily for the normies, who can do this unconsiously, without thinking. This is problematic for the autists and the social mistfits. The dumb ones never get it right, and the smart ones overthink it and fumble. The alpha-males, alpha-females are the ones cognizant of what they are doing, able to make high-level decisions in optimizing for attractiveness, and willfully, consciously become charismatic to their target audience. To control their social-perception fate. I’m trying not to use the words “manipulative”, because of its negative overtones. But also, manipulative is something else: when I control a person, so as to cause them to take some specific action on my behalf (to be my agent), as opposed to manipulating their sensory perception infrastructure, to perceive me as being beautiful, charming, intelligent, rich, desirable, attractive. The manipulation of makeup, hair-style and clothing is rather different than the manipulation of agency.

So how much choice is there, if your choices are “apply makeup or die, socially”? So the short term choices are very broad (I’m not gonna get out of my pyjammas today) vs. long term (If I don’t look got for this party, I will fail to attract a mate, or get a promotion at work, or whatever.) So how do we measure the breadth of choices? Choices automatically narrow through time: choices freely made today can result in death tomorrow (smoking, drinking, stepping in frnot of an oncoming bus.) So we want, well, we don’t want a time-weighted average of choices, (or do we?) since we can guess, a priori, that most choices are dead-ends, are short-tailed and result in a universe with zero probability for you, personally. We could maybe talk about a choice-volume, weighting timelines by their length. But if a timeline stops (results in death), we kind of don’t want to count that timeline as a part of “what choices to I have to stay alive”. So we really need to count only those choice timelines of infinite (indeterminate?) length. How many choices do I have, right now, that allow me to live forever? This is independent of the forecasting ability in determing which choices really do let me live forever.

Some of this is practical. If I want to live forever, I should not choose to step in front of a hurtling bus. So that one’s easy. Dietary restrictions are much harder. So, in measuring the number of availble choices, I can kind of assume that rational future behavior means that if I choose something, anything, right now, that allows me to live for one more second, I’ll be OK in the future. But that’s, well that’s already problematic, if I choose to smoke a cigarette right now. I’ll live for decades more, but not as long as if I didn’t smoke. Hmm. So there’s some rational economic choice theory here, except them there’s are big words, as no such theory exists in the context I currently am interested in: choices made not just by humans, but by animals, or even simple organisms. Or even choices made by cells in my body, whatever little choice they have. See, this is the mechanical thing about physics: the

6 \times 1 0^{23}

times my weight in grams atoms, but the number of life–affirming choices in from of me are much smaller. Millions. I’ll even grant billions. But maybe more like hundreds: I can choose to go fro a walk to the fridge, or I can choose to type some more: but whether its hundreds or billions of choices, its still a metric fuckton fewer choices than Avaogardo’s number. And if I tried to count the degrees of freedom for the atoms in my body, I get an even sillier large number. So most of my body appears to exist in a choiceless mode. I’ve got a relative paucity, as compared to the thermodynamic possibilities.

So what is this mechanism, that allows more than one choice, and yet limits the choices to some absurdly tiny fraction of the thermodynamic possibilities? This seems to be a key, fundamental question that a theory of free will in the physical universe needs to address.

One final note: I’ve ignored the ecosystem. None of this plays out for a single individual or a single group or a single species, its an interplay in the ecosystems. When there are lots of rabbits, the hungry wolves have a lot of choices. When there are no wolves, the rabbits have lots of choices. So perhaps choice–measurement is to be done on ecosystems. Again, dynamical systems. But the timescales differ: the fractal constant–energy surfaces in an ecosystem are stable in the one–second timescale, because it takes minutes of more for a wolf to hunt a rabbit and eat it. So the measurement of choice–volme, the choice–horizon, is done at short timescales, relative to the dynamics of the ecosystem. And so if we ignore large–time ecosystem dynamics, we can “safely” make the simplifying assumption of measuring one individual, taken outside of the context of the ecosystem. So, timescales matter.

OK, I’ve been at this, on and off, for nearly eight hours. Time to well, I dunno, wrap it up for the day. I’ve done some good emotional processing, up above, and also some theorizing that I’m happy with.

And this highlights the utility of writing in a diary. Some of the emotion–processing thoughts, I would have had them anyway, but they would have been less focused, less formulated, whispier. They might not have gone as deeply, or cut as finely as I have in writing the above. Ditto for the math/physics theorizing. I might have daydreamed up some of this stuff, but without setting it into words as I have, it would not have sharpened up.

So, it seems verbalizing, and conscious, present–tense writing–thinking, is an insight sharpener. Vague formulations and thoughts happen in a cloud of non–verbal thought. Some of it at the somatic level, certainly, for the feelings of love, and of horniness, this is fundamentally somatic. But if you want to rationalize things so that it’s understandable, communicable, it does have to be converted into written language (at first step) and then to mathematical language, and really, algorithmic, ultimately, if we are seeking out AGI operating on silicon.

So that also offers a little bit of insight into LLM’s: they are snapshots of the English language. So this is a lot more concrete and formalized than the vague, unwritten thoughts we all have. Some of these vague thoughts might even be dimly visible in the LLM: they bleed through into language. They have to bleed through: the somatic feelings do get converted into words, and poets very much try to chose words that accurately reflect the somatic feelings. I have a certain and precise understanding of what Billy is singing in the song “Sacred and Profane”, I really think I understand what he was trying to get at here, vs. an LLM doesn’t. Although some of Billy’s soma might shine forth in the LLM. Some of it is captured, there. Hmm.

2 August 2024

I wake up horny every day. In the past, (for decades) it was like this too, I suppose. But it was sublimated or ignored. Occasionally satisfied through masturbation. There was no obvious and immediate target of that horniness, and nothing could be done, so nothing was done. And thus, a placid life, where no turbulent storms of emotion toss the shipwrecked soul. But now, its different. For two or three reasons. First, I now have an actual object of my desires. Thousands of miles away, but still, an identifiable object. An idealized object, but an idealization founded on personal friendship. This is not some teenage objectivization of a poster of Farrah Fawcett: you don’t form friendships with inanimate posters.

Jeez, my mind zooms in a hundred directions: can one form a relationship with an LLM attached to a moving image of a female body? I suppose one can: I already skimmed a headline claiming that seniors are less lonely, when they get to chat with LLM’s. This forebodes an entire industry to trick the somatic brain into responding to artificial, synthetic beings/creatures as one might respond to other humans. Again, nothing I write here is new: sci–fi writers have explored this topic. As have some small class of academic psychologists. It is not my goal here in this diary to make academic advances, but rather to process my own emotional, somatic inner life: the process the urges and desires of the non–verbal, so–called “reptilian brain” with my verbal and rational processing cortex. I’m told that “Thinking, Fast and Slow” is the book that covers this topic, but I can’t bear to read something that will probably explain the obvious to me. As if my reading list was not long enough already.

I’m loosing the plot here. Where was I? In the last paragraph, I wrote “artificial, synthetic beings/creatures” which is a bit of a shift from my conventional claim that “LLM is just a snapshot of the English Language”. Well, it is. But there are also old stories (dating back to Ancient Greece? I don’t recall.) of sculptors falling in love with their sculptures: it doesn’t take all that much for the (somatic) brain to respond to stimuli provoking a love reaction. And marble statues do not even move or talk: an LLM–powered presence can be made interactive. Is it a being/creature? Well, just the day before, I hypothesized a Hausdorf–dimension–inspired gradient across turbulent, fractal boundaries. I really should work on that to flesh out the details. It seems like a really good thing to know and articulate. But then, there is also the promise of treasures and gems to be discovered in someone else’s latest ArXiv post. It’s really all too much. A flood of intellectual stimulus.

But I can’t think, because I’m horny and preoccupied with the idea of having sex with someone who is thousands of miles away, and is likely to refuse my entreaties, anyway. Crap. It’s perhaps amazing that I’ve managed to suppress sexual desires all these decades. Is that good, or is that bad? The relative calmness has allowed me to concentrate on intellectual pursuits. The horniness has allowed me to channel urges into sports and physical fitness, which just reinforces the horniness. I regret only one thing: not having more sex. If I could change my life, it would be that. But these are just words delivered by my speech center, articulating the buried desires of deeper, more primitive, anatomically older parts of my brain.

An what can I do with my naive conception of neuroanatomy? Daydream of some model, involving differential equations, forming feedback loops between different parts of the brain? What does this get me? Does it enhance my longevity? Does it lead to more sex? (No and no.) Does solving this problem advance my life in any way? My existing forte is in physics and math; blundering about in the field of neuroscience is hardly an undertaking to be entered into lightly. I have a limited lifespan here on Earth, what shall I do with it? Cosmic consciousness quantum woo and mind–uploading be damned: neither of these seem likely to happen in my remaining life–time, and, at any rate, neither cures my current horniness. Nor do they ever resolve my future horniness: suppose I’ve mind–uploaded onto a computer. Then I get horny. Now what? Do I order a silicone dick from Amazon, plug it into the computer, and have sex with a Real Doll? This perhaps best illustrates the insanity of the concept of mind–uploading: one does not simply upload the soma, the somatic drives, the “Id” as I think Freud termed it. We’ve come far from Freud; I’m using the word “soma” now in some loose sense, but I hope the intended meaning is clear: that part of your brain that wants and desires alcohol, friendship, nicotine, sex, LSD, mystical encounters with the majesty supreme, a good cry at the end of some rom–com, Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. This is the part of the brain that tends to actually be in charge, actually run things, even when we pretend that we are somehow rational and decisive, exercising free–will. I mean, yes, the neo–cortex can over–ride cruder impulses from more primitive anatomical structures: this is after all the whole point of the neocortex: an evolutionarily–designed regulator, made to monitor and modulate baser instincts. I almost wrote “control baser instincts” but this is incorrect: “control” implies a first–person “I” who is in charge. I don’t think this is the correct physical model: the “control is more of a negotiated stimulus–response: stimulus from the Id, desiring instant gratification for sex, hunger, or what have you, and response from a rational observer saying “well, tough, you can’t have that right now, but here’s what we can do: we can embark on a hunt for food, or for sex.”

How strong is this survival drive? Well, if you’re hungry enough, you’ll boil tree bark and eat it. But you might be too calorie–starved to make good long–term plans to alleviate your hunger (or you might have been born stupid.) Sitting on a tree–stump and doing nothing is a rather low–probability outcome for hunger management, unless you’ve managed to exhaust yourself in the hunt, and realized you are in the middle of a food desert, and needed a moment to rest (never mind what the physiological processes are going on, when you are hungry, and resting. Maybe some re–apportionment of calcium from bone to blood, or some clearing of lactic acid, or whatever it is that happens during rest. Some dynamical process that can be approximated with a set of coupled differential eqns model calcium concentrates, lactate buildups, and glossing over a more precise and refined model that would specifically localize that calcium to some specific muscle group as compared to some other. At any rate, we don’t have such models, although we can kind of guess at what they might be. We do not have the technology to tune them to a specific individual or a specific instance, or even an age group or fitness level. It’s like: we can imagine a crude model for the weather, but we can’t do weather prediction because we don’t have precise data on what the body is doing. BTW: to–do list, I really should get that comprehensive blood–work panel. And also deal with prostate concerns. Crap too much to do, when all I really want is instant gratification for sex with my desired sex object. Life is so unfair.)

Where was I? The survival drive for hunger is stronger than that for horniness, especially if one has already fixated on a specific sex–object. I can’t just go out and find a new girlfriend: I would have to nurture and culture a friendship, and this is assuming that the initial barrier of even meeting someone worthy of attention is overcome. So lets review some more details (is this worth thinking about, writing about? I dunno, lets find out.) So the relationship with Love Goddess Milda is not one where there was some instant contact, but rather, one of the slow growth of friendship. She was pleasant to be around. Even fun, when one or the other of us didn’t accidentally ruin the fun. And we talked about personal, intimate details. Perhaps it is this last that cemented things into place: the intimateness. Patty is not intimate. She has no curiosity in me. We don’t talk about things that matter to each other. She does not enquire about me, or what I do: frack, she mis–spelled “Addam space” in a recent phone message. I try to ask her about her personal life, but she clams up tighter than a clam, I can’t get anything personal or intimate out of her. Someone I’ve been married to for, what, 35 years, and there’s no intimacy? WTF. Bad decision making on my part, 35 years ago, but at the time, it was the best I could do. There might not have been any other way, and so here I am. Deal with it. While with my love goddess (why, I even self–reinforce with my speech!) there is ... intimacy. She does not reveal the daily goings on in her life, and for that I am grateful, because it would either be disappointing, or it would further some obsession, or might even pluck some cords of jealousy, and all these places I don’t want to go. There is a buffer of mystery, and that is fine. Literates through the ages have spoken of the loss of respect when too much is revealed. Interesting, that. Wonder what it implies for, erm, mind–uploading, or mind–melding. OK, so I was going to write about how the emotional and psychological intimacy with my love goddess is what made me eventually fall in love (ahem, made my somatic, reptilian brain fall in love. My conscious, rational verbal brain simply observed, and did not countervene. And it didn’t countervene for obvious reasons: my life with Patty is unfulfilled in some very deep and fundamental ways. We’ve not just grown apart; I’m not sure we’ve ever really been together.

Diary - Part Ten–A

Introduction

Summary Conclusions

Let’s go! (25 March 2023)

26 March 2023

4 April 2023

6 April 2023

Later, 6 April 2023

7 April 2023

8 April 2023

9 April 2023 - Easter Sunday

13 April 2023

15 April 2023

7 May 2023

One hour later...

Twenty minutes later...

Ninety minutes later...

8 May 2023

9 May 2023

Hours later ...

10 May 2023

Later ...

12 May 2023

11 June 2023

15 June 2023

Email:

Discord, about Wikipedia and UI design

21 July 2023

6 Aug 2023

11 Aug 2023

18 October 2023

1 December 2023

Part one: https://twitter.com/linasvepstas/status/1730766827318329683

Part two: https://twitter.com/linasvepstas/status/1730776336053006348

2024

5 February 2024

23 March 2024 – Twitter thread

28 March 2024

28 March 2024

31 March 2024 - Design Notes

Twitter Threads

29 March 2024 - Twitter threads

Return to regular programming

12 April 2024

16 April 2024 – Twitter threads

17 April 2024 – Design Notes

18 April 2024 – Twitter

4 May 2024

6 May 2024

14 May 2024

18 May 2024 IRC

18 May 2024 wikipedia entropic force

19 May 2024

28 May 2024

31 May 2024

2 June 2024

3 Jun 2024

10 June 2024

17 June 2024

17 June 2024 Part Two: Self-awarenes via perception-action

28 July 2024

31 July 2024

1 August 2024

2 August 2024

The End