Month: July 2019

My uncle killed himself on Monday around 6:17pm.

I’m laying in bed, distracting myself, processing at the corners of my periphery.

I need to wake up early tomorrow, pick my manager and Japanese colleagues up from the hotel.

My mind is restless. It wants to dive deep into the dark folds, bury itself in melancholy.

Life is good, and I am responsible for too much to allow this tragedy to derail my focus.

Though, there are tinges that it’s all trivial. I must resist, for the time being. I have much work to do this week.

I need to process this situation without overindulging.

Need to sleep now. More soon.

People will do anything, no matter how absurd, in order to avoid facing their own souls. One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious.

—Carl Jung, Psychology and Alchemy, Page 99.

Seldom, or perhaps never, does a marriage develop into an individual relationship smoothly and without crises; there is no coming to consciousness without pain.

—Carl Jung, Contributions to Analytical Psychology, P. 193

Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of ourselves.

—Carl Jung, Memories Dreams and Reflections, Page 247.

The healthy man does not torture others-generally it is the tortured who turn into torturers.

—Carl Jung; Civilization in Transition; Page 587.

A man who has not passed through the inferno of his passions has never overcome them. They then dwell in the house next door, and at any moment a flame may dart out and set fire to his own house. Whenever we give up, leave behind, and forget too much, there is always the danger that the things we have neglected will return with added force.

—Carl Jung, MDR, Page 277

Knowing your own darkness is the best method for dealing with the darknesses of other people.

—Carl Jung, Letters Vol. 1, Pages 236-237.

It all depends on how we look at things, and not on how they are themselves. Thinking is an act of the soul whereby it becomes conscious of itself and of other things outside itself.

—Carl Jung; Symbols of Transformation; Footnote 2.

The dynamic principle of fantasy is play, a characteristic also of the child, and as such it appears inconsistent with the principle of serious work. But without this playing with fantasy any creative work has ever yet come to birth. The debt we owe to the play of imagination is incalculable. It is therefore short-sighted to treat fantasy, on account of its risky or unacceptable nature, as a thing of little worth.

—Carl Jung; Psychological Types Ch. 1; Page 82.

The pendulum of the mind alternates between sense and nonsense, not between right and wrong.

—Carl Jung, Memories Dreams and Reflections, Page 154.

Even a happy life cannot be without a measure of darkness, and the word “happy” would lose its meaning if it were not balanced by sadness.

—Carl Jung, C.G. Jung Speaking, Pages 451-452.

We cannot change anything unless we accept it. Condemnation does not liberate, it oppresses. I am the oppressor of the person I condemn, not his friend and fellow-sufferer.

—Carl Jung, Modern Man in Search of a Soul, Pages 234-235.

I realize that under the circumstances you have described you feel the need to see clearly. But your vision will become clear only when you can look into your own heart. Without, everything seems discordant; only within does it coalesce into unity. Who looks outside dreams; who looks inside awakes.

—Carl Jung, Letters Volume I, Page 33.

Filling the conscious mind with ideal conceptions is a characteristic of Western theosophy, but not the confrontation with the shadow and the world of darkness. One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious.

—Carl Jung; The Philosophical Tree; CW 13: Alchemical Studies. P.335

After all, the essential thing is not the shadow but the body which casts it.

—Carl Jung, CW 16, Page 64.

A Mathematician’s Apology by G.H. Hardy

Nice little read. Surprisingly poetic for a mathematician. Deep insights into the beauty of mathematics as an exercise of the imagination, and one of the purest expressions of creativity and ingenuity.

I love literature. Love love love literature. Love juicy plots. Love philosophical frameworks. Love poetic verse. Love witticisms and clever prose.

I love art more generally. Love all the forms of human expression, from singing and songwriting and instrumentation, to dance and theater, to sculpture and painting and architecture.

But I’ve only recently begun to indulge in appreciating the beauty and aesthetics of mathematics. I’m not gifted with math. I began writing when I was 8, and journaling a few years later ever since. I never spent the time developing the foundations of math. Never honed my mind like I did with writing. I wish I had. I wish I had some better influences. It was always something that I enjoyed, but I never had confidence, and I never felt at home with its methods. I wish I did.

But the older I get, the more I give myself permission to explore the areas of thought that I missed out on. The more I allow myself to appreciate the beauty of these domains.

Reason and mathematics are almost inseparable. There is inherent structure in our grammar that follows the same logic that mathematics builds upon.

The reasoning tools mathematics provides seem endless.

Mathematics tells us nothing of value. Only of methods.

But yea. Mathematics is quite amazing. Great book if you’d like to glimpse into a mathematician’s inner mind.

One of the most fascinating discoveries I made in college was in a formal logic class, when we learned the foundations of logic.

Why does logic work?

Logic is the basis of mathematics.

Logic is the basis of grammar.

Logic is the relational structure upon which mathematical rules build upon.

But what is logic built upon?

Introduce: the laws of thought.

What are the laws of thought?

There are three laws that govern our thoughts, and the reason and logic they produce, and three signs which represent the contents and operations of the mind.

The abstract contents of our thoughts can be represented by three signs:

1. Symbols, which represent things that are subject to conception [A,B,p,q,x,y, etc]

2. Operations, which represent how the mind combines or resolves things into new forms [and, or, not, if then, etc]

3. Identity, which represents equality or equivalence [=]

There are three laws:

•The law of identity: (A=A)

•The law of non contradiction: ~(A&~A)

•The law of excluded middle. (A or ~A)

There are also three operators, or logical connectives:

“is” represents equality [=]

“or” represents disjunction, or this or that or both [+,∨]

“not” represents negation or [~,-]

From these operators we can build other operators:

“and” represents conjunction or grouping [&,∧, •, ×] ~(~p or ~q)

“conditional” implication, or if this, then that (essentially cause and effect) [→, ⊃,⇒] (~p∨q)

“Biconditional” representing equivalence [=,↔︎,≡]

The law of identity states that a thing is equal to itself. A is A. It cannot be the case that something is equal to something that is not itself. This is tautological. Ex: 3=2+1=1+1+1. Three is a composite of integrals, of parts. The whole must be equal to the sum of parts. 1lb = 16oz. You can imagine the consequences if things were equal to things other than what they were. Without the law of identity, you could equivocate anything, and all would fall apart and be meaningless. There would be no clear distinctions of what things are. The sun is not the moon. The sun is a star. The moon is a planet.

The law of non contradiction states that something cannot be and not be at the same time. You cannot exist and not exist simultaneously. You cannot have a dollar and not have a dollar simultaneously. It cannot be Noon and Midnight.

The law of excluded middle states that a thing is one thing, or it is something else. It cannot be both. Something is either alive or dead. Not half alive or half dead. You exist or you do not exist, not partly exist. There is no “middle”.

All of these laws assume a permanent or static context, without change, and therefore a time constant. Because we know that something can be the case in one moment, and not the case in the next moment. So logic requires we define a context, or “domain of discourse” which we assign a range of values to variables.

Writing provides a map of a mental model.

Literature is a map of a mental model.

If you want low resolution mental models, read a summary.

If you want high resolution mental models, read a book.

Summarizing the contents of a landscape is fine if you are navigating from above, and only require low resolution.

But you will never know the terrain until you’ve lived it, until you’ve explored all the contours yourself, and met those also inhabiting it.

Books are the closest thing to living the landscape. They are confessions of the inhabitants divulging their mental models, laying out the maps they’ve devised as they’ve explored the terrain.

Summaries will never replace books, just as books will never replace experience.

Summaries are a guide, but they fail to contain all the interesting features.

A quality experience requires presence, so the senses and reason can observe unperturbed by past ideas, and the bias and inclination it produces. You must stop and be still, open to what’s before you. Otherwise you will miss it, and fail to appreciate the character of experience, which informs us with understanding.

A book requires this same presence. Reading is an experience. Lifting the contents of a map into the mind, and recreating the mental models for personal use, require imagination, reflection, and patience.

No summary can capture the idiosyncrasies of a book, just as no book can capture the idiosyncrasies of a landscape.

But in order to understand, we need to take the time to observe. This requires patience.

Low resolution maps have their place for crude navigation. But they tell us nothing of the character of experience. There is no substitute for living in the landscape. But quality books get close.

Writing teaches you to create mental models. Mental models rule the world. They are the programs that govern the collective.

When you learn to write effectively, and create mental models others can utilize to solve problems, you are programming minds.

When you learn to program software, you are learning to program minds.

Read books only from those that are living in the landscape you wish to understand. Those bumping into the terrain, solving the thorny challenges of navigating the geography, in all its gloom and glory.

Summaries are poor substitutes for acquiring mental models.

“What I cannot create, I do not know.” —R. Feynmann

We must experiment. We must write. We must build. We must not be passive. We must not delude ourselves into thinking the work can be done for us.

To acquire a robust mental model, we must do, as intimately as possible.

Cambrian Explosion was a Hot Event

Interesting if you think of life as a thermodynamic process, of increasing complexity of energy efficient bodies, which diffuse energy/heat in some formulaic evolutionary way.

Explains why the Cambrian explosion occurred, ie why a supermassive evolutionary speciation occurred.

Same reason why speciation is greatest along the equator.

One impetus for Organism evolution is thermodynamics.

This makes sense anyway.

It’s like, the same reason why hot water freezes faster than cold water, ie Mpemba effect.

Crystallization seems to be encouraged by vibrations, like the molecules wiggle into place faster, and arrange into lattice structures more quickly, thus dissipating heat more efficiently.

I feel like it’s somehow someway linked to evolutionary processes. Since like water is like super abundant on earth and some of the hottest and most humid areas on earth of greatest speciation.

So let’s say you had two large containers filled with an fraction of water, with temperature sensors in the water, as well as temp and humidity sensors in the upper container filled with air, both in closed systems, with heat exchangers at the bottom to facilitate freezing.

One container began at 35° and the other at 100°. And you began freezing.

Monitor the rate it took to freeze the water, as well as air temp and air humidity.

Should probably also have something like a magnetic mixer in each container to reduce temperature differential within the bodies of water as much as possible. And maybe have heat exchangers on all sides not just the bottom

My friends say they are extremely confident that the one starting at 35 degrees would freeze before the one at 100 degrees and I think their rates of temperature decrease would be approach equivalence as you tightened the experimental controls

But, I think the magnetic mixer would screw it up, because it would distort the crystallization process, if we assume that. crystallization facilitated more efficient energy dissipation

On another note, thermodynamic processes also may explain why massive advances of complexity occurred with every technological advance which allowed humanity to harness energy more efficiently, ie agricultural revolution, scientific revolution, industrial revolution, leveraging oil, computer and digital revolution, etc.

Someone asked me about automation controls, and where Nvidia and Qualcomm’s “Edge Computing” technology fit:

Industrial Automation Controls is dominated by two types: Industrial Controllers (Programmable Logic Controllers/ PLCs) and Industrial Processors (Programmable Automation Controllers/ Industrial PCs).

You can think of industrial controllers as really robust Arduino’s, and industrial processors as really robust Raspberry Pi’s.

The main difference is controllers primary function is basic mechanical controls processing with 12-24V inputs and analog signals and motion controls. They are very easy to program (primarily ladder logic, as well as structured text similar to C) and maintain and troubleshoot, and can run for a decade without problems. This is mostly “Factory Automation”. The top PLC player is Allen Bradley (also known as Rockwell Automation). Or Siemens.

Industrial Processors main function is processing lots of data. They have much greater processing power, and are typically doing “process automation”. Think any type of refining process requiring fine tuning and measurement, such as refining and mixing etc. These controls systems tend to be less stable and more difficult to trouble shoot, because their underlying programming architecture is more complex to achieve speed. For example, a window’s update may cause serious problems for the application you’re running. Many of these company’s have their own Window’s or Linux version that’s locked down to prevent these issues. They can also be a bit more difficult to maintain and troubleshoot. I don’t specialized in these types of controls, so I’m sure there are exceptions to everything said here. The top or leading industrial processor player is Beckhoff Automation. Or Siemens.

As the “Internet of Things” and “Smart Technology” become more ubiquitous in the manufacturing environment, we’re seeing more and more need for data processing, as a result of collecting data about the process for analysis and intelligent automated decision making. Whether that’s collecting sensor data, tracking and traceability data from barcode’s or RFID, recipe data, production information, process data, etc.

“Edge Computing” is a way to do data processing on a field level to make real time decisions, rather than passing it up stream or to a master controller/PC or server to be processed. This is a direct outgrowth of the whole IOT movement, where AI and “intelligent algorithms” are being applied to machine/robot process and sensor data to make intelligent decisions. Edge Computing requires high processing power, and hence a new type of controls solution with greater data processing capability.

The closest product we have to Edge Computing is our compact multi-function PLC. This allows you to have a dedicated controller in a field or sub-system to do controls processing, rather than have a centralized controller doing all the work. However, the FP0H is not doing typical Edge Computing. It’s just doing relatively simple field controls with minimal data processing, but it’s a step in that direction.

As Machine Vision and Advanced Sensing Technology continue to permeate manufacturing and commercial applications, and work with automated machine systems and robots to do intelligent decision making, more and more data is being collected, and a greater need to process that data quickly.

This is where Nvidia and Qualcomms technology is stepping in, and Edge Computing more generally.

Here’s a good topic:

Is information physical?

For the sake of discussion, let’s assume physical is anything tangible or concrete to the senses.

Consider these discussions a form of imaginative play. We’re playing a game, so you can act on whatever assumptions necessary to make the game fun and progress towards an end, which is understanding.

I was listening to a lecture this morning and the speaker referenced Claude Shannon, a pioneer in information theory, who posited that information was physical. I thought this was interesting. I never thought of information as physical. I guess I thought it was objective. Like, physical bodies have physical information. Eg Arrangement of atoms have geometrical shapes, and that is information encoded into the physical structure

But I just found the idea that information is physical as unintuitive.

Like information seems to be purely psychological, like an idea. But it seems to exists outside of us, in the physical world.

Just something curious that made me think

If it is physical, it needs to obey the laws of physics. Which is Interesting.

Going back to information theory, all these philosophical or science based discussions (or books and lectures etc) are meant to, for all intensive purposes, augment or strengthen or modify the interpreter/receiver in our heads. Call it reason, and the associated algorithms and heuristics we use to process. What’s interesting with information theory is it’s vast applications.

Electronics is the most obvious. The better the signal, the better the receiver, the less noise, the better information capture

The receiver is our senses in some respect, but it’s also our ability to perceive.

The destination does some post-processing of the signal to tune into the correct pattern we’re trying to perceive/capture. Ie our minds. Much like you do signal processing to reduce noise and identify relevant wave form information.

I just started reading a book titled An Introduction to Cybernetics by W Ross Ashby. Written in 1956, it has some extremely fascinating insights into information theory relating to communication and controls.

I really had no idea what “cybernetics” was prior to picking up the book. Sounded like an outdated sci-fi term. But it actually has tremendous relevance to automation, for living and non living machines.

Cybernetics is defined as “the science of communications and automatic control systems in both machines and living things.” I see lots of parallels with consciousness and biomechanics and AI etc.

I also have been a big fan of Terrence W Deacon. I bought his book The Symbolic Species, which I have only scratched the surface of, but contains so much insane insights into how humans developed the capacity for language, which is an information processing mechanism.

But I recently bought his book Incomplete Nature, which delves into the evolutionary origins of biosemiotics (signs and symbolic systems of biological organisms), consciousness, and the nature and origins of “life” more generally.

Only read the preface, but I am enthralled by his novel thinking and interdisciplinary approach to solving the most difficult problems of science, which revolve around the subjective mind which makes sense of the world, and can’t be entirely be extricated from science’s objective conclusions.

Why pose these questions? Why the fervent anxious scramble to make sense of the world?

Regarding anxiety, I’m not so sure it’s entirely bad. I think it has tremendous utility if you possess self awareness, if you learn to master and guide it, rather have it master and guide you.

It’s a physiological response to existential threats.

I think channeling this can be extremely productive.

Learning to toggle or throttle it seems like a smart way to leverage this evolutionary adaptation to perceived stress.

Channeling anxiety to achieve a “flow” state seems useful, regardless of whatever ends you choose.

Going back to the perceiver,

If a tree falls in the woods and there’s no one there to hear it, does it make a sound?

No, it doesn’t, because sound is an anthropomorphized conception of vibrations we can perceive.

A tree falls, energy is transmitted.

That’s all we can say objectively, I think?

Energy is being emitted all the time. There is a vast spectrum of how we capture or measure or perceive energy.

The range of energy being emitted by all living or non living matter may as well amount to pure chaotic noise in the scheme of things.

Without a mind to apply a context, to delineated and draw boundaries on what’s relevant or irrelevant to a set of value based ends, all this pulsating energy “means” nothing. Is nothing. It’s a soup of vibrations, on a scale that’s difficult to fathom, and likely impossible to make sense of, beyond our human biological based prerogatives.

The mind creates order.

Or does order create the mind? Is there a god like energy force guiding these patterns, impressing this order?

Or is consciousness or life more generally adhering to physical laws which produce the illusion of order?

Probably that.

I was reading last night and the author was talking about “energy”. I need to find the book i was reading, but he was speaking about how energy is always referenced, but no clear definition exists.

What is energy?

When you stop to really reflect, it’s almost mystical.

Is energy finite, or infinite? Ie does the universe contain a finite amount, or does it spring from nothing? I think we concluded it’s finite, but… is it?

What is energy?

Where is the source? Matter is energy. Vibrations are energy.

Matter is just a bunch of vibrations.

Everything is a vibration.

Quantum Decoherence is what allows for matter. Collapsing wave forms.

It’s fascinating.

Everything is music, in that everything is vibrations.

Motion is energy. Forces are energy. Gravity is a force, so it’s energy. Vibrations are a transference of energy.

Motion? Is Kinetic energy… energy just changes forms, but what it is… is kinda mysterious. Energy: magnetic, internal (thermal), chemical, kinetic, electrostatic, elastic, potential, gravitational potential, nuclear…. but… what IS it.

Motion must always have a frame of reference. We’re moving around the earth, moving around the sun, moving around the Milky Way galactic center, moving away from other space objects.

The source. Where is the source.

And what can consciousness teach us about this “source”.

If you want to find the secrets of the universe, think in terms of energy, frequency and vibration.

—Nikola Tesla

Weird thing is we can’t see energy. We can only see how it manifests.

“In the beginning was the word.” -John 1:1

“But still, one may be tempted to assume that whenever we ask questions of nature, of the world there outside, there is a reality existing independently of what can be said about it. We will now claim that such a position is void of any meaning. It is obvious that any property or feature of reality “out there” can only be based on information we receive. There cannot be any statement whatsoever about the world or about reality that is not based on such information. It therefore follows that the concept of reality without at least the ability in principle to make statements about it to obtain information about its features is devoid of any possibility of confirmation or proof. This implies that the distinction between information, that is knowledge, and reality is devoid of any meaning. Evidently what we are talking about is again a unification of very different concepts. The reader might realize that unification is one of the main themes of the development of modern science. One of the first unifications was the discovery by Newton that the same laws apply to bodies falling on earth and to the motion of heavenly bodies. Other well known unifications concern the unification of electricity and magnetism by Maxwell or the later unification of electromagnetism and the weak force.

In other words, it is impossible to distinguish operationally in any way reality and information. Therefore, following Occam’s razor, the notion of the two being distinct should not be abandoned, as the assumption of the existence of such a difference does not add anything that could not also be obtained without it. 

Therefore, if we now investigate fundamental elements of information, we automatically investigate fundamental elements of the world. We have already seen earlier that any representation of information is based on bits. Any object is presenting a huge number of bits. If we go to smaller and smaller objects we necessarily arrive at the fact that such objects can be characterized by one bit, two bits, three bits, etc., that is, information is quantized in truth-values of propositions. In view of our proposal that information and reality are basically the same, it follows that reality also has to be quantized. In other words, the quantization in physics is the same as the quantization of information. To conclude, it is worth mentioning that this idea can be turned into a research program developing the structure of quantum physics from first principles.”

–Anton Zeilinger (Physicist), excerpt from “Why the Quantum?”

”This model of material world obeying laws of physics is so successful that soon we forget about our starting point and say that matter is the only reality, and perceptions are only helpful for its description. This assumption is almost as natural (and maybe as false) as our previous assumption that space is only a mathematical tool for the description of matter. But in fact we are substituting reality of our feelings by a successfully working theory of an independently existing material world. And the theory is so successful that we almost never think about its limitations until we must address some really deep issues, which do not fit into our model of reality.”

“Is it not possible that consciousness, like space-time, has its own intrinsic degrees of freedom, and that neglecting these will lead to a description of the universe that is fundamentally incomplete? What if our perceptions are as real (or maybe, in a certain sense, are even more real) than material objects?”

—Andrei Linde, Physicist at Stanford
https://web.stanford.edu/~alinde/SpirQuest.doc

I think it’s safe to say that there is no “true nature of reality” to speak of independent of human perception, ie controlled hallucinations. The entire discourse of the world is human.

Unless we can invite the perception of some other organism to share their perception….

Even then, we can’t escape our human perceptions. We only have the human experience. There is no other experience we can speak of, from my point of view.

How do we separate the human perspective from “experience”?

We map our understanding onto the world, and every experience. It seems inextricable.

Time is a human construct.

Every sensation.

Every idea, concept, model.

It’d be fascinating to find another organism that does the modeling we do, that possesses a reflective communicable experience of “what it’s like” to be something. Or has its own form of modeling.

Even then we’d have to anthropomorphize the model to interpret and understand its significance in the context of our human experience, according to our own models, in order to make sense of it

Perception is largely an act of imagination, or construction, on the part of the perceiver.

You may say: “You said “We only have the human experience. There is no other experience we can speak of, from my point of view”. But really you only have your experience. You’re making some sort of a leap to extend that experience to other humans. And at that point it seems arbitrary to me as why not to extend it to chimpanzees or orangutans or cats or dogs or mice or ants or…. You’re confident that dolphins don’t communicate via symbolic expression?”

You’re completely right.

Except that other animals don’t use language. They don’t possess symbolic systems. They don’t write, they don’t transpose thoughts onto the world via abstracted signs. They communicate, but communication is temporal signaling. It’s constrained by its impermanence.

No two moments are time are neurologically equivalent. There are no two equivalent experiences for me. So there definitely aren’t between two minds.

Humans possess symbolic language that goes beyond basic temporal communication.

We can access degrees of other experiences via this symbolic language, which are an aggregate of the historical human experience, passed down, in the form of culture.

It’s as if we transpose the abstract semantic building blocks via symbolism to produce mental models and recreate understanding in others.

I’m sure animals have their own experience, but what that is will never be understood beyond the context of human understanding, since we’re the observers and interpreters.

Everything I say is conjecture, an attempt to build a cohesive model of the world, that will provide more utility in navigating challenges and questions of values and meaning.

I find it fascinating that our language is packed with historicity.

Every word, however technical or ordinary, has a genealogy, whether we know it or not. There is a history to our language— ideas, values, behaviors— that sprout from human activity, society and civilization.

It’s programmed into us as soon as we are born into the context of our rearers, situated in a time and place of a civilization, which has evolved by adding or losing memories through a sort of natural selection of the collective experience.

Language is not limited to the common “tongue” we speak. It’s the entire symbolic system with associated semantics that go along with it, for every facet of society, from healthcare to law to science to art to market economy to business and beyond.

The language we inherit, that we’re conditioned into by being participants of the human experience, by partaking in socialization, molds our brain and shapes our mental models, the structures that allow us to perceive the world, and even provide common foundations to engage with other minds sharing similar mental models .

Do other animals have these predictive mental models, this Bayesian Brain?

They certainly don’t have the higher cerebral functions and higher cortical functions that humans possess, which play an instrumental role in our brain’s predictive modeling functions.

Is this a critical aspect of consciousness?

Does the absence of these higher brain functions decrease consciousness, or the ability to possess an experience of “what it’s like”?

Most likely, yes.

I was fascinated by the Rosetta Stone.

Archeologists discovered hieroglyphics in Egypt, but they had no idea what the hell they said. There was literally no way to crack the code.

The Rosetta Stone allowed for translation.

I find that fascinating. You find a language.

Just decode it!

We can’t.

Why?

We don’t know what it means.

We needed to import our semantics via translation.

Every word is born in the context of human activity, the environment and social relations with others. It’s fascinating to take everyday words and names look at their etymology and history. The language we use, the meaning they contain, and the models we create, are imbued with the history of human activity.

This idea of “collective consciousness” makes more sense in the context of all the unconscious programming we undergo as we develop in the context of human society. There are subconscious threads in the form of archetypes tying humanity together.

It’s interesting to learn that the mind is a predictive machine

Rather than a reactive machine. Makes you question the origins of its predictive models: How they come to be, or came to be. How pervasive they are, etc. Also makes you wonder how far down they extend.

Like how far can you drill down into these predictive mechanisms? Are there inherent predictive structures in the brain, like the language structures Chomsky proposed? What are the levels of predictive processing structures? Neuroscience has shown there is a hierarchy to this processing, and it occurs in a number of areas in the brain.

Are these predictive structures malleable? Which ones are and which ones aren’t?

Our implicit assumptions about the world form the basis for these predictive mechanisms which mediate perception

LSD does a fine job dissolving all this

Reflexivity (Popper): Subject and object are coupled systems, so that any subject’s influence on the object creates a feedback loop that influences the subject, which in turn changes the relationship with the object. Subject and object are not independent of one another. (Also relevant to uncertainty principle)

During early childhood development,

The “external world reality” constructs our brain’s predictive mental models.

As we mature, and brain conditioning occurs,

Our brain’s predictive mental models construct external world reality

This is loosely what the Bayesian Brain represents,

in that our brain’s use predictive [statistical] models to perceive information inputs.

The external world reality does not project onto the mind.

Our mind projects onto the external world reality.

Perception is a controlled hallucination

Culture is shared illusion.

I’ve always dreamed of making enough money to go back to school to probe the depths of my curiosity, which expand broadly to just about every subject, which poses the problem of what exactly I’d study and concentrate in. Therein lies the problem. A PhD program is designed for deep exploration of niche subjects, whereas my curiosities expand the whole of human knowledge. My desire is to acquire a deep understanding of every subject and synthesis each of these models into a unifying understanding of the whole of human experience, which in my view is inextricable with reality. There is only one reality, and it’s the human perspective. Of course I think an objective reality exists, but it is forever inaccessible beyond the human perspective.

Philosophy is what you’d call my program, but it extends to every existing domain of knowledge, from the abstract world of mathematics and symbolic systems, to economy and social systems, to the mind and physiology, to information theory and physics, to engineering and art and design, to biology and ecology, and beyond.

If you scanned my library, you would find thousands of books, mostly primary texts of original thinkers, spanning all these subjects. Most I’ve only just skimmed the surface of, and haven’t delved deep, but they provide reference material whatever a relevant or related subject crosses my path, and I’d like to gain additional insight on the topic.

How I wish I could leisure all day with my books and write out my reflections, meditating on associations and connections that percolate as I try to reconcile these various models of the world to make sense of this human condition.

I’m not sure graduate school is the best venue for this, but until I’ve become self made, I’m not sure if there’s a better option.

Responsibility is a difficult thing to learn.

One of the primary ways to develop a well developed psychology is learning to expand the bounds of our perceived responsibilities.

We alone are responsible for everything that happens to us, or rather, how we react to what happens to us.

The more narrow we perceive our responsibilities, the more we are a victim and suffer.

The more broadly we perceive our responsibilities, the more empowerment, the more joy to act in ways that alter situations in our favor.

Everyone thinks of changing the world, but few think of changing themselves.