thoughts 1

thoughts

I have a finite amount of knowledge and infinite amount of ignorance.
definition of life: unusually stubborn chemical reaction

to be a child again: create a virtual world with different physical
laws and rediscover reality

for Witnesses, the Bible has the Divine Right usually assigned to
kings

little kids learn fast because they are unconscious, undistracted

the Buddha said laziness is the main problem, humans are designed to
be lazy: it's a mechanism that conserves energy

sacrificing (killing) young children could be helpful for a society in
that overpopulation is slowed. similar to the way sickness can control
a population. remember the story Mrs. Yort told about the tribe that
didn't use soap. when they did they suffered more from overpopulation
(less disease meant too many people)

human thought has inertia. human tend to think the way it is now is
the best of all possible choices. some philosophers (Pope i think)
were saying this is the best of all possible worlds. people, like Nico
Giuly, can't accept that our school system is lousy. they figure it
worked for them so it must be good. they don't realize how ignorant
they are and how much more they could know.

we have information now. philosophers have been right for thousands of
years and no one listens to them. we can still use new ideas but there
is an urgent need to at least tell people about old, really good
ideas. God is a good mechanism for making people believe and act on
what you tell them, but he's not tangible enough for true
enlightenment. karma is just made up too. rebirth is another made up
thing. when someone is really smart, the society says they are just a
freak of nature rather than learning, that's what Jonathan Sea Gull
is all about. humans could be infinitely smarter (alot smarter) if
they just had the motivation, and the absence of ego might help.

it's hard for a human to say, "i'll be good because i know everybody
needs to think like this to have a good society". they need god of law
to force them to help themselves. transitioning from self sufficient
animals to society based animals, god is a way of holding on to the
old idea of my life is most important. with god, we can say you have
to be nice to preserve your own life. it's compatible with old ideas

intelligence isn't all important though. emotion is too. dogs probably
aren't too smart but they still have fun and people still enjoy being
with them. (Spock from star trek demonstrates this idea sometimes, so
does Data)

We should at least replace mindless activities such as popular TV with
learning. Right now commercialism is depriving people of intelligence
and art.

people want to show that they have problems for respect and
sympathy. heroes deal with problems. it's hard to have a hero with a
problem

Just as a programmer without recursion doesn't think about doing
recursive stuff, an unenlightened human doesn't think about doing
enlightened stuff

adult human imagination works better for figuring how bad it could be
given change. young imagination seems better at figuring how good it
could be given change. the adult system is safer (not necessarily better)

two approaches to the game: master it or cheat. life is similar but
sometimes cheating is a great thing. eg: remembering everything is
hard to do, we'll write on paper instead

a big sucked lolly pop stick would be a work of art

watered down nature of text books and classroom literature makes them
boring (no sexual stuff for instance)

June 2000

obverse people that are good at stuff and be like them, that's better
that finding people you don't like and being not like them

human government is like the blind leading the blind, we should work on
learning to see

the human brain can probably absorb lots of data quickly given that
all the senses are used well. reading something is a relatively slow
way of inputing data. "books" could be "written" (created) to be
totally submersive (activate all your senses)

truth is stranger than fiction, that's an understatement. fiction may
be closer to our perception of reality than true reality. fiction is
(usually) a modification of truth that stays within our concept of
reality. it follows the rules, rules that are probably wrong, rules
that our minds invented, rules that we consider reality. it's probable
that reality doesn't follow these rules at all.

nico did well in school because she had internal motivation. she
tricked herself into believing the stuff was truly important. that's
where her warped views of how relevant the information was come from.
Nico said she can't make decisions. She is not strongly internally
motivated to learn anything at all in school. The Bible has what she
really needs, so she has no strong motivation to study on her
own. Someone "at the door" may appriciate talking to an educationed
person, that is one motivation she may have had. I doubt it was
powerful though. She needed the grades to motivate her, because she
had no great use for the academic skills.

Chelsea has a love of learning, thats why she likes those
cartoons. She likes to assimilate the data and such. People who watch
sport like to learn. Learn the outcomes of the games and to stories of
the players involved. Humans really do have a basic love of
learning. It just gets twisted and lost usually.

The way to learn mundane facts is to learn to much, too many of them
along with any patterns you can find. Running the same minimal ideas
into the ground is not as effective.

If you keep going through the same repetitive sequence in your mind,
your brain creates a little device to store that info and
relaxes. Then it spits out that sequence over and over but doesn't
learn it anymore that it did the first time. You need variation to
learn, only variation makes the brain pay attention.

Do animals lie to each other?

many kindergarten / first grade schools focus on reading too much. You
can teach math, art, lit, science, music without reading. kids should
want to read to find out about stuff they like, stuff they know about
by means other than reading.

a kid might learn to read by listening to a computer read a book as it
lights up the word it's on. (phonics would be another thing) kids
could have the input from books without the ability to read.

humans don't have a racial bias naturally, they have a "different"
bias naturally. if people with three arms emerged, there would be bias
against them. Humans learn what is "normal" through observation. Some
of racism is actually taught.

rather that teaching a group of subjects to an age group of kids,
teachers should give students choice. let them focus on what they
like. when they become advanced in that area, one might suggest they
learn some other stuff.

Helen Keller was seeing and hearing until the 19th month of her
life. She had time to develop common sense before the
deafness/blindness set in. I think she had to think more to deal with
the fact that she was deaf and blind. Probably made her smarter.

in a virtual world, you could redefine how the appearance of an object
relates to the actual object. i.e. a person could feel the object and
relate that to it's appearance. this would mean new forms of art could
be created based on a different visual perception of stuff.

July

lying is art. truth is raw material.

one can be so good with language that he tricks himself (Ian Trenbeath)

God didn't have to make us mean enough to kill and torture, he could
have given us choice without the ability to physically damage each
other

God could have created each one of us individually, each with a
different personality. Instead he chose to use a messy (painful)
procreation system. Deformed children, abortions, embryo deaths, and
dangerous irrational need for sex are are production of the
human-making system.

humor can be pee in the food of a deep conversation

humans hold onto information like genetic material, they do their best
to preserve the old stuff whether it's good or not, but change happens

"successful verbal performance under challenge is thought to be a sign
of quickness and intelligence" -Shirley Heath _Ways with Words_

two societies exist and there is a cave with a bear in it. kids in the
societies have never seen bears. one creates a myth about some evil
human in the cave (all the kids have seen evil humans). the other
society creates no myth, and tells the kids that there is a dangerous
bear. the kids that are lied to are more fearful and more
survive. religion consists of myths that aid survival.

school brings together people with different hardware and software,
different purposes for life, some without purpose (and that's
reasonable) and criticizes the ones that don't conform as if they
don't understand. Kristi criticizes people that don't conform as if
they don't understand.

animals that are not cute and and self-sufficient are more likely to be
killed (by humans) than animals that rely on humans (not
parasitically) and are cute.

It's best to be critical of the people who are critical, intolerant of
the people who are intolerant.

pain is useful. those that felt pain after cutting themselves avoided
it later so they survived. if God created pain, why did he make it
blind. torture is mostly useless, but God made provision for it with
his pain system. pleasure is useful, those who crave sex are more
likely to reproduce. it is also blind. masturbation among other things
can be substituted for sex, though they are not beneficial.

why did God allocate so much pleasure (importance) to sexual
intercourse knowing that it would cause overpopulation, unwanted
children, gang rape, pedofiles. he could have created a (preferable
weaker) desire for children instead. [children used to die more,
having many kids by accident was less of a problem, evolutionarily
speaking. if God intended for kids to die often, I question his love.]

the way our eye fills in blind spots, we fill in lack of understanding

In a letter to rachel rouse: By the way, here's my current theory
regarding the "practice" of life: pick something interesting, believe
that it's really important, and ignore people that tell you it
isn't. Notice the word "important" rather than "correct." (The true
"purpose" of life question probably has no useful answer, so I decided
to leave that topic alone.)

definition of human: function of functions
personality(time) = your personality at given time
output = personality(time)(input)
what you do is based on what input you recieve and what personality you have
what-you-do operation is closed under the modifiable universe

we learn what fun is.
what we do constantly cannot be fun unless it is somewhat painful.
tension and release in music is beatiful. always resolution is not.
constent happy input signals become boring.
constent unhappy input signals are boring/painful.
you must move inbetween the two to sustain "happiness"
you must be not content (at times) to be content (in general)
you can't help people unless they are in need (suffering)
you can't appreciate help unless you are in need
spoiled kids hate life
life in a perfect world (Jehovah's Witness style) would be like playing a video game that you can't lose, or if you do lose, you never get to play again -- no fun
you can have lots of theories for every little thing and or a few theories that cover alot
racism is a theory based on insufficient data, as are most theories
people play sick for the attention
the new order is good compared to now, but I don't know what it would be compared to itself - living forever is an advantage in any world (barring torture)
it's more fun to tell stories about bad things

turn on the cd, play something with it, turn off the cd, play something to back up what you played, and you have something new

what's the different (from my perspective) between something existing and my believing that it exists

public education is intellectual rape

Kristi has made the weather of her mind a tropical island with a cool breeze, I have more of a radically temperate region climate

August

good: beautiful, life giving, true
bad:

killing Christ was a nasty way to get a point across, but God used it as an example based on something the Israelites could understand, animal sacrifice.
animal sacrifice is a nasty way to show you love your creator but God did it to prepare the people for Christ's death
why didn't God use a more reasonable way of showing love than violent sacrifice

human minds were originally mostly a way of holding information from one
generation to the next, a volatile instinct storage system. this
explains strong unquestionable tradition

the universal goal of the individual: death
the universal goal of mankind: life

no rational god would drop us into this universe, naked and ignorant, and expect us to not only preserve our lives but also live up to some vaguely defined ideal

purpose of logic: justify emotion

everyone lives in an imaginary world that he or she has created. some of these may coincide with reality more than others. we usually consider the worlds that many people can agree on to be closest to reality

totemism / football

there's no way to tell that God is perfect or that he is honest

the agony of pleasure

questions are the ultimate commodity (I'd hate to run out)

I see gray, some people see black, white and color

death is the mistake you can't learn from

my obsolete brain still wants to believe life has purpose, still
craves sex as if it leads to reproduction, still craves loves for
security. but the logic it gained supplemented by science has
disproved it's own beliefs. it's a blacksmith than just noticed that
no one in the world needs it's service, but it still craves to work
with the metal

I feel sorry for that ignorant little primordial piece of my
brain. the poor thing thinks I'm important, but it has no concept of
truth

only crazy people realize the total irrelevance of life itself. we
have every reason to be depressed all the time. puyscologists return
us to a state of dilusion, they can cure us, but the disease is truth.

entropy may cycle rather than just increase

some energy is still present at absolute zero, if we went a bit below
zero (the structure would begin to collapse i guess), and allowed the
structure to absorb to last little bit, we would be a absolute zero.

ideas from one source control a nation, perfect unity, strong
nation. but capitalism works well, individuals are selfish to a
degree, this works to the advantage of capitalism. if you could
convince people that their own good was the good of the nation, maybe
the central power would work, religion helps do this as does war. an
ideal society has to take advantage of the selfishness of humans

create a virtual world with fewer physical limits, more freedom,
create anything cheaply (like the holo-deck)

people in overpopulated countries are evolving faster

individuals evolved sense of pain to keep alive. to keep species
alive, a fast way to make people not kill each other was to make them
imagine than what they do to others is being done to them. that's why
i grab my arm when somebody's arm gets cut off on tv. i image others'
pain naturally. all the ideas of pain carry over, so we immediately
know what hurts others

our emotion could be wrong. killing children might be good. saving them might be bad

we tend have abortions and use birth control. this randomly kills / prevents children. child/infant death selectively kills, it is better for evolution.

some people may think that following any religion is good. that there is no universal truth but people should follow their abitrary religion well.

is everybody's heart on the left side?

considering that a newborn human needs seven months of growing to sit up, but a newborn ape comes out ready to cling to the mother, we must have given up some muscle for brain

if it ain't broke, don't fix it
(not) if it ain't broke, don't improve it

we explore for the sake of exploration. cats kill for the sake of
killing, whether they are hungry or not. this explains why we go so
far beyond what seems necessary. (many animals explore as children, we
continue to explore - neoteny)

if humans are appeased by seeing their enemies suffer, we may be able to lessen the motivation of wars of attrition, simply by showing the death and pain of war to the masses, live

birth,pain,death

September 2000

creating theories with insufficient data was important for human survival

just because rules for a competition had a couple contradictions, I
wouldn't disregard them completely, that would surely loose -- bible

the universe is a computer but it's very fast and very parallel, it took a while to compute life. we should be able to compute life on a little machine give some guidance, it might be easier to let the intelligence of a machine evolve than to program it

Oct
is it possible for only the present to exist?

as our minds evolved, it swung past the neccesary intelligence

the entire universe may change it's laws without us even noticing

could the rate of everything happening slow down, but time not really slow down

questions

if i move a brick does that affect a brick a billion miles away emidiately?

if a brick is infinitely far away from the visible universe, wouldn't time continue after a big crunch to allow the brick to get here

reading and writing may not be so important, we could store data other ways

if a light flashes at the center of a spherical cloud of dust that has a radius of one light-minute, could you watch the light spread out

my mind doesn't want to work something out so it jumps to some other problem that's easier and focuses on it, this is not good. it may be why people cannot accept new information, it's easier to work it in with what is already known. i need to not veer off so much

we're going about things the hard way. when there is a problem we try to solve it by manipulating the external world. why not just change our mind genetically so that the problem no longer exists?

in high-school, when they teach math, the proofs are not emphasized, so understanding the stuff cannot be a true goal. the goal seems to be memorizing procedures to solve problems. we have calculators that have already memorized these procedures so we should use them. if one is worried about not understanding concepts, the proofs should be focused on

academic achievement is not the consummate act, tell it to K Trenbeath

i asked God what to do, but he didn't actually reply, so I had to make an educated guess

if the universe is not really 4d, maybe only the present exists, the best way to see the past would be to run the present state backwards a while, but the past would not actually exist

all science could be based on a coincidence, everything could be wrong tomorrow

waves describe light though it is not a wave, maybe matter is not made up of particles, it could be anything (and still sort of act like particles)

a blind, deaf race's physics, what would it cover, what if they couldn't feel either, it wouldn't need to cover much of anything I suppose, ours probably doesn't cover much of anything

if put water in an unbreakable sealed container, with no extra space, and get it really cold will it freeze, i doubt it, could such a container exist?

istead of bombing, the world super power could give communication technology to developing countries, people usually handle revolt on their own if they can communicate well

I heard a lady saying that a Watchtower (or Awake) said that men who start having sex with their kids have a hard time stopping, this may be because the old primate ape societies had a dominant male who had sex with his children

base life on priciples of the bible, K Trenbeath says, but by the time you boil the bible down to priciples (inductive) and apply those priciples to every day life (deductive) you've made a whole bunch of arbitrary assumptions

of all the places for cancer to come from, why the ornamental hunks of fat (breasts), or maybe it comes from the muscles right behind the fat

little kids aren't racist as Dr. Vasseur said, but they usually would not consider any "bad" (what adults consider bad) people to be bad. they have little concept of bad people at all. as they mature, they create oversimplified theories that classify black people as inferior and "bad" people as bad in general. i told marie i figured we were racist by birth but that's not really it, we are mostly unbiased and develop all sorts of biases later on, but basing them on appearence may be a natural tendency

considering the govt tries to fight drugs as a "war," politicians may be using the psychological power of war to keep control, it's a war on drugs rather than other people, never mind the people only hurt themselves... the witnesses also call their work a war, they may also be using this (possibly obsolete) aspect of human thought -- that war means unity and determination

if we build very smart robots, we will be the dumb animals, then what

I'm beginning to think my memory itself is not so bad, but I refuse to form connections unless there really needs to be one. people with "good" memories form connections when I would generally refuse to connect things, remember brian used lengths of words and rainbow color order (on resistors) to memorize them

a computer image represents a neuron configuration, their may be an initial sketch at birth and we work from their. the brain cannot actually "fill" no more that a changable image can "fill". we can always make changes but the amount of stuff in the picture would be limited to resolution

November

there is a continuum from forming theories very easily the not forming them very easily. it was more beneficial for man to form them easily leading to half wrong theories based on half wrong observation, but better than nothing. the scientific method tries to ensure that humans do not rely on normal quick theory forming

jokes make connections where connections should not be made, puns are an example

we wouldn't have to deal with unit conversions at all in physics problems if the computer dealt with them for us

when does the largest amount of information enter a woman's body? when a sperm cell or lots of them enter i suppose, but microorganisms enter with a lot of genetic information also

why are many expletives associated with reproduction and excrement? (fuck, pussy, shit, piss, ass, tit) why do people make up little words to replace the formal names of all these, (doing it, private, number 2, number 1, hiny, boom-boom) [the last is not directly connected to reproduction or excrement but has sexual meaning and is analogous to the buttocks

dogs like to (1)have sex (2)kill (3)eat (4)socialize, with dog pets, 1 and 2 are usually banned, 3 is reduced to dog foot, and 4 is left for the owner's satisfaction

why do chemical dependencies form?

drugs, are "cool", stop lying to the kids

we don't need war anymore, it was evolutionarily useful at one time, not anymore, we have genetic engineering

we should create more artistic branches of physics that describe in detail, the physics of probably non-existent universes (repulsive gravity comes to mind), it would probably allow us to understand our own physics better

i was licking chocolate chips off rose petals when both of her arms fell off, both nearly at the same time, and it's not the falling off that got me, it was the fact that both came off

standardized tests measure a person's ability to take a standardized test. they are not so useful.
math: teachers should work with students to solve very complex problems, the kind that actually almost require math.
english: the kids should write about things they like alot, read the stuff to the class, publish things in the school, read the classics if the students enjoy them.
social studies: work on creating ideal societies, argue about how the world can be made better, argue over politics.
science: make things that work, set up experiments, not everybody working on the same prefabricated experiment. talk about ideas and argue over whether or not things are true and do some research with the kids even if they aren't very good at it

most experts that are useful to society do not have the education an ideal school child has-- how to take tests in a bunch of subjects; they have a specialized knowledge and it might round out gradually

people like nico create a structure to work inside of, goals are usually reachable and existant, difficulty is high enough to be enjoyable, and there is no better solution that the solution being worked on, no better approach that the one being used

richard a. giuly creates a structure where only a very narrow course of action is possible

there is pleasure and pain on a low level, underneathe logic. (see figure 1) that's what the graph is graphing with respect to time. we are pushed around by forces out of our control. after a slope upward, we feel good, it's not really pleasure it's just good. the pleasure source may stay up, but we cannot keep on feeling really good, only a movement up makes us really feel good, especially if we cause the movement. similarly, to an extent, even if pain comes in continuously, it's not so bad, unless it increases suddenly, we cannot always feel bad (we can but usually not) the structures mentioned in the last two entries help define a surface for this pleasure, pain, accomplishment shifting to take place on. by default it is survival and reproduction but our society has so much free time that the surface for moving around can be defined by individuals, religions might try to do it for people.
the above make little sense, but i was thinking one thing particularly, there is a considerable devision between low level pleasure and high level pleasure, the low level probably needs to move around for the higher level to go up, the high level is like a mathematical derivative of the low level

the creation and modification of life must be reduced to child's play, probably with the aid of a computer, then we can start to understand and modify ourselves

December

we need to probe the brain, all of the neurons
i want to be able to tell what a human is saying to himself in his head by probing his brain, then we could hook this to a radio transmitter, hook a reciever to auditoriry nerves and communicate without speaking, just speaking in the mind

you could move a magnitized needle around will a joystick assuming it had elecromagnetic coils around it and they were controlled, you could use the thing to mess with cells, nerve cells

musical instruments should interface with nerves directly


one could argue that eliminating all boring, simple jobs, as i wish to do, would put unskilled people out of work. thats true, but unskilled people's work is no fun, i doubt they enjoy doing it for the most part. one could argue that the stupid people will not be able to do anything useful. stupid only describes a very small portion of the population, ignorant describes most of the population. as jobs require skill, people will aquire it, corporations will pay for people to be well trained, the general standard of education will increase because big business, who controls the govt, will want the standard to increase. we need machines to do boring labor.

you cannot be hight on the pleasure scale continuously for the same reason that you cannot tell the difference between red and slightly darker red in another picture. you can see the difference if they are next to each other. you need no be normal and move to happy to feel anything. people who enjoy life all the time tend to do something that requires constant effort. to a task is presented, it needs to be done, so things are bad, as the task is completed thinges are getting better, pleasure, then the task is complete, lots of pleasure, then you reset down to normal again, start the next task. i will consider continuously making progress without reseting later, if that's possible.

(Carl Brown is the flugle horn player that invited my on stage)

you work on a sculpture made of clay, it's soft and flops around as you change things. you leave the unfinished work for a few days, come back, and it's solidified. then you can add and scrape away without it flopping around, like starting new with a foundation in place. sleep for the human brain is waiting a few days for the clay. shaping the clay is learing. a very foundational lump is created during childhood, if it's malformed, problems will arise througout life. some peopl study for tests by slapping together a loose wet structure that quickly falls apart.

every now and then it's better to destroy everything and start over. people resist this. they try to fit things into what they already have, what they already know. that's why children have great ideas, they make an effort to create because there is nothing there to begin with. it is easier to take what exists, follow the path of least resistance. all formal learning seems to be an attempt at preserving rather than creating. maybe if people are given what they need without work, they will see that creating is all that matters. as an artist is given a camera and sees that creation is all that matters, the camera can copy just fine.

why can't a little kid work professionally? lack of skill? probably not. what you need to know to work you don't learn in school, you learn from life. it's just people skills and some ability to realise that you need to do what you need to do. this is learned by doing not by going to school. little kids could do work under supervision and they would very quickly learn to do the task. then as they needed math or science or lit, they would learn them for the task, not for a test. by 10 years old a student should be working professionally doing something useful.

if humans begin growing babies outside the mother, the menstral cycle and the ability to bear young may de-evolve in women, all humans may become dependent on technology to reproduce

define human perfection- something that can but chooses not to do things that displease god. if you use this definition humans are much more complicated than they need to be. the minimum requirement would be something like a molecule that had a boolean state, good or bad that could changed arbitrarily. then there would be good and bad molecules, the good ones would be perfect, you could destroy all the bad ones in Armageddon.

what is "serving" God considering that he doesn't need any help. if god relied on humans to spread the good word, the humans would do an imperfect job. assuming god could choose without people's help, the people could stop spreading without harming anything. so, the argument, "we have to preach to save people" seems rediculous. it suggests that god relies on imperfect humans to save people, that would not be fair. India says they preach just to let god know that they care. this still indicates that preaching itself is not important, only the show of caring.

2001
January

the desire for fame serves a similar purpose as empathy, tricking an individual into serving a society. usually fame is gained by being good at or doing something people appreciate. One may desire fame, and help others as a byproduct. e.g. a scientist wanting to make a name for himself might find the cure for aids, not for the people that suffer, but for fame.

suppose the set A of people have a desire to please the opposite sex during intercourse. suppose the set B of people do dot. set A's people probably have more offspring, so humanity may presently have many that do desire to please the opposite sex during intercourse.

I may find flaws in things, and expect others to find flaws in me, because my father found flaws in various thing constantly, many times correctly (infomercials).

Ian trenbeath seeks recreation (racing a bmw, snow boarding, going to new york for a party, having 300 cds and a nifty changer) i wonder if it works, if the recreation satisfies whatever he's trying to satisfy

if you spend too much time figuring out irrelevant things, there will be no time for the real thing, though methods used to figure out some of the irrelevant things may come in handy later.

what does it mean to have time running backwards? you could video tape a waterfall, and run the tape backwards. then the waterfall would be breaking laws of physics. could you use a different complementary set of laws to describe backwards motion?

why is clapping so loud, what about snapping

the human body is a collection of cells that generally agree to work together. the brain is a subset of this collection. the mind is directly dependent of the brain but takes in input from various other cells and directs output to other cells. one might say the mind is directly dependent on the whole body, or the whole universe.

Differentiating humans from other animals, Calvin Rouse thinks that humans have spirituality and apes do not. Lets say spirituality is religious value. Apes have no defined religion that I know of so, his statement is partly correct. Some humans do not hold religious values, I don't care to hold any religious values, but I am human. If we try to say humans are different because they are more intelligent, we must admit some apes are smarter that some humans. Those humans qualify as subhuman animals, by the intelligence definition.

people teach common errors in school, and they are rembered as common errors, not as skill to do things correctly. teachers should always do things correctly, not worrying about discouraging wrongness, incouraging correctness.

jesus forgave people very quickly. he did not require them to put in so many hours of field service, become baptized, ect., he just forgave them. i need to check into this more

Suppose I save $10,000 and increase my probability of dying today from .001 to .002. For Example, I buy a less safe car. There is some way to relate probability of death to money, as there is to relate money to life or time. Maybe we could relate happiness to money also.

first the human body will become obsolete, then the brain
what about the mind?

the world is full of people who do crappy work. not because they can't do any better but because they are lazy and don't respect their work. you give them instructions, dangle a cookie in front of them, and they vomit out some half baked solution, the bare miminum that allows them to get the cookie. (that what the Windows OS is) school with it's grades, and jobs with their money operate on the Dangling Cookie principle. the rules are contructed for people who chase cookies, and inadvertently incourage the cookie chasing. i want to do good work and the rules (designed for cookie chasers) are constricting. (i have to write trivial programs for cs classes to get a degree to prove that i can do something, if i used the time more contructively, i could do more when the time came, but who would hire me. another less related ex: the neural to computer experimentation project is help back by the government. they don't think an implant should be in a healthy human.)

is not wetting the beg a biologically incouraged behavior?

a moment of pleasure followed by a moment of pain, or nothing at all, many times I choose nothing at all. many people go for the pleasure.

if we create lots of feedback loops in our nervous system (listen to heart pumping for instance) we can control much more, maybe nervousness and hormone release

according to "Principles of Neural Science" by Kandel, Schwartz, and Jessell, p37, 30,000 of 80,000 genes have informatien expressed in brain cells. That means personality is heavily inherited.

everything is arbitrary and God is the arbitrator; that's the easy explanation

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stages

(1) there is one big computer that people try to share, only a few at a time. (mainframes, thats pretty much over with)
(2) every user has a pc on his or her desk, maybe in hand. it senses basic physical input, touching keys, moving mouse. Output displays images on a 2D screen and playsback prerecorded sounds. (we are here, mostly)
(3) their are many screens and input devices per person, both carried and in the environment. (that's what one of your papers is talking about)
(4) The computers are worn. (At least one guy already does this, almost.) Two disply outputs, one for each eye are on each user, embedded in a pair of glasses, mabe even contacts. The screen is visible anytime the display projects it on the retas. Much of the time, the display is invisible or partially invisible, projecting exactly what the user would see anyway. For sound, earphones will do.
(5) There is a realization: it's much easier to make fake representations of things that physically contruct them. For example, rather than put a picture on the wall, you can just add it to the big database that keeps track of the first level (i'll talk about the second later) of virtual reality. Everyones sees it there, because everyone sees the first level of virtual reality on top of reality, if they choose. But it is not there, it is displayed on their retina, just where it should be, rendered as if it really was on the wall.
(6) We add other levels of reality that have nothing to do with true reality, the problem is that you can't feel anything that is just an image on the reta, nothing more. A quick fix might be a piece of machinery that moves around and presents surfaces in arbitrary ways. E.g., it gives you an actual surface to lay your head on when you put your head on your vertual desk. This would be very limited, mabye 5 different surfaces that can move around mechanically.
(7) Another realization: humans already are analog computers, it would be cheaper to just send in the input signals directly. So reality will exist, but it will probably be boring. People will spend most of there time interacting with things that do not exist. We can fake touch sensation so no more moving surfaces are needed. (Defining reality has some serious advantages.) I suppose people might come out of virtual reality to take a bath, but that's about it. There will still be crime, because humans are just that way, but I imagine there will be less killing. People will hardly ever really be in contact with each other (if you can fake touch, you can fake sex probably). If you really don't like somebody, just delete him, rather than kill him.

Now I've made too many assumption to be anywhere near accurate, but there is some more I want to describe.
The human body will become obsolete. If we want to interact physically, we can use a manufactered body of arbitrary form. Governments will probably use this sort of thing for war, but hopefully not too much.

Genetic engineering will allow us to shape ourselves however we want. Pleasure and pain will be arbitrarily defined. That's really weird, think about it.

We will be using enery efficiently and probably will be taking a free ride off the sun for the next zillion years, until it dies. With intelligent machines and virtual reality, no one will really "go to work" anymore, I can't imagine why they would need to. People would either do what they enjoy or be manically depressed, maybe from a lack of defined purpose.

Maybe we will go ahead and transfer our mind onto better platforms that organic brains, maybe not. There will be no need for pain, unless it is usefule in complementing pleasure.

At any rate, it will be very difficult to prove that life is meanful or useful because it will be nothing but a process on a computer or a playland. And humanity will be mostly one big organism.

I don't know if we will continue to seek out physical territory beyond the earth, or if we will be satisfied with nearly infinite virtual territory. The line between life and nonlife will be totally blurred. Having a real child or having the computer generate one for you will not be much different.

I really think this stuff will happen, assuming humanity survives another few million years, but not much of it matters right now. We still need to work on stage 3 and 4. We're still in the dark ages.

Why did I send you this? Because I saw your stuff on the web (especially your artwork, about half of which was shockingly good stuff) and I figured you might understand what I'm saying. Maybe not take it as far fetched, because it's not. I see people running around this rat maze that is life everyday and image how futile every action would be if we just changed a few parameters. And why do people think they are so important? I'm pretty sure that a human is no more important than a rose bush. We arbitrily assign importance to ourselves to preserve the species, but we really aren't that important. It seems that every other animal on earth would be better off if we went exstinct. We aren't especially evil though, if any species had the chance we have, it would probably take over too (i think).

if you actually read all that (or even if you just read most of it)
, I thank you

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the slowest, most error prone, most flexible part of the human brain is the little part that school tries to over use. the other more powerful parts generate and understand speech, music, and art, they learn by doing. for instance, sentence diagramming utilizes the slow logical portion to analyse language that the language processor could handle fine on it's own. another example is reading music. it's mathematical. but we have innate nonmathematical structures in place to handle music quite well, we should focus on using them.

people can teel you "why" they do something but that's rarely the actual reason. decisions by themselves can tell us about what the human is doing, but the reason they claim to have for doing it is almost irrelevant. e.g. rebecca wants to live only to raise her kids, probably not, she probably wants to live anyway. another slightly related example: Kristi Trenbeath and her husband don't want kids, but they "accidentally" have three, how can you make a mistake like that three times? you would know the rhythm contraception thing didn't work after the first two. so i suppose she really wanted kids.

a computer's cpu is very flexible but relatively slow. if you want to process sound or video, you probably need specific hardware that is less flexible. the human brain has a logical subsystem that is very flexible, but slow. we have specialized hardware for language and other things, and we need it. the logical part isn't good enough alone. that's why people with certain brain regions ruined cannot talk, no matter how much they can think.

heres a much better way to make software: a natural language interpreter is created that understands english. this is used to build programs, and when the thing doesn't understand stuff it asks questions. if it does stupid things, you tell it, and it adjusts. everyone in the world uses the program and it keeps getting smarter and smarter by adjusting to how each person wants it to act. it can act different for different people. maybe just one master program on my machine that learns from various input. the program should then evolve, shaped by user preference. e.g. "take that button off", and it does

my philosophy has very little to do with my actions, if it did, i would probably manically depressed

when my mind asks a question and is given an answer, it has a high probability of remembering. when it has information thrown at it, it has a lower probability of remembering

occam's razor is good for science, not for everything. evolution would have built it into human thought if it was extremely useful, but evolution never did. the flexibility and speed of not using occam's razor may be useful.

A major problem in machine learning is that of inductive bias: how to choose a learner's hypothesis space so that it is large enough to contain a solution to the problem being learnt, yet small enough to ensure reliable generalization from reasonably-sized training sets.
-Baxter, J. (2000) "A Model of Inductive Bias Learning", Volume 12, pages 149-198.

sometimes i think people find really good acronyms and then fill in the words arbitrarily

talking to yourself silently is almost as bad as talking to yourself out loud when you are trying to fall asleep, but singing doesn't seem to hurt (keep you awake) as much

(low) cell/cell,brother/sister,family/family,marchingband/marchingband,nation/nation,humanity/space-aliens competition happens inside and out, there is a balance between internal and external hatred, the lower levels pull together to fight the battles of higher levels. i say that siblings hate each other, but they love each other on many levels.

melody moore has a tendency to make things sound better than they are. this is good for getting money, but not good for development

i propose that classroom learning is worthless, you must learn by doing.
i propose that kids learn almost nothing from what is actually taught in school. but they do change, a 6 year old is different that a 18 year old. what they learn is mostly from interaction with people.
most of what kids learn in school is not on the curriculum.
if you let kids into a work environment, they would quickly learn how to fuction and become valuable employees later on.
a new system needs to be organized where no college or highschool training is needed, and students take jobs based on ability rather than paper work.

in not teaching kids to use tools like Maple, schools are far behind, just of speck on the horizon looking back from the moving vehicle of technology

when you actually sleep even for a small amount of time, something changes with the saliva in your mouth, at least if feels that way. and it only does that if you go unconscious

if a woman shows off she is more likely to reproduce, exhibitionism could evolve based on that fact, but the evidence is not very good.

i here people talking about how smart others were like charlie parker and einstein, and i want to be smart too. but i'm simply not incredably intelligent, maybe those people weren't either (but that would be a cop out) i will assume they were and i am inferior. still i want to do something special, so i plan to spend more time than anyone else (practically) understanding both basics and the rest

many times curiosity fails to understand relevance

(consider a turing machine, this is not a turing machine) you could just list every possible input, every possible output, and have the thing find the answer. in the whole univers, since things like distance are apparently quantized, you could consider every possible manipulation of the universe and pick the sequence that lead to the best result, like a computer playing chess with brute fore stategy. this sounds something like what evolution did

the us govt goes to foreign contries and kills people, but it won't allow people (that choose to) have a brain implant (for transmitting neural signals) stuck in their brain.

it would be hard to figure things out without pencil and paper

the human penis could be relatively long (compared to other mammals) because the copulation position is different, face to face, and the vaginal tube had to be somewhat rotated

February

the human being (especially me) has little or no natural capacity for learning from a lecture. lectures are good for preaching, but not for teaching. we learn from doing. this is why school are hopelessly flawed, and why the exercises in math are so important. computer simulations are generally better than human teachers, mainly because they are interactive. when you conduct your experiment with the child, use the computer to teach.

if you replace each cell in the brain with an artificial neuron, one at a time, you would have a big artificial brain, and the consciousness would be preserved.

what if every time you go to sleep one conciousness dies, and when you wake up a new one is born with the memories of the last. we need to create a copy of a human brain, ask ask it if it feels any different, it if feels like another person.
this is really important, what if every time you wake up, you are actually a different person, with memories of the last person of course.

consciousness may require so much energy that sleep is necessary
wherever

getting good grades and being "successful in life" tend to be proportional, but generally not because the students that got good grades were learning. the students that got good grades had an ability to deal with some situations, like taking crap from teachers, and those skills come in handy on the work force to. i want to get across the point that even if school teaches nothing at all, you could find a correlation between good students and good employees.

people have an urge to teach. maybe schools satisfy that urge, whether they teach anything or not is another story.

March

you could build a computer that acted exactly like a human, based on a human brain. you could ask if it is conscious and it could answer yes. but you would not know if it reall is. you don't know if anyoune in the world is for that matter. i read that babies are not conscious and i agree. they are more like modern machines.

not many hackers (software writers) are artists, artists would get bored with all the hacking. if would could make software writing less tedious, we might get some more artistic software.

very cheap lcd screens that access the internet or a school book server should be available

there are infinitely many viable explanations of everything (or every observation), choose one you like

getting rid of the carelessness in the world might do more good that getting rid of the evil

people want problems. if none exist they create them. math: the problems are mostly contrived. war: most of the problem is war itself, created by people. video games: problems created by people for others to solve. puzzles in general. the ironic thing is that people will claim they try to avoid all problems.

if the red marker of god were to come down to mark all the mostly false statements, the library would be a bloodbath

all we need are poets, artists, and musicians, the rest is lubrication. (tools and environments that make the poets, artists, and musicians work better.)

teachers like to introduce vocabulary and then assign definitions to the words. they should introduce concepts and the assign words to concepts as needed.

logic circuits could work asynchronously by sending "finished" or "it's valid now" signal when the gates are done changing, and the next gate could look for this signal

April

When I stop talking to myself in my head, I see things more clearly (literally, in the visual sense).

read-only variables in classes really would be useful. they probably were not invented because fuctions were similar to what people already did.

if god didn't want people to use profanity, why did he invent the words, pretty much all human languages have them, so i doubt they are accidental

prostitution service management
drug retail

could you break the symmetry of two parallel universes with communication?

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when a compiler/interpreter find an error it shoulde consider how much of the code is valid, from the last compile, and hightlight exactly what is not valid now, on the current compile.

i was dreaming about that music that i'd never heard before (sort of classical sounding, at the trenbeath house). there is mostly untapped potential there, in the subconscious

school shouldn't be so subject based. kids should find something that they like, and work at it. if that means pulling from five different subjects or just one, so be it.

people try to use what they know to solve problems. it may be better to use what you don't know (experiment)

god was a way of explaining things that people didn't understand at all. some people think that if you understand (and can mostly predict) everything then god doesn't exist, so you can't understand everything. those people might be better of thinking of god in a different way, not as the only being that can understand life.

i was thinking a teacher should really teach every kid individually. that would take to long. so you should teach the kid to learn himself, to read from the book and learn the stuff. that means you need books that are easy to read, or computers that are easy to learn from. the job of the teacher will be to answer questions that the student has, maybe on the phone, with video conferencing immediately. there should be a pool of teachers that the students use.

the math people contrive the problem so their methods will solve them easily. if you try to use your own method you may have more stuff to deal with. in real life math doesn't apply perfectly, most problems require dealing with a lot of crap. you learn to solve contrived problems in math, not real ones.

the program's indentation should actually define the blocks, no need for {} or () or begin/end, mainly because the terminating }'s are ugly

maybe i'm not surprised much because i don't expect specific things much

right now, video games are getting like reality, soon reality will be getting like video games

i'd like to be a crab or a dolphin or a plant or a girl for a little while just to see how it is. we will be narrow minded until we can do this sort of thing, enter the mind of another creature. i don't know how if it would be possible to record the information from one mind and remember in another in a meaningful way.

the problem i talked to ian about rephrased. take a bunch of marbles in the shape of a glass, knock them apart (in a box with zero gravity). They marbles bounce around. Take any configuration after the bouncing, reverse the velocities, and the marbles should return to the original configuration. Figure out all of the possible configurations that can be achieved by messing up the original bunch of marbles. These are all of the configurations (positions, velocities) that would reform the shape of the glass.

notice how humans build things with square corners and straight lines. Nature builds things with curves and fuzzy lines. Maybe that's because nature works with cells and we work with big chunks of matter.

when i grow up i want to be a school principal - a splinter in ass of our nation's youth (in faris bueller's day off that pricipal said he didn't get where he was by doing something or another, i don't think he got very far, i don't think a school principal is so great.

school theory: i'll just learn everything and when a real problem comes along it will be easy to solve. why not just learn the stuff for the specific problem?

i lapsed into a subconscious state 9:53 am, may 6, 2001, i had been up since early in the morning, may 4:00 am or so, and i was taking a nap. i could hear a voice that i could not control. it was like a dream but i was mostly conscious, it sounded sort of like a talk show on a radio and i was trying to identify it. trying to catch a few words that would identify it, thinking it might be a radio signal being amplified in my skull, which is rediculous, but i was only half conscious. when i finally managed to force myself awake, i noticed half of my face was "asleep" probably deprived of blood. this could have something to do with the subconsious state, some sort of lack of blood flow. i am almost positive that this it was people here when they here "voices." it was a different voice than mine and i could not control it. 12:24 another observation a few hours later. i could play a piano in a dream and actually hear the notes. i'm not sure if it played accurately, but it did appear to play wrong with a B natural mistakenly played in a F major ascending scale

i claimed on may 8 in the presence of nice, my mother, and father that acedemic rules come from great art.
the claim that acedimic rules come from great art in general may be false -- only some of them do nico attacked my claim, her point was that the ballet wasn't great when the primodial rules were formulated. i suppose that (acedimic) mideval drawing style was not derived from great art either.
nico says ballet is perfect. if she means perfect because rules are followed perfectly, than you could quickly define a simple dance style and be perfect, that would be silly. more likely she means that it is perfectly graceful. so i suppose the rules are trying to achieve perfect grace. it would be better for a student to understand perfect grace, at least before he or she worries about the rules.
actually the rules of ballet were defined from great art, probably. simply because i doubt people had the imagination to invent the rules without looking at them first.
i bet there were great individual dansers that the rules were derived from.

back to dreams: i just had a dream that i woke up while the dream was going on, i was in this subconscious state again. i dreamed that i could pull my eyelids open and see. i felt my face and it was numb, as if the nerves were turned off. i felt my actual eyeball very gently to ensure what was happening really was happening. i could feel the actual eyeball. i may have had one eye partially open because i thought i could see the back rails of rod iron on the bed i was on. then i woke up with both hands still under the pillow. the point is that dreams lie to your haptic sensors, i felt that eyeball. i knew they lied to vision and audio, but now i know they lie to haptic. i've never noticed them lying to smell.

you should be able to embed pretty pictures and comments in your computer source code, not just ugly "/* xxxyyy */" stuff

homosapian courtship, can't live with it, can't reproduce without it

electing officials doesn't work because the population can't predict how well a person will perform.

the robot that runs around in the danger zone as it's neural network is programming itself, with obsticles all over the place, will finally reach normal world and notice how easy it is. the robot programmed on perfectly flat ground will reach the real world and run into walls all day. (compare to sheltered child to the street child)

the ultimate sacrifice isn't death, it's a lifetime of labor

if you are trying to find yourself, there is probably nothing to find. you have to create yourself first.

i looked and some little bananas and they looked cute. not lady finger really small ones, more like small regular bananas. i'm thinking if those are the only bananas i ever saw, they might not look cute. a smaller version of the original might tend to be cute. especially if it's a fatter rectangle. i mean the shape it's as slinder regardless of actual size. the banana is a smaller fatter version, just like a little baby. the point is that part of the cute responce may be so general in humans that is sees anything that smaller and a bit fatter than the original as cute.

survival of the fittest: you have to unite and compete, both at the same time. that's what modern nations do, especially during war. the native americans didn't unite, they were exterminated ["exterminate" refers to mass somewhat careless killing, not that the native americans were pests]

two wheels at 90deg, one can turn the robot, the other can make it go (while the turning one is lifted)