thoughts 2

what's the diffence between being conscious and appearing to be conscious (as a robot might), is there any? there is no observable difference.
each part of the brain fights to control the muscles

there's little reason to help anyone if God has planned people's suffering, and their suffering has a purpose, and everything is guaranteed to be fixed in the end.

i might say we have destroyed more information that we have created by destroying species. jose moralis might say, the information was not understoon in the dna in was just there. i might say it was understood. the dna created as system that worked with information. we want a system to model the world in our mind, one specific pare (the cerebrum maybe) the part we use to work out math problems, the slow and accurate part, not the fast and powerful subconscious part. not many people know how they walk, the physics of walking is not in that math problem part of the brain, but it is modeled somewhere else. my point is that that math part of our brain is only one platform to model things on, we have built in mechanisms to model things just as other animals do, you could say that mechanisms in dna understand what's going on just as we understand things. what difference is there between using information to make good decisions and understanding? there may be none. (there might not be any)

in a story, something can be beatiful, the omniscient narrator just has to say so. in real life beaty is debatable.

intellect is a dangerous freedom for an organism, note that dumb animals never comit suicide. evolution must be hesitant to allow intellect, it must be tempered with (or by) emotion.

(looking at a dance show at ghp 2001) sex probably isn't the heart of artistic expression (isn't that what Freud thought?), but it's somewhere right next to it. the heart might be boredom.

August

letter to Nana (BugsB34452@aol.com)

There's no difference between fiction and reality. If all the history you know is a lie or if all of it's true doesn't make any difference from your perspective. You can read or hear about people that exist or don't exist or somewhere inbetween, but whether or not that thing that the story depicts really exists doesn't matter much. I used to think it really did matter. As if nonfiction is more valuable that fiction. Now I'm thinking fiction might be more real than so-called nonfiction.

And I'm thinking humans aren't very logical but the world around them is. They do all they can to make it alive and not coldly mathematical, but it really is coldly mathematical. That's probably why people were almost forced to create mathematics and science. It was the only way to fully control the environment.

There are really old cultures, I mean tribal societies, that have a bunch of myth. They have all this stuff they believe that's not true worth a flip but it's extremely complicated and I can't help but think it guides them -- in a mostly helpful sort of way. A man might refrain from mating with his daughter because he's afraid some spirit will eat him; it's not true but the end result is that he doesn't have deformed kids and that's a good thing. They myth works well and it's efficient. It would take a long time to explain the scientific reason for why mating with your daughter is not an idea. In fact, those ancient tribes didn't have a chance of figuring it out. Myth was much more useful at the time. The only advantage of science is that it is more flexible and precise.

You could have a system of myth and taboo that guides a society or you could have science. They are both hit and miss experimental ways of figuring things out. With the myths, a society just believes them and the best myths are the ones that preserve the society. The best societies survive along with the best myths. With science people are just a little more careful, they want to prove something is true before they believe it. That fine and good but it's slow and tedious too. It's only now within the last few thousand years that science has actually become more useful that myth for survival. It's a tool that took a really long time to create. It's the big general solution that takes so long to figure out, as opposed to the quick fix.


--ricky


(letter to rachel)
sweet mellon honey on a sticky wet flesh. dew of field, spray of venom blood and urine. the taste of blackberries and candied yams. smoke and nicotine, sugared coke and soured wine. child crying in a street of dirt, shrivel body, plump wet body, poisoned rotten decayed with maggots. soft red velvet in a slick bowl of oatmeal, warm raisons

do people that stutter stutter when they are talking to themselves (in their mind), probably not

death is a blessing to our species but we are programmed to fear it

i'd like to see every thought a human ever said to himself, every word he spoke in his head

you can sing to yourself instead of talking to yourself

does language access an intuitive, natural problem solving ability that we have or does it define it. even if language defines some of our ability, we still must have a natural bases, something to start with. what is that basis? maybe some people lack it, maybe that's why they are considered crazy. the crazy person's might be only incompatible, not wrong (and that would make a pretty good story)

we've hamstrung evolution

we won't be enslaved to machines and warwick suggests, we will be obsolete

at three years of age, you have the questions that you will simply fill in for the rest of your life (i say "simply" because many stop asking new questions after the early years of childhood)

I start to fall asleep (it's 4:30pm and I've already been up once) and I hear a song in my head seconds before waking up. I was hearing the song that made me think so much that I did wake up. And I wonder (1) did mozart hear this stuff in his head all the time, did art tatum, (2) why aren't normal people programmed not to hear it all the time? (3) will taking drugs make you hear this stuff, consider the scene where steve jobs is conducting a symphony [movie, triumph of the nerds], I think they will.

in sports, the performance is everything, there is no product. in art there is a product, especially if you make a painting, a video, or a music cd, and the performance doesn't matter, only the product (actually the performance does matter, but i want to simplify my point) once that cd is made, nobody care how it was made, they just care about what it sounds like, for the most part. (counterexample: rachel rouse liked a girl singing 'it's the end of the world as we know it' because she had just learned the song, barely knew it, and made some mistakes)

time flies when you're having fun. when people practice and prepare for things they like, they can do more of it because time flies (in other words you're unconscious mind wants to be doing it) you learn better. when people claim to be no good at things, sometimes it's just because they never really put much into it, time never flies for them

life is a single brushstroke, the immortal names are only names

choice in the freedom to do what you want, but what you want is predetermined

depression caused by not achieving what one wants to achieve may be more common in a huge society (as opposed to a small one) when a person seeks to be the best

letters to nanna
(1)I just noticed that all of human society is driven by a nearly common set of instincts, like a big organism. We don't even know what they are exactly but they are at the heart of the definitions of good and bad, pleasure and pain, love and hate. When people think they are making decisions to do what they want, they are doing whatever instinct encourages them to do. This instinct is bigger than reason. It's the real boss, the grand ruler, the big cheese and it's totally transparent.
(2)people crave food - for nutrition - so they suck on candy that does more harm than good
people crave activity - for productivity - so they play games than produce nothing
people crave sex - for reproduction - so they go at it and use birth control (there's another thing that could go here that i'll let you guess)
the list could be much longer
humans are cheating

families are breaking up because they aren't functional anymore (like they would be in a tribe or on a farm)


September 2001


letter to nana (BugsB34452@aol.com)
is it just me or are videos of buildings blowing up beautiful? i would hate to be an artist competing with that.
at any rate, i have some ridiculous psychology test coming up in a few hours and i was looking through the book. psychologists are clueless. i can't believe the crap they come up with looking at mri scans and doing little experiments on college students. the field is so interesting that people are going to claim they know alot, and it's so complicated that they don't know crap. this is the age old human characteristic of thinking you know everything until you are educated of your own former ignorance. (i predict) people are going to model a full scale human brain in 5 thousands years or less or much less, and then they might be able to say they know what's going on. and then they'll laugh at the stuff in my textbook like we laugh at Egyptian medicine (e.g. spread dung on open wounds to aid healing)
--ricky

we need to have small children in laboritories, not just grad students

letter to austin about greenwaltz song i made
it was pretty much a mistake, just put way too many different melodies on top of each other to see what would happen. i don't even understand most of the harmony and didn't intend the conflict/resolution but it showed up anyway (well -- mostly conflict)
the thing wrote itself, i couldn't have done it on purpose if i tried, and i figure editing it will monkey it up worse that it is, so i'll just let it be. (i think god said something like this sortly after creating the earth.)
--ricky

letter to nana

what kind of love did you say 'come to me' demonstrates? i forgot and now it's bothering me, chronic curiosity (hotmail already killed the message)

one another note
i think i said one time that an artificial world wouldn't make me very happy, but creating it would. i should say that it would be a heck of alot more fun than this one. it would make me hapiER. i could fly, change the color of the sky (make it a big picture maybe), reverse gravity, visit anybody anywhere, create any arbitrary visual representation of myself, etc. it'd probably be easier to just take drugs.

i think think this is a little counter-intuitive: it doesn't matter much if you change the environment or you change the observer, the mind. humans go to so much trouble to shape the environment because they can't easily reshape their own minds. maybe you can't have what you want but you could just program your mind not to want anything (if you knew how).

it would be nice to say the mind is inaccessible. separate from the body (separate from the physical world) so you can never mess with it. then the only thing to mess with is the environment. and i could happily mess with the environment. things as they are, i feel like that's not an efficient way to do stuff, that's just playing the game by the rules.

i mean you can win a game playing by the rules or you can just change them so that you already are winning (changing the rules is probably easier)

some people say 'give me an arbitrary set of rules and watch what i can do with them.' those people happily live out there lives as functional members of society. they also play sports. and go to school.

i don't say that. i say give me some far off goal and let me get at any way i can. and upon realizing there is no reasonable far off goal, i just write you an irrelevant email. why not.


--ricky

life's a joke, if you analyze it, you kill it

each person has his inner beliefs that are immutable and unknowable, all his logic is influenced (tainted, poisoned) by these. e.g. the religious fanatic, or maybe einstein, who searched ~30 years for something he believed in, but didn't find it, though he might have been right

October 2001

[letter to nana]
When I took world history I was amazed at how people resist change (no matter how bad the current system is). I'm thinking evolution doesn't really work unless you have a very accurate way of transmitting data from one generation to the next. I mean DNA copying is something like 99.999...% accurate. If it was perfect there wouldn't be much evolution at all. But it is was not very accurate (like 90%) species would degenerate way faster than they could ever improve. So I figure humans have developed some stabilizing instinct (basically conservatism). The thing is that it's not necessarily rational at all. All it does is preserve, a lot like DNA.
If humans were truly open minded, societies would probably degenerate faster that they could improve. So insularity is a rather useful adaptation.
i still don't like it
--ricky
did i just say 'insularity is a rather useful adaptation'
sheesh
[end of letter]

things that are evolving and tends to resist drastic change...
-visual art
midieval artists drew things wrong on purpose, traditionally
-music
every new form is considered demonic
-literature
book burning
-religion
duh
-secular law
no one questions the constitution
-science
einstein had a heck of a time convincing people of his theories
_
notice the ones most central to survival are the least likely to change.
and, notice that religion changes now more than it used to (in western culture).

what schools do to shakespeare is criminal, they destroy the beauty by analysis. (consider that writer on NPR that said he hated teaching because he hated the way schools do thematic disections, or disections of the plot.)

[to nana]
some people mistake ineptness of the teacher for complexity of content

and some teachers mistake their personal inability to explain things for an uncanny personal ability to understand things

that being said, i'll consider everybody stupid and everything simple enough to understand

--ricky

maybe savants could be useful to society, very useful because modern society allows for extreme specialization. (you don't have to get your own food anymore like most ancient people did)

i think the scientific method is flawed. they alwats start with a hypothesis and see if it's right. that just ensures bias. you should start with nothing, look at an experiment, and see what you get, then come up with a hypothesis.


[subject: no limits; to austin, nanna, rachel]
I think the human mind's ability is just barely sticking out past a threshold. There are limits on human intelligence, just they there are limits on a monkey's intelligence. But it seems like we crossed a certain point where we managed to start keeping good records and modeling things outside of our brain - like with math. And instead of just using our body we manage to use tools heavily. Hands are sort of crappy in terms of survival, but hands with tools are incredibly powerful. Our brain is despecialized like our hands.
_
But what I really want to get at is the idea that once you cross a certain line with being able to record and model information, you can do pretty much anything, all you need is time. A large population working in parallel can cut down on time significantly. We made it past that line and basically quit. Now our ability grows on paper rather in the structure of our brain. I don't think relatively intelligent people are producing any more offspring than anybody else, which means evolution in that respect has come to a standstill, probably backsliding, I donno. I mean in general, you could survive with less intelligence and more knowledge and knowledge is growing pretty quick.
_
I suppose that a species could exist that is thousands of times more intelligent than us, but it wouldn't really be the way we are more intelligent than ants. Ants still can't record data, they haven't developed a system of physics, not even a bad one and they can't. They can't do what we can do. But it seems like we could do whatever the super intelligent species could do, we would just need a lot more time to consider a given problem.
_
It's also possible that we actually are very limited, so that we could never understand an intelligent species. Even with our writing and record keeping our brain could have logical limitations and we would never be able to understand some things (unless we got new brains). I don't know what those limitations are at all, but I wouldn't. [And there's even the possibility that the unknown laws of physics - assuming there are any - that govern us don't allow us to be as intelligent as other beings under a different systems. In other words the aforementioned 'new brain' wouldn't do much good.]
_
We could build machines much more intelligent that we are, that would be weird. It will happen though, assuming our species stays around for a while. It will happen because if nothing else you can always just model an entire human brain on a computer, that's monkey work, there is nothing stopping that from happening now except time and expense. And once you have one whole brain, you can mess around with it to make it better.
_
Consider the constraints on a human brain. It has to run off a very small amount of power and live in a tiny little skull. Plus it devotes quite a bit of energy just to keeping your basic systems going. It's got all kinds of limits that are in force to keep you alive. Once you get one of these suckers outside of a body with practically no limitations on size or power consumption, you can surely make a brain hundreds of times (or lots more) powerful than our own.
_
I keep getting side tracked, but what I wanted to mention was this: if we were super intelligent we wouldn't need a huge body of knowledge to draw from. Everything would be obvious. Our massive collection of models (models like physics) is a testament to our own limitations. The models serve only to translate the complex into the simple.
_
--ricky
notes to self: (1) i could have said intuitively clear instead of obvious. (2) this hole message stems from the fact that the so called brilliant scientists are actually dummying down reality into a form we can understand, wich seems ironic. i was reading about maxwell in a physics book by tipler.

working physics problems is 10% interesting and 90% tedious. if we could make a computer do the tedious parts, things would be more interesting. if we just used variables instead of numbers (as they do sometimes) things would be better

what if there were no regular jobs. what if people were just payed separately for each task. many tasks in todays society can be performed from anywhere so the emplyee doesn't even need to live near the employer. also, it might change the way we require certain types of education before we hire. the person the does it for the least amount of money would tend to be the one doing it, is that a good thing? it's true free market.

psychology tries to use the scientific method. the problem is that there are thousands of relevant variables (variables that can significantly affect results) and only a few of them are actually monitored (measured)

maybe you could program a human brain to revert back to language learning mode and learn a new language quickly. i still think the key to learning though is needing to learn, having no other way to express what you need to express and being forced to learn

sometimes a computer's cpu isn't fast enough to something. you get a card with it's own processor that does avery specific task very quickly. this is like a subsystem of the human brain (an unconscious thing). we couldn't handle language consciouly but that subsystem can, it's specialized for it.

god could just calculate the rest of the future and skip over it. put us directly into Armageddon or the new order. maybe that's all we are though, the calculation in god's mind. how would that be any different? Assuming he modeled everything and didn't take any shortcuts the model in his mind would be a lot like reality.

life is nothing more than a resistance to change, a derandomization
(i say this because i think all humanity will merge into a single being with the simple goal of preserving itself, or maybe they already have)

there's no positive correlation between the difficulty of the user interface and the intelligence of user, though some seem to think so.

there is a negative correlation between the difficulty of the user interface and the intelligence of its creator (probably)

humans are taking drugs all the time, food has all kinds of chemicals in it. if we get too much of a chemical i assume our body does something to counteract that chemical. so if we took happy pills for a long time i assume the brain would eventually adjust to say happy pills are just normal. and if we quit taking happy pills, the adjustment that it made would make us extra sad. this would be the basis for chemical dependency. the point is that we have a system in our body that allows us to take in nearly anything into our body and maintain some kind of equilibrium. but shifting the diet around is going to throw things off, quitting an addiction throws things off temporarily. i wonder if the brain can refuse to be happy all the time, does morphine/opium ever wear off?

what would pop songs be about if humans were asexual?

why do they always put the finishing touches on the robot with an arc welder? (see bjork's video)

[to nana and rachel]
I'm thinking the strongest evidence that some intelligence creature with a sense of humor created us is dreams. Your own mind takes you for a crazy fantastic ride, fools you into thinking it's not crazy, and then wipes out nearly all record. I mean what adaptive purpose could this possibly have? It's tempting to assume God just threw them in for the hell of it.
--ricky

wear glasses, not contacts
i'm more interested in what the world looks like to me than what i look like to the world

in general, (examples it applies to: societies, humans, arts)
you fumble around for a while figuring things out but not really getting anything done (childhood) and then you basically quit figuring things out and just do mostly the same stuff, but you are doing sort of useful stuff (adulthood/classical music). what if you just never settled down and kept learning, fumbling around?

why all the debate about mirrors reversing left right but not up down. if you turned around from a mirror by rotating on a horizontal axis, you would probably say that the image is flipped up/down. (what about those mirrors that supposely correct things and make the mirror look like what other people see?) << i forgot here that the mirror image doesn't exist at all in real life, that may make my argument bad

sexual reproduction and the ceremony around it has given people a lot to write and sing about (shakespeare). it's a rich source of story material. if we reproduced asexually, we couldn't have all that.

i just noticed something sort-of simple, there's no way that god could tell that he is really god, he could be mistaken.

November 2001

bacteria decided to get together like humans
early humans less organized
individuals that communicate with cell phones
individuals that communicate through neural links
sonic language could be done away with for a neural language
all humans will be nodes in a single machine
all humans are nodes in a single machine, those that are not are imprisoned or killed
life is a machine that perpetuates it's own existance
the human mind has laws of physics, some platform to work on (a brain), how does the mind of god work
consciousness can be extended just a a program can be modified as it is running
is thought universal, is the value of life in though, and would that means humans aren't so special. if they created a machine that though would that be a good replacement for them, would that be moral?
is human thought special

consider stewart's _arrow of evolution_
bacteria will not survive the destruction of the solar system very easily, humans will. that's why humans really are probably superior organisms. because when something really terrible happens, they will have predicted it and adapted to it. not to mention humans are making evolution obsolete with genetic engineering. they will be able to adapt very quickly.

could you model a system on a computer where life would bdgin to exist. is life simply the tendency for a thing to perpetuate its structure.

two perpectives of life
(from outside) a big machine perpetuating itself
(from personal view) a short ride. like when you stick your head out the window of a moving car. you get some wind in your face and then it's over with. or like listening to a song. as shakespeare said, just a moment on stage. life is just a very short irrelevant experience

the human mind is insulated from reality. the sense organs deal with reality.

as soon as a group of humans can communicate you get a system of law and a dominant culture in that group. i don't care if it's a family or a nation the same rule applies. now we have nearly the whole earth communicating. that only happened a few years ago. there's probably going to be a single culture and a single language (ignoring a few pockets here and there) as soon as they have time to unify. and it looks like western culture is going to dominate.
_
but here's the deal with this whole middle east thing. the time is up on that culture and it's going to get killed one way or another. all these little terrorist attacks and silly declarations of war are manifestations of a culture fading off and it's last ditch effort to perpetuate itself. isreal is the culture of the west and the west is using it as a millitary weapon and as a starting point for expansion. it's going to consume the whole region. and if the middle eastern culture really tries to fight back, that will be the end of them. that will be the excuse the exterminate them out right. it happened with native americans once before.
_
so i'm saying all the political stuff is what you see on the surface, but the motivation is just an instictive desire to make everybody you can observe operate under the same basic rules. it's some kind of instict designed to create and preserve societies.
_
we used to have a bunch of tribes you know, each with his own rules. the tribes keep getting bigger, and it's just going to be the human population pretty soon. wars are like growing pains.


"mommy, look what i made"
or "i made this"
classic human behavior

i think there's going to be a loss of origination. people are going to stop attributing accomplishments to certain people because every onewill be working as a collective. copyrights and patents would not be very useful. as it is everything is created from something else. a child not exposed to language can barely speak. creation is based on some sort of foundation whether it's big or small. humans tend to drop a lot of credit on one person but that's probably an oversimplification.

time limit:
there are two possibilities, the bible is right and God fixes everything pretty soon or it's wrong and humanity will change so dramatically that the religion suggested by the bible has no practical value

one of the things that motivates me is the possibility of judgement. i spend coultless hours working out mostly worthless physics problems because i will be judged by that work. this is why performance makes for better practice.

God is the intellectual icing (or the wrapper) for an instinctive notion that humans are important, more important than any other species. i guess that there are other ways of wrapping the instinc besides just the concept of God.

you could create a fake world for a person to live in that incourages him to do one thin well, then use him for certain tasks.

the ability to not think about things is really important (the power of the unconcious mind), it's something that iq tests probably don't measure well

they should teach the language of math in preschool, not arithmetic

some teachers want people to come to class to satisfy their own ego they just need an audience

december

whether or not the creation operation is transitive is important. god creates man, man creates sin, so god creates sin (if it is transitive)
or
person A shoots gun, gun kills person B, does that imply person A kills person B

truth is not beauty, truth is that which preserves the human species

stem cells
humans value the life of little babies so much because babies take so long to replace and comsume so many resources. embrios aren't like that. you shouldn't associate an emotion intended for babies with embrios.

you can predict the behavior of a system, but I think you need to stop interacting with it to do so (consider the movie pi and the stock market, and quantum physics) maybe if you could predict your own interaction, that would help, but i don't think there would be any reason to measure if you could

jan

need a computer program that can simulate all laws of physics, then feed it a zygote, all of the molecular data, and let it build a full human, then study the simulated human

the white civilization's society evolved very quickly whether their actual bodies did or not, even if natives and africans and such were stonger, faster, and smarter than the average white man they lost the wars because they did not develop a complex society fast enough. (the power of the european societies probably came from size, brute force, there are more skilled people to do things in a huge population and more specialization) the human population is being selectively bread to work as a society, not neccesary as individuals. size matters. the size of an oraganized society greatly affects its strength. the Native Americans had tribes and the Europeans had nations.

there are assumptions and there is experimental physics, that's all.

we derive pretty much everything from axioms but, we try to model the physical world and it doesn't care about axioms at all. it may not even follow any.

the useful religion would allow for upgrades and modifications. it would be a set of rules that help you get through life, but never a burden. (well it might be a burden if you have to do something annoying to get a desired result, but the point is that you get the desired result, and if you don't get the desired result the burden is not justified.

as andrea said, an arbitrary set of physics would give you "wonderland"

you are either delusional, depressed, or apathetic, that's it

the robot demostrates how instructions get more and more complicated until you have to throw them out and start over

the study where the teachers were told that certain kids are really good randomly and then those kids did do good is really important

people are like clay models, the grow up and harden. then you can't change anything without breaking the structure


a movie where kids have to memorize long sequences of arbitrary numbers in school (would show how trivial a lot of the stuff they teach is)

religion is like dumbo the elephant's feather to some extent. some people (like kristi trenbeath) could be good without it but they hold on to it anyway.

April 2002

memory is sort of like java (or smalltalk) memory, you have references to things and when the references go away the things pretty much go away too, (sort of like garbage collection in java), for example, when you finish dreaming you pretty much loose the references too the stuff. but sometimes the stuff can be found. maybe it's not exactly garbage collected, maybe it's overwritten or partially overwritten sometimes.

at present, i don't think the human mind has the ability to understand the realm it lives in. modifications to it or extensions of it through computers may help, but maybe the truth cannot be found at all.

people think that the smart kids are ones that understand what the teachers says as he or she says it, without any further explanation, but there is more to it than that

drugs water down life (antidepressant drugs are what i was thinking about, but maybe they aren't the best example) all the drama of life is what makes it interesting

i found out chelsea is on some kind of drug, probably because her parents think something is psychologically wrong with her. and that she got involved with the 'wrong crowd' at maybe brought a knife to school, but that's what mommy said so the facts are highly questionable. it makes chelsea less perfect, less perfect that the being that her mother creates. i mean chelsea's mother's idea of chealsea is near perfect, but this puts a big dent in that image and it's nice. things that are perfect are unapproachable. shiny diamonds have 'do not touch' signs on them, and just touching them puts fingerprints on them that look bad. but the thing you really use and play with are always a little worn and imperfect. it's nice to see such tangible evidence of her imperfection.

is there any statistical evidence(spelling?) showing that using statistical evidence(spelling?) to change things is useful?

i was wondering what would happen if you plug the dvd drive into the parallel port on my laptop because it will take the floppy drive, but not the dvd drive. i didn't actually want to try it because i thought it might damage something. in a dream i saw that the dvd drive would not fit. it will but the dream was saying it wouldn't. it was a useful and reasonable lie that my unconscious(spelling?) mind came up with. i think the unconscious is really good at lying. i've also heard that a girl that was pretty much crazy tended to make up great lies to justify her actions, or for some reason i'm not sure exactly what. i think the ability to make up these stories is actually built into the human brain, and i bet that people who don't deal in pure reality (like kristi trenbeath(spelling?)) use this natural brain function quite a bit whether they are aware of it or not. (they are probably not aware of it)


does humor trick people into sharing information that's imbarising(spelling?)

computer programs tend to put nice intefaces on things more than math. i mean you can no nothing and still use the function that gives you the answer. with math, you have to more to read the language (i mean the language, math) and use it.

they didn't have pornorgraphy in the old days because they didn't have camera's. so all you had it drawings, painting, and whores. the whores were actually much better than pornography of course, so one could say pornography is a modern convience (much like tv dinners) that isn't very good compared to the original. (one might say it's still better just because of the convinience factor)

my sister always said i was blind, i could see fine though, i was just endowed with a not-so-fast (I was going to say bad, but it's not really bad) searching algorithm

mike mcrracken and the guy that replaced him a couple days that liked to interact with the class
the guy that gave the first couple of mark guzdial's classes
the guy that showed up in place of dr. boyd one time
all of them had a deep respect for the guy they were replacing and tended to act like or talk about the guy they were replacing

it's ironic how the people you study in college didn't go to college

the events with the rouse family are like grains of sand that are later transformed into pearls through recounts (through recounting, storytelling)

the private sector could take over education, train the kids to do real work

if humanity unified, beauty could become obsolete

everyday is the beginning of the rest of your life until you get married

you got the nextgen (motherboard) and dc drives (dvd player) refund, now you should get a cdw (network hub) refund

only one part of a woman's body needs to be large, her heart

you can have drugs or all the other stuff in life, but not both

there's a whole world in a piano, not many people go there (maybe gould and herbie hancock did)

prostitutes are cheaper
(that is, they are less expensive than 'respectable' women, especially in the long run)

women are like parking spaces
the best ones are already taken
illegal to have two of them (for a long time)
ga tech only has a few, and those are expensive
belong the other people, but
some are public, some are private, some are pay-per-use
sometimes you use them anyway
two small ones can function as (serve the same purpose as) one larger one
truck drivers use the big ones (or they should anyway)

does the crowd demand the leader or does the leader demand the crowd (maybe i mean create rather than demand)

evolution created humans
God created music

we (humanity) have nowhere to go but sideways

you don't need a board to play chess
you don't need a brain to support consciousness

consciousness: I think consciousness is a tool that nature gave humans (and others) for the sake of survival.
free will: It's a strange thing to give an animal such a large degree of control over itself because it's risky. You have a potential to do more along with a potential to make more errors. Really all animals do whatever they want all the time including humans. Human behavior is so generalized, I guess that's why we say we have free will. Because will have a smaller amount of innate guidance, basically we have emotion to guide us and logic as a tool to figure things out. You go to school and they typically try to use competitive emotions to make you solve logical problems. So we have emotions to put constraints on free will.

world peace is not so important, not stop crime increase pleasure
cybernetics and genetic engineering will reshape the world so that it's barely recongnizable
reshape consciousness

artists work on the happiness (brain candy)
engineers work on survival of the species
(physisists are artists because they don't necessarily care about practicallity, they are on a quest for beauty)

prison is a lack of variety

perfection is existance, everything else is gravy

movie: 'eye of god': said that prison is about a lack of choices

concept of God used for war against native americans
also used by isrealites in war against other tribes
also used during the crusades
humans will use God to justify the most heinous/atrocious acts of cruelty
we natually don't like it when people do mean things but, leaders will use the concept of God to try to argue that doing something obviouly evil is OK
people also use God to incourage people to be kind to one another
the idea of a God exacting exclusive devotion is probably dangerous

as far as having fun goes, reality is unimportant (cybernetics)

to fix criminals, i suggest cutting off their bodies and replacing them with bodies incapable of committing crime but capable of everything else

create a woman that stays 18 years old her whole life
maybe change the way here hair is distributed


if we had snouts, we wouldn't need silverware

(2002 July maybe not exactly here, but the next entry was definitely in July)

to store or process information you need to have a language (at least some kind of model of information). we have a language for communicating. there is some language deeper than that within the brain. you can make a choice, a reasonable decision or analysis without any words at all, not even in your head. (language describes a state and allows that state to be transfered.) the little neurons in your head can solve a problem without any language at all. animals solve problems regularly without any language. are they conscious? do you need language to be conscious. if you can use language, are you conscious?
maybe a language is a model of information. a group of symbols that represent an outside state. a wave function (maybe) describes the state of the physical world and the connections between our neurons describe the state of our mind, there are so correlations between the two. we can never know what the state of the universe is but we can pick out some important aspects of it.


does the brain store information in the morphology of neurons or does it set up little state with neural pulses, like a pulse that goes back and forth and sustains itself between two neurons


--- laptop stolen

katie summers - last mail i never returned [(i remember after writing this list), actually i saw her in person along with that guy at mr. landis's house, and it was only confusing (could have used a shave and haircut)]
mrs drossos - last email my have had bad effect
(katherin) something from band camp (dodds maybe) - faded away
rachel rouse - messed thing up with email but they seem to have healed
chelsea - asked her to play violin with me, but now seem to be doing okay (both like independent films)
nana - sent too much email
(joy honey) - left before anything could go wrong
pamela - sent to weird of an email
stevie - sent too weird of an email
stephanie (from physics class) - handed a casset playing coltrane, that's the extent of the thing
lauren davis - things went well with the music but she's already taken
courtney davis - obsession now, but i'm choosing not to email
-
i have a hole (a figurative hole in my mind that you can fit a female into) probably wasn't there until i was about 15 (around freshman yearhighschool) and started. started most vividly with katie summers. women are just cute and beautiful when you are little but after that they are an obsession. there is usually one focus it doesn't leave (leaving nothing behind) but it can be supplanted by another.
it's not something that i want. i would be willing to got back to being five years old at heart and just seeing women as women. i don't think romantic love is an interesting topic, it's more like an annoyance. i can't get rid of the emotions. castration might help, might have help at birth especially, but i'm not going to do that. there are emotional mechanisms in place that make me not want to be castrated. may be some physical pain involved but that's not the first thing that bothers me. modern technology can eliviate a lot of pain. of course that's just a guess, castration may not help at all. i wonder if females have the same disease of the mind that males have. do they have it for other males or other females.
she is the cure for the disease, the scratch for the itch, the food for the hunger. if could could eliminate disease, itchiness, and hunger, i would. the only thing lost would be the joy of bringing an end to them on a regular basis.
communication helps satiate the hunger. (stevie wonder - i just called to say i love you; joe the physics reu student got a call every single night) that's why i emailed most of the people on the above list. physical presence is even better, sortof.
shackle and chain i would be willing to cast off
notice that food is only good because you are hungry
melvile: the fire or the warmth of another is only soothing because it's so cold without them
the romantic statement is that you want to be with the person, the more realistic statement is that you can't stand being without the person, or are these the same. optamist/pesamist. i don't think they are because i would be willing to destroy the urge itself.
but friendship (not love) is the true situation where you want to be with the person. i wouldn't be willing to kill off friendship because it isn't a need anyway. it has some logical underpinning. (not really logical) but love is arbitrary with an emotional underpinning at best. a shallow, not deep, emotional underpinning.
well deep in magnitude but not very interconnected
there is some danger is love by correspondence. you can't just email or mail somebody letters. (movie eye of god: the girl nearly just walked out because she couldn't talk to the guy) katie summers, pamela mashburn?, and stevie - i can't talk the them because too much was said over email. nana was also messed up with email. it's not a very good medium for me in that respect although there may be no good medium. i want to try face to face more. when i talked to onja and nana face to face, things seemed to run smoother, but it's better at night (onja and kristi trenbeath for example).

the more different something is from you, the more easy it is to mistreat it
racism
war
mistreatment (including eating) animals

people will create a standard brain format so you can read other people's minds. if you didn't have a format, every neural net would be different. you could look at some information but some would be mixed up, based on structures that were developed specifically by that person (not consciously). by standardizing the way all the brains work, information can be moved around quickly. you loose the potential for an individual to have a better than average layout, but you gain networking ability.

math is not the notation, i was thinking it was. math is sort of like physics. there is some kind of truth and you make the notation so you can describe it. math is trying to describe truth. you need it to show that things are true. a fourier transform works (gives you the frequency components). you can never prove something like that with just examples. math can be used to prove it. the point is that math isn't all the funny notation. it's what that notation is describing. (sort of like music isn't the notes, it's the sound you get.)
math is figuring out whether a statement is true or false. it uses theorems and axioms. people use theorems too but they are just little things they remember. if you don't want to derive something from basic axioms every time you answer a question (that would take too long) you just use theorems. i could come up with some sort of example where you don't analyze the axioms, you just spit out an answer in real life, not just math.

evolution would go much faster in water. nature used the ocean to figure out hard stuff like eyeballs and then just adapted them to land.

if you ignore time as a barrier, we are competing with the humans that will come later and be smarter than us

people could put their consciousness in a machine or in a body with no limbs and exist just fine but if they needed to interact with the outside world, they could not

lauren davis, trying to save someone by leaving her body and feeling sorry because she could not, sound like something i might try to do and feel in a dream

(venessa, the girl that was living with india)
unforgivable, that's what you are
unforgivable, so near or far

apparently god didn't need to know how life works to make it all work, set it up. maybe we want to know how it works so we can make it do what we want faster.

I guess part of the fun of being a human is not realizing that you are a machine.

People don't understand what's motivating them.

(I hate the way life has been reduced to something we can pretty much understand.)

biographies, all the choices one can make, there is a small probability that you will make many correct choices, or many errors. in either case a biography might be helpful for other people, they can learn from the correct choices and mistakes.

not that a person is necessarily logically making all the right choices, but one could by accident and someone else could learn from that accidental success.

some things can't be taught, but they can be learned

sink drains are nasty (unpleasant)

i haven't seen much improvement as far as human life span goes. what people are doing now is surviving the sickness of old age a little better than they used to.

maybe we should have kept some of the neat african tribe cultures in a zoo. if we become an endangered species, they might keep us in a zoo. (remember brave new world movie where the normal people were sort of in a zoo, or the book where the indians were in a zoo (maybe not a zoo exactly))

two aspects of art. the art it self just tickles the senses. i notice a lot of people appreciate another aspect, they appreciate the fact that something is hard to do -- people watch skateboarding just because it's hard to do, not that it is particularly beautiful to watch. [these are the two things (1) beauty (2) it was hard to do.] india, my sister, once said that she would pick a piece of art as a winner for a show because it looked like it was difficult to make, but it wasn't that good looking to me, it was made with colored string in a grid. will art go out of style because it is useless? will it de-evolve. are we so stagnated genetically that it wouldn't matter if it was useful or not, it would stay as a vestigal organ. is are a neccesary component of human communication. art has inspired revolution and massive change? so maybe it has shaped out culture. for the better? when you practice you want to do something a little more difficult that the actual thing, maybe that's part of what art is. practicing for real life -- mundane survival. and art is a scratch for an itch as freud put it, the mind wants to see things beautiful and are pumps in the beauty. what about dark painful art?

to erase all the knowledge all the art every book in the library all technology and start again actually forget what we know. disconnect. we would be children again as a a species. or maybe as it is we have a lot to discover. i still think it would be neat to have the music, the art, and the thought all tracable to the people that live around you (and you) rather than to someone that died more than one hundred years ago.

people admire other people's work almost as if it was their own. tendency that forces people to work together better. (consider rachel rouse burning cds and admiring the work of others.)

theodore doskovski, crime and punishment, svidrigaloff says 'reason is the slave of passion', that's a good way to put what i say sometimes, that logic is enslaved by emotion

you have to look through a (drinking) straw to find any meaning in life

if you created the illusion that high technology was lost, people would probably work harder to restore it to its usual state, they would not work as hard to move it forward

(2002 sept 22)

on your own (rachel rouse wanting to say she is on her own when she is living with my mother and has a job from my sister) being on your own means that you are dependent only on strangers. but no one is really on his or her own, every one is dependent on at least stangers, unless you know how to survive off of the land (no many do).

better to be a bumb and live off the crumbs of society that you just venture off into the wilderness and live off the land

divine providence, so you have no right to kill based on what you think, only god can make that decision. (reu andrew lydle) saying sometimes he would just kill people, all of us have that thought but the idea of god taking care of things makes it unnecessary.

the things we believe strongly are probably the most wrong. deeply ingrained in our minds. but what about pure logic

war
israelites thought god was the way to win war
modern people use science
maybe very old people (i mean older cultures) used magic
(the magic of people fails against god's power in the bible)
i'll say here that turing's work came out of preparation for a war, but i don't think that is relevant.

human behaviour is so maliable that there are a lot of species within humanity. a lot of ways of solving the problem of existance. war allows humans to figure out what is "true". useful maybe. they claim what they say is true blindly and whoever wins must have what is true.

back in tribal days i bet there were people who still didn't believe in magic

painful things are chosen, pleasurable things are not
(birth)

i'll be your host today, and you can be my paracite, i mean guest

monogamous, selfish, carnivorous, things that humans are, sortof but not really (compare ants)

human nature, you want your children to do better than you but nobody else

(2002 october)

death comes and washes away life, soap bubbles of misfortune

XPstyle of programming and schools and metric system vs british system, car and cdr, and querty, we see that tearing things apart and reshaping them is a good thing to do a lot of while you are figuring out what works, later on it might be a good idea to stick with a choice

we create (maintain) the illusion that we are useful with our work (that's why i agreed with dick trenbeath when he told me (something like) to keep working hard)

the concept of individual humans with minds is a convenient model of what's going on, but it's not really what's going on.

if we were all physically clones at birth, there would still be evolution of thought, still survival of the fittest, survival of the fittest religion

art can also be for communication (not just display of ability or tickling of senses)

when you change something in a program, the program shouldn't just break, it should be flexible, then it can evolve (neural nets would help)

does the brain use the sometimes use logic that you've develop over the years without telling the conscious mind about it?

two word poem:
bloody incest

i think god could record the event of an electron dropping to a lower energy state (write it down in a little notepad), wait a while, and then have an electron somewhere else go to a higher energy state so that the one that dropped and the one that went up are c*time apart (where c is the speed of light). the light does not need to exist in between, we would never know the difference (but the interference pattern makes this a not so good argument) god might want to draw out the waves and use them to calculate the probability of where the interaction is to occur.

sometimes it's better to abandon common sense (like in math) because it doesn't do much good anyway. this is not entirely true, set theory after all is based only on common sense
.


i'll deal with dying when i get to it

abuse the women you love: the thought of smacking some of them entered my head, i wonder if that's the manifestation of an instinct

it's impossible to know what is impossible, but things may be impossible (the statement nothing's impossible is probably false, but i can't prove that)

i think we've come a long way in the last few thousand years, there wasn't any time for genetic evolution to happen. we took a brain made for something totally different than the problems we are solving. that's why people go to school for twenty years, most animals don't live twenty years. all the baggage, the notation, it's a bridge between what we can understand naturally and what we can fake. (here, fake means understand but only through analogy). i mean there are some things that the brain can deal with naturally and a lot of room for expansion, but it's all based on what it can deal with naturally. if you made a brain that could deal with things like quantum mechanics naturally, it would understand little things (small in size) better than we do. (consider a blind person (a blind species or society i mean) trying to figure out maxwell's equations, it's just harder) not going to use humans as universal computational machines forever, we'll end up building minds that can deal with things faster and better than our own. discovery of physical law is now like building pyramids with just people. population increases exponentially so the computational power of humanity increases exponentially. the computer is trying to figure out how to survive. (as opposed to hitchiker's guide to the galaxy where it's trying to figure out the meaning of life) the universe invented an intelligent mind that could understand the concept of existance and maintain it's existance. figure out a way for it to survive. all life tends to evolve in such a way that it continues to exist, but we actually got a computer (mind) that understands existance, its own existance, and tries to preserve it. could a computer understand that it exists. you could copy the whole state and it wouldn't know the difference, but you could do that with us also and we wouldn't know the difference. we do sort of assume we are each unique entities, that there aren't copies of us floating around, that would mess up the idea of existance.
nature has gone to a lot of trouble so that your mind can understand existance and want to survive. the mind's concept of existance is probably and approximation, might be rediculously wrong but close enough to do some good.

that said, we want to live forever

could you build a computer with the movement rules of chess? an infinitely large board and lots of pieces that move whenever (not really normal turns) might help.

some other species might have a different concept of existance that is better than ours

do you ever feel blessed to have a body, to exist, seems like there was only an infintesimal chance of it happening, but it did (maybe it's not a good thing at all)

universe where the physical became irrelevant, and it was evolution of minds only

nature, a headless god

is the human brain mathematically chaotic?

november

imaginary numbers are no more imaginary than real numbers, and real numbers are no more real than imaginary numbers

lead follow or get out of the way -- the statement shows that society is a single organism

marriage, semi-exclusive fucking privledges

is this x important
x element of {individual, species, world, universe}

quantitative analysis of love

researches trying to show off inadvertently help others by publishing their work

[email to rachel, pamela, courtney subject: ape]
Being an ape can't be that much different than being a human. I wonder
what it would feel like. Maybe there is some way you could mangle your
neurons so you would think like an ape. At that point I'm not sure if
you would understand how an ape thinks because you would pretty much
just be an ape. I don't know if you would carry the information back
with you when you reverted your neurons back no normal. Maybe it would
be something like taking a mind altering drug, people sort of remember
those experiences. I guess the trick is that the ape's memory has to
work about the same way as your memory. If they were totally
incompatible, you could never remember what is was to be an ape,
unless there was some handy translation scheme.
[second email: ape2]
But if there was a handy translation scheme, you could always just take an
ape's brain, collect the memories, translate them to human, and put them into
your brain. Still that might not be what I'm after, it might be impossible to
experience being another mind. I wonder if your childhood mind gets thrown out
to make room for your adult mind and only the memories carry over.
[i didn't send this:]
Being an adult can't be that much different than being a child. I wonder
what it would feel like.

humans do for life what software did for computers, they are flexible solutions, maybe not as efficient as hardware, but flexible

with quantum mechanics, there is a small probability that the refrigerator will turn into a dog in the next 20 seconds. with classical physics, if you could measure everything, you could say for sure that is will not. you could not say what it would do an infinitely long time from now (unless it reached some steady state)

peter hesketh said people watch videos off classes while working in the lab because they are so boring. this varifies the suggestion that you need a person to teach one class at a time maybe no so much because of the interaction (as peter suggested) but just because people are more likely to pay attention to a real human standing in front of them. same reason people go to live concerts.

noble motivations for heinous acts, fighting for your country

life is distracting

face of little oriental kid in his mother's arms unmolded chunck of human flush soon to be casted shaped molded int o braick for the wall of humanity absorbed, assimilated into the masses, programmed and incorporated into the organism, the sea of thought

confine chelsea, confine gun powder

religion could be an infection

i'm not very good at convincing people of things because i'm honest

the good thing about have fanatical weirdos that do or don't do certain things, is that when we are surprised by something (grape juice causes infertility), there will be some group of people that still survive (the grape juice haters)

young (or maybe asleep), you learn faster when you are not conscious, but you are not as careful about what you learn

december

people are going to define what desires a human has, why leave it to chance?

so abstract that it doesn't stimulate human emotion any more. art. want to do the red ball and the line cartoon, but even they are anthropomorphized. total separation from the mundane is color blobs, but music already is. it already is abstract (the book dorian gray pointed that out). it does sort of sound like speech, some of it actually is speech but it's typically more abstract than visual art. i'm going to tell you a story, not about something you can realte to. no familiar element. no emotions, no good guys, no bad guys, just a source of input for your brain as if it didn't have enough already. but that's just noise. arbitrary, nonrepresentative audiovisual stimulation, static. alright, that's already boring so, lets introduce some order, fractal. symmetry. symmetry. symmetry. i mean repetition. human, animal, plant. object. emotion, fear. love, hatred, death, naked. hot and cold.

lick the nectar off your cherry lips

dmetri claimed multiplication could be expressed in terms of addition, but that is probably not so:
numerically, multiplication can be expressed in terms of addition (well not really you have to multiply or divide by ten to work out the multiplication problems). but algebraically, only sometimes.

illusions beat the h-ll out of reality sometimes

2003

jan

look at one word on a page. you can see the whole page but you can only read that one word. your visual system is only really good in one little spot. if a computer had to do what your brain did it would ignore most of the camera's field of view.

my mind is cold (amoral) but my heart is not (it's soft)

the human brain is more than a typical mathematical function because it has memory.
you could say it is a function off all input that the human receives over its entire lifetime and the output is all the responces of the organism of its entire lifetime.
could you make a learning algorithm that knew when it should store data and when it should calculate data, and make it create storage or calculating machines as necessary.

what would a million years of human evolution with nothing to achieve accept creating pretty music produce?

segments of the population could be genetically segregated to do things well (levites)

science enables humanity to cut its own throat
machines [or engineered life forms] will replace us

how much energy does it take to do an or operation (is that the physics of computation)

better to be totally alone or totally not alone than somewhere inbetween

dr. gole has porous silicon, mark guzdial has squeak, thad starner has wearable computers (or lisp), they all have babies, they will all protect (or verbally defend) their babies, they all want their babies to grow

how does nature work out differential equations?

why are the ants so misguided, chasing after every imaginable goal. evolutionary perfection is about advancing intelligence and power as far as it can go and populating other planets. instead drive your own species to extinction by accident.

{
dealing with the real worl was so hard that we developed a pretty powerful intelligence. some of the most advanced thing we have done recently were in preperation for wars. the competition among humans for resources forces human societies to get smarter. build a simulation, you have to make sure that the environment is challenging enough to make the agents become intelligent and become intelligent in a way that is useful (too me).
[virtual] robots could develop their own laguage, keep genetically modifying them until they can communicate. ideally, they should be able to give a list of high level instructions to another robot and that robot should figure out a reasonable implementation. transfering an entire program would be a trivial solution to the problem. we need the robots to learn how to understand high level commands so that they can understand our high level commands. a way to do that may be to put them in a situation where they have to use high level commands to survive, use a genetic algorithm. once they develop a language to communicate, we could figure out how to translate it into english.

maybe make them more "fit" if the amount of information they transfer is smaller. (this may or may not work) that would force them to develop some kind of abstract representation. and make it so an exact list is less likely to work, the environment is always changing just like reality, so just a list of instructions is useless.

very little quantum mechanics in the stone age, so start there. start with robots that can do what stone age people did. give them tools of stone, raw stones lying around, bodies to move things around with, create fruit trees and preditors, limit the food supply, allow them to kill each other and reproduce.

you could represent the whole world as a bunch of cubes (we have atoms). the cubes would be about the size of a marble and everything would be composed of them. there would be tricks though, so of them would be things like computers. the human might have one cube on him that is a brain with programing that can be modified according to his dna. dna can specify the complete organism, it can be the instructions for building the organism from cubes. one cube might be something like a not gate, then the virtual organisms could use the cubes to build computers of their own. the main reason for having cubes was so you can have an object and cut it like you do in real life. the virtual organism could just have a binary actuator that caused the two cubes they are touching to bond or not bond. they could also be able to reach through matter, that might make things easier. you could have weather so they have to build shelter.

give them lego pieces to use to build things

build a boat

build a bridge across running water

sexual reproduction (could be more that two)



}

jan 19 2003, my life is probably no big deal (nor is anyone else's)

begin to_pamela

[if i start to annoy you with this email, let me know and i'll try to stop,
this is just stuff i was thinking about today walking to class, listening to
beetoven]

(almost) nobody follows those ancient religions where you had to sprinkle
things, dance around, and paint masks. there was a lot of diversity. like the
diverisity that exists when cultures that can't communicate. chinese music and
western music. popular religion tends to destroy diversity, it's about
unification, because unification creates the strongest organism. (you never win
a fight with your cells revolting against each other).

the religions that accept everything die out with the people that believe them,
attacted by maniacs that are perfectly and exclusively correct, ancient
isrealites, americans.

there's no logic that leads you to the idea that humans are good.

there's no definition of perfect. not even a guideline.

humankind is dragged around kicking and screaming by evolution, war. they don't
make all the choices they think they make. no human on the planet is
intelligent enough so say anything about how to build the perfect life form.
nature decides experimentally.

we will be replaced relatively soon (less that a million years). christians
have a hard time believing that, but the guys and girls painting masks probably
had a hard time believing that europeans would exterminate them, no matter how
much their gods loved them.

end to_pamela

don't mix business and pleasure
what if pleasure is your business

february

fun is rewarding while it is going on
satisfaction doesn't need to be while it's going on

(lauren) my heart is greedy, it gets a taste of you and wants a lot more

conflict of kindness and honesty

am i programming computers or people's minds?
what's the difference: computers are easier. that's going to change.

does the moth fear the flame?
i imagine that for that breif moment, as the flame consumes his body and his nervous system is mutilated and incinerated, he feals fear, but only for a moment (that moment)

do something that you love or be with someone that you love

sin carries over from one generation to the next, why not righteousness

maybe holding onto ideas that are wrong isn't bad at all. it reduces the size of a problem space that a person has to deal with. that thinks low level stuff is important for computer scientists.

i should have told thad that humans don't know how human brains work but they use them anyway.

you could have life and evolution without death and reproduction

true love is an oxymoron

we try to represent all computation, not on a turing machine, but in a human mind. what if the human mind is very limited. if it was extended, we could probably do more. machines that are more intelligent than we are will probably do more. much of mathematics deals with packing complicated models into a mind that is not made to deal with them.

cardinality of infinite sets. it may not be useful, but here is a case where it works well: you can store all of the information on two turing machine tapes on one turing machine. having two infinite tapes does not allow you to store any more information than just one infinite tape.

humans brain sort of do newtonian physics, quantum mechanics might require more power that a brain even has, (but it could handle the basic concepts)

March 2003

i don't act on impulse

scientific method, i wouldn't make a guess until i had data [it may be a good idea to make a guess before you have data, as most do]

what do things taste good together, bread and meat. not so much by themselves. is that the easiest way for nature to ensure you are eating a balance? is it actually advantageous to chew them up together rather than separately?

our laws of physics may not be the best for constructing life forms. do we fit nicely into the frame work or are we an unsightly hack.

computer scientists use acronyms to name their works (mispelled words consisting of the first letter of some words loosely related to what they are working on), musicians don't. maybe there is a fundamental difference in mentallity. or maybe cs people didn't want to type long names.

why did they wait for computers to be almost invented (or maybe intevented) to make the theory of computation. note that the turing machine is based on tape. you could have invented it in 500 A.D. with something like beans on a table rather than tape.

there won't be any more mozart songs
anymore shakespearian love poems
anymore species like humans
because the place is already filled
(there may be better alternatives for all, but the cost of replacement is too hight or replacement is too improbable)

terrible but true, the wife or husband dies and give the spouse a chance to start over

people who are never satisfied but do good work and die from drug use

oppression -> intelligence and carefulness
power -> stupidity and recklessness
(-> means leads to)

there are no societies of intellectuals, they wouldn't hold up against morons. actually you need the intellectuals to build the bombs and the morons to use them. why the intellectuals appreciate the approval of the morons so much i don't know, that is not a neccesary factor anyway (curiosity would do)

give a child a slingshot and kill him when he breaks a window
train the taliban

the prokariotic cell with it's mitochondria evolved only once. all animals use the same framework. humans will only evolve once. all we do now is re-arrange society and create technology. just as all animals are arrangements of prokariotic cells. mutation is rarrangement. we replaced neandertols, maybe prokariotic cells replaced another reasonable animal cell, but they may never be replaced. not because they are so great, but because they are alread so widely used.

chess without seeing the other player's moves. it would be sort of like battle-ship

the guillotine incouraged beheadings. war technology incourages war.

April

balance of power
-in history, european nations
-in presest, united states not balanced with russia, united states attacking middle east
-in history, american indians ally (work with) nature
-in present nature is expoited (conquered)
only form allies if needed, if you can overpower and control, that's what you do (if you are an average organism)

people should do scientific studies on what teaching styles work the best and produce people who are most successful

one time i told that pamela girl i wasn't planning to kill her. if she read that book lauren told me about, she may have suspected me as a true killer.

is success more important than life.

human are immortal (dna) but their minds get reset

women are sexual partner snobs

physicists rebuild intuition from the bottom up.
basis is set theory.
the exceed the (intuitive) ability in some ways.
they do not reach the ability in others (i can predict what a person will do better with intuition than by solving a schrodinger equation for a potential energy distribution and wave function that represents the person's state. maybe if our mathematical tools were a lot better, they could beat intuition, but our computational tools probably will beat intuition soon.)

the fact the lauren does work in the morning shows that she too probably suffers from not being able to do boring stuff except in the morning

sex, eating, sleeping all cycles that can get messed up (or maybe not cycles, maybe just wait until you can't anymore)

May

our language forces you to expose gender, not any other trait

nomadic instinct says redecorate the house

just as painful for them to adjust to your wishes as for you to put up with their natural behavior

like the french assigned male and female to words i sort of assigned male and female to numbers. the masculine feminine probably came into the language because people like to put gender on their nouns in general.

evolution: same basic principles generate life and death and keep things going. tom ray's program for evolution tierra, the rules of evolution are separate from the rules of death.

June

an example of honesty may help someone else be honest (austin's example)

the idea you feel, that doing something like einstein would be really great, that's just as false as any other idea. there are no acts of greatness.

June

to_lauren
beauty isn't just skin deep. it's a pretty good indication of good embryotic/fetal development and health. if it was just superficial, people probably wouldn't care about it. though it may be less important than it used to be

l. divinchi had it so easy, so little previous work to worry about, just make stuff up and it's really new (this after i notice a tic tac toe and evolving animal system exists after i work on them as a supposedly new idea)

introduce yourself to people on the phone (lesson learned by calling thad starner)

don't trust that people know everything just because they are expert (butera, gole, ashwin ram, hesketh), but always ask them anyway.

practicing (music) is intellectual, playing is not

some writers said they enjoy their work as they write it and they hate looking at old work (dickens said he liked the one he was working on best)

easier to break symmetry with nondeterministic equations

three person marriages or animal marriages
[three person marriages already exist, though i doubt all of the women are expected to perform sexual acts on one another]

lisp in book:
;; hello
;; world
you wrote
;; hello world
when attepting to copy it, probably because you just wrote it as you read it

July

safer to stick your hand in a toilet than the vagina of a prostitute

not lying decreases the quality of your life

humans think in parallel, talk sequentially

nature's physics-->life-->intelligence is pretty good. a totally different way of getting to intelligence may be hard to find.

teenagers know so much because their brain probably tells them so

starting a song is more natural than finishing (in terms of writing)

the fall of the american empire
the fall of the roman empire
people have been hitting each other with rockes for 10 million years and now we have nuclear weapons, no indication that our instincts can handle that sort of thing
it would be a good idea to spread out to other planets

in _I, Claudius_, Claudius hires a prostitute to live with him, when she is ready to retire from prostitution and have a family, she leaves and finds a good replacement for herself. that's just the kind of girl i need.

August

maybe YHWH gave adam a woman sort of like he gave isreal quail in Numbers (sort of punished them with the gift)

you judge a musician by what comes out of his horn, judging a person is different

girl 16 years old argues with mother, evolutionary reason, emotionally easier to leave out of anger than to leave and want to stay home. emotionally easier for mother and daughter maybe to have enmity between them. (or father and son) like people in a romantic relationship that break up and become enemies (marie moser and philip)

people make viruses because they want to make a splash

do monkeys look in mirrors like we do? maybe we weren't intended to see ourselves.

truth is a little flag set in your mind (true, false, maybe). evolution decides what truths become more popular.

do the human eye do a translation on the whole image to keep an object stable?

robots will replace people but that's no big deal, people replace people as it is (another person is another machine just as a robot is another machine)

humans tend to be nomads and they use a lot of energy, not so for plants

i was pointing out in class that a woman boss copulating with a man worker is different that the other way because female and male phsychology is different and the class just laughed. people live in a system of lies. it's not just religion. it's ethics. some of common sense. spanish kill off the natives because they practice canablism, spanish though is spead. survival of the fittest set of lies. but why not just call the lies truth. it may be better to keep track of these lies or thruths as heuristics rather than lies or truths. the best heuristics spread more. people tend to call them truths.

when people can generate arbitrary machines based on information it's going to cause some export problems (consider the exporting of encryption algorithms, and the government classifying them as weapons)

(September 2003 not exactly here)

Fall in love with a person. Learn a language. First one is special.

jose (moralis maybe) at ghp said that something he said to somebody in a conversation might lead to something. treating human progress as a collective effort.

you can be near the top and to stuff with world class people, you don't have to be better. when sam at churchill says people are among the best it's doesn't mean it's an eclusive right, even when he says best he uses it in many different ways, so many people can be 'best' in his eyes. there is room at the top.

(some philosopher said something about when to be angry, maybe in gift of fear or emotional intelligence book it was mentioned)
i'll say the question is not should you lie, it is when should you lie, how much, and what should the lie be
gift of fire books says how environmental modelers lie


October

need some kind of 'i did this first' global database of are with secure login to keep track of who did what. then eliminate copyright protection. and figure out a way to pay people for creating stuff.

guy that wrote "stuart saves his family" said he realized at a meeting for people with drug or alcohol problems that you can learn from anyone (even if the guy is not smarter than you)

thoughts can flow, they do it when you are asleep or nearly asleep, maybe sometimes late at night. if you think about the stuff, you impose restrictions and they don't flow. you have to relax your mind for the flow to happen, which i'm not used to doing on purpose.

use can use second nature type information while your not thinking, but not regular information that's not second

(or first) information. maybe you can, but second or first nature is better.

when duke ellington said he was dreaming when he played new songs, maybe he wasn't kidding.

if i designed humans, i would put the sexual organs further away from the waste disposal organs

like vasseur said, ultimately none of the writing rules matter

contrary to what Keiko Matsui is thinking, music and war can exist simultaneously. music doesn't make people stop fighting. and war doesn't make people stop playing (consider military band)

email quote:
If you're falling off a cliff, you might as well try to fly. After
all, you don't have anything to lose.
[i'll add that life is falling off a cliff]

quantum mechanics and Isbel's MIMIC optimization algorithm (with the mentioned hack of giving small prob. of random change) both give a small probability of random change. QM is the way nature optimizes organisms.

November

ryan thought that human can define there own goals. suppose a human started out with no goal, only logic. there would be no way to formulate a goal. the goal must be handed down as an inhereted assumption or random.

all that gym time just to create stimulous in female brain seems like a waist

when you stop being a kid two desires become important: desire to do somehting for humanity (to some that is making money) desire to screw someone

walking around the mall, the male limbic system just doesn't realise they are made of plastic (plastic girls, manikins)

universities choose short term goals (read this and that, do that problem).
given a difficult problem, like solve a molecular chemistry problem when you are not a molecular chemist, most people would not do it, but they will do smaller problems.

in an artificial competitive environment, you maintain fairness. in a real competitive environment, all is fair.



december 2003

blowing up (demolishing) a building without telling the people inside to get out first, turning off a computer by cutting the power

head shoulders knees and toes knees and toes uses animaniacs song chords

non related (to you) zygotes, let them develop into women, move to pacific island where there are no laws

women are NP complete