thoughts 4

2004

January

dreams irrelevant side effect of evolution

if i made humans, they wouldn't breathe

extending skills tends to be a process that takes a while, and you do it in short bursts, methodically, learing a little bit or a little better each day, the production of stuff can easily happen all at once though (i'm sure these are not hard rules but the point is that learing new skills takes a little each day somewhat methodical (like gilbeav/gilbo said).

when practicing, you might not see daily improvement, but it is there, it's very slow (like dan hearl at the abersold thing said)

pam
her mind is a clear blue ocean full of wonders to explore

hellen keller (limited input but not all gone)
suppose no inputs, not even feeling
mind is still there, because the computation is still there, it's defined in the dna. can't prove intelligence while there are no inputs/outputs but if you add them later you may be able to show it was intelligent while it was disconnected. (you may not)

people are like songs, the rich kind that take a long time to appreciate.

God doesn't take sides, does he take the side of good?

considering how disconnected different parts of your mind are, rewarding yourself might make sense

like charles isbell said, indeterminate looks same as hidden variable

from dream
if coltrane used abersold, he would not end up playing like coltrane

maybe i would make a movie to inspire, as movies have inspired me (number five alive [short circuit], the matrix, etc)


femanine beauty like a fine crystal sculpture, finally cracks at some point and ruins very quickly. masculine more like wood sculpture, not as brilliant, but wears out more gracefully


astrology - people are looking for patterns, believe that patterns are important (important because they are patterns). panetary alignment affecting the person you are or your life. the astrologers are scientists of today.
science is pattern recognition and description.


human (maybe animal) touch, nothing can suffice [emotionally, helps physically too]

suppose you are simulating the future, a system that you are involved in. part of the data streaming in to the system would have to actually come from the future bacause assuming the machine works in the future (what you are simulation) it will bring in data from the future that will affect the future. i'm trying to say that you probably can't get this working because you can't predict what the outcome will be without predicting the outcome.
(if you simulate something you are detached from, you may pull it off though)

lots of people maybe a million in the world (the scientists more or less) each with ideas and biases and interests, occationally one happens to be in the right place at the right time, the right interest at the right time, and that person is elevated to genius status. more important - humans are working in parallel some don't do anything very interesting but they serve to explore a region, it could become interesting.

Feb

big part of life, doing things you aren't good at (driving)

how does the brain partition information so that amisia can wipe out some but not all (like it wiped out a non-native language according to that french movie about the writer visting spain)? how can it come back?

intelligence hard part of making robot, after that emotion easy

art and technology of killing people

man term of indearment (nice) woman the opposite (hey woman) (hey man)


hannible(hannable?) lecter(lector?) more associative than creative


soft motherly love thing harder to shake than lust (masterbate kills lust)


heuristics of our species:
chronological order:
1) everything including volcanoe is human - model based on understanding of humans
2) science everything is math
need to have different people, some believe God others believe whatever makes most sense (scientist) which may still be God or may not.
illusions are essential.
religious freedom, ability to specialize large population.



belief
gil
pam words
love art
brain
[love art life music - general words]
what is music: is it a local definition in your mind:
here's a theory: the mind has some indentifiers or symbols or whatever you want to call them only important thing is that they are unique. they link to a bunch of stuff in the brain. the brain probably has one for dog. then words link to these identifiers (you don't need the identifiers really, you maybe could get away with blobs of that which is dog) the question "is this music" is answered immediately by your brain before you utter a responce. most people have the same definition roughly (not in words, it's encoded inderectly in the brain, it's a result of a bunch of neural stuff) and i'm supposing the question is answered outside of conscious whaterer. belief - mind answers the question before you have time to reason about it. with that definition of belief, i probably have lots of them. consciously i decide not to totally believe anything. gil wineburg(spell?) claimed that anything somebody creates intentionally [put "thought" into it] is music (i assume he meant an audible creation). what is life. we can all recognize life, but any definition can have a counter example.
pam mashburn - the meaning of words, the uselessness of the dictionary are recursive nightmare of links. (maybe links in brain are recursive too but ignore that) the brain has a fairly specific meaning for each meaning of each word, the job of the dictionary is just to find which concept to hook it the word. you know what a dog is even if you don't have a word for it. (mice, our evolutionary ancestors probably plenty of these identifiers floating around without the words and the words got added on later)
what is art

mix of cooperation and competition in research is strange but it works, (like strange idea of sexual reproduction, seems like asexual would have cut the mustard, but gene mixing is important)


slippery and sticky, why do they show up together (like the blue slippery stuff on the mach 3 razor). explain with molecular physics.


March

orgasm without penis, probably so

there is no truth, there are assumptions that make you strong and assumptions that make you weak


you could argue that there is no difference between brain and body


7 orders of magnitude, number of neurons in ant compared to human

by the time you notice you already have it [typed for no reason]

maybe the eyes "purposely" didn't evolve to the point of detecting photons because that would have messed up the vision processing system

if animals fear you you are safe
exception: if humans fear you they will kill you
(snake, Ashok the AI prof said monkeys don't like snakes)

degree of randomness is dependent on the mind of the observer

(in)ability to embrace illusion

(1) detached cold reason
(2) emotion
tribal warfare*, need (1) and (2) to survive
they conflict
religion
*shaped evolution of humans for millions of years

patriachal societies dominated because they were agressive (meaner)

i can't (purposely) lie to myself enough to feel emotion
[psych myself out as my mother would say]
can't have religion
can't care about football game
no point in imagining people naked for public speaking (that would be more distracting than comforting anyway)

willy wonka
so much to do so little time
life

to pam: the difference between you and an angel is that you are real
[that's actually better than an angel, except aging]

some people have the problem of not doing things (sex, job application)
some people have the problem of doing things (murder,lies,sex,drugs)

why not perform art (paint picture) from a script like people read music

the mechanics of evolution evolved in the oceans with billions of (tiny) organisms rapidly evolving (once the mechanics of evolution were perfectly, evolution could create something like humans, but it was already highly optimized by that time

when i dream, sometimes brain tells lies that soothe, hopefully you don't notice
(if you aren't conscious you don't have the ability to notice it's made up)

women care about kids more that job, men care about job more than kids. (biologically inspired caring) - technically both care about kids more that job but i'm describing something like relative caring levels (male relative to female) - so women tend to get stuck caring for kids - she would threaten to not take care of them and the man probably would take care if he had to.

two things to take form wayne the psychologist:
people are interesting, following protocol is a good way to meet most people

user testing (as in Human Computer Interface) for designing programming languages would probably help




Alex,

I hadn't thought about the problem of having enough bits to predict the universe through simulation. Assuming it has probability of being in any possible state, that is a serious problem.

But I have thought about this other logical problem, and I think there's a nice way to express it:
You have the universe.
Part of the universe is a iMac that has a model of the universe, so it can use physics to predict state of the universe with respect to (future) time.

Now to really predict the future, the iMac needs to have itself in the model, because it is going to affect the future.

And inside the iMac's model of itself, there has to be another repesentation of the universe.

And in that, there has to be an iMac, and so on.

Drawing a picture of this is fun.

If you can just take the iMac out of the picture somehow (you can if it doesn't affect anything) then you can do the prediction. So iff you never show the results, you can make the prediction.

Reminds me of some quantum mechanical nonsense.

-rick



being God, makes prediction easier, you just set the universe to the state you predicted it would be in

for humans, control requires prediction, (for God) prediction requires control

wonder if dreams switch around sensory input sometimes to make events line up with the plot better, seems to anitcipate events, or maybe it trick you to thinking it's anticipated, maybe sensory input are on a delay

if there are no other charged particles to feel one moving, is there any radiation at all? (will one charged particle wiggle forever and never emit radiation)

chocolate (misconception)
that which gives pleasure is not sin
that which takes pleasure away is sin

maybe hacking is underestimated, humans are hacks of fish (not designed from start)

key elements of intelligence: [1] ability to carry out abstract command (like "make it dark" - what you would do before sleep). (i was thinking even a person that had the eyelids won't shut disorder would figure a way to do this even if it involved a leaf over the face in primitive times). command could come from emotion (get together with that girl) [2] ability to do fast search (search as in AI) - good heuristics, or ability so solve difficult problem quickly, this is creativity


thay quote from the guy with the gotee in the psychology special in psych class, the one that studied people in a mock prison, said something about society being the canvas we paint our lives on, though i hate to admit it, that is no joke (art is always judged by what other people think of it, how it is generated is another story) movie - particles of truth

people ignore that fact that one person could discover the same thing as another. (or maybe one artist could rise to prominence in place of another.)

encoded in our dna: if you have something to give to society, give it - and that giving does actually make you happy, that's how it's encoded, as a thing that brings inner joy
(sort of like ants)

May

corporation is a big complicated animal like a human, has to have protocol and bureaucracy. small business more like bacteria, very fast reactions (and reproductive rate) to stimulus (not all stimuli) but not as powerful. Small business tends to be more specialized.

have religious skeptics (agnostic) been around forever? even in tribes? when you fade into animal thinking (go back far enough), what is religion?

maybe women have more heuristics for dealing with people and men have more heuristics for dealing with "reality" (like machines). (actually humans are "reality," but they are a special form of it.) Pam said something about atoms feeling each other, that's a human model of a physical system. Mothers seem to remember and process information in an emotional way, they also tend to have problems with computers and they tend to treat computers like people sometimes. Mrs. Rosier said she hated the computer because it was logical. [actually the printing bug that made her click some random options to make it work was not logical, but most of computer operation is logical]
- really you can lean either way regardless of gender. difficult to do both at same time. einstein said talking to his wife after working on theory was like playing violin after using a jackhammer (or doing somekind of heavy work).

if quantum mechanics is right, you could just a wait a long time and the universe would reset (nonzero probability of forming a "reset" configuration of atoms, for example the placement of all atoms as they are now)

people like to assign credit (assume the need evolved because it incourages people to do good stuff so they will get credit) Athena goddess got credit for inventing the flute among other things.

people should publish things that don't work (or maybe that would be too discouraging, might stop somebody from trying something again and making it work)

plant birth is prettier than human birth (good for literature)

could neurons actuall have a model of the activity that is supposed to be there and keep moving around and changing parameters until that activity starts happening?, i doubt it because you can't do that stuff based on local decisions, but it's something to consider

the universe is chaotic, you can walk outside and change it

women are generally more concerned with the words of the music (liz phair was) women jazzers tend to be singers, that singers at churchill grounds said a woman spent years writing lyrics (maybe body and soul) -- reason, they don't have to pay attention as much because there brain is more wired to hear the meaning of the words, india showed me songs, she was interested in the lyrics, deidre said she wanted lyrics, my mom focuses on lyrics, rachel rouse focuses on lyrics

if you use yourself (emotions use the mind) why not use other minds too, e kante said you shouldn't use people and i'm disagreeing

marie moser was right about reading things that maybe aren't the big a deal (little novel) just to help you think about stuff on your own, it's just subject matter

my Waking Life comments
ironic don't understand the consciousness I use to pose this question, hurts a curious mind
no dreams in death
artist on consciousness
music i hear in dreams is not mine, and i couldn't tell the stories [but i doubt they are channeled in, they come from the dyanimical system that is my brain, they just aren't easy to access]
brain constructed to understand enough, not the truth
consciousness is a side effect
D H Lawrence
venal
ineffeble
Benedict Anderson
ontology
(did Einstein really do the dream thing Austin mentioned with a ball in one hand)
through evolution the human mind gained an ability to question that is almost too powerful, the ability to expose the truth even when it hurts, religions and some philosophies are attempts to fill this curiousity: the cat kills whether it's hungry or not, so the curious explore whether it does them any good or not.

choose to describe an event with zero words

counterexample to "the truth is whatever works" the idea that the soul lives on forever afterward works in the sense that it makes you feel better, probably not true though. the statement should be the truth that society accepts is whatever works, society does accept some sort of immorality of soul i think.

June

what do blind people dream

Elizabeth (roomate) is oblivous to the truth and that gives her confidence. She also invents little lies to repair her errors, like that men don't care about breats and do care about butt, because butt is what whe has.


i'd rather be a depressed real person than a happy pothead

if people actually though deeply enough to care about existentialism and objectivism i think we would be ok, no war (counter argument to idea that one is much better than the other) (also argument that waking life is a good movie)

austin suggested that music makes you feel better and this is survival: my thought, (1) if they mind developed into something that was difficult to please, music could stop depression (2) spiritual connection is important, not sure why, maybe talks directly to subconscious
-
a lot of human evolution deals with a situation where it is easy to survive, but the strength of the society is important (tribal warfare) and the strength of the monogomous bond is important (for the demanding baby) and logic exists (something you have to over-ride occationally) because it is imperfect and intuition is many times a more powerful model (gavin de becker)

do people really listen to a voice in their head?

did George whitesides mention a negative index of refraction, would that means light goes through it faster

give a man a fish and he'll eat for a day, abandon a man and he'll figure out how to get his own fish

does it matter if anything is real - i guess no, not sure what real means

philosophy is a game inside the mind, with the assumption the minds exist, and i think there are some assumptions philosophers make.

if the rubber ball is conscious, why draw the boundary on the ball object, the floor and ball interact, all particles in the universe interact so the universe is conscious

mind is like the shadow of the brain


__________________ brain mind ____________
what is consciosness, totally dependent on the physical processes in the brain but still outside the brain, outside the physical world. i want to apply science to figure out the physical underpinnings of consciousness so i have to focus on the physical brain - the physical brain is almost infinitely maliable, given the technology the rationally modify it - and that's good for experiments. it's difficult to do experiments on the mind. i want to shape minds, create them from scratch, add thoughts and take them away - you can probably do all of that by messing around with the physical brain. it will probably take much longer than my lifetime for humans to figure it that sort of technoloty - but just incase they do, i want to be around for the next 50 years or so. we know nothing about consciousness, how it connects to information, whether it is a biproduct or essential, whether consciousess can merge or transfer. ok, we know we have it, but i can't use that fact to restructure or understand it.

basic idea: you probably can't figure out your mind with introspection (you definately can't arbitrily augment and modify it) so figure out your brain and figure out the connection between brain and mind. basic experiment, change your brain and try to observe the effect with introspection. (you are the only mind that has acess to your mind with current technology)

like most people, i bet there is an external reality and it creates an effect on your mind. we say things are "real" when they exist in the external world and fake when they exist only in the mind. so if your perception is flawed, you can think something is "real" even when it's not. we trust our perception because there is no reason to waste time questioning it, but it can make mistakes. optical illusions are a decent example of perception mistakes.

diagram of information flow:
real world -> sense-organ -> brain -> mind

you can insert fake information so the mind can be tricked. The Matrix inserts directly into the brain. the ideal Holodeck inserts into the the sense-organs. both create illusions of reality that (if set up correctly) would be indistinguishable from reality. (neither are technically feasible right now) i doubt we live in something like the Matrix or the Holodeck, but it wouldn't make much of a difference.

besides, if i could recreate a fake reality as one would with the Matrix, i would probably make it totally different than the reality than the human organisms evolved to deal with and watch them sqirm.












what is a mind without any external senses, conscious, but not aware of its world.




actually i'm not sure how the brain and mind connect. it would be unfortunate if a mind has no ability to understand what a mind is.










when you dream, your own brain feeds your mind information that is not so much dependent on senses.





you could be the only conscousness

our minds give our consciousness a very limited view of what's actually going on. introspection is basically enough information for one person to attempt to explain what they thought so someone else, but the actual though process was a bunch of indescribable neural activity, we don't have access to it.



can one human have two separate consciousnesses?

i know i'm conscious, but i don't know if anyone else is, i assume they are.

while i'm awake and i'm not even sure how our brains manage to asociate this intangible thing with a word.


__________________


internet is a nervous system

Colleen says she used to speak with feeling and she has learned to speak with logic. I wonder what it's like to speak purely with feeling and I bet it's useful for starting up conversations and at parties.


----------
2 approaches for curious who seek a challenge/growth

(1) take the thing you are naturally good at and push it to a new level

(2) take something you are not naturally good at and push it to a new level

(1) is actually more emotionally difficult, has higher probability of turning boring. it's good for careers because we live in a competitive world where nobody cares how much you improved, only how good you are. as long as you're in a big city i think this can really work.

(2) is fun, unlikely to get boring because the difficulty doesn't decrease much, but people may or may not pay you money.

(1) extroverted/sharing/showing off/giving to the world

(2) introverted/learning/experimentation

if you chase after something crazy enough you can make (1) feel like (2)

if this doesn't make any sense, maybe i'll talk about it later
--------------

from Colleen conversaion:
maybe religion is a way for nice people to justify their niceness. Colleen suggested that it encouraged her to be nice and I said I like to be nice in any case, that's the way I'm programmed, and she said something like maybe she would be nice anyway. (Nico claims she would break up with Caleb and have an abortion if she was not a witness, though I doubt it)

----------------------
colleen-

remember when i said something about being nice because we are social
animals and then you said if you aren't nice you get thrown out of society.
i just wanted to make sure you realize you are using a totally different
reasoning. i was saying people's brains are configured in such a way that
they feel bad if they are mean and feel good if they are nice - so being
nice is like eating candy, just a different form of pleasure - there are
conflicts when you have to say... hurt others to get food, or starve
yourself physically to give food -- these are the cases where religion might
change your mind [or like spock you might just accept that the good of the
many outweighs the good of the few, or you might decide you are more
important than anybody else and you might be right.]

you were saying if you are mean you might get kicked out and be lonely or
starve to death which is also true. my point was that evolution built some
stuff into us to stop that from happening (much) and it is the pleasure of
being nice (the wise natural world does not trust us to logically figure
that we should be nice). It doesn't trust rats to figure out that they need
food to live, just makes them hungry.

some psychologist told my sister she needed to do more things for other
people to make herself feel better - eventually she got a kid and i think
that helped.

so christian religion is one way to rationalize an emotion that is there
anyway (karma is another). rationalization is a big deal in this world - for
preaching and law writing and other things

-rick
----------------------------
[see above, if the emotion was a little stronger, religion probably wouldn't neet to focus on it so much, another problem is our ability to rationalize evil actions and convence ourselves we don't have the resources to help others]

suppose the american indians were smarter and would have built a better society but didn't unite in time so they got wiped out (if evolution had more patience maybe things would have worked out better)

dislexia indicates that we store sequence with a non directional encoding and have a separate direction flag that dislexics lack

still remember when nico talked about clipping my toenails while i was talking to caleb about quantum mechanics, the mind is receptive at times and i don't like people throwing garbage into conversations while my mind is receptive

probability is about carefully expressing ignorance (or being "smart" (rational) about ignorance)


-----------
Colleen

I was walking outside thinking about why nature is beautiful / why fractals
are beautiful.
I figure that when we were little primitive apes, we aquired an appreciation
for lush vegetation, for dried out dead vegetation, we aquired a repulsion.
Standard darwinian mumble mumble, those mammals that love to hang around
dead plants died because all the good food is in the lush vegetation. (The
desert is beautiful you say, well maybe, but I would get tired of it way
before I got tired of a rain forest). So when we were little monkeys we had
to figure the difference between plants and arbitrary objects like rocks.
(You might think that's easy but it's not, the only reason it's easy for you
is because of all the millions of years of evolution that has shaped your
brain to deal with vision processing easily.) Part of the way you find a
leaf or plant is by looking for symmetry and repetition or pseudorepetition
like fractal stuff. So we figured out how to identify leaves or plants and
our brains said they were beautiful. Then we come along with math and create
fractals that activates the brain's appreciation for that beauty that's in
nature.

For a roach, beauty is a dark crack, and rotten meat smells good.

Rick

-----------

religions evolve, philosophies are engineered

einstein was thinking, what are the rules God used, somethink like a computer scientist might think if you had to program the universe, what would the program be (language is important) some say math is the language of nature (it's probably a good estimate)

July


colleen-

women shave their legs so
the model of beauty in the human mind does not match the real normal human so

(1) our society has somehow created and embedded a concept of beauty in our mind (hairless leg) that does not exist naturally
(2) we naturally have a concept of beauty in our mind (hairless leg) that does not exist naturally

even though (1) might sound better, i'm guessing (2) is closer to the truth. basically we have a bug [error] in our brains, not sure how it got there, and since we can't correct the brain [yet], women just conform to it, shave the leg.

[then again it may not be a bug, maybe there is some reason that we stopped liking hair. i think one theory is that we starting pushing the population toward neoteny to preserve the ability to learn all our lives. child animals learn way more than adults, humans are special because they learn for a longer portion of their lives. desiring people without hair was helpful because hairless ones were also the most neotenous (young at biological heart and capable of learning more). but that wouldn't explain the hair on your head, and it's a pretty shaky theory.]

if we could modify our brains rationally we could arbitrarily define beauty

i mean what is sacred when you can define beauty? anything you want.

i just felt like sharing

-rick

---------------

women and curiosity are my two sub-motivations in life, both lead up to happiness which is the single "root" motivation (as in root of the tree), so everything i do is for one or the other


candace - when i said (about the ~17 year old kid that won a date with candace) something like you should have had sex with him - then said it was a joke, her roomate suggested i laugh or something to indicate it was a joke
nico - when i said "let's go to the chinese place" in seatle, nico said it would have been less insulting if i had said it jokingly
elizabeth - when i said the air conditioning was not as loud as her mouth, she eventually said it was the way i said it that made her mad
-- so there's a common miscommunication i'm having where people, especially women, think i am being insulting on purpose



maybe people confuse kids with stories to make themselves feel smarter

capitalism works better than communism because people work more efficiently when they can benefit directly from their work

i suppose male cum is slippery because female cum needs to be slippery (lubrication) and males inherited the slipperiness, it may help the fluid slow easily, but doesn't seem like slippery would matter that much for just making the cum go in properly. i imagine the system evolved for rats and the slipperiness was neccesary or they might not bother to mate.



colleen-

I'm almost done with The Celestine Prophecy and here's my analysis: this is roughly religion, like any religion you create things in the mind that don't exist in the physical world, like angels or karma. "what is real" says Morpheus. My guess is that the energy the Redfield talks about does not exist anywhere in our *physical* universe, though it can exist in your mind if you are high, and the idea can exist even if you are sober, which is almost the same as it existing in the physical universe. The existance of the physical universe is just a postulate that I usually accept. Main difference between physical-universe stuff and only-in-your-mind stuff is that in-your-mind stuff is totally relative to the observer, the laws themselves are relative to the observe, with physics the laws are always the same. Since we are all humans, and the human species has a low amount of variation (compard to say, fruit flies), we all sort of share the same in-the-mind rules. The enery is explained in a way the really only makes sense to humans, primates, maybe mammals. It's like when some girl told me the love she felt for another girl was so thick she could see it, she couldn't really, but people like to think of things as tangible because it allows them to do mental tricks, treat the idea like a physical object and you can throw it around like a physical object, you can use all the tricks our brains developed to deal with the physical world to deal with ideas, in an abstract way. But when I say it's relative, I mean there is no way you could create a near perfect agreement on what this energy from the perspective of all life on earth. All moving animals understand physics to some degree because physics is universal, no matter what kind of brain you have.

People usually believe religion and then "it works" so if you believe the energy exists, you have a way to rationalize this way of life that Redfield is proposing which I think is really good, follow your dreams, trust intuition, be honest to kids, and he has some experience with couseling abused children so I bet what he says about control dramas is a good way to look at things. Looks just as good or better than Christianity. The energy is like the particle in your Physics I text book, even though particles don't exist, we pretend like they do, and it gets the job done. You can pretend that the energy exists and it can help you make good decisions. Actually if he had called it something else, just made up a word, like flig (rather than energy), and not claimed that you can see it, I wouldn't have any skeptical remarks at all - but then his book sales would be low and I never would have heard of it from you. I think of energy in the strict way that physics people do so I don't like people using it for other stuff, and I think if you are going to use it for something else, don't start throwing in blurbs about Einstein who definately was using the physical definition.

The idea about people trading energy is neat, a good way to visualize what's going on. My explanation for the effect is that each one of our brains is processing a good deal of information and calculating something like Redfield's energy for each person, it's more of a value in our brains than a physical thing. Like if the brain was a computer, and it had a program running, it would have calculated this energy stuff and stored it in variables that correspond to people or places. So each person is going to have a slightly different idea of the global distribution of energy, but they will all be close, because all of our brains are similar. The energy levels are exracted from a huge web of information, like all of our experiences, our brain's wiring and the current sensor inputs. If you are talking about real light, a form of physical energy proper, there is less processing to bring it into a variable, so it's much easier for everyone to agree on its placement and color.

Ok I'm starting to confuse myself, actually all of this means that reality is sort of a soft maliable idea, like some things are more physically real than others based on how much computation your brain has to do to generate a model of them. Universal agreement is the primary characteristic of reality? Physical reality is the thing that all of us share (that's the theory anyway). Fortunately, things don't need to be physically real to be useful.

Physical reality probably caught on as a tool, a way for society to build tools. (yes I mean a mental tool for tool building) And the societies that used it eventuall took over through Darwinian evolution of nations and while that was going on skeptics in the populations probably increased somewhat, because those are the ones that naturally think about physical reality. Why doesn't everybody obsess over physical reality (like me)? -- because there's no point in doing it if you don't have to. Living a spiritual life is fun and productive. It's just that when you are building tools and you think that they will work for some emotional reason they probably won't, good to be a skeptic in that case.

To some extent you pretend like the rocks are magical when you are coming up with reasons for why you carve them like you do, making a spear head. Like it shatters because you hurt its feeling somehow, the explanation for shattering that is more physical requires quantum mechanics and the other guys would have beat you over the head and taken your women long before you figured out quantum mechanics, so you just use the rule of thumb there, anthropomorphize the rock, volcano, tree, sun. Science is for people with plenty of time to get the model almost perfect and then generalize or specify as neccessary. Myths are a quick and dirty approach. But myths have more potential for satisfying emotions I think.

-rick


exteme luckiness is improbable - you has a low probability of making all the correct decisions by accident - maybe what this really suggests is that luck doesn't exist

if research time was proportional to complexity and complexity was proportional to number of nerons: then if it took a millions years to figure out a human brain [thats what Shawn Hochman guessed], it would take about one year to figure out and ant brain, and if you did figure out the ant brain, you would have the best hexapod controller built so far, just trick it into doing what you want by simulating happy drugs at certain times

maybe the idea or rewarding yourself (like some suggest you do), like giving yourself a cookie after you do something well is a way of training your unconscious mind with you conscious mind

humans will construct artificial brains to deal with problems they cannot, just like we construct a fork lifts to move what we cannot

my feminine side is mostly missing but so is my masculine side (see celestine prophecy and unclosed circles)

people will engineer pleasure in the future

tom said that's he would save elizabeth before a bus-load of kids (sort of like spider-man, sort of like will smith at the end of i robot) and he would to it because she brings him more pleasure than the bus-load of kids. (he's against altruism) i don't think that's a great idea because society is more fun when people just make good decisions that increase society's happiness, like saving the bus instead. unless the girl was really special, more so than all the kids combined.

i should write out my philosophy and long term goals so that other people can understand it and maybe join me. it may help ultimately fund my research or help me find other people interested in the same things i'm interested in. [thinking about this while thinking about modeling the aplysia nervous system, and how some are not so interested, though on of the speakers at the 2004 gecco conference talking about systems biology seemed like he would be interested sort of] one of the main problems of society is a focus on short term goals and too much trust in out-dated instinct and too much love of the species. i suggest you take every point in the celestine prophecy and change it to reality [no general purpose, just evolution working things out], maybe write a parody.

invent something like a research colony where kids learn to research at a younger age.




colleen-

near the end of I Robot, will smith has makes this decision (i don't want to
ruin anything telling you specifics) that greatly endangers the entire human
population but saves the heroine. so i said to Tom that i'm tired of that
cleache in movies - it's the wrong decision according to my feeling. and Tom
says that he would save the girl he loves rather than a bus load of little kids
he doesn't know [what spider-man almost did]. [[not to mention neo in matrix2]]
he actually thinks that altruism is bad. he thinks that guys like hitler tried
to help society rather than just help themselves and that's why things went
bad.

i think altruism is built into every human being and just about every mammal on
the planet. it's a way to make everybody's life better. in fact i don't even
think Tom understands half the stuff he is saying - why would the idea of
hitler bother Tom in the first place -- hitler never actually attacked Tom, and
he Tom claims he doesn't care about anything but his own happiness. the other
thing he ignores is that (if you are at least half-normal) altruism does
increase your own happiness. giving is a selfish act, but a good one.

it bothers me when people are so confused, confident, fragile, and blind that
you can't even argue with them properly.

-rick


colleen-

Tom has a small point: an excess of altruism is problematic. if you try to make the world a better place for all and forget about yourself, it probably won't work - mainly because you don't know what the world wants - and neither do they. my sister tries to help other people by preaching, and i think she mostly bothers them. (and define "better place") economy is set up in such a way that you can get money for increasing other people's happiness. trading in some of your happiness for everybody elses, that's what money is, happiness tokens. but if you get a job you like, it doesn't even take much from you, gives more.

-rick


other side: men bombarded with images of women so perfect that reality has nothing to offer, so men are hurt (typically women complain about the media creating an image that forces them to mess up their own bodies to conform)

[sent to colleen]
notice how the nonliving universe makes no effort to hide anything but still keeps secrets.

this is the information age but the information is dead, fixed as a picture or words, in the next age it will be alive, AI

people like to talk about people
when rachel told me about her work, she talked about the people
everybody can understand people, so they are a universal conversation topic
a good choice for a conversation topic


August

for men the quality of a girl you can snag gets better as you get older and for women the opposite is true, up to a point [movie 'something's gotta give' looked into this]

i look like a highschool kid (elizabeth exagerated when she said i look 12 years old, i'm 23). i think i have the emotions of a highschooler roughly, falling hard into love.

like hegel philisopher
most fun thing to do and socially acceptable i think: find the truth in both sides of the argument, i should try it

may bring colleen some sick and twisted satisfaction to know i was crushed like a grape 'neath her charm [beneath]

maybe the human embryo detects environmental conditions and actually changes (like coldness or lack of a vitamen) and then builds an organism that can deal with that better. seems like that sort of thing could evolve, even if it's unlikely

listening to books is night because you eyes don't have to look at words, they can be closed, so your imagination is totally free to put pictures in your head

everything i say should be interpreted as tounge in cheek, saterical, or perfectly true, pick the one that offends you least.

[to colleen]
Sexual reproduction introduces pressure on the population to evolve in a special way - males must impress females and females must impress males. In asexual reproduction, this pressure doesn't exist; I wonder if that has made us smarter or stupider over the aeons. [Classic example, women have big chunks of fat "breasts" that have no exact function and make running inconvenient, probably just for the sake of pleasing the eye of men. It's a common misconception that they are for the baby to suck on, they actually make it a little more difficult to suck, and no other mammal uses them, ape nipple/breast system is about perfect in terms of functionality. That's what our baby bottles nipples look like, ape's breasts may expand some when they are full of milk but they don't have all the extra fat to carry around -- so that's a physical example, but could there be a mental example, like a mental ability that doesn't really matter except that the other sex likes it, i think darwin thought music was one. And if you think the breast example is insulting, forget it, it's not my idea, it's Desmond Morris's idea.]. The environment that we have created, the social environment is really vastly different than nature so we evolve to master this environment and most every other animal evolves to master nature. So you go camping and you remember your 10 million year old mastery of nature that has been superceded but not replaced by your mastery of human interaction.

3 reasons not to use pot:
1) ryan said he would use it for a while if he knew he had an infinite time to live
2) austin said he likes smell that reminds him of it, it creates an illusion of something special when it isn't anything
3) alison said that you may by an addict and don't know until you try (she said i was too old to try, but really i don't think it would help a young person either)

austin just told me that about 30% of what he is saying is becoming something to say just because you like the way it sounds, relates to my claim i made earlier that some people use words like music totally abstract without any intension of conveying information [not technical information anyway]

speak without any intension to accomplish
accomplish without any intension to speak

i may be abnormal in that: i consider my desires hopes and dreams to be a product of genetic programming, arbitrary and probably unimportant or important - equally both, no way to define importance

in the good-will movie, the girl wants a guy that's capable, whe says she doesn't care about his job, idea is that the instinct of love doesn't really see the job, it sees the ability to do a job

stare at a tree and wiggle your head from left to right and the tree basically stays still because your brain does the make-image-still trick like new video cameras. but after 3 beers it doesn't, the tree wobbles.

longest jouney starts with a single step, but it works better if you takes step approximately in the right direction. tell butera when you have those talks you are really just looking for a direction.


when drunk:
easier to laugh but things are not funnier
want women more but they aren't prettier

evaluate school by inverse of the amount of prozak the kids take over their adult life or their salaries rather than by scores on standardized tests, otherwise you are making the mistake that you make with a bad fitness function, you are testing something that doesn't matter in real life

[possible plot to a story]
buy a girl from india, grab a few stomach cell from colleen, shock them to turn them back into a zygote, or whatever they do for cloning, grow a copy, and in 18 years you are set

other possible story involves shooting a girl in the back with a tranquilizer, dragging her off and reprogramming her brain

everybody is possesed by one demon, some more

(could say to butera)
i'm motivated by insanity, not curiousity
(he said i was curious, but he was using the adjective to describe me not saying i posses curiousity)

lif is either for fun or for nothing. by rational argument i would say it's for nothing but i'm going to pretend like it's for fun.

pudendal nerve interface, put it in lots of people, use it to control them, like make them have orgasms when they do something you want

how does eye color fit into our evolution

kate said it's good to read papers so you can communicate what you are working on to people, you can say it's like or relates to some other guy's (gal's) work

Sept

(watching planet of the apes looking at the altar the apes created, thinking about what a strange thing an idol is, how it could have evolved)
humans get stuff in their head and project it into reality

water is so important, why don't we taste it like we taste sugar

how does the nervous system adapt (think about the comment health teacher webb smith (i think that's the name) made about tiger woods haveing a lot of nerves in the muscles he uses to angle the club) if it does adapt how does the brain guide it, or do nerves observe what's happening to them and then adapt - like the nerves in the muscle - not sure if that would work.

the multiple universe thing could happen with newtonian-like physics, especially if the rules get changed in the universes we don't see

to say (not the truth but) whatever needs to be said to create the desired effect. i saw people doing it in highschool but didn't like it (against my grain and at the time against my religion to lie). but really it's a skill, it's what leaders do.

when you see a fan blade spinning, as it starts to get fast, you see something like a blade going in the opposite direction, is that from the frame rate of your eye - and does the update in frames rathers than sort of blending from one to the next

austin mentioned life being like a strobe light (and i commented) - times when you can see and predict and times of darkness, surprises after darkness

religion good in sense that it has organized society and made it strong (if you like society)
complaint is that all of its claims are not true, but it does work
with science you can make the same claim, maybe none of it is true, but it does work
religion has to violate common sense at times. science does not - even relativity is fine, just remember we work at slow speeds - but science might violate common sense if it's not fully explained or maybe when common sense is incorrect. - the real conflict is that relgion and science are for two different things, one is to shape human society, the other is to understand the natural world. - those two goals may be largely incompatible - people seem to be meshing them together pretty well though - new books about science and religion. important point is that in a way, relgion is true, in the sense that it works, and whatever works is true. --- like the celestine prophecy book, or the fire that people think about when they raise their body temperatue, or various way of thinking about practicing a brass instrument - like blowing to the wall. BUT if religion doesn't work, it is useless UNLESS the afterlife really does exist. untimately i cannot accept normal religions because I don't think the after life is going to exist and it would be more fun to just make ourselves immortal - spread over the universe to avoid overpopulation.
[did the the guy that wrote the book i read about immortality in near future read a lot of asimov, i think he did]
but dropping religion for the goal of creating heaven could be such a difficult goal to chase that it causes society to progress more slowly and they don't find the way to heaven as quickly


October

"insane love" - redundant or oxymoron

americans do something professionally or not at all (thinking about art and music as compared to europeans)

most people ahve minds that fill in the gaps automatically (like don't know the song lyrics and they just get filled in) but my brain doesn't it just leaves the unknown stuff unknown (doncing, they do slightyly worng stuff and just keep going, ortalking they tell stories with facts changed but the idea preserved)

better to die living than live dying (why i took miles the rodent back outside a while ago, even if their were cats)

two different brains optimized for physics, or for dealing with people, and could switch between them (sort of optimal solution assuming you can't have both at once) maybe moods are something like that, switching between ways of thinking

colleen
begin with total separation of mind and body
mind deciding what to do with body how to distribute it's pleasure among the population, how to delay reproduction and then to reproduce
learn physical skills, learn mental skill
write what needs to be written, say what needs to be said
mind and body are linked (signals from brain to muscles)

aplasia [[not completely sure why this is written here, aplysia mispelling]]



what steve potter does is like taking fish out of water and measuring their swimming patterns as they flop around. disassociated neurons are fish out of water.

i heard a cs guy saying silicon valley people don't read alot just what they need to
kate said half of them have asperger's syndrome

better to think of a nobel prize as payment for efficient, useful work (because industry doesn't alway pay scientists), rather than as a competition

steam shovel operator proves that you can get away with a not-so-good mechanical system and a powerful controller (human brain), but you probably cannot get away with a not-so-powerful controller and a good mechanical system, like a human arm

wouldn't matter if you were trying to destroy mankind or improve them, you end up doing the same science. amoral power. improvement claim helps funding. [or for DOD destroying helps]
(generates amoral power)
[[found quote after i wrote above: with definition of amoral]]
maybe i'm driven by hatred to pursue neuromorphic engineering, to prove humans are no more than machines (i'll leave that motivation out of my statement of purpose)
grad school application - good thing science is amoral by nature, i may be able to slip by telling the other (moral) side of the story - work is the same in any case


--
science is amoral

conjecture:
science's purpose is make the evolved complexity on our grain-of-dust planet expand into the universe. (survive the death of the sun and such.) i don't mean humans surviving, just complexity.

i suppose even if the entire physical universe organized into one gigantic [collective] brain-ish system (speed of light transmition delays aside), it still couldn't figure what it's purpose was. at level of complexity, it probably couldn't understand itself either.
--

a bee hive is one animal
a nation is one animal
if aliens attacted earth, we would act as a behive (internet for communication)

mouthwash, how it fits into universe
person with bad breath has less effect on society and less effect on universe
purely a property of the human olfactory system, could be changed (but it's a useful system to avoid rotten stuff)

i have all the symptoms of smoking pot without smoking it

quest to (1) raise machines to humans or (2) lower humans to machines, technically only (1), but poetically maybe (2). depends on if i'm in a good mood which one i am doing.

charlie parker unique in that everything he plays is melody, no gimmicks, none of those things like two note repeated over and over you might expect in a live setting (those are cool, i'm just saying he doesn't use them) what he plays is a melody, the kind you could write out

i don't really have natural self confidence, don't have the emotion, but i do have confidence in that i think i can do things (maybe sometimes that confuses people, think i can't do something that i can do - with high probability)


November


---
colleen,

1) I think it's interesting that you beleive in God. That girl I talked to did too. I guess it's human nature to assume that interesting stuff comes from intelligent creatures because we produce interesting stuff. Beleiving in God changes the unanswered question to "what created God" rather than "what created the universe". (If one says 'nothing created God, he was always here', one could also say 'nothing created the universe, it was always here.' - just evading the question. - then again i guess something had to be not-created so you have a starting point - anybody's guess whether that something is God or physical universe)

What about multiple intelligent creatures conspiring the create the universe, does that count as God.

universe strikes me as something like an oatmeal box that God created and forgot about and things started growing in it.

2) I probably haven't listened that far in atlas shrugged. But I know the philosophy due to my roomate's raving about it. My conclusion on that is that how the world "really is" is inacessible to our puny minds. I agree that we should use logic, but that's just one tool in the bag and not a perfect one. And I think people are entitled to having fantasies that make them happy IF they can actually believe them. (Their is a reason that humans are irrational about certain things because pure rationality is dangerous. - is that true?)

Some say the reason to live is because there's pleasure - but there's more to it than that. The collective of human society is doing something than no individual really understands. we pleasure seek on an individual level, but pleasure has little to do with the big picture. you could theoretically configure all brains to be in a state of pleasure all the time but there's no point, pleasure is just nature's way of forcing us to do things. if it's not selective it's pointless -- and it's not defined perfectly so it doesn't always tell you the right thing to do, whatever that is.

> The more I learn about the universe the more reverence I have for him but
> the less I think he gives a shit about me. Which is obviously
> anti-Christian. Why would someone who created the entire universe in all
> of
> its' intricacies want to know how my day was? It's conceited to think
> that
> he would. And illogical.

intuitively i agree, but can you prove that it's illogical. based on what?

[maybe God loves you and only you... and he's crazy (in spite of his power) so your life can still suck.]

about logic,
even mathematical proofs boil down to intuition. a proof reduces a complex problem to steps that just about anybody can agree on based on their own intuition. but without intuition, it's just symbols on a sheet of paper. we don't understand our minds, they just work, and we trust them. black box.

-rick
---

God could have multiple consciousnesses to keep up with everybody

"science is for benefit of mankind" statement is like a bread-sandwich, not satisfying

computer science: procedural math

more that half of the people in the world think they are smarter than most, that could work as long there there's more than one way to measure intelligence

i don't understand people well - i'm the tool maker - so it would make sense that others (like my mother) understand me better than i do

do we take pleasure in liking things nobody else likes (tom said he liked philip glass -very probably the 'facades' piece-, didn't really care, when eliz said she liked bjork, it actually bothered me because i like bjork and not elizabeth)

people take over each other's cultures like viruses take over cells

people will always have tendency for war, maybe satiate it with video games so we can move on

since we kick president out every 4 to 8 years, he doesn't have a reason to try to maintain power in nasty ways (like saddam husain)

coding i'm a fish in water,
cleanroom i'm a fish in oatmeal

women are sweet poison

in physics i learned to appreciate little things that don't matter. like when you jump and the earth moves away from you. (quantity) and how significant digits demostrate how little changes don't matter.

match the mind of the composer, the code in is head that makes him choose the notes that he does, may match your head and so it's a good idea to find music by that composer

i claim there is no universally good art, all relative to the observer. (claim may be unorthodox but it doesn't have much consequence either)

fundamentals are more (powerful) than details - shouldn't underestimate them - ideally concise but not always. (one time i made fun of a 'fundamentals or algorithms' book for being so thick as if the fundamental information should not be so long)

advise that tells you how to do what you want is welcome. advise that tells you what you should want [do] is useless.

i assume women are looking for characteristics i do not possess
[brute strengh, social charm]

make a "concious" effort
unconcious effort may be better

in life, there are r2 units and c3po units, i'm an r2
(c3po is a language master)

want to get in your pants but i can't so i get in your mind instead [female email penpals]



colleen,


If you think it's a sin to get high what was this "try it once" like the
french business - trying to get me damned to hell?

Here's a possibility: you are ashamed of yourself to some extent. So you
believe that God is not watching you - and that heaven/hell don't exist.
It's a way of escaping.

wicked views :)
It's okay, they thought Jesus had wicked views too. I'm in favor of
certain wicked views.

I was never taught that hell existed so I don't struggle with that much.
If you figure out how to believe in heaven, clue me in/write a book.


>
> The other night I had a very conflicting discussion w/ Chris about God.
> You
> think that truth varies from person to person, but that isn't true, in my
> opinion.

[oh the irony.]

--------------

measuring.... you believe truth comes out of measuring - very sciency view.
i agree that physical measurements are the way to expose physical law, but
i don't think they expose all truth.

- you could be in the Matrix

- different people come to different conclusions based on same data

I have decided that truth is something we strive for but don't reach. What
we have is a set of beliefs - I wich I could say beliefs are there just to
make us happy, but that's not the case. Most of them are stuck into our
brains by DNA, some by childhood, a few more by life experiences. They are
there to make us strong as a species - sort of.

In the realm of science, God probably does not exist, but do you see what
a useful belief God it is? - even assuming it's made up? It makes people
productive, unified, not depressed, and allows them to win wars. Einstein
believed in God and it motivated him. No surprise that it is a pervasive
view - those societies that have accepted it have become strong - survival
of the fittest.

God/gods used to be visible or at least very visibly active, see bible,
see ancient religions. When people became so educated that they could
explain the weather and diseases and life pretty well, God became
invisible. I am sure it was easier to believe back in the day, when they
had idols and magic because they "saw" gods acting directly.


> That guy from MIT puts happiness before truth, why can't they co-exist?
> Why
> does one have to negate the other? I don't think that they are as
> opposing
> as most people think. I can believe in God, accept truth and be happy all
> at the same time. Am I wrong?

People like me try to find things to do that really matter - some people
assume that almost everything matters and don't worry about it. When you
reduce the universe to just a bunch of atoms interacting based on cold
mathematical rules, you can't prove that anything matters. It's easier if
you beleive humans are special, important, sacred in a way - then you
contribute or whatever and think you are doing good. [As it is, I could
make an argument that humans are not only un-sacred but destructive pests,
I'd rather not.]

Does it matter if you are wrong? How do your beliefs affect your actions.
If you believe in God, but not the afterlife - you aren't obligated to do
anything religiosy that a typical believer in God does - you have
basically avoided the only danger I can see in believing: waisting time
trying to please a God that isn't worried about you pleasing him. Studies
show that praying makes people less depressed, so go for it.

What's Chris's concern? You've ruled out drugs and I assume you are
nonviolent so I'm guessing he has a problem with sex or possibly just
non-belief.

By really trusting yourself, you are sort of violating the bible's
teaching. That's what got Eve in trouble: tree of *knowledge*. Do you
think that Christianity is the religion of God?

I believe that an invisible-undetectable fairy lives in my room and I pray
to her, and she created the universe. Am I wrong? Do you have more
evidence to support God than I do to support the fairy theory? This
universe is amazing, prove that God is the only wat to generate it.

Technically God can coexist with me but religions cannot, they get in my way.

that was fun

-rick


[sent after message above]
possible moral of the story: it's not 'whether' you believe in God but 'how' you believe in God that counts.

sometimes a good approach is to make a decision and just trust yourself, spare you the time of questioning (which may be more time that time lost by not making the exact correct decision) - [thinking about this as i choose to not study for and retake gre - because i don't know if i'll get any higher without a large amount of study - but focus on writing a very good statement of purpose instead]

religious taboos on weird sex or sex out of marriage incourage successful reproduction - original reigions were based on fertility - not that much changed

guy at caltech neuromorphic engineering place using # of papers as a measure of scientific progress and saying that it's basically limited by funding. i say funding generates papers but not neccesarrily science.

i tend to want all of the focus (from a group) or none at all (don't like sharing)

girl metric: (probability of sex)*(physical beauty)

different kinds of signaling - pain and just signal (like red or blue, hot or cold) pain bypasses conscious mind and demands action (red does not) - quote in terminator where he says he gets signals that are similar to pain - but his mind still is allowed to take action - we could be built like that but (1) we have evolutionary constraints - animals must be forced to avoid pain (2) maybe nature doesn't trust us to avoid pain unless if forces us to. what is the mind and how does pain come into play. can a robot feel pain - answer must be yes.

hide jokes behind a paper thin layer of indeterminism and act like that makes a difference

the next thing humans will mechanize is thought

worrying about a gir's clothing is like worring about the color of the bag that you buy your apples in: doesn't matter because you're going to take it out of the bag before you eat it anyway

pot smoker
you are trying to enjoy life and i'm trying to conquer it

couldn't feel headache while i was on stage at open mike playing, then it came back when i was done (gate theory of pain)

notice your grandmother and mother are both very social - no surprise - it takes that to get along with somebody like me or my father or my grandfather(when you was young and more introverted)

most phrases that people spit out are just tips of the iceburg


---
pam,

sitting at the counter at the flying biscuit
there was this black guy that got a conversation started about the move
'what the bleep do we know'
and foreign guy with accent said that spirituality in universal in all
humans and that's part of our evolution[i agree]. - and then i said i
thought it was a way for us to trick our selfs into getting along -
(carma, and most God theory make you think doing good to others will
physically benefit yourself)
foreign guy didn't agree exactly with the tricking part but i'm not sure why.
maybe he wasn't talking about darwinian evolution, but i was.
and foreign guy said we other species tend to diverge and we tend to unite
- sort of true, but i think in the last few million years homosapiens
killed off the other similar species. [unification or purification or
homogenization (i'm not a fan of killing)]
animals can't unite over long distances because they don't have language.
sometimes i think they are ~as smart as we are minus the complex language
ability.
cold night reminds me of being a little kid at my grandmother's house
playing with fake strawberries.
the black guy works at arden's gardens by the video store.
guy at counter retorted (to my comment about native americans would have
won if they could have united) that they already had a government - but i
think he was just defending their coolness (it wasn't a government that
united *all* (or >%90) of them)
point being you have to unite to win and it helps to have a common
religion - so religion is a weapon of war at times - and maybe the only
way to survive asuming maniacs are trying to kill your society
then counter guy says doing good requires conscious effort and doing bad
does not and i retorted that woman seem to do good unconsciously and he
modified his point - retricted the domain to man vs. nature.
bjork song on her new album called 'the pleasure is all mine' about women
taking pleasure in giving
and the idea the mainstream chistianity has nothing to do with christ came up
guy at counter said people should have more conversations like this and
not work so much - just making rich people richer [& 8hr workday is a
terrible thing]
i figure i'm going to like my 8hr of work once i get things in order
(that's why i really should be working on grad school application right
now).
but conversation is something i really like and really starve, that was a
taste.

-rick
---

post colleen, i have a thing for redheads. (of course that girl i met in kindergarden had redhair - or her twin did) - maybe it's nothing new.

December

religion and biological evolution are interdependent
(thought while listening to karen armstrong)
understanding religion is so different that believing it
you can't see the painting when you are a part of it
[to pam]
understanding religion globally is so different that believing religion - i think the two verbs confict. (you can't see the painting when you are in it) the people that understand religion don't have one.

this is unusual. you can understand basket weaving, all forms, and still be a basket weaver, or whatever.
[end to pam]
karen technically violates nearly every religion by respecting all of them as human creation.
actually it's the theory that those who study religion tend to accept that conflicts with religion: that people created religion

can you look at humanity [or the whole universe] from far away and set goals that are beyond pleasure (pleasure is nature telling you what to do but you don't have to listen to it)
[in responce to life is just for pleasure - at all levels from eating ice cream to career]


are there sounds that speakers can't make (there are sights that computer screens can't make, the the way a butterfly wing reflects light or a thin later of silicon dioxide - remember the cmos prof. (mark allen i think) said human eyes are best thing for telling how thick a layer is, not an artificial vision system like a camera)

non having a gender non-specific pronoun is a way of forcing us to expose the gender of people we talk about. (probably some sexual/biological/evolutionary stuff coming into play) - because a gender non-specific pronoun would come in handy (you would think) and it's not in french or english (don't think it's in hebrew either)

i'm pessimistic and sometimes (shawn about accepting evolution) try to prove something i believe is correct wrong. maybe that's part of my interest in genetic algorithms/evolutionary computing.

the unconcious mind of the people speak to each other back and forth without the people knowing about it - maybe eliz detected that i thought she was a ~worthless slut

be sure to study quantum mechanics in grad school

i'm the type of person the knows very little, so have have to do a lot with what i know
[remember danny harper saying there are some simple things like using the 9th that you can get a lot of milage out of]
i don't have a big verbal vocabulary either

pam said her cat figures out how to get around rules (do it while she's not looking or do it in a sneaky way)
mommy said her dog sassy (i think) did that to papa
jim and kyla's dog will put itself in timeout after jumping on counter if they are looking, but will just jump on the counter and do whatever if they are not looking
conjecture: animals don't have the ability to learn a model of behavior that a human expects. humans can do it pretty easily: child tends to know what's going to make parent angry. nature's way of passing down not just a behavior to a child, but an ideology. religion puts makes God the parent and people get that model of what God wants and live by it. (remember the philisopher comparing the asthetic man to the man that does what God wants). (kate williams said something about trying to please parents (that children do it) and since her father is an engineer i suppose she is guilty of it)

desserts are my least favorite food - story of my life

i might rather be pam's child than my mother's child but pam is the only human for which this holds true

people who appreciate other people are more likely to appreciate themselves

saw an add about "zero carb" thin playstation
nickname girlfriend playstation

nico said mr. baskins didn't care about having a test criticized because he's no the one that wrote it
when pam said she doesn't think movie blood looks real, i wasn't worried because i was just quoting a book (clockwork orange)
the guy that was using ice picks for labodomy began to criticize his own work (when he moved to using ice picks or when he moved to something else, not sure which)

nico has a problem with me being a monomaniac, but nobody else in family does

written language (and spoken language in a way) is digital (spoken language has analog stuff like pitch)
dna is digital
when nature needs to have exact copies, information storage, and communication, it will use digital
(might say neuron firing is digital)

spiderman2: scientist fighting crime is like a world class balerina cleaning toilets because she happens to be good at cleaning toilets too

football coach said:
team that wins is teacher
team that looses is student
only problem with that argument is that some thing can't be taught or learned

berries taste better than mellon, maybe they are higher maininance for the plant though, so they cost more (in terms of plant effort and money) or maybe picking them is the only major cost

finding grad school easier than finding girlfriend due to formal application process (though the online dating thing is almost a formal application, in an ebay sort of way) vulgar rephrase: can't apply to girl's k*nt

what is understanding
(can you predict without understanding)
(do you understand if you have to break something down into parts)
[i don't understand understanding]


"The human brain is reportedly the most complex object in the Universe"
[PROGRESS AND PERSPECTIVES IN COMPUTATIONAL NEUROANATOMY
Giorgio A. Ascoli, Department of Psychology and Krasnow Institute for Advanced Study at
George Mason University, MS2A1, 4400 University Dr.- Fairfax, VA.22030-4444]
no, the collective of human brains is more complicated
the earth - nature which created the human brain is more complicated

-plight of the individualist
-neuron decides to use different encoding scheme and becomes worthless as part of the brain
-use sharp/flat system in music
-sometimes it's better to conform
(use english because it's standard)
(use querty because it's standard)

much of the thing you learn is school (diff eq and such) are close to what the brain is doing anyway - almost like a wrapper. (logical or symbolic wrapper on your intuition) use them to understand things better

-robotic slavery
--no because robots would enjoy what they do
-well you could use human, genetically engineer to make the enjoy whatever you want them to
-why don't humans already enjoy work
-maybe they do enjoy it if they believe that it is important
-what do they complain
-americans work do much (maybe think to little)
-why
-they have created a society where you have to work hard to keep up
-depression (anti-depression drugs), no time to take care of kids (ritalin)
-cogs in machine
-(do you have a profound interest in your work are are you just trying to get a phd and run)

onya (onja)
i don't think choice of significant other is any more important that choice of car in terms of what i think of the person


why is public radio so good but public-(other things, like housing) bad?

probability jehovah's witness getting aids is probability of an eskimo getting heat stroke

what did isbell do with independent component analysis?

part of learning is adding, part is taking away
(reorganization of the brain, but the brain is always "full")
makes sense that people specialize

sometimes it's fun to listen to lies (creative distortions (like caleb saying i though my car was stolen when i said i though i'd lost it and maybe his story about how i called right after he had calmed down nico)) much of fiction is just that. i can see how my mother would have been a good fiction writer.

--
pam,

one analogy: learning stuff is analogous to fill a bucket with water, filling a mind with information.

opposing analogy:

learning is like rearranging furnature - or you are rewiring neurons - not neccesarily adding connections - older people have less connections than young - it's just finding a reasonable configuration to deal with your particular life

little babies babble phonemes from every language and by the time they grow up they usually can't even pronounce phonemes from every language

i figure guys like mozart were not born with magical gift or experience from previous life, they just managed to keep everything they needed turned-on until they reached adulthood

dickens said something about this in david copperfield

-rick

--

when you start copying human brains to make cyborgs, use female brain/nervous system, less likely to start killing people

i think knuth said something about people polishing best work of mathematician's life until it's brilliance is blinding and then presenting it rather than teaching people how to discover the stuff

stories people boy/girl meet up at end, people eat this like food, it never becomes a chelche even though it is (most movies have this element)

to pam
to colleen
stories people boy/girl meet up at end, people eat this like food, it never becomes a chelche even though it is (most movies have this element) i imagine little paramecium discovering conjugation, the invention of the gene "pool" because now dna cut across to various members rather than always going to the asexual decendents and the manifestation of this in the video store, blockbuster by the frozen juice store.


there are only 2 questions
[1] why does physics work
[2] what is conscieousness
i don't know how the approach the first, so i'm working on the second


science is like an expanding puddle (water dripping into the middle)
all the scientists are at the edge, pushing outward
certain ones get blocked or sometimes they get ahead
like when you dip your finger in and move outward and there's a streaking coming out
some fall behind and you get sort of a hole, but after a while it fills in


X/Y chromosome difference allowed women to evolve to be kind and men to be agressive simultaneously (women can take care of kids and men can win wars) the two personalities don't coexist well (moods help different personalities coexist, but not that much) (some people have multiple personalities)

why is multiple personalities called a disorder?
(why not multiple personality talent)