Alcohol

Use of alcohol (in any situation including dates and friendly gatherings) is probably deeply ingrained into human psychy. Like our teeth are modified for cooked food, our minds are modified to expect alcohol.

h(t)

let h(t) be happiness as a function of time for a given relationship.

i like this formalism.

h(t) = 0 would be pretty boring

positive spikes would be... pretty obvious

negative spikes would be arguments

there would probably be negative and positive spike correlations

the RMS of h would be like a measure of how much of a rollercoaster the relationship is.

DC bias would be just how generally "constantly" happy it makes you - like are you in a lower or higher mood throughout the whole relationship.

healthy relationships probably have significant RMS. it's a sign that communication is happening, but not so much RMS that they blow a fuse.

At the River

for the full sized, goth, bio-luminescent fairy that's going to be my lover, this is the make-out song. i'll just call her maya, (Hindu for illusion).

it (the song) takes about 1 min 30 secs to really get going.

groove armada - at the river
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fb2HBDxqwIg

Two Minds

i have this part of my mind, it's right, but it's so fucking impractical - it doesn't work with my reward system, dopamine, or whatever. it just sits there and tells me the truth, as if i need to know about it.

and it's at odds with the other part, that is basically an animal (and when i say animal i mean like a cat or a mouse, not a great ape, which is almost the same as a human)

this is what happens when an evolved brain. you get the animal brain, then nature spends 10 million years tacking on one more layer. instead of revamping the whole system for one cohesive function, it just tacked on a layer.

i think i'll need one project to keep one part of the brain happy, and another part to keep the other happy.

now that i think about it, this is probably what freud was talking about (id and super-ego), but he jumped to way too many conclusions to be generally credible.

religion teaches that our life energy will be preserved in some way, and this makes the super-ego and the id relatively happy - as they are both interested in keeping us going.

but really the only way to preserve our life energy... would be to do it ourselves. no invisible super-powerful being is going to do it for us.

Identity

our identity is pretty much an illusion. it's a program running on our brain for a bunch of reasons, one of which is probably to help preserve our bodies. the feeling that we cannot be replaced is to help convince us to stay alive. it wouldn't matter if somebody replaced a human with a copy in his or her sleep, it may have already happened to me, no different would be detected. our mind is the result of information encoded into a bunch of atoms. although the mind itself is a rather weird thing - it's not the atoms really - just something riding on top of physics. i don't know if humans will carry the concept of identity into the distant future when they are computing things on machines other than brains.

Polygamy

polygamy

this makes me think: with humans, a man and a woman form a colony (a very small colony) that is like a super-organism. ants being an example of a super-organism with lots of members.

the drive that humans feel to find another (sometimes called love or whatever) is like the drive that ants have to be part of their colony. they would feel lost without it. they would only be 1/10000th of an organism. human would only be 1/2.

Dolphins

"The Cove" documentary about dolphins mentioned that a TV show used 5 dolphins to play one. One dolphin could recognize itself on TV. So dolphins can recognize themselves on TV while people cannot.

Predicting The Future

Lets just say physics is deterministic. You could predict the future by making a copy of the system and simulating it into the future. You could observe what happens. But, there's a catch. If you looked at the result of the simulation, you would need that result near the beginning of the simulation to run it properly. So, it wouldn't work unless you did not observe the result. As long as you don't observe the result, you can create a good simulation that just assumes that you don't know the result. Unfortunately the whole thing is pretty pointless if you can't observe the result of the simulation.

Anyway, the thing about observation reminds me of quantum mechanics - even though this thought experiment has nothing to do with quantum mechanics and assumes the state of the world is measurable and deterministic.