Humans woke up

Humans woke up. Their brains developed to a level of general intelligence through a survival arms race. They made two major logic "errors" as a collective. One error is assuming life is not a "machine." They made this error because they couldn't see the moving parts (molecules are small). Second, most created a concept of afterlife. Maybe not so much an error, but a way of dealing with a survival instict combined with an intelligence great enough to see all the way to the end of survival. Basically cognitive dissonance on a massive, organized scale. The idea of a spirit in addition to the body fits with both of these errors - it's the unseen force that animates the body, and it's the immortal part that doesn't die. The thing is that congnitive dissonance is know to be beneficial to people who use it, in some cases. These are not so much errors as they are carefully crafted constructs freeing (ancient) people from realities that would hijack logical portions of the brain and make them less likely to be productive. As far as evolution is concerned (evolution as the curator of human belief and culture), sometimes you're just better of believing a lie and being happy. However, maybe it's time to accept reality, now that it is staring us in the face. We now can see the moving parts of the machines (life forms) and we understand that the forces guiding them are the same forces that guide every atom, dead or alive.

Club analysis

Part I

I thought I recognized some dudes from talking in line, turned around and did like a hand shake thing and a smile or whatever. They looked kind of surprised but reciprocated. Then I realized they weren't the same guys. My face recognition wasn't really tuned in exactly yet. (Again this is party-like environment.)

It's interesting how much positive energy there is locked away in a set of people selected at random.

Even though I've known the JW's (former religion) were wrong about how people were created for many years, I think some of their philosophy about the human race is still getting rinsed out of my brain. It's rinsing that can only be accomplished through experience.

Because... they consider all people who aren't members of the religion to be sort of creepy and degenerate, with some potential to "get better" but in a lost state.

They would consider stuff going on in the clubs totally off the hook bad.

But I see it in a totally different light. Just people trying to enjoy life, one brief little flash of existence called life. There are so many barriers to people having fun. Clothing, inhibitions, stupid social tendencies. In the club, people are trying to break down a lot of walls, and it isn't easy, but the environment works pretty well.

Western religion tends to claim that joy will be in another life and not this one. To me, assuming they are incorrect (and that seems to be the case), then the lie they are propagating is truly evil. They are robbing people of their lives for the sake of preserving an afterlife that doesn't exist.

Anyway, I can't hate on religion too much. Part of my thing is just being naturally shy, a tendency that has nothing to do with ideology. A tendency that I'm breaking down piece by piece.




Part II


Some girl once said that the world sends back what you project out. Technically it doesn't. If you smile at a toaster, it doesn't really care. If you smile at a saber tooth cat, it might decide to kill you and eat you.

However the girl was just thinking about people. And, for the most part, people are apparently wired to return some emotions that are projected to them. It's a pretty good principle.




Part III


Key point is that people do *not* reflect back so much in terms of semantics and words. Only emotion. They naturally come into or out of sync with a cascade of nonverbal cues that come from all over a person's body. The last thing they consider is words. That's why the clubs just blast the music enough to cancel out the words completely, as if to say they truly don't matter.

It's a bit strange to me, because my nature is to largely not care at all about nonverbal cues (either out of me or from others). I'm naturally more tuned to the actual words, the message, stripped from all the over stuff, like writing (without smilies).

So it's strange, but it's making more sense over time.

What is dancing really - it's an amplified cascade of nonverbal cues.

Logic is the most insane thing ever

Logic is the most insane thing ever

Evolution of beauty

Sometimes the evolutionary underpinnings are far removed from the thing they generated. (Like a faded memory or some translucent thread of impetus that's barely differentiated from a dream.)

Pretty good example is physical beauty. The evolutionary underpinning is that it's a health & fertility metric. The human brain approximates health and fertility with visual information and higher value is more beautiful.

However, once that neural system is in place, the one that takes an image decides on its level of beauty, it takes on a life of its own. Keep in mind that it doesn't truly measure health and fertility, it's just a method of approximating that with visual information.

The beauty system can't evolve very fast because (mostly) it's burned into the network at the level of DNA programming.

Once that system is in place, people can actually evolve toward what happens to be beautiful... regardless of what is healthy or fertile (because of sexual selection). Although eventually, evolution will always make sure that choices are made to favor survival and reproduction.

Anywaze, point is something like a flower ends up beautiful - and it isn't a fertile human at all. Probably because of the interplay between (1) our beauty system designed to favor nice symmetric smooth curvy things and (2) the flower's own evolution to look nice when animals see it. Because flowers are there just to get the animal's attention after all.

Why women like to travel

In chimps (our closest cousins), females leave the community to go off and breed. Males pretty much stay in the same one all their lives. That's why women like traveling so much. It's an inbreeding avoidance mechanism. But to the women - consciously - it's basically a perception of other places as really interesting.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pQPek8bHjGk

Teenage rebellion

A documentary called Walking with Beasts is talking about how a mother kicks her child off on his own. This is a programmed action. Human children tend to kick themselves off on their own.

Teenagers are probably programmed by nature to rebel to some degree so that they will go out on their own rather than repeating possible mistakes of parents. If nature programmed them to be this way, there probably was an advantage to it. Otherwise, nature could have programmed them to be less rebellious in general.

Africa's evolutionary tendencies

There's something really special about Africa. It builds really powerful and capable animals. I mean looks at a lion - ultimate hunting machine. The zebra is the ultimate escape machine, with highly developed patterning and group coordination to make it hard to catch. The patterning isn't even really camouflage, I think it's something more advanced, designed to mess up the predator's vision system.


Ants and bees out of Africa are insane. Ants have jaws so powerful that they can be used as sutures, and the bees are capable of multiple stings so they can pretty much kill an animal threatening the hive.


Look at Australia in comparison - koala bear. Seriously? I really like Australia as it seemed to favor creativity over brute performance, but just sayin'

And we are the product of Africa developing a species that specializes in intelligent behavior. Pretty brutal sometimes too, which is how the African species tend to be.

Life is a brief flash of experience

Life is a brief flash of experience, the bi-product of a bunch of atoms flittering around signaling the illusion of consciousness until they disorganize in death and decay.

Girls are canaries in the social coal mine

When you walk into a public place, everybody sees your body language and interaction style. Women are the most sensitive. The game with attracting women is not just about attracting women; it's about attracting everybody. However the women will be the most sensitive.

Dancing is like a digital clock

When you turn on a digital clock and all the segments of all the numbers light up simultaneously (showing what appears to be a bunch of 8's and stuff), that's what dancing is. People use it to check that the person dancing has all of the "outputs" to muscles working. Not consciously, but unconsciously, this is why people are programmed to be attracted to people who dance "well." It also defines what dancing "well" means. Also, people are looking for synchronization with external music, which indicates that the inputs are working also. If you only dance with like one joint, it doesn't look right. You often have to engage a lot of them.

Inner confidence and being in the body

I recently listed to this Pickup Podcast Ep. #109 Inner Confidence Interview, and it's finally starting to make sense.

This time I explored being more in the body at a Salsa club. The basic principle was thinking about how joints feel, thinking about music, thinking about how toes feel, looking at the girl's facial expression constantly, and listening deeply to the music. All this occupies the mind so much that there is little left for "thought." It probably means that recently evolved structures like the neocortex are not being used as much. It made the dancing more fun. A main trick that was pointed out in the podcast was "make sure you feel your toes," and that was useful. This stuff is more important than anything they teach in school. For example, I'll never need to know any historical date of anything. I'll never use social studies. But, the ability to understand how to interact with others effectively and enjoy life... that's probably the most important thing you could ever teach to anybody. Only subject that got close was music & band... because that's where I got some experience with letting go... being forced to let go.

Risk and reward

By the way, basically everybody does analysis with every decision where risks and rewards and considered, balanced, and then action is taken. All of that typically happens unconsciously in a moment. The emotions that people feel actually will be altered based on the analysis. Main difference is that some people set the thresholds differently, some people get more reward out of certain things. Some people perceive risk differently. For those who believe in an afterlife, really and truly, theoretically there is practically no risk for anything - not even jumping off a building. Although I find few who seem to really trust the afterlife. Most seem to use it just as sort of a security blanket.

Brain mode

I'm listening to this podcast, (Pickup Podcast Ep. #109 Inner Confidence Interview), and I'm understanding more about what people mean when they talk about mind and body... being in the body... and really what you mean when you say hearing the music.

The thing is, they (including you) have an odd way of saying it. You're "right" in a way, however the meaning doesn't always get through to me. Because it's not literally about being in the body... you're always in your body. It's not literally about hearing the music... I'm always hearing the music. But I'm just now putting together what you guys and girls and really meaning to convey.

This is probably the deal:

There are two different brain states. Somehow you can semi-consciously modulate whether your brain is in one state or the other. I say semi-consciously because this is sort of like learning to wink. It's a control that sometimes you don't even have until you investigate it.

State (1) Processing and acting more directly (from sensory information through wired pathways directly into action).

State (2) Acting with high level cognitive intervention, using more recently evolved structures in your brain, like the neocortex, which is powerful cognitively but also fragile and slow compared to the rest.


The trick is switching into (2). And, the reason that people drink alcohol at clubs, is because alcohol tends to shut down the "outermost" recently evolved brain regions first, like the neocortex, leaving others like the stuff that keeps your heart beating running.

Musicians consider state (2) a lot also. Especially, it comes up with jazz musicians, because you want to flip into that state in order to have the kind of response time necessary to play music. You're still being creative, but it's got to come out of the "wiring." No time for the neocortex (unlike a music writer). And when you do turn the neocortex on, the delays there are so long that you can hear them in the playing.

At a club, those delays translate into micro-second-long facial expressions and the like that people will then automatically process.

And this is why those few guys in my classes at highschool who knew how to program computers were the exact same ones on the wall with arms crossed at the dances. Because they have a boatload of neocortex going on but don't typically switch over into the other state. It's also why my romantic interest who was a profession dancer damn near hardly ever made logical sense, because she's going through her whole life in state (2).

Dreamlike block removing conscious mind from sex

No matter what the cognitive ability of a women, she is not aware of her own motivations. It's like when you're in a dream and odd things are happening but you never know it while dreaming. There must be some kind of a block in the brain, a block that partitions application of logic to analyze the events of the dream. This partition acts in the minds of women. When they show their cleavage they will not openly say that they want sex. When they choose to go out to places with guys present, they won't admit that they want sex. They will say they are going there for fun, and that is what they will believe in their minds. But, evolution has programmed them in such a way that they cannot have fun unless they are opening themselves up to be accessed by males. They will also drink alcohol, to disable some of their inhibition, also because they want the sex. Again, they'll say and believe that they are drinking because it's fun.

It follows that they will not respond well to direct talk about sex, but they will crave talk about it that is indirect. Just enough of a suggestion to bring it to mind, but not enough to admit that it really is the topic of conversation.

Comments on Bell Curve video

The Bell Curve is a 1994 book by psychologist Richard J. Herrnstein

Comments are about this video http://www.c-spanvideo.org/program/BellC

(1)

I think at the core, there's a pain that humans have to deal with: survival of the fittest seems immoral.

Survival of the fittest is probably a major creative force. Ironically, it's the creative force that people usually assign to someone like God of the new testament, who is loving. We want the creator to be loving.

(If God is reading this email, I should be clear that the creation is amazing, whatever it is, even if I don't understand the how or the why of everything... and it's a privilege just to be an observer.)

The idea of welfare is that we don't want children to go without food. However, welfare makes no sense for evolution. It pretty much breaks the force (of evolution) that created us.

Still... (for example) Steven Hawkins would have been wiped out by ancient evolutionary pressure... he survived and made major contributions... because people had love and weren't Nazi's about it. And... actually love evolved out of survival of the fitness.

It's pretty complicated. Although I have to agree that welfare could be limited, and that would probably help. I heard from homeless people that churches give away better food anyway. I think the government is more likely to cause problems than regular human kindness.

(2)

Something about this guy's speaking sort of disturbs me. Mostly he makes sense. But, he loosely uses words like smart and dumb, just drops people into those categories. I have a friend who has some serious issues with school and learning basic math skills for some reason. But the thing is, she just uses a calculator, and when you get past that, she has a great sense of humor, and she's fun to be around. She's arguably one of the most-fun-to-be around people I know. So, what's up with that... this guy doesn't recognize that there's more going on in life than IQ scores. I'm not really criticizing his thesis here... just sayin.. we do NOT want to evolve into mere problem solving machines.. do we? Isn't that what artificial intelligence is for?

Deep in the future when the human mind, evolved for survival, is an obsolete decision making device, what purpose will motivate actions?

Deep in the future, pleasure and pain will be mastered. Technology will allow humans to experience pleasure or pain however they want. The search for meaning and purpose will become more and more difficult. Death will be mastered. People will not be forced to die. We'll understand the universe with more clarity. We may find a secret, something like the universe is a simulation created by someone or something or some group. That would be amazing. Although it may not be the case.

A clear understanding will exists that each human is an organized chunk of matter that serves as an expiriment, natures way of finding a better survivor or contributor. Emotion defines the deep motivation implanted into these experiments to guide them in where to put mental effort.

However, emotions developed millions of years ago to make tribes stronger. They can't be relevant forever. If they have not become obsolete already, they will. Then what will be the deep motivation of humanity?

Knowledge is the flotsam on the river of conversation

Michelle said you don't need to talk to everybody because you can get knowledge from the internet instead. However most women speak to each other for the phsychological reward. It's like conversing activates their neural reward systems. It has nothing to do with exchanging actual knowledge. However, in that flood of conversation, bits of knowledge do tend to transfer, like flotsam on a river. It may be that nature evolved this method of communication to makes sure those bits get across. Why not just say them directly? Well maybe it's too easy to lie. The stuff between the lines might actually come through with better signal to noise ratio.

Fingers and Toes

The "index" toe right next to my big toe sort of feels like the middle finger does when I squeeze it... those two smaller toes after the index toe both seem like the ring finger, and the smallest matches the pinky finger as expected. I suppose if there is some kind of mapping from hands and feet all into the brain, there may some place where the toe sensory inputs are shifted over a little to make this phenomenon happen.

At first blush, the big toe might be mapped to the thumb, but seems most like the index finger in terms of the feel. Perhaps with a little bit of thumb mixed in.


So the mapping would be something like:

[Thumb]      [Index]       [Middle]       [Ring]          [Pinky]
        [Big Toe]          [Toe 2]    [Toe 3] [Toe 4]   [Little Toe]


Might be different for nonhuman primates...

Pollution as a form of theft and property destruction

Free markets are great, but they will create a society that is not desirable if some principles aren't kept in place. One principle is not being allowed to steal from people. If one can steal items without consequence, it's an efficient, low cost way to get them. But thefts messes up good business. Even a relatively free and capitalist society usual has some publicly funded police in place to stop theft.

Environmental destruction is a form of theft or property destruction. We split the earth up into geographic regions, but these divisions are arbitrary. The ecosystem, the air, and the water are interlinked. There's a network of interactions between them that stretches over the earth like a web. When components are removed, the effects are often felt in other places. Here's an extreme example to make a point: one person sets off a bomb that causes nuclear winter and kills off most of the large mammals on earth including most humans. Here's a less extreme example: an industrialized nation pumps enough carbon dioxide into the atmosphere to change the climate where poor people live in Africa, altering to less livable conditions. It's roughly equivalent to going to Africa and damaging the people property, but the law doesn't take that into account. In order to pump carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, companies should be obligated to pay for the consequences on the network of interactions that forms the global system of "life." The typical free market system is that entities have to pay for land, not pay for the chunk of the global network of life that they are affecting.

All this said, it really makes sense for government to step in with environmental issues. They are roughly equivalent to theft or property damage.

Humans

Humans as a species have a unique opportunity to live an die with universe because they can understand the events that will destroy them, like the scheduled explosion of the sun. A bacteria could maybe survive, as a spore, deep in a rock, protected from cosmic rays, until it lands on another habitable planet somewhere, and is freed from the rock on impact. But that would be just insanely random chance survival.

Humans model the world around them, and they can build tools to accomplish goals that they could never achieve bare handed. (They'll get in a ship and move to another planet rather than getting blown up by the sun.) Turns out that a brain for making sharp rocks, spears, and nests is pretty much enough to make a spaceship. Seriously, because we were in the stone age just a million years ago... and that's not enough time for a brain to evolve very much physically. Although it's definitely full of different information these days.

And, I mean no disrespect to the cavemen. Making a spear from rocks and stuff really is an advanced skill - both for somebody today or way back then.

We build layer upon layer, a machine to help build a machine, to help build a machine, until we can build 42 inch LCD screens and stuff. With the brain power that would have gone to figuring out how to survive in a jungle or a dessert, we figure out science, engineering, etc. And, we pretty much forget how to survive in the jungle or the dessert ... sort of OK because so few of us need to.

Obama

I was listening to Obama talking about creating jobs. Obama's pretty cool. But I want to take issue with the whole idea of "creating jobs" as an end goal. We want to create *happiness*. Sometimes jobs make people unhappy.

Economist talk about "growth" as the goal. This is also flawed. Economic growth means bigger GDP, the market values of goods and services we produce. If one works really hard to produce stuff, one might make the GDP bigger, but again one might not be happy.

Happiness is achieved when the standard of living is high. It's achieved when people are efficient. People need more than just jobs, they need jobs that do important stuff efficiently... jobs that are well matched to the people doing them so they enjoy it.

How to achieve happiness in jobs... Does anybody enjoy cleaning toilets?... Cleaning toilets should be worth about $200 an hour really... because it's so fucked up. Just like people get extra pay for danger, they should get extra pay for gross-out factor.

Separate from happiness there's an innate force within the living (organisms) to take control of matter and reorganize it into a device that behaves in a similar way. It's religious preaching, manifest destiny, reproduction in general. These forces often go against the happiness of one group in favor of the happiness of another.

The classic example to me is in the Bible (old testament). Israelites are displacing other people from fertile land, taking over resources, and using the land to reproduce. But they describe it in terms of removing people who don't love God. Really their actions only make sense* from a biological perspective, and from a distance they are similar to certain bacteria, engaging in war for control of resources.
http://www.sciencenews.org/view/access/id/39584/title/WARRING_BACTERIA

When I say sense, I don't mean they are doing any kind of good. I just mean they are doing what many biological organisms do - sort of blindly try to expand their species.

It's so odd for me to live in a brain that tries to guide me (with signals of pleasure and pain) toward its multiple often conflicting goals: to understand stuff, to reproduce, to survive, to care about others, to gain power, to create art, to eat, to sleep, etc.

The Human Brain wasn't Meant to be a Calculator

The brain is a very powerful computer. A computer with equivalent computational power would still fill up rooms (even with today's technology)*.

The irony:

 Regardless of that innate power, I (and many others) usually make an arithmetic error if we work out a few problems. Whereas a tiny calculator can add millions of numbers flawlessly in practically no time.

And why? Why does our brain that's so powerful make so many mistakes? Because arithmetic exercises is not what our hardware was built to do. Our brain hardware was built to make us survive and reproduce in the jungle.

Of course the sword cuts the other way; a pocket-calculator-brain would be pretty inept for survival and reproduction in the jungle.


*Clearly there's no software yet that can replicate what a brain does (even if the computational power is available), but that's another topic.

Evolutionary Basis of God and Spirituality

Today I was talking to Alice about her concept of God. She said that she feels the presence of God especially when she is isolated. When she's around people she feels it less. She also said she felt God very closely when she was fasting. People have been feeling spiritual things for 100's of thousands of years. God is what Christians feel. Others have felt different kinds of spirits.

Spirituality evolved as a way for humans to re-purpose some of the feelings they have for parents and friends in a way that made society more powerful and stable. People feel protected by their friends. They feel that they want to please their parents. These instincts are ingrained in humans (and in other social animals also). Through spirituality, this feeling an be redirected to a being, and idol, or god, which is defined through culture and religion. Culture and religions then evolve over time, which reconfigures the effect of the spirituality.

Humans have a powerful logic engine, but there's a problem with run-away logic. Logic in itself does not explain purpose. Religion can add a layer of purpose. Christianity leverages the innate (deeply programmed) feelings of love a person has for father and transfers that to God. Normal humans want to please their parents, so then they will also want to please God if he is cast as the father.

It's ironic that religion has played a critical role in the population-based evolution of humans while many religious people reject the concept of population-based evolution. But, religion is to be believed, and that's when it has the expected effect. If it's analyzed critically, it doesn't necessarily work correctly. That is, it doesn't influence people to take certain actions, such as commiting to doing what they feel that God would want them to do.