It is the prerogative of each generation to point out the hypocrisy of
the one before. The social contract we enter into on birth includes the
understanding that you will be subject to judgement.
Your life will be weighed by people with different values to you. The witnesses to your completion will have a different perspective from you. Its uncomfortable to think about the fact that your life story will have an ending.
How will you face this judgement, at the end of your life? Will you hope to argue your case from beyond the grave? Will you seek redemption when your body has broken down? What's the best strategy to be remembered as kindly as possible?
Our obsession with how we're judged by others is a side-effect of this cultural awareness we have in our minds. So much of what we think about is what other people are thinking about.
It takes up so much of our conscious thought. Or maybe it is this capacity for abstract thought, thinking about thinking, that is the conscious part of us. Seeing ourselves in the perceptions of other people gives us our self-awareness. You do just about everything else without needing to think too much.
This shared consciousness we have with others forms this connection of awareness that will ultimately survive your death. And you know this. This is the basis of all religious thought, a subject that completely revolves around ideas of immortality, what survives beyond your death.
Deep inside ourselves, we somehow instinctively understand this, even if we don't have the right words for it. That's why we're completely obsessed with what other people think about us. We form our identities through a contrast between the within and the without. And the within often includes the people whose opinions we care about.
That's why loneliness is such an insidious trap to fall into. Its almost like a disease that feeds itself, an ever steepening slope of retreating within yourself. Something's wrong, you sense its out there. Its the end of your awareness. Death. When you realise you're spiralling, you should try to find a handle and pull it out of there. Its almost never too late to change your approach.
How will we face our deaths? In the myriad ways that we've been taught to think about this, we cannot help but become anxious about. Sometimes when we're occupied or distracted, we can forget about this momentarily. Sometimes when there's a good dream going on that can occupy our minds, we prefer to stay asleep.
How you will be remembered is how your story will survive you..
Who are you? That question can only be answered by gazing at the reflection of yourself in others, in knowing what they think about you.
Maybe you'd like to think of yourself as kind and loving, or competent and wise, a good lover or a brave hero. This is the story you're trying to tell yourself, and hence other people. The people who witness your life will hold in their heads their image of you that survives beyond death.
You know this even if you didn't quite know how to say it. Culture and language teach us how to say our parts in this story about ourselves. Sometimes words are frustrating tools to use. You care about what other people think of you. You want attention. You start feeling anxious about death when your mind has too much time to think.
The joke is that even while you think about all these things, you have barely any awareness of the body that you're supposedly made of. You're rarely aware of your breathing, of your heartbeat, of your digestion and your metabolism. That's not the stuff that makes up your awareness. You hardly spend any mental time thinking yourself or feeling yourself.
Maybe 'you' are not really who you think you are. What is your identity? Are you merely that body, or are you that echoing story about yourself that you will be remembered by? Is the reflective, self-aware conscious side of you not physical, but mental? 'You' are information. 'You' are an image.
How you will have lived is a story that ends with the chapter on how you will die. And 'you' will survive your own death. The story of your life, no matter how trivial you may believe it to be, will forever be echo'd, dispersed and embedded within the universe.
And every day we labour at crafting this little story. Desperate and obsessed, rarely taking the time to sit back and think things through. Afraid if we don't keep busy, we'll run out of time.
Friday, September 30
Saturday, July 19
An attempt to express a 21st century taoist's perspective of the world
The MetaPattern and Freely Evolving Intelligence
Thought and Memory through Time
Patterns and Medium
Patterns are Structure, Emptiness is Chaos
Shifting an observed pattern into a medium where its less usually found allows us a different perspective of that space.
Abstraction then allows us to string together multiple patterns, to find a relationship between them. A pattern of patterns, hence MetaPattern.
This allows us to form a cohesive model of our environment in our minds, a simulation of the universe around us strung together from all the various stimuli from our many senses. Without employing abstraction, we would not be able to process that much information coming to our brain centers.
Some people began wondering if the universe they saw was real, or merely a simulation. The conclusion could have been arrived at much sooner had they considered that the universe they saw through their eyes was indeed simulated by their brains. Our eyes are only capable of perceiving in two dimensions each. The third dimension in our awareness is a product of that simulation.
Because the act of observation collapses quantum states, it becomes impossible to actually make sense of a "real" universe because there would not be one. It would be a fuzz of uncollapsed quantum states, until seen through the eyes of observation and abstraction. It seems abstraction is a natural optimisation for multi-cellular species. Allowing a cluster of neurons to work together to compute, delegation and categorization of thoughts and memory (experience) into a problem solving machine.
With larger neural networks, this abstraction became all the more important, allowing much higher levels of pattern recognition than those of lower neural density. With more efficient pattern recognition, we could process more of our environment at once, creating richer and more detailed simulations of the "real" universe around us, without the noisy information of dimensions irrelevant to the human mind.
How does abstraction work? The process of abstraction seems to be tapping into randomness, possibly utilizing the underlying universe, to trigger shifts in perspectives. Once patterns are spotted in the canvas of memory, they're flagged for attention. After a perspective is scanned for a first layer of patterns, the flagged patterns become a new layer, and the second layer of perspective is scanned for patterns.
This neural density allowed us more memory than usual for creatures. That combined with our long lifespans and prepubescent periods, allowed our mental instinct to evolve under the influence of resonant patterns in our environment, allowing a conscious mind to cast a wider net for relationships between points of data in our senses. That instinct for patterns varies in scope and orientation for each person, due to both genetic origin and circumstantial variation across lives during which thought patterns are collected from the environment and integrated into instinct.
Art is a Skill of Abstraction and Metaphors
Art is the practice of encoding a complex web of patterns into a medium, textured by entropy (randomness), in and effort to influence an environment. Good art resonates across simulated universes within minds, introducting new detail and a better view of the meta-universe.
Language itself is an art, encoding ideas into sound waves to be delivered and then reborn into the universes simulated near us in other people's heads.
Will is to engage the meta-universe and directing our motion through it with intent. Will is generated by desire. Desire is born into life from a genetic code inhabiting a flesh medium, but evolved by experience. Is will free? If you consider that an entity's will is owned wholly by itself, though influenced by its environment, then yes. But it doesn't seem enough. Perhaps if you consider that the environment consists of a field of seeming randomness that permeates all of reality, you could consider that free. But does freedom actually apply as a pattern in this medium? Because part of will's mechanisms of navigating the meta-universe is through directed attention and conscious thought, will and consciousness are really the product of a structured universe interacting with a field of randomness. A mind is like a little kink in the meta-universe.
Matter and Space
Movement and Time
Randomness and Harmony
Thought and Memory through Time
Patterns and Medium
Patterns are Structure, Emptiness is Chaos
Shifting an observed pattern into a medium where its less usually found allows us a different perspective of that space.
Abstraction then allows us to string together multiple patterns, to find a relationship between them. A pattern of patterns, hence MetaPattern.
This allows us to form a cohesive model of our environment in our minds, a simulation of the universe around us strung together from all the various stimuli from our many senses. Without employing abstraction, we would not be able to process that much information coming to our brain centers.
Some people began wondering if the universe they saw was real, or merely a simulation. The conclusion could have been arrived at much sooner had they considered that the universe they saw through their eyes was indeed simulated by their brains. Our eyes are only capable of perceiving in two dimensions each. The third dimension in our awareness is a product of that simulation.
Because the act of observation collapses quantum states, it becomes impossible to actually make sense of a "real" universe because there would not be one. It would be a fuzz of uncollapsed quantum states, until seen through the eyes of observation and abstraction. It seems abstraction is a natural optimisation for multi-cellular species. Allowing a cluster of neurons to work together to compute, delegation and categorization of thoughts and memory (experience) into a problem solving machine.
With larger neural networks, this abstraction became all the more important, allowing much higher levels of pattern recognition than those of lower neural density. With more efficient pattern recognition, we could process more of our environment at once, creating richer and more detailed simulations of the "real" universe around us, without the noisy information of dimensions irrelevant to the human mind.
How does abstraction work? The process of abstraction seems to be tapping into randomness, possibly utilizing the underlying universe, to trigger shifts in perspectives. Once patterns are spotted in the canvas of memory, they're flagged for attention. After a perspective is scanned for a first layer of patterns, the flagged patterns become a new layer, and the second layer of perspective is scanned for patterns.
This neural density allowed us more memory than usual for creatures. That combined with our long lifespans and prepubescent periods, allowed our mental instinct to evolve under the influence of resonant patterns in our environment, allowing a conscious mind to cast a wider net for relationships between points of data in our senses. That instinct for patterns varies in scope and orientation for each person, due to both genetic origin and circumstantial variation across lives during which thought patterns are collected from the environment and integrated into instinct.
Art is a Skill of Abstraction and Metaphors
Art is the practice of encoding a complex web of patterns into a medium, textured by entropy (randomness), in and effort to influence an environment. Good art resonates across simulated universes within minds, introducting new detail and a better view of the meta-universe.
Language itself is an art, encoding ideas into sound waves to be delivered and then reborn into the universes simulated near us in other people's heads.
Will is to engage the meta-universe and directing our motion through it with intent. Will is generated by desire. Desire is born into life from a genetic code inhabiting a flesh medium, but evolved by experience. Is will free? If you consider that an entity's will is owned wholly by itself, though influenced by its environment, then yes. But it doesn't seem enough. Perhaps if you consider that the environment consists of a field of seeming randomness that permeates all of reality, you could consider that free. But does freedom actually apply as a pattern in this medium? Because part of will's mechanisms of navigating the meta-universe is through directed attention and conscious thought, will and consciousness are really the product of a structured universe interacting with a field of randomness. A mind is like a little kink in the meta-universe.
Matter and Space
Movement and Time
Randomness and Harmony
Saturday, December 15
Sunday, December 9
I love SemiAccurate
Microsoft could not buy Nokia outright, the EU would have rightfully laughed that out the door. Instead they put Elop in place and had him promote a ‘strategy’ that had no chance of succeeding. Once Nokia had burned all the bridges that could have saved it, most of the remaining pieces would be unpalatable to any potential buyer.
I'm obviously biased, because they're saying exactly what I've been thinking, except more eloquently and with greater exposition. There really feels like a world of doublespeak these days in the tech press. You feel like you're reading marketing shill half the time and wonder why its being passed off as content. The troubling thing is that, just like in politics, this new talk technique of speaking non-truth into existence seems to be working (in everything but actual sales numbers). People begin to lose their will to hold on to their own ideas and start spouting worthless contrived phrases.
It seems to work, but at what cost? All this shouting down of dissent and the torrent of manufactured PR-talk to drown out originality might just cost humanity its humanity in the long run. It would be sad if the dystopian Orwellian world came to be not because of a political struggle, but to shift some worthless silicon toys off the shelves.
Thursday, December 6
Binaries and Service Level Agreements
Technology has always had an obsession with numbers, especially in the way that its marketed. This spawned the megapixel race, where camera manufacturers pointlessly one-upped each other by cramming more and more pixels into ever tinier sensors, selling you on more while giving you less.
The same story played itself out in the CPU frequency race of the early 2000's, with Intel and AMD pushing their chips to untenably high megahertz and gigahertz until AMD bowed out and attempted to change the message. It didn't work out so well for them. The obsession with marketing-driven numbers may well be justified.
It seems that even when it comes to services, this obsession still remains. Perhaps because nobody really knows what technology really does behind the scenes and numbers become the only way to quantify what something technical actually means for them. Tech Support is sold on something called 'Service Level Agreements', SLA in short. This conveniently allows marketing to attach yet another number, this time with increasingly insignificant decimal places tagged on behind. 99.9% up time guaranteed! We'll throw in another 0.09% if you pony up another couple of thousand!
What the numbers really don't tell you is that percentages rarely reflect satisfaction. If you had a service that really sucked, you would still hate it even if it were available to you 99.99% of the time. If I sold you a shitty mattress and told you it would stay on your bedframe nearly all the time, it wouldn't make sleeping in it any more comfortable. You can get a dial-up modem to stay online for months, even years at a time, but all you'd see on the internet would be boring old text (like you find here).
SLA is a binary issue. Its either up or its down. Being up is good, to be sure, but it really only reflects a part in the larger whole of user experience. Binary systems don't work well with the entire spectrum between excellent and terrible.
The same story played itself out in the CPU frequency race of the early 2000's, with Intel and AMD pushing their chips to untenably high megahertz and gigahertz until AMD bowed out and attempted to change the message. It didn't work out so well for them. The obsession with marketing-driven numbers may well be justified.
It seems that even when it comes to services, this obsession still remains. Perhaps because nobody really knows what technology really does behind the scenes and numbers become the only way to quantify what something technical actually means for them. Tech Support is sold on something called 'Service Level Agreements', SLA in short. This conveniently allows marketing to attach yet another number, this time with increasingly insignificant decimal places tagged on behind. 99.9% up time guaranteed! We'll throw in another 0.09% if you pony up another couple of thousand!
What the numbers really don't tell you is that percentages rarely reflect satisfaction. If you had a service that really sucked, you would still hate it even if it were available to you 99.99% of the time. If I sold you a shitty mattress and told you it would stay on your bedframe nearly all the time, it wouldn't make sleeping in it any more comfortable. You can get a dial-up modem to stay online for months, even years at a time, but all you'd see on the internet would be boring old text (like you find here).
SLA is a binary issue. Its either up or its down. Being up is good, to be sure, but it really only reflects a part in the larger whole of user experience. Binary systems don't work well with the entire spectrum between excellent and terrible.
Tuesday, December 4
Monday, December 3
DNS. Broken Metaphors
Every time I approach a new topic in in technology, I try to relate it back to some other allegorical metaphor in the physical world. Its usually a great way to learn the basic concepts of an idea, even if the real thing and the metaphor don't fit quite right.
Some examples: when learning about electricity, I connected the basic ideas of it to that of water. For electricity we have voltages, for water we have pressure; electric currents - water flow rates, etc.
When I was first learning about DNS, I thought of using phone directories as a metaphor to how DNS works. It was alright for a while, and seemed like a pretty good fit, considering both systems were for matching names to numbers.
How quickly that metaphor fails though. DNS is like the phone directory compiled by a serial-murdering brain-rapist. If the phone book is like a charming old guitar, DNS is like a Moog hooked up to the soundbank from another galaxy.
Some examples: when learning about electricity, I connected the basic ideas of it to that of water. For electricity we have voltages, for water we have pressure; electric currents - water flow rates, etc.
When I was first learning about DNS, I thought of using phone directories as a metaphor to how DNS works. It was alright for a while, and seemed like a pretty good fit, considering both systems were for matching names to numbers.
How quickly that metaphor fails though. DNS is like the phone directory compiled by a serial-murdering brain-rapist. If the phone book is like a charming old guitar, DNS is like a Moog hooked up to the soundbank from another galaxy.
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