What about aging – which is currently inescapably and is what really kills most people? Smoking just accelerates the accumulation of cell damage. Why limit ourselves to aging that’s caused by one particular vice? Breathing causes oxidative damage, and caloric restriction increases longevity. Should we also make billboards that say “Hyperventilation and eating more calories than necessary cause X deaths a year. Face the facts!”.

According to Wikipedia, New Zealand has a 7 in 1000 death rate. That’s 0.7 % or just over 30,000 (going by the current population figures as shown on Wikipedia). I find the attribution of 5000 of these being “caused” purely by smoking a slight exaggeration, but without them citing their sources, they could really make up any number they like.

Alternatively, I think it’d be more amusing to have a billboard that said either:

• “Entropy marches relentlessly on! Face the facts!”
• “You’re going to die! Face the facts!”

But y’know, SmokeFree New Zealand would probably change their marketing director if that happened.

Number in brackets are for alternation of dosage count.

• Fish oil for Omega 3 1000 mg (2/1)
  • EPA 180mg
  • DHA 180 mg
• Lecithin 1200 mg (2/1)
• CoQ10 150 mg (1/0)
• Echinacea 500mg (2)
• St John’s Wort 3000mg (equiv. Hypericin 1.65 mg) (1/0)
• Red Seal Memory Power (2/1)
  • Ginkgo biloba Leaf (extract equiv. to) 1250 mg
  • Gotu Kola (Centella asiatica extract equiv. to) 75 mg
  • Lecithin 125 mg
  • Vitamin E (dl-alpha-Tocopheryl acetate 50 mg) 50 IU
  • Huperzine A (from Huperzia serrata equiv. to 300 mg) 25 mcg
• Spirulina 500 mg (2)
• Vitamin C 500 mg (1)
• Centrum (1/0)
  • Contains lots of various trace elements.

Occasionally taken:

• 5-HTP 50mg
• Modafinil 100mg (Monday/Wednesday/Thursday)

I am considering adding, Aniracetam, Vinpocetine, Hydergine, ACF-228, and Adrafinil (Olmifon), but I’ll wait to see how/if the current stack has any unwanted side-effects.

Yup, it’s a whole bunch of pills, but I’m no where near the obsession of Ray Kurzweil yet, who was quoted as saying “I cut it down. It’s like 150 pills a day” when asked about the 250 pills a day he used to take.

“Is someone you work with taking Provigil to give them an extra competitive edge? I’ve spoken with one executive who says he uses it regularly to work twenty hour days, and the buzz lately is that it’s the “entrepreneur’s drug of choice” around Silicon Valley. Over the last week two separate entrepreneurs have mentioned it casually in conversation, and one said he tried it once and loved it.”

An interesting conversation was had at a friend’s bday dinner about drug prohibition, and I meant to mention this kind of thing while dining. Another reason I think the whole recreational drug thing needs to change or be approached without a maxim of “drugs are bad” is because performance enhancement is going to become more common.

What’s so funny is that entrepreneurs apparently aren’t interested in typical drugs – instead they find the one that gives them a mental and stamina advantage.

“What’s so funny” about this statement is that I’m sure this is a completely false claim. It’s merely more socially accepted to take drugs to be a more productive member of society. Thus it’s easier to admit this to colleagues. Possibly it conveys “I’m a hard worker”, not that it really does (since you can still be unproductive even if you’re awake), but the dissonance between the reason behind taking drugs and the public’s perception of it is annoying.

I’ve personally talked to several entrepreneurs who’ve had the seeds of their business inspiration arrive while under the influence.

Note however I’m not saying innovation and new ideas can’t be arrived at without drugs, since that’s patently untrue.

You see, your reality is your delusion. Whatever your outlook on life, yourself, or others, it’ll always be subjective. You may align your outlook with thousands or millions of other human beings, but their observation of the universe will also be subjective. In essence, you can believe what you want to believe. Obviously, if you stray to far from the collective reality then bad things will start happening, like bankruptcy if you believe you are materially wealthy beyond your means, or being committed to an institution if you start proclaiming yourself as Jesus. However, small deviations from what your mind (and especially your insecurities) might initially tell are actually incredibly powerful.

I’m a firm believer in the mind being part of the body. You can believe things about soul, or spirit, but your existence is intricately tied to how your body, and in particular your brain works. The brain is a neural network, neural networks work through updating the connections between neurons based on feedback of whether they were useful to activate at a certain time (in an extremely abstract and slightly incorrect summary). Another feature of the brain’s neural network, is that connections are established and only reinforce themselves if they are actually used. Thus if you repeat an affirmation, you are literally making yourself believe it. It doesn’t matter if you initially don’t believe it, the fact that the sentence… for example “I eat healthy foods”, might not apply immediately, doesn’t matter. Purely by parsing and processing THAT idea, it’s becoming part of your consciousness. If you repeat this 100 times a day “I eat healthy foods” becomes a stronger connection (indeed, VERY strong, since most ideas we have are not repeated so frequently unless we are studying or whatever) and more ingrained in your psyche. Later, even if you don’t consciously perceive that thought, it’s still being activated and used at an unconscious level.

Now, I’m not going to claim this will suddenly change you, but like anything worth doing, it takes time. In particular, intermittent learning is a lot more powerful than swatting for an exam and forgetting everything afterwards, and the same applies to affirmations. Doing affirmations for a couple of days won’t make much of a difference (although it’ll plant a seed).

Since most of this post has been me spouting knowledge which I’m too lazy (oops, this is a negative identification… I’m not actually lazy, I’ve just got more pressing matters to attend to then searching the net to support one of my mind dumps) to find references for, here is something related. The idea of affirmations could be made even more powerful by watching your brain in real-time as you make the statement, and compare it to the reaction of other statements you either believe to be stronger true or false as recently seen on TED.

Your mind can never change
Unless you ask it to
Lovingly re-arrange
The thoughts that make you blue
The things that bring you down
Only do harm to you
And so make your choice joy
The joy belongs to you

Massive Attack – What your soul sings

Government’s seem to have a fascination with criminalising substances that change mental awareness, however there are so many things that do this, it’s strange that they intervene in some cases but not in others. Consistency and reliability are key components of trust, how does one trust a government with an erratic value system for experiencing our consciousness?

It’s been exclaimed in poetry and songs, love is a drug, a quintessential part of human experience. The euphoric highs when you meet someone special, planning how you might met with them again for a coffee in order to get another dose of those powerful attractants. Let alone all the other emotions which they themselves are based on a concoction of organic compounds. Being human, love is a strong attractor for the complex system of the human mind. If you get torn asunder from this attractor, it can feel like physical pain: severe withdrawal symptoms that can lead to anger, regret, and depression. In extreme cases murder (if other people are involved), and/or suicide. And yet the government allows it. This seemingly random experience that we cannot control – unlike substances that change our awareness, which we are free to control through our own will and determination in the universe (if you believe in free will of course, I chose to, even if I don’t really, because it’s leads to a much more effective life).

I certainly don’t mean to imply that love isn’t worth it, or it isn’t special or part of what makes being human worthwhile, but it, or sometimes the person you are in love with, can have all the psychological effects of a drug.

You are the perfect drug, the perfect drug, the perfect drug…
Nine Inch Nails – The Perfect Drug

A different slant: certain foods have short term addictive properties. I’m sure you know the ones I mean. The junk food that you have a small handful of, but it tastes so good you need more. If you don’t have the will power to resist, you end up eating a whole bag of crisps, a whole block of chocolate or whatever. You feel the worse for it afterwards, and the overload in high carbs and saturated fats is anything but good for you. Still, governments allow THAT too*.

One more example: exercise and sports. These give you an endorphin kick and can be addictive, although possibly to different personality types from those that get addicted to junk food (I’m not so sure though, since I’ve experienced both… long hours at the gym followed by binging on junk food, and what was I trying to hide from? See the first example). Gym aficionados – those that love the feeling after a decent workout and have been doing it for some time – will tell you how the feeling can lessen as you continue. So you lift more weights, you run further, you push your body to it’s limits again and again. Sure, this is how you can develop a stunning physique, but the fact is that you are constantly stressing your body. And the addictiveness can lead to you ignoring the feedback from your tired joints and muscles, overtraining and damaging them along with other connective tissue.

Despite all this, we ban things like MDMA/Ecstasy and LSD/Acid. Both have the potential to result in great good if used in therapeutic settings. In fact, they can result in great good in non-therapeutic settings too. SWIM** once felt deadened to life, depressed about a failed relationship, and generally wasn’t having that great a time, but a certain experience involving the previous substances led to SWIM developing a new outlook on life, become enthused about music and people, and excited about the future.

Why do people turn to these substances for recreational purposes? My guess is that the human psyche hasn’t evolved with the rapid expansion of culture and society. Our minds are still tribe based, some people more than others, and when we’re out in club, on a dance floor, or outdoors sharing pulsating rhythms with a throng of thousands we need something to let our guard down. Alcohol does this, but can also sway nastily into aggression. MDMA, by it’s very nature, causes connectedness and a loved up feeling – I’ve never heard of a fight instigated by someone on it (of course, feel free to point out if I’m wrong, but I suspect any counter-examples would be of less than pure substance which is a direct result of the lack of regulation that comes with criminalisation). Sure, you could say this loved-up togetherness is a negative thing and other people could take advantage of the implicit trust that someone rolling grants to others, but it depends on your outlook on the world. Do you choose to view the world as a positive or negative place? Different substances can draw you to these polar views, and one world view leads to a more easily controlled populace. Can you guess which it is?

* Many campaigns are being launched of late however to educate the public about healthy vs. unhealthy food and stem the tide of obesity and diabetes.
** Someone who isn’t me

It starts with the simple advice and conclusion of the piece:

Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.

That, more or less, is the short answer to the supposedly incredibly complicated and confusing question of what we humans should eat in order to be maximally healthy. I hate to give away the game right here at the beginning of a long essay, and I confess that I’m tempted to complicate matters in the interest of keeping things going for a few thousand more words.

And more evidence of how capitalism fucks with policy:

Naïvely putting two and two together, the committee drafted a straightforward set of dietary guidelines calling on Americans to cut down on red meat and dairy products. Within weeks a firestorm, emanating from the red-meat and dairy industries, engulfed the committee, and Senator McGovern (who had a great many cattle ranchers among his South Dakota constituents) was forced to beat a retreat. The committee’s recommendations were hastily rewritten. Plain talk about food — the committee had advised Americans to actually “reduce consumption of meat” — was replaced by artful compromise: “Choose meats, poultry and fish that will reduce saturated-fat intake.”

A subtle change in emphasis, you might say, but a world of difference just the same. First, the stark message to “eat less” of a particular food has been deep-sixed; don’t look for it ever again in any official U.S. dietary pronouncement. Second, notice how distinctions between entities as different as fish and beef and chicken have collapsed; those three venerable foods, each representing an entirely different taxonomic class, are now lumped together as delivery systems for a single nutrient. Notice too how the new language exonerates the foods themselves; now the culprit is an obscure, invisible, tasteless — and politically unconnected — substance that may or may not lurk in them called “saturated fat.”

Lucky for me I’m mostly vegetarian.

Besides which, it makes sense. The spoils of a meat kill were somewhat of a luxury for our ancestors, and our bodies are evolved to be sustained mostly from foraging fruits, nuts, and veges.

In particular, the comparison to mountaineering is quite nice:

The truth is that recreational drug taking is like mountaineering. When all goes well, as it does most of the time, the experience can be fun and even profound. Not only can the experience be great, it can also give the adventurer insights into his or her own character and the workings of the brain, insights that can be applied to the rest of life. But drug taking, like mountaineering, can be dangerous.

Let’s all grow up, stop pushing lies and have an honest debate about drugs

Optimisation techniques

Since I’m a programmer, and enthusiast about artificial intelligence, I’m going to approach it from this angle. Particularly genetic-algorithms, simulated-annealing, neural-networks, and other optimisation techniques that have a solution space that one can visualise as being a rugged fitness landscape of peaks and troughs.

The height of a point on this landscape indicates the fitness of being at that particular point. Imagine you are standing at said point. If you move slightly in one direction it may increase your fitness, decrease it, or it may stay the same. All the above machine learning methods, in some way, are moving along a multi-dimensional landscape of fitness, all are trying to reach the peak fitness value. The problem however, is that, generally these methods only move in the direction of increasing fitness (although the specifics may be different). If you find yourself at the top of a peak, you’ve reached the locally optimal solution, but you’ve no way of knowing if you’ve reached the globally optimal solution.

The way these optimisation techniques get good results however, is by including an element of stochasticity or randomness. Either this randomness is added to the path that the solution point takes along the landscape, such that it will sometimes move down slopes, or suddenly jump onto another nearby hill. Or the optimisation is run many many times from different start points, and by chance, one of these start points is likely to be at the base of a peak that represents a pretty good solution, even if the solution isn’t the best.

Even including a small amount of this random behaviour can have a significant effect on the performance of these techniques. Obviously it depends on the problem you are trying to solve, and particularly how rugged it’s fitness landscape is. If the landscape is just one huge peak, then it doesn’t matter where you start, you’ll get to the best solution eventually.

Storing patterns in the mind

This is where I start getting beyond my formal training, and I’m relying on various books I’ve read, but can’t remember where or when, so this could be me just spouting mumbo jumbo. You’ve been warned.

I read somewhere that one of the leading ideas about the purpose of dreams, and sleep in general, is to find a low energy state in which to store information. Thus, when you’re asleep, your brain is trying to juggle all the data that is running around in your active, short term memory and meld it with the existing neural pathways. This is another optimisation problem, based on all your existing memories and knowledge, which are stored in intricate patterns and interleave one another, how do you include the new memories while using the least energy. Or put another way, what is the most efficient way to store the new experiences and information you’ve received since you last slept? This information is probably weighted by how important it is in your day and such importance may be described by either the emotional response it invokes or through sheer repetition (which is how neural pathways are strengthened). The latter explains why if you do something monotonous all day, even if it’s of little consequence to your life, you’ll often end up dreaming about it anyway.

The long term result

Since memories are being layered over our existing neural pathways, it isn’t causing significant change. Unless of course something major happens in life which requires adaptation. We can easily get stuck in our ways, or in our thought routines, since the patterns that build up while storing memories are the same patterns that result in our intelligence, behaviour, and conscious existence. Often people think about intelligence and memory as separate entities, and I very much doubt they are. Memory are patterns in your mind, just like your intelligent thought. I admit however that certain areas of the brain are dedicated to the storage of particular types of knowledge, but the use of this knowledge is thought, and without the thoughts activating the knowledge it may as well not exist.

Anyhow, basically what I’m trying to say is that our mind, as it consolidates knowledge, memories, and our experience, can get stuck on a hill on the fitness landscape… not only for the lowest energy state, but also for the best interpretation on the knowledge that has been integrated into our minds, and the most satisfying direction in life.

It’s easy to get stuck in a rut.

Drugs shake it up

Why I think people take certain drugs, is that it distorts the fitness landscape for whatever optimisation problem is being run by the human mind (I don’t really think intelligence is as simple as an optimisation process, it’s just for the purposes of this argument). It’s like the stochasticity that machine learning methods use to explore hills in the fitness landscape that are nearby and possibly have better overall fitness.

Many recreational drugs have had a past as an aid in psychotherapy. I think this might be why.

But then again, a drug’s effects could lead to a less fit peak for the brain to climb, thus for some people drugs have a negative impact. How do you know what result to expect? I guess you don’t, but it’s probably safe to say that some drugs are more likely to result in the net benefit to you, while others are not.

I recommend Erowid if you want information about a recreational/nootropic drug.

Disclaimer: I am not condoning drug use, or otherwise. These are just my musings.

My life has fallen down
around me before
–lots of times,
for lots of reasons–
usually other people.

I do all right
alone,
and better
together,
but
I do very poorly
when
semi-
together.

As a kid I used to ridiculously excited about buying stationary for school each year. All that blank paper, waiting for thoughts and ideas to placed upon them. Even now when I go to book stores, my favourite area is not the fiction shelves, the technical book shelves, or the magazine stand, it’s the stationary area. Particularly the notebooks, so many styles and all begging me to express my thoughts, ideas or projects upon them. It’s the same with buying a new computer, it’s a new piece of equipment with a spanking fresh OS install, I can plan how to organise my folder structure, trim down the installed applications to just what I’m currently using and my mind exudes a clarity that immediately fills with potential projects and Cool Things to do.

And so it is with my life right now. Despite the best of intentions, the whole “lets just be friends” isn’t feasible for my ex and me, at least not with some significant amount of time apart. So here I am almost at a place I can in some ways call a clean slate. Not quite yet though, I still have to finish this PhD I foolishly committed to some 3 years ago. Purely by being in the same environment for so long has kept me from moving on due to so many memories over that time. I do immensely look forward being ALL DONE, then the world is my oyster, or at least my olive*.

There is one thing I might have trouble with though. The sheer limitless number of possibilities available when I buy a new book or computer often has me procrastinate for a long time while I try and weigh up my choices, trying to come up with the best plan. It’s difficult to overcome this block since before I start perfection is still a potential state for anything. I want things to be just right, and sometimes it prevents me from doing anything. I know it’s psychological, and that I should really follow Nike’s slogan: Just do it.

*since I’m potentially allergic to shell fish.