Entries Tagged 'mind' ↓

It’s Christmas time, and I enjoy getting gifts for people even though I’m not religious. I’ve also been enjoying getting rid of lots of stuff I don’t use/need. This not only makes me feel like I’m clearing out mental space (I have Tyler Durden’s words echoing in my head “The things you own, end up owning you”) but also makes me feel good that other people are getting something that they want/need. Especially since I’m either giving the stuff away or selling it cheaply on TradeMe.

I googled “It’s better to give than receive.” since that’s the quote that’s automatically been ingrained into my psyche. Turns out it’s from the Bible, Acts 20:35 (King James Version):

“I have showed you all things, how that so labouring ye ought to support the weak, and to remember the words of the Lord Jesus, how he said: ‘It is more blessed to give than to receive.’”

(I guess “more blessed” translates to “better” these days.)

Never mind that giving psychologically makes us happier than spending money on ourselves. It also physiologically affects us, by releasing, not only the good old reward molecule Dopamine, but also the love neurotransmitter Oxytocin (unfortunately the mention of oxytocin isn’t in the abstract, but it’s discussed here).

There is another aspect of gift giving I want to mention, which I haven’t got any references for, but is based on my intuition on the mechanics of intelligence. When we give someone a gift, we usually have a reason for it, and when we choose a gift for them we tend to think “Will the person like this?”. The act of that means we have to emulate, model, and predict what they want and by activation it re-enforces their pattern within our mind. Does this inadvertently get us thinking of other aspects of their personality and of what other people might like too? I’ve discussed how part of love is the strong bonding of patterns, one’s self in another mind, their mind emulated in the self. This twinning makes us feel connected to the other person. To me, it makes sense that going through this process while selecting gifts for other people will inevitably make one feel more connected in general. And as mentioned above, the neurotransmitter associated with love is also released during giving.

Maybe this is why the gifting economy of Kiwiburn (and the American equivalent) is such a central part of the festivals and contributes to them being such enjoyable experiences.

“We make a living by what we get, but we make a life by what we give.”
– Winston Churchill

I’m not old, a mere 27 years in fact, but there are a few things I’ve come to discover. Things that it’d be nice to have been taught in school, but that instead I’ve discovered haphazardly:

1. The first step to doing anything is believing you can – One thing that I’ve noticed, is that some people sabotage themselves before they even try. They just believe that they can’t do something, or it’s too hard. Some people have told me I’m smart, whereas mostly I think I’m pretty average. What I do however, is have an absence of restriction. If I want to do something, the only restriction is time. This is important when you’re doing something like working on a thinking machine.
2. You can’t do everything – You’ll notice the caveat above about time being the only restriction. When I was a kid, I wanted to read the entirety of Encyclopaedia Britannica… I got to about “Aardvark” before I realised it was mostly dull (no offense to the long-nosed beasts!). I’m still struggling with this one, I have so many things I’d like to do, that I frequently wonder if I’m overcommitted and if the more optimal path would be to obsessively focus on one thing and one thing only… but then I realised that if I tried that I’d get bored. I’m too curious and have grown up in the age of variegated knowledge at our finger tips.
3. Emotions are cues – they give you an indication of something going on internally. Something that might not be able to be immediately expressed verbally, and if it’s a negative emotion it probably indicates something isn’t right. And by “isn’t right” I don’t mean it’s necessarily to do with the external world, it could be an indication that there’s something inside that hasn’t been resolved. However, don’t make them the focus.. since everyone likes analogies, and I’m particularly good at straining my analogies: think of emotions like the gauges on your car for temperature, fuel, etc. They are important, so that the engine doesn’t explode, or so that you don’t run out of fuel, but if you spend the whole time focusing on the gauges, you’ll miss the scenary. Anger specifically, I feel can be boiled down to “when something or someone doesn’t act the way you expect/want them to” – every time I’ve been angry, it’s because my expectations don’t match reality… so mostly it’s about having a world view that doesn’t quite match reality (or the consensus of reality, as described below).
4. Nothing is objective – you can argue whatever view you like, but most of us reach consensus about a specific interpretation of physical reality because of shared modalities and the wet-ware for interpreting them. That doesn’t mean you’re right if you subscribe to the current scientific consensus. Humanity collectively believed silly things like the world being flat, or the Earth being the centre of the universe. Knowledge and truth are dynamic, and they’ll continue to be so. Keep an open mind. And because I like loops, link back to point 1 about believing you can… since nothing is objective, you can believe you can do anything you like[1].

I’m sure there are others, but those are the ones that came to me just now. What do you wish they’d mentioned to you when in school?

[1] If you believe you can fly, you can (buy a plane ticket, or go sky-diving). But jumping off a building is just dumb, so don’t do that ok?

Following on from other’s recent discussions of crime and punishment, I offer these completely unhelpful transhumanist thoughts:

• A mind from the past can become completely different from the one that committed the crime. So is it fair to punish someone in the present, when their current mind state bears as much similarity to the mind that committed the crime in the past is it does to a completely separate person?
• A body replaces most of it’s cells over the course of many years. So it’s not really someone’s body we convict, but their structure. What happens when people can upload? Supposing we can represent that structure digitally or otherwise (but in a form of easily copy-able data) what happens to the replicates of that individual? Are they convicted as well? Does it become illegal for other people to harbour that sequence of data, even if it’s in stasis and getting no processor time? (which is essentially the same as dead, but with the difference of being revivable at a moments notice)
• Continuing from the assumption that it’s the structure of a criminal we want to punish/remove from society: Since a baby is essentially derived from the fair proportion of the parent’s structure, if the parent commits a crime, then shouldn’t the child also be considered a criminal? Even though the child takes some of it’s structure from the other, hopefully non-criminal, parent, the first point seems to imply that exact similarity isn’t required.

(Note, most of these thoughts are me just musing on a theoretical level that is not at all pragmatic. I don’t actually believe children of criminals are also guilty)

A friend of mine, JMM knew that I’ve been funded in the past by SIAI to work on OpenCog, so he asked the following question:

“The Singularity Institutes “main purpose” is meant to be to investigate whether a recursively improving intelligence can maintain “friendliness” towards human kind. “

Okay, but my standpoint is: Why does the recursively improving intelligence need to be non-human? It seems counter-intuitive to me to devolve this power to something outside of ourselves – and also a bit like we’re just trying vainly to become a kind of God, creating another type of being.

I think the main reason there is a focus on AI rather than improvement of human intelligence is because it’s so damn hard to do experiments on people’s brains. It’s ethically difficult to justify various experiments, and it only gets harder as things become more regulated (and rightfully so for the most case). I think they’ll definitely be continuing research into this stuff though. For myself, occasionally taking Modafinil enhances my productivity significantly (so long as I maintain focus on what I’m meant to be doing, it’s easy to get enthralled with something that interests me, but isn’t related to my work).

But there’s no exclusion of human intelligence amplification from the singularity concept. If we create smarter humans, then this begets even smarter humans. Again we can’t really predict what those enhanced “humans” would do, because they are a significant step smarter than us.

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When we interact with people, our mind models them. Thus, as a consequence we also end up modelling other people’s beliefs, which in turn can potentially affect our beliefs. I don’t believe that the contextual belief systems of humans (self vs. other) is absolutely isolated – if you are surrounded by contrary beliefs long enough, they could slowly seep into your unconsciousness. Which leads me to wonder if this might have some relation to Stockholm Syndrome? With perhaps stress priming the mind to accept new beliefs more fluidly than usual, in order to allow humans to adapt and survive, even in unpleasant scenarios. Peer pressure and conformity bias might be otherways in which other people’s beliefs can unintentionally alter our own. Of particular interest are the experiments where all but one of the participants in a group are told to lie about observing a phenomenon and the the other, whom are making a decision purely on what they see, tend to agree with the rest of the group. Even when they are later asked about their decision, and told that the other participants were told to lie, generally the one will still swear they saw the phenomenon anyway (see the Solomon Asch study of social conformity).

There are lots of self-help articles and books that tell you to surround yourself with inspiring and positive people and avoid people who are stuck in a life of negative thought, or otherwise are poisonous to people’s happiness. And from the above, it makes sense that negativity is actually contagious. Let alone whether we have empathic tendencies, and mirror their feelings, just mirroring their viewpoint of the world would transfer those beliefs. I certainly don’t want to argue we should all become heartless isolationists, because compassion for other people is always important. But in the end, you are responsible for your own happiness over others (although not at the cost of others, through causing unnecessary harm) and to that end, I think it’s important to sometimes check whether the negativity of others is morphing your beliefs and outlook on the world.

This spread of belief occurs for small chunks of knowledge, and through modelling others at a personal level, but also occurs for larger concepts and ideas. Memes are particularly adapted to play to parts of the human condition so that they get actively spread by us. Things like quizzes that tell us how we fit in the world or appeal to our narcissism and ego, telling us we are unique in some way and that help to define our identity, are particularly virulent. Not that there’s anything wrong with them, as I’ve wasted plenty of time finding out I used to have a “pool boy” dating personality, that at some stage I was 45% pure, and that I am simultaneously a dozen historical figures. They also promote participation – which would arguably work better to promote the spread of the meme over a purely academic piece of knowledge or trivia. Tests that are also related in the attention sphere of Pop culture, the contents of which are themselves memes, piggy-back on the success of other ideas and memes.

Last year I read about the “formula for genius”, by Dr Piotr Wozniak. I found it very interesting and changed my view on the relation between memory and intelligence. In the past I’d written off the memorisation of facts as being relatively unintelligent (not least because it was boring), and with the internet and personal wikis there was no longer any need to remember trivial information. However, if your brain has access internally to a larger amount of knowledge, it’s able to draw more abstractions, generalise better and find new connections. Which makes sense in hind sight, if you don’t have that knowledge in your mind, how are you going to draw comparisons with new knowledge?

I was also intrigued by his learning software SuperMemo, but it looks like it’s become outdated, and more specifically it’s confined to windows and isn’t open source (meaning I can’t easily modify it if it doesn’t work the way that’s right for me). Thus, I went looking for some new learning software and came across JMemorize and Mnemosyne.

Both are based on the Leitner principle (proposed by the German psychologist Sebastian Leitner in the 1970s) which is described on jMemorize’s about page:

“The basic idea is to divide the cards into different decks depending on the difficulty they present to you. This is done by repetitive quizzes in which you try to answer the question out of your mind. Every time you know the correct answer to a card, it is put on the next higher card deck. If you fail at a card, it is put back to the starting deck.”

I ended up using Mnemosyne for the following reasons:

• it is written in gtk
• supports pictures, sounds, and 3 sided cards
• it also is a research project, allowing you to optionally submit your learning to their server (not the content of the cards, just your performance through time).

Plus it’s in ubuntu so you can just type the following to install it:

sudo apt-get install mnemosyne

So far I’ve been using Mnemosyne for 8 or so months. I’ve learnt the periodic table as a test (Ialways found chemistry my downfall in school due to it mostly being memorisation). I’ve also learnt the French words for dates and body parts, and now I’m learning Spanish (in a more concrete way than just random words, including phrases and the various parts of speech). So far there are 2700 facts, which for the most part I can recall relatively easily.

Another method of memorisation specifically for numbers is the Major memory system. There is a perl script for helping using this system here.

I’ve going back through some draft posts which I never published. Here’s one from way back last year some time. I should note that I don’t really believe I have Asperger’s or anything like that. I also now believe that “breadth of ideas” is a natural consequence of the parallel nature of the brain. But, being the hoarder and preservationist of digital information that I am, I couldn’t just delete this… so here it is.

…

In the past I’ve read about aspects of Asperger’s syndrome and in the past have wondered if I’ve got some small inclination towards it. I function reasonably well now though, but this is only through years of practice and working on the things the are traditionally deficient in someone with the syndrome. On deeper reading of the wikipedia article, it’s more likely that they are simply surface similarities. I certainly learnt a lot from being in intimate relationships and am constantly trying to improve (and maintain) my social abilities, but the fact is that I taught myself to look people in the eye while holding a conversation, to exhibit confidence instead of trepidation and to use my empathy to feel what others feel (instead of shutting it out of my head due to it being overwhelming).
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As a kid, and even in the first few years of University, I used to have trouble understanding why things needed to be explained in detail. Essays were difficult because I’d take the point I was trying to make and think of it like a logic problem:

This interesting fact and this analysis, thus this is the point.

Except that made for very short essays that were no where near the word limit.

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Prompted by reading a chapter on Zen in “Gödel, Escher, Bach”:

Zen seems to be a sort of holism to the extreme… dissolving the self to become one with the universe and achieve enlightenment.

In some ways I see the use for this viewpoint while meditating and as a relaxation technique. In particular the concept that all the universe and time in static and immutable, and time and space is mere illusion, has a remarkably calming influence (at least for me). In some ways this reminds me of something I did that was somewhat odd as a kid. I think I first thought this around 5… I found time strange, and my memory of it also strange, thus I decided to imprint a distinct memory of that moment. I was sitting at the dinner table and I focussed on the fork I had. I can remember this moment, whereas many other parts of my early childhood are but a blur. There are other moments too, such as when I was riding a bike home in a ridiculously strong wind at age 11… again I committed this to memory because I reasoned “this is incredibly hard work, I feel exhausted! But in but 30 minutes I’ll be at home and this will purely be a memory. In fact, it may as well not be happening since this is a small fraction of my total experience at any time and will continue to get smaller as I continue in my life.”

Did other people do this too? Or was I just a somewhat strange kid?

Zen philosophy is somewhat relaxing and find kōans play novel games with the logic in our heads. As a life philosophy however, I think it’s flawed since the separation of us from the rest of the universe is what makes us human. In fact, it’s what life is all about. The localised increase in pattern and extropy within a system. Maybe Zen boils down to being an acceptance of possible the heat death of the universe when everything becomes a homogeneous soup? Which, if time is but an illusion has already happened and is the culmination of the universe’s evolution!

Before I sign off, time for a kōan:

A monk asked Zhaozhou, “What is the meaning of the ancestral teacher’s coming from the west?” Zhaozhou said, “The cypress tree in front of the hall”.
case #47 of the Book of Serenity

Zen also seems to have mastered the art of surrealistic humour.

Looks like I’m not the only one:

“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.