Never been one to let the carrier drop

So, i was thinking about how I know the Christians are not, generally, on my side, and I’ve come up with a few good indicators

*) Anyone who thinks you should change in ways that your highest self, your best self, doesn’t think you should change is probably not on the right side.

*) Anyone who things that things that are enjoyable and positive and most people would want to experience, like sex, are sinful or should be carefully kept in little boxes and frowned upon, is probably not on the right side

*) Anyone who doesn’t speak against violence, or things that are bad and generally no one would want to experience, is probably not on the right side. *encouraging* violence over things like religions, which are fundamentally unknowable, is a especially strong case of this. (Example: Crusades)

*) Anyone who wants to censor ad restrain art which is enjoyable, such as rock music, and wants to sell the idea that such art is ‘sinful’ is not on the right side

*) Anyone who wants to replace observable reality with their own claims which run obviously counter to observable reality is not on the right side. (example: Galileo)

*) Anyone who wants to tell you you are so fundamentally flawed that only the mercy of a higher power can save you – flawed because you learn by making mistakes, which is the very nature of neural networks – is not on the right side, and is probably lying about their message being divinely inspired.

I continue to think that most of the world’s religions exist largely to keep the world’s religious leaders employed. I also continue to think they are largely holding us back and even leading us in wrong and bad directions. Part of this, of course, is that I think we would be happier if we recognized that humans fall in love more than once, and also we never really get over anyone we’ve been in love with, and encouraged people not to end friendships or disconnect from people because they’ve fallen in love with other people, but instead to share. I realize that it was very important for reasons that are, as usual, stupid, for the tribe to know which baby belonged to which parents, but I think this is partially because we have really awful and anti-success memetics.

More later.

So, I think I’ve talked about this before, but I thought I’d mention it again.

We have 10^11 neurons. 100 billion of them – and each neuron is made up of many, many atoms. A conservative guess might be a hundred thousand. Each atom has a electron that forms a probability cloud that is the most dense close to the nucleus, and asymptotically approaches zero as it moves away from the nucleus, but it’s never really zero.

We are all connected, we are all inside each other. We can’t escape this.

At the same time, our experiences of each other can never really be the territory, but must be the map. We experience avatars of other people, because our experience of the other people is happening inside our heads even though the other people are in fact real beings that are out there in whatever world or worlds we inhabit.

This is all before we even start to open the can of worms marked ‘multiple worlds theory’ or ‘multiple dimensions’.

So, since June 1 I’ve been on a facebook break – it’s been 52 days now. I think it’s been good for me, and I’m not anxious to go back although there sadly are some people in my life I have no other way to communicate with. I do feel a bit bad about not posting the cover of America on facebook although I don’t know how many listeners missed out on that.. I need to pay someone to log into facebook for me and post my music 😉

Other than that, I continue to work my paws off on guitar and keyboard skills.. at this point I’m going to try to get up to a hour a day for guitar (I’m at about 35 minutes now.. building up the callouses and the finger strength) and a hour a day for keys.. I’m still working my way through all the keys in improvising on the 12 bar blues, today was the start of a new key, Ab. (This is convenient because I’m also working my way through all the songs I feel like every keyboard player should know and this week’s is Take the A Train, which is in Ab)

I’m still growing pretty regularly, and I’m starting to surprise myself. I have to imagine another six months of this and I’m going to be shredding.. it’s so frustrating sometimes because I’m *almost* good.. 😉

So, I have started this post a few times and just tossed it into drafts when it turned into a rant against the conservatives – which, yes, I loathe the viewpoint of, but that’s not really the point I wanted to make in this article.

The point I wanted to make in this article is we’re fighting the wrong battles, as in, the trillions we spend on weapons should be spent on health care and getting better at being friends, getting along, and working together. That I feel like wanting to be polyamorous still involves being something of a beta tester argues for the viewpoint that we haven’t really mastered getting along – as does the high divorce rate and high stress level many relationships suffer from.

And then, of course, the pandemic makes the argument that we should be spending trillions on health care – as does the fact that people can’t decide to live longer than a hundred years because we don’t have the tech to support that.. and even within a hundred year lifespan, we have to experience massive amounts of suffering because our bodies were not designed, they were evolved, and they slowly malfunction while exposing us to all kinds of unreasonable levels of suffering.

There’s also the point I’ve made that we should be spending billions of dollars and hundreds of thousands of man-hours on studying neuroscience and the way neural networks behave because until we know what we’re measuring *with*, we won’t *ever* really know what we’re measuring.

Anyway, you would think we could reach a place where we would acknowledge that no one should be invading anyone any more, and the world as a whole should stop anyone who tries, and we should move forward with fighting our common enemies, the many problems that plague all of us. Of course I am mostly talking about health care here, but also automation and the like, because we shouldn’t have to be enslaved or afraid any more – we should be easily able to reach a place where food and housing is guaranteed for all.

One of the things humans seem to love to do is oversimplify problems, fail to identify the root cause, blame a individual, and then punish them and feel good about how they’ve solved the problem. (Hint: They haven’t. They’ve made it worse)

One of the places I see this the most often is the criminal justice system. In the case of the black folk, we have perpetrated a whole bunch of brokenness (slavery, jim crow limiting access to education, and so forth) and then we blame them for being broken after we broke them, and we lock them up with a bunch of other broken people so they can all entrain on each other’s brokenness, and then we’re shocked when there’s a huge recidivism rate.

I agree in general with the people saying defund the police – I’d say let’s also defund the military, because they’ve thugged around in other parts of the world doing massive amounts of damage to humanity as a whole. What we need to do with the funds, though, is figure out where things are really broken and what we can do about it.

In general very few things are one individual’s “fault”. It’s a common failure of abrahamic religions that they paint the idea that we all have ultimate free will and we deserve torture or reward based on our behavior, but the truth is most people do not have a lot of free will as having a lot of free will turns out to be a *lot* of work. It’s the nature of our minds that we are the product of our environment and the box of options we can see open to us is generally fairly small. We tend to build decision trees based on past experiences of what worked and then anneal them until they are very nearly unchangable – witness all the staunch right-wing constitutionalists defending Trump as he shreds the constitution to enrich himself. (Of course it’s not exactly Trump’s fault either, as he is also a product of the life he’s led – he’s broken because his environment led him to be broken)

One can always wonder what would have happened if someone had bought hitler’s art.. and in general I think we should fund artists *regardless* of whether we think they’re any good or not because A: you have to start out bad and get good and B: we have *enough* to feed and house everybody – it’s just the bosses love enslaving folks and so they get off on having us all live in fear. And they are likewise probably the product of a broken culture that *they* grew up in.

Anyway, my basic point is, almost nothing is one person’s fault, and punishment is moronic. Consequences in order to provide negative training are a good idea – we don’t want to have *no* negative results. If you doubt this, try to teach a dog not to bark using only positive reinforcement and you will discover that positive reinforcement has some problems when trying to teach to *not* do something. However, those consequences should be designed to be just enough that the lesson is learned – punish someone out of proportion to their crime and you’ve actually broken their mind worse and justifiably built a desire for revenge into them. It’s true that there are some people who don’t think this way but it still doesn’t make sense to have punishments that are completely out of scale for the crime. (For example, steal $100, spend 10 years in jail, steal $100,000,000, get told what a good capitalist you are)

I do feel like I need to explore the idea of distributed fault that is a probability curve surrounding events more, because I am a product of my culture and I do often fall for the easy trap of simply blaming the most obvious source of the problem. And it’s undoubtedly true that even after we’ve managed to remove Trump and Mitch, the bugs in our culture that enabled them to get so much power and abuse it so thoroughly will still be there. We probably need a constitutional convention, but the bosses like that they can have the police beat us into submission and are not likely to go for having one.

Posts marked ‘Tinfoil hat’ are to be taken with at least a few grains of salt. They may not represent the beliefs of my mind as a whole but rather just the beliefs of certain subnets, or they may represent beliefs I hold which I think are contradictory, illogical, or unreasonable.

(Toto : I’ll be over you)
(todo: record cover and place link here)

Some people live their dreams
Some people close their eyes
Some people’s destiny
Passes by

There are no guarantees
There are no alibis
That’s how our love must be
Don’t ask why

[Pre-Chorus 1]
It takes some time
God knows how long
I know that I can forget you

[Chorus 1]
As soon as my heart stops breakin’
Anticipating
As soon as forever is through
I’ll be over you

[Verse 2]
Remembering times gone by
Promises we once made
What are the reasons why
Nothing stays the same

[Pre-Chorus 2]
There were the nights
Holding you close
Someday I’ll try to forget them

[Chorus 2]
As soon as my heart stops breakin’
Anticipating
As soon as forever is through
I’ll be over you

[Guitar Solo]

[Chorus 3 with repeats]
As soon as my heart stops breakin’
Anticipating
(Anticipating)
Someday I’ll be over you

As soon as my heart stops breakin’
Anticipating
(Anticipating)
Someday I’ll be over you
As soon as my heart
(As soon as my heart stops breakin’)
(Anticipating)

MLM folks, *do not* have in person parties.

“But no one is sick!”

The problem is, COVID can

A: Be totally asymptomatic.. you feel just fine, but you are shedding – releasing hundreds of billions of copies of the virus

B: Be shedding before it’s symptomatic.

And

C: The test probably false-negatives fairly often, based on the number of people I know who got the test negative but are obviously sick with it. One thing I suspect also is that whether a person believes they have it or not may affect what answer they *hear* regardless of what the actual answer *is*. The human brain is a very tricky animal especialyl when death is involved.

“But I need to pay the rent”

Look, if the landlords evict us, we will *end* them. All we have to do is a special type of general strike where we give them all the money. Once all the tokens are in one group’s possession, they are totally worthless and then we will create a new type of money. Remember, we make the value, they don’t. Go back and read resource allocation as a group, especially the last part.

Only one musical post in all of 2018. Going to have to do better in 2019. I tracked ten different songs that I didn’t think were good enough to release in 2018, and I’ve tracked three so far in 2019. I’m not sure if I need to turn down the lint level, or if I’m just working towards another plateu. On the other paw, it’s not like I get emails clamoring for more of my music or anything 😉

One thing I’ve really been feeling is the sense of missing people. I miss Phoebe, I miss $PERSON, I don’t really ever seem to get over the people I’ve lost. I miss my uncle joe.. I’ve even reached the point of missing my dad, who is still in my life. (I have set up a camping trip with him – I’m not so stupid as to not fix the ones that can be fixed).

One of the things with Phoebe is remembering and regretting all the stupid things I said, especially during our break-up. I know that I participated in breaking that friendship too badly to be repaired and I wish that I had a time machine so I could do things somewhat differently.

Ah well, we go on. What other choice do we have?

I think part of what bothers me about missing $_PERSON at this point is that it’s been so long since I had any kind of contact that I have *no* idea who she is. At some point your copies of copies of memories have no real reliability to them at all, and generation loss has pretty much etched that one away to where it’s nothing but a guess. That combined with the sense that the things that pushed her away were not really me – I mean, they certainly weren’t who I would choose to be and they all occurred in extreme mental states.

Recently I spent some time talking to a facebook friend who seemed to have been experiencing a extreme mental state of her own. A number of my friends criticized me for this, or at least expressed doubt that this was a wise use of my time, but I am fairly sure that what I was doing fit nicely inside my philosophy of ‘be excellent to each other’, and that if more people behaved the way I do, the world would be a better place.

and I have to admit as I research neural networks, my half – and often scarred memories – combined with blackouts – of the periods where I wasn’t myself are telling. I’m fairly certain what I was experiencing was islanding – very large collections of subnets, large enough to be able to respond to stimuli but not large enough to sustain consciousness. This brings up the interesting question of, in DID, are the alters conscious? I’ve always assumed that they are, but then I’ve been doing kitteny neocortex research that is making me question that assumption.

One of the things I’ve realized is that there’s no way we currently know to know whether a neural network is having a conscious experience or not. A NN will learn, and respond to stimuli based on what it’s learned, whether or not the ‘magic’ of consciousness is there or not. At this point I tend to agree with the person who theorized that consciousness is what information feels like when it’s been processed, but I think that’s only true in a very specific context which likely has to do with the way temporal memory works. However, in building my unsupervised learning system for the kittens, I found myself implementing something very similar to short term memory because in order to do unsupervised learning in the model I’m currently using, you have to let LTP create the bindings first, *then* learn the lesson. You also have to keep track of previous lessons so you can unlearn them if they turned out to be wrong. (At least, to solve my particular problem that I’m working on at the moment you do).

I haven’t really come up with any new years resolutions – I have a vague sense that I’d like to exercise more, vape less, eat less, write more music, and generally try not to break anything critical about my life.

So, while there’s much shouting back and forth and wrending of garments on the subject of whether collectivism is good or bad, whether the time has come for socialism, and how much damage being a member of the 1% does, I’m curious – we all have strong opinions, and obviously we’ve all got reasons for them, but has anyone done any software modeling on this?

It should be possible to, by looking at recorded data for the many hundreds of countries and thousands of industries and the like, create software models for various types of collectivism and capitalism and any other systems we’ve got records for, and determine what the best answer is. While right-wingers may feel firmly convinced that collectivist attempts are doomed, and certain aspects of the left that socialism will cure all our woes, I’m not really all that convinced that anyone who has never modelled the problem actually has any idea at all what will and won’t work.

Clearly capitalism comes with some advantages re: competition, but also clearly as we move into the age of automation we’re going to have to do UBI or *something* or we’ll have no jobs left and people will be forced to starve to death because they’re more expensive than machines. I guess one question that we should probably start with is, can we agree why we’re here? Can we at least agree it’s not to starve to death?

If we can, could we perhaps model some of these things? Maybe try to determine how much collectivism hurts initiative and innovation, figure out whether we could even successfully run as a collectivist system at all when measuring in real resource costs rather than in stupid-fiat-dollars?

I grant you that modelling this problem would not be a insignificant challenge – after all we’re not talking about the Glooper here – but I imagine we’d have a lot better luck with it than we would with modelling the weather, especially if we look at it as a problem in probabilistic behavior and determine based on pre-existing data what likely probabilities are.

Then again, it may be that some members on both sides are so firmly programmed that they couldn’t accept the output of a software modelling problem in the area of collectivism if it were run. I do often wonder, if we weren’t all being programmed by the left & right medias and our peer groups / bubbles in what exactly we’re supposed to think, what *would* we think? There have got to be *some* people who recognize the sheer folly of the idea that the other side must be completely and totally wrong. Yes, I’ve chosen my side, but I like to think the people on the other side are not idiots and I also like to think that one of these days we will stop shouting at each other and start devising some scientific methods to ascertain what the truth really is.

Of course the problem with this is there’s a chunk of people out there convinced that some God who has made no attempt in recent memory to get in touch with us and is quite possibly a work of fiction comprised by various unsavory elements of our past culture in a attempt to achieve some form of social control is actually completely in control and if science says something other than what they expect to see from God, then science must be wrong. Have faith even in the face of hard data, or you’re a bad $RELIGIOUS_NUT.

Ah, the human condition. Full of so many interesting miseries and contradictions.