Friday, April 27, 2007

Does the universe have AADD?

I have been considering whether I am AADD and might benefit from Ritalin or something like it. I know Erdos swore by his speed. I certainly qualify: I have a hard time finishing things, I'm not very focused, I seem to go from one thing to the next and have a hard time hitting deadlines. This can be very frustrating at times.
But I kept having this nagging feeling that some of what I add in the world and at work is because of this. I know a big part of what I enjoy about being conscious is seeing the big patterns and ingenious ways reality seems to work. Let's just take the signs I listed.

I have a hard time finishing things.
But I do deliver things. They're just not finished. They work, they do what they are supposed to, but they can't be finished, because nothing is ever really finished.
I am always working on the same thing: to (in the Zen sense) do nothing. When you start working on something, you realize it's connected to other things, not superficially, truly connected. The economy of a country is connected to its laws, it's connected to other countries' laws and and other economies, and so on. Adjusting an economy without looking at tariffs and so on is not losing focus, it's not seeing the whole problem. We don't just systematically ignore all of the higher order terms in the Taylor series expansion of something do we?
Yes, there are seperable systems, and we love them because they are easy to solve. But the real problems we face are not separable, reducable. It's inevitable, once the easy problems have been solved, then you have to solve the harder problems, and so on.
Everything is connected, and the more important of interesting it is, the more connected it is.

I lack focus.
But it's not because I'm distracted by moving objects or flashy colors. I am very focused on learning the different ways complex phenomena are described, concepturalized, and so on.
If the universe has a focus, that will be my focus. But what is the universe focused on? What people call focus, most of the time, seems like studying the font something is written in rather than what it says. I can be focused enough to see that category theory talks about coordination one way and chemistry in a sligthly different way, and of course, relativistically speaking, what does it even mean, and in computer science, you have the Byzantine general. If you understand the little picture how can you understand the big picture? How can you really understand the little picture if you don't know what the big picture is? How do little pictures become the mosaic of the bigger picture?
Is the bigger picture inside every smaller picture?

I have a hard time hitting deadlines
True, but sometimes I deliver things before anyone even knows they need them. That makes up for it. Knowing the future is very powerful in the right hands. You don't have to know exactly when things will happen, just a time span, then you (implicitly) buy an option on it.
How do you know the future? If you see the right patterns, it's just like now - only more complex. You just have to get far enough away from it to see it all happening.
Plus, plenty of creative people have a hard time hitting deadlines. I don't think I need a cure for creativity.

So - I'm going to pass for the time being on this AADD thing, at least until I'm convinced the universe doesn't have it too.

Monday, April 23, 2007

Cognitive reflection

"Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities."
—Voltaire

I was at Thinking.net and was reading Waking the "Mindfield" How Systemic Thinking Helps Avoid Common Fallacies in Thinking and Action by Daniel Aronson. It occured to me that there might be ways a person could tell if they were in a self-reinforcing schema pattern as described above. Yes, systems thinking teaches you lots of schemas and how to compose them into metasystems and metametasystems and ...
That is the way - but what about people who don't have that background?
Are their decisions and their effect in the world and on society and history simply to be tolerated? If fewer people had only a linear dynamic schema would we have started doing something about global warming sooner? Very smart people can make the mistakes outlined in the article. They don't usually make them at work, but they have some "natural" schema they use for real life. There are probably even some systems scientists out there that use false attribution in their personal lives.
Anyway, here's a stab at some things someone could do to check if they were in a self-reinforcing schema.

1st way - If you have only one schema type it's probably self-reinforcing. Add another,an eastern way, a physics way, an aesthetic way, there are plenty out there.

2nd way - Think about how a schema progresses. If it's healthy, it will become more complex as time goes by and will include more and more types of information.
By complex I mean something like Kolmogorov complexity,some measure for size of the smallest program that could generate all the information your schema recognizes for some phenomenon.
For information, I'm using the Bateson definition: "differences that make a difference" (within your schema).

A self-reinforcing schema will not continue to progress in complexity over time and will not include new kinds of information. It can get more information and get more complicated but it doesn't get new kinds of information because it isn't complex enough (I'm sort of invoking the law of requisite variety here...).

So, how much has your schema really changed since school, college, career, marriage, home, family, ...? Are you listening to any new kinds of music, reading any new kinds of books, incorporating any kind of new philosophy?

3rd way - Add schema that blocks self-reinforcing schemas.

What does this schema look like?

It takes the current schema, looks at the input patterns and then compares those to example environments. By a combination of inspection and inference, the dual of the predominent schema can be formulated (at least loosely). This schema can then be tested by the main schema. If the conclusions from the dual are roughly the same as the master schema, you're probably ok. If not, there might be a problem. Now based on the inputs for each, check to see which schema includes more kinds of information. The human test is, spend some time looking at everything you usually don't look at, if the world starts making more sense as a result, then your schema might be self-reinforcing.

Here's a link to some other cool material on this "systems stuff"

Archetypes - Interaction Structures of the Universe

Sunday, April 22, 2007

Beauty

The cashier
in my line is
talking to the old man in
front of me
Calls him darlin'
"What about that orange juice there,
is that yours too darlin'?"

She is
loving
this
old
man

I recognize her
I saw her coming out of
the store a few days before
and was taken by how
strange
she looked
A mangy cat like face of a woman
young-ish
with the kind of moustache women
can get, but
unattended unconcealed

She has a slightly dazed look
about her
like she's been caught on
camera

And now I notice, sneaking glances from
my place behind the old man
that one of her front teeth is broken
and that all of her teeth are brown and crooked
and filled with decay

When it's my turn to check out
I look into her face

She looks back at me with an expression
that says
"What are you looking at?"

Not that hateful kind...
...innocently asking
aware and
not aware

For the first time, I can see her eyes.

They are
beautiful
The kind of eyes some
waitresses
have
Wide, with thick
droopy lids
that slant down at the cheeks
suspended from a permanently
upturned brow
Eyes that seem to be asking -
What is it- hon?...
and I can see that
the rest of her face is actually
quite beautiful underneath the
cosmetic neglect
like a beautiful
painting
some school boy
has drawn a
moustache
on and blacked
out the teeth

If I was a god in some experimental universe
I would make some angels just like this
Just to see.....


Sunday, April 15, 2007

What this blog is about (for now)

I believe the universe has all of the truth in it.

There is no "human" truth that is not already present in the lessons of reality. Every fact is a lesson, every type of fact is a theory and every constant is a principle, if we just look.

I realize that where I am is an evolving point in time-and-understanding, and that where I'm at, is not necessarily where you're at.
Years ago, I was at this conference and was thinking I was pretty hot. So I go to the bathroom and I'm standing there at the urinal and I see that someone had written something, like people do, usually something obscene, or "for a good time call..." - but this said:



I was you

It really hit me. That's something I would definitely be able to say to my self-from-ten-years-earlier...and ten years from now be able to say it to me now! - woah - I am the dumb previous self of me ten years from now....so through a glass darkly - but at least if not awake, waking up. Excellent adventure! Excellent!










Anyway, how to locate yourself in some type of consciousness space?
Here's what I'm starting with - if the (intuited) gradient of where you are is pointing at something like (could be a different topic or subject type as long as it's about the same level of complexity) carefully re-listening to the entire set of recordings that Miles Davis made with John Coltrane in order to understand details about the mechanics of mastery, (kind of like, "...you might be a redneck."), then you might be a neighbor.

If you are working to really understand what other fields have to teach you about understanding the most most advanced aspects of your field, then you might just be a neighbor. Basically, I'm saying, if we think our gradients are similar enough in terms of consciousness (with respect to increase in complexity) - then we're at (roughly) the same abstract point in space. I expect the terrain to be similar in complexity and diverse in phenomena.


Now if you can say "I was you" to me - I would love to hear from you - what's it like up there? What am I missing? How much time have I got doc?

Here are some more terms that seem to be highly relevant in this neck of the woods:

Consciousness and Reality.
The relevance of systems theory, computer science, math, physics, biology, chemistry,...., fine art, literature, ..., history, sociology, psychology, cultural anthropology, ... in daily conscious life.
Responsibility and morality as conscious acts.
Ontology, epistemology, and metaphysics.
Digital physics and digital philosophy.
The singularity.
Consciousness and Reality.

Here are some cool links
Quantum Consciousness
Stream of Consciousness
Universe as Computer

And of course, fractals are everywhere. I may even be you at a different angle of magnification.

The recursion is stated finitely and runs indefinitely. So cool, so deep....

Worlds within worlds and suffering.

What is on the other side of consciousness, that is, what is it that we are conscious of, what can we be conscious of?
It seems that the more ways we have of seeing the world, the more of the world we see.If it is the sum of what is logically/mathematically, physically possible, then the more logics we have the more we'll see.If it is an imaginary world, then the more ways we can imagine, the more we'll see.If it is everything possible, then the more kinds of possibilities we understand,the more we'll see.It certainly isn't one way. Picasso's world lives along side Franco's.
The suffering of others is what stirs our moral consciousness. It gives purpose to all of our actions.It is the recognition of others and other things that places us in the world.Our notions of justice mean nothing if we don't answer the question that the suffering of others asks. If you don't know what the question is, then you don't see others as you see yourself.
Can we be moral without being (truly)educated?
If a law case is extremely complicated, what will the typical jury selection strategy be for the lawyer that wants to win at any cost?
Why are medical ethicists and ethicists in general people who know how to deal with complex circumstances. How "natural" should people's notion of cause and effect be to make the judgements of their generation? What effect did god or the devil as causes have on justice, lets say during the dark ages?
If as time goes by, we learn more ways of understanding the world, from superstition to geometry to algebra to calculus to topology to stochastic systems and on and on, when does simple cause and effect not create its own injustice?
Can you be fair to people if your explanation of things is god or the devil?Similarly, if you were taught that correlation doesn't mean causality and only believe it was true in math class and have since forgotten the fact and live as though it isn't true, aren't you likely to attribute cause to something merely correlated at some point, and isn't it likely that one of those times you will(accidentally) falsely accuse someone of something. If you know it is true, and ignore it, are you responsible for the harm? If you sincerely seek to be moral, do you not at some point say, okay, let me see if there are ways of looking at cause and effect differently than I do since, cause and effect plays a big role in moral judgement. Is there a time to say, "You should have learned this by now." -

If we use Bayesian approaches to diagnose things when we are supposed to care (at work),how is it tolerable for the world we share to be composed mainly of simple pairings, that is, the mistaken notion, a implies b, implies, b implies a. There is no cardinality except in the case of direct experience. Is it moral then for those who do see the world many ways, probabilistic, stochastic, dynamic, chaotic,as well as predicate calculus and description logics and modal logics and eastern and etc. to ignore the vast numbers of people still operating in the world of an eye for an eye? If for nothing other than our own survival, we should introduce everyone we can to more ways of looking at the world.Then the world would get larger and softer.If we want to "manage" the singularity, why are "we" not "managing" the the inevitable network effect of unattended growth in ignorance with respect to growth in complexity and interdependence in the world?
If the world is a system, why is it not run by systems scientists? We don't have hack lawyers running gas stations or brick kilns or nuclear reactors. We don't have scientific ignoramuses running science departments, but we do have scientific ignoramuses running weapons programs. Figuring stuff out is the easy part if you're smart, getting not-so-smart people to understand it is the hard part. Why are most intelligent people in the world dominated by minds that are still operating at the greed and me-first level. Why is Kasparov being questioned instead of Putin or Bush. These are criminals running the world. How can it be that the smartest people in the world are so co-opted by the corporate state that they can't figure out a way to move the world into something rational and humane and just and beautiful. I guess they're too busy grading papers or designing weapons or pricing derivatives.
Can democracy work when the "people" is a fool?