Hick

Day 11.

The feeling that one had more time in youth is an illusion. There isn’t less time. That can’t be. What’s actually happening is that the brain has more stuff. Cramming even more things into it takes longer.

Measuring time in absolute units in the context of learning is not helpful. A measure for how fast the brain could process input per unit time would be more appropriate. Yet the many kinds of inputs and variations of brain states make for even more combinations of the two. Creating a yardstick for that is hard.

Sleeping is easy in comparison. There’s nothing like good sleep to give the brain time to make space for new data. It is of interest that the exact same cause as the brain having thoughts make getting to sleep difficult.

Once one makes the intention to sleep known, it’s as if thoughts become aware of being in line to the chopping block. Each one makes their best case right then hoping to survive the upcoming purge. Hear them one by one, but do not engage. It is their way to say goodbye.

Imagine holding a sieve against the current of a river. In fact we do not have to be so fancy. Imagine fingertips touching the sand spread against the coming and going of waves. Or against running water from an open faucet.

In this metaphor, there’s supposed to be some brain, some time, some sleep, and some learning; but they all got away. Sleep and don’t waste water. Enough for today.

Nathan Petrelli

Day 10.

It was a dream about flying. Lift right foot with both hands, and with one’s left foot leap. The sensation was akin to floating on water at calm sea. Except one is face down high above ground roaming around free.

And not without effort too. The intention to lift one’s foot was all too real. One could feel the fatigue and the need to come down. Until one regroups enough to give it one more try.

The feeling is not unfamiliar as this I would always try to do. The sun is bright and the sky is blue. How nice it would be to plant one’s face on the sea for a change? But then one would get reminded that one can’t breathe under water. And we know how snorkels suck.

Existence is fascinating. This notion of a place, the knowledge that one is somewhere. What is this I that got disappointed it wasn’t real when it woke up? It’s as if this body had a memory of being a fish in the water, of being unborn in the womb.

Brains have sections that map to the physical world. One could acknowledge that physical processes as information compression could lead to this. That sometimes one could be “awake” while it happens. That one plays around with Google Earth on occasion. Yet even so it’s surreal.

And thus continues the eternal swinging of the pendulum. From the freedom to think of the self as not needing a body as did Avicenna, to one who says enough is enough as Al-Ghazali. So on and so forth.

The fish I ate for dinner was delicious. Enough for today.

Taste and See

Day 9.

意見。Idea. See. Opinion. 意味。Idea. Taste. Meaning.

If one presses the key g while using the software Stellarium, one could see the stars through the ground. One with eyes that could detect neutrinos would see only noise. Constraints make sense.

Butterflies taste with their feet. They sample leaves before laying eggs on them. Figs eat wasps. Early in U.S. history, the runner-up in the presidential election became the vice president.

There are so many dead websites. Addressing content on the internet is a problem. URLs are so brittle. The Wayback Machine is not sustainable. For the sake of preservation, at least search indices exist.

I could be wrong, but it’s very likely that Mangyan started as a pejorative exonym. It sounds so close to mga yan. They have names for themselves that most people do not use. We’ve got a long way to go.

Spinoza’s god couldn’t be a person. If it is the nature of being a person to have a perspective, then what else is there to see if one is already everything? That which is a person cannot be infinity itself. Or this explains why God is vain. Alas, the eternal cop-out is to say, all things are possible.

Cognitive dissonance shows up in many situations. Belief disconfirmation, induced compliance, and effort justification are some examples. To be fair, living is hard and people are busy. Enough for today.

Deep and Dreamless

Day 8. (Notes on J.T. Ismael, How Physics Make Us Free, Chapter 2, The Rise of the Self-Governor)

There are simple groups, like a bag of groceries. There are dynamical systems, like a steam engine. There are self-organizing systems, like a colony of ants, a crowd, or the free market. And then there are self-governing systems.

Individual ants follow simple rules. There is nothing in the colony coordinating its activity. Each ant is unaware of what others are doing. A self-organizing system is a collection of parts that do their own thing. Yet under random external pressure, the system arranges itself into a collective whole.

Atoms in a crystal emit individual lightwave trains when excited. One observes only a superposition of uncorrelated wave trains at first. When field amplitude is high enough, the atoms oscillate with coherence. Crystal atoms in a laser is a self-organizing system.

A self-governing system is a self-organizing system with an extra feature. It has a super routine that collates information from constituent parts. A self-organizing system responds to stimuli immediately. A self-governing system acts based on this collection of information instead.

This mediating computational cycle decouples behavior from stimulus. In humans, the brain separates information about the world from one’s location in it. One’s sense of presence in space develops into a sense of oneself as an embodied intelligence. One then conceives of one’s self as a source of volition.

Enough for today.

Nautilus

Day 7.

Pascal’s dad did not enroll young Blaise in school. John Locke did not approve forcing children to study. The notion that philosophy is the work of the devil growing up becomes useful once one outgrows the idea.

Discouragement to engage in popular culture, though, has negative consequences. Most don’t feel compelled and partake only on occasion. But to those who lack basic cultural references, a daunting challenge awaits. One could overcompensate and try to consume everything.

If one insists, there is a silver lining. It’s easy for adults to discount new things only as a bit different and not worth paying attention to. As a fraction of the sum of all past days, the value of each new day grows ever smaller after all. Maintaining childlike curiosity is hard.

Thus drastic changes in one’s worldview after youth present unique opportunities. Negative spaces left by discarded thoughts are useful scaffolds when building anew. Old ideas are new again. The ability developed through experience to grab thoughts by their affordances remain.

All the while, value systems are almost immutable. One could with great effort reorient the viewpoint of the mind. But the collections of the instances of existence that make the layers of the self remain. And so does the need for new layers to be of the compatible shape to add to such. Enough for today.

Sweet Summer Child

Day 6.

Nation-states enforce social contracts. They derive power from monopoly on lethal action. They decide how to represent value. Weapons make money.

When a thing becomes a thing it’s hard to revert to having the thing not be a thing again. This is not about the military industrial complex and its role in geopolitics. I meant this writing-everyday thing becoming more and more a drag and a nuisance.

That is not to say it is not tempting to pull words out of one’s posterior and have opinions about current events. Arms manufacturers want customers to sell to. What faster way to increase market share than to manufacture demand as well. That which aspires to be strong in its own fibre ought to be careful not to end up swaying to and fro in the wind.

Mark Chua disclosed ROTC corruption to The Varsitarian. Finding his body later in the Pasig river sparked protests that culminated with the NSTP Act of 2001. Renato Cayetano was the principal sponsor. PGMA was president.

Blame Thomas Hobbes and his winterbred ilk’s dire view of human nature. In an environment of plenty, Leviathans are unnecessary. But the monsters are already here. Scarcity mindset wins.

Whatever is going on, we’re at the tailend of something good. Enough for today.

Some things I noticed 02/24/2020:
  1. Nani?! Exempted because they know what they’re doing? ?
  2. Flat-earther, meet earth. Don’t do at home.
  3. Senate, do your thing.
  4. Imagine all the people...?”
  5. On the loose in Italy
  6. Drug Repurposing Hub
  7. deep learning predicts new antibiotics
  8. tunnel digger, 10x faster

Aporia

Day five.

As with most recent things, what’s happening in South Triangle is a timed misdirection. It will muddy the news cycle at a moment when clarity is not useful. After serving its purpose, the whole ruckus will come to pass. To get something done, any thing, one can’t go wrong leaning unto entropy, before doubling back. Also, track 12 of Gloc-9’s Matrikula comes to mind.

During the Islamic Golden Age, scholars gathered and translated all the world’s knowledge. One could object saying that education is not all about the content. Sure. To the extent that the actual point of schools is to babysit children so parents could work, they do well enough.

“The State shall assign the highest budgetary priority to education.” This underrated part of the constitution should allow for PTV to be under DepEd. After all, why should education stop? Mongols came. They destroyed libraries at the Siege of Baghdad. Arabic numerals survived.

Learning seems like nudging boundaries. One might expect to be able to go back to where one has been before, having covered it all. But knowledge does not wrap around a sphere. The number of unknown unknowns a person can encounter has no bounds. Once born, a person can only be more stupid.

February 2006. 73 people died at the PhilSports stadium stampede. About 400 people got injured. Enough for today.

Some things I noticed 02/23/2020:
  1. Progress is simply # of iterations × progress between iterations.
  2. Breed two images to create new ones using neural nets
  3. Only the present is real, and even it isn’t
  4. God sits on his throne so he too has to have one
  5. Basically, variations on how to eat sunshine.
  6. Now I’m a believer!
  7. This beats using Ra in a mnemonic to remember 予
  8. Manuskript
  9. Slow start. Best possible ending.