Knowledge is Power Part 2: The extended potential well.

I like potential wells. Its easy to bridge to common sense: If a broken down car is between two hills, a takes work to push it out of there, up a hill. If the same car is sitting in a tiny dip on top of a hill, the work it takes to push it out is less than the work you can harness out of the car rolling down the hill, if say, it had a rope attached to it, you could use that work to pull a skateboarder up the hill, because a car is heavier than a skateboarder and that's how things are. Getting it rolling down with a push would be less work than pulling the skateboarder up yourself.

That's a potential well, a car sitting in a dip on top of a hill. It has potential to do work, it just needs a little push, a little work put in, to get more out.

But what is an extended potential well?

Well, its all cars, sitting in dips on the top of all hills, plus the information I just gave you - that you can get energy by pushing them out with a rope tied to them. In this case the push isn't just the effort put in, its the knowledge that you can do this. Information, remember, is power. 

Fusion is the same thing, except the car is in a volcano crater on top of Everest. A huge amount of energy needs to be put in to get it out, but even more is there for you if you can actually do it. The extended potential well is all cars in all craters on top of all Everests...Okay, that metaphor is stretched too thin. Its all hydrogen nuclei that could be fused to make helium, a situation that's all over the universe waiting to be tapped. If you can just do it.

But back to the metaphor. It takes work to get the car out of the crater, no doubt. But it takes even more work to figure out how to get a car out of a freaking crater on top of mount Everest. But like I said, knowledge is power. And it takes work to know. Once you know how, you've tapped the extended potential well.

There's a certain amount of energy that must be put in to fuse two nuclei. A physicist could tell you. Also, there's a certain amount of information on the topic you'd need to learn before you can build a fusion reactor to do this at all. Information too, remember, is energy. Its the energy needed to tap the extended potential well of fusion, the knowledge needed to do this on a repeated basis, and harvest results out of it. The extended potential well of fission has already been overcome with information, that's why we have nuclear energy.

In my most twisted and psychotic intuitions, I see that the amount of information needed to do this may be knowable, though the path would still not be revealed. But I'll leave that alone. Suffice to say I think its very worth it to study the unfolding of our own knowledge as it happens, a sort of meta-scientific inquiry.

Pushing the potential well lets us gain energy, pushing the extended potential well let's us know how to get the energy. The biggest trip is that at the fundamental level, these two are on in the same. 

Knowledge is Power Part 1

Knowledge is Power

I'm writing this to get to the core of that idea. Knowledge is power, information is energy.

Scientists have known for a long time that information – knowledge – can be converted directly to energy. The proof of concept is the Szilard engine, a 1929 thought experiment, and refinement of Maxwell's demon that shows how having one bit of knowledge about a thermodynamic system can be used to harness work from that system.

Its an idea that makes sense of thermodynamics. Thermodynamics says that a system should move toward higher levels of entropy: If a box filled with gas has all particles on one side, (low entropy) the laws of probability say the vast majority of possible states have the particles distributed somewhat evenly across both sides, so the most probable state to find the system later is equilibrium. A move from imbalance to equilibrium is almost inevitable. And that's what it does, simply because its most probable.

However, this idea doesn't actually preclude movements from high entropy to low entropy. To see it, imagine 5 or so gas particles randomly moving around a box. It would happen from time to time that all 5 would end up on one side, it would simply be less probable than finding a mix with some on each side.

So then couldn't we simply watch the particles, wait for this to happen, and then harness work from them when they do as they seek out a higher entropy state? Without Szilard, the answer would be yes, and we would be able to build a free-energy machine.

But with Szilard, we see the fundamentally equivalence between information and energy, and know this is impossible. Simply put, it takes energy to know things. It takes energy to flip a bit. And his work shows that the energy cost needed to know where the particles are at any given time must be equal or greater than the amount of energy that can be harvested from having that information. Thermodynamics saved, Maxwell's demon slain.

But equivalence is a two-way street, the energy cost of knowing things isn't that much of a mind blowing fact: Computers take electricity, our brains take calories. So that's interesting, but well within the realm of the intuitive. But on the other hand, the conversion of knowledge/information to energy, the hidden side of this equivalence relation, is a BIG FUCKING DEAL.

Its a big fucking deal not just because what it says, but because of the scope of the truth it applies to. The second law of thermodynamics has proven to be one of the most powerful and far reaching laws, resonating in each new framework of science that is explored. The reduction of Von Neumann entropy to Shannon entropy shows yet another holy repetition of the same mantra.

But the ideas I think are most powerful are the common sense ones, which are informed by scientific realism. From this desire for common sense, I ask a simple question:

How Many Bits Does it Take to Power a Light bulb?

This is an absurd question really, but as is my style, through absurdity, veritas.

The question has an answer. The quantum nature of things – by which I mean a fundamental level under which units of energy can no longer be divided, must also apply to computer/information theory if the second law of thermodynamics is to hold. There must be a minimal energy to to both observe a system, and a minimal energy to record something, to set a bit. This ensures we cannot create a free energy machine from a Maxwell Demon or Szilard engine. It also gives to me a gut feeling of intuition on Young's double slit experiment, and the power of “observation” (information gathering) to change these systems, but exploring that feeling is beyond the scope of what I'm writing about here.

But what is this fundamental limit? There are probably physicists out there who could actually tell me, and I'd love to learn from them. But what interests me even more is how inequalities – departures from this pure level - so often manifest in this relation. For instance, the energy needed to literally track 5 atoms of gas around a chamber probably vastly exceeds the energy that could be harvested from them, if its even possible to track them at all. That's the dark side of this relation, the side that feels futile. But there is also a light side: How many bits of information were collected by exploratory deep earth imaging by X fossil fuel company before their latest fracking operation? And given the fundamental equivalence relation between information and energy, what order of magnitude describes the amount of energy they got out, vs the amount of information they put in? Certainly its huge. Or again, what is the relationship between the total amount of bits – again expressed in terms of these fundamentals - we will learn about how to create fusion energy before humanity actually does it? And what order of magnitude to the increase then, when we have discovered a power source that will provide zettajoules for eons of our great^18 grandchildren, after just a couple centuries of research? Certainly, there is so much to gain from that work.

The reason I'm presenting this image, this way of looking at things in terms of exploiting imbalances in information energy equality, is because I feel it provides a general framework for looking at things going forward. The peak oil question has long been a matter of great importance, and now we have a new lens: For a long time its been known that the cost of getting at the remaining oil increases as the most easy to get to reserves become tapped, but now we can see the whole picture: The actual cost is the energy/bit cost of finding the oil that remains, the energy/bit cost of figuring out how to get to it, and and the cost of getting to it, all this offset by the gains. (given by the same information seeking research) This provides the whole picture of oil costs going forward, a generalization of what has been said before. But what's elegant about this particular generalization is how elegantly it flows into alternative sources of energy, like fusion. The cost of getting to the deep oil, and the cost of getting to fusion, are measured in the same fundamental units of information/energy. “Drill baby drill” can mean into the earth, or it can mean into the unknown realms of high energy physics needed to make fusion a reality. How deep you may have to go before you hit gold can be an open question, but after putting enough in, you are guaranteed to get a hell of a lot more out, if the fundamental assumptions are right.

But I'm not here to advocate for fusion research, though I think its a good idea. What I'm saying is that at a deep and fundamental level of the universe, energy acquisition is an IT problem. (where “IT” can be taken to stand for Information Tech or Information Theory) And I mean “law of gravity” deep and fundamental:

Knowledge is power, and power is knowledge. Information is energy, and energy is information. Information systems are what can identify potential energy for harvesting within a physical system, whether these information systems are our brains identifying wood that we can burn at the camp sight, or food we can eat for calories, or complex computers identify thermal imbalances in our new climate that can be exploited for electricity. Its the same game. Its all the same fundamental forces at work. Information machines like brains identifying energy sources and exploiting them. This is as fundamental as the forces which drive life itself.

That's why, when I hear alternative energy narratives that focus on solar panels and windmills as “all there is”, I know we have failed. Both these these are good ideas, both of these ideas had a certain amount of bits of learning put in to make them happen and make them energy positive, and they work. But in saying these are all there is, we've missed the fundamental, profound, big fucking deal that is information-energy equivalence:

I've seen a once-free-energy-conspiracy-theorist attach a wire to hobby drone, and fly it up in to the air to power a small engine with the electrical potential difference between the air 100 feet up and the ground. Of course we know this potential difference can exist, when it gets really big that's where bolts of lightning come from. But what we ignore is that its there most of the time, and it can be harvested. Does the energy needed to know about it exceed the energy that can be harvested? I highly doubt it. With a tall tower I'll bet a person could harvest a little energy from the air above, on and off, all day long. More in a thunderstorm.

My point isn't that this small amount of energy is a solution to our energy needs, its not. My point is to say that sources of potential energy are around us all the time, if we only cultivate the information frameworks that can see them. That means embracing information acquisition as the path to energy acquisition in general, whether they apply to superficial knowledge of the systems around us, or to deep theoretic principles. The two are, at some level, one in the same.

Peace!

Freedom!

I was looking at the stars the other night, thinking of how awesome it would be to have my own Star ship. Of course the goal would be to find strange new worlds. But then the thought came to me: Even if I could travel much faster than light, would I find those "m-class" planets? Or is space just too vast that all probability says I would never find one?
The information age is well upon us, and we are flooded in an absolute deluge of information. Its pretty much impossible to sort it all out. That's the funny thing, with all this info, I don't fell like anybody is getting any smarter, know what I mean? The great realization of this time may not stem from the floods of information available to us, but from the fact that there is no way in hell anybody can possibly take it all in.
Its this fundamental fact, the realization of ignorance, that most defines this time. It may be that the greatest expression of human intelligence is not in knowing a lot, but in knowing exactly what you don't know, as well as what you don't know you don't know, (to quote Rummy) and bringing it into our calculations.
For most people though, its a hard step. The comfort of the world we thought we knew falls away, and we are left with a world where "reality" is nothing but an approximation, a story. This can lead to its own disease of thought, one where we don't think reality exists at all. The "nothing is true" mentality. But the very statement "nothing is true" shows this cannot be the case, for if nothing is indeed ultimately true, then the statement "nothing is true" cannot be true either, so something must be true. This reasoning doesn't, however, tell us what that true something is...So what we are left with is an ultimate Reality we only know by implication. I call it "The Implicate Order" (no relation to Bohm's work) because I like the sci-fi poetics of it. Throughout history though, people have called it "God". The point is, its real, its out there, but its nature is always ultimately mysterious to us. Its the truth about God, The Universe, and everything, and its simply to large to fit in our little mortal brains.
So what are we left with? The functioning of our tiny mortal brains, the point of this blog. (before it also became my safe place for drunken babbling) Mortal brains function like life, they are bold. They don't understand the game well enough to know what will win, but they play anyway. They pick a strategy, a story or narrative, and they go with it. They move forward. And they call that story 'reality', used as a substitute for the thing they cannot see, God, the implicate order. That chosen reality is experienced as real, but its actually the lens through which we experience our fragment of the Implicate Order. Physical evolution is similar: a base strategy (do what worked before) dictates the shape of life forms, then they combine a couple forms through sex and try some new form. They have absolutely no idea, no reasoning as to why a form might work, they just throw something out, and its judged by the implicate order. The successes are passed on through rule 1. Our minds work basically the same way.
But this leads us to a startling conclusion: 100% of people are technically lying all the time. Not the rational "nothing is true" type of lie I talked about above, but the kind of lie that is told when one drunk mentally disabled man tries to explain the theory of relativity he heard about to the other: No deception is intended, but he simply doesn't have the capacity to relate the actual thing. He gives it his best, but it will always fall short. So its all lies anyway, right? Nothing is true? No. Though this is a place where natural language falls a little short in expressing what I am saying, it remains that the implicate order is True. Whatever stories are told, they will be judged for their utility within the context of the implicate order. So life, that of living things and of stories told, is the process of making offerings to the implicate order, and discovering what things might be acceptable in it's sight.
To see what it has found acceptable, one need only consider that the live of thoughts is an extension of the story of the life of forms, and take a walk in some pristine nature. This is the product of the implicate order over billions of years, this is what's pleasing in its sight.

Constantly regard the universe as one living being, having one substance and one soul; and observe how all things have reference to one perception, the perception of this one living being; and how all things act with one movement; and how all things are the cooperating causes of all things which exist; observe too the continuous spinning of the thread and the structure of the web
 -Marcus Aurelius, The Meditations, 167 CE

So that's what works, that's what succeeds. Those little flowers in the field. Why? We really don't know, but their existence is the product of passing many tests of time. The words of Marcus Aurelius are the same, I'm writing them almost 2000 years after the fact. Why? Because they have that quality we call true, the resonate with the implicate order, the real Truth of which we cannot understand. 

But the key with both, is that they exist... Which tells us that at some point in time, something, and somebody was given enough freedom to express itself in a new form, to play with new ideas and stories, to roll the dice in the ancient game of making offering to the Implicate Order. It is from that freedom from which all things were ultimately born, and it is that freedom to express in new way which ultimately gives rise to our collective destiny.  

"The W know first is the W don't. "

That's what the situation in the middle east is a case of, I've heard it many times on the news.

Needless to say, my ears have been having problems. Doctor says its an infection, with a wax buildup. The interesting thing is that it makes you a little dizzy, it makes you more awkward even though your eyes are fine.

Dylan Ratigan has apparently decided to have a 21st century news program, which is great - his last show reported on energy issues and robot vision. I wanted to comment on the latter. In the last post I didn't publish, I wrote:

Modect stereoview.

Basically, you use motion events off still background to enforce 3d motion detection zones in stereo security cameras. Because due to the limited nature of stereo motion events in each frame, location is computationally cheap using old fashioned overlay. (where in one picture is inverted with 50% alpha and moved pixel by pixel over the other with contiguous grey areas as a match for that layer of depth.) Simple, effective. Fun.

This was about using two cameras to get a 3D field of view, like our eyes do. The algorithm I talked about above is good because you can set it up to only capture the kids when they get on your lawn (Thus triggering the "get off my lawn" senior citizen bot to chase them off) but it doesn't trigger when they are on the street behind, because it has 3d awareness of where things are. Since different layers of depth correspond to overlay offsets, the algorithm for detecting things only needs to compute a limited number offsets to determine if motion events are in the zones it cares about.

But the broader issue I want to write about is the generalized "synaesthesia" of the brain, how integral combining data from numerous inputs is to its function. To wit: Cyclopes fail. Nature does produce them, the disease is called Cyclopia (I read about it the other night.) And they don't make it. The Great Scientist tried this experiment long before the first human scientists even existed, and it didn't work. Nature gives large animals at least two eyes, and more to smaller animals like spiders. The great achievement of the brain is combing these two inputs into a unified experience.

Second, there are more than two inputs. I have been stumbling because my ears are sick, so there is some kind of accelerometer in there that helps me balance, notes my movements. This aids my eyes in constructing the scene I am in.

Third, there is more than stereo scopic stuff going on in depth detection. If I close one eye and look at my finger before my face, I can detect its depth by focusing on the finger (making the background blur) and then focusing on the background (making my finger blur)

4th, there are zones my brain deals with, 3 to be precise. 1) Far away (stereo vision can't differentiate between distant objects, a cloud looks as far away as the moon as the sun, as the stars) 2) medium (where stereo vision works) and 3) close where stereo vision breaks down and I rely more on focus, or a "holy shit" response is triggered, such as a bird flying 3 inches in front of my face will make me close my eyes and pull away.

The data structure about the space we are observing is probabilistic. We go with the best model until new data overthrows that model, makes it improbable. Observe it in your own brain here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XyALAuKiKug

You think one thing until new data updates your spacial model.

The fact that we get a good 3d sense of a scene from a 2d movie, like in the video above, shows that the majority of our spacial perception is done with correlating data not between two separate still stereo frames, but between what we see now and what we saw a spit second ago and what we saw a split second before that. But I think that the two eyes are the way we train that. I don't think a cyclops would develop that as well. Its like "If I see in my right eye what I saw in my left eye a second ago, I must have moved a few inches to the left." The brain gets its core training from stereo vision.

I was able to construct 3d scenes which stereo vision could not make a model of, its easy and their name is legion. One of the funnest is to exploit the correlation problem's weaknesses, to cause the brain to make false correlations. Magic Eye pictures do that. Your brain will assume a repeating pattern when there actually isn't one, and will falsely correlate one tiny jellybean with another just like it in the other eye, when they aren't actually the same, so they create the illusion of depth where there is none.

Here is a 3d magic eye image showing the image offset method to reveal its 3d secret. Original (larger here if you want to actually do it):

Offset:

Notice contiguous grey area in middle, corresponding to the field of depth represented by the offset you can see on the left. (I really love my Brother MFC-240 btw. Great printers.)

So what you have here is a situation where if you put the image and its inversion together with no offset, its totally grey. But you also get grey with other offsets, so there are many possible spacial constructions. You brain PICKS ONE AND ONLY ONE for the current spacial model, but you can have it "pop" like a necker cube into the different view. So what you are talking about an edward scissorhands situation, you have a probability cloud and each new observation trims that bush down into the shapes all around. So you really want to throw everything and the kitchen sink at that cloud. As many eyes as you can, past frames, accelerometer readings, echolocation, audio triangulation, anything you can think of. The wonderful thing about nature is how dual use everything is: We think the bird is making a mating call, but that call also serves as a

1) self health check

2) echolocation environment update

3) alert to other males

4) test for predators when in optimal state to get away.

etc.

If my robot doesn't tweet like R2-D2, I'll know the designers gave up a lot of good possible data on space and material hardness data. (hard things echo better)

But anyway, its all about the Magic Eye/ necker cube pop. The brain instantly updates, it doesn't take a bunch of time to tear down its existing probability model and build a new one. Its like the secondary model was almost already built in the background, ready to go. Look at the picture above. The brain is a consistency finding machine, good at getting rid of noise. It pays attention to the consistently grey areas and gets rid of the noisy junk. So it must be with probability models. Consistent alternatives to the model perceived are calculated in the background, but those that have too many contradictions, those that can't be true are discarded with the noise. It has Occam's razor features, it looks for the simplest models and discards the rest. Once the dominant model becomes more complex than an alternative, the alternative becomes dominant. It works off of what it knows, but what it knows can be discarded at any time for a predefined alternative.

In other words, taking it back to the title, its a case of "the devil you know verses the devil you don't". If you know their both devils, then you know something about both already, though its the one you know the most about already that you claim to "know". These levels of knowledge between the subconsciously known and consciously known seem to be a really important part of all thought.

Figuring out what a framework like this looks like in computational terms is one of the great and fun challenges for robot vision folks, who I believe will be laying the foundations for real AI, simply because they are following the incremental development footsteps of the Great Scientist, who gave Her creations sight and sound a billion years before giving them language and abstract thought. Much smarter than not trying to start at the final product, the human mind.

The Eroticism of God is Death.

There, I said it. I got it out there. For all you Scorpios. Something to pin on your leather jacket with the other patches, of the punk rock bands and whatnot.

I intend to talk about God tonight, which is to say I intend to talk about real things, things that matter. So I will start with Amit Goswami. This sentient turtle/parrot man of the rebel alliance, has made quite a name for himself as an established quantum physicist who realized the deep philosophical ramifications of the science he was studying and shifted his focus away from the material worldview. I saw his movie called Quantum Activism or something, and I enjoyed it. I wanted to talk to him, I wanted to say "I know, I know how the light just flows into you, and you want desperately to share it, but your words are countable and finite, and the light is uncountable and infinite. So you just hit these points, you hope the viewers will connect the dots, you forget yourself, you share what you can. And is it enough? You know the nature of the phenomenon is that the ignorant are empowered to enforce the tyranny of their own ignorance. Thank GOD for the man who set me free. Was it you? Was it me?"

But that's not enough, that's not enough to say. Scientists like him demand rigor, that rigor which reduces the complex to the simple. The rigor of the reliable. But what if the reliable, I mean the old scientific reliable (reliable across numerous observers) simply does not hold within this new sea of truth? What if Freedom were the ultimately the enemy of (consensus) truth? Amit would just smile with that far away look. He would understand what I was getting at, but know my words were imperfect and can be taken in different ways. He would see my maths were strong on intent but imperfect.

I guess I have now stumbled drunkenly into the realm of poets. Nothing is real here, Nobody can reach or understand me here: I am beholden to all the stories I have written and devised, and I am pleased. Maybe authors are Buddhas. They understand that what they deal with after they die is they stories they themselves have written. Mine have been very few but good. Lord, take me to Hyder to meet the mermaid girl at the bar. Take me again to be with Lane, let her draw my blood and have her show me her father Santa claus the Devil, in the north pole where I may be frozen into a plaything, to be liberated by the gay Rudolph on the stripper pole, and run 200 miles with a teddy bear through the snow. These are my homes, these are songs written in the secret language in my soul, these are where I will be after I die.

Who takes ecstasy as their own? Who takes the most high and holy elements of existence their abode? Lord, what kind of pervert....




Yes Lord, WHO???



Who seizes by right what belongs to them?

I apologize, I have nothing REAL to say tonight.

You. Are. Invited.

You. Yes you, you cynical old man. You fat middle aged woman. You wretched soul, yearning to breath free air. You are invited to this.

Its not about you. Its really not. And that's GOOD news. Tonight I went out to the store, and I found in my yearning and loneliness, that there was for me a bag of original flavor corn nuts available for 89 cents. It was a gesture of love somebody made awhile ago, inventing corn nuts, putting them in a bag I could afford at just 89 cents. So I bought them, and wandered down the isle with tears in my eyes: It was just not enough. All the products, celebrating their little love to me with their offers, were just not enough. The love pouring to me off the shelves of the supermarket was just not enough to satiate my soul, to really speak to who I am.

I'm writing this tonight because I know the score, I know who's listening, I know what's at stake and I really want to provide you with something BEYOND the 89 cent bag of corn nuts I bought earlier. I want you to know that I am really trying, I am really trying to bridge this gap between the human souls of you and I. I am trying to say something real and pure. I am searching for the words right now, and all that comes to me is the line from a Leonard Cohen song: "The heart has got to open in a fundamental way". That's how it feels, a hunger in the heart, a yearning that consumes you, that makes everything else you've ever known and felt seem inconsequential. IT doesn't matter if I live or die, my little life and little pain just doesn't matter any more. Its about something more, its about YOU, its about future generations.


Its about LOVE, pure and simple y'all, that's what I am feeling tonight is about. And YOU ARE INVITED. Love your neighbor, love the average guy on the street around you, with all his imperfections. Lets reach beyond ourselves and think about everybody else. Lets bridge the gap between the thought and the reality.

Good night y'all, and PEace

We are beautiful people.

A million thoughts, vivisected.

Lord, the effort they put into this. Why Lord? Why?

Another path through the wilderness:

The words don't come easy. My right hand hurts from punching myself in the face the other day, and its hard to type. But type I must, some strange ancient code compels me, from the beginning of time. If you read this, save it on your hard drive, and publish it somewhere else in several years, or after I am gone. It doesn't matter that you don't understand, it really doesn't matter until the sun sets on ancient shores.

He's old and his skin is cold. The ancient secret is that there is not so much distance between the Gods and you. Its not written in some secret place, but rather in the wood glue, the smell of two by fours: The endeavor of construction that scientific advances always were and and will always be. The last realm of scientific conquest of this age (and this is the realm being explored now) is the realm of the self, this strange attribute of consciousness and the brain. There will come a time, when the man who dedicates his thoughts to the nature of self, just as men a generation or two before did to designing a better mousetrap, will be inevitably confronted with the fluidity of its nature.

We who are thinkers, we who are intellectuals, what a tiny amount of things we have achieved. Wise are those of us who honor our father and mother, who look back at Socrates. He reasoned: "All men are mortal, Socrates is a mortal, therefore Socrates will die". If you know the logical foundation of all mathematics, you know the importance of this. And in boolean logic, in every computer program that runs, or the ones of the future, the importance of this. Socrates must die. So thus the hemlock, thus the confession before his execution by the state, thus history, the executioners escaping down the crap shoot of history.

Its all there, a million silent flowers of divinity between the statement "Socrates must die" coming from his own lips to his students and the moment of execution. Both an eternity and the blink of an eye. And in this garden and its seeds, the hiding of it in the dark age, the planting of it in the enlightenment, the blossoming of it in Newton and Curie and Tesla and the rest yet always, Socrates must die.

Friends, none of this matters. Because the essence of it, the thing you should not be afraid to spill your own blood for because it is so true is, that Socrates must die, and this is perfect.

The issue is this, the man just does not die. What forgotten garbage did his shadowy executioners believe in? Nobody cares. What matters is that 2000 or so years after the fact, Socrates did not die. Perfect words are so rare, they form this kind of oasis that the hearts of the world drink from for so long, so long. But their perfection lies in their meaning, and their meaning is what was carried by the million silent flowers of divinity between their speaking, and the moment it was realized. Socrates must die.

A million silent flowers, speaking in a voice so loud that only children and fools have a hope of ever hearing them. The truth is so simple that nobody hears it: Even in these words I speak tonight, what is concealed from the wise and the prudent is revealed unto babes.

At that time Jesus answered and said, I thank thee, O Father, Lord of heaven and earth, because thou hast hid these things from the wise and prudent, and hast revealed them unto babes.

Yes, thank you. THANK YOU. A million times, thank you. Good night, America, Good night.

But it was only Fantasy

The wall was too high, as you can see. No matter how he tried he could not break free...

The Wall was the best album ever on the intersection of psyche and politics. It was an internal breakdown cast in terms of totalitarian fascist politics. I'm trying to look at what I'm exploring, what I was exploring with my letter to to future bot last night. What happens when that wall between internal mind and external reality is completely torn down? What happens when the walls of ego, who's who becomes vague and undefined? People talk about the worst 9/11 scenario as being the one where it was an "inside job", but I can imagine far worse things: The hijackers were a cover story, but a cover story developed to hide a far more horrifying truth. Pilots simultaneously, randomly decided to fly planes into the buildings for no apparent external reason whatsoever, acting in the control of some unseen outside entity. The government, the nice, visible government, having nothing to do with it. Then hearing the random comments from friends and loved ones, veiled comments of bizarre disasters of synchronized behavior to happen all around, them having no idea why they are making the comments at all, except that it seemed natural. (as I projected on my friend, after hearing reports of two individuals being hit by a train in the same day on the radio). Scientists researching it would awaken to find they had commited horrible crimes, claiming that their acts were impossible, as Amy Bishop did when confronted by police. That would really be the MOST horrifying situation you could be in.

But as with all truly terrifying things, the Lotus is in them, where there is fear there is something deeper that beckons for exploration. It seems to me that the most relevant thing is the question of self determination. Is the human being a deterministic machine? Penrose says no, believing that quantum phenomenon are at play. Others discredit Penrose, and I tend to side with them. I am not a physics guy, it seems to me that overlapping fields in the brain should fall at some small level into the domain of the quantum, but a good scientist shouldn't discount the fact that the human brain could be a deterministic system. The then raises the question of the self. I wrote a letter on it some time ago, about how humans relate to God. I made a metaphor where humans were computer programs and God was the programmer. So the human behavior is deterministic in the eyes of God, but in the eyes of man it is not, because he makes certain choices where he knows not the mechanism unfolding to to make them, and he calls this "free will". The programmer knows he simply veiled awareness of the deterministic means those choices are made from the program, so the free will experienced by the program is only an illusion feed by ignorance, its not free. If the programmer wants it go to some state, it looks at how the bot will react, and either tells it to go into the state or not to, knowing a priori whether the bot will obey or assert its "freedom" by disobeying, but in the end it will always accomplish the programmers wishes.

But what when the controller is a human and the bot another human? Has one made a slave of the other? As I've already said, the controlled believes itself to be free though accomplishing the will of the controller. Their mental processes are the outcomes of physical processes in their brain, being interfered with by the controllers device, which their ego identifies with as "their own". The controller, who's will is being projected, also is identifying unfolding physical processes, not being externally influenced, as being his own. So the state changes in his brain are going out via the control device and creating other state changes. It all physically makes sense, except for the ego itself. What IS this thing self, that goes around identifying with deterministic physical processes? What is the self?