LastThursday

Are you stupid? Do you like the smell of paper? I found the following video totally fascinating. Here's a young woman who's deciding that she's had enough of being stupid - and her process for becoming less stupid. From a philosphical point of view in many ways we're all stupid. Although, ignorant or inexperienced might be better words. But how is it that we can get to know something that is unknown to us? It's like being parachuted into an mysterious land and then trying to work out what to do with little or no prior information. How do we bootstrap ourselves? The fascinating part of the video is exactly that process of bootstrapping being explained. But she also explains why it is that she (thinks she) is stupid. From a personal perspective, it's interesting to get an insight into the thought processes of a person who is the antithesis of me. I've always been driven by curiousity and never been afraid to learn stuff, complex stuff, difficult stuff. Largely, I think I've been lucky to have always had that drive. Who would I have been if I hadn't had that? To a degree my sister is like the woman in the video, she was always afraid of or shied away from academic learning, despite her intelligence and talent; it was an identity she clung on to. With some coaxing from me, my sister did start a first degree in languages and sociology in her later years. She never finished it, but nevertheless I think it made her realise that she was more than capable of "not being stupid". Fundamentally, I think she didn't complete it because it directly confronted her deep seated identity with being anti-academic and in a way anti-learning. I hope it loosened things up for her. I would caveat that being academic is not the only way to be intelligent (!). The real process for not being stupid starts with awareness, awareness that something is off and needs to change. But I do think the trigger for that awareness is ultimately mysterious. Yes, you could be told directly "you're stupid", but that may not trigger awareness to do something about it: it's quite natural to just think "no am not!" or "yeah whatever" or "I'm naturally stupid, why bother changing it's impossible?". There's great intelligence in that awareness and that is the seed needed for bootstrapping yourself. In some ways this video speaks to my directly. I have a strong awareness that I myself need to bootstrap my way out of my current situation. But I'm stupid and have no idea what needs to be done. I need my equivalent of learning to read books; to enjoy the smell of paper!

+1 for autonomy. But sometimes it can be fun and freeing NOT to think for yourself and be in someone else's flow. I reckon your Romanian friend is just more extrovert than you, which in itself is neither here nor there, just a difference in style. Most relationships involve some sort of compromise (romantic or not), I would say tolerate what you can tolerate and no more than that. And, sometimes it's fun for other people to be in your flow and you lead.

I remember being a young teenager and talking to my uncle. I don't know how we got on to the subject, but I said to him "life seems to get harder, but it also gets easier". I think for a fulfilling life we need constant expansion. We take on the hard stuff and it then becomes easier over time and we keep on levelling up. But this can make it feel like we're going nowhere. I think we have computer games because they reflect something deep about our psyches. It's not just about enjoyment and skill and escapism, it's an existential thing. We know that we're just playing a game called "real life". For comedic value go here: https://www.reddit.com/r/outside/ @CARDOZZO there is only one way to know that we're in a simulation and that would be to look for glitches and inconsistencies. By definition, no simulation is perfect.

I have to agree that humans are an extreme outlier as an ape. We are unique as an animal in general. I think with Neanderthals (and probably with Denisovans) there was a messy dynamic with humans, some level of competition, some interbreeding and lots of other factors - maybe overwhelmed by sheer weight of numbers. But the fact that humans migrated into Neanderthal territory and not the other way around is telling - they were simply more adaptable to new environments and that probably gave them the edge. Evolutionarily, you only need an edge over a long enough period to become the dominant organism, basically it's "survival of the fittest". You're right that humans and chimps say, occupied different niches and so chimps survived. But humans overlapped with wolves for the same prey, and they ended up domesticating them - but no doubt wolf numbers are less as a result of humans. It's a damn shame that there aren't more species of humans around, perhaps they'd keep us in check? But we'd probably keep them as pets, servants, or show them off in zoos or put them into ghettos, or force them into reservations, so it's probably just as well.

I don't know, a gorilla is not a chimp, is not a human. These biological categories are ultimately based on similarity. You could say that humans are the least similar in the group of apes, but they definitely have similarities in behaviour, form and genetics to other apes. From those similarities you can conclude that all apes had a common ancestor. It's also a matter of definition. The category of apes includes humans, so humans are apes. You could just as easily make up a different category that excludes humans, but includes chimps and gorillas. The story with Neanderthals is not just about extermination, humans nowadays (especially Europeans) have a small percentage of Neanderthal DNA, which means that humans also interbred with them, so some of us are partly Neanderthal. In any case Neanderthals were possibly going extinct due to climate change at the time. Humans also kill by drastically altering habitat or passing on diseases or wiping out part of the food chain, i.e. incidentally. In that sense we're "out of place" in the ecosystem balance of the planet. But invasive species and the mass spawnings of locusts do the same sort of ecosystem damage, we're not that unique I suppose.

A couple of weird throwbacks

@Leo Gura if you have a cure, let's have it. My tinnitus is most probably caused by going to too many loud clubs in my youth. It's a constant very high pitch whine, which I sort of ignore most of the time.

I don't know. Every time I think about it there's a hundred different angles you could take and each one could come out either way, yes and no. But you're right @gettoefl it really is about "choice". For free will you need choices and a chooser. But there's also the carrying out of a choice. Is making a choice without actioning it, really free will? So you need all three ingredients - if you remove any one of those ingredients you no longer have free will.

@Razard86 I enjoyed that, there's a lot of mystery around how computers really work. Here's one as to why we have computers at all:

Two phrases: "Can you just...?" and "Can you quickly...?" To which I often want to reply: "Can you just [insert swear word]?". Obviously this is what my managers at work say, my friends wouldn't dare.

When is enough, enough? I read an article in New Scientist recently about a phenomenon called languishing. The top result on Google says: https://www.healthline.com/health/mental-health/languishing#what-are-the-signs This fits me to a T. In retrospect the rot set in around 2009 or so although at the time I didn't realise what was happening. I'd come out of a relationship of three years, which I was definitely sad about at the time, but it wasn't overwhelming and I moved on. But even at that point I began to realise something major had or was about to change. In those intervening three years, I felt like the bonds and social capital that I had with my close network of friends had evaporated. One of those friends had been an ex who I had been with for 11 years. There was (and still remains) an awkwardness between us that we never really worked through. She married and had a kid - I feel genuinely happy for her, there's no resentment or envy on my side. The result of all this was that I began to feel unanchored and I didn't really to know how to resolve those feelings. During that time I had met up again with some old school friends through Facebook and interacting with them regularly kept me sane. I fell in love with one of them. I desperately needed (at the time) to feel anchored in something again and over time my feelings intensified and I thought naively that the person I had fallen in love with was the answer. We had a very on-off relationship, and in the end it just wasn't going to work. I felt frustrated I couldn't get what I wanted, lonely and increasingly frustrated with myself for not being able to resolve my situation. This resulted in a kind of prolonged mid-life crisis (which I've written about extensively here) and I went to some dark places. I decided to move away from where I had lived and the network of friends I'd had, it just wasn't working for me any more. Originally, I wanted to move closer to the person I'd fallen in love with - before it fell apart - and I'm still here all these years later. But more than anything I just wanted to escape myself and my mid-life crisis. Very slowly over time I came out of all that funk. But fundamentally I never regained what I'd had before, that dark place I'd been in for years had turned into the grey place I'm in now, languishing. What to do? Instead of looking back for an explanation in the hope that somehow that's where the answer lies, I need to look forwards. Somehow I need to wrangle the unwieldy beast of my psyche so that I move towards a happier place. I would say at the moment I could continue with the set up of my life indefinitely, I'm neither sad nor particularly happy, I have enough money to live on and do what I want, I have a handful of friends that I see semi-regularly and family that I interact with semi-regularly. I think someone looking into my situation might say things like "what do you want?" and "you need to take action" and maybe "get therapy". In terms of taking action, the very obvious things that come to mind are; change jobs, change house, find a girlfriend. But I'm old enough to realise that doing more of the same is not going to resolve my situation, i.e. I've already done those things and it didn't help - I've done a lot of things in my life so far. What I'm after is an emotion or sensation, literally to wake up every day and to feel excited about it instead of dread. I'm also after that warm fuzzy feeling of being connected to people and working together for a common purpose. And therein lies my problem. What I want are emotions, but I have no sense of how to get there, no concrete physical plan of action. I'm motivated by the things that excite me (emotion) not by the things I think about (reason). Any physical action I take towards the emotions I want to feel, will involve me having to move away from the homeostasis I find myself in, i.e. it will involve emotional and physical labour to move my setpoint and there's no joy in this process. I may even be less happy in the interim whilst I reconfigure my life and all the while I get ever older. But, enough is enough.

Usually around 40 is what I’ve heard. Bear in mind it doesn't drop off a cliff. It's more like a slow gentle slide downwards. I'd say it decreases after 30. Essentially thoughts of sex etc. take up less and less of your thoughts as you get older. Most probably down to a drop in testosterone, but also greater executive functioning and better control of emotions (aka horniness). You can definitely still be horny even after 40, or 50, it never really goes away.

Except that AI is built by and programmed by humans. The way AI is set up at the moment requires it to be guided and trained by humans on data created by humans. It is very much full of the biases and limitations of the human experience. Even if AI were eventually to be trained on its own output (free from human input), the original base of human input would remain. In order for AI to "seem" human it needs to be trained in a human way by humans. Which humans should you choose to train it, which data set? Although, It doesn't seem inconceivable that an AI could detect its own biases (after it all they're only patterns) and correct for them. But it would have to somehow "know" that a particular bias is unwanted and that seems like a tall order. As far as limitations go, AI could in theory extract large scale patterns that we humans are not good at spotting. But it doesn't seem possible for it to go beyond the patterns in its training data set. For that you would need more data. The intelligence in AI doesn't come from itself, the intelligence is in the data it's given, i.e. the outside world.

Before I even knew this forum existed, I used to religiously watch Leo's videos. At some point I just stopped, mainly because the topics didn't seem relevant to me or it didn't feel like anything new was being said. But I decided to watch Leo's latest video for the first time: Some of the things Leo covered in this video touched a nerve and I have to admit to myself that I am immature is a number of ways. Without going into it too much, a lot of the malaise and lack of purchase on my life I feel is due to aspects of my immaturity. So I'm immature? What to do about it? It's all a bit chicken and egg. I need to do in order to mature, but I need maturity in order to do. This seems to be a general rule in life and probably why people can be immature, they simply never learn to mature because... they're not mature. Personally it hurts, because I've always striven to be as mature and as "good" a person I can be. But at least I have an inkling of what needs to happen. Aside from that, I'd like to make a case for the general genius in Leo's videos. What eventually switched me off from Leo's videos is in fact what makes them good. Just simply having a talking head with no other distractions such music and a whirlwind of graphics and cut scenes, makes you pay attention. Leo's also very good at just enumerating all the different facets of a particular topic: his videos really are just primers on each of the subjects he covers. But a primer is very useful just like a reference book is useful, it's the bare facts without the fluff. But also, that makes his content direct and often there's no hiding from some of the repercussions of what he's saying for your own view of yourself, and some of it sticks and irritates enough that you take action to "fix" the problem. His videos raise your level of awareness and that can only be a good thing. He is also comprehensive and has covered a huge range of topics, there is bound to be one that resonates and affects you personally. More than anything else Leo's done, I'd say that his videos are what most people would identify as his brand. It's understandable that he has a life and wants to try other things out and life changes. But if I were to give him advice (from my super mature self) then it would be that he should maintain his brand even if it's at a subsistence level. Obviously this is good from a business point of view, but it's also good from an altruistic point of view and simply just spreading his god given genius for this sort of thing. I might even watch a new video if it were to come out....

I thought I'd pick up on this statement. If life is truly unpredictable, then it doesn't matter what you do today. It wouldn't matter if you were optimistic or not optimistic. In other words you are totally free to chose how to be. A lot of negative or disempowering thinking is really about equating one thing with another - and believing it to be true. Here's some examples of what I'm talking about: I can't ask for a pay rise because my boss will say "no" I'm inherently a depressed person because of my genetics If I try and improve my life it never works out Without optimism I can't feel motivated Being positive now is disappointing in future If A then B A because of B A is B etc. A is related to B The problem with this type of thinking is that they are all non-sequiturs. Two different ideas or concepts get shunted together that have no right being together. A lot of therapy is about deconstructing these artificial equalities and therefore escaping the prison of this sort of thinking. Try this instead: I feel like being optimistic right now I'm in the mood to be positive I feel disappointed because I just do I want to be depressed now I can't be bothered to be depressed now To be free is to act unconditionally.

You can talk about consciousness, the absolute, the dream, all you like. But you're talking about the finger that points, it is not the moon itself.

@mmKay In the grand scheme of things, what you choose to do is mostly irrelevant: it will soon all be forgotten by everyone involved. Flip a coin. This is going to sound woo woo, but you finding the guy's stuff was no accident. It happened so that you can look inwards and confront yourself. The outside world is mirroring your inside world.

Ok then I shall. Part II: 8. Constant context switching is guaranteed (i.e. flipping between different tasks), 9. Context switching always hurts productivity, 10. Actual project managers are super rare, 11. If you work in a big company, especially a bank, you can't touch the database (and this is always a PITA, see point 2) 12. Most projects are chaotic and unstructured, 13. Launching a new project will always be months late and this will create friction all round, someone will get fired, 14. Knowing what the hell is going on in a new job takes 6 months, 15. You'll watch other (non-coders) go on jollies and travel to nice places, you'll be chained to the monitor and keyboard forever, 16. You will have to speak to people outside the company, and it will always be a PITA, 17. Specs and requirements are rare and if they are produced nearly useless for anything except getting the gist of what's needed, 18. If you think you know better than your manager, you will eventually be fired, 19. Most software managers are egotistical or get off on their power, 20. When 13 happens, you will work unreasonable hours and not be re-compensed for it, 21. Customers are a PITA. 22. Customers will not understand or care what problems you're having with their requests, 23. Managers will always kowtow to customer's demands even if unreasonable, 24. Managers will always care about customers more than they care about you. 25. Your physical comfort is generally low priority for the company, 26. Apraisals are completely pointless, and you'll struggle every year to come up with stuff to talk about. Ok, Ok, that's enough whining. I'm changing career right now or becoming a manager.

By learning to be more present and aware of what is actually happening around you, and less in your head. By seeing the good in everything that happens or turning it to your advantage. By being more calm and a bit more stoic when difficult stuff happens. By just getting on with things without complaint and allowing yourself to enjoy it. By being a bit more realistic and less idealistic. By allowing things to be imperfect or out of your control.

It varies a lot between companies some are more into time wasting than others. There are several truths about working in software: 1. There's always a massive code base, 2. You'll spend more time with the database than writing code, 3. No coder can code for 8 hours straight, 4. There's never enough documentation, 5. If you want enough documentation you'll spend all your time writing it. 6. The spread of talent between different coders is generally huge, especially in larger companies 7. Managers are non-technical. I could go on... lol.

It may be ASD. I used to find talking on the phone excruciating. Even the thought of making a phone call or taking one gave me a lot of anxiety. Even now I'd take meeting someone face to face over phone calls - and video calls are much easier. It's the lack of cues, the crummy audio quality, and the need to make decisions on the spot sometimes - it's a very immediate medium. However, I've had to do it so much with work, that I've largely overcome the anxiety. Practice makes perfect that would be my suggestion: work in a call centre lol.

For the first time in many months I started playing piano (electric) again. I've been wanting to learn how to play a version of Autumn in New York, basically this one: Thing is there is no sheet music for it. I've tried to work things out by ear, but the bass notes elude me. But yesterday I found a way to turn the music directly into Midi format: https://piano-scribe.glitch.me/ And amazingly it was actually ok. Not a fast service by any means, but it works. There's a couple of missing or too many notes (I think), but it's good enough for me. The next thing is, do I actually have the skill to play it? Just about, with lots of practice, the end of the piece sounds tricky though. I also think my hands are not big enough to do some of the chords spanning over an octave, so I'll have to make do. The hardest bits will be the accentuation, smooth playing and getting the general "jaunty" feel of the rhythm. I always think it would be so cool just to casually sit at a piano somewhere and knock out a few jazz numbers and impress my audience. I've done this before, but I only really know classical pieces which is not to everyone's taste. Although I do know a few of the more popular ragtime pieces.

No definitive answer. These are some off the cuff ideas: It strikes me that the hard problem is just one of definining a thing (consciousness) in terms of itself. So can you retrieve anything from a recursive definition? If you try and use logic then it fails, it ends in a circular argument, or effect without cause. You can collapse the recursion and say something like "a brick is a brick", but that feels unsatisfactory even if you "know" what a "brick" refers to. You could try and cheat and say that consciousness is the only thing that can be defined in terms of itself. Hence consciouness is exactly what you get if you have a pure recursive thing, i.e. the essence of consciousness is recursion itself; consciousness is conscious of itself. There's no room for another pure recursive thing because consciousness appropriates it all. In maths and computer science recursive definitions are everywhere. But they are always finite in some way and operate within some sort of framework - numbers or algebra or bits and bytes. It's not clear if consciousness has a framework at all, that's what I mean by pure recursive. In the case of consciousness, it seems like consciousness is the recursion operating on itself. It is clear that consciousness has stuff going on and structure and qualia to it. I'd call this "Content", what materialists would call matter and laws. Is it possible to have pure recursion without Content? In other words is it possible to be conscious of being conscious, in what might be called a complete void, where nothing happens? I'd call this a "Singularity". If you go for Occam's razor then a Singularity would seem a simpler form of pure recursion than consciousness with Content and so more likely. But there is room for Content in pure recursion, if the Content is defined in terms of itself (i.e. it is cause and effect). This implies that Content is always relative to itself (recursive) and has no absolute ground or base. Recursion has built into it the idea of process and hence a component of separation with each iteration. This seems to tally with consciousness we experience, Content changes at a fixed rate. This appearance of rate of change seems to be a core part of what Content is. To have a rate of change at all, there must be a "stickiness" to Content. To be conscious of change there is a form of comparison, where the previous iteration of Content is compared to the current Content. Enough must "stick" to be able to do the comparison at all. On the other hand for anything to change at all it must be "fluid" in some way. Fluid is just a different way of saying ungrounded or prone to forgetfulness. So Content itself is a recursive tug-of-war between stickiness and fluidity, or remembering and forgetting, living and dead, absolute and groundless, existence and non-existence. Content also seems to be endless and abundant. A Singularity as its name implies would be a finite entity of one. The opposite of a Singularity would be complete fluidity in Content without any stickiness - i.e. everything would happen at once. But consciousness seems to be something in between. I'd add that consciousness is both Content and recursion, and that they are the same thing.

Lately I've been doing a lot of retrospection. It seems to just bubble up at times. The sensation is somewhat like looking through binoculars. What I see seems so close and very familiar, but the view is constricted to a small circle of light. I remember and re-feel stuff clearly, but I can't fully re-enter that old reality again, so much is lost. And, when I stop looking through the binoculars I'm suddenly sucked back to where I am, and I realise how far away things were and how irrelevant all that stuff is to me now - and yet all that stuff is just there should I wish to look again. What I feel is that a lot of what makes "me" originated back then and also got left behind then. I got to re-invent myself along the way both consciously and unconsciously; there's a lot to like about my new self and my new circumstances. But I'm feeling untethered. Back then I was tethered to my family and my surroundings in a deep way and I didn't question it: I felt I was part of the fabric of my lived-in experience. Along the way that sense of being integrated got exploded, mostly because the family I belonged to was dysfunctional and eventually crumbled. It was a painful awakening for me, I felt lonely, more and more disconnected and betrayed by the people who were supposed to love me. I was cast out at sea with no life support. And nobody came to help. The 80's wasn't a soft time, not a time of support groups and mental health help and space for neurodiversity: you dealt with the roughness alone. It's made me hard and defensive at times, I know how to survive. But my nature should be/is a soft loving joyful optimistic person. I haven't been the same since. Repeatedly, I feel like I lost a big part of myself back then. I'm mostly just winging life like a kite being buffeted by the wind of circumstance, I'm not in control of it. I'm living my life in reverse, I had to become an adult early and take on responsibilities I didn't ask for. Now I don't wish to take on any more responsibilities, I want to take back that lost time and be the teenager I should have been. Unfortunately and ridiculously, I'm 51 in a couple of days, and I can't live a topsy-turvy existence; I can't both be a responsible adult and unresponsible child. But my aversion to taking control and the pain that goes along with it is strong. I'm just doing the bare minimum required to keep on flying. I want to resolve the conflict and the melancholy and resentment. I want to flourish and stop floundering. I want to re-connect to the fabric of my existence. But all that old connection is gone forever and I can't re-connect to it again, I have to try a different way and as a different person. I have to re-learn to be an adult, but the right way this time. Winter blues? Drama? Possibly.

I need to get myself a cook, both metaphorically and in reality.