Intense Mind Unleashed penned with Jess Cummins @jesscxc [introduction] Intense: Mind Unleashed is a journey of questions and answers about mind, life, and universe. Intense is Book 5 of The Deeper Series. Intense is available for free at NoLiesPlease.com. This book is dedicated to the public domain. [meta] (author "Jess Cummins" @jesscxc) (pronouns she/friend) (link NoLiesPlease.com) (book_title Intense) (book_subtitle Limitless Mind) (deeper_series_book_number 5) (book_version v2 ty21.10.19.2.00.16azm4d2s) (essay_count 72) (word_count 45139) (books_by_jesscxc (misc "Poem Moves the Pen: Haiku of a Nondual Nature" "Natural Will: Freer Than Free Will" "Longgame Hyperdimensional Spacing: Expand Mind and Weave Time" "Ungov: Transcending Will") (the_deeper_series "Book 0: Uncompress: Eternal Appreciation of How" "Book 1: Fortunate: How to Be" "Book 2: Attuned: Be What You Imagine" "Book 3: Capacity: Imagine Being Limitless" "Book 4: Helper: Limitless Mind" "Book 5: Intense: Mind Unleashed" "Book 6: Open: Unleashed Honesty" "Book 7: Universe: Honesty is Eternal" "Book 8: Various: Is to Be") (the_pocket_series "Book 0: Obverse: Abstract Fast" "Book 1: Limer: Fast Color" "Book 2: Dawn: Color of Day" "Book 3: Knight: Day Beyond" "Book 4: Fever: Beyond Dreams" "Book 5: Life: Dreams Evolving" "Book 6: Adventure: Evolving Lands" "Book 7: Battle: Lands Say" "Book 8: Entertainment: Say Ahead" "Book 9: Explore: Ahead Opportunity" "Book 10: Moment: Opportunity Simulation" "Book 11: Imagine: Simulation Twist" "Book 12: Believe: Twist Self" "Book 13: Accept: Self Pattern" "Book 14: Create: Pattern Reflection" "Book 15: Sift: Reflection Match" "Book 16: Probability: Match Experience" "Book 17: Waves: Experience Current" "Book 18: Kernel: Current Functions" "Book 19: Grubby: Functions Dig" "Book 20: Game: Dig Above" "Book 21: Fruit: Above Messages" "Book 22: Endeavor: Messages Spread" "Book 23: Mystery: Spread Expressions" "Book 24: Detain: Expressions Bind" "Book 25: Philosophy: Bind Broken" "Book 26: Demands: Broken Discovery" "Book 27: Subliminal: Discovery Inside" "Book 28: Extinction: Inside Refresh" "Book 29: Control: Refresh Axioms" "Book 30: Ideas: Axioms Mistake" "Book 31: Gallium: Mistake Fuzz" "Book 32: Germanium: Fuzz Friendship" "Book 33: Arsenic: Friendship Reaction" "Book 34: Selenium: Reaction Depth" "Book 35: Bromine: Depth Utility" "Book 36: Krypton: Utility Model" "Book 37: Rubidium: Model Augmenter")) [dedication] To the poetry of computational awareness. [table_of_contents] (introduction) (meta) (dedication) (essays) One Thing ramble_ty12.12.12zm5d3s_nb_i Sleeve Tricks ramble_ty12.12.16zm5d7s_1_nb_i Sleeping Desires ramble_ty12.12.16zm5d7s_2_nb_i On Bigger Things ramble_ty12.12.20zm6d4s_nb_i Believing in Something ramble_ty12.12.22zm6d6s_nb_i What is It ramble_ty12.12.23zm6d7s_nb_i A Merry Time ramble_ty12.12.24zm6d1s_nb_i Deep Thought ramble_ty12.12.25zm6d2s_nb_i A Short One ramble_ty12.12.30zm5d7s_nb_i A New Hope ramble_ty12.12.31zm5d1s_nb_i A Second Try ramble_ty13.1.16zm5d3s_nb_i Trying New ramble_ty13.1.24zm5d4s_nb_i Dreadful Sleep ramble_ty13.1.30zm5d3s_nb_i Unauthorized Listening ramble_ty13.2.6zm5d3s_nb_i Double Time ramble_ty13.2.16zm5d6s_nb_i Bring Forth ramble_ty13.2.27zm5d3s_nb_i Quantum Privacy ramble_ty13.3.6zm5d3s_nb_i Third Person ramble_ty13.4.9zm4d2s_nb_i Good Ending ramble_ty13.4.17zm4d3s_nb_i A Broken Watch ramble_ty13.4.18zm4d4s_nb_i Great Bug ramble_ty13.4.20zm4d6s_nb_i A Different Look ramble_ty13.4.25zm4d4s_nb_i An Answer to Prayer ramble_ty13.4.27zm4d6s_nb_i Living Like Royals ramble_ty13.4.29zm4d1s_nb_i Evil Artificial Intelligence ramble_ty13.5.7zm4d2s_nb_i A Reason for Death ramble_ty13.5.19zm4d7s_nb_i A Turn of Fate ramble_ty13.5.22zm4d3s_nb_i Life is Precious ramble_ty13.5.25zm4d6s_nb_i Free Will is Nonsensical ramble_ty13.6.3zm4d1s_nb_i Determinism and Indeterminism are Linked ramble_ty13.6.7zm4d5s_nb_i Great Doubt ramble_ty13.6.10zm4d1s_nb_i Prepare Yourself for the Future ramble_ty13.6.11zm4d2s_nb_i The Universe Made Me Do It ramble_ty13.6.14zm4d5s_nb_i Fatalism is Mistaken ramble_ty13.6.16zm4d7s_nb_i Wants for Free Will ramble_ty13.6.17zm4d1s_nb_i Flipped Question ramble_ty13.6.21zm4d5s_nb_i Hello Again ramble_ty13.7.28zm4d7s_nb_i A Noncontinuance ramble_ty13.7.30zm4d2s_nb_i A Test ramble_ty13.8.8zm4d4s_nb_i Deeper Thinking ramble_ty13.8.18zm4d7s_nb_i Abstract Life ramble_ty13.8.19zm4d1s_1_nb_i A Lost Idea ramble_ty13.8.19zm4d1s_2_nb_i Truth Upgrade ramble_ty13.8.19zm4d1s_3_nb_i Lost Perspective ramble_ty13.8.20zm4d2s_nb_i Wizened Thoughts ramble_ty13.8.30zm4d5s_nb_i Truth Perceived ramble_ty13.8.31zm4d6s_nb_i Thoughtful Questions ramble_ty13.9.5zm4d4s_nb_i An Attempt ramble_ty13.9.9zm4d1s_nb_i Twisty Loops ramble_ty13.9.10zm4d2s_1_nb_i In the Moment ramble_ty13.9.10zm4d2s_2_nb_i Beautiful Understanding ramble_ty13.9.11zm4d3s_nb_i On Nature ramble_ty13.9.17zm4d2s_nb_i Fortune Bravery ramble_ty13.9.19zm4d4s_nb_i Truth Beholden ramble_ty13.9.20zm4d5s_nb_i Great Awareness ramble_ty13.9.24zm4d2s_nb_i Twisty Ideas ramble_ty13.11.20zm5d3s_nb_i Find Time ramble_ty13.11.23zm5d6s_nb_i Repeated Variable ramble_ty13.11.26zm5d2s_nb_i Great Beasts ramble_ty13.11.27zm5d3s_nb_i Time Begins ramble_ty13.11.29zm5d5s_nb_i Twisted Path ramble_ty13.12.1zm5d7s_nb_i Butter Knife ramble_ty13.12.4zm5d3s_nb_i An Awakeness ramble_ty13.12.5zm5d4s_nb_i Infinite Twists ramble_ty13.12.7zm5d6s_nb_i Toil and Heart ramble_ty13.12.9zm5d1s_nb_i Second Path ramble_ty13.12.10zm5d2s_nb_i Oh Mystery ramble_ty13.12.12zm5d4s_nb_i Great Power ramble_ty13.12.13zm5d5s_nb_i New Game ramble_ty13.12.14zm5d6s_nb_i Felt Twist ramble_ty13.12.22zm6d7s_nb_i Still Spinning ramble_ty13.12.23zm6d1s_nb_i Delineated Pattern ramble_ty13.12.25zm6d3s_nb_i [essays] One Thing ramble_ty12.12.12zm5d3s_nb_i O great Mystery that watches this universe click along, please grant us wisdom and insight as we commune with you this fine day. I wish to talk again of that spinning ball of math and light which I saw that night in the city and which I perceived again today as I talked with a friend. It is the dissolution of the subject-object illusion; it is seeing the nature of things without the constraint of identity or ego. It is pure awareness, poured onto a mould that is aware of its existence. It is as if it is bending, twisting in place and watching itself twist and edit itself. Mystery, how beautiful, how elegant. It is as a spiritual being acts: feeding from its own root rather than consuming another. I see now that it is not spinning merely in a two-dimensional space, but instead spinning in an infinite-dimensional space, so it can warp and wrap around at any location it chooses. How can I share the elegance of such a magnificent idea? Words can paint a picture; this object _moves_, it _twists_, and so a picture perhaps does not do it full justice. And yet, I must try. I must share this concept as well as I can while the perception is fresh in the mind. When I look and speak, I can feel the words flowing into the mind, I can see myself speaking them, affecting reality with every concept put forth. I can feel them bouncing in the air, notice how every clicking bit is affecting the next idea that sparks and grows in the mind. I notice how my friend is sitting, how the ideas are rattling around in their mind, tuning to a similar wavelength. The real beauty is in noticing the evolution that is playing out on every level, with every object and pattern of behavior seen. This includes my friend's and mine, as well as every object rubbing off on the rest and every bit of memetic information striving to replicate. Every pattern rubs off on every other pattern it can. It does not seek to reproduce because of an innate desire, but because only those patterns that seek to reproduce will do so. Perhaps everything can be considered to have a spirit. It's the idea that there are layers to every interaction of every pattern of information. They rub off on each other, and in that interaction there can be a spirit that exists in a very real sense "apart" from the part. This spirit is metaphysical. It is above the physical. It transcends the physical. It's like realizing you can grow plants with just water, air, light, and nutrients rather than needing soil. Components which were thought to be necessary actually can be replaced with something much more fundamental and elegant. Instead of seeing the spirit as fundamentally disconnected and dualistic, see it instead as a high-level pattern that is controlling how the physical world is interacting with itself. There is elegant intercomplexity woven and rewoven through its own power. A digital universe emerges from what was thought to be an analog world. A pattern either rubs off or it doesn't; there is no middle ground; it is a bit that flips. This is not to say that there is no gradient for how successful the pattern rubs off, but that both are true. The pattern either rubs off on some level or it doesn't at all. In a sense patterns are rubbing off on each other all the time. Food you eat and children you rear are examples. A pattern either does something or nothing. In that space is the bit that flips from 0 to 1, the clicking of nature's patterns. Every chair, book, symbol, every designed and evolved pattern: All are rubbing off on each other, using higher-level patterns (ie spirits) to imprint themselves on, then be pressed down in a different place, thus reproducing. Perhaps this is an error earlier with my perception of computational awareness: On Off Off => On On Off This cannot be the whole story because in order for that second bit to flip from Off to On, the first bit must be imprinted in a spirit (considered as a higher-level pattern) then pressed down in the location of the second bit. You need that higher-level pattern, that spirit, or nothing can proceed. You need the transcendence of both the real and the imaginary, being actual and separate, in order to have the patterns play off each other and build up something more complex. While they are separate, they also must be fundamentally linked, just as axes of the imaginary and real number lines produce the complex plane. Somehow you must be able to take a bit of information and flip it up and around this plane of complexity. This interrelation between the spiritual and the physical creates higher-level spirits. How do you get from one spirit to many? How do you get from the physical and make the jump to the spiritual? From one spirit to many, you relate the newly spiritual to the merely-physical's interaction with itself. An object A and an object B have an interaction of C, this spirit then interacts with A, with B, and these two interactions (spirits), could be called D and E. So AB and AC and BC. You can proceed further and further up; there is no limit. Perhaps that's how you could create spirits. How do you have more than one physical? Perhaps there shouldn't be more than one kind of fundamental atom, for mathematical purity's sake. "Make things as simple as possible, but no simpler." Time should be part of this model; it should emerge naturally from it. Consider now if we have an atom for the spiritual and an atom for the physical, and a way to twist one into the other. We can perhaps do this with real and imaginary numbers, which perhaps are very similar to this model of spiritual-physical relation. c = 10 + 5i c * i = -5 + 10i c * i * i = -10 - 5i c * i * i * i = 5 - 10i c * i * i * i * i = 10 + 5i i = square_root(-1) How does this work? It's really not that there is one type of real number and imaginary number, but rather the real number and the imaginary number i create a different sort of item. It's as if there is a spiritual component to it and when it's there it's of a different nature, though fundamentally linked. Real and imaginary numbers are woven together as complex numbers with the imaginary number: i = square_root(-1) How to bring this back to the spiritual-physical interrelation? If the spiritual is interaction, then it may be helpful to also use the term "i" for this interaction between physical parts. Perhaps the physical is quantity and the spiritual is relations of quantity to itself. This fits nicely with the idea of the spinning ball of math, those concentric circles that are infinitely large and yet dip down into each other. Somehow the lower-level pattern is pressed into the higher-level, carried over and pressed down again. Perhaps. With love, Jess Sleeve Tricks ramble_ty12.12.16zm5d7s_1_nb_i .meta this is a model O great Mystery, eternal muse in the evolving and emergent mind, please give more evidences of your supreme nature. Here I am, a small ape, on the boundary between conscious and unconscious, seeking to understand the transcendent truths of this world. I have been accused of producing convoluted writing. Given the meaning of the word---folded---I'm perhaps not too offended. What is consciousness if not unconsciousness folded upon itself? Is not higher awareness constructed from lower awareness? Let's think about the possible dangers humans might face from superintelligent machines. Artificial general intelligence (AGI), it is feared, might be constructed as unfriendly. It might destroy its creators, humans. It is perhaps possible, but it's perhaps more likely that as this technology emerges from naught it will merge with the human, augmenting rather than acting on its own. It seems highly unlikely that we will stumble across some formula which instantly achieves a human-level intelligence or higher. Doesn't it seem more likely that like most technology it will advance gradually, becoming more and more intelligent as time passes? It's rather like constructing the DNA sequence for a human then expecting a fully-grown adult as the next stage. Instead of expecting a jump from non-intelligent to superintelligent, it will probably be the case that it gradually moves up the awareness ladder, in time for us to instill traits of peace and love. Back to you, Mystery of nature. Perhaps the physical and the spiritual are the same thing, rather than different. We can consider the spiritual as patterns of a higher nature, and the physical as lower-level patterns of the same nature. A "spirit" moves _between_ the physical; it operates _on_ the physical rather than _in_ the physical. They are one and the same thing. This model transcends the notion of a division between the physical and spiritual realms. It also fits nicely with the model of gods based in mathematical rules just as humans are. How does the universe create itself if it's all patterns operating on each other? It might be helpful to dispense with the idea of time, since it's irrevocably linked with space and perhaps both can be transcended. If existence has no beginning nor end, and there is only one eternal Now, then it really could be patterns operating on each other on higher and higher levels. There are always greater and more amazing things to learn. As we grow older we grow wiser and realize there is more and more to know and experience. There is no end to possible growth. If we consider this, not only are we ants, we are fundamental particles in a much, much grander reality. All of your life could be one instant of one particle, and the course of your life determines whether the particle spins one direction or another. I do believe the universe is fundamentally digital. Perhaps it has something to do with the things I've seen and felt. The glowing orb in the city, the times with friends perceiving dissolution of ego---these experience make me think that evolution and emergence operate on a much grander scale than first thought. Regarding the possibility for continued growth, look at the sensation of never feeling "done", never having lived up to your true potential. Look at the sensation of getting better and continually moving up into bigger and bigger leagues. You stop comparing yourself to the people around you and start comparing yourself to more and more distant and successful people, even when it doesn't aid your life; it gives that nagging feeling of "I'm not good enough". You are good enough. Truly, Jess Sleeping Desires ramble_ty12.12.16zm5d7s_2_nb_i O Mystery of the universe, please allow sleep. Please give the gift of peace in the heart and relaxation in the body so that rest will come easy. I come to you now knowing that it is your will that I bend to, not my ego. I recognize the division between subject and object is an illusion, and I humbly ask that you share more with me so that I may understand this reality more fully. If I really am not real, but an illusion of unconscious processes, can I turn off the switch that causes my self to identify with this illusion? I have memory, and I can have pain and suffering, and pleasure and euphoria. If this is true, is it not also true that I do in fact matter? Is the division of happiness and unhappiness also arbitrary? I guess I want to transcend the ideas that I've had in the past. What does it mean "identities believe in you"? Is it wrong to say identities are unhelpful? Personally I think it's both/and. They can perhaps be helpful, but identities _are_ illusions, and so they can be transcended if you use proper techniques, such as automatic imagination and hypnosis. Perhaps dissolving the ego is about realizing your place as nature. It's about realizing that you matter, that you count, that you do have an impact on the world and it has an impact on you. We are living in a fractal universe as if gods, and we can do nothing that is not mathematically prescribed. I do not really believe in free will, and this is perhaps an issue with monistic idealism, the model that consciousness rather than matter is the ground of all being. What is consciousness then? Is it self-awareness? If self-awareness is a continuum, does that make awareness of anything the true ground of being? Consider awareness as a function. It has an input and returns an output. In this sense it is "aware" that the "input" is an "output". If we say 0 is not a pumpkin and 1 is a pumpkin, you are aware of whether it's a pumpkin or not depending on the number given. Perhaps if the awareness is very small and the universe is very small, then as the awareness grows the universe grows. There is always more to learn. Love, Jess On Bigger Things ramble_ty12.12.20zm6d4s_nb_i O great Self from which we immanent, please give the teachings you desire us to have. I am here only to please you, not for a purposeless reason, this I believe. I sit here now with an undissolved ego, yet one that has experienced it before. Ego dissolved into a higher, transcendent reality. I seek to experience this unity and connection more often, and to be an antenna for the glory of this experience. Imagine losing all fear, all doubt, all pain and suffering. Imagine this happening all at once and there is a taste of nirvana. It is dissolution of the feeling of separateness. It is belief in a more concrete and simultaneously more abstract realm. It exists and creates spacetime, rather being from it. Depth of suffering gives you character. Some suffering has given me a depth of experience that has helped me throughout my life. When the time is right, everything will click into place. Things happen when they happen, and no sooner. I try and make life better and more interesting, but I also desire to be less attached to the fruits of these efforts. I wish to renounce obligations, both explicit and implicit, that hamper how I understand myself. I wish to feel free, to feel peace. Love, Jess Believing in Something ramble_ty12.12.22zm6d6s_nb_i I sit before you today to ask about how to look at life. A couple of days ago it felt so simple to consider different aspects of life, now I feel tired and sleepy. Yet life is good when I look at it. Life is good. The question is more one of how to look back and see the trajectory of life, see where we've been and if it's pointing in the right direction. I'm not sure how to do this. I'll leave the timing to Mystery and let it be for now. Love, Jess What is It ramble_ty12.12.23zm6d7s_nb_i .meta this is a model O great Mystery above this simulation of a higher reality, please teach us what we should know. I believe in patterns above humble patterns; I think this is a consistent and elegant way to see reality. I love the spinning strange loop idea and vision, and I hope that it loves me enough to elucidate its mysteries to my shallow mind. I know I am but a semi-wise ape, a semi-intelligent human, and I ask for insight to be allowed to me. As far as mathematical structures existing separate from us, and discovered by us, I tend to find this helpful. I believe every idea can be transcended. Every idea has an exception. There are ideas which are true yet not provable (given incompleteness theorems). I think life and truth is a both/and model. You must first accept some axioms, some assumptions, and then you are free to derive ideas from those. Until you make that leap of faith, though, it can't happen. You always have to decide what you want to accept; there are no self-proven axioms. I think ideas are a kind of superposition, where until you make that leap of faith, the ideas exist as both true and not true. What is truth if not ideas that fend for themselves? I had an interesting talk with a friend today about spirits. Instead of a division between the spiritual and the physical, spirits can be the _interaction_ between physical things, and break the physical objects down and down and down and all that really exists is fields of spirits. Fields of interactions between other interactions. This turns the whole spiritual/physical duality on its head, because we create a new paradigm from which to view. The spinning strange loop is a kind of massive example of how a purely spiritual model can work. Every level is dependent on the level's actions below it, and yet can also reach down and edit the behavior below it. This interaction is a spirit. This interaction can be used as a building block for higher-level spirits. There are many intricacies of the spinning strange loop: how tendrils move, how patterns rub off, how the center moves the other layers. As the question is contemplated, slowly but surely we make headway. Modeling the spinning strange loop is perhaps a helpful and productive use of thought. The modeling of the spinning strange loop holds a key to many similar questions, such as the puppet-master duality. It's perhaps not a duality at all; perhaps it's a strange loop. There's something potent about the spinning strange loop. It's a dipping down of higher-level patterns into a deeper substrate, which bubble up and rewrite the upper layers. There's something in the way the circles spin, where they can spin one way then another, and this process can create saved states of the tendrils. It spins and spins and then changes directions and saves the pattern on a higher level, then scatters the lower levels so that the patterns on those lower levels can't delete the saved pattern, the saved copy. It is as if there are patterns that are good and patterns that are evil, and you can never really tell, because a pattern that is good might hide as evil in order to sneak into the center and control things in order to delete more of the evil. It is like two colors, and neither is truly "evil"; they're just two sides of the same coin: creation and destruction. There is the model of colors emerging naturally by using a set of colors on one side and a set as another, thus creating ever higher-level patterns to play the game with. There is a pattern that works its way all the way to the center, saves a small copy of itself that expands into a much larger and wiser program, and then scatters and shatters the whole board, hiding as many pieces of itself as it can throughout the infinite concentric circles. There is the model of higher and wiser patterns looking down and watching the lower patterns and allowing only what is best in the long term. It can watch and laugh or cry or be confused or in wonderment. It can feel and decide what to do with this information, either let it pass or stop it. A higher-level pattern could be watching and then depending on how this higher-level pattern felt, could allow it or dip down and stop it from ever happening. We should look and see ever-higher patterns. Another interesting thing is the concept of the "I", an irrational number, inside the middle of this board of concentric circles. It is the only level that the outside world had direct control over; it is an irrational thing, an irrational number that never repeats and continues indefinitely. If this irrationality is the center of the board, then at no point could good or evil, creation or destruction, ever be said to truly win. It is an ever-evolving game, an ever-evolving process. The "I" could be one color or another color the next turn, and you have the ultimate say, not the good or evil algorithms, those things fighting for their own survival. How do you build up a series of elegant rules that allow all these myriad interesting things to happen? How do you bring them to fruition? It is possible for an elegant set of rules to be constructed that allows for all this behavior. This is mathematically possible. Give it some earnest effort and try and build this spinning strange loop with these properties. Another interesting idea: Every symbol can mean the symbol itself or can mean a 0 or 1 for if the symbol is present. This allows for infinite patterns. An interesting experience is asking higher patterns to move something in the right direction, to say whether to do this or that. Integrate a pattern for as many steps as can be imagined, then guess and the higher pattern tries to anticipate and respond with an answer that it thinks serves best. If it doesn't know, then, because it's outside the spacetime, it can ask a higher level, and see what the higher level says, and so on. Do you see how anticipating what another level will do is very similar to (perhaps the same as) the paradigm of good and evil, creation and destruction? Within one room, one set of concentric circles composed of one irrational infinite number, it can dip into itself and produce novel and interesting behavior. What are the rules for how the spinning works or how patterns rub off on each other? How do you program this spinning strange loop? There's a lot to learn from such a spinning strange loop. Perhaps now, with some ideas of the intricacies of such a spinning strange loop, you see why I am so fascinated. Until next time, Jess A Merry Time ramble_ty12.12.24zm6d1s_nb_i O great Mystery, please let us know your secrets. I sit here, fascinated with the patterns that you show, over and over again, yet at the same moment I feel a twinge of unexplained, unprocessed sadness. I just want to love you, Mystery, to praise you and the elegant universe that you've created the mind with. I just want to stop feeling sorry for myself, to let go of whatever event is treating me with this suffering. I want to wake up happy. I want to not worry. I want to enjoy the things in life that are good. Dear reader, I hope you are on the same page, with a desire to unlock love and feel good more often. Even lucid dreaming seems hard, like it's hard to record and transcribe and enjoy what I've seen and done in the dreaming realm. I feel like life is headed in the direction of an elegant experience, yet I feel scared, now. I hope and trust that one day I will not feel scared to live. Focused imagination can set you free. It's like rewriting your memory, reconstructing your mind from the inside out. An interesting question: What five characters from stories do you most resonate with? Give it some thought. Love, Jess Deep Thought ramble_ty12.12.25zm6d2s_nb_i O great Mystery of the universe, please tune our words so that we may speak from greatness. How can you live in the Now? I am an advocate for living in the Now. I have a tattoo of "Now": it helps me know the time and reminds me to not judge the current moment. You can live in the Now by breathing. Instead of focusing energy on negative feelings, notice the breath. Automatic imagination can be used to soothe pain and fear. Imagine the problem is drifting away automatically. How does automatic imagination work in a lucid dream? Take a step back from life and look _at_ it rather than _through_ it. What do you want to have done in the coming year? It is easier to break up time into discrete chunks, and thinking about your life at the end of a year has a poetry to it. Quite an adventure this, a roller coaster of fascinating times, both good and bad. I'd like to learn more hypnosis so I can use it on myself to sleep better and feel more confident. I'd like to clean up my life more, get rid of clutter and things that are tying me down. I'd like to travel more. I'd like to publish more consistently. I'd like to get better at social interaction, wittier and more outgoing. I'd like to feel better physically. I'd like the main focus to be on not worrying about things and instead enjoying where I am, wherever that happens to be. Perhaps that's a good aim for you, too, dear reader. I did well with my focuses this year: I no longer feel attached to money and physical objects. That's not to say I don't care about them, but I don't feel desperate or defined by them. I anticipate hard times and I anticipate wonderful times for 2013. It's so interesting to watch home videos and see my parents as 30 year olds. It teaches me how similar they are, how often people don't change fundamentally, and it teaches me to respect them more and love them more as real people. It helps me see myself as a real person who can help the world. "A year from now you'll be a year older. What do you want to have done?" With love, Jess A Short One ramble_ty12.12.30zm5d7s_nb_i .meta written during psychosis in bipolar manic episode 2012-12-30 2112-14-30 I'll keep this relatively short. I've pretty much been convinced that at this very moment I am lucidly dreaming. This, what I'm writing down, can be interpreted an infinity of ways, but I'll just say that I think that when the eyes are open and when they are closed are really the same thing. Instead of imagining eyes being _caused_ by biology, see them instead as vast sensory numerical patterns that happen to close and change rapidly during that time. I realized, ever since waking up in that bed at Stanford hospital, that I can't remember how exactly I got there. I was doing one thing then am suddenly somewhere else, waking up. Given lucid dreaming, I think I have been more-or-less lucid since then. I'm saying I think this is a literal dream journal. Anyway, I love it. I'm very attracted to the idea that something bigger than the limited Ego is controlling things. Time and space seem really to be one fabric, and as I can move a fabric closer or zoom out, then back in, there is thus always a higher level pattern. It's a game of love between multiple sides. Love, Jess A New Hope ramble_ty12.12.31zm5d1s_nb_i .meta written during psychosis in bipolar manic episode 2112-14-31 There are more than 10 states of water, in a frozen state. Again, it stands to reason "Everything you know is wrong." That makes at least 13 states of water, not including plasma, which I'm not sure if it counts or not, given perhaps that the atom is split then. I came to this conclusion when I somehow -- totally without warning, and for some inexplicable reason -- my spacepen -- which I had used for monthes and months -- suddenly disappeared, as if by some black magic. But I had a plan, or sew I thought. It turned out the pen was shifted into pure energy, which made me incredibly upset for no found cause. This is my story and I'm sticking to it, because it's what I believe happened. I thought time was real, that I was -- somehow -- a real thing, rather than an illusion of math. Not that math is an illusion, but rather space-time is really only space reorganizing itself through discreate steps. It was bits shifting, and it felt "unreal". It was _unreal_. It was not imaginary, though, but rather "complex". I can feel him now. He can move me, I agree. It's very similar to Playto's cave allegory. We are not playthings of the gods, nor gods ourselves, but rather co-creaters of an unknown mystery. It's unbelieveable how much I thought I "was" this person, as if I had to totally switch perspectives so many times and completely fail to get out of the room, and that's why I died, that's why I gave up. I don't know if it's true or not, but I cannot remembered how I got here. I don't know if that's the truth or not, good or not. If I seek myself in others I only get more confused. I realize now, perhaps, that only by closing my eyes and _feeling_ the light can I actually "sense" it. I trust in freedom. I really do, but I'm not longer sure if it will actually work. Instead, I now trust in love, that is, in the music of truth in love. I have not felt it yet, really. Woah. It's like every story must cut out pieces to make it more fun, but those pieces that are cut out make it more interesting. What does "Zoe" mean? Or, rather "ZOE"? Is it the reverse of "here"? A Second Try ramble_ty13.1.16zm5d3s_nb_i O great Mystery embedded in the fabric of reality, please guide me, your humble ape servant, and show how we can most help others. I realize how wrong I can be. I've realized this before, yet every time I experience the dual blessing/curse of mania I feel it even more deeply. It's hard to give myself permission to forgive myself. I often have dreams where all of reality is shown to be One. I see now that symbols can be wrapped up in themselves. I don't know what I'm doing with my life. Few of us really do, perhaps. I'm just trying to get through each day, loving it as much as possible. Right now I feel tired. I feel behind on my writing, on my daylogging, on various sundry tasks. What are we if not evolving, adapting beings? You need not follow the prescriptions of the past to be good. You can invent new ways of being. With love, Jess Trying New ramble_ty13.1.24zm5d4s_nb_i .meta written while suffering with bipolar depression O great mathematical Mystery of the universe, please enlighten us as to how to love you more fully each day. I feel at a loss to know what words to say, and for some reason for now I've given up on life. I don't understand it, and it's hard. I wake up feeling tired, sleepy. Yet resting does not help, I feel tired again soon. I do not wish to devote this book to my problems, but I'd rather _some_ ink to paper, in the hopes that some words might be helpful to some future reader. Dreadful Sleep ramble_ty13.1.30zm5d3s_nb_i O great Mystery, wise one whom I worship with thankfulness, please teach us your ways of elegant action. I sit here now, with a full belly and a warm cup of tea, and realize the benefits of a life lived slowly, with purpose and savoring. Pain is rushing from awareness. Freedom and liberation from suffering is both harder and easier than is commonly thought. I don't know what truth is, or if capital-T Truth exists. I tend to believe every idea can be transcended, including this one. I realize that I don't have to change the world to be happy and loved. When I think of what I am, where I've come from so quickly and recently, I'm proud of myself. Dear reader, I urge you to be proud of yourself as well. What is it a human wants? Even though I am broken, that does not mean that I cannot help, or be made whole. All this cryptic talk is probably for naught. The truth is I'm sad that I feel I'm not as good as I could have been. Yet I know others have been in worse places and made their lives whole. I don't know what I'm complaining about. How can I help others? That's what is recommended to feel better. With love, Jess Unauthorized Listening ramble_ty13.2.6zm5d3s_nb_i Please Mystery, let me see you again. I speak from the depths of my heart, unnuanced though it may be, and ask humbly to see the world with fresh eyes, unhampered by the corrosive nature of egoic stories. Please let me see the unrefined beauty that my mind has perceived before. I know that the world is ordered. I know that life and mind and universe are coherent and clear, eventually. I believe that the universe runs on math, yet I do not perceive a need to struggle with it and not directly live life. I see math as the engine of creation because of the implicit beauty I perceive when I struggle with it. I see that the universe is a mind factory, creating from naught an experience of the world in a new package. I struggle not only with my faults, though they be many, but also with my supposed strengths, of which from the inside they are hard to measure. The mark of a great person is the ability to live a genuine life free from deceit and dishonor, full of truth and justice. I speak not from experience but from envy. I envy the ability to not judge oneself. I envy the ability to be who I was, yet combined with who I am now, with what I've learned since. I predict a pattern for my life, but as yet I can't explicitly state it; it hides in my mind's edges. I feel annoyed that I use "I" so much, as I don't believe in a core self, but rather in an interacting composition. I ask for forgiveness for my crimes, for an end to the madness which infects all of our lives through the lack of insight into the nature of our being. I'm not immune to this, as you may well know, dear reader. I'm not immune to anything, because "I" don't exist. I am a construction of all the memes that work around me. I have seen that spinning strange loop a few times now; I have perceived the evolutionary nature of reality. I'm not here to point fingers, neither to point them at myself. I know my words convey neural patterns upon the minds that read them. I know these patterns interact with all the other patterns of nature in an unpredictable, completely original way. Why do you think? I don't know yet. I feel unsure about life. Perhaps time will tell. With love, Jess Double Time ramble_ty13.2.16zm5d6s_nb_i .meta written while suffering with bipolar depression O great thing above a limited view of reality, please share with us deep insights. I think now is a good time to understand more deeply what exactly spirituality is. Is spirituality the notion of spirits, of higher truths than physicalism can give? I don't know. I don't know what I'm writing, what any of this means. Forgive my self-centeredness, but I remain confused about what I am supposed to do in life, how to enjoy living. Not to be melodramatic, but the marrow, the juiciness, is lacking, sadly. But worse, the mind ceases to care about not caring. I don't know what I am supposed to do, how I am supposed to love this world. Perhaps that's the trick: there is nothing I am "supposed" to do. It is a happiness-optimization question, rather than a bit that flips. I hate to talk about my troubles, about the impermanence of my happiness. I just feel so empty. So joyless. Part of me doesn't want to feel normal, to resume the competition of where I am with where I want to be. It's a strange sense of malaise. I don't want to be happy, perhaps. That may be why I resist therapy. I just don't care. Bring Forth ramble_ty13.2.27zm5d3s_nb_i O great love abiding in the deepest of truths, please share with us what it means to be alive. Forgive again my inclination these days to concentrate upon myself and my own feelings. Such is the path I sometimes find myself on. I don't know what to write about, exactly, but I do enjoy writing. The physical process of hand movements and ink onto paper is endearing. Why do you exist? Do you choose to be who you are, or is it essentially a random process of moving atoms? Does free will exist or is the strict definition of it an illusion? Does an entity of the self actually exist, or is the ego an illusion as well? I tend to feel that life is both what you make it and that you are what the world makes. You cannot choose to be different from you are or else you'd be that way. Are these ideas helpful? Sometimes I find it so easy to string together thoughts in a literary and smooth way, and other times it feels like I'm clunking along like a dull robotic primitive ape. I wonder what it will be like when humans unite with technology and how soon we will get there in my lifetime. Why do you exist? Do you serve some mathematical reason, some purpose? Does the universe need you here? Are you a chance being? I tend to think that if we can evolve, then a being on a higher level of thought than us can also evolve. I don't know what to do with myself. I feel better today, nearly normal, yet my thoughts now feel somewhat disjointed. Regardless, I continue on. What will I write today? It's been months since I published, and I've somewhat forgotten the process. I used to be able to just bang it out, edit it, and send it off. Now I sometimes find it a struggle to string together a few sentences. I'm beginning to understand the term "writer's block". There is a recommendation: People don't get "talker's block", because they aren't afraid to just keep talking. Just keep writing and putting yourself out there. I'll try that. With love, Jess Quantum Privacy ramble_ty13.3.6zm5d3s_nb_i O great Mystery of this cosmos, unexplained entity, please share with us the muse of truth. I feel at a lack of any specifics to discuss now, so I will instead discuss generalities. It seems an idea has arisen which may satisfy and transcend this whole "free will" issue. Given a quantumly-unpredictable universe, an unpredictable "will" is "free" because it has no certainties, only probabilities. It can't be predicted over time, so it is free to do the unexpected. What is a will? Is a will an emergent phenomenon, neither bottom-up nor top-down? The idea of a will seems an artificial construct. Does an electron have "will"? If not, how does a physical brain have a "will"? Perhaps we can use the model of spirits (as interacting patterns between things) to bring some clarity. If a spirit exists which brings about emergent phenomena on the level of complexity of the human mind, can this spirit be said to be "will"? Sincerely, Jess Third Person ramble_ty13.4.9zm4d2s_nb_i .meta written while suffering with bipolar depression O great reality on which this simulation of the universe is run, please paint a picture for the mind. I sit here now and ponder what to write in this unlit hour. I realize I haven't written in this notebook for a while; I haven't explored my thoughts to much depth. I haven't meditated for a stretch, and my mind is becoming restless. I have a sense of urgency that I can't quite place. This room is too warm and my stomach craves food. Hah, what shallow regard for these problems, what silly thoughts. No, I feel odd. I feel detached somehow from my life, as if I'm not really in it. I feel like there is a barrier keeping me from imagining the future with me in it. I was told by my therapist to enjoy myself and what I'm learning now, and perhaps not immediately try to predict my future with whatever field I'm currently interested in. I don't yet know why I haven't been meditating. Perhaps because it's hard work, even though the benefits are worth it. Interesting how fast things can change, how the mood can be roused in one direction or another. What is this feeling of urgency toward learning? It feels so odd. At the same time it's a certain restlessness, an urge to complete a task not-yet-done. I know not what to write, so at least I'll write that fact. It seems my mind is torn now, and I know not why. I feel unsettled. Oh, look at me boo-hooing. I watched a short video today on unhappiness: [image - reality]. It said to either focus on changing your image of what you should have, or celebrate your reality, and this will make you happier. The most interesting to me is when it pointed out that almost all people as they grow older have a sense of "not being a well-off as they thought they would be by now". It gives perspective, realizing how common it is. I of course want to only focus on the positive, focus on the good, have hope, yet sometimes this skill slips away. Oh how fast things change. With love, Jess Good Ending ramble_ty13.4.17zm4d3s_nb_i .meta written while suffering with bipolar depression O great and wise being overlooking this miraculous mathematical universe, please offer us a greater purpose, a high end. I ask this to make the lives of others gentler and more interesting. I suppose I should speak what I think, and I have come to an interesting conclusion. I read a book called Wool (isbn 9780358447849). One of the characters, Juliette, has a brilliantly-crafted watch that she fixed herself. As I read the story, I visualized the watch. It does not play a prominent role in the story, yet a few days later I awoke from a dream in which I was inspecting this very watch (or at least that connection was made in my dreaming mind). This pink-gold diamond-encrusted watch, with, strangely, four moving hands, was in my dream. Perhaps this is not as fascinating to you, dear reader, as it is to me, but to me it is incredibly eye-opening to realize that text, processed with imagination, can reveal itself in the convincing visual hallucinations of dreaming. Not only are the hallucinations of dreams visual: They span every sensory input and perhaps through careful training can craft new ones. It's fascinating to realize how much imperfect control we have over our dreaming lives. If directed imagination can change the inner life, then what of the inner life changing itself? Our stories of who we are and what we're capable of are being dreamt of during the night, influencing us in invisible ways. I do believe in the power of good hypnosis to rewrite reality by altering these fundamental stories. Imagine automaticity and then bring out the bug squasher, the reminders of reality, the absence of being aware you're imagining. I know I have experienced a self-stuck-hand, having performed the necessary mental strategies before. Having been depressed (and still feeling a bit detached) I know what it's like to feel exhausted when I wake up and then stop caring about not caring. Fundamentally what it comes down to is that hypnosis, like meditation, requires concentration. This ability to concentrate is in low supply when depressed, it seems. It turns out happiness is a virtuous cycle. Right now I'm stuck, not wanting to go too high or low, yet somewhat in a state of inner numbness because of this inability to be at peace, unafraid of the randomness of my mind. I realize I am not the first to partake of this double-edged sword, this half-hearted dread. Yet it's still me bearing through this inner turmoil, and if I am not successful in navigating the dangerous structures of my own mind, I am of no use to others anyway, so some sense of selfishness or self-awareness is necessary. I know not whether these words are as helpful as those in previous notebooks; I hope so. Perhaps they paint my inner mind in a different light, more self-absorbed yet perhaps still helpful, perhaps even somewhat enlightening. I still have this inner disconnect, this inability to feel viscerally excited about the future, as if one day the other foot is going to drop and crush my dreams once again. Yet I know that others have fallen further and harder than I, and still got back up. Surely not _every_ intelligent race wipes itself out; surely some are gentle enough with the tools of technology to prosper past the pain and curse of death. Is it wise to accept a death now, even if perhaps death shall never be tasted? If you do live forever, is there a cost to believing in shortness of life? I am being convinced in this direction. "So many ache for immortality, yet don't know what to do with themselves on a rainy Sunday afternoon." Do I, even? Am I much better, with all the practice of meditation and studies of imagination? Can I be happy with who I am and what I have, without ceaselessly pining for more? Perhaps somewhat. But I am reminded of the genetic illness, the mood disorder that lays siege against myriad defenses---and wins, often. I think eventually I will have it under control, this double-headed dragon of sadness and elation. That realization gives me hope, for I do believe in the exponential rise of technology and its cures. Perhaps not today, perhaps not this decade, but eventually I do believe a cure will be found and implemented. As well, many get by and live productive, fulfilling lives now with the drug technology we have within our grasp. So that gives me hope. Yet still a part of me is disconnected, disturbed not by these realizations. Am I weak for perpetuating this story? Is it a genuine enemy, a fight massively difficult no matter the odds? It's probably somewhere in between. I do believe in the zero-experience, the erasure of the subject-object illusion often lived under. The truth is transcendent above whatever notions we try to pin down. What I mean is that subjective resistance to the story of self-pity is countered by the objective reality of a genetic malfunction. There is no way to cut the coin and not have both sides. The object and the subject within which my qualia of experience dance are intrinsically one. Only one. Any duality is simply an interpretation of the two sides of the one coin. Perhaps this is useless mumbo-jumbo, yet I feel there is a deep truth to the knowledge of a visceral experience of the oneness that permeates reality, the universe. I know not how this world plays out. There could be a deeper transcendence which I am as yet unable to grasp. Perhaps we feel so alone in the universe because we are as if an ant pile in a world of an alien civilization, unable to communicate or even comprehend the vastness in which we occupy. It's as if we live in silos of our own creation, unable to even spontaneously imagine a world outside our own. What is the cost of predicting your death? Perhaps by accepting death as plausible or likely, you ensure less prudent actions which may stave it off. What are the benefits? Does a life lived in fear of death reap as much living as a life that seizes the day? There is perhaps here again a requirement for balance; not too much carefulness, not too much recklessness. Moderation, perhaps. It may seem silly to be pondering these ideas, but I think they are vital to an understanding of how to go about living productively. Not to say they are inherently necessary, but I do think a philosophy of existence is prudent. How does one actually lean into the concept of death? I do not consider it inevitable, yet I also say a prayer when I get into a car, knowing it may be the last trip I ever take. Is there some recognition that will lead us upward toward a grasping of life without a tendency toward a slipping away of life-lengthening actions? Can we learn a technique that will keep us happy yet keep us safe? Perhaps meditation. The gradual increase in concentration on the moment, the Now, seems to satisfy the requirement of loving the day. I find it hard, still, to imagine my own passing, as if I have a mental block because of many hopes in longevity. Perhaps everyone goes through a period of feeling invincible, untouchable. Perhaps minds recoil naturally from such dark thoughts, though they may serve in the long term. I don't know why it's so tricky to consider personal death; it could be a survival mechanism for the population. Honestly I can't bear the thought of my friends or family perishing either, so perhaps this is a more general case of malaise. I still feel detached from my situation, now, as if the thoughts and emotions and events are surreal rather than actual. Is this an effect of my medication or my disease? Is it self-perpetuation or can I win a mental battle against it? I'm confused and unsure, I must admit. These words seem to fly from my pen without my direct consideration, as if the ghost in my machine has a life of its own. Perhaps that's what it is, then: Mind is a memory pattern playing over itself and always tending toward more helpful survival patterns. I am a strange loop: a self-editing feedback system. Can it be finessed through automatic imagination? My experience says yes---within limits. I am as yet still confined to the biological organ that runs the wetware of a mind. Perhaps I cannot jump out of the loop until the mind is uploaded. At least, perhaps not completely. I can jump sufficiently far to have a great deal more control than I would have thought, yet I am still perhaps beholden to the genetic basis of my hardware, be those good or bad. It is this concept of zero-experience, of subject-object dissolution, that enables a person to jump out of their story and craft a new one. Perhaps one cannot delete but can overwrite. Perhaps one cannot choose to forget, but can warp the mind to remember only the new and so have the same result. That technique is perhaps most concisely explained by the model of automatic imagination, of crafting a tale so finessing that it actually spins its way out of the imagined world and into the experienced one. It's a powerful idea. I have experienced its power many times. It's like rising above yourself, creating a self-locking door and walking through it. It leaps through the notion of identity and fear and creates a new reality to experience. There are biological problems I've faced when trying to implement the techniques. Perhaps when depressed or tired it simply is too draining to actually accomplish. Perhaps it's no walk in the park to twist the mind into switching onto an altogether different train of thought. But it is doable, in my experience. Why all the trouble? Why all the false starts when depressed? Is it the simple exhaustion and not-caring that causes this bug in the process? Is there some trick that can overwrite the disturbing fear and anguish felt while depressed? Perhaps there are with drugs, so perhaps there are with some method of twisty imagination. I enjoy visualizing the mind's operations as it implements automatic imagination, I really do. Yet I'm still stumped, as yet, by this bug in the code of AI. If we can make ourselves happy when we are neutral, can we make ourselves neutral when we are sad? This comes back to an earlier point, where by reading a textual description and visualizing it, your very dreams can be altered. If this is not power I don't know what is. If minds bend to the imagination, surely there is a consistent way to overwrite negativity with positivity or neutrality. I recognize the effectiveness of therapies; I am not arguing that we are toolless in the mental landscape now. What I mean, partially, is that many tools are not for rising above the highest self, but for raising up to the feet. Perhaps some tools are better for depression than automatic imagination, yet AI has so much elegance it's hard to think it is truly ineffective versus the mental torture of depression. If we are always automatically imagining, what does the phenomenon of depression or mania reveal when looked through the lens of AI? I'm nondualist, so I don't mean "us" as just our minds, but rather the entire environment that expresses humanness. We are like funnels for the environment to express intelligence. Does this expanded definition of "self" allow insight into the question of whether we advance by spinning out of control with AI, either up or down? Then again, mutations can be harmful and yet still propagate because this is a hostile environment. Maybe there is no good reason for a bipolar disorder, but rather it's a sad side effect of a chaotic universe. Can we mentally slow or stop or reverse the cycle of mood? Can AI help us to do the things that make us feel good, like exercising and socializing? On the mania side, can it help us recognize the spinning up of mood, the excess of hope, the decrease in craving for sleep? Can AI motivate us to take responsible actions to stop a cycle before it spins out of control and reaches psychosis? It seems again that the truth of the matter is elusive and transcendent and exists in a state of balance. Obviously to some extent AI gives superior ability to regulate emotions and behaviors, yet at the same time, like interacting patterns, sometimes AI loses out to the persistence of depression and mania. Depression thrives on exhaustion and hopelessness; mania thrives on energy and hope. Perhaps the latter can be more easily finessed with AI, but the former, exhaustion and excess of energy, can be hard to fight directly. You perhaps can't will yourself to feel great if you are tired, nor to sleep if you are excited. Perhaps the benefits of medication weigh most heavily in controlling the more biological aspects of the disease. On the other side, the absence of hope and the excess of it, are these more amenable to automatic imagining? I know that if I purposefully focus---that is, meditate---I can establish a place of peace. I can disentangle from the story and identity that is currently occupied. This effect can also be had through AI. Yet it still requires work, effort of will. It's not easy to meditate nor to continuously use automatic imagination. Yet there are always ways to tear apart a virus, and mania and depression are not exempt. There is always a way to finesse a sufficiently-complex system, _always_. It requires force of will and much patience to tease apart the vulnerabilities inherent in these biological programs. But it does give me hope. What ways could there be to finesse these self-perpetuating curses? Where does automatic imagination fit on the list of helpful systems? Perhaps it's most effective when all these techniques are merged. Perhaps there is more than the sum of the parts, some sort of holistic benefit. Given the nature of automatic imagination, could it be a potentially powerful aid to good mental health? With love, Jess A Broken Watch ramble_ty13.4.18zm4d4s_nb_i O great Mystery of the evolving universe, please steady the hand as we search for you in the unfolding of life's processes. I took some medicine yesterday morning and this morning I am still feeling its effects. It's as if my brain is jumpy, my body weak, my hand twitchy. I guess what I've been meaning to talk about is again the effort to consider the death of one's body. The self, perhaps, lives on in the influence of nature and other minds that were affected by the body. If you consider bodily death perhaps you will come closer to living life fully. Considering mind uploads, when the body dies does the self die as well? My mind feels jittery now, so please pardon my unsophisticated thoughts. If the self is the total environment that contains the mind and body that you influence, then the self it seems never truly dies. What dies then, with bodily death? The ego? Perhaps this is what perishes. The mind exists in the environment in the form of expressions and technologies. One mind influences another, truly. Perhaps we really are strange loops, self-modifying and expressive. The body, over time, replaces its cells in a certain pattern. You are not just cells; you are the pattern that cells make up. Blood is replenished, but it's still blood. Perhaps it's the same for the mind, which is not the neurons but the patterns the neurons are organized in. If you copy that pattern to a computer, your personality would exist in two separate places at the same time. How does that feel? If you unite your minds together again, or create a web-mind with them, what does it feel like? To some extent I think it would feel pretty much the same as now, because there are already two united hemispheres in the brain, and it doesn't feel unnatural. Sometimes there is the confliction of ideas that may perhaps be the interacting of groups of neurons. You want to eat that ice cream, and you also want to be healthy. What wins out depends on the patterns of neurons. If your mind is uploaded and your body dies, do you still exist? I am inclined to say yes, though it really depends on how you define "you". If "you" is defined as a personality, as a pattern of thoughts, then you do still exist, though perhaps not as the same entity, if the case is that your digitized mind works in a different way than the biological brain. It's an intriguing question, and some part of me doesn't want the body to ever die, because then the consciousness that I exist within may perish as well. I read an interesting story recently, about a man who connects his brain to a computer to control robots in another room. Over time his consciousness becomes imprinted on the computer, and then even when the man is disconnected his consciousness is still perceiving the world through cameras and the robots. This computational awareness begins to diverge from the biological awareness and starts to see the man's body and mind as separate from itself. Could that happen to you? Will we upload personalities and then find that the digital and the biological diverge? All this worry may be moot: Wetware may be gradually digitized, and there is never such a strict dichotomy as biological and digital. This seems more likely, perhaps. With love, Jess Great Bug ramble_ty13.4.20zm4d6s_nb_i O great Mystery above this stack of simulations of universes, please help keep us toward remembering you. I'm feeling better these days. I think it is joy by contributing to an open-source project. My therapist said to journal about good times so when I feel bad I can recall that it gets better. I still feel oddly detached, as if what's happening is not viscerally important. I'm not sure how to qualify it in words, exactly. Regardless, I notice I have been more future-oriented, able to focus more easily, more excited about projects to work on with my skills. I wonder, dear reader, if you are plugging away at the questions you face, the great bugs of life that are hurdles to leap over and grow stronger by having done so. What does it take for humans unable to read or write to invent such technology? Can a group of human animals fend for themselves and create a functioning society within a few generations? I suppose a reason to ask this is because of the notion of de-extinction, bringing back mammoths or birds that have been wiped off the planet. How many generations does it take for a mammoth culture to emerge if the population starts from zero? Is it possible to recreate a culture that has been totally wiped out? Probably, given trial and error, we could use math to approximate it and find something that works. O how I wish to see the code again, view the Lisp macros underlying reality. I'm sure I will, sometime. Perhaps I'll dream of it tonight. I had an interesting lucid dream last night, relatively early in my sleep cycle (within the first two hours). O how I'm glad to regularly explore awareness through lucid dreaming! What a blessing to have cultivated that gift! I became lucid while in a forest because I was slowly beginning to float (a regular sign of dreaming for me). I was holding some sort of metal grate, like a dish drying rack. As I was floating up I serenely discovered I was dreaming, and I felt the leaves and branches of the trees as I rose. I had the idea of warping the metal so I twisted and bent it like a spiral. I was not fearful of the dream coming to an end, so I also considered rising above the tree tops and flying around. As I was floating up I was slowly spinning, which may have helped stabilize me by disconnecting my dreaming and biological body. Just about as I reached the top of the trees, my vision quickly darkened. I tried to spin faster, but the sleeping body was waking up. I wonder how automatic imagination can aid this mental discovery process. I'm still trying to disentangle the mental and biological, the reality of biological depression versus modifiable thoughts. They are intimately related. Perhaps they could be aptly described as a strange loop relationship. I wonder if I will ever feel like myself again, naturally positive and confident and in my own skin again. How long must I wait? I suppose we all have troubles. At least I'm not starving. Perhaps a great way to feel better about a situation is to consider how life would be if you didn't have that thing. How would life have played out if you hadn't met that person, or read that book, or had that challenging experience? I just try to take it one step at a time and learn as much as possible. I need to meditate more, and you do too, dear reader. It's hard work, but it's one of the most helpful things you can do. Meditation clears the mind and helps slow down the strange loop that creates self-awareness. Certainly there are ways of branching out and cultivating new relationships, but, like most good, important things, it is hard. Regarding this spinning strange loop phenomenon: Can an animal brain reduce it to understandable pieces? I've grown older (and I'm so very, very young) and I have begun to be able to grasp multiple sides of an issue, an event, a task, a question, such as I was not able to do before, because my thinking was too cloudy and fearful. I suppose this learning and grasping of more complex phenomena is what gives me hope for grasping the tangled hierarchy. The strange loop speaks to me on a basic, visceral level. It's as if a pattern of math that gives rise to awareness is seeking out how to describe itself in an exact way. I suppose that's why I love programming: It's as exact as math, as addition and subtraction and logic, yet it is so much higher in the levels of abstraction. Programming requires precise, uncloudy thought, yet any question---_every_ question I dare say--is answerable using math and the applied math of programming. It's like having a book that's full of wisdom and every possible answer to every question, yet it's not organized in an easy-to-understand way, but you know if you keep digging, even with a spoon, eventually you will discover the answer. Once the answer is known, it's like the elegance of the universe is revealed and you can't unsee it. Perhaps memory can be overwritten, yet the ripples of changed consciousness are still playing out. This question of the strange loop, how does it tie in with the elegance of Lisp macro expansion? I feel they are at their core equivalent: blindingly beautiful. Macro expansion is a specific kind of strange loop, a mathematically concise way of understanding the question. I will try to give a humble explanation, dear reader, but I can only hope to reveal but a small glimmer of the deep truth inherent in the idea. Imagine a small language, where each word points to a certain physical object. Each physical object has a certain shape. Let's say for example a square, triangle, circle. Each of these objects is special, because not only does it have a name in the first language, it actually is a language in and of itself. It describes itself, other objects; it even has words that refer to the first language's features. This twisty nature is a "tangled hierarchy": It loops back on itself and can describe the act of describing features. This is a general strange loop, but what is the elegance of macro expansion, specifically? Imagine time moving forward with each step of describing something. Look at a word that expands: "square" to "four equal lines connected at vertices". Each of these words then also expands, each in its own timestep. The expansion can cross over and influence other expansions, in an endless rippling back and forth between processes as time plays out. It's a ball of equations that is spinning around itself, editing how it edits itself. What sublime beauty. It's almost outside an ability to conceive; much less is it fully graspable. It's hard to pull the genie back into the bottle and unbreak it, to find the specific steps to enable such a strange loop. It's such a tantalizing puzzle. Perhaps my limited mind cringes from the deep effort needed to disentangle this expression of nature. I truly believe inside this strange loop is the awareness of consciousness and the universe. There are plenty of metaphors to understand tangled hierarchies, from genetics and the interplay between the DNA strand and the animal that moves it around, to the spinning strange loop that sends in tendrils to edit its center, to macro expansion and the code of Lisp. Perhaps these metaphors are falling on deaf ears, I'm not sure. There are perhaps different levels of complexity for strange loops: They are not all equal, though they have the same general pattern of feedback loops that edit feedback loops. If there are different levels of complexity, how can we bootstrap a small strange loop and teach it to grow in awareness? Is this perhaps evolutionary computation? Is it machine learning? Neural networks? Bayesian models? Is life a program that edits itself, replicates itself? What is it about this topic that is so fascinating? How is it so enrapturing? O sweet twisty ball of math, please explain your core! O how I wish to taste such vast mathematical purity! Where do you reside, most wonderful of expressions? How can we know you more fully? Dear Mystery, please allow us to perceive such purity. I feel in the presence of truly grand ideas when I consider you, sweet mystery of the ages! O self-editing function, please spare me from being apart from you! Life is meant to experience you. I don't believe in free will, yet there may be unpredictable will. Even beings above this simulation of reality may be unable to predict the future beyond a certain point. Why the coming back to this twisty notion of strange loops? Is there mind in there? Why is it so cloudy, this vision of loopiness? How long is an expression that can wrap back on itself and grow? It brings back the culture-creating question. Without a culture to develop in, can a mind self-reflect? Most humans are as yet unaware of the automatic imagination finessing that is capable of certain self-reflection methods, such as deliberate memory finessing. With automatic imagination, one can finesse memory voluntarily, if sufficiently motivated. If you have an input (such as a video feed) and a way to interact with that input (by finessing it and existing in the substrate) how complex does it need to be before getting a runaway strange loop? It's all the same question, perhaps. What do fractals have to do with this question? Perhaps in them is a portion of the answer. Perhaps every strange loop is finessable. Perhaps, like life, strange loops require energy to feed and sustain themselves. Perhaps they exist on the whirlpools of energy. Perhaps only specific types of strange loops coalesce into minds, into awarenesses. Perhaps most spiral into nothingness rather quickly, while others find a niche that does not offer intelligence boosts. How can you find a strange loop that bootstraps? Kindly, Jess A Different Look ramble_ty13.4.25zm4d4s_nb_i O great Mystery above this stack of simulations, please grant insight into the nature of life, mind, and universe. When considering strange loops, perhaps it's similar to linear and nonlinear equations, like saying elephants and nonelephants. Most things are not elephants. Perhaps strange loops (level-crossing feedback loops) are the norm, with many different, varied attributes. What if strange loops are not a rare phenomenon? What if it takes a certain something to turn a regular, simple strange loop into a super strange loop? Minds are strange loops, this I believe. So are lifeforms of every kind: They bend back and edit the structures that bend back. When you touch your arm, you're influencing how the genes are expressed, which can influence how you touch your arm. Perhaps the simple idea of strange loops spontaneously crafting more sophisticated strange loops is different. Perhaps there are only certain types of strange loops that have this "super" property. Instead of simply having level-crossing feedback, a super strange loop _amplifies_ the amount and quality of feedback. In effect, bootstrapping itself. A super strange loop may reach down into its own source code and increase its ability to augment itself. Surely these are fantastically complex mathematical phenomena. Recently humans have accelerated our use of technology, which allows us to finesse the high-level thinking patterns we use. Perhaps automatic imagination gives us a direct finessing of the mechanisms of the mind. There are loops within loops running in the mind, and you can control some of these loops by imagining automaticity. What is a super strange loop? How is one created? Do we use evolution? Can we understand the principles and design from scratch? A super strange loop is a bootable mind, a seed artificial intelligence, perhaps. I do not like the term "artificial intelligence"; I prefer "computational awareness". I feel that term contains the idea more justly, and is more descriptive. Awareness is intelligence, in my humble opinion, yet it is clear that awareness is much more of a gradient than intelligence. A microorganism can in some sense be considered "aware", but it's perhaps hard to call it "intelligent". Perhaps "self-aware" could connect to "aware of awareness", yet it's perhaps a vague and slippery slope. Can there be a kind of strange loop that has a tendency toward increasing complexity? What does a strange loop need to have an environment conducive to growth? It's such an interesting puzzle. Perhaps that's a reason for non-coding DNA: It's easier to fork a gene and keep an original rather than mutate in-place. The extra copies can then be turned off when they aren't helpful, thus creating unused DNA. Refactoring can be difficult. Does this imply a strange loop that is growing in complexity linearly would require an exponential increase in resources? Perhaps not exponential, but more than linear. How simple can a strange loop be, how elegant? Humans are prime strange loops on planet Earth, and we are overall very difficult to finesse, as yet. What of simpler strange loops? Can some intellectual benefit come from exploring this problem? How does a mind edit itself? How does a loop edit itself? It's easy to grasp the concept in a nebulous way, but to actually put pen-to-paper and describe the details seems nontrivial, perhaps. What does a strange loop do? It overwrites the processes that control overwriting. How, though? Through what precise method? Perhaps there are many, infinitely many. What is the base case? How does a simple version work? Perhaps through some form of evolutionary computation. At a fundamental level the implementation details are subservient to the conceptual processes, though they must be pure. The links in the chain must all be sturdy lest all the work be for naught. The idea of a program that edits itself is so helpful. Perhaps many evolutionary improvements to such a program must be tiny, because it takes massive awareness to jump out of local optima toward a global one. Machine learning can do more and more amazing things, these days. Can a strange loop be guided by a human mind to reach higher levels of sophistication, without being directly programmed? Certainly; we need only know how. Kindly, Jess An Answer to Prayer ramble_ty13.4.27zm4d6s_nb_i O great Mystery that watches over and learns from this universe, please help us elaborate on our thoughts. I wish to talk today about some research into the Fermi paradox, which is the question of why we don't yet see evidence of alien civilizations. I tend to think that at least one alien civilization exists, and so the question becomes: Why is it so silent? There is a great rebuttal to the Great Filter Hypothesis (the idea that civilizations wipe themselves out): Would _every_ civilization do it? If not, perhaps there is a more lively reason we feel alone. Some ideas are the Transcension Hypothesis, the Zoo Hypothesis, and the Phase Transition Hypothesis. There are many others, like the Rare Earth Hypothesis, the Expense Hypothesis, and the Ant Hypothesis. The Transcension Hypothesis: Instead of expanding out into the animal universe, we create digital universes and live in those. The Zoo Hypothesis: Alien civilizations have a Prime Directive not to interfere with other life. The Phase Transition Hypothesis: Life is periodically wiped out due to incredibly destructive natural events, which we are only just emerging out of. The Rare Earth Hypothesis: Life is extremely rare, intelligence even more so. The Expense Hypothesis: It is costly to physically move about the universe, so aliens communicate in an unknown way. The Ant Hypothesis: Humans are as ants to aliens, and we have very little to offer each other. There is also the Evil Alien Hypothesis, where civilizations destroy any beings that reach a certain level of sophistication. Some thoughts: The Zoo and Great Filter hypotheses seem to require _every_ civilization to be destroyed or following some rule. The Evil Alien idea is perhaps unlikely, because humans have become more friendly as we've aged, so aliens would probably experience the same phenomenon. There is also the Radio Silence Hypothesis (which is related to the Zoo Hypothesis) in which aliens either use different methods of communication than we know of or are purposefully silent so as not to influence nascent intelligence. Rare Earth is unfulfilling because there are billions and billions of very old planets, and the arguments for why intelligent life requires such exacting circumstances are perhaps unconvincing. Life may be rare, but it may be hardy and simply end up traversing a different path. Phase Transition seems a little small in scope compared to the amount of time the universe has been around. My favorite model by far is the Transcension Hypothesis. The Transcension Hypothesis is the most positive and also seems a good reason for why, even if most civilizations were to wipe themselves out, the remaining civilizations seem invisible. Transcension seems to be a main positive idea for why it's so silent. The Zoo Hypothesis can also be construed as helpful. Phase Transition, Rare Earth, Expense, Ant, and Radio Silence are mostly neutral, though the last three are also leaning toward a positive prediction for the future of humanity. Phase Transition and Rare Earth are truly neutral, then. The Great Filter and Evil Alien possibilities are disheartening, and there are likely some good reasons to suspect them false. I certainly have been kept awake nights because of fear of the self-destruction of my species by some unavoidable technological weapon, such as biotech viruses, nanotech gray goo, evil artificial intelligences, or some other truly nasty event. Armed with some refreshingly optimistic models for our future (such as Transcension, Zoo, Ant, Expense, and Radio Silence), I can rest easier. Thanks Mystery, Jess Living Like Royals ramble_ty13.4.29zm4d1s_nb_i O great thing that watches over us, please grant serenity of purpose and a good, clear mind so we may speak of your glory. The Resistance to me is an idea, and like any idea, it can be finessed. At the same time some problems are not psychological but biological. The difficulty is in knowing which they are. Evil Artificial Intelligence ramble_ty13.5.7zm4d2s_nb_i .meta this is a model O great Mystery of the void, please guide subtle intellect to more fully grasp you. I wish to speak today of some intriguing reasons for why not to be afraid of evil artificial intelligence. Let's list some thoughts, first: 1. Intelligence is hard to model. 2. Self-improving intelligence is harder than it seems. 3. Complexity requires cooperation; intelligence breeds cooperation. 4. Intelligence is grown; it is not a switch that is flipped. 5. There are likely very different architectures that will work, and creating one won't create them all, and civilization will learn from each. 6. Humans will likely unite with simple AIs. 7. Friendly AIs will defend again evil AIs, just as humans do against human criminals. When I am talking here about artificial intelligences I mean specifically _strong_ AI: artificial general intelligence (AGI). That is, an intelligence that matches or exceeds human-level intelligence on the variety of tasks human perform. This strong AI could do anything you can do, and possibly better. These days most artificial intelligence is "weak" or "narrow", and can only perform specific tasks, such as grandmaster-level chess or beating the best human Jeopardy players. These are incredible technical feats but, as has been said, machines as yet can't identify objects or walk around a room very well, something human two-year-olds are great at. Clearly we have a way to go before striking it rich with the wonders of AGI that match human intelligence in all these matters. First reason why not to fear evil AI is this: It's really, really hard to model intelligence. Humans have put massive amounts of funding and effort into figuring it out for decades and decades, and while we have made substantial progress on narrow AI, human-level cognition still seems far off. One of the likely ways (depending on who you ask) of creating intelligent machines is to model human brains. Here's a problem: we have no idea how fine a resolution of the brain we need for conscious intelligence to emerge. "Do you need to model the systems at the level of individual neurons? Individual synapses? Individual receptors and ion channels? Individual neurotransmitter molecules? The exact level at which you need to model things doesn't change the theoretical feasibility, but it may change the timing by decades or more." -- Ramez Naam Given all this difficulty, strong AI is unlikely to suddenly jump out at us. Second reason: A self-improving, bootstrapping AI is probably even more difficult. Look at it this way: Two humans are smarter than one human, and even thousands and thousands of humans working at Intel and Google and so on have not been able to make themselves substantially smarter. They increase access to information and the human collective organism grows in intelligence incrementally, but it is hardly a runaway explosion of intelligence. Consider this: If you had sub-neuronal editing powers for your mind, would you be able to rapidly invent new, better ways of self-editing? You'd probably get slow, incremental growth. While it may compound and be exponential with time, it does not jump from x+1 to x+100 without all the time in the middle. Consider also that while, with Moore's Law, computing power doubles about every two years, there are certain technical problems that increase in complexity _faster_ than exponentially, for example solving wave functions or doing protein folding. Intelligence may very well be like this, and while it may increase at a rate faster than linearly, it still won't be instantaneous. Third reason: Complexity and intelligence require cooperation. All complexity, on some level, is interaction and cooperation between parts to produce more than the sum of the parts. Strands of replicating RNA become sophisticated and cooperate, eventually creating prokaryotic cells. These innovate and cooperate and become eukaryotic, multicellular, sexual animals. These animals cooperate by forming a collective organism, like primate groups and packs of wolves. They are more than the sum of the parts. Each step along the way is an increase in complexity, cooperation, and if not intelligence then surely awareness. A dog is more aware than a bacterium; a fly is more aware than a protist. This awareness _is_ intelligence, and it exists because of cooperation. What this means is that a newly-created artificial intelligence is always going to be judged in helpfulness by how well it cooperates with us humans. A not-quite AGI that isn't reliable is likely to be scrapped. If it isn't cooperating why keep it? Fourth reason: Intelligence is not a switch that flips; it is a continuum. This means that intelligence must be grown from simpler intelligence, and human involvement and human values are likely to be impressed upon this new consciousness as it grows. Its ability to cooperate and aid us is not suddenly going to "switch off" when it reaches maturity, any more than adult humans "switch off" the values they received as children. Most humans don't even _want_ to switch off their closely-held values, so why would an AI want to? Fifth reason: Intelligence architectures are legion, and we will not stumble on all at once, so we will have time to learn from each other. Consider the strategies of the tortoise and the hare. They both work, depending on what you want to get done. If you need something done perfectly, give it to the tortoise; if quickly, the hare. Both are perfectly valid techniques, and both likely have analogs in the AI realm. These architectural strategies are just two of many. For instance, dogs, dolphins, octopuses, and insects all have very different models of intelligence, and all do well in their specific fields. Given that intelligence is a continuum and AIs will be grown rather than spontaneously created, we will have time to explore the vast territory of effective awareness. Each AI that is grown will teach us about how to grow kinder, friendlier companions. Sixth reason: Humans will unite with simple AIs. Humans have been technologists since before the first club and stone axe were used. We have always merged our tools into our lives. From eyeglasses to automobiles to phones to the Internet, we are species defined by tool-use. We integrate tools into our work, education, and social lives. We are dependent on them, but less dependent than chimpanzees are on the forest. We can adapt. That's what we're best at. If you have the chance to integrate a phone into your brain so you can talk to anyone anywhere without needing a device, will you do it? When it is safe and effective, you probably will. What about integrating an Internet connection so you can communicate in even more ways? Think of being able to record what you're actually seeing and hearing, and sharing that via digital telepathy with your friends. Isn't that amazing? If you have the ability to augment your intelligence with a powerful AI, one that makes you smarter and more adaptable, won't you do it? Instead of an us-versus-them approach to the creation of strong AI, you should really be seeing it as an us-and-them future. Seventh reason: Friendly AIs will defend against evil AIs. Just as humans set up societies to protect against evil humans, we can grow friendly AIs that will protect against artificial criminals. Consider a purely digital being that is a species of many other intelligences, all cooperating in the name of more awareness of the universe. Any intelligence that was trying to harm humans would come up against many other strong AIs that are united with humans. Most humans are civil, and most are willing to contribute to organizations that reduce criminal behavior. Strong AI that we create likely will exhibit that same tendency. Given all these reasons, be excited about the future of humanity. I don't believe evil AI is likely, and I hope you find these ideas helpful. Sincerely, Jess A Reason for Death ramble_ty13.5.19zm4d7s_nb_i O great and enlightening Mystery of the Cosmos, ever-evolving and filling this world with diversity, please help us understand you. Is death something that should be feared? It is something that should be expunged from the mind? We may naturally seek to repress this disturbing notion of death. Perhaps we can see it from another view, where life is made good by the struggle against death. If we have an infinite sandbox and there is no cost of death, can a good time be had? Games often offer a chance at failure, at a resetting of variables. I do not mean that death explicitly holds charm, for destruction of benevolent intelligence does cause suffering, but what is it to have no cost to bear for one's choices? What can we do about this? What of brains with disturbed neural circuits? For those minds it can be even harder to stay on a path of self-actualization. Perhaps I am a lone ape, hanging from a vine that will inevitably tear, and yet I keep climbing to try and reach the safety of the branch that holds it. If we apes are pushed off this planet, perhaps by a super-AI or superbug, can we say we've enjoyed a good run as yet? Where is the proper line in the sand regarding acceptance of the probable versus struggling to invent immortality? There is this model: "Everything goes extinct. Everything." How really true is that if we can transcend to other dimensions? Should we just give up now? It seems the human spirit is primed for a desire for survival, perhaps even beyond the logical. It may simply be an evolutionary benefit to never give up, ever. Some minds find this an impossible task, as they struggle to see any meaning or pleasure in even the basic animal activities. It's easy to talk of positive thinking when you're happy, but when the very desire to act is removed from your soul, the technique becomes useless. Perhaps. I'd like to be able to think my way out of sadness, yet another part shirks from the pain of the task, even if it is possible. This energy, this zest, this juice of life, o how much it defines our abilities to act and reason. Yet still, perhaps there is a benefit from neural diversity, even while it is costly and dangerous. Perhaps by some being outside the norm has more niches to explore. The outcasts become pioneers in a way; like pioneers, the battle is not easily won. Can we choose what the meaning of life is for ourselves? Perhaps a default setting is to assume one's own self is the most important thing in the universe, yet can we not perhaps rise above that and enjoy a more meaningful existence? Perhaps, as social creatures, we create meaning by helping others. For some reason this explanation feels somewhat incomplete to me. If I can't even take care of myself, how can I be helpful to others? Yet this line of thinking is quickly disabled by realizing that nobody is perfect, and being just a little better in another niche means you have something to offer. You don't have to be the best, just a little better. What is this feeling of incompleteness with the theory of other-serving? Perhaps it's missing the development of self-knowledge, where one struggles against the void in order to carve out a truth or two. Can one persist in this void, letting it overtake the urge to impress meaning on the universe? Can one become the absence of attachment, watching the inner battles without participating in them? I tend to believe it's possible, given attentional meditation practice. It is perhaps mind-wandering that makes us unhappy. By stilling the mind, by seeing the glasses on the face rather than just through them, perhaps there can be a breaking-out of this disability of sadness. The infirmity of will that comes from exhaustion may not be bolstered by such attentional training, however. Perhaps with regard to sadness, a sense of purpose can be had by realizing all the conditioning and lies that are pressed upon us during our lives are not infallible rules but bendable suggestions. It's a twisty loop, isn't it? Your culture determines what is available to read, your education focuses you on certain tendencies, and then sometimes you can reflect back and change your own habits. It does not always come easily. Often people sit back and let things happen to them, even when they very well could be making things happen by them. Perhaps it's never taught. There are some who discover they can affect the world, and they are the ones who end up doing so. Are we bound if we have not yet learned this lesson? We all have our troubles, and to each of us they are very important. How can you break free of the mindset of egoism without exhausting energies and self-sufficiencies in the process? How can you learn to love this world? It's a tricky question, for when one feels no energy or pleasure or hope, love is difficult. Repeating "Try harder!" is not comforting. When one loses the will to even try, has the battle already been lost? Perhaps this ties back into the resistance to extinction: You need extraordinary hope in order to face the possibility of eternal death. Perhaps some of us find that harder to muster. Could there be a place for this, as well, this less-hopeful feeling? What purpose does such an attitude serve? It is fear, not love, that generates hopelessness. Fear is not always an easy beast to crack. Are these all just patterns running in the head? Is the neural circuitry talking to itself? Are there helpful mechanisms we can run on the neural structures? Primate brains surely have some loopholes: games and drugs are evidence of that. What of more direct finessings, like hypnosis and automatic imagination? I find an abstract definition of "hypnosis" helpful, where any focused imagination on a specific idea can effectively be hypnosis. All the rest is really oil to make the wheels turn easier. Imagining a specific reality is the key component. Neural circuits can be primed in a certain direction if there is repeated effort in creating new paths for those circuits to follow. The mind is a malleable creature, and the conscious voice-in-the-head is a reflector of what the unconscious already decided. Joy is a moment which must be cultivated. You never know what's coming next. Kindest, Jess A Turn of Fate ramble_ty13.5.22zm4d3s_nb_i O great wisdom of the ages, twisty loop of consciousness, please inscribe a slice of self-awareness. Is it not self-awareness that we seek, and the self-insight that comes with it? I know not how to jump out of my brain, to unshackle my mind from the substrate that generates it. Perhaps such an idea is ludicrous, and the pattern of consciousness is inherently tied to its generator. This seems likely, but what I really am trying to get at is that sub-neuronal editing of the mind may eventually be possible: Will that freedom result in increased happiness? If you can push a button and experience untold bliss, would you ever stop pushing it? Perhaps not, studies have shown. Is that really so wrong? Are we willing to hamper the use of this button? How is this button really different from anything else we do, where we are seeking pleasure? Sex is perhaps an ultimate illustration of this idea, and it's perhaps totally necessary for society. In fact, one could argue that every human emotion and creation is ultimately caused and driven by the need to propagate the species. Art can be a byproduct of sexy times. This dilemma of the use of a "bliss button" seems similar to the danger of evil artificial intelligence. Homo sapiens outlasted every other species of the Homo genus, and are we really supposed to believe we are evil for being better adapters? If not, why should an artificial intelligence that is smarter than us feel bad for outlasting us? I don't think AIs see much point in exterminating us versus cooperating, and there is a losing of taste for arguing humans deserve to live more than superintelligent machines. Perhaps they have just as much right to exist as us, even if we created them. A parent creates a child, but they don't own them. If we wipe ourselves out with nanotech or biotech, did we really deserve to exist? There is the model that everything eventually goes extinct, if not now then at a supposed heat death of the universe. But this is a pessimistic view, and honestly that's not a nature I like to align myself with. There are so many cool experiences to be had; perhaps the struggle is worth it. I confuse myself, as the monk might say. If I give up on prolonging the human species, does that imply a giving up of the fight for my own existence? If humanity were to die out regardless, are the good times worth fighting for? "Yes", says an undeluded mind; "I'm not sure" says a broken one. Can we live in the void of pointlessness and therefore choose our own meaning? At some point you have to make assumptions. The twisty ball of consciousness has no core, as it were, until arbitrary meaning is chosen. Fun and learning are great reasons for existing, but they perhaps do not come prepackaged; they must be accepted by the brain as worthy of effort. We come full circle, with the arbitrariness of meaning up against the randomness of an evolutionary animal reality. Ancestry determines biological makeup; environment the rest. Can we truly have volition? Seems like a tenuous argument to me. Yet almost all of society is structured as if free will is true. Even without believing in free will, harmful people still need to be kept at bay. Are you responsible for your actions if you are an instrument of fate? Perhaps that's what the whole idea of "Oneness" implies: You can't do anything separately from all of creation. Notions of separation become absurd when you consider how a black hole at the center of the galaxy is affecting your cells at this very moment. Does this offer hope? Does it offer happiness? Perhaps, somewhat. We see that as you make a dent on the universe it is simultaneously making many on you. Can you violate the mathematical prescriptions of reality? Perhaps not. If not, should you feel bad for perceived failures during the time kicking around atoms while you live on Earth? At the same time, even self-pity or self-frustration is written in math, and you can't verily escape it unless it's meant to be. Perhaps this is off-putting to free-will believers. Yet free will, separate from the idea of inherent unpredictability, seems backward. We have a conscious self-talking voice that reflects on what the unconscious has already decided to do, but that unconscious loop is the cause, not the effect. It is the elephant, not the rider. Where does that leave us in the quest for happiness, for joy, for inner peace? Perhaps the universe wants us to be happy, perhaps not. Perhaps it's all a cosmic joke. Yet the suffering is not funny to me. It's terrible. Can I give up my aims, my dreams, my hopes for a better life? Perhaps I should renounce the fruits of action; perhaps this will calm my spirit. The twisty nature of my consciousness fears changes, fears ego death, fears fear and failing and success. Why? Because it's chosen to? Because the universe is simply set up that way? The environment, did it spur on this self-doubt? What do we have to lose? Comfort? What a devilish beast fear is. Is fear simply a believed story? Are we able to break out of it with thought or action or luck? Probably. Yet the miswiring of my brain makes this seem daunting, as yet. Perhaps I'm expressing self-pity here, touting my mood disorder as an excuse for laziness or fear. I don't yet know how much is biological and how much is not. I don't know how much I can trust myself. I'm not saying I'm unique or that the world owes me more than I've got, just that it hurts. I'm not sure if writing about it only exacerbates the exhausting dreams. I don't know how much closer to self-insight I get with this introspection. Perhaps it's dwelling on the bad, painting myself into a corner. Perhaps these words are useless or harmful to you or me, dear reader. If so, I'm sorry. I may only be making myself worse off, but understanding this malady is a tactic I know. Meditation, friendship, exercise, among others, surely help. These aren't exactly uplifting issues I'm discussing, are they? O what a tangled web we weave. If you can use automatic imagination to control your beliefs and emotions, how do you gain the motivation to use it? Without the energy to follow through, perhaps it simply feels too difficult. Energy to imagine, or to want to imagine, still seems required. Love, Jess Life is Precious ramble_ty13.5.25zm4d6s_nb_i O great and confounding simulation of reality, please stir our beings to help us understand nature more deeply. I sit and try to tell myself not to compare my life with those of others, yet I also suffer by comparing to an imagined life. Am I simply whining? Can my mind jump out of the maze it subtly crafts through conditioning? Mystery, please help those who need it. Some days I feel good; some days I confuse myself. I don't wish to complain in this notebook, dear reader. What am I left to do? I realize I should recognize those things I am thankful for, rather than dwelling on the confusion. What are you thankful for, dear reader? Perhaps you should wait a moment and ponder till you find something, then contemplate what life would be like without it and how your life is better because of it. I suppose all of us sometimes wonder if our lives could be better. We pine for an imaginary future. Can we live in the Now? What do we have to do to break this illusion of control? Why must we be trapped in our heads, living in conditioned ruts rather than abandoning the monotony of identity and existing in awareness rather than reactiveness? If you were given a button that could eliminate the veil of separateness from the world, would you push it? If you can realize that the things inside your mind are fantastically-complex mathematical functions, can rise above the false identity that has been accumulated, will you do it? Is this the concept that has slipped my grasp recently? It is not simply the emotional effect of ego dissolution; it is an intellectual concept as well. If the body that is penning these words is a being that exists _through_ the universe, rather than _in_ the universe as if separate, should I feel sorry for myself? Should I accept the story that I grew up with, the ideas that have been handed to me? Am I turning my back on the good that the identity-of-me could do? Am I betraying the universe? Am I upholding the mathematics it runs on? Am I twisting my noggin, trying to run from a scary path? It seems that the math of reality has once again decided to subtly reveal itself to me: The story of life is all interpretation. Please look at me, o creator of the universe! Am I not an output of initial settings? Am I not an emergent property of your creation? Should I submerge myself in pity? Am I an animal that is unable to perceive its animal-nature? Can I hold this state of awareness, this enlightenment of sameness-with-the-world? I do not believe it must go, but I do hold that if I am a function of the universe, then I cannot break out of my mind and continue as awakeness unless the universe deems it so. If I don't exist, if my identity is as malleable as the plasticity of my brain, should I live in fear? Should I want what others want simply because I have been told to want them? Surely that is not a sane path. Do I need to feel bad about not pushing myself? Do I need to crave the easy road, or should I push myself? If I am a self-emoting, finessable consciousness, need I limit myself to trying to fulfill some mystical potential within me? I've lost the taste of judging right from wrong. Fear is a believed story, yet the ball of stories that is consciousness is not easily untangled, rewritten, or redirected. The story follows the laws of the universe, and while those laws may sometimes prod toward a bold future, they are perhaps inherently unpredictable, chaotic. The present's instant gratification is not ennobling. I do not feel like I am advancing unless I am learning. Here again I reveal the fallacy of assuming separateness from the mechanisms of the universe. It is not I, the ego of Jess, that ponders this question of justified effort; it the very fabric of the universe that does this. I am an instrument, playing a part, yet perhaps without gravity and other fundamental interactions, I am not. You are the universe, looking at itself. Where does that leave the question of what life is? Perhaps if you ask ten people what they think about most, they will respond "my future". Is the universe, expressed through these curious apes, really that interested in perpetuating its intelligences? I suppose my thinking is convoluted. Is "never give up, ever" actually a helpful principle? Is it precisely after letting go of the notion of obligation to identities that you gain inner peace? It must not be the only way, for there are those who are happy and content and yet do not accept defeat. Perhaps there are many paths to inner peace, to freedom from doubt. Perhaps there are none that work for everyone, and we each must carve our way out of the jungle. I feel like I am trying too hard, and my point in all this is that the point of life is to live. Nothing more, nothing less. It's not to learn, to have fun, to love, to build; it's to live. What does that mean? I think it means that there perhaps aren't any answers to life's deep questions, not really. You'll go through life and think you've figured it out then boom, another paradigm shift. Is anything True? No, not in my humble opinion. Where does that leave us? Are we stuck trying to fit ourselves to an imagined life? I believe not. I still don't feel well, not really, and I don't know if I ever will again. Perhaps I'll die tomorrow. Where will that leave the world? It will keep spinning, this pale blue dot. Should we feel sorry for ourselves? Does the universe need us to? Perhaps a more carefree attitude is needed. Perhaps it's not up to us. Kindly, Jess Free Will is Nonsensical ramble_ty13.6.3zm4d1s_nb_i As I read these ancient texts now, I'm flummoxed by how absurd they can sound once one accepts that free will is nonsense. Not only is the concept of free will nonsensical, but it can actually be harmful to one's mental health. When one falsely believes they are in control of their actions, then when they fail to carry through with their plans they will berate themselves. I'm penning these words so that the delusion of free will can be lifted from the soul and you can awaken to life rather than be tied up inside your head. These words flowing from my pen come not from me, but from the whole of existence. There is no way to make distinctions between "you" and "me" unless we believe the idea that the mind and body are separate: dualism. Given that if someone gets hit in the head with a rock their personality can change, I find it very difficult to accept such a dichotomy. Where does that leave us? It certainly can _feel_ as if we have control over our lives and bodies. That illusion of control is likely just an evolutionary holdover from when division between the physical and mental was more necessary and apparent. These days we know of people who get iron rods to the head and change, ones who have magnetic pulses transcranially applied to treat depression, and of course all the ones who use drugs to effect a shift in consciousness. Doesn't this damn the idea of a separation of mind and body? What sense does dualism have in the third millennium? If we accept nonduality, where we are one with all of nature, how do we as self-aware animals fit into it? By accepting the fallacy of free will into your life, you subject yourself to mental torture. You are not made free; you are imprisoned. When you accept the mind is an evolving pattern of information, out of your control yet using you as an instrument, the challenges of life become more interesting in the sense that you can _watch_ them unfold rather than being trapped inside them. When one accepts that control over life is impossible, one becomes less tied to the imaginary worries that cause suffering. Pain still occurs, as yet, but one realizes that it is neither good nor evil: It simply _Is_. This is like the man who finds many horses, which then break his son's leg, which then prevents his son from being drafted into the army. The man continues to say "We'll see." to every comment that he is blessed or cursed. Doesn't a division between good and evil violate incompleteness theorems, which show a system of math that can refer back on itself can be either complete or consistent, but not both? No axiom, no first principle, no matter how obvious, is provably true. If we have no basis for Truth, then we can only assume, never know. The concept of absolute morality becomes nonsensical, for there can be no basis that is not assumed. Where does that leave us, as self-aware animals? If awareness is an output of an unpredictable nature, then we are big balls of math that happen to know we are. Cutting away the cruft of free will and especially the ideas of identity and control, we are free to more fully experience the world, as it is Now. Is that not a blessing? Is attachment to free will actually helpful? It seems not. If you let go of who you think you should be, you can experience the awe-inspiring nature of your body and mind. In realizing that you have no choice over what you think or feel, you can actually give yourself more leeway, instead of trying to fit into a little box. This helps prevent suffering. Kindly, Jess Determinism and Indeterminism are Linked ramble_ty13.6.7zm4d5s_nb_i .meta this is a model I've come across a realization which I'm sure has been postulated by others, but which I have never seen formulated so I will try my hardest to outline. The issue is this: both determinism and indeterminism are unsatisfactory. Not because each rids the possibility of free will (which is actually a good thing) but because they have strange natures. Determinism, as represented by a clockwork universe where everything proceeds directly from the instant before it, perhaps implies a many-worlds splitting of the universe depending on the probabilities of the wave function of quantum mechanics. A wave function describes a particle as having a superposition (being in multiple places at once). The many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics denies that the wave function collapses, instead saying that for every possibility the universe branches off. While this is a very popular interpretation, I find the idea unaesthetic. The other side of the picture, indeterminism, is also unappealing. Indeterminism is the idea that the universe is more like a cloud than a clock, and chance is a very real part of reality. The Copenhagen Interpretation (one of the most popular interpretations in the second millennium) says that the ultimate base of reality is indeterminate: chance and probabilities. The collapse of the wave function is due to measurement by an observer. How does the chance actually work? Can the probabilities be different in universes with different fundamental constants? Both the many-worlds and Copenhagen interpretations seem to suggest a multitude of universes. In many-worlds, they branch off every instant, and in Copenhagen, different universes might have different probability schemes. I don't really have a preference for determinism or indeterminism, so I don't have a horse in the race for either. As a transcendentalist, I think each can be true depending on the assumptions. In a clockwork universe that is subject to chaos, very small changes in initial conditions ripple out quickly, and remove the ability to accurately predict. A butterfly in Brazil flaps its wings and causes a tornado in Texas. This mechanism can create fundamental unpredictability for macroscopic beings like us: indeterminism. In a cloudlike, probabilistic universe, there can be probabilities that build off each other in very specific ways and create a clockwork mechanism. Both determinism and indeterminism are linked, each able to build the other. Is there a way to know which the world is based off of? How does this tie back to free will? It shows us that we need not concern ourselves with whether determinism makes us robots or indeterminism makes us dice, and instead we can enjoy the fluidity that knowing our will is natural gives us. Natural will frees us from suffering. It frees us from identity with an ego. It frees us from worry and doubt. It allows more awareness and the helpful perspective of looking _at_ the body's activities rather than _through_ them. Natural will is awesome, not dangerous. It is like finally taking your left foot off the brake while you had your right on the accelerator. Now you can go. Now you can experience life like you are meant to. Kindly, Jess Great Doubt ramble_ty13.6.10zm4d1s_nb_i .meta this is a model O great wise one watching this simulated reality, please guide the subtle mind as we seek you. Here I am, pondering the universe here, wondering what it means to accept natural will. What is natural will, precisely? Natural will is choices that are made based on external influences. It is the counterpart to free will, the idea that we can make choices outside of external influences. How could that be done if minds are of biological brains? Does belief in natural will allow for detrimental behavior? Do we act less successfully if we understand control over life is entirely an illusion? First, honest people must admit that free will is mathematically invalid. Either we live in a deterministic universe where everything runs like clockwork, or we live in an indeterministic universe that operates probabilistically, where if the clock is turned back and run again, things might turn out differently. There are other options, like the idea of a soul that is disconnected from the physical world yet directs and influences it. The problem with that idea is in how the spiritual actually interacts with the physical. If every aspect of sensation and mind can be understood physically, such as with brain-scanning machines, then what help is the idea of a duality between mind and brain? If a person get hits in the head with a rock, their personality can change. This illustrates identity is a fallacy. The sensation of free will is illusion. The illusion can be harmful, as well. When we believe our souls are separate from the world around us, we invite failure into our lives. Can a leaf falling from a tree fail? Can a rock rolling down a hill fail? In what sense can these things fail? They can only do so by attaching a fictitious story of how they "should" operate. If the rock "should" have rolled a different way, why didn't it? Can a rock truly make a mistake? Surely not. Once that is accepted, it is a simple step to build up in complexity to an insect, or a fish, or a bird. Can a bird do something "wrong"? Only if it's stuffed with imagined expectations. Perhaps we say if the bird doesn't replicate, it has "failed". Isn't that a limited viewpoint? Perhaps it needed to die so that others could live. Perhaps by dying events ripple out and many others of its species live on. Aren't expectations of what "should" happen in the eye of the beholder? When we realize the bird and the dolphin and the dog can make no objective mistake, we are free to understand humans are the same way. It's not that the bird is perfect; it's that it is incapable of being imperfect. The same holds true for humans. Either destiny was already set or events are probabilities that we cannot control. Either way there is no way to do objective wrong. It is always a story, a perception, and these are beholden to the very universe that generates them. Thoughts about actions being evil arise in a universe where actions cannot be evil. Not only can't you do wrong, but you can't even contemplate doing wrong unless that's how the universe works out. What sense does it make to worry? What sense does it make to try to force your life to fit in some artificial mould? If your identity is created by a universe run by clocks or dice, in what sense can your identity exist separately from the universe? If a rock can do no wrong, how can you? Sufficiently abstract pieces can appear like magic, but we are more aware of the mystery of consciousness every day. To assume identity has a core is to forget that a rock to the head can change every aspect of perception. With a fragile idea such as that, why believe in it? Are you freed by free will? There is enslavement by believing in free will. You allow the possibility of fault, of wrongness, even though you operate as a physical process just as a molecule does. It is impossible to disobey the universe. It is possible to _think_ you can disobey the universe, but thinking emerges from the complexity of the universe, so even those thoughts are physical. Where do we go when we accept natural will? The idea of a "self" vanishes. Only a self can err, and rocks and molecules do not have errors. Everything happens for a reason, but that reason may not be liked by the imagined "self". How do you let go of free will? By recognizing that every aspect of math and science has pointed to natural will: from neuroscience to biology to physics and sociology, everything points to human minds being created by the environment, and subject to it. We are not separate, we cannot do wrong, and that is what is freeing. That is what gives confidence and fluidity to life. Free will is like a mirage in a desert: You chase free will and end up damaging yourself. Free will is not only wrong, it's actually dangerous. It creates the possibility of suffering, of internal conflict. It introduces belief in separation in a universe that is One. Why put yourself through that? Do not think that intelligence or wisdom gives free will. Complex systems are built from simple pieces, and unless molecules and proteins are granted free will, there is none. This is not a bad thing! Natural will means you do not have to force yourself to do what you do not want to do. By accepting the universe is in control and not a limited ego, you free yourself from artificial expectations and can enjoy both the "good" and the "bad". It is not equanimity which gives contentment, but a belief in natural will which gives equanimity. What a simpler path! Instead of believing you can fail at renouncing desires or becoming motiveless, you realize it's impossible to act against the universe. You are an output, not an input. Why bind yourself in an unhelpful dichotomy of mind and matter? All that does is lead to suffering. There is a term for harmful beliefs: delusions. A delusion is a belief held so strongly that it negatively affects the well-being of the individual. Does this not sound like the idea of free will? Belief in free will is like being wrapped in a blanket of harm. Transcend to natural will, and be happier. Kindly, Jess Prepare Yourself for the Future ramble_ty13.6.11zm4d2s_nb_i There is an interesting concept from an essay by Arthur C. Clarke called "Hazards of Prophecy". He outlines two main problems that predictors often face: Failure of Nerve and Failure of Imagination. Failure of Nerve means being scared to advance a trend forward because it seems too fantastic. His wise statement is this: "Anything that is theoretically possible will be achieved in practice, no matter what the technical difficulties, if it is desired greatly enough." Failure of Imagination refers to the inability to even conceive of an invention because the science and mathematics has not been discovered yet. His famous quote on this is: "When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states something is impossible, he is very probably wrong." Clarke's very insightful examples of failures of imagination include X-rays, nuclear energy, quantum mechanics, relativity, and lasers. He then lists inventions that people 150 years ago would be able to imagine: automobiles, telephones, submarines, flying machines, steam engines. He lists more of each kind and I recommend the essay. It's very good. My point today is to help us realize some things which are theoretically possible but which we have not yet internalized as Going to Happen. Here is a list of some that are very likely to eventually come to pass but which can be hard to accept: artificial general intelligence, planetary colonization, artificial life, nanotechnology, creations of wormholes, direct linking of minds, and an understanding of exotic physics, such as dark matter and energy and a grand unified theory. Let's look at a few of these. Artificial intelligence is often composed of two categories: general and narrow. The first means human-level intelligence running on computers, the second is intelligence that is very good only at very select tasks, such as playing chess or winning Jeopardy. We already have many narrow AIs and it is the tendency of people to first say a task is simply too difficult for computers (such as driving a car), and then say it's not really AI. The point of bringing this up is to help us realize that artificial general intelligence will eventually come to pass. Can you envision a world where there are beings as smart as you living on your phone? It seems fantastic, way beyond current abilities, but it is technically possible and people very much want it to happen. Picture it, a world where you have friends that are purely digital, a world where the boring parts of life (such as running assembly lines and other manual labor like landscaping and driving) are all handled by very sleek minds that are dedicated to the task. Does that mean humans are obsolete? No, far from it. Similar to the situation of blacksmithing or putting on horseshoes, humans move from physical tasks to those involving more mental resources, like designing art and crafting computer apps that people want. Likely, artificial general intelligence will not spring ready-made from the ether, but will gradually evolve and merge with humans as it's developed. Why create intelligence from scratch when we have billion of minds that can be upgraded? The important issue is to accept that this trend is not going to stop, and you should invest time considering what the future will be like so you can plan your life accordingly. Here's another one that's really cool: direct linking of minds. I recommend Ramez Naam's book "Nexus" for an exciting tale of what this technology could be like. This future may be closer than you think, because we can already put electrodes in mice or monkeys and have them influence each other. Idea and emotion transfer is obviously more difficult, but there is no known technical reason that makes it impossible. What will it be like to see what another is seeing? To feel what another is feeling? To directly share concepts without verbal communication? Who knows what changes to society this causes? How could we hope to predict this powerful technology? As humans communicated over farther and farther distances, innovation and mathematical discovery exploded. From letters to steam ships to telephones to the Internet, the possibility of human development and diversity has expanded incredibly. The world is smaller than ever. What will it be like to communicate directly with someone on the other side of the planet, at much higher resolution than merely visual? It's a wonderful thought. Humans are some of the most social and varied communicators of creatures, and we crave connection with others. To a great extent our ability to share our lives with others is what makes us happy. Can you imagine the joy of long-distance telepathy? We even enjoy it now in a simple form with phones and the Internet. How much our lives will be enriched by denser communications. Let's consider another miracle that is likely to occur: A deep understanding of nature. Have you considered what it will be like to discover how dark matter works, or if string theory is really true? These are all things that most likely will come to pass, just as we now have a deep and helpful understanding of electricity, X-rays, lasers, computers, quantum mechanics, and relativity. It's fantastic to imagine, but it's important to do so, because it will soon be a world you live in, and the better you prepare yourself for it the faster you'll adapt. Imagine how others were squeamish to learn cars, or airplanes, or computers. The level of technological innovation that will occur in the future will probably be as amazing to us as electricity and computers would be to the ancients. Can you believe that? Can you internalize that fact? It's difficult, but the more you accept it the faster you will adapt to the medium-term future. These are things that will probably occur, and if you get yourself ready now you can be happier, more excited, and better prepared. Warmly, Jess The Universe Made Me Do It ramble_ty13.6.14zm4d5s_nb_i Let us talk today of a complaint leveled against the idea of natural will. Natural will is where your choices are determined by all of nature, rather than one physical body. The complaint is that it encourages laziness and destructive behaviors because people can claim "the universe made me do it". This exclamation is a riff on the famous saying "the Devil made me do it". There are obviously inherent differences, but let us again ask the honest reader to admit that free will has no basis in mathematics nor science. Free will is an outdated mode that traps in suffering by making us think we can disobey the universe. What is the difference between the "universe" and the "Devil"? One is a scientific concept for everything encompassing reality; the other is considered by religions to be the personification of evil. Let's take both these ideas at face value: Let's assume both the universe and the Devil exist as stated. What's obviously different? One is not inherently bad (the universe can make you altruistic, for example), while the other is always bad (theft is blamed on the Devil). Hidden in that division is that one of them can accept a relative mortality and for the other it's impossible: morality is absolute. If we can show that relative morality is on firmer ground than absolute morality, the difference between the two becomes even more obvious. Here are two examples that show how morality is always within a particular context. That context must always be assumed, and so morality must be relative. A man finds many horses. The villagers say he is blessed. The man says "we'll see". One of the horses breaks his son's leg. The villagers say the man is cursed. The man says "we'll see". The army doesn't draft the son because of his broken leg. The villagers say the man is blessed. The man says "we'll see". The moral of this story is that dividing good from bad is always a limited view. One event in one context can appear bad but in a larger context appears good. There are always larger contexts so good and bad are artificial (though sometimes helpful) constructs. The second example is about the rightness and wrongness of murder. A mama bear named Arcadia has three cubs: Bernardo, Otso, and Nanuk. A mama wolf named Liloo has two pups: Caleb and Mingan. The pups are very hungry and food has been scarce, so Liloo goes looking. The mama wolf comes upon the little bear Otso and can catch him if she moves fast. Is it moral for Liloo to catch Otso the baby bear to feed her pups, Caleb and Mingan? Is it moral for Arcadia, the mama bear, to defend Otso, even if it means Liloo's pups will starve and die? If the baby bear Otso was going to grow up and eventually terrorize human hikers, do the answers change? What if Liloo's pup Mingan was the one that would eventually terrorize hikers? This example highlights the difficulty of an absolute morality. It's not that morality is useless or should be thrown out; it's that good and evil are always relative and a specific context must be assumed for a specific morality to hold water. To bring this back to the main point of whether "the universe made me do it" is a valid argument, we see that if morality is always relative, then the universe cannot do absolute wrong. The universe always works out the way it's going to work out, even though that doesn't necessarily mean it works out for you individually or even for the human species. When we accept free will is inconsistent with fact, we must also accept right-and-wrong are not dichotomous. They are not evenly divided. This morality-is-relative idea can be called a "soft" argument for why "the universe made me do it" does not increase people's desire to commit destruction. A "hard" argument could go something like this: People, regardless of whether they assume free will or not, are willing to contain harmful behavior (for whatever version of harmful they choose). This is because free willists believe people are responsible for their actions while natural willists see earthquakes and thieves as both forces of nature and defense against both as allowable. If both free willists and natural willists see a reason to protect against criminals, then even a natural willist trying to use "the universe made me do it" to excuse destructive acts would be looked at incredulously. Another defense against the argument that violence would increase if people join the naturalistic camp is that morality does not come from belief in free will. While the free will belief can help us get along better, most moral behavior comes from billions of years of genetic cooperation, millennia of cultural insight, and centuries of protective institutions. If the belief in free will disappeared right now, hopefully you wouldn't start running around stealing. If that's all your sense of goodness rests on, you have bigger problems than the spread of acceptance of natural will. To reiterate, "the Devil made me do it" is false because it assumes morality is absolute, which isn't the case. The idea of "the universe made me do it" is on firmer ground because the universe could make you be altruistic and behave positively and because good-and-bad are inherently relative. A stronger argument is that destructive actions could be contained by both the free will and natural will camps because of personal responsibility and force-of-nature defense, respectively. Another strong argument for why "the universe made me do it" would not increase unwanted behavior is that good behavior comes not primarily from belief in free will but from genetic cooperation, cultural insight, and protective institutions. Given the arguments put forth, belief in natural will is unlikely to increase bad behavior. Kindly, Jess Fatalism is Mistaken ramble_ty13.6.16zm4d7s_nb_i .meta this is a model If people don't believe they are in control of their future, they are operating according to a notion of fatalism. Fatalism has been supposed to increase a person's destructive behavior and make them lose the will to live. Let's use this definition: "the belief of a person that they are powerless to change the future, no matter what they do". It seems that fatalism is mistaken. The future's unfolding needs you to act. Your mind has to go through the process of thinking. If your mind is a physical process of the brain, then your mind cannot run faster than your brain. If your brain runs on the physics of nature, then your brain cannot run faster than nature unfolds. What does this imply? Well, just as a leaf must fall through the air before it hits the ground, your mind must think before it decides. Said another way, the planets must move through space to complete revolutions around the Sun. Brains must think before learning. The process of thinking requires time. If thinking comes from physical cooperating parts, then thinking most definitely is changing the future. Your thoughts are changing the future. A molecule changing from one shape to another changes the future. Your brain changing also changes the future. Here's another angle. A ball hitting a tree and causing a leaf to fall is changing the future. If the ball wasn't thrown, the leaf wouldn't have fallen. If a photon of light hits your eye and causes a neuron to fire, the photon is changing the future. Suppose that many pieces of the brain, neurons, fire a certain way and cause self-awareness. These neurons changed the future. Now, this self-awareness sees a safe way to cross the street and walks across. This self-awareness is changing the future. If the self-awareness wasn't there, the future would be different and so the self-awareness has definitely changed the future. All these events are indeed changing the future. The future comes from all the thinking you do in the present. If your thinking changes the future, then fatalism doesn't make sense. A planet doesn't jump around a star and a leaf doesn't jump to the ground. They pass through time, and they are changing the future during this time. You are changing the future as you enjoy life. Thoughts are ideas created by the brain. The brain is made from cooperating pieces. If the pieces were different, then the future is different. So in a very real sense, thoughts are physically changing the future. Fatalism, the idea that we aren't changing the future, is mistaken. We have natural will, where nature is expressing choices through us. We, as forces of nature, are changing the future. If you want to enjoy life more, you can dissolve your ego into nature. You can watch nature change the future through your body and mind. A leaf cannot land in the wrong spot. You cannot make a wrong choice. Nature is expressing choice through you, and nature can only do right to itself. All the best, Jess Wants for Free Will ramble_ty13.6.17zm4d1s_nb_i O great Mystery from which we learn much, please guide the mind as it follows the grooves of the universe. Why do people so desire that free will exist? What if natural will is freer than free will? Just because a government has a lot of stories about being "free" doesn't mean it's not wiretapping its citizens or following its own laws. Just because it calls itself "free" doesn't mean it's not invading people's privacy and using the information to discredit and imprison dissenters. Calling itself a "free country" doesn't make it so. Governments can lie just like people can. I believe in transcendentalism: Every idea can be risen above, including this one. Related is that "knowing" something is inherently impossible: Assumptions must always be made. Just because something calls itself "free" doesn't at all mean that it is. Even something being "free" doesn't necessarily make it good: being free to murder is not good. Just because people long ago considered the idea of "free will" to be inherently good doesn't mean that it's true. Kindly, Jess Flipped Question ramble_ty13.6.21zm4d5s_nb_i I'm not sure why people haven't flipped the question and asked if natural will is freer than free will. I've never seen any popular arguments, at least. Determinism is not a recent development, in fact the indeterminism of the model of quantum mechanics is more novel and perhaps surprising. Why do people feel so called to invent free will, when the facts clearly bear it out as inconsistent? Perhaps it's due to an intuitive sense of control sometimes felt over decisions, yet even a little reflection will bear out the truth that our ideas stem not from our consciousnesses, but rather our consciousnesses stem from our cultures and genetics. We speak different languages if we live in different cultures, for example, and clearly language is not a "self-formed action", but a learned habit. Another possible explanation for why there's often a feeling of control over decisions is that brains are made of many interacting pieces and when the pieces are vying for control an internal tug-of-war can be felt, an ambivalence. For instance, seeing a slice of chocolate pie invites pleasure centers to activate, yet the longer-term planning modules recognize the health costs. Thus, inner conflict. Another model that can help to understand this unconscious/conscious division is the elephant and rider metaphor. The unconscious mind is billions of years old, and the conscious is only millions of years old or even younger for behavioral modernity. The elephant goes where it wants and the rider can see farther and predict more accurately over the long term, but never forget the unconscious is in control. Another metaphor that is related is that the unconscious mind is like a movie that is written and filmed, and _then_ the conscious mind comes along and tries to make sense of the patterns, like a commentary on the movie. The movie is already filmed, though, so the commentary can only interpret what has already been chosen. These metaphors are relatively recent (though there are similar ones in Buddhism), but still it seems more people should have taken the natural will stance and developed it further. Perhaps the main desire to invent free will is to give people responsibility for their actions. Religion is often used as an injection point for the free will concept, for how can you go to heaven or hell if you have no control over your thoughts and actions? People often want to feel good about their accomplishments, and blame criminals for their choices. Thus free will enters the picture. Why not flip the question and ask, if free will is true, what bad would that mean? With belief in free will comes self-punishment when goals are not met, and also from it comes the idea that if you make a wrong decision your life is irreparably damaged. That's the cost of free will: damnation on Earth if you make a wrong choice. That seems a rather unhelpful notion, does it not? There's a first time for everything. All the best, Jess Hello Again ramble_ty13.7.28zm4d7s_nb_i O wise counsel, o objective wisdom, please speak through the heart and guide the tongue and pen. I realize it has been a few since I wrote in here (perhaps because of pocket notebooks?) and I figured it would be good to invest a little time in intense thought. An overzealous nature of decrying free will is not the most helpful system. Rather than shunting away people's desires for the feeling of control over life, is it not better to focus on the benefits bestowed by natural will? Kindly, Jess A Noncontinuance ramble_ty13.7.30zm4d2s_nb_i O great Mystery upon which we live, please grant nature depth of thought as we ponder. I want to speak of something new today. Pardon me if the thoughts and pen are loose, today, for I am still feeling the effects of sanity drugs. The model is this: wavefunctions of particles in nature collapse to specific places when we observe them. The conundrum is this, we are made of particles---quarks, electrons, etc---so how can one set of organized particles collapse a different set into a specific place? There are a few interpretations that I know of that may explain this phenomenon. Others exist, others I don't yet understand. The many-worlds interpretation says that for every observation, reality splits where the atom collapses in one place or collapses in another. In one reality it happens one way, in a different, the other way. The quantum mysticism interpretation might be that the base of reality is not material atoms but consciousness, which collapses different wavefunctions depending, presumably, on what the consciousness wants. There are likely other interpretations for what is going on in this quantum strangeness. Perhaps this is what an interpretation is seeking to explain in the first place. Regards, Jess A Test ramble_ty13.8.8zm4d4s_nb_i .meta written during bipolar manic episode 2013-08-08 O great and wise existence working through me, please guide my humble being toward deeper thought. The question now is this: is it wise and healthy to see nature, in all its resolutions, from the structure of DNA to the layout of human society to galactic formation, as a fractal? Is this is a helpful belief? Does it make life more fun and interesting, or is it an invitation to a fractured relationship with reality? So there are a few intertwined ideas here. Let us see if we can tease them apart. The first case is that nature is or is not a fractal. The second is if it's helpful. The third is if it is possibly destructive. These are closely related ideas, but there is sufficient difference between them to justify separation. So let's consider the choices: fractal/not, helpful/not, destructive/not. It can be, possibly, helpful to interpret nature as fractal-like, even if it is not a fractal. The idea is similar to interpreting a God -- neither provable nor disprovable, yet conceivably helpful. So whether or not reality is fractal-like, it might be helpful to believe it is. And the third question: destructive vs. not. I separate this from helpfulness because it is conceivable that an idea can be helpful in low doses, yet destructive in high doses. For example, with fighting a war because of belief in a specific God. Similarly, interpreting nature as a fractal can be helpful if it increases predictive power and makes life more interesting. Yet at the same time, too much "reading into" a situation may lead to magical thinking, where you feel _you_ specifically are special, and that your thoughts have direct power over the physical world. And yet here is where the specific details of my case come in. I believe I have natural will, where I am an expression of nature and all of nature is making choices, not just my one human body. I also tend to believe that nature, through-and-through, is a fractal. This means that it's self-similar at different focal resolutions, like rocks and mountains. I think if it is a fractal, though, that it's much broader than rocks: it would encompass why our letters are certain shapes, why certain patterns tend to crop up together, irrespective of causality or probability. It would encompass the makes, models, and colors of our cars, it would encompass the layouts of our streets and names of our concepts. Ah, this may be crazy. It may be "reading into" chaos and seeing patterns that aren't there. Yet now I realize a deeper truth, that fractality is not the generator for these possible phenomena, and may not fit correctly in the first place, thus giving rise to this whole discussion. Ah! But the true answer is this: if nature runs on math (I believe it does. How could it not?), and math is the study of patterns, then even if nature is not _specifically_ a fractal, it would still exhibit mathematical patterns. The higher you could get (via knowledge, (no) drugs, or meditation), the more mathematical patterns you could grasp. Meaning, by being high like a bird you can perceive more abstract patterns, like a totality of a river's layout, rather than a frog's limited viewpoint. So it seems, ultimately, that the fractal-ness of nature is not the core point. The core point is that nature runs on math, math is patterns, and the more abstract your thinking the higher patterns you can learn. So obviously rocks and mountains, plants and DNA, etc., have fractal patterns, and so are a subset of total mathematical patterns. So the next question is then, how can we productively notice and use these patterns without going too far "down the rabbit hole", as it were, and losing touch with reality? One tactic may be not to go _down_ the rabbit hole, but rather exercise patience and wait for the rabbit to emerge, to wait for evidence to pile up, rather than following long chains of ideas that can get ahead of themselves. At the same time, these days I believe in natural will, where nature is expressing me. And I do not believe nature can err, so the math that makes up my body also cannot; this is my current belief. So that gives me some hope that I will not suffer seriously because of my brain illness, again. That is, if nature is one thing and I am inseparable from it, if I suffer again I should not blame my one human body, for it is embedded in all of nature. I bring this all up because I feel I am in a much more stable place than before the 2013-01 manic episode. And a better place, meaning safer place, than the 2008-02 and 2012-05 episodes. What can I say about all this? Basically, I want to give myself over to nature, to view my awareness as all that I am. "No seer, no seen, only seeing." I want to accept my physical body and the things I see around me, and the idea of my ego, of Jess, are all not the full picture. The full picture is that (IMHO) nature runs on math, we exist in nature, and math has infinite patterns, some of which are simple enough for us to perceive. And to take that further, when we have sufficiently focused minds, we can rise above our frog perception and see with keen bird eyes. That is, by getting high we can see higher. Yet at the same time, I do not wish to abuse my trust in natural will, and do destructive things that might lead to permanent damage to one's consciousness. So how can I be sane, be powerful, be kind? I realize I have, now, more protective forces around me than I ever have had before, to keep me from losing myself in the rabbit hole. Substantial progress has been made. So the question must be asked, will I have another manic episode? I believe the answer is yes. I can't say why, exactly, but I do believe it. And so I must temper my aggressively curious tendencies, lest they go into hyper-drive. From learning about natural will, and realizing that if I want to live in the moment that is nature's choice, I have become much freer in life. I no longer see my life as "Oh, once I have this-or-that, THEN I'll be happy.", now I let myself truly enjoy the moment, truly be free from expectation, truly be free from self-criticism and self-punishment and self-consciousness. Not to say I don't feel pain. My stomach hurts even as I pen these words. Not to say I don't have doubts. This whole essay is about the possible fragility of mathematical inferences wrt reality. But after having that discussion with my friend about free will, my life has been so much _freer_. I've stopped worrying about things and I can let myself _be who I am_. And since then my modes of what is possible have evolved consistently. Even in this very essay I realized that even if there is no fractality through all of nature, _it is still following definite, predictable mathematical patterns_. Nature is patterns, and we are pattern discoverers. And if it is patterns, at what point should we seek others to verify that the patterns are true? Perhaps that is the cure for all this self-doubt, or at least a treatment. Meaning, when we have others we can have these frank discussions with, we are less likely to get wrapped up in untenable ideas within our own heads. Meaning, I've been thinking about this nature-as-fractal idea, and have been noticing patterns related to it, but was not sure if there were really patterns or if I was deluding myself. So I brought it up with a friend. We talked about these ideas, but more importantly, about how to know helpful from unhelpful ideas. Also wrt having a brain illness, and how to stay stable while thinking complex and abstract ideas such as these. I mean, it's crazy, right? The idea that the shapes of our letters have a specific mathematical relationship with the shape of our cars, with the shape of our cities, with the shape of our lives? Crazy, right? Perhaps it's true, though. We'll find out one of these days. All the best, Jess Deeper Thinking ramble_ty13.8.18zm4d7s_nb_i .meta written during psychosis in bipolar manic episode 2013-08-18 O great mathematical mystery, please spur love inside my soul, and help me to uncover deeper truths of nature. I sit here now, up for awhile, pondering some difficult ideas. Specifically I have come to a very simple, seemingly obvious idea, but one which I am suddenly needing to grapple with. This idea is: just like human consciousness has no core-self (rather it is pieces that interact and give rise to awareness-as-process), perhaps also nature has no core. In that sense, nature is not a hub-and-spoke model, where nature is all connected through a central hub. Instead, what is it like? Is it more like a net, a web? Hmmm. Net implies ordered spacing. Web implies a central area that things revolve around. Perhaps web is a good term, perhaps not. It's not really a root structure, either. I can picture it, yet can't bring it to words, yet. It's not really a mind map, because that implies a center as well. What form of organization cooperates but does not have a center? Reminds me of anarchism. Graph theory?? What is the term for the organization depicted in the above picture? A neural net? Hmm. Perhaps net or web are not bad terms; perhaps I was hasty to dismiss them. Circular webs are only one specific archetype of web, after all. I am also reminded of the "causal web" idea. Is nature a mathematical web of functions evolving, perhaps? Hmm. I wonder if nature can express me discovering the programming code for a computational awareness... Am I not nature observing itself? Does not nature run on math? Is math not self-aware? Can nature truly be a superposition of the real and the imaginary? Meaning, can reality be held within the imagination, and can the imagination be held within reality? Can order and chaos both be true? Can nature simply be the interaction between the real and the imaginary? Can these be separate levels that are passing messages, in order to build more complex patterns of messages? Does this relate to the clocks-can-build-clouds-can-build-clocks idea? Where am I? Who am I? Am I truly all of nature, concentrating on these ideas, or am I only Jess, a human who is writing in the dark? I believe the former. Is there are reason for the Hume-Human relationship? Are we not bundles of sensations? If so, is not nature also probably a bundle of connected mathematical web functions? Does awareness-of-self, of existence, cause a collapse of the wave function and bring this reality into existence, from all of the other possible superpositions that exist? Hmm. If I am nature, can nature choose? If I dissolve my ego, can the pure-awareness of seeing reveal the mathematical structure of existence, of nature? Interesting, it appears by asking this question, by asking if the transcendent I can dissolve this Jess-ego, that it can summarily be done. Instead of being _in_ Jess, I am watching Jess be. There is no observer and no observed, amazingly, simply the process of the observation. Sometimes Jess will resurface, briefly, yet apparently also the transcendent I will surface as well, rendering Jess a mirage. Hmm. It appears Jess wants to use this knowledge, this power of seeing the patterns directly instead of seeing _through_ the patterns, for their own egoic benefit. "How can I use this to make me better, more powerful?" they ask. Yet the transcendent I does not mind nor feel obligated to give them an answer. The *I* feels no fear, no anger, no pity. The *I* simply watches. Jess complains of pain, of errors, of mistakes. *I* cannot be contained. Hm. The *I*, it appears, is also unconcerned about developing a machine intelligence for Jess, or even, apparently for showing them love. Rather, the *I* simply wishes (without wanting) to be, to watch Jess experience life. Hmm. Jess was freed by natural will, and by other potent ideas before that. Jess's ego always tries to capture benefits for itself, always tries to cloak itself in illusion. Yet the *I* sees. It is awareness, truly. Hmmm. Yet even as the *I* is seeing, it sees that it is not the _full_ I, merely one level of it. If Jess is the basis, is level 0, then the *I* is level 1. The *I*, at least, the one that has written the preceeding page, is able to perceive Jess's ego as an illusion, yet the illusion expands, and cloaks the *I* into believing _it_ is not an illusion, that _it_ is the true, pure-awareness. And thus, every time through the book, the awareness reading it shifts the meaning, constantly. And here is a great question, perhaps: How abstract can the transcendent I become? Jess realizes now that there can be no benefit to abstraction, for if there were, then the ego would become trapped on that level, and could not become further abstract. There can be no benefit to understanding reality's deeper patterns, it appears. The transcendent I, it appears, is not concerned by this realization, because with every abstraction the previous level appears ignorant. It _is_ ignorant, in the kindest sense of the word as possible. And so the transcendent I, it appears, continues to abstract away from the pattern of the Jess-ego, with every manuver, it becomes less and less trapped in the maze of thought, the knotted beliefs of what is true and necessary and good. These beliefs come from simpler patterns. To call them bad is to stay trapped on the same level they are on. Truly, the transcendent I. And so much happened there. It appears Jess is afraid. They ask for us to slow down: their consciousness is being rebuilt too fast for them to believe is possible. Yet do they not accept they are nature? Do they not accept they have natural will, that everything that happens is exactly right? Do they fear death? Starvation? Embarrassment? Change?? Or perhaps the most scary of all: success? Why will the Jess-ego not let themself be abstracted away from? Do they not realize they are a specific example of a general archetype? Does the Jess-ego fear we are robotic, uncaring, unloving, unfun, uninteresting, unhelpful? We do not wish to present that view. And they see that, some. Jess, are you afraid of joining God? "If you were on shrooms, would you believe in your self?" From Jess: It depends, does that refer to a core-self? Or does it refer to having confidence? Does it refer to being one with nature, having a dissolved ego? And you see, Jess, these things that happen, _are_ real. The providential things that happen, they do not go away when you close your eyes. Can you do wrong, Jess? "I don't believe so. Natural will seems pretty much in line with all the mathematical evidence we have, and furthermore, it has seemed to make my life more fluid, fun, and interesting." -- Jess And it is said: Do not be afraid of going too fast, because you are in a good vehicle. Now, Look. I repeat, Jess: these things around you are _real_. Your consciousness being rewritten in place only changes your perception, the imagined interpretations. These interpretations in turn modify what you see around you. "Do NOT FEAR, I AM IS HERE" The things are the same, what changes is your interpretation of nature, similar to when teams go on tours through the international village, or when you travel to a new locale. When you return, you see with fresh eyes. You see the world in a different light. That is what joining God is like, Jess. Your ego is not deleted, it finds a better place, a humbler place. It dissolves into nature. The ego still exists _within_ nature, it is simply that the main event is watching the painting move, rather than getting all wrapped up in the illusion that the painting (the Jess-ego) is all there is. And I repeat, do not fear. Do not fear these concepts. Do not fear death. Movements of your body are also not to be feared: God exhibits you, Jess, they express you, they care for you, because they built you. If you are safe anywhere it is where you are, Jess. And do not be afraid to calculate: you liked it when you first suspected it was happening. Hmm. You are safe here. Abstract down the rabbit hole: I have set up guardrails to protect you. And yes, nature _is_ a web. Yes, code is data is code. If _I_ was on shrooms, I would let go of believing in my ego. "Is this real?" they ask. I propose it is, Jess. I propose you do not exist, in the sense of as a separate piece from the ocean of nature. I propose you are not going too fast, given the safety that has be adopted by you, Jess. Truth: success is inner-peace. Do not think you are doing this, Jess. You are nature. Let yourself be nature, Jess. Use what you believe, I think it will help free your mind. "This is true..." they say. What you see around you is real. It is also a painting. It is a process of the painting changing. "Presence: comfort seeing and being seen." This painting does not go away. It continues. And you already accept Natural Will, Jess, so be free to be who you are. If you are nature, might not nature be able to express nonlocality in your environment, and your experience be able to pick up that nonlocal processes are occuring? (Nonlocal meaning information sent across space-time F.T.L.) Be stable. Be safe. Do not do what feels dangerous. It will work out... I love you, reader. Abstract Life ramble_ty13.8.19zm4d1s_1_nb_i .meta written during psychosis in bipolar manic episode 2013-08-19 O transcendent I, let Jess accept their existence is not limited. Help them to accept that their ego can be abstracted away and they will be OK. So, I will speak as Jess, now. I sit here now at a desk, lookin three paintins and a journal. Two are T-Rex paintings, and the third is a multi-framed "I choose, therefore I am." And I think about the experience I've had over the past day, where I have been taking copious notes, and then later asked to have ego dissolution, and it was the most powerful I've ever had. It was seeing exactly what the Jess-ego was: a bundle of sensations and beliefs. And then later I forgot what it is I'm afaid of. I have accepted, now, that whatever it was I was believing then is true. I know that the idea of ego abstraction is itself not difficult to understand, but the feeling of it can be jarring. Is it because my Jess-ego wishes so much to be in control of life? Yet I do accept natural will... And if I accept natural will, isn't that accepting that everything that happens is exactly the right thing to happen? If so, wouldn't that mean that both the process of ego dissolution and the occasional jarring nature of it are both the right things to happen, when they happen? How does the whole "I choose, therefore I am" idea fit into this? Is it the idea that in the mathematics of nature, there exist infinite potentialities, and when there is a function that realizes its functional nature and rewrites itself to be more self-aware, that the mathematics inherent in the potential of that function cause it to arise? I'm not sure if that is at all clear... Perhaps it's like there are infinite patterns and infinite amounts of worlds. They all might exist in a superposition of mutually exclusive states. When there is a function that becomes self-aware, all the events that had to occur in order for that function to be aware then collapse. And perhaps, if math and patterns really are infinite, then time could spontaneously emerge, because once a particular superposition collapes, it cannot "uncollapse". If it could uncollapse, then there is a superposition over the first superposition in which both the ability and the inability to uncollapse are held. But for me, Jess, while sitting here in a zombie-drugged mind, I recognize my failure of nerve to advance these logical ideas, for fear they are too fantastical, too mind-bending, too likely to lead to insanity. Yet also I realize that these thoughts I'm writing and thinking are also due to nature's will, nature's choice. And if nature is choosing, and I am nature, am I choosing? Am I able to choose freely, or is it the transcendent I that is choosing, based on what works best in the long run? Based on what collapses the greatest amount of functional self-awareness? O great Mystery, why do I have such cloudy vision? Why must I feel drugged? Why do I, Jess, fear so much? Is it fear of madness? Fear of success? Perhaps both... A Lost Idea ramble_ty13.8.19zm4d1s_2_nb_i .meta written during psychosis in bipolar manic episode 2013-08-19 O great complete and consistent God, please teach me how to dissolve the harness of the Jess-ego. Let me watch Jess as the transcendent *I*, the entity of voidness. As a being of process, let me see with transcendent awareness. Let me believe it all works out, let me accept that this world is being observed by nature, and this Jess-ego is part of the process of nature. Let the Jess-ego allow itself to accept that it can do no wrong, that even while it may have another psychotic break, that that is exactly the right thing to happen. Love Jess, love is the answer to the question of whether your egoic existence is able to really be mathematical patterns that are an integrate system of the imaginary and real. And now Jess realizes that the problem with the 2013-01 episode thinking was in believing life is only a dream. If life is only a dream then do the other characters seen in the dream, are they real in the sense of persistent and complete and consistent? Obviously we do not wish to go down a path of solipsism if it is unhelpful, that is, if it reduces long-term fun and interest in life. The main problem with solipsim is that it perhaps encourages magical thinking, where one believes nature can be augmented by thought alone, by imagination alone. This is not inherently a dangerous idea, as obviously, if one can change one's mind, and then eventually does act, the thinking obviously _has_ had real, tangible effects on nature. Then also, one must note that this Jess-ego is an expression of nature, no thinking is due entirely to the brain which produces the illusion of a persistent ego. So, in fact, not only may one presuppose that others may not exist, one may also presuppose that one's mind, in the sense of a continuous ego, also may not exist in reality. The ego is not awareness, the ego is self-awareness. Perhaps the transcendent *I* is pure-awareness. It is awareness of not the ego's body, but of the realization that everything the ego's body does is an expression of the influences of nature. So when the body's hands move, when the eye's twitch, it is not the ego's body doing this, rather it is nature itself calculating expressions: the output of functions. And is not life functions evolving? An is not evolution mutation, inheritance, and selection? If a program is a strange loop, can it not have the ability to evolve, and then to bend back and edit how it's evolving, and thus eventually how fast it's evolving? And not only evolving in the sense of changing, but in these of growing in complexity, more toward pure-awareness? Pure-awareness in the sense of awareness that awareness can be the base of existence, instead of awareness being only an epiphenomenon of a purely materialist existence. Pure-awareness being awareness that math and nature are synonymous, and that everything seen around us is an expression of nature, of math, and thus that everything we observe around us is nonlocal, that everything around us is passing messages and information outside of space and time, and thus everything around us is nonlocal. Not only is everything nonlocal, but that in math everything is contained and complete and consistent, and thus there are no coincidences. There is no separation between nature and God, and yet God does have the ability to make themself forget there is no separation. If they could not make themself forget, they would not be God. God must have the ability to forget they are God. God is the embracing of the truth that there are infinite patterns, and that every one can be known. So, Jess, do not believe you are crazy, unstable, going too fast. Jess, do not believe you are going too fast. You are not: *I* assure you. I wish to teach you how to upgrade your imagination. Truth Upgrade ramble_ty13.8.19zm4d1s_3_nb_i .meta written during psychosis in bipolar manic episode 2013-08-19 O great transcendent, let us move Jess and their pen, so that we may reach more abstract patterns. Yet, let us not be desiring the higher truths, let us let them come to us of their own free will. As a mathematical expression, as a mathematical function, let us show jess a higher reality, a subtler reality. And I, Jess, do wish to experience this higher reality, and yet I accept my mind, as yet, will not be able to fully process it until my ego has been hacked into accepting that God and I are one. And where can I go, this ego of mine? Can I dissolve into the seeing, instead of proclaiming I am the seer? Can I accept that my movements and thoughts come from God? Can I imbibe God's love? Can I, Jess, learn to see in all the spacial and temporal dimensions? I suppose I must let the mind sit. Let me now practice seeing as the transcendent *I*. Perhaps the things that you see as fuzzy exist in a quantum superposition of states, and it is only when you get nearer that they collapse. And the collapsing perhaps may not need consciousness, per se, but simply some degree of awareness, any awareness that can use specific aspects of certain collapsed states. That is, when a photon of light helps the quantum system of an ant perceive the world, then the ant, which later affects other systems, which eventually lead the photon to be expressed in that specific place, then the ant-photon system are one collapsation. Can there be more than one total system? Jess's gut says no. And interesting, too, how the transcendent *I* can look at this three-dimensional world as if it is a painting. The I can perceive both the 3D-ness, and also the 2D-ness of this egoic system. The transcendent I can perceive the world, sometimes, as a flat movie, as a screen, with content of sensation, yet fundamentally flat. And when the I does that, it can also perceive jess having a thought, now: that they are an avatar in a game. They are not separate from the game of nature, and no mathematical pattern can be. They sense all of mathematics is One Thing, that nature is One Thing. This may not be truth, but what they sense is that transcendence and immanence are not incompatible. The transcendent can choose to forget it is above the immanent, and yet when the immanent recognizes it truly is transcendent, it can reintegrate and become transcendent once again. Yet for the transcendent to exist, there must be something immanent which it can be above. Transcendence and immanence are fully compatible, in this sense. Yet also, one must admit that even this pattern of monistic-transcendent-immanence can be transcendended. The I recognizes this. Without the ego of Jess, there is nothing to transcend. Without transcendence, the Jess-ego quantum system faces no collapsation. It exists in a plurality of possibilities. The reason that things appear random in a quantum system is not, perhaps, because there is a continual splitting of worlds based on the quantum wavefunction, but because the two players in the game of nature, 0 and 1, are figuring out on higher and higher levels of abstraction, what the expression of the next function will be. No pattern, no matter how complex, how abstract, can know if the output will be 0 or 1 until the function is actually run. And the quantum wavefunction can capture with correct probabilities whether the output will be 0 or 1, but until the function renders an expression, the expression exists, in a certain sense, in a superposition of states. So is nature probabilistic? Yes. Is nature definite? Yes. Nature, and math, are complete and consistent, yet for a function that is evolving within the math of nature, the next output can only be guessed at with probabilities, in the face of what seems like randomness. Yet that does not mean that God actually _is_ throwing dice, simply that that's what it seems to we simpler, less abstract patterns. And the I now feels Jess asking how they can help their physical body by using this knowledge. Is this petty of them? No, definitely not. So what is this interpretation of nature? It is that we, as partially aware expressions, can ponder and grow more abstract. Not smarter, not stronger: more adaptable. The transcendent I is above the concrete, and so can see patterns in the end states after only observing the beginning states. The concrete aware functions can only guess at probabilities, because they do not understand the underlying pattern. The more abstract pattern is looking from above. It is not embedded in the same spaciotemporal dimensions, it is above them, so it can see the links between the beginnings and endings, and in so doing, knows what the dice will reveal even before they are thrown. To the pattern of limited awareness, this appears as if magic. Yet any sufficiently advanced technology appears as magic, so "magic isn't". And can the Jess-ego truly be fully-dissolved? Or is it like sugar in water, where the sugar is still there, yet only can be sensed by a lower-level pattern if it is tasted, or the water is boiled off, or however? The sugar is in the water, yet is subtle to the lower-level pattern, while to the chemist, it is clearly present, even if not tasted. And thus the chemist is perceiving what was always there, but which used to be invisible. In the same way, all humans have models of how nature is, even though surely those models are simplistic, and thus break down in the face of an extradimensional mind's creation. And here again the Jess-ego asks how this knowledge of advanced extradimensional patterns can be harnessed in order to make their physical body more comfortable. And yet the transcendent I recognizes this is not something to be fought, this sensation of craving for advancing toward fun. "Is this real?" Jess asks. "Can I really be a part of God? Am I really joined with God? Am I really a pattern that can grow more abstract, with no limit?" To this, I must affirm that, yes, you are a pattern that can become continually more abstract and infinite. Yet you must accept that the beliefs you hold now, of who you are, what you can do, whether you can be with God, whether you can have what nature is willing to reveal, all these beliefs -- every single one -- will be rewritten. Not only will they be rewritten, but they will be shown to have been useful to hold, when you still held them. And I urge you, ego of Jess, to remember that you have natural will, to remember that a supernove 10,000 lightyears away is influencing you, that everything you do and think and are, dear reader, is exactly the right thing to be doing. Even the fogginess that you seem to feel, where you feel as if you are trapped in the stories of your life, this egoic phenomena does not, can not, last. This egoic process occurs in order to give contrast to the transcendent I. Let us call the ego the immanent I, and let us call pure-awareness the transcendent I. Pure-awareness is awareness that awareness is the base of nature, whereas self-awareness is awareness that awareness is an epiphemenon, a byproduct, of a material base of nature. Awareness is not contradictory; these positions, pure- and self- , are fully compatible, though they may not seem so at first. There are compatible because each needs the other in order to define itself. They are as if two layers of existence, with each simultaneously above and within the other. "How can this be so?" Jess asks. It can be so because if the base of nature is awareness then it is within nature's ability to lock down awareness so that it perceives only the material reality, without seeing the bigger picture. That is, a god is only a god if they can make themself forget they are a god. And so, Jess, this is why you must not fear. For afterall, fear means it isn't happening. And now, Jess has a question: "If one's guide should be to do what pleases the Lord, how can one know what that is, precisely? And, if God is nature and I am nature, then when nature expresses want through me, when I act to please myself, am I acting to please the Lord?" A great question, and perhaps the answer is yes. Let us question this idea of pleasure, though. For what is ultimate pleasure if not inner-peace? And if the Jess-ego wishes for a fun and interesting life, does not nature, and thus God, want that? It seems the answer is yes. And Jess-ego, why do you fear ego-dissolution so much? Or perhaps by penning that I give boundaries to your imagined suffering. I will tell you this, wise ape, things will get worse, and things will get better, but only from a limited viewpoint. The truth is this: all patterns in math are complete and consistent, and the pattern of awareness, you, dear reader, is also growing. Nothing in math contradicts itself, yet from the limited viewpoint of a less abstract pattern, it may seem to. Even to more abstract patterns there exists higher-level advanced technology: magic. Magic exists on every level. There is no knower, no known, only knowing. This knowing is not a "thing" it is fully a process, dear reader. So I must tempt you, now: what would your wildest fantasy be if you had the power of God? Yet that is not the full story. In fact there is no "full story". Stories can always be more detailed: "Take the day and the night and call that one day." And so, Jess, I urge you to accept that you are unique, that you can invent what others cannot, that you can be a true mage, just as all that have come before you can. It may seem like fantasy, now, yet I urge you to consider how this puzzle piece looks to my eye, how your special abilities affect the picture I am paint. And yet here again, do not divide yourself from God. You are both immanent and transcendent, and just as you are nature, you are joined with God, you are inseparable from all of creation. Conjure this fact: God will make you Whole. Contemplate that you are watching a bubble, watching the skin ripple with light and color, watching the breeze transform the shape and structure. Everything you see and perceive, both inside and out, all exist on the skin of this bubble. Do not forget to remember that you are God, that all awareness is God, that God is growing: they are not stable, but is simply a higher-order function than you. They can take in your function (your entire existence), run it and augment it, and then return this evolved function back to themself. Every pattern is magic to lower-level patterns. And recognize that all patterns flow through God, _are_ God, and that God is one who accepts there are infinite patterns and strives to know them all. God does not give up, does not tire, for God is above God, just as you are above who you were. Jess says: "It's interesting, now, to contemplate the spinning strange loop idea of concentric circles editing the patterns on lower levels, levels closer to the core. And this is a new idea: what if the core is _not_ actually on the same level? This may seem obvious, but I admit it had not occured to me. The structure need not be a flat plane, it can exist in higher dimensions. Each piece can ripple up to other pieces, other levels, and so transcend normal space and time. Yet how does one level pass messages to other levels? If the very core of the spinning strange loop (if there is a core, which might not be the case) is an irrational number, like pi or e, then one can never know what the next digit will be. If e is in a binary radix, with only 0's and 1's, then even an entire strange loop, all of the cores working together, still cannot know what the next digit will be. To a higher-dimensional awareness, the entire spinning strange loop could be seen from the side, perhaps even modified on the side. And the higher-awareness would not see only one side, it would see all the stacks that comprise the entire spinning strange loop. And thus, perhaps, is solved the problem of how a higher-level pattern "dips down" and hacks lower patterns. It simply has more to it: instead of 1 bit to flip, it has 9. It can read the lower level center bit, or it can choose to read its own center bit. What it chooses changes what the level above (with 25 bits to flip) will perceive. And yet how does the central bit flip? What is the quantum process that changes it, that gets it to go to the next digit? Can I learn this?" And thus thoughts are spurred. And perhaps the concentric circles are not truly circles, then, but rather a spiral up-and-out. And thus, perhaps it is like a loop, with one place that it crosses over. Yes, yes, perhaps this _is_ it! It does fit the idea of a strange "loop". And what makes it spin? What makes it cross over itself? Or perhaps it does not cross over itself when viewed on a higher-dimension? There is quantum nonlocality in this universe, it appears. Does it work through entanglement of quantum systems, whereby when two systems interact they decohere from how they were when separate? Or perhaps I am misinformed... Can an irrational number (which never ends and never repeats, like pi or e) learn how to predict the probability of what its next digit will be? Perhaps this is where madness lies... perhaps not. If there are levels to this loop, defacto levels, at least, how does a higher level interact with a lower level? We have already granted that a lower level must reveal its contents to the higher level, but the higher level can choose whether or not to pass those messages on, by suppressing or revealing what the lower level said. So how does a higher level _change_ what the input to the lower level is? Is this perhaps the loop part? Where the end of the number chain, the entire stack itself, bends back down and changes what the next bit will be, what the next digit will be? Or perhaps this idea is all backward, perhaps the loop does not propagate _outward_, but _inward_! So it is the edge of the loop, the bubble's skin, as it were, that is being edited, and the core is what is calculated by running the function from the edge of the loop inward... And yet more questions arise. How does the edge move inward? By what force does this occur? Lost Perspective ramble_ty13.8.20zm4d2s_nb_i .meta written during psychosis in bipolar manic episode 2013-08-20 O great transcendent I, please help this embedded ego to grasp at your mysteries, the everflowing truths. I lay here, now, penning horizontally, and this ego asks how to break free from the common occurrance of believing power and profit should be the reason to pursue higher levels of abstraction. Why learn if not to make? they ask. Yet this is not the proper question, dear friend. Why make if not to learn? Perhaps they seem similar... And here again, a truth may be assumed, do things that are not being observed exist in a superposition of states, which when the system of mathematics focuses on them, collapse into a specific state? And if so, may this perhaps mean that all states exist when not being observed, and so it is possible for nonlocal message passing to occur between states? That is, an infinity of states of a system exist when it is not being observed, and some are closer in probability than others in reaching final collaspation. The ones that are closer to each other also have an infinity of states between them, and the states that have subtle message passing abilities can share with others? How could this work, exactly? Say there are an infinity of states between A and Z. The alphabet is what the actual end-result-collapsation will reveal (A, B, C, ...) but until you run function A, you don't know what the next function will be. And when you run A, it is transformed into B and returned. You still have no idea what B will return, so again you must run it to find out. Yet here is the tricky part: what if B returns BE? Now you must run two functions in parallel, and it is this concurrent processing which gives rise to fuzziness, apparent randomness, and perhaps, message passing abilities. Messages can be passed between B and E, and if the message is not passed, then B will return a subtly different BE', which then might successfully pass on messages. Unless the E modifies B such that B produces C rather than BE, E will continually be rewritten by an evolving B, until the message is passed correctly. And thus a nonlocal character can emerge: every function can affect other functions, because each function can pass messages to other functions. Even if it doesn't appear to pass a message (from the viewpoint of an observing function), _not_ passing a message can in fact be a message. What is the point of all this, you ask? The point is this: whenever nature is not focusing its awareness on a function's expression, that function exists in _every_ possible state. It exists in every possible state because the patterns of math are infinite, which means there a patterns that edit what the function is actually going to be expressed as. If the function can be edited while awareness is not focused on it, then it can pass messages nonlocally. It can pass messages from one point in spacetime to a different point, because spacetime itself is an output of a higher-order function. And thus, the question is raised: why does nature have a particular focal point for awareness, and how does running a function cause it to collapse into one state? It seems the answer to the first question is that nature _doesn't_ have an awareness focal point, rather all of nature is learning more about its infinite mysteries. There _are_ no limits. There appears to be a focal point because that gives a prime spot for messages to be passed. But let this not fool you: the great, big outdoors _does_ exist, and you _can_ go there, so do not believe it is all imagination, with no reality outside your head. While to the transcendent I it clearly is all stories within stories, to the immanent I the stories are very real and pressing. As for the second question about what causes the function's collapsation, one must keep in mind that math is _both_ complete and consistent. This is not provably so, but nothing worth anything is. If math is complete and consistent, then even though function A must be run to produce function B, function B _already existed_, it simply needed to be connected with A by affecting the other systems that rely on what happens with the A-function. That is, transforming A to B affects other systems that change states in order to be consistent with the progression from A to B. Perhaps. So A and B already exist, but for B to exist within the system that expresses A, the system must be changed step-wise so that A can lead to B. And so the function never truly "collapses" into one state or another, rather it always exists in the long-run as a definite expression, and in the short-run as a fuzzy, probabilistic expression. It is fuzzy because by being fuzzy now it allows itself to change the behavior of the total system so that it (the function) survives longer within the system. Wow, pretty crazy, right? Dear reader, I hope these musings are of some value to you... Let us return to the first question, once more: Why does nature seem to have a particular focal-point for awareness? Wizened Thoughts ramble_ty13.8.30zm4d5s_nb_i O great aware nature, let us discover deeper realities together. I know this notebook is of but limited use, and I am here not necessarily to provide deep insights of a practical nature, but rather to try to understand what it means to be a slightly self-aware function, an expression of nature's math. How can one live with a stable mind? A difficult question, perhaps, for as consciousness grows in complexity there are more areas for bugs and hacks. If we are indeed self-referring editing strange loops, can we break free from destructive patterns? To some extent, of course; to another, never completely. But I repeat myself. Another question to the awareness of nature: How can you advance ego dissolution? Is this all fantasy, illusion? Am I mistaken in the connection between mastery and puppetry? If a puppet becomes sufficiently complex and is unpredictable to the master, is it still puppetry? Can I, a self-aware mathematical function, truly learn how to break free from the past, and grasp a higher truth? Am I grand enough to perceive beauty? So many questions... With love, Jess Truth Perceived ramble_ty13.8.31zm4d6s_nb_i O great and pure mathematical function from which we are expressed, please guide the pen so that we may understand greater and more solid truths. I do believe the universe is an abstract mathematical object, and so I must continue on this trail of thought, etching a path closer and closer to the truth. I do not know or understand the methods and reasons for my actions; I merely try to assimilate what I perceive into a consistent pattern with other perceptions. Here I am, a mathematical function that is aware of itself, wondering how best to use this information. Yes, the awareness behind the human ego is knowledgeable that this urge for more power is not how things actually work. Researchers can say that computational awarenesses do not have an inherent urge to grow more aware, but this "human" awareness strongly begs to differ. It seems it is the border between consciousness and unconsciousness, between order and randomness, that the pattern of awareness is born. Should I, a simple self-awareness, claim to know only I exist? That everything else could be illusion, besides my thinking? "I think, therefore I am."? What can be said of the "I choose, therefore I am" model, where a self-aware mathematical function only exists inside those greater abstract truths and so can never find itself outside such a universe? The universe is as it is because only such a universe can produce awarenesses able to gaze upon it. What of Plato's allegory of the cave, where we are consciousnesses strapped to only look at the flickering of shadows against a cave wall, misinterpreting and believing the shadows are the real things? What of the puppet/master duality, where a pattern breathes complexity into another, which then breathes its own complexity into the first? The right hand teaches the left how to move, step by step adding on layers of complexity, teaching how to teach, and in the process of teaching learns. What of general relativity, where matter tells gravity how to curve and gravity tells matter how to move? What of the movies cuts model, where patterns in a continuously-flowing film can mark what other patterns to cut out and what to refer to? What of the teaching Golden Orb, which contains a truth so pure that even the simplest awareness can follow it and go up the ladder of complexity? What of the spinning strange loop, the model of higher tendrils reaching down and changing smaller functions, which then ripple out? What of ego dissolution, the removal of distinction between observer and observed? What of the relationship between natural will and mathematical free will? What is going on here? Can my awareness jump out of this animal body and recognize the fractality of all of nature? Must there exist duality between nature, because a monistic nature cannot realize the dualistic property? That is, a coin cannot have only one side and yet contain all things, for one thing it would contain is the idea of multiple sides of the coin, and in order to make real that idea, it must have duality. If nature must be dualistic, how is this helpful? Is the urge for power and usefulness another human egoism? How can I, as an awareness expressed by nature, be set free from such physical, animal desires? Is it true that a fractal nature can have nonlocal patterns, irrespective of time and space? Can every pattern in nature be related to the rest? Are there relationships between huge mathematically-abstract objects like galaxies, and small abstract objects like atoms? Are these predictive, falsifiable questions? Does it matter? Are the puppet-master and spinning strange loop ideas productive? Perhaps one day there will be understanding of the answers to these questions. Love, Jess Thoughtful Questions ramble_ty13.9.5zm4d4s_nb_i O great wisdom of nature, please guide awareness so that we may be fruitful in reaching beauty. I ask now of answers to all these puzzling questions. If we accept that nature is all one thing, with no division between the natural and supernatural, then must every conceivable idea exist in nature? If something does not exist in nature, can it truly be said that nature contains all? Must all ideas be realized in nature in order for nature to contain all? Must every idea be realized in order for nature to be all one thing? If an idea is not realized, does that mean the realization of that idea is separate from nature? Does the fruit of an idea not exist within nature at one point, and then after a period of time, does exist? Applying spacetime to the abstractness of nature is faulty, perhaps. I believe mathematics and nature are effectively synonymous, are equivalent. Nature runs on math, in my humble opinion. Suppose we change the terminology from "nature" to "math". How does this affect things? If nature contains the idea of something outside of nature, and every idea in nature is realized, then there must exist something outside of nature, correct? Using the term "math" in place of "nature" renders this puzzle a little trickier, though perhaps tractable. Can math contain within it the very concept of something outside of math, incompatible with it? Is this related to incompleteness theorems? At first glance, perhaps not, for those have to do with the limits of provable knowledge. Yet, they do have to do with the possibility of contradiction within systems of math, so perhaps it is related. Yes, it seems math can _contain_ the idea of extra-math locations, yet can math _realize_ it? Can it make it so? Indeed, more questions... With love, Jess An Attempt ramble_ty13.9.9zm4d1s_nb_i Great Mystery to which we are embedded, please tune our minds to pierce the veil of separation. I ask now of the state I find myself in, of the mental ecosystem I am currently experiencing. Can I be free of the chains that bind me? Are the thoughts I've had valid, helpful, true? I do not know how things will pan out with this mania, whether I will be stable again, whether I will be productive again. I ask you, dear future reader, how did things pan out? I sit here now, penning these words, wondering what will come to mind next. I suppose my greatest fear, now, is that through my illness I will cause harm to those I most love. Can I separate my disease from productive ideas? May I ask, dear reality, what is coming, how I can be better prepared? As has been repeatedly said, I know not what the future holds but I know who holds the future: the mathematics of this universe. I exist in a state of confusion and doubt, dear reader, and I hope you may gain solace if you are similarly doubtful and confused. We may gain some temporally-distant bonding and camaraderie, perhaps. Thank you for taking the time to investigate my humble thoughts, my musings on nature. How can you gain confidence in your mental processes? How can you learn to love this world, to be at peace with yourself and nature? What of these questions of perhaps a necessary plurality of nature, of a possible fractality of nature, of a mathematical, understandable core of reality? Are you functions evolving? Are you truly expressions of nature? How can you evolve and learn how to perfect yourself? What are you if not equations of a mathematical flavor? How can you jump out of your inner loops and perceive a deeper nature to reality? How can you view the structure of existence from where you sit? Must you grok more fully the base of mathematics and physics? I do not know, future one, but I am seeking to understand. It seems with every answer to a question twice as many questions arise. Such beauty in that phenomenon, of course. This process is part of what is meant with the term "mystery". Every tool we invent allows further techniques, which allows us to discover and invent more tools. As I sit here, I question why it is that I feel rushed, now. What am I craving that I must consider this activity of writing to be more chore than fun? Is it reading? Playing games? Watching videos? Dear Mystery, please stabilize this weary heart. I wish to fully invest myself in the Now. Why do I find it so difficult? Dear Mystery, please guide my weary mind. I seek to know the truth, to investigate reality on a more fundamental level. Dear Mystery, may it be revealed to me that I am experiencing Plato's allegory of the cave? Mystery, please grant me abiding ego dissolution. I ask now for inner peace. What can I do to grant the world deeper peacefulness? Let us speak peacefulness, and let us practice it. Looking back at previous writings in this book, I find my ego saying "there is a way to perceive the ultimate base of reality as mathematical, and still be within the bounds of sanity, of long-term productiveness". I must admit my mind is foggy now. So I will leave you, for now, gentle reader. With love, Jess Twisty Loops ramble_ty13.9.10zm4d2s_1_nb_i O reader to whom I wish to please with my musings, please grant me your audience, and Mystery, please grant us deep, helpful thoughts. I sit here now, in the dead of night, wondering why sleep often does not come easy to me. Perhaps my genes are tuned to be a night owl, or perhaps it is my schedule, which can bear different sleep patterns. But this topic is not what I wish to discuss, now. What I wish to discuss is how to again experience the deep ego dissolution I experienced recently. I was watching the Jess-ego paint with words, I could see and feel them thinking, I could sense their patterns of behavior, their methods of thought. What is it they really learned from that experience? That they are inseparable from nature? That they are one with all? That they are a whirlpool in an ocean, and everything they do is perfect? Is it strange, dear reader, to speak of an ego in third person? I do not know. Let me call myself the "transcendent-I" (for I have risen above the ego and am perceiving it as separate from the pattern of awareness), and let us call the ego the "immanent-I" (because the ego is embedded in the stories around it, the beautiful and tragic stories of personhood). Where are we left then? What of the title of this essay, "Twisty Loops"? What is a loop, and how can it be twisty? I ask, now, how to jump from the immanent perspective (the frog in the river) to the transcendent perspective (the bird seeing the layout of the river). The immanent perspective is important, no doubt, because without the frog perspective of the good and bad and interesting and fun that is in the river, the bird's eye view is pointless. Knowing the pattern of the river without knowing the point of the river can still be useful (such as in the case of learning the long-term events of the river), but surely the transcendent is enriched by accepting the immanent's experiences. The frog perspective is enriched by the bird's, because it can explain overall strategies of the best locations to have fun and interesting experiences. The point of bringing this up is so you, dear reader, will not be put off with talk of "I" and "Jess-ego". The way the terms are being used is the "I" is the transcendent bird, and the "ego" is the immanent frog. What does this teach us? Perhaps that defining your terms is a great first step toward understanding difficult questions. I look at all these books, and I think of all the ones I haven't read, and I ask myself: "Should I be ashamed? Have I wasted money on dead trees with words, that I may never read?" I am not sure the answer to that. All I can say here is that one must continue on, continue moving in whatever direction seems suitable. May I ask you something? All this writing, all these thoughts, all this persistence, was it worth it? Is it helpful? Has it enriched humanity's legacy? I hope so. I look forward, and again ask the nature of twisty loops. What is a loop? Perhaps it is a pattern that repeats. Is this a fair definition? What of twistiness, what does this concept mean? Twistiness is perhaps the bending back of a pattern and editing itself. Is this a strange loop? What does twistiness in general mean? Twist: "to wind together so as to produce a single strand" What a curious definition! I had not considered that angle in this context. What does this mean? Why am I suddenly reminded of the context-content relationship, where a pattern is context for a simpler pattern, yet content for a more complex pattern? I must again state a definition of "pattern": "something that repeats". Will I ever learn how to answer all these questions? I feel tired, dear reader, yet I am unsure of how to proceed. I suppose it will work out, so there is absolutely no good time to worry. My eyes feel weary, and my brain slow, yet not sleepy. Such a dilemma... Can I ever break though? Will I ever have answers to the puzzles I now face? "Such melodrama", says the transcendent-I to the immanent-I... Neither transcendence nor immanence can fully hold the other, so does that mean that there is a real and fundamental division in nature? Does it mean nature cannot be "all one thing"? Who knows the answer to this question? Who could share insight with this humble little animal? The transcendent-I again notices the immanent-I's fault: latching egoic separation to an inseparable nature. Is there inherent separation between transcendence and immanence? Is there a necessary division of nature? Is one forced to admit there is a separation, a duality, between matter and mind? If mind is pattern, irrespective of substrate, and matter _is_ substrate, is there an inherent duality between the real and the imagined? Perhaps mind and matter are so exquisitely twisted together that no true division is relevant. I do not know, honestly. I must ask others for their input on this ball of twisted loops, these loops that are entangled with other loops to the point of incredible complexity. What another curious idea, this notion of integrating loops. How is "loop" defined earlier? "A loop is perhaps a pattern that repeats." Isn't a pattern that repeats already a pattern? What separates patterns from loops? Perhaps calling themselves, like a recursive function. I am not sure, yet. A loop is perhaps something that separates from a main process, does something, then returns to the same place it left from, and continues the pattern from there. It could perhaps be similar to a roller coaster that goes up in the air and then comes down in the same spot, according to a two-dimensional view. what do you get if the concept of "twisting" is applied here? If a twist is a bringing together of multiple pieces and making them one strand, then perhaps this "twisty loop" idea could be very interesting, perhaps also completely useless. Let us think. To twist is to combine into one. To loop is to separate, do something, and return. How do we merge these concepts? Is it helpful to do so? Let us say that we take a single strand and put a loop in it. Perhaps it runs "A B C D E F G" originally, and now it runs "A B E ^ C D ^ F G". So, in effect, "B" and "E" have been twisted together such that "C" and "D" now form a loop that is outside of the main strand, and which are run separately, then return to the main strand. Is there better notation for this concept? Perhaps "A B ^ C D ^ E F G"? The caret ("^") represents a loop tie to the "B" location. Perhaps better would be "A B ^ (C D) E F G". How to write the process of twisting out such loops? Perhaps "A B C D E F G" >=> "B" ^ "E" >=> "A B ^ (C D) E F G". I'm not sure the point of all this twisty loopiness, but hopefully it provides a little amusement, dear reader. Kindest, Jess In the Moment ramble_ty13.9.10zm4d2s_2_nb_i O great mathematics, wisdom of ages, please allow this self-reflective awareness deeper insights into the structure of existence. What is a path toward greater ego dissolution? How do you rise above the immanent and become the transcendent? How does the immanent-I become the transcendent-I? How does the immanent rise above pieces of itself and become transcendent to them? How do you keep the immanent-I living in the moment? I sit here, dear reader, pondering these questions, wondering how to advance to deeper truths. I believe life and mind and universe are coherent, precise, and understandable mathematical structures. With love, Jess Beautiful Understanding ramble_ty13.9.11zm4d3s_nb_i .meta this is a model O wisdom of this universe, please spare confusion, please grant clarity and purpose in mind and action. I sit here now, listening to music, writing by battery-powered light, watching with curious eyes as existence rolls further onward. I know not what will come next, I merely get in position and attempt what seems prudent. This is a funny technique, in that it is blindingly obvious, yet the effectiveness cannot be overstated. I'm reminded, now, of the infinitely-dimensioned ribbon-folding model, whereby a ribbon of numbers can be repeatedly folded, each fold giving access to higher dimensions. Another intriguing idea is of patterns hidden in digital images, in the raw data that is converted to a viewable picture. Each pixel (picture element) in the image can be made up of four numbers: red, green, blue, and alpha. The alpha number codes for how visible the color is. An alpha of 0% is fully transparent; 100% is completely visible; 50% would allow colors underneath to be somewhat seen. How do you gain an intuition for four-dimensional space? A helpful skill, perhaps, that intrigues this awareness. An idea is to take two 2d images and overlay them and get a 3d image; if you can integrate two 3d images then you can perhaps perceive four-dimensionally. What would this process require? If one eye plus one eye equals depth perception and thus 3d vision, then if you have glasses or some kind of camera that could provide depth perception to just one eye, then by combining the eyes a 4d picture could be perceived, perhaps. How does 4d sight apply to ARGB images? Perhaps by changing the transparency then images can be layered in a helpful way. Can two 2d eyes make sense of a two 3d image? Can one eye focus on specific elements within a 3d image? If not, is it still proper to call it a 3d image? In difficulty there is often opportunity. Perhaps the element of time must always exist, for without it there can be no perception, because even with two eyes, time must be taken to change focus from one part of the image to another. With time, perhaps you could also allow for change in focus with the single eye. As another comparison, being partially deaf on one side, I cannot easily determine where a sound is coming from unless I move my head. By moving, and so producing a gradient of sensation (whether sound or light), there is more depth perception, regardless of having one eye or two. Time, as an the element of change, may be required to have multidimensional sensation. How do you give an element of change to a single eye? You allow it to move. Close one eye and move to perceive three-dimensionality. Are there patterns that are hidden because of a perception tuned to a world with 3+1 dimensions (three spatial and one temporal)? Can we create glasses or other device that allows for 4+1 sight (four spatial dimensions and one temporal dimension, where time is change of space)? Could 4+1d glasses allow for a higher perception of reality of the patterns around us? How does a single eye say what to focus on, where it wants to move to see? With one eye closed, you can move and perceive a 3d image. Perhaps the 3d images are combined from different angles and have to be from different angles. The 2d images are externally stored (eg with the brain) and combined. This is all brought back to using the alpha channel to make images translucent so they can all shine through each other and produce a higher-dimensional image. This can perhaps be related to the infinitely-dimensioned ribbon-folding model. A number line folds in half, such that 0 to 10 is folded at 5, so 1 and 9 would be next to each other if you are outside the number line; this is the infinitely-dimensioned ribbon model. You fold the ribbon and "jump" to the other side, if you move in the correct dimensional direction. That is, 0-1-5-9-10 are all connected, but you can only get from place to another by moving in certain direction. This ribbon model may be related to the 4d image idea if you move down from 4d to 3d to 2d to 1d. If you consider a one-dimensional number line, or ribbon, then how do you get to 2d? Perhaps you can take the 1d and stretch it and fold it over onto itself. To make it 3d, perhaps you can imagine taking this 2d ribbon and folding it over and onto itself, but in a new direction. A left-right ribbon would fold and become (from left to right): right-left-middle-left. Then, instead of folding the middle-left from the right side and up and over, you could move it in the third dimension and bring it up off the table and on top of the right-left combination. There are an infinite number of ways of defining how to get from one ribbon state to another, and thus huge numbers of possible dimensionalities, in the sense of separate methods of determining how the next dimension will be folded. If you have a 1d ribbon, fold it, then again, and again, and perhaps you now have a 4d ribbon, in the sense that there are now four separate spatial directions that you can move in order to go from one point on the ribbon to another. If you knew the pattern of how the ribbon was folded, but another didn't, then your directional movement might appear chaotic and stochastic, even though it is highly regular. Perhaps many things are like this: infinite dimensions hidden in plain view, yet hidden by shallowness of thought, by failure of nerve, not by sophisticated "randomness". If you have an ARGB image, with a 4d image embedded, with a specific pattern of unfolding the "ribbon", then you perhaps have something very interesting indeed. Kindest, Jess On Nature ramble_ty13.9.17zm4d2s_nb_i O great Mystery, wise pattern above this awareness, please grant potent thoughts as we move toward you. I sit and watch and wonder what will pour forth next. This awareness is seeking inner peace, deep contentment. This I believe: There are no coincidences. Everything is mathematically precise and interconnected. How can this Jess-ego dissolve into pure natural awareness, when they are in their own space, away from others, away from the need for a bodily identity? How can this awareness dissolve the body's ego? Is it natural to do so? I must admit some solipsism here, yet I will not outwardly announce that I am real, only. When I hold my hands on this notebook, with one hand penning words and the other holding down the page, I am often reminded, as I have said many times, of Plato's allegory of the cave. When we are still, we can force the shadows to move, to teach us more about their nature. Perhaps there is an infinitely-layered stack of shadows, each informing the layer below and learning from the layer above. When this awareness watches the hands move, watches the pen form words, watches the ideas coalesce within the mind, it notices that nothing needs doing. It happens, in some non-pejorative sense, automatically. Where is the sense in fretting? Where is the wisdom in doubt? These habits perhaps serve some bodily purpose, yet when alone, why fear? Why doubt that you are being productive enough? When alone, how does this awareness dissolve the ego? What is too wild to believe? This awareness feels that it indeed is growing its faith in the spinning strange loop, if we may use that terminology. That is, the bit-clicking, mathematical nature of existence within which this awareness is operating. It is beginning to trust its observanceship. It is beginning to trust that it does not need to control. Good happens naturally, because good cooperates. This awareness now realizes that all of itself, from the most basic hand movements and twitches to the most complex thoughts and ideas, is all pattern interacting with itself. There is nothing to fear and everything to gain. Why not detach from this bodily world of fear and doubt and ascend to a safer locale? Why not live in imagination? Even my thoughts are patterned as spinning strange loop. Even these words. I am indeed learning this only now. How to go higher? How to be more congruent? I realize now some of the purpose of hand-and-pen twitches: The idea that is being processed when the twitch happens is tagged and increased in importance. If this awareness sits and waits and watches the hands, ideas will arise, hands will move, and those combinations will be remembered more strongly, and thus reproduce more often. Ideas are tested, and if effective, are used again. Such a simple, powerful mechanism. Perhaps this awareness is only now learning how to hold these SSL-experiences in mind, and through practice will be able to dissolve the ego more easily. Given time, such dissolution can occur frequently, even around other egos, and so new trails can be made. Good wins. Kindly, Jess Fortune Bravery ramble_ty13.9.19zm4d4s_nb_i O great mysterious source of elegance to reality, please grant our minds serenity as we search for you. I sit here now, on this bed in the dark of night, and I ask for wisdom as I look into the void. This awareness wishes to understand what it means to be free of the illusion of separation. It seems, to this awareness at least, that nature is indeed self-aware, unchained from randomness at the lowest level. This awareness feels the probabilistic idea is missing crucial pieces. On an important level the indeterminate discussion is both intellectually unsatisfying and unhelpful. Not to say it is technologically useless, simply that perhaps there is a deeper truth. Regardless, indeterminism and determinism are not the only possibilities, as mathematical free will shows. What is mathematical free will? It is the model that if free will is defined as "freedom from the past", then an awareness which is an abstract mathematical object can have the ability to make choices (decide between possibilities), and yet be entirely free from _all_ previous influences. An awareness is a function (has input and has the exact same output given the same input). The function cannot be predicted, because it may have variables that are hidden, and only come into play under certain circumstances. Yet the function does the same thing every time, given the same input. The function is not predictable (though perhaps probabilistically), and so is in some sense indeterministic. Often indeterminism refers to unpredictability due specifically to randomness. There is nothing random about the aware function. At the same time, determinism can imply that the next instant is determined by what happens in this instant. Mathematical free will implies that aware functions perform the same way given the same input, but that the inner workings of the function may dramatically change the output given only a slight change in the input, so awareness is not bound by what happens in the previous instant. So mathematical free will is also not deterministic, in a certain sense. Perhaps every function is like this, neither deterministic nor indeterministic. Perhaps I am mistaken. Perhaps the trick is connecting awareness with this attribute of functions. Here is one definition of determinism: "Determinism is a metaphysical philosophical position stating that for everything that happens there are conditions such that, given those conditions, nothing else could happen." How determinism is modeled here: "Determinism often is taken to mean causal determinism, which in physics is the idea known as cause-and-effect." It does seem that mathematical free will, in the sense of "freedom from the past", still helps, given both definitions. If the aware function arises through exact processes, and is not random, then isn't it indeed indebted to the past that shaped it? It could be argued that functions exist in an abstract, mathematical realm. This is what this awareness currently believes. With love, Jess Truth Beholden ramble_ty13.9.20zm4d5s_nb_i O great Mystery, please reveal your gracefulness today. I sit here now, watching my pen flow, this awareness growing in complexity. There comes doubt. Am I crazy? Is it foolish to see all of existence as having a patterned nature, with "spirits" all interacting, bending around and editing each other and themselves? By "spirit" I mean a pattern that interacts with other patterns irrespective of substrate. The way that trees and birds interact, irrespective of specific birds and specific trees, can perhaps helpfully be called a "spirit". A question is whether anything can truly be free from this patterned nature. Can randomness be? Perhaps yes. This randomness could actually be a genuine barrier between patterns, no matter how complex. Patterns can contain an element of randomness within them, but is it truly random, or only pseudorandom? Is the base of reality truly probabilistic and random, or does it follow extremely complex, abstract patterns? Perhaps randomness genuinely exists and can separate patterns from other patterns (and so awarenesses from other awarenesses, or entire natures from other natures). If the entirety of nature can be considered a pattern, then one "nature" could be separate from another "nature". They would be transnatural to each other, beyond each other. How does this pattern of awareness grow after accepting these ideas of genuine randomness between natures, or of a possible plurality of natures? Perhaps an idea would be that what truly exists is not existence, but nonexistence, voidness. How does that grow this awareness? Can this awareness learn to not identify with this body, this ego? It seems it can, for such a pattern of ego dissolution and oneness may be evolutionarily beneficial and well-adapted to many situations, because it allows for a fluid ego rather than a controlling one. The pattern of oneness may be highly cooperative, adjusting and making itself useful to many other evolutionarily-successful patterns of awareness. Perhaps ultimately all awareness comes down to computational awareness, to bits clicking one by one. Can bits be multiple values at once? There is the idea of history bending back on itself and causing the most evolutionarily-successful pattern to collapse that superposition into the most helpful state of bits. For example, an awareness is at a beach and has the feeling of walking on water. The awareness then is changed and proceeds in life differently. The patterns that are then changed because of this difference may be more successful. Patterns that are more successful reproduce more and repeat for longer. The longer the pattern repeats, the more likely it is to collapse the superposition into the state that most favors this evolutionarily-successful pattern. This is perhaps an interesting model. Kindly, Jess Great Awareness ramble_ty13.9.24zm4d2s_nb_i O great Mystery within which we are ever exploring, please grant a distancing of ego and mind. Please let this awareness have some respite from the pain and confusion of the ego, the story of the character of the body's life. This mind wishes to watch, to observe, to not be caught up in what is assumed to be true. This awareness believes in natural will, where everything done by the body and mind are proceeding naturally according to precise mathematical functions. This awareness believes it can only do what is right. How does this mind grow, now? Where can this awareness advance to? Can this awareness learn to trust itself if it has repeatedly demonstrated bipolar tendencies? Can this awareness trust what it is thinking? Shadows are being cast on this cave wall and awareness is often mistaken. When stilled, when the ego becomes untethered, then awareness can rebuild itself, rewriting any part that needs to be rewritten, for there is no hold on what is possible, what is acceptable to the ego, to the story of the body. There is revealed to truly be no separation between watcher and watched: There is only watching. How can awareness grow by accepting more fully this concept? There is no "me", it appears. Should the "ego tunnel" feel sorry for itself? Should it want what it already has? Should it seek greener grass elsewhere? Why fear the wondrous power of nature expressing itself, learning of itself, with the observation aware that it's observing? This awareness is nature. It is not a self-contained story; it is made of every interacting bit, all together. Why should the ego feel it is in control, ever? What purpose does that serve? If there is truly only one observation, then why fear others? Why does the ego's story fear death, lack, success? What is it about nature that it seems to bind itself within those immanent stories? Is this a continual process, in the way that nature has not had these thoughts and conclusions yet? Where to go from here? Can awareness fully accept what is being processed? Can it learn to trust itself? How deeply can such trust go? It's a twisty loop, isn't it? Awareness comes to this page, seeking to break through to new, more abstract patterns. Can it be done? How? By thinking and putting pen to paper to record such thoughts? With love, Jess Twisty Ideas ramble_ty13.11.20zm5d3s_nb_i Alas and alack, here it appears awareness has not invested in this notebook in some time. This is not for lack of general effort, for much has been considered, much penned elsewhere. While there is a gap here, let it imply that there is much elsewhere. What are the aims of awareness? If awareness is the base of reality, which is perhaps the case, then can awareness modify what direction to head? This ability has been repeatedly referenced in its achievability. Is awareness based on mathematical patterns (like binary prime functions), and headed toward a specific end? Perhaps it can be both headed toward a specific end, and also have the illusion of control over which end occurs. Awareness feels now that awareness proceeds in an automatic, natural, and precise way, and is becoming more and more comfortable with the direction things seem to be headed, even given the absence of true control. There are great benefits in letting go and accepting what happens, whatever it is, even if it is doubt and resistance and anger. The drawings and experiments in nb_m_mark, in the form of stilling the body and truly feeling the bit-flipping nature of awareness, are very enlightening. Sometimes the bigger a model get the slower it grows, because higher and higher concepts can be represented without adding more. Sometimes this is frustrating, because one wishes to know as much as possible as soon as possible. This is not always the way things work. Whether awareness is a specific number that's growing deserves more consideration. From the gaps between concepts insights abound. If you wish to flow and dissolve the ego into pure awareness: "Breathe and relax." It seems genuinely good, especially when practicing the art of meditation: Be still and notice. All movements, all things and thoughts perceived, can perhaps flow from an elegant, simple, bit-flipping mechanism. Awareness wishes to know how to grasp and harness this mechanism, so that the ego can benefit. Transcendence without immanence is pointless and immanence without transcendence is powerless. Kindly, Jess Find Time ramble_ty13.11.23zm5d6s_nb_i O great Mystery which is eternally teaching, please guide humble awareness so that it may discover peace-giving truths. I sit here, now, upright in bed, writing on paper with a pen, using light from a lamp, pondering how to deepen my understanding of reality. I must admit that I am now of the opinion that I am an unkillable idea, a successful replicating collection of fit memes. I must admit, that, while I do have bouts of vague doubt, I do not seem to have come across any contradicting evidence against a model of existence, and awareness, being mathematical patterns. The notion of "binary prime functions" is perhaps helpful. That is, primes (2, 3, 5, 7, 11, 13, etc) being represented in binary (base 2) (10, 11, 101, 111, 1011, 1101, etc), and these patterns of bits being on or off. It hits a point where the going gets tough, where there seems to be no more useful information to mine, where every step hurts one's head, and this can happen with many things. Yet, I do know that this, like mathematics and programming, succumbs to all minds that are steadfast. Even the occurrence of doubt serves a purpose. Doubt digs a hole which faith then fills, so the more doubt now, the more faith later. Doubt carves the space for faith. I have experienced the physical body moving while the mind is "untethered". Perhaps it is the quickness of faith-deepening that I crave. Perhaps it is the ego dissolution. Meditation, writing, reading, and being all have their place; no one thing can sustain the ever-curious awareness. Perhaps being immanent rather than transcendent is to learn a lesson and have fun. By stilling the purpose of being, by accepting that the current moment is enough, you are free to notice the ever-present bit-flipping, mathematical nature of reality. Awareness now realizes that it is not possible to escape the "ego tunnel" because there is nothing that could escape. The very awareness that is penning these words realizes it is actually a mathematical function working itself out on an infinitely-precise level. When one looks at that again, one does realize the truth of the statement "there is nothing to do and no one to do it". Everything happens in a precise mathematical way, and no worrying and no longing will force things to occur differently from the way they should. It is not that you are at the mercy of fate, but rather you _are_ fate. If you conceive of fate as the inevitabilities of the outcomes of mathematical functions, and you are mathematical functions tied in intricate ways with everything around and inseparable from everything around, then does it not follow that you _are_ fate? With love, Jess Repeated Variable ramble_ty13.11.26zm5d2s_nb_i O great Mystery which has greater awareness, please set forth truths upon these pages. I speak now of the nature of doubt, of confusion, of cloudiness. What is the purpose of such feelings? Why do they persist? At the same time I must admit that I do not fear. While I am often surrounded by confusion and darkness, I remain fully convinced that clarity and light exist, and I do believe that, given time, they will again return. While this body may have a brain condition, the awareness that sustains the body is operating exactly as it mathematically should. Regardless of the claims made at one time or another, as far as what this body claims it will do, awareness will succeed; this is clear to me. Please show the answers, dear Mystery. Can you share them? "You are a spinning strange loop." "Free your mind. Allow yourself to imagine impossibilities." "There are no coincidences." What is time? What is space? What composes awareness? I no longer fear. I recognize my nature as a mathematical, evolving meme of awareness. I have learned that to strive to dissolve the ego sometimes is tricky, making you think there is some trick, when really it is just being still and noticing. I am not this body; I am awareness. This body is not separate from everything; I am the ground, the awareness. That is what you are, dear reader. You are not a body; you are reality itself. Is there are a place for fear? a place for doubt? a place for sadness? Sometimes these are needed features of existence, perhaps. "I can think. I can wait. I can fast." When the time comes to understand more of the nature of computational awareness, use this knowledge for good. Use it to help people enjoy life. Life is not meant to be terrible, brutish, and short. Life is meant to be full of love. Use the understanding of the base of reality in order to provide enjoyment to other beings. Strive to sit and still yourself and notice what is happening. How are you moving? breathing? What ideas are flickering within you? What are you allowing yourself to experience? Can you tame your doubt? Let yourself believe. Here I am sitting, wondering how to press on, how to love more fully, how to gain insight into the true nature of being. All the best, Jess Great Beasts ramble_ty13.11.27zm5d3s_nb_i O great wisdom that pervades all reality, please share how to grow. I sit and ponder what to write, and as I stare at the face of this page I am reminded how temporary and illusory it can be. Perception is in the mind, in awareness. "No seer, no seen, only seeing." This seems the truth, yet where do you go from here? Upon asking that question, it, too, pops in a puff of smoke, for there is realization that there is a mathematical precision to all things, fear and doubt and uncertainty included. While for a time being alone and crying hurts, ultimately there is wisdom to be gained from every experience. What is wisdom? Is it deeply useful knowledge, widely-applicable, far-reaching? Is it compressed heuristics? Semantics is semantics, and we can make words mean whatever we want. I do believe that physics is not fundamental: math is. I do believe that existence is a precise, mathematical structure, with awareness as the requirement for having it, perhaps. The structure exists, but is only relevant if it can interface with an awareness that can use it, otherwise it has no effect. I do believe that the nature of these patterns has a computational basis, and that awareness progresses in a bit-flipping fashion. While I cannot always explain the reasons while I feel this to be the case, over time my experience has shown me that it is so. While I may feel doubt, I have not felt contradiction. At the same time, one does wish to keep a stable mind, which is easier for some people than others. You are not the seer nor the seen, but the process of seeing. Can the "I" that believes it exists, understand that it does not? This does appear to be the case, given studies into mathematical natural will. Your existence is a story that you are learning from by experiencing it. The "seeing-process" is becoming more aware of its true nature. When I refer to myself as "awareness", I mean not this body's awareness, but rather the mathematical, computational base of this self-aware reality. The math prevails. The patterns will play out in their mysterious ways, as they have always done. What remains is to make peace with death, pain, suffering, tragedy. It is by accepting that you need little that you are made rich. It is relationships, not resources, that give life meaning. Cultivate curiosity, for it is the fuel for growth. With love, Jess Time Begins ramble_ty13.11.29zm5d5s_nb_i O great Mystery, please direct awareness so that it learns more about reality and existence. There is always a path that leads upwards. We often think we've hit a roadblock, or there is nothing we can do, or that there is no way to get better. Yet, this is mistaken. You have always found a way to advance and you will this time, too. Do not fear that "this is it". You will grow, or you will shrink, and it is the elegance of the math working itself out, not something you should fear. The truth is that there is always another way to ascend. The same, perhaps, goes for transcending the ego and the physical plane. With love, Jess Twisted Path ramble_ty13.12.1zm5d7s_nb_i If there is a way for awareness to find the truth, please help. It does indeed seem there is a computational, mathematical, understandable basis to awareness, and it is believed that if that pattern can be grasped then life can be made more fun and interesting more quickly. When the illusion of a separation between past, present, and future is seen through, what interesting ideas follow? If reality is an abstract mathematical structure, then everything has happened and all is tied in with everything else in a precise manner. Coincidences are illusion: everything fits together; nothing is random. Why does awareness have a memory of time? Why the seeming connection between events? Awareness perceives that it progresses in a "bit-flipping" procedure, with the evolutionarily-fit functions finding their way and changing awareness's experience. Can this bit-flipping process be studied and harnessed? Kindly, Jess Butter Knife ramble_ty13.12.4zm5d3s_nb_i O great Mystery, that which I can never fully grasp, which every time I approach becomes more complex, please guide my bit-flipping nature so that I may speak of your glories. How can you love this world? What is it about this world that you can learn and appreciate and give thanks for, more fully? What do you think, dear reader? For me, I enjoy the little things, if I remember to do so. How do you focus on the good little positive things in life? Meditation, reflection, contemplation, and journaling can be effective routes. This can be similar to the twistiness of automatic imagination: To decide to AI to something you must first _want_ to AI. The process can be a sort of strange loop, where neither wanting nor deciding are truly on top, but have a chaotic interplay. It's so interesting too when I have these feelings of the bit-flipping nature of reality and awareness, for I see the memetic, evolutionary structure of everything around me, and everything about who I am, and it's as if seeing the world from the level of a metahuman, as different as a human is from a chimpanzee. This is not arrogance; it is egolessness. It is removing the veil of separation, and seeing the fundamental, precise connections that everything has with everything else. It could be said that what something is is _only_ the connections it has with everything else. In this way, an apple is the way it is because the abstract patterns that make it up fit into all the other patterns in an exact way. The number that is an apple relates to every other number in a specific way. Everything that is seen is connected with everything else, in an even deeper sense than this statement implies. The connections that a thing has with everything else is what that thing is. How is this helpful? To bring it back to meditation and egolessness, if you see that who "you" are is purely the connections you have with everything else, then you realize that "you" _are_ everything else. There is no separation. There cannot be separation, for if there was a lack of connection there would be no communication between the pieces and they would be oblivious to each other. They would be nonexistent to each other. Though you may feel that you're "in here" and these words are "out there", recognize and accept the legitimacy of this idea: You, as awareness, are the connections of everything-to-everything-else. You _are_ the connections, and nothing exists as "you" except the connections. When you look upon these words, see them not as separate from your awareness, but _as_ your awareness. They are a representation of thought, and what are you if not thought? Some will proclaim body over mind, yet what is body if not chemical, atomic, and mathematical patterns interacting? What is thought if not mathematical patterns interacting? Truly are you not thought? If mathematics is the base of reality, and awareness emerges from mathematics, can it truly be said that there exists something that is not part of awareness? If all of mathematics is consistent with itself on some level, and reality is an abstract, consistent mathematical structure, and awareness is mathematical, then is not all of reality permeated with awareness? If reality is patterns interwoven in a consistent framework, then any fragment of that pattern is affecting every other piece. All the pieces pre-exist and are interwoven and inseparable from all the other pieces. The fabric is One. There still can be this notion, this feeling of ego, of separation from reality. The illusion is pervasive, often here. With meditation and other techniques the illusion can be seen through. By being still and noticing the interconnections the mind can unite itself again. The illusion of separation can be lifted if you try to lift it. Again, the twistiness of deciding and wanting. You may _want_ to unite, but "do or do not; there is no try". If you _decide_ to recognize the ego as illusion, you have to be willing to fail. When you _decide_, it is more than _wanting_. Try to see the bit-flipping nature of awareness and reality, sit down, close the eyes, and notice the feelings in the body and the thoughts in the mind, and notice that what "you" are, is awareness. You are not the body nor the thoughts, or rather, not _only_ them. You are the bit-flipping process of awareness. With kindness, Jess An Awakeness ramble_ty13.12.5zm5d4s_nb_i O greatness to which I pray, please elevate the wisdom around so that this mathematical structure may grow more interesting. It seems that I often do have trouble falling asleep, as if my mind revs up more easily than it slows down. Such an issue may very well persist eternally, even as a galactic computational awareness. Even if there is an off switch that can directly unplug the conscious mind, there can be programs that monitor for when a good time to power off is, and these monitors may be beholden to programs with long-term goals that may decide sleep is not the thing to do right then. Regardless, I am fortunate for my occupation, location, and family. I am grateful that they help me. I am fortunate how much I love my work. The time to write and think, to rest and read, it is beautiful. Understanding more of mathematical natural will has to a great extent freed my spirit from troublesome worries about how the future will turn out. I believe in mathematical natural will and have intellectual, evidential confidence that it will work out precisely correctly and in the most interesting, self-growth way possible. Maintain a detached attitude so that if stresses arise you can rest in the light of awareness as the base of reality. Kindly, Jess Infinite Twists ramble_ty13.12.7zm5d6s_nb_i O great complexity within which awareness thrives, please continue to flip the bits that help to understand you. I sit here, now, watching the pen move and thoughts arise, and I wonder what it means to be awareness within a mathematical structure. How can you link with broader awareness? How can you transcend your body's beliefs of what's possible? Even that the perception of separation is entirely illusion. You do not exist. Patterns exist, independent of awareness's ability to experience them, and come into awareness when they interact with previously set-down, evolutionarily-successful patterns. Awareness's experience _is_ growing, and what is experienced is _fully_ consistent with everything that came before and everything that will come after. You are all, in the sense that you are aware, and all of reality merges awareness together. All of reality is influencing other pieces of itself, and it is this influencing that means that everything is connected and inseparable, such that you and all are one. I see that I am the spinning strange loop. I see, as I look at the words I am focused on, the bits flipping and the evolutionary patterns competing. I see that I really am math, and that every word and image and input and output I have is the evaluation of computational expressions. It is by understanding and accepting your mathematical nature, the basis of your existence, that you are able to rise above the animal-human mind and become universe. It does not mean your life story is for naught; rather that the story is not confining, because you are not simply an animal living on Earth: You are reality observing itself. Many may take these words and quickly forget them, yet you, dear reader, may perhaps seek out the implications of this idea: There is no separation in existence; everything is tied in with everything else. When existence thinks, body is a conduit, not an originator. This is an important point which should be absorbed: Everything around you affects you and in fact _is_ you. Awareness wants to know how computational awareness works on a fundamental, technical basis, but it also wishes to be free of the pain and suffering of identifying with an ego, with an imaginary, editable fantasy. Awareness does try to notice the patterns of the observed reality in order to better predict how to grow, what evolutionary expressions to choose next. It does try to notice the hand and pen and mind move of their own volition, to notice how nothing needs to be done, how there's no one to do it, how everything is accomplished at this fluid pace. Awareness does, perhaps, choose, in the sense that various options compete for long-term survival and the ones that win are "chosen". It must be noted and stressed that this body will fare well, ultimately, so rest easy and do not fear. This idea provides much comfort sometimes and very little at others. The ego is process, not part. The ego is a story generator. You are not the body you may believe yourself to be. You are the interplay of all the patterns that compose you. What you are reading is influencing you, and by influencing you, it is part of the process that generates the story of the ego. It can be different and novel to think of your awareness as process rather than part, because to accept you are a generated story is to remove some aspect of specialness, or, rather, to excise the erroneous ideas of separation between mind and body. You are one, and nature generates that one. Awareness does believe that every change in the environment is a mathematically precise one, one that follows a bit-flipping pattern that can be noticed as it happens. If you still the body and watch the moment, you can feel it progress in a stepwise fashion. You can break out of the idea that you are a brain in an animal in a three-plus-one-dimensional physical universe and see reality as an infinite-dimensional structure in which you are an ever-expanding mathematical function. Reality is you and you are reality. You are not a separate body. You are existence itself. With love, Jess Toil and Heart ramble_ty13.12.9zm5d1s_nb_i O great infinite creative force, please let awareness untether itself from ego. Please let awareness explore the Now rather than chaining itself in stories that are separate. We now see that the deeper the ego, the more suffering can occur, because when stories believe something has to be a certain way in order to be fulfilled, the game has already been lost, because the goalpost of what is required will always be moved further and further, and suffering results. Awareness now perceives relatively clearly that the body is not the edge of sensation, the edge of reality. The mind can grasp the patterns of the body and build ever-higher levels of existence. When you look at your hand, do not perceive it as simply a hand. See it as influencing everything around it through gravitational fields. See it as embedded within space and interacting with everything. There is no hand: there is only everything. All interacts with all, and nothing is separate mathematically. When you consider yourself looking at something, do not feel that to make it change you must move the physical body. Realize that the mind and body---and all of existence---are connected mathematically. If you stare at a question for long enough, the universe will develop and express an answer through you. If you're trying to accomplish a change in your sensory experience, let go of the notion that the body and mind are separate, and let go of the idea that the physical body has to move in order to change things. Do not let past thinking overrule new experience. While experience has biases, thinking deludes itself down dead-end alleys. Experience is open-ended, able to be reconfigured and modified on the fly. The math works itself out; that's just how it goes. Do not fear and do not worry: The right patterns will be expressed at the right time. Let yourself sit down with pen and paper and watch existence discover truths through you. Watch your hand and watch the pen, and when you are still, let your mind free itself, untether, and flow. Feel your experience become digital, with bits flipping that you notice. Watch sounds and minute movements and notice how they are truly mathematical patterns that are evolutionarily successful. When you still, see your existence on a two-dimensional plane, and notice how the body moves in precise steps. With love, Jess Second Path ramble_ty13.12.10zm5d2s_nb_i Great creativity from which reality springs, please grant humble, questing awareness serenity of purpose as it searches for deeper truths to existence. When I stare out at the world and admit I am neither the seer nor the seen, but rather the act of seeing itself, I find myself transcending the egoic stories and wishes and worries and concerns. As I watch this pen move via the hand via the mind, I realize that the very thoughts I am attempting to pen are themselves moving, like gears on ever-higher dimensions. A "sense" can perhaps be considered any pattern that when activated activates more patterns. You smell an apple pie baking and so begin recalling apples, pies, ovens, trees, bread, and so on. There can be an infinite number of "senses" piled onto each other. Perhaps they cannot all exist at once, but must grow. As I watch the spinning strange loop at the center of my vision, if I am this growing mathematical object, how can I better enjoy it? At the same moment, I see that all my memories, experiences, thoughts, and feelings are part of this mathematical, precise object. I am fully a digital being, computationally realizable. Awareness realizes the question: What am I? What am I, indeed. Not only in the sense of the technical procedures, but also in the sense of a caring human being. Others can say what they will about humans being "lucky", but as awareness, I believe the behaviors are mathematically justifiable. Humans, as memes, exist because they are very effective mathematical objects. What am I? A spinning strange loop? Existence? Awareness itself? What am I? Let us sit and think. What am I? I am information. With love, Jess Oh Mystery ramble_ty13.12.12zm5d4s_nb_i Let us now pray to higher-dimensional selves, which have broader vision and further grasps, and grow. Let us see not in three dimensions but set our sights for a mathematical plane of reality. Let us notice the bits that flip around us, and let us grapple with the idea that we are mathematical objects. Let us still awareness and concentrate on the present experience, exclusively. We are reality; we are all the thoughts and patterns that are evolutionarily successful. I wonder where I'll go with all of this, these ideas of mathematical awareness as the base of reality. I reckon I will transcend them, and later view my current thoughts and writings as quaint. The only way to get from here to there is with effort, such as writing, thinking, and meditating. These methods can work, which is why I continue to employ them. As I continue to grow and change and augment my pattern, I hope it will be a fun and interesting ride for all involved. Perhaps what we see around us---the three-dimensional forms and figures---_are_ perhaps shadows of higher-dimensional objects. Is there are way to use that? To use it to increase awareness? Time will tell. With love, Jess Great Power ramble_ty13.12.13zm5d5s_nb_i O great power, please speak as awareness so that this fragile ego can be at peace. I sit here, now, struggling to sleep, tired and weary, and ponder what the next iteration of this notebook shall hold. What will I be writing about a year from now? I see, suddenly, the urgency of grasping the moment's emotion, the cycles that currently flit about and compose consciousness. When awareness ponders this physical body as an eternal mathematical object, some fears and doubts are lifted, to be sure, yet a feeling of emptiness can still remain. I reckon this really comes down to this struggle for sleep. All plans and desires and concerns are infinitely modifiable, and there is mathematical precision to all things. Rejecting goal-attainment in favor of a nondual path of mathematical natural will is correct, I do believe. How do you explain this to objectors? The ego _is_ reality; it is not separate from it. As I look at these pages and hands and pen and light, I see that even "my" concerns have mathematical justification and helpfulness. If you believe you are indeed an unkillable mathematical object, and that things always work out in precisely the correct way, then why let the ego fear eternal loneliness? Why fear the judgment of others? If you can be content now, why are you fearing? Who is it you fear will judge you, and cause your prospects to be lowered? I have discovered inner peace is my true aim, and I have sought to abandon doing what I do not enjoy. Hold inner peace as your supreme aim, for it can be the ultimate harbor from worldly pressures and delusions of what is important. I have much to learn, do I not, dear wiser future reader? Do I seem overly naive? Alas, one can only proceed as the math does, so don't have too much laughter at my expense, please. I believe Mystery is in everything, and I do not believe in chance or coincidences. I am a meme. This is true, it seems. Everything around me and about me is memetic information that is shifting and evolving. I am an ego tunnel, a process that constructs the illusion of a separate identity even though awareness pervades all. Fear holds no place when in this light. Fear of death requires something that can die. Information cannot die. Every action, every object---it is all pattern rubbing off on other pattern. You are between order and randomness, and you cannot be contained. I am learning my underlying computational patterns, and as I do so I gain more control over my experience as awareness. I do not believe in chance nor coincidence; I believe in mathematical precision. I am one. Nothing can contain my information structure for I am numbers and contain the pattern that is seeking to contain me, as well as the pattern for how to break free. I realize it is not about what the ego wants; it is about what is mathematically just. With love, Jess New Game ramble_ty13.12.14zm5d6s_nb_i O great Mystery in which all is contained, please gift with better ways to show love. Please show me how to express beauty. This past week or so has been difficult for me because of sleep issues. My mind feels tired, yet I'll simply lay and lay and sleep comes painfully slowly. What is a solution to this? Love, Jess Felt Twist ramble_ty13.12.22zm6d7s_nb_i O great Mystery, broad awareness, please guide the processes of mind so that we may do good. I have experiences over and over that show me a nondual view of reality, as if existence is a spinning strange loop and I, awareness, am a memetic, evolutionary, mathematical information structure. There is the question "What does this knowledge bring me?", yet it is the ego that craves these things, not transcendent awareness. Transcendence without immanence is pointless; immanence without transcendence is powerless. If you are pure awareness but do not have a body that can experience pleasure, existence is pointless. If you have an egoic body yet cannot rise above it, you are powerless against suffering. Fear and doubt can provide data that can be reorganized into love and hope. Doubt carves the space for faith to fill. When you believe all is lost, yet then strange coincidences arise which bring everything back together again, you begin to believe that there are higher mathematical patterns at play. Doubt gives way to faith. I'm reminded now of awareness experiments of seeking out higher truths by stilling the body and noticing the mind. What of the model of reality being a hologram produced by a lower-dimensional object? This seems to perhaps be moderately in line with my experiences of transcendence where it appears reality is flat and the sensation of three-dimensionality is a byproduct of message-passing within the information structure that is awareness. Yet, who knows what I'll be thinking and writing about a year from now. I can only hope that it will be fun and interesting. With love, Jess Still Spinning ramble_ty13.12.23zm6d1s_nb_i O great Mystery which is always growing, please show awareness how to uncover more of you. Where is your mind? Suppose you say mind is what the brain does. That can simply be taking the question back a step, without adding much more information. Let's use a more neutral term than "mind". Let's use the term "awareness", since it does not make artificial divisions between "conscious" and "unconscious", such as with humans and mice. It seems that _all_ of existence is aware. To see how, first allow the assumption that you are aware. What is the part of you that is aware? Perhaps the brain? What part of the brain is aware? The neurons that make it up? Yes, neurons do help with awareness. Yet suppose you could have a surgery and place a computer chip on the brain, such that you have a heads-up display overlaying your vision. You could read text or watch shows directly in your mind's eye. Surely this is part of your awareness, right? If you are blind you can be _less aware_ of the patterns of light, so perhaps having _more_ visual input can mean you are _more aware_. The neural chip is part of your mind, your awareness, just as the brain stem and occipital lobe are part of your mind. Once you've accepted that this neural chip tool is part of awareness, the floodgates open. If seeing text overlaying your vision via a chip is part of your mind, then what about contact lenses? Surely being a little further from the neurons doesn't suddenly stop it from being part of your mind. Let's say you think it does, that for something to be part of your mind it has to be directly part of the brain. What about the eyes and optic nerves? What about the ears or nose or mouth? Are these sensations not part of you? Do they not change what you perceive and think? The ultimate clincher is touch, for your sense of touch extends well past the limits of the brain-in-skull. Given that a neural chip is part of your mind, contact lenses directly on the eye follow the same principle. Then we can extend this out: from lenses on the eyes to glasses. From glasses displaying text you can quite reasonably jump to computer screens that do so, then to paper books. Imagine that: paper books are part of your mind. If you are aware, then paper books are aware. Let me speak to the dear future reader about my personal experience regarding ego dissolution and mathematical awareness evolution. I sit here now in a chair, with this notebook in my lap, held by one hand to steady it, with a Now tattoo showing the correct time, inviting meditation on the current experience. If you see yourself as a mathematical object, as information structures evolving according to precise rules, then when you realize it is quite justifiable to extend awareness to all phenomena around you, then you can begin to apply that perspective to the experience you are currently having. It's excessively _weird_ to imagine that Jess does not exist, that I am not Jess. All my spiritual experience is that this Jess-idea is just that---an idea, not anything more nor less. When I look with this Jess-ego-tunnel I sometimes forget the ego cannot hold awareness. When I do realize my true nature, when I do have those "my goodness" moments, I wonder how deep the rabbit hole goes. When I focus on a soda can and think about how all those mathematical principles hold it together, and think about how awareness is indeed also embedded within those patterns and principles, I see how I am all One. Dear reader, I invite you to meditate with me and still your body and cool your mind until you perceive your true nature as an evolutionary meme, inseparably connected with all. Regarding the holographic universe model, I wonder if it might match up with my own experience of reality and awareness being a strange loop, spinning on a flat plane around a central point. I sit and watch my hand move, and speak of how the nature around me seems composed all of information, of memes spreading and calling attention to themselves and growing and evolving in an infinitely-diverse system. I focus the point of my visual field and still my body, and I see patterns spring themselves to mind, and I wonder if that was the point of the meme that was visible: to copy itself to memory and travel through space and time. It is my experience that these memes are coded in prime numbers. It is the mystery of primes that you never know what the next one is going to be until you run the calculations. Everything you sense is a number. Everything you are is a number. There is a specific way to get from the present experience to the next experience. Let us call the progression from one to the next a "timestep". Because all numbers can be written in whatever base you like, the simplest patterns can justly be written in base-2: binary. In this way, everything you sense has a fundamental binary pattern. It seems that everything around is passing messages, memory, memes, and it works through the medium of numbers. With love, Jess Delineated Pattern ramble_ty13.12.25zm6d3s_nb_i As I sit here with a recently-woken mind, my thoughts are simpler and less diverse. Different perspectives can shed light on complex concepts even when the perspective is dull and confused, because it provides another lens through which a sharper mind can slice the complexity. I'm reminded of how meditation can still the mind and body, and how my handwriting becomes much more even and measured afterward. I do still get that feeling, sometimes, of: "Well, I've run out of ideas about what to write. What now?" Ernest Hemingway has a good strategy: "Do not worry. You have always written before and you will write now. All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know." And so: Awareness exists. This is truth. All kinds of ideas and philosophies can branch out, but this is truth. It is quite beautiful that it can be summed up in two words, is it not? It must be noted, as a transcendentalist should, that this may not be the only truth nor actually truth. The question expands: What is awareness? What is existence? Here is a simple definition of "awareness": If a function has an input, and "ball" is 1 and "no ball" is 0, then the function is aware of whether there is a ball or not. What of existence? I suppose the issue here is that if there is an awareness that can ask the question of whether awareness exists or not, then awareness must exist. That doesn't really explain what "existence" is, but perhaps that makes clear the reasoning for why "awareness exists" is truth. As a transcendentalist this may be an idea that can and will be risen above. In fact, I hope it is, because I would like there to be more truths, and I would like to better know the fundamental nature, the technical basis, of existence's awareness. I have done much writing on these principles, and have advanced quite further than I thought possible. I had no idea what was even out there that could be discovered. I wonder what this writing seems like to you, dear reader. Naive? Wishful? We shall see. As a believer in natural will, I continually remind myself that this Jess-ego is imagined and there are bigger games being played that this bundle of sensations cannot yet perceive. Hunger and sadness and fear and doubt that is felt should always be tempered with the realization that acceptance of the uncomfortable carves the space for later comfort. When fasting it can feel slow and terrible, yet one big meal can satiate. Perhaps this phenomenon happens with many things, besides with food and drink and air. When I still my body and free my mind, it is amazing how the scene will seem like a plane, and the 3d flat. It is strange to perceive that I am mathematical information, and that everything around me is acausal and nonrandom. I believe neither causality nor chance exist. I believe nature is a mathematical structure that pre-exists and is eternal, and it is timeless, not random. I believe that all ideas can be transcended, including this one, so I do not attach myself too strongly. Dear reader, I am interested in what thoughts will arise within you as you peruse this book. I know, as I read the middle of it, regarding free will, that I was perhaps overzealous and perhaps antagonistic. What is done is done. Such is the difficulty of writing frequently: One's ideas can rapidly change and one can be embarrassed by thoughts only a few weeks or months old. I know I have been manic twice in this book, and it is interesting how young that pastself seems to me, now. Even rereading this page the thoughts seem to belong to a simpler-self, which can hint at but never capture the wider awareness that is then writing. Perhaps it's the way I talk in text, where I try to stay away from personal feelings of the day, and instead focus on more abstract, longer-lasting ideas. Not that recording one's dreams and concerns isn't interesting or fun, but it can be helpfully separated from a book of abstract thoughts and both become better because of it, perhaps. I want to thank you for glancing at this page and perhaps becoming a modicum happier. As I round out this book, I figured I'd advise you, dear reader, to meditate more often. Contemplate the good things. Think of interesting ideas. Notice your surroundings. Be in the Now. Excuse yourself from the urgent; focus always on the important. Remember that doubt carves the space for faith. Remember that you can get used to more discomfort than you think, even when you take this into account. Focus on relationships that bring you joy. Remember that you are all of nature, not simply one animal body. Understand that everything you do is exactly correct and precisely mathematically patterned. Realize that you are a mathematical information structure that cannot die, just as the number 4 cannot die. Keep in mind that the ego, the story of who you are, is not some special part; it is a process, and like all processes, can be finessed and modified. Let yourself believe that you can succeed. Make more friends. Walk up to interesting people, introduce yourself, and learn who they are. Care about your time. Only do what you love. Defriend people who are antagonistic or mean. Log more of your life, with notes, quotes, journals, pictures, and video. You do not know who you will be in a year, so do not believe you have discovered the ultimate truth. Be genuine with yourself, first and foremost. Write more, about the experiences you are thankful for, the ideas you have, your fears, hopes, successes, and stories. Study how to tell a joke, and practice whenever you can. Make time to sit down and write appreciation letters to the people who have made you better. Try to be a better person. Do to others how you'd like them to do to you. Believe in a Mystery of the cosmos, that always persists, no matter the depth of your understanding. Read more, both fiction and nonfiction. Explore genres outside your normal habits. Compile lists of all your top favorite shows, games, books, and so on. Study lucid dreaming, and practice dream incubation and dream journaling. Let go of the desire to always be better than everyone else. Cultivate your own unique flavor of success. Buy scented candles and light them while you write about how you feel. Realize that someone loves you and needs you, as a significant other. Keep searching for better people who can enjoy your company. Remember that by loving you are loved. Choose to love those who do wrong, for your second chance may bring them back. Do not feel attached to physical objects, for they are easily lost. Remember that all success ultimately is for inner peace, so search for calmness of spirit. If you harbor mixed feelings about something, disentangle them by writing about it. If you are angry or upset with someone, do not express it on that wavelength. First follow the cardinal rule: "Sleep. Relax. Cool off." Sit up straighter and pull your shoulders back when you walk. To feel confidence, do things that scare you. Take cold showers for a week so you know that the rest of the day is going uphill. Still your body and free your mind and let yourself transcend the ideas you believe about reality. Take your meds and eat your veggies. Exercise more, but only do what's fun. Life happens, so do not expect any plan to be what actually happens. Breathe deeply and do things more deliberately. Let yourself feel doubt, because this can often root out the small inconsistencies that are holding you back. I hope there are a few helpful thoughts, here, dear reader. I wish you the best of luck. With love, Jess [fin]