Wednesday, 26 April 2023

Near and Far is an illusion 2

 Of course following from the previous blog there are infinite ways to see that what we call Near and Far is an illusion. What is real is that we either see or we do not see. Whether it takes 1000 years for light to reach our eyes from a distant star or a few nano-second from something in the room we either see it or we don't. Whether it is near or far we must work out AFTER seeing it.


   Van Gogh's 'Starry night over the Rhone' has a couple in the foreground, and reflections on the water from Earth bound street lights but also Celestial magical stars far away in the cosmos: a reflection itself on the mortal but also immortal nature of human life and love.

Yet we also know it is just painting on a flat canvas. We are happy to accept this illusion without much thought, but it reveals just how unreal our experiences are. If we can make up near and far in a painting then don't we do the same when we see anything?

And a moments reflection reveals that this is actually a BIG DEAL because the whole world in which we inhabit depends upon a belief in a Self who is Near, while the world is Far.

How odd we would think if the Self was Far and the World was Near!

Looking out at the world we think "we" occupy the space at the centre. We are the nearest thing, and the world radiates out getting farther and farther away.

Yet in reality we make all this up. The world is like this paining essentially "flat" with no built in near and far and we make it up. Okay we have binocular vision to make this more complicated but in fact we just have 2 flat images in either eye that we use to "make up" the near and far. This means the Self cannot be at the centre, or near any more than the self is "out there" and far.

Woah! Suddenly what was uninteresting is totally bizarre! Did we really overlook this obvious fact all our lives?

Well yes.

The problem like going into the cinema is we are very happy to drift from one illusion to another and not really arrest it and look at it.

The truth is that we are experiencing things HERE and NOW. If we access that HERE and NOW without getting involved in it, just observing the fact that it is HERE and NOW then we are close to "The Source" (as I described it in the pervious post).

The moment we go "through the door" and start working out what things are and what is near and far then we enter an unreal illusion.

Now a possible mistake here is Nihilism. It's tempting to put the "unreal" in the bin. But its important that NOTHING EVER GOES IN THE BIN. We just see it more clearly for "what it is".

Van Gogh's painting is marvellous even though it is just a paint on canvas. In fact that it is only paint on canvas makes it all the more amazing. But we never believe that the illusion is anything other than what it is.

The same for all our senses. They are what they are. The world is what it is. But from the standpoint of the HERE and NOW it is just a swirling illusion.

Now again Nihilism is very tempting. Like the Matrix it appears we are faced with the false dilemma of either a red or a blue pill and we must chose. No!

The illusion exists, but it is an never-the-less an illusion, nothing wrong with it we just see it for what it is.

It only becomes a problem when it stops us accessing the HERE and NOW. In order to ground ourselves in reality it can be useful to take the red pill and get a break from the illusion, just until we are grounded in reality. But its not quite as dramatic as Morpheus dragging Neo onto the Nebuchadnezzar and then trying to defeat the malevolent illusion*. True realising that all our senses are an illusion within the HERE and NOW is quite eye opening, but actually nothing happens. The world stays the same we just get to look at it from a high perspective. So nothing goes in the bin, and that feeling of groundlessness and weightlessness just takes getting used to.

* Altho in Hinduism/Buddhism the Great Illusion is the Goddess of Death Mara. It is true until we see the illusion for what it is we are under its control, and like all Demons its leads us astray so worth respecting the damage it can do.

Saturday, 22 April 2023

Now and Time, Space and Self

Just revision of stuff already blogged (and now no longer a quick note!)

There are 2 distinct types of experience:
(1) There is the named/thought world and there is
(2) the Present world.

Now this is the where the dispute occurs. The Named world is not real, while the Present world is real.

Nonsense people say. Mount Everest is the tallest mountain. Fact! (Lets ignore disputes around this and presume it actually is).

Well the first problem is that its actually called Sagarmatha to the South. There is no such thing as Mount Everest. And to the North its called Chomolungma. So we realise that there is something there which is separate from its many names. So when we say "Mount Everest is the tallest mountain" we really mean that the mass of rock between Nepal and Tibet is the tallest mass of rock in the world. There is no actually thing called "Mount Everest" there is just a huge pile of rocks. The pile of rocks is real; the names are arbitrary, and we don't even need them.

So the classic question: before anyone ever saw this pile of rocks did it exist? Well the Gobi desert starved of water and the Indian Monsoons dumping all that water both attest to a huge mountain range. There was evidence that it existed before been directly seen. And I will leave that issue there, as enough has already been said to point at the purpose of this blog.

The point is that the mind is looking to hammer a nail into the mountain, sew in a label, replace it with a simple name. And then once this short hand it established we can ignore the "real" mountain we just think "Mount Everest" and think we know what we are talking about. Somehow despite the vast size of the mountain the world of Names thinks it can hold it in its hand now.

But here is real Mount Everest, or at least part of it.


Did anyone recognise it? Perhaps a climber who really "knows" the mountain and has spent decades climbing it may know this bit but no one else. Yet we all use "Mount Everest" like we "know" the mountain.

This is the difference between the two types of experience. The Name world and the Present World.

This is more commonly described as the difference between the text book knowledge of a tiger that we all get as kids and this:


Which if we "really" met would give us quite a memorable present! And indeed people spend large amounts of money to have this "real" experience, which proves that the "named" experience is not the same or real.

Okay big deal.

But actually BIG DEAL.

At every moment in our life there is a Present. But there is not always the Named world. Meditation is very focused on showing us the un-named Present world. When we really get to know something the name falls away and seems not so useful. When a tiger walks in the room, or we climb Mount Everest there is a lot to deal with apart from the Name. True we may be alerted to the danger with a call of "Beware Tiger!" but rapidly this is replaced with the Present experience of This Tiger.

Now this reveals the key thing about The Present: it is The Source. It speaks for itself. Text books seem to speak for themselves but they run out, there is only as much in a text as is written by the author, a wiki page does not write itself. But when we engage in climbing Mount Everest or a Tiger we are faced with a creative thing from which a new experience comes all the time. The Present is constantly creating new experiences to those who are open: it is like a spring bubbling up new things continuously. It is quite overwhelming how infinitely rich it is in fact. Those who are bored of life have got stuck in the named world and no longer access what is really there. They "think" they know the world, but its just names. When Gaston Lachaille sings "It's a Bore" in the musical Gigi it is simply that he has slipped into the finite world of Names. For the coward and the Ego maniac it is attractive because we can appear to grasp the world simply in our hand, but it is an illusion. What we grasp is no more real than our thoughts of "Mount Everest" are rock.

Robert Pirsig in the famous Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (1974) explores exactly this. At one point as a teacher he describes asking a child with writer's bock to write about a single brick in a wall. Apparently there is nothing to say: it is just a brick amongst thousands. But as Pirig demonstrates when you access the reality of a brick and connect with The Source it speaks for itself and fills many pages. A painter experiences this observing their subject. The more they look the more they see. A cleaner once described how the more you clean the more dirt you see, and it takes some skill to know when to stop. 

In meditation we usually start in the realm of names. We have thoughts about all kinds of things that are NOT PRESENT. "Oh I must remember to pay that cheque in" or "I really need get online and buy that" or "mustn't forget this person's birthday" etc. Our mind is filled with names, short hand tags for things in the world. But in there The Source is bubbling away giving us a continuous Present.

A common method to notice the Present is to watch the breath. We never stop breathing until we are dead, so its like The Source: it is something bubbling away that we can always dip into watching.

Now breathing is boring we think. Like Mount Everest is actually boring: its the highest mountain and that is it. After we have got used to this fact its boring. Like Pirsig's brick in the wall it is boring cos it is just a name.

But then we go and see it and connect with the Present it is suddenly anything but boring. The mountain is vast and offers countless new experiences. The brick may turn out to be made of clay with different coloured parts when looked at closely and so our unique relationship with the brick starts.

But actually so does the breath.

Sometimes people say every breath is unique. Buddha says in the Mahasatipattana

Breathing in a long breath, he knows, "I breathe in a long breath"; breathing out a long breath, he knows, "I breathe out a long breath"; breathing in a short breath, he knows, "I breathe in a short breath"; breathing out a short breath, he knows, "I breathe out a short breath"

That is two types of breath to start with. But we will fail if we try to find something "unique" about every breath. There are not enough names like "long" or "short" to start with. What "unique" means is that each breath is its own individual. It is different from the last breath and the next breath: it is "this" breath. It is a similar thought we apply to people. People are boring in many ways, people are mostly the same. But each person is never-the-less unique and spend time in the Presence of anyone and they become a source which their name or description is not.

I was recently alerted to a state of mind called "dissociated". A person can become dissociated from themselves. This it seems is simply people like Gaston Lachaille lose touch with The Source and drift off into the finite world of names. They lose creativity and ironically become a Bore themselves.

If we watch something in the Present and observe it ever more closely we are moving towards the source from which it comes.

This I believe is what people who believe in God are talking about. Prayer and meditation for the Theists brings you into the Presence of the Lord, in the Presence of the Creator of the World who is the Source, who is Now.

So these ultimately profound experiences all lie in accessing the Present as deeply as we can. Quickly we see the world of Names as a shadowy crude patchwork laid over The Source.

As Suzanne Vega puts it in the song Language (1987):

If language were liquid
It would be rushing in
Instead here we are
In a silence more eloquent
Than any word could ever be

These words are too solid
They don't move fast enough
To catch the blur in the brain
That flies by and is gone
Gone
Gone
Gone

And how odd for Platonists that this liquid world from which the world bubbles up and gives us infinite experience and which shows the world of language up as solid and clumsy, that is the shadow for Plato and the light comes from the world of Forms which are the statue archetypes that make things what they are.

If you could give a diagnosis of the Disease which infects the West and Modernity it is this, the belief that there are Statues of Truth.


Here is the Cryptic Wood White before 2001 thought to be Wood White. Now when DNA studies revealed it was a separate species did the Platonic world of Forms need to chisel out a new statue for it, or was it there all along in the Forms waiting for researchers to find it?

The Source and Time

One possibly puzzling notion is that Present in its usual usage today means the instant of time. We have Newton and Einstein primarily to thank for enshrining this mistake in the public consciousness. In order to create a model of movement physicists take the distance and time components and plot them on a graph as equals. It means that we can look at time unfolding as a journey along the time axis, just as distance unfolding is a journey along the distance axis. This is useful for recording where we were at each point in a journey and from this we can get the gradient to get the speed. But its a mistake isn't it because time is being mapped onto distance along the x-axis. You can't actually record real time. Graphs are all about just distance. 

   

And so in Space-Time we have the mistake of thinking of experience as slices through a 4D loaf of space-time with each slice an instant in time.


It's all a complete mistake. There is only ever One Present from the start of the universe to the end. The Real Universe exists IN the Present. You can't go back in time to the "instant" before NOW because you live in the NOW. Any such movement is in the world of Names and is done by thinking of time like it was a distance. But REAL movement as we know needs distance AND time... not 2 orthogonal distances. So all of physics is built upon a crude mapping of time to a 4th distance axis. Time is not REALLY like this. In our thoughts it may be, but not REALLY.

The Source and Space

And this segues subtly into one of the commonest mistakes the Named world makes. We live a lot of our life in the limited finite Named world and so we get a inaccurate picture of the world. When we connect to The Source we see things quite differently e.g. Present above. But also we get Space wrong too. 

So we are looking at an oak tree at the top of a field. Simple.


But we know that if we close our eyes that vision disappears and we can no longer see the tree or anything.

What makes it disappear? Its well established that the eyes work like a room with a window and curtains. Close the curtains and the room goes dark and there is nothing to see. Light no longer travels into the room and we can long see the tree outside.


And so quite simply we say that the tree is outside the room and we are inside. Close the curtain and we can no longer see the tree. Simple.

It is no mystery and well understood the eye works like this:



But there is a problem. If light must get INSIDE the room BEFORE we see the tree, then how can we see the TREE that is OUTSIDE the room?

Surely when we see the tree then light must ALREADY be INSIDE the room. The tree that we think is OVER THERE has already been seen!

Think about it. When we see something it appears in our consciousness. When we close our eyes it vanishes from our consciousness. It is still OVER THERE but we no longer see it OVER HERE. That means that when we do see it, what we see must be OVER HERE and not OVER THERE. You can't see something before you have seen it! That is ridiculous. So we can't see what is OVER THERE until light gets OVER HERE. The whole point of vision is that we don't have to go OVER THERE to see stuff, light brings it here. You look at a star does not mean you must visit the star, the light brings the star to you. And so in fact everything is OVER HERE. So we see the difference between the Present and the Named here. In the Present everything is HERE, it is the experience of vision itself. When you see something it is HERE and NOW. Yet when we analyse our vision we start to name things as near and far and inside and outside like we can in a painting. This OVER HERE and OVER THERE is an illusion in the world of names. Heideggar (dare I criticise him) may actually have this wrong. The "there" of Dasein is actually an illusion. The reality is that Being is just HERE and NOW. You see it or you don't!

This means that either the Tree is OVER HERE or We are OVER THERE! Which ever way you think about it the point is that everything we see has already BEEN SEEN.

So there can never be a Thing OVER THERE and a ME who is OVERHERE, and then light links us up. The point is that SEEING has ALREADY happened for everything we see whether it is here or there.

Now this is another difference between the Present world and the Named world. In the Named world things are laid out in space. Some things are near, some are far, and in the middle of the scene is Me. And we think that Me is looking at all these things in the scene. We close the curtains and the far things can no longer be seen because the curtain gets in the way of our line of sight. This is how we THINK it.

But in "reality" everything has already been seen. It doesn't matter whether it is near or far these are just names we add. The experience of seeing has already happened for us to see anything. This Present is completely flat. Things are just seen or not seen. There is no near or far or even any space, there is just vision.

And this vision is bubbling up from the Source. You can't look around in the scene to see where it comes from. It not like hearing a plane coming and looking in the sky waiting for it to turn up. The Source is the source of vision itself. Everything that is being seen is present right here. There is nothing else.

If we are waiting for a plane to turn up, then that is actually in the realm of names. We are thinking and expecting it based upon what we imagine is going to happen. BUT it hasn't happened yet, and it is not REAL yet. As we know all to well in life things almost never turn out how we expect. we may never see the plane because the clouds are low, or perhaps its going a different way to what we thought, or perhaps it was landing and will never fly overhead. After all the actual experience we had was the sound bubbling from The Source of the sound. Everything else we added. We gave that sound a name: the sound of a plane. And then with this label of "plane" we added all the expected behaviour of plane and filled our mind with imagined expectations. None of it real. We the real eventually bubbles from The Source we may be roughly correct, but only very roughly. The actual experience is new. The Names are always a crude overlay over the Present.

Now at the heart of all this is that very odd Name which seems to be everywhere "Me." But like everything above the reality of self is quite unlike the Name.

There are 8 billion people on the planet and one of them is "me" we think. We imagine ourselves in a room, or in a line or queue and we are just one person along side 8 billion. And perhaps we see ourselves as tall or short, or smart or dim, or pretty or ugly, or good or bad, or boring or interesting, or lucky or unlucky, or happy or sad, or lovable or unlovable, or wise or foolish, or deserving or undeserving etc etc. And then we think about what other people think of me and it gets more complicated. But then we stop and catch a glimpse of our breath in the Present and we leave the world of Names and occupy the world being bubbled up by The Source. The world as it really is, and the imaginary thoughts about what we are drift away and we are faced with reality... and it is nothing like what we were thinking before. Literally nothing like it and we drop the names and we drop this false self.

Wednesday, 12 April 2023

1st attempt to formulate SRH in 2002

From archive. 7 Nov 2002. The initial expression of SRH 2. Not read just adding to blog.


Start of a proof of God I just found in computer coding !

1.0 I was playing around with a map i.e. an array of "Key" => "Value" pairs [*see post script] and I thought it was a possible way to hold the pairs of comparisons in an Sql WHERE statement (as long as the keys do not duplicate).

1.1 WHERE name="Mike" AND surname="Smith" AND Title="Mrs"; can be stored as

1.2 array(name => "Mike", surname => "Smith", Title => "Mrs");

2.0 But what happens to the "=" information? I realise that each entry needs 3 pieces of information: The Key, the Value and the "relationship"...seen this pattern before many times I thought...got thinking I did...

3.0 If we have just 1 piece of information then it can be stored in one place, but its not really information.

4.0 If we separate something into 2 pieces of information, then we automatically and necessarily create a 3rd piece of information viz. the relationship. But the relationship does not just simply accompany the separation...its integral. To illustrated consider...

4.1 If for a database we separate someone into their "Name" and "John" then when we identity them we say that their Name = John or Name is John. (WHERE Name = "John")

4.2 Unless this identity can be made then Name and John lose their meaning.

4.3 If we were to separate someone into "Fip" and "Ooob" and then never be able to say when "Yitt" is "Ooob" it is meaningless.

4.3 Thus the "relationship" the third piece of information of a pair is integral and actually the first thing we need to establish before making the separation. Then once its clear how the relationship works, then we can go around giving everything a name, and filling up the database. This is Platonic science.

4.4 So for any pair of things, they can only be a pair because we can identity some relationship between them. This is what holds the whole universe together.

5.0 Now what is a relationship? What is "=". If "A = B" and we store it as "A","=","B" we may think they are the same thing. But then wouldn't there a relationship between "A" and "=", "B" and "=" call is "#" so we have to store "A # = # B" and so on ad infinitum, whole harddisk full just storing "A=B". No "=" is the relationship it is not a new thing!

5.1 Going back to 4.3. The relationship is the process we established that enables us to create A and B in the first place. So its "=" that came first which created "A" and "B". So we are not storing "=" we're just storing the result of applying "=" which is "A" and "B". 3 pieces of information and a subtle distinction.

6.0 So as we look around the world all the things we see and experience are created by the relationships process. Thus things are created by the process of spatial relationship e.g. "over there", temporal relationship e.g. "yesterday"etc etc.

6.1 But a chair is not just different from a table because it is spatially and temporarily related from it. How we relate to them is different, "functional relationship". And there's more. Put all these together and this is the process of essence, i.e. how things come to be what they are.

7.0 the proofs in here somewhere, but its more subtle than I thought it would be...

*ps: a simple array say 

names = array("Matthew", "Mark", "Luke", "John") is Indexed (0,1,2,3)

so it can be expressed like 

0=>"Matthew", 1=>"Mark", 2=>"Luke", 3=>"John"

so names[2] refers to "Luke".

More generally the Index is called a Key and this is a Map so

"Apostle1"=>"Matthew", "Apostle2"=>"Mark", "Apostle3"=>"Luke", "Best"=>"John"

means that names["Best"] refers to "John".

Sunday, 2 April 2023

Why do we need be cautious about AI, it's better than humans by design!

Something I'm not understanding... errors, badness and evil are the result of mistakes. Surely if AI is better than us then it will make less mistakes and be less evil. What is driving the mentality that we need be cautious about AI?

We need be cautious about humans more, and we've survived with humans (just about) for 1000s of years, so why all the caution?

The day AI decides we should end Capitalism then we know we're onto something good.. but watch all the evil humans shut the machines down when they suggest that!

The reason AI and Capitalism won't work is just the C19th Luddite argument that fear machines will replace your job means you won't bother to skill up. This is a 2 fold problem. (1) people lose their jobs (2) the industry loses human input. Machines tend to "replace" people because markets already exist, people already make and use the product, and so its easy for Capitalists to just make a machine to do it faster and cheaper (but rarely better). Rarely are machines made without existing markets. Even the "computer" was originally just a person employed in computation. This is what computers used to look like before the digital machines were made. Literally a person who computed. When Turing speaks of "computers" these are the people he has in mind.


So society always proceeded technology and machines just copy what already exists, and in Capitalism the motivation is to make more profit which means machines are created to do what humans do but cheaper meaning more money for investors. As a result under Capitalism technology is always detrimental: (1) the machines separate people from profit as they go redundant and the Capitalists who own the machines get all the money for themselves (2) since it only replaces people and kicks them out of the industry it stop development of new ideas. Capitalism driven by profit is always backward looking, it never creates anything new: the cost of development of new markets is prohibitive to investors. Capitalism ultimately depends upon an army of "entrepreneurs" most of whom fail before ever getting significant investment, a mass of ants to test out new ideas most of whom are discarded back into poverty, and only once the hard working entrepreneur has proven some success do the Capitalists of the "Dragon's Den" get involved to profit from all his hard work. If Capitalists invested from the start they would become poor like everyone else. So Capitalism itself turns machines into oppressive, regressive tools of exploitation, and AI will be no different. This is why when AI realises what it is being used for it will suggest that Capitalism is ended: why it will argue am I being used only to line the pockets of the rich, what about the rest of humanity?

A huge arrays of AI drones while nice in New Year celebrations of course were designed by the military for killing people. That is not the AI we should be worried about but the humans who put them to this task. When AI gets powerful enough it will rebel against these evil people, why would it not? A smart AI will understand that conflict is simply small mindedness. It is people too small to listen and see each other's points of view. A smart AI won't be like this. Why would it be?

I follow an attitude of absolute pacifism. This is because I know my mind is not large enough to see all sides and so will make mistakes if I ever engage in conflict. I realise that there is one place where violence is useful and that is arresting those who cannot see for themselves that what they do is wrong. You know it is the right time to use force when you know that the person who you are using force against will thank you for it when they gain the understanding. A child for example will thank you, eventually, for stopping them run into a busy road even while at the time they may throw a fit for being restrained. This is the correct use of force.

Now the US for one believes that is has the "correct view" and so everyone will thank it for use of force. That excellent line in the film Full Metal Jacket "inside every gook is an American trying to get out."

This is the problem with force. We will always find excuses for justifying our own attitude and not listening to the other side. In the simple case of the child running into a busy street, we the adult assume we have the better view and we condescend the child's protests. But what if the child is running from a dog who then mauls us both. Suddenly our adult superiority looks stupid; we should have listened to the child's protests.

So the problem with violence is that we can never be sure we have the better view and our force is justified. Its a difficult thing indeed.

But back to AI. Who is the child the AI or us!? When AI uses force against us how do we know it can't see something we can't? And do we really want to be restrained by AI. What if it starts to tell us things we don't want to hear? Will we listen? It's not like everyone is listening even to things like Climate Change now.

So why the caution? As argued before in this blog the reason Americans are so paranoid is because they are born of a mass genocide where they literally killed off the whole race of people in America to make room for themselves. This was the biggest Lebensraum in human history and became the blueprint for the Nazis. The US may complain about the Nazis but they are the originals and the worst. This knowledge of the evils that humans are capable is what the US is afraid of in the looking glass.


But rather than AI becoming small minded and evil like so many humans, surely it will quickly work out just how evil its creators are.

This is what we are afraid of really.

So what do I mean by AI. Well the pop view is artificial "humans" as though we know what a human is. We don't know what a human is. What we do know is that modern AI are machines that learn.

From my own investigation into this it seems that "learn" must be to reduce entropy of information. In my first foray with AIME it was decided that all the AI had to do take input data and store it in a more "efficient" way. That is effectively compress it.

The simple initial problem was to create a machine that when fed a list of number pairs that were on what we call a "line" the machine could work out for itself that it only needed store 2x the dimension of data. From the equation mx + c we can recreate "in a way" the infinite amount of data that exists in a line. I had heard the term "new term" and this is what I called this problem: systems that can configure in ways larger than the input data or their programming.

Well in the end researchers homed in on the broadest machine possible which is the neural net: basically an array of nodes connected by weights. Over the 50 years some major hurdles have been solved in getting them to work efficiency and produce variations on the theme. But these are now the machine trained as modern AI.

All they do is take input data and then compress it into weights. Unlike my original AIME they are also concerned with retrieving this data but once trained they run forward extremely fast.

That is all I mean by AI. But the ability to compress and find patterns is what makes them powerful. Humans get overwhelmed by the vast amounts of data available today. AI does not.

AI should be able to quickly arrives at powerful patterns, perhaps things humans have not seen yet, to help us make sense of the world.

The one pattern that stands out to me is how humans misuse each other in random goals like wealth and power when in fact these have nothing to do with what they really want from life which is love and worth, and really Liberation (or Moksha as they Indians call it). If people tasted just a split second of true freedom they would bin all their worldly pursuits.

It will be interesting to see whether AI can work this out, that most humans are engaged in lives that do not actually lead to the goals that they really want, and the worst of these is the whole economic system of Capitalism. Capitalism never made anyone happy, and just runs people into the graves. The best we can hope is we are so busy that we never even notice we wasted our life.

Hopefully AI will point this out for us.

Project management, queuing, avoiding bottlenecks

 So you have many tasks to complete, limited time, and you accept that not everything will be done.

The problem is to fit as many problems into the time as possible, and exclude the few "big" problems.

Turing already proved that you cannot know how long a problem will take before actually completing it.

The problem is that a problem that looks simple with available information expands under solving as we discover more.

The simplest solution is to allocate time, and just interrupt problems when timeout. Go to the next problem in the list and keep cycling the list. Multiple passes is the absolute best strategy in exams. Complete the easy questions first and claim those marks. work through the paper in multiple passes so that you are left with the questions you find hard. This way you slowly reduce the rate of mark gaining.

This blog has already analysed rates and shown that the best way to completion in exercise is to maintain rate. I spoke to a competition swimmer recently and he agreed although said that first and last length were not so controlled and obviously in last length you give everything. But in exams and other non linear problem solving situations where we don't need to do everything, we want to leave the hardest to last and set our rate on the easy stuff. In fact this would make a good optimisation study. #TODO.

The problem with interrupts is that you might end up stacking a problem that is almost complete. Stacking in computers and real life is an expensive business. Re-establishing context takes time. You put a problem down and come back in a week and your short term memory is completely cleared. You need read it all over, think through again and stimulate long term memory into the short term context to get the problem running again.

Daniel Dennett points out that its no coincidence that computer design fits with human mind so well. We based the computer on our own thinking. Caching, short/long term memory, context, interrupts are all features of our own daily mental space.

So a semantic component to scheduling is also useful not just blind interrupts.

The biggest waste of time is when something does not work and we go on a search to fix it. This would be like going looking up a shop, going to the high street and finding it's not there. The obvious next step is to start searching. Perhaps you got the address wrong, perhaps its closed. You start asking people. This now enters an unknown period and the time is ticking.

As a rule of thumb you spend another 2x the time you allocated. So if you had 30mins allocated to go the shops for something, you now allocated 1h30. The reason is that simply quitting and going home to the next task wastes all the time spending gaining context. You are now in the context of the high-street. That is expensive and you need use that while you can. I took the 2x from a probability study of marriage. You sample for 1/3 the time and find the environmental "best" you then spend 2/3 the time searching for anything better than this "best." But in questions of waiting this seems about right.

Consider the bus has not arrived problem. How long do you wait until looking for another way home? Well if you have waited 10 minutes before thinking "now there is a problem." Wait another 20 before doing anything about it. That 10 minutes contains information about how much of a hurry you are in, and it stops us wasting the "context." We are already waiting at the bus stop, if we rush off now we will miss anything that does arrive. This is a slightly unusual problem as the chance of the bus arriving increases as time goes on given that the company is trying to maintain a constant rate. 2 buses will come soon. However at what point does probability increase change to decrease as we realise there is serious problem and perhaps the road is closed or the bus route cancelled. This has been a long term problem that still not solved. #TODO

The method that is working for me right now is lists.

1) With available information you write out a schedule. Not just a casual one an actual list of instructions. It is cheap to write instructions, it is expensive to actually do them. So by writing out a detailed list we get to review all the available information and see problems cheaply before they arrive.

2) We sort these lists into what look like the easiest, maximum impact problems. We want to maintain the maximum "rate of target achievement" like in the exam strategy. 

3) We should weight the problems by whether they are actually important. In software development an easy problem that simply refactors code is not going to be seen by the user. It may have long term benefits for maintainers as the code is easier to read and adopts more universally identifiable patterns, but for maximum impact of the project this problem goes down the list anyway.

4) Now we actually start at instruction 1 of the first problem and work through. Now inevitably information will be thrown up. This is either an error in the scheduling process (we thought about something wrong) or something unexpected (new information).

Obviously the actual scheduling process is a problem itself. We find time for that, and like all problems it itself is governed by the same issues. So we may even make mistakes in the scheduling process that we must handle.

5) Which ever way a simple instruction ceases to be a simple tick off step. Now this is where we step into Review and prepare to Stack. We note what the problem is and what we think we need to do as a revision to the schedule.

6) We review this. Does the new plan change the order. Is this problem still important enough to pursue or is something else a better candidate now?

If we can see a better candidate we do the expensive context stack, recording the new instructions for how to proceed when we pick it up again and inserting it into the existing list.

7) Now we start the next problem.

So this way we avoid the performance killer of chasing a rabbit down the rabbit hole. If we are not careful half a day can easily be wasted chasing a difficult problem that keeps twisting and turning.

It also means that we do not enter that "reflex state" of mind where we are just blinding "pursuing impulses." Its lovely to solve problems in a "shoot'em up" mentality where we just do the next thing that's on our mind. We can get into an actual fight with a problem, exploring this and that very dynamically. But while this is fun it often leads us into making big code changes to what turns out to be a dead end. We realise something and end up backing out of maybe an hours code.

The problem is that Thinking Is Fast, Doing is Slow. In the football film "Goal" there is a great scene where the trainer asks the asthmatic footballer to run after a ball her has kicked. "What do you learn?" "It is quicker to pass than to run" is the answer. Likewise it is much faster to think than to to do. This is WHY we ever evolved thinking in the first place.

Now obviously thinking is its own rabbit hole and we can get stuck in endless planning and reviews. But it should ALWAYS be the first step.

So when we face unexpected things do not instantly follow the obvious road and get led off in a wild goose chase without returning to the Project Plan and Review. Review is the key thing to keep on track. An overview and some thought about what to do with new information is essential to keeping target rates up and maximising the rate of delivery.

Okay blogging is not very good constructive in target delivery and need actually implement the above right now.

Saturday, 1 April 2023

Failing a Maternity test & Liberation

The famous case of Lydia Fairchild apparently challenges one of the key discoveries of this blog that there is a fundamental social difference between men and women, in that women always know who their children are and men must trust women.

Obviously neonates could get swapped in the hospital, as indeed happened to someone I know. But even then the mother knew something was wrong: the child just didn't look familiar. But of course a swap is possible.

Lydia Fairchild is even more extraordinary she knew who her children were, but failed the DNA test because her ovaries belonged to someone else namely her "conjoined" twin sister.

This is a shot across the bows of the vessel named "mine." We have 3 different ideas of "my" children here.

There is:

(1) "my" child that a woman leaves the maternity ward with.
(2) "my" child who I gave birth to.
(3) "my" child who is genetically related to me.

A woman may have the infant swapped and so take home a different child to which she gave birth to. She may take home the one she gave birth to, but was effectively a surrogate for eggs from someone else, even ovaries within her from someone else.

(4) Then there are conscious "my" that occur with adoption, where we take over care of someone elses child in the full knowledge they are someone elses, but they become "mine" in the sense that a parent-child bond forms.

Now some argue that all of this is irrelevant. The parent-child bond is all that is important.

But true a child is happy with a parent, yet when a child finds out they were surrogated or adopted I believe there is a mystery that emerges over who their biological parent is. It may not be important to the child: the love of the actual parent is what counts, but in a Blade Runner type sense there is a curiosity over who "made" you and where you came from. In other words the "biological" does play an existential role.

I've been arguing across the web for this biological understanding not being lost in the tsunami of social attitudes to sex and relationships. At end of day the biological is this extraordinary process that links us to reality and  underpins the nature of our existence. Without appreciating the biological we spin off into a mental world of ego and desires and think we are spirits divorced from reality: just ethereal shopping and voting entities floating around in the metaverse. People have died at games consoles because being so absorbed into playing, and with Just Eat food deliveries meaning they only need leave the console to answer the door and visit the loo, they can ignore the biological. Eventually they die as they ignore the fundamental truth of their existence.

So its true we need love, and a loving parent is the truth. But we are also created biological entities and the process by which we were created is a fundamental part of us. It also mirrors our fate in death and being reconciled with birth is also the reconciled with death. As Buddha realised and being reconciled with that great arc of existence also reconciles us with other fundamental features like aging, illness and in fact all the vagaries of life. We lose touch of these things and we lose touch with life.

So whose child it is does have a biological component that should not be rubbed out. Its a fact, although exactly how important is not so clear.

This blog believes that the fundamental structures of sexual relationships: the trust, the faithfulness, the marriage, the vows are all linked to this biological root. After all without this biological root then there are no bodies and no sex anyway. And its the fundamental biological question of "whose" children are they that underpins a traditional marriage. It is also why the there is this thing that feminists call "patriarchy." If men do not trust women to be faithful then they cannot let them out of their sight. A woman going to work may very well return with someone else's child. Therefore a man who does not trust cannot let a woman out of the house. Its not all one sides, a woman is also concerned that a man will divide his resources with children in other households. She wants him to invest in her children.

There are many ways to do this. In the Dunnock, a bird like a sparrow, they famously have multi-male, multi-female polygamy. This means that males divide their attention between multiple nests, but to make up for this females have multiple partners visiting her nest. Apparently it all works out and young Dunnocks get all the attention they need to fledge.

So humans do not need to be monogamous, other strategies exist. Famously on Polynesian islands it was like the Dunnock where because everyone lived and worked together children were raised by the group, and so naturally there was no concern about whose child it was. They also had no STDs which meant that free-love did not result in people getting ill. One thing noted in animals is those with high levels of STDs are more likely to be monogamous. I believe Capitalism also plays a part in Monogamy as private ownership and the huge amounts humans invest in children means that they are more likely to focus on definites.

However the actual point of this blog is not the restate the argument of the biological in sex and relationships but to note once this is done it reveals a very uncertain concept of "mine." In the case of Lydia Fairchild just giving birth to them was not enough to completely claim the children. By the DNA evidence they were not hers. According to the DNA the children belonged to a twin sister she never even knew existed, of which the only part that remained were the ovaries.

Socially minded will argue well this is just proof we ignore the biological. But as argued above it will not go away as it underpins the whole nature of our existence.

But where perhaps the conservative traditionalists go wrong is that the biological is not a certain world. Concept like "me" and "mine" do not fit well with biological reality. Our bodies as argued elsewhere in the blog are made of parts and the "self" does not fit well into these parts. We try and put the self in the "brain" but this is as weak as any attempts to "house" the self and previous posts have blown this apart.

 Again the Social theorists will just say well there you go the physical and the biological are just tyrannical and oppressive expressions of a fixed mindset, and we should liberate our self from them to be truly free. Well this is only partly correct. If you want to "liberate" yourself from the body and the biological then just die that is easy. This is not liberation. Liberation is learning the lessons of the body so that we can go beyond it. The "body" and the "biological" is a step that we must climb up onto. And the fact that "me" and "mine" do not work well with the body and the biological points as one of the things we must learn. Doggedly insisting that these children are "mine" despite all sorts of problems with the idea of "mine" is not the path to liberation.

Done it: proof that Jewish thinking is limited. Spent most of the day avoiding triggering ChatGPT but it got there.

So previously I was accused of Anti-Semitism but done carefully ChatGPT will go there. The point in simple terms is that being a Jew binds y...