What ever Tyler Durden from Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club may say, I am a beautiful and unique snowflake.

You see, your reality is your delusion. Whatever your outlook on life, yourself, or others, it’ll always be subjective. You may align your outlook with thousands or millions of other human beings, but their observation of the universe will also be subjective. In essence, you can believe what you want to believe. Obviously, if you stray to far from the collective reality then bad things will start happening, like bankruptcy if you believe you are materially wealthy beyond your means, or being committed to an institution if you start proclaiming yourself as Jesus. However, small deviations from what your mind (and especially your insecurities) might initially tell are actually incredibly powerful.

I’m a firm believer in the mind being part of the body. You can believe things about soul, or spirit, but your existence is intricately tied to how your body, and in particular your brain works. The brain is a neural network, neural networks work through updating the connections between neurons based on feedback of whether they were useful to activate at a certain time (in an extremely abstract and slightly incorrect summary). Another feature of the brain’s neural network, is that connections are established and only reinforce themselves if they are actually used. Thus if you repeat an affirmation, you are literally making yourself believe it. It doesn’t matter if you initially don’t believe it, the fact that the sentence… for example “I eat healthy foods”, might not apply immediately, doesn’t matter. Purely by parsing and processing THAT idea, it’s becoming part of your consciousness. If you repeat this 100 times a day “I eat healthy foods” becomes a stronger connection (indeed, VERY strong, since most ideas we have are not repeated so frequently unless we are studying or whatever) and more ingrained in your psyche. Later, even if you don’t consciously perceive that thought, it’s still being activated and used at an unconscious level.

Now, I’m not going to claim this will suddenly change you, but like anything worth doing, it takes time. In particular, intermittent learning is a lot more powerful than swatting for an exam and forgetting everything afterwards, and the same applies to affirmations. Doing affirmations for a couple of days won’t make much of a difference (although it’ll plant a seed).

Since most of this post has been me spouting knowledge which I’m too lazy (oops, this is a negative identification… I’m not actually lazy, I’ve just got more pressing matters to attend to then searching the net to support one of my mind dumps) to find references for, here is something related. The idea of affirmations could be made even more powerful by watching your brain in real-time as you make the statement, and compare it to the reaction of other statements you either believe to be stronger true or false as recently seen on TED.

Your mind can never change
Unless you ask it to
Lovingly re-arrange
The thoughts that make you blue
The things that bring you down
Only do harm to you
And so make your choice joy
The joy belongs to you

Massive Attack - What your soul sings

This is the first of a number of essays I’ve drafted out, but have left stagnating in my “to write” pile. They are distinctly without references, because I didn’t have the time to trawl for them, but I welcome critique and/or addendum from my readers.

Government’s seem to have a fascination with criminalising substances that change mental awareness, however there are so many things that do this, it’s strange that they intervene in some cases but not in others. Consistency and reliability are key components of trust, how does one trust a government with an erratic value system for experiencing our consciousness?

It’s been exclaimed in poetry and songs, love is a drug, a quintessential part of human experience. The euphoric highs when you meet someone special, planning how you might met with them again for a coffee in order to get another dose of those powerful attractants. Let alone all the other emotions which they themselves are based on a concoction of organic compounds. Being human, love is a strong attractor for the complex system of the human mind. If you get torn asunder from this attractor, it can feel like physical pain: severe withdrawal symptoms that can lead to anger, regret, and depression. In extreme cases murder (if other people are involved), and/or suicide. And yet the government allows it. This seemingly random experience that we cannot control - unlike substances that change our awareness, which we are free to control through our own will and determination in the universe (if you believe in free will of course, I chose to, even if I don’t really, because it’s leads to a much more effective life).

Continue reading ‘You/Food/Exercise are the perfect drug’

I just got myself this beautiful laptop.

However, I got the Sound Blaster Audigy upgrade - without reading the fine print. It’s only a software upgrade (what the hell??) which means it’s really not worth the extra cash… especially since I’ll be using Ubuntu most of the time. Damn it Dell, you were so close to getting a very happy customer. Now I just feel cheated.

Thus, happy with the hardware and build of the laptop, not so happy with deceptive marketing strategies.

I’ve been reading a little about social dynamics and what makes people attractive. There is the obvious and oft mentioned confidence, but another one is a lack of response to criticism or insult. Or rather, not being dramatic about things. If you respond, you give those people acknoledgement to whatever their frame was (a frame is basically a viewpoint), you are acknowledging their frame has value and thus are accepting whatever their insult/complaint was about. If you ignore it, by just not acknowledging it, or by acting as if what they said was just odd, then you are not buying into their frame.

What gets me, is that the opposition in political debates and in the media almost ALWAYS is complaining or reacting to something the incumbent does. This, in my opinion, lowers their value. Instead, I’d be immensely more impressed if they worked with the incumbent, subtley trying to mould policies to be more inline with their values. Or by offering alternatives, but not by blaming the incumbent for a problem. Just state “this is the way things are now” - don’t go down the path of blame, it’s pointless. Work together for change and improvement, demonstrate WHY you think something will be an improvement over current circumstances. Do all this, and you as a politician, and as a political party, will look like you have value, like you should be in power if you are not already, instead of a whiny little bitch.

This is my hypothesis. The mind is not a object but a process, it takes information from the outside world and transforms it into pattern. That pattern is not the mind, it’s just the way the mind sustains itself from moment to moment. That pattern still exists when you die, albeit temporarily until decay sets in, but we aren’t alive because the mind isn’t receiving any new input.

Now that doesn’t mean a consciousness can’t be revived, the pattern is still there, and if the process can be restarted then I suspect the consciousness would continue as if nothing happen. One moment about to die, the next revived. This is essentially what proponents of cryogenics expect to occur.

Did I just contradict myself, by saying that consciousness can be revived from the pattern, even though I claimed the pattern wasn’t the mind? I don’t believe so. The pattern is the painting, the mind is painter. In humans, the painter is the physiological processes that generate the electrical signals shooting through our body and that update the neuronal structure in our brain.

SIAI and OpenCog are recruiting people for Google Summer of Code. GSoC is a program that offers student developers stipends to write code for various open source projects.

Want to work on AI/language-processing over the Northern Hemisphere summer? Here are some of the ideas for projects proposed. Applications to Google open on the 24th of March.

Reading an interesting article by Kurmo Konsa, “Artificialisation Of Culture: Challenges to and from Posthumanism”. I particularly like the following quote, because it summarises a bit about me. I’ve always identified with being a transhumanist (even if the methods of improvement available right now are somewhat crude) but at the same time I’ve had flirtations with tattoos, piercings, body building, nootropics, crazy hair, acrobatics and other things…

In modern Western culture the view that the human body is a means of self-expression, and because of that the place for cultural experiments, is widespread. Body perforation, cosmetic surgery, physical training programs, etc., have been created to change the human body according to the requirements of the individual. This implies the objectification of the human body (in other words, the human body is turned into an object), but on the other hand individual human nature will be tied more closely to the body, and therefore what a person thinks and feels will be directly expressed in the body. Art, especially performance art, is actively engaged in defining the body and finding the borders of corporal existence.

You’ve heard of TED talks right?

Well here’s BIL (Brilliance. Ingenuous. Lounge.) an event in a similar vein, an “open, self-organizing, emergent, and anarchic science and technology conference”. If you’ve heard of Foo/Bar camps, then it’s a similar kind of relation.

Only problem with all the cool conferences I see is that they are all in America, and often California. Hopefully I’ll get to time some of my trips later this year to coincide with some.

A video with a really great explanation of curve numbers and how to turn a sphere inside out.

My spatial mind felt a mite expanded after watching it.

Haven’t been writing much here due to being very busy. I’ve moved to Wellington, I went to Kiwiburn, I’ve started contract work continuing my PhD work part time, and also developing artificial general intelligence for OpenCog.

I’ve got a reasonable sized music collection (just over 300 gig when I last checked) and I’ve had trouble finding software that can really deal with it. It windows there is the awesome MediaMonkey, and although there are lots of promising candidates on Linux, nothing quite matches it. The closest, in terms of usability AND polish (I don’t have time to muck around fiddling with my music player anymore) is Amarok.

Recently however, my collection has lost some of it’s tidiness, and there are quite a few tracks that are broken. Some of these cause Amarok to stall while doing a collection scan. It took me ages to find a small mention of how to find more detail about what file is being scanned. In the end I found out that ~/.kde/share/apps/amarok/collection_scan.log contains the file currently being scanned. Thus, if you run:


$ watch cat ~/.kde/share/apps/amarok/collection_scan.log


You can keep an eye out for if a media file is taking an excessively long time to be processed. If it is, then you can either delete it (if it’s well and truly screwed) or move it or rename it to an extension that Amarok won’t scan. Unfortunately you have to rescan the collection from the start again, but eventually you’ll get there!

One day I’ll sit down, get a virtual machine running and use MediaMonkey everywhere. Either that or create my own client for XMMS2 that is on par with MediaMonkey.