Lifeless times

Is life after death important by itself or the continuation of our memories is what really matters?

If I continue in an afterlife but have no recollections of who and what I was in the previous life, does that count as a real afterlife?

Just as if we had a different life(or many different lives) before this one, but had no memories of it(them). Would it(they) still have any significance??

Isn't it then, the memories, that we desperately want to keep more than the life itself?

Timeless Lives

Towards what does the "time" move so fast? What is ALL the rush for?

And the more we try to keep up, the less we do.

Whether it is a failure in design or a cruel joke, can I unlearn it?

I guess a whole bunch of words and grammatical structures that come with "time" should be eliminated from our semantic network first, like, "getting old", or "being young", also using structures like "I think" instead of "I am thinking" or "I thought", along with similar actions need to be done first to see whether we start to unlearn it, or not.

What else? 

And would unlearning linguistic aspects of "time" make it any less prominent in our minds?

Will we become more mindful once we stop using the concept of time in our speech and thought, or our brains are hard-wired to experience it and there's no way out of it?

On Cheesiness of Our Lives

It’s 2 am and I cannot sleep. I am thinking about how cheese is taking over our lives and our world.

We, humans, are gradually and consistently becoming cheesy species, and I mean it both literally and figuratively.

I was on Instagram a while ago, checking cooking videos, which always excites me.

After watching for a while, I realized cheese has become a main ingredient in many recipes.. We have, mac and cheese, different types of pizza, different types of pasta with cheese…, even cheese waffles!

I admit, I am a big fan myself. I have several different types of cheese in my fridge, even different packs of a similar kind..I can say that I am addicted to it, and tonight, I am wondering why.

It is not the healthiest ingredient, a mixture of fat and additives, not the best for our health. Yet, our body craves it, our mind wants it. why is that?

Corporations and mass media are mostly to be blamed. Put it simply, it is advertisement that makes it an essential part of our cooking, the enticing cooking videos all over the internet show tempting dishes with cheese in them.. it’s texture, it’s stickiness sticks to the craving part of our brains.

The other, more interesting part of the blaming equation, is the hardwired need for dominance. It seems irrelevant at first glance, I know. But let me elaborate.

You have heard that, like attracts like. In this case, it is not only because our brain is hardwired to ask for more of the same thing, because it is adapted to it(that could be A reason, too), it is that our cells, our brain cells more specifically, are becoming cheesy, the food they have been taking in for some time was made up of cheese, and food, plays an important role in maintaining the cells. No wonder our cheese craving, cheese addicted cells don’t accept steamed vegetables. 

Would it be strange if a congress with the majority of republicans, vote for a republican president, even if he is wrong in every possible way? No, not really.

If you are the majority, you want to remain that way, and that is achieved by keeping dominance and power in your own party, and that means you shouldn’t vote for the competition, be it the healthy steamed vegetables.

That’s why we tend to make cheesy choices. We like to keep things the way they are. When a signal enters the brain, the choices the brain makes is not spontaneous and sudden, rather it is made up of the sum of the mini votes of each cell.

Anyway, this is a cheesy brain talking and it might not be scientifically accurate. but even science is not immune from cheese. haven’t you heard that science is full of false positives, like a spongy cheese, full of holes? It is because of the cheesy minds of the researchers that don’t let them decide clearly between what is expected and well accepted by science and what actually happened.

So beware of what you eat, because it doesn’t just pass through your digestive tract and end up in the sewage, it becomes you. Your body is an amazing manufacture. Still, the input material very much matters in the resulting product. You cannot take in poison and expect the body to end-up healthy. What you eat, makes up your body’s building blocks and then those building blocks decide for you and what to eat next, and if you want to pick cheese, it’s okay, just know that cheese is not a firm enough material to let you stand tall.

And eat everything in moderation. Don’t focus on one or a few things. It helps democracy sustains in your body and no one ingredient dominates and rob the power of you. Eat less aggressive ingredients and believe, it takes a lot of strength and courage to rebel agains a cheesy body, do it before it is too late.

Is the butterfly dreaming me?

- waking up at 3:29 ahead the of alarm going off - a quick wash-up and heading out of home - to the mountains - taking a new path, one that hasn't been tried by any one else (at least no foot-tracks) - getting lost - feeling scared, hungry, thirsty, worn out - drinking water from a suspicious source - getting nauseous - sitting - watching the sun set - feeling empty yet peaceful - heading down following the water down - a group of people - fire - drinking an odd-taste drink - cooking and eating a sort of meat - me doing the same things - getting high - HigH - HIGH - waking up in my bed - What happened?! - a dream? - or an aftereffect?

unanswered (P)rayers, unanswered (Q)uestions

...
Haven't you ever wanted to take a chance?
What if we never went beyond the limits of the known?
Have you never wished to see beyond the clouds and the stars?
Or to know what makes trees grow? and changes shadows to light?
But speak like this and they call you a madman.
Yet, if I could answer just one of these questions..what eternity is, for example.. I wouldn't care if they called me mad.
...

From "The Spirit of the Beehive"

uneXplored paradYgmZ

Philosophers apply analogies and metaphors to make an argument, to clarify, to propose and to make a point;  Scientists too.

During 17th century, Leibniz uses the analogy of the 2 clocks  to suggest that mind and body only appear to interact: in reality there is no relation between the 2 substances, rather God has pre-established a harmony so that our minds and bodies do not fall out of sync (Parallelism).

In psychoanalysis, Freud used an analogy based on the laws of thermodynamics. These laws indicated that energy neither can be gained nor destroyed in a system, though it can be transformed from one type to another. By analogy, Freud considered that psychic energy should follow the same rules as physical energy.

Hilary Putnam proposed the "Computational Theory of Mind", a view that the human mind and/or human brain is an information processing system and that thinking is a form of computing. Despite being largely repudiated in analytic philosophy(due to work by Putnam himself, John Searle, and others), the view is common in modern cognitive psychology and is presumed by many theorists of evolutionary psychology.

Philip Lieberman, in his book "Human Language and Our Reptilian Brain" notes that mechanical-biological analogies are not limited to neuro-physiology. He explains,

"Physicians bled feverish patients in the early 19th century because of a false analogy between blood temperature and steam engines. Early steam engines frequently exploded as pressure increased at high operating temperatures.  Safety valves then were invented that released super-heated pressure. Hence, it followed that bleeding would reduce temperature. As a result of this false analogy, the chances of survival of soldiers wounded were greater if they hadn't been treated by surgeons immediately after the battle. In its own way the analogy between biological brains and digital computers is as fatal for understanding neural bases of human language."

I'mpolite

Saying greetings, I believe, is a thoughtless,wasteful and redundant social habit. While we could start our conversations afresh each time, we stick to the same old routine without it meaning much. Despite their seemingly harmless characteristic as conventions, greetings are the embodiment of traditionalism. The dominance of rules over men for what purpose? persistence of order? of obedience? 

Me me me vs ...

I see many people who like to be the topic of talks all the time, to be the center of attention. In one word, to be popular. 

I also know few people who, on the contrary to the first group, do not need to be the center of attention. Instead, they seclude themselves from social life. In a subtle way, they see themselves better than the rest, but do not make a show of that.

The first group usually call themselves, in a humorous way, narcissists.

Although they might seem so in the first glance, they are usually somewhere close to the opposite. If Narcissism is characterized by self-love, egotism, and selfishness, I can see it in the second group and more clearly. A person who loves him-self, doesn't need to prove it to someone else, nor needs others' approvals or love (self-love makes him self-sufficient). An egotist doesn't care about people's opinions and a selfish person usually puts himself on a pedestal instead of becoming the subject of talks. He knows better that these sorts of talks in praise of someone, are nothing but absurd.

It might be linked to the difference of introversion/extroversion too. I don't know about extroversion, but one can be introvert by choice. By definition, Narcissism very much suits the second group (mentioned above), and introversion comes with the package.

The curse of consciousness?

Prespeech mind lacks reflective awareness (or what is known as consciousness). With speech there came a dark side, an Achilles' heel if you will: while the positive side of acquiring speech was the ability to get hold of, remember and use experience, the negative side was the anxiety and limbic overinvolvement in acquiring the concepts like death, danger, threat, pain, fear, hunger loss and etc.

Since it was anxiety overload that had to be compensated for, it is easy to identify two distinctly mind-created and mind enhanced danger schemata:

1. Invisible forces or gods, that is, agencies that lend causal coherence to incomprehensible phenomena.
2. Humans, or more precisely alien groups of humans, with their imagined group of intentions as constituting the source of danger.

Simply put: the down side of being equipped with language was an anxiety resulted from the negative emergent concepts that the pre-speech species didn't experience. Gods or concepts as such were created in order to explain the inconsistencies in the scenarios that found meaning through language.

With some adaptations, from The Crucible of Consciousness

Élan vital*

(This post is randomly generated by a text-generating software, character by character)

"Imagine At the border between England and Wales you pass a small town called Abergele. Its railway station has a beautifully kept garden in which, sprawling across the lawn, you are faced with the inscription, set out in small white pebbles: ‘Welcome to Wales by British Railways.’ No one will fail to recognize this as an orderly pattern, deliberately contrived by a thoughtful station-master. And we could refute anyone who doubted this by computing as follows the odds against the arrangement of the pebbles having come about by mere chance. Suppose that the pebbles had originally all belonged to the garden and would, if left to chance, be found in any part of this area with equal probability; we could compare the large number of arrangements open to the pebbles, if distributed at random all over the garden, with the incomparably smaller number of arrangements in which they would spell out the inscription ‘Welcome to Wales by British Railways’. The ratio of the latter small number over the former very large number would represent the fantastically small chance of the pebbles having arranged themselves in the form of the inscription merely by accident; and this would crushingly refute any supposition of this having been the case."**

According to Polanyi, the significance of this type of occurance is because of the quality of orderliness. That's because the probability of some events, if happened randomly, is infinitesimal. It seems improbable that such order be a result of mere accident. He then applies this to the theory of evolution:

"This bears on the theory that the different living species have come into existence by accidental mutations. This can be affirmed only if, first you accredit the distinctive pattern of living beings as exhibiting a peculiar orderliness which you trust yourself to appraise, and second you accept at the same time the belief that evolution has taken place by a vastly

improbable coincidence of random events combining to an orderly shape of a highly distinctive character. However, if we are to identify—as I am about to suggest—the presence of significant order with the operation of an ordering principle, no highly significant order can ever be said to be solely due to an accidental collocation of atoms, and we must conclude therefore that the assumption of an accidental formation of the living species is a logical muddle. It appears to be a piece of equivocation, unconsciously prompted by the urge to avoid facing the problem set to us by the fact that the universe has given birth to these curious beings, including people like ourselves. To say that this result was achieved by natural selection is entirely beside the point. Natural selection tells us only

why the unfit failed to survive and not why any living beings, either fit or unfit, ever came into existence. As a solution for our problem it is logically on a par with the method of catching a lion by catching two and letting one escape."**

On the origin of life there are several hypotheses, from the Primordial Soup (more of a theory than a thesis) to the Electric Spark to RNA world.. . Almost all are based on this small probabilities. Some say the time that it took for life to emerge was so long that makes it less improbable after all. But in the previous example, it still seems improbable that the pebbles write themselves into a "meaningful" sentence after a billion year and the magnitude of order in a sentence is not even comparable to the order in a single cell organism.

*

** The book is about not the origin of life, but personal knowlege.

Written by Pinocchio

After all, it is a "Chinese" room, not a Japanese. What do you expect?

Spaun (or Semantic Pointer Architecture : Unified Network) is a cognitive neural model of a perception-memory-motor system.

"...The model consists of 2.3 million spiking neurons whose neural properties, organization, and connectivity match that of the mammalian brain. Input consists of images of handwritten and typed numbers and symbols, and output is the motion of a 2 degree-of-freedom arm that writes the model’s responses. Tasks can be presented in any order, with no “rewiring” of the brain for each task. Instead, the model is capable of internal cognitive control (via the basal ganglia), selectively routing

information throughout the brain and recruiting different cortical components as needed for each task."

The tasks it can perform are:

1. Digit Recognition, in which a handwriting digit is given to it as an input and Spaun recognizes it with an accuracy well compared to that of humans.

2. Tracing from the memory, Spaun can not only recognize a digit and draw it as an output, it can mimic the style of the input (its font for instance).

3. Serial Working Memory, that is to repeat a sequence of numbers in the same order given to it.

4. Question Answering, it can identify a digits position within a sequence. It is a different task from the  one above in that in the previous task, it only repeats the sequence.

5. Addition by Counting, Spaun can perform mental addition via counting, which might seem an easy task, given a calculator does it pretty easily, but it is done from start to the end by the network (the recognition and probably decoding of the input and the further computation).

6. Pattern Completion,  given a training set such as :

Input: Biffle biffle rose zarple. Output: rose zarple.

Input: Biffle biffle frog zarple. Output: frog zarple.

Input: Biffle biffle dog zarple. Output: dog zarple.

It can generalize the pattern and give the following output to this:

Input: Biffle biffle quoggie zarple. 

Output: quoggie zarple.

I admit this is impressive. But, from a computational semantics point of view, I wonder, if such a model simulates a network with specified neural properties and organizations for understanding and producing language, after training it (the same way a human infant is trained), would it "understand" and produce language (appropriately)?

I came across this paper through Conscious Entities' post which in my opinion, shouldn't be missed. 

Here are some videos demonstrating each task performance by Spaun.

Concept explosion 2045*

I can usually think of a situation in which a concept could have, for the very first time, emerged. Despite trying a lot, I couldn't do it for some abstract concepts such as "knowledge", "thought" and "consciousness", not at least without the scenario ending up implausibly funny.

----------------------------------------------------

I always wonder, have I had other sets of concepts instead of the ones I now have, would my perception of objects and events be different than what it is now? (how would my world be like if I couldn't conceive of "knowledge"?)

----------------------------------------------------

There seems to be a correlation between the number of concepts involved in human life and its complexity.  In the scientific arena, new concepts are created each day. With the limited memory capacity we have, if we were to keep and use all concepts we acquire, we couldn't function mentally. So, prioritization is essential - both in individual and collective scales - or we may end up with a pile of unnecessary, inessential concepts and if our ultimate goal is to understand/define life, with the increasing number of concepts, aren't we making it more impossible? 

Singularity makes sense.

* 2045.com

Mentally under Maintenance

After writing the thesis it seems a little too difficult to write about anything else, beside the fact that I am afflicted by the so-called "writer's block" for a while now, not that I am a writer to begin with. I guess the point is made.
-------------------------------------------------

I have recently joined a journal club of cognitive neuroscience. The first session was very appealing, the topics of discussion were just what I was looking for. Apparently there is an inclinaton towards "consciousness" and "NCC".  Also, there is a class of "molecular neuroscience" that I am going to attend, hopefully from tomorrow.

-------------------------------------------------

I have an on/off thing with "lucid dreaming". I mainly wanted to get lucid in my dreams to be able to do whatever impossible-in-"real"-life thing I want, in my dreams. But without getting lucid,  I sometimes have such fulfilling dreams that I wouldn't have dreamed of .

-------------------------------------------------

This was an attempt to break the block.

Lock or Luck?

I am starting to learn  Rock Balancing. I am going to self-learn it, and I know it might take a while until I can balance rocks like in the photo above, but it doesn't make it any less exciting for me.
Wish me luck ;-)

Pot(ai)to Pot(A)to

..of course, honesty has its appeals, and is even more appealing if it's the more difficult choice, if not the most. But Lying has its own charm too, in a situation where honesty is much easier and brings pride, like when someone is asked about their achievements, or if the good deed is done by them(which is). Besides, it's unfair not to appreciate an artistic deception.

According to the Information theory: If a bit of information, say a 0, is lost on its way to a destination, and instead, another bit is randomly being generated and transmitted, be it also a 0, we cannot say that the signal has been delivered. The received data is just noise.

Suppose someone doesn't like you (merely hypothetically), and they pretend otherwise, that's like the signal is a 0 and the noise is a 1, and you might be bright, they might not be good at pretending, or vice versa, that either leads into your detecting the lie or not. Now, suppose that someone doesn't like you, but instead of pretending otherwise, they "pretend" they don't like you, in an obvious way(so that their pretension is detected, and it makes you think they like you). This is like the signal is a 0 and the noise is also a 0. Now it takes more than just smarts to spot the truth in this case. The question is, if the receiver is not smart enough to discern the pretense, is the action still a lie? or merely a complicated game in which the opponent failed to participate?

the comatose worm

Is fear grounded in meaning? If one loses touch with meaning, would one still be struck by fear? What is there to be afraid of? 

I was thinking it could be generalized to other feelings such as happiness,love or hatred, but it couldn't. Apparently, fear has an unspecifiably unique quality.

According to this, I'm wondering if it is implausible not to have some level of meaning in any conscious animal who can experience fear.

Like me if you want, but don't let me think for you!

For a while, I have been busy with school, and I didn't get a chance to update the blog.
But I spent some(actually quite a lot of) time in Google Plus, and as I'm generally interested in neuroscience and cognition.. and related topics, I usually follow these kinds of posts. What I noticed about the scientific/pseudo-scientific posts ..and the interactions with them (Comments/ +1s/Shares), was how people usually by understanding only some parts of a text, or by just seeing a few familiar terms related to the topic of their interest, +1/Share it.
If someone's posts are interesting, or usually credible, it doesn't mean that we should accept whatever they say by faith. We can of course, but this lacks critical thinking. And we might obtain information this way, but not knowledge.
It's also dangerous, as it's a form of sophistry to put a desired pseudo-fact in-between a few known, accepted facts, or fabricate a seemingly coherent causal relation between them, or deviate an argument by long, correct but unrelated examples. Accepting without critical thinking and scrutinizing, instead of knowledge, leads to double ignorance.

La Petite Mort

I was reading a rather "prescriptive" post on sexual liberalism today, which made my stream of consciousness wander around the subject. 

Not exactly related to that post..this question popped in my mind:

I've read that most mammals and some non-mammals, too, experience sexual pleasure,and some, like humans, even have orgasm. I can accept that as an evolutionary reward system for reproduction. Sex is not something like food that life depends on, and probably most of times, if not all, it takes a lot of energy to be performed.. of course for the female part it takes much more than that(the pregnancy, the labor and the rest..), if done by the purpose of procreation. So, there must be a rather huge reward to pay off these costs. 

Evolutionary speaking, that makes a lot of sense. What I'm curious about, even if considering non-mammals who perform sexual activity to procreate, as having a sort of pleasure or reward system for that, what is the reward for other types of reproduction, like the nonsexual ones, it takes a lot of work to continually reproduce..say, for a bacteria. Why even bother? or is there "a kind of" orgasm in cell division too(of course it's rather a controversial subject as it is highly implausible for a bacteria to be conscious in the first place)? But how is it paid off?

Trivia : "La Petite Mort" = "The Little Death" in french is a metaphor for "Orgasm".

What does this big elephant do in this dark room?! (Irrelevant intentions)

Metaphorically speaking*, there's a spectrum between the blinds and the schizophrenics.

Assuming there's a firm reality out there, if blind people were the majority, would it be reasonable if they considered themselves normal & "others" liars/idiots/delusionals?(Naturally yes!)

Assuming the same thing, if schizophrenics were the majority, would it be reasonable if they considered themselves normal & "others" liars/idiots/blinds?(Naturally yes!)

The problem lies in the belief that reality is a firm, reliable experience for everyone, or else, there's something wrong with their receivers and not the reality itself.

* Since Blindness and Schizophrenia are not generally opposites.

The sick or the sage?

Time does matter,
If you were born some 900 years ago, you could have become a saint or a master have you had visions (and an exotic lifestyle).
If you were born last century(ish), you would be considered schizophrenic have you had visions (and the exotic lifestyle could even worsen things for you).

I was just reading Ibn Arabi's biography, and without any disrespect meant, I was wondering what would have happened to him if he were born in our time. Perhaps lots of pills and mental hospital! Good for him!