drcomputer's comments

Can anyone please explain how the following

> Try experiencing red without visualizing it, naming it or imagining associated objects.

can be commanded to be done without being able to objectively qualify what exactly is occurring when one 'experiences' red?

How does one know when 'has experienced red' has occurred? How are they able to qualify this as a comparative to 'has not experienced red'? When I read this it honestly sounded like the author was telling me to find god.

Snarky commentary aside, while I think this is an interesting picture for the descriptions of thought, the processes for reasoning about software complexity can develop independently without fitting any of these models, and those heuristics will modulate and mold the adaptive abilities of the developer on a similar scale of overall improvement.

> These phenomena will slowly start to convert from being some “runaway kids”, living in the shadows never lit by consciousness, into “rightful citizens” of the psychical space, with overall balancing and efficiency-improving effects.

This scares the crap out of me and would make me want to run like all hell. You can learn and teach thinking using multiple techniques and you can teach those techniques without enforcing a clear right and wrong. Instead, trust that the experience and influence of the world marching along to the beat of time will help direct people better than an authoritative command on what reduces software complexity and what does not. The summation of a lot of 'wrong' might wind up being one big 'right'.

The funny thing really is that when one uses the a reasoning system to reason about their reasoning, assuming they are reasoning with the correct reasoning, they often wind up contradicting themselves.

The only thing I subjectively see in the value of music is the lengthy amount of time that the formalism of it's language has survived. Otherwise I typically listen to the same songs on repeat until they have turned into a drone like noise for me to block out the rest of the noise in the world. Sometimes I do appreciate variation in music, and I have spent a lot of time devoted to studying classical music. But still, a particularly well known sonata might as well be a recursively constructed formalism of white noise to me, because that is how I remember the piece. It is beautiful in that regard, but I just do not consider myself educated enough in music to understand anything about it otherwise.

I find code and mathematics to be much more delicate, intricate, fundamental; to my own personal comprehension. I remember playing the piano a couple of times to think about how a computer might experience the progression of it's thoughts. The thing with creativity is it has no walls.

I already agree with you and I have from the start. I have no interest in talking, because it is obvious that I can not communicate effectively and fluidly, on the internet. Thank you for the conversation, but this is the same circle of thought as it has always been, and it never seems to change.

What if my belief has always defaulted on silence, no thought?

It's just the opposite of the confidence in always yielding a conclusion. When I work with science, I ere on the side of hesitance, and I always believe that hesitence will be there.

I think some of my beliefs about believing are stronger than my actual beliefs. This conversation has become too overgeneralized to say anything useful aside from the ways the mind simplifies, reduces, and applies pattern derived from observation.

I don't understand the strong reaction in 'knowing'. I always feel like I have to know everything all at once, in order to truly suggest that I know anything, and since I can not know everything, I only have a very vague guess of knowing some things, which are continually subject to the same analytic deconstruction and reconstruction. Ideas are broken down and rebuilt over and over and not a single one of them is a complete picture. That's what I observe in my mind and in dialogue outside of my mind. I don't have to believe anything about it because it's a direct observation. It just comes down to how angry, 'strong', assertive, or authoritative people sound, and I find that ridiculous. It's like being human is a stupid joke.

I wasn't directing that at you, just in general. I really do try to create one part of an intelligent dialogue on these forums, but it is incredibly frustrating to have experienced variations of ways of perceiving information, without having the capacity to express the issue in a way that anyone is willing to listen to, and then be down-voted on top of that, which feels like being silenced.

> insisting that current lack of knowledge means permanent lack of knowledge.

The alternative to that is that there is a limit to knowledge, that it is possible for all things to be known. And even if humanity does hit that point, I think at that point, it becomes a choice to choose whether to believe all things are known, or to believe that some things are not yet known.

I don't understand why you replied to me.

I don't think you understand that you can't control what information and processes are dynamically influenced and what components are static and unchanging. The methodology of science can be subject to the same level of analytical inspection and rigor that the scientific methodology itself upholds.

You hold science as a constant and shape the world around that lens. What happens when science starts to take itself apart, when it starts to redefine itself, analyze itself, study itself?

Keep down-voting me if you like. All I really know is that I have more questions than I have answers, and I don't think that is a bad thing.

Measurements that are qualitative are much more tricky to deal with than quantitative measurements.

When I read words like 'hollow self esteem' I feel like I am reading a poem, not scientific data. Hollow self esteem means 'self esteem that lacks social validation', but when we define self esteem clearly in terms of social validation with relations that show the distribution of 'when the social validation occurs in terms of time' and 'how much social validation is given' versus 'how much social manipulative ability is granted' then people in society start to become definable and moveable like machines. What is the point of existing as a human being when life can be plotted?

If I define my self esteem through a single data point in my past, can you really compare that to someone who defines their self esteem by each day as it unfolds? Can you really measure self esteem when everyone's self esteem is dependent on comparisons of self analysis versus social analysis?

Culture defines culture. Social groups define social groups dynamically as the group is processing and composing information. Data is almost the same as theory when it comes to psychology. I personally find it all ridiculous and believe that people need to have balance between the methods of science and understanding and seeking their own personal truths. People have the potential to be more than what language and mathematics can convey, but this makes many people uncomfortable, because it's not definable. What isn't definable always seems to get filtered through a lens of religious, dogmatic belief in the scientific community. If it can't be measured, it doesn't exist. But it does exist. The problem is that scientific, mathematical language does not measure the effect of itself.

Have they ever done this study on people who have never drank alcohol and are healthy? It seems biased that the only group of 'non-drinkers' are people that are former drinkers.

We is scientific and mathematical, precious.

I don't agree with that. If you understand the mathematics and computational foundations, then you already have the depth of programming languages in an abstract form. You might choose to pick up new languages because you want to learn how others elegantly can solve the same problem on a different level of the machine.

Then you can apply similar techniques in whatever language paradigm you have to work in, while also understanding the pros and cons of such a thing (are you just mimicking the paradigm or on what gradient is the implementation correct? What can you assume now from tweaking the language?)

A programming language is not really a separate thing from the machine. It's useful to think about them in this way because it makes the knowledge simple and easier to make fast assumptions given some 'correct usage' of the language with regard to the specification and design of it.

It's just different stuff that each programmer has to pick up as they go. Everyone who is building anything has to do some thinking while they are building and do some remembering while they are building.

I find when you reduce all technology to this level, it becomes very hard to determine what proficiency is. Every bit of knowledge and piece of experience is potentially valuable at the same level.

I don't think people are static objects. Even if you've come into contact with one of these "types" of people, chances are that they are living on a meager amount of energy.

When people are energy drained, they are either in poor health mentally, emotionally, socially, or physically.

They might have expended an extraordinary amount of energy into something with no compensation. They might have broken their bodies, minds, and hearts over the kind of work they do.

The human evaluation of what constitutes as value added to society is not perfect. The human evaluation of what to do is not perfect. Sometimes people just don't know what to do.

Also, social pressure shouldn't be the motivator. That's motivation that comes from fear. It is literally like living solely for the sake of dying, and all I can do is feel a tremendous amount of pain for people if they experience such a thing.

I think that is one possible perception, but I could argue the same for the existence of 'chaos' or 'randomness' and make the same point.

Do things succeed because they adapt correctly over a given time frame or do they succeed because the adapt correctly over a given time instance. The evaluation of whether competition successfully denotes success is limited to the scope of variables that the competition tests. If those variables cease to be indicative of success, then we have a lot of stuff that appears like it won the war, when in actuality it only won a very small subset of selective battles, much of what we only arbitrarily correlate to success (because without reproducing the conditions exactly, the data and information we can derive about the past is limited and/or subject to malleability).

We've evolved this far because we did. It's survivor bias.

It is entirely likely that there exist good things that are adapted for everything they purport to be, aside from competitive environments. If competition is eliminated, we can at least begin to separate the variables that are a function of the competitive process, and the variables that denote skill.

It is not necessary that we leave the survival of culture and ideas up to the same primitive mechanisms that determine whether a fish with smaller gills reproduces in a shallow pool rather than a deeper one - and make the inference that because it does survive, that it was because of the depth of the pool, and not because of the lack of sharks. Just because it has worked so far does not mean it will continue to work. Competition can cause emotions to control direction rather than objectivity over the data as it exists. When people want to win just because they want to win, .. Then competition becomes a measurement of competition, and not of the things it purports to select for.

The construction and maintenance of my psychology using mathematics and symbolic logic to model, explain, extrapolate, analyze, and manipulate it.

I use computer science to explain psychology, in a way the makes the person being judged correct, instead of requiring their behavior to be altered based on personal opinion.

Imagine you have two conflicting sets of data from observation in your mind, and you have to process this data quickly. Taking an arbitrary and insufficient amount of data is selective and results in bias. Over time this results in contradiction even though both instances of inference are correct with regards to the logical model they rely on, and the data fed to the model. Now imagine that you received this data because over a short period of time, you have experience such a wide range of life experience that your observations allow you to collect both sets of data simultaneously and with correctness. Both data models model the world correctly, but when separated into distinct models of 'knowing things' instead of 'one confusing mass of data', you get contradiction.

So imagine someone endures trauma in their life, and has their mind molded in a specific way based on the current state of psychology, because over time the thoughts in the patients mind are shortly transformed to the thoughts in the therapists mind. Psychology did not experience the trauma, so how can psychology have an opinion on the consequences of bad things happening?

Making inferences adds to data and alters future data models and inferences. How people are judged while they are being 'helped' affects whether that help harms or helps them. I was in a group therapy for victims of domestic abuse and my "counselor" told me that she hated people like me.

> My question to you, how do you approach learning? Learning new things and marking your progress? What gives you the satisfaction that you've made progress in "learning" a given topic?

I don't know. Right now I am learning how to not know when I am learning, because I have determined that measuring learning in any form can often be a barrier that actually prevents me from learning.

The upswing of awesome sounds like a great way to prepare yourself to build things that are 90% correct with a 10% catastrophic failure rate.

I really try to keep a more emotionally neutral stance on all of my code and my abilities. If I want to indulge in arrogance I philosophize.

In the end, it's the same thing over and over again. Symbols swapping with others symbols denoting some kind of esoterically tangible, but ultimately fleeting, meaning.

It'd be nice to not feel perpetually stuck in the desert of despair though. I used to think being there meant I was learning stuff, because I had intuitively learned from repeat failure that after failure comes success. Turns out you can think about yourself plodding along at a steady pace, with no comparison to anyone else, as long as you stop assuming that there exists a clear, coherent, ordered organization to knowledge.

There exists such a thing in school, or at least the commentary on a topological sorting would have you believe. Technology doesn't always develop and get released in school though. Sometimes it develops in webs that are can not be causally described, because thought and skill do not necessarily travel in measurable directions, nor is their instantiation completely definable/observable.

People apply too many theoretical concepts to describe, dictate, and organize reality without understanding the effect on perception.

Thanks for writing this. Over the last 4 years I switched from studying computer science with applications in mathematics, to studying math and symbolic logic with applications in computation. I did this alone, without interacting with anyone in the field. I thought I was going insane because of how many direct 'abstract' connections there are from computer science to mathematics and back again. I know these abstract connections exist as words in the world, but many times it feels like I have to go hunt for the word when I already have the idea.

I haven't really found any real world applications of the concepts I've learned, aside from having to hold a meticulously constructed symbolic reasoning world inside my head for a really long time without observational reality confirming it's correctness as a model to describe all things. This makes me pretty good at programming things that are incompletely described, I think, but also explains why Tarski said he was the only sane logician.

I never really hear about autodidacts talking about their experience. It can be really rough most of the time. I literally think it's just luck that I stumble across the right words. I also think it's luck when I manage to understand things and make a connection between them. I have managed to connect such disparate symbols together and maintain that connection strongly for long periods of time (with absolute conviction), that it all really seems like magic when it does work. But, giants, shoulders, yada yada.

I am guessing because some hormonal changes in mid/elder life will kick in some kind of emotional down that is mostly fillable by children, rather than peer validation and stuff.

That's what I am terrified of. Celibacy allows me to have room to do everything I want to do in life. I'm just terrified I will wake up one day (again) with a hormonal landslide affecting every thought, direction, and attitude I have.

Cats like me though, so there's always that.

Thank you for appreciating it. :)

Encyclopedias, dictionaries, and other types of reference materials often conform to a rigid and pedantically defined aesthetic. This aesthetic is more about context, appearance, intuition. Editing is an art form.

Conveying meaning differs from conveying the intended meaning with clarity. When you have to say 'most people', we already have a problem. Reference material should refer. Leaving it up to intellectual interpretation is simply no good for material that is meant to record and preserve information.

That said, this possibly has nothing to do with the difference between 'comprised of' and 'composed of'.