Archive for September, 2010

The Revelation (Part 1.5)

Sep 30 2010 Published by under Life

In the beginning there was darkness. It was the middle of the night. He’s deep asleep. Off in that other realm, where beliefs make things real. In the dream, I let things happen. The experience was seemingly concrete, yet I made no choice. Gradually, as if a movie was being played among the stars, the plot turned sour. I watched in shock as each event passed, helpless in my desire to help. An unnamed horror (which actually happened later in the day after I woke).

Then I had a hundred thoughts at once.

At that instant, I wake up in the dream. I realize what horrors had just happened. It all happened in a single moment. At that moment, the entire reality of the dream emerged. All of the factors came together, weaving a single thread. Time stopped, as if the dream happened in the blink of an eye and never was.

At once, I loved and dreaded the dream. The fate behind the dream was revealed as life itself, in my awakened reality.

The dream turns into a nightmare. Out of nowhere, an I emerges. At the same time I wake, I finally choose to abort the simulation. The I that emerged had no relation to a single event in the dream, and it was quickly forgotten.

When I wake up, I remember the horror and question whether it’s real. What was real about the dream? I created it, though it had a destructive nature.

The series of events have more turns before we arrive here, though this is where the horrors were most vivid.

In the spring of that year, I got distracted with life. Life itself, on the lowest level where happiness was abundant. Spring break came, and I got a clean break from my previous state of mind through a change of environment. I hanged a map of the local town behind my head, so I had more pleasant explorations in my dreams.

Meanwhile, in real life, where I just woke from the dream, I cannot sleep. The phone rings. I wonder why. Useless! Meaningless! Was I still in a dream? Nobody would even hear a phone ring while they were asleep. I return to pondering the dream.

Next episode: two lefts don’t make a right

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The World Ended and Time Stopped (Part I)

Sep 25 2010 Published by under Life

Evolution has been at work in the universe since the Big Bang. I save that for later. The premise here is that evolution is in fact the process of our reunion. It has been at work, behind the scenes, in my life.

One cloudy day, as I walked home from school, I ran into a software bug. Think of it this way: hardware dictates the necessities of power and the input and output signals of the machine. So I was not hungry nor was I faced with an immediate, physical danger. It can only be a software problem. If you are in the system, and the system is in trouble, then you’re in trouble, too. The only way to fix the problem is to escape the system first. Then, instead of being a chess piece, you play chess. But this is impossibility.

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A dragon, realizing the unreal nature of its existence, tries to escape unreality.

Can a software bug destroy hardware? In certain circumstances, if a particular part of the chip is overly exercised, it can overheat. It melts, like a piece of glass. This corresponds to those particularly nasty bugs that produce many of the drones of our society. When infected with drug, alcohol, or sex addiction, escape is seldom possible.

Fortunately, we have a different software bug to consider, since it was my life.

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A box built by the imagination, or a software program

It is interesting to note that a few months before this bug appeared, I read books about black holes and optical illusions.

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Now I don’t know what the difference is

Suddenly, as I was walking home that day, I ran into an infinite loop. Time. It was time itself. I was trapped in the same infinite time loop as in the Groundhog Day. Doing the same thing over and over again, but never getting it right. The capacity for error built into humans, into evolution itself, always creeps in. When the DNA of an organism is altered, the copy of the DNA survives into the next generation .1% of the time. So evolution was at work here. This was when the delusion came full force. At that moment, all possibility of reunion was forgotten.

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Goodbye, world

When I woke up in the morning, I said this is a new day. I can get it perfect. Then the bug creeps in, and the whole system crashes. Whatever I do after that, I’m not fully in it. I know the past is there, and I can never justify it with anything I do in the present. Failure caused by failure to be perfect, sits there. I wait again and again for the moment to break out of it, but it never comes. My mind is sharp. I finish homework twice as fast as before. But other times, the loneliness. I sit watching the clock, waiting for another chance . . .

Books read:

  1. Sailing and poetry book/diary
  2. The illusion book
  3. Eye witness books
  4. Cartoon history of the world
  5. The Adventures of Tom Sawyer
  6. Alice in Wonderland

(to be continued)

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Some Memorable Books, Some Highly Regarded

Sep 24 2010 Published by under Life

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The Power of Computing (Skyping with Yuguang)

Sep 23 2010 Published by under Singularitarian

[9:05:00 PM] Yuguang Zhang: how did you know roy? was he working in canada office just last year?
[9:13:47 PM] Peici: ha, just leave for some other thing
[9:14:07 PM] Peici: Roy left on April this year
[9:14:34 PM] Peici: and, I heard from others that, he left because he want to attend friend’s wedding, and plan to travel
[9:14:51 PM] Peici: (rofl) I reallu curious if it’s true
[9:25:49 PM] Yuguang Zhang: he got a job in shanghai, plans to buy a car, and a nice house
[9:26:38 PM] Peici: (inlove)wow, he could afford to buy house in Shanghai. This work should pay very much
[9:27:06 PM] Yuguang Zhang: 65*7/hour?
[9:27:18 PM] Peici: $?
[9:27:27 PM] Yuguang Zhang: that’s what rob paid him here
[9:27:32 PM] Yuguang Zhang: $65 an hour
[9:27:48 PM] Yuguang Zhang: mus tbe a joke
[9:28:08 PM] Yuguang Zhang: I think average is $32 canadian
[9:28:33 PM] Peici: I really want to earn morny in Toronto, and live in China
[9:28:46 PM] Yuguang Zhang: rob makes lots of jokes throughout the day
[9:29:03 PM] Yuguang Zhang: He has some serious moments
[9:29:04 PM] Peici: 😀
[9:29:11 PM] Peici: really? when?
[9:29:20 PM] Yuguang Zhang: likes to say the company’s doomed
[9:29:34 PM] Yuguang Zhang: failure on business strategy and management
[9:29:49 PM] Yuguang Zhang: website gets changed, and management wants changes undone
[9:30:34 PM] Peici: (rofl) seems Rob is some kind of prople who is directly
[9:30:51 PM] Yuguang Zhang: prople?

[9:30:59 PM] Peici: people (blush)
[9:31:18 PM] Peici: did Rob mention me anytime?
[9:31:32 PM] Yuguang Zhang: just tells me to get tasks from you
[9:31:37 PM] Peici: I feel I am a little nasty, always puch work
[9:31:47 PM] Peici: my boss always push me
[9:32:27 PM] Yuguang Zhang: I like challenges, as long as I can do them
[9:33:02 PM] Peici: (F) good boy
[9:33:20 PM] Yuguang Zhang: you are only 5 years older than me
[9:33:37 PM] Yuguang Zhang: reminds me of some school teachers
[9:34:16 PM] Peici: 😛 heihei, I love the feeling to call others little friend
[9:34:39 PM] Yuguang Zhang: have not been called “good boy” since grade 6
[9:34:58 PM] Yuguang Zhang: maybe “nice guy”, but more often “quiet”
[9:35:34 PM] Peici: (chuckle) “nice guy” heard like from girls
[9:35:47 PM] Yuguang Zhang: it’s actually true I’m a bit off-centered
[9:36:00 PM] Yuguang Zhang: I mean eccentric
[9:36:33 PM] Peici: really? nowadays, we need eccentric to make life funny
[9:37:25 PM] Yuguang Zhang: it may be because I know some things other people don’t
[9:37:53 PM] Peici: wow, which kind of things? :O
[9:38:13 PM] Yuguang Zhang: let’s talk about the philosophy behind this company
[9:38:47 PM] Yuguang Zhang: the software built here is used by AMD to do what?
[9:38:59 PM] Yuguang Zhang: chip design
[9:39:37 PM] Yuguang Zhang: they build better hardware that allows more complex software
[9:40:26 PM] Yuguang Zhang: and look at how much computation the average desktop could do only 1.5 years ago
[9:40:34 PM] Yuguang Zhang: half
[9:40:42 PM] Yuguang Zhang: so it doubles every 1.5 years
[9:40:53 PM] Yuguang Zhang: 4x in 3 years
[9:41:42 PM] Yuguang Zhang: 1 048 576 times in 30 years
[9:42:24 PM] Yuguang Zhang: don’t forget, the first computers started with a few bits
[9:43:19 PM] Yuguang Zhang: so you can imagine what is possible
[9:44:09 PM] Yuguang Zhang: in 30 years, a computer for $1000 will have as many bits as neurons in the brain
[9:44:18 PM] Yuguang Zhang: actually, 20
[9:45:24 PM] Yuguang Zhang: not to count supercomputers, a lot of tasks done by humans can be replaced

[9:46:53 PM] Peici: so, boy, work hard to build powerful software that can make use of that powerful computing resource in future (rofl)
[9:49:04 PM] Yuguang Zhang: but on the other side, I know technology does not make life better
[9:49:21 PM] Yuguang Zhang: that’s the part other people don’t get
[9:51:05 PM] Peici: en, you really think deeper than many others
[9:51:31 PM] Peici: by the way, do you buy apple product?
[9:51:46 PM] Yuguang Zhang: no need, too expensive
[9:51:55 PM] Yuguang Zhang: I’m a student
[9:52:09 PM] Yuguang Zhang: I use Linux for a unix environment
[9:53:07 PM] Peici: really not easy to keep this mentality. I know young people like these apple things
[9:54:45 PM] Yuguang Zhang: a coherent hardware/software experience
[10:00:56 PM] Yuguang Zhang: talk to you next time
[10:02:50 PM] Peici: :) good night
[10:03:37 PM] Yuguang Zhang: bye (I can’t find the animation for this one)
[10:06:27 PM] Peici: (chuckle)(wave)
[10:07:09 PM] Yuguang Zhang: I guess this is why they left this one out

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Biological Enhancements – The Mind/Machine Interface

Sep 22 2010 Published by under Singularitarian

I think, and my thoughts cross the barrier into the synapses of the machine, just as the good doctor intended. But what I cannot shake, and what hints at things to come, is that thoughts cross back. In my dreams, the sensibility of the machine invades the periphery of my consciousness: dark, rigid, cold, alien. Evolution is at work here, but just what is evolving remains to be seen.

Alpha Centauri

Amber, like most of the postindustrialists aboard the orphanage ship Ernst Sanger, is in her early teens: While their natural abilities are in many cases enhanced by germ-line genetic recombination, thanks to her mother’s early ideals she has to rely on brute computational enhancements. She doesn’t have a posterior parietal cortex hacked for extra short-term memory, or an anterior superior temporal gyrus tweaked for superior verbal insight, but she’s grown up with neural implants that feel as natural to her as lungs or fingers. Half her wetware is running outside her skull on an array of processor nodes hooked into her brain by quantum-entangled communication channels – her own personal metacortex . . .

Accelerando

Quantum-entangled communication means when one bit changes, another changes simultaneously. It happens in every day life, in a more balanced way. As an aside, uranium exists as a mineral in harmony, as a part of the whole. When taken out, isolated, and separated from the rest of life, radioactive decay happens and the surrounding environment turns toxic. Same thing happens to create table sugar. Sugar beets are boiled and refined until the forms acceptable to the human mind is created. That is, little white cubes, sand like, having no taste, only a stimulant to the mind. Why no taste? Just buy some molasses and see what you’ve missed. What monsters modern economic structures can create in the name of “shelf life”, “profit margin”, and “food safety” through pasteurization.

Putting the aside aside, and putting what’s left over aside, is the issue from the previous post. Thoughts can cross, just as the sea can cross, from the painting to its environment, from the machine to the brain. I, for one thing I can vote for, would elect to let the machine take over the 98% of my thoughts that are repetitive. Then I can devote my self to wholly creative pursuits. It’s like writting a novel without having to remember what happens next in the plot, because it’s just one thought away. Then I can do something totally outlandish, say, reverse the fate of the character, with a new thought I create. The machine then churns, and I get a perfectly consistent plot. In this way, my work is wholly creative. This, by the way, is how a eudaimoniac society functions.

However, let’s return to the 2% of the thoughts that are non-repetitive, dynamically generated. Do thoughts generate thoughts? If so, the world is created by our thoughts, and our meaningless thoughts are showing us a meaningless world. The previous sentence included. Now you have no hope, absolutely none, of escaping it.

The other alternative, of course, is to twist reality. This is where value and money comes. Here, this will be the answer to all of your life’s questions/problems. Here, buy this and you will be better than everybody else. It will make you ★ “special” ★. All it really comes down to is the foundation of our materialistic society. Science takes on an “objective” view of reality, itself not included in the picture, and says thoughts are created by stimulus. Pav Lov rang the bell every time before feeding the dogs. He rings it many more times without the food, and the dogs still come. That is the basis of the predictable universe. The universe is governed by certain laws, although your thoughts are totally meaningless. Physicists like Stephen Hawking since Aristotle’s time are still trying to model the universe with meaningless thoughts.

But wait a minute! I now come to a contradiction. The kind allowed by Plato in a proof. Quantum entangled bits means the cause cannot be separated from effect. As you are get out the coat, a thought comes that you should fetch the umbrella. Next minute, it rains as you take a step out the door. That’s quantum entanglement. Where did the tought come from? Where did the rain come from? (more details in Schrodinger’s cat) Now science has the fundamental assumption of cause and effect, in which certain stimulus causes a determined set of behavior. By contradiction, a twisted reality (which means a fake reality) cannot exist.

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Mistaking the Painting for the Painting

Sep 21 2010 Published by under Life

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The Human Condiction – Rene Margaritte

“All thoughts are delusions.” Now that is a delusion, too.

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Paradigms, True Choice, and the Modern Worldview

Sep 18 2010 Published by under Religion and Mythology,Singularitarian

I once read a book called The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. The first habit, the most important one is to be proactive. The key to that is to choose. A choice is different from a decision. Decisions are made on a conscious level of the mind. The alternatives are weighed and the pros and cons compared. A machine could do that better than humans. Assign weights to the priorities, gather the values each alternative offers to the priority, multiply and sum. One suggestion in the book is to change the vocabulary. That also happens on a mental level. Instead of saying “I must”, “I have to”, change it to “I choose”. That makes it obvious to the mind that there is a choice. However, a choice on the level of thought is still trapped in the same level.

Einstein understood that a problem created on one level cannot be solved at the same level. For example, the problem of crime in those crook havens cannot be solved by sending the military there and issuing martial law. In the medieval ages when crime was practically nonexistent, the church taught young men how to behave in their society. In this case, problems on the level of biology are not solved on the same level. In fact, neighborhoods with military bases tend to have higher crime rates due to those biological tendencies being fed. A guy waiting a few seconds for his burger reaches to his belt to pull out a gun, only to find his hands slipping through. Same thing with the problems twentieth century physics faced. Einstein solved them by going to the metaphysical level, doing thought experiments about the nature of the universe.

“I choose” is merely another “I must”, if you see what I mean. The mind says, “I must say ‘I choose’, if I am to get out of here”. See? That’s a mechanistic action programmed by thought forms absorbed through reading a book. So what does it mean to make a choice? Pause and think about this for many minutes, perhaps for the rest of your life. That is a pointer (the words do not matter) to the purpose of your life (and many reincarnations).

Now I’m going to blow out the ember on the candle with this one, so don’t read the rest of this article if you want to find the purpose of your life.  Words cut reality into pieces. If I say “pencil”, the 3D image of a pencil immediately appears in your mind, as if it existed in its own universe. That’s the mistake Plato and all professors made since him, in one of his dialogues, “The dialectic comes before all.”. The dialectic is simply the question and answer way of deriving logic through a dialogue. That’s like saying the universe sprang from Newton’s first law. So to have a true line of reasoning that reflects reality, either there is no beginning, or the beginning itself is subject to its own laws. That means the scientific method is examined by the scientific method, just as the genetic code modifies itself. I find it funny that the scientific method is set in stone, just as .005 is set in statistics for a negligible correlation for the data to prove the hypothesis.

If you are still reading, I suggest you stop. This is where the words may blind you. None of us, except for super humans (as in Nietzche’s idea), of which the human race has had close to none except the Christos,  has ever made a choice in our lives. For one thing, most humans who participate in modern society live in a conscientious hallucination. As a metaphor, take for example a map that is to represent the world. In previous ages, it was possible for a human to know the entire map, that is, to be regarded as someone who understands the world. That is one way to define an engineer. Leonardo da Vinci, painter, sculptor, architect, musician, scientist, mathematician, engineer, inventor, anatomist, geologist, cartographer, botanist and writer, was an early example. Newton was an alchemist, physicist, mathematician, astronomer, natural philosopher, and theologian. Now the map is too big for any single person to know it. It happened as a result of the renaissance. Newton was really the last magician and the first scientist. Science really cut the world into many fine pieces. The basic scientific tool is an experiment, and that assumes you’ve got a piece of the world isolated from the rest of it. That’s why modern scientists do not understand quantum mechanics. Quantum mechanics, the part not explained by any theory, is at play in your life at this very moment. How else would you be reading this article? Consulting the I Ching is one example of coincidences at work. How else do relevant and insightful answers come just by tossing 6 coins?

Our modern world is in fact the map, not the real world it’s supposed to represent. See? Not many since civilized society appeared have lived outside the map. The map is passed down generation to generation, as a guiding light for young men. What happens when one comes to the edge of it? There is a choice. One can either carry the map in his pocket as he goes into the wilderness, or he can choose to burn the map, to forget about the delusion once and for all. Any ways, that map is rotting, just as human flesh rots, sitting beside a piece of metal. By human flesh I mean the body of human thought and total understanding of the universe. By the piece of metal I mean that in front of you, yes, the rigid, cold, alien thing. The rapid pace of technology has outpaced the rate at which the map can be handed down from generation to generation. Now young people are handed shreds of the map from their parents. Some try to piece it together, like a jigsaw puzzle. Try smoking, try sex, study this at the university, travel around the world, etc. Others realize the shreds are rotting in their hands as they look at it. That’s why children are so good with toys adults do not know how to use. They don’t have a map at all when learning new technology. Old metaphors no longer work with new technology. A TV with a switch dial and tuner cannot be operated the same way as an XBox. So parts of the old map has rotten away, revealing the logical, linear, predictable behavior of a machine designed by the machine of the global economy of which we are all a part. In other areas where the map has rotten, biological tendencies are revealed: gang violence, drug lords, pornography. The old map where kings once lived, marriages were a happy ending, and a trade lasted a man for a lifetime, was gone. In place of it, we have one filled with information traveling faster than the speed of light, immortality and godhood, infinite and worthless copies of music/art, environments changed at the click of a button, anything and everything was permitted, as long as it is virtual, the answer to all of life’s questions to be found on Google . . .

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By the Sea Shore I Played with Sea Shells

Sep 15 2010 Published by under Life

I’m sorry this blog will no longer be about purely technical matters. Technology is only a mind amplification device. It is only what happens within the mind that truly matters. So here is one to those of us outcasts, who see the train on the track and where it’s heading. While I once pretended to be one aboard the train and watched the scenery pass by, I can no longer ignore the landscape that was there all along. The train was the passer-by. It’s the mountain that watches the train pass, not the passengers that watch the mountain pass.

We sit together,
the mountain and I,
until only the mountain remains

Li Po

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