|
|
Sunday, May 13th, 2012
| |
11:08 am - Movie madness
|
A possibly entertaining pastime I just came up with, for a bunch of people who can think at their feet:
Find a movie none of you has seen before, spoken in a language none of you knows. If it has subtitles in your language, turn them off. Each time when a character in the movie speaks, somebody improvises a "translation" of what they're saying. Optionally, each character in the movie may be "adopted" by the first person to translate them, who then translates all of their lines from that point on. Or not, in which case all characters remain free-for-all. See for how long you can keep the story consistent.
To make things more interesting, you could decide to change the genre of the movie. For instance, if you know that it's a romantic comedy, you could decide beforehand that it's really a sci-fi drama, or vice versa.
|
|
(Leave an echo)
|
| Saturday, May 12th, 2012
| |
2:52 pm - On fantasy and discount rates
|
"...some method for discounting future and distant consequences is necessary. It is possible, perhaps, that the degree of discounting would exactly correspond to the increasing degree of uncertainty that goes with predicting remote events. But there is no simple formula that relates time or distance to uncertainty—some events a year from now or 5,000 kilometers from here may be much more predictable than other events only one week from now or 100 meters away." (Wallach & Allen, Moral Machines)
This bit made me think. Wallach & Allen state correctly that the relation between (physical or temporal) distance and uncertainty is not a simple one, and some things which happen far away are more predictable than some things that happen nearby. But in what kind of a universe would that statement be incorrect? If it always made sense to consider events happening a week from now 20% more predictable than events happening a year from now, or events happening 100 meters away 20% more predictable than 5,000 kilometers away, regardless of the type of the event, what would that imply of the world one lived in?
It seems to me that this would have to be a world where the laws of nature were highly local. Things such as the speed of light and the boiling point of water would have to vary smoothly, depending on where and when you were. Actually, whether the universe had things such as "light", "water", or "boiling" in the first place would also vary by location. There are some things that we probably need to keep constant in order to avoid a logical contradiction, though. For instance, since we stipulated that events happening 100 meters away should be 20% more predictable than events happening 5,000 kilometers away, the geometry of the universe should not change as to make the concept of distance meaningless, nor should the axioms of arithmetic be changed at random.
Would it be possible to live in such a universe? Certainly if the discount rate was high enough, the universe would be so chaotic as to make all advance planning pointless. Not to mention the fact that organisms wouldn't live for very long if their blood might literally begin to boil at any time. But let's stipulate that the rate of change was slow, and that the organisms living in the universe were generally changed in such ways as to not outright kill them or drive them insane. Note that we are now again forced to introduce some predictability that is not a direct function of distance.
Things would perhaps get easier if we dropped the bit about change over time. The laws of nature would be spatially local, so traveling 5,000 kilometers would get you to a place where things worked quite differently, but things wouldn't change if you stayed put. For this, we'll obviously have to limit ourselves to laws of physics which allow for time and space to be separated in such a way. Now we don't need to protect the organisms living in this universe from its changes anymore - organisms in different regions will simply evolve to exploit their local laws of nature, and to avoid going into places where they cannot survive anymore.
Some of the regions in such a universe would be teeming with life (though whether we'd recognize it as life is another matter), while other regions would be desolate, incapable of supporting any kind of complex structure. Journeying far from your home would let you see things that were literally impossible back at your place of birth, but to travel far enough would mean a certain death. Although you could never directly witness the wonders of the regions that were too different from yours, you might find creatures that lived at the borders of such regions. They could travel farther away than you, although they could not come to the place you were from; and if you could find a way to communicate, the two of you might be able to swap tales. You could tell them of the things you had seen, and in turn, be told of wonders you could imagine, but never quite comprehend.
|
|
(7 echoes left behind | Leave an echo)
|
| Saturday, May 5th, 2012
| |
12:52 pm - Personal achievement reports
|
I haven't posted my personal achievement reports for March and April, and in fact I think I might discontinue the habit for now. The reason is simple: for the last two months I've been doing writing for the Singularity Institute - on a per-project basis since early March, and on a full-time basis since early April. The job takes up most of my energy, so most of my reports would consist of little more than "worked X hours, meditated Y hours this month". And I don't want to speak much about the projects I'm doing before they're done.
So expect to see the occasional meditation log, "hey I completed this" update, or whatever, but not necessarily more achievement reports. Though I might still change my mind about this.
|
|
(Leave an echo)
|
| Monday, March 19th, 2012
| |
6:07 pm - Neuroinformatics 4 seminar, session III - GWT/meditation, neural correlates of consciousness
|
Yes, I know that I'm way behind on my reports: session III was over a month ago. Better late than never.
I've been thinking about global workspace theory on and off in the context of meditation. Haven't come up with anything particularly insightful, basically just a repetition of the argument in the Dietrich paper: in meditation, attentional resources are used to actively amplify a particular event such as a mantra until it becomes the exclusive content in the working memory buffer. This intentional, concentrated effort selectively disengages all other cognitive capacities of the prefrontal cortex.
Put into GWT terminology, normally sensory systems and "thought systems" within our brain generate a number of (bottom-up) inputs that compete for control of the global neuronal workspace (GNW), and some process of top-down attention picks inputs that get strenghtened until they dominate the neuronal workspace. In meditation, the practicioner seems to train their attentional network into only choosing a specific set of stimuli (e.g. their breath, a mantra, the sensations of their body, etc.) and ignoring all the others. As they concentrate on these stimuli, those get transmitted into all the brain regions that receive input from the GNW. Since this is an abnormal input that most of the systems can't do anything with, they gradually get turned off - especially since the it doesn't matter what output they produce in response, as the successful meditation practicioner pays no attention to it. Of course, it will take a lot of practice for a practicioner to get this far, since the brain is practically built to "get sidetracked" from meditation and concentrate on something more important.
It's interesting to ask why this would lead to perceptual changes, such as an increased tolerance for pain. A straighforward guess would be that if the GW/GNW gets taken over by a very simple stimulus, and that stimulus gets broadcast into all the different systems in the brain, then there are systems related to learning that can't help but to analyze the stimulus. If a meditation practicioner consciously begins to break a sensation into smaller and smaller components, or begins to note and name individual sensations, then the implict learning systems will pick up on this and learn how to do it better. Also, as the meditator forces his brain to analyze very simple inputs, the brain allocates disproportionate computational resources into analyzing them and begins to find in them increasingly subtle hidden details - which the meditator then dismisses, forcing his brain to go to even more extreme lengths to find something. Over time and with enough practice, he learns to feel and notice these subtle sensations even when not meditating.
Of course, it's a bit of a misnomer to talk about the brain "finding" subtler sensations, since those sensations are themselves also generated by the brain. Rather what's happening is that there is a hierarchical process in which simpler inputs get increasingly complex layers of interpretation applied on them, and meditation strips away those layers of interpretation. Thus information that's usually thrown away during earlier processing stages becomes revealed and accessible to the conscious mind. That'd my guess, anyway. It's also interesting to note that savant abilities are also hypothesized to be created via having access to lower-level brain processing, but so far I haven't heard of anyone becoming a genius savant through meditation, even if it should be theoretically possible.
As I noted the last time, there's still the puzzle of how the attentional networks find out about an input that might be worth promoting into the GNW, if the GNW is already dominated by another input. A hypothesis that might make sense is that we're actually rapidly cycling a lot of content into and out of consciousness, and the attentional networks decide which stuff gets the most "clock cycles" (here's an obvious analogy to operating systems and multiprogramming). E.g. this text gets processed within the GNW, then I hear a sound coming from outside and that input pushes its way to the GNW for a brief moment, and then an attentional system decides that it isn't important and gets back to the task of writing this text. While the outside noise has pushed the text out of the GNW, it's still locally active in the brain regions that were most heavily involved in processing it, and the attentional network can home into the activation in those regions and strenghten it again.
Alternatively, this whole hypothesis of swapping stuff in and out might be unnecessarily complicated, and there could just be cross-region communication that wsan't conscious. There are a number of results saying that cross-modality integration of sense data can happen without consciousness. E.g. in ventriloquism we see a talking puppet mouth and hear sound coming from the puppeteer's closed mouth. Somehow this conflict gets resolved into us hearing the sound as if it were coming from the puppeteer's mouth, without us being consciously aware of the process. Also the results of the paper below, which suggest that attention and consciousness can both occur without each other, would support that hypothesis.
None of that actually has anything to do with the third session, though - it's just stuff that occurred to me while thinking about some of the seminar papers in general. So let's get to the actual topic...
----
The third Neuroinformatics presentation covered Giulio Tononi & Christof Koch (2008) The Neural Correlates of Consciousness: An Update. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences. The paper was pretty packed with information, and there was a lot of interesting stuff mentioned. I won't try to cover all of it, but will rather concentrate on some of the most interesting bits.
In particular, the previous Neuroinformatics papers seemed to come to close to equating consciousness and attention. If input from our senses (or from internal sources like e.g. memory) becomes conscious if it is chosen to be promoted to consciousness by attentional processes, does that mean that we are conscious of the things that we pay attention to? Subjectively, I'm often conscious of experiences that I try to direct my attention away from, though that might just mean that a top-down attentional mechanism is competing with a bottom-up one. Introspection is notoriously unreliable, anyway.
Tononi & Koch argue that the two are not the same, and there can be both attention without consciousness and consciousness without attention. Let's first look at attention without consciousness. Among the studies that they cite, Naccache et al. (2002) is probably the easiest to explain.
The experimental subjects were shown ("target") numbers ranging from 1 to 9, and had to say whether the number they saw was smaller or larger than 5. (They were not shown any fives.) Unknown to them, each number was preceded by another ("priming") number, hidden by a geometric masking shape. In some versions of the experiment, the subjects knew when they were going to see the number, and could pay attention around that time. In other version, they did not, and could not focus their attention specifically at the right window in time. When the subjects were paying attention at the right time (and therefore also paying attention to the priming number), there was what's called a priming effect. Their reaction times were faster when the prime number was congruent with the target number, i.e. either both were smaller than 5 or both were larger. When the numbers were incongruent, the reaction times were faster. When the subjects couldn't focus their attention on the right time period, the priming effect didn't occur. Tononi & Koch interpret these results to mean that there can be attention without consciousness: the priming numbers were always seen too quickly to enter conscious awareness, but they caused a priming effect depending on whether or not the subjects paid attention to them.
The opposite case is consciousness without attention. There are experiments in which the subjects are made to focus their attention to the middle of their visual field, and something else is then briefly flashed in their peripheral field of vision. Subjects are often capable of reporting on the contents of the peripheral image and performing some quite complex discrimination tasks. They can tell male faces from female ones, or distinguish between famous and non-famous people, even though the image was (probably) flashed too briefly for top-down attention to kick in. At the same time, they cannot perform some much easier tasks, such as discriminating a rotated letter "L" from a rotated letter "T". So at least some kinds of consciousness-requiring tasks seem to be possible in the absence of directed attention, while others aren't.
Tononi & Koch conclude this section by summarizing their view of the differences between attention and consciousness, and by citing Baars and saying something akin to his Global Workspace Theory:
Attention is a set of mechanisms whereby the brain selects a subset of the incoming sensory information for higher level processing, while the nonattended portions of the input are analyzed at a lower band width. For example, in primates, about one million fibers leave each eye and carry on the order of one megabyte per second of raw information. One way to deal with this deluge of data is to select a small fraction and process this reduced input in real time, while the nonattended data suffer from benign neglect. Attention can be directed by bottom-up, exogenous cues or by top-down endogenous features and can be applied to a spatially restricted part of the image (focal, spotlight of attention), an attribute (e.g., all red objects), or to an entire object. By contrast, consciousness appears to be involved in providing a kind of “executive summary” of the current situation that is useful for decision making, planning, and learning (Baars).
As has often been the case lately, I wonder how much weight I should actually put on these results. A study that has not been replicated is little better than an anecdote, and while Tononi & Koch do cite several studies with similar results, there have been previous cases where the initial replications all seemed to support a theory but then stopped doing so. So for all that I know, everything in the paper (and the previous papers, of course) might turn out to be wrong within a few years. Still, it's the best that we have so far.
Like some of the GWS/GNS papers, this one also suggested that non-dreaming sleep involves reduced connectivity between cortical regions, and the regions communicate in a more local manner. That's also interesting.
|
|
(Leave an echo)
|
| |
4:32 pm - Meditation log, Mar 9 - Mar 19
|
For those curious, basically all of my meditation has been tranquility meditation.
Friday, March 9th. 30 minutes. Attempted to meditate while lying on my back, figuring that I wouldn't fall asleep since I'd just had my morning caffeine. Not very successful. I was maybe a little too relaxed, my thoughts wandered and I had difficulties feeling my breath in order to concentrate on it.
Sunday, March 11th. 20 minutes. Attempted to meditate in the morning, noticed that I was basically just falling asleep, then took a cold shower and tried again. Felt nice, though not particularly exciting.
Monday, March 12th. 50 minutes. I had the timer on 30 minutes, but I just ignored it at first. Somebody had recommended drinking green tea about half an hour before meditating, so I gave it a try. I only had bagged tea at hand, but I put two bags in the same cup to get a stronger effect.
Something happened, though I am not sure what it was. I ended up concentrating on various feelings of pain and bidding them welcome - not in a masochistic way, but rather in such a way where I genuinely welcomed pain and didn't consider it something that would cause suffering in the first place. I dug up memories of various situations where I'd been embarassed or ashamed, and each such memory seemed to make the state of concentration deeper. It felt nice.
From this point on, each of my meditation sessions has been preceded by a cup of green tea, made using 2-4 tea bags.
Tuesday, March 13th. 60 minutes. I sat meditating with my fingers crossed, and at one point relatively early on I freaked out as my fingers started feeling incorporal. They also felt like they were drifting to be inside each other. Then the frightened surprise pulled me out of that state, and although I tried to reach it again, I could not.
Wednesday, March 14th. ~45 minutes. I started gradually losing feeling in my fingers and feet, after which the numbness spread to the rest of my body. Only my head and part of my chest (where I was too conscious of my breathing) retained feeling. Then at some point I realized that although large parts of my body were without feeling, I still remained aware of where the borders of my body parts were. After I realized this, feeling pretty quickly returned to them.
After that, the lack of feeling came and went for the rest of my meditation session. There were moments when I noticed, noted, and let go of feelings whose existence I hadn't even realized before. I started to get a small inkling of what the complete cessation of sensation that's said to come with the deepest meditative states might be like. I became aware of having a sense of time, a feeling of presence in my own head, and a feeling of moving my attention around. I attempted to focus on those to make them vanish as well, but was for now unable to do so.
I also felt really good and happy for the rest of the day.
Thursday, March 15th. 20 minutes of meditation, bathroom break, 40 minutes of meditation. At the end of the second meditation session, I got a clear feeling of something happening, but I don't know what it was. After it had happened, I got a sense of this session's leassons had now been learned. It told me that I could stop meditating now, since I wasn't going to learn anything more before the next time. My concentration seemed to grow considerably more shallow at the same time.
Whether that feeling actually meant anything or whether it was just a trick of my brain is an interesting question. I'm presuming that it was just a random feeling: to use a computer metaphor, meditation practice seems to be about exploiting some accidential glitch in the brain which likely never played an actual evolutionary role. Given that, whatever subconscious system produced that "this lesson is now over" sensation is probably just as clueless about what was going than the rest of me was.
This turned out to be a "let's practice meditation / concentration all the time, everywhere" day. Pretty much no matter where I went or what I did, I used the opportunity to do concentration practice and dismiss unwanted thoughts or feelings. When waiting for a bus, for instance, I picked the feeling of impatience and pretty much just got rid of it. I started thinking that if somebody could learn to do this reliably and for any feeling / emotion, it would let them have complete control over their own mind, only suffering from the fears and dislikes that they wanted to suffer from. I don't know whether that's actually possible, but the possibility is exciting to think about.
Friday, March 16th. 20 minutes, break, 40 minutes. Nothing particularly exciting happened on this day.
Saturday, March 17th. 60 minutes. At one point, I noticed that my meditative state was failing to deepen because I was clearly waiting for it to deepen, and the feeling of expectation messed things up. I then tried to rid myself of the expectation, and I was kinda successful, though through an unexpected route: by visualizing and looping in my head the Sean Den Förste Banan video. (Yes, you may point and laugh at me now.) As I did so, I felt my concentration clearly deepen.
After a while of doing that, I switched to counting numbers. Suddenly I realized that I was not experiencing them as raw numbers, but as my age. For instance, when I visualized in my head the number 15, I also saw images of myself when I was 15. As I got past my current age, the images grew more abstract. As I approached age 100 I felt/saw myself get older, but then apparently radical life extension was invented and my body stopped getting frail. Past age 100, there was a feeling of having lived for a long time and having seen everything, and of living in a drastically different world than pretty much anyone who wasn't as old. I think I died, presumably in an accident, around age 180 or so, but I kept counting until I reached 300. "While I was dead" I think there was a feeling of stillness and a lack of motion, possibly combined with a sense of things continuing to happen all around me.
Eventually I concluded that nothing more was happening and started exploring impermanence by studying the various sensations of my body and trying to break them into smaller and smaller components. Most of it I did to the sensations from my feet. Soon my feet started feeling odd, as I had no idea of whether my muscles were relaxed or tense - they felt like they could have been both.
Monday, March 19th. 65 minutes. Mildly altered states of consciousness, nothing particularly special. Again, I noticed that I was expecting something interesting to happen, and that expectation prevented me from just being a neutral observer of my own mind. I tried to get rid of the feeling of expectation, but then I realized that this too implied an expectation of change - trying to will something gone involves expecting that it will be gone. So then I tried to just let go of it without specificially trying to let go of it. (Yeah, I can't explain it any better than that.) Not too good at that yet - I think I might have had momentary successes, but each time they caused an "oh, I did it, something's happening now" feeling which ruined it. I'll just have to keep practicing.
Since last Wednesday, meditation has frequently led to me losing feeling in my fingers and feet, but I haven't experienced the almost-whole-body lack of feeling again.
|
|
(1 echo left behind | Leave an echo)
|
| Wednesday, March 7th, 2012
| |
11:39 am - Personal achievement report, Feb 2012
|
February was a low-achievement month. Aside for making progress in meditation, I didn't get much done.
COMPLETED WRITINGS
* A Less Wrong post, Avoid Misinterpreting Your Emotions. As of right now, it has promoted status, 60 upvotes and 28 comments. It's an expanded version of my earlier LJ post, Not believing in your emotions.
* Contributed three answers to the Cognitive Sciences Stack Exchange. The answers were to the following questions: Is variation in human brain size related to mental functioning? (my answer got 12 upvotes), Bias by which we tend to accept vague descriptions of ourselves (my answer got 5 upvotes), and Do we understand the mechanism behind pleasure and pain, excluding the subjective aspect? (my answer got three upvotes).
* I got an e-mail telling me I was one of the top CogSci Stack Exchange users for the month of February.
INCOME HUNTING
* Attended a job interview for the IT research assistant summer job. Heard that the research group I'd picked as my top choice had about 70 applicants, out of which only a few would be picked. Although the interview went okay, I don't think I'll make the cut.
* Sent a couple of job applications to other places.
* Went to the library and looked through some of the magazines there, searching for ones who might be willing to pay for my writing. Found some promising ones.
* The secret crazy website project is still being worked on.
BOOKS-IN-PROGRESS
* Novel: secret co-written one that I'm not at a liberty to talk much about. Minor progress.
* Novel: The City of Light and Fire. No progress on this one.
* Novel: Dreamland (working title). No progress on this one, either.
* Non-fiction book: How human minds differ, or, I need a catchier title (working title). Nope, no progress here either.
SCHOOL
* Continued attending Neuroinformatics 4, but I haven't gotten any session diaries written beyond the first one. Need to fix that.
* ...and that was just about all that I accomplished, school work-wise.
OTHER
* Started doing semi-regular meditation exercises again, and began finally making progress on it. For details, see my post from two days back.
* My Google Plus account went up from 687 followers on Jan 31st to 726 followers on Feb 29th. That's an increase of 39 people. (Statistics courtesy of circlecount.com.)
OVERALL
Meh, much ado about nothing. I'm not sure of exactly how I managed to achieve this little. This month, I need to shape up.
|
|
(Leave an echo)
|
| Monday, March 5th, 2012
| |
11:22 am - Meditation progress report
|
I've finally been achieving some progress in meditation, so I figured I'd give you a report and also write things down so that I won't forget.
About a month or two ago, an iRL friend of mine found Daniel Ingram's Mastering the Core Teachings of the Buddha and started doing meditation practice. Since he had done things involving concentration practice before, he made rapid progress. Inspired by his practices and partially because I'd so quickly lost my position as being the superior meditation guru of us two, I too started making attempts at meditation again.
On a Monday maybe three weeks ago, I realized that something had clicked. You know that thing when you try to learn a skill, spend a long time being bad at it, and then suddenly one morning you wake up and realize that you're suddenly good at it? That happened to me and my concentration ability: concentrating on just one thing felt easier in an almost qualitative way, and was far less frustrating.
I reached the first samatha jhana the following day, the first time since my only previous jhana experience last summer. I put myself in the first jhana several times afterwards (including once while walking next to a noisy road), and also tried doing some noting practice. Suddenly I was using almost all available opportunities to do concentration practice, like when I was preparing a sandwich snack. I also thought about the Three Characteristics a lot.
On Friday that week, I woke up in the morning and turned on the lights. The first thing that I happened to look at was the back of my hand (which I'd just used to turn the lights on), and I was startled to realize that I was seeing in it far more details than I'd done before. When I looked around me, I could see details of things jumping out at me in a way they hadn't done before. While looking at a fantasy map on my wall, I noticed the names of the different regions for pretty much the first time - previously I'd only looked at the "big picture view" of the map. Things also looked sharper somehow, as if I'd just gotten stronger glasses.
I expect that if I'd done meditation practice at this time, the effect might have become permanent. As it was, I didn't have the chance as I had promised to go see a friend. By the time I got back home, six hours later, my perception had gradually faded back to normal.
For some reason, this caused a longer interruption to my practice. Getting to the first jhana felt more difficult, and I lost my inclination to keep doing concentration practices all the time. This might have had something to do with the fact that the noting practices had made it more difficult to really try to solidify any emotion, since I'd just been trying to think of them as impermanent. For a while, I was basically unable to meditate while at home, though for some reason I noticed that getting to a very light first jhana was still possible if I was walking outside. Sitting still at home, though, not much luck.
Then a while later, I decided to try out tranquility meditation. The first time, recalling a time when I'd felt happy and using the way I had felt as my concentration focus, felt quite nice, and I think I got to the first jhana. Unlike my previous jhanas, it was almost entirely lacking the irritation of needing to constantly maintain the feeling.
My next attempts at tranquility meditation fared worse. Using feelings of happiness as an object became harder, because for whatever reason, I suddenly had difficulties recalling my feelings on occasions when I'd felt happy, or indeed recalling any occasions when I'd been happy in the first place. And there was again the thing about having difficulty solidifying anything, feeling included.
So after some days, I decided to use the breath as an object instead. Now, there had been *one* lasting effect from that one Friday: I had briefly done some meditation on the way to my friend, and thought that I could see faint lights even with my eyes closed. And those lights had began to show up on later meditation sessions, as well. They don't seem to be *entirely* hallucinatory, since they are clearly stronger when I'm meditating somewhere well-lit, but I have also seen a much weaker form of them when when meditating in total darkness.
So this time around, I was doing tranquility meditation with the breath as an object, and I began to really notice the lights. Mostly I seem to sort of see them from the corner of my (closed) eyes, and if I try to focus my attention to them I'm not sure if I'm actually seeing any light at all. Now however, there were times that they got strong enough to persist when focused on, and I could follow them as they moved about in my visual field. They also seemed to work as feedback - when I e.g. focused on a feeling of tension and tried to let it go, the lights got considerably stronger. In general, they seemed to intensify whenever I was doing "the right thing".
I seemed to get quite strongly into... something, not entirely sure what. Some sort of jhana, I suppose. There was a feeling of movement, and my body seemed to grow heavy and slightly numb, with all sensation in the region around my head, where the lights were and where I'd also been focusing on some tension. Something seemed to be happening, but I wasn't sure of what.
When I emerged from meditation, I had an odd feeling, pretty close to how MCTB describes the first vipassana jhana, Knowledge of Mind and Body. I also seemed able to visualize things more vividly. I meditated two more times that day, though I didn't get an equally strong experience from those occasions, and I think my mental state actually faded back towards normality during them. On the third time I also got rather drowsy (I guess I hadn't slept enough that night), and ended up feeling drowsy for the rest of the day, unable to get much done. By evening I was feeling rather normal again.
That was yesterday. This morning I started with some more meditation, which went roughly the same, though again my experience wasn't nearly as strong and I didn't seem to get as deeply into it. Part of this was probably that I couldn't decide how to act regarding the lights: should I treat them as feedback but essentially ignore them, e.g. keep doing the things that made them stronger but not particularly focus on them? Or should I try to gradually shift from using my breath as a focus to using them as a focus? Or should I do neither, just treating them as yet another observation to be noticed and then let go? I think I instinctively did whatever the "right" thing was before, but I can't remember what that was.
I also made a tentative observation that I might be able to reverse the causality with the lights: e.g. usually when I'd let go of a thought, the lights would get stronger. On a few times, I tried instead making the lights stronger, thereby letting go of the thought. I'm not really sure if it worked, though, since on most occasions the thought still seemed to be there when my attention "got back" from the lights.
When I stopped meditating today, I again had a slight Mind and Body-ish feeling, but it was much weaker and also faded much quicker than on the first time.
|
|
(3 echoes left behind | Leave an echo)
|
| Friday, February 3rd, 2012
| |
1:59 pm - Personal achievement report, Dec 2011 - Jan 2012
|
It's time for my second semimonthly personal achievement report! This one covers the period from December 13th (when I wrote my previous report) to January 31st. From now on, I'll try to post reports at the end of each month.
So, what have I accomplished since I last reported?
COMPLETED WRITINGS
* Two LJ posts, Not believing in your emotions and Interesting paper on the neuroscience of meditation. I'm pretty happy with "not believing in your emotions", and count it as a very important insight.
* A Less Wrong post, The Substitution Principle. At the time of writing, it has promoted status, 59 upvotes, and also 59 comments. I'm pretty happy with it.
ACADEMIC ACHIEVEMENTS
* Finished and submitted my two papers to the International Journal of Machine Consciousness. You can see the submitted versions here: Coalescing Minds and Digital Advantages. Unless something catastrophic happens, they should be published in print around summer. These will be my first peer-reviewed journal publications, so yay.
INCOME-HUNTING
* Responded to a "writers wanted" ad on Less Wrong, and ended up doing a total of 12 hours of copyediting work for Quixey on a contract basis. They paid nicely, but I don't know when/whether they'll have more work for me.
* Submitted a summer job application to be an IT research assistant.
* Submitted an application for the Rationality Curriculum design position. Also wrote "The Substitution Principle" to be the start of a rationality training program, to be followed by concrete exercises, but didn't get around designing the exercises yet. Need to do that next.
* Submitted a grant application to Taiteen keskustoimikunta, asking them if they'd want to give me money to write my book on how human minds differ from each other. I have no idea about my chances, but it can't hurt to try.
* Began planning a way to make money by presenting myself as a rationality expert and giving lectures to various companies. That's still under development.
* We figured that we didn't have the time to release the secret crazy website project in time for Christmas and make it polished enough for our tastes, so we decided to postpone it for now. It's still being worked on, though, and other secret crazy website projects await after that!
BOOKS-IN-PROGRESS
* Novel: secret co-written one that I'm not at a liberty to talk much about. We made progress on this one, developing a new way to write it and making considerable improvements on our main characters.
* Novel: The City of Light and Fire. No progress on this one, really.
* Novel: Dreamland (working title). Based on an RPG campaign I ran, so I already roughly know the plot for this one. Wrote one page worth of prose for it, which is not much but still something.
* Non-fiction book: How human minds differ, or, I need a catchier title (working title). Submitted a grant application and asked for money to write this one, and came up with a preliminary table of contents as a part of that.
SCHOOL
* Passed the two exams (Introduction to Machine Learning, Introduction to Specification and Verification) I had.
* Currently doing two courses: Neuroinformatics 4 and Probabilistic Models. Was also supposed to test out of two courses (Distributed Systems and Software Architectures), but I haven't gotten around doing the needed studying for those two.
* Made a Khan Academy account to revise some calculus that I'd forgotten. However, while I managed to remind myself of how derivatives worked, I was sorely disappointed to realize that there were no automated integration exercises offered. That's what I'd have needed the most.
OTHER
* Since it was Christmas, I put in an extra donation to the Singularity Institute, giving them a total of $140.
* Been actively posting various kinds of links on my Google Plus account, and they're apparently being appreciated, judging from the fact that I've gone up from 622 followers on Dec 13th to 687 followers on Jan 31st. That's 65 people. (Statistics courtesy of circlecount.com.)
OVERALL
Again, not a bad month. I'm still not doing as much schoolwork as the recommended pace, but then I'll hit my maximum allotted student benefit months this fall, so I'll need to find an alternate source of income before that. My income-finding efforts weren't too bad so far, but I need to invest more in them still.
|
|
(6 echoes left behind | Leave an echo)
|
| Wednesday, February 1st, 2012
| |
6:08 pm - Neuroinformatics 4 seminar, session II
|
Today was the second session of the Neuroinformatics 4 course that I'm taking. Each participant has been assigned some paper from this list, and we're all supposed to have a presentation summarizing the paper. We're also supposed to write a diary about each presentation and hand it in in the end, which is the reason why I'm typing this entry. I figure that if I'm going to keep a diary about this, I might as well make it public.
Session I: Global Workspace Theory. I held the first presentation, which covered Global Workspace Theory as explained by Baars (2002, 2004). You can read about it in those papers, but the general idea of GWT is that that which we experience as conscious thought is actually information that's being processed in a "global workspace", through which various parts of the brain communicate with each other.
Suppose that you see in front of you a delicious pie. Some image-processing system in your brain takes that information, processes it, and sends that information to the global workspace. Now some attentional system or something somehow (insert energetic waving of hands) decides whether that stimulus is something that you should become consciously aware of. If it is, then that stimulus becomes the active content of the global workspace, and information about it is broadcast to all the other systems that are connected to the global workspace. Our conscious thoughts are that information which is represented in the global workspace.
 There exists some very nice experimental work which supports this theory. For instance, Dehaene (2001) showed experimental subjects various words for a very short while (29 milliseconds each). Then, for the next 71 milliseconds, the subjects either saw a blank screen (the "visible" condition) or a geometric shape (the "masking" condition). Previous research had shown that in such an experiment, the subjects will report seeing the "visible" words and can remember what they said, while they will fail to notice the "masked" words. That was also the case here. In addition, fMRI scans seemed to show that the "visible" words caused considerably wider activation in the brain than the "masked" words, which mainly just produced minor activation in area relating to visual processing. The GWT interpretation of these results would be that the "visible" words made their way to the global workspace and activated it. For the "masked" words there was no time for that to happen, since the sight of the masking shape "overwrote" the contents of the visual system before the sight of the word had had the time to activate the global workspace.
That's all fine and good, but Baars's papers were rather vague on a number of details, like "how is this implemented in practice"? If information is represented in the global workspace, what does that actually mean? Is there a single representation of the concept of a pie in the global workspace, which all the systems manipulate together? Or is information in the global workspace copied to all of the systems, so that they are all manipulating their own local copies and somehow synchronizing their changes through the global workspace? How can an abstract concept like "pie" be represented in such a way that systems as diverse as those for visual processing, motor control, memory, and the generation of speech (say) all understand it?
Session II: Global Neuronal Workspace. Today's presentation attempted to be a little more specific. Dehaene (2011) discusses the Global Neuronal Workspace model, based on Baars's Global Workspace model.
The main thing that I got out of today's presentation was that the brain is the idea of the brain being divisible into two parts. The processing network is a network of tightly integrated, specialized processing units that mostly carry out non-conscious computation. For instance, early processing stages of the visual system, carrying out things like edge detection, would be a part of the processing network. The "processors" of the processing network typically have "highly specific local or medium range connections" - in other words, the processors in a specific region mostly talk with their close neighbors and nobody else.
The various parts of the processing network are connected by the Global Neuronal Workspace, a set of cortical neurons with long-range axons. The impression I got was this is something akin to a set of highways between cities, or different branches of a post office. Or planets (processing network areas) joined together by a network of Hyperpulse Generators (the Global Neuronal Workspace). You get the idea. I believe that it's some sort of a small world network.
Note that contrary to intuition and folk psychology (but consistently with the hierarchical consciousness hypothesis), this means that there is no single brain center where conscious information is gathered and combined. Instead, as the paper states, there is "a brain-scale process of conscious synthesis achieved when multiple processors converge to a coherent metastable state". Which basically means that consciousness is created by various parts of the brain interacting and exchanging information with each other.
Another claim of GNW is that sensory information is basically processed in a two-stage manner. First, a sensory stimulus causes activation in the sensory regions and begins climbing up the processor hierarchy. Eventually it reaches a stage where it may somehow be selected to be consciously represented, with the criteria being "its adequacy to current goals and attention state" (more waving of hands). If it does, it becomes represented in the GNW. It "is amplified in a top-down manner and becomes maintained by sustained activity of a fraction of GNW neurons": this might re-activate the stimulus signal in the sensory regions, where its activation might have already been declining. Something akin to this model has apparently been verified in a number of computer simulations and brain imaging studies.
 Which sounds interesting and promising, though this still leaves a number of questions unclear. For instance, the paper claims that only one thing at a time can be represented in the GNW. But apparently the thing that gets represented in the GNW is partially selected by conscious attention, and the paper that I previously posted about placed the attentional network in the prefrontal cortex (i.e. not in the entire brain). So doesn't the content in the sensory regions then need to first be delivered to the attentional networks (via the GNW) so that the attentional networks can decide whether that content should be put into the GNW? Either there's something wrong with this model, or I'm not understanding it correctly. I should probably dig into the references. And again, there's the question of just what kind of information is actually put into the GNW in such a manner that all of the different parts of the brain can understand it.
(Yes, I realize that my confusion may seem incongruent with the fact that I just co-authored a paper where we said that we "already have a fairly good understanding on how the cerebral cortex processes information and gives rise to the attentional processes underlying consciousness". My co-author's words, not mine: he was the neuroscience expert on that paper. I should probably ask him when I get the chance.)
|
|
(Leave an echo)
|
| Saturday, January 28th, 2012
| |
12:56 pm - Interesting paper on the neuroscience of meditation
|
http://www.cogsci.ucsd.edu/~pineda/COGS175/readings/Dietrich.pdf
It proposes that what we experience as consciousness is built up in a hierarchical process, with various parts of the brain doing further processing on the flow of information and contributing their own part to the "feel" of consciousness. It's possible to subtract various parts of the process, thereby leading to an altered state of consciousness, without consciousness itself disappearing.
The prefrontal cortex is usually associated with "higher-level" tasks, including emotional regulation, but the authors suggest that this is due to the prefrontal cortex refining the outputs of the earlier processing stages, rather than inhibiting them:
"In such a view, the prefrontal cortex does not represent a supervisory or control system. Rather, it actively implements higher cognitive functions. It is further suggested that the prefrontal cortex does not act as an inhibitory agent of older, more primitive brain structures. The prefrontal cortex restrains output from older structures not by suppressing their computational product directly but by elaborating on it to produce more sophisticated output. If the prefrontal cortex is lost, the person simply functions on the next highest layer that remains.The structures implementing these next highest layers are not disinhibited by the loss of the prefrontal cortex. Rather, their processing is unaffected except that no more sophistication is added to their processing before a motor output occurs."
Their theory is that several altered states of consciousness involve a reduction in the activity of the prefrontal cortex:
"It is proposed in this article that altered states of consciousness are due to transient prefrontal deregulation. Six conscious states that are considered putative altered states (dreaming, the runner's high, meditation, hypnosis, daydreaming, and various drug-induced states) are briefly examined. These altered states share characteristics whose proper function are regulated by the prefrontal cortex such as time distortions, disinhibition from social constraints, or a change in focused attention. It is further proposed that the phenomenological uniqueness of each state is the result of the differential viability of various [dorsolateral] circuits. To give one example, the sense of self is reported to be lost to a higher degree in meditation than in hypnosis; whereas, the opposite is often reported for cognitive flexibility and willed action, which are absent to a higher degree in hypnosis.The neutralization of specific prefrontal contributions to consciousness has been aptly called ‘‘phenomenological subtraction’’ by Allan Hobson (2001).The individual in such an altered state operates on what top layers remain. In altered states that cause severe prefrontal hypofunction, such as non-lucid dreaming or various drug states, the resulting phenomenological awareness is extraordinarily bizarre. In less dramatic altered states, such as long-distance running, the change is more subtle."
And about meditation in particular, they hypothesize that it involves a general lowered prefrontal activity, with the exception of increased activation in the prefrontal attentional network:
"It is evident that more research is needed to resolve the conflicting EEG and neuroimaging data. Reinterpreting and integrating the limited data from existing studies, it is proposed that meditation results in transient hypofrontality with the notable exception of the attentional network in the prefrontal cortex. The resulting conscious state is one of full alertness and a heightened sense of awareness, but without content. Since attention appears to be a rather global prefrontal function (e.g., Cabeza & Nyberg, 2000), PET, SPECT, and fMRI scans showed an overall increase in DL activity during the practice of meditation. However, the attentional network is likely to overlap spatially with modules subserving other prefrontal functions and an increase as measured by fMRI does not inevitably signify the activation of all of the region's modules. Humans appear to have a great deal of control over what they attend to (Atkinson & Shiffrin, 1968), and in meditation, attentional resources are used to actively amplify a particular event such as a mantra until it becomes the exclusive content in the working memory buffer. This intentional, concentrated effort selectively disengages all other cognitive capacities of the prefrontal cortex, accounting for the a-activity. Phenomenologically, meditators report a state that is consistent with decreased frontal function such as a sense of timelessness, denial of self, little if any self-reflection and analysis, little emotional content, little abstract thinking, no planning, and a sensation of unity. The highly focused attention is the most distinguishing feature of the meditative state, while other altered states of consciousness tend to be more characterized by aimless drifting."
They do not discuss permanent changes caused by meditation in the paper, but if the prefrontal cortex is involved with last-stage processing of incoming sensory data, then prefrontal regulation would fit together with meditators' reports of being able to experience sensory information in a more "raw", unprocessed form. Likewise, if the prefrontal cortex unifies and integrates information from earlier processing stages, then meditation revealing the unity of self to be an illusion would be consistent would reduced prefrontal activity.
Vipassana jhanas, or other forms of meditation aimed towards reaching enlightenment, would then somehow involve permanently reducing or at least changing the nature of prefrontal processing. Meditation practicioners speak of "the Dark Night", an intermediate stage during the search for enlightenment, which is experienced as strongly unpleasant and where "our dark stuff tends to come bubbling up to the surface with a volume and intensity that we may never have known before". This is achieved after making sufficient progress in meditation, and will continue until the practicioner makes enough progress to make it go away.
Under the model suggested by the paper, the Dark Night would then be an intermediate stage where the activity of the prefrontal cortex had been reduced/changed to such an extent that it was no longer capable of moderating the output of the various earlier emotional systems. Resolving the Dark Night would involve somehow finding a new balance where the outputs of any systems involved with negative emotions could be better handled again, but I have no idea of how that happens.
|
|
(3 echoes left behind | Leave an echo)
|
| Friday, January 20th, 2012
| |
11:21 am - Not believing in your emotions
|
One of the many things that I've learned from ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif?v=92.1) theferrett is that I don't have to believe in my emotions.
Here's an example of what I mean. Last night, I was suffering from insomnia. As frequently happens when I do, I got frustrated and started worrying about everything. It did not take long before this proceeded into severe self-doubt issues: will I ever amount to anything, will any of my projects actually succeed, et cetera. I was quickly - as usual - becoming convinced that the answer was no, and I should just stop being ambitious and settle for some safe but boring lifepath while I still had the chance.
Now, previously I'd only thought of two options in this kind of a situation:
A) Get rid of the thoughts by distracting myself or finding something that will cheer me up and get me out of that mood.
B) Fail to get out of the mood, keep thinking these thoughts.
For some reason, it had never occurred to me that there could also exist a third option:
C) Keep feeling miserable, but stop thinking those thoughts.
So that's what I did. I thought, "I'm feeling miserable because I can't sleep and I'm frustrated, but that has nothing to do with whether my projects and ambitions will be successful or not. My current emotions convey me no information about that topic. So it's pointless to doubt myself because of these emotions." (Not in so many words, but that was the general idea.)
So I stopped thinking those thoughts. And while I still felt generally miserable, the thoughts stopped making me feel even worse.
Previously I had thought that emotions and thoughts were connected in such a way that in some kinds of bad moods, you had no choice but to think negative thoughts. Now it appears that this isn't the case. Is this something that everyone but me knew already, or is it something that should be talked about a lot more?
Cross-posted: G+, FB.
|
|
(6 echoes left behind | Leave an echo)
|
| Tuesday, December 13th, 2011
| |
11:39 am - Personal achievement report, Nov - Dec 2011
|
theferrett has this awesome habit of making regular updates on how his story-writing and his published stories are doing. I find them inspiring. After seeing his latest update, it occurred to me that I should write one of my own, to help keep track of how I'm doing, and to remind my brain to keep thinking about the stuff I want it to be thinking about. And maybe to also boast a tiny little bit. Anyway. Here are my projects and achievements from November 1st onwards. Overall, not too bad.
COMPLETED WRITINGS
* Less Wrong post, "Modularity, signaling, and belief in belief". Part of my series summarizing Robert Kurzban's book "Why Everyone (Else) Is a Hypocrite: Evolution and the Modular Mind". Only got 16 upvotes and 733 page views (not counting front-page views), probably because it was mostly covering material the LW community already knew.
* Less Wrong post, "The Curse of Identity". I'm really happy with this one: at 98 upvotes and 4858 page views, it's my most popular LW post to date. Also the one that I'm possibly personally the happiest with.
* Less Wrong post, "5-second level case study: Value of Information". This one fared much less impressively: 18 upvotes and 770 page views. But it was an experimental post, and I did expect that it might not be very popular.
* FB/G+ posts on how to visualize AI thought processes in a movie or TV series. [1] [2]. Random fun and not too insightful, but I'm quite happy with the second one in particular.
* FB/G+/LJ posts on how science doesn't work and it seems really hard for us to know anything. It was a rant that I've had in mind for a long time, and seemed to strike a chord with some of my readers, with 14 G+ shares.
* A couple of briefer posts that I don't count as achievements.
ACADEMIC FAME AND WORKS-IN-PROGRESS
* I received two reviewer's comments for my and Harri Valpola's paper Coalescing minds: brain uploading-related group mind scenarios for the Mind Uploading special issue in the International Journal of Machine Consciousness. The comments were excellent, and we will be doing substantial revising soon.
* I also received one reviewer's comments for my other paper in the same issue, Relative advantages of uploads, artificial general intelligences, and other digital minds. They were next to useless, and I still haven't received comments from the second reviewer.
* Provided comments for two papers that other people wrote for that special issue.
* Playing around with Google Scholar, I found out that my 2010 ECAP paper, From mostly harmless to civilization-threatening: pathways to dangerous artificial general intelligences, had been cited in a paper for the 2011 AGI conference. I wasn't very impressed with the paper, but at least I now have an h-index of 1!
(* Jokapiraatinoikeus, the book I wrote on copyright together with Ahto Apajalahti, had also been previously cited in two Bachelor's-level theses and one Master's thesis, but Google Scholar apparently doesn't understand Finnish theses since they don't appear as citations even though it finds them.)
BOOKS-IN-PROGRESS
* Novel: secret co-written one that I'm not at a liberty to talk much about. But I can probably mention that I wrote about 8000 words of prose for it before we decided that it wasn't working as well as it could and we had to rethink our approach.
* Novel: The City of Light and Fire. Some of you will remember me starting on this in summer. I didn't really have a clear enough idea of where it was going, and the protagonist was too passive for my tastes, so I put it on the back burner while trying to figure out what I wanted to do with it. Some discussions with alicorn24 have given me a bit of an idea, and I might re-work what I have and return to it on Christmas leave.
* Non-fiction book: How human minds differ, or, I need a catchier title (working title). Put up a couple of posts in various places asking people for their experiences, began collecting ideas. Haven't gotten much farther than that, though the LW thread in particular provided a lot of interesting material.
* Non-fiction book: Human thought, or, I need a catchier title even worse (working title). A book on human rationality which is still trying to figure out what its central claim will be. I've been jotting down notes on that for nearly a year now, and each time I write down a new central claim, I note that it's completely different from everything else I've written. The most intriguing approach would be to write about the effect of social norms and the curse of identity on our thought, but I'd need to read up on my social psychology more for that.
OTHER-WRITING-IN-PROGRESS
* A popular article on A) overfitting and AI goals, as well as B) that old "but surely a superintelligent AI would understand that this wasn't what we really wanted" claim. I intended to only write about A, but then I ended up writing five pages worth of B first and still haven't gotten around A. I'm trying to decide whether I should split it in two articles or rearrange the structure somehow.
* I need to finish my LW series on Robert Kurzban's previously-mentioned book.
OTHER PROJECTS
* Secret crazy website project that I'm working on together with a friend. Did a bunch of writing and planning for it, he's been doing programming and planning. We intended to unveil it at the end of last week, but didn't meet that goal.
* I haven't done much progress with regard to overcoming suffering and equanimity lately: in fact, I've lost most of what I did achieve. It seemed like being happy and free from suffering made me less productive, since I was just happy doing nothing, so I've put that on a hold until I figure out how to fix that problem.
COMPLETED SCHOOLWORK
* Made the final decision to change my major to computer science for my Master's degree: applied for the program and was admitted.
* Aced an Operating Systems exam, have two other exams coming up which I expect to pass. I'm currently set to net a total of 12 credits from the fall term, which isn't very impressive given that the official target is 30 credits a term. I should do more school stuff and less of everything else.
|
|
(11 echoes left behind | Leave an echo)
|
| Monday, December 5th, 2011
| |
10:26 am - How is your mind different from everyone else's?
|
I've come to believe that there's a lot more variety in human minds than many naively expect, and I'm thinking about writing either an essay or a book with plenty of examples of such differences. From commonly known and ordinary, like differences in sexual orientation, to the rare and seemingly impossible, like motion blindness. In what ways does your mind differ from what you think is the norm for most people?
I'm particularly interested in differences - small or large - that you didn't realize for a long time, automatically assuming that everyone was like you in that regard. It can even be something as trivial as always having conceptualized the passing of years as a visual timeline, and then finding out that not everyone does so. I'm also interested in links to blog posts where people talk about their own mental peculiarities, even if you didn't write them yourself. Also books and academic articles that you might think could be relevant.
Some of the content that I'm thinking about including are cultural differences in various things as recounted in the WEIRD article, differences in sexual and romantic orientation (such as mono/poly), differences in the ability to recover from setbacks, extroversion vs. introversion in terms of gaining/losing energy from social activity, differences in visualization ability, various cognitive differences ranging from autism to synesthesia to an inability to hear music in particular, differences in moral intuitions, differences in the way people think (visual vs. verbal vs. conceptual vs. something that I'm not aware of yet), differences in thinking styles (social/rational, reflectivity vs. impulsiveness) and various odd brain damage cases.
If you find this project interesting, consider spreading the link to this post or resharing my Google Plus update about it. Also, if you don't want to reply in public, feel free to send me a private message or an e-mail ( xuenay@gmail.com ).
|
|
(3 echoes left behind | Leave an echo)
|
| Monday, November 28th, 2011
| |
2:02 pm - My knowledge as anti-knowledge
|
During my more pessimistic moments, I grow increasingly skeptical about our ability to know anything.
Take science. Academia is supposed to be our most reliable source of knowledge, right? And yet, a number of fields seem to be failing us. Any results shouldn't really be believed before they've been replicated several times. Yet, of the 45 most highly regarded studies within medicine suggesting effective interventions, 11 haven't been retested, and 14 have been shown to be convincingly wrong or exaggarated. John Ioannidis suggests that up to 90 percent of the published medical information that doctors rely on is flawed - and the medical community has for the most accepted most of his findings. ( http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2010/11/lies-damned-lies-and-medical-science/8269/ ) His most cited paper, "Why Most Published Findings Are False" has been cited almost a thousand times.
Psychology doesn't seem to be doing that much better. Last May, the Journal of Personality & Social Psychology refused to publish ( http://psychsciencenotes.blogspot.com/2011/05/failing-to-replicate-bems-ability-to.html ) a failed replication of the parapsychology paper they published earlier. "The reason Smith gives is that JPSP is not in the business of publishing mere replications - it prioritises novel results, and he suggests the authors take their work to other (presumably lesser) journals. This is nothing new - flagship journals like JPSP all have policies in place like this. [...] ...major journals simply won't publish replications. This is a real problem: in this age of Research Excellence Frameworks and other assessments, the pressure is on people to publish in high impact journals. Careful replication of controversial results is therefore good science but bad research strategy under these pressures, so these replications are unlikely to ever get run. Even when they do get run, they don't get published, further reducing the incentive to run these studies next time. The field is left with a series of "exciting" results dangling in mid-air, connected only to other studies run in the same lab."
This problem is not unique to psychology - all fields suffer from it. But while we are on the subject of psychology, the majority of its results are from studies conducted on Western college students, who have been presumed to be representative of humanity. "A recent survey by Arnett (2008) of the top journals in six sub-disciplines of psychology revealed that 68% of subjects were from the US and fully 96% from ‘Western’ industrialized nations (European, North American, Australian or Israeli). That works out to a 96% concentration on 12% of the world’s population (Henrich et al. 2010: 63). Or, to put it another way, you’re 4000 times more likely to be studied by a psychologist if you’re a university undergraduate at a Western university than a randomly selected individual strolling around outside the ivory tower." Yet cross-cultural studies indicate a number of differences between industrialized and "small-scale" societies, in areas such "visual perception, fairness, cooperation, folkbiology, and spatial cognition". There are also a number of contrasts between "Western" and "non-Western" populations "on measures such as social behaviour, self-concepts, self-esteem, agency (a sense of having free choice), conformity, patterns of reasoning (holistic v. analytic), and morality" ( http://neuroanthropology.net/2010/07/10/we-agree-its-weird-but-is-it-weird-enough/ ; http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayAbstract?fromPage=online&aid=7825833 ). Many supposedly "universal" psychological results may actually only be "universal" to US college students.
In any field, quantiative studies require intricate knowledge about statistics and a lot of care to get right. Academics are pressed to publish things at a fast pace, and the reviewers of scientific journals often have relatively low standards. The net result is that the researchers have neither the time nor the incentive to conduct their research with the necessary care.
Qualitative research doesn't suffer from this problem, but it suffers from the obvious problem of often having a limited sample group and difficult-to-generalize findings. Many social sciences that are heavily based on qualitative methods outright state that carrying out an objective analysis, where the researcher's personal attributes and opinions don't influence the results, is not just difficult but impossible in principle. At least with quantiative sciences, it may be possible to convincingly prove results wrong. With qualitative sciences, there is much more wiggle room.
And there's plenty of room for the wiggling to do a lot of damage even in the quantative sciences. From the previous article on John Ioannidis:
"Simply put, if you’re attracted to ideas that have a good chance of being wrong, and if you’re motivated to prove them right, and if you have a little wiggle room in how you assemble the evidence, you’ll probably succeed in proving wrong theories right. His model predicted, in different fields of medical research, rates of wrongness roughly corresponding to the observed rates at which findings were later convincingly refuted: 80 percent of non-randomized studies (by far the most common type) turn out to be wrong, as do 25 percent of supposedly gold-standard randomized trials, and as much as 10 percent of the platinum-standard large randomized trials. The article spelled out his belief that researchers were frequently manipulating data analyses, chasing career-advancing findings rather than good science, and even using the peer-review process, in which journals ask researchers to help decide which studies to publish, to suppress opposing views. "You can question some of the details of John’s calculations, but it’s hard to argue that the essential ideas aren’t absolutely correct," says Doug Altman, an Oxford University researcher who directs the Centre for Statistics in Medicine."
Of course, all of this is not to say that science wouldn't be good for anything. I'm typing this on a computer that obviously works, in an apartment built by human hands, surrounded by countless of technological widgets. The more closely related a science is to a branch of engineering, the more likely it is that it is basically right. Its ideas are constantly and rigorously being tested in a way that actually incentivizes being right, not just publishing impressive-looking studies. The farther out a science is from engineering and from having practical applications that can be tested at once, the more likely it is that it's just full of nonsense.
Take governmental institutions. Academia, at least, still has some incentive to seek the truth. Meanwhile, politicians have an incentive to look good to voters, who by and large do not care about the truth. The issues that citizens care the most strongly about tend to be the issues that they know the least about, and often they do not even know the political agendas of the parties or politicians that they vote for. For the average voter, who has very little influence on actual decisions but who can take a lot of pleasure from believing things that are actually pleasant to believe, remaining ignorant is actually a rational course of action. Statements that sound superficially good or that appeal to the predjudices of a certain segment of the population are much more important for politicians than actually caring about the truth. Often, even considering a politically unpopular opinion to be possibly true is thought to be immoral and suggestive of a suspicious character.
And various governmental institutions, from academics funded by government funds to supposedly neutral public institutions are all suspect to pressures from above to sound good and produce pleasing results. The official recommendations of any number of government agencies can be the result of political compromise as much as anything else, and researchers are routinely hired to act as the politicians' warriors ( http://www.overcomingbias.com/2011/01/academics-as-warriors.html ). Even seemingly apolitical institutions like schools and the police may fall victim to the pressure to produce good results and start reporting statistics and results that do not reflect reality. (For a particularly good illustration of this, watch all five seasons of The Wire, possibly the best television series ever made.)
Take the media. Is there any reason to expect the media to do much better? I don't see why there would be. Compared to academia, journalists are under even more time pressure to produce articles, have even less in the way of rigorous controls on truthfulness, and have even more of an incentive to focus on big eye-catching headlines. Even for the journalists who actually follow strict codes of ethics, the incentives for sloppy work are strong. Anybody who has an expertise in pretty much any field that's been reported on will know that what's written often has very little resemblance to reality.
Some time ago, there were big claims about how Twitter was powering revolutions and protests in a number of authoritarian countries. Many of us have probably accepted those claims as fact. But how true are they, really?
"In the Iranian case, meanwhile, the people tweeting about the demonstrations were almost all in the West. 'It is time to get Twitter’s role in the events in Iran right,' Golnaz Esfandiari wrote, this past summer, in Foreign Policy. 'Simply put: There was no Twitter Revolution inside Iran.' The cadre of prominent bloggers, like Andrew Sullivan, who championed the role of social media in Iran, Esfandiari continued, misunderstood the situation. 'Western journalists who couldn’t reach - or didn’t bother reaching? - people on the ground in Iran simply scrolled through the English-language tweets post with tag #iranelection,' she wrote. 'Through it all, no one seemed to wonder why people trying to coordinate protests in Iran would be writing in any language other than Farsi.'" ( http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/10/04/101004fa_fact_gladwell )
Take the Internet. Online, we are increasingly living in filter bubbles ( http://www.ted.com/talks/eli_pariser_beware_online_filter_bubbles.html ; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filter_bubble ), where the services we use attempt to personalize the information we read to what they think we want to see. Maybe you've specifically gone to the effort of including both liberals and conservatives as your Facebook friends, as you want to be exposed to the opinions of both. But if you predominantly click on the liberal links, then eventually the conservative updates will be invisibly edited out by Facebook's algorithms, and you will only see liberal updates in your feed. Various sites are increasingly using personalization techniques, trying to only offer us content they think we want to see - which is often the content most likely to appeal to our existing opinions.
Take yourself. Depressed by all of the above? Think you should only trust yourself? Unfortunately, that might very well produce even worse results than trusting science. We are systematically biased to favorably misremember events, only seek evidence confirming our beliefs, and interpret everything in our own favor. Our conscious minds may not be evolved to look for the truth at all, but to choose of various defensible positions the one that the most favors ourselves. ( http://lesswrong.com/lw/8gv/the_curse_of_identity/ ; http://lesswrong.com/tag/whyeveryonehypocrite ) Our minds run on corrupted hardware: even as we think we are trying to impartially look for the truth, other parts of our brains are working hard to give us that impression while hiding the actual biased thought processes we engage in. We have conscious access to only a small part of our thought processes, and have to rely on countless amounts of information prepared by cognitive mechanisms whose accuracy we have no way of verifying directly. Science, at least, has _some_ safeguards in place that attempt to counter such mechanisms - in most cases, we will still do best by relying on expert opinion.
"But if you plan to mostly ignore the experts and base your beliefs on your own analysis, you need to not only assume that ideological bias has so polluted the experts as to make them nearly worthless, but you also need to assume that you are mostly immune from such problems!" ( http://www.overcomingbias.com/2011/02/against-diy-academics.html )
----
Most of the things I know are probably wrong: with each thing I think I learn, I might be learning falsehoods instead. Because the criteria for an idea catching on and for an idea to be true are different, the ideas that a person is the more likely to hear about are ones that are more likely to be wrong. Thus most of the things I run across in my life (and accept as facts) will be wrong.
And of course, I'm quite aware of the irony in that I have here appealed to a number of sources, all of which might very well be wrong. I hope I'm wrong about being wrong, but I can't count on it.
(Essay also cross-posted to Google Plus.)
|
|
(1 echo left behind | Leave an echo)
|
| Thursday, November 10th, 2011
| |
11:29 am - Recommendations for everything
|
The biggest problem with enjoying good forms of art is finding them. I'm certain that the world is already full of top-quality works that would let me fill my entire spare time with nothing but nonstop moments of awesomeness, if I only knew what they were.
This is, of course, a well-known problem. And there are various recommendation systems that try to figure out your tastes and suggest other things that you might enjoy. Last.fm provides suggestions about music, Netflix has its famous recommendation system for movies, Amazon recommends books plus other products the site sells, et cetera. But there is - at least as far as I know - no recommendation system for e.g. fan fiction.
Having several different recommendation systems seems wasteful. On the other hand, yes, if you build a system for only music, then it's easier to tune it exactly to the domain of musical recommendations, using a variety of rules that only make sense for music. But on the other hand, it seems like at least some of your preferences in one domain ought to be correlated to your preferences in another domain. If you listen to lots of sappy romance songs, then perhaps you'd also like to read some romance novels. Or if you buy a lot of fantasy RPG books, maybe you'd like some fantasy art. With more information available, it would be easier to identify your tastes and anything that made you different from the median romance or fantasy fan.
So I would like to have a recommendation system for everything: books, music, movies, computer games, scholarly papers, fan fiction, amateur fantasy CGI art, adult pictures, IRC channels, interesting people or hobby groups in your neighborhood, you name it. I could just specify a category, and the system would throw out a number of suggestions.
This would, of course, require an immense amount of information to produce anything worthwhile. But that information is already being collected, it is just not available in one place. Google and Facebook already have immense amounts of information about what the tastes and preferred websites of many people. One of them could partner with e.g. Amazon, Last.fm and other similar sites to combine the user information to one big recommendation engine.
Alternatively, many of the existing recommendation sites already offer APIs or other ways for third-party sites to pull the existing information. If they don't already offer it, they might be persuaded to do so. This opens up the possibility for a start-up built around the "recommend anything" concept, whose users could just specify the sites they wanted their information to be taken from.
Obviously there are various privacy considerations to take into account. At a minimum, no information should be shared between two separate services without the explicit permission of the user. Amazon shouldn't be allowed to turn over your shopping history to Google unless you specifically asked it to do so.
Still, if such hurdles could be overcome, and the recommendation system could be made to work well, it could become absolutely awesome. No more wondering of "I'm bored, what would entertain me?" ever again.
|
|
(3 echoes left behind | Leave an echo)
|
| Tuesday, November 8th, 2011
| |
9:14 am - Sturgeon and his political corrolaries
|
Sturgeon's law: 90% of everything is crap.
Political sturgeon's law: 90% of all the arguments offered in the support of any given ideology or movement are crap.
The fish-shooting corollary: 99% of all the arguments made against any ideology or movement attack the crappy 90% of arguments, never bothering to engage with the quality ones.
The ignorance corollary: You have never even heard the good reasons for supporting most of the ideologies or movements you've rejected as obviously wrong.
|
|
(1 echo left behind | Leave an echo)
|
| Wednesday, October 26th, 2011
| |
3:28 pm - Shun offensive things: always, never, sometimes?
|
Suppose that taking offense is something that you do in response to something that you think lowers the status of either you, your group, or something that you hold dear. Now there are two extremes as to how to respond to possibly offensive things, both of them wrong:
1. Shun anything that could cause offense to anyone. This is wrong because it would unreasonably restrict communication, because people can perceive something to lower their status when it doesn't, and it would allow status grabs where groups decide what you're allowed to say by arbitrarily defining things they don't like as "offensive".
2. Say that being offended is your own fault, and maintain that anyone should be free to say anything they like, regardless of whether it offends someone. This is wrong because some words or expressions, when used in certain contexts, do genuinely attack people or groups by lowering their perceived status. Social norms that were offense-blind would strenghten existing status differences.
The challenge is finding social norms that are balanced between these two. E.g. slurs against a genuinely high-status group are more acceptable than slurs against a low-status group, but the status of a social group is constantly changing and different people have different ideas of a social group's status.
Suppose that person X says something that offends person Y, but X thinks what she said was fine. This could be because of two reasons:
A. X does think that her words might lower the status of Y's group, but Y's group does deserve to be taken down a notch.
B. X genuinely did not intend her words to lower the status of Y's group, and thinks that most listeners wouldn't think that she did.
In the case of e.g. offensive drawings of Mohammed, either or both reasons could be true. X might think that all religions should be mocked because religion is for idiots (A). Alternatively, X might think that all religions get mocked but that doesn't make them less valuable and important (B). Or X might think that yes, this does take lower a religion's status, but only because that religion's adherents have given it such a high status to start with. If they didn't (in X's mind) unreasonably privilege their own beliefs, they'd have no reason to be offended by an assertion that their religion is of no higher status than any other belief (A&B).
Online, it often seems to be the case that people fall prey to the illusion of transparency. If you're with a group of friends who know you well, then it can be safe to say potentially offensive things, since your friends either share your opinion of the other group's status, or know that you don't mean any harm. But if you speak online, where not everybody does know you or your friends, then they cannot know what your intentions were.
People who go with the general strategy of shunning anything offensive tend to presume that reason A is always (or most often) the only right one, while people who think everyone should be free to say anything tend to presume that reason B is always (or most often) the only right one. I don't think either assumption is right.
|
|
(13 echoes left behind | Leave an echo)
|
| Saturday, July 16th, 2011
| |
7:32 pm - Plussery
|
I'm on Google Plus these days. Recommended: it's much better than Facebook.
Feel free to add me if you wish.
|
|
(Leave an echo)
|
| |
5:04 pm - Equanimity thoughts
|
Recently I've been trying to become consistently more happy and suffer less. An important component of this involves reaching a state of equanimity - "a state of mental or emotional stability or composure arising from a deep awareness and acceptance of the present moment", to use the Wikipedia definition. Although I have several techniques for overcoming negative feelings, it often happens that I'm simply not motivated enough to use them. In other words, I feel bad, and I know I could make myself feel better with some effort, but I just don't feel like mustering that effort.
By contrast, if I've managed to reach a state of equanimity, managing and dissolving negative feelings is something that happens almost on its own. While I'm not immune to emotional hurt, say, it's much easier to take care of. Things like practicing mindfulness on any sort of discomfort becomes almost automatic when in equanimious.
Getting into equanimity isn't always easy, even when I want to. Exercise and cold showers help in making me feel physically good, which helps. Ultimately, though, I need to think the right way.
There are a number of thoughts that I've noticed help me get into a state of equanimity. Not every one always works, which is why I've developed a number of them. If I have access to them all, usually at least one will work.
During the last month or two, my Enlightenment progress has stalled, and on most days I haven't been equanimious at all. Part of this, I think, has been because I forgot pretty much all of these thoughts. Every now and then some of them has come back to me, and sometimes it has helped for a day or two before it stopped working again. I finally realized I needed to compile a list of all such thoughts that I've used. This should help me to always have available *some* thought that might work in that state of mind.
I've divided these in three categories.
No self: Negative emotions arise from drawing a boundary between self and non-self. When one abandons the thought of a separate self that has to be defended from a hostile external world, emotions such as fear or uncertainty vanish.
No time: The need to defend yourself only exists if there is a chance that things will get worse in the future. Likewise, being impatient about something, or wanting desperately to experience something, only makes sense if it is combined with a notion of time passing. When one abandons a time-centered perspective and concentrates on the present, emotions such as fear or impatience vanish. When the present is the only moment that exists, my thought often goes, I should take heed and enjoy it.
No care: Suffering arises from identifying so strongly with your emotions that you cannot resolve attention-allocation conflicts. If you have a strong emotional attachment to eating expensive chocolate bananas on one hand, and on principle avoiding all chocolate on the other, you cannot reason your way out of such a conflict. When one stops identifying with their emotions but instead embraces them as useful feedback, the suffering related to negative emotions vanishes.
And here are the actual thoughts. Although listed as separate, some of these are overlapping and some build on each other. In particular, several of the "no time" theories presume parts of the "no self" theories. Some might also seem to somewhat contradict each other, but I don't think they ultimately do: they're simply based on different levels of analysis.
I don't really have the space or energy to comprehensively explain these all, so I'm not sure how much sense they will make to people. Still, maybe someone will find something useful here nonetheless.
- No self, psychological: There is no Cartesian Theater or homonculus, sitting in the center of the brain and running things. To take some specific part of the brain and call it "THE self" is not scientifically justified. Instead, there is only a vast collection of different subsystems, producing quite a variety of selves.
- No self, Occam's Razorical: It makes little sense to talk of an observer in the brain that is the one that observes everything. What would the positing of such an observer add to any theories? It makes more sense to say that there are various cognitive algorithms, which produce qualia as a side-effect of being run. Instead of there existing somebody who observes all the qualia produced by the brain, there are only the qualia which observe themselves and then cease to exist. If so, it makes little sense to identify with the qualia produced by my brain in particular. Instead I can identify with the qualia of all life everywhere. (I previously wrote about this view here, under "the self as how the algorithm feels from the inside".)
- No self, system-theoretical: To speak of a 'self' as separate from the environment makes little sense. My identity is defined by my environment. If all of my physical properties were held constant, you could make me think or do anything by choosing an appropriate environment to match. I'm part of a vast distributed cognitive system, and drawing the boundaries of self strictly around the physical shell housing my body makes little sense. (I previously wrote about this view here, under "the self as lack of personal boundaries".)
- No time, psychological: My mind can only act in the present. I can imagine the future, or remember the past, but both of these involve thought processes that operate in the now. I live in an eternal present.
- No time, physical multiverse: Depending on which Tegmarkian multiverses are real, all physically possible worlds exist or all logically possible worlds exist. Then, no matter what I wish to experience or what I fear, in some part of the multiverse I am already experiencing it. If I identify not with a specific observer but with qualia, then I'll know that I already have everything I could ever wish for, as well as already suffering from everything I could ever dread.
- No time, physical block: In a block universe conception of time, the whole universe already exists as an unmoving four-dimensional block. Time does not pass in the sense of the current me ceasing to exist and being replaced with another me after a moment passes: instead, this me, and all the other mes, exist eternally.
- No time, logical: If I identify with specific qualia instead of specific observers, then the qualia that "I am experiencing" (rather, the qualia which I am) at this very moment is the only qualia which I can be. Anything else would be a different qualia. Therefore, the me that exists at this very moment is the only logically possible one that I can be.
- No care, psychological: Our emotional reactions to anything are just an interpretative layer imposed by our brain, our emotions in general a mechanism to guide our action. They do not exist outside our brain. There is no inherent reason for why I should react to something with anger, and to something else with fear, and to something else with joy. In principle, I can choose to feel any emotion in conjunction with anything that I do or experience. (I previously discussed this view here.)
- No care, projective: All emotions exist within me. To think that somebody external pressures me, say, is incorrect to the extent that it assumes an external force. What is happening that others are activating processes that reside within me, and to ascribe them as pressuring me is projection.
- No care, philosophical: I can dis-identify with any thoughts or emotions that come into my mind. Instead of saying "I am angry", I can say "I'm hosting a feeling of anger as a visitor in my mind right now". I have desires, emotions and thoughts, but I am not my desires, emotions or thoughts. (This is the basis of at least some sort of mindfulness practice, which I previously discussed here.)
----
These might give you the impression that nothing matters and you might as well lay in bed until you die. Not so. Even if every possible experience exists, not all of them exist in the same proportion. If it did, we would not observe the kind of a regular, ordered universe that we do, but instead a chaotic, unpredictable universe [1]. Therefore our actions still matter and have consequences - it all adds up to normality.
It is still meaningful for me to have goals which I seek to accomplish - even if were logically, psychologically and physically impossible for "this" particular entity to experience their completion, some "other" entity will still reap their benefits. (Our language is not very well designed to handle self-lessness.) And of course, if I identify with all the qualia experienced with all sentient life everywhere in the world, the fact that this particular set of qualia will only be this set forever doesn't matter. I want my efforts to be happy and free of suffering to have as big of an effect as possible.
I think I'll stop here, in case I still have the occasional reader or two who considers me somehow sane.
[1] I should be more specific here. Yes, if all possible experiences exist, then it is logically necessary that *some* of those experiences would still be about a regular, predictable universe, regardless of whether the universe actually was chaotic or not. But there would only exist a small number of such experiences, while far more of them would exist if there was a more regular weighting. Therefore, given that "I" observe a regular universe, the subjective probability that I exist in one is higher.
Regardless of what kind of a theory we select, it has to be one that still allows probability theory to be meaningful. If it didn't, then nothing we did mattered, and we don't want that, now do we? Again, it should still add up to normality.
See e.g. here or here for views on how to make probability theory function even in a Big universe.
|
|
(Leave an echo)
|
| Monday, July 11th, 2011
| |
10:20 pm - The City of Light and Fire, III
|
-4-
I followed my companion through twisting tunnels. There was an even warmth in them, and the walls were lined with balls of fire, each separated by the same distance. At no point did I see a window.
We met few others on the way. I saw the occasional glimpse of small creatures, a head shorter than me. I could not say much about them, for they seemed fearful and quickly ducked out of sight. My companion did not speak, nor did he react to the creatures in any way. I wondered whether we were nobles of some kind, or whether the creatures were just generally jumpy. Slowly, more thoughts came into mind.
Something seemed to be missing in my thoughts. I saw something duck away from the corridor, and the notion of us maybe being nobles came to mind. But although I knew what nobles were, I could not recall any examples. It occurred to me to ponder what else I might know. But when I tried to ask myself this, there was only a silence in my mind. I could only think of the things that had already occurred to me.
The cut left by the knife had already closed, but it was still aching. My fingers were drawn to the scar, gently caressing it. I glanced at my companion, but he did not seem to notice.
This was the first scar in my life. I studied that thought, curious to know if it would lead me anywhere else. Then something seemed to move within me. It was as if the idea of a first thing floated in my skull, calling its kin to it. From somewhere in my chest, other ideas leapt up one by one, to join the one waiting in the skull. The natural follower of a first thing was the idea of a second thing, joined by the idea of a third thing, and then the fourth, and then the fifth, and so on, each of them coming faster and faster until I could no longer name one before the next was already there.
I looked down at my hands, and now I saw that I had two of them, each with five fingers. I remembered the idea of numbers, and of counting. And while I could not come up with memories of having counted other things before, I could count the things that I saw now. I found the distance between fireballs in the wall to be about six steps, and I counted about seventy fireballs before we arrived at a door. My companion glanced at me and then spoke, and I counted what might have been three words.
Unlike what I expected, this time none of the cavities in me could catch my companion's sounds. There was something different in them now, a strange shape. The sounds bounced around in me, but failed to find a hole in which they would fit. With nothing to keep them alive, they quickly disappeared. By the time I realized this, the door had opened. I was told to step inside, and again I observed as my body obeyed the command.
It was a large chamber. I paused to take it in. The floor was curved, slanting down until it suddenly grew flat and cold. I could hear dripping sounds from all around me, tiny things falling down from dozens of spots in the ceiling. They made a sound each time they hit the flatness, causing a ripple of temperature that quickly faded. I could see that some of the falling drops were cold, some of them warm. The flatness covered most of the room.
”This is a cavern of memory”, my companion said. He had gone back to using the other sounds, the ones I had cavities for. ”One of many. In each one, water from the city is allowed to mingle with the blood of the prophets, both mixing in a lake to make sightwater. I'll show you the purpose that you exist for. Follow me, and be careful not to fall in.”
With me in tow, he walked to the edge of the lake and kneeled. He raised his right hand and pushed it into the sightwater, submerging everything up to his wrist. He was quiet for a while before he spoke.
”Put your hand in. You're going to feel faint when you do, so make sure you're stable first.”
I sat down, then touched the sightwater myself. When I did, my sight grew hazy. The warmths of various objects in my vision seemed to bleed into each other, becoming hard to make out. I gasped. Had I still been standing, I would have stumbled.
”I'm showing you a piece of my memory. For a moment, you'll become a light-seer, just as I.”
Almost as soon as he had stopped talking, I was him. I was standing in a vast hall, filled with things of all kinds. There were slabs of heatstone, breathing statues of lifeclay, deathblade swords that could cut anything in two in an instant. There were weapons, there were basic necessities, there were luxuries. A large bowl with exotic, intelligent fish; a gem that would stop you from aging, for as long as you carried it with you; drops of a liquid that could only be made at great expense, with no other purpose than to show off your wealth. I saw everything in light-colors. Even in the memory, most of things were ones that I did not recognize.
In the middle of it all, looking around them, were many humans. I hid behind a statue and watched as men and women with feathery wings walked among the humans. They were the harpies, and I could not help but to have my eye drawn to them, their faces and their bodies. They stood a head taller than the humans, and their voices were no less beautiful than their looks. Clear and soft, deep and captivating, each of them spoke in a different manner, but the meaning of their words was always the same. They spoke of the marvels of the things on sale, the exquisite care that had gone into making them, the way they could change the buyer's life. Many humans were led off from the others, one by one or in small groups, to hear more about some specific wonder. The humans made hesitating offers, and the harpies laughed in delight, quick to place a counter-offer.
”Look well at those harpies.” Through the memory, I heard my companion's voice, the voice which felt like it ought to belong to me. ”All the goods we make, they sell. The humans will make offers, now. But before any deals are closed, the harpies will take them to eat, to be bathed, to sate their lower desires. At least for a while, a single harpy can make a hundred beings happy.”
”Look, at them.” There was a sudden feeling of my back being shoved forwards. Still immersed in the memory, it took me a second to realize my companion had pushed me into the water.
The startle and the reality of where I was pushed rudely into the memory. A momentary sensation of panic, confusion over two senses of a body mixing together. A splash, my real body falling into the sightwater, coldness assaulting me on all sides.
”The harpies!”
The words sent my mind back inside the memory, the transition as sharp and visceral as my sudden submersion. And suddenly my companion's need became my own; a desire to imprison some of the harpies, bring them to where goods were made. I did not know why this was so important, but it could not be questioned. The makers needed the harpies; the harpies would not come voluntarily. So they would have to be brought by force.
”Good.”
I could sense my companion grabbing me, dragging me out of the water. I wanted the same thing he did, now.
But the shock had dislodged something in me. A roar of urgency, which for the briefest moment awakened a distant memory of hurricanes. There was something I still had to see, something I might never again see otherwise. Something my companion did not know about.
Again I saw a harpy, one of the many in the memory. But this one was special. It had locked gazes with someone who looked like a human woman, but was something else. As I turned my attention to the human, her skin and flesh melted away, revealing the shape of a lifestone tower below. She was something the towers had created, something that was disguised as a human. My companion had never seen her for what she was, but I had reacted to the signs.
I did not see the tower-woman's eyes, but I knew she was watching me, saying something. The sounds hit me, one after another, physical hits like throwing knives. I did not have the right cavities for them, but they burrowed themselves deeply in my skull, waiting for the time when I would.
Find the key to our words. You are a servant of the tower. That much I understood. The obsession to do so imprinted itself in me, like the obsession to find the harpies had done.
Then there a was a forceful pull, and my body was out of the sightwater. I saw in patterns of cold and hot again. I cried, curling up like a ball. My companion was breathing heavily, but he seemed satisfied. I did not think he realized something unexpected had happened.
That was my final thought before the blackness came.
|
|
(Leave an echo)
|
|
|
|
|
