Thursday, May 31, 2018

Who are the strangers in your dreams?

You're not crazy. There is a bot working behind the scenes.

Experimenters have shown us that electronics are an order of magnitude faster than neurons at making connections, so --- how is the brain so fast?

Think for a minute about how many things you can do at the same time. Think harder, and you'll notice that with training, the brain can estimate an original premise, then modify all the arguments which depend on the premise on the fly. You can see the immense powers of abstraction the brain has merely by listening to music, observing a work of art...
...or acknowledging the immensity of a project resulting from a simple question: "What do I need to do to put somebody on the Moon and bring them back?"

So, the brain is capable of forming multiple pathways on the fly to solve a problem it has become responsible for solving. One can even enlist the aid of other, like-minded brains to work on the nuances of any problem suited to them.

"OK, genius, get to the point," you said. OK:

You have an avatar in your head for every person you've ever cared about, and this avatar can be considered alive.

You use the general pattern of behavior you have observed in others, as manifested in these avatars, to endow images of persons you've never met with imagined behavior patterns.


Immense abstractive power is present in the alert individual to predict adverse conditions, such as attacks offered through the environment. Be it weather or a rival tribesman, the brain can figure out ahead of time what might happen, and prepare. 

This is a survival trait.

You have an innate power to recognize hazardous conditions, and your memories are both extensive and non-verbalized due to their complexity. You have extensive memories of normal human behavior, a sort of Identification, Friend or Foe, and specific memories of the significant people in your life. You remember what they look like, how they walked and talked, how they acted, what they smelled like at different stages of their lives. This also includes other conditions like those found in your neighborhood and car. The sound of rain on the roof. How the lawn smelled when the dew fell.

There are thousands of scenarios you can consciously recall, and others waiting to be brought out into the open by a trigger of some kind. Can you say, "deja vu"?

It is a trivial thing for your brain to populate any dream with realistic people because the rules for normal human appearance are ingrained. The mechanism is the exact same thing that has you running from a poorly-lit shape in the night.
That rule is: unfamiliar = threat.
The rule in your dream is: "People look like {this}."
The rule for a person about whom you fantasize is: "Person should act like {this}."

There is more!

All the loved ones that have influenced your life are "indexed" in your mind well enough that you know, not only what they look like, but what they would say or do given any particular situation.

Your eyes take an image to be processed by the brain, and the visual cortex is huge
You know about optical illusions. Magicians know dozens of ways to fool your brain with physical illusion. Why would you think you actually have to see something for the brain to work with it?

Grandma isn't seeing ghosts. Her memories are so intense that she can see her memories vividly by contrast with the tamer life she actually leads. She wants desperately to see the people and do the things she remembers.

The power of abstraction is so large that people frequently substitute fantasy for reality in order to feel better, because learning, basically the integration of reality into the mind, is often unrewarding, especially when compared to the comfort we imagine seeing our loved ones bringing. 

As long as we remember the difference which ALWAYS exists between reality and our perception of it, we can avoid costly mistakes.

Thursday, March 8, 2018

Of Marjorie Stoneman Douglas High School, LIES and Reasoning Deficit Disorder


Dear Students:  

You have been lied to.

Your own parents, grandparents perhaps... guardians, aunts, uncles, teachers, your representatives in government, the police and everyone else you have looked up to at this point... have lied to you. They have provided many things for you so that you could be comfortable at all times, on the street, in the mall.

At school.

Then, they all promised you would be safe - just trust them.

And then, some overmedicated psychotic with a rifle arrived at that school - and proved to you that you really didn't have any sort of security. You are NOT "safe". Even the police just sat there as he shot you - and every gunshot spoke the truth.

The truth? What the hell can a gunshot say? This:

There is no such thing as a "safe space".

Rough men willing to do violence on your behalf have successfully defended you for years - so successfully that other people near you decided that there just wasn't anything mean or dangerous to defend against. Not only were defenses lowered, they weren't raised again as the country itself changed - as "entertainment" mutated into watching some thug grab his crotch and shout obscenities. As "the people" morphed from citizens into consumers, greedy for the Next Great Instant Gratification, shouting, "Me! Me! Me!", discarding the idea that they were responsible for... anything.

This might surprise you, but clear up into the 1970s, it wasn't any sort of big deal to see a gun at school. They were just interesting machines. We The People didn't shoot anybody, because that just wasn't done. It wouldn't be fair or just. The gun wasn't blamed for anything, because it was (and is!) obvious that no gun can act on its own.
What could be evil about a thing that burns tree bark (not kidding here, that's what basic gunpowder is made from) to throw a piece of lead?
Why, nothing.

The gun has been around for over 400 years, with "modern" designs dating back over 120; they have also been far more available than they are now. I have an ad from 1958 for a Solothern™ 20mm cannon, with ammunition. Yes, you could have bought it - for less than $200, through the mail. No one would ask you who you were, much less what you were going to do with it.

So what happened? Once, life was understood to be important, and that the lives of others meant something to us. Now? Not so much for many people, who have been shown, not just told, that things and money come from government, they are not earned, and so there is no purpose to be had in their lives. Why should you be responsible for property when government will replace it if it is lost? Why be responsible at all?
Where's my check?

It is a modern issue that some Americans want absolutely nothing to do with responsibility. They will do anything to shift blame from themselves and/or to try to get another chance to escape responsibility. They also wish to do what they please without accountability, and they resist learning - so the lessons of history, which show us what happens when the people cry to be taken care of, remain unlearned.

So:
• A desire for instant gratification
• A desire to escape responsibility and the real work of learning
• Ignorance of the consequences of leading a life of excuses as to why others should act...

...produced a generation incapable of understanding the real world - which is still a jungle, though it has buildings in it. This generation has been pimped out by opportunists seeking to enrich themselves at the public's expense - yes, the political class.

The incessant crying about this issue has made me think that there is an affliction, a disease, I will call Reasoning Deficit Disorder because of its similarity to Alzheimer's.
As you know, the victims of Alzheimer's know that they cannot make themselves understood and can feel their faculties diminishing. It is reasonable that others displaying emotional infirmity might have a similar problem.
How may it be spotted? Well, consider this: people horrified by the shooting at MSDHS, in Florida, are actually calling for people just like themselves to be disarmed nationwide, in the mistaken idea that criminals will then not be able to get guns like the AR-15* the shooter used there. Such people do not notice that the very same system that fed their living bodies to that lunatic is the one they are now counting on to protect them!

• Cops didn't protect me, so
• Let's make it so only cops have guns

There's where public ignorance of history shows up. Those who study history, or who are merely aware of it, are acutely aware of what a police state looks like (hint: only the police and Army have guns), and therefore, who benefits from the presence of the 2nd Amendment: the citizen.

Question: can you name the purpose and the actual job of the NRA?

The aware know that Federal laws regarding gun possession, as opposed to ownership, are routinely ignored. Yes, your police disregard existing law because it's inconvenient. See someone with a warrant on {Cops, LivePD, On Patrol: Live, pick one} carrying a gun? That's supposed to bring mandatory jail time. Nope!
It isn't a gun, any kind of gun, that has changed - it is the people, conditioned so completely by buying stories inciting fear, that they will surrender everything just to get that promise of safety back. Having been told that shackles on them make them "safe", they cry to be shackled further. For "safety".
As we have seen - it doesn't have to be real safety. It just has to look like it, like the TSA groping passengers.

I include a couple of links that elaborate on the issue so as to save space here...
• It's Elementary - And Not Just A School Shooting
• Larry Correia, Firearms Expert, After The Sandy Hook Incident (includes a video)
• Larry Correia Explains Why The Second Amendment Is A Universal American Right

I include this link to the Federal Form 4473 PDF because many people have shown they do not know what has to happen to buy a gun from a dealer in the USA and its territories.

Note
: I am registered "Unaffiliated", not Dem, Rep or Lib, and I am not a member of the NRA. You might have to invent an excuse not to learn from this post.

* - chances are, you do not know just how many guns are functionally identical to the AR-15, whatever you have been told an AR-15 is, so you might have work to do to make your opinion worth anything.