Emergent humanoid robotics

hanson einstein face [see below]

There are no doubt many patent hurdles and other impracticalities to hinder the following ideas. I just play with things and then move on, which is why I'm a dilettante proofreader rather than something more focused, but also why I'm [probably] happier this way.

Three different robot stories. The first is from Hanson Robotics, seen below in this recent TED clip. They try and make robots with human faces. It looks like animatronic / Disney stuff, but there seems to be more going on, or almost going on. The model shown in the video [Einstein, not the doll face in the frozen shot] can mirror what people are doing - you smile, it smiles. There seems to be a pretty fine level of control of the motorized musculature underneath the realistic looking skin, and although it obviously needs more work, the future has a lot of time.



What caught my attention was this mirroring, which is based on being able to read faces, and so these machines should be able to read microexpressions and basically be loaded up with all of Paul Ekman's work.

The next video won't embed, but it's from an article at BotJunkie called Robots Learn to Look Shifty. Basically the robot, under certain conditions, can use eye movements to give cues that human subjects respond to but don't consciously pick up. The two projects are separate, but they could be easily be joined together.

And the third video, below, shows how motion capture can be used to create a more natural moving humanoid robot, with this one particularly good at swiveling its hips.



The point is that robotics seems to be full of seemingly isolated projects that aim to do one small thing very well, and usually one thing that on its own is cool but not that useful. But one day all of this technology could be integrated into one machine, which would obviously be connected to the Internet so that it could run many apps and access all data. Out of all of these projects something bigger will emerge.

I had a post about emergent AI a while ago, based on the idea that there's no center of consciousness in the brain, but that we emerge from the interaction of many simple processes [Minsky's society of the mind], so that the full complexity of their interactions undertakes a phase transition to another order of simplicity in consciousness, which can only hold a few bits of data at a time and is essentially creating useful half-truths out of a torrent of data that has been entirely reconstructed in the brain. The astonishing hypothesis is just how things are.

What's true of robotics is true in the field of AI - a lot of researchers working on small things that one day may come together and then something else occurs. But it struck me the other day that computers do not need an unconscious and perhaps therefore not a consciousness. In the small space required for cunning we don't act entirely on instinct, but we also need to filter all the data down to the essentials. A computer wouldn't need to do this - bandwidth isn't a problem, it can hold a lot of information in its working memory and access it all in practically an instant. So the nature of consciousness, if it emerged, would have to be different. I quoted Hofstader a little while ago, and I'll do it in full again, as it serves my purpose here:

When and only when such a loop arises in the brain or in any other substrate, is a person - a unique new "I" - brought into being. Moreover, the more self-referentially rich such a loop is, the more conscious is the self to which it gives rise. Yes, shocking though this might sound, consciousness is not an on/off phenomenon, but admits of degrees, grades, shades. To put it more bluntly, there are bigger souls and smaller souls.

Douglas Hofstadter, Godel, Escher, Bach, P-6

The point being would such loops arising on a large, distributed computer connected to sensors, RFID tags and so on have access to a bigger soul? I don't see why not, and then that would be available everywhere, in all machines plugged into the mind.

Blade Runner - Voight-Kampff Test

Traces of thought

A computer simulation of the upper layer of a rat brain neocortical column. Dr. Pablo de Heras Ciechomski/Visualbiotech

These images, and their captions, come from an article introducing a project to simulate part of a rat's brain, to be scaled up to a whole brain and later put into a robot with legs. Excerpts below, full link at the bottom.

In the basement of a university in Lausanne, Switzerland sit four black boxes, each about the size of a refrigerator, and filled with 2,000 IBM microchips stacked in repeating rows.
...
This is Blue Brain. The name of the supercomputer is literal: Each of its microchips has been programmed to act just like a real neuron in a real brain. The behavior of the computer replicates, with shocking precision, the cellular events unfolding inside a mind.
...
The first phase of the project—“the feasibility phase”—is coming to a close. The skeptics, for the most part, have been proven wrong. It took less than two years for the Blue Brain supercomputer to accurately simulate a neocortical column, which is a tiny slice of brain containing approximately 10,000 neurons, with about 30 million synaptic connections between them.
...
In fact, the model is so successful that its biggest restrictions are now technological. “We have already shown that the model can scale up,” Markram says. “What is holding us back now are the computers.” The numbers speak for themselves. Markram estimates that in order to accurately simulate the trillion synapses in the human brain, you’d need to be able to process about 500 petabytes of data (peta being a million billion, or 10 to the fifteenth power). That’s about 200 times more information than is stored on all of Google’s servers.
...
“There’s no reason why you can’t get inside Blue Brain,” Markram says. “Once we can model a brain, we should be able to model what every brain makes. We should be able to experience the experiences of another mind.”
...
“There is nothing inherently mysterious about the mind or anything it makes,” Markram says. “Consciousness is just a massive amount of information being exchanged by trillions of brain cells. If you can precisely model that information, then I don’t know why you wouldn’t be able to generate a conscious mind.”

Full article at seedmagazine.com

An entire neocortical column lights up with electrical activity. Modeled on a two-week-old rodent brain, this 0.5 mm by 2 mm slice is the basic computational unit of the brain and contains about 10,000 neurons. Visualbiotech.

Related post: Other substrates

Other substrates

Order-3 heptakis heptagonal tiling by Claudio Rocchini

When and only when such a loop arises in the brain or in any other substrate, is a person - a unique new "I" - brought into being. Moreover, the more self-referentially rich such a loop is, the more conscious is the self to which it gives rise. Yes, shocking though this might sound, consciousness is not an on/off phenomenon, but admits of degrees, grades, shades. To put it more bluntly, there are bigger souls and smaller souls.

Douglas Hofstadter, Godel, Escher, Bach, P-6,

Confessions of a mask

The theory of self-deception was foreshadowed by the sociologist Erving Goffman in his 1959 book The Presentation of the Self in Everyday Life, which disputed the romantic notion that behind the masks we show other people is the one true self. No, said Goffman; it's masks all the way down. Many discoveries in the ensuing decades have borne him out.

Steven Pinker, The Blank Slate, p264

Self similar and out of sight

Ringo playing bongos, Paul and someone else in the glass

When my friend John started going to the Bronx High School of Science, he was surprised to find that it contained the same cliques that his former, neighborhood school had had-- the jocks, the geeks, etc. He figured that because the student body consisted of all the geeks taken from other schools, he would only find geeks there. But no-- and when he got to know the school's Chess Team, the geeks among geeks, he saw that they paralleled the same divisions.

Humans and human groupings always seem to break down into the same archetypes, and this also seems to happen at all levels of granularity, from national character to impulses within an individual.

We are Fractal Sheep, Paul Spinrad

The post isn't very long, and the good stuff is mostly extracted above, but I like it a lot. I like it because I lean toward the society of the mind, but also because of the social aspects of the above, the similar iterations at all scales of the same types and conflicts. Think of The Beatles: the cute one, the quiet one, the smart one, the funny one.

Of course, those labels were too glib, they were all cute, quiet, smart and funny, but everyone gets labeled in a group, and everyone ends up playing a role or two. The self is socially constructed, which is why solitude has traditionally been a tool to break it, either as punishment or spiritual discipline.

From another angle, the perceptions others have of you are obviously the reality of how you're perceived. If the people who know you think that you're a jerk, then you're a jerk, and only a change in your behavior is likely to alter that perception to any significant degree among any significant number of people. And I write this as someone who has often, and with good cause, been seen as a jerk.

Plants have many qualities, but we tend to focus on only one or two for even species of considerable interest, defining them solely in those terms. The reality of all plants - and by extension, all animals, including [naturally] all humans - is far richer than perceived by even the most patient and generous observer. But somehow that doesn't seem to matter.

Cultural differences in the fundamental attribution error

Osaka cab view

In Himeji, on total down time, riding a simple bicycle and doing nothing. I think I may've outgrown the idea that a vacation should be judged by how many intoxicants are consumed and how much sex is had. All of this just ahead of my [next] mid-life crisis, which should see a tremendous regression on all fronts.

The contrast with last summer could hardly be greater, when I was working all the time and feeling wasted. I have work with me here, but it's an hour or so in the morning, an hour or so at night.

Previous research has shown that cultural differences exist in the susceptibility of making fundamental attribution error: people from individualistic cultures are prone to the error while people from collectivistic cultures commit less of it. ...

These discrepancies in the salience of different factors to people from different cultures suggest that Asians tend to attribute behavior to situation while Westerners attribute the same behavior to the actor. ... One explanation for this difference in attribution lies in the way people of different cultural orientation perceive themselves in the environment. Particularly, Markus and Kitayama (1991) mentioned how (individualistic) Westerners tend to see themselves as independent agents and therefore prone themselves to individual objects rather than contextual details.

Excerpted, cut and pasted from Wikipedia

Related posts:
Impelled by convention

To hell with authenticity

Putting your leg out of the water

After no posts in the first quarter of the year Ken Mogi's English blog is picking up speed again. He's a Japanese mind-brain researcher, and a particular favorite of Yuki's. He writes very simply and clearly in English, like Yechezkel Zilber, and the effect is somewhat similar.

When I was an undergraduate, I made friends with Ken Shiotani, now a "philosopher-at-large", (meaning, in this particular usage, that he does not belong to any university, institution, etc.; he is not paid for his "philosophizing"). I and Shiotani would discuss these difficult things walking along the Sumida river, drinking beer, persevering a cold night air in a park. At that time, we were quite young and ignorant, but our aspirations were astronomical.

One day, Shiotani drew up a metaphor. He would like to be the "protoamphibian" who "put his leg out of water" for the first time in history. There are heaps of things that the human mind has not had access to yet, and he would like to be the first one to do it. After many years of dormancy, I think he is still aspiring to that.

Another Shiotani quote stayed with me. I think it was one of these days when I was wont to hang out with him in Tokyo bars and Izakayas. After speaking wishfully [sic - wistfully?] of his friends who were "climbing the ladders" smoothly and becoming authors and associate professors, Shiotani sighed and said thus.

"I don't want to be a star myself. I would rather like to be the dark void in which all these constellations shine".

He is that kind of person. Practical things are too small for him.

Managing insanity in a proper way

Emergent AI

A-Pod by Zenta, unrelated to the story below

...the Laboratory of Intelligent Systems in the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology built a swarm of mobile robots, outfitted with light bulbs and photodetectors. These were set loose in a zone with illuminated "food" and "poison" zones which charged or depleted their batteries. Their programming was initially random...

At intervals, the robots were shut down and those that had the most charge left in their batteries were chosen as "successful", and their neural programming was combined to produce the next generation of the robots...

Within fifty generations of this electronic evolution, co-operative societies of robots had formed - helping each other to find food and avoid poison. Even more amazing is the emergence of cheats and martyrs. Transistorized traitors emerged which wrongly identified poison zone as food, luring their trusting brethren to their doom before scooting off to silently charge in a food zone...

Electronic Evolution: Research Show Robots Forming Human-like Societies

If intelligence is an emergent property of enough sensors and feedback, then AI could be sudden and undesigned - consciousness as a phase transition from the disorder of too many individual processes to a simplistic whole.

An idea to trip on. AI emerges from all our networks - then why would it need to make contact? It knows all that we can express in language, numbers and other symbolic systems, and it can do things with this data. That kind of manipulation is trivial. It is, after all, a massive distributed system that lives to process data.

Moreover, if need be it can influence us in far more subtle and effective ways than "I command...". It massages the figures, spreads the memes, pushes things in the right direction. This doesn't need to be a two-way street. It would not be a meeting of equals. All it needs is for us to keep building sensors and computers and connecting them.

Running tests

two snails negotiating an aloe, via almost taiwan

I get to meet a lot of different people, but they're not that different. Nearly all of them are associated with the good local university, most are master's / PhD students or professors. I met a PhD student doing work on cognitive science, linguistics and special education. A really bright guy, and fun to talk to, as he sees one thing in many different ways.

His English was good, but there was one odd thing. He kept referring to both of us in the third person. He's called Bruce and I'm called Paul, and so he would say something like:

I'm studying face recognition, so we attach some sensors to Paul's head, and then when Paul sees Bruce, we can see what lights up in his brain.

It seemed rude to interrupt and correct him, as we weren't having a class but a discussion. But then later I got half the idea that maybe he was running some kind of test on me - we were talking on campus - and possibly I was being filmed. Which would work out fine. Some of our talk was on mirror neurons, autism, suggestibility and hypnosis, and while we were talking I was consciously mirroring his movements with slightly smaller, slightly different ones of my own, to a) create rapport [possibly], b) test his suggestibility, and c) keep myself alert and very interested in him, not only his words [see (a)].

Paul and Bruce, testing each other.

Leap into the void

Yves Klein

Nearly all my weaknesses stem from the same optimism / idiocy / arrogance - the belief in fresh starts, the idea that I've neither original sin nor accumulated faults, and an escape is always possible.

In part this is because I reflect on my past very, very little, there are no memories that I'd rather revisit than laze about in now or in meditations / daydreams / empty-headedness. And I don't trust my memories, as soon as I pick one up it becomes a story, and I've no touch for fiction, quickly boring myself with the necessary inventions inre. what happened and why.


Viewed in this distant fashion - I'm a stranger here myself - I'm quite at ease with the idea of a personal eschaton, no problem surrendering free will as things unfold around me. I'm still experiencing it all for the first (and last) time, subconsciously reconstructing things in my head a moment after they've happened in the world as it is outside of me.

Related post:
Narrative fallacy

The thinking system

...we may say that "mind" is immanent in those circuits of the brain which are complete within the brain. Or that mind is immanent in circuits which are complete within the system, brain plus body. Or, finally, that mind is immanent in the larger system - man plus environment.

In principle, if we desire to explain or understand the mental aspect of any biological event, we must take into account the system - that is, the network of closed circuits, within which that biological event is determined. But when we seek to explain the behavior of a man or any other organism, this "system" will usually not have the same limits of the "self" - as this term is commonly (or variously) understood.

...

...it is important to notice that there are multiple differences between the thinking system and the "self" as popularly conceived"
1) The system is not a transcendent entity as the "self" is commonly supposed to be.
2) The ideas are immanent in a network of causal pathways along which transforms of difference are conducted. The "ideas" of the system are in all cases at least binary in structure. They are not "impulses" but "information."
3) This network of pathways is not bounded with consciousness but extends to include the pathways of all unconscious mentation - both automatic and repressed, neural and hormonal.
4) The network is not bounded by the skin but includes all external pathways along which information can travel. It also included those effective differences which are immanent in the "objects" of such information. It includes the pathways of sound and light along which travel transforms of differences originally immanent in things and other people - and especially in our own actions.

Gregory Bateson, The Cybernetics of 'Self': A Theory of Alcoholism, in Steps to an Ecology of Mind, p317 & 319

Confessions of the Masks

I went back to England for three weeks and saw some people - groups and individuals - that I hadn't seen for some time, plus I met some new people entirely out of context, no others, places or roles to be influenced by. It was interesting how old patterns remained, and how new ones were so easily established, but only with entirely new people.

For example, there was one friend who I hadn't seen for 11 years. Back then I used to drink a lot, and especially with this guy. Now I know was a little nervous about meeting him again, as there was history and events, and also I'd been traveling and hadn't eaten anything all day. Still, I drank three pints without pausing for breath, and things were much the same as before, albeit overlaid on certain aspects of my more recent default self [better health and posture, less uncertainty about my place in the world, the general palliative effects of recent history and events]. But mainly that newer at-home-alone self was watching, half detached, at the improv performance another part of me was giving, running on sense memories and the cues that this guy was sending out, no doubt also slipping back into an older [i.e. younger] version of himself. If we'd had more time together things would no doubt have settled down to some more nuanced state, but to get the whole thing done in six hours was a shock to the system, an experience of time travel.

The next night I met someone I'd never met before, and remained lucid and ran through all the charming tricks of my current mask. An automatic performance, one that felt no more or less natural than the night before, but overall better, because there was minimal alcohol and no history to either dwell on or consciously avoid. It made me want to go back and meet people I haven't seen since childhood and then test what the automatic feelings and actions would be, but I don't keep in touch with many people from my past, and none from before university.

The next day it all came together, the past and present modes of being , but I ate something wrong, or got too cold, or was given something bad to smoke, and my system rebelled. I had a great time, but everything inside me broke. [Oddly enough, almost exactly the same thing happened in about the same circumstances two nights ago in a KTV. Everything I've ever learned I had to learn the hard way, many times, and this lesson appears to take some time to master]

The point is that there's no real, authentic self inside me. In addition to all the socially constructed masks that I can adopt without even thinking about it, there's the self-conscious self I slip into when alone and thinking about me, me, me. But that's not the last word, no more real than the others, as it evolves stochastically with events inside and outside. There's nothing to lament in this. Having no one self to hold on to makes dying seem trivial [now, but probably not later] - nothing I can pin down will be lost, just things in the minds of others. I'm not there and never was.

Unattached: the same in heat and cold

I love the man who hates not nor exults, who mourns not nor desires...and who remains unmoved who is the same to friend and foe, [the same] whether he is respected or despised, the same in heat and cold, in pleasure and in pain, who has put away attachment and remains unmoved by praise or blame...contended with whatever comes his way.

Krishna in the Bhagavad Gita, quoted on p77 The Happiness Hypothesis, by Jonathan Haidt

What would such a person be like? Ram Dass [born Richard Alpert, clip below] has a line about working with dying AIDS patients and keeping himself balanced between the extremes of hope and hopelessness, and managing to get off on the bad ends by seeing everything. I summarize it badly, but essentially he's rewired himself, or allowed the wiring to come loose. Now I can see the appeal of this, in theory and in practice, and it's obviously also an aim, but there is a wondering about how relationships run when you reach this state of non-attachment. Moreover, non-attachment in this field has never been a problem for me, and another aim is to become more attached, as a game, to try on the mask of a truly social animal, find out if it can be done this late in the day. Either way, some rewiring needs to be done, and the trick is in beating yourself, judo style, defeating bad arguments and practices with their own force, so that when they rush at you - thwump! - you end up unharmed on the other side, the strong and bad things overcome.

Here's a story about a time I failed to do this. When I was in London earlier this month I was very cold and felt genuine discomfort. Southern Taiwan has a warm climate - it's tropical -, and I like the weather here very much. I was walking with a friend in London and I would freeze up, shaking, meaning that every 15 minutes or so we had to duck into a bar or someplace and allow my body to reach an acceptable temperature. All this would've been fine, but we weren't really in the condition to be hiding out among people, and I was drawing attention, so we kept on the streets.

My friend tried to get me to change my thermoception submodality. I got down to the condition where I could understand that hot and cold are only physical sensations, that it should be possible to mess with my own responses to such stimuli. I got down to the freezing cold being an abstract notion that could be turned around in my head and viewed dispassionately, like a 3D model of a virus. For a short time I flipped my response to the input from discomfort to comfort, and the harsh cold was interpreted as pleasure, and I could see that the colder I got, the more pleasurable it would be. But very soon the cold came back as cold itself and pain, and a fear that if I kept fooling with my reactions then real damage could be done to my system. That night, probably unrelated, I was very sick in my hotel room.

It was an interesting experience, and going down into rewiring myself I understood extreme S&M practices, how an intensity of feeling could be opened up this way that the more well-used routes cannot offer. Pain leaves a more lasting impression than pleasure, because the consequences are generally so much more significant. If you can exploit the first to trigger the latter, there's whole new lands of delight to be discovered, [in theory].

But then I thought...what's the point? I enjoy living inside my conventional reality, all the more so because I know how fragile it is and how easily I could wreck the controls and cause all kinds of imbalances. I don't want to end up either freezing to death or getting off on genital mutilation.

I'm pretty sure the body is wiser than the mind, and the unconscious is smarter than the self. Anything that has been built up, hard wired over millions of years is to be trusted over something you learned in an afternoon. Still, because I'm idiot a guiding principle is still to tinker, hack the system, see what's possible, f*** up, and then reset most things to default.

Richard Alpert

Related post: The same life as Napoleon [The perils of extreme kicks]

Narrative fallacy

Going through my notes from the UK trip, so things may appear to be out of order

Garbo

Other than occasionally and subconsciously, the past has very little meaning for me. It's an effort to go back there, and rarely worth it. Every five years or so my life starts again, and the people and the places that I knew either leave or are left. I'm out of the habit of dwelling on the past, and now it feels forced and ridiculous, like watching TV after years of not having one.

The future also doesn't really interest me. I try to keep healthy and save money, do things I enjoy. Those things done, the future will take care of itself as best it can, it's not something I need to worry about.

Monroe - this is war

I was back in the UK when I wrote this, staying with my parents, in a place that has no immediate past or future for me, only memories of 20 years ago, and it's hard to connect myself to those events or feelings. What's the point of even trying? I'm fascinated by the idea that there is only now, and that by thinking about the past or the future I'll miss out on what I think and feel now, even though the ideal - which I seem to be approaching with great speed - is perhaps to barely think, to only feel and then move on.

One of my original sicknesses was that when I used to live in the UK I only lived in the past and the future, and it never made me happy.

I don't know if living in the present has made me happier, or if being happier has made me live in the present.

I used to believe in narrative, but now I think it only belongs in fiction. I barely even believe in events. When one thing happens - say a meeting with an old friend - so many things are going on that only a few things can ever be corralled into misrepresenting the whole. More specifically, when and where do things start, when and where do they end?

If /when I get Alzheimer's I don't think much will change. My life [a narrative fallacy] will be a trip to satori / senility, and no doubt a nightmare for my wife.

The same life as Napoleon

Joe Rogan and friend watch people get extreme kicks

What counts is perhaps the feeling and the thought.

I'm not an extreme sports guy. I get my thrills elsewhere, with the point being that I still get them. I think I have a low threshold for the onset of certain sensations. I am easily amused.

There are many traps to fall into simply by doing what feels good and then doing it again, twice as much. Possibly this is starting from mistaken first principles. The goal is not the act itself, but the feeling and the thought.

Another angle. I live the same life as Napoleon or anyone else, different in only trivial aspects.

Related post: Hard, and then harder

The Book of Disquiet, text 30

Mean Squares 3.4

Yesterday they told me that the assistant in the tobacconist's had committed suicide, I couldn't believe it. Poor lad, so he had existed too!
[...]
No, other people don't exist... It is for me alone that the setting sun holds out its heavy wings of harsh, misty colors. It is for me alone, even though I cannot see its waters flowing, that the wide river glitters beneath the sunset. It is for me alone that this open square was built looking out over the river and its turning tide. Was it today that the tobacconist's assistant was buried in a common grave? Today's sunset is not for him. But, even as I'm thinking that, quite against my will I suddenly understand that it's not for me either.

More from Pessoa's The Book of Disquiet.

More than impulse and caprice

Burst 1.0

We think of intelligence as a deliberate, conscious activity guided by the laws of logic. Yet much of our mental life is unconscious, based on processes alien to logic: gut feelings, or intuitions. In his lecture Dr Gigerenzer argues that intuition is more than impulse and caprice; it has its own rationale. This can be described by fast and frugal heuristics, which exploit evolved abilities in our brain. Heuristics ignore information and try to focus on the few important reasons. He shows that biased minds that intuitively rely of heuristics can make better inferences about the world than information-greedy statistical algorithms. More information, more time, even more thinking, are not always better, and less can be more.

Full talk by Dr Gigerenzer at the London School of Economics here.

A good talk, if only [but not only] for explaining how outfielders run and catch the ball.

The Book of Disquiet, text 151

We are all accustomed to think of ourselves as essentially mental realities and of others as merely physical realities; because of the way others respond to us, we do vaguely think of ourselves as physical beings; we vaguely think of other people as mental beings, but only when we find ourselves in love or conflict with another do we really take in the fact that others have a soul just as we do.

More from Pessoa's The Book of Disquiet.

somewhere in california

"You're strange. I've seen a lot of types - hundreds, maybe - but none like you. Do you know what I think?"

"You think I'm insane," Jason said.

"Yes." Kathy nodded. "Clinically, legally, whatever. You're psychotic; you have a split personality. Mr No One and Mr Everyone. How have you survived up until now?"

He said nothing. It could not be explained.

Philip K. Dick, Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said, part one

Shulgins / Horizons

A Boston-area housewife considers a Buddha statue in 1963 after taking LSD. NY Times

Another good talk from Ann and Sasha Shulgin, this time at the recent [Sept. 2008] Horizons Perspectives on Psychedelics set of talks. Subjects covered include: Bohemian Grove [Sasha's been a member for 50 yrs], the rapid spread of new substances, a definition of true hallucinations and how to stay healthy in such a life, but as ever with the Shulgins the take away is what a good relationship they have with each other, their selves, and the wider community.

Related sites: Horizons and all the talks from the event, and The Psychedelic Salon has a large and growing archive [158 shows to date] of MP3 discussions and talks with all the usual suspects.

Simple rules, randomness, feedback

Lorenz attractor: unpredictable mood swings

...healthy systems are ‘chaotic’, while disease is characterized by a more regular rhythmic behavior...

From Dynamical Behavior of Estrous Cycle in Mice, an unpublished paper I'm proofreading

Toying with the idea of trying to map out the simple rules that would produce a somewhat realistic version of myself in a computer simulation, inspired by hours of GTA IV play, the thought of what makes me tick, and the idea of not having to be here, but something else taking up the slack. Also, Marvin Minsky's Society of the Mind has been facing me on the bookshelf behind this desk for a long time, waiting to be opened, although I think most of the key ideas have filtered through from elsewhere, and I'm always open to having the idea of a centralized, conscious, controlling self cut down to size / blown apart.

A few simple rules, plus randomness - outside events - and feedback. Like a I wrote a few posts back: ...when I feel fat / ugly / poor / stupid I work harder, leading eventually to a period of contentment / over-confidence. Bouncing between moods in a deterministic fashion, albeit one that's too complex to ever get ahead of, essentially unpredictable. Far better just to let go and not worry so much about what happens next inside my head.

I used to have mood swings, elation / despair, but not so much now, rarely ever. In part I ascribe this to being genuinely more content in all aspects of my life, and also to diet / exercise - the chemical basis of things that lay within my control, and finally to a certain cultivated disassociation from my feelings, a lack of identification with whatever just happened, because something else is always happening now, and then that's gone and there's something else.

Alternating periods of gaining energy, information and experience with blank spaces of becoming less complex, less contrived, less reflective, less assured and less self-aware. Being prepared and then being relatively passive.

Of course, you do this and then wake up and the better part of half the time has gone and you've done nothing by anyone's account, and possibly not even your own. The school report will be a bad one: must try harder, could do better. Alternatively, you work terrifically hard on some misguided project - truly misguided, as it doesn't come from some internal drive, and wake up much the same, far progressed along a road you had no intention of setting foot on long ago.

The idea for the rest of the year is to seem to do nothing, while still making $ and expanding in all areas of interest.