shrughes

Every once in a while, I realize that there’s so much stuff I need to learn.  I need to learn how to generate code for the x86 instruction set.  How to make music on the computer.  How to do computational geometry.  Materials science.  Quantum physics.  How can I not know quantum physics?  Honestly, I barely even know multivariable calculus.  And I’m not comfortable with tensors.  I never have been!

I’m terrible at learning, but I’m good at remembering.

There’s just so much stuff I haven’t learned.  The only math I know is the kind useful for high school math contests.  I really know my 30-60-90 triangles and will never forget them.  I’m good at thinking carefully under brief spurts of high pressure not lasting more than 3 hours.  However, I’ve lately been developing into a panic because of how little I know, and how little I’ve learned, despite meaning to learn it for several years.

When I look at my interests, there is the difference between what I want my interests to be versus what they are.  In my 6th semester of college, I took a lighter courseload so that I could spend more time on personal projects.  And what did I do?  I muddled around with Haskell.  But what I wanted to do was to muddle around with math and compilers.  But I didn’t!  I muddled around with type systems.  Blah!

I barely know how to write software.  Oh hey, I want to make a software project…. and how do I do that?  I worked for 1.5 years as a programmer and I’m still fuddling along, going at a snail’s pace.  Why don’t I have the energy for this?

Do I need more exercise?  I’m going to go out and exercise right now.  I’ll be right back.  And then we’ll see how my attitude has changed.

Well!  It’s amazing how far you can run when you haven’t run for the past week and a half and you have all that stamina built up.  It’s amazing how much heavier you feel when you’ve been eating a fair bit in that period of time.  Well I’m going to take a quick shower.  And then we’ll see how my attitude has changed.

What I’ve found is that when exercising, particularly when running, that after exercising, my thoughts tend to get scattered and that they tend to go testing themselves in all sorts of different tangents.  It’s as if all sorts of different whimsical departments of the brain have all gotten reactivated and decided to call up the center of consciousness and decided to tell it what it might want to think about.  And then the center of consciousness has to cut them off and listen to other upshoots of ideas, and then cut them off.

While running, I started to think about what causes me to have opinions about things and what causes certain opinions to be written down.  You see, back when I was a teenager (I’m 23 now), I used to freely publish my opinions online.  But then, as I turned 17 or 18, I started to notice that I wasn’t a fan of my previous opinions, because my opinions had changed.  They had gotten older and more mature.  And so I got a sort of Vulcan-like persona online.  I became all logical and restricted my thoughts to matters of fact.  You see, I couldn’t leak dumb thoughts online that my older and more mature self would feel embarrassed about, when it remembers their leakage in the future.  But then, later, I felt embarrassed about how I had somewhat bottled my online self up in the past, and how this must have been a mark of immaturity, or something, and so I spent some time feeling that way.  And lately, with this blog, I’ve decided to become unbottled, and reveal my true opinions.

But what are my true opinions?  What does that even mean?  Presumably, it means that somewhere inside myself, there’s a person that has opinions, and that I just have suppressed them and have decided not to leak them.  And so my “outer” layer of consciousness has operated under the rules of, “take the inner consciousness’s opinions, and filter them.”  Lately, with this latest blog, though, have I simply let the inner consciousness’s opinions out, or have I encouraged the inner consciousness to develop ridiculous opinions and let those out?  Or has my outer consciousness decided to embellish the inner consciousness’s opinions and satirize them to an absurd extent, and write those down?

I’ve recognized, in the act of writing this blog, that to some extent, this blog has been a satire of why my true opinions are.  (And there we are back again to that central question: what are my “true” opinions?  When I’ve just drank a lot of soda, I resolve to drink only tea.  When I have refrained from soda for a while, I feel that one or two or six sodas would be a tolerable indulgence.  What is my true opinion?)  That is, I recognized, as I wrote the opinions down, that they are to some extent a satire of what my true opinions are.  Or are they a satire of what I imagined my true opinions to be?

The trouble with having opinions and memories of opinions is that you can never really tell what the true cause of your opinions are.  Often, when you come up with opinions or reasons for your opinions, you’re just telling yourself rationalizations for why you have certain opinions.  Or at least I think that’s the case for you — I know it’s the case for me, and since you seem to be human, I’m assuming you’re similar to me.  For example, when deciding not to go to grad school, I came up with all sorts of rationalizations.  And I don’t know which are the real ones.  If any of them are real.

So, when talking about the notion of “true opinion,” I mentioned that there might be some “inner consciousness” that had opinions on things.  And I mentioned that when cooling down after exercise, all sorts of departments in the brain would chime in to the center of consciousness about things they’d like to blog about.

What I’d like to know is: how do the different departments of the brain know that it’s time to think about certain things?  Like what to blog about?  It seems to me like the center of consciousness sort of broadcasts to other parts of the brain “Hey, I’m thinking about this, would you please send me ideas if you have them?”  And then the other parts respond.  Some parts are particularly specialized.  Reading, writing, face recognition, are fairly well-hardwired.  Back in high school, when I was spending a lot of time with RPN calculators, I got really good at mentally simplifying complex expressions, because I would just keep a stack of numbers in my head and pipe the argument through some parellized RPN version of the expression I was evaluating, or some near-RPN version that was more like a direct expression tree computed in parallel.  I have definite memories of deciding to compute x*(y+z) into x*y + x*z in parallel, rather than sequentially.  So anyway my point is that the brain obviously does stuff in parallel, and we can learn to do multiple things at the same time, like piping numbers through equations while listening to and parsing the words of a person speaking and pushing a buzzer.

And it seems to me like that if there’s an “inner consciousness,” located somewhere in my brain, that has its own opinions of things that my “outer consciousness” filters or exaggerates or whatever, then there’s a separate center of consciousness operating there.  And so there’s a person there — a mind! — that would like to do and say things and that always gets frustrated because its opinions and decisions never get acted upon.

And I think I’m that mind, and that there’s some outer center of consciousness that filters things.  And I think the outer center of consciousness, and me, the inner center of consciousness, both can manipulate memory.  And so the inner and outer centers of consciousness, looking back on their own memories, think that it’s their decisions that caused them to do the things they did.  And so they have no direct evidence of one another.  So there’s no way to tell whether your mind is the inner or outer center of consciousness.  They are only slightly out of synchronization.  So my decision that “I’m the inner center of consciousness” is a complete contrivance of opinion, and isn’t based on any observation.  And of course, the outer center of consciousness has let this opinion through, and so apparently it thinks it’s the inner center of consciousness.  Or maybe the outer consciousness decided that it would add this sentence about a complete contrivance of opinion.  Or maybe the inner center of consciousness managed to flip the controls and outmuster the outer.  I of course can only remember having thought of writing that, since my memories are mixed in with the other center of consciousness.

And of course, why are there only two?  If anything, there should be as many centers of consciousness as there are points in space.  Each of them is a product of an infinitesimal neighborhood of the brain receiving and sending information.  Some are smarter or duller than others, and all of them have a separate center of consciousness, or “mind,” arising out of them.  And so there are minds formed everywhere in the brain that all have opinions on things, and some of them are minds formed out of parts of the brain that get to control things, and maybe others are minds formed out of parts of the brain that are dead ends.  That are mostly overlooked.  That don’t really matter.  And so you get minds that have opinions on what to do but then immediately forget that they had such an opinion (since new information is coming in that didn’t depend on the production of that opinion) and then have new irrelevant opinions.

So there’s a good chance that my mind is completely irrelevant, and that there’s a mind a micron away that is really the master of everything.   But what about these memories?  If the same memories of thought are getting pumped through every part of the brain, it seems like every center of consciousness would end up being more or less equals.  Since they’re all mixed together, they’re virtually identical.  Of course, many parts of the brain do specialized things.  So it seems like they would have separate, duller centers of consciousness.  Somewhere there’s a 3D imagination center of the brain that imagines 3D things and calculates accelerations and frisbee trajectories.  It has a jolly good time, when it gets some use, and doesn’t concern itself with worldly problems.

Well, I hope you enjoyed this silly blog post.  It’s stuff like this that makes me a panprotoexperientialist.