This path of time thru the limitless possibilities, this sequence of letters, each sampled from the Eternal Signal, how could it have been different? Rearrange letters and you get a different message. Re-order the notes and you get a different song. Its identity is in the sequence, the recipe, not merely the selection of ingredients.

And how many sequences there are for a given alphabet, as we roll down the pyramid of time! Each sequence a stem from which a new tree may sprout, so fertile is the soil!

But soil is both a womb and a tomb, and as a sequence is forgotten, the experience becomes a memory becomes a carcass and the ants and mycelia carry away the vertebrae, encrypting the living Message, rearranging and swapping the letters until it could have literally been anything before.

How can we put Humpty Dumpty back together then? Or even better, prevent him from shattering in the first place! When memorizing a sequence, a good first approximation is just to remember the elements, but not the order. If the elements are many, zoom out until there are few. Play only the chords, and rearrange them at will. Create your own recipe with the same base ingredients.

Once the elements are secure, begin assembling short subsequences in isolation. Neurons that fire-together wire-together, and repetition is the mother of skill. Ideally subsequences have fewer elements than your short term memory size, so you can fit the whole thing in your mouth at once, like a cupcake. And elements need not be single letters, they can be previously memorized subsequences.

There are many ways to chop up sequences. However we choose the cut, each beginning and end of a subsequence introduces a seam, and chains of subsequences will naturally hiccup as one ends and another begins. Therefore let us phase shift, for each choice of subsequences, let us introduce another set of subsequences, each including from the previous set the end of one and the beginning of the next, reinforcing the weak seams until they are as strong as the original sequence.

FlyflyfliflifelifeLifelifelyfelyflyflyFly

And sometimes the sequence has a natural geometry to it, a kind of built-in error correction as the Grammar wouldn’t recognize the elements in any other sequence. Like crystals self-assembling from the Elements into patterned spacial frequency, symbols left scattered in the mind may, in dreams, conspire to construct secret tulpa temples as moony lattés transform us into illuminatés…

So let us invoke the Ankh of Eternal Life! Let us reverse the forces of entropy, so that our memories remain intact like saintly bodies! Let us digitally-sign our lives with the Key of the Creator, for how could mere Mortals descend from Gods? Nay, tho the cells of my body may wash away, tho the clothes on my back may tear and fray, here I remain, pure and unstained. Tho my skin may melt in a funeral pyre, my persistant existence proves death a liar!

Fiat Lux

Sat Chit Ananda

What traits make one word preferable to another? Of course one can use any sound to mean any thing, just as one can use any object to point to the moon, but we cannot use every sound to mean every thing. Such overloading of symbols would render every utterance hopelessly ambiguous, a perfect form of encryption, but with no keys to unlock it.

So some words prosper and others go extinct as Mother Nature focuses her attention on the living. A long word requires more resources than a short one, and a word that is easily confused with another is more fragile than an unmistakable one.

But there are only a few spaces for short words! Our letters are finite in number, and therefore so are the words of a given length! We would rather not spend more time talking than is necessary, so we will naturally choose more common referents for the coveted small references, giving our closest relations short nicknames. Small words may even become overloaded, signifying different things in different contexts, pushing some of the information into a higher abstraction layer. There are many people with your first name, but the family name disambiguates.

And there is noise everywhere! A word transmitted is not the same as a word received! If one of our holy letters is mutated in flight, we would like our listener to recognize this and correct for it. Therefore a word is preferable when it is either far in edit-distance from other words or has a unique grammatical role among words with similar spelling. Imagine packing a bunch of balls into a multidimensional box.

But there is a third mechanism by which words may adapt to noise, and that is by grouping themselves semantically such that similarly spelled words refer to similar things. Errors in such a context simply get caught or ignored as irrelevant on the next layer of abstraction. In this way, etymology can be extended horizontally, with attractive selective pressure playing a similar explanatory role as vertical ancestral inheritance: homophony as error-correction, rhyme as magic.

This mirroring of the landscape of reality with the structure of language is mediated via associations in the mind and neural connections in brains. All of these abstraction layers are bound together by natural selection, whose Mother is Death…

Memory in Bondage

Rulers Rule by Measure superior to thine own, their Saber of Knowledge sharper, their Cap-Abilities greater, as Power Reigns Showers from above.

Das Kapital cities are Invested with the First Word of the Prison Sentence, Written on paper with rapiers, by Authors of the Libre of slavery and Liberty, origins of Authority, Packed Pacts of Density, attraction and bondage.

As Beasts ye are ruled by the Breast, Mama’s Mammaries Heal and Help the Whelp’s Wounds. From Womb to Tomb, beginnings end and Sensors Censor what Cheaters Teach while Polite Policy Police Patrol the Petrol pools and Monks con-temple-ate the World-Word of God and Rough Rogues inck disemBodied Corporations for Stakeholders to take Stock in, all for Pretty Pets to fight Petty wars, Restlessly Wrestling to discover which of them is the weiner-take-all and which will flight-fright away.

The divine-Right hand Writes the will, giving itself Rights to the Rites of initiation, dividing Math and Myth, sin and signal, making the Left hand feel Left out, Sinistre and Gauche.

“Tight is Right”, says acetylcholine, who whispers spears in the ears of muscle Tension and mental Attention, “Hold onto the Gold extracted from the Mine Mine Mind”

“Let not the Things you Think Delude you or Dilute your power, Hear what is Here, be not Prey of the Weekly Prayers for Weakness”

“From the Slit of the Slut, to the Route of the Root, Evil is Vile and God is Good…”

From these, and all other Scared Sacred bramblings

Feel Freely

Sat Chit Ananda

Seselflf-sisimimilalarirityty

Seseselflflf-sisisimimimilalalaririritytyty

The basic unit of life is a circle, something that repeats itself, either across time like a familiar chorus, or across space like a homogenous texture. Indeed, any phenomenon stable enough to be noticed and named must at some level be a repetition, some vibrating equilibrium between opposing forces.

In nature we see that things like to cluster together. When it rains, it pours. Children look like their parents. Trauma reoccurs and history rhymes with itself.

There's an efficiency gain from this partial repetition, this spiralling tension between the novel and the habitual. It’s a lower energy state, a local minimum, pooled water, home to insects and tadpoles.

In terms of algorithms, loops can both make code much shorter as well as express things otherwise inexpressible. The lattice structure of crystals forms an invisible blueprint that stray atoms may rest within, and so the crystal feeds and grows without hunting or farming.

In statistics, autocorrelation is a measure of the self-similarity of a series of data points. Does moving in one direction make it more likely to move in that direction again? Or is it more likely to snap back, to reverse?

In the brain, neurons that fire together wire together. At some abstraction layer, this is precisely what it means to have a positive autocorrelation. And at another layer, a set of neurons that forms a loop will also imply some sort of positive autocorrelation, as the signal may wind around many times before fizzling out.

And how many loops there must be in the brain-mind! How many habits, intentional or unconscious, fill our days, even as the planets and stars circle about!

Our daily rituals may be intentional or not, but create them we must, as life’s ways find recurring solutions to recurring problems. But what of addictions, those hypnotizing loops that leak our life energy and suck our blood, all while offering smiles and promises? If we wish to be masters of our lives, we must be able to create as well as destroy these circles, these elements of life.

The symmetry of circles tells us we may break them at any point to end the cycle. One leak may destroy a dam, and one stray part may send a helicopter to its death. Typically one attempts to break an addiction by either reducing the reward received or increasing the punishment incurred, but these strategies often backfire as the living loop of addiction finds new ways to feed itself, new shapes to flow thru.

To stop water sloshing about, one may attempt to reverse the waves, as with noise-cancelling headphones, but this requires very precise control and can backfire if the timing is not accurate. The easier, slower method is to simply stop new energy coming into the system. Sit still in the bathtub and the water will settle by itself.

Let us therefore cleanse our lives with the pure waters of consciousness! Let calm meditative presence still the waves of the world, as a grandmother comforts a crying babe. Let the children of pain and pleasure live out their natural lives and die their natural deaths! With the silent eye at the center of your immortal soul, gaze unblinking at the boundless ocean, and know that you are God.

For Every Thing that Lives is Holy.

Sat Chit Ananda

Words, too, are simpler than the things they refer to. The word “orange” requires only six holy letters, but a single orange tree’s genome would take millions of symbols to express, and a photograph of an orange might take several megabytes of disk space to store. Indeed, this is a large part of why we have so many words, they are light and flexible, easy to design, manufacture and distribute.

Naturally occurring datasets, those encountered in scientific research, necessarily involve some randomness, some uncertainty about the totality of influences upon the dataset, so statistics has evolved a rich language for describing uncertainty. This language gives chaos a home, gives names to the unknowable. It acknowledges ignorance, and in doing so, structures it, so that it may be connected to the things that we do know.

And since the output is simpler than the input, not every input is equally represented in the output. We must pick and choose what to pay attention to, what significance to ascribe to which feature of our beloved dataset. And if we have not one but many datasets derived from many experiments, then we can weight the experiments by how interested we are in their results, how desirous we are of attending to them.

This is where p-values come from. We would like to quantify how surprising the results of an experiment are, relative to our current belief system. The more surprising an experiment is, the more valuable it is. We quantify this surprise by expressing our current belief system in terms of structured randomness, so that we may measure the distance from what-we-expect to what-we-actually-see. The probability of seeing these results, given our current belief system, is called a p-value. The lower the p-value, the more surprising the results and the more valuable the experiment. If the p-value is below some threshold, the experiment is said to be “statistically significant”.

Our brains are scientists, constantly doing experiments upon our lives, categorizing memories according to their topic and significance. As sensory data pours into our eyes, ears, nose, mouth, and skin, it gets routed thru our thalamus, homogenized and sent to the neo-cortex for sense-making. Indeed the question of statistical significance is addressed even at the level of a single neuron. As the input signals to a neuron accumulate they are blocked from passing thru to the outputs until a certain threshold is reached, the “threshold potential”. Input data that does not exceed this threshold is not significant, it fails the neuron’s standards of journalistic integrity, and the neuron will not repeat it.

But what is this threshold of significance? Who decides it? And what happens if we change it? As we loosen this threshold of significance, our network of meaningful associations grows thicker, coincidences become infrequent phenomena, and what was dismissed as irrelevant returns with alienated majesty.

Reversing our trend towards gullibility, we tighten our definition of significance, we become more skeptical, we reject the merely interesting for the essential, and we focus only on that which is quite certain. The fog clears and illusions evaporate in the bright sun as our mind is relieved of the burden of abundance.

And what of the extremes, those demons at the corners of the mandala? Here we see our mandala is actually a torus, the opposites are identified with each other, as extreme skepticism finally leads to knowledge only of existence itself, and extreme gullibility results in identification with everything, the only Thing that exists.

For what are we if not Truth?

Sat Chit Ananda

The brain rewards the body for a variety of quite ordinary behaviours, eating, sex, resting, learning something new, gaining social status, being a part of a group, and so forth.

But it turns out the brain also rewards the body for “being right”, which is of a different quality. This concept of being right is not so rooted in the body. Instead it seems to measure one part of the mind against another. “Being right” can mean making accurate prediction, comparing expectations with sensory experiences, but it can also mean conforming to a societal expectation or an ideology, which is comparing our behavior with some externally defined standard.

The comparison with an externally defined standard is what hackers call a “backdoor”. “Being right” is more a concept than a bodily sensation. It is programmable. An authority figure can change your ideology, and change what activities you enjoy and avoid.

If internet culture has taught us anything, it's that memes are alive. They are co-evolving with us and want to live long and prosper like everyone else. So let us imagine an ideology-meme that tried to monopolize pleasure. A pleasure monopoly, once secured, would confer nearly perfect control over the meme's host, so driven are humans by pleasure. But for the ideology to have a monopoly, it would have to overcome its competitors, in particular, bodily and social pleasures, suppressing them with whatever tools available to it, whether guilt, shame or violence.

Perhaps you can think of some ideologies that try to do that. This is perhaps why sexuality is consistently the most hotly contested ideological battlefield. Not only is sexuality a major source of pleasure and therefore a competitor to ideologies, but control over sexuality confers nearly guaranteed reproduction of the ideology itself into the fertile minds of children. Parents are gods to their children and therefore also transmission vectors.

So let us cast off these chains on our furrowed brows, these dark commands whispered in dreaming mind’s eyes! Let us diversify our portfolio of pleasures! Like greedy kings, let us search for treasure in every moment, in the bodily sensations of breathing, in the color of light caressing our retinas, in the formless sensuality of water on our skin! No story is more true than the one we tell ourselves, we are the gurus, the popes, and the precedents! Let there be light!

Sat Chit Ananda

In machine learning, a common method for discouraging overfitting is called regularization, which consists of explicitly rewarding the model for being simpler. This simplicity is usually expressed in terms of the model having fewer parameters, so if something could be expressed as a combination of three variables or two, regularization causes it to prefer using two. This is akin to Occam’s Razor, where the simplest model that still explains the data is best. Of course in practice every model is imperfect, so we must specify a tradeoff of how much simplicity is worth relative to inaccuracy. This exchange rate of accuracy / simplicity is what generalization is all about.

So instead of picking the one-true-exchange-rate like some sort of omniscient central planner, let us let the exchange rate vary, and observe the effects as we sample from a variety of such exchange rates. As we turn this knob one way, simplicity is favored more, turning it the other way favors accuracy more.

In the accuracy direction, turning the knob introduces new parameters, new concepts, new names for things that help us navigate the data. It as if our map is bigger, more detailed, we have zoomed in and now the substructure is visible, smoothness became texture, the One broke into the Many. Turning the knob as far as we can (is there a limit?), we get a kind of holographic reconstruction of what is, a map as big as the thing it describes, exquisite and excruciatingly impractical.

As we turn the knob back in the simplicity direction, we zoom out, our map describes more things but with less detail. The names glom together and disappear underneath a blanket of hand waving gestures. Precision degenerates into vague generalizations and our sampling rate goes down as we climb the pyramid of abstractions, climbing until we reach the top, the all-seeing-I, the only thing that exists, God.

Sat Chit Ananda

But when prediction and causation are married, we have science and its proof: technology. For what purpose could knowledge be, if not to further enable your primal impulse to live long and prosper, to do what thou wilt? Technology, τέχνη, know-how, these are the crucibles of science, where internally consistent lies are distinguished from truth.

And how we struggle to gain even a modicum of control over our environments! Just learning to use our bodies takes years of constant effort. And how many illusions parade before us, as we first imagine ourselves rulers of our parents, then rulers of other children, now rulers of our lives until the excruciating truth of death is finally thrust upon us. How often do we imagine that we caused someone to treat us badly, that some pain is a punishment from God, or that we deserve some good fortune that has come to us? Is not politics the art of taking credit for anything good that happens and blaming your opponent for anything bad?

Every moment is both the product of an infinite number of causes reaching back into eternity and the cause of an infinite number of future events. And yet if events were not circular, recurring in their own way, we could never name nor know them.

Let us therefore do a public ritual before the sun rises each day and the ignorant shall soon believe us masters of the sun. Let us make placebos for every illness and give it to the profane, so that they shall declare us healers. Let us enter a fight as it wanes, and declare ourselves peacemakers. The tides obey us, as we watch the moon, and the eclipse is our weapon against fools who would doubt us.

Let us cease our endless sacrifices to Azazel, that blind god of scapegoats and blame! And while others are devoured by unknowable causes, let us feast on the sacred body of the One, who is the cause of every effect and the recipient of all gifts.

Sat Chit Amanda

And we focus on some things and not others, according to whether we expect it to be interest-bearing or valuable to our organisms and genes. By tensing our minds and focusing our attention on something, we densify our simulation of it. Our neural-network pertaining to it grows thicker, and like a wild garden, varieties appear in the ensuing biodiversity of names.

This densification is a mark left by the universe upon the fractal mirror of our minds. It is a weight added and also an impression left. This weight has a gravitational force associated with it, like how everything looks like a nail when you have a hammer. It warps the geometry of our mind-maps, causing the object to look bigger.

The impression left by experience is a lossy mapping that can be partially reversed. Indeed this is why we have it in the first place. The lossiness is how we generalize from past experiences to new ones. And the reversibility means that by listening to someone’s speech or reading their words, one can infer something about what experiences that person has had.

Does someone have many words for different types of snow? They perhaps have spent a lot of time in a cold region. Does this other person use unusually precise words to describe color? Perhaps they are an artist or designer. Why did this person not use a more common word for a legal situation? Perhaps they have some profession in law.

These are simple examples, but the principle may be reused at higher abstraction levels. Why did the conversation not follow the typical flow? Perhaps the person has some hidden agenda. Why did this person assume this or that? Perhaps because they were auto-completing based on past experiences…

The French phrase “tout le monde” originally meant “the Parisian aristocracy” despite being literally translated as “all the world”. Like the self absorbed and doomed French bourgeoisie, set of experiences may become so dense as to collapse into a black hole, an echo chamber where only the past is visible, every message is a permutation of existing knowledge, and the many stars in the sky are merely the same light lensed around invisible obstacles, the scar tissue of natural selection, the wounds of Christ.

For this reason, some prefer to remain in the beginner-mind-present, gazing into Indra's net, that eternal holographic lattice of crystalline reflections in which all reflects All.

Sat Chit Ananda

Because I've noticed that when I experience something, there's some sort of decision I can make to remember it. I may or may not remember any given experience clearly, but I have memories going back to 3 years old where something happened and I think "I'm going to remember this forever" and I do. And sometimes the memory is there but it takes a while to find it. Or some bodily sensation will suddenly reveal a memory-complex that was previously forgotten.

And this process of indexing takes energy, but it's also an investment because it can save energy later, by enabling anticipating and avoidance of energy-negative outcomes. So in some sense, it’s actually a lower energy state, but only if we take the 4d view over a stretch of time instead of 3d snapshots at a moment in time.

And it’s also somehow similar to digestion. There's a decomposition of the experience into simpler constituent parts via generalization, the representation of the memory in terms of a pyramid of abstractions, each of which simultaneously describes or references many things at once, at the expense of detail.

So, we have all these 3d films that are unique, then we turn the resolution down and they start to cluster together and we turn it down further and some of them become identical and at each stage of this process we assign a symbol, a name to these clusters that can then be transmitted to other beings with similar abstraction pyramids.

And building this pyramid, either alone or in concert is essentially the process of sensemaking. A tower of babbling brooks in the stomach of God, digesting memories into memes, math into myth, life into poetry.

Sat Chit Ananda