Most arguments aren’t REALLY about being right or wrong – if they were, they’d be mostly abandoned as ineffective. They’re about jockeying for status. We don’t want to be right, we want to best our opponent. Our instincts tell us the way to do this is through combat – lexical combat, but combat nonetheless. An argument makes almost no sense unless you look at it through this lens, since almost nothing else is accomplished by having one. There’s little else to be gained from imposing your will on someone else. It may seem like a petty goal, but people spend a huge amount of time and energy on status-seeking – it’s a large aspect of our society, and can’t be disregarded.

An argument isn’t like other conflicts. It’s as if in battle, you can make your forces intangible at any moment you decide, and keep them that way until you change your mind. You can goad your enemy, entice them to attack an enemy that can’t even be hit. No damage will be done – lasting damage is seldom done in an argument anyway – but your opponent will lose face furiously trying to attack a foe that refuses to engage, and can’t be hit.

To jump out of my jerkoff prose for a bit, what this means is that if someone is trying to argue with you, one of the best ways to win is to simply refuse to fight him. Don’t gently disagree with him, don’t try to change the subject, just don’t talk to him at all. Don’t acknowledge their existence. Our instinct is to jump into the fray and show whoever it is a thing or two. Ignore that instinct. There are few things more infuriating than someone refusing to pay attention to you – they’ll be enraged, you’ll be calm, collected, and in the superior position.

It’s the same simple rules of strategy over and over again – never compromise your freedom of action, and do everything possible to limit your opponents. Status is as important a resource as any other. And an angry, flustered, insistent person is seen as weak and out of control, whereas someone calm, collected, and indifferent seems to be superior, guiding things without effort. If you’re going to play that game, play it to win – don’t limit yourself to your instinctive responses. Use every tool available.

(Surprised myself by actually stringing together all my thoughts into something halfway coherent. It still needs alot of work, but I at least have something to build from. Too rough to call this a first draft – more of a 0.5 draft – but the key points are there.)

Consciousness is supposedly one of the unique facets of humanity, and one of the driving factors behind our intelligence. But there’s some evidence that high levels of consciousness actually interfere with certain kinds of mental processing. The dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DL-PFC) shows extremely reduced activation when people are dreaming, which is why we don’t notice the fucked up dream world we’re in (it gets activated again if a person enters a lucid dream state). The DL-PFC is, among other things, responsible for self-awareness/metacognition, but this seems to hamper the strengthening of mental connections and the creation of new ones that takes place while dreaming. You see something similar when people are daydreaming (reduced self-awareness and enhanced formation of new connections, due to different brain regions working in concert) and while people are on alcohol (increased daydreaming, reduced self awareness, reduced activity in the DL-PFC). And there’s strong evidence that experts/professionals who think hard about exactly what they’re doing perform much worse than those who just do it automatically. Furthermore, there’s evidence that people in a flow state show reduced prefrontal cortex activation, and people in states of meditation (a state of almost total awareness, nearly the opposite of a dream) shows increased prefrontal cortex activation.

The DL-PFC is also largely responsible for executive function – the ability to oversee all the other brain functions (it’s also responsible for working memory, which may explain why we generally don’t remember our dreams, and why remembering them is important to lucidly dreaming). But constant scrutiny and direction over our mental resources prevents the sort of random wandering and connection formation that’s the foundation of important insights. Archimedes didn’t discover the concept of displacement hunched over his desk performing calculations – he was sitting in his tub (Eureka!). Many of Poincare’s contributions came to him while he was riding the bus (he then proceeded to prove them at his leisure).

Humans aren’t the only creatures that are self aware – a wide variety of animals can pass the mirror test. We’re not the only ones to use tools. We’re not the only ones with a complex language, or social structures. What sets us apart, what defines our unique minds, is the shear volume of mental connections we’re able to create and sort through. Our brains are able to summarize a lifetime of experience and boil it into a single impression – a feeling. To make maximum use of our brains, we have to grudgingly hand over the keys to the part of it we have no control over – that’s where the horsepower is.

[Interesting aside, even though we lack the high-level ability of self-awareness in certain situations (dreams, daydreams, etc) we're still clearly conscious. Seems like there's 'levels' of consciousness, or a continuum of it, rather than just on or off.]

Everything in war is simple, but that does not mean it is very easy. – Carl von Klauswitz

We have several basic, instinctual motivations (I shall cleverly label them all with ‘S’ words) – sleep, sex, status, and sustenance (food+water), and safety. most of what we do is largely some combination of these basic desires.

Beyond this, we all have a few defining personality characteristics – he might be an optimist, she’s an over-achiever, he’s super-competitive. I don’t have the research to cite (I will if this turns into a larger essay), but my best guess is that our basic personality traits/flaws can be boiled down to a small number of motivating factors. The Myers-Briggs test boils us down to a combination of 4 different preferences, and I’d wager that those are set by even more basic traits. To use myself as an example, the preponderance of my personality is centered the fact that I feel like I always have to be right. There’s probably one or two others that together make up 95% of ‘me’.

Beyond THIS, we have our basic physical and mental capacities – how much we can lift, how fast our reflexes are, how intelligent we are, how empathetic etc. Again, this can be boiled down to just a few measures – intelligence, for example, can be summed up in a single number.

The point is that it’s not necessary to be complicated to be, well, complicated. You don’t need more than a few basic inputs to get complex outputs. People all have the same basket of motivations, personality traits, and capabilities to grab from – it only takes a few variables to nearly completely define us. But this belies our enormous complexity – these motivations and abilities shape how we interact with our environment, which in turn shapes the development of our motivations and abilities. Humans run on chaos – small changes in initial conditions give rise to the enormous diversity of personality that we see. Just because it’s (relatively) simple to define a person doesn’t mean that you’ll be able to predict what they’ll do. Even a state with three bodies is unresolveable – one with the 15 or 20 that humans have is probably orders of magnitude more difficult.

(I’m trying to write another longer essay on dreams and how they relate to cognitive function. These are my current notes on)

It’s not 100% clear what our brains are doing while we’re dreaming. But our best guess its that it’s related to memory consolidation and scenario generation. While we’re sleeping, our brain generates a world that can only be seen with our inner eye, a kind of virtual reality where we test things out. Movement shuts down, and we don’t question the scenario given to us. It’s just us and whatever warped simulacrum of real life our subconscious generates, and the only tools we have are our practiced modes of thought. It’s our brains attempt at a test run. What works and makes sense gets written into long-term memory, what’s meaningless quickly fades away. This interpretation explains why:

-we often dream about extremely recent experiences or experiences we recall frequently
-we don’t remember our dreams
-we don’t question the premise of the dream
-we’re able to ’sleep on things’ and subconsciously solve problems while we’re asleep.
-brains are shown to recall memories while in REM.

The phenomenon of lucid dreaming shows that we’re able to break out of this pattern, and recognize we’re in a dream; we can take control of the context we generate (or can we? look more into it). To do this we essentially have to utilize subconscious habits that trigger our bullshit meters

Developing this line of thought (musingzzzz):

-Normally when we interpret events we do so in the context of everything we’ve ever experienced. But we seem ‘unable’ to do so when we’re dreaming – we don’t compare the hallucinated dream world to the normal real world and say ‘this doesn’t make sense’, unless we specifically train ourselves to (lucid dreaming)

-How does a succesful scenario navigation – ie, learning something useful to be applied later coincide with memory consolidation – ie, reliving something thats already happened? It doesn’t seem clear that they are.

-We don’t EXPLICITYLY solve problems when we sleep – rather, we form new mental connections which may reveal a path to the solution. (it seems likely that we’re simoultaneously subconsciously thinking about the problem and forming new mental connections, one of which happens to “click” into place)

-Dreams are related to memory consolidation, yet we don’t remember our dreams. Whats the connection?

-The dream state, the daydream state, and the hallucination state all seem related, and they’re all marked by the generation of new/random mental connections, and of not being aware that we’re in a dream/daydream/hallucination

-Dreams are furnaces of creativity – they spawn completely random and nonsense mental connections, and are unfettered by our experience of how the world actually works.

There’s a tendency whenever you read something to implicitly believe what the author says – call this “Gospel Bias”. As long as the author doesn’t send any signals of gross incompetance, virtually anything written can sound plausible. Even if it expressed an opinion contrary to what we believe, it still has it’s effects on us, which is why we react by getting defensive, trying to salvage our viewpoint. I can think of a few reasons for this:

-Our susceptibility to rhetoric – it works just as well with words as it does with speech.

-With the written word, it’s easy to forget that behind them is just another dumb person with the same flaws as everyone else – it’s very easy to idealize an anonymous figure, because their flaws aren’t made salient when we can’t see them.

-Years of being conditioned to believe what we read – we spend the first 25% of our life in school, being educated through textbooks. This imparts a tendency to believe whatever we happen to read.

-Our tendency to listen to authority (created the same way as #3 – we spend 25% of our life obeying our teachers and our parents, and then the next 75% listening to our boss). And it’s easy to impart authority to the written word.

I counter this bias with a simple heuristic that I call JAA – Just Another Asshole. I force myself to remember that whoever wrote what I’m reading wasn’t gifted with special talents or divine insight that give him the ability to impart wisdom. If I met him on the street I wouldn’t be humbled by his presence – I’d think he was just another asshole. I force myself to consider the person behind the writing, and not subconsciously assume that it was conjured from the aether by some force of pure knowledge.

Of course, this heuristic can easily backfire – if I’m familiar with a writer and have a negative opinion of them, that’ll color my interpretation of whatever they write – I’ll inclined to criticize and comb it for errors, and may even discount it out of hand. But assuming it’s wrong is just as bad as assuming it’s right – the words should stand or fall on their own merits, not on those of the person behind them.

There’s many ways then, that absorbing new information can go wrong – truth is a moving target.

(Attention readers: thank you for your kind comments yesterday!)

Discuss certain topics with people (evolution, physical limits of knowledge, orgins of consciousness, etc) and you’ll occasionally hear people say things to the effect of “science doesn’t have all the answers”, or “you can’t figure everything out using science”, or “science can only take you so far”. This is a fundamentally confused viewpoint.

The implication is that science/empiricism is a method of limited effectiveness, and that there’s another, superior method to science that’s able to discern truths that science can’t. It’s usually not stated what this is, but it can be inferred that they mean the human brain – that humans are capable of understanding things that we can’t measure or test for.

The reason this is confused is that the brain isn’t magical – it’s not some ancient artifact that hides the secrets to understanding the whole universe. It’s a motley collection of neurons shaped by millions of years of evolution to get triggered by certain sensory stimuli. Specifically, the brain pulls information from it’s environment (through touch, taste, sight, etc), interprets it (by searching for patterns), then specifies an action to take based on how it predicts the interpreted environment will respond. In other words, it gathers data, forms a hypothesis, and tests it. Your brain is a scientist.

Your brain is, unfortunately, only a mediocre scientist. It’s very very fast, but it’s very very sloppy. It sucks at dealing with probabilities, with large or small numbers, with understanding it’s own underpinnings, and at a thousand other things. It doesn’t follow the proper rules of updating on evidence. It’s results are good enough for finding food and avoiding tigers, but to perceive anything deeper we need to abstract the principles the brain works on away from it’s shoddy implementation. That’s what science and empiricism does.

Saying science isn’t capable of figuring out the answers doesn’t make sense, because as far as we know, hypothesis, test, and update is the ONLY way to learn anything. It’s trial and error or nothing. Science is simply an attempt to perfect that method, to converge on the right answer as fast as possible. But it’s powered by the same principles as the brain is.

It’s easy to get disillusioned, to forget why you’re doing what you’re doing, to want to give up. It seems like what you put the hours in on is making no difference at all. But this is only practice. You’re building this into something else – you just don’t know what it is yet. But it’s going to lay the foundation for everything that comes after it – the rest of your life.

You have no readers – which sucks – but it really doesn’t matter. At this point, readers would only serve one purpose – calling you on your bullshit. Forging your skills in the furnance of relentless critcism. But you can (and do) get that elsewhere.

Remember, what you’re after is getting BETTER – improvement is all you can hope for at this stage. You have big dreams, big ambitions – you want to go toe to toe with the greatest minds on the planet. Bad news – you don’t have the mental capacity for that. Sorry, but it’s true – there’s people that are several standard deviations smarter than you, who are always, always, ALWAYS going to outshine you. The best you can hope for is to work your ass off at what you like to do, and hope it leads to some success. There’s no guarantee that it will – for every shining success story there’s a thousand untold and unnoted failures. But at least you’ll be able to look back and say that you made the right move, that you wouldn’t have played it any other way.

Remember the stoics – the past and future are mental illusions, the only thing that really, truely exists is the now. All you can do what you know is best in the moment.

Now go read a goddamn book – you’re way, WAY behind.

Why are humans creative? What sparks our desire to build and make things?

In the ancestral evolutionary environment, the things we made would have aided survival – shelter, hunting tools, skins for warmth, etc. Today, we still build those things, but it’s not considered being ‘creative’ – creativity has become synomous with being artistic – with painting, sculpting, making music, writing, etc. Modern living has made forging our own implements of survival unnecessary, so the things we create exist for their own sake. Of course, it’s all based on the same impulse – creation is creation.

But why do we have it at all?

Creativity is closely tied to proficiency. You can never just sit down and bang out a masterpiece – it takes hours and hours of concerted effort to be able to master whatever field you’re in. Creativity is essentially the work needed to hone a skill – whenever you’re creating, you’re simoultaneously learning how to do something. Having a natural instinct to do that would confer a great advantage (and could thus be selected for by evolution). Even if we consciously understood the benefit of certain actions, such as tool use (crows and monkeys can be taught to use tools), practicing at them until we became skilled would make them that much more effective. Our higher brain functions give us the ability to understand and solve complex problems, but they piggyback onto our subconscious to teach us to become GOOD at solving those problems.

If you went back in time several hundred years, the people you found speaking english would be almost completely unintelligible. Modern english is a descendent of the now dead language ‘old english’ – over the years, the language evolved and changed with each generation, eventually becoming an entirely new language.

You see this with every language spoken today. Spanish, French, and Italian are all descended from Latin, which evolved from old Latin, which likely evolved from some proto-italic language. Mandarin is descended from Old chinese. Arabic is descended from Old Arabian. The greek language has gone through seven different forms to get to the modern greek spoken today. All languages shift and change over time, eventually becoming entirely new ones. According to linguists, all surviving, spoken languages are relatively young.

Modern language variants are all descended from a few basic proto-languages, that likely developed independently in the areas where humans first appeared. From these cradles of civilization, people gradually spread out, and the slow speed of communication and the difficulty of travel caused these basic languages to fracture and eventually turn into completely new ones.

Today we should be seeing the reverse effect – the ease of communiction is putting everyone in constant contact. English is quickly becoming the lingua franca of modern society. How will languages evolve when the constraints on the development of language are changed, when anyone can instantly talk to anyone else on the planet? Are there other, less obvious constraints that foster the development of language? I can think of a few:

-Different speech patterns becoming normal/appropriate in different social groups. We see this to some extent with texting/typing abbreviations (zomg lol imho), leetspeak, etc.

-Strong cultures keeping older languages alive, though gradually and unintentionally changing them over time.

-Interest in the possible efficiency/clarity gains of designed languages such as Esperanto or Lojban.

However, I don’t think any of these is powerful enough to act as a selection pressure for language evolution. When everyone talks and interacts with everyone else, crossing social and geographic boundaries, there’s simply no opportunity for a budding language to take hold.

No, I didn’t figure it out. Sorry to disappoint you.

But wait, I have something just as interesting! A surefire way to FIND the meaning of life!

Or at least, a surefire way to avoid not finding it….

I should explain.

Philosphers (both armchair and professional) spend a great deal of their time searching for answers to questions about the nature of the world – why are we here, what’s the maning of life, what is existence, does morality exist, etc etc etc. The answers they arrive at tend to come in two flavors:

1) A lifetime of experience boiled down to a few aphorisms.
or
2) A dense, impenetrable, rigorous, consistent-yet-unverifiable interpretation of a particular aspect of the universe.

The problem with both of them is that they’re externally focused. They’re attempts to make sense of the world we observe, but they fail to properly take into account the observer. A person isn’t just a person, a unit that can’t be divided. A person is a brain, and brains are made up of complex machinery shaped by millions of years of evolution. There are of course philosophers that take this into account, but if your philsophy makes NO mention of the brain, has no sliver of a neuro- physio- perspective, it’s necessarily incomplete. How can you possibly have an interpretation of the world without understanding the machine that’s doing the interpreting? Any philosophy without a strong neurological component is not even wrong.

I’ll admit that I’m somewhat biased – holding this opinion makes my life alot easier. It means the vast, vast majority of philosophy for the past 2000 years can be disregarded out of hand. Of course, this should probably be done anyway – as Cicero said, there is nothing so foolish that some philosopher hasn’t said it. This just makes a good heuristic for what to ignore.

(note: Philosophy of mathematics, philosophy of science, and generally philosophy of any purposefully created system make an exception to this rule.)