Drawing How the Brain Represents Animals

I have a large print of the image at the right hanging on my wall. The images are from the
Chauvet Cave France and were made in the Aurignacian Era around 40,000 years ago.

The enlarged version shows more of the detail of the animal drawings than this JPG does. The animals are drawn with charcoal and are actually really good sketches that are shaded and the lines are emphasized in the same way contemporary artists draw realistic 2D projections of the 3D world.

A realistic sketch is probably a lesson in how our brain represents the natural world--animals in particular. The drawings made on the cave wall in charcoal emphasize boundaries and the most information dense (in the information theory sense) portions of the visual image. The thing an artist actually draws with a pencil is how their brain represents the world visually.

Information Density of Two Lions Image

The interesting thing to me is that the external world is actually in our brains. The minute differences in proportion of various animal heads, for example, is encoded there so we can recognize different species--some now extinct--of bears and lions in the cave painting. Our ancestors spent countless generations with them.

Are Culture "Wars" Bread & Circus Entertainment?

Since I'm not on Faceberg or Twatter anymore, I'm only occasionally exposed to culture "wars" news stories via random YouTube videos. I'm thinking it's a bad habit to pay too much attention to this stuff, but it is sort of compelling the same way watching sports is compelling.

For a while, I thought the present-day "clash" (if you can call it that) was unique because of social media, but in a lot of ways its a replay of earlier eras. It seems like left wing groups are perennial millenarian religious zealots, even if their religion is atheism. In an earlier era a figure like Carrie Nation was on a jihad against booze and wouldn't be out of place today with blue hair. Also, the temperance movement of the era was bankrolled by oligarchs of the day and was really a prototype wedge issue.

1800s American Idealism and a Mania for Institutions

In the early 1800s, shortly after newly opened territories were opened for settlement, people in the United States went on a bender of ideological and religious experimentation of various kinds. Several towns and cities and colleges in Ohio, for example, were basically founded by religious leaders (aka cult leaders). While today we associate religious zeolots with socially conservative ideas, many of those 19th century Christian groups espoused what we think of today as progressive ideas.

They also went on a bender of creating institutions and groups that sought to put ideals into practice, which really meant that they wanted to legislate and regulate individuals and engineer "a people". It's not surprising they turned to the Prussian Education system as a model for schools in the United States since they were trying to "solve" a similar problem, that is engineer a unified country from many disparate groups and individuals.

The progressives then and now tend to focus on groups and institutions like corporations rather than individual's pursuing his own goals or following a particular path toward understanding.

Neoliberal Central Command Sent a New Memo On Migration

In the past couple of weeks John Kerry and Hillary Clinton started to criticize mass migration, specifically migration into the EU, as a catalyst of populist backlash. I'm sure if I bothered looking, I'd be able to find them making heartfelt pleas for Europe to accept as many migrants as possible in the recent past.

Those people are actors who have no beliefs of their own, so where's HQ? Who's actually in charge of these empty suits and mouthpieces?

Populist Empire?

When you read about the north american colonial period one of the themes that pops up frequently is manufactured goods were often made in the mother country and the monetization of the raw materials of the New World was made possible by import of manufactured and/or luxury goods, and no competing local industries. Money, and therefore credit were attached to the mother nation and its trade monopolies which led to deliberate hobbling of the colonies' economies.

It seems like innovation is inherently at odds with authoritarianism and oligarchy. (The Japanese Empire is a notable exception to this notion.) The rising tide of techno-totalitarianism across the western world (and in spades in China) is really pretty interesting from this point of view.

The thing I wanted to write about in this post, though, is the contradictions of the United States neoliberal empire and how the populist backlash against it could go down a dark path. The imperialism of the present day US is carried out by and on behalf of corporations. It takes the form of exploitation of less organized nations' people and environment for the production of goods abroad. It really represents a near total ownership of governments all over the world by corporate interests. The empire really doesn't sit well with the nation's long held ideals, though, but maybe it's idealistic to think the average American is attached to them either.

The populist backlash against corporatism is a long time coming and at the present time has very little positive shape or any specific agenda or goals. It's pretty easy to imagine a lot of bad potential outcomes. For example, rather than promote freedom around the world and see corporate exploitation of people in Asia or Latin America as a problem, we could end up with a populist empire that seeks to exploit them more on behalf of a bread and circuses mob run amok.

The Cash Economy Versus Crypto or Gold

When I was in high school, I had a good friend whose family had a lot of assets in the cash economy and they conducted a lot of business that way--doing barter and trade and buying things with big wads of $100 bills. If you're able to start young and earn income outside the banking system and the gaze of tax authorities, you can actually build a large pile of tangible wealth in the form of vehicles, tools, collectibles, antiques, etc... that's an alternative to putting money in a bank. Some of that stuff is relatively easy to liquidate and if you're shrewd, you can even make a profit on trades. However, if you're not shrewd, or need money in a hurry, you can lose big.

Precious metals and crypto currencies are supposed to serve as alternatives to cash but in practice it can be difficult to liquidate precious metals without paying a significant fee, and it is also rare to find someone who will take PM's in exchange for goods or services. (I did see a craigslist ad for a tractor that had a 20% discount for precious metals purchase.) In my area, only about 1/1000th of craigslist ads are marked to indicate they accept crypto.

PMs and crypto are, to me, akin to stock or commodity trading where there is 0% chance that you can have any knowledge advantage or any other type of advantage versus anyone else in that market. (I stopped trading stocks a few years ago for that reason) With tangible assets, though, you can gain actual useful knowledge and either add value to a thing or at minimum have an advantage in a trade.

Lessons for Cryptocurrency Enthusiasts from Ohio Company (1749-1763)

Empire and Oligarchy are essentially the same thing. Can there really be one without the other?

The settlement of Ohio is one of the more interesting chapters in US history because it's really like a microcosm of world history. The Ohio Company was formed to begin settling what was then the Northwest Territory of colonial America. The french conducted trade with indian tribes in the interior including the Ohio territory, but the French presence was pretty feeble and was contested by the British and the American colonists.

While the British had their fangs in the neck of the New World it was useful to irritate and subvert the French so it was useful to their interests to promote British settlement in what were nominally "French" territories. However after the Seven Years War, it seems like the British Empire sought to bottle up the colonists and stop their advance into the western frontier. That was probably their policy all along, and was a goal they stated after the war of 1812. The leaders of the Ohio company were really playing at Great Game politics rather than conducting their own business or advancing their own interests.

The nature of trade, especially overseas trade, tends toward concentration and centralization via control of markets. The very feeble British and especially French presence in North America was sufficient to control trade and markets for a long time. The remote oligarchs in Britain and France managed to extract great wealth from colonies through a feeble spiderweb network of businesses. It seems like oligarchy's interests tend to become past-oriented as they try to maintain monopolies and extract wealth through what are basically broad based taxes, e.g. church tithes, church indulgences, usury, monopoly of commodities like salt or oil, etc...

New technology or new worlds, like the age of sail colonies, or the Internet, upset those systems and threaten the schemes of monopolists. Crypto looks quite a bit like the frustrated schemes of the Ohio Company. As long as it fits into the plans of the entrenched oligarchies of the day it gains users, but if it competes with their monopolies it gets attacked by their lackies in the media and the government.

Natural Information: Symbols and Storage Systems

In the previous post I noted that a key difference between natural information and systemic representation of bits in something like a telecommunication systems is formal systems are constrained in time and space while natural information isn't. Animals, obviously, are contrained in time and space and only perceive a filtered version of natural information, and maybe that's what a symbol for animals and humans really is. The active filtering networks of our senses that feed information to the central nervous system are the things that are natural versions of written symbols or words.

When you see a squirrel, for example, you really don't see a mere array of pixels like a digital camera does, rather the nervous system has some built-in representations of a generic animal and probably even some built in representation of a generic "squirrel". If you're not around squirrels very often, for example, you probably won't even perceive the visual differences of different sub-species.

It seems plausible that those built-in representations form the basis of language and the language of our brains and memory. That's probably why our memories are so bad and prone to distortion compared to a photograph.

When I try to recall a squirrel I saw yesterday, my mind's eye really sees squirrelness.

Modem Symbols and Natural Information

Information theory is a new field. It really only dates to my grandfather's era and I'm a child of the 1970s. It came about as big telecommunications systems started spreading around the United States and good mathematical models were needed to engineer them. Information theory is really a statistical model of symbol transmission. Most modern telecommunication systems use modulators and demodulators plus some encoding method (really very complicated and sparse alphabets) to move strings of bits. Typically the bits are represented by a modulated carrier signal where groups of 1's and 0's are represented as regular perturbations of the carrier; Old timey audio-frequency modems transmitted data in the audible range (e.g. 300 Hz) and you could hear the signal. Information theory describes the probability of the symbols being decoded correctly based on signal-to-noise ratio.

Natural information is different. If you drop a sugar cube in a bathtub, for example, the concentration of sugar in the water will form a gradient. That is, the concentration will be higher near the cube than further away until a number of hours or minutes elapses. The gradient is information. Is it in any way symbolic in information theory terms?

No. The concept of a symbol is really a formalized expression of human language--really it's a systemic representation of writing--a mark. One of the topics I wanted to get at in the earlier post about information and scales is that telecom systems are really, really specific and the engineering concepts apply mostly to representing 1's and 0's within specific extremely constrained systems in terms of time (frequency really) and space and method.

Natural information is not constrained, which may be the chief reason it can't be symbolic. Symbolic really strongly implies space and time constraints that are exemplified by electronic telecommunication systems.

Narcissism and Frontiers

There are 1001 hero cults. For many boys, day to day life in childhood is spent soaking in hero cults of sports, comic books, and TV. For some, training begins for a chance to shine forth in the light of natural justice and achieve victory and be a hero, at least on a small scale.

There's almost nothing sweeter than the thrill of winning against a field of competitiors who all prepared and worked hard to try to win. This feeling is experienced by proxy by sports fans. Day-to-day real world life, though, is almost entirely devoid of such opportunities to compete and win, and often times naked competition in the human world is very destructive. People who participate in sports as adults often transform the competitive elements of their sport into mechanisms for self-improvement as the realities of life and age set-in.

If a true understanding is really achieved by creating a mind that's a reflection of nature, then the narcissist or egotist's understanding of the world is very distorted, and the egotist is, rather ironically, very easy to dupe and exploit.

Simply creating a venue for someone to be "special" and give them an award of a cheap medal will motivate hundreds, or maybe thousands of people to strive even at the risk of their own life. (See Napoleon's quote) 

A frontier provides a "natural" test of men, although the "struggle" for life on the frontier is probably framed in a hero cult delusion, too.

Funhouse World

A decade ago, there was an article about a father who doped his young son so the kid could win inline skating competitions. That story came up in the context of performance enhancing drug distribution rings in the US that were being busted, as well as Tour de France doping. It was apparent that the illicit market for performance enhancing drugs was substantially larger than that for their legitimate medical uses.

Today, of course, media celebrates parents who do what East German coaches did to athletes back in the 1980s and start dosing their pre-teen kids with testosterone or estrogen and put them on a course that will require lifelong treatments that cost hundreds of dollars a pop. Media appeals to the narcissism of parents and their children and gives them a way to escape the humdrum normalcy of their actual day to day life by going to a doctor and taking an injection.

There are a million and one ways for parents, even well meaning parents, to FUBAR their children and there are many industries who happily wreck children's lives in various ways while making the opposite claims about their intentions. Are pharmaceutical corporations any different in kind or degree than other industries? Not really. Actually one of the great disservices of fiction, TV/movies is to depict evil corporate heads as really slick and fancy-pants, and implicitly rare, rather than common and banal.

When this mania passes, either because this market saturates, or harmful side effects of frequent hormone use become obvious, how many parents and grown children will regret their choice as they step out of the mania-decision-making context into the harsh light of day?

One of the great tropes of sci-fi and horror movies is the Fun House that's actually an entrance to a slaughterhouse. What an apt metaphor for this world of lies!

Information Storage, Transmission, Operations On Multiple Scales

Data and his "brother" Lore

One of the most powerful teaching and learning tools is the thing that's "not there". Commander Data in Star Trek is a great example of that method of learning through stories. He's the man who's not human. His role in the story of TNG is to create a void that can never be filled even with repeated asking of: "what does it mean to be human?"

Computers and formal language systems serve a very similar role in improving understanding. In an effort to make simulacra of intelligence, they create similar voids that beg the questions of "what is intelligence and what is information?"

Formal language systems like computer programs are like an obsidian mirror reflection of natural systems of information storage and transmission. (Maybe they're derived from systems of representation in our brains which are apart from the primary information storage in our brain.) By studying the formal langauge system in natural information terms, and vice versa, it might be possible to come up with a third mode that fixes the deficiencies in formal language systems.

If we start with the premise that information and intelligence are omnipresent, then the woods on our property must have their own intelligence, but it's also extremely unlikely that we could understand that intelligence in its own or its full terms. That said, there are probably some aspects of intelligence that are universal and that can be aped with formal language models.

One of the big problems we have before we can even get started on such a model is to understand the time (really inverse time: frequency) and spatial scale that something like a woods stores information so you can represent it with a symbolic version of the same.

Credit Tightening for Tech Companies

Tech Bubble 2.0 appears to be in the process of popping (aka making credit more scarce for tech companies). I say this based on first hand, albeit anecdotal evidence.

There's no AI, there's only I

Intelligence, like information, is apparently a property of our universe that arises from the relationship of its elements. The human brain embodies this aspect of the universe. Our brain has a network of associations and structurally encoded information (i.e. knowledge  cultural, genetic, and molecular) that allows us to think and to understand. Other networks on different scales of time and size are operating all the time on Earth and throughout the Universe as a whole.

Computer code is a bad analogy for how our brain operates. Our brain is more like the structures that emerge from running code and those structures are quite apart from the program. The analogy of how the mechanics toolbox stores information is a way to illustrate this.

I don't think AI, in the sense it's popularly understood, is possible. That is, you can't write a computer program that manifests intelligence, rather you could embody intelligence in a machine or a computer the same way nature emodied intelligence in us. (This is really the premise of SkyNet in The Terminator movies.)

 However, I think the fundamental problem is that there's no way to create a formal language representation of the information that's stored inside us that makes our brain work. Since the world doesn't operate in formal langauge code, you can't encode it with formal language (a computer program).

Great Paper on Egyptian Astromythology

The Celestial River: Identifying the Ancient Egyptian Constellations by Alessandro Berio

Egregore and Not Getting What You Want

One recurring theme in this blog is that a system has a life of its own, or more precisely lives through the people who make it work. When you try to solve your problems with a system, you end up getting more of what the system wants, than what you wanted from your ostensible invention. You invite a god into this plane of existence.

The moderns thought they replaced the gods. Modernity is really an attempt at engineering social and economic systems from a rational basis, rather than rely on cultural traditions, which in the worst cases were long standing means of oligarchic control. Rationalism replaces the voice of received traditional wisdom in an attempt to free human beings. (It really frees them to engage in rational enquiry)

The moderns model of reality is the natural world is entirely passive and can be endlessly modified according to human whim and that everything is isolated and malleable on its own. (This is really exemplified by transhumanists.) In the worst cases, this belief is applied to nations and people, which some believe can be modified and shaped according to the whims of social engineers, and the most malignant case is that social engineers create a new religion and enslave people to ideologies like race supremacy and communism.

The egregore is a better and more subtle model for what actually happens. The engineer really builds a bridge for a new god to cross into our plane. It seems like older modes of design and engineering were possibly more conscious of this. The amish (again with the amish) skepticism of new technologies and systems is really another way to prevent malignant gods from entering into our world.

The Amish, the Cathars, and Lefty Racists

Last weekend we drove out to Mesopotomia, Ohio (aka Mespo) which is a small, rural town in the Grand River Valley. It's not too far away from where we live, but it's like a different world because of the high proportion of Amish people, and the rural landscape. When you visit a place like that, you can really see how civilization is a thing of its own that exists through a people since the Amish economy and day-to-day life is distinct from that of their immediate neighbors. The thing is really like the God of those people.

It's easier to imagine the circumstances of the Crusades against the Cathars in the 13th century when you visit a place like Mespo. In the world conception of the thuggish Catholic Church and Monarchies of the day, a distinct people and religion like that of the Cathars or the Amish today was anathema, since it represented a threat against their civic and religious order. (In WWI, Hutterites who refused to serve in the US military were tortured to death in prison)

Lefty identity politics is pretty weird when you contrast how the Amish maintain their distinct culture within a larger sea of people with no apparent sense of victimhood, i.e. being a loser. If you want to maintain a distinct way of life, which you believe is better for you and yours, then you have to actively maintain it. Lefty identity politics is weirdly passive and spoiled-child entitled.

The constant complaint and resentment against "white people" is really like that of the Catholic Church against the Cathars, except it's more the other way around in terms of population and power. The lefty racist blames all his problems on the white man instead of just living his own life and seeking after his own interests, which is exactly what whiny white klansmen do.

Three Political Parties in the US of A

The Internet changed how election propaganda and political discussion takes place in the USA in recent years. It seems like the Internet accelerated a split in both parties, where the libertarians with any affiliation with the GOP got fed up with the neocons and the socialists and more libertarian oriented people who voted for democrats finally got fed up with the war  mongers and corporate lackies in the blue party.

Trump actually managed to establish a new coalition as a sort of third party candidate that used the apparatus of the GOP to win the election. Bernie Sanders' campaign was actually pretty similar, but he got bought off by the Clintons at some point.

Maybe over time, we end up with three parties in the US and the Internet breaks up the major political parties the same way it is breaking up the MSM. It seems like the three groups are pretty stable: various flavors of libertarian, rino/dino corporation party,various shades of communist.

The Middle of Everything

A widesoread mythological theme is that man is in-between or in the middle of the celestial realms of the gods and the world of matter. "The Hobbit" and "The Lord of the Rings" take place in Middle Earth. The plane of man in the norse myths is Midgard.

We are animated matter. We are the intercessor between the material world and the spirit realms.

Champagne Socialists and Communist Dictators and the Star Trek Future

Woman with Japanese Skull WW2 War Trophy

Star Trek: The Next Generation is on Netflix and has been remasted in HD (with the original TV aspect ratio, though). The main premise of the show is that human beings evolve and our civilizations evolve as we acquire knowledge. In fact the show almost completely conflates technological progress with "social" progress. Have we really progressed and become  more refined or has  our brutality just shifted around and moved into dark out of sight out of mind places? Really, WWI and WWII, were made possible by industrial technology and were the serial application of it to mass slaughter. The death toll of those two wars is off the charts in human history and the total war doctrines of the great powers in WWII was as barbaric as any Mongol Hoarde.

Could global level rational cooperation among all people ever really work? Many of the people who are always trying to sell the idea are champagne socialists who preach universal "sharing" from atop piles of money. Of course, the "promise" of forced cooperation inevitably turns to slavery and worse. Socialism seems pretty un-clever.

Humans are capable of both cooperation and competition, obviously, but in Star Trek world the need for competition seems to be obviated by the super-duper sources of energy they have. So all the people, at least of starfleet, participate in a rigid hierarchical (but presumably meritocratic) militaristic organization, which is actually a pretty weird ingredient of the fantasy world of future atlantis.

Is global cooperation a pre-requisite for advancing technologically or in other ways? Probably not. Not in the Star Trek or globalist way certainly.

Steering People With Aesthetics

In the 1980s culture wars, the game of Dungeons and Dragons regularly featured as a villain that was tempting children into the ways of satan. My dweebie friends and my dweebie young teen self played the game on a weekly basis. D&D was really like an extension of sci-fi and fantasy novels and an exercise in shared active imagination, which children are generally pretty good at through years of practice in games and playing with toys. Religions are actually pretty similar on that score. A congregation and a people share a base of imaginative stories that are elaborated over time, but for the typical churchgoer, the religion "game" is more passive. I think the critique of D&D by christian conservatives of the day was actually correct in some ways.

D&D grew out of The Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings and works by writers of the Lovecraft circle who were tied into Theosophy. The world of fantasy, for them, was real and malleable and where the future could be made.

Many people, but especially children, evaluate information through aesthetics. Since they don't have any actual experience, they can't make judgements any other way. If a kid sees a cool car, they'll react to its shape, the sound the engine makes, and how shiny it is. If an adult sees a politician on a stage surrounded by a crowd, they'll react to the apparent social circumstances of a person being "important" rather than evaluate whatever nonsense is being said. The play violence of kids pretending to be knights or cowboy gunfighters seems like the model lay people have of wars.

An aesthetic understanding is more primal than attempts at rational understanding and probably relies on evolutionary "memories" that people have. The chrome and cooling fins and shiny paint of motorcycles conjure up the slick colors and patterns of reptiles and birds. Leathers and helmets of street racers cover up their human features, which as far as animals go are pretty jumbled and muddled, and reduce them to a simple clear forms.

Culture Wars and Focus on "Cultural Marxist" Issues as a Distraction

Do you remember how similar the "left" and "right" wing critiques and observations about the federal government were around 2008? Much of the commentary on the financial system by a left wing academic like Michael Hudson and right wing youtuber's complaints about the Federal Reserve were interchangable or at least complementary. Similarly, the critique of imperialism and foreign wars by the USA was similar if not complementary.

A few years later much of the audience for that commentary is wrapped up in culture wars bullshit. Was that engineered as a diversion? The "alt right" seems like it was entirely fabricated. The audience who opposed wars and financial crime ended up worrying about white genocide or commie dweebs on college campuses or nonsense like Bruce Jenner's sex change.

I didn't follow any of the development of the alt left over the past few years, but it wouldn't be a surprise if that followed a parallel path.