Songs without Words

At some particular times, one feels so close to some sort of truth. It’s so weird, because there is no indication or reason why there should even be such a thing as truth .. and yet isn’t it that somehow, something inside of us is naturally inclined to believe in it?

Even though most things in this world are easily explained once their mechanisms are elucidated, still some remain elusive.

When I watch shows on the Discovery Channel or Animal Planet, I am constantly amazed at all the things that other creatures on this planet can do. The natural abilities of plants and animals – and of bacteria and fungi and protists, too – are just so breathtaking. To change stone into fruit, to transform from independent cells into one huge organism during stress, to split water to harness solar power, to create and manage an empire 5000 km long when one is less than a centimeter long. The thought that such creatures inhabit this same world is hard to fathom.

But while those shows always exalt the other creatures in comparison to human capabilities, it’s not fair at all. The human race is really something else. Yes, the individual human is relatively weak and useless. Its eyesight is mediocre, its sense of smell is limited at best, its hearing is jammed right in the middle. It can only run at a couple miles per hour and can only hold its breath for a minute or two under water. It has small teeth and jaws and has no ability to digest cellulose, even though it is not suited to be a hunter, since its muscles are considerably weaker than the great beasts. And it has lost opposable thumbs on its feet, reducing its ability to climb trees.

Thinking like that is placing too much emphasis on “evolution.” Indeed, evolution is a very important force. But just as gravity is not the only force of attraction, and much weaker than its electromagnetic counterpart, and much much weaker than the nuclear forces, even the so-called “weak” nuclear force — just like that, evolution is most visible, but it is not the only force that shapes life.

Human beings are the realization of a complete revolution in biology. Sure, Lamarck was wrong – giraffes didn’t get long necks by stretching them. But in the human race, evolution is dead. Evolution is only powerful over millions of years with massive amounts of death. In this capacity, it is like gravity, which is the strongest at far distances. Humans, on the other hand, wish to reach enlightenment in a couple thousand years. Only simple creatures like viruses and bacteria could make significant evolutionary inroads in this timeframe. And indeed, as amazing as other creatures are, in terms of sheer power, only the simplest and most complex reign.

Giraffes, going back to the classic example of Lamarck, cannot have gained their long necks by stretching, we reckon, because there is no way that it would be a heritable trait. Sure, one giraffe might have a long neck, but its offspring wouldn’t.

But why does a child of a mathematician know calculus? Surely there is no way that humans are “inheriting” knowledge of calculus. No, humans are “passing on” the long necks. Consider the ramifications of this: a creature that is able to retain adaptations from one generation to the next. A squirrel gets run over by a car. Its offspring get run over by a car. Evolution is a weak teacher.

Instead of entering an arms race with its prey, it has discovered that better than bringing the fight to the prey’s turf is being the prey to one’s own turf – by choosing the weakest ones and then mass producing it in an enclosure.

Instead of evolving eyes that can see all forms of E&M radiation, it has created instruments that use these forms of radiation and translate them into the very narrow range that it can actually see.

Instead of using its hands to build structures, it has created powerful machines and vehicles that are thousands of times more powerful.

The human being is an amazing thing. Evolution granted it a brain, but a brain on its own is not such a useful thing. The brain is a lump of unwired neurons – it’s like a Lego or K’nex starter kit. By itself, it is kind of unsightly and useless. With nothing to build, the brain is pointless. Many other creatures have large brains – whales for instance. But whales aren’t really that smart (the smaller dolphins are smarter by far). It’s because, despite their massive brains, they haven’t figured out a way to fill it with power. The human spends twenty full years filling the brain with pure power – and not just raw experience, but the experience of the “very best” that there is to offer.

Consider it: what do we learn? We learn the “greatest hits” of the history of knowledge. The mistakes are erased. How many kids these days would say the world is flat, despite overwhelming physical evidence that would indicate it? How many kids these days would say that the sun revolves around the Earth, even do it looks like it does? In this sense, the adult human effectively becomes a continuation of the previous generations.

The human being is merely a single cell in the larger organism. The human race is one large organism. It does occasionally war with itself, but then, the cells within the human race certainly can be hostile to one another as well. The human organism has a collective knowledge, a knowledge that is held in common among many of its individuals, that is recorded in books and hard drives. That is, just as the DNA is preserved because every cell has it, so too is the human collective knowledge protected. It has taken billions of years to come up with the 3 billion base pairs of the human DNA. It has taken scarcely a couple thousand years to create the massive body of knowledge of the humans that is magnitudes larger than that stored in DNA. Indeed, this knowledge nearly includes the ability to create new life, in addition to many other things.

What does this mean?

This means that the human that walks at 5 km/hr has created a vehicle that travels at 62,600 km/hr.  It still feels insufficient, not because there is any other creature faster, but because it is obsessed with chasing the speed of light, which of course remains somewhat out there at 1,080,000,000 km/hr.  Sure, light is fast, but human ingenuity must not be underestimated – as soon as the *necessity* arises, humans will create very rapid transportation meant for space use.  It has taken only 200 years to go from 14 km/hr to 62,600 km/hr.  Another leap of this kind would take humans to 300,000,000 km/hr .. a respectable speed if I might say so myself.  Fast enough, certainly, that the stubborn common sense that a person jumping off a 20 mph train at 20 mph is jumping at 40 mph would finally be replaced by the relativistic understanding (since a ship taking off from another ship taking off from another ship would certainly not be going 900,000,000 km/hr.  Otherwise we’d have the “piggyback warp drive,” the stupidest thing that never made it into sci-fi movies).

In any case, enough on this.  I just wanted to point out that human beings shouldn’t get too caught up in an inferiority complex when it starts becoming aware of the natural forces around them.  Evolution is dead, and it’s time to show how adaptation can change all the rules.  Next: on the technology of Catleya.

I just spent a good 45 minutes in the attic, going through my pile of old stuff.  The pile of old stuff is a great source of treasure, but it is hidden among tons of junk.  Indeed, the pile is very large, consisting of three stacks of folders, each 3 or 4 feet tall.  It is difficult to actually find anything, since it is scattered and unlabeled.

Among the important documents I have recovered that I will soon summarize and/or scan in:

– A political map of ancient NewAegun

– A time-course map detailing the changing boundaries and cities of nations during the Silver and Golden Ages, as well as the Dark Ages following the arrival of cats.

– Biological diagrams of the Urimentian physiology (Uriments are the gods)

– Many illustrations of Nisuna

– Two separate and possibly contradictory sets of “Old Cat” characters representing various gods.

– The 6-page road map of Catland

– A land-feature map of Catleya

– Several texts and scripts for the original “Nisuna mew Norime” story

– population and species data

And on the side, I have also recovered these:

– The original text of “Violet Rain,” one of the great remaining “lost” stories

– The long-lost “Julia collection,” which contains most of the best illustrations of Julia, past and present

– Many illustrations of Nisuna and Faxuda

– The entire first season of Root J (the original!)

I think it’s about time that I finalize the backstory of my imaginary world.  I might end up changing around a lot of stuff in the process, though.

The girl-dream is a peculiar thing. It is experienced in first person, except for moments when sudden jerks or motions send the view temporarily into third person (usually looking at the back). Most of the appearances, then, have been gleaned from these brief back views and from looking in a mirror within the dream. Of course, outfits can be recognized if they are laid out before being worn.

Here are the five girls’ profiles and storylines, from left to right:

1.

Description: an Asian girl with short hair. Personality is nearly identical to mine: artistically and scientifically oriented, roughly equally, with very little attention to gender roles. Clothing is androgynous, as is the hairstyle (moreso in the dream than depicted here).
The very first girl-avatar I occupied was this simple girl. Because it was my first time, I spent a good deal of the dream trying to figure out what was going on — looking in the mirror and poking at my breasts .. looking at my face with the smooth skin, etc. I was eventually distracted by the sight of my younger sister trying to play a cello as a violin, which really worried me (just think about where the pin might end up going through … yeah, ouch). And that was that. Short and sweet.

This dream shortly followed the creation of Julia as a twin alter ego, way before I tied romantic identity with Julia, and way way before Julia reverted to being a twin-type figure.

3. (Note that the second from the left was the *third* girl)

Description: a pretty and vigorous girl of maybe 17 years or so. Claims to be the “true” girlfriend of the fictional character “Light Yagami,” although this is unconfirmed. Also claims to have had contact with death gods and the like. An intense, calculating person with interest in self-preservation and success, she would certainly be a much better mate for Light than Misa could ever be …

For a longer summary, see the original post on this dream, but the gist of it was this: I was being chased by a death god who had made a strange pact regarding my status as the girlfriend of a particular boy possessing the notebook of death. In any case, I had to make sure I was not seen by him for a full twenty minutes. I ended up running up and down the stairs in an effort to outwit the flying monster, and in the end, I took off into the courtyard, through many buildings, trying to use my cunning to keep myself alive. There was one close call that was so frightening that it provided the primary image on which I have been able to guess my appearance.

2.

Description: an average-looking girl with long flaxen hair. Not a tomboy, not a girly girl, just something in between. A little bit adventurous, a little bit lazy.

The dream, so long ago, has largely faded from memory, but it involved amoebas dripping down from the ceiling and caverns filled with gigantic freezers full of 20-pound frozen chickens. Needless to say, this was not a deep and meaningful examination of my gender.

4.

Description: a tomboyish girl with short spiky brown hair and an embarrassingly underdeveloped chest. Likes to wear clothes with tones that are the most “natural” – the colors of trees and various shades of earth and dirt.

This dream was quite recent, so its entry is in this blog. It involved being at an academy built of logs and which had a McDonald’s inside its cafeteria. I was just trying to pick out a matching outfit … to no avail.

5.

Description: a shy, slightly awkward girl of 18 or 19 years; Asian with somewhat short hair. Focused mostly on her studies, she doesn’t waste much time on becoming elegant. She has cuteness somewhere in her, but she seems oblivious to that side of her most of the time. Very, very slim with compact but ample breasts; maybe 5′ 4″ or so.
The situation was getting serious: I had to attend a banquet-party in a few hours, but I looked at the massive pile of wrinkled clothes lying all over my messy room and realized that I couldn’t find a single skirt or dress. I inwardly groaned at this bizarre possibility, but I decided that there was a last-ditch effort I could take: my neighbor might have clothes of the same size.

I threw on a t-shirt and a pair of gym shorts and ran into the starlit early night / just-after-dusk and ran over to the house. I tried on this outrageously simple dress … and fell in love with it, because it was the most gorgeous shade of pale blue-green – slightly turquoise-tinted seafoam green is how one might describe it … well, I cannot quite reproduce the color for you here, but use your imagination.

The dress itself was really soft and flexible, and I had no trouble walking in it … actually, I had never felt so happy in my entire life ^^. Of course, from now on, I would have a more balanced wardrobe ;) even tomboys should know how to dress up, too~

Ten minute quick sketch of my avatar from the first of several dreams I had last night.

I’ll be producing a low-quality chibi color image of the five girls so far. I think it’ll be interesting to examine their distinct features, as well as the commonalities between the various plotlines of the dreams.

A further refinement of the idea-net concept; moving the theory into actual code.

Proposal 1.  Better than node-counts:

In order to determine the maximum “radius” of search, node-counting is easiest to execute, but can also be misleading.  Thus, the “searching” function should be constructed in the following way:

ltm.searchNet([list of words] (or ‘string’), maximum distance traversed, maximum nodes traversed (default 0), maximum search results (default 3), *options)

Examples of options include:

1.  Contradiction handling.  Suppose that word A leads to B, and C leads to D, but while A and B agree and C and D agree, B and D disagree.  Then, are B and D, which are very close but contradictory, acceptable results?  yes/no

2.  Exclusion of bad routes.  If the maximum distance allowed is 20, but single connections of distance 16 are to be excluded due to excessive length, then this setting should be activated.

By setting a maximum distance, one is able to gather all ideas that are reasonably related.  As an analogy, one is technically very closely related to all of one’s relatives.  But in practice, not all relatives are that close, and friends of friends may be closer than siblings of parents.  As a result, it would be more accurate to poll those who are close, not those who are necessarily directly connected.

Proposal 2.  The binary distance system

The distance system assigns a default “high” value to a “fresh” connection between ideas.  After repeated exposure to the connection, this value is whittled down.

However, there are two problems with a linear system:

1.  It eventually could reach 0, which is not useful at all.

2.  It does not reflect the actual state of things: the second exposure is key; by third exposure, we are willing to believe something.

As such, the proposal is this:

if connection is True:

connection.halveDistance();

Basically, you have a default distance of, say, 16.  This distance is then halved to 8, then to 4.  By the time it reaches 4, it is within a reasonable distance to be confident.

Proposal 3.  Separation of confidence vs. nature

The “distance” concept must be treated independently of the nature of the connection.  It is easy to get confused between the *type of relationship between the nodes* and the *confidence with which one senses the connection*.  As an example, let us suppose that Caroline has just learned that one might refer to a language as a “tongue.”  She establishes a connection (‘language’,’tongue’,16,0).  The 0 is the relation: it represents the conception that language and tongue are synonyms, or true equals.  But the 16 is the distance: she is not yet sure if she has picked up the right connection, so she is not confident in this connection.  As another example, suppose that Caroline learns about love and hate.  (‘love’,’hate’,0.5,-3).  The distance, 0.5, means that Caroline intimately knows the relationship between love and hate.  But this relationship is highly polarized: -3 indicates the strongest repelling between ideas, and so Caroline understands that as concepts, they are as far apart as possible.  They are only close in “distance” because they have a strong connection with one another.

Proposal 4.  Deletion of weak connections.

A lot of connections that will be made will be flat-out wrong.  People might lie or say things incorrectly, or use incorrect diction; or, a connection might be made between two words erroneously linked.  So, to counter the amassing of false information, it is prudent to weed out weak links at the end of the day, the same way that people do.

Basically, the algorithm might work like this: weed out 10 to 20% of 16-distance connections and perhaps 1 to 2% of 8-distance connections at the end of each day.  This might seem counterproductive: what if something useful is lost?  And yet this is a necessary measure.

Why do students studying for a test seem to spontaneously forget things?  It’s because of this same mechanism: the brain discards what it thinks are poor connections in order to allow for revision.  This is also the same reason why we are flexible – why we change our opinions or correct old misconceptions.

A Pop Sci article recently mentioned how only a couple of genes encode the entire brain, which is constructed as a random mass of roughly equal neurons.

Suppose that a particular clump of neurons represents a particular concept (just as a model .. it probably isn’t true). As an isolated idea, it is completely useless. This is analogous to my dictionaries. These dictionaries hold a lot of facts. But as a great blogger pointed out recently, a user manual is useless if it only lists functions: one must know why one would want to use such functions. In the same way, the facts need to have a context, a purpose for accessing.

So, the probably key to linking up the ideas properly is to “wire” them. The problem with computer-style hierarchical data structures (think folders and subfolders) is that it establishes a sort of tiered order that is an artificial construct. Real data is hard to store in such a fashion.

Each concept may have multiple connections and also may be part of a circular loop or whatever. The “neuron net” is clearly the solution to this problem: it allows for logical connections without the restrictions of hierarchy. No one node in the web is “more important” in the sense that it is at the “top” of the logical tree. Instead, nodes may be important due to having many connections, but all nodes are fundamentally equal.

I have not yet totally decided on how to store this “map” as data, but what I will probably end up storing is not the nodes themselves, but the lines that connect them. That is, the “soma” of the neurons are not what matter, but the axons and dendrites. I need to know four pieces of data for each connection:

1 and 2. The start and end nodes.

3. The distance between the nodes.

4. The nature of the connection

In real life, the “nature” may be as simple as excitatory vs. inhibitory.

In my proposed net, connections are allowed of three basic types: positive (excitatory), negative (inhibitory), or neutral. Positive and negative come with three grades of strength: high (greater than), medium (equal to), and low (less than). Complex relationships are created by wiring the destination-node to the start node and to a verb-hub.

I’m not totally set on how to implement the “complex” wiring yet. In any case, the mass of connections would be stored in “ganglia,” which are self-organizing subdivisions of the larger factual database. The idea behind the ganglia is to segregate connections that are “close” to each other into small communities of ideas that are likely to accessed together (eg, keyboard, typing, keys, space bar or green, blue, yellow, red, orange).

The goal of this section of Caroline is to replace the vaguely-defined previous concept of looking up all the words in a sentence input and then amassing a list of related topics from the words’ nature themselves. Instead, Caroline would be inclined to use this set of facts as a faster and more life-like alternative. The intersections of the probing will provide the idea of a “context.”

For example, suppose a sentence has the words “ice” and “melt.” Probing, say, 3 connections deep (that is, collecting connections from the web that are at most 3 nodes away – a humble list), certain “hits” would be more numerous than others. I would imagine that “water,” and the negative-related “hot” and “cold” would show up in each of the probes. This would be the easiest way to establish that the context of “ice” is in relation to its property of being water, and something to do with the ambient temperature.

The “basic brain” is clear – that is, it has no connections. It is wired based on experience. One way to “train” Caroline may be to simply say a lot of sentences to her. Words that seem to keep showing up together will be automatically added as a connection. If this method is pursued, then “distance” will start at a default high value and decrease as Caroline grows confident that there is indeed a connection between the words. Obviously, prepositions and other simple words must be treated differently. I would probably begin with just nouns, adjectives, and verbs.

One beautiful thing about the web system is that it might one day replace my dictionaries altogether. That is, that a tree is green does not have to be defined in a structured dictionary with {‘tree’:{‘attributes’:{‘color’:’green’}}} but rather just as (‘tree’,’green’,1) (‘green’,’color’,1).

The human brain is amazing because it seems to rely only on billions of cells of almost identical build, with exactly the same DNA, and without any external organizer. That is, the brain is the “boss,” but the brain itself has no boss – each neuron does its own thing, making its own connections, dying if it is not important, and somehow, that autonomous action on the large scale produces a highly structured data environment that comprises “intelligence.” The “miracle” I always talk about is still a mystery to me …

I understand now, after writing this, why connections establish knowledge and comprehension. However, what I still don’t understand is how the data has any meaning at all. The data in a computer is of course as simple as the brain’s: just 0 and 1’s. But it has particular rules for understanding those binary digits – ASCII for one, and the low-level functions, etc. But what are the rules for interpreting the brain’s data, which, for one, is a web, not a structured set of files? The fact that it is a web means that it has no beginning and no end; there are certainly areas for speech or for music or whatever, but where is the actual *data*? And what about connections that I suddenly make, that I didn’t have before?

I’ll try to implement a basic version of this web tomorrow evening, but time is really scarce. I need to practice a lot of violin these days to catch up on a LONG time without practicing.

I wonder … are the things I’m talking about in these notes as interesting as I think they are … or am I just stating common knowledge?

Okay, MCAT done, beach vacation done.  Now I need to learn how to properly color satin and denim textures (argh).  Man!  Anything that is not cotton or standard polyester (eg. t-shirts, tank tops, skirts, whatever) really get me every time.  I’ll write more later.

Don’t be afraid. It won’t be scary.

I’ll only be away until Monday. If you believe.

But until then, maybe give this a try:

169

And move one step closer into my world.

I usually am pretty good about appropriately assigning opposites.  However, there is one type of opposite pairing that I can almost never distinguish, no matter how simple it is for everyone else.

This is the case when a single object can change its designation merely by switching position.  You see, I usually do not consider objects as being “fixed in place” so to speak – when I see apprehend an object in my vision, I build a 3D model of it in my head which is allowed a full range of motion, and as long as I have seen it from all angles in real life, the object retains all those views simultaneously.

Now, consider a concave mirror and a convex mirror.  The problem I have is this .. a concave mirror, flipped 180 degrees, is now a convex mirror (assuming that it is coated on both sides).  Therefore, I can’t remember whether it is concave or convex .. because as far as I can tell, it is both!  When we draw it, we don’t draw the coating – we just draw a parenthetical shape.  This presents a huge problem for me, and even though I try to remind myself that it is concave when it is bent towards the object, I still get confused very often.

I also get confused with the terms “electrophilic substitution” and “nucleophilic substitution” (the former is alkene chemistry, etc., while the latter is carbonyl chemistry, etc.).  It’s unclear to me why you would have such designations, when, like reduction and oxidation, electrophiles and nucleophiles must come in pairs.

Anyway, yeah …