Noesis Theory

This phenomenon of when you measure a particle it collapses from a wave to a particle and stays that way kind of reminds me of raytracing & polygon rendering.

It’s like the universe always starts with raytracing, because it just follows the principles, the rules of the universe and is very abstract & generic; not specialized to the situation.
Like it’s trying to conserve computational power (even though I know raytracing is harder for computers. But come on, this is the universe we’re talking about, it has "invented" the physics rules so its form of raytracing should be cheaper than trying to keep track of individual particles).
But then, if somebody needs to drill into the details, then it says, "well ok, then I guess I’ll have to render the whole scene with polygons. It’s more computationally intensive for me but since not everyone is asking me to do it at the same time, I can accommodate it".

It also reminds me of how the brain tries to do fuzzy routing if he can get away with it, because it is less computationally intensive. It interprets the world & gives instructions with the minimum possible level of detail. But then, if it spots out-of-context, it goes "well, I guess I’ll need to turn my attention and add a lot of resolution to my input & output".

And this is just one of the many, many examples where I see repeatable patterns in the way systems get designed from the micro to the macro level. At some point in the future, I will analyze this in full detail.

Answering to a Reddit post on whether and how AI could take over and improve our political process.

[Debate] "One day AI will be able to govern a country and manage its economy more effectively than human politicians and leaders."
https://www.reddit.com/r/artificial/comments/71ybpb/debate_one_day_ai_will_be_able_to_govern_a/

My comment:
"The idealized version of what you describe will take a lot of time to materialize, and most probably by the time they reach such level of intelligence we will have already handed over the keys to this planet, willingly or not.
The main reason why this will take so long, is because there is a very significant lag between the decision and its consequences, which makes it very very difficult to train an intelligence on this via trial and error. If you think of it, it’s not serendipitous that the top management positions in corporations are about strategy, and are the highest paid and also the hardest to control of whether one’s doing a good job or not. In such strategic dilemmas we really are reaching the limits of human intelligence and I’m not confident there’s a magic way to circumvent the learning process.
It’s also no accident that history repeats itself. This has to do with what we mentioned above, accentuated by the… limited human lifespan. We don’t live long enough to do enough trials and errors and be able to build an experiential modus operandi for the really difficult decisions and directions in life.
Finally, even if an AI manages to overcome these two hurdles, there is the final one that is always prevalent but seldom openly discussed of "who’s the interests and pleasure you wish to maximize with your decisions". In other words, there are many right decisions; they just satisfy a different set of people. So it might even not be a matter of strategic difficulty to pinpoint the optimal course of action. It could just be a case of you having different interest and wants than the decision makers. And believe me, it is absolutely not certain that if and when an AI takes over the authority to take and effect political decisions, it will have the same interpretation as you on what Good is. Especially if the means of production and the sources of wealth are AI-automated not in the hands of your social group.

TLDR: Political decisions are strategic and thus very difficult for both humans and machines to get them right. If and when the machines overcome such limitation, politics will probably be the least of our worries."

Indeed this question has been asked & answered many, many times. But it’s time to give it one more try, and provide an answer that uses the constructs of Noesis Theory.

Let’s start with some… axioms. According to the Theory, your attention (“Selector”) is always focused on one thing (a set of inputs) and uses your brain power (“Battery”) to project what the most probable evolution of it would be, i.e. trying to guess the most probable future (the next set of inputs).

Having said that, one could easily jump into the conclusion that our brain always lives in the future, and more specifically the plausible futures that lay ahead. This is not incorrect, but in reality it does not answer our question fully. The full answer is a bit more elaborate, and to reach it we need to incorporate into our discussion another theory construct, the Driving Pockets.

Thinking and investigating about alternatives to a specific reality is not an exercise in futility; it is a costly (in terms of resources) exercise and needs to be done with a purpose. The purpose that the brain identifies and knows that it’s meaningful to keep thinking (investigating… exploring…) is getting the taste of a pleasurable or painful experience. When you have felt that in the past, all the neurons that related to this experience got bound together and thus you can recall it once your investigation brings you around these paths again. It’s like setting a landmine on that site. If you cross again around this path, it will blow up and will definitely capture your attention. The bigger the initial pleasure/pain, the bigger the landmine, the bigger the mess it will uncover.

Actually the landmine is not a great analogy, because you need to step on top of it to get activated. An analogy that uses smell could be a better one, because smell gets dissipated in the air more radially and the closer you get the bigger the smell. So it would be better if I compared it with taking some radioactive dump in a place. The closer you approach this place the next time around, the stronger the smell will remind you of what happened the last time. And since it’s radioactive, there will be decay as time goes by and after a lot of time it will have gone back to normal. (please appreciate the effort and don’t ruin my analogy by pinpointing that in radioactive dump the microorganisms that cause the smell in poop would probably not be able to live, so it wouldn’t smell 🙂

Notice also that I’m not differentiating between pleasure and pain, because any of the two can trigger us into exploring alternative futures. Futures on which we are able to experience the pleasures and avoid the pains.

Coming back to our question of where does your brain live. The answer is that your brain lives on the time-reference that the Driving Pockets (pleasures/pains) of your brain live.

If a very unfortunate event happened in your recent past and everything you see reminds you of it and brings back the pain, then your brain will be focused on finding alternative futures (to this past event) where this dark event did not happen, or was mitigated, or any other solution that you think would avoid the pain. Your brain will revisit the scene again and again, playing it back, thinking how you should have reacted, how others should have reacted, what you would have liked to happen. This is actually a very useful function of the brain, because in non-irreversible event, this reliving will allow you to deal with it better next time. And indeed if your brain find a plausible solution (alternative future), the Driving Pocket will subside and you will relax, letting another DP take over and capture your attention. But for this whole duration, you were living in the past.

If you are a type that is very averse to pain, then you might find yourself focusing a lot on your potential futures and trying to identify which is the one with the less discomforts ahead. Notice here that I’m not really breaking my rule of treating equally pleasure and pain, it’s just that our world has many, many more options for pain available, if you misstep along the way, than for pleasure. Therefore such persons will not just let it rest. They will investigate future A, and go beyond, and think this through, and how will I respond if he says that, and if the other thing happens what do I do, and let’s also think about scenario B. And this goes on and on. In essence, for such cases your brain is living in the future!

Finally, you could also be a type that is very much incentivized by the short-term pleasures. You are relatively optimistic for the future, either because others are taking care of it for you, or because nothing very bad has happened thus far for you to change your focus, or because as a character & life mentality you take bad things very lightly and let them brush off past you. For persons such as these, it is quite likely that they will be focusing on the here and now. They will be exploring briefly all currently available components of the present, and seek which one of them can deliver the most pleasure right here and now. They can even be addicted to the now, because there is the added “benefit” that on whatever you focus your brain at, you experience it in a more grand manner (think of a girl that is afraid of needles, is she more likely to panic if she’s looking away from the shot and listening to her favorite song, or if she’s looking directly at the needle?). Therefore these profiles are tuned to get maximum reward by focusing on the now and thus live in the present!

To sum this up, we could say that there is no universal answer. Any person can be living in the Past, Present or Future, and up to a point it’s his or her decision where to live. We could theorize that some character traits may make it more likely for somebody to frequent in his past, his present or his future… but in the end what you need to remember is: you live on the timeline that you choose to focus your attention on. You decide whether you want to relive your past, shape your future or enjoy your present.

And there is no right answer. All are useful, and that’s why all are available as tools in our noetic algorithm. You could say that animals are probably more likely to live in the present and the other two modes emerged more lately with the rise of superior human intelligence. But be careful on what conclusions you can extract out of that. Reliving in the past deprives you of your future, but also thinking too much about it in a world that is heavily imbalanced between the abundance of pain & pleasure, may let you experience too many unpleasant potential futures that will never really materialize and miss out on the simple pleasures of the here and now.

So living the Present is not the less intelligent thing to do. If you strive to live a pleasant life, maybe it’s even the smarter thing to do. So those exercises for mindfulness may be useful after all!

And even if you don’t agree with the above, or just don’t want to change your default -time-focus orientation, the fact that you are now aware of those options is one more step into giving you back the power to shape your focus and at least make it more balanced. Because hopefully I just created a Driving Pocket in your brain, and now you must explore it further and identify the potential future that suits you the most. 😉

"Why" is one of the basic questions anyone can ask. One would say it’s one of the most fundamental and usually most difficult to answer. It is the epitome of curiosity, and also the foundation of science & progress in general. It is what makes Homo sapiens stand out. And it’s no accident that you’ll probably hear it a million times from your children as they grow up.

But I would postulate that in the mechanisms of the mind (and here I generalize; I don’t refer only to the human mind) why is not the most basic of the questions. In fact, I would say that it comes 3rd in terms of priority: after What and How.

"What" is the first question that our mind tries to resolve, always at an emotional level first. So, you see a pattern and you automatically ponder "What is this for me? Is it good? Is it bad?". In other words the first question that your mind needs to answer is what kind of pleasure or pain should I expect to receive from the pattern/thing in front of my eyes (or in my ears, etc). Of course you will use your previous experiences to derive the answer to this question (what did it feel like the last time we crossed paths with something similar?). But it doesn’t necessarily mean that you will get a detailed answer from your pondering. It will not bring to mind a series of past experiences like a movie passing through your mind with all the best and worst highlights of the past. No, it needs to be fast, in order to be effective. So you’ll get a gut feeling, a simple emotion (or a Driving Pocket as I like to call it in Noesis Theory terminology) that will combine the most relevant past experiences, to guide your next steps towards your pleasure hunt & pain avoidance.
This means that you might see a new person with a face that looks familiar, and you will automatically get a positive or negative predisposition towards him/her depending on what type of feelings you had connected with those persons of the past that looked like him/her. And you may not even stop to notice that your behavior was altered because of this. Or you might see a food that had caused you a heck of a stomach ache some time in the past. Immediately you will get a strong feeling of disgust, but this doesn’t mean that you mind will automatically explore the "Why" you are getting this feeling. It might even be unable to bring back the full memory, but the feeling has remained, in order to be able to swiftly answer the What.

"How" is the next question that your mind will tackle, and it’s usually action-oriented. Ideally the answer is a walk-through of how you need to act to deactivate your Driving Pocket that was activated by answering the What, i.e. how to avoid the pain or reap the pleasure. Usually you have a series of action sequences that you can activate on demand to cope with your most common action needs; you built all those during your lifetime, you don’t need to revisit them. They may need some finetuning along the way, but you can start acting and you’ll adjust as you go along (what I call Fuzzy routing in Noesis Theory terms). What is important to note here is that you can jump from the What to the How without ever questioning the Why. This is very meaningful for survival, but also thought-provoking (and a bit disappointing) if you generalize for what it means for the human nature.
It is meaningful because investigating the Why (i.e. thinking about it to bring the full past experience to mind) will certainly need time and there are many cases where time is of the essence and can translate at minimum to a lost pleasure opportunity (the deer I was hunting escaped) and at worst to the loss of your own life (I paused to think what this ominous sound from behind might mean and got eaten by the lion). Thus it really makes sense to connect the How directly to the What, in order to forward to action directly as your Driving Pockets get activated (with the prerequisite that you have a suitable action handy).
But this is also a bit disappointing for the human nature in general. Because it means that once you connect a feeling, a need, a pattern with an action, then you act without thinking of it too much or doubting Why you are actually doing it. This is very worrying because it translates to a huge manipulation potential for the human race. Actually, it may be happening already! If "the system" convinces you that this is the proper way of reacting to things to cover your needs, then you’re set for life. You might not even question them again, and act in the same way, day in and day out. Go to work, take the kids to school, pay the bills, watch tv, etc. You are welcome to replace "the system" with any other word of your choosing (the government, the religion, the capital, the Illuminati, your parents, your spouse, …) and built your conspiracy theories 🙂 But the fact remains that once you connect the What with the How, if you don’t receive external stimuli to break you out of this loop, you can continue looping ad infinitum without really questioning again the Why.

Finally, let’s look at the "Why". I didn’t want to mislead you that this question is not important. Indeed it is, and it’s the main way with which we build new knowledge. It is asked when we know the What but don’t know the How. Or similarly if a How we know more-or-less matches but it doesn’t perform the way we expected it to (i.e. bring us pleasure or stop the pain). Only then is the time to sit down and think, to explore better the memories of the past, investigate into our own experiences, try to combine different thoughts & concepts together to devise a new How. Therefore, Why is an important question, as it promotes learning and enhances survival, but it has to take the third place behind What & How which are prerequisites for survival.
That’s why I mentioned at the title that Why is overrated. We tout to value it above all else, but in our day-to-day lives, we rarely use it. Most of our activities are a programmed sequence of stimuli->reaction (What->How) and to pause and think about it is a notable exception. We live the lives we were taught to live, we provide pre-baked solutions to all the problems we were taught to handle, we limit ourselves to the boundaries we were taught that exist, and seldom do we pause to really ask ourselves. Why?

I had an idea that I wanted to share with you. I have a fuzzy feeling that you’ll like it…
But let’s stop and analyze for a brief moment these two words. Fuzzy, feeling. But why even separate the two? Are there feelings that are not fuzzy? Do you also have… precise feelings? Crystal-clear, well-defined?
Well, I would dare say that every feeling is more or less fuzzy! Feelings are forged by the amalgamation of the sensations we experienced in the past. Different stimuli, different senses are combined into one whole experience that we identify as a feeling. But that is one occasion; and in life you will have the opportunity to experience a particular feeling in many, many different occassion. Similar, but different in the details. Same feeling, (slightly or vastly) different setting.
So in your teens you were probably rejected by persons of the other gender more than one times, right? It might even be happening to you nowadays, every now and then, right? How does it feel? You have lived through it many times, surely you can describe it. The truth is that every one of those experiences was a bit different; different setting, different person, different conversation, varied emotional charge… So when I ask you to make the feeling precise, by accurately describing it in words, the only thing you can do is try to recall one or more of those occassions and relive it. Probably they are a bit fuzzy in your brain. Probably they are a bit tangled, interwoven between them. Time has set its toll on your memory and the only thing you have (without seriously thinking it through) is a fuzzy memory of this feeling.
This is not necessarily a bad thing. On the contrary, it’s the only way! You don’t really need to make the feeling precise. Fuzzy is good enough, actually it’s perfect. Because the next time you attempt to ask a girl/boy out, if they even try to start pulling some excuse towards you, you’ll immediately get this fuzzy feeling reactivated, and you’ll be sure that you know where it’s going. You see, just because it’s fuzzy, it can pattern-match with whatever is relevant in the future and immediately bring you to familiar territory. Then, you can use this forewarning to your benefit and act to save face.

Going forward with the argument, we move on to another thing that is fuzzy by defintion. And that’s the concept of, well actually… the concept itself 🙂
Humans are evangelized to be special because we are able to do abstract thoughts. We fiddle with concepts in our mind. But what are concepts? Aren’t they also the amalgamation of experiences, of stimuli, of memories? When I ask you to define for me the concept of freedom, you start by drilling in to this fuzzy area of your brain where all the experiences related to freedom are interwoven, and then start picking out various relevant memories. The statue of liberty, the sound of your national anthem, an image with a pigeon and an olive branch, George Michael’s Freedom ’90 song, the first night your parents allowed you to come back home after midnight, etc.
Both feelings and concepts are quite objective, because the feeling of letdown and the concept of freedom are experienced & known universally by all mankind. At the same time, they are highly subjective, because they are experienced and stored into memory according to the particularities of each individual and thus different from one another. And above all they are both fuzzy in the way they are stored & recalled.
Finally, to connect this with Noesis Theory, we will focus our attention on "fuzzy routing". In case you don’t remember by heart, fuzzy routing is about starting an action when you are confident enough (but not certain) that it will bring the desired result, and if needed you’ll do adjustments afterwards. Using now the two tools we built above, we are able to explain it even better.
When we experience something from our external environment, our pattern matching mechanism first does a fuzzy recognition of a concept. You can think of it as a node inside our brain that is relevant to the highlights of our here & now. It’s fuzzy, but it’s also fast. So when it’s dark in the alley and we hear strange noises, we immediately recall the concept/idea of getting mugged. Of course it’s fuzzy, we don’t have an image of our would-be attacker, we don’t know the weapon he would use or what he would want from us. It’s fuzzy, but it’s good enough. At the same time we experience another fuzzy thing in our stomach, the feeling of fear.

Do you see it now? Concepts are "loaded" with emotional content, with feelings, and allow us to act fast and do fuzzy routing, i.e. route our attention towards acting in the best possible way to negate a danger before it materializes or reap a potential benefit before it expires.
Put in different words: sensual stimuli arrive to our brain, we recognize first a fuzzy concept to get a first understanding of what it is we are experiencing, this concept usually translates to a feeling, and if this feeling is strong enough, we do not delve into details and immediately proceed to action. This is fuzzy routing.

Key takeaways: feelings and concepts are two different sides of the same coin. They emanate from the method our brain uses to distill experiences into a fuzzy, interconnected web of patterns, loaded with emotional content. They are not well-defined on purpose, firstly because it’s the only way to get activated in all similar cases, and secondly because this allows them to be first on the scene and jump into action if necessary.
For AI aficionados: because of the fact above, there is no way that true AI will be precise in the way modern computers are. Not if it’s built in a manner that emulates the human mind. Our brain is by-design fuzzy and we like it that way. It’s the only way proven by nature that it works.

So the next time you only have a fuzzy idea of who this guy/girl that you met at a party is and don’t remember his/her name… don’t sweat it. It’s not your fault your memory is fuzzy, it’s million years of evolution that perfected it this way :p