Update from Mars
Here are some things that have been buzzing around my brain lately.
-How can we detach ourselves from classification by division? It seems that the largest difficulty we seem to have is in nonlinear thoughts - where things aren't just polarized between good/bad, left/right. Many suggestions for improving many such standard ways of thinking involve diversifying the relevant scales used to describe our thoughts - for example, arranging two sets of polar opposites as a compass - but this is simply shifting our one-dimensional thinking into two. The same problems emerge. It's all just a consequence of our comfort level with rules, I suppose - we like being able to be precise and accurate and well-understood and all these fantastic things, which has led to a language that in and of itself is very divisional rather than relative. Divisional discussion is easier, less cluttered with comparative descriptors and more limited. It also tends to polarize peoples' thoughts, impressions and suggestions... and often this overall language is self-supporting through the actions it induces.
Such behaviour is also very much a rut - we need a clear reason to leave it instead of simple a clear improvement to work towards. It's dehumanizing and the way we talk to one another has become completely saturated with examples of it. We often confuse absolute-sounding statements with facts.
This is not new but it has been seriously bothering me lately - the simplest effort of moving from 'black and white' to 'black, white and gray' essentially doesn't change the way we talk - only inserting uncertainly caveats. Gray, depending on context, could be as wide-ranging as "unknowable" to "equally valued", from "indifferent" to "torn", which are important distinctions yet not much of an improvement because they themselves are divisional terms. Presumably, by including enough polarizing terms which cross on exactly the point we wish to get across, we can talk in this fashion but it is quite a lazy language, and most likely the reason we lean away from the entire landscape of gray/silver/semitransparent/whitewash. Much like most things I propose, it involves spending some serious initial investment in effort, and language shifts are monstrously impractical to forcefully implement. I'm trying to personally detach myself from a simple and ambiguously abused dividing line of 'good' and 'bad' - not entirely, just on average - the arbitrary positive/negative scale appended to everything, seemingly for no other reason than that every scale needs to be equipped with one. This could possibly be reformed as a hippie-it's-all-subjective bit, but I wouldn't be so brash as to use those terms around my friends.
Another thing to think about - this time for my mathie readers.
I have to learn something about projections. I have a bijective function that maps a 2^n space to an encoded 2^n space, and I want to know what conditions imply that, given some 2 dimensional vector v (with basis vectors a and b for this 2d space), if you take n tensor products of v, encode it, and project it onto the 2d subspace spanned by the encoded a and b that you get precisely that v in return. (I know why this specific example works, and can tell you everything you'd want to know about the subspaces involved - group theoretically I can also list off the stabilizers of each subspace, but there's a generalization I need to put my finger on). There's two ways to process this 'equality' - by allowing arbitrary components in the 2^(n-1), 2-dimensional orthogonal subspaces in either the encoded or non-encoded subspaces. (i.e. tracing the equality backwards or forwards through the projection, as it were) If any of you have any ideas for resources, let me know.
oh oh oh and one last thing - are there generalized 'prime numbers' on a complex sphere? I'm thinking there might be some cool relationships to look at between pure states and prime numbers - when a product wavefunction collapses it projects onto one of its prime components. I've heard of the Cesium atom and its energy lines lining up with the zeros of the Riemann Zeta function (which is all about primes) as well as a few other odd ties between prime numbers and quantum mechanics and was wondering if you guys had any thoughts.
I've also been thinking about significance, and how it relates to both the physical brain and psychological identity. How is it that we can prescribe significance? Even by deliberately placing as little importance as possible on a single event we attach significance to it, which induces a vortex of concentration on the topic. XKCD illustrates it effectively: If the question "what is the meaning of life" is meaningless, why does the human mind always revisit it? If I'm to stop focussing on something, and distraction is the only thing that removes me from that vortex, how is it that distraction rearranges the significance of an event? How else can I indirectly change how significant I find something? Is there inherent significance, meaning a physical inclination for me to assign significance to a given thought, moment, interaction? How does this generalize to humanity? Can I figure out if what I *think* is significant is simply due to this instinctual reaction or due to boredom of the mind? How does this fall in line with my idea of quality?
Lastly, I've become acutely aware of the surroundings I particularly enjoy. Through a combination of psychology, an artistic attention to detail, hedonism and the recognition of internal satisfaction due to higher-order thought I've found a balance I've always somewhat sought...
... but have previously rotated through on a much longer timescale than lately. Through this I've been able to (somewhat) divide destructive self analysis into its healthier components. It's been pretty refreshing.
Now all I need is to PUBLISH all these stupid little results I've raked up. Hmm.
-zoe-
-How can we detach ourselves from classification by division? It seems that the largest difficulty we seem to have is in nonlinear thoughts - where things aren't just polarized between good/bad, left/right. Many suggestions for improving many such standard ways of thinking involve diversifying the relevant scales used to describe our thoughts - for example, arranging two sets of polar opposites as a compass - but this is simply shifting our one-dimensional thinking into two. The same problems emerge. It's all just a consequence of our comfort level with rules, I suppose - we like being able to be precise and accurate and well-understood and all these fantastic things, which has led to a language that in and of itself is very divisional rather than relative. Divisional discussion is easier, less cluttered with comparative descriptors and more limited. It also tends to polarize peoples' thoughts, impressions and suggestions... and often this overall language is self-supporting through the actions it induces.
Such behaviour is also very much a rut - we need a clear reason to leave it instead of simple a clear improvement to work towards. It's dehumanizing and the way we talk to one another has become completely saturated with examples of it. We often confuse absolute-sounding statements with facts.
This is not new but it has been seriously bothering me lately - the simplest effort of moving from 'black and white' to 'black, white and gray' essentially doesn't change the way we talk - only inserting uncertainly caveats. Gray, depending on context, could be as wide-ranging as "unknowable" to "equally valued", from "indifferent" to "torn", which are important distinctions yet not much of an improvement because they themselves are divisional terms. Presumably, by including enough polarizing terms which cross on exactly the point we wish to get across, we can talk in this fashion but it is quite a lazy language, and most likely the reason we lean away from the entire landscape of gray/silver/semitransparent/whitewash. Much like most things I propose, it involves spending some serious initial investment in effort, and language shifts are monstrously impractical to forcefully implement. I'm trying to personally detach myself from a simple and ambiguously abused dividing line of 'good' and 'bad' - not entirely, just on average - the arbitrary positive/negative scale appended to everything, seemingly for no other reason than that every scale needs to be equipped with one. This could possibly be reformed as a hippie-it's-all-subjective bit, but I wouldn't be so brash as to use those terms around my friends.
Another thing to think about - this time for my mathie readers.
I have to learn something about projections. I have a bijective function that maps a 2^n space to an encoded 2^n space, and I want to know what conditions imply that, given some 2 dimensional vector v (with basis vectors a and b for this 2d space), if you take n tensor products of v, encode it, and project it onto the 2d subspace spanned by the encoded a and b that you get precisely that v in return. (I know why this specific example works, and can tell you everything you'd want to know about the subspaces involved - group theoretically I can also list off the stabilizers of each subspace, but there's a generalization I need to put my finger on). There's two ways to process this 'equality' - by allowing arbitrary components in the 2^(n-1), 2-dimensional orthogonal subspaces in either the encoded or non-encoded subspaces. (i.e. tracing the equality backwards or forwards through the projection, as it were) If any of you have any ideas for resources, let me know.
oh oh oh and one last thing - are there generalized 'prime numbers' on a complex sphere? I'm thinking there might be some cool relationships to look at between pure states and prime numbers - when a product wavefunction collapses it projects onto one of its prime components. I've heard of the Cesium atom and its energy lines lining up with the zeros of the Riemann Zeta function (which is all about primes) as well as a few other odd ties between prime numbers and quantum mechanics and was wondering if you guys had any thoughts.
I've also been thinking about significance, and how it relates to both the physical brain and psychological identity. How is it that we can prescribe significance? Even by deliberately placing as little importance as possible on a single event we attach significance to it, which induces a vortex of concentration on the topic. XKCD illustrates it effectively: If the question "what is the meaning of life" is meaningless, why does the human mind always revisit it? If I'm to stop focussing on something, and distraction is the only thing that removes me from that vortex, how is it that distraction rearranges the significance of an event? How else can I indirectly change how significant I find something? Is there inherent significance, meaning a physical inclination for me to assign significance to a given thought, moment, interaction? How does this generalize to humanity? Can I figure out if what I *think* is significant is simply due to this instinctual reaction or due to boredom of the mind? How does this fall in line with my idea of quality?
Lastly, I've become acutely aware of the surroundings I particularly enjoy. Through a combination of psychology, an artistic attention to detail, hedonism and the recognition of internal satisfaction due to higher-order thought I've found a balance I've always somewhat sought...
... but have previously rotated through on a much longer timescale than lately. Through this I've been able to (somewhat) divide destructive self analysis into its healthier components. It's been pretty refreshing.
Now all I need is to PUBLISH all these stupid little results I've raked up. Hmm.
-zoe-