Philosophy of Everything

I will approach mindfulness from an informational perspective, adding just a little brain physiology. If you already know about mindfulness, you can directly skip to " The heresy" Introduction As many subjects that I approach in this blog, my knowledge about the subject is at hobby level, maybe a little more than the average guy. One of my childhood dreams was to discover something really new. The strategy that I considered then was to start on that subject without all the prejudice from the previous research done in that domain. I realize now that it is merely impossible to innovate something without having in mind the prior results and mistakes done on that study field. However, I still hope that one can derive new perspectives in a domain by combining common knowledge from various domains. With that said, here is a little essay about how and why mindfulness might  be working for humans. This might depart sometimes from the mainstream conception on mindfulness and ...

How would you define consciousness? Is dreaming a form of consciousness? What happens when you pass out? Consciousness (like in "aware of himself") is a subjective perception that is normally easily accessible subjectively, by introspection. However, the mechanics of consciousness are hardly understood and the consciousness state is hard to evaluate from outside in non-fully awake mind states. Is there a consciousness while being drugged? Is there a consciousness in catatonic people? Where is the consciousness boundary between being awake and asleep? The following reflections aims to give some clues about the nature of consciousness.

We love "cutting edge" technology. We need to have the latest gadget, we need to use this new trendy framework, we need to use the latest update of our favorite software. Newer should be better, right? Actually, each new technology brings a promise of improvement and an additional hidden small risk. You are trying the new innovative painkiller drug that promises to solve your low intensity, but still disturbing, migraines . You can get a real improvement on your condition, you could get no significant improvement or, with a small probability, you could die, like in the recent drug trial in France . Indeed, that was an experimental drug, and many others that took the drug were not affected. Well, this is exactly the danger: if the really bad effects only happens with low probability, it might not even be caught in the trial period...

Intelligent people learn to adapt to environment,  unintelligent people adapt environment to them  (popular joke) 1. Change the outside Few people can be happy when basic needs are not met. When you are hungry or in pain it is unlikely that something else would make you happy. Even with the basic needs fulfilled, many people have higher order needs, like being appreciated, achieving their highest potential.

I watch my photo archive and I realize that my memory does not recall a lot of things. Even photos from couple of years back seems like pictures of events that happened to someone else. I remember when I took that picture, however it's like I see this for the first time. The memory has a strange way to forget things. I still can't believe that my boy was that small. I know rationally, however I cannot recall the perception of him being that small. Pictures are not only anchors for memories, sometimes they are the only memories. Our children are the first generation that can have, over years, a history in images of their entire life. Of course, we also have some pictures from childhood, but they are too few to create an image of continuity. Most of our childhood pictures are black&while and in studied positions (because of their scarcity) and looks more like taken from a movie/theater than from real life. The general availability of color digital pictures, sometimes incl...

We have a population of animals. Each individual can be associated with a certain "value", expressing his "fit level to the environment". We want to design a simple algorithm in the animal's genes that would make the individuals to mate close to optimal. Let's say that resulting value for the mating is the product of the "value" of the two involved individuals. We will study the case when each individual can only be involved in mating with a single other individual. In this conditions, the close to optimum mating is reached when mating is realized between individuals with very close values. Mathematically, we have a set of positive numbers (the values) and we want to create the pairs of numbers so that the sum of products of each pair will be maximal. This happens when we sort the numbers and we pair each number with the one next to it.

My kid is close to 4 years and started to exhibit a very human brain process: before sleepping, he starts to remember random ideas and expresses them. Sometimes they are not only memories and plans he had over day, some are really new and original ideas - even that many are yet childish of course. It is not something that could be related to a sudden thought association, he just has "ideas". It does not happen only before the sleep, it just happens more often then. Before the sleep it is also easier to eliminate hypothesis like "this thing remembered him about that other thing". This process could show some light about how brain and neurons works, and possibly helping to design more human-like artificial intelligence. I would speculate that the same process that makes ideas and memories to pop up out of nothing, to be the process that permits the most amazing thought processes in humans.

“There are two types of people in the world, those who divide everybody into types and those who do not”. I am part of the second type ;) Is the text above true or false?

The meaning of music is hard to capture in words. Let's try some ideas anyway! The brain bug The brain has a natural ability to extract patterns from all the stimulus. It's a fact that we like the music that has some patterns: that is not very monotonic (boring) but not very random either, so we can continuously learn some new patterns. Somehow the brain has the illusion that it continuously learns in an accelerated rate by listening music. So music could be considered a small addiction at the first analysis.

Human intuition behaves similar to a neural network software algorithm: it produces an estimation of a certain probability, based on prior experience. The same with an artificial neural network, human intuition needs to have sufficient training experiences on that field so it can extract regularities. The training experiences should be able to provide adequate and rapid feedback that can be used to adjust the internal model, for both biological and software neurons.