Wednesday 28 December 2011

Why history repeats itself


We have all seen examples while studying history that humanity makes the same mistakes again and again. Probably Thucidides was the first one to accurately note it and describe it. And there's a very good reason why this behavioral pattern happens again and again... And we're going to explain it via the Noesis theory!

The idea is simple: history repeats itself because the "context" of each individual (the onion layers around the DFs) dies along with him/her and does not get transferred to the next generation. In other words, all the thoughts and action, all the teachings of past experience, all the pain from wrongdoing get lost once a person dies.
Do you remember when I said that death is the tool of evolution? And that this is a good thing, because it pruns the tree, keeping only the good things of each generation?
Well, that is true but not 100% accurate. It needs further elaboration to explain my point better: although in the field of genome this is accurate, in the knowledge world it is not.
Because in the genes world, the biological mechanisms of evolution have been set in such a way in this world so that they promote the beneficial genes and the individuals carrying them will most likely lead longer lives and have healthier offspring. This is the mechanism of nature (ok, it has been overriden slightly by man and medicine, but that's another topic), we don't have to do anything for it to be enacted on this world. So in this field, death is the instrument of evolution and the system should converge to better and healthier genes.
Now, on the knowledge world, the problem is that this process of keeping the best is optional! It is upon the individuals of the next generation to judge what good did the previous generation create as new knowledge and try to preserve it for the next. And it is also discretionary to them whether they'll study it and "own it", make it a part of their own thought process, as if they were the ones that discovered it (in Noesis terms: equalizing the "context" of the minds of the previous generation with the context of their own minds).
On a side note, this is the reason why writing and science are two great achievements that resulted in exponential growth of knowledge in the human world. Writing because it provides the mean to transfer context from one dying generation to another (much better and more massively than story-telling) and science because it provides the means of judging objectively what is a new advancement and should be included in the generally accepted theories and what is not and can be safely discarded.Writing and science are the two most important tools for transferring context from one brain to the other and it resulted in amazing progression of our capabilities (hundreds of years) whereas previously we needed hundreds of thousands of years for simple advancements. Side note ends...
Going back to the knowledge world, hopefully we have understood by now that humans now have the tools to converge to better and better knowledge as generations progress in time but, compared to the genes world where enactment of these tools is automatic, in the knowledge world the usage of these tools is discretionary. The next generation will try to judge all the knowledge contributions of the previous era and if it likes it, it will try to integrate it into "history" and "generally accepted theory". There is no guarantee that the judgement will be correct, no guarantee that it will be recorded/understood right, no guarantee that someone will actually study it and own it, in order to essentially integrate into its own mind and learn the teachings and the mistakes of the past.
And there's a final flaw as well: even if someone fully describes to you a theory, the context that will be built into your brain is much more shallow (with less interconnections of neurons) than the one the inventor of this theory has into his own brain. So for example this text for my context is 100% descriptive (even the side-notes or the comments in parentheses) because when I read the words-patterns, a whole set of other patterns get lit up into my brain and "I get it". On the other hand, someone who is quite new to the Noesis theory does not have this whole context into his mind and might need to read some parts of it 2-3 times in order to "fully get it". Not because he is not smart or capable! It is just because he is missing the appropriate context. So, final word on this: even if you describe to someone with words and illustrations some previous knowledge, there is no real comparison of the context that you're forging into his brain with the context that experience has forged into your context.

As it becomes clear now, with every new generation we are losing knowledge from the generation that passes away. And it is the responsibility of the new generation to safeguard the best part of this lost context and integrate it into its own context and thinking processes. This is a duty no doubt, but its enactment is optional. And the tools humans have for this are also imperfect. And the assurance that the preserved context (even if we assume that the best parts were identified and preserved) will be studied is non-existent.

The result of the above paragraph is that... history repeats itself! Humans of the new generation do not have their context embodied with the teachings of past mistakes. And even if they have, it has not been done "the hard way", i.e. living it, experiencing the pain yourself and building strong neural connections with the DFs. You may have only read about it, so you might recognize the pattern, but the connection is not very strong, so you will not recognize it soon enough and you might not have associated it with a DF of pain, in order to try and avoid it.
Thus, you will make the same mistakes as your ancestors. Your children might not, because you, still in pain from your previous mistakes, will make sure that you transfer the context to them well enough, but regarding your grandchildren... it's not certain any more. They are too far from the source of knowledge and if they haven't studied history well enough, they might go down the same paths.

Saturday 3 December 2011

Micro-impulses, the pattern-to-action links and absent-mindedness

In my recent speech at Mensa I talked about these three topics, but I don't think I have had the opportunity to mention them here in writing as well.

Let's begin with the second one: the pattern-to-action links.
The easy way of describing this is saying it is very similar to the action-reaction concept. In physics you have a reaction for every action. In the brain you may have an action for a specific pattern that you identify; meaning that whenever you see a specific set of patterns, you immediate try to act in a specific way, without trying to think about it and analyze it.
Well, it's not exactly that simple, but I wanted you to get the "cause-and-effect" concept of it. Action => Reaction. Pattern => Action.
This is possible in the human brain if:
  • the pattern is in-context
  • the link from the pattern to the action mesh has been created in the past via the DP mechanisms
You  need both prerequisites for it to work. It has to exist (ii) and it has to be as expected (i). In other words, you must have done this action in the past: the first time a DP was created, it stole some battery power, you tried some actions, you found one suitable, you got feedback, the neurons were strengthened and a weak link from the pattern to the action mesh was forged. The next time, the out-of-context experience was less, the DP smaller, the action easier, but still the extra feedback made the link even stronger. Thus, in time you build links from patterns to specific areas in the action mesh, that serve as purpose to propel yourself from identifying the pattern directly to acting on it in a specific way, that you know from past experiences that was useful to you (this was proven by the fact that you got feedback).
But the pattern has to be very similar to what you're used to seeing when you learned to react in this way. If all other external stimuli from the environment are different, then the "combined traversal" of them into your brain won't be the same and the signals will end up in different areas of the brain, and thus they won't reach this P-A link, and the action won't be performed.
It's like asking you to play bowling with a bolleyball. It might still be possible to somewhat play, but the weight of it in your hand feels different and the way you have to throw it is different, thus you can't just pick it up and perform the same moves as you're used to. This situation is out-of-context and the P-A links that you have already built from your previous bowling experiences are only partially useful. You have to build new P-A links in this new context!
If you're following thus far and know the rest of my theory as well, then you probably already understood that this pattern-to-action links are the instruments upon which the Helix mechanism (the ex snail mechanism, I have renamed it :) is created; it would not be possible to have a choreography of consecutive moves that one causes the other, if you didn't have P-A links for each one.
So now the Helix can be described as follows: you get some external stimuli, if they are in-context and you have P-A links in place, no DP is created, you perform a spontaneous action, which alters the environment (outer loop) but also alters your expectations of what will come next (of what will be in-context). If the new external stimuli continue to be in-context and you have P-A links for this, you do another action, and so on and so forth.
This choreography of spontaneous actions that come naturally to you and you don't even realize/remember them is the Helix, and it is composed of the P-A links, the inner&outer loop and the Selector.

Now that we have this in place, we can describe the micro-impulses as well.
This mechanism actually generalizes the concept of Driving Pockets and gives a better explanation as to how we can perform difficult actions or new actions by combining the previous "kinetic" knowledge of our brain. Actually this topic would be very helpful in robotics and neural networks, I suppose.
To explain the micro-impulses, you have to take one thing that I'll tell you as a fact: when the brain decides to make a move, it does not know beforehand exactly how it will do it. It gives a general order, a vague "description" of how it wants to move and makes it more specific along the way. How does it do it? It's very simple! It has an idea of what it wants to perform (by "projecting" the outcome through the inner loop into the pattern mesh). It observes the effects of its abstract command for action on the environment and the external stimuli that it now gets (through the outer loop) and spots minor differences that will create small DPs (or large, if we don't know at all how to do it, or very small if we have done this many, many times in the past). These small DPs, steal a small amount of the battery power and in the known way try to fix this out-of-context thing by adjusting the details of the action. In other words, they create micro-impulses; minor muscular adjustments to the original kinda vague movement order.
Since these micro-impulses are done by small DPs, the current available to the battery for other, big DPs is enough and this does not disrupt our regular processing ability, unless while trying to perform something ordinary we spot something extra-ordinary (out-of-context) that is important (relates with a DF) and thus deserve our specific attention.
If this is not the case, all regular/usual actions are handled by a combination of Helix, the P-A links and micro-impulses to perform minor adjustments to our movements.


Finally, if you want to have a kind of proof for the fact that our brain "orders" abstract moves and adjusts them along the way, you can think of this:
what happens when we hear a loud noise, while performing an action. If this let's say sounds dangerous and we get alarmed, a big DP gets formed, steals all battery signal and our movement gets disrupted. But we don't stop moving instantly! We continue for maybe about a second or so more. And this last second of movement is not very precise (because we have lost focus and we don't continue to make adjustments with micro-impulses). So there you have it: the fact that we continue to do a general movement is kind of proof for the fact that the brain gives abstract move commands and the fact that this move is not precise when we lose all battery power (that gets stolen by the big DP), is proof that we need microDPs to do micro-impulses and make our moves precise.

Moving on to the third one, we will describe why we act in an absent-minded way sometimes (we needed the first two to understand this better).
If we are focused on something that is important (i.e. we have a big DP that steals almost all current of the battery), then we don't have a lot of battery power left for the micro-impulses. This means that something that is quite in-context (but not 100%) will create a movement via the P-A links, but this movement won't be adjusted by the micro-impulses (because all the battery power is stolen by our big DP) and thus our movement will be done only approximately correct, or "muzzy", blurry (στο περίπου in Greek).
And by another example we can understand how this also translates to the thought process as well, because (I'm tired of saying it again and again) actions and thoughts are the same thing for the brain in terms of mechanisms. When we are performing an action that is very out-of-context, but is important (and thus we have a big DP that steals all battery current) we cannot think of something at the same time. We are focused on our action. It is not necessary to have to do difficult and abstract/advance thoughts to perform this action. No, this effect happens even when we just do a difficult action without using our thinking process too much. So it's not like we're using our capacity for abstract thoughts in another way; no it is not used at all. Nevertheless, we cannot use it because we don't have battery power, and if something asks us a question, we might reply with a very generic/vague/simplistic answer, just because we didn't have the battery power to think of something better/more-elaborate to answer. In other words, when we're focused in an action, our thinking process and our answers are muzzy/indistinct/inaccurate/non-elaborated, exactly as our actions are muzzy when we're thinking. Q.E.D.