Why your every attempt to get fit fails in the long run...

I see it everywhere around me.

People are trying to get fit, lose a few of those extra pounds, do a little more exercise, become a more lean & slender version of themselves.

And to accomplish it, they are willing to undergo hardship, suffering, hunger, sweat, and become miserable in the short-term. All for the greater cause. They try, they really do honest efforts. Others for a few days, many for a few weeks, a few for even a couple of years... And they get startled when they experience failure in the end. It just seems unfair to them. And they have probably paid good money for it; all until this dessert comes along and becomes the last drop in their mind that lower all resistance and throws you all out to feast like there's no tomorrow, wondering why you were depriving yourself of such pleasures for so long. Life is too short to be always miserable trying to become/stay fit. You're just fine the way you are.

Sounds familiar? The reason I'm writing this blog post is to mention a very simple concept in the struggle for fitness, that may help you overcome the aforementioned obstacles.

If we tried to simplify a lot a equation for fitness, we would say that

fitness = knowhow x discipline

You have a level of knowhow and a level of discipline. When you do gradual increases to the one or the other, your overall level of fitness gradually increases. In whichever way you try to vary these two variables, in the long-term you will always be gradually converging back to your "natural" fitness level.

When I'm talking about know-how, I refer to knowing which foods you should eat, in which way, when, how combined, etc. Also what type of exercises you should be doing based on your fitness goals, the technique, the regularity, etc.

When I'm talking about discipline, I'm talking about the strength you find within you to follow this goal despite the short-term discomfort. The willingness to not skip the workout today, even though you're tired/lazy. The strength to skip the dessert because you're already full, even though it looks delicious. The strength to order to healthy choice instead of the fast-food.

Following along with this example, when you go visit a nutritionist and he gives you a strict, tailored nutrition plan, what essentially you are doing is a short-term injection of know-how. It temporarily brings your knowhow level a few clicks up and the longer you maintain it, you will be able to gradually converge to a higher level of fitness. The trick is though that it's an external effect that will cease once you stop it. And you will fall back to your previous level. Oh, and by the way, this nutritionist is giving you know-how, but he's not giving you extra discipline, and that's an extra reason why it's highly likely that you'll fail.

Going to the discipline factor... here the things are even harder. Unfortunately I think that some people are just less willing to suffer than others, and will quit much earlier than other when things get tough. It's not something you can easily fix, you were either probably born with it or it was formed quite early in your childhood. There ARE things that you can do to raise your level; it won't skyrocket but still it has the potential to be better. The simple thing is to find some long-term incentives to align with fitness. A very simple example is when it's about health. Another one (but usually more short-lived) is when you're trying to be attractive to the opposite sex. 

Whatever it is, it has to mean something important for you and not be another external factor. So, getting a personal trainer is not effective, for the same reason as before. You are injecting a short-term increase in discipline (you must go to workout because someone else is indirectly forcing you to) and in know-how. But since it's external, once you cease doing it, you will gradually roll back to your earlier state.

As a conclusion, I want to repeat the previous equation.

Fitness = knowhow x discipline

So 

• focus on building your personal knowhow, little by little
• set realistic goals (because if it's too much your self-discipline will betray you soon, you'll burn out)
  
• work on building up an intrinsic motivation, by binding/synergizing your fitness goals with other important goals of your life, in order to secure higher discipline

Or just leave it like that, but be happy about it, because now you know the path, but it's your choice not to follow it :)

Moments of doubt

Sometimes I'm daunted by the complexity, sometimes I fray from cloudiness and other times I notice behaviors so remarkable that I know I'll never be able to fully explain.

But then again I remind myself that I don't need to invent the Pentium; I only need to build an ENIAC...

The rest will follow naturally

About Singularity and its temporal proximity

I just read about the Singularity concept. Although it really agrees with my predictions that the discovery of real artificial intelligence will be an unblocker for several things in the nature of human intelligence that holds as back

(namely the fact that even great minds have to die and humanity starts from scratch and the fact that we are bound to our biological limits/capacities in terms of memory, neuron branching, connectedness of individual brains etc.)

it was kinda daunting the postulation that all those events have a high chance of occuring within my lifetime. I always thought that our  evolutional offspring (let's call their species machina sapiens :) would rise after many, many generations.
The prediction that the mean date for this occurence is just around 2040, the fact that Moore's law will have produced by then the necessary hardware to house the amount of complexity neeeded to simulate a human brain, and the fact that Noesis Theory can be a catalyst for all this by providing the algorithim foundation for this construct make the likelihood of this actually occurring in our lifetime certainly not zero. Another interesting potential for Noesis Theory is that it not only unlocks the capability of building true AI, but it also enables us to understand how the algorithm that produces intelligence is made of and thus unlocks Seed AI and recursive self-improvements.

Nevertheless, if I was asked to guess for my own estimate about the necessary time to achieve the Singularity, I would see many more steps in this process... Namely:
- 2-3 years to produce a workable vesion of the Theory,
- 3-5 years to make it known and start actively working on its practical implementation
- 10-12 years to produce a real intelligence
- At least 20-30 years to allow it to grow up and flourish (you have to let it become adult to give it time to realize its full potential and see the actual limits)
- Another 20 years to finetune the intelligence and bring it on par with the best human levels of intelligence
- 30-40 years more to escape the regulations and artificial barriers that humans will set upon their machinistic siblings for fear of being overshadowed by evolution.
- 5-10 years for the AIs to reach a Singularity-level of sophistication
So I'd say we would be looking at a good 100 years more before we're able to pass on to the next level of intelligence/complexity in this pale blue dot.

Of couse, I have not factored the networking effect that could be possible with artificial brains (which can certainly be short-sighted of me, but it's a bit more complicated to analyze) and which has the potential of shortening this temporal distance.

In any case, the times ahead of us seem pretty exciting. Time will tell.

What is Life?

Somebody in the INTJ group of Facebook asked a question "What is Life?"

I copy-paste my answer here, in case you find it interesting.

If we take an abstract perspective on the history of the Universe as we know it, we can see that there is an inherent capability of this "construct" (the Universe) to increase its organizational complexity. From a soup of matter, to revolving galaxies, to planets of different types, to chemistry on the surface of the planet, to organic chemistry, to single-cell organisms, to plants & animals, to mammals, to homo, to homo sapiens sapiens... arriving at the epitome of evolution and complexity... the human brain.
This is the single most complex organ/system in the known universe.
So if you're still with me, and you accept that from our observations of known history till now there is a clear trend inherent in the laws of the universe to produce increasingly more complex organizations, then... life is simply the latest "vehicle" of this Law towards further increases in organizational complexity.
If at some point in time humans discover true Artificial Intelligence and manage to create superbrains that surpass in complexity our own (and can network themselves, and never die, etc), then the latest vehicle in the progression of organizational complexity of the Universe will cease to be Life and will be something else (e.g. the self-improvement of undying-and-thus-non-living AI).

Noesis Theory explaining scientific research

I read today in Scientific American about a new research for mirror neurons & hatred.
On the one hand it is very encouraging to find out that Noesis Theory explains most of the discoveries in the area of the brain... In fact, I could have predicted the outcome of this research beforehand, just by using Noesis Theory. It is also useful for me, because I learn about the proper scientific terms for some of the mechanisms I have described.
So I learned from this research the term of "mirror neurons" which in NT terms is the product of affinity. We get pleasure from some patterns and they are stored in our brain as extensions of ourselves (increasing the "affinity" between us and them), thus these neurons  will reflect with a varying degree (which depends on how much pleasure they have provided to us) pleasure and pain of others towards us. In other words, any pattern that gets linked with us with the mechanism of affinity can be called a mirror neuron.
As a direct result of what I mentioned above, and a hint for future research for Scientific American: any memory neuron can become a mirror neuron, just because any type of pattern can possibly offer us pleasure and thus be linked with affinity.

The only disappointing thing from the comments above is that although Noesis Theory seems to have great value and potential (it explains scientific research before it even gets done), due to the fact that it is not well known yet, it cannot be utilized by the scientific community to set a proper framework for all cognitive functions and better direct our research.

Let's hope that this will change in the future.

Birth date of maximization of pleasure idea

I was browsing through my notes and studying the evolution of my thought process and when in particular the basic idea of Noesis Theory (maximization of pleasure / minimization of discomfort) was born.
The first entry is in Feb 14 2006:

(...)

Το θέμα όμως είναι......... Τί είναι αυτό που θα κρίνει την επιτυχία ή αποτυχία της διάσχισης?

 Ελπίζω μονάχα να μην είναι τόσο πεζό όσο αυτό που φαντάζομαι και ο άνθρωπος να μην αποδειχθεί απλά μια μηχανή που υπακούει στις ορμόνες του και επιθυμεί να μεγιστοποιεί τα ευχάριστα συναισθήματα και να ελαχιστοποιεί/αποφεύγει τα δυσάρεστα. 

Another entry that showcases this as a fully developed idea was at 22/07/2006:

Είμαι σίγουρος ότι πλέον ο άνθρωπος είναι ένα ον που προσπαθεί να μεγιστοποιήσει την ευχαρίστησή του μέσω της κάθε σκέψης και της κάθε απόφασής του.

So somewhere in the spring of 2006, the foundation of Noesis Theory was put in place.

About racism

First of all racism is a natural derivative of the human brain function, due to affinity. Our brain is trained to spot similarities between things that are close to us, and if those things bring us pleasure they increase the affinity and we consider them as a extension of ourselves. When we have built such an affinity with these patterns, it is natural to be able to spot differences with people that are widely divergent from those familiar to us patterns. This mental separation can manifest into indifference, aversion, snobism or even racism.
You'll notice here that I'm using the word racism with a more gentle connotation that usual, i.e. not implying acts of hatred or severe discrimination. For me, racism as an unavoidable product of our mental processes, is just a strong sense of personal differentiation from others.
Now the question is: does racism exist even today and in what form? Well, as you would imagine the discrimination in casts of humans is still here, mostly because as we said it is an derived from an inherent feature of the human brain. And the way it appears today is in my opinion via the financial capabilities of each individual.
Poor people are considered of lower value than rich people. Life is worth less for these "lower levels of human existence" (I'm being ironic here, of course). They are entitled to less healthcare & welfare and are marginalized from society. If we go a bit upper, to the hard-working but low-paid populace, they are certainly better but still, they are utilized like modern slaves, forced to work day & night and give their lives as cogs to the capitalistic machine. They are comforted with a mobile phone, a remote control and always kept on a leash via a heavy mortgage.
Going even higher on the human scale, we have the self-made business owners & professionals (the upper middle-class). These are now highly regarded because they rose up to the challenge and made a difference. They are considered a higher class on their own, entitled to good private healthcare, and capable to live in spacious, luxurious homes with many comforts of their choosing. They are the envy of the populace and the highest grade one can ever hope to ascend to.
And finally, we have the super-rich, who were born into riches or the extremely few who became billionnaires. They are a class of their own, self-regarded as the rulers of this system. These are the masters of the "slaves" below, heavily dependent on the populace to keep the machine turning and provide them the profits, with little or just normal work. They might have inherited the riches, they might not be smart or capable, but still they consider themselves above all else.

You see, and this is where the system is wrong. Because discrimination and racism exists even today (and we probably cannot avoid as long as we are human), but it's form is twisted. Because we have translated money as a measure of worth and regard the individual depending on the amount of money & assets we has in his bank account.
If the ideal of eradicating racism cannot be achieved, at least we should change its manifestation. We need a better measure of worth than money. Don't get me wrong, I don't totally disagree with the notion that making money is a measure of worth. It definity shows something. An excellent (bright, capable, honest) employee would be paid more than an average employee. This is natural and expected. It is healthy, because it provides an incentive to the excellent employee to keep up his efforts, as well as a motive to the average employee to get better.
But this is a good case of where more money means more worth. There are also many other examples that this paradigm fails. If you inherited the money, it means nothing about your abilities (moreover, it is a counter-incentive to evolve and better yourself). If you stole & cheated to get it, it is also a bad indicator. If you had a better startpoint than most (due to your parents' circle of acquaintances, or their financial support) it is unfair to be compared to equal terms with the rest. So, in the process of making money, there are many other factors expect individual human worth that can tip the scale in your favor or against it, which ultimately makes money a bad factor for differentiation.
And what is a better measure of worth? Well, if it was simple, we would have discovered it. It would be nice to have a way to measure how virtuous a character is, how much is his capabilities, his smarts, his willingness to offer to the public, his potential for evolution. If we had such an objective measure and is also was not only genetically predisposed (i.e. you were not born into a class but you had the capability to change if you wanted to and tried), then I would personally be ok with having some kind of discrimination. If you had the capability to ensure a good level of welfare for all individuals, give them all, an equal starting point and then judge them objectively based on their actual worth and contribution to society, then yes some who excelled should also be rewarded more handsomely that others. This is perfectly normal and it would set a precedent and align the motives of everybody for a better world via personal contribution.
But until we have such a system, racing based on any other measure is just plain wrong.