Ontological Math Snigglets # 2

More snigglets . They're relatively easy to write, and don't require a big investment to read. And just to be clear, except as noted, these are ideas I came up with on my own independently of the OM books.

Once again, most do not directly have anything to do with OM. However, I would make two points about this. First, I did try to select ideas that I think will be appealing to other OM'ers (believe me, I could have added a bunch of computer science entries as well). Second, since OM is a true Theory of Everything, then technically speaking, anything you talk about is a part of OM.

Anyways, I hope you enjoy.

p.s. Snigglets #1 are here

Subtle But Big

There should be a word in the English language for the concept of something that is small -- a minor insight say, but yet at the same time imparts a surprisingly large impact.

I think a good example of this is the crossing of the event horizon in a black hole. Let's assume you have a small creature about the size of an atom. We have to do this because for any macro-sized object it will be ripped to shreds by gravitational tidal forces in a process physicists call spaghettification. But a small atom will escape these forces unscathed. Surprisingly however, the passing of the event horizon for this creature will be totally non-eventful -- it wouldn't even necessarily know it had passed the event horizon unless it was somehow monitoring it. You would think there'd be some sort of effect like a flash of light, or a sonic boom or something. But the crossing of the event horizon would be no more eventful than crossing the international date line in a plane flying over the Pacific.

However, from the outside perspective, the second this creature crosses the event horizon it will never be able to get back. It will essentially disappear completely from the rest of the universe. So it's obviously a huge impactful event at another level of analysis.

In addition, I would like to cite two "subtle but big" examples from history.

One is the mass adaptation of coffee drinking. Prior to its discovery and cultivation, people in Europe drank alcoholic beverages on a daily basis due to the fact that most other water sources were highly contaminated:

In Europe during the Middle Ages, beer, often of very low strength, was an everyday drink for all classes and ages of people. A document from that time mentions nuns having an allowance of six pints of ale each day.

- Wikipedia

Imagine the collective harm to IQ alone, with mothers routinely drinking during their pregnancies. Varying degrees of fetal alcohol syndrome must have been widely prevalent. The simple act of boiling water is the reason why coffee (or tea) is safe to drink. Of course, the stimulating effects of the caffeine presumably had some benefit as well. As far as decontamination goes, they could have just as easily boiled the water, and then stored it for future use if they properly understood germs. Remember, the concept of "germ theory" did not come along until the 1860's and even then it was considered controversial. Gloves were not worn during surgery until 1894. So people had no idea what germs were, let alone how to prevent them -- sterilizing water was "theory-free" for hundreds of years.

I heard one historian on a podcast suggest that coffee was, in fact, a large component of what actually caused the renaissance.

Two, is double-book accounting:

The rise and metamorphosis of double-entry bookkeeping is one of history’s best-kept secrets and most important untold tales. Why? First, because it arguably made possible the wealth and cultural efflorescence that was the Renaissance. Second, because it enabled capitalism to flourish, so changing the economies of the world forever. Third, because over several centuries it grew into a sophisticated system of numbers which in the twenty-first century governs the global economy. This medieval artefact is still in daily use around the world.

Gleeson-White, Jane. Double Entry: How the Merchants of Venice Created Modern Finance (p. 8). W. W. Norton & Company. Kindle Edition.

For instance, with double-book accounting you could finally have publicly traded corporations. Prior to double book, you could effectively only have enterprises the size of an extended family -- people whom you knew and could presumably trust to not rip you off.

Imagine if it were truly the case that simply by drinking coffee, and adopting double-book accounting this was a sufficient enough reason to make the transition between the dark ages and the Renaissance: small, subtle ideas to be sure, but ones carrying a big impact.

In a similar fashion, when I contemplate the question: "What impact has learning OM had on your life?", I would have to say the impact is "subtle but huge". In my everyday life, it doesn't have much of an impact: funnily enough, knowing about "transcendent mathematical idealism" doesn't help you much when getting out of bed in the morning, or when you're trying to debug a program. However, in my "higher" life, it has been revolutionary.

I think this is also the nature of ontologies vs. epistemologies.

Epistemologies comes into play in everyday life. They are analogous to Newtonian Mechanics. Ontologies come into play at the extremes of life. They are analogous to relativity.

Physicists routinely still use Newtonian Mechanics when the speed of objects is much less than the speed of light, in spite of the fact that they absolutely know the foundational ideas of it are dead wrong, disproven by Einstein over 100 years ago. However, it's more intuitive and easier than using a relativistic model, yet still produces highly accurate results. But when the speed of the objects involved becomes close to the speed of light, or if you have a lot of gravity, then you need to use relativity to get accurate answers: the simpler Newtonian model breaks down.

Analogously, epistemologies are useful for everyday things, and ontologies useful for the "extremes" of life.

Ontologies help you with questions like "why is there something rather than nothing?", "what happens to you when you die?", and "what existed before the big bang?" etc. -- all the places where epistemology breaks down.

Ontologies also give you an independent "audit" of your epistemology and vice versa.

As I said, subtle but huge.

What other simple ideas are out there that could revolutionize everything if properly understood and adopted?

Alpha, Mu, and Omega Points

The Alpha Point is the start of the cosmic cycle: the great chain of becoming. The Omega Point is the final point, the zenith point, before it cycles back once more to the new Alpha Point.

I propose the addition of the Mu point -- the Greek character for our "M": the Middle point. The Mu point is where we currently live, and stands for all points between the alpha and omega points.

The ultimate question at any point in the universe is "Who/What am I?".

What answer does the universe come up with at each point?

Alpha Point: I am nothing.
Mu point: I am something (or 42).
Omega Point: I am Everything (or God).

0, 42, and infinity: these are the ultimate answers for the universe.

Brains vs Minds

Google can build brains but not minds. They train their expert systems against large databases created by humans. They do not create new intelligence, although they may be able to extract embedded patterns from the source data that no one noticed before.

The more common expression to distinguish between these two types of intelligences is machine learning vs. general AI. In the 1960's through the 1980's, AI was mostly concerned with general AI, which proved difficult and little progress was made. In the 1990's and early 2000's, they switched over to a more mechanical type of extracted intelligence, machine learning, and had much better success.

George Gilder says a useful metaphor to distinguish between types of intelligences is frequency domain vs. time domain from Fourier transforms. Time domain intelligence is intelligence embedded in structures (pictures and text) created by humans. Frequency domain intelligence is root, primary, creative intelligence: the kind of intelligence that only humans seem to have -- the ability to create whole new ideas and patterns from scratch. By this measure, Google is creating only time domain intelligence.

This is not to take away from the amazing accomplishments that machine learning is achieving, but right now contemporary AI is kind of like the Borg from Star Trek: archons that can only extract knowledge from other species, perhaps combining it in different ways, but fundamentally unable to contribute anything completely new.

It is said that smart drugs (nootropics like modafinil or provigil) really only make you smarter at doing "busy work" (crystalized intelligence) not creative work (fluid intelligence). That is to say, they emphasize your animal/autistic nature over your angel/artistic nature. In short, good at enhancing your time domain intelligence like machine learning, but not so good at enhancing your frequency domain intelligence like general AI.

Ad-lib vs Improv

Most people conflate Ad-lib and improv as being more or less the same thing. Ad-lib means coming up with something off the top of your head, spontaneously, and in an unplanned fashion. In short, it's what most people consider improv to be. Improv, however, simply means unscripted.

That is to say improv is not necessarily spontaneous. In fact, it can be planned out rather meticulously, with pre-planned jokes in a comedy routine for instance. Take the movie "Spinal Tap". It's considered improv, yet the entire storyline, jokes, and funny situations were all worked out before hand i.e. they didn't simply show up on a movie set one day and start filming *1. But since they didn't have a pre-written script for dialog, it's considered improv.

*1 American comedian Howie Mandel had a good take on this. He would start off saying that's he's really into improv and then asks the audience to provide him with a character, and then a situation. Then he says "Ok, now give me some funny things to say".

Arguably, improv requires more preparation than a scripted bit, since you don't know the direction the routine might go, or how the audience reacts etc. You might want to have three jokes for every one scripted joke. Imagine going into a job interview where you're not quite sure what questions they may ask you, or what skills they will emphasize. To properly prepare, you'll have to cover all bases. Thus proper improv is actually very demanding. Of course, this isn't a requirement of all improv -- you can simply wing it with more ad-libbing and hope for the best, but this is pretty risky unless you're highly confident.

Ad-libbing is either effortless (you're just on a roll), or painfully difficult. If people know you're ad-libbing, they'll usually cut you a little slack. In America, there used to be a show that was all about ad-libbing: two comedians are given characters and a situation, and they have to come up with something on the spot. Most of what they came up with wasn't really very funny, but you since you knew they were making it up on the fly, you granted them a certain amount of respect that you wouldn't otherwise give them.

Robin Williams was known as an improv comedian. While I have no doubt he genuinely did come up with many ad-libs, you have to realize that in his act and T.V. appearances he probably had a large body of prepared jokes. While I believed him to be funny, I'm not quite sure he's as "genius" as everyone made him out to be since they assume "improv" means "ad-lib", and therefore assumed he must have come up with all that material off the top of his head. He definitely benefitted from his reputation as an improv comedian, since people would be more inclined to cut him a little slack.

As far as scripts go, if something is scripted you definitely want to be careful about altering even a single word. The writers may have chosen a particular word, or phrase very deeply. Maybe in the final scene, it will be revealed why certain words were used prior in the script. If the actors and directors start playing fast and loose with the script, the entire premise of the movie might be destroyed. Let's take the case of Data in the Star Trek TNG franchise. He famously cannot use contractions (although there's a YouTube video out there showing all the times Brent Spiner, Data's portrayer, mistakenly uses contractions). There was one episode in particular where they showed Data in the future and in the last scene he says to Captain Picard "I can't". That was an intentional contraction used as a nod by the writers to indicate that in the future Data gains the ability to say contractions, and in fact, in the second TNG movie he does get an "emotion chip" and acquires the ability to use contractions. Imagine the disaster if they cavalierly decided to have him say "no", or "I cannot" etc.

Even Robin Williams had to follow the script meticulously in his movies. Some directors let him do an alternate take where he and the other actors were free to improvise, but this was only after they had done a full scripted take.

Beyond Gold

What's beyond gold? Not platinum. How about E8 quasi-crystals: transfinite gold, or at least 248-dimensional gold (projected down to 4-d).

Others say crypto-currency like Bitcoin.

The Most Dangerous Drugs

Dopamine and hopium: the real addictive drugs in the internet era.

Social media companies have engineered the art of delivering dopamine hits on a semi-random payoff schedule, the same basic mechanism that drives gambling addiction.

Hopium is related to FOMO: fear of missing out.

Genes, Epigenetics, and Memes

Your phenotype (e.g. your body) moves at the speed of genes, but your brain moves at the speed of memes. Individual gene changes occur over decades at the generational level, while collective gene changes occur over thousands of years. However, memetic changes can occur much more rapidly, even, with proper motivation, instantaneously.

But there's another level of change that most people ignore: epigenetics. Epigenetic changes occur at a rate midway between that of genes and memes.

I would say that today our culture is at the epigenetic level of evolution. Full memetic level of pace will only occur once we are past the event horizon of the technological singularity.

Locusts are the poster children of epigenetics. While only about ten of the 8000 species of grasshoppers can morph into locusts, the damage they can inflict has been known thousands of years. There are several types of locust-transitioning grasshoppers, but only one family of locusts. In other words, as everyone suspected, all assholes are the same.

Polyphenism: when one genotype gives rise to more than one phenotype.

Grasshoppers turn into locusts when their environment is in stress e.g. drought. Then, all it takes is a single trigger to turn them into a locust. Locusts pass their traits on to offspring. While it takes only a few hours to convert into a locust, it takes several reproductive generations for them to return back to a docile grasshopper.

Donald Trump literally turned large swaths of the media: the press and late-night comics, into locusts -- a mindless, reactive, hyper-liberal mob. That was the trigger. Now, five years after he became president, and over a year since he's left office, they are still in locust mode. Last I checked, democrats controlled the presidency, the house, and the senate. That is to say 2 of the 3 branches of government, plus effective control of the press, sometimes called the fourth estate. However, you would never know this from the way late night comics talk. They still have "jokes" about Donald Trump and nary a bad thing to say about any democrat, much less Joe Biden.

While Trump might have been the trigger, the fact that their market-share is shrinking due to streaming and social media is probably what's preventing them from reverting out of the locust state.

Humanity 1.0: genetic evolution at the speed of genes.
Humanity 2.0: epigenetic evolution at the speed of culture.
Humanity 3.0: memetic evolution at the speed of thought.

We are currently Humanity 2.0. We have yet to pass through a great filter before and if we ever make it to Humanity 3.0.

Posh Accents

Social scientists say a posh British accent is worth 15 points. That is to say, if you show a video of an actor talking in an upper class British accent, and then have the same actor say exactly the same thing in a standard American accent, people will rate the IQ of the posh speaker to be about 15 points higher. Of course, that's a perceived higher IQ, not an actual higher IQ.

Let's say having an accurate model of reality (or language of reality) increases you actual IQ by 15 points. That is to say, if you have a more insightful model of reality, you can "see" things that people with a lesser model need a higher IQ to achieve.

It's pretty clear that many of the OM authors are British, and I picture them as coming from Oxford or Cambridge (AKA "OxBridge"). Since they have a superior system of thinking via OM, throw in the posh British accent and they're getting about a 30-point IQ boost, two standard deviations, for "free".

David Beckham has an Essex accent. Apparently, this is considered to be a cockney accent and thus lower class. He originally found little success as a pitchman in Europe flogging expensive gear, because it was like, to American ears, someone with a thick Bronx accent, say Joe Pesci, trying to sell you diamond watches. However, most Americans consider his accent to be kind of sophisticated (as they do most British accents save a hard-core cockney "sweep your chimney, guvnor"), and he had much better luck as a spokesperson in the US in spite of having relatively little name recognition over here.

VR Porn

VR porn is typically much more mundane than standard internet porn. It's all basically just standard sex, what some might even consider to be "ethical porn". Standard internet porn, however, frequently gets extreme. Anyone who has ever visited standard internet porn sites will probably come across activities they don't typically do or even have never done i.e. it gets "kinky" real fast.

The reason for this, ironically, is that VR porn is much more intimate than standard video porn. It's literally 3-d instead of 2-d. VR porn producers say it's all about the eye contact. Yes, the eye contact. You don't need to resort to extreme sexual acts like you do with non-VR porn, to cross that 2-d barrier, so to speak.

In an article about VR porn, a journalist interviewed a married couple about their attitudes toward VR porn. While the wife was OK with her husband occasionally looking at online porn, after seeing VR porn for the first time she immediately said "no way" to its viewing. She said it was way too intimate and qualified as a form of cheating.

The same trajectory happened with standard cinema. In film from the 1920's, everyone acted with broad emotive gestures, presumably because the screen was small and details were hard to see. Come the 1980's, I recall watching a video about acting from Michael Caine, talking about how acting is all about really small, almost imperceptible gestures like subtly raising an eyebrow to indicate concern.

This is all good for the VR industry as a whole. Anyone who thinks that VR may not make it has never watched VR porn. Just like VCRs and X-rated videos in the 1980's, VR porn alone will carry VR across the finish line. Of course, it's not polite to say this in most media circles, which is why you never hear it. In addition, VR has several other positives -- VR game play is amazing for instance. Any of these others is also capable of carrying the day as well. Taken all together, VR is virtually assured (no pun intended) to make it, whether you like it or not.

Freedom vs Power

Slavery, freedom, power, and uber-power form a hierarchy. What's the difference between power and uber-power? I would say power is individual power, while uber-power is collective power -- power over others. However, what should the order of this hierarchy be? Obviously slavery is the least desirable. But what is the most desirable: freedom or power? Many people, including new-age guru types and Buddhists would say freedom. However, as Nietzsche said, the only people who crave freedom are those who've never had power. So for the power seekers, "uber-power" would be the highest, leaving freedom as only one step above slavery.

It certainly seems that once people taste power they never want to go back. I knew a co-worker, an engineer, who got promoted into middle management. In spite of him being a quite good engineer and a not so good manager, indeed getting fired as a manager, when I asked if he was going back to being technical he said no way-- he wanted to be a manager from then on.

Interestingly, there is no such thing as uber-freedom, since you cannot have freedom over others. This is a fundamental asymmetry between freedom and power. Yes, there is the concept of collective freedom but this is just individual freedom many times over. Also, you cannot have any stronger form of freedom, because full freedom is like a circle: no matter what change you make to a perfect circle, by definition, makes it less circular. Likewise, any alteration to pure freedom make it less free by definition.

Power is a little different. If you've ever wondered why really wealthy people, who never need to work again, don't just simply quit and sip a pina colada on a beach in the Bahamas, lust for power is the answer. Uber-power gives you control over how others can live their lives etc. Any politician running for president is an example of someone craving uber-power. Donald Trump may seem like an archetypal example, but he's really no more power hungry than, say, Bill Clinton.

Facebook

Facebook is a honey pot of social media. They present themselves as one thing to capture information at another level.

On the surface, and only on the surface, they are a social media company. But on the back-end they're all about collecting information on your likes and dislikes so they can sell that information to advertisers. That's where they make all their money.

In other words, they're what I call a controlled paradox.

Mark Zuckerberg is the perfect spokesman for Facebook, because he himself is a controlled paradox. Underneath he's basically a technical engineer, a Meyers-Brigg INT mostly interested in ideas, but on the surface he tries to present himself as a typical Meyers-Briggs ESF, all social, and interested in people: a split personality just like the company itself. That is to say, Facebook the company is built in the image of Mark Zuckerberg the man. Or has Mark Zuckerberg himself, out of greed and necessity, morphed his personality to match that of his company?

The Real Golden Rule

He who has the gold makes the rules.

Knowing How to Do Things.

Knowing how to do things usually isn't quite enough for someone to actually hire you. There's also knowing how to do it well, and knowing how to do it quickly. You need two of the three to actually get paid to do it.

Syntactic vs Semantic Hallucinations

Note: This is a concept I originally obtained from the OM books. Unfortunately, I can't find the original source so I can't remember what parts came from them and what parts came from me.

The suggestion is that certain psychedelics give syntactic hallucinations, while others give you semantic hallucinations. Let's say you've taken a psychedelic and you subsequently see color coming out of your radio -- you're having a visual hallucination for what is typically an auditory experience. When interpreted as a semantic hallucination, you will know that this is strange, but still also know that it is not real. However, when interpreted as a syntactic hallucination, it won't seem strange at all, and you'll feel that you're now finally seeing the real truth -- that sound is actually light, and that hearing music like you did prior is what is weird.

A semantic hallucination would be like waking up from a dream and instantaneously realizing the dream world was crazy. But while you were dreaming, that world seemed real, that is to say it was a syntactic hallucination. Most dreams are syntactic hallucinations.

Supposedly, DMT gives you syntactic hallucinations, which is why people think what they see and hear while tripping on it is the real reality, even when they sober up. This is unlike some hallucinogenics such as LSD, which give you semantic hallucinations. When you come back to reality from these, you more readily accept the fact that everything you saw was a hallucination and not real.

Next, let's next explore how you should properly interpret hallucinations.

The standard model of awareness is that you have a tiny trickle of reality data that is able to pass through one's "doors of perception", upon which the post-effects processing part of the brain constructs the final perceptual illusion that we experience as our everyday world. The standard interpretation of how psychedelics affect consciousness is that they open wide the doors of perception and, proportionally speaking, diminish the relative influence of the illusory component thereby allowing one to directly experience the true reality. But what about the possibility that what they actually do is close the doors of perception, eliminating the tiny trickle of reality entirely, thus letting the illusory part of the brain run rampant and unchecked? In other words, what you are seeing and experiencing while tripping is a doubled-down illusion, not the unadulterated "raw" form of reality most trippers assume. So now you're two hops removed from reality, not the one hop of everyday experience, or the zero hops of direct reality.

If the double-down illusion theory is true, then there's obviously a danger in interpreting it in the wrong way (as true reality). However, you could still gain insight into the nature of true reality in this case by noticing the difference between the everyday illusion and the drugged-up double-down illusion, and then, in effect, trying to subtract this difference from the everyday illusion to get a flavor of true reality. In others words, "subtract" all the bright colors and DMT dwarves, not add them. If you interpret all the dwarves and infinite time etc. as true reality then you've just deceived yourself into believing an illusion, and are now two hops from the actual truth.

I don't know which interpretation is the correct one, or even if it's ontologically possible to distinguish between them, but you should consider the possibility that DMT trips et al, are potentially deceiving you into believing an illusion over reality. I've never actually tried psychedelics, so admittedly this is all a little theoretical. Perhaps, if I tried them I would just intuitively grasp that this "has to be" true reality. But is intuition ever preferable over pure rationalism (assuming this is in fact a "rational" argument)?

On Zinfinity

Zinfinity is zero doped with infinity. Or maybe it's infinity doped with zero.

e vs pi

e (Euler's number) is the invariant of a circle in the complex plane. pi is invariant of a circle in the real number plane. Thus e is the pi of the complex plane.

pi in base e = 10.101002...
e in base pi = 2.20212...

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-> Internal Note: Snigglets based on notebook 31

-> Update History:
2022-06-02: first publishing.
2022-06-03: Fix minor typos and grammar