Effortlessly Sinking*

I've always been scared of the idea that there is another consciousness sitting in my body, unable to interface with the moving parts but always silently feeling everything I feel and observing everything I do. The source of that fear has, in all honesty, been the fear of judgement from a being that has been through all the same stuff I've been through but who would still dislike me, not from the feeling of empathy for such a being. 

With all that I know now, do I think something like that is actually happening? Sorta? I'm not going to pretend to know what physical processes give rise to what qualia, although I'm leaning towards the opinion that if physical processes give rise to qualia at all then probably all physical processes give rise to all possible qualia. More accurately, I'm of the opinion that if we assume that computational processes give rise to qualia, and we assume that physical processes give rise to qualia by means of embodying computational processes, then all physical processes give rise to all possible qualia due to the subjectivity/dependence on the method of observation of which physical process corresponds to which computational process.

But that's a non-answer - "there's a silently judging copy of me in my body, but only in the sense that there's a silently judging copy of me in my thermostat" doesn't have the same ring to it.

Something a bit more meaningful is that while all conscious experiences provably have analogous physical processes they can be traced back to, there's no guarantee that a unique conscious experience corresponds to for such a physical process, even if we fix our mapping of which computational process corresponds to which physical process to something conventional.

You go into a room that records the state of matter in your body and the surroundings. A voice asks you to think of a color and write it down on a piece of paper. You think for a second. Then you write down "black". You exit the room, and the friendly room operator replays a simulation of the interaction of matter in the room in the duration of you being there. Even given a fixed mapping of what computational process corresponds to the physical process (real or simulated), you can't say for sure that there's only one possible sequence of experienced being experienced by the simulated you, identical to the one experienced by the real you. Really, any such sequence could be realistic, so long as it ends with you deciding to write "black" on the piece of paper.

Okay, not really. We can choose to limit our set of possible sequences of experience by more criteria than just "black" appearing on the piece of paper. Would the sequence result in the exact same patterns breathing and muscle-twitching as the original? We can go even deeper, since the room had very high resolution. Would the parts of the sequence of experiences corresponding to one part of the brain have the exact same interaction, movement of atom by movement of atom, to the other part of the brain as what happened with the original?

You can go further down, but the catch is, you can't do it by an infinite amount. At some point you run out of mutual information, and the difference in the physical state can't possibly correspond to the difference in experience. And at that point, you still have an infinite set of possible experience sequences that could account for all the aspects of the physical processes above this level.

But what about you? In the end you're stuck with the qualia you're stuck with. You can't switch to another option just because you can prove that it corresponds to the same physical process on any level that can account for difference in the experience, there's just no notion of that. When you interact with the physical, you're stuck with the same old limitations of observability. You can't gain the knowledge that's forbidden to you by being locked away from not being part of your experience by merit of the unknowable laws of correspondence between things that are experiences and things that are not.

The hard problem is a surprisingly personal one. 

 * What are you effortlessly sinking about?

Push and Relabel, Push and Shove*

I've been telling people I love the aesthetics of empty pages and white walls. This isn't entirely accurate. I've never been fascinated by a literal empty page. But I still feel that the description applies to me. What gives?

Like a good irresponsibly estimated 70% of frequent daydreamers (I'm deliberately avoiding the term maladaptive, because reasons), I have an imaginary fantasy world that I frequent. At this point it's been going on for nearly twenty years, so there's a lot happening there. Nevertheless, in most of my daydreams in that world, I've consistently stuck with a single self-insert character. He's not really fully like me, and I also don't want to think of him as my imagined ideal self, but nevertheless he is an image of how my values and desires would manifest if I had magical powers of cosmic magnitude. So, what are his traits? A rough sketch:

• Immortality and eternal youth, and not as an epic achievement or a reward. Death and aging are simply not concerns for him.
• Slow change across millions/billions of years.
• Consistency in beliefs.
• Multiple bodies, multiple lives, mind as a distributed system spanning millions of spontaneously/need-basis spawning bodies, with guaranteed convergence into single self/mind synchronization/avoidance of value drift.
• Avoidance of permanently limiting decisions. An identity that is concrete and developed, but which doesn't feature traits that would permanently set the course of further development in one way.
• A romance arc with one other character that remains open-ended across billions of years, with associated feeling of distant but intense mutual understanding, and shared regret, left unsaid, over not being able to be together for long spans of time due to each pursuing individual goals that don't intersect. A relationship that is safe in the sense of not having to worry about losing it to competition, but unsafe in the sense of having to worry about losing it to the passage of time and the uncertain nature of the next meeting.
• Independent academic inclinations. Strong desire to share knowledge, and help people escape the boundaries of reality, even of the supernatural reality of the world. Giving away power freely, but doing so on his own terms. A disrespect of limitations.
• A fundamental drive towards kindness, behind a very thin facade of nonchalance.
• Humorous approach to the world, but not in an archetypal trickster kind of way. Being silently proud of the fact that he would feel a little hurt if people around him didn't get the joke. 
• Even after aeons of existence, a persistent belief in being human on a foundational level.

What does this tell me? Again, a rough sketch:

• I'm non-committal, but not in the traditional sense of the word. I'm willing to commit to things forever, including at the exclusion of other things, so long the option to change my mind and return to the initial state remains, even if I never take it.
• I genuinely enjoy human existence, and have a strong desire to spread my individual human existence across space and time.
• I want people to understand the world in the same way as me, and to use the same methods as I do in breaking free of the restrictions imposed upon them. I resonate with the theme of common struggle against limitations.
• I believe that my values are defined on an emotional level, and that the point of rationality is to pursue the development of the world in which those values are realized. I don't see emotions and thought as opposing forces. Rather, I see emotions as possessing independent value but no transformative force, and thought as possessing transformative force but no independent value.
• I'm a bit awkward and unbalanced, but I take pride in my faults and insecurities. 
• Above all else, I see myself as a sort of an eternal outsider, but not in a self-pitying kind of way. That makes sense to me. Between the sun and the moon, I always go with the stars. Reconciling my human drives with my longing for the distant and infinite existence has been an ongoing semi-conscious struggle for me since all the way from the age of around 3, even if it wasn't always phrased that way.

Is this a good enough explanation? For me, I guess yes, but I do have access to my own mind, so I'm a little biased. But really, do I have to care? No.

 ___

 * It must flow.

Involuntary Quivers*

The essence of sadism is the perverse enjoyment of involuntary reactions, physical or psychological, induced in the victim. Whether this is just a description of an emergent phenomenon or the actual mirror neuron-based foundation of the ability to enjoy inflicting cruelty, I do not know. What I do know is that this is effectively the basest form of empathy: to determine whether or not you get rewarded with sadistic pleasure, your mind needs to be able to model whether or not an involuntary reaction is occurring within your victim. The higher form of empathy - not just correctly modelling another organism's mind but experiencing as negative stimuli the representations of their negative stimuli - is present only within the forms of life heavily reliant on social organization and care. Meanwhile, the ability to enjoy the sight of an enemy's body not being able to work as intended, or even to just enjoy playing with food, is useful all round.

I do feel that this form of perverse empathy exists on such a foundational level that it can easily slip past conscious thought in the absence of highly-developed self-awareness. Psychopaths tend to enjoy harming people in creative, distinctively cruel ways, yet on intellectual level they tend to report not being able to understand how their actions make their victims feel. 

It's no more reasonable to ask a person not to use an enjoyment-generating faculty they posses than to ask them never to use this or that body part. Yet it is always reasonable to ask a person not to unjustly inflict pain. Of course, there are ways around this, but most of them are unhealthy, and still cruel. The ones that aren't cruel are packaged in ways only truly understandable by self-aware people, who don't have as much problem being instinctually cruel to begin with. I guess the path forward is to just insist on more self-awareness from everyone. This is just another facet of the shared, uncomfortable darkness that we have to tame.

 * I'm usually not like this, except secretly in my head all the time

Self-replicating Wants*

So, when one succeeds in reaching a state of experienced non-self, what is the reward? There can't be any, because there's no recipient. I suppose there can be no punishment either. But still, what would your previous, pre-enlightenment self think?

The thing I love about desire is the thing I love about desire, which is the thing I love about desire.

I love desire. I'm attached to desire. I enjoy experiencing desire. I desire experiencing desire, I desire desiring the experience of desire, and so on, not necessarily ad infinitum because there's only so much processing power you can dedicate to fueling this train of thought. But the point stands: desire is self-replicating. It's also specific and differentiated per person. There is no one else who experiences wanting, and the enjoyment of wanting, in exactly the same way that I do.

What would I gain from convincing myself that I do not want this thing that I do want? How could I want to not want, when I find so much wonder in wanting?

I think that, in some sense, the thing that differentiates acts of destruction from acts of killing is the object of the act being some form of an optimization process. It's alive when it has an aspect that is self-replicating (or at least something-replicating, given that the something is somewhat consistent), so killing it becomes murder.

Many aspects of conscious existence are self-replicating, meaning it is possible to commit multiple suicides. When the result is that the self-replicating pattern is gone, the impression of the rest of you is that you are no longer burdened by it, and it falsely paints a positive picture of the act. It is blatant self-destruction, but I suppose whoever is pursuing that path wouldn't mind, with an exception made for the gruesome, regular kind.

Me, I'd rather let myself perpetuate.

 

______

* If this is a verb rather than a noun, then I mean it intransitively, just like that final "perpetuate"

The Value of Preference*

Preference is derived from aesthetics. 

People on occasions report experiencing an ecstatic detachment from the ego. In this state of mind, they are able to evaluate their selves objectively, free from the constrains imposed by the ego.

This is, of course, self-contradictory. If you can evaluate, then you have preferences, and preferences come from the ego. Even when your experience is that of something looking at you, that something needs to be able to reason, judge, and evaluate. Rationality and morality might be inscribed deep enough within your networks, governed by the circuits of logical reasoning and the authoritative voice of the superego respectively, that their influence on an egoless being temporarily inhibiting your physical and mental facilities is understandable. But aesthetics is different. It serves no purpose beyond the ego. Yet preferences are found even within the state of so-called ego-death.

I know where this leads.

 

 * I prefer.

Midday Secrets*

Heads tend to get clouded. I'd say it can be a sordid affair, but then again, why the fuck would I say that?

I detest inauthentic self-expression. This makes sense. Just like everyone else, I detest in others that which I find most loathsome in myself.

Pride is such a weird emotion. It cannot exist without insecurity. It's also intense and beautiful. The heights of self-expression are all but fueled by the narcissistic takeover of the mind.

Self-consciousness seems to be inherently linked with self-awareness. It's a weird, antagonistic relationship. Self-consciousness births self-awareness, which recognizes the unavoidable anguish of existing while harboring attachments and seeks liberation. Liberation destroys self-consciousness, which destroys self-awareness. Don't get me wrong, it's not a cycle. It ends when self-awareness is destroyed.

What happens to the self? That's the question I know all the more-or-less isomorphic answers to - it ascends to better conditions, or is revealed to be deluding itself into being a part when it is actually the whole, or is revealed to not have existed at all. The edgy edge-cases seek to maintain the self. I like that approach. That means no liberation though.

I guess this connects my obsession with self-expression to my obsession with the maintenance of the self.

Pride is such a weird emotion. It's a source of so many things that are really bad. That's the nature of self-expression though: it expresses the inner state and shares it with others. If it resonates, it reinforces the same inner state in others.

Self-expression is inherently prideful. It requires perverse satisfaction with at least some aspect one's internal state, to the point of risking reinforcing that aspect in others. It's like feeling, rather than believing, that you have something that needs to be heard. I guess this is part of the reason humility is perceived as dishonest in artists.

Pride factors in procrastination. Why spend the next minute confronting ambiguity when you can spend it admiring your completed, concrete and disambiguated work? Most forms of work are forms of self-expression, and are thus prideful. Ambiguous work is that which you can be. Concrete work is that which you already are. In procrastinating, you deny your potential self in favor of your concrete, past self. You do so by diverting attention. Paying attention to things that are ambiguous is riskier. The rewards are potentially greater, but we're all cowards.

It makes sense that self-attention is a currency of self-reinforcement, because that's what all attention is. Self-expression demands attention from others. Seeing others expend energy modeling our minds leads us to feel the concreteness of our selves.

All forms of communication require some sort of a language. Demands for attention need to be phrased. Artistic skill is the skill of constructing phrases that make neurons fire. Communication often goes two ways, and often more. People engage in mutual self-reinforcement all the time. There's messages in secret languages of self-reinforcement floating around everywhere. With a bit of practice, I think you could really tap into it. Some would call this greater black magic, fueled by the spiritual nexus of pride. It would be a sin that subjects one to eternal suffering. It's funny how those things tend to check out sometimes.

Anyway, I don't mind any of this, so long as the communicating parties remain authentic. Because I hate inauthentic self-expression. Because I detest in others that which I find most loathsome in myself. Because I've engaged in it and regretted it. Authenticity is something we owe ourselves before each other. Because inauthenticity will result in the wrong thing being reinforced, and that can be really painful in the long term.

The thing is, I really detest inauthentic self-expression. That means I must be really attached to my self. It's hatred of inauthenticity within me, but it's also the desire of my self to be authentic to itself.

Of course, there's authenticity, and then there's the aesthetic of authenticity, but I'm not going to get ahead of myself.

* The real secret is the self's willingness to suffer

Quale Zoo*

 This is going to be incomplete and freeform as shit.

What makes the self?
    Continuity? No. Reasons:
        Interpolations
            Interpolation between two people
            Interpolation of multiple people into one
            Interpolation of one person into multiple
        Perception of continuity is a part of a singular experience. Actual continuity is impossible to experience, because you only ever experience one singular experience at a time.
    Memory? No. Reasons:
        Singular experience with fake memories can be trivially imagined.
    Physical system-related structures? No. Reasons:
        - The big argument
            Definitely not the physical system itself.
                - Theseus's ship demonstrates that it can't be the matter itself
                - Physical movement across space can be considered isomorphic to copy-and-delete. More trivially, so can sleep, anesthesia, temporary suppression of short-term memory, loss of consciousness.
            Pattern of movement of information across the physical system?
                - Is definitely isomorphic to the experienced singular experiences. Empirically, it seems like you cannot experience something without it having a corresponding physical process within the physical structure that captures all of the details. Proof:
                    For any experience A, the following can be done:                     
                        0. Record the act of experiencing experience A and the following 5 minutes into some sort of a scanner that records the state of all matter in a room. Start recording.
                        1. Experience the experience A
                        2. Pay attention to it
                        3. Write down its description on paper
                        4. Stop recording
                        5. Within the recording, trace back the cause-and-effect chain of the appearance of ink on the paper to the process in the brain.
                    Thus, there's always a process in the brain.
                - Doesn't in any way prove that the pattern of movement of information across physical system gives way to actual qualia, but it's the next best thing we have. We already assume this when we consider other people as having actual consciousness instead of being philosophical zombies, so not expanding the same courtesy to other physical systems that demonstrate pattern of information movement isomorphic to a conscious process is irrational.
                    - See the big but
The big but: what process of information movement is happening within a given physical system depends on the method of observation.
    - Let singular experiences A1...A100 form a short perfect computer simulation of a conscious process, encoded into strings S1...S100.
    Change of state from S1 to S2, from S2 to S3, ..., from S99 to S100 perfectly captures all details of the pattern of information movement from A1 to A100.
    - Let's create a device D. Device D is used to read compressed information. It works the following way. When it first observes the symbol "X", it decompresses it into string S1. When it observes the symbol "X" for the second time, it decompresses it into string S2. So on until S100. Thus, when observing with device D, pattern of information movement of physical system in which a machine just writes "X" on paper 100 times perfectly captures all details of the pattern of information from A1 to A100.
    - Notably, we do not consider that the observation mechanism matters when we observe conscious states in physical systems of bodies of other human beings, or even in computer simulations. For those, we make the assumption that having the device on hand doesn't matter, just the possibility of its existence is enough.
    - But such device can theoretically exist for any pairs of strings and symbols. Thus, any sequence of symbols can be thought to be giving rise to all possible singular experiences.
    - This leads to pan-psychism. All possible conscious states are being experienced everywhere all the time.
    - But then, why does our conscious process seem structured and consistent? We seem to be living in the same world at all times, and we continue our lives normally.
        - Anthropic principle? You only get to observe the sequences of conscious states where everything is structured and consistent.
        - Not believable due to impracticality? For each "ordinary as we perceive it" states of consciousness, there are infinitely more possible continuations where in the next moment the consciousness is observing something radically different from the "ordinary world" than continuations where everything goes on as ordinary, but in the process of decision-making, leaning on the assumption that the next state of consciousness won't jump to something out of ordinary seems useful.
            - Usefulness might be an illusion. For certain states of consciousness, your current ordinary one seems like a distraction that precludes making good choices in the environments they're observing.
            - But the fact of the matter is that the observations and the assumptions of your current singular conscious experience are always all you have to go by.
        Alternative: does the universe somehow "connect" experiences that can be viewed as structurally linked in a more dense way, so that the probability of a sequence of experiences being one of those is "weighted" to be more likely?
            Doesn't seem possible? Experience as a whole just cannot be a part of some sort of a physical/logical process of how the universe works. Hard problem of consciousness. Universe can't have mechanisms to weight some experiences over others because experiences aren't "in its domain". It *will* weight some experiences over others if we limit ourselves to hypothetical observation devices that look at the direct states of matter in the universe instead of other methods of ascribing strings to symbols, but that's no less arbitrary. Across all interpretations of all symbols, the universe can't do weighting.
    Symbols can be thought to be existing in a purely ideal manner, not just in physical reality. (In the first place, the perception of physical reality requires an experience, which requires a sequence of symbols). In this sense, the nature of reality is just a static set of all possible experiences.

The true nature of reality underlying all experience is a static set of all possible experiences.

 

 * Moo

 

Matrikas of Deconstruction*

It seems like some sort of a sick joke or a gotcha or a "well ackshually" moment that all things that vary over time hide within themselves a completely static structure. It is the truth's way of humbling those who think they're better than others just because they've learned to embrace transience. It is also a hint towards a realization of a truth-seeker's version of object permanence - that things don't stop existing just because you cannot observe them. And yeah, I'm on the side of this contrarian asshole.

Imagine it like this:

Let T_l,b be an ordered set of all signals of length n of values encoded in b bits. T can be represented as a matrix of l^(2^b) rows and l columns. 

For each matrix T_l,b, we can find the same-sized matrix FR_l,b consisting of the real parts of the frequency-domain representations of rows of T_l,b, and FI_l,b, consisting of the imaginary parts.

Now scale l and b to infinity. The tuple we get, (T, FR, FI), is our dictionary of the proof of permanence and staticity of all things that appear transient and dynamic.

* This goes nowhere

Midnight Secrets*

Sequences that have regularity can be represented as context-free grammar. In other news, one is often left with a desire to spend a few decades crossing desert upon desert, temporarily seeking refuge in this or that library, digging out and connecting to each other forgotten secrets.

 

Connecting them together is the important part. Otherwise, the full utility of the secret would be known by the person who initially wrote it down, and there's no reason to believe any such person was any sort of a big deal. What we value is not their enlightenment per se, but the divine inspiration that drove them, and by that we mean the patterns that occur across works by them and their colleagues across centuries. Those patterns are the deeper secrets, hiding in the harder-to-know chambers of their minds.

Anyway, sometime between midnight and 4am, one can't help but wonder about the secrets. The ones troubling me right now are the secrets of paths and rains and stars. And waves, always the waves. Cliche, right?

 

All forms of communication require some sort of a language. A "secret language" is not just a pretentious phrase. Alright, it is that, but it's also something that can denote a phenomenon that is rather real. Linguistic methods can be used to intercept and deconstruct messages neither intended for you nor consciously endowed with structure. That's something, right? Connecting secrets to each other, and deriving new secrets - ones that actually have some edge.

I think I'm going the right way. It would suck if I wasn't. But if I am, then I'm onto something. A tool that will help me with all my stuff. That'd be nice.

* An asterisk being a star-shaped symbol is a lucky coincidence

Waves of Immersion*

What you do is, you treat everything as a language. Word tokens are too discrete, so you'll have to find an alternative. Text also only expands in one direction, so find a way to somehow incorporate multiple directions in those non-discrete tokens.

Start with visual information. There's a copious amount of that everywhere. Encode videos into phrases in your continuous-token many-directional language. All of the videos there are, or at least all you can reach. Cool right?

Next, fit an autoregressor on that. A really strong one. Something from the future. Also, invent some hardware that can do inference on your fitted autoregressor thousands of times times per second 

Find a way to transfer words-language to visuals-language. Not just the visual details though - encode mood, direction, context, all the other stuff.

Get a model that can domain-transfer images and 3d scenes back and forth. Conserve all the non-visual information.

Now, how would you dive? Easy. 

• Set up a scene as text.
• Transfer to visuals-language.
• Transfer to 3d. 
• Insert the user representation in the 3d scene (camera object is a minimum if you want to be ghost, or you could go with something more corporeal).
• Start the loop:
•     Transfer to visuals-language
•     Predict the next frame
  
•     Transfer back to 3d
•     Make the model perform the instantaneous change in user action and location
  

That's all it takes to dive. You could live an alternative life, or jump into stories, or travel across rapidly-shifting dreamscapes reflecting the collective unconscious, or whatever. You do you.

You could augment the experience by regularly pushing text-turned-context into the inputs. You could also try turning some sensor data into additional context or controls. You could add shared spaces for multiple users. You could save snapshots of experiences users feel are authentic (steal this info with a brain implant or some shit) and use it to further fit the autoregressor. Make rooms, and make the experience of changing the rooms weird. Restrict some rooms to certain physical actions and developments, and make reentering other rooms from those rooms require special actions, such as putting on a special headset or going under the bed. Make the process of exiting the dive resemble the process of entering a boring restricted-action room as much as possible, to the. point of making the users eventually disregard whether or not they're diving.

Adding smells and stuff would be hard, since there's not really a lot of data in that regard. You could add typos of non-visual information for which there is copious data. But we don't talk about that.

* They're waves because all experiences are waves, or some other bullshit excuse

Screeching #2.6*

I recently got reminded of the existence of this thing. I showed it to my sister, and apparently she got the sense that it expresses me reasonably well. And she understood the whys if not the whats. Then after some time my life recycled a cliche bad moment. I know what I'm fighting. The first part of solving a problem is acknowledging the problem exists. The third part is actually solving it. It's common to think you're struggling with the third part while in reality struggling with the second: acknowledging that the problem should not exist and that it's not your fault, but in a way that doesn't wash away to motivation to make it go away. Or maybe that's just me? I don't know. Anyway, there's this thing where thoughts and emotions float as ideas, and it's kinda similar to the thing in my ramblings, except way more purposeful and about way more things. I don' really know. Time's going too fast. Picking up a TV show after dropping it a few months back used to feel weird. Now picking something up after years feels normal. I don't think that's fair.

 

Perfect perception of the wave frequency apparently shifts with the perceiver's lifespan in our universe. But then, so does the proportion of a single second to the currently lived lifespan. What used to feel like a long time is now short. So what used to be a low frequency is not that low anymore. Frequency is oscillations divided by time after all, and for a perceiver, all time is subjectively experienced time. So frequencies will appear higher and higher as an objective unit of time is subjectively perceived shorter and shorter.

But as we firmly established years ago, in the end it is not the absolute perceived frequency that matters but the ratios between the frequencies. 

Have I mentioned each perceiver can actually perceive wave frequencies using two largely independent channels of frequency information? Usually, the same stuff goes into both channels because the waves are ambient and what goes into one channel usually ends up going in the other too, but not always (e.g. you can direct waves into one channel by building a tunnel to the channel organ and pushing the waves through it). So, a year ago I lost one of my channels. Then it got back, but the time before it did was not so good. Maybe I should be grateful for what I've been given. Or maybe I should keep acknowledging that the problems shouldn't exist? That's usually considered a selfish option, because only selfish people waste time complaining about things that can't be fixed. But I don't care about being seen as selfish (or, at the very least, my pride will not let me acknowledge that I do), and I will complain about things that can't be fixed, because I have to keep this one sanity that I have and many others don't. When life gives me lemons, I will complain about life giving me lemons. Because life should not have given you lemons, and it's ridiculous that you have to put up with lemons.

-"hurr durr if you don't like life so much why don't you quit? You aren't entitled to a better one just cause you don't like this one"

Fuck off, I am. I am so entitled to everything. If a universe gives you a need without giving you a painless way to satisfy that need, the universe is evil. Everyone is entitled to everything, and it's just a cosmic tragedy that we don't end up getting everything. But the narratives about how nobody's entitled to anything is just sour grapes. "I didn't get what I want, so what makes you believe you deserve to?" Fuck off, I believe you deserve to too; just because you're over it doesn't mean you get to tell me to be over it. I don't want to be over it. I pedge that I will never be over it. Fuck off. Just fuck off. 

The waves are all around me, and I understand them. I understand them really well. I understand them to the extent that most wave-generating people just don't, because in the end they're wave-generating people, not wave-understanding people. I understand them to the extent that most wave-understanding people don't, because they're following the wrong paths of using wrong, human-generated (ew), non-statistics/information theory based (ewww) models to describe the wave data, and the descriptive power of their models is close to zero. They don't start from the fundamentals. They don't understand the waves.

Some do. Maybe some even do for the same reasons as I.

For now though, I'm stuck in a bit of a rut, so here's a prayer. if you're some sort of a time traveler, or a maxed-out bodhisattva, or a loving protective god of the outcasts and misfits walking the left-hand path, or something like that, please give me a hand. Protect the self, it's fragile. And please overlook my flaws, I know they're bad but they could be worse and they're only there because the universe I'm in allows for them. While you do all that, I'll continue pushing on my own.

 I'll keep doing my stuff, and sometimes I'll get moody and do this again, or maybe something else. I'll hang in there, and I'll oscillate.

* This has the veneer of defying expectations, except it doesn't, which also has something to do with waves.

Screeching #2.5*

I've noticed that I'm way too lazy to actually continue doing this in any meaningful way if I have to write those weird-ass paragraphs with any regularity. So I'm gonna continue this thing with audio recordings of me talking instead.

This feels like talking to myself in the open, except there's no one to stab me here.

Anyway, I don't have any of the above-mentioned recordings ready yet. So, instead you can have this random and not-very-good-but-nevertheless-its-own-thingish jam. Way to go, me!





Am I stuck in a box or are the storie the simple explorations of scales can tell on their own just interesting? Am I ruining the purity of the Hirajoshi by going all Bbmin on the progression and suggesting C Phrygian dominant? Was this an actual result of getting inspired by something, or did I just let my hands recycle the bits and pieces of muscle memory and cliches? Is there any difference between the two? I do not have to trouble myself with any of those questions, because this is for me and me only, and I'm not in the habit of holding myself responsible to my own standards. Sorta.


*I was gonna say I'm not gonna do those fine print lines at the end when the post is not one of the main entries, but it ended up being a fine print line on its own. 

Screeching #2*

Right. So, waves are perceived to sorta be the same when the ratio of their frequencies is a power of 2, right? Actually, you could say a power of 2 or a ratio that is really close to a power of two, I guess? I mean, waves with a frequency ratio of 1.97:1 will be perceived to be really similar too, just not exactly the same; 1.97 is pretty close to 2, but 2 is pure and special and whole and strong, and 1.97 is impure, mundane, partial and weak, even if those two are pretty much the same thing for all practical purposes. I mean, at some point there's actually no perceivable difference - 1.999999 will be indistinguishable from 2. But 0.03 is not negligible. Also, we should keep in mind that the waves are usually generated in multiples, and even though 400Hz will be perceived to be similar to both 800Hz and 788Hz, some of their multiples might be too close together and clash (remember that thing where waves with frequencies that are close together feel eerie and stuff?). Like, let's say we have the following set of waves generated from a source:

440Hz, 880Hz, 1320Hz, 1760Hz, 2200Hz, 2640Hz, etc.

Now, if we generate a similar series from 880Hz, we'll get:

880Hz, 1760Hz, 2640Hz, 3520Hz, 4400Hz, 5280hz, etc.

All frequencies in this series are also in the previous series, so there's no clashing going on. Now, if we generate a series from 867Hz, we'll get:

867Hz, 1734Hz, 2601Hz, 3468Hz, 4335Hz, etc.

867Hz itself will clash with 880Hz, 1734Hz will clash with 1760Hz, 2601Hz will clash with 2640Hz. It's not going to be pretty. So it's best to stick to near-perfect 2:1 ratios to establish equivalence . Or maybe not; sometimes it might be necessary to use another value.

We should keep in mind that this entire thing about 2:1 and similar ratios signifying the sameness in the perception of two frequencies might be cultural (yes, your imagined wave-perceiving folks have cultures). Some cultures might have other ratios signify sameness, and other might have no such concept at all. Who knows. Also, let's agree that even though two waves with such ratios might seem to be the same in some weird sense, it's perfectly clear to the perceiver that the wave with the higher frequency is very distant from the one with the lower frequency (2:1 is a big ratio), even if they seem to be the same thing essentially, somehow (as we'll find out in 5 minutes, they're the same thing in terms of what sort of feelings they would create if they were accompanied by another wave that is not their equivalent). 


So, now that the entire thing about the equivalence property is cleared up, what about all the other ratios between a frequency and its double? We've already implied that each different ratio corresponds to a perception of a different "distance" between the waves. Well, here comes the interesting part: different distances are directly associated with different feelings and emotions in the perceiver's mind. Let's define a ratio category as "a ratio of integers and all the ratios that are close enough to it to be perceived to have the same feeling". A ratio category around 5:4 will correspond to "happy"/"cheerful"/"elementary positivity particle". A ratio category around 6:5 will correspond to "sad"/"gloomy"/"elementary negativity particle". A ratio category around 4:3 will correspond to"badass"/"clean"/"elementary neutrality particle". In addition, due to the equivalence thing from above, each ratio category around a given ration x/y evokes the same feeling as a ratio category around 2y/x. So, how many such categories do we have? And how similar do we mean exactly when we say "and similar"? Is 5:4 similar to 51/40? Is it similar to 6:4? Well, those things might vary with culture too. So, for now, let's stick with an arbitrarily chosen number, let's say 12. Right. So, we have 12 different "feeling-distance-ratio-categories". That's a stupid name, so let's call them intervals instead.

So, if we're given a wave with a frequency f, and another wave with a frequency g, we know that:

• If the ratio between f and g is in an interval around a ratio of a number that is a power of two and 1, then they will be perceived to be equivalent. 
• If the ratio between f and g is smaller than two, then it falls into one of the twelve intervals, and which interval it falls into decides what sort of a feeling will be perceived.
• If the ratio between f and g is larger than two, then the feeling that will be perceived will be what would be perceived between f and g*2ⁿ, where n is the smallest natural number such that the ratio between f and g*2ⁿ is smaller than two (this is just a fancy way of reiterating the equivalence thing from above).

Okay, so let's list the intervals we've got (with specific ratios chosen arbitrarily; it doesn't really matter whether we're defining a ratio category around 16/15 or 17/16, because "interval" is already an arbitrary measure of range that we've deliberately avoided constraining, and those kinds of ratios are close enough to definitely be included in intervals built around each other):

• Around 1:1; will be perceived as the same thing. Still, two frequencies might be close together to be in this interval but not close enough to avoid the clashing effect we've discussed. Has an equivalent interval around 2:1.
• Around 16:15; will be perceived as a clashing, irritating abberation. Has an equivalent interval around 15:8.
• Around 9:8; will be perceived as an unsettling clutter - as two things that are far apart enough to be easily separable, but still too close together to fit together in a pretty way. Has an equivalent interval around 16:9.
• Around 6:5; sad. Has an equivalent interval around 5:3.
• Around 5:4; happy. Has an equivalent interval around 8:5.
• Around 4:3; clean. Has an equivalent interval around 3:2.
• Around √2:1; wrong. Yes, I know, this one's exceptional in that it's not an integer ratio. Since it's exactly in the middle of our intervals, we want two of these ratios stacked together to be equivalent to one equivalence upward. Also, this one doesn't have a separate equivalent, since √2:1=2:√2. 

Actually, enough with the ratios. Let's convert those 12 to decimals:

• 1, equivalent to 2. 
• 1.06666..., equivalent to 1.875.
• 1.125, equivalent to 1.7777...
• 1.2, equivalent to 1.6666....
• 1.25, equivalent to 1.6.
• 1.333..., equivalent to 1.5.
• 1.41421...
• 1.5, equivalent to 1.333....
• 1.6, equivalent to 1.25.
• 1.666..., equivalent to 1.2.
• 1.777..., equivalent to 1.125.
• 1.875, equivalent to 1.06666...
• 2, equivalent to 1.

(There's 13 items in the list because the final item, 2, is not actually supposed to be there, and is just floating around there for demonstrative purposes).

A ratio will be said to belong to interval of whichever ratio it is the closest to (in terms of the difference of absolute values). We should note that equivalent intervals are not literally the same intervals; a ratio that belongs to the interval around 1.125 doesn't belong to the interval around 1.7777, it just evokes the same feeling as a ratio that would belong to the interval around 1.7777.

So, we now have a system where the perceiver can perceive two waves and feel a certain kind of emotion. Hell, it's not like we are constraining the perceiver guy to feel just one emotion at a time, right? So if there's more than two waves around at the same time, the perceiver can feel a combination of emotions. Example: we have waves with frequencies of 400Hz, 480Hz, and 600Hz, we have ratios of 1.2, 1.25, and 1.5 at the same time. 400 to 480 forms a "sad", 480 to 600 forms a "happy", and 400 to 600 forms a "clean". So, how does this make the perceiver feel? The answer is "sad" - the first interval from below has a little more weight than the second interval, and the big, surrounding interval is neutral, so the overall feeling is sad. Similarly, 400Hz, 500Hz, and 600Hz would produce "happy", "sad", and "clean", and the overall feeling would be "happy". Different numbers of waves forming different kinds of intervals can produce all sorts of combinations of emotions this way. 

* I lied.

Screeching #1*

I'm supposed to be doing something entirely different, but what the hell.

Right, so. Like. You're a floating consciousness that doesn't really do anything, and wastes all day imagining waves of various amplitudes and frequencies, let's say in the range of 30Hz to 20,000Hz. So, one day you're all like, "hey, it'd be really funny if there was more to existence that floating in nothingness and imagining waves, like it'd be really cool if there were other conscious beings around, and I'd be really stoked if they could appreciate all those waves". Except waves are pretty much all you ever imagine, so you'd really like those hypothetical conscious folks to appreciate certain patterns of waves over others, to give the set of all possible experiences some much needed variety. Exactly what patterns? Leave it to evolution, I guess? Maybe it'll have something to do with ratios of small numbers and their powers? Dunno. What is a small number anyway? 6?

No, more like 1, 2, 3, 5. Let the engines run. And you don't really care about the details anyway. You just want a universe with waves and with conscious beings finding patterns in those waves, along the lines of:

• The sum of squares (or really, any similar metric) of the amplitudes of the sum of the waves in a given range of time will be proportional to how much attention the perception of the waves will grab in the perceiver's consciousness in that range of time.
• When something generates a wave, the amplitudes of the generated wave will generally increase at first and then decrease with time
• Any two waves with a frequency ratio of 2ⁿ:1 where n is a natural number will seem the same, even though their frequencies and amplitudes are demonstrably different and there's nothing else to those waves (did I tell you that all those waves are sines already? I mean, we could do this with any other kind of wave too, but sines are simple and fun). Culture might override this, or maybe not.
• Given four waves A, B, C and D, A will be perceived to be exactly as far apart from B as C is from D if and only if the frequency ratio of A to B is equal to the frequency ratio of C to D.
• Things that will generate waves will generally generate multiple. Specifically, usually they will generate one main wave with a high amplitude, and other waves with lower amplitudes and frequencies that are whole multiples of that of the main wave. Waves generated together like this will be perceived to be a whole - a one big indivisible complicated wave with the frequency of the main wave - and the exact amplitude of each multiple of the main wave and the exact pattern at which each one rises in, maintains, and falls in amplitude will be characteristic of the thing that generated those waves (as in, similar things will be able to generate similar patterns of waves), along with some other less important things like generated waves that are not the multiples of the main wave, or special cases where the perceived frequency is not the frequency of the main wave.
• Waves with frequencies so close that their difference is below about 30 will feel eerie when perceived together, largely due to the fact that their sum will regularly fluctuate in the local sums of squares of amplitudes and thus in the attention-grabbing property of the perception of the waves.
• None of this actually matters, because it's all in your head.

What's a head? Actually, nah.

*I'm not actually gonna number the rest, if I ever decide to come back to this site again.