math

math

Thursday 28 January 2016

The Noman

In this thought experiment we consider a 'Noman'. We must place the experiment far, far into the future where technology has advanced exponentially. The Noman is a human that has been born in an artificial womb. It carries genetic information from it's donor egg and sperm cells. At the point where it is ready to exit the womb, the Noman is contained inside a perfectly cuboid room, with blank white walls. There is literally nothing to see in this room apart from the white walls. The Noman is fed and kept healthy by 'nutritional air' circulated through the room. (We are in the future...anything is possible) That's about it for the set-up.  All the Noman has to interact with is his own body and a white room.
The interesting question is: How does he progress?

( Please comment any ideas. )

Monday 25 January 2016

Postulates of a No-Control Theory

I will start by hypothesising possible postulates for a theory that could describe, but quite importantly not predict, the actions/behaviours of human beings.
Some assumptions can be made;

  1. For a prenatal human at the time, T_0, which I define as the time that exists between its embryonic state and its birth in which the human is able to access information from the world via it's body. I'm no expert on human development or any biology in fact, but I assume there is a point where a human starts to take in information, even if it is not placed into memory, the body experiences sounds, movements etc. to which it can respond to accordingly. I will succinctly call this time T_0, the constructor time, the reason for this will become clear later.
  2. As a continuum of assumption (1), no information, apart from that of DNA, is passed to the prenatal human from an external source before the constructor time. I.e, no memories from another human being are passed on. Any information that can be stored in the prenatal's mind can only be from their experiences after the constructor time. As to my point about DNA, as the body develops, it will do so following the instructions from genetics, which is passed down from the parents. This genetic structure will provide the physical body for which includes the mind of that individual which will start to hold new information at the constructor time, which will depend on the genetic build of the body.
  3. I assume that our thoughts are wholly dependant on our mind at current time t. By mind I mean the result of t-T_0 units of time of acquiring information from the environment, which may be altered by algorithms developed using previous information. Since our intake of information is a continuous parameter so is the rate of change of the algorithms. Faced with a situation at time t, the thoughts we have are a direct result of the current algorithms in place.  
N.B. You may disagree with my use of the word algorithm whilst describing human thought processes. There is slight difference to a computer algorithm in that they are not continuously been updated. I speak of algorithms that are highly complex and could never be reproduced by computer code.

This has been a start to, hopefully, a future project involving PhD student Steph Acaster and a fellow student and close friend of mine Pasha Ab. The above are entirely initial 'ideas' that I came up with without researching the current science in the field. Obviously this will be done and could potentially change everything, please comment if you have any ideas on the very short list of assumptions above. 
MT out.

Wednesday 13 January 2016

The cheeky twitch.

I wrote my first post in a state of compelling confusion, not knowing where I was going...of course, we never do. I shall now explain the meaning of the title to my first post 'A cheeky twitch...'. Hemifacial spasm, that's it. I recently started experiencing hemifacial spasms in my right cheek. Google diagnosis suggest irritations to the fifth cranial nerve and tried to persuade me into unconditional botox injections. Further self-diagnosis resulted in high caffeine intake, which seems reasonable. I will continue to intake caffeine as the cheeky twitches are quite pleasant and send me into a trance involving second-order thoughts (thinking about thinking) and abnormal self awareness. If you are interested in gaining a cheeky twitch start off with a daily dose of 5 cups of coffee, after approximately 567 and a half days (+ or - 1 day) observable results should unveil.
MT out...

Tuesday 12 January 2016

A cheeky twitch.

What am I doing here? What am I doing say here in my comfy chair, that faces a crackling, open log fire, in my family house, in the village of Hook, on a planet we call Earth on this very day 12th January 2016? I've spent two decades wandering, uncontrollably in and around the vicinity of an area of land in the northern hemisphere. My wanders trajectory followed a path constructed by life itself. Life, as I know it, is been continuously submerged in a world. Constant pressure from an unpredictable environment forces us to evolve into a non-zero derivative of our former selves. After 20 years the result is me. The world has suppressed my brain with a mixture of terrible beauties. There is no 'I' in the sense that 'I' choose what person to become, it is chosen for me. I am a biological machine controlled by the Universe, but programmed to believe that I am actually in charge.