Wednesday, 27 March 2024 ------------------------ Hello. All is well. I seem to be recovering from what I think was a cold. I was afraid it was a flu as I had quite the headache with some nauseousness and fever for most of the day. I haven't really experienced that in the last 5 years or so apart from experimenting with alcohol. Today I only feel mildly weakened, best to rest for now regardless. One of the most practical benefits I've received from meditating, is being able to get rid of pain while in a meditative state for several hours. For me, it requires absolute no distractions from outside such as noise. When I'm in a lot of distress, I find laying on my back the most effective. I don't think you have to get caught up in the most correct position for mindful activities, it really depends on what the purpose is. Walking in a straight line by the ocean in complete darkness works very well for me when I just want to enjoy the present moment, being nothing. Continuing with chapter three, René Descartes, the rationalist, started with his own existence as a truth. Then I think he went a bit astray with his ideas of innate stuff from a perfect god. I started learning math. I'm currently on the level where we add apples together so bear with me, but I don't think math is the language of the universe or god. I think it models itself very close to reality, at least to the extent we can understand reality for now. We can all agree JavaScript is probably the language of the devil though. Moving on, John Locke, the empiricist, was more based. He took the route of observation and experience. I found "ideas of reflection" pretty interesting, sort of the abstract, intangible level of concepts in the brain and conceptual combination, we talked about when learning new emotion concepts. In the fourth chapter, we learn of people trying to analyze knowledge. Essentially, they keep running into issues with basing knowledge on beliefs, ending with that knowledge may come before belief. I think this makes sense. Belief is the brain making a prediction of knowledge. In all the examples the book makes, like broken clock or plastic muffins, this is the obvious reason for why knowledge does not come from belief. That's why I say knowledge cannot exist without a defined context. In math, we can easily make equations like 1 + 1 = 2. In the real world, using our senses, our brain has to predict knowledge from the experience it has. Obviously in the broadest context of reality, our brain cannot predict correctly with absolute certainty. That's why geniuses do very well within more defined contexts such as mathematics, chess, computer science, or physics. Here they can put their superior prediction engine to good use. Funny, I started reading chapter five, and the book says you can't remember when you learned the fact that mount everest is the tallest mountain unless it happened during a significant event like an earthquake. Obviously this is true in general, but I think I might remember (keeping in mind memories are highly deceptive). It was in Fageredsskolan (~late preschool, 16-18 years ago) in the dining hall (we used it as a classroom sometimes), and the teacher, Börje, mentioned the height of it was approximately the distance between Fagared and Ullared (Sweden). In chapter five, they talk about internalism and externalism, two ways of understanding what knowledge is. From what I understood, internalism is the idea that knowledge should be derived from sound reasoning / beliefs (existing internally by reflection), and externalism is the idea that it only matters how accurate the knowledge is regardless of how it's derived (internal reasoning or external facts). I fail to see why it matters which one is the correct or why make a distinction like this. I think everyone would agree that deriving knowledge from sound reasoning / beliefs is the ideal. The issue is that dependent on the context, it becomes impractical or impossible. I think we have to accept that as humans, with the latest understanding in neuroscience, we're built to derive knowledge in the fashion of externalism. If we want knowledge from sound reasoning, we must use computers, and understand the limits of what knowledge is computable this way. They're both valid, it just depends on which constraints we're working with and our purpose, basically it depends on the context, hehe. The book mentions the idea of the two systems, thinking fast or slow. I want to look more into that, but I think we have to understand that it is a simplified model of thinking. My assumption is that both systems are inherently prediction based, though the latter is more computational heavy in someway to check our predictions more thoroughly, but our conscious effort is still what we call a rationalization stemming from unconscious predictions. This becomes clear when you consider how affective feelings cloud this effort significantly, while we can be fully unaware of it. The more experience you have, the better or more accurate your rationalization can probably become but better is relative to the context, as in the complexity of it. I'm not very familiar with machine learning and large language models, but it seems like even with computers, we are going to the way of externalism to derive knowledge because reality is just so darn complex. For myself, I find this interesting because I have a feeling that my ability to derive knowledge is broken at some level (can be something else making it seem so in practice), requiring me to supplement with more conscious effort to make sense. This makes me very inefficient but allows me to see reality more broadly in a sense, sometimes revealing something useful but most of the time, it's just noise. Yes, I'm hinting at autism spectrum, but I haven't been diagnosed, nor do I really want to use that word because I don't think we fully understand what we associate with that word. I only use ADHD label because it's required legally to receive medication I find useful and some explanation purposes I dare to use lightly. It's a delicate matter, I empathize with people that have struggles from some form of neurodivergence (understanding also there are different levels of debilitation it can have, that my experience is not the only one), but I find the potential for labeling oneself as a victim with it harmful for oneself. If you want a life worth living then you have to be as practical as you can with the support afforded to you. That's been my experience at least, seeing myself as a victim only lead to more suffering. I would dare to say I'm more happy and fortunate than most people alive today. People that fit easier in society, being more neurotypical or whatever you want to call it, have loads of struggles today because of the issues with society, and in the past too really.