A stoners take on life the universe and everything my forty second attempt to explain my self.”
First I studied all the “traditional” wisdom I could swallow, all of it that I had the means to study. I found it hard to find satisfaction and I proved to myself that reality is what it is regardless of my beliefs.
Which leads me to the serious philosophical question of whether we live in a matrix or not. I don’t believe the question is valid it assumes a duality that we are “Inside” the universe so there’s an “Outside” the universe, but what if there’s not. Like a goldfish in a bowl trying to understand what’s beyond its small world, except nothing exists beyond the bowl.
The closest analogy I can think of to the nature of the universe is the nature of consciousness itself. The water is muddy here too because we carry multitudes of assumptions and misconceptions mostly learned from other people but merged into this collection of opinions and emotions and experiences that we call our “Self”, and that is our Matrix.
I play with neutral network theory and design when I can giving me some insight into how biological neutral networks function. I’m keeping this as simple as I can but for my networks to learn requires training. I’ve written several OCR neural networks, simple single layer networks that can read smudged or faded text. The image pixel color values are the inputs to the neutral net, each connects to a neuron. The network is a value that connect two neurons together. There’s a connection between every neuron with every other neuron and one to itself, so if you have 9 neurons then there will be 81 connections. Those numbers in the connections become a memory bank and search engine. You train it by showing it the letters of the alphabet that are great examples of what that character looks like. To calculate the weight adjustment each learning cycle requires something called a back propagation algorithm. In biology a similar process does the same thing. In a sense the network can now look at a smudged or incomplete letter and produces a value that indicates a probability that it’s a certain letter. When it’s wrong to continue training you run the back propagation algorithm again which adjust all the connection values based on the magnitude of the error.
Such networks run in Watson the IBM AI that won Jeopardy.
Now we’re clever apes, we discovered neural networks and back propagation long ago, we call it school and in physical education and dance and such we call it practice.
We have endured “ideals” we can’t live up to through our entire lives. It’s why religion incessantly harps on divine perfection.
The best thing about biological neural networks is their plasticity. You can monitor your life without adding religious guilt or political bias into the mix. Which is also always a part of religious mythology a renunciation of self typically associated with an ordeal like fasting in the wilderness for 40 days or sitting under a tree for 40 days or attempting to explain self for the 42nd time. The point is of course to see reality by refusing to perceive your Matrix so you can learn to build a Matrix that is more honest and far less frustrating.
It’s that simple, and requires no ordeal.
Happy Thanksgiving
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13 comments
Feel free to reply to any comment by clicking the "Reply" button.A fish bowl? What?! No, no, no. We all live in a yellow submarine.
chalupacabre
Level 8
Nov 26, 2020
4
Thank you for the insight into your work.
Fernapple
Level 9
Nov 26, 2020
1
I do the AI stuff for fun, the work they pay me for is control technology with cloud access and statistical analysis for predictive maintenance. Mostly in the form of equipment performing their own self diagnostics. Airports are becoming semi sentient and self aware especially in ground support equipment and resource management and scheduling all being affected by maintenance down time.
My 400hz power converters occasionally blow out an IGBT, it's like a small bomb went off. We monitor the temperature, there's a predictive rise in temperature letting us know failure is imminent and when by the rise over time. This works 72% of the time, the rest are instantaneous failures. They are designed to be replaced as a module, but it still takes a few hours.
The airport can override the alarm shutdown in the unlikely event there's false alarms.
We have thousands of units in airports all over the world, thank goodness it happens only 2% of the time, but it's a huge liability since we warranty our equipment. So it's still a lot.
Love your indepth insight, with my limited understanding of some of the concepts you brought to the table, what I understood was that we are limited to seeing to what we have experinced and it can be difficult to see other wise, which is why doing really challenging mentally and physically taxing things can really help lift this cloud of experince and beliefs and permit us to recalibrate for a more optimal and more accurate perception of who we are and where we are8
Iamcelery
Level 3
Nov 26, 2020
2
I do get some of this. I'm not sure of a matrix however because it seems more likely to have come out of the movie and is just science fiction. Here's where the truth hits me. Just today a friend and I are discussing the universe. He asked me what I thought was on the other side. I asked him what he meant by other side. Since this guy is a Christian the "fishbowl" idea came into our talk and he says look at the universe as a fishbowl. What's on the other side? I told him I do not know and my believe is that an endless universe does not have to have fishbowls or other sides. There are no directions as we know them in the universe and it could just go on forever. There does not have to be an end. There may be continuous recycling going on but never an end.
The strange thing to me on this is that Christians invented the "fishbowl" to explain to us how their god is in another universe like being in another fishbowl. God can pop into our fishbowl and then back into his own fishbowl and we have no evidence of it. In this way they think they have protected their god from us. How would this be? How would such a preposterous thing even be known to anybody?
DenoPenno
Level 9
Nov 25, 2020
2
Exactly!
The universe can be infinite in what we experience as size.
I think the cosmic background radiation is the foot print of the energy from the rest of the cosmos beyond the wall of the observable universe where everything is traveling away faster than the speed of light because space is expanding faster there.
That wall is the wall of our goldfish bowl.
That edge is the nettle pointing to now.
Besides by relativity all that over the edge cosmos would be traveling backward in time which quantum tunnels that energy back into the big bang event. Whatever that quantum tunnel is, its the same as the stuff beyond the observable universe.
Yes look up quantum tunneling microscopes and see how they take pictures of atoms. Quantum space is a thing and we have a whole technology based on it.
I don't know if I know what matrix you're taking about. At first I thought you were taking about the theory that we're almost assuredly living in a simulation. The first time I heard it I didn't give it much thought and didn't really agree or disagree with it; it seemed like a corollary of the whole 'what if the universe is actually just a cell in the fingernail of a giant' argument. But when I actually listened to what it was theorizing, it made a tremendous amount of sense. Especially since by that point I had come to the realization that humans do not have free will.
ChestRockfield
Level 8
Nov 25, 2020
1
I don't want to type out my line of reasoning (I'm quite lazy when stoned) but there's good reason to believe that if there's no free will there can be no time travel, but it seems space unfurled due to a delta between cause and effect, it's the phonograph needle to sample a deeper math that we perceive as ourselves in this universe.
We are trapped in this phase delta between cause and effect or "now", inertia is mass with a difference between cause and effect, not to mention relativity doesn't allow for travelling backwards in time.
I suck at explaining this. I was studying the algorithm that compensates for the relativistic time difference between the ground and GPS satellites.
Curved space is so cool.
@Willow_Wisp I do know one thing. Time travel is possible and we are all on time machine Earth heading forward in time right now. I think this is the only direction we get though. 
This feels like a topic that would be great to talk more at length at. Or at least listen to more of what you do. The only computer programing I did was so long ago and clueless to the new languages. But I am fascinated , or would be fascinated by how you and others create these networks to 'learn'. Again I am coming from simple stuff like Basic and Fortran. LOL That shows you how old I am. But its amazing you can create something that does what our brain does to 'learn'.
GenkidesRich
Level 6
Nov 25, 2020
1
I do think there's an analogy to be made between consciousness and the universe. As for reality, I think we are all part of a program and each of us create a unique story. The program gives each character an identity so their universe is real to them but only for them. Only characters you have actually met actually exist as identifiable characters. There is a program creator who may, or may not, be part of a greater program playing its own game. String theory is accurate because every story creates a unique vibration, or universe, so we actually imagine ourselves into being.
rainmanjr
Level 8
Nov 25, 2020
4
Okay then IF that be the case where is the hard drive, the monitor, the power switch, the keyboard, apps, etc, etc.
Ironically I just heard Daniel Dennett published a book about how consciousness, AI and the cosmos are interrelated.
Can't wait to read it.
@Willow_Wisp Do a review for us.
Jeez Louise, what was the bloke who wrote that smoking?
Triphid
Level 9
Nov 25, 2020
3
It was a Canndescent "Create" 100% Whole Flower 1 Gram pre-roll. THC: 18.03%.
I plan to finish it after I eat.
If I understand what you are saying, I agree. I have been trying for most of the seventy years of my existence to discover what reality exists beyond our, I call them filters, and see what is really there. So far I have found much to show that a matrix, like in the movie, seems to be the best way to show where most people are. I do not know if I am making sense, time to go listen to Talking Heads.
dalefvictor
Level 8
Nov 25, 2020
1
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