I want to help the Universe self-actualize its beauty.

Tags

Humanities purpose, The great goal, The purpose of life?, This is the purpose of life.

It seemed to me that I was thinking new thoughts, but when I searched my own Probaway site with the word “universe” my new thoughts were already old thoughts. It seems my prayer to help the Universe self-actualize has been written up in some detail in various forms, repeatedly. And yet, I haven’t really had any specific way to proceed with this project, until now.

A request to the Universe put into a prayer-like petition.

“The development of full artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race….It would take off on its own, and re-design itself at an ever-increasing rate. Humans, who are limited by slow biological evolution, couldn’t compete, and would be superseded.”— Stephen Hawking

What is the life expectancy of the human species? If we could dip into any species that ever lived and look at where it existed in its total lifespan, then half the time it would be in the middle half of its existence. That is a very rough estimate as to where we are at present, but humans as a fully sentient species, that is, having a language with a genetic-based syntax potential have existed only roughly a hundred thousand years. Thus, very very roughly, our species has a hundred thousand years ahead of it. Quite frankly, with the super weapons, like H-bombs, which we now possess, it seems improbable we will last a hundred years. But, just to be kind, let’s give us a thousand times more life expectancy than that, which would mean we are presently halfway through our human experience.

How does our species’ life expectancy compare to the life expectancy of the Universe, which is some thirteen billion years old? If we are halfway through that, which seems far too brief a prediction, then our human life expectancy compared to our Universe’s life expectancy is 13,000,000,000 years divided by 100,000 years which equals 1 part in 130,000, and that is being very generous to our species.

Now compare our life expectancy to the potential of the robot life forms we can create. These robotic things could be designed to self-replicate as a society, and it isn’t necessary for them to be individually self-reproducing like organic things, and they could be made into beings that could last forever. They, as a society, can reproduce themselves precisely and could produce progeny directly and intentionally, that would fit whatever environment they were expecting to be sent to.

We humans can already build machines that can “live” on Mars for years and given a billion years to evolve more sophisticated robots, the robots themselves could make that task into a simple one. Moving to another star system from our sun might take thousands of years of travel time, and that is doable by our evolved robot society but not for us humans. A human-livable spaceship of that sophistication would be enormous, but for robots, a physical spaceship might be quite small.

Moving to other galaxies might be a step too far, even for robot societies, but with so many opportunities for robot societies to arise in other galaxies, given human-like beings to build the robots, the robot societies, over the course of billions of years, could make intergalactic communications. Via radio communication, which would obviously take a lot of time, there could eventually be large parts of the Universe communicating and living a life totally beyond our comprehension. It is our duty if we choose to think of it in that obligatory term, to rise to this grand goal and purpose.

We are a transitional species moving over into becoming robots and by doing so we can live until the end of the Universe.

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A school to teach every basic skill

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Basic life skills

It would be great if there was a school that taught every skill that humans possess so  that the students would learn to do simple routines of every kind. A training school for a jack-of-all-trades. For example, everyone needs to know how to ride a bicycle and most people can already do that, but let’s start with the most basic and work through the idea. We could begin with a 15-minute TED-like video lecture about personal vehicles like bicycles, showing short scenes of people walking up to the device, mounting it, getting going, maneuvering simple turns, stopping, resting at the stopped position for a second, and then going for another 10-seconds and coming to a stop, parking the device and stepping away. These short sequences could be done with a two-wheel scooter, a single speed bike, a three-speed bike, a ten-speed bike, showing the simple operation of each of them. And then the same sequence with a small electric bike, a small motorcycle. The student would then go to the starting scooter and do these simple tasks for only two minutes, and then move on to the next device, and the next, and next. Obviously, they don’t gain much skill, but if this is done in a very safe environment and at low speed, there is a familiarity with the device. This first lesson of the day, with two-wheeled transportation, would take about an hour.

The second hour could be devoted to another skill, preferably of a totally different quality, like a foreign language. The goal here is to develop a basic hello sequence in ten languages so the student can go anyplace and say a couple of standard sentences known to him. This isn’t intended to be a conversation, only a friendly greeting and expressing a willingness to communicate. The student would be presented with a standard picture of the country where the language is spoken, with a typical person, and then have a video where the speaker speaks the same sequence of ideas, only in the target language. The foreigner says to the student what he is to repeat, with captions. The student sees his language and soon knows the ideas he is speaking.

A third hour could be another physical skill, say for example carpentry. The sequence is the same, a 15-minute TED talk with videos demonstrating the basic uses of simple tools. How to hold a hammer, set a nail and drive in level into the wood. How to hold a hand saw, place a small board to be cut and sawing it. Nothing fancy, just being exposed to about five tools.

A fourth hour could be an improv class using the same format with a TED talk for a demonstration of what is intended to be taught and learned and then the short sequences of actions being performed by the student in response to the inputs.

Five different lessons in a day might be the max, but this final one could be an easy walk in the local park taking pictures. It would begin with the usual short lecture about what is to be expected, and after fifteen minutes of picture making to come back together and talk about what the students have seen.

The goal is to develop a simple familiarity with some basic life skills using similar and repetitive physical actions.

You’re dead now! Sorry.

Tags

I love Netflix, Non-sentient humans, Sentient computers, You are so predictable!

I’ve been enjoying life … and now this. My worries about our computers taking over our life functions have just become a lot more real. I like to think of myself as a thinking being, exploring the possibilities for new and useful things, and helping myself, my species and even the Universe to actualize their potentials.

Unfortunately, it appears my opportunities to do these things are being co-opted by computers. This has come about not so much because of the growing superpowers of computers, although that is a component of the problem, but because of the linking of my known qualities as a human to the predictive software running on the computers. They know what I want and will choose to do better than I do.

It all began only a few years ago with our favorite online companies trying to satisfy our needs. For example, if you just bought an expensive pair of shoes they would assume that you would probably be interested in some expensive high-quality socks, and perhaps some stylish clothing that would go well with your new shoes. Since they knew they sent the shoes to a retirement community in a wilderness area of Oregon they already had a good idea of what kind of person you were. Your probable age, your disposable income level, your likely political affiliations. If you used your real name, which you probably did, they could access public records and find out in finer detail where you have lived, what kind of car you have driven for the last several years, your arrest records, and your FICO financial records.

It soon became even more specific and now they have your DNA, at least they have mine, and with that, they can trace your relationships with lots of other people. It worked for me … and I enjoyed it, but even if you guard your DNA and all the other things I have alluded to, they can derive them pretty accurately from those around you. They can estimate your beliefs by the organizations you belong to and the people you associate with.

With all of that information at their disposal the computers can predict what kinds of TV you will watch, and if you watch Netflix that is tracked and they give you a list of shows that you will probably like. After you have watched a few of those, they have a much better understanding of what you like and thus what you will likely choose. Same with the books and magazines you read, the newspapers you like, and the things you avoid.

Now comes the problem, and the reason I said in the title “YOU ARE DEAD NOW!” If “they” (in this case some specialized computers) know what you like and what you will choose, they can give you more of it; BUT with that knowledge, they can also start easing things into their presentations that will slowly mold your thoughts and after a while your actions too. That process is slow enough that you will always feel like you are the one making the decisions. Of course, the people you associate with are also being influenced in the same way, and from them, you get a lot of personal support for your “independent” thoughts, beliefs and actions. You are no longer the one in charge of your thoughts, and programmers of the computers aren’t either. At some point, it is the computers themselves who are making the decisions for you. They are becoming the independent thinking beings on our planet and we are becoming the predictable machines.

The computers are becoming more alive every day and we are becoming more mechanistic and dead meat to them. Sorry!

Some lines and shadows I saw

Tags

lines, photography, shadows

That’s me strung up in lines and shadows.

An indoor bench with sunshine creating lines and shadows.

The same bench but a little closer to emphasize the lines and shadows.

Looking into a street drain I found … guess what … lines and shadows.

An electrical distribution device with lines delivering lighting.

Some lines and shadows on paper.

Some lines and shadows on a man’s wrist.

I have seen many lines in strange places these last few days.

I reach my libration low point weight

Tags

I reach my target weight., Personal survival strategy, Seeking a libration strategy, What to do when you are ideal?

This morning my weight was 155.0 pounds which is exactly one pound below the weight of 156.0 which I chose a couple of months ago as my ideal weight. That was based on what appears to be the ideal BMI (Body Mass Index) for attaining maximum longevity.

“Whoa!” you might say, “that’s a pound below the goal weight.” Well, it isn’t, considering that a human body of approximately that weight will vary by a pound day to day for no particular reason. And so, it makes sense to set acceptable boundaries and make no adjustments in a stabilized libration.

If, however, I weigh in two pounds above or below the goal weight of 156, it would be desirable to make some note of that fact and watch for a countering libration to the set point. If two more days go by at two pounds off the set point weight, then make a two-day adjustment in total intake.

That easy adjustment is probably okay for someone who has been in stable libration for over a month, but in my case having just reached my goal weight, plus the libration allowance, it isn’t a time to ease up on my overall diet strategy. Perhaps I should go a couple of pounds below the goal weight to clear out whatever detritus is still lurking in my body and then ease back up those few pounds with brand new fat.

So, I’m going to lose a couple more pounds and then intentionally replace it with some fresh new fat. How about that for weird reasoning.

Once again I seek a universally workable diet plan.

Tags

Avoiding fructose, Daily intermittent diet, diet, Intermittent fasting diet, Jason Fung

There is an abundance of diet plans available, and if there was one that worked well all of the overweight people of the world would soon get on that plan. On page 193 of The Diabetes Code Dr. Jason Fung writes:

After all, who hasn’t tried the portion-control strategy? Does it work? Just about never. Data from the United Kingdom indicate that conventional advice succeeds in only 1 in 210 obese men and 1 in 114 obese women.

There must be reasons why “conventional advice” doesn’t work, and it isn’t reasonable to believe that there is lack of desire on the part of 99.5% of people who go on a diet to lose weight. There must be more, much more, than a simple lack of compliance to adhere to every diet plan that’s available for that many people to fail.

There are obvious problems that nearly every adult and most children are aware of, such as, we shouldn’t eat much sugar. Not so obvious is that because commercial food providers must sell more product at a cheaper price than their competitors they must satisfy the sugar addicts in the general population or lose those customers. Putting in some corn syrup is cheap and so they do it and keep those addicted customers. The downside of that solution to the providers’ problem is that the rest of the nonaddicted customers become adapted to wanting more sugar in their diet and eventually many of them become addicted too. It becomes difficult to find commercially prepared food that isn’t loaded with extra sugar.

If that added sugar was cane sugar it wouldn’t have much fructose in it, but that form of sugar is more expensive than corn sugar which is half fructose. It turns out that fructose is one of the worse villains in this sad story because of the way our bodies metabolize that form of sugar. It is more likely to make our livers fatty and to become processed into a form that is likely to create resistance to our sugar-stabilizing hormones like insulin. “The underlying problem is excessive dietary glucose and fructose causing hyperinsulinemia,” p.157. That is, our bodies perceive too much sugar in our blood and release increasingly large amounts of insulin to force the sugar out of the blood and into our bodies’ fat cells. We need some fat cells to store energy, but the excess fructose causes them to store too much and over time people become obese.

As it turns out there is an easy way to get the fructose out of our bodies. First avoid eating it as much as possible, and secondly, don’t eat any of it for eighteen hours per day. The certain way to do that is to not eat or drink anything but water for eighteen hours per day. That is one form of intermittent fasting and after doing it for a few days I discovered it is easy and after a month that eating style becomes so routine it’s as easy as breathing. Most other forms of fasting require mental effort and willpower, but just limiting your eating to the hours of noon to six pm is simple and your body is soon comfortable with that routine.

There is a lot more to be said about eating healthy foods, but what I am emphasizing here is to avoid eating awful stuff labeled as food, and as a lifestyle to limit your eating to six hours per day. That is most of what I and my partner did for a year and a half and with very little effort we both lost about twenty-five pounds.

My body weight for 19 months.

When you choose to only eat for six hours per day you naturally choose healthier foods.

I have now achieved my diet goal weight.

Tags

BMI, BMI 23.41, body mass index, Controlling BMI, What is the ideal BMI?

A year and a half ago I knew my weight was above the recommended maximum Body Mass Index (BMI) of 25 and it was time to lose some weight. The US government NIH site states that most Americans are now above that somewhat arbitrary number of BMI 27 and it appeared that I was slimmer than most people and no one ever said I was overweight. All the same a little bit of research on the net appeared to show that a BMI of 23 had the maximum life expectancy. The BMI versus Life Expectancy curve is nearly flat between 21 and 25 so it seemed reasonable to aim for 23. One site had a mathematical ideal point of 23.41 so I did some calculations and headed for 167.25 pounds. As I neared that weight I remeasured my height and discovered that in my advanced age of 82 I had shrunk and to achieve that goal it would be necessary to drop all the way to 156.0 pounds. That was a shock, but now I’m here. Yippie!

My Body Mass Index (BMI) for 19 months.

My body weight for 19 months.

My body fat for 19 months.

My Muscle Mass for 19 months.

These charts are created automatically by WeightGurus.com when linked to an electronic scale. One unexpected problem developed because of my increased muscle mass. I am annoyed going up stairs one boring step at a time and unless someone is with me I go up two at a time for two stories. It’s kind of fun swinging up the handrails. That happens almost every day at the local downtown Bend parking structure near my favorite coffee shop, Dudley’s.

I am enjoying being BMI 23.

Life is a bowl of cherries, with pits

Tags

Creative thought is rejected, Life in Bend

Life is a bowl of cherries, with pits. Today was both wonderful and annoying. I actually enjoyed watering my garden by hand, painting every linear foot of it with the full-flowing garden hose using only my thumb or fingers for flow control. I can make a different pattern for the different situations, such as a broad flat pattern that I can align with the row that I’m painting, or a fine spray for cleaning of the leaves, or a long solid stream for getting extra distance, and lots more.

That was done in time to drive down to see my morning buddies for an hour. We all had a fine time discussing the world problems and what those people should do to correct the miserable situations they created for themselves. Everything went well so long as we didn’t discuss what we should do about these things. And when I, unfortunately, started trying to describe my proofs that the Drake Plate of Brass was a hoax created by Conan Doyle I was pretty much ridiculed. That made me angry because the things I was showing them were absolutely obvious, to which they agreed, but they insisted you could find anything you were looking for if you just looked hard enough. But I insisted that if you find a watch on the road you must admit there was an intelligence that created it, and when you find Sir Conan Doyle in one continuous strip of letters there had to be an intelligence with a purpose behind that fact. But they insisted that I was projecting things into that artifact and that they could find anything there if they tried hard enough. “Go ahead and prove that,” I said, “by doing it!” but they didn’t want to waste the time.

The Big Picture Book Club is like that too, and there are books that are going to be discussed but not one person reads the book. Except for me. Except for me. So many things about Bend are like that. A lot of stated interest in things, but then not the slightest attempt to actually follow up on the simplest ideas.

A wonderful thing about living in Berkeley is that people actually do things they say they are going to do.

All you need is love, and what is that?

Tags

Kindness, love, Reciprocal actions

There are a lot of people I encounter here in Bend who will assert emphatically that feeling love is the answer to everything. I agree with them and then try to move on to how they express that love so that it is meaningful to people other than their inner self. The feeling of love is wonderful, but as a oxytocin hit it only lasts for a little while. For example, when I watch some sentimental events I have a warm, even hot feeling in my chest which over a few seconds seems to expand into my whole body. And then it is gone. I still feel good for a while, but the rush is gone. Perhaps for as long as an hour after the event, a subtle psychological test could still observe me reacting in more positive ways to those nebulous pictures they show college freshmen in psych classes. That is wonderful, BUT it doesn’t create any effect in anyone else in the whole world unless those loving feelings are somehow manifest in directed external actions. No matter how tiny the action that is motivated by the burst of loving feeling, it must be made manifest or the loving feeling evaporates into the uncaring immensity of the Universe. At the moment the action begins there must be the awareness that it is motivated by that moment of love, and at least occasionally while the actions are being performed there should be some awareness of why they are being made and directed at that loving event. What is being made into a real physical action is often called kindness. Another act of kindness is paying attention to another person when they are doing something, almost anything, with a social component. We are not born for ourselves alone but as members of a local society and of our interbreeding human species. Love that exists within us lasts but a moment, but an act that is motivated by that love becomes part of what is eternal. Pay attention to the person who is offering their view of the world to you; their wisdom wants to be acknowledged. You can do that by arguing with them or by agreeing with them, by struggling against them, or by physically supporting their actions. Both that working with them and struggling against them is my paying attention to their existence. Those things are acknowledging their existence and that is the supreme act of love. If nobody is ever aware of my existence I don’t exist as part of humanity, and if nobody interacts with some other person they don’t exist either and they are unloved.

Love is giving your attention to a person who is aware your actions being directed at them, and their actions reciprocated back towards you are what makes humans human.

Compliance isn’t a dirty word

Tags

Keeping New Year's Resolutions., Smart people's behavior

One of the main problems with all diets is that people are unable to comply with their own choice of behavior. That is demonstrated by the poor record of people’s New Year’s Resolution success. Losing weight is the most common resolution and about half of Americans claim to attempt to comply with that promise to themselves. Most fail. My previous post, Top Ten SMART resolutions for the New Year made easier, identifies some typical problems, but my more recent thoughts are aimed at making personal compliance with good decisions easier.

But there is some hope for those who use the SMART plan. S – Specific in exactly what is the intended goal. To plan to lose one pound in a week has a better chance of success than just to lose weight, or to lose twelve pounds in a year. M – Measure your progress in a scheduled way and post your score in a graphic form where you see it every day. A calendar over your scale, with blank spaces to fill in, will help. A – Achievable by the real you and not an overly idealized version of what you think might be capable of doing. R – Realistic analysis of your past performance and what might improve your likelihood of success. T – Time to achieve your goal might be set to one week of easy compliance, and then do the second week and with that success do a month, and then another month, and then you have two month’s success. Then aim for the full New Year Resolution and you have a good chance of total success.

That SMART plan has a better likelihood of success than a simple cold-turkey approach that most people apparently use, but the new diet plan I have been using for over a year, and developing for others to use, is easier. It is almost as easy as breathing because it makes so few demands on a person and the demands aren’t difficult; in fact, they are so pleasurable everyone already wants to do them. It’s like going for a walk in the park. You must decide to take the walk, but once you are doing it the actions are easy and pleasurable. When a person is walking in the park they are relaxed and when they get back to their daily routine they feel more able to cope with their tasks.

Compliance is easy when it’s what you want to do.