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Religion, consciousness, and continuity

Most religions can be seen as a social technology that enable cooperation, ultimately enabling a society to be able to better preserve and defend itself. First, we will analyze Christianity as a social technology that enables a more efficient economy. Second, we will make an association between deontological ethics and autonomic systems, and attempt to illustrate consequentialism as an awareness of autonomic functions. Third, we will attempt to create a comprehensive philosophy that contains both the deontological ethics of religious thinking and the consequentialism of scientific thinking, ultimately to present a modern social technology that could be a replacement for both types of thinking. Christianity is pushing forward the image of a new type of person: Jesus Christ. What are the characteristics of Jesus that sets him apart from the old image? It is the belief that the dominant organizing force of a society can be compassion instead of fear (and the ability to instill it). From t...
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Context, reconciliation, and performance

I believe the software industry needs a word to differentiate the design of performant software from the inside (or bottom up) versus the outside (or top down). There is a heavy focus on algorithms and data structures in the software engineering world, which is great if you are designing performant software from the inside out (bottom up). But this will only be performant so long as there is one monolithic structure. As soon as there are competing components (or silos of functionality) that need to integrate together, the integration of the components often becomes a performance bottleneck. And this phenomenon is unavoidable because there is a limit to any human's working memory. Large problems are broken down to smaller problems so that they can be more easily grappled with. But the choice of how things are isolated often can incur a performance gain or loss that is just as significant in magnitude as choosing the right data structures and algorithms. And it is this way because da...

Guitar improvisation from May 23, 2025

OPINION - On Cyc and EURISKO

The fundamental problem with symbolic AI is that logic is bounded. There is a shape to any corpus of logical expressions that can be programmatically generated via following a set of manipulation rules. And due to the rigid manner in which the corpus evolves, the corpus is bound by its initial position and the rules of manipulation. This is a problem when the corpus has to choose the direction in which it wants to evolve itself further, because the corpus itself is a product of following a set of rigid manipulation rules. Any heuristic rule that can be devised is often not self-referential, and even if it is, it has a limited scope of self-inspection. This is because the heuristic rule itself must be a product of the same mechanism which generated the corpus of logical expressions: the rules of manipulation. And unfortunately, the rules of manipulation are often atomic, often akin to the fundamental laws of logic (e.g. modus ponens). I think it is often hard for people to imagine the s...

OPINION - On the axiom of choice

I find it distasteful that non-mathematicians think that Gödel's work introduces a level of subjectivity to mathematics. I agree that one can construct an arbitrary number of mathematical universes via selecting an arbitrary set of axioms. But I disagree that they are somehow all equivalent in value or structural consistency. I personally believe that there is one mathematical universe (or category of universes that are structurally equivalent via something like an isomorphism) that has the most structural consistency and can give the human mind the most insight. I personally believe that there are axioms that are representations of structural properties of physical reality. And I believe that there is a set of axioms that aligns perfectly with the physical universe, and subsequently allows the human mind to comprehend its logic to the fullest extent. I believe this because the way that the human mind understands logic is already a consequence of physical reality. Our ability to un...

Video game engine design and an epistemological approach to world building

 

Symbolic Maps, Managed Feedback, and Deception

Any time there is displacement in a system, it causes pressure to build on another component in the system. When a drop of water falls in a pond, the ripples spread out causing more displacement. Eventually the ripples reach the boundary of the pond and the waves crash on some shore. If society were managed in a way where every ripple would play out its natural course, it would lead to a lot of friction and violence. Perhaps this is the best way, since every witness of violence leaves a lasting impression and is a reminder as to the heavy price of mismanagement. Perhaps it is not, and it could be more effective to preemptively make space for such displacement, and things move in harmony all at once or not at all. This would require dual structures, or perhaps more than dual, where a movement on one side is mirrored in the other, such that any displacement that would ultimately reach the other side is taken into account in a way that there are no crashing waves. I think people who try t...