Advice to men when it comes to wooing women.

Negotiation follows sales which follows marketing which follows product development.

A bloke has to have all these skills.

Oh, he also needs operations! Expectations must be met to avoid claims of false advertising.

Only in Australia can we expense our way to prosperity.

Everywhere else, they require investment.

We can defy gravity. Aren’t we great?

The herald again. There’s this odd habit of the fading north shore (and whatever the Melbourne equivalent is) white-bread petit bourgeoise.

When their elders die they clamor to get obituaries into the herald. No matter how obscure the dead folk.

I don’t know whether they, the living, pay for these adverturies or the income is simply amortised over accumulated subscription fees.

They are clearly not for our edification. A root cause analysis would suggest the motivation is an of mix of self-validation and self-esteem for the living.

The opinions of others…. yet again.

There’s not much point trying to deconstruct reality until we deconstruct the brain.

This because the organ we use to do the deconstruction may lead us astray.

Think of this as the same problem as an experiment where the method of observation actually modifies the result.

So. Brain first. Then we move onto reality.

My guess is that our brain is digital but not binary.

It’s probably based on ten states per operating unit or memory unit because we like that number so much.

For example, we choose ten as the  repeat unit, where we stick the zero onto the first number (one). There is no a priori reason why the repeat unit couldn’t have been after eight or eleven counts.

A Russian advertorial in the Sydney Morning Herald. I don’t understand.

And why would they lead with the Ukraine?

I really shouldn’t read the papers.

Our supposedly more intelligent micro broadsheet doesn’t bother labeling the x axis.

Even if not one of my hypotheses of the brain is correct, this is how I would construct artificial intelligence. It’s just so obvious.

Hypothesis on sleep…

I suspect that the thousands of gigs of RAM that make up the id’s flowchart are actually volatile memory.

That is, they need power (they aren’t  there after we die) and they have to be fully refreshed every night to prevent ‘errors’ building up.

Without the nightly refresh, after a few nights, we are screwed because we can’t even make simple instinctive decisions (e.g. lift that leg, pump that heart, etc).

Sleep…. Nightly refresh of volatile memory. All others processes of the id have to be shutdown while this if going on, hence sleep.

The super ego, however, plows ahead with its scenario making and efforts to discredit the id via dreams.

According to wiki the human brain has about 2500 Gigabytes of memory.

They are probably out by a factor of 100 -1000.

That’s a lot of memory but we have stuff stored in there from the start of life in this planet.

Our memory is full and the brain probably can’t increase in capacity at a rate commensurate with the ever growing complexity of our world.

Which I guess is what started the development of the super ego, to compensate.

Even so we still selectively replace memories in the flowchart of the id with new and more useful ones.

All my life ‘labile’ has meant a weak chemical bond.

Now the pop psychologists in my life use it to mean ‘prone to anger’.

Clearly my grip on the meaning of labile has been quite labile.

I have resigned myself to the fact that my Infinity seat isn’t going to turn up.

I think I will call Kickstarter the micro-loss site.

Dreams are an attempt by the super ego to discredit the id in the eyes of the ego.

Basically the super ego and id are in competition for the same action; control of the host.

Which is to say the smart thing is to ignore your dreams. They aren’t a secret message of truth, just the opposite.

Buy it was worth noting just how deceitful your super ego is.

In two hundred years time it is predicted that there won’t be any abalones left in the oceans because of increasing sea water acidification resulting from anthropogenic carbon dioxide build-up in the atmosphere.

The pen is mightier than the sword.

The keyboard is mightier than the gun.

The touchscreen is mightier than the drone.

Siri is greater than the ICBM.

Well not really.

Two parts Eros, one part Isos, no parts Hadeos.

Freud reckons that the two primary emotions (his idea) that the id uses to motivate our bodies (my idea), via the ego, are Eros and Hadeos. Love and hate.

Freud says all other emotions are built on these. Probably in the same way that all colors are built on the primaries. I guess the intensity of the emotions is just contrast; black and white.

Antidepressants generally suppress both Eros and Hadeos which is a pretty useless outcome.

The developed super-ego attempts to suppress the influence of Hadeos without losing Eros.

That’s bloody hard. Which is why it is taking millennia of evolution to achieve.

I have a suspicion that there might be one more primary emotion. This would better explain the huge color range of emotions and nature does tend to replicate itself in these sort of patterns. It’s probably “live” – the desire or will of the individual to not die and continue living.

The best name I can come up with for this emotion is Isos, after Isis.

If I cycle though all the emotions in my head I can easily construct them from Eros, Hadeos and Isos.

In this, it is important to recall that emotions aren’t “real”. They are just one way that the id controls the physical – the other being direct instinctive action. Emotions are a means to an end; part of continuous process improvement in evolution.

I just got a parking ticket from the world’s best looking parking police person.

I attempted to chat myself out of the already written ticket. Unsuccessfully of course.

Even so, I wasn’t the slight bit pissed off.

Double standards. I blame Eros.

The trick to ending war is not to attempt to remove the Hadeotic impulses (which is hard) but to fight war by proxy.

We are already doing this with drones and other automated technologies.

Ultimately, however, we can simulate war in computers. Well, we can already since it’s the favorite pastime of most computer nerds.

The trick is to get sovereign enemies to submit to the outcomes of the computer simulations. We can’t have the losing party spitting the dummy and  launching a nuke in spite.

One way we can get this to work is to get all human life into the simulation. Bring on the Matrix.

The other is to keep developing and in a thousand or two generations we might have developed the ego and super ego to such an extent that the Hadeotic impulses of the id are sufficiently suppressed.

But we have to survive that long without terminal war, of course.

Four

I am sort of forced to ‘intellectualize’ the mind-brain conundrum.

What alternatives are there?

The id is a mechanical donkey and there is no relief coming from that quarter. Only a very, very small fraction of people live totally intuitive and happy lives… and they probably have no idea how lucky they are.

The monks try and shut down the ego by reducing both the incoming signals and the outgoing actions. This makes me think of certain babies and their bathwaters.

No, I am left with the super ego that can do the thinking and then I will let the ego decide what to do with the subsequent beliefs. A little tension with the id (and it’s suggested actions and feelings) along the way is a good thing.

Today’s case study is anger.

The shambles that is yesterday’s hypothesis would suggest that anger, an emotion, is an attempt by the id to control the host body.

Some sensory input has gone into the ego and then been routed directly to the id for instant processing.

The dalek has responded with an ‘exterminate’. It has detected a threat and wants it removed, one way or the other.

However the ego also sent a supplementary signal to the super ego to do a bit of complex modeling on the side. It has come back with a likely scenario which suggests future sadness if the anger is not attenuated by the ego on the way out of the body.

Instincts versus beliefs. Actions and emotions.

General grinding of cogs… over heating…a bit of steam… ego pops a valve…host body decides to simply shut down all systems via the influence of alcohol and deal with this tomorrow.

I can’t help but think that, in the modern day, little of this has anything to do with survival. Are we doomed to play out the ghosts of evolutionary processes past?

The more I understand, the more my beliefs can moderate the ego. However my real interest is in doing a little surgery on the id.

Psychological issues must usually reside in the ego, the referee that decides how to process the incoming info. Either intuitively in the id or with delayed thinking in the super ego.

If the ego is wobbly then so will be your life because you will process stuff in the wrong part of your brain and that will mess up your actions, your beliefs and your feelings

As parents we need to pass onto our kids the training on how to use the ego well. To do this we have to be aware of our shortcomings in this regard which will help us bypass the generational replication of issues.

The mystery is how to identify and solve the problems with our ego using the same organ that it’s housed in?

No wonder it’s hard.

It makes me think that an automatic approach that relies on external response to stimuli (from our actions, feelings and briefs) might be a better way to iron out the bugs in the ego.

I suppose a therapist is a dodgy version of this.

Arrogance is a mask for insecurity.

In the bigger picture, I am fairly sure that my brain is not that good. I expect it’s big frog in a small skull.

It doesn’t worry me too much. I will happily try and solve my own mysteries in my own way.

I am not here for the amusement of people that I don’t know.

The super ego needs beliefs.

The computer in there needs to constrain it’s modeling options or else outcomes would take too long.

We keep a list of useful constraints and call them beliefs. We can inherit them, adopt them, and make them up.

Is much harder to lose them. Which is why this RAM looks more ROM-like.

Beliefs are the ROM of the super ego.

Feelings are just one of two ways that the id uses to controls it’s host body.

Actions come from both the id and the super ego, with the ego acting as referee.

All the outputs of brain processes can be broken down into binary units.

Decisions, actions, thoughts, emotions…etc; they call be broken down into tiny decisions to do or not to do, or to believe or not to believe, or to feel or not to feel.

That is, we make binary decisions in three dimensions. Every output of the brain can be modeled by these 6 options

There is nothing else.

It is surprising how much apparent complexity we manage to conjure up within this system.

The role of art is to fool both the id and the ego.

If the super ego gets involved it’s a ‘fail’.

I just figured out what thinking is.

The id, the intuitive ‘analog’ decision making process, uses inherited and learned rules to make instant decisions based on instantly processed sensory information.

The ego checks that the sensory conditions coming in match those under which the rules can be used.

Where required the ego transfers the decision making to the slower offline super ego. This ‘digital’ computer does the thinking.

And the reason it is offline and slow is because what we are doing is modeling (or simulating) a number of future scenarios in order to make decisions. This takes a lot of  processing power. We select the best scenario in order to make our decisions. We probably just keep modeling until we get a satisfactory answer.

Initially thinking must have developed as an emergency adjunct to the instinctive id. Over time we seem to have co-opted this part of our brain and we are well on the way to super-ego dominance.

And we have had to sculpt the world itself to allow us this luxury. For example we are engineering risk out of our lives because we know we are suppressing the id so much that our lives would be endangered if we did not.

Star-kids. That is the name of the ‘hand over your coins’ charity on Jetstar airlines.

The promo justifies the charity on the basis that the money will go towards ‘change’ for kids in some of the world’s ‘poorest’ communities.

By ‘change’ I wonder if they mean the coins. Do they just hand ’em over? We know they don’t.

No, ‘change’ means that the kids need to be more like us in the West. Consumers.

So we spend the charity money on professionals who train them how to acquire and exhaust wealth. ‘Poor’ isn’t  how little wealth you have, it’s how little you spend.

It’s not really charity; it’s more missionary. Money is our religion and we just need new customers.

Poor change for stark ids.