defining consciousness & psychological boundaries

The fun thing about consciousness is that people throw the word around like it means a lot ... well it doesn't unless you spec a def ... it has like three of four major definitions which are wildly different based on the context.

Roughly :

• - medical usage ( closest to commonspeak )
• - poetic usage ( romantic, sentimental )
• - information systems usage ( broadest )
• - qualia-logy usage ( metaphysics / onotology / last big question )

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If I may extend this a bit. ( Tell me when to bugger off. )

• 1. The fact that you appreciate your feelings should always be sacred to yourself. Nothing else has to adjust it. That includes other people's feelings.
• 2. Choosing to admit other people's feelings as effective upon oneself should not be impulsive, but risk-managed.
• 3. There are plenty of other people's feelings that will be debounced at 2. Many humans will be rightfully filtered out. You just need to decide which bots to filter in.

Once you get good at 2., it helps you work on 3.

In the long run, the only difference between a properly behaving bot and a properly behaving meathead is ... civil rights.

It's a bit mind-bendy, but it's at the crux of the philosophical distinction between various types of humans that have less than normal civil rights : criminals, disabled, etc.

At some point bots become more competent than the bottom-tier meathead ... then whaT?

:) philosophy!

brain networks and sense modalities

Brain network modelling : comparison of my college-era and past-week studies :

DMN activity seems to be associated with primacy of focus on haptic, oscillatory, thermal, and other somatic data types. 

CEN activity seems to be associated with primacy of focus on optical and acoustic data types. 

I could be mistaken, and IIRC the SN is associated somewhat with somatic data types. 

Need to go back and check documentation later.

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Progress.

So, it appears that we do (a lot) of our conscious spatial modelling of kinesthesia by abstracting into the optical mode. That is to say, when we mentally prepare to move the body, we (often) visualise the movement, instead of feeling it. Of course we do both, and it is more accurate to do the latter. But the stronger the imagined somatic data signal, the more live SNS somatic signals are displaced from conscious memory, and the greater the risk that SNS-PNS feedback loops currently in-flight would get distorted by the imaginary signal.

For example, say I actually hold a ball. I can imagine visually dropping the ball, or I can imagine haptically dropping the ball. If I imagine too strongly the haptic signal, it appears to my conscious memory that I had felt the ball dropping and my subconscious might step in to modify the MNS signal and mess up my current effort in holding the ball in place. Of course, with more practice, a kinesthete will be able to imagine stronger haptic signals without corrupting their SNS-PNS feedback loops. That is just part of what all manual/physical exercise studies do.

I suppose in college, I didn't think of this distinction much. I mostly thought about activating the DMN as a matter of zeroing my optical and acoustic imagination. I guess that is because most verbal reasoning happens in those sense modalities. But actually a total zeroing is excessive - I should have allowed non-verbal acoustic and optical imagery to remain in the imagined signal. That would have been enough to disengage CEN activities from conscious memory. 

Back to thinking about this.

Aside, I must say calcium's hourly effect on neurochemistry is probably the most important thing I picked up over the past 1.5 years. The slower release of chalk in tablet form seems to optimally emulate whole food release rates. The only other thing now is that my stomach is going to get used to producing more acid than it did. So I will have to monitor that

BNM : metaphysics of money

2025 Working paper by BNM on Syariah ontology of modern money, and relevance to CBDC 

https://www.bnm.gov.my/documents/20124/826852/ahmad-et-al-2025-wp325.pdf

Here, BNM appears to take an EITHER-OR stance on the ontology of money : 

• - either it's a COMMODITY, with intrinsic value, 
• - or it's a DEBT INSTRUMENT, merely a double-entry item.

** THIS IS INCREDIBLY NAIVE **

In modern monetary use, each transaction is a CONTRACT between THREE parties.

• 1. The ISSUER of money, a.k.a. bank, controls its BASE SUPPLY
• 2 & 3. OTHERS who use money, are counterparty to 1, and needs 1. to be sane

I skimmed the paper, and may go back for a deeper read later.

"apa yang menghalang kita pergi lebih jauh?"

• 1. sejak kemerdekaan ekonomi lemah
• 2. pemimpin tumpukan isu 3R dan bukan ekonomi
• 2b. akibatnya, sistem pendidikan merosot : akidah naik, akal turun
• 3. sudah 70 tahun merosot, tapi boleh diselamatkan lagi
• 4. sebenarnya bagi ekonomi, kena tumpukan kepakaran berikut saja : MATEMATIK, FIZIK, EKONOMI

Ini merangkumi perdagangan, STEM, dan kesenian.

Pendapat saya sahaja.

- pendakwah kekasaran 

"quiet times" as DMN exercise

On 50% sleep today. Most operations were as usual, being rather unviolent activities. No running, no gym. Just clearing the backlog of reading at the desk, food, and a walk. The walk is a recently imposed routine - for DMN exercise. 

During higher resistance activities, I think the CEN is dominant - jogging is not done in a safe place, so it is essentially an hour of risk management. Walking, apparently I can manage at a lower risk-level. I schedule in 8k steps per day, per conventional guidelines. I think I can do some other things during DMN time : I can do twisty puzzles and study knots while walking, or replace walking with skateboarding or cycling. I have been back at this for a few days, and I am still thinking about how it works.

I was raised in a tradition of doing daily "quiet times" for religious practice - I don't practice that now. In college, I walked a lot, and had plenty of time to think about things without risk. 2005 to 2015 was a mixed bag : a lot of CEN drills, with weekends, in a sense. Work between 2015 and 2020 was highly focused on CEN stuff, being on foot all shift, from 8 to 36 hours at a go, and on-call 24-7. So I suppose it is appropriate to force this sort of thing back into my schedule, for balance of mental conditioning. 

From what I can tell the "quiet time" or more concretely, DMN exercise, is helping to normalise dopaminergic tonality, the baseline signal. This makes it easier to exercise active/phasic dopaminergic activities during CEN work for the rest of the day. Proper dopaminergic form vis-a-vis CEN helps with the rate of reading and integratign new information, to a non-trivial degree.

Rather hypothetical at this stage.  

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More stuff I think, that can be scheduled into DMN time : rumination on vague concepts, for example when studying new terminology, or thinking about maths and architectural problems

History of the terms "cognitive science", "neuroscience", and "psychology"

• 1. "mentalism"/ subjectivity was of course the initial approach to psychology ( 1510-> )
• 2. Watson 1913 was a paper that flipped the focus to "behaviourism"/ objectivity
• 3. Chomsky 1959 flipped some focus back to mentalism, which was rebranded by Neisser 1967 as "cognitive psychology" - its subfield, "cognitive linguistics" was then a brand claimed by up to three major factions
• 4. Longuet-Higgins 1973 coined "cognitive science" finally

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• A. Meanwhile "neuroscience" was Schmitt 1962

improvements needed in Malaysia's censorship process

CENSORSHIP has been a grand government of Malaysia tradition ( at least during my life which began in the 80s ), which continues!

What Malaysia NEEDS is a publicly auditable PROCESS ( accompanied by an easily-understood flow-chart ) ... which illustrates the steps taken between : 

• - legislative policy
• - executive policy
• - originating reports to enforcement agencies
• - actions taken by enforcement agencies
• - across multiple agencies, such as the police, and the MCMC

This is so that JUSTICE maybe EFFORTLESSLY SEEN to be DONE, not merely done.

( - taking a brief moment, to comment on current affairs, though I'm in the middle of some history of linguistics thing rn )

world models be so trendy these days

Just to nag again : "world" models are what every human argues about with each other. But those are built on "categories of sense experience" ( traditional terminology ), and the subsequent graph of gestalten, and then only the names of gestalts. If the phenomenological data types are imprecisely anthropomorphic, the world models will so be. Words too.

The root of AI hurdles for a 100 years has not been having the wrong operations, but having the wrong data structure under operations.

EPF : Apa Lagi Rakyat Mahu?

Good, but historically, the EPF doesn't seem to have provided the sort of basic security net available in more robust economies. We continue to rely on C2C aid, which exacerbates parochial family / race / sub-group polarity, rather than putting a focus on collective national wealth, which fuels permanent social security payouts.

SARA etc. type helicopter money programs are hopeful experiments, but certainly not a comprehensive plan. I look forward to more expansive policies integrating

• - monetary debasement to support trade,
• - SMB infrastructure to increase velocity,
• - fiscal deficits to install health and economic infrastructure,
• - and a strategic narrative from the MOFinance + MOEconomy integrating national strategy : particularly how investments in healthcare and social security can undegird life-long contributions of citizens to real GDP growth.

apa itu perundangan

Kebanyakan orang tersalahfaham peranan perundangan dalam masyarakat.

Perundangan bukan paksaan mencapai persefahaman dalam semua hal, dan tidak bertujuan untuk memupuk apa-apa perasaan seperti kasih sayang ataupun kesetiaan.

Sebagaimana pun perundangan adalah mekanisme yang membolehkan pelbagai pihak yang berbeza, yang saling kejahilan, yang takut/ benci/ kecam antara satu sama lain ... dapat bersefahaman pada tahap yang minimum bagi perpaduan tanpa kebinasaan, sahaja.

Jadi, perundangan menjadi dasar kemasyarakatan, dan akar ini tidak bergantung kepada sebarang kepercayaan, harapan, perasaan, pendirian, kejiwaan, intuisi, ataupun ketidaksengajaan yang berasal sebelum kewujudan perjanjian ( dikatakan kontrak ) sebegini.

plebs defined by luxury

An important distinction, of political affinity : 

(1) people who cannot have luxury, are plebs

(2) people who want luxury, are plebs

calcium, sodium, magnesium

This is very cibai. So it is good to figure it out :

• 1. Bone is a reservoir for Ca, Na, Mg, in descending order of mass
• 2. If one of these minerals is deficient in serum, the entire bone structure gets resorbed, and the other excess minerals are dumped into urine
• 
  
• 3. Finally the same minerals are reabsorbed by the kidney using a common mechanism, so dumping any of one, dumps more of the others too

Practical conclusion : Ca, Na, Mg need to be consumed together