What to think about everything, or 'Life is NP-Hard'

This post was entitled 'What to think about everything', and waiting in my drafts.  Naturally I got excited, but it turns out that it was not populated. I've no idea what I would have said, but anyway...

The world is a place full of entities and possibilities, because its always developing through time.  The brain is nature's way of keeping the world's tendencies to kill your genes from developing into actualities.  The mind is the brains way of keeping the brain's tendencies to kill you from developing into actualities.

The brain is solving the problem of Abduction - relating a schema of the super-sensible to a limited observation of a reality in motion is an NP-hard problem (C.S. Pierce first showed that thinking depends on abduction; there are a variety of papers on it but Bylander et al 'The Computational Complexity of Abduction' 1991 is pretty good). NP-hard in a large world means that you can't solve it fully in a reasonable amount of time*, unless you can reduce by orders of magnitude the number of involved entities by:

• lumping up sensations into objects which are cleanly defined by not being other objects, excluding them from their space.  Sensations denote limbs and a body which is really just one bear that can be treated as a point, in relation to the question of what to do next.
• expecting repetition of familiar scenarios.  Run away.
• importantly, being set up to be pretty darn insensitive to things that don't matter, like 'what if this bear just a regular cuddlepie who are not out to kill us?' meh. No one cares about that. Assume everyone's out to kill us, especially people who look like they don't have our genes.
• Being sensitive to generalisation logic, to reasoning with representations rather than imagining entire entities.  I really like Lukacs Kaiser's paper on building a logic detector and solver for tic-tac-toe, connect-four and other simple games. It shows the potential power for symbolic reasoning to play games, and I think games, narrative and dynamic logic are going to get unified pretty thoroughly pretty soon.
• Letting a really simple brain (the emotions) cooperate with you and run the mechanics of the limbic system and what not, and even take over entirely at times, causing you to punch people, cry, or start a blog.
• Making contingent decisions and commitments that will be modified soon.

Over time, the disintegrated solvers get fine-tuned to my environment and it becomes possible for them to be more and more integrated.  For me at least, many of those integrations didn't come up with more than a fractious truce.  My emotions are kept at arms length a lot of the time, and I don't feel very much, and I don't imagine how something would feel for myself in the future or another person in the present all that well.  My reasoning has not been very purposive - I hardly plan, am often unproductive, and get motivated about weirdly small things, and deeply dejected about normal size things, like having a job and a few extra-curricular commitments. (To illustrate agonizing about the very small, I spent a number of hours agonizing about buying a couple of computer components totalling about $30 which I don't need.  They were heavily marked down.  But I couldn't (or didn't try to) imagine a me in the future who just didn't care that he didn't have them, or a me who did but was disappointed, or a me who suddenly saw what that $30 could have gone toward.  I stalled in the emotional desiring and the super-ego's denial.)  My reasoning is also unmotivated by anything except deeply personal felt trouble.  The mere promise of approval and acceptance, of satisfaction in a job done (whether well, or medium) moves me very little, unless the job is immediately in front of me.

I've been reading 'The mindful way through depression' by Jon Kabat-Zinn. He points to a similar phenomenon in depression, of using the reasoning ('doing') executive brain parts in fruitless wars against desire; in inquisitions against feelings of disappointment or remembered shame; and (I suspect this in my case very much) in abdicating to the emotions when pressed to work hard at something that doesn't seem immediately personally relevant (item 0 -> coaching the emotional brain into useful contribution by putting the right prompting and questions to it).

These two (and other faculties of body and mind) are me.**

*Well, we can't at the moment. Some problems that are NP-hard have no conventional (Turing/von Neumann etc) computing algorithm that completes in polytime, but Shor's algorithm is a famous example that means a quantum computer could complete it in polytime.

** The recent PEL podcast on Lacan suggested that this unification of the divided subject, taking responsibility for all the internality (however it was produced. Mostly made of externality (cultured stuff)) was the goal of psychoanalysis.  This is a Pennebaker Essay on how I overcame the major psychic division and became cheerful, emotionally alert and productive. 

The Big U

This is not a post about Neal Stephenson's first novel. Perhaps it should have been.  He writes some killer novels.

I've been feeling gloomy the last few days.  You read about my farcical Thursday and disappointing Friday.  Further disappointment on Friday afternoon when I proofed a report I've been working on and realised it needed more work than I thought..  Further disappointment when I got the nanoKontrol more or less working in an hour last night, but found today I will need to do far more to have it really seamlessly integrated - I need to learn about Cakewalk's implementation of a midi-learn mechanism (ACT), and I need to design a scheme for it to map usefully to the K5000, Synth1, Cakewalk's mixer and throughout, Cakewalk's transport controls (stop, play etc). My friend's mythTV which I built for her is not working well. Listening to J Bernstein I realised I have to be doing close-reading of my own if I actually want to understand Hegel. I have not nearly learned as much as I could.  I got an email reminding me I could enter a screenplay in a competition if I would just sort the structure and finish it. As Hegel and Hajime Tanabe (and Heidegger I suppose) remind me, you don't learn something without confronting that you don't know, that you are something with no way to be in the situation: you have to face up to your 'nothingness'. You find that who you are is wrong about the world. It's very lowering.

My experience is that I then don't learn at once.  I learn by a series of digressions and misunderstandings, and as each one shows its failure, I lower my estimate of my own understanding even further, and at long last, listen and learn.  Eventually, I have made all the mistakes there are to make, and I might start to exercise a little familiarity and have some success.

Today I was thinking of this as a big U.  From the top, I look across and see a lovely vista of  MythTV leading to years of seamless entertainment, nanoKontrol leading to home studio greatness leading to extra income and notoriety, philosophy mastery as a path to lucidity and purchase in the world of ideas, screenwriting as a way to have an impact on society, even if its just to give an alternative 2hrs of tedium*. Serious work as a way of earning my living, some dignity, and helping clients and colleagues.

But then I start, and the descent down into the bottom of the U is painful and hard.  I have to face my shortcomings, misunderstandings and hubris again and again.  And I really hate that, far more than any normal person (or just as much, but with much scanter resources of courage and tenacity). So much so that this blog probably owes most of its existence to my refusal to keep trying at any one thing.  I look down into the big U and 'the grave opens up before me like a big hole in the ground.'**  And I run, and write a blog post or read an article or ten instead of solving a problem.

One good thing about this blog is that I find writing things out can clear my mental image.  I realised that there are four things I want to control with the nanoKontrol and that it has four 'scenes' - perfect. It also can act as a Pennebaker Essay, helping me process this and see a U, where I have historically looked back and see only the climb down and from the perspective of having won through, the climb down looks doubly ridiculous.

* all the possible readings of this are meant.
**  Blackadder season 2.

I have a woman's legs.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1gHsQoqQPd4&cc=1#t=115s

One of the unfortunate physical non-ailments I lament at length is that I am slightly knock-kneed, particularly with my knees bent at all. This means (as for many people) that my ITBs (iliotibial band - the band of muscle and adjoining tendon on the outside of your leg) get exercised whenever I bend my legs, straighten my legs or clench my leg muscles. The VMO (vastus medis oblongatus - the muscle that bulges on the inside front above your kneecap when you straighten your leg to its limits) is not exercised very much.  Furthermore, the odd angle through my knee means that all kinds of odd torques need to be reacted up through my thigh and into my hip - a straighter leg would reduce these.

But don't waste too much sympathy - my legs are a little bendier than the ideal man's, but they are much less bendy than those of most women, who having broader hips, tend to have a bend at the knee.  What has really stymied me as a runner is my horror of effort without the promise of world-championship (which is a pretty broadly applicable horror given my lack of any genius).

I wanted to link to video from Parks and Recreation, a scene from the basketball game in season three, where Ron Swanson asks Tom Haverford 'Are those women's sneakers?'
Tom replies 'They fit real well and I like the styles.  Also I got a discount when I was working at Athlete's Foot.  And the best part is, no one can tell.'