Chiraq Addresses

There are two implications to being young. In the first place, you have time to grow and think and mature and you have a daily routine to follow. Second, however, there is little importance or urgency in your life alone so you can while your time away easily. And yet, there is a deep resentment no matter which attitude is taken so that the developing individual is encouraged to ignore the minutiae of one's daily routine as a consequence of the imposing nature of the mirages of the stages of life through which one progresses.

Given the gun problem in Chiraq, fingerprint-based biometric authentication is a good solution to ensure that only the individuals who are judged as being competent users of the weapon use it. Because of the danger of guns, another possible enhancement to them is the installation of a small user-facing camera, microphone, screen, and speaker on the gun so that it is possible to legally mandate LLM-enabled therapy with the user before the user is allowed to pull the trigger, potentially talking the user out of shooting the gun, a very dangerous decision.

Finding out whether you got accepted or rejected from a particular application to a job or university is like a split-second, quantum decision in which it is revealed to you whether the person you presented yourself as part of the process fits the position and stands out from other candidates. As you proceed down the pipeline of life, there emerge various stages or levels to your position. At a certain point, you maybe realize that everything about you matters and defines your next move, from the grades your receive to the way you spend your free time. The risk here is that you may allocate a large part of your life blindly following a prescription for what you may think is desirable. Evidence for this is the appearance of "model" students or employees who have the set of attributes sought after by institutions but proceed along this path by imitation. The lack of a fixed set of criteria for admission fits the independent, free-spirited quality of the nation we live in. However, it diminishes the value of the objectively meritocratic and places undue emphasis on social factors such as friend group and relationship to others. While being a part of the position one is accepted in, the actions one participates in as part of the role play a large determining role in setting the track for the future of the individual's future involvement in the role--personal connections determine a lot.

To a callow individual who is a fresh player in the game of life, it may feel exhilarating to believe that the admissions process is not very meritocratic and relies upon the judgement of others, who perhaps are opinionated and politicized arbiters of students' merit. However, despite the at-times-skewed way of the game, such a person should not blind him or herself to the value of following the steps of admissions with candid eyes and ears. For since it is one's attitude that shapes one's meaning of and relationship to life, the moves that one plays on the infinite board, drawing from an infinite pile of cards, where each card could be anything, are all that matter in explaining the course of one's life.

From biology we know certain properties of the human animal. Besides the various diseases, medications, preventative cures, and therapies that are used to treat individuals, there are curious properties of human life and existence that have been revealed by those who practice medicine and the patients upon whom medicine is practiced. Those who have suffered concussions have a greater tendency to participate in riskier action. Those who suffer through Near-Death Experiences transform forever after. Those who learn to practice certain skills during early life and hone them as they grow older tend to be better than most at exercising those skills and putting them to practical usage. These facets of human existence seem to suggest how malleable humans are, ignoring genetics, almost to the point of being magical. It is a possibility, consisting of both opportunity and risk, that we can change ourselves and our minds by taking ourselves in the direction of our thoughts. Taking genetics into account, the tens of thousands of years of evolution over which cultures evolved appear to have endowed key characteristics to some members of the population over others. Given the records of humans that have been collected of human beings over the centuries, patterns of human thought can be observed, modeled, and predicted. If man is made in the image of God (meaning that man is low-dimensional projection of God from different angles), then a well-structured reconstruction of the total likeness of God can be made by studying man. Further, supposing that the complexity of biology is understood well enough to be modeled on computer to the point of being able to successfully analyze and make predictions about people, an oracle-like technological microcosm of the natural world in its current state can be made as a masterpiece of the ages. We may begin to be able to experiment with genetics through technology to develop fictional mythical organisms and simulate their interactions with humans.

A parallel seems to exist between biology and technology. Computers seem to "emerge" from their constituent electrical components similar to how human biology emerges from the level of the cell. The fact that computer architecture continues to be studied and improved upon is evidence that certain questions can only be asked about the fully built computer, similar to how a living human being is not yet fully understood to great detail, even though individual cells of the body may be. If a computer can be modeled from the ground up on another computer, in theory one with enough compute power to represent and analyze the computer, Reinforcement Learning algorithms can be applied to optimize certain qualities of the computer and the software running on it, as discussed in the previous post, potentially to the point of transforming the computer into something entirely new. Generative-adversarial-style games can be set up to "evolve" the computer by iteratively pitting a model that generates a valid SW-HW pair against a model that analyzes the pair and makes a decision about the pair based on its measured analytics. Developers can create LLM systems that comprehend existing research on architecture, computer software, hardware, etc. to improve computers and the hardware they run on and possibly extend research artificially by conducting independent experiments.

The level of interaction between humans and technology and emerging technologies that have synergized with human biology internally and externally are beginning signs of the connection between humans and technology. The brain, which is like an interface to the entire body, may transmit and receive signals, as in the case of Neuralink, to a chip, which, upon processing the signal, responds by sending a signal to a specific part of the brain to achieve a certain function. On the opposite hand, the brain can be used to signal the chip in order to control the external environment through one's thoughts at a more rapid pace than one can control it through physical interfaces. The back and forth exchange of information between biology and chip establishes a bridge through which information about biology and chip can be communicated. What new facts and patterns about human life can be revealed by analytical study of information collected through digital technology? What new methods of manipulating technology (e.g. without the use of keyboard/mouse and potentially without language) can be engineered? Can parts of the brain itself be harnessed by the chip for offloading its computation? Conversely, can the human with the chip execute queries or command using the chip or wirelessly compute to a remote device?

Warren McCulloch stated that he had realized at the tail end of being a teenager that the scriptures are mathematical in nature. This implies that the stories and passages of the Bible, and potentially scriptures from other religions, harbor some inherent connection to math. What about old stories, then? Can LLMs make the precise mathematical relationships contained within the aforementioned texts explicit? If the human mind is dependent upon narrative or story in order to function, and if, as Jordan Peterson says, that religious texts are the archetypal story, then can technology not be used to ascertain and potentially modify the nature of the story going through the brain, as a pathway to experimentation in psychiatry? If these stories can be tuned in a deterministic manner and the external world exists within the human mind, then can  the modification of the brain not be equivalently described as changing the world that constantly changes outside the brain? Additionally, how should the individuals who are strongly motivated to change the world and the people within it in some particular way be dealt with? Can the portions of the mind that are inside and outside be delineated through the means of technology? Can man in assistance with technology write improved stories, play games better, navigate through the world better, and leave his mark on the world in augmented fashion? Given the creative potential of the human mind, can technology be used to channel human potential to generate new ideas in the background? Since large parts of the human brain are not vital for human function, can ablation studies be conducted with technology intervention to determine the essential role of various brain lobes? Further, given the realization about the integrity of brain being nonessential, how will the dynamics between freedom and control change as the threats and possibilities of brain modification emerge?

Finally, what role can technology play in unveiling the facade of technology and overcoming personas through which individuals communicate (e.g. Snapchat filters, which morph the appearance of the face)? If not for human will and whim, which is both good and evil, what is the nature of the force that guides the usage of the improved technology and understanding? Will the technology compel greater transparency between individuals and the system (e.g. medical system, board of education, government agencies) by providing a channel for communication that is more precise than modern human language? What relationship will does the technology have to the various layers of consciousness that exist in the human mind as well as the societal factors that push certain thoughts, emotions, feelings and ideas to the back and pull others to the front? As human relationship to the technology grows stronger, how important will man's relationship to the outside world become and to what extent will we become detached from reality? How can self-manipulation of the technology that communicates with one's mind be used to transform one's feelings, ideas, and experiences while alone, and what societal, practical, and effective limits may exist?