Dissensus Dilettante Society

version

Well-known member
Re. fintech, there was a big cover article in The Economist last week about Ant Group, who're the current big noise in finance circles. It gave lots of figures on their latest consolidation etc how they're about to take over the world and so on, and gave me exactly the impression Padraig describes - finanace bros using new tech to enrich each other at everyone else's expense.
 
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constant escape

winter withered, warm
The Neuropsychology of Dogmatic Beliefs and Delusions


The study that @Matthew posted about the neuropsychology of religiosity got me looking for lectures on the topic, and this is one that touched upon similar things. Still haven't read that study though, but it would be interesting to look at it alongside this presentation.

The presenter is Mark Reimers, whose research involves mapping neural activity associated with convictions. He made it clear that there was some grey areas involving what precisely could be measured.

Screen-Shot-2020-11-04-at-8-24-45-AM.png


My guess is that the correlation rates here are high enough to indicate partially localized activity, but too low to indicate that activity regarding loyalty is entirely localized in those regions. That is, those regions are likely part of a more complex circuitry, which could potentially yield a higher correlation rate, if it is able to be distinguished. I would imagine that the discreteness of the active region is inversely correlated to the correlation rate itself, so the MRI data that would yield 100% correlation would practically be noise, activity being too diffused across the brain. Just conjecture though, as this thread indicates.

He then used as an example the US political spectrum, comparing democrats, republicans and independents in terms of cognitive flexibility, which he explained as the ability to appreciate a variety of perspectives on a given topic. The graph on the right shows placement on the spectrum, rather than party identification. He didn't go into detail about how this flexibility was measured, unless somehow I missed it.

Screen-Shot-2020-11-04-at-8-29-00-AM.png


-100 would be far left, and 100 would be far right.
 

constant escape

winter withered, warm
@luka @suspendedreason very interesting paper about dopamine and the spiritual high [attached]

also see

Fascinating read, although I feel a bit twitchy after having powered through it.

On the basis of twin studies, there is reason to believe that religious experience and behavior have a biological basis, in that religiosity appears to be influenced by inheritance to about the same degree as intelligence

The theory proposed here posits that religious experience and practice in humans are a consequence of the expansion of the dopamine-rich ventral brain systems that, in other mammalian species, mediate behavioral interactions with the most distant portions of the surrounding 3-D space. Specifically, it is argued that religion represents the extension of distant extrapersonal space and time into abstract and cosmic realms—e.g., heaven and eternity—even as it relies on mammalian brain pathways that ordinarily oversee whole-body, head- and oculomotor orienting and exploration in the distal portions of actual 3-D space.

The experience of ‘‘oneness’’ with the universe is one of the most distinguishing characteristics of the mystical state (Runions, 1979).

[...] the more distant portion of the visual world is biased toward the upper field, given the elevated position of the eyes and the slant of the ground plane towards the horizon, whereas most peripersonal activity such as reaching is confined to the lower visual field (Previc, 1998).

Many examples of the reduced self-awareness created by right-hemispheric lesions are provided by Brugger (2001), Cutting (1990), and others, such as the woman with left hemiplegia who said ‘‘ . . . [my] hand doesn’t belong to me . . . [it is] just like a plastic hand’’ (Cutting, 1990, p. 190) or the patient who believed the left side of his body ‘‘to be evil and controlled by external agents, sometimes the devil and sometimes his deceased father in collusion with the devil’’ (Nightingale, 1982, p. 464) .

For example, DA antagonists disrupt food transport in rats, but only if the home shelter resides in extrapersonal space (at least 2 m away from the food) (Dringenberg et al., 2000). Dopamine also is involved in orienting toward distant time, in that DA in rodents is critically involved in predicting future rewards (Schultz, Dayan, & Montague, 1997) and in both humans and animals mediates the executive intelligence (planning and strategizing) that requires alteration of future behavior on the basis of current feed- back (Previc, 1999). In line with its orientation toward distant space, DA stimulates a wide variety of upward-directed movements [...]

For example, the hyper-dopaminergic jerker rat—originally known as ‘‘stargazer’’—makes continuous upward head movements (Truett, Brock, Lidl, & Kloster, 1994), whereas upper-field neglect, a dearth of upward eye movements, and downward reaching biases all follow damage to the DA-rich substantia nigra in Parkinson’s disease and associated animal models (Corin, Elizan, & Bender, 1972; Hotson, Langston, & Langston, 1986; Kato et al., 1995; Lee, Harris, Atkinson, Nithi, & Fowler, 2002; Poizner et al., 1998).

According to Previc (1998), dreams and hallucinations represent the triumph of the extrapersonal systems over the body-oriented or peripersonal systems. They are both characterized by themes and experiences associated with extrapersonal space (out-of-body experiences, distant scenes, etc.), little reaching, consummatory, tactile or other peripersonal experiences, and a preponderance of upward eye movements.

Large-scale studies have shown that lesions (i.e., under-activation) of the right hemisphere are almost twice as likely as left-sided ones to produce complex visual hallucinations (Hecaen & Angelergues, 1965; cited in Hecaen & Albert, 1978, p. 161). Similarly, epileptiform activity (i.e., overactivation) in the left hemisphere is almost twice as likely to produce hallucinations and delusions (Cutting, 1990; McAllister, 1998; Sherwin, 1984; Toone, 1981; Trimble, 1984).

One explanation for the near-death experience is that it represents an adaptation to a situation in which reduced oxygen and/or extreme stress may be present (Alper, 2001; Roberts & Owen, 1988). Increased DA transmission is a major feature of the brain during hypoxia (Buyukuysal & Mete, 1999), and hypoxia at birth is one of several early-developmental risk factors for schizophrenia (Dalman et al., 2001), in which DA levels are elevated. Upward eye movements and auditory and visual hallucinations are additional correlates of hypoxia (Lempert, Bauer, & Schmidt, 1994).

Inherent to most religions are the concepts of God, Heaven, soul, and the after-life. The soul is an extension of corporeal space, God and Heaven extend the concept of space beyond the most distant sensorial realm, and the after-life extends time beyond the finite period of our own lives.

The religious significance of upper space is further reflected in upward oriented behaviors and orientations during individual religious experience and practice. Upward eye shifts (eye-rolling) have been shown to accompany meditation, hypnosis and seizures (Rosenow et al., 1998; Tebecis, 1976; Tebecis & Provins, 1975), similar states that are frequently associated with religious experience (e.g., Hood, 1973; Saver & Rabin, 1997).

There are also negative connotations for leftward space, both generally (e.g., ‘‘sinister’’ derives the French word for left) and in religious contexts (Fabbro, 1994; Tan, 1998). For example, Persinger (1994) found in 83% of his subjects that ‘‘sensed presences’’ in the left visual field were associated with negative experiences (e.g., fear), where 83% of right-visual field presences were associated with pleasant experiences (e.g., angels).

This, above, made me think of a bit from Castaneda's Journey to Ixtlan, where Don Juan teaches him about how his death is always over his left shoulder, and that one ought to develop a constant rapport with and acceptance of their inevitable death.


The reports of elevated DA during meditation and trance states are consistent with the auditory and visual hallucinations and the heightened awareness of environmental stimuli found in these states (Buckley, 1981; Cas- tillo, 2003), both of which are found in other hyperdopaminergic states (Kapur, 2003). It is also in line with the faster perceived passage of time during transcendental experiences (Goodman, 2002), given that DA is known to speed up the internal clock (Meck, 1996).


Some good etymology too, below:

Although, religion is associated with a normal psychological profile in the vast majority of practitioners, an elevated level of religiosity has been noted in clinical populations dating back to antiquity. For example, the original meaning of the Hebrew word ‘‘nabi’’ (‘‘those carried away by religious visions’’) was ‘‘insanity’’ (Herschel, as cited in Goldwert, 1993). Similarly, the ancient Greeks viewed epilepsy as a ‘‘sacred disease’’ brought about by a visitation from the Gods (Saver & Rabin, 1997).

An upward conjugate deviation of the eyes (‘‘oculogyric crisis’’) is also a prominent fea- ture of seizures (Rosenow et al., 1998) and Tourette’s syndrome (Frankel & Cummings, 1984), a hyperdop- amergic disorder closely related to OCD. In OCD and mania, the heightened motivation and goal- directedness—‘‘deranged planning,’’ according to Boyer (2001)—further reflect a heightened concern or anx- iety about future (temporally distant) events.

The playwright August Strindberg (Brugger, 2001) and the Nobel laureate and mathematician John Nash (Nasar, 1998) are two of the more famous schizophrenics reputed to have suffered religious delu- sions, a group that may have also included the prophet Ezekial (Goldwert, 1993).

A recent evolutionary theory (Previc, 1999) proposed that the driving force behind the attainment of the modern human intellect was an expansion of dopaminergic brain systems.
 

Woebot

Well-known member
Fascinating read, although I feel a bit twitchy after having powered through it.

the stargazer rat is one of the great things out of previc's work. his dopamine imbalance causes him to look to the sky!

rat.jpg

i got in contact with previc - very cool but a little wary :cool: his background was in helping the US military cope with the situation wherein pilots who have the sensation at high altitude that their plane disappears around them.
 

constant escape

winter withered, warm
Yeah that paper made some amazing connections with oxygen deficiency, upper space and hallucination. Thats cool that he actually helped those pilots, seeing as those kind of claims would otherwise get you labeled insane.
 

constant escape

winter withered, warm
Huh, yeah watching that film in light of all this could be interesting as well. Especially if there are similarities to be ascertained, content-wise, across these sort of hallucinations.
 

vimothy

yurp
The course is gonna get into AI more, as well as blockchain. Gensler, who used to work for Goldman Sacks in some capacity, briefly asserted that blockchain is exerting a distinct and novel force on finance, but he didn't make it sound impactful enough to reorient the whole global financial system. That said, he's yet to have gone into detail about it.
why would it reorient the financial system? we already have databases and digital currencies. nothing fundamental about the financial relationships between entities would change with the adoption of blockchains, it's just minor optimisations for a system which is already highly optimised.
 

constant escape

winter withered, warm
Could just be an error in my understanding of it, but I thought the whole potential of it was based on its decentralized ledger system, wherein the transcendent role played by some human party is now played by the system itself.

And It's also deep speculation for me. Much of everything is, which is why I'm so interested in optimizing deep speculation.
 

beiser

Well-known member
why would it reorient the financial system? we already have databases and digital currencies. nothing fundamental about the financial relationships between entities would change with the adoption of blockchains, it's just minor optimisations for a system which is already highly optimised.

It's the difference between handing a letter to your friend, and asking the post office to give it to him. The latter usually works well, unless perhaps you live in a country where the post office opens up letters and makes some changes. You can say "I don't live in a country like that at the moment", except the financial system distinctly does put pressure on its users—in the US, usually sex workers and weed sales. My local dispensary pretends to be an ATM, so they have to round your purchase to the closest $10 increment, and then they give you the change back in cash.

Then there's the fact that you have a currency that's not owned by any country, and which has sovereign monetary policy.

You can argue those are unlikely to come to fruition, and you might be right, but it seems ridiculous to act too confident at this stage.
 

vimothy

yurp
that all depends on what you think a digital currency means. one provided by the central bank essentially gets you to the point where the CB adopts some of the roles fulfilled by banks.
 

vimothy

yurp
if you are more clear about what you think constitutes a digital currency, it would probably be easier to discuss it
 

constant escape

winter withered, warm
Just started a new Google doc for the history of US politics. I had been doing this on Numbers, the mac equivalent, but I ran into problems regarding maximum cell count, as well as sharing. As far as I can tell, Google docs has infinite maximum cell count, can is much easier to share.

So far I'm still breaking this project up into different spreadsheets, this one for US politics. So far I've only added a section for the Senate. Still figuring out the formatting.


But I'll be starting others as well, all with the same custom template (hence why US politics stretches waaaay back before the US was a thing.

So far I've been able to greatly benefit from creating these spreadsheets, in terms of being about to visualize history in extensive models, getting a better sense of temporal scale, etc.

Anyway, figured this might be of interest to some among you. If there are any issues editing, let me know.

The big previous one I did was mainly about academia, across all disciplines, touching upon politics, esoterica, and more. But that was a Numbers file, and I ran out of space.
 

constant escape

winter withered, warm
Instead of starting a short lived thread entitled Independent Scholarship, I figured the thoughts could just as well go here.

First, what are the thoughts on autodidacticism? I take it to involve a self-guiding education, which doesn't entail that one refuse the teachings of previous humans, just that one navigate such teachings on their own, in a way forming their own curriculum.

That way, we don't throw out the baby with the bath water. The bath water being the inheritance of disciplinarily constrained and perhaps ossified or obsolete learning practices, and the baby being the expertise accrued by experience. Its possible to salvage the latter without being bogged down by the former.

And frankly I don't think a thorough and pandisciplinary autodidacticism was possible before the internet, but debate is welcome there. The closest thing, I suppose, would involve basically living at the library.

As it is, the educationary materials are there, more or less for free, to be absorbed and strung together by the internet autodidact, a role of great potential, perhaps certain revolutionary potential. I'm still feeling out how well this can be connected into the kind of information-exploiting capitalist regime described by the likes of McKenzie Wark. I've used the term "cognitariat vanguard" to describe this kind of bourgeois cadre of independent internet autodidacts, with political sympathies toward the far left.

There could be something worth defining and elaborating there, but I'm still not sure.

Communist pipedreams aside, a sort of internet autodidactic praxis can still have serious merits - that is, a sort of metaguide for self-guidance.

Naturally I'm always inclined to make grand connections between grand projects, in this case a connection between a radical autodidacticism and a sort of proto-ubermensch type. Again, its tough to make definitive claims regarding such things, but I think it is possible to extend this kind of program beyond an autodidactic scholarship, and into the territory of awakening a kind of gnosticism, terraforming the psychic culture into one that may prove hospitable for the mass production of higher beings, atheistic messiahs.

So to lay aside the more bombastic and highfalutin elements, the central inquiry here is regarding the optimal practices for autodidactic internet scholarship, a kind of post-university scholarship. The degrees will remain exclusive to those who can afford them, but the educational potential is now, as far as I can tell, in the commons - even if we restrict ourselves to legal practices.

And I can take greater pains, if need be, to sever the more fantastic and hubristic prospects from the more realistic ones - but I do believe that ones reach should always extend ones grasp, so long as such a tendency can be reconciled with inner peace, which I believe it can.
 

constant escape

winter withered, warm
What would a "metaguide" consist of? Perhaps not a term I would stick with, but it would largely consist of a set of best practices, informed by the feedback of whoever cares to engage.

As it is, my practices center around lectures on youtube. I've personally set the lower bound at 30 minutes, so almost every video I watch is over that. That is in the interest of exercising attention span, seeing as such an ability is otherwise constantly dwindling and threatened by atrophy.

More specifically, my efforts are now largely centered around ever more focused and invested viewings of these lectures, which I mentioned in the coming authoritarianism thread as a fusion of work and play. In my case, its not really work in a strict sense, because I am choosing to use my free time this way, and because I'm not generating any revenue from it.

That said, the basic principle of a willful channeling of libdinal energy seems to apply here. One may not consider a series of biology lectures to be invigorating stuff, but I believe it is possible to willfully shed a passionate light on such material, in the interest of minimizing the effort to stay focused. Its easier to remain focused on something that you are passionate about, no?

Well what if such libidinizing forces, the internal-outward psychic forces that determine what activities appeal to your passions, are not only plastic but manipulable by the will? My nebulous evidence suggests that is the case, and frankly Im pumped to explore the potential further.
 

constant escape

winter withered, warm
So how does one willfully harness and steer the otherwise unconsciously operating libidinizing forces?

Again, in the authoritarianism thread, I mentioned a sort of balancing act of phobia and philia, a willing-into-existence of a phobia away from X and a philia toward Y.

It can also, at least to some extent, be considered in terms of habit formation and habit breaking. First, define some prospective habit that you think would prove conducive to the kind of progress you would like to make. Then its a matter of steering yourself, via negative and positive feedback, into alignment with that habit. If and when you reach such an alignment, you may be able to settle into that habit and turn on cruise control.

In my case, I used negative feedback (guilt) to steer myself away from watching videos that didn't contribute to the kind of progress I prospectively deemed worth making. All of this is in the larger effort of prototyping myself in general terms, in the interest of elaborating a praxis that can be transposed from me onto someone else - ideally, anyone else, but I'm not nearly there yet.

Once such a habitual equilibrium is attained, you can gradually diminish the guilt-based negative feedback. In my case, once I got into a comfortable rhythm of watching videos that serious strain my cognitive ability, I no longer had to punish myself for watching unchallenging or non-constructive content. Why? Because I am hardly ever watching such non-constructive content now - so there is almost no need to inflict negative feedback.

No need to punish unfavorable behavior when that behavior only occurs in marginal and benign capacities. This is the saving grace here. Instead of taking on a perpetually self-punishing psychic ontology, one only need to administer decisive and short spans of such negative feedback in order to reach the desired equilibrium, in order to establish the desired habit. At that point, again, cruise control can be turned back on, and you can redirect your efforts elsewhere.
 
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