The strange thing is: later that week I visited Seth Godin’s blog, and saw that earlier on Sunday and Monday he had posted a couple of items about flutes. He was puzzled by having seen two separate commuters in traffic that day, who were both playing the flute while driving. Later someone sent him a painting that depicted a man playing the flute in his car. He was a little disturbed about this and half-jokingly speculated that there was some worldwide underground movement of flute-playing drivers.

Even weirder, is that lately I have been listening to Seth Godin’s marketing audiobooks “Small is the New Big” and “All Marketers are Liars” very often. I really like his way of looking at the world. He does his own reading in the audiobooks, and his voice doesn’t have the generic professional voiceover person tone that can put me to sleep.

I wonder if listening to his voice through my iPod for hours on end, and getting in tune with his way of thinking, somehow enabled a transfer of this bizarre flute motif into my mind? Yes, I know that sounds pretty wacky, but come on: how often would you expect to be thinking about a subject like flute playing while at the same time an author you listen to is writing about recurring flutes in his daily life?

If (and I do say IF) some sort of telepathy is the explanation, I just wish that something more practical would have been the subject.

This is a simplified description of McMoneagle’s idea; he describes it further in the context of the collective subconscious, which would address questions like “If that’s true, then how can someone predict something beyond their physical lifespan” or “What if the person being tested is never told the correct answer”.  

It’s quite a good way of explaining the mechanism not only behind remote viewing, but also the more spontaneous deja vu.  However, I would like to propose an alternate explanation for deja vu, just speaking as someone with no training in neurology or cognitive sciences.  It revolves around the idea that parts of our minds may operate at different speeds.   Typically, one would think that all areas of the mind would be closely synchronized in terms of timing.  However, what if one part of your mind perceived some events at a slightly different pace than the rest of your mind?  A thought process could be delayed by a second or so, for whatever reason, maybe a glitch in the mental software.  

Example: you experience some new event, such as having a conversation about an obscure topic with someone for the first time.  Most of your mind is processing this conversation in real-time, and as each segment of dialogue progresses it’s filed into the category of “memory”, something that’s happened in the past.  But let’s say one part of your mind is slightly delayed.  As it’s catching up, it starts to perceive the parts of the conversation that have already passed by, but this part of your mind experiences the events as “new”.  This leads to the funny feeling of “remembering” a new event as its unfolding, because the rest of your mind considers it to me something in the past.

I don’t know if there’s any proof that all parts of your mind experience time in the same way.  Otherwise, this seems like a reasonable explanation for why deja vu occurs.  

If you’d like to learn more about Joseph McMoneagle and remote viewing in general here is his Wikipedia entry: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_McMoneagle

It’s difficult to do this however, because of the interference of the ego. Often a person’s insecurities and racing thoughts will get in the way of clear thinking. This is especially the case when interacting with others because of the need to observe and understand other people’s reactions in real-time.

One method I have found which can help the thought process operate more effectively is to speak using a robot-like voice. Imagine that you are a robot (or artificial intelligence such as HAL 9000 or the Enterprise main computer) who has been tasked with a goal. Then speak to yourself using a very monotone, measured voice regarding the possible options. You might feel a little bit silly doing this, but you will find that it becomes difficult to get otherwise emotional when you force yourself to speak like this.

This method will not only allow you to consider various scenarios in a more organized manner, but the steady pace of thought will permit your intuition to contribute valuable insights to the process. It can also be used during intense discussions with other people, where careless words could result in emotional outbursts and result in arguments and failure to achieve the objective of the communication.

I suggest you try this method for yourself and observe the results. Perhaps as we move towards the future, more of humanity will see the value in approaches such as this which support more selective rational thinking.

“Within every adversity is an equal or greater opportunity.”

What could be the opportunity that springs from the adversity of traveling through the television wasteland? I’m not talking about the rare gems of “quality programs” in the fields of garbage. I mean: what greater purpose could be served through the saturation of the populace with junk programming?

Speaking as a civilian, I think it’s possible that an answer can be found in what happens at boot camp when people join the service. From what I understand, a lot of emphasis is placed on seemingly pointless things like making your bed 100% correctly and marching around in formation all day. Now, anyone halfway familiar with war movie cliches will recognize that although the recruits may gripe and moan about these things, eventually they will realize that the old drill sergeant was just trying to get them prepared for the real deal, by instilling in them a maniacal level of attention to detail and team discipline.

So, if we are repulsed by the senseless images, sounds and thoughts being dumped into a billion human minds, let us consider that this is merely boot camp. The ability to affect consciousness by technical means on this scale is an extremely recent phenomenon. Why should anyone be surprised that:

a) the early attempts are crude and tasteless,
b) humans need to be trained to be receptive to information injected into their minds in this way, and
c) training needs to begin with the basics, literally meaning the basest human needs such as sex/power/fame

Continual refinement of the means by which human attention is aggregated and focused should lead to a point where all minds can be set to operate in near unison. When this occurs, the television and mass media that we see now as being utterly without value, as pointless as making a bed perfectly, can be seen as a blessing and a gift, a power to be used when the time is right, by the right wielder, and for the right purpose.

The question naturally arises: what is the right purpose? Maybe the creation of the hive mind is itself the goal. We won’t know until we try.

This sad story still wasn’t the trigger for my game abstinence, though. I had been noticing for a while that I was finding fewer and fewer games that I enjoyed, even though I was buying more than ever (usually one or two every couple of weeks). It was almost like I was desperately searching for a high that would bring back the fun of the old classics like Ultima IV: Quest of the Avatar, the original Civilization, or Master of Orion. MOO nearly got me fired from my first real job when I stumbled into the office at noon after a post-dawn session purging the galaxy of the Meklar and Klackons.

No, the real reasons for this change are two-fold: in general, regular brainwave entrainment exercises have altered my thinking as I wrote about earlier; more specifically, a simple suggestion from Steve Pavlina’s blog about modifying your environment to help achieve desired goals.

Basically, I just deleted all the game-related Windows desktop shortcuts, which had taken up the entire display, and also deleted game-related sites from my browser favorites.

The difference this has made is astounding. I have not even been tempted to start up a game since I’ve done this. I used to check game sites many times every day. Now I realize how utterly stupid a lot of that was; it was just a habit that was reinforced by being faced with constant reminders of games games games.

I still love PC games. But now I realize that I was just robotically buying, playing and reading about them even when they were not really fun. The thought of all the time I wasted makes me sick.

I have read that once you do something for 21 days, then that is a key milestone because it means that you’ve installed a new habit or broken an old one (I have no idea if this is true or not). After 60 days without any games, I think I understand how to control this hobby and make it fun again. I’m going to restrict myself to fixed sessions of games that I really enjoy, like Rome: Total War and World of Warcraft. The great thing is, even after I’ve decided to give myself permission to play games again, I don’t feel an urge to start one up right away. I think I can even wait for Medieval 2: Total War to come out before I start again, and I’ll be free of worrying about future Mountain Dew-related “accidents”.

Also, thanks to Swiecki’s Blog for including my post about setting up WordPress on Windows in their latest tech-blog carnival. Swiecki is 15-years-old, I sure wish I had been the kind of active person who would organize and run a blog carnival when I was that age!

(Warning— amateur philosophizing ahead, please use caution!)

If there is 1 person in a room, most people would agree that there is 1 consciousness in the room. But if there are 5 people, does this mean there are 5 consciousnesses? And if 100 people, then 100 consciousnesses?

Another example: assume Earth is only populated world in universe. As Earth population grows, then consciousness is also growing in proportion? And if there was some catastrophe that eliminated all life on Earth, then the quantity of consciousness in the universe drops down to zero?

It doesn’t make sense!

Using a plural form of the word consciousness is awkward (consciousnesses? consciousnessii?). I wonder if this is a clue that there is no plural form of the thing itself.

Similarly, if all the people in the room leave the room, leaving only a chair and a table, then how many minds are left in the room?

To quote from Ervin Laszlo:

What we call “matter” is the aspect we apprehend when we look at a person, a plant, or a molecule from the outside; “mind” is the readout we get when we look at the same thing from the inside.

With no people in the room, then the chair and table still represent a form of consciousness, incomprehensible to use because its in a different manifestation that we aren’t in tune with, just like we cannot comprehend the mind of an insect.

The interesting thing is, if one assumes that there is no separate consciousness, isnt this how sociopaths think? They are unable to empathize with other people, to some extent they do not even believe that other people and their feelings exist. So does this mean that sociopaths have a better understanding of reality than the rest of us?

Maybe not, because sociopaths operate in the incorrect belief that they are the only island in the ocean, without believing that other islands exist. A more correct view would be that other islands exist, but understanding that each is connected underneath the ocean and their apparent separate nature is just an illusion.

When two entities are in conflict or competition with each other, the entity which has the ability to iterate through these loops faster has superiority. But the key is not that they are just doing more things faster. Instead, if one side can iterate through their loops fast enough, self-correcting on the basis of new observations each time, they can alter the context in which their opponents are making decisions. This is known as “getting inside the opponents loop”.

Once this occurs, the opponent will be making decisions and acting on the basis of a reality which no longer exists, leading to incorrect analysis and unexpected results. By forcing the opponent into an increasingly chaotic mode where they are constantly reacting to confusing signals, they will eventually be brought into a state of total collapse.

(This is my very simplified interpretation of Boyd’s concepts, I am still trying to understand them)

A question that arises from thinking of conflict in this way is:
in the current struggle which is variously called the “Global War on Terror” or “World War IV”, which side does a better job of cycling through OODA loops?

Links:
a comprehensive site related to Boyd - make sure to check out the “Patterns of Conflict” download, a 200-page PowerPoint presentation (also in PDF version). There is a lot of fascinating material on this site; if I had understood when I was younger that this was the type of work that could be done in the military, I would have been much more likely to join. Being a physical weakling and a bit of a worm, I opted not to do that.

Wikipedia entry for Colonel Boyd.

I was first exposed to Boyd’s concepts through an unlikely source, an MSDN article by Roger Sessions in which Sessions describes how lessons from Korean War jet-fighting can be applied to enterprise architecture.

Unfortunately the logs themselves are still very revealing, including people’s names, addresses, phone numbers and email addresses; essentially anything that an AOL user could have entered into the search form is in the log.

Think about it: could someone who knows you identify you by looking at your history of searches? Sure. A lot people do searches on their own names just out of curiosity. So then your name would appear in this log along with all other searches done by that searcher. Of course, we couldn’t tell for sure that it was you that searched for that rather embarrassing genre of porn, just that it was someone who knew you by name.

But let’s say that someone also knew that you took a vacation recently in Barbados and refinanced your mortgage this year. Well, what do you know, the public AOL logs show that “anonymized” user name 123456 happened to do a search for your name, that seedy website, “Barbados hotels” and “refinance mortgage”. Hmm.

Actually, this does not even depend on a person having done a search of their own name. I’ve done Google searches on people I’ve known just out of curiosity. If I had done these searches on AOL, then their names would appear in this published data. If one of those people found their name in this log, then they could easily reconstruct my identity based on the same Barbados and refinancing scenarios.

What were those AOL people thinking??? On the page where they released this file (cutely called AOL Research “Alpha”, apparently a little joke about Google’s beta applications), they were very proud of the fact they had obscured the identities of the searchers and shared this valuable data with the world. It seems like these engineers are narrowly focused on their technical achievement but utterly clueless about how their users (and the real people who are named in the published data) might react. Did the above scenario never occur to them or their managers?

I have read that in Google headquarters, they have a giant flatscreen display in the receptionist area showing office visitors real-time searches that are being done. But that isn’t quite the same thing as AOL releasing an entire set of data like this so thoughtlessly.

Update: it appears that the page on the AOL research site that hosted this file has been taken down. Maybe they can ask people to kindly ignore the files that they downloaded while it was available.

Update: CNET.com has examples of some really disturbing searches that hint at people’s identities. I’m sure CNET does not want to expose too much information for fear of getting sued themselves.

Update: TechCrunch.com, one of the sites that first broke this story, posted a link to a NY Times article with the first person positively identified from the data, some poor lady in Georgia. As noted earlier about the CNET report, I’m certain that the only reason more people haven’t been outed in public is because no blogger wants to end up getting sued. The NY Times got this lady’s permission to use her as an example it seems. But no doubt as this data gets around people will be outed among their circle of acquaintances or co-workers. I would not be surprised if eventually someone committed suicide from being mortified with embarrassment.

There is a segment of the technical world that thinks this is not a big deal in proportion to the credit card fraud and identity theft that occurs on a daily basis. But I suspect that, given a choice, these folks would rather have to go through the hassle of closing stolen credit card accounts, compared to having your name and reputation permanently associated with some of the truly demented stuff found in this data.

Watching this episode and the more pleasant “open ocean” episode that it’s paired with, I got wondering: what causes deep sea fish to be so terrifying (at least to this human), while dolphins are cute and sunny and get to play in the upper levels of their environment? Is it an evolutionary thing? Is it something from the subconscious, ie. knowledge that the bottom dwellers feed off of the dead?

Going down a weirder path: could it be related to some aspect of heaven and hell and the various other planes? Why should “below” be so commonly understood to imply evil, while “heaven” and the “higher planes” are conceptualized as being physically above us? Could those concepts find their origin in ancestoral memories of these creatures from when we all lived in the sea hundred of millions of years ago?

All I know for sure is that these things scare the bejeebus out of me.