epistemology

To produce spiritual states of mind, would there be certain neuroanatomical objectives or goals for invoking them? If you control your mind, your motor faculties, your cognitive patterns, aren't you influencing electrical and energetic flows within your body, spine and brain? So, if you understand your brain as a computer with complex, biological transistors, then changing the electrical and energetic flows, globally, regionally and circuituitously absolutely has an effect on how they regulate themselves. Further, this is a discussion of neuroanatomy as it relates to spirituality in general, with a strong focus on Buddhist meditation. Christianity and other religious traditions have practices which can evoke similar and potentially identical spiritual states of mind. Some kinds of prayer, especially when extended, force you to open your heart and surrender yourself and your mind to God.

Tatiana tells me they're at the Denver Comic Con to get ready for the San Diego Comic Con, where the Orphan Black cast is doing a panel. She asked me to come up with some questions so she could practice. After one generic question, I came up with a really good one: 'Which one of the clones would be best prepared for the Zombie Apocolypse?' We continued talking about all the things: linguistics, philosophy, post-structuralism, movies, etc. We talked about the Singularity and it's implications for society. I told her about mass NSA surveillance about a week before the Snowden story broke. We talked about using 3D filming techniques in 2D films. She told me about scenes coming up in 'The Wolf of Wall Street' and asked several questions about quaaludes, lol.

Two different paths for the 21st century with regard to availability of information. Again, these separate paths lead to the same place: in several decades, we'll have a communication infrastructure where it's impossible to control the desemination of information. Therefore, we'll reach a world where it's not possible to censor information, but in the meantime, we will transition through a period of time where governments and corporations have strong incentives to censor and attack ideas. So, we can either decide to embrace a controlled transition towards this destined future world where ideas cannot be censored or we can trudge painfully through this intermediate world where governments and corporations try their hardest to censor information.

Your rate of learning is a function of (1) everything you know (2) your ability to interrelate your knowledge to model new things (3) the proficiency of each base cognitive function and (4) your ability to coordinate those cognitive functions. Therefore, by improving on any of these four points, you will accelerate your rate of learning.

Data and metadata about functions and language in particular is likely found all over the brain. And information related to other faculties of the mind is likely similarly sharded all over the brain. This would help achieve dynamic behavior, as it would allow multiple regions of the brain to sort of map functionality together. But doing so would also contribute to efficiency and redundancy.

I love learning new things. I get to experience beginner's mind again and it gives me a chance to reflect on the process I use to learn. By actively observing beginner's mind, you can refamiliarize yourself with its nature, so that you might be able to partially apply this state of mind when you need it. By introspecting on this process, I hope to continually improve it. I try to approach new activities and skills from a multitude of perspectives and I like to examine the similarities between everything.