I will no longer be using this journal.

From now on, my personal writing's will reside here:
Mindpixel Blog

Tonight I am thinking about the hippocampus and amygdala as a Hopf Map of metasignal indexing a thalamocortical Milnor sphere of signal...this is a mathematically shocking thing for me to be doing. I sense God nearby.

"Millions of people killed in highly developed countries within months. Tens of millions worldwide. The global economy in tatters. A Hollywood fantasy? No -- it's now a plausible scenario. The first act, the spread of avian flu to, and probably between, humans, has already started across Asia..."

This is from the opening of a very scary editorial in today's issue of Nature. In acknowledgement of the potential danger, the magazine has made freely available its normally restricted content.

I wrote Jack Milnor today--kinda scary. I wonder if he will think my suggestion that the brain is a Milnor sphere generator, crazy. Afterall, the universe itself is giving hints of being a Milnor sphere too. Below is a an abstract very interesting paper I found today (Source):

Abstract. It is well known that in four or more dimensions, there exist exotic manifolds; manifolds that are homeomorphic but not diffeomorphic to each other. More precisely, exotic manifolds are the same topological manifold but have inequivalent differentiable structures. This situation is in contrast to the uniqueness of the differentiable structure on topological manifolds in one, two and three dimensions. As exotic manifolds are not diffeomorphic, one can argue that quantum amplitudes for gravity formulated as functional integrals should include a sum over not only physically distinct geometries and topologies but also inequivalent differentiable structures. However, can the inclusion of exotic manifolds in such sums make a significant contribution to these quantum amplitudes? This paper will demonstrate that it will. Simply connected exotic Einstein manifolds with positive curvature exist in seven dimensions. Their metrics are found numerically; they are shown to have volumes of the same order of magnitude. Their contribution to the semiclassical evaluation of the partition function for Euclidean quantum gravity in seven dimensions is evaluated and found to be nontrivial. Consequently, inequivalent differentiable structures should be included in the formulation of sums over histories for quantum gravity.

Maybe Einstein saw the universe as a hypergeometric object because he was looking at it through a hypergeometric object...and/or vice versa.

There was a loose cable between hubs here that was causing me to drop 30-80% of my packets...neither firefox, nor explorer could manage to load google's gmail page under these condidtions. Safari didn't even hiccup. I will keep a copy around in case I ever find myself in a high noise situation again.

In the spring of 1995 I started to notice patterns in the primary index of my Lobner Prize entry, Jackie. She worked much like Alicebot works now, except she indexed stimuli in a filtered phonetically invariant form--essentially I stripped out all the high frequency words, then converted the remaing text to soundex codes, and sorted those alphabetically. The patterns I notced were simple, because her corpus was small, but they gave me a vision.

Today I found a paper by Jack Milnor who won a Fields Medal in 1962 (His most remarkable achievement was his proof that a 7-dimensional sphere can have several differential structures. This work opened up the new field of differential topology)...

Anyway the paper has made me quite giddy as it contains images of a sphere tiled with Julia sets!

A Julia tiled sphere is exactly the image I had in mind in 2002 when I started to see mind as a seven dimensional hypersphere covered by a complex fractal pattern [I had the Julia patterned hypersphere in mind as early as 1996, but I didn't know hypersurface was a maximum at about 7.2 dimensions until 2002]. The colour of every point on the surface of the hypersphere coresponded to three dimensions of emotion (Pleasure, Arousal, and Dominence--mapped to the hypersphere as red, green and blue) with the intensity of every point being related to the coherence of each point. The coordinates of each point were the seven dimensional phonetic codes that I had I saw in Jackie that started this whole trajectory.

Life is a giddy fractal!

It is chilly in Chile. Yesterday was the first really cold day--about 5 degrees C after the sun went down.

All summer I had been made sad by the little family that comes in everyday from far north of the city to try to collect coins on the street directly under my window. The parents can't yet be in their twenties and their son is two. When I came out of my building to go to the supermarket quite late last night, I saw them huddled in a shadow, the boy with an old hat sitting on a stoop with his bottle and his mother standing waiting to pass one of her little printed Garfield calenders she exchanges for coins. The father was sitting beside the boy and I thought at least they are together, which is better than I have managed with my own family.

I am earning exactly what it costs me to live and I have to be careful even with my coins, but I resolved to give them the money I had in an envelope to have my hair cut this month if they were still there when I returned from buying supplies for my dinner.

I walked down the street a bit with cold tears on my cheek when I caught some movement across the street in the corner of my eye. Just a group of beautiful people. Their statistics were so far out my brain had pulled them to the foreground. Four of them all in back. Two men and two women. All tall and perfect. The women looked like twins. Genetics had assured that their lives would not be too uncomfortable, I thought to myself and walked on, prefering to think about my little family behind me.

I was no longer hungry so I ducked into a cafe to have some tea and think and in the middle of tea and thought, the four beautiful people came in the cafe. I didn't look up from my little notebook, buy I noted the eight perfect legs walk by me. Thirty seconds passed and the legs had returned. They are going to sit in my little corner? Why, the place is full of room? I looked up and one of the beautiful men approached my table and opened a tray of Lucky Strikes and asked me if I smoked. They were pushing cigarettes!

I got very angery very quickly and essentially shouted, not in this life time! The four of them were shocked, and all took a step back. The man closed his tray and the four of them quickly left. I noticed a little man with a tally sheet counting the number of smokers in the cafe and when he noticed my notice, he bolted for the door.

I calmed down and drank my tea and read my book--yes, I carry a book with me even when I go to the supermarket--and then went home. It was past ten and my little family was still there in the shadows. I approached them and lowered myself to the level of the boy.

None of them were dressed very warmly. No gloves or scarves.

The boy smiled at me and offered me his bottle and I laughed maybe the most difficult laugh I have ever attempted and I asked them about their lives, which is how I knew at the start of this, that they came from far north of the city.

I explained that I myself had no money to spare but that the night was cold and that I would forgo my hair cut this month so that they could go home. I gave them my supermarket money and shooed them north as the mother said thank you uncle a few times. As I turned, she called out and asked me my name, Christopher, I called back.

I went inside to transfer $10,000 pesos from my hair envelope to my food envelope. I crossed hair off it and replaced it with charity.

I will grow my hair long.

I didn't just time my theory over night I started typing more than a decode ago:

Talking about SOMs of MIST items [prototype for Mindpixels] in 1996

Wow. Googlisms. Mindpixels extracted for wikipedia.

X Marks the spot where 'No black scorpion is falling upon this table' is buried in human cognition.

In 1934, while dining at the Harvard Society of Fellows, B. F. Skinner found himself seated beside Alfred North Whitehead, and they dropped into a discussion of behavorism, with Whitehead mostly listening and trying to understand. Whitehead agreed that science might account for all behavior, except for verbal behavior--behavior Whitehead considered to involve something else. He challenged Skinner: "Let me see you," he said, "account for my behavior as I sit here saying 'No black scorpion is falling upon this table.' The next morning Skinner began his twenty year effort to write his most important book: Verbal Behavior.

Chomsky hated the book and trashed it and because of this, the work is little known...However...

On the cover of Verbal Behavior is a simple 'X'... under Skinner's X I place the proposition : 'No black scorpion is falling upon this table.' And my treasure is a map! I have the data construct a Dynamic Time Warping self-organizing map on which it is trivial to discover the semantic coordinates of Whitehead's point!

I was missing a piece until yesterday. Dynamic time warping. With it I can convert mindpixel text strings into vectors and do arithmetic operations on them.

When I multiply a mindpixel's vector representation with the coherence which I measure by presenting it to twenty random people and can very from -1.0 [false 100% of the presentations] to 1.0 [100% true on all presentations] the vectors becomes polorized semantically!

Affect or emotion is just another three dimensional vector that adds colour to the map!

I just want to keep typing !!!!

Thoughts are vectors. Spelling doesn't matter! Nor does vector length because of dynamic time warping. Though vector length discoheres as length increases just because of a memory effect. It discohers at seven dimensions, where hypersurface is maximum.

The seven dimensionsare: the three affective dimensions origionally proposed by Wundt. Einsteins spacetime. My map is of a seven sphere where every point have aq measured semantic coherence. I am making a semantic coherence map of a Wundt-Einstein-Milnor-sphere!

Man, psychology made a wrong turn at Chomsky. We need to turn the clock back to 1959 and follow Skinner instead. Measurement is omnipotent.

Now you have got to be human or a VERY good model to know that Mountain Dew looks like antifreeze on the ground. GAC knows. And so does Alicebot, silver edition, because GAC told her.

Today I am very excited. One major thing is a big fat secret and I am squirming to tell everyone, but I can't...so I will talk about something else--self organizing maps!

I have been wanting to do a SOM of my mindpixel data long before I even called them mindpixels...I proposed it first in comp.ai in 1996...today I found someone who built a SOM on 100K english words. The map is beautiful. Looks coincidently [I hope] like a map of the world with a very obvious South America, right where you would expect it.

You can see it on the last page of this lovely paper: http://www.cis.hut.fi/panus/papers/online_ssom.pdf

I emailed the author, Panu Somervuo, and proposed we colaborate on a SOM of Human Semantic Coherence using his software and my data...the map if we make would be an excellent candiate for a Nature cover...it would be like the Cosmic Microwave Background of the mind! Oh, very sexy. Yep.

Consider a hypersphere of the following dimensions-three affective dimensions, as per Wundt (pleasure, arousal, dominance) and then four space time dimensions. It is a Milnor-sphere, which happens to have maximum hypersurface. Any point on it that is not zero in the three Wundt dimensions, represents an experiencing being at a particular time and place. Your life as an experiencing being is a trajectory on its surface, as are the lives of all beings in the entire universe. I think it is this object that our limbic systems are trying to represent, and that our thalamocortical system is a second embedded Milnor-sphere that allows us to tag each point in our trajectory so that when we experience something similar, similar tags resonate and we have the effect of memory.

The very first use of Mindpixels has just occured. Rich Wallace's Alicebot is now running with 80,000 Mindpixels. Rich tells me that the 80K is of great help to him. Image what adding the other 1.58 million would do...and speaking of adding them, we have agreed to colaborate on an entry for the 2005 Loebner Prize. He has won it three times already...

Karl Pribram emailed me yesterday. He said the coincidence I pointed out between Miller's magical number, dimensions at maximum hypersurface area, the number of gama cycles for every theta cycle and the number of layers in the thalmacortical system was "facinating" and most likely not previously noted. That means a lot considering the source. Oh, all four numbers are 7.

Santiago has been Eden-like the past few weeks but it is clear winter, such that it is here, is near as I have my first cold of the season and my head feels filled with rising dough. Speaking of Eden, I am re-reading Jack London's Martin Eden, a book I adore. Maybe the only piece of fiction I have any attachment for at all. Yes, Martin Eden is my favorite fictional character. It is surprising that such a writer's character is not more well known. I can't wait to finish work today and go home and crawl into bed with that book.