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PostPosted: Sat Oct 01, 2011 7:50 am 
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Joined: Mon Sep 26, 2011 9:10 pm
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Here are my brainstorm notes for a website idea. The point is to develop mathematical definitions and models so that the spiritual community can persuade the scientific community that there are in fact better ways to do things and that here is rigorous proof. Maybe not exactly that since it's got a very broad scope and the ideas it will produce can be used in a lot of areas. Let me know your thoughts.

Quote:
Tenets:

1) Do no harm

2) All perspectives are valid

3) Have respect and understanding for all things (Universal Un-conditional Love)

4) The work herein does not overrule our better judgement - obviously, but in case people think "oh know what if your conclusion says we must do something grossly wrong". Also to prevent any AI from running amok.

Words of wisdom:
1) Wise man always changing his beliefs.
2) Ignorance vs. illusion of knowledge
3) David Hilbert on axiomatization of a subject.


Open Problems and Ideas:
1) Mathematical modelling of economies doesn't take into account each individuals perspective, and is totally disconnected from peoples' collective idea of what doing no harm should be (give examples). We need a way to account for these abstract ideas that is scientifically and mathematically rigorous, as not everyone goes for the spiritual side of things. For example, say one of your goals in transforming the current economy of the world into a healthier economy, is to minimize the amount of harm done. But what is the definition of harm? What is a mathematical definition of harm? What work has been done to develop a "harm metric"? Will the amount of harm in some scenario be a numerical value or will it be some non-trivial mathematical structure. Is harm an ordered relation (poset, or w/e) on the set of all possible economies (e.g.)? And so on... How does one calculate harm?

2) Would a mutual fund for the poor help heal the world? Basically a non-profit open source project that starts with donations and splits all money made in investment markets among all people equally or based on some metric, like the less money you have the more you get! This ties into the fact that not everyone is aware as financially successful people about how to invest. This let's people remain ignorant about the insanity that is the world of investment markets and spend their time doing something more productive for society or whatever they like. This will temper the greed of the rich, who seem to think they deserve more money just because they have money. No man in the world could work hard enough his entire life to justify having billions dollars while another man who breaks his back working honestly, barely makes enough to survive, let alone has any time to learn about investing.

3) What are the fundamental flaws in our current economy, like ones mentioned above? Another is that people are working more hours for another person's interests. It's as though society provides nothing better over wild tramping since a person apparently has to work way more nowaday than we had too way long ago when our only concerns were food. "Scientific progress" seems to entail human blood sacrifice and sacrifice of the good parts of life. A totally backwards system which could possibly be doing the opposite what is its name.

4) Axiomatization of the tenets and rationalization for and against them.
....1) Why are all perspectives valid?
....2) What is consciousness
....3) Accounts of meditators and psychedellic users and spiritual philosphers
....4) Should we axiomatize them or just keep them imprecise?

5) Generalization of causes of problems in the world, e.g. everyone always trying to convert other poeple to their belief system. Generalization of morals of the world.

6) Morality. If everyone in the world caged bears for their bile, it would probably be moral and we would all be unconscious of the harm that many of us in the world are aware of in that scenario. So does the collective consciousness define what is moral? (Do we need this?)

7) How will we take into account the consciousness of all people to make decisions in our mathematical models? A voting system? How do we account for people who are unable to vote?

8) Well-being of this project and Information War. The government has personality management software. What algorithms do they use? Is this related to grammar extraction? (Can grammar extraction be a tool used in this project?) How do we defend against such bots? Should access to certain data on the site be restricted to identified-only members, the public, or simply registered users? Should P2P technology be used to guarantee continuity of the project in case of catastrophe?

9) Analysis of similar work by others (like Aguilar's Axiomatic Economics). What ideas can we borrow? What flaws were inherent in their work and how do we overcome them?



Site work that needs to be done:
1) Make tenets more precise
.....1) Rational arguments for and against the tenets
....2) What other tenets are needed?
3) Website
....1) Related books, links, forum, front page, site name
....2) Will people understand what this site is about after visiting the front page?
....3) What is the site about?
4) Promotion
5) Information backup
6) Site security and preservation
7) Goals of the community
8) License to prevent profiteering off the work


Applications of collected works:
1) Modelling of economies, society, psychology, utilitarianism, (Asimov's) psychohistory, voting systems, metrics for happiness, standard of living, etc.
2) How best to heal the world
3) Scientific enough to convince those who need proof, what people should do


Related work:
1) CTMU
2) Bitcoin-like voting systems
3) Axiomatic Economics by Aguilar
4) Mathematically Perfected Economy
5) Max Igan's work
6) Truth Movement



The above is not very well organized. The tenets and a few other sections will be on the front page, the other things are notes.

Explanation: so the website is going to be a place where people come together who've wondered about applying math to the world's issues. To start with, people need to agree to some fundamental tenets which are what everybody has or should have. Maybe we could send them to Max's YT channel to learn the why of the tenets in addition to an essay on the site and a forum thread that discusses each tenet. The tenets are like axioms in math. At the beginning of a mathematical work you have a list of them. Things are then derived starting only with the axioms, logic, proof technique, and other proven areas of math. Physics also has axiom-like objects called laws. The tenets are not precise or completely stated, but just there to jump-start the project. The tenet "do no harm" limits the universe of discourse to theories that attempt to do no harm, and also requires that a theory define "harm".

There will be a forum where people freely share ideas and they're not bound by logic. As my college physics book says one must be rational to understand current physics but to advance physics you need irrational thought (it then goes on to teach physics and nothing about irrational thought). There will be another area of the site that is a repository of projects, all sorts, each person can choose how mathematically rigorous they want to be since great ideas can emerge from non-mathematical thought. There are so many projects that need to be fleshed out. For instance, if someone develops a model that requires as parameters the conscious decisions of everyone who is able to vote, then there needs to a verifiable voting system project. Bitcoin is a verifiable, unhackable currency algorithm that someone made a while ago. If you google "bitcoin voting system" you'll see that people are already working on one! So you see, we use modularity to break things up, this allows the members of one project to assume that a true voting system exists and will be available, greatly reducing their project's scope. Hence their project's goals are more attainable!

It's a huge undertaking, but I think a lot of people will find it interesting because it's a very unexplored, fertile area of understanding.

If you post your ideas for the project, I'll add them to the notes. Whoever is webdev savvy and can put this info up on a Joomla or Drupal site and set up a forum, please do! Any volunteers? If not, I will get to it at some point.

:cheers:


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PostPosted: Sat Oct 01, 2011 10:12 pm 
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I'm New Here

Joined: Mon Sep 26, 2011 9:10 pm
Posts: 11
No replies? I would like to know your first impressions then. Is it obviously a crazy idea? If so, please explain, because what's obvious to you is not to me.

I brain storm when I can, allowing many breaks and not thinking things through too deeply because this leads to wasted time. It's better to share ideas as you have them and let people point out flaws than it is for a few people to kill their brains coming up with something that is in the end fundamentally flawed usually.

:soap:

Take for instance Chris Langon's CTMU theory. Granted the man is probably 100x more knowledgeable about math than I am, but he didn't see that he could bounce his ideas off other people from the start. Let's take a look at a quote from his CTMU Primer page:
Quote:
Reality Principle - The real universe contains all and only that which is real. The reality concept is analytically self-contained; if there were something outside reality that were real enough to affect or influence reality, it would be inside reality, and this contradiction invalidates any supposition of an external reality (up to observational or theoretical relevance).


Firstly, it's not very clear in his use of "up to". I've seen it used like A is the same as B "up to addition by constant" or "up to isomorphism" in math. But here to me, it's not that clear. Secondly, he uses the word "real" without defining it, and in fact reality is different for every perspective. And before deciding for the world what is real, the man really should learn to meditate or experiment safely with psychedelics, i.e. something that will make him re-question his basic assumptions.

So, he took the approach that his been used by many academic researches for centuries, to go off on his own and philosophize and later present it to the world. What drives someone to do this? What drives a mathematician to keep their work private or among only a few associates until it is finished? People could learn things together. How much more powerful of a theory would CTMU be if it were an open source community driven project?

I'm trying to remove my own ego from this work as much as possible, which is hard from a state of fear, fear that you'll be forgotten when you die or that someone will gain from you're work while you're living homeless, or whatever the fear may be. It takes very few rational steps to realize that doing it without ego and only using your ego when the work requires, is the best approach for humanity and ourselves. Of course it takes just as few steps to rationalize the other way. But in the first case, we have the opportunity for someone to shed light on such questions, where as if we thought too deeply ourselves, we're kind of re-inventing the wheel if someone already has come up with the same result we would stop at.

This project has the potential to expand many peoples' minds exponentially. When we come to reasons on our own, it's as if we're letting a door close in our mind, and we sometimes never consider leaving that door open with an "i don't know". Or we pick an answer based on our fears.

So enough of the soap boxing.

Keep in mind that this forum thread is the seed of the project. Whatever ideas are posted here are to be considered as if the site is already up. So if you have any light bulbs go off, mathematical, psychological, or whatever, then please share.

Here are some ideas. This is an idea on how one can present their ideas from all perspectives and potentially has inherent in it an easy-to-understand data structure that could be used in the mathematical side of things. What do we do when we reason naturally, i.e. when we're not blissed-out or meditating? We attempt to think of all likely scenarios and their causes and effects. We cull some of the scenarios based on our own perspective and our fundamental morals.

Well, using ourselves as inspiration, why not structure ideas / perspectives / votes like this:

Choice 1)
....Result 1)
........Result 1)
........Result 2)
....Result 2)
Choice 2)
....Result 1)
....Result 2)

i.e., a tree-like structure that can go arbitrarily deep, and at each node in the tree (these are the results or choices) we give an estimated probability of occurence, that is based on our perspective. This probability would be what a voter uses to tell us their perspective. This may not be simply a number but some complex yet-undefined mathematical structure. And it may be based on others' perspectives and so on.

Now, it would be nice to include the perspective of every atom of the universe, but for practical reasons, unless someone proves otherwise, this can't be done at the moment. And reason against it would be that if we want to consider the perspective of a blade of grass, it would be people who choose to incorporate that perspective, and so that choice is based on people's perspective. In a similar fashion all perspectives are incorporated based on the consciousness of the people.

For an exercise in this, the next time you're in a thoughtful mood, give this a try. Instead of cancelling possibilities, write down each one you can think of no matter how bizarre, and underneath each write your own perceived consequences and go as deeply on each one as you have time. You don't have to attach probability - I don't even know if that would be a good idea - it's just a poor attempt to mathematize things.

Now imagine a system where everyone's reasons are exposed for people to understand. 1) You have the opportunity to re-evaluate yourself based on others' perspectives, which you respect. 2) It gives others a chance to understand your perspective. 3) And this is the exciting part, this may lead to a deterministic algorithm for calculating abstract terms like "harm" based on the structures people come up with and the values they assign to things.

Should we let biology, chemistry, religion have their own perspectives since they are so powerful? Answer is no - see blade of grass example - the tendency to value a certain perspective higher than others will naturally arise out of the perspective of every person on the planet. If a group of people base their perspectives greatly on science, then so will be their perspective, and "the perspective of science" will be an abstract object (for lack of a better term) that exists within the "perspective structures" within the collection of all perspective structures.

Well, let me know what you guys think. I will try to test this idea out myself and make a post to see what it looks like for something completely random that happens in my day, though ideally the perspectives will be toward larger issues, but we can have fun can't we?

Remember, let your ideas flow, think of them for a while and let them go. And if you fear losing them, simply write them down! This can be hard though if you're stoned. Solution is then to not take them too seriously, or use an audio recording device. Just throwing that out there.

This is exciting! :D


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PostPosted: Sun Oct 02, 2011 2:25 am 
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I'm New Here

Joined: Mon Sep 26, 2011 9:10 pm
Posts: 11
Now that I'm down from my energy drink high, this seems like a horrible idea. My perspective has changed, LOL :D

:excited:

I found some interesting research out there related to these ideas.

:axe3:


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