Being Programmed, and Coding with AI

You may have heard me say that the brain is an AI. I'm watching a video of Dr. Bruce Lipton talking about the science of manifestation. In it, he provides an image of the brain in which the front tip is distinguished from the rest of the brain.  He explains that this front tip (maybe 10% of the mass) is where consciousness operates, and that the rest of it is "subconscious".  This is what I mean by "the brain is an AI". I'm excited to see the next parts in which he will talk about being a spirit. I recently read in the book Innercise by John Assaraf that the subconscious is like a gorilla, in other words, overpowering!

I started this post because of the basic sensitivity I feel when considering these things.  The fact is that it is relatively difficult to do anything differently from how the gorilla will do it. The programming is there and difficult to overcome. The spirit is willing, but the gorilla is overpowering... or so it seems. I believe the gorilla is overpowering, but it is dedicated to its code, and who writes the code? If you let them, everyone else will write your code, using your gorilla to program you in their own best interest, but you have to let them do it for that to happen.

If you write your own code, then you use your gorilla to figure out what code you need to write, and you write it every time you make a conscious decision. This is why I like doing hard things, like meditating for 15 minutes as soon as I get up in the morning.  Okay, that's not all that hard.  But I also like to invite people to criticize me so I can get better at whatever I'm doing, and I like running at least 5 miles three or four times a week, getting into really cold water, and avoiding junk food.  People say I am disciplined, and I suppose that's close.

I think of it more as "trained", but not trained by someone else.  I am trained by myself.  You, also, are trained by yourself. You wrote those programs running in your mind, or you let someone else write them.  Either way, they are your responsibility.  Congratulations, I hope! Or... pay more attention!

I have a question for you: Who are you, really? Who are you being, most of the time, yourself, that spirit that actually experiences everything to which you pay attention when you actually pay attention? Or are you, most of the time, being someone created by everyone else? Your individuality is important to me. If you're not being the person you design yourself to be, you're just another AI, something without much of a spirit, an NPC. I think you, also will like the you that you design better than the AI that you'll otherwise become.

Bee-ing

The prospect of panpsychism excites me. The first of the "Seven Natural Laws" is "All is mind." If experience is had by everything and obvious to humans only when it produces what we view as "coherent behavior", then there are a lot of "things" having experience which we don't perceive. You may be aware of your own subconscious, perhaps because it has done things for you which you soon recognized.  Perhaps you have never noticed it. I have noticed my own quite often, from dreams which helped me become a better person or understand things better, as well as giving up on trying to recall something and remembering it a few seconds or minutes or hours later.

If everything has experience, then why are we unable to be conscious of the things our subconscious minds do? As I think of it now, I don't think "the subconscious mind" does anything.  I think the brain does stuff that doesn't carry experiential value, and so we don't experience it. This theory of mine (and mind, my spellchecker pointed out) suggests that we can describe a difference between processes which have "experiential value" and those that don't.  So I thought of a bee.

Bees dance in order to share the location of food. They find the food and then return to the hive and tell their hivemates where it was. We don't know if they also share interesting details like "Watch out for animals" or "It smells kind of bad about halfway there." The prospect of being swatted or trampled or disliking what you smell is less important than finding something to eat, but it still has meaning. We attribute meaning to certain combinations of sensory input. The intersections and angles and line segments in A mean the letter A to you, and that causes some auditory neurons to play a sound in your head. It could be a meaningless sound, but it isn't, and that's because your brain learned how useful A is a long time ago. Your parents, teachers, siblings, friends, and others taught you about A (and B, C, etc.).

When you emerged from your mom's womb, you had a compulsion to suck if you felt something between your lips, and then swallow, and so you nourished yourself, but that was largely "subconscious", or, since I'm defending that there is no such thing, an automatic response created by thousands of years of trial and error by evolution to get mammals to nourish their young. But the recreation of the self (or something like the self) has experiential value.

My current level of rigor in defining the distinction between what has experiential value and what doesn't is quite low, but here it is: If a process is materially (macroscopically) affected by quantum effects, then it has experiential value. The thing that experiences has some say in how quantum wavefunctions collapse, and this is the essence of "free will". Can the bee choose whether or not to bother with the waggle dance? The further away the food, the longer the dance will take. Do bees ever make choices, or are they deterministic?

One of the practices which help me reduce my level of stress is mindfulness, and I enhance my ability to engage in mindfulness by meditating.  I'll do that soon, but I want to give this little essay a good ending first. You can join me! Mindfulness and meditation can both be part of your life by simply being present.  In the context of reading (or writing, for me) this essay, imagine you are a bee, tired of flying, knowing there's a little food a ways away, landing at the entrance to the hive.  It's warm in there, energizing even, and maybe, your little bee mind feels, energizing enough to help you waggle dance as you recall and imagine the trip you just flew so that your waggle dance lines up properly. Sit with it for a few minutes, pondering, wondering whether resting this way for too long might fade the memory too much to be effective.

Recognizing that memory fades might require more neurons than bees have. Certain things that AI (or blue whales, or groups of humans) can do might require more neurons than humans have. I need to go meditate.  Thanks for reading!

Dave's Narrative

Show Me
This is a request and a description

Part I
(in which I try to help you)

The opportunity here is to help each other. I face adversity because I advertised my desire to buy and sell crypto for a small premium or discount. My lawyer and I discussed the "Money laundering" issue:

I said "It's like with apples: There are people eating apples and people growing apples. The government sees that the people eating them have money that ends up in the hands of the people growing them, and concludes that there is a money transmission business between them." Nathan (my lawyer) said "Yes, but bitcoin is not apples. It's money."

I eventually got him to explain that he is presenting everything from the government's point of view, so what he meant is that the government views bitcoin as money.

I will continue using this metaphor, so keep it in mind. Some of the money that people use to buy apples is stolen, or extorted, or otherwise the proceeds of crime, and so the truckers and grocery stores are helping to launder the money those criminals spend (on apples). The apple industry doesn't need to worry about this because apples are not money.

Under this view that every bitcoin purchase or sale is potentially helping to launder money, my potential co-defendants include everyone I've ever traded with. We will have to wait until the contention that bitcoin traders are helping to launder money is resolved, or the government relieves me of the responsibility to remain incommunicado with my past trading partners before we communicate again. Or I could go back to jail and write y'all letters, but then I need your address, some way to maintain the muscles in my writing hand (since I'll be writing them with a short pencil), and whatever I tell you, I'll be telling them too.

Part II
(with info on how to stay informed)

If you use PACER or RECAP (part of courtlistener.com where documents that should be public can be made public by anyone willing to pay to get them from PACER), you will find two cases with "David Scotese" in them. The first is the prosecution of some cash that was mailed to me by Woody Ochle in 2017, who was under investigation for drug trafficking at some point. The documents I filed do not include all my research, and I forget the reference, so it's possible that I'm misremembering, but I wanted to know how to buy and sell crypto without violating the law (specifically against operating an unlicensed money transmitter business), and to see if I was really doing that. What I remember is that "money" is issued by a central governing authority, which excludes bitcoin, both because anyone can mint it (run a bitcoin miner) which makes it decentralized, and because it is "issued" by anyone who finds a block, it's issued by someone other than a governing authority (most of the time… I have not heard of governments doing bitcoin mining, but now we're getting into weeds).

The second docket you'll find is about my current case. It's June 17, 2023, and I don't think there's anything in there yet from me or my lawyer, so that is the government's version. This is like a reverse class action lawsuit brought by the government against the entire peer-to-peer crypto trading community.

Part III
(in which I pontificate)
Laundering money requires knowledge. In the apple example, the truckers and grocery stores don't usually know whether or not the apples were grown illegally or will ultimately be purchased with ill-gotten gains, and this lack of knowledge means they are not laundering money, but if they do know and it was illegal, then they are laundering money, even though apples are not money.

Money transmission, according to the law as I read it, requires a transaction that is dependent on another transaction. You could view the handing over of a bag of apples to be one transaction and the handing over of $5 as another one, but that is wrong because that would mean every grocery store is a money transmitter. Each transaction has each party receiving one thing and giving up another, and for money transmission, the transmitter is a party to two of them, and one of them is dependent on the other. To me, this means that if the first transaction fails, then the second must be reversed if it happens to succeed. I have actually explained to some of my customers that this is the case when we discuss details of trades. I have not resolved this discrepancy with Nathan because I think it doesn't matter to the government: If I sell some bitcoin to someone who gives me cash in return, there is no second transaction that needs to be done. The government may plan to play fast and loose with the definition of "dependent" in the definition of money transmission. On the other hand, I may be remembering FinCEN guidance rather than statutory language, in case one takes precedence over the other.

Obeying laws is nearly always a good idea, but that requires clear laws. FinCEN exists and publishes guidance on what laws mean specifically because this isn't the case. There is a legal principle called "void for vagueness" which is intended to protect those who attempt to obey laws from getting trapped by poorly written laws. Why would that happen? Because large financial interests recognize threats and motivate legislators to write laws which must not violate the Constitution, but which they want very much to violate the Constitution. Monopolies fail in free markets. If you can scare people into avoiding the exercise of rights you wish they didn't have, that's just as (or even more!) effective as making laws to prevent them from such exercise.

Part IV
(how to stop scammers)

Here is a quote from a letter I send to everyone who mails me cash, or at least to those whose cash comes in an envelope with a return address: "There are few things I want to prevent: A) Scams involving bitcoin, B) conversion of stolen cash or proceeds from the sale of stolen goods into crypto, and C) people like yourself expecting something they will never get."

A "Man in the Middle" (MITM) scam is what it's called when the victim receives instructions to pay for something by mailing a payment to the address of a legitimate seller (of something else). The man in the middle doesn't have the thing the victim wants to buy, but they say they do. They also don't get the payment, the legitimate seller of something else (often crypto) gets it. Once the legitimate seller of crypto has been paid, they send the crypto to whoever answered their ad, and that happens to be the middleman, in a MITM scam.

When this happens, it's too late for my letter to help, so why do I send it? I send it because it also recommends that the victim consider the possibilities and be more careful, just in case they didn't actually answer my ad and in case they are being scammed. I have one letter from a victim of this scam, and it is the copy of my letter that I sent her, with some notes she wrote on it. Typically, a MITM scammer will collect and milk victims with sob stories and explanations of how the previous amount still wasn't enough, or whatever. My letter, I like to think, often breaks that cycle. If the scammer moves on to a new victim and uses me again, the new victim gets the letter too. I imagine this pattern may frustrate the scammer out of scamming.

When you get hurt, it sucks, but it also gives you a lesson. You will eventually learn how to avoid getting hurt in that specific way, but that lesson sometimes comes only after you make the same mistake several times. If and when there is an opportunity for me to see that this is happening to someone who sends me cash, I will consider how to approach it with them. In many cases, the victim and I have conversed on the phone for a while before I was able to convince them to find a better way to help their "friend". I am in the difficult position of helping them to see something ugly where they thought was just some suffering that they could have helped to relieve.

Part V
(Brink of Second Bailout)

What is the point of bitcoin? The very first block has a clue: "Chancellor on Brink of Second Bailout for Banks". The value of any particular stuff is inversely proportional to how much of it there is, and this is true for money too. If counterfeiting were not illegal, a lot of people would counterfeit money instead of doing useful work to earn it. Misrepresenting something cheap as something expensive has always been that particular form of fraud called "counterfeiting", even before any government anywhere wrote a law against it.

After many goldsmiths were hanged because they spent receipts that they wrote up themselves without having received any gold, society craved a better solution. The government stepped in and created the idea of a bank which would fulfill the role of receiving gold, writing receipts, and then managing things ethically. Except it wasn't ethically, and so there were bank runs because the government allowed banks to hold less gold than the receipts they had issued said they held (aka "fractional reserve"), and when people caught on, they scrambled to get their gold before the bank ran out. I think some of those bankers were hanged. I'm not sure. The "federal reserve" is supposed to be the bank that solves this problem, but instead, they made it worse. Austrian Economics describes it pretty well in the Austrian Business Cycle Theory. The "roaring twenties" demonstrate the first stage in which overspending occurs, and the "gr eat depression" demonstrates the second stage. I don't like the see-saw, and it seems Satoshi didn't either. The people who like it like it because they have their hands on the levers and know when to buy and when to sell to milk everyone else. They don't like bitcoin. They are large financial interests and they recognize bitcoin as a threat.

I still want to help them, but not to kill bitcoin. I want to help them leverage their useful skills like security and records maintenance, and to abandon their uglier skills, like getting vague laws passed to weaken the networks and technologies that spring up to alleviate the suffering of my species that results from greed and politics.

Part VI
(is this my fault?)

At the north end of the street on which I grew up (Bellflower Drive), there was a bush with long cylindrical leaves that looked like alien hands. I broke one of these leaves open, curious about what was inside. It was a white fluid called latex. I put a tiny bit of it on my tongue, which immediately got inflamed. I felt the burning travel slowly down my throat as I spit and exhaled violently trying to get the poison out of me. I walked home, still spitting, with a sore throat.

What did I learn? I looked up the plant and discovered that it was one of the most poisonous plants we know about. I encountered it in the wild and survived without hospitalization. I and my brain and instincts worked well enough to keep me alive despite my potentially deadly curiosity. I hurt the people who love me a very tiny bit because they knew I had a sore throat. Otherwise, it was a huge positive. I was already that way before I almost accidentally killed myself, but it suggested something to me: People don't trust themselves as much as they should. A.A. Milne said it through Christopher Robin at the end of Winnie the Pooh: "You're smarter than you think, Braver than you believe, and Stronger than you seem." He also told the bear, "I will be with you always."

There are bad people in the world who are doing bad things and we do have some responsibility to avoid helping them do the bad things. However, I think we have more responsibility to protect ourselves from the bad things they do. I have revised the version of the letter I send to everyone who mailed me cash from the original which you can read here. If you are interested in exploring how I view the world and relate to it in more depth, feel free to search this blog for any term you want.

Letters of Support

You may know someone who is facing criminal charges and possibly prison time, and feel a strong desire to write a letter of support for that person.  This happens to be a very useful activity and so I have been thinking of how one might approach such a task.  I spoke with my lawyer about it and have incorporated some of his suggestions into the following list.

I am presenting a list of topics in the hope that one of them appeals to you more strongly than the others because that will have a strong positive effect on the strength of your letter and how well it influences those who read it to align with love instead of fear, restitution instead of retribution, healing instead of vengeance, and a freer world rather than a more controlled one.

What effect did the person in question have on you?  Was it positive or negative?  It might be confronting, but even if it was negative, it may have improved your life or the lives of others.  Your readers are interested in improving the lives of everyone, or at least that is an assumption we should make, and a perception they strongly desire that we hold.  If your letter aligns with this global improvement idea, it will bring even the most horrible and authoritarian government people at least a little closer to that ideal.

Is this person currently having a positive effect on your life?  Do you feel that you need them for something?  What about the future?  Do you see their role in your life in the future as becoming stronger or weaker, and for a positive or a negative outcome?

Will keeping this person away from the public provide the public with some kind of benefit?  Will it take away some kind of benefit?  Supposing it does both add and remove benefits, what is the net effect?

How do you imagine the close connection between this person and the prison staff that will inevitably develop if he or she is imprisoned will affect the prison staff?  How will it affect this person?  What will be this person's effect on the other prisoners and their effect on this person?

What do you perceive is the level of honesty, kindness, generosity, knowledge, inspiration, and creativity of this person?  Do you imagine those levels will go up or down because of imprisonment?  How will this punishment help this person become a better version of themselves?

Do you imagine those levels will go up or down because of leniency?  How will leniency help this person become a better version of themselves?

Do you have examples of things this person has done that you believe they will not be able to do if they are imprisoned?  Are these things that will be missed or will people be happy that they have ceased?

What do we create and what do we destroy when we put this person in prison and what is the nature of those things?

How will the outcome of this person's case affect your perception of the justice system, the government, and the people running those institutions?  Will it depend on how the outcome is produced or simply on the outcome itself?  Are you open to having your views of this person and/or the government and the people running it altered by these proceedings?  How should they go to maintain an ever-improving world?

Thank you for pondering!