Flow and Grothendieck-like Problem Solving

Flow: a pleasant, efficient, focused state of mind.
Alexander Grothendieck: revered mathematician living between 1928 and 2014 who had an unusual approach to mathematics.

The idea that being in a state of flow is desirable for computer programming is now commonplace; good information on the nature of this mind-state and techniques for inducing it are more sparse. My idea here is that the meditative mind-state and flow are one and the same—which I suspect is uncontroversial. From there, however, I'd like to address a general problem in learning how to flow at will, which I think can be made more clear by analogy to a style of problem solving that Grothendieck was especially known for (not that it was unique to him by any means, but it seems to have been a sort of trademark because he took it to such extremes).

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After spending years dealing with a computer-related repetitive strain injury, I found that using computers was not the same even after I’d resolved the physical component of the problem. Eventually, in trying to discover the source of the problem that remained, I came across the notion of ‘flow,’ which instantly connected with certain common occurrences from my pre-injury programming days. Recent occurrences of this state were utterly absent; and, in fact, the more I thought about it, the more sense it made that my current problem in using computers could be clearly characterized as ‘anti-flow.’ If there’s some axis in the space of mental states where a large positive value indicates being in flow, my problem was that I had a large negative value on this axis (such an axis could sensibly be named ‘acceptance of things as they are’—which will make more sense by the end of the essay). So, my interest in flow began.

Reading more, it would’ve been difficult not to connect this concept to the ‘meditative mind-state’: a state in which all experience is accepted as okay, lacking in self-awareness, and characterized by direct interaction with the objects of experience. The opposite involves the heavy presence of meta-thought, analyzing what one is doing as one does it. 

Reading more, I discovered this excessive meta-thinking is basically synonymous with anxiety. This makes intuitive sense: you meta-think about something you’re doing when you think there might be something wrong with it. And, being in a state of flow, characterized as behavior lacking meta-thought, has an intuitive reason for being more efficient: it’s like the difference between running a procedure encoded in software, executed on a general purpose chip—and having the procedure directly represented in hardware. In both cases you have this trade off of efficiency for mutability. Further, it makes sense that flow would be enjoyable and meta-thinking not: anxious experiences are unpleasant ‘by design’—they encourage the experiencer to change something, to get out of that mode; by contrast, the more you’re able to stay in a state that doesn’t require meta-thought, the better things must be going for you, and your mind rewards you.

So, in order to resolve my computer use issues, which I could now more usefully state as, “in order to move toward Flow on the ‘Acceptance Axis’” or “in order to reduce anxiety while using computers”—I could draw from methods in Western psychology, or Eastern philosophy. I have explored both and both have been useful. Ultimately, however, the literature surrounding Eastern meditation practice and, to a surprising extent, life perspective—was the most directly applicable. Isn't it strange, though, that 'life perspective' should concretely affect my ability to engage in some activity? I thought it was, and I spent a lot of time thinking about how that could work. Here's how I think of it now.

‘Life perspective’ is another way of referring to the conceptual framework in which one thinks, their total set of Schemas, the conceptual categories available for organizing experience and the rules relating those categories. Just to give an idea the kind of thing I’m talking about, I’ll give two ridiculously stripped down, simplified examples of personal conceptual frameworks.

(1)I am an autonomous entity with a fixed set of actions and senses. I exist in a universe made up of small objects that follow fixed rules. I am made up of these objects. After a certain duration I will cease to exist. While I exist I will experience some things that are good and some that are bad, and the proportion of good and bad experiences will depend in part on my actions.

(2)I am an eternal soul that can suffer or feel joy. Temporarily I exist in a ‘physical’ universe, and depending on the moral character of my decisions while here, I will suffer or feel joy eternally afterward.

One’s ‘life perspective,’ as a framework, provides a special kind of vocabulary—a set of terms to make statements 'in terms of.' What makes this kind of vocabulary special is that it provides terms that could be ordered based on how general or particular they are, where the more particular terms are arrived at by supplying parameters to the more general terms. For instance, if you say, “the most fundamental things in existence are ‘physical entities’,” then you have the general term ‘physical entity,’ and everything else in your framework must be expressible as some parameterization of that general term (e.g. "that is a physical entity with location X, Y, Z, smelling like W, with color R". So, the more general a term is, the more other terms are potentially impacted by it. This is the same as in any framework, and modifications to these very general terms are what we call 'fundamental' changes. In science, such changes are often called ‘revolutions’; they are how we change ‘paradigms’ (this is Thomas Kuhn’s popular terminology anyway), rather than elaborate the present one. These changes of very general framework terms are also what take place in significant software refactors; they are what determine whether you work with elegant structures, or whether you become an expert in the application of duct tape. 

Personal ‘life perspectives’ are this same way. Incidentally, this is why some people are so interested in metaphysics: it’s a field explicitly addressing the most general structures of personal conceptual frameworks or ‘life perspectives.’ But what difference does it make if you personally have one framework or another? Consider the difference in behavior that results when someone really, truly believes that an afterlife with eternal suffering or pleasure exists and they’ll go to one or another based on their actions, or if someone were to believe that people are essentially robots with no real experience of pleasure or pain. Or, if someone were to believe that all of the universe, including all of humanity, was truly one indivisible whole, so that it becomes meaningless to say "this part of the universe is me, that part is not"; is selfish behavior possible if you deeply believe this? Is fear of death or any form of material loss? Those are extreme examples, with extreme consequences for adoption, but: people's beliefs, their conceptual frameworks (the true contents of which are actually quite hidden from us!), have a pervasive influence not only on how we behave, but on how we interpret our experience.

Let's switch to Grothendieck for a minute. I’ll quote from Pierre Cartier’s essay on him:

“Grothendieck’s favorite method was similar to Joshua’s for conquering Jericho. One must seize the place by sapping it; at a certain point, it succumbs without a fight. Grothendieck was convinced that if one had a sufficiently unifying vision of mathematics, if one could sufficiently penetrate its conceptual essence, then particular problems would be nothing but tests that no longer need to be solved for their own sake.” -Pierre Cartier, “A country known only by name” (http://inference-review.com/article/a-country-known-only-by-name)

This sounds like the same wisdom we hear about refactoring in software: you can change the framework so that the problems within it are easy, or you can work hard solving the problems in the framework. Here’s another quote on Grothendieck's approach:

“My friend Bob Thomason once told me that the reason Grothendieck succeeded so often where others had failed was that while everyone else was out to prove a theorem, Grothendieck was out to understand geometry. So when Grothendieck set out to attack the notoriously difficult Weil Conjectures, the goal wasn’t so much to solve the problems as to use them as a test for the philosophy that if you generalize sufficiently, all difficult problems become easy.” -Steven Landsberg, “The Generalist” (http://www.thebigquestions.com/2014/11/17/the-generalist/)

Okay, back to meditation for a minute.

If you try to meditate, you are immediately faced with a problem: “how do I go about intentionally doing something which requires that I do nothing?” If you try to get into a state of flow, you will run into the same problem: it’s characterized by effortlessness; you don’t monitor your actions and decide beforehand which to take next; it's often described as a cognitive mode where you act without taking actions (non-paradoxically: acting without consciously choosing your actions). In the terminology of Taoism, this is called ‘wu wei,’ or ‘non-action.’ To be in this state is a normal part of human experience; it 'just happens' under all sorts of circumstances. The intentional cultivation of wu wei, or flow, is important largely because circumstances often act to prevent it—and if your environment is particularly stressful, those circumstances may be ever-present.

Here's the problem in another form: if practice as a general human activity requires monitoring performance and making corrections, how do you practice the skill of non-monitoring, or intentionally avoiding meta-thought? My proposal is that all valid forms of solution use a Grothendieck-like method, restructuring one’s personal conceptual framework, so that there's nothing to do when it comes time to 'practice,' and yet, in time, you do improve. By contrast, normal practice consists in monitoring yourself as you take some action, then revising your way of taking the action and repeating; this is like proving individual theorems within some existing framework. 

As an example of the framework revision approach: one of the first things one learns when studying Eastern frameworks is a formulation of ‘self’ that differs from the typical Western conception: we think of it as what’s often called the ‘ego’ or the ‘will’—that which decides; but if you think that your most essential identity is the part of you that makes decisions, how are you going to take actions without deciding to take them? Interestingly though, it seems that, most often, the ‘insights’ leading to fundamental personal conceptual revisions are derived from direct, personal experience. Regarding one's conception of self: if you consistently experience yourself doing things without consciously deciding to do them, while still feeling that it was yourself doing them, you are collecting data that implies the ‘ego’ or ‘will’ is too narrow a definition of 'self' and you're inductively led to a revision. So, in this way, meditation is a sort of strictly empirical metaphysics. I think the efficacy of the empirical approach is what makes it possible for Eastern philosophy to not philosophize, rather insisting on non-conceptual approaches. 

When starting to learn to meditate, one inevitably imagines the process will be similar to other things they’ve learned before and they generate all sorts of images of what success would look and feel like; they imagine that they’ll one day be able to say, “now I’m going to meditate” and they’ll begin using this skill called ‘meditation’ that they’ve developed. My understanding is that, in actuality, you will have learned no skill whatsoever; you will have just changed your understanding of self and life so that you arrive at ‘nothing needs to be done’ (where 'be done' refers to intentional action) in more and more situations. Alternatively, it could be said that you more often find yourself in a state of mind where “it’s not necessary that I do anything, but it’s okay to do things if I like,” which is probably also a description of being in the mindset for ‘play.’

Why There's Nothing Rather Than Something

It seems like despair over the emptiness of existence is something like an occupational hazard for philosophers. Maybe it only seem this way because society especially pushes this image -- or it may be that it primarily affects amateur philosophers who know only enough to be dangerous. Whatever the case, we can at least say that some large number of people who make a habit of analyzing their relation to the universe end up dissatisfied with the results. Probably the only substantial error here is to waste the time analyzing something essentially irrelevant and unanalyzable; but since poorly directed analysis is an entrenched habit of mine, I have a cause to propose for this unfortunate conclusion.

We understand things by analogy, or in other words, "in terms of what we already know." When we attempt to understand the universe itself in terms of things more familiar, we expose the severe limitations of our capacity to understand, to an extent that's almost embarrassing. It's true we can do pretty well predicting some of its behaviors, if we radically isolate the attribute in question and delegate some of the processing to adjunct calculation machinery -- but to me this cannot be called understanding. Understanding is a more rich experience that occurs only with sufficiently complex subject matter which we're able to interact with from many angles.

We create specialized frameworks for anticipating some facet or another of the universe, and we can gain an understanding of several of these with time -- but the degree of their specialization prevents any holistic comprehension. Imagine you must try to understand humans without prior knowledge, but the only route available is to study endocrinology, followed by neurophysiology, followed by rheumatology, etc. When you complete these studies, you will have very good understanding of humans for many definitions of "understanding" -- but as a human, you will find the result dissatisfying, probably because we have divergent modes of understanding which work well only for their respectively appropriate subject matter.

When we ask questions like, "what is the nature of reality?" or "what is the essential character of the universe?" -- questions outside the domain of science -- and seek answers by improving our understanding through the scientific/analytical mode, we have chosen a route than can end only in dissatisfaction. What was confusing to me, though, was which domain these questions are in if not the scientific. What valid modes of understanding could possibly exist besides those grounded in observation and logic? It sounds like since I'm being asked to not use scientific understanding, that I should not observe the phenomena in question, and use some transformations other than logic to elaborate the dubious unobserved starting point of my speculations. This is overreacting.

Why do we ask the question, "what is the nature of reality?" ? One reason is that we are following a chain of causes to some root, because that's what we do. But I think another important and mostly overlooked reason is that it's something we have to co-exist with, and decisions about whether or not to live in the company of some thing are among the most important to humans. So, I propose that "what is the nature of reality?" is really a social question. We want to know whether we can trust the universe, whether he tells good jokes or is always getting into trouble, etc. Our brains are trying to figure out whether a relationship with the universe is the best decision for spreading our genes.

Clearly there's something funny about this question. It gets back to what I was saying about our embarrassingly limited capacity for understanding the universe: our brains try relating it to something already understood and the nearest match is a ways off.

And, when the depressed philosopher reaches the conclusion that reality is fake or empty, what is he getting at? To me, this sounds like a social imputation; that the universe promised to be one thing at some earlier point, but time bore out that it was all pretense. Of course the universe makes no promises, so that she is flaky cannot be a very meaningful claim -- but we did get the idea from somewhere.

When we are young, we just do things, and it's fun. When we get older, and develop our tendencies to abstraction, we want to name things -- especially if we're into creating functional symbolic systems that can compute predictions for us, if only we can find the right set of names for things. To be more precise, we come up with layers of definitions for things, and at the bottom of these definition strata, lie indefinables. Also, it's not always clear to us that these systems are separate from their referents; that a rock flying through the air and F=MA are two different things. So, when we were young, the universe was just mystery -- filled with potential; by the time we lay the groundwork for a more sophisticated comprehension of the universe, we find that it is a series of representations, resting on top of indefinables (i.e. something about which there is nothing whatsoever interesting to say), and no substance. Substance does not exist, only representation. The universe is a charlatan.

First off there is an error here in that it sounds like we've discovered some metaphysical property of the universe -- unfortunately an overly ambitious hope: instead the discovery is epistemological. We don't experience substance directly; our minds operate through representations. This seems to merely transfer the source of the problem, leaving its effects in place. The error here, however, is to think that this is a problem in the first place, that we understand anything about what it means to experience a reality through representation versus directly, or if such a notion is anything but nonsense. The problem is something like trying to imagine the edge of the universe or time travel. Our brains construct a model of the situation when we query them to, but we know better than to trust the model for much more than amusement.

Again, the solution probably is to admit defeat and go play outside.

Solving Wrist Pain by Writing an IDE

This originally appeared on the my project website for Tiled Text, which can be found here: http://westoncb.com/projects/tiledtext

Late in my 19th year I was writing the third iteration of my ongoing game engine project, when I felt the first typing induced twinge. Saw doctors, half-heartedly tried a number of remedies and some ergonomic upgrades, continued programming. Nothing phased it, the pain got worse. After a few months I decided I would have to stop programming, maybe for a year or so. That was okay: I needed to get caught up in mathematics if I was going to be very good with real-time graphics. Took time off, no improvement. Dropped out of school.

Years passed. I didn't understand compromise then and preferred the prospect of working in another field over being crippled in the one I loved; though I eventually finished a CS degree despite having no real hope of returning to software development. I became more academic in the interim. I thought a lot rather than just building things. I liked philosophy and science (and philosophy of science!) and suspected there was some mathematics out there that would be as good as software. After graduating, my project was to discover why people thought mathematics was beautiful; failing that, at least acquire some rudimentery facility with it. That went so so, made a lot of progress—but it wasn't coding. About a year in, though, while explaining to a friend why coding with the Microsoft Kinect wasn't a real solution (with existing IDE's), the kernal of the idea behind Tiled Text occurred to me.

And, like the warrior who has put killing behind him, I blew the dust off my keyboard and set to work: my wrists would hold out for a few months until I could build this thing.

The initial idea was an early form of the code generation concept (didn't understand what a formal grammar was well enough to see how it would relate; thought of making some kind of linguistic constraint description system—thankfully my dad put me off the path of re-inventing the wheel here), but it was augmented in the early days by a few epiphanies. Real, old-fashioned epiphanies: if I were religious I might have thought they were gifts. The first was on the cycling behavior—the other half of the core concept. The second gave the UI concrete form (was still thinking of building it on top of an existing text editor before this). The third mostly related to the architecture, and led to generalizing beyond just code editing.

Then there was work. And more work. I worked three days a week stocking groceries and four days a week on the project. I did this for about five months, with constant wrist pain. Then I got Type 1 diabetes. I had medical bills in addition to student loans and was barely scraping by. Then I worked for another 9 months or so, with progress slowing some.

I needed a change. I'd been thinking about moving to Boston for a while, inspired by Paul Graham's comments on it from "Cities and Ambition." And now, here I am, in Harvard Square, excited about whatever's next. I'd like to continue with Tiled Text and GIDE, but I realize that may not be possible. What I really want now is to get in an environment where I can learn from others. I've been working in relative isolation for most of the time I've been programming, but I know the only way for me to progress is working with experts. Of course that will involve typing/mousing, but: ironically, I have learned how to mitigate my wrist pain from mouse/keyboard while working on software to obviate my usage of those devices.

And, incidentally, when I would procrastinate work on Tiled Text, I would often go to math books. My studies at these times were very fruitfull and I think now that mathematics has a chance at contending with coding, and I have finally seen some glimpses of mathematical structures that should be called beautiful.

An Architecture for Deliberate Thought

     Some time ago I realized that when I think very abstractly, what's going on in my mind is not for the most part natural language; instead it's more visual. Specifically, the visuals seem to be of a schematic nature, focused on indicating relationships between things. The ideas in this essay came out of my thinking about what sort of cognitive system underlying thought could allow one do it both in natural language and in something as diverse as the 'schematic thinking' I was doing. The more general system accounts for thinking in various domains; e.g. chess or algebra might be other domains you think in.

     This is actually part of a larger piece I started on schematic thinking, intending to build up to something like a tutorial—but for now I just have this fragment which I think is kinda neat on its own.

     (If you'd like to know more specifically what I mean by 'schematic thinking' check out the two excerpts I include at the end of this document. They are from Hadamard's "The Psychology of Invention in the Mathematical Field," but they are essentially descriptions of what I have in mind when I say 'schematic thinking'.)

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     Deliberate thought can take place in a number of different substrates, which I shall call "Domains," each of which corresponds to a domain in a more ordinary sense. The mental counterparts to Chess, algebra, social situations, physical situations, drawing, and playing the flute are all different Domains.

     When a Domain is active in the brain, some State is present. A State in Chess is the board layout at a single moment of a particular game; a State in algebra is an algebraic expression or equation; a State in a social situation is mostly made up by the estimated mental state, facial expressions, and bodily gestures of a group of people; a State in a physical situation is a group of objects relatively oriented under the constraints of one's understanding of physical law; a State in drawing is the contents of a piece of paper; a State in playing the flute is the configuration of the fingers of the player combined with an exhalation strength. When thinking in some Domain, words are not present (unless language is the active Domain -- but more on that later), only a chain of States from the Domain. Although, in practice, when playing Chess for instance, the Chess Domain will be your substrate for thinking only a fraction of the time: you may swap in a social situation Domain, or a language Domain, and then jump back to the Chess Domain with new ideas -- but at that point (probably an image of the board is the principle contents of consciousness), words disappear.

     Each of these Domains is defined by a set of assertions considered always true while the Domain is the active substrate; these state the elements of a Domain and limit the valid relationships between those elements. In chess the assertions would comprise the rules of the game and constraints on how a board/pieces may appear; in social situations they would correspond to an experience based collection of verities in human interaction: if I behave violently toward a person, they will return with violence -- etc; in drawing the assertions are that a mark will be left at the point of contact between pencil and paper, and a pencil may be moved while in or out of contact with paper. Each of the States mentioned before has a particular format which is a result of the assertions of the Domain; and so, it is useful to think of the assertions of the Domain as a sort of grammar for the Domain -- this will be returned to later. Now let's view the theory in the abstract.

     A Domain is a collection of assertions considered always true while that Domain is active, and a collection of valid States.

     A State within a Domain is a configuration of mental elements in some arrangement allowed by the assertions of a Domain.

     A Line is a sequence of States, corresponding to the notion of a "line of thought."

     Deliberate thought within a particular Domain consists primarily of finding a desirable Line. Between each State in a Line there is considered to be an operation which changed one State into the next; this collection of operations for a Line forms a set of actions to take in the external counterpart domain (e.g. actual game of chess).

     It is useful to consider a space of all of the possible States within a Domain, called a State-space: each point is a State; each axis of the space corresponds to an operation which may take place in the Domain (e.g. a valid move in chess, yelling in a social situation), resulting in another valid State in the space; any path through this space would be a Line.

     Consciousness, the work table of deliberate thought, holds a small list of States in view at any given time, with the most recently occurred being most prominent. These active States are the input to a recursive process for determining which State to add to the list next. Choosing a next State is identical to selecting an operation, i.e. selecting a direction to step in a State-space.

     Thought within a Domain is exploration of a State-space. The decision making about which direction to move in next is subconscious, and does not operate in the narrow confines of the Domain itself. Every Domain has two assertions which guide this decision making process: the first is that contradictions may not occur, and the second is that composite mental constructs with similar internal relationships are interchangeable to some degree. The first assertion allows the mind to use logic, and the second enables analogy.

     The Domains considered so far are of a primitive type, which presumably showed up in brains so that animals could carry out simulations within particular domains in order to estimate an optimal decision in that domain. These primitive types all seem to have a clear notion of what an operation within the domain is: moving a chess piece, adding to both sides of an equation, grinning, etc., which results in a successor State to the current one. When we consider a language as a Domain, where its assertions are the grammar and lexicon for the language (e.g. "each sentence must contain a verb," "'triumphant' is in the lexicon"), we find that it has the same basic role in the mind as the others: subconscious processes serve up successive States (sentences in the case of language) to consciousness, and the States in consciousness have an important role in determining which States will follow -- but, when we look at two successor states, no operation which transformed the first into the second is apparent with language. Now, in any Domain, the process which selects the operation is always complex and hidden, but in the primitive domains, given a State and a successor for it, we are at least able to identify the operation, once selected; not so with language.

     It is a hypothesis of this theory that language is a later evolutionary development which generalized the more primitive Domain "simulation" machinery. But with language, there is no counterpart domain external to the thinker, instead language seems to be a meta-Domain, for thinking about other Domains. Its generality also allows it to translate between Domains. (Perhaps analogy didn't appear as a method for navigating State-spaces until language showed up.)

     Before, I said that the assertions of a Domain define a format which the States of the Domain must be in, and that this was good reason for considering the assertions to form a grammar for the Domain -- hopefully this is more clear now that we have a Domain where the assertions are a grammar and lexicon, so that the definition of grammar undertakes only a slight expansion. But viewing them as a grammar is not just an amusing conceit, it gives an idea about how the brain is able to derive meaning from States. In linguistics and computer science, systems exist which can take expressions conforming to a given grammar and analyze them into atomic units which each have a pre-defined role; this is called parsing and is the first step to incorporating semantics in a linguistic machine. Since States in a Domain have a consistent grammar, States can be parsed and each of their elements assigned some role in the context of a semantics for a particular Domain. In this form, a subconscious process could take the labeled elements and determine a value for a State, so that some States can be considered good and others bad, and we have a system in place for preferring certain Lines over others. It is probable that the value determination of a State manifests emotionally.

     In this theory then, the complex system of meanings that we experience when thinking in language is an outgrowth of the semantic systems of the more primitive Domain simulators. It is possible that the correct way of viewing a language's State-space is as an infinite-dimensional space: since it is a meta-Domain rather than a proper Domain, and must be able to talk about all other Domains, it doesn't have a finite set of operations for transforming its States -- instead, it has the general notion of operation itself, which includes all operations. Or it may be that there isn't enough structure between its States to usefully view a State-space for it; perhaps its lack of operations is a testament to its freeness -- it can jump between any States that logic or analogy suggest, guided by semantic-emotional responses to candidate Lines.
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Excerpts from "The Psychology of Invention in the Mathematical Field":
"Indeed, every mathematical research compels me to build such a schema, which is always and must be of a vague character, so as not to be deceptive. I shall give a less elementary example from my first researches (my thesis). I had to consider a sum of an infinite number of terms, intending to valuate its order of magnitude. In that case, there is a group of terms which chances to be predominant, all others having a negligible influence. Now, when I think of that question, I see not the formula itself, but the place it would take if written: a kind of ribbon, which is thicker or darker at the place corresponding to the possibly important terms; or (at other moments), I see something like a formula, but by no means a legible one, as I should see it (being strongly long-sighted) if I had no eye-glasses on, which letters seeming rather more apparent (though still not legible) at the place which is supposed to be the important one."

"About the mathematicians born or resident in America, whom I asked, phenomena are mostly analogous to those which I have noticed in my own case. Practically all of them -- contrary to what occasional inquiries had suggested to Galton as to the man on the street -- avoid not only the use of mental words, but also, just as I do, the mental use of algebraic or any other precise signs; also as in my case, they use vague images."

Interpretation of David Foster Wallace's "Mister Squishy"

         After reading the story "Mister Squishy" by David Foster Wallace and really liking the design of it, I found myself uncertain whether certain aspects were actually there or just something I read into it. So, I looked around online for interpretations of the story, especially one given by Wallace, but I couldn't find anything too useful—and I felt that many popular summaries were doing the story a disservice by describing its marketing language as 'noise' or 'random,' since it appeared as a stream of coherent concepts in my reading. So, here's my interpretation.

         The story is about the deception, manipulation, and unwavering self-interest that underlies the operation of modern corporations, particularly those whose success is highly dependent on the public's perception of the company and its products. The story is set in a downtown skyscraper, and the structure of the story matches this setting, its layers being displayed one at a time in an upward journey that reveals the figures of each lower level to have been duped by someone above.
         At the start of the story we are shown a focus group in progress, and are introduced to its coordinator, Schmidt. Then we are shifted up a level for the first time: it is revealed that the company isn't interested in the immediate results of the focus group, but is instead using it as a component in a larger experiment involving a parallel focus group being conducted with a slight difference. In particular, the group which we are shown is given information on the the processes behind the development of the product (a chocolate snack-cake), particularly the concepts behind its marketing; the other group will not be given this information. The aspect monitored for variation between the two groups is a measure of difference between individual surveys of members within the group, and a single group survey which each group will fill out together; in other words, deviation between their private and public responses to the product—though "public response" is probably too much of a simplification: the story treats groups of people as isolable, abstract organisms, the organisms studied by statistical methods; so really, the group evaluation contains the responses of this group organism.
         Now it seems that the purpose of the focus group, rather than gathering information about consumer response to the snack-cake, is to improve the design of future focus groups. Schmidt, however, informs the reader through glimpses we are given to his thoughts during the session, that the focus groups have no material impact: rather than using the collected data to make inferences about consumer preferences, it is desirable to end with a nebulous analysis which could conclude one outcome or another based on which direction the client company is already planning on moving in: the focus groups can only confirm a decision which has already been made: a deviation on this will result in the termination of the marketing firm. And so, the focus group facilitator, Schmidt, presumes that the real purpose of this inter-focus group experiment is to generate multiple conclusions so that a desirable data set may be selected at a later date.
         Then we ascend another level. We are introduced to the perspective of a member higher up in the marketing firm—Awad, and a peer of Schmidt's who has the favor of Awad: Mounce. Awad shares with Mounce that the true purpose behind the inter-focus group study is to explore a class of marketing strategy where a depiction of the inner workings of the company is the subject of advertising material. So, Schmidt, without knowing it, is effectively delivering to the focus group a primitive form of this behind-the-product advertising, and his peer Lilley gives a similar presentation absent the behind-the-product information to another group.
         Then we ascend another level. We are introduced to the perspective of a member higher up in the marketing firm than Awad: Britton. Britton also has a mentee, who he discusses strategy with while smoking cigars: Laleman. Britton and Lalemen have a sub-surface power struggle between them, Lalemen thinking he is on an approach to surreptitiously overtaking Britton, while Britton is fully aware of Lalemen's machinations. Still, they discuss the future of demographic analysis which they anticipate will be carried out by monitoring websites rather than running focus groups. The only problem is all of the presently employed focus group coordinators. Here is shown the penultimate deception of the plot: the inter-group experiment is actually a device that will be used to demonstrate to the coordinators their own inimical influence on the focus groups, using a statistical argument which the coordinators, themselves statisticians, will be forced to accept, followed by their resignation—or, if they are so unreasonable as to protest, as evidence against any case they may form in a lawsuit regarding their termination. The argument which Britton is devising centers on the fact that humans are random components interfering with the demographic analysis process, and in order to concretely represent this fact the focus group will have a "stressor" appear who pushes the coordinator to behaving erratically.
         There is another character, nearly silent, who plays an important part in my interpretation of the story as a whole: a participant in Schmidt's group, who is referred to as "I" in the story's narration, so that we must identify this character with the narrator of the story; however, the narration is omniscient, switching between the thoughts of many people in the course of the story; so, I conclude that this character is different from the others—he is a meta character who is a character in the story, but also represents the story itself. This "I" is covered in sensors, has been given a script which he must stick closely to, and wears an "emetic prosthesis," that can be used to simulate vomiting. He is the stressor which Britton has inserted in order to effect his strategy of giving the coordinators "enough rope."
         It is important to note also that this strategy of introducing a stressor and observing the results is demonstrated several times in the story (most vividly when Britton has Awad make unwanted sexual advances toward Lilley, just to observe her character), and becomes a symbol for the concept of applying scientific methods in a callous fashion.
         Similarly, by various approaches the concept of the consumer's awareness of marketing activity is presented, the conclusion generally being that at best the consumer has a superficial sort of awareness which the marketing agencies have already easily accounted for.
         Two other facts have evolved in parallel with the story's principle structure outlined above: Schmidt is a deeply dissatisfied person (probably) interchangeable with the typical white collar worker, and Schmidt has been developing (and implementing?) a scheme for injecting a lethal poison into the snack-cakes.

         So, we are introduced to an experiment where one group of people is given the (appearance of the) marketing strategy behind a product, and a control group is not; in this experiment is a character present who will stress the group so that some outcome may be observed (using his emetic prosthesis)—and this character represents the story itself; and, the reading of the story represents a sort of experiment analogous to the inter-focus group experiment: we have just been given a generalized version of the story-behind-the-product—we have been told the story behind products. Thus another layer of deception has been revealed: the real purpose behind the experiment was to inform readers of the more complex and insidious reality behind product marketing—but, this character, who is the story, also played the role of a stimulus used to provoke a reaction which could be scientifically observed, so the story must play that role also, and the author wins the pinnacle seat on the tower of deception, and proves himself the master of calculating manipulation.
         And there's another question left fairly uncertain: did Britton know about Schmidt's development of the poison or not? If so, then the emetic prostheses is supposed to trick Schmidt into thinking that one of the members of his group is vomiting in reaction to a poisoned snack-cake. If not, then the final scene where Laleman notes a chocolate cake stain on Britton's finger, laughing internally in reply, would seem to indicate that Laleman was exulting in consideration of Britton's demise. But, we are informed in the story that the chosen poison would take 24-36 hours to take effect, so I'm inclined to go with the latter interpretation, which seems to imply that the cog-like victims of the marketing machine eventually get their revenge.
         There's also a guy scaling the wall of the building and drawing a crowd that speculates on his activities throughout the story, who in the end, while carrying a gun or gun replica, inflates his costume which bears the image of "Mister Squishy" (the logo for the snack cake company). I see this scenario as representing the reality of the interaction of marketing firms with consumers: the marketers put on a carefully designed show and the consumers are drawn to it inexorably, their awareness of their situation never reaching more than superficial levels, though many take satisfaction in their delusions of knowledge.

I Who?

     An excess of thought circulating in a young mind trammeled by habit and hopelessness drove the first of two unusually precise friends to complain, "I'm bored, Ramij. I'm tired of thinking about all the things I usually think about. I feel like all of the philosophical questions I've had have already been answered by derivations off of the universe being governed by rules..."

      Ramij sat opposite his friend at a weathered and graffitied park table; he'd been silent for some time, contemplating, but the interruption was welcome at this point.
     "Well Illya, if you're up for it, I think there's a question of self-identity that's important to consider, though people generally neglect it, thinking it's either too obvious or too impossible. Specifically, I think it's important to go beyond looking at self-identity in the in the sense that we use the word 'I' to refer too; its usefulness seems to be primarily in distinguishing one person from another, which is of course a very practical thing to be able to to do, but what I'm more interested in, once we've isolated an individual, is figuring out what is that individual. In other words, how does the individual relate to the rest of existence?"

     Illya nodded his assent, despite being a little disconcerted by his friend's barrage.

      Ramij continued, "Probably we'll make the best progress if we can nail down a little more precisely what an individual is first—what 'I' refers to in the way it's commonly used. Ideas?"

     Illya began to apprehend what he'd gotten himself into; he roused himself from his lazy boredom, sat up a little straighter, and managed to articulate, "Well, I'd say it's the atoms making up a  person's body... Although... I'm tempted to go a step further and say most of the body is irrelevant and that when we speak of 'I,' it's primarily in reference to our preferences and decisions, which seem to belong to the mind particularly. So maybe 'I's and brains are one and the same."

     Ramij knew fully well from the outset that they'd have to trudge through these preliminaries; he responded with patience, "I agree for the most part, but there's a tricky question of awareness that I think this misses—"

     "—Consciousness?"

     "Possibly, depending on exactly what's meant by consciousness. Ninety nine percent of what's usually meant by it is pretty mundane, and brains are obviously responsible for it: it's a part of the brain that's aware of—or, processes data from—the rest of the brain, the rest of the brain being aware of data received externally from sensory input, as well as what it has stored internally. The only quasi-mysterious aspect of it is self-awareness, which seems to come from the fact that the computations occurring in consciousness—which are about the rest of the brain—are fed back into the rest of the brain, so that some of the rest of the brain's computations end up being about itself. In either case, it's a sort of awareness that seems entirely possible in mechanical systems, and which I think is insufficient for defining 'I's.
  "I think a definition of 'I' must include the aspect of brains which causes them to feel the data they process;  which gives red or cold data the particular feeling of redness or coldness—though this must not be mistaken with the sensory input itself: I mean the mind's experience of processing those symbols.  I think 'I,' as it's generally understood, refers to this sort of awareness... in conjunction with the operation of mundane consciousness and of the rest of the brain..."
     But Ramij had a habit of thinking as he spoke, and a potential shortcoming in his statement occurred to him, "—Err, I guess this could just be a property of the functioning of brains then—something everywhere-intrinsic in their operation rather than something adjoined; though I still don't see how to account for it materially and I suppose we won't get anywhere if this definition we seek ends up using elements from some hypothetical extra-reality..."

     For Illya the park then dropped out of consciousness. The thoughts that had ground circularly round too worn neural haunts appeared to slip outside the trammel. Tentatively, something new was happening.
     "Hold on a sec—you've given me an idea. If we define 'I' to be simply the sum of all the matter composing a particular person's brain, then I think we would both agree that 'I' in the common sense will have been accounted for, absent this final awareness that you speak of.  You said that maybe this awareness is just a property of brains—what if it's instead a property of matter generally, which just becomes interesting when matter forms arrangements with certain kinds of complexities, like human brains. In other words, maybe this final awareness is just how it is for the matter comprising a mind to process the data that flows through it; or rather, for that matter to exist in time⁽¹⁾.
  "Then again, it's unfortunate—"

     With quick perception Ramij saw the implications in full.
     "—Oh! That's good!"
He Hardly paused before moving on to applications.
     "Actually, seeing all of mind reasonably accounted for by ordinary matter, you've just given me a more satisfactory solution to the 'would I be my mind-duplicate' question than I've had before. If we take your definition of 'I' as all of the matter comprising a particular brain at a single instant of time and expand it to instead be the world line of that definition—"

     "—wait, wait—world line?"

     "I figured you'd know that one! A world line is an object in space and time, rather than just space. So, take a ball, say it pops into existence in 1952 and pops back out in 2005 and it stays in one place in space this whole time; its world line is a sort of cylinder with spherical ends extending from 1952 to 2005 along the time axis. Well, close enough anyway—that's a three dimensional approximate visualization of a four dimensional object. If you take a two dimensional object, say a circle, and extend it through time, then you actually get a cylinder.
     "Anyway, with the world line definition of an 'I,' whose implications I think form a complete correspondence with our common understanding of the notion, it becomes very clear that duplicating a mind would create a new world line, hence a new 'I.' Awesome."

     For Illya however, the discovery was not made without misgivings; it may have been, technically, a new region for his thoughts to roam, but the new land appeared as barren as the last.
     "I'm glad you can feel good about it; I think its a depressing confirmation of the idea that the self is insignificant; it's just a matter aggregate with enough similarity through time for human abstraction to call it the same object now and ten years from now. It's unfortunate to have a material account of experience—if all it is is some configuration of matter 'being,' I'm tempted to say that experience doesn't exist after all; if data in the brain essentially dies after being consumed by consciousness, I don't think it ever does anything useful at all. I have a kind of longing for there to be something there that actually experiences—whatever that means; and I know that's useless: nothing material will satisfy me, and I'll never be convinced of the non-material..."
     Illya's head drooped slightly; his boredom was forgotten.

     Ramij could empathize with Illya, but the new notion had struck him from another angle. He shrugged, "I feel differently about it—I think we've arrived at a good definition for 'I' in the way that it's traditionally used, but I think the more interesting question, which we originally set out to answer, is a little different; that was the question of identity in the deepest sense, really of how an 'I' relates to the rest of existence. This greater question we can form as 'what is self?' for convenience. I became curious about self after noticing that I'd been answering the question with 'self is "I",' which of course isn't really answering it at all. So yes, I agree with you that the 'I' is far less significant than it's been considered in the past, but the question of self still has potential.
     "We see the 'I' as less significant because it's material; it doesn't differ in any essential way from any other object in the universe⁽²⁾. This makes the 'I' a much more arbitrary construct than it's traditionally been held to be; it doesn't make as much sense for our existential identity to be so strictly bound to it. If experience is just what it's like for matter to exist in time, then the essence of our selves is just being matter, not being the matter that our bodies comprise, but just generally being matter. That being the case, and since the universe is the only source of matter and nothing but matter, I feel a deeper identity with the universe as a whole rather than with just my body. "Matter" of course is slightly inaccurate, but by it I just mean "fundamental universe parts." Follow?
     Illya considered, then gave a minor nod, not indicating his comprehension so much as his desire for Ramij to continue.
Ramij considered: his words were accurate, but their import significantly compressed; a new approach was required. A demonstration.
"There's a way of visualizing the universe that will help to make the notion more concrete. In actuality the universe has some extents in time and spatially, and perhaps along other unknown dimensions as well, and these extents may or may not be infinite. In order to hold some concept of the universe in my mind, I strip it down—it becomes finite in all of its extents, it now has two spatial axes and one time axis which behaves exactly as the spatial axes—the whole universe, throughout time mind you, then becomes one massive, luminous glass cube with the most intricate conceivable patterns filling it. Since we started with two spatial axes only, from outside the cube we see all the objects within as their three dimensional world lines⁽³⁾.
  "Now lets say this cube is actually glass—the material doesn't really matter, just that it's homogeneous, as the actually universe is in the sense that it's matter everywhere, or even better, rules everywhere—we can peer into it and see the full life of some two-dimensional being before us, one branch of a massively networked glass sculpture. When I contemplate the life of this being and ask myself what it is essentially, the only answer that comes to me is, 'part of the sculpture.' The only way that it differs from any other part of the sculpture is that it is in the space that it occupies—and its boundaries are extremely arbitrary: its only a consequence of my own mind's pattern forming routines that it can be called a separate object in any sense at all. Since the only boundaries between parts of the sculpture have a subjective origin, objectively there is just a single whole.
  "When I add back on to this glass sculpture each of the pieces I originally stripped out, making it matter again rather than just glass, giving it infinite extent and all of the dimensions it deserves, but pausing after each facet I rejoin to ask whether my conclusions about the object and its parts have changed, I must answer 'no,' even when the universe is whole again. And for that reason I think the universe is the most sensical source of identity for anyone in it. 'I's have no objective significance; your mind is how it feels to be the universe in one particular area, the same way that the sensations from a patch of skin on your arm are how it feels to be you in one particular area."
     Content that he'd made his case, Ramij leaned back, placing his hands with interlocked fingers behind his head.
     "The only question remaining then is whether it's any better to be the universe rather than some person in it. My answer to this is that although the glass cube approximation is a miraculously wondrous thing in itself, the true universe is still incomprehensibly grander. I think I would not have felt this way in the past, but the more I learn about the universe the more incredible I find it; and it doesn't hurt that it's probably infinite and eternal. I think even man's earlier overblown conceptions of the 'I' are meager next to this self I see."

     Illya had listened closely, and caught the spark of something in the proposition, but held on to reservation. His suspicion that reality was a disappointment still lurked nearby, hardly budged; but the prospect of a potential fatal flaw within it inspired a little cheer.
     "We'll see."



(1)
Unfortunately, now that I am done writing this, I realize that I'm actually uncertain on the existence of qualia (the stuff making up "final awareness," the way it "feels" to process the symbol "red")—I've got doubts. And I've expressed the doubt before: "A complex self-monitoring system would have the illusion of a meaningful interpretation of its own data." Fortunately the main thesis is untouched if they turn out not to exist (it'd be quite a lot stronger in fact). The material account of qualia I gave was only to give a fully material specification of mind; if the mind does not include qualia then its specification was already completed before broaching the subject. Ramij gets excited when qualia are accounted for because it troubled him before as a potentially non-material aspect of mind, but his important insight about self is due only to the fact that the mind had been fully materially accounted for; if Qualia is stripped out as part of the description, as may be appropriate, the mind remains material and the argument stands.


(2)
I see the most basic constituent of the universe as being the actual laws that govern it. My understanding of the modern view of fundamental particles, in physics, is that "particle" is really just a convenient way of referring to something which in fact doesn't represent a physical object at all, but is something closer to a consistent behavior. Now I say the universe is homogeneous because its laws appear uniform throughout. And even if there were more variation in its fundamental behavior than I've described, it's still just a bunch of rules being carried out; I don't think someone would find the essential character of the universe as one thing under A, B, C and another under D, E, F. The only thing which could make the character of these rules different, that I can conceive of, is if they were embedded in some kind of infinite nesting doll of meta realities—which is absolutely impossible to determine. So if nothing else, our universe is a homogeneous locus of rule application. (Later edit: interesting seeing this serious and detrimental error in thought here: the idea that the universe IS rules; clearly mistaking a system of description with the thing being described, mistaking the "finger pointing for the moon itself" as it's sometimes said.)

(3)
I think some would object to viewing the universe in this crystallized form even in principle due to a supposed lack of determinism in reality, the idea that what will happen next isn't actually determined until the current instant occurs. Perhaps that's the case—but I think we lack a reason for thinking it is. The idea of this non-determinism comes from quantum physics, which is non-deterministic; but quantum physics is not a direct description of physical reality, but a modeling of our knowledge of physical reality instead. So, just because this system we've invented for making approximate determinations of certain physical quantities (granted, with great precision) isn't deterministic, it should not be taken as an indication that the system it approximates is itself non-deterministic. The non-determinism in physics comes directly from the fact that its statements are in terms of probabilities, which are a result of speaking of our knowledge rather than the system itself—this should have no bearing on the qualities of the system itself.

A Sinister Morning

      At 4am, just before bed, I entered a morning perhaps sinister, though not gloomy, perhaps menacing, though not sad. After a day of relative ease, I decided to end with a cigarette and mug of Brazilian evening tea. Unexpected, however, was the fog laden morning I soon found before me. The streetlights glowed yellow and the trees, though expectant of Spring, knew leaves not yet; instead their branches jutted bare like broken swords, unfriendly and austere. But the morning was undecided, and knew not whether to emerge evil or amicable. In partnership with the darker elements it did proffer, were the morning birds and their sweet chirp. At first sparse, their sounds left me only wanting more; and as my desire fulfilled, the morning and I grew more in accord. At last its visage showed nothing worse than mystery, not any hidden threat; and as I dragged the cigarette I rolled, then expelled my contribution to the early fog, a sense of wonder grew within me. My thoughts roamed to ancient man in my position, amid the fog but less knowing. Would it be fearful to him? Without modern images, what is a densely fogged night? Is it the mantle of some goddess, or the oily smoke of war? I knew not. My cigarette was done now, ready for tea was I; and happy to find its temperature somewhat slaked by chilling mist, which now surrounded on all sides, my first warming gulp took I. Before me I spotted wet accumulations, water gathered just to fall, too weak to bear its weight; and across the way, objects earlier plain to see had been pulled with greed into the mist. This revealed something new. Perhaps the fog was not so friendly; it would not maul or bite at once, but one should not recline in ease amidst it. And the birds -- their chirping was now everywhere -- but was it calling in the sun? or were the creatures not themselves? Things trembled in the grass unseen. The birds, it's possible, were diseased. Their hearts had blackened, and together they conspired. This morning, after all, was cruel and hungry, and the birds its siren call.