we are all circles

everythings a circle. everythings a cycle. it's all just movement in loops and spirals.

one of my favorite books is titled, "I am a Strange Loop" - it's basic point is that the concept of the self arises from nothing more than our mind's ability to represent itself and continuously update that representation as it is affected by experience. it serves as an argument for the computational nature of the mind and the possibility to computationalize consciousness. The concept comes so naturally that I had no trouble accepting nearly every point as i quickly turned through the pages.

This account of our conscious awareness won't be the focus of this post, but it will be beneficial to understand the foundation off of which i intend to contemplate the nature of interpersonal love.

to distract myself, i often spend my time on tumblr, usually favoriting and reblogging pictures that resonate with my mindset. about a week ago, a picture (accompanied by some text) on my dashboard caught my eye. i was quick to favorite it and after a few days, when i had time to spend updating my personal page, i reblogged the photo and added a caption similar to what is now the title of this post - "we're all just circles"..here is the photo:

for all of my life and, i assume, the lives of everyone living today, homosexuality has been one of the most culturally controversial topics. I have posted once before about the concept of marriage and the inability of many to accept the transformation of the term - and, in turn, our culture - to account for the union of homosexuals, but i have hardly delved into the topic of homosexual love.

to be clear, i've got a strictly hetero-orientation. I'm just nearly obsessed with the concept of love because, in my opinion, it is an all-encompassing notion that can explain all interaction. not only does it impact our interpersonal relationships, but it really is the driving force behind every interaction a being can have with its environment. beings love beings and that love is what guides them in continuing their existence. everything in existence should be thought of as a being. all of existence is the greatest being of all and that is my concept of god. if there is a word denoting a tangible concept, then in my mind, i would consider that concept as a being. say we have concept x, if we can say x is being x, then x is a being. the sweater i am wearing is a being because the sweater is being a sweater and an item of clothing and whatever else you can think of the sweater being (if i wear it as a turban, then it is being a turban). and i am certainly a being - there should be no qualms with that. there is some degree of love between me and my sweater and that love is what has guided me to wear it today. i love existence, so i choose to continue to exist - to interact with the beings of existence.

so..about the picture..

as you can see, people are represented as circles with protruding shapes representing their gender. sexuality is guided by love. sexual orientation is accounted for by how these different shapes overlap.

while it is important to be aware of the sexual inclinations of others in some instances, for the most sexual orientation should have no bearing on the judgments we make about the people we interact with. i love women..but i also love men..and i love all animals - independent of their gender. it's our expression of love that causes people discomfort.

when in a relationship of mutual love (in an ideal world, this would be a redundant phrase), the best thing to do is learn and be aware of the desires and tendencies of your relationship partner. it's best to express love in such a way that all parties involved are satisfied with the nature of the loving relationship. the only way to have this awareness of desires is to communicate with your partner. it is not enough to signify their sexual orientation with a silly symbol.

we are all just circles. attracted to other circles through our loving tendencies. maybe one day, each person will be expressed by their own unique symbol to allow for computer analysis to determine all orientation and desires of that person - in this hypothetical world, love would not be free. luckily, in this current day, we are all internal. while our bodies are the unique symbols that represent all that we are, there is no computer analysis that can determine exactly what it is that will make us happy. often, not even self-analysis can reveal that.

it takes action and interaction. eventually, through this, we can hopefully find others whose satisfaction and happiness is inversely correlated with our own.

this is easy with simple objects lacking happiness or the ability to feel.. we can project whatever happiness we have held within onto these beings and feel satisfied with the pleasure we receive from these interactions. once the concept of life is introduced, we must have a much more keen awareness of the states of the beings  we interact with. everything that lives has goals. the ability for us to understand those goals and do what we can to assist, or at least not hinder, the being's pursuit of goals is the sole(soul) purpose of love.

man or woman, gay or straight, we should all love each other. we should work to understand where we all stand amongst each other and act accordingly. we love for each other. life would be incomplete without it. we're all circles and none of us wants to be empty.

robot controlled by rat brain

so this is kinda inhumane because of how many rats must be killed just to make a silly video..if only brains in jars wouldn't die.

somebody's gotta figure that shit out.

http://en.vidivodo.com/188787/first-cyborg-of-the-world

gesture interface

Sweetness. It's like even better than minority report. So you've got a phone with no screen and just a power button..how does that work?

http://http//www.technologyreview.com/communications/25380/?ref=rss

Oh of course, it has a projector and some gesture recognition software equipped to a camera. Amazing. This is very similar to the SixthSense technology developed at MIT. SixthSense is different in that it projects a sort of augmented reality to what the user is seeing, whereas the above hardware is only for interaction with the device. Here are links to a video and an article about SixthSense:

http://www.technologyreview.com/video/?vid=386

http://www.technologyreview.com/tr35/Profile.aspx?TRID=816

eye control mobile device

When I saw this video, I was extremely excited. It seems a little dull, but for the past year and a half or so, I have been commited to the idea that this would soon be a viable interface for device control. I even bought a book that was way over my head on openCV, a computer vision software, in order to get some idea of how this was possible. Sadly, I'm as good as illiterate with that book. Here is the news though, researchers have enabled a hand-held device to be controlled by eye movements and blinks alone. This has been done and nearly perfected on desktops, but has not been shown successful on a mobile device yet. It is much harder with a small mobile screen because the movement of the phone distorts the angle of perception at a much higher rate than when a user movs their head around a large screen in their immediate view. With the advancement of this and gesture user interfaces, researchers of today will revolutionize the devices of tomorrow
.

http://www.popsci.com/gadgets/article/2010-05/eyephone-new-cellphone-software-tracks-users-eye-movements

Kant's Noumena

Kant's use of the term Noumena is in classification of things in themselves, outside of the view of the perceiver. All that we can know is phenomena - conceptual knowledge of the world formed through experience. Our idea of a dog only consists of what we know about dogs through experience. We learn that a dog has certain physical features through observation and actual physical interaction. We know it's bark through what we hear as it barks. We do not know what dog experiences are like. We can form some idea through experimentation on dogs. Think specifically of Pavlov and his realization of a dog's uncontrollable anticipation for a meal or treat. We've also somehow been able to determine that the visual experiences of dogs lie in a much smaller spectrum of light than humans, leaving them with a dull black and white conception of the world. But all of this we have learned through our own sensory experiences aided by knowledge and prediction. Each of our conceptualizations of the world can be classified as purely phenomenal according to Kant.

i am a strange loop

Douglas Hofstadter's I am a Strange Loop is a follow-up to his original,