2004-01-24 Squirrel unfolding """ There is evidence that squirrels, who bury their food, know where to find it later because they have created some kind of mental map. They seem not to rely upon a sense of smell -- which makes sense, because if the owner of the nuts and acorns could find them by smell alone, then so could any other passing squirrel. """ p177, Figments of Reality Which is to say that the placement of the nuts by a given squirrel is some kind of function computed by the squirrel, and it can't be random otherwise the nuts wouldn't be found again. The mapping function must be unique to a squirrel, which means it must be derived from an aspect of the squirrel that is persistent over time (and reproducable), but is different from other individuals. Why bother to separate it out when instead it could compute a hash of the structure of the brain itself - which of course includes the qualia induced by the environment and kinaesthetic senses - and keep what appears to be stable? While the sense of the environment for two squirrels will be the same, the qualia induced will be different and depend on upbringing. So then: by examining the map of nuts buried by a number of squirrels in the same area, we can factor out the environment and produce a function to transform the map into a description of the structure of the brain of an individual*. Then by using this description, we can deduct it from a true squirrel and reveal the proto-squirrel. Now by using the proto squirrel as a base, we can reproduce the brain of any given squirrel simply by adding the transformed nut map. Or alternatively: Given the squirrel's brain will have changed over the months and it'll be using the finding and not-finding of nuts to recalibrate, by selectively removing nuts we can adjust the squirrel to a fictional (and designed) nut map, and thus change its personality. Over a number of seasons we could alter the personality (and thus the physical structure itself, by Hebb) to reinforce certain potentials, and produce a highly-organised - or at least: improbable - standard-wave-meshwork across the brain. This meshwork could have any property we desire: For example we could design it to collapse (consider the meshwork of Europe of 1915 which moved very quickly to the World War I attractor), or maybe we could design it to unfold and cascade, like a glider producing factory in Conway's Life, a squirrel which psychically expands along a certain line of flight towards something utterly alien, unknown**. * We have Bessel functions in physics; why not functions that capture the ringing/dynamics of potential topologies in the brain meshwork? ** Or perhaps construct a secondary environment which itself allows evolvable features, which outputs to the effector layer of the brain, in the same way we humans output to the fabric of the physical universe [that is to say, everything we do is reflected in the isness, somehow, we can't *not* output to it], which may itself (on its other side) be the effector, the moving interface-skin, of our universe, but in another place. Or to put it another way, we humans are constructured out of arrangements and folds of a skin. And whilst we are embedded in it much as the gliders are embedded in Conway's Life's rules, there may be a representation of the whole universe which acts (effects) something Else, in a way utterly orthogonal to not just the physical dimensions, but to reality -- in the same way that seeing Life played out, the impact that has on us as part of the environment, the viewable game as an effector, that *light* the screen emits and the *knowledge that it exists*, the distortion that game makes on human reality throughout all spacetime: The way that distortion-effector is orthogonal to the glider/rules assemblage. That's what I mean.