What happened with Imran Awan? How does the DC Swamp really operate?

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This is a terrific interview. Real investigative reporting. Rosiak details how corruption in DC transcends party lines. If you wonder what happened to Imran Awan and why his story disappeared without major ramifications, this is the answer.

I hope we Americans can begin reaching across the many issues that divide us so deeply. It is both ironic and very fitting that corruption in both parties may be the best way to accomplish that.

There are some good people in this story, but corruption has prevailed so far.

Today’s world turns on “democratized information” more than ever before in human history. This interview is 40 minutes of eye-opening info. Don’t miss it.

Brain networks act dynamically, rapidly reorganizing on both spatial and temporal scales

~ ABN ~ 2 Comments

A new model of the brain is emerging from research that shows that:

The brain is highly dynamic, reorganizing its activity at different interacting spatial and temporal scales, including variation within and between brain networks.  (The spatial chronnectome reveals a dynamic interplay between functional segregation and integration)

Traditionally, models of brain activity have assumed networks were spatially more fixed. More information about this study can be found here: Structure of Brain Networks Is Not Fixed, Study Finds.

In Buddhist literature, it is frequently stated that one’s karma can be completely changed in the “duration of a single thought,” or words to that effect.

If we understand karma to mean the work or ongoing functional habits of the mind, and consider that in light of the above findings, we may fairly conclude that thousands of years of Buddhist practice have been based on valid insights into how our brains actually operate.

Buddhist concepts of non-attachment, emptiness, and impermanence can also be seen in this light. And this would apply both to individual psychology, group psychologies, or the cosmos itself from a Mind Only perspective.

A good tool to have is the understanding that even deep psychological states can be transformed in a moment’s time. Consider also that the Buddha did describe some individual traits as “persistent” or unchanging even after enlightenment.

Perfect communication is not possible (but greatly improved communication is)

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Human beings cannot possibly expect to communicate with each other perfectly. Perfect communication would require complete transfers of information with no ambiguity.

This point is fundamental to understanding why we need a method to frequently correct or adjust interpersonal communication in real-time.

If we do not have a method to do that, mistakes will inevitably cause problems, some of which will inevitably snowball.

TBH, I don’t understand why no one before me has figured the method out. Many have seen the problem in one way or another, but none has provided a way to fix it as far as I know.

To simplify the problem a bit, let’s just stick with language.

Language is ambiguous in and of itself. And when it is used for interpersonal communication it is fraught with ongoing and very significant ambiguities.

These ambiguities are so serious, I believe I can safely maintain that they account for a major component of our personalities. They may even be the major component.

Why does this seem so obvious to me but not to many others I speak with? I really do not know. Why didn’t Plato or Buddha or Laozi or Kant or Dostoevsky deal with this? I don’t know.

It’s possible the Buddha did privately or that’s what the Pythagorean’s secret was. Buddhist monks traveled in pairs and may have had a method to deal with interpersonal ambiguity.

If they did, I doubt it would be very different from my method, which you can find fully explained, free of charge here: FIML.

Please consider the problem of ambiguity before you undertake FIML.

Give ambiguity some real thought. Contemplate how it has affected your life in many ways you already know about. Then consider how many more ways you do not know about.

How many mistakes in communication—just due to ambiguity and consequent misunderstandings alone—have affected your life?

Watch for it and you will see ambiguity happening very often. Sometimes it’s funny, sometimes insignificant, sometimes it’s tragic. The more there is, the worse it is.

When just two humans clear up almost all ambiguity between them (a process that must be constant like any other maintenance chore), amazing things begin to happen to their psychologies.

For each pair, what happens will be different because FIML is only a method. It has no content itself. What could be better than that?

Information streams plus interpersonal communication are the foundations of philosophical psychology

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In this context, an information stream is a stream of information that largely fills the minds of all who are in it such that they know much more about that information than any other.

They value that stream and believe it or believe in it more than any other stream. All human cognition and psychology is taken from and conditioned by primary information streams.

Information streams are essentially “religions.” They include all of the world’s religions in addition to other fundamental belief systems such as science, politics, atheism, a life of crime, and so on.

Interpersonal communication is the most intimate or subjectively honest communication an individual human engages in.

These two factors define human life on planet earth, especially conscious human life.

The following follows:

  • it is impossible for any individual human to know more than a few information streams well
  • very few, if any, humans have really good interpersonal communication; very few are deeply, effectively, and richly subjectively honest with anyone else
  • thus, virtually all humans are trapped within the confines of their information streams (“religions”) and their unrequited personal subjectivity
  • and thus as a substitute, we fight or feel sad or become narcissistic or seek reclusion or take drugs or pursue money and power or sports and so on

I would maintain that once you see the above trap we humans are in, if you are of sound mind, you will want to escape.

We can never fully escape our need for some information stream (we have to have something) but we can escape to some extent by knowing that there are many information streams and none of them (as far as we know) can claim perfect information.

And, though we can never fully escape subjective isolation, we can escape to some extent by doing FIML practice.

The best way to view information streams is learn about a good many of them and then assign probabilities to how true they seem to you.

For example, I might hold that a materialist explanation of the cosmos has a 10-15% chance of being completely correct and a 25% chance of being a valid part of a larger whole that is more correct but has not yet been determined or discovered.

Assigning percentages mainly helps the mind categorize and assign resources. This, in turn, affects what we read, talk about, and do.

In addition to the percentages provided above, I might assign another 25% to the Buddhadharma and another 25% to the Buddhadharma plus all of the other world religions. Then I might assign 15% to the invented God argument and then some to the simulation argument and so on.

You can do this in any way that suits you. Your percentages don’t have to add up to one hundred, but it is good to have at least a rough calculus to provide some order to the many streams of information available to us.

My own percentages go up and down. The largest one is I cannot honestly be sure of very much but believe it is profoundly worth trying to be more sure or better at trying.

I believe the above description plus having some dedication to an endeavor sort of like that is a good definition of philosophical psychology.

To my eye, philosophical psychology is a good information stream to be in because it stresses how we think and what we think about while also paying full attention to our humanity.

Machine learning used to successfully predict psychosis

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A very interesting study shows that a computer analysis of language use has predicted early signs of future psychosis with ~90% accuracy in at-risk individuals.

,,,results revealed that conversion to psychosis is signaled by low semantic density and talk about voices and sounds. When combined, these two variables were able to predict the conversion with 93% accuracy in the training and 90% accuracy in the holdout datasets. The results point to a larger project in which automated analyses of language are used to forecast a broad range of mental disorders well in advance of their emergence.  (A machine learning approach to predicting psychosis using semantic density and latent content analysis)

An article about the study says:

The results showed that higher than normal usage of words related to sound, combined with a higher rate of using words with similar meaning, meant that psychosis was likely on the horizon. (The whisper of schizophrenia: Machine learning finds ‘sound’ words predict psychosis)

Phillip Wolff, an author of the study, says of it:

“This research is interesting not just for its potential to reveal more about mental illness, but for understanding how the mind works — how it puts ideas together. Machine learning technology is advancing so rapidly that it’s giving us tools to data mine the human mind.” (Ibid)