Mykola Bilokonsky mbilokonsky

What Is This?

This project is an attempt to explicate the text Evolution and Consciousness, by Leslie Dewart.

Glossary

We have a glossary of terms that may be helpful in understanding the concepts in play.

Chapter Summaries

We then follow with a chapter-by-chapter breakdown of the arguments of the text, expressed in the most accessible terms possible.

Quizzes

Chapter 1: The Anomaly In the dark dystopian world of the Matrix, a mysterious anomaly begins to disrupt the simulated reality. Neo and Trinity notice strange glitches. Meanwhile, in the Watchmen universe, Dr. Manhattan senses a rift in the fabric of spacetime. The Animaniacs, in their zany world, discover a portal that leads to unknown dimensions.

Chapter 2: Convergence Dr. Manhattan, driven by curiosity, investigates the rift and discovers it's a connection to other realities. His investigation sparks a philosophical debate with Rorschach about the nature of existence and whether realities are interwoven patterns of information or discrete entities.

In the Matrix, Neo and Trinity consult the Oracle, who presents them with theories of information complexity. They discuss the nature of reality as a construct, where dimensions might be layers of complexity rather than physical spaces.

The Animaniacs, on the other hand, playfully explore the new worlds, making light of these profound existential questions.

Thinking About Thinking

Having grown up with undiagnosed autism, I've been thinking about how to think for as long as I can remember. My models of the world never seemed to match anyone else's: I'd be confused at things others easily understood, and I'd understand easily things that others found confusing. I had to learn to reverse engineer how thinking itself worked so that I could anticipate the connections other people would make, and then use those insights to construct a social identity. I needed to understand why things seemed mean different things to me than they did to others - what is meaning, anyway?

And so I learned.

Understanding Meaning

I learned that meaning is constructed - that when someone associates some things in some way that they create third thing, the meaning of which is relationally defined by things joined. For instance, maybe someone hears a piece of music while experiencing a pleasant emotion. That piece of music now 'means' that emotion for that person, and vice versa. So w

Often, when building software or thinking about reality, we have this natural tendency to organize our reasoning in terms of top-down narratives. What I mean is, we see an ant carrying food back to its nest and we think "Yes, the ant colony survives by sending individual ants out to get food." There is this natural, to most humans, sense of teleology. We understand things by understanding what they're for, what purpose they serve.

We don't, as a rule, understand behaviors that seem to serve no purpose. We at best describe them as "not yet understood", and we assume that with more information we'll finally be able to tell a story that includes the fact under discussion.

But like, stories are only real in our heads, right? We tell stories because stories are how humans think. If some data can't fit into a story then we ignore it, because we literally have no way to think about it. But I think that this often leads to a specific kind of fallacy: the fallacy of assuming that a story exists that can reconcile al

Thinking Like a Function

Part 1: What's a function?

As a software engineer, you probably think of a function as a unit of code that takes some arguments and returns some value, eg:

 function square(x) { 
   return x * x;
 }

I'm kind of making this up but I have this notion that there exists some sort of law of conservation of information in programming. It works like this:

[Total Information In the System] = [computations done by your code] + [work done by your runtime] + [external environment]

Depending on what you're trying to do, it can be helpful and instructive to think about how you shift information around between these three buckets. To illustrate this point I'd like to step through three different implementations of the same program.

Let's do everyone's favorite simple program, a fibonacci number generator. Given some input INDEX, it'll give you the INDEX fibonacci number. So fib(0) = 1, fib(1) = 1, fib(2) = 2, fib(3) = 3, fib(4) = 5, fib(5) = 8, etc.

Computation

In our first example, let's just write a computational function that'll figure this out for us. It'll look something like this [lifted from the first google result](https://medium.com/developers-writing/fibonacci-sequence-algorithm-in-javascript-b253d

Abstract

JavaScript is notorious because it was written in ten days as a less-horrible alternative to a Microsoft future. Shipped well before it had a chance to mature, its runtime support is inconsistent and fragmented and its internal shortcomings are well documented.

But these issues have led to the emergence of something marvelous. The JavaScript of today has its problems, sure - but the obstacles it's had to overcome have each left their mark on the language's capabilities. Join me as we take a longer view of the language and tooling that defines what we do today on the front-end.

Things like AJAX, JQuery, Node/NPM and CoffeeScript all solved specific problems - but they also fundamentally changed the scope of what was possible. We reinvented the relationship between server and client, used abstraction to break external constraints, and learned to reach outside the browser and create our own tools. And once we started transpiling, everything changed forever!

We'll look at the way various trends hav

Keybase proof

I hereby claim:

I am mbilokonsky on github.
I am mykola (https://keybase.io/mykola) on keybase.
I have a public key ASAiU-5a-WeL8q6N5dOHR4WOVmGqYXZzcb7PLFSBdBCNZAo

To claim this, I am signing this object:


	[
	{
	"name": "sound",
	"category": "sensory",
	"sense_seeking_question": "I have a stim that involves really loud sound, be that music or machinery or something else.",
	"sensitivity_values": [
	"A sound needs to be very loud for me to even notice it.",
	"I sometimes need to turn the volume up to hear something that others seem to hear just fine",
	"I've always felt pretty normal here - my experience seems to be in keeping with that of most people around me.",

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	const actionTypes = {
	name + "_INVALIDATED": name + "_INVALIDATED",
	name + "_RETRIEVED": name + "_RETRIEVED",
	name + "_FAILED": name + "_FAILED"
	}

	const createInvalidatingAction() {
	return {
	type: actionTypes[name + "_INVALIDATED"],