Religious Convictions

At least twice this year, I have found myself wanting to talk about having a religious conviction that something was the case. The first time of these two that I remember, I had a conviction that a late-Autumn swim in a cold lake would cure something in me that was ailing - and it did. It was fantastic. Not like regular swimming at all. It was spiritual swimming.

Then, just a moment ago, I wanted to talk about the religious conviction I had and have in my ability to build a deep, comprehensive, insightful theory of <the nonsense I'm currently enamored with /> (which wasn't sociosexuality or petrology, if you're reading this from after 2018).

This is a little odd for me because I'm not religious. I'm not terribly far from being religious, but still, I'd like to find a different way to describe this significant thing that I occasionally feel.

At first, I was reminded of the old Roman distinction between religion and superstition, and I asked myself, "Does a religious conviction feel different from a superstitious conviction?". Well, I don't have superstitious convictions, so, yes, I think superstitious convictions must either feel different or not exist. Moving on to more productive territory, let's try a big list of guesses, as is my usual form:

  1. An intuition is a belief you can't justify or abandon. A religious conviction might simply be a very confident intuition.
  2. A religious conviction is a belief about how the world properly interfaces with your soul. // Like how a swim can cure something in you that's upstream of your mood, or how, if my second religious conviction is/was right, you can aggressively stalk a fleeting idea through google scholar for a few months and eventually capture some deep and life-changing insight.
  3. A religious conviction is a belief that's accompanied by a suspicion which tells you that you believe the thing mostly because it's beautiful or cool or awe-inspiring. // Believing things because of their emotional impact is one of the Human Universal Cognitive Biases Associated With Religions Cross-Culturally that I tried to enumerate here. Some of the other guesses here will also be based on the Human Universal Cognitive Biases Associated With Religions Cross-Culturally (HUCBAWRCs?).
  4. A religious conviction is a belief that you feel was sneakily communicated to you by someone who knows what's going on behind the scenes. // Say it with me now: HUCBAWRC!
  5. A religious conviction is a belief in a narrative explanation of something in your life, even when a narrative explanation should feel unsuitable because you know that the thing isn't determined by the interactions of people. // Can I get a HUCBAWRC? No! This one wasn't on the list. Maybe it should have been? Not too shabby.
  6. A religious conviction is just a sacred belief - sacredness recognition being a shared social adaptation for not talking about beliefs that are strategically adopted in an epistemically irrational way. // Is this a HUCBAWRC? But of course! Yet another a HUCBAWRC! Also, when I first wrote this out, I accidentally typed "religious suspicion" rather than conviction. That's a whole new can of worms, isn't it? It will stay unopened for tonight.
  7. A religious conviction is a belief that you hold on the basis of non-verbal encouragement from a certain part of you - a part of you which knows just what you need to do in order to flourish and find eudaimonia - a part of you which would readily guide you by detailed instructions if it possessed any linguistic faculty of expression. // Wow. What? That is not a HUCBAWRC. Is that a new hypothesis and/or dumb micro-fiction? I'll tell you! That's some recent conceptual machinery: "the unconscious mind attributed with undue personhood and wisdom" is one of the Proposed Naturalistic Identifications Of The Soul (PNIOTS! I said and you can't stop me.).
  8. A religious conviction is a regular conviction felt on a night when you want to be better friends with people who also have god-shaped holes in their hearts. // D'aww?

As is the custom, I will probably add a few more guesses to the list over the next few days, and then never explicitly decide among them. Maybe I could summarize them though? That's the normal format for presenting ideas. Let's try a summary. A religious conviction is 1. A confident intuition. 2. A belief about your world-soul interface. 3. A belief which you want to have in something beautiful. 4. A gnostic belief of natural order. 5. A narrative explanation applied in an inappropriate context. 6. A strategic lie protected by a sacred taboo. 7. Encouragement from your unconscious MINDSOUL. 8. Just a regular conviction, Preinfarction. Just a regular conviction.

Nice. Actually, they feel much less persuasive in summary. Hopefully, any further guesses I make will be better.
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How is tonic immobility adaptive?

A gazelle goes still in a lion's mouth. Lots of prey animals do. It's called "tonic" immobility because the gazelle's muscles are tense. Why doesn't the lion kill it? The reason that the lion holds off on killing an immobile gazelle it is the reason that immobility is adaptive. Let's guess:
  1. The lion is stupid. It thinks the gazelle is dead. 
  2. The lion has stupid instincts. It only attacks moving prey. 
  3. The lion prefers giving its family fresh (live) meat, and it bets that the gazelle won't escape.
  4. Cats like playing with their food (whether for exercise, or training, or the thrill of the chase) and part of the lion wants her prey to escape so that she can capture it again. I feel like if this were the case, she'd wound the gazelle lightly to make recapture more probable. Which might happen? I don't know.
  5. The lion wants cubs in the family to kill the gazelle. Does that happen? Easy mode combat simulator.
  6. The lion wants to show off to other lions how healthy its gazelle was, which works better if it's alive.
  7. The lion doesn't like carrying the gazelle in its mouth and hopes that the gazelle will change its mind and agree to walk voluntarily back home.
  8. The lion loves carrying the live gazelle in its mouth. Happiness is a warm gazelle in the mouth. Don't knock it till you've tried it.
  9. The lion is cruel and wants the gazelle to suffer in fear. Fear is the lion's bacon bits.
  10. The lion is kind and wants the gazelle to have as long of a life as possible. That might not sound kind, but look at how your own society keeps suffering people alive in its beneficence.
  11. Lions procrastinate just like everyone else and would rather not go through the hassle of killing the gazelle until it's absolutely necessary.
  12. The lion's better nature just wants to bring the gazelle home as a friend or a pet, but somewhere down the road the lion's worse nature always rears its impulsive head.
I think #3 is the most probable ("fresh meat for the family"), but I've actually only seen #1 ("playing dead") and #2 ("attack in predators is triggered by the perception of movement") in the literature.

Immobility is adaptive in other contexts to avoid detection, of course, and you could argue that the same immobility is manifesting maladaptively when the gazelle has been captured. I think that's wrong. I think it's adaptive in gazelles at the time of capture, because it makes later escape more probable, because it keeps the lion from attacking. But why? It deserves a thorough analysis.

I'll keep adding guesses throughout the day if I think of more. Or if I read something cool. Or if I see another route by which immobility is adaptive besides avoiding detection and delaying attacks when you're in the lion's mouth. 

I guess there's the old situation of immobility being adaptive when action is being directly punished, like when arthritis causes joint pain or when people look for an excuse to slap down people they don't like, or when you've got a very vocal internal critic. That's not tonic, but it's also interesting. Yep.

Edit 1: A friend brought up Pinch-Induced Behavior Inhibition, aka the Vulcan Nerve Pinch of transporting baby cats, squirrels, mice, and rats by the neck scruff. Wouldn't it be awesome if predators were exploiting an adaptation that allows mothers to carry babies?

What about animals besides cats and rodents? The internet also has photos of adult wolves, bears, and foxes carrying their babies in their mouths, but I don't know if there's associated pinch immobility. Probably Pinch Immobility is less widespread in vertebrates than Defensive Predator-Contact Immobility, and can't explain it.

Edit 2: Any explanation that relies on the particulars of lion motivations will be insufficient, because tonic immobility is adaptive for animals on different continents with different predators. American rabbits hunted by foxes display tonic immobility too. Most of the above explanations aren't specific to lions, so that's fine, but I should say it up front. Anyway, here's a new one: Maybe tonic immobility following non-lethal contact with a predator deters the predator from further attacks not because the fox is fooled into thinking the rabbit is dead, but because the fox thinks the rabbit is sick. Lethargy is one of the symptoms of the syndrome called sickness behavior, and if you're not sure if the animal in your mouth is diseased, maybe that's reason to hold off on eating it.

At this point, I think I need to just put more effort into researching the real responses of predators to tonic immobility, and maybe predator neurology also, in order to learn whether predators have a stupid brain circuit giving them a stupid instinct to only attack moving prey, even if the prey was moving a second ago and is now sitting handily in the predator's mouth. Also, I've read inconsistent reports on whether tonic immobility is accompanied by brachycardia (decreased heart rate). If it is, then that's a small point in favor of the hypothesis that tonic immobility is a condition which a predator could confuse for death. Why the predator doesn't keep eating the animal she thinks she just killed would still be a mystery, but it would be a smaller mystery at least.

And maybe the hints I've read about tonic immobility being adaptive are wrong: maybe the prey animal's brain is just shutting down maladaptively in an extreme situation, or maybe evolution just sucks and tonic immobility is even a maldaptive response to something non-extreme like how rabbits and maybe dogs can be immobilized just by putting them on their backs in the right way, or maybe predators aren't deterred at all by tonic immobility displays, or maybe other things. I need to stop coming up with explanations for what's going on before I've gotten a thorough understanding of what's going on. Get my data first, then explain it. I suppose. And once I know about rabbits and foxes, then I'll know a little more about humans. It will be one of many dozens of perspectives on executive dysfunction in this, my Year of Solving Akrasia Forever, In Theory If Not In Practice.
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Why Do I Feel A Little Bit Morally Opposed To Video Games?

Observation: People who like video games more seem worse than people who like video games less. Why? Here are some things which could explain the apparent trend.

  1. Video games appeal to bad people.
  2. Playing video games makes people worse.
  3. Playing video games doesn't make people worse, but it funges against becoming better, so people who play video games gradually fall behind.

    🌡

  4. Playing video games makes people a little bit better therapeutically, but video games are mainly sought out by bad people (trying to improve) and that imbalance isn't fully offset by the improvement. Like Simpson's paradox. And maybe games are primarily played by people who start out bad because playing them is unpleasant or costly, like how it's mainly sick people who take unpleasant costly medications.
  5. Bad people like video games and good people don't, but this happens for a mysterious reason that has nothing to do with whether video games are good, which they are.
  6. Some people have lots of norms, of which some are good and some are neutral. Lacking norms is upstream both of being bad and of playing video games. 

    🌡

  7. Video games are good and liking them is shameful for some reason. Lack of shame is upstream both of being bad and of talking about liking video games. 

    🌡

  8. Good and bad people like video games the same amount, but it's mostly {the bad people who don't fully endorse being bad} who talk about liking and playing video games because they have fewer activities and preferences to talk about which aren't bad. This imbalance gets exaggerated when good people see that moderately bad people talk about video games and then avoid the topic or activity out of reputational interest. 

    🌡

  9. The demographic that likes video games is better characterized as being low status in society as a consequence of something else (being poor, lonely, impulsive, ...) than as being bad. Being bad is also low status. Low social status and badness often get incorrectly conflated. 

    🌡

  10. Video games appeal to people without physical culture, and the largest group without physical culture is the group that has no culture, so video game discussion is dominated by the uncultured.
  11. People who play some games, perhaps Civilization, are good. People who play other games, perhaps Red Dead Redemption, are bad. There are many more bad people than good, so video games get a bad reputation based on the popular titles, the same way that television shows and films do. 

    🌡

  12. Popular video games appeal to normal people, who are the regular amount of bad for humans, and also make them worse. Video games that make people better don't appeal to most people, because becoming better is costly.
  13. Video games are unpleasant for some, pleasant for others, and addicting but not pleasant for others still. People who play video games compulsively have a self-consistency incentive to believe that they like, rather than merely want, to play the games. People who find video games unpleasant just see other people doing unpleasant things, and assume that the players are addicted or like unpleasantness. Self-consistency incentives and theory-of-mind failures both contribute to a discourse which is unable to point to people with normal morals who actually find video games pleasant. The more people talk about video games, the less healthy will video games seem to people who don't play.
  14. Video games are good, but they don't contribute to complex human flourishing. People who choose to pursue complex human flourishing instead of video games see others as having made a failure of moral judgement and see people who play more as going further down the wrong path.
  15. It is specifically players of multi-player video games with an option of strong anonymity who are bad because people behave worse behind anonymity. 

    🌡

  16. Doing bad activities within video games is bad, even if it doesn't change your values - bad in a way that isn't captured by consequentialism - and people who are more insensitive to this are also more insensitive to other moral considerations.
  17. Video games and cartoons are fine for children, but adults who like them have an aesthetic faculty which is underdeveloped, and this is upstream of being bad in other parts of life.
  18. Video games are good. People who like video games are good. Preinfarction is bad, except when he indulges in the occasional video game. Everything he thinks is wrong. His utility function has a minus sign where it should have a plus sign. He is the closest thing we have to Satan in this world.
  19. Video games appeal to people in pain, and being in pain is upstream of not having the energy to be good. 

    🌡

  20. Some video games are bad, and they appeal to everyone, and good people are better at disengaging: Some video games are addicting supernormal stimuli made by an industry looking to exploit quirks in your reward system for profit. People who have experienced games like these and then not disengaged might have poor self-control, poor self-awareness, a weak memetic immune system, or limited concern for their mental autonomy and well being. None of these traits do we associate with health and good judgement and righteousness. They're bad traits. Not necessarily traits of bad people, but still bad traits. 

    🌡

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Think Before You Don't Speak

Wei Dai told us to think before we speak and signal it. Wei Dai does that himself. He writes wonderful, thoughtful things. But he writes so rarely. I'm glad he's around, but I don't know if everyone should do that.

If people could largely develop beautiful theories in isolation, human history wouldn't look like it does. We're mostly not that smart individually. We need to talk and work together. You're not Alexander Grothendieck and neither am I. Neither am I Wei Dai for that matter.

On the other hand, human history has had no shortage of people talking, and most of it didn't result in theoretical progress. Were they talking about non-intellectual things? Were their gains not captured? Are gains mostly made in isolation by great people, regardless of priorities and capture? I am reminded of myself:
Well, last night I skimmed a dozen papers trying to identify the function of serotonin. Nothing came of it. I wrote a tweet and deleted it. I didn't post the papers. I probably won't summarize it here on my blog. And now I'm a little burned out on serotonin literature. Everything is like this. It's amazing, but sometimes progress is limited by the "compare notes" phase and not the "solitary bold conceptual departure" phase.

Have you noticed that people who post thousands of tweets a year have thousands of followers? It makes me wonder if a constant stream of my thoughts would be a good way to spread ideas. But I mostly don't follow those people. People who tweet with high volume don't tweet with depth. They might be capable of depth, but they stop demonstrating it when they start to care about large audiences.

On the other side of the coin, I heard about cool ideas like the Gödelian diagonalization view of trolling from Will N. like six years ago, and his smart friends talk about it and understand it, but no one has ever written it up. Deep people don't write at all, or they write a few things and let the bulk of their ideas live and die in private chats.

Why should formal, high-quality, algorithmically precise philosophy on topics like voting theory not happen on public blogs outside of academia? Why can't we post and talk to each other and make progress?

You're all cute on twitter and I like hearing about what you're having for supper and what you saw on the train and which works of art you enjoy and how dating is going and how you're making a skating rink for you son.

Sometimes I like being cute too. But existential risk reduction through formal philosophy sits in my heart where religion sits for other people, and it's not cute, but it's what I want to talk about a lot of the time.

But Wei Dai told us to think before we speak and signal it. And look how well he writes. So here am: not really wanting to be cute, too burned out to think on my own, and not talking through hard thoughts with friends, just like almost every human has done throughout our glacial 300,000 year history.

Think before you speak and signal it. It sounds good. It doesn't work. Not for me. Nothing else works either, but I'm going to try something else anyway. I'm going to think as I speak, because otherwise I get stuck on the thinking and never get to the speaking. That's no way to make progress.
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Displacement Behaviors Demonstrate Cognitive Compulsions

Hair pulling is a displacement behavior that shows frustration. Hand wringing shows deliberation about whom you will end up choosing to hurt, perhaps. Holding your arms and rocking shows anxiety about whether to perform when you doubt your skill and the cost of failure is high.

What are some other compulsive behaviors of neurotypical people that are cognitively interpretable?

And also, isn't it wild that they exist at all? What does wringing your hands have to do with moral deliberation? Nothing, so far as I can tell. It's just part of the universal human gesture lexicon in which compulsive gestures were paired up randomly with compulsive thoughts for their signalling value.

What is the meaning of drumming your fingers or tapping your toes? What does cleaning a table by scratching it with one fingernail mean? What does biting down on the side of your lower lip mean?

Maybe squinting + grimacing + shaking or nodding your head is a technique to self stimulate your ears so that you can reset your phonological loop when you've reached a conclusion and you want to stop thinking about a topic. I think that one's not compulsive enough to call a displacement behavior, but it's still interesting, no?
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Beard stroking is a displacement behavior that's culturally associated with deep thinking. It might be more specific than that though? What do you think? I want to talk to someone who can think.

Several people I've known will tap some point on the center-line of their face (chin, lower lip, or nose) when they're approaching a conclusion.

I think drumming your fingers probably shows boredom. And hair twirling shows boredom. Are they different kinds of boredom? Are they? These are answerable questions. Look in yourself and make a guess. And then tell me, and I will say, "Hm, yes, interesting! Maybe.".

Boredom by itself doesn't seem all that compulsive. There are compulsive thoughts associated with the mood of boredom, like looking for something else to do or wondering when something else will happen or wondering when the current thing will stop happening. Probably others. I think drumming your fingers is about waiting, and twirling hair is about something else, but I'm not sure what. Maybe hair twirling shows mild frustration. That makes a little sense on the grounds that the behavior is like a mild version of hair pulling. But when you see it, you think "boredom" first, don't you?

You might say "hair twirling is self-stimulation so you have something to process when you're bored". Fine, sure, yes. But they're all self-stimulation. What's the associated thought? There might not be one. I don't know. Let me know.
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The False Lexical Constituent Riddle Game

A false lexical constituent pun looks like this:
There's a fake meaning (to acquire a pub) derived from breaking the word "bargaining" into false lexical constituents. Here are some more lexical constituent puns presented as tricky riddles. If you saw these before on Twitter or Slack, you may want to skip the first seven.

1. Fake meaning: A hollow metal cylinder that was born under the first sign of the Western zodiac.
Real meaning: Yellow finches native to islands off the coast of Portugal and Morocco.
Hyphenation pattern: 3 letter - 5 letters.

2. Fake meaning: An Oriental or Eastern Orthodox painting of a religious figure which people like to brush their fingers against.
Real meaning: The river separating Gaul from Italy.
Pattern: 3-4.

3. Fake meaning: A mesh for catching a falling male descendant.
Real meaning: A form of poem in 14 lines.
Pattern: 3-3.

4. Fake meaning: A sheep made from the remains of a fire.
Real meaning: An Indian monastery.
Pattern: 3-3.

5. Fake meaning: A lord of immoral transgressions.
Real meaning: Gradually entering into the ground.
Pattern: 3-4.

6. Fake meaning: A furry animal that can be caressed when it sits on your thighs.
Real meaning: A small fold in a garment. (This one was a little obscure to me.)
Pattern: 3-3.

7. Fake meaning: 2000 pounds of intercourse.
Real meaning: A groundskeeper for a graveyard or parish.
Pattern: 3-3.

8. Fake meaning: The edge of a garment that has been sewn by a ground-dwelling eusocial insect.
Real meaning: An uplifting song associated with a nation or other social group.
Pattern: 3-3.

9. Fake meaning: A large saline body of water in the shape of a torus which is connected to an ocean.
Real meaning: Hot enough to scorch.
Pattern: 3-4.

10. Fake meaning: To prohibit Scottish bonnets.
Real meaning: The miniature, dwarf variety of any chicken breed. Also a publishing house that uses a chicken as its mascot. Also a weight class in boxing between fly- and feather-.
Pattern: 3-3.

11. Fake meaning: A place to lie down and rest in a pub.
Real meaning: Having jagged spines, as on a fish hook.
Pattern: 3-3.

12. Fake meaning: The era in which an item of clothing was worn.
Real meaning: Trash.
Pattern: 4-3.

13. Fake meaning: A person who cooperates with a lower limb.
Real meaning: Done in a licit manner.
Pattern: 3-4.

14. Fake meaning: A single object which reflects light at the lowest end of the visible spectrum. 
Real meaning: To have performed again.
Pattern: 3-3.

15. Fake meaning: When NBC tries to make a new version of an 80s sitcom featuring an alien anteater. 
Real meaning: A pasta sauce made with parmesan cheese, named after its inventor.
Pattern: 3-4.

16. Fake meaning: A billion years of geological time following the domestication of boars. 
Real meaning: A dove, especially one which is not white.
Pattern: 3-3.

17. Fake meaning: A person who shoots down several enemies in combat while riding a wave.
Real meaning: The outer or uppermost layer of a thing.
Pattern: 4-3.

18. Fake meaning: A skinny monarch.
Real meaning: Cognition.
Pattern: 4-4

19. Fake meaning: A safari park ruled by a dynasty of Emperors of Han Chinese ethnicity. (This one is easier to get if you know about my love for adjectives pospositional.)
Real meaning: Moving quickly, or adjusting a camera smoothly between long-shot and a close-up.
Pattern: 3-4.

20. Fake meaning: A regular stopping place on a public transportation route for shrew-like mammals.
Real meaning: Sexual assault, especially of children. (Sorry.)
Pattern: 4-7.

21. Fake meaning: A long serrated blade re-purposed as a weapon in battle.
Real meaning: The capital of Poland.
Pattern: 3-3.

22. Fake meaning: White cereal grain stored in a baseball hat.
Real meaning: A sudden change of mood or behavior; eccentrically impulsive.
Pattern: 3-4.

23. Fake meaning: The speed at which molten metal is poured into a mold.
Real meaning: To remove the testicles of a male animal.
Pattern: 4-4.

24. Fake meaning: The sound of sonar pulse reflected off of gauze fabric. (The fabric is a little obscure. It's the five-letter component, if that helps.)
Real meaning: Being thrifty.
Pattern. 5-4.

25. Fake meaning: A commercial for a solid sphere.
Real meaning: A narrative poem or song presented in short stanzas.
Pattern: 4-2.

26. Fake meaning: The last stop on a line of the San Francisco metro.
Real meaning: To serve alcoholic drinks from behind a counter.
Pattern: 4-3.

27: Fake meaning: Anger experienced in a small sheltered bay.
Real meaning: The extent to which something has been placed beneath another thing, especially for concealment or protection.
Pattern: 4-4.

28. Fake meaning: Having the poor visual acuity of a cloistered religious mendicant.
Real meaning: Tampered with a machine in the manner of a curious primate.
Pattern: 4-4.

29. Fake meaning: A Native American from a tribe indigenous to Colorado and surrounding areas who has chemically reshaped their hair into curls.
Real meaning: To change, especially to reorder the elements of a mathematical set.
Pattern: 4-3.

30: Powdered resin used in laser printers which is pale in color.
Real meaning: A person who is unrestrained, unruly, or unchaste.
Pattern: 3-5.
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Identifying The Soul

There are lots of recently coined terms for mental objects which I mostly don't use except in quotation.
As for historical terms, I'm not yet resolved either way as to whether the term "soul" has a referent. If there is no soul, then how do we account for soul food and soul music? We have lots of good words for mental objects that aren't so laden with supernatural associations, and which can often stand in for "soul" in common expressions, and I'd like to make up my mind on the question of whether the the soul should be thought of as equivalent to any of them or distinct from them but also naturalistic.

Light-hearted proposals:

1. The soul is the mind-like thing which is tethered to the body but does not reside in the brain. Therefore the soul is the processing capacity of neural reflex arc pathways.

2. The soul is the mental image of a person in which their skin is still attached to their face. Saying a person has a soul = thinking they still have a face. Think about it.

3. The soul is what we called the brain's (magnetic) aura before we realized it was computationally impotent.

4. The soul is the thing that's confused when you learn about a new genre of fetish pornography.

Serious but low quality proposals:

1. The soul is whatever fragment of yourself you can identify with and appreciate finding in other moral agents and moral patients. This is less an identification of the soul and more a procedure for identifying it.

2. The soul is just one's mind or mental identity, but sometimes we call it the wrong name for poetry's sake, especially when a person has died and we want to be reverential. In support of this, notice that "psyche" is a synonym for both "soul" and "mind". By the transitive property of equality, we can derive ... nothing, because synonymy isn't equality. Still, they're plausibly the same.

3. A thing has a soul precisely if we attribute moral decision making capacity (agenthood) or moral value (patienthood) or both (personhood) to it.

Serious proposals:

1. The soul is the moral or immoral content of personality. The soul of a person is the set of stable traits or tendencies of decision-making which we call virtues and vices. I'm not sure how much of personality could be called morally neutral in contrast with this. Maybe the soul is just personality and "morally-charged personality" is redundant? Not sure either way.

2. The soul is what motivates us to moral action or inhibits us from immoral action. If the excitatory component, which works by inspiring pride through self-praise, is called "ego" and the inhibitory component, which works by inspiring guilt through self-shame, is called "conscience", then the soul is just the combination of ego and conscience.

3. The soul is the capacity to valuate behavioral policies. We could say that every formal decision theory is a different soul architecture. Similarly, but with a little more psychological realism, we could say that the soul is the set of human emotive valuation mechanisms, which I've taken to categorizing as liking/disliking, wanting/dreading, and approving/disapproving. In contrast with those two capacities of valuation, I think it's abundantly clear that the soul, if anything, is not a set of valuations itself: the soul is not a utility function of any stripe.

4. The soul is the unconscious mind viewed as a separate person. Like everything else, this is largely done through the use of the unconscious mind.

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I'm glad that I've explicated these hypotheses. Some of them feel a little plausible. Still, maybe soul rhetoric should be left to the super-naturalists. In the absence of feedback from other naturalists, I guess I'll just see what word choices I make in the future and that will be a telling sign of whether these ideas have led me to believe that the word "soul" is a useful word with a clear enough natural referent.

Edit 1: I found myself using the world "soul" to refer to the part of myself which (at the least) reaches profound conclusions about the value of my behavior, where profundity means something like "possessing strong emotive force". So that's cool. The soul reaches emotional conclusions or suggests them to us for conscious consideration.

But what is "strong emotive force" really? I understand intense emotion, but what's that "force" word doing there? It's some persuasive influence on our decision process, clearly. Maybe it's like getting angrier as you prepare for a fight; it's a condition wherein you're planning and rehearsing the behaviors that you would begin performing upon adopting a belief, and then that focus and simulation somehow irrationally influences your belief, and that's the persuasion.

Or maybe emotive force is more like getting angry with someone as your suspicion grows that you would *win* in a confrontation with them. For example, you decide that their behavior is indeed immoral as you realize that other people would agree with your assessment and support you in criticizing and standing up to your opponent.

More generally, suppose there's a contemplated belief, an emotion that you would feel upon adopting the belief, and a course of behavior which the emotion generally promotes to attention. When you judge that the promoted behavior would be good in your situation, then you've got an emotion waiting to flare up, and so the contemplated belief is associated with the possibility of a strong justified emotion, and that may be enough to convince you to adopt the belief and take the adaptive action, regardless of other evidence which should weigh upon our consideration of the belief. So, again, briefly: we see a valuable behavior, we want to have a reason to perform the behavior, and sometimes that's enough to sway our judgement and convince us that we do have reason. And sometimes the behavior is not "fight" but "keep your head down" and the belief is "you're not so special" and the emotion is shame. Omission and inhibition can have moral force too. Or, in a domain other than interpersonal confrontation, the soul might lead you believe that someone is worthy of moral consideration because it calculates that expressing that belief would be politically advantageous for you, and then we call the moral force "empathy".

I kind of like this hypothesis for it's naughtiness: the soul is preconscious, epistemically irrational, and politically motivated. The soul might give us our sacred conclusions, but it's operating principle is calculating and profane. Unconscious motivated cognition, folks. I'm calling it Serious Soul Identification Proposal #5. Best one yet, I'd say. In the top five at least.

Edit 2: On twitter, one Hope S. suggests that her lack of soul is related to her not finding inspiration in seeing a flower growing up from cracks in the pavement. Perhaps a soul is "the ability to be inspired by things like stories of perseverance through adversity".
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Giving You Heads On An Unmade Bed

To the tune of "Chelsea Hotel #2" by Leonard Cohen
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I remember you well looking at a brain cell;
You were talking of mental elites.
Joining up neural threads from all of their heads,
Oxygenating them with your heartbeats.

You were the brain child and I the brain stork,
Delivering tissues and skulls in the flesh.
And you always knew when I'd bundled them wrong
Because the grey matter wasn't quite fresh.

Then you got away - Didn't you, babe? -
From the normal bell curve of the crowd.
In a few short days with Cas9 endonuclease
You'd augmented and then jumped to the cloud.

I remember you well, looking at a brain cell;
You were famous, your mind was a legend.
You told me again you preferred genius men,
But for me you would make an exception.

You pulled my hips close. I put a hand on your blouse,
But you had in mind something hotter.
Live electrodes snaked in, deep under my skin,
And pierced through my brain's pia mater.

I don't mean to suggest that I served you the best.
I can't keep track of each sub-personality.
I remember you well, looking at a brain cell,
And that's all I've become in your mental plurality.
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Generating Meaningful Sentences

When we model the English language statistically and then use our learned model to make new sentences, we get meaningless garbage. It's a little disappointing; we'd like our computers to say intelligent things to us instead.

Is there a test that we can run on sentences to see if they're meaningful, so that we can save ourselves some disappointment and only look at model outputs which pass that test?

One answer is "No, we can't". There are lots of languages that could be formed from English words, and a given sentence could well have a different meaning or no meaning in each of these languages. But of course we don't care about possible languages that associate words and meanings: we care about the specific language that we already have and share, and its associations between words and components of the world.

Perhaps we feel that we should be able to algorithmically determine what a sentence is talking about just from language usage data. Having no vision and no instilled linguistic faculties, a competent newly born AI should still be able to reason about atmospheric optics from reading the Wikipedia article on Rayleigh Scattering, should it not? With enough deep thinking? AIXI could do it, presumably! Why not my shitty Python program?

And indeed, amazingly, we *can* translate between languages using just language usage data - even using just mono-lingual non-parallel corpora we can do this! - without modelling the associations that languages make between words and the world as it presents to our sensors.

But if our conventional statistical methods paired with merely terrestrial amounts of data and computing resources can't reliably make sentences from scratch that meaningfully refer to the world, well, that's not so unreasonable. It's a hard task. And it's not so tragic, either: all that we need in order to make Language Generation meaningful is to jointly model the world and language. We just have to get our programs to look at things while people talk about them and then our programs can be "grounded", and they too can talk about things while looking at them. We know it can be done in some circumstances: AI programs right now can label images with grammatical sentences and paint new images from sentence prompts. We have not yet foreseen the date when AIs will be able to talk about more abstract concepts like justice as fluently as they can already talk about the colors of birds' wings, but we will get there or be killed trying.

I suspect that the language grounding literature to date is all about grounding language in sensory categories, which are different from concepts. There are some fairly simple sensory categories for "mother" such as "a woman who is seen caring for children that look like her and her mate", while the concept of "mother", which is more complicated and built on top of the sensory category, can involve inferences to unseen events in the woman's history like "childbirth" or "adoption". Concepts are just one step on the path to intelligent language generation, but my hope is that the first step alone (sensory grounding of language terms) is enough to generate lots of meaningful speech, if not intelligent speech.

While present research in language acquisition almost uniformly leverages parallelism between a linguistic source and a sensory channel, maybe the task can even one day be done with merely non-parallel visual and linguistic data streams, as we are just now learning that translation can be done even without a corpus from each language which is parallel to the other in meaning at the sentence level.

Below are some titles of academic papers that I'm looking forward to reading soon which I think are relevant to the project of meaningful language generation. Not all of them are about grounding language acquisition in perception: I do still have some hope that language can be grounded in itself so to speak: that usage data has a good amount of as-yet-uncaptured structure that can be used to constrain language models so that they only output sentences which are sensical (if not sensorially referential). In particular, selectional restrictions and subcategorization frames are really cool to me and I want to play with them and see if they can help me to make broad sensical grammars.

* A Cognitive Constructivist Approach To Early Syntax Acquisition
* A Comparative Evaluation Of Deep And Shallow Approaches To The Automatic Detection Of Common Grammatical Errors
* A General-Purpose Sentence-Level Nonsense Detector
* A Neural Network Model For Low-Resource Universal Dependency Parsing
* A System For Large-Scale Acquisition Of Verbal, Nominal And Adjectival Subcategorization Frames From Corpora
* Combining Language And Vision With A Multimodal Skip-Gram Model
* Detecting Grammatical Errors With Treebank-Induced, Probabilistic Parsers
* Ebla: A Perceptually Grounded Model Of Language Acquisition
* Experience-Based Language Acquisition: A Computational Model Of Human Language Acquisition
* Exploiting Social Information In Grounded Language Learning Via Grammatical Reductions
* Grounded Language Acquisition: A Minimal Commitment Approach
* Grounded Language Learning From Video Described With Sentences
* Grounded Language Learning In A Simulated 3d World
* Integrating Type Theory And Distributional Semantics: A Case Study On Adjective–Noun Compositions
* Interactive Grounded Language Acquisition And Generalization In A 2d World
* Learning Perceptually Grounded Word Meanings From Unaligned Parallel Data
* Learning To Connect Language And Perception
* Parser Features For Sentence Grammaticality Classification
* Reassessing The Goals Of Grammatical Error Correction: Fluency Instead Of Grammaticality
* Selection And Information: A Class-Based Approach To Lexical Relationships
* Solving Text Imputation Using Recurrent Neural Networks
* The Generality Constraint And Categorical Restrictions
* Unsupervised Alignment Of Natural Language Instructions With Video Segments

Why don't I have a bunch of references to Deep Learning papers like "Generative Adversarial Text To Image Synthesis"? Because I read what I want. Or I don't read what I want, but I make a blog post about what I kind of want to read so that I can close some of these browser tabs.

But let's get back to the main question: is there a test that we can run on sentences to see if they're meaningful? Well, if you ground an agent's language faculty, then it will understand some sentences and not others, just as I understand lots of English sentences but my eyes lose focus when I hear people talk about category theory. So by grounding an agent's language usage, we can push back the question of "Is this sentence meaningful?" to the questions of "Is this sentence meaningful to the agent?" and "Is the agent conceptually fluent in this domain?". If the agent is well versed in the plumage of birds but doesn't have a good guess for the meaning of a sentence that mentions feathers, then we can suspect that the sentence is semantically ill-formed, even if a syntactic parser tells us that the sentence is grammatical. That leaves us with a problem of judging to what degree an agent is conceptually fluent in a domain and a problem of how to handle sentences in domains where our agent never becomes fluent (for example, because a conceptual faculty is required, whereas the agent only has sensory categories).

Right now I just want to read some papers and write some code and see what I can do when I commune with the spirit of the academic times. I'll let you know how it goes. Take care of yourselves.
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Finding Short Rubik's Cube Codes

When you see codes for the 3x3x3 Rubik's cube, they're generally used for manipulating the top layer while keeping the lower two layers intact. I'd like to discover all of the last-layer algorithms for various short lengths.

6-Move Codes
There aren't many at first. If we constrain ourselves to a set of 18 moves consisting of clockwise quarter turns of the six faces, (U, D, L, R, F, B), counter-clockwise quarter turns (denoted by appending a typewriter apostrophe ' to the letter of the turned face), and half turns (for which we append a 2), then even though there are 18^6 distinct sequences that are six moves in length, there are, up to rotations and mirror reflections, only two last-layer algorithms among them:

<F  U  R  U' R' F'> and its inverse <F  R  U  R' U' F'>

7-Move Codes:
What about codes that are 7 moves in length?

Let's normalize our presentation of codes in the following way:
  • If a code's first move is on one of the faces (L, R, or B), it should be transformed by rotation into a code that begins with a turn of the F face.
  • Any code which then begins with F' should be transformed into one that begins with F through a left-right reflection.
  • What about codes that begin with F2? A left-right reflection won't change the first move, but it will change any quarter turns that show up later in the move. If a code begins with F2 and contains a quarter turn later on, prefer the left-right variant for which the first quarter turn is made to be clockwise rather than counter-clockwise.
  • Any code that has a turn of the U face at its beginning or end should have those moves simply cut off.
  • Any code that begins with a turn of the D face should have that turn moved to the end.
  • Any two successive turns on the same face should be combined into one turn, and they should also be combined if they're only separated by a turn of the (independent) parallel face.
  • I haven't added this into my normalization procedure yet, so the codes below might not adhere to this rule, but if a code has two successive moves on opposite faces, the two moves can be swapped without changing the result, so perhaps we should establish some ordering (such as U, D, L, R, F, B), and prefer that opposite faces occur in that order, unless the reverse order would result in a reduction according to one of the other rules. For example, "U D" would be preferred to "D U" in the interior of a code, but if "U D" appeared at the end of a code, then by switching to "D U" we could shorten the code by removing the U turn.
Using those normalization rules, there are 5 distinct last-layer codes in 7 moves. These are

<F  U' B' U  F' U' B > | The inverse of which, in normal form, is same code.
<F  U2 F' U' F  U' F'> | <F  U  F' U  F  U2 F'>
<F  R  B' R  B  R2 F'> | <F  R2 B' R' B  R' F'>

Again, this is kind of weird: the number 18^7 is much bigger than 5. It's not as if the number of distinct last-layer configurations (about a thousand, depending on which symmetries you ignore) is the real limiting factor, because I would happily separately count two codes that produced the same configuration. There are just very few sequences that are codes. Oh well. At least it's an easy set to memorize.

8-Move Codes:
How about codes in 8 moves? Surprisingly there are just 19.... probably. The program that I ran in order to find these had a stupid optimization which might have skipped a valid code or two. My guess however is that these are the full set.

<F  R  B  R' F' R  B' R'> | <F  R  F' L  F  R' F' L'>
<F  R  B  U' B' U  R' F'> | <F  R  U' B  U  B' R' F'>
<F  R  B' R' F' R  B  R'> | <F  R' F' L  F  R  F' L'>
<F  R' F  R  F2 L' U2 L > | <F  U2 F' L2 B  L  B' L>
<F  R' F' L  F2 R  F2 L'> | <F  R2 B' R2 F' R  B  R'>
<F  U  F  R' F' R  U' F'> | <F  U  R' F  R  F' U' F'>
<F  U  F' L' B' U' B  L > | <F  R  U' R' F' L' U  L>
<F  U  F' U' F' L  F  L'> | <F  R' F' R  U  R  U' R'>
<F  U2 F' U2 F' L  F  L'> | <F  R' F' R  U2 R  U2 R'>
<F  U  F2 L  F  L2 U  L > | Whose normal-form inverse is the same.


I wish I could say which of these are newly discovered and which are known. Probably all are known, given how small the set is and how much computing power has been thrown at Rubik's cubes, but it's hard to know. People online don't put their codes into normal form, so even if Google can't find one of my codes online, maybe that just means someone has posted a transformed version of it.

9-Move Codes:
How about Last Layer codes in 9 moves? I really don't have any guess as to the size of this set. The search space is huge. If I were to limit myself to codes where each face besides U had face turn conservation (that is, the turns to each face must add up to 0 modulo 4, counting each counter-clockwise turn as -1), then I think I could find all such Last Layer codes in a few days. Maybe I will. It would be pleasing to know that I had exhaustively found all 9-move codes even in that restricted class.

Here are the 9-move normal form codes that I have so far - 76 in total, but I still need to filter out a few equivalent codes that remain unnecessarily due the fact that I haven't yet normalized the order of successive moves on parallel faces.

<F  B' U  R  U' R' F' U' B > | <F  U' B' R' U' R  U  F' B >
<F  B' U' R' U  R  B  U  F'> | <F  U' B' R' U' R  U  B  F'>
<F  D  B2 D' F  D  B2 D' F2> | <F2 D  B2 D' F' D  B2 D' F'>
<F  D2 B2 L  U2 B2 D2 R  F > | <F  L  D2 B2 U2 R  B2 D2 F >
<F  D2 B2 R  B2 D2 F2 L  F > | <F  R  F2 D2 B2 L  B2 D2 F >
<F  L' U2 L  U2 L  F2 L' F > | <F  R' F2 R  U2 R  U2 R' F >
<F  R  B  U' B' U2 R' U' F'> | <F  U  R  U2 B  U  B' R' F'>
<F  R  F  U  F' R' F  U' F2> | <F2 U  F' R  F  U' F' R' F'>
<F  R  U  R' F' U  F  U2 F'> | <F  U2 F' U' F  R  U' R' F'>
<F  R  U  R2 F  R  F' U' F'> | <F  U  F  R' F' R2 U' R' F'>
<F  R  U' R' F' U' L' U2 L > | <F  U2 F' U' L' B' U' B  L >
<F  R  U' R' U  F' L' U  L > | <F  U  F' L' U  B' U' B  L >
<F  R  U' R' U  R  U  R' F'> | <F  R  U' R' U' R  U  R' F'>
<F  R  U' R' U' F' L' U  L > | <F  U  F' L' U' B' U' B  L >
<F  R  U' R' U2 F' L' U  L > | <F  U  F' L' U2 B' U' B  L > 
# Both of the above are equivalent to <U2>. That's a trivial result, but they're still very pretty codes.
<F  R  U' R' U2 R  U  R' F'> | NF-inverse is the same.
<F  R  U2 B  U  B' R' U2 F'> | <F  U2 R  B  U' B' U2 R' F'> 
# The above are equivalent to <U> and <U'> respectively.
<F  R' F  L2 F' R  F  L2 F2> | <F2 R2 F  L  F' R2 F  L' F >
<F  R' F  R  F2 U  L' U  L > | <F  U  F' U  L2 B  L  B' L >
<F  R' F  R2 B' R  B  R2 F2> | <F2 L2 B  L  B' L2 F  L' F >
<F  R' F' U' F  U  R  U' F'> | <F  U  R' U' F' U  F  R  F'>
<F  R' F2 L  F2 R  F2 L' F > | NF-inverse is the same.
<F  R2 B' D  B' D' B2 R2 F'> | <F  R2 B2 D  B  D' B  R2 F'>
<F  U  F  D  F' U' F  D' F2> | <F2 D  F' U  F  D' F' U' F'>
<F  U  F' L' U  L  F  U' F'> | <F  U  F' L' U' L  F  U' F'>
<F  U  F' R' F  U' F' U  R > | <F  U  R' U' R  F' R' U  R >
<F  U  R  U2 R' F' L' U  L > | <F  U  F' L' B' U2 B  U  L >
<F  U2 F  D  B' R2 B  D' F2> | <F2 D  B' R2 B  D' F' U2 F'>
<F  U2 F  D  F' U2 F  D' F2> | <F2 D  F' U2 F  D' F' U2 F'>
<F  U2 F' L  F' L' F2 U2 F'> | <F  U2 F2 L  F  L' F  U2 F'>
<F  U2 F2 U' F2 U' F2 U2 F > | NF-inverse is the same.
<F2 D  B' D' F' D  B  D' F'> | <F  D  B' D' F  D  B  D' F2>
<F2 L2 R2 B2 D  B2 L2 R2 F2> | NF-inverse is the same.
<F2 L2 R2 B2 D  F2 L2 R2 B2> | <F2 R2 L2 B2 D  F2 R2 L2 B2>
<F2 R2 F  L2 F' R2 F  L2 F > | <F  R2 F  L2 F' R2 F  L2 F2>
<F2 R2 L2 B2 D  B2 R2 L2 F2> | NF-inverse is the same.
<F2 U  L  R' F2 L' R  U  F2> | NF-inverse is the same.
<F2 U  R' L  F2 R  L' U  F2> | NF-inverse is the same.
<F2 L  F  L' U' F2 R' F' R > | <F  R' F' R2 U' B' R  B  R2>
# The above are both equivalent to <U'>.
<F  L  F2 L' F  U  F2 U' F2> | <F2 U  F2 U' F' L  F2 L' F'>
<F  U  F' L' U2 L  F  U' F'> | NF-inverse is the same.
<F  R' B2 R  F  R' B2 R  F2> | <F2 L  B2 L' F  L  B2 L' F >

Gosh, that was fun. If you know of someone who's already done or even started this work, please do let me know.

EDIT: While testing for remaining 9-move codes, I did some online searching and found a handy little github repository from Lars Petrus containing a (large) text file with all possible Last Layer algorithms up to fifteen moves here. After normalizing those, I was pleased to find that there were no codes in fewer than 9 moves that I had failed to find, and that for codes of exactly 9 moves, there were only 4 new pairs:

<F  R2 B' R' B  U  R' U' F'> | <F  U  R  U' B' R  B  R2 F'>
<F  R2 D  R  D' R  F2 U  F > | <F  U  F2 L  D' L  D  L2 F >
<F  R2 D  R  D2 F  D  F2 R > | NF-inverse is the same.
<F  U  F' L2 B  L  B' U' L > | <F  U' R' F  R  F2 L' U  L >

None of those violate face turn conservation except in the U face, so I would have found them all eventually, though it would have taken days, and I wouldn't have had this warm satisfaction of knowing that I was done with the project. I'm free!
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The Meaning Of Identity

What is identity? It's a long story.

Ascriptions of identity happen in the mind at the level of conceptualization, and not at the lower level of perception. While perception supports a faculty of categorization which is invariant to many sensory perturbations, such as lighting conditions and partial occlusions in the case of vision, this categorical invariance with respect to sensory perturbation is not the same as object identity.

Even the recognition of objects is not the same as recognizing them as having comparable identities. A mind can know about objects, as parts of a data stream which can be modeled separately, and yet still not know about their physical separation, persistence, or identity. Let me explain.

I was trying to imagine different ways an AI could analyze a video in order to tease out my implicit ideas of how the mental processes of conception differ from and build on perception. Here's the hypothetical: An AI could have an assumption of persistence for some features, like that there will keep being a bird with a bowler hat in each successive frame of the video, and not assume persistence in other features, like the AI could be unable to guess that the bird has a cane behind its body which was seen in a previous frame.

Is this AI seeing samples from the class of "bowler hat birds" and not relating them across times? Or is it successfully forming a very limited concept of identity whose only identity criterion is "be a bird with a hat"?

The answer could be either one, depending on the details of the AI, but pondering that question led me to a description of what it means for an agent to identify a thing as existing in two percepts rather than for it to merely make the same sensory categorization about the contents of the two percepts: Percepts of two instances of a category (two different bird pictures) have similarities which are genetic (arising in the past, after which the things could go their separate ways and never meet each other or their maker again) while two views of one object have similarities because of persistence or conservation (locally, spatially, through intervening times). "This bird" isn't the very narrow category of "birds with all features presently observed to be persisting". "This bird" differs from "a bird just like this" in that the mind assumes an intervening history transforming the features observed in or inferred from one percept into those features observed in or inferred from another percept.

If the AI has no conception of identity, it will just see a sequence of samples from the category of Bowler Hat Birds, and the AI will having nothing to say on whether they're the same or different birds. Despite having learned persistence of features and sensory categorization, it will not have learned Identity, and the question of whether the bird in the second frame has a tiny cane behind its back will be answered at some ignorant base rate (for birds or for canes, about which the AI could well reason separately). If the AI does have a notion of identity, then it could tell us it sees a sequence of different Bowler Hat Birds or one persisting Bowler Hat Bird, depending on its personal categories. But whether it sees them as the same or different, that judgement will be based on whether it suspects there was a causal history in which the objects depicted in the first video frame became the object in the second video frame. If such a transformation is plausible, and would not have entailed the destruction of the tiny cane, then hey presto, we have a plausible inference at the level of conceptualization enabled through through the ascription of identity.

In summary, objecthood at its lowest level might be interpreted as something like learning separation of background and foreground in a sensory stream. Learning that the feature values of an object or the sensory categories of an object are persistent in time is not enough to license other inferences across time which Identity allows, such as supposing that this bird has a tiny unseen cane behind its back. Maybe that's not impressive to you because the AI could have learned object persistence for the cane too, but Identity also lets us do counterfactual cross-temporal density estimation for unobserved features of the bird: like if she has cancer in one frame, she'll probably still have cancer three seconds later. And finally, Identity means supposing a local transformative history (as an explanation for the similarities which allow cross-temporal density estimation) rather than a genetic similarity of the category (in which case observed dissimilarities could be written off as within-category variance).

So that's a good start at what I think Identity is. It might be more complicated. Maybe it can only be the same Bowler Hat Bird in the second video frame if the hat stayed on the whole time between frames. If so, would that specifically be part of the criterion of identity for Bowler Hat Birds, or does continued identity require continuity of identity generally? I don't know. Hard question. Important question. Not for tonight.
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Simple Songs For Sarah Sparks

Here are some songs I like, which, if I've sorted through them well enough, can be played on guitar without using any barre chords. Some of the chords do require four fingers, like A/C# and D7/F#, but for these, you can just leave out the bass notes that follows the slash. "Slip Sliding Away" does technically have one barre chord, an F Major, but it doesn't occur during a singing part, so that could also be skipped, I'd say.

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One Syllable Professions

I wanted a list of one syllable jobs. I couldn't find that list, so I made it.
aide, bard, bass (singer), boss, chef, chief, clerk, clown, coach, cook, cop, dean, doc, grip, guard, guide, hand, host, judge, maid, (ship's) mate, mime, monk, nun, nurse, pimp, pope, priest, scout, scribe, serf, shrink, smith, spy, sweep, thief, vet, wright
I think "whore" could probably go on there too, but I can also see the argument that it's a slur and not a proper title of the profession. "Mayor" is one syllable long for some people and two syllables long for others. I've left out noble titles like "queen, king, prince, lord, duke". I've also omitted some historical names for young male aides, "squire, swain, jack, knave, groom". If I'm including "thief" as a profession, then "crook", "fence", and even "mule" might also merit inclusion. "Head", as a department head, doesn't seem to to be quite a job title to me, though I'm having difficulty articulating why, and though a "head of staff" might disagree. I'd like to give a dishonorable mention to "I" and "eye", which are terms for an investigator, as in the phrase "Private I", and also to "poet" and "dyer", which should be ashamed of themselves for looking so monosyllabic.

If you can name more one-syllable professions, I'd love to include them.

Edit: For those of you who don't read comments, the enchanting Sarah Sparks adds bum, hack, dom/domme, prof, pol, temp, star. and one more name for a young male aide, page. Great!
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