Identifying The Soul

There are lots of recently coined terms for mental objects which I mostly don't use except in quotation.

I don't have a tulpa, an egregore, a fursona, a cartesian theater, mental subagents, qualia, or free will, and you can not have them too.

— Preinfarction (@preinfarction) January 28, 2017

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".

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.

The Religious Cognition Of Atheists

Religions exist across cultures and one explanation for their existence is that humans have cognitive architectures tending to confabulate and preserve the stuff of religions. I think I first heard it from Sapolsky that purifying rituals of religions might have been historically innovated by people with minds tending toward OCD and that the ideas of unseen spirits might have come from people tending toward schizophrenia. Given that some abnormal behaviors and beliefs are historically innovated, to understand the existence of religions we then need to look to more neurotypical incentives for why religious content is widely culturally adopted. Maybe individuals have needs for tribal culture which religious content provides to them, or maybe some religion-stuff is the right amount of weird and emotionally compelling to give people a sense of insightfulness or personal meaning, or maybe some religion stuff is mememtically virulent (which is the mind projected way of saying that that humans copy and repeat some things even without seeing value of doing so), or maybe part of the reason for individual adoption of religion is gullibility or acceptance of social authority, and probably other stuff.

So maybe the genesis of a religion proceeds like this: innovation of compelling nonsense by somewhat abnormal persons followed by pragmatic adoption by neurotypical people who are in need of some emotionally compelling weirdness. 

This is a nice narrative, but I think it's too easy on the normies. Watching people talk about their religion (or politics) is almost as terrifying to me as watching people who have been confabulated by dementia or traumatic brain injuries. Neurotypical religious thought might be normal, but it is not sound. The fuel which feeds the fire of religion isn't "pragmatic interest in communal narrative and ritual" or anything nearly so rational, it's the fact that people are cognitively misshapen and dysfunctional, universally, pathetically.

If the scary, sad, gross cognitive failures of neurotypical religious thought are human universals, as religion is a human universal, then we atheists should not be so proud as to think ourselves spared. We have the same disease, even if some of our symptoms have cleared.

This in mind, I wanted to identify some of the failures of human cognition which are associated with religions cross-culturally. Maybe I should have just started with a list of biases from Kahneman and Tversky, but that's not what I did.

One failing of religious thought is compartmentalization, which is mostly to say that people practicing a religion are unable to scrutinize the beliefs of the religion in a way that can successfully produce doubt. Questions of internal consistency can be raised, but somehow these questions don't seem to bear much on whether the person will continue to retain the conceptual edifice as a whole. Further, the edifice can be maintained in the mind with almost no explanatory or predictive connection to reality. For many people, "the suffering observed in the world" doesn't seem to enter the radar of "facts which might challenge a belief in a beneficent god". The philosophical discourses on the question of evil, plentiful as they may be, are not enough to discount this huge daily disconnect between the beliefs and sense data available to neurotypical religious people. I propose that any topic which you think would be controversial to bring up in polite multicultural company, such as cryonics or antinatalism or artificial singletons in my own case, are worth special scrutiny, of the sort that could successfully produce doubt, should the topic merit doubt. If this doesn't sound like an immense epistemic burden, think about the level of reflective scrutiny that it would take for a religious person to abandon their faith in the absence of new social incentives.

So much as the attribution of sacredness to a thing is associated with an unwillingness to quantify the value of the thing or to contemplate trades of the thing against mundane things, all sacredness attribution is a kind of compartmentalization and is deserving of special scrutiny. Maybe you know the dollar value of a human life, but there's probably something out there which you value emotively but still treat in an economically incoherent way. Spooky stuff, right? Someone get Night Vale on the line.

I want to write up the other religion-associated cognitive failings that I identified tonight in long-form, but it's getting late and I have a thing to do tomorrow, so in the interest of posting something at all, which has not been my strength, I'm going to paste the remainder of my twitter tweets on the subject with very little editing.

Another cognitive failing of religious thought is overestimating the causal power of categorization judgments? Or, no, I want to identify something more general than that. What's going on in humans such that they think prayer is a thing worth doing? We overestimate the power of linguistic utterances? That covers more behavior but it's less cognitively abstract. Maybe the core failure is that humans expect reality to condition its behavior socially on our social displays. This is kind of like attributing animacy widely to reality.

For the next failure of religious cognition that I want to talk about, consider divination, numerology, omens, and delusions of reference. Part of what's going on with these is an expectation of a natural cosmic order where the world is self-similar or self-describing, maybe? Divination and numerology are schools of thought for deriving predictions from principles that (the practitioners believe) operate throughout the universe structurally (like a folk notion of physics, but phrased directly in terms of the concepts and objects of daily experience, instead of being phrased in terms of particle-field-shaped math). So that's interesting. 

"Reality is self-similar" is, I think, a good guess; it feels close to one of the mistaken inductive principles which is common to lots of religious cognition cross-culturally, but it's also not quite the principle that I want to identify. Maybe the problem with it is that divination isn't just like reading the structure of the heavens in a spilled drop of cola, it's not just seeing the self-similar structure, but it also has a social component of requesting information before possibly receiving it. Like religious people think that the cosmos knows things and may choose to reveal info them if it thinks that they're ready? And the rituals and superstitions of divination are like a cargo cult for getting the attention of that Knowing Natural Order? Does that make sense? When people look for spiritually guiding signs in their daily lives, those signs are like communicative events to them. I think that makes sense. But to the degree that I see personally significant messages in the mundane events of my life, those signs don't really feel communicated to me, so maybe "there is a knowledgeable natural order which has a plan for you" isn't one of the core universal religious mental failings that I need to identify and be vigilant against in myself. I'll keep looking for other magical thinking that might be cognitively upstream of delusions of reference and which plausibly applies to me and other neurotypical people. And the same for prayer, because "expecting reality to respond socially to your social displays" isn't quite as persuasive an account of prayer as I'd like. That was the previous failure that I identified, remember? After compartmentalization and sacredness.

Finally, Zodiacs seem like evidence of another culturally pervasive religion-associated cognitive failure. Maybe the genesis of zodiacs happens like this: people have a general over-reliance on explanations of behavior in terms of stable personality traits, and some people prone to apophenia notice false patterns in who gets stuck with which stable traits (again, which traits the people may not have stably), and then people generally suck at knowing when to abandon named/reified concepts, and so the confabulated patterns of explaining how traits are allocated stay in discussion and eventually become common knowledge. 

Nothing in this explanation of zodiacs really rings of magical cognition. Maybe that's because zodiacs aren't all that religion-bound, or maybe it's because I haven't done a good job of finding a supernatural-inductive-bias-like cognitive failing which is upstream of people caring about zodiacs and which is also plausibly at work in my own mind to my detriment. Something something swearing, something something did you know that I hate the Myers–Briggs Type Indicator?

That's the end for tonight, folks. Be good to yourselves.

Edit 1: I just heard about thought-fusion beliefs as studied in abnormal psychology. One example is a person thinking that {an event is more likely to happen because they've been imagining the event happening}. Another class of thought-fusions beliefs is like when a person feels that it's roughly as blameworthy to perform a socially prohibited action as it is to imagine doing so. Are those two examples of religion-like cognition? I think they might be. I think thought fusion might be a kind of widely operating inductive bias which partly explains the cross-cultural genesis and retention of religious content and which also might afflict the minds of atheists. Rad. And maybe the first of those two thought fusion beliefs, where motivated focus on a topic alters the expectation that it will happen, maybe that's also part of the explanation of prayer. Prayer is a way to convince yourself of a desirable fiction through motivated focus. I like that explanation a lot. It's definitely something I can be on the guard against in myself.

Edit 2: I would like to add "believing things because they sound cool or beautiful" as a universal human cognitive failing that manifests equally in religious and non-religious people, and which might support the generation and adoption of religions cross culturally. I think that's an important one and it deserves a short name so that it's easier to call up from the depths of memory. I hesitate to call it a kind of optimism bias, because some things that sound cool are very pessimistic.

Perhaps nearby to "believing things because they sound cool or beautiful", there's a bias of believing things which flatter our self image in ways that we can believe. "I'm the most beautiful man on earth" falls flat as flattery, but "I'm one of a chosen people" is vague enough that everyone can believe it of themselves and not be disturbed that the tribe on the other side of the river also believes it. So that's one more thing to guard against.

I'm wondering now if my purpose in writing this post, deep down, was to find cognitive biases that I could want to be vigilant against. A lot of the Tversky and Kahneman stuff has a ring of either "this won't replicate" or "this is only called a bias when it happens to lead to bad outcomes, and isn't architecturally unsound", and it's hard to care about those. By finding biases that I can associate with religion, maybe I'm just trying to motivate myself to be unlike a negative role model. Is that bad? Is that what one of my negative role models would do? I don't know.

Questions, declarations, demands

Questions are approximately statements of ignorance, but they're better at getting people to respond. Why? Consider:

S1. Declaration of ignorance
Alani: Oh no, here come's Hukov. He's such a prick.
Hukov: Hi, Alani. I don't know how the world would look if participatory consent were a socially overvalued moral construct. Idk if you know either.
Alani: Hukov, I don't care about you or what you know. Go away.

S2. Inquiry
Alani: Oh no, here comes Hukov. He's such a prick.
Hukov: Hi, Alani. What if Jesus were a raisin?
Alani: I ....hm....what if Jesus were a raisin? Let's talk this out.
...

So maybe one reason that questions are more effective than declarations of ignorance in getting an informative response is that questions, by skipping the mention of the speaker and their mental state, give the audience fewer opportunities to decide they're not interested.

Another reason is that questions are kind of like demands for answers, and people have a quick mental reaction that promotes compliance with demands.

If a demand is roughly a statement of the speaker's desire for the audience to perform a behavior, then maybe a question also encodes a little bit of a preference for the audience to respond, and a little bit of an assumption by the speaker that they have social authority to voice their preference with a reasonable expectation that the audience will comply.

Neat.

Of Confidence, Understanding, and Conclusions

Confusion and understanding are important concepts in rationality and metaethics. The concepts of conclusions and resolved beliefs are similarly important. These concepts appear in the written works of our culture much as they appear in our daily language: without precise definition or explicit connection to the mathematics of probability theory. One may wonder, what is the connection, if any, between epistemic confidence and understanding, or between confidence and resolved belief? Below I will outline some guesses.

What if like:
You're chatting with a peer. They ask a question and you pause for just a beat before replying. I propose that the condition of your mind during that pause is nearly the same as the mental condition of confusion. The difference is that the condition of a mental pause is almost imperceptively brief, while confusion persists for noticeable and even uncomfortable spans of time. Confusion is a condition where the mind is generating and discarding ideas, having not yet settled on an idea which is good enough to justify ending the search. Confusion doesn't have to be preceded by a surprise, and not all uncertainty is accompanied by confusion. Where in a Bayesian mind do we place confusion? We place it not in uncertainty, and not in surprise, but in the failures of attempted retrieval and production of ideas, theories, strategies. On the time scale of milliseconds, these failures are mental pauses. On the time scale of moments and minutes and more, these failures are called confusion.

So much as the subjective feeling of confusion comes from noticing one's own failure at cognitive production, so contrariwise the feeling of understanding comes from noticing a productive fluency; noticing that one is quickly able to generate ideas, hypotheses, strategies in a domain, and to feel confident that the produced cognitive contents are valuable, and that the value justifies terminating a mental procedure of search or construction.

From the idea of terminating a mental train of thought, we naturally come to the concept of conclusions. I once wrote, "Our beliefs gain the status of conclusions when further contemplation of them is no longer valuable." There are many reasons why you might disvalue further contemplation of an idea! You could have other things which you prioritize thinking about! You could expect that there are no further reasons which could change your belief! You could notice a limit on your reasoning, like an inability to quickly find reasons which would change your belief, while still accepting that such reasons might exist! There could be unpleasant environmental consequences of continuing to contemplate a topic, like if someone didn't want you to think about the thing and they could tell when you were doing so!

So conclusions are merely those beliefs that you maintain when a train of thought terminates, and which you're likely to recall and make future use of. Resolved beliefs are different! I know that "resolved belief" isn't a standard term in the rhetoric of rationality or metaethics, but maybe it should be. Resolved belief is the great promise of maturity! A resolved belief is a conclusion where you have a reasonable expectation that no further reasons exist that would change your mind. The conservation of expected evidence means that something has gone wrong in your mind if you expect that your belief will change some specific way after seeing some unknown evidence, but it is still entirely rational for you to expect that your beliefs will change in some unknown direction after seeing unkown evidence. If you expect that your beliefs will change a lot (in some unknown direction!) that just means you're about to see strong evidence. One way to phrase this situation is to say that the question whose truth value you are contemplating is about to be strongly tested.

I'm not totally sure that updating on lots of bits of evidence is the same as reaching a resolved belief. It seems like a different thing to say, "this issue is probably settled hereafter" than to say, "our inquiry changed our beliefs drastically". If the latter is to say that an idea has been tested, then the former is to say that the idea perhaps can be tested no further: that there is no test the observation of whose result will cause us to update our beliefs. The relationship between these two sounds like something that mathematicians have probably already figured out, either in analyzing converge of beliefs in learning algorithms, or perhaps in logic or metamathematics, where settled conclusions, once tested now untestable, are very salient. Unfortunately, I'm too stupid for real math. Some quantities that seem relevant when making a judgement of whether you've dealt with most of the important possibilities are 1) the conceptual thoroughness of your investigations, per genus et differentiam, 2) the length of time that you've spent feeling confident about the topic and similar topics, and maybe 3) the track record of other people who thought they had investigated thoroughly or who thought that the issues were settled. For some issues, maybe you can brute force an answer by looking at how your beliefs change in subjectively-possible continuations of your universe? That's probably not a topic about which I can think productively.

On the topic of other maybe-relevant math that I'm too stupid to understand, I'm reminded of the idea of the Markov blanket of a variable in a probabilistic causal model. Within the pretense of validity of a given causal model, if you condition your belief about a variable X on the states of a certain set of nearby variables, the Markov blanket of X, then your belief about X shouldn't change after conditioning on the states of any variables outside of the blanket. Unlike in the case of beliefs that are settled by logical proof, I don't think it's the case that the untestable belief in X after having conditioned on its Markov blanket will necessarily be confident. Possibly that's not the case with proof either when you start talking about undecidability and self-reference. I guess the best question my curiosity can pose right now about resolvedness of belief is whether convergence of belief in probabilistic logical induction is related to an independence result like which obtains when you condition on the Markov blanket of a causal variable.

Learning rate adaptation is another math thing in the semantic neighborhood of resolved belief, but it's not a thing Bayesians often talk about, from what I've seen.

But so then:
The feelings of confusion and understanding both accompany our judgements about our individual abilities to quickly produce valuable cognitive contents in a conceptual domain. In familiar domains, we find that some beliefs and valuations, "conclusions", are reliably useful after being reproduced - retrieved or rederived. Confusion and understanding of a deeper kind pertain to a specific kind of conclusion that I've called a resolved belief, somewhat neglecting the notion of resolved valuations. In my terminology, we say that a belief is resolved to the extent that we expect that there are no facts we could learn which would change our minds about the belief. As I have introduced the notion, probability theory does not require that a belief which no longer seems testable need be confident. Still, I have a strong intuition that resolved beliefs and valuations should generally be and will generally be confident, in just the same manner that I become more confident that I know the contours of a face after doing a portrait study. While I think that resolved beliefs will generally be confident, contrarily, it's abundantly clear that one's confidence in a belief or valuation alone cannot justify an expectation that the thing won't change in the future. I don't yet know what theoretically justifies a judgement that an issue is settled, but maybe it has something to do with belief convergence in the mathematics of learning. The concept of metaethically resolved valuation might then be viewed as a variety of resolved belief in the domain of self-characterization. I hope that other philosophical questions can also be translated into terms where the mathematics of learning is clearly relevant, so that philosophical questions can potentially be resolved just as much as can computational ones or physical empirical ones. Resolved belief is the great promise of maturity, and it's high time that we figured out what it means.

Addendum: Hrm, the papers I've seen so far about posterior convergence make it seem like statisticians care about such things for pretty different reasons than I do. The usual situation presented in the literature on convergence of parameter estimates is like, "You get a sequence of percepts of the thing, and the noise has a certain shape. Depending on the shape, we can show how fast your guesses become better." Adapting that to be relevant to confusion, I'd want to frame attempts at cognitive production as noisy percepts of something. That's not the worst idea, but it doesn't seem to capture most of my idea of the source of failures of cognitive production. Maybe the literature on decreasing KL divergence in model selection will help to clear things up.

*distant voice*: Aren't you forgetting about Solomonoff induction?

Oh. Yeah. That's probably the topic I should review first.

My Lives and Deaths in a Big World

Among the describable moments where I remember this moment as the last one that I experienced, maybe a lot of them involve dying as my thermal fluctuation of a brain, filled with hallucination, returns to non-existence.

That situation isn't one I normally consider when going about my life, and so the question arises of whether my behavior is adapted to it.

Maybe it make reflective sense, and not just intuitive sense, to not care much about the observer moments in the lives of Boltzmann brains, because one's decisions as instantiated in Boltzmann brains won't have much of any effect on those brains' surrounding environments, given that the rest of one's supposed body probably won't exist there to be actuated, and even if one's bodies do exist, one would still be effectively swatting in the dark at imagined flies.

Taking this idea a little further, we find the suggestion that we should perhaps generally care less about incarnations of our bodies which are more disconnected from their surroundings, those being less perceptive or less powerful to effect changes. Consider however that this is surely not the principle which informs our intuitive expectations of worldly permanence and our intuitive lack of concern for observer moments that arise in thermal fluctuations: if so, we'd also disbelieve that we could be blinded or demented or paralyzed.

In locales where brains persist long enough to effect biological reproduction, it's little surprise that brains evolve with expectations of sensory persistence. If we endorse the value of our intuitions of sensory persistence, then perhaps the process of evolution which endowed us with those intuitions can also provide us with principles for forming reasoned beliefs regarding how to act in a universe or multiverse large enough to contain many incarnations of our minds in different locales.

"Act as though only those future moments are real in which you might reproduce" doesn't sound like wisdom. What other possible lessons could we abstract from evolution? "Act to achieve good states in worlds where you can do so"? That might  be a principle which prescribed avoiding paralysis in EEA, while excluding thermal weirdness. Although it sounds much less evolution-y than the first one.

Complementary to the topic of intuitive dis-belief in fluctuation-death is our intuitive actual-belief in total death - i.e. in the complete cessations of our subject experience, despite arguments suggesting subjective immortality of minds in a big world. And yet the explicit reasons for discounting the decision theoretic value of Boltzmann moments (of seemingly extraordinary death) listed above do not seem to provide complementary reasons to discount extraordinary survival scenarios.

And so once again I am left wondering whether my evolved intuitions are ill suited to thriving in a big world.

We've all heard the quantum immortality thought experiment, and we've mostly all found some reason to not commit quantum suicide. Beyond this, I know almost no sources of relevant advice.

Of course Robin Hanson wrote How To Live In A Simulation, and Eliezer Yudkowsky once made the intriguing suggestion that one should open one's eyes to decrease world simulation measure when bad things happen (and to close one's eyes to reduce simulation load when good things happen). This advice is in the right weirdness neighborhood, but not obviously relevant to taking Boltzmann brains or subjective immortality seriously.

Capitalized Abstract Nouns

On Facebook, Marcello Herreshoff posted a list of Capitalized Abstract Nouns that people believe in. Marcello provided it as a resource for an exercise to help individuals explicate their own preferences, but that exercise is not my main interest here. My aim to form a taxonomy of things that people believe in, working off of Marcello's list.

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Conditions: People believe in preferred conditions of individual existence such as {innocence, dignity, strength, health, and freedom} and conditions of collective existence, such as {equity, order, accountability, and justice}. Also, people believe in beauty, which might be a preferred condition of reality, independent of the existence of people. Asserting a belief in these is perhaps asserting that the audience should also value the conditions.

Standards: People believe in behavioral standards or procedures (both individual & collective) such as {decency, fairness, honesty, efficiency, cleanliness, discipline, faith, and patience}. Statements of belief in these are partly assertions of their terminal value, and partly assertions of their instrumental efficacy in obtaining good conditions.

Agents: People believe in particular agents (individual & collective) such as {god, nature, human society, America, the American military, the global market, Whatever Inc, Senator Whomever, and themselves}. Belief in these is mostly about the ability of the agent to obtain good conditions, and partly about the ethical behavior of the agent, and a little bit about the terminal value of the agent's existence.

People believe in non-particular agents also, such as {family, friends, volunteers, patrons, citizens, stewards, and leaders}. Saying "I believe in family" means something very close to "I believe in the value of the relational behavioral standard of kinship," but I've decided to make this a separate category from believing in the other behavioral standards like decency, fairness, and honesty.

Projects: People believe in projects, movements, and social systems, such as {the reformation, open source software, democracy, feudalism, the war on drugs, and miscegenation} Belief in these is a lot like belief in particular agents.

People believe in bodies of knowledge and procedure, such as {education, medicine, tradition, law, and functional programming}. These are more like the behavioral standards.

Dunno: The last one I really care about categorizing is "The Future". Is that like believing in a particular narrative, as in "I believe in the virgin birth of Christ"? Or is the future conceived of as an agent bringing about desirable conditions? Or is the future thought of as desirable condition itself, like beauty? Or is the future a non-particular collective project, like believing in revolution? Maybe it's the normal kind of belief, and people are just saying that the future exists. Probably not that one, but I don't know.

-

SO THEN: People believe in good things, good lives, good conduct, good people and institutions and social roles, good projects, and maybe things in whatever category The Future belongs to. Riveting.

Pragmatic evidential semantic speech attitudes or something

There are more possible relationships between the content of your speech and your meaning than "serious" and "sarcastic".

1. I believe what I'm saying.
2. I kind of believe what I'm saying.
3. I said a thing that I believe in an unusual way so that you would understand how sincerely I believe it.
4. I would be surprised if what I was saying was mostly right, but we have to start with something if we are to compose a productive theory.
5. Some part of me believes what I'm saying, but I don't endorse that.
6. Some part of me doesn't believe what I'm saying, but I don't endorse that.
7. I believed what I was saying as I was saying it, but then I totally remembered or figured out that it was all wrong.
8. I don't really mean any of what I'm saying, but I'm saying it because of some impulse.
9. I don't strongly believe what I'm saying, but I'm still saying it because it's (funny | hurtful | interesting | a prank, mate | shit-posting | so random hahaha | expected of me | habitual | what someone else said | useful | phatic | ... ).
10. What I'm saying is literally true, but I don't mean all of the connotations that you're reading from it.
11. What I'm saying is literally false, but I meant the connotations that you're reading from it.
12. I don't know how to say a thing that I would mean, but what I'm saying gets close to the issue.
13. I know what I would like to say, but I'm saying something slightly wrong for sake of brevity.
14. I know what I would like to say, but I'm saying it with lots of indirection because you wouldn't respond well.
15. I'm not resolved yet as to whether I believe what I'm saying, but I will believe if someone finds a laudable reading of it or if lots of people seem to like it.
16. The state of affairs became true because I declared it.
17. What I'm saying is unrelated to my beliefs.
18. I thought I didn't believe the thing as I was saying it, but I have now been convinced by hearing my articulate argument aloud.
19. I believe what I'm saying, but not quite so much that I want to defend it while some asshole on twitter picks it apart.
20. I meant multiple readings of what I said, to different degrees toward different audiences, but I wouldn't normally try to simultaneously independently steer the beliefs of multiple audiences unless I were showing off to yet another audience.
21. I said the thing precisely because I thought you wouldn't know what it meant or if it meant something.
22. What I'm saying doesn't mean anything.
23. I meant the opposite of what I said, you butt.

The Endorsed Toxidrome

When I'm fucked up, that's the real me. 

When I'm fucked up, that's the real me. 

This lyric is sung by The Weeknd in The Hills. Hearing it, I wondered what was going on in the mind of the lyricist. Why would a person identify more strongly with a substance-intoxicated form of themselves than with their sober form?

One possibility is that the intoxicated man reliably outperforms the sober man on a criterion which the sober man values. A causally interleaved trio of common biological effects of recreational intoxication seem likely to enable this: elevated self-concept (including elevated estimates of one's social appearance, skill, and the task-adequacy of one's holdings), decreased anxiety relating to expected social persecution for potential violations of respect- and etiquette-based social conventions, and a generally elevated, euphoric mood. This trio of effects together produces greater motivation, reward-seeking approach behaviors, and attentive physiological arousal. In short, the sober man may find himself inhibited from following desired courses of action, of which inhibitions his drugs relieve him.

A second possibility is that the man is dissatisfied with himself when sober and that recreational intoxication inhibits this judgment, but without producing an elevated self-concept as before. This could be achieved by a different cluster of effects of recreational intoxication; that of sedation, numbing, insensibility, blunted affect, and disorientation (including derealization and depersonalization).

A third explanation, this one pragmatic: the man maintains separate peer groups; in one group he claims credit for his sober behavior, and in the other group he claims credit for his intoxicated behavior. One benefit of this arrangement is that the man has opportunities to act according to one group's standards or the others', as suits him, without losing as much face if he did the same without the excuse of intoxication (respectively, without the excuse of sobriety).

One test of this third explanation, as a strategy of general human use (because of course I'm looking at this through the lens of CEV), is to see whether people endorse, in restricted social contexts, other personal conditions of diminished capacity which could excuse them from bearing credit for their acts. People often maintain distinct peer groups wherein they are credited for their youthful acts versus their mature acts. Fatigue, I think, does not present such a strong confirmatory case, maybe because fatigue is too (common, transitory, graded, ...?) for the one to join a group of peers for its occurrence and other peers for its remission. Duress of a limited kind does fit here I think; for example, people can claim as an excuse that they were acting under familial social pressures. The condition of physical disability doesn't fit here, but I'm sure it would if people went through regular phases of physical ability and disability. Mood disorders with phases do fit, I think. Automatism doesn't fit, which is weird from the perspective I used a second ago because it's kind of like a transitory form of disability. "When I'm habituated, that's the real me / When I'm habituated…" I'll have to think about that one more, later. Lycanthropy, though fictional, would certainly fit if it existed. I should probably do a better job unifying the cases where excuses don't fit, especially by analyzing automatism and fatigue, but for the moment this is a satisfying list.

I welcome any alternative explanations of why a person would, at least sometimes, endorse their intoxicated behavior.

Edit: Someone who is more often intoxicated than not might identify more strongly with their more familiar mental state. The lyricist could either be in such condition or wish to persuade others of that he is. This part of the edit I like. The next part is crap.

I don't know my Evo Psych, but I pattern-match this attempt at persuasion as consonant with a certain reproductive strategy; trying to piece my half-thoughts into a full sentence of a theory, it comes out something like this: impulsiveness\risk tasking, criminality, and sensation seeking are, for a man, marks of high testosterone (or high testosterone sensitivity?), which promotes seeking of mates and aggression\competitiveness in domains of male-male conflict (territoriality, mate guarding, food competition), while reducing the individual male's investments into mates and offspring.

The reasons why this testosterone-promoted strategy of high mating investment and low parental investment works...are even more tangled in my mind, and probably causally-disordered. It's clear that men who appear to have a lower mutational load or higher genetic parasite resistance, being more valued by women, can afford to offer less support to those women and to their offspring than can men of lower apparent genetic quality.

"The eugenic man can purchase sex at a lower price" is the usual case. There might be confounding factors relating to, like, seasonality of reproduction, or selection pressures that vary with the prevalence of high versus low parental investment in a breeding population, or...whatever. But with the usual case being usual, if a man's genetic status is known by his potential mates to be quality, or even if his genetic status is uncertain to potential mates, then being neglectful, unfaithful, criminal, impulsive, et cetera, are behaviors to be expected.

I'm not impressed with this as even a micro-theory of human male sociosexuality, but I also don't know the reasons why it's wrong. One problem is that it doesn't account for the unemployment of some other possible counter-signals, like maintaining poor nutritional status. Even if the sociosexual counter-signalling idea were right, the connection to the song lyric is tenuous. Grr.

I'd still appreciate hearing any alternative explanations of the lyric, or pointers for putting the micro-theory aright.

Edit 2: Will Newsome provided two more explanations on twitter. First, the mind of a frequent drug user might be more lethargic when they're sober and more creative when they're drunk or high. The second explanation I'm producing verbatim because I don't trust myself to summarize all of his nuances:

"but there's a moral dimension to the utterance as well that is important. He sees himself as tragically flawed"
"the weeknd is all about being hedonistic to cope with pragmatic-lesson-teaching tragedy, certain kind of chick crack"
"(thereby creating a powerful mate of a man who otherwise would have been expected to remain a genetic contractor so to speak)"

These are good points, and they make me want to write a piece on authenticity and forgery of social appearance in the context of negotiating dyadic intimacy.

Feature Centrality as Conceptual Immutability

Previously I wrote that, given an object category defined over object representations, a prototype might be a set of features distinguished by some nice semi-formal properties:

1.  Prototype feature values are individually typical of the category, so that p(feature value is true of object | object is a category member) is high, and
2. A prototype feature value set is jointly diagnostic of category membership, so that p(object is category member | all the prototype feature values are true of the object ) is high.

This was meant as a plausible weakening of the folk intuition of category essentialism, wherein categories are defined by individually necessary and jointly sufficient criteria.

I also had some underwhelming speculation about replacing typicality with average values for graded and scalar-valued features (meant to capture the notion of "feature centrality"), and a little rant about fuzzy\graded category membership judgements being the result of individuals equivocating between similar but distinctly-motivated categories when they don't have domain expertise or introspective fluency to articulate the criteria distinguishing membership.

I've since mostly given up on the conception of prototypes as weakened-essence feature sets for categories. The experience that motivates people to talk about prototypes of object categories is just mental imagery of category members, which from the outside view is something like inferences about perceptual features of category members. Since these inferences aren't necessarily tied to memories of the situations from which the category's concept was learned, we usually think of prototypes as being unnamed and source-unsituated.

I've also since found a much more persuasive notion of feature centrality: the authors of "Feature Centrality and Conceptual Coherence" (Sloman et al., 1998) give an account of central features of a concept as being those features which are less mutable, in the senses that other object-features depend upon the central ones (within the subject's intuitive explanations of category feature co-occurrence), such that imagining mutations to central features (while maintaining explanatory coherence over the object features) may result in large downstream changes of dependent\peripheral features, with the possible effect of excluding the hypothetical object from category membership. Breathing is a central feature of the concept of birds, because we have difficulty imagining a bird which has never taken breath, except for example if it is stillborn, or if it's an ornament that looks like a bird, et cetera.

Fuzzy membership is still dumb though.

Dyadic Belief Modelling

Let A be a person, and A(B) be a description of person B as given by A.

A(A) will be very close to A, because of A's familiarity with and privileged access to particulars of A's character. Often, deviations between A(A) and A seem like evolutionarily adaptive non-conscious self-deception, producing mistaken inferences which support systematically distorted conclusions of one's own competence or status, which mistaken beliefs make belief-aligned social impression management efforts more persuasive in the minds of others.

Differences between A(B) and (B) will be mostly due to A's unfamiliarity with B, and access to particulars of B's character being costly for A, but there are also distortion effects from evolutionarily-politically-motivated social perception of others,  and distortions of convenience from using resource-inexpensive mental models.

At two levels deep, A(B(A)) corresponds to this situation: we go to A and say, "We asked B for a description of you. What do you think they said?".  A's answer, A(B(A)), might be thought of as properly contained within A(B) - since B's beliefs about A are features of B, but it's also sometimes useful to maintain the distinction. The distortions of A(B(A)) from A(A) will stem from A's guesses of what particulars B knows, or does not know, or misbelieves about A, relative to A(A). Of course, we expect that A(B(A) will be a multiply distorted version of A, but there are also a few improbable opportunities for A(B(A)) to be a more accurate account of A than either A(A) or B(A): A could inaccurately fill in details from A(A) which are unfamiliar to B, and A could incorporate B's presumed-mistaken but actually-accurate beliefs about A, correcting for A's self-misperception.

A(B(B)) is A's account of B's self-misperceptions. It's also properly contained within A(B). Not much to see here.

A(A(A)) is A's account of A's self-misperceptions, properly contained within A(A). Differences between A(A(A)) and A(A) should probably all be due to failures of logical closure; a deductively productive mind can be mistaken about many of their attributes (so that A(A) differs from A), but their beliefs should probably not be mistaken about those beliefs themselves (so that belief in belief contracts to belief, and A(A(A)) becomes equivalent to A(A), and not merely contained within it). Likewise, A(A(B)) should contract to A(B).

At 3rd level, if A thinks that B can contract belief in belief, then A(B(B(A))) becomes A(B(A)), and A(B(B(B) becomes A(B(B)). Of A's eight possible 3rd-level representations of the two people, the only ones which are not trivially contracted are A(B(A(A))) and A(B(A(B))), both of which are properly contained within A(B).

 The first kind is useful for correcting self misperception: Alan muses to himself, "Bettie and Barb say that I under-estimate myself as a programmer, so maybe I'm better than I think," and then contracts his belief in belief with an update.

The second kind, A(B(A(B))) could be elicited in this way: we go to Alan and say, "We asked Bettie to describe herself as you would describe her. What did she say?". Alan thinks of Bettie, A(B), and how she thinks of herself, A(B(B)), and what she knows about Alan, or does not know, or misbelieves (relative to A(A)), which is A(B(A)), ... and then he segfaults and asks you to repeat the question.

"We asked Bettie to describe herself as you would describe her. What did she say?"

Alan starts describing Bettie as he would normally describe her, making small omissions where he thinks Bettie thinks he doesn't know about her, or small substitutions where he thinks Bettie misperceives herself and doesn't know what Alan thinks, and other substitutions where he thinks that Bettie thinks his beliefs are mistaken about her relative to her B(B), when in fact he and Bettie agree, and probably other things, I don't know. This is probably useful for impression management, but I don't want to think about it any more today.

Prototypes

What is a prototype? One hypothesis: given a category defining membership over fully specified things, a prototype is a certain underspecified object whose features are individually typical and jointly discriminative\diagnostic of objects within the category, so that each prototype feature probably holds for an object drawn from the category, and category membership is probable for any object having all the prototype features.

This view of prototypes is just a less committal version of the idea that a category is defined by necessary and sufficient criteria; now a category has (or is associated with a prototype object having) individually kind-of-necessary (i.e. typical) features and jointly kind-of-sufficient (i.e. discriminative) features.

I. Centrality
When I posted this on #slatestarcodex at FreeNode, several people said that a definition of prototypy\prototypicality should make reference to "centrality". What does "centrality" introduce that isn't captured by typicality? Here's a guess: central position refers to average feature values for scalar\graded features of a category. Thus instead of saying that a prototypical willow tree has typical proportions, so that most willow trees have those proportions, we now say that prototypical willow trees have average proportions, whether or not most willow proportions are close to the average value. I don't think this is a very good guess! It would probably help if I had intuitions about the importance of centrality to prototypes.

II.  Underspecification and graded membership
Another comment, this one from grognor alone, was that underspecification wasn't playing a well motivated role in my definition of prototypes. To grognor, a prototype can be a fully specified object, and graded judgements of category membership can be made by gauging the similarity of objects to the prototype.

I'm receptive to the idea that prototypes can be fully specified objects, but I don't think I like the second part. People don't say "This tangelo is 70% an orange", and rarely say things like "Tangelos are more oranges than are lemons." Surely they can make judgements of relative similarity, but those judgements aren't then stated as relative partial memberships.

III. Articulating membership
Or consider, if you ask an articulate person to make a hard-ish categorization, like whether curtains are furniture, they're often capable of providing fine introspective criteria distinguishing category membership definitely. They might say, "Curtains are furniture in the sense of semi-functional, semi-stationary materials which I use to decorate my house, but they are not furniture in the sense of bulky objects that I use to support things off the ground in my house." Or they'll say, "Curtains, like pillows and clocks and dishes, are furnishings, not furniture. That's not a hard categorization. Who do you think you're talking to? I am the queen of home decor categorization judgements. Get out of my kitchen, you uncultured swine."

So some people can figure out distinguishing criteria on-the-fly for different categories, and other people who are familiar with a domain might have a remembered repository of more and finer categories with distinguished labels for objects in the domain. I think it's mostly the less articulate people who are sweating about having to make a binary judgement: the ones who know that words are rough equivocations of categories across minds, but who don't have lots of finely distinguished expert category labels or the ability to invent longer phrases on the fly to explain the motivations behind potentially conflicting membership judgements; to them, hard categorization prompts are a trap. Some people recognize the trap and stop sweating: they give up on reductionism and say, "Curtains are kind of furniture. I'm sure there's no binary answer. Fuzzy concepts. Get with the psychological research zeitgeist." I guess that's fine, and I don't want to trap people. But I don't think I want to make "partial membership" part of my own ontology either.

IV. Uncertain membership
We just saw a fictional case where someone was uncertain about category membership because they didn't know what judgements were relevant to another person's label applications. This is maybe a special case of a category judgement depending on unknown empirical features. Another source of membership uncertainty: the person might not be able to make a confident binary judgement because of logical uncertainty, like if the category is not specified directly in terms of objects having membership\non-membership. Most aren't!

Maybe someday I'll work these sources of membership uncertainty into my definition of prototypes, along with an improved understanding the centrality caveat. And maybe a prototype is still a thing which has individually typical (or central) and jointly discriminative features, but it's fine for any other features to be specified also, in a less principled way, like just cutting and pasting from the population as they do in instance-based statistical learning techniques.

My next post will be about stereotypes as privileged objects of categorical cognition. It's gonna be so sweet.

Tactile Qualia

I'm working on two long essays: one about existential meaning and one about the function of the basal ganglia in time perception, attention, task engagement, and impulsivity. Hopefully those will be complete some time mid-May. Until then, here's some crap about an indecorous quale.
 
The internet does a good job chronicling idiosyncratic human pleasures. One cluster of these I will call "visceral fit", for lack of a better term. (Edit: What a bad term!) The stereotypical elicitor is popping bubble wrap. Visceral fit is felt in response to some haptic stimulation, and other-modality cues that co-occur with that haptic stimulation. Also, I don't know quite how to say it, but, the stimuli which produce the specific quale I'm pinpointing are more textural, and do not extend as clearly to muscular stimulation such as in massage or the relieving one's bladder. (Edit: They're cutaneous sensations!)

One evolutionary domain giving rise to visceral fit qualia is close interpersonal contact, especially through grooming and sex. Elicitors from this domain include the sounds of head scratching, whispering, and various fluid sounds - produced not only by the movement of saliva in the mouth. Connoisseurs of abrasive and fluid sounds can be found at /r/asmr and /r/gonewildaudio, the latter of which is of course porn. Probably the prickly sound and feeling of hair clippers on one's neck falls here too.

Another domain for which the elusive textural stimulation quale pings is that of food. John Allen writes an opinion piece about the evolution of human preference for juicy, crunchy food, concluding that the preference was made adaptive by the prehistoric advent of cooking techniques, rather than finding fixation through the benefits of eating arthropods with chitinous exoskeletons. Some food consumption sounds will provoke disgust in the ordinary human audience, but certainly there are also sounds, perhaps relating to the consumption of crunchy and juicy food, that are pleasing, and which perhaps evoke tactile mental simulation. Maybe the pleasant crackling of fire falls here too.

Disgust does not fully inhibit tactile sensory pleasure, and this is nowhere more apparent than in the reddit community which delights in viewing ruptured cutaneous pathologies. This is the dark and forbidden side of grooming pleasure, and I will not provide a link.

Those are the more easily interpreted elicitors. /r/oddlysatisfying chronicles many other things which produce the quale: Things fitting tightly into receptacles or coming into synchronous alignment. Materials being cut and abraded from surfaces of objects. Changes throughout entire object volumes, such as by crushing, shattering, shredding, melting, and deformations to elastic solids, viscous fluids, and semi-solid mixtures.

There is a great diversity of things that produce tactile simulation pleasures, and the whole thing feels a little bit naughty. Someone with too much time or the right comparative advantage should write about it with a better informed and more cutting analysis than I have provided here, because brains are interesting, and shared aesthetics are kind of important, and naughty things are fun.

Edit: Q-tips in ears! Can't believe I didn't think to bring that up. When stimuli in other modalities trigger a tactile response, the cross-modal response is so very much like cotton swabs in the ear. As for other-modality stimuli that I failed to mention: Some people get gooseflesh when they listen to music and call it "frisson" (though most of the stuff on /r/frisson doesn't do it for me, so maybe there's wide variance in which music triggers which people?). I should look at what else produces gooseflesh. And let's not forget sparkles! Some people get ASMR from looking at sparkles. Like a visual-to-haptic synaesthesia. So now I'm looking into tactile hallucinations, goosebumps, and music-frisson generally (which has a much larger literature than ASMR for some reason). Did you know that there are different cutaneous receptors for different kinds of mechanical stimulation? Maybe I can distinguish elicitors of good feelings associated with each kind of cutaneous mechanoreceptor. If that categorization seems compelling, it would make for a pleasing correspondence between aesthetic concepts and aesthetic hardware. To the literature!