I think I've trained my mind to feel content and satisfied when things make sense to me. I think things make "sense" to me when I feel I can explain them to others. I think I judge others' understanding of my explanations based on how happy and content they look.

I summarize this process to others by saying "I seek contentedness with the truth." I'm not a huge fan of using "the truth", because if others don't agree with me on something, me saying "the truth" seems pretentious.

I began learning about neurotransmitters a few weeks ago. I want to discuss how I think serotonin works. Roughly, I think it supplies a feeling of contentedness. I want to learn more about GABA soon, because I've read it's the most widely used inhibitory neurotransmitter, meaning it tells neurons not to fire. I think this could be very useful in training the brain not to feel good about a mistake. I would define mistake as something which isn't useful, something which was unintentional in hindsight.

Long ago, I'd learned about neural networks, and tried to fit my understanding of them to the brain. I tried to figure out how a neural network could produce what we feel as consciousness. The process I used was to pick out certain distinct behaviours of my mind and attempt explaining them. I think I matched up many ways the mind feels to how a neural network could facilitate them. Thus, I believe the brain is a neural network, and I can treat it as such.

My limited understanding of serotonin leads me to think it's what gives a sense of calm contentedness. Not so much a sense of bright happiness, but a sense that everything is going alright. I like this feeling. To train my brain, I think I essentially try to feel calm while being the person I want to be.

To accomplish this, I think I first built an important tool in my brain. I spent time discovering thoughts I have which bring about this sense of calm. I think I was physically locating the parts of my brain which released serotonin. I repeated this process, finding different routes to the sense of calm, until I could do it on command, in many different environments.

Once I had this serotonin-releasing tool in place, I came up with behaviours I wanted to reinforce in myself. I would then do those behaviours and use my tool to release serotonin, feeling that sense of calm. I believe this takes the parts of the brain responsible for carrying out the behaviour and the serotonin-releasing parts, and connects the two, so in the future, carrying out the behaviour will release serotonin.

I did a lot of discovery when I was younger, trying lots of things and watching other people. I picked out the things I liked, and used this process of training to become them.

Comedy interests me to no end. Laughing doesn't need to exist, yet it does. And just a few words from others, even no words at all, can incite such an instinctual, uncontrollable impulse to laugh. Along with the sinusoidal stomach contractions, it brings happiness. Comedy can even lead us to new realizations, to new data, to new knowledge.

I find comedy amazing.

My neurosis is the need to understand everything, and the need to understand comedy motivates me to no end. It seems completely beneficial, and at worse, harmless.

I know comedy can be understood. Everything can be understood. To say otherwise is to assume humans don't abide by the laws of nature. Maybe that's an assumption you're willing to make. I'm not willing, and I don't make that assumption. But that's just my ego wanting to assume I'm better than those who make that assumption. It doesn't really matter :)

For a longer time than I've been interested in understanding comedy, I've been crazy about neural networks. My love of them developed over years and years of trying to understand humans. After asking "how would survival of the fittest produce that quirk of humans?" to no end, eventually I had to delve inside the brain.

When I finally reached San Francisco, I found myself alone, and I just thought. Then I thought more. I worked, I drank, then I thought some more. I eventually determined a model of a brain which fit all I knew about how humans' brains worked. I won't say it's how ours works, but with my little research and lots of observation, it fit.

I loved it. It showed to me we're essentially "machines", and that's beautiful. It's fucking lovely. That 13 or so billion years of essentially absolutely nothing bumping into itself, and it produces us, which can move on a whim, kill, speak, invent the internet, write blog posts. It's incredible, and the fact we're not inherently special, but still absolutely special in terms of our environment, is far more beautiful than any external creator. (I don't mean to bash religion. I just don't think rationally believing in a creator allows for as much beauty to be realized.)

So, believing anything can be understood, and that we're machines which can be predicted, I believe comedy can be formulated. I believe, knowing the inputs, comedy can be measured, and thus can be recreated. I believe it can be distilled to a formula requiring only certain known inputs. This is not putting down any jokes or comedians, and I don't mean to. Even if a stand-up machine existed, I could not tell you one person who can replicate the amazingly intricate computations required to play fuckin Counter-Strike, so anyone who could emulate a comedy machine would be incredible.

Anyway, to the intention of this post! I want to make this comedy machine. I want to produce a neural network which can produce comedy.

I have many ideas on neural networks, but I have almost nil knowledge on how to put them on a computer. My plan is to read a million papers on neural networks, and learn what others think is possible and not. I will learn specific methods. Then I will try building my own.

Finally, I will write a neural network whose aim is produce jokes. Text which will incite laughter. I want to build a website frontend to this neural network, where people will input words as inspiration for the neural network to build a joke upon. Then, users will be able to say "this is funny" and "this is worse than Ben Stiller" to train the network.

It can be done. I'm still pretty young, so I have the time for it.

It will be done.

I'm constantly searching for more useful methods of reasoning. Today, I want to talk about a certain disconnect in common thought processes. I'm going to attempt to explain the disconnect, then hypothesize its source. I feel this is important enough to warrant a blog post, because understanding the thought processes on either side of the disconnect has allowed me to understand many people's manner and intent quicker than before I knew it explicitly.

I believe there is no fear but of the unknown. I don't mean to say we're only really afraid of the dark, or the endless cosmos, but rather we fear that which we don't know how to react to. The flip side of that coin is feeling comfortable. I believe feeling comfortable is knowing how to react to any (well, most) potential situation.

So, to the disconnect, I've noticed there are people who think in terms of this fear. Their aim in thought and action is generally to change the environment so this fear can be minimized. They either haven't recognized their fear or its mechanism of function, or they've lived with it so long it's become the natural, innate, default thought process. I've known people in this category to wax caution, worry about offending others, have a "life plan" (however detailed), and generally live more conformatively.

On the other side are those who are constantly aware of the future. They think about possible outcomes, so the future draws little to no worry. I've noticed many with this type of thinking can be described as intense by others, as they can be perfectly calm and cool and collected, but "go off" unexpectedly.

I hypothesize the two semi-distinct groups differ in their perception of time. The former "worriers" live decidedly in the present, believing more that life throws things at ya. Their perpetual present bias shapes their world. The latter group believes change is constant, and time is the medium through which it occurs.

I'm not aiming to marginalize anyone. If a thought process is useful to you, then I'm all for it. I'm also not trying to say these differences are the only important ones; there are many, many factors one could judge character by. As a reductionist, however, I aim to seek out the core of things, and the perception of ourselves in time appears to me to be a very useful indicator of how people will react.

As for practical application, judging this in others just makes my life smoother; like any information, knowing it makes for better choices. But, as if my bias wasn't present enough, I wholly recommend thinking about possible outcomes. Think about possible situations which could occur, and think about how you'd react. Think about whether it's how you want to react; you've got time to change it.

Cool and calm and collected and comfortable. Cocks.

Yak

Oh, to drown the light
Each and every night;
Oh, to give up thought
And render real, nought;
Oh, to droop the lids
And do what Earth forbids;
Oh, to lie in wait
And once, control fate;
Oh, to live in dreams
And rule all that seems;
Oh, please leave me be
Wide awake to see.

I had this idea, long ago, for a sort of marketplace where what's traded is not physical items, but their value. But that's how I'd sell the idea.

The idea came about when a friend began thinking, then developing a sort of cheque. Much like Bitcoin, the cheque is cryptographically signed and replicated in a chain. It's a detail I don't understand enough to talk about, but the core aim is a cheque that, once created, is recorded and known to exist to everyone. The cheque simply implies ownership of a physical item, and when the cheque is given to someone else, they can rightfully claim the item.

The hope was to encourage the flow of abundant supply — if you've got 100 apples, but you only want 20, what do you do with the rest? You'd create a cheque, and give it to your friend. Maybe they don't need the apples, so they hand it off to their nephew, who desperately needs apples. And just like that, it changes hands from those with extra to those in need.

I loved it (but apparently not enough to completely understand all the details), but then the problem was adoption. So my friend tossed around adding an optional monetary value to the cheques. You could give a cheque to a friend as a gift, offering a bike you own or an equivalent monetary value of $400.

So my lowly contribution was this idea. A marketplace where this "equivalent monetary value" could be determined, for anything you could create a cheque for — which is, well... anything.

I tucked the idea away and walked through life for a while. Jumped into Silicon Valley, fell out, went through crazy -- that old chestnut. Talking to others, I realized the idea's "potential." One could use it to describe something one needs, like parts for a plane or the pedal for a 1950s bike. Others in the marketplace who knew about plane parts or old bikes could submit their valuation, along with links or contact info to get in contact with a supplier.

So on the outset, Valoro is a site to upload items (photos, description, videos, etc) and learn their fair market value. Delving deeper, it's access to the right people with useful information. Ever seen American Pickers? Pawn Stars? Even Antiques Roadshow. They always have the guy who knows everything about wax figurines of Richard Nixon. Enabling people who need information and knowledge with the people who have it.

As for turning it into a viable website, there were a few problems I needed to figure out:

• Making it easy for those with knowledge to view items they can help with
• Reducing spam
• Reducing low-quality item postings and valuations

A few solutions presented themselves, which will be the subject of the next Valoro post.

Cheers