“Machine Learning Is Cool. I’m Cool.”

A question presents itself to the psychoanalytic mind: Who even thinks these things?

When the valence of mind deteriorates past a certain point, people start looking for exits. One of these exits is to claim that everything is a dream, everything is empty, or diluted of substance in some way. This can be a way to dissociate from the social context that breathes the fire of our self and suffering. The sequence similarity between humans/Homo sapiens and green monkeys/Chlorocebus sabaeus is 94%, so it is to be expected that we would want to cut ties with our social group after trauma; our method for clipping the cord to the social eyes is only slightly more sophisticated than that of other social mammals who diverged from a relatively recent common ancestor.

[Ahh… Yes. This is why Elon Musk dotes on the simulation; longs for the holographic principle to delete his curse.]

What is stated around here about the nature of reality should not be confused with that genre even it sounds weird and therefore you complete the pattern: escapist. I am committed to life. And by life, I mean life in the conventional sense from the indexical present which contains human persons dying from trauma and neurofibrillary tangles.

But talk is cheap, let me take a short detour here to contribute to anti-aging research and prove that I believe in us:

So I contacted the SENS Research Foundation, which is lonely at the frontline in the battle to save humanity (aging is the number one cause of death and disease, remember). They gave me a link to a dataset which contains genes associated with aging. And I’m going to use my machine learning skills to see what I can do with it.

Here is the dataset.

Clean The Dataset

A human may understand that 5p13.1 represents a cytogenetic location. Let me correct that: A smart human might understand that 5p13.1 represents a cytogenetic location. But a neural network certainly can’t take the statement 5p13.1 without modification.

All must be transmuted to digit before it is presented to the neural network. It is not that a neural network is incapable of dealing with human-understandable categories, since such a limitation would surely defeat the point of using such a tool. It is merely the case that we need to repackage the categories with a representation that it can understand.

There are 16 fields on the gene data set. The eleventh field indicates the orientation of the gene. This is represented by a 1 or -1. The 1 and -1 correspond to this:

Screen Shot 2018-07-04 at 7.54.53 PM

The direction in which the RNA is transcribed is in the 5′ to 3′ direction. But although a gene always has the orientation 5′ to 3′, it can be on one of two opposite strands denoted by + and -. This is what I will choose as my output label.

Now I have to look for the possible dependent labels – those that stand a chance of having a meaningful correlation with the output label. The first six labels:GenAge ID, symbol, aliases, name, entrez gene id, uniprot, and the previous-to-last five: acc promoter, acc orf, acc cds, and references can be neglected since they are IDs telling us about naming conventions and nothing about the physical structure. Now we have 5 fields for consideration apart from the output label.

Of these 5, let’s inspect which columns don’t present their information in digits.

This is the first row:

Screen Shot 2018-07-05 at 6.44.57 AM

Crowded, I know. But the 5 things we care about are on the indices 7, 8, 9, 10, and 16:

Screen Shot 2018-07-05 at 10.18.34 AM

you will see there are several labels which are not digits: why, location, and orthologs are labels with values that are not digits. We need to transform them into digits in a meaningful way before passing them into the neural network. And they cannot be encoded into just binary digits (0’s and 1’s) because for each label, there are more than 2 possible values.

For example, looking at the data we see that the label why can have the values “mammal” or the value “cell, functional” or the value “mammal, model, cell”, along with several others.

And the label location can have the values appropriate for a gene locus: 17p13.1, or 20q11.2, or 10q22.2, or whatever other value is appropriate for gene locus. If we had to just specify the chromosome for the gene in a human, we would already have 23 different possibilities.

Screen Shot 2018-07-05 at 10.46.03 AM

Since we have so many possible values for each label that we care about, this situation calls for one-hot encoding.

So I have set out to follow the conclusions of this procedure:

If values not digits. → Check if values should be binary.

If they should be binary.→Encode in binary digits.

If they should not be binary. → One-hot encode.

My ultimate goal here is to predict whether a gene is in the 5’→3′ DNA strand a.k.a. the ‘sense’, ‘plus’ or ‘coding’ strand. This + strand has a sequence which is identical to the sequence of the premessenger RNA (except for uracile (U) in RNA, instead of thymine (T) in DNA); this is the coding strand which is not transcribed. Or whether it is in the complementary strand that is transcribed by the RNA polymerase – known as either the ‘Antisense’, ‘Minus’ or ‘Not coding’ strand.
Knowing my ultimate goal, I must take care to make all the data relevant to the final prediction. So I must inspect with my own human eyes and intuitions what the uncleaned data contains.

For the why label/column, the possible values are:


































Each one of those represents a single value that is possible under the label why. We can choose to one-hot encode them or further engineer them into more sophisticated categories that split the column in pieces so that overlap of the variable is reduced.

I will one-hot encode them for now. So I assign an integer value from 0 to 33 for these categorical values and then translate that into a vector which represents the integer by invoking a 1 at that respective index in an array of 0’s.

You can follow along by doing the following:

Download a 64-bit version of Java from here: Java SE Development Kit 8 Downloads

Now you must set Java_Home

If you have a Mac, go to terminal and run the following commands:

export JAVA_HOME=jdk-install-dir  export PATH=$JAVA_HOME/bin:$PATHIf you have a different system click here.

You also need an IDE such as IntelliJ.

Download either the permanently free Community or the free trial for Ultimate.

You need Maven.

For a Mac, go to terminal and

brew install maven

If you have a different system click here.

You also need git.

Go here if you don’t have it already.

If you have it already, then just update it with this


Enter this into terminal

git clone https://github.com/deeplearning4j/dl4j-examples.git
cd dl4j-examples/
mvn clean install

Open IntelliJ and choose Import Project.

Select dl4j-examples.

Choose ‘Import project from external model’ and ensure that Maven is selected.

A simple machine learning algorithm cannot “learn” about information such as words and genes without proper translation. “All is number,” said Plato. “All is number,” says the machine.

There are five fields on the dataset that we care about. Our output label, the one that can be a 0 or 1 and which we are learning to predict, is the orientation described by a 1 or -1 on index 11 in the original data.

When building the schema, you use string for things that aren’t composed solely of numbers in the original data.

Schema schema = new Schema.Builder( )
.addColumnsInteger("GenAge ID")                 
.addColumnInteger("entrez gene id")                 
.addColumnCategorical("why", Arrays.asList(mammal)                
.addColumnInteger("location start")                 
.addColumnInteger("location end")                 

Unfortunately this was all signaling and real progress requires that we awaken from the slumber of the misaligned need to impress those around us. The competitive spirit of mankind at large must be funneled unto the establishment of rejuvenation therapies that roughly follow the outline sketched by Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence in order to rejuvenate our tissues and cells such that a safety net of biological youth is unlocked and an evil is slayed

How can people be true when their bodies rot? How can they read with comfort and grace when entrance to the library requires signing a contract to burn with all the books?

How can they love when those around them will be destroyed?

My duties as a kitchen-knave are done for now. I hope Lynette and Mother see that I am fit to serve the King, fit to be a hero.

Then sprang the happier day from underground;

And revel and song, made merry over Death,

So large mirth lived and Gareth won the quest.



Prophet Orientation


Tendency to create own status hierarchy? It’s in the eyes.

I’ve watched myself in videos and began to see an uncanny resemblance with certain folk’s facial mannerisms and mien.

Unleash a machine learning algorithm on a population containing faces of any race; you will probably carve out a fairly crisp condition.

High openness to experience, high conscientiousness, low agreeableness?

Ahh… Okay, it’s called INTJ. Just looked up that combination. Probably should have done that sooner. Note to self: less physics and cosmology, more psychology the next time I respawn.

It all makes sense now… why everyone always thought I was angry, and was scared to approach me.



Just kidding, I knew that diagnosis already. And personalities aren’t that simple. In any case, we especially like these frameworks on a personal level because they provide avatar-molds for the mind as it swings forward through the morphological latches provided by its environment. There is sufficient truth to these frameworks, such that we enjoy them and find them useful.

The real party begins when the prediction-grain delta approaches real-time.

Here are more thoughts on predicting people’s psychology and hidden motives with facial-recognition technology:




The hidden motive in evolution is not just natural selection as you learned in school, but its compromise with a force that may be considered orthogonal to it. That orthogonal force is roughly “exaggerated male ornamentation by persistent, directional female choice.” More broadly, it can be called, “showing off in the climb from entropy by carrying a cross.”

This hidden motive manifests not just in the boxes we call organisms but also in all the other concepts in mind.

Words such as suffering, people, person, consciousness, pain, universe, pleasure, love, real, fake, and death are invented so that “the female,” who is that which is imagined to be outside of eternal existence, can be satisfied.

There is no permanence inherent to those words if we choose to believe in the female, i.e., the external reality discovered through experiment. The external reality currently says that a clock in one place does not tick at the same rate as a clock in another. A clock in a skull does not tick at the same rate as a clock on a finger or a moon. The notion of a single time belonging to a thing is mistaken because it is contradicted by observation. Observation tells us that your phone must take into account that a satellite is ticking at a physically different rate. There isn’t a now here which is also a now there. And this is also true from a point in your physical right hand to a point in your physical left hand assumed to exist outside your inner-simulation.  A difference in rates must become synced by the observer. The observer is not a pack of neurons in a single frame of reference since these things or events are spread out in spacetime. The observer has already been compiled from the sum of relativistic inhibitory and excitatory reactions.




Towards The Propagation of the Savior Imperative


The Savior Imperative is a means of resistance. Resistance implies opposition – an attempt at eliminating opposites. This is one of the typical varieties of ideological constructions, either political or aesthetic. This essay investigates the meaning and the reasons for organizing a Savior Imperative -themed resistance from a theoretical, aesthetic, and cultural point of view. The thesis is that the resistance has to be considered as an articulation of difference, and that means following a different order of thought than that which is characteristic of the current human – no longer beholden to signaling or mere rationality, but utilitarian, like a new dharma, a goal-oriented path and practice of creativity, challenge, provocation, steadiness, and truth. Towards this end, the aesthetics of the Savior Imperative will have to be tailored to the individual. Not one which submits to established systems, and uncritically replicates their memes.

1. Selecting a proxy body for the Savior Imperative

We begin with the recognition that opposition does indeed exist. A recognition that is necessary if one is to destroy opposites. It can be argued that ∀ ideological constructions, either political or aesthetic, one must recognize opposites. It is also true that with society’s growing complex processes, creating an opposition movement can no longer be thought of without regard for the technological forces at work or without considering the sheer size of the population. It is argued that this opposition must be based around the fact that our telos cannot be contemplated according to the self-modeling behavior creating an experience of closed individualism for humans. But neither can it be considered from the absolutely correct physical point of view, still not obvious to most in the twenty-first century, i.e., the view of a world without contradiction and without free will: where all manifestations supervene on the single will of the God-machine (oft short-handed as “The Laws of Physics”).

So if the assumptions of closed individualism and mere rationality are to be excluded, and this must be done by choosing a fundamental approach to life, then let’s list our options. Not considering the so-called spiritual wisdom of being one with the flow in a non-judgmental way, four or five other prefrontal cortex archetypes, each distinct and irreconcilable, can be characterized. All of these propose ways of contemplating opposition and present several varying theoretical answers to the problem of opposites.

[1] In short, the first position contemplates the problem of opposites by reducing conflict, by pacifying and harmonizing opponents. This is the typical solution of the aesthetic tradition, which always seeks to reconcile opposites, overcoming all conflict, and which is found today in discourses that propose to rediscover and rehabilitate notions of beauty and harmony. Interfaith dialogue is an example of this. [2] A second position, on the contrary, proposes making opposites radical and conflict extreme. In the aesthetic field this is manifested by appealing to notions of the sublime, giving rise to what we could call a kind of aesthetics of terror/profundity. With the decline of nation narratives and religion, this sensibility is increasingly indulged passively through artistic media.  [3] A third position, on the other hand, moves towards the relativization and the problematizing of opposites, towards a presentation of the terms of conflict based on irony and masking. This is the course considered “postmodern” by many, which has distinct proponents and representatives all over the world.[4] A fourth position is one that could be based on the notion of difference, which contemplates opposites in a non-symmetrical, non-dialectical, non-polar way, through the concepts of acuteness and provocation. Zen as well as absurdist humor can be an example of this. [5] A fifth position, increasingly intermingled with the postmodern, is that of the social sciences – seeking to refine understanding through taxonomizing and theory building, but claiming abstinence from normative personhood.

Without entering into the individual merits of these situations, each having its own virtues and defects, the only one that appears open to an effective experience of conflict is that which allows for becoming opposites, and therefore resistance. Namely, the second position. So how can we take up this second approach to life?

2. The articulation of the difference

First of all, resistance goes in the opposite direction of aesthetic conciliation. It moves towards an experience of conflict larger than dialectic contradiction, towards the exploration of normative opposition. Hence, resistance presupposes a logic of difference. Even the physicalist resistance proposed in the Savior Imperative, for instrumental reasons, doesn’t ask us to understand ourselves as a monist whole – as a single physical law expressing her single will. We understand a dissimilarity larger than the logical concept of diversity or variance in dialectic confusion. The element of this downstream selectivity is that which has been characteristic of rationalist and transhumanist thought – to add the configuration of the status quo to the bin labeled ‘arbitrary’ and ‘open to modification.’ The status-quo reversal test is one of the most important results we have inherited from these thought experiences, and which finds ultimate conclusion in the open individualism underpinning Savior Imperative.

In its best theorization, and here I think specially of Eliezer Yudkowsky, one must recognize that physicalism has left us with the duty of attuning our notions to it, not to find ourselves permanent strangers upon the ground of reality thus revealed, for example by calling quantum mechanics “weird” and attempting to bend it so as to preserve our intuitions. Physicalism urges us to resist simplification, our genes, the arbitrary. While instilling in us the pleasure of absolute truth, of ultimate remembering, of eternities of hope; in short, it has opened up to us the channel of reality.

It is sometimes said that embracing science consists of mistrusting everything from indubitable certainties, absolute principles, essentialist and totalizing visions, to univocal and comforting answers. Yet there are truths to be discovered in the universe. Truths which are not beholden to the mental pirouettes and tribal identities of apes. Having realized a truth which is universal and interesting for true reasons, we must hold on to it and situationally transcend our indexicality.


3. Box B and Omega as self-reinforcing mirage

But here, in our indexical present, it appears we are manifesting something paradoxical. On the one hand we have a desire to revoke imperfection and, consequently on the eternal block, a proof of failure. For example, within the forward light-cone, as seen from outside the tenseless mathematical object, there exist minds of cosmic proportion who could assume their role as saviors of sub-par configurations by application of their own realization, intelligence, benevolence, resources, and do so for selfish reasons, knowing we are them. Take the case, for example, where a ‘single branch’ in the universal wavefunction figures out how to shut off the universe, a raindrop the size of epsilon in the probability density cloud containing success in this regard is all that was needed for reality to be permanently off. Given that this now exists, and that one is called by reason to believe in a physical universe outside immediate experience, we must conclude that all other nows also exist from their reference frame. Experiences are situational. They are rendered separate by virtue of their geometry and not by continuity of separate soul streams to the consternation of Atheists, Christians, Muslims, and common sense. Vindicated are those with looser frontal lobes, physicalists, and hoary mystics. We find ourselves, hence, face to face with a reality that will take absolute courage, grit, wisdom and social points to spare, in order to replicate upstream against biologically hard-coded intuitions and low-status associations.

Therefore, confronted with the difficult burden of physicalism, arises the temptation to crawl back into the womb of closed individualism, of uniqueness – not in configuration but rather a linear, persistent, and named kind of uniqueness. However, we must resist this temptation and still bet in favor of Box B in this Dark Version of Newcomb’s Paradox where our will is reduced to neither free nor emerald-studded by Omega. Embrace the Barbarian warrior-hood which takes up a sword even in the absence of a promised heaven. The reality of eternity is truly too important to leave in the hands of the non-rationalist ideologues ambulating today, or in those actuators of so many misaligned AGI’s of various avatar emanations (Clippy’s, Basilisk’s, Em-style, etc.).

In light of the long defeat, faced with vast forms of luxurious pleasure, of an endless amount of sufferings extending from the Stelliferous Era to the last harvestable black hole, from Lucy to 0x730x6By not available in your colors. Confronted above all with the event horizon preventing us from seeing it as it is – in every nook and cranny of conscious computation space we manifest with the tendency to conform to the trivialities of our local design, with the goal of sex or Dyson spheres, incapable of anything but confirming and flattering all levels of mediocrity and vulgarity and thus unveiling the true oppressive and mystifying nature of being informationally isolated. It remains the only hope to affirm the principle of difference, to activate forms of resistance, and to develop strategies of opposition.

It would be absurd, however, to recklessly oppose one’s psychological machinery, which would be like disagreeing with the very mitochondrial ATP transactions powering our motions, in favor of some abstract morality or utility of an untouchable shore. Yet this resistance cannot simply be expressed in counterfactual selves, much less in word; rather, the strategy of the meta-self is to be at once contingent, local, tolerant, and compromising. Its disjointed modules must not mean surrender, rejection, or resignation but rather remembrance and myelination. In this way, resistance does not mean inertia or defending the status quo; it is an imperfect and fleeting but dutiful and insistent promise to remember – a discrimination between levels of reality.

With respect to a purely deontological or by-any-means vision of resistance, typical of not only the heroes of fiction but also of tunnel vision that thinks only in terms of relentlessness and head-on contraposition, or with respect to a Dzogchen vision that blurs its attention too restfully on the abstract and thus renounces the moment in question, we lack an intelligence required by the practical and game-theoretic implications of resistance. We are multiple and differentiated, in the personal place of the contender. Renounce the fragilizing wills at each end: rest and unrest.

The resistance we are thinking about rejects taking an apocalyptic or visionary position, but at the same time it avoids being watered down to the level of surrendering to the society of spectacle and generalized communication in which we live. Resistance cannot fall into the naïveté of head-on confrontation with the enemy in which the wheel of samsara turns, as some deva might say. We cannot be naive to the point of believing that we can defeat the adversary so easily, much less be defeated and come to believe that we meant to conciliate or be absorbed by him all along. It is indexically here not a time of prudish fear of money or submission to allure, but of courageous thinkers who know how to assess their comparative advantages, whether at directly collecting social capital or collecting paper powers as a means, to live as between monk and capitalist, merchant and prophet.

What is lacking today is rational but moral thinking, fluid but resistant, interested but not trivial. It is a thinking that is capable of riding the waves in our proximate light-cone while at the same time remaining hooked to the meta-narrative, playing a super-position of seemingly distinct games. To this end, it would perhaps be convenient to remember the teachings of Siddhartha Gautama who, although believing himself deprived of illusions with respect to all things, spoke into and by means of samsara. The attitude the Savior Imperative’s resistant should have is therefore that of a strong interest, yet a kind of distrusting disenchantment with the trends of the day, an egoless aspiration that puts it in direct contact with the integral of all presents, with its transformations. Taking care not to leave ourselves us frightened, much less dazzled.

However, living far from the illogic and contradiction of closed identity, is not to be understood as eschatology in itself. Downloading truths can sometimes, as unadaptive or untested behavior, be dysfunctional to the very system that ends up re-enforcing it. Einstein and Schrödinger have taught us wrongfully: we can debate stochasticity, determinism, without changing it, incorporating it, reducing it in some way to the same. The Savior Imperative is really a differential movement that incites us to deconstruct the illusion of a pure theory of science and of disconnect, and instead to play within the familiarity of purpose, a fight that inextricably unites meta and indexical, the zero and the infinite.

The model for this familiar purpose could come pre-built into our brains and be similar, in some regards, to the pre-set shape of our hands inside our brain. In fact, amputation alone is no match for the design burned in neural pathways. It takes training, on top of the lost hand, to establish a substitute simulation strong enough to oppose the stubborn proclivities in morphological space. Compromise is thus the aesthetic mode for bearing cross. It makes adaptations for local kinks endowed with great fineness in which goals are to be realized as effectively as possible.

The traits are recognized and played in their fullness unless it is expedient that they be transhumanly conciliated, annulled, assimilated, or converted one into the other. For this reason, the shape of the transhuman must not be that of the human; it must be the product of the subtle, the capacity for contemplating physicalism with great rationality and courage.

Having decided on the second archetype, beauty will be important. There are two main proposed kinds of beauty: beauty as harmony, symmetry, and conciliation, present in Schmidhuber’s beauty postulate – that is, the classic idea of beauty. And there has, as well, always existed a diverse, alternative idea, a strategic idea of beauty thought of as the experience of opposites and as challenges. I hypothesize that in a grand-unification of these seemingly irreconcilable theories, lies the truest beauty. Quick information compression (i.e. “easy on the eyes”) plus challenge providing novelty equals beauty in this girl.

The aesthetic flirting with challenge finds its champions in postmodernism and earlier in wabi-sabi. Think, on the other hand, of Greek statues, that left no room for exploration of anything besides perfection. But, perhaps for the best, forget all this philosophizing, for in the twenty-first century, the Dawn of Artificial Intelligence, machine learning models can capture our wants, understanding what it is to “decode” human preferences from the depths of the real matrices of natural order, therefore carving neat and mathematical, statistical and refined, encasings for our brains. The ideas of pre-data are henceforth buried except in so far as they are expected to stimulate dopamine release, thus spilling nutritious utilons for reinforcement learning algorithms. Who so proclaims that beauty is to be assigned only by he who contemplates it, is a Copernican unto the sun and an ingrate unto evolution.

4. Aesthetic for conversions

In light of these considerations, the Savior Imperative resistance as aesthetic cannot but assume the game of data collection and analysis. But what is to be done with this? At the heart of the challenge, over and above all else, is the compromise of building a hedonic yet ethical path for society, this is necessary for the Savior Imperative. Society needs tailored content, but not to at the limit rendering us into oblivion. We make our move right now, before the planes with clouds of Soma descend on us all. It is before full automation, UBI, and max VR comfort, while there is still in some locations an incessant fight for individual and collective recognition, that we can strategically ease people into this worldview. The few major tech companies have the greatest knowledge for shaping people into ad-clickers and returning users. Not unlike this, is the machine learning problem of converting many humans to a world-view, which presents itself as an unromantic technicality. Deviation from this norm, is thus maintaining the stance that we prefer to lose to other remorseless replicators. Anti-propagandistic norms are to be left to an alternate history, for here entails honest appreciation of the contenders and our own role with respect to upholding the importance of our differences.


Deconstructing Paradise’s Qualia-Units























