windy country road, going a bit quick, isuzu 4x4 with a big snorkel in the oncoming passing lane crosses the center line and would have clipped the front corner of my van if i had not leisurely brought us 250 mm to the left 500 ms before the projected moment of impact, i get a *download* of the next 1000 ms – rainbow trajectories spray horizontally into phase space, i mentally salute the ones that didn't make it, and then on we go does anybody else get these?

actually, after i got sick to death of it, i am thinking about binding again. gotta go backwards to go forwards if we wish to take a group theoretic approach to understanding qualia (i.e., the qualia space inhabited by a given qualia is closely related to the symmetry group inhabited by the state space of the underlying physical structure; add to this that said pair of structures should also not violate locality/causality), should we also explore a group theoretic approach to binding? what might that resemble? perhaps "binding" would then be something as simple as a qualia space whose parts can't be transformed independently for example, if a visual field involves spatial motions E(2) and colour transformations U: - E(2) ⋉ U^X: each qualia pixel's colour can be transformed independently; experience is unchanged, because no pixel's colour is related to any other's - E(2) × U: changing one qualia pixel's colour alone does change the experience, because the relations between that pixel and all the others shift; only a transformation applied to every pixel at once leaves experience unchanged cc: @KanizsaBoundary @jessi_cata

consider also how physics literally works like this... all point charges in a given system affect the behaviour of every other... perhaps the dumbest possible reading is that everything is bound, duh... nitter.cf/cube_flipper/status/20…

recently i have been watching what a friend can achieve with affordable access to formal verification methods (using astra/fable). where before if you wanted to *prove* that some software had some property or another – maybe you want to prove it is secure in some way – this effectively required hiring expensive consultants from INRIA or somewhere. now you can just pay for the tokens for example, while i was driving around yesterday i was thinking about how the USA cannot allow itself to import Build Your Dreams cars, presumably because nobody can guarantee that the car's firmware won't be remotely disabled by China in the event of a war. this is the sort of thing cheap formal verification solves at the front of my mind is @johnsonmxe's post, "We need ownable neurotech" opentheory.net/2022/05/we-ne… > An underappreciated aspect of neurotech is we lack a strong “ownable computing” model, particularly for implanted systems. cc: @maxhodak_ @viemccoy

key quote from the recent @robinhanson post on consciousness: > My second key observation is that all of our known fundamental descriptions of how the universe constrains physical systems are quite local and simple, even if they result in complicated physical worlds. That includes all proposed interaction and boundary condition rules. This strongly suggests that whatever rule describes which experience systems really feel versus not is also simple and local. overcomingbias.com/p/no-new-…