application

frustrated that i can't seem to remember the password to my first blog for professor moss's class.
It feels more fitting to write in there, with the mood i'm in right now.

stressed out over having to write an "autobiographical sketch" for an internship application. What does that even entail? It's oxymoronic--sketch of my life? It's been 20 years and I couldn't even "sketch" one year. I'm not saying my life has been so tremendously varied and interesting as to incapacitate a page of words; just that i have qualms about reducing it to a cover letter, turning pith and depth into a marketing...gimmick. (check this out. the term/concept of "branding" oneself scared the cheezits out of me. i don't want to be one of those faceless, merchandise-decked Ipod ad sillhouettes. i may be a cyborg, but i still have a face!)

i'm off to montreal in a few days. i'm not even in a state of mind where i can allow myself to feel excited about it...two exams and forty billion more applications to go. i've really become quite an accomplished list-checker

Project Post

My project, at this point, has evolved into an attempted digital representation of the mind, with focus on REM sleep and dreams (the virtuality branch of my mind-map) through video art. The video is broken into three parts/three different links (download in wmv format):
- "introduction" connecting the mind with the larger body of the universe, as well as a digital body; the system of the brain is juxtaposed against the matrix of a computational engine
- primer to REM sleep; explores the fluidity of identity through morphing faces (source of endless amusement). Dreams tend to distort faces and even create those that you might never have seen. I tried to combine many different categories of faces, not only those of humans, or even of the same dimensions. I think my favorite hybrid came out of a cartoon-human pairing...though I also did enjoy blending two paintings of faces (Marilyn Monroe + the Mona Lisa = ?).
- the final part of my project, REM, offers a portrayal of the mind during dreaming--haphazard, yet subliminally structured (maybe even super-structured?); after all, REM is when much of the days emotional issues get sorted out, so the sequence of dreams is not so much driven by logic (can logic only exist in a conscious state of mind?) as it is by subcortical forces, something more primal and potent.

Updated Project Map

I've been working on this mind-map (software: the SourceForge's Freemind) for a while, and it's probably an even better representation of what I want to explore (um...everything?) than my actual project, which is, even at this point, entirely unwieldy and limited by the video form.
Apologies for the awful resolution of the map...I exported the .mm file as a JPEG, which looked fine until I uploaded the image onto blogspot. So now it's blurry and unreadable.
And more technology issues: I tried to embed a hyperlink of a XHML version of the map, which is actually readable and clickable (parts are linked to websites and to each other). But that didn't work out either.
I'll figure it out soon. For now, here's at least a graphical representation of my project blueprint [click to access a readable but non-clickable pdf version of the map]:

Curriculum, so far

I've got about 11 classes on my short list for next semester, which means I'll be spending the first week shopping around. It is almost unfathomable how many wonderful Fork-style courses there are in LSA alone. I've been combing through the course guide for Winter 2009 and have already come up with enough credits for an entire curriculum. There's still a lot more I want to look at though, including non-LSA courses (art/design, music, architecture, engineering, policy, medicine....). Save that for after finals.
Here's what my schedule looks like for next semester (short short list): Comm 458: representations of the virtual, Uarts 250: Creative Process, Psych 447: Complexity and Emergence, Phil 456: the Zhuangzi, History 239: A History of Everything, and MCDB 401: Developmental Neurobiology.
Whew. I promised myself I'd take it easier next semetser, devote a "just" amount of time to each class (I feel that I really couldn't this semster, especially since the first two months were so occupied by recovering from my long summer (post-ecstatic stress disorder?)), but it's looking like it'll be another 18 credit term.... I'm excited to see how these classes will change my mental outlook, but also, very honestly anxious. I think my parents would be angry, maybe even disappointed, that I'm allowing pure interest to direct my plans (shouldn't it have been that way from the start? But i'm lucky I have the luxury to even think this way, to even believe in it.). I'm going ahead with it anyway, despite all that, and the fact that I wonder sometimes if I can even trust my own instincts (which have really been wonky since I got back to the States).

Here are some other classes I've shortlisted for the curriculum:
AAPTIS 425 - Near Eastern Studies Capstone Seminar
Ritual and Community
ARCH 409 – Special Topics in Architecture
Modeling Space and Marking Time
AMCULT 103 - First Year Seminar in American Studies
Codeswitch
POLSCI 391 - Introduction to Modeling Political Processes
PSYCH 442 - Perception, Science, and Reality
PSYCH 541 - Advanced Topics in Cognition and Perception
Design Process Models
REL 448/PSYCH 418 - Psychology and Spiritual Development

More to come soon!

Future, in design

Class registration approaches, and for the first time since entering college, I have absolutely no plan for next semester's schedule. I'm two classes and a thesis away from completing my Neuroscience major at this point, and only two classes into my English major. It should be easy then, right? In fact, I should be set (no hard decisions!) until I graduate--just fill up the terms with English courses.
Well, I'm tired of sticking to plans that refuse to update themselves. Ever since I came back to school, I've been waffling between sticking out the English or switching to something else altogether. I thought my summer research and internships had settled two things for me: 1) that i want to be involved somehow (specific, I know) with East Asia, China and Japan in particular, and 2) that I'm a little fed up with academia. I'm too impatient for it, and I hate feeling helpless, which can come from being too locked up in theory. So I considered a more "practical" choosing for my second major (Neuroscience isn't really practical per se, but at the time, I was also pre-med (am I still? I still can't rule it out?)--Econ? Pre-Policy? Comm, even (my internship had been in TV production (started out as a screen arts major))?
But of course, once classes got into full swing, I decided I'd be missing out on way too much by going strictly Econ/policy/comm. This class in particular encourages a way of thinking that is both wonderful and frustrating. In DL1, we practice a mental (referring to all aspects of the mind, not just intellect) flexibility that almost makes it impossible to avoid developing an integrative/multidisciplinary framework. So I've decided to design my own major [ICP], based on my interpretation/application of Limited Fork theory.
It's been torturous deciding to "drop" English. In more than one way; it's not only the intense reading regimen (that I would never be able to keep on my own) and forced development of writing/literary analysis skills I'd be "missing out" on, but also the way of life, almost, that is conferred by stability and security. This may be overdramatizing it (micro-crises occur on a daily basis), but sometimes I feel like I'm looking into a bottomless pit when I think about the decisions I've made recently about my almighty Future. What the hell am I doing not going to med school (parental voices reverberate)? It 's a weird mix of residual immigrant mentality, Confucian notions of filial obligation, and, most of all, the desire to be (an) Independent and uh, "true to myself" whatever that means.
But I'm already creating my curriculum for the ICP. For the first time, I feel like I'm the one designing my future, autonomous, completely accountable. It's fresh and exciting, but I wonder, if this falls through the floorboards, will I find myself wishing for the sweet, constricting lethargy that comes with following someone else's plan?

Lecture: Towards Epistemic Autonomy in Adaptive Self-Organizing Systems

I attended a lecture hosted by the Center for the Study of Complex Studies today on Epistemic Autonomy. The material was pretty much way over my head, but, being a neuroscience major in a tech and humanities class, the topic drew my interest, because the brain is really the ultimate integration of technology and humanities--or rather, all humanity stems from it, and all technology is an imitation of it or some aspect of it.
It was presented by Dr. Peter Cariani, a neurophysiologist from Harvard Medical School. Here is some what of what I got from it:

Lecture: Towards Epistemic Autonomy in Adaptive Self-Organizing Systems

Dr. Peter Cariani

Nov. 11, 2008

• Dr. Cariani – Harvard Medical School; auditory neurophysiologist
• Studied biological cybernetics, symbolic AI
• Neurocomputation; information representation in brain
• Neural timing nets
• John Templeton Foundation: neural basis of consciousness
• Sensors allow one to gain control of the way life is constructed
• Emergence – creation of something fundamentally new
• Conscious awareness as a new aspect of the universe
• Inspired by biological evolution
• New dimensions within modalities (i.e. color vision within vision)
• All technology is prosthesis – amplification of biological function
• New concepts increase dimensionality of system
• How to create systems that devise their perspectives (self-organization)?
• Actions as related to purposes
• Complexity easy; functional (steerable) complexity is difficult
• Syntactic, semiotic, and pragmatics axes
• Digital devices can help elucidate how brain operates
• Hertzian moedeling relation
• Scientific method
• Semantic: encoding (relation of symbols to world)
• Pragmatic: what symbols mean (relations of symbols to goals)
• Syntactic: formal rules (relation of symbols to symbols)
• Computations vs. measurements
• Charles Morris
• No necessary relationship between symbols in mind and symbols in environment
• Don’t generate empirical data by running computer simulation
• Sensors connect computer to world
• Semantic relationship; effectors
• Reactive system because there is no feedback (computational method stays the same)
• Create a system with computational adaptivity
• Can change computation (ex: genetic algorithms)
• Not capable of knowing what features are necessary because it can’t change its sensors
• Can’t discover new aspect of world
• Change world view by constructing a sensor; ability to add sensors leads to epistemic emergence (increases in dimensionality) and control over perceptual capabilities
• Synologous with scientists devising new measuring devices
• Analogous to evolution of sensory organs
• The newly observable also adds the newly primitive
• Learning phase necessary to adaptation; leads to creative behavior (increased autonomy leads to increased degrees of freedom leads to increased creativity)
• Tradeoff between adaptability (need time to search) and efficiency
• Tradeoff between creativity and predictability
• Space of possibilities: well or ill defined?
• Syntactic emergence: sensors allow mapping of world
• Internal sensors (iconic analog repsentations)
• Gordon Pask – electrodes in ferrous sulfate solution; pass current through
• Like a neural network because of inverse relation of conductance and resistance; changed by amount of iron fibrules (“dendrites”) between electrodes
• Physical analog to the growth of a concept
• In half a day, growth of iron threads steered situational assemblage because of sensitivity to sound vibrations
• Change in different ways in response to different frequencies of sound
• Steering done by “rewarding” (artificial natural selection); ex: aritifical evolution of ear before lunch (corresponding artwork in Brazil)
• Warren McCullock: how to get basic categories of action
• Principles of such devices
• Self-organizing sensors
• Materially-based generation of new behaviors
• Epistemic autonomy (new ways of interaction outside set already possessed)
• Problem of no inheritability – need to construct a language like genetic algorithm
• Implications – interactions dependent on senses (an epistemic “race” between modalities)
• Interaction complexity increases with dimensionality of shared signal spaces
• Increased dimensionality of signal spaces with new sensors and effectors
• Simon Penny – complexifying signal space
• Modes of creativity – combinatoric emergence vs. creative emergence (make up new pattern-grammar): closed vs. open universe of possibilities
• Core of evolution – still constrained by pattern grammar; how to open up system?
• Expansive (generation – anything goes) vs. restriction (selection – nothing goes) phases
• Brain as an adaptive self-organizing system
• Temporal problem; dogma: information is coded in the pattern of which and when neurons fire
• Time-locking of spikes: stimulus imposes its own time pattern on neuronal activity
• The time between spikes convey information
• How to increases the dimensionality of these time intervals?
• Problem with dogma: summation of all spikes fired in response to a sound stimulus results in a large central peak that corresponds to the fundamental frequency of the stimulus
• Thus, it doesn’t matter which neurons are firing, only how; ditch the labeled-line theory/dogma; this alternatively hypothesizes that signals are not tied to transmission lines because information is only coded in patterns
• In other words, the statistic of time intervals encode the information
• Then, it is possible to broadcast – operates more like the internet or radio than a telegraph, leading to a decrease in signal competition
• However, coding at the cortex is still murky
• Brain is a signal self-production system; a pattern-resonance system; multiple ways of looking at it
• Analog transduction into neural form
• Analog-digital boundary occurs at internal sensors
• Signals regenerated in recurrent loops (alternative hypothesis about information integration in brain)
• Complexifying – chain activation induced by simple auditory stimulus (e.g. the word “elephant”): convey signal into coherent, self-sustaining pattern that would be the interpretation of the spoken word/phrase
• Conclusions – multiplexing
• Space of possible sensors ill-defined
• learning and creation of new concepts analogous to evolution of sensory organs (smaller scale)

in the middle of a systems relocation.