Computer Science and Machine Learning provide an effective vocabulary to talk about mental states. As I go about my life, I tend to think of the computational processes I could be applying to solve tasks. I'm not sure everybody does this as often as I do; probably geeks do it more often? I'm doing it more and more since I started meditating and became more aware of my mental processes and formations.

While we live, we experiment things; feel a series of qualias. While we experiment with the world and feel things, we learn. When we learn, we adjust our internal neurological state.

More in computing terms: feelings about things and ideas are linked to weights in our models. Qualias are vectors; each dimension is a characteristic of the experience. Experimenting a qualia is evaluating a condition. Usually we experiment many qualias muddled up together; we are evaluating batches. Summing up: the weights we adjust when we learn determine the experiences we feel on different stimuli; they might be the qualia.

Concentration ("Samatha") lets you evaluate your mental state while considering fewer items at a time. It lets you focus more on individual weights in the model, observe them and update them individually.

You believe in things that ended up with a high weight in the "belief" dimension of its qualia. You believe these things because they happen to be true, or useful, or otherwise important. Wisdom, as distinct from knowledge, is the sum of all this information you carry.

Metta is theory of mind training.

Metta lets you experiment the affinity weights that link you to other people in your life. You feel happy when they feel happy; how much? You feel miserable when they suffer; how much? It might be that some weights are lazy-initialization; reading them actually sets them (lazy here means they are set to NaN and don't affect batch calculations). Or perhaps reading them also reinforces them; if you check for a feeling often enough, and it comes up positive, perhaps it comes up more positive every time (TODO: look up neurological correlates)..

The self is a cluster of ideas we are positively disposed to; our identity is the set of things that that a) make us happy for one reason or another (we feel as if we "choose" those), or b) we don't like but otherwise are useful (for example: they are good at predicting how we will behave in the future, like character traits we don't want but carry).

Feelings of happiness related to other people let you identify with those people; move your self distance operator towards a gravity center not within yourself. Your self expands as you do Metta. As you do it with yourself, you also realize that the same mental processes you use to build a mental model of what other people think (theory of mind) are (or at least feel) like the ones that you use to think in first person.

Hypothesis: they are the same. "Being social" probably comes after just "being" (and trying to understand your being) evolutionarily speaking. So it would make evolutionary sense for it to build on the previous neural pathways; a mutation is more likely to trigger a new module than an independent system.

Once you realize all this, you can can choose to adjust your self any way you like. Part of your identity is group-linked; the group can be expanded, and your identification with it too (every time you do this, perhaps you "feel" it to be true a bit more). You are not the same as all people in all the ways; but if you care about them, and you want them to be happy, well: you've got something in common with all of it.

Eventually the significant weights you use to decide whether some entity is in your "self" or not flips. In a practical way, your self can become "everybody".

This is the nature of the Buddha: Buddhism mostly agrees that it is core to all living beings.

You become the Buddha by identifying with your Buddha nature; believing this to be true.

• #pull [[loving kindness]]
• [[burn kindly]]

• a [[process]].
  • Flancia is the revolution, done [[kindly]].
    • #go https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revolution pull
      • #q a revolution (Latin: revolutio, "a turn around") is a [[fundamental]] and [[relatively sudden]] change in [[political power]] and political organization which occurs [[when the population revolts against the government]], typically due to perceived [[oppression]] (political, social, economic) or political incompetence.
    • #push [[revolutions]]
    • #pull [[Murray Bookchin]] would likely be my default delegate for matters pertaining to [[revolution]] in a [[liquid democracy]] system.
    • Given that he's dead, when in doubt, I ask [[@neil]] and the [[Agora]] :)
    • My current personal proposal is the [[Flancian Revolution]], which is designed to be constructive and optional and is based on the patterns of [[Federation]], [[Commoning]] and [[Dual Power]].
    • Flancia is meant to be a revolution guided by [[loving kindness]].
      • In Flancia there is no [[poverty]].
      • In Flancia there is no [[homelessness]].
      • In Flancia there is no [[violence]].
      • In [[Flancia]] we will [[meet]]!
    • In Flancia we slayed [[Moloch]], and by that I mean we [[disentangled]] from them.
      • I am a [[Flancian]] and this [[Agora]] contains my [[manifesto]].
    • [[Aristotle]] describes two types of [[political revolution]]:
      • [[Complete change]] from one [[constitution]] to another
      • [[Modification]] of an existing constitution.
  • In Flancia the [[internet]] yielded a thriving [[knowledge commons]] for humanity through the ages.
    • I like to think of [[Flancia]] as the world as it could be, improved through a series of [[peaceful]] revolutions.
    • #push [[Protopoi]] is the [[space]] of composable [[incremental improvements]]; rational and well meaning changes that can be chained or composed for the betterment of the world.
      • We can [[explore]] this space together, and to do so it is that I set out to build an [[Agora]].
  • [[twitter]]
    • https://twitter.com/flancian/status/1368252143338192898 pull
    • https://twitter.com/flancian/status/1462091524985045002 pull
    • #pull [[buddhism]] [[satyagraha]] [[non violence]] [[effective altruism]]
    • #pull [[peter singer]] [[frederick engels]] [[karl marx]] [[hans widmer]] [[murray bookchin]]
  • #pull [[free, fair and alive]] [[patterns]]

• [[Military]] goes over to a rebellion when two conditions are met. collapsed:: true
• How can you make [[people]] think a [[majority]] [[believe]] in Something? How can you make it seem like your revolution is inevitable?
• [[Structural]] [[revolution]] model:
  • 1. [[Fiscal]] illiquidity, [[officials]] and [[enforcers]] are not paid.
    2. Intra-[[elite]] conflict between [[state]] officials and those who [[finance]] the state- [[economic]] elite vs [[ruling]] [[officials]].
    3. [[Mass]] [[movement]] of dissidents- a movement claims a [[solution]] to the [[deadlock]] and fills the vacuum. The solution doesn't have to be real- it is often [[ideology]] used as a unifying [[tactic]]. The revolutionaries have to be able to [[attack]] the deadlock and make the State [[solvent]] again.

Revolution

the institutional transformation of society by society

– [[Common: On Revolution in the 21st Century]]

I'm on board for a [[social revolution]] in the 21st century. My revolutionary flavour of choice is [[revolutionary socialism]]. [[Eco-socialism]], specifically, as [[to be a 21st century socialist is to be an eco-socialist]]. I am desiring of a revolution that leads to something akin to an [[ecological civilization]].

How to get from here to there?

revolution never occurs just through the behaviour of a particular group, however big or small. It happens because masses of people, many of whom have never considered the matter before, demand change and put themselves at the centre of political events

– [[Revolution in the 21st century - Chris Harman]]

Strategy: I hope that [[prefiguration]], education, agitation, and organisation ([[educate, agitate, organise]]) may lead us to a [[social tipping point]] that tips us towards harmony. I believe you need both some of the spontaneous network and the party form to make this happen. See [[Neither Vertical Nor Horizontal]]. A bit of both [[Climate Mao]] and [[Climate X]] if you will.

Tactics: With revolution there is the thorny question of violence and struggle. [[When bringing change we must minimise violence]]. I hope the minimum = 0 and that [[direct action]], [[civil disobedience]] and enacting positive alternatives in there here and now can suffice. Probably naive. But unlike in [[To Posterity]], I hope that we who wish to lay the foundations of kindness, can ourselves be kind.

Demands: TBC. see e.g. [[Half-Earth Socialism]], [[ecological civilization]].