Deja Vu AscendancyChapter 176: Heading To Vegas free porn video
Tuesday, May 3, 2005
We'd gone to sleep just after half past midnight as Julia's considerable excitement had become non-verbal, which was far more enjoyable for me, so I awoke about 4:40am. Studying didn't appeal all that much, but something to eat would be nice, and I wanted to find out if we'd had an overnight improvement in our ability to share memories, as we'd had the previous night.
We started testing our memory during first-breakfast, using a cookbook we found in the kitchen. We very quickly found out that sharing memory was now a piece of cake (actually, according to the page we were using, it was a "Beef Wellington", but you know what I mean). It was now as close to effortless as made no difference. I still needed to find out how functional it was, specifically, whether the minds who'd studied Algebra could understand Calculus, and vice versa. I had the perfect test up in my study: the Calculus assignment. I'd have the two minds that had not learned Calculus attempt some of the questions on it.
I was also extremely curious about how the massive reduction in effort - from 100% down to sub-1% - was possible in just two days. I thought about that during the rest of breakfast, and had some ideas that I thought might have been relevant:
Although we don't tend to think of it being so, the brain is a physical construct, like muscles and bones. The rest of my body had physically improved very dramatically over the last nine or ten weeks, so why not my memory too? Surely memory is largely a physical process, in that the memories are stored physically somewhere in the brain.
I also wondered, "How could a one-hundred fold reduction in effort be achieved in just two days?" My body had never improved at a rate ANYTHING like that before, so how could that part of my body that was my brain change so much? I decided there probably hadn't been a hundred-fold improvement at all. It surely takes some energy for the brain to retrieve a memory, and make itself consciously aware of the fact. Let's say it normally takes 1.000 Joules for an easily retrieved memory (which is certainly the wrong value, but it'll do for my purposes here). Back when I had to put virtually 100% effort into retrieving a memory from a different mind, that didn't mean I'd used 100.000 Joules. The amount of conscious effort didn't have to correlate linearly to what happened at the physical level. For all I knew, 100% effort used 1.001 Joules! There was no way I could measure how much difference mentally 'trying hard' made to the expenditure of energy within my brain, so I simply stopped worrying about the question. I didn't solve the problem, but I was happy enough simply to doubt it was a hundred-fold improvement.
^
[[The above point about memory being physical, motivates me to make a small digression about memory and brains.
First, memory is far less of a physical storage process than you might think. Memory is:
HIGHLY mutable, rather than being analogous to facts stored permanently on a hard disk.
HIGHLY redundant, so gaps can be filled in, often very 'creatively'. Somewhat similar to Error Correcting in computers/communications, but highly dependent on the emotions associated with the gap.
HIGHLY multi-layered, similar to there being indexes, indexes of indexes, meta-indexes, etc.
HIGHLY associative, in other words, it has some very weird indexes.
Very importantly, HIGHLY meta-level analyzed.
And rather bizarrely, it's not nearly as much a physical process as you'd think, although that aspect is invisible to modern science because it has very little understanding of how memory functions are performed, and even less about the related aspects of the Universe.
I'll start explaining the penultimate point, "meta-level analyzed", with an example. I remember that I've never been introduced to Chloe's parents. How can I remember the absence of something? My mind certainly doesn't search every single memory I've got and find that none of them contain such an introduction.
A great deal of our sense of self is formed from memories that we're constantly consciously and especially subconsciously aware of. One simplistic computer analogy is that they're in RAM rather than on hard disk. In humans there's a great deal of overlap between 'program' and 'data', which is another simplistic analogy. How we behave, our personalities, beliefs, etc. (i.e., the program that 'runs' us) is substantially written and re-written by the 'data' we encounter (i.e., by what happens to us, which immediately becomes our memories). Memories are part of who we are (our 'program') so a great deal of meta-level memory is necessarily constantly active within our mind, because our personality is always active, even when asleep (e.g., neurotic people have more bad dreams than happy people).
Constantly active are not just the memories themselves, but analyzed summaries of them, such as my never having met Chloe's parents. That analysis is necessary so we know who we are; in other words, our self-image. Not just whether we think we're an honest person, but whether we really are an honest person. Ditto for greedy, lazy, and every other personality trait.
These functions are performed and maintained subconsciously, otherwise when we wake up every morning, our brains would have to go through an enormous 'startup' procedure to rediscover/recreate everything we think and know about ourselves and our life. The subconscious is VASTLY bigger, more capable, more complex, and more important than we're consciously aware! Too large to be wholly contained in our brain, which probably surprises you.
Brains are FULL of all sorts of lower level functions, not leaving enough room for many of the higher memory functions, or for your mind itself. Here's one example of something your brain does that you're probably not aware of. People can be rendered blind by receiving severe brain damage in their brain's visual processing center. They report seeing nothing but flat gray, even if their eyes are shut (if you think about that for a moment, you'll realize that shutting their eyes makes no difference).
Clearly they can't recognize faces, read books, etc., but if you throw them a ball, they'll catch it. They've got no idea how they caught it. They'd swear black and blue that they never saw it, don't know what color the ball is, who threw it, or any other visual detail. All they see is an unrelenting single shade of gray. Catching a ball they don't even know is being thrown at them is possible because the subconscious maintains its own visual processing center in a more primitive part of the human brain. It has a very limited functionality (which does include catching balls), and is totally inaccessible to the conscious mind - that's the key point: there's a SHIT LOAD of stuff that happens inside your head that you've got no idea about! The subconscious visual processing center is a hang-over from our VERY early evolution, long before we even looked like monkeys, but it's still functional today. It's not relevant, but I'm amused that in those TV courtroom dramas where the pretending-to-be-blind-baddie gives himself away by catching something the hero throws, the baddie could truly be blind.
I use this example because visual processing is a complex task. Somewhere between 25 to 30% of human brain matter is devoted to it. There are so many functions going on inside human brains that minds and memories are largely "out-sourced", that being the last of the bullet points above. I'll say more about that much later.]]
^
Upstairs in our study, I pulled out the Calculus assignment and got the Algebra minds to try answering problems that we hadn't done before.
There was good news and bad news. The good news was that they retrieved all the memories they needed to complete the problems correctly. The fact that these were old memories, from before we started working on sharing our memories, was very welcome. The bad news was that it was slow because they couldn't index into the correct memories accurately, and it required a great deal of active cooperation from the owning mind. It had to be willing to let each of the fairly specific memories go. It was doable, but painfully slow.
We were discussing the implications on our college studies, when, #1:
I said, "Don't you think that's an overreaction to her being uncomfortable unbuttoning her blouse at school? That hardly makes her a bad girlfriend." I was aware that getting Chloe to unbutton her blouse was an important first step in Julia's plan to teach her that boys being idiots wasn't something she needed to take personally, but its importance to Julia did not make it important to Robert and Andrew, so their advice did seem like an overreaction.
Robert said, "In my experience, having to pretend to use force is required to get the girl to do everything over wherever she draws the line. If she's making a fuss about undoing even the top button of a blouse, then she's going to make a fuss about everything to do with sex. It'll drive you up the wall."
Julia said, "Chloe's already admitted she'd like to have sex with Mark, so maybe her problem is just about how she looks in public?"
Robert shrugged, "Perhaps. I just know that I wasted too much time on the first girlfriend like this that I had, and I got less patient with that personality each time since then. Good relationships require giving, but these girls can't give physically. That makes them bad girlfriends as far as I'm concerned. She's got psychological problems, and you don't want a girlfriend like that."
"I agree," said Andrew. "Undoing buttons at school is irrelevant, but if she requires force in private, I'd have a talk with her. Give her one chance, and if she doesn't show good reason or good improvement, dump her. Like Robert said, she's psychologically damaged and she won't be a good girlfriend. That's presuming she can't turn the behavior off. If she's doing it for fun or some other reason she can control, then that'd be fine, but if she can't turn it off, then she'll drive you up the wall."
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