
The Wisdom of Insecurity - t0dd
http://kirtimukha.com/surfings/Cogitation/wisdom_of_insecurity_by_alan_wat.htm
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sentientmachine
"Can you, at the same time, read this sentence and think about yourself
reading it?"

The moments before I fall asleep is when I sometimes can get a glimpse of how
the machinery of reading and thought work under the hood. It looks like a
computer program that runs thousands of commands in parallel, and it's not
controlled by the command-giver between your ears.

There is a shutdown process that occurs when you fall asleep, to most people
it's like a switch where it goes from totally on to totally off, but I've come
to see it like a janitor walking from room to room in a large building and
flicking off lights in each room one after another.

And you can change the order of the shutdown procedure to keep the command-
giver in your mind awake until last, and watch what happens that requires your
thinking mind to go away while it brings up new processes. The most
fascinating part is those 4 seconds before falling asleep. Where you get the
halting of ordinary thought, and the machinery that does deep learning rumbles
to life one by one, in various order.

It's hard to describe, one thing I see, it all operates in parallel. And it's
like a democracy. It's not a line of execution, it's everything all at once.
All experiences being dumped into modified networks to solve for objectives.
If a superior model is found to map input to motor output, the new model is
made dominant. We do learning during the day, but the model generation that
glues it all together happens at night. And you can watch it do its work in
those moments before sleep.

~~~
kevinwang
Interesting... sounds similar to what Feynman did.

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read
Are these 4039 words trying to say that being insecure is better? If that's
it, I wish this text said so in the first sentence.

The opposite of insecurity, having high self-esteem, can be detrimental to
success :
[http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-20756247](http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-20756247)

I also wish this text didn't say things that can't be proved to be true. It's
hard to continue reading falsities.

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baumbart
I think this kind of belongs to the MysticalProgramming corner
([http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?MysticalProgramming](http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?MysticalProgramming)).

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kjs3
I remember the intersection of adolescent navel gazing and the discovery of
pot. I just never wrote it down.

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backlava
Great wisdom lies in stupidity.

~~~
stonogo
Then Alan Watts is the wisest person ever to have lived.

