Chapter 176: Heading to Vegas

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: <Let's not worry about it now. Let's wait to see if it's any better tomorrow.>

Which made sense, so we studied for a while instead.

We had a momentary distraction when we remembered the cool spreadsheet we'd thought of writing, the one that simulated daily profits for a day trader. I was tempted to write it now, because it'd be fun, but resisted. We'd wait until we actually had some profit to simulate. I went back to studying.

Julia came in about half an hour earlier than normal, immediately saying, "How can you study at a time like this?"

"You're right. Clearly I should have been spending my time trying to make sense of Chloe's behavior."

"Huh? What about Chloe?"

"She behaved very strangely at lunch yesterday. She..." I gave Julia a quick description of Chloe's behavior, or as I think of it, misbehavior; although I suspected that her mother would have the opposite viewpoint. I finished my recounting and waited for Julia to make everything clear.

Julia said, "Weird. I can understand her not wanting to undo them, and having undone them, her doing them straight back up again when lunch ended, but why would she not get angry with you forcing her to undo them?"

"I was kind of hoping you'd tell me that. You don't know?"

"No. It doesn't make any sense," admitted Julia.

I wisely rejected the first few replies that occurred to me, eventually saying, "If you don't understand her, you can imagine how confused I am."

"Don't worry, we'll ask Mom at breakfast. How's the studying going?"

#1: <Another weird mealtime conversation at the Williams' breakfast table then.>

"It's going well, although I didn't get much done this morning because we went to sleep so late. Which reminds me, shouldn't you still be in bed."

"I'm too excited. It's going to be so wonderful to have lots of money."

"Don't you think you're being just a wee bit optimistic?"

"No. I'm sure you can do it. Maybe we can go back to bed and celebrate for a while?"

"Now you're crossing the bridge before the eggs have even been laid. But we can practice for the possibility that we might have something to celebrate, if you like."

Julia was already on her feet and pulling my arm, so I was pretty sure the answer to "if you like" was positive. I let her lead me into temptation, mainly because she got a headstart on me, otherwise I'd have been leading her.

#2: <Times like this I'm glad we don't have to shut the computers down first. With how long that takes, across the whole planet, Windows must be responsible for an amazing amount of lost sex.>

At breakfast, my girlfriend told her mother, "Mark's got a problem seducing Chloe. Tell Mom what you told me, Mark."

I repeated my lunchtime story. Before I got to the end Andrew and Robert were both nodding along. I finished through to Chloe doing up her buttons at the end of lunch, then asked The Boys, "I couldn't understand Chloe's behavior, but you two seem to recognize it?"

Robert said, "Sure. I've had a couple of girlfriends like her, including one extreme example."

Andrew agreed, "I've had one too, although nothing as extreme as Robert's old girlfriend. It's not that uncommon."

I asked, "But what is it? I've got no idea."

Robert answered, "I can't say I ever spent much time thinking about it deeply, but it seemed to me that those girls wanted to have sex, but they'd been taught it was a bad thing, so they wanted the boy to 'force' them. That way they got what they wanted, but were blameless."

Julia said, "In this case, not 'having sex', but undoing buttons. You're saying Chloe wanted to undo her buttons for Mark, but her parents had taught her it was a bad thing to do?"

Robert said, "Or maybe she taught herself it was a bad thing. I think the key thing is that she needed to be 'forced' to do it, so it was Mark's responsibility instead of hers. Personally I found it to be a pain in the ass. I can imagine some guys might like it, but I can't imagine you'll be one of them, Mark."

"How do you mean?" I asked.

"You have to force the girl to do what you want. Do you like forcing girls?"

"I'd never force a girl, but Chloe didn't need to be forced. I never touched or threatened to touch her. I only had to walk away."

"You didn't use physical force, but you did use emotional force. You threatened to break up with her if she didn't undo a button, which was still coercive. I got very tired of having to do it, and broke up with the girls who required it."

Julia asked, "So how did you get them to stop it?"

Robert said, "I never did. I dropped them and moved on."

"Same here," echoed Andrew. "You can try asking Chloe to behave normally, but if you get her to change you'll be doing better than I did. My advice would be not to waste time on her. Dump her and find someone less screwed up. From what I've seen, that'll take you thirty seconds, haha."

Both Julia and I disagreed with Andrew's advice. We both tried to speak at the same time, and got tangled up. Once we got past the "after you", "no, after you" stage, it turned out that we had quite different reasons.

Julia's reason was, "We're trying to 'unscrew' Chloe." | My response was, "Getting her to undo her buttons at school isn't important enough to break up with her over."

Andrew shrugged. "Up to you. I couldn't get the girl I knew to change even a small amount. I don't think Robert could either?" Robert shook his head. Andrew continued, "You've got plenty of girls to choose from, so why persist with a messed up one? My prediction is you'll end up getting too annoyed with her, so you'll dump her."

#2: <Haha. I don't think Andrew's met Chloe, has he? Obviously not, or he wouldn't have said that.>

Robert said, "I agree. If she's anything like the girls I dated, you'll get pissed off quickly. My advice is to talk with her about it, to give her a chance to explain or change. But if she doesn't improve quickly, don't waste your time and energy on her. Dump her and move on."

#1: <But Robert HAS met Chloe, only a few days ago. He can't have forgotten BOTH of her breasts in such a short time!>

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."

#3: <Good thing #4's on duty, or he'd be too upset to eat. Remember that we vaguely intended to have virginity-retaining sex with Chloe, but never got around to doing anything about it... >

#1: <Because we got too distracted by the stupid button game.>

#3: <Yeah. I wonder if we should have a private session with Chloe. Purely just to check out her psychology, of course. And maybe also to strip her naked and give her as many orgasms as we can.>