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Theorem: smartphone as evolution of the human senses by lemasney

The obelisk is an iPhone
The obelisk is an iPhone
The obelisk is an iPhone
The obelisk is an iPhone

A conversation about whether evolution has a ‘mind’

I conversed with my 10 yo about the idea that evolution might have a mind. I believe that it does. It is not a physical mind in the sense that we think of the chemical/physiological extension of a brain. More like the chemical extension of trees.

Intelligence as evolutionary preference

We choose to be more or less intelligent. In degrees. We choose to have more or less information, process it, and make use of it. What would happen, (what if, if you will,) if we decided to be less intelligent, to work against our progress? Perhaps this exists already, in the interest of regression to a simpler time, maybe. What benefits exist, if any, in organized ignorance? This idea, as I write it, seems sacrilegious to progress. But what if it is the progressive path?

Data as prespectrometry chaos

We have limitless data coming at us all the time, in the form of visual information, light, smells, GPS coordinates, and so on. How do we interpret it? It is a fire-hose and we are looking for a water fountain. Filtering becomes necessary.

Hidden senses such as the limits of the eye to see the entire spectrum

We show the chemical makeup of suns as we look at them through a prism and telescope. What will the data driven sensor based data interpretation do for us, socially, and ideologically?

“Interfacing ion mobility spectrometry to mass spectrometry (IMS–MS) has enabled mass spectrometric analyses to extend into an extra dimension, providing unrivalled separation and structural characterization of lowly populated species in heterogeneous mixtures. One biological system that has benefitted significantly from such advances is that of amyloid formation. Using IMS–MS, progress has been made into identifying transiently populated monomeric and oligomeric species for a number of different amyloid systems and has led to an enhanced understanding of the mechanism by which small molecules modulate amyloid formation.” – http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3787735/

GPS as sense of direction

I have a ridiculously poor sense of direction, and yet, with my phone, I will never get lost ever again. Ever. In a world where getting lost is impossible, will we work to lose ourselves? will it be a game? A lesson?

“Cooper switched on her GPS in the hopes that ‘Nell’ would bring them home, but in a 121 degree-weather, the confused device ended up taking the trio of day trippers further into the desert. After about 100 miles, the women were completely lost. To make matters worse, their car ran out of gas and they no longer had cell phone service to call for help.” – http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2293713/Three-women-recount-lost-Death-Valley-THREE-DAYS-GPS-error.html

Camera as time machine

All of my memories are available, chronologically ordered, tagged and organized. I do not need to remember in my brain, because the evidence of my existence exists in other ways.

Step counter as caloric expenditure

I know precisely how many calories I have burned because a tiny sensor told me so. I need not wonder.
“Amazing Product! It motivates me to reach my goals!. This device is very accurate in my experience, and more importantly it motivates you to reach the goals you set. Excellent job Fitbit!” –

Technology is a solution for our human shortcomings.

I am obese because I have no sense of my intake and output. Solved. I am unintelligent because of my lack of photographic memory and understanding and recall of literature, math, and cinema. Solved. I am unloved because I do not have an understanding of the human condition, and yet thousands have written of it, and synopses of it. Solved. I am lonely. Solved. I am disconnected. Solved. I am inhuman. Solved.

I believe that we are years deep into a human evolution based on technology that will extend what we think of as sense, and will change how we emote

The obelisk in 2001: A Space Odyssey is a lot like a smart phone. Kubrick and Clarke coordinated on the idea of the extraterrestrial evolution of humans. I think instead we are being pushed ahead due to terrestrial technologies. I have always loved this idea. I think of the slab smart phone as the event that will move us forward evolutionarily.

I get frustrated when people complain about technology, because of its potential

Technology is not at fault, any more than a fire is at fault in the destruction of a home, it could have just as easily been used to make dinner. Guns don’t kill people, sociopaths kill people. Phones don’t make people antisocial, the phone/tablet is just a tool for those who want to do that.

My belief

I think that we are in the midst of a relatively quick evolutionary change due to the quickly accelerating use and portability of technology. I would argue that we are human-robot hybrids now, because we benefit from all the sensors and extended senses of the devices we carry, even if they are not literally and directly connected to us, as science fiction often predicts. This is similar to the idea that people are waiting for the future to come where flying cars exist. They exist now, we call them planes. Smartphones are adapters that allow us to have time travel, audio capability over long distances, an amazing global sense of direction, the ability to know what thousands of people are talking about at once. We are becoming a kind of god, knowing all of what is going on all at once, a few typed keys away from knowing the answer to anything that is known and shared openly.

In a single device. we can publish globally in a second, a dream never imagined by Gutenberg. We are our own television and radio stations, media creators who have a global audience waiting. We can send a thought out in text, audio, video, image, photograph, and endless mixtures of all of them. Everything is recorded, and readily retrievable, to boot.

I am able to watch any movie ever published, listen to any song, listen to any recorded speech in history, look at any photo. More personally, my entire recorded history in text, photography, music, video, and everything else digital is available to me, now, from any internet connected device, including one that I’ve never touched before. We live in an amazing time. What will happen next is a more streamlined connection between us and devices. For example, wearable technology is emerging, a further alignment between our flesh and these devices. Google Glass, Android wear, and Fitbit all point to devices that might one day simply be embedded in us, but for now, they are just very close to our bodies.

There was a man, Dann Berg, who embedded a magnet in his fingertip and it affected his everyday understanding of iron and ferrous metals. He sensed his world in a different way. There is a compass present in every contemporary smart phone which gives the same kind of feedback when viewed. The smartphone-based sense is just not nearly as obvious and unmistakable as the magnet fingertip.
“Let’s talk about magnet implants. I don’t really bring it up much, but I have a small rare earth magnet implanted in the pinkie finger on my right hand. I’ve had it for around three years now.” – http://gizmodo.com/5895555/i-have-a-magnet-implant-in-my-finger

On the death of privacy

 In my opinion, privacy is dead. It makes more sense to simply know that it is dead and to act accordingly. If everything everyone did was truly, fully open, I think that we would care far less about things like marijuana use, or masturbation, or the existence of a human body in its natural form.
“Google knows what you’re looking for. Facebook knows what you like. Sharing is the norm, and secrecy is out. But what is the psychological and cultural fallout from the end of privacy?” – http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/aug/03/internet-death-privacy-google-facebook-alex-preston 
In regards to the idea of too much access to knowledge, (see also Genesis,) I think that people have feared that at every paradigm shift in communication. I’m sure that when the printed book became available to the average person, people were concerned that we might know too much. I have no such fear.
 “In Jewish tradition, the Tree of Knowledge and the eating of its fruit represents the beginning of the mixture of good and evil together. Before that time, the two were separate, and evil had only a nebulous existence in potentia. While free choice did exist before eating the fruit, evil existed as an entity separate from the human psyche, and it was not in human nature to desire it. Eating and internalizing the forbidden fruit changed this and thus was born the yeitzer hara, the Evil Inclination.[6][7] In Rashi’s notes on Genesis 3:3, the first sin came about because Eve added an additional clause to the Divine command: Neither shall you touch it. By saying this, Eve added to YHWH’s command and thereby came to detract from it, as it is written: Do not add to His Words (Proverbs 30:6).” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tree_of_the_knowledge_of_good_and_evil
People also regularly believe that everything has already been done, all ideas being complete. Unfortunately, it’s simply not true. If it were, the world would still be flat, we would be without electricity, and we would still believe that gender or skin color or sexual orientation was a significant difference between people and their ability. It is not.
“All things are wearisome; Man is not able to tell it. The eye is not satisfied with seeing, Nor is the ear filled with hearing. That which has been is that which will be, And that which has been done is that which will be done. So there is nothing new under the sun. Is there anything of which one might say, “See this, it is new “? Already it has existed for ages Which were before us.…” – http://biblehub.com/ecclesiastes/1-9.htm
You can try to hide from it, but then you lose the benefit of it. You can have a kind of privacy, at the loss of technology. Even then though, you could and would still be tracked/traceable.

On Application Permissions

I am familiar with the issue of Facebook Messenger’s privacy concerns over its request for certain sensor permissions. A friend tagged me in their post about it to comment. I started with privacy is dead, and reminded them that many other applications ask for exactly the same information. We can give up technology and convenience and assume that we have something like privacy, or we can dismiss it as a possibility, and use technology at will. Regardless, the concept of privacy is a dead matter.
“Much of the problem, Facebook says, is due to Android’s rigid policy on permissions. Facebook says it doesn’t get to write its own, and instead must use generic language provided to them by Android. The language in the permissions “doesn’t necessarily reflect the way the Messenger app and other apps use them,” Facebook wrote in a Help Center article designed to address what it calls misinformation on the topic.” – http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2014/08/08/facebook-messenger-privacy-fears-heres-what-you-need-to-know/
Are you familiar with the concept of the boiling frog? If you drop a frog into a pot of burning water, it will jump out, happy to escape the boiling. If you take the same frog and put into a pot of cool water, then slowly turn up the heat until boiling, the frog will simply stay there, always adjusting to the temperature around it, becoming boiled. We are the frog, and the loss of privacy is the boiling water. Facebook is the slow and gradual rise in temperature. We are the boiled frog.

In short

The devices we have in our pockets are  a vehicle for a series of 13-20 sensors that extend us as humans from the standard 5. We should embrace the reality of that and become the superhumans we are evolving to, and stop worrying about the noise versus the signal. Embrace the signal.
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On quantification and truth

Venn diagram of nutritional management by lemasney
Venn diagram of nutritional management by lemasney

My Weekly ‘Therapy’ Session

Venn diagram of nutritional management (three gauges) by lemasney
Venn diagram of nutritional management (three gauges) by lemasney

I was having a conversation with a very good friend the other day. We were talking about the circle of topics that we always talk about, e.g. life, work, relationships, status, and emotion. I deeply enjoy the conversations and they happen almost weekly. It is my own surrogate for therapy, and we pay each other by giving that listening and suggestion to each other in response.

At any rate, it was his turn on the couch, so to speak, and he was telling me that he had no outlooks, no drive, very little to show for his effort, and little to look forward to. He said that he was waiting for things to happen, and did not care much when they did. This is atypical for my friend, usually a bastion of insight and support for when I feel this way.

The Invisible Hand Theory

In discussing possible solutions, we talked about the Invisible Hand theory, often applied in financial theory, in which some people believe that we are acted upon by an unseen influence, like fate, or God. At the opposite extreme, there is a free-will mentality, in which we put ourselves on paths that lead to a greater or lesser likelihood of intended outcomes. I am in the self-driven free-will camp.

For instance, let’s say that we are talking about an accident. It happens. Was it fate that caused the accident, in which we had no choice in the matter, and it was going to happen no matter what? Or was it you taking the risk of that accident by getting into the car or driving recklessly? All other possibilities and contingencies aside, you likely feel stronger about one, or the other.

Some might say that we are born into the understanding capability that we have. That we are more likely or less likely to have the ability to be smart about some particular topic, because of fate or destiny. This is often attributed to me in regards to technology. Some say I ‘just get it’ because it was meant to be that way. My point of view is that I understand technology because I have a passion for it, and want to learn about it, I want to have it in my hand, and I want very much to understand it. To this end, I surround myself with people, media, practices, and work that moves me towards that end. It is not an effort, per se, because I have a passion for it, but it is not by fate, in my opinion. I choose that particular path.

Nutrition, Emotion, and Schedule

51 of 365 on meeting management by John LeMasney via lemasney.com
51 of 365 on meeting management by John LeMasney via lemasney.com

We also talked about it in regards to nutrition. I lost over 100 pounds in about a year after being obese most of my life. This happened because I read books, got tools, and practiced, to that end. I did not know what I was eating, what I was burning, or how any of it worked. I spent time with people who thought nothing of eating footlong sandwiches and chips or fries for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. I did not put the right foods in my refrigerator, did not visit the right restaurants, and did not understand the hidden natures of food, such as how food’s size or type or connotation (e.g. ‘healthy’) is completely unrelated to satiation, calories. or flavor.

In regards to emotion, the same is true. Without meditation to understand the nature of your mood, or by spending time with negative or poisonous influences, you might be asking for a bad mood. You might not see patterns and relationships between food, visits, actions, tone, and mood, but they exist. Unless it’s just fate, but I do not believe that it is.

Finally, there is schedule. I, myself, live by my calendar. I use tools like IFTTT to place an event on my calendar automatically when I get or make a phone call, and record all of the details that I can in the fields of meetings, such as an address in the location field, so that later, I can review and understand the nature of the way that I spent my time, which may very well affect how I spend my time better.

Insights on Tools and Quantification

Towards the end of the conversation, I had a very good insight. For me personally, it is the tools that allow me to review and annotate the quantification of events related to food, schedule, safety, and communication. Like almost anything else I believe and understand the truth of something when I can sense (sight, hearing, taste…) it. I realized that it is because of my awareness of incoming calories in MyFitnessPal combined with output of calories in FitBit that I am able to easily maintain, increase, or decrease my weight. I realized that it is because of the manual and automated manipulation of my schedule that I can see very clearly what took place yesterday, tomorrow, last week, next week, last year or next year.

It is because of the automated download of on-demand media such as technology podcasts about topics I find important in my work that I am able to stay abreast of what is going on in those arenas. By making good choices in the grocery store, I am forced to some degree to make good choices about eating.

I figure that if I can find the right tool for the other concerns in my life, such as money or customer relations, I might be able to apply the same kinds of logic to those in order to make those ecosystems better as well. My emotion, for example, is now being recorded every three hours by MoodiModo, an emotion tracking app that asks me about 16 likert style questions (are you more or less…) about my moods like how angry, scared, or anxious I am. I can look at the charted responses in conjunction with my food diary, exercise charts, or calendar in order to see trends between, let’s say, food or meetings and my level of anger or joy and maybe begin to sense causal relationships.

His response? “But that takes willpower and commitment in order to do that, you have that.”

My response? “if you leave the right tools and choices in your path, working passively and automatically, you need neither. “

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On maintenance #fitness #nutrition #health by lemasney

Procrastination Basic program by lemasney
Procrastination Basic program by lemasney
Procrastination Basic program by lemasney
Procrastination Basic program by lemasney

If you like this post, or if you feel like it might help someone, please share it. Thanks!

How do I feel today; What did I do today?

I’ve been rather depressed lately. It’s mostly chemical-based, but there are a few stressors and other triggers that have been bringing it on. I tend to meet depression at major points of life change, and some, like the end or beginning of the year, are built-in. There’s also, though, the change that my body has gone through, and the ways in which my eating has changed for maintenance mode, rather than losing mode. One might think that the suddenly allowed addition of 700 extra calories in a day would be welcomed, but for me, it has been a fearful transition. There’s fear that my eating habits will return to the way that they were, where I eat simply because food is there, or simply because of the way that I feel, and that’s scary. I enjoy eating according to a plan, with a purpose, and to a goal, but now that the goal is reached, there is more unknown than known in the future. One might ask “Isn’t your goal now to stay where you are?” Well, yes, but there is more enjoyment in movement towards betterment (transformational) than stability in betterment (transactional), and even though I know what I must do, there is a struggle there with no clear wins or finish lines. I’ve met this depression before, when I graduated from degrees, when I accomplished other goals, and when I changed relationships. There is pain in ending, and fear in new beginnings. It works out in the end, when there is stability and familiarity in the new situation.

What or how have I been eating recently; What did I savor?

I have been eating cautiously lately, mostly whole foods, mostly vegetables, nuts, whole grains, and  fruit. There is joy in eating what you know, and a certain solace in the familiar.

How have I been moving?

It’s cold, and so I’ve continued to slack a bit in my movement. I’m walking about 5000 steps a day, about half of what I walk in nicer weather. I’ve been spending most of my usual walking time finishing projects and starting new work.

  • My FitBit profile: This is where I track my daily activity, sleep, and workouts.
  • My Fitness Pal food diary: This is where you can find out exactly what I ate today.
Related articles
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20120103: On so-called bad foods #fitness #nutrition #health

Losing Weight: Eat Real Food cc-by lemasney
Eat Real Food cc-by lemasney
Eat Real Food by John LeMasney via 365sketches.org
Eat Real Food by John LeMasney via 365sketches.org

Feeling: Today, I thought I might talk a bit about some of my feelings about categorizing foods into good and bad. I try to categorize food in better ways, as it’s a much more complex issue than that, and it’s generalization to group foods wholesale into moral standing. For instance, I’d rather eat foods that make me feel good than ones that don’t. I’d like to eat foods that make me satiated and energetic. I think that very often we label food bad because of the stereotype of that food, rather than the food itself. I think that the worst foods in moral standing can easily be the ones that help you stay fit. My key rule is that it’s very hard to make whole food bad.

In no case should anyone be eating any food to excess. Let’s take pizza. I’m not promoting eating a whole 16 inch pizza to anyone. I’m saying that if you have a slice or two, it need not be rubbery, overindulging, mass-produced slop, but something to savor, to luxuriate in, to benefit from.

A Pizza Hut Supreme pizza.
A Pizza Hut Supreme pizza. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Eating: If all you ever ate was Pizza Hut pizza, I could understand it being referred to as a bad food. They are often thick, bready, messy takes on what can be a delicious and wholesome delight. If all you ever had ever eaten was thin crust Jersey pizza shop pizza, you’d be better off, but still I could see it as being called bad food. These pies are often more about grease and cheese and meat than the crust or tomatoes, though the crust is sometimes spectacular. My favorite pies are ones I make at home with pre-packaged naan bread (about 500 calories), topped with thinly sliced Roma tomatoes, garlic and fresh basil (50 calories for all of it), topped with 3 ciliegine mozzarella balls (60 calories).  It’s whole food, it’s soft inside with a crisp crust, and it has depth of flavor. You can customize it to your every whim, and you can control exactly how it tastes, with little effort. It is in no way bad food.

Naan Pizza by John LeMasney via lemasney.com
Naan Pizza by John LeMasney via lemasney.com

Let’s look at fries. Skip the McDonald’s large, and julienne a single medium potato into a hot lightly oiled pan, flip until tender, add salt, and you will have a very nice treat with about 300 calories.

Moving: I’m not back up to 10,000 steps a day yet, but I got about 6,000 in yesterday.

Learning: I’m taking new approaches to project management today.

Insights:

  • My FitBit profile: This is where I track my daily activity, sleep, and workouts.
  • My Fitness Pal food diary: This is where you can find out exactly what I ate today.
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20130102: Starting the year at goal #fitness #nutrition #health

Photo on 2013-01-02 at 11.06
Photo on 2013-01-02 at 11.06

LeMasney weight loss progress from April 2012 to December 2012
LeMasney weight loss progress from April 2012 to December 2012

Feeling: I’m feeling pretty good. It’s the new year, and I reached my weight goal on Christmas. I met my goal of 200 pounds, set in April 2012, when I was 295 pounds. I was a much different person at the time, and many things have changed. At this precise moment, after just returning from a holiday trip and taking on a new maintenance calorie regiment of about 2000 calories a day after being at about 1300 calories a day, I’m full. I weighed myself this morning, and not surprisingly, I had gained a few pounds. I’m not concerned though, as the newly added maintenance calories will take a bit to work themselves out.

Eating: So far today I’ve only had coffee, but over the break I enjoyed some of the foods that I have not enjoyed in a long time, like apple crisp, brownies, petit fours, and bagels. Mostly though, I ate apples, bananas, lots of coffee, egg whites, and salads. It was nice to splurge a little, but I’m back home, and looking forward to more whole foods again. I think for lunch, I’m going to eat on campus and enjoy some salad and pizza.

Moving: It has been incredibly cold here in the Northeast, and as a result, I have walked less. I’m going to force myself to get out and move today.

Learning: I just started learning some new programming skills.

Insights: I’m happy to have reached my weight goal, and now maintenance is the new thing to learn.

  • My FitBit profile: This is where I track my daily activity, sleep, and workouts.
  • My Fitness Pal food diary: This is where you can find out exactly what I ate today.
Related articles

 

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On technology and simplicity

 

A legitimate smile (John at 225 lbs)
A legitimate smile (John at 225 lbs)

A very dear friend just asked me a very interesting question, which I’ll paraphrase to “Is there a conflict for you between your love of technology and your love of a simple life?”

In no way whatsoever is there a conflict for me. Let me explain.

I do not love all technology for technology’s sake, and I do not love all simplicity for simplicity’s sake.

For example, one might consider the new Google Nexus 7, an Android based tablet, a technology. Books are technology too, by the way, but I assume that she referred to my love of new technologies. I love it because it is open. I love it because it is useful. I love it because I am a fan of Google as an organization. I think they make good choices. I love it because it is innovative. I love it because it is portable, functional, and benefits me in my lifestyle. I love it because it is extensible, flexible, and meaningful beyond the technology in and of itself.

It provides me with a certain simplicity in many ways in my life. For example, I use it to log my calories while I am out, as I eat during the day, using the MyFitnessPal app, which allows me to track my caloric goals, get support from the community, look up calorie values for just about any food I eat, and store all of my eating activity. I could do this with a simpler solution, such as a notebook, pencil and calorie counts book, but it is simpler, in my opinion, to carry just one object, in which I can do those tasks with less effort.

Another example is my beloved Fitbit, an amazing device that acts as pedometer and altimeter, tracking steps taken very accurately, stair flights taken, sleep, and calories burned. I have used a few pedometers in the past, and I got incredibly frustrated with their limited function and inaccuracies. The Fitbit allows me to know when I have done enough movement for the day, when I’ve not, how I’m sleeping, how many calories I’m burning, how fast I’m going, and more. Guesswork is gone. Using other methods to do this might be without technology, but they would not be simpler in the least. When I walk in my home, the Fitbit wirelessly syncs with my account on the web, updating my charts and reflecting my effort. All I have to do it remember to throw the Fitbit on my hip, and the rest is simply movement. This is simplicity defined, given my goals.

In my opinion, technology provides increased simplicity, or it has less value for me.  Technology and simplicity are not only compatible for me, they are deeply connected.