Intuitions of a Winter Child

I often asked myself, what’s it like for someone to take a trip inside my mind? What’s Youcef’s deepest most subjective way of thinking & -i guess ‘feeling’? From an outsider’s ‘different’ and -inherently subjective lense. It’s hardly a simple or straight forward question, but I think it’s interesting for anyone fascinated by the mind, and what the mind can do.

Intuition

I see myself mainly as an intuitive thinker, i automatically construct mental patterns (my brain does) for almost anyhting, like using hashing, or optimized search algorithms in computers to process the world. But those patterns don’t occupy the full extent of my mind, they are useful only when they can be useful. I can’t by any way or means reduce myself to simply an ‘intuitive’ being.

Logic

I have a love story with logic. And I rather foolishly assumed everyone worshipped logic (I was 6 or so). I had no idea that a larger, richer world of social, cultural and psychological sophistication existed. I learned as the years went by. Unlike someone who had a stroke making them neglect some part of their body, or their own incapacities, or a schizophrenic not being able to understand their own pathoogy, I was aware of my weaknesses in that side of life, vividly. I still consider that awarness of my own self quite remarkable and astonishing when I look retrospectively. I celebrate it on a daily basis, as one of my genuine victories. One that no person saw me fight to win. Only I, or the spectator part of my soul watched me drive the metaphorical sword through the heart of uncertainty. A boy of 9 or 10 did behavioural psychotherapy to himself without even knowing what psychology meant or was, I forced my self to learn social patterns and cues in the same way I saw and loved logic, numbers and geometrical patterns. It didn’t reduce the sophisticated social realm to a simpler, hard codded and logical world contructed by Lego-like pieces as you might imagine. Instead, it opened my eyes to a new reality, a new dimension where things were not binary, nor were they ruled by absolute certainty or concrete mathematical logic. I embraced the stochastic probabilistic world of the humans while being completely aware of my virtual ‘color blindness’ to it compared to normal people (wht is a normal person anyway? does anyone like that exist? I doubt it).
I still to this day smile inside, a smile of pure joy when people complement my social skills, or even when they simply tell me I seem completely normal in social settings when I throw the " I’m an autist myself" bait meme at them.
What’s ironic is that later in life I learned that the world is actualy non-deterministic at the atomic level, fucking quantum mechanics man. Well, anyway, a new kind of interconnected beauty was constructed inside my head. Most people couldn’t see the link between and abstract and a real concept. sociology and physics. I’m extremely happy that my brain can. Thank you God, and mom, for those genes.

Connections

What does an elephant and the number ‘4’ have in common?
Maybe, you might say, “an elephant has 4 legs”. Reasonable, yeah. But, look at it from another perspective, the stoner perspective. Both ’elephant’ and ‘4’ are mental representations of things that exist, we chose to call that big grey animal with a long nose ‘an elephant’ to short-circuit the mental agony we’d have to go through to explain what an elephant is, but in objective reality, an elephant does not have to be called an elephant, it’s called a different thing in many other languages. So does the number ‘4’, it’s a mental, linguistic, representation of an semi-abstract thing that exist, albeit being in a diffrent realm of a mathematical concept. Both share the propery of being projections the brain uses to make us relate, connect things to the real world. I found out since childhood, that my made funny connections ‘intuitively’ and that I often didn’t realize why my brain thought of mental image ‘F’ when I was thinking of another distant image ‘X’. I’m sure everyone had a similair experience, and you later find out why your brain made that connection and go ‘Voila’ i got you, you sucker!
The brain is a true masterpiece, it gives things meaning somehow, drama, music, humour (even bad jokes) can be ‘felt’ and connected. AI scientists would have to do a fuckton of work to even remotely reach AGI. But I don’t have doubt they will get close to reach it.