How I made my own VPN server in 15 minutes | TechCrunch

[Eric Charles-2]

Hmmmmm..... while I don't disagree with Nick, I also don't think he answered the question. It might well be that when we ask what a thinking man is doing in any particular instance, we are missing the point. And yet, as the man sits for longer and longer in his thoughts, that argument seems itself to have become more remote with regards to our concerns. Further, it seems empirically true that the man who gets up from thinking is sometimes different than the man who sat down to begin his pondering. What is THAT about?

There is not a good answer to this question. I wrote a chapter with British experimental psychologists Andrew Wilson and Sabrina Golonka about the problem recently, in a collected volume on American Philosophy and the Brain. We lamented the lack of a good language with which to talk about what the brain does, arguing that cognitive-psychology speak is inadequate and was holding back the field. (Nothing too novel in that.) We also made some solid suggestions about what the new language would need to look like - drawing from ecological psychology, dynamic systems theory, and the like - even though we couldn't commit on its final form. Much of the text can be found here, and I'll get the full text if anyone is interested: https://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=TvgqAwAAQBAJ&oi=fnd&pg=PA127&dq=charles+andrew+sabrina+neuropragmatism&ots=F-EM6R_Zq1&sig=xa9EbE82QAxAXQVrtad64a-w6Ds#v=onepage&q=charles%20andrew%20sabrina%20neuropragmatism&f=false 

The answer has to be something of the form: He is reconfiguring himself.

To the extent that he is "consciously thinking": He is responding to the fact that he is reconfiguring himself. He is like a man "psyching" himself up to lift a heavy weight, in that he has a "sense" of whether his body (brain included) is ready for the task ahead or not.

To elaborate: Humans show a remarkable capacity to rapidly reconfigure into different types of "task-specific devices" (TSDs). That is, we are well tuned to (relatively) skillfully do one thing at one moment, and a different thing at a different moment. After contemplation, our thinking man is a different dynamic system than he was before, and he now connects to the larger dynamic system of himself-in-his-environment differently than he did before - he is sensitive to different variables, and responds to variables differently than before. While physiological psychology covers a wide range of systems, including hormonal systems, gut physiology, and lymphatic response, such processes are generally slow, operating on the scope of minutes to days. More rapid reconfiguration suggests that alteration of neuronal mechanisms is the best explanation for the changes observed during a typical bout of "thinking."

These changes in neuronal mechanisms are a key component in a change in the habits (relatively predictable responses) one is prepared to display based on surrounding events.

The question of self-awareness, then, is a question of how one re-cognizes what one is predisposed to do. This relates to the issue of apparent "higher-order" self-regulation by which one keeps one's self reconfiguring until one is ready to act, or until some additional factor pressures action. The principles that apply on that "higher" level, ought to be expressible in the same terms as those which operate on the "lower" levels. The skill of knowing when one is ready to answer a math problem, or give the public speech, or drive to work, etc., should be viewed as equivalent to the skill of knowing when one is ready to lift a given weight. Some weights are light enough that one is essentially always ready, some are close enough to the limits of one's ability that being (as much as is possible) the right type of task-specific device is crucial, and still other weights are so heavy that no amount of effort towards rapid reconfiguration will suffice. So it is with solving math problems, nailing a speech, or navigating dangerous roads in a vehicle.  I fully acknowledge that lifting the near-limit weight will also rely on several of those minute-scaled bodily changes (blood oxygen, adrenaline, etc.). However, the key point is that whatever language we come to agree upon most allow us to highlight the similarities between that situation and the more typical examples of "thinking", rather than making it seem as if there is a an uncrossable gulf between the two activities.  

On Sun, Apr 23, 2017 at 5:19 PM, Nick Thompson <[hidden email]> wrote:

Hi, Frank,

 

Heluva Question, there!

 

Allow me to skip to what seems to be the core question you are asking:

 

“Nick: What is it that you Peirceian’s think I am doing when I think I am modeling stuff in my head.”

 

 

Gilbert Ryle put this in an even more succinct manner.

 

What is Le Penseur doing?

 

Now, you of all people, Frank, know how troubling this question is to a behaviorist, particularly one who denies to himself the notion of “unobservable” behavior.  It is the kind of question which has sent me to Peirce, who initially dissappointed me by writing:

 

The truth, however, appears to be that all deductive reasoning…involves an element of observation; namely, deduction consists in contructing an icon or diagram the relations of whose parts shall present a complete analogy with those of the parts of the obect of reasoning, of experimenting upon this image in the imagination, and of observing the result so as to discover unnoticed and hidden relations among the parts. 

 

Now this is dissappointing to me because at first blush, it appears to be a stalwart defense of the notion of “Mental Models”, which so captivated the field of Cognitive Psychology and which, as you know, I deplore.  In fact, so far as I know, it may be the first INVENTION of that notion, in which case, Peirce, not Tolman, would have to be acknowledged as the Father of Cognitive Psychology. 

 

So, either I have to abandon Peirce, or understand him in another way.  The problem is that I take Peirce to be a neutral monist.  To be a monist is to believe that there is only one kind of stuff in the world.  Now, Idealists and Materialists are both monists of a type, bur I think they are kidding themselves; neither position survives without the implication of the other.  Indeed, for a any monist to name his “stuff” is really inconsistent because in naming it, he implies the possibility of its absense, and that is to step on the slippery slope of dualism.  But to go through the next 100 words using the word stuff, two or three times in a sentence, abhors me, so I am going to give this stuff an name: “experience” stuff.  This experience stuff is not experience of anything else but of other experience.  We begin, thus, by saying that there is a stream of experience in time and that all experience is of other experiences.  In short, we begin in the middle and we regard as silly, a question like, “What was was the FIRST experience of?” 

 

So we start by assuming that experience is random.  In such a case, no patterns will appear in it, or, at the very list no such patterns will endure.  If patterns do emerge, however,  it would make a lot of sense to mark them and behave in accordance with them.  We note that some things stick with us when we leave a room and they become “self”; others come and go even when we are stationary, and these become “other”. Some are accompanied by immediate suceeding experiences, and these we call objective; others lead to expectations that are not confirmed, and these we call “dreams.”  Etc.  Some objective experiences are immediately confirmed by all of our senses, and these we call “direct”; other experiences are confirmed only by longer chains of experiences, and these we call indirect or abstract.  The blow of a hammer upon a thumb is of the first sort, the collision of two electrons is of the second.

 

All behavior, from a monist perspective, consists in experiences of relations between an experience of “seeing” and an experience of “doing”.  When those two experiences are close together in time we experrience a reflex; when they are more distant in time, we experience a response; and when they occur at a still greater distance in time, we experience a deliberate action.  So the difference between your hitting your thumb with a hammer and yelling “Ouch”  and you hitting your thumb for the ninth time and reaching for a pair of pliers to hold the next nail, is a difference in degree, not a difference in kind. 

 

In short, the mystery of the mind, about which we often talk, is really a confusion that arises because we so unreasonably priviledge things that happen half a second apart of being related to one another.  So, looking at Le Penseur and asking, what is he doing?, is like looking at a very highspeed photograph of a moving train and demanding to know how fast it is moving on the basis a single instantaneous image.  The only proper answer is, “We don’t know yet! “

 

Thanks for the question,

 

Nick

 

 

 

 

Nicholas S. Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology

Clark University

http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/

 

From: Friam [mailto:[hidden email]] On Behalf Of Frank Wimberly
Sent: Sunday, April 23, 2017 11:32 AM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] the arc of socioeconomics, personal and public: was VPN server

 

So it's easy to substitute the word 'conceptual' for the word 'mental' whenever I talk to you (or Nick).

 

I'm curious.  My qualifying exam in real analysis consisted of 10 questions (stimuli, inputs?) like "State and prove the Heine-Borel Theorem". The successful response was a written version of a valid proof.  I hadn't memorized the proofs but I had memorized conceptualizations of them. How does that fit?  Would the referents​ be the proofs in the text or as presented in class?

 

I passed.

 

Frank

 

Frank Wimberly
Phone <a href="tel:(505)%20670-9918" target="_blank" value="[phone]">[phone]

 

On Apr 23, 2017 10:00 AM, "┣glen┫" <[hidden email]> wrote:

I've made this same point 10s of times and I've clearly failed.  I'll try one last time and then take my failure with me.

When you assert that there's a dividing line between rigorous and whimsical mental models, what are you saying?  It makes no sense to me, whatsoever.  Rigor means something like detailed, accurate, complete, etc.  Even whimsical implies something active, real, behavioral, physical.  In other words, neither word belongs next to "mental".  When you string together mutually contradictory words like "rigorous mental model" or "whimsical mental model", your contradiction prevents a predictable inference.

At least the word "concept" allows one to talk coherently about the abstraction process (abstraction from the environment in which the brain is embedded).  It preserves something about the origins of the things, the concepts.  When you talk of "mental models", then you're left talking about things like "mental constructs" or whatever functional unit of mind you have to carve out, register, as it were.  What in the heck is a "mental construct"?  Where did it come from?  What's the difference between a mental construct and, say, a physical construct?  What _is_ a "mental model"?  How does it differ from any other "mental" thing?  Is there a difference between a "mental foot" and a "mental book"?  What if my "mental books" are peach colored clumps of "mental flesh" with 10 "mental toes"?  It's ridiculous.  Contrast that with the terms "conceptual foot" or "conceptual book".

So, in the end, I simply disagree.  The term "conceptual" does much to illuminate.


On 04/22/2017 08:35 PM, Vladimyr wrote:
> there exists a dividing line between rigorous and whimsical mental models
>
> that the term “conceptual” does little to illuminate.

--
␦glen?

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[Vladimyr Burachynsky]

>Marcus wrote " Others are just involved in collective performance art in
the hopes of pushing their citation count higher."

They profit since so many are seduced by crappy graphics. My last academic
supervisor was one of these characters. But knowing that I finally completed
my sentence in academic prison.

Gentlemen don't retreat. Most children go through a stage when they
experiment with watercolor paints.
Parents dote on these kids. With little success.

Once I condemned an artist for choosing a small easel, low expectations.
But many artists choose self constraining media that they can easily master.
They impose self restrictions on themselves yet seem to desire a great
reputation.

Glen's referents are salient and possibly very useful. These referents enter
the neural landscape
and transform the very connections of neurons. London Cabbies are famous
world-wide for their
mental skills and neuro-anatomy. Their rigorous mental models are
astonishing.

The artwork of most humans rarely progresses beyond flat 2D scribbles, and
yet teaching them anything
about the matter is almost useless.

Some brains can create artifacts of surprising elegance and other brains
make caca.
And then there are the Economists that prefer the later.

If the referents are robustly entrenched in formalism then likely so are the
artifacts.
vib



-----Original Message-----
From: Friam [mailto:[hidden email]] On Behalf Of Marcus Daniels
Sent: April-23-17 11:14 AM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] the arc of socioeconomics, personal and public: was VPN
server

Heh, it amuses and frustrates me the pressure to publish when one could
instead do something useful like develop and share code.   Those "mental
models" scribbled down on paper obviously have less value than tools to
solve the general problem (i.e. working through all the boring but necessary
cases to make it all computable), both as formalisms and from a utilitarian
point of view.   Nonetheless, I hear all the time from theory types that
they "have it in their head and just have to write it down".    Some of them
I believe.  Others are just involved in collective performance art in the
hopes of pushing their citation count higher.  Hmm, I seem to be down on
academics today.
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[Marcus G. Daniels]

Vladimyr writes:

"If the referents are robustly entrenched in formalism then likely so are the artifacts."

I work on source-to-source compilers.   There's no real-world referent.  Just transformations between representations.  

Marcus

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[Marcus G. Daniels]

Tom wrote:

"What do you think, folks?  Worth the effort?

https://techcrunch.com/2017/04/09/how-i-made-my-own-vpn-server-in-15-minutes/?ncid=tcdaily"

I just received one of these.  It gives another Wifi hotspot which can be directed by its web page or iOS app, to a VPN or Tor.

I got the package that has unlimited VPN access (to about 20 different countries).   No software setup is required.

(Ok, I have a weakness for Kickstarter campaigns.)

Marcus

---

From: Friam <[hidden email]> on behalf of Tom Johnson <[hidden email]>
Sent: Sunday, April 9, 2017 1:10 PM
To: Friam@redfish. com
Subject: [FRIAM] How I made my own VPN server in 15 minutes | TechCrunch

 

What do you think, folks?  Worth the effort?

https://techcrunch.com/2017/04/09/how-i-made-my-own-vpn-server-in-15-minutes/?ncid=tcdaily

TJ

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