Author: James Vornov

I'm an MD, PhD Neurologist who left a successful academic career on the Faculty of The Johns Hopkins Medical School to develop new treatments in Biotech and Pharma. I became fascinated with how people actually make decisions based on the science of decision theory and emerging understanding of how the brain works to make decisions. My passion now is this deep explanation of what has been the realm of philosophy, psychology and self help but is now understood as brain function. By understanding our brains, I believe we can become happier, more successful people.

Decisions in Wetware

I spent some time editing the manuscript section talking about “Perceptual Decisions”, a terminology that doesn’t really fit in the vocabulary of standard decision theory. This mismatch drives home an idea that while Decision Theory and the brain need to solve the same problem of choosing options under conditions of uncertainty, Decision Theory is described in an abstract language of boolean algebra or set theory. The brain solves the problem in wetware, using networks of excitable cells to model the process in a language we can’t access, let alone understand.

The comparisons are fascinating at a conceptual level, but leave unsolved how to use our semantic tools to improve the functioning of the brain networks. That turns out to be the real challenge of deciding better

Editing the OBD Manuscript Once Again

It’s almost comical that I forgot that I had completed a full draft of my manuscript last June. I had edited about half to be a more complete, organized draft and got completely distracted. First it was building a PC to run Linux, then explorations of Emacs and LogSeq, which led into organizing and publishing work in progress. Plus delving deeper into the foundations of probability theory, reading Jaynes and standard accounts of the Kolmogorov set theory basis.

Almost all of my real notes have been on paper, so there has been little to publish here anyway other than casual notes and a few photos. I’m not at all concerned about the productivity function, just reeling in and completing some projects.

So I opened up the ODB manuscript folder and read over some of that first draft. My intent now is to finish that first draft and get something out there to call the project done after many years. Which of course frees up some mental energy to think about the next project.

Of all the ideas in my ODB theory of everything, the one I really want to explore is Bateson’s idea of Ecology of Mind. It gets at the root of personal identity, the internal model of the world and the role of conscious perception in brain function. Lets see if I can split off a bit of time to start that exploration.

Amazing how easy it is to reconstruct a social network on a new platform starting with a few well chosen individuals as starting nodes.

Honestly, I wish I understood what Doctorow really means here:

Online, a lot of us have been unhappy with our social media platforms for a long time, but we hang in there, year after year, scandal after scandal, because as much as we hate the platform, we love the people who use the platform. We don’t leave because we don’t want to lose them. They don’t leave because they don’t want to lose us. It’s a hostage situation, and we’re all holding each other hostage. Collective action problems are hard problems.

_ – How to Leave Dying Social Media Platforms | by Cory Doctorow | Oct, 2022 | Medium

He’s right that we’re locked in because the information is available on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. Not just friends, but services and news. I’d like to leave, but see no alternative.

Somehow, I think, he wants the services to open to outside syndication. Interoperate with a broad set of platforms. Doctorow broadcasts his work from multiple platforms, but I’m out here on what they call the indie web just writing. I stopped the Twitter and Instagram cross posts. It was a nuisance and just feeds their lock in.

We’ve seen social media platforms die or migrate away from their original audience. Flickr of course comes to mind. Odds are that we’ll just see a new platform emerge, like Instagram did to accommodate photographers who left Flickr for the new style of promotion. Now that Instagram has changed, I haven’t seen where these photographers are going. Not their own websites and to no other platform. It’s just become kind of moribund with fewer interesting photographs to see. Either that or Instagram has decided to fill my feed with posts that are more viral or financially lucrative.

Looking for answers, but see my only recourse as my own site and RSS feeds.

One of the advantages of photography as an artistic practice that it requires engaging with the physical or social environment

Rocks

Soldiers Delight Natural Environmental Area

The Q2 Monochrom on a rehab walk.

I’m 5 months out from my bike crash and C2 fracture followed by a cervical. Off the bike outdoors, so walking an hour a day became a habit to supplement my indoor bike trainer rides.

Sadly, I wanted to be unburdened by camera, so there a few captures from over the summer. Not sure where this is going, but I’m now looking for full frame subjects as a new project.