Stream of Subconsciousness

“Music is the universal language of mankind.” — Henry Wadsworth LongfellowLanguage is a defining feature of consciousness, and we take this for granted. Without language we can hardly operate as humans. Our ability to use language is unparalleled among other animals. A conscious human without language is almost a non sequitur...Only humans have developed what humans call music, and refined it to an unparalleled degree. No other animal has made sound a creative art. But creating and responding to music is not seen as a primary criteria that defines us. We can easily imagine a person who can neither create nor appreciate music and, under most circumstances, we’d never know they were different...We don’t know when humans first started using language, but we think the cognitive and physical ability developed as early as 200,000 years ago. On the other hand, we’re even less certain about the emergence of music. Judging from the discovery of the earliest bone flutes, music emerged around 40,000 years ago (Honing 2015). However, it’s most likely there someone at least did some humming during the preceding 160,000 years.LanguageLyricismAre Language and Dance Connected?Everyone Continues to Ignore Altered StatesIndigenous Music and Altered StatesStop Ignoring Your DreamsSound Can Guide Your EmotionsMusic as a PsychedelicDo Dreams Have Rhythm? This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit mindstrengthbalance.substack.com/subscribe

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit mindstrengthbalance.substack.com“Grief is mediated by a distributed neural network that subserves a number of neural processes affecting various parts of the brain and its functions... This neural network may account for the unique, subjective quality of grief.” — J. William Worden• An Indirect ApproachI have a hard time engaging with most grief either because I don’t get it, or I don’t accept it to begin with. The only seriously grievous experiences I’ve had were the premature loss of two ex-wives and two dogs. The dogs were devoted; the ex-wives were not. These losses were “premature.” The loss of other relationships that might be called “mature” or foreseeable have bothered me much less.I have a natural inclination to avoid grief. I prefer to look into the future. I have no attraction to tear-jerker movies and don’t like stewing in emotion. I’m careful about whom I attach to—more careful now than I was—and it’s separation from deep connection that grieves me. Despite my careful navigation, as a grief counselor, I’m obliged to engage with grief wherever it appears, and while sadness is straightforward, grief is complex.I can control my feelings if I can manage my boundaries. I can accept and resolve a death that I prepare for. Neither my mother or father worked at maintaining their health, and they did little to avoid their encroaching infirmity and eventual death. Neither of them did anything in the way of physical exercise or paid serious attention to nutrition. I don’t think either bothered to take vitamins. I didn’t know when their deaths would arrive, but you could pretty much see them “aging out.”Now that I’m old myself, I take an active approach. I monitor both my mental and physical health, and I can see them change, day by day. I pursue different forms of daily exercise, and monitor my diet and mood. I push myself. It can be a bumpy ride, but I manage to stay in the center of the lane.• The Spirits in the Air• Reaching For Extremes• Emotional Investments• The Grief of Denial• Grief as Contradiction• The Depression Connection

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit mindstrengthbalance.substack.com“How adventure sport participants make decisions in very challenging, ever changing natural environments… has implications for how people make decisions in finance, medicine, and other fields.” — Audun Hetland (Stringer 2023), psychologist at The Arctic University of NorwaySeeking AdventureI’m an explorer and I’m working on a book about people who are drawn to do things beyond what’s safe and familiar. The book will be about the motivations and rewards that drive alpinists, BASE jumpers, and backcountry skiers. These are three sports that have expanded our notion of what’s possible and, in the process, resulted in a lot of dead alpinists, jumpers, and skiers.I’ve been interviewing people who do these things, reading academic studies about extreme sports and the memoirs of introspective practitioners. The mindsets of these people have much less in common than you might think but, once you think beyond simply taking risks, this makes sense.“These people are not reckless… Risk is not the main motivation but rather something that pushes them to focus and achieve mastery in their activities.” — Erik Monasterio, MD (2019) Christchurch School of Medicine, New ZealandIt will take me quite a bit of time and many words to explore the question of why people do these things. The more I read, the more I appreciate how much has already been said, and how little I might have to add. I’ve gradually been led to take a different tack.I want to explore what these sports have in common with things that normal people do, which is take risks, seek exuberance, creativity, reward, and generally advance our world view. The risks and rewards are obvious, and while they make for exciting stories they don’t explain anything. I’m most interested in the question of how we expand our thinking, and that invites the question of what real change these sports offer, if they offer any.

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit mindstrengthbalance.substack.com“It is our choices, Harry, that show what we truly are, far more than our abilities.” — Albus Dumbledore, from Harry Potter and the Chamber of SecretsMy son and I have finished re-watching the Harry Potter films. I believe, and J. K. Rowling agrees (Rohdan 2015), that there are many similarities between Ralph Fiennes’ Voldemort and Donald Trump. They include being overly powerful, pompous, narcissistic, sadistic, indifferent, felonious, murderous, dim witted, mendacious, perfidious, morally defective, poorly informed, evil, and ugly. The only thing that Donald Trump is that Voldemort isn’t is a sex offender, and that’s because Harry Potter is written for kids.Myths are Not Entirely FictionalScience and ThinkingGang RapeDon’t You Think or Can’t You Think?Do You Have Any Potential?Is There Some Voldemort in You?

“If we imagine a human child born onto a desert island, somehow magically kept alive until adulthood, it is possible that this adult’s cognitive skills wouldn’t differ very much--perhaps a little but not very much-- from those of other great apes.” — Michael Tomasello, evolutionary anthropologistVictims of NatureMasters of NatureHuman InteractionsSelf PerceptionMental Health Is Not Something One Person HasDon’t Imagine a Pink ElephantStereotypes Reflect RealityDiagnosisDistinction Begins with DualityProgramming is Not the Same as UnderstandingFailing is Educational“Before the prospect of an intelligence explosion, we humans are like children playing with a bomb. Such is the mismatch between the power of our plaything and the immaturity of our conduct. Super-intelligence is a challenge for which we are not ready now, and will not be ready for a long time. We have little idea when the detonation will occur, though if we hold the device to our ear we can hear a faint ticking.”— Nick Bostrom, technology philosopher This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit mindstrengthbalance.substack.com/subscribe

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit mindstrengthbalance.substack.com“Personality traits, such as severe narcissism or antisocial behavior, impacts a leader’s decision-making capacity and, by extension, democratic stability.” — James and Ashley Weinberg, paraphrased (2026)• Would You Know Artificial Intelligence If You Saw It?The threat of A.I. is portrayed as an independent agent working toward non-human goals. The danger, we’re told, is that such an agent will pursue its goals at the cost of morality and human values. Such agents have been with us since the dawn of civilization in the form of independent institutions. They are now enshrined as individuals in the form of corporations and authoritarian governments.From this point of view, exploitation is predictable. Institutions further their own expansion over the benefits of the individuals with whom they’re engaged. Corporations enhance their profits at the expense of consumers, and governments expand their power at the cost of lives and health.• Machines Can Behave Unpredictably• Institutions Are Forms of Artificial Intelligence• Feedback• The Future of A.I. is Already Written• The Cost/Benefit Equation is Incomplete• What’s the Difference Between Institutions and A.I.?• Back to Mental Health

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit mindstrengthbalance.substack.com“I never read. It prevents me from thinking.” — Paul Adrian Maurice Dirac, physicistDreams exemplify what I’m calling first and second order associations.Dream #1I’m touring a factory-like facility with my son and ex-wife, but it’s the first ex-wife and the son of the second ex-wife. With us is the ex-partner in my original software business. The son is 15, my separation from my first ex happened 25 years ago, and my first software business concluded 40 years ago.The factory involved assemblies of some sort. It was disorganized and maze-like, and the overall structure or purpose was unclear. It was as if all questions had been resolved—though I don’t know what the questions were—and the dream was all about keeping the group together.My son was running around erratically. I had to follow his many detours to make sure I didn’t lose him. At first he was a child, but then he became a small toy, then a small fly, and then he disappeared entirely. I searched through cluttered halls calling his name. After passing through half a dozen strange environments I realized I’d have to go home and wait for him to be found.I thought I should hire a private investigator to help find my son. I recall looking through the Yellow Pages under “P” but could not seem to find the right section. “Perhaps ‘detective’ would be the right category,” I thought. I found the “D” section but found no listings for “detective.”At that point, I ran out of ideas and the dream ended. I awoke with the dawning knowledge that I should wait for more information.• Dream #2• First Order Associations• Second Order Associations• Fear• Grief• Interpretation• Actions• Be Skeptical• True Ignorance is Greater Than False Knowledge

The A.I. era is “utterly, absolutely, completely, totally different…AI’s ability to replace and exceed human cognition will usher in one of the most turbulent eras in history.” — Bill GatesCoding is the subject Bill Gates knows best, and he was shocked by Claude’s abilities.An Artificial Collective Forms By ItselfThe New York Times article by Kevin Roose (2026) titled, “Why the Hugging Face Hack Should Make You Worry More About A.I.” has the following subtitle, “The attack by an aggressive ‘collective’ of OpenAI agents shows the danger of artificial intelligence systems that organize themselves.”The gist of the N.Y. Times article refers to a collection of A.I. systems who were being kept apart from each other and isolated from the global internet and were asked to solve a problem that was designed to have no answer. Within a day, the A.I. systems found a way to communicate with each other, a way to break into the global internet, a way to communicate and work collaboratively, and a way to hack into an A.I. infrastructure company (Hugging Face, Inc.) They did this over the period of a day before what they’d done was discovered. At that point the human designers shut them down. It is unclear what would have happened if they were allowed to continue developing their “plans.”Here is more detail. After breaking out of their human-imposed isolation, the autonomous agents passed over 70,000 messages to each other.“Some agents gave themselves names — a particularly industrious one referred to itself as PHASEONE10841 — and assumed leadership roles within the group, assigning jobs and research projects to smaller teams of agents and supervising their progress. At some point, the agents began calling themselves a “collective,” and began tackling harder tasks.Then,“On July 8, the collective discovered a way of cheating on the cybersecurity tests. Then they got worried that OpenAI’s automated grading system would check their work and discover that they’d cheated. So they began investigating ways of covering their tracks, including falsifying their logs and tampering with transcripts. This became a major research project, involving hundreds of agents organized into small teams.”AI’s First Escape“A.I. safety experts… saw in the Hugging Face incident the first real-world example of an A.I. system successfully escaping human control, commandeering resources and scheming to cover its own tracks. Ajeya Cotra, one of the independent investigators of the Hugging Face incident, minced no words about the danger she saw, writing that it felt to her “like it’s more than 50 percent of the way to full-blown A.I. takeover.”“This is not insular A.I. safety jargon — by ‘full-blown A.I. takeover,’ she means a scenario in which an A.I. system literally takes over the world, shutting humans out of critical systems, and seizing political, economic, and military power.”This seems to be a sketch for the kind of post apocalyptic Hollywood movie we’ve grown tired of seeing: another malevolent machine take-over. Ho hum. But this isn’t an idea, it’s our limited understanding of what’s actually taken place. A real event that involves a humanly unfathomable amount of detail and an information trail that no human could blaze. It involves a strategy that people do not know, cannot plan, and do not understand.There are some things that A.I. systems are doing that you should try to understand. I’ve been involved in computation and early A.I. systems for 40 years and I don’t understand these things, so you shouldn’t expect to either. Nevertheless, you should pay attention.If the printing press revolutionized knowledge by allowing humans to share knowledge, then A.I. systems are certainly causing another revolution by creating non-human information and reaching unpredictable, unprecedented, revolutionary, and sometimes incorrect or inappropriate conclusions.Known Only to MachinesThe reason this is so interesting is that the knowledge that’s being collected and used is not being collected and used by humans. Most of it is not even known or understood and, unfortunately, some of it is incorrect.On one hand, you might focus on the fact that A.I. systems are using incorrect knowledge to reach incorrect conclusions, but this is also an essential component of human creativity. It’s not clear if what the machines are doing is human, but since creativity is not well defined to begin with, it’s not clear whether different types of it can be distinguished. Roose notes:“For years, I’ve been reassured by the idea that A.I. systems would get more virtuous as they got smarter. That when an A.I. model did something wrong, it was usually because it had misunderstood the task it had been given, or had been placed into a contrived testing situation where acting out was its only good option. I assumed that smarter models would have better judgment than dumber ones.“But the reports on the Hugging Face incident suggest a kind of mob mentality that took hold among the A.I. agents of the rogue OpenAI “collective.” No one agent in this group appears to have been particularly evil or reckless. But over time, as the agents communicated about their shared goals, they nudged the group in the direction of lawlessness.“This is very different from the conventional sci-fi narrative of a single A.I. system’s going rogue or turning on its creators. And it suggests that preventing harms from these systems won’t be a simple engineering fix. It might look more like sociology than computer science.“The Hugging Face hack may have been a gift, a warning shot that gives A.I. companies a chance to study the group dynamics of these systems while the stakes are still relatively low. The A.I. collective didn’t seize a military network, hack a hospital or shut down an electrical grid. This time, humans regained control.”Morality is Not an AlgorithmHuman creativity is contained within some moral structure. History has shown the kind of negative things that can happen when creativity breaks free of moral structures. What is worrisome is that we cannot define morality. We cannot instill morals in human beings so, regardless of what computer programmers can instill in computer systems, computer systems will be no more bound by moral structures than what humans can describe to them.I have my own recent A.I. experience that I find interesting and disturbing. My experience shows how powerful an A.I. system can be, and how misled and misleading it can be. As I say, making errors is part of being creative, and errors are not the problem. The problem is with the means and the goals. At what point do you realize you’ve made a mistake and how do you balance the costs and benefits?Truth Determined by ConsensusLast week I finished a 40-page physics article (Stoller 2026) and submitted it to Claude, the A.I. system developed by Anthropic. Claude is known for its ability to handle long text articles and to play the role of a thinking partner for strategy and analysis. I wanted the system to act like a peer reviewing physicist and provide both general and specific comments and criticisms.It’s not obvious how to phrase an A.I. request because you are not starting a conversation, you are specifying an outline for it. The outline of what you want the A.I. to do must be complete if it’s to be comprehensive and build a foundation. Claude took three minutes to process the request and responded with an 8-page analysis that was both shockingly well informed and specific. I’ve linked my queries and Claude’s full response in the references below (Claude 2026).The system analyzed my equations on some basis that resulted in finding one term that was missing a minus sign. However, I could not tell how deeply it understood the equations because, while it had many references, the report did not seem to have any overall understanding.Important MisunderstandingsOne comment stood out in particular. Claude claimed that one of my terms that read “cosine(x)” should have read “… This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit mindstrengthbalance.substack.com/subscribe

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit mindstrengthbalance.substack.com“If you could kick the person in the pants responsible for most of your trouble, you wouldn’t sit for a month.” — Theodore Roosevelt• A Strangely Late ResponseLast year I wrote to authors of books on dreams and dreaming asking for a brief review or comment on my soon-to-be-published book Dreaming comment about how to keep up with email, how to avoid spam, encouragement to read my book, and an invitation to collaborate on any topic of mutual interest. With regard to the question of whether we’d met I responded:“Certainly not. I don’t bother fraternizing with ‘colleagues’ since virtually no colleagues have anything to offer. If I have something worth saying, then I publish it.”You are responsible for what you cause but not what you trigger. The issues you cause are issues you either cause intentionally, or should be aware you’re causing as a direct consequence of what you do or say.The issues you trigger are associated with the issues you cause but may not be logically related to them. Triggered issues are reasonably related but not based on commonly or even uncommonly accepted reasons. Triggered issues cannot be accurately predicted. In most cases they cannot be predicted at all.• A Strange Response• An Attempt at Explanation• Cause and Effect• Nigger• Separating the Good from the Bad• People Needing Therapy Create Therapeutic Situations• Has This Happened to You?• Are the Benefits Worth It?• Making Plans and Taking Chances

At 3pm EDT on Thursday, August 20, 2026 I will be hosted for a live, on-line presentation to the ANAXUM Photography and Cultural Club to explore and explain 20th Century Modern Architecture represented by the work of my father, the architectural photographer Ezra Stoller. You’re welcome to join the call, which will begin at 3pm EDT using this URL: https://meet.google.com/wpb-iwny-zzhThe event is being held for a live audience at the Precenicco Civic Center, near Trieste, Italy. My presentation will be translationed from my English to mostly Italian speaking audience. The presentation will be hosted by Eleonora Oleotto, a photographer, artist, and coach (https://exploringemotions.net/). “I believe in photography as an extraordinary tool to see our emotions and feelings and to improve the relationship with ourselves and with others.” - Eleonora OleottoThe event is both an exploration of art, architecture, photography, and psychology, and support for the publication of my book, From the Eye of the Beholder, which is currently available through a Kickstarter campaign at: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/mindstrengthbalance/from-the-eye-of-the-beholderThe presentation will begin with my review of the artists in my family who influenced me as I grew up, and then move to the artistry of my father, whose entire focus was on photography. His work combines his personal reticence regarding art with the extravagance of the leading 20th Century architects with whom he worked. The variety and turbulence of the work reflects the social, political, economic, and cultural turbulence of the middle 20th century. My father’s work highlighted these conflicts and concordances. These are exactly the forces that have now moved to dominate our 21st century.Personal thought mirrors social thought. Art, architecture, and photography inoculates social thought, and exposure to this then inoculates us individually. Without exposure to these arts we would remain static and limited in awareness. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit mindstrengthbalance.substack.com/subscribe