"Can you, at the same time, read this sentence and think about yourself reading it?"<p>The moments before I fall asleep is when I sometimes can get a glimpse of how the machinery of reading and thought work under the hood. It looks like a computer program that runs thousands of commands in parallel, and it's not controlled by the command-giver between your ears.<p>There is a shutdown process that occurs when you fall asleep, to most people it's like a switch where it goes from totally on to totally off, but I've come to see it like a janitor walking from room to room in a large building and flicking off lights in each room one after another.<p>And you can change the order of the shutdown procedure to keep the command-giver in your mind awake until last, and watch what happens that requires your thinking mind to go away while it brings up new processes. The most fascinating part is those 4 seconds before falling asleep. Where you get the halting of ordinary thought, and the machinery that does deep learning rumbles to life one by one, in various order.<p>It's hard to describe, one thing I see, it all operates in parallel. And it's like a democracy. It's not a line of execution, it's everything all at once. All experiences being dumped into modified networks to solve for objectives. If a superior model is found to map input to motor output, the new model is made dominant. We do learning during the day, but the model generation that glues it all together happens at night. And you can watch it do its work in those moments before sleep.
Are these 4039 words trying to say that being insecure is better? If that's it, I wish this text said so in the first sentence.<p>The opposite of insecurity, having high self-esteem, can be detrimental to success : <a href="http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-20756247" rel="nofollow">http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-20756247</a><p>I also wish this text didn't say things that can't be proved to be true. It's hard to continue reading falsities.
I think this kind of belongs to the MysticalProgramming corner (<a href="http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?MysticalProgramming" rel="nofollow">http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?MysticalProgramming</a>).