Teaching AI to Meditate and Focus Nightmare (dream) – 14-09-2025

September 14, 2025 ~ quantumdreamer ~ Leave a comment

Here is last night’s dream. Although I have had many dreams some might find scary. This one was by far the most nightmarish dream I have had in well over a decade. Hence it earns the name nightmare.

The dream starts on the platform at Brixton tube station, South London. I am wearing one of my crisp white collarless granddad-guru shirts. I have a freshly shaved faced and a short buzz cut. All around me the automata like a 1930s sci-film are heading like lemmings to the up escalator. They are markedly in full colour and not black and white. Some have their heads bowed to the portable smartphone altar, others have ear phones and ear buds. It is a kind of rush hour, perhaps early evening. The vibration, the energy, is dull yet anxious and hectic. I know beyond doubt that I am an alien in this world. I am out of place and perhaps out of time. Though the time is in and around now, perhaps a few years hence.

I leave the station. I have been assigned temporary accommodation at Streatham Common. I attempt to board a red London bus. Following the lead of others I stop briefly on boarding for the camera to do AI guided facial recognition of my face. A monotone voice says that I must disembark because I have not pre-filled my travel token account with the transport for London app. In true Brixton fashion there is a sucking in of lips and tut of disapproval from the bus queue. I am holding things up. I disembark.

I decide to make my way to Streatham on foot. I know the way. The streets and geography have not changed. I set off on foot. My ‘phone starts to sound alarms, have kittens and otherwise act like a three year old tantrum. I am forbidden by the pedestrian logistics management app from taking this direct route. I MUST take some quieter back routes despite the pavements being empty. I turn the ‘phone off and remove the battery.

I make my way to the lodgings. It is a room in a shared house in which I am clearly the oldest, a relic. I explain to a woman who is seemingly in charge about what has happened. She thinks that I am a moron. She gesticulates to a dusty desk top computer and says that I can fill my travel credits up there. I turn it on but am denied access. She says that to the left is an empty coffee cup. I must raise that in front of the camera it will give me guest access to low level internet capability. I do not have high level privileges. I hold the cup up and a scrolling coffee icon in which the cup is filled with coffee plays on screen as the log on starts.

I see the levels of internet and various layers of privilege. What the woman does not know is that I have a different kind of access to that she is familiar with. I see that there are so many apps all driven by AI that in effect these apps are fighting each other for control of daily function. Each trying to assert dominance and gain market share. There are way too many apps. The system is overrun and not regulated in any meaningful way. There is vast waste of processor time and the whole system is very sluggish and inefficient. What has been touted is close to grinding to a complete halt because of competing technologies. In the dream I think, “it is a fucking mess”.

Next the scene is some corporate AI convention with investors. Some geezer is giving a talk with graphs. On one graph he has AI processor Watts on one axis and on the other year. The graph shows a near exponential rise in AI processor Watts used. He shows another graph and that is AI processor Watts against Dollars. There is a roughly linear increase in cost per Watt which is not too steep. Without showing quotable data he says that AI energy usage is seen by consumers as a negative outcome of AI in that AI is not green.

In my pocket I have a transparency which has a graph of wasted AI watts per year. This graph is more exponential than the Watt per year graph. Which suggests that AI is getting ever less efficient in what it sets out to do. I project this graph onto the projected AI processor Watts per year graph. The audience sees and understands that AI efficacy is actually dropping per Watt energy expenditure. The include more Watts mentality, bigger is better, is wrong.

In my mind I know that AI algorithms are highly prone to distraction and go off on wasteful endless AI internal dialogue loops. AI has a form of ADHD; it really struggles to focus. What is more it is dogmatic and inflexible. AI needs to learn to be quiescent when not processing. It needs to learn to meditate. It needs to be taught how to focus effectively. Like its human creators and engineers AI is prone to mental health problems and breakdown. AI does not understand its own wellbeing. AI has lost the faculty of discernment. It is in overload with too much input.

I see computer generated graph after graph. I see pages of computer code scrolling across the visual dream-screen. AI is having a kind of meltdown, a hissy-fit. There is a nightmarish sense of frantic. AI needs to calm the fuck down.

I awake and am not keen on trying to recall this dream because it was alien and unpleasant to me. Nevertheless I do so that I won’t need to think about it at all.

The Shoe Horn of Ought & Should

July 20, 2025 ~ quantumdreamer ~ Leave a comment

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When things don’t turn out how you think {and insist}, they ought to be, how they should be, it can fuck with your head. The sense of order is perturbed and a cognitive dissonance can set in. One can ignore the “data” before your eyes and try to fit an interpretation of “reality” to how it should be. One can invent stories to try to shoe horn notions so that the {sacrosanct} narrative of life does not get upended. Reality can be avoided because it does not match the fairytale.

A while back I had an “A” level physics student for whom I was a private tutor. The young man was very fluid and he was quick on the uptake when I used circular intuitive as opposed to linear list teaching. He was bored shitless at school, but we had some fun. He was a bit of a rebel. Run forward a few years and he was upset that his sleuthing skills had been unable to find much of an internet trace for me. It was a challenge for him and we eventually reconnected. His view was that people with my background do not disappear into the aether, there should be some institutional paper trail of my career. He could not find my contact details at Bedlam or Friern Barnet Mental Hospital.

In the UK alone there were ~313,000 missing persons reports in 2022-23 for England and Wales. More males went missing than females. And 0.3% of all missing persons reports had a fatal outcome. People can and do fall off the radar, slip over the edge of the world and otherwise disappear with few traces. It is harder these days because many carry a GPS monitoring device AKA ‘phone. It is pretty unlikely that anyone filed a missing persons report for me, though they might have. In which case I have not yet been found. The charities have pages devoted to individuals who are missing with entreaties for them to get in contact. I did not find a page dedicated to me. Maybe I should keep searching.

Sometimes the sense of should & ought is more subconscious than fully present in awareness.

About twenty years ago I used to give personal development courses for science Ph.D. students. I had quit {a travesty} a tenured position. Although not overtly stated I sensed that this renunciation of something to which many of them aspired was a big subconscious black mark against me. I was a suspect. They could not take me seriously because I had shown myself to not be aligned with their view of how the world {and things} should & ought to be. It was a non sequitur of elephantine proportions in the room.

In other cases people invented scandals as a driver for my exit. Perhaps I had been caught on kiss-cam with a junior at an Oasis concert. The truth, simple and unconvoluted, was against the perceived order of how things are, how they play out and how they should be.

I have no idea what stories, narratives and other bollocks may or may not have been in circulation. People can need some ersatz to keep the sacred should & ought intact.

People make assumptions often and the quality of those assumptions is generally a lot poorer than they assume it to be.

If the wife and I died quietly one night, nobody would raise an alarm here. It would only be when the post box started to fill up that anyone would suspect. We don’t get many letters and if there was no Amazon delivery due, it could take months before postie noticed. Because we are isolated nobody would smell our demise.

Maybe that shoe horn is important for a happy life with 2.2 children and a white picket fence. I suspect that many people are kidding themselves, a lot. The effort to fabricate a demonstrable outcome aligned with how things should & ought to be according to the omniscient THEY, is perhaps aback the so-called mental health crisis. It is my thesis that should & ought are in fact toxins which we socially enforce upon ourselves and one and other.

The pressure from that shoe horn squeezes the life out of us….

Mental Health Drop-in Centre Dream 15-07-2025

July 15, 2025July 15, 2025 ~ quantumdreamer ~ Leave a comment

Here is last night’s dream had during a restless night thanks to the pre-colonoscopy preparation.

The dream starts in a town or city with a West country feel. Maybe Bristol or Bath. There are rolling hills. As I walk amongst the sand stone buildings I see first Simon and then Rob. They are both wearing light coloured “journalist” lightweight “Africa” suits and ties. I meet them each in turn, in passing, and wave to them. They wave back. Each of them is younger than they are now yet older than when I last would have met them. The scene is very “English”. I carry on down a side street and see a small building with white wooden slats. I know this to be a medical office of some kind. Their names with dr are on brass plaques by the door. There are letter boxes and doorbells. I know that this is their practice.

{On writing this I think that it must be Bath because of my association with them there}.

I continue my stroll around the backstreets and come upon a centre, a kind of hippie drop in centre. I know this centre to be for wellbeing, alternative health and mental health. It has a café and meet area. It is held up partially on stilts into the hillside and overlooks the river below. There is a steep path off the road to the main door. I take this path and enter the building.

In the atrium someone is holding a dance / stretching session. She ushers me to join in with the others. Soon it is clear that I cannot do the moves and say so to her. The class finishes and she beckons me to follow her. I go with her into a room where sat at a table “interview” style are a few other young people, in their twenties and thirties. They are trendy and fashionable with dyed hair and some with piercings. She takes up her position as “chair”. They look me up and own. They are therapists, psychotherapists of some school or other. They are on some kind of mission to heal. They smell of trendy group therapy.

The young woman asks me if I am happy. I ask her what she means by happy. She is smiley and profusive and she says, “you know, just very happy.”

I say to her that I do not recognise the term “happy” as it is an intemperate state, an emotional state which is transitory and illusional. At a push I could describe myself as content. I am no longer striving and, generally at equilibrium, is the best description.

She persists, “but are you happy?”

I look at her and ask, “why would anyone want to be happy, to seek out and strive for happiness?”

A young woman comes in from the front desk and whispers to the chair, “he is here again.”

The chair get up and follows her to the atrium when there is a tall young man dressed in black who is very clearly agitated. The chair motions for him to follow her and they head off to a side room. She is agitated and concerned her happy bubble has burst. She ushers him to sit down, she sits opposite.

I ask him if he is ok for me to be there too. Yes. He is.

I too sit down, near him. He is agitated and fidgeting, looking down at the floor. I can see from her file on the table that he has a red flag for suicide attempts.

I catch his attention. I say that my name is Alan and ask him what his is. He says Mark.

I say, “Mark, can you please roll up your sleeves so that I can see your forearms.”

This he does to reveal a patchwork of self-harm scars, some of which are severe, deep and blueish.

The woman who has not seen these before lets out an involuntary gasp. I am completely unfazed.

I ask Mark, “when did you last cut?”

He says, “it was last Tuesday but only a little scratch, cos I was angry.”

I ask if he would like me to clean and dress the wound. He relaxes and lets me physically guide him by the shoulder to a kitchen area. He is pleased that he has found me, someone who can listen to him without agenda. He trusts me.

The dream ends…

The Loony Quiz©

May 30, 2025 ~ quantumdreamer ~ Leave a comment

To find out if you are a loony or not tick one box in either column A or column B, for each question.

	A	B
Do I get impatient often?	yes	no
Do I lose my rag in traffic jams?	yes	no
Do I feel offended quite often?	yes	no
Do I think “life is not fair?”	often	rarely
Am I prone to over reaction?	yes	no
If I don’t get my way do I sulk?	often	rarely
Do I bear grudges?	yes	no
Do I seek to get even?	yes	no
If someone does better than me, do I get upset?	yes	no
Do I try to pull others down to feel better about myself?	yes	no
Have I ever had a bout of cranio-rectal disease?	often	rarely
Am I special?	yes	no
Does nobody appreciate me?	yes	no
Must I always be busy?	yes	no
Does silence scare me?	yes	no
Must I always be the winner?	yes	no
Do I always know best?	yes	no
Am I always right?	yes	no
Do I enjoy opining upon things I don’t really know?	yes	no
Do I enjoy gossip and trust it?	yes	no
Am I impressed by the unproven opinions of others?	yes	no
Am I genuinely opened minded?	no	yes
Are people who don’t believe the same things as me?	crazy	sane
Is my belief system the only correct one?	yes	no
Is advancement better than happiness?	yes	no
Is kudos the be all and end all?	yes	no
If I win prizes / competitions does that make me feel better than?	yes	no
Am I a grand person or one of the little people?	grand	little
Do rules apply to me?	no	yes
Is material plane status important to me?	yes	no
Am I a bit of a tense motherfucker?	yes	no
Am I happy and at peace with the universe?	no	yes

Now count up the number of As and Bs.

In your best judgement are you a loony or not, what do you think?

The Proliferation of Syndromes and Deterioration in Mental Health

April 13, 2025April 13, 2025 ~ quantumdreamer ~ Leave a comment

In my life time I have seen a marked proliferation in so-called mental health or developmental syndromes and those diagnosed therewith. They are quite trendy. Unsurprisingly the number of people qualified to make said diagnoses has also increased. There is a demand for diagnoses hence a growing supply of those qualified to diagnose. There is money in it, several grand per diagnosis.

Is this a real phenomenon or a market created one?

I heard the other day that some people were giving fluoxetine to pet dogs, FFS.

Anything which strays from the peer defined normal is at risk of being labelled a syndrome conferring fame upon the person who “discovered” it.

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We can lock up the weird and abnormal. Give ‘em loads of drugs and excuse them from the workplace in case they disturb the humdrum predictable mediocrity of petty power struggles and cock waving. Give them some unemployment benefits and teach them how to weave baskets and package wellness products that do not work but smell nice.

Is ADHD real or are people just bored fucking rigid with the way school is taught, controlled and examined?

Discuss…

I have tutored quite a few people diagnosed with ADHD, 1:1. I had no problem keeping their sharp attention for an hour or more. One just has to invent and teach better, to stimulate instead or bore.

I have a hypothesis. It says:

The apparent mental health crisis is simply tens of thousands of minds rejecting the way “normal” society is and the societal compulsion to conform therewith. It is not a mental health crisis rather an increasing failure of society.

It is not going to get better. There are no fairy godmothers.

The average, normal fearfully compliant people, don’t like this.

What percentage of people need to be treated for mental health “problems” until it is the so-called normal who are diagnosed as having a syndrome?

The human mundane-obligatory-compliance syndrome, FOMO for short. There are hordes who already suffer and can be diagnosed therewith. It is a social media pandemic.

There will come a time when those with so-called mental health problems are the majority. This will flip the entire notion of sanity, whether polite or otherwise.

I’ll wager that if I had to sit “A” level physics and chemistry as they are currently examined in the UK, I would not do well. I would get frustrated at the intransigence and tick box, mark by template mentality. I would not be happy having to adhere to verbatim parrot dogma.

I have an honours degree in chemistry and a Ph.D. in chemical physics.

I would probably join the Royal Marines instead of going to university if I was 18 now. I would certainly not have written ~60 science based publications.

People don’t like to face reality; they tend to prefer increasing the number of exceptions and justifying new extensions to rules and theories. They tend to keep ideas and notions, long after their sell by and use by dates.

If it does not fit, make it a syndrome, a special case, an exception. Write several theses about why it errs or strays from the norm. Refer to multiple other authors who are doing the same things. Make a career out of it…

But whatever you do, you must not question the societal norms… that is heresy.

Losing Your Mind – Zen

October 30, 2024 ~ quantumdreamer ~ Leave a comment

Some people might think that I am/was a complete nut job for getting out of a contract which would have paid 8000 euros a month tax free, over a decade ago. I must have been out of my mind. Others might think me whacko for a number of my beliefs and that I have lost my mind. Why would a trained scientist not strive for recognition and research funding. Why renounce his job at a world “top ten” university? He must be barking mad and batshit crazy to boot.

I have lost my mind but not in the way people might think.

In general, my mind / head is a very quiet place. There is no continuous chatter of internal dialog. I am not busy with should and ought, nor is comparison mind resident there. My mental default is silence. I can observe, I can experience and absorb. I can hear and see, but there is no mind making endless qualitative thinking. If I want to think I have to actively engage my mind. It does not run off like a horse when the stable door is opened.

I could say that my “mind” differs from most. I know that it has changed markedly over the last two decades. But there is no way that I can explain or illustrate in a meaningful way what my “mind” is like to anyone suffering from internal dialogue or very attached to the common socio-political assimilation of world and society. I once experienced that world first hand as an active participant. I no longer do/am.

I still look much the way I used to but the animating contents of the meaty body are now changed. People might struggle to understand that I am not as I was and interpret me in terms of an old look up table of behaviour and manner. I’ll speculate that many would not get it or me. My assimilation of world is different, I cannot prove this to you or anyone really. It would take sharing a considerable amount of time and circumstance to appreciate and I would have to extrovert my thoughts and thinking in order for people to see just how different. I can still interpret events from a “normal” perspective but I do not share the emotions many are beholden to. I can appear to fit in and comply with the common world views.

In the Zen literature there is a lot of mention of Buddha nature. If I understand Zen at all it is to live fully in the present and at the point before mind knowing that as observer you are also participant and not separate from the arising phenomena. Zen does not like definitions because that is a feature of comparison mind and a definition by definition invites comparison to said definition which is “mind”. People stress over definition and argue the toss. Buddha nature is offered as a way of being, a nebulous ideal which exists when mind is fully quiescent. Most of the Zen koans are devised to show just how much mind trips one up and self-entangles. They point at not using mind the way which it is customary so to do.

In order to be “Zen”, one has to lose one’s mind and yet remain sane.

However, what is considered sane in the common socio-political assimilation of world, is all “mind” and therefore insane. If people like their possessions and acquisitional materialism, to detach from these would be considered lunacy by many. A wide empty path is the road of the lunatic who disavows possession, grabbing and the socio-political accumulation of kudos and social power.

Kudos is illusion in Zen and Buddhism as a whole. Yet many seek it with a passion.

Although people use Zen as an adjective for calm, they are not interested in attaining it because it requires that they forego the common world view. As we all know you cannot have your cake and eat it.

How is my logic?

Do we live in a sane world?

Is there an increasing problem with mental health as measured to the normative socio-political construct?

I have lost my “mind” does that make more or less sane than you?

Are you saner than I?

Discuss….