The sketch-camera thing is turing out to be trickier than I thought. One issue is resolution. The mac's web cam is 640x480, and still frames appear a bit blurred. I'd like my sketches to be crisp.

One solution I'm considering is "super resolution" — overlaying multiple still frames of video on top of each other. This requires aligning the frames, which I'm concerned might be slow in JavaScript.

I'm curious what the mac does with it's "signature thing".. does it use multiple still frames? maybe I should try showing it some image that is pretty detailed, and see how it does.. hm.. the answer appears to be "no". I drew a dotted line with about 6 dots, and it turned that into maybe 3 dots..

errata

I feel like mental states and phenomena are hard to be sure about — they seem to shift and seem highly convoluted with other mental stuff and also with expectations set by what I hear from other people. I was just thinking about a couple things I think I'm wrong about:

First, I mentioned "jhana" states before, here here and here, and I said I thought I had been to 13 of them.. upon further reflection, and talking with my meditation teacher friend, I'm not so sure.. I'm pretty sure I've entered 4 of them. The first 4 have pretty clear eye movement characteristics, and seem fairly "mechanical" in that sense. The ones after that seem more subjective. I think I got my brain into various states, but I'm not sure if they were "jhanas".

Second, I mentioned here a mental transition I thought was "falling asleep". I'm less sure it is that, and a better characterization of it, I think (there might be two different phenomena at play) is feeling a sense of confusion and also bodily discomfort, e.g., my body wants to change position. I've heard about this "body wanting to change position" when reading about lucid dreaming associated with nearing sleep paralysis, but I'm not sure.. I feel like I've entered lucid dreams without ever feeling like my body needed to change position, but on the other hand, I may have just fallen asleep those times and realized shortly thereafter that I was in a dream, and thought I had succeeded in staying conscious through the transition when in fact I had not..

We study math and science growing up.. I wish we studied how to think and feel.

"Hey kids, you are robots with biomechanical brains, and we're going to learn the mechanisms of those brains, and what changes you can make to those mechanisms.. yes Billy?.. no, you can't induce continuous pleasure.. yet.."

Todo items are painful to think about. Why, I wonder.. perhaps because they seem to have wrapped within them the anticipation of doing the thing, which I anticipate being painful.. so I guess it's a signal telling my brain "hey, this thing will be painful to do, so factor that into your decision to do it"..

..but, they're so painful to think about that I avoid even letting them enter my mind, which seems inefficient — in fact, if I have many todo items, I can't plan around them at all, because it's too painful to have them all in my mind simultaneously..

..so, what to do.. I could try to convince my brain to not feel the anticipation of a todo item, but then maybe I'd end up doing more painful things than I need to? hm..

meditation notes:

• consciousness/qualia/experience seems like memory formation (noted before)
• mind receives input from eyes, ears, body, thoughts, etc, and it does pattern matching — this bunch of splotches looks like a cat — and model building — there is a cat there
• the notion of "self" seems like a model: there's probably a self-neuron that fires in my head when a pattern of sensory inputs and thoughts looks like a "Greg", and I update my model saying "there is a Greg there".. and there's probably some symbolic connection elsewhere that says "I am Greg", but that connection seems tenuous.. "Greg" seems like a storybook character..

lucid dream

It's still super exciting for me when I have a lucid dream because I try sooo hard and still fail sooo much — like all the time. My last success was a month ago.

Some notes:

• I did not count this time. Instead, I did a sort of meditation I've been doing which involves sortof just being aware of what's going on in my head without judging it. Of course, I've done this meditation before without entering a lucid dream.. I think the difference may be the timing — it was early morning, and my body was still expecting to get some more REM cycles in. I sortof hope that's not the reason, because I would like to be able to have lucid dreams whenever..
• Prior to the dream, I did notice a sort of mental transition which I'm pretty sure is "falling asleep", which is characterized by.. I'm not sure.. thinking less clearly perhaps, and not having a sense of time so much.. My mental faculties picked up a bit after I was in the dream..
• I made more of an effort to be non-judgmental this time about the mental imagery floating through my head as I was drifting into sleep. Usually I think I worry about it not being as good as I hoped for. I think I interact with it a little, to the extent to which it seems like it would be more effort not to.. where I suppose the interaction itself is part of the hypnogogic hallucination.. I'm not sure on this point..
• I'm pretty sure the dream started with a sortof hypnogogic mini dream where I was being held by a woman (yeah yeah), but I noticed that I really felt like I was being held, which seemed like a good sign that my mind had left reality behind and that I was at a point where I could walk around.. so in a sense, I guess this was a "reality check" waking me up from a dream, but I'm pretty sure I never lost consciousness, and there were lots of mini dream sequences prior to this one, they just weren't as real..
• This was perhaps the longest lucid dream I've had.
• I worried at a couple points of bad scary things happening, but they didn't — that is, my mind was able to have some concern about something, without that concern manifesting itself, which suggests that lucid dreams do have some capacity for thought. Though I do recall at one point seeing a mirror and wanting to step into the mirror, but I decided not to because I thought things might get too weird if I did..

Notes from the dream itself:

• I saw a woman who walked behind a piano, and I sat down at the piano. She was an instructor I guess because as I played, she was commenting on whether I was doing well. The piano had wooden brown keys, and no black keys, which is fine for me, because I don't use black keys. I played a melody, and I heard it, which surprised me a bit, because I don't often hear sound in dreams, and although I've written previously about hearing sounds, I referred to people talking, and I'm not entirely sure that I do hear people talk per se, as opposed to just know what they're saying. The notes worked, in the sense of being in a key, though I don't have perfect pitch, so I'm guessing the pitch of the first note I played was random.
• I walked around and explored the building I was in, which changed as I explored it. I wanted to walk out into an expanse of landscape, and I kept this thought in mind as I walked down a passage, but it emerged into an even longer underground hallway, but I walked down that still hoping for a landscape, and when I went around the next bend, there was another long underground passage. I turned into one of the doors off to the side, and there was a window, and directly outside there was a view of a wall, but above the wall I could see the landscape I was hoping for. I tried to climb out the window by willing it open, and it did open, but I couldn't think of a way to get over the wall before the window closed again forcing me back inside. But I went through another door and there were a series of large floor to ceiling windows with a good view of the scenery, so I figured that would do. Whatever building I was in was moving along, like a train, and I could see the scenery change.
• At some point it seems that the building with windows more-or-less collapsed down to a small ship that I was piloting, and I started flying around, and at some point I had an external view of myself, and upon realizing this I woke up — I'm not sure that's why I woke up, it's just when I woke up.

I'm working on the thing to let me hold sketches up to my mac's camera, mentioned here. This image was captured and filtered using JavaScript.

Next step, make a filter that captures a sketch and removes the background..