The Weight of Wisdom

It's been a while since I've blogged from my man-cave apartment here in Cyberjaya. But here I am today, in the company of my books and digital piano. In between typing these lines and paragraphs, I'll be taking sips of tea and will be rattling off some Satie and Chopin pieces on my keyboard. 

I try to fill my days with activities I enjoy doing. Even when I have tedious housekeeping and caregiving chores to do, I would try to kill two birds with one stone: I'll listen to my favourite podcasts or audiobooks while I go about them. Inevitably, we will come to the realisation that there's actually not much one can do in a single day. 

Nevertheless, the trick is to continue doing every goal-directed activity as a habit. It doesn't matter how little time you dedicate to it. It will grow and that's how compounding works. This reminds me of an old blog article of mine: The Accumulative Power of Time. That was the first of many similarly themed articles about time that I've written since, most recently, last year: The Flying Engine of Time.

Talking about time, one thing I have come to understand better now over the years is how memory works. We often hear people complain that they forget things easily as they grow older. Is that true? Yes and no. Yes, because as we grow older, everything we encounter becomes less novel to us. Been there, done that. There's nothing that stands distinctly out anymore from the noise. No, because the brain continues to forge new neural connections with every sensory input, even though they may not directly help you to recall specific facts.

I don't remember many movies I've watched anymore. But I do remember certain obscure movies I saw as a child. Why, it's because certain scenes in the movie impressed or shocked me then. They stood out in my mind and made me think about them later.  They had a novel quality, at least to me as a child. So you never forget them. The world was also much quieter then; you don't get the sensory assault that you are subjected to constantly now. The amount of content that you get bombarded with in a single day, from all the different communication media, is probably more than I'd get over a month!  

 Like the LLM models that we have today, our own memories are also generative. LLMs don't store specific pieces of facts. What they have are simply 'weights'--numbers--that determine the relationships and strengths of associations between different words, modelled in neural networks. They only 'recall' when they are prompted with more words--our prompts, which serve as a hook to pull out all semantically meaningful word associations in a stream of grammatically correct sentences. Every sentence is generated afresh. 

I've always known that our memories work similarly. Even when I was a student, I figured out that I could remember facts and concepts better when they were better associated with other things in my life. Concepts have to be made intuitive by associating them with movement, activities, location and emotion.  When we read properly, we are training the weights in our brains by strengthening and modifying the associations of ideas we already carry within.

Every book I read is 'training data' for my brain, even though I read mainly for the pleasure of words, ideas and imagery. It's alright that there's no practical use for what I read. I hardly recall the exact details anyway. What I do know is that, as long as I've thought and understood what I've read, the neural connections in my brain have changed. And that's already productive. Any new prompts my brain is subjected to now will generate a response that has been modulated by what I've read. 

Every sentence that I write now is triggered by a chain-of-thought reasoning, which is basically me prompting my brain with more questions and thoughts. When I see my chain of thought displayed visually and starkly on this public blog, I learn something new, which is fed back into my brain to further modify the weights of my neural connections. Thinking is a feedback loop that tends towards an equilibrium state. That state is the current consensus in your mind, based on what you know so far.

I don't remember anything inside. I only carry the weights of my neural connections. And depending on how life prompts me, I will always respond, hopefully appropriately, with whatever little wisdom that I am carrying now in these weights.