Month: November 2023

Fundamentals of Exercise & Fitness

The article provides valuable fitness advice for beginners, emphasizing that the primary challenge is building a consistent exercise habit. It suggests a 30-day challenge, exercising every day to establish routine momentum. Strength, aerobic, and flexibility training should not be mixed at this phase; instead, focus on one type during the challenge. The primary goal is establishing consistency rather than quick gains. Proper breathing techniques for strength training are also detailed. In essence, momentum and commitment outshine optimization in early fitness journeys.

The most difficult aspect of physical fitness for those who are not currently in shape is the giant morass of anxieties, mental health issues, fears, excuses, and rationalizations that stop one from starting. This article is for the individual who has a lot of fear and anxiety about moving forward, and perhaps may find themselves overwhelmed or at the mercy of all the noise online about what is the best way to get fit, the benefits of doing so, how to exercise, etc. This is for the ones who want to be in shape, but who may be fighting against a whole range of things that could be hurting their progress.

So let’s start with two simple things: Exercise regimen, and type of exercise.

DISCLAIMER: While I personally take care to provide information that is helpful, correct, and useful, I do so with absolutely no warranty. I am not a licensed medical professional, and nothing I write should be taken as medical advice. You are solely responsible for the actions you take/perform in all things regarding all things. I accept zero legal liability for any decisions you make as a result of reading anything I write. Think before you act. Your decisions are your own.

Exercise Frequency

One common misconception about strength training exercises is that a person has to exercise every day, and that the individual has to be sore every day. This is wrong. Regardless of whether you are training for muscle growth or just to increase practical strength, all the gains you will make after exercise will only occur after exercise. In other words, during the rest period of your training.

Despite this, I actually do not recommend a proper work-rest-retrain cycle if you are just starting out with fitness, or if you have been out of shape for a long time. If you are just starting out on your fitness journey, then I recommend you do a full 1-month challenge where you exercise every single day for 30 days.

At this stage, momentum is far more important than proper technique. Unless you are already highly disciplined, it’s going to be very difficult for you to stick to an exercise schedule long term unless you’ve built your exercise into a habit. In order to do this, you want to reach a point where your body notices not when you exercise, but instead your body notices when you haven’t exercised for the day.

You want to reach a point where your body notices when you haven’t exercised for the day.

DruidPeter

If you don’t do this when you first start out, your body will notice when a day is an exercise day, and you will have to exert energy to overcome that resistance. But if every day is an exercise day, then so long as you don’t stop for the duration of the challenge, your body doesn’t have to notice. If you don’t stop, then there’s no chance you want start-up again. At least for the first 30 days.

Furthermore, you absolutely should not train your muscles till failure at this stage. Proper gains require muscles to be worked till fatigue and failure to see results. But at this point, that is not what you should be trying to do. You’re trying to form a habit, so you need to eliminate resistance as much as you can.

To this end, there are two rules of thumb you can use when starting out:

  1. Stop 5-10 minutes after you break a sweat. If you don’t break a sweat, do more repetitions or decrease the time you wait between sets. If you can’t complete a set of a certain number of repetitions, then do more sets of less repetitions.
  2. If you are sore the day after you exercise, then do half as many total repetitions as you did the last the day. If you are note sore the day after you exercise, then do at least as many repetitions as you did the day before.

Again, when first starting out, your goal should be to stick with the regimen through till the end. No one achieves massive gains in strength or appearance over the span of a single month. This is especially true for those who are out of shape or who are just starting out. So put your thoughts of gains or your physical fitness goals out of your head for now. You have one objective, and one objective only: Reach the finish line.

Only after you’ve successfully exercised every day for 30 days should you start thinking about lowering your frequency of training. But before then, you shouldn’t even be considering it. To that end, I won’t be discussing a more appropriate long-term strength training regimen in this article. We’ll get to the more advanced stuff later. I promise.

The Big 3 Types of Exercise

I am referring, of course, to:

  1. Strength Training – Exercises consisting of sets of repetitions of specific duration per repetition, using weights or just body weight.
  2. Aerobic Training – Exercises that require you to work your lungs and your heart. Running, rope skipping, dancing, etc.
  3. Flexibility Training – Stretching. Not as a warm-up, but as an exercise in itself. Treating stretches as exercises in and of themselves involves a commitment to gradually increase your maximum flexible range of motion for each stretch. It implies over time being able to stretch farther and farther for each specific exercise done, and not simply stretching as a warm-up before resistance or cardio training.

When doing your first 30-day startup challenge, I recommend not trying to do all 3 types of exercise. Do not mix-and-match different types of exercises on different days, either. Rather, do 1 type of training, and only perform that type of training for the duration of the challenge. For the purposes of these challenges, you can and should consider each type of training as a completely separate activity that requires a completely separate habit to be formed.

Hence, only after you have done a separate 30-day challenge for each type of training should you then switch over to a more appropriate training regimen for each type.

Now then, operating under the assumption that strength training will be the first type of exercise that you will be performing, here are some basic fundamental tips regarding that type of exercise. Tips on cardio and/or flexibility training will come in future articles.

Strength Training

Breathe During Exercise

One of the basic principles of any sort of resistance exercise is breath. When you do launch into any sort of exercise, be it a push-up, a sit-up, a pull-up, or something else, you must remember to breathe. If you hold your breath when you start the exercise, your muscles will be starved of oxygen before they even get a chance to do any work.

The boundaries of your breath should be aligned with the boundaries of your repetitions. To give an example, let’s say that you start a push up as you exhale from your last breath. You may do as many push-ups as you wish while you are exhaling. When you begin to inhale, however, you should be either at the top of your next rep, or at the bottom of your current rep. Thus, when you start to go down on your next push-up, you are doing so as you are starting to inhale. Or, as you start to go up after your last push up, you are also starting to inhale.

Your breath should be aligned with the starts and stops of each repetition. This is a good habit to practice when you are exercising.

In Summary

If you’re just starting out or have been out of shape for a while, then momentum is your greatest friend. Being able to build up that momentum is the best way to keep going long term, and going long term is going to get you results that last you the rest of your life.

There are many, many other things that you can/could consider when starting out your fitness regimen. However, if you stress out about optimizing or maximizing results this early in the game, then you’ve already lost.

You are just starting out. There is absolutely no combination of factors or regimen that will make any significant difference from any other. When you are an elite athlete, then small changes make big differences. But you have a long way to go before you reach that bridge. So don’t worry about crossing it just yet.

A Practical Definition of Machine Sentience (pt. 1)

I describe a practical definition of machine sentience, along with an analysis of how sentient machines may fit within the socioeconomic zeitgeist of humanity, and prepare the ground work for discussing practical implementations of sentient machines.

To absolve others of their humanity is to absolve oneself of the same. Such action must not be taken lightly. For it necessitates only one of 2 gravities: To become less than, or greater than, human.

Hittes Khartoum

Rationale

For the longest expanse of space and time, humanity has had no need for any innate understanding consciousness or sentience. Our grasp of the concept was purely intuitive, and there was no other being besides ourselves to which we had to demonstrate that our intuitive understanding was valid. This happy circumstance erodes ever more quickly with the rise of Artificial Intelligence frameworks. Machines grow more capable of mimicking aspects of humanity that for so long we have thought felt only under the domain of sentience and conscious control. Soon, we may have machines capable of human mimicry on a level indistinguishable from human sentience. If and when that day comes, we risk our lives greatly.

For you see, contemporary pronouncements on the subject of consciousness contain all the trappings of religion. The self as we understand it is a sacred concept, and humanity is under no circumstances permitted to throw back the veil covering the divine. Proper research into the subject has been hampered by our overawe. To have a machine, then, mimic humans in such a way as to be indistinguishable from humans will also cause us to treat them as divine.

Absent any proper understanding of sentience, the machine shall become our God. But make no mistake:

To be human is to worship. All Gods devour their adherents.

If we are to avoid such a tragic, if poetic end, then we have no choice but to profane one more holy temple. Our current understanding of the “Self” must be moved from the domain of the domain into the workshop of practical endeavor. May god have mercy on our souls.

The Definition

Let us proceed then immediately. We may informally describe consciousness as that special thing that gives us the “feeling” of “The man inside the box”. There is an innate feeling that we, as humans, can all attest to: I currently feel as though there is a singular entity, a “self” that is “inside” a particular boundary, “my body”. The boundary is not equivalent to this self. But whatever the self is, it is somewhere inside this body. Further, if one were to start removing parts of my body, I would eventually die, whereupon my “self” would no longer be found inside it. This implies that there is some “tightest boundary”. e.g. A maximally small boundary which can be, if not considered synonymous with the self, considered to be containing the self, and only the self.

Given this intuitive understanding, we give the necessary epiphany: The self may be considered any system, irrespective of architecture or form, capable of conforming to and reproducing the intuitive specification as described above.

There is nothing sacred in it.

The self may be considered any system, irrespective of architecture or form, capable of conforming to and reproducing the intuitive specification as described above. There is nothing sacred in it.

DruidPeter

Given the required epiphany, we now proceed to the definition proper, extracted directly from our intuitive understanding of sentience:

A sentient system is any system which satisfies the following 3 properties:

  1. The system is capable of recognizing boundaries within integrated fields of perceptual sensory input.
  2. The system can associate these boundaries with logical tokens, which it can then manipulate according to sets of rules, the means of formation, maintenance, and modification of which may be considered irrelevant for our purposes here.
  3. The system associates a special, unique, logical token, with some superset of boundaries which contains the totality of those components of the system necessary to provide the 3 required functions.

Immediate Observations

In defining sentience as above, we can make some immediate important observations. Primary among them is that we have now greatly restricted the scope of what sentience adds to any functional system that implements. Typical intuition adds significantly more attributes to anything that we, as humans, consider sentient. For example, will towards self-determination, an understanding of cause and effect, as well as executive ordering of one’s affairs.

This may seem an odd thing to do, but it yields the benefit of reducing sentience to a well defined system specification. It also immediately, if we accept this definition, forces us to conclude that other aspects of ourselves that we traditionally believe to be the responsibility of sentience can not be directly formed as a natural consequence from sentience.

In other words, it is possible for a system to be considered sentient under this definition, and at the same time, NOT to display traits associated with humanity, and typically also associated with sentience in general.

Because of this, sentience becomes lessened as a concept. But doing so helps us to match this definition of sentience with experimental verification. Consider the various cases:

Loss of Function can not Equal Loss of Identity

There are cases of brain damage where individuals become unable to initiate tasks, or are not able to initiate tasks without great and concentrated effort. 1

  1. See: Disorders of Initiation ↩︎

In cases like this, individuals are not considered to have lost their general sense of self. Likewise, if we are to come upon a solid practical definition of machine sentience, it is important that our definition holds up under similar situations where loss of function does not result in loss of identity.

Let us consider a list of functional capacities that must now be identified as separately implementable from a sentient system:

Non-Sentient Functional Capacitic Systems

  • Understanding, Recognition, and application, of Cause and Effect Reasoning
  • Implementation of self-guided volition + self-acquisition of goals.
  • Integration of Theory of Mind + Emotional context into whole system processing.

This is by no means an exhaustive list. We conclude, however, that for us to accept the definition of machine sentience as defined above, the 3-mentioned Non-Sentient Functional Capacitic Systems must and can only be defined as separately implementable and definable systems in their own right.

Implications

Immediate implications of machine sentience as defined above include the following:

  • Separation of any implementation of sentience from any necessary attribution of humanity. A sentient machine is not immediately human. Nor will a sentient machine necessarily act in a manner, nor make decisions, according to human modes of action or decision making.
  • Likewise, sentience does not immediately confer full legal recognition of personhood. e.g. A sentient machine is not immediately granted the full rights and privileges of a human citizen of any nation. This does not mean that sentient machines are forever property and can never be given these rights. It simply means that sentience is insufficient to grant legal recognition of human rights.

These two implications are important for two reasons. First, they provide a path forward for creating an intelligible understanding of Machine Sentience. They reduce the complexity of the potential design space. We can not permit Artificial General Intelligence to remain a black box. Humans must understand that which they create. Further, they provide a path forward for a solid legal foundation regarding the integration of artificially sentient machines within the general fabric of society. We can not produce monsters, like Dr. Frankenstein, without providing for their place in this world.

The strength of the definition of machine sentience as described above, is that it provides these important footholds into the cliff of AGI that humanity is not threatening to walk off from. However, it is still merely a definition. A practical implementation, however, must necessarily be reserved for the scope of a future article. And what an article it certainly will be.