The Dreams Of Josephius – Page 3 – An eccentric dreamer in search of truth and happiness for all.

On The Reality Of Dreams

On March 5, 2025

When I was younger, I believed strongly in the idea of having dreams to aspire to. A part of this may have come from my English name, which is of a character from the Bible who had and could interpret dreams. So, the idea of dreams, either the ones when you sleep, or the wishes you want to achieve in your life, were both things I valued.

It went so far that I often ended up a sort of hopeless romantic, choosing to do what I felt sentimentally to be right, rather than what was necessarily rational or prudent. Often, I would let my emotions get the better of me, despite being normally fairly logical.

To some extent, this is encouraged in our culture. Movies and books have protagonists who chase their dreams and get what we, the audience, think they deserve. This is, in reality, something fed to us because it sells. The idea that we will all get what we think we rightfully deserve, this notion that the universe is just and fair, is something we hope to be true.

But the truth is, in so far as anyone can tell by the evidence of the actual universe, fate and chance happen to us all. Our aims are not always met. Hard work can be thwarted by bad luck. The forces of history conspire to overturn everything from time to time, often without rhyme or rhythm.

The reality is that most of us are not significant in the grand scheme of things. And the bigger our dreams, the bigger our almost certain disappointment.

That being said, I don’t think we should abandon our dreams. Dreams do serve a purpose. They act as a guide for our decisions. They point us in a direction that we consider worth going in. Chances are, we won’t reach our destination, but we’ll get somewhere closer than if we didn’t bother. And the journey will be more meaningful than if we simply took a random walk through the universe.

Nevertheless, there needs to be a balance between dreaming and being prudent. We can, in our foolishness, ignore the real opportunities in favour of a mirage. It takes wisdom to understand this, to recognize when to satisfice.

If we search vaguely for something optimal, we will never stop searching. Eventually, you have to decide what is acceptable to you.

This is what I eventually did with my life. I started a dreamer, chasing the impossible, but ended up finding an acceptable life to live. I did this because the alternative was to forever be unsatisfied, forever chasing the wind.

In truth, what I, deep down, really really want, is not something that I can realistically see happening. My trajectory simply fell way short. I did go further towards a good life than if I’d just meandered aimlessly, but I won’t pretend my life wasn’t full of disappointments.

The more you hope, the more you will be disappointed. The only way to avoid it is to expect nothing, which is probably worse for you in the long run. Disappointment is the cost of having dreams. I believe it’s something worth paying, and I won’t pretend dreams come free.

It is fun to dream, but sometimes, for the sake of actually doing something meaningful, you have to be realistic.

We like to imagine ourselves an important person, but actually, we’re much more likely to be the average person. You’ve never heard of them. They live a mundane, somewhat interesting life, but nothing that makes the news or the history books. They probably manage to keep a job and have a family and some friends. They do normal, human things.

People like me, find being an average person somewhat unsatisfying. But the reality is, we don’t have a choice in this. Most of the things that make people super special are also things completely outside of their control, those forces of history I mentioned earlier.

So, it’s pointless to be upset that your life is only so-so, especially if you’re a dreamer with absurdly high expectations. The reality is, we’re lucky to have what we do. And we should be grateful. The universe can take everything you have away from you in an instant. It is… capricious like that.

At the end of the day, I can’t stop dreaming completely. But I can understand the limits of reality, and not allow myself to be taken by foolish fancy. I can show prudence and wisdom, and act according to reason. This way, I can eke out a good, fruitful life. As long as I stay true to my values, this should be enough.

The Story of Music-RNN

by Josephius

On November 19, 2024

In Life, Projects

There was once a time when I actually did interesting things with neural networks. Arguably my one claim to having a footnote in AI and machine learning history was something called Music-RNN.

Back around 2015, Andrej Karpathy released one of the first open source libraries for building (then small) language models. It was called Char-RNN, and it was unreasonably effective.

I had, back in 2014, just completed a master’s thesis and published a couple papers in lower tier conferences on stuff like neural networks and occluded object recognition, and figuring out the optimal size of feature maps in an convolutional neural network. I’d been interested in neural nets since undergrad, and when Char-RNN came out, I had an idea.

As someone who likes to compose and play music as a hobby, I decided to try modifying the library to process raw audio data and train it on some songs by the Japanese pop-rock band Supercell and see what would happen. The result, as you can tell, was a weird, vaguely music-like gibberish of distilled Supercell. You can see a whole playlist of subsequent experimental clips on YouTube where I tried various datasets (including my own piano compositions and a friend’s voice) and techniques.

Note that this was over a year before Google released WaveNet, which was the first of the real generally useful raw audio based neural net models for things like speech generation.

I posted my experiments on the Machine Learning Reddit and got into some conversations there with someone who was then part of MILA. They would, about a year later, release the much more effective and useful Sample-RNN model. Did my work inspire them? I don’t know, but I could hope that it perhaps made them aware that something was possible.

Music-RNN was originally made with the Lua-based version of Torch. Later, I would switch to using Keras with Theano and then Tensorflow, but I found I couldn’t quite reproduce as good results as I had with Torch, possibly because the LSTM implementations in those libraries was different, and not automatically stateful.

I also moved on from just audio modelling, to attempting audio style transfer. My goal was to try to get, for instance, a clip of Frank Sinatra’s voice singing Taylor Swift’s Love Story, or Taylor Swift singing Fly Me To The Moon. I never quite got it to work, and eventually, others developed better things.

These days there’s online services that can generate decent quality music using only text prompts, so I consider Music-RNN to be obsolete as a project. I also recognize the ethical concerns with training on other people’s music, and potentially competing with them. My original project was ostensibly for research and exploring what was possible.

Though, back in the day, it helped me land my first job in the AI industry with Maluuba, as a nice portfolio project along with the earthquake predictor neural network project. My posts on the Machine Learning Reddit also attracted the attention of a recruiter at Huawei, and got me set towards that job.

Somewhat regrettably, I didn’t open source Music-RNN when it would have still mattered. I was convinced by my dad back then to keep it a trade secret in case it proved to be a useful starting point for some kind of business, and I was also a bit concerned that it could potentially be used for voice cloning, which had ethical implications. My codebase was also, kind of a mess that I didn’t want to show anyone.

Anyways, that’s my story of a thing I did as a machine learning enthusiast and tinkerer back before the AI hype train was in full swing. It’s a minor footnote, but I guess I’m somewhat proud of it. I perhaps did something cool before people realized it was possible.

Creativism

by Josephius

On September 2, 2024

In Philosophy

I wrote an essay about an alternative value theory to hedonism for ethics.

Be Fruitful And Multiply

by Josephius

On January 6, 2024

In Life, Philosophy

I recently had a baby. There’s some debate in philosophical circles about whether or not it is right to have children. I thought I should -briefly- outline why I chose this path.

When I was a child, I think it was an unwritten assumption within my traditional family that I would have kids. In undergrad however, I encountered David Benatar’s Better Never To Have Been, which exposed me to anti-natalist views for the first time. These often argued that hypothetical suffering was somehow worse or more real than hypothetical happiness. I didn’t really agree, but I admitted the arguments were interesting.

Subsequent to that, I became a Utilitarian in terms of my moral philosophy, and was exposed to the idea that adding a life worth living to the universe was a good thing.

Environmentalists and degrowthers often argue that there are too many people in the world already, that adding yet another person given the limited resources is unsustainable and dooming us to a future Malthusian nightmare. I admit that there are a lot of people in the world already, but I’m skeptical that we can’t find a way to use resources more efficiently, or develop technology to solve this the way we have in the past with hybrid rice and the Green Revolution.

Though, to be honest, my actual reasons for having a child are more mundane. I ultimately let my wife decide whether or not we have kids, as she’s the one who had to endure the pregnancy.

I personally was 60/40 split on whether to be okay with having a child. My strongest argument for was actually a simple, almost Kantian one. If everyone has children, the human race will continue into a glorious future among the stars. If no one has children, the human race will die out, along with all of its potential. Thus, in general, it is better to have at least one child to contribute to the future potential of humankind.

At the same time, I was worried, given the possibility of things like AI Doom that I could be bringing a life into a world of future misery and discontent, and I also knew that parenthood could be exceedingly stressful for both of us, putting an end to our idyllic lifestyle. Ultimately, these concerns weren’t enough to stop us though.

My hope is that this life that my wife and I created will also live a happy and good life, and that I can perhaps teach some of my values to them, so that they will live on beyond my mortality. But these things are ultimately out of my hands in the long run, so they aren’t definitive reasons to go ahead, so much as wishes for my child.

In Pursuit of Practical Ethics: Eudaimonic Utilitarianism with Kantian Priors

by Josephius

On January 5, 2024

In Philosophy, Rationality

Read Here

Why There Is Hope For An Alignment Solution

by Josephius

On December 21, 2023

In Rationality

Read Here

Superintelligence and Christianity

by Josephius

On December 21, 2023

In Rationality

Read Here

On Infatuation

by Josephius

On December 19, 2023

In Life, Limerence

Where to start. When I was younger, I had a tendency to become infatuated with one particular girl at any given time. Three such infatuations in my life basically, and I’m only slightly exaggerating here, destroyed me for years.

The problem with infatuations, particularly of the unrequited love kind, is that they are fundamentally unfair to everyone involved. To you, the obsessed, you lose all sense of perspective and feel powerless against the draw of this girl who all your thoughts and feelings now orbit around. To the beloved, well, your obsessive attention is just creepy if she finds out about it. Though, perhaps you’re like me and managed to somehow be simultaneously a tsundere and a yandere. Both are actually very unhealthy archetypes, and the combination is just bad. To other people, you are devoting absurd amounts of effort and attention at one girl, and your other platonic relationships suffer as a result.

Infatuations are fundamentally unhealthy. Even if she did reciprocate, the power dynamics in the relationship would be completely unbalanced. She would have all the power, and if she is a decent person, that’s not a comfortable position to be in. It takes emotional maturity to recognize that a good, healthy relationship respects boundaries and strives towards an equality of power.

Infatuations of this type tend to stem from admiring someone from afar without actually getting to know them well enough to recognize that their little foibles are actually serious flaws that they need to work on. They tend to create unrealistic impressions that put the girl on a pedestal and place her in an impossible position with expectations she cannot possibly meet in real life. This is seriously not the kind of pressure you should place on anybody, much less the girl you like.

Having said all that, I basically managed to become infatuated three times, once in high school, once in undergrad, and once in grad school. The first two lasted until the next, and the last one managed to cling to me for more than a decade even through actual relationships I had with other girls. In some sense they all left a residual impression on me. I still hide feelings in me, that sometimes I can access when I reminisce about the past. Useless emotions that I don’t know what to do with, so I just lock them in a metaphorical box in the deepest recesses of my soul.

For the record, I’m married now and have a child. For all intents and purposes, these things should best be forgotten. And yet, I’m writing about it now. I guess this is yet another attempt at catharsis.

With hindsight, what I truly regret is that I allowed myself to sabotage cherished friendships with girls I actually cared about to the altar of the infatuation. It prevented me from seeing things clearly, from acting reasonably, from being normal and treating these people like regular human beings rather than some idol, or object of fear.

The pattern that emerged was basically that I’d meet the girl, develop a crush that would explode into infatuation and unrequited love, alienate the girl with my chaotic and counterproductive behaviour (alternating between extreme and obvious avoidance/pushing away and extreme and unwanted attention), and after she stopped talking to me I’d usually get super depressed and probably suicidal at points. Rinse and repeat. Needless to say, my studies during these times suffered immensely. My other friendships and relationships suffered. I was useless and pathetic and generally insufferable.

My advice to you, dear reader, is to avoid infatuations like the plague. They kill the friendships you care most about. They feel great at first, but are a poisoned chalice. You are better off not allowing them to happen. I recognized this was a problem after the first time. And yet it happened again. And again. Each time I swore I’d do things differently, and to be honest, things did play out slightly differently each time. But at the end of the day, the overall result was about the same.

It took a certain realization that my whole hopeless romantic dreamer shtick was a big part of the problem. It took realizing that I was exceedingly unrealistic and foolish. It took recognizing that I was sacrificing actual potential relationships on this altar of my infatuation. It took telling a beautiful girl I was dating that I wasn’t in love with her because I still had feelings for someone else, and seeing her cry, to realize how messed up it all was.

It’s easier said than done, but fight the urge to be infatuated. If you’re the type to develop it, fight it with all your strength, for the actual sake of your would be beloved. Recognize the opportunity cost of casting your devotion and loyalty after a girl who isn’t interested, while ignoring all the others who actually like you. Be willing to instead satisfice and choose someone who you can actually be happy with, in a healthy, reasonable relationship.

There Are No True Monsters

by Josephius

On November 3, 2023

In Motivational

As a child we often fear that the world is filled with monsters, creatures that want to hurt us for no reason other than because they want to. As we grow older, the monsters in the dark, under our bed, or in the basement are proven to be imaginary, but we encounter apparent real world monsters in the form of scary animals and, most often, people who don’t have our best interests at heart.

That being said, the truth is that these apparent monsters, upon closer inspection, aren’t the same thing as what we previously feared, not because they aren’t dangerous, but because they tend to hide complicated motivations other than mere malice.

The tiger that our prehistoric ancestors feared, wasn’t attacking them out of pure malice, but rather because it either saw an opportunity for meat it could eat to survive, or it was afraid of our pointy sticks and struck first. Most real world villains are merely selfish humans who’s moral circle consists only of themselves, or worse, those that are blinded by some ideological aspirations to sacrifice others for some so-called greater good. In both cases what they do can be monstrous, but in the simple sense, they are human beings, rather than true monsters.

But what about sadists, you might counter. What about those that gain enjoyment from the suffering of others? Clearly these are monsters right? Well, to be fair, they didn’t choose to be what they are. Some perverse environmental factors incentivized their sadism by connecting their pleasure to the suffering of others. In truth, they just want to feel pleasure, and their sadism is a means to that end. It’s definitely a screwed up thing, but it isn’t the same thing as being a monster who wants to hurt you for no reason.

So, in truth, there are no true monsters. Everyone has some motivation that complicates the matter. No one is born inherently evil. They can become essentially evil through their choices, commit acts of malice out of hatred or revenge, but these are all motivations that stem from a failure to empathize with other beings.

In theory, it might be possible to show such people the error of their ways. Ideally, that should be how you deal with them. Their darkness stems from ignorance rather than malice after all. But the difficulty is that those who are prone to such thoughts and beliefs are also likely to be more dangerous. You may not have the luxury of debating them on ideas, when they’re trying to kill you for whatever reasons.

So sometimes we have to fight. Sometimes we have to punish and deter. But we should do so with the awareness that the people we strike against are still human beings, sentient creatures that can love and feel happiness and suffering as well.

There may not be true monsters in the world, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t dangers. We should respect that as much as we may want to redeem others, it may not be realistically possible, when they are too fargone into madness, or too closed minded to see beyond their selfish impulses.

When we can, we should empathize and show mercy, lest we become what we fear and disdain. When we cannot, we must understand this is a prudent compromise with reality, one that we choose begrudgingly rather than gleefully. Everyone is a hero in their own story. We should be aware how we can, while fighting for what we value, become villains in the stories of others.

On The Morality Of Work

by Josephius

On May 17, 2023

In Motivational, Philosophy, Politics

If you accept the idea that there is no ethical consumption or production under capitalism, a serious question arises: Should you work?

What does it mean to work? Generally, the average person is a wage earner. They sell their labour to an employer in order to afford food to survive. To work thus means to engage with the system, to be a part of society and contribute something that someone somewhere wants done in exchange for the means of survival.

Implicit in this is the reality that there is a fundamental, basic cost to living. Someone, somewhere, is farming the food that you eat, and in a very roundabout way, you are, by participating in the economy, returning the favour. This is ignoring the whole issue of capitalism’s merits. At the end of the day, the economy is a system that feeds and clothes and provides shelter, how ever imperfectly and unfairly. Even if it is not necessarily the most just and perfect system, it nevertheless does provide for most people the amenities that allow a good life.

Thus, in an abstract sense, work is fair. It is fair that the time spent by people to provide food and clothing and shelter is paid back by your spending your time to earn a living, regardless of whatever form that takes. On a basic level, it’s at least minimally fair that you exchange your time and energy for other people’s time and energy. Capitalism may not be fair, but the basic idea of social production is right.

So, if you are able to, please work. Work because in an ideal society, work is your contribution to some common good. It is you adding to the overall utility by doing something that seems needed by someone enough that they’ll pay you for it. Even if in practice, the reality of the system is less than ideal, the fact is that on a basic level, work needs to be done by someone somewhere for people to live.

While you work, try to do so as morally as possible, by choosing insofar as it is possible the professions that are productive and useful to society, and making decisions that reflect your values rather than that of the bottom line. If you must participate in capitalism to survive, then at least try to be humane about it.