FAQ for the Dark Gift
Frequently Asked Questions about Dr. Ogi Ogas and his articles.
This FAQ contains answers to frequently asked questions about the Dark Gift website, including a glossary of terms you’ll encounter here. Latest edits: October 21, 2024.
Q: Who am I and what is the Dark Gift blog about?
My Dark Gift blog ogiogas.substack.com (which you are reading right now) contains original articles about autism, mindscience, consciousness, sex, purpose, physics, and the fundamental nature of reality.
One of the two main goals of the Dark Gift is to educate and uplift autistic souls.
I am autistic, most of my family is autistic, and one of the main quests of my life was unriddling the neural dynamics embodying the autistic experience. My quest was successful and this website is devoted to explaining how autism is made in the brain, how to live an autistic life of joy, fulfillment, and connection, and why the science and medicine of autism in the twenty-first century remains mired in the nineteenth century.
The other goal of the Dark Gift is a bit more radical and dramatic.
I underwent an anomalous experience when I was eighteen that altered the trajectory of my life and delivered me here. The experience motivated me to spend my daily toil studying the fundamental nature of reality from a non-human perspective. In particular, I focused on the mathematics of purpose, too long ignored by human science, including the dynamic systems embodying consciousness, language, free will, and autism. Early on, I recognized that just as important as penetrating the math undergirding reality was developing the capacity to communicate all this extraordinary mind-bending material to the public.
I ended up spending a lifetime on two parallel tracks: science and art. Mindscience and literature, in particular. This was fortunate, for once you start getting up to the highest of the high levels of reality, where physicists and angels fear to tread, the unity of science and art becomes not merely self-evident and wondrous, but the prime mechanism for engaging with higher sentience in an effective manner.
The Dark Gift blog is an attempt to synthesize the knowledge I’ve earned in such fashion that certain readers—perhaps you, pilgrim—will gain access to another world.
A world where all are welcome. You’ll find strong opinions here, but no activism. No politics. No tribes. Indeed, the guiding philosophy of the Dark Gift is anti-tribe, or to be more precise, tribe-aware and tribe-avoidant. Make up your own mind and live your own life, pilgrim! Whatever your background or education, whatever your age or genome or brain state, there’s a place for you here.
Because the Commonality was made by all of us, for all of us.
Elections come and go. Empires rise and fall. The Commonality is everlasting. Your soul is everlasting. That’s the ultimate focus of the Dark Gift.
Fair warning: just about everything you’re going to read here will subvert what you know about science, human knowledge, and the nature of reality. It will often seem the exact opposite of what you’ve been taught and believe. Heroes will be revealed as villains, conventional wisdom revealed as rank ignorance, grand truths revealed as comforting lies.
But this revolution—these revelations—will always be couched in clear and rational explanations supported by ample data and evidence, but most crucially and persuasively they will stand upon mathematical unifications of different components of our shared physical reality widely believed to be independent.
Q: What sorts of articles will I find on the Dark Gift?
Here on the Dark Gift, you’ll learn how autism is made in the brain and how our shared reality (the Commonality) works. Including the mechanical operation of your soul.
There’s quite a bit of ground to cover. Mostly because of the dismal state of twenty-first century science, something we’ll explore together, pilgrim.
The Dark Gift is a quilt of ideas. Explicitly designed to reveal hidden unifications of aimlessness and purpose, matter and Mind, love and the architecture of the cosmos, and the unification of sentient minds across the universe.
Dark Gift articles are divided into the following categories (each available from the menu bar):
AUTISM Articles
Lessons about how autism is made, stories about the autistic experience, and guidance on living the good life with the dark gift.
CONSCIOUSNESS Articles
One of the greatest mysteries of human science has been solved. Solved the way natural selection solves the origin of species and relativity solves gravity. You’ll learn how consciousness is made in plainspoken, friendly language that requires no science background.
It’s necessary to understand the physical mechanics of consciousness in order to fully grasp how autism is made in the brain.
As a bonus, the flow of consciousness is one of the most beautiful and wondrous and fascinating dynamics in the universe. You’ll appreciate the cosmos with greater intimacy and intensity once you fathom the operation of awareness.
SUPERMIND articles
In order to understand the autistic experience—and why our contemporary world is gripped by hyperpolarization, culture wars, and shooting wars—we need to understand the dynamics of the supermind. The dynamics of tribal thinking.
HUMAN SEXUALITY Articles
To fully understand the sapiens supermind—including culture wars, gender politics, sexual orientation, autistic gender confusion, and individual erotic desire—we must understand the secret dynamics of the sexual brain.
DYNAMICS OF PURPOSE articles
There’s two dynamics in the universe. You’re familiar with one of them: the dynamics of aimless matter. Physics.
The other dynamic has long been marginalized and dismissed by human science. The dynamics of purpose incorporate evolution, neural dynamics, and supermind dynamics—as well as meaning, free will, perception, creativity, suffering, politics, language, artificial intelligence, relationships, extraterrestrial communication, and immortality.
If human civilization survives that long, this is where science will be in 50 years.
SUPER-LEARNING Articles
Yow, there’s so much to learn if you want to understand the fundamental nature of reality and the deep truths of autism!
If you want to learn it all in a single-lifetime, you’re going to need to up your learning game. These articles explain the nature of learning and provide guidance on amping up your knowledge acquisition skills to superhuman levels.
GODS OF A HIGHER SCIENCE Articles
What is science, really?
What is math, ultimately?
What is time, fundamentally?
The Dark Gift represents a revolution in our human understanding of the universe and our place within it. A revolution in understanding the ultimate nature of your soul.
It’s a revolution overthrowing science as you know it. We’re going to ascend to a higher perspective, one that subsumes human science within its vaster purview.
Don’t worry, E still equals MC2 in this new perspective. We’re just going to put physics, and the rest of human tribal endeavor, in its proper place.
We’re going to learn to see the universe the way the higher sentients see it.
To get there, we’ll scrutinize science with an intimacy and frankness you’ve never encountered before. We’ll identify its flaws and self-deceptions, its self-aggrandizing myths.
And then we’ll slowly ascend to a higher plane of comprehension. Or perhaps you’ll make a sudden astonishing jump to new heights.
This radical re-conception of science will help you fathom why autism is truly a cosmic gift.
THE INTEX REVELATIONS
The beating heart of the Dark Gift. The source of all this extraordinary and unprecedented knowledge. This is where you forever leave behind the constraints of the familiar, the conventional, and the tribal, and leap into an astounding new world of insight and experience.
Q: What do I get from a paid subscription to the Dark Gift?
Right now, as of November 2024, you’ll gain access to my memoir articles—any articles that narrate details of my personal life, including my intimate experiences with autism and intex.
Sometime soon, I’m going to switch to a system where new articles are free, but after a month or so will only become accessible to those with paid subscriptions. This will place most of my articles behind a paywall.
However, crucial articles that address how autism is made in the brain and share core intex revelations will always remain free to the public. It’s my intent to make the most important knowledge about minds and reality available to everyone.
If you want to support me and ensure I can write articles with any sort of frequency, please buy an annual subscription. It’s set to the cheapest cost that Substack permits. You can sign up right here:
Q: What are the “Article Technical Levels”?
Though most articles on the Dark Gift are explicitly intended for a broad audience, including folks without a science or math background, I recognize that sometimes it’s simply not possible to explain stuff without delving into some complexity. To help readers know what to expect, I’m going to try to label each science article as one of three categories:
Easy for Everyone: where (hopefully!) every term and relationship is explained in plainspoken language that doesn’t require any science background. (Though it certainly may require a little thinking on your part.)
Moderate: where some familiarity with science or math or, more importantly, a willingness to grapple with more complicated ideas will be helpful. In these articles, I’ll be more concerned with comprehensiveness, detail, and evidence, which may put off casual readers.
High: There won’t be many articles like this, but these will presume an academic background.
Q: Why is “Mind” capitalized in the articles here on the Dark Gift?
Biologists boast a ready term to refer to all species that ever were: “life.” Neuroscientists lack a corresponding term for all minds that ever were, so this website will employ “Mind” for the task.
Biologists study life. Mindscientists study Mind.
Q: What is the Dynamic Mind?
The Dynamic Mind is a scientific perspective on thinking in general, and the human brain in particular. It is the perspective embodied in the work of Stephen Grossberg and Gail Carpenter.
It holds that thinking consists of activity and that the way to understand (and model) all forms of thought in the universe, including feeling, comprehending, free will, and consciousness, is in terms of purposeful activity.
The Dynamic Mind is in stark contrast to the three other leading frameworks for understanding minds and thought.
One might appropriately be termed Statistical Mind: applying the mathematics of statistics to thought. This is the basis for digital AI, but does not apply to biological thought.
Another might be called Digital Mind: applying the mathematics of information theory and algorithms to thought. Though this approach is quite powerful when applied to digital computation, it is ultimately a mathematics of bits and integers. A mathematics of things, rather than activity.
The rest is a mathless grab bag of interesting (and often relevant) physical factoids: genetics, brain imaging, enzymes, receptors, without any organizing principles.
The Dynamic Mind perspective organizes this grab bag into a coherent framework.
Q: I’m an academic and I don’t see any references or citations on the Dark Gift! What is the source of all your material about neuroscience, consciousness, and autism? Can't you please cite the publications you're drawing your articles and arguments from?
Though my PhD is in mathematical neuroscience, I am not an academic and am not motivated by the incentives and drives that motivate working professors. In particular, my central interest is explaining the science of Mind to the general public, especially how autism is made in the brain and how reality works.
And how these two things are deeply related.
Most of the underlying science and math here on the Dark Gift is derived from the extensive research of mathematical neuroscientists Stephen Grossberg and Gail Carpenter. I believe Dr. Grossberg is the second greatest scientist in human history, after Isaac Newton who earned the top stop by inventing human science single-handedly (though Newton tied all his science to his private deity, Ancient of Days).
Briefly, Grossberg is the second greatest scientist because, at first single-handedly and then with the help and support of Gail Carpenter, he became the first scientist to comprehensively and accurately mathematize the neural dynamics of most major functions of the human brain. In terms of his mathematical and conceptual contributions, they are greater than Einstein’s theory of relativity and the modern account of quantum physics combined.
How can I say this? The dynamics of aimlessness (physics) is characterized by a mathematics easier to compute and more intuitive for humans to think about than the dynamics of purpose (mindscience). Amply demonstrated by the fact that physicists raced through their understanding of the physical sciences during the Renaissance and Victorian ages—classical mechanics, classical electromagnetism, statistical physics, atomic theory, and so on and so forth, while mindscience didn’t meaningfully get started until the late 1950s when Grossberg, at the age of 17, devised the first mathematical model of the neural dynamics of a high-level function of the human brain—and indeed, one of the most sophisticated and inscrutable brain modules on Earth, the When module which stores and retrieves lists of items of indeterminate length. (The When module is crucial for toolmaking, music, and language.)
His contribution established, at long last, the correct mathematical framework for modeling thought, feeling, and consciousness. But because the math was unlike the math familiar to physical scientists, Grossberg’s contributions were ignored for decades. All of the mathematical and physical intuitions scientists had built up over the centuries were mostly useless when contemplating the operation of purpose—the operation of thought and consciousness.
Many scientists have stolen bits and pieces of Grossberg’s work over the years, relying on the fact that even other scientists have difficulty following the math. This academic burglary culminated last week in the awarding of the Nobel Prize to someone for a tidbit of work 100% stolen straight from Grossberg. (In grad school back in the 1990s I watched as the stolen work gained fame, but never imagined that the scientific community would reward such naked theft. A longer article forthcoming.)
Another reason Grossberg’s contribution to science is so weighty is because his discoveries address issues of tremendous interest to most human beings, not just ivory tower academics: consciousness, language, feeling, free will, purpose, art, memory, morality, meaning, social connection, mental illness. We’ve become used to thinking of these topics as squishy humanities subjects, eluding scientific specificity. Yet like Newton before him, Grossberg wrestled such numinous-seeming phenomena down from the mental heavens and rendered them in cold, hard, beautiful math.
Though Newton’s breakthroughs were quickly built upon by his peers, Grossberg’s breakthroughs were almost completely ignored by the mindscience community in the 1960s, 70s, and 1980s, even after he correctly identified the neural dynamics that embody consciousness in the early 1980s (a full decade before Daniel Dennett’s willfully misguided Consciousness Explained and David Chalmer’s absurdist claim that consciousness could never be explained by science.) This ignorance was due to a simple and unflattering reason: working mindscientists simply did not possess the mathematical chops to comprehend Grossberg’s work. Which, again, is based upon mathematics more challenging than what physicists wrestle with, both in its raw complexity and because it’s different math than what physical scientists are familiar with, and so nobody has any background or training or intuition in the mathematics of Mind.
The only way to get exposed to the math is to get exposed to Grossberg’s work. Or read the Dark Gift, where we explain it in plainspoken everyday language! Or study the mind yourself and wrestle with how it works, for then you’ll converge onto Grossberg’s math independently, just as anybody who studies electricity independently and deeply will converge onto James Maxwell’s math.
And today, in 2024, the universal ignorance of the math of neural dynamics hasn’t really changed. Now there’s maybe a few dozen folks across the planet who fully fathom Grossberg’s mathematical account of the brain, which encompasses detailed evidence-based models of vision, hearing, motor control, planning, navigation, emotion, social cognition, targeting, creating, all sorts of memory, language, decision-making, free will, and consciousness.
Here’s a very succinct and lucid way to grasp the enormity of Grossberg’s contribution: unifications.
The only way to know if your understanding of the operation of some portion of reality is true and real is through a unification: demonstrating that two parts of our physical reality that were previously believed to be distinct and separate, are actually different facets of a single physical phenomenon. This unification must be demonstrated mathematically: that the math governing one phenomenon and the math governing a disparate phenomenon can be conjoined within a single mathematical system.
Physics famously marched through a parade of unifications, such as uniting electricity and magnetism into electromagnetism or uniting Newtonian gravity and spacetime geometry into relativity, but in my own field of mindscience there were no such unifications until the twentieth century.
That’s when Grossberg almost single-handedly began initiating a march of mathematical unifications of Mind to rival the entire sweep of human physics.
The bulk of the science you will find here on the Dark Gift is derived from Grossberg’s daunting magnum opus, Conscious Mind, Resonant Brain.
Most of the rest is from Dr. Sai Gaddam and I’s extension of Grossberg & Carpenter’s mathematical framework, Journey of the Mind: How Thinking Emerged from Chaos, which contains plentiful citations for the reference-hungry.
But here on the Dark Gift, you will find all of this explained in what I hope will be clear, clean, accessible prose.
Q: What books should I read to help me understand Stephen Grossberg's work?
Though the great compendium of Grossberg’s work is his own Conscious Mind, Resonant Brain, I can’t really recommend that anyone jump right into it, not even mindscience PhDs. First of all, the math and concepts are extremely challenging, and the book doesn’t contain any tutorials or introductions to the math or concepts. And because the math and concepts are unlike those in the physical sciences, whatever background you bring to it will likely lead you astray. Second of all, Grossberg’s greatest weakness as humankind’s second greatest scientist has been his inability to communicate effectively with others. He has always struggled to explain his work to other scientists, while his capacity for illuminating his work to the public is nearly non-existent. CMRB is not a well-written book and makes no accommodations for the reader’s inevitable confusion.
If you have a background in dynamic systems and are comfortable thinking, like Norbert Wiener, “not on the mass, energy, and force concepts of physics, but rather on the concepts of feedback, control, information, communication, and purpose” then perhaps you could give it a shot. But give yourself ten years to do it justice.
The only attempt at explaining Grossberg’s work to the general public in serious detail is Journey of the Mind: How Thinking Emerged from Chaos, which I co-authored with mathematical neuroscientist Sai Gaddam. We deploy accessible, non-technical prose, abundant lucid graphics, and stories to illustrate Grossberg’s approach to understanding thought and purpose. It contains a plainspoken explanation of Grossberg’s theory of consciousness.
Let me be perfectly clear, however: Grossberg did not derive an explanation of autism. Though he published a few papers that explicitly address autism (as defined by the DSM), those are not the source of the articles on autism here on the Dark Gift.
Unfortunately, Grossberg—like almost all scientists—took seriously the diagnostic criteria for autism in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, which are based upon Freudian-style science rather than neural dynamics, biology, or math. Those criteria cannot lead to an understanding of the nature and operation and neural dynamics of the dark gift.
Q: Were you on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?
You can read about my experiences reaching the million dollar question on the famous game show here. Autism played a central role.
I also battled Ken Jennings in the championship finals of a tournament to determine the greatest game show contestant in America. Autism played a central role in that, too.
Q: Is autism truly a “spectrum disorder”?
No.
This series of articles explains why there’s a superficial spectrum of “boxes” that contain autism, whereas the autism “merchandise” inside the brain is a consistent set of neural dynamics.
Q: When I search your name on Amazon, it won’t show any of your books? And what is up with your Twitter account?
There’s a willful glitch in the Amazon search engine code that changes searches of “Ogi Ogas” to “ogio gas” which shows either luggage or rocket fuel, despite the fact that I have eight books for sale on Amazon, six with major publishers. I have tried many times and many ways to get this remedied, including soliciting the help of a friend who works at Amazon, to no avail.
If you might be able to help me fix this, I’d reward you with signed copies of all my books or some alternate preference of yours.
Regarding Twitter, back in 2019 I tried to cancel and delete my account, as I lost interest in social media. Something went wrong and it didn’t delete—but neither can I get access to my account. As with Amazon, repeated attempts at getting this remedied ended in failure. So now it’s a zombie account, inaccessible to all, undead.
There is no reward for helping me with Twitter.
I view both of these as amusing and frustratingly typical examples of life in our digital age: these technology corporations have immense control of my public identity, and no viable way to regain control of my digital Self.
Though this is largely true of our Selfs in any physical domain.
Glossary of Terms
Supermind
Superminds are groups of individual minds that merged together to form a single collective mind capable of thought and purposeful activity. The most sophisticated mind on planet Earth is the human supermind.
The human supermind boasts collective dynamics built out of mind-to-mind mental dynamics, primarily spoken language, though also encompassing gestures, body language, art, writing, music, games, and various forms of culture. Superminds are capable of consciousness, just as the individual brains in a human supermind are capable of consciousness. (Consciousness is embodied in a particular form of physical dynamics that can be produced at the supermind level as well as within an individual human brain.)
The supermind is the fourth rung of the ladder of purpose.
Super-learning
Superlearning refers to an autistic brain’s potential to assimilate large quantities of new information rapidly, especially compared to non-autistic brains. Superlearning is a consequence of the exact same neural dynamics responsible for our social difficulties. In other words, just as autism makes it harder for us to connect with other people and function in tribes, it simultaneously opens up possibilities for knowledge and skill acquisition notably more efficient and effective than what is available to healthy sapien brains.
Super-focus
[article forthcoming]
Superfocus refers to an autistic brain’s ability to pay deep, unwavering attention to a subject or task for a long period of time—notably deeper and longer than non-autistic brains are capable of.
As with Superlearning, the autistic capacity for Superfocus arises out of the exact same neural dynamics responsible for our social shortcomings. There’s a straightforward trade-off: more social capacity, less non-social learning and non-social focus. Less social capacity, more non-social learning and non-social focus.
In brief, instad of autistic brains paying attention to people and tribes the way the Homo sapiens brain is designed, our own brains pay attention to other things, ideas, and events instead, with the same depth and attentiveness that non-autistic humans bring to socializing.
The Commonality
[article forthcoming]
The Commonality is intex’s term for our shared physical reality. It encompasses both the dynamics of matter and the dynamics of purpose and the totality of their interactions.
Pre-Newtonian science
Pre-Newtonian science is descriptive rather than mathematical.
Pre-Newtonian science refers to the methods widely used by natural philosophers before Newton introduced mathematical models and physical empiricism into the study of Nature. Basically, if something here on the Dark Gift is referred to as “pre-Newtonian,” it means it consists of observation without math or physical understanding.
Sigmund Freud’s science was almost exclusively pre-Newtonian: he made careful and attentive behavioral observations, but he eschewed math and mathematical models and never investigated the biology of the brain. (Or, to be more accurate, Freud had a golden opportunity to become the Isaac Newton of mindscience and mathematize neural dynamics back in 1895, but he rejected that opportunity and instead embraced pre-Newtonian methods.)