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Contingency Theory: Gravity, Light, Computation and Theory

Posted in algorithm, analysis of behavior, behavior, computation, computer science, Computers, determinism, grid computing, philosophy, science, time, Uncategorized, wearable computers, tagged , , , on February 14, 2016| 1 Comment »

And I have to start this essay with a simple statement that it is not lost on me that all of the above is 100% derived from my own history, studies, jobs, art works, and everything else that goes into me.  So maybe this is just a theory of myself or not even a theory, but yet another expression in a life time of expressions.   At the very least I enjoyed 20 hrs of re-reading some great science, crafting what I think is a pretty neat piece of art work, and then summarizing some pondering.   Then again, maybe I’ve made strides on some general abstract level.  In either case, it’s just another contingent reconfiguration of things.

At the end I present all the resources I read and consulted during the writing (but not editing) and the making of the embedded 19×24 inch drawing and ink painting (which has most of this essay written and drawn into it).   I drank 4 cups of coffee over 5 hrs, had 3 tacos and 6 hotwings during this process. Additionally I listened to “The Essential Philip Glass” while sometimes watching the movie “The Devil Wears Prada” and the latest SNL episode.

——————-  

There is a core problem with all theories and theory at large – they are not The t=Truth and do not interact in the universe like the thing they refer to.   Theories are things unto themselves.  They are tools to help craft additional theories and to spur on revised dabbling in the world.

FullSizeRender (4)

We have concocted an unbelievable account of reality across religious, business, mathematical, political and scientific categories.  Immense stretches of imagination are required to connect the dots between the category theory of mathematics to radical behaviorism of psychology to machine learning in computer science to gravitational waves in cosmology to color theory in art.  The theories themselves have no easy bridge – logical, spiritual or even syntactically.

Furthering the challenge is the lack of coherence and interoperability of measurement and crafting tools.   We have forever had the challenge of information exchange between our engineered systems.   Even our most finely crafted gadgets and computers still suffer from data exchange corruption.   Even when we seem to find some useful notion about the world it is very difficult for us to transmit that notion across mediums, toolsets and brains.

And yet, therein lies the the reveal!

A simple, yet imaginative re-think provides immense power.   Consider everything as network.  Literally the simplest concept of a network – a set of nodes connected by edges.   Consider everything as part of a network, a subnetwork of the universe.  All subnetworks are connected more or less to the other subnetworks.   From massive stars to a single boson, all nodes in a network and those networks of networks.   Our theories are networks of language, logic, inference, experiment, context.  Our tools are just networks of metals, atoms, and light.   It’s not easy to replace your database of notions reinforced over the years with this simple idea.

But really ask yourself why that is so hard but you can believe that blackholes collide and send out gravitational waves that slightly wobble spacetime 1.3 billion light years away or if you believe in the Christian God, consider how that’s believable and that woman was created from a guy named Adam’s rib.    It’s all a bit far fetched but we buy these other explanations because the large network of culture and tradition and language and semiotics has built our brains/worldviews up this way.

Long ago we learned that our senses are clever biological interpreters of internal and external context.  Our eyes do not see most of “reality” – just a pretty course (30 frames per second) and small chunk of electromagnetic waves (visible light).   in the 1930s we learned that even mathematics itself and the computers we’d eventually construct can not prove many of the claims they will make, we just have to accept those claims. (incompleteness and halting problem.).

These are not flaws in our current understanding or current abilities.  These are fundamental features of reality – any reality at all.  In fact, without this incompleteness and clever loose interpretations of information between networks there would be no reality at all – no existence.   This is a claim to return to later.

In all theories at the core we are always left with uncertainty and probability statements.   We cannot state or refer to anything for certain, we can only claim some confidence that what we’re claiming or observing might, more or less, be a real effect or relation.   Even in mathematics with some of the simplest theorems and their logical proofs we must assume axioms we cannot prove – and while that’s an immensely useful trick it certainly doesn’t imply that any of the axioms are actually true and refer to anything that is true or real.

The notion of probability and uncertainty is no easy subject either.   Probability is a measure of what?   It is a measure belief (Bayes) that something will happen given something else?  Is it a measure of lack of information – this claim is only X% of the information?  Is it a measure of complexity?

IMG_4369

Again, the notion of networks is incredibly helpful.  Probability is a measure of contingency.   Contingency, defined and used here, is a notion of connectivity of a network and nodes within the network.  There need be no hard and fast assignment of the unit of contingency – different measures are useful and instructive for different applications.  There’s a basic notion at the heart of all of them: contingency is a cost function of going from a configuration to another configuration of the network.

And that leads to another startling idea.   Spacetime itself is just a network.  (obvious intuition from my previous statement) and everything is really just a spacetime network.    Time is not the ticks on a clock nor an arrow marching forward.  Time is nothing but a measure of steps to reconfigure a network from state A to some state B.   Reconfiguration steps are not done in time, they are time itself.

(most of my initial thinking comes from Wolfram and others working on this long before my thinking about it: http://blog.stephenwolfram.com/2015/12/what-is-spacetime-really/ – Wolfram and others have done a ton of heavy lifting to translate the accepted theories and math into network terms).

This re-framing of everything into network thinking requires a huge amount of translation of notions of waves, light, gravity, mass, fields, etc into network conventions.  While attempting to do that in blog form is fun and I’ve attempted to keep doing it, the reality of the task is that no amount of writing about this stuff will make a sufficient proof or even useful explanation of the idea to people.

Luckily, it occurred to me (a contingent network myself!) that everyone is already doing this translation and even more startling it couldn’t go any other way.   Our values and traditions started to be codified into explicit networks with the advent of written law and various cultural institutions like religion and formal education.   Our communities have now been codified into networks by online social networks.  Our location and travels have been codified by GPS satellites and online mapping services.  Our theories and knowledge are being codified into Wikis, Programs (Wolfram Alpha, Google Graph, Deep Learning networks, etc).   Our physical interpretations of the world have been codified into fine arts, pop arts, movies and now virtual and augmented realities.   Our inner events/context are being codified by wearable technologies.    And now the cosmos has unlocked gravitational waves for us so even the mystery of black holes and dark matter will start being codified into knowledge systems.

It’s worth a few thoughts about Light, Gravity, Forces, Fields, Behavior, Computation.

  • Light (electromagnetic wave-particles) is the subnetwork encoding the total configurations of the entire universe and every subnetwork.
  • Gravity (and gravitational wave-particles) is the subnetwork of how all the subnetworks over a certain contingency level (mass) are connected.
  • Other 3 fundamental Forces (electromagnetics, weak nuclear, strong nuclear) are also just subnetworks encoding how all subatomic particles are connected.
  • Field is just another term for network, hardly worth a mention.
  • Behavior observations are partially encoded subnetworks of the connections between subnetworks.  They do not encode the entirety of a connection except for the smallest, most simple networks.
  • Computation is time is the instruction set is a network encoding how to transform one subnetwork to another subnetwork.

These re-framed concepts allow us to move across phenomenal categories and up and down levels of scale and measurement fidelity.  They open up improved ways of connecting the dots between cross-category experiments and theories.   Consider radical behaviorism and schedules of reinforcement combined with the Probably Approximately Correct learning theory in computer science against a notion of light and gravity and contingency as defined above.

What we find is that learning and behavior based on schedules of reinforcement is actually the only way a subnetwork (say, a person) and a network of subnetworks (a community) could encode the vast contingent network (internal and external environments, etc).   Some schedules of reinforcement maintain responses better than others, and again here we find the explanation.  Consider a Variable Ratio schedule reinforcing a network.  (see here for more details: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reinforcement#Intermittent_reinforcement.3B_schedules).   A variable ratio (a variations/compositions on this) schedule is a richer contingent network itself that say a fixed ratio network.  That is, as a network encoding information between networks (essentially a computer program and data) the variable ratio has more algorithmic content to keep associations linked after many related network configurations.

Not surprisingly this is exactly the notion of gravity explained above.  Richer, more complex networks with richer connections to other subnetworks have much more gravity – that is they attract more subnetworks to connect.  They literally curve spacetime.

To add another wrinkle in theory, it has been observed in a variety of categories that the universe seems to prefer computational efficiency.  Nearly all scientific disciplines from linguistics to evolutionary biology to physics to chemistry to logic end up with some basic notion of “Path of Least Effort” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principle_of_least_effort).  In the space of all possible contingent situations networks tend to connect in the computationally most efficient way – they encode each other efficiently.  That is not to say it happens that way all the time.  In fact, this idea led me to thinking that while all configurations of subnetworks exist, the most commonly observed ones (I use a term: robust) are the efficient configurations.  I postulate this explains mathematical constructs such as the Platonic solids and transcendental numbers and likely the physic constants.  That is, in the space of all possible things, the mean of the distribution of robust things are the mathematical abstractions.  While we rarely experience a perfect circle, we experience many variations on robust circular things… and right now the middle of them is the perfect circle.

IMG_4366

Now, what is probably the most bizarre idea of all:  nothing is actually happening at the level of the universe nor at the level of a photon.  The universe just is.   A photon, which is just a single massless node, everything happens to it all at once, so nothing happens.

That’s right, despite all the words and definitions above with all the connotations of behavior and movement and spacetime… experience and happening and events and steps and reconfigurations are actually just illusions, in a sense, of subnetworks describing other subnetworks.   The totality of the universe includes every possible reconfiguration of the universe – which obviously includes all theories, all explanations, all logics, all computations, all behavior, all schedules in a cross product of each other.   No subnetwork is doing anything at all, it simply IS and is that subnetwork within the specific configuration of universe as part of the wider set of the whole.

This sounds CRAZY.   until you look back on the history of ideas, this notion has come up over and over regardless of the starting point, the condition of the observational tools, the fads of language and business of the day.  It is even observable in how so many systems “develop” first as “concrete” physical, sensory things… they end up yielding time and time again to what we call the virtual – strangely looping recursive networks.   Here I am not contradicting myself, instead… this is what exists within the fractal nature of the universe (multiverse!) it is self similar all the way up and down scales and across all configurations (histories).

Theories tend to be ignored unless they are useful.   I cannot claim utility for everyone on this theory.  I do find it helpful for myself in moving between disciplines and not getting trapped in syntactical problems.   I find confirmation of my own cognitive bias in the fact that the technology of loosely connecting the dots like GPS, hyperlinks, search engine, social media, citation analysis, Bayes, and now deep learning/PAC have yielded tremendous expansion of information and re-imaging of the world.

IMG_4355

Currency, writing, art, music are not concrete physical needs and yet they mediate our labor, property, government, nation states.   Even things we consider “concrete” like food and water are just encodings of various configurations.  Food can be redefined in many ways and has been over the eons as our abstracted associations drift.   Water seems like a concrete requirement for us, but us is under constant redefinition.  Should people succeed in creating human-like (however you define it) in computers or the Internet it’s not clear water would be any more concrete than solar power, etc.

Then again, if I believe anything I’ve said above, it all already exists and always has.

 

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Chaitin on Algorithmic Information, just a math of networks.
https://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~chaitin/sciamer3.html

Platonic solids are just networks
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Platonic_solid#Liquid_crystals_with_symmetries_of_Platonic_solids

Real World Fractal Networks
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fractal_dimension_on_networks#Real-world_fractal_networks

Correlation for Network Connectivity Measures
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22343126

Various Measurements in Transport Networks (Networks in general)
https://people.hofstra.edu/geotrans/eng/methods/ch1m3en.html

Brownian Motion, the network of particles
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brownian_motion

Semantic Networks
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_network

MPR
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathematical_principles_of_reinforcement

Probably Approximately Correct
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Probably_approximately_correct_learning

Probability Waves
http://www.physicsoftheuniverse.com/topics_quantum_probability.html

Bayes Theorem
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayes%27_theorem

Wave
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wave

Locality of physics
http://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2016/02/all-physics-is-local/462480/

Complexity in economics
http://www.abigaildevereaux.com/?p=9%3Futm_source%3Dshare_buttons&utm_medium=social_media&utm_campaign=social_share

Particles
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graviton

Gravity is not a network phenomenon?
https://www.technologyreview.com/s/425220/experiments-show-gravity-is-not-an-emergent-phenomenon/

Gravity is a network phenomenon?
https://www.wolframscience.com/nksonline/section-9.15

Useful reframing/rethinking Gravity
http://www2.lbl.gov/Science-Articles/Archive/multi-d-universe.html

Social networks and fields
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Wendy_Bottero/publication/239520882_Bottero_W._and_Crossley_N._(2011)_Worlds_fields_and_networks_Becker_Bourdieu_and_the_structures_of_social_relations_Cultural_Sociology_5(1)_99-119._DOI_10.11771749975510389726/links/0c96051c07d82ca740000000.pdf

Cause and effect
https://aeon.co/essays/could-we-explain-the-world-without-cause-and-effect

Human Decision Making with Concrete and Abstract Rewards
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1090513815001063

The Internet
http://motherboard.vice.com/blog/this-is-most-detailed-picture-internet-ever

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2016 Launch – January 1

Posted in analysis of behavior, automata, behavior, cellular automata, government, life, politics, science, social science, Uncategorized on January 5, 2016| 1 Comment »

When, in 1991, a list was drawn up by an assortment of heavy weight problem solvers to focus on important social and scientific topics receiving prominent play in media over the prior years.   Behavior, psychology nor its related sub fields were mentioned.

Other areas were listed… molecular biology, artificial intelligence, chaos theory, massive parallelism, neural nets, fractals, complex adaptive systems, superstrings, biodiversity, nanotechnology, the human genome, expert systems, punctuated equilibrium, cellular automata, fuzzy logic, space biospheres, the Gaia hypothesis, virtual reality, and cyberspace, to mention a significant few, but no psychology…  Other important disciplines besides psychology were also absent: 3D printed body parts, immunology, pluripotent stem cells, chemistry, epigenetics, climate change, internet of everything, etc.

Things have changed since 1991…

The world is rocking in a way not envisioned by Led Zeppelin or Van Halen.  The “rocking” I am referring to core changes that involve every aspect of our existence.  Over the last twenty-five years or so, all the rules, ideals, principles, and codes, etc., have been changing faster and faster and we now are experiencing the collective impact of those changes.

For many, that is a very good thing.

For the world, because all those rules, mores, traditions, ideals, values are ALL changing AND, all at the same time, it is more than an unsettling variation.  No, no one has acceptable ways to understand, predict, or control the changes, their paths, consequences or implications.

More than metaphorically, we have a world out of balance that is worse off that it might otherwise be if we collectively understood it was, indeed, out of whack. Most in the world doesn’t understand or they double down so they don’t have to deal with it.  Of course, they are clueless about how to deal with it.  Thus, entities keep digging in deeper to keep the old rules ’cause that has mostly how it worked in the past in times of uncertainty.  Hard to give up on making buggy whips when the horse carriages have gone away.

You can observe it everywhere. People, groups and agencies hanging on to the last vestiges of the past by their mental fingernails in efforts to hold on to what was once comforting. The carcasses of ideals, dichotomies, castes, simplistic explanations are hard to ignore.  But many keep trying to do just that. No one wants to say out loud in front of the lords of celebrity and the kings of political unions that the jobs of 1990 aren’t coming back (different ones are emerging but…), equality is available if one values it, aristocracy over citizens is weak, and Jacksonian statements from “The Lottery,” “we’ve always done it that way” are more impotent than ever.

Today, 2016, we want to understand ISIS, rulers of in Iran, North Korea, Washington, DC, teachers, parents, babies and ourselves.

A more objective objective is needed. An objective that is liberated enough to abandon the almost endless marginal disputes of quarrelsome mundane dogmas in order to affect the survival of everybody on the planet, all on the way to figuring out what the heck is going on. We might want to study behavior. We might be ready.

Unlike some smokestack disciplines still protecting ancient edifices or intellectual self-indulgence, the empirical study of behavior viewed as a horizontal set of endeavors has solutions rather than the regurgitations of irrelevant quackery.  This proposal is based on very pragmatic understanding that there is no time left to dally and psychology’s past has run out of runway to contribute to even the simplest solutions necessary to be of value to Earth.

Some think another and perhaps bigger gun, Lightsaber, a deity with new super powers, yoga schools, another pill, repression of the weird ones, stricter laws, election of a benevolent bully, or the return to fundamental values from another era would bring back order, old forms of rule, hierarchies and such.

Haven’t we heard all that before?  Hello…!

Who knows how to change behavior?

JHBryant – Lone Star College – Conroe, Texas

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Everything is Connected… New Kind of Science Edition

Posted in algorithm, new kind of science, science, social networks, Uncategorized, tagged , , on December 2, 2015| Leave a Comment »

Yes.  This is GREAT.  http://blog.stephenwolfram.com/2015/12/what-is-spacetime-really/
 
While I have many interests and ideas… the most of enduring is my own obsession over the nature of reality and specific spacetime. It’s probably been my guiding light since my much younger self around 14-16 started reading/toying with chaos theory, popular cosmology books and starting in roads into deeper than algebra mathematics. At the same time the theater bug struck in earnest as I struggled with a long involvement with Christianity and the bible. You put it all together and all of these things seemed to be asking questions about origins and the flow of time and cause and effect.
 
I have a bit of a revisionist/simplified story around why I went to University of Chicago… but a lot of my most basic thinking at the time was still about how to fully engage my obsession… it was very clear that was probably the only place I could go and chase this obsession in a world class physics and math department that just so happened to co-exist with amazing theater and improv comedy. (These things are related deeply, I swear, on some incredibly fundamental level.)
 
Somehow I managed to survive, barely, getting a theoretical (not applied) math degree (it’s still a mystery as to how I survived complex analysis) while performing in, directing or writing something like 40 theater shows… and then I went out into the real world no closer to understanding anything at all about the true nature of my obsession, spacetime.
 
Futzing about with first real world jobs but mostly sneaking off to Borders as often as I could I basically read almost every professional computer book I could as well as picked up A New Kind of Science, by Wolfram. In a mish-mash of messing around with programming/multi media side projects, shortlived w2 jobs and reading as much as I could… I finally devised a ridiculous plan. I would one day work under Stephen Wolfram and actually come to know his vision and math driving A New Kind of Science. All 10 billion pages of NKS seemed to overflow with consistent, mind blowing Yes This Could Actually Be The Basis of Reality stuff that somehow was bizarrely consistent with the bevy of other art, theater, religious, literary thoughts I’d come across on the matter.
 
So this plan… well first I knew that it wouldn’t be good enough to have “read” NKS, i would actually need to know how to use Mathematica and understand the theoretical and applied logic behind its operations. Being a resourceful young man with no shame I managed to convince my software provisioning team at the w2 job I had at the time to purchase me a license for Mathematica (those are expensive for non students!) because it was critical for the development of Online Advertising Recommendation Algorithms. Well, whatever, it worked and I was off and running learning and trying things out and mostly making a mess of my computers.
 
The plan needed to evolve as I wasn’t getting anywhere. in 2008 or so someone pointed me to the New Kind of Science summer school that Wolfram Research put on. Well, shoot! There ya go… I doubted whether I had any business in spending three weeks in Bernie Sanders country (VT!) hanging out with some of the smartest people I’d ever met doing theoretical physics and computer science… but having no shame… I wrote up a typo filled statement of my intentions and applied. I wrote a lengthy run on sentence piece about how I thought the approach of NKS could finally bridge the broken disciplines of cognitive psychology and economics and radical behaviorism (I said it somewhat differently… and live blogged my approach… shameless… http://socialmode.com/2008/03/21/anatomy-of-a-decision-in-life-applying-to-nks-summer-school/). Beyond the silly basis of my plan my wife and I also had two young kids and I didn’t really have a job job, just consulting gigs… so spending 3 weeks working on insanely theoretical/no-connection to my real life was even more ridiculous. but obsessions are obsessions…
 
Shorting the story here Wolfram invited me to the NKS school that summer where I decided to pursue a project on Turing Machines (http://socialmode.com/2008/08/07/nks-summer-school-summary/) that was pretty great to work on. I greatly improved my understanding of Mathematica, the beauty of turing and his machines, the lambda calculus as well as further confirmed I was as far away from understanding spacetime as ever. Beyond my project I had several deep interactions with SW and various members of his team. These all gave me better and better glimpses into this stuff… the other students also had a mix of unbelievably interesting perspectives in philosophy, neuroscience, medicine, architecture and so much more. I was under no delusion that I understood much of anything… much like my math degree in college… but I always bet on osmosis and you don’t know what you know and what you don’t know…. meaning, sometimes you know things but only by using it and applying it in different ways…
 
Ok, so having properly stoked the obsession I became more deeply enamored with things which led to more discussions with SW and ultimately to engaging their team in launching Wolfram|Alpha, which i had see while at the summer school and knew that I wanted to somehow be involved with it. Outside of NKS and my various reality seeking obsessions my own “professional” career had continued down the “search engine” path from SEO junk, to building various search engines/crawlers, playing with query semantics and indexing ideas, etc. etc. by this time I’d worked on several web scale search engine/recommendation engine/geo gis systems and everything in between. So doing Wolfram|Alpha was an obvious next step pro wise and obsession wise.
 
Well, beyond the fun times in trying to explain WA to the world and trying to figure out various business models my little spacetime obsession became an obsession with language (programming and otherwise) and probably what some would consider semiotics and other analysis of symbols. There was just something in NKS, math, mathematica, computers, turing machines, radical behaviorism, theater, religion, art, LIFE that scream SYMBOLICS… study of SYMBOLICS… oh and on and on and on.
 
I carried all of these obsessions from various bill paying gigs to the next… which was really just a front for me to continue buying computers and books at an alarming clip while not completely ruining my young children’s futures.
 
This sort of brings us back around to RIGHT NOW with this wonderful blog post from SW and my own current Art and Philosophy situation. His post still strikes me as On The Right Path. And it’s still not the full story… it’s even more fundamental than Space as a Network and it’s Just a Network and some simple rules… and the only way I’ve come to be able to work out the details is well, not to work out the details… but do as SW is doing… searching the space of possibilities… I’m just doing it through art, as my hunch (which is likely just a confusion of my obsession) is that an artistic exploration is Computational Equivalent to writing a bunch of symbolic programs AND may, in fact, be more efficient due to the nature of how humans (awesome multi faceted pattern recognizers) process data and the world that data represents. See here for some exposition and poke around the art… http://www.worksonbecoming.com/symbol-and-relation/
 
Look, perhaps this is all unknowable (likely) and perhaps I’m just a kooky guy who spent too much time with his nose in a book. What I learned though is that… this little obsession spun me off in a million directions gaining lots of little skills that all allowed me to navigate the weird business world, the slightly unnerving computer programmer culture, improved my literacy, help start a school, employ and raise up lots of ambitious upstart people and perhaps have made a couple of hundred million dollars here and there for folks, and now has me making art, mostly poorly conceived but done at a pace that fills me up.
 
perhaps that’s what spacetime is really about. using it in fulfilling ways.
 
perhaps everything is connected.

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Psychology Today

Posted in analysis of behavior, behavior, biology, science, social science, Uncategorized on November 14, 2015| Leave a Comment »

 John H. Bryant – Lone Star College, Conroe, TX

“Is it time yet?” “Are we there yet?”

No, these are not questions of children eagerly waiting to leave on vacation or arrive at a valued destination. These are the questions for those who are wondering if we’ve spent enough time, effort, and money with pre-scientific jargon, agency, myth, and cha-cha to refocus on worn pseudo-science approaches.

So, “Is it time yet?”

When it comes to the mixed bag of psychology approaches, our current practices evolved more from philosophy and theology rather than chemistry and physics. Academic psychology (re: the study of behavior and mental processes) is not in isolation when it comes problems raised here, similar arguments hold for most of the social science disciplines. Yet if psychology is to be better understood and useful, more has to be done to communicate what is scientific about psychology rather than folk lore.

Now, according to some, psychology as a discipline has a “replication crisis” (The New York Times and elsewhere) that must be dealt with for the salvation of us all.

Perhaps it is time to examine some factors that make for a “replication crisis”. It’s likely that what sounds alarming is part of a continual reassessment that takes place regularly in sciences. However, now outside sources are asking for an accounting of why replications are so difficult in psychology.

There once was a time when things were based on dogma rather than data. When data came to be preferred over opinion and dogma, some thought that psychology would go in that direction. But, as it turns out, that position was a bit optimistic.

Some of the required changes to psychology’s approaches including math, chemistry, and cross-platform information methods that mirror established scientific approaches haven’t found much traction. And, rather than get immersed in more scientific pursuits, psychology’s focus remained non-science oriented contexts and continued to depend on private narratives, mental models and ‘thought experiments’ from non-scientific pursuits that were the genesis of much of psychology.

George E. P. Box

“Since all models are wrong, the scientist cannot obtain a “correct” model by excessive elaboration. On the contrary, following William of Occam, he should seek an economical description of natural phenomena. Just as the ability to devise simple but evocative models is the signature of the great scientist, so over-elaboration and over-parameterization is often the mark of mediocrity.”

• Science and Statistics (1976) p. 792

Three major issues are relevant to the large historical comfort zone that promoted speculation, storytelling, and philosophizing not readily amenable to the disciplines of science.

Agency

Rather than measure behavior at all levels (social to biochemistry, for example) to discover what was going on in contextual sets, psychologists continued to continue to hypothesize an array of internal entities which cause behavior. Collectively, these are called “agency” and make up, self, personality, possession, mind, needs, drives, motives, and so on. Because each agent eventually fell short of the requirements to explain behavior, the notion of agency required additional theories and hypothesized more intervening variables, hypothetical constructs and new sets of agents. These processes came to create subfields within psychology which frequently submerged the original question that started the conversation of why organisms do what they do.

Reification

Reification generally refers to making something real, bringing something into being, or making something concrete when it is a concept or idea. Concepts and agency terms filled a void over the ignorance about behavior. Thus, if the populace repeatedly used a concept to explain or describe behavior, right or wrong, the concept frequently morphed into subsequent communication at the level of reification.

Psychologists came to lead the way in doing what scientific disciplines (mathematics, chemistry, physics, biology and genetics) discontinued doing a century ago; using inference to assign causes. The evolution of the DSM (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders) has provided a mushrooming array of mentalism geography, and agile agent gymnastics in internal workings of Homo sapiens in an effort to assign, align, and categorize “casual” attributes of behavior. As the size and scope of the DMS has grown, one might conclude that everyone has a ‘mental’ disorder. While this helps maintain a level of path dependency within psychology to its past, lack of correspondence just as often conflates any utility those terms, metaphors, and simalies provide.

Measurement Scales

Doing science is hard, agnostic, and unapologetic. As disciplines, social sciences treat information from the different scales (below) as if they were all the same. They are not.  For some, technology has offered opportunity to empirically measure more and assess the results more accurately rather than assign labels arbitrarily. With methods based on science rather than received wisdom from anthologies and vignettes, it can be argued that psychology could move in a more scientific direction. Changes don’t come easy. Changes in the direction toward a scientific understanding for psychology won’t come easy as long as nominal labeling and ordinal counting grows faster than the experimental work required can yield reliable results. A “good story” with pseudo-scientific terms will win almost every time. Creating a larger lexicon of untestable hypothesis and jargon in the absence of solutions has had a good run.

“Are we there yet?”

There have been a few excursions to move toward empirical assessments and away from naming conventions in psychology, yet teleological and ontological explanations and “extrapolation beyond the data” remain as the currency of much of psychology and its proliferation of subfields.

These are substantial issues. Changes are processional. Some will take the challenge and entertain changes. Others will not. Each will have to show value if it is to reach the formal analysis that typically accompanies a ‘scientific’ endeavor. Each option includes steps that must be added to the discipline if embracing the standards of science is their objective. An equally daunting set of steps must be expunged from current practices if scientific research produced is to be reproducible, reliable, and relevant to the substantial number of issues that psychology is framed to address

For psychology and similar disciplines, every time the going gets tough requiring genetics, mathematics, neurochemistry, and the knowledge of the methods those disciplines use, psychology and the other social sciences crawl back to philosophical narratives and mental gymnastics.

It may appear to show understanding when someone posits that such and such are the ‘causes’ of such and such. However, when the “causes” are encased in made-up abstractions, non-observable internal body states, inside the neuron, inside the chemistry, etc., (you get the idea) the scaffolding of abstraction grow out of control rapidly. It all is really not ‘understanding’ or ‘explanation’. It is dogma.

Psychology has taken these strategies of the untestable to explain the unobservable as its very domain of expertise. Such talk, writings, lectures, that cannot be tested, monitored or independently verified come in as welcome guests but never leave. They have no anchors to anything and thusly the value of the information morphs when the data is interpreted with empirical tools. It’s easy, especially when whatever modulates the dependent variables is unknown to the lecturer, writer, observer or psychobiologist.

Only when the methods used in psychology begins to depend more on measurable content rather than pre-scientific or hypothetical concepts, agency, or reification, they will find greater amounts of correspondence with what is actually happening in nature. Of course, that isn’t the entire solution, but will have benefited their disciplines on the way to understanding current problems on the way to solutions as well as foundations for more complex behavioral properties like emergence, convergence.

There are no shortcuts. As a discipline, psychology can’t wear the science badge if it doesn’t self-correct when there is no link between what is hypothesized and what is actually going on in the world. Making conjectures without testable options is still philosophy.

“A new scientific ‘truth’ does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.”

Max Planck, a Nobel laureate physicist

Yes, it is time consuming and a very inefficient set of contingencies. Yet, as long as those who are doing “psychological” research mix hypothetical internal agencies with hypothetical attributes and then interpret mixtures of data from different scales as equal, there will be a systemic lack of replication, accuracy and relevance to what psychology has to offer.

So now the initial questions remain to be answered:         “Is it time yet?”           “Are we there yet?”

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What is Data?

Posted in computer science, data mining, philosophy, science, science fiction, tagged , , , , on June 20, 2015| 1 Comment »

From within the strange loop of self-reference the question “What is Data?” emerges.  Ok, maybe more practically the question arises from our technologically advancing world where data is everywhere, spouting from everything.  We claim to have a “data science” and now operate “big data” and have evolving laws about data collection and data use.   Quite an intellectual infrastructure for something that lacks identity or even a remotely robust and reliable definition.  Should we entrust our understanding and experience of the world to this infrastructure?   This question seems stupid and ignorant.  However, we have taken up a confused approach in all aspects of our lives by putting data ontologically on the same level as real, physical, actual stuff.    So now the question must be asked and must be answered and its implications drawn out.

Data is and Data is not.   Data is not data.   Data is not the thing the data represents or is attached to.   Data is but a ephemeral puff of exhaust from an limitless, unknowable universe of things and their relations. Let us explore.

Observe a few definitions and usage patterns:

Data According to Google

Data According to Google

https://www.google.com/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&rlz=1CAZZAD_enUS639US640&ion=1&espv=2&ie=UTF-8#q=data+definition

The latin roots point to the looming mystery.  “Give” -> “Something Given”.   Even back in history data was “something”.   Almost an anti-definition.

Perhaps we can find clues from clues:

Crossword Puzzle Clues for

Crossword Puzzle Clues for “Data”

http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=data&a=*C.data-_*Word-

Has there been a crossword puzzle word with broader or more ambiguity than that?   “Food for thought?”  seems to hit the nail on the head.   The clues boil down to data is: numbers, holdings, information, facts, figures, fodder, food, grist, bits.   Sometimes crunched and processed, sometimes raw.  Food for thoughts, disks, banks, charts and computers.

????????????????????????

Youtube usually can tell us anything, here’s a video directly answering What Is Data:

Strong start in that video, Qualitative and Quantitative… and then by the end the video unwinds the definitions to include basically everything.

Maybe a technical lesson on data types will help elucidate the situation:

Data Types

Perhaps sticking to computers as a frame of reference helps us.   Data is stuff stored in a database specified by data types.  What exactly is stored?   Bits on a magnetic or electric device (hard drive or memory chip) are arranged according to structure defined by this “data” which is defined or created or detected by sensors and programs…   So is the data the bit?  the electric symbol?  the magnetic structures on the disk?  a pure idea regardless of physical substrate?

The confusing self-referential nature of the situation is wonderfully exploited by Tupper’s formula:

Tupper's formula

http://mathworld.wolfram.com/TuppersSelf-ReferentialFormula.html

What exactly is that?  it’s a pixel rendering (bits in memory turned into electrons shot a screen or LED excitations) of a formula (which is a collection of symbols) that when fed through a brain or a computer programmed by a brain end up producing a picture of a formula….

The further we dig the less convergence we seem to have.   Yet we have a “data science” in the world and employ “data scientists” and we tell each other to “look at the data” to figure out “the truth.”

Sometimes philosophy is useful in such confusing situations:

Information is notoriously a polymorphic phenomenon and a polysemantic concept so, as an explicandum, it can be associated with several explanations, depending on the level of abstraction adopted and the cluster of requirements and desiderata orientating a theory.

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/information-semantic/

Er, that doesn’t seem like a convergence.  By all means we should read that entire essay, it’s certainly full of data.

Ok, maybe someone can define Data Science and in that we can figure out what is being studied:

https://beta.oreilly.com/ideas/what-is-data-science

That’s a really long article that points to data science as a duct taped loosely linked set of tools, processes, disciplines, activities to turn data into products and tell stories.   There’s clearly no simple definition or identification of the actual substance of data found there or in any other description of data science readily available.

There’s a certain impossibility of definition and identification looming.   Data isn’t something concrete.  It’s “of” everything.  It appears to be a shadowy representational trace of phenomena and relations and objects that is itself encoded in phenomena and relations and objects.

There’s a wonderful aside in the great book “Things to Make and Do in the Fourth Dimension” by Matt Parker

Finite Nature of Data

Finite Nature of Data

https://books.google.com/books?id=wK2MAwAAQBAJ&lpg=PP1&dq=fourth%20dimension%20math&pg=PP1#v=onepage&q=fourth%20dimension%20math&f=false

Data seems to have a finite, discrete property to it and yet is still very slippery.  It is reductive – a compression of the infinite patterns in the universe, it is also a pattern. Compressed traces of actual things.   Data is wisps of existence, a subset of existence.   Data is an optical and sensory illusion that is an artifact of the limitedness of the sensor and irreducibility of connections between things.

Data is not a thing.   It is of things, about things, traces of things, made up of things.

There can be no data science.   There is no scientific method possible.   Science is done with data, but cannot be done on data.  One doesn’t do experiments on data, experiments emit and transcode data, but data itself cannot be experimental.

Data is art.   Data is an interpretive literature.  It is a mathematics – an infinite regress of finite compressions.

Data is undefined and belongs in the set of unexplainables: art, infinity, time, being, event.

Data = Art Data = Art

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These Are Strange Times

Posted in analysis of behavior, anthropology, behavior, computation, economics, journalism, media, religion, science on April 5, 2015| 1 Comment »

I often think, “these are strange times.”  As if I know what other times were like and as if they would be any less strange than now.   The thought is completely baseless.  Nonetheless, most days I drift off with a parallax feeling – something is somehow amiss.

Socrates Death

Socrates Death

Three days ago a healthy fever kept me prisoner in bed.  I turned on the TV to distract my burning brain.   For several hours I fell in and out of hysterical sleep as the MSNBC and CNN shows droned on. Finally my hand managed to dump me into the local news.   I managed to catch snippets and sound bytes on various political actions in Arkansas and Indiana and the emergence of movement on Iran Nuclear deals and the various drought issues in California.   Of course that little bit of content was sandwiched between erectile dysfunction ads, more news show promotions, political ads, and a bunch of other nonsense that was so nonsensical it didn’t register at all.

My fever provided an interesting kaleidoscope to consume all this “media.”   I barely recall the specific words, but I vividly recall lots of reddish pink faces, stunted vocal inflections, disjointed rejoinders all trying attempting to rile me out of my feverish funk and to take action – against anything.   I awoke the next morning remembering an angry opera where all the singers sing over each other and nothing makes sense but there’s a frenzy and certainly the frenzy means something because well it’s a frenzy.

This experience and any resulting thoughts aren’t really that enlightening or difficult to analyze.   We live in a cacophony of cacophonies.   We create them for each other, we consume them, we sell them to each other, we seek them out.   Media exists only as a cacophony.   Without the cacophony so many institutions and systems collapse.    Our identities and sense of almost being folds in on itself.   Without mass frenzy who needs a search engine?   Or curation tools? Or talking heads? Or journalists?   Or critics? Or pundits? Or experts? Or “likes”? Or vacations? Or spas? Or meditation centers? Or insurance? Or assurance? Or reputation management? Or pr? ….

The silence would obliterate an industrial turned digital world.  Our senses are now ill suited for the silence or slowness of a world without this recursive self generating cacophony.   The very senses so essential to our survival in what was likely a very competitive environment thousands and thousands of years ago reached what seems to me some bizarre threshold of sensation.  These every more acute senses and brains and bodies needed more than what the fabricated industrial world could deliver.  We needed media to put us back on edge.  Always keep us on the edge.  Something is out there to get me.

This is not the only way to fulfill and engage the senses and the brain and the body.  But by gosh is it the most efficient.   Thinking and engagement are costly efforts that cut into the means of production.   Philosophizing is hard to monetize.  Art shifts perspectives away from commoditization.   Walking is slow.   The mass of humankind should not engage in these activities for they lead to more of these activities.   No, listen to the cacophony and like a slot machine keep pushing the buttons (the handle is too slow), let the whistle sounds and cherry sights keep us in attention without engagement – next time, next time! The human capacity for repetitive motion and thought is nearly boundless if injected with just enough stimulation (throw in a little variation to throw the probability center off).

But it isn’t as Huxley thought it would be – habituation through pleasure – it’s more effective for production to a have a slightly disembodied sense of dread.   Pure pleasure would not keep the right chemicals flowing like dread and fear does.   Our fear of death is stronger than our desire for pleasure.

I contest that the pursuit of truth and knowledge is more powerful and sustaining than fleeing death or enjoying pleasure – but it is a hard practiced reward.  It takes a good deal of effort to get to a point where it sustains and grows.    It requires an upfront investment of the mind, body, and senses.   It forces one to give up the relentless pursuit of capital.

The human creature seeks the real – it can be trained and sustained on the near-real though.   It can hang on the edge of the real for as long as you can keep the cells alive.   But deep down the entirety of a given human seeks the real – the real world, the full view of a tree, the scent of the crisp night, the touch of another human, the lick of a dog, the view without glasses….   Without the real, we will take convincing substitutes and become sufficiently addicted until the senses have weakened and are no longer able to seek the real.

These are strange times.   They are strange because we seem to notice less and less than what the historical documents of the past suggest we were noticing previously.  Though we were ignorant then, as we are now, we seemed to appreciate that ignorance in some enlightened circles.  Instead of hiding from it, some went to their death because of their pursuit.   Now even the enlightened often seek the near-real or the unreal – the media, the virtual reality, the video games, the re-tweets, the parody news, the cable news, the ads as content, the representation vs the actual, the press statements vs a conversation, a political party vs a candidate with a feet on the ground.   That Edward Snowden didn’t cause mass uproar is only one of the main signs of this parallax situation.

We can no longer see the real.  I’m not even sure I can or ever could.

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The Ridiculous Fear of Artificial Intelligence

Posted in computer science, Computers, philosophy, science, tagged , , , , on December 26, 2014| 5 Comments »

Recently there’s been hubbub around Artificial Intelligence (AI) and our impending doom if we don’t do something about it. While it’s fun to scare each other in that horror/sci-fi movie kind of way, there isn’t much substance behind the various arguments floating about regarding AI.

The fears people generally have are about humans losing control and more specifically about an unrestrained AI exacting its own self-derived and likely world-dominating objectives on humankind and the earth. These fears aren’t unjustified in a broad sense. They simply don’t apply to AI, either the artificial nor the intelligence part. More importantly, the fears have nothing to do with AI but instead with the age-old fear that humankind might not be the point of all existence.

We do not have a functional description of intelligence, period. We have no reliable way to measure it. Sure we have IQ or other tests of “ability” and “awareness” and the Turing Test but none of this actually tell you anything about “intelligence” or what might actually be going on with things we consider intelligent. We can measure whether some entity accomplishes a goal or performs some behavior reliably or demonstrates new behavior acquisition in response to changes in its environment. But none of those things establish intelligence and the presence of an intelligent being. They certainly don’t establish something as conscious or self-aware or moral or purpose driven nor any other reified concept we choose as a sign of intelligence.

The sophisticated fear peddlers will suggest of the above that it’s just semantics and we all know what we mean in a common sense way of what intelligence is. This is simply not true. We don’t. Colleges can’t fully count on the SAT, phrenology turned out to be horribly wrong, the Turing Test isn’t poor by definition, and so on. Go ahead, do your own research on this. No one can figure out just exactly what intelligence is and how to measure it. Is it being able to navigate a particular situation really well? Is it the ability to assess the environment? Is it massive pattern matching? Is it particular to our 5 senses? One sense? Is it brain based? Is it pure abstract thinking? What exactly does it mean to be intelligent?

It’s worse for the concept of artificial. It’s simply the wrong term. Artificial comes from very old ideas about what’s natural and what’s not natural. What’s real is what the earth itself does and not what is the work of some humankind process or a machine. Artificial things are made of metals and powered by electricity and coal and involve gears and circuits. Errrrr. Wait… many things the earth makes are made of metal and their locomotion comes from electricity or the burning of fuel, like coal. In fact, humans were made by the earth/universe. The division between artificial and natural is extremely blurry and is non-existent for a reified concept like intelligence. We don’t need the term artificial nor the term intelligence. We need to know what we’re REALLY dealing with.

So here we are… being pitched a fearsome monster of AI which has zero concrete basis, no way to observe it, and zero examples of its existence as described in most discussions. But still the monster is in the closet, right?

For the sake of argument (which is all these counter-factual future predictions of doom are) let’s assume there is some other entity/set of entities that is more “intelligent” that humans. We will need to get a sense of what that would look like.

Intelligence could be loosely described by the presence of complex, nuanced behaviors exhibited in response to the environment. Specifically an entity is observed as intelligent if it responds to changing conditions (internal as well as environmental) effectively. It must recognize changes, be able to adjust to those changes, and evaluate the consequences of made changes as well as any changes the environment has made in response.

What seems to be the basis of intelligent behavior (ability to respond to complex contingencies) in humans comes from the following:

  • Genetic and Epigenetic effects/artifacts evolved from millions of years of evolutionary experiments e.g. body structures, fixed action patterns
  • Sensory perception from 5 basic senses e.g. sight, touch, etc
  • Ability to pattern match in a complex nervous system e.g. neurological system, various memory systems
  • Cultural/Historical knowledge-base e.g. generationally selected knowledge trained early into a new human through child rearing, media and school
  • Plastic biochemical body capable of replication, regeneration and other anti-fragile effects e.g. stem cells, neuro-plasticity
  • more really complex stuff we have yet to uncover

Whatever AI we think spells our demise most likely will have something like above (something functionality equivalent). Right? No? While there is a possibility that there exists some completely different type of “intelligent” being what I’m suggesting is that the general form of what would be akin to “intelligent” would have these features:

  • Structure that has been selected for fitness over generations in response to its environment and overall survivability
  • Multi-modal Information perception/ingestion
  • advanced pattern recognition and storage
  • Knowledge reservoir (previously explored patterns) to pull from that reduces the need for a new entity to explore the space of all possibilities for survival
  • Resilient, plastic and replication mechanism capable of abstract replication and structural exploration

And distilling that down even more raw abstractions:

  • multi-modal information I/O
  • complex pattern matching
  • large memory
  • efficient replication with random mutation and mutation from selected patterns

What are the implementation limits of those abstracted properties? Turns out, we don’t know. It’s very murky. Consider a rock. Few of us would consider a plain old rock as intelligent. But why not? What doesn’t it fulfill in the above? Rocks adjust to their environment – think of erosion and the overall rock cycle. Their structures contain eons of selection and hold a great deal of information – think of how the environment is encoded in generational build of a rock, it’s crystal structure and so forth. Rocks have an efficient replication scheme – again, think of the rock cycle, the make of a rock being able to be adsorbed into other rocks and so forth.

Perhaps you don’t buy that a rock is intelligent. There’s nothing in my description of intelligence or the reified other definitions of intelligence that absolutely says a rock isn’t intelligent. It seems to fulfill on the basics… it just does so over timescales we’re not normally looking at. A rock won’t move through a maze very quickly or solve a math problem in our life time. I posit though it does do these things over long expanses of time. The network of rocks that form mountains and river beds and ocean bottoms and the entire earths crust and the planets of our solar system exhibit the abstract properties above quite adeptly. Again just at spacetime scales we’re not used to talking about in these types of discussions.

I could go on to give other examples such as ant colonies, mosquitoes, dolphins, pigs, The Internet and on and on. I doubt many of these examples will convince many people as the reified concept of “intelligence as something” is so deeply embedded in our anthropocentric world views.

And so I conclude those that are afraid and want others to be afraid of AI are actually afraid of things that have nothing to do with intelligence – that humans might not actually be the alpha and omega and that we are indeed very limited, fragile creatures.

The first fear from anthropocentrists is hard to dispel. It’s personal. All the science and evidence of observation of the night sky and the depths of our oceans makes it very clear humans are a small evolutionary branch of an unfathomably large universe. But to each person we all struggle with our view from within – the world literally, to ourselves, revolves around us. Our vantage point is such that from our 5 senses everything comes into us. Our first person view is such that we experience the world relative to ourselves. Our memories are made of our collections of first person experiences. Our body seems to respond from our own relation to the world.

And so the fear of an AI that could somehow spell our own “top of the food chain” position makes sense while still being unjustified. The reality is… humans aren’t the top of any chain. The sun will one day blow up and quite possibly take all humans out with it. Every day the earth spins and whirls and shakes with winds, heat, snow, quakes and without intention takes humans out in the process. And yet we don’t fear those realities like folks are trying to get us to fear AI. The key to this fear seems to be intention. We’re afraid of anything that has the INTENT, the purpose, the goal of taking humans and our own selves out the central position of existence.

And where, how, when, why would this intent arise? Out of what does any intent arise? Does this intent actually exist? We don’t really have any other data store to try to derive an answer to this other than humanity’s and our own personal experience and histories. Where has the intent to dominate or destroy come from in humans? Is that really our intent when we do it? Is it a universal intent of humankind? Is it something intrinsically tied to our make up and relation to the world? Even if the intent is present, what are its antecedents? And what of this intent? If the intent to dominate others arises in humans how are we justified in fearing its rise in other entities?

Intent is another reified concept. It doesn’t really exist or explain anything. It is a word that bottles up a bunch of different things going on. We have no more intention than the sun. We behave. We process patterns and make adjustments to our behavior – verbal and otherwise. Our strategies for survival change based on contingencies and sometimes our pattern recognition confuses information – we make false associations about what is threatening our existence or impeding our basic needs and wants (chasing things that activate our adrenaline and dopamine production…). It’s all very complex. Even our “intentions” are complex casual thickets (a concept I borrow from William Wimsatt).

In this complexity it’s all incredibly fragile. Fragile in the sense that our pattern recognition is easily fooled. Our memories are faulty. Our bodies get injured. Our brains are only so plastic. And the more or survival depends on rote knowledge the less plastic our overall machinery can be. Fragile, as refereed to here, is a very general concept about the stability of any given structure or pattern – belief system, behavioral schedule, biochemical relations, rock formations… any structure.

The fear involved in fragility and AI is really about less complex entities that are highly specialized in function, sensory scope and pattern matching ability. The monster presented is a machine or group of machines hell-bent on human subordination and destruction with the weaponry and no-fragility in its function or intent – it cannot be diverted by itself nor an outside force.
OR

We fear the accidental AI. The AI that accidentally happens into human destruction as a goal.

In both cases it is not intelligence we fear but instead simple exploitation of our own fragility.

And yet, as appealing as a fear this seems to be, it is also unjustified. There’s nothing that suggests even simple entities can carry out single “purpose” goals in a complex network. The complexity of the network itself prevents total exploitation by simple strategies.

Consider the wonderful game theoretic models that consider very simple games like the Prisoner’s Dilemma and how it turns out simple Tit-For-Tat exploitation models simply do work over the long-term as domination strategies. It turns out that even in very simple situations domination and total exploitation turns out to be a poor survival strategy for the exploiter.

So domination itself becomes nuanced strategy subject to all sorts of entropy, adjustments and complexity.

Maybe this isn’t a convincing rebuttal. After-all what about a simple idea that what if someone created really simplistic AI and armed it with nuclear warheads. Certainly even a clumsy system (at X time or under Y conditions, nuke everything) armed with nukes would have the capability to destroy us all. Even this isn’t a justified fear. In the first place, it wouldn’t be anything at all AI like in any sense if it were so simple. So fearing AI is a misplaced fear. The fear is more about the capability of a nuke. Insert bio-weapons or whatever else WMD one wants to consider. In all of those cases it has nothing to do with the wielder of the weapon and it’s intelligence and everything to do about the weapon.

However, even having a total fear of WMDs is myopic. We simply do not know what the fate of humankind would be nor of the earth should some entity launch all out strategies of mass destruction. Not that we should attempt to find out but it seems a tad presumptuous for anyone to pretend to be able to know what exactly would happen at the scales of total annihilation.

Our only possible data point for what total annihilation of a species on earth might be that of dinosaurs and other ancient species. We have many theories suggesting about their mass extinction from the earth, but we don’t really know, and this extinction took a very long time, was selective and didn’t end up in total annihilation (hell, and likely lead to humanity… so…) [ see this for some info: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cretaceous%E2%80%93Paleogene_extinction_event].

The universe resists simple explanations and that’s likely a function of the fact that the universe is not simple.

Complex behavior of adaptation and awareness is very unlikely to bring about total annihilation of humankind. A more likely threat is from simple things that accidentally exploit fragility (a comet striking the earth, blotting out the sun so that anything that requires the sun to live goes away). It’s possible we could invent and/or have invented simple machines that can create what amounts to a comet strike. And what’s there to fear even in that? Only if one believes that humanity, as it is, is the thing to protect is any fear about its annihilation by any means, “intelligent” or not, justified.

Protecting humanity as it is is a weak logical position as well because there’s really no way to draw a box around what humanity is and whether there’s some absolute end state. Worse than that, it strikes me personally, that people’s definition of humanity when promoting various fears of technology or the unknown is decidedly anti-aware and flies counter to a sense of exploration. That isn’t a logical position – it’s a choice. We can decide to explore or decide to stay as we are. (Maybe)

The argument here isn’t for an unrestrained pursuit of AI. Not at all. AI is simply a term and not something to chase or prevent unto itself – it literally, theoretically isn’t actually a thing. The argument here is for restraint through questioning and exploration. The argument is directly against fear at all. Fear is the twin of absolute belief – the confusion of pattern recognition spiraling into a steady state. A fear is only justified by an entity against an immutable pattern.

For those that fear AI, then you must, by extension, fear the evolution of human capability – and the capability of any animal or any network of rocks, etc. And the reality is… all those fears will never result in any preventative measures against destruction. Fear is stasis. Stasis typically leads to extinction – eons of evidence make this clear. Fear-peddlers are really promoting stasis and that’s the biggest threat of all.

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A Discussion On Truth

Posted in analysis of behavior, musings, science, tagged , , , on December 24, 2013| Leave a Comment »

There is truth.   Truth exists.  There is a truth to this existence, this universe.   We might lack the language or the pictorial tools or the right theory and models, but there is truth.

What is this truth?  what is truth?

Things exist, we exist, there is a speed of light, the square root of two is irrational, the halting problem is undecidable, there are abstract and real relations between abstract and real things.

The truth is a something that, yes, has a correspondence to the facts.  That is not the end of it though (despite the pragmatic claims of some!).   The truth has a correspondence to the facts because it is true!   The facts HAVE to line up against a truth.   The truth exists outside of specific events or objects.   A number has an existence, if even only as an idea, and it has relations to other things.  And the description of that number and those relations ARE truth.  A computer program has its truth whether you run the program or not.  If you were to run it it would halt or not halt, that potential is in the computer program from the beginning, it doesn’t arise from it’s execution.

On Proof and not Proof but Use

We can prove these truths and many more.  We can prove through English words or through mathematical symbolism or computer programs.   Our proofs, put into these formats, can and are often wrong and set to be revised over and over until there are no holes.   No matter how fragile a proof and the act of providing proof the truth is still not diminished.  It is still there, whether we know it or not and whether we can account for it or not.  And the truth begs proof.  It begs to be known in its fullness and to be trusted as truth to build up to other truths.

BUT!

Proof isn’t always possible – in fact we’ve learned from issues in computability and incompleteness – that complete provability of all truth is impossible.   This beautiful truth itself further ensures that the truth will always beckon us and will never be extinguished through an endless assault.  There is always more to learn.

The unprovable truths we can still know and use.  We can use them without knowing they are true.  We do this all the time, all day long.   How many of us know the truth of how physics works? or how are computers do what they do?   and does that prevent their use – the implementation of that truth towards more truth?

Why?

Why defend truth?  Why publish an essay exalting truth and championing the search for truth? Does the truth need such a defense?

Being creatures with intelligence – that is, senses and a nervous system capable of advanced pattern recognition – our ultimate survival depends on figuring out what’s true and what isn’t.   If too many vessels (people!) for the gene code chase falsehoods the gene code isn’t likely to survive too many generations.   Life, and existence itself, depends on the conflict between entropy and shape, chaos and order, stillness and motion, signal and noise.  The truth is the abstract idea that arises from this conflict and life is the real, tangible thing born from that truth.  We learn truths – which processing of this thing into that thing that keep us alive, we live to learn these things. In a completely entropic existence there is nothing.   Without motion there is nothing.   In total chaos there is nothing.   It is the slightest change towards shape, order and signal that we find the seeds of truth and the whole truth itself.  The shaping of entropy is the truth.   Life is embodiment of truth forming.

So I can’t avoid defending the truth.  I’m defending life.  My life.  In defending it, I’m living it.  And you, in whatever ways you live, are defending the truth and your relation to other things.  If I’m alive I must seek and promote truth.   While death isn’t false, chasing falsehood leads to death or rather non existence.   Could there ever be truth to a statement like “I live falsely” or “I sought the false.”   There’s nothing to seek.  Falsehood is easy, it’s everywhere.  It’s everything that isn’t the truth.  To seek it is to exert no effort (to never grow) and to never gain – falsity has no value.  Living means growing, growing requires effort, only the truth, learning of the truth demands effort.

How do we best express and ask about truth?

There’s a great deal of literature on the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics to describe the world.  There’s also a great deal of literature, and growing by the day, suggesting that mathematics isn’t the language of the way the universe works.   Both views I find to be rather limited.   Mathematics and doing math is about certain rigor in describing things and their relations.   It’s about forming and reforming ways to observe and question ideas, objectives, motion, features…. It’s about drawing a complete picture and all the reasons it should and shouldn’t be so.   Being this way, this wonderful thing we call mathematics, there is no way mathematics couldn’t be effective at truth expression.   Ok, for those that want to nit pick, I put “computation” in with mathematics.  Describing (writing) computer programs and talking about their features and functions and observing their behavior is doing math, it is mathematics.

Art has very similar qualities.   Art doesn’t reduce beyond what should be reduced.   It is the thing itself.  It asks questions by shifting perspectives and patterns.  It produces struggle.  Math and art are extremely hard to separate when done to their fullest.  Both completely ask the question and refuse to leave it at that.   Both have aspects of immediate impression but also have a very subtle slow reveal.  Both require both the artist and the audience, the mathematician and the student – there is a tangible, necessary part of the truth that comes directly from the interaction between the parties, not simply the artifacts or results themselves.

Other ways of expressing and thinking are valuable and interesting.  That is, biology and sociology and political science, and so on….. these are all extremely practical implementations or executions of sub aspects of the truth and truth expression.  They are NOT the most fundamental nor the most fruitful overall.   Practiced poorly and they lead to falsehoods or at best mild distractions from the truth.  Practiced well and they very much improve the mathematics and art we do.

What does any of this get us?  What value is there in this essay?

This I cannot claim anything more about than what I have above.   For example, I don’t know how to specifically tell someone that the truth of square root of 2 is irrational has x,y,z value to them.  It certainly led to a fruitful exploration and exposition of a great deal of logic and mathematical thinking that led to computation and and and.   But that doesn’t even come close to explaining value or what talking about its value today, in this essay, matters.

My only claim would be that truth matters and if there is any truth in this essay then this essay matters.  How that matter comes to fruition I don’t know.   That it comes to any more fruition than my pounding out this essay after synthesizing many a conversation and many books on the subject and writing some computer programs and doing math is probably just a very nice consequence.

The truth’s purpose is itself, that it is true.

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Response to IMPASSES “exploring critiques of the accountability process”

Posted in analysis of behavior, behavior, Book Reviews, brain, science, tagged , , on December 1, 2013| Leave a Comment »

The discussion of accountability and consent in anarchist and collective groups is very interesting to me. The groups are loosely organized groups that tend to impose few, if any, rigid structures and processes. Much of the point of these groups is to resist strict ways of being and supporting the safe exploration of ways to relate, live and engage. It is a set up that flat out resists explicit rule making. So when a group is confronted with an issue such as sexual assault it’s not entirely clear how the group and its members will and should respond. In a sense it provides a bit of a behavioral experimental playground much more so than more commonly organized groups of people.

In the specific case of sexual assault in these loosely connected groups the situation can be very complicated. The group doesn’t want to operate with well established rules that are marketed into its members. The group also doesn’t want to appeal to some moral or behavioral authority outside of the group. So there’s a real conflict in figuring out what exactly anyone is accountable for and what behavior to reinforce or extinguish. In some sense the lack of established processes and rules forces any conflict to always have reactive approaches rather than preventative. This doesn’t make it wrong or bad or ineffective. Consent and accountability isn’t necessarily dealt with well in a dogmatic rule enforcing set up. Often overly explicit ruled organizations create behavioral associations to following the rules rather than being attentive to others values, perspectives and personal comfort. So how should we think about consent? and respond to offenses?

The essay in IMPASSES “exploring critiques of the accountability process” mostly focuses on a synthesis and response to two pamphlets about accountability in anarchists groups. Presumably these pamphlets and others like them came about in response to specific challenges to accountability within the group. So I’m coming to my interpretation of the essay from both the context of the group’s possible issues and the general points the essay is trying to make.

The essay synthesis focuses a lot of energy on questioning the prevailing language used in accountability situations – that is situations where there needs to a response to some abuse. The author of the essay wants to resist any adherence to judicial or government like processes to organize people. I feel this is in general a useful intellectual approach. The fact is a resistance driven approach to living isn’t authentic if in the face of some adversity resistance is dropped and a person or group reverts to dogmatic or traditional approaches.

I believe the author is also justly critiquing these essays as giving in way too easily to common notions of victimhood and perpetrator and guilt and innocence. The world is vastly more complicated than most of our society’s media, processes and government admits.

The idea of consent is complex. And consent is a central component of identifying abuse and obviously possible healing behavior. Relating to each other in any open way requires a lot of listening and a lot patience. Often we don’t know our own rules and boundaries until they have been crossed. In some sense developing a sense of consent and vocabulary for communicating consent takes a willingness to approach and cross boundaries.

Values come about this way – one learns what behavior is reinforcing by behaving and experiencing consequences. The confusing part is that it can be extremely difficult to understand when a response to a behavior is a negative or positive reinforcer.

Even when rules are explicitly stated the ideas of consent and abuse are murky. The fact is whether we state rules or not we all are operating under a set of internal rules and values. These aren’t unchangeable laws but they are patterns of operating we’ve learned through consequences to our behavior. These rules can be hard to articulate but we all know when we’ve had one of our own rules broken.

The main challenge in any relationship is one of communication. The issue of consent or rather avoiding abuse is discovering rules before they are violated. The challenge the essay takes on is what should we do in reaction to an abuse. In particular, how should we handle things such to create more suffering by anyone in a process of healing and resolution. My interpretation of most common processes provided in schools, society, etc is that they are woefully simplistic and formulaic and focus far too much, as the author suggests, on defining things into victimhood and guilt. Typically in society once we can direct blame, accurately or not, our processes end. Unfortunately these approaches do not heal and increase perspective.

There’s is a ton of interesting research and literature on punishment and punitive approaches to society. The works of B.F. Skinner are worth a read. There’s also a great collection of essays under the book title “Beyond the Punitive Society” that are worth a browse. I point some of this material out because I think these materials get to the heart of consent and responsibility and accountability much more so than this essay in IMPASSES.

America is very much a punitive culture. From how we discipline our children to our judicial system to our religious views almost all processes we engage in for conflict resolution are punitive. It’s efficient, I suspect… Or it feels like it is. Oddly though it does not appear to be effective long term. Positive reinforcement (not the pop psyc positive mental attitude) is by far more effective. No person who violates a rule does so because they are evil or in isolation is a bad person. In this regard I side with the author of the essay in a search for better way to think and talk about accountability and consent and to not give into established approaches that don’t appear to be that effective in creating a safe, open culture.

I do hope the author(s) of the essay publish more about what they uncover. The world has far too few discussions about fundamental and powerful concepts like consent.

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Response to “On Questions and Answers” from IMPASSES

Posted in analysis of behavior, anthropology, science, tagged , , , , on October 27, 2013| 3 Comments »

The first essay presented in IMPASSES “On Questions and Answers: Some Notes on How To Do Ideas” offers a compelling call to reject all ideologies and to engage in “continued experiments in ways-of-life.” (page 23).

“Ideology is theory that has escaped study” (page 18) is an excellent working definition of ideology.   It specifically captures the main issue with any and all ideologies – a truth reduction.   Ideologies are not representative of how anything completely works except in only the most trivial of cases.   Figuring out what is a trivial case is much harder than one might think.  Take an example from mathematics – is arithmetic consistent?  Meaning is the whole of arithmetic free of any internal contradictions.   It’s still unresolved.   Yes, there are a couple of proofs of the consistency of arithmetic but they are complicated and not 100% accepted as final proof.  If we can’t be 100% sure of something as “simple” as arithmetic what hope is there of assurance of truth about concepts as vague as God, country, knowledge, etc.

As beings with finite resources (lives and means) we must take shortcuts aka make assumptions and have representations.   We wouldn’t get through a day in our life if we tried to work out the complete truth of everything around us.   Truth reductions are useful to survival in that we have to behave with imperfect information.   But truth reductions can also be extremely dangerous, particularly around complicated issues involving how we relate to the planet and each other.   We must always question and re-question what we’ve decided advertently or inadvertently as an acceptable truth reduction.  Not doing so may make it such that we miss key information about the world around us and do things that increase suffering and/or reduce the possibility of survival.   Consider that for thousands of years slavery was mostly unquestioned and that it took a massive effort in 20th century to educate the population that inhaling tobacco was generally bad for your health.

Our methods of questioning must also be critically analyzed.  For a stale approach to questioning may be as misleading as truth reductions.  A biased approach to asking questions, such as at a biased university, whose primary objective is to keep operating as a university and needs to “[produce] results that maintain the university.” (page 19)   Confirmation biases seep into a huge chunk of scientific research and policy creation (great paper here.).   Even when our research is relatively free of flaws we certainly are all guilty of not knowing what we don’t know and are likely not even asking the best questions in which to go research.   It seems like a worthwhile approach to “increase our capacity for experimentation.” (page 24).

The essay itself poses a great critical question about methods of study but also confuses the matter with a muddled discussion about Politics and dualism.  While certainly useful topics to question and discuss the details covered add little to the main point of the essay other than to be examples of reductionist thinking in a pool of infinite examples.   It actually does something I believe the author specifically would like not to do – it politicized the essay a little into a bit of anti-government reduction.   There’s simply no need to single out politics as any more reductive and misleading than religion or a billion other ideology laced approaches to going through life.

Math and science as tools comes up a couple of times in the essay and with the questions at the end of the essays.  Math and science are also under constant review for their usefulness in not reducing truth.  There certainly have been many periods in history where math and science have gone through shocks calling into question their validity as truth seeking approaches.  Mathematics, in particular, was shaken very much when Godel unveiled his incompleteness theorems.   Far from destroying mathematics as a useful paradigm to form worthwhile questions and work towards useful and true solutions “incompleteness” actually enriched mathematical thinking’s capacity to ask important questions.

The questions at the end of the essay are worth a response. and offer an opportunity to “test out” the ideas of the essay and my own ideations.

1) If theory is merely a tool, how do we prevent it from becoming an apparatus (of control, of power, of ideology) like math and science?

This question seems to misunderstand the main points of the article.   The question is reducing the concept of theory established in the essay.  Labeling theory with a word phrase like “merely a tool” suggests that there’s something more useful than a tool or that a tool is mere.   Theories help us establish models and experiments in which we can go falsify or confirm and refine.   The prevention the question asker seems to seek is some prescription for not letting theories turn into ideologies (truth reductions).  And it seems the essays answers that quite clearly – always study, always question.  In other words there isn’t a single prescription.   The prevention of reduction is about re-questioning in every changing ways.

Secondly math and science CAN be apparatuses of control but that doesn’t mean they are a priori.   Math and science are various questioning and experimentation approaches also subject to refinement.

2) Academic study (and perhaps this could be said of study more generally) is oftentimes just a regurgitation of previously thought-up ideals.  Is novelty as a result of study necessary or is fluctuating between already-done ideas enough?

Again here the questioner assumes too much.   Where is the source of this novelty?   All thoughts and knowledge are the evolution of previous thoughts and/or responses to the environment.   The novelty suggested is emergent over time through the transmission and mutation of information.   It’s a non question when thought/ideas are viewed that way and it’s a confusing question period without a definition of thought and ideas.

3) Is study solitary or communal? What is the relation between “spreading anarchy” and others participating in critical studying?  Is there a set of values being set up around study whereby those who don’t participate in it (or participate in the “proper” ways) are seen as less credible, or is the questioning of this itself falling into the trap of movement-building?

This is a juicy set of questions.  Study is both a solitary and communal (and environmental activity).   We are all people within a world of other people.  I think it would be useless contradiction to define proper way of studying.   There are an infinite number of ways to explore this world.   The end goal being finding ever changing experiments on ways-to-live.   Particular methods of study might be viewed as inconsistent or improper within their method but it doesn’t invalidate them in the general idea of “studying”.   Fiction is a useful critical synthesis of the world.  So is non fiction and a painting or a music piece or a poem or science experiment.   The keys seem to be participation and being ever critical.  The more variation the more possible a real exploration of possibilities.

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