January 2004 - Posts
with all this talk about mad cow disease and asian bird flu, i wonder if i should be eating buffalo wings.
i don't know what's worse, the virus itself, or all the rss and email spam reporting on it. it's a dos attack on my senses. total bandwidth usage attributable to these "attacks" is probably much higher for the voluntary preventative measures and reporting going on.
besides, i was thinking of running _this_ virus intentionally ;-) (dos on sco.com). is it illegal to become intentionally infected ? i got one in the mail yesterday, got categorized as spam.
space simulations, critical masses of population, peformance enhancements - kind of pulling a few threads together here...
how much of actual reality - and the attendant resources - do we actually need to partake of, if we become satisified with a virtual presence indistinguishable - and potentially far better - than “reality” ? if people are more and more immersed in their chosen virtual environments, why should they consume - and pay for - all the corporeal necessities that are becoming ever less relevant ?
people could opt out of the physical world, the contract being a sustainment of basic physical processes allowing extended life (both physically and virtually), in return for a nominal maintenance fee and agreement to abdicate the physical world otherwise. i suppose such a timothy leary mode (“turn on, tune in, drop out“) could be imposed as well as voluntary.
some wild things could be done in the sim worlds. without the constraints of physical reality (unless one wanted to engage in them), where would our minds lead us ? remember, constraints define as well as limit. would the participants dissolve into mental formlessness ? they might, in the perspective of those “outside”. and how would control of the sim parameters be allocated ? what about individual sim-to-sim interactions ? i suspect that initially fluid consensus virtualities would be created. but how much of our desire for confrmity catch up with us ? in other words, even in a limitless world, there would be those who would both impose and accept limits - as if they were immutable laws.
no, i didn't derive this from the matrix, although it is very similar in some ways, and understandably so. how many distinguishable uncontrained realities do you think there can be ? only one, of course. it is the constraints that create diversity, not the other way around. so no, this isn't matirx. and i'm envisioning something we choose to do, not something imposed by a malevolent external force with some evil purpose. i'm thinking of something, that like our realities today, self-organizes. the demons, if any, live within.
and, y'know, this is not so different than the world we live in today, in many ways. we create and accept illusions of limits and freedoms all the time. so perhaps this virtual universe is more instructive that it might seem at first glance. a mental experiment within which we can test and compare what is truly real, and what is imposed by our will - or lack of it.
i suspect that, at an extreme, a mental analog of the fermi paradox would eventually occur. different individual and group/consensus realities would quickly become disjoint, without there being some contraint to force them into proximity (a form of externally imposed consensus reality).
anyway, no overpopulation worries until some extreme is reached. one doesn't need much more than a brain-sized receptacle, and a minimum of support equipment, all shared, of course. does this make possible an intellectual critical mass necessary for human advancement that is less than the physical critical mass that causes a collapse of infrastructure ? is there still a need for a physical critical mass as well, the one needed for the production of finished products from raw materials ? probably reduces it quite a bit, but will there be enough manpower left to create things like starships, which is still a necessity to long term “human” survival - ?
“human” ? neither group would probably qualify as such at that point, neither the brains nor the brawn. they would both be dependent slaves to each other, a divergent evolution dimorphic species, locked together in a struggle for survival against the dangers of confinement to single planet, system, galaxy, and so on.
i suppose that even the corporeal half would get their chance to become immortal. by the time of physical death, however remote that may be by that time, their brains could be decanted to join the virtual masses. perhaps even brains would become unecessary after a time. although one cannot take “consciousness” and transfer it as if it were a bottle-able essence, since it's merely a neural process, one can readily imagine that this process might extend itself farther and farther into the hardware of the sim system. such a transfer might be detectable by the brain going into a permanent “neutral” mode, if it ever does happen. that would require effective machinery (software/hardware) to support the same consciousness process. each mind would migrate in its own time. it's not clear that the end of this process would be distinguishable from corporeal death. nor is it clear that such migrated minds would have anything in common with physical reality any longer. could they relate ? could they even be considered to exist ? how - and why - would communications occur ? perhaps a steady stream of new, non-migrated minds would need to be integrated for some links to remain.
but then, physical manifestations to control the environment would eventually be createable at will, which could be controlled by the minds in the machine. no need for the old primates by that point. in fact, the skills, or even awareness of something called “physical reality”, might be considered an esoteric specialty, perhaps even a forbidden concept. after long eons of virtualness, eventually it may become fashionable - or necessary - to invent a way to migrate into this novelty, the physical universe.
let there be light.
- does cannibalism fit on the atkins diet ?
- what happens with a viagra overdose ?
there was a news story today about some 92 year old who was sentenced to 12 years in prison for robbing a bank. well, ok, it was his third or fourth such offense since he was 80. on the other hand, he didn't really force the issue; apparently the teller asked him if he was joking, and when he said no, she gave him the $1600. should robbery require that some sort of resistance ocurred ? or at least the lack of same should be a mitigating factor. well, sort of. otherwise rape could be claimed if someone “insists”. of course, the degree of “insistence” is important.
ok, never mind the defnition of crime, lots of worms in that can; what about the meting out of punishment ? when sentencing guidelines were created, i'm sure there was some sort of implicit or explicit assumption about the proportionality of the punishment. when one speaks of prison terms, is it the absolute length of incarceration that matters, or a relative amount ? consider: if we had an average life expectancy of 1000 years, would, say, 25 years seem to be a fair sentence for murder ? if not, and one expects the sentence to be proportional to one's future life expectancy, what does that say about a 12 year sentence for a 92 year old ? on the other hand, if the 12 years might be seen as one-fifth the future life expectancy of an 18 year old (the age of majority - or should the starting point be some later average age of crime commission ?), then the future life expectancy of a 92 year old, less than a year, means he'd get a month or two. then he's out doing it again ? of course, some sort of recidivism provision might prevent that.
leading to some sort of consideration that the likelihood of future criminal acts might need to be taken into account. well, of course. and, well, are older folks more set in their ways ? there is much evidence to support reasoning that change becomes progressively more difficult as we age.
of course, this ignores the whole question of determination of responsibility, and then the purpose of sentencing, in the first place. and these in turn depend critically on one's world view (well, the consensus view of a society, anyway). and these days, most world views are deeply rooted in irrational beliefs.
anyway, just wondering if there should be some sort of actuarial consideration mandated in our criminal legal system.
have you heard of the big anti-globalization gathering in india ? ok, fine - let's send everyone home and take our off-shored outsourcing dollars back. oh, they meant culture ? i see - they want global money sent to them, but they don't actually want to participate otherwise. so, well, do they want our goods or not ? if not, what are they going to do with all that money ? oh, build their own stuff ? then won't there be enough jobs over there already ? they won't need our money or our jobs. (“our“ ?)
oh wait, maybe they're _for_ globalization. ok, does that mean i'm allowed to move over there and take jobs from them ? no ? well, ok, can i work here for the same pay and buy the same basket of goods ? no ? then what are we talking about here ?
oh, _that_ - you mean the continuing concentration of wealth by top executives ? but it's being sent overseas too, right ? doesn't it help those economies ? but those economies are already polarized far worse than we are. do you really think those funds are reaching the have-nots ?
still believe in “trickle-down” economics ? so you think your well being depends on the consumption habits of the wealthy ? do you think that's a _good_ thing ? so we should socialize, right ? sure, lowest common denominator for everyone. no ? what about elimination of greed ? no ? but we're civilized, right ? human ? something other than the animal and inanimate worlds ?
it's not confusion you're experiencing, it's denial.
what's “the answer” ? there is no “answer”. the first step is to reject your illusion of consciousness and identity, and then act. or not.
all is illusion. we are masters of that, no ? well, actually, no. we let our current illusions get in the way of establishing new ones, maybe ones that are given to us from someone else. so what is the purpose of deconstructing the illusions we have, of acknowledging the mechanistic consistency of underlying “is“-ness ? perhaps only to allow us new illusions. but what wonderful illusions we can make ! oneness with totality, we are already there, we understand all. what need for preservation of a species beyond a minimum healthy gene pool ? why “preserve” at all ? or go the other way, become an ever growing seething mass, some uber-organism with illusions of its own. let us define separateness, and fight for unity, define oneness, and fight for identity.
que sera, sera. we do not choose. all is change and illusion. accept that, and all our everyday silliness becomes clear. stand aside from nationalist concerns, for one. survive, or die, they are the same. likely to lead to one's quick dissolution, but no matter. the truest “consciousness” is denial of itself. so i will follow my path, as all of us cannot help but do.
mumbo-jumbo, eh ? but to get “answers”, it makes more sense to deal with the deepest reality we can find. like medicine, symptoms can be treated, or the underlying disease, or prevention of even that, and ever further up the causal chain. so to try and attempt to manipulate events - our lives, our world - at face value is to accept failure. we even kid ourselves about the results of our attempts, so we cannot accurately judge. the trick is not to be balked by complexity, today's analog of the unknown forces in the universe that caused our ancestors to invent gods and morals. science “succeeds” where it has because of its hyper simplicity, so far. but we still create myths at the edges of our reason, no different than ever. no doubt prehistoric gods seemed just as reasonable to our forebears as our enlightened rationalism does to us today, with its concepts of freedom and consciousness and so on.
so, what to do, what to do... all i've really said is that i have no idea in a conventional sense, so maybe it's time to look at things from an unconventional perspective. with all the apparent contradictions and paradoxes in the way things stand today, perhaps a higher level of abstraction is called for; think godelian incompleteness. then look for assumptions and constraints, especially implicit ones, and see what happens when we breach them.
uh, “think outside the box” ;-)
just playing around with various flight sims lately, mostly wwii combat stuff that at some point has been massively multiplayer. aces high is a current one; air warriors was an early example that actually started in 1987 and continued until 2001. anyway, it occurred to me to revisit a space flight simulator that i ran across last spring but never really did anything about. i was actually looking for something with an interstellar flavor, but those only seem to come in game-flavors with much less physical realism (but apparently still very good, from what i've read). it makes sense that the interstellar types aren't as mature yet, for all kinds of reasons.
but what occurred to me was that the orbiter sim had no multiplayer aspect. now, how cool would that be, to have bunches of people flitting around in a simulated solar system ? i mean it's fun to a certain extent to just do the flying and playing with orbital mechanics, but it is bound to get kind of lonely out there. such a massively multiplayer application in this case could include all kinds of stuff, from mudding to trade to warfare to exploration - even extension to interstellar stuff and beyond.
which brings me to my point - even the local stellar neighborhood is a vast and empty space. how really likely is it for accidental encounters to occur between players who otherwise were unaware of each other ? and this is even unlikelier yet when more extended spacetime distances are considered. without prearranged communication, the probability is likely zero. fermi asked, “if they are out there, where are they ?”. in this case, we go out, and probably won't even find ourselves !
of course, given that we have an implicit common background which will in effect provide a type of communication, we would find ourselves at whatever hotspots are currently in vogue - like mars, etc. but in a very short time one would expect the commonality to dissipate with the great number of choices available. of course, now i'm talking more about what the reality would be, not simply a sim where our underlying earthboundness is always there.
there's a similar type of consideration sometimes addressed in time travel fiction, called variously the “hitler” or “jesus” effect - if there's time travel, wouldn't we expect a flood of travelers to show up at “major events” ? however, what i haven't seen considered, probably because it takes all the fun out of things, is that deep time perspective will change awareness and judgement of what is considered “major”. beyond a few thousand years, we have no knowledge of events which may have been considered earthshaking by generations of our ancestors. all kinds of biases enter here.
minski wrote an essay “communicating with alien intelligence”, in which he assumes the problem is surmountable due to the fact that all organisms will have common needs, motivations, etc. i think he is wrong there. and landis considered the likelihood of alien contact given a percolation model of expansion. i think he errs there as well; i expect over the timeframes under consideration, that one quickly arrives at a sparsely populated region with no communication, and therefor inhabitants who all think they are the only ones, with all the accompanying ramifications.
ie - even the colonizing species themselves experience the fermi paradox with respect to their parents !
which might seem to lend credence to the “seeded life” argument. but that presumes that there is proof of some other life to start with, of which there is none to date.
so all i'm really saying, is that we could actually run such an experiment using massively multiplayer interstellar colonization sims, even to the point of randomly seeding the universe with life, and then seeing if any contact occurs, etc. and probably make some money in the process ;-)
a "discussion":
craig: http://www.scifi.com/sfw/current/books2.html (yeah, like many of us these days, craig speaks in url's sometimes)
me: does it seem science fiction is getting better recently ? i wonder why. and i wonder what exactly i mean by "better".
craig: Yeah it has. To me "better" means how many more times did I go "wow" to myself when reading.
me (in a classically disproportionate response):
that's one way of looking at it. i'm trying to imagine what my reaction might have been if i had come across some of today's stories thirty years ago.
i've been toying with a thesis for a while, that scifi has been more and more constrained over the years, as the wildest flights of fancy have needed to be reined in as we begin to shade in the outer limits of reality. yet that still leaves a lot of room for that "wow" effect you mentioned. that's where the fractal nature of our perceptions of the universe come in, i think. with ever finer distinctions being made, the depth never seems to change.
the other effect i've tried to imagine over the years, is what would science fiction be to a character in one of our novels, then repeat that process. it seems to me that we quickly move out of the realm of the unimaginable and/or incomprehensible. and perhaps that would have been the reaction had one of today's stories appeared in the 1930's or 40's. perhaps this is the reverse fractal effect.
it's interesting to try and stand outside such subjective matters and maintain a more or less steady (relatively linear ?) perspective. that may at least be a valid exercise when attempting to make comparisons across different "eras", while the normal (internal fractal) subjective perspective remains valid for dealing with daily life (not necessarily so, but in terms of relating to the commonly held notion of reality). one thing that i've noticed is that i've been making finer and finer distinctions myself as i get older, learn more, etc. i think this is a common feature of aging, and what sometimes has been referred to (mistaken?) as "wisdom". of course, this process prcoeeds at different paces in all of us.
this is sometimes what makes cross-generational communications so tough. and it's interesting that there is a neural developmental analog to this process - or it may even be at the root of its outward appearance. the brain, as it matures, goes through a continuous pruning process as it builds knowledge. this is especially pronounced in the first few years of life, but continues through all ages. accompanying this physiological change are changes in the learning process. a child learns more generalized concepts in he beginning, including, for example, fears. later in life the learning process becomes much more specific. this is why dysfunctional fears/anxieties ("neuroses"), for one thing, are difficult to extinguish later in life. the earlier, generalized learning is asymmetric with the later, relatively specific learning. to attack the general, many specifics must be addressed. the same considerations explain our perceptions of "character", one's ability to change, etc.
but this still does not explain, to me, why scifi seems "better" now. so i think there is something more inherent to the process going on, and i think that there are simply better authors doing better work now than there was for a few decades. and it seems most of these new and better authors are scientists, which seems more representative of the golden age of scifi. and this, in turn, is likely more representative of what i personally like about the genre, although it does seem closer to its original definition, however ambiguous that may have seemed over the years.
so i wonder about the flip side - are there people out there longing for the softer "science" and more mundane (commercial) version of what masqueraded as scifi that seemed to swamp the genre in the 70's through the 90's ? perhaps what happened is that those stories got folded into the mainstream of fiction when so many contemporary authors began working elements of the fantastic into their primarily non-science focused stories. so, perhaps, scifi may not be any better, it may just be that things are being binned differently.
it's that classic philosophical question again, perception vs. reality.
so bush wants to go to mars, eh ? let's send him on the next british effort ;-) what sucks, though, is that he wants to use 92% of nasa's current budget to do it. that's a lot of abandoned projects. and that's nowhere near the money it would take, so all it accomplishes is a lot of failed programs. he could very well end up destroying the us space program entirely.
ok, take the us military budget, and proposed wars and healthcare and education bucks, etc. - end up with a few trillion, and a lot of manpower. now multiply that by a factor of 10 if the rest of the world gets involved at the same level. well, has to be restricted to military funds, since that's the only "surplus" source. of course, that means all the military industrial complex follows as well. now _that's_ the kind of effort and commitment we should be making. but hell - we just cancelled the sst program - no profit. does war make a profit ? apparently it does for _someone_. with our tax dollars, no less.
the problem is in trying to sustain an effort like that, with the latest round of economic globalization, and more to come, that will eventually degrade the tax base. the re-concentration of weatlh will do that. so we may yet get off the planet, on the backs of the masses who will get left in the dust of the rich.
it's a multidimensional pyramid thing, needs a _huge_ level of base mass to support such a pinnacle effort. it's sort of like making a multistage rocket. there's also a critical mass of resources and population necessary as well.
which is interesting, because for other purposes we are already overloaded with population. from this perspective, there is another kind of critical mass - the kind that when reached will cause a chain reaction catastrophic implosion. so, what i wonder, is whether the "good" critical mass is smaller than the "bad" one. if not, then we ain't going nowhere.
the other option is to somehow reduce the masses involved, but i'm not sure how that could happen. is automation the answer ? again with the rocket analog, it's like having higher energy density fuel.
regardless of practicality, any such mass will by definition be supported on a huge majority of the human population living in impoverished circumstances. until globalization, such effects were geographically constrained, but this will not continue to be the case in the long run. this will be the legacy of things like "outsourcing". the pyramid is being made squatter in this way. i suspect humanity will collapse under its own weight before anything lasting can be accomplished.
i guess one more perspective is the possibility that society as a whole can somehow "levitate" itself into ever higher levels - standards of living, technological accomplishments, etc. i'm not sure this is a reality. i think some people look at some particular upper level, while missing the presence and operation of the supporting layers, and then declare that this "levitation" is possible. any truly levitating socio-economic-techno-system assumes that a completely closed system can be created. well, perhaps with some minor external inputs.
perhaps this is possible. but any such system is inherently unstable. the lack of substantial supporting systems means that graceful failover or degradation to older processes are difficult at best. but this also could be worked into the master plan.
hmmm......
excerpted from a recent article somewhere:
"Karla Zimmerman, who wrote the Great Lakes section of the upcoming edition of Lonely Planet's U.S. guide, said Detroit's "post-apocalyptic feel," combined with several renowned museums, make it a fascinating destination.
"If you're from a different country and you're trying to get a feel for what the USA is like, Detroit is kind of a nice bite," she said.
On the Net:
Detroit Metro Convention & Visitors Bureau http://www.visitdetroit.com
The Fabulous Ruins of Detroit http://www.detroityes.com"
just makes ya wanna tap the heels of your ruby slippers together three times. "there's no place lke home, ...". actually, it would be interesting for them to get the twentieth century worked into the detroit historical museum's "streets of old detroit" exhibit, warts and all. that would be cool.
it's funny how people fear empty streets. it's like, hello, those are the _safest_ times. and a downtown does not the city make. nor poor statistics. the metropolitan area is huge, and it really is a dynamic place. the biggest problem for me around there is it's relative geographic paucity, way too much flat land. but that only goes for the immediate area, and lots of lakes and rolling hills cover the rest of the state.
well, not a problem; i always regret it when favorite places get "discovered". pretend i didn't post this.
been reading Reason: Cybergreen: Bruce Sterling on media, design, fiction, and the future. at one point he talks about “command of the facts”, and opines that the mere ability to find them on the internet is not the same thing. i'm not sure that is really the case, although i will admit that this represents the bias in current culture. i think he actually had the true answer when he mentions the emergence of a “new literacy”, the ability to quickly find _relevant_ information. in my own experience, i liken this to having “a mind like a thesaurus”, although, as the article mentions, implicit boolean abilities are valuable as well. so, is “encyclopedic knowledge” on the way out, to be replaced by something even more abstract than indexing ? i say _more_ abstract, since we don't need to have incorporated the indices, we merely need to know where to find them. of course, we also need to be able to infer “meaning” from what we find, and “meaning”, particularly in this sense, is a comfort in competent use and relation to other forms of knowledge, a familiarity. [this assumes a mechanistic definition of mind where commonly conceived mystical qualities (eg, consciousness) are acknowledged as mere illusions.]
he also describes our growing “intimate relationship with objects” as performance enhancements. for me, instead of erecting an artificial “self/other” barrier, it is more important to recognize the reality of an extended mind/body - we always have been an inseparable part of the world around us, and now the linkages are being made explicitly. this is more akin to eastern (synthetic?) philosophy, although the western (analytic?) approach does have its uses.
so i would argue that, far from handicapping us, by adapting our minds (and bodies) to more and more abstract tasks, those not yet automated, and integrating them seamlessly, we have gained far more than we have lost, if indeed we have lost anything at all. but there is a long road between the here/now and this vision. part of this has to do with the level reliability and persistence of the enhancement environment. as it stands, the connections are still very tenuous.
this applies to physical extension as well, which, ultimately, is what “mind” is in the end anyway. taking recent interplanetary missions as an example, we have extended our reach quite far (relatively speaking). but what of “personal” experience of such things ? is there real need for actual physical presence ? even as things stand now, no matter where we are, we still carry the same set of basic equipment with us no matter where we go. of course, there is an “emotional” component to this as well, but that returns us to the cultural bias mentioned above. and this same remote presence consideration applies to time as well as space, along the lines of memory “implants” (think “total recall”, etc.).
so, for the immediate future, as long as we “feel” present (in terms of mental and physical connection), we are. this means advancement in interfaces for all senses, the classic five, and also an extended proprioception, etc.. while in the far future, i would hope that we will have evolved out of our self/other concerns and illusory views of reality enough so that “personal experience” is probably a meaningless forgotten concept - one/all will “experience” one/all simultaneously. (it's also interesting to think of relativistic effects in this context.)
did someone say “evil borg” ? ;-) anyway, a very good article, for lots of reasons. go read it.