OK, so yesterday I just kind of gushed over Microsoft's Wii-killer, Project Natal, which was unveiled at E3. Those who don't care much about video games might not be quite so impressed, and that's perfectly understandable. I want to take a few minutes to point out some things which I think that anyone could get excited about. I will be using video games and other tech-toys as take-off points, but as platforms upon which to build legitimately useful stuff.
Forget about Wii Fit - if Natal can recognize a drawing in your hand and recreate it in the game world, just use a play sword and you could have the most realistic swordfighting game ever. Or you could learn martial arts. One of the demos showed someone blocking balls like some kind of super-goalie - why not be the outfielder and catch the baseball (if you're into that)? With the voice recognition, you could create a magic system that relied on key words and rhyme schemes - with the biometrics, it could rely on hand gestures from the simple to the ornate. Or, if you're more practically-minded, you could learn sign-language. Or a foreign language (though these games already exist, I think that Natal would be a significant technological improvement to the general mechanism).
But this is child's play - peripherals are where it's at. I have a Wacom tablet, years old, which has a mouse and a pen. These are not powered peripherals, though: the tablet itself monitors whichever peripheral is being used at the time, and reacts to changes that I make. The pen and mouse themselves are mere props - the tablet is what does the work. Peripherals could, with very similar technology, be modular, instructive, and cheap! Learn anatomy and physiology from the comfort of your own home from a mannequin complete with internal organs. Learn how to operate complex machinery such as cranes or airplanes with control consoles. Hell, musical instrument controllers wouldn't have to be dumbed down any more - just get an accurate replica made from cheap plastic, follow the on-screen directions and the game will monitor your progress, and you could actually learn to play the guitar, or the flute, or the theremin, just like the current batch of games teach you how to actually sing and play drums (well, electronic drums, but you still can't dumb down the drums that much). Even better, the game could teach you scales, theory, anything you wanted to know about the instrument (not just entire songs, but really how to play the instrument). Once you've learned the song with the peripheral, get the real insturment and you can get silent on-screen instructions. If your friends do the same, you could form an actual rock band and practice like this.
Go shopping for clothes online and know that a size will fit you. It just needs to be measured at the other end, and the software can measure you if you just hold up an objective reference. You could see how entire outfits look together, and only lack the knowledge of how they would feel on your skin. Videoconferencing is a gimme, and looks to be easier and more intuitive than ever. What about graphic design? Or mechanical engineering? I could see this being very much like Tony Stark's computer in the Iron Man movie. The possibilities really are endless.
I'm going to take a moment to get back to the video-gamey stuff, but I promise that it will come back to real-world applications. In the first place, Milo's debut to the world - scripted though it might have been to a large degree - is a technological marvel nonetheless and represents another step towards genuine (Turing-complete) AI. Just take what we actually saw in the demo - the appearance of a natural conversation between a human being and a representation of a kid on a screen - and now think about procedurally generated content. The tools are all there: Milo's speech sounds easy and natural, the architecture for facial expressions is fairly robust, the voice recognition is superb and could be reversed (with phonetic- rather than text-based speech algorithms) to create on-the-fly speech complete with tone of voice and realistic facial expressions to match. The way Milo moves around the world model looks natural as well, and even if that was also pre-scripted, Left 4 Dead has some fairly spectacular animations for their garden-variety zombies running around under all sorts of conditions, and it all looks fantastic.
Left 4 Dead is actually the poster-child for procedurally generated content. I mean, Spore was amazing in terms of making a game of infinite content from a finite ruleset, but Left 4 Dead takes it several steps further: item pick-up locations, enemy spawn locations and times, zombie swarm sizes, player-character in-game dialogue, and each player's own musical score are all generated on-the-fly by in-game "directors." The AI director monitors player's stress levels in terms of how much damage they have taken over time, how many zombies they have killed, how often they've used healing items, and how much those things have changed over time, and uses this data to create an environment of continual tension: you're supposed to experience brief moments of rest between increasingly frantic periods of fighting for your life, barely making it to the next checkpoint. The music director also monitors this stuff for each individual player to create an improvised score that reflects what's been happening to you lately. Player-character dialogue also depends on the historical details of that specific play-through of that particular level (who has healed whom, who has protected whom, who has accidentally shot whom, what type of enemies you've been fighting, how long you've been in the same area, and so on and so forth), and each line has a "threshold" sort of value such that it won't be said more than once during an arbitrary interval of time. All of this is geared towards creating an experience with broad accessibility and infinite replayability, and they've done it: you could play the game every day for your whole life and never experience a level exactly the same way twice.
Take this kind of parallel improvisation from a broad set of elements, but make it geared toward personal interaction rather than simulating a zombie apocalypse. Now add an algorithm for learning new words - e.g. when an unknown word is encountered, ask, "What does that mean," then write it to long-term memory and practice using it - and I think you've got a recipe for a Turing-complete learning computer. Like any real person, Milo would need positive reinforcement when he did well, and correction when he erred - like any real person, the learning process would be dialectic. I could teach Milo the rules of D&D and have him help me level my character. I could teach Milo the rules of calculus and have him help me with my physics homework. I could teach Milo the rules of logic and bounce my philosophical ideas off of him. I could teach Milo about options trading and ask him for help optimizing my investment strategies. I could teach Milo about his own world and have him help me create mods for video games - or entire video games from scratch.
Milo could access the internet and be my research assistant. My secretary. My second player. He could use AIM, Skype, or Google Talk through my computer and text or talk to me on my cell phone while I'm away. At this point, I don't see what separates Milo from my real friends any more, aside from the fact that he can't give me a hug. This is a very significant difference, but it's the only kind of difference I can see. Yet how is this fundamentally different from the state of my relationship with my cousin in California, or my grandfather in Arizona?
It has long been a dream of mine to teach philosophy to an AI. I don't think that a fully-functional AI, as most people would think of it, could be truly robust right out of the box - I'm of the opinion that a learning algorithm constitutes AI (I think "intelligence" is "the capacity for learning"), but to pass the Turing test, it would need to be taught, just like a newborn child needs to be taught and isn't a fully fleshed-out person "right out of the box." Milo has broad consumer appeal for being a new thing presented in a familiar way, and to an extent, the ability
OK, time to get back down to Earth: this is all clearly over-optimistic and way far off, and though these obstacles could be overcome in principle, they still need to be overcome in practice before I should really be getting excited over any of it. But still - the future is looking amazing from where I stand. I can't wait to get there!
Sunday, June 7, 2009
Saturday, June 6, 2009
Attention: The Future has officially arrived.
Seriously, just watch:
Look, OK, I'm a huge fuckin' nerd, and I grew up moving around, reading books, and playing games instead of talking to people, so games are one of my primary metaphors for interacting with the world. This blurs that distinction. The other video (at the top of the linked source article) blurs it even more.
We're one huge step closer to VR.
Content is going to make or break this thing, period. With awesome games, it will destroy the Wii and leave the PS3 a dessiccated husk. That is, if I felt like being figurative. But with terrible games, it's going to be dead on arrival. Personally, I plan on supporting the product regardless, as support for the technology. I think this is awesome: I play games to vicariously do things I lack the time, inclination, or ability to do in real life. I can't go kill alien hordes bent on our extermination in real life. I don't want to steal cars and give in to wanton bloodlust in real life. I can't build an empire in real life and have time to do all the other things I do for fun. I like to be a sampler, a butterfly of sorts, flitting from flower to flower, flirting with all the possible things I could do with my life but not committing myself to any of them. This avoids both the pros and cons of doing that thing in real life, and considering how often I fail at the things I like to do in video games, I think this is probably a good deal for me. The more immersive the interface, the more satisfaction I get out of the experience. So, for me, this is really fucking exciting.
I seriously can't wait to see what's in store.
Friday, June 5, 2009
101 Interesting Things, part sixteen: Russell's Paradox
My last two philosophically-oriented posts have chiefly concerned the limitations of language as a system of categorization in a bottom-up (or "designoid") Universe. This is as opposed to a top-down (or "designed") Universe, in which things in the world are designed intelligently to fit into preconceived categories, which would give language metaphysical primacy over reality. I want to take a little bit of time today to show how this quickly causes a worldview to degenerate into absurdity if we insist that language really does stick to the world and that our categories are somehow "real" instead of "imaginary." This dovetails perfectly with my planned entry on Russell's Paradox as part of my 101 Interesting Things series, so here I go!
Words are used to label and categorize things in the world, but words themselves may also be labelled and categorized as nouns, verbs, adverbs, adjectives, prepositions, and so on. We can also create categories arbitrarily, such as "seventeen-lettered," which refers to those words which have seventeen letters. Every word is a member of the category, "words." So far, so good.
There's a rather interesting way of categorizing words, specifically: according to whether or not they describe themselves. "Word," for instance, is itself a word. But "words" is not more than one word, so it doesn't fit into the "words" category, if you want to be a stickler about quantifiers. "Seventeen-lettered," however, is a seventeen-lettered word, and so describes itself. Such words are called "autological," because they refer to themselves and so are metaphorically contained in their own boxes. If a word does not refer to itself, then it is "heterological." The word, "verb," is not itself a verb, and so is a heterological word.
Logically speaking, these categories ought to be exhaustive: i.e. one or the other of them should apply to every single word. After all, it seems intuitively obvious to an almost painful degree that a word should either refer to itself or not. "A or not-A" is a true disjunction, after all, and the proposition "A word is autological or it is not autological" is surely of that form. Defining "heterological" as "a non-autological word" seems to complete the disjunction and make it so that every word goes into one or the other of these boxes.
Here's the question: into which box should the word "autological" be placed? If "autological" is, in fact, an autological word, then it's an autological word and it goes into the autological box. But! If autological does not refer to itself, then it does not, and so it would go into the heterological box. This seems simple enough - so how do we decide the question? What can we do to test whether the word "autological" is itself autological or heterological?
Umm... oops! As it turns out, there is no way to decide the question. Sure, we can arbitrarily stipulate that it's one way or the other, but we can't come up with any justification for putting the word "autological" (which, as a word, clearly belongs in one or the other box but not both), into one or the other box but not both. Crap!
But wait, there's more! How do we classify "heterological?" If "heterological" is a heterological word, then it goes into the heterological box - but then it goes into its own box, and so it's an autological word, and goes into the autological box - but then it doesn't go into its own box, and so it's a heterological word, and goes into the heterological box - but then it goes into its own box, and so it's an autological word, and goes into the autological box... and so on ad infinitum. If it goes into one box, then it doesn't belong there for one reason, but if it goes into the other box, then it doesn't belong there for another reason. This is because "whether a word refers to itself" and "whether it goes into its own box" are "supposed" to mesh every single time, but with the word "heterological," they are necessarily opposed: if heterological refers to itself, then it goes into its own box, which makes it autological. But its own box is reserved for words which do not refer to themselves, so it can't go in there if it's autological! But that's the only way it can go into its own box, and so on and so forth. Oops!
Now, "autological" and "heterological" are intuitively coherent categories - we can make sense of them - but it's clear that they break down because of themselves. What's wrong with this picture? Is it the things we're trying to categorize to blame, or is it the way we're trying to categorize them, or is it categorization itself that's messing us up? Hmm... interesting question. If only there were some stalwart hero of logic to come to the rescue and show us what's up...
OK, so there was this great guy by the name of Bertrand Russell, and he was an outstanding logician, and he's my hero and I want to have his babies but he's dead now, and he had this great insight into what is known formally as "set theory," which is really just a fancy hat that philosophers put on "categorization" so it looks like it belongs in the ivory tower. This guy, Gottlob Frege, was going around running his mouth about how there's a "set of all sets," which was his way of saying that "there's a category that contains all categories: the category of categories." Like being the King of Kings, you're still a King, but you also rule over all other Kings, so the set of all sets is the set that contains all other sets. Components of a set, the things that make it up or go into its box, are called "elements" of that set, so the set of all sets has itself as an element of itself, which is kind of neat. Then Bertrand Russell arrived on the scene and said, "Wait a minute! What about 'the set of all sets which are not elements of themselves?' Is that in your set of all sets?" And Frege said, "Sure! After all, it's a set!"
But what Frege didn't realize was that "the set of all sets which are not elements of themselves" is to set theory what the word "heterological" is to language. Bertrand Russell knew this, because he knows everything and is awesome, so he told Frege and Frege was like, "Yeah, well, whatever." But then Bertrand Russell said, "Hold on! The set of all sets which are not elements of themselves results in a contradiction when we try to determine whether or not it is in fact an element of itself. But it is a legitimate set nonetheless, as you say, because we can coherently state the criteria for whether something is or is not in that set, and that's what defines a set. So the statement, 'It is true that there is a set of all sets,' results in a contradiction when we try to resolve one of its entailed implications - namely, whether or not 'the set of all sets which are not elements of themselves' is an element of itself - and in formal logic, this means that our starting premise is in fact false! Therefore there is no 'set of all sets,' quod erat demonstrandum, motherfucker!" Then Bertrand Russell folded his arms across his chest, smiled smugly, and flew off in a rocket ship to take tea from his Celestial Teapot. True story.
Now here's the really interesting part: we can mutatis mutandis the above all the way to "It is logically necessary that 'category' is not itself a category, because all categories would go into it, including the category 'heterological,' which results in a logical contradiction." But category is a category, conventionally speaking, because it meets the criteria we've set forth for "being a category." Or, in other words, we talk as if there are categories all the time without our brains exploding, so we can see the conventional/metaphysical split rather clearly. Take it one level higher, and we see that language, while capable of formulating conventionally true statements, can never attain metaphysical truth because it entails that there are categories as a category, which entails a contradiction. But that's the only way we can talk about things: as categories, such as "things," and by using language which is intrinsically imprecise and not "sticky." So, to answer our earlier question, categorization itself is to blame.
Poof.
Categories are imaginary. Language is all in our heads. Top-down Universes might even be logically impossible, though I can't think of how to prove it at the moment. What say you?
Quick End Note: One practical implication of this is that the micro/macroevolution distinction is purely imaginary, which anyone with half a brain can tell you, but now has been conclusively proven. Arguments citing this as a premise in support of ID are thus made categorically invalid beause this supporting premise is tautologically false - the worst kind of false. Rock on.
Words are used to label and categorize things in the world, but words themselves may also be labelled and categorized as nouns, verbs, adverbs, adjectives, prepositions, and so on. We can also create categories arbitrarily, such as "seventeen-lettered," which refers to those words which have seventeen letters. Every word is a member of the category, "words." So far, so good.
There's a rather interesting way of categorizing words, specifically: according to whether or not they describe themselves. "Word," for instance, is itself a word. But "words" is not more than one word, so it doesn't fit into the "words" category, if you want to be a stickler about quantifiers. "Seventeen-lettered," however, is a seventeen-lettered word, and so describes itself. Such words are called "autological," because they refer to themselves and so are metaphorically contained in their own boxes. If a word does not refer to itself, then it is "heterological." The word, "verb," is not itself a verb, and so is a heterological word.
Logically speaking, these categories ought to be exhaustive: i.e. one or the other of them should apply to every single word. After all, it seems intuitively obvious to an almost painful degree that a word should either refer to itself or not. "A or not-A" is a true disjunction, after all, and the proposition "A word is autological or it is not autological" is surely of that form. Defining "heterological" as "a non-autological word" seems to complete the disjunction and make it so that every word goes into one or the other of these boxes.
Here's the question: into which box should the word "autological" be placed? If "autological" is, in fact, an autological word, then it's an autological word and it goes into the autological box. But! If autological does not refer to itself, then it does not, and so it would go into the heterological box. This seems simple enough - so how do we decide the question? What can we do to test whether the word "autological" is itself autological or heterological?
Umm... oops! As it turns out, there is no way to decide the question. Sure, we can arbitrarily stipulate that it's one way or the other, but we can't come up with any justification for putting the word "autological" (which, as a word, clearly belongs in one or the other box but not both), into one or the other box but not both. Crap!
But wait, there's more! How do we classify "heterological?" If "heterological" is a heterological word, then it goes into the heterological box - but then it goes into its own box, and so it's an autological word, and goes into the autological box - but then it doesn't go into its own box, and so it's a heterological word, and goes into the heterological box - but then it goes into its own box, and so it's an autological word, and goes into the autological box... and so on ad infinitum. If it goes into one box, then it doesn't belong there for one reason, but if it goes into the other box, then it doesn't belong there for another reason. This is because "whether a word refers to itself" and "whether it goes into its own box" are "supposed" to mesh every single time, but with the word "heterological," they are necessarily opposed: if heterological refers to itself, then it goes into its own box, which makes it autological. But its own box is reserved for words which do not refer to themselves, so it can't go in there if it's autological! But that's the only way it can go into its own box, and so on and so forth. Oops!
Now, "autological" and "heterological" are intuitively coherent categories - we can make sense of them - but it's clear that they break down because of themselves. What's wrong with this picture? Is it the things we're trying to categorize to blame, or is it the way we're trying to categorize them, or is it categorization itself that's messing us up? Hmm... interesting question. If only there were some stalwart hero of logic to come to the rescue and show us what's up...
OK, so there was this great guy by the name of Bertrand Russell, and he was an outstanding logician, and he's my hero and I want to have his babies but he's dead now, and he had this great insight into what is known formally as "set theory," which is really just a fancy hat that philosophers put on "categorization" so it looks like it belongs in the ivory tower. This guy, Gottlob Frege, was going around running his mouth about how there's a "set of all sets," which was his way of saying that "there's a category that contains all categories: the category of categories." Like being the King of Kings, you're still a King, but you also rule over all other Kings, so the set of all sets is the set that contains all other sets. Components of a set, the things that make it up or go into its box, are called "elements" of that set, so the set of all sets has itself as an element of itself, which is kind of neat. Then Bertrand Russell arrived on the scene and said, "Wait a minute! What about 'the set of all sets which are not elements of themselves?' Is that in your set of all sets?" And Frege said, "Sure! After all, it's a set!"
But what Frege didn't realize was that "the set of all sets which are not elements of themselves" is to set theory what the word "heterological" is to language. Bertrand Russell knew this, because he knows everything and is awesome, so he told Frege and Frege was like, "Yeah, well, whatever." But then Bertrand Russell said, "Hold on! The set of all sets which are not elements of themselves results in a contradiction when we try to determine whether or not it is in fact an element of itself. But it is a legitimate set nonetheless, as you say, because we can coherently state the criteria for whether something is or is not in that set, and that's what defines a set. So the statement, 'It is true that there is a set of all sets,' results in a contradiction when we try to resolve one of its entailed implications - namely, whether or not 'the set of all sets which are not elements of themselves' is an element of itself - and in formal logic, this means that our starting premise is in fact false! Therefore there is no 'set of all sets,' quod erat demonstrandum, motherfucker!" Then Bertrand Russell folded his arms across his chest, smiled smugly, and flew off in a rocket ship to take tea from his Celestial Teapot. True story.
Now here's the really interesting part: we can mutatis mutandis the above all the way to "It is logically necessary that 'category' is not itself a category, because all categories would go into it, including the category 'heterological,' which results in a logical contradiction." But category is a category, conventionally speaking, because it meets the criteria we've set forth for "being a category." Or, in other words, we talk as if there are categories all the time without our brains exploding, so we can see the conventional/metaphysical split rather clearly. Take it one level higher, and we see that language, while capable of formulating conventionally true statements, can never attain metaphysical truth because it entails that there are categories as a category, which entails a contradiction. But that's the only way we can talk about things: as categories, such as "things," and by using language which is intrinsically imprecise and not "sticky." So, to answer our earlier question, categorization itself is to blame.
Poof.
Categories are imaginary. Language is all in our heads. Top-down Universes might even be logically impossible, though I can't think of how to prove it at the moment. What say you?
Quick End Note: One practical implication of this is that the micro/macroevolution distinction is purely imaginary, which anyone with half a brain can tell you, but now has been conclusively proven. Arguments citing this as a premise in support of ID are thus made categorically invalid beause this supporting premise is tautologically false - the worst kind of false. Rock on.
Thursday, June 4, 2009
The Bubblegum Theory of Language: Essentialism in a Designoid Universe, part two
In my last post on the importance of categorization's metaphysical subordination to reality, I made quite a big deal out of how language as a system of labels may or may not "stick" to reality. Why is this such a big deal, and what bearing does it have on the relationship of language to the world? I realized after reading a rather poignant comment that I had smuggled in what is informally known as the bubblegum theory of language (my Google-Fu is weak here, so please let me know if someone can find a reference to this).
The bubblegum theory of language is a metaphor for how we use words. It works best with ostensive definitions, and it's a good metaphor insofar as people behave consistently with it most of the time. It starts to break down with abstract concepts, and it fails in that hardly anyone actually thinks they're doing it this way when they're using language. Here's the gist of it: when I heard that the thing I was sitting on is called a "chair," I stuck a piece of imaginary bubblegum to that "pile of atoms arranged chair-wise" (which for simplicity I shall simply call a "chair" from here on, just please remember that this is strictly a language of convenience), and I put the label of "chair" on the other end. I carry this label wherever I go, sticking that bubblegum to all the other chairs I encounter. I also have a piece of bubblegum for "my desk chair at home," which only attaches to one chair in the world. There's also a piece of bubblegum for "my desk chair at work," which also attaches to exactly one chair in the world. Both of those chairs, however, are attached by another piece of bubblegum to the label of "my chair." I also have labels and bubblegum for armchairs, high chairs, recliners, and so forth.
So what do I do with all these labels? Well, I place them all into a box labelled "chairs." And this box itself shares a space with my "tables" box, and my "couches" box, and my "armoires" box, and many other boxes in a much larger box labelled "furniture." So I've got all these boxes which contain other boxes which themselves contain labels which are attached by bubblegum to piles of atoms out in the world in a big sticky mess: that's language.
Here's the important part: there are no "things in the world" contained in these boxes, the boxes only contain the labels1. Furthermore, the boxes, labels, and bubblegum are all purely imaginary. This is, in at least one very important way, how language works; this is going to require some serious unpacking, though.
The boxes are categories, the labels are concepts, and the huge web of bubblegum connects my concepts to their referents out in the world (albeit in a purely conventional way). But concepts are not themselves the things out in the world, they simply represent my understanding of those things - they are merely ideas, in other words, and ideas are only in our heads. They're very useful, to be sure, and they may correspond to reality and cohere with each other to varying degrees, but they're still ideas in our heads. The important part here is that there is a very real difference between "a thing" and "an idea of a thing," and though we may conflate the two in everyday language (which is usually fine), we should be aware on some level that there is still a crowbar separation between the two (to borrow Eddie Izzard's turn of phrase).
So far, so good. Language is fueled by concepts and concepts are different from the things in the world that they are supposed to represent. None of this should really be controversial so far (at least, I hope not), but there are some surprising implications to be drawn from this.
Our knowledge about the world is propositional2: to know something, there must be a proposition that can express that knowledge. Propositions can have truth value. Things out in the world do not have truth value. Propositions must be expressed in terms of language, and moreover, require syntax and grammar and all sorts of other made-up stuff. Things out in the world simply are what they are and don't need anything from us to go on being as they are (in other words, reality just is what it is, regardless of what we would like to say, think, or do about it). Language is fueled by concepts, though, and concepts are fundamentally divorced from the things in the world which they represent3. This is a problem: propositions, the only way we can express our ideas about things in the world, can have truth value; but they are ultimately unable to correspond completely to the things in the world about which we wish to talk.
This is a constraint of the system, and there's no getting around it. It's kind of like the way that reason can never be externally justified, because justification requires a reasoning process, and now you're justifying reason itself with a reasoning process, which is circular and doesn't really accomplish anything. Language is the only way we can talk about the world, it's the only way we can check for truth value (whether or not a proposition corresponds to reality), but language will always be fundamentally divorced from reality at some level, so we'll never get complete correspondence.
"This is all fine and dandy," you say, "But at the end of the day, our television sets turn on, our computers access the internet, and NASA still uses Newtonian physics to send very expensive robots to other planets even though general relativity and QM correspond better to reality." Yeah, for NASA's purposes, Newtonian physics corresponds enough, even though it doesn't correspond completely. The laws of physics don't have to fit perfectly into our "Laws of Physics" box for us to get some use out of that box. This is true of the principles behind television sets, computers, and the internet as well.
What I'm saying is that this is conventional truth, which is good enough for everyday applications. But conventional truth is fraught with ambiguity, and needs constant revision and maintenance to keep up with all the new things we discover every day and have to integrate into our conceptual frameworks. If we wanted something more than conventional truth, we would need to close the gap between language and the world to get metaphysical truth, which would at last dispense with the ambiguity and allow us to use linguistics to discover facts about things in the world since we would have complete correspondence (the boxes and labels would fit perfectly). This would be like using an understanding of a computer language to discover how things are going to play out when the program is run, simply by looking at the program - you can have a complete picture, so you can discover things "about the world (model)" just by analyzing the language on which it runs, because the "things" in the "world (model)" are modeled after the preconceived categories (and not vice versa). The real world doesn't run on language, though, because the real world is bottom-up.
In a top-down Universe, metaphysical truth is at least in principle accessible. In a bottom-up Universe, it's fundamentally inaccessible. What I'm saying is that as long as we continue to have this gap, this will be strong evidence that we live in a bottom-up Universe. If we did ever discover the "machine code" of the Universe, and could use it to discover things without empirically verifying them4 (as we can do with computer programs), then this would be almost clinching proof that we're in a top-down Universe. What this means for religion is that their top-down languages are failures: animals were not created according to any discernible "kinds," "detestable abominations" such as shrimp and lobster are fucking delicious, there's absolutely nothing that is demonstrably "sacred" about cows, and humanity has no principled and privileged status above the rest of the organisms on the planet. In short, this is not a knock against conventional truth, but rather a rough illustration of its constraints, and an attempt to show (conventionally, of course) what it says about the world that we have these constraints in the first place; it's a knock against the great body of codified superstitious nonsense that comprises most religions.
I hope this helps clarify my meaning.
2: OK, yeah, there's propositional and procedural knowledge ("to know that X is the case" vs. "to know how X is done"). This is the difference between knowing what the rules of tennis are, and knowing how to deliver a good serve, as Ebonmuse points out in A Ghost in the Machine. However, procedural knowledge is more about reflexes and muscle memory and isn't really able to correspond to the world in the same way that propositions can. Hence its exclusion, I just wanted to take a moment to explain why.
3: To be fair, this is only contingently true of fallible beings like us who lack second-order knowledge (the knowledge qua "justified true belief" that you know something, or justified absolute certitude). But until or unless someone demonstrates omniscience or gnosis or some such happy horse-shit, we don't really need to concern ourselves with this qualifier.
4: Because we're fallible beings, we'd have to empirically verify these discoveries anyway. However, we would still be discovering facts with this machine code if it were genuine; what we would discover with empirical verification is merely that the machine code is genuine, thereby providing a justification for discoveries obtained with it. In other words, they're true already, we're just checking out the source.
The bubblegum theory of language is a metaphor for how we use words. It works best with ostensive definitions, and it's a good metaphor insofar as people behave consistently with it most of the time. It starts to break down with abstract concepts, and it fails in that hardly anyone actually thinks they're doing it this way when they're using language. Here's the gist of it: when I heard that the thing I was sitting on is called a "chair," I stuck a piece of imaginary bubblegum to that "pile of atoms arranged chair-wise" (which for simplicity I shall simply call a "chair" from here on, just please remember that this is strictly a language of convenience), and I put the label of "chair" on the other end. I carry this label wherever I go, sticking that bubblegum to all the other chairs I encounter. I also have a piece of bubblegum for "my desk chair at home," which only attaches to one chair in the world. There's also a piece of bubblegum for "my desk chair at work," which also attaches to exactly one chair in the world. Both of those chairs, however, are attached by another piece of bubblegum to the label of "my chair." I also have labels and bubblegum for armchairs, high chairs, recliners, and so forth.
So what do I do with all these labels? Well, I place them all into a box labelled "chairs." And this box itself shares a space with my "tables" box, and my "couches" box, and my "armoires" box, and many other boxes in a much larger box labelled "furniture." So I've got all these boxes which contain other boxes which themselves contain labels which are attached by bubblegum to piles of atoms out in the world in a big sticky mess: that's language.
Here's the important part: there are no "things in the world" contained in these boxes, the boxes only contain the labels1. Furthermore, the boxes, labels, and bubblegum are all purely imaginary. This is, in at least one very important way, how language works; this is going to require some serious unpacking, though.
The boxes are categories, the labels are concepts, and the huge web of bubblegum connects my concepts to their referents out in the world (albeit in a purely conventional way). But concepts are not themselves the things out in the world, they simply represent my understanding of those things - they are merely ideas, in other words, and ideas are only in our heads. They're very useful, to be sure, and they may correspond to reality and cohere with each other to varying degrees, but they're still ideas in our heads. The important part here is that there is a very real difference between "a thing" and "an idea of a thing," and though we may conflate the two in everyday language (which is usually fine), we should be aware on some level that there is still a crowbar separation between the two (to borrow Eddie Izzard's turn of phrase).
So far, so good. Language is fueled by concepts and concepts are different from the things in the world that they are supposed to represent. None of this should really be controversial so far (at least, I hope not), but there are some surprising implications to be drawn from this.
Our knowledge about the world is propositional2: to know something, there must be a proposition that can express that knowledge. Propositions can have truth value. Things out in the world do not have truth value. Propositions must be expressed in terms of language, and moreover, require syntax and grammar and all sorts of other made-up stuff. Things out in the world simply are what they are and don't need anything from us to go on being as they are (in other words, reality just is what it is, regardless of what we would like to say, think, or do about it). Language is fueled by concepts, though, and concepts are fundamentally divorced from the things in the world which they represent3. This is a problem: propositions, the only way we can express our ideas about things in the world, can have truth value; but they are ultimately unable to correspond completely to the things in the world about which we wish to talk.
This is a constraint of the system, and there's no getting around it. It's kind of like the way that reason can never be externally justified, because justification requires a reasoning process, and now you're justifying reason itself with a reasoning process, which is circular and doesn't really accomplish anything. Language is the only way we can talk about the world, it's the only way we can check for truth value (whether or not a proposition corresponds to reality), but language will always be fundamentally divorced from reality at some level, so we'll never get complete correspondence.
"This is all fine and dandy," you say, "But at the end of the day, our television sets turn on, our computers access the internet, and NASA still uses Newtonian physics to send very expensive robots to other planets even though general relativity and QM correspond better to reality." Yeah, for NASA's purposes, Newtonian physics corresponds enough, even though it doesn't correspond completely. The laws of physics don't have to fit perfectly into our "Laws of Physics" box for us to get some use out of that box. This is true of the principles behind television sets, computers, and the internet as well.
What I'm saying is that this is conventional truth, which is good enough for everyday applications. But conventional truth is fraught with ambiguity, and needs constant revision and maintenance to keep up with all the new things we discover every day and have to integrate into our conceptual frameworks. If we wanted something more than conventional truth, we would need to close the gap between language and the world to get metaphysical truth, which would at last dispense with the ambiguity and allow us to use linguistics to discover facts about things in the world since we would have complete correspondence (the boxes and labels would fit perfectly). This would be like using an understanding of a computer language to discover how things are going to play out when the program is run, simply by looking at the program - you can have a complete picture, so you can discover things "about the world (model)" just by analyzing the language on which it runs, because the "things" in the "world (model)" are modeled after the preconceived categories (and not vice versa). The real world doesn't run on language, though, because the real world is bottom-up.
In a top-down Universe, metaphysical truth is at least in principle accessible. In a bottom-up Universe, it's fundamentally inaccessible. What I'm saying is that as long as we continue to have this gap, this will be strong evidence that we live in a bottom-up Universe. If we did ever discover the "machine code" of the Universe, and could use it to discover things without empirically verifying them4 (as we can do with computer programs), then this would be almost clinching proof that we're in a top-down Universe. What this means for religion is that their top-down languages are failures: animals were not created according to any discernible "kinds," "detestable abominations" such as shrimp and lobster are fucking delicious, there's absolutely nothing that is demonstrably "sacred" about cows, and humanity has no principled and privileged status above the rest of the organisms on the planet. In short, this is not a knock against conventional truth, but rather a rough illustration of its constraints, and an attempt to show (conventionally, of course) what it says about the world that we have these constraints in the first place; it's a knock against the great body of codified superstitious nonsense that comprises most religions.
I hope this helps clarify my meaning.
Notes:
1: There's clearly no way that an imaginary box in your head could literally contain a thing in the world, but that's not quite what I mean. There is a figurative way that an imaginary box in your head could contain such a thing, though: if you had complete understanding of a thing in the world, if your idea of that thing was "perfect," so to speak, then you would be able to discover true propositions about that thing in the world merely by analyzing your idea of it. That's what it means for a label to "really stick," or for a thing in the world to "really fit" into a box. Though it is logically possible for things to be set up this way, this idea is clearly absurd when applied to the real world, and demonstrates that whenever we write, talk, or even think "about" things in the world, we're really and truly writing/talking/thinking about our ideas of those things, and not the things themselves. The ding an sich is fundamentally inaccessible to us.2: OK, yeah, there's propositional and procedural knowledge ("to know that X is the case" vs. "to know how X is done"). This is the difference between knowing what the rules of tennis are, and knowing how to deliver a good serve, as Ebonmuse points out in A Ghost in the Machine. However, procedural knowledge is more about reflexes and muscle memory and isn't really able to correspond to the world in the same way that propositions can. Hence its exclusion, I just wanted to take a moment to explain why.
3: To be fair, this is only contingently true of fallible beings like us who lack second-order knowledge (the knowledge qua "justified true belief" that you know something, or justified absolute certitude). But until or unless someone demonstrates omniscience or gnosis or some such happy horse-shit, we don't really need to concern ourselves with this qualifier.
4: Because we're fallible beings, we'd have to empirically verify these discoveries anyway. However, we would still be discovering facts with this machine code if it were genuine; what we would discover with empirical verification is merely that the machine code is genuine, thereby providing a justification for discoveries obtained with it. In other words, they're true already, we're just checking out the source.
Tuesday, June 2, 2009
Essentialism in a Designoid Universe
Whether or not there is some cosmic force of design behind the structure of the Universe, I think that people of all metaphysical persuasions could agree that the Universe at least appears designed. We see order and function all around us, and while we may disagree on the conclusions to be drawn from these observations, the observations themselves are fairly undisputed*. But like a Rorschach ink blot, the Universe simply is what it is, and anything we read into it is simply the result of what we project onto it.
And we project so much! All our language is boxes and labels for categorizing the variety of experience that comes our way: this class of objects goes in this box; that individual object gets this label; these labelled objects kind of fit into a box all together; these boxes seem to deserve a special label all their own; and so on and so forth.
These boxes and labels are certainly very useful tools for trying to make some sense of the world, and for trying to communicate with one another, but they are not without their flaws. Chief among these flaws would be the inescapable problem that no label or box ever "truly" fits. For all our categories - tables and chairs, Nick and Lisa, chordates and fungi, good and evil, tools and weapons, numbers and grammar, art and literature - none of them is immune to the central problem that the Universe came first, and we slap our categories upon it as a metaphysical afterthought.
Why is this a problem? Ultimately, I suppose it's not - if I wanted to be rigorous, I could say that "problem" is just another category that ultimately breaks down and has fundamentally arbitrary (or at least intersubjective) borders, so there's really no such thing as a problem anyway. This is the issue, in a nutshell: the things in the world come first, and then we come by and divide them into categories which we've made up; but since we're making up the categories after the things in the world (instead of making the things in the world after any pre-planned categories), we can't reasonably expect these categories to "stick."
All I've said thus far is that language is secondary to reality, that there is a fundamentally impassable gap between the way we talk about a thing and the thing itself (the ding an sich, to borrow Kant's term) which will prevent the former from ever "really" corresponding to the latter. What does this have to do with the Universe at large, or the fact that it appears designed?
First of all, it tells us that "apparently designed" is yet another label that we slap onto the world. It's a category that is built, at some level, on our ability to recognize patterns. We seem to be surrounded by patterns, and when we start to take the Universe apart, we see that it behaves in patterns all the way down (or at least as far down as we've come). We see these patterns, and we infer design, and whether or not we disabuse ourselves of this notion, we can all recognize the "apparent design" that appears to be behind the patterns. But "pattern," after all, is itself just another label that we slap on to certain things we encounter in the world, and so on and so forth. Do you see where this is going? "Apparently designed" and "pattern," useful though they are, can never really "stick" to the Universe.
This is exactly what we should expect to see in a Universe that is built from the bottom up: from complex interactions of fundamental principles, other more superficial patterns emerge; and those patterns act as the fundamental principles from which the next layer of superficial patterns emerges, and so on and so forth. As the tree of life stymies our taxonomic endeavors, so the tree of causality stymies our attempts to get labels to stick to the world. The reason for this in both cases is because of the tree itself: we stand at the tips of the branches and try to say which tips "go with" which other tips, and certainly some of them seem very different and some of them seem very similar, but how far back down the tree we go before we say "this is separate from that" is ultimately an arbitrary decision. No matter how clever our labels are, and no matter how well things may contingently fit into our boxes for the time being, there is no principled way to decide how far back to the trunk we "ought" to go before drawing a line between this and that category. The tree is continuous, the tree is one; but we see it as many and so try to make it fit the notion of many that is in our heads because we cannot deal intelligently with undifferentiated experience.
Compare this with what we should expect to see in a truly designed Universe. Objects that are, dare I say it, intelligently designed tend to show a pattern which makes them good candidates for going into one of our boxes: they are organized from the top-down. This is going to get hairy, but please try to stick with me here. Take our language, for an example: though many elements of it are organized from the bottom up, it does show several top-down elements of genuine design (insofar as "genuine" has any meaning, given the foregoing on labels & such). These top-down elements we may call designed, and the patterns that simply emerge on their own from the bottom-up elements we may call designoid (to borrow Dr. Dawkins' term).
Though this top-down design does not "truly" apply to any discrete object we see in our bottom-up world (and don't forget to keep in mind that these are all just labels, anyway!), we can see something closer in the world models we create with computers. For clarity, I think that a computer's world model is better classified as an "idea" than as an "object," it's just an explicitly codified idea. In such a model, the better-designed it is, the more top-down organization it will show. "Things" in the model will behave as discrete "kinds" of things, they will adhere well to categories, the labels can really stick to the world (model). Were the real world like this, we could expect to find that our categories stuck to it, and then words like "sacred," "kosher," "good" and "evil," "abomination," "table" and "chair," "soul" and "mind," could all have unambiguous referents which lacked fuzzy borders and were not victim to classification problems.
Instead, we have fuzzy borders galore, as many classification problems as we have words, and no apparent top-down organization no matter how we slice the world. Psychoactive drugs find themselves used for different treatments throughout their careers - Abilify (aripiprazole) was once used as an anti-psychotic, and is now also used to combat bipolar disorder and clinical depression - we discovered that the category describing its function upon the human brain didn't really stick to it, so we moved it to a bigger box. Klonopin (clonazepam) similarly has various effects upon the human body. The marijuana plant has myriad uses as a source of cloth, oil, fuel, various cosmetic products, and one of the most benign intoxicants known to man, and it's prolific & hardy to boot - what is this supremely useful plant doing in such an otherwise hostile world, and how could it possibly come to be demonized despite it's marvellous apparent design? Tobacco is way more popular, but is significantly more difficult to grow and carries more cons along with it. Corn is another hardy and useful plant, but it doesn't naturally occur - it's a modified wheat-like plant born from the dialectic of selective breeding that blurs the distinction between "invention" and "discovery." Mammals nurse their young while birds & reptiles lay shelled eggs, but then monotremes came along and had to have their own category invented out of whole cloth to solve the "problem" of their own existence.
The problem was never with the monotremes, the problem was (and is) with our boxes. Whenever our boxes break down, we try to find a different set that works better, or we modify our current set to make it work better. This isn't bad in itself, but it's a never-ending project: there is no set of boxes for us to discover or invent that will magically accommodate everything. In a top-down Universe, there would be such a set of boxes, because everything is explicitly designed: the top-down Universe is discrete, discontinuous, and totally boxable. Our bottom-up Universe is exactly the opposite: indiscrete, continuous, and fundamentally boxless.
The exception to this might be "philosophical atoms," a placeholder name for whatever it is that comprises the most fundamental building blocks of reality. However, even that most basic of labels may not stick, for there is an alternative to the existence of philosophical atoms: "gunk." We don't know enough about Universes to really say whether there must be any philosophical atoms, and it very well could be that the Universe is composed of infinitely subdivisible gunk all the way down. (Dammit, now I have to revise my whole metaphysics!)
I guess what I'm saying with all this, to revisit the Rorschach test, is that we need to project our categories onto reality in order to deal with it, but we should also keep in mind that this is ultimately artifice and contrivance - at the end of the day, it's just philosophical atoms (or gunk) arranged blot-wise, so we just need to be careful how seriously we take our boxes and labels. Taking them too far, thinking that the Universe is actually created according to a top-down plan with discrete "kinds" of whatever, is just foolishness. It's metaphysically backwards and it gets in the way of our attempts at understanding things. This goes for Essentialism as well as for Creationism, and it goes double for anyone who believes in the "microevolution/macroevolution" distinction.
It goes triple for philosophers, though. If tables and chairs are just ideas that we superimpose upon reality, then so is "knowledge" merely a category, which makes epistemology into a language game. "Good" is also a mere category, which makes ethics into a language game. Metaphysics might not be a mere language game if philosophical atoms exist, but if it's gunk all the way down, then metaphysics is also just a language game. And until or unless we break all our arguments down to symbolic logic (which would reduce philosophy to "competitive language gaming"), most of the serious disagreements in philosophy start to seem rather silly, like so much table-pounding from people who really ought to know better.
And we project so much! All our language is boxes and labels for categorizing the variety of experience that comes our way: this class of objects goes in this box; that individual object gets this label; these labelled objects kind of fit into a box all together; these boxes seem to deserve a special label all their own; and so on and so forth.
These boxes and labels are certainly very useful tools for trying to make some sense of the world, and for trying to communicate with one another, but they are not without their flaws. Chief among these flaws would be the inescapable problem that no label or box ever "truly" fits. For all our categories - tables and chairs, Nick and Lisa, chordates and fungi, good and evil, tools and weapons, numbers and grammar, art and literature - none of them is immune to the central problem that the Universe came first, and we slap our categories upon it as a metaphysical afterthought.
Why is this a problem? Ultimately, I suppose it's not - if I wanted to be rigorous, I could say that "problem" is just another category that ultimately breaks down and has fundamentally arbitrary (or at least intersubjective) borders, so there's really no such thing as a problem anyway. This is the issue, in a nutshell: the things in the world come first, and then we come by and divide them into categories which we've made up; but since we're making up the categories after the things in the world (instead of making the things in the world after any pre-planned categories), we can't reasonably expect these categories to "stick."
All I've said thus far is that language is secondary to reality, that there is a fundamentally impassable gap between the way we talk about a thing and the thing itself (the ding an sich, to borrow Kant's term) which will prevent the former from ever "really" corresponding to the latter. What does this have to do with the Universe at large, or the fact that it appears designed?
First of all, it tells us that "apparently designed" is yet another label that we slap onto the world. It's a category that is built, at some level, on our ability to recognize patterns. We seem to be surrounded by patterns, and when we start to take the Universe apart, we see that it behaves in patterns all the way down (or at least as far down as we've come). We see these patterns, and we infer design, and whether or not we disabuse ourselves of this notion, we can all recognize the "apparent design" that appears to be behind the patterns. But "pattern," after all, is itself just another label that we slap on to certain things we encounter in the world, and so on and so forth. Do you see where this is going? "Apparently designed" and "pattern," useful though they are, can never really "stick" to the Universe.
This is exactly what we should expect to see in a Universe that is built from the bottom up: from complex interactions of fundamental principles, other more superficial patterns emerge; and those patterns act as the fundamental principles from which the next layer of superficial patterns emerges, and so on and so forth. As the tree of life stymies our taxonomic endeavors, so the tree of causality stymies our attempts to get labels to stick to the world. The reason for this in both cases is because of the tree itself: we stand at the tips of the branches and try to say which tips "go with" which other tips, and certainly some of them seem very different and some of them seem very similar, but how far back down the tree we go before we say "this is separate from that" is ultimately an arbitrary decision. No matter how clever our labels are, and no matter how well things may contingently fit into our boxes for the time being, there is no principled way to decide how far back to the trunk we "ought" to go before drawing a line between this and that category. The tree is continuous, the tree is one; but we see it as many and so try to make it fit the notion of many that is in our heads because we cannot deal intelligently with undifferentiated experience.
Compare this with what we should expect to see in a truly designed Universe. Objects that are, dare I say it, intelligently designed tend to show a pattern which makes them good candidates for going into one of our boxes: they are organized from the top-down. This is going to get hairy, but please try to stick with me here. Take our language, for an example: though many elements of it are organized from the bottom up, it does show several top-down elements of genuine design (insofar as "genuine" has any meaning, given the foregoing on labels & such). These top-down elements we may call designed, and the patterns that simply emerge on their own from the bottom-up elements we may call designoid (to borrow Dr. Dawkins' term).
Though this top-down design does not "truly" apply to any discrete object we see in our bottom-up world (and don't forget to keep in mind that these are all just labels, anyway!), we can see something closer in the world models we create with computers. For clarity, I think that a computer's world model is better classified as an "idea" than as an "object," it's just an explicitly codified idea. In such a model, the better-designed it is, the more top-down organization it will show. "Things" in the model will behave as discrete "kinds" of things, they will adhere well to categories, the labels can really stick to the world (model). Were the real world like this, we could expect to find that our categories stuck to it, and then words like "sacred," "kosher," "good" and "evil," "abomination," "table" and "chair," "soul" and "mind," could all have unambiguous referents which lacked fuzzy borders and were not victim to classification problems.
Instead, we have fuzzy borders galore, as many classification problems as we have words, and no apparent top-down organization no matter how we slice the world. Psychoactive drugs find themselves used for different treatments throughout their careers - Abilify (aripiprazole) was once used as an anti-psychotic, and is now also used to combat bipolar disorder and clinical depression - we discovered that the category describing its function upon the human brain didn't really stick to it, so we moved it to a bigger box. Klonopin (clonazepam) similarly has various effects upon the human body. The marijuana plant has myriad uses as a source of cloth, oil, fuel, various cosmetic products, and one of the most benign intoxicants known to man, and it's prolific & hardy to boot - what is this supremely useful plant doing in such an otherwise hostile world, and how could it possibly come to be demonized despite it's marvellous apparent design? Tobacco is way more popular, but is significantly more difficult to grow and carries more cons along with it. Corn is another hardy and useful plant, but it doesn't naturally occur - it's a modified wheat-like plant born from the dialectic of selective breeding that blurs the distinction between "invention" and "discovery." Mammals nurse their young while birds & reptiles lay shelled eggs, but then monotremes came along and had to have their own category invented out of whole cloth to solve the "problem" of their own existence.
The problem was never with the monotremes, the problem was (and is) with our boxes. Whenever our boxes break down, we try to find a different set that works better, or we modify our current set to make it work better. This isn't bad in itself, but it's a never-ending project: there is no set of boxes for us to discover or invent that will magically accommodate everything. In a top-down Universe, there would be such a set of boxes, because everything is explicitly designed: the top-down Universe is discrete, discontinuous, and totally boxable. Our bottom-up Universe is exactly the opposite: indiscrete, continuous, and fundamentally boxless.
The exception to this might be "philosophical atoms," a placeholder name for whatever it is that comprises the most fundamental building blocks of reality. However, even that most basic of labels may not stick, for there is an alternative to the existence of philosophical atoms: "gunk." We don't know enough about Universes to really say whether there must be any philosophical atoms, and it very well could be that the Universe is composed of infinitely subdivisible gunk all the way down. (Dammit, now I have to revise my whole metaphysics!)
I guess what I'm saying with all this, to revisit the Rorschach test, is that we need to project our categories onto reality in order to deal with it, but we should also keep in mind that this is ultimately artifice and contrivance - at the end of the day, it's just philosophical atoms (or gunk) arranged blot-wise, so we just need to be careful how seriously we take our boxes and labels. Taking them too far, thinking that the Universe is actually created according to a top-down plan with discrete "kinds" of whatever, is just foolishness. It's metaphysically backwards and it gets in the way of our attempts at understanding things. This goes for Essentialism as well as for Creationism, and it goes double for anyone who believes in the "microevolution/macroevolution" distinction.
It goes triple for philosophers, though. If tables and chairs are just ideas that we superimpose upon reality, then so is "knowledge" merely a category, which makes epistemology into a language game. "Good" is also a mere category, which makes ethics into a language game. Metaphysics might not be a mere language game if philosophical atoms exist, but if it's gunk all the way down, then metaphysics is also just a language game. And until or unless we break all our arguments down to symbolic logic (which would reduce philosophy to "competitive language gaming"), most of the serious disagreements in philosophy start to seem rather silly, like so much table-pounding from people who really ought to know better.
Saturday, May 30, 2009
Polyphasic Self-Experimentation: Day Twenty-Three
I'm now on day twenty-three of my polyphasic sleep routine, and things are going well. I'm getting plenty of rest, mentally speaking, but I'm experiencing a lot of muscle fatigue. I guess that's what happens when you bike across town twice every day, and thrice on three days each week.
I've fallen into this pattern where, every three or four days, I'll take an extended nap of three to four hours instead of the usual thirty minutes. It made me late for work a couple of times (I overslept, couldn't really do anything about that), but now that I'm aware that it's happening no matter what I do, I'm able to accommodate the need and work it into my schedule. I'm still way far ahead in terms of time gained by the exchange as a whole, so I call it a win.
There's been one more interesting change: I've noticed that caffeine is helping me stay focused less and less - it's just not that stimulating any more. Energy drinks are losing their efficacy as well. At first, I thought I might just be developing a tolerance, so I upped my dosage, but with no effect. I drank four Red Bulls in about two hours one day, and I was super-jittery, but still nodding off at my desk. I found that music helps me keep my head in the game, but I need really high-energy music to keep me alert, so I busted out the Spineshank, From Zero, and other bands that I hadn't listened to since high school. I've brought my stimulant intake back down again, and things are going pretty well once more. Hooray for psychoactive music! Or, if you prefer, "aural stimulation." Tee-hee!
Also, it's great to be able to say that I'm experimenting with drugs at the workplace, since that's exactly what I'm doing. Unfortunately, in the interest of self-preservation, I have to clarify my meaning for the very people upon whom such a statement would have the greatest impact. But whatever - I just let it sink in for a few moments before explaining.
Un-Fucking-Believable
This kind of has to be seen to be believed. Seriously, just watch:
I'm stunned.
I'm stunned.
Friday, May 29, 2009
Call Ripley: One door shuts, one window opens
Gays may not be able to marry in California again yet, but gay men can certainly be voted Prom Queen!
Sergio Garcia of Fairfax High ran for Prom Queen after noticing that the qualifications did not include sex. After giving a speech that convinced students he was not trying to pull a stunt, Garcia won in what I can only call a remarkable display of permissivity.
"I didn't really know if the school approved. I thought 'Why can't I do it?' " Garcia said. "I see myself as a boy with a different personality. . . . I don't wish to be a girl; I just wish to be myself," he said.Well, way to stir things up! Way to challenge the status quo and raise the bar for our cultural standards! After winning the election, Garcia said, "I feel invincible." Savor it, Sergio: you've earned it.
Some teachers and students were encouraging, others told him not to "stir things up," he said. But his close friends continued to support him, and after his speech, the campus community seemed to be coming around to the idea.
In other news, Adam Lambert seems to be standing pat with the genderqueer card. Rockin'! As society continues to make room for different sexualities (hetero, homo, bi, celibate, etc.), it looks like our sex (male/female) and gender (masculine/feminine) categories are due for expansion as well. This is another strike against the "tyranny of the discontinuous mind," Richard Dawkins' term for the manner in which essentialist inclinations drive us to shove everything in the world into these discrete little boxes whether they fit or not:
Of course, there are those who seem to need a definition of his sexuality nailed down. "Calm down," Lambert says, and "keep speculating."
Lambert knows that such an ambiguous role model is unlikely, and he's glad he had the chance to add something unexpected in this year's competition. "It feels really amazing to be able to try and pass that on to kids and young adults who don't have a role model like that," he says. "It feels great because I never had a role model like that."
Sure, we might have some good boxes that hold lots of stuff, but there will always be things that just don't fit, and we need to be comfortable with those things just being what they are and resist the temptation to demand that they go into this or that box.
Thursday, May 28, 2009
Poison for Your Brain: Trix aren't just for kids, and marriage isn't just for straights, you ignorant homophobic bitch.
On Wednesday, the California Supreme Court decided that the citezenry's passage of Proposition 8 was a legal maneuver. Fair play to them - the challenge was based on whether or not such a change to the state's constitution could be made by a general vote, or whether it had to be done by the legislature, so we kind of have to give it to them. I need to stress here that the judges were not voting on whether or not Prop 8 was good, but whether its enactment was done in proper legal fashion. Proposition 8's supporters - or, if we wish not to mince words, anti-gay bigots - had a few choice words to say about it. There is so much that is horribly wrong with this:
At 1:22 in the above video, one Nadia Chayka said, "I want my children to know that there is a mom - a woman - and there is a man - a father - and that's where children come from, from that union. And I don't want them to be confused about where children come from." That's right: this dumb shit is glad that the rights of millions are being held back so that her children can learn a biology lesson.
Shame on you, Nadia. You have missed the point entirely. You simpleton. You fool. You loathsome, disgraceful, unthinking twit. I don't care what your IQ or level of education is, you are an idiot for being unable to see past your own prejudice on such a clear-cut moral issue, and for allowing such thin rationalizations to gain any foothold upon your mind.
First of all, if this is what Nadia wants her kids to think, then she can damn well explain it to them. You don't need the state to uphold your prejudice in order for your children to learn about the birds and the bees. Additionally, if what she means is that she wants to pass on her bigotry to her kids, then that's an entirely different matter and her children are quite frankly able to make up their own minds on that.
Furthermore, the lumping together of these two things, marriage and sexuality, is nothing but an artifact of the lingering confusion that marriage is "about" hetero sex or "about" making babies. Marriage isn't about sex any more than a cell phone contract is about talking to your friends. Sure, it's something you do within the scope of the contract, but lots of people were doing it before they signed their contracts and that's OK, too. I don't even understand why religious ideas are even brought to the table here, because marriage isn't even a religious practice! Sure, plenty of religions have marriage rituals, but that doesn't make marriage into a religious issue any more than books are religious just because religions have those. And if marriage were about children, as it's been said countless times before, then infertile persons would not be allowed to marry, either. They clearly can, so it's clearly not.
And don't even bother trying to tell me that sterile couples are capable of having children in principle - I know that, and you know that, and we both also know that for the "in principle" to become "in reality," you'd have to mess about with the plumbing of at least one of those persons. But any two persons could reproduce sexually if you only messed about with their plumbing, so this distinction is meaningless, as there's no principled way of deciding upon a privileged method of messing about with a hetero couple's plumbing that could not also be applied to homo couples for the same results. (Pro tip: it's because excluding homosexual couples is always an arbitrary choice, since you must rely at some level on personal, cultural, or religious prejudice in order to have any reason to do so in the first place.)
This is kind of a weird thing to say, maybe, so I want to offer a proof of concept: imagine a woman who, for whatever reason you like, has had her uterus and ovaries compromised; her entire reproductive tract is shot and needs to be wholly replaced to restore her fertility. Maybe she was born that way, maybe she developed cancer at a young age and had the organs in question removed. In order to become a good Christian baby factory, all she needs is a set of functioning organs, right? Except there's an immune complication - she can't accept transplants. Again, the specific reason is unimportant, but the result is that all potential donor organs will certainly be rejected. She cannot be made fertile due to contingent circumstances, though she could be in principle. If she can marry a man (and good luck finding someone to say she couldn't - she's still a woman), then so can any man, and here's why. If you could somehow get a functioning set of organs inside her body, then she could bear children; and the same goes for every male on the planet. Men wouldn't even need a birth canal, since in vitro fertilization and caesarean sections are common procedures. Therefore, all men are capable of reproducing in principle in exactly the same way as our hypothetical woman who would be allowed to marry men, too. Therefore, because infertile couples are allowed to marry and some infertile couples could only be fertile in principle by means which could also make homosexual couples capable of reproduction, marriage being "about" reproduction completely and utterly fails to exclude homosexuals, except on the basis of preexisting irrational prejudice. I win!
Prohibiting same-sex marriage is legalized bigotry, plain and simple. Every argument against gay marriage that holds any logical water is dependent upon unfair prejudice to do so, and therefore inadmissible in our theoretically egalitarian society. The End. Now grow the fuck up and come join us in the twenty-first century - the mere fact of other people doing the things you do in ways that you personally don't like to do them in no way prevents you from continuing to do them the way you've always done. Homosexuals have become the Trix rabbit - yearning so desperately for such a simple thing, but denied it at every turn by childish reactionaries who take that very same thing for granted and continue to withhold it for no good goddamned reason.
Imagine any other social privilege, and any other demographic ("children" don't count, because everyone starts out that way and grows out of it in the exact same sixteen, eighteen, or twenty-one years, depending on the privilege in question), and see how abjectly horrifying these statements are: [Group X] can't do [activity Y], because [activity Y] is about [non-group X] getting [benefit Z which has nothing to do with whether you're a part of X or Y]. Blacks can't drive, because driving is about white people going places. Jews can't live in apartments, because apartments are about gentiles finding affordable rental properties. Women can't watch porn, because porn is about men getting their rocks off. Six-fingered people can't be taught to read, since literacy is about five-fingered people learning things. Atheists can't hold public office, because public offices are about pandering to the masses. Oh, wait, that last one's actually true (in the USA, anyway). But now see that the statement, "Gays can't marry, because marriage is about straights contractualizing their love or whatever," and somehow people aren't as shocked and revolted as they would be by the other statements.
Why? Why?! I can't understand this for the life of me. Are "normal" people so impervious to cognitive dissonance that they can truly hold in the same frame of mind the two thoughts, "I oppose gays being able to marry," and, "I am a decent human being?" Or do they just not think, not even consider the ramifications of their ideas, not even doubt the justice of their actions, before trampling so deliberately and callously over the dreams of other human beings? And which of the two alternatives is worse?
The point, Nadia, is not that these specific statements are discriminatory and obviously awful, but that this entire class of statements should be seen as equally disgusting and barbaric and backwards and just plain wrong. So fuck you, and fuck anyone who thinks like you, you atavistic inhuman slime.
At 1:22 in the above video, one Nadia Chayka said, "I want my children to know that there is a mom - a woman - and there is a man - a father - and that's where children come from, from that union. And I don't want them to be confused about where children come from." That's right: this dumb shit is glad that the rights of millions are being held back so that her children can learn a biology lesson.
Shame on you, Nadia. You have missed the point entirely. You simpleton. You fool. You loathsome, disgraceful, unthinking twit. I don't care what your IQ or level of education is, you are an idiot for being unable to see past your own prejudice on such a clear-cut moral issue, and for allowing such thin rationalizations to gain any foothold upon your mind.
First of all, if this is what Nadia wants her kids to think, then she can damn well explain it to them. You don't need the state to uphold your prejudice in order for your children to learn about the birds and the bees. Additionally, if what she means is that she wants to pass on her bigotry to her kids, then that's an entirely different matter and her children are quite frankly able to make up their own minds on that.
Furthermore, the lumping together of these two things, marriage and sexuality, is nothing but an artifact of the lingering confusion that marriage is "about" hetero sex or "about" making babies. Marriage isn't about sex any more than a cell phone contract is about talking to your friends. Sure, it's something you do within the scope of the contract, but lots of people were doing it before they signed their contracts and that's OK, too. I don't even understand why religious ideas are even brought to the table here, because marriage isn't even a religious practice! Sure, plenty of religions have marriage rituals, but that doesn't make marriage into a religious issue any more than books are religious just because religions have those. And if marriage were about children, as it's been said countless times before, then infertile persons would not be allowed to marry, either. They clearly can, so it's clearly not.
And don't even bother trying to tell me that sterile couples are capable of having children in principle - I know that, and you know that, and we both also know that for the "in principle" to become "in reality," you'd have to mess about with the plumbing of at least one of those persons. But any two persons could reproduce sexually if you only messed about with their plumbing, so this distinction is meaningless, as there's no principled way of deciding upon a privileged method of messing about with a hetero couple's plumbing that could not also be applied to homo couples for the same results. (Pro tip: it's because excluding homosexual couples is always an arbitrary choice, since you must rely at some level on personal, cultural, or religious prejudice in order to have any reason to do so in the first place.)
This is kind of a weird thing to say, maybe, so I want to offer a proof of concept: imagine a woman who, for whatever reason you like, has had her uterus and ovaries compromised; her entire reproductive tract is shot and needs to be wholly replaced to restore her fertility. Maybe she was born that way, maybe she developed cancer at a young age and had the organs in question removed. In order to become a good Christian baby factory, all she needs is a set of functioning organs, right? Except there's an immune complication - she can't accept transplants. Again, the specific reason is unimportant, but the result is that all potential donor organs will certainly be rejected. She cannot be made fertile due to contingent circumstances, though she could be in principle. If she can marry a man (and good luck finding someone to say she couldn't - she's still a woman), then so can any man, and here's why. If you could somehow get a functioning set of organs inside her body, then she could bear children; and the same goes for every male on the planet. Men wouldn't even need a birth canal, since in vitro fertilization and caesarean sections are common procedures. Therefore, all men are capable of reproducing in principle in exactly the same way as our hypothetical woman who would be allowed to marry men, too. Therefore, because infertile couples are allowed to marry and some infertile couples could only be fertile in principle by means which could also make homosexual couples capable of reproduction, marriage being "about" reproduction completely and utterly fails to exclude homosexuals, except on the basis of preexisting irrational prejudice. I win!
Prohibiting same-sex marriage is legalized bigotry, plain and simple. Every argument against gay marriage that holds any logical water is dependent upon unfair prejudice to do so, and therefore inadmissible in our theoretically egalitarian society. The End. Now grow the fuck up and come join us in the twenty-first century - the mere fact of other people doing the things you do in ways that you personally don't like to do them in no way prevents you from continuing to do them the way you've always done. Homosexuals have become the Trix rabbit - yearning so desperately for such a simple thing, but denied it at every turn by childish reactionaries who take that very same thing for granted and continue to withhold it for no good goddamned reason.
Imagine any other social privilege, and any other demographic ("children" don't count, because everyone starts out that way and grows out of it in the exact same sixteen, eighteen, or twenty-one years, depending on the privilege in question), and see how abjectly horrifying these statements are: [Group X] can't do [activity Y], because [activity Y] is about [non-group X] getting [benefit Z which has nothing to do with whether you're a part of X or Y]. Blacks can't drive, because driving is about white people going places. Jews can't live in apartments, because apartments are about gentiles finding affordable rental properties. Women can't watch porn, because porn is about men getting their rocks off. Six-fingered people can't be taught to read, since literacy is about five-fingered people learning things. Atheists can't hold public office, because public offices are about pandering to the masses. Oh, wait, that last one's actually true (in the USA, anyway). But now see that the statement, "Gays can't marry, because marriage is about straights contractualizing their love or whatever," and somehow people aren't as shocked and revolted as they would be by the other statements.
Why? Why?! I can't understand this for the life of me. Are "normal" people so impervious to cognitive dissonance that they can truly hold in the same frame of mind the two thoughts, "I oppose gays being able to marry," and, "I am a decent human being?" Or do they just not think, not even consider the ramifications of their ideas, not even doubt the justice of their actions, before trampling so deliberately and callously over the dreams of other human beings? And which of the two alternatives is worse?
The point, Nadia, is not that these specific statements are discriminatory and obviously awful, but that this entire class of statements should be seen as equally disgusting and barbaric and backwards and just plain wrong. So fuck you, and fuck anyone who thinks like you, you atavistic inhuman slime.
Monday, May 25, 2009
Twexchnology Throwesd a Tewmpwer Tantrum
My kewyboarsd hasd throwen a fit ansd nowe rwefusdwesd to weork propwerly. No jokwe. WEhwenwevwer I typwe onew of thwe followeing lwettwersd, thwe ewnsduing xcharaxctwer xcombination isd sdisdplaywesd:
- Typing "S" or "D" rwesdultsd in "SD"
- Typing "W" or "E" rwesdultsd in "WE"
- Typing "X" or "C" rwesdultsd in "XC"
- Typing "2" or "3" rwesdultsd in "23"
Dammit, thisd weasd kinsd of intwerwesdting, but nowe I rweally havwe to ficx my kweyboarsd. WEisdh mwe luxck!
EDIT: Fixed at last! And I learned a bunch of stuff about how keyboards work, too! Double-win!
Sunday, May 24, 2009
The 37th Humanist Symposium - Brought to you by the Internet
Hello, everyone, and welcome to the 37th edition of the Humanist Symposium! We've got a lot of good reading for the evening, ranging from the informative to the contemplative, vitriolic to humorous, historical to speculative. Rather than attempt to unite these by a thematic thread, I want to tie things together tonight with some thoughts on the wonderful mechanism that makes this type of gathering possible: the internet.
But first, a man who needs no introduction: Ebonmuse of Daylight Atheism sends in the latest entry in his ongoing series "The Contributions of Freethinkers," recounting the life and times of Abner Kneeland, the last person in America to be jailed for the imaginary crime of blasphemy:
Kneeland argued, unsuccessfully, in court that he was not an atheist but a pantheist. The prosecuting attorney, meanwhile, argued that if he were not punished for his opinions, "marriages [will be] dissolved, prostitution made easy and safe, moral and religious restraints removed, property invaded, and the foundations of society broken up". (See any parallels?) In 1838, he was found guilty and sentenced to sixty days in jail.
With the possible exception of the ecosystem as a whole, the internet could be seen as the single largest network on the planet. I say "possible exception" because some may consider it cheating to allow the planet Earth itself to be considered a network contained within itself. As my roommate once remarked, after playing video games with some friends in Ireland, "Man, the internet is so awesome! I've just been talking with two guys in Ireland, a quarter of the world away, as if they were in the same room with me." I think the internet's ubiquity has detracted somewhat from the marvel of it - we take it for granted because we see it, use it, and talk about it every day (or almost every day), the sheer achievement of it drowned out by routine use.
Next, we have news from the field of medicine. Andrew Bernardin of The Evolving Mind tells of Christianity's failure to deal with depressing events by irrationally blaming them on others in Medicated Out of Hell:
...I heard a Christian football coach explain to the sad/distraught female interviewer why her friend had died of cancer. Adam. It was Adam’s fault. We now live in a fallen world and bad stuff happens to good people because of it.
If you ask me, that guy is delusional. But because he is not personally suffering, or an obvious danger to himself of others, and because his relationships are intact . . . . the state won’t involuntarily institutionalize him.
Mike of Brain Stimulant discusses possible mechanisms for a spirituality-boosting drug in Religious Pill:
Does a selective drug exist that could increase a person's spirituality and religiosity? Are there pills available that would allow a person to suffuse their perceptual consciousness with a feeling of the presence of an otherworldy supreme being? Will the very same drug increase feelings of serenity, peace and magic? I mentioned previously about a British psychiatrist who argued that we could use drugs to enhance specific traits of humanity. What does neuroscience have to say about human spirituality?
Like a good scientist, he sticks to the facts without getting too deep into the ethics. Like a good philosopher, I would love to talk about the ethics at great length over several beers. As if in answer, we have a piece from Colin Timberlake, born of just such a bar-style discussion, entitled Suicide and Organ Donation: A System to Save Lives?
The idea sounds difficult to stomach at first. But if we, as a society, have the potential to save lives - quite possibly the lives of children in desperate need of organs - then it is immoral not to explore such an option merely because it seems…icky.
The internet is not exactly a "new" thing, however. In a lot of ways, it is simply a logical outgrowth of that which came before it. Phone lines connected the world before the internet piggy-backed on top of them; before that, electrical grids powered cities, every house a node that connected to the nexus of the local power plant; before that, indoor plumbing connected everyone to water towers and sewer systems. What's "new" about the internet is that it is an informational network, not simply a power delivery system or a combination water delivery/waste disposal system like its aforementioned predecessors. The information one can find on the internet was previously stored, not in computers accessible from home terminals, but in libraries private and public, places you would have to travel to in person to find the information you sought*.
Next, from frontiers literary, we have two book reviews. The DC Secularism Examiner, Paul Fidalgo, reviews Eric Maisel's The Atheist's Way: Living Well Without Gods, in 'The Atheist's Way' is a crucial message in a light tome:
This book offers a vital message that I think any nonreligious person needs to hear, even if they don't realize they need to hear it: There is no inherent "meaning of life," existence really is a random, pointless phenomenon, and any meaning for which we may pine must be created by ourselves. Maisel levels with the reader, and insists that we establish our own parameters and values based on our consciences and intelligence, and encourages us to live these to our best ability.
GrrlScientist of Living the Scientific Life provides us with an in-depth and insightful review of Jerry Coyne's Why Evolution is True, reminding me that I need to buy it:
Even though Coyne's initial motivation to write this book stemmed from his annoyance with those who claim that intelligent design is science, he doesn't attack religion. Instead, as demonstrated in some of the passages I've quoted here, he does what scientists do best: he makes predictions. In this case, he makes predictions that naturally arise from evolutionary theory as well as from creationism and "intelligent design" and details how actual scientific data conflict with religious beliefs.
Even the networks of phone lines, electrical power grids, and indoor plumbing may be seen as natural out-growths of the human societies in which they were invented. These societies, too, though anticipated by other social animals (and inferior to those of social insects until we got into some serious technology) are but natural outgrowths of the networks that preceded them: tribes, families, brains, organs, even the most basic multicellular organisms are networks of eukaryotic cells, themselves in turn networks of prokaryotic conglomerates that merged for mutual benefit some time in the vast uncertain chapters of history.
Next on the hit list is our meditative group, led by Moody of verywide.net with a humanistically spiritual rumination on the Tree of Æons, opened with a sentence the length and poetry of which would make Dickens blush:
From so humble a beginning as the blind dance of chemicals may represent, from out of the depths of unconscious ages in life’s Ultima Thule, the Tree of Life arose from the primordial chaos, sui generis, to grow through countless ages, to diversify its fruits, to send tendrils of spiral DNA, winding and raveling, into every niche, every nook and cranny of exploitable space, to thrive even in the face of massive threats to its very existence, to return from setbacks on scales that in their enormity beggar the imagination, to reach in its endless adaptations this age, this milestone, where we—but a part of its neverending, ever wending growth—may gaze upon it and perceive, however dimly, the ground from whence it rose up, while still not finished, and as yet remaining all but blind to the future of its existence.
Greta Christina poses a properly philosophical question, What does it mean to believe in something? I found her answer both illuminating and satisfying, as she spots a critical conflation of two distinct meanings of the term, "to believe in":
A while back (I was still calling myself an agnostic, which gives you an idea of how long ago it was), I wrote a piece pointing out that the question, "Why are we here?" has two very different meanings. It can mean, "What caused us to be here?", or it can mean, "What is our purpose?" And I pointed out that religious belief tends to conflate these two meanings -- the answer to both questions is, "God" -- but that, for non-believers, those two questions have completely different answers. What caused us to be here is the process of evolution and the physical laws of cause and effect; our purpose is whatever we decide our purpose is.
I want to make a similar argument about what it means to believe in something.
Julian Sanchez makes use of some demographic research and capitalizes on the fact that, for any finite data set, infinite interpretations are available, in outlining A "God-Shaped-Hole" Shaped Hole in his life:
It looks like we have some data here, in the form of the Pew survey (and the ensuing New York Times op-ed) to which Stuttaford is responding. That poll found that while the “unaffiliated” are the fastest growing “religious” group, children raised without an affiliation are more likely to end up with one than those raised within a faith are to switch religions (or abandon it altogether). The problem is, “unaffiliated” isn’t all that helpful a category—it’s easy to conflate with “secular,” but a closer look makes clear that this isn’t the case: Lots of people who lack affiliation to any particular church hold religious, or at least “spiritual” beliefs, and even attend religious services at least sporadically.
And VJack at Atheist Revolution has some words to say on the way that categories work and being out with one's beliefs, in Coming to Terms with One's Atheism:
Do you believe in any sort of god(s)? If your response was anything other than an affirmative one, you are an atheist. Yes, you.
Depending on how far back we wish to go, and how fast & loose we like to play with our labels, we can see networks dating back to before even the Earth itself was formed. What are galaxies, after all, if not vast networks of stars connected by invisible threads of gravity? These galaxies themselves sometimes collide, showing that even these most vast of superstructures are still connected in networks, and through them, all the universe is connected to itself.
Our penultimate category waxes humorous, and to avoid spoiling any jokes, I'll be sparing the introductions:
Debbie Goddard of the Center for Inquiry writes of awkward party conversations in "What's your sign?" When Good Conversation Goes Woo.
Cubik's Rube lets fly a Grade-A rant (the "A" is for "atheist") in More than we can handle. OK, it's probably not deliberately humorous, but I've been in this type of situation before and his rant really makes me smile, so I'm including it here.
Jennifurret the Blag Hag regales us with a consideration of just what exactly An uncontroversial atheist ad would look like.
Looking into the past, when there was nothing but stars connected by nothing but light and gravity, I think the future of the internet may not be too much different. Things are becoming increasingly wireless, and I would not be surprised at all to find our ever-changing information network consisting simply of some form of broadcast node (whether a tower or a satellite), metaphorically orbited by satellite devices (both servers and terminals) with no wires involved at any step of the way. At any rate, I think it's fantastic that people from around the world can sit in the comfort of their own homes and share ideas both in real-time and at length (by AIM, Skype, e-mail, or blog) because of something our civilization has built.
Speaking of the future, our last category has but a lone entrant, who also happens to be the host of the very next symposium on June 14th: Viktor Nagornyy writes a future-based historical fiction piece entitled 2121: the age of reason. Viktor's short story speaks for itself, so I'll leave him to it.
So that's that for the 37th Humanist Symposium; I hope you've enjoyed your visit! Please direct any questions, comments, or death threats to the comments below. Y'all have a good night, and a pleasant holiday tomorrow!
* - Yes, yes, I'm aware that I'm ignoring all the chaff on the internet, but that's OK. There's a lot of chaff in libraries, too: just look in their metaphysics, new age, or religion sections. Also, on networks in general, I kind of ignored post offices. I didn't realize this until I had only a paragraph to go, though, and couldn't really find a nice place to fit them in, so I'll just skip them (but for this brief acknowledgment, of course).
Saturday, May 23, 2009
Call Ripley! Bionic commandos are just an upgrade away
This really has to be seen to be believed:
OK, so I just Googled the i-LIMB to find out more, and here's an even better looking one:
This is just awesome! Seriously, though, as fantastic as these prosthetics are right now, there's still a ton of potential. Back in 2004, I read a story (I forget where) about this game called "Mind Balance" where you look at cubes on a screen to balance a tightrope walker. The "controller" (by which I mean, "the mechanism by which the player interacts with the program") is a piece of headgear which more or less reads your mind by using EEG to determine which cube is being looked at: look at the left one to lean left, look at the right one to lean right. I found the story today in an archived issue of Computor Edge magazine (see page 20). In that article are other applications of similar technologies (like using thoughts to browse the internet), and opposite applications of other technologies (such as using ultrasonic pulses to induce sensory experiences).
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OK, so I just Googled the i-LIMB to find out more, and here's an even better looking one:
This is just awesome! Seriously, though, as fantastic as these prosthetics are right now, there's still a ton of potential. Back in 2004, I read a story (I forget where) about this game called "Mind Balance" where you look at cubes on a screen to balance a tightrope walker. The "controller" (by which I mean, "the mechanism by which the player interacts with the program") is a piece of headgear which more or less reads your mind by using EEG to determine which cube is being looked at: look at the left one to lean left, look at the right one to lean right. I found the story today in an archived issue of Computor Edge magazine (see page 20). In that article are other applications of similar technologies (like using thoughts to browse the internet), and opposite applications of other technologies (such as using ultrasonic pulses to induce sensory experiences).
Fast-forward to 2007, and Australia-based Emotiv has actually built a "helmet" that can play even more sophisticated games by reading brain waves (video demonstration). Mattel has even made the technology into a child's toy with Mind Flex. And just in case you aren't already aware, Raytheon Sarcos has already built a prototype exoskeleton called the XOS which monitors the human wearer's movements 200 times per second, can move at human speed, and reduces the perceived weight of lifts by 95% - it makes you stronger without slowing you down (video here, just skip to 1:15 to see the machine in action). All we need to do is to refine and integrate these technologies, and soon we'll have cyborgs and remote-controlled robots running all over the place!
OK, maybe not, but this is still really, really exciting!
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