Fear and Society

The world is what we make it, stop worrying about your privacy, and we will have nothing to worry about. Cheap ubiquitous cameras are everywhere, we can use these to watch eachother from afar. Do not let this scare you by taking only the perspective of the victimized individual. You are the entire society. You are doing the watching as well as being watched. Consider this an opportunity to grow closer to your fellow netizens. All relationships must be symmetrical, and the same technology available to everyone. Individuals engage in horrible arms races and power struggles. Fear drives it all, the individual fears the other individual, who in turn fears him back. Have no fear, and have no problems. You have nothing to be ashamed of. There is nothing that you can do that could make me hate you, irregardless of whether you do it in front of a camera. Symmetrically, you have no grounds to hate or shame me, or anyone else for anything you observe them doing, or believe them to be doing. We are not individuals, we are society. There is no point in shaming ourself when our actions, and attitudes towards those actions are all under our control.

If you feel that some behavior is wrong, like dancing, then you will shame anyone whom you see dancing. If they know that, and feel ashamed, they may stop dancing. But they may just keep dancing and hide it from you. This second scenario is more chronic and pathological. Huge rifts in society develop this way. The only way to heal the rift is for the dancers to come out in great numbers and dance all over the place until everyone is comfortable with that. Cameras, and communication networks are slowly healing the many rifts in society by exposing people to eachother. Surely you have been on the internet at some point and thought “wow, there sure are a lot a crazy people out there.” That is society facing itself and admitting how diverse and conflicted it is. The world really is full of crazy people right now, and as they get used to that, they will not seem so crazy to eachother anymore.

So you don't want your webcam to turn on when you are not aware? Why not? Somebody might see you changing clothes? Smoking pot? Making a mistake? or simply not looking your best? All these activities are bruises in our opinion of ourself. There is nothing hurtful about being naked in front of other people, so don't be ashamed of it. If you watch someones webcam all day without their knowledge, you may come to realize that they are much like you, and most of what they do is quite unremarkable. Maybe you don't want the police to catch you doing something illegal. This is proximately valid fear, but ultimately it is no different than everyday shaming. The executive branch of our government is just the physical realization of fears we have coded into law. This is just like any other fear, except that we have less control over it. I must stress that the only way to heal a rift is to face the fear that caused it. Bring the hidden out into the open.

Maybe there are some things that we should be ashamed of, maybe some activities really are bad. We are a society, but a society can act in a goal-directed way, much like an individual. Societies can compete for dominance on the global scale. Actions of individuals that are detrimental to societies goals, must not be performed. Shame is one way to implement this. There are other ways, like education, and preemptive design. Shameful actions might include destroying infrastructures, and killing many people for no good reason. (I am reluctant to choose petty crimes because I can dream up scenarios where they would be desirable, but even these large crimes may be good in some exceptional situation. We can make no predictions whatsoever about the shameful actions without knowing the goal) But can a society be goal-directed without hiding information, lying to itself, and introducing rifts? Only if everyone understands organization of the whole society and agrees with it. A very unrealistic notion right now, but not impossible.

If you tend to ignore connotations, you might recognize a resemblance between rifts in society produced by fear, and the process of modularization in a growing system, such as an organism, a brain, or a large software project. Could these really be the same process, when stripped of their consequences and contexts? Is fear a mechanism for modularizing society? People only act on the information they have. If there is to be an efficient division of labor, there may need to be a difference in the information available to different people. Is the information people have available to them a good determinant of their actions? In other words, if you had that information, could you predict what they will do with high accuracy? If you could, then society could control itself by controlling who gets what information. When you hide your activities from the shame of others, you are controlling what information they have and how they will act upon it.

Suppose you, and only you, know the milage on your car. Decisions that must be made based on this knowledge, such as whether to get the oil changed, or whether the car is worth the cost of repairing it, are now solely your responsibility. If you are a member of a society of equally well informed people with a common goal, it would not matter who knew this, all would make the same decisions. But we are not in such a society, and one is not likely to ever exist. A purely self-interested individual will hide the information from others, so that they cannot gain additional power over him. But we are not in a purely self-interested society either. Ours is a hybrid, where mostly self interested people do share information often. There are people who specialize in deciding whether a car is worth the cost of repairing it. We entrust these people with the information they need to make their decisions because it is in all of our best interests for people to have liability insurance. And the insurance company must make rational decisions about risks in order to not go bankrupt.

What does a non-modular society look like?
What are the benefits of modularity in the first place?
Do the different modules of the brain hide information from eachother? Do they do it out of self-interest? Shame? Efficiency?

A Sci-fi short

Allow me to introduce, Bridget McMillan.
"Thank you" said the young astronomer.
"I'm here today to talk to you about recent images in visible to low infrared wavelengths of the black hole M82 X-1. There, circled in green, is the object that has come to be called "The Dollop" due to its resemblance to a dollop of whipped cream. It was thought to be an hunk of ice in the accretion disk of the hole, but I am here to show you otherwise. Once the gravitational lensing effect of the hole is accounted for, the dollop appears as a crescent shape. What you a looking at is really a planet orbiting the star HD 10864. Due to these lucky circumstances caused by the black hole, we have the highest resolution visible light image of a extra-solar planet to date."

McMillan beamed with enthusiasm. The already impressed crowd of professors and lecturers, all at least twice her age, had no clue what she still had in store for them. She could not possibly have prepared them more than she already had.
"Now direct your attention to the three dim stars just above the crescent. They are obviously no closer than HD 10864, but if they were farther away, they would be occluded by the planet, Thus, I humbly suggest that these lights are not stars, but cities."

The air conditioner hummed in contemplation in the silent auditorium. Skeptical whispers seeped in and gradually, a commotion grew unstoppably louder. After about thirty seconds, there were people almost shouting at each other. Some were drafting unlikely theories to explain the dim lights, others whooping about aliens and parties and probes.

The transit time was 2442 years. 2002 to get the probe to the planet, 440 for the light to get back to us. That was with the the most powerful propulsion system we were capable of: the nuclear pulse drive. Even then the proposal seemed absurd. The amount of refined uranium consumed by the probe's journey could power an entire city for several years. Were we willing to spend all that to see what had emitted a few photons on the dark side of a distant planet 440 earth years ago? What if the civilization was gone by the time the probe got there? self-destructed, ousted by parasites, meteors, or who knows what else? What if we suffered the same fate before the light got back to us? Would our decedents even care enough to be listening when the signal arrived?

While the world's government's and other powerful institutions were weighing their options, astronomers were blasting signals at HD 10864 as loudly and as brightly as they possibly could. People were sending everything from simple blinking light, to multi-channel compressed video. The news media milked the story for three months, while also broadcasting its own signal into space. the noise subsided and only a few dedicated dishes and orbiting mirrors still repeated their signals. eventually people returned to their lives and could extract no more excitement out of the dollop lights.

440 years later, over a dark and desolate wasteland where fires burned constantly and the sky was blacked out by toxic clouds, while observing a black hole, an orbiting satellite took note of a sudden muffled cacophony of jittering light from a main sequence star just behind it. It anxiously relayed the aberration to its surface laboratory with mechanically unwavering hope that it would respond this time with instructions, but none came. Inside the laboratory, the tiny delicate body of a long extinct thing sat perched on its control orb surrounded by lifeless machines.

A context free grammar defining 90% of my voicmails

<message> ::= [<greeting>] [<rationale>] [<request>] [<bye>]

<greeting> ::= <hellotype> [<recipent-name>] [<identification>]

<hellotype> ::= "hi" | "hey" | "hello" | "sup"

<recipent-name> ::= <name>

<identification> ::= ("its" | "this is") <caller-name>

<caller-name> ::= <name>

<rationale> ::= <reason-for-calling> | <statement-of-fact>

<reason-for-calling> ::= ["I" ("was" | "am")] ["just"] "calling" ("because" | (<to-inform-you-of>)) <statement-of-fact>

<to-inform-you-of> ::= "to tell you" | (("to let you know" | "to inform you") ["that"])

<statement-of-fact> ::= "you suck" | "your rent is overdue"

<request> ::= {<connector>} <suggestion>

<connector> ::= "so" | "just" | "please"

<suggestion> ::= "jump off a bridge" | "call me back"

<bye> := (["good"] "bye") | "later" | "peace"

My Opinion of Relativity

1.) The correctness of someone else's opinion is inversely proportional to the square of its difference from one's own. 2.) One will adopt others opinions in proportion to their precieved correctness. 3.) Opinions cannot travel between people at infinite speed, therefore black opinion holes could exist. "Truth" is but a tear in the fabric of opinion-space where correctness approaches infinity.

Google Induced Synesthesia

I noticed that whenever I see the Google logo written in the correct font (Times new roman) it appears somewhat colorful. This is not actually synesthesia, just a normal human side effect of having an associative memory. But when I checked the order of the colors I was perceiving with the actual logo, they were scrambled! My brain remembered to fill in the fact that every letter of the Google logo is either red, blue, yellow, or green, no two adjacent letters are the same color, and there two blue letters and two red letters, while there is only one yellow and one green. this leaves only certain possible combinations that I could have dreamt up. So to test my prediction of the possible set of my predictions my memory would make of the order of the colors in the Google logo, I quickly scribbled out a list of the possibilities and then went back to the text where I originally saw a black and white version of the logo. But, to my surprise, after looking at the real logo moments earlier, my memory of the color order had corrected itself and my perception of the logo was now being rendered with the correct color order. Soon after this eerie surprise, I figured that the experiment would have been impossible anyways, because of the additional component of my memory of the Google logo that states that whatever the order, it doesn't change every time you look at it.

So, I pose an alternate, even more interesting test: If Google were to randomize the order of the colors in their logo within the rules stated above, would anyone notice?

diversions

so since its currently summer there won't be much on pattern recognition showing up here. I used to just have that sort of thing swimming around in my head all the time because I was always writing programs and taking adderall. Later on this year when fall semester gets going I'll be prongramming more and I'll have more to say.


As for now I have good news. The theories and tactics I have been using for my pattern recog and AI programs have already been discovered by someone else. Jeff Hawkins of the Redmond Center for Theoretical Neuroscience has already come up with it and he named it the Memory-Prediction Framework. Its described in his book, On Intelligence.

Probably not that amazing of an accomplishment considering that I educated myself in modern cognitive science but I still feel pretty proud that something I came up with mostly through introspection and lucid dreaming has also been discovered by a neuroscientist!

Reinventing cybernetics

Power measures the extent to which one can control one's environment. Control can only be accomplished when one understands the environmental system one wishes to control. Understanding of a system can only be had if one has the power to control for some variables while observing changes in others. power enables more science, science brings greater understanding, greater understanding yields more power. This amplifying feedback loop gives rise to the all too familiar and seemingly inevitable tendency of power to concentrate itself.

Couldn't a device be contrived to operate according to these principles? A tool that becomes more powerful with time? The answer, is yes. These miraculous devices are already produced in bulk all over the world. You already possess one, in your very skull.

The nervous system of Homo Sapiens may or may not operate according to different principles than the rest of the animal kingdom, but one thing is certain: there is a runaway feedback system at play. We become exponentially more powerful with the passage of time.

Consider a simple system S in an unknown environment with three inputs, a b and c and three outputs, x y and z.

The inputs are wired up to different sensors which each measure some unknown property the environment and represent it as a real number. now each of the outputs takes the form of a real number which is under the systems complete control. changing the number has some unknown effect on the environment, possibly through the action of a motor.

It is possible to design a subsystem of S, call it T that runs tests on each of the output variables x y and z individually and measures their effects on one of the input variables, a until enough information has been collected that the previously uncontrolled input variable a comes under virtual control via the intermediate output variables x y and z. S may now command a to change and the subsystem T will convert the instruction to commands for x y and/or z to produce the desired result.

The purpose of T, in a nutshell, is to bring more variables under S's control. Only one more thing needs addressing: the short supply of input variables for converting. some system must be designed to usefully subdivide them to add more members to the set of uncontrolled input variables. if a system could add useful inputs, then T could continue to convert them to virtual outputs, and S could steadily increase its control over its environment. there are a few more bugs to work out, but that is my idea of how to create a self empowering tool.