Evidence that takes some sorting

tokyo undressed

A typical assignment for Srivastava goes like this: A mining company has multiple samples from a potential gold mine. Each sample gives a different estimate of the amount of mineral underground. “My job is to make sense of those results,” he says. “The numbers might seem random, as if the gold has just been scattered, but they’re actually not random at all. There are fundamental geologic forces that created those numbers. If I know the forces, I can decipher the samples. I can figure out how much gold is underground.”

Cracking the Scratch Lottery Code

Working hypotheses

Perhaps it would be better if I could find one single philosophy that I could apply equally to each circumstance, but I find that the best path is to believe different things about aspects of reality when I play these different roles or perform different duties.

Jaron Lanier, You are not a Gadget: A Manifesto

Related posts:
The imperatives of survival on six distinct time scales
Turtles all the way

We are living in a world that has an even lower level of reality than the unreal world

Perhaps the solution begins from softly accepting chaos not as something that “should not be there,” to be rejected fundamentally in principle, but as something that “is there in actual fact.”

Haruki Murakami, Reality A and Reality B

Fluctuation and noise

TechnicalGanXta

Dr. Todorov has studied how we use our muscles, and here, too, he finds evidence of optimization at play. He points out that our body movements are “nonrepeatable”: we may make the same motion over and over, but we do it slightly differently every time.

“You might say, well, the human body is sloppy,” he said, “but no, we’re better designed than any robot.”

In making a given motion, the brain focuses on the essential elements of the task, and ignores noise and fluctuations en route to success. If you’re trying to turn on a light switch, who cares if the elbow is down or to the side, or your wrist wobbles — so long as your finger reaches the targeted switch?

Dr. Todorov and his coworkers have modeled different motions and determined that the best approach is the wobbly, ever-varying one. If you try to correct every minor fluctuation, he explained, not only do you expend more energy unnecessarily, and not only do you end up fatiguing your muscles more quickly, you also introduce more noise into the system, amplifying the fluctuations until the entire effort is compromised.

“So we reach the counterintuitive conclusion,” he said, “that the optimal way to control movement allows a certain amount of fluctuation and noise” — a certain lack of control.

Seeing the natural world with a physicist’s lens. NYTimes

Everything does everything to everything

What we are finding is that at the molecular level the organism is so dynamic, so densely woven and multidirectional in its causes and effects, that it cannot be explicated as living process through strictly local investigations. When it begins to appear that, as one European research team puts it, “everything does everything to everything,” the search for “regulatory control” necessarily leads to the unified and irreducible functioning of the cell and organism as a whole — a living, metamorphosing form within which each more or less distinct partial activity finds its proper place.

Getting Over the Code Delusion

The imperatives of survival on six distinct time scales

katie allen [click image for huge]

The destiny of our species is shaped by the imperatives of survival on six distinct time scales. To survive means to compete successfully on all six time scales. But the unit of survival is different at each of the six time scales. On a time scale of years, the unit is the individual. On a time scale of decades, the unit is the family. On a time scale of centuries, the unit is the tribe or nation. On a time scale of millennia, the unit is the culture. On a time scale of tens of millennia, the unit is the species. On a time scale of eons, the unit is the whole web of life on our planet. Every human being is the product of adaptation to the demands of all six time scales. That is why conflicting loyalties are deep in our nature. In order to survive, we have needed to be loyal to ourselves, to our families, to our tribes, to our cultures, to our species, to our planet. If our psychological impulses are complicated, it is because they were shaped by complicated and conflicting demands.

Freeman Dyson: From Eros To Gaia, p. 341, via Warren Senders: Eight Thoughts About Timescale

Of limited interest

I haven't posted much because I've been so happy lately that it feels like I've been living entirely in the present, with almost no reflection or planning. This works because I've finally cultivated some good, simple habits - work hard, eat right, exercise, save $, love, and party at least twice a week. Plus I'm doing this in nice surroundings and self-employed, setting my own hours, rates and so on.

A simple life, but with rules that I easily adhere to, so the illusion of control is not required. Things are set in motion, and I follow them, with complex behavior emerging from the interaction of a few simple systems.

Turtles all the way

...the non-fundamental ontology of everyday life (solids and fluids) can seem as a kind of "coarse-grained" macroscopic approximation to the more fundamental microscopic ontology of quarks and electrons; indeed, the former should be (at least in principle) derivable as a logical consequence of the underlying fundamental theory.
...
...it means that what appear in the older theory to be a fundamental entity is, in reality, a non-fundamental entity derivable as a "coarse-grained: version of something deeper.
...
In this view, reality is composed of a hierarchy of "scales"... The theory on each scale emerges from the theory on the next finer-scale by ignoring some of the (irrelevant) details of the latter. And the ontology of the theory on each scale - in particular, its "unobservable" theoretical entities - can be understood, at least in principle, as arising from the "collective" or "emergent" effects of a more fundamental theory at a finer scale.

Alan Sokal, Beyond the Hoax, p242-54

Signal / noise

simon page via grain edit

Following on from the last post, I kind of reset my head the other week at the beach (and in a new year frame of mind), so I'm going to try and take my hands off the controls for the foreseeable future [which with me, is very short]. What this means is focusing solely on inputs inre. overall well-being, and not worrying about the outputs.

What this means in more detail is:

• work hard / well
  
• save $
• keep active
• eat right
• socialize
• be nice
• drink less
  

Only the last item is a change in the current regime, but a small thing that ought to make a huge difference to how things play out.

Love as an emergent behavior

Love as an emergent behavior - in which case focus on the inputs and not the outputs, to which we have little direct access and even less control.

Emergent humanoid robotics

hanson einstein face [see below]

There are no doubt many patent hurdles and other impracticalities to hinder the following ideas. I just play with things and then move on, which is why I'm a dilettante proofreader rather than something more focused, but also why I'm [probably] happier this way.

Three different robot stories. The first is from Hanson Robotics, seen below in this recent TED clip. They try and make robots with human faces. It looks like animatronic / Disney stuff, but there seems to be more going on, or almost going on. The model shown in the video [Einstein, not the doll face in the frozen shot] can mirror what people are doing - you smile, it smiles. There seems to be a pretty fine level of control of the motorized musculature underneath the realistic looking skin, and although it obviously needs more work, the future has a lot of time.



What caught my attention was this mirroring, which is based on being able to read faces, and so these machines should be able to read microexpressions and basically be loaded up with all of Paul Ekman's work.

The next video won't embed, but it's from an article at BotJunkie called Robots Learn to Look Shifty. Basically the robot, under certain conditions, can use eye movements to give cues that human subjects respond to but don't consciously pick up. The two projects are separate, but they could be easily be joined together.

And the third video, below, shows how motion capture can be used to create a more natural moving humanoid robot, with this one particularly good at swiveling its hips.



The point is that robotics seems to be full of seemingly isolated projects that aim to do one small thing very well, and usually one thing that on its own is cool but not that useful. But one day all of this technology could be integrated into one machine, which would obviously be connected to the Internet so that it could run many apps and access all data. Out of all of these projects something bigger will emerge.

I had a post about emergent AI a while ago, based on the idea that there's no center of consciousness in the brain, but that we emerge from the interaction of many simple processes [Minsky's society of the mind], so that the full complexity of their interactions undertakes a phase transition to another order of simplicity in consciousness, which can only hold a few bits of data at a time and is essentially creating useful half-truths out of a torrent of data that has been entirely reconstructed in the brain. The astonishing hypothesis is just how things are.

What's true of robotics is true in the field of AI - a lot of researchers working on small things that one day may come together and then something else occurs. But it struck me the other day that computers do not need an unconscious and perhaps therefore not a consciousness. In the small space required for cunning we don't act entirely on instinct, but we also need to filter all the data down to the essentials. A computer wouldn't need to do this - bandwidth isn't a problem, it can hold a lot of information in its working memory and access it all in practically an instant. So the nature of consciousness, if it emerged, would have to be different. I quoted Hofstader a little while ago, and I'll do it in full again, as it serves my purpose here:

When and only when such a loop arises in the brain or in any other substrate, is a person - a unique new "I" - brought into being. Moreover, the more self-referentially rich such a loop is, the more conscious is the self to which it gives rise. Yes, shocking though this might sound, consciousness is not an on/off phenomenon, but admits of degrees, grades, shades. To put it more bluntly, there are bigger souls and smaller souls.

Douglas Hofstadter, Godel, Escher, Bach, P-6

The point being would such loops arising on a large, distributed computer connected to sensors, RFID tags and so on have access to a bigger soul? I don't see why not, and then that would be available everywhere, in all machines plugged into the mind.

Blade Runner - Voight-Kampff Test

Degrees, grades, shades

...humans are not magic animals different from all the others, but part of a spectrum...

Darren Naish on 'crappy humanoid dinosaurs'

Related post: Other substrates

Mandelbulb

A page with lots of images from a preliminary investigation into a 3D rendering of the Mandelbrot set. Beauty abounds.

Breaking the clouds

Alejandro Selkirk Island, South Pacific Ocean

This small member of the Juan Fernandez Islands off the coast of Chile measure just under a mile across. But its 5,000 feet of elevation is high enough to reach the layer of stratocumulus clouds pictured above. The result is a type of flow known as a von Karmen vortex street. This striking, curly pattern of eddies can also be seen in clouds, and fluids or air moving past rounded objects such as an airplane wing. This image was taken by the Landsat 7 satellite in 1999.

Wired: Islands Seen from Space

Patterns emerging from granular matter

Patterns emerge from a rotating tube filled with colored balls of different sizes. Very cool that there are still mysterious things happening with simple objects at the macroscopic scale.

It's just a coincidence, because they used white and orange balls in the video, but it reminded me of the Turing patterns [below] in this post [which is mostly Rudy Rucker].


I've been sick a few days and even slower / more stupid than usual, sweating heavily and dragging myself through dull files. But today the recovery is taking hold, and with the gathering strength other patterns are also emerging in my life, but that's all stuff for another time.

More from Wired on the above

Deeper ecology

Carl Zimmer writes:

We are, fundamentally, a fusion. As I wrote in my essay [subscription req'd - I don't have one] for Science on the origin of eukaryotes, there's now a wealth of evidence that our cells evolved from the combination of two different microbes. The mitochondria that generate fuel for our cells started out as free-living bacteria. Today, they still retain traces of their origin in the bacterial DNA they carry, as well as their bacterial structure, including the membrane within a membrane that envelops them.
...
In today's issue of Nature, James Lake [of the University of California, Los Angeles, a veteran researcher on the early history of life] questions whether we may be too quick to assume that only eukaryotes are the result of fusion. He observes that aphids depend on a species of bacterium called Buchnera to digest their food, and Buchnera in turn contains other bacteria on which its own survival depends. These two bacteria are still distinct enough from each other that we can tell them apart. But what if two bacteria joined together billions of years ago and their identities blurred together? How would we tell them apart?
...
When scientists dredge up muck from the ocean floor, for example, they often find different species of microbes living together in tight clumps. They have to live close to other species to survive because each species takes care of chemical reactions that their partners can't carry out on their own. That intimacy makes it easier for individual genes to move from host to host, as viruses infect different microbes or as microbes die and other microbes slurp up their genes.
...
Our cells, in other words, are not just microbes within microbes; they are microbes within microbes within microbes: a true Russian doll of evolution.

Microbes Within Microbes Within Microbes

Slightly related post: Matryoshka selves, strange loops and inner voices

Inertia / momentum

Philip Larkin dated the start of the 60s [sex] to 1963, and the end has been put at Altamont [1969] or when Haight Ashbury began attracting tourists and runaways from the midwest [1968, in Jane Didion's account], but I remember reading somewhere that for the Rolling Stones the sixties didn't end until the early seventies, around Exile on Main St / Cocksucker Blues. The point being that things don't follow a neat timeline, there's intertia / momentum, and the landmarks we set up are all just points of departure, convenient half-truths, like most of our perceptions.

All through my early + mid-20s I was a fairly typical under-skilled and over-employed liberal arts grad, and then when I was 26 I quit my job and spent the next few years traveling and getting more heavily into not working and over-partying, and there were many occasions when I should have died, been horrifically injured or imprisoned, all through stupidity rather than daring.

I think this is a good way to spend your twenties, if you can find a way out at the end, but that generally means not getting in too deep, not having as much fun as you could. Because the people who have a lot of fun, the ones who take a happily irresponsible attitude toward drink, drugs, sex, and so on to its logical conclusion - happiness being a button that you hit again and again - well, there are many traps along the way.

But then not following those lines of inquiry may leave you open to easy regrets, which can last for the rest of your life. And there are traps all over the place, in the quietest, safest lives you know.

So when I was 30 I wanted to get my life together, because I thought in neat, 10-year units. I skidded on haphazardly until at least 33, and then slowly pulled things into some kind of order, to the point they are now [39], when I'm married, have permanent residency and do my own thing with regard to time / $. But even in periods of seeming inertia things are churning beneath the surface. Nothing is consciously willed into being at the moment of decision or action. Which means that although I have no idea what will happen next, most of it has already started.

Related post: Monkey orgasm button

Emergent AI

A-Pod by Zenta, unrelated to the story below

...the Laboratory of Intelligent Systems in the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology built a swarm of mobile robots, outfitted with light bulbs and photodetectors. These were set loose in a zone with illuminated "food" and "poison" zones which charged or depleted their batteries. Their programming was initially random...

At intervals, the robots were shut down and those that had the most charge left in their batteries were chosen as "successful", and their neural programming was combined to produce the next generation of the robots...

Within fifty generations of this electronic evolution, co-operative societies of robots had formed - helping each other to find food and avoid poison. Even more amazing is the emergence of cheats and martyrs. Transistorized traitors emerged which wrongly identified poison zone as food, luring their trusting brethren to their doom before scooting off to silently charge in a food zone...

Electronic Evolution: Research Show Robots Forming Human-like Societies

If intelligence is an emergent property of enough sensors and feedback, then AI could be sudden and undesigned - consciousness as a phase transition from the disorder of too many individual processes to a simplistic whole.

An idea to trip on. AI emerges from all our networks - then why would it need to make contact? It knows all that we can express in language, numbers and other symbolic systems, and it can do things with this data. That kind of manipulation is trivial. It is, after all, a massive distributed system that lives to process data.

Moreover, if need be it can influence us in far more subtle and effective ways than "I command...". It massages the figures, spreads the memes, pushes things in the right direction. This doesn't need to be a two-way street. It would not be a meeting of equals. All it needs is for us to keep building sensors and computers and connecting them.

Why I go out drinking more often than before

The major implication intended by this paper is that the personal experience of individuals is closely bound up with larger-scale aspects of social structure, well beyond the purview or control of particular individuals. Linkage of micro and macro levels is thus no luxury, but of central importance to the development of sociological theory. Such linkage generates paradoxes: weak ties, often denounced as generative of alienation are here seen as indispensable to individuals' opportunities and to their integration into communities; strong ties, breeding social cohesion, lead to overall fragmentation. Paradoxes are a welcome antidote to theories which explain everything too neatly.

Mark Granovetter, The Strength of Weak Ties [pdf, 1973]

Click for a bigger version of an awesome 'map of science' from this paper

An idea mundane in one group can be a valuable insight in another.

Ronald S Burt, Structural Holes and Good Ideas [pdf]

What you repeatedly do

almost taiwan

Doing a big clean ahead of house guests arriving, listening to two old Mark Pesce talks on the same topic, around the same time [Fall 2002, see links at the end]. He mentions Wolfram's A New Kind of Science [whole book online here] and gives the executive summary as there are no formulas for some processes, but rather only processes that need to be followed from start to end, giving the example of a rose.

The same thing is the basis of wisdom vs. knowledge. Knowledge, as facts, can be downloaded / learned at high speed. For many things it's possible to jump over the process directly to the outcome, which enables people with almost no technological know-how, like myself, to function in a society surrounded by engineering marvels that are essentially black magic boxes. As a user, the process is unimportant and more or less invisible.

So back to Aristotle: "We are what we repeatedly do, Excellence is therefore not an act but a habit."

The first talk, Memes to an End, is slightly more scholarly, while the second, Bios and Logos, is the same material through a psychedelic lens, and several references to Terence McKenna, with my angle reminding me of this idea from somewhere in his work: most people take 40 years or so to see through the shit, if they ever do, that is culture, and now more people are living longer than ever. I don't really believe the supposed implications of this, as I think the mediated reality is so pervasive and deep that the cognitive dissonance of a mass awakening in middle age would be a break down of society, one that may well be happening, but expressed as alienation and substance / behavioral abuse rather than real recognition and communion. At 40 yrs old there's too much skin in the game to throw it all up for something authentic and better. Absurd, until you look around at what people do day after day after day.

The Pesce talks:
Memes to an End, via Future Hi
Bios and Logos from 2002 [text form here]

Slightly related post, on health:
The process not the outcome

cone shell via wikidepia