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.

Some things really did happen

Am distracted / engrossed in life and so little to post here, but some more from that Sokal book that I want to keep online.

Whether the accused in a murder trial is or is not guilty depends on the assessment of old-fashioned positivity evidence, if such evidence is available. Any innocent readers who find themselves in the dock will do well to appeal to it. It is the lawyers for the guilty ones who fall back on postmodern lines of defence.

Eric Hobsbawm, On History pviii, quoted in Sokal p321

It is [...] pretty suicidal for embattled minorities to embrace Michel Foucault, let alone Jacques Derrida. The minority view was always that power could be undermined by truth ...Once you read Foucault as saying that truth is simply an effect of power, you've had it. ...But American departments of literature, history and sociology contain large numbers of self-described leftists who have confused radical doubts about objectivity with political radicalism, and are in a mess.

Alan Ryan, quoted in Sokal p95

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

The long line of supposedly beaten generations

Portrait of the author as a young man

'That is how the hero of our time must be,' [wrote a contemporary critic of Mikhail Lermontov's 1840 novel A Hero of Our Time] 'he will be characterized either by determined inactivity of else by futile activity' - that is, by either passive conformity to the social norm or petty rebellion against it.

From the introduction to Mikhail Lermontov's A Hero of Our Time

Nothing changes. That said, I got divorced the other week, and events surrounding that have been behind the recent lack of posts, as I wanted to avoid explicitly dealing with the topic, although it's really all that I've been thinking about for the last two months or so. Hence the easing back into things with just quotes from things I've been reading. But the one above, and the whole air of the novel, reminds me that every modern generation seems to think that's uniquely on the verge of disaster and disillusionment, from the fin de siècle by way of the Lost Generation and through the Beats and on to the Millennials.

What amazes me about Lermontov's feeling that there's nothing to be done is that it comes only 40 - 50 yrs after the French revolution, and only 20 since the death of Napoleon, but this is something for another post - I just need to get back in the habit.

The farther we stray from intuitions

...the deeper we probe into the nature of things, the stranger they tend to look. That is not surprising: the deeper we probe into the nature of things, the farther we stray from the intuitions about macroscopic objects (and about human psychology, etc.) that were sculpted into our brains by natural selection.

Alan Sokal, Beyond the Hoax, p240

We are wired to share the processing load

Various complex personal / admin issues to deal with, so best not to do this until they're resolved, but a nice passage in a recent NY Times article on touch:

A warm touch seems to set off the release of oxytocin, a hormone that helps create a sensation of trust, and to reduce levels of the stress hormone cortisol.

In the brain, prefrontal areas, which help regulate emotion, can relax, freeing them for another of their primary purposes: problem solving. In effect, the body interprets a supportive touch as “I’ll share the load.”

We think that humans build relationships precisely for this reason, to distribute problem solving across brains,” said James A. Coan, a a psychologist at the University of Virginia. “We are wired to literally share the processing load, and this is the signal we’re getting when we receive support through touch.”

[full article]

Would you buy a used paradigm from this man?

jaron lanier by allan j. cronin

Good talk by Jaron Lanier at the LSE [link to MP3 on that page] that starts slow and fairly rambling, but touches on a lot of interesting things [Xanadu / the importance of boundaries / the wrong turn at Turing / anti-Singularity / anti-Wikipedia / anti-neo-Maoism / pro-micropayments] as a way to a) sketch out the ideas in his new book, and b) make a case for a new [well…old] technological / economic model for the Internet, essentially based on one copy of each file [Ted Nelson's Xanadu] and micropayments.

Since Larnier was previously on the ‘free’ side of the ‘information wants to be free, but it also wants to be expensive’ debate, it’s an interesting trip he takes the listener on. The bottom line – of this talk, at least – is that micropayments will be embraced when anyone can launch themselves as a creator – already possible – and become part of the system [not yet in place, but presumably something like a bigger version of the iTunes store]. With the right incentives thus in place, people will work harder at being more creative, because they’re being [potentially] rewarded for their efforts and can maybe pay the rent and so on without a day job.

Side note: things are sloooowly getting back on track here, and something like abnormal service will kick back in later this month.

Not drowning, but waving

I got my first positive response from an unknown reader a few weeks ago, and then didn't post anymore. The events were unrelated, I just let myself slip out of time for a while. I've been away doing other things, and it was confusing, but very soon it all made sense. My life has totally changed, and I'm still in the process of hitting old beliefs and seeing if they ring true.

When I was a teenager I got given a copy of 'Notes from the Underground' and sat down and read it in one go, glowing in recognition that someone had got things down true. I'd never been much of a reader before that, but starting the next day I began to read everything, and my life was changed by that night.

A little later than that I took LSD for the first time, and all the things I'd read about it were true, but more so, and everything changed again. All the old beliefs had to be questioned, a process that's ongoing - the psychedelic life.

And the same thing happened when I met this woman about a month ago, and knew fast that my old life would have to end if I was going to live at all honestly with the truth of what had happened. My life fell apart and came together over the course of a few hours, but there were still some things I had to change if I was ever going to walk straight again.

Things are still kind of fucked up, objectively speaking, at the home of A DEEP LUST, but subjectively they're better than they've ever been, and I've got full confidence in how things will play out over time - the past few weeks the universe has been conspiring in my favor.

Normal posting will resume when my head falls in place.

Fractals from roots

No real idea of the math behind it, but a great set of images via John Baez [click the name for full post], who writes:
My friend Dan Christensen has created a fascinating picture of all the roots of all polynomials of degree ≤ 5 with integer coefficients ranging from -4 to 4.
Sam Derbyshire then went on to investigate Chrtistensen's image, above, at a higher resolution and came up with several images, including the ones below, both of which can be clicked and enlarged. It seems like a very interesting environment to poke around in, and it's all real.


All posts tagged fractals.

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.

You made me realise

my bloody valentine

We are on a sinking ship, but the only materials we have to build a ship that will float come from the ship itself.

The Guru Papers: Masks of Authoritarian Power, by Joel Kramer & Diana Alstad, p161

Fuck everything

by leonard eisenberg, via evogeneo

A post a while back called sex in time, about speciation that ended with the line

...if all the 'species' ever extant where brought back to life there could be one unbroken chain of fucking going right back to the first creatures that invented sex...

Hence the nice picture above, click to enlage, then imagine the scene.

brooks too broad for leaping

I met a guy a a few months ago who had lived for three or four years in a famous Asian city. He worked in nightlife, and told me that he had slept with three or four hundred women in that time. It didn't surprise me, as he'd been quite open about paying for sex , and so a number two or three times that would have been reasonable too. But I must getting old, or sensible, or between mid-life crises, because there was no sense of shame, regret or envy that at sex partners he had me beat by an order of magnitude. It was an odd feeling, feeling nothing.

harland miller

More from Procopius, this time on Theodora, future wife of Justinian, emperor of Rome:

She used to tease her lovers by keeping them waiting, and by constantly playing about with novel methods of intercourse she could always bring the lascivious to her feet; so far from waiting to be invited by anyone she encountered, she herself by cracking dirty jokes and wiggling her hips suggestively would invite all who came her way, especially if they were still in their teens. Never was anyone so completely given up to unlimited self-indulgence. Often she would go to a bring-your-own-food dinner-party with ten young men or more, all at the peak of their physical powers and with fornication as their chief object in life, and would lie with all her fellow-diners in turn the whole night long: when she had reduced them all to a state of exhaustion she would go to their menials, as many as thirty on occasion, and copulate with every one of them; but not even so could she satisfy her lust.

One night she went into the house of a distinguished citizen during the drinking, and, it is said, before the eyes of all the guests she stood up on the end of the couch near their feet, pulled up her dress in the most disgusting manner as she stood there, and brazenly displayed her lasciviousness. And though she brought three openings into service, she often found fault with Nature, grumbling because Nature had not made the openings in her nipples wider than is normal, so that she could devise another variety of intercourse in that region.

Procopius, The Secret History, p82 [although I Googled, copy / pasted from here]

And on the same theme, Seutonius on Caligula [From The Lives of the Twelve Caesars - full text]:

He had not the slightest regard for chastity, either his own or others', and was accused of homosexual relations, both active and passive, with Marcus Lepidus, also Mnester the comedian, and various foreign hostages; moreover, a young man of a consular family, Valerius Catullus, revealed publicly that he had buggered the Emperor, and quite worn himself out in the process. Besides incest with his sisters, and a notorious passion for the prostitute Pyrallis, he made advances to almost every woman of rank in Rome; after inviting a selection of them to dinner with their husbands he would slowly and carefully examine each in turn while they passed his couch, as a purchaser might assess the value of a slave, and even stretch out his hand and lift up the chin of any woman who kept her eyes modestly cast down. Then, whenever he felt so inclined, he would send for whoever pleased him best and leave the banquet in her company. A little later he would return, showing obvious signs of what he had been about, and openly discuss his bed-fellow in detail, dwelling on her good and bad physical points and commenting on her sexual performance.

He was not conscious that he had once been a man

steve blackburn

In the grip of this terror he went upstairs to his bedroom and sat down on the bed alone. There was no one honourable thought in his head; he was not conscious that he had once been a man. The sweat ran down his face unceasingly; his head swam; his whole body trembled in an agony of despair, tormented as he was by slavish fears and craven anxieties utterly unworthy of a man.

Procopius, The Secret History, p58

I haven't felt like that in a long time, but it'd be foolish to think that it'll never happen again.

The other day I was in Kanding / Kenting [see picture], beshroomed and a little drunk. I was with some friends and it was after 1am and the place was dead, which is an odd experience in Taiwan.

We walked to a beach and in the pavement someone spotted a jagged hole that went deep. One wrong step you'd be lucky if you just broke your leg, with a smashed jaw or slashed throat more likely.

On the way back we were all distracted, and nobody looked out for the hole. We noticed this soon after, and one of us could easily have fallen in. Absolute terror.

In bed I kept getting flash visions of terrible injuries, as if in all the multiverses nearby my life had taken a bloody and significant turn for the worse.

Sometimes it seems like after the bad joke of my youth the universe is conspiring on my behalf.

Procopius has a great story about an ultra-slut that I'll shoehorn into my next post, which ought to be about sex.

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

Sense of achievement

japanese subway etiquette

Went to an open-air show that started in the afternoon and ended up a very long day, but out of it mostly unscathed.

A friend's band was playing. He's the guitarist and singer. The last show they had he kicked in a speaker and knocked over the drum kit [video, 01:50]. He was wandering around before the show with a bottle of beer. His drummer had written 'don't drunk' on his arm. No one has ever written instructions on my body.

He got drunk and put on a great show.

OMG (of limited interest)

Illustration from Listen, Little Man [full text]

This week is the one year anniversary of me quitting my job and going full time freelance. The year has gone very fast, in a blizzard of work and extremely late nights, with all kinds of systems tried and abandoned, essentially a series of mid-life crises that start in a quest for fun, seem to end with the joke being pushed too far, and then start up all over again. Somehow the center holds, I move between the poles of discipline and dissipation, and things do not fall apart.

At some point I'll buckle down and write a post about it, just to get my thoughts together, but right now I'm grateful that I've got no boss, the $ comes in every day and it looks like I'll get away with it for longer.

Repetitive behaviors

More from The Guru Papers: Masks of Authoritarian Power, by Joel Kramer & Diana Alstad, [p212].

Limiting ourselves to the configuration of addiction that involves an inner battle about being addicted has the advantage of isolating the most elusive, controversial, and seemingly mysterious component - control. In focusing on the inner conflicts around control, including the ostensible loss of it, there are two related factors:

1. Doing repetitive behaviors that one feels either incapable of stopping or that take great effort to try and stop - and should one succeed, their possible return is always lurking the background.
2. These repetitive behaviors are judged by the person involved to be (or in fact are) interfering in a non-trivial way with one's well-being - in short, they are self-destructive.

The eyes have it

You can't sneak a peek, because of all the face we're most set up to spot the eyes. The importance of sunglasses in certain situations is thus beyond measure. Nobody knows what I see and nobody knows what I'm thinking.

I sit in public and watch what people show of themselves, amazed that any of us leave the house. Going naked would be only marginally more revealing.

Related paper: The eyes have it! Reflexive orienting is triggered by nonpredictive gaze.

Eleven characteristics of transcendental states

Since I decided to get a social life after quitting my job / going freelance a year ago, I keep finding myself walking out of bars at 5 or 6am, which means this year there's been more posts tagged drink than psychedelics, but a good description of transcendental states in The Guru Papers: Masks of Authoritarian Power, by Joel Kramer & Diana Alstad, [p304].

1. One experiences being in the eternal, a place that always was and always will be.

2. There can be a great energy that breaks through boundaries to the extent of experiencing one's awareness expanding until it seems to (or could) include everything

3. The ordinary separations between what's me and not-me either momentary disappear of become really ambiguous.

4. There are often (though not always) deep feelings of identification - one might even call it love - with the cosmos.

5. One "knows" this place is always there to be tapped into.

6. The place feels foreign and yet familiar at the same time.

7. The is both awe and a feeling of personal insignificance, where the mundane concerns and emotions around self-enhancement and self-protection seem trivial and beside the point.

8. There is no fear, because death feels quite unreal. Or in a slightly different vein, when you cease identifying with yourself and merge with the cosmos, it feels like you've already died, so there's nothing left to fear. This cessation of fear is one of the most marvelously unusual feelings, bringing deep relaxation on levels one didn't even know existed.

9. One feels immune from being affected by the judgments of others, and also free from such petty responses as vengeance and competitiveness. After all, we are all one. Along this line, all so-called negative emotions - anger, jealousy, etc. - can seem not only unnecessary, but silly and based on illusions.

10. There is a recognitions that one is (or we all are) and aspect of God.

11. Everything (oneself included), and the way the cosmos is unfolding, is seen as perfect.

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

Crossing the bridge

Probably last Scientology post for a while, but below is a good 2hr interview with Jason Beghe on his involvement and disillusionment with the cult. Like all other related materials, it's full of creepy thrills, and he's a great speaker on the topic.

Via XenuTV.

The golden age of madness

I've a free ticket to 2012 and the movie is only a 10 minute walk from my house, but I'm staying in and getting all my sci-fi / conspiracy / madness thrills from this 3hr Scientology summit from 2007 [links to Google video]. This is when Miscavige says "yeah, we've been doing it wrong all these years, but now we have the right tech." And the roomful of impoverished believers who've spent all their $$$ trying to master space / time eat it up and ask for more.

I can't enough of this crazy.

Mandelbulb

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

It was twenty years ago today

Argentine ant

Wonderful theory. Wrong species.

Edward O. Wilson on Marxism [quoted in The Blank Slate, p296]