science

To be perfectly honest, the Shadow Robot Company sounds like an evil corporation from a 1990s anime - maybe Mobile Suit Gundam: Hoxton. ON THE OTHER HAND (wait for it, that phrase becomes pretty important shortly) they actually design and make robot components, so the name is fairly appropriate. Plus, two of my friends work for them (or with them, or around them, or something) so I have a vested interest. Actually I don’t have a vested interest, but I wish I did, because robot parts are going to be big in the future. Not big physically - although they might be, especially if that whole Gundam thing has a revival - but big in a pop-cultural sense. Trust me, you heard it here first, or you read it somewhere else first, which seems more likely. Anyway, Michael Pollitt (yes, one of those friends and my ex-flatmate) circulated some press coverage to me a while back, which I managed to ignore. In a spirit of reconciliation, here are the videos:

They build robot hands, you see? That’s why I said “On the other hand”!

Truly my time is wasted on you, the reader.

The Shape of Music by Dmitri Tymoczko covers fascinating ground in suggesting that the human affinity for mathematics is bone-deep, as long as the bone we’re talking about is the malleus. Tymoczko offers a jumping off point for a wider discussion about the way that humans receive the world while talking about the way chord progressions using the analogy of musical notes positioned on a clock face:

The reason these chords all sound alike is that the human ear is more sensitive to the distances between notes than their absolute position on the clockface.

So in music humans are more sensitive to the relative than the absolute; likewise the visible universe in general is more sensitive to the relative (acceleration) than the absolute (speed), as Newton’s bucket showed. Humans have been in love with the idea of absolutes since at least Plato, but perhaps it’s time to throw away our dreams of perfection and accept that relative values are the only ones we can rely on. An absolute morality makes no more sense than an absolute music.

A fascinating article which I have shamelessly hijacked for my own purposes. Read it all, and while you’re at it read Music in Concentration Camps 1933–1945 by Guido Fackler, for a reminder of the perplexing role of music in human history. (HT the latter: Norm!)

UPDATE: Well, gosh:

This indicates that the mapping of numbers onto space is a universal intuition and that this initial intuition of number is logarithmic. The concept of a linear number line appears to be a cultural invention that fails to develop in the absence of formal education.

I feel a thesis coming on.

While reading this post, you should be listening to Let the Good Times Roll by Layo and Bushwacka!

I tend to think that the Singularity is merely the ne plus ultra of technotopianism, a trend which must be combated wherever it is found, but I avoid talking about it for fear of drawing down the wrath of Eliezer deliberately. However singularity thinking does force us to ask difficult questions about almost every aspect of human endeavour, and I like that. Probably a bit too much.

One such aspect is the question of what it really means to be human, intelligent and conscious, with the prospect of various combinations of biology, chemistry and engineering about to radically alter the way the human does business. You need to read a bit of background before the following will make any sense, and understand that one of the key tenets of singularity thinking is that - at some point in the near future, as computer processing power increases - it will be possible to upload a human mind to a computer.

This raises all sorts of questions, but in the course of arguing for the singularity on 3quarksdaily, Jesse M makes the following point:

Of course a simulated brain would require inputs like those from a real body or it would probably go crazy or become comatose, like a person locked in a sensory deprivation tank forever.

As I burnt my tongue on the pizza I’d just made, this set me thinking. What does it mean to be crazy or comatose? In essence it means that you involuntarily apply an abnormal filtering process on the inputs your brain receives. So being without inputs wouldn’t just be a cause of being crazy or comatose - it would be the result of being crazy or comatose as well. The causative chain doesn’t just go in one direction here, which makes it hard to disentangle which came first without being able to go inside and have a look - and that’s the one thing that currently we can’t do.¹

This made me think some more - what would it mean to have a brain without inputs? This is where you have to separate out mind from brain (sorry dualists): let’s say that you have a brain in a tank - how could you tell if there was anything going on inside that brain? From outside, how would you know a mind existed, if it wasn’t open to inputs against which you could test its responses as per the Turing test? From inside, how would you know you were a mind if you weren’t open to inputs against which you could define yourself (bearing in mind that even the Cogito requires external experiences, even if only to doubt them)?

And then I had the flash of insight which made me forget about my burnt tongue². A brain might exist in a purely physical sense, but without inputs it makes no sense to make the assertion that a mind exists. If there are no inputs, for all practical (and possibly for all philosophical) purposes there is no mind. It’s therefore entirely reasonable to assert that the mind exists only insofar as it interacts with an external world.

If this is the case, is it sensible to draw a hard line between our minds and that external world? (No.) Does the external world need us as much as we need it? (Possibly.) Does my tongue still hurt? (Yes, but I’ll be alright.) In the context of the ongoing singularity conversation, if you upload your mind to a machine, and then close that machine off to all inputs, what are the implications for the continued existence of that mind? Perhaps the Singularity doesn’t provide all the answers to the question of mortality after all.

The good news is that this does help to confirm my own prejudices that (a) The internet already constitutes a machine intelligence - just as these machines are becoming an extension (extrusion?) of our intelligence, we’re an extension of their intelligence - and (b) God is an emergent property of a universe with intelligence in it, in a similar way as consciousness is an emergent property of a body with a mind in it.³

1. Of course with a simulated brain it may well be possible to go inside and have a look (although I tend to doubt it, for reasons which are irrelevant to this discussion but have to do with levels of complexity). Interesting ethical question - should it be considered torture to deliberately inflict this type of condition on a conscious entity, even if it’s artificial? I strongly suspect that this may form part of the case that Eliezer makes in his AI-Box Experiment. [↩]
2. I’m sure there’s some lesson in there as well, incidentally [↩]
3. Note to self: this also creates problems for God, but he’ll have to take care of that on his own. Literally. [↩]

In a Guardian interview, James Lovelock explains why he thinks that there’s no point in most of the environmental activities that we currently pursue. Or indeed, no point to most of the activities that we pursue.

… the current canon of eco ideas… [is] premised on the calculation that individual lifestyle adjustments can still save the planet. This is, Lovelock says, a deluded fantasy. Most of the things we have been told to do might make us feel better, but they won’t make any difference. Global warming has passed the tipping point, and catastrophe is unstoppable.

“It’s just too late for it,” he says. “Perhaps if we’d gone along routes like that in 1967, it might have helped. But we don’t have time. All these standard green things, like sustainable development, I think these are just words that mean nothing. I get an awful lot of people coming to me saying you can’t say that, because it gives us nothing to do. I say on the contrary, it gives us an immense amount to do. Just not the kinds of things you want to do.”

… What would Lovelock do now, I ask, if he were me? He smiles and says: “Enjoy life while you can. Because if you’re lucky it’s going to be 20 years before it hits the fan.”

Lovelock may or may not be correct that the apocalypse is knocking on our door, but is he correct that these sorts of activities - carbon offsetting, recycling, energy conservation and so forth - won’t make any difference?

No, he’s not, for at least four reasons.
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