The liberal party submitted a bill:
"For
the well being of the state, the youth of our nation need a healthy
society. In addition to existing programs of contraception and family
planning, additional social services will provide food, shelter, and
care for children in need."
The conservative party was outraged.
"It stinks!" the senator shouted, "Your slimy scheme should slip us into
Socialism!" A poll was tallied, and totaled: A tie.
The conservative party submitted a bill:
"For
the well being of families, the youth of our nation need a healthy
home. In lieu of existing programs of contraception and family planning,
additional family services will provide food, shelter, and care for
children in need. In God we trust."
The liberals fumed with indignant frustration,
"You propose to impose your persuasion!"
The conservatives chided, "Your sinister quarrels
Are attacking our nation's high morals!"
Both bills were shot down, the first and the latter, and the debate rages on to this day.
Though principles come with a cost, both parties agree:
It's a price that the people can pay.
Thursday, April 25, 2013
Thursday, March 14, 2013
Revolution Post-Hierarchy
I've been listening enthusiastically to the Long Now Foundation's Seminars About Long-term Thinking series, and over the course of days have been able to connect ideas that were presented over the course of years. A lot of interesting common themes seem obvious with you have the luxury of consuming such an enormous number of ideas in an compressed time scale. It's like school but more efficient and less productive.
Two speakers that I relate right now are Clay Shirky and Paul Hawken, who respectively presented the talks Making Digital Durable: What Time Does to Categories and The New Great Transformation (Hawken also presented a talk called The Long Green which was effectively the same subject). If you have the chance go listen to those talks and then the other 130 or so in the series because they're all really worth listening to even if some of them show their age.
Anyway, the connection I think is interesting is that Clay Shirky explains methods of categorization, and he ends history as we know it on the notion of tags, which on the internet are user-selected short description that, with complex algorithms, are extremely effective tools for searching for and grouping similar and related items. Traditional hierarchical systems are highly arbitrary and come with peculiar biases.
Paul Hawken identified the Green Revolution which he later generalized more as the Social Justice Movement which he identified as an enormous cultural movement spanning the entire world with no single ideology, no hierarchy, and only loose organization that none the less shares common humanitarian and dignitarian goals and are very involved on a local level.
I think social justice activism can be aptly described as a single movement but it's impossible to group them without treating their similarities as tags. Individual groups may recognize their common goals between one another but they don't see each other as existing under a hierarchy because a hierarchy hasn't been defined.
This does raise the question though, can a non-hierarchical movement be described on the same terms as traditional movements? If we describe movements through common tags, could other groups be out there that just haven't been defined yet? Would the overlaps then build up past the point where it even makes sense to describe them as groups at all?
Either way, I'm all in favor of this, at least so far. It's a wonderful movement to be a part of.
Two speakers that I relate right now are Clay Shirky and Paul Hawken, who respectively presented the talks Making Digital Durable: What Time Does to Categories and The New Great Transformation (Hawken also presented a talk called The Long Green which was effectively the same subject). If you have the chance go listen to those talks and then the other 130 or so in the series because they're all really worth listening to even if some of them show their age.
Anyway, the connection I think is interesting is that Clay Shirky explains methods of categorization, and he ends history as we know it on the notion of tags, which on the internet are user-selected short description that, with complex algorithms, are extremely effective tools for searching for and grouping similar and related items. Traditional hierarchical systems are highly arbitrary and come with peculiar biases.
Paul Hawken identified the Green Revolution which he later generalized more as the Social Justice Movement which he identified as an enormous cultural movement spanning the entire world with no single ideology, no hierarchy, and only loose organization that none the less shares common humanitarian and dignitarian goals and are very involved on a local level.
I think social justice activism can be aptly described as a single movement but it's impossible to group them without treating their similarities as tags. Individual groups may recognize their common goals between one another but they don't see each other as existing under a hierarchy because a hierarchy hasn't been defined.
This does raise the question though, can a non-hierarchical movement be described on the same terms as traditional movements? If we describe movements through common tags, could other groups be out there that just haven't been defined yet? Would the overlaps then build up past the point where it even makes sense to describe them as groups at all?
Either way, I'm all in favor of this, at least so far. It's a wonderful movement to be a part of.
Thursday, December 9, 2010
Abortion: All a Big Misunderstanding
I was keeping up with my friend's Tumblr and she left a post, a screenshot of another post (honestly we could have a field day discussing how information is transferred and lost through that site) that I found striking for several reasons. The argument itself is mostly valid (and the obviously invalid bits are trivial enough to dismiss), but still does nothing to refute the opposition. Here's a transcription of the post:
But that's not my point. In fact, the argument isn't really entirely bad, per se, it just totally fails to refute its opposition because either side bases its opinion on totally different premises.
Here's an excerpt from the Catechism of the Catholic Church:
A logician might say that the fundamental problem is that the premises are conflicting, which is true, from a logical standpoint, but I think the bigger problem is that both sides are actually ignorant of the other's perspective. The simple fact that neither side is willing to acknowledge the validity of the opposing argument out of stubborn principle or closed-mindedness or whatever means nobody is willing to yield.
Courts and lawmakers have actually done a reasonable job reaching compromise in the abortion issue. Although it is legal, limits such as how far into pregnancy it's available reduce the more gruesome side. In almost every state it is illegal past the first trimester, meaning that the recognizable human form isn't yet developed. While this is still clearly not in compliance with the ideal of life being sacred from conception, it still appeals to a more universal, less literal understanding of humanity.
But not a perfect job. Lobbyists in favor of abortions ideologically believe that they should necessarily be available, not just as a personal liberty, but as a healthcare right. The controversy that many pro-abortion advocates fail to recognize is that many laws pushed make it strictly mandatory for doctors and hospitals to perform abortion procedures to patients who request them, regardless of the moral values of the doctor or hospital. In the spirit of protecting human rights, lawmakers inadvertently stifle other rights that don't necessarily need to be stifled.
On the anti-abortion side, there is still some evil from its pressures. The fact that the Catholic church is so adamant about its position indirectly puts a lot of pressure on predominately Catholic nations, especially in South America, to impose incredibly strict abortion laws, with penalties equal to regular homicide. Unfortunately, this has resulted in a horrible downward spiral for many families, caused by a combination of unavailable birth control (also a Catholic ideal), unavailability of sanitary abortion clinics, and harsh penalties for abortion. For a continent with so many sexy people, this is bound to be problematic.
In these sorts of discussions, it's hard not to make the Catholic Church appear like an evil empire, but that isn't entirely fair. The problem is that it's just so big and influential; even though the church doesn't hold its standards to those not of the faith, its massive influence and explicit chain of authority still cause it to create massive collateral damage.
With Benedict XVI, there's some signs that the church is beginning to recognize its influence. In an interview, the Pope gave some acknowledgment (albeit incredibly restrained) that the use of condoms can be valuable to preventing the spread of STD and should be used appropriately. It was a small statement, but it shows a growing responsibility on the part of the Church about its influence on people's behavior. Although his statement clearly was not intended to apply to Catholics (in fact, his specific example was male prostitutes, which undoubtedly are among the least of Africa's worries in the AIDS epidemic), that recognition of non-Catholics having their own separate moral standards is a significant step towards understanding.
So there you have it. Everyone's wrong because everyone's right. As Epictetus said, “We have two ears and one mouth so that we can listen twice as much as we speak,” and in these debates that is proving to be all too true. Clearly there should be less focus on who's right and more focus on understanding and compromise. Or maybe I'm being idealistic. I don't know.
So obviously this was written by someone with fairly less than a rudimentary grasp on rhetoric, but we'll forgive that and focus the blame on public education, which has no focus and spends more time ruining math than actually teaching people to compose arguments properly and think for themselves. As a result, freethinking tends to be anti-academic, like the quote above, focusing more on emotional appeal than making a relevant logical argument.
oh? really? because i fucking think every life is valuableYes, really. And oh my god, I agree! Of course it is. Every single human life is valuable, no matter what. But guess what? The fetus isn't a human. If it was a human, we'd call it a fucking human. But it's not a fucking human. It's a fetus. It's the mother's fetus. It's not your fetus. Not anyone else's but the mother's. You act as if women have babies JUST to have abortions. No, women don't abort their babies for the fucking fun of it. They have a reason. Whether is(sic) be rape, they can't support the baby, the guy lied and actually didn't use a condom, the condom broke, they changed their mid, whatever it may be. And you need to respect that decision. It's just like all other opinions. You need to fucking respect it. Do you understand that when women walk into those clinics, it's the worst day of their fucking life? They don't want to abort their baby. That's the last thing they want. Maybe they didn't want the baby in the first place, but by god they don't want to abort it. And you need to respect their decision to get an abortion. If you don't like abortion, don't fucking get one. But PLEASE, for the love of god, do NOT tell them they can't get one because you think it's wrong. That's taking away rights. And I will fight to keep abortion open as an option for women until the day I die. I may be 15, but I know what's right and what's wrong. Is your opinion wrong? No, it's not. Is taking away rights from other people wrong? Fuck yeah it is. I won't fucking stand for it.
And if you think every life is valuable, I suggest you stop jacking off every night, buddy. Do you know how many ~*possible*~ lives you're killing?
But that's not my point. In fact, the argument isn't really entirely bad, per se, it just totally fails to refute its opposition because either side bases its opinion on totally different premises.
Here's an excerpt from the Catechism of the Catholic Church:
AbortionClearly there's a conflict in definition. In the former case, the definition of a life is cultural, and in the latter, biblical. Neither is strictly wrong, but they're incompatible and decidedly ignorant of each other. Compare the last line of the first argument
2270 Human life must be respected and protected absolutely from the moment of conception. From the first moment of his existence, a human being must be recognized as having the rights of a person - among which is the inviolable right of every innocent being to life.
Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, and before you were born I consecrated you.
Jer 1:5; cf. Job 10:8-12; Ps 22:10-11.
[. . .]
2274 Since it must be treated from conception as a person, the embryo must be defended in its integrity, cared for, and healed, as far as possible, like any other human being.
And if you think every life is valuable, I suggest you stop jacking off every night, buddy. Do you know how many ~*possible*~ lives you're killing?to this excerpt from the catechism:
Offenses against chastity
2352 By masturbation is to be understood the deliberate stimulation of the genital organs in order to derive sexual pleasure. "Both the Magisterium of the Church, in the course of a constant tradition, and the moral sense of the faithful have been in no doubt and have firmly maintained that masturbation is an intrinsically and gravely disordered action." "The deliberate use of the sexual faculty, for whatever reason, outside of marriage is essentially contrary to its purpose." For here sexual pleasure is sought outside of "the sexual relationship which is demanded by the moral order and in which the total meaning of mutual self-giving and human procreation in the context of true love is achieved."
A logician might say that the fundamental problem is that the premises are conflicting, which is true, from a logical standpoint, but I think the bigger problem is that both sides are actually ignorant of the other's perspective. The simple fact that neither side is willing to acknowledge the validity of the opposing argument out of stubborn principle or closed-mindedness or whatever means nobody is willing to yield.
Courts and lawmakers have actually done a reasonable job reaching compromise in the abortion issue. Although it is legal, limits such as how far into pregnancy it's available reduce the more gruesome side. In almost every state it is illegal past the first trimester, meaning that the recognizable human form isn't yet developed. While this is still clearly not in compliance with the ideal of life being sacred from conception, it still appeals to a more universal, less literal understanding of humanity.
But not a perfect job. Lobbyists in favor of abortions ideologically believe that they should necessarily be available, not just as a personal liberty, but as a healthcare right. The controversy that many pro-abortion advocates fail to recognize is that many laws pushed make it strictly mandatory for doctors and hospitals to perform abortion procedures to patients who request them, regardless of the moral values of the doctor or hospital. In the spirit of protecting human rights, lawmakers inadvertently stifle other rights that don't necessarily need to be stifled.
On the anti-abortion side, there is still some evil from its pressures. The fact that the Catholic church is so adamant about its position indirectly puts a lot of pressure on predominately Catholic nations, especially in South America, to impose incredibly strict abortion laws, with penalties equal to regular homicide. Unfortunately, this has resulted in a horrible downward spiral for many families, caused by a combination of unavailable birth control (also a Catholic ideal), unavailability of sanitary abortion clinics, and harsh penalties for abortion. For a continent with so many sexy people, this is bound to be problematic.
In these sorts of discussions, it's hard not to make the Catholic Church appear like an evil empire, but that isn't entirely fair. The problem is that it's just so big and influential; even though the church doesn't hold its standards to those not of the faith, its massive influence and explicit chain of authority still cause it to create massive collateral damage.
With Benedict XVI, there's some signs that the church is beginning to recognize its influence. In an interview, the Pope gave some acknowledgment (albeit incredibly restrained) that the use of condoms can be valuable to preventing the spread of STD and should be used appropriately. It was a small statement, but it shows a growing responsibility on the part of the Church about its influence on people's behavior. Although his statement clearly was not intended to apply to Catholics (in fact, his specific example was male prostitutes, which undoubtedly are among the least of Africa's worries in the AIDS epidemic), that recognition of non-Catholics having their own separate moral standards is a significant step towards understanding.
So there you have it. Everyone's wrong because everyone's right. As Epictetus said, “We have two ears and one mouth so that we can listen twice as much as we speak,” and in these debates that is proving to be all too true. Clearly there should be less focus on who's right and more focus on understanding and compromise. Or maybe I'm being idealistic. I don't know.
Wednesday, August 18, 2010
Alan Turing's Broken Machine and the Hofstadter Solution
Alan Turing was, regardless of anything I'm about to say, a brilliant man. His ideas and designs form the basis for the computers that every single last one of you reading this today are using. I could easily write for the rest of my life on how Alan Turing has affected my life, and a great many people make their careers out of writing about and expanding upon his fundamental design.
However, I find it fundamentally unlikely that his own machine could pass his famous proposed test. Granted, it is possible and in fact easy to fool a human, so I don't propose that no artificial intelligence program will ever pass the test, but I stand with reasonable certainty that no Turing complete machine will ever be capable of replacing or even replicating a human mind.
I still believe that true artificial intelligence is possible and likely to be developed, but not by its current approach. Regular showcases of animatronic puppets with eerie robotic voices and disconnected thought processes are fun, and may do something for the need for companionship, but clearly are not the ancestors of a thoughtful, sentient computer. Even more developed, strictly text-based artificial intelligence, such as A.L.I.C.E. and the disappointingly accurately named "World's Best Chatbot" fail to resemble even an imbecile. It's just a weird pattern, a tool without a purpose.
I assert that these are not even the ancestors of sentience because they have no resemblance to real world sentient ancestors in any way. Even Theo Jansen's (almost) mindless walking machines "Strandbeest" feel more like living creatures than Chatbots.
However, more than outward resemblance, I find that the root of the Turing design is fundamentally inconsistent with sentience. Computers are strictly logical, developed from the ground up on Boolean logic gates (from the most basic Tamagotchi to IBM's Deep Blue, all computers are made of the same basic designs), and arranged to process higher orders of logic. All programming languages, for this reason, are strictly logical, no matter how advanced and abstract.
Compare this with human languages. Human thought is almost defined by idiosyncrasy. Double-negatives are a perfect example of how natural language is logically inconsistent. We all understand someone who says "I don't know nothing" or "No sé nunca", but anyone can recognize that that's still a contradictory statement. Of course most people seem to have caught on to this and pompously remove it from their speech, but there's another oddity I tend to hear from these sorts of people a lot. Quite often they say something along the lines of, "We're out of milk, we need to get some more. I mean, we need to get some." The first statement was clearly correct, not just because milk is a staple of my diet but because clearly when you have none, you would like to have an amount that is greater than none. But, as logically proper folk are quick to assert, "you can't have more than nothing! You don't have any to start out!" This is a good example of a problem that held back mathematics for centuries: People do not naturally recognize zero as a number.
These and other idiosyncrasies are the butt of a lot of jokes by observational comedians such as the late George Carlin and certainly the target of rage by many an anal-retentive grammar teacher, but I propose they would be better used as a point of study for artificial intelligence researchers. Douglas Hofstadter certainly recognized this, and and as he explained, in his aptly named paper "To Err is Human; To Study Error-making is Cognitive Science", by studying the errors in human thought and action, we can better understand the underlying process by which it works. That is to say, the very fundamental construction of cognition is incomplete without the elements that produce these very errors.
It may very well be possible regardless to develop an artificial brain that functions without error, at least to the same degree as a regular computer, but it would not be believably lifelike if it did not obey the fundamental pattern of a human brain which by design gives rise to these errors. When the basic formula is discovered, the first models may not be anywhere close to modeling human speech, but unlike any artificial intelligence yet made, they will have qualities of living sentience, perhaps curiosity, the ability to learn and develop, and to make associations and analogies.
I don't have faith in this topic gaining funding and developing with direct research, but several experiments with the mold Physarum polycephalum, as well as many of the comments on the experiments, are giving me hope for the development of artificial brains as I described.
Update 26 September, 2010: There is still hope.
However, I find it fundamentally unlikely that his own machine could pass his famous proposed test. Granted, it is possible and in fact easy to fool a human, so I don't propose that no artificial intelligence program will ever pass the test, but I stand with reasonable certainty that no Turing complete machine will ever be capable of replacing or even replicating a human mind.
I still believe that true artificial intelligence is possible and likely to be developed, but not by its current approach. Regular showcases of animatronic puppets with eerie robotic voices and disconnected thought processes are fun, and may do something for the need for companionship, but clearly are not the ancestors of a thoughtful, sentient computer. Even more developed, strictly text-based artificial intelligence, such as A.L.I.C.E. and the disappointingly accurately named "World's Best Chatbot" fail to resemble even an imbecile. It's just a weird pattern, a tool without a purpose.
I assert that these are not even the ancestors of sentience because they have no resemblance to real world sentient ancestors in any way. Even Theo Jansen's (almost) mindless walking machines "Strandbeest" feel more like living creatures than Chatbots.
However, more than outward resemblance, I find that the root of the Turing design is fundamentally inconsistent with sentience. Computers are strictly logical, developed from the ground up on Boolean logic gates (from the most basic Tamagotchi to IBM's Deep Blue, all computers are made of the same basic designs), and arranged to process higher orders of logic. All programming languages, for this reason, are strictly logical, no matter how advanced and abstract.
Compare this with human languages. Human thought is almost defined by idiosyncrasy. Double-negatives are a perfect example of how natural language is logically inconsistent. We all understand someone who says "I don't know nothing" or "No sé nunca", but anyone can recognize that that's still a contradictory statement. Of course most people seem to have caught on to this and pompously remove it from their speech, but there's another oddity I tend to hear from these sorts of people a lot. Quite often they say something along the lines of, "We're out of milk, we need to get some more. I mean, we need to get some." The first statement was clearly correct, not just because milk is a staple of my diet but because clearly when you have none, you would like to have an amount that is greater than none. But, as logically proper folk are quick to assert, "you can't have more than nothing! You don't have any to start out!" This is a good example of a problem that held back mathematics for centuries: People do not naturally recognize zero as a number.
These and other idiosyncrasies are the butt of a lot of jokes by observational comedians such as the late George Carlin and certainly the target of rage by many an anal-retentive grammar teacher, but I propose they would be better used as a point of study for artificial intelligence researchers. Douglas Hofstadter certainly recognized this, and and as he explained, in his aptly named paper "To Err is Human; To Study Error-making is Cognitive Science", by studying the errors in human thought and action, we can better understand the underlying process by which it works. That is to say, the very fundamental construction of cognition is incomplete without the elements that produce these very errors.
It may very well be possible regardless to develop an artificial brain that functions without error, at least to the same degree as a regular computer, but it would not be believably lifelike if it did not obey the fundamental pattern of a human brain which by design gives rise to these errors. When the basic formula is discovered, the first models may not be anywhere close to modeling human speech, but unlike any artificial intelligence yet made, they will have qualities of living sentience, perhaps curiosity, the ability to learn and develop, and to make associations and analogies.
I don't have faith in this topic gaining funding and developing with direct research, but several experiments with the mold Physarum polycephalum, as well as many of the comments on the experiments, are giving me hope for the development of artificial brains as I described.
Update 26 September, 2010: There is still hope.
Saturday, September 19, 2009
Establishing Provisional Territories
First a Twitter, now a blog, in high hopes of better aspirations to come of them.
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