Kazart!

U.S. Border: assaulting non-criminals?

2010-07-06T12:10:00.000-07:00

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s2V-BumPX6g part 1
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nqZaFVfxHrk part 2

The recordings above are of an actual border interview. Among the most amazing things
1) Saying he didn't know which stores at the outlet mall he was going to and asking "does it matter?" got his keys taken and he and his wife ordered in for 2ndary interviews. Is this kind of answer really associated with drug dealing or terrorism? I have to imagine if I were a drug dealer or terrorist I would be meek as a lamb and answer every question.
2) Border patrol orders him to do things, when he asks why just repeats the order. Is it not obvious that informing the person so ordered that these are orders you must follow immediately or else be arrested such a bad choice? I would like to see it REQUIRED of all law enforcement that you cannot be charged with obstruction for asking why.
3) The border agent tells him that pulling away from the border agent that was reaching to grab him is "assault on a federal officer." Are these people TRYING to be insane, or does it just arise naturally whenever you give weapons and uniforms to men?

Blindsight by Peter Watts

2010-06-17T14:06:00.000-07:00

Blindsight is a 2006 science fiction book. It was mentioned in an Overcoming Bias blog and so I read it. The book is available in electronic form for free on the web. I read it for free from my local public library.

The quality of the ideas about consciousness and mind are outstanding. 5 stars, 2 thumbs up. You don't really get to the main punch line until page 325. What he has to say about consciousness and awareness and brains before then is merely excellent.

A quote: "... People aren't rational. You aren't rational. We're not thinking machines, we're --- we're feeling machines that happen to think." This is where I have been going in my own thinking about brains and consciousness. My model is Lucy, my Golden Doodle dog. In my opinion, you can't read about brains, biology, evolution, especially evolutional psychology, and not see it all laid out before you when you have your own dog. A highly pleasant way to reach your own conclusions about evolutionary psychology, get a dog. So in particular, and only sorta, you've got a lizard brain wrapped in a mammalian brain wrapped in a neocortex. Of course all mammals have a neocortex, but a dog's is a lot smaller than a human's. Whether I've got the anatomy right or not, most of what I think of as feeling is pretty similar between dogs and people.

And then you wrap it in a neocortex. With a sorta mini-dog neocortex you get a little bit of help figuring out what to be mad at, what to be hungry on, what to be horny on, what to be scared of. But mostly, if you are a dog, you are happy, sad, mad, glad, scared, excited etc., and these things dictate your actions. They also dictate your interactions. You can be a social animal without a lot of rationality. Just be loyal to what you love, angry at what seems to be frightening you and you have a pretty functional system.

Wrap it in a big-old human sized neocortex, and throw in nasty monkey emotions (have you seen chimpanzees interact?) and you get a deep need for psychiatrists, psychologists, and many other paid professionals, not to mention a significant and growing pharmacopia. Take the straight forward emotional reactions to things and graft a GIGANTIC rational model of the world, including all the people around you on to it, courtesy of your friendly local neocortex, and you have the basis of some great tragedies and comedies.

That which does not kill us, makes us stranger. -Trevor Goodchild

This is a quotation leading off a sectino of the book. I googled Trevor Goodchild, he is a character in a science fiction TV show that used to be on MTV. But I like the quote, it reminds me of Nietzsche.

I will talk more about consciousness after the "read more" link. SPOILERS about the book will be here. If you are thinking of reading the book, I recommend reading the book before reading the rest of this post.
WARNING SPOILERS! if you read the rest of this post.

WARNING SPOILERS!
The punchline is that the alien intelligence is not conscious, or perhaps you could say not conscious of itself. Further, characters in the book hypothesize that consciousness is an inefficiency, a defect of intelligence. That it is or was a kludge, an inefficient way to get some things done, and that it should have, would have, will eventually, atrophy and wither away as evolution continues.

Now part of what is great about this is the intriguing idea that intelligence can exist without consciousness. If you study Artificial Intelligence, you will be accustomed to trying to figure out how to get consciousness to show up in an intelligent machine. Not easy, with Searle's Chinese Room really driving home to me that a simulation of consciousness is not consciousness. If I program a computer to answer "yes" when you ask it "are you conscious," I have not created consciousness, any more than programming it to report "you have killed 1 million people with your nuclear weapons" during a video game makes you a mass-murderer. A simulation of a nuclear explosion is NOT a nuclear explosion. Searle's point or claim is, a simulation of consciousness is NOT consciousness.

Blindsight turns this on its head. Stop thinking about how to turn a thinking machine conscious. Rather consider what you lose by skipping the consciousness entirely, if anything. In Blindsight's universe, you lose nothing. Rather, you gain stuff. You gain efficiency and speed of execution.

Peter Watts has the right question: what do you gain by having consciousness. Does he have the right answer in our universe? I suspect not. But I don't have well-developed ideas of what consciousness does buy us.

One thought is that consciousness is needed to have the absolutely overwhelmingly intense social integration that we humans operate with. Just as an approximation of this social integration, how many bits do we exchange with other humans on a daily basis? Just my written and the trivially semantic part of my verbal communicatinos must correspond to a few hundred book pages a day of communication. Consider a few hours a day of stories on TV and hours a day of low- to mid- level interaction with family, co-workers, and friends, and you have a lot of interaction. How would consciousness help this? In Blindsight, consciousness is described as when the brain goes from modeling the world to modeling the modeling of the world, including modeling the modelers and other levels of recursion. Perhaps in order to link with other humans in a meaningful way we need to have a highly complex model of the human, and that model is enabled by consciousness. I don't know, I am just making this up as I go along.

Another thought about consciousness comes from one of Penrose's objections to strong AI. From wikipedia, "Penrose presents the argument that human consciousness is non-algorithmic, and thus is not capable of being modeled by a conventionalTuring machine-type of digital computer." Among other things, if I recall correctly, Penrose talks about proving theorems about the limits of Turing machines. I think he claims that you could not write a Turing machine to prove those theorem's about Turning machines!

So if we can prove these theorems, and we can write a simulation of human consciousness, that simulation will NOT be able to prove these theorems. Now I think a lot of engineers and physicists working on simulations will think "yeah, I could see that." Whereas people who don't work on simulations may think "if it is a good simulation of consciousness then it will do the things consciousness does." It is important to understand that ALL simulations are by definition imperfect. The only completely correct simulation of a nuclear explosion is a nuclear explosion. Computational simulations consist of listing a set of equations and rules that you believe adequately describe the physics of that which you are simulating. Notice the words "believe" and "adequately." An "adequate" result of a consciousness simulation might be that the simulation can compose email that fools your boss into thinking the email is from you. Writing that code makes no guarantee what the simulation will do when you give it Penrose's descriptions of these Turing machine proofs to study.

Another interesting defect, or feature, of a simulation is how we deal with randomness or noise. Consider the firing of a neuron. The exact instant it fires may depend on thermal motions of ions. If I were writing a simulation, I would model this thermal motion using a random number generator. Further, there may be quantum choices being made in the brain, collapses of the wavefunction as Blindsight describes them. In one version of the theory of physics we say the way the wavefunction collapses is random. But all that means is we don't KNOW what dictates how it collapses, we just know the statistics of those choices in some limited and controlled situations.

So if I were writing simulations of the brain, of consciousness, I would use random number generators to "simulate" how these choices get made, how these wavefunctions collapse. But what if, what if there is some physics in there that I, that WE, just don't know? What if something we have not taken in to account yet determines how it collapses? In that case, my simulation will not behavnig, or may not behave, like the real system. Where my mind (if I pushed it hard enough) might comprehend Penrose's theorems about Turning machines, my simulation will just respond to it randomly, because some part of my understanding of this theorem involved the non-random collapse of some wavefunctions, and I simulated them as random.

Maybe my simulation of consciousness will be a "zombie." Lights on, motor's running, even the cruise control and autopilot are set, but nobody's driving, nobody's home.

If you think about it, its probably a lot easier to build a dead brain than a live brain.

I think I have wandered far afield in this post. Oh well.

Approximations to an Exponential

2010-06-03T16:13:00.000-07:00

Alan Crowe asks some interesting questions about the exponential function.

Summarizing, we have the exponential function taking a complex argument

F = exp(Z)

If we write Z explicitly in terms of its real and imaginary parts,

Z = X + 1j*Y

then

F = exp(X) * exp(1j*Y)

But each of these pieces is simple:

FX(Z) == exp(X) is the exponential function on a real argument, very small for negative X, very large for positive X, and always positive for any X

FY(Z) == exp(1j*Y) is a rotating phasor. FY always has magnitude 1 and phase Y radians.

Now let us consider approximating exp(Z) with a finite polynomial. The page referred to above describes that a little more in detail, most of you will not need to check that to see what is going on. Let us write the approximation of exp(Z) to an Nth order polynomial as

expN(Z) = FXN(X)*FYN(Y)

Let us look at graphs of some of these functions. First the exponential.

Here we show the argument of the exponential. We see it depends only on the imaginary part of Z, not on the real part of Z at all. And we see it "rolls," as the phasor exp(1j*Y) rolls.

Now lets look at the magnitude of the exponential. The log of the magnitude of the exponential is what we show, we label it Real(log(exp(Z))) because this is equivalent to log(abs(exp(Z)). Now exp(X) gets extremely large (close to infinity) and extremely small (close to zero) so we take the log of exp(Z) to get that magnitude down. When we do that we see the magnitude depends only on Real(Z), as we would expect from the equations above.

Now what might we expect from approximations to the exponential? Lets put up the results for a 51 term polynomial approximation to exp(Z).

Here is the argument, the phase, of the approximation. We see inside a 'C' shape, it is a pretty good match for what we had with the complete exponential. Outside the 'C', it is quite different.

What defines the 'C' shape? The 'x' marks on the plot show the roots of the 51 term polynomial which we are using to approximate the exponential. There are 51 roots. They lie on the 'C' shape. Apparently, the approximation to the exponential is pretty good as long as we are inside the rough shape defined by the roots of the approximating polynomial, and are wildly bad if we are outside that shape.

We notice a similar result for the magnitude of the approximation. We have plotted the magnitude of the approximation using the same scales as we plotted the original exponential. Inside the 'C' shape defined by the roots, you can see rather good agreement: the colors match. Outside the 'C' shape, things are much worse. Indeed, Red corresponds to very large values, outside the 'C' shape the magnitude of the approximation rises to very large values, it only manages to stay very close to zero inside the 'C' shape.

We have shown the result for a 51 term polynomial. How does this result change as the order of the polynomial changes?

The figure shows an estimate of the radius of the 'C' of roots as the order of the polynomial increases from 0 to 99. The 'C' wraps around the point Z=0. The estimate above is made by measuring the distance from Z=0 to the top of the 'C'.

From this one learns that the radius of the 'C' is growing linearly with the order of the polynomia. Indeed, for larger N, the radius is essentially 0.42*N.

What this shows is how the exponential function, with no zeros (no roots), arises from increasingly accurate polynomial approximation. Even though each higher order polynomial has more roots, the roots are moving away from the origin, being pushed out towards the edge of the complex plane.

In some sense, one might say, in the limit the exponential function has an infinite number of roots but that they are all at infinity. Now many real mathematicians might hate that statement. But I suspect the intuitivists might like it. The intuitivists believe it is not the limit at infinity that tells you what is happening, but the journey to get there.

Note added: from comments a great page about this very same problem: http://www.mai.liu.se/~halun/complex/taylor/

How many possible worlds exist?

2010-06-02T12:35:00.000-07:00

One. I know this is true because I read it in a blog.

But I have an idea why we think there is more than one. Its because we are wrong about what is possible. Its because the model we carry around in our head of the world is quinzillions of times simpler than the actual real world.

So couldn't there possibly be a world where I posted this blog with a spelling error? Well within the super-duper over-simplification of the world we can think about, which has to fit inside a brain which is, again, one-quinzillionth the size of the actual universe, it sure SEEMS like that is possible. But that's just because we are overlooking like a quinzillion (give or take a trillion) facts about the actual universe, and probably a bazillion of those, if we knew them, would completely rule out a different past than the one we see.

Now of course, my mind isn't even beginning to be big enough to know for sure that there can only be one possible universe when all the facts are taken in to account. But following a nice idea from the blog I linked above, the multiple worlds hypotheses, as a class, are not the best explanation of anything. So in my economy of explanation, I'm not ever going to seriously use them. So I don't believe in them, q.e.d.

Poizner vs Whitman, what poseurs!

2010-05-04T12:29:00.000-07:00

What if they held a Primary and nobody came?

I don't mean no voters, I mean no candidates.

I listened to the May 3 Poizner vs Whitman debate. This debate precedes the Republican primary for gubernatorial nomination in California 2010.

I find a lot of things remarkable about this debate and this race, and so I will remark upon them.

First of all is the apparent fact that we have two people who were at best moderate Republicans, and possibly even Democrats, now posing as conservative-dinosaur-tea-party Republicans. They spent the entire second debate bashing each other mindlessly to establish which of them is the greater conservative-dinosaur. There MUST be a lot of back-story here, so I shall make some up.

California for years has been doomed by a primary process that seemed to fling gubernatorial candidates to the edges of political respectability, the Republicans flinging their candidate to the right as the Democrats flung their candidate to the left. Presumably the "smart money," or rather the people who take money from these two billionaires through their claims of being smart, have taught these candidates they must run to the right for this nomination.

The remarkable thing is the smart money may be right. To win the primary, you don't need to be electable or rational or smart or honest. You need to get more voters to the polls than the other candidates do. Who votes in Republican primaries? The history seems to be that the conservatives vote, hence the "fling to the right" in recent Gubernatorial candidates. So maybe the smart strategy is "abandon all principles ye who enter here. The right will determine who is on this ballot."

Now of course the traditional media, to the extent they follow this thing at all, which is not much I assure you, will merely report the bashing. Who's the better basher. Who's slanders were more convincing, whos were more injuring. Politics as sports, with no back story.

Yeah, Meg Whitman supported Barbara Boxer (D-Cal.) for senator. Steve Poizner supported Al Gore. The theater of the thing is incredible. Here are these Silicon Valley technolgy billionaire ex-CEOs with their moderate political pedigrees standing on the stage and saying such things as (I kid you not) "there is only one moderate Republican on this stage and it isn't me." It doesn't even matter WHICH candidate said this.

So the back story is that the Republican primary for governor in California is such a non-event that it can be run entirely as theater with no real media coverage. My apologies to the press who HAVE written good stories, I'm sure you are out there, and it is far from your fault that your stories haven't risen in the search engines. It is the fault of the fact that the broad consensus is IT JUST DOESN'T MATTER.

Another amazing thing about this primary is that the only two candidates are moderate billionaire ex-CEOs with little (Poizner) or no (Whitman) political credentials. I'd love to think that their real motivation is to think that they can step in from outside and dial back the suicidal course that California State Government is on. And god knows, maybe that is what will happen.

So where ARE the usual collection of ding-dongs that show up for republican primaries? Is the state of the state so dismal that even the hyenas and jackals have left the field?

I have to decide to what extent I am willing to stand back from the ridiculous theater of it in order to decide who to vote for. But how do you pick a candidate when you know everything they say is bullshit? Can I really trust myself to read behind the lines, the lines in their scripts that is?

You might wonder, why not just go for Brown? Well, I might. Whatever else he is, he isn't this particular kind of theatrical clown. But I really do want a revolution for California. I really do want someone to press the "reset" button in California, and knock out the 5,000 pages of education code and stop giving everything away to the public employees unions and blah blah blah. Amazingly, all three candidates will probably run on this platform.

I have peaked in to the sausage factory and I have already tossed my cookies. What do I do next?

Attractive, me?

2010-04-20T08:55:00.001-07:00

I just saw "Date Night" with Tina Fey and Steve Carell. WAY better than I thought it would be. Clever dialogue, good concept, blah blah blah. Will NOT change your life, but better than 2/3 of what's out there.

But I found myself personally injured by a concept in there. Steve and Tina are man and wife. They have issues of sexual boredom, taking each other for granted. But the thing that got me was, they knew they were somewhat attractive. Steve talks about needing to work out more. Tina is pleased that Steve finds her sexy in a hooker-y outfit ("I can't stop staring at your boobs"). She can ACCEPT that he finds her sexy.

I simply do not think of myself as physically attractive. Mentally attractive to the right kind of person, I can buy that. That someone would want to suck my face and get their neurons indirectly agitated by me I believe, it is an extension of an exciting conversation. But that someone would look at me and just from looking at me, be excited, or take that first step towards excitement, I simply don't believe it. Not in a rational sense of don't believe it, but in a neurotic sense.

I don't know what to do with this information, but here it is.

Somebody Else's Love Song

2010-04-06T13:19:00.000-07:00

Can I write a song called "Somebody Else's Love Song?"

I listen to these love songs that make me cry, Hallelujah, If I Fell, Over The Rainbow/Wonderful World. I think "This is not my life." And yet I resonate with them. Is it just some pure mammalian emotionality? Probably but even so, it is explainable at the cause and effect level.

Moral Truth: simple as 1 2 3?

2010-03-15T11:50:00.000-07:00

One of the wildest aspects of philosophy, of mind, is math. We can conceive of 1+1=2 and 1+2=3, but after excluding various word games, we cannot really conceive of 1+1=3. From where does this limitation come?

A first thought is it is hardwired in to the brain. We evolved in this world, and if it just so happens that in this world, 1+1=2 and associated concepts have a great deal more utility than 1+1=3 and so on, then it shouldn't be too surprising that the brain that has evolved, the brain that has survived, was the one wired for this thought, and not one of the alternatives.

For the life of me, I'm missing a lot of the subtlety about this question as I write this post. But a second thought, woefully undermotivated by this post, is: it is wired into the WORLD. 1+1=2 is pretty much the way of the world. Having been wired into the world, and with consciousness being so intimately linked to the world, conscious minds just can't really operate unless they perceive 1+1=2. To the extent they are able to get in the neighborhood of 1+1=3, those minds are on drugs or otherwise having their tight connection to the world attenuated.

Too Many Books!

2010-01-16T13:37:00.000-08:00

SO for the last few months I have been "managing" my reading by requesting fairly popular books from the San Diego County library. As they would come in I would go get them and take them out. Some of them I would even read!

But now I'm realizing, there are too many books! I went to start reserving some books and realized I just have too many out I haven't read!

So let me now try keeping track of them in a blog entry!

Glass Books of the Dream Eaters: some odd Victorian Sci Fi, recommended by Neal Stephenson in his talk at Google.

Bad Monkey: Mat Ruff, Neal Stephenson recommends all of Mat Ruff in his Google talk.

Etgar Keret: short story writer recommended by Stephenson because he could do something Stephenson couldn't do: write short stories.

O Jersualem, history of formation of Israel, recommended by Ashutosh.

Freedom at Midnight, history of formation of India, recommended by Ashutosh

Don't tell them there's something wrong with them

2009-11-10T09:51:00.001-08:00

This American Life has a story on Mosaic Downs Syndrome. A particular mother of a child told his K teacher he had this. When she visited the class, her child was being allowed to lie on the floor isolated while every other child sat in a circle for a story. From that point on, Mom never told anybody what was up. Her son has an IQ of 110 and got A's and B's. He finally pressed her when he was 13 or 14 years old and months after he first asked, she told him.

If we were the kind of people that treated all individuals as individuals, we wouldn't need to hide things like this. But we are not. There are old studies where some teachers were told that their classes were "gifted," while other teachers were not. The classes were not gifted, they were the usual mix of vagabonds and knaves you find in any class. The classes where the teachers were told the kids were gifted all scored higher by the end of the year.

Faster than light travel!

2009-11-08T10:15:00.000-08:00

I'm reading Roger Penrose's The Emperor's New Mind. I'm less than halfway through, but so far the outline of the book seems to be
1) Review every major bit of math, physics, and metaphysics from the last 5000 years
2) Point out how the idea of determinism is pretty weak about 16 different ways
3) (and I haven't gotten to this point yet) show how a regular computer can never be a brain.

But the journey, in this case, is a good fraction of the fun. Today I read the twin paradox. I first learned this 35 years ago, I have known it in some sense for 2/3 of my life. And somehow in that time I never noticed that that Special Relativity allows for faster than light travel!

Consider this example to explain it. The space-faring twin leaves the earth, travels to a star 4.45 light-years away, and returns to earth. He does this at about 86% the speed of light, enough for about 50% time dilation.

The amazing thing, to me, is the traveling twin returns to earth after only 5.14 years of his own time have elapsed. So this twin woke up one day, said "I will leave on an 8.9 light-year trip today," and 5.14 years later looks up into the sky at the star 4.45 light-years away and says "I traveled to that star and back in 5.14 years." Indeed, he arrived at the star when only 2.57 of his subjective years had one by.

Now by my calculations, that twin traveled at 8.9/5.14 = 173% the speed of light!

And if he had traveled significantly faster than 86% c, he could have cut that elapsed time down to arbitrarily low.

Now this must have been true for the last 35 years, but how could I have not noticed it? How could I have not noticed that you can look out your window, see something 100 light years away, and if you can travel at .999999 c, you can get there in a very manageably short time?

I'm shocked and amazed at myself. And wondering, has this been exploited in science fiction? It seems it must have been. So how could I have not noticed it after reading all those thousands of sci fi books I ahve read?

The fiction of health-care market efficiency

2009-10-25T09:24:00.000-07:00

This blog entry is written as the U.S. debates whether or not to increase its socialization of medicine to come up towards something more completely approaching making health care universally available to its citizens.

I propose an unusal addition to the argument for socialized medicine. And that is the market argument. If you look at how non-government corporations treat health care among their employees, they virtually all reject market solutions in favor of socializing the costs within their jurisdiction. The vast majority of successful corporations offer subsidized health insurance to their employees. Indeed, the most successful of these corporations offer the highest degree of socialization of these costs: high quality health care available to their employees and employee families at little or no out-of-pocket cost.

Let me make this clear. Essentially all successful U.S. corporations, acting as rationally as is concievable in the modern world, reject market solutions for the health care of their employees. This rejection is notable for what these corporations do NOT choose

They do not offer less insurance to large famililes than to smaller families or single employees
They do not choose insurance plans with very large co-pays or partial coverages
They make no attempt to alternatively compensate employees who use the benefit less, and therefore cost the company less

How remarkable is it that U.S. corporations, these bastions and beneficiaries of free market capitalism, treat health care in this market-rejecting way? Not that remarkable. Think of the other ways U.S. corporations reject markets every day.

There is no market in offices. Wouldn't there be a great efficiency and fairness in calling upon employees to rent their offices in a market system? Shouldn't the employee willing to work in a windowless cubicle be paid some of what he saves the company compared to his colleague in the corner office with windows?
Information Technology (IT) help is available for free. I'm sure there are some employees who beat their computer problems to death before they make that call to IT. I'm sure there are other employees, like myself, who love the high quality help so much that we look forward to finally addressing the problems of our laptops with hour-long calls to IT. Shouldn't the company charge employees for their IT calls? Isn't the efficiency of the enterprise dependent on employees making intelligent choices about which resources to use, something they can only do when signalled by pricing information? Shouldn't the low-impact employees make a little bit more money, since they are saving the company money?
Indeed, there is no market in computer equipment, office equipment, or access to printers and fax machines. For years I have bureaucratically fought for the best computers and laptops I could get. I have always had a better laptop from work than anything I would ever buy at home. How crazy is it to think that a profit-seeking company can ignore the information a priced market would provide to improving resource allocation.

In summary, the refrain that the market is always more efficient than the government seems fraught with the peril that even those making it choose non-market solutions time and time again. If the market is no good for the health care of the employees of the best, richest, smartest, most profit-managed corporations in the world, then why would anyone think it is a good idea instead of a government program for health care?

An OT reply to a Motley Fool post

2009-10-15T16:58:00.000-07:00

A reply to http://boards.fool.com/Post.aspx?mid=28031986&reply=true#reply

Darn it, man, I recieved my used copy of the Emperor's New Mind not two weeks ago and am already on page 14. You just made me surf all over the place on "Goedel Escher Bach strong AI" to find out what Hofstadter might think as this kind of thing matters to me very much these days. THe best I could find is "...his conviction that human-level consciousness/strong AI can appear in a machine."

I accept the Chinese Room and no longer believe you will get true AI by programming a computer. You MIGHT get fake AI, a simulation of intelligence which can do many of the things you think can only be done by someone/something intelligent. BUt they will not be intelligent, I now agree. A simulation of intelligence is no more intelligence than is Sim City a real city, World of Warcraft a real battle between monsters, or a simulation of an H=bomb likely to ever knock down a building. And classic AI is, I think, a simulation of intelligence. We keep looking to see what intelligences do, and where we can find patterns we code them up.

But can a machine have intelligence? Of course. What are we other than a wierd bioligical machine? Maybe we have wierd quantum stuff going on in our brains. But either there is a god with a personality that comes down and plugs souls into machines, in which case it is pretty much up to her mood whether an appropriately built machine gets a soul plugged into it, or it is something about the way the brain/body is built that gets it consciousness, in which case it seems we could eventually figure out how to build something like that, too.

I have to say the Chinese Room thing now seems obvious to me. A chess playing program is no more intelligent than is the calculator I use to figure my taxes. All the intelligence is in the programmer of the machine. Building real intelligence will require something very different from programming.

Tuscany

2009-07-26T00:09:00.000-07:00

Are some people better than others? Or does it just seem that way?

Our hosts in Tuscany are Holly Melia and Luca Belluci. In the 18 hours we have been here, Holly has brought over a pile of art books written by her mother (Pauline Bewick), cucumbers and zucchini from her garden. Holly or Luca sent a plate of cut-up watermelon down to us when we were swimming with their children in the pool.

I need two or three affirmations to cut out, write down, repeat to myself. "Be careful where you are going because you will get there" is a BAD paraphrase of one, I must find it. But the one I think of now is "if you admire someone for doing something, do that thing yourself." Again a bad paraphrase, but I think the idea is clearer.

Thinking that, I washed the dishes before I went to sleep even though I was tired. And this morning I made coffee for Barbara twice. The people I admire do things for other people, and do not seem to be tired all the time.

Notes on what to Blog

2009-07-25T09:34:00.001-07:00

In Florence:

What makes a small(ish) town in 1500 produce Michelangelo, Leonardo, Gallileo, Bruneschelli?

The Christian stories don't seem tailor-made for a commerce-dominated society. Maybe the Christian empires deserve a little credit for that. Christianity may have been quite the humanizing influence, maybe.

We all live in ignorance. Of course, peasants in the dark ages presumably lived in more ignorance than intelligientsia in the 21st century. But what is the great materialistic fallacy? That this time it is different. We live in ignorance, just way way WAY less ignorance than serfs in the dark or middle ages. But ignorance none the less. We don't know where we are before we are born, or where we go when we die. We don't even know IF we are before we are born or IF we are after we die. We do not know if we have free will or not. We do not know whether conscious life is a miracle, or whether we just mix the right things together and we get some.

What is the lesson of zen? On one level it seems the lesson is that life is. It hits you in the face and you keep trying to figure it out, then it trips you in the mud and hits you in the face again. Maybe it is not so much that this is some great virtue, but that this is what we do in our state of ignorance. Every time we perseverate over figuring something out, we have missed the point that we are still ignorant.

The place in Tuscany is beautiful. Two little girls to keep Melissa and Julia company in the pool. A miraculosly beautiful villa in a tiny community of perhaps three or four families, secured by a long dirt road/driveway to get there. Iron rail around tiled patio with stone walls, wood beamed ceiling. While it was hot(ish) when we got here, we rolled in the pool for an hour or two and at 6:45 PM the sun is still reasonably high over the hills, but the breeze is blowing lightly through the pines and olive trees. I am sitting here with Julia and Melissa at the rough table, (probably a few hundred years old) while they eat buttered toast. There is an ancient scale hanging above the porch. All this, and internet!

Lessons from the iPhone

2007-12-20T16:06:00.000-08:00

Jon bought me an iPhone. Thanks Jon!

Here's some lessons I am gleaning so far, after owning it for 5 days.

Integration is a good thing. Dial visually from the contact list. Maps will map addresses from contact list. Searched stores whatever on the map, press the link, you see phone number and web pages for each store, press the phone number it dials, press the web page and browser opens.
WiFi and other connectivity should be seamless. Once you add a WiFi access point to the iPhone it goes over to it automatically, without even telling you. Right now I don't THINK it makes voice calls through WiFi, but perhaps soon it will, it will be seamless, that should work. Right now email, web browsing, youtube, etc. are what are handed over seamlessly.
Beautiful screen!
Small screen still useful if it is beautiful. At 50 I thought I would be screwed (without reading glasses) but I can read smaller things on that screen than in other places.)
UI with fingers is amazing. There are still things that can be done to improve UI.
Advanced featuers, not so important. Obviously the iPhone has plenty of advanced featues, but it doesn't have:
Voice Recognition (for dialing)
Calls initiated from headset
Position location
VOIP over WiFi
Even though competitors have these things, presumably it is smart for the iPhone not to have them until they can be made to work really well.

Much cooler than I thought it would be. Big surprises:

Can navigate in browser and maps much easier than I thought, 20 seconds to find something on the map for example.
Having email on phone much more positive than I realized it would be.
Visual voice mail very valuable.
Dialing from contact list VERY nice. (although regular phones do this, but not as beautifully).

Ciao for now,

Lying

2006-08-17T19:49:00.000-07:00

I think we pretend we don't lie, but we lie all the time. I asked a mom what she thought her kids thought about lying. She told me her daughter "tells stories" but that her two sons don't lie. 2 minutes later, her older son chased her younger son from the pool in a way that always scares the younger son. The mom challenged him on this telling him not to do it. He said, after we had all watched him do this, that he had NOT done it. Hi mom turned back to talk to me, apparently unaware that one of the sons that doesn't lie had dropped a stinky one minutes after we had talked about it!