Filed under: Artificial Intelligence, Augmented Reality, Expert systems, General Musings, Music, Predictions, Ray Kurzweil, Science, Science Fiction, Singularity, Society, Writing stuff
Just now, my good lady wife was through to tell me that she’s off to take a bit of a nap. Both of us are getting over a touch of something (which I had mentioned last weekend), and on a deeper level still recovering from the profound exhaustion of having been care-givers for her mom.
Anyway, as she was preparing to head off, one of our cats insisted on going through the door which leads from my office into my bindery. This is where the cat food is.
“She wants through.”
“She wants owwwwt.”
“Any door leads out, as far as a cat is concerned.”
“Well, that door did once actually lead out, decades ago.”
“She remembers.”
“She can’t remember.”
“Nonetheless, the memory lingers.”
* * * * * * *
Via TDG, a fascinating interview with Douglas Richard Hofstadter last year, now translated into English. I’d read his GEB some 25 years ago, and have more or less kept tabs on his work since. The interview was about his most recent book, and touched on a number of subjects of interest to me, including the nature of consciousness, writing, Artificial Intelligence, and the Singularity. It’s long, but well worth the effort.
In discussing consciousness (which Hofstadter calls ‘the soul’ for reasons he explains), and the survival of shards of a given ‘soul’, the topic of writing and music comes up. Discussing how Chopin’s music has enabled shards of the composer’s soul to persist, Hofstadter makes this comment about his own desire to write:
I am not shooting at immortality through my books, no. Nor do I think Chopin was shooting at immortality through his music. That strikes me as a very selfish goal, and I don’t think Chopin was particularly selfish. I would also say that I think that music comes much closer to capturing the essence of a composer’s soul than do a writer’s ideas capture the writer’s soul. Perhaps some very emotional ideas that I express in my books can get across a bit of the essence of my soul to some readers, but I think that Chopin’s music probably does a lot better job (and the same holds, of course, for many composers).
I personally don’t have any thoughts about “shooting for immortality” when I write. I try to write simply in order to get ideas out there that I believe in and find fascinating, because I’d like to let other people be able share those ideas. But intellectual ideas alone, no matter how fascinating they are, are not enough to transmit a soul across brains. Perhaps, as I say, my autobiographical passages — at least some of them — get tiny shards of my soul across to some people.
Exactly.
* * * * * * *
In April, I wrote this:
I’ve written only briefly about my thoughts on the so-called Singularity – that moment when our technological abilities converge to create a new transcendent artificial intelligence which encompasses humanity in a collective awareness. As envisioned by the Singularity Institute and a number of Science Fiction authors, I think that it is too simple – too utopian. Life is more complex than that. Society develops and copes with change in odd and unpredictable ways, with good and bad and a whole lot in the middle.
Here’s Hofstadter’s take from the interview, in responding to a question about Ray Kurzweil‘s notion of achieving effective immortality by ‘uploading’ a personality into a machine hardware:
Well, the problem is that a soul by itself would go crazy; it has to live in a vastly complex world, and it has to cohabit that world with many other souls, commingling with them just as we do here on earth. To be sure, Kurzweil sees those things as no problem, either — we’ll have virtual worlds galore, “up there” in Cyberheaven, and of course there will be souls by the barrelful all running on the same hardware. And Kurzweil sees the new software souls as intermingling in all sorts of unanticipated and unimaginable ways.
Well, to me, this “glorious” new world would be the end of humanity as we know it. If such a vision comes to pass, it certainly would spell the end of human life. Once again, I don’t want to be there if such a vision should ever come to pass. But I doubt that it will come to pass for a very long time. How long? I just don’t know. Centuries, at least. But I don’t know. I’m not a futurologist in the least. But Kurzweil is far more “optimistic” (i.e., depressingly pessimistic, from my perspective) about the pace at which all these world-shaking changes will take place.
Interesting.
* * * * * * *
Lastly, the interview is about the central theme of I am a Strange Loop: that consciousness is an emergent phenomenon which stems from vast and subtle physical mechanisms in the brain. This is also the core ‘meaning’ of GEB, though that was often missed by readers and reviewers who got hung up on the ostensible themes, topics, and playfulness of that book. Hofstadter calls this emergent consciousness a self-referential hallucination, and it reflects much of his interest in cognitive science over the years.
[Mild spoilers ahead.]
In Communion of Dreams I played with this idea and a number of related ones, particularly pertaining to the character of Seth. It is also why I decided that I needed to introduce a whole new technology – based on the superfluid tholin-gel found on Titan, as the basis for the AI systems at the heart of the story. Because the gel is not human-manufactured, but rather something a bit mysterious. Likewise, the use of this material requires another sophisticated computer to ‘boot it up’, and then it itself is responsible for sustaining the energy matrix necessary for continued operation. At the culmination of the story, this ‘self-referential hallucination’ frees itself from its initial containment.
Why did I do this?
Partly in homage to Hofstedter (though you will find no mention of him in the book, as far as I recall). Partly because it plays with other ideas I have about the nature of reality. If we (conscious beings) are an emergent phenomenon, arising from physical activity, then it seems to me that physical things can be impressed with our consciousness. This is why I find his comments about shards of a soul existing beyond the life of the body of the person to be so intriguing.
So I spent some 130,000 words exploring that idea in Communion. Not overtly – not often anyway – but that is part of the subtext of what is going on in that book.
* * * * * * *
“Any door leads out, as far as a cat is concerned.”
“Well, that door did once actually lead out, decades ago.”
“She remembers.”
“She can’t remember.”
“Nonetheless, the memory lingers,” I said, “impressed on the door itself. Maybe the cat understands that at a level we don’t.”
Jim Downey
(Related post at UTI.)
I got the following fantastic anecdote from a good friend (who is a musician) in the course of a discussion about the arts.
On Nov. 18, 1995, Itzhak Perlman, the violinist, came on stage to give a concert at Avery Fisher Hall at Lincoln Center in New York City. If you have ever been to a Perlman concert, you know that getting on stage is no small achievement for him. He was stricken with polio as a child, and so he has braces on both legs and walks with the aid of two crutches.
To see him walk across the stage one step at a time, painfully and slowly, is an unforgettable sight. He walks painfully, yet majestically, until he reaches his chair. Then he sits down, slowly, puts his crutches on the floor, undoes the clasps on his legs, tucks one foot back and extends the other foot forward. Then he bends down and picks up the violin, puts it under his chin, nods to the conductor and proceeds to play.
By now, the audience is used to this ritual. They sit quietly while he makes his way across the stage to his chair. They remain reverently silent while he undoes the clasps on his legs. They wait until he is ready to play.
But this time, something went wrong. Just as he finished the first few bars, one of the strings on his violin broke.You could hear it snap -it went off like gunfire across the room. There was no mistaking what that sound meant. There was no mistaking what he had to do. People who were there that night thought to themselves: “We figured that he would have to get up, put on the clasps again, pick up the crutches and limp his way off stage – to either find another violin or else find another string for this one.”
But he didn’t. Instead, he waited a moment, closed his eyes and then signaled the conductor to begin again. The orchestra began, and he played from where he had left off. And he played with such passion and such power and such purity as they had never heard before. Of course, anyone knows that it is impossible to play a symphonic work with just three strings. I know that, and you know that, but that night Itzhak Perlman refused to know that. You could see him modulating, changing, recomposing the piece in his head. At one point, it sounded like he was de-tuning the strings to get new sounds from them that they had never made before.
When he finished, there was an awesome silence in the room. And then people rose and cheered. There was an extraordinary outburst of applause from every corner of the auditorium. We were all on our feet, screaming and cheering, doing everything we could to show how much we appreciated what he had done. He smiled, wiped the sweat from this brow, raised his bow to quiet us, and then he said, not boastfully, but in a quiet, pensive, reverent tone, “You know, sometimes it is the artist’s task to find out how much music you can still make with what you have left.”
What a powerful line that is. It has stayed in my mind ever since I heard it. And who knows? Perhaps that should be the way of life – not just for artists but for all of us. So, perhaps our task in this shaky, fast-changing, bewildering world in which we live is to make music, at first with all that we have, and then, when that is no longer possible, to make music with what we have left.
By Jack Riemer, Houston Chronicle (Feb 10, 2001)
Inspiring, no?
Problem is, it evidently didn’t actually happen.
I wanted to give Riemer proper credit, so started doing a little searching in order to come up with a link to the original article. A Google search gave hundreds of references to various blogs and newsletters which had repeated the article, each giving credit to Riemer, some providing the date the piece ran. But none of the first couple score of hits were to the Houston Chronicle itself.
Hmm.
So I went to the Chronicle’s site, and started searching their archives. I don’t know if there is something wrong with their search function, or the archives are incomplete, or if the piece never ran, but I couldn’t find it.
Hmm.
One of the first places I head when I start getting suspicious about an email item is Snopes. And there it was:
Three Strings and You’re Outre
Claim: Violinist Itzhak Perlman once finished a concert on an instrument with only three strings after one string broke.Status: False.Example: [Collected via e-mail, 2001]
Origins: The piece quoted above did indeed appear in The Houston Chronicle (on 10 February 2001). Verification of any of the details contained within it has proved elusive so far, however.
There’s full details there about how they came to this conclusion, with citations.
Now, the question is: does it matter? I have seen Itzhak Perlman perform in person. Yes, due to the effects of the polio he suffered as a child, he does indeed approach the stage exactly as described. And the man is justifiably considered a genius, one of the greatest violinists ever. So why not just accept the anecdote as an inspirational piece about how genius can overcome challenge?
Well, that was exactly what I initially intended to do, before I started to dig a little in order to give proper credit to the author of the piece.
But I think that what I found is actually more interesting. Hundreds of sites have used the anecdote. Thousands, if not millions, have read it and likely found it inspirational. Why?
Because we want to believe in the power to overcome hardship.
And there’s really nothing wrong with that. The anecdote makes an important point. Yet I would say that it is not necessary to have this particular anecdote to be true – it just makes it easier to be inspired. Itzak Perlman has overcome hardships, developed his latent talent further than most mortals, and worked hard to achieve the success he has experienced. Isn’t that enough?
Jim Downey
Filed under: Babylon 5, Emergency, General Musings, Health, J. Michael Straczynski, JMS, movies, Predictions, Science, Science Fiction, Society, Survival, Travel
This is disturbing:
‘Back from dead’ case stuns doctors
THE case of a man whose heart stopped beating for 1-1/2 hours only to revive just as doctors were preparing to remove his organs for transplants is fuelling ethical debates in France about when a person is dead.
The 45-year-old man suffered a massive heart attack and rescuers used cardiac massage to try and revive him without success before transferring him to a nearby hospital.
Due to a series of complex circumstances, revival efforts continued for longer than usual for a patient whose heart was not responding to treatment, until doctors started preparations to remove organs.
It was at that point that the astonished surgeons noticed the man was beginning to breathe unaided again, his pupils were active, he was giving signs that he could feel pain – and finally, his heart started beating again.
Several weeks later, the man can walk and talk.
As John Sheridan might say: “Death? Been there, done that.”
Deciding on when someone is irrevocably dead is actually a very difficult thing to do, and through the ages there have been many instances where people thought to be dead have either spontaneously revived, or been re-animated through the use of medical technology. The Victorians had something of a phobia about premature burial, but the concept of a lych gate has existed for centuries (my first encounter with such can be found here, towards the bottom).
When you add in a legitimate need for organs appropriate for transplantation, which need to be ‘harvested’ quickly, then you’re pushing two conflicting timelines. This is evidently part of the problem which has led to the ethical debate mentioned above. Add in new research into ‘suspended animation‘, and things are going to get even more confused.
Welcome to the future.
Jim Downey
*recognize the quote?
Filed under: ACLU, BoingBoing, Civil Rights, Constitution, Government, movies, Science Fiction, Society
I didn’t realize that this was one of the sequels. But it sure sounds like it.
D.C. police will seal off entire neighborhoods, set up checkpoints and kick out strangers under a new program that D.C. officials hope will help them rescue the city from its out-of-control violence.
Under an executive order expected to be announced today, police Chief Cathy L. Lanier will have the authority to designate “Neighborhood Safety Zones.” At least six officers will man cordons around those zones and demand identification from people coming in and out of them. Anyone who doesn’t live there, work there or have “legitimate reason” to be there will be sent away or face arrest, documents obtained by The Examiner show.
Wait. They think that they’re serious.
“This is a very targeted program that has been used in other cities,” Nickles told The Examiner. “I’m not worried about the constitutionality of it.”
Others are. Kristopher Baumann, chairman of the D.C. police union and a former lawyer, called the checkpoint proposal “breathtaking.”
Shelley Broderick, president of the D.C.-area American Civil Liberties Union and the dean of the University of the District of Columbia’s law school, said the plan was “cockamamie.”
Gee, ya think? A site devoted to DC area news has more information, including this comment:
Can you say Police State? The Examiner has the scoop on a controversial new program announced today that would create so-called “Neighborhood Safety Zones” which would serve to partially seal off certain parts of the city. D.C. Police would set-up checkpoints in targeted areas, demand to see ID and refuse admittance to people who don’t live there, work there or have a “legitimate reason” to be there. Wow. Just, wow.
Papers, please.
Jim Downey
(Via BoingBoing. Cross posted to UTI.)
Filed under: Daily Kos, Emergency, Flu, Flu Wiki, Government, Health, Pandemic, Plague, Preparedness, Religion, Society, Survival
One of the ‘front page’ writers at Daily Kos is very much concerned about public health issues, and preparations for a pandemic or other public health emergency. He’s also one of the people responsible for the Flu Wiki. He had a good post up today at dKos about how this issue is playing out in the current presidential election. In the discussion of that post, there was one comment in which the author said this:
Our Emergency Rooms are in Chaos Now …
…without a pandemic.
We are in no way prepared for anything out of the normal. Republican misrule has mazimized corporate profits in medicine while minimizing social welfare benefits. Unprofitable activities like emergency preparedness have gone wanting.
If we have a pandemic, pray hard.
I am not a person of faith. I don’t write about that much here, though if you follow any of my links over to UTI, you’ll certainly see what I have to say about religion there. So the thought of praying for help in a pandemic would never occur to me – I would much rather do something practical to prepare for such an emergency, like getting our hospitals ready.
And I don’t think that the author of that comment is saying that we should only rely on prayer – just expressing some exasperation with the current situation, the current mindset about what role hospitals play in our society. Daily Kos is, after all, a blog devoted to electing progressive democrats and pushing liberal values like a good universal health system.
Anyway, first consider how prepared you are for a possible pandemic, earthquake, whatever. Personally. You have to take responsibility for yourself and your family. As I have written before, there are a lot of good resources with excellent information on what steps you can take to insure your own survival in an emergency. And then investigate what steps you can take to help your local government, your community, to better prepare. It is a very complex problem, and they will likely welcome your help. This will be a step I will likely be looking into in the future, now that our care-giving responsibilities are done and I am recovering.
If prayer is important to you, then by all means, pray. But that shouldn’t stop you from doing what you can to also prepare in more tangible ways.
Jim Downey
Filed under: Alzheimer's, BoingBoing, Bruce Schneier, Civil Rights, Cory Doctorow, General Musings, Government, Privacy, Society, Travel
Survey: Americans make 41M fewer air trips
WASHINGTON – Nearly half of American air travelers would fly more if it were easier, and more than one-fourth said they skipped at least one air trip in the past 12 months because of the hassles involved, according to an industry survey.
The Travel Industry Association, which commissioned the survey released Thursday, estimated that the 41 million forgone trips cost the travel industry $18.1 billion — including $9.4 billion to airlines, $5.6 billion to hotels and $3.1 billion — and it cost federal, state and local authorities $4.2 billion in taxes in the past 12 months.
When 28 percent of air travelers avoided an average of 1.3 trips each, that resulted in 29 million leisure trips and 12 million business trips not being taken, the researchers estimated.
Gee, like this is a surprise. Between the airlines doing everything possible to squeeze each and every last penny out of their customers to cover increasing fuel costs and their own ineptitude, to absurd security theater practices, to idiotic behaviour by TSA personnel, travel by air has become such a pain in the ass that it is hardly news that people avoid unnecessary air travel whenever possible. But it is good to see some solid numbers on the impact these factors are having, and perhaps it will prompt some changes. I can hope, can’t I?
How about you? Have you changed travel plans in the last couple of years to avoid air travel? Because we were 24-hour care providers for someone with Alzheimer’s until early this year, my wife and I have had limited opportunities to travel recently. But I certainly would not have flown anywhere if I could avoid it. And we’re planning a trip out to Denver to visit friends this summer, and are going to drive the 12 hours rather than fly (as we did some years back when we last went out there) in order to avoid all the hassles. So yeah, the air travel environment has definitely changed *my* behaviour.
Jim Downey
(Cross posted to UTI.)
Filed under: Astronomy, Babylon 5, Fermi's Paradox, General Musings, J. Michael Straczynski, JMS, Science, Science Fiction, Society, Space, Writing stuff
One of my favorite episodes of the SF series Babylon 5 comes in the final season (not my favorite season, by a long shot). It is episode #92, A View from the Gallery, and is unusual in that the main focus of the episode is on a couple of maintenance workers, and their ‘common man’ perspective. Here’s what the series creator, J. Michael Straczynski, had to say about the episode:
One of the things I always do is look for ways to turn the series format on its head, and show us our characters from other perspectives, since perspective is so much at the heart of the show. Whether that’s jumping forward in time, or an ISN documentary, or seeing everything through the eyes of a third party (or two), it’s always a risk, because it’s never what one expects to see, and a lot of people like to see what they expect to see.
“… a lot of people like to see what they expect to see.” Indeed.
* * * * * * *
A new study comparing our sun to the general range of ‘main sequence‘ stars has concluded that it is pretty much run-of-the-mill. And this has significant implications for the possible development of life elsewhere. From NewScientistSpace:
There’s nothing special about the Sun that makes it more likely than other stars to host life, a new study shows. The finding adds weight to the idea that alien life should be common throughout the universe.
“The Sun’s properties are consistent with it being pulled out at random from the bag of all stars,” says Charles Lineweaver from the Australian National University (ANU) in Canberra. “Life does not seem to require anything special in its host star, other than it be close.”
And from Cosmos:
To get a better answer, Robles and his co-workers simultaneously compared 11 stellar characteristics that could plausibly influence the evolution of life.
They looked at parameters such as: the Sun’s mass; age; metallicity (the amount of elements heavier than helium and hydrogen, such as oxygen, carbon and nitrogen); as well as its rotation rate; its whereabouts within the galaxy; how it ‘bobs up and down in the galactic plane’; and the activity of its photosphere. Using statistical methods, these were measured against data available on other stars.
* * *
“When analysing the 11 properties together, the Sun shows up as a star selected at random, rather than one selected for some life-enhancing property,” Robles said. “The upshot is that there doesn’t seem to be anything special about the Sun. It seems to be a random star that was blindly pulled out of the bag of all stars.”
* * * * * * *
When I was growing up, I always wanted to think that I was special. I was that unlikely hero from so many Science Fiction stories, the kid who had some undiscovered special ability or trait that would prove to be remarkable. Believe it or not, the death of my parents just as I was entering adolescence fed this fantasy. Think about literature, and you’ll see that this is actually a fairly common trope: the orphan who discovers his ‘real’ history, and goes on to greatness. There are even elements of this in Communion of Dreams, both with the main character and with the Chinese girl. It is a very common theme.
Of course, real life isn’t like that. As smart and well educated as I was, I didn’t grow up to be particularly remarkable. I’ve had plenty of successes, plenty of failures, accomplished things which gave me a touch of fame here and there. But for the most part, I am like most people – just trying to get through life with my self-respect more or less intact.
And that’s OK. Oh, there’s nothing wrong with a bit of fantasy – of having dreams and desires, goals that you work towards even though they may never be achieved in quite the way you would like. I wouldn’t have started this blog, were that not the case. But it is healthy to maintain perspective, to understand that only wishing for something will not make it so.
* * * * * * *
“… a lot of people like to see what they expect to see.”
Think about that again. JMS was talking about some of the flack he took over doing something a little bit unconventional with what had become a well established and much beloved television series. But he did not betray any of his principles, didn’t go for some kind of a cheap emotional trick. He just offered a different perspective, challenged people to open up their thinking a bit.
For centuries, one of the basic tenets of common belief was that God put us here, and that we were at the center of creation. As science has expanded our understanding, we came to realize that we weren’t at the center of creation. Or the solar system. Or the galaxy. Or the universe.
As I mentioned a few days ago, there is a growing awareness that Earth may not be unique in holding life, even intelligent life. Discovering that there is nothing particularly unusual about our local star adds to this awareness. We may be nothing special, just one island of life in a universe teeming with the stuff.
And that’s OK.
Jim Downey
Communion Of Dreams 