And the Wheels Turn

Some Notes on the Material Circumstances of an Inspired Idea

2010-12-24T22:05:00.000-08:00

Editor's note: this a strange thing to write down, it's true, but I always think back to George Polya's comments in his clever little book on meta-problem solving, "How to Solve It", on the art and the surprising mysteriousness of coming up with really, really good ideas, i.e. inspiration. I've only had a very small number of such ideas, and their mystery is intriguing enough that I decided the circumstances of this latest one might be interesting to record to posterity.

The idea itself deserves an entirely separate exposition, and will have to wait for another time.

* * *

Snowed in the morning. Woke up earlier than usual, ate, prepared to go out. Road conditions were poor, so I dozed off for several more hours. Had extremely engaging, vivid, and colorful dreams, involving several very broad, sweeping landscapes, a train, more snow, a broad hillside view, many angry accusations, the speaking of foreign languages, the encountering of a partially visible and extremely valuable but dangerous artifact, frightening infirmity, shocking police corruptions, fossil fuels.

Spent day dabbling in various interests I had not had time for; investigated possibility for shoe-horning the Arduino into a full-on software radio, played a game of Go on PANDANET IGS (and won), read half of "Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception" by Michel Foucault. Had finished two other books earlier in the week, namely "Critical Path" by R. Buckminster Fuller, and "Thinking in Systems: A Primer" by Donella H. Meadows. Had spent most of that week, and the several weeks preceding, working very intensely on a stylized demonstration compiler exhibiting Harrison's resumption-monadic kernels as a an alternative way of compiling functional programming languages. This involved the introduction, absorption and quick application of a lot of new and highly formal concepts I had not really encountered or used before. Exhausted by these earlier efforts, and by an over-strenuous physical regimen that appears to have caused me some internal injury, this dabbling was a means of rest and recreation.

Also read several short passages from Eihei Dogen's "Extensive Record" ("A deluded person and an enlightened person at the same time use one boat [to cross the river] and each is not obstructed." -- Volume 1, lecture 52, 'Study of Sounds and Colors') and the Book of Chuang-Tzu ("When a man has been killed in battle and people come to bury him, he has no use for his medals." -- 'The Sign of Virtue Complete')

Visiting with family for the holiday, persuaded them to watch "Exit Through the Gift Shop", the peculiar documentary (?) of a supposed meeting between internationally renowned street artist Banksy and one Mr. Thierry Guetta, who, inspired by such street artists, began his own budding art career, which then went on to exemplify everything that street art had rebelled against. Drove sister home. Briefly discussed the film.

Went to Eastside Tavern for "Dirty Disco Dance Party", but no one was dancing, so I sat at the bar and had a beer. As I generally always do, I sat alone and contemplated whatever thoughts happened to enter my mind. Thought about an LED array I had assembled from a kit, and its possible applications to creating interactive devices that would allow visualization of otherwise invisible ambient data in real time. Thought of this partially from something I read in Meadows' book, regarding electric meters in the Netherlands and electricity usage. Thought about how the array I had assembled had several bulbs that were not working, and speculated as to why this might be. Also thought about the essentially finite nature of any output data the devices might produce, and thought about the contrast between this relatively small state space and the very large state space representing not only the physical device itself, but all the materials comprising it. Also thought about how this limited output state space relates to function. Was surprised to consider how strangely ephemeral the notion of the "boundary" of a system is, or even the idea that a system is an isolable thing at all. Wondered whether this notion of "isolable system" is a cultural artifact, and would be considered strange by an equally advanced culture with a very different history from mine. Thought about the various parts and functions of a system (still visualizing the LED array) as peaks and troughs in a series of waves of different frequencies, sometimes overlapping, sometimes not. This reminded me of something from Fuller's book regarding a paradigm revolution in the Twentieth century view, i.e. "a world normally in motion" as opposed to "normally at rest". Thought of Fourier transforms. Suddenly recollected something I had read in the ARRL Radio Engineering Manual about the Nyquist Sampling Criterion, that I had read that afternoon while trying to learn how to construct a rudimentary antenna for Arduino. Saw a very unexpected relationship between this and other thoughts about "systems" and what they are generally. Was pleasantly surprised, but did not make much of it at the moment; wrote a quick note to self in my notepad and continued drinking beer. Left when the beer was finished.

As I drove home, the idea seemed to gain further and further significance, snowballing into something that seemed at once very broad and very clear, with very concrete analogies to what seem to be well-understood and respected theories. Became more and more surprised and excited the more I thought of this. Resolved to make a note of all aspects of the concept immediately occurring to me. Wrote these down in my research notebook. Idea turned out to be a broad generalization of a very particular computer security problem that I had tried to formulate a definition of for some months; although I had formulated a workable definition, something about this previous, more specific idea seemed strangely too specific, as if missing some other important principle. Judged this new principle to be what was missing.

Also decided to write this account, because although this has happened to me before, it has not happened many times, and I would be curious to later observe and reflect upon the circumstances surrounding the appearance of a really, really good idea occurs to me.

If Technology Is Cheap, Why Is Prosperity So Expensive?

2010-07-29T01:10:00.000-07:00

Cockroaches and pigeons seem to do quite well for themselves. Any visit to an urban center of appreciable size should be sufficient to confirm this observation. Common belief seems to hold that these, and other species considered urban vermin, prosper due to inherent durability and resourcefulness, or to some other difficult-to-qualify fitness for life -- hence the frequently repeated quip that after nuclear war, the roaches will inherit the Earth.

While I do not wish to speak ill of the cockroach or the common rock dove (Columba livia) or their tremendous success, it is worth pointing out that one-fourth of all food produced for human consumption is wasted [3], and so, inherent fitness notwithstanding, our pests suffer no shortage of nourishment. Taking into account that increased food supplies generally correlate to population growth, the abundance of pests in and around areas of concentrated human habitation is more likely due to our own wastefulness than to any of the species' individual hardiness. Phrased another way, our prosperity is so tremendous that we in the developed world somehow afford to feed not only ourselves but a large population of animals in which we have no agricultural or economic interest. While this may be prosperity, it is prosperity of a very strange and negligent kind. Arguably, this strangeness and wastefulness it not particular to the production and consumption of food, but to many other facets of our economy as well.

It is a favorite charge of American conservatism that 'poverty' in America is no longer objective destitution, but merely an economic position of relatively less affluence. [7] This claim does have a factual basis; Americans, in general, do not suffer from "extreme poverty", meaning the inability to meet the basic needs of food, water, shelter, sanitation, and healthcare necessary to sustain life. Such arguments correctly address the factual matter of whether or not Americans suffer severe, life-threatening privation (they do not), but do nothing to answer the question of whether our tremendous material surplus is well-spent. It is well and good that our poor do not starve, but should we really settle for an American Dream or a Human Aspiration that looks no further than a full stomach?

The same pundits who belittle American poverty are also quick to note that ninety-seven percent of households classified as 'poor' own a television. [ibid] Television ownership among Americans generally hovers around this figure. The average American spends four hours a day watching television (a figure offered both by A. C. Nielsen and satellite provider Dish Network), which readily translates into 1460 hours (about two round-the-clock months) of television viewing in a given year. Given that a typical Energy Star certified television set consumes about 208 watts of power [4], and that ninety-seven percent of the roughly 115 million households in America own at least one set, it is readily calculated that approximately 40 terajoules (4 * 10^13 J) of energy are expended each year just to receive and view television broadcasts.

In perspective, the atomic bomb detonated over Hiroshima released approximately 60 terajoules[6]. What this means is that the United States annually spends two thirds the energy-yield of the first nuclear weapon on such intellectual pursuits as the choice of a new "American Idol".

We humans have reached a point in history where at least some of us can afford to watch over 1400 hours of television apiece each year. (Anecdotally, but more currently relevant, time spent online is now on the same order of magnitude.) We are the beneficiaries of a superabundance so profound that we live out our lives largely free from thirst, hunger, most disease, or even the threat of bodily harm through physical violence (unless you happen to live in certain parts of certain urban centers). Please do not underestimate the significance of this point. If you live in the developed world, you live a life of luxury that would be unimaginable if you were not already experiencing it. What are we doing with all the time we are not spending in fear of drought, famine, and pestilence?

Early technologists prophesied that the work-week in the industrialized world would gradually dwindle, or perhaps even vanish altogether. Norbert Wiener prognosticated that automation would usher in an epoch of unemployment so severe that the Great Depression of the 1930s would appear as a "pleasant joke". The distinguished R. Buckminster Fuller foresaw the day when a "research fellowship" would be granted to each and every citizen, to do with as he or she saw fit. It is now 2010, and to the best of my knowledge, neither of these things, nor anything like them, has happened. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that employed persons still work a roughly 8-hour day [9], and the United States Congress is presently engaged in an ugly, ideology-poisoned debate over whether Federal unemployment insurance benefits should be extended -- which would seem to indicate that anything so generous as a "research fellowship" is out of the legislative question. Meanwhile, "retail salespersons" and "cashiers" accounted for 1 out of every 17 employed positions in 2009 [10], with "office clerks, general" and "combined food preparation" following closely behind -- which is to say that, technological advance and intellectual liberty notwithstanding, the presently constituted economy sees fit to employ the largest portion of our citizens selling things and doing paperwork. A large fraction of us are employed in roles custodial to institutions whose relation to material or intellectual production is secondary at best. We would be right to question the operation of such an economy; it may be that the remaining sectors produce enough to sustain the material status quo, but does such an arrangement represent an efficient use of human potentials and the real wealth they represent?

We as a nation, perhaps even as a whole species, are now free to do as we please with a fairly large portion of our time, and to do so with the informational and material support of high technology. A popular slogan of the Linux community is: "put enough eyes on it, and no bug is invisible." This slogan was picked up by Robert David Steele's Open Source Intelligence (OSINT) initiative [8], which bases itself upon the philosophy that bottom-up organization of ordinary citizens in the task of information gathering and analysis is vastly more effective than reliance upon a small corps of expert analysts. (As an aside, I had the good fortune to meet and speak with Mr. Steele at this year's HOPE in New York City, and I can honestly say that this meeting impressed upon me considerable personal respect for him.) If broad public participation can benefit such diverse endeavors as operating system implementation and national security information gathering, it can surely be of service other problem domains as well. The building blocks of high technology are now cheaply, commercially available to anyone. It amazes me that I can walk into a Radioshack store and purchase an assortment of prefabricated transistors, along with the tools to wire them into a useful circuit, for just a few dollars. It amazes me that production quality compilers are freely available for all major programming languages -- even complex, cutting-edge languages like Haskell -- and are easy to use. One often hears of how "information technology" has revolutionized our economy and our culture, but the most important fact is the one least remarked upon: the essential building blocks of this revolution are readily available and perfectly usable by anyone who takes the proper initiative.

Economist W. Brian Arthur recently remarked that all technologies are assembled from other technologies. [1] While this may at first glance appear an innocuous observation, it has tremendous consequences for a society in which the products of high technology are widely, cheaply available in modular, readily usable forms. By virtue of sheer combinatorial magnitude, the number of useful technologies waiting to be discovered among the almost endless arrangements of commercially available parts and pieces is astounding. Although, as Americans, we have been largely conditioned to believe in "making a living" by any means available, Fuller's constituents of wealth are worth recollecting: wealth is the product of time, energy, and knowledge. Thanks to industrial technology, energy is plentiful. Thanks to prosperity, time is abundant. Thanks to the global communications network, knowledge is now ubiquitous. But how much of the available knowledge is actually being harnessed and put to work? Are ordinary Americans -- honest and capable people all -- using anything close to 40 terajoules of energy to understand and solve tomorrow's problems? Can our so-called "knowledge" economy be said to be using its time and energy in accordance with the best available knowledge when so many of its employees must condescend to be mere functionaries of non-producing institutions?

It is the top-down mode of developing and deploying technology that is responsible for the exclusion of ordinary citizens from the evolution and application of humanity's greatest powers, and failures of the top-down approach to technological use and development have become painfully evident. The current hundred-day fiasco in the Gulf of Mexico is, once again, highly instructive. When an oil well under development began to freely spew oil into the Gulf after the Deepwater Horizon's catastrophic explosion, all U.S. Federal agencies stood by, largely helpless by their own admission [2] to stop the leak. Despite many theatrical reproaches, the task of cleaning up the spill and stopping the leak were left primarily to British Petroleum, the very entity whose gross negligence was the original cause of the disaster. This heavy reliance upon BP's resources and technical knowledge opened the way for BP's indiscriminate application of untested and highly toxic [5], oil dispersants, in an apparent attempt by BP to conceal the full extent and severity of the spill by reducing the amount of detectable oil on the water's surface. The lesson in this episode is painfully clear: even the experts sometimes fail. More importantly, when the experts do fail, they have a material interest in hiding that fact from the people they purport to serve, often with very damaging consequences.

If people are empowered to create solutions to the problems that they see, they will. When I say "people" here, I do not mean particular experts or persons situated in any particular professional context; I mean anyone. Moreover, those people who do take it upon themselves to solve a problem will generally factor their own personal and communal welfare into the solution as basic constraints on the problem space. Given enough information, individuals generally know what is in their own best interest and act accordingly. Large institutions, whether private or government, purport to act according to common interests, but also act in their own interests, with primacy tacitly given to the latter over the former. This is an important distinction, especially in the context of high technology, its powers and its dangers. Although it continues to be fashionable in some quarters to cast technology as a malevolent force that "controls" or "dominates" our modern lives (I think particularly of Neil Postman's somewhat old, and rather error-ridden, but still widely read "Technopoly"), it is only our alienation from technology that allows for domination or control to take place. We live in a very extraordinaty time in history, when ordinary citizens are able to understand and apply technology according to their own needs and purposes -- provided they take it upon themselves to do so. The neo-agrarianism of the "sustainability" movement is arguably a reclamation of the very earliest technologies, and the discovery that they are within the grasp and purview of any and all ordinary citizens. However, the lesson of sustainability is not that we are better off returning to an agrarian society (a thesis that I personally disagree with), but that we are better off when we take full ownership of humankind's technological heritage, as individuals whose wills and purposes will shape its development and use.

Prosperity need not be expensive or difficult -- but it is not inevitable either. We should not delude ourselves into believing that affluence is simply the product of some vaguely defined virtues inherent to ourselves, nor should we should suppose that if the big system should all come crashing down, we will somehow persist in spite of catastrophe. The material ease and luxury we enjoy now is indeed the result of increasingly uncomfortable and tenuous dependence, but it is also a success that we can take full responsibility for -- if only we are willing to entrust our most powerful tools to ourselves and to all our fellow citizens alike.

[1] W. Brian Arthur. "The Nature of Technology: What It Is and How It Evolves", The Free Press, 2009.

[2] public comments made by Coast Guard Commandant Adm. Thad Allen, speaking at a White House briefing on May 25, 2010.

[3] "Estimating and Addressing America's Food Loses", Economic Research Service, USDA 1997.

[4] ENERGY STAR Program Requirements for TVs, Version 3.0.

[5] "EPA Response to BP Spill in the Gulf of Mexico", accessed here.

[6] John Malik, The yields of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki nuclear explosions, Los Alamos National Laboratory report LA-8819, September 1985. Available here

[7] "Understanding Poverty in America", Robert Rector and Kirk Johnson, Heritage Foundation, 2004, available here

[8] "Human Intelligence: All Humans, All Minds, All the Time", Robert David Steele. Available in full here.

[9] American Time Use Survey -- 2009 Results, U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics

[10] "Occupational Employment Statistics Highlights", U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, June 2010

Barbarians on the Shore

2010-06-04T23:29:00.001-07:00

Old Archbishop Dom Gregory Diamare, the abbot [of Monte Cassino], talking one day to [Count] Gavronski about the barbarism into which Europe was in danger of sinking through war, said that during the darkest Middle Ages the monks of Monte Cassino had saved Western civilization by copying the ancient and precious Greek and Latin manuscripts by hand. "What should we do today to save European culture?" concluded the venerable abbot. "Have the same manuscripts copied on typewriters by your monks," replied Gavronski. [2]

On April 20, the Deepwater Horizon oil rig, leased by British Petroleum to drill for oil off U.S. coastline adjoining the Gulf of Mexico, suffered a catastrophic explosion which killed 11, injured 17, and caused the rig to sink to the bottom of the ocean. As of this writing, the ruptured oil well head has spewed crude oil into the Gulf of Mexico continuously for 46 days. Numerous attempts to stop the flow of oil have failed.

A great deal else about this incident has already been said, and continues to be said elsewhere. It would seem idle to recount the technical facts of petroleum extraction and spill response, or to add to the litany of well-deserved blame and opprobrium. The episode of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill is plainly horrifying for the nightmarish destruction it wreaks, and will to continue to wreak, on a large part of the world we live in. It is, however, equally horrifying for a much subtler reason that we all, as architects and beneficiaries of late technological civilization as it exists today, would do well to contemplate.

It deserves to be said that extracting oil from deep beneath the ocean floor is an engineering feat so complex and difficult that its success could justly be called miraculous. This is to say nothing of the scientific knowledge that made it possible for humans to convert a chemical compound, stored millions of years ago deep within the Earth's crust, into vastly powerful source of energy, ready to almost any imaginable use to which its possessors might put it. The activities of the Deepwater Horizon before the catastrophe represent a display of amazing technological power. The utter failure of attempts to seal the Deepwater Horizon's ruptured well represent the amazing impotence of that same technological power in the face of its own consequences.

How are the limitations of our own technological powers currently understood and dealt with by those who most directly wield them? A public comment on the catastrophe by former Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) administrator and former CEO of Shell Oil, William Reilly, is telling:

The extraordinary success of this industry in developing technology to go deeper and deeper into the sea to put down a well, essential well, and then go out in all directions to get the product up is breathtaking.

And the condition, as nearly as I can tell from looking at the photographs and the movies from what's happening in the Gulf, is that the response technology is about as primitive as it was in the Exxon Valdez case [over 20 years ago]. That is the skimmers that are dysfunctional in the open ocean, the booms that break, as you say, with the slightest wave action, dispersants that are not ready for prime time, that may or may not be toxic, something that has to be determined in the event, which seems to me ought to have been anticipated, with impacts on fish that really need to be very carefully acknowledged and may or may not have been.[3]

If a comment such as this one, on an episode such as that currently facing the United States, is at all revealing, then it points to an alarming short-sightedness and gross indifference to risk on the part of those who manage and direct of some of the human species' greatest technological powers. In a more immediate setting, such destructive myopia and callousness would be termed 'barbarism.'

Communitarian philosopher Alisdair MacIntyre memorably wrote less than 30 years ago that "the Barbarians are not waiting beyond the frontiers; they have already been governing us for quite some time."[1] MacIntyre was concerned with what he saw as the rapid decay of morality and civility in the West, but in light of comments such as those by Mr. Reilly above, such a sentiment certainly applies to the frightening negligence with which the high technology of the human species has been lately deployed. The threat of such negligence is twofold: either the human species will effect technological suicide, or our civilization will abruptly and violently recoil (or be forced to recoil) from the powerful tools we have developed to serve human needs and wants. We have no reason to believe that either outcome is inevitable, but neither do we have any good reason to believe that either is impossible.

The threat of technological self-destruction is not a new appearance, and much comment has already been made on it, especially through the latter half of the 20th century. Much more insidious is threat that our way of life may collapse due to a justified but unmanageable aversion to the tools and mechanisms that sustain it. Barbarism begets barbarism. Every technology devised serves some genuine human want, and so no such device is fundamentally evil or corrupt. Be that as it may, many of our powers are now routinely used by persons and organizations whose motives are at best short-sighted. With this misconduct comes the real danger of delegitimizing the base of theoretical and practical knowledge sustaining the technologies that now feed, clothe, and shelter more of humanity than at any other time in history. Accumulated knowledge is surprisingly fragile, and if our civilization comes to associate our current powers only with greed and destruction -- a view which is still in the minority, but growing both in range and intensity -- there is a real threat that it may be neglected and thereby lost.

It is only through the labors of a preciously small number of scholars and monastics that the works of Classical civilization survived into the Renaissance. Such ancient ideas may at first appear flawed or baseless when viewed in retrospect, through centuries of intellectual and scientific progress. It should nonetheless be remembered that at the time, the ancient works of the Greeks and Romans represented the limits of human learning, and went on to lay the foundation for the very erudition that now finds them quaint. As oil spews unabated into the ocean adjoining one of the most affluent and powerful nations on Earth, it seems conjectural but not idle to fear the coming of a technological and economic dark age. In spite of the abuses to which it has been put, we have labored long and hard for the scientific and engineering knowledge the human species has accumulated, and should not easily let it go, and more work remains if this knowledge is to be transmitted to future generations.

There is good reason to believe that the barbarians are upon us, and this peril issues an urgent question to the scientists, engineers, technologists, scholars, and ordinary citizens of this time and place: What part of our technological knowledge can we save, and how?

[1] MacIntyre, Alisdair. After Virtue. University of Notre Dame Press, 1984.

[2] Malaparte, Curzio, Cesare Foligno (trans.). Kaputt. New York Review of Books, 2005.

[3] Originally broadcast June 3, 2010, on MSNBC's "The Rachel Maddow Show". Video also available here.

The Not-Understanding Perceptron, and the Grim Shadow of the "Average Man"

2010-02-18T22:01:00.001-08:00

... and if you're too intelligent
they'll cut you down to size;
they'll praise you till you're happy,
then they'll fill you full of lies ...

"Cradle to the Grave", album of the same name, Subhumans (1983)

A friend of mine came up to me unexpectedly today, with some obvious concern and agitation. "Can I ask you about something? Could you explain something to me?" he said. I said okay, and he took a piece of paper out of his pocket and began folding it awkwardly back and forth, trying to hide most of the contents while showing me just one small part. Finally, he handed it to me and asked very soberly, "What does this mean?" I looked the paper. It was a score from an IQ test. The score was not good.

It was at that point that I thought about what it must feel like to receive a piece of paper that tells you that you are officially stupid.

I've known this friend for a while. He had a difficult past. He's attending a local community college. He wants to go on to some position where he can counsel troubled kids -- not kids who are troubled about the usual things that trouble kids, but kids who are troubled in a way that's bigger and deeper and harder to articulate, who have been to jail, or will likely end up there soon. He's an honest person. He's a curious person. He works hard. And I could tell that he understood what the paper said, at least in literal terms. I could tell he was hoping, perhaps, that there was some subtle detail of the report that would nullify or at least mitigate the coldly obvious meaning. It was not a question about scales or confidence intervals, even though I explained these ideas at some length so as not to seem flippant or condescending.

There was no way I could just hand the paper back and say, "It means you have a low IQ."

What happened is, I sat back in my chair and said this:

"Look, I don't know much about this sort of thing or about IQ tests or what they're really good for or exactly what they mean. They've been around for a while, and a lot of people have criticized them for a lot of reasons, and they still give them out anyway, but none of that is really the point. The point is that it's all bullshit. The point is that a test score just tells you how well you scored on a test, and nothing more than that. For some reason, we've come to live in a fucked up world where people give us test after test after test to evaluate what use we, as human beings, have to them, as figures of power and authority. It's a bad measure. What's really good and interesting about human beings is how adaptable we are. If we can't do things one way, we can find another. We're never incapable; the only thing we ever lack is persistence or inventiveness. This score doesn't matter. It doesn't tell you what you can or can't do. It doesn't tell you whether or not you'll succeed in life. It doesn't tell you who you are. Those are all things that you determine for yourself. So the meaning is nothing; it's just a test, don't worry about it. Life isn't a test; it's a challenge. It's hard, but there's always another way. There's always a way to live."

Then I handed the paper back, and left.

I sincerely wonder why we insist on so many abstract metrics of people. They may serve an organizational purpose, but they serve no individual purpose, and in some cases even represent and individual harm. Perhaps it's a bit worn and trite to criticize tests and tell people that they can do whatever they want. I acknowledge that not everyone has the same abilities. I acknowledge that some people will try things and succeed, while other people will try things and fail. I acknowledge that we are all stuck playing with the lot we're dealt. What I take exception to is the proposition, implicit in every quantitative metric of a person, that there are only a certain number of clearly circumscribed roles a person may play in life, and all of those can be characterized by a certain number of simple, measurable quantities.

I don't think anyone would dispute the simple proposition that capability is only really proven when the thing is done. Can you write? Write something. Can you fight? Fight someone. Can you think? Come up with an idea. That is all fine and good, but what is often not recognized is that narrow metrics such as standardized questionnaires and puzzles measure only a person's competence in one particular strategy of doing, not that person's overall capacity for thinking, learning, or doing. There is an enormous breadth and variety to the genres of writing, styles of fighting, and certainly to ideas. In the end, the one goal that all of us hold as ultimate is simply to live. As far as I can see, the measure of that is something that we all figure out for ourselves.

I wouldn't be the first person to criticize the IQ test; as far back as Vygotsky and Luria, people were well aware of the influence of a industrialized education on the direction of concept use and formation. The modern practice of measuring by standardized test even resembles, to some substantial degree, the operation of very primitive feature-weighting recognizers (e.g. Rosenblatt's perceptron), which Minksy and Papert famously showed could not even distinguish the presence of such basic relationships as continuity. There is a remarkable synthesis in the way human cognition sees form as function and function as form; one sees it everywhere, in our tools, in our art, in our basic ways of thinking. Batteries of questions aimed at abstracting some particular feature of an individual, however, separate the form of the person from the function being sought. The issue is not one of which kinds of intelligence we should measure, or which quantities are really important in determining health, fitness, or success. The issue is that the measurement of finite quantities is a procedure fundamentally insufficient to the task of determining what we should do with ourselves, or how.

If that sounds like a trope or a triviality, stop and really imagine for yourself how exactly would it feel to receive an scientific report documenting how stupid you are.

One of the really interesting things about being human is that we make purposes and meanings for ourselves. This is not an inspirational appeal that takes us away from the compelling argument that simple biological impulses underly our lives and activities. This is assertion of the brilliant complexity with which those impulses manifest when placed in a brilliantly complex world. What's amazing is that we all end up acting as differently as we do even though we all start with same small handful of biological goals and directives. A clever strategy can turn a weakness into a strength. Sometimes, the meek really do inherit the Earth, and nobody sees it coming.

Sometimes, however, is not the same as always. Sometimes the test speaks the truth. Sometimes might is right. Possibility, however, is an essential organizing principle of how we think about ourselves and the directions of our lives. To borrow notions from the cognitive scientists, our identity is fundamentally tied to a self-ideal, that is, to a persistent thought not just of who we but who we want to be. Without the ability to imagine possible selves and possible futures, the whole sense of self collapses. If tomorrow's outcomes are all completely and fully known today, there is no human sense in bothering to live them all out. (This assertion is pregnant with all kinds of epistemological interpretations.) Of course we need to know, in plain, unsparing terms, how the world is. Of course we need to know, frankly and directly, what our weakness are. But each of us, if we are to go on living at all, also has to be able to imagine better.

I have an above-average IQ. I know this because in fourth grade I went to a quiet, out-of-the-way room in my school and took a strange-looking test, after which they sent me to a so-called "gifted program" once a week. There, we got to do things like tinker with fractal-generating computer programs and assemble-your-own-robot kits. I liked the things we learned, and I liked the absence of the overbearing regimentation that pervades ordinary public schooling, but to tell the truth, I never liked any of the other children there. They all knew that they had taken a test, and that adults approved. They knew that they had been declared officially intelligent. As such, they were all filled with insufferable smugness and self-satisfaction. Knowing that they could do things to please adults, they competed viciously among one another for praise and attention. Based on my later contact with intelligent, talented, and highly educated persons in my adult life, these are features that, I am almost certain, many if not most such children retain for the rest of their lives. Knowing that you have been blessed with "the gift", it is difficult to resist fascination with your own wonderful ability. Having this fascination, it becomes difficult to arouse much interest in what your work means for the other humans you share the world with, what shortcomings or limitations you might have despite your talents, or what people without "the gift" might think or have to say. Having a belief in your own excellent function, you lose the form of yourself as human being, with all the frailties and blights that entails.

Blame or praise only really help when they suggest new directions. There is no "good function" or "bad function", only "good for this" or "bad for that". The only real function is to live out our lives, and that is something we do in whatever way we choose. So what if you have a low IQ? Human chess players are helpless to beat powerful chess playing algorithm, but people still play chess. The joy of a game is just in the playing; in just the same way, the joy of living is not in solving any single problem, or meeting any one goal. So what if you have a high IQ? Your shit still stinks, and somebody still has to clean it up. The world is unimaginably huge and complicated, but everyone has a place in it. Contrary to some opinions, there is no placement test to tell you where.

Implications of Universality for Computer Security

2010-02-06T16:16:00.000-08:00

"In the United States (U.S.), we have items available for all our needs. Many of these items are cheap and easy to replace when damaged. Our easy-come, easy-go, easy-to-replace culture makes it unnecessary for us to improvise. This inexperience in 'making do' can be an enemy in a survival situation. Learn to improvise. Take a tool designed for a specific purpose and see how many other uses you can make of it." (U.S. Army Field Manual FM 3-05.70, "Survival", May 2002)

One of the most noteworthy features of computer security is its overwhelmingly defensive stance. While there are certain programming practices that mitigate threats (e.g. sanitize your inputs, check your array bounds), it is practically impossible to preclude all possible attempts to corrupt or co-opt a system. Granted, there are always a few stubborn hold-outs willing to step forward and claim that the system that they have constructed is constructed in that elusive "right way" that everyone so far has failed at. It's possible that one of these people may be right, but evidence seems to weigh against such claims.

All the way back in 1993, a landmark report from the Naval Research Laboratory [3] found that almost half of 50 serious security breaches involved code that correctly implemented its specification. Of course, that was well over 15 years ago, and so one might protest that perhaps some better model of security has come forward since that time. Even so, one has to take notice when large teams of talented programmers correctly implement a meticulously specified system, and the system nonetheless succumbs to attack. Cases such as this lead illustrious security researcher William Wulf to call for a revolutionized approach to security that abandons the old paradigms of "perimeter defense" [7] as late as last year. Wulf proposes a model of security inspired by the success of the Internet, wherein a small foundation with minimal but very general functionality allows for systems to adapt to localized and quickly evolving conditions as needed and desired. This seems a very pragmatic and promising approach, and the success of the Internet is nothing to sneeze at. Even so, one cannot help but wonder what exactly it is about the traditional way of doing things that leads it to fail.

Let's consider a very intuitive idea from the traditional theory of security. Noninterference is a rather early and very successful idea due originally to J. A. Goguen and J. Meseguer [2] that can be informally phrased as follows: if two users (or processes) share a system, then the action of one should have no effect on the other. In some sense, this is like what we would expect in many kinds of situations where security is important: if you're on a time-sharing system, you don't want your files, or what you do to them, to be visible to other people; if you're buying something online, you don't want the credit card number you send to the vendor to somehow end up on the computer of some third party not part of the transaction. Of course, such assurances are very hard to make on large systems that a lot of people use; it would be pure whimsy to suggest that one could ever make such an assurance about the Internet (especially considering that large-scale data mining by merchants and advertisers already counts, arguably, as producing unwanted side-effects), and it would even seem like a bit of stretch to make absolute promises about a large, practical system that a lot of different people had to use to readily exchange information. However, suppose that someone were to successfully construct a shared system conforming to Goguen-Meseguer noninterference; if we were really that confident in its conception and construction, we could be assured that no one would be meddling in anyone else's data, nor would the kernel be unwittingly divulging any secrets to attackers bent on trying to compromise it.

Here's the catch: even a perfectly conceived and constructed system has to interact with the rest of the world in order to be used by anyone. This of course introduces the vector of social engineering, whereby the human element becomes part of the system. Even so, we don't have to rely on operator fallibility to show how problems immediately and essentially arise once the theoretical construct is out of its own solitary universe. One such very simple and very clever example is due to Daryl McCullough [4], and works essentially as follows:

Imagine we don't want any information flowing from the red parts of the system to the blue parts, although blue-to-red is okay. (This is indicated by the directions of the arrows.) Considered separately, the blue and red parts of the system both satisfy noninterference, since the red portion consists only of a single process, while the blue portion is defined in such a way that its two processes never interact. Does the entire system obey noninterference, once its parts are put together? It turns out that it does not.

The reason for this comes from a subtle but important detail of machines, namely, their finiteness. Suppose that processes A and B fill up their respective input buffers -- which they certainly can do in any kind of realistic machine. Should they start throwing away messages, or should they wait? We don't want to lose any messages, so we insist that the processes wait once their respective buffers fill up. However, in order to know to wait, the buffer or some mechanism attached to it must be able to send signals back to its process, telling either to go ahead or wait. That is, we want our processes to perform blocking reads and writes on the buffers, wherein their execution is suspended until the necessary read or write becomes possible. Now suppose, that our red process has a one-bit input from S that is uses to decide which of buffers A or B to read from, i.e. red multiplexes A and B according to the input it receives from S. The red process waits until acknowledgment arrives in buffer C before reading the next input from S. Suppose processes A and B immediately fill their respective buffers; once our red process reads from one of them, the buffer will have space for a new message, and will signal back to its respective process that it can go ahead with its execution. This is all good and fine and perfectly reasonable. What's the problem? The problem is this: suppose also that A writes some innocuous notice to the output on the left, say '0', each time it sends to buffer A, and that B writes '1' to the same source each time it sends to buffer B. Why is this problem? Because, given this setup, the stream of bits being written to the (blue) output on the left now exactly matches the stream of inputs being read from the (red) input on the right, which is precisely what we did not want to happen.

One immediate conclusion that one can draw from this result is that some security properties simply are not composable, that is, even if two different systems exhibit the property, there is no guarantee that putting them together will result in a system that exhibits the same property. However, I think that there is another informative way of looking at what's happening in McCullough's example: connecting the blue to the red system gives the blue system an opportunity to emulate red.

Emulation is an idea that goes all the way back to Alan Turing's universal computer. In essence, one machine emulates another whenever it performs computations equivalent in rule and structure to another. This is what gives Turing's machine its universality; it has the capability to emulate any of a very large class of other machines, and hence to perform any computation of which any machine in that class is capable. Chip developers use emulators to test against design errors. Nostalgic gamers use emulators to play titles from long-defunct platforms on modern personal computers. Interpreted programming languages (e.g. Java) use an emulated abstract computer to achieve some measure of portability. However, the basic principle that one machine (or tool) can serve in the stead of any of large class of others seems to me much broader and deeper than any of the niche purposes to which it has so far been put, especially as regards security.

Most prisons in the United States place rigid constraints on what sorts of items prisoners are allowed to keep in their cells. The reason for this is that a small piece of metal or a hard, sturdy object can easily be improvised into an excavating tool or a weapon, given the proper motivation -- of which prison inmates typically have an abundance. Ingenuity in making and using tools is one of the distinguishing and noteworthy characteristics of humanity, and the dramatic success of the tool-weilding primate is a testament to the power of a usable tool, however crude. This is not a new or surprising observation. However, it is truly astonishing to observe the huge disparity between the smallness of the means necessary to cause a disruption and the explosive magnitude of the disruption itself. Who would have ever imagined that using a bludgeon instead of fists and teeth would have catapulted humans to the position of dominant predator, or that millennia later those same humans would be improvising artifacts for personal hygiene into deadly melee weapons?

What we have here is a very broad principle. How does it apply?

A number of attempts were made during the 1960s and 1970s to construct a universal Turing machine with the smallest number of possible states; Marvin Minsky constructed one with only 7 states and 4 symbols in 1962 [5]. Successive attempts collected and published by Yuri Rogozhin in 1998 produced at least one smaller machine. In 1985, Stephen Wolfram claimed that his famous Rule 110 one-dimensional cellular automaton was able to emulate a Turing machine with only two states and five symbols, sketching a proof in his widely read and controversial 2002 opus [6]. Though such constructions always give some whiff of obsession with arcana, they also give very concrete evidence of a genuinely startling conclusion: it takes very, very little in order to make almost anything possible.

This should be a very potent lesson for the discipline computer security. Systems can be very tightly walled off from the rest of the world, but it takes only a very narrow gap for an attacker to worm his way in. A first reflex is to try to wall off the system even tighter but this, ultimately, turns out to be a failing solution: one can only constrain the system's use so much before it becomes completely unusable, whereas the attacker needs only the slightest concession in order to devise an exploit. This seems to confirm Wulf's argument that a pitched battle over the integrity of a rigid boundary is doomed to defeat. However, it also gives a potentially very useful language in which to phrase the problems of security. Consider the following informal conjecture:

If a system S allows its users functionality F, then S is vulnerable to an exploit E if and only if F is computationally expressive enough to emulate E.

This is plainly visible in McCullough's construction above; the blocking signal from a full buffer gives the blue portion of the system exactly enough information to act as if it were reading off of the secret input buffer. Erik Buchanan, Ryan Roemer, and Stefan Savage presented a method of constructing exploits without the use of code injection (which I also cited here several months ago) at Black Hat 2008 [1], which seems to confirm this very same intuition. The authors showed that subverting normal control flow was sufficient to coerce "trusted" code into arbitrary computations, thus producing "bad" code without the need to introduce any new code.

Explaining security breaches in terms of "emulating your inferiors" also provides a graded metric of susceptibility. (This may be useful if it turns out that Mr. Wolfram is indeed right and the world is rife with computational universality.) If one system is capable of emulating another, then the time complexity of the emulated computations will always differ from those of the native, non-emulated computations by a constant factor. However, a given system may be better suited to emulating some systems than others, and the program required to set up the emulation may be substantially more or less complicated. A rock might serve as both a hammer or a crude knife, but it makes a much better hammer than knife; an actual knife, by contrast, can be improvised to a wide variety of very practical purposes. The same is undeniably true of computational systems; although the Rule 110 automaton can emulate a Universal Turing Machine, and that universal Turing Machine can emulate the operation of the latest multi-core processor running your favorite operating system, the time performance of your system would decrease by a very large (but nonetheless constant) factor, and require quite a bit of memory besides. In the same vein, dynamic database access through a webpage makes it relatively easy to steal privileged information from the database because (if the website is badly designed) the user has the chance to pass arbitrary SQL queries to the server, but would be much more difficult (by itself) to leverage into an attempt to seize control of the operating system kernel.

Malware, then is just software coerced into emulating an unwanted computation; attack vectors are essentially just abstract buses over which the victim machine receives instructions from its attacker; exploits are essentially programs running on a maliciously purposed abstract machine. This is, of course, all highly speculative, but it seems to give an expressive language in which to formulate many of the problems of security, and to tie together many well-developed branches of computer science.

[1] Buchanan, Erik, Ryan Roemer, and Stefan Savage. "Return-Oriented Programming: Exploits Without Code Injection". Presented at Black Hat 2008, slides available here

[2] Goguen, J. A. and J. Meseguer. "Security Policies and Security Models". IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy, 1982.

[3] Landwehr, Carl E., Alan R. Bull, John P. McDermott and William S. Choi. "A Taxonomy of Computer Program Security Flaws, with Examples". ACM Computing Surveys, 26:3, September 1994.

[4] McCullough, Daryl. "Noninterference and the Composability of Security Properties". IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy, 1988.

[5] Minsky, Marvin. "Size and Structure of Universal Turing Machines". Recursive Function Theory, Proceedings of the Symposium in Pure Mathematics, 5, American Mathematical Society 1962.

[6] Wolfram, Stephen. "A New Kind of Science". Wolfram Media, 2002.

[7] Wulf, William A. and Anita K. Jones. "Reflections on Cybersecurity". Science, vol. 326, 13 November 2009.

"The Best Kind of Student Goes and Practices It Assiduously"

2010-01-31T22:49:00.001-08:00

Lao Tzu said that when the best kind of student hears about the Way, he goes and practices is assiduously; when the worst kind of student hears about the Way, he laughs in contempt. This is a good statement about learning in general, and what it means to effectively apply one's self to a study -- any study, and every study.

In order to really learn something, you have to really truly make it a part of your self. This is a fine sentiment, except that 'self' itself is such a vague and illusive concept, and so talk of adding parts and pieces to such a thing quickly descends into confusion. Is something a part of yourself because you wish for it? Because you think about it? Because you attribute it to yourself? Because someone else attributes it to you? How much is enough, and how little is not? Can you know it when you see it? The boundaries of the self are so hazy that the metaphor of taking things from the outside and putting them inside simply does not work. Learning isn't an acquisition.

This is what makes Lao Tzu's attributed utterance profound: the best kind of student is the best for the simple reason that he goes and practices, in all the senses of that word. Learning means putting into practice, and what you choose to put into practice becomes a seamless part of the activity that is your life. Learning is doing.

There is a subtlety here, though. When you value you something, you keep it in mind; you don't set aside or casually forget about people you love, ideals you treasure, nor your own certainly your own goals and survival. When any of these things come up, you remember them, and you act in a way that accords with them. Learning is no different.

Hence the importance of the latter part of the saying; the worst kind of student hears about the Way and laughs in contempt. I say this having done things in just this way, many times in the past, and having utterly failed in such cases. This is the acquisitive approach to learning, the one that suppose that the facts are set in place and it is only a matter of taking them and putting them inside of one's brain. When you come out and say it this way, such an attitude sounds utterly false; everybody knows that you have to practice something to get good at it. But if you don't know what it is that you're actually doing, then your actions aren't practice. They're wasted effort. It's easy to go out and engage in a flurry of activity and to call it "practice", but what makes for real practice is a sensitivity to the interplay between what you do and what the rest of the world does in reply. If your practice is just the stubborn application of your self-conceived ideas to the situation your happen to be in, you're not learning. You're insisting. Practice acts, but carefully studies the consequence. Learning begins with questioning, and questioning is empty if no attention is paid to the answers.

When something is stated, it seems obvious. When something is done, it seems hard.

In a short comment appearing somewhere in the middle of "The Society of Mind", Marvin Minsky gives an interesting counter to the question of whether machines have souls. "I ask back", he says, "whether souls can learn. It does not seem a fair exchange -- if souls can live for endless time and yet not use that time to learn -- to trade all change for changelessness. And that's exactly what we get with inborn souls that cannot grow: a destiny the same as death, an ending in a permanence incapable of any change and, hence, devoid of intellect." Mr. Minsky's insight is quietly brilliant: learning is growth, and growth is inseparable from life.

Time passes. Situations differ. Nothing produces harmony by itself, and nothing acts by itself.

Assiduous practice is assiduous living. Our lives are nothing other than the lessons learned from a long dialogue between ourselves and our circumstances.

All Computation Is Effectful

2009-12-06T20:56:00.000-08:00

I had the fortunate opportunity to attend ACM's Symposium on Principles of Programming Languages (POPL) '09 earlier this year, including keynote addresses and open panel discussions by some of the field's most prominent and celebrated researchers. One issue that came up over and over again was the difficult problem of how to handle so-called "effects".

The functional programming community typically uses terms such as "effectful computation" or "side effects" to describe a broad class of things a computer program may do at runtime whose consequences may not be readily apparent from inspection of the program text itself. These may include memory references (e.g. as in the notoriously strange pointer semantics of C), I/O, interrupts, exceptions, and message passing. In certain quarters, there is a long history of concern over how to encapsulate these inevitabilities of useful programming within a language that somehow tames their unpredictability. This is no doubt a worthy motive; programs all of whose effects were perfectly and completely evident in their source code would make programming in general much easier and might even open the door to that elusive and often contentious goal of "formal program verification". A very substantial research effort has gone into solving the problem and the ideas put forward, which are far too numerous to survey here, show a dazzling sophistication. Even so, the fact that the problem of how to sensibly express computational effects is still an active concern of leading researchers is evidence that no work so far has decisively settled the issue.

To understand the difficulty, one must understand the curious notion of "functional purity". Functional programming languages are languages based on the Lambda Calculus, one of the three canonical (and interchangeable) paradigms of universal computation. The Lambda Calculus, originally due to Alonzo Church, expresses computations as the application three basic reduction rules to syntactic objects usually referred to as "lambda terms". Because the Lambda Calculus is a complete model of universal computation, any program that can be executed on a computer can, in theory, be expressed as a term in the calculus, with the "halt state" of the program equivalent in some sense to the fully-reduced form of the lambda term. The basic building block of a lambda term is a "lambda", which is nothing other than a function in the formal mathematical sense of the word "function". That is, a lambda specifies a rule according to which an input value is matched to a specific, well-defined output value. It would be ideal if programs behaved like lambdas, producing a well-defined output for each well-formed input, according to a specific and well-defined rule. Moreover, since lambda terms are composable into larger lambda terms, such programs could be modularly combined, according to traditional software engineering practice, to produce large and useful new programs from smaller, more basic ones, all while preserving the happy property that no program could have more than one output for any given input. This, in essence, is the goal of pure functional programming.

The significance of functional purity is that it leaves no room for unexpected effects. In theory, program execution should proceed according to nothing other than the well-defined reduction rules of the lambda calculus, whence each reduction has exactly one effect, namely, that specified by the appropriate reduction rule. This does not mean that a pure-functional program may not have bugs, only that source of bugs will be restricted to logical errors on the part of the programmer, rather than unexpected interactions between parts of the program. By contrast, a program in a more familiar and more organic language (such as C) may appear superficially correct but cause effects at runtime whose consequences ripple widely through the program with obscure and unintended consequences. However, the more attentive or skeptical reader may object: since any really useful programming language has a well-defined semantics that specifies what any given statement will do, separating a logical error in a pure functional language from a effect-caused bug in an impure language is a distinction without a difference. Any unexpected behavior of a program is a bug, regardless of its origin.

That's not to say that pure functions are not a useful organizing principle. Pure functions capture a basic intuition of how programs are "supposed to" work, producing no more than one possible output for any given input, and doing so according to a clearly specified rule whose deeper implementation mechanics are usually of no interest to the programmer. Moreover, the simple reductions of the lambda calculus make it relatively easy to foresee what a functional program will do, which is a notable contrast to the semantics of non-functional languages which, even though well-defined, may be forbiddingly complicated. It is very telling that even the illustrious Edsger Dijkstra, an unflinching champion of careful and semantically exact program composition, admitted that semantic analysis for even straightforward properties of trivial imperative programs seemed excessively complex[1]. (However, it's also noteworthy that Dijkstra did the analysis anyway.) The idea of a pure functional language certainly has virtues. It is, however, another matter whether these virtues are attainable in practice.

The best-developed and most successful pure functional language yet implemented is Haskell. Haskell enjoys a selection of stable compilers for every major platform, including the Glasgow Haskell Compiler (GHC), which is a commercial-grade compiler boasting numerous useful extensions and the capability to produce native machine code. Programs written in every major implementation of Haskell, however, suffer in most cases from serious performance deficits compared to similar programs in a non-imperative language. Even the official Haskell Wiki notes that "GHC doesn't have any credible competition in the performance department", and suggests that programs written in Haskell may keep pace with counterparts in other languages, but only with very aggressive tweeking and optimization. Haskell depends upon a very complex run-time system that is highly susceptible to memory leaks and greatly complicates formal verification of compiled Haskell code. One might argue, however, that for at least some applications this would be an acceptable price to pay for the straightforward semantics of a lambda calculus. Haskell's purity, however, is in name only.

Arguably, Haskell does not achieve purity at all, but only manages to localize all of its "impurities" to one place. This place is an essential Haskell construct known as the IO monad, where virtually all essential program behaviors take place. In essence, a Haskell program can only make system calls, catch or raise exceptions, or handle interrupts inside the IO monad. This allows the familiar Haskell type "IO a" to act as a wall separating the idyllic garden of pure functional delights made possible by the runtime system from the gritty details of how real programs execute on real machines. One of the chief architects of GHC, Simon Peyton-Jones, famously described the IO monad a giant "sin-bin, used whenever we want to do something that breaks the purely functional paradigm." [2] Peyton-Jones makes a reasonable argument in the same article that simply making the pure-impure distinction is useful in itself, but also acknowledges that contemporary attempts to more completely account for effects prove either too complicated or too inefficient to be practical. Haskell represents the end-product of a tremendous and concerted research effort by a large number of talented people and GHC is surely an impressive technical accomplishment. However, the sheer magnitude of the effort required to achieve even this modest gain toward the language enthusiasts' goal of functional purity makes its shortcomings that much more conspicuous.

There is, I think, a lesson in all this, and that lesson is that there is no promise in trying to capture all the effects. Computers are machines, and machines work via carefully a orchestrated cascade of predetermined physical causes and their expected effects. All computation is effectful computation. I realize that this may be an extremely controversial thing to say, but I feel that it stands on a well-founded principle. The difficulties and idiosyncracies of so-called "effects" all arise from the fact that computers have to be physically constructed, and thus must accommodate the protocols of the circuits that constitute them, must retain their data in some kind of physical memory, and must have some means to communicate with machines and components that are spatially separate. Trying to resist this fact by abstracting away such details is bound to end in abstractions of rapidly increasing complexity and rapidly decreasing practicality.

The motivations for abstraction via programming language are multifaceted and practically compelling. At the same time, not all abstractions are good abstractions. Church's calculus has proven a powerful and useful model of computation, and is theoretically interesting in its own right. However, it is telling that it was Alan Turing's eponymous and much more mechanical "machine" that became the conceptual basis of the first digital computers. The difficulty of a problem often depends upon its phrasing. We can't write programs that consist of causes with no effects. I admit that it's a very broad, very contentious, and very far-reaching claim, but the utter complexity and unusability of attempts so far to account for so-called "computational effects" suggests that perhaps we are trying to answer the wrong questions.

[1] Dijkstra, Edsger. "Notes on Structured Programming." T.H.-Report 70-WSK-03. 1970.

[2] Peyton-Jones, Simon. "Tackling the Awkward Squad: monadic input/output, concurrency, exceptions, and foreign-language calls in Haskell." Microsoft Research, Cambridge. 2001.

Something Better: The Essence of Naturalism

2009-12-01T23:15:00.000-08:00

I've reflected recently on how the arguments of naturalistic philosophy can be so sound and eloquent and yet be fiercely resisted by so many people. I've also been dismayed the dry, perversely nihilistic view that some naturalists seem to take. Science, however, is a personal and very human endeavor, a fact that is neglected by both the more nihilistic naturalists and their vocal opponents. It is the lack of consideration for this strongly personal feature that leads some naturalists to treat scientific theory as untouchable empyrean truth, and that deters traditionalists from embracing what they see as a world-view that is anesthetic and impersonal.

I had planned out a much longer essay, but for now it seems more constructive to concisely state basic, working principles. A great deal of ink has been spilled on this subject already. What's missing are ideas that can be readily acted upon:

Observe carefully. Truth is everywhere.

Ask questions. Knowledge begins with a question.

Acknowledge the unknown. Understand that assumptions have consequences, and these consequences point beyond.

Be the truth. Apply your full understanding, and act according to everything you know.

Finding and knowing the truth is everyone's business.

To be human means to live in the midst of a conflict between hope and possibility. It's been wisely said that to exist is to suffer. It may be that our uniquely human existence entails uniquely human sufferings such as these. We have the distinct ability to dream up new worries for ourselves, and then to worry ourselves sick over them. We also have the distinct ability to deconstruct our own views and perceptions and thus rationalize away any and all appearances, to the point that the world of our experience is left desolate and bare. Sometimes we see things that aren't there. Sometimes we don't see things that plainly are there. This basic principle leads to a significant conclusion: seeing is not the same as understanding, and not seeing isn't the same as seeing clearly. This principle is widely applicable to all constructed philosophies.

Science has made wide inroads to areas considered the sole domain of mysticism or metaphysics, but even the eloquence of brilliant and heroic thinkers has been insufficient to dispel the unease with which many people regard the proposition that all the phenomena of our experience proceed from basic natural laws. Empirical or logical arguments fail to convince not because they are unsound or their conclusions untrue, but because they fail to adequately replace the practical function of gradually evolved systems of personal belief.

People do not need different theories. People need better ways of theorizing. Science is the acquisition of knowledge, and the acquisition of knowledge should not be constrained to a narrow set of subjects, or particular class of professionals. There is no sense in convincing people to abandon traditional views of God, free will, or humanity's place in the Universe if it only means substituting scientific theories for pre-scientific dogmas. Both represent incomplete views of the world, the distinction being that science puts its fictions to the test. This distinction is crucial but easily overlooked. A theory is nothing but a story whose deeper meaning manifests as a discovery about the world. People embrace traditional views because these views allow them to make discoveries about themselves. They resist naturalistic explanations only when they appear sterile and unable to explain anything new or useful within the scope of their own lives.

What's needed in the reform of all our views is a sincere valuation of the truth, a deep appreciation of what it is and how it is gotten. A close examination reveals that, at the personal level, this is no different from learning and growing as a human being.

It is through fictions that we learn, and knowledge is just the skillful manipulation of fictions. Wisdom is the ability to go beyond fictions.

Thoughts on Control and Proportion

2009-11-27T22:30:00.000-08:00

In the common usage, a system is generally said to be "under control" whenever there is some way to act on the system to produce a predictable outcome. This is a perfectly sensible definition, but it makes clear that control is really a matter of degree. Does "outcome" refer to the ultimate behavior of the system, or only certain of its moving parts? Does "predictable" mean that outcomes are foreseeable one second into the future, or one year into the future, or indefinitely into the future?

There are other interesting questions one can ask that may be particular to a system or a class of systems: When control-actions put together serially or in parallel (or in that awkward hybrid of the two sometimes known as "concurrency") are their cumulative results foreseeable, so that large, structured actions can be composed of smaller ones? Do control-actions have an outcome that is constant with time, or does their behavior change, albeit in a predictable way? Do what degree is control of the system susceptible to irregularities of the environment or noise in the input?

Degree, though, seems to be an essential aspect of the notion of control. The things we are typically concerned with controlling are macroscopic and complicated. In those rare instances where we unequivocally succeed in controlling a physical phenomenon (a working machine is one instance of such a success) behavior of the thing may be quite steady and predictable, but still show susceptibility to abrupt, unexpected failures or malfunctions. Friction, cross-talk, ambient vibrations, waste-heat, leaky gates, freak-accidents, and all their like loom threateningly in the background of any working order. Though such entropic can never be eliminated, a successful machine (at least in all current conventional senses) has a design that somehow subsumes these forces.

The world is a vast and inconceivably complicated place. That anything is predictable or understandable at all is something of a miracle. That humans can produce even dim understanding or very modest instances of control is more miraculous still. In this sense, any given thing in the world, from a pebble to a space shuttle to a low-pressure trough to a working farm to an ocean, analyzed in full, contains a volume of information that is completely beyond the comprehension of even the most brilliant human mind. In essence, the information density of even the tiniest, simplest objects renders them wholly immovable to the human mind.

The idea of control thus hearkens back to Archimedes using a lever to move the whole world. Control is a particular arrangement that gives an agent (i.e. something with a minded purpose) leverage enough to move to the world from one understandable condition to another. This suggests a (very) slightly more formal idea of control as a specific kind of proportion: a thing is "controllable" when there is some arrangement by which a relatively low bandwidth input yields a comparably (very) high bandwidth output, i.e. a state of the system that is foreseen.

This is not necessarily a new way of looking at things, by any stretch. (After all, we can even give old Archimedes some credit, not to mention such big names as Boltzmann or Weiner, who first began asking the modern versions of such questions.) Control is essentially a means of mapping some relatively coarse vision of a complex phenomenon onto its extremely fine-grained reality, and doing so in a way that is suitably robust and structure-preserving. The transistor is the classic example of this, whereby something as complex as a semiconductor can be made to act like a trivial logic function. This view is suggestive of certain interesting avenues of investigation. One has to wonder, for instance, if establishing a regime of control, i.e. designing a machine or proving its properties, is something like playing Michael Barnsley's "Chaos Game": the design ask and answer, over and over again, how do the small things resemble the big things in this picture?

Amped Up Over Tasers: When Technical Details Don't Mix

2009-11-24T22:48:00.000-08:00

Adoption of the electrical neuromuscular incapacitation device commonly known as the "Taser" is a contentious issue in law enforcement policy. As with many contemporary issues, the adoption and deployment of the Taser appears to incite a spirited public debate that is, in actuality, not so much a debate as a vicious clash of two different sets of vague and incommensurable intuitions. As should not be surprising, this quagmire of ill-formed but irreconcilable feelings is even more severely exacerbated whenever the works of science and late technology are involved.

In recent local news, an action group calling itself "People for a Taser-Free Columbia" hosted a public discussion on the police department's issuance of Tasers to beat officers. At that event, opponents raised frequent objection to the Taser: it subjects its victims to an electrical potential of 50,000 volts. This quantity, opponents contend, is manifestly unsafe, whence the Taser's status as a non-lethal weapon is questionable. The Columbia Daily Tribune reports that a certain city councilman dismissed this objection by noting that "it's not the voltage that matters, it's the amperage." Exchanges such as these have become typical in American civic discourse: one side glibly cites what appears to be a fact, and the other side, without considering any particular features of the problem, dismisses that fact as irrelevant. Because such exchanges have become typical it is easy to mistake them for serious policy debate, when in fact they are little more than hysterics and posturing on either side. This recent exchange by Taser opponents and the city councilman is a striking illustration of how much worse matters become when technical information is involved, and is often unwittingly used to perpetuate an unproductive argument.

A closer examination reveals how little the participants in this debate are actually saying. (Sadly, it's worth even less than the few sentences we've given it here.) Let's first address the councilman's inane rebuttal.

Electrical current is commonly measured in amperes. On this definition, the councilman seems to assert that the voltage figure quoted by opponents is irrelevant on the basis that it is the quantity of electrical current that actually determines the magnitude of injury. The councilman's objection superficially appears erudite: he correctly distinguishes between current, which measures the rate at which electrical charge flows through a medium, versus voltage, which is a measure of potential energy. Opponents, however, are clearly objecting to the Taser on the basis that its sheer energy output seems to be frighteningly high. Does the councilman's remark actually address the spirit of this concern? According to Ohm's Law, a basic physical principle familiar to anyone who has ever taken a college physics course,

electrical current = electrical potential / electrical resistance

which means in particular that current, and thus 'amperage', is proportional to voltage. Thus a small voltage will produce a small current when applied to a given conductor (e.g. a human subject), and a very large voltage will produce a very large current when applied to the same conductor. The number of amperes experienced by a person shot with a Taser dart thus depends upon the number of volts of electrical potential generated by the device. What the councilman seems to be saying is: "It doesn't matter how many volts the suspect is subjected to, as long as he doesn't suffer too many amps." In light of simple physical laws, such an argument makes no sense. Moreover, it does nothing to address generic fears that Thomas A. Swift's Electric Rifle shoots out a quantity of electricity that is simply too large.

It is possible the councilman actually meant something else by his objection, but I cannot think of any other sensible (or favorable) way to construe the remark. It is also worth noting that the councilman's remark is similar to an aphorism oft quoted in the electrician's trade. In the context of creating an electrical current, an electrician or engineer certainly is concerned with the problem of creating a current using as little voltage as possible, but this is quite a different concern than determining how much current can be applied to a human being without causing injury or death. Let this be a lesson about the danger of repeating aphorisms without clearly understanding their meaning and application. Be careful not to use pre-packaged phrases to cover up a lack of understanding.

The councilman's technical flub was only made worse when the Deputy Chief of Police asserted, according to the same Tribune article, that the Taser induces a current that is "much less than a standard wall socket's output." Considering that, in the United States, electricity is transmitted to homes at 120 volts, it is impossible that a correctly functioning wall outlet could induce a current greater than the peak current produced by a successful Taser deployment. According to Taser International Inc., the device's manufacturer, the TASER X26 delivers a maximum effective voltage of 1200 V across the body of the subject. All things being equal, Ohm's Law entails that the peak current delivered by a relatively low-voltage taser is at least ten times what a wall outlet could deliver.

This flub, however, leads into one of the subtle difficulties of citing figures: there are many to choose from, and it often matters which you choose. One should note that I said the X26 delivers a peak voltage of 1200 V; the one-second baseline average reported by the manufacturer is only 0.76 volts. There is probably a substantial and pertinent debate to be had on whether the peak or the average current output is more meaningful to the issue of the Taser's ability to do mortal harm, or how long a peak must be in order to be physiologically relevant. However, none of these issues were raised by any participants that I am aware of, nor is there any evidence that the Deputy Chief took these matters into account. One could blame the genre of news reporting: there is only so much space, and reporters favor simple questions with short answers. Moreover, the Deputy Chief is a peace officer, not an electrical engineer; he may have little or no knowledge of the Taser's technical details, beyond those necessary to its operation, and is mostly likely citing the nearest available figure.

Nonetheless, newspapers need to be able report news concisely, and police officers need to be able to do their jobs without worrying about a lot of scientific ephemera. What could have been done differently? The reporter could have troubled his or her self to formulate a somewhat more specific question -- and to follow up on fact-checking the answer. The Deputy Chief, for his part, could have given a more generic expression of his confidence in the device's safety. This would sufficiently express his position without giving the misleading and all too often conjured appearance that "this is all very scientific and things are completely under control." Don't cite specifics unless you are certain of specifics.

(Specifically Deputy Chief claimed the Taser's current output to be 0.014 amperes, without specifying this as average or a peak, or giving a source. I could not locate this figure on the manufacturer's website.)

Now, on to the question of the Taser opponents. The attentive reader may have noted that the peak voltage I cited above for the TASER X26 (1200 V) is substantially below the sensational 50,000 V figure. This is because, while the electrical circuitry of the Taser does in fact produce an internal potential of 50,000 V, this voltage is not the voltage applied to the body of a person shocked by a Taser. According to a Taser International fact sheet the Taser's effectiveness is partially due to its ability to administer a shock even in the case that the terminal probes do not make skin contact with a subject, e.g. in the instance that the probes are embedded in exterior clothing and do not reach the skin. The Taser accomplishes this by steadily increasing its internal voltage, up to 50,000 V, until the potential difference is sufficient to produce an electrical arc from the probes to the body of the subject. Much of the current produced by the 50,000 V potential difference, however, is lost in the process of "jumping" across the gap between the probes and the body of the subject. As soon as the potential difference built up within the device is released (by shocking the unfortunate person on the other end), the voltage rapidly drops. The extra voltage within the Taser is thus built up only far enough to overcome any electrical resistance on the probe end and thus to produce a current sufficient to subdue the human subject. (The basic idea at work here is also very succinctly described by Ohm's law.) What this means it that no person subjected to a shock from a correctly functioning Taser experiences anything close to 50,000 volts.

(That is not to say, however, that their experience is a pleasant one.)

Though I respect opponents' interest in protecting the public safety, they would know that the figure they so often quote is actually not pertinent if they had troubled themselves to learn about the issue they're debating. Throwing out a figure as an emotional artifact ("Look how big it is!") fails both rational discourse and impassioned elqoeunce. When facts in general, and numbers in particular, are used this way, it is usually results either from someone's lazy skimming of the available information for the first apparently supporting technical fact, or from the widespread repeating of such a carelessly disjointed fact. The end product is a clumsy admixture of fevered pleading and rote recital. The fact that Taser opponents often cite a technical fact of no relevance to their legitimate concerns diminishes their apparent gravity and opens the door to glib dismissals like the councilman's 'amperage' remark.

It would be nice if policy decisions were made the same way that a scientific question is studied or an engineering problem is solved: a collection of experts would assemble, collect and analyze as much data as possible, render a decision or propose a course of action, and publish the findings for public scrutiny. Even if such a system of governance were possible, however, I think it would be at best naive to expect it at this stage in history. Moreover, human societies have to take into account human passions; these can't be swept under the rug if any kind of peace or social harmony is to be maintained. A mode of governance more scientific than those in existence today would still have to account first for the hopes and fears of the governed, else it would be nothing but a brutal, mechanical autocracy. Putting aside dreams of later and elsewhere, what could be done differently right here and right now?

The episode at People for a Taser-Free Columbia's forum is problematic because both parties are clearly talking past one another, and using misconstrued technical details to do so. The effective output of the Taser and its short- and long-term physiological effects are essential points to understand and take into account. However, neither party seems to be seriously considering these issues, so much as cherry-picking bits and pieces to suit their existing biases. Both parties, however, have valid concerns that do not necessarily lie within the bounds of engineering details or known laws of electricity. Police serve a useful and necessary function any society, but citizens do have a legitimate interest in checking police powers and in dictating what is and what is not acceptable police action. This is a natural source of tension. The idea of a new kind of weapon is viscerally scary to any normal human being, and it is natural that some citizens would be concerned that the police, to whom they have granted a substantial measure of power, use these new weapons carefully and responsibly. On the other hand, early evidence suggests the Taser is a highly effective, non-lethal means for officers to subdue aggressive persons, with the promise to greatly reduce the incidence of serious injury to either police or citizens during arrest scenarios. These are two points of view that surely can be brought to some satisfactory reconciliation; Taser opponents surely would not want to see a greater number of suspects or police officers harmed during arrests, nor would Taser proponents want to see the police issued a weapon that posed unacceptable dangers to public.

To emphasize this last point, consider that in the most controversial Taser episodes in recent history (some of which are also local) are controversial not because an electrical neuromuscular incapacitator was deployed, but because it was deployed under highly questionable circumstances. In one sensationally publicized episode last year, Columbia police used a Taser on a man threatening to jump from the I-70 overpass at Providence Road, causing him to fall 15 feet to the highway median below. A Taser was used in spite of the fact that the man in question threatened nothing more than suicide, in spite of the fact that he was only passively uncooperative in his refusal to move himself to safety, and in spite of the fact that the officer's action quite foreseeably caused the man to fall from this perch, thus causing the very injuries police had sought to prevent the man from visiting on himself. In another episode on August 28 of last year, police in Moberly, Missouri used a Taser against one Stanley Harlan during a routine traffic stop; Mr. Harlan died shortly thereafter. The event has come under scrutiny because Mr. Harlan was Tased at once while lying on the ground. The city of Moberly has since agreed to pay the Harlan family $2.4 million.

Episodes such as these underscore the legitimacy opponents' concerns that the new weapon may be irresponsibly or recklessly deployed. At the same time, it is clear that the harm in these episodes was not essential to the Taser itself, but resulted from improper police conduct, which, it can be convincingly argued, could be remediated by better training and more stringent department policies on Taser use. By contrast, these salient points are lost behind shrill assertions about tens of thousands of volts, or the supercilious amperes that somehow matter more.

In closing, I would like to point out that I have assumed that Taser International Inc.'s technical data is all complete and correct, and that I have no reason to believe otherwise. However, this is a crucial assumption. The skeptical citizen should remember that every manufacturer has a large material interest in the perceived safety of their product and so is not necessarily an impartial judge of potential dangers said product may pose to the public.

The lesson in all of this is that we would do well to find a better way to express and legitimize the seemingly vague and unquantifiable hopes and fears from which our views originate. It's more communicative to say, "I'm afraid the police," than, "According to my calculations, the Gizmotron 3000 shoots out too many volts!" We need to be willing to acknowledge that we're human beings, with human hopes and human fears that need to be openly acknowledged and should be respected without qualification. At the same time, we also need to consider hard facts and well analyzed data in making decisions, being careful not to misuse them to give trappings of legitimacy to arguments that more emotional than rational. It's ultimately hopes and fears that bring us together as human beings; we should use the facts to harmonize rather than to obfuscate our deeper motives.

Is Truth-Value A Strange Attractor?

2009-11-16T18:48:00.000-08:00

"What is Truth?"

Formal logic is interesting because it captures both the essential qualities and the essential deficiencies of how human beings think. We have a natural tendency to draw sharp lines and draw (frequently binary) distinctions, while nature tends force us to revise the boundaries we use to draw human-navigable maps of the world. Logic is pragmatic: it makes sense, and yields results. However, like all practical expedients, logic is quite fallible, and often entails subtle complexities even in the pursuit of relatively simple goals. Some authors [3] have characterized logic as a way of thinking about thinking. This is a very interesting view. It means that if we soberly and seriously attend to what goes on in our logical constructions, we may learn something about how we think and what our thinking can and can't and tell us. This, however, means we must understand logic as a human construct with both human relevance and human imperfections.

There has been some excellent writing by some superb minds on the subject of formal logic, its relevance and its connection to informal logic, and I leave it to better experts than to elucidate this matter [5]. Instead, because I try to write as much as possible to the level of the lay-person, I would like to give a few simple and informally constructed examples to give the reader a flavor of basic logic, as a lead-in to a somewhat surprising, and unexpectedly colorful analogy between the abstractions of logic and the deceptively simple behavior of a certain class of phenomena that are both intuitively sensible and concretely physical.

Binary distinctions are everywhere in human thought: yes and no, up and down, light and dark, before and after, inside and outside, present and absent. They're a basic staple of how we see the world. It turns out, they're also a very efficient way to encode and store a lot of information. Consider the familiar game "Twenty Questions", where one player thinks of something and the other players try to determine what it is the first player is thinking of by asking him or her a series of no more than twenty yes-no questions. A few years back, some enterprising folks manufactured and marketed a electronic version of this game, packaged in a unit small enough to fit in the palm of one's hand. The game, and its clones, seemed to be astonishingly skilled at guessing what human players were thinking of -- provided, of course, they did not change the thought-of object midway through the game, or choose something extremely specific or idiosyncratic. The secret to the little gadget's success, however was no different than the strategy commonly used by human players: ask very broad questions at the start (e.g. "Is it an animal?"), and gradually narrow the scope until the set of possibilities is small enough to allow successful guessing (e.g. "Is it a cat?").

It appears that a large class of familiar things (and even many unfamiliar things) can be identified by a series of yes-no questions. This is, for instance, why Twenty Questions is not too hard to win, and not even too hard, with the help of modern technology, to implement as an electronic circuit. This observation is also at the heart of classical logic. In such traditional systems of logic, every proposition is either true or false (No exceptions!) and propositions can be connected using a few simple operators to express the truth or falsity of more complex expressions. In this context, 'operator' is perhaps an over-glorified word. The operations I am referring to correspond (tellingly) to very common words that are staples of ordinary reasoning about everyday things: 'and', 'or', and 'not'. Letting '1' stand for 'true' and '0' stand for 'false', we can succinctly express 'and', 'or', and 'not' in the following tables:

AND	0	1
0	0	0
1	0	1

OR	0	1
0	0	1
1	1	1

NOT
0	1
1	0

These correspond to basic intuition: if p and q are statements about something, p AND q is true only if the truth of p coincides with the truth of q. For instance, suppose p stands for 'eats grass' and q stands for 'says moo'. If we apply p AND q to a cow, then p AND q = 1 certainly, since we've seen cows eating grass, whence p = 1, and since everybody knows the cow says "moo", whence q = 1 as well. On the other hand, if we apply p AND q to a sheep, we have p AND q = 0, since sheep eat grass but generally have other things to say.

We don't, however, have to restrict ourselves to just conjunctions, disjunctions, and negations of simple true-false statements; we can use 'and', 'or', and 'not' to connect formulas to other formulas. Recursively, if P is any (arbitrarily complex!) formula, and Q is any other formula, we can connect them using any of our operators to get a new formula whose value depends on the respective values of P and Q in a way that respects our simple truth-tables above. The basic construction of logical formulae thus uses only very simple building-blocks; the formulae themselves, however, can become huge and immensely complicated.

An example is instructive. Suppose I come to you and say "I'm a secret super-spy!" Your first inclination might be, "Well, if it looks like a spy and it acts like a spy, it's a spy." That is, you might represent your belief that I'm a spy by the formula:

let 
p =

"looks like a spy"
q = "acts like a spy"

in
        p AND q

However, after a while, you might think to youself, "Gee, I've never met a real spy before, so don't really know how a spy looks or acts", so you decide to refine your idea of the situation a little further. Spies keep a lot of secrets, so you decide that if I don't act secretively enough, I'm probably not a spy, or I'm not a very good spy, or I must really trust you to keep my secrets. You also decide that spies are pretty busy working for someone, and so I need to be off doing spy things as frequently as possible, and not ordinary stuff, and so your idea grows:

let 
p =

"looks like a spy"
q = "acts like a spy"
r = "is secretive"
s = "really trusts you"
t = "is busy"

in
        (p AND q AND (r OR s) AND t)

After some further reflection, though, you realize that it's also possible that I'm deep undercover, and so even though I might be part of some super-secret operation, I might be going to great lengths to appear as if I'm leading an ordinary life so I don't blow my cover That means that either I'm deep undercover or I'm not telling the truth about being a spy, and so things get even more complicated:

let 
p =

"looks like a spy"
q = "acts like a spy"
r = "is secretive"
s = "really trusts you"
t = "is busy"
u = "is deep under cover!"
v = "is telling a tall tale ..."

in
        (p AND q AND (r OR s) AND t AND (u OR (NOT v)))

If I regale you with tales of super-spy exploits, you'll have even more information that you'll have to take into account: if I say I was part of a secret plot to blow up Professor Nightmare's death-ray on Flaming Death Island, then that means that either I was part of a super-awesome adventure and it didn't make the news and death-rays exist, or I'm telling you a tall tale, in which case maybe I'm not trustworthy and I'm making the whole thing up:

let 
p =

"looks like a spy"
q = "acts like a spy"
r = "is secretive"
s = "really trusts you"
t = "is busy"
u = "is deep under cover!"
v = "is telling a tall tale ..."
x = "super awesome adventure!"
w = "none of the exciting news is ever fit to print"

in
        (p AND q AND (r OR s) AND t AND (u OR (NOT v)) AND (x OR (w AND (NOT v))))

As you can see, things may get arbitrarily complicated, and as your idea of me as the super-spy depends upon more and more variables, you find your belief pulled ever more chaotically back and forth between amazement and incredulity. However, I don't have to cook up an incredible story in order to exhibit an instance of a phenomenon with simple parts and simple rules that nonetheless behaves in strange and wildly unpredictable ways.

Sitting on the Fence

"Chaos theory" broadly refers to a large area of research in mathematical physics that originated in the 1960s and flowered in the 1970s and 1980s as science turned its attention to physical systems that exhibit large changes in response to small variations. Like logic, chaos and non-linear dynamics are an active area of study with their own deep and fascinating literature, and so I leave it to those more accomplished to exposit their virtues and mysteries. (The interested reader might consult [4] for an informal but very readable overview of the field, and [6] for a more formal but equally readable presentation of the basic mathematics.) Instead, I would like to borrow one very simple device from the field, in the hopes that perhaps it leads us to a interesting analogy.

A physical system is typically said to be bistable if always tends toward one of two stable states as time passes. Such systems are interesting to non-linear dynamicists because, although they exhibit stability after enough time has elapsed, it is often very difficult to predict which state the system will ultimately end in. A classic example is a ball perched on a very thin divider, as in:

Common experience should be enough to convince the reader that the ball will always fall to one side of the divider, or the other. If the divider is relatively wide -- almost but not quite wide enough to allow the ball to be balanced -- the experimenter should be able to make fairly reliable predictions about which side the ball will fall to when placed. If the ball is sufficiently off-center to cause it to roll to the right or to the left, the imbalance will be visible at the outset. However, if the divider is narrow enough relative to the diameter of the ball, it will be very difficult to predict to which side the ball will fall, no matter how much is taken in placing. (The reader is encouraged to go play with some blocks, and so become really thoroughly convinced.) In this case, the very same physical forces are acting on the ball (e.g. gravity, the normal force exerted by the divider), but slight variations in how the ball is placed will be much harder to detect. As if that didn't make predictions hard enough, the many tiny irregularities in the ambient air currents or in the surface of the ball and the divider have a much larger proportional effect on the motion of the ball than they did when it rested upon a relatively wide divider. By making the divider very narrow relative to the diameter of the ball, a huge number of almost invisibly small variables become relevant to the final outcome, and much smaller inaccuracies in the initial placement of the ball may have a much larger impact on its motion and hence its final state, i.e. whether it comes to rest to the right or the left of the divider.

One interesting thing about this example is that predictions are easy when the relevant variables are few and the forces at work are large and easy to observe, but hard when many variables must be accounted-for and the forces at work obscure. Phrased this way, it doesn't seem excessively imaginative to note the wide-versus-narrow comparison made in the ball example is somewhat like the difference between judging the truth of "x is a cow", which requires relatively little information about relatively few features, and judging the truth of "x is a secret super-spy", which seems to require a great deal of information about very hard to discern features.

Getting the Ball Rolling

Suppose I wanted to construct oracle that answers simple yes-no questions. (Think "Magic 8-Ball", not "Delphi") The ball-and-divider gizmo described above is one very good candidate. All we need to do is let "left" stand for "yes" and "right" stand for "no"; if the ball rolls off the divider to the left, that means the oracle says "yes" to our question, whereas if the ball rolls to the right, that means "no". If we want the oracle's advice (in "yes-no" format, of course), we just utter the appropriate incantation, ask our question, then perch the ball atop the divider and see which side it rolls to. In keeping with the venerable old tradition of superstitious parlor games, we could keep the divider very thin, which would give the ball's motion an appropriately oracular irregularity. (Nobody likes an oracle that always say the same thing.) On the other hand, we could make the divider wide enough that the ball's motion would be easy to predict. (As long as we "clear our minds" sufficiently before playing, getting what we expect might make our oracle more suited to the company of the popular Ouja Board and the Magic 8-Ball, human psychology being what it is.) If our construction was precise and careful enough that we could control which way the ball rolled according to its initial placement, we would have something less like a Magic 8-Ball and more like a transistor.

The transistor is the textbook case of a bistable system. Very loosely speaking, a transistor acts as a material whose overall conductivity is "balanced atop" a semiconductor in a way that can be pushed either to conduct or resist an electrical current. This allows the transistor to be used as a two-state switch. (A light switch is a two-state switch, in that it is generally only "up" or "down".) The importance of semiconducting technology to the development of modern technology cannot be overstated; the invention of the transistor set in motion the explosive advance of the digital computer, which, at its most basic, is nothing more than a very complicated assemblage of two-state switches. Thus, our simple ball-and-divider oracle actually shares and interesting (And not coincidental!) kinship with a basic building block of the computer as we know it.

In its present, very simple state, the ball-and-divider oracle can be used as a machine that computes the answers to exceedingly simple yes-no questions. If we "ask" the oracle to check a statement we know to be false, we place the ball slightly to the right, so that it rolls of the divider onto the "no" side; if our statement is true, we place the ball slightly to the left. At this level, of course, the exercise seems silly: the little gizmo only does what you expect it to do. At the same time, in a world that's full of seemingly random occurrences and surprising things, it is actually extremely noteworthy when something behaves the way we expect it to behave. We can thus use our little oracle as a an external model of our internal judgements.

Nobody's going to be too impressed at a ball that rolls off a wall, but suppose we gave our construction a little more refinement and complexity. Suppose we have at our disposal a team of master craftsmen, and we ask them to modify our oracle as follows:

Essentially, our oracle now has a small replica of itself built onto its left and right sides. Instead of controlling our device by placing the ball, let's also ask our craftsmen to give us some way to modify at will the slope on top of the various dividers, so that we know which side the ball will roll to when it encounters a divider. (Perhaps each divider has a sloped piece that can be snapped on and off the top, so that the direction of motion can be reversed by turning the piece around.) Obviously, the measurements must be (excruciatingly) precise, and the device very carefully constructed, but if all goes according to plan, we can now ask our oracle more complicated questions. But how?

In the original construction, we assigned a truth-value (that is, 'true' or 'false') to each side of the divider. I chose 'left' for 'true' and 'right' for false, but we could have easily chosen the other way. In essence, the original construction corresponds to the simplest logical formula of all, namely, the formula with one variable and no connectives, e.g. just p. However, our new oracle now has two smaller copies of the original constructed into it. We can use this! Suppose I arrange the device so that the ball rolls to the left of the center-most (that is, highest) divider. After it rolls to left, it will fall a short distance and (if the device is correctly constructed) encounter another divider. If this second divider can also be arranged to direct the motion of the ball, we can make it stand for a second statement whose truth depends upon the first. For instance, suppose that we have a statement '(x eats grass) and (x says moo)'. We let the first divider stand for 'x eats grass' and let the two other dividers stand for 'x says moo' (we do need to use them both). If we adopt the same semantics for our two secondary dividers as we did for the first, i.e. if the left side of each stands for 'true' and the right side 'false', our device now computes not just p but p AND q:

It is no mistake that the labels along the bottom of the device correspond to the truth table given for 'and' in the above. We can similarly arrange devices that behave as OR and as NOT:

Now things will really start to take off, provided of course that we have the continued support of our craftsmen. Suppose that our team is able to construct machines with as many dividers as we please -- even up to very huge numbers --- and suppose that these machines have the same stable, predictable, reproducible behavior as the simple ball-and-divider construction we began with. The tremendous importance and difficulty of this stability to the function of the overall machine should not be underestimated and cannot be overstated. Small influences cannot be overlooked, and we must ensure that every possible force is very precisely accounted for in the design and construction of the machine. If we don't, there is no way that our thoughts can follow the bouncing ball -- its motion will be chaotic and random! (This challenge is not unlike tremendous effort that has been required -- and continues to be required -- to design and construct reliable solid-state electronics.) If, however, we can overcome the difficulties of physical construction, our little oracle will have grown into a programmable machine that, given a set of truth-judgments, can evaluate the truth of arbitrarily complex logical formulae. How might this be done?

Suppose we've overcome the construction challenges, and we can add as many dividers as we please. Suppose also that we have a logical formula with N many propositions (e.g. "x eats grass", "x says moo") and a collection of N many truth-judgments about our respective propositions (e.g. "it's true that x eats grass", "it's false that x says moo"). Starting with just one divider in the center of the board, we add 2^k additional dividers for each kth additional proposition. That is, we add 2 additional dividers for the first additional variable, 4 for the second, 8 for the third, and so on. We add the dividers in tiers of the same height, and associate to each divider a collection of dividers with the same height. Thus, for example, if p, q and r are propositions in our formula, we arrange our dividers as:

Note that our first tier, which consists of only a single divider, splits the plane of the device in half. The second tier, consisting of two additional dividers, taken together with the first, splits the plane in quarters. The third tier, consisting of four additional dividers, and taken together with the first and second tiers, splits the plane into eighths. Thus, for each proposition, we take a set of dividers all of which stand lower on the board than the last tier, and place them on the board so that split each segment of free space in half.

Now we want our machine to express some relation between the variables. That is, we want to program our machine with a chosen logical formula. This is done by labeling the slots in the board that lie between each pair of dividers. For instance, we obtained 'p and q' as well as 'p or q', both of which have two propositional variables, by changing the labels along the bottom of the board. If the ball falls into a slot labelled '0', this indicates that our formula expresses something false; if it falls into a slot labelled '1', this indicates something true. The machine is now configured in a way that models some logical formula with N propositional variables. For example:

Our machine is now programmed and ready to go. How do we give it input, that is, how do we ask it to compute the truth of our logical formula given a set of true-false judgments about the variables? This is accomplished by tilting the dorsal surfaces of our dividers, in order to govern which way the ball should roll when it encounters a particular divider. If we stick to our true-left, false-right convention (which we might as well, to keep things simple), we slope a given divider to the left or to the right according to whether the proposition corresponding to its tier is true or false. For example, if 'p' and 'r' are true but 'q' is false:

Now we're ready to go! Once we've gathered all of our information and set up the machine, we set the ball in the middle and just let it roll; the label attached to the ball's final state corresponds to the truth or falsity of our original statement.

(It should be noted how strongly the operation of our machine resembles that of the famous and very real "Plinko" device, which was prominently featured on the popular game show "The Price Is Right". The important difference between Plinko and our machine is that Plinko seemed to purposefully admit a fairly high degree of random behavior, as evidenced by the conspicuous bounciness of the pegs. This seemed to be an important part of both its appeal and its challenge.)

If all goes well (Does it ever?) our machine can successfully automated a potentially very elaborate arrangement of logical judgments. Assuming that the work in setting up the machine is not too difficult or time consuming (which, in our example, it almost certainly would be for all but the most trivially simple formulae), we can now model our basic truth-judgments as we understand them and apply them to very complex situations that would otherwise be humanly impossible to reason through. This is effectively what makes the modern digital computer so powerful and useful: it can apply our own basic "and/or" and "not" intuitions to arrangements that are complicated vastly beyond our own human cognitive abilities. Unlike our Plinko-like machine, however, an electronic computer is much easier to program and will execute much more quickly, though, again, this difference is relative and not at all absolute. Any computer programmer or engineer of even modest experience will most certainly agree. (Despite the computer comparisons, I cannot resist a technical note that our deterministic Plnko-machine is not a Turing Machine, since it lacks a random-access memory.) These differences aside, our imaginary machine is now much more than silly toy: it is a very complicated system that behaves the way we expect it to. Again, given the dear scarcity of things in life that we can expect, this very noteworthy.

In the same way that a bridge allows us to use ordinary human ambulation to cross expanses that we could not traverse on foot, our machine is a tool that allows us to apply our ordinary reasoning to systems whose complexity is far beyond human comprehension. This is all good and fine but (again inviting the reader to go play with some blocks), the bigger bridges get, the harder they are to construct, and the same law of increasing difficulty applies to the size and complexity of the ball-and-stick logic machine.

"Truth is stranger than fiction."

If Newton stood on the shoulders of giants to see as far as he did, it would seem that none of us are in a position to refuse the invitation for a boost above eye-level by someone of greater stature. So, let's push our little logic machine its logical conclusion, using a venerable old trick: limits at infinity.

In the preceding section, we saw that we could use our little logic machine to compute logical statements in as many variables as we pleased, simply by adding enough dividers. As we add variables, a forest of dividers springs up on the plane of our device, becoming (exponentially!) more dense with each variable we add, so that this:

rapidly becomes this:

(Actually, with better artistic skills and more powerful drawing tools, this would
come out something like a collapsed Sierpinski Gasket.)

As the number of dividers increases, the outline of our device rapidly converges to a pair of continuous slopes in opposite directions, both leading down from the same elevated point. A few features, both abstract and concrete, are immediately apparent.

Firstly, the functional details of our machine are now humanly unmanageable. How are we supposed to read infinitely small labels, or manipulate infinitely small parts? The parts do not even need to be infinitely small for the machine to become impractical; they just need to be very small relative to human eyesight. However, the machine is only really interesting if it can handle formulae with lots of variables, which necessarily entails exactly this kind of tortured, inhuman precision. If we wanted badly enough to use the machine, we could construct still other machines to program and use it, etching ball-slots with lasers, or watching the progress through a microscope. Be that as it may, even these methods have limits, and the density of trajectories within the machine grows explosively with each additional variable.

Secondly, the size of the ball that actually runs the machine now matters. An infinitely small ball (that is, one that has zero diameter but somehow "still exists") could be dropped on the machine, somehow falling through the infinitely dense forest of dividers to come to rest in an infinitely small notch, thus evaluating the truth or falsity of a logical statement somehow depending upon an infinite amount of information. Of course, this always mattered, but we glossed over it in the construction. The ball obviously must be large enough to fall through the space between dividers. This means, however, that computing a logical formula with more variables requires adding more dividers and hence requires a small ball. Not only that, the size of the ball must shrink exponentially as the number of variables grows. Basically, there is a vicious dependency between components of our machine. This dependency moreover tightens (Worsens?) as the machine grows in power. The ball we drop will rapidly shrink to the size of a dust-speck as we increase the informational output, no matter whether it starts out the size of an orange or the size of a planet.

There's more. Notice that any sufficiently large ball (really, any ball with a diameter greater than zero), when dropped into our infinitely powerful logic-engine, will appear to roll all the way to the left or all the way to the right. Moreover, because our dividers must be very (i.e. infinitely) small in order to fit onto a finite board, the starting divider which sits at the center will always be very small relative to the diameter of the ball. But that means that our infinite logic-engine, when used with a finite-diameter ball, will actually behave exactly like the very chaotic ball-and-divider construction we started with!

Suppose our board has finitely many dividers, but the space between them is sufficiently small relative to the diameter of the ball. When we try to run our logic engine, the ball will eventually reach a stable state but will fail to fall all the way to the bottom of the board because the spaces below will be too narrow for it to fit. What this means is that, given a ball of a certain spatial extent R, there is a limit to the number variables that a given (finite) logic-machine M can model, and hence to the number of logical formulae it can compute. Moreover, the upper bound on the number of variables in the formulae M can compute is proportional R! Essentially, a finite-variable logic-machine is approximated by an infinite-variable logic machine using a ball with non-zero diameter. What happens in such a case is that the ball simply settles into a rut somewhere between the central divider and one of the edges of the board. Everything below this height corresponds to the "random noise" that is assumed away by the modeled formula.

What does all this mean? Infinite information looks like randomness, and classically logical systems can only model systems with finitely many variables, where the difficulty of model-construction grows exponentially as information about the system is added. Somewhat pretending to understanding, this vaguely resembles a certain theory of Chaitin's [2]. Without pretending, this simple, mechanical analogy greatly resembles familiar human reasoning, in which too many details makes things fuzzy, so that hypotheses that require too much information to evaluate are indistinct from an uninformed assertion of "random" behavior.

In an alternate construction, we might notice that infinitely small labels along the bottom of our infinitely dense board somewhat resemble a Cantor dust or a one-dimensional Julia Set [1]: a ball might roll arbitrarily close to the "true" side of the board but come out false, or arbitrarily close to the "false" side and come out true. Thus life always manages to surprise us, and categorizations always prove intractably blurry about the edges, no matter how logical we choose to be.

Logic thus gives us a bridge beyond some of the limitations of working memory and attention span, which mechanism moreover can extend. However, this extent quickly and easily collapses under its own weight when stretched too far, in exactly the way that a real bridge does. Either the ideas we consider abstractions are very much like our supposedly "concrete" perceptions of the "real world", or supposedly abstract constructions, no matter how empyrean or pure, are subject to the same noisy unpredictability of the physical world we actually inhabit.

[1] Barnsley, Michael F. Fractals Everywhere. Academic Press Inc., 1988.

[2] Chaitin, G. J. Algorithmic Information Theory. Cambridge University Press, 1987.

[3] Ernst, Zachary. Free Logic Now! Available here.

[4] Gleick, James. Chaos: The Making of a New Science. Penguin Group, 1987.

[5] Quine, W. V. Philosophy of Logic. Harvard University Press, 1950.

[6] Strogatz, Steven H. Nonlinear Dynamics and Chaos. Perseus Books Publishing, 1994.

When Is It Time to Turn Out the Lights?

2009-11-10T10:43:00.000-08:00

I happened to be reading "The Illusion of Conscious Will" by Daniel Wegner (which I highly recommend -- it is an excellent book) and in the text I came across the following excerpt from a book by Julian Jaynes:

Consciousness is a much smaller part of our mental life than we are conscious of, because we cannot be conscious of what we are not conscious of ... How simple that is to say; how difficult to appreciate! It is like asking a flashlight in a dark room to search around for something that does not have any light shining upon it. The flashlight, since there is light in whatever direction it turns, would have to conclude that there is light everywhere. And so consciousness can seem to pervade all mentality when it actually does not.[3]

On reading this, I immediately thought to myself that the solution is, in fact, very easy: turn the flashlight off.

This reminds me of a certain other venerable old quotation:

It is said that things coming in through the gate can never be your own treasures. What is gained from external circumstances will perish in the end. However, such a saying is already raising waves when there is no wind. It is cutting unblemished skin. As for those who try to understand through other people's words, they are striking at the moon with a stick; scratching a shoe, whereas it is a foot that itches. What concern have they for the truth?[2]

This is the interesting thing about carrying a light with you: it is an invitation to explore deep and extremely dark places. This makes me think of the last time I ventured into a cave. (Missouri is, after all, "The Cave State". Because it's like living in a cave?), I went deep enough inside that I needed a light, and shining it about I saw all manner of strange and wonderful things. Still, I could not get past the sense that I was in some sense an anomalous occurrence in that place, if not an intruder outright. It's true, there were things before my eyes that I could perceive and understand, but they were made perceptible and understandable by my own planning and device. It's true that there's genuine information in a beam of light, in both the technical and the colloquial sense of "information". Moreover, such information would not be unavailable otherwise. Even so, investigating what's in the dark by getting rid of the inconveniently dark part seems very unlike the fabled objectivity that classical science strives to attain.

Without admitting romanticism or mysticism, we already know that the Universe contains at least two kinds of knowledge: things that are computable, and things that are not. How many other divisions may there be besides? If we admit that the mind is a physical process and not some magic causeless cause that can create information ex nihilo, there surely must be knowledge that it cannot produce, or even that certain of its subfunctions are unable to produce. (Aphasias are one such interesting and highly celebrated case.) This seems like a little explored and very challenging but very interesting domain for scientific investigation and philosophical inquiry. On the other hand, it might turn out that this is a domain wherein scientific investigation cannot possibly answer the questions we are trying to ask. What then?

We acknowledge that 'knowing' is a physical process, caused by physical processes. Still, we intuitively think of it as a "meta-process", that pertains to certain other processes. The time may yet come when we have to collapse all of the "meta-" distinctions in our modes of thought into a unified whole. A science that successfully transcends all barriers to knowledge will have to remove the distinction between the events in our brains that constitute "knowing" and the events elsewhere that seem, perpetually, to confront, confound and challenge us as human beings.

I realize that this is a very bold and very sweeping proposition, requiring a very unwieldy camel to be threaded through a very delicate needle. Even so, there seems to be a deep conceptual incongruity in our macro-scale world knowledge, and even our personal self-knowledge, that we habitually lean upon but seldom acknowledge. If the vivid sense of identity and "there-ness" that each human being experiences is dependent upon and essentially the same as phenomena in the world at large, why is the feeling of difference and identity so strong? This is the essence of the so-called Hard Problem of cognitive science, and of such puzzling questions as Hofstadter's "identical human copy" problem [1], and no doubt of many troubled personal introspections by many people. I would argue, however, that the question has a much broader, transpersonal significance: Are there facts that are scientifically unknowable? And have we reached a stage in the progress of science where such a question may be regarded as serious and respectable? Perhaps, perhaps not. If not, it seems science is moving more slowly hoped. Even so, this isn't a victory for romanticism either. The romantics, for all their rhapsodizing about essences and sneering at analytic problem-solving, have yet to give any clear, convincing, and accessible explanation of of the key practical point:

When and how do we turn the light off?

[1] Hofstadter, Douglas. I Am A Strange Loop. Basic Books, 2007.

[2] Mumon's Introduction to The Gateless Gate, Katsuki Sekida (trans.)

[3] Wegner, Daniel. The Illusion of Conscious Will. MIT Press, 2002.

Editor's Notes for October 2009

2009-10-28T09:48:00.001-07:00

I've done a great deal of writing lately but, much to my chagrin, none of it has been here. There is good reason for the digression (proposals, submissions), but I am troubled by the appearance of neglect or lifelessness in this corner, and so, to avoid this, a few passing points of interest and some encouraging news:

Return-Oriented Programming: a colleague recently pointed out to me an extremely interesting finding reported at last year's Black Hat USA Briefings. The authors present a exploit that allows them to perform arbitrary computation without injecting code. If an attacker can gain control the stack, the authors show, he can influence program control flow to link together certain segments of code into instruction sequences of his choosing. This is very neat because it is one of those things that seems as if it should possible in principle. However, we so often hear in computer science about humanly impractical things that are "possible in principle"; here is someone who has taken the principle and successfully used it. Well done!

Iterated Function Systems and Control Languages: I was very pleasantly astonished when, in the course of combing the literature aimlessly, I discovered the recent work of Henning Fernau and Ludwig Staiger, which appears to be a link between automata theory and fractal geometry. Intuitively (and offering no justification other than that), I feel as if such correspondence makes sense, and I admit to being thrilled that skilled mathematicians have undertaken to actually investigate such a correspondence. This also suggests the surprising possibility that abstract computer science might eventually have substantive theoretical contributions outside of its own domain. Well done!

Why doesn't Wendell Berry own a computer, and why don't I own a mule?

The Liar Paradox Redux: It occurred to me yesterday that the situation I constructed in the Truth Machine thought experiment was actually an elaborate variant of the famous Twin Paradox. The paradox is not really a paradox so much a puzzle, stated as follows: you meet a pair of identical twins, one of whom always tells the truth, and one of whom always lies. What single question can you ask them to determine which is which? (I would also note that this familiar paradox appears to be a favorite intellectual toy of accomplished animator Genndy Tartakovsky, as the puzzle and its solution has appeared in episodes of both The Powerpuff Girls and Samurai Jack.) That's not to say that there isn't a great deal more to the Truth Machine example than there is to this familiar puzzle, only that I hadn't realized the connection before. Interestingly, it appears that I unwittingly attempted to construct something like the solution to the Twin Paradox as one stage in the elaboration of the Truth Machine.

A Second Editor's Note on the Truth Machine: Another thing I had not realized until recently is that The Truth Machine is also the title of a novel by science fiction writer James Halperin. It appears that Mr. Halperin's truth machine is not quite so general in its function, acting in the restricted (but still remarkable) role of an infallible human lie detector, with horrible dystopian consequences. Why is it always the case that catching falsehoods leads to so many unforeseen complications? This seems like a question worth answering.

What happens to the story of Job if you reverse the "good" and "evil" roles, i.e. make Job an extremely wicked man who only persists in evil because it's so materially rewarding?

Is there such a fallacy as "appeal to chaos"?

I'm afraid that's all the time we have for now. Until next time!

A Concise Refutation of the So-Called Objectivist Philosophy

2009-10-08T10:19:00.000-07:00

Ayn Rand and her followers acknowledge that certain exercises of power may infringe upon the basic libertarian rights of others, but fail to either recognize or to acknowledge that economic power may be concentrated and abused in exactly the way as brute strength or cunning deception. For all their talk about the property crimes of tyrannical governments, these would-be philosophers fail to acknowledge that private entities are capable of exactly the same kinds of abuses as public institutions.

So-called "objectivism" has all the marks of a bad abstraction. The entire body of thought fails not because of what it incorporates, but because of the important issues that it leaves out.

The Truth Machine: A Thought Experiment

2009-10-05T00:53:00.000-07:00

A Beautiful Dream

Suppose, one day, you stray off your usual path and wander off into some out-of-the-way place. After a time, you realize you're lost. Looking around for someone who can show you the way back, you come across me. You're about to ask me for directions, but then you notice that in front of me is a fantastic machine the likes of which you have never seen before.

Naturally, you ask me, "What does that machine do?"

"It's a truth machine," I say.

This sounds outrageously impossible, but you're intrigued enough that, with some coaxing from me, you put aside your objective of getting directions and decide to ask the machine a question. So you think of an easy question and we feed it into the machine. Lo and behold, it comes back true.

"Ah, well that was too easy," you say.

"Well, ask as many questions as you want," I reply.

So, we proceed to feed some harder questions into the machine. Each one seems to come back with a truthful and accurate answer. Emboldened, you start to ask the machine some really wild and speculative questions. These come back with answers that are far too big to verify right away, but you're really intrigued now, and you want to make sure this isn't a scam or a prank.

"How does it work?" you ask me.

"It's very simple," I say.

I proceed to give you a thorough and convincing explanation of the basic scientific principles at work, and the engineering methods I've applied to them in order to construct the machine. (The details of this explanation are left as an exercise to the ambitious reader.) It becomes clear that the machine is not just a high-class Mechanical Turk, or a nice bit computational ventriloquism on my part. Moreover, there's no sorcery, no divine intervention, and nothing weird or unexplained. The workings of the machine are unambiguous consequences of straightforward and readily accessible scientific facts, and they are all perfectly clear to you.

"That's amazing!" you say.

You're overcome with a wave of excitement and decide to get back to the rest of the world so you can test out the machine's answers to your really difficult questions. I give you directions back to the beaten path, and you go on your way. Perhaps, even more interestingly, it is the Machine that gives you the directions.

I might try to tell the rest story but, as wild and fantastical daydreams go, the uses and consequences of the Truth Machine would far surpass even the Machine itself. Would all those beautiful utopian dreams of the Enlightenment finally come true? Or would we turn our knowledge destructively in on ourselves and extinguish the entire universe? Would truth become another commodity to be bought, sold and advertised on the market? Or would the accumulated knowledge of humanity finally be free to anyone curious enough to ask? I won't speculate, because speculation is not my purpose here.

Instead, consider a slight variant of the scenario above.

A Variation on a Theme

Suppose that everything happens as before; we meet, and I demonstrate the Truth Machine. After you've had your fill, we part ways, but you have so many more questions that you decide to come back the next day. You find me and the Machine in the same place, and can hardly contain your excitement.

"I have more questions," you say. "Can I ask the machine?"

"Well, I'd love to oblige," I reply, "but it's too hot today. The heat will interfere with the way the machine works, and it will give false output."

I go on to explain why this is, and it's immediately clear that this is not only consistent with the previous day's explanation, but a necessary consequence of the way the machine works.

You turn to leave, but you're very clever and perceptive, and it occurs to you that this kind of situation often gives rise to paradoxes or infinite regressions, or other such weirdness. Deciding to really put the machine to the test, you turn back to me and propose the following:

"Suppose I ask the machine a question today, take the answer I get, and come back on some day when the machine is working and ask 'How would the Truth Machine answer such-and-such question on a day when the temperature such-and-such many degrees?' If you really do have a truth machine here, and if the ambient temperature does affect its function, then even though the machine answers the question wrong today, it should be able to reproduce and explain its wrong answer later, on some day that it is working."

"That's true," I say. "Why don't you ask your question, write down the answer, and come back later when the machine is working again."

And so, you ask your question and write down the answer. A few days later, you come back, and together we ask the machine how it would respond to your earlier question on a hot day. Much to our surprise, nothing weird or paradoxical happens: the machine correctly reproduces its wrong answer, and gives an accounting for its failure. We're both so thoroughly amazed that you become totally convinced that the Truth Machine works as promised, and I suffer a minor injury from patting myself on the back for my accomplishment.

Some Casual Dream Analysis

There are several ways to read this variation of the story. The story's description of the machine replicating and explaining its own mistakes is something like what happens when one scientific theory subsumes another: a new scientific theory must always explain why its predecessor seemed to be true. This is one interesting feature.

Another interesting feature is brought out if we continue to vary the story by adding additional constraints on the correct function of the machine. For instance, suppose that the machine is sensitive not only to temperature but also, say, electrical fields so that a passing storm cloud might disrupt its function. We can go further and suppose that the machine is sensitive to temperature, electrical force, and perhaps noise. Maybe certain levels of background radiation have an effect. Perhaps very slight changes in gravitational force at the point on the Earth's surface where we are running the machine, due to elevation or the moon's orbit, may also disrupt its function. This doesn't seem unreasonable; after all, the Truth Machine must be extremely delicate. It would seem that we could go on adding necessary constants indefinitely (if you say that we couldn't, then it seems you know more about truth engineering than me) until running the truth machine and getting a valid response requires carefully planned and controlled conditions. Of course, the machine still gives us correct answers; it's just that we must be very careful that exactly the right external conditions are in place to ensure that all the necessary processes within the machine work as expected.

What do we get if we add enough constraints? At some point, the Truth Machine will start to look less like a stunning technological oracle and more like an ordinary experimental apparatus, in the spirit of Boyle's air pump or the Large Hadron Collider. Of course, our fictional construction here differs from typical experimental apparatuses in that it seems we can pose it any question we please and, given the right circumstances, get a correct reply. By contrast, we may be able to ply the LHC for answers about elementary particles or black holes, but it is not immediately apparent how it could give us direct answers about how animal cells specialize into organs, whether the Navier-Stokes equations are a faithful model of fluid dynamics, or how exactly a pair of sociopathic teenagers burning a cat to death in an Internet video could give rise to the NEDM phenomenon. This is an important distinction. Most experimental machines are constructed to answer one specific question, or a specific class of questions.

(On the other hand, if it's perfectly clear to you how the details of elementary particle theory relate to Internet memes, you should really be talking to the Nobel Committee.)

What I've sketched out here is something like the outline of traditional scientific knowledge. Truth comes from relating reproducible phenomena that we do understand to other phenomena that we know less about. In this case, we leveraged what we knew about the workings of the machine into new information that we didn't know. I've purposefully resisted the strong temptation to involve exotic, modern abstractions like algorithmic information theory (Would our machine have to contain all the information in the history of the Universe?), or classic tropes like a Turing-style non-termination scenario (What happens if we ask the machine to predict the future of its own execution?), but not because I think such considerations are irrelevant. Mathematical logic has produced some truly strange and remarkable artifacts in the last century, and as deserving of recognition as these are, it is not immediately clear how they relate to the physical world as we know it. If I brought such abstract machinery into play here, I feel that I would be admitting unfounded back-door assumptions about how the physical world in general, and Truth Machines in particular, must work.

However, I'm not done just yet. Supposing that we do obtain a context-sensitive Truth Machine as described above, is the only work left for the thinkers and discoverers of the world to work out a calculus ratiocinator and start dreaming Leibniz's dream?

Dream On, Leibniz

We meet, I demonstrate the Truth Machine. I explain that it doesn't work on hot days (or stormy days, or at high altitudes, etc. etc.), and you're satisfied that this is indeed a necessary consequence of the appropriate Laws of Nature. As before, you ask the Machine a question on a hot day, in order to really put the Machine to the test by checking the consistency of its answers. Realizing that it may be important what question to ask, you think for a while, and then come up with something.

"Let's ask these two questions," you say. "(1) Is A true? [where A is any meaningful proposition] (2) How will a truth machine answer the question 'Is A true?' under conditions suitable for a correct answer'"

"Well that's a weird question," I say, "but alright. Let's feed it into the machine."

We ask the Machine your question. The Truth Machine gives the following answer: "A is false [without loss of generality, since we can transform any true proposition into a false one by negation], and under conditions suitable for a correct answer, a truth machine will find that A is false." I suggest that you write down the answer and come back tomorrow when the machine will be working again, but you're not satisfied just yet. You go on to ask the machine another question:

"What are necessary conditions for a truth machine, as constructed here, to give correct answers, and why are these conditions necessary for a correct answer?"

The machine responds by describing exactly the physical conditions under which it is operating at the moment. It goes on to give a response that explains, at great length and with considerable detail, why these conditions are essential to producing a correct answer. You and I both seem to understand the response, and after looking over it carefully, neither of us is able to find any internal inconsistency to it. Moreover, the truth or falsity of A is not immediately verifiable without the Machine's help.

"Well," I say, "the machine isn't working right anyway. Of course it would say that. Come back tomorrow, and we'll see what it says."

The next day, you return and we repeat your questions to the machine. According to my earlier claims, conditions are favorable to truth machines that day, and the machine gives the following response: "A is true, and under conditions suitable for a correct answer, a truth machine will find that A is true."

"There you have it," I say, " I guess A is true after all."

But you've become a little more skeptical now. You decide to repeat your other question as well, and you ask the Machine a second time:

"What are necessary conditions for a truth machine, as constructed here, to give correct answers, and why are these conditions necessary for a correct answer?"

As before, the machine responds by describing exactly the physical conditions under which it is operating at the moment. It goes on to give a response that explains, at great length and with considerable detail, why these conditions are essential to producing a correct answer.

"And that's what I said before," I volunteer. "It's all settled."

But you're really troubled by all this now. A shadow's fallen over the enterprise, and although you're not prepared to dismiss me or the Machine out of hand, something seems unaccounted-for.

"How do we know that it wasn't working correctly yesterday?" you say. "Maybe you're wrong about the external conditions, and the machine is actually malfunctioning today."

"But who do we trust? You? Me? The Machine?"

"Brother, let us reason."

Whose claims should we trust? Presumably, we're all interested in nothing more than getting to the truth of the matter. We've all sworn "Calculemus!", true to the spirit of ol' Leibniz, and we're willing to trust the Machine so long as we can verify that it's working as expected. Still, there is a clear problem of which source of assertions to trust. The Machine throws things out of balance because, presumably, it is a new and very large source of information that has come into conflict with a body of information that, as far we know, is well-founded and correct.

This conflict is distantly reminiscent of Poincare's skepticism toward Frege's project of formalizing all knowledge and placing it on a clear and unambiguous axiomatic foundation[1]. Frege seemed to believe in the possibility of realizing a genuine calculus ratiocinator, whereas Poincare argued that the soundness of such a system could never be empirically proven, since it would require the verification of infinitely many theorems. One could always argue for a sort of "generative proof" of the sort one sees in formal logic: show that the axioms of the system do not conflict with one another, then show that it is impossible for any application of the proof rules to produce a contradiction, whence any theorem proved from the axioms cannot be a contradiction. This is fine for an abstraction but, Poincare points out, our abstraction is of interest only to the extent that it reflects some material reality, and no proof of internal soundness can guarantee the faithfulness of a model. Phrased another, we don't know if or when an empirical contradiction might jump out and surprise us.

How can we decipher the conflicting responses of our troublesome Machine? The problem arises because the Machine seems to have distinct and incommensurate frames of reference: it answers the same question one way on one day, and the other way on a different day. One way we might get to the bottom of all this would be to keep plying the Machine with questions, both on "on"-days and on "off-"days to see if we could catch it in a contradiction. If the machine gave a reply that was plainly false to us, the observers, or that contradicted an earlier response we would know that the external conditions under which the machine was operating could not be the right circumstance for truth machines to be truthful. However, there seems to be no way to tell how many questions we might have to ask the machine before we caught it in a contradiction; we might question the Machine until the end of time and never see anything but self-consistency.

As long as the machine continues to explain its own operation and to do so in a way that reveals no contradictions that aren't directly tied to changes in operating conditions, we have no reason to believe that its answers are anything other than the necessary consequences of essential Laws of Nature.

Worse still, there's no way we could ask the machine for help in the matter, since we've already cast doubt on its judgments.

Who do we trust? You? Me? The Machine? And how should we understand the Machine's explanations of its own contradictions?

Though I won't pretend that these questions are impossible or intractable, I also don't see an obvious answer. There is, however, one last variant that may say something important, though it may not resolve this particular dilemma.

Ground Zero

Recall that in the paragraphs above, we took a completely idealized and perfect Truth Machine and replaced it with one that was affected by its physical operating conditions. We observed that we could elaborate a succession of factors that might all contribute to the machine's correct operation, and that so doing lead to something reminiscent of an ordinary experimental apparatus. In schematic, we have a succession like so:

(1) Given input A, the machine produces output B and B is true.

(2) Given input A, the machine produces B and B is true if the machine doesn't get too hot.

(3) Given input A, the machine produces B and B is true if the machine doesn't get too hot and if the machine is insulated from strong electric forces.

...

And so on, until we've taken into account all of the factors that might affect the Machine's operation. This is really a sequence of refinements to our idea of of the variables upon which the machine's output depends. That is, we could look at our succession as:

(1) The machine's output depends on its input.

(2) The machine's output depends on its input and the ambient temperature.

(3) The machine's output depends on its input and the ambient temperature and net electric forces acting on its mechanisms.

(4) The machine's output depends on its input and the ambient temperature and net electric forces acting on its mechanisms and ...

And so on. Looked at this way, it seems that there's one variable that we've forgotten, in our rush to account for necessary operational constants. Consider what we get if we take a step backward from (1):

(0) There is output.

Even the ideal machine we started with had one factor that affected its operation, namely, the question that its user asked. We began to doubt the Machine once its operating conditions allowed it to give different answers and also to account for them. However, we would in general expect our machine to give different answers to different questions. (Unless, of course, it just "holds up a finger."[2]) If we hold that (1) humans are physical beings, and (2) their actions comprise physical phenomenon, and (3) asking a question to the Truth Machine is a physical phenomenon, then since (4) the Machine's output depends upon the question it is asked, it must be that a question is an external physical condition affecting the operation of the Machine. This leads us to one last question:

Is is it function or malfunction for the Truth Machine to give different answers to different questions?

[1] Poincare, Henri, Francis Maitland (Trans.). Science and Method, Barnes & Noble Publishing, 2004 (original 1908).

[2] See case 19 of The Blue Cliff Record

Outputs: When There is Madness to the Method

2009-10-01T23:04:00.000-07:00

Considering that algorithms are human artifacts, it is very interesting that there even is such a thing as a bad algorithm. (It's also very interesting that apparently it is possible to make a joke in the form of an algorithm.) The phenomenon would seem to tell us something about the "essence" of an algorithm since even a severely deformed sorting algorithm is still recognized as a sorting algorithm. Consider a classic example:


START: given an array A[1..n]

STEP 1: IF (A is in sorted order) THEN [HALT] ELSE [GOTO STEP 2]

STEP 2: DO [randomly shuffle A[1..n]]

END

, which is more commonly known as "bogo-sort" and can be traced back at least to 1984[1]. There are some amusing quantitative analyses of such algorithms[2], but what stands out to me is that this can be called a sorting algorithm at all. I'm not disputing that bogo-sort is indeed a well-defined procedure, or that it eventually sorts its input array. What seems noteworthy is that we have here something that really is a sorting algorithm, but only just barely.

The only sense in which bogo-sort is a sorting algorithm is that, if and when it stops, the input array will be sorted. If we were to change the condition in STEP 1 to anything other than "Is A sorted?", we might say we have some kind of algorithm, but it would certainly not be a sorting algorithm. Put another way, we could change the condition to (almost) anything else and get an algorithm that is not a sorting algorithm. Bogo-sort is nothing other than a slightly constrained version of a very generic and very disorderly procedure (i.e. moving things around at random); its "sorting" is really nothing other than a discrimination applied to an otherwise indiscriminate process.

Perhaps another appropriate (but less snappy) name for this procedure would be "tautological sort". The array is sorted when the program says they're sorted, or rather, when the programmer says the program should stop. By way of analogy, this would be something like "straightening up" a messy room by going in and hurling objects about at random, and stopping whenever it was that you declared the room to be clean. ("Mission accomplished!") In this case, the output makes the program, and the notions of the programmer make the output. Maybe this is not especially surprising in and of itself, but it makes for a stretch of thin and blurry line separating the orderly and the chaotic, or the desirable and the undesirable.

The authors who have already commented on this curiosity raise a class of interesting questions: for any given objective, what is the worst possible means of attainment? ("The Pyrrhic Problem") This is worth asking if for no other reason than to point out that there are exceptionally bad ways of attaining almost any object. Although it seems little more than an academic curiosity when applied to algorithms, the question becomes strangely illuminating when applied to any number of real-world enterprises. Consider, for instance, how useful toilet paper is, but consider also that huge swaths of forest are cut down to produce it. It seems not only that are ends sometimes used to justify means, but that utter chaos circumscribed by an end can become a means.

[1] Broder, Andrei, Stolfi, Jorge. "Pessimal Algorithms and Simplexity Analysis", ACM SIGACT News, 16:49-53, 1984.

[2] Gruber, Hermann, Markus Holzer, Oliver Ruepp. "Sorting the Slow Way: An Analysis of Perversely Awful Randomized Sorting Algorithms", FUN 2007, LNCS 4475, p183-197, 2007.

Recent UAV Incidents and the Human-Computer Problem

2009-09-30T23:09:00.000-07:00

Over the weekend, the Association of Computing Machinery (ACM)'s RISKS news digest passed along a report about a United States Air Force (USAF) drone that became unresponsive to operator commands and was accordingly shot down by a manned USAF aircraft before it could cross the Afghan border. It's unfortunate that ACM RISKS chose to package a rather lightweight and sensational report that seemed to insinuate that the drone may have become self aware, and ended with a provocative quotation about the drone being motivated by its feeling of being "sicked by reaping hapless fleshies."

The USAF's official statement on the incident is unsurprisingly terse, and an investigation is still pending. However, there seem to be no serious grounds for supposing anything like self-realization or rebellion (compassionate or otherwise) on the part of the drone, and there are several logical and factual problems with even suggesting this to be the case. Most seriously, there is no good reason to believe that a drone designed and built to be controlled by a remote human operator would have anything more than minimal capabilities of autonomous operation. Giving the machine unnecessary autonomy of any kind would be counterproductive to whole aim of building and operating an aircraft with a remote human pilot. More to the point, its seems excessively whimsical to suppose that such a highly constrained and special-purpose computer-control system could possess the richness and complexity necessarily underlying the spontaneous emergence of such a miraculous and unprecedented machine awareness. As far as becoming sick of "reaping hapless fleshies", I would hope that the human operators would take it upon themselves to conceive such a sensibility, rather than offloading the work of ethics onto a machine.

For the record, I believe that machine intelligence is entirely possible, even probable, and I do even admit the possibility of its spontaneous emergence. What I object to is that suggestion that a special-purpose machine containing the same sort of embedded computer systems common to most modern aircraft and designed to be controlled by a human pilot, albeit a remote one, would suddenly be the first machine to become not only willful, but conscious enough to be compassionate or vengeful.

As is always the case, though, truth is stranger than fiction. This most recent failure of a U.S. military unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) has some striking features that tell us, surprisingly or unsurprisingly, that we have more difficult problems with ourselves and how we use our machines than we do with the machines themselves. Five years ago, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) compiled and analyzed all information available on accidents involving U.S. military UAVs (there are no civilian UAVs in widespread use, that I know of), and found that the MQ-9 Reaper (also known as the MQ-9 Predator B), the UAV most commonly used in current U.S. operations in Afghanistan, suffered a noticeable preponderance of accidents due to human error[1]. In particular, operator difficulties with the poorly designed interface used for the remote control of the Reaper were cited as contributing factors in just under half of all reported accidents. These included an improperly executed attempt to transfer control of the UAV between ground control stations that resulted in the turning off of the aircraft's engines, and another episode wherein a pilot accidentally executed a routine that erased the random-access memory of the control computer while the UAV was in flight. The FAA report cites another source claiming that a sequence of keystrokes used to control the lights on the Predator UAV is almost the same as a sequence that cuts the aircraft's engine. Anyone who has ever played a video game knows how easy it can be to hit the wrong keys and get your computerized proxy metaphorically killed as a result. It would be naive to suppose that such mishaps are impossible just because the proxy is a $53.3 million[2] aircraft and the killing is quite literal.

I should note that the most of the other UAVs reviewed in the FAA report showed a much lower incidence of human error attributed to accidents, and these could usually be localized to a single eccentricity of the particular aircraft that made its operation counter-intuitive. (For instance, having to a turn a knob to the left in order to make the aircraft turn right.) However, this only seems to emphasize how the generally poor quality of the Reaper interface contributes to accidents. The episodes described by the FAA report sound eerily reminiscent of the infamous Therac-25 incidents[3], wherein a minor confusion at the interface between human and machine was all it took for someone to be seriously injured or killed. Perhaps we should worry not so much about the consciousness of our machines as about the consciousness of ourselves.

It's noteworthy that the wayward UAV was destroyed once it stopped responding to commands from its operator. This is a dramatic illustration of a basic technological principle: the thing has form and value only insofar as it serves a human purpose. The destruction of the unresponsive Predator can also be viewed, perhaps, as a tacit admission that the thing is dangerous in the absence of a human controller. Of course, there were sensible and sound reasons for USAF's action: the drone was on course to cross international boundaries, which could be easily and rightly read by others as an act of callous negligence, if not outright aggression. In all likelihood, this particular failure of a Predator was due to a component malfunction and not to any error by a human operator or maintainer. However, the episode itself and the responses it has drawn at large all call attention to a basic concern with the notion of a powerful technological artifact being allowed to drift freely out of human control. I would argue that such concern is a mark of sanity. The ease with such errors can happen, by simple misunderstandings or oversights, should highlight the profound difficulties in navigating the interface between human intentions and the machinery built and deployed to execute them.

[1] Williams, Kevin. "A Summary of Unmanned Aircraft Accident/Incident Data: Human Factors Implications". DOT/FAA/AM-04/24, Office of Aerospace Medicine, Washington DC. (available here)

[2] USAF Fact Sheet on the MQ-9 Reaper (available here)

[3] Leveson, Nancy, Clark Turner. "An Investigation of the Therac-25 Accidents", IEEE Computer, 26(7):18-41. (Also available here)

Hacking the Trolley Problem

2009-09-29T23:23:00.000-07:00

When humans perpetrate awful things they are usually numb or indifferent to the awfulness of their actions. By contrast, most ordinary people -- even ones who may eventually do something awful -- will recoil when presented with the proposition that circumstances might compel them do something evil or reprehensible. It is perhaps this prospect of mechanically necessitated evil that makes what's commonly known as the Trolley Problem such a frequent and favorite topic of conversation. The original statement is due to Philippa Foot:

A trolley is running out of control down a track. In its path are 5 people who have been tied to the track by the mad philosopher. Fortunately, you can flip a switch, which will lead the trolley down a different track to safety. Unfortunately, there is a single person tied to that track. Should you flip the switch?[1]

It would be great to fall back on a straightforward exhortation: "Don't be a tool, man!" Unfortunately, this won't work if we stay within the bounds of the thought experiment. In this, and any other standard formulation, you are inextricably caught in the machinations of a sinister mastermind; you have no choice but act out some part in what seems to be an evil deed. You can make choices, of course, but you still come out a tool.

This sort of problem is very characteristic of a certain mode of thought. The question itself, by the information it gives and the boundaries it draws for itself seems to suggest that (1) there is such a thing as some sort of "net-goodness" or "net-benefit" of an action, (2) it is possible to determine what the net-goodness of a particular decision will be, and (3) such notions of goodness are quantifiable. In fact, this dilemma is strikingly mechanistic: the passengers are imprisoned within a machine hurtling out of control, a situation that leaves them no apparent choice but to use the highly constrained controls set in place for them by a scheming architect. (I am tempted to borrow from XKCD here to make a joke: "The passengers should just type 'sudo stoptrain'.") The dilemma itself is almost a statement of a sort of frustration and despair regarding our late technological society that has been expressed elsewhere, in recent popular culture:

We're trapped in the belly of this horrible machine
and the machine is bleeding to death[2]

What I am suggesting is that this popular and appealing thought experiment exposes a great deal about how many people are accustomed to thinking about ethics: that 'goodness' is something that you can measure objectively and apply to the world through an effective and well-understood mechanism of control. The Trolley Problem is so persistently provocative of discussion because it takes these intuitive notions of ethics and responsibility and uses them to produce what seems to an unpalatable situation, wherein we are forced to choose only between greater or lesser evils.

A variant of the problem will, I think, bring the assumptions of the original sharply into focus. Consider the following restatement:

A trolley is running out of control down a track. Its passengers consist of members of two families unrelated by blood. In the path of the trolley are five members of one family. The passengers can flip a switch, which will lead the trolley down a different track. Unfortunately, five members of the other family are tied to that track. Should the passengers flip the switch?

I am not aware of any similar restatement of the problem, though I would not be entirely surprised to learn that there is one. Think about this variant for a moment. The utilitarian argument applicable in Foot's original statement won't work here: both families stand to suffer a terrible and tragic loss, and there seem to be no obvious criteria -- at least not generally applicable criteria -- that would make once choice clearly superior to the other. Moreover, this situation involves a very serious and troubling kind of distributed responsibility: if either party of passengers has its way as to whether or not to flip the switch, it will do so at the expense of the others. Thus, the interests at stake are not only commensurable, but necessarily in conflict with one another. Certainly one family will not sit idly by and let their loved ones perish for the sake of sparing the other family and equally deep and awful grief. The two parties will be collectively responsible for any possible outcome, and in either case, someone with the ability to affect the final outcome will suffer terribly. Foot's trolley problem seems to let us choose between a greater or a lesser evil, while this variant, which adds only a consideration of normal human social relations, appears to be truly impossible to resolve, either for the passengers, or for us as observers.

We might resort to constructing special cases where one or the other decision might seem preferable. Case-based arguments, however, are really a retreat from the sort of objectively knowable idea of net-goodness that Foot's problem proposes; they attempt to get around the problem by adding new parts to it. The very phrasing of the original Trolley Problem presumes that there is an optimal course of action, and that this course of action necessarily hinges on what the passengers do with the limited controls before the train hits. If we start asking about other elements of the situation, we are really admitting that there is more to the problem than just its mechanisms and its victims.

The trolley itself is an interesting element of the problem. To see why, compare Foot's ethical dilemma to the one of persecuted early Christians being forced to fight one another to the death in the coliseum spectacles of Imperial Rome. This problem has almost all the same elements as the Modified Trolley Problem presented above. Two parties are forcibly put into a position where their incommensurable interests are in necessary conflict, so that whoever prevails must do so at the expense of the other. Moreover, responsibility is distributed; assuming that the combatants are sincere and Christ-like christians, neither one will want to harm the other, even for the sake of his or her own well being. However, this dilemma readily admits a "poetic response" that the Trolley Problem does not: in his classic of Christian fiction, Quo Vadis, Sienkiewicz has the two would-be gladiators throw down their weapons and embrace, refusing to fight[3]. This, of course, results in their being mauled to death by captive lions. Notably, however, this response does not result in either party compromising their interests or those of the other. The two combatants, though they die anyway, seem to reach agreement that theirs is the best course of action.

The trolley forces a mechanical necessity on the situation. It is a sort of perverse deus ex machina; whereas the gods who appeared ex machina in classical tragedy did so in order to reconcile what seemed to be irresolvable conflicts of duty or justice among humans, the machine that appears as a premise of our thought experiment seems to create an irresolvable ethical conflict for the people entangled in it. The mechanical necessity of the imagined situation is an important part of what makes the thought experiment seem plausible. The passengers cannot stop the trolley, except by using the one problematic switch. The passengers cannot outrun the trolley, in order to rescue or warn the people ahead. The passengers cannot stop the trolley outright, since presumably its break mechanisms are malfunctioning. The machine (the trolley) essentially forces its passengers to evaluate outcomes in terms of a single point of control (the switch that changes tracks), thus forcing a lose-lose situation because, being only a machine, it can only do so much.

How one views and states a problem has a profound impact on what the accepted courses action will be. (This is a theme that came up earlier in "Paradox and Specification".) Foot's original Trolley Problem understands the problem as one of constraint by machine and evaluation of net-goodness. Thus, it only makes sense that the ethical question is phrased as "Should you flip the switch?" If this were a computer program, we would ask "What form does the output take?", and our response would be "A one-bit signal indicating whether or not the trolley changes tracks." However, I would argue that the Modified Trolley Problem articulated above is impossible to resolved by either flipping of the switch. In the Modified Problem, something awful will happen no matter what the passengers do, and neither the passengers nor any observer is able to leverage this one decision (whether or not to flip the switch) into anything like a commensurably better outcome. To me, this suggests that "Should you flip the switch?" is the wrong question. Answering it tells us nothing helpful.

What, then, is the right question? How about, "What does each family owe to the other in the wake of the tragedy?" Or, "How should each family behave toward the other?" Confining the scope of the ethnical question to within the boundaries of the machine is mistake, and precludes any kind of useful ethical directives. Asking "Should you flip the switch?" is characteristic of a myopic view in which we assume that problems can be solved once and for all by a single decision; in this case, by simply flipping a switch. (Does this mean that the modern world is promising us "push-button" ethics?) What I contend to have constructed here is a problem that cannot be solved in terms of the mechanisms actually available in Foot's formulation, or in any of the standard formulations. Tragedy cannot be averted or even mitigated. Rather, the participants of the tragedy must look to themselves, and to one another in order to understand how to cope with and accept something truly horrible. We must not localize our notions of consequence to only short-term outcomes, and we must not constrain our notions of possibility to those made explicitly available us by people that it seems do not have our best interests at heart.

There is a great deal more to ethical behavior, it seems, than the mere exercise of control.

[1] Foot, Philippa. The Problem of Abortion and the Doctrine of the Double Effect in Virtues and Vices (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1978)

[2] Godspeed You Black Emporer. "The Dead Flag Blues", F#A#∞. Constellation Records, 1997.

[3] Sienkiewicz, Henryk, Stanley Conrad (Trans.). Quo Vadis?. Ignatius Press, 1992. (Also available through Project Gutenburg.)

Paradox and Bad Specification

2009-09-28T21:42:00.000-07:00

In the early Twentieth Century Bertrand Russell published a variant of the so-called Liar Paradox which he attributed to Oxford librarian G. G. Berry, and which, accordingly, is now commonly known as Berry's Paradox. The paradox is constructed as follows: What is the first number with an English language description of more than, say, thirty syllables? It seems reasonable to suppose that there is such a number; we can certainly think of numbers with descriptions that long. But how can we actually locate the first one? We could count, and for each number counted go through a list of its descriptions and count their respective syllables. It seems only logical that if there exists a number with no description of less than thirty syllables, then we must eventually reach it in the process of counting. Moreover, if such numbers exist at all, then there must be a first i.e. least such number. But wait! There's a catch! Suppose we reach a number, say N, and all the possible descriptions of N are thirty syllables or more. Suppose also that N is the first such number. Then N can be uniquely described as "the least number with no description less than thirty syllables", which is a description of exactly sixteen syllables. Sixteen is indisputably less than thirty, and so it would appear that N cannot be the least number with no description less than thirty syllables. Hence, the apparent paradox: conferring the name "least number with a description of less than thirty syllables" renders the name itself incorrect and inapplicable as soon as a candidate number is discovered.

The interest in this particular paradox, I think, is that it takes the self-referential circularity of the more commonly treated Liar Paradox and elaborates it as something of a computational procedure. The paradox has a certain intuitive appeal, because it takes a number of familiar, accessible ideas and puts them together with an unexpected result. To demonstrate what I mean by this, consider a naive algorithm (call it A) that seems to implement the sort of count-and-check procedure described above:

BEGIN (A): Set N := 0;

STEP 1: DO [generate all descriptions of N; denote this list by L]

STEP 2: FOR EACH [description in L] DO [count syllables in the description; let MIN := smallest number of syllables counted so far]

STEP 3: IF (MIN > 30) THEN [output N; HALT] ELSE [N := N + 1; GOTO STEP 1]

Unfortunately, this algorithm won't work. One problem is that there are, arguably, an infinite number of descriptions for any given number. For one thing, there are infinitely many ways to define a number in terms of arithmetic expressions, for instance, as the difference of two other numbers. (That is we can use the fact that , for any N, N = (M + N) - M, for any other number M, to generate infinitely many descriptions.) For another thing, we can define infinitely many numbers in terms of the sort of "tokens" that Frege used in his argument that the natural numbers are an a priori analytic concept[1]. For instance, "the number of dishes on the table I am sitting at, at Lakota Coffee of Columbia, Missouri on September 28, 2009" and "the distance, in centimeters, rounded down to the nearest whole number, between inch marks on a ruler" are both in some sense valid descriptions of the number two. Besides the apparent infinity of such descriptions, there is also an obvious difficulty in devising a procedure that could generate them all; this is left as an exercise to the inordinately skeptical reader.

These difficulties are not wholly insurmountable though; we might be interested only in a certain class of descriptions that we can finitely generate. In this sense, "the least number with no description less than thirty syllables" smells surprisingly like a bad specification. If we were actually interested in writing such a program, we would immediately ask, "Well, what kind of descriptions do you mean?" simply because "all" is generally an unreasonable thing to ask of machines except in the most tightly constrained circumstances. The paradox thus achieves its amusing paradoxicality by dwelling on its own bad specification. Consider, for instance, what we get if we devise an algorithm (call it A') closer in spirit to the algorithm as it plays out in the human mind:

BEGIN (A'): Set N := 0; L := EMPTY;

STEP 1: DO [generate new descriptions of N; append these to list L]

STEP 2: FOR EACH [description in L] DO [count syllables in the description; let MIN := smallest number of syllables counted so far]

STEP 3: IF (MIN > 30) THEN [append "least number with no description less than thirty syllables" to L; GOTO STEP 2] ELSE [N := N + 1; L:= EMPTY; GOTO STEP 1]

This is a slight variation on A, wherein we make the accumulation of descriptions in L at least partially explicit. The details of this are not important here (but try to work them out if you don't believe me). What is important is that the program now appends the paradoxical description to its list of descriptions-to-check, and checks it. This, of course, means that the program will throw out any and all candidates, either because the ordinary name-generation process produces a name that is less than thirty syllables, or because the very same process generates only thirty-syllable or longer names, which in turn triggers STEP 3 to append "the least number with no description less than thirty syllables" to the list of names to check, which then leads to the list being rechecked, and thus to the number being rejected on the subsequent pass. Essentially, the program is written to undo its own work and hence to work endlessly in exactly the same way that Berry's Paradox appears to lead to an indefinite search for the elusive number described in its statement.

There is an interesting conceptual disconnect between A and A'. Properly constrained, A will eventually halt and output something sensible, but doesn't do anything at all paradoxical. On the other hand, A' can never halt but "acts like" the paradox as it seems to present itself. Which one of these is correct? Before you answer, consider that we could modify A' so that, in STEP 3, N is output before going back to STEP 2. In this case, we would get an infinite sequence of numbers as output, the first of which would be the same as the output of A. Moreover, we could make the output of A identical, simply by changing "HALT" in STEP 4 to "GOTO STEP 1". The programs look different, and are differently motivated, but not all that different in how they actually work. More precisely, it is only our idea of the problem that seems to influence the decision of what the program should output and when it should stop. Even more surprisingly, the presence of the paradoxical description ("the least number ...") as in A' seems to be unnecessary; we could replace it with any description of less than thirty syllables, or we could just use modified-A to get exactly the same output.

I had at first imagined a profound and sweeping essay of logic and computer science that would somehow relate Berry's Paradox to program bugs or verification procedures, but this proved far too broad, and never quite seemed to resolve into a single idea of any greater coherence than "they all lead to an indefinite search for an elusive thing." Fittingly, though, I've come to the conclusion that the paradox is best framed as an instance of bad specification, but a very particular kind of bad specification. Essentially, asking for "the least number with no description of less than thirty syllables" is asking for too much, because it requires the seeker to account for "all" descriptions, in order to prove that "none" of them violate the sought-after property. Of course, we can always narrow the scope of admissible descriptions, as we presumably did to produce A and A'. This reduces the problem to a question of "going through these finite sets in order, which is the first that contains no small things?" This question is considerably less provocative than a paradox, and the reader might join me in finding it substantially less interesting. The thrill of mystery, or the unexplained seems to be the fun of the paradox and, weirdly, constraining this away seems to give us something materially present (i.e. a halting program with output) but rather dull. Considering that people program and use computers with human motives, one must ask if we ever make paradoxical demands on our machines and attempt to implement them, only to find ourselves disappointed.

[1] Frege, Gottlob, J. L. Austin (Trans.). Foundations of Arithmetic. Northwestern University Press, 1968.

On Burning and Place

2009-09-28T21:40:00.000-07:00

[a portion of a personal correspondence]

Some years ago, I had a deep insight into things, and it left me with the conviction that "everything has a place." Thinking of place and personal story today, I feel an equally deep and perhaps even more lucid impulse to add, "and that place is on fire." Sakyamuni Buddha once said, "All things are burning." The world is burning. We are burning. What are we to make of this?

Fire is a potent metaphor in many traditions. In the Lotus Sutra, the buddha uses a tactful trick to lead his children out of a burning house and out into safety. A common maxim of the Zen school is that one should practice "with urgency, as if your head is on fire." The Hells of the world's imaginations are all conspicuously aflame. Wendell Berry has referred to the destructive and exploitative modes and motives of our late civilization as "the combustion economy," which I think very vividly and completely captures the essential features of the modern way of life.

This has always bothered me, and it bothers me more as time passes. Feeling the heat of the flames, knowing that the world is burning, how can we possibly hope, and without hope, how can we possibly live? I have grown accustomed to living my own life astride the fault line of contradictions, but even familiarity cannot drown out the din of conflict. This has had many faces in my own past, but today I think of myself at the heart (though not the center) of a huge technological, economic, and social complex whose ways I find monstrous and inhuman, and my own heart is deeply troubled as to how I should live.

Why are there two worlds? We see a world of pastoral nature and a world created by man. Why are there two Americas? We see before us the America that is given, and the America that is taken. These division are not merely conceptual; they have become real matters of habit and of fact. More and more, I see these differences not as mere discriminations, but as deep wounds. Seeing this, I find that I want nothing more than to see these wounds healed, by wholeness and by peace.

But still the world burns, and we are in it. It burns with division. It burns with strife. It burns with vicious self-consumption. There is no way to simply remove ourselves, or to be above it. Even if this were possible, it would only be another division, bringing with it still more war and more hatred. There is no individual merit, and there is no individual guilt. We are all in this together, and we must take what we are given. But then what do we do?

The events of September 11, 2001 have become a deadly potent cultural symbol for us as Americans. I say this having largely disregarded their significance myself, until very recently. That occasion seemed to bring into sharp focus exactly the painful divisions, of worlds, of Americas, that we all now suffer from. It is the vividness and suddenness with which that division was manifested that made that episode so deeply terrifying to so many. The essential image is one of burning, and collapse. This is not, however, the only image. One of the stories most heralded, and most remembered by those involved was that of firefighters entering the doomed towers in search of the trapped and the wounded. It was an action of unmistakable selflessness and heroism, and one that spanned the divisions of that awful day and of the awful things it embodied.

I had not given this much thought until today, when it suddenly came into clear focus, and I said to myself, "Everything has a place, and that place is on fire."

We all give our lives to something, though we may not acknowledge it. As humans, each of us only has so much time, and so the use of our time is ultimately a gift to someone, or to something. When we willingly dwell in this burning world, we give our lives to a world that is imperiled. But does this fire ever go out? Is it within our grasp to extinguish it? These questions are matters for those who are trying to hold onto lives, rather than give them. It is thus that Jesus said, "whoever tries to save his own life shall lose it"; life is not a thing that is kept or obtained, it can only be a thing that is used. It is in search of peace that we enter the ground of war. It is in search of unity that we embrace division. It is only loving action, though our lives and according to our own capabilities, that can make things whole.

Things are different. People are different. We all have a place. When we go to our place, even as it burns, it is an act of selflessness and heroism. Fire is not only destruction, but warmth and light. These, ultimately, become the gifts of our own lives.

More Than Dust and Smoke: A Personal Perspective on Recent American History

2009-09-14T23:31:00.000-07:00

When I was about seven or eight years old, in what would have been the late 1980s or early 1990s, I saw a photograph of a volcanic explosion doctored to look as if it bore the face of the devil. I saw it at a supermarket check-out line, on the cover of one of those tabloids that printed blatantly false and fantastical "news". Although I feel like I should have known better, I was a very sensitive and deeply impressionable child, and I was deeply disturbed to see a report, accompanied by apparent photographic evidence, that evil itself had burst forth from the very depths of the Earth in a sulfurous cloud of smoke and ash. The grocery had always seemed like pleasant, familiar, and safe place, but for weeks afterward its bright cleanliness and its promises of plenty were somehow darkened by vividly illustrated news of a demonic emergence from the depths of a shockingly literal Hell.

In my memory of today, that old supermarket tabloid is a document of unconcealed silliness, and the face of that fabricated devil is laughably cartoonish. A cosmology in which Satan lives inside of a volcano in Alaska seems almost quaint, as if he was little more than the eccentric and decadent villain of a James Bond movie. I remember my mother trying to explain to me that the photograph was fake, and why it was that a newspaper would publish reports with no factual content. I remember trying to comfort myself that it was all a harmless spoof belonging to the strangely frivolous and disconnected world of adults. I also remember how little comfort any of those arguments brought.

Surprising though it was, I was willing to believe in the falsity of certain news reports and the possibility of faking photographs. Possibility, though, is immeasurably bigger than any particular collection of events. I knew that there were other newspapers that were not fake, and whose photos depicted real events. I knew that each day brought new stories and new pictures, and there seemed to be no guessing what they might contain. I convinced myself that the picture was a fake, and that the devil was not erupting from a volcano somewhere in North America. Still, that seemed to provide no guarantee against what unforeseen but unquestionably real nightmares might emerge from the passage of days. I couldn't imagine what faces might yet appear, or where.

That cartoonish devil still floats in my memory, as a chimera of childish gullibility and mute awareness of the limits of the predictable.

In September of 2001, I had very little going on. My health was bad. School was not going well, and I didn't really care. Kung fu was the sole point of interest, and it was the only thing that I really worked at, but it seemed to cause me more frustration than anything else. Mostly I just wanted to play video games, and not think about the future.

On Tuesday the 11th, I didn't have class and so woke up extremely late. I put on some dirty workout clothes, went to the living room, and fumbled around trying to arrange the weights on a barbell for a strength workout. After one set, I turned on the television and saw that there seemed to be a news broadcast going on at an odd our the day. Someone was speaking dryly but haggardly about the stability of the stock market. I thought, oh, the market must have crashed, and took no further interest. I left the television on as I did several more sets. The press conference gave way to several others, then one or two monologues by television anchors. This was followed by a video of a very large building collapsing on itself in a plume of dust. I thought, huh, did someone botch a demolition job? The newspeople seemed all to be working under the assumption that I had been watching their broadcast for some time and so knew what was going on. I was not especially interested in what they were saying, though, and had written all them off some time ago as shameless seekers of attention. At some point, from bits and pieces fished out from the stream of information oozing in through the television, I gathered that someone had crashed commercial airliners into both towers of the World Trade Center, precipitating the collapse and utter destruction of the entire building. Realizing this, I recall saying to myself, "Ah, now that's something you don't see every day."

Later, my brother and I went to our favorite gas station off of the I-70 exit and got a soda. We ignored the minor panic of nervous motorists and windingly queued-up automobiles swirling around the gas pumps. Later, I went out and did what I always did at night, which consisted of drinking many cups of coffee at Osama's Coffee Zone (no, I am not making up that detail) and stubbornly studying abstract algebra that I could only barely understand. My days had long ceased to have any interest for me, and knowing no other way to orient myself, I tried to take pride in this, though I could scarcely understand how it was anything to be proud of. People always seemed to think that constancy was a virtue, and so I patted myself on the back for making all my days look exactly the same. I had become skilled at bending other people's views to suit mine.

At 10:00 PM that night, I honestly wondered if anyone I knew had not yet heard what had happened, and if I would be the first to break the news of the total destruction of a major U.S. landmark. As it turned out, everyone had, and I found myself vaguely annoyed with how hard people were taking an event that did not seem to impact any of them directly. There are, I thought to myself then, many thousands of people dying every day all over the world in events just as surprising and horrible. Why should this one event be any different? It seemed to me cowardly and self-indulgent to give these other tragedies, happening continuously around the world, such scant thought or mention, but then to raise a loud, public lament when our own false senses of security are shattered.

The world is full of pain and death as a principle, I would say to people then, so why raise a hue and cry now?

On the 12th, the Chancellor of the University declared a campus-wide moment of silence at noon. I was unaware of it until after it had happened. At noon, I simply found myself walking through ghostly still and silent crowds of people as a bell tolled from somewhere above. I hunched under a backpack that was too heavy for me, and scowled.

I look back at my profound sickness of the soul with sober disapproval, and I am never proud of it. To this day I do not fully comprehend how it came to be. Sometimes I wonder if perhaps I saw too many stories of important events confabulated, and then debunked.

Just over three years later, my brother would die in an accident. Four years later, I would fall in love on the day that the city of New Orleans was almost totally destroyed by a powerful hurricane. Six years later I would lose that too. That was the same day that they unceremoniously tore down the old plantation house at the north edge of town, the one that had stood there since before I had moved here over twenty years ago.

The other night I returned home late. I turned on the television to see what was on, and discovered that the channel it had been left on was airing old news broadcasts from eight years ago. All the sudden I was seized with the feeling that I had lived through some history whose importance I had never really grasped at all. Many things have changed in the time that has passed, and all of it makes me see those events in a new perspective.

There is a profound tragedy in the perpetration of such a tremendous act of violence, and in the many lives lost as a consequence. There is no diminishing, or ignoring this, but I am of the firm conviction that death is a thing that speaks best and most truthfully for itself. For us as Americans, however, there is also a deep cultural significance attached to this event, one that goes beyond the number of lives lost, or the shocking manner in which they were lost.

I encourage the reader to locate and watch an old news broadcast of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. I don't mean a news broadcast detailing the events after the fact, I mean a recording of the journalists and broadcasters struggling to cover the events as they unfold. Watch from the first announcement at least up until the collapse of the second tower of the World Trade Center. Events unfold with the surreal abruptness of a nightmare and indeed, I do not think it would be an exaggeration to say that those events have become a nightmare of the collective mind of America. As is the case with nightmares, a patient examination reveals the unexpected contents of the unconscious.

The most conspicuous feature of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 is the utter helplessness of everyone involved. The journalists, whose modern profession is to appear confident and knowledgeable about the world, are shaken, confused, and visibly frightened. Their voices tremble. They speculate wildly and talk over one another. They ask questions that no one answers. A train of experts comment by phone, with none offering anything but bewilderment. The President delivers a short statement saying nothing new. The terrorists would seem to be the only ones with any power at all, and even they obtain it only at the cost of immolating themselves, so that even the perpetrators of this awful act have no real control over the course of events. All the while, the World Trade Center burns, the Pentagon burns, and the cameras are able to do nothing but sit and watch.

On that day, American wealth and American military power, the two things we have all learned to take for granted, are suddenly revealed as fallible. They suffer the destruction of two of their most conspicuous symbols and appear wholly unable to defend themselves. This is a profound revelation for our nation, for us as a people. Its significance should not be underestimated. For generations now, we have been able to justify all of our best and highest expectations for ourselves, for our families, for our communities, and for the country as a whole simply by noting that "this is America." We learned to take American victory and American prosperity for granted. We assumed ourselves invincible and eternal. Then, for a fleeting instant we all saw a face in the dust and the smoke, threatening us with the possibility that it could all be suddenly snatched away.

We should have learned, all of us, to live in a world where successes cannot be assumed. We should have learned that the ideals and principles of America as we know it, as we believe in it, as it can be, stand beyond the reach of money, influence, or forceful violence. America is not unbounded abundance and military victory, but liberty, equality, and justice for any and all who would peaceably dwell here. We should have learned that wealth and power are not bestowed on us from on high, but earned through perseverance and hard toil. I think that to some degree we did all learn that lesson. But I also think that would could have learned it better, and taken it more to heart.

Why do I say we could have done better? Because in the years that followed, we proceeded to try simply to debunk the frightening fallibility of American power through a series of far-reaching and ill-planned military adventures. We tried to debunk the threat of scarcity or poverty, in the days immediately after by urging the people their money freely "for the good of the economy", and in the long days after by turning a blind eye to destructive and short-sighted machinations of powerful financiers and captains of industry whose schemes ultimately spelled ruin for our economy today. We could have done more to reflect upon and nurture the sources of our power and our wealth, instead of recklessly flaunting them in an attempt to trivialize the significance of that terrible day. Our power and our wealth begin with our people and our land. We pursue heedless war and easy gain at their expense.

This is the error of those would abstract away from this event, and attempt to turn it into a simple schematic of wealth and power flowing here and there across the world. This sin was committed in many ways, by all kinds of people with all kinds of politics: the war profiteers with their lucrative government contracts, the idealogues who condoned the violence and indulged their own self-loathing, the politicians who used tragedy as a device for personal ambitions, and the demagogues who used the deaths of thousands of Americans to sow fear and division among honest citizens. These are all the people who would tell us that such things are "just the way world", disguising half-hearted and selfish fatalism as wisdom or maturity, in a self-serving justification for the callous pursuit their own small agendas.

We can do better than that. Loving your country means accepting responsibility for its past, present, and future. It means taking its triumphs and its tragedies to heart as your own. It means accepting its virtues and its faults as if they were your own. Being a genuine citizen means much more than just being on the winning team.

They say that tragedy tests a person. Surely the same is true of nations. Even all these years later, we should look back at that tragedy and ask what that test has showed us about ourselves. There is much more to America than wealth and power. There is much more to those terrible events of eight years ago than cartoonish caricature of evil, or a series of disembodied images beamed in from far away. The tragedy is one of real people and real events, all of which, in some way or another, belong to all of us.

A Comment on the Start of the Lotus Sutra

2009-09-14T23:26:00.000-07:00

[...]

At that time the Buddha emitted a ray of light from the tuft of white hair between his eyebrows ... lighting up eighteen thousand worlds in the eastern direction. There was no place that the light did not penetrate, reaching downward as far as the Avichi hell and upward to the Akanishtha heaven.

At what time? This light shines wherever there is awareness and truthful presence.

[...] At that time Bodhisattva Maitreya wished to settle his doubts concerning the matter. ... So he questioned Manjushri, saying, "What is the cause of these auspicious portents, these signs of transcendental powers, this emitting of a great beam of brightness that illumines the eighteen thousand lands in the eastern direction so we can see all the adornments of the Buddha worlds there?"

Maitreya sees this great light as a sign and looks for a meaning. But what he looks for is already before his very eyes! Every being in every world is gathered together in a single illumination. What more meaning could there possibly be?

Watson, Burton (translator). The Lotus Sutra. Columbia University Press. New York, 1993.

Case: Schematic of a Win-Win

2009-09-08T23:39:00.000-07:00

I returned to my car a little after midnight, and found the parking lot uncommonly quiet. The only sound came from an empty styrofoam cup rolling gently back and forth, making echoes from the walls. And I thought of Selfridge's "Pandaemonium"[1] and said to myself, there is the one and only other living thing here.

I see no difficulty in attributing thought or life, even if extremely dim and primitive forms, to odd things. This is something that wise people have done across cultures for generations, and it has lead people to extremely stable and harmonious ways of living. That this view should arise in the elaboration of modern empiricism, materialism, and late technoscience only confirms to me its truth.

And I wondered to myself what it must be like to have a mind consisting of nothing but echoes stray breezes.

As I walked to the car, I noticed there was also dark green katydid sitting alone on the ground. It was chirping to the empty lot. It must have been lead by the bright lights to this barren space, and now was singing to a hopeless, lifeless absence. This struck me as incredibly sad.

I thought about taking the katydid home, to release into my yard, but I had no container to put it in. Transporting a living thing to a better place only seems like a sound act of charity if you can assure its safe passage on the way. At the far end of the lot, the cup began to roll back and forth, and I thought, ah, of course, life seeks out life.

So I put the solitary katydid into the solitary styrofoam cup, and took them both home. The katydid is now singing to other katydids, and the trash is no longer on the ground. Episodes like this one, however, make me think that there should really be no such thing as "trash."

INPUTS: lost insect, piece of trash

OUTPUTS: transportation of insect to a friendlier home

What kind of procedure produces outputs like this from inputs like that?

Note the structure of the phenomenon. The problem presents as a division: the insect is out of its normal place, the cup has been left where it should not be. The solution appears as a unification (with intentional, but not exclusive reference to "unification" in the sense that a logic engine "unifies" terms): the cup and the insect become mutual parts of a process that puts things back where they belong.

What other sorts of problems present as division, and are solved by unification?

The skeptic might protest that not only was this a pointless or self-indulgent diversion, but that there is no guarantee that it would not ultimately result in a "net-evil" in utilitarian terms. That is, what if transporting the insect robs a starving bird or bat of a meal, or what if it leads to a plague, or what if the katydid turns out to be the orthopteran equivalent of Adolf Hitler, ad infinitum. (I would also add "ad absurdum".) Utilitarian arguments, such as this one, suffer from a certain conceptual lack: they recognize that causes may have far-removed and unexpected effects, but then assume that these effects do not themselves become causes, and thus can be evaluated as magnitudes of goodness or badness that can be used to compare courses of action. Such comparisons, however, are silly if they are arrived at by reasoning that uses "unexpected consequence" as a factor since (1) there are always unexpected consequences and (2) the same process that produces these consequences produces effects that evaluation at a single point in time cannot take into account.

We should recognize that every action has far-reaching and essentially unforeseeable consequences. This does not trivialize decision-making, but it does exclude the existence of "perfect plans" or "final solutions", both of which, as we have all seen, fail miserably at implementation time.

It is my firm conviction that if the Universe has anything like a logic to it, this logic is complete, in the technical sense of "complete", and whatever actions are good and right are exactly the rules of proof. Thus is how we live throughout that matters, and not some result that is tabulated, judged, or measured after a certain interval of time has passed. An action, then, is good simply if it is done in a good way. When we are confident that we have used the right means, we don't worry about whether our action has strange or startling, or even disturbing consequences any more than we would reject a strange or startling or disturbing theorem with a water-tight proof.

Goodness is truth, and truth is goodness, and goodness is as goodness does.

[1] Selfridge, Oliver G. "Pandaemonium: a paradigm for learning". Mechanization of Thought Processes: Proceedings of a Symposium Held at the National Physical Laboratory, 1958, London: HMSO, pp 513-526.

Two Exemplary Thinkers of Our Time

2009-09-07T10:21:00.000-07:00

Easily, the two most provocative and fascinating books I have read this year are Ray Kurzweil's The Singularity Is Near, and Wendell Berry's collection of essays, The Art of the Commonplace. The very fact that these two books are simultaneously in wide print circulation is a vivid testament to the astonishingly deep schism in modern views about humanity, its place and its destiny.

It is extremely noteworthy when these authors intersect their subject matter, considering that they seem to have no knowledge of one another's work. Neither author cites the other, despite their prominent positions in their respective movements, and despite the fact that all aspects of their respective philosophies and practical proposals seem to oppose one another. One suspects that they are either wholly unaware of one another, or that each considers the other's program wholly irrelevant to their own.

Consider what each says of the Luddite uprising of the early nineteenth century:

Mr. Berry says of the Luddites,

These were people who dared to assert that there were needs and values that justly took precedence over industrialization; they were people who rejected the determinism of technological innovation and economic exploitation. In them, the community attempted to speak for itself and defend itself. [...] The Luddites did, in fact, revolt not only against their own economic oppression but also against the poor quality of machine work that had replaced them. And though they destroyed machinery, they 'abstained from bloodshed or violence against living beings, until in 1812 a band of them was shot down by soldiers.' Their movement was suppressed by 'severe repressive legislation' and 'by many hangings and transportations.' (Berry, "Sex, Economy, Freedom, and Community", 1992)

Of the same Luddites, Mr. Kurzweil says:

The invention of the power loom and the other textile automation machines of the early eighteenth century destroyed the livelihoods of the cottage industry of English weavers, who had passed down stable family businesses for hundreds of years. Economic power passed from the weaving families to the owners of the machines. As legend has it, a young and feebleminded boy named Ned Ludd broke two textile factory machines out of sheer clumsiness. From that point on, whenever factory equipment was found to have mysteriously been damaged, anyone suspected of foul play would say, 'But Ned Ludd did it.' In 1812 the desperate weavers formed a secret society, an urban guerilla army. They made threats and demands of factory owners, many of whom complied. When asked who their leader was, they replied, 'Why, General Ned Ludd, of course.' Although the Luddites, as they became known, initially directed most of their violence against the machines, a series of bloody engagements erupted later that year. The tolerance of the Tory Government for the Luddites ended, and the movement dissolved with the imprisonment and hanging of prominent members. (Kurzweil 2005; footnote 37, Chapter 1)

Subtle differences in the telling of history make profound differences in its understanding.

On the issue of the body, biology, and death, the two make remarks that are uncanny, almost chilling opposites of one another:

Mr. Berry:

I know that there are some people, perhaps many, to whom you cannot appeal on behalf of the body. To them, disembodiment is a goal, and they long for the realm of pure mind -- or pure machine; the difference is negligible. Their departure from their bodies, obviously, is much to be desired, but the rest of us had better be warned: they are going to cause a lot of dangerous commotion on their way out. (Berry, "Feminism, The Body, and The Machine", 1989)

And Mr. Kurzweil, in a fictional dialogue between himself and Ned Ludd:

NED: You're missing something. Biological is what we are. I think most people would agree that being biological is the quintessential attribute of being human.

RAY: That's certainly true today.

NED: And I plan to keep it that way.

RAY: Well, if you're speaking for yourself, that's fine with me. But if you stay biological and don't reprogram your genes, you won't be around for very long to influence the debate. (Kurzweil, 2005)

Have we really produced two irreconcilable views of humanity?

Berry, Wendell, Norman Wirzba (ed). "The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays of Wendell Berry". Counterpoint, Berkeley, CA, 2002.

Kurzweil, Ray. "The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology". Penguin Group, New York, NY, 2005.

Dissection of a Contemporary Fallacy

2009-08-29T11:34:00.000-07:00

I doubt I'm the first person to observe that the public discourse has become markedly more discordant, shrill, and even malicious in the past year. This is a bad trend, and it has destructive consequences for everyone.

One particular style of argument marks this discursive shift toward viciousness. In the proper sense of the word it is not really an 'argument' at all, but a kind of rhetorical sleight-of-hand. Unfortunately, this rhetorical trick has been shrewdly put to use by a number of influential and extremely unscrupulous individuals in order to foment discord in the general public, and to ultimately create a very harmful and wholly unnecessary cultural schism in American life. I won't speculate on the motives of these individuals, but I will say a few words to deflate the shock and awe that makes their dangerous verbal stage-act so effective.

"The President likes to set things on fire. He's a known arsonist. He's planning to burn down your house while you sleep."

Is this assertion ridiculous? Is it paranoid? Well, let's look at the facts. ABC news reports that Barack Obama, the sitting President of the United States, is a known smoker. It's a known fact that in order to smoke a cigarette, you must cause it to combust. An arsonist is someone who purposefully sets fire to things. Smoking is a habit so difficult to quit that it might be termed compulsive. The President is a compulsive arsonist. It's only a matter of time until he burns down your house, or the house of someone in your community.

Have I convinced you that it's only a matter of time before our cities are in flames at the hand of a pyromaniac national executive? In the current climate of the political discourse, a few people might actually say "yes", or others might at least assent to my assertion but not necessarily my argument, being content to ride the rhetorical effect of suggesting that the President will burn down America's cities. Be that as it may, go back and read the preceding paragraph and really try to convince yourself that it is sound, factually scrupulous, and makes sense. Take your time, think about each step in my deduction, and really try to prove to yourself that it leads to a valid conclusion. Can you honestly do it?

(If you remain convinced that the President is going to burn down your house, or if you see no problem with the argument as such, go back through and replace "Barack Obama" with "your car", and "smoking habit" with "internal combustion engine", and then ask yourself if you also believe that your personal automobile is going to burn down your dwelling because it is powered by an involuntary mechanical process of burning petroleum.)

All politics aside, I hope we can agree that the argument I've made above is patently silly. It's supposed to be. At the same time, don't underestimate its persuasive power. The argument "works" on a certain level if you read over it quickly, and if you're willing to place a little more trust that average in my expertise as the author. Maybe I know something that you don't, and maybe it just happens to be that my refined intellect and masterful command of the facts allows me to glibly and easily spring past an argument that might otherwise be difficult and tedious. (This has a parallel in advanced mathematics texts, wherein many authors have the bad habit of writing "proofs" to the effect of "it's just obvious", to the great vexation of students struggling to learn the material.) In fact, if you're willing to trust me as the speaker or author, simply seeing that I've presented you with an argument may be more than enough for you to accept my claim at face-value. This is normal in many kinds of casual discourse; if I see you come in from outside and I ask, "Has it started raining?", I don't then press you for a rigorous justification of your reply. What's more, the argument I've presented concludes with a statement that demands your immediate attention. After all, it would seem that a prominent figure with all the collected power of the government wants to destroy your home and possibly burn you to death in the process. Something has to be done!

My contrived argument is deliberately absurd, but don't presume that you're somehow "too smart" to be taken in by it. There has been much backlash against certain media figures guilty of the kind of fallacy I outline here, and much of it has wrongly attacked the intelligence of the offenders' collective audience. Besides being high-handed and contributing to the unhealthy atmosphere of hostility on both sides, such objections ignore the fact that some of their own favorite causes have been and still often are advanced using similar discursive tactics. There are no enemies; this is a problem of bad thought and bad speech. This is important. Remember it.

If you rejected my contrived assertion ("The President is going to burn down your house!") out of hand, it is quite likely that you correctly read my intent to construct an invalid argument with a false conclusion, and this reading influenced your interpretation of my statements. Remember, context plays a very important role in the meaning of words. It may also be that you took my statement to be plainly outrageous and thus rejected it as too bizarre to possibly be true. Remember also, though, that the apparent strangeness of a claim may weigh against its truth but is not sufficient to invalidate it. If you don't believe that these cautions are warranted, imagine your favorite and most trusted commentator accusing your least favorite and least trusted public figure of material involvement in what you consider to be the most serious (and real) problem in the world today. Go on, try it. You may not even have to imagine: just visit your favorite blog or switch on the television. (Do you believe what is being said? On what basis?) Finally, consider what the consequences would be if my claim that the President is out to get you turned out actually to be true, and you ignored my warning. Of course it sounds highly implausible, but in the event that my outlandish claim turned out true you would be the target of a very powerful man with a small army of trained killers at his side and the resources of a whole nation at his disposal. That sounds like a dire situation if there ever was one, and my advance warning might be your only edge in finding a way out. Remember that we all have to make timely decisions based on incomplete information, with some of the most difficult being those in which there is little information but much at stake.

We now have the tools we need to analyze my strange argument that the President is going to burn down your house, and to reach some useful conclusions about how and why arguments like it often succeed. (Remember, "Everyone else is stupid," is not an explanation and says nothing useful about the problem or its solution.) Here's a breakdown of how the argument proceeds: (1) The argument starts with a reasonable-sounding and (probably, mostly) factual statement. This sets the stage for something seemingly serious to be said, and gives the initial appearance that what is to come is a sequence of equally factual statements. ("Sure, the President's a smoker. Everybody who reads the news knows that.") (2) The argument proceeds quickly through a number of very large deductive leaps. These also tend to be (probably, mostly, but with some variation) factual statements or reasonable-sounding claims. However, they are for the most part only loosely related to one another and in general do not represent a chain a sound logical inferences. Oftentimes, they don't represent any sort of inference at all, so much as a sort of pre-conceptual complex of disjoint thoughts on loosely related subjects. (" It's a known fact that in order to smoke a cigarette, you must cause it to combust. An arsonist is someone who purposefully sets fire to things.") (3) The sequence of deductions abruptly entrains some claims or statements that are less plausible or perhaps even bizarre. This is where particular techniques of speaking are put to extremely good use by certain television and radio personalities. Many popular commentators rapidly fire off a succession of strange and outrageous statements with such apparent fervor and emotional affect that their seeming conviction effectively drowns out any murmurs of doubt that might otherwise surround the meanings and consequences of what they are actually saying. ("Smoking is a habit so difficult to quit that it might be termed compulsive. The President is a compulsive arsonist." Say this very quickly to yourself, and with fervent conviction that it's true. What does it sound like?) (4) The argument reaches a very sudden and very evocative (often provocative) conclusion. In general, this conclusion does not follow from the argument at all, and sometimes may not even be related. However, because the conclusion entails strong and emotionally charged associations, the mind of the rapt listener naturally switches stance from listening to formulating a course of action in response to a disturbing idea. This effectively short-circuits any reflection on the argument or its premises, which allows the spurious chain of reasoning to slip by unnoticed. ("It's only a matter of time before the President burns your house down! Something must be done!") Essentially, this sort of argument is nothing but a trick with words. An explosively rapid exposition hides numerous logical and factual errors, and an abrupt, shocking conclusion effectively redirects attentions that might otherwise uncover these.

We might call the genre of argument under discussion strongly connotative. Such arguments utterly ignore the meanings of their own statements. Instead, the assertion holds itself together with a hastily formed network of strongly emotional cues and associations, and often gains much of its strength from the charisma, expertise or authority attributed to the speaker. Surprising or not, this strategy is incredibly effective: statements that would otherwise seem ridiculous suddenly "just make sense" when buoyed up on a tide of powerful feeling and apparent urgency. Connotation is an essential part of human communication; intonation, volume of speech, choice of words and all sorts of non-verbal cues influence the meaning of statements as much as their basic meaning. (Imagine a nervous air traveler asking a stewardess, "Is there a problem?" on hearing an unsettling noise from deep in the mechanical bowels of the airplane. Now imagine Chuck Norris or Robocop uttering the same words to a gang of thugs caught in the act of robbing a quaint little mom-and-pop store. Notice the difference?) What makes this style of argument especially dangerous is the plasticity of association, which allows connections to be arbitrarily drawn between ideas and then strongly reinforced through persistent repetition. As a result, spurious connections made in the course of very short but often-reproduced "arguments" seem progressively more "obvious" each time they are repeated. This connotative manner of arguing allows bad ideas to slip past better judgements and to enter that mysterious place occupied by "common knowledge", where they can propagate unchecked.

A number of commentators have used this strategy to produce some extremely virulent and extremely divisive cultural associations in the past twelve months. I don't wish to catalog or even mention any of them here; they are not topics of serious debate but merely outlets of frustration that offer no hope for a resolution on either side. In essence, this is just what they are designed to be: a mechanism for stirring up deep-rooted cultural resentments and at the same time effectively stopping all discussion of the underlying problems. This is a very powerful tactic, but it has a very serious weakness: such arguments utterly collapse when you "try them at home." The analogy to a magic trick is a particularly strong one here. When you see a magician seem to make the Statue of Liberty disappear, or apparently allow himself to be buried alive in a straight-jacket only to escape, you are forced to conclude either that (1) there's something he's not showing or telling you, and that something allows him to produce a convincing illusion or (2) he has super-powers. Without weighing the relative merits of (1) and (2), consider that the matter would be largely settled if you discovered some ordinary and decidedly un-magical way to produce an illusion similar to that produced by the magician. (One could try to argue that, even though your buried-alive spectacle uses boring old non-paranormal tricks and gizmos, it could still be that Criss Angel is wielding some unearthly powers to achieve his own dazzling, albeit identical, feats. If that were the case, one would be inclined to ask, "What's the point of supernormal powers with strictly normal effects?" or "Why wouldn't you want to use your powers for something that can't be done with a matchbook, a box of baking soda, and an ordinary household toothbrush?") Seeing a way to reproduce the illusion, you could safely assure yourself that it was possible to comprehend what you saw. Similarly, really sound and truthful argument should not depend solely upon your willingness to accept that a verbal spectacle is exactly what it appears to be. Many of today's commentators are skilled showmen and manipulators of appearance. That's not to say that every word they speak is categorically wrong, only that the listener should take special care to watch their hands and to remain undistracted by sparklers and smoke-bombs. Remember, some people make their living by fabricating dramatic and captivating illusions.

When you're presented with an argument, don't just sit there and be passively convinced. Collect all of the information that the speaker gives you, and make an honest effort to reproduce his argument as a series of reasonable conclusions. Take your time. If a step doesn't seem utterly transparent, then take special pains to convince yourself that it makes sense. It is amazingly difficult to discover something new about the world. Don't just assume that what you hear is "news" just because you haven't heard it before.

Most importantly, don't be discouraged if the world seems like a huge and deeply confusing place. This is a very human fear. Instead of driving us apart into bitter factions, it can bring us together in a collective search for the truth.

Ignorance Considered Un-Blissful

2009-08-27T22:59:00.000-07:00

I don't like the old aphorism, "Ignorance is bliss." It's often repeated, in one sense or another, but I don't think it's ever true in any literal sense. Please allow me to elaborate.

Does knowing less make you happier? Some people would say 'yes', and some people would say 'no', and I think that intelligent individuals on both sides could probably give some kind of reasonable argument to defend their position. In particular, I think it is quite reasonable to say that knowing more does indeed provide more opportunities for complication in one's life. Knowledge brings responsibility and worry, both of which can become burdensome to even the most responsible or courageous among us. In fact, it seems likely that the saying that "ignorance is bliss" originated in the observation that knowing more gives more to worry about.

The motivating observation that knowledge brings worry seems reasonable, so let's explore it. Let's presume that a worry-free state is a blissful state, and let us also suppose that you know nothing -- nothing at all! If you know nothing, it seems to follow that you would have nothing to worry about, and having nothing to worry about, it seems to reasonably follow that you would be situated in a blissful state. (If you know nothing at all and you still haven't attained bliss, then ignorance-as-bliss would appear to be thoroughly invalidated right off the bat.) The chain of deductions seems sound enough, but what exactly could it mean to "know nothing"? Personally, I think it seems absurd to postulate a well-defined mental state where you somehow "know nothing" (without, of course, getting into a tortured semantics of what constitutes "knowledge"). All the same, let's suppose there is such a state, and let's suppose that, somehow or another, you were able to attain it. Then what? Does it seem plausible you could stay there?

There's a respected tradition in modern science of analogizing the dynamics of energy (heat in particular) to the flows of information, dating back to the work of pioneers such as Shannon (and the equally essential contributors to this tradition, such as Lebesgue and Boltzman and many others who are much less often credited in popular science literature). It is a gross understatement that a perfect thermal insulator (i.e. a surface that conducts no heat whatsoever) would be very difficult to construct. Try it at home if you don't believe me! (Or, see the nice summary of some relevant proofs in Enrico Fermi's "Thermodynamics", (1956).) In an analogous sense, it would be extremely difficult to construct a perfect informational insulator. Try this one at home too! One way to phrase our "perfect ignorance" or "know-nothing" problem, then, is in terms of constructing a perfect insulator. Whole sub-disciplines of engineering are devoted to developing better thermal insulators, and whole areas of research in mathematics are focused upon understanding the differential equations describing the conduction of heat. Keeping things that are hot from heating up things that are not so hot turns out to be amazingly useful, and much harder than it may seem at first. If the analogy between knowledge and heat seems strange, consider this: extremely active areas of theoretical computer security are just as occupied with the problem of keeping information from crossing boundaries it isn't supposed to cross. A classic formulation of this challenge is known as the "Confinement Problem" and, stated succinctly, it is the problem of ensuring that a particular computer system never "leaks" information that it needs to keep secret. (See Lampson, "A note on the confinement problem" in Communications of the ACM, October 1973.) In essence, both the thermal insulator problem and the Confinement Problem are occupied with making sure that what's in one place -- whether heat or information -- doesn't somehow find its way into another place where it isn't wanted. More succinctly, you cannot keep information confined to just one particular place. As a consequence, it would seem that you cannot keep all information out of your mind forever, even if you wanted to.

Now a problem arises. If you can't keep information out of your mind, you're going to start knowing things, whether you want to or not. There are various ways you might try to resist the informational torrent of your own experience but, apart from self-immolation, it would require a concerted effort through every moment of the day to sustain your attempts to block all sensory input, not to mention to instantly snuff out any stray thoughts from inside your own mind. Something important has happened here: without realizing it, you've developed a worry. Moreover, it is a worry that is inextricably rooted in your own desire to be free from worry. Paradoxically, knowing that ignorance is bliss gives you just enough knowledge to form a worry and work yourself into a decidedly un-blissful state. Total ignorance is fundamentally unstable and impermanent. This is no more strange than a hot cup of coffee eventually getting cold.

(Compare the "worry about worry" in the preceding paragraph to divergent oscillatory behavior in feedback systems with too high a latency. Norbert Wiener gives some poetic descriptions of these in "Cybernetics: Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine" (1948). Compare also to a classic parable from the literature of Zen Buddhism, namely the story of the girl who believed her head had somehow been removed without her knowledge; a retelling can be found in "The Three Pillars of Zen", Kapleau (1989).)

There is some extremely wild territory we could wander into at this point, but let's remain focused on the matter at hand. What I've essentially argued is that, even if ignorance is blissful, it's hardly something you can count on. A consequence of this is either that you're going to have your blissful ignorance suddenly and very unpleasantly interrupted at some point unforeseeable by you ("the rude awakening") or you're going to worry yourself sick in anticipation ("it's the waiting that's the worst"). Ignorance is not bliss at all; quite the contrary. Ignorance is danger. Ignorance is fear.

What is especially interesting about this line of argument is that it is perfectly scalable. We need not assume any sort of idealized and extremely implausible know-nothing state; what we have said above we can say about ignorance of anything arbitrarily specific or arbitrarily general. But if ignorance isn't bliss, then what is? And if ignorance is dangerous and frightening, then how do we explain all the worry and difficulty that comes with knowledge? More importantly, how do we resolve all that worry and difficulty? I think an obvious answer would be, "Do something!"

But what exactly should we do?

That's a very important question.

A Bridge to a Bridge to Nowhere: A Short Critique of Transhumanism

2009-08-26T10:31:00.000-07:00

One thing that I must credit to the Transhumanist movement is its advancement of ideas that are extremely bold and extremely forward-looking. Not everyone may see this boldness as a credit, but certainly any sensible observer has to acknowledge it. One of the central and most radical ideas of the movement might be termed the "Objection to Death" or "Suffering as an Engineering Problem." (Though I mean for these terms to be neutrally descriptive, they are not, to the best of my knowledge, used within Transhumanist circles.) Concisely, the Transhumanist view is that many, or perhaps all kinds of human suffering can be ameliorated or even eradicated through the proper application of technology. It should be pointed out that, as uncomfortable as the aims of Transhumanism seem to make a lot of people feel, the express Transhumanist bias toward technological applications whose motives are unambiguously benevolent is at least admirable. This view is especially noteworthy when contrasted with more conventional attitudes toward technology, which purpose it simply as a means to power or profit, whether for good or for ill. Even more noteworthy, however, is the potential of the Transhumanist program to upset centuries of social and cultural organization motivated around certain basic constants of biological human existence.

The Transhumanist initiative is quite earnest and already under way. By his own account, accomplished scientist and entrepreneur, and prominent Transhumanist Ray Kurzweil takes several hundred pills a day ("The Singularity Is Near", Kurzweil, 2005) in a bid to extend his natural life long enough to benefit from even more radical life-extension technologies whose development he anticipates in the near future. Mr. Kurzweil terms this the "Bridge to a Bridge" strategy (ibid), an allusion to expectations that the hastening pace of scientific paradigm shift and engineering know-how will allow human lives to be extended through a succession of different technologies. Immortality of any degree has long been a human fixation, and so one can hardly doubt Mr. Kurzweil's sincerity. What is remarkable is the coherence and proactive organization of the initiative: Mr. Kurzweil's program of radical technological life extension, organized in collaboration with medical doctor Terry Grossman, is apparently so well developed that it is being marketed to the general public. Although I would argue that Transhumanism is a distinctly apocalyptic cultural movement, I cannot help but give Mr. Kurzweil credit for taking immortality into his own hands. However, rather than debate the relative virtues or vices of technological life extension, I would like to examine the Transhumanist response to death when death cannot be avoided.

I agree with the thesis that radical life extension may become possible in the near future. I also agree with the thesis that technological advancement has the potential to greatly enhance the quality and the extent of human life, perhaps even to the degree that the human lifespan does become indefinitely long. However, I fail to see how either of these theses in any way exclude catastrophe. Suppose I am in excellent health, benefitting from all of the latest advancements in health-, youth-, and vitality-technology, but while crossing the street on my way to an appointment with my life-extension consultant, I am hit by a speeding bus and instantly killed. You may object and say that, if I had been really serious in my desire to stay alive indefinitely, I would have been more scrupulous in looking both ways before I cross the street, or perhaps avoided busy streets altogether. Suppose I do just that, and live to an age contemporary with the development of full-body prostheses. But suppose then that, in my hurry to adopt the latest advancements, I come to inhabit a robotic body with a serious design flaw, as a result of which my life-sustaining functions suddenly and unexpectedly fail and I expire before repairs can be made. You may object that such dangerous technology would never be rushed to market, and that we should expect a thoroughly developed infrastructure for the care and maintenance of such bodies, to ensure that such episodes do not happen. That's not unthinkable. So suppose then that I live into a ripe old advanced technological age, and all information constituting my identity is uploaded into a global computer network where it can reproduce arbitrarily, instantiating itself in as many and as widely varied forms as it sees fit, whether corporeal or otherwise. This is certainly consistent with visions that Mr. Kurzweil himself has put forward. But suppose that in spite of all this, war breaks out and an electromagnetic pulse weapon fries all computer hardware on which my various infomorph copies live, or suppose that a runaway hoarde of pathologically replicating nanobots devours our civilization, clones and cyborgs and machine-ghosts and all, or suppose that no source of energy sufficiently cost- or labor-efficient to power our advanced technological civilization ever materializes, and all our gadgets, including our high-tech selves, simply expire? It's easy to see that this list could go on indefinitely. I think it is equally reasonable to say that each unlikely, but possible, doomsday scenario could easily be met with some no-less-likely, and no less possible, solution. Sure, something could go terribly wrong, but on the other hand, we could find a way to set it right. Sure, things might greatly improve, but that doesn't mean nothing bad will ever happen again.

This problem-solution dialectic highlights an essentially reactive feature of technological solutions: new technologies always arise in response to real or perceived problems. We may develop technology in anticipation of a problem, for example, techniques for diverting an asteroid on a collision course with Earth. It may also happen that unexpected benefits accrue in addition to those expected with the development of something new -- perhaps you could use a computer printer to build living organs (see Boland, Damon, and Cui, "Applications of Inkjet Printing to Tissue Engineering", Biotechnology Journal, 2006). Nonetheless, it seems unreasonable to expect that we can anticipate all problems before they arise, or that unforeseen secondary applications of existing technologies could account for all contingencies. The Transhumanist position is very proactive, in that is emphasizes a sort of "eternal hope" in the form of ever more ingenious solutions to ever deeper and ever more insidious problems. Personally, I find this attitude commendable. An underlying assumption of the Transhumanist position seems to be that the problem-solution dialectic could go on as long as humankind sees fit. I see no reason for challenging this assumption. At the same time, an inexhaustible supply of technological solutions in no way implies an exhaustible supply of human problems, technological or otherwise.

I would tend to side with Mr. Kurzweil that claiming certain problems as unsolvable, without empirical proof or rigorous deduction to back up the claim, is staking out a regressive position. I'd like to take special care here to distinguish unqualified impossibility from the more precise notion of relative impossibility. For example, it can be rigorously shown that no machine functionally equivalent to Turing's famous abstraction is capable of determining whether any given Diophantine equation has an integer solution. However, this is quite different from claiming that there no possible way to determine whether the very same equation has the sought-after solution. (For a less airy example of what I mean, consider that you can't get blood from a turnip, but that doesn't mean that it's impossible to get blood from anywhere.) To argue that A is impossible by method B is a sensible argument that can proven or disproven, and is at least exact enough to debate in a reasonable way. To claim that A is unconditionally impossible is to advance an incomplete argument, and oftentimes implicitly presumes but doesn't state a certain method or collection of methods for accomplishing A. As such, any argument to the effect that indefinite human life extension is simply impossible would need to show that no conceivable technology could ever accomplish this end, and thus entails the daunting task of attempting to characterize 'all conceivable technologies'. At this point, many Transhumanist critics resort to the argument that there is something fundamentally misguided or evil about human augmentations or artificial life extension, but it is beyond my present scope to discuss this class or moralistic objections. Instead, let's presume that radical technological life extension is entirely possible, and examine the consequences. What would be the consequences to Mr. Kurzweil and his fellows living for as many centuries as they pleased, aided by a succession of dazzling scientific and technological advancements?

I contend that there are no meaningful consequences to humans "transcending biology" (Kurzweil, 2005). This may seem a very strange and surprising twist of the argument, so please let me explain. In the preceding paragraph, we constructed an argument that effectively voids any objections that the Transhumanist program is impossible in principle. (Note, however, that impossibility in practice is an important matter in its own right.) Essentially, this argument says, "You can't foresee technological solutions that haven't been invented yet, so you can't claim that they won't be able to solve problems that we're already aware of." However, this argument has a natural and equally valid dual, obtained by simply swapping the roles of 'human problem' and 'technological solution'. Essentially, the same line of argument that allows for a continuous train of successive technological solutions also has that you cannot foresee the full extent of solutions that haven't been implemented yet. In some sense, our material problems are invented artifacts, in exactly the same way that our technological solutions are invented artifacts. It's true that you can't dismiss the effectiveness of a solution that hasn't been conceived and implemented yet, but it's equally true that you can't dismiss the reality or seriousness of a problem that hasn't yet arisen and confonted you either. There are always problems. That's just life. Radical life extension and cyborgs and strong AI or not, human civilization is going to just keep doing what it's been doing.

This is a basic underpinning of Mr. Kurzweil's argument in Singularity, as his argument for the coming technological revolution is at least partially historical and inductive. This distinction I make between my own views and those of the Transhumanist community is that there seem to be deeply personal motivations behind much of the enthusiasm for radical life extension. This is not surprising; zest for life and fear of death are both very natural, and it is not strange that people should dearly want to keep on living and to keep from dying. What I would be interested to hear addressed in greater detail is what these zealous exponents of the future have to say about the specters of disaster that have always hovered at the periphery of human life. It is a fine thing to wish to live for centuries and do it by means of advanced technology. But how will you cope with the unavoidable possibility that this might not happen, or that your aspirations might be unexpectedly cut short? I feel that the arguments I have laid out here make the convincing point that, even if humans as a civilization do conquer aging and death the way we have conquered illness and scarcity, substantial problems will always remain for us. Take note that, in spite of dramatic improvements in overall quality of life for humanity in aggregate, people still get sick and people still go hungry, and a great many still get sick enough or go hungry enough to die from it. Transhumanism as a coherent movement is cultural, but not spiritual. This distinction may be deliberate on the part of Transhumanists, but it is very important to make note of. There are strong undercurrents of a sort of spirituality in much of the Transhumanist literature out there, and it would be very interesting to see them come forward and made explicit in the writings of some prominent exponent of the moment. What bearing do these more esoteric, less empirical views have on the inescapable shadows of catastrophe and failure?

If there is any danger in the Transhumanist movement, it is not that its success will somehow rip away everything that we hold dear in our culture, but that it will change the face of our whole way of life at great expense, leaving us with something essentially the same as what we had before. It would be interesting to apply similar arguments to technological revolutions of the past. What about the Industrial Revolution? What about the Agricultural Revolution? Certainly, it would bring more of the relevant issues into sharp focus. I am not arguing here that we should fear or resist change. Rather, I am arguing for a measured and perhaps more reasoned attitude toward change, one that makes a clear distinction between enthusiasm for personal motives and arguments about the future developments of the vast, social, cultural, and technological edifice that is our civilization. Romantic critics should not worry themselves too much. Transhumanists are not going to solve all our problems. We can always invent more.

In the end, this reduces to the fundamental philosophical question of technology: What exactly is it that we're trying to accomplish?

Goodbye Johnny, Hope All Your Days in Hell Are Sunny

2009-08-23T20:32:00.001-07:00

(Abe Schulz; August 23, 1986 to December 11, 2004)

Why should death be like an abrupt awakening when there are so many other moments in life? Each moment is the moment of truth, and each one tells us the same thing.

I never had the opportunity to personally see the mural displayed above. I heard rumors about it, but by the time that I visited the place, it had been white-washed over.

Looking back on it, I think to myself now, "Ah, it makes so much sense. A wide-open space for the next image to unfold. The agents of destruction have left behind a perfect beginning."

Freedom leaves no trace behind. There's nothing to grieve over, and lots to do.

How To Talk and Listen

2009-08-23T20:22:00.000-07:00

Always seek a better understanding of the truth. You should make your views accord with what is true, not the other way around. There is no one who knows everything. There never has been, and there never will be.

Treat all other participants as comrades in a collaborate effort of understanding. This includes showing due respect for all involved. There are differences, but there should never be enemies

If you notice you have made a mistake, readily acknowledge it. Do this regardless of whether you yourself notice, or whether the mistake is pointed out. Mistakes are inevitable; there should be nothing extraordinary or shameful about them.

Do not resort to coercion of any kind. Do not insult. Do not present ideas in a way that is gratuitously offensive or disturbing. Emotions are powerful; see to it that you use this power tactfully, rather than allowing yourself or others to be used by it

Listen, and earnestly try to understand the viewpoints of all involved. Try to understand people and arguments on their own terms. There are always reasons that people say and believe the things that they do, and even if their chain of reasoning is muddled or unsound, they may have access to information or experience that you do not.

hello world

2009-08-22T11:10:00.000-07:00

hello world