watching the world turn.

Following on from other’s recent discussions of crime and punishment, I offer these completely unhelpful transhumanist thoughts:

• A mind from the past can become completely different from the one that committed the crime. So is it fair to punish someone in the present, when their current mind state bears as much similarity to the mind that committed the crime in the past is it does to a completely separate person?
• A body replaces most of it’s cells over the course of many years. So it’s not really someone’s body we convict, but their structure. What happens when people can upload? Supposing we can represent that structure digitally or otherwise (but in a form of easily copy-able data) what happens to the replicates of that individual? Are they convicted as well? Does it become illegal for other people to harbour that sequence of data, even if it’s in stasis and getting no processor time? (which is essentially the same as dead, but with the difference of being revivable at a moments notice)
• Continuing from the assumption that it’s the structure of a criminal we want to punish/remove from society: Since a baby is essentially derived from the fair proportion of the parent’s structure, if the parent commits a crime, then shouldn’t the child also be considered a criminal? Even though the child takes some of it’s structure from the other, hopefully non-criminal, parent, the first point seems to imply that exact similarity isn’t required.

(Note, most of these thoughts are me just musing on a theoretical level that is not at all pragmatic. I don’t actually believe children of criminals are also guilty)

I just finished reading Global Brain. There were lots of parts deserving of comment, but I wouldn’t really be adding anything to the discussion except saying “Look, THIS” and pointing at quotes. Suffice to say, I think it’s worth reading (and if anybody wants to borrow it, they are welcome to – it’s actually quite short, since the book is essentially half references and notes).

Anyhow, there was one part that resonated with me that was related to my attempt to be open and honest about certain aspects of my life, which is unfortunately in conflict with what the law deems to be true. This particular piece is discussing a Baptist town in New York State which is fervently against this “era’s godless sins”, and how the reality was that most individuals indulged in those same sins to their holy shame, assuming that they were the only transgressors:

“How completely the annointed had commandeered collective perception became apparent when Schanck asked the closet dissenters how other people in the community felt about face cards, liquor, a smoke, and levity. Hoodwinked by suppression, each knew without a doubt that he was the sole transgressor in a saintly sea. He and he alone could not control his demons of depravity. None had the faintest inkling that he was part of a silenced near-majority.

Here was an arch lesson in the games subcultures play. reality is a mass halucination. We gauge what’s real according to what others say. And others, like us, rein in their words, caving in to timidity. Thanks to conformity enforcement and to cowardice, a little power goes a long, long way.”

Obviously that’s an extreme version of the issue I’m obtusely referring to, since within our personal groups there is openness about these things. But to go beyond that, and announce it to your work colleagues is to risk job loss. However, without facing that risk, we are buying in to the validity of those laws. I don’t suggest anyone do so, but it’s a difficult catch 22 situation to be in.

I’ve recently been rereading Howard Bloom’s Global Brain. A book I originally read in my second year of university. The first time, I found it incredibly interesting and it became a running joke with my girlfriend at the time about me saying “Global brain this! Global brain that!”. Anyhow, suffice to say, I felt it was influential to my intellectual life and wanted to revisit it with the wisdom of 8 more years (the other two major books that influenced me being Michio Kaku’s Hyperspace and his later book Visions, which I may reread and possibly summarise here).

One serendipidous clash of ideas that occurred recently was me stumbling across the triangle of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. For those that haven’t come across this pyramid before, it’s a frequently mentioned model for representing the psychology of human motivation. What it purports to show is that the higher level desires only really manifest once the lower needs are met. So at the very lower level we have physiological needs like breathing, water and food, and at the level above that we have the need for safety, and then social needs. In other words, it’s very hard to be concerned about whether you’ve got a date this weekend if you can’t breath right now! If you’re interested in more detail about what falls in each level, check out Wikipedia as I’m going to move on and connect this to something Bloom talks about in Global Brain…

Basically, Bloom talks about the rise of systems with ever more complexity and the sharing of information. From self-assembling molecules that pre-dated life, all the way to the internet. Bloom points to 5 or 6 characteristics of these complex adaptive systems that lead to them evolving and proliferating. Two of these characteristics are conformity enforcers and diversity generators.

Conformity enforcers are things that ensure the system maintains coherence. It’s why all our cells work together and why we kill off foreign bodies (since they don’t conform to the antigen mould expected by cells of the ‘self’) and why conservative society frowns on errant behaviour.

Diversity generators allow a system to try out new ideas, and often a certain amount of diversity is needed for a system to actually properly manifest itself. Since after all, despite our cells having essentially identical DNA, they differentiate into physiologically different forms. Likewise, in human society, we all specialise… even in the most conservative of cultures.

My hypothesis is, that the ratio of diversity to conformity in human society is related to the fulfilment of individual’s hierarchy of needs. A bias towards lower levels will lead to a pressure for conformity, whereas a large number of society’s members reaching the level of self-actualization leads to individuals following more independent and unique paths.

However, that’s all well and good, but since adaptive systems need conformity to retain coherence, many societies enforce or promote a deficiency in one of these needs, in effect inhibiting self-actualization.

For example, institutions such as religion instill a inferiority complex: e.g. you are born with original sin putting in a firm block at the ‘esteem’ level. Many others try to convince it’s practioners to refrain from sex except under particular conditions or circumstances, making it difficult to even go beyond the first physiological level without first meeting these conditions.

Sparta was one of the greatest conformity enforcing societies (see Global Brain for details) and was able to push it’s citizens to the very bottom of the triangle. They were deprived of food growing up and forced to steal (all part of the training). My hypothesis does fall down a bit (as does Maslow’s hierarchy) as the Spartans apparently did have some higher needs such as sociality and esteem met. They were essentially a big gang, and considered the people of the societies they ruled over as inferior.

Global Brain frequently compares Sparta and Athens as opposing ends of the conformity vs. diversity balance. One of the things that lead me to the hypothesis was that, in Athens – the diversity king, individuals had a wealth of choice. They could find the group they fit in best and there was plenty of potential to explore new ideas, both of which I’d consider major aspects of self-actualization.

Last night I had a wistful musing about starting a political party in New Zealand, due to my constant annoyance of my perception of everyone in parliament treading the line and being too paralysed/cynical/stupid to really change anything. Tatjna made the insightful comment that this is naturally what happens when people enter politics, entering with high ideals and wanting to change the world, but gradually having to compromise while working at small changes to the original goal ends up diluting that former grand goal.

When I was 19 I wanted to start a political party. Yeah, at the time, I mostly I thought it’d be a hoot. I wasn’t at all political (except for the general bafflement at politician’s idiocy at times), and I wasn’t one of those students that joined the clubs of other political parties. I did once run for student president at Canterbury University, except that was also a joke campaign: “1 of 5 New Zealanders have a mental illness, and I’m representing them”, “I will fight off pirates with my l33t ninja skillz”… a whole 100 people voted for me! Which surprised me, given that I didn’t even know 100 people and not everyone who was my friend was comfortable voting for my madness.

However, I still have those thoughts about starting a party. And then I also thought, “Hey! I also know a lot of intelligent and sometimes outspoken people who’ve got personal campaigns of things they want changed”. So maybe I will, after all. What would be my stance be on various topics? Well, I’d have to think about it some more, but generally, I will have a number of wild, outlandish ideas so that on the off chance I did get in, and even if politics diluted my idealism, one of those wild ideas might filter through…

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A friend of mine, JMM knew that I’ve been funded in the past by SIAI to work on OpenCog, so he asked the following question:

“The Singularity Institutes “main purpose” is meant to be to investigate whether a recursively improving intelligence can maintain “friendliness” towards human kind. “

Okay, but my standpoint is: Why does the recursively improving intelligence need to be non-human? It seems counter-intuitive to me to devolve this power to something outside of ourselves – and also a bit like we’re just trying vainly to become a kind of God, creating another type of being.

I think the main reason there is a focus on AI rather than improvement of human intelligence is because it’s so damn hard to do experiments on people’s brains. It’s ethically difficult to justify various experiments, and it only gets harder as things become more regulated (and rightfully so for the most case). I think they’ll definitely be continuing research into this stuff though. For myself, occasionally taking Modafinil enhances my productivity significantly (so long as I maintain focus on what I’m meant to be doing, it’s easy to get enthralled with something that interests me, but isn’t related to my work).

But there’s no exclusion of human intelligence amplification from the singularity concept. If we create smarter humans, then this begets even smarter humans. Again we can’t really predict what those enhanced “humans” would do, because they are a significant step smarter than us.

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An essay by Paul Graham on Why Nerds are Unpopular:

When I was in school, suicide was a constant topic among the smarter kids. No one I knew did it, but several planned to, and some may have tried. Mostly this was just a pose. Like other teenagers, we loved the dramatic, and suicide seemed very dramatic. But partly it was because our lives were at times genuinely miserable.

Bullying was only part of the problem. Another problem, and possibly an even worse one, was that we never had anything real to work on. Humans like to work; in most of the world, your work is your identity. And all the work we did was pointless, or seemed so at the time.

…

And there was no way to opt out. The adults had agreed among themselves that this was to be the route to college. The only way to escape this empty life was to submit to it.

Which, in my personal experience is completely true.

I’m a lot happier when the work and tasks I’m doing have a reason. Written problems bored me silly, and I got much more reward back from helping my friends with them. Scripted laboratory work was similar, although a little better.

Perhaps that’s why I liked computer science early on. It was possible to easily experiment with whatever you liked. You didn’t need the tutors to arrange the right chemicals or reagents beforehand (as in biochemistry or genetics).

For a while I’ve wondered how to efficiently and unobtrusively power cybernetic implants. To me, the idea of having to replace batteries and recharge things that are part of my body is antithetical to the whole idea of implants. Implants should blend with organics and utilise the natural power sources within the body.

So, how much wattage does the human body produce naturally? Well, this is what the Basal Metabolic Rate (BMR) indicates, or more accurately, it indicates the average amount of energy expended on day-to-day activities… if you had a particularly active day then this would jump up higher.

There’s a BMR calculator here and according to it, my BMR is 1906 kcal/day. This works out to about 92 Watts… not much more than a light-bulb*!

In order to tap into this energy source, we need to adopt one of the energy currencies of the body. Some ideas might be glucose, ATP, or the electron transport chain (although the latter two are generally intracellular processes, so I’m guessing it’d be harder and potentially more dangerous to try these). Further, there should probably be some regulation of utilising the body’s energy, so that if these energy substrates drop too low in concentration then the implants should either switch off and warn their user that blood glucose levels are low.

As a result of this, it’ll give you an excuse to eat more delicious food to power your implants. Or, if you’re trying to lose weight, you could run the main processor overnight to encode your previous day’s memories to xvid – or regularly present the vocabularies of 5 foreign languages to your brain as you dream – hablo castiano un pocho )

But then, a negative consequence of having more implants is exactly this – your body will have to work harder to sustain them. Depending on the strength you place on metabolic rate affecting longevity, more implants could then start reversing the gradual increase in lifespan we’ve been seeing during the last couple of centuries. Of course, they’ll be plenty of others trying to come up with engineered ways to halt or reverse this metabolic aging.

Anyhow, I hope the cyberneticists are taking this all into account, because it first gives designers an idea of the wattage they have to play with and also because I’d really prefer to avoid having to plug myself in at night!

* 1906 * 4.18 kJ/kcal * 1 day / 8.64e4 sec = 92.2 Watts. And upon conducting research about this, NASA and HP labs have made the comment in the past that the human body produces about the same amount of energy as a 100 Watt light-bulb needs.

Time is the one precious commodity. You can’t change what you do with it, you can’t rewind the steady increase of entropy. Even though it may decrease locally, across the whole universe it’s alway on the rise (at least as far as physicists have collectively determined… I’m sure that there are eccentric exception that think otherwise).

In relation to that, our attention is also precious. So what, and more specifically, who, do we pay attention to?

In Accelerando, by Charles Stross, the author introduces the concept of reputation markets, where someone’s reputation can be bartered a bit like a final currency.

I kind of like the idea. You could immediately get a sense of whether you should trust someone or not, and whether you want to hire them for a particular job. On a more day-to-day level, hooking in things like car registration numbers means that people could provide feedback on the driving on others… “sure you might be a nice person to work with generally, but behind the wheel you’re a nutter who also refuses to indicate out of round-abouts” (that might be my pet peeve along with tail-gaters and people that don’t know how to merge).

Of course, this is flawed first by the privacy implications and also by the fact the people are more likely to feel the need to report negative experiences than positive.

In the past, I’ve written about the drug like effects of love. When I wrote that, it was from a retrospective viewpoint based on my prior experience but while single.

Now I find myself in love again, with a fantastic woman, and it’s interesting to be just a little bit more aware of the psychological stuff that goes on. The warm feeling of love, the companionship, and the equality.

However, there have also been the less pleasant effects. For instance, I’ve noticed that after spending a lot of time with my partner, and then going to a period of her absence, the day after I feel listless and generally down. “Of course” you say, “that’s what it’s like, you miss your partner when you’re apart!”. I understand that, and I don’t want to be indifferent to when the next time I’ll see her will be. It’s nice looking forward to spending time with someone. At the same time however, I wish the physiological effects were not so real, because they don’t actually contribute to my mental health as far as I can tell. After the initial down, I fortunately remember that I really appreciate and enjoy my time alone and get to work on a variety of fantastic and interesting projects. Time as an individual cements the concept of my independent self, which I think is important, so that when I spend more time with my partner I have more to offer.

In fact, she’s expressed similar ideas, but from a different angle. Bringer together two whole people is more amazing than seeking yourself in or minimising yourself for another.

I while ago I finished “What the Dormouse said” by John Markoff, subtitled “How the 60s counterculture shaped the computer revolution”. Although I was vaguely aware of the use of LSD in the development of the internet and personal computing, this book made it a lot clearer… particularly about how prolific it was. It was actually used as an enabler for team planning meetings of major businesses! Circuit designers would use it to visualise and solve logic problems (how exactly they did this with the other associated effects going on, I’m not sure, perhaps dose high enough for loss of consciousness of the external world?).

In reverse, the internet itself is a prolific source of drug information. Users (double meaning unintended) are essentially anonymous, there is a large amount of information available. Knowledge of new “research chemicals” can quickly be disseminated. Books that have been made difficult to obtain due to their possibly controversial nature (e.g. Pihkal) can be shared P2P. Suppliers of various substances can actually sell and ship research chemicals to people despite local drug laws, partly by luck of the substances getting through local customs (some suppliers will even try multiple times if the first attempt is intercepted), but often these research chemicals are too obscure for authorities to be aware of their usage in a recreational setting. This, however getting difficult to carry out, as the authorities are also becoming more aware of the internet as a source of knowledge on recreational substances.

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