j a c k *

Be Modern, Be...

I heard about an article attacking "new" atheists by reading Ophelia and PZ thrashing the thing quite soundly. Be Scofield makes many of the common mistakes in his critique -- debating strawmen, the Courtier's Reply -- and the atheist defenders make quick work of identifying those errors. Both of them, with Greta piling on, cut out the heart of the article by addressing the central issue of atheism: is religion true? If not then atheism is justified on that basis alone, end of story.

To these excellent responses I'd only like to point out that Scofield's clumsy hatchet job is thoroughly postmodern, and can only be fully understood in that context. Postmodernism argues that truth is a kind of story, so within any community or culture the local truth they all talk about is just as true as different "truths" in other communities. As result postmodernists take the view that Science, with its interest in universal, testable truth, is a kind of western cultural imperialism. That's why he puts "reason" in quotes -- it's just another western product, like blue jeans, to be forced down the throats of less privileged indigenous people who would be perfectly happy without it.

While there may be arguments that some of the prescriptions of modernism may not be appropriate for every social context, that is never an argument to reject the entire progressive project. In a search for objective truth, which must be the very definition of truth if anything is to mean anything, the discovery that a particular idea doesn't always work is just another observation to fold into the search.

The only interesting question that Be actually raises is whether religion on the whole does more harm than good. There could be arguments either way, but they will necessarily be historical. You'd have to weigh the role of religion in Bach's masterpieces against the horrors of the Inquisition, the religious justifications of slave holders against the comfort it gave to slaves, or the religious motivations of those who wanted to exterminate the Jews against the religious motives of those who wanted to protect them. It's by no means obvious that religion would come out on top.

But whatever the result it cannot have any bearing on the question of religion versus atheism. Atheism is not about the past -- it's about how we are now and going forward into the future. Do we value truth, or do we value the not at all certain possibility of comfort over truth? This what's at stake, even if the postmodernists refuse to see it.

- jack*

Material Matters 2...

I may take a while, but I do eventually circle back to threads of thought that I start however long ago. Six years ago I argued that materialism was necessary and complete -- that an honest inquiry would conclude that everything that exists is material. Such a claim is greeted by philosophers with eye-rolling condescension, and most laypeople reject the notion as far too sweeping. I nonetheless believe I can make a convincing argument.

First of all, let me clear up some confusion. Materialism is not the same as saying that science already knows everything that can exist. It seems odd, but when I talk about materialism some people seem to confuse that with tacit acceptance of the Standard Model, which is a theory about all the kinds of particles believed to exist. It may be right or it may be wrong, but that has nothing to do with materialism. All that materialism says is that anything new discovered by science will be material. If dark matter is real then it's made of something.

Materialism is also not the same as saying that science is the only way to study the world. I'm a big fan of science, don't get me wrong. It says so right in my blog banner. But there are many legitimate forms of inquiry that are not amenable to scientific methods. The fact that we live in a material universe has no effect on the study of art and literature. Indeed those works were created by humans with physical brains, but the workings of the brain are hidden and its mechanisms are mysterious, so the physical sciences can be of no help here.

Likewise, materialism doesn't deny the existence of emotions or ideas. "What about love?" people always ask. Yes, love exists. Of course it exists. The question is: how do we know that love exists? We know it because we observe its effects. We see it demonstrated in the physical world as acts of compassion between people. Saying the words or feeling the feeling subjectively isn't enough. The stalker may feel deeply that he loves his victim, but we can determine by his actions that he's mistaken. It's this objective aspect of love, and other feelings and ideas, that grounds it and makes it meaningful. Stripped of its material aspects, love ceases to exist.

- jack*

Snowman in Lava...

John Scalzi, noted Sci-Fi writer, challenges nerds to justify their whining about how this or that isn't realistic. Why do they accept some otherwise-crazy events in the stories they read but not others?

This is about "suspension of disbelief," the foundation that allows fantasy literature to work. It's a pact between author and reader -- the author asks the reader to accept something unbelievable in exchange for an interesting story. It's a kind of bargain, but the onus is entirely on the author. If the author pushes the reader too far the bargain breaks down, and the fantasy crosses the line into the absurd.

Scalzi calls this a "Flying Snowman":

When my daughter was much younger, my wife was reading to her from a picture book about a snowman who came to life and befriended a young boy, and on each page they would do a particular activity: build a snow fort, slide down a hill, enjoy a bowl of soup and so on. The last three pages had the snowman walking, then running, and then flying. At which point my wife got an unhappy look on her face and said ‘A flying snowman? That’s just ridiculous!’

To which I said: ‘So you can accept a snowman eating hot soup, but not flying?’ Because, you know, if you can accept the former (not to mention the entire initial premise of a snowman coming to life), I’m not sure how the snowman flying became qualitatively more ridiculous.

A snowman comes to life, he eats hot soup, he flys -- what finally breaks the fantasy writer's pact? The answer is simple -- what's not required for the story. Snowmen come to life all the time in fantasy, as do all manner of anthropomorphic artifacts. But why? Do they come to life to explore the boundary between living and dead? To terrify people as unstoppable foot soldiers of darkness? Or is this a study in ice-based life forms?

No, in this case the purpose is for a human child to have a fun companion. Someone to do all the things that a child would want to do in the winter. Building, sledding, eating soup. Those all make sense for that story. For an 'ice-based life form' story soup is a problem, but for the 'companion' story eating soup is OK.

But flying? No, that doesn't fit the concept as required for the story (at least as relayed here). Thus, disbelief dissolves.

This whole discussion originated with a thread about Gollum falling into lava at the end of Lord of the Rings, and how he shouldn't have sunk. Two things about that.

First, the fantastical elements that Scalzi points out as potential flying snowmen really aren't: impossibly large spiders, talking trees, rings freighted with corrupting evil, Uruks birthed from mud. These are all really the same thing. This is a world where evil exists as a material force, and all the other oddities derive from that. Evil makes spiders huge and animates the Orcs and Uruks. Its opposing force presumably makes eagles giant and motivates the Ents. But lava's just lava.

Second, everyone always gets lava wrong. Molten rock isn't an everyday occurrence, and lava lakes aren't a human-scale phenomenon. You can't walk out on to a bridge and look down into a lava lake. The first problem is the heat. If you've ever been at a glass blowing demonstration you've gotten a tiny sample of it. When the glass furnace is open you can feel the heat biting into your flesh and the air starting to dry and heat up fast. After only a few tens of seconds it starts to become unbearable. Now imagine that expanded to fill a mountain, and opened long enough that the surrounding rock is heated through and the air is as hot as it can get. If the Hobbits managed to walk into that they'd be cooked before they got to the edge.

Of course they wouldn't get very far anyway because of the air. Melting rock releases a lot of gases, none of them fit to breathe and many of them poisonous. In what is depicted as a relatively enclosed space, unless Gollum can metabolize sulfur he'd be long dead before he got anywhere near the lava.

The fact that lava can boil and flow belies the huge forces required to move it about. It's dense, viscous and very sticky. If Gollum's body were to land in it, it would most likely lie on the top or be dragged under by the force if its movement, like a bit of straw in a pasta pot. It would then be quickly consumed, like a snowflake in hot soup.

- jack*

A Modestly Tricky Proposal...

Obama has always been a fan of precedent; he thinks it armors him from criticism. For example the first time he made recess appointments -- absolutely required since his nominees have been filibustered at a rate far higher than prior presidents -- he appointed exactly the same number as Bush did in the same period of his presidency.

So I have a suggestion.

Obama is strongest when making direct appeals to citizens, something that the GOP has tried to minimize with comical effect. Here's my idea. I'm apparently bad at The Google because I can't figure out how many times G.W.Bush made prime time addresses and how many times the filibuster -- failing to reach cloture in the senate -- happened during his 8 years. But those two things are knowable numbers that could make a ratio. Suppose Bush did one TV address for every 20 filibusters. Obama could follow the precedent.

Not explicitly. That would be kind of like bullying or just being a jerk to make it an explicit rule. But he could do it implicitly. Drop enough hints through other people that maybe that's what he was doing. Every 20 filibusters (or whatever the real number is) he'd schedule a prime time TV address. He could talk about the important legislature that was being blocked by GOP obstruction. Talking heads on TV could speculate breathlessly about how this next vote would be the 20th filibuster and what would the president talk about this time. Democratic Senate leaders could tease Republicans about whether they want to trigger another prime time speech by the president.

At the very least it would make the unprecedented use of the filibuster less of business as usual and something to be discussed as actual news.

Assuming this makes sense. My crude research suggests that although cloture votes are succeeding less frequently for Obama, there may also be fewer of them overall. So perhaps senate Dems would have to bring to heat, about which they are very weak. In any case I offer this kind of thinking as a way to get outside the box of ordinary politics that's killing us one quiet cloture vote at a time.

- jack*

Objective Free Will...

Some bloggers have recently hashed over the old dilemma about free will vs. determinism. If the future evolution of physical systems is determined by their past circumstances, they ask, and if the human brain is a physical system, then human behavior is -- at least in theory -- predetermined and predictable. And if so, do people really have free will? And can we honestly hold people responsible for their actions?

The premises are inescapable. The entirely mechanistic features of the known laws of nature are unlikely to be undermined by future discoveries. Skeptics invoke quantum fluctuation and chaos as ways out of the conclusion, but these are no help here. Both are just ways to introduce randomness into clockwork processes that average out in statistical aggregates. I don't think anyone is cheered by the idea that their decisions are mostly predetermined but might be slightly random as well.

Likewise Cartesian dualism is entirely untenable. There is no immaterial soul, no ghost in the machine. The mind is the brain and the brain is the mind and that's just all there is. Trying to rescue salutary free will is wishing for magic.

The conclusion is therefore equally inescapable: human behavior unfolds from the prior state of the brain and the environment. To the extent that the evolving state of the universe is deterministic, future human behavior is deterministic. But so what?

As human beings we don't know the state of the atoms that make up our brains, and we know even less how those states translate into actions. The problems we face are completely the opposite. We have far too little information going into decisions and often agonize over possible outcomes we can't begin to predict. Action coming out of that kind of indecision might feel like salutary free will, but that's a subjective question and I don't want to address that right now. Instead I want to address the second question: should we hold people morally accountable for their actions if they have no ability to act other than they did in any given circumstance?

Imagine a world populated by perfectly rational actors. These are not people, but are instead thinking beings with no free will who know they have no free will. They will always act to maximize their own personal benefit and, as they are all identical, they know that all their neighbors will act for themselves in the same way. Facing any decision they weigh all the evidence against everything they know and they pick the choice most likely to benefit them the most. They have human bodies, senses and limbs, but a limitless capacity for analysis and no ability to choose other than that which benefits them.

It's objectively true that cooperation is better than brute individualism. These are creative beings (that's compatible with determinism -- just look at evolution) and will eventually figure out that it's better for them personally to be part of a group than to continue to kill anyone that gets near them. (Or at least the cooperative ones will out-compete the solitary ones.) So there will develop some kind of steady state in which these rational actors -- call them Ayns -- can coexist. A kind of society.

What happens when the rational self-interest of members of this society conflict? Suppose Ayn0147 is doing quite well making baskets in exchange for membership in the group, but new member Ayn8802 intends to start making baskets as well. It's quite possible that the best, most rational response would be to kill the competition. So Ayn0147 kills Any8802 and threatens to do the same to anyone who tries to make baskets. Because that's what she determined was the rational thing to do.

As you see, although they are perfectly rational, they are nonetheless constrained by their senses. That means that they suffer -- like us -- from information asymmetry. Some of them know things that others of them don't know. They all realize, if they didn't before, that any of them might be killed by a rival without being aware of the danger beforehand. The rational action, it seems to me, is to form an anti-murder collective. Since all members of the group wish to live, and they are in constant social contact with other members of the group, they create a new rule. No murder within the group. If one group member kills another, the entire group will use their superior numbers to kill or expell the murderer.

They decide to adopt this rule because they know it will change the calculation in a way that serves each individual's best interests. Given a severe consequence for murder, killing becomes a much less attractive option. Any Ayn facing a tough decision will have to take the new rule into account, and although murder is still quite possible the potential downside will mean that other choices will generally be better for that individual's self-interest, and thus for the self-interest of all the members of the group.

By pre-stating their intentions, the group has changed the incentives. Murder may still be the rational action in some conflicts, but it will have to be done secretly.

Of course they all know this, so when murders happen it's important for the group to find and punish the culprit. This makes it even less likely for future Ayns to conclude that murder is the best of all possible options. Being highly rational they can examine forensic evidence and determine who performed the act with great accuracy.

But there's a new problem. The rule against murder is too simple; it can be exploited for fraud. It's quite possible for a fully rational Ayn, with only asymmetric access to information, to be manipulated into committing murder for what would seem like rational reasons. Highly rational beings would be good at framing others for crimes, assuming they determined that was the best course of action given what they knew. So what happens in that case? Are the Ayn willing to allow their mutual protection pact to be abused in that way?

Of course not; that wouldn't be rational. So the rule should be modified. The group's judicial body have to consider not only the outcome of an Ayn's decision, but the reasons for it as well. Perhaps Ayn4146 committed murder, but that doesn't have to be the end of the story. His analysis of the evidence indicated that murder was the best -- and therefore inevitable -- course of action. And yet because the evidence he used had been doctored by Ayn1105, his conclusion could not be faulted. He should therefore not be punished.

Even if the source of the deception could not be identified, or if there was no active deception at all, then the self-interest of the group would still be to reject summary judgment in those cases. All things being equal, rational beings would configure their social environment to prevent decisions to murder -- about which they have no control -- to lead to incorrect punishment.

This is a simple thought experiment, and I may be wrong about what it might mean in many details, and yet I think that it shows that it makes sense to develop a judicial system that takes intention into account regardless of any model of free will. We attribute free will to our neighbors, but that's not really a philosophical position. It derives from living in a community of rational beings with asymmetric access to information.

In terms of crime and punishment there is no difference between a world with free will and one without. Treating people as if they are responsible for their actions is necessary, one way or the other.

- jack*

Occupy Leverage...

I've finally realized something I should have already have known, that the Occupy Wall Street movement is about leverage. It's natural over time for those who rule to employ the law to disenfranchise those who oppose or threaten them. In the last thirty years this means that wealthy corporations and powerful business interests have been handed more and more direct control over the levers of governance, while those who might object to this concentration of power have been more and more cut out of the process.

As a proud member of the progressive blogger brigade I have sometimes wondered -- as I cataloged more and more brazen abuses of authority from the quiet comfort of my home office in my middle-class neighborhood -- "This is an outrage! Why aren't people rioting in the streets over this?" I was not alone in my confusion. But the answer was not simple.

It's entirely possible that people were protesting these outrages, but how would I or anyone not already aware have known about it? 50,000 people might have gathered in peaceful protest, but if there are no pictures anywhere did it make any difference? Remember "Free Speech Zones?" Bush and his enablers segregated protesters in pens, far away from events and nowhere near reporters, in a constitution-shredding stunt that nonetheless successfully curtailed criticism by using the force of law against citizens.

But you don't even have to look that far; there are many more subtle ways to defang the first amendment. In Zuccotti park -- the bizarrely privately owned public space that the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) protesters brilliantly decided to use as their base -- mechanical sound amplification is illegal. Apparently we must relax regulations on for-profit media, but we have to crack down on soapboxes. Go figure. Likewise other "occupy" groups have run into zoning regulations, camping regulations, use permit regulations, and more. In the age of corporate deregulation it's curious how we find our constitutional free speech and assembly rights so difficult to exercise.

In the face of these structural impediments, OWS has managed to find leverage. After realizing that officially-sanctioned marches -- no matter how large or how popular their message -- don't make the nightly news, they decided instead to park themselves in the middle of Manhattan where they couldn't be ignored. They were then ignored and discounted because of their "outsider" status for another two weeks until the powers that be overreached and sent in the police who also overreacted. Then it was a story. And every time since then that city officials and the police attacked peaceful protesters the story grew.

Likewise dealing with the lack of amplification OWS invented the "human microphone" which allows them to transmit their thoughts to each other, albeit slowly. It's inefficient and subject to ridicule, but it also embodies the very spirit of the free speech that it transmits. And more than that, it creates leverage. At a speech in Chicago, the infamous Scott Walker was interrupted and effectively shouted down by a group using the human microphone to drown out his electronic one.

Through collective action OWS has shown us that we can use the natural leverage of our superior numbers against the legal leverage of those few who are actually in power. I'm inspired and I compliment their efforts. However, this is an arms race. There can be no doubt that American aristocrats and their toadies will also discover ways to counter anything they see as effective. The destruction of multiple OWS encampments under media black-out and with DHS coordination is start of a bourgeoisie backlash. I'm cautiously confident that this movement can innovate in the face of an opposition with too much undo leverage, and that the opposition will expose its straight-up Machiavellian core for the public in the process.

- jack*

Duck Diligence...

I'm a bit behind on this one -- about two years behind -- but I only just saw it on The Daily Show recently. Pat Robertson was concerned that hate crime legislation, in addition to preventing violence against openly gay people, might protect people who have sex with ducks.

Yes, sex with ducks. That's so stupid it's not even wrong.

On the day that any individual of any species of duck demonstrates a sufficient level of awareness and intelligence to be able to legally sign contracts we can start talking about ducks having sex with humans. Until that day, however, any interaction of the type Robertson feverishly imagines would be abuse, and plain old animal cruelty.

But what does this say about the conservative concept of sex, and especially women? Robertson obviously believes that sexual attraction to fowl is bad, but completely fails to grasp -- or at least believes his audience won't grasp -- that the key distinction between this case and the case of human-human attraction is the question of agency. A duck cannot consent, a human adult can. It almost seems that for the conservative male, the agency of their sex partners is rather irrelevant.

We've certainly seen conservatives who have little regard for the agency or autonomy of women. Suffrage was won over their opposition, and every slow gain since has been met by bastions of male privilege asserting that women don't belong in the halls of power or academia. The abortion debate in particular has highlighted how little regard conservative minds give to female agency. They want abortion to be murder, but say they won't send women who self-abort to prison. How does that make sense unless all women are essentially children without the ability to make moral choices?

Authoritarian morality is rule-based. Men having sex with women is "normal" and everything else is equally abhorrent by virtue of breaking that rule. Any other object of sexual attraction -- and that's what they are: objects -- adult of the same sex, child, dog, turtle, duck -- they're all the same.

- jack*

High-Definition Liberty...

I love this story:

“The alleged purpose of Tea Party HD was to be the ‘world’s first HD provider of news about the Tea Party,’” the lawsuit states. “In reality it was an investment scheme to defraud politically conservative-minded citizens who support the Tea Party mission.”

Hard core Tea Partiers dream of a world of unfettered enterprise and no government regulation, a free market paradise where savvy investors make their fortunes on good ideas and stupid people are left with only the ashes of their own failure. Somehow in their imaginations they always end up the winners, triumphing over the less capable by virtue of their superior minds. In reality, not so much.

Investors in "Tea Party HD" not only used their genius insight to fund a straight-up fraud, once they found out they took their complaints to the taxpayer-funded justice system to cry like little babies. Ayn Rand would be spinning in her grave.

Here's the lesson. In reality a political system dominated by private enterprise is going to produce scam after scam, corruption after corruption. Capitalism is the best system ever invented for separating fools from their money, and people who believe they are smarter than everyone else end up being the sucker most of the time.

- jack*

Occupy Headspace...

The most amusingly frustrating aspect of the reaction to Occupy Wall Street is the inability in some circles to grasp what it's about. Tom Tomorrow nails it, as always. They lack a coherent message, say right-wing detractors. They need to make concrete demands, say left-wing concern trolls.

Really? You really don't see what they're about? You can't think of anything that happened in recent history that might correlate with anger at Wall Street?

Remember? Remember that one thing? Remember how the financial elite crashed the world economy and no one has ever been held accountable? Oh yeah. That little thing. Maybe that has something to do with it.

But that was the past; we need to look forward our leaders tell us. So what do the OWS protesters demand? What do they want to happen?

Really? You can't think of a single thing that they might want? You have no idea at all of an action, policy change, law or declaration that could be made by people in power that would cheer the protestors? Nothing at all that would make them feel like they were heard and could go back to their families rather than lying out in the rain and getting beaten up by cops?

You can't think of anything? Then you're a smug, complacent idiot because I can think of about fifty off the top of my head.

- jack*

UPDATE: Glen Greenwald gets it.

Extropian Wake-up Call...

Charlie Stross has a post making the rounds among skeptics and curmudgeons about how the Singularity is not particularly near and may be impossible. I agree, but largely on the conclusion not necessarily on the particulars of Stross' argument.

It was nice of Stross to link to the 1993 article by SF author Vernor Vinge that first coined the term. Vinge looked ahead, as is proper for his profession, and he found his speculations on the human future were clouded by an event he imagined to be both world-altering and imminent. He rightly called this a "singularity" -- the point where the current rules no longer apply and further extrapolation is impossible. The future beyond the singularity is governed by principles so radically different that we cannot imagine it.

Nonetheless he imagined it anyway and described an apocalypse. This result is fairly common when people try to deal with potentially powerful historical processes. Malthus famously predicted much the same when he looked into the arithmetic of population growth. Likewise, those of us who grew up in the 70's and 80's can recall the widespread belief that once there were enough nuclear weapons to destroy the world multiple times over that it was just a matter of time before we did.

The event that Vinge cannot see beyond (or can only see as the end of the world) is the development of super-human artificial intelligence. AI is an old trope in SF. We've imagined a future full of wise-cracking robots or homicidal computers for decades and no one really gave them a second thought. We would always somehow defeat them with our human cleverness or some unique biological illogic that's always better than rationality.

The modern wrinkle is Moore's Law -- the observation that computer power is increasing exponentially. How can we continue to think we'll outsmart the robots if they are always getting smarter than we are?

Formally the argument goes like this: through heroic efforts or just by accident we develop super-human AI. That AI turns its efforts to improving both the algorithms that make it intelligent, and the hardware on which it runs. Any improvements in intelligence or performance result in a faster rate of improvement. Thus a runaway feedback loop produces super-super-human AI in short order and normal meat-based humans are toast.

One counter-argument is that Moore's Law will peter out. That's true eventually, of course, but I think we're a long way from the limits of how much computation can be wrung out of small amounts of matter. Others argue that hard AI is impossible. Either the brain must be made of meat for some reason, or that human attempts to understand the brain must necessarily fail.

I disagree. I believe that AI is possible; I don't think there's anything magical about the human brain that can't be figured out or converted to an algorithm. I do believe, however, that AI is hard. It isn't going to happen by accident, or just as a result of some threshold level of complexity. The Internet isn't just going to "wake up" one day and become conscious, like some fanatics fervently hope.

This will require a theory of mind. I believe we will eventually puzzle out the mystery of how neuronal interactions create mental phenomena, including awareness and consciousness. And it will be a singular event; people will understand the world and themselves very differently after that. On the other hand much will stay the same. People will have better insights into how their own minds work but that won't necessarily produce better behaviors. The problem is that because this development requires both research and insight, we cannot put a time estimate on when it might emerge. It could be a very long time to discover a theory of mind.

Once we understand how minds work it may still be a long time before we can put that knowledge to practical use. The path from science to engineering can be grueling and tortuous, especially if the subject is complex. We have a very good theory of life; we understand how DNA works, we have a large body of work on proteins and enzymatic action, we have great models of signaling inside and among cells, and we can manipulate all of these processes in the lab. And yet the grand results of biotechnology imagined decades ago are still decades away. Life processes aren't very amenable to engineering. Mental process may be just as complex if not more so.

But suppose they aren't. Suppose that engineering minds is relatively easy, or -- given enough time and research -- we've figured out how to do it. In that case do we get a runaway AI, a Frankenstein's Monster in silicon?

No. If we have a theory of mind, and if we have experience building artificial minds, then we'll know how to build them to omit or subsume anything that could be anti-social or dangerous. There's no reason to think that any of the features that come standard with natural human minds -- greed, pettiness or tribalism -- are required for the useful application of general intelligence. Even if an AI bent on domination did arise, we'd still have AI's on "our side" that would use their super-human intelligence to counter the threat.

Could we get super-human AI without a theory of mind? Possibly. The path in that case is to wait for technological development to reach the point where a human mind can be "digitized" by scanning the configuration of neurons and their interactions. We still wouldn't know how the brain works but we wouldn't have to -- we'd just be simulating it as a program, and if the computer runs faster than the equivalent neurons then you have a faster, and therefore super, human mind.

Except that because we don't know how it works, the only way the mind simulation can function is in a simulated world with a simulated body. That has to be a huge bottleneck. What you have is not really super-human AI but rather a sub-culture of normal humans living really fast. Sure, they can think faster than physical humans, but subjectively they are still living normal -- albeit virtual -- lives.

More importantly, there's very little that these uploaded fast-humans can do to improve themselves. They could work in the field of electronics to create faster computers, thus making themselves (and every other computer) faster, but that will still require them struggling through what for them will be years of virtual college. Without a theory of mind they cannot improve their own intellect. They are just a simulation of the off-the-shelf natural-selection model, and short of simulated evolution nothing can change that.

Put simply, I think SF writers can relax for a while.

- jack*

The Importance of Expertise ...

Editors of Scientific American, Dear Sirs:

Your recent article A Test for Consciousness was subtitled "How will we know when we've built a sentient computer? By making it solve a simple puzzle." I'm puzzled how an article lacking any substance could be published at all, let alone with such grandiose headlines.

To start with the authors seem entirely ignorant of the history of Artificial Intelligence (AI) research. They state, for example:

To your computer, all pixels are just a vast, disconnected tapestry of three numbers (corresponding to three colors) with no particular meaning. To you, an image is meaningful because it is chock-full of connections among its parts, at many levels.

In the 60's people used to take the more reductionist view that computers process images as a series of ones and zeros. I guess RGB is an improvement. But let me quote from my 1976 textbook on AI The Thinking Computer by Bertram Raphael:

Therefore the problem for the software is to translate confusing arrangements of numbers into simple, meaningful descriptions of visual scenes.

In other words, software engineers have known for at least 35 years that just dealing with raw data from the sensors is not enough. The goal is to interpret perceptual data in useful ways. Perhaps common knowledge and context can be important. Indeed the authors suggest:

Today's machines can pick out the face of a likely terrorist from a database of a million of faces, but they will not know his age, his gender or ethnicity, whether he is looking directly at the viewer or not, or whether he is frowning or smiling. And they will not know that if he is shaking hands with George Washington, the photograph is probably digitally doctored. Any conscious human can apprehend all these things and more in a single glance.

Wait -- what? Any conscious human can identify George Washington and knows the context in which he lived? What about William Kamkwamba, aka the Boy who Harnessed the Wind? He was about as ignorant as one can be of the modern world and still be a genius. I'm sure he had never seen George Washington during his life in tribal Malawi. Is he non-sentient?

What Koch and Tononi are talking about is the "general" knowledge or "common sense" knowledge problem. This is an old, well-known issue in AI research.

While researchers were aware that in an AI system, knowledge would have to be explicitly represented, they did not anticipate the vast amount of implicit knowledge we all share about the world and ourselves. [...] In retrospect, this is perhaps not surprising, because the implicit nature of this knowledge in humans means that we all take it for granted, and never have to state it or consider it explicitly.

I could excuse this lack of scholarship if the authors offered anything new or interesting. They do not. They propose a test for consciousness that involves ranking pictures based on cultural knowledge -- something only slightly better than IQ tests that require culturally contextual interpretations. Perhaps I know that a flowerpot can't be used as a computer keyboard. Or more likely I've never seen anything like either of those things.

The most disappointing part of this terrible article is that they never answer their own questions about "sentience" or "consciousness". These are very, very important questions, and yet they just wave their hands in response. Consciousness, they say, is related to complexity of wiring, while never considering software complexity. "Sentience" is never mentioned in the article at all.

There are a lot of smarter people who came before you. You are welcome back when you have something substantive to say.

- jack*

Drastic Aspect Ratios...

Dear Internet,

You know I love you. I obsess over you every day the way my parent's generation adored their newsprint data feeds -- perhaps more so. I need you to entertain me, to inform me, and to support my enterprise. I cannot do without you.

And yet you do stuff like this. What the hell, Internet?

Let me explain.

My computer, like most, has a wide-screen "high definition" monitor. This means it's short and stout. Look at your own computer display. Most likely it's also 80% wider than it is tall, and for good reason. All current video content is 16 by 9; thus all TV screens are 16:9; therefore all computer monitors -- made by the same companies and with the same equipment as flat screen TVs -- are also 16:9. This is a mathematical manufacturing reality mysterious to no one.

On the other hand most web content is oriented vertically. Look at this very website. You will see wide expanses of empty blue on the left and the right, while the actual content of the site inhabits a narrow strip down the middle of the page that demands scrolling. Even on more fully-populated pages, the useful material tends to run vertically down the center with the peripheral areas filled with secondary links and ads.

So we see that there is already tension between the pixels that are available to show web content, and the format of the content itself. At best we are left with a narrow band of useful pixels down the middle of the screen -- the intersection between the vertical content and the horizontal display. Perhaps we can use the remaining area fruitfully with other applications, perhaps not. What's clear in any case is that vertical real-estate is at a premium, while horizontal real-estate is going to waste.

Why then -- why oh why oh why -- do internet applications insist on eating up that precious vertical space? The "free web toolbar" previously linked -- that has started showing up on sites where I mostly want to read the content thank you very much -- sucks up at least 2 or 3 lines of what could be text. To what end? Those sites all have acres of empty space to the right or left that could be used for rarely-used toolbars. These are nearly as bad as the website headers and menus that persist in taking up space no matter how much you scroll. Are web programmers really incapable of making interfaces that use the sides of the screen instead of great swaths of vertical space?

Of course it's not just the web pages; it's the browser itself. My old browser reserved vertical space for: the window title, the application menu, the navigation toolbar, the bookmark toolbar, tabs, and a status info bar. The new one removes the status info and the menu -- incorporating the latter into the window title -- and yet it still makes considerable vertical space unavailable for content. Content which cannot, by the way, take advantage of the wide open frontiers of the sides of the browser.

So here's my question, Internet. Is it really impossible to make web content -- and web browsers for that matter -- that actually fit with and fully utilize widescreen computer displays? I think it is, and I don't feel like I should be having to ask this question.

- jack*

What a Boehner...

Republican House Speaker Mr Boehner says some very strange things. For example, he has consistenly said that increasing taxes for anyone, for any reason, is not acceptable. Even if the alternative is national default, Boehner would rather trash our credit rating than raise taxes even one penny on the rich.

So why did he argue -- the very same day -- to raise taxes on rich people because they can afford to pay more? Make no mistake: means-testing of Federal insurance programs is a tax hike. If you have to pay more for the same government services then I do then you are being taxed more than I. Your higher payments are going to pay for my benefits. Apparently in this particular scenario, Mr Beohner thinks that's fair.

And if you're middle-income, lower income, we are going to pay, just like we do today, for the cost of [Medicare]. But for people of means, there's no reason why we should subsidize [their Medicare]. I'm sorry.

And most people think this is true. In fact most people think this is true in general -- that high income individuals should contribute more to funding the social insurance programs that make up the great bulk of government spending. And yet for Mr Beohner and his colleagues raising income taxes -- even a little -- is "off the table."

It's almost cute how he thinks he can hide his true meaning behind populist rhetoric. The simple fact is that means-testing Medicare kills Medicare. Once you take "rich" people out of the system --and to get any real cost savings your have to cut out a lot of the middle class -- it devolves into another welfare program for the poor, and it's easy to kill because anyone with political power has already divested. And that's what Republicans have dreamed about since Medicare was invented.

Funny how they're all for tax hikes when it achieves their policy objectives. Such principles!

I Hate C++: Template Rage...

Object-oriented programming was a very powerful idea, evidenced by the fact that it rapidly and completely overran the prior generation's structured programming as the preferred conceptual framework. It gets its power from two things:

1. Encapsulation. The idea of a software object maps very well to our understanding of objects in general. A microwave oven, for example, has a state that can be read from its LED display, and methods that can change that state in terms of buttons that can be pressed. Designing software systems this way makes their interface simpler and easier for engineers to understand. It also isolates problems, so that bugs in the microwave don't affect the refrigerator.
2. Inheritance. Just as goats have many of the same features as quadrupeds and mammals, so software objects can derive much of their functionality from older and well-debugged ancestors. While they may differ in details, well-designed base classes allow specific sub-classes to sport rich functionality with very little actual coding.

These are inherent in using object-oriented approaches. In other words, unless a language has both encapsulation and inheritance it's not object-oriented. But there's a third thing. It doesn't have a name, as far as I know, and it's inconsistent among the various examples of object-oriented languages. Objective-C handles it reasonably well, while in C++ it's a disaster.

I'll call it anonymity. This is the idea that an algorithm or object can act on other objects without having to know up-front what they are. The concept of anonymity is essential to both democracy and the free market, and for much the same reason it's important in software too. If I'm going to perform a service I don't need to know my client's life history; I just need to know enough to do what I have been hired to do.

Inheritance can take us pretty far. If an object inherits from objects of the type able to use an interface, then it can use that interface too. It doesn't reveal its ultimate identity, but it reveals it's ancestry. This is often good enough and can solve a lot of problems. Except one.

That problem is allocation, which in C++ looks like this:

new T

new is a reserved C++ keyword that must be followed by a class name. This is the only way (as far as I know!) to initiate the chain of actions required to allocate a new instance of a given object type. Invoking new allocates memory sufficient for the object and then calls a series of constructors that initialize the object from base class(es) upwards. But because C++ is a strongly-typed language, the T above is lexical -- it can only be resolved during compilation. It's not possible for me to call new on a type only known at runtime.

While there may be anonymous objects in C++, there are no anonymous types. And that is a bit of an issue, the same way a brick wall built across a freeway is a bit of an issue.

The C++ solution -- and you can see that they dimly recognized that there was a problem by designing a half-assed solution -- is templates. Templates simply allow entire functions and classes to be nothing more than macros to be invoked later when the actual types are finally known. This approach is so complex that few C++ compilers supported it at first, and even in modern compilers it still causes strange and unexpected issues.

And why? There are several things that templates are used for, but I would argue that the one that is most insurmountable is the new operation.

Objective-C solves this problem with the concept of the meta-class. This is a run-time object -- just like other objects -- that represents the class itself. new is just a method on this class. It's possible to write a function that can allocate any object based on a run-time input. This is not possible in C++. As result the anonymity afforded by templates remains reserved for small-scale classes -- things like lists and queues -- but never anything large. To do that always involves abstractions sophisticated enough to resolve the dilemma caused by new despite the limitations of the C++ language.

This is something that C++ should have handled internally, whatever the complexity, instead of presenting it as a roadblock to the programmer.

- jack*

I Hate C++: Public Privates...

My last complaint was a bit trivial, I admit. So this time let me tackle what is perhaps the worst design decision in the C++ language: all members must be pre-declared. To understand why this is so awful you have to understand something about software engineering. Not just programming like you might do as an assignment or class project, but the assembly and coordination of very large software products, the kind that span continents and decades.

Creating anything complex requires breaking it down into less complex functional units and putting them together in a coherent manner. While it's true that the parts all have to fit together correctly, the amount of information --- the level of detail -- required to mate the parts together is much less than that needed to build each of the parts. When assembling we only care about the ways the parts touch each other -- their interfaces -- and not so much about anything that happens in between those interfaces.

As a simple example, suppose you're making something that uses AC power. There's a massive infrastructure behind your wall outlet: generators, transformers, transmission lines and their control electronics, all the way to the breaker box outside your home. None of that matters. All you need to know is the if you make something with metal prongs of the right form factor you can tap into AC current of a known frequency and voltage. Following a one-page specification your appliance can get power in any home in America.

Software design follows the same principle. Every component in a large software system is defined by two things: interface and implementation. The implementation is how the component works, and it can be very complex indeed, but as long as it works correctly the only people who have to worry about it are the engineers who built it and fix it when problems are found. They're like the technicians who keep the power grid humming; unless we're having brownouts no one ever needs to think about them.

The interface, on the other hand, is everyone's concern. It's like the specification for how the software component is used -- its control system. And like all control systems (or computer user interfaces) simpler is better. Cars used to have chokes and required double-clutching. If cars were software we would have said that the wires of the implementation were poking through into the interface. Today cars have fuel injection and automatic transmissions, so while the implementation has gotten more complex the interface has become simpler.

Moving complexity from the interface to the implementation is exactly the kind of progress we want to see. If drivers don't have to spend time or mental effort on using their clutch correctly then they can spend that on more productive matters, and we're all better off as result.

Apparently the designers of C++ either didn't know any of this, or they didn't care. C++ makes it impossible -- literally impossible -- to separate the interface from the implementation.

The unit of functionality in C++ software is the class, which is defined as a collection of data and operations on that data. For example:

class CBox {

int x, y, w, h;
void Add (class CBox &);

};

My hypothetical Box class (prefixed with C by C++ convention) is given by a 2-D position and size (called member variables) and an "Add" operation (called a member function or more formally a method) which allows this box to be added to another box. This is necessarily simple as an example, but it can stand in for something much more complex. The member variables and methods could be multiplied dozens of times, and many of the methods could be common internal operations that the class would use in its implementation but not intended for outside usage. But suppose this Box class represents something like that; it would be totally unsuitable as a component of a large software project.

Why? Because the implementation -- the x, y, w, h variables (and perhaps internal methods) -- are exposed in the interface. That means that the implementation cannot change. The wires of the implementation are poking through the interface, and if a better way to represent a box is discovered later this class cannot use it. It is forever committed to a specific implementation.

There is a "solution" for this in C++. It's called public and private.

class CBox {

public:
void Set (int x, int y, int w, int h);
void Get (int &x, int &y, int &w, int &h);
void Add (class CBox &);

private:
int x, y, w, h;

};

Just so we're all totally clear here, what we've done is labeled part of the interface as public -- the part we can use -- and the rest as private -- out of bounds. You can still see the implementation. It's right there! But the C++ compiler will raise an error if you attempt to use it. So problem solved, right? The implementation can change and other code will still work correctly because it's forced to limit itself to the public part of the interface.

It's temping to think so, and obviously the designers of C++ thought so too. But it's wrong. The problem comes from the fact that in large-scale software systems the different parts are not always developed at the same time, or even by the same companies. So class A could be implemented and deployed, and then class B could be created that uses class A, and then some time later class A could be fixed or improved. Class B should also be improved, shouldn't it? If it was all written in C++, the answer is a huge no. The only way that B can benefit from the improvements in A is if the developer recompiles the class with the new interface.

Imagine, by analogy, that every time your electrical grid did a major upgrade to its internal systems, all of your household outlets slightly changed. You'd have to buy new appliances that fit the new outlets, or appliance manufacturers would have to figure out how to adapt to new outlets, adding to the cost and complexity of their products.

Why did they do this? Once again it was laziness. Put simply, they wanted to make it easier to write a C++ compiler. If you know the size of a class and you know the layout of the vTable, then it's very easy to handle inheritence. It's not that they didn't know how to do it right -- they did. Despite my imprecations otherwise these were very smart people. They just made the decision that getting lots of C++ compilers on the market sooner, by making the language easier to implement, was more important than making a language that supported large-scale development efforts.

And we've all suffered for it ever since. Thanks guys, way to go.

- jack*

UPDATE: part 3