Author Archives: Donald Taylor II

Information Phenotype

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The fractal tree at the corner of 18th and Lamont, Washington, D.C., 29 April 2009

I have previously commented on my love of the movie π (“The Supernovae in Your Coffee Cup,” 2 November 2008). It left me with two enduring images: mixing coffee and cream as an example of turbulence, previously discussed; and the branching of tree limbs as an example of fractal symmetry. I love winter for its exposure of this fabulous phenomena, innocuously right over our heads. I am always a little sad for the arrival of spring and the enshrouding of all these thought-provoking fractals in greenery.

The picture above is of my favorite tree in the neighborhood where I live. The degree to which the pattern of major arc over two-thirds of growth length followed by sharp break and lesser arc over remainder of growth length is repeated trunk to twig is amazing. Notice the arc of the trunk: unlike many trees which follow one rule for trunk and a separate rule for the branches, this tree follows a single rule throughout.

We think of a fractal as a recursive algorithm, a mathematical formula. But there’s no math in that tree. The recipe for that fractal is coded somewhere in the tree’s DNA. But the DNA contains no fractal. The DNA is a bunch of nucleotides that are transcribed by messenger RNA that code amino acids that assemble into proteins that form the structures of cells. The cells then split and differentiate in response to a complex of internal chemical signals and environmental stimuli to grow in a pattern that is the fractal.

One might say that there is a fractal somewhere in that tree, but there are so many transformation rules between nucleotide sequence and fractal growth pattern, that it is only in a manner of speaking. I am reminded of Wittgenstein’s discussion of what constitutes following a rule and going against it (Philosophical Investigations, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe [Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 1953]):

198. “But how can a rule shew me what I have to do at this point? Whatever I do is, on some interpretation, in accord with the rule.” — That is not what we ought to say, but rather: any interpretation still hangs in the air along with what it interprets, and cannot give it any support. Interpretations by themselves do not determine meaning.

“Then can whatever I do be brought into accord with the rule?” — Let me ask this: what has the expression of a rule — say a sign-post — got to do with my actions? What sort of connection is there here? — Well perhaps this one: I have been trained to react to this sign in a particular way, and now I so react to it.

But that is only to give the causal connection; to tell how it has come about that we now go by the sign-post; not what this going-by-the-sign really consists in. On the contrary; I have further indicated that a person goes by a sign-post only in so far as there exists a regular use of sign posts, a custom.

199. Is what we call “obeying a rule” something that it would be possible for only one man to do, and to do only once in his life? — This is of course a note on the grammar of the expression “to obey a rule.”

It is not possible that there should have been only one occasion on which someone obeyed a rule. It is not possible that there should have been only one occasion on which a report was made, an order given or understood; and so on. — To obey a rule, to make a report, to give an order, to play a game of chess, are customs (uses, institutions).

To understand a sentence means to understand a language. To understand a language means to be master of a technique.

200. It is, of course, imaginable that two people belonging to a tribe unacquainted with games should sit at a chess-board and go through the moves of a game of chess; and even with all the appropriate mental accompaniments. And if we were to see it we should say they were playing chess. But now imagine a game of chess translated according to certain rules into a series of actions which we do not ordinarily associate with a game — say into yells and stamping of feet. And now suppose those two people to yell and stamp instead of playing the form of chess that we are used to; and this in such a way that their procedure is translatable by suitable rules into a game of chess. Should we still be inclined to say that they were playing a game? What right would one have to say so?

201. This is our paradox: no course of action could be determined by a rule, because every course of action can be made out to accord with the rule. The answer was: if everything can be made out to accord with the rule, then it can also be made out to conflict with it. And so there would be neither accord nor conflict here.

It can be seen that there is a misunderstanding here from the mere fact that in the course of our argument we gave one interpretation after another; as if each one contented us at least for a moment, until we thought of yet another standing behind it. What this shews is that there is a way of grasping a rule which is not an interpretation, but which is exhibited in what we call “obeying the rule” and “going against it” in actual cases.

Of course Wittgenstein is writing about social phenomena where custom and training are factors, but the undecidability of rules is the point here. Socially dogmatic, we are dismissive of blatant divergence from consensus. Less dogmatic — but not free of dogma — science resorts to the metaphysical-aesthetic notion of Ockham’s razor with which to cut through the myriad of rules that might potentially be made to accord with observed behavior. Is there really a fractal in the tree’s DNA? The fractal pattern of tree growth is but an interpretation of the tree’s DNA — an interpretation that would be different given a differing machinery of RNA transcription, amino acid assembly, protein expression, etc.

The Last Trace of 1968

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The last of the 1968 Martin Luther King, Jr. assassination riot damage, 14th Street NW, between N Street and Rhode Island NW, 24 April 2009

When I first moved to D.C. in 2003 I set out to explore. My aunt had told me that it was unwise to go east of 16th Street but I did anyway. I remember walking up 14th Street NW toward U Street and it being obviously a neighborhood in transition. There were a few new places, but much remained burned out and deserted. The middle class people who were there were the homosexual vanguard of gentrification.

I simply thought of it as the usual urban decay and renewal, but it turns out that 14th Street had something unique about its desolation. Here’s the AIA Guide to the Architecture of Washington, D.C. (Baltimore, Maryland: Johns Hopkins University Press, Fourth Edition, 2006):

The Logan Circle / Shaw area declined gradually until 1968, when a series of riots in the wake of the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. dealt a devastating blow. Angry mobs set fire to businesses that refused to close in mourning of the slain civil rights leader, and the physical and psychological scares of that tragic period are still evident in various corners of the neighborhoods. (p. 268)

Fourteenth Street wasn’t just any urban decay, but was where some of the most notable of the rioting and arson had occurred in 1968. The damage to the buildings that I was witnessing was the damage that had been done then and the area was only now, 35 years later, starting to be repaired. The scars were those rent in anger over the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr.

I have lived in Washington, D.C. for six years now and during that time the 14th Street corridor has gentrified significantly and the street of which it would be unwise to go east has moved significantly further eastward. At this point 14th Street is more or less a continuously nice street from the Mall all the way up to Columbia Heights and on to … I don’t know where … probably where 14th Street terminates at Iowa Avenue out in the early generation suburbs (I’ve commented previously on the transformation of 14th Street at Columbia Heights here: “The Future of Columbia Heights,” 25 February 2007). The last remnants of the 1968 riots is the block between N Street and Rhode Island NW (pictured above) and now even it is being refurbished. When they are done there, the last physical remnant of the 1968 anger will finally have been erased.

In a city of monuments, I almost feel as if they should leave it as a monument to the end of an era, to a bad year, to a time when the populace wouldn’t take it, when misdeeds were met in kind and to the city that was. Cities need to change, but they need to show their history as well. When this refurbishment is complete, the District of Columbia will have gained a few thousand more square feet of places to go and to live and a few thousand dollars more in rent and taxes, and a neighborhood blight will have been eliminated, but the record of 1968 in our everyday, non-nostalgic, non-consciously historical lives will be gone.

Auto-Impalement

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When I was in college and struggling to get postmodernism in philosophy, I asked a friend who was a writing student what postmodernism in literature meant. His very brief description — he was dismissive like that — was that in modernist literature, ordinary, every-day occurrences drove the drama of the story. In postmodernist literature, extraordinary events drove the plot of the story. The example that he made was that a story might start one morning when a man realizes that there’s a tree growing out of his leg.

Today, Komsomolskaya Pravda Daily reports that Artyom Sidorkin of Izhevsk, in the Ural Mountain region of the Russian Federation, went for surgery to remove what doctors had believed to be a tumor, but in fact turned out to be a five centimeter tall spruce tree growing in Mr. Sidorkin’s lung (“5 cm. Fir Tree Removed from Patient’s Lung,” MosNews.com, 13 April 2009 [Warning: Images Not Safe For Dinner]).

Two observations:

  1. Life imitates art — and vice versa. It’s not just philosophy and literature that are post-modern. They are merely middling indicators. They have become so only to the extent that actual lived life has become post-modern. Trees are actually growing out of people. I’m concerned that tomorrow I might read news of a man who woke up to find that he had turned into a giant beetle, or that the latest trend among young people was to turn into a rhinoceros.

  2. Life is fucking relentless. I used to find it bizarre that a mile out into Lake Washington on the 520 floating bridge, weeds grew in the automobile soot that had accumulated in the crevices in the asphalt and spiders had spun webs amidst their stems and apparently caught enough food to survive. Here you have a tree that actually tried to make a feeder-log of a man.

Update, 2 May 2009: On Monday, Steven Colbert picked up the story for his segment, Craziest Fucking Thing I’ve Ever Heard. He offered that that’s why he uses Roundup Nasal Spray.

A Cyberpunk Rereading of German Idealism

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Pattie Maes's TED talk demonstrating an enhanced reality device, February 2009

Over at SLOG there is a bit of a conversation is going on about Pattie Maes’s recent TED talk in which she demonstrated what she calls “sixth sense,” but that I would call “augmented reality” (with Pranav Mistry, “Unveiling the ‘Sixth Sense,’ Game-Changing Wearable Tech,” TED, February 2009; Hecht, Anthony, “Holy Freaking Crap,” SLOG, The Stranger, 3 April 2009).

Today Charles Mudede, one of the thinkers to whom I consider myself most close, comments on the significance of Ms. Maes’s innovations along a line similar to my own project (“The Near Future,” SLOG, The Stranger, 8 April 2008):

It’s as if Hegel’s geist in his grand narrative of the history of consciousness, Phenomenology of the Spirit, actually came true. We can laugh at Hegel and his impossible absolute spirit, but we cannot laugh at Pattie Maes and her wearable tech.

For some time now I have been thinking that a cyberpunk rereading of the German Idealists is necessary. I have made a number of posts along this line (see Related Posts below). One of the themes of this blog — one that has emerged accidentally — is of the hard materiality of that which we call “ideal”; the degree to which mind is in the world; and not just statically so, but the degree to which the balance of matter and information is giving ground to information, processes of reification, the “imperialism of information”; that tool for rendering the study of ideology a material science, the meme; of those twain machines which bridge the gap: brains and computers.

My contributions to the project to date:

“The Deus ex Machina of Economic Crisis,” 25 March 2009
“The Noosphere Visualized,” 1 January 2009
“Emergence and Aufhebung (Hegel and the Swarm),” 5 December 2008
“The Day I Became a Hegelian,” 18 August 2008
“Imagination Unmoored,” 8 August 2008

“What is rational is actual, and what is actual is rational”!

— Preface to The Philosophy of Right (1821)

Consider the Hermit Crab

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À la David Foster Wallace’s famous essay, “Consider the Lobster” — published in Gourmet of all places (August 2004) — new research shows that hermit crabs experience pain, remember it, can recognize and take steps to avoid future encounters of a similar kind (“Crabs ‘Sense and Remember Pain’,” BBC, 27 March 2009). The full research report is:

Elwood, Bob and Mirjam Appel, “Pain Experience in Hermit Crabs?,” Animal Behaviour, vol. 77, no. 5, May 2009, pp. TBD, doi:10.1016/j.anbehav.2009.01.028.

I’m a vegetarian so of course I find the practice of boiling crustaceans alive disturbing — and have since the first time I witnessed the gruesome spectacle at about the age of eight or ten. Nevertheless, I find Professor Elwood’s characterization of the practice as “potentially very large problem” to be bizarre. “Problems” have no objective existence. A “problem” is an issue of perspective. It would seem that, say, 5,000 years and trillions of boiled crustaceans into the practice of cooking arthropods alive, it’s a little late to declare it a “potentially very large problem.” An ethical lapse is only “a problem” if the perpetrator runs afoul someone who objects and is in sufficient a position of power to do something about it. Unless we wake up in the antechamber of the afterlife and it turns out that the correct answer was Hinduism, or unless it turns out that Yahweh takes seriously that bit in Isaiah about wolves and lambs lying down together (11:6-9), or unless we vegetarians establish a GULAG and declare universal jurisdiction for crims against animals then there is no problem here — at least not for the humans.

My Interests, As Reverse Engineered by Amazon.com

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According to Amazon.com’s reverse engineering of my purchases, here are my interests:

Accounting, Asia, Biology, Chaos & Systems, Cognitive Psychology, Communism & Socialism, Consciousness & Thought, Economic Conditions, Economic History, Economic Policy & Development, Epistemology, Ethics, Finance, Government, Greek & Roman, History & Surveys, History & Theory, Holocaust, Intelligence, Intelligence Agencies, International Relations, International Security, Investments & Securities, Japan, Logic, Marxism, Military & Spies, Military Science, Modern, Napoleon, Naval, Nonfiction, Nuclear, Philosophy, Physics, Political, Political History, Political Ideologies, Presidents & Heads of State, Public Policy, Purple Politics, Relations, Russia, Social Theory, Sociology, Statistics, Strategy, Theory, World War I

That reads about right. I could quibble about some omissions, e.g. where’s Europe. That being said, why do Amazon’s recommendations suck so much? How is it that I can routinely go into a bookstore and find, not obscurely hidden in a lesser-trafficked corner, but prominently displayed, some work of exceptional interest to me, but that Amazon hasn’t recommended? And the heavily cut tracks! I find that I have an occasional interest in, say, the U.S. Civil War, but that I refrain from adding a Civil War title to my wish list because the Civil War is such an overdone cottage industry: if you add a single Civil War title, next thing you know every new volume by every small-town antiquarian, about every two-bit local general is going to be recommended.

Update, 5 April 2008: And what the hell is “Purple Politics”? Everything listed under that category seems perfectly respectable, but when I hear “purple politics” I think of Jessica Cutler’s The Washingtonienne, the Starr Report or the tabloids on Nicolas Sarkozy and Carla Bruni.

The Deus ex Machina of Economic Crisis

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In defense of Secretary Geithner’s economic detox plan, Christopher Carroll makes a larger point about the basis of fundamental valuation (“Treasury Rewards Waiting,” The Economist’s Forum, Financial Times, 24 March 2009):

Unlike the critics, the Treasury has absorbed the main lesson from the past 30 years of academic finance research: asset price movements mainly reflect changes in investors’ collective attitude toward risk.

Perhaps the reason this insight has not penetrated, even among academic economists, much beyond the researchers responsible for documenting it, is that it has not been expressed in layman’s terms. Here’s a try: in the Wall Street contest between “fear” and “greed,” fear fluctuates much more than greed (in academic terms, movements in “risk tolerance” explain the bulk of movements in asset prices).

In thinking about economic crises, people have a tendency to contrast fundamentals versus psychology, dismissing so-called psychological factors as “not real” or somehow illegitimately interfering with the proper functioning of the economy. But the economy is not a machine with the humans being somewhat incidental to its operation (at least not yet). Insofar as human desire, priority, ambition, plans and beliefs about what the future holds are more foundational to the enterprise than the material constituents of the economy, psychology is fundamental. At some point, the economy gives way to society as the more fundamental unit of analysis.

This is not to say that the future-oriented plan makers don’t get “spooked” — hence Keynes’s “animal spirits” — and that they are irrational over the medium term to do so; but who can deny that retrenchment is not rational within certain limited considerations. That being said, it is the role of the government to defend the commons.

CS, AI, T&A

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A bit of a discussion broke out at this morning’s session over Shane Legg and Marcus Hutter’s paper, “Universal Intelligence: A Definition of Machine Intelligence” (Minds & Machines, vol. 17, no. 4, 2007, pgs. 391-444, arXiv:0712.3329v1). Following the convention of abbreviated reference to a paper by its authors’ last names, and as Hutter is pronounced “hooter,” this paper is referred to as “legs and hooters.” So there was this back and forth, “As the legs and hooters paper shows …” “You should look more carefully at legs and hooters.” “It can be hard to get you head around legs and hooters.” “We shouldn’t rush to embrace legs and hooters.” I exaggerate slightly, but I would imagine that there are better papers than Legg and Hutter’s on the subject of the definition of machine intelligence; it’s just that those other papers get passed over in favor of one granting a computer nerd the opportunity to say “legs and hooters” in all seriousness in front of a room full of people. I’ll bet that Legg and Hutter decided to collaborate on the basis that such a winning name combination guaranteed their rocket-like ascension in the ranking of most oft cited papers.

Disciplinary Normativeness and the Artificial General Intelligence Conference

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Ben Goertzel and Jürgen Schmidhuber, Artificial General Intelligence Conference 2009, keynote question and answer, 6 March 2009

S. and I are spending the weekend volunteering at the Artificial General Intelligence Conference 2009. Last night we saw organizer Ben Goertzel’s introductory talk and Jürgen Schmidhuber’s talk on various aspects of intelligence as compression and formalism in AGI (post-talk discussion, Goertzel left, Schmidhuber to the right). Today we attended Cognitive Architectures I and II and the poster session. Matthew Ikle and Ben Goertzel’s discussion of using formal economic models as a means to generate attention in the OpenCog framework and Eric Baum’s presentation on the relation between evolution and intelligence both blew my mind. I cant wait for these talks and their attendant slideshows to be up on the website.

For now the most interesting thing about the conference from the standpoint of a social scientist is the degree to which the organizer, Ben Goertzel is a Kuhnian revolutionary disciplinarian. His talk on the challenges of AGI was a perfect demonstration of the problems of prerevolutionary or pre-paradigmatic science. Pre-paradigmatic is the current state of AGI research and it would be an excellent candidate for history of science study as it will probably remain so for many years to come, but its revolution is coming.

It has gradually become clear to me the degree to which Mr. Goertzel is a leader in the field, by which I do not mean his role as an innovator — though he is definitely that — but that he is someone drawing the discipline together from its disparate strands and goading it on in its proper objectives. The problems that he identified in his opening talk — the lack of a common language, a dominate model shared by at least a plurality of researchers, a road-map for future problem identification, again, shared by at least a plurality, the lack of any metric of progress — are all classically Kuhnian problems. The conference obviously serves a number of objectives, many very traditional such as professional networking and facilitation of communication of findings. But unlike one might expect from a conference of a more mature science, there was a considerable amount of normative, discipline-definitional activity. First is the very conference itself. There is clearly no well-defined research area of artificial general intelligence. The bizarre diffusion of backgrounds and affiliations represented displayed no coherence or institutional establishment. Participants had backgrounds in neurology, cognitive science, anesthesiology, evolutionary biology, bioinfomatics, mathematics, logic, computer science and various strands of engineering. Creating the problem of a shared language, people had to be fluent in the languages of multiple disciplines and were mixing and matching as well as engaging in isolated terminological innovation. People worked as academics, corporate researchers and developers, engineers, entrepreneurs and so on.

Ill-definition means that things don’t cohere, or that what has come together naturally dissipates. It is in this sense that Mr. Goertzel is a disciplinary revolutionary. He really has a personal goal and a vision regarding AGI. At one point in his opening talk he actually delivered a brief bit of a lecture to conference participants on the problem of focusing on sub-general level intelligences for the expedience that they are achievable and money-making, though admitting to culpability in that respect as well. It is also clear what a small clique of researchers constitute the AGI world, as well as Mr. Goertzel’s position as a hub of the social and intellectual network. During the question and answer, he was able to call on most people in the room by first name. And he is clearly an intellectual celebrity with few peers. As Kuhn argued, non-scientific factors feature more prominently in the definition and direction of a science than rhetoric of objectivity would lead one to expect.

More Bold, Writers!

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After any far-reaching junket to the library, I usually leave amazed at the flecks of brilliance lost by dint of the sheer mass of information that humanity churns out, like an ounce of gold alloyed in ton of oar. I often have the same feeling about the online world. For every one thing that goes viral, ten acts of genius are buried in someone’s quickly advancing feed.

Thus, today I find Suzanne Marchand, in a Journal of Modern History (vol. 63, no. 3, September 1991, pp. 608-610) review of Michael Burleigh’s book, Germany Turns Eastwards: A Study of Ostforschung in the Third Reich, concludes the following:

Overall, one might conclude that Burleigh has given us a competent, complete monograph that lacks, however, the ironic twists and adventurous spirit which would have made it a truly outstanding book.

Remember, aspiring writers, especially those under sober, academic tutelage: ironic twists and an adventurous spirit can be what separates “competent and complete” from “truly outstanding.”