Month: June 2012

SOOO or OOO

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An ever-present flaw in almost all theology and apologetics–and a flaw that is easily remediable–is the requirement for omnipotence, omnibenevolence, and omniscience (OOO) on the part of the structure of God or the gods. We see this in the argumentative doldrums of the Problem of Evil, with practitioners like William Lane Craig and Richard Swinburne building-out elaborate explanatory theodicies in an effort to justify or, at least, allow for an OOO deity. There are extensional consequences, too, like Paul Draper’s argument that an OOO-deity may be obligated to create more than just a single worshipful species given the known extent of the universe.

And what if we remedy the flaw by simply declaring that the OOO assumptions are unnecessary for deities? What if we simply loosen the requirement to something like “God is super-powerful and super-good?” Let’s call this the semi-OOO god theory or SOOO for short. Does SOOO short-circuit the most problematic issues that arise in placing the gods so far above us that we no longer resemble them at all? (an interesting side note: given Christianity’s obsession with the avatar-like character of Christ, it hardly seems aesthetically wrong to assume a flawed God).

The theological and apologetic problems do seem to evaporate, though philosophical arguments evaporate, too:

  • The Ontological Argument: The premise requiring God to be the greatest possible being (Anselmian formulation) immediately goes away. Therefore, there is no Ontological Argument. God doesn’t exist, but only on the initial premise. God may still exist as an SOOO deity.
  • The Cosmological Argument: No impact; the First Cause could be just about anything, as before. Only pre-scientific societies necessarily associate such a cause with an OOO deity.
  • The Problem of Evil: There are actually many formulations of the Problem of Evil, and it remains debated to this day, yet the primary formulation currently fashionable among apologists requires evil (at least moral evil, but sometimes also “natural” evil) in order to provide a proving ground for our moral character.
… Read the rest

Bostrom on the Hardness of Evolving Intelligence

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At 38,000 feet somewhere above Missouri, returning from a one day trip to Washington D.C., it is easy to take Nick Bostrom’s point that bird flight is not the end-all of what is possible for airborne objects and mechanical contrivances like airplanes in his paper, How Hard is Artificial Intelligence? Evolutionary Arguments and Selection Effects. His efforts to try to bound and distinguish the evolution of intelligence as either Hard or Not-Hard runs up against significant barriers, however. As a practitioner of the art, finding similarities between a purely physical phenomena like flying and something as complex as human intelligence falls flat for me.

But Bostrom is not taking flying as more than a starting point for arguing that there is an engineer-able possibility for intelligence. And that possibility might be bounded by a number of current and foreseeable limitations, not least of which is that computer simulations of evolution require a certain amount of computing power and representational detail in order to be a sufficient simulation. His conclusion is that we may need as much as another 100 years of improvements in computing technology just to get to a point where we might succeed at a massive-scale evolutionary simulation (I’ll leave to the reader to investigate his additional arguments concerning convergent evolution and observer selection effects).

Bostrom dismisses as pessimistic the assumption that a sufficient simulation would, in fact, require a highly detailed emulation of some significant portion of the real environment and the history of organism-environment interactions:

A skeptic might insist that an abstract environment would be inadequate for the evolution of general intelligence, believing instead that the virtual environment would need to closely resemble the actual biological environment in which our ancestors evolved … However, such extreme pessimism seems unlikely to be well founded; it seems unlikely that the best environment for evolving intelligence is one that mimics nature as closely as possible.

… Read the rest

Semantic Zooming

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I’ve been pushing hard for a demo at Hadoop Summit this week, waking unexpectedly at 5 AM this morning with spherical trigonometry percolating through my head. The topic is “semantic zooming” and it is not a complicated concept to understand because we have a common example that many of us use daily: Google Maps. All the modern, online mapping systems do semantic zooming to a degree when they change the types of information that are displayed on the map depending on the zoom level. Thus, the “semantics” or “meaning” of the displayed information changes with zooming, revealing states, then rivers, then major roads, then minor roads, and then all the way down to local businesses. The goal of semantic zooming is to manage information overload by managing semantics.

In my case, I’m using a semantic zooming interface to apply different types of information visualizations to data resources in a distributed file system (a file system that spans many disk drives in many computers) related to the “big data” technology, Hadoop. A distributed file system can have many data types (numerical data, text, PDFs, log files from web servers, scientific data) and the only way to interact with the data is through a command-line or through fairly simple web-based user interfaces that act like crude file system browsers. Making use of the data in the system, analyzing it, requires running analysis processes on it, then pulling the data out and importing it into other technologies like Excel or business intelligence systems to bind charting and visualization tools to it. With semantic zooming operating directly on the data, however, the structure of the data can be probed directly and the required background processes launch automatically to create new aggregate views of the data.… Read the rest

Excerpt from Pornotopia (experimental novel to be published late 2012; NSFW)

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That theme ballooned into a greater realization, too, that my initial fantasies about the adult world or, more, the adult world of pornography, were incorrect, were shallow and unconvincing, that there was a carefully ordered balance between the everyday public sphere and the furtive world of desire, and that the porn stars and prostitutes were not carrying the banner of perfect bacchanalian body and mind pleasure, but were stand-ins, simulacra, for a shadow projected by our bodies, that since the end result of sexual desire was families and children and stability and rules and education, a precise and orderly protection of children until we can finally buy those magazines and videos and booze, we needed that balance and that hidden world to remain a shadow, a longing, an urge, channeled and kept fast with fear and guilt and an inchoate sense of calamity or we might descend into animalistic chaos, unable to partner with only one girl or boy or man or woman until the children grow, safe and with that perfect loving parental dyad, and so just as I had become discontented after only a few months with my stack of sexual dynamos, I imagined that there might be some virtue in trying to avoid masturbating, resisting and pushing back what had become a ritual driven by whatever stimuli were present on a given day, Farah Fawcett, Colonel Wilma Deering, Rebecca, Gwen, the shorts of the girl riding the bike, the slightest hint of bra straps through the teacher’s white blouse, every cheerleader at my school, individually and in groups, Princess Leia, then working through to orgasm eidetically in the hardest, dirtiest porn I had seen, that if I could control myself I could also control the urge for novelty as well and derive satisfaction from the resistance and overcoming of these tendencies, like being forced to wait, snackless, with the clots of kids before a dinner party and trying not to whine about it, trying to be more like the adults and governed in my wants and my actions, that by so doing I would be becoming those adults and take more pleasure in simpler acts like holding Rebecca’s hand, unsweating, my erections stabilized somehow, and be present at that moment without the sharp sword of desire and sex hanging over me, coarsening me, at every moment.… Read the rest

Politics is Religion

Mark Davis1 Comment

Anglo-American Analytic Philosophy has steadily distanced itself from Continental Philosophy for many reasons, but the defining difference must be with respect to the correlation of meaning with textual intent. Continental Philosophy deconstructs (at least in recent years) and as a phenomenon there is cultural significance to the motivation to tear down the assumptions that we have carefully nurtured from the Enlightenment through to Modernism. Meaning disconnects from words. It slurs. And reinvention is the only persistent motivation.

Arguably, though, it is only Continental Philosophy that cares about politics and culture, which makes it less abstract and irrelevant than the thumb twiddling of the analytic strain. Modern culture and our claims about significance are the lambs for the slaughterhouse. I thought of that voting in one of California’s ever-present elections today. Simon Critchley carried the water for me with his recent argument that politics is essentially religion (side-note: check out his discussion of Philip K. Dick in the New York Times recently; nothing really new to anyone who has read the VALIS books, but the facts concerning Dick’s later years and death are worth understanding). How is it religion? Because it is easy to redraw the semantic map in Continental Philosophy. Words mean what they are positioned to mean and the positioning is highly variable. The only solidity is in faith-based attachment to a theory of meaning, and politics exemplifies that in a way that is passingly second to religion itself.

We can see the effects of this religion in the defining political conflict of our era. The Pew Research Center’s new report, Partisan Polarization Surges in Bush, Obama Years, shows this political religion at work.  On a majority of issues, the study shows, among Americans who self-identify as Democrats, Republicans, and Independents, there has been a steady increase in the disparity between opinions.… Read the rest

Randomness and Meaning

Mark Davis1 Comment

The impossibility of the Chinese Room has implications across the board for understanding what meaning means. Mark Walker’s paper “On the Intertranslatability of all Natural Languages” describes how the translation of words and phrases may be achieved:

  1. Through a simple correspondence scheme (word for word)
  2. Through “syntactic” expansion of the languages to accommodate concepts that have no obvious equivalence (“optometrist” => “doctor for eye problems”, etc.)
  3. Through incorporation of foreign words and phrases as “loan words”
  4. Through “semantic” expansion where the foreign word is defined through its coherence within a larger knowledge network.

An example for (4) is the word “lepton” where many languages do not have a corresponding concept and, in fact, the concept is dependent on a bulwark of advanced concepts from particle physics. There may be no way to create a superposition of the meanings of other words using (2) to adequately handle “lepton.”

These problems present again for trying to understand how children acquire meaning in learning a language. As Walker points out, language learning for a second language must involve the same kinds of steps as learning translations, so any simple correspondence theory has to be supplemented.

So how do we make adequate judgments about meanings and so rapidly learn words, often initially with a course granularity but later with increasingly sharp levels of focus? What procedure is required for expanding correspondence theories to operate in larger networks? Methods like Latent Semantic Analysis and Random Indexing show how this can be achieved in ways that are illuminating about human cognition. In each case, the methods provide insights into how relatively simple transformations of terms and their occurrence contexts can be viewed as providing a form of “triangulation” about the meaning of words.… Read the rest