On the Structure of Brian Eno

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I recently came across an ancient document, older than my son, dating to 1994 when I had a brief FAX-based exchange of communiques with Brian Eno, the English eclectic electronic musician and producer of everything from Bowie’s Low through to U2’s Joshua Tree and Jane Siberry. Eno had been pointed at one of my colleague’s efforts (Eric in the FAXes, below) at using models of RNA replication to create music by the editor of Whole Earth Catalog who saw Eric present at an Artificial Life conference. I was doing other, somewhat related work, and Eric allowed me to correspond with Mr. Eno. I did, resulting in a brief round of FAXes (email was fairly new to the non-specialist in 1994).

I later dropped off a copy of a research paper I had written at his London office and he was summoned down from an office/loft and shook his head in the negative about me. I was shown the door by the receptionist.

Below is my last part of the FAX interchange. Due to copyright and privacy concerns, I’ll only show my part of the exchange (and, yes, I misspelled “Britain”). Notably, Brian still talks about the structure of music and art in recent interviews.

… Read the rest

Signals and Noise: Chapter 24 (Psy Ops)

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The weekend came in with skating the tubes under the ghost lights of the nearby self-storage facility until a cop flashed them with his spotlight and they broke up and headed their separate ways. Mom was out until late, drawn into a party thrown by a coworker. Her work, her life. Zach settled in for late night TV and pizza rolls, amused at the banter that had broken out with Belinda on her AetherFaces page. She was a quick wit but needed time to assess her adversary and overcome shyness. Zach decided she was more tiger than sheep. He slipped off another salvo in the repartee, looking forward to meeting her on Saturday.

By midnight he was back in the cave and back shuffling among the servers that were the islands of his Odyssean wanderings. He was poking through an encrypted list of encrypted passwords and targets on a machine somewhere in the financial district of Jakarta when he noticed an IP address that was familiar. It was the basement rack of servers. It came flooding back to him and he realized that he had somehow blanked out the rummaging about in their workings and their connection to The Signal. He logged in and began touching different aspects of the file system. It was all still here, he thought, plunging down through the strange analytical database engine that was cranking out the mathematical filigrees that defined the colored blobs. How had he been enraptured by a process, he wondered, a process that was as unfeeling as a car door? Yet here was the source, the font, the wellspring of the peace he had felt many times.  There were bits of blogs cataloged in the server architecture, too, and Zach began parsing out the strange and variegated history of rants and lunatic ramblings.… Read the rest

The Universe is Smeary Stuff

Mark Davis4 Comments

What should our expectations be regarding scientific theories? That question regularly bobs to the surface for me. When I taught physics in the Peace Corps over twenty years ago I worried over it. And now, with an inquisitive thirteen-year-old curious about the recent results from the pursuit of the Higgs Boson asking me questions, I continue to think that the conceptual shifts requisite for scientific understanding are perhaps as important as the science itself.

You see, none of it makes simple, clean sense. And none of it makes sense precisely because there is no conceptual similarity between our everyday scales of interaction and those of the mega and the micro. They are baffling and complex and not fully understood. We should take great pride in this, as human beings. We should revel in the rise of experimentation and rationality that has led us to this baffling precipice. We should not back away into the gray simplicity that predates what our scientific investigations have brought us to, because they make enough sense that they can be understood with some effort. But the urge is there; relent at the scale, scope, and complexity of the edifice that is required to get even basic traction. It either doesn’t impact me or is inhuman at some level.

But it needn’t be. The Higgs Boson is simply badly explained because it it based on preserving explanatory footholds that relate to everyday physics of cars and bowling balls. Drop that assumption and things get both weirder and simultaneously simpler. The universe appears to be composed of stuff that has a holographic quality to it in the sense that holograms replicate images throughout their structure. Break a piece off of a hologram and you can still see the image in it.… Read the rest

No Videodrome

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I started reading James Wood’s How Fiction Works while on a business trip to the unequivocally nice Orange County or The OC. The trip was less than pleasant for me personally because I apparently tore my rotator cuff earlier in the day while engaged in mildly excessive exercise activities. I say “apparently” because it took me a day or two to figure out what the source of pain really was, living through brief panic waves about what was happening to me while trying to avoid lifting my left arm in a manner that might give away the agony I was experiencing during business meetings.

Note that this is the literary critic, James Wood, not the actor, James Woods; not the guy from Videodrome or any of the dozens of ecclectic roles the actor has been associated with.

James Wood, the critic then, is trying to operationalize the vast, categorical shaping of Roland Barthes or Milan Kundera in their efforts at criticism. Wood is not a pure theorist, but a careful reader who looks intimately at texts, unpacking the intent of the writer while defining the historical perspectives that informed the artistic effort. Looking intimately at Flaubert, Wood sees the flaneur of realism that began modernism and led, in turn, to post-modernism. Characters transform from our acquired fog of beloved personalities into flat extensions of English sensibilities in the Theophrastus of Jane Austen, or lurk behind the Russian tradition of estrangement that assigns extravagant and unlikely terminology to everyday things (Nabakov’s “leggy thing” in Pnin), and everywhere is the transition from description to internal dialog that drops the formality of specifying dialog at all. That is modernism. That is realism.… Read the rest

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

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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