Is distributed memory a real problem ?
January 29, 2011
I posed several question a week or two back in response to Doc Searle’s post “What if FlickR fails?”. They are;
We all generate so much data these days there is no earthly way that we can hold it all internally and to some extent our external cyborg selves penetrate silicon strata around the world, none of which we own personally. So;
If your memories are held on a piece of hardware owned by another person what ethical duties does that person have with regard to your freedom to function as a human being ? Not legal duties note – ethical duties.
Also what can you actually can legitimately sign away under a reasonable use agreement ?
What are the civil limits to what bits of your being you can sign away without the person gaining the signature having some degree of backward responsibility to stop you from doing so ?
If they have taken on the responsibility to act as a partial mind substitute do they not have a responsibility to act for the benefit of that mind as whole ?
Can I sign away my own memories ? Am I competent to do so ? Or would the conscious act of surrendering mind function be deemed an act of madness ?
Can I actually cease to own parts of my own mind ?
If it is uploaded is that portion of my mind fungible ?
What part international law is that covered by ? International human trafficking, organ harvesting or intellectual property ?
Just going to save them here for a while and have a think about them.
My main problem is on the boundry between the legal and ethical front because there probably isn’t any legal precedent to say that non-coporeal memories i.e. memories not embodied in property or in living body tissue, have any status.
That I think is a possible real problem because there should be a fairly good argument that all memories are ‘created’ by the rememberer and that digital props that evoke or form part of a memory evokation also form part of the performance of that memory even if it is wholly internal. These days we can test whether a digital file is remembered or not by sticking the brain in an fRMI scanner so there shouldn’t be an argument that this is a fakeable experience. In which case with memory as free-form creation and digital files as the instruments played during the improvised performance of memory how do we differentiate the rememberer from the musician ?
How do we treat great improvisational musicians and their instruments ? We allow them some social leeway certainly. They can treat their instruments as friends or lovers. BB King had Lucille and many virtuoso’s have booked airline seats for their treasured possessions and have talked of devastation on their theft or destruction.
Why is the lost family album treated any differently ? It is the one item most people would save from a house fire given a choice.
‘Gendering’ of scientific paradigms
December 28, 2010
Very quick thought that I don’t want to loose;
I’ve been working with Kuhnian interpretation of scientific paradigms and was wondering if there was anything inherently gender-oriented within those definitions. For example the causal/Newtonian paradigm is all sharp divisions, yes/no, few grey areas, little space for discussion. It feels stereotypically masculine. Whereas the probabilistic paradigm is all curves, no sharp divisions, few answers that are just black or white, very perspectival and multivocal. It feels slightly feminine, to me at least.
It is just a thought sketch and may just be me being all synaesthetic, but could it be that in the way we describe current science we may be imbuing it with a feminine pseudo-gender which is at odds with all previous science and contributes to the difficulty we have with getting to grips with probabilistic science in general.
I’ve not done the research but it seems to me that there should be plenty of work available on how the different genders deal with things like ‘risk’. Anyway just a thought.
Its all coming together Part Two
May 13, 2010
So in Part One I tried to persuade you that we are living in the transition between two scientific and technological epochs or to use Kuhn’s terms ‘scientific paradigms’. Epoch One lasted until 1930s when Turing published “On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem” in reply to Godels work on his incompleteness theorem and set in train the start of formal exploration of cybernetics and artificial intelligence and its counter-point; the examination of the human mind using physical and mathematical means.
At that point in time (well, that generation) there was also a crux in mathematics and physics as the mathematics of complexity and quantum physics started to come to the fore. A new paradigm was born either side of WWII and it had nothing to do with steam power or communication networks. It was a change in the fundamental endeavour of science from automating and enhancing things that our bodies do (higher, faster, more accurately, stronger, bigger, further) towards doing things that our minds do (smarter, with more empathy, more responsibly, more beautifully, happier).
In understanding this we can start to understand how the current changes in communication networks, democratic engagement and the changing role of journalism fit together with wider technical and societal changes.
For example, if we accept that the internet represents a vast and near universally accessible library of all fact and opinion (which is questionable right now, but we’re closer now than ever before) then the role of the journalist is equatable to the role of the academic librarian or research assistant. Send them to seek and sooner or later they will find. Sounds like something to automate, yes ? Absolutely ! In fact lets start a company, call it Google and make cash off the back of advertising through it as millions of folk send out their own librarians to find the information that they want. Dead easy. Also at its most basic its a simple piece of maths in the ‘causal’ vein, but Google is a bit smarter and uses users to provide relativistic data in its performance so that the next search is incrementally more probable to meet the next users requirements. Up the ladder of sophistication we go.
What Google can’t do is generate opinion to kick its performance up the ladder. That is a function of mind. That is you telling the librarian “No, that’s not quite the sort of data I want. Bring me books with more blue on the cover”. Google’s vast size allows it to ape mind function, but it still us that dictate page rank in the end.
So there are different approaches towards this automation of mind.
There is the world of computation, where patterns are sought in vast data sets and those patterns linked to probability functions which relate to success or failure. Computation assumes that all answers are available somewhere in the information universe and that calculations are maps to find the answers. Where uncertainty exists a set of the most likely answers can be gathered and presented a la Wolfram Alpha.
There is the Google way of hiding behind stolen opinions and making believe that intelligence exists.
And there is the human way of just having more minds available operating with access to data that has a higher level of sophistication (its called education).
We don’t yet have a functional model of consciousness. We’ve been working on it for 70 years give or take, but we’re not there yet and there are doubts whether we yet have the tools to get there. My own suspicion is that just as the electronic age required a new physics and maths to advance, the age of the mind will too. We need to really understand quantum computing and strange effects like entanglement to get anywhere close to having the brute computing power of the human brain.
So again how does this affect journalism and democracy. Well for all the cost efficiencies of news aggregators, the multiplicity of voices in the ether means that journalism has two very different routes.
The first is as computer engineer designing search algorithms to seek out the juiciest data and re-present it a la carte. Quite frankly that role will not last long as available compute power rises. It is also the least sophisticated solution. Its cause and effect. ‘The data is now there, so lets go and get it’.
The second route is to abandon objectivity as core to definition of journalism. This is the more sophisticated route to take. Actually take the time and make the effort to have a valid opinion. Use the mind to its greatest advantage. Embrace plurality as a mode of expression. BUT you have to educate everyone to make sure that they too may have access to the same raw data and be able to understand it, in order to be able to critically assess your opinion.
So bloggers are a potential future, so are twitterers or whatever comes next, but only if we are smart enough to understand what is being said and why.
That’s all for now. I’m having a break from thinking in order to earn some money.
Life logging and loosing yourself
May 2, 2010
In response to a couple of recent pieces on identity by Jeff Jarvis and one by Gary Wolfe of Wired on living by numbers.
It should be becoming obvious by now that I’m quite pragmatic about technologies, especially those that purport to replace mind function with mathematics, and these two threads are kind of along the same lines. Interesting, but not quite right. In fact Wolfe’s piece is quite wrong in some ways, but typical of the cyber-utopian and really getting very dull these days. We’ve had the net 20 years and its still a shiny box to be prayed to for some people. Get over it Wolfe and actually think about what you are saying ! Your words are more important than the technology.
Case in point; Wolfe’s piece describes a number of different strands to the general social and technological movement towards quantification and couples them with communication. Fine. No problems with that analysis. Automated diaries, blood sugar monitoring, chips in the soles of our shoes recording physical exercise, etc, etc, all feeding data into a set of databases that may or may not be accessible by other people to react to. A method of capturing all that time that is wasted without noticing it. A way to streamline activity. Be more productive. Really ?
Quote (of those subjecting themselves to self-tracking);
“they are also looking to understand their strengths and weaknesses, to uncover potential they didn’t know they had. Self-tracking, in this way, is not really a tool of optimization but of discovery, and if tracking regimes that we would once have thought bizarre are becoming normal, one of the most interesting effects may be to make us re-evaluate what “normal” means.”
Apart from the obvious internal contradiction, I wonder whether Wolfe questioned what it is about self-tracking that appeals to the American psyche (as his pieces seems to imply). What it is about systematically removing the spontaneous actions from everyday life that is seen as a positive ? To me its disturbing that a dominant global culture seems so eager to stop thinking and to export the idea that contemplation is no longer a valid goal in itself. Does that imply that Americans believe that understanding of self can only come with unceasing, unidirectional activity. Not only that, but a piece of mathematics is in a better position to tell you what you need than your own mind. Do you trust yourself so little ?
Of course there are good things about the life logging movement. Medical diagnostics is probably the best example, but the good things will tend to be the physical. Try as hard as you can to avoid trying to replicating mind functions. Please ? For me. Just this once.
This is where we cross into the issues around identity that JJ has been looking at. Online identity is something that I’ve dealt with professionally for the best part of a decade and I have to say, technically its no longer an interesting issue. However it is an interesting social and philosophical issue as we spend more and more time immersed in worlds made of other peoples imaginings.
The crucial thing to remember is that we cannot control how other people see us in a world where we can sprout wings and fly off to Brazil in a second. Identity as a projection of self is no longer irreducible if your existence is mediated. So while there is value in being able to prove that you are who you say you are in a transactional sense, there is less and less value in communicating who you are in a personal sense. Question; what is a hate crime in 2nd life ?
Neuroscience cannot read your mind
April 3, 2010
I’ve written about Newtonian science and the simple cause and effect interpretation of the physical universe that it embodies, and how the mathematics of complexity and statistical interpretations of the physical universe, such as quantum mechanics, have superseded that mechanistic view. What I would like to suggest is that neuroscience is treading the same path in its interpretation of the mind as a mechanistic system demonstrable by a physical understanding of brain function. This is not a new idea as far as I know, but I need to ‘say it out loud’ to show myself that I know where the limits lie.
I’ve been thinking about whether I believe that the mind could be replaced by the internet, and I think ‘no, but there could be functions that could be farmed out such as memory‘. Here I’m going to explore that idea with specific reference to the blossoming fields of neuroscience, neuromarketing, neuroethics and neuro-anything-else-they-can-think-of.
The mathematics of complexity and uncertainty, chaos theory, complex systems, or however else we wish to express the concept, all share the same fundamental tenet; that simple mathematical relationships can give in unpredictable results. This is shown by the Lorentz’s Butterfly Effect, but it it is also embodied in Godel’s incompleteness theorem and the Schrodinger’s Cat thought experiment. To me these are all similar aspects of the same idea; that we can never measure all variables sufficiently well to be able to have a 100% reliable model.
If we transpose this notion to the pursuit of neuroscience, where claims are being made almost to the point of being able to read the minds of experimental subjects, we should at least consider the nature of the systems involved before we accept the validity or even applicability these kind of claims.
Brain structure is primarily a function of the expression of DNA of the individual and DNA as a replicator a very mechanistic and ultimately predictable system. I say this because genes are quite simple. Their complexity is in their size, not their building blocks. That the Human Genome Project was able to sequence our genes using automated techniques suggests that a mechanistic approach to reading that material is appropriate. However once the brain has started to develop neuronal connectivity in response to stimuli (memories start to be formed in response to experience), that mechanistic interpretation is no longer applicable without having a set of meta-data that shows the context under which those connections are made.
What neuroscientists are doing using fMRI is establishing a work-book of that contextual meta-data under experimental conditions, and its very impressive that they are managing to exclude enough of the outside world to be able to see human responses such as lying and trust and jealousy in the data that they collect. I’m sure that, on average, they are seeing some functions of mind being expressed physically. BUT, what cannot, and indeed must not, be inferred from this work is that the responses from one individual’s brain can be directly equated to the responses of another individual’s brain.
We could go though a significant proportion of the human race, taking subjects from all walks of life and every corner of the globe and find average response curves for each chunk of the brain, but we would never be able to replicate the contextual meta-data to a fine enough resolution to be able to counter Godel’s incompleteness theorem as it applies to basic information or the individual’s brain development in response to experiences from its own unique viewpoint. The mechanistic interpretation of mind, that equates brain activity to mind function, breaks down under existing mathematical interpretations of the physical universe. We would need a whole new mathematics to be able to do what is currently being claimed for neuroscience. To be fair to the neuroscientists, many of them shy away from the grand claims, but enough are not that we see fMRI being cited in legal cases. Far from free will being dead and neuroscience proving a deterministic worldview, it is showing just how poor our quantitative understanding of mind really is.
This is not a new experience. Psychoanalysis promised an understanding of mind and motivation at the beginning and middle of the 20th century and arguably was the basis for the construction of the consumerist global economy. I wonder how far neuroscience will be pushed outside the lab.
Proponents see recent fMRI science as analogous to genetic fingerprinting; as a quantitative diagnostic tool. I would argue that it is more analogous to a form of psychoanalysis where interpretation is automated. In many of the new institutes and companies working with fMRI we see the objections to the wider application of fMRI-centered neuroscience being characterised as philosophical and relating to ideas of free will and determinism. I don’t see that as a valid or even relevant conflation. My counter-claim is that what is being claimed for neuroscience is not mathematically possible and that in ignoring the role of mathematical complexity scientists, lawmakers, economists and others are acting unethically. What is being seen is the brain and not the mind. That the brains responses are linked to the mind shouldn’t be a surprise but the simple Newtonian idea of cause and effect is not applicable where 100 billion neurons each have around 7,000 synapses many of which have been influenced by memory formation or physical conditions since, or even before, birth. Simply put, just because a specific cubic centimeter of grey matter demands extra blood flow in response to the same stimuli, it doesn’t mean its for the same reason.
If it is possible to mathematically model the mind, then it should be considered as a complex system inhabiting another complex system (the brain) and informed by a set of contextual meta-data (memories and experiences) as well as environmental stimuli. Divining motivation from brain activity is a step too far mathematically, but an approximation could be possible with a sufficiently large database to populate response curves with experimental data. Whether those response curves could provide useful predictive data can’t be known at this point, but what we can say with a good degree of certainty is that you’d need a large n-value to compensate for the free variables in two complex systems and the contextual meta-data.
