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.
As I work towards my PhD I’m trying to develop an understanding of where new journalism fits into our new networked society. I think that its starting to come together, but its a bit deeper than I thought that it would be.
Here is my theoretical framework so far;
There are several parallel themes in society and technology. They cross and interact and, to a certain extent, some workers are getting confused about what they mean and how they will work together in the future.
These themes are specifically; the development of the internet and integration of networked living into more general societal settings, the collapse of business models that support conventional print journalism and so support the 4th estate model of democratic journalism, the rise of the open database/open government model, the rise of empirically or evidence supported policy-making (as opposed to ideologically motivated policy-making), the role of science in policy-making, the media portrayal and public understanding of science, the rise of advanced numerical neuroscience and (finally) the rise of the individual as a politically relevant actor.
Lots there, but we can simplify things.
First if we use the Kuhnian notion of scientific paradigms we can do two things. The first is to separate scientific advance into two core paradigms ‘Automation of Body’ and ‘Automation of Mind’. ‘Automation of Body’ is virtually all scientific and technological endeavour until Alan Turing proposed a computational mechanism that theoretically might be able to replicate the function of the human mind. ‘Automation of Mind’ is the development of mechanisms that enable mind function to be off-loaded or enhanced. At this point we must be careful of the distinction between mind function and brain function, but there is a relatively simple philosophical question that enables us to tell if a specific action falls into ‘Mind’ or ‘Body (which includes brain)’.
Ask yourself ‘Do my memories count for anything in this task’. If the answer is yes, then we are dealing with a mind function, if no then its a brain/body function. Its shorthand, but it seems to work most of the time. The reason why is something to do with how we form opinions and make memories, because we don’t do it in isolation from our prior experience or emotional responses. I may spend some time developing this idea.
So we can separate science into ‘Automation of Body’ and ‘Automation of Mind’. So what ?
Well, it allows us to analyse whether standard computational, mechanical, chemical or physical techniques can be applied to the problem or whether the more advanced mathematics of complexity and probablility, itterative evolutionary design or quantum mechanics need to be invoked.
Here we come to a second, probably more familiar, layer of Kuhnian scientific paradigm. I’m calling these three physical paradigms ‘causal’ (with broad parallels to Newtonian mechanics), ‘relativistic’ (parallels to Einsteinian physics) and ‘probabilistic’ (similar in ethos to Quantum Mechanics). I believe that we can use these three scientific paradigms to analyse the way that people understand their physical and social interactions.
By this I don’t mean that we can use quantum physics to describe how people understand shopping (sorry Sokol, not playing that particular game). What I mean is that we can have different modes of understanding depending on our situation. For example lets take a statement ‘war causes poverty’. It implies a direct causal relationship and I would call this a causal relationship. However we could say that ‘war causes more poverty’. This would be a relatavistic statement and would usually have qualifier “war causes more poverty than …”.
Lets go for a third statement ‘war usually causes more poverty’. This is a probablistic interpretation since it uses the language of probability to express uncertainty.
I don’t think that there is any doubt that the probabalistic statement is more factually accurate than the causal, but if we didn’t know that there are vast profits to be made by some in supplying the materiel for war the statement would not make sense. We could say that it is also a more advanced and nuanced argument showing a higher degree of sophistication.
So again. So what ?
Because so much of what we call news is a representation of our physical and social universes the way that it is reported embodies much of our personal understanding of that universe. That understanding can be in terms of simple causal relationship (e.g. Katrina flooded New Orleans), in terms of value judgments (e.g. World Better Off Without Saddam) or probabilistic interpretation (e.g. Climate Chaos Likely). We’re sort of flirting with linguistics here, but I trying not to.
So that’s the basics;
We have a two-layer understanding of science and technological progress, with the movement towards ‘Automation of Body’ underlying most of our time as mankind and only recently the movement towards ‘Automation of Mind’ has got started though mathematically it started in the 1950s and we have been working on the technology to be able to pursue it since then.
There is currently a great deal of misunderstanding about the dividing line between mind and body, with many workers, in the physical sciences especially, overestimating the reach of the numerical understanding of the universe. We are only now really starting to understand brain function using fMRI and other techniques but as we get closer to that goal we will inevitably get closer to the ‘Automation of Mind’ paradigm and we are starting to see the confusion as our understanding start to cross over between the two. We’re not there yet.
That all appears to have no relevance to new journalism, democracy or political engagement.
Untrue.
If we consider evidence-based policy making as a desirable outcome, facilitated by open discussion and access to all available data then value judgments must, per force, be relegated in importance within government.
With the movement towards open databases, e-government and the like much of what currently constitutes journalistic endeavour can be automated, and if the current objectivity fetish persists journalists will, and indeed should, be programmed out of the loop because they will only introduce their own value judgments. (At this point we can talk about Herman & Chomsky and the impossibility of objective reporting within a corporate media framework, but this false concept of ‘journalistic objectivity’ works just as well within a game theoretic framework, and maybe even within a fairly humdrum psychological interpretation).
So ‘Automation of Body’ must result in the elimination of human journalists as purveyors of opinion ? Well yes & no, but only if journalism insists on objectivity as a core goal and value. This has not always been the case. back in the 1800s, journals used to be recognised as opinion pieces rather than factual accounts. The blogging movement may be an equivalent to a return to the opinion piece. Few commentators would say that bloggers are a fountain of truth. And here we start to see echos of Habermas’ Public Sphere.
End of Part One
The screen-life ironic
December 3, 2009
I think that maybe I’m a bit of a weirdo.
There are aspects of life that most people consider private, closed to debate, embarrassing, secret, even forbidden. I haven’t a clue what they are. Does that mean that I am a deviant from the social norm ? I’d say not unless we understand what the social norms are saying about what life should be.
Lets start with an easy one;
I don’t find watching trashy movies embarrassing. In fact I love bad effects, cliched dialogue, non-sensicle plots and ham acting. To me that is real life. I can imagine floating through space with a plastic-faced alien who magically speaks English.
Ken Loach and the whole ‘gritty urban realism’ thing isn’t my life. I can’t imagine wanting to imagine being trapped in a loveless marriage in a towerblock in Burnley. I’ve nothing against Burnley I just can’t imagine wanting to be there. I don’t have a pregnant teenage daughter and a crack addicted pit bull. That’s not realistic to me, it’s just depressing. I’m not being anti-intellectual or dismissing the plight of the inner cities, I’m failing to be entertained by entertainment.
The question is what is ironic here ?
(Just so there’s no misunderstanding, throughout this post I will be using the word ‘ironic’ in the dramatic sense of multiple meanings, rather than the more popular, comic sense of wry humour)
Is it that as someone who is considered in the top quartile intellectually (smug) I like ‘poor quality’ entertainment ? Or is it that precautionary tales told without irony are considered entertainment ? The thing is the nearest programming that I can think of as equivalent to the high-brow precautionary tales of urban realism in the ‘low rent’ end of the market is ‘You’ve Been Framed!” which is unashamedly pitched as entertainment. I bet you never saw Ken Loach and You’ve Been Framed as sharing a common gene 
I have no problem watching real people being hit in the face with a tennis ball, I might even laugh once I’ve got over the wince reflex. I just don’t feel the same way about urban realism. I can’t relate to it. Its not as if I haven’t lived in some pretty rough areas in South Manchester. Places where small riots go unreported and firebombings are not unknown. While I was there we had an armed home invasion where my friends and I barricaded ourselves into our living room for our own protection until the armed response unit got there, another time the police used my bedroom as a surveillance post during a spate of local burglaries, and yet I’m not entertained by re-enactments of grimness.
Terrible things happen in the world all the time and sometimes I even do something about them, but that doesn’t mean that I want to pay to watch them. Twist them around a bit and I’m fine. Make the pedo a wicked witch, make the thug a sith lord and set it all in Oz. I don’t care. At least show that some imagination has gone into it, then I may find it entertaining. Then I might find it relevant to my life. I’m Homer Simpson in A Star is Burns
Does that mean that I can only deal with representations of the real world if presented to me ironically ? Or that involve sporting equipment and pain ? No, of course not. I watch the news. I engage in debate.
The acceptable social norm is for me to be a concerned and engaged citizen. Actually its not really. Its to be a vocally concerned and physically unengaged individual. But we say its the first because it sounds like we care. It is acceptable for me to sound like I care. The norm is hypocrisy.
So is the social norm itself ironic ? or am I just disappearing up my own post-modern ass ?
La vie virtuelle
July 26, 2009
I’ve just had a wake-up call from reality. I hate those things, they always mean that I’m going to have to do something I don’t like.
Recap: I applied and was offered a place to attempt my PhD at the other end of the country. I recently went there for the first time. Lovely place, pleasant town, college was a bit run down but they are getting a new one soon.
But it felt wrong. I couldn’t really put my finger on it.
Was it the interactions that I had with people while I was there ? On the whole they weren’t unpleasant, probably not the most helpful folks I’ve every met in the service sector, but honest. They seemed OK online.
Was it physical isolation ? OK it was a long drive from here to there, but here is more isolated than there.
Maybe it was just the weather and sleep deprivation due to heavy rain on canvas.
It was a long drive home, so I thought about it quite deeply (but not to distraction). I think that the place wasn’t sufficiently different to where I was coming from. The physical balance was different with more focus on land and less on sea, but essentially the elements are the same. Even the economies of the areas are similar – mining, farming & tourism. Again, a different balance but the same elements.
And I wondered about how that sort of ambient situational noise would translate into online communities or even if it is relevant since the sense of physical ‘place’ online has no direct analogy. In a way this is what my PhD was supposed to be about – the translation effects between online & offline versions of reality. What do people say when the world is looking over their shoulders vs what do people do in the privacy of their own lives ?
Update – has ‘place’ been replaced by ‘community’ online ? If so, perceiving community is not dependent on any physical parameter, apart from access to the net. What does that mean in terms of nation and of national politics ? If our community only lies in virtual space do we pledge allegiance to the physical embodiment of the virtual space and form our own armies to protect server farms ? Do we take responsibility for that virtual community and its real-world impacts or is there something inherently different about a non-corporeal community ? Does its basis in the commercial world mean that an online community can be expected to persist in the same way as a physical one ? What happens when Facespace goes bust ? Is it the same as a nation going into political turmoil ? Are there online refugees ?
Yes, lots to explore over the next few years. Check out the new report on the Internet and Civic Engagement from the Pew Internet Project. Interesting stuff, but a bit cart before the horse. I think that we need to address some of the deeper questions about how people engage with each other before we start to act on this sort of data.
