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.
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
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.
Scientific Method as Strasberg’s Method
March 3, 2010
We’ve been hearing a great deal about science in the media in the context of climate change and new energy sources lately, and the quality of some scientific work has been called into doubt, and there have been calls for an increased understanding of science to try and stop misrepresentation by the media, blah, blah, blah. This call for dialogue between the fields of arts and sciences is happening on more and more occasions as science gets more difficult and mass media becomes less patient. Anyone still remember CP Snow ? So why don’t we look at things a slightly different way ?
Science is media
That sounds a bit odd, but philosophically science is a mechanism by which we try to understand the physical reality that we inhabit and mass media (especially news journalism) is also a mechanism to help understand the world around us. Their methods are different but their core goals are the same – enhanced understanding of reality.
So lets look at some recent science through a media lens. In fact let’s get PoMo on its ass !
Marshall McLuhan in ‘The Medium is the Massage’ posits that you perform the message that you wish to communicate. It doesn’t matter if that is verbally, ethically, artistically, mathematically or physically, what you do and how you do it IS what you say. On the other side of the coin if your performance does not tie in with your message the audience undergoes cognitive dissonance and the message is garbled, contradictory and ineffective.
Strasberg’s Method Acting technique is a great example of this. The actor does everything in his power to become the character in order that his whole performance reflects the experience of that being, in so doing the words and the physical body perform as one and, hopefully, the role is played well. The actor doesn’t actually become the character, that would be impossible, but he will take on or construct every aspect of that character that he can discover.
So if we take the recent CRU email scandal (yes, scandal), we have a set of scientists who perform their science under the scientific method which involves openness, respect for others results and views, self-criticism, peer-review and data validation. Over the years they have told us ‘trust us, we’re the best, we do good science’, in effect we’re following the scientific method, and now we find out that their performance is not backed up by their method. We thought that we were seeing the real thing, or at least a good approximation of the real thing with the scientists suffering for their art, but we were sold a poor performance. A shallow frontage. Its like finding out that a character that Al Pacino plays never actually liked coffee but Pacino forced a re-write because he couldn’t go without his morning joe.
For the record and as a former scientist I find the actions of the CRU scientists abhorant, but human (I never lived up to my own view of what a scientist is, which is why no longer call myself one, though I still perform the role of scientific critic). For me the affair doesn’t detract from the credibility of climate science as a whole, but its disturbing that their performance was more Lee Majors than Lee Strasberg.
They need to get their method back.
