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.
Brian Cox’s Huw Weldon Lecture
December 31, 2010
I like Brian Cox’s programs. He has an engaging style and an obvious passion for cosmology but he was inconsistent with his own arguments within his own recent Huw Weldon lecture and did nothing to enhance is reputation as a commentator outside his own area of expertise.
As someone who is investigating aspects of the philosophy of science his blanket dismissal of the academic understanding of scientific understanding was disappointing. Yes, the Sokolian viewpoint that the scientific worldview has proven to be a superior worldview over others in explaining our physical universe is undoubtedly true, but to then go on to say that it should never be challenged is not a valid position for an academic to take. It doesn’t matter if post-modern interpretations of science have any real-world meaning or not because science and the scientific method themselves are human inventions.
If we take the ultimate argument of Godel’s incompleteness theorem as applied by po-mo researchers – that full knowledge about the pursuit of an area of understanding can never be attained from within that area of understanding. There is no part of Godel’s theorem that allows or even suggests that it can be applied outside an oblique area of mathematical proof, but it rings true in human experience. The people we know with the deepest subject knowledge are also the blindest to the consequences of that knowledge. The deep passion that Prof Cox has for starlight is not the same deep passion for starlight that the lover has for the light that cast across the face of the loved. There is no better or worse, but there is different. In dismissing different ways of understanding we reduce the imagined to the possible and the possible to the probable and so down to the actual.
Now the actual may in fact be perfectly wonderful in its own right, and I might suggest that in choosing cosmology and sub-atomic physics as his subject area Prof Cox has chosen well, but what about more mundane pursuits. The fluid dynamics of sewerage systems for example (sorry Spenser) will never attract ex-pop stars and yet is one of the basics of modern urban existence. It could be every bit as complex to comprehend with chaotic flows of different fluids interacting on both a physical and a chemical basis to bring good or harm to millions of people every day. But you would have to be heartless in the extreme not to allow the workers in that sector to imagine the smell away or that chunkiness in one stream is just chunkiness. And yet that is what Prof Cox is asking for when he wishes to dismiss a super-position of alternate understanding on science and scientific progress.
The thing is though, later in his lecture he performs a complete about-face with no apparent recognition that he is contradicting himself. He yearns for the leaps in imagination and the deeper levels of understanding that he, as a professional scientist, feels through his hard fought understanding of science without recognising that what he is eulogising is a philosophy of science, and without acknowledging that the recognition of the polemic as a valid form implies admission that debate is possible. To be fair he did recognise the difficulty of his own position with regard to absolutism and autocrasy, but that only made things worse and made his own status as ‘talking head’ less tennable.
I agreed with 95% of what he said in the body of the lecture, especially regarding shifting objectivity to consensus and the journalistic tendancy to see reporting the controversy as balance, but his bookends showed that his own understanding of what philosophy of science is and does is every bit as skewed as poor reporting of MMR or climate change.
No-one is an authority on anyone else’s views but their own and no-one should be forced into a certain viewpoint irrespective of factual correctness. Evidence is just evidence. Interpretation is carried out by humans with human flaws. If you take your own argument a step or two further Prof Cox you will see the tyranny of your logic and recognise that we must be allowed to make mistakes irrespective of the quality of communication available.
Developing the argument about arguments
June 14, 2010
I’ve put forward the proposition that different Kuhnian scientific paradigms have associated with them different modes of argument (Newtonian-causal, Einsteinian-relativistic, Quantum/complex-probabilistic). This shouldn’t be a big surprise and is almost a definition for a paradigm shift in itself.
What I would like to suggest is that in order to perform an argument for or against a specific piece of science the rhetorical tools that you employ must be of at least the same level as the science itself. So you cannot employ causal arguments in a debate about the aerodynamics of Formula One racing cars and hope to win, but you could employ causal arguments of momentum transfer when discussing the science of playing snooker. Likewise the basic chemistry of cooking has no use for relativistic rhetoric, but the evaluation of emotional response only really has meaning in relative terms. You could not hope to argue successfully that a weather system will or will not respond to your building of a new house in simple black and white terms, but you may be successful if you provide a probability factor that you will induce a rain shadow on your new garden by raising the roof-line by a meter.
So if we take this thesis one step further we have a ready made quality of debate-o-meter. All we need to do is look at the paradigmic position of the arguers with respect to the subject matter of the argument to give a gross overview of whether one or other will be able to defend his position. Those who use the correct tools for the subject being more likely to win the argument because the opponent has not understood that in order to argue a scientific position you must first understand where that position fits in the schema of scientific paradigms.
At this point I should just state that we can definitely use a scale of increasing effectiveness (causal-relativistic-probabilistic) because scientific discovery is cumulative and even scientific dead ends like phlogiston taught scientific method by error.
So next time you read or have a real debate about a subject that has science at its heart look at the paradigm that your argument belongs to against the paradigm that the science belongs to.
Thats it. A simple one today.
Fit the argument to the paradigm and you will have more success.
and
Later paradigms are more likely to win than early paradigms.
However this has an potentially vast implication regarding scientific communication, the use of experts, the role of education in democracies, all sorts of things. We may get to those eventually.
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
