It appears that Prof Cox’s increasingly bombastic dismissal of universes beyond his own conception brought attention from Britain’s scientific senior class and a public rebuke (if you know what to look and listen for).

I was listening to Radio Four’s BAFTA award winning Infinite Monkey Cage (Series 4, Part 1). Its an engaging piece of pop-sci co-hosted by the ubiquitous Prof Cox and Robin Ince (a British stand-up comedian). Its usually funny in a nerdy kind of way. But this time the guest, Prof Steve Jones, one of the UK’s scientific grandees shoved Prof Cox’s head down the toilet and flushed repeatedly.

Unlike Cox, Jones recognises the limits to science and science’s role in discovery of knowledge AND truths. His is a mature and humble perspective on humanity’s role in the universe. Based on current scientific knowledge he estimated (or quoted estimates) that ‘we’ understand to a good degree 1/10^120 of the universe. That is the inverse of ten to the power of 120 or 1/100,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 of all matter in the universe.
Put in that perspective modern physics, though undoubtedly a powerful AND truthful representation of the known universe, actually knows almost none of the universe and therefore remains in its own terms mainly composed of theories and partial evidence.

We only have to look at our understanding of how DNA operates or how a planet forms to see how close to home the unknown resides and in turn to appreciate our personal contexts. I don’t mean for this to suggest that scientific progress is not the most relevant or most successful mechanism that humanity has to better understand its own context, rather that science has a perspective that is per force both limited and directional (with time). In contrast the human mind has the power to reject time as an argument and work outside the historical context of scientific development. One only has to look at science fiction authors such as Verne, Wells or Clarke to see that value in expressing an imagined future, deeply unscientific though it is. If our minds can do away with a fundamental, universal variable with almost no effort and invent limitless and coherent internal universes, how can that be seen as any less powerful that the collective experience of scientific progress.

Anyway, if you get the chance to listen to this radio show listen for the negative space, the things unsaid and watch for the looks exchanged to find a young, brash, star-spangled scientist getting a lesson from the wise old wizard.

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.

The piece in the Telegraph is so riddled with inaccuracies and false conflations that it should be used as some sort of example of how not to do it in journalism schools. Lets pick it apart and see what he got wrong.

Japan creates synthetic version of rare earth metal palladium

WRONG

AND THE JAPANESE SCIENTISTS DID NOT CLAIM TO CREATE A SYNTHETIC PALLADIUM, THOUGH THEY DO STATE THAT THEIR ACHIEVEMENT IS ‘AKIN TO MODERN ALCHEMY’
IN THEIR CONCLUSIONS THE GROUP SAYS
“we conclude that the Ag50Rh50 solid-solution alloy has an electronic structure similar to that of Pd (palladium)”.
THE USE OF THE WORD ‘SYNTHETIC’ BY RYALL IMPLIES A NEW MATERIAL WAS FORMED WHEN IN FACT WHAT WAS BEING CREATED WAS A VERY FINE MISTED MIXTURE THAT OTHER MOLECULES REACTED TO AS IF THAT MIXTURE WAS PURE SOLID PALLADIUM.

Japanese scientists have developed a synthetic version of the rare earth metal palladium, a breakthrough that it is hoped will eventually reduce industry’s reliance on exports from China.

WRONG

JAPANESE INDUSTRY IS NOT RELIANT ON CHINESE EXPORTS FOR SUPPLIES OF PALLADIUM. MOST PALLADIUM COMES FROM THE SAME DEPOSITS AS PLATINUM. RUSSIAN AND SOUTH AFRICAN MINES PROVIDE OVER 75% OF THE WORLD’S PALLADIUM. CHINA’S MAIN INTEREST IN PALLADIUM IS THROUGH RECYCLING OF WASTE CATALYTIC CONVERTORS. IT HAS NO MINES OF ITS OWN AND DOES NOT SIGNIFICANTLY INFLUENCE PALLADIUM PRICE OR AVAILABILITY.

By Julian Ryall in Tokyo 7:00AM GMT 03 Jan 2011

Researchers at Kyoto University achieved the world-first by uniting molecules of rhodium and silver, which do not naturally combine, through the fusion of ultramicroscopic particles of the metals after they had been reduced to a fine solution spray.

WRONG

THE USE OF ‘UNITING’ AND ‘FUSION’ IMPLIES THAT THERE WAS A FORCED BONDING BETWEEN THE METALS. IF YOU READ THE PAPER IT IS APPARENT THAT THE NANO-PARTICULATE SPRAY IS A SIMPLE MIX WITH A FEW ADDED CHEMICALS TO ALLOW THE NANO-PARTICULATE TO FLOAT TOGETHER WITHOUT STICKING TO THE CONTAINER. THE WIERD EFFECTS WERE SEEN WHERE NANO-PARTICLES HAPPENED TO SETTLE ADJACENT TO EACH OTHER. A TEMPERATURE OF 170C IS NOWHERE NEAR ENOUGH FOR NORMAL METALLIC ALLOYING TO TAKE PLACE, EVEN IF THE METALS USED WERE MISCIBLE, SO SOME SORT OF QUANTUM STATE DIFFUSION LOOKS A GOOD BET (NOT BEING A QUANTUM METALLURGIST THAT’S AS FAR AS I’M STRETCHING).
THE WORD ‘ULTRAMICROSCOPIC’ IS A TRANSLATION THAT HAS NO MEANING IN TODAY’S SCIENCE AND THE SCALE AT WHICH THIS WORK WAS BEING CARRIED OUT COMMONLY USES THE TERM ‘NANO’ TO DENOTE THE SMALL SCALE.

Each particle is a mere 10 nanometers in diameter, Professor Hiroshi Kitagawa told the Yomiuri newspaper, but the new alloy has the same properties as palladium.

WRONG – SEE ABOVE.
ALSO THE PAPER MAKES IT PLAIN THAT PROPERTIES SUCH AS HYDROGEN STORAGE ARE VERY DIFFERENT.

Exports from China of palladium – which is a crucial part of next-generation engines and serves to clean exhaust gases and absorb high levels of hydrogen – were abruptly halted in the wake of a territorial dispute between Beijing and China.

WRONG

THE DISPUTE HAD NOTHING TO DO WITH PALLADIUM AND THERE WAS NO CONFIRMATION FROM CHINA THAT ANY DISRUPTION OF MINERALS SUPPLY TOOK PLACE. JAPANESE OFFICIALS WERE PRE-EMPTING ANY SUCH MOVE BY CHINA BY LODGING A FORMAL DIPLOMATIC PROTEST AT THE RHETORIC BEING USED OVER THE BORDER DISPUTE AND THREATENED TO APPROACH THE WTO REGARDING ANY FUTURE DISRUPTION OF SUPPLY OF RARE EARTH ELEMENTS, NOT PALLADIUM. WHICH AS WE HAVE STATED IS NOT IMPORTED INTO JAPAN FROM CHINA IN ANY VOLUME.

In September, a Chinese fishing vessel operating within Japan’s exclusive economic zone around the Senkaku Islands, the very southernmost tip of Okinawa Prefecture, rammed a Japanese Coast Guard patrol vessel.
The captain of the trawler was arrested, causing an outcry in Beijing, which claims the uninhabited islands as sovereign Chinese territory.
The Chinese fisherman was eventually released without being charged, but not before Beijing imposed a ban on shipments to Japanese firms.

MOSTLY OK BUT A LITTLE WRONG

NO BAN WAS ISSUED. THE CHINESE WERE MORE SUBTLE AND SIMPLY DELAYED SHIPMENTS IN PORT AND CUSTOMS CLEARANCE.

As well as Japan’s automobile industry, rare earth materials such as yttrium, praseodymium and thulium are important for companies here producing everything from infrared lasers to alloys for aerospace components, batteries, ceramic capacitors and parts for computer memory chips.

OK – BUT PALLADIUM IS NOT A RARE EARTH ELEMENT. THE ERROR IS MADE THREE TIMES IN ORDER TO JUSTIFY THE STORY WITHOUT IT THE SCIENCE IS PROBABLY TOO ESOTERIC FOR TELEGRAPH READERS TO BE INTERESTED IN. LAZY AND GREEDY.

The scientists said the new alloy will be difficult to produce commercially at this point but the production process is expected to lead to the development of more synthetic alloys that can be used as alternatives to rare earth metals.

AND THIS IS THE WHILE POINT OF THE SCIENCE (SO LONG AS THE RARE EARTH THING IS IGNORED YET AGAIN) – IT IS A BREAKTHROUGH IN NANO-PROCESSING AND WAS NEVER INTENDED TO REPLACE NATURAL PALLADIUM. SCIENTISTS OFTEN PICK THE OPTIMAL COMBINATION OF VARIABLES TO TEST A NEW CONCEPT BEFORE THEY GET ON TO APPLYING THAT CONCEPT. IF YOU READ THE PAPER THE WORKERS STATE THAT THEIR HOPE IS THAT THE TECHNIQUE CAN BE USED TO MIX OTHER CURRENTLY UNMIXABLE METALS;
OR IN THEIR WORDS “Following on from the discovery of the Ag-Rh solid solution alloy, we envisage the development of new solid-solution alloys of immiscible Ag-Ni, Au-Rh, Cu-Ru, and others that exhibit phase-segregated structures, even in the high-temperature liquid phase.”
IN OTHER WORDS FORGET SILVER AND RHODIUM AND FORGET DELICATE MISTED SPRAYS, WHAT THESE GUYS ARE LOOKING FOR IS A QUENCHED SOLID THAT HAS THE SAME PROPERTIES BUT CAN WITHSTAND THE RIGOURS OF REAL-WORLD USE WHILST COMBINING RELATIVELY COMMON ELEMENTS. BASIC SCIENCE INVESTIGATING NEW IDEAS BUT WITH AN EYE TO THE FUTURE.

Joint research has already begun with car companies and Japanese electronics manufacturers, Prof Kitagawa said.

AT LAST SOMETHING THAT WE KNOW IS ALMOST CERTAINLY TRUE ! THE JAPANESE, THROUGH THEIR NATIONAL NATURAL RESOURCES STOCKPILER, JOGMEC, HAVE BEEN INVESTING IN ALL SORTS OF NATURAL RESOURCE PROCESSING TECHNOLOGY AND ALTERNATIVE MATERIAL DEVELOPMENT AS HAVE ALL THE MAJOR ECONOMIES.

(END)

If the journalist had actually read the original article (here translated from the original Japanese), clocked that some of the translation had some ambiguity, and then gone to the original scientific paper to address that ambiguity you wouldn’t have inane comment from all and sundry around the world aimed at a perfectly good piece of basic scientific research.

OK, some of the most inane comment has come from vested interest groups, but you also have long-time metals commentators such as Martin Creamer in South Africa taking time to do a 5 minute piece to camera when it would have taken less time just to chase the story down and see that it is no immediate threat to South African mining. In his follow up written piece he follows Ryall’s lead and wrongly conflates this research with rare earth elements. Martin, if you are listening – Prof Kitagawa uses the term ‘Rare Metals’ not ‘Rare Earth Metals’ or ‘Rare Earths’. This is not a story about current metals supply it is a story about nano-fabrication and basic science as your quotes from Peter Duncan from JohnssonMatthey would seem to confirm. You have all the information, you’ve obviously chased down the article from Japan, you even have the right interpretation by an expert who has seen and read the paper, but you still conflate this with the rare earth story from last year.

Where the Telegraph journo is lazy and greedy, Creamer is not (and for the record he is one of the best resources journalists around), but he is still mistaken in the face of expert opinion and appears follow a poor conflation blindly to add spice to the story.

Science isn’t always sexy or fun. Sometimes its just process and of interest to relatively few people. We’ve all seen the kind of trouble that happens when non-specialists ‘sex up’ detailed work by others. Just don’t do it if you don’t understand it.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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 ?

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.