Blog the Gnarl, Encore
I see my guest blog is still up even though I haven’t added anything since last Thursday. I thought I was done. Okay, look, here’s a final infodump, unused bits culled from the working notes of my work in progress, The Lifebox, the Seashell and the Soul. This is meant to be a week's worth. But, sorry, no links or pictures, beating the filthy Microsoft HTML formatting out of this was hard enough.
Geek Joke for the Preface to The Lifebox, the Seashell and the Soul
I was in fact tempted to call this tome Early Geek Philosophy. As many will know, in early 20th century American slang, “geek” had the specific meaning of a carnival sideshow performer who would bite the head off a live chicken or eat raw liver. In practice, a carnival geek was a person whose primary skill was a. high tolerance for grossness, ridicule, and pain. By the late 20th century, with carnivals a rarity, a “geek” was simply a person who seemed very different from other people, usually a person lacking in social graces. Because so many of these types of people became involved with computers, “computer geek” became a natural name for programmers in general. Given that computers have been around for considerably less than a century, in the grand historical view of things the computer mavens of our time are still early geeks, so call me Rucrates! And my predecessors are the pre-Rucratics.
Working with computers isn’t quite like biting the head off a live chicken, but it’s close. The thing is, computers are somewhat repellent. Computer cases are a dull, ugly shade of beige. Computers are the tools of telemarketers, dot-commers, oppressive governments, and digital snoops. Many of us have office jobs where using a computer is part of the daily grind. The damned things never work like you expect them to for more than a few weeks at a time. You have to constantly upgrade their software and hardware. They flicker and they make an ugly noise. A lot of us lost money on computer stocks in the Dot Com Bubble. And so on.
Who but a chicken-head-biting geek could stand to spend much time with such machines?. What could less life-affirming, mind-manifesting, or philosophical than computers? Ah, but if you look, the secrets of life float just beneath the pulsing screen.
More Bitching About Computers
Occasionally I see an old movie from the Thirties, or Forties or Fifties --- and I’m always struck by the absence of computers. How peaceful things look without those demanding machines; how leisurely and free those old-time actors seem.
When they’re done work for the day, they leave their office --- without having to wait through any kind of computer log-off procedure. When they arrive at their offices in the morning they get on with their business ---without spending an hour or more combing through email.
My First Computer
The first computer I saw was when I was in high-school in Kentucky, maybe forty years ago. I was in the math club, and our group got atour of the computing center at the University of Louisville.
The thing that impressed me most on that first computer excursion was a large mechanical drawing device ---they called it a plotter. The plotter was shaped like a sand box; it was a square hollow frame four feet by four feet. In the middle of the plotter was a bracket-mounted pen held in place by tight pulleys. The pen was supposed to draw on a three-foot square of paper, but at the time of our visit the plotter was out of order ---nothing unusual for computer hardware then or now.
Even though the plotter wasn't working, the idea of it stayed with me. By speeding up and slowing down two little pulley motors according to some equations, a computer could move a pen around to draw pictures. Some of the pictures were on the walls. I seem to remember a spider-web and perhaps a mechanical drafting of a nut or a bolt. The friendly white-shirted nerds who ran the computer center tried to explain how they used punch-cards to feed simple equations to the computer that ran the plotter --- but their explanations didn't make any sense to me. The important thing was the visual evidence of the plotter: A computer could control a device capable of generating smooth shapes. Computers were more than punch-cards and teletype print-out.
In math class at that time --- I think this would have been the eleventh grade --- we were studying equations with things like cube roots, exponentials and polar coordinates. I wished I had a plotter to play with, so as to quickly turn lots and lots of equations into pictures. I also wished that I could understand how to use punch-cards to put equations into a computer. I was hoping there might be a way to learn this without having to become a complete Martian like the computer-center guys.
Rap about Halting Being Bad
Your experience with pencil-and-paper computations, such as multiplying numbers, may have left you with the impression that a computation has to terminate with an answer. But this need not be true. A computation can be ongoing, with no specific termination time contemplated --- think of a flowing river or of a computer screen-saver. Each of the successive states is an output linked to a moment in time.
Speaking of time, how long does a computation continue?. We won’t impose any bound at all. Certain kinds of computation will indeed signal when they’ve arrived at a desired result --- for instance by beeping or by printing a result --- and then halt in the sense of no longer changing their states. But there’s a sense in which such computational processes continue after their halting point. It’s just that after they halt they remain in a constant state.
For a computer that’s supposed to calculate a number, halting, is usually viewed as a good thing, but for a living being --- which is also a kind of computation --- halting has the bad connotation of death. Most naturally occurring computational processes are things that we like to keep going as long as possible.
The Turbulence Pattern Known as a “Von Karman Vortex Street”
I like to think of Von Karman Vortex Street as a place, possibly located somewhere near Miles Davis’s Green Dolphin Street and the Firesign Theater’s Non-Euclid Avenue.
Fredkin’s Billiard Ball Computer
In the 1970s, the computer scientist Edward Fredkin gave a theoretical proof that, if you idealize away all of the real-world crud, you can make a universal computer from billiard balls bouncing around on a sufficiently large table. At the time this seemed like a surprising result, but by now it’s beginning to seem likely that almost all of the physical systems we encounter are universal, just as they are.
Now, in reality, you can’t actually build a Fredkin-style billiard ball computer, for the balls’ large-scale motions will quickly display the slight inaccuracies in yourstarting conditions, not to mention the influences of effects as small as gravitational forces from your body as you walk around the table observing the experiment. The system won’t behave in the repeatable digital fashion that you’d planned. It’s not realistic to expect the motions ofordinary objects to behave like a digital computer. We live in an irredeemably analog world.
But Fredkin’s proof-in-principle encourages us to believe some form of Wolfram’s Principle of Computational Equivalence, which claims that essentially all physical systems embody universal computations fully rich enough to emulate anything that happens inside an electronic machine.
Bitter Ranting Against Quantum Mechanics
I might as well say straight out that when I try and explain quantum mechanics, I feel like a cross between a browbeaten atheist reciting Bible stories at Sunday school, a frightened former landowner singing the praises of Stalin, and a one-legged man trying to tap dance.
Entanglement
Entanglement is a popular topic for quantum mechanical mystery-mongering. But it’s easy to read too much into it. Wolfram remarked to me that if you heat a large flat pan of water, steam bubbles will appear at the same time on opposite sides of the pan. This doesn’t necessarily mean that there’s a magical faster-than-light entanglement between distant pairs of bubbles. It can simply mean that the bubbles are the result of a lower-level common cause.
Everything is a Program
Philosophical ontology and computer science's Object Oriented Programming (OO) as in C++ or Java.
Everything is mathematics implies Everything is a set implies Everything is an object.
Objects are better than sets, as they have function pointers, they are a verb as well as a noun.
An interesting thing about OO (object-oriented) languages is how they are like set theory. We build up class definitions from the primitive byte variables (of various standard lengths, recall that a floating point real is just four bytes, for instance) like the way set theorists build up all of mathematics from commas and pairs of brackets. Objects are even better than sets, though, as they contain function pointers and corresponding blocks of code. That’s a cool thing about the von Neumann architecture is that we have instruction pointer and data pointer, so we crawl over both data and code.
Software engineering teaches us to look for patterns in our lives.
Telerobotics
For many applications, the user might not need for a robot to be fully autonomous. Something like remotely operated hand that you use to handle dangerous materials is like a robot, in that it is a complicated machine which imitates human motions. But a remote hand does not necessarily need to have much of an internal brain, particularly if all it has to do is to copy the motions of your real hand. A device like a remote robot hand is called a telerobot.
I have a feeling that, in the coming decades, telerobotics is going to be a much more important field than pure robotics. People want amplifications of themselves more than they want servants. A telerobot projects an individual's power. Telerobots would be useful for exploration, travel, and sheer voyeurism, and could become a sought-after high-end consumer product
Weinberg’s Put-Down
"There’s a good reason why Dell and Intel don’t market Turing machines or Rule 110 Cellular Automata." Universality isn’t everything. Answer to Weinberg: The speed up of using a better machine is only linear. It's the logarithmic speedup that's ruled out by Wolfram's Principle of Computational Unpredictability (my name for his implicit conjecture: Most naturally occurring complex computations are unpredictable.)
Anti-Beige Agenda
It’s possible that electronic computers are only a passing fad.
Brain Surgery
In a human being, changing the microcode is analogous to undergoing brain surgery or (in a temporary way) dropping acid; flashing the BIOS is akin to having a peak conversion experience; and changing the operating system is comparable to adopting a behavior-modifying regimen such as meditation classes or group therapy. A pathological neurosis can be so deeply ingrained a system bug that one has to dig down quite far to change it.
Good News Bad News
No intelligent robots for at least a century. Depending on how you look at it, this may seem like either good news (we won’t be replaced by smart robots) or bad news (we won’t figure out how to build smart robots very soon).
Incomprehensible Solutions
The neural net for recognizing smiles and frowns, for instance, is just a mound of some three thousand real-valued numerical weights. You might hope that if you analyzed the weights, you’d discover that each of the hidden layer neurons is in fact learning to recognize a specific aspect of facial expressions. Perhaps the first neuron notices whether the left corner of the mouth bends down or up, perhaps the second focuses on the wrinkles or lack thereof in the face’s brow, and maybe the third pays attention to the twist of the mouth’s right corner. But this isn’t necessarily the case. In many neural nets there’s no easy way to pick out what it is that each individual hidden-layer neuron islearning. Indeed, the more compact and effective a neural net becomes, the more opaque it becomes, and the less amenable to human understanding.
Unsupervised Learning Raps
Unsupervised learning is when K goes out in the playground and a girl won’t get off the seesaw to give him aturn, and K bites her on the butt, but she’s wearing thick snow pants and doesn’t notice, but even so K feels bad and dumb. Unsupervised learning is when K looks for someone to marry and ends up with the girl he tried to bite in first grade. Unsupervised learning is when K finally tells her that old story and she divorces him. Error! Unsupervised learning is when L drinks so much beer at age sixteen that she throws up, learns to drink slowly enough not to get sick, but then realizes after thirty years of increasingly vexed imbibing that she suffers from alcoholism. Unsupervised learning is M dying of cancer from smoking cigarettes. Back-propagate that! Unsupervised learning is N laboring in obscurity on a novel for fifteen years and then selling it and having a nice success. N was right all along!
Robot Emotions
It’s worth mentioning that the roboticist Rodney Brooks thinks of machine emotions in quite a different way. For Brooks, emotions are to be contrasted with reason. He feels that we’re looking at artificial reasoning when a robot or program arrives at a decision by means of some kind of internal simulation of the situation, possibly combined with a logical analysis. And for Brooks, a robot emotion is when a machine simply responds, as when using a built-in reflex.
Nonlinear Brain Waves
The glider model is somewhat more appropriate than waves because we don’t in fact see our thought trains spreading out and diffusing, they tend to stay rather narrowly focused. But if we really want a wave-like model of thought trains, we can represent narrow, focused waves by something called non-linear solitons.
Rant at Start of Chapter on Society
I write this book during a dark time. America’s government is in the hands of criminals and morons.
I’d like to break through to a radically different way of talking about society, to throw a bucket of ice-water in the face of the sleep-walking sheep who think that history is about presidents and kings.
A baby filling a diaper is infinitely more significant than a congress placing a movement on the floor.
Joy of Hacking
Coding a simulation forces a programmer to ponder unexpectedly many issues. God is in the details. One might go so far as to assert that a person doesn’t fully understand something until they’ve written a simulation of it --- a precept which has the perhaps too übergeekly corollary that non-programmers don’t fully understand anything!
Peace March Safety Example of Enjoying a Crowd
During the Vietnam War, and again during the second Iraqi War, the only times I felt truly safe from my nation’s government was when I was part of a protest march.
Games and Flocking
I think it’s a shame that online massively multiplayer computer games don’t presently take into account the joy of flocking. In all too many games, the only interaction you have with people is to attack them with a weapon, to run away from them, or, at best, to share a ride in a vehicle. Games are more interesting and humane if a player has to dance with or walk around with the other characters --- instead of simply killing them. Sports games are something of an exception, with, for instance, open field running in a football game being a nice example of crowd-motion play.
Twin Towers
Facts: The twin towers fell. The terrorists were Saudis. Bush invaded Iraq.
“Ah,” someone might say, “if nobody wanted to fight, we’d be invaded. Look at the twin towers. The world’s not safe.”. And I would submit that the administration’s reaction to the twin towers was exactly the wrong one. Instead of jumping into the repetitive tit-for-tat class two Israelis-versus-Palestinians mode, the government should have gone class four. What would make men kill themselves while destroying a part of our lovely New York City? What system produced them? Isn’t there a way to get in and jolt it in some totally unexpected way, something more original than rocket fire vs. car bombs?
Emigration
Before virtually every American presidential election, I’ve heard people say, “If so and so wins, I’m leaving the country.” But they never do. The only time my friends eve remigrated was during the Viet Nam war, a time when the hive mind was undertaking the wholesale slaughter of a generation. But most of the time, for most of us, things aren’t bad enough to make emigration seem reasonable.
If the election is stolen again in Fall, 2004, the answer could be armed revolution, not emigration. If the Bush faction tries to retain power, a significant number of people may feel compelled to go to D.C. and fight in the streets until the tyrant is deposed. However long it takes, however dearly it costs. Would it be worth it?
Hopefully he'll lose the election by too great a margin to fudge. But for that to happen, we have to vote. The popular vote margin matters, if not in the electoral college, then in the hearts and minds of our oppressed populace. If the margin were big enough, the house of cards could collapse.
Life is Hard at Every Level
My perennial concern about being a mid-list non-best-selling author--- here I am stuck out on the fat-but-not-all-that-fat tail of the gravy train. It's an inverse power law. Like earthquake magnitudes. Accept it. You don't have to hit the ball out of the park. Critically tuned self-organizing systems are class four.
Criticality means that at least things are boiling at every level. So it’s never going to be dull. In fact it’s not easier to send your stories to very low-circulation magazines or take jobs you’re over-qualified for. There’s just as much hassle at every scale where you’re competent.
Memes
It could be fruitful to think of cultural artifacts as independent beings that travel about in the hive mind. Mind parasites, as it were. The meme theory of artifacts views them as agents competing with each other in an evolving environment. Memes are a type of life.
Magpie
The magpie approach to writing. Stick in any old thing you’ve experienced ---and see what grows out of it. Like seeding a solution for crystals.
Enlightenment Is...
Enlightenment is when you let the world think you --- instead of you thinking the world.
posted by Rudy Rucker at 9:25:37 AM | permalink
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