I see vacuous people....

Yoo-hoo

Oh, vacouous yoo
vacuously troo
Yoo knew;
trooth over survival
beauty over pain

You may have noticed the new graphic header for the blog.
It's a set of deformations of Solomonoff's Algorithmic Probability equation (Sholarpedia, MIT Lecture). ALP in essence takes the weighted sum of all the hypotheses about a set of observations. It has been shown that ALP learns to correctly predict any computable sequence with only the absolute minimum amount of data.
You can get it straight from the horse's mouth here, although, be forewarned, Ray is struggling with a missing front tooth which makes it hard for him to enunciate.

Something you probably don't know, is that Ray Solomonoff was in Steven Wright's short film, "One Soldier"!
In the film, there is a scene where Steven Wright's civil war character meets himself from 40 years in the future. His future self tells him not to worry about 40 years from now, he will will have been dead for 37 of them anyway. The man playing the 80 year old Wright is Ray Solomonoff. I saw his name in the credits and went back and checked, and sure enough it's the guy in the picture. As far as I know, no one else has noticed this. How deadpan is that?
So, vacuous you; have some fun with Ray and his beautiful and profound ideas about reality.

Word Jazz and SETI

In another life, as they say, before the invisible cities, before the invisible wars, my girlfriend and I got hooked on Ken Nordine's Word Jazz, which was on NPR. It was so profound and metaphysical, but with a jazz attitude. Very cool. After a while, it seemed like his shows had some sort of clue about our lives. We couldn't wait to get home from work on the nights his show was on and see what he had in store for us. It seemed like the them of our lives for that week was the them of the show! Sometimes they were very specific things, like something happening on a bus on his show that was weird but almost identical to something that happened to us. Yeah, I know, tropical fish look like they're dancing to the music, Ramsey theory says you always find patterns, etc. But, I've never known anyone who actually thought the fish were dancing, it just looks like they're dancing. Yes, we always find patterns, but some are more meaningful. For some reason we think it's more than a coincidence that when we read a book, we generally learn, or that in conversations, what the other person says, usually fits with what you were saying, (more searching for entailment).

The difference between superstition and science is, the amount of scrutiny the conclusions get. So, yes, I could think Ken was communicating clues to my girlfriend and I because of natural co-occurrence, Ramsey theory, Dada, mind as meaning maker, whatever. But once we ask ourselves, "Is it possible?" - things change.

Let's look at some of the ways this could occur.

1. The message is deliberate, strictly personal and is equivalent to one given by an omniscient agent that knows the significant facts of who you are. This happens with no one else.
2. Just like 1, except everyone gets a personal important message. In essence, KN is Santa Clause, knows every kid and what they need to do get the best Christmas ever. Everyone that listens will hear their personal important message.
3. Just like 2, except ...

We see the pattern.
Basically we have {always personal and specific} {deliberate, not deliberate}, {only for you, for others{grouped, ungrouped}, for all others{grouped, ungrouped}}
Specific means, you might listening to the show and he would be talking about how greed brings grief with it, and you just realized that you had been greedy and hurt other people by putting yourself first.
So we want to see if there is a feasible interpretation over these possibilities.

Here's what I think: We live in a fractal reality, so everything is essentially the same thing. But there are "ways" of being the same thing, and some of them are death and some are life, some are ugly and some are beautiful. Everything true is personal and specific because the specifics are just the local distortion of the truth fractal. Actually, to be specific by attribution is so much less personal than by "speaking truth" if we are indeed truth incarnate. I'm pretty comfortable with that metaphysics.

So, what's this got to do with SETI. They have the same problem. Is this signal varying because it knows something we recognize, or is it merely the transcription of some deep truth. Is it intelligent? Does it care?

Ken Nordine speaks the cool truth, like Miles Davis did. I eventually moved away and never found it on radio again.
After all these years, I've never forgotten him or the excitement and mystery of listening to his shows and seeing how they seemed to fit with our daily lives. I ordered a couple of his Cd's and that was about it other than periodically surfing for him on the web. Well, he has a web site (of course) - and I just went there for the first time - there's no place like home, ah Oz....let's go see what he has to say tonight, shall we?

word jazz

Hell: a non-entailment problem?

"Hell is the impossibility of reason." - Oliver Stone's Platoon

I have been busy trying to find the right rectifiers for my nervous system and at the same time working pretty hard on getting Eclipse EMF to do some basic things, like represent XMI metamodels as ontologies and lesser model types like UML and Ecore . But it's like pulling teeth, even with all the fancy stuff. So, I have not been able to give you, p(t), anything new. I know you are currently the empty set, but that's ok, I don't discriminate. But what is time to the empty set and, to some future onlooker, what tree fell in a forest here before you arrived?

hELL

Why have I needed to put new "industrial strength" rectifiers between my nervous system and the real world? Well, there's reading Sartre's Nausea and there's being in it. Kind of like "Total Recall" with an existential twist.

eNTAILMENT
But this all has to do with entailment. If we postulate something like a valid culture (identity, perspective, value system, etc.), then shouldn't global (system wide) ethics entail every valid culture. Before globalization, tribal "micro-theories" could co-exist and since the interaction between tribes was minimal, tolerance (entailment of the other culture), was not an issue. Increased population, and advances in transportation and communications, make the tribal approach untenable. Tribalism was fine as a precursor to the current dynamic, but it wastes too much information to handle any real complexity. Global ethics is defined institutionally but has not been personalized by very many people.
Is it OK to stone your wife because she committed adultery? If we say yes for some cultures, is it because they are too crude to understand that this is cruelty, that other cultures have abandoned this practice and lived through it? We should advance a simple upper ontology of basic good that has two simple constraints:

1. Don't hurt anyone
   
2. Help as much as you can

Now of course, this entails quite a bit. You have to at least be honest enough with yourself to be able to tell if you are really doing those two things or not. Well, how do you know if you're being honest with yourself? That leads to more answers and as e.e. cummings used to say:

"Always the beautiful answer who asks a more beautiful question."

I just watched the most fascinating video that is a form of what I am trying to get at in this blog.











Carlos Puentes seems to have integrated his work as a Hydrologist doing chaos theory with his spiritual/metaphysical position. He even sings at one point. What a sweet beautiful person.

This is the true poetry of science and mathematics.

Enjoy

From Complexity to Peace

Does the universe have AADD?

I have been considering whether I am AADD and might benefit from Ritalin or something like it. I know Erdos swore by his speed. I certainly qualify: I have a hard time finishing things, I'm not very focused, I seem to go from one thing to the next and have a hard time hitting deadlines. This can be very frustrating at times.
But I kept having this nagging feeling that some of what I add in the world and at work is because of this. I know a big part of what I enjoy about being conscious is seeing the big patterns and ingenious ways reality seems to work. Let's just take the signs I listed.

I have a hard time finishing things.
But I do deliver things. They're just not finished. They work, they do what they are supposed to, but they can't be finished, because nothing is ever really finished.
I am always working on the same thing: to (in the Zen sense) do nothing. When you start working on something, you realize it's connected to other things, not superficially, truly connected. The economy of a country is connected to its laws, it's connected to other countries' laws and and other economies, and so on. Adjusting an economy without looking at tariffs and so on is not losing focus, it's not seeing the whole problem. We don't just systematically ignore all of the higher order terms in the Taylor series expansion of something do we?
Yes, there are seperable systems, and we love them because they are easy to solve. But the real problems we face are not separable, reducable. It's inevitable, once the easy problems have been solved, then you have to solve the harder problems, and so on.
Everything is connected, and the more important of interesting it is, the more connected it is.

I lack focus.
But it's not because I'm distracted by moving objects or flashy colors. I am very focused on learning the different ways complex phenomena are described, concepturalized, and so on.
If the universe has a focus, that will be my focus. But what is the universe focused on? What people call focus, most of the time, seems like studying the font something is written in rather than what it says. I can be focused enough to see that category theory talks about coordination one way and chemistry in a sligthly different way, and of course, relativistically speaking, what does it even mean, and in computer science, you have the Byzantine general. If you understand the little picture how can you understand the big picture? How can you really understand the little picture if you don't know what the big picture is? How do little pictures become the mosaic of the bigger picture?
Is the bigger picture inside every smaller picture?

I have a hard time hitting deadlines
True, but sometimes I deliver things before anyone even knows they need them. That makes up for it. Knowing the future is very powerful in the right hands. You don't have to know exactly when things will happen, just a time span, then you (implicitly) buy an option on it.
How do you know the future? If you see the right patterns, it's just like now - only more complex. You just have to get far enough away from it to see it all happening.
Plus, plenty of creative people have a hard time hitting deadlines. I don't think I need a cure for creativity.

So - I'm going to pass for the time being on this AADD thing, at least until I'm convinced the universe doesn't have it too.

Cognitive reflection

"Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities."
—Voltaire

more good quotes from Voltaire

I was at Thinking.net and was reading Waking the "Mindfield" How Systemic Thinking Helps Avoid Common Fallacies in Thinking and Action by Daniel Aronson. It occured to me that there might be ways a person could tell if they were in a self-reinforcing schema pattern as described above. Yes, systems thinking teaches you lots of schemas and how to compose them into metasystems and metametasystems and ...
That is the way - but what about people who don't have that background?
Are their decisions and their effect in the world and on society and history simply to be tolerated? If fewer people had only a linear dynamic schema would we have started doing something about global warming sooner? Very smart people can make the mistakes outlined in the article. They don't usually make them at work, but they have some "natural" schema they use for real life. There are probably even some systems scientists out there that use false attribution in their personal lives.
Anyway, here's a stab at some things someone could do to check if they were in a self-reinforcing schema.

1st way - If you have only one schema type it's probably self-reinforcing. Add another,an eastern way, a physics way, an aesthetic way, there are plenty out there.

2nd way - Think about how a schema progresses. If it's healthy, it will become more complex as time goes by and will include more and more types of information.
By complex I mean something like Kolmogorov complexity,some measure for size of the smallest program that could generate all the information your schema recognizes for some phenomenon.
For information, I'm using the Bateson definition: "differences that make a difference" (within your schema).

A self-reinforcing schema will not continue to progress in complexity over time and will not include new kinds of information. It can get more information and get more complicated but it doesn't get new kinds of information because it isn't complex enough (I'm sort of invoking the law of requisite variety here...).

So, how much has your schema really changed since school, college, career, marriage, home, family, ...? Are you listening to any new kinds of music, reading any new kinds of books, incorporating any kind of new philosophy?

3rd way - Add schema that blocks self-reinforcing schemas.

What does this schema look like?

It takes the current schema, looks at the input patterns and then compares those to example environments. By a combination of inspection and inference, the dual of the predominent schema can be formulated (at least loosely). This schema can then be tested by the main schema. If the conclusions from the dual are roughly the same as the master schema, you're probably ok. If not, there might be a problem. Now based on the inputs for each, check to see which schema includes more kinds of information. The human test is, spend some time looking at everything you usually don't look at, if the world starts making more sense as a result, then your schema might be self-reinforcing.

Here's a link to some other cool material on this "systems stuff"

Archetypes - Interaction Structures of the Universe

Beauty

The cashier
in my line is
talking to the old man in
front of me
Calls him darlin'
"What about that orange juice there,
is that yours too darlin'?"

She is
loving
this
old
man

I recognize her
I saw her coming out of
the store a few days before
and was taken by how
strange
she looked
A mangy cat like face of a woman
young-ish
with the kind of moustache women
can get, but
unattended unconcealed

She has a slightly dazed look
about her
like she's been caught on
camera

And now I notice, sneaking glances from
my place behind the old man
that one of her front teeth is broken
and that all of her teeth are brown and crooked
and filled with decay

When it's my turn to check out
I look into her face

She looks back at me with an expression
that says
"What are you looking at?"

Not that hateful kind...
...innocently asking
aware and
not aware

For the first time, I can see her eyes.
They are
beautiful
The kind of eyes some
waitresses
have
Wide, with thick
droopy lids
that slant down at the cheeks
suspended from a permanently
upturned brow
Eyes that seem to be asking -
What is it- hon?...
and I can see that
the rest of her face is actually
quite beautiful underneath the
cosmetic neglect
like a beautiful
painting
some school boy
has drawn a
moustache
on and blacked
out the teeth

If I was a god in some experimental universe
I would make some angels just like this
Just to see.....