|
May 22nd, 2009
“It’s true: Since the 1980s, it has been possible – in principle – to resolve resource allocation problems algorithmically, by computer, instead of needing a market. Markets are wasteful: They allow competition, much of which is thrown on the scrap heap. So why do they persist?”
Manfred shrugs. “You tell me. Conservativism?”
Gianni closes the book and puts it back on the shelf. “Markets afford their participants the illusion of free will, my friend. You will find that human beings do not like being forced into doing something, even if it is in their best interests. Of necessity, a command economy must be coercive – it does, after all, command.”
- Charles Stross Accelerando 2005
We cling to our concept of free will like blood. Declaring one is without free will is akin to admitting you don’t have a sense of humour, it is effectively saying you aren’t human. For what are we without free will – robots; actors; performing monkeys?
Philosophy has wrestled with free will vs determinism for as long as there has been philosophy. In more recent times science has pitched in on the debate too. Physiologist Ben Libet, who died in 2007, conducted a number of experiments in the 1970s on the timing of neural events. His measurements demonstrated that when the decision to perform an action is made, the beginnings of the action occur before the corresponding activity in the consciousness centre of the brain. These findings seem to suggest that the conscious mind, the area we regard as our decision making centre, is actually nothing of the the sort. It is subconscious processes that make all our decisions; the only role of the consciousness is to retrospectively justify these decisions to ourselves.
Our sense of free will, if Libet’s experiments are to be believed, is nothing more than an illusion. It is just another bi-product of our massively over-sized brains. The Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen paradox in quantum mechanics seems to back up this conclusion, I burbled excitedly about this realisation in a post two years ago. But even if we had something more accessible than conceptual psychology or quantum mechanics to prove this point, would we ever be able to accept it?
My answer: who gives a toss? We are certainly the only animal who believes in, or cares about such a concept. The dog I questioned on the matter was very clearly disinterested in the subject, and I suspect his may be the right attitude. Does it really matter whether we have free will, or only the illusion of it? Our actions will still be the same either way. Whether we have a strong grip upon the rudder of destiny, or we are just socks thrown around in the washing machine of chance, our lives will still be the same – messy, chaotic and surprising.
Believing in free will is akin to believing in God. We are welcome to do so, but it’s probably ever-so-slightly nutty of us. If the concept makes us feel better about ourselves, and we can pretend we are more important than all the other bundles of matter in the cosmos, it doesn’t cost us anything, and it doesn’t do us any harm, does it?
Um, yes, I think it probably does do a lot of harm. But that’s another post.
Posted in bad science, culture, literature, philosophy, universal automatism, zen |
November 15th, 2008
If you don’t read my work blog (and if you aren’t of the geek persuasion there’s no reason why you should – it would doubtless bore you senseless) you won’t know about my stupidly over-ambitious Open Source Generative Art project that is nibbling away at my precious free time. I have set myself the task of producing 100 generative artworks, to be published one a week for as long as I can keep it up, mainly to see if I can do it, but also to see where it takes me. You are very welcome to drop in and sneer at my awkward efforts, or subscribe and get a new one every Friday.
When putting the site together I felt it needed the obligatory “What Is Generative Art?” FAQ page, to make it more accessible to the bewildered surfer, and so whipped up a bit of copy that I felt did the job. But, obviously unsatisfied with what I wrote, my brain has been bugging me on this question ever since. I’m not sure I can satisfy it.
I don’t require an answer to “What Is Art?“, it’s been a while since I’ve been that drunk, I just want to narrow down what we can call “Generative Art“, and attempt a concise, pithy description. But this is not as simple as it might first appear.
My boy, as with all three year olds, is learning to express himself in a number of ways, including artistically, with varying degrees of success. Naturally, as parents we take stupid amounts of pride in every random daub or scribble he manages to get on a piece of paper, especially if he comes up with something vaguely recognisable. But, my evil brain is wondering, when I compare his works to the algorithmically generated abstracts on abandonedart.org, might my son’s formless doodles also come under the heading ‘generative art’?
The generative element here is a biological process rather than a mechanical one, and the four years taken to complete the algorithm (from conception to splats of paint on paper) is much longer than the process you can observe with each of the abandonedart works. But isn’t the principle essentially the same? Does the “artist” claiming credit for the work (me) have any greater claim on the output of an algorithm he has fashioned than the artistic expressions of a child he has sired?
This is a cruel example obviously, because if anyone can claim to be the artist in this example, it is my son. To attempt to steal the credit for his achievements is an extreme abstraction of influence over individualism, it is only computations we can treat so inhumanely (this century anyway).
It might also be stepping dangerously close to what the crazies call “Intelligent Design“, the idea that a creator might take credit for an evolutionary process if they are the one who defined the initial conditions and started the ball rolling. I’m sure this isn’t the only instance where the concepts of “Artist” and “God” might be so easily interchangeable.
Thirdly, I should also be slapped for once again evoking the spectre of Universal Automatism, seeing the whole universe as one big algorithm; which is what I am doing in proposing a causal chain from a certain ‘creative act’ in the bedroom to an abstract piece bought home from nursery four years later. UA, where every deterministic action or inaction is just part of the great computation, absolves us from responsibility for just about anything we do, our artworks included.
But still I’m no nearer to answering my question. Lets shortcut the discussion with a few bullet points on what I am settling toward, and I challenge you to dispute any of these. For an artwork to be “generative” …
- there has to be some kind of autonomous system involved
- there has to be a degree of unpredictability, and
- the results have to hover somewhere in the sweet spot between chaos and order for it to be appealing.
Beyond these imperfect axioms I can’t come up with anything more definitive.
There is a page on generative.net which collects definitions. Philip Galanter’s is the most often cited,
“Any art practice where the artist creates a process, such as a set of natural language rules, a computer program, a machine, or other mechanism, which is then set to motion with some degree of autonomy contributing to or resulting in a complete work of art.”
Unfortunately, it’s one of those sentences that leaves your brain looking around the room for someone else to talk to, and it doesn’t even hint at what makes generative art so interesting (bullets 2 and 3 above). I much prefer this glorious nugget, which was teased out of a recent debate on the eu-gene mailing list:
“generative” is where you lose control of a machine which does exactly what you tell it.
If anyone can come up with anything sweeter than that, I’d like to hear it.
Posted in art, culture, evolution, fatherhood, generative art, open source, philosophy, tech, universal automatism, web |
November 3rd, 2008
“Mathematics and prophecy: Kearney had known instantly that the two gestures were linked, but he couldn’t say how. Then, waiting for a train to King’s Cross the following morning, he identified a relationship between the flutter of cards falling in a quiet room and the flutter of changing destinations on the mechanical indicator boards at the railway station. This similarity rested, he was willing to admit, on a metaphor (for while a cast of the Tarot was – or seemed – random, the sequence of destinations was – or seemed – determined): but on the basis of it he decided to set out immediately on a series of journeys suggested by the fall of the cards. A few simple rules would determine the direction of each journey, but – in honour of the metaphor, perhaps – they would always be made by train.
He tried to explain this to Inge.
‘Events we describe as random often aren’t,’ he said, watching her hands shuffle and deal, shuffle and deal. ‘They’re only unpredictable.’ He was anxious she should understand the distinction.”
Light – M. John Harrison 2002
An entirely deterministic universe does not have to be a boring one. And even if we had to accept we were without free will, it wouldn’t mean our lives would be without surprises.
There is an anthropological twist to the concept of unpredictability. Just because we cannot predict the future, it doesn’t mean that the future is unknowable. It just means it is unknowable by us, at our present level of intelligence. If Moore’s Law were to eventually give us the processing power to accurately model our entire universe, the future wouldn’t be something we’d have to speculate upon, it would be something we could calculate.
Posted in culture, literature, philosophy, universal automatism |
July 13th, 2007
“I very much enjoy looking at the wind moving trees around, and I love looking at the ocean, and clouds. I always think if there were only one place in the world where you could see clouds everybody would be flocking there, clouds are so fascinating and we just take them for granted, we don’t even look at them.
That’s one thing in an environment like a Mall: it’s hard to find any examples of what I call ‘gnarl’, natural gnarl, where you see a leaf waving in the wind, or a fire flame, or some flowing water. We often box ourselves up into these rooms.
When you see something like the leaves on a tree, that’s a good example, there may be a simple equation underlying it, like the laws of fluid flow. We’ve got a certain amount of air and a certain number of leaf positions, the leaves are complex compound pendulums, and they begin rocking in these unpredictable ways.
The distinction that’s new, and that we didn’t used to make, is that something can be deterministic but not predictable. We tend to think they are synonyms but they’re not. Something can be obeying some law of nature but it’s not predictable because what it’s doing is so complicated that the time it would take you to calculate what it was going to do would take longer than the thing actually doing it. So you could compute it but you can’t compute the world any faster than it is happening.”
Rudy Rucker in conversation with Rick Kleffel, January 2007.
When Alan Turing did his pioneering studies in the 1930s, defining the bedrock for the field of Computing, there was no such machine as a “computer”. When Turing talked of computers he was envisioning human beings with pen and paper carrying out repetitive sequential tasks, not machines. The lump of metal and matt plastic we now call a computer didn’t really find it’s way into our lives until fifty years later, long after Turing’s suicide in 1954.
In the early nineties I started a Computing degree at Exeter University, which I endured for about a year and a half before, bored senseless, I dropped out. I then went off to be arty for a few years to restore some kind of left-right hemisphere balance to my brain. I was so repulsed by my experience of early 90s ideas of Computing that I made efforts to stay as far away from computers as I could for the next five years.
It was only towards the end of the last decade, after the World Wide Web started to take off, and everyone suddenly discovered what they’d been doing recently with video cameras, photography and hypertext was now being called “New Media”, that I was drawn back in, and I made friends with the machines once more. It was also around this time that I started using a Mac, rather than a PC, which may also explain my shift in attitude.
But I sometimes think that my original attitude towards the study of Computing may not have been so negative if it was made apparent to me at university that Computing is not something you need a Computer to study. This took me a long time to realise, because I’d never really encountered this idea until recently. Computation is everywhere.
Computing is what our DNA does at it unravels. It is what a stream does as it finds it’s way downhill towards the ocean. It is what the planets do as they move in their orbits. It is what our bodies do as they maintain the balance needed to keep us upright. Computing is what I am doing now as I process these ideas, and output them as text. The only place computers really come into it is in attempting to simulate these computations, or allowing us to create simple computations of our own. And computers are rather limited in this capability. This is why I can say without contradiction that I find Computers quite boring, but Computation is fascinating. If you don’t believe me turn off your primitive adding machine and take a look around you.
Even the most elementary of phenomenon in the natural world – the fluttering of a leaf, the spray of the ocean, the weather – are way beyond what can be computed by the technology we have. And it is theorised, via the work of Turing, Godel, Hofstadter and others, that we could never develop technology capable of simulating such a level of computation – it is simply conceptually impossible. This is why, as Dr Rucker’s quote above says, an entirely deterministic idea of Universal Automatism doesn’t mean we have to live in a world that is in any way predictable.
If you intended to develop an enthusiasm for literature, you’d study the classics; Shakespeare, Milton, Blake; examples of writing done well. You wouldn’t examine till receipts. Just as I’m sure no one was drawn to architecture by seeing a particularly well-constructed shed. Like Determinism and Predictability, Computing and Computers are not synonymous, and the study of Computing is not something to be done in front of humming box of electronics. Computing is better studied watching the wind in the trees, sat by a stream, or looking at the clouds.
Posted in computers ate my brain, introspection, philosophy, retro, tech, universal automatism, zen |
May 6th, 2007
 Hypothetical scenario: At lunchtime you email your partner, “Fancy watching a film tonight.” Partner replies, “Nice idea, can you pick up a DVD on the way home”.
So after a bitch of a day at work you forget to go to the shop and come back empty handed. But your partner has their heart set on a film so you have to pick something out of the collection at home. Your day’s been hard on the brain so you don’t want anything too challenging, and you’ve done a lot of screen-time so can’t hack anything with subtitles. Your DVD collection, mostly built up when you were both pretentious twenty-somethings, is full of arty foreign nonsense, so is a bit light on dumb Hollywood bilge. Also, your partner vetoes anything superhero related, because she has spent most of her day reading comics to a one year old.
Back at lunchtime you literally had the choice between every film ever made, but by 7pm the possibility space is already reduced to only ten or twenty films. She says pick a comedy, instantly you suggest a Steve Martin, she groans but consents, you saw Man With Two Brains not long ago, the only other one you’ve got is The Jerk. So you end up watching The Jerk again. Your possibility space has zeroed in on one film and that is the one you will watch.
Reverse Causality
When you emailed your partner at lunchtime you had no idea what you would be watching that night. You had the whole world to choose from, but you were always going to end up watching The Jerk. The chain of events, influences and thought processes were perfectly deterministic – every factor followed a linear path which could only end at one point. There was a reverse causality predetermining what you’d be watching as far back as lunchtime, in fact reverse causality predetermined what you’d be doing that night before you’d even had the idea.
But this doesn’t mean you could have emailed at lunchtime to say you’d both be watching The Jerk that night. The chain of causality was so complicated that it couldn’t be predicted – that is to say that there wasn’t a faster way to work it out than playing through the chain itself in real time. Perhaps, at 7pm, after you’d missed the video shop, your eyes were tired and you’d seen your partner was in a good enough mood to consent to watching something of your suggestion, you might have been able to forecast upon where the causality was converging. But that’s doesn’t make you Nostradamus.
Ignore your seer superpowers for now and consider the philosophical consequence of this. If we accept that the world is entirely deterministic, i.e. every action is the inevitable consequence of preceding events/actions, a chain of cause and effect, and that every factor along the way – the bad day at work, forgetting to go to the shop, the collection full of art-house rubbish etc – all has a reverse causality too, it means that at lunchtime we might have thought we had the choice of hundreds of thousands of films to watch, but we didn’t, there was only ever one we would be watching that night. We didn’t have free will; we only had the illusion of free will.
“But the world is not that way, I’m not a robot”. This is the point where you mount your enraged attack on the notion of determinism. The idea that we don’t have free will is never a popular one. Unfortunately there is some evidence this may actually be the condition of our universe, coming from the world of .. ulp .. Quantum Mechanics.
The Schrodinger’s Cat and Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen Paradoxes
You are probably already familiar with the Schrodinger’s Cat paradox; it’s a nice way of explaining the Copenhagen Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics. The family cat has been placed in a box with a phial of poison gas, the gas is triggered to release based on whether a single quantum particle decays or not. Because of quantum uncertainty, until a particle is observed it can be in multiple states, it exists as a wave before settling into a steady state only upon observation. The paradox of the situation is that, until the box is opened, and the observation takes place, the cat is both alive and dead.
This has been a difficult paradox to resolve, and has been the basis for parallel world hypotheses, with a universe endlessly splitting to accommodate all these quantum paradoxes. But there is a more recently observed phenomenon which suggests another interpretation. I first heard of this in the same place I get most of information about the universe, a comic book. JLA issue 19, June 1998 to be precise. I’ll quote you Mark Waid’s explanation:
“In 1997, a physicist at the University of Geneva divided photons and, using optic-fibre cables, sent the pairs of light particles over six miles apart. Reaching the ends of these fibres, the two photons were forced to randomly choose between alternate pathways. Uncannily, in every case, the choice of any one photon mirrored its partner, even though there was no physical way for them to communicate with one another.”
This is a demonstration of the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen paradox, two particles which cannot communicate faster than the speed of light, somehow stay entangled, by some crazy sub-quantum force beyond our understanding. The best explanation that physics has offered to explain this phenomenon is that the two particles are linked by reverse causality, that they are sending messages to each other back in time to a point when they were still entangled. It’s called the Transactional Interpretation, and it seems to be the most consistent (i.e. paradox free) theory of Quantum Mechanics we have at the moment. Seriously, this is the best they’ve come up with.
Do We Care?
This is reverse causality demonstrated under laboratory conditions, and could perhaps be ‘proof’ of a deterministic reality. In case you haven’t realised it yet, what I’m wittering on about here is my favourite theory, Universal Automatism, the idea that everything is computation, that there are algorithms to describe everything from the flow of a river to the movement of the planets. Unfortunately, a consequence of this theory is that if we know the state of the present, the future is predetermined. It is as fixed as the past. And the consequence of that, as we might ponder as we watch The Jerk tonight, is that it means there’s no such thing as free will, only the illusion of it.
But ultimately, free will or not, does it make the damndest bit of difference? We’ll still spend ages deliberating over decisions, we’ll still feel like we’ve got free will – its part of the process. Also, just because the world is deterministic, that doesn’t mean it’s predictable. It still holds plenty of surprises for us with our limited temporal perspective.
Free will or no free will, the world will still feel exactly the same, so who cares? It’s a win-win situation – if you end up watching a good film you can take credit for the decision, if it’s a stinker blame Universal Automatism. Hah.
tags: universal automatism, quantum mechanics, reverse causality, determinism, free will, philosophy
if you liked this article, please digg it, thanks.
Posted in philosophy, universal automatism |
|
rss feed