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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 |
January 13th, 2008
 Have you ever questioned why we have such large brains?
The modern human brain is approx 1500 cubic centimeters, three/four times the current size of our closest ape ancestors. Two million years ago, our brains were roughly ape size, around 400cc, but in our transition from Australopithecus to Homo Sapien some evolutionary factor drove the expansion of this one organ to extreme proportions.
Biologically, our brains are hugely over-sized for our bodies. They are swollen organs, much larger and more sophisticated than we have ever required to satisfy purely biological needs. In Darwinian terms, our over-sized brains are actually a selective disadvantage, not just because of the mess of stimuli they create to distract us, but also because they require so much energy to support, energy that would be better devoted to, say, running away from predators. They are also dangerous to develop; just ask anyone who has ever given birth which part of the infant was the hard bit to squeeze out.
To quote Stephen Pinker, “Why would evolution ever have selected for sheer bigness of brain, that bulbous, metabolically greedy organ? … Any selection on brain size itself would surely have favoured the pinhead.”
But we seem to have done alright with them. We have adapted to our excess of cognition, and invented things like computer games, art galleries and shopping channels to keep them busy. We can’t simply switch these brains off, so we have developed our tendency to over-think everything into a series of complicated games to make our basic anthropological processes of eating, fucking and breathing stupidly challenging, just to make the most of our fine cognitive skills.
Clearly this hyper-demanding swollen mass we balance atop our slender necks is not acting in the interests of furthering the species. No other species have found the need to invent a Michelin Restaurant Rating System in order to eat, nor to develop hideously complicated systems of money, status, fame and haircuts in order to determine which members of the opposite sex are attractive to them. No other species thinks about their lives so deeply that some members of it decide upon suicide, not bothering to wait for predators or harsh natural conditions to determine their survival, but to do the job themselves. This is how “smart” we are. The survival of our species has not been because of our big brains, but despite it.
All the indications seem to point to the fact that, despite how pleased we are with ourselves at our ability to build bridges, fly aeroplanes, play football, invent religions and then fight wars over them, in the grand sweep of geological history, we are very likely going to be one of the flash-in-the-pan species. The “civilisation” our big brains have built around us has protected us from nature, but has weakened us physically. Over time we have lost the ability to survive in the natural world. In England, it only takes a few inches of snow to grind us to a standstill and make us unable to leave our homes. So it’s not going to take much of a natural disaster to finish us off.
And if we were to be wiped out tomorrow, it is probably unlikely we would even appear in the fossil record, simply because we’ve only been around 30,000 years or so, which is nothing. The entire history of homo-sapien is the final millimeter in the million mile marathon of life on earth. There’s a very good chance we would be gone and, after our bridges and aeroplanes have crumbled back to dust, leave no trace of our ever having been here.
But don’t lose heart, it may not be that bad. We aren’t the first freaky creatures to have survived long enough to leave a mark.
The Irish Elk, or Megaloceros Giganteus, was neither Irish, nor an Elk. It lived on our planet during the Late Pleistocene era. It sported the most ridiculous headgear ever seen in the history of the planet.
The antlers of the Irish Elk were around 12 feet wide, the size of a small car, a spread larger even than the body that supported them. They were hugely inappropriate appendages – large, heavy and awkward. They severely limited the areas the animal could move in. They were unable to seek food in forests, wetland, or heavy bush. They could only live on ground hard enough to support their weight in an environment open enough to permit them to move. To predators the antlers were a gift; too unwieldy for fighting or self-defence, too heavy to allow the animal to move with any speed, and so prominent that hiding or camouflage were impossible. The antlers were so big that just staying upright was the animal’s most immediate challenge. The “Irish” of the name comes from the peat bogs of Ireland where the majority of their fossilised remains were found. It is thought that the weight of the antlers caused the animals to sink into the bog to their deaths, which explains why so many of their remains have been discovered.
Yet still, despite this ridiculous handicap, the Irish Elk were awarded around 400,000 years on this planet. Nature demonstrated remarkable tolerance to the Irish Elk’s monstrous mutation. Who knows, perhaps she might be accommodating to Homo-Sapien’s monstrous mutation too.
Interesting though, it is now thought that the eventual demise of the Irish Elk was probably down to being hunted to extinction by the rise of Man. The beast had successfully survived half a million years of predators, climate change and natural disasters. But then no saber-toothed tiger ever needed a hat-rack, whereas mankind now has a pressing need to keep his swollen brain warm.
Large comedy antlers are probably not half as dangerous a mutation as an organ that can encourage the animal to engage in extreme sports, or build nuclear weapons though. While I’d like to believe we are no more freaky than the Irish Elk, we’d probably have been able to survive a pair of big antlers for a few hundred thousand years without too great an issue. But the big brain is likely to be a much shorter lived biological mistake.
Posted in evolution, philosophy, zen |
October 30th, 2007
Wolverhampton lost one of it’s major landmarks yesterday – Fred, The Ring-Road Tramp.
Not his real name, but it was the only thing he answered to. He lived in a tent pitched on the central reservation of the Wolverhampton ring road for over 30 years. The local Asian community regarded him as a holy man. In the late eighties, practical jokers erected a satellite dish outside his tent – he obviously didn’t care though, as it remained there for several years. He spoke very little English and seemed fearless of traffic.
He tended his patch contentiously, collecting litter and sweeping the leaves around St Johns church. He was visited by meals on wheels daily and often dropped by the soup kitchen my dad works at, which was how I’ve stayed up to date with his news, despite being many miles from Wolves (a much more reliable source than his facebook group). He was also well looked after by the reverential Asians too, and had a bank account set up to receive his pension (which he never touched).
His story: Jozef Stawinoga was born sometime around 1920 in Poland. He fought in World War II and may or may not have been held prisoner of war by the Russians. He arrived in the UK in 1946 and worked as a hospital orderly in Wales and later as steel worker in Bilston in the 1950s. In Wolverhampton he met and married an Austrian woman, but she left him after a year and it was around this time that he stopped turning up for work and went to live on the streets, eventually settling on the ring road.
This is the commonly reported story, but seeing how he spoke very little English, refused contact with social services, and now is gone this is probably the only version of the facts we will ever have.
Traumatised by war time experiences he developed a fear of confined spaces and eventually set up home on the one spot where he felt comfortable – on a narrow stretch of grass between 4 lanes of high speed traffic.
Fred was like an émigré from another life. Not only had he found a different way of living, and managed to survive to a ripe old age doing it (he’s was 87), he did it right in the heart of the urban hive – as an example to us all. Thousands of people passed his tent every day on their way to work.
He was offered social housing many times, but refused. He had made his life under canvas. He was a reminder that there are other ways of living on this planet, that the trappings of urban living aren’t necessary to our survival, or peaceful existence. This is why he’ll be missed more than we realise.
Posted in philosophy, society, zen |
September 3rd, 2007
The philosophy of Alan Watts, animated by the South Park studio.
There are others, see also: life and music, i, zen, madness, prickles and goo
Posted in bullets, culture, evolution, film, philosophy, video, zen |
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 |
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