Infommunication

A blog about contemporary art, progressive music, convergent design, cognitive science, and the life of fighting ivory tower intellectualism by half breed 0 generation russo-afghan boy Boris.

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My Experience with Circularity In Social Context

This post is about letter I wrote to one of my ethnic studies professor after an experience I had with him and a few other of his students. 

He invited me to a table with 2 women and one man, as they wished to be called. We soon begin to speak of macro-historic trends in social co-operation, collaboration, etc. They did not agree with me for reasons that I am not sure are invalid or not as I do not know complete and accurate research and knowledge to inform me one way or another. 

I was right then informed that the conversation was making them uncomfortable and asked to leave. I was taken aback and had wished to know what it was I had said that was offensive so I could apologize. This may be an example of my own unawareness and ignorance but I am once again not sure. I was told that educating was not their role but that they would reluctantly invest time in me since I was the professors friend. 

I then was told that it's not my fault, it's just a product of who I am. I was invited back into the discussion and then told that I couldn't talk if I wanted to stay  (which I did since the professor was my friend), or rather that it was better not to and that it would be useless. I was, what felt to me like, condescendingly lectured to for 10-20 minutes by everyone there with the silent approval of the professor that my existence and thought was predetermined by my skin color, sex, and gender and that I was guilty of oppression since I lived a life of privilege ( even though I was an illegal immigrant at one point, I have a father who has lost jobs and developed clinical depression due to his skin color and religion, a mother who has been forced out of her career due to her accent and linguistic profiling, and come from a family that up until last year made around 15-20K a year for 6 people to live off). I was stereotyped, profiled, prejudiced, and discriminated against. I was told to stay silent and not say anything anytime I wanted to contest a point or even had a question to ask or even want to affirm what had been said. 

At the end of the lecture  was given the choice to leave or have them leave and enact myself as the oppressor. I left and cried outside the pub for about 10 minutes. I don't cry often, maybe once a year so far, knock on wood. To be fair they were all at varying levels of drunkenness and I had fair warning. I do not blame anyone for keeping me there as that was my own willful choice and I am glad I had the experience, and feel I did truly learn something valuable from it. At the same time I do place blame on the people for being verbally and psychologically violent towards me. 

I went back in as I had remembered that I forgot my sweater in the pub. Upon entering one of the women came up to me and asked me if I felt all right? I asked her if we could ever speak as equals. She indirectly replied no. I asked her if she was aware she was enacting negative equality. She directly replied yes. The professor approached and denied it. I was then pulled back into a slightly more discursive version of the previous lecture. I choose to leave of my own accord this time as I was emotionally and physically spent ( it was around 1 am). 

I feel like the experience opened me up to some important concepts and showed me a new perspective as well as helped me clarify my own position on such topics. It had left me emotionally troubled as well. In response to the experience I sent my professor an email, as he had prompted me to do so upon my leaving  For the purpose of serving my memory reliably (in the cloud) and serving my emotional need I will post this letter. I felt better after writing it. I understand some people may disagree with what I say and vice versa and versa vice. I understand some people will think this is just stupid. It is understandable. Feel free to post such sentiments and I will try to process. 

The following is the letter ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

I am writing this email as a statement to the beliefs you seemed to reinforce when we last talked. If those indeed are the beliefs you hold then this email itself will most likely be disregarded as stupidity or oppression or a mixture of both. I say this because the way you and your friends spoke and acted implied that you believe that my very existence situated in the historicity of the world is an act of oppression. As you said yourself 'it is unresolvable'. You denied me choice as a person, you denied me space as a sentient being, as a mind bearing ideas. You framed me and boxed me ... You violently forced me into a role based on the history of my skin color and gender. You are heterosexist, monosexist, and racist. You commit the crime that you study. I'm sure this sounds as stupid and naive to you as the idea of transgender individuals, or violence in lesbian and gay relationships. You believe in a stagnant, not dynamic, form of engendered and enracialized cognition. But its the transgender thought that leads to adopting a transgender body. You ignore the dialectic though. The world shapes the mind you say, but fail to include that the mind just as much shapes the world. With the exclusion you preach a paradigm that breeds nothing but division and conflict. You self perpetuate these crimes and oppressions and promote a negative equality. Your female friend told me so herself in her own words. She answered 'Yes' when asked if she was aware that she was enacting negative equality. I was forced to empathize. I was forced to cry and feel a minute portion of the struggle that i know not whether they have or not have experience themselves directly, but make claims to. I have stayed up all night sleepless due to this trauma inflicted by you on me. They felt justified, and indirectly to an extent so did you. I have cried before and likewise experienced struggles you or your friends may not ever have the affordance too. There is every right to be angry and outraged and bitter but I believe revenge isn't an answer and it is inexcusable. The fight for equality should not and can not equate to a fight for counter oppression like the one that your group advocated; a world in which if the historic majority was non white, then whites would be oppressed. That's my belief and all i can do is state it and hope you see why I believe that. I wish to do no more and no less. I will once again stress that what you did as a group was violent, in a very real sense. It was hurtful and that was intentional at a certain level. I believe that much is undeniable, though your beliefs may differ. I cannot say that your gesture at the end of our conversation meant much to me. Hugs show people you value them, yet you cannot claim to value me as a being if you cannot respect my basic human right to speech, even if others was denied. The gesture was thus moot, and either ignorant or insincere in my eyes. How you feel about this is your choice. If you wish to have reference for any things I mentioned feel free to look up distributed cognition, trans feminism, 3rd wave feminism, etc. 

If you ever want to come back to me with a more open discussion platform and actually wish to have meaningful discourse instead of exemplifying an oppressive one, I am open to that. In a way this was addressed to the group at large, not at any one person, so do not take it on an individual level. This was meant for your group cognition (excepting the parts that explicitly mention you as a physical individual, ie terms such as 'you' may sometimes stand for the identity-mind that was the group). PS Philosophy as a historically shaped discipline falls prey to the process of philosophy itself. If philosophy is built on white male oppression, then what of meta-philosophy? What of self questioning? Thoughts are shared by all people, we all do philosophy weather we like it or not. The difference is that some is meticulous and accounted for in every thus far seen detail of LOGIC and some is not. It seems to me that the fact that you say philosophy is 'bullshit' is a product of your philosophy.

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 This post is going to be a summary of the work I've been doing over the summer at UCSD as I imagine it would be interesting to some people. Especially those interested in the future of alternative computing or interesting interaction design. 

The first picture is a graffiti tag that features the philosopher Michel Foucault who wrote extensively on Jeremy Bentham’s Panotpicon prison in which the guards can always see the prisoners, but the prisoners cannot see the guards. Invisible surveillance. The ink from which the tag is made is able to sense explosives such as TNT, DNT, or gunpowder. It can be easily imagined that such a tag could be painted in certain urban areas without attracting any notice, and at the same time be reporting on all the explosive activity around it. This opens the door to new types of surveillance within our society and begs the questions of what would be using it, what would be being watched, and in what context. The piece will be shown in the SME building Gallery at UCSD starting the 14th of September and a live demo will be performed during the opening reception on the same day. 

The second photo shows work that is part of a series of computing skins I designed which will be able to sense biophysical metrics such as blood sugar, adrenaline levels, pulse, etc, and then proceed to upload them into a network data analytics network hub, much like Pachube. 

These bandages or tattoo’s will also be able to notify you at which stage your wound is in the healing process, when they should be taken off, and many other important things.  They may even in the future be able to aid in drug delivery.

 The purpose of these designs was to conceptualize a decentralized mode of healthcare, where patients didn’t have to go to hospitals, but rather had a hospital node always on them, in the form of some type of chemical computing device, and the hospital would become a global scale, decentralized network of wearable chemical computers. Patients could get constant monitoring, checkups, and diagnosis, in real-time wherever they are and health care could move to being largely preventative versus reactive, making it cheaper and more efficient for everyone.

Tattos will also be on display in the afore mentioned gallery, if anyone wished to check them out. They wont be live as that is still legaly questionable, but you'll get non-live ones and they'll have a cool info pamphlet. 

A web-cam demo of my global pulse concept can be seen at distributedhealth.org. It basically takes your pulse and lets you add it to the rest of the worlds. The first step towards having complete data about your body and being able to utilize it meaningful ways. 

So yeah, this stuff has pretty much been my summer. I've been working with my very strange and pseudo-nihilistic professor Ben Bratton and he's been KINDA guiding me in the work while also guiding me to a slowly impending existential crisis.  Either way, I guess thanks to him. Hopefully I'll post more often now that this is coming to a close around the 14th. 

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Another picture I made to express my thoughts at this time.  

Some late nights I stay up missing places I've never been to and yearning to be with people I've never met. It is at the same time a very sad and somehow joyous relationship. I suppose melancholy is the right word. 

It may be kind of embarrassing to say, but I'm sure I'm not the first nor last person who has fallen in love with the with a kawaii anime girl here or there, nor the first to wish to have gone to school in Hogwarts, and not even the first to try to lucid dream myself into one of my favorite movies. 

What is so perfectly happy and familiar about these concepts, places, and feelings in our imagination, and what makes them so impossible in our present reality? It may seem like a simple answer at first, but the longer I try to answer it the more the answer eludes me. 

I've never been in a jazz cafe. Yet I miss it. I miss the the sound of the saxophone gently rolling around in the hazy summer twilight, letting the breeze carry it's carelessness past the aroma of a dark french blend filling my nostrils as I look out onto the people walking through my life and a group of my closest friends laughs, warm-hearted and sincere, enjoying unconditional and loving company. 

I feel the scene in my mind like I've lived it a hundred times. It's like a tune one hears and it reminds them of a good memory from a long time ago, even though the sound is brand new to them. Does anyone else get this strange nostalgia?

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In between working on my augmented reality cube and trying to bash my skull open against stacks of design books I've started making art in illustrator to pass the time that I spend lifeless in front of the program, waiting for inspiration to strike. 

This is the first such piece of mental detachment. It is a visualization of the way time feels to pass for me sometimes. In an evolving pattern, where everything seems almost the same day after day, yet there is a subtle tinge of difference, the minutia of feeling that separates one second from the next. 

In a greater sense, this process of subtle differentiation seems to apply to most people who live routined lives. Humans are habitual creatures after all. Yet overtime, even with our deeply ingrained habits and repetitions, we've managed to evolve from mud huts to skyscrapers, from abaci to computers, and from cave dwelling tribes to modern society. Sometimes, just taking a step back from all the theory and tracing the evolutionary paths found in our world, one will find a picture of slow and ever morphing beauty. 

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The Joker.

This is a post about the recent shooting that happened in Colorado during the Dark Knight Rises premier. Its analytical in nature as most of my posts are but that shouldn't be misunderstood as a lack of empathy. I am saddened by the event and hope for peace for the hurt someday, but that is not something to discuss here. What I wish to discuss in this post is the causal line leading up to the event. As a cognitive scientist who likes to operate on a general scale and pick out the patterns and as a person who has seen a lot pro-gun vs no-gun debates in the past day, it is hard not to hypothesize about what helped cause and facilitate the event, especially when there are some telling signs and patterns to be seen here, in our culture, in the narrative of the fiction, in it's translation to reality, and in the way all those things are connected.

Firstly, we must look at our culture. It is a culture built on ideas. Most people see the good side of this and this principle is often toted as being the main success of the modern western world. There is a bad side to, and I believe this is an example.

Our culture, while it is at the top of the chain in terms of producing and outputting ideas, it is also very high on the list of consumer cultures that consume and employ  those ideas. We are very much a feedback consumer-producer culture, in which we produce an idea and depending on it's merit we fiercely consume it, and that consumption then creates a demand for a reinforced production of that same idea. Ideas are, in a loose paraphrasing of author Eric Drexler, parasites, and they have the ability to infect our minds and spread.

If one looks at the narrative that is Batman, one can see that this feedback loop of creation,consumption, and infection has indeed worked its magic on the series. Ever since his inception in 1939 by Bill Finger and Bob Kane Batman has been taken in by little kids, teens an adults, and reproduced and re-imagined hundreds, if not thousands of times. The ideas that comprise the narrative have taken a firm grasp in our culture in the US and in many other countries around the world. Batman has  helped shape the concept of justice, heroism, villainy, and countless other issues in the minds of many people, probably myself included. At the same time, Batman has grown, and now the idea has infected many, many people. Now Almost a century after the inception, Batman has so much thought, energy, and resources invested in it that it has almost taken on a life of it's own. 

This brings me to the translation of the fiction of Batman into reality. The part that has taken on the most life in the Batman narrative is a scary part. In fact, it is a scary character to be more precise, and he started taking on a life of his own a while back, with the start of the Dark Knight Trilogy. The Joker.

The Joker has always been vividly portrayed in the the trilogy. There was a lot of thought put into how the character was designed, dressed, acted, marketed and basically made for the trilogy. All of those thoughts and plans were executed very well most people would agree. The acting was great, the essence was captured, and the character was really bought to life. Especially so in the second movie, particularly after Heath Ledger was regrettably found dead, so soon after having filled the role of The Joker.

Now while it may be up for debate as to weather Heath Ledger was in some sense figuratively killed by his role as The Joker, it is fair to say that the general circumstances surrounding his death made it seem that way to a lot of people, especially because of the amazing performance that was given in the movie. With Ledgers death he added even more gravity and realism to the character. His death made the joker much more palpable to a lot of people. I think that is accurately reflected in all of the merchandise, the memes,  and the "why so serious" slogans and jpgs floating around the internet right after the movie premiered and his death was announced. Ledger made the Joker in a cultural phenomena, the poster boy of Batman for our generation. He made The Joker into a very powerful, a very real and visceral idea, and that idea spread.

This is where the feedback loop kicked in to reinforce the power of the idea. When the buzz around the joker and Ledger caught on the producers of the buzz about the joker had even more incentive to pour more resources, more energy, and more thought, into the propagation and dissemination of the idea. One can trace this with many nods made to the late Ledger by the people who worked with him, by the rumors of unreleased Ledger footage in the next installment, by the award of the Oscar. I am in no way blaming them or saying they are bad people. It is natural to pursue a good idea and flush it out to it's full extent, even if we are aware of its potential power, which I would argue most people were not. 

Nevertheless the feedback loop amplified the joker and now, in 2012, we see a product of our culture, plus our narrative, plus our hype, plus the interaction of all three, realized in the form of a highly educated young gunman claiming to be, who else but, The Joker.

He was methodical, he was calm, he did not resist arrest. In the end it seems as if he would have done the same thing had he known there was a possibility he would be shot himself. The idea lived through him. 

And even now, we are amplifying it back, still not learning from the mistake. We are letting the joker, the idea, grow even more with all the news coverage, all the buzz, all the pictures, and even indirectly with this blog post itself.

Charlie Brooker, a prominent psychologist addresses the very issue here, in this minute long video. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PezlFNTGWv4&feature=BFa&list=FLeqZC_OIOKvq34q8KxC61sw

In the end it's not about more guns vs less guns, it is about our society and culture growing more self aware, responsible and careful as a whole, becoming more knowledgeable, and becoming more able to diagnose when a problem arises from itself, how to properly treat it early on, and how to prevent it from repeating. In the meantime I will say that I still prefer to have anti-gun laws, as the presence of guns I feel makes it harder for this necessary cultural growth to happen, as people would always prefer to take the easiest way out, even if it's not the right one. After all, killing the killer isn't really solving the deeper problem. It's more like cutting off a cancerous growth and ignoring the actual cancer. We need preventative medicine, not reactive medicine. And as long as we depend on reactive treatment, we may not want to put in the effort to explore preventative measures. 

Best Wishes to all the victims, and in a sense to us all, as we are all the victims. 

photo: https://www.facebook.com/littleleaguelol

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More old stuff :)

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Trying to keep it all saved and accessible

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Augmented Reality Sculpture.

http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:26766

Finally completed a model for 3D printing. This is a model of a cube made to work with Augmented Reality software in the Processing programming language. JUst printed it yesterday. Now I just gotta paint it, code the interactivity, and I'll have an awesome interactive digital sculpture on my hands, accessible via the physical AND virtual space :D blending and mending dimensions haha. I'll post pics and updates as the project moves along so hopefully there will be some cool stuff to show.

If anyone wants a more in depth look into Processing or augmented reality, a really cool (albeit somewhat glitchy) demo and tutorial can be found here.

creativeapplications.net/processing/augmented-reality-with-processing-tutorial-processing/  have fun kids.  

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The Premise

The premise is that the sentient desire for happiness drives the social mechanics of the universe as we know it. The premise is that sentience/consciousness is the universe as we know it.

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Final

For my final project I portrayed the concept of user dependent technology in an anthropomorphic way. I assigned the computer the role of a baby that would cry when the caretaker, or user, was not around. I did this by employing computer vision libraries in processing and writing a motion detection algorithm that was tuned to detect the presence of humans in the webcam. When there were humans, all was quite, when there were none, the computer cried.

My further intention was to also display video loops that would also react to user presence. Specifically, a loop of a closed eye when presence was detected, and a loop of an opening and searching eye when it wasn't. I wished to convey the concept of a dormant awareness that may lie in the complexity of our systems when we are not there to observe it, but that formulates itself when it senses our presence is gone. A spiritual analog to the quantum saying that a watched pot never boils. 

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Metascapist

An amusing train of thought I occasionally like to follow is one that extrapolates from the human urge towards escapism. As a developing civilization, humanity has, as far back as history can tell, loved to partake in escapism of any kind. It could be stories, cave drawings, plays, and more recently, video games, movies, and other extremely immersive environments.

If one traces our progress through time, one can easily see that we as a race have invested a lot into escapism. We have developed it along side ourselves, spending a lot of resources, such as time, money, and intelligence on it. Our simulations are always being improved, the levels of immersion only get deeper and more complex as time goes on, we constantly develop new technologies that let us sink deeper into old stories in new ways. Perfect examples of this trend are next generation gaming consoles, emerging technologies such as augmented reality, and perhaps symbolically strongest, the race towards achieving AI. 

I would like to particularly focus on video games, as I believe they help illustrate the concept of this musing best. Video games have been responding to a consumer trend over the years. The trend is that consumers generally want more open ended, complex worlds, in which their choice have as tangible as possible consequences on the world that they're inhabiting. Some of the best games, or at least most groundbreaking, as regarded by the gaming community include games such as the Grand Theft Auto franchise, Mass Effect franchise, Everquest, Final Fantasy, MineCraft, Super Mario Bros, etc.

One thing that all these games have in common is that they greatly expanded the environment in which games could take place. Super Mario Bros was on of the first games to ever combine dynamic graphics with a full narrative, Everquest was one of the first games to provide real social interaction within a virtual world, Grand Theft Auto was one of the first mainstream games that allowed for open endedness in the context of a narrative, and Mass Effect took the concepts of open endedness and user centered environments to a somewhat tangible level (at least they promised to do so after the backlash after ME3). MineCraft is a game that is widely recognized for the fact that it is a truly unique, generated environment and that one truly can bend the limitations of what can be done within the game.  

Consumer escapists, whom most people are, want increasingly dynamic, realistic, expansive, and reactive worlds to inhabit and escape to. It should be easy to see that if one creates worlds that increasingly look more realistic, scale more realistically, detail more realistically, interact more realistically, and in general are as hyper realistic as we can make them, then at some point we will be recreating reality. We will be escaping into the very thing we wished to escape from. It might be a different reality, but it will still be a reality. Will that be enough?

This is where the interesting parts of this concept really flesh themselves out. Will we ever have such immersive worlds that we will fall in love with the hyper-realistic, if not just plain real, scenery, weather, or atmosphere of a virtual world we inhabit. After all, no doubt the next generation of gamers will call for neural stimulation that may simulate temperature, wind, textures, etc in a game. will Will we ever have AI so immersive that it will be just plain intelligence, an entity that we may fall in love with? People have always loved good character development. What can be more developed than someone real? Will 'games' really be games anymore, or will they be, quite literally second lives, or a meta-life? As some may have noticed, it's getting harder to tell. 

I believe the line between the virtual and physically natural is becoming blurred at an exceedingly faster pace. Due to this blurring we set up a structure of recursion. A great example of this already upon us in the present day is the computer built within the popular computer game MineCraft. There are computers being built inside computers. They're not gimmicky either. They are operated by fully functioning logic circuits and can be programmed for an infinite number of uses even in their present uber basic state. If the physics of the game could possibly be modeled better than perhaps it would even be possible to create fully functioning internet, particle accelerators, and perhaps even eventually an incredibly immersive game which allowed for the creation of another such game within itself. 

Part of me feels there is a flaw within my logic somewhere, another part of me hopes there is not. It is fun to lose oneself in mental recursion sometimes. As far as I can see in my cursory glance at the trends and patterns, we seem to be heading in the direction of extreme immersion, perhaps recursion, and even maybe meta-escapism, at the present. We may also make a sharp turn off this path in the foreseeable future but that is another long train of thought that would better be expanded upon elsewhere. 

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I Don't Get Design

I don't get design. As someone who is majoring both in the Arts and in Human Computer Interaction this might seem like an embarrassing thing to say. Strangely though, I don't feel too embarrassed, even though I know I should. Maybe it's because I have a nagging suspicion that perhaps no one truly gets design, perhaps everyone just warps 'design' to mean some over-generalized and stylized version of their own aesthetic. My fears may be unreasonable, and perhaps even stupid, but nonetheless I feel it is important to voice them, if only to understand them better myself.

Part of my fear rests on the assumption that design is the fine line between art and utility. It's the blur between the rigor of discipline and drunken hedonism that is contemporary art ( or art in general, really). Another part of my fear lies in the fact that I've read a number of design blogs and looked over a decent sized amount of work and have to say that it's all different in style and yet I don't get a sense of awe at any point like I do with most forms of art. It's all inspiring but not THAT inspiring like my favorite song or installation or piece of architecture is. I don't even have a favorite; i like it all but nothing stands out. Or does it all stand out? It's all the same in the end. It feels like the hipster kid at the party who's kinda cool cause he's trying to be really cool in a sense that all other hipster kids try to be really cool. 

Basically, design is confusing in that it tries to bring two kinda contradicting concepts together and at the same time, perhaps due to it's contradicting constraints of utility and creativity, it all seems different in similar way. Of course I am only speaking of what many refer to formally as design, such as graphic or visual. There are tons more blanks to fill in for what is design and what is designed.     However, just because I don't explicitly speak of UI design, urban design, product design, etc, doesn't necessarily mean that those forms of design shouldn't be critically analyzed for the same things I mention towards graphic and visual design. 

My first quarrel is with The Elements and Principles of Design. Not with them within themselves but with the concept of principles and elements in design. I took a high school class once with that exact heading; The Elements and Principles of Design. It was a basic art class that attempted to teach me line, color, shape, form, space, etc, all on a 2d surface with paper and pencil. A basic drawing class. I didn't do very well. Nonetheless, today I am still an artist by some measures, even though I rarely employ those principles in my work. In fact a whole part of art, some would say starting from the dadaists, is focused on not employing those principles in their work. So what about design. Can the new design be ignoring the principles of design. I'm not sure? Art doesn't need utility but design does. Are the principles of design when applied to design more the principles of utility? To illustrate the problem I wish to quote William Lidwell, who himself stated that even "The best designers sometimes disregard the principles of design. When they do so, however, there is usually some compensating merit attained at the cost of the violation. Unless you are certain of doing as well, it is best to abide by the principles."

Some compensating merit indeed. A rather vague statement that doesn't really offer much in guidance on how, when, and whether to break from the principles of design. 

If the world is made up of systems which are made up of pattern, as I've previously mentioned in older posts, then interaction is what drives the world. Interaction between patterns. It seems like this interaction between patterns is what creates a need for design. Whereas perhaps the simplest and most complex yet innate systems of interaction have been designed for us by nature it is in OUR nature to look for and produce new ways of interacting with other patterns in this world. It is in our nature to design. We design to constantly make easier, simpler, and newer ways of interacting with other systems. In this naturalistic view of design there is no artistic intent needed to design. One might argue that it's not artistic in itself at all but that art may sometimes merely be a byproduct of design. Yet the modern day view on design somehow almost always incorporates some sense of aesthetic or artfulness about it. Perhaps this is because design these days is driven by and produced in a consumer capitalist society in which it was found that aesthetic and artfulness sells. Perhaps it is because utility and aesthetic really do overlap in a lot of places surprisingly. I am not sure, nonetheless, I am still a bit confused. Confused as to whether I should stick to age old recipes or embark on creative endeavors when it comes to design. In the end, somehow, I'm sure it'll end up being both. 

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Ahhh a remix of one of my fav songs from one of my fav producers, just found it :). 

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Singularity.

I am a singulatarian. I may not be as Utopian as others but I entered the UCSD cog sci dept. with the belief that strong A.I. is possible and that a human level sentience/intelligence will one day be realized in synthesized materials. I don't think it will solve all the worlds problems but I do think it will solve old ones and give us new radical ones. I will discuss some of the reasons for my support of the singulatarian hypothesis. Some may seem grounded and some may seem far fetched but all of them serve as interesting thought experiments.

I am a person who believes that primary indicators of the future are the patterns of the past. If we look to the past we see general shifts over long periods of time, less general shifts over shorter periods, and even micro-patterns in small time frames. Some of these patterns hold over all scales. One such pattern is the pattern of entropy to equilibrium. It seems that, just as water even spreads to fill its container, humans do as well. Over the years, it can be seen that the individual human has much more traveling power than ever before. As time goes forward humans can travel more easily and more humans end up traveling. This averages any one humans presence in space over time and thus, from this point in time it looks like there is a general shift to omnipresence in human history as time goes forward. 

This is one example of a historical pattern and there are many such patterns that raise the probability of a technological singularity event. You may have heard of some, such as Moore's Law, or The Law of Accelerating Returns. Other patterns are patterns of higher rates of information dissemination, patterns of higher education rates, patterns of social change in terms of political correctness, tolerance, and civil rights, and there are many more. I believe there are more patterns that increase the probability of singularity event rather than decrease it. 

I hypothesize, and that is all anyone can really do at this point, that strong A.I. is a possibility. The most cited arguments I have heard against it, and this may be a product of the company I keep, is that one cannot create a thing one cannot understand, and that any intelligence made by a systematic program is never really fully intelligent nor conscious. There are other arguments which I have heard and refuted in my own way, but they are too technical and too long to address here.

To address the first issue, that one can't create something on can't understand, I say that assumption has been disproved since the beginning of time. Humans create other humans all the time. We don't understand them, we can't control them, but we can make them. Why not A.I.? One of the growing views in cognitive science is that consciousness may be an emergent property of the organization and wiring of the brain. Under this theory it seems that scientists would only need to provide the right circumstances for consciousness to flourish, and complex interactions, perhaps beyond our understanding, will do the rest and bring forth the conscious entity. Very much like we make conscious entities the old fashioned way, via birth. 

To address the other issue, I would say that perhaps in the current age of hardware computing, where paradox systems are impossible (ie, bits cannot be both 0 and 1 at the same time), it may not be possible. There is much work though happening in the area of new computing technology, such as quantum computing, that has already made this somewhat possible. There are other people still who would argue that paradox systems are not necessary to program a conscious entity, but those can be read elsewhere as in replies to the Chinese room or other writings from singularity institute, KurzweilAI, etc. In the end it comes down to my belief that consciousness is patterned data that makes information. Consciousness is patterns, albeit extremely complex ones, and thus once they are worked through, they may be able to be systematically emulated. 

These are just a few thoughts for consideration to anyone interested in the theory of consciousness and the future of information. 

[infommunication-blog]

yay new song.

[infommunication-blog]

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[infommunication-blog]

I am almost halfway through being 20 years old. Last night I was invited to a lingerie party. I declined. This morning I awoke feeling old. Why? Because I feel like a settled and married man. I guess that's the feeling that comes upon people like me with having a relationship for an extended amount of time. It's a feeling of getting old, predictable, outdated and eventually obsolete. No fun. 

It is wrong of me to blame this feeling on a significant other but my mind is a master of projection and sometime I cannot fight it. So I go in stupid cycles of semi-depression/mid-life crises that I try to find an external cause for and happy, peaceful moments of lucidity in which I see that these feelings and fears of becoming old are just reflections of my own insecurities. It is a battle.

I feel like most people of my psychological inclination have this fear of being forgotten and irrelevant. I would say it could be perhaps one of the things they fear most. When I speak of my psychological inclination I am speaking of an inclination towards fervent discovery and exploration. An ambitious desire to seek out the truth in every crevice of life. To try to understand everything and create everything. A yearning towards the ideal and picturesque. I believe A lot of philosophers and artists fall under this type of psychological inclination but not all. Symptoms of this inclination can include bi-polar disorder, psychosis, insensitivity, restlessness, and other such volatile states and feelings.  

This inclination can be a blessing and a curse, as any inclination can I suppose. If one can battle and confront themselves and ultimately accept themselves than one can achieve many great things. But I do not know how. It is a learning experience. Making art is one such way in which people of my inclination can either find or lose themselves. Making art is a learning experience. Hopefully I will learn how to be happy with myself. When I do I feel that my work as an artist and as a human in general will bring much more value to the world.