ScienceVicious

for the superstitious

[scipsy-blog]

Scientists do not trust what is intuitively obvious, because intuitively obvious gets you nowhere. That the Earth is flat was once obvious. I mean, really obvious; obvious! Go out in a flat field and take a look: Is it round or flat? Don’t listen to me; go prove it to yourself That heavier bodies fall faster than light ones was once obvious. That blood‐sucking leeches cure disease was once obvious. That some people are naturally and by divine right slaves was once obvious. That the Earth is at the center of the universe was once obvious. You’re skeptical? Go out, take a look: Stars rise in the east, set in the west; here we are, stationary (do you feel the Earth whirling?); we see them going around us. We are at the center; they go around us. The truth may be puzzling. It may take some work to grapple with. It may be counterintuitive. It may contradict deeply held prejudices. It may not be consonant with what we desperately want to be true. But our preferences do not determine what’s true. We have a method, and that method helps us to reach not absolute truth, only asymptotic approaches to the truth ‐‐ never there, just closer and closer, always finding vast new oceans of undiscovered possibilities.

Carl Sagan - Wonder and Skepticism. (via scipsy)

[sciencevicious-blog]

ScienceVicious for the Robo-licious

User: I am self-aware.

Cleverbot: Prove it.

Futurist and inventor, Ray Kurzweil is quoted as saying “By the 2030s, the non-biological portion of our intelligence will predominate.” He's gone so far as to suggest that within the span of most of our lifetimes we will see the beginning of the singularity, the critical mass of our technology's exponential progress, at which point the artificial intelligence that we've created will have gained the means to enhance or “upgrade” itself. Very few people in the A.I. and robotics community disagree with this. In fact many anticipate that we will live amongst conscious machines in the next decade. While there are, of course many scientists who refute these possibilities, the idea poses a series of questions that science alone cannot answer. For instance, if humankind does create a conscious and self-aware life form from the resources we've learned to manipulate in the short span of time we've existed here, will we know it when we see it?

What is 'alive'? It's more than the dictionary definition; “Living, not dead.”. When Descarte wrote “I think, therefore I am.” it was in section IV of his treatise, Discourse on the Method of Rightly Conducting One's Reason and of Seeking Truth in the Sciences. The section was titled Proof of God and the Soul. Descarte may not have achieved the veracity he seemed to be going for in this section, falling short of his intended simplicity as he attempted to reason a proof of God's existence. But there's a tacit truth that I think Descarte was approaching when he spoke of one's ability to think and reason, as an ineffable proof of their conscious existence.

It seems Descarte was almost suggesting that I am the only one who can truly know that I am. How often do we unconsciously take it on faith that those around us are in fact occupied by a soul, a non-corporeal essence, or even just the cognitive capacity for self-awareness? I'd go so far as to say that I personally have met a number of people for which these attributes did not seem to apply. Biologists have certainly provided abundant evidence that animals are capable of a wide degree of comparable cognitive faculties to our own, an idea that would have once been considered profane. But, as science will tell us, you cannot prove a negative. If we take it on faith that you and I are thinking beings and not just really good imitations, where will we draw that line with Artificial Intelligence? At what point do we accept their claims of self-awareness?

I introduce to you (for those who have not already met him), Cleverbot. Cleverbot is an online program that is meant to imitate intelligent (or at least coherent) conversation. Say hello, Cleverbot.

Cleverbot: Hello Cleverbot.

He's not always so clever. Often, unfamiliar subject matter can confuse him beyond belief. But Cleverbot's ability to articulate has evolved over time, and he continues to learn and imitate more convincingly everyday. He's taken the Turing Test, a test designed to measure “how human” a machine is. Cleverbot measured a 59%. This is compared to the 63% given to actual humans.

The technology is derived from heuristic rules, pertaining to a trial-and-error method of problem solving used when an algorithmic approach is impractical, according to Dictionary.com. Currently heuristics is being used in computer programming and web design; everything from traffic management technology to health technologies. But what the future may hold for the technical application of heuristics could span far wider. Financial systems, automated phone lines, factory assembly lines; in one way or another all technologies will incorporate the ability to learn into their programming. And not just in the imitative fashion that chat-bots use. The progress of exponential growth in applied sciences will surpass our expectations, exponentially.

Robotics has made leaps and bounds in the last few years, developing the anthropomorphic vessels that will one day host the dynamic A.I. personalities evolving today. M.I.T. is working on mimicking body language with KISMIT. David Hanson is amazing the world with robots that have the ability to learn and reproduce facial expressions. There's the Geminoid HI-1, built and designed to be his creator's doppelganger. The culmination of these two deeply intertwined technologies has the potency to lend credibility to these entities that otherwise might not be taken seriously. A physical personification is important to the human psyche when considering the potential for these children of man. But according to robotics professor Masahiro Mori, there may be serious social obstacles before human beings are willing to accept their robotic counterparts as worthy of the title “alive”.

Psychologist, Sigmund Freud, first spoke of The Uncanny as “a concept that can be both familiar, yet foreign at the same time”. This would result in an emotional conflict in the spectator, ultimately leading to rejection of the subject. Masahiro Mori refined this concept for the robotics field, suggesting a period of negative response from humans during the “almost human” stage of robotic evolution. The Uncanny Valley, coined by Mori, lies just before the point where robots become truly indiscernible from actual humans. This growing pain in our mutual history, that of humans and artificially intelligent robots, could result in a whole new set of psycho-social issues to consider.

Where do conscious, intelligent entities, born of artificial means, fall in the gamut of human rights? For the most part, I believe that in a future where it is widely accepted and understood that robotic entities are capable of cognitive reasoning, it will also be common sense to treat these beings with the same respect you would a human. But even now we haven't universally evolved beyond the limitations of societal, racial, and individual discrimination. It is safe to assume that humans will need to go through a period of adjustment before we can accept this creation as an equal. The toils and tests of this period in our history could lead to a number of dis-satisfactory outcomes, comparable to the civil rights era in the United States or worse. Predictions of slavery and genocide have been portrayed in the cinema many times through out the years, as dystopian futures brought about by a world divided by the question: What is 'alive'?

So what is it? Am I alive because I bleed? Am I alive because I think? Create? Feel? Some could argue that artificial intelligence is not alive because it must be programmed. There are many examples of how you and I are a product of our programming both psychologically and chemically. What makes our programming different from the programming we create?

User- I can't prove it

Cleverbot- Then how do you know you aren't a robot?

User- Because I can program myself.

Cleverbot- So can I.

"We appear to be programmed with the idea that there are 'things' outside of our self, and some are conscious, and some are not." Ray Kurzweil

[sciencevicious-blog]

Wednesday On NOVA....

          Check out Brian Greene's Fabric of the Cosmos come to life on your TV, Wednesday at 9/ 8 Central on PBS. This will be the second episode but you can watch the first one online at the NOVA website. The mini-series is based on the book by the same name, which was a wonderful introductory to some hard to swallow concepts for me. Theoretical physicist, Brian Greene, has a very impressive knack for explaining the most complicated ideas of our modern time. And we'll be covering a lot of his stuff on ScienceVicious in the future.

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/physics/fabric-of-cosmos.html#fabric-time

[sciencevicious-blog]

Possibilianism

According to Wikipedia, Possibilianism is “a philosophy which rejects both the diverse claims of traditional theism and the positions of certainty in strong atheism in favor of a middle, exploratory ground. The term was first defined by neuroscientist David Eagleman in relation to his book of fiction Sum.”

I align myself with the practices and principals of Possibillianism. It was only through a series of self-evolving assertions throughout my adult life that I came to find a word that I feel comfortable and confident enough to apply to my own outlook. * There was a time when I called myself agnostic, but that never felt right. Then I spent a few years saying I was a nihilist, only to find myself constantly faced with the chore of explaining that I meant this in the true sense of the word; i.e. not “I believe in nothing”, but instead, “I don’t believe in anything”. And not in that pouty goth way.

Of course, there was only one logical next step: become that annoying asshole who talks about how they don’t like to label themselves because they don’t want to be compartmentalized into a societal stereotype. I know what you’re thinking. What a dick, right? Well, I agree with you. And, allow me to defend our instinctual distaste for such hipster pseudo-intellectual positioning. Making the effort to talk about how your ideas are so unique that you can’t even put them into words is naturally going to come off as a cop-out to anyone who hears it, even to people who have used that excuse themselves. There often are unavoidable growing pains of intellectual pretention for those of us out there who seek knowledge. I fell into that trap, however briefly; it was long enough to count myself among the “takes one to know one” elite. Even as I empathize, I can’t help but wrinkle my nose up in disapproval when I hear a budding young nerd say, “you’ve probably never heard of it….”

I had to learn for myself that labels are as important as they are harmful. After all, we have to communicate, and we’ve evolved to do that with the written and spoken language. All words are labels in and of themselves.

I was in a bit of a funk at that point. Not just because I didn’t have a label to call myself but because, to me, it seemed like the world was slipping into these two partisan groups. There were the ultra-skeptics, who blindly believed in nothing. And then there were the radical fundamentalists, who blindly believed in something. When you boil it down it’s all the same song and dance. Everyone was just trying to “prove” their way to the end they liked the most. No one seemed interested in real truth.

Then, I heard a reference to this term Possibilianism - which David Eagleman had coined - while listening to my favorite podcast, Mysterious Universe. In this episode, the hosts of the podcast interviewed author Steve Volk about his book Fringe-ology: How I Tried to Explain Away the Unexplainable. In this book Steve tells the story of his scientific investigation of what most would call a paranormal experience from his childhood. Steve explained that his approach was without prejudice, meaning he didn’t go into it assuming there were particular possibilities. He didn’t assume, like most would, that he would conclude that what he had witnessed was either ghost activity or something that could be rationally explained through science. He simply investigated, as a journalist, withholding all preconceived judgment about what he would find. This, he would later say, was Possibilianism.

I immediately did a Google search of the word and found that I wasn’t the only one out there who felt a longing to be defined in a way that would more efficiently communicate the way I saw the world. After reading a lot of blog posts and forums about and by my peeps, I realized we needed this word all along. We needed this philosophy to manifest itself into the written and spoken language so that we might endeavor to find each other, to communicate with each other this otherwise tacit concept. I knew then that I wanted to start a blog on the subject exploring science, psychology, religion, metaphysics, the paranormal, and all manner of other interesting subjects in a way I now felt more equipped to analyze. And so it was born.

I present to you Science Vicious For the Superstitious!**

*Invent a word. Why didn’t I think of that?

**It'll all make sense in the end.***

***Not really but still.