zenBen Land

Dendrites

2011-10-19T16:06:00.001+03:00

If you see
a porcupine
then you have
dendritic spines
Given a-
ny other fact,
you will still
have them, at that.

Zizek in the Woods

2011-03-26T04:08:00.000+02:00

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
but this wood is trackless, white and cold.
I passed through unwelcoming aliens
they shivered, echoed in me something old.
An enmity, a fear, another time, a signal
of homeostasis lost. Was it ever owned?
Ecology! Ecology! A murder of plastic,
we writhe in guilty ideology, humility sold.

Expression

2011-02-19T13:45:00.000+02:00

In the sciences, we spend our lives looking for truth. In the end,we express our ideas in words, interpreting numbers or proposing theories. Mendelsson said something like "words, far from being too definite, are rather too indefinite". When has a scientific tract, other than awakening insights which were close to fruitition anyway (or you could not have had them), arisen that special feeling of truth-in-beauty or beauty-in-truth?
Much of modern thought, scientific or otherwise, is algorithmic, modelling. Models are dead things, only brought to life through understanding. Without the audience, this play is dead. Maybe we should strive to write a script that lives, as the Homeric poets.
...

Can you make art? Make a beautiful thing today, for the sake of those of us who only make models.
Esperanza Spalding

Nothing to say

2011-02-16T00:15:00.000+02:00

How many things can be said in a way, that still allows that you have nothing to say?
How many phrases are put together, that never indicate a where or a whether?
How much bullshit will a man push out, and still never meet an ear of doubt?
How many words are there in this rhyme, how much information here in 4/4 time?
How long until the reader just stops, yeah how long how long this long tops...

OSU

Some W40k terrain

2011-02-14T15:36:00.000+02:00

Been making ths for a while, finally finished painting it at the weekend.

OSU

Synecdoche

2010-11-24T14:30:00.000+02:00

It's a pity that my head is mine alone, or rather that the confluence of concepts and metaphors that occasionally arises when I get on a good streak of discovery cannot be shared, in such a way as to lend context to something that arrives CRASH and crystallises amorphous forms.

Here is a quote that does it nicely:

"This website considers the apparent one-to-one correspondences found between the characteristics resulting from simple dichotomous development and some of the modern models of reality, leading us to the probability that we have adapted to the, at least 'local', spacetime continuum by internalising at least one of it's characteristics - dichotomisation. And so the tendancy by some to see 'mind' in the formation of the universe, or to find 'truth' in esoteric maps is based solely on dichotomous analysis, and results from the projection of the proposed template out into the universe; the models of reality are based on metaphors which are models of our selves."

Whether we call it god, or science, or something else, we are looking at ourselves.

OSU

Language

2010-11-14T23:26:00.000+02:00

Words, far from being too definite, are rather too indefinite - language is a by-product of our evolution of an extremely powerful capability to model the world, and thus manipulate it. Thus it is NOT a tool for communication - if anything, language is a hindrance to communication when it comes to concepts which we can know intuitively such as emotion. Only when we communicate abstract concepts, fixed, distant and eternal, are we really at an advantage using language. Even then, we must go to so much trouble to fix our definitions for mutual understanding, that a conversation without such fixing can be worse than useless. It isn't just that you don't know the terms from my field, but that the terms I use work from other metaphors. My perspective on the world, my model of it, is not yours and you can only communicate with me to advantage if you build a ground truth from the same metaphors. If this seems too rigid, if it seems that in your life you manage to communicate about your ideas quite well, remember that you live in a world where homogeneity of thought has been increasing for milennia. Try to imagine communicating your most sophisticated ideas to a Guarani indian. Or even just a randomly selected immigrant of different educational background.

Of course all this doesn't include so-called 'peripheral' forms of communication when using language, such as intonation, prosody and body language. These are actually deeper, closer to our true meaning (unless we dissemble). However pure prose, dissociated words, are fixed meaningless symbols manipulated to address real meanings.

Probably music is closer to an expression of our 'felt' reality than words.

OSU

Internet Life

2010-07-29T01:38:00.000+03:00

OEEE OE OE OE OEEE

2010-07-13T18:23:00.000+03:00

OSU

Israel's crimes

2010-06-01T00:36:00.001+03:00

Check out this SlideShare Presentation:

Israel's crimes

View more documents from Ben Cowley.

Serious Games

2010-04-12T23:54:00.000+03:00

Serious games, eh? There´s always a place for serious games. If we could just persuade everyone in the world to turn all activities into a serious game, everything would become a garden of halcyonic fucking delights.

toothpastefordinner.com

OSU

Buy Your Rebellion Here!

2010-04-10T12:23:00.001+03:00

This isn't actually a social politics post (thank jebus), but the title is just a reference to what is so commonly assciated with rock music, which is what I really want to talk about.

Commoditisation of rock music could very nearly have killed the genre. That's a bold claim, but I think the way that punk washed overthe relevance of rock like a wave in the late 70s shows the point. Rock simply got too big, too commercial, too irrelevant. Metal had barely gotten off the ground before hitting the same doldrums. They both revived in the 80s, morphed a little (rock a lot more than metal, witness grunge), and that was in no small part thanks to punk and the inspiration that musicians got from seeing the energy created in Manchester and New York.

Further declines (does this follows a decadal pattern?) were answered with the internet. By now we are in a strange new place where new business models are the only hope of the dinosaur record companies who seem largely not to recognise that fact, and bands are doing all sorts of things now that money's too tight to mention.

So thats the history, and we all know where we are - so going back to my original point. Commoditisaton of rock (and all music to a lesser degree). Why is it a bad thing to create a product out of a band? Because, I argue, music is fundamentally a service...a good time, where the source is objectively less important than the experience. I don't say musicians shouldn't be well rewarded, but to create a monolithic branded entity, who is the only one who can give you your high, is pretty much the same as having only one dealer in town. Invitation to a monopoly, abuse of power and fixing the system to fleece the consumer - all the fun capitalist tricks that the music industry indulged in until thepiratebay changed the rules.

Its the fault of the Beatles really. Apple products (not the computers), branding films and merchandise...compared to them the Zep look quite tame. "Selling bootleg posters while the band are on stage"...nobody fucked with Peter Grant :)

Music is music. Musicians interpret it, and serve it to you as the skilled chef serves a meal. Celebrity chefs are only worthwhile when they're telling other chefs that they're 'fucking crap' on TV. Classical music has stars, but their power is not open to abuse because the real star is the music. People idolise Beethoven, but a) he's long dead, and b) it is really his music that is loved. So anyone can play it, and it sounds great, but there's no sense that you have to break up the band now that the composer is dead. More importantly, its not necessary to try to create another brand named Boothoven, selling its weak facsimile copy CDs for massive markups because the consumer wants so badly to not be able to believe it's not butter.

OSU

Serious Games blog

2010-04-05T19:00:00.000+03:00

Don't forget to keep checking out the SAVE ENERGY serious game blog, detailing (intermittently, like all my blogs), the development of the Green My Place game.
It would be nice if I could reply to your comments too, but right now the word press admins for the projects haven't even added a simple spam filter plugin to the blog, so its overwhelmed with ci@lis etc.
But I'll be happy if people simply know about the game.

All the best!

Feeds: http://serious-games.community.ict4saveenergy.eu/feed/

OSU

Funny Pages

2010-04-05T10:56:00.000+03:00

Here´s an idea for the day - why doesn't somebody create a website that aggregates all webcomics, using a folksonomy model in a social network way. The site links to the comics that people tell it about, and provides systems for people to rate the ones they like, comment and share. But what is most important, it gives the user some sliders to control content they see - like the slider for ratings, so you only catch the comics that are funniest. Even Cyanide and Happiness has crap days. Why waste my time? Just tune it out!
Then, a recommender system can act on top of that to start matching your ratings with other people´s ratings to know what you like, so it can favour the rated comics from people who are like you. And people can recomment each others ratings, and recommend each other´s recommendations...

And then, why not use the same system to create non-funny pages? Go to the online newspapers and reproduce the best articles, topically arranged and rated by the community.

Seems pretty easy, so I'll give this one away - just an original idea credit please.

OSU

Memory

2010-03-30T00:02:00.000+03:00

Memory is a funny thing. Is it an evolved trait that we have imperfect memory? If all our memories are retained at some deep level, and the machinery exists to recall it, why is it that the system works so poorly?
Perhaps it is evolutionary - natural selection does not favour introspection. The introspective aren't active enough, wallowing in the ghosts of their past. Did the first bipedal hairless apes feel nostalgia or melancholy? Do we only retain that because it is too neutral and adaptation to effect our survival? Perhaps memory has levelled off at the tradeoff point between the quality of our learning and the distraction of our internal lives. We know no more than we do because individuals that remember too much find it a disadvantage, and procreate less readily than those who just do.

Or is this all hokum? Evolutionary psychology, a lovely game for wasting the hours when you can't remember enough to waste them in the past.

OSU

TWENTY TEN

2010-01-10T19:46:00.000+02:00

Greetings, blog lovers!

Well its been a long time since I blogged regularly here, practically a year - and so it is fitting to kick-off again at the dawn of not just a new year, but a new decade.
Although there was an abortive attempt at a restart last summer, it ended rapidly as the final leg of the PhD reared its ugly head: preparing and sitting the defence, followed by minor corrections made extensive by my own perfectionism. That sounds odd saying it, since I'd far from claim the thesis to have been perfect, even in its own small domain. The other words I tried simply fit less well :)

So where are we?
The new year should herald a good deal of closure as I wrap up the writing from my PhD - after Pacman conf. paper III must come journals 2, 3, 4, etc! Yet there are more opportunities for investigation there in the original data and methods, so that could open new lines of work (all extra-curricular, that is, outside working time :).
The personal projects also include running a Helsinki site for the Global Game Jam, which I proposed last October (or August?) in work. A few hardy souls ventured to row in with me and it looks like it's going to pay off. We've teamed up with two other loactions, Tampere and Kajaani, and possibly also a site in Turku still to be confirmed, to create the subset jam: Finnish Game Jam! Last year there were no jam sites in Finland (ironically since the whole concept started off as the Nordic Game Jam in Copenhagen, practically on our doorstep). Anyway, keep track of us on the site and through our twitter HelsinkiGameJam.

Meanwhile, the work projects opened last year, TARGET and SAVE ENERGY, will complete first phase by March & June, so phase shift will mean a new (hopefully more contemplative, less stressful) mode of working.
Right now I'm running a pretty large data gathering phase for my 'psycho-physiological correlates of learning in serious games' experiment (Raph Koster notwithstanding, it's a topic still needs some work).
On the SAVE ENERGY serious game, development is about to hit a new phase, as we commit to implementation of a complete visual/conceptual design for the meta-game, what we are now gonna call 'Green My Place', and begin the work of iterating our mini-games to beta. I did manage some blogging relating to the game, on the project's weblog, in the last few months. That was another reason not to ressurect this blog earlier. The final one had something to do with letting my old domain name lapse, so zenben.net was poached by some Californican cowboys and is gone from the world of (semi-)respectability forever...

Outside the head-space, I really want to get my nidan grade in karate sometime after August. That pretty much means training somewhere between 5 times a week and every day.

That's my diary for today, more cogent thoughts of interest-worthy content to follow!
I may do a cross-posting thing between this blog and the Green My Place blog, make myself seem a little busier that way :)
Eyes peeled!

OSU

Haha, eternal life! (but no cake)

2009-07-10T09:33:00.004+03:00

Now, apparently we can quite safely say that caloric restriction will extend health benefits to the point of extending life expectancy (note all this does not guarantee a longer life, since age-agnostic diseases can still get ya).

All you have to do is eat less cake! A 20 year study on rhesus monkeys should be quite reliably predictive for hominids, although the effects seem to decrease the larger the mammal (rodents saw up to 80% lifespan increases).

It raises quite a question though - what do we prioritise? Most people quite enjoy food, and most people would quite like to live longer. So what a great joke that our own appetites are our greatest threat. Of course, certain ascetic god-fearing outlooks have made a virtue of denying the flesh in order to preserve the quality of the soul. And if one has a 'greater purpose' than having a good time, then it would be only logical to preserve the capacity to act by denying certain base pleasures and thereby deny debilitating ill health.

But these are all compromises of the basic question, and do not touch it fundamentally. So what do we want to do? Live longer, or live fuller?

OMG LOLZ!

2009-07-06T09:54:00.004+03:00

Hehehe, that's me (with a varying rate of timelag, anywhere from 3 to 20 years is my backlog time for games, but new releases? never).

"Hey blog still cool! you read later, LATER!"

2009-06-26T11:43:00.003+03:00

In the spirit of open and inclusive discussion, I'm going to post some links and some quick thoughts and just try to open up a subject area for random contributions and waffling.

Anti-aging research has come a long way, but in direct contravention of science fiction, we're still not handing out 'juvenat treatments' like sweetmeats. Are we coming close to the elixir of life? Or are we chasing a receding goal like some fever dream?
Aubrey de Grey seems to think that the solution lies in reorienting the approach to the middle ground between geriatrics and gerontology...
The approaches that are available are promising: resveratrol can dramatically increase the lifespan of nematode worms, caloric restriction can't be very much fun but it is proven to increase lifespan for larger animals (rats and mice by 40%). Genetics and proteomics are trickier for me to unravel, but I am assured that the answers there are coming...
If that's not enough to prompt some commotion, what about the fact that we seem to be built for immortality, but have natural selected against it? What are we to take from the fact that sex-cells are functionally immortal, but we are not? Is this a direct confirmation of the selfish gene theory?
http://www.world-science.net/exclusives/090607_germline

And then there's the ethics of anti-ageing research. Personally, I feel like arguing that longevity may actually be the answer to our problems, especially if we are of the optimistic viewpoint that ordinary people are still in control of their own destiny, and the goodness of man should prevail.

For instance, despite the accelerating increase in the speed of effective action, policy planning lifespans for everything from fishery to war is outstripping the political lifetimes of those who make the highest level decisions, and thus carry the can. If we assume a consequent/correlative 'drawing out' of the length of time we spend doing things, including our careers, then our lives may also begin to catch up on the timescales that politicians need to be responsible for. That's not to say that all the other problems with global capitalism will go away. But then again, why not? If the people who refuse to account for the full cost of their decisions suddenly realise that they're going to have to face consequences inherent in the raped system that they currently think they're 'leaving to the next generation', might they not think twice?

So lets get back to the waffles...

Notes on Noah Falstein's talk

2009-06-25T12:01:00.002+03:00

Some indeterminable time ago, Noah Falstein spoke on serious games at a silicon valley IGDA chapter event, and I stumbled across the posting the other day. Given that in all likelihood I will soon be designing my own serious game, for a pretty serious purpose, I watched the whole 80 minutes and even took notes.

All carrot no stick. Never 'force' player to do something.
Allow player to get thru game without learning anything, but make it so they do better the better they learn.
Gold with jewel - perfect score, gold still available for non-perfect score.
Voice over is cheap and informative!
Can't fail - prevents you from moving forward until you complete...but random answers can get you through. Still, they aren't much fun - no bonuses, lower score, etc.
'Serious game': it Can be just a curriculum with quiz-show type interface. No need to make the next Mario...
Mini-games give variety, look to traditional formats : crossword puzzle.
Make abstract things concrete - see speech icons in mata hari; treat physical and non-phys actions the same but add info to distinguish. Today I die = concrete out of abstract poetry.
Start designing in middle of game, not start - not that shud start at level 10, but shud save the work of the intro for halfway thru dev time, when more practice = better work. First thing people see shud have benefit of some experience.
More money = less innovation.
Ron Gilbert - puzzle dependency diagram: think in terms of players tasks, start at end and work back.
multi-player in Cisco: in classes makes sense, outside not. Same here: only multi in pilot?

It's a curious thing. I'm not a game designer, never studied for it, never had designs (pun intended) on doing it, and when I undertake this task I feel I'll just be doodling in the margins of the theses of great men. On the other hand, that serious purpose I mentioned above includes the pressure of succesful completion of a whole EU project...kind of indicates that I do whatever I have to do to get it right.
All the time, in my head I'm singing the immortal words of Joe Strummer: "shoud I stay or should I go?"

Eco-games

2009-06-11T13:04:00.004+03:00

In the spirit of my new job, & new project to save the world, I'm playing new games. Research. It's all about the hard slog :)
Eco-games, so far, are all basically managers along the lines of SimCity, some at higher levels of detail, some lower. There's a fundamental failure of imagination when serious game devs keep approaching the eco-game with a concept for Manager-types, when management of the large-scale environment is impossible for almost everyone likely to play such games. Maybe a political advocacy game, or an FPS where the enemy is methane belching cows.

Anyway, the last two I played where old-school, but nicely done and a good laugh for my managerial tendencies.

http://climcity.cap-sciences.net/us/index.php
This is like the LHC took a spreadsheet and fired it at a bitmap.

http://www.electrocity.co.nz/
This is like Duplo blocks (Lego for under 5's). You'd almost be fooled into thinking you can actually build something.

http://www.bigfishgames.com/download-games/5257/plan-it-green/index.html
A National Geographic game, but with no humping animals

iWeb 2.0

2009-06-07T14:09:00.003+03:00

++Transmission begins++

For a while now it has seemed to me that the web has reached a plateau, that something more significant is possible and needed, than the endless parade of social networks and disassociated widgets and utilities. What I’m talking about is a purpose, a reason to be there, something that means that 55 profiles and accounts on different services and websites all jointly represent you. Not because it is necessary to link it all, but simply because the opportunity presents itself to achieve something by doing so.

Integration is coming, of course. Open ID sees almost all the major internet content providers getting into bed to supply a single way to log on to their respective services. A small step qualitatively, but significant with those backers.

Yet this is not the true nature of what I’m getting at, which is that the online presence must in some way come to represent who you really are – an avatar of yourself in the digital empyrean. It starts with the same motivation as Open ID – one can only remember so much personal info before a bootstrap optimisation is necessary. Then beyond that there comes a point when you can’t really remember every way in which you have represented yourself online over the years, and control over both access to, and knowledge of, your online presence is desired. Remember, aside from organisational entropy, nothing on the internet ever goes away.

Finally, (perhaps only finally in my limited vision), there is control of where you want to go, and what you want to know. The internet is a big place, and it would be nice to be able to link your online representation to the spotlight of your directed attention every time you log on, the better to swim in waters that are relevant and/or hospitable.

Perhaps it is my feeling of disenfranchisement as a citizen that prompts these thoughts, for the power of voting seems to be to have been annulled by the hydra of capitalistic democracy and consequent lack real choice between candidates. That is a whole other topic, but certainly I feel far more likely to have my voice heard by somebody online, than I do on a ballot.

So the representation I speak of is both a new and age-old concept. The phrase ‘citizen of the net’ has been bandied about for years, but it’s far from a reality and the infrastructure would be need to be evolved dramatically. To start with, and to return to where I started, is the melding of all those piecemeal representations that we call our profiles – and then comes real self-knowledge, and real control, as all the pieces of our online selves cohere in our own vision.

At the logical conclusion of this way of thinking, lies the representation of the impact your life has on the finite world in which you live. If we are no longer able to count the economic cost of environmental impact or natural resource consumption as zero, then any true representation of ourselves in any media must carry that caveat: ‘What I am as a social being, is accompanied by this tally of my impact on the world’.

And the value of that, is that with self-knowledge comes self-control. But this again, is another topic.

++Transmission ends++

My Brain on Games

2009-06-03T21:21:00.008+03:00

My BrainHex Class is Socialiser-Mastermind!

Survey taken under beta for the good folks at iHobo, see their website for details.

Results

Your BrainHex Class is Socialiser-Mastermind.

You like hanging around with people you trust and helping people as well as solving puzzles and devising strategies.

According to your results, there are few play experiences that you strongly dislike.

Learn more about your classes and exceptions at BrainHex.com.

Your scores for each of the classes in this test were as follows:

Socialiser: 7
Mastermind: 7
Survivor: 5
Achiever: 5
Daredevil: 5
Conqueror: 2
Seeker: 2

Go to BrainHex.com to learn more about this player model, and the neurobiological research behind it.

Feel free to take a copy of your BrainHex icon and display it anywhere
you wish! Simply right click and choose "save as". All we ask is you
provide a link to BrainHex.com anywhere you use our images.

Thanks for taking part in the BrainHex survey!

Das Dual Boot

2009-05-15T19:11:00.005+03:00

Ubuntu is so sweet :)
The idea that a thousand nerds at a thousands Sun workstations could produce an OS that plays nice in a dual boot with a shared data partition, with Windows friggin XP...beggars belief. Yet they have. And it only continues to get better.
As long as nothing ever goes wrong...ugh, terminal :(

Back in the saddle

2009-05-15T17:10:00.004+03:00

So having given the old site a facelift, and blown a tiny fanfare, I find myself in the embarrassing position of having even less time to write than before. I've put up nothing but unintended publishings of old draft material and that has to change - but I'm a bit blocked. Thus, I'm going to give a bulletin update of news and hope to get my regular posting back on track within the month.

There is one PhD thesis in the bag, and one viva defence still to come. That was a long haul, but never got out of hand, I think. It becomes more like a job of work than a Bachelor or Masters degree, since its sooo long and sooo precise that you can't really just throw manic energy at it and expect to get anywhere. Then, there's still the viva, and I haven't even thought about what that entails. More research required!
Job secured. Uh oh, I'm going back to the World of Work! A mystical place where work disappears into a gaping void of 'what exactly have we achieved?', and money appears out of the great blue yonder of 'whyyyy?' I'm going to be working on a couple of EU projects as a post-doc researcher, with the Centre for Knowledge and Innovation Research, Helsinki School of Economics, Suomi. All very grand sounding, although I admit I'm not yet quite sure what I'll be doing there. Being wonderful as usual, I suppose :S
Moving time! Moving house is a logistics fetishists dream, and moving house between countries, especially one with a (very) different language, is just value-added complexity. So great fun for me...
Finland, Finland, Finland. The place where I want to be. Will be. Officially bi-lingual, practically tri-lingual, the most and least Scandinavian country, depending on perspective. Problems with Russia. I wonder if Finland is a good place to weather the coming storm. I know Ireland and the UK are not good places, more like epi-centres, but I'm unsure of Finland's exposure. They have masses of potable water, but in Helsinki they have water charges. They have a huge land-to-population ratio, but most of it is under snow. They have a great economy, but its heavily service-biased. They have a great standard of living, but I expect it costs a fair bit to keep it through those winters.

Watch this space!

Yes, yes, very nice...braaaains

2008-11-26T16:01:00.004+02:00

Ok, so it's an interview for the insufferably smug self-satisfied Edge club, but it's very nice all the same.

[ALVA NOË:] "The central thing that I think about is our nature, our human-animal nature, our being in this world. What is a person? What is a human being? What is consciousness? There is a tremendous amount of enthusiasm at the moment about these questions.

They are usually framed as questions about the brain, about how the brain makes consciousness happen, how the brain constitutes who we are, what we are, what we want—our behavior. The thing I find so striking is that, at the present time, we actually can't give any satisfactory explanations about the nature of human experience in terms of the functioning of the brain.

What explains this is really quite simple. You are not your brain. You have a brain, yes. But you are a living being that is connected to an environment; you are embodied, and dynamically interacting with the world. We can't explain consciousness in terms of the brain alone because consciousness doesn't happen in the brain alone."

Thought experiment inspired by this article - what can we see occurring in the brain/cognition when the body/action is the main focus but is focused inward, on performing some task not involving environmental interaction? My example is a kata, where the entire action is conceptually, not interactively based; and all thought is turned to the action. Then a person is suddenly highly active, but not interactive, and cognate but focused, not distracted. Kind of like Flow.

They told me to do it...

2008-10-14T15:34:00.002+03:00

4 months

2008-09-24T22:12:00.002+03:00

Tomorrow marks the four month anniversary of the last blog post I made, and so I've decided to break my silence this once, just to prevent that momentous date from actually occuring. Very quickly after writing this, I will go back to the grind of trying to write a thesis in the face of massive and insolent procrastination and excessive alternative commitments of an unnecessary nature.

In other news the poll that I've had up for all that time, measuring the comprehensibility of my pieces, has returned a massive 10 results! Unless that was me, answering from multiple separate machines over the last 4 months and not remembering, this represents a huge jump in readership figures. Since there is nothing to read, I'll assume they've all gone away again.

Whaa!?
Does anybody ever know what I'm talking about?

Fiendishly over the top

50%

I can't read, I just like the pictures

50%

Perfectly pitched

Actually, a bit simple

total votes: 10

The results clearly show that nobody knows what I'm talking about, unless they can infer a lot from the mostly randomly chosen pictures. On second thought, all those who chose the 2nd option probably represent the increase in subscribers, and thus don't increase my 'readership', at all.

A Little Something for the Weekend

2008-05-25T04:09:00.002+03:00

"Enjoying all the loneliness at home"
Is it a question of being alone?
Employing silence to fill up a hole
the loud sound of thoughts all unknown
and buzzing memories to be owned.

The mind is I and the mind it is whole
or so it seems, so I feel I know,
but does cyclical confirmation hold?
Who holds me to be me, myself, my own?
Only one, the one that is all I hold.

Dream-beings

2008-05-15T14:41:00.003+03:00

Did I dream this belief,
or did I believe this dream?
- Peter Gabriel

"In the further adventures of Achilles, he again crosses paths with the Tortoise just as he is pondering certain imponderables thrown up by an unfortunate accident involving excessive physical activity and mild concussion.

Achilles: Tortoise! I'll have a word with you, since you're going nowhere fast.

Tortoise: By all means. Nothing would give me more pleasure!
[at this point, authorial licence gives way to reality...]

Achilles: I have been thinking about when I went unconscious. When I was dreaming, do you think that was some function of the brain?

Tortoise: I do.

Achilles: What do you think is the evolutionary purpose of it?

Tortoise: My 'official' reaction would be to say that dreaming is probably an accidental by-product of analytical thinking

Achilles: hmmm, not very convincing

Tortoise: I'll elucidate then. Let us consider that we have this function to think analytically and not just instinctively like most other animals

Achilles: So animals don't dream?

Tortoise: Clearly they do! But their dream is a shadow of their particular form of thought process, as ours is a shadow of how we think. I wouldn't like to begin to address what I have not experienced, when explaining what I have experienced is such a challenge.
So we were considering the analytical thought process, a function that doesn't go away when we sleep. Working solely with memory data, as opposed to sense data, the analytical thought process is on shaky ground. It confabulates fantastical visions for the 'experiential self' by performing its normal function, which is to recognise, assign nominal or symbolic value and classify. That is, it reads memory, performs some processing (which was designed for waking operation), and writes back to memory.
That is my 'official' line.

I would stand by that (because it's not really very deep at all, so it's reasonably safe).

However, if I was going out on a limb, I might say that there is more scope for interaction with unusual sensory perception when asleep simply because our analytical minds are shut down.
I might go so far as to say that this extra-ordinary interaction causally precedes our evolution - i.e. we dream because the dream state is there to be had, in the same way that we see because sight is possible.
Now, I wouldn't defend that view since, by all standards of reason, a defence is impossible!

Achilles: What do you think of aboriginal concepts of Dream time?

Tortoise: I know of it, it's a mythology built around the common idea of the mythic oneness. I wouldn't gainsay it - we know time to be entirely subjective, so I have no problem with Dream time as a metaphor for reality, outside of a single frame of reference.

Achilles: Is it possible, do you think, that the evolutionary consciousness rises out of dream time, and is used to pick and choose its subjective linear experience

Tortoise: Evolutionary consciousness? Explain.

Achilles: Well, consciousness as an evolving construct - rising out of the primordial soup as it were.

Tortoise: Consciousness associated with what? A single human? The collective unconscious? Gaia?

Achilles: A single human - but at different levels it drops further into a larger "dreaming"
I just feel that what I experienced was something akin to a dream time experience, and that it was my evolutionary consciousness, that values my linear experiences, that pulled me out and kept my alive...although, the human experience also helped me, as I was woken up by another human being.

Tortoise: To my mind, it's a double question really
a) does consciousness come from before, and last after, the human body?
b) is there really a single great consciousness so that a single personality is just an illusion, one that we can 'awake' from (whether that be in dreams or in death)?

At first reaction, I honestly can't answer either question. These are truly imponderables.

Achilles: Well, if b) is true, is it possible that the dream isn't a shadow of the waking self, as you seemed to be suggesting?
Rather, that the dream is a fundamental state of being that we can all share and partake of, and where we all become incredibly similar...but in which the identity becomes increasingly malleable.

Tortoise: My own experience of dreams leads me to believe that most dream experiences are akin to normal conscious experience, and all the stuff about identity being malleable results from the faculty of imagination - modelling!
BUT...I cannot deny there is possibly something more happening.

Achilles: Surely though, what we bring back from dreams is influenced by our own waking self

Tortoise: I think I see what you mean - that we reinterpret the dream experience on waking.

Achilles: yeah

Tortoise: We 'remember' the dream, based on a model that is built by our conscious mind?

Achilles: yup

Tortoise: Well, I agree that may affect remembrance...but it doesn't actually imply anything different is happening when we dream.
I am open to the idea that there is something extra happening, but I can't really approach that idea of a greater consciousness...because the more I think about it, the more clear it is that any rational answer will only approximate a model of a level of consciousness which I cannot understand or even discuss rationally!
For instance, imagine a Gaia consciousness that persists based on a substrate of electrical energy within the world [or solar system or galaxy, why not?]. We have a concept there, but what more can we say about it? the why, how, what...none of our experience can begin to help us form answers.

Achilles: I think our analytical brain does influence the dream a lot, even during sleep...yet what was strange for me was how little influence it had during unconsciousness, and then its sudden attempt to reassert itself. It felt like the evolutionary process speeded up in a second, pulling random impulses into a fully formed human.

Tortoise: Ok, so I have a concept of some rather unapproachable level of consciousness, and you have your unconsciousness/dream concept, which brings us back to your recent personal experience...and I feel I can say this much:

Consider the analytical, self-oriented left-brain part as 'You' for a moment. 'You've' basically got a will to live, or a will to die - stay in the human body, or exit it. You can think of dying as the end of things, or as reunion with the One, enlightenment. Yet if there is this greater consciousness, then it doesn't matter what you think, because you can't approximate the truth with thought...and you can't escape it.
If it true, then when you die you join it.
If not, when you die you rot.
Seems like I just made a good rational argument for not worrying about spirituality too much!

Achilles: I think its the "you" part that I am having difficulty coming to terms with!

Tortoise: Is there anything more that we can say regarding the transcendence of dreams? What is the 'I' if all we need to do to wash it away, is to fall asleep? Are we remembering a true state of experience when we sleep or when we wake?
A good question, Achilles, and I thank you!"

Noise-beings

2008-05-07T21:39:00.003+03:00

What I have been talking about in the Doubt-beings and Love-beings posts is probably best thought of as a metaphysics of cognition, a subject which needs a metaphysical treatment only because of our relative ignorance about how we produce thought. However more and more the field is advancing, and one of the most productive areas is the investigation of noise in neuronal processing, or what looks like noise because we don't quite understand its role yet.

Did a quick google on noise in neuronal processing, and discovered enough interesting studies to last a long time. [Possibly a career's worth. We'll see!]. See these [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7]
Still, for now, a quick recap and see how this bears on my previous two posts.

In the late 80's Roger Penrose in his book The Emperors New Mind attacked the stance of strong AI (which claims that consciousness is algorithmic and so can be executed on a UTM), saying that cognition was essentially a non-algorithmic process characterised by [what I'll call for want of better phrasing] Godelian relationships. He also made the bold claim that perhaps resolution of quantum linear superpositions was occurring as neurons act, therefore making thought a practically non-deterministic process. This view was downplayed by the mainstream, as it was thought that neuronal activity was too large-scale to be affected by quantum phenomena. The claim has not been verified or disproven, but there is some evidence to suggest that quantum phenomena do play a role for the average neuron.
The implications were this hypothesis to be proven true are staggering in scope - and they really do bear heavily on any metaphysical look at consciousness. We'll come back to this toward the end, after a few more research perspectives.

One view of the brain is a rather rattletrap contraption, riddled with signal-delivery noise and therefore stacked with signal-processing redundancy.
There's a nice article here about how noise is inherent in wetware but is compensated. Essentially, from a reductionist perspective the picture is that neurons are signal carriers that can loose signal, distort the encoding or lose it entirely. Redundancy of processing for brain areas effectively combats noise - neuron groups and signal trains are used, like this example:
"When we hear a sound, hair-like structures on neurons in our ears wiggle. Their wiggling creates a pattern of voltage spikes, which the neuron then passes on to 10 to 30 other neurons. All of those neurons then carry the same signal toward the brain, where they can be compared. Each neuron degrades the signal in a uniquely random way, and by averaging all of their signals together, the brain can cancel out some of the noise."

This perspective comes from looking at the action of single neurons, and then extrapolating that behaviour up to the next level at which hard science is possible - single event response mapping. Using functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI), they can examine the brain as it acts (almost in real time, now). But the entire picture is far too big, busy and chaotic to treat scientifically, so they have to prime the brain to respond to a single event, like a sound, and map the response in the fMRI results.
The problem with this, valuable work though it is, is that it gives a picture of the brain that is too functionally modular. The brain is modular, sure, but it is also interconnected. The whole brain is switched on (though perhaps not acting) at the same time, and it is occlusive to think in terms of one part at a time. In complex emergent systems, it is the high level behaviour that embodies the most powerful and beautiful results. Ant algorithms are very simple on the individual ant scale, but the entire culture of an ant colony is a staggering construct for such tiny creatures.

So another perspective on noise in the brain keeps the higher order in mind - that noise encodes decision possibilities until resolution and so the brain represents information probabilistically, by coding and computing with probability density functions or approximations to probability density functions. This implies that the brain is actually a Bayesian probability calculator.
On the face of it, that's not so different to the ear example above - lots of signals are sent, the averaged sum of probabilities gives an approximately correct answer. The differences in the technical details may be larger, but one non-technical difference in particular strikes me - in this latter view, the noise is not really noise at all. It is a pre-cursor to the system - in a way, it is the principle around which the system is built. In other words, our brains evolved the way they did because the biological substrate they evolved within has to have noise. If a noise-free system were possible, we wouldn't think the way we do at all (well, we as us wouldn't exist, but for the sake of argument...).

So there we have a few different fresh perspectives on how the brain is processing and decision-making. Can we relate this in some way to the level of discussion of the earlier posts, Doubt and Love?
I'm loathe to start drawing definite inferences, since I'm working myself on the basis of intuition. Yet I think that with the most open of minds, we could imagine a brain that operates from the quantum level toward resolution of probabilistic predictor functions. This type of brain could operate as we know it does, and yet also operate within the undifferentiated, relative and probabilistic reality that we suspect* exists independent of our conscious experience of it. In other words, we exist in touch with the beautiful everythingness of reality, and yet filter it down to a point of focus that permits self-aware pro-active consciousness. I may be jumping crazily about waving my hands in the air, but I believe that I have just summarised my Doubt and Love posts with reference to hypothetical operative descriptions of the brain.

Furthermore, all this to my mind, presents a picture not so much of dichotomy but of layering of relational activity. There is not just one view of the world or the other (as I have presented in the previous two posts referenced above), but a system that requires both views to exist simultaneously and harmoniously, and therefore produce conscious thought.

Note: In all this I am kind of taking the stance that conscious thought is somehow a desirable end product of the setup of our brains - a final** and valuable cap stone of the system. Another stance might claim that consciousness is just an accidental by-product, that the 'zombie in the brain'*** is what's really in control, and the whole apparatus only operates in order to enable the 'selfish gene'. I just find the letter view a mite shortsighted and pessimistic, though I don't claim I know better.

* I am using an uncertain form in order to admit the solipsist outlook.
** Or possibly not final! But thats another days discussion.
*** Look up V.S. Ramachandran 'Phantoms in the Brain'

Phantoms in the Brain: skim-over

2008-04-27T19:58:00.003+03:00

In thinking about an upcoming post, I came back to a really eye-opening book I read many years ago called Phantoms in the Brain: Probing the Mysteries of the Human Mind, by V.S. Ramachandran and Sandra Blakeslee (I also see that it is the book's tenth anniversary, so this is a well-timed remembering). I thoroughly enjoyed the book for it's wit as well as wisdom (well, it is a tour of some research findings, so perhaps wisdom is the wrong word). I found a list of quotes from the book (particularly like the last one), so without the time to write a nice synopsis or review, I'll just bang them straight out with a recommendation to read the whole thing.

p. xi:

"In any field, find the strangest thing and then explore it."
- John Archibald Wheeler.

p. xv:

I'd also like to say a word about speculation, a term that has acquired a pejorative connotation among some scientists. Describing someone's idea as "mere speculation" is often considered insulting. This is unfortunate. As the English biologist Peter Medawar has noted, "An imaginative conception of what might be true is the starting point of all great discoveries in science." Ironically, this is sometimes true even when the speculation turns out to be wrong. Listen to Charles Darwin: "False facts are highly injurious to the progress of science for they often endure long; but false hypotheses do little harm, as everyone takes a salutory pleasure in proving their falseness; and when this is done, one path toward error is closed and the road to truth is often at the same time opened." Every scientist knows that the best research emerges from a dialectic between speculation and healthy skepticism.

p. 1:

For in and out, above, about, below,
'Tis nothing but a Magic Shadow-show
Play'd in a Box whose Candle is the Sun
Round which we Phantom Figures come and go
- The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám

p. 35:

The completely static picture of [cortical maps] that you get from looking at textbook diagrams is highly misleading and we need to rethink the meaning of brain maps completely.

p. 35:

You never identify yourself with the shadows cast by your body, or with its reflection, or with the body you see in a dream or in your imagination. Therefore you should not identify yourself with this living body either.
- Shankara (A.D. 788-820) Viveka Chudamani (Vedic scriptures)

p. 61:

For your entire life you've been walking around assuming that your "self" is anchored to a single body that remains stable and permanent at least until death. Indeed, the "loyalty" of your self to your own body is so axiomatic that you never even pause to think about it, let alone to question it. Yet these experiments suggest the exact opposite - that your body image, despite all its appearance of durability, is an entirely transitory internal construct that can be profoundly modified with just a few simple tricks.

p. 81:

in science one is often forced to choose between providing precise answers to piffling questions (how many cones are there in a human eye) or vague answers to big questions (what is the self), but every now and then you come up with a precise answer to a big question (such as the link between deoxyribonucleic acid [DNA] and heredity) and you hit the jackpot. It appears that vision is one of the areas in neuroscience where sooner or later we will have precise answers to big questions.

p. 93:

People often assume that science is serious business, that it is always "theory driven", that you generate lofty conjectures based on what you already know and then proceed to design experiments specifically to test these conjectures. Actually real science is more like a fishing expedition than most of my colleagues would care to admit. (Of course I would never say this in a National Institutes of Health [NIH] grant proposal, for most funding agencies still cling to the naive belief that science is all about hypothesis testing and then carefully dotting the "i's" and crossing the "t's". God forbid that you should just try to do something entirely new that's just based on a hunch!)

p. 110:

the primary visual cortex, far from being a mere sorting office for information coming in from the retina, is more like a war room where information is constantly being sent back from scouts, enacting all sorts of scenarios, and then information is sent back up again to those same higher areas where the scouts are working. There's a dynamic interplay between the brain's so-called early visual areas and the higher visual centers, culminating in a sort of virtual reality simulation.

p. 152:

"What we call rational grounds for our beliefs are often extremely irrational attempts to justify our instincts."
- Thomas Henry Huxley

p. 156:

[Sigmund Freud] had discerned the single common denominator of all great scientific revolutions: Rather surprisingly, all of them humiliate or dethrone "man" as the central figure in the cosmos.

p. 157:

If you think you're something special in this world, engaging in lofty inspection of the cosmos from a unique vantage point, your annihilation becomes unacceptable. But if you're really part of the great cosmic dance of Shiva, rather than a mere spectator, then your inevitable death should be seen as a joyous reunion with nature rather than as a tragedy.

p. 180:

Some of these [temporal lobe personality] patients are sticky in conversation, argumentative, pedantic and egocentric (although less so than many of my scientific colleagues)...

p. 183:

Higamous hogamous
Women are monogamous
Hogamous higamous
Men are polygamous

p. 185:

Just because religiosity has a neurological basis, does not in itself deny the existence of God, just as the neurophysiological basis of color vision does not deny the existence of color.

p. 204:

jokes have much in common with scientific creativity, with what Thomas Kuhn calls a "paradigm shift" in response to a single "anomaly" ... the joke is "funny" only if the listener gets the punch line by seeing in a flash of insight how a completely new interpretation of the same set of facts can incorporate the anomalous ending.

p. 206:

Freud's explanation [of humor as the relief of tension] belongs to a class of explanations that Peter Medawar has called "analgesics" that "dull the ache of incomprehension without removing the cause"

p. 222:

There's much truth to Sir Arthur Eddington's famously paradoxical remark "Don't believe the result of experiments until they're confirmed by theory."

p. 227:

[According to Hindu tradition] the self - the "I" within me that is aloof from the universe and engages in a lofty inspection of the world around me - is an illusion, a veil called maya

p. 227:

Everything I have learned [from neurology] points to an unsettling notion: that you create your own "reality" from mere fragments of information, that what you "see" is a reliable - but not always accurate - representation of what exists out in the world, that you are completely unaware of the vast majority of events going on in your brain. Indeed, most of your actions are carried out by a host of unconscious zombies who exist in peaceful harmony along with you (the "person") inside your body!

p. 228:

"Consciousness is a fascinating but elusive phenomenon: it is impossible to specify what it is, what it does, or why it evolved. Nothing worth reading has been written on it."
- Stuart Sutherland

p. 229:

[The] need to reconcile the first-person and third-person accounts of the universe ... is the single most important unsolved problem in science. Dissolve this barrier, say the Indian mystics and sages, and you will see that the separation between self and nonself is an illusion - that you are really One with the cosmos.

p. 235:

[The zombie argument] is based on the fallacy that because yuo can imagine something to be logically possible, therefore it is actually possible. ... even though you can imagine an unconscious zombie doing everything you can do, there may be some deep natural cause that prevents the existence of such a being!

p. 256:

It seems somehow disconcerting to be told that your life, all your hopes, triumphs, and aspirations simply arise from the activity of neurons in your brain. But far from being humiliating, this idea is enobling, I think. ... Once you realize that far from being a spectator, you are in fact part of the eternal ebb and flow of events in the cosmos, this realization is very liberating.

Love-beings

2008-04-09T22:11:00.003+03:00

This is a companion piece, so best to read the post Doubt-beings beforehand!

I've said I'd use this term love to describe what I'll talk about below, so even though the doubt piece proved that adapting language to new uses can be counter-productive, I'm pressing on. Bear with me!

There is the sense of the word love that follows everyday use, and this is emotional and interpersonal. People mostly love other people - I'll come back to why I think this happens, toward the end. One can talk about loving things, concepts and so forth, but most people recognise that such emotion is inherently different to what people feel about other people.

Although perhaps in one sense, it is not so different. Love is a term that is used in other contexts - I'm thinking of teachings on enlightenment. Love is the Buddha...all is One, and One is love. At least, that's what they tell me. Now this is not emotion, because emotion is a product of the self, it's constrained and relational. And as mentioned, here love is ALL.

Yet it relates to the humble emotion we call love in the day to day. Perhaps what we call love is a snapshot of this great constant Oneness, or better a flash of light through an iris opened by the reduction of the obsession with reflection on the self. True love feels like a very selfless thing. Is it just a play on words to suggest that this is because true love involves the exact same opening of being outward beyond the self, as enlightenment does?

I can't say that without addressing why everyone is not enlightened - most of my readers will know more than I, but anyway...it takes awareness to be enlightened, one must be aware that the self is not real, is an illusion that needs to dissipate - and that awareness is very hard to hold as well, because its a scary thing at first. (This is what I've read, at least. No Buddha am I!)

With regard to the snapshot idea, I am playing with this concept in respect of my own life, trying to see how love can occasionally and spontaneously explode for people and things I have no relationship with, for variable lengths of time and no apparent reason. Or how it can last long past the end of a relationship, although that relationship may have ended acrimoniously. Or how it arises for nothing, just because my state of mind relaxes, my concerns drop away for a moment, and the world around me looks very beautiful. This often happens when travelling - walking or on trains mainly. And a curious thing accompanies - very often I will start to notice a lot more detail about the world, like how the trees beside the path on the way in from the train station to my office are all curved the same way at the base, suggesting when they were saplings the prevaling wind was nor'westerly. Of course, such musings invariably become recursive, and I start to think about my own thought process, and the spell is broken. The self is back. Is this a familiar experience?

This kind of makes me think of what else may be coming through with the emotion of love (as I am describing it. Keep in mind as you read that your own experience - and thus idea - of love is going to be different, so its just a word). If the emotion itself is a window on a constant, does this suggest that the relationship between the self and the emotion is like the opening of a valve? OK, and what does the constant represent? I'm thinking of it like a pure recognition by the right brain of the sublime quality of reality. The whole thing is pretty amazingly put together, I think our best science supports that indubitably (see what I did there?), and art has known it forever. If we consciously get a glimpse of that, its a sublime feeling. Could it be that there is a substantive recognition of intrinsic quality in the Oneness of reality that leaks through as we experience the world without the processing mechanisms of our left-brain filtering system? This idea is not that far from Kant's ideas on aesthetics, as I understand them. It is not a world away from Robert Pirsig's Chautauqua on Quality.

Maybe it gives us another channel from the narrow self-oriented conscious left-brain to the wide-open undifferentiated unconscious right-brain...love as the non-filter, a time-division multiplexed interface with the beauty of reality where doubt (or discrimination, or whatever you want to call it) is frequency-division multiplexed.

...

Coming back around again to the common idea of interpersonal love. A lot is at stake here, as we hardly want to relegate this important facet of our lives to a mere mechanistic working of cognitive functions. So all I'll say is that if the emotion of love is a reflection of this Oneness constant, then falling in love, or loving your family, could be (in operation) a lowering of defenses and a reduction of concerns about the self. You enter willingly into a vulnerable place because you trust the other person you love, and that starts the process of stripping away the illusory trappings of the self and opens you to feeling the reflection of Oneness. You're not becoming enlightened (probably the opposite >:D ), but you actively feel bliss.

But the awareness that this process is beginning isn't present as it is when enlightenment is being sought, and the relationship with the other comes with its own cares, and so the self quickly reasserts itself. And so we get this flash of pure bliss, which is over quickly but cascades into associated positive emotions, and the whole thing is labelled by our categorising left-brain as 'falling in love'. And its great! But it has less to do with this other person, and more to do with our own state, than we think.

...

Final thought - can the self-oriented, analytical left-brain experience be trained toward the state of mind I have been talking about here? Could Flow be a left-brain version of this sort of openness of being? If we had a rigorous knowledge of either one type of experience or the other, we might have a better idea, but as I say (too much) in my work - that is an issue for future work*!

*the academic equivalent phrase to 'that would be an ecumenical matter' :D

Disclaimer: There is NOTHING about thinking this through that bears on the actual experiences involved - no clarity is gained with loved ones, no steps toward enlightenment achieved, no knowing what the next moment of a new relationship might bring. It's only words - but I enjoyed setting them down :)

Poll Results

2008-04-06T19:41:00.003+03:00

Post-oil warring into a new stone age

30.8%

Historical precedent says everything will stay much the same, only more so

30.8%

Super-intelligent borganisms

15.4%

Whaa!?

15.4%

An unforseen utopia of free energy and human kindness

7.7%

Wow, 13 whole votes!
Looks like the trend of belief is either down or level, which given that nothing ever stays the same really, looks like a majority vote for pessimism. And only one true optimist! And I can't even remember if it was me!

Dr. Seuss Movie Adaptations

2008-04-06T16:42:00.004+03:00

"On the fourteenth of March, in towns nationwide,
In every cinema, multiplex, on every barnside,
Gleamed another adapting of one of my books,
CGI-ed and digitized by another sly crook.

Horton, my favorite—look how he's been treated!
Stuffed with tinsels and tassels and promptly excreted!
The puns! And the filler! The script fees you must save!
While I tumble and grum-humble around in my grave.

Did you learn all but squat from The Cat In The Hat?
Please tell me you fired the prick who made that.
I would have stopped writing, maybe sold Goodyear tires.
If I knew one dark day I'd costar with Mike Myers.

And Oh!
Oh, dear! Oh!
My poor Grinch, what they've done!
They crammed in live-action and snuffed out all the fun!

It's icky, it's tacky, it's awkward, it's wrong.
The Whos look like ferrets, it's an hour too long.
What a rotten idea to spend millions destroying
This masterful tale kids spent decades enjoying!
But still you keep making them!
Just how do you dare?
Sell my life's work off piecemeal
To every Tom, Dick, and Har'.

Why it's simply an outrage—a crime, you must judge!—
To crap on my books with this big-budget sludge.
My books are for children to learn ones and twos in,
Not commercialous slop for Jim Carrey to ruin.

Have you no respect for the gems of your youth?
To pervert them on screen from Taiwan to Duluth.
Even after you drag my last word through the dirt,
I know you, you pirates,
You'd cut out my heart for a "Thing 1" T-shirt.
For eighty-some years I held you vultures at bay,
knowing just how you'd franchise my good name some day.
Not yet cold in my grave before you starting shooting
the first of my classics you'd acquired for looting.

Mrs. Seuss, that old stoofus, began selling more rights
to Dreamworks, Universal—any hack in her sights.
First The Cat In The Hat and then this, that and Seussical
without a thought to be picky, selectish, or choosical.

So to Audrey, you whore, you sad sack of a wife:
Listen close. Pay attention, for once in your life.
You give Fox In Sox to those sharks who made Elf
And so help me, I'll rise up and kill you myself.

No Sneetches by Sony—
No One Fish: On Ice—
Burn that Hop On Pop II script not one time but twice.
Don't sex up my prose with Alyssa Milano…
And no Green Eggs And Ham with that one-note Romano!

This must stop! This must end! Don't you see what you're doing?
You're defiling the work I spent ages accruing.
And when it's dried up and you've sucked out your pay
There'll be no going back to a simpler day,

When your mom would give Horton a voice extra deep,
And turn the last page as you drifted to sleep.
Instead you'll have boxed sets, shit movies, and… well,
You'll have plenty to watch while you're burning in hell."

Stolen, without kind permission,
from the swell guys at theonion
and please before harsh objection
note the flattery, in my selection

Doubt-beings

2008-04-01T16:27:00.003+03:00

Doubt is rather a constant thread of thought, occasionally featuring operationally, occasionally topically. Recently the issue of true certainty has been occupying me on a personal level, and almost inevitably the corollary has arisen in conversation with peers (notably here). I think that before reading on, it would be valuable, though not essential, to read that and watch this.

I begin with a premise (framed as a question) leading from those pieces - I wonder if there are doubts in the realm of thought which is supposed to belong to the right brain, the immediate and total awareness of sensory perception without reference to the self or identity?

It kind of implies that doubt is itself a construct of (the evolutionary trait of) identity. An evolutionary psychologist might therefore say that we doubt because certainty is self-defeating as a fitness function in a natural selection competition. And I suppose that this is pretty tautological, when you think about it. The certain are slower to adapt, to bend to outside forces and shape their habits to changing needs. Its intuitive, anyway, you don't need to posit evolutionary reasons to see that doubt (and fear) are useful in the day to day.

Now how far can we push doubt, and does it serve any purpose to do so, other than fueling madness and occasionally allowing wisdom to be obtained therein? Could doubt be a mechanism by which the brain circumvents its own filtering of right-side sensory overload?

The consciousness has massive input, because the senses are quite wide-band. But the left brain, the 'me', has limited attention, because to store and sort everything would take too long. Maybe doubt prevents the left brain from filtering too predictably, from cutting the same type of data out of the sensory input every time. In other words, if there was no doubt, we would never see anything novel at all.

Terry Pratchett and Douglas Adams both played with this idea of sensory editing. In Pratchett's Reaper Man, Death takes a holiday, but instead of seizing a recently deceased body, he just arrives in the rural getaway of choice looking like himself, dressed in overalls. Because they cannot sufficiently doubt their own concept of reality, nobody can see him as he really is, they simply see a rather tall, gaunt man. Only a small child can see him as he really is. Only one without certainty knows that Death is among them - is this a Pratchett version of a moral tale?

Perhaps it's worthwhile considering the experience of taking hallucinogens. So many of the commenters on the video I've linked to above claimed to have experienced a similar left-brain disconnect, when they took LSD. I wouldn't call it exactly the same experience (although everyone has different experiences) but there are similarities. The mind becomes far more localised, open, sponge-like and undiscriminating. The connection with the self is attenuated. Some people have had a complete out-of-body experience, though I don't think I have (memory is hazy with these things :D). What can we say about the larger implications of moving away from the discriminant faculties of the left-brain?

For one thing, this is a helpless beast. A person on hallucinogens for the first time is like a baby, needing a totally unthreatening environment and possibly care and guidance. Bill Hicks said anyone who thinks they can fly when on drugs and then jumps out a 10 storey window is a moron - baby birds don't do it that way! And yet nobody who wasn't on drugs ever failed to heed their doubts that they could, in fact, fly (except in Douglas Adams books, where it seems completely logical to throw oneself at the ground and miss).

For people that are habitual hallucinogen users, personality may not change at all, but if it does it often seems to involve an erosion of healthy doubt. Belief in 12 foot lizards abounds. An increase in absurd doubts may also result, as the fabric of both objective and inter-personal reality comes under question. I haven't studied the long term effects of drugs objectively, so I must say this comes completely from personal observation.

For another thing, the left-brain, the identity vector or the self is not quiescent. It can jump into the trip at any time, noting the thoughts of the consciousness and trying to relate, categorise and classify - to understand, in fact, which is its natural task. If you happen to notice this happening while you're tripping, a recursive self-recognition cycle can build up, as the brain watches itself think about itself think about itself think...It can get to be a bad trip! Another personal observation, this one from inside the experience.

What purpose these postcards from the edge? Just to note that functioning of the [input->filter->process->store] pipeline of the consciousness is a powerful part of being conscious, and I don't think it appreciates being derailed.

Perhaps this is because, as the consciousness lifts outward and settles into the moment, the identity of the self comes face to face with itself - it's forced to try to grasp what it is, in totality and separate from any simple definitions or concepts of a personal nature (anyone who's gone or going off the rails in a solipsist existential sense may feel recognition). The problem with this is that the self is a construct designed for defining, creating relational concepts and so on. Can identity really grasp itself, can the tool of understanding act upon the tool?

What is doubt? Could it be the action of the self, which separates itself from everything else, and thus cannot truly know anything else? If we exist as processes rather than fixed entities, then may not be unreasonable to think of the active element of our selves as a process too - the process of doubt, uncertainty, the knowing of things and the letting go of this knowledge.

Disclaimer: I feel its important to note how unsatisfactory I find my own blog-mounted theorising - like moulding a diamond out of clay instead of cutting it from a rock [if the analogy makes no sense, Kant has been described as a master diamond cutter]. Now, my mother is a potter, I'm not putting down clay - but if you mould a solid lump of it, chances are when it is fired it will explode. Thats the source of some unease.

Excess Revelry - too much fun

2008-03-19T01:50:00.005+02:00

"What sour unkind movement stirs the heart of me?
Some dour fecund fruit from excess revelry,
love's labours lost, staunchless gush and - puuaaaggg*!"

*calumny

Sometimes real work is just not worth it, when the toys are so much fun.

Games as Information Systems Q&A

2008-03-16T16:30:00.008+02:00

Since I have had no time to post in a month, and there have been no replies to my last post, there is a happy opportunity to segue straight into a little Q&A on the topic of games as information systems, derived from some response to the topic over at onlyagame.

So, onto the questions:

- How would one measure the bits of information in a game situation (and is it worth even trying)?

Answering the second part first - why measure the bits of information? - I think it is clear that no matter the graphical fidelity, games are still component systems designed from the top down. Therefore a reductionist approach to analysis can still work. And reductionism is a powerful tool. I think the idea is not that we want to break down gameplay to the point where we can say: the player has just interacted with information bit x, and is being presented with bit y.
I think rather that we want to be able to say that the stream of information coming in to the player has X profile at time T.

The how is quite difficult. The first step is to reduce the dimensionality of the measurement to the 2 dimensions that the player sees. But you can't lose the relational information between what is in the viewport frame and what may be around it (and the viewport frame is itself information bearing, especially in games where it represents the player's view). Thats the really hard part.
I think that I would have to hand-annotate a game with information before I could answer this in the general case - i.e. familiarise myself with my own proposal!
But to start with, everything in the game has a relationship with the player and a novelty to the player. Under these two headings, one could imagine a framework for assigning bits to in-game elements based on their relatability and novelty. I often think of FPS games like Battlefield here - there is so much detail in one of those worlds, but a player only assigns a little attention to terrain, because no matter its appearance it all behaves the same way. On the other hand, other players require a deal of attention, because despite a certain uniformity of appearance* they can all do quite different things (to kill you!). Roughly, the idea is: how can we measure the (potential) attention budget of the player?

*Which would be a personal gripe with Battlefield games - if they skinned them in Warhammer 40K designs, then you'd have a game :D

- Can game information be considered comparable? Consider the analogue information in the state of a snowboarding game versus, say, the positions of the players on the pitch in a sports game.

Very pertinent - possibly the hardest problem with this approach. Could this be gotten around by considering the possibility space of the game, and comparing on that basis? In this sense, the possibility space of a sports-like game is more dispersed (softer) than that of an analogue game. But the essential nature of the information is still the same - probability weighted relatability and novelty. Its just that that tree down the slope at time T has a much higher probability of still being down the slope but closer at time T+1, than that player down pitch has of still being in the same spot a second later (but consider the beautiful game - the goalkeeper has a pretty high probability of being in roughly the same spot! Its all degrees).

- Are information and time the only factors influencing game difficulty?

Well, novelty is very important, and is kind of assumed in the information approach. But novelty can only be judged by known play history of the player. Who can only be identified on a profile sign-in basis. Which system can only be trusted to be valid, not known. So thats a problem.

In fact, its the same old problem with player modelling again - after a certain point, without biometrics we really can't be sure that the person playing is the same one we've been modelling all along. The fields of concept drift and concept shift have methods for dealing with this, but again its all a matter of probabilities.

Games as Information Systems

2008-02-15T20:41:00.004+02:00

I'd like to share a prototype idea that may never get development time, and so is only gathering dust on my magnetics. The doc below was written up to pitch to my supervisors, so the language is both of the area of CS, and of my own work, and there may be unexplained assumptions or glossing over. Anything of the sort, feel free to point out. For instance, I am talking about my own interpretation of Pacman, where Ghosts move probabilistically and not under rules. So without further ado:

Information Processing as the Challenge & Skill Metrics in Pacman

Ben Cowley

1. Introduction

The aim of this approach is to represent the player’s point of view programmatically, by breaking down the game’s aesthetic presentation into component units of game-relevant information, which coorespond to the basic elements of the game that the player observes and manipulates in the process of play.

(Certain classes of) Games are about processing Uncertainty, making meaningful choices, consuming patterns. This is all related to prediction. What is provided to guide the player in their predictions is information. Insofar as information is related to the elements of play, then as it increases that must correspond to either: increasing numbers of active elements to keep track of (and to generate Uncertainty about future states); or more inactive elements which it is necessary to filter. Either way, cognitive load seems to be increasing and so must difficulty.

Ideally, the value (as predictors) of such a set of units of gameplay (as expressed by their assigned information value) would be determined by testing against logs of real games played. In other words, as subjective difficulty increases players will make more errors and the general trend of quantity of information to be processed would be correlated against this.

On the other hand, we have a defined difficulty progression in the game as it stands. The ghosts get faster, they hunt the Pacman more aggressively and the Pills make them vulnerable for less time, as the levels advance. Alternatively, if speed stayed the same, we could increase difficulty by having more ghosts. This suggests a relationship as follows.

Increasing Information	=	Increasing Difficulty	=	Constant Information
Constant Time to Process				Decreasing Time to Process

If we can accept a relationship similar to that above, we can say two things. Firstly, we can say that there is self-consistent way to measure challenge, so that one type of challenge can be compared to another, if both are given an information value using the same framework of judgement. Secondly, if this can be seen to work reliably and self-consistently, then we don’t really need a reference to an outside measurement, like a correlation to real game logs.

2. Framework

Information would be recorded from anything that varies in information content over time.
Game units of Pacman {with their informational attributes}:

Pacman: { x,y | possible vectors }
Ghosts: { x,y | possible vectors }
Goal-map: { Points for Dots | Points for Pills | Consequences of collisions }

The player will have three classes of information-based attributes (with generic description):

Vectors of movement (Opportunities for action)
Relative distance to ghosts (relation to dynamic obstacles)
Goal map (relation to goals)

These attributes (for a given agent) can be defined as:
Vectors: unblocked directions of movement from the agent. New vectors would spawn from old vectors at intersections (junctions in the map) and open alternate directions if multistep movement was to be considered.

Relative positions/distances: use A* over short distances, and my heuristic distance over longer. Cut off between short and long would need to be decided.
Goal-map: scoring function over local area, or area of local actions. So, possible points of action could be available from following the vectors defined above.

3. Clarification

Some figures below try to clarify the definitions of a unit’s information attributes (above).

Fig.1 Vectors for Pacman & Ghosts at a single iteration (i.e. no subsequent vectors representing change of direction). More iterations could be included depending on computational cost.

Fig.2 Goal map for Pacman across a local area o the right. The actual state is on the left.
The ghosts are assumed to move two squares in each direction – this is just for illustrative purposes. In practice we can assume the ghosts will be within a certain limited area and not worry too much about where – we are trying to approximate the player’s point of view.
Goal map – evaluate information for mechanics along vectors of opportunity, decreasing weights as we go. This can reflect gameplay because the game uses probabilistic mechanics for the ghosts, and so the actual course of the game has a similar fuzzy nature to the predictive capacity of the player.

Dawkins, Only Begotten Son of Science

2008-02-14T02:54:00.003+02:00

What if Dawkins is a prophet?
Maybe thats the way it works! I mean, forget about all the incarnation stuff, it's just beyond the pale of reasonable discussion (i.e. metaphysics baby). Lets just call Jesus/Buddha/Mohammed and so on, some smart guy. Perhaps a person (all male in recent history, boo urns) just happens along. They are there at the right time and the right place, and they have learned some things along the way, possibly from other wise guys, possibly from sitting under a tree. They may stand on the shoulders of giants. But they are the ones that are listened to, that draw a crowd. Then the crowd goes off and tells others, and you have a movement. Over time, morphology generationally produces a religion. People follow that, for a while.
Then a man comes along. At the right time, and the right place. With some other message.
I wonder, is Dick Dawkins a prophet?

What a downer for him if he is!

Music in its new Age

2008-01-23T01:43:00.000+02:00

Read a rather interesting interview between David Byrne and Thom Yorke, discussing In Rainbows and the revolution in the business of music. Digital downloads!

The phenomenon of file sharing [the ethics of which are trawled through here] has rocked the industry, mostly because it was such a cosy, locked-in business model that the bright and the overpaid panicked, rather than because file sharing was offering a viable alternative source of the full range of music products. This full range is where people, with resources to exploit, need to be looking to grow their service portfolio...let's not forget, all they do is provide a service. Music is an auditory experience, packaging and distribution is a service. Record companies need to let go of the idea that they actually own music. That was never their function until they overstepped their mark. If file sharing sank all the old industry dinosaurs and evolved a new breed, it wouldn't be too soon.
But partisanship aside, let's be constructive and try to think of some ways the music industry can save itself, without crucifying everyone else in the world [the rough population of those who will eventually become file sharers].

How about a model where fans go to a concert and download the whole experience to their mobile wireless digital storage devices, whatever form they may take? The performance itself becomes a digital saleable commodity, one that can be traded online afterward. The concert DVD already does this, of course, but it seems very exciting and attractive to me that it would be instantly available and personalised (concert DVD's are usually only filmed in one location from a tour, this would be every location and be automatically the location the fan attended).
The ticket cost pays for the music, so ticket costs would have to go up (costs of putting on the show have to be covered).
However, maybe if the tickets were paid for by account debit or credit (or credit card), then they could form a binding contract on the buyer, and songs from the show recorded by the buyer could be digitally watermarked to allow detection of widespread distribution. I dunno, this is getting a bit like DRM...

Nevertheless, this is an inventive scheme, and it's invention that is needed as we have a real necessity to reinvent or replace the dinosaurs and bridge the gap between affordable music and sufficient revenue to produce it.

Let the music out - that's what's really needed.

Where's the Cheese?

2008-01-20T00:48:00.000+02:00

"Hellgate: London gets content update.

...The Stonehenge Chronicles update adds open, outdoor wilderness areas intended to stand in contrast to the main game's setting in the streets and sewers of London.

The update is comprised of three different sections: The Caste Caves, Moloch's Lair and The Wild. The Caste Caves unlocks four dungeons for each enemy caste, and each tasks players with defeating a spectral overlord. "

I took this from Gamasutra, which could be seen to deflate the point I'm about to make, but I'll press on regardless (oh, and maybe see the last post also).

Caste Caves. Moloch and his Lair. Spectral overlords. Sewers. In point of fact, Hellgate!

What on earth would be wrong with an MMO set in some variant of a cool real world location, as London undoubtedly is, that didn't involve either a) the cast of ghouls and ghosts, or b) the cast of the Lord of the Rings (book not film)?

Is it that hard to let go of a glorious past and set out for new horizons? I'm sure somebody in the games industry could come up with a compelling scenario to cover the possibility space for play in an MMO mechanic, that occurs in the real world, a place many people who don't care two figs for Moloch's Lair are quite attached to!!

It's kind of sad, really.

To be fair, I'm not trying to attack Hellgate: London, which I know almost nothing about. I was just kicked off by reading the Gamasutra piece, which raised the old bugbear. Why is there so little attempt to work the tropes of familiar, everyday life into games? Not every movie or book is about a land reached only through a wardrobe - some people like to read about themselves. Dogs and ponies and invasive surgery are massively popular on a certain handheld, so why doesn't anyone leverage the cinematic visuals and power of the top-end consoles or PC's to tell a little tale about modern urban life?

Or, as opposed to invoking daemonic ingress, even an MMO about how to survive the world's end we've cooked up in the real world!

Can Games ever become Art?

2008-01-16T22:25:00.000+02:00

Received this synopsis of an Irish Times article recently, edited by the sender but essentially verbatim. It's not an uncommon theme for the specialist press, but as we know (and as Hegarty comments) games rarely go through the mainstream press, so I thought this worth posting because he is quite an astute social commenter. My own quick reaction follows...

by Shane Hegarty, Irish Times Weekend Review, January 12

'This column will be about computer games. Please don't turn away. I mention it only because the subject appears to be regarded by newspapers as an effective reader repellent. Millions play computer games, but it seems that few want to read about them. It is a thriving, multi-billion-euro cultural behemoth, but there are more interesting multi-billion-euro behemoths elsewhere.

...I've been playing (on) an Xbox 360...Halo 3... in which the player (in practice) must ignore the story and just shoot lots of things to survive and reach the next level. (he goes on to complain that games really haven't developed/ matured with their players; film evolution was so much more impressive - from Lumiere Bros. to Fritz Lang over a similar 35-year time-frame). 'What have games given us? Pacman, Mario, Lara Croft and Sonic the Hedgehog.

"Games boast ever richer and more realistic graphics, but this has actually inhibited their artistic growth", argued Daniel Radosh in the New York times in September, after three days of eye-blurring play with Halo3. "The ability to convincingly render any scene or environment has seduced game designers into thinking of visual features as the essence of the gaming experience". worse, he complained, the genre can't break free of another medium it has pretensions to supercede. "Many games now aspire to be 'cinematic' above all else". Not so, claimed Slate.com's gamer. Reviewing the game on the merits of its single-player campaign is like judging a deck of cards on how fun your last game of solitaire was".

He argued that a game such as Halo 3 should instead be lauded for the way in which it offers open-ended artificial environments, which the player can reshape and jump into alongside players from all over the world.

This debate is seldom picked up in a wider media that tracks every trend in music or movies, and which frets constantly over standards in each. Games are confined mainly to the business or technology pages or, pejoratively, when discussing the obesity crisis. Titles are reviewed in some publications, but not with anything like the same attention given to movies or music.

There are some obvious reasons for this. Games are predictable. For all the bluff put into the story on the back of computer game boxes, many of them actually require players to do only one thing: ignore the story and just shoot lots of things to reach the next level.

Game design is also too collaborative to throw up great individuals [my emphasis].

This week, Irish-based company Havok won and Emmy. No one seemed to be able to explain exactly what it was for. They add to the realism and interactivity of games, was the standard line, although one paper just went with, "Game Geeks Win Award".

Cinema and music offer collective experiences, while gaming is still seen as pretty anti-social. Games offer collective experiences too - with the new generation of consoles tapping into social networking - but its not the same as getting several hundred, or tens of thousands, of people in the same space to enjoy the same event.

Meanwhile, cinema has personality, unpredictability, and the possibility of a great performance. The only great performance in computer games comes from the player, and nobody else cares.

Listen to this games expert on slate-com talking about his personal highlights from 2007, and see how many syllables you get through before losing consciousness. "So there I was, minding my own business, flying my Rupture-class cruiser in a low-security star system called Klogori. All of a sudden, a Thorax blastership flown by a pilot from the then-powerful RISE alliance appears on my heads-up display...". Which reminds you that, in 35 years, the genre has yet to throw up a great critic either.

So, for the moment, this cultural giant - which increasingly influences cinema, drives technology onwards, generates huge revenue, and occupies millions of people - remains somewhat in the shadows. It seems if it still has a little way to go before it overcomes its enemies and gets to the next level'.

ENDS

shegarty@irishtimes.ie

comments to: www.ireland.com/blogs/presenttense

Hegarty is pretty much on the money here. The reason for it is that, up until recently anyway, games development usually attracts two types - men who are recidivist adolescents, with accompanying juvenile power fantasies (I've got my hand up :D), and money grubbing bastards.

And there are 'grown-up' games out there, but nobody's really interesting in talking about them, not even the games press {who are themselves even more useless than the developers, so much in the pockets of the big publishers}.

Ideas and thinking

2008-01-06T18:44:00.000+02:00

Its funny how what we think about can totally fool our own faculties of logical and aesthetic discrimination. Beautiful ideas can creep up on you, pop out with the least effort, and be lauded and praised while you're still wondering why anyone would read it...or you can slave away on a body of work that ties in years of reading and careful concept building, and nobody gets it.

Maybe that's why some people believe in the Platonic reality.

What I've described above is quite exaggerated with respect to myself, but I'm sure of the truth of it, even then. Something in the way cognition and conceptualisation work rings true to this phenomenon. How much can we truly say our minds are arbitrary, chaotic creations of fuzzily specified hardware systems? Isn't there some thread of structure of thought that is inherent to us all?

Many have claimed there is.
It was thought to be language-based, maybe recursion, but that is by no means established. Some rather famous (in anthropology circles) Amazon tribe seems to exist entirely without recursive speech, and all it takes is one black sock.
It may hide somewhere in the little-understood processes of memory formation and recall.
The signalling system of the biological neural network is hardly measurable, and very much not understood. Allow me here a hackneyed and misplaced analogy with computers, to spell things out...If our neural nets are the physical data transfer layer, then the signalling between them is the logic gate design*. If we do not have a full grasp of even this level of algorithmic operation, how can we divine the instructions being passed, or the language that they underwrite, or the semantics being expressed?
How can we hope to reason about why thinking works in such peculiar ways? I'm afraid that for now, the engineering of cognition is a way up the slope**, and we are stuck with thinking about thinking.

The beauty of it is, thinking about thinking can be far more fun than knowing the answer :)

*We could also say 'the Turing Machine specification', but this gives the false impression that classical Turing machines are not totally superseded by von Neumann logic gates (Tesla's logic gates are kind of besides the point, occuring too soon). Also, this analogy only holds in the static case, but the dynamic is too much to go into - see Holland's Emergence.

**The slope of the acceleration of human knowledge. I'm not going to say anything about how that relates to linear time here. That woud be presumptuous.

The Man...

2008-01-04T21:07:00.001+02:00

This was going to be a follow up to, though not too promptly on the heels of, my previous oil post(it may be wise to read that first, if you haven't). However the point I am circling around is two-fold, and this part has run quite long enough, so I'm posting it standalone. I may continue back around to oil or I may diverge to the environment. We'll see!

One thing I think is often mis-understood is the exact nature of 'Them'. The Man, whoever he is. Some like to believe that there are shadowy bodies of power-brokers, overseeing great conspiracies to rule the world. Others believe that it's just ordinary people at the top, with ordinary motivations of varying shades of morality.

One thing that's not often posited is that the truth is probably somewhere in between - there are shadowy bodies of unrepresentative individuals overseeing loosely collaborative agreements on how to exercise their vast power to run the parts of the world that concern them. I doubt, however, if their motivations are larger than their capacity for vision. This is key, because I strongly believe that you don't really get to positions of great power, if you are the kind of person who sees very far beyond yourself.

Vision, in entrepreneurial terms, means discovering opportunities of indefinite expansion. Expansion, as I've said before, is the sine qua non of economy. The very idea of value is predicated on a positive prediction for economic expansion. Empires rise as they master forms of expansion, and fall as their strategies for expansion are outdated by the consequences of that same expansion. Populations of all sorts of creatures follow the same pattern - boom and bust. Managing to avoid the bust is indeed an admirable skill, and rewards its holders very highly.

It's not really visionary though.

Great, world shaking thinkers and entrepreneurs have been distinct sets of people, I believe.

To come back to the point then, where the shadowy power brokers theory falls down is that there are no people that would be put in such a position of power, and see a way to use it for truly extrinsic achievement. Read a goodly spread of sci-fi authors, and the chances are good someone will have posited a really quite plausible set of steps to be taken from the present day to escape the closed loop of our existence. And that is only the most obvious example of vision.
And where is it to be seen among those who wield power? They threw away the plans for the Saturn rockets that got us to the moon, for Heaven's sake! They used a planetary lifetime's worth of free carbon-based energy to power an economy less than two centuries old and doomed to crash by the very nature of it's design!

Still, it is little wonder, after all. 'Waste and want' are the watchwords of our world. Little wonder those at the top of food chain direct things in similar mode. Any attempt to paddle in the other direction usually costs the exemplar everything, in personal terms. So great is the flow of humanity toward oblivion, that any attempt to signal for change requires complete dedication of the signaller's life. A high price.

So it's easy to say lions for lambs, but harder to step into those shoes and be anything but the same as those led, who turn out to be more sheep with the appetite of lions.

After the Oil crash...

2007-11-26T05:38:00.001+02:00

...we can fuel our global needs with leftover Jimmy Dean products! He is the foul genius of the apocalypse! Imagine -

"Jimmy Dean Chocolate Chip Pancakes & Sausage on a Stick"!!!

Read the comments here, hilarious, thanks Kris. The ingenuity of this man's artistry obviously provokes immense feeling in the sensitive breast of the junk food cognoscenti, as all great art should.

"Dear Jimmy Dean

I use the roll sausage in recipes for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. It’s so versatile. Would love to see a light maple version.

--Madeleine, Glens Falls, NY"

Breakfast, lunch and dinner! Amazing what you can do with a roll sausage :D

"Dear Jimmy Dean

What are you rebelling against?"

Creative Computing

2007-11-21T19:25:00.000+02:00

So, for those who might stumble upon this blog in hope of content on games, I've been posting everything games-related over on the blog for my research group, Creative Computing Coleraine. I set up this blog a while back, but it didn't hit critical mass until recently, when it got redesigned by my supervisor anyway [so you can't even see my classic design :( and around the same time, the machine I did the design on was riddled with virii and I had to wipe it, so nothing remains of that...week's...work. Ach, no matter!]

Oh, and apparently now we have two blogs, for some reason - see also Creative Computing Coleraine 2.0. Which will be the ultimate blogging champion?! Only time will tell!

Peak Oil - Aaaaaaaaaaaargh!

2007-11-17T18:34:00.000+02:00

Peak Oil is coming, it's great neon claws flexing to rend us asunder. Can it really be as bad as is made out on LATOC (as he likes to call himself in a way very reminiscent of the U.S. government and their endless acronyms)?

To precis the site:

Economically viable oil production - including R&D, exploration, drilling, processing and distribution - operates on a bell curve, because supply is limited. Once all the easy to find oil runs dry, the ROI goes down when we go looking for harder to find oil. That exploration requires greater investment (and remember wealth equates to oil, so it's investment of oil), which means we need more oil than before.

However the global economy that runs on oil operates on a linear growth curve, because our systems of finance require growth to in order to define wealth. Credit lending institutions need to know that their debtors will be able to pay them back. That they can pay back is dependent on an increase in wealth value of the debtors economy. America right now is a good example - even conservative papers like the Observer are running stories (Sunday 11.11.07) about the inevitable decline of US global power, as it is linked to the US economy which cannot maintain the confidence of its creditors, like China.

Two vicious cycles par excellence!

So the oil crash will happen because as we hit the down slope of the oil bell curve, our economy will still be trying to go up, and it will struggle higher and higher until it stalls and crashes when oil becomes prohibitively expensive to meet world demand.

The question is - has this become inevitable? Can we segue out of the global oil economy into one that runs on another energy source - while maintaining economic growth and our current standard of living?

In the LATOC website, Matt Savinar makes some very persuasive arguments to the effect that we cannot. One could find it quite easy to be persuaded, go outside to a hill somewhere and start building a bunker and a homemade wind turbine (actually not that hard to do). On the other hand, you could put your trust in the powers that be to implement renewable alternative energy paradigms for the global economy to run on, before it's gone; then you could invest in these energy types on the ground floor, so to speak, and become filthy rich (the catch - if the energy changeover doesn't happen or work, all money will become worthless, so investment as we know it will have been meaningless).

I'd like to diverge from my standard model of pontificating and then wrapping up, in order to open the floor and ask - which option would you go for, or would you suggest another? Maybe after a little to and fro, I'll be inspired to make up my own mind!

*************

Help! I need somebody (to play Pacman)

2007-11-13T19:32:00.000+02:00

Hello all friends of Ben's PhD!

I'd like to invite you to take part in an experiment being run as part of my PhD project, entitled Player Profiling & Modelling for Adaptive Artificial Intelligence in Computer and Video Games. This experiment aims to address the thorny problem of building into a game, an A.I. that can reason about the player's preferences for the kind of experience they will have.
It involves two parts - gathering of data on player habits, and building an automated modeller based on such data.

The first step is where I need your help - to download and play my Pacman implementation; and complete an online survey that will determine the type of player you are (adapted from the original donated courtesy of Chris Bateman and iHobo, many thanks).
All you need do, is proceed to my Pacman web page and follow the instructions!
Also, please please forward this mail on to as many people as you think may be interested in playing a free casual game, or advancing the field of game play research (by a tiny amount!).

If you take part, your privacy is completely assured and you'll be enveloped by the warm rosy glow of helping mankind (have better games of Pacman)...
Remember, this is for posterity, so, be honest...

Many thanks!

What precisely is the point, Mr God? : Cassus Belli

2007-11-10T05:52:00.000+02:00

I've rambled recently on about Dawkins and all that jazz, so I want to wrap that up by rambling a bit on a more general take on argumentation and God.

Lately, we've seen over here how action as born of speech forms our highest expression, to wit: "The future of mankind depends on our capacity to exercise this thought, to use it as the foundation for speech, by which to determine the action we should take."

Thought must be the foundation of communication, thus speech, thus the formal and/or inter-personal action that we take (which must be nearly all action, we are a social species after all - action that has no effect on anything outside the actor can hardly be considered worth accounting). So I've been told that speech/communication serves as a guide for how we take action, but I as see it, speech also serves a facilitator of action because without explaining our actions, documenting them, translating our intent for them, we circumscribe our ability to act by failing to be cooperative. This is why the public forum, the ear of the masses, is so important. Power comes from people, the power to act and act upon.

But as I said in the previously (post on Dawkins) its hard to get everyone to listen. How do you communicate about your actions in broadcast? Context is vital to communication, and incredibly difficult to convey. Its inherently hard to even define context, just look at the research on ubiquitous computing, where context is everything.

We need big ideas to anchor our little lives - massive, all encompassing concepts that change little with time, distance, frequency of repetition (chinese whispers). All communication requires analogy since people cannot share what is in their heads directly (is my colour green the same as your colour green?). Analogy requires reference points or measures with associated plausibility or truth-value, since without reference to source knowledge the analogy reverts to unsupported assertion (is my 'big as a house' the same as your 'big as a house'? Probably not, I live in a flat :D BUT seriously, one needs *at least* knowledge of the margins for variability).

In context of the post title, can you see where I'm going with this? High Rennaissance art had a very limited subject range, but vast variety of scenes, models and constant revolution in execution. Still, everyone knew what was being talked about when they saw a woman with a babe in arms, whether she's sitting on a throne or on some rocks by the sea.

In truth, it is no small thing to establish immutable truths (see what I did there? :D ). We can, of course, say there is no big 'T' truth. So that rules out universal points of agreement - one can always deny someone elses truth, if necessary from a solipsist standpoint. But still, the story doesn't end there - because we must avoid that very solipsist standpoint in order to maintain functional existence. Solipsism is an absolute stance - there are no half-measures. And it also seems rather untenable to me - if it is true that only my own thoughts exist, then I can have no relationship with anything else and must conclude that the thoughts themselves are quite of suspect existence - why are they occurring if there is nothing to think about? Oblivion beckons. If there is anything to think about,that's a point of reference outside oneself, which is not true solipsism and forces one to admit that the rest might as well exist as well.
From another viewpoint, if there is no objective truth, how can one dismiss anything as not being true since one has no grounds for comparative judgment?

My point is - there is no big 'T' truth, since we only exist in relation to anything else through application of our consciousness, which is an approximation model at best. So what possible use can one find for the truth concept? Well one can apply it as a working guide - with an inherent plausibility - to whatever can be demonstrated to offer a repeatable framework for one's consciousness model.
Then all truth is relative, relative to the degree to which one can personally understand it (as demonstrated), otherwise one is taking it on faith. For instance, I personally believe that Newtonian mechanics hold true, because (for example) when I run into a wall, I hit it and it hits me back equally hard. Once I can stand up and think again, I don't have to think very hard about the principle of the Third Law to see that it described the actions of the model that I call my perception/memory of the reality of what just happened, namely, running into the wall (I have done similar, alcohol was involved :D). In fact, I don't think about it at all, but that's because the Third Law was encountered years ago in school and assimilated once reason was satisfied that evidence supported it.
It doesn't have to be held true - in fact, this is a very rough approximation model indeed, as Newton stated the third law within a world-view that assumed instantaneous action at a distance between material particles. The wall doesn't really effect an equal force on me in the instant I hit it - it's more like a wave effect of forces on particles that the wall and I are composed of. In modern physics, action at a distance has been completely eliminated, except for subtle effects involving quantum entanglement. But it is a close enough approximation model - it is true enough - that it suffices for communication of related concepts in the everyday.

The degree of faith that one has in the model's universality determines its utility as a tool for communication. I suppose that is one reason why God(s) is(are) so popular, and so divisive - when you believe in the absolute, it makes the reference point absolutely clear; but if you realise that another's God reference has a different value, nothing can be communicated that depends on these reference points. Then it seems that historically the usual reaction is: one of you has to go!

**************************************
To paraphrase Huizinga, 'Its not the cheater who ruins the game, but the player who refuses to recognise the rules...'
This applies to what we're saying here with the (I think) relatively recent emergence of atheism as a tenable and respectable metaphysical position. And it's not atheism in the strict sense of the definition, since people have been denying each other's gods forever. It is rather, when someone stands aside from the metaphysical bedrock of the argument, and calls it scotch mist, that the communication really breaks down. Now the game is not even being admitted on its own terms!
It must (have) look(ed), to those who have true faith, kind of like Jack Thompson looks to game developers:
"You're developing mass-murder training tools!"
"No we're not, we're just entertaining people?"

Except the atheists would be saying
"You're mass murdering delusional zealots!"
"No, we're just saving people's souls"

And that is essentially where my ramblings are leading - atheism poses the unique threat to established religion of making it socially acceptable to do away with communication references to the absolutes that the religions deal with. Perhaps this is scientists, not priests/sages/soothsayers, are now the holders of all human wisdom and advisors to the powerful.
This shouldn't bother the faithful if they are not great espousers of organised religion, but it seems to anyway, perhaps because everyone wants to cheer for their team. Likewise, religion should never have been a threat to the pursuit of scientific knowledge, but perhaps its unsurprising that it has become so - because ever since quantum physics, science has not proven all that satisfactory in replacing religion with a clear and unchanging absolute reference framework.
And as the 'Truth' shifts about, communication becomes more ephemeral and people must adapt. Some people, they just don't like to adapt!

Bastards. Bastard Sons of a 1000 Maniacs

2007-11-04T02:17:00.000+02:00

I was spammed. I feel so...dirty!
I worked as a spam filter technician a few years ago, so I know when it's happened. 140 bastard comments from bastard RX peddlers. Not too hard to miss :D

Thus, word verification is now on. Sorry folks.

Fucking spammers. I hope all the hypochondriacs die. Vitun apara. Va fanculo. Voi helleti, tvoyu mat, pog mo thoin, merde, cazzo, mingia, puta madre ...

What precisely is the point, Mr God?

2007-11-02T05:55:00.001+02:00

[Above, Dawkins on the warpath again. I believe he's actually licenced to kill by HRM decree]

Having recently finished reading Mr. Dawkin's highly controversial anti-religious rant, the God Delusion, I'd like to chime in with a kind of review cum explication of my own views. These are probably aetheist/humanist, but lean away from Dawkin's antipathy to God without leaning toward religion. I think I'm more interested in the process of thinking about it than in the answers anyway, but this may be a function of my youth, and comparative distance from thoughts of death (by aging). No matter the person, I think mortality is a shadow over all thought. Even for the aestheist who professes to be reconciled/resigned to death without afterlife. It would be interesting to see if the positive correlation between education and aetheism is prefaced in life by a correlation between ambition to suceed and high educational achievement. The point being, people may want to be remembered in this life because they believe there will be no next one. Can't imagine how you'd go about designing such an experiment though.
Enough tangential rambling - on with the topical rambling.

Dawkins' hypothesis seems to be that the probability of a big G god's existence is so slight that faith in that probability is irrational and unproductive. Then he argues that since belief has so little demonstrable worth, and the negative consequences of religion are so great, the entire enterprise should be done away with. There's a good bit more to the book (although editing his personal anecdotes would still cut it in half) - but that is the gist as I understood it. To paraphrase:
'Faith in God is inherently worthless, is largely a consequence of psychological conditioning, and collectively has great negative consequences and few positive ones that would not be occurring without it.'
I don't recall the argumentation addressing the corollary of the last point - that religion's negative consequences might also be occurring without religion. That's an aside though.

Can we ask an important question - what is the point of this kind of attack? Surely people of a religious bent will not be 'converted' to atheism by a single polemic? Dawkins invokes the demonstrably tiny probability of a creator god, as though the tiny probability were not what seekers of religious truth were seeking in the first place (Things that are rather self-evident don't really require faith)! And as for those who might be persuaded, Dawkins is so acerbic, impolite and unrelenting in his attack on religions that those on the fence must be more likely to remain there than come to his side. They may well have been on the fence because they disliked religious fanaticism (now I can't compare atheist fervour with religious fanatics, but still...) so it's surely a turn off for such moderates. Especially when he says he has utmost contempt for agnostics!

But no. Despite all this, it is worth saying a lot of what he says. Much of it is one-sided, but much is also true. Some has not been widely publicised before. The logic is nice in places, particularly where he discusses the God hypothesis. Of course, he does nothing to demonstrate that one shouldn't believe in a creator God on grounds of the intrinsic lack of logic in the hypothesis, for it is a minority indeed that cares if its belief(!) system is validated by logic - mostly logicians and mathematicians, I would guess.
Still, we need the like of Dawkins. The scarier the Creationists etc get, the scarier we need someone to hold the other corner. Nobody listens to nice people. They listen to lots of people, and crowds are always easier swayed when you're loud and scary. The politicised Christians in the U.S. are particularly scary right now, and having angry uncompromising people like Dawkins tells the rest of America that they can hold their own views and get away with it. They don't need to agree with him, just be inspired to independence of thought. Not many tend to do that on their own. When something threatens one in a basic and fundamental way, we can either be Chamberlain or we can be Churchill.

To carry the analogy, taking the path of most resistance forces one immediately into conflict. The appeasement route looks like initially like live and let live, but how far can this go? It cannot be thought of as resolution, since neither opposing side is likely to abandon their mutually inimical stances by a process of entropy. Depending on the overlap of their spheres of concern, and their proximity, it would seem inevitable that the expansionism inherent in human nature is going to force the issue sooner or later.

So, whether by this eventual process, or if one first chooses the path of most resistance, one naturally comes straightway right against the other fellows beliefs, which he cannot abandon, which in fact he may have been hoping to foist onto you. What to do? However you cut it, believing strongly or having interests in something - anything - seems to have the potential to force you into a situation of conflict. If what Dawkins is doing is recognising this and drawing up his battle, I do not find myself inclined to fault him too greatly for it.

Goals

2007-10-22T05:27:00.000+03:00

"A common theme prompts again at me/
I wonder what could the answer be/
Is it forwards I'm going or back/
Or is it moving wallpaper I'm looking at?"

I like the question of the validity of time as a frame of reference, but it becomes especially interesting if you shift perspective on your own life (in that kind of way you can shift your eye's focus from the close to the far away and for a second mothing makes any sense to your brain). Cease from looking at it as a major linear event interspersed with minor day-to-day diversions of attention. Think about your life as those diversions, with some moving wallpaper in the background. It's just as valid, if you accept that, for most people, most of life is filled with small diversions.

I tell you, it's one certain way to escape the self-indulgent attitude of the tragedian, or the socially-responsible, or the ambitious. At least for the length of time it takes your eyes to re-focus.

Another perspective on nihilism

2007-10-11T03:29:00.000+03:00

Perhaps believing that we cannot know, or convey, the Truth to others, nor hope to have them believe something congruent to our beliefs, is not such a bad thing.

Nihilism: "Rejection of all distinctions in moral or religious value and a willingness to repudiate all previous theories of morality or religious belief."

Can we imagine a perspective where we want to throw the baby out with the bath water?

Use of the above image is totally unpermitted - if anybody has a problem with that, please go read the rest of the blog while you're here. Then...unleash hell!

Adam Curtis

2007-10-01T18:17:00.000+03:00

Pictured is not Adam Curtis, but R.D.Laing, whose work I believe could be appropriate reading these days. Curtis thinks so too, I'd say. He features many such slightly obscure but influential thinkers of the 20th century in his BBC documentaries on the state of the world today, and how it got here. A riposte to the charge of the dumbing down of TV (too little too late, of course).

In any case, the point of the post is just to highlight the benefit of watching Adam Curtis' documentaries 'The Power of Nightmares', 'The Century of the Self' and 'The Trap'; all of which you can find on google video here.

An insightful man, with an excellent speaking voice. Perhaps his theses would find it harder going in dialectic rather than broadcast form. Yet still even if there are points to disagree on, he forces you to reach for the counter-arguments, to think and that is a rare thing in television (even if it's not television I'm advocating you watch it on, the point applies).

Better than sitting down to another run of Coronation Street, I would say.

Revolution in the Third Age

2007-09-24T16:09:00.000+03:00

I read this article recently, bringing me a little up to speed on the tone and mood in Zimbabwe right now which concerns me mainly because my beautiful ex-pat Zimbabwean friend is visiting her family there right now. Despite the non-occurrence of significant events, and negativity of the situation in general, the author ends on a hopeful note:

"I remembered Arthur Hugh Clough's "Say not the struggle naught availeth:

"For while the tired waves, vainly breaking, Seem here no painful inch to gain, Far back, through creeks and inlets making, Comes silent, flooding in, the main."

Despite all the fear and depression in Zimbabwe today, I sense that the tide of popular opinion is silently flooding in and that this dreadful regime will find itself overwhelmed from within.

David Coltart is the shadow minister of justice in Zimbabwe's Parliament and a member of the Movement for Democratic Change. He has been a human rights lawyer there since 1983."

Personally, I'm looking at this from the perspective of socio-political theory, since I have never been to Zim and have no on-the-ground experience of the place. From that perspective my thoughts are largely in line with this article, in that we are talking about a second order implied dictatorship. History has shown this kind of establishment is doomed to instability and thereafter some failure state, often brought about through the will of the people. The people probably must be their own saviours here, as few outside influences or economic factors seem to apply. Perhaps Brown’s recent position offers some hope of an guardian angel. Still, I would prefer to place my faith with the Zimbabweans.

Indeed, during the recent economic trouble, I have been told that the ordinances of the government amounted to little more than a comparison baseline for the price-fixers of the black market, where the bulk of trading was done. Reports of food and supply shortages were, I was informed, greatly exaggerated. Walk into a local grocery store, and the shelves were bare, white, cleaned out. Be a pretty local girl though, and have the shopboys offer you whatever you need. Connections, not power, was what counted. The people will have their way - the main surges in.

My motive for opening with Zimbabwe was not really to bring that issue to the table. I want it instead to serve to provoke thought on this – if it were necessary, what strategy would you use to effect some change of regime in our own society? The issue that Zimbabwe raises for me is, what constitutes 'the main' in the third order society of the west? Is it any longer possible to say what the tide of social change represents, never mind where it is flowing?
What would one be fighting for if the moral foundation on which one justified one's struggle was in fact the rhetoric of another age, another system long obsolete, and co-opted by the ideas and social structures whose birth-pangs killed what one thinks of as one's civilisation?
There is supposedly a clear exposition of this uncertainty, loss of bearings, in John Berger's new book Hold Everything Dear. I've only managed to read the review, but it suggested to me a good place to get a synopsis of the base, the material outcomes of the acting in this our third order society. However, one needs to go further to hypothesise about the motivations of society's actors, including ourselves - the individual and his/her collusive death-denial*. While one can't deny the feeling that we have moved beyond the enlightened despotism of the Leviathan - the necessary tyranny of government-controlled labour market societies - what can one say for certain about the norms that bind us now?
To understand one's role in society as a producer of worth in a labour market is to ascribe oneself a proactive role in a collusive market economy, which role seems for the most part to be a great illusion. I have maintained that such an illusion is foisted upon the citizenry of the systems of economic and political governance, by those actual systems. This is a claim unsupported by evidence and highly opinionated (somewhat supported by opinion here), but at the core is the idea, I will even say the fact, that society by definition is the very anti-thesis of personal freedom. We must constrain and restrict ourselves in order to live with other people (and of course, at heart this is a good thing). In the modern world, as the definitions of our societies become ever more blurred, should we not ask ‘wherefore do the constraints and restrictions that affect us spring’? What is their source, their process and their goal? Can we ever know, from our lowly individual perspectives?

Aside : : I won’t deny it is possible for a small number to control their own destiny, but for the most part the great societal forces that shape our lives seem so immutable – for example, so many demonstrate against globalisation, but change nothing. Why is this? And what effect does it have on our actions?

By control of destiny, I don’t mean those starred subjects of history and celebrity. Ben Cousins (go here and scroll down to the fourth article "Myths of Process and a Nonlinear View of History") illustrates rather nicely how this is a misapprehension of the nature of the achievements of these kinds of titans of history of modern society. What I mean rather is simply people who maximise a natural potential, irrespective of societal influences rather than because of them.

To get back on track, where do the forces that move our everyday lives originate, and how do they grow to have such irrefutable power? I think this quote (even though it was really addressing another topic) gives a clue “We’ve implemented these systems in the first place, [because] we’re trying to ensure we can experience desirable human contact while minimizing harmful contact.”
We built the systems ourselves. Of course we did, they’re not spontaneously arising entities (unless you’re a Creationist). I suggest that even though we created them, these systems are now well beyond our control.

ManBitesBlog points out, “human beings have this tendency to strongly identify each other based upon our affiliations–our tribal affiliations... But when the tribe is thousands, millions, of people large and those individuals that make up the tribe are scattered across the globe, each one a member of a culture with different traditions, different needs, different available resources, is it still appropriate to consider the larger system a composite of the will of the individuals within the system? Or to ascribe the properties and traits of the system to an individual whose efforts sustain it?”

The problem in our third order society seems to me to be then, that all the goals of all the individuals who might side with some idea or another, some formal social way of life, will be drivers of social change in directions that are neither mappable nor static. So everyone who is not living purely for themselves, every PTA member, green activist, right-wing separatist etc. is pushing toward something that nobody can identify. To see how this unguided activity can be dangerous, one need look no further than the common practice of science, which as ‘everyone knows’, very often drives towards a utility that is not forseen by the scientists, and not understood by the other stakeholders. Or, as ManBitesBlog again says so succinctly “If every single person lending their passion, drive and labor to the system is steering it towards goals which are to the benefit of the culture, then there probably wouldn’t be as much of an issue.”

But they don’t do that, do they? Individuals identify their energy and output with the system they do it within. To justify this, they can go so far as to claim “Greed is good”. Or, they may simply not forsee the ends to which their means allow - a striking example of this is the Iranian pro-democracy revolution which ended with the absolutism of the Ayatollah. I found it nicely summarised here.

In such a situation as we find ourselves today, it may be the best we can hope for is that conflicting drives in the general impetus, and possibly also apathy, lead to a zero sum game - but that would be a remote hope. The only constant is change.

* If it seems like I’m getting jargon-y in this piece, it is probably the influence of Baudrillard. Reviewing what I’m reading is beyond the scope of what I’m writing though, so I’ll just say it’s worth picking up but is quite a brain-fuck.

The opening image is the Great Zimbabwe, the largest and oldest stone structure in Africa south of the Sahara, after which the country is named.

A Reason for Atheism

2007-09-07T03:45:00.000+03:00

I had never pursued a biography of Alan Turing, someone I admire greatly for his contributions to computing and the dedication and brilliance that allowed him to achieve so much so young (something I cannot hope to emulate anymore - he was 24 when he solved the Entscheidungsproblem).
But I have just read of how he died, and the gross injustice and humiliating details of the case sparked a sense of outrage I rarely feel about this jaded world. In short, having been forced by circumstance to admit to a homosexual affair in 1952, he underwent a bizarre hormonal treatment to avoid jailtime and had his security clearance revoked so that he could not continue his current work. Two years later, he was found dead, apparent suicide by eating a poisoned apple.

The whole thing, though it was long ago, disgusts me in a way I can't really express. The fact that it is close to home (geographically, not personally) is important, I think. With all the religiously apologised (if not motivated) pain and suffering caused around the world, it strikes me that perhaps it is time for a third way. Liberalism has been neutered. Conservatism has been overtaken by fundamentalism. Can there be a role for our creaky old continent to show a way to live by application of reason, following of common sense and respect for others? Not just on the level of the individual, but on that of nationstates as well.

I can't claim to be politically well-informed, but if there is a power other than China that is at least partly aetheist, and thus neutral in the religion wars, it must be Europe. If we could have risen above such dogma-driven intolerance as the Turing denouement within 50 years, perhaps a more proactive role in world affairs would allow us to show that the means by which we rose did not produce the end of apathy and impotence, but nor did it take us full circle back to technologised barbarism, as in the U.S. How far they have fallen from their Enlightenment founders! As for a new European Enlightenment - could we define it as a counting problem: how many places in the world today would it be safe to be Alan Turing? As to that, two things are needed: the generation of ideas, ideas powerful and universal enough to be worth following even in competition (though preferably not) with religion; and the organ of transmission that will allow people to hear. And I have no idea where to find either (mayhap it'll come in time). I imagine Turing would have had one or two.

[A nice article on Turing in the New Yorker]

A game survey...

2007-09-04T17:53:00.000+03:00

From the onlyagame weblog, where resides the mastermind behind the survey I am using in my current research, comes the survey to end all surveys (until the next one :P ). This is important research, please take part. Think of the children.

"Ultimate Game Player Survey

This is a copy of a press release issued at the International Hobo site.

International Hobo Ltd is pleased to announce it’s new study into patterns in the game playing audience. Following the success of the company’s seminal DGD1 model, the subject of the acclaimed book 21st Century Game Design, we are now conducting a new survey in more detail than the original, from which we will develop a new DGD2 model of the gaming audience.

To take part in the survey, click here, or upon the Survey link in the site menu [at the ihobo site]. As an added incentive, you could win the game of your choice (terms and conditions apply) just for taking part!

We encourage everyone to pass the relevant link onto anyone who might be interested. Thanks for your support!"

Beautiful Katamari - Intro Movie - Xbox 360

2007-08-13T17:09:00.001+03:00

Whoohoo!

A great man once said...

2007-07-21T03:03:00.000+03:00

If you think you're a good person, pious and sincere,
try to keep your mind to yourself until you see
what its like to want to destroy.

And if you have an anger, don't give much for men,
try to keep your hand behind your mouth unless
a greater love behind it grows.

WTF am I doing?

2007-07-13T08:32:00.000+03:00

It would appear I am completely mad. Or at least, I'm committing myself more and more every day to a course of action with ill-defined goals, fuzzy methods and little chance of success...but it's so damn sexy!

Still, people should be more easily classifiable. I can't see why everyone has to meld and unbind, non-conformist to the neat typological boxes I have prepared for them. Damn them all.

It could be that my supervisor is correct, and Pacman simply won't serve to distinguish players. Or it could be that everything will be fine, once the data is processed, and any current worries are just a matter of zoom perspective. Can't see the wood for the trees - but when I focus on the wood, I forget the nature of the trees.

The Prisoner's Dilemma, a new formulation

2007-07-09T11:36:00.000+03:00

The Prisoner's Dilemma is a Game Theoretic problem wherein two prisoners must choose whether to betray their partner in crime or remain silent. Betrayal is rewarded by going free, and the betrayed gets the heaviest punishment. If both betray the other, both gain a lighter punishment. But if both cooperate, then both gain the lightest punishment of all.

Nevertheless, since neither can know what the other will do, the rational move is always to betray the other in the hope of going free, and both end up with middling punishments instead of the lightest. This is only altered when the game is iterated, so that punishment for betrayal (i.e. future betrayal on the part of the betrayed) becomes a decisive factor.

It is interesting both as a mathematical problem and a philosophical/ethical one. But the really interesting thing is that such a simple choice begets such complexity when presented at the same time to more than one decision maker (or agent, in the terminology). The reciprocal effects drive the potential complexity through the roof - in other words, trying to calculate, or take account of, the actions of the other party, knowing they are doing the same for you and they know that you are trying to predict their actions when deciding what yours will be, and so ad infinitum...but where does that break down when the agents are fallible humans? How much calculation can one human do?
This is what makes player modelling a hard problem - you can't reduce it to a case of agents.

*Although actually, the prisoner's dilemma, a new formulation by moi: wank or work out!
:D

Dan Dennett: Ants, terrorism, and the awesome power of meme

2007-07-08T17:17:00.001+03:00

Despite the corny sponsor's advertising and the elitism inherent in the opening blurb (which I'm sure most of the participants would reject) - these TED talks are really worth checking out. Not only are interesting things explained, but they're explained by experienced public speakers, so its good entertainment.

Anyway, I really liked this talk because Mr. Dennett (or Danny D, as I like to call him) clarifies some thinking that I've had for a long time, but it never crystallised for me until now. So check it out...

Who are you?

2007-07-05T01:13:00.000+03:00

"Are you righteous? Kind? Does your confidence lie in this? Are you loved by all? Know that I was, too. Do you imagine your suffering will be any less because you loved goodness and truth?"

Why does a person exist? What reason can there be to be conscious, feeling, capable of reason and emotion? Do these things, the trappings of the self, lend any value to our lives?

There is something to be said for wisdom, for the slow evolution of knowledge into greater understanding, compassion, and even altruism. For the individual, this can be a lifelong aim. But what are its larger social implications? For if living a better and better life is the goal of life, this is no more intrinsically valuable on the very large scale than living a horrible, miserable life. Because really, if the overall aim of higher learning becomes greater altruism, we've simply recursed back to propagation of the species. And if one seeks a goal beyond the self to motivate the betterment of the self, what need to look so far as wisdom? Build a family, a community to house it and leave some happy DNA behind. Who is to say that is greater worth to good works on a large scale than to a good life on a small scale?

Can we look beyond our selves and our DNA propagation for motivation to betterment? Progress alone seems to be a moonwalk, desperately racing to stay still. We cure our diseases, improve our nutrition, live longer and slowly kill the environment that is the backbone of our existence. Will we end up in UV-shielded floating biodomes, eating goop produced by the bacteria we trail beneath us in giant permeable microhorticulture farms, far enough below the surface of the ocean to protect their unicellular structures from the sunlight that kills everything else with now-unreflected radiation? [I wonder, would that work?]
So, what are we doing it all for? What is there beyond our own survival?

We theorise the self to be an evolutionary advantage, a cognitive capacity that allows non-instinctive behaviours and thus progressive goal-making beyond simple personal survival. But as noted, if you look closely enough, its hard to prevent these higher goals from looking recursive. If we had outlived any other species, that we weren't directly responsible for the extinction thereof, we might be able to say that consciousness is a mutation that was a true advantage in the evolutionary stakes. But on the evidence, all we can say is that in our class of lifeform, it will possibly be responsible for our being the last of the extant lifeforms.

So what is your self-hood there for? Why has this collaborative collection of cellular robots evolved to embody a higher order mind?
Who are you?

How do we know what we are?

2007-06-20T21:31:00.000+03:00

Once, a student wondered about many things, and questioned constantly in his quest to attain enlightenment. One day, he asked the question "who and what am I, so that I can seek the path to enlightenment?"
No one answered, and in that moment the student was enlightened.

I often wonder who and what I am, and in the wondering hope to move my experiential state vector towards a more optimal phase where information processed gives the greatest possible return on processing energy, thus increasing total wisdom. On occasion, I wonder if this wondering is not itself enlightenment of a kind. Consider this koan:

"A Zen master named Gisan asked a young student to bring him a pail of water to cool his bath.

The student brought the water and, after cooling the bath, threw on to the ground the little that was left over.

"You dunce!" the master scolded him. "Why didn't you give the rest of the water to the plants? What right have you to waste even a drop of water in this temple?"

The young student attained Zen in that instant."

Clearly, the student already knew all that he needed to become enlightened, since his master did not provide him any new learning, nor pose a question the answering of which would lead to new learning, of anything outside himself. Merely, he gave the student a cause to reflect upon himself ("What right?") and his actions ("Why?"), and in so doing learn what it was that had previously seperated him from his Zen state.

What was this moment of revelation? What relationship does it have to enlightenment, to the classic Zen description of enlightenment - "It is no-mind...the disappearance of the ego...loss of all identification with the body and the mind. It is freedom from beliefs, opinions, ideals and concepts. It is always sudden, because it is not an achievement; it is already the case. It is a remembering."

On what level can this take place in the cognitive process? We can point to the concept of no-mind to bypass the conscious cognitive process, but the state of the mind notwithstanding the corporeal body remains. And it is difficult to accept that mind and body are not one, so that the state of the individual is both body and mind. Can we say that smaller enlightenments can take place in the day-to-day, because our tie to physicality makes the whole concept of enlightenment one that exists on a continuum. Once reached, it is not the end. Why not?

Compassion draws the enlightened one back, to continue to exist in disharmony with everyone unenlightened. Compassion is empathy. Empathy is fellow feeling. It is all predicated on knowledge of one's fellow, which is the encapsulation of the existence of other minds within a theory of mind.
In Accelerando, Charles Stross talks about the predictability of a normal human to one whose cognitive functions have accelerated, i.e. been boosted by direct interface with technology (something another TED'er - the insufferable but farsighted Ray Kurzweil - talks about). The theory of mind becomes so powerful that the normal human is essentially encapsulable as a predictive model (theories are postulated to predict real phenomena).
Can one feel compassion for an automata? A completely predictable person might look as such to the modeller. But the knowledge of the person required to build the model is itself an emotive context, and processing affective information causes affect. So compassion arises from knowledge, even when that knowledge is great as to be 'weakly godlike'.

Robert Thurman seems to be coming toward this viewpoint from a tangent in his talk for TED, available here. I am just rambling, but the notion that learning and consequent minor frequent epiphanies could be considered in a certain light as progressive enlightenment, even to the connection with compassion, is a comforting one. So much of our work is working toward completion of our own work, that considering its larger futility is all too easy. Who can change the world? But if the changing is worth the doing, then the fact that we are changing ourselves is worth remembering.

Work is the koan.

Dyscordian

2007-06-12T09:02:00.001+03:00

Just a curiosity for those who accord discord, from this site.

The Simpsons Do Video Games, Pt.1

2007-05-23T01:51:00.001+03:00

The Tetris effect has to be the clearest possible indication that computer games are naturally optimal Flow-inducing activities. As to why, well it has a lot to do with cognitive information processing. For more, look to the last link here.

Am I ethical?

2007-05-21T16:17:00.000+03:00

Fig.1 Laughing at people in wheelchairs (and the Stephen Hawking voice) - ethical?

On foot of the ethics campaign over at onlyagame let me bare my soul, or at least post my moral values on the web like automobile accident statistics.

Am I ethical? You know, to be honest I would say the simple answer is "only when I feel it would benefit me". Which some might say, is completely unethical. But more meaningfully, I think that I have such trouble defining ethics, and imagining principled positions that would apply in practical situations, that addressing the subject of my own ethics is to address the whole sum of my existence, and my relation to an objective reality. This is all broadening the scope a bit much for the question asked, so instead let me take a bottom-up approach and answer a few (apparently) key instruments on personal morals (a word I assume to be interchangeable with 'ethics'). The hope is that these should provide a basis for an inference on what, in general, my ethics might be.

For anyone else currently feeling inconsistent or vague in their ethical position, there is a website (when is there not) which proffers these simple self-report tools that might help to focus thinking.
http://www.yourmorals.org is the work of psychologist Jonathan Haidt of the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, Va. Found out about him from here.
Most surprising thing I found out about myself - I have a slightly higher sense of disgust than average. Students these days - what are we coming to?!

So without further ado, allow me to unveil...me!
_____________________________________________________________
The scale you completed was the "Moral Foundations Questionnaire," developed by Jesse Graham and Jonathan Haidt at the University of Virginia.

The scale is a measure of your reliance on and endorsement of each of five psychological foundations of morality that seem to be found across cultures. Each of the two parts of the scale contained four questions related to each foundation: 1) harm/care, 2) fairness/reciprocity (including issues of rights), 3) ingroup/loyalty, 4) authority/respect, and 5) purity/sanctity.

The idea behind the scale is that human morality is the result of biological and cultural evolutionary processes that made human beings very sensitive to many different (and often competing) issues. Some of these issues are about treating other individuals well (the first two foundations - harm and fairness). Other issues are about how to be a good member of a group or supporter of social order and tradition (the last three foundations). Haidt and Graham have found that political liberals generally place higher value on the first two foundations; they are very concerned about issues of harm and fairness (including issues of inequality and exploitation). Political conservatives care about harm and fairness too, but they generally score slightly lower on those scale items. The big difference between liberals and conservatives seems to be that conservatives score slightly higher on the ingroup/loyalty foundation, and much higher on the authority/respect and purity/sanctity foundations. This difference seems to explain many of the most contentious issues in the culture war. For example, liberals support legalizing gay marriage (to be fair and compassionate), whereas many conservatives are reluctant to change the nature of marriage and the family, basic building blocks of society. Conservatives are more likely to favor practices that increase order and respect (e.g., spanking, mandatory pledge of allegiance), whereas liberals often oppose these practices as being violent or coercive.

Your Score:
Average Score:
_____________________________________________________________
The scale you completed was the The Disgust Scale, developed by Jonathan Haidt, Clark McCauley, and Paul Rozin.

The scale is a measure of your proclivity to feel disgust. People vary quite a bit in how strongly and how often they feel disgust, and in the kinds of things they find disgusting. Earlier research using the disgust scale showed that there are three sub-types of disgust:

1) Core disgust: the "core" of the emotion, which is about defending the mouth from contamination by dirty or inappropriate things like body excretions, certain animals like rats and cockroaches, and certain foods, like ice cream with ketchup.

2) Animal-reminder disgust: things involving death, corpses, and violations of the external boundaries of the body, such as amputations. These things remind us that we, like animals, are mortal.

3) Contamination disgust: this kind of disgust is a defense of the whole body, not just the mouth, from contact with dirty or sleazy people

The idea behind the scale is that disgust is an important and understudied moral emotion, as well as being an emotion about physically dirty and gross things. Disgust is involved in many moral codes, for example it appears to be part of the psychological foundation of widespread ideas of purity and pollution. Many religions (e.g., Judaism, Islam, and Hinduism) have extensive rules for regulating human bodily processes and keeping them separated from sacred objects and practices. Disgust appears to provide part of the structure of these rules and practices. Disgust also has clinical ramifications, for it seems to be involved in obsessive-compulsive disorder and in a variety of phobias.

Your Score:
Average Score:

___________________________________________________________
The scale you completed was the "Schwartz Value Survey," created by Shalom Schwartz at Hebrew University, Israel.

The scale measures the degree to which you value each of ten domains that Schwartz has found across many cultures. Values are defined as "desirable, trans-situational goals, varying in importance, that serve as guiding principles in people's lives."

The idea behind the scale is that there is an internal order and structure to values. Using various statistical techniques, Schwartz has found that the ten basic human values show a pattern of relationships that can be graphed as a circle (see below). Values that are next to each other are closely related; values that are across from each other tend to be opposed, or tend not to be strongly endorsed by the same person. Political liberals have been found to endorse the "openness to change" values, while conservatives are more likely to endorse the "conservation" values. We have put this scale up on Yourmorals.org because we are interested in learning how Schwartz's ten values (which include moral and non-moral values) relate to the "five foundations of morality" theory from Haidt and Graham, as measured by the "Moral Foundations Questionnaire."
The values are described by Schwartz as follows:

POWER: Social status and prestige, control or dominance over people and resources
ACHIEVEMENT: Personal success through demonstrating competence according to social standards
HEDONISM: Pleasure or sensuous gratification for oneself
STIMULATION: Excitement, novelty, and challenge in life
SELF-DIRECTION: Independent thought and action - choosing, creating, exploring
UNIVERSALISM: Understanding, appreciation, tolerance, and protection for the welfare of all people and for nature
BENEVOLENCE: Preservation and enhancement of the welfare of people with whom one is in frequent personal contact
TRADITION: Respect, commitment, and acceptance of the customs and ideas that traditional culture or religion provide
CONFORMITY: Restraint of actions, inclinations, and impulses likely to upset or harm others and violate social expectations or norms
SECURITY: Safety, harmony, and stability of society, of relationships, and of self
Your Score:
Average Score:
____________________________________________________________
The scale you completed was the Social Dominance Orientation Scale, by Jim Sidanius and Felicia Pratto (2001).

The scale is a measure of how you feel about hierarchy vs. equality among groups in society.

The idea behind the scale is a theory called Social Dominance Theory, by the same authors. The theory says that societies tend to be stratified by age, sex, race, and other group differences. People vary in how legitimate they think such stratification is. Males (and other groups with more power) tend to be more in favor of such differences, and to enforce them more actively. Sex hormones may also play a role: Men with high testosterone levels tend to have higher SDO scores. Political conservatives generally score higher on SDO than do liberals, but SDO and conservatism are not the same thing.

Your Score:
Average Score:
_______________________________________________________________

Well, just posting those has been an exhausting and time-wasting wrestling match with blooger.com (typo intended!), so no post-match analysis will be forthcoming...for now. Still, like those (undoubtedly wildly inaccurate) online IQ tests that always seem to rate everyone as a genius, its a worthwhile little diversion if you've never done it before - who knows, you might even learn something!

Man Bytes Blog: May Roundtable P.II

2007-05-20T22:24:00.000+03:00

So, it took a little while to get back to it, but...
Well I thought a little more about how goals can bleed backwards into the process that achieves them, in the domain of gameplay. I think that anyone who has studied the relationship between means and ends in production systems would have a lot to say here. Essentially, the path along which one approaches the goal of an activity can begin to dominate one's perspective within the activity. A metaphor which just popped into my head is the hill-climbing false horizon. Most hills have concave sides, thus when climbing to the top one's shortened line of sight results in seeing a horizon that isn't actually the peak.
As with large, >1 man, software projects (which I'm sure we've all been involved in), playing a game is a matter of achieving many short term objectives along a definite path towards a given goal. But fortunately for game players, they almost never have to plot the path themselves, nor update it in a change control process, nor adapt to reductions in their agency*. I suspect if they did, the number of game completions would drop through the floor.

The point being, management of goals isn't a prioritised skill-set of game playing, which is one reason narrative is so important to games. The natural human tendency is to deal with what's in front of us and put the rest off. Too much complexity can completely shut a person down, render them incapable of action. I think there is a hierarchy of player goals, atomic actions forming the easy-to-process bottom layer, above that situated actions/reactions, then tactical, strategic and finally narrative layers.
So I contend that the gameplay process is actually a process of transference in this hierarchy, the player's attention forming a wave moving through the medium of the possible foci for her attention - that is, the medium of goals. And the transference occurs continuously, as players complete atomic actions, that lead them through situations, each of these requiring tactics that serve a strategy. Since narratives are mostly linear and pre-designed (so far: even GTA just allows you to ignore the narrative at will), these are out of the player's control and thus form the anchor points of the wave, keeping it from becoming too chaotic and unraveling. Not that game devs could provide that much content anyway!
The goals in each layer are aggregates of those in the layer below. From this perspective, we see that players embark on an activity for which they know there is a goal, though they don't quite know what it is, and they follow a process in order to get there, although they haven't specified the process since they don't know where it's supposed to lead them. Instead, they work toward the nearest specifiable achievement, using the means given to them by the game mechanics, seeing it as a reliable method of finding new achievements to aim toward. You climb the hill in order to climb the hill. And (hopefully) finding this experience to be an optimal one (i.e. they enjoy themselves), the player memorises the pattern of cognition and/or kinesthesia involved in the activity. This reinforces the pleasure derived by the brain from experiencing it again, so long as enough variety remains to permit a level of novelty that matches the individual's taste (correlating to their capacity for processing complexity).

A game doesn't end when you produce something, it ends when there's none of it left to do. Maybe, there are no goals to games! *(I wonder what kind of game that would make - where progress is measured by power-downs, kind of like aging backwards. If you start off as the Destroyer of Worlds and progress down to Imp#5276, would you be bothered playing?)

Please visit the Round Table's &amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;a title="Round Table Main Hall" href="http://blog.pjsattic.com/corvus/round-table/"&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;Main Hall&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;/a&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt; for links to all entries.

Man Bytes Blog: May Roundtable

2007-05-16T19:25:00.000+03:00

I think an unreconstructed ramble on the specification bleed between goals and processes in gameplay will serve as my round-table entry. So I will pick up straight from onlyagame's contention that "to make the process the goal, [is] to undermine the meaningfulness of the term goal".

Surely by divorcing the term goal from the process which achieves it is to distance it from the commonly accepted idea of the nature of game playing. Games are undertaken primarily for reasons other than production, in that achieving any end outside the game is necessarily defined as a system of activity which includes the game only as a subset. Consider the rare cases of games-within-games: in PGR, one could have an arcade machine in ones garage which ran the instant classic XBLA game Geometry Wars. The goals achieved in playing Geometry Wars had no influence on the superset of activities offered by PGR, just as the goals of playing PGR have no affect on the superset of real life.
Unless one considers the goal of playing to be the passing of time. But surely this implies the process of play is the goal.

Which leads us to the position that game play is a self-actualising goal, for a game must be played, and play is a process, and if a process is a goal - you see where this is going.

But then how can it be detrimental to enjoyable gaming to have games with too little structure and guidance? If just being there was enough, designing a game would be just a matter of providing the tools.
Hmm...this seems incomplete - perhaps a little more depth of examination is required...

Please visit the Round Table's &amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;a title="Round Table Main Hall" href="http://blog.pjsattic.com/corvus/round-table/"&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;Main Hall&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;/a&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt; for links to all entries.

Agent S, I presume?

2007-04-26T18:28:00.000+03:00

Increasingly, I am convinced of the inevitability and necessity of personality-attuned neurologically-interfaced semi-autonomous hierarchical software agents (PANISAHSA's?). An exo-cortex. I am a surfer on the crest of a techno-informatic wave, constantly on the verge of 'wiping out', and despite my skills, training, innate intelligence and constant effort to maintain my position, I have no guarantee of remaining current, wired, up-to-date. If you fall behind, you've fallen off, there's no catching up. So what I need, what would save me from obsoletion, is a system of information retreival and processing complex and powerful enough to handle the wired and well-connected world.

Santa, I wanna exo-cortex!

Bush, Iraq and my 2 cents

2007-04-24T04:34:00.000+03:00

KI-AI! Take that, neo-cons!
Filled out a media analysis survey for my sister, the media student. She is doing this qualitative survey for her course, and while I could comment on her scientific method, I'd rather just pontificate on the topics raised :D Here goes:

Media Analysis Survey

Q1 Which sources do you regularly locate your news from?

Random headlines from top of the gmail inbox, and friends sending online links, so mostly internet. But also headlines on papers in shops, tho I dont buy the papers for news

Q2 How and when did you first hear about George W. Bush?

A report (possibly in a paper or magazine) about how this redneck wannabe cowboy upstart was overhauling John McCain in the Republican primaries for the 2000 election, which sounded like bad news but no big deal since he could hardly go on to win the presidency, could he? Which was true.

Q3 What information was relayed to you in this first news report/article, etc.?

See above

Q3 What was your opinion of him initially?

A cowboy upstart. No, at first I really did think of him as a political anomaly and unlikely to have to worry about, as I underestimated the Bush family's power, since I was 12 when Poppa was in power.

Q4 Has that changed since then?
Yes

How and why?

I still would be surprised if there were no power behind the throne, but I do believe that when he is allowed to, he acts as he wants and is the most powerful man on earth. Thus he is a force to be reckoned with, a direct effect on my life and a very much a force for harm.

Q5 Did you feel positive or negative about George Bush's policies and actions post 9/11?

Negative

How and why?

Its empire building, pure and simple. Its destructive to take the resources of the worlds only superpower, garnered 30 years ago during the boom time of cheap energy, and squander them sending armies around the world chasing the dwindling stocks of oil instead of investing everything in ways to generate energy without destroying the world. There may be no way out of the energy trap, but at least it wouldn't be going backward.

Q6 Do you feel that the Bushisms, e.g. "I know the human being and fish can coexist peacefully", affects the public's opinions of him?

Yes

How and why?

Say anything enough times and people begin to accept it as the truth, It wasn't very hard for everyone to believe that Bush was a simple man, and when they had a reason to dislike him, switching to believing he is a simpleton is a small step.

Q7 Do you feel that the Bushisms affect international public opinion more than U.S. public opinion?

Yes

How and why?

Most americans feel like Bush is similar to them, because he is fallible but in a christian way. I.e. he makes mistakes but ones that are publicly acceptable in circles where being morally 'upstanding' is important. Foreigners wouldn't ever feel similar to Bush, and so can feel scorn for him more easily.

Q8 Do you feel that George Bush's primitive speech may be used to his advantage?

Yes

How and why?

Well yes because it allows him to connect with the simple people who support his war and have little in the way of shades of grey in their beliefs.
But then again no because it makes him more devisive than if he appeared intellectual, but was still a Texan cowboy - if he was thusly, liberal classes might be able to at least trust the quality of his thinking, if not agree with anything he thinks. Now they just think he pulls everything out of his 'gut'...

Q8 What is your reaction to the term "Shock and Awe"?

reminds me of 'Blitzkrieg'

Q9 Do you think that it has played an important part in the U.S. public opinion on the war in Iraq?

Don't know

Q10 Have you seen any of the prisoner abuse photographs that have come into the public eye?

Yes

Q11 What were your feelings about them?

Resigned unsurprise

Q12 What images or thoughts come into your mind when you hear news reports about the war in Iraq?

Pictures I've seen of the exploded heads, where most of the skin remains but the insides have been squirted out...

Q13 In general, would you say that the tragedy of the war is apparent to you, or do you feel desensitised to it?

Oh, desensitised completely. I'd need direct contact stimulus to be moved by it.

Q14 Do you think that it is possible to consider the gravity of the situation each time you hear more news about the war in Iraq?

Yes. Because the gravity is global, yet the carnage is nothing special globally. So we can consider the widespread, longterm implications and how the situation will affect us. On the other hand, as the war on the ground goes on, so too it could be happening anywhere else, and is in Darfur, Lebanon, Palestine, Afghanistan, Central Africa...Thus, war is almost inevitable and meaningless on a personal level, until it affects one personally. And the farther effects of war are political, economic, social, all things which obey trends that can be predicted, if not accurately. So considering the gravity of the situation is just a matter of measuring the breadth, depth and longevity of the trends.

Playing with Fire...

2007-04-18T21:47:00.000+03:00

Damn this is a little belated. Play 'Play with Fire'! Buy it, in fact. But at least try it. I know at least some of you out there would enjoy playing as a ball of flame, burning things up. Kris?

Why did it take me 3 months to plug this? Weird.

Pull the strings...

2007-04-16T18:58:00.000+03:00

No one would have believed at the beginning of 2007 that human affairs (the AIIDE'07 conference) were being watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than Man's. Yet, across the gulf of space on the planet Zenok Prime, intellects vast and cool and unsypathetic regarded Earth (actually just Stanford) with envious eyes, and slowly and surely, they joined their plans against us (them).

Doo DOO DOOOOOOOOOOOO!!

Yes, I shall shortly be invading! The plans have been laid, all is in readiness, all I need do now is play the waiting game.
And then, I too will know the way to San Jose. Its on the Caltrain, three stops down from Palo Alto, right?

I think I'll wear a flower in my hair...

12 Modern Delusions that must be challenged. #1

2007-03-27T17:27:00.000+03:00

Numero Uno. The world's population problems, and the spread of Aids, can be solved without the use of condoms.

This is not only the most dangerous, but also the most criminal error of the modern world. Millions of people will suffer, and die premature and humiliating deaths, as a result of the policies pursued in this regard through the UN and related aid and public health programmes. Indeed, there is no need to ask where the first mass murderers of the 21st century are; we already know, and their addresses besides: the Lateran Palace, Vatican City, Rome, and 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, Washington DC. Timely arrest and indictment would save many lives.

My Reply:

See reply to last delusion! Ok, I do have something to say on both of these topics. I'm still going to beg off for the moment, and try to rewrite a paper, develop a player typological experiment, write a book chapter on in-game adaptivity and continue to incrementally improve my decision theoretic player modelling method for Pacman. Phew!

All seems kinda insignificant when you look at these delusions...

12 Modern Delusions that must be challenged. #2

2007-03-26T22:53:00.000+03:00

No 2. The only thing 'they' understand is force.

This has been the guiding illusion of hegemonic and colonial thinking for several centuries. Oppressed peoples do not accept the imposition of solutions by force; they revolt. It is the oppressors who, in the end, have to accept the verdict of force, as European empires did in Latin America, Africa, Asia and as the United States is doing in Iraq today. The hubris of mission accomplished in May 2003 has been followed by ignominy.

My Reply:

Ok, oddly enough (given the topic) nothing quick and inspired is coming to mind for me here. So I am going to switch tactics, hope that some others have caught onto the presence of these posts, and leave the answering to others. Maybe I'll get something up in time. Right now, I'm settling into that slightly panicked mode of feeling like I haven't worked enough lately, which is my main source of short-term motivation. So...nose to the grindstone!

Sometime later...
Tansy emailed around a very interesting article on the aestheticisation of violence, which I have posted below. This was in the context of another discussion, but I thought it very appropriate here as it speaks directly to our own role in the whole topic expressed above. We permit our leaders to pursue these imperialist policies - they are not dictators, they must have a mandate from the people, however far removed their day-to-day activities may feel from our own powers and influence. I have raised the point in delusion #8, that people need the sense of emancipation of belief in the efficacy of their own free will. Free will may or may not exist in fact, but in attitude it is all important. So certainly oppressed people will revolt, inevitably they will throw off the shackles of oppression or be destroyed in the attempt (whether through annihilation or assimilation); yet the shackles are imposed time and again, as though history was a blank slate, lessons unlearned. So in addressing this delusion, let us accept these inevitabilities and look instead to ourselves, and how it all becomes possible starting at home.

Tansy*:
hey folks...

this is something i found while researching a college project but thought that it was worth emailing around. concerning bush and his Shock and Awe-some War on Terror...

T

The aestheticization of violence for political purposes

Though many tools are available for political purposes, the threat or use of violence attracts those of a more proactive disposition as the simplest way to resolve any conflict or achieve any ends, because its strategies are well-known and weapons easily obtained. When asked to identify alternative nonviolent techniques, people find it difficult to visualise effective methods; moreover, sceptics can quickly raise moral and practical dilemmas to complicate any set of choices until violence appears the easiest option.

Thus, this topic is relevant across a spectrum of causes from those disagree about social or commercial practices within their local community, to those unhappy with the political regime in their own country, to those who believe that another country is a threat.

Nevertheless, a person or group wishing to use violence as a strategy must overcome objections from both prospective supporters and the other interested parties. No cause will prosper until the majority agrees with the justifications offered for the decision to use force, because all who adopt aggressive strategies require emotional and logistical support from the local community for success.

Hence, the aestheticization process is used to direct the audience's interpretation of events by shifting the values of the lexical words used to minimise consideration of the moral, ethical or other costs. In Nineteen Eighty-Four , George Orwell proposed that the means to achieve complete control of people's minds or their ability to think rationally about the issues at stake is to invent a new language, more primitive and less articulate than current "oldspeak". That is the intention of aestheticization. It seeks to subvert the rationality of the current paradigms through doublespeak and goodthink , and to persuade the majority that the use of violence in the particular context is not merely necessary or expedient, but just and glorious in the prosecution of higher ideals.

Whether the use of violence is or is not justifiable is irrelevant for these purposes. The sole interest lies in the mechanism for the transfer of the particular use from the paradigm of unacceptable into the paradigm of acceptable. In contemporary terms, this brings semiotics into a position of prominence both to set the frame and to deconstruct it.

[ edit] An example of semiotic analysis

In January, 2003, the U.S. implemented a battle plan based on a concept developed at the National Defense University. Called " Shock and Awe " (see Americanism ), its stated purpose was the psychological destruction of the enemy's will to fight rather than the physical destruction of his military forces. The choice of name is revealing, even at a denotative level.

Shock refers to the surprise and distress caused by events and, when associated with battles, means the violent interaction of individuals or groups as they join in combat. Meanwhile, awe is an overwhelming sense of wonder or admiration that may, to a greater or lesser extent, be associated with fear. But, at a connotative level, the use of the words is intended to fulfil several distinct aims:

In reality, the army may be going to kill large numbers of people, both combatant and non-combatant. These words are not the actions but they represent them at a symbolic level. Analysis shows that the words fall within the paradigm of lexical words signifying the emotional responses to external stimuli: responses that can only be experienced by those who are alive. The intended implication is that enemy soldiers and civilians will be so disoriented by the display of power that they will simply surrender rather than face the threatened injury or death. Hence, the enemy casualty count will be low and the immediate gains will significantly outweigh the moral, ethical or other costs of the enterprise.

All warfare involves death and destruction on a scale that may be shocking to the sensibilities of the ordinary person, so what is the value of these words? Applying the commutation test, substitutes for "shock" might be: excitement, impact, and surprise, as opposed to: scare, trauma, and upset.

The substitutes for "awe" might be: admiration, reverence and wonder, as opposed to fear, horror, and terror. Both words are capable of signifying less appealing qualities but, by setting them in a conjoined relationship, the expectation is that they will both be given the same value. The sui generis rule applies so that second and subsequent words in a conjoined sequence define the class. Evaluating the substitutes for "shock", the degree of match as synonyms seems reasonably adjacent and the balance of connotation can be considered balanced.

This would give the word "shock" a relatively neutral value. Since the preponderance of connotation to "awe" is positive (the negative substitutes are less directly synonymous), the relationship in the phrase is intended to invoke values suggesting a certain degree of magnificence in the technology and the manner of its delivery. Not only those on the receiving end are expected to experience awe: all external observers may be impressed by this display of power, and, perhaps, feel not a little afraid — a useful general propaganda gain.

The connotation of the word awe tends to refer to unequal power relationships, e.g. a beginner may be in awe of the skills of a professional, an ordinary mortal is in awe of a deity, etc. The implication is that this war is such an asymmetrical contest that the enemy might just as well give up before the battle is joined with such an overwhelmingly superior force.

Figurative usages provide what the semiotician Roland Barthes called a "pleasure of the text" (1970), i.e. the pleasurable reaction produced by a clever arrangement of signs. So figurative words are more memorable than literal words, particularly when used in unexpected contexts. Using this phrase in the otherwise literal context of declaring the opening of violent hostilities is incongruous and that contextualisation has made the phrase memorable, effectively displacing all the imagery of imminent death and destruction that might otherwise have dominated.

Monosyllabic words wield considerable rhetorical might: they are short, punchy, and memorable. Through the careful mixing of short and long words, the impact provided by the short words stands out against the rhythmic flow provided by long words. Rhetorical theory maintains that any proposition can be expressed in a variety of ways.

Hence, when persuasion is the overriding goal, the rhetorical perspective suggests that the manner in which a statement is expressed may be more important than its propositional content. In this instance, the repetition of two sounds, a binary pair of semi-onomatopoeic words, produces hyperbole. Whether written or spoken with an appropriate intonation and body language, the phrase is memorable and serves its aestheticization function.

12 Modern Delusions that must be challenged. #3

2007-03-23T00:16:00.000+02:00

No 3. Diasporas have a legitimate role to play in national and international politics.

This is for Ultan (who does not have the head space to join us at present, please do Ultan, you are the Man here). The notion that emigrant or diaspora communities have a special insight into the problems of their homeland, or a special moral or political status in regard to them, is wholly unfounded. Emigrant ethnic communities play almost always a negative, backward, at once hysterical and obstructive, role in resolving the conflicts of their countries of origin; Armenians and Turks, Jews and Arabs, various strands of Irish, are prime examples on the interethnic front, as are exiles in the US in regard to resolving the problems of Cuba, or policy-making in Iran. English emigrants are less noted for any such political role, though their spasms of collective inebriation and conformist ghettoised lifestyles abroad do little to enhance the reputation of their home country.

My Reply:

Well now this is one for which I truly have little to say. Even though some might term me an emigrant, at the moment. I never have credited the idea that a person who is born (or has lived from an early age) elsewhere to his ethnic homeland can claim true nationality of that homeland. You are a product of your genes and your environment, and when an emigrant minority settles abroad and attempts to hold on to the type of culture from which they came, this is categorically not the same environment as that of the culture's origin. For one thing, it usually has more jobs.

Whether that should disenfranchise emigrants from their homeland's political process is another thing. They may not have the same understanding of local issues, they may have old-fashioned or even backward and bigoted views on the neighbours of their homeland. But they have an indisputable link to that land that should be protected in some way so that the baby is not thrown out with the bathwater. What form that protection should take is more difficult.

A fully enfranchised diaspora would seem to me to have an undue influence on a geographically remote region that has its local population to worry about. But then those who stay are unlikely to make very much of the plight of those who leave, whether it be good or bad. After all the grass is always greener...

So in summary, I have no good idea how this issue could be addressed...case by case? Set up a franchise-by-application system, that would enable the interested and invested to vote-by-remote? Or maybe a proportional system, where only a statistically insignificant number of the diaspora could be directly involved in the homeland's political process.

Pie in the sky!

12 Modern Delusions that must be challenged. #4

2007-03-22T19:13:00.000+02:00

No.4. The world is divided into incomparable moral blocs, or civilisations.

This view has been aptly termed (by Ernest Gellner) as 'liberalism for the liberals, cannibalism for the cannibals' But a set of common values is indeed shared across the world from democracy and human rights to the defence of national sovereignty and belief in the benefits of economic development. The implantation of these values is disputed in all countries, but not the values themselves. Most states in the world whatever their cultural or religious character, have the signed the universal United Nations declarations on human rights, starting with the 1948 universal declaration.

My Reply:
This one goes quite deep. Because the fact is, the universal commonalities/sympathies of humankind can mainly be traced to our shared biological heritage and the formative effect that this has on our cultural and technological evolution. Every person needs to squat to shit. Unexpectedly familiar patterns often occur as artificial systems evolve (which are the only ones we can observe evolving, hence the confusion that leads many to accept the Creationist argument). So the fact that there are similarities between disparate cultural groups could have as much to do with quirks of random socio-economic & cultural evolution as with universality.

If you strip away similitude of need and the form of living, the wants and functions of living seem to diverge quite sharply. Who wants to live in peace? Not everyone. Who wants power? Not everyone. Who wants assurance of a (better) afterlife? Not everyone. Who wants everyone to subscribe to their beliefs? Not everyone.

We could start to look at this delusion in terms of teleonomies*. A genus or species operates on a genetic teleonomy, so that each individual member is driven by the actualisation of the gene. This gives us reproductive imperatives, the drive to survive, and is essentially the same for all members of a species. At the other end of the scale, there is the " teleonomy of the self" which describes the self-organising principle that we get from having a conciousness. This allows thinking beings to diverge from their genetic teleonomy by saying that "Yes I am hungry now, but I won't eat because: that magazine tells me not to/that poor person needs the food more/I can't afford food beer". Teleonomy of the self is a pretty interesting area of study cos it leads into the question of why we think, and why we think in terms of quality and aesthetics.
In the middle, there is culture. The individual is born into an environment (in terms of subjective experience) that is shaped in large part by a cultural teleonomy - how we behave toward each other in order to prolong co-existance. This teleonomy is an emergent phenomenon and most of what we know about its development is that form of educated guesswork that we call evolutionary psychology.

*All these teleonomic categories are also the categories of information transmission (some would even say storage) and learning in biological organisms.

What's the point of all this talk of teleonomies? I suppose it's just to point out how little of our inbuilt 'control software' is actually shared among people of seperate cultures and backgrounds. In his Leviathan, Hobbes posited that tyranny of the state was the only logical large-scale social contract that would be stable - if people didn't have the threat of repercussions that is inherent in law, there would be only chaos: "the war of all against all".

12 Modern Delusions that must be challenged. #5

2007-03-19T20:34:00.000+02:00

No. 5. We should welcome the spread of English as a world language.

It is obviously of practical benefit that there is one common, functional language of trade, air traffic control etc. but the actual domination of English in today's world has been accompanied by a tide of cultural arrogance that is itself debasing: a downgrading and neglect of other languages and cultures across the world, the general compounding of Anglo-Saxon political and social arrogance, and the introverted collapse of interest within the English speaking countries themselves in other peoples and languages; in sum a triumph of
banality over diversity. One small but universal example: the imposition on hotel staff across the world, with all its wonderful nomenclature, of name tags denoting the wearer as 'Mike' 'Johnny' and 'Steve'...

My Reply:

Ahhh, Engrish! It's hard to take the Anglo cultural hegemony so seriously when you come across the comedic malapropisms of the second language speakers and the Chinese-whispers malfunctioning of grammar coming from linguistic propagation through the undereducated and uninterested. Slang is only slang while it's in the minority - Ebonics, Australian, (sometimes even) the brogue of the emerald isle would be hard to call Queen's English, especially to the face of the speaker!

But then, the argument here isn't really that speaking English itself is a bad thing, more that its spread creates the potential for other languages to stultify and lose their vitality through preservation as opposed to use. It's hardly as though they will be lost, after all - the capacity of humanity to record itself is becoming so great that it may forestall the need for an archaeology of this or any future period. But language is a living thing, its meaning relative to its user, and to provide a more utile ( i.e. widespread) and easier method of expressing new ideas and new meanings is to spell the end of a language's growth. Latin is dead not because no one speaks it, but because not enough people speak it to be able to grow it. Irish suffers a similar malaise, on a less severe scale. But it's still in trouble - being preserved by the state and abandoned by the people. Preservation is for the dead...

There has always, as far as I know, been a dominant functional international language used as a de facto standard to enable widespread communication. Greek, then Latin, then French, then English, would be my guess. Why then is it just becoming an especially thorny issue now?
Perhaps it is because formerly, the international language was in a similar position to those problem languages outlined above - their use in an international context was limited in such a way that they could never usurp native tongues as a preferred method of expressing new ideas. They were spoken between foreigners the way communication networks use standard algorithms - as a way to make sure the broad outlines of communication are understood by each side. The main organ for expression was still the native tongue, and this be followed by translation to the international language.

Nowadays, the backbone of computer technology is English, and so many former English colonies are such vital international players, and then there is the mighty American media machine, churning out the beat and the dreams of the world. Or at least having the biggest budgets (and a big head start) in film and music production.
Yet that which interacts the most, changes the most. Without bothering to learn fluently another person's language, the casual speaker of English manages to communicate their approximate message and can fill in (perhaps with reference) using bits of their own and the other's language. So Engrish (the Japanese pronunciation, as they have no 'L' sound in their natural language), becomes the medium behind the medium, that means by which the native tongues are made to fit together up until communication becomes so complex that only the native tongue would do anyway. This complex area might be thought to cover any 'expression of new ideas' already, thus forestalling any danger to the native tongue.

The major problem for this vision is that for all those people who are native English speakers, there is absolutely no need to learn another language. For 99% of humanity, necessity is the only thing that can teach a language, in my opinion. So where does that leave us? I would say it leaves the native English speakers as the cultural paupers, and that if you come from somewhere non-Anglo, you only have historical economic disadvantage to blame if your culture suffers under the weight of Anglo-imports. In other words, those places that can afford their own culture seem to have it, and have the luxury of choice as well.

12 Modern Delusions that must be challenged. #6

2007-03-16T19:39:00.000+02:00

No 6 : In the modern world we do not need utopias.
Dreaming, the aspiration to a better world and the imagination thereof, is a necessary part of the human condition. There is nothing better than dreaming - this is my area. Dreaming, literally being a visionary - the Bible is littered with them, from Joseph in the Pharoah's prison to Daniel in the lion's den, Jacob with his dream of the ladder up to heaven and angels ascending and descending on it. This is not religion by the way, this is visions, this is revelations, hated by religious authorities because visions, dreams subvert the orthodox and inspire us mortals to great happiness.

My Reply:

Utopian idealism is indeed in my view one of the prime motivators of a great many of the most important works of an individual. In the day to day, we might not ascribe our actions to any kind of "make-the-world-better" ideal, but we can still derive a great sense of purpose from the notion of a potential for the ideal in our actions. I think this ties in with the concept of the fall from grace, and the perfect and harmonious afterlife. Nothing can be made perfect in this non-Platonic world, but in striving to do so we express a desire, even a need to shape what we do in the image of an ideal of what we do (and perhaps we reflexively express this ideal of doing in the concept of heavenly paradise). In other words there is the thing done, and the idea of the thing done which supplies the conceptual mould, if you like.
Where does the idea of the thing done come from?

Some posit the existence of multiple realities [note this is not multiversism] - the reality we live in, that of classical physics and comprehensively measurable macroid entities; the reality of matter, quantum physics and uncertainty of measurement; and the reality of perfect concepts, with no need for measurement. This latter reality is simply that of mathematical entities, that by their descriptions give us the tools to explore them with infinite precision, without need for measurement, modelling or translation. This 'world of ideas' as an actual, self-contained reality is a view for the ardent logical anti-positivist (if such a thing is possible), and is not really necessary for this argument. The point is that the world of ideas exists, even if only as a metaphor, and it is here we must look to begin to understand how closely idealism entwines with cognition and the human condition.

I believe the active aesthetic/discriminatory faculty is a key part of human cognition and memory, which together serve as the developmental basis for the emotional faculty that eventually becomes something of an autonomous control function. This aesthetic faculty is sitting somewhere behind the raw data input from the senses, helping to process our impressions of the world around us so that for each person, the exact working of their aesthetics ends up being a factor in shaping their very reality. A powerful stanchion under my reasoning comes from here - a hypothesis on the working of the human eye and brain.

This is again leading to an under-developed idea of mine, so working step by step toward the ultimate implication could be doomed. Instead, I will go straight to the point with what I have laid out so far. If you take this occasionally expressed yearning for the ideal which permeates the human condition, and allow that it may be related to the aesthetic faculty inherent in the human cognitive processing pathway, it sets up the argument that utopianism is in fact a biological imperative rather than an unscientific expression of romanticism. Philosophically, it has been said that quality is the arbiter of a conscious reality - socially, as here, this translates into the maxim that the ideal must always prefigure the practise.

12 Modern Delusions that must be challenged. #7

2007-03-14T18:38:00.000+02:00

No 7. Religion should again be allowed, when not encouraged, to play a role in political and social life.
From the evangelicals of the United States to the followers of popes
John Paul 11 and Benedict XV1, to the Islamists of the Middle East,
the claim about the benefits of religion is one of the great, and all
too little challenged impostures of our time. For centuries, those
aspiring to freedom and democracy, be it in Europe or the Middle East,
fought to push back the influence of religion on public life.
Secularism cannot guarantee freedom, but, against the claims of
tradition and superstition, the uses to which religion is put in
modern political life, from California to Kuwait, it is an essential
bulwark.

My Reply:
It seems that in modern times, challenges to religion in general mostly take the form of challenges to the idea of divinity, in other words 'strong' atheism. I call it strong because in decrying all faith in the metaphysical, these proponents of godlessness do not seem to recognise that their own position is a metaphysical one, and thus is very much a faith in its own right. Much more has been said on this topic, with much greater clarity, on Chris Bateman's blog. Of especial interest here is Popper's milestone, which is a lemma about the boundary between science and metaphysics that says - he proposed that falsification be used as a boundary condition for science, and consequently that anything that could not be falsified belonged to the domain of metaphysics.

This milestone seems to offer a potential resolution to the issue of church-in-state. Religions are faith-based systems of belief which posit a theory of existence, and derive from their beliefs a set of ethics which are used to guide day-to-day behaviour in social interaction. The faith-based theories of existence are clearly metaphysics, by Popper's milestone, since we cannot falsify the claim of the existence of God/gods/Brahmin/Tao/etc (the last, personally, is my favourite divinity).
Sets of ethics, on the other hand, are theories of optimum social behaviour which apply absolute values to variable circumstances. It is written: Thou shalt not kill. It is not thereafter written in parentheses: unless your government tells you to. So ethical models derived from religious principles are clearly flawed in application to everyday life. But as models applied to everyday life, they do deal with finite, measurable data, and the quality of life derived from their application should stand as a measure of falsifiability of their claim to be optimal systems for living. So religiously-derived ethics can theoretically be placed in the realm of social science, and this means they are subject to the same checks and balances as all secular systems of government of social interaction must be.

The upshot is, if religions were capable or willing of having their ethical systems subjected to scientific analysis, I see no reason not to give them credence in the application to government of social interaction. The ethics may be derived from nonsense for all I care, if they can be proven to work, then why not? The trick to having this outlook comes uniquely from computer science, namely machine learning. For many given problems, if you know the variables, constraints and computational requirements, you can set up a process called a genetic algorithm that essentially goes from being a completely arbitrary, random set of numbers, to a complete and optimal solution. It will work as long as you set the right constraints and evolutionary process. So its not so insane to think of allowing religions (arbitrary, random) to set up and run societies, as long as you've got suitable constraints and evolutionary process.

The image at top is the Palazzo in the Piazo di San Marco in Venice, the winged lion rampant.

12 modern delusions that must be challenged: #8

2007-03-12T14:58:00.000+02:00

No 8: Markets are a 'natural' phenomenon that allows for the efficient allocation of resources and preferences.

Markets are not natural but are the products of particular
societies, value systems and patterns of state relations to the
economy. They are not efficient allocators of goods, since they ignore
the large area of human activity and need that is not covered by
monetary values - from education and the provision of public works, to
human happiness and fulfilment. In any case the pure market is a
fantasy; the examples of the two most traded commodities in the
contemporary world, oil and drugs, show how political, social and
cartel factors override and distort the workings of supply and demand.

My Reply:

I am taking the stance that delusion # 8 is not just a delusion, it is (as with the consequences of delusion no.10) an active lie propagated by its beneficiaries and cloaked by them in esoteria and scientific mystery so as to prevent easy dissemination of understanding.
Of course it's not a case of active conspiracy (not much), but a powerful self-perpetuating mythic system. Like religion, or gender roles.

I read some powerful (though very briefly explained) ideas on markets in Charles Stross' Accelerando, so some credit due there. A market system, he explained, is a highly inefficient allocator and manager of resources, and does not usually reflect the good or the will of the majority. I might add that it is a system rife with chokepoints, strange attractors (these are like numerical whirlpools or black holes) and systemic instabilities, which are all natural self-regulatory mechanisms but would seem to be unnecessary in an unnatural system. His perfect alternative is typically 'geeky': Resource Allocator 1.0, software solutions to the calculation problems of relative worth and need. Think about it as a massive balance sheet, and you can see his point - we need and want certain things, and trade in them, and produce certain things, and trade in them. Sometimes need and desire are not the primary motivators of trade, but it all comes down to production and consumption in the end, and so we get a massively simultaneous system of linear equations that describes the relationship between each person, their produce and their consumption. This system of equations could be encoded and solved on a massively parallel computer (maybe a...quantum computer!) and then run forward in simulation to predict the needs and contributions of its base variables - people. Since the whole system of trade is not a natural one parts of it can be controlled to a degree, so by building in margins for error (like : it is permissible that x number of people starve each year), we can (theoretically, hopefully) avoid the catastrophic prediction failure that was discussed in delusion 12. This would be a perfectly fair, perfectly efficient system of economics for the world. It doesn't even have to be socialist - in fact it would be totally flexible, and all sorts of economic models could be accommodated, different ones in different geographical regions if so desired. Trade would be based on empirical, absolutes metrics of worth, so speculative inflation (just made that up - essentially, like the dot com bubble, meaning false measures of value) would be impossible. As long as an individual's production and consumption equation could be solved, they would be able to do what they wanted!

Stross then points out why markets are dominant, if not necessary - they promote the idea that we have free will. People need to believe that they are masters of their own destiny. If there was a giant computer controlling the economics system of the world, even if it was totally flexible it would be seen as an usurper of our self-realised destinies. The 'workings of supply and demand' would be met with absolute efficacy, but the human condition would reject its own salvation.

What then, can be done instead? I'm in favour of a global politic system where, instaed of nation states, we have socio-economically/ethnically self-cohesive minimalist political entites, joined by standardised trading and diplomatic functions. This kind of implies an economics like that of Stross, but without the super-computer. Unfortunately, it could never be brought into being because if you understand what I mean by these political entities, you can see that the balance of military security in a modern world could never be guaranteed. Essentially a small number of these political entities would resemble military-industrial R&D outfits like Lockheed etc. Any new superweapon would enable instant empire building, and screw up the trust-based economics.

This last idea has been ping-ponging around in my head for a while, but I've never done the research to put it into a sensible form. Offer it up here on a purely caveat emptor basis...these delusions are getting harder and harder to reply to and make sense! :D

12 modern delusions that must be challenged: #9

2007-03-10T21:14:00.000+02:00

No 9: We live in a 'post feminist' epoch.

The implication of this claim, supposedly analogous to such terms as
'post industrial', is that we have no more need for feminism - in
politics, law, everyday life - because the major goals of that
movement, articulated in the '70's and '80's, have been achieved. On
all counts, this is a false claim; the 'post feminist' label serves
not to register achievement of reforming goals, but the delegitimation
of those goals themselves.

My reply:

Delusion no.9 is even further from my area of expertise. I will be tempted to look at both sides of the gender divide and the 'battle of the sexes', but will attempt to restrain going too much into the male condition, staying on the topic raised.

In large part, I see this as a true 'challenge' to the delusion posited, but my reasons for thinking so have nothing to do with the unequal female condition. It doesn't affect me, and has seeming little effect on the women I know well, (other than to make them stronger people, perhaps, which I count as no bad thing). Rather, to me this is another symptom of the ever-growing capacity of a certain kind of super-system to adapt, assimilate and eventually neutralise alternative systems of thought/politics/social behaviour. Ironically, the growth of academia provides this super-system with a powerful tool to assimilate such alternative propositions, as departments of specialist study are set up, entrained to funding sources and constrained to a model of production initiated by the Royal Society hundreds of years ago. In other words, observation separates the observer from the observed, and this can cut the heart out of an alternative proposition as all those who had the wit and the personality to broker their 'movement' to the masses find themselves 'legitimised' by default. "Turn on, tune in and drop out" became a radio station catchphrase. Consciousness expansion became a recreation from the 9 to 5.

Feminism became legitimised, not because it worked, but because it settled for being listened to. Its proponents should have remembered whoever it was (Greer?) that said "if you're looking for equality, you're not thinking big enough" (paraphrase), because as I see it, men and women are not equal. There is ascendancy and subjugation at every level of each person's condition, all across the board. Men treat women like shit across the world, and men humiliate themselves for the amusement of women in their turn. Nowhere is it truly equal, and the greater trends of inequality that feminism addressed could only be affected if it was recognised that this chaotic game of swings and roundabouts will perpetuate itself regardless. Thus you do not try for equality - instead you must try to hold your system outside of that greater one you wish to change, using its self-cohesive identity as a spur for change within the greater system until eventually that system settles to a new form around your one. That which you try to change, changes you. Don't try to change anything - just exist as you wish to and watch everything else change to meet you.

The reason this may not make any sense is that I haven't really tried to articulate it before. Interpret as you wish.

12 modern delusions that must be challenged: Reply

2007-03-08T19:47:00.000+02:00

Reply (to the replies) by the progenitor of this little discussion, my mother Patricia Howard:

Guys this is really exciting for me, thank you for your terrific
replies so far, much to ponder, I will reply tomorrow, I have a little
point on Ben's chaos theory which might be worth mentioning. Kris
Suskind raises a scary vista, a society without laws, boundaries
principles or just at a very basic level common decency where true to
Nietzschean philosophy the law of the jungle applies. What is new? It
seems to me that Bush and his kind have met their own realities face
to face in 9/11 and the Muslim Fundamentalists, they are mirror images
of each other.

Our dependence on oil is no longer subconscious we know that we are
to blame because of our dependence on oil for the rapidly advancing
global warming. Oil has peaked, Bush is the dying scream of an
obsolete way of life. The radical Muslims are his hateful and hating
shadow world.
Have to be quick tonight as I must meet with the salt of the earth
tomorrow, those who are trying to save the planet in their local way.
Saving food miles and much much more, the brown earth people of
Wexford. I am privileged.

To pick up a point in 'Ben's Chaos Theory' - quote 'that very small
changes can result in very large changes to the state of the system
over time' It is very interesting to note the weather - a beautiful
calm day not a puff of wind, about mid afternoon a tiny puff caresses
the face, by nightfall a full blown storm has gathered force. The
weather can be predicted, but only accurately to about one week hence.

12 modern delusions that must be challenged: #10

2007-03-08T19:40:00.000+02:00

Number 10: We have no need for History

In recent decades large areas of intellectual and academic life-political thought and analysis, economics, philosophy - have jettisoned a concern with history. Yet it remains true that those who ignore history repeat it;as the recycling of unacknowledged cold war premises by the Bush administration in Iraq has devastatingly shown.

My Reply:

This is less my area, so there'll be less of a point to my ramblings.

It is interesting to look at the actions of the Bush administration under the assumption of their ignorance of history, but its probably truer to say that the people who elected him are the ones ignorant of history. Take this little nugget, gleaned from a progressive blog site at http://www.inthesetimes.com

In the autumn of 2004, shortly before the U.S. presidential election and in the middle of a typically bloody month in Iraq, the New York Times Magazine ran a feature article on the casualty of truth in the Bush administration. In a soon-to-be-infamous passage, the writer, Ron Suskind, recounted a conversation between himself and an unnamed senior adviser to the president:

The aide said that guys like me were 'in what we call the reality-based community,' which he defined as people who 'believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.' I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. 'That's not the way the world really works anymore,' he continued. 'We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you are studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we'll act again creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors … and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.'

History is not their enemy, it is their target. To be the writers of history, means to be the winners. This is the Plan for the New American Century - they want to take over the world. Or keep taking it over. I think they stand a good chance too, because we all depend on 300 million under-educated, overfed sheep to reign in their worst excesses.

History as a warning, serves only those who have a discerning eye for detail and the truth so that they can pick out the propaganda from the reportage. History as a tool, served only the winners. But now there is the internet, and everyone can write their own history. The problem then becomes, no one can read all that history to decide the ultimate truth, no more than one can talk to everyone in the world to get the popular opinion. So the history being written remains the preserve of those who have the biggest broadcast bandwidth.

I did warn that there wouldn't be much of an overall point to this!

12 modern delusions that must be challenged: #11

2007-03-06T22:46:00.000+02:00

No 11. The World is Speeding Up.

This, a favourite trope of globalisation theorists, confuses acceleration in some areas, such as the transmission of knowledge, with the fact that large areas of human life continue to demand the same time as before; to conceive and bear a child, to learn a language, to grow up, to digest a meal, to enjoy a joke, to read a poem, to make a pot. It takes the same time to fly from London to New York as it did 40 years ago, ditto to boil an egg or publish a book. Some activities - such as driving around major Western cities (Dublin!), getting through an airport or dying - may take much longer.

My Reply:

Number 11 could stray very much into the territory of subjectivity of existence. If we are not part of a True external reality, then we are merely experiencing a construct of our own senses and beliefs, which are quite malleable. The acceleration of knowledge acquisition forces the mind to view its own beliefs, and thus its own state, as less permanent all the time. Thus the 'world' of experience is literally speeding up, since no one part of it features as a fixture or landmark for quite as long as it used to. However, this is easy to say for someone who has never borne a child, which is an easy state alteration to achieve (many a slip twixt...) but much harder to move out of again short of the natural 9 month term. Other examples abound, as shown below.

The question that still holds for the accelerationista's after this argument is made, is that if experience is in fact subjective, and reality is in some way a construct of our self-consciousness (we think, therefore everything is) - well then, why is there an accelerating wave of biological science along with knowledge-based science, that could alter even such things as pregnancy terms, unless we are imagining for ourselves a future where thought and the external effect that it creates come closer and closer together, until cognitive causality is almost instantaneous.

It is the implication of the unfettered potential of human science, that in order to 'keep up' with it, we would not be able to remain human ourselves. The essential characteristics of human consciouness, never mind physiology, wouldn't hack it when things really start speeding up. The keywords as to why this is, for those who don't really get what I'm driving at, are massively parallel and non-selfhood.

Other replies (from Kris McGlinn):

Reminds me a little of Icarus.

This kind of makes me think about another question I have wondered about. At what point can we say we exist in the same world? For instance, I am aware of animals in the wild...does that mean that they must be aware of me in some sense? Or can I be aware of realities that other people I share this world with are unaware of, just like they may be aware of realities that I am not aware of...and at what point can we say we no longer exist in the same world?

I suppose what I am really getting at is, if there is some correlation between myself, the technology I use, my environment and the humanity I identify myself with (including its history and current technological advancements), then at what point do I become human? and how do we agree what it is to be human? and is there a point at which we can say we are no longer human? or is the entire concept of humanity as misguided as concepts of individual identity ( i.e. there is no division, we are all one)?

Kris.

Here is another thought for those interested in Numerology with a little bit of mythology mixed in (to be taken with a pinch of salt). Number 11 has caused us to question our reality, and of course 9/11 is brought up which is inextricably tied to the collapse of the twin towers. The twin towers are similar to the pillars of heracles which were also seen as gateways from one world into the next (see also Dantes Inferno). The twin towers were the pillars that opened up into the new world of america, these have now fallen. In their place we have ground zero, a term normally associated with the aftermath of a detonation of an atomic bomb (I believe the germans also called the remnants of their burnt out cities ground zero at the end of world war 2).

What will be raised up from the ashes in the place of ground zero? Will it be a reflection of the collective state of consciousness if not of the whole world, at least of the western world (I wont go into the implications of the phallic patriarchal giant tower, maybe that is for the feminists)? But I suppose what interested me was the point that was made, in that Bush sees his own reflection in islamic fundamentalism. If this is so, and the dots we join around 911 reflect how we choose to interpret the events building whatever narrative we feel gives our lives meaning (the events may be completely random, unpredictable and chaotic)...then what part of us does Bush and islamic fundamentalism reflect? Possibly our subconscious realisation of a dependence on oil and the part this plays in the bolstering of the oil barons, along with the suffering it brings to the people of the middle east?

Kris.

12 modern delusions that must be challenged: #12

2007-03-05T21:02:00.000+02:00

Number 12: Human behaviour can be predicted.
In the name of a supposedly "scientific" criterion of knowledge,
scholars are berated for not predicting the end of the cold war, the
rise of Islam, 9/11 and much more besides. Yet many natural sciences -
seismology, evolutionary biology - cannot predict with accuracy
either. Human affairs themselves, even leaving aside the matter of
human intentions and will, allow of too many variables for such
calculation. We will never be able to predict with certainty the
outcome of a sports contest, the incidence of revolutions, the
duration of passion or how long an individual will live.

My reply:
Isaac Asimov is probably to blame here, for writing the 'Foundation' sci-fi novels, wherein a galactic utopian civilisation is built on the work of mathematician Hari Sheldon, who constructs a model of humanity that can predict large-scale trends with complete accuracy. But this was written before the widespread work began on chaos theory, which says that very small changes in beginning conditions can result in very large changes to the state of the system over time. This means that unless you can know with arbitrary precision, the state of the system now, you cannot predict its behaviour over time. Most complex systems are also chaotic. The problem is not one of modelling (which is what people expect the scientists to do), but of data gathering (which is what they *should* actually do, and build the models after to help confirm or disconfirm their hypotheses).
Even if you could have sensors placed around the earth's atmosphere and oceans in a grid with 1cm intervals, and even though the mathematical models for fluid dynamics are perfectly accurate , you cannot measure the current state of the weather with a fine enough precision to predict more than a weeks worth of weather with accuracy. You can't even predict the behaviour of liquid in a small pot with accuracy using fluid dynamics.

Thus the only way to gather enough data on our 'reality' that you could predict its behaviour, is to measure and store its quantum state. Now if you have a large enough quantum computer (say one with the same number of quantum states as the reality you're measuring), you could store this measured quantum state and run it in simulation to 'predict' the behaviour of the 'real' system. There are three problems with this. Firstly, the computer would run no faster than the reality so it wouldn't really be a prediction at all. Secondly, perhaps more importantly and for various reasons that I mostly forget, in order to replicate a quantum state you have to destroy the original - so there would be no reality left to observe the results of the prediction, except inside the prediction. Thirdly, the quantum computer that you built was originally part of the quantum state that you're trying to simulate, so in trying to measure it and simulate it, you need to replicate it inside itself, and then destroy it outside of itself.

Hopefully that's enough paradox to adjudge the whole idea of predicting human behaviour as pointless.

12 modern delusions that must be challenged

2007-03-05T20:50:00.000+02:00

In a broadside at the accepted wisdom of the plutocracy, Fred Halliday posited 12 delusions of modern times. Attempting to engender discussion among family and friends, my mother broadcast this series over email and I took the forum floor with my ramblings.
Here, since mum has no blog of her own yet, that series will be reproduced along with any answers that were forthcoming from the family and friends she broadcast to. Counting down, we start with number 12.

Thanks to Fred Halliday for unpermitted reproduction of his 'delusions': Fred Halliday is professor of international relations at the LSE, and visiting professor at the Barcelona Institute of International Studies (IBEI).

Another great eye, but still ever watchful

2007-02-25T19:52:00.000+02:00

Now that's some cool space fireworks!

Stirring it...

2007-02-16T00:19:00.000+02:00

Recently went and stirred the shit on the www.gamedevelopers.ie forum, under my forum name of catbert, in a thread addressing the debate over the value of new-ish undergraduate courses in game development. Here is an abridged version, highlighting the main points and counter points:

catbert:

Doesn't it ever seem to those working in academia that the games companies don't actually deserve what they're looking for? After you slave over a hot student (pun intended) for four years, wouldn't you rather send them anywhere else but the games industry?

I'm not going to go trawling for figures to back this up, but having read this article - it's clear that some world-class graduates are going to be employed in those games companies in four years.

Yet what can they expect? This isn't a government defence contract, they're not going to be rolling in cash, and still they'll be expected to work a full-time intensive grind until they burn out after five years. If an industry treats its employees in this way, why should they get the best?

Some of the games degrees [on offer in Ireland] have been accussed of deceiving prospective applicants into thinking that the sub-par education they offer will get them a job. Maybe they do. But an industry that treats employees as asset collateral with a 5-year half-life, could be accused of a greater deception - that the job is worth having in the first place!

*rant over >:) *

When pressed on my claim that industry workers have an average 5 year career, I had to go and find the article I had read on it so many months ago. Damn them. Happily, I had Google to hand (when does one not?). This was backed up by a later reply (see Idora's reply below) quoting the original IGDA white paper :

http://www.escapistmagazine.com/print/40/23

Specifically, this: "When the average career length of the game development workforce is just over five years and over 50% of developers admit they don't plan to hang around for more than 10, we have a problem."

Then there was a bit of to-ing and fro-ing on the issue of crunch-time, or intensive long-term (oft-unrewarded) overtime prior to a games shipping date.

Darragh: it would be very hard to maintain [any] sort of lifestyle when you're working from 9am to 1am in the morning..

Omen: that is an exaggeration and its one that really needs to be kicked out, because it simply shouldn't be true. Thats one of the reasons I left Rockstar, because I simply wasn't prepared to work like that.

Peter_b: I've only worked a short big of overtime here and it was all highly compensated, both financially and in grub .

Kyotokid: we worked quite a bit of overtime to get MotorStorm out the door....so crunch does exist.
omen: Yes, crunch does exist, but you can say no.

Now, I actually enjoy crunch time, as it exists in the areas in which I work. And I said so, but I also had to get back to my point:

But I reiterate my original point - games companies, like all the entertainment industries, are guilty of 'selling' the jobs they offer based on the associated 'coolness' of the product they produce. No developer recruitment ad ever shows a picture of an office, they show Lara Croft.
So who are they to point fingers at the universities for mis-representing themselves?

In cinema, 'runners' work 16 hour days for no pay simply for the chance to be on a film set. How much of what should by rights be remunerated to a skilled individual worker, is actually withheld by games companies just because the junior employees accept it as 'the cost of working in games'?

It was shortly after that we got a real reply, addressing the crux of the argument in general and not just nit-picking the corners off my hasty scribbles:

Idora:

catbert wrote:

the point of the origin of this discussion is that there perhaps isn't as much slaving 'over a hot student' as there probably should be…

catbert wrote:

Idora and/or some other industry folk (was it the panel at the GameOn conference in DIT? Refresh my memory Idora) have been accusing some of the games degrees of deceiving prospective applicants into thinking that the sub-par education they offer will get them a job

Gotta be careful on this one – this comment was made in relation to *some* courses (and not necessarily degree courses either) that simply rebadge existing courses and call them games

Also, it's not a matter of deserving them. We have jobs; some graduates want them; end of.

catbert wrote:

omen wrote:

I'd take that article with a pinch of salt

It was written by the Executive Director of the International Game Developers Association. Ask Idora if he is worth his salt.

The figures quotes are from the first QOL survey done in 2004 by the IGDA in preparation for writing the QOL White Paper. More info and highlighted stats here (incl. full survey source data for those interested):- http://www.igda.org/qol/whitepaper.php

Overtime is necessary at some point in most industries (every job I’ve ever had anyway). And as others have pointed out – there more than a few companies/industries where OT isn’t compensated fairly or at all. How about teachers/lecturers with all that lesson prep time, for example?

While there are many games companies not compensating employees for OT, and many that seem to think crunch is the ONLY way to do it, there are also many that do compensate for OT (e.g. bonuses, stock/stock options, time in lieu, overtime, etc.), and many more that work hard to do little or no overtime at all.

[ For those new to the industry or unfamiliar with the term ‘crunch time’ is extended/intensive overtime, i.e. working 12 – 14 hrs a day every day for a week or working a normal 8 hr day but having to work EVERY day, including weekends, for a month ]

For the record – I am now on my third games industry job and have worked crunch only once for 2.5 months and that was only because I was starting a new job, helping organise the Awakenings conference AND had a (self-imposed) major deadline looming. In the first year of my current job we have worked on multiple projects (sometimes simultaneously) and have worked approx. 50 HOURS overtime in total on those projects without any crunch. There are a few folks on this forum who could tell you similar stories

catbert wrote:

I reiterate my original point - games companies, like all the entertainment industries, are guilty of 'selling' the jobs they offer based on the associated 'coolness' of the product they produce.

Catbert, while I agree with most of the individual points you’ve made (but not the overall thrust of your argument), this one is verging close to WTF? territory.

It’s sales – using a poster of Lara Croft or the ‘coolness’ factor to attract the brightest and best is absolutely acceptable, above reproach and NOTHING WHATSOEVER to do with unrewarded crunch time

So I thought to wrap it up around there:

Excellent, a response worth reading. In the end, although I still say games companies take advantage of the illusions of young enthusiasts simply because they can, I too fall on the side of: its not about deserving a job. No more than luck exists, to deserve is not a personal attribute.

If someone falls for the gd's hype, thats their problem, just like coming to college expecting to be spoonfed an education is the problem of all under appreciative welfare state scions. But thats another debate...

Needless to say, the debate goes on. Some useful things were said though, and we all ended up…well, probably none the wiser. Such is the way of the social consensus wisdom of the web – sometimes all the equal voices harmonise and come together in a great hosanna to enlightenment; sometimes, its just babel.

AAAAARRRGH!

2007-02-16T00:03:00.000+02:00

Dear God I'm busy!

If all the effort required to invest myself in all areas covered by my interests, pays off, then I shall be rich beyond riches, but only in whatever metric is suggested by the phrase "pays off"...

Half the time required for a nuclei to undergo radioative decay

2007-01-14T09:38:00.000+02:00

07.41am, Sunday morning 14 January 2007. About a year and a half after everyone else, I finally finished HL2. Quite worth the extended attention, I feel. But sorry to say, the delay was not of my making. Fucking Bastard Steam-Mongering Pieces of Shit (it's not bad language, that's their official name!) left a game killing bug right at the beginning of the last section. And here's the crazy part - it's a bug that is completely explicable to even a rigorously logical person though the internal consistency of the ingame narrative.
To elaborate - I got stuck at the beginning of the level entitled 'Our Benfactors', just after Gordon enters the Combine Citadel and has his gravity gun ungraded for free (nice Combine). The way forward hit a junction - a choice between a corridor blocked by a forcefield, and one blocked by a low metal railing. Well, what choice? Clearly a low metal railing is within our power to overcome? But no, for it became apparent that somehow after entering the Citadel, we lost the abilty to jump. Legovers were never a part of the control set, so the low metal railing appears to have stymied us. Nonsensical? Perhaps not. When life gives you lemons, even if they make no sense, do you first ask - why would I be getting lemons? That's just stupid. OR, do you assume that life knows what it's doing, and instead ask - what am I gonna do with all these lemons and no booze?
In a computer game - a triple A game with a 5 year development cycle, no less - similar assumptions apply. After all, logically speaking, why put a low rail across the only forward path? It makes no sense unless the novel inability to jump is an intended gameplay development. But why, suddenly, should we be unable to jump? Is gravity stronger inside the Citadel? Well hardly. We were jumping and prancing about right up until they confiscated our weapons - wait, the weapons! The gravity gun has been augmented by crazy Combine localised field technology! Could it be that its new potency must be traded against a kind of gravitic inertia? It seems plausible - nay, given the clear evidence of our denuded jumping capabilty, it seems definite. So that's the way the game system has gone. I guess we have to look for another way forward.
WRONG! NO! DO NOT PASS GO! DO NOT COLLECT BREEN'S HEAD-ON-A-STICK! In fact, return the game to the person you pirated it off and deny it your game of the year vote, cos you ain't goin noplace, son! Its just a fucking bug, disguised as a plausible gameplay feature with such improvidence, one can only suspect the hand of the horned one himself to be at work in the bowels of Valve.
It's a bug that you can't jump over the tiny, pointless fence at the start of the final section of HL2, and if you don't hold it within your mind that this is not necessarily a self-consistent, logically sound world that you are experiencing, you are in danger of treating the bug as a consequent feature of game-world attributes entrained to a plausibly real-world logic.
Which sucks, cos then there's an hour or so of fruitless level-wandering, back-tracking and head-scratching as you ponder on how to proceed, before concluding that reality demands this to be regarded as a hopeless cause, and the premiere game of 2005 is relegated like somebodies least favourite pair of underpants.

Or at least that's what happened to me, until I got my machine on broadband a while ago, got some free time a bit ago, and got around to investigated where it all went wrong a second ago. And so one blog ago, I finally finished HL2.
Not bad.
8/10

Somewhere along the line there, I wanted to ramble onto a thread of thought regarding human cognition and self-consistency. But its late, or rather early, so instead I'll just point here - and hope that one can access it. If not, perhaps another time!

mUsIc live, freedom love

2006-12-11T23:27:00.000+02:00

10%20Music%20Is%20My%20Hot%20Hot%20Sex.mp3

Check out this cool, cool band...

The answer moves, but always leaves you clues.
Every new state will reflect a past face.
All this comes to he who does not look but waits.
When walking, stumble and jog to hold steady.

That's all I have to say.

"A great Eye, ever watchful!"

2006-12-08T18:27:00.000+02:00

Saturn recently developed a superstorm over its south pole, the diameter of which is two thirds that of the Earth. Imagine, if it weren't for practical reality getting in the way, you could dip something the size of the Moon right in there without touching the sides. Cool.

Anyway, the point is that this news led me to this article, on this site, wherein I learnt about the electrical universe hypothesis. This hypothesis directly addresses one of the assumptions which I had about the local physik reality*, namely that the Earth has an electrical field, but it is localised and not linked to those of the other heavenly bodies. As I said in an earlier post, this assumption limits the capacity of the accessible electrical field, and in part caused me to drop or alter one of my mad notions about the nature of that part of our existence that some might say, concerns us most but is least well understood - the afterlife. What happens after life? Do we remain extant in any form? Where do we go if so? And so on.

Now, as if by magic, comes a new way of looking at the localised physik* that just might resuce the possibility in my mind of 'afterlife' phenomena without resorting to multi-extra-dimensional physical theories like String Theory. Which is good because, while I cannot criticise String Theory on any informed grounds, I am made uncomfortable in accepting it at face value simply because of its great self-divergence and lack of forward progress. But, if the electrical field extends beyond individual heavenly bodies, then we can imagine an infinite substrate on which to base the information storage/transmission necessary to allow some transference after death, of whatever pattern of energy it is that is associated with a living being.

It's all terribly pie in the sky, but quite a fun thought experiment. For if you grant it temporary credence, then you can start to think about all the exisiting faiths and metaphysics that rely on an afterlife concept of some sort but offer no rational physical explanation for it.

* Forgive my mad phraseology, but I just can't take myself too seriously when I write this stuff :D

Free your country!

2006-12-05T13:51:00.000+02:00

Verse
In my country there is problem,
And that problem is transport.
It take very very long,
Because Kazakhstan is big.

Chorus 1
Throw transport down the well (repeat line)
So my country can be free (repeat line)
We must make travel easy (repeat line)
Then we’ll have a big party (repeat line)

Verse 2
In my country there is problem
And that problem is the Jew
They take everybody money
And they never give it back

Chorus 2
Throw the jew down the well (repeat line)
So my country can be free (repeat line)
You must grab him by his horns (repeat line)
Then we have a big party (repeat line)

Verse 3
If you see the Jew coming
You must be carefull of his teeth
You must grab him by his money
And I tell you what to do

(Repeat Chorus 2 twice)

See it sung and played! Borat and his Cowboy Astoni-band! Yee-haw!
Then go and spread the message, that we can finally find a solution to the evil, thieving JEW. Not 'did you', but JEW.
(Perhaps these lyrics would be better set to some Vagner. I mean Wagner).

Wave of the future, Dude...

2006-12-01T19:01:00.000+02:00

Jobs for the boys! All those poor schmos slaving over their hot cracked 3DS max 7 can now put their underemployed talents to use, slaving over hot cracks in their hot cracked 3DS max 7. All you need is a good imagination and some business savvy, like these guys. And real feelings!
Cool :D

(loook at these women...they've got dead eyes!)

Statistics is fun!

2006-11-30T11:47:00.000+02:00

Hans Rosling gives it welly. On the development of the world since 1962.
This is interesting as, with the right kind of eyes, you can almost imagine accompanying slides demonstrating the trends associated with global warming over the same forty-year time period - and they would correlate.
Development in the Western world is not to blame for global environmental destruction - we are driving smaller cars, our families are at a stable size, economic growth is in low single digits. No, the blame is solely that of our vision. We are outnumbered many times by the huddled masses (that we huddled), and we gave them an economic model to follow that relies on exploitation and rapine. We told them they needed a western economy to enjoy the 'benefits' of a western lifestyle, and never once incentivised them to follow that model but with sensitivity to their own surroundings. In fact, we actively participated in the rape of mother nature. And you know what that makes us - mother fuckers*.
Gooooood Morning the West!

* For more on our shit-ness (actually mostly that of UK/US&A), see my previous post and hope the link is still valid.

Creative Computing @ Coleraine

2006-11-20T18:46:00.000+02:00

In case the Posting post wasn't obvious enough, my research group has a new site, in blog format, created by ME!
Go there or go to hades...
http://creativecomputingcoleraine.blogspot.com/index.html

Tool!

2006-11-20T17:57:00.000+02:00

As I said last post, conference this week in big Dubbers.
But, ok, I'm actually in town for a gig by Tool, contemporary kings of hard rock. Makes them sounds like Nashville country stars...hmm. Maybe modern Emperors of metal rock. Imperator musica!
The heirs to Zeppelin, in innovation, uncomprised excellence in both form and function, dedication to quality over commerce - it is fitting that they have produced the best Zeppelin cover to date in No Quarter. And if you count their sister band A Perfect Circle (basically the same members, but in a more reflective and politcal vein), also When the Levee Breaks. That one goes the other way, not powerhouse at all but interesting and delicate.

And coincidently (or not, as one might say that there is no such thing as coincidence), last week the Zep where inducted in the UK Hall of fame - maybe you saw it?
If not here's a clip: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fSYscoIx69A
A fair bit of waffle to start and then mostly clips from the DVD, but the end is worth it!

Of course its not that impressive to get into the hall of fame when Bonzo's already dining in the Hall of the Gods, drumming and boozing and shagging all at once like fuckin shiva, but the time will come for that for all of us.

Hail to the Gods of Rock!

Conferences

2006-11-20T15:30:00.000+02:00

CGAMES, 22nd-24th November, DIT Aungier Street, Dublin 2. Heading to my third conference this week, not on the back of any effort or work this time but as a volunteer. Gonna slide in and network for all I'm worth with the minimum of effort expended. Tie up a pretty good year on the self-promotion of my research front...

First off I wrote a paper, User-System-Experience Model for User Centred Design in Computer Games, expressing my understanding of gameplay, adaptivity, and the play experience as it stood. Quite a lot to squeeze into a little 5 page piece - took me longer to edit down than to write up! Accepted to Adaptive Hypermedia 2006, a pretty shit-hot conference even if I was only part of the Doctorial Consortium stream. Nice freebies, anyway :D
Next the reading I was doing led me to look at Information theory and eventually do some experiments on player modelling in Pacman using predictive methods - Using Decision Theory for Player Analysis in Pacman. Wrote that up for a promising-looking workshop in Roma (a favoured place, although more for the people than the locale), organised by the right honourable Yannkakis.
Then in swift succesion, writing up the 1 year confirmation report, attending AH'06 and back again for my confirmation hearing.
A summer of - not very much at all, but solidified my ideas on games, players and experience as information systems. Now it has all been turned into a journal paper (link when i get published!) and seminar. This will form the theoretical underpinning to my practical work, and there is a much clearer idea behind the point of it all than there was when
Thereafter, attended the workshop in Roma (proceedings here), then had myself a holiday in Venice (che bellissimo!). Formed some resolutions with the other delegates about the value of the workshop (it was the inaugural year, the form of its future was under question), leading to the formation of the 'Optimising Player Satisfaction in Computer Games' mailing list. Also I wrote a review on the C^3 blog.
Now that the journal and seminar are nearly done with, its almost time to begin a new phase of the PhD, with practical overtaking theoretical and coding trumping reading. I hope! I could wallow in papers and books forever, its a steep-sided slops pit of knowledge and I do manage to be productive within it.
But the little gods of computing demand a sacrificial offering, and I am not yet wont to follow the Lightbringer and carve out my own domain. So next up - Pacman!

Pacman HOOOOOOOO!