Conciousness, spiders, humans, machines, and anthropomorphism

Anthropomorphism is defined on Wikipedia to be: "the attribution of uniquely human characteristics and qualities to nonhuman beings, inanimate objects, or natural or supernatural phenomena." We use this term to attribute 'uniquely' human characteristics, but often mistake characteristics common to all conscious creatures as anthropomorphic features. I believe that we do this for a number of reasons. Firstly, as a species we have generally been incredibly arrogant and biased against any idea or hypothesis of consciousness or intelligence that treats humans and animals as fundamentally similar. We use the concept of anthropomorphism to artificially distinguish humans from animals. We also use it as a justification for belief in 'intelligent' design.

It is quite possible that when all is said and done, the only traits that are uniquely human are those that are solely cultural. Of course, these cultural traits are just as good as discriminants between individuals within different human cultures as they are between human beings and animals. What does this mean? We are just animals. Or removing the verbiage of human arrogance, we are biological machines just like the monkeys, the birds, and the bees.

I would guess that the only trait that distinguishes us from other biological machines in respect to fundamental mechanisms is brain complexity, but this trait is not uniquely human, just more pronounced inasmuch as we can measure or are aware. It is already well understood and accepted that we are not the most complex biological mechanisms within our own experience. We are no more complex than most of our mammalian counterparts. But far less complex than most any Earth ecosystem, even the most barren.

There is something about self-knowledge that intuitively seems particular to human activities. However, regardless of how self-aware we might be, I am pretty sure that even the simplest biological machine is self-aware. When a hand or newspaper threatens the continued existence of a spider, we consider this only to be the end of a potential nuisance. However, the spider understands at a far more fundamental and complete manner what it means to be squashed. The spider, however, considers this to mean the end of its existence. Does this make the spider conscious of its own existence? Most likely. Does this mean that it has a theory of mind? This is hard to establish without knowing spider-talk. Does it consider its existence in the same manner that I do? Probably not. However, do I consider my existence in the same manner that you do? Most likely not, although we share common biology, and aspects of culture. Depending upon the specific life-philosophies of another human, within particular domains, I might even have more in common with the spider. I am a rational, objective, and atheist. It is likely that within the simple mind of the spider, there is little spare room for the supernatural or sophism.

So, my whole point about discussing spiders and the self-awareness of such a creature is to bring to the forefront the idea that our assumptions about self-awareness are probably very incorrect. It is quite possible that any machine capable of truly independent action is also fully capable of being self-aware. Whether or not an animal, insect, or fungus is self-aware probably has less to do with whether or not we can detect it and more to do with natural selection. Does the biological machine in question have a mechanism in which knowledge of self can reside and be processed? More importantly, would the organism benefit from self-awareness?

If the mechanism of self-awareness is far more diverse or far simpler than we had ever presumed we could have easily overlooked it in our studies of anatomy and behavior. What about single-celled organisms? Organisms which are clearly driven by fixed responses can be easily modeled and understood, such as the forward motion of a protozoa. It isn't likely, but if there is a mechanism for self-awareness within such simple organisms we would probably have missed it due to using the wrong tools to attempt to observe it. And whenever self-awareness emerges within our own mechanical creations we probably won't realize it. So far, if it doesn't take the same exact form as that which we are so used to within our own minds, we simply don't know how to detect it. I think that so far, we understand these things in terms of their effects and not the ultimate causes.

Some references:
What is the Octopus Thinking?: http://www.fortunecity.com/emachines/e11/86/cephpod.html
Animal's Self Awareness: http://www.strato.net/~crvny/sa03002.htm
Cradle of Thought: http://books.google.com/books?id=OWzpKZwYNXkC
Animal Imagination: http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=288
Not so dumbo - elephant intelligence: http://www.bbc.co.uk/nature/animals/features/302feature2.shtml



Images:
Sponge Bob Hug - latca - Flickr.com - http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/deed.en
Spider IV - SeraphimC - Flickr.com -
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.0/deed.en

The problem with representation in technical language

I was having an enjoyable and extended leave-of-absence from academics for about 5 years. My day job didn't interfere much with my nights and weekends and I really felt that nearly everything that I did had a purpose. Whether this be software development, project management, basic research for my employer, or weekends spent bent on bringing about my own ingenious schemes.

Now that I have returned to academics, I realize that not much has changed in the last few years. It is great to have guides to navigate the enormous amount of material latent within any discipline. I generally enjoy lectures and enjoy the material presented (depending upon the format).

However, there are several things that I don't enjoy.

Particularly, I despise convoluted explanations for simple phenomena. Regardless of the field, the intent of specialized, specific language is make concepts more precise. Gaining this precision compromises generality and has a negative impact on nascent minds. But much of the use of specialized language is conjured out of no more than habit or expectations of academic precedence. Precision is fine, jargon for the sake of jargon is not.  This is done in corporate and government environments ad nauseam.  I shouldn't have to put up with it when doing science.

All precise terms should be succinctly and generically defined wherever they are used. A fundamental problem with the definitions provided for many terms is that they self-referentially depend on other precise terms. For the nascent learner, this is unacceptable. One cannot learn these terms without building conceptual context into which they fit and this won't happen if terms are defined outside of the context of shared human experience. For example: Eigenfunction is a complex sounding German derived word that simply means 'characteristic function'. These characteristic functions along with 'characteristic values' uniquely define a space, allowing all points within the space to be referenced using combinations of the eigenfunctions and eigenvalues.  The reason for the complex-sounding German word is that it is precise.  Mathematics is rife with specialized language.  So are many fields, but some are more sensible than others. Some leverage metaphor, common English, and broad cultural knowledge.  Whereas others seem to be completely unaware of the value of sensible representation.  My criticisms are straightforward:

1. a specialized language is a barrier to learning, understanding, and retention
2. little account of human cognition is considered in the design of technical language

3. technical languages are generally ill-conceived through a process of ad-hoc conglomeration

4. we have adequate knowledge of human cognition to design superior specialized languages

5. I am expected to 'deal with it' as part of the cost of acquiring new technical knowledge

This is unacceptable.  Quite simply, we need to rethink our approach and revise our technical language representations using a consistent approach having a scientific basis.  We must consider aspects of human cognition and human vision.  We must designing our technical languages (just as programming languages are designed) to take advantage of the human mind (just as programming languages take advantage of computing hardware).  

We must do this soon.  If not, the expanse of time (think 10's of thousands of years) will relegate all but the most obvious technical wizardry of today to the domain of the anthropologist.

The Fallacy of Free Music

Free from fees, free from taxes, free from licensing, and we are free from protection. This is the state of digital consumer media. Because we demand nothing but freedom from these things we demand nothing.

I don't really know a whole lot about copyright and there are thousands of sources of information on copyright and so many rants on copyright and DRM that there are rants about the rants, but I think that the answer to this whole mess is pretty simple and the consequences for the future, fairly dire.

The Digital Millennium Copyright Act (pdf summary) does not protect the rights of consumers. It protects the rights of copyright holders when and if they are able to file lawsuits against you for infringement. It protects your service provider by limiting their liability in regards to acts that you as their customer commit. But the DMCA does not do anything to protect the consumer and does nothing to provide proper incentives for consumers to respect the letter of the law in copyright. The very shallow thinking of counter-DMCA initiatives such as the Digital Media Consumers' Rights Act do little more than create exceptions to the mess created by the DMCA, really just bringing us back to a state where sanity is just over the horizon instead of where it is today: somewhere deep within the labyrinth of the legal system. And surely, even if you have never downloaded a song from the internet or the Pirate Bay you are still in the labyrinth because all of your music and movies are belong to someone else.

Beyond the scope of the DMCA, there are things for which consumers should be seeking protection. For example, when my material copy of a compact disk is damaged, I should retain the rights implicit in my original purchase; a license to make use of the licensed content. I should be able to retain access to the content of such media independent of any physical form. I think that my copyright; that is, my right to a copy upon purchase, should be protected. The double-speak of the copyright world would have us believe that we are purchasing a revocable license to limited use of the content, but that this ephemeral license is also tied to a physical media. It is encrypted to prevent my fair use. So smart consumers crack the encryption so that we can store our DVDs on our computers or listen to our copy-protected CD music on our iPods (or vice-versa). I would argue that if the license is ephemeral, it is logically independent of the media on which it is stored. And if my CD collection is stolen, lost, or otherwise destroyed, my license is not destroyed, but perhaps just proof that I had a license to begin with. This is even more true in today's world of digital content where I can't physically touch the tangible form of the media.

I think that if there are copyright laws to protect the copyright holder, there should certainly be complimentary law that guarantees certain rights to consumers. Isn't that license that I am purchasing just a contract anyway? How about someone write a better contract and give me good sound reasons to hold true to the contract.

I'm not even sure what is truly a copyright violation. Just ask yourself. If you watch a film on DVD with some friends, how many friends does it take for it to be a 'public presentation'? Is it infringement to show a Halloween flick at a party with 15 people present? How about 30?  50? What if everyone is invited? Do you feel like you are violating copyright when you are downloading music for which have already purchased a license? Are those individuals that are providing you with this download service violating copyright? According to the law, it is probably "yes" in both cases. Should this be the case? Probably not. If the media conglomerates want to retain control of their music, then they need to let us do the controlling. As a metaphor drawn out to ridiculous lengths: How does any person or group think that they can drive all of our cars all at once given that we are all going in different directions, at different speeds, to different destinations, and will make different stops on the way. I don't want to be confounded by the DRM "encryption circus". I don't want DRM. The real copyright violators will copy whatever they want anyway. Why don't we do something to take away their incentive to copy instead of our fair use rights to the media? It just hurts the consumer and gives us less for more. We pay more for music and films today in part because of the extra special secret sauce of DRM. It doesn't do anything for me but cause me physical pain and make me angry.

To elucidate a bit: I just recently had video produced for a conference. The production team did a good job and keeping things absolutely simple, they didn't do anything extra or charge me anything extra. Their process was to go directly from DV to DVD. This would be fine if I thought DVD was an adequate distribution mechanism, but it isn't. I wanted AVI or QuickTime, hell, anything web-ready, which absolutely excludes DVD. With 6 DVDs representing about 13 hours of video in hand, I was faced with the completely stupid situation of having to extract and decrypt DVDs for which I own the copyright. Huh? So yeah, I'm a geek, this should be simple, but settings be damned, it takes an awful lot of trial & error trying to make sure that everything is ripping and decrypted properly and that the re-encoding process doesn't screw things up. It took me nearly two weeks of trial and error to find the right software and the right software configuration to get things into the right format without any horrendous glitches. I'd even done this before with DVD movies that I own, and I'm tech savvy. Sometimes it seems painless, but most of the time it is like sawing off one of your own limbs. Like I said, DVD encryption and format settings be damned.

Before you start pointing me in the direction of the newest and greatest wiz-bang DVD extraction tool 1, just ask: Why the hell was it encrypted to begin with? Encrypted? Never-mind that the production team has a broken process. They are just going along with the industry and using the de facto standard. The de facto standard is to go through superfluous steps which take incredible amounts of extra work to make the content as difficult to copy as possible. WTF? If we continue down this path there will be nothing left of the present when the future finally arrives. It will all be lost to the noise of arbitrary encryption schemes that only ever really served to make things temporary, fragile, and disposable in the face of time.

Oh, sure, we'll have über-geeks and super smart software that knows about gobs of DRM and media encryption/encoding/decoding schemes, but should our technological resources really be so caught up in just decrypting and decoding the present (or worse, the past)? Why will the future of media suck if we continue? Because encryption will always be broken, new methods will always need to be developed, and before we know it we will just have a huge retarded trash heap of media rights management technology that requires media players and computers smarter than people just to figure out how to pull a dead rabbit out of the very convoluted hat. I don't want that.


So what do we do? Fuck it. Drop DRM entirely and completely. Artists should produce art because they enjoy producing it. My home stereo output is definitely not a live performance and it shouldn't cost anything close, especially when the media is for all intents and purposes, intangible.

If you put control back in my hands, I'll do what I think is right. I just bought the new Radiohead album, which is being sold with exactly this model. I paid what I thought it was worth to download the album. Less than what I would have paid on iTunes, but far more than free. Just think, because people pay what they think it is worth, or what they think that they can pay, there is no market for pirating it. That option was not available before. This is a really good idea and it doesn't require any computer geniuses to figure out how to implement or big, dumb, greedy companies to try to cajole me into thinking it is OK. It is better than OK. It makes sense where current digital music pricing and DRM are senseless.

One might also turn to Copyleft or Creative Commons and release your original works into the public domain, or use the Creative Commons license tools, draft your own license, and distribute it yourself. This has worked for me so far, as I have produced only 2-3 original compositions per year. And since I'm not in it for the money, please, download my music. It will make me happy knowing that someone else is listening to it and enjoying it. Which brings me back to the point I was trying to make before losing myself in the agonies of DRM. Why do we listen to music? Why do we make music? Why do we communicate?

I like good music. I enjoy making art. And I like good ideas. And I'm really not convinced that wealth creates better art. I don't think that there is any correlation at all. And I'm absolutely certain that DRM is a dumb idea. If you can convince me otherwise, I'll buy you dinner where I'll provide you with an encryption key for viewing my next blog post.

Is the US Postal service surviving solely via spam-revenue

I am continually annoyed at the amount of advertisement mail that is sent to individuals via the US Postal Service. It seems that in their struggle to stay pertinent within a world which has many venues for communication and the shipping of parcels that they have become simply a business of waste. I have lived in several apartment complexes in the last few years. There was always a trash can full of advertising mailers which was filled every week. This amounts to hundreds of pounds of excess material each month and tons of material every year. Multiplied across all of the individuals that receive unsolicited mail this is an enormous amount of paper material on the order of hundreds of millions of tons. This is just stupid.

When I asked a US Postal Service employee how I could opt-out of unsolicited mailers I was told that I could not. Ridiculous. I don't even really care if they charge me more due to loss of advertising revenue. Just stop it. It goes without saying that most of us like trees a whole lot more than we like unsolicited junk mail.

I propose that unsolicited mail be banned from delivery and fines be levied against those that send it. A 'do not send me junk mail' list is not appropriate or sufficient. Instead an opt-in system should be created where I can choose to opt in to mailers in general or I can opt-in just for specific mailers from specific companies and groups, or I can even have a set of preferences that detail what type of material would be most suited to my interests. Laws protecting consumers and the environment need to be created and enforced. An opt-in system, both for physical mail, phone solicitation, and email solicitation needs to be implemented. It is far too wasteful to continue wasting our time, energy, and natural resources on such trivially stupid cultural missteps.

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Update:

A couple of things that you can do to prevent yourself from receiving junk mail:

• Update your Direct Marketing Association preferences: DMA's Mail Preference Service
• Opt out of pre-screened credit card offers: OptOutPrescreen.com
• Because telemarketing just sucks: DoNotCall.gov

I was amazed at the mis-information presented on the DMA website during the opt-out process. The suggestion that receiving junk mail is environmentally friendly due to increased shopping from home is stupid. This may have been true before the internet existed. And even though you can 'save' money from local vendors who send coupons we shouldn't be doing this via mailers. We need to send a message to local advertisers to use online advertisement methods.