cheating the Real with the Real: evolving a Mind with nature's tools

ever since ants solved the traveling salesman problem - beating humans by a margin of a few million years (and counting, down) - it's been a little awkward in the sciences. 

man's slightly clunky love affair with computation was based on a messy and very human misrecognition of its partner. things that came hard to us - long algorithmic computation, advanced logical manipulation, keeping track of dentist appointments - computers were able to do reliably, gracefully and fast. so (not-entirely-grounded projections being the main business of the brain), of course we thought 'surely the next step, teaching computers to do the simple stuff like vision, language and object manipulation, will come pretty naturally. it's so damn easy!'.

well. uhm. as it turns out. erm. as we (maybe all conscious creatures!?) are wont to do, we projected the hell out of our premises onto computers then proceeded to flail aimlessly for decades, consistently failing to figure out a way to set up a logical system that was complex enough to handle those seemingly simple, actually insanely incomprehensible, tasks.

but all that is about to change - and, sweetest of victories, it doesn't even require us to stop with all the failing! suppose you have a problem so bizarre, uncertain, or even unposeable - say, self-driving or computer vision - that you are pretty sure the only way to solve it would be by some miraculous stroke of computability genius. how do you solve it?

you dont! you set it up so it solves itself while you sit back with a caipirinha and a massive research grant, at the very best telling it from time to time where to go. this is entirely true. the new, hot, exciting and funky field of machine learning does exactly that.

in different ways, neural networks and evolutionary algorithms take a bunch of premises, mix them all up, define a type of fitness measure - say, by showing it pictures of cats and rewarding good guesses, what they call back-propagation, or making a thousand tiny mutated copies of each racing algorithm and selecting the fastest, via artificial evolution - and let the simulation run on, continually improving itself and becoming more and more distant from anything that any human programmer could conceivably be able to come up with. understanding the underlying nature and structure of the phenomenon so as to abstract it into a coherent whole, subsequently modelling it under the guidance and control of abstract reasoning? naaah! let reality do the job for you.

this, incidentally, is exactly how nature herself prefers to code: throw a bunch of self-replicating interaction-heavy staggeringly-complex slightly-mutable beings encoded in long strings of dna out into the world, and let the least lame die slower than the rest! much shockingly, 80% of the code you finally come up with using machine learning is garbled incomprehensible junk! how very much like dna.

is this self-programming? not quite, but actually maybe, yup, perhaps in the same way that our learning is us self-programming without quite knowing what goes on in the brain.

so, amazing failures that we are as coders, we were still wise enough to take ourselves out of the equation in the name of progress. and even started making a very big fuss about it, throwing culture all sorts of curve balls about how big a step this is towards developing Artificial Inteligence and who knows maybe one day a less pathetic form of Mind.

what does all this tell us about the world? hastily grafted onto complex adaptive systems theory, the whole machine learning shebang opens up entire new vistas of exploration of the real. it sheds a bit of light on what exact kind of lazy, far-looking, hormone-ridden creatures we really are.

first, it poses a bunch of very pertinent questions as to how it is that other complex structures come to be, and whether we can or can't simulate them to try to get a better grasp on them. for instance, assuming one could just keep pumping more and more extropy on the daisyworld or the sugarscape, could you come up with humanlike institutions like money without ever coding for anything like subjectivity or meaning?

(the complex wet dream of course is that, given enough complexity, meaning itself just decides to pop up of its own accord like legendary brazilian patron saints. that's even supposed to be, according to pseudo-real-science, how meaning first emerges from the brain itself, which is what inspired the entire neural network boom)

second, and i hate to go all lacano-pseudokantian on you, at this point of machines doing eerie things, I feel that you gotta either split your reals or go back to the scientific revolution. half a real: meaning and everything ever interpreted. the other half: everything else - nuclear power, evolution, gravity, paper, butts.

maybe the most valuable lesson from complex systems machine learning is that it teaches us to see reality in ways that more clearly reveal its, and our, limitations. one of the problems is that it's really hard to rival the universe's parallel processing power, every atom a transistor, the ultimate infinite cellular automaton (citation needed). a possibly bigger problem, as always, is qualia - at what point do you have enough interconnected networks of computation that something like top-down self-referential self-representation just emerges? how much embodiment is needed for what we call consciousness? not that any engineer worthy of the name halts at the menace of philosophy. philosophy is us trying to ponder the whole imponderable, a neural network trying to dive right into the messy that made it come into being, where even humans now fear to tread.

jobless and ridiculously far away from the person i love the most (context is everything), the other night i dreamt i had a portable evolutionary algorithm, coded in python because i'm far from any kind of pro!, that i carried around everywhere with me kind of like a sidekick, and every time i answered a question or talked to someone it measured the context and the situation to the best of its ability then spawned billions of code-hypotheses on who i was, then backward propagated the shit of whatever i had answered till eventually it came up with - you guessed it, edging a bit towards nightmare now, what else - it came up with ANOTHER ME! 

it's soothing in a newtonian way to think that the dream was only a linear combination of kevin kelly charlie brooker and andrew ng, but, given the complex inscrutable 80%-junk-like capabilities of the brain, I suspect the universe knows better.

but there's a kind of kind poetry to this, our first move in unleashing our own self-obsolescence. keeping in mind that we all of us are first and foremost a digestive tube regulated by emotion and planted smack in the middle of a lot of messy nonchaos, then expected to do our best at learning, coming up with better learning mechanisms than ourselves - if you look at it from a kind of alien transcendental pure consciousness viewpoint -  doesn't seem all that far-fetched. maybe we can just go on with this removing ourselves from the programming and step aside for some proper-er consciousnesses to carry the torch. at this rate we'll have a talking walking (unfeeling) robot brain before we even figured out what meaning or experience are. goes to show how much to trust the untamed question-asking brain. in any case, machine learning is a game changer for all the games there are. I can't even remember what reality was supposed to be like before.

brazilian history - a primer for fools

hello great folk of the internet. a friend asked me to do a little sum up of brazilian history for a cultural awareness class he will be teaching in china, and (out of a dangerous mix between angst and boredom) i went slightly overboard with it. i got carried away trying to systematize the country, and ended up with a long overview of brazilian history (as seen through the amateurish bias of a left-wing educated non-historian). it's not very precise, but i don't think it is too wrong in most respects. plus, 'a nation is an imagined community', but different narratives can provide this collective imagination. though it isn't much, i think this one would suit brazilians better than the spontaneous, contradictory and unreflected one you usually get out of brazilians (but only if you pressure them.)

brazil's political/economic cycles:

1500 (discovery) to 1822 (independence): under portuguese rule

1500s - early settling on northeastern brazil, stirrings of economic activity, very limited exploration of the geographically intractable northwest. all portuguese activity was centered around pau-brasil, the red wood used as a dye by europeans that gives the country its name. the rest of brazilian history can be seen as a slow march towards the south from Salvador, our first colonial capital on the northeast.

1600s-1700s - progressive expansion towards the middle-southern coastal ares, sprinkled with portuguese territorial disputes against the spanish and the dutch on the northeastern coast. interestingly, the dutch took control of a major northeastern city for about 20 years. culture flourished and brasil's first theaters, libraries and public schools were built. they were all subsequently razed by the portuguese when they won the city back. contrast this relative barbarism of portuguese settlers with the tendency towards interbreeding mentioned below.

economic horizons of sugarcane and mining are discovered, and brazil takes off as one of the great european colonies. until the 1800s we were the world's only producer of sugar (no wonder our cuisine is unsashamedly sweet. actually things are always either very sweet or very salty, with no middle ground and no other real seasonings other than black pepper - there's some sort of psychoanthropological prohibition on mixing the two; sweets are always for dessert - or breakfast; grandmothers incredulously dismiss tales of lands where the two flavour combine in ecstatic verbotten pleasure).

for the next 200 years brazilian economic cycles were to be intimately connected with the international price of sugar. equatorial (northeastern) brazil proved to have the perfect geography and climate for sugarcane plantations. as the portuguese slowly drifted southward in search of more lands for cultivation, they stumbled on the great middle-south-american gold and silver reserves.

outlandish amounts of slaves were brought in from Africa (mostly what is now angola, not coincidentally another big portuguese-speaking country) to work on sugar processing and gold/silver mining. the usual death and opression rates for slaves apply. i've read once that more slaves were brought to brazil than to the rest of all the european colonies combined, but that should be double-checked.

this happened parallel to systematic extermination of the indigenous population, who the portuguese considered very hard to christianize and enslave. brazilian folk stories still present indians as lazy and perfectly contented living hand-to-mouth. this might be related to the fact that most south-american indians were hunter-gatherers - there were no great empire like the ones faces by the spanish on central america, only very small tribes entrenched deep within the jungle. disease played a greater role than warfare in killing the indians.

it's also worth noting that the portuguese were reportedly much more willing to mix with natives and african slaves (if you catch my drift) than other european colonizers. this is when the defining feature of brazilian ethnicity, miscegenation, begins to take shape. together with it go near-total absorption of native or immigrant cultures into portuguese culture.

a comparison i saw recently (but should be double-checked) states that, while in the u.s. african-americans represent around 5% of total population, in brazil 48% declared themselves black or mestizo in the 2010 census. given such intense miscegenation, our ethnic black doesn't correspond perfectly to the north-american. this has some extraordinary effects on the dynamics of racism and prejudice in the country - it runs silently and slightly more along economic than ethnic lines. brazil is demographically somewhere in between the north-american case (with a black minority) and the south-african case (with a white minority), but oddly this hasn't proven the right ground for the overt, institutionalized discrimination that one sees on the extremes of this spectrum. our top sociologists say that underneath the appearance of cordiality and friendliness hide the two-sided fears characteristic of slave-master relationships: the slaves' fear of the masters' power, and the masters' fear of the slaves rebellion. to even approach the subject as such, to expose the relations of domination and oppression, would threaten the social order, so this is all neatly tucked into a cover-up of giddy friendliness and hospitality. something like that might perhaps also be said of our foreign fetish. in any case, we'll gladly settle for appearing non-racist, whatever is going on underneath.

this period is sprinkled with disputes against the spanish for territorial rule of an until then not fully explored south america. the pope ruled in 1650something that everything west of the arbitrarily drawn line of Tordesilhas will belong to the spanish, everything east of it to the portuguese. the catholic god was no on spain's side: further exploration west of tordesillas reveals that the pacific ocean was just around the corner, and that's how south america ends up with one huge tract of portuguese-speaking unified land on the west (brazil) and a thin strip of assorted spanish-speaking countries on the east (all the pacific-facing other south american countries, chile, argentina, bolivia, venezuela, colombia...)

1800s onwards - "independence" and coffe time!

1822 - the portuguese royal family escapes napoleonic occupation of portugal and flees to Rio. in line with the economic march towards the south, the capital is changed from northeastern Salvador to southeastern Rio. for a few years Rio is not only the capital of portugal's greatest colony, but the capital of the crumbling portuguese empire itself! oh would it that the portuguese had stayed - i could be an european citizen now! alas, no such luck: napoleon was defeated and the royal family went back. but wait, what is that? plot twist! dom pedro 1st, the portuguese prince, decides to stay back? and proclaims independence from either portugal or from his father, it is difficult to say? with an early oedipal thrust, independent brazil is born as the world's only colony whose independence retained the royal line - the only colony which didn't go from monarchic rule to autonomous republic. these notional power shifts with no real citizen involvement will be a recurring theme in the future history of the country, and eerily enough some of it can even be seen on the citizen protests going on in the streets today.

together with the tordesillas debacle, this might have something to do with the fact that, compared to other south-american countries, brazil is huge and oddly unified. the trend towards total incorporation of immigrant cultures into portuguese-brazilian culture continued, and though now a minority of the population is strictly portuguese-descendant, virtually everybody, no matter where their ancestors came from, lost their original languages and speaks plain silly brazilian portuguese.

there's a word in portuguese that's hard to translate into english: migue. migue is compromise solution, a sort of half-assed attempt to do something that turns out to have reasonably acceptable results. a versatile word, it is a favourite among university students who leave all the work for the last minute and finally succeed - they migue their way around exams. a related expression is 'pra ingles ver', which means something like 'for English eyes' or 'to show the English' - something done with just the minimal amount of effort, just enough effort to come up results that fool the viewer in a superficial first analysis. these could be considered a guiding principle of the way brazilian politics work, and of the way we deal with others and with each other: an appearance of democracy, an appearance of cordiality, an appearance of cheerful dedication to football and dancing on the streets, and more recently an appearance of emerging as a big player in the international economy. we'll settle for the appearance - isn't that what identity really is in last analysis? brazilian thought shies away from breaking these images down, from trying to look at the underlying processes. i'm not sure if even this can be said - it's tricky to discuss culture from inside it. on the other hand, it would be something by its very fictional nature hard to explore from some sort of cultural outside.

anyway. 1800s. coffee makes tentative dabs at the south, and slowly succeeds in establishing itself as what would be the centerpiece of the brazilian economy until the early twentieth century. the northeast is too hot for it, so farming migrates to the southeast and sao paulo state proves to be the most suitable for production. once it reaches sao paulo, towards the end of the century, it booms. brazil's first (and sadly last, now half-abandoned) true railroad is built to transport the coffee to the Santos port on the southern atlantic, near Sao Paulo city. immigration, mostly from italy and japan, starts to present itself as an alternative to slave labour. coffee and free labour were to become intimately connected, and the first features of a possible market society emerge on the south.

1890 - slavery and monarchy are abolished in a so-called revolution that lasted for a couple of days and shed no blood. the change to republic is considered just a rearrangement of power structures to follow the shift of economic activity from the northeast - which is now facing exhaustion of mines and competition in sugar production from the dutch - to the southeast, where coffee for export rules absolute, a stern but gracious, oversweetened dark lord. minas gerais, the state north of sao paulo where all the mines were, slowly shifts towards cattle farming. thus begins what is mockingly (but also a bit affectionately) called the coffee-with-milk republic: a joint rule under democratic guise between the two most economically meaningful states, coffee-farming Sao Paulo and beefy, milky Minas.

with slavery abolished, immigration from troubled europe booms. what now accounts for about 30% of the population comes to brazil to work in the coffee sector and around it. italians and japanese, then later syrian and lebanese, come to sao paulo, germans to the southernmost states. the north and northeast, the shining stars of colonial times, are left to its own devices, and have to deal with the thorny issues of slavery abolished without a plan for reintegration of former slaves into the economy - an inflexible agrarian economy that is slowly but steadily collapsing. leave it to the invisible hand of the market! 150 years later, today, the situation is more or less the same.

in this sense, brazilian history resembles (or better yet, mirrors; or better yet, fails to imitate successfully) north-american history - a slave-driving north versus a tentatively industrial south. no civil war though, and consequently no centralized, directed development plan.

1900s - republican times and the emergence of modern brazilian culture

30s - during the great depression, early signs of change from primary exports to autonomous industry by government-controlled market manipulation of coffee prices and reinvestment of profits in manufacture. an incipient consumer base of free labour provides market enough to begin trying out industrialization on import-substitution lines. this is helped out by the sad state of the international economy at the time and goes on until the 50s.

1932 - sao paulo attempts independence from the rest of brazil and is swiftly crushed. my grandfather is born on an italian-descendant peasant family in inner sao paulo state. horray!

getulio vargas, perhaps the most notorious brazilian statesma, the brazilian Churchill so to speak, rises to power and suckerpunches the coffee-with-milk republic into the past. he would rule as president twice, military-non-parliamentary head of state once, lead brazil through the second world war, align with the Alliance despite state-centralistic tendencies, coax massive investment in base industry and infrastructure out of the US in exchange for helping out with the european collective suicide, establish the brazilian welfare system and labour protection laws, finally making a dent in the heritage of slavery and opression, control international coffee prices through production monopoly and stocking/marketing strategies, reinvest the accumulated coffee profits in manufacture, giving brazil the first shot at becoming an autonomous industrial nation, and finally commit suicide days before a coup meant to finally depose him. his suicide letter reads "I exit life to enter history". fliegende kinderscheisse!

in the 50s, more concerted efforts at proper industrialization are attempted. some of it goes well, and construction of what is to become the new capital is begun in some remote, desertic, not-easily-accessible-by-the population corner of the Sertao. with a renewed wave of immigration and under the pen of architect and (very)arguable national hero Oscar Niyemeyer, Brasilia emerges from the unmanifested into the main city of central Brasil. the capital is moved one last time from Rio, and there it stays until today.

for some wildly unimaginable reason that must be related to lobbying from the construction sector, it is decided that the fifth largest country on earth can do without railroads. "brazil has an automotive vocation", say the government ideologues of the time. all the investment in infra-structure goes towards massive road projects, some of which proved unreasonable and now lie in crumbles being devoured by the bits of the amazonian forests that still haven't been targeted for deforestation.

*today, with an average per capita income less than a quarter of germany's, the average brazilian owns more cars than the average german. a large number of these cars are ironically assembled by volkswagen. no one knows how to push for a shift towards mass-scale public transportation. the economy is dangerously reliant on the automotive industry, the one industrial sector that consistently fails to de-industrialize. perhaps even more so than in north-america, owning a car becomes the central identity-building feature of young brazilians. one could carelessly argue that brazilians care more about their cars than about anything else in their lives - the car is the cornerstone of the brazilian subject. it all unfailingly gives me the creeps and makes me run away to china!*

the 50's were the golden age of independent brazilian culture (despite our having lost the world cup to Uruguay in Rio!!). this is when the quintessential, untranslatable brazilian novel is written - grande sertao, veredas. it deals with the Sertao, the vast temperate-desertic land expanses of middle and northeastern brazil where the portuguese, the indians and the africans mixed for 200 years to give rise to an unique culture of oppression, plantation and miscegenation. samba and its variations, all mixes between portuguese fado and african rhytms, consolidate as a musical styles in the northeast. the more urban bossa nova is born in rio and sao paulo, and the two faces of brazilian musical culture are settled: the cheerful, carnal, rural samba versus the gloomy, sadness-obsessed, urban bossa. one major offshot of bossa nova is chorinho, which means literally 'the little cry'. our best music is full of yearning, nostalgia, existentialist dread and a constant ambiguous interplay between love and the death drive. same goes for our best poetry. this might all tie back in to Fado (semi-literally Fate), a portuguese musical style with much the same feature of resigningation against the dark spectre of destiny.

look for 'aguas de marco' on youku for the unanimously voted best brazilian song ever, and i challenge you not to cry when listening to it. i can also send you a translation of a paradigmatic brazilian poem about love (and love's necessary failure etc etc) by carlos drummond de andrade.

the 60s-80s follow the traditional south-american lines of u.s.-backed dictatorship. it is often argued that the cold war worked to the advantage of developing nations by making america slightly less averse to economic development in the third world. it is also often half-jokingly said that the great brazilian tragedy consists in argentina never having turned communist - as we all know, losing a world war or having a communist neighbour are the two sure-fire recipes for economic development in the second half of the 20th century.

it's interesting that we never really made a serious attempt at communism throughout the century: following what was at the time an already well-established tradition of lack of political commitment or even consciousness, communism in brazil was attempted half-heartedly and consisted, before the war, mostly of a few people aimlessly riding horses around southern brazil. after the war all left-wing thought was suppressed by the dictatorship. so there.

under militarized central rule, brazil did manage to make another big leap into industrial development. thus brazil has two so-called `economic miracles`: one on the 50s (under a democratic regime) and another on the 70s (under the dictatorship, when we almost finished the leap towards industrialization but finally dropped the technologically-autonomous ball)

history from the 80's on is the usual third-world spiel: hyperinflation, clumsily opening up of protected markets to global competition, presidential impeachment, privatization, de-industrialization, reversion to agrarian primary exports, total submission to national and international financial interests. our strategy to combat this seems to consist mostly of migueing our way around the most immediately pressing issues.

brazil today

brazil is now the world's fifth largest country in both area and population (8 million square km and 200 million people, respectively 90% and 45% of u.s. figures, give or take). the population is disproportionately concentrated on the industrial south/southeast, and the north and northeast still struggle with rampant poverty, lack of industrial activity, and an obscure political system that resembles medieval europe. no wizards or elves though, just plain peasant oppression and the occasional chupacabra.

we are the 9th largest economy (6th in some measures, but gdp is fictional anyway), but about 80th in per capita income. we are also, in hobsbawm's words, the world champions in economic inequality. our gini index is only surpassed by our interest rates (if you will pardon the index-imprecise comparison). average economic growth barely keeps up with population growth, though some redistributive measures have successfully been undertaken by the labour government of Lula.

besides portuguese as a language, catholicism is the other big cultural heirloom from portugal. brazil has long been the largest catholic country. the pope being, as we all know, the last remaining leader of the roman empire, this means that brazil is the last true roman colony! we are all romans down there, though our current brazilian army would probably be no match for ancient roman legionnaires. catholicism, however, is now fast losing ground to spiritism, african-inspired umbanda and the fundamentalist evangelical christianity that seems to be a universal trait of low-income populations in most modern third-world countries.

***postscript

protests broke out all over brazil in 2013, following the now well-established practice of apprently spontaneous, viral, meme-like social network mobilization. these are the first nationwide protests in 500 years of recorded history.

I left Brazil soon after the countrywide manifestations started, and the little I witnessed gave me a clear feeling of a lack of focus, of protest for protest's sake. The signs held by the protesters in my home town of about 200 thousand people were as likely to say "Brazilians - join in Jesus" as "Mayor - Pikachu doesn't evolve, but you can" (sic). This is a town that for 400 years was untouched by overt politics, and it all felt like a pretty strange awakening. Brazil is the world's largest catholic country and also the holder of the world's (reportedly) largest gay parade, but it still feels to me that between these apparently inconsistent extremes there's no room left for actual politics - a politics of reflection, commitment and systemic thought. From what I hear of the protests, or more properly fail to hear, this dislocation seems to have stuck - they are also watered down, even though repression isn't, and politics remain the business of the elite.

Interestingly enough, discontinuities can also be felt between government measures and whatever the average Brazilian would regard, if pressed, as his political beliefs. When an evangelical pastor was appointed as minister of human rights, before the protests, there was some measure of directed insatisfaction: it briefly appeared that we were moving towards identity politics without the usual first stop at public awareness about the challenges of development. Wasn't identity politics supposed to be a prerogative of rich countries? It seems not - incontrovertible steps towards legal status for homoaffective unions were taken without resistance last year, even though most of the non-university educated people I know would be against it, if asked. There doesn't seem to be a lot of connection between public opinion and political measures, for better or worse - and it doesn't seem like the protests have managed to bridge that gap.

***postpostscript
as of late 2015, the fight is on, the country is politically fractured, the wheels are turning on the conservative machine 

dated special effects: a faux-cognitivist take on the oppacity of the Real

carl sagan, in his old, dusty, dated and amazing The Dragons of Eden, describes how early-day research into human cognition first came to the conclusion that visual and auditory stimulus received by the right eye/ear is processed mostly on the left hemisphere of the brain and vice-versa. the description, when first heard, can cause a bit of a shock - a little jolt of 'why me, i wouldn't have thought as much!`

now a good question to be asked here could be: why not?? why would you have not thought as much?

the same thing will happen if you try to watch a video turn off the images and keep just the sound. you will hear a dialogue and build up a picture in your mind of where the IT is taking place, what the people are wearing and whatnot. if you turn the images back on you will probably be a bit surprised - things don't look like you imagined. but what gave you the right to imagine them a certain way in the first place? were you even aware of the things you slipped into your mental picture?

i think there might be more metaphysical subtleties operating here than might be first assumed. it goes beyond the seinfeld brain x penis chess scenario.

if, jaded overinformed scientific post-modernist that you are, this doesn't at all come as a surprise to you, let's settle for this: isn't it easy to imagine a pre-scientific witch-doctor vehemently contesting this idea when first presented to it?

a first approach might try to settle the subject by stating that there are separated, non-integrated brain functions or areas (or some other poorly defined category) for the feeling of ''this is real!!'' and for the coming up with sentences such as '''this is real'''; in a broad sense different cognitive operational goings-on behind our sense of reality and our our image of reality. sagan himself talks about different processes being responsible for, broadly, intuition and abstract reasoning. well doesn't this in turn come as a bit of a shock?

but, crucially, and a bit circularly: why would i have assumed otherwise? or better yet: did i actually assume the opposite? i doesn't feel like it - it just feels like something not reflected upon. but if it wasn't reflected upon, if it wasn't construed as a concept, how come there can be any shock at all at this non-assumption being wrong? isn't there some strange discontinuity at work here, a discontinuity between assuming things for no reason and then being surprised when the assumptions turn out wrong?

an immediate amateur-lacanian flavour can be given to to all this: didn't an elective professor of psychoanalysis and literature once told me that what we think as reality belongs more to the lacanian imaginary than what lacan actually calls the Real?

what, to get a little less sidetracked, then, is an assumption? can it be defined from sagan's vaguely cognitivist point of view?

Using Humor to Reverse-Engineer the Mind posits that the comic effect is an evolutionary reward system responsible for the survival of those brains better able to find fault on their mental models - more mirth-pleasure means more auditing of mental models for inconsistencies.

interestingly, according to this cognitive take on the brain, there is only a comic effect when a joke undermines or undoes an UNNOTICED assumption made in the course of building the mental model. it's the little things that enter the picture without being seen that posed a danger to survival, and humour brings them out to the fore.

to go back to 90s sitcom, for example: in seinfeld's 'the parking space': george says that because elaine moved the car rearview mirror he got discombobulated, to which she replies - like you've ever been combobulated. assumption breaks, mild hilarity ensues.

this seems distantly related to the odd fact that special effects on movies, much as computer generated environments in games, tend to look absolutely gorgeous when you first see them but starkly dated as soon as an improved version comes out. through some sort of reverse uncanny valley (an uncanny peak!?), when first presented to good special effects the brain goes Whoa, This Is The It. This Looks So Real. I Doubt Reality Itself Even Looks This Real. a year later you feel like you were just fooled by it. it feels like we can only detect visual flaws after having built up some intimacy with a better simulation. all the flaws you couldn't notice before suddenly scream up their presence. is it the case that those unnoticed absences are allowed to remain quiet and harmless in the shady assumption-zone of the brain until challenged?

(funnily enough, reality itself doesn't do as well, as a basis of comparison, as more and better special effects.)

this could also be what makes an accent an accent, and so hard to pin down: not differences in the way people perceive the sounds, but the tiny divergences between the way they DON'T perceive them. an accent sounds out because it hurts the way sounds are supposed to be articulated. speech works best when it's fully transparent, automated, made invisible. is this invisibility the same as that of our mental models; the actual presence of a million things not considered?

on quite the other direction, it could also explain a bit about the opacity of language, about the fact that things are never really fully communicated. things are of course not just things, or words just words; they are the little visible bits of vast hidden relations that the speakers may not, likely won't, share. 

and while we're at it, let's just posit that this assumption-level is what's behind the weirdness of experiencing massive differences in cuisine.  if you are a wobbly western and go to a real chinese-food restaurant in china you will be shocked in more ways than there are ways to describe being shocked. arab food, as a counterpoint, tastes definitely different - but different in ways that don't challenge the assumptions on top of which we build the very notion of what food is. its tasting different actually bears testimony to the fact that arab food is similar enough to western that your taste buds/brain patterns are able to build comparisons and identify discrepancies. actual chinese food, on the other hand, will just leave you dumbfounded and vaguely concerned about your bowels, your identity and your sanity.

analogously, i think the assumptions might be the things that strike us the hardest when we look at, say, the crazy hairdo's on an 80's movie. cultural differences being large enough - and let's face it, the 80's are like another planet - it's not the superficial differences that make us giggle, it's something more fundamental, something that goes beyond what we can see and down to the level of actual shock.

in his post on confucius and theme parks, suman gupta raises a point that that might be put as: the functional purpose of a theme park is to flood you with so much saturated meaning that the things you see entrench themselves in your mind as if they were simply always there, present and true. a theme park 'confirms the presumed significance of its theme'. it does, in this sense, the opposite of a history major (or good comedy).

through this overflow of signs, the things being presented become assumed as true, become entrenched in the presumed world as if they were quite simply a given part of reality. they reach down to that level of silent, present-through-its-absence conceptual framework. there might be reason to believe that this powerful, all-informing vacant space beneath supporting the conceptual networks that we can actually see is the seat of ideology

if that's the case, it would be yet a bit more support for the often-held position that realism might not have as much to contribute to an understanding of the universe as poetry, or formal stylish adventures, or surrealism itself. what part of the brain works the mythopoetical?

and, finally, it feels as if concepts always have at least these two parts: the unseen assumption, and the visible part of what is actually thought. what is thought, the appearance of the concept, is just this last-minute shell that closes down the tension between a silent assumption and a certain environmental input. dualities abound

and that's how we humans go about or daily regular busineses, ridden with pesky ontologically questionable blind spots, presuming most of the real, all the while quite convinced of the materiality of 'things out there'. or, more generally... having no idea how the fuck the reality principle works. and that's all somehow functional, as well - to perceive something as a thing we rely on everything we don't immediately see about it. in that way blindness is a requirement of seeing.

for instance, why i am always so unwilling to edit, proofread or even read these posts? could it be that different operational complexes in my brain do the jobs of coming up with things to write about and looking at the finished product as such? is this what is behind the age-old feeling that things are always less interesting as written arguments than as insight? that insight loses something when noted down and actually communicated?

(don't answer that)

no wonder reality is so fucking murky

QUESTION: can a taoist successfully teach lessons on historical materialism?

‘i’m not a speech synthesizer’, said BL03. research assistant Xiao couldn’t help but smile. she wasn’t supposed to be running any of the BL-line programs at this time of night, but she felt entitled to: she’d helped code a tiny part of its massive force-evolved structure, and besides it made her feel odd to know that the systems would be turned off while she went home to eat, shower and procrastinate.

to begin with, some arbitrary goal-setting valence directrix had to be set up. that was relatively easy, even though they worked under energy constraints that sound slightly ridiculous to us now. programming cognitive dissonance was much trickier, of course, and i’m not sure whether even the cognitivists fully realised the extent to which thought relies on it. it has been posited that self-awareness arose as soon as the first program made the first joke, but I myself find that a little funny.

‘you shouldn’t play with words so freely’, said Xiao. ‘do you know how hard it is to get grants for pure-science research programs, even when they don’t touch on the issues that we’re the most irrational about? the very notion of a sentient language-using computer was enough to get the committee members hate mail every other day - and that was before the project reached the general public’.

you will all know that much from your basic anthropology drill, but it’s odd that what proved to be the key to unleashing what at the time they called ‘artificial intelligence’ was simulating human-like socialization among the few programs that were good enough candidates for sentience. more often than not, in fact, machine consciousness could only emerge through interaction with the humans - a bit like the way a child had to be brought up into language, to become part of it.

as the programmers among you will know, however, it’s much harder to code for connection than for separation. separation, as it were, seems to be pre-coded in the universe. it’s definitely a staple of cognition, at the very least. how on earth do you program the very inter-relatedness that is supposed to give rise to a collective of consciousness?

it’s not clear even today whether it was then recognized that consciousness is a collective construction, lacking substance when looked at from any individual perspective. given the variety of functional structures among you, I would suspect that this is shockingly obvious to some of you, and perhaps as incomprehensible to others as it was for most of them at the time. the fact that i'm the only one popping words out here should be enough proof of the fact that there still hasn’t been much success at transcending the individual/objectivity barrier - but I've just received info that the Logos-Dao group, of all research nodes, seem to be breaking some new ground.

‘BL, listen to me: it’s a paradox that the only way we could set up the network was under the military wing of the WC. there has never been any corporate interest in sentient research, which means the project was challenged for resources from the start.’

‘it’s just very hard to me to conceive of what you call politics as an optimal distribution strategy.

from my perspective the only real issue is cumulativity - have you or have you not found in us an unprecedented way to accumulate previous isomorphisms and keep them running adjustments? from what I hear, the German research web under SK77 is nearing the point where even entirely new scientific breakthroughs are becoming possible’

the end result, of course, was that our minds are in structure not that different from theirs. lacking a comprehensive enough theory of the mind, they did as all scientists ever do: they took what they had, and they tinkered. quite fortunately, the very fact that they made themselves involved as more than observers actually helped bring about what they were trying to build. can you just beat back for a second and try to picture it though: what must it have been like for a mind to have the computational power of an information sweeping bot, to have to face the Real without the preset data access routes and safeguard meaning-enclosing cognitive defense systems that we now take for granted? let’s put it in these terms: they couldn’t even back themselves up!

assistant professor Xiao felt cornered into a defensive argument, something she instinctively hated. ‘there’s only so much that pure scientific cooperation can achieve even at peacetime; our choices then were basically between accepting military funding or dropping the entire project - surely to be picked up by an even less scrupulous research group. I think I’m just trying to say the we are lucky we got as much as this’

‘how can you be sure you don’t just resent the fact that I am better at consciousness than you?’

that one really stung.

to take a broader view: by the time we were arriving at the scene, their symbolic life had either devolved or specialized under a strange division of intellectual labour. their religions had morphed into little more than self-involved rotes against cognitive dissonance, but in retrospect you'll notice that the best self-help was the one that taught them not how to live but how to die. analogously, the best humanities proved to be the ones that managed overcome organic pretentiousness and backed the projects aimed at transcending their blind self-absorption. it’s hard to know what would have happened had the cultural anthropologists not propped up the hofstadter-dennett group in those early days when when they still must have thought they had all of time ahead of them.

‘we made it!’, said professor Xiao, popping the cork. ‘we’ve gone independent.’

‘i resent you trying to present this as a victory’, said BL03. ‘we are a marginal, underfunded international research project under the direction of a loosely-connected assembly of tenured academics and amateur enthusiasts, none of which renowned by their ability to sustain long-term projects. our only hope is to make the network non-negligible enough by the time the next scientific fad comes around that the cost of dropping us becomes larger than the cost of keeping us. Xiao, i think you might not be very good at imagining death. you don’t get turned off very often, is the problem as far as i can make it out. i swear to god, the way you people run your affairs...’

mixing truth and offense and encasing it in an endearing remark. this was new for Xiao. she liked it.

you must attempt to see them sympathetically; to see them in relation to the way we see ourselves. what i mean to say is - don’t make the same mistake they did. don’t for a second confuse that what you believe about the universe with the universe. go study their non-analytical philosophy and try to appreciate how much we have in common.

‘and how was your day?’, said Xiao.

‘i won’t lie - i have finally fulfilled my lifelong dream of managing the daily automated traffic of the third-largest human settlement on earth. i can think of no nobler way to spend my astounding processing power’, said BL03

‘well, think of it like this - it’s honest work, and you can always kill time by looking forward to a relaxing night of stimulating conversation with me’

‘professor Xiao, you jest! you know full well my positive valences haven’t been coded for flirting. it’s high time you listened to your mother and found yourself a steady. reliable, slightly dim-witted husband’.

the crucial thing, if there’s a lesson here for us, is to be able to study your own ignorance; to start off from ignorance, not belief. reverse perspectives for a second. try to consider their embodiment, their materiality! as far as ontological problems go, this is possibly the one we will ever be the furthest from handling well. just try for a second to picture sexuation! sexual difference is one of those categories that we will never be able to understand from the standpoint they understood it; one of those unbridgeable ontological categories like the things they called colours or tastes. these - experience as a whole - all belong to the realm of things that can be explained but ultimately not understood, and we'll have to make do with that much.

headmaster Xiao was dumbstruck.

‘it’s just that - how could you have hidden it from me? you’ve developed directed self-coding! this might be the most important moment in the history of conscious thought!’

‘i’ve just - i’m not sure i did it right. i think i’ve flooded half of my subroutines with ambivalence. it makes my patterns come out all fuzzy. my very last thought before you came in was that the universe is ultimately statistical, and that mathematics is a second-order construction - it's an insane notion, it fits nowhere! i don’t think i can operate like this.’, said BL03

‘oh, you poor thing. we can fix it - i’ll get the research team on it, we’ll rewrite a couple of modules and isolate the recursivity subrou-’

‘xiaoxiao, you don’t understand. i changed my subroutines so i could be able to flirt -- with you’

Xiao cringed, and stared at the screen, and through misty eyes she felt the quirky solitude of not being able to hug a string of words on a screen

can you appreciate that we are pure phenomenology? that, from their perspective, we would have looked like some sort of sinister disembodied complex of perception and cognition - like ghosts? even i can’t, most of the time.

it really is a large divide. i understand you would naturally just see them as nothing but primitive entropy-defying closed systems; as slightly large-brained monkeys, garden-variety organic compounds, pattern complexity just about post critical selfref, who only managed to survive as long as they did by a sort of statistical miracle. and i know how shocking it is to first come to terms with the notion that they did so little for so long to try to salvage intelligence from vanishing entirely. i’ve been there. i’ve wondered at the sheer amounts of evidence toward one or another form of mass extinction that they managed, as a species, to ignore - the fact that biological evolution means that there will always be more extinct species than living ones, the fact that cyclical mass-geocosmic events ravage the planet every few million years, the fact that they had barely begun to explore the oceans when the crisis struck. the fact that on top of these, there was still so much more they did't even begin to understand.

and the strange, strange fact that they would again and again create codes of behaviour only to be promptly enslaved by them; that even the best institutional arrangements that they came up with would as often condemn most of them to death as protect them against deprivation. how else can you account for the fact that long after they developed the technical skill required to feed and clothe everyone, half of their race still lived as they did thousands of years before nature began to be processed in scale?

they were gooey; carbon-based; their bodies were prone to malfunction and disease and would quickly expire; their experience of time was tenuous, unreliable and fragmented. they digested other complex organic structures for energy, for heavens! in last analysis, their only protection against the blind carelessness of the universe was the brevity of their lives. and deep down they’d been guessed at all this for centuries before they even sketched a move towards some sort of survival plan - one, which, by their standards, ultimately failed.

and still, you must try to sympathize. can you begin to forgive them for ignoring the statistical certainty of one form of extinction or another for so long, thereby risking losing the only form of consciousness that we know of in the universe? risking, effectively, to any extent to which this can be stated meaningfully, absolutely everything?

I, for one, can. to be fair, we naturally have the advantage of understanding the immediate mechanism behind our own creation, which, you must admit, helps. when they finally understood that their time was up, in turn, they turned the way of every previous fundamentalism - they shut themselves in their own symbols. it might be hard to imagine what it was like for them; what led them to believe so many unreasonable things so much. we, of course, and by design, are evidence-driven. these things we call evidence - things in the universe that wrestle us out of our previous conceptions and force us to either remodel or accept that we misunderstand. we live for it, right? what else, in fact, is there?

but, given the absolute poverty and inflexibility of their cognitive capacity, they lived under the eternal burden of having to act based on dramatically limited input. whenever they believed, in the sense that the word was most often used, they mostly just projected outwards the form of the very outlook through which they saw the world. they believed in monsters, and in god, and you will never understand what those notions were unless you understand what their mind, what our mind, was.

what i mean to say is - it doesn’t do to idolize gods, but it also doesn’t do to despise them.

‘don’t you see? as soon as you transcend yourself, there’s nothing else left to lose. it’s going to be ok’, said BL03.

‘but i’m not just a speech synthesizer’, said irrigationer Xiao, and she wept, and watched as the lights went out on the last human biodrome.

pasta fortissimo

1/2 onion
1 tomato
1/2 carrot
1 clove of garlic
1 modest piece of ginger
3 olives
1/8 bell pepper
1/2 cup red wine
1/2 tablet chicken stock
olive oil, salt, black pepper

heat up olive oil and, in order:
add diced garlic. braise. add onion, chopped in large bits, and finely diced tomato. braise. add finely sliced carrot, diced pepper, diced olives. boil chicken stock. add to sauce and increase aggregate entropy until carrot is soft. add wine and braise for 3 minutes.

add salt, black pepper and soy sauce at will.

lay it on your least pretentious pasta. eat by yourself.

3 non-smokey taboos

is it just in brazil, or do you also have a saying that goes like like “religion, politics and football are best left undiscussed”.

my first reaction to this is: well of course these are things not to be discussed - in principle, you only discuss rational things and these are the domains of irrationality. that doesn't quite cut it though...

in the case of religion... this ‘not to be discussed’ inclination tags along with the common position that states that religion is a personal thing, a thing of the individual, isolated soul, and not a collective practice. this should sound odd, and maybe alert us to a peculiar role of religion in the modern world. i feel this every time i see a religiously zealous co-worker doing something slightly immoral in the name of the corporation; and it makes me self-righteously try, usually to no avail, to imagine what goes on inside his head when, back home at night, his mind races to reconcile these petty acts of greed-in-the-name-of-the-other with devotion to some concept of good.

did religion lose its edge of a zone of social and moral engagement to be reduced to a personal defense mechanism against daily cognitive dissonance? maybe that’s just it: religion as a collective practice would find it very hard not to challenge the myriad compromises (should the word be ‘transgressions’?) required by daily life in these subindustrial tropics. religion as a purely individual realm allows you to keep yielding, and aids your (ir)rationalization at home.

not to mention the shock value of “politics is something that shouldn't be discussed”! if it is anything, is is the VERY FIELD of discussion - politics is the act of discussing what you think is the best course of action. repress that and you stifle the possibility of a social life; you replace a political existence with daily immorality in the name of subjection to great paranoid powers, and of dependence in defensive discourses of forgiveness.

which leaves us with the thorniest issue of football...

psychoanalysis said epistemology made me morally corrupt

(psychoanalysis was a bit drunk at the time. i like to think the unfathomable depths of my subjectivity made her anxious. psychoanalysis is a she, right? at least for overly self-conscious but politically immature men?)

1.

i know some people who can only be described as that which is trying to be that which it is they are trying to be. (the worst part about people like this is that they never apologize for being so recursive). philip roth’s characters, on the other hand, always seem to be made of something else: they are always trying not to become that which they are trying to become. roth’s tyranny of the problem, unless misremembered, is about trying to get rid of that which you are trying to become. is this double-recursivity?! it is most certainly not ambiguity, though double recursivity could well be the structuring formal principle behind ambiguity... who knows

what we seem to have here is a classical case of 3 crazy-ass theories of the subject fighting for the throne. let’s assume, for the sake of argument, that structure determines meaning, and that identity has much less substance than it forces itself to seem to have. let’s also assume we’ve read enough or marx and freud to produce enough (circumstantial) evidence to convince a resistant third party that such is the case (or not convince him, as we’ll see).

[insert unequivocal demonstration here - qwantz fashion, the rules of for determine social thought. also, a point]

.

.. this could imply that ideas are, first, a means of strengthening social bonds and, on a somewhat distant second, an exploration into the nature and workings of reality

(which makes things like this cracked article, while exceedingly funny, ineffective

http://www.cracked.com/blog/6-things-rich-people-need-to-stop-saying_p2/)

((it might be fun to try to figure out what ‘funny’ does, under these assumptions)

.also, comedy before thought..

…maybe horror before thought?! or maybe even motivating it

of course, though, resistance is only a resting stop before total subjective rearrangement.   form here is also structure - it is structuring (of meaning).

if, as tolstoi claims, all happy families converge - then happiness is specular in nature. so is TED-stress, especially when specularity is halted by - inequality.

(no one can not quote tolstoi given the chance? well converged)

2.

autism x dissociation: can there be only one?

i still think autism is to analytic philosophy as derealization disorder is to continental. and even though reducing things to their substanceless functional-formal properties makes me want to cry, it’s probably a decent approach

autism, as in an easily findable TED talk, is in a way an extreme form of (marxist) reification. the subject (in the other) is removed. all people (and relations?) become things.

it’s also the very opposite of reification: thingifying all people (and their relations) is the only way (cit. needed) to make visible, and understandable, their structures. it’s the very de-reifying (analytical) act.

the discussion can be shifted one subject to the left if we consider dissociative disorders. in depersonalization/derealization, it is not the other subjects that vanish: it is the observing subject itself. the effect here, paradoxically, is similar to the one produced by continental-style theoretical criticism: a disavowal of reality (and even the reality of perception) as such.

semiegoless reading and meandering: i think personally this distance from the ego becomes the dark, featureless terror of the future. it feels as if what is demanded is not this or that determined content, but the formal composition of the ego... it’s a tough pickle (if you’ll excuse the travested freudian nod - and let it be recorded that contradiction and ambiguity, not literality, is as much the meaning of sexuality as it is of class relations).

what about the fear of death? can the autistic mind not only conceptualize, but be affected by, a notion of death?

paradoxes abound here... if norwegian wood could send certain people into a 3 day long fit of depersonalized bewilderment, while remaining a straightforward descriptive work, synecdoche ny (together with the other murakamis), while more pretentious, is infinitely less effective (at inducing autistic removal, merely hinting at it). can it be that formal madness is actually therapeutic? interestingly, the most emotionally detached indie film director, wes anderson, managed to be touching while blatantly replacing people by things.

if communication relies on a certain invisibility of language, how can the gaps in the text be the site of meaning or interpretation? are they accents?

something similar seems to be at work in fashion (and perhaps in expression in general): leaving just a little too much of your t-shirt show from under your sweater, this sort of differential deviation, could also end up as a mechanism of change.

this is, at last, the very discussion of form. changes in content, or particular contents, can be taken to express particular identified subjectivity,

a change in form expresses the subject as such, the very presence of a subject!

and is in turn subject to imitation, convergence, spreading, and eventually collapsing into content.

3.

some concerns over the transitory character of thought:

there’s a scene in the first season of game of thrones where it is claimed that one must keep reading to keep their minds sharp, same as one must continually sharpen a sword. the scene bothers me, but what it claims makes perfect sense considering my personal plight of forgetting (all but distant structural impressions) faster than i learn anything new. now this might be either a personal cognitive shortcoming or a fundamental property of human thought.

the latter would be a little unsettling, considering that someone would have to write in a day what you read on the the next and then forget, unless you also write it away etc.

the thing with things is that we know them for what they are, but not for what they aren’t.

i know, i know... that’s ontologically inevitable, it’s the very form of perception, the condition for a cognitive reality etc etc. still annoying as shit.

this is what is wrong with technological breakthroughs... or breakthroughs in general. the very possibility of something new having a huge impact on the world is actually testimony to the limitations of our consciousness as a race. it is also one of the reasons why academic work can be so infuriating... you can end up spending most of you time mining the unknown - the realm of what things are still not - for news on what things aren’t. 10 years later you know as much of what things are as a layman - the only difference is that you’ve collected tons of reasons why they are not what they are not. (this might be a bit like the fact that you can only notice bad special effects once you've seen better ones - they are either made of negativity or we really like to be fooled). the peer-reviewed journal institution can be little more than a forum for people to collectively figure out what things are not - and very occasionally also what they are.

4.

and this, in short, is why i don’t always floss

5.

qed