Wednesday, August 03, 2005

Show Me The Nectar

Do you remember films where some group in a control tower somewhere maintain a vigil on some dramatic event occurring elsewhere by way of monitors? These monitors seem to have eyes and ears everywhere and can show you what exactly is happening as a spaceship dives into the sun from the point of view of someone hanging on just behind the tail of the ship in question. It used to bug me even when I was little. How did they get that view? What camera was hanging about within the story to allow people within the story to see what we, the audience could see as part of the third person narrative?

Well it looks like we soon may be able to have that sort of omnipresence. We have heard about the pilotless drones which buzz around over various hostile regions, ready to strike down enemies and send back images to base but it appears that this sort of surveillance is going to become widespread in a way that can only cause terrible feelings of Big-Brotherness amongst the general population if of course they can be bothered to look up from watching everybody else. It seems that we are about to see things called Eternal Planes, lightweight constructions of plastic and super new materials which can reach anywhere in the world in 24 hours and then keep station for months at a fraction of the cost of a geo-stationery satellite. Of course being closer to the ground than one of Arthur C. Clarke’s wonderful inventions will make them more able to pick up information with a level of detail akin to IMAX times 100.

I don’t want to think about the Civil Liberties of this situation. My point here is how this idea brings us closer to my idea of a complete model of the world defined inside some machine. With continuous surveillance like this, we wouldn’t need a model; we could see the world in real time from anywhere at any time maybe from the web with a click of the old proverbial. Think of that camera on top of the Club-House at St Andrews or the ones in Times Square that you can pan and tilt and zoom using a pad on a web-page. Think of having that over the whole world.

So on the one hand we will all retreat into virtual worlds created inside the computer, eventually having our consciousness permanently downloaded and be at one with the machines while on the other, the machines will spread their conduits and sensors into the real world and view what happens physically. All humans will end up as memory in some spaceship drifting in space, able to avoid the problems of the physical earth and to dodge oncoming asteroids while they remotely watch the real world and marvel at how crowded it has become inside the memosphere that is their home now.

Add to this the work on making tiny surveillance robots the size of flies and you have everything covered. Nothing we do will be private except thoughts and then one day they will have those captured as well. The use of this information is then the question. Can one group of people rule another? Can you block some thoughts and not others so the elite have their thoughts to themselves while knowing everyone else’s or does it just become a general sludge of irrelevancies that no one could be possibly interested in? This makes me wonder whether anything I may have thought at any point in my life would be enough to put me away by the moral and legal framework of this country today. Just by admitting such a thought are you incriminating yourself? As usual you are only getting questions. Nothing very bad in here I am afraid but then again my humanist thoughts would be enough to make some people of stronger religious persuasions choke on their wafers. At this point I normally get mad that some people can think that any of the thoughts which I consider reasonable to be ‘bad’ thoughts.

While waiting for Number One Son to fall into sleep deep enough to allow transportation to the cot last night, I was reading Susan Blackmore’s book – Meme Machine. Her first chapters go over bog-standard evolution but I soon found my thoughts diverging from the words going into my brain from the page. I was trying to decide on how to program a simple version of evolution into the computer. The book had just mentioned about us only having the one chance at evolution which for some reason made me think about the possibility that life on earth actually is some experiment and that there is a creator. Computers are complex things and with all the newer and faster giga and peta flops floating around out there, we could easily simulate a quite complex set of evolutionary factors. Richard Dawkins has already produced his own programmatic version. I don’t know enough or remember enough to say whether the irony of the arch denier of the existence of a creator creating (after a fashion) life himself is clear to him. At this point, I am sure you are chanting Occam’s razor at me but I have gone on before about how much of the world a creator would have to actually produce in order to convince the inhabitants he produced that it was indeed real. The human mind fills in lots of stuff for which it only has limited sensory input and could it be the case that the inhabitants of a created world would use that mechanism to create belief. Dreams seem to be the brain making sense of lack of sensory input. They are what the inhabitants of the world think about when the world they inhabit is no longer present.

Someone in this building has the word Paramnesia written on the white board in their office. This is a disorder of memory (you guessed) where dreams are confused with reality. The actual word to describe the Zen master who is not sure if he is a butterfly dreaming he is a Zen master or a Zen master dreaming he is a butterfly. I though that rather apt for today’s stuff. For a moment staying in the ordered and rational real world, I cannot think why he has this word on a white board otherwise full of proper work-related stuff. Maybe it is the man’s way of asserting that he is indeed a man and not a number.

All of this is rubbish of course. You know yourself that the desk in front of you is hard and would hurt should you choose to bash your head on it. But then again you could be programmed to feel that. I am sure that there has been computing power around for years now that could allow the creation of a program that could be convinced it was human. Maybe we should think in terms of fractal levels of cognizance. The lowest level would be a simple few lines of basic which when asked ‘Are you human?’ replies in the affirmative. Program deeper levels of detail into this until the machine begins to get to a point where it has to ask questions of itself. Take the example of getting hurt when bashing your head on the table. This could simply be a link that says Action – Bash head on table – result – Ache. Or it goes down to the level of the colour we see in the pain we actually get when we bash our heads. The trick is to keep the level of self-awareness of the entity being questioned below the actual reality it is asked to describe. Humans must have got to a stage where they think far beyond the experience of the world. Maybe I am describing the point at which consciousness arose. Two lines – reality – awareness of reality. When the awareness of reality goes above reality then we have become conscious. All this could be summed up as thinking about thinking. I await the emails from guffawing philosophers and machine cognizance researchers. You have me in this mess of my own thoughts about the world.

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