America’s A Police State
December 8, 2011
Let’s all admit it. Let’s stop the denial and look at what’s really going on. Unless you’ve had your head in the sand, you’ve probably realized that ever since this “War On Terror” began, our civil liberties and freedoms have been rather rapidly eroding away. Probably the single most important provision to a system of justice is due process. Your charges are openly brought against you, you’re innocent until proven guilty, you’re brought before a jury of your peers to defend yourself, you have a right to an attorney, and so on. Well take a look at this:
The Senate voted Tuesday to keep a controversial provision to let the military detain terrorism suspects on U.S. soil and hold them indefinitely without trial — prompting White House officials to reissue a veto threat.
The measure, part of the massive National Defense Authorization Act, was also opposed by civil libertarians on the left and right. But 16 Democrats and an independent joined with Republicans to defeat an amendment by Sen. Mark Udall (D-Colo.) that would have killed the provision, voting it down with 61 against, and 37 for it.
“I’m very, very, concerned about having U.S. citizens sent to Guantanamo Bay for indefinite detention,” said Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), one of the Senate’s most conservative members.
Paul’s top complaint is that a terrorism suspect would get just one hearing where the military could assert that the person is a suspected terrorist — and then they could be locked up for life, without ever formally being charged. The only safety valve is a waiver from the secretary of defense.
“It’s not enough just to be alleged to be a terrorist,” Paul said, echoing the views of the American Civil Liberties Union. “That’s part of what due process is — deciding, are you a terrorist? I think it’s important that we not allow U.S. citizens to be taken.”
Democrats who were also concerned about liberties compared the military policing of Americans to the detention of Americans in internment camps during World War II.
“Congress is essentially authorizing the indefinite imprisonment of American citizens, without charge,” said Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), who offered another amendment — which has not yet gotten a vote — that she said would correct the problem. “We are not a nation that locks up its citizens without charge.”
Backers of military detention of Americans — a measure crafted by Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.) — came out swinging against Udall’s amendment on the Senate floor earlier Tuesday.
“The enemy is all over the world. Here at home. And when people take up arms against the United States and [are] captured within the United States, why should we not be able to use our military and intelligence community to question that person as to what they know about enemy activity?” Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) said.
“They should not be read their Miranda Rights. They should not be given a lawyer,” Graham said. “They should be held humanely in military custody and interrogated about why they joined al Qaeda and what they were going to do to all of us.”
Source: Huffington Post
Of course, none of this is really new. We’ve had the Patriot Act for a while, but now they’re just wanting to push all of this police state legislation even further. We already have a system of dealing with wrong-doers. We already have laws in place for crimes. There’s never a need to create a special set of laws for “terrorists”.
You know, maybe I just see this stuff so clearly because I’ve spent years of my life studying history. I think about the old Soviet Union, North Korea, Nazi Germany, and the list goes on. There’s a pattern to what they do. They always use the same tactics, over and over and over. You have to manufacture an idea of either internal or external terror. In our case, it’s Al Qaeda and the Taliban. Next you create secret prisons because you need to develop a separate legal system to bypass the courts and the normal rule of law. This is the true intention behind Guantanamo Bay. You tell the people that these special “terrorists” don’t have any rights, and after extensive propaganda campaigns you have to hammer into people’s minds fear, fear, and more fear. That way they give up their freedoms voluntarily. Next you need your own personal thug paramilitary caste to enforce your arbitrary rule of law. This is what Blackwater is. As this police state develops, huge government programs grow up to spy and police the citizens all under the guise of protecting you from “terrorists”. I’ve already written written several blog posts about developments in this area. You can find one I wrote about two years ago here. They start reading your mail, they’re listening into your phone calls, they’re gaining access to your bank accounts, and so on. They start monitoring more and more people. Once they’ve gained a huge foothold over the system, they start arbitrarily throwing dissidents in jail, removing political enemies, and controlling the press. In the end the entire free society as you knew it is gone and you’re left with a totalitarian dictator running the show.
Currently we’re at the step where they keep broadening the concept as to what constitutes a “terrorist”, and continue to expand their facilities which carefully monitor the people.
Maybe I’m over-exaggerating here. Maybe there’s no need for alarm. But I can’t say that to all of you and be honest about how I feel. I’m worried. Luckily this sort of thing isn’t being ignored. Even guys like Jon Stewart are covering this. Sad thing is, people just laugh about it. It’s not funny. When I watched this skit, I didn’t laugh at all. I sat in terror.
Like most people, I don’t want to deal with any of this. I think, “Why is this happening to me? Why now? Why during my generation?” There’s always someone wanting steal our freedom, take our money, silence our free speech, and confine us to a miserable life of poverty and toil. Like every generation, we have to stand up and stop these people from ruining everything.
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The Music Of Biological Xerox Machines
December 4, 2011
When I was a teenager, I used to watch a lot of MTV and listen to the radio. I’d go play basketball in the recreation center and inside, the radio would be playing music from Matchbox Twenty, Goo Goo Dolls, and Third Eye Blind. Good memories and good times! I’d spend hours in the gym shooting around, listening away while I practiced my jumpshot. But even then, I couldn’t help but wonder why nearly every song dealt with the same set of topics. They’re always about love, relationships, attracting a lover, mating rituals (hand holding, grooming, fitness displays, etc), reputations, showing off resources, status, dealing with rejection, dealing with infidelity, sex appeal, and so on. At the time I never could understood why, but after studying evolutionary psychology many years later, it was almost obvious why this is the case. But as a young man, love never played a large role in my life, so it was always hard to understand. I was primarily interested in computers, business, and later, science. It just baffled my teenage mind that the only thing people could think about was sex and relationships. Not that I’m against either. It just seemed to me that there should be more running through someone’s mind than just those things.
I’ve always wanted to do a study on this, sifting through a long list of popular music in hopes to prove I’m not crazy. Turns out researchers at the University of Albany did this very study and they found just what I expected: 90% of all popular music covers themes related to love and reproduction.
… Of the songs that made it into the Top Ten on 2009 Billboard charts, over 90% featured embedded, evolutionarily relevant reproductive messages. These included references to sexual intercourse, body parts, promiscuity, infidelity, sex appeal, and rejection.
Country songs contained an average of 5.9 different reproductive messages per song, with the most frequent being about parenting, commitment, rejection, and fidelity assurance. Pop songs contained 8.7 reproductive references per song, where sex appeal, reputation, short-term mating strategies, and fidelity assurance were the most common. For R&B there were 16.7 reproductive messages per song, with sex appeal, resources, sex acts, and status being the most prevalent.
A further analysis showed that across all three charts, popular songs that made it into the Top Ten contained significantly more reproductive messages than those that failed to rise to the top of the charts.
Fascinating. So what were the messages they were looking for? I found the criteria they used instructive, so I’ll list them all out for you now. These categories are what you’ll find in nearly all popular music.
1. Genitalia
Any explicit, implicit, implied or slang reference to genitalia.
2. Other Body Parts
References to any other body part other than genitalia, including waist to hip ratios and shoulder to hip ratios.
3. Courtship/Long Term Mating Strategies
References to dating, handholding, and other sincere courtship displays and overtures.
4. Hook Up/Short Term Mating Strategies
References to short-term mating strategies such as “hooking up” and overt solicitations for short term relationships.
5. Foreplay/Arousal/Sex Act Precursors
Any reference to kissing, fondling or undressing, as well as physiological precursors to intercourse.
6. Sex Act
Any explicit, implicit, implied or slang reference to sexual intercourse.
7. Sexual Prowess
References to stamina, sex drive or other sexually related skills and/or bragging of such.
8. Promiscuity/Reputation/Derogation
Includes references to promiscuity, as well as negative reputational references, attempts to defame another person’s reputation or make negative social comparisons.
9. Sequestering/Mate Guarding
Keeping tabs on a mate, watching, guarding, tracking and/or isolating a mate. Also includes references to privacy, secrecy, and isolation for the purpose of intercourse.
10. Fidelity Assurance/Abandonment Prevention
Questions or statements to assess the fidelity of a mate. Seeking information to ascertain the commitment of a mate and prevent abandonment/cuckoldry.
11. Commitment and Fidelity
References to dedication, sincerity and long term commitments to a relationship such as marriage, boyfriend, girlfriend, wife, and husband or committed other. Also includes honest courtship signals such as diamond rings which indicate a committed relationship.
12. Resources
Any reference to luxury items, cars, money, or things that denote resources.
13. Status
References to a person’s high standing in society; VIP status, being referred to as the “boss” or a “rockstar” or other high ranking person.
14. Mate Provisioning
Use of status or resources specifically to protect/retain a mate.
15. Appearance Enhancement/Sex Appeal
Grooming, physical appearance, general attractiveness, fitness displays and/or signals, or references to any visual /physical aspect of a potential mate.
16. Rejection
References to divorce, breakups, broken hearts, or discord within the context of a pairbond relationship.
17. Infidelity/Cheater Detection/Mate Poaching
References to cheating, extrapair copulations, suspicions of infidelity, stealing another person’s mate, or paternal uncertainty.
18. Parenting
Includes any reference to parenting, child-rearing, or desire for children. Also includes references to grandparents and grandchildren.
If you want to read the research paper itself, you can find it here.
I often see news articles poking fun at us men, saying we’re obsessed with sex, thinking about it once every hour. I don’t think it’s fair to say that it’s just us men though. This type of thinking is ubiquitous among both sexes. We’ve evolved here on planet Earth as DNA replication machines. Our bodies want to replicate and make copies of themselves, so finding a mate is imperative. Most of what our brains think about is securing a mate, creating successful copies of ourselves, and making sure those copies survive and flourish. Then we all carefully watch as the copies try to make even more copies before we pass on, and such is life.
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The Illusion of Self
November 27, 2011
I’ve never really found any definition or account of the “self” to be satisfactory. To me, it’s the single most important question to answer, but I never seemed to make any progress. The self is something unique, the set of all essential qualities making someone distinct from everyone else. I’ve never been able to find any criteria which can set us apart from one another, and that has always troubled me.
I found myself falling back on the existentialist philosophy of Jean Paul Satre, and I conceived of myself as a sort of “freedom”. If you’ve read his book Being and Nothingness, you’ll find it’s a book intended to battle determinism and any casual influence over us. Though a great read, overall, the idea of “free will” doesn’t make any sense. I don’t see any evidence that we have such a thing, and the more time I’ve spent dissecting the idea, I can’t understand what such a concept would even be. I’ve written about it before, and there’s no need to go into all of it again.
I read John Locke, David Hume, Hegel, and others. How could I define myself, distinguishing myself from others and the world around me? I thought that maybe it’s our thinking processes which set us apart. But no, animals can think too, just not to same degree we can. Before long, we’ll have computers which will be able to out-think all of us, but will they have a “self”? Their neural networks will process information according to the same algorithms our brains use, but whether or not they’ll be conscious, who knows. As I’ve written neural network algorithms which emulate many forms of intelligence, I find human intelligence to just to be one algorithm our brain does, and it isn’t nearly as remarkable as people think it is. In fact, I’d argue that we humans aren’t all that intelligent. If we were, we wouldn’t struggle to exist and there wouldn’t be so much poverty and misery.
I thought that maybe it’s our memories and the timeline of our lives which define us. But no, memories can be altered either by brain damage, disease, or if you were skilled enough, inserting false memories into someone’s brain. Maybe we’re our physical bodies or our desires? But no, none of those work either. Our bodies are changing every day, cells dividing and splitting, and old cells dying. Every so often, our entire bodies are rebuilt from new materials. The same materials are reused by all of us. And our desires are created by our brains. If you alter your brain, you alter your desires — and the brain is chemistry all the way down. Quantum effects are negligible at the scale of neurons. To top it off, a person’s desires can be changed by what they know, and we learn by our experiences. It’s “your” desire until you learn there’s better choices you could make. When would that process ever end? It doesn’t. All evidence suggests we’re determined. What you want is to feel happy and satisfied. What you actually experience and do is beside the point.
Frustrated, I left the philosophy of self alone for years and dedicated myself to physics and other physical sciences where I could feel I was at least making some progress instead of just spinning in circles. But then I got into neuroscience which brought me right back into the debate. Being a rather philosophical kind of guy, I found myself reading the American Journal of Bioethics and came across a rather intriguing article called Personhood and neuroscience: Naturalizing or Nihilating? It begins with the following introduction:
Personhood is a foundational concept in ethics, yet defining criteria have been elusive. In this article we summarize attempts to define personhood in psychological and neurological terms and conclude that none manage to be both specific and non-arbitrary. We propose that this is because the concept does not correspond to any real category of objects in the world. Rather, it is the product of an evolved brain system that develops innately and projects itself automatically and irrepressibly onto the world whenever triggered by stimulus features such as a human-like face, body, or contingent patterns of behavior. We review the evidence for the existence of an autonomous person network in the brain and discuss its implications for the field of ethics and for the implicit morality of everyday behavior.
I was drawn in like iron filings to a magnet. This article shows the brain regions involved in creating the illusion of the self, and gives a basic understanding as to how they work. Our brains process certain types of stimulation in special ways, and that’s where we get this idea of “self” and “others”. After discussing how our brain processes faces and other types of human stimulation in these special areas, the authors move on to explain how there’s also special areas of our brain to process certain special patterns of motion. These patterns are hard-wired in us to ascribe intentionality. (quoting again from the article):
In addition to visual shape features such as static eyes, faces and bodies, certain patterns of motion are also effective at engaging the system. In particular, contingent “behavior,” by which a stimulus seems responsive to its environment, can evoke a sense of intentionality and personhood. In the famous animated film of Heider and Simmel (1944) two triangles and a circle move around the screen with motions that are interrelated, giving an impression of three entities interacting with motivations and intentions (see http://pantheon.yale.edu/~bs265/demons/causality.html). The automaticity of this attribution is apparent in the difficultly of describing this film without using psychlogical terms such as “wants” and “tries” (Scholl and Tremoulet 2000). This automaticity seems related to the trigger of the person network, in that a patient with complete bilateral amygdala degeneration described the film purely in pshysical terms (Heberlein and Adolphs 2004).
Brain imaging studies of Heider and Simel-type animations show that all of the brain regions shown in Figure 1 are activiated (Castelli et. al 2000; Martin and Weisberg 2003; Schultz 2003). For example, in the study of Martin and Weisberg (2003), two sets of animations were presented: both were composed of moving squares, triangles and circles, which moved in a contingent interactive manner (e.g., as if dancing together or chasing each other) in the “social” set and in a manner consistent with mechanical motions (e.g., like billiard balls or objects on a conveyer belt) in the “mechanical” set. Despire the absence of anything resembling a human being in these animations, the former set and only that set activated the fusiform face area, amygdala, temporoparietal junction and medial prefrontal cortex.
After I read this I thought, “Of course!” When doing research on space and time, I wanted to know how well the brain intuitively understood the laws of physics. It turns out that we have a system which is alright at judging the movements and behavior of objects in certain everyday situations, but it’s lacking in many ways. Take a common mechanics problem. Say you place a solid wood cylinder beside a hollowed out aluminum can, both with the same radius, and roll them down a ramp.
Which will reach the bottom first? People have no idea. (In fact, the university that did the study found that physics professors weren’t any better at this than normal people, without first doing their mathematical computations). This isn’t surprising considering the brain has no way of figuring out problems like this. Like our sense of space, which is only partially correct, our brain’s intuitive sense of how objects move and behave is only partly correct as well.
What does this have to do with personhood and the self? People don’t move in simple patterns like the objects of the world. Their movements are largely unpredictable. If I were to throw a baseball in the air, it goes straight up, then back down toward the ground. But if I throw my arm up and it stops mid-way in its free-fall, you’re not surprised. Why is this? You say, “Jason stopped it for some reason.” Our brains evolved a separate area to identify special objects (living things), and we process them via a different system. When an object seems to be “attuned” to its environment, responding to stimuli it like an animal with sense organs, we process it using special brain regions. Instead of using the brain’s physical mechanics system, it instead analyzes motions of these special objects according to “intentions”. It thinks in terms of locations of food sources, mating, desires, and trying to get “inside the head” of the thing you’re looking at. We think, “What does this thing want? What is it after? What is it trying to accomplish?” Your brain tries to imagine what that thing will do by simulating what you would do in that situation, and so forth.
This intuitive and automatic intention system is what we’re mistaking for free will. People were too complicated to understand by other means, so the brain evolved the easiest route to analyze these complex behaviors – self reflection. It’s not that people have free will. It’s just our brains gave up trying to predict such complex behavior and instead found a new way of dealing with others. This sense of “self” has allowed us to interact and cooperate with others in ways we couldn’t have otherwise.
To illustrate this point, think of autistic people. An autistic child will climb up your body like you’re just another piece of furniture to use. That’s because their “person network” in their brain isn’t working like ours, so they’re more “selfish”. Ironically, they’re not more selfish, they’re less so. They less understand their own sense of self and yours as well. And as anyone who has worked with autistic children knows, they’re harder to work with and are less cooperative.
Our own sense of self is an illusion created by this person network. We’re not separate from our world or those around us, but our brain creates this illusion because it was useful for these human shells to cooperate. Even though it’s a fiction, it’s a good one. It allows us to love, understand, and work with one another.
This explains why the self can’t be defined – it never existed to begin with. Like many things, when you look at the problem from the wrong angle, you never find a solution. The self is a useful illusion, nothing more. If you pull open the curtains, you find that it was never there, but it certainly feels real doesn’t it? Our own fear of death is a way for us to give value to our time here and to also value the lives of others as well.
Even still, this all leaves me with a lot to think about. I think we’re so unhappy dwelling on ourselves because it’s a hollow illusion. There’s just not enough there to keep any real thinking person occupied, though it will leave you confused as you’re navigating the maze of mirrors.
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Artificial Evolution
November 24, 2011
Tonight I want to briefly discuss artificial evolution using computer simulations. This is one of the coolest things ever. I wish I had time to actually write programs which do these things.
This first video is rather ancient but I chose to include it because of how well it communicates the ideas. A computer programmer is going to simulate biological evolution on a computer and evolve all types of walking and swimming creatures. Virtual beings control body blocks which are all jointed together and moved by a virtual nervous system. A certain fitness routine is programmed in, such as walking, swimming, or jumping, and whichever virtual being is best at doing the task gets to “reproduce” and all the others are removed. He then takes that winner, makes random modifications to it, and then runs the simulation again. You do this over and over and over, and lo and behold, you get organisms that behave just like real world organisms. You get little walking creatures, swimming fish-like creatures, and so on. They naturally evolve fins and tails, and jointed bodies, and everything.
What’s most fun is watching creatures evolve strange solutions to the problem. I think this is going to become a very common engineering method in the future, where instead of having to worry about programming all the details into a robot, you would just artificially evolve it in the computer. Then whatever it came up with, you place that program inside the real robot and you’re done. Need a robot which can walk up stairs, climb ropes, navigate rough terrain, and do countless other tasks? Just put a virtual staircase and everything else in the simulation and simulate that robot’s body, whatever shape it may be. Program a fitness function into the simulation which represents the ideal you’re striving for, and then let it learn to do everything by brute force trial and error, millions of iterations of evolution, until it perfects it. You yourself wouldn’t even need to know how such a creature does what it does. You just have to know what you want and then mine the computational universe for a solution. That’s awesome.
In this next video a computer programmer “taught” a robot to walk through evolutionary algorithms.
But “fitness” can be anything to a computer. This concept isn’t limited to biology and evolving bodies or their control systems (nervous systems). Your fitness function can be not dying in Mario and the algorithms will brute force solutions to how to beat levels in video games. This is a bit inefficient, but it’s the exact same idea.
In a general sense, what you have is some system with lots and lots of possibilities. There’s a certain solution you’re looking for and you’re going to have to search for it. The better the fitness function, the less “brute force” attempts you’re going to need to find it. The solution could be a perfect score in a game, a control system for a robot, whatever.
A big part of AI is to be able to quickly sift through possibilities and root out those that are obviously not what you need to do to achieve your goal. Like the AI playing Mario. If instead of pure brute force, it had a representation of that game’s world in its “head”, understood the capabilities of its enemies, and that its goal was to get to the goal in the fastest time possible, it could immediately start work on those solutions and would come to a solution far more quickly. Our brains are such a system. In the largest possible sense, they’re a tool which “recommends” to us quick solutions to various goals related to our survival.
Our very conception of space and the objects within it seem to be an outcome of the intricately evolved neural network AI system which is our brain, “programmed” over countless trials and errors over millions of years. It’s hard-coded to recommend quick solutions to practically infinite muscle contractions and movements you COULD do but never “choose” to because they serve no benefit. I mean, you could roll around on the ground like those evolved creatures in that program, but you never choose to. Your brain never recommends such actions because in the past, they didn’t help humans survive and reproduce.
This idea of mining a computational universe of possibilities for solutions to problems is fascinating. Fitness functions are mining tools, and the better your simulation and constraints, the better these computers narrow down possibilities to an ideal solution that you need. I’m rather new to all this, but I find it all intriguing.
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Frozen Planet Is Finally Here!
November 23, 2011
I’ve been waiting for this series to come out for the past six months or more! It’s the latest nature series by David Attenborough. He’s covering the Arctic and Antarctica. Seven one hour programs in gorgeous HD. These have always been my favorite TV programs to watch. Here’s a preview.
Poor little guy.
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