The Attentiometer

The two-slit experiment. Schrödinger's cat. Heard of 'em? If not, go read up. I'll wait.

They're important concepts. They represent the greatest mystery about reality we currently face, and I just don't hear much about them. This bugs me. The two-slit experiment demonstrates that looking at the universe changes it. But it doesn't give us an adequate description of what "looking at it" means. Schrödinger's cat was an attempt by Schrödinger to make us see how bizarre were the implications of the "observation" aspect of quantum mechanics. Remember, he intended it as a reductio ad absurdum, that is, he meant to show how silly the superposition interpretation of quantum mechanics was, by showing that it led to a cat being both dead and alive at the same time, which is absurd. But nowadays lots of physicists are perfectly happy to use it as the metaphor by which they describe reality. "Yup," they say, "until you observe it, the cat's dead and alive at the same time."

Maybe if I'd taken one more term of physics before giving up, I'd know why what I'm about to suggest is just plain wrong. I hope somebody will explain it to me, and be gentle. Here's my thought:

Observing a quantum event can change its result. If you stick a photomultiplier on one of the slits, the pattern on the film changes. Can we turn that around, and use the pattern on the film as a way to tell whether an event was observed?

Could we send people randomly into a room where the output of the photomultiplier shows on a screen? And make sure that if there's no one there the information is irretrievably lost? Like, line the room in black velvet? Or something? Then later we compare the films with records of when there was someone in the room, and (here's my hypothesis) lo and behold we can tell when someone was watching.

I dunno. Maybe if you add it all up informationally, you're always observing or you're never observing. Maybe your act of looking at the results is causally downstream of the events, and so always counts as an observation. We know already that the observation's collapse of the quantum state is extratemporal. Or maybe something like Penrose's "one graviton effect" rule holds true, and it's purely a matter of how much stuff gets bumped by the event.

But, dammit, we can see the difference in the films. Can't we? Isn't there an epistemic asymmetry there? A handle to grab on to?

Maybe there's a catch-22 guaranteeing that you can never gain utility from decoherence. They say that you can't use entanglement to make an ansible; maybe it's a similar kind of situation to that. I don't grok it; I didn't study hard enough in Differential Equations. But, if so, is there any way to rigorously prove that that's the case?

And could somebody please convince this layman, so I can stop dreaming?

Please, can we settle this question?

The Schrödinger Gun

Roger Penrose proposes in The Emperor's New Mind that consciousness depends not just on arrangements of synaptic connections, but on funky quantum effects. (He was on a panel discussing this at a symposium at Dartmouth while I was there studying cognitive science, and I got to ask him a question. Squee!) Collapse of the quantum waveform, decoherence, boundaries between the quantum and classical, that sort of thing. Apparently he explored that particular topic, specifically with regard to a hypothesis he has about microtubules, in his next book, (hang on, Googling/Wikiing the name...) Shadows of the Mind. I haven't read it.

Suppose he's right. Suppose consciousness relies on something like quantum computing. Well, then, decoherence would interfere with it, wouldn't it? If you could figure out a way to "observe" the essential process or feature, you could disrupt someone's consciousness.

It's too bad we have no actual clue what "observe" means. Either theoretically or practically. How do you open the box on the cat? Can we mathematically define what constitutes opening the box? Penrose touches on this; he proposes that maybe it's something like, an event is observed when it's causally connected to a one-graviton outcome. He makes it clear that he's just waving his hands, though.

What if we could causally connect consciousness to a one-graviton outcome? Something like a photomultiplier for the soul. A cascade resulting from detection of some aspect of cognition.

Like say we discover that the quantummy activity in, oh heck, let's just go with the flow and say microtubules, sometimes emits neutrinos or something. Or when consciousness is happening, it has a different probability of emitting neutrinos. I dunno, all you need is something observable. Yeah, I know what you're going to say, but just for the sake of argument let's suppose we figure out a way to detect neutrinos without a coal mine full of ultrapure water. I watch PBS sometimes, too, you know.

So there you go. Point some appropriate kind of detector at somebody's head, and disrupt their consciousness. Just like the detector in the two-slit experiment, but useful.

Wouldn't that make a rockin' weapon?

Meme Grenade

I'm shy, in a peculiar kind of way, about communicating with people I don't know. There's a threshold, and only certain situations will get me over that threshold. If I have something I know to say, for instance, and I can convince myself it's relevant to the conversation, I can usually open my mouth. That's rare, though, and tough, and I'm afraid in my efforts to improve my social skills I may have somewhat degraded my criteria for relevance.

Another behavior which I often exhibit is what I call the meme grenade. I do this both in person and online. I'll toss an utterance of a few words into the group, carefully constructed to catch in people's heads and stimulate thought and conversation. Often, I'll then withdraw a bit, since the grenade was all I had to offer. More often than not, it's a dud, but it goes off frequently enough that I get reinforced for doing it. There's a little bit of glee I derive when, for instance, a thread or subthread discussion I initiate snowballs into a weeklong conversation.

There's a little subvocal exclamation in my head when I pull the pin. Translated to words, it might be, "Fire in the hole!"

I'm a visual person. There's a part of me that attributes synchronicity or something to the faint resemblance between an old-fashioned pineapple grenade and the capsid of a virus.

The Powers That Be

So, we just got to see the OLPC talk at PyCon. It was given by the fellow who handed out the first production OLPC.

And I've got my usual sci-fi feel about the OLPC thing, like it's going to wake the Overmind and such. And I don't know how silly that thought is. Even the most extreme position I've got in my head thinks that there's less than an even chance that this thing will actually happen; there's a great risk that it'll either fizzle on its own, or be stomped out by the powers that be.

I mean, how subversive can you get? How futurist can you get? Mesh networks. Pedagogy, economics, memetics.

One sad note, in that extreme position, is that if the big stuff happens, it will also include some bad shit. Seriously bad shit. Mass roundings up of XOs. Quashed uprisings by children. I don't want to think too much about it, but if you're starting to get really ugly images, you're heading in the right direction.

But one hopeful note is that the heroes of these events won't be unsung. The revolution will be televised.

And not so much broadcast as sowed. It's decentralized. Peer-to-peer. Mesh. The fundamental architecture of the OLPC project is exactly the kind of stuff that's least suppressible by tyrannical governments. In fact, it's superbly engineered countertyrranical technology. Someone's been doing some big-picture systems thinking.

I spent some time last night playing a trial of a game called GalCon. It's a resource-acquisition galactic conquest game. Implemented in Python, natch. I sucked at it, as I do at games, but after a little practice I began to hold my own against the Practice level of the bots. It reinforced a lesson I'd learned in Settlers of Catan: Grab resources fast. The importance of a given second in the game follows something like a hyperbola; no second is nearly as important as the one before it.

So taking that lesson and looking at OLPC, I'm happy that this fellow was talking about handing out a quarter million laptops in this first go. Sure, more faster would be better. But this might be enough.

Let's hope the powers that be don't yet grok graph theory.

An Outsider Visits PyCon

I'm at Guido's keynote.

Totally surrounded by Pythonistas.

As usual, I'm the odd man out.

The staff tees have an xkcd panel about python on the back.

Aaaaaaand the wifi's not working.

So here's a great example of how I think. Just now, an irritating buzzing noise intruded on Guido's keynote. He was going over some of the cool new features coming in Py3k. Somebody closed a door or something, and it went away. It wasn't particularly loud. Not loud enough that Guido had to stop talking. But for one or two sentences, radically fewer of the people present were paying full attention to what Guido was saying. I know I couldn't focus on the memes he was trying to transmit. I'm pretty sure I did not grab any important information out of that part of the meme stream. How many other people didn't?

And what effect will that have on the future? This is a pretty important conference. Imagine a graph of pythonistas, showing who has lots of influence, who acts as a maven, etc. I'll bet, even if 1000 (that's how many are here) is a tiny percentage of all the people using Python, that more than half of the... I don't know the graph-theory term; mass or something... more than half of the total mass of the pythonista influence graph is here in this room. So, suppose uptake of a particular new feature had a big impact of the future of Python development (and, let's face it, on the future of computing as a whole, and thus probably on the future of humanity, and heck, let's be bold, the universe; if you don't believe me, I ask you, how different would your laptop be if its ancestors had used something other than punched cards?) then what memes got into the heads of these people here, especially during that particular slide, is a relatively big knot in the grand tapestry.

If I were some benevolent or malevolent entity (or even a neutral entity) trying to command history for good or evil (or for the heck of it) the repertoire of tools I'd use would probably include making a buzzing noise, not too loud, during the New Features slide of Guido van Rossum's keynote at PyCon 2008. From my subjective vantage, I have no clue whether that event had big import or almost none. But if I hop into the simulator part of my brain and try out an objective vantage for a moment, I imagine that if some real-darn-smart-but-not-omniscient being were nudging history, that fact would manifest itself to my subjective vantage as that buzzing noise.

Ah, crap, is that just paranoia?

I suppose, given the just-because-you're-paranoid rule, that that question is irrelevant. The real question should be: Does this observation give us anything? What could I do with it? What could anyone do with it?

How do I know what's really important?

Maybe the answer is not something that's available to my subjective vantage. Ever.

Alethetropy

When I wrote about epistemic ethics, I talked about an attitude. The attitude which underlies the scientific method. The tendency to seek cognitive techniques which bring us closer to truth. I wanted to talk more about that attitude. I wanted to complain that we needed it to show up in more contexts than just the structure and activities of the scientific community.

But it's tough to talk about that attitude. Awkward. Hard to explain. Hard to refer to. I needed a word for it.

I couldn't find the right one. I decided it didn't exist.

So I made one up.

Aletheia was the Greek word for truth. It comes from lethe (λήθη) which means obscurity, concealment, or forgetfulness. The prefix a- (ἀ–) means not. Aletheia means not concealed.

Tropos (τρόπος) means turning. I remember in high school biology being delighted to learn the word heliotropism. It's just a neat word. It refers to the habit of some plants to turn to face the sun.

Alethetropy, then, means a tendency to turn toward the truth, or the act of facing the truth.

It turns out that I'm not the first to follow this etymological path; a variant, "alethetropic," is part of the title of an out-of-print book. So it's not really original. But it means something I want to say, so I'm going to start using it.

Now that I have it handy, it's a lot easier to express the following:

The scientific method is an algorithm for institutional alethetropy. What we need now are algorithms for individual alethetropy and cultural alethetropy.

Science

I once had a conversation with an acquaintance about a television show she had seen. Her description included the phrase, "and then they did science." I asked her to explain, and she described what the people on the show had done, and I replied, "Well, that's not science." I tried to explain what I meant. I tried to explain things like falsifiable hypotheses, and attempting to eliminate bias, and the like. She didn't understand.

Science isn't men in white lab coats with bubbling beakers. Science isn't pointing shiny instruments at things. Science isn't big expensive machines making measurements of incomprehensible quantities.

Those things can happen as part of the process, but they're not what science is.

Science is the courage to seek the truth. To separate truth from untruth. To exchange what you want to be for what is.

Epistemic Ethics

It occurs to me that before I go on using these terms much more, I should write down definitions.

So, first: Epistemic Ethics. Epistemic ethics has to do with assigning moral value to how much one cares about the quality and provenance of one's knowledge.

The idea is that being skeptical (or credulous) can make you a good (or bad) person.

Let me put it in context: Nowadays you can go into a grocery store, and buy broccoli that the merchant assures you was grown in a garden without pesticides. In a country with fair laws. By farmers who weren't being oppressed. That's called provenance. How did it get to you, where did it come from?

Implicitly, you're a bad person if you don't care where your broccoli came from. If you buy your broccoli at the other store, the one across the street, you get a little twinge of guilt and fear that it might have been grown in toxic waste by slaves (which isn't far from the truth, maybe, but that's not my point).

And yet there's a section in the first store, the one with the happy ethical broccoli, that sells herbal supplements for improving various complaints of physiology. Most of them say what they're for. But if they do, they also have to say "These statements have not been evaluated by the FDA." But that's not a very strong warning, is it? Face it, we've all come to think of the FDA as a lumbering inept government bureaucracy (mostly because it's true). So if they haven't gotten around to finding out whether this particular flower or root will help me go to sleep at night, who cares?

But what the warning really should say, in most cases, is, "These statements have not been evaluated by anybody."

The FDA, flawed as it is, is an attempt to put into practice a particular attitude. It's an attitude that has evolved over the past few millennia, and has proven itself to help people in getting at the truth. It shows up in philosophy, it shows up in the US constitution, and it shows up in the scientific method. It's hard to articulate, and many people have done a better job of it than I could do here, so I will only try to sum up: it's an attitude of intellectual humility, and mutual honesty. It's epistemic ethics.

When the FDA requires a pharmaceutical company to conduct rigorous double-blind clinical trials, it's attempting to enforce epistemic ethics. You can argue, with good cause, about how it's implemented and how the system has evolved, but you must admit that it's done a good job at reducing how often people can get away with making stuff up. It's introduced disincentives for people to proffer to other people junk knowledge.

Western medicine has flawed standards of proof, and questionable motives, yes. But it sure beats no standards of proof, and obvious motives.

And yet people have turned away from the attitude that brought about the FDA. They're forgetting the motivation because they're angry at the implementation. They're forgetting the moral root of the situation. They're buying products that bear the words "These statements have not been evaluated" as a badge of honor.

So, when I see a flower in a bottle, one aisle over from the morally upright broccoli, it bugs me. It bugs me that I might be living in a society where you can be a bad person for ignoring where your broccoli came from, but you get a free pass to ignore where your knowledge came from.

And that's a problem of epistemic ethics.

Foundations

There is no relief from Descartes's deceiving demon. If I dig at the roots of my epistemic foundations, that is the bedrock I always find.

Given the deceiving demon, what does an individual possessed of reason take as a maxim of action? Reason itself, alone, is inert, and must be moved from without.

Even alethetropy cannot have an absolute foundation. I want to use it as my pedestal, but when I push against it, it shifts.

Alethetropy, then, must be taken as a guideline, a rule of thumb. It can serve as a moral basis, but like any other, must it be accepted on faith?

Bad skeptic!

There's a problem with modern skepticism.

When somebody objects to charlatanry on the grounds that its principles are wrong, that's bad skepticism. I've seen people object to homeopathy, for instance, by pointing out that the Law Of Infinitesimals contradicts known scientific fact. Bad skeptic! No biscuit!

The scientific mindset doesn't require you to prove how something works, or why something works, but that you prove THAT it works. Double-blind placebo-controlled clinical trials (that old chestnut) do not prove that a researcher's reasoning is valid; they prove that some particular testable prediction was correct or not correct. With error bars.

Knowing WHY something is, is a very different thing from knowing THAT it is. The former is deep, and rich, and in some cases might in fact be impossible (maybe fully understanding quantum mechanics, say, takes, in some inescapable information-theory kind of way, two more square inches of cortex than you've got in your skull). The latter, though, we have a chance at, and sometimes may even get a firm grasp on.

But bad skepticism happens a lot. People who think themselves intelligent, un-gullible, alethetropic, or epistemically virtuous, often engage in bad skepticism. When they should know better.

It happens because of a deeper problem. I think it may be connected to the Myth Of Reason. We've allowed ourselves to get so cocky about being logical, that we've begun attributing to logic powers it doesn't have.

Which, if we do not correct it, will make us no better than charlatans ourselves.

Wheelbarrow

This morning I saw
on Lexington Road
on the bank of a stream
by a well-manicured house
a wheelbarrow
overturned
rotting into the ground under a pile of brush.

We none of us can maintain our worlds
keep them in good repair
and proper order. All decays.

I am on Thoreau's railbed, I think.
And here is a graveyard
on and on.
Lives that came and went.

But produced, evidently, headstone-carvers
who survived them.

Someone made the wheelbarrow new, once.

So what I crave to know
is
is someone somewhere building a wheelbarrow today?
Will someone again build a wheelbarrow tomorrow?

Turning

What's on my mind? My mind. It slurs, sloshes. It's troubled, but not by trouble. Just turbulent. Waves. Eddies. I knock on the glass, and within I answer back with a smile, and bubbles. And swim away, drifting loose in the bowl. I mouth the words. He shakes his head in reply. This is real, he says. This is us. We're happening.

But if nothing comes of it? So much disappointment. So much guilt, embarrassment at hopes forgotten, expectations not just unfulfilled, but denied the honor of regret.

Slow, slow. And one says that's the way, and one says that's nothing, that's void. Lack.

And I won't know. Even in the final accounting. So the question remains, as ever, what to do, when the answer will never be known. Alethetropy assumes return, not question alone. So if there is no answer, if the sum is never taken, what then? Then, then. Then there is no alethetropy. Only as an exercise, only the subjunctive. But the subjunctive is. Its referent absent, still it is, and gives power. So is alethetropy. It is not something we can have. It is a direction, not a destination. All we can do is cast the rope ahead, for the next. The best we can give them, is that we looked about, opened our eyes, and tried to discern the light, before we let go.

Needle and thorn

Walk, before you die, among catbriar and pine. Drink their lofty dappled air.

A haze of vegetable steel. Twining vines, sharp points. To walk that path is to yield to its piercing embrace, enveloped, bound, penetrated.

I would, if I could, stand still. Let the questing soft climb enchain me. Become the heart of a swaying pillar of this bark-walled cathedral to the filtered sun. Be grasped caressed gently inexorably by sweet curling tendrils jade.

And my troubled turmoil rot, sink to loam, and feed the singing still forest mind.

Running

Why am I running? Why am I running away from what I have to do?

I rationalize. I suggest, well, maybe it's for the best, because what you're supposed to do isn't really what you're supposed to do. But that doesn't sit well. First of all, it's obvious rationalization, and rationalization is an epistemic vice. Second, if it were true, I'd expect it to look more like doing something else, and less like just not doing this. I don't exactly have a bias toward action. And I feel like I should. I suppose it's possible that the right thing to do right now is nothing, but my upbringing tells me otherwise. My upbringing says, no, you only get to use that excuse if you're doing something more important, not if you're doing nothing at all. And then the rationalizer says, well, I'm always doing something; suppose breathing or daydreaming is the more important thing? And we go around again.

I also have learned helplessness. And what an apt learner I am. Even when I protest, it's always phrased as "Why can't I?" Never do I suggest that maybe I just could. There is implicitly some savage dark power shackling me. It must be dark, indeed. However I peer into the shadows, I do not see it.

Certainly we can't have evolved lazy. I admit, it makes sense to conserve resources. It makes sense to minimize risk. But there has to be evolutionary pressure to do what we must.

What if that's it? What if we have evolved to do what we must? And here, in the Age of Fructose, there is so little must to go around, action escapes us. We're content to sit in a great crowd, picking nits from one another's fur, and we don't get up to forage for fruit, because fruit is all around us. At our fingertips. Clinging to us. Weighing down our bellies and buttocks. Instead of hiding in the trees where it belongs, beckoning to us to climb.