Friday, December 16, 2011

Failed State

Every year the legislature gets together to re-up the National Defense Authorization Act. Every year, under the auspices of this legislation, the Constitution that is supposed to protect the "inalienable human rights" bestowed upon us by our very nature as human beings, is being systematically destroyed. The entire system of government in the United States is working to undermine the basic freedoms we as citizenry ought to be able to take for granted.

Beyond any idealism, the systematic evisceration of the Constitution is not something that can be attributed to just one administration. Bush and Obama are no different in this respect. There is little reason to believe that during this election cycle, Obama will revert back to his campaign "promises." Rather, the current president should be known as the propagandist of the century, for his rhetoric during his election initially has been completely ignored. Government is no longer working to protect the citizenry; Government is a body of lawyers and lobbied special interests working to only protect those who have large sums of money invested in the policy making machine. Government is neither for the people, nor the State. Government is out for itself. People in power will fight to stay in power at all costs.

During wartime, these laws effectively give the President, as Commander and Chief, the power to do literally as he pleases, domestically and otherwise. It just so happens that we are engaged in an endless undeclared war on terrorism. Come to think of it, when is the last time our government actually followed the Constitution and declared war? There has never been any congressional discussion or debate as to whether or not the president, on the whims of his own decision making, has grounds to send the military to war. And yet, here we are. We are living in an age of unauthorized, unprecedented government seizure of power over the entire country; it could be argued as well that that very same power extends to everywhere the United States has presence. The idea that the world is now an authorized battleground is no longer fantastical.

Those of us that are glued to our television screens absorbing the mass propaganda of the now moot mainstream media will not see the full picture. The media is programmed to emit limited information on limited subject matter. Journalism no longer operates under the principles upon which it was founded. Freedom of the Press was extended under the Bill of Rights to ensure a constantly opened window into the fortress that is now the Government. Such amendments are now being systematically ignored. With sports and entertainment news consuming the headlines, and pundits swaying and misinforming the public on issues that matter, there is also very little reason to believe that the public will ever have a chance to become truly informed. As a result, the public will continue to vote for major leaders of the major political parties, further exacerbating the corruption now inherent in the system.

If these issues remain ignored, it will no longer be the fault of the Government, but of the masses, for they will unknowingly participate in the destruction, or the failure, of the State they are pretending to vote in the best interest of.

Thursday, December 8, 2011

Indubitable Crises

These are interesting times. It is quite simple to capture the state of things in a few paragraphs. The difficulty arises when these few paragraphs are read and evaluated by the news-media influenced public mind. Encouraging people to think of the issues themselves untainted by the propaganda machine is the most difficult thing to do for reform-minded activists. Common thinking is swayed significantly by the media, which directs its focus toward issues at the whim of the power elite. Financial institutions and multinational corporations, as Noam Chomsky highlights, are clearly at the forefront of government influence toward policy making. Chomsky points out in a recent article "American Decline: Causes and Consequences," that the public is seriously divided, not only within its own ranks, but also separated significantly from policy makers. The problem then is clearly one of misinformation, or propaganda. If the electorate is to ever have an effect on the outcome of policy, the system must be unhinged from the throes of the financial industry "masters of humankind" as Chomsky puts it.

Why is it acceptable that Obama hired on his economic team the very same individuals who manufactured the current crisis? Goldman Sachs and its economic policy is no policy at all... it encourages high risk high reward transactions at the cost of the "rabble's" livelihood. The recent bailouts of the "too big to fail" banks benefited those banks, who have further incentive to do as they please. Their security blanket is the government itself. Why should they yield? And why should a legislature that is largely bought and sold by those institutions pass reforms that would hurt the masters' bottom lines? Despite the evil of the state of the economy and government, it is entirely rational from their point of view to sustain business as usual.

Analogous is the global warming crisis. The economic crisis is a long term issue--reforms made today will not be overwhelmingly noticed today, but ought to protect future generations from having to pay their forefathers' debt. Similarly, the climate crisis is something that must be dealt with today, not because we will necessarily feel the effects today (even though the fluctuating weather patterns across the globe seem to be a surprise to everyone), but because our children will have grandchildren of their own who very likely will pay with their lives in a century or less.

These are crises of ideas. Policy follows ideas. And the ideas being generated from the current popular media and legislature are overwhelmingly "business-as-usual" in tone. Business as usual is not sustainable by any stretch of the imagination.

Far from conspiracy theory, all it takes is a day of research to connect the dots for oneself uninfluenced by the pundits on the major broadcasting networks. They do not live by journalistic principles. How could they? They are told by those in power what to report. And it isn't their fault. They trust those in power, even if one particular network is more cynical than another. The internal constraints built into the system prevent free thinking from breaking out into the public mindset. Even the tea-party grassroots movement was co-opted by the Republican Party. Accordingly, it will not be a shock to discover the occupy movements to be co-opted by the moderate-conservative Democratic Party.

Societies are complex, dynamic systems, driven and confused by what I have called the "Agency/Morality Circularity." Simply put, to be outlined in more detail, self-interested agency influences, manifests and deterministically generates moral structures (governments, social norms), which subsequently influences self-interest. Eventually, the paradigm is caught in a stagnant loop, where one side of the polarity is controlled by the other side of the polarity. The dichotomous nature of such a circularity gives rise to the very complexity apparent in the system at large. There are now layers upon layers representative of such static circular paradigms. Corporations are also driven by self-interest, despite being heavily motivated by their "lesser" working constituents. However, the upper echelon's self interest is what influences policy making on the government level. Moral agency is thus co-opted by self-interest in the guise of moral agency. Consider the recent legislation granting Corporations the ability to, as private citizens can, fund campaigns. One not need to ponder that fact for more than a moment to realize the connection.

Tuesday, August 30, 2011

Quantum Macroconnectivity

Condensed energy,
then it seems a single momentous stream
stretches means into modal tendencies.
Space spanning centuries:
Origin growth, exponential forces explode.
More than is known disclosed as we soar from the globe.
Potentially...
Cosmic memory is force and motion,
gravitation extrapolated from common heredity.
Genetic courses from enormous holes in proportion,
to life thriving from the shores to the oceans.
How did we progress from the source of the quantum order,
where nothingness became collections of thought recorders,
with their own subjective piece of this tropical destiny.
Philosophical, psychological, biological entities
devouring the planet like some entropically spread disease.
Mechanics is the observation of interaction
between the constant stages we're living trapped in.
To study how our honest hatred conditions madness
is to understand how our cosmic sameness delimits passion.
Just listen closer, Schrodinger found, as minutes pass,
friction happens, causing certainty to diminish fast.
Despite the fact we know so little, the problem is real:
as descriptions of the micro and macroscopic revealed
through action processed in theoretical fields,
become accurate commentary on our active ontic ordeal.

Now we seem to be so entrenched in our attributes,
we're content to be blind to the evident, savage truths
raining down upon us like Heaven's collapsed and moved
our notions of paradise to discrepancies, past confused.
Get it? We never get asked for proof,
we just refer to the annals of the last who knew,
who referred further back to the annals of aristocrats reviewed,
who earned money by selling the truth in a package to
the same people who eventually became the massive youth.
Intertwined quantum exactitude.
We live inside minds where consciousness acts as You
and think were not a single kind of object who lacks a clue.
Connections run deeper yet I'm still a skeptic.
We need food, but eat poison knowing it kills digestion.
We feed into a system knowing that it will infect us.
But it's all part of this absolute soul.
We're all descendants,
we all have to choose though.
Despite the fact that beyond our actions, truth holds
and becomes the very same as our decisions.
Thus, we're all dependent,
and we have to choose, so...
With Mind we track beyond our actions, where truth floats
beyond horizons
and becomes the very same as our conditions.

Thursday, August 18, 2011

Purus emergentiæ poetica

 Sacrifice | Three-Planes-Aligned
Purus Emergentiæ Poetica 
 
Grief and fantasy, dreaming phantoms scream
out into the void where freedom emerges, into
peaceful disturbances, voicing lethal determinism;
I sleep to manage these, frequent occurrences,
either that or keep my evil concerned with rhythms;
To answer each question authentically is mentally,
like trying to deal with good and evil separately,
I guess we need to keep our terse existence anywhere the serpent isn't.

Or embrace the oblivion that subverts the spirit
- Being senseless is preferred in a dirty prison
Fast to coerce a critter - to pretend and bleed
That the flesh is weak - and thoughts are worthless flickers
Either you accept that objections breed, regret and grief
- Or you consent to sleep in the middle of this burning village
The path of least resistance has a toll of thirty silvers
But off-road, regime servicemen murder drifters

Emergent myths turn from illusory to computed truth.
Programming souls standing up to those that choose abuse.
I'd prove to you the need to evolve,
but the people involved seem to confuse peaceful resolve
with the seeds of assault: reach into the breach,
beyond par when the King might attempt freeing the Gulf.
The spider's web is an equally responsible matrix;
from the launching of spaceships to the breeding of Gods.

And there you lie in obscurity and bleed for your cause
To feeble applause - from the listless choir
Coughing and wheezing as mould eats through the gauze
- A crippled, wizened, disfigured lion
The facts demand, a man of action, and
- A proactive stance as well as a fist of iron
The tree of wisdom withers as it's licked by fire
Making a noise falling - but rotting in chilling silence

Filling vibrant strings of void with prophets.
Building minds with nodes and sockets, open sourced
pockets with exploding bandwidth consortia.
Assorted and reconfigured pieces expand distraction.
Speed and advanced exactness while fleeing from damned entrapment,
so I toss mountains until my glass house is freed from the threat.
Speak for the rest of the diseased collective
tell them they don't need to expect it, the answer happened.

The balance act is - impossible math
- A dance with abstract particulars and ashen hangmen
Ghastly Latin - creativity is an obstacled path
- Insoluble wrath and fractured grammar
Unfathomed famine - towards the lucid offering
- The future is calling and in my stupor I'm soaring
I don't plan to shatter or go out with a bang
- I just plan to implode one of these beautiful mornings...

From ousting the strange to computing its normalcy,
the future's abhorrently without the constraints
needed for equilibrium. I'm fused with a coarse disease
that forces me to accord with reason and destroy deceit.
Speaking to free the cynical from their obnoxious doubt.
I'm more than Me, I'm uni-factual when problems bound,
computing practical by tapping into the quantum-cloud.
Because the apocalypse will only arrive when I'm not around.

Tuesday, August 16, 2011

The Nature of Reality

"The nature of reality is pure subjective fantasy; space and time, the here and now, are only in your mind." Andy Bell, from Oasis, Dig Out Your Soul, 2008.

Monday, August 15, 2011

The Ethics of Biological Longevity

What if we were to cease the symptoms of aging, reverse the aging process all together, and reach a kind of immortality? There are many that offer speculation as to the path to that end; some adhere strictly to biological solutions: by understanding more thoroughly how cellular structures respond and react to gene/enzyme manipulation and encoding, aging might be considered simply as another disease with a cure. Some point toward nano/non-biological solutions; small robots programmed to root out the source of aging and reprogram cells to respond accordingly; or perhaps, uploading the self into a virtual system which could keep "life" contained within a system that self-corrects-- that all it would need are minor hardware fixes (which it could also self-correct). Or we could develop an increasingly more intelligent artificial entity that could solve all of our aging problems for us, perform the necessary procedures, eliminate needless threats to longevity (climate change, war, vicious habits, etc), and allow us to live on in harmony until the end of time. Regardless of the approach, the end is what I'm concerned mostly about. Assuming we can reach such a point, where it is no longer about when death will come, but what to do now that death is no longer the norm.

Perhaps the value of life itself would stabilize; since everyone ought to have the same or similar ability to extend life, the choices we make come down to methodology. Perhaps, however, life would become so much more valuable, since the loss of life would be that much more tragic. In a world where everyone has the chance to live as long as they please, tragic death would seem all the more devastating.

Suppose we do end up reaching this end. Who is entitled to the extension of life? Will it cost money? Will it be contingent upon who has what resources to expend to obtain "immortality?" Will religions fade away, or surge back into global consciousness? Would we have to consider branching out into space to account for the population explosion that would inevitably come? Could we extend longevity, as such, to other forms of life? There are so many questions that arise when considering such a profound potential, it is difficult to fully understand the implications.

Friday, August 12, 2011

Ultraintelligent Machines

"Let an ultraintelligent machine be defined as a machine that can far surpass all the intellectual activities of any man however clever.  Since the design of machines is one of these intellectual activities, an ultraintelligent machine could design even better machines; there would then unquestionably be an ‘intelligence explosion,’ and the intelligence of man would be left far behind. Thus the first ultraintelligent machine is the last invention that man need ever make." - I.J. Good

Thursday, August 11, 2011

Speculations for the future...

So, the consensus seems to be that we are at an integral point in human history (what age hasn't said that about themselves?). Regardless if the claim is hyperbole, however, it does seem fairly clear that the explosive technological expansion the world has experienced (most of the world, that is; one need not mention in length the 3rd World, which, for the most part, doesn't have running water) has grand implications for the future. The Singularity Institute (http://www.singinst.org) was established to address the issues that inevitably will arise when such a "future" comes about. Consider what sort of situation the 3rd World would be in when machines become so embedded in the global fabric. Will they prosper? Will they be consumed? Will all of us be consumed?

In my mind, the "becoming" of the newest world, a world where the threshold between human and machine is increasingly blurred, will be gradual, even if fast by any normal standard. Accordingly, such issues, ethical, political, socio-cultural, and otherwise, will also "become" gradually, even if with unprecedented haste. For example, in order to allocate the necessary resources to engage with intelligent machines, entire social and political systems will need to be uprooted, redesigned and reoriented to account for the new overarching agency of potentially more intelligent and efficient "citizens." How will the existing moralities of the various affected cultures change? Leading up to any Singularity, we would necessarily have to already have a moral foundation upon which the new paradigm could stand. It is my contention that the human virtues and vices that exist now will still be alive, but so very minimal in comparison, that any Aristotelian human excellence would be a side note to the amazing machine intelligences. Of course, the alternative is, if we find a way to merge with the machines, or exponentially enhance ourselves, we could, perhaps, find ourselves on relatively "equal" footing upon that new paradigmatic global foundation.

Then, of course, there's the prospect of "mind uploading" and brain emulation/simulation in real and virtual worlds. Consider the possibility of having more than one Self in the world. Imagine living amongst exact replicas of yourself. First of all, would they truly be exact replicas? The virtue of being human is that experience is ultimately a subjective enterprise, and the capacity for learning depends upon the cohesiveness of fluctuating experience. The "stuff" in the mind might be the same, but the experiences they encounter would necessarily, from the very outset, cause them to diverge significantly. "Clones" in that sense, can't actually exist outside the physical substrates which make up their hardware. Consider computers as an analogy, or perhaps smart phones. Two phones, same manufacturer, same developer... indeed, same phone. However, the "personality" of each phone would necessarily differ depending on its owner. Each owner experiences the world differently, and thus utilizes the computer differently. My clone might  very well be strikingly similar to me. But considering experience, a posteriori reasoning and epistemic justifications for present phenomena, clones simply cannot exist removed from considerations of physicality.

Interesting.


Wednesday, August 10, 2011

Singularity

Recently I've rediscovered the movement now known as the "Singularity (see http://www.singinst.org) for more information)." In short, due to the exponential expansion and growth of information and information technology, in many minds, it is becoming quite plausible to imagine a future, in this century, of highly advanced, intelligent technologies interacting with human beings surviving into posterity well beyond normal life expectancies through the implementation of nano-technological solutions to climate change, poverty and health; some conceptions even envisage virtual reality systems potentially replacing "reality" as we know it, and most strikingly, the development of artificial intelligences smart enough to create smarter machines which would in turn create even smarter machines, ad infinitum.

The implications of the "intelligence explosion" (http://intelligenceexplosion.com/primer.html) as it is being called are vast. First, the moment we create a machine only slightly smarter than the smartest human, theoretically, that machine will be able to create an even smarter machine, on and on until the limits of the laws of physics are reached. At that point, the networks of intelligent machines would be so massive, by many orders of magnitude, that civilization as we know it now would be long transformed. Some speculate that humans will merge with the machines, others think that perhaps we could create "friendly AI" and coexist with them while others are less optimistic. The machines may very well consume us, Matrix style, and any conceivable human-biological paradigm would disappear from the universe. Whether the intelligence explosion comes about by emulating the brain, or emulating evolution, or scientists and researchers figuring out how to implement bio-technological/nano-technological enhancements to our own intelligence, all of these ideas are exceedingly becoming more fascinating to me, for, philosophically, the implications are more and more confounding.

David Chalmers writes: "The basic argument for an intelligence explosion is philosophically interesting in itself, and forces us to think hard about the nature of intelligence and about the mental capacities of artificial machines. The potential consequences of an intelligence explosion force us to think hard about values and morality and about consciousness and personal identity. In effect, the singularity brings up some of the hardest traditional questions in philosophy and raises some new philosophical questions as well."[1]

Philosophy, it should be noted, has many many potential things to say regarding the notion of a future Singularity. The idea that academics could ignore the potential for such a paradigm shift is pathetic, and proves the shortsightedness of human beings in a culture where success is determined quarterly and not by the decade. Obviously there are problems to always gazing too far into the horizon, but the horizon is fixed, and the opportunity to see where the path might lead is up to speculative thinkers undergoing rigorous conceptual analysis, amongst other things. Perhaps most importantly, the philosopher must begin to seriously think about the ethical implications of having artificial agency. Our conceptions of Self, personal identity, ideas of Other minds, consciousness and subjectivity, and most broadly, of Mind, will need to be examined with rigor, under the kind of serious practical scrutiny that philosophers thrive on when the new world agents we deal with most likely will not be as we assume we are with each other. Consider the problems we might encounter, when an artificial mind can indeed decide, on moral grounds, to do some such thing with ethical implications. The issue would get more complex as the phenomenon unfolds.

With this blog, I intend to write, as often as I can, my thoughts regarding the ideas that I come across moving forward. I am newly inspired by minds like Ben Goertzel (http://www.goertzel.org), Ray Kurzweil, James Martin, David Chalmers, among many others. I highly recommend, if you are interested in learning more about Singularity and its many offspring, to check these names out.






---
[1] David Chalmers, “The Singularity: A Philosophical Analysis”