Strange Loops

According to CNN earlier this month, the FBI wants to cook up a gigantic biometric database of peoples’ prints, eye scans, tattoos, face shapes, walk patterns, etc. Of course, they don’t plan to have only criminals in the database, but job seekers and the like — maybe eventually everyone.

According to the FBI, more than half of the queries to the current fingerprint database are not for criminal investigations at all, but run on normal people applying to work in an old folk’s home or with kids or in another sensitive job. Even if the applicant doesn’t match up to any criminal prints, their information might be added to the database and store. The FBI is planning a service for employers to request the FBI to keep applicant biometrics on file and to inform them if the employee ever commits a crime. The FBI says it would require applicants signing a waiver to allow this, but if it’s a condition of employment — especially if it becomes a standard condition of employment — then there isn’t a lot of real choice for the applicants.

But, of course, the government is not just compiling data from job applicants. This month the Electronic Frontier Foundation filed a lawsuit against the government to force disclosure of border search policies. Apparently lots of normal people at airports and borders have been forced to disclose their login passwords, to allow their laptop data (including web searches, emails and address books) to be copied, to let agents go through their cell phone numbers and text messages (taking out SIM cards).

No suspicion of criminal activity needed. The government claims that it has the authority to look at all your electronic information (even that which is password protected) when you travel abroad. Doesn’t matter if you have sensitive personal information, or business information you are legally required not to share.

Shirin Sinnar, a staff attorney with the Asian Law Caucus, said that by scrutinizing the Web sites people search and the phone numbers they’ve stored on their cellphones, “the government is going well beyond its traditional role of looking for contraband and really is looking into the content of people’s thoughts and ideas and their lawful political activities.”

No one knows how long the data they have copied is stored. Is it all going into a big database? It’s plausible, given programs like CAPPS II. That is why the Electronic Frontier Foundation is filing lawsuit — the government so far has ignored Freedom of Information Act requests to provide information about what they are doing with all this data.

So for now a lot of businesses are storing all their information on company servers and having employees log in remotely over securely encrypted channels, rather than storing any information on the company laptop.

These days a lot of our memories, plans, ideas and other thoughts are externalized and distributed across technology (a post-it note with a to-do list is just a memory extension, and sometimes more reliable than the memory system built into our neurons). Given that, maybe in the near future, the only way to keep your thoughts private from government scrutiny will be strong encryption. Are we nearing the days of crypto-anarchism?

Back in 1961, Yale researcher Stanley Milgram performed a now-controversial experiment. He recruited people to volunteer in a psychology study supposedly about learning and memory. When they arrived, they were told the setup: a pair of participants were to play two roles, teacher and learner, while the experimenter (a stern man in a lab coat) observed. However, the trick of the experiment was that each participant was always “randomly” assigned to be the teacher, while the second alleged participant, assigned as learner, was in fact always an accomplice to the experiment.

For the experiment, the participant (as teacher) was moved to a separate room from the learner. Through an intercom, the participant was to read a list of word pairs to the learner, who then had to choose matching pairs when quizzed. After incorrect answers, the participant was to flip a switch to shock the learner — a panel at their desk had switches labeled 45 volts increasing up to 450 volts. The participant had watched the learner get strapped in to the shock equipment. The learner mentioned in passing that he had a heart condition, after which the experimenter authoritatively assured him that there was no danger (again, this was all acted out with the participant thinking the learner was just another volunteer). Back in the test room, the participant received a not-insignificant 45 volt shock to see what it felt like, and then the word-pair testing began.

The teacher read the words, and the learner appeared to be responding, and getting shocked at successively higher levels after each mistake. In fact, there were no real shocks, but a pre-recorded tape played reactions to each shock. As the shock levels went up, the learner feigned increased pain and eventually banged on the wall, complained about his heart condition, and asked to be released. If the participant continued, the learner stopped responding at all.

At a certain level, many participants stopped to question the experiment, querying the experimenter who was observing in the same room. When the participant did so, the experimenter verbally pushed them to continue (”Please continue”, “The experiment requires that you continue”, “It is absolutely essential that you continue”, “You have no other choice, you must go on”). Only if the participant still refused to go on was the experiment ended; otherwise it went on until they had delivered three shocks at the maximum level (450 volts, labeled “dangerous” on their panel).

Amazingly, most of the subjects — 65% — gave the final level of shock. While every participant at some point questioned the experimenter, not a single one dropped out before the 300 volt shock level. Even those who quit the experiment before the final level just removed their own participation, without trying to stop the experiment itself or check on the health of the learner. (Remember, the learner had complained of a heart condition before and during the experiment, and had gone silent after a possibly dangerous shock).

This experiment and its later replications vividly demonstrate the power of authority over peoples’ behavior. In this case it was a man in a labcoat in a university, but the experiment itself was inspired by the “just following orders” defense used in war crime trials for World War II Nazis. It’s not just the World War II Germans, though. Atrocities can be committed by anyone, including Americans. As Michael Albert put it:

“I have long since understood that the Germans weren’t different than the Brits or Americans or anyone else, though their circumstances were different, but for those who still don’t understand mass subservience to vile crimes induced by structural process of great power and breadth, I have to admit that I mostly just want to shout: Look around, dammit!”

But Milgram showed us that it is not just soldiers who can be influenced by authority to do bad things, but also normal people. Someone might counter that the Milgram results happened in a very different era, and that people today would act differently. However, the experiment has recently been replicated with similar results. See the ABC video below:

Related experiments have further confirmed how situational effects can bring normal people to commit horrible acts. In 1971, researcher Philip Zimbardo at Stanford created a fake prison underground in the psychology building. An experiment assigned the participants to play either a prisoner or a guard role, and paid them by the day to stay in the experiment. Prisoners were stuck in the basement 24/7, while the guards worked shifts in the mock prison and then went home to their normal life. What’s interesting, though, is that the guards quickly took on their role in seriousness, abusing the prisoners and showing genuine sadistic tendencies. Guards adapted their behavior to conform to what they thought Zimbardo — playing Prison Superintendent — wanted. (See this YouTube video for more).

Haslam and Reicher (2003) partially replicated Zimbardo’s prison experiment, demonstrating the crucial role of a leader (in this case, Zimbardo as superintendent) in establishing these patterns of behavior.

However, it is not just authority that can alter a normal person’s behavior for the worse. Conformity to a larger group can make people go against their better judgement. In the 50’s, Solomon Asch ran an experiment in which a group of participants were presented with a simple task: shown a picture with a plain line labeled X and three parallel comparison lines (A, B and C), choose which comparison line is the same length.

Crucially, all but one of the alleged participants in the group were actually accomplices to the experiment. All of the group members responded in order, out loud, which line matches the example line’s length. Occasionally, though, what the accomplices did was uniformly select a wrong answer — something anyone with normal vision could see was wrong. But after hearing a row of people claim this wrong answer, the participants often conformed and gave an answer they knew was wrong.

In later interviews, many subjects claimed they did not actually believed their conforming answers, but some actually did. Was it possible that their very perceptions were changed by the pressure to conform?

A more recent replication study, published in 2005, used brain imaging to show that different parts of the brain were active depending on whether the actor was conforming or independently dissenting. When not conforming, regions of the brain associated with emotion were active, suggesting an emotional cost to going against the group. Whether conforming to a wrong answer or not, there was no increased activity in the parts of the brain associated with conscious decision making. Crucially, though, when conforming to a unanimous wrong answer, a brain area devoted to spatial awareness lit up. In other words, it appears that how we see things — not just metaphorically, but literally what we see — is affected by social pressure.

Together, these and similar experimental results show how tenuous our control is over our own behavior. Under the combined influence of authority, leadership and conformity, perfectly normal people can come to disregard their own beliefs, morals and even perceptions. Deep down in all of us lurks a potential monster.

Perhaps an upside may be found among the variation of behaviors. Some people quit Milgram’s shock experiment (after giving quite a few shocks, of course). A few guards in Zimbardo’s prison experiment did little favors for the prisoners. Not everyone conformed in Asch’s line-perception experiments (having someone else dissent before you makes it much more likely you will dissent). And, of course, even some Nazi officers refused to participate in the atrocities of Hitler’s regime.

In other words, there is some hope. Further work in this line of study will hopefully identify and highlight the factors influencing non-conformity in similar situations, so that we might better understand what pitfalls to avoid in the future. Until then, we best keep these experiments in mind as a reminder that we are all susceptible to influence that may push us far beyond our normal ethical boundaries.

How would you feel if law enforcement started scanning all of your email, your file transfers, and your web search history that Google and other companies keep (often going back years)? The U.S. Director of National Intelligence, Michael McConnell, is proposing just that. It’s for our security, he says.

Security, after all, is a trade-off. We know that staying home all day would generally increase our safety, but is it worth it? Banning cars would decrease traffic deaths immensely, but is it worth it? We face a multitude of situations like this that involving weighing increased security against its costs. (This is to set aside the many cases where security tactics are mere security theater, and may be counter-productive).

Security weighed against costs — unfortunately this common-sense notion has been used to promote a false dichotomy in United States discourse recently: “security versus privacy”. It’s assumed that the more we allow privacy, the more our security is undermined because Bad Guys^tm can take advantage of it, hide behind it. Making ourselves safe requires giving up some of the privacy we’ve expected up until now.

We will become safer, people assume, if we let the government look through all of our emails and web search histories, if we let them video tape us on the streets and in public buildings, if we are forced to use a data-filled national biometric ID in order to fly on airplanes or open bank accounts, if we are searched wherever law enforcement decides it is necessary, if we are, in short, presumed guilty until proven innocent. If privacy and security are a zero-sum game (as claimed by Ed Giorgio, the guy working with Directer McConnell on the internet spying proposal), then as privacy goes down, security must go up, right?

Not necessarily. As Bruce Schneier argues, we’ve been sold the idea it’s “security versus privacy” in the debate at hand, when in fact it is a question of “control versus liberty”. We may — may — gain some security by giving more control to the government, but if that’s always true then the safest place to be is inside a police state. Why aren’t more people eager to live in a police state?

Because in the U.S., for protection against abuse our system is set up to circumscribe government power. Law enforcement has certain invasive spying options for pursuing important national security and terrorism investigations, but it is historically limited to using such invasive techniques only for those essential purposes (not to catch and prosecute minor crimes). The only thing stopping the government from ubiquitous and pervasive use of intrusive spying on every American are legal safeguards — like warrants and judicial oversight — that make sure extreme measures are only used for their intended extreme needs. (Which is one of the reasons why the Patriot Act’s blurring of FISA court oversight has been so contentious).

Technology is getting to the point where Big Brother can be automated: as of 2006, Britain had one security camera up for every 14 people, and the U.S. may not be very far behind. Cameras now have license-plate recognition capabilities, and face-recognition (as well as gait-recognition) software is developing by leaps and bounds. Soon, our entire lives and all our actions could potentially be scanned for government approval. Our privacy is fading, even compared to other countries like China and Russia.

However, our legal tradition (including such protections as the constitutional guarantee against arbitrary search and seizure) has historically put limitations in place to make sure law enforcement doesn’t get out of hand. In many cases, we require probable cause, and if laws aren’t followed by enforcement officers, evidence isn’t admissible in court even where guilt is obvious. (Otherwise, the government would never follow the rules and could arbitrarily detain anyone — including you — just in case they find out later you’re guilty of something). If every law was enforced perfectly and automatically, just about every one of us would be in jail for something.

Instead, we value our privacy and put limits on our government executive in order to protect ourselves. In other words, we require security not just from terror and spies of a foreign origin, but from the internal terror of a police state, from spies in our own government. An essential requirement for that security is a respect for basic privacy built into our laws.

If we start lifting basic restrictions on government power — basic safeguards against abuse — just because some higher up thinks it will make us safer from the latest threat-de-jour (be it terrorism, communism or something else), then we may permanently lose the very liberty that provides us protection from our own government going too far. Security is not the opposite of liberty and privacy; rather it is intimately tied to them.

Normally our bodies receive sensory input through eyes, ears, skin and other systems, and those inputs synch up in consistent ways, such that our brain can put it together into a coherent picture of the 3D world around and including us. My visual input is basically just a sterooscopic movie, but because it matches so well with tactile and other input (you feel the toe-pain of a rock right when you see that familiar foot object hit it), we interpret those images as us being inside a 3D world. Really we construct the world around us — and we presume our construction is veridical because it consistently predicts the matching up of sensory events (occasional illusions notwithstanding).

This makes perfect sense if, as we assume, we are bodies inhabiting a 3D world — bodies including brain systems that integrate sensory input from different feedback devices (including inner feedback from proprioception and the like). But if this is the case, then we should theoretically be able to disrupt or alter the brain processes that synch up our various sensory experiences, such that our consistent, 3D view of the world from our own body’s perspective is thrown out of whack. But what would happen, in that case?

We’re all familiar with claims of out-of-body experience such as, say, looking down on your own body from above. That is to say, some people report visual input that seems to locate itself in a spatial location within the 3D world that is not the same as usual. In fact, they may see an image of their own body, much like what we see in a mirror; except in the case of a mirror the various sensory modalities still match up. When seeing yourself in a mirror, the proprioceptive and muscular feedback of lifting your arms corresponds to visual feedback of the arms moving up in the mirror image, as well as peripherally seeing the arms come up as normal. In an out-of-body experience, however, the body could move (or not) in a way that doesn’t correspond to the changes in sensory (usually visual) input to the experiencer.

One way to explain this might involve imagining that our self or mind, our perspective as a subjective experiencer, is not actually tied to the body in a strict way, and that we as an experiencing being can separate from the body and move about through space in some other way. Of course, aside from the major problems inherent to mind-body dualism in general, this also leaves us unable to explain how something lacking eyes and a brain could receive and process visual input from light waves.

However, there is a more plausible explanation for the reports of out-of-body experiences and autoscopy (perceiving one’s body as if from outside it). Maybe it happens because the normal brain processes that link up our multi-sensory input get messed up and the brain is just doing its best to represent the world however it can.

This is a rough description of how scientists studying the phenomenon have come to understand it. Olaf Blanke and others have found evidence that implicated the brain’s temporo-parietal junction in piecing together our multi-sensory experience. Basically, they suspect this area is crucial for the sense of self located in space, and disrupting it can lead to out-of-body experiences.

Meanwhile, scientists have come up with a completely different approach at studying the phenomenon. H. Ehrsson and colleagues managed to induce out-of-body, autoscopic experience in perfectly healthy participants. They hooked people up to a virtual reality head display which showed real-time video coming from two cameras located a little behind their body and aimed at it. In other words, they saw a real-time movie of their own body taken from right behind it.

Then the experimenters stroked the participant’s chest with a stick while at the same time stroking the air near the video cameras where a body’s chest would be if the video cameras were eyes. Doing this led to out-of-body experiences, reports of participants feeling as if they were behind their physical bodies and looking at the bodies from that location. But this only happened if both sticks were stroking synchronously; if not, then the out-of-body experience was not produced.

Furthermore, a followup by Olaf Blanke and company replicated this but then afterward blindfolder participants and passively moved them to another part of the room. Next, they asked participants to return to their original location. Intriguingly, those who had experienced the synchronous out-of-body condition moved to the wrong part of the room (closer to where the video cameras had been, rather than where their actual body had been). On top of their verbal reports, this provided further evidence that they had truly experienced themselves as being located where the virtual body was (that is, where the cameras were providing visual input from). People in the asynchronous condition did not experience this. [More details here]

These experiments show that it doesn’t take brain damage or near-death to induce out-of-body experience. Simply altering sensory input (specifically, how information from multiple senses comes in together) can alter our perception of self and body in space.

This is really cool stuff for two reasons: (1) it helps debunk supernatural/paranormal explanations for out-of-body experiences by showing how the illusion can be produced in a completely natural way, and (2) it helps us better understand how our brains produce conscious, subjective (from a particular perspective) experience.

Researchers in the U.S. and Japan successfully synched up a monkey’s brain with a robot across the world, and after about an hour of practice the monkey could control the robot’s legs while it walked on a treadmill.

First the scientists trained the monkey to walk on a treadmill, and electrodes monitored her brain signals during the activity. The brain signals predicted her leg movement in such a way that they could translate the signals into instructions for a bipedal robot in Japan on a similar treadmill.

The monkey was shown a live video of the robot’s legs while both walked on their own treadmill, and the monkey’s brain soon ‘tuned in’ to the robot’s leg movements. In fact, when they turned off her treadmill and she stopped walking, she continued to concentrate on the video screen, and sure enough, her neurons kept firing, controlling the robot’s movement. The robot kept walking, controlled from across the seas by a stationary monkey’s brain.

The visual feedback (and feedback in the form of treats) had been quickly incorporated into the neural system. If they can do this with humans (and there is no obvious barrier), then people with limb injuries will soon be able to control prosthetics with their intentions. For that matter, people will be able to control any machine built with an appropriate interface. It is a much more refined extension of earlier biofeedback technology (e.g. therapeutic games played via physiological measures where winning requires training yourself to relax).

Animal Mentality?
An interesting side question: would we say the monkey was intentionally controlling the robot’s movement? Did she in some sense understand that she was in control?

If the robot is moving along according to the monkeys’ brain signals, let’s say we suddenly make it act contrary to those brain signals (go left when the monkey signal directs it right). Will this disturb the monkey, even if she continues getting treats regardless? At the least, that result would suggest she expected the robot to move a certain way, despite no outward cues on which to predict its behavior.

If the subject expected the robot to go a certain direction, would we say the monkey understood she was in control? Did she intend the robot to go in one direction and felt thwarted when it didn’t? Or did she just have inexplicable expectations (not realizing the source) and nothing more than that?

Whether animals can have intentions (whatever that means exactly) and understand their actions is a contentious issue. No matter how intelligent, flexible and intentional their behavior seems, there is often some alternate explanation at the purely mechanistic, behavioral level which could predict the same results, no matter how elegant the experimental setup.

Perhaps we have to accept that these are not always competing hypotheses so much as competing levels of explanation. It is possible that both are true — or perhaps I should say it is possible that both types of explanation can lead to useful new predictions and models.

We attribute inner mental states to other humans not because we have absolute certainty that they have them, but because it is such a useful assumption. It is possible that it’s all an elaborate ruse by an evil demon manipulating our experience, or they could be philosophical zombies, or we could be inventing them in our own solipsistic mind. But we don’t take these explanations seriously — not because we have ruled them out as possibilities, but because they don’t do much good as explanations. They add an extra layer to what we observe (the illusion of mind), but because our observations are so consistent, we can get by just fine by assuming that our neighbors do in fact have minds, do experience the mental states they claim and appear to experience.

So if we eventually find, after much more testing, that attributing some form of inner experience or mental states to some animals is a useful and parsimonious way to frame our observations of their behavior, then so be it. That is, if crediting animals with minds allows us to make useful predictions and meshes with our broader models of the world, then it is reasonable to give them such credit, even if we cannot rule out a purely mindless, algorithmic explanation.

After all, at some level our own behavior can be put in those terms: the predictable physics ruling the movement of atoms in our body, brain and environment can explain all of our behavior without resorting to mental state attribution. We allow that both explanations are valid because they are two levels of the same system, neither more ‘true’ than the other.

Sometimes it is useful to frame things from the reductionist perspective, and sometimes it is useful to consider things from the higher up, integrative perspective. After all, we survive better if we interpret the world as macro-level phenomena (a hungry tiger lurking nearby, or a car headed right for us) than if we try to see the world only as the mindless, intentionless, algorithmic interacting of countless invisible particles.

So there may come a point where it is similarly useful to assume that animals have certain mental states or inner experience. While this risks a slippery slope (what if a robot demonstrates just as much intelligence, flexibly or whatever in its responses?), that slippery slope might just end up demonstrating the problem with our assumption that mental states are some binary black-and-white, all-or-none thing, and somehow different from normal physical explanations. There is likely some continuum of feedback and flexibility in various systems (animal, human, robotic, etc.), and humans at one end are obviously different from rocks or very simple animals at the other end, but things bleed into fuzzy gray somewhere along the middle.

If, for systems of enough complexity of the right sort, we find it useful to label those physical events as mental states (as a shorthand for some properties that physical system demonstrates), then why not for animals — even if we can’t 100% prove they have inner experience any more than we can prove it for humans?

Over enough time, molecules released into the air disperse pretty evenly (this is why polluting smoke-stacks are so tall, avoiding local pollution by dispersing the output more widely). It’s reasonable to assume, then, that whenever you breathe out, eventually those molecules from your breath end up spaced fairly uniformly around the Earth’s atmosphere.

That’s also the case for historical figures (for whom enough time has passed to really disperse their breaths well). So if, for example, Caesar’s last breath is spread around the atmosphere pretty uniformly, then what are the chances you are breathing part of that in right now, in this very breath?

According to common calculations, the chances are really good. Each breath you take, in fact, has a high chance of having some of Caesar’s last breath in it! (And the exhalations of Shakespeare and Hitler and Plato and the first human beings and…). How do we make such a calculation?

• Well, we can estimate with some numbers. The Earth is about 6400 km in radius, and most the atmosphere is within 30 km (i.e. in the outer shell of a 6430 km radius sphere). That gives an atmospheric volume of roughly 1.5 x 10¹⁹ m³.
• A normal human breath is ~1 liter, that is 10^-3 m³. So what fraction of the atmosphere does Caesar’s last breath take up? ~6.6 x 10^-23 (one breath volume divided into total atmosphere volume).
• If we take in a new breath, we take in a liter of atmosphere. So our liter 10^-3 m³ times the fraction of atmosphere made up of Caesar’s breath gives ~6.6 x 10^-26 m³ as the volume of Caesar’s last breath we’d take in, on average.
• The standard air density at Earth’s surface is ~1.3 kg/m³, so multiplying this by the volume of Caesar-breath in each liter-sized breath we inhale gives ~8.6 x 10^-26 kg of Caesar-breath as the mass we take in each time.
• The Earth’s atmosphere and our breaths are largely made up of oxygen and nitrogen, which have similar atomic masses. One such molecule has a mass of ~5 x 10^-26 kg. So divide the mass of Caesar-breath we take in with each inhalation by the mass of an air molecule, and you get the average number of Caesar-breath molecules we breathe in each time: ~1.7.

Phew. So if our rough numbers are anything close to correct (see below), we’ve shown that every time you breathe in, you’ll generally get one or two molecules that came out on Caesar’s last breath! [Similar results found here and here]. Ditto for the breath of anyone who lived long enough ago.

The same sort of calculations can be done with a cup of water thrown into the ocean long ago — any drink we take is likely to have some atoms out of that earlier cup. It’s counter-intuitive, but there’s just so many atoms in any day-to-day volume we deal with that dispersing those atoms around evenly leaves some everywhere. (Compare to the case where a breath contains only a trillion molecules — any two breaths would be unlikely to share molecules).

But in the above calculations, we used some pretty rough numbers to estimate our parameters, and thus few significant figures in the calculations. So is our conclusion really legitimate?

Unfortunately, the nature of the problem is just too complex to calculate in any exact way. Air density is not uniform, for example, and atmospheric dispersion is complex (which is why we chose the breath of someone who lived long enough ago). But these estimates can at least get us around the order of magnitude of the solution. In other words, even if we’re wrong about averaging 1.7 Caesar-breath molecules each inhalation, we can probably be confident of taking in at least one of those molecules per day.

Still impressive. It just goes to show how inter-connected our lives are. All of us share the same air, even with those humans that came thousands of years ago.

“So what is this mind of ours: what are these atoms with consciousness? Last week’s potatoes! They now can remember what was going on in my mind a year ago — a mind which has long ago been replaced. To note that the thing I call my individuality is only a pattern or dance, that is what it means when one discovers how long it takes for the atoms of my brain to be replaced by other atoms. The atoms come into my brain, dance a dance, and then go out — there are always new atoms, but always doing the same dance, remembering what the dance was yesterday.”
–Richard Feynman (The Value of Science)

Back in 1953, researchers at the Smithsonian Institution concluded from radio isotope tracings of chemicals entering and leaving the body that we replace around 98% of our bodies’ atoms every year or so.

Most of us are familiar with the cells in our body being replaced (the new daughter cells being made up largely of new food we take in). Skin cells slough off constantly and yet we retain skin. Hair is lopped off and new hair comes out. The stomach lining is replaced in a matter of days, the liver in weeks. An 18% yearly calcium replacement in the adult body replaces most of our bones in a few years. Neurons essentially stay for life (though adult neurogenesis sometimes replaces these).

But even those cells that are not replaced through duplication — even those holdout cells like neurons — have shifting make-up on the level of particles. New atoms flow in to replace old ones.

Now, we need not concern ourselves with whether or not every single atom actually gets replaced, or on what timeframe. We can at least be confident that a very large and significant amount of material in our bodies — even in our brains — was not there previously and won’t be there for very long. As Feynman put it, our bodies and brains are last week’s potatoes.

Obviously, this suggests that the individual atoms in our brains aren’t like packets of information holding memories or personality. Rather, the structure is what is important to cognition: whatever materials can instantiate that structure so as to carry out the computations and lead to the proper outputs are sufficient.

It’s reminiscent of how a Turing machine can theoretically be made out of beer cans and toilet paper and still carry out the same work as any old electronic computer. We spend so much time identifying with our body as if it is a constant, but its constituents change all the time, and the only reason we have continuity of identity is because the new parts take their place in an existing structure.

But even the structure changes! Certainly our cells don’t just replace themselves identically — we grow, we develop, we age. My current body certainly looks little like that of the 10-year-old who went by my name years ago. And I’ve no doubt a brain scan today would show something quite different from a scan of my brain thirty years from now. The structure which makes up our memories, our personalities, our identities, it changes. But it changes slow enough that on the day-to-day scale, we don’t really notice.

In some fundamental sense, I am certainly not the same person in the morning as the one who laid down in bed the previous night. But I am so similar that it is absurd to try to organize the world in such a way that I make a consistent distinction between such closely-related things. Imagine if every reference to a friend was instead a reference to a friend-state limited to a particular moment.

It’s clearly a useful illusion to consider our identity constant, but common sense (our vast change physically, mentally and emotionally over time) and science (isotope traces and more recent histology) remind us that deep down, it is indeed an illusion.

“No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it is not the same river and he is not the same man.”
–Heraclitus

At the Primate Research Institute in Japan, Ai is a chimpanzee in her thirties who has been involved in cognition research for decades. She’s well-known for learning to use our familiar numerals (1, 2, 3…) to appropriately label sets of objects (5 bananas, etc.), and she’s done some other really cool things with numerals and numbers.

What I didn’t know until recently is that she has a son, Ayumu, and he too is becoming quite the research superstar. A recent study demonstrated his talent for remembering an array of randomly mixed numerals on a computer screen, after they were very briefly flashed to him and then masked by white boxes. He had to touch each of the hidden numerals in order without a single mistake in order for a trial to be considered a success. This seems to show a pretty impressive working memory for visuo-spatial layouts, but does that mean Ayumu has something like eidetic memory (”photographic memory”)?

I don’t have the full article. However, previous studies with other chimps (including Biro and Matsuzawa’s 1999 study with his mother Ai) have shown that they “queue up” action sequences in a task like this, such that if the targets change/move in the middle of a trial, their fingers still briefly travel toward where the right answer would have been. Perhaps this is a demonstration of a pre-planned motor sequence, rather than anything like photographic memory.

One way to test this might be to remove one or more of the number locations completely (including the white box masking where it originally was flashed). If the chimp has a photograph-like visual of the layout in memory, then he should be able to continue the sequence by skipping over the missing numeral. But if he has pre-planned his actions in advance (as mother Ai did for a set of 3, 4 or 5 numerals), then his finger should still move to where the missing numeral disappeared.

Either way, if the task sounds easy, try it for yourself. (even with only 5 numerals, it’s pretty tough at first). The study compared college students’ performance to that of Ayumu, and the chimp won. Note that without access to the paper, it’s hard to know if the setup was truly the same. Ayumu almost certainly had a lot more practice than the college students (but then this is necessary to teach him what the task is, whereas humans can have instructions explained to them). Also, Ayumu’s numerals aren’t masked until he touches the first one (usually very quickly), but the college students’ might have been masked immediately after flashing (as the website demo with fewer numerals does).

At any rate, the experiment is a very impressive demonstration of a larger memory span than has been seen before in a setup like this. However that information is stored, it’s cool that he can do it.

[Thanks to Primatology.net for the game link]

The Catholic Church just announced an effort to train hundreds of priests to become exorcists. Apparently, right now “you have to hunt high and low for a proper, trained exorcist,” according to the Vatican’s Exorcist in Chief, Father Gabriele Amorth. You know, a proper, trained exorcist, as opposed to some schmuck merely reciting prayers to an archangel (the poor man’s exorcism, according to the Vatican). It’s just more magically powerful if a proper priest does it.

In case you forgot, Father Amorth is the guy who warned against the Harry Potter books because they try to distinguish between good and bad [fictional] magic, whereas he says any magic is a move toward the devil. Any magic, that is, except his own. Magic power words (prayers), magic water, and hand-waving magic gestures used to banish demons during an exorcism — those are okay, because they are done by trained professional magicians (priests).

By the end of 2005, Catholics numbered over 1.1 billion, about one-sixth of the entire world population. We are not talking about a small religious group, but one of the biggest out there. And their official body, representing their god and religion, is still back in the Dark Ages worrying about boogiemen possessing people. Why?

Is it because fear keeps people in the flock, and takes their mind off scandals like wide-spread child rape by church leaders?

If so, it’s a double-edged sword, because such fear makes people irrational, and when you feed into their irrational impulses with talk of magic and demons and other superstitions, you fuel a fire of stupidity that leads to deaths (note some exorcism-related deaths thanks to Wikipedia) and more scandals.

Of course, this sort of thing is not confined to Catholics. Many Muslims believe in possession by jinn (genies, invisible spirits made of smokeless fire). Scientologists work to exorcise possession by Body Thetans. But it’s especially popular among Evangelical Christians (a “big business”, estimated at around 500 such ministries in 2006).

A couple years back, I had a friend in the army. He told me stories about how himself and his Evangelical comrades in the barracks were involved not just in a war against another country, but in a real war against evil demons. This was apparently common belief among a large proportion of the barracks personnel, who claimed to experience the literal presence of demons involved in such shenanigans as opening and closing doors at night and moving objects around. No doubt more nefarious things would have occured were it not for the “strength in Christ” shared by these army guys. The same friend also told me once of an exorcism “successfully performed” on a member of his church, right down the street from where I lived at the time. The practice is not just for the rare group of nutcases; it’s surprisingly common (often hidden under the less conspicuous label “deliverance ministries” by Evangelicals).

The sad thing is that many of the victims of exorcism (note: victims of the practice itself, not victims of possession) have historically been people with some sort of real disorder (schizophrenia, epilepsy, Tourette’s, depression). Unfortunately, this faux treatment can keep them from getting real help (when it doesn’t directly threaten their lives, that is).

Maybe some people just need magic. The world is big and complex and scary, and believing in magic is an easy way to simplify everything. But it’s too bad that such a belief in magic can hurt innocent victims too.

Fear not, I have done my best to banish the bandwidth-eating demon of hotlinking, so that you, my dear reader, may safely once again peruse my collection of odd signs at the Introduction to Semiotics.

I’ve taken down the Funny Signs (Intro to Semiotics) page from the website. I logged in to find that in a single day, many gigs of bandwidth had been burned by someone hotlinking to my images there.

Initially, I tried to simply prevent hotlinking to images by altering my .htaccess file, but it turns out that also blocks RSS programs and breaks images on my own blog syndication. So I’m back to allowing hotlinking, and have just removed the files that tended to be linked to.

If someone finds a more elegant solution (say, allowing hotlinking to blog images but not main site images), please let me know.

or: You Didn’t Pay For What You Bought

When we buy an item at the store, there’s a price tag attached and we usually assume that price on the tag is made up of two things: the cost of making the item, and some amount added on for overhead, profit, etc. If we see a remarkably cheap item, like a complicated piece of electronics for mere pennies, we assume that efficient creation, cheap parts and mass selling make up for the small profit margin. And to some extent that is a valid picture.

However, more often than not, the price tag on the shelf does not actually reflect the real cost of the item we buy. The cost is, in fact, higher than what we pay. Sounds like a great deal, right?

It’s not. The reason companies get away with selling items at lower than the cost to produce them is because the companies externalize their costs. Now, externalization is a simple enough idea in general: let some third party do part of your business in a way cheaper than doing it yourself. For example, having the pros like FedEx do shipping for your business instead of doing it in-house can save lots of money. But that is only the surface of cost externalization, and what we are interested in is much more insidious.

In fact, many — if not most — of the items we buy cost much more than the price tag reflects (and it supposedly includes profit on top of the costs!). Consider the earlier processes that got the item onto the store’s shelf in the first place. Specifically, harvesting resources and manufacturing them into goods are a prerequisite to selling those goods, and in these two steps significant costs can be externalized to the public. That is, to you and me.

Pollution is the most straightforward example. In general, companies do not bear the cost of their polluting (some limited laws exist to help, but locating factories in foreign countries can get around laws). Polluted rivers, to examine just one aspect, are an indirect but very real cost to the general public (unsafe to swim, 40% of U.S. rivers now undrinkable, etc.), to other private industry (fisheries, e.g.) and eventually a direct cost to the public (when the government has to go in and clean things up). Pollution is just one area, and may not be convincing to those who aren’t already interested in sustainability.

But consider an issue with a human face, like the ubiquitous use of extremely cheap human labor by locating factories in foreign countries where the standard of living is absurdly low. It may make sense from a business standpoint, but the cost in making the items is being paid for in real toil (and often suffering from dangerous work) by other humans. The items we buy are cheap because a bunch of really poor people are paying the difference on your items (the amount taken off of the end price tag by using cheap labor). The people with the least ability to pay are helping pay for your items with their work, with their time, with their wasted lives (sometimes literally lost lives).

As consumer end-users at the store, we don’t have to think about these things. We just see a number on a tag. If it’s low, we’re happy, because we don’t have to pay very much. But sometimes we end up paying in the long run, a lot more than we think. And certainly someone out there is paying for it, and it’s not the companies making and selling goods.

Consider further the subsidies (direct and indirect) that government hands down to business, often through rather corrupt or at least unfair methods (”corporate welfare”). Even subsidies for farmers have ended up benefiting large corporations more than small family farms. All of these subsidies are tax money paid by the public (a cost to you and me) which profit the private businesses.

It’s only by considering the externalities involved in the process of getting goods on store shelves that we begin to comprehend the real price behind those items. They are not as cheap as they appear. (Prof Richard Robbins at SUNY provides a partial case study of cost externalization in the example of the sugar that goes into Twinkies).

For a broader and quicker picture, The Story of Stuff is a great 20-minute video about the whole process of goods, from harvesting resources and making things to selling/consuming them and finally throwing them out. (As with anything, treat the claims to due skepticism, but do note the site provides sources for claims in the video).

According to the video, only about 1% of things we purchase are still in use six months later. The other 99% of our stuff is in the trash bin within half a year. As the video mentions, part of this comes from planned obsolescence (disposable razors, disposable drink bottles, etc.) and perceived obsolescence (out-of-fashion). Yet a lot of it comes from just being trained into wastefulness because we have so much money in the U.S. and things are so cheap (at least according to their overt price tags) that it becomes natural just to throw out what you don’t want anymore. Once it leaves our curb, we don’t think about it again.

The video also states that about seventy cans of garbage are created earlier in the process of making goods for every one can you haul to the curb. Imagine if we saw all of that sitting on the shelf behind the products we buy, and had to viscerally process the fact that so much waste was involved in getting that product there. Would our little consumerist splurges (some people attest to the psychological boost of “shopping therapy”) be so easy to make if we weren’t thinking only of the numbers on the price tag?

It’s hard to imagine the amount of waste we casually create in the U.S. every day, but an artist named Chris Jordan has come up with a creative way to help us visualize it. His site has examples of large artworks made up of vast numbers of smaller pieces (e.g. “106,000 aluminum cans, the number used in the U.S. every thirty seconds” or “60,000 plastic bags, the number used in the U.S. every five seconds”). Seeing the pictures might help make the numbers more real. And then all that waste just seems insane — but then it’s easy to create all this waste when things are so cheap (hence disposable).

The take-home message here is that your money goes as far as it does because someone is paying the externalized costs behind those cheap items. Whether the hidden costs are getting paid by you, by your government (i.e. you via taxes), by some Chinese kid working in unsafe conditions for pennies a day, or by everyone in the whole ecosystem (in the case of mass pollution) — regardless, someone is paying those hidden costs, and it isn’t the corporations profiting off of the sale.

Someone in Maryland has been secretly replacing ipods inside their boxes with culture-jamming ransom-style notes.

Quote: “Reclaim your mind from the media’s shackles. Read a book and resurect[sic] yourself. To claim your capitalistic garbage go to your nearest Apple store.”

Personally, I think this little act of poetic terrorism is well-intentioned and pretty harmless, so I say more power to whoever is doing it, and may you continue your spree without getting caught. Yeah, it may have been an annoyance to the end consumers, but maybe it caught their (or someone else’s) attention. Getting someone to stop and think (or giggle) for a moment is worth slowing them down a day or two on their latest quest for expensive consumer goods.

[story via BoingBoing]

A survey from Pew (Sep 2007) reported on Americans’ opinions of various religions.

Basically, most people (76%) tend to have a favorable opinion of Jews and Catholics, more than half (53-60%) like Evangelical Christians, Mormons and Muslim Americans, though non-American Muslims are viewed unfavorably by about a third of Americans.

But then we see down at the bottom that – what a shock – atheists are the most disliked group. Only about a third of Americans have a favorable opinion while more than half have an unfavorable opinion of atheists. They’re much more disliked than Muslims, despite all the extreme Christians and nationalists media-blitzing on the dangers of Islam lately.

It seems Americans just don’t like atheists. (Note: it doesn’t ask for their opinion of atheism, the belief, but atheists, the people). Not a surprise I guess, given:

• a 2007 Gallop poll showed that more than half of Americans would refuse to vote for an otherwise well-qualified atheist as president (a similar Newsweek poll has the number at 62%). We’re more likely to see someone female, black, Jewish, Mormon, gay, etc.
• a 2006 study Univ of Minnesota study found atheists to be the most mistrusted minority among Americans (even more than homosexuals, Muslims, etc., and we’ve seen how backwards people can be about those subjects).
• a number of states’ constitutions only extend protection from religious discrimination to those who acknowledge a deity; also, many states’ constitutions still bar atheists from public office or testifying as a witness in court. (Thankfully most of these wouldn’t stand up to federal constitutional scrutiny).
• negative popular opinion: for example, in Tampa Bay half of the city council walked out of their meeting because an atheist had been invited to give the invocation.
• in child custody cases, religious parents are preferentially chosen over non-believer parents (under the assumption that a religious education is in the child’s best interests).
• these has never been a known atheist representative in Congress. (The first African-American in the House was in 1870; the first woman in the House was in 1916; the first known gay Congressperson was in 1972, after coming out in 1983).
• common claims of atheists being immoral or criminal…despite the fact that atheists make up less than 1% of the prison population (i.e. underrepresented in crime).
• treatment by public figures: for example, the elder Pres Bush said in 1988 “I don’t know that atheists should be regarded as citizens, nor should they be regarded as patriotic.” His son has been as bad (the same guy who claimed that God told him to go to war with Iraq). Note we’ve never had a non-Christian president, certainly not an atheist.
• media coverage is generally antagonistic: see example CNN video on Youtube)
• countless personal anecdotes of jobs lost, students assaulted, families harassed, etc. when people find out someone is an atheist. Such harassment isn’t as well-recognized or well-published as some other discrimination because beliefs are not as overt as, say, skin color, but out-atheists can face as much or more persecution than out-homosexuals.

I could go on, but then it’s easy to find a similar list of discrimination against many groups (even majority religious groups still get discriminated against in some instances). Odd to think, though, that at the end of the day the atheists may have the hardest hill to climb, given that they’re the most disliked and mistrusted group in the U.S. right now. Thankfully we’ve come a long way in accepting peoples’ differences in this country, but we’ve got a long way to go yet.

The Singularity Institute (Oct 2007) posted a piece on how immortality can give meaning to a life, in much the same way people have argued that death gives meaning to our lives.

The author, E. Yudkowsky, gives some common arguments about the meaning death gives to life, and then goes on to provide examples of how similar reasoning could be applied even if people never died.

Death gives a sense of urgency, people say, so we are motivated to do things we would otherwise put off. “Go hang-gliding today, go learn to play the flute today, for tomorrow may never come.” But, as Yudkowsky points out, if you were immortal, you’d still have motivation for not procrastinating. “You’ve got to learn linear algebra eventually - why not start today?” Or perhaps a better argument would be that the boringness or regret of time not well-lived would still be there for immortals, pushing them toward more interesting or worthwhile pursuits (whereas those who age and die may come to their regret — or wisdom — too late to do anything about it).

Some people are nice to others in the here and now because, who knows, they may never see those people again. But presumably that gives you just as much reason to be an ass, which is why people are often more rude and confrontational when anonymous. For that matter, Yudkowsky points out, if people lived forever, they would be much more likely to run into the same people again eventually, so we have good reason to treat them well.

Perhaps the inevitability of death encourages people to be more virtuous.

“What meaning does death, the inevitable termination of existence, give to an effort to be a better person? Perhaps the notion of a virtuous life having a beginning, a middle, and an end; so that it is shaped, through a finite amount of effort, into having a satisfying conclusion; and then it is done, finished like a painting, put on a stand and exhibited. What meaning would immortality give to a virtuous life? An unending, unbounded effort; never finished like a painting, never simply exhibited; never flawless, always improving. Is this not equally a beautiful thought?”

Yudkowsky doesn’t, however, tackle the argument that immortals might stop growing and improving if there is some absolute ceiling that limits them at some point, whereas a finite life can be one of constant self-improvement from beginning to end. But obviously someone could counter that it is still better to improve one’s self beyond the limits of a finite life, if you can, than to just settle for the ceiling imposed arbitrarily by time. Why not keep going and get as close as possible to an absolute limit, if there is such a thing?

After all, there is so much knowledge and wisdom and culture accrued in human society today (not to mention future humanity, transhumanity, or other intelligences) that one could not possibly absorb it all in a human lifetime. Try reading a significant fraction of a modern large library in one human lifetime and you find that our knowledge-base as a culture has gone way beyond what any one human can master in 100 years of life. But perhaps with more time, we can at least gain some more knowledge or wisdom, if not from learning more than from experiencing more. How could it hurt?

But then, if the arguments that death provides life with meaning aren’t as solid as they seem, why do we cling to them? Presumably, we try to value death because we assume it is inevitable and don’t want to be depressed. “Such is human nature,” says the article’s author, “that if we were all hit on the head with a baseball bat once a week, philosophers would soon discover many amazing benefits of being hit on the head with a baseball bat: It toughens us, renders us less fearful of lesser pains, makes bat-free days all the sweeter.”

Trying to find the positive in death is an example of cognitive dissonance in action. Cognitive dissonance is the tension when your thoughts and beliefs conflict with your behavior, your circumstances or your other thoughts, and the resulting tendency in humans is to alter thoughts and beliefs when circumstances and behavior can’t be changed. For example, a 1959 experiment showed that after doing a boring task, well-compensated people still believe it was boring, but poorly-compensated people convince themselves it was an okay task in order to alleviate the tension between their belief (that it was boring) and their behavior (in doing the task), the latter too late to change now.

So maybe if we could indeed remove the inevitability of death, we would be more optimistic about life as immortals. Yes, it is certainly possible to live a meaningful finite life (as I’ve argued previously in The Meaning of Life Without Afterlife), but an immortal’s life need not be that of Sisyphus pushing the same rock up the same hill for eternity. It can be just as filled with meaning and growth.

However, that very issue — growth — brings me to my main point. I find a serious flaw in the sort of reasoning commonly found among optimistic transhumanists. They spend so much time arguing the value of immortality to you and I that they completely ignore the fact that for complex creatures like us time brings change, and with more time comes more change. From childhood onward, we continuously grow and alter our minds, personalities and consciousnesses — the very way we experience, interpret and interact with the world.

The ‘I’ of today is not the same naive and youthful ‘I’ that went by my name 15 years ago. It has evolved into a very different mind, a very different identity. Indeed, I think it is in some fundamental sense not the same person.

In which case, if we extend our lives indefinitely — especially if we do so by integrating technology that may change our sensory modalities, memory equipment or other ways we experience and interact with the world — we will continue to change and evolve on the individual level to the point that you and I (here and now) are not in fact the ones living forever. The being that exists many, many years from now (and its future versions, or shall I say descendants?) is not you or I.

If we follow that line of reasoning, then it seems that we should be just as happy with any continuity of life generally (say, by having children, or by our species evolving into a new one, or even by creating an entirely new species through technology, like an artificial intelligence), rather than caring so much about personal immortality. (I’ve expanded on this idea in a previous article, The Afterlife: Traditional and Unusual Views, as well as others in the science section).

That said, it’s good to get this dialog going, as we will no doubt at least face drastically increased lifespans within our own lifetimes, and that will alter how we function both at a societal level (social security can’t stay the same) and at an individual level.