Understanding the self

Journal entry from 2/21/12

Like Dean Young says about Keats's Ode to a Nightengale:

"The self is not a fixed thing, rather a movement:  A collection of arrived-at and abandoned impulses and conflicting conclusions, one X over another." (The Art of Recklessness, pg 54)

But as much as our self wanders throughout the day, we, like Keats being dragged back to his forlorn self, always return to that place where we lay our head on the pillow.  Our routines bind us to an identity and give us an illusion of control in a constantly changing world.

Part of our fear of algorithms finding our patterns is that we cannot, or don't want to, break out of them.  Besides, if we do break out, how long before we fall back in?  Do we converge on an invariant identity, categorizable, well-defined, predictable?  Is it even possible to ever break out?  Breakouts become patterns of their own, part of the overall texture of a pattern.

But behold!  We break free, forth into the darkness or the light, ever-changing world where we try new things, jumping off the dock into green water, skiing through the trees, propelling ourselves into space, falling in love, adapting to change, creating new ideas, new things, new ways of being.  In the big picture, we are unpredictable, and in the microcosm of a moment we are as well.  It is only in the quotidien cycle of waking and sleeping, following our routines, that we are most predictable.

So then the most unpredictable we could be would be to change daily or weekly or cyclic habits.  But who would want to?  It is the cycle that gives us a sense of stability.  The predictability is good, reliable.

Christine Miller

"Death is not a fearful thing, it's living that's treacherous."

That is a quote by Jim Jones that I pulled from the second track of the amazing debut album from Cults, who pulled it from the notorious and profoundly sad Jonestown Death Tape.  I hadn't really thought much about the Jonestown disaster since I was little, when I remember seeing the pictures of the bloated bodies and the purple Flavor Aid in a book about photojournalism.  (Actually, come to think of it, that book introduced me to several major atrocities.)

After discovering the SDSU Jonestown website, "Alternative Considerations of Jonestown and Peoples Temple," I came across this incredibly sad and fascinating story of Christine Miller.  She alone stood in dissent of Jim Jones's horrific scheme, but she was ultimately suppressed by the crowd and possibly murdered by lethal injection.

Read.  Listen.

Apostrophes of possession with proper nouns

http://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/621/01/

add 's to the singular form of the word (even if it ends in -s):

the owner's car
James's hat (James' hat is also acceptable. For plural, proper nouns that are possessive, use an apostrophe after the 's': "The Eggleses' presentation was good." The Eggleses are a husband and wife consultant team.)

"James' hat" may be acceptable, but it is clearly wrong.  James's name is James, and there is only one of him.  I will grant that the intention of the apostrophe in that phrase is disambiguated by the fact that the word hat is singular.  However, there would be no need to refer to that implication if the writer's use of apostrophes was consistent between singular and plural nouns.

Elegy for Reason

you pantsed me
and then I pantsed you back
you pantsed me and then
I pantsed you back and then
I pantsed your mother
said one little god to the other
and then I pantsed the president
said the little drummer
Pah-rum-pum-pum-pum
I pantsed your brother
said my sister
what does it all mean
what does it all mean
you pantsed a honey bee
you pantsed a honey bee

Art from a Machine

In a recent episode of Radiolab, Jad and Robert sampled some of the more intriguing views of Alan Turing.  One of Turing's most exciting insights was that we humans are essentially just biological machines.  From there, they entertained a brief discussion on whether or not a machine could ever produce a work of art.

To create a work of art, a machine would need to have an understanding of concinnity.  That is the perfect union of all parts of a work of art: its form, its function, its ability to inspire new thoughts, its originality (novelty), etc.  Concinnity is the harmonious involution of all those things that make a piece profoundly beautiful.  But a machine could pass a Turing test and still not be capable of recognizing beauty on any level.  Nor could it necessarily be capable of empathy.

"The highest accomplishment of the human consciousness is the imagination, and the highest accomplishment of the imagination is empathy."  - Dean Young (The Art of Recklessness)

I do agree that we are biological machines, albeit marvelously intricate and wildly capable ones, the likes of which have never been seen before on this or any other known world.  However, simply because a machine can be mistaken for a human in casual conversation does not mean that it is capable of anything more than that very thing.  In fact, Turing concedes as much in his paper "Computing Machinary and Intelligence", which is where he first proposed the test.  The point of the Turing test is to prove that a machine is capable of thought, for that definition of thought given in the paper's introduction.

Now we are at a point in time when we are seeing machines capable of testing that barrier more earnestly each year.  It will soon be broken through, but we will have still only barely scratched the surface of the field of Artificial Intelligence.  I think that when the test is finally passed for the first time, there will be a frenzy of sensationalistic media coverage about "machines that can think," "human exceptionalism," etc.  But that will be a classic misinterpretation of scientific results.  The question that most people who are not AI researchers will be thinking is can we make a machine that behaves like a human being, not can we make a machine that is capable of passing the Turing test.

For me, and I'm sure many, the true test of a machine's ability to behave like a human will be to feel empathy and interpret beauty.  It may be possible that one is a necessary condition for the other.  Those are barriers that I do not think we will live to see breached, although I would be excited to be proven wrong.

Put in that perspective, it seems like being able to build a machine that could hold a convincing conversation should be mere child's play.  A vastly more impressive accomplishment will be building a machine that is capable of works of art, and even more that is capable of building other machines that are capable of works of art, ad infinitum.  Of course, even then it will have been a HUMAN accomplishment.

Exercise as an expression of self-loathing

Like you, or unlike you, I sometimes find myself trudging under the weight of some anxiety, which after some time trenches into an open pool of guilt and irrational self-loathing.  These days when that happens I think of forcing myself to exercise because I don't enjoy exercising just for the sake of it.  So it begins as an act of aggression against a guttering mind, a self-destructive behavior, but in the process it often rekindles the mind and strengthens the body.  Somehow I am actually drawing on the angst to press myself.  It's a little sadistic, but also masochistic.  I am both the dealer and the recipient of pain, pushing myself to run further, faster, longer, proving, disproving.

But isn't that how all exercise is?  And of course who REALLY enjoys exercising just for the sake of it?  Isn't it always this push and pull of sadomasochism?  Somewhere in our minds we're disgusted with who we are becoming, so we use exercise as a weapon against that person, which requires overpowering the body's inclination to remain comfortably at rest.

I suspect that most successful people in this world and throughout history have found motivation in creating distance between themselves and that which they have considered revolting, namely failure in themselves or others.  But in focusing on that failure as a means of inspiration, we're really embracing it.

Some things I've learned about running

1) You don't like doing it? Nobody likes doing it. Just shut up and go.

2) You don't have 30 minutes you can spare? I don't believe you.

3) You really don't have 30 minutes? The President finds time to exercise. So can you.

4) If you get out there 3-4 times in one week, it actually starts sucking less, and after a couple weeks, your body actually starts craving it.

5) Just run until you can't run anymore. You don't have to kill yourself over it, just go. Every time you go you're doing yourself a favor, and next time you'll be able to go further.

6) If you let more than three days pass between runs, you'll regress. See rule #1.

7) Unless you really enjoy running, which I don't, you don't need to run more than about 3 miles at a time to be fit. If you still have some time after that, you should move on to other things, like core strengthening, flexibilty, balance, and power (that's the actual order of my priorities).