The first letter I’m going to read—I’m not going to tell you who the recipient is until I finish the letter. It’s a letter from a father to a son.

“My dear son,”—this is an actual letter.

“I am appalled, even horrified, that you have adopted Classics as a major. As a matter of fact, I almost puked on the way home today. (…)

“I am a practical man, and for the life of me, I cannot possibly understand why you should wish to speak Greek. With whom will you communicate in Greek? I have read, in recent years, the deliberations of Plato and Aristotle, and was interested to learn that the old bastards had minds which worked very similarly to the way our minds work today. I was amazed they had so much time for deliberating and thinking, and was interested in the kind of civilization that would permit such useless deliberation. Then I got to thinking that it wasn’t so amazing after all, they thought like we did, because my Hereford cows today are very similar to those ten or twenty generations ago.

“I am amazed that you would adopt Plato and Aristotle as a vocation for several months, when it might make pleasant enjoyable reading for you in your leisure time as relaxation at a later date. For the life of me, I cannot understand why you should be vitally interested in informing yourself about the influence of the Classics on English literature. It is not necessary for you to know how to make a gun in order to know how to use it. It would seem to me that it would be enough to learn English literature without getting into what influence this or that ancient mythology might have had upon it. (…)

“I hope I am right. You are in the hands of Philistines, and dammit, I sent you there. I am sorry.

“Devotedly,

DAD.”

Quite a remarkable letter. The recipient of this letter was Ted Turner. And while I think Ted Turner’s father is right about most classicists and classics professors and universities, I don’t think he’s right about the classics. And I believe that it was the crypto-classicist in Turner—his exposure to the wisdom of Greece and the culture of Greece, and to those paradigms of thought and understanding and excellence, the vision that he was exposed to in his studies in the classics—that may have played some role in making him the visionary that he was. I like to believe that Ted Turner created CNN somehow out of his studies in the classics. Because, really, if you think about it, what he did was take the television set—which, at that point, was a kind of fishbowl that made the world smaller—and he really transformed it into a window on the world.

{ Herbert Golder | Continue reading }

statue { Zeus, King of the Gods, God of the Sky, Thunder and Lightning, and Law, Order and Justice }

A fundamental difficulty in artificial intelligence is that nobody really knows what intelligence is, especially for systems with senses, environments, motivations and cognitive capacities which are very different to our own.

Although there is no strict consensus among experts over the definition of intelligence for humans, most definitions share many key features. In all cases, intelligence is a property of an entity, which we will call the agent, that interacts with an external problem or situation, which we will call the environment. An agent’s intelligence is typically related to its ability to succeed with respect to one or more objectives, which we will call the goal. The emphasis on learning, adaptation and flexibility common to many definitions implies that the environment is not fully known to the agent. Thus true intelligence requires the ability to deal with a wide range of possibilities, not just a few specific situations. Putting these things together gives us our informal definition: Intelligence measures an agent’s general ability to achieve goals in a wide range of environments. We are confident that this definition captures the essence of many common perspectives on intelligence. It also describes what we would like to achieve in machines: A very general capacity to adapt and perform well in a wide range of situations.

{ Shane Legg and Marcus Hutter | Continue reading | PDF }

Artificial general intelligence (AGI) refers to research aimed at tackling the full problem of artificial intelligence, that is, create truly intelligent agents. This sets it apart from most AI research which aims at solving relatively narrow domains, such as character recognition, motion planning, or increasing player satisfaction in games. But how do we know when an agent is truly intelligent? A common point of reference in the AGI community is Legg and Hutter’s formal definition of universal intelligence, which has the appeal of simplicity and generality but is unfortunately incomputable. (…)

Intelligence is one of those interesting concepts that everyone has an opinion about, but few people are able to give a definition for – and when they do, their definitions tend to disagree with each other. And curiously, the consensus opinions change over time: consider for example a number of indicators for human intelligence like arithmetic skills, memory capacity, chess playing, theorem proving – all of which were commonly employed in the past, but since machines now outperform humans on those tasks, they have fallen into disuse. We refer the interested reader to a comprehensive treatment of the subject matter in Legg (2008).

The current artificial intelligence literature features a panoply of benchmarks, many of which, unfortunately, are very narrow, applicable only on a small class of tasks. This is not to say that they cannot be useful for advancing the field, but in retrospect it often becomes clear how little an advance on a narrow task contributed to the general field. For example, researchers used to argue that serious progress on a game as complex as chess would necessarily generate many insights, and the techniques employed in the solution would be useful for real-world problems – well, no. (…)

Legg and Hutter propose their definition as a basis for any test of artificial general intelligence. Among the advantages they list are its wide range of applicability (from random to super-human), its objectivity, its universality, and the fact that it is formally defined.

Unfortunately however, it suffers from two major limitations: a) Incomputability: Universal intelligence is incomputable, because the Kolmogorov complexity is incomputable for any environment (due to the halting problem). b) Unlimited resources: The authors deliberately do not include any consideration of time or space resources in their definition. This means that two agents that act identically in theory will be assigned the exact same intelligence Υ, even if one of them requires infinitely more computational resources to choose its action (i.e. would never get to do any action in practice) than the other.

{ Tom Schaul, Julian Togelius, Jürgen Schmidhuber, Measuring Intelligence through Games, 2011 | Continue reading | PDF }

Hidden inside language are small, stealthy words that can reveal a great deal about your personality, thinking style, emotional state and connections with others. These words account for less than 0.1 per cent of your vocabulary but make up more than half of the words commonly used. Your brain is not wired to notice them but if you pay close attention, you will start to see their subtle power. (…)

We found that the use of pronouns – I, me, we, she, they – mattered enormously. The more people changed from using first-person singular pronouns (I, me, my) to using other pronouns (we, you, she, they) from one piece of writing to the next, the better their health became. Their word use reflected their psychological state.

This was the prelude to a more substantial discovery. (…) I wondered if there were any gender distinctions and found that yes, there were significant differences. (…) Not only was gender a factor, there were large differences in language style as a function of people’s age, social class, emotional state, level of honesty, personality, degree of formality, leadership ability, quality of relationships and so on. (…)

In one experiment, we analysed hundreds of essays written by my students and we identified three very different writing styles: formal, analytic and narrative.
Formal writing often appears stiff, sometimes humourless, with a touch of arrogance. It includes high rates of articles and prepositions but very few I-words, and infrequent discrepancy words, such as “would”, and adverbs. Formality is related to a number of important personality traits. Those who score highest in formal thinking tend to be more concerned with status and power and are less self-reflective. They drink and smoke less and are more mentally healthy, but also tend to be less honest. As people age, their writing styles tend to become more formal.

Analytical writing, meanwhile, is all about making distinctions. These people attain higher grades, tend to be more honest, and are more open to new experiences. They also read more and have more complex views of themselves.

Narrative writers are natural storytellers. The function words that generally reveal storytelling involve people, past-tense verbs and inclusive words such as “with” and “together”. People who score high for narrative writing tend to have better social skills, more friends and rate themselves as more outgoing.

{ NewScientist | Continue reading }

artwork { Jean-Michel Basquiat, Tuxedo, 1982 }

Technically, fundamentally, and economically everything that can go wrong is going wrong for the stock market – all at once.  Which is a positive development for those who understand the need for closure and rock-bottom. In life, the fear of future events is typically worse than when those fears are realized, particularly when the overhang drags on for so long a period of time. I think I speak for most market participants when I say that I’m pleased to see the endgame approaching faster up ahead, because it is only on the other side of these issues that we can progress to the next phase.

{ Joshua M Brown/The Big Picture | Continue reading }

“People often follow a different way of thinking than the one dictated by classical logic,” says Aerts. “The mathematics of quantum theory turns out to describe this quite well.”

It’s a finding that has kicked off a burgeoning field known as “quantum interaction”, which explores how quantum theory can be useful in areas having nothing to do with physics, ranging from human language and cognition to biology and economics.

{ New Scientist | Continue reading }

image { William Hogarth, Analysis of Beauty, 1753 }

A survey conducted in 2006 by political scientist Jon D. Miller of Michigan State University showed that only 14 percent of American adults consider evolution “definitely true” while roughly a third believe it to be “absolutely false.” Out of a sampler of 34 countries, only Turkey was less accepting of Darwin’s theories, while in nations such as Denmark, Sweden, and France, better than 80 percent of the adults questioned sided with Darwin. Perhaps more disquieting is the fact that 20 years ago about seven percent of U.S. adults were uncertain about evolution; that number has since tripled.

The uniquely American aspect to this resurgence of religious fundamentalism is reiterated by a chart showing the relationship of wealth to religious belief republished in the June 2, 2010 opinion section of by the New York Times (“Why Is America Religious?”), which demonstrates that “the wealthier a country is, the less important religion is to that country. The one exception: The United States.”

{ Logos Journal | Continue reading }

You live in the past. About 80 milliseconds in the past, to be precise (just slightly longer than the blink of an eye). Use one hand to touch your nose, and the other to touch one of your feet, at exactly the same time. You will experience them as simultaneous acts. But it takes more time for the signal to travel up your nerves from your feet to your brain than from your nose. The reconciliation is simple: our conscious experience takes time to assemble, and your brain waits for all the relevant input before it experiences the “now.” (…)

Aging can be reversed. (…) It’s only the universe as a whole that must increase in entropy, not every individual piece of it. Reversing the arrow of time for living organisms is a technological challenge, not a physical impossibility.

{ Discover | Continue reading }

photo { Violet Forest }

‘“Most people are simply not designed to eat pasta:” evolutionary explanations for obesity in the low-carbohydrate diet movement

Low-carbohydrate diets, notably the Atkins Diet, were particularly popular in Britain and North America in the late 1990s and early 2000s. On the basis of a discourse analysis of bestselling low-carbohydrate diet books, I examine and critique genetic and evolutionary explanations for obesity and diabetes as they feature in the low-carbohydrate literature. Low-carbohydrate diet books present two distinct neo-Darwinian explanations of health and body-weight. First, evolutionary nutrition is based on the premise that the human body has adapted to function best on the diet eaten in the Paleolithic era. Second, the thrifty gene theory suggests that feast-or-famine conditions during human evolutionary development naturally selected for people who could store excess energy as body fat for later use. However, the historical narratives and scientific arguments presented in the low-carbohydrate literature are beset with generalisations, inconsistencies and errors.

{ SAGE | Continue reading }

related { Habit makes bad food too easy to swallow }

This article looks at how previous practice of portraiture prepared the way for self-presentation on social networking sites. A portrait is not simply an exercise in the skillful or “realistic” depiction of a subject. Rather, it is a rhetorical exercise in visual description and persuasion and a site of intricate communicative processes. A long evolution of visual culture, intimately intertwined with evolving notions of identity and society, was necessary to create the conditions for the particular forms of self-representation we encounter on Facebook. Many of these premodern strategies prefigure ones we encounter on Facebook. By delineating the ways current practices reflect earlier ones, we can set a baseline from which we can isolate the precise novelty of current practice in social networking sites. (…)

Although a Velasquez portrait does not look much like a Facebook page, it fulfills many of the same functions. A portrait by Velasquez, hanging in the grand palace of Madrid, articulates an image of royal power and privilege to those permitted to view it, and thus reinforces the sitter’s right to certain prerogatives and respects.

{ SAGE | Continue reading }

Teorema (1968) is an Italian language movie directed by Pier Paolo Pasolini and starring Terence Stamp. It was the first time Pasolini worked primarily with professional actors. (…)

Terence Stamp plays a mysterious figure who appears in the lives of a typical bourgeois Italian family. He engages in sexual affairs with all members of the household: the devoutly religious maid, the sensitive son, the sexually repressed mother, the timid daughter and, finally, the tormented father. The stranger gives unstintingly of himself, asking nothing in return. Then one day he leaves, as suddenly and mysteriously as he came.

Teorema means theorem in Italian. Its Greek root is theorima, meaning simultaneously “spectacle,” “intuition,” and “theorem.”

{ Wikipedia | Continue reading }

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Paraconsistent mathematics is a type of mathematics in which contradictions may be true. In such a system it is perfectly possible for a statement A and its negation not A to both be true.

How can this be, and be coherent? (…)

This statement is false.

To be true, the statement has to be false, and vice versa. Many brilliant minds have been afflicted with many agonising headaches over this problem, and there isn’t a single solution that is accepted by all. But perhaps the best-known solution (at least, among philosophers) is Tarski’s hierarchy, a consequence of Tarski’s undefinability theorem.

In a nutshell, Tarski’s hierarchy assigns semantic concepts (such as truth and falsity) a level. To discuss whether a statement is true, one has to switch into a higher level of language. Instead of merely making a statement, one is making a statement about a statement. A language may only meaningfully talk about semantic concepts from a level lower than it. Thus a sentence such as the liar’s sentence simply isn’t meaningful. By talking about itself, the sentence attempts unsuccessfully to make a claim about the truth of a sentence of its own level. (…)

How does a paraconsistent perspective address these paradoxes? The paraconsistent response to the classical paradoxes and contradictions is to say that these are interesting facts to study, instead of problems to solve.

{ +Plus | Continue reading }

According to Descartes’ model, any real understanding of the body could only come from taking it apart, just as one takes apart a machine to discover its inner workings. If we wish to understand how a clock tells time, according to this model, our job is to disassemble it. Understanding a clock means understanding its springs and gears. And the same is true of living “machines.”

This notion of the body as a machine would clear away centuries of intellectual detritus: By arguing that the body was the sum of its interacting parts, and, more importantly, by suggesting that the study of those parts would reveal the workings of the body, Descartes shifted centuries of scientific and philosophical discussion about imponderable life forces and inexplicable animist vapors. (Lest we go overboard in praising Descartes, he clearly panicked at the last moment. He exempted human beings from the ground rules he set for other living organisms. In so doing, he sowed 400 years of confusion and discord with his notion that the mind and the body were separate phenomena, governed by separate rules.) (…)

But living systems are not really clocklike in their assembly, and organisms are not really machines. (…) The number of elements that compose any living system—an ecosystem, an organism, an organ or a cell—is enormous. In living systems, the specific identities of these component parts matter. Unlike chemistry, for instance, in which an electron in a lithium atom is identical to an electron in a gold atom, all proteins in a cell are not equivalent or interchangeable. Each protein is the result of its own evolutionary trajectory. We understand and exploit their similarities, but their differences matter to us just as much. Perhaps most importantly, the relations between the components of living systems are complex, context-dependent and weak. In mechanical machines, the conversation taking place between the parts involves clear and unambiguous interactions. These interactions result in simple causes and effects: They are instructions barked down a simple chain of command.

In living systems, by contrast, virtually every interesting bit of biological machinery is embedded in a very large web of weak interactions. And this network of interactions gives rise to a discussion among the parts that is less like a chain of command and more like a complex court intrigue: ambiguous whispers against a noisy and distracting background. As a result, the same interaction between a regulatory protein and a segment of DNA can lead to different (and sometimes opposite) outcomes depending on which other proteins are present in the vicinity. The firing of a neuron can act to amplify the signal coming from other neurons or act instead to suppress it, based solely on the network in which the neuron is embedded. (…)

We have revealed the elegant workings of neurons in exquisite detail, but the material understanding of consciousness remains elusive. We have sequenced human genomes in their entirety, but the process that leads from a genome to an organism is still poorly understood. We have captured the intricacies of photosynthesis, and yet the consequences of rising carbon-dioxide levels for the future of the rain forests remain frustratingly hazy.

{ American Scientist | Continue reading }

The cataclysmic extinctions that scoured Earth 200 million years ago might have been easier to trigger than expected, with potentially troubling contemporary implications.

Rather than 600,000 years of volcanic activity choking Earth’s atmosphere with carbon dioxide, just a few thousand years apparently sufficed to raise ocean temperatures so potent greenhouse gases trapped in seafloor mud came bubbling up.

Much of everything alive on Earth was soon wiped out. Another half-million years of vulcanism were just icing on the cake. The immediate question: What lessons, if any, can be drawn?

{ Wired | Continue reading }

I’m having one of those days in which I never had a future. There is only a present, fixed and surrounded by a wall of anguish. (…)

I was abandoned in a corner where I could hear other children playing. I feel in my hands the broken toy I was given out of malicious irony.

{ Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet | Continue reading }

photo { Alexey Titarenko }

The Apple idea is that instead of the personal computer model where people own their own information, and everybody can be a creator as well as a consumer, we’re moving towards this iPad, iPhone model where it’s not really as adequate for media creation as the real media creation tools, and even though you can become a seller over the network, you have to pass through Apple’s gate to accept what you do, and your chances of doing well are very small, and it’s not really a person to person thing, it’s a business through a hub, through Apple to others, and it doesn’t really create a middle class, it creates a new kind of upper class. (…)

Google has done something that might even be more destructive of the middle class, which is they’ve said, ‘Well, since Moore’s law makes computation really, really cheap, let’s just give away the computation, but keep the data.’ And that’s a disaster.

If we enter into the kind of world that Google likes, I mean, the world that Google wants is a world where information is copied so much on the Internet that nobody knows where it came from anymore, so there can’t be any rights of authorship. However, you need a big search engine to even figure out what it is or find it. They want a lot of chaos that they can have an ability to undo. (…) When you have copying on a network, you throw out information because you lose the provenance, and then you need a search engine to figure it out again. That’s part of why Google can exist.

{ Jaron Lanier/Edge | Continue reading }

In the history of humanity there are no civilizations or cultures which fail to manifest, in one or a thousand ways, this need for an absolute that is called heaven, freedom, a miracle, a lost paradise to be regained, peace, the going beyond History. (…)

There is no religion in which everyday life is not considered a prison; there is no philosophy or ideology that does not think that we live in alienation. (…) Humanity has always had a nostalgia for the freedom that is only beauty, that is only real; life, plenitude, light.

{ Eugène Ionesco | Continue reading }

No society has been able to abolish human sadness, no political system can deliver us from the pain of living, from our fear of death, our thirst for the absolute. It is the human condition that directs the social condition, not vice versa.

{ Eugène Ionesco | Continue reading }

images { 1 | 2 }

Genes determine 50 percent of the likelihood that you will vote. Half of your altruism. One-quarter of your financial decisions. How do we know? Twin studies.

Researchers compare some behavior or trait in a set of pairs of monozygotic (identical) twins and a set of pairs of dizygotic (fraternal) twins. In theory, the siblings in each pair have been raised in the same way—i.e., they have “nurture” in common. But their “natures” might be different: Identical twins come from the same sperm and egg and are assumed to share their entire genomes; fraternal twins match up at only about half their genes. So if the pairs of monozygotic twins tend to share a trait more often than the pairs of dizygotic twins—be it the likelihood they will vote, a tendency toward altruism, or a strategy for managing their financial portfolios—the difference can be chalked up to genetics.

Some call this approach beautiful in its simplicity, but critics say it’s crude, potentially misleading, and based on an antiquated view of genetics. The implications of the studies are also just a little bit dangerous, because they suggest, for example, that some people just aren’t cut out for being nice to one another.

The idea of using twins to study the heritability of traits was the brainchild of the 19th-century British intellectual Sir Francis Galton. He’s not exactly the progenitor you might want for your scientific methods. Galton coined the term “eugenics” and was the inspiration for the push to manipulate human evolution through selective breeding. The movement eventually gave us forced sterilization and the most offensive passage in the history of the U.S. Supreme Court (and that’s really saying something): “Three generations of imbeciles are enough.” (…)

Twin studies rest on two fundamental assumptions: 1) Monozygotic twins are genetically identical, and 2) the world treats monozygotic and dizygotic twins equivalently (the so-called “equal environments assumption”). The first is demonstrably and absolutely untrue, while the second has never been proven. (…)

Twin studies also rely on the false assumption that genetics are constant throughout one’s lifetime. Mutations and environmental factors cause measurable changes to the genome as life progresses. Charney cites the example of exercise, which can accelerate the formation of new neurons and potentially increase genetic variation among individual brain cells. By the time a pair of twins reaches middle age, it’s very difficult to make any assumptions whatsoever about the similarity of their genes.

{ Slate | Continue reading }

{ Emotion in Good Luck and Bad Luck: Predictions from Simplicity Theory | PDF }

The Desert of the Tartars (Il deserto dei Tartari) is a novel by Italian author Dino Buzzati, published in 1940.

The novel tells the story of a young officer, Giovanni Drogo, and his life spent guarding the Bastiani Fortress, an old, unmaintained border fortress.

The plot of the novel is Drogo’s lifelong wait for a great war in which his life and the existence of the fort can prove its usefulness. Drogo is posted to the remote outpost overlooking a desolate Tartar desert, spends his career waiting for the barbarian horde rumored to live beyond the desert.

Without noticing, Drogo finds that in his watch over the fort he has let years and decades pass and that while his old friends in the city have had children, married and lived full lives, he has come away with nothing except solidarity with his fellow soldiers in their long, patient vigil.

{ Wikipedia | Continue reading }

screenshot { Michelangelo Antonioni, L’Avventura, 1960 }

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