Happy Birthday Sprot!

Today is the 25th anniversary of the birth of my daughter, Abigail Flora. A quarter of a century. Twenty-five years. We've had a lot of good times together, a few not so good, but none of them bad enough to break the bond or push us apart. We share a lot of personality traits and a lot of interests and we learn from each other. Even our mistakes can become part of our collective myth, like the title of this post. I use to call her Sport until I made a typo and she liked it, so Happy Birthday, Sprot. Giovanni says so too 'alles gute zum Geburstag!!'

The Return of the Polak

Although I've been back in Europe for almost a week (actually, it's getting close to three weeks, I've been hibernating) and  I've not written a word, and until last evening, close to a thousand photos were sitting lifelessly in the storage card in my trusty old Nikon.  Today, SATORI, or something like it, at least you might say I am awake, with a little activity on the right side of my limited capacity thinking machine......

I was in the United States for three and a half weeks.  I started out in New York, moved over to NE Pennsylvania, and closed the chapter with more New York.  It was a lot of living outside of the Stone Street Monastery.  It was a lot of human contact.  It was a lot of fun. It was a lot of experience.

You'd think a 65 year old would just say something like 'it was nice' and get on with his preparations for death, but you'd be wrong.  The reason for this is linked very subtly to the Android operating system.  I don't mean the one by Google, I mean the one envisioned by guys like Alan Turing, Norbert Wiener, and, more recently, Ray Kurzweil.  On top of the science, we have guys like Charlie Stross and Verner Venge giving us the futurist view of 'post-singularity' society.

What's this got to do with my summer vacation?
An observation.
An experiment.

AI (artificial intelligence) is all about behavior.  Intelligence is the the way a brain responds to decision making and problem solving (a multi-branching decision tree).  Decision making is contextual.  Dickson and New York cities are contexts.  Your living room is a context.  If you understand the concept of original mind, you understand the problem of artificial intelligence.  If you understand the concept of context sensitivity in language, you understand the problem of human behavior.  If you understand the problem of human behavior, you understand the problem of artificial intelligence. The problem with artificial intelligence is this:

we don't fully understand

any of the 

above

We all start out with the same bits and pieces, arranged a little differently because of historical context.  Some develop into mystics, some into murderers, and the rest lie somewhere in between.  The way we see them is the way we have been taught to see them, and for many of us, that doesn't work anymore, so we are conflicted about it.  We don't want to be afraid of people because of their skin color or the density of their tattoos and piercings, the language that they speak, or any other marker that tells us they are from another context, but we are.  Fear, anger, hatred is the primordial progression of emotional response to out of context markers. It results from our training in dualism.  

I:Not I. 

Good:Evil

God:Man

Escaping this eternal looping of our psychological defenses is the goal of artificial intelligence proponents of the singularity, the technological singularity, the point at which we reach an event horizon where we can no longer understand or predict the behavior of our creations. The basic premise is this: algorithms will become self-teaching, transcending human intelligence, becoming super intelligent, and will travel beyond the reach of human comprehension. 

Some suggested solutions to the problem entail implants: augmented perception, learning, behavior, through the implantation or wearing of devices with direct feedback and feed-forward access to the brain.  Secondary benefits to such technology include increased longevity, and even immortality.  When your augmentation senses something going awry in your shell, it adjusts it back to acceptable levels.  Potential health and behavior problems can be detected, regulated, and maintained. We are the Borg.....

On on hand, heaven on earth, on the other.....

Heaven:Hell

Man:Not Man

One way of seeing augmented Man is through the lens of Trans-humanism, the human transcended by augmentation, a kind of techno-mysticism. You first need to program morals and values into the intelligence by incorporating a fail-safe set of algorithms corresponding to the belief that man is the reason for being of the universe and therefore should be protected from harm at all costs.  This way, rogue machines, regardless of their transcendent state, will be prevented from doing anything men would think irrational or immoral.  One problem with that is the human-centric notion of free-will.  If the algorithms are to be human-like, they're supposed to have it, which means that they are allowed to harm humans as well as other machines.  The whole thing is a double-bind: damned if you do, and damned if you don't.  The double bind is a well documented trigger for schizophrenia.  Draw your own conclusions.....

There is another way to getting to this state.  You can come to Steinstrasse and meditate.  Just follow your breath and realize that heaven and hell, god and man, good and evil, pretzels and ice cream are all loved, feared, enjoyed, avoided based on psychological reality (a sort of magical state in which you create your own heaven or hell, otherwise known as daily life).  The key is finding your Steinstrasse, your psychological reality, the universe which makes you happy and doesn't harm any other sentient being because of its existence.  Once you've created yourself, you've only got to avoid extinction. Context is what you allow it to be and what we allow, we teach, so teach the world that one human sitting quietly is trans-human and proto-human and superhuman.  When we finally realize that the reality of the singularity is an internal event horizon, a quiet walk across the borders of perception and conventional learning into a world that is free from suffering it's okay if the machines and rocks and pretzels think for themselves.  It's the nature of nature.

Which brings me back to New York and Dickson City, my daughter and my son, and Gideon the Great, Grandson of he who sits on Steinstrasse.  New York, Dickson, and Herford are studies in contrast.  Size, architecture, demographics, infrastructure, even the birds change the context, and yet, if you look at it in the right way, they're all the same thing, which brings us back to nature, which is (if you think about it in the right way) everything.  I think it's time for a nap.

Guten Rutsch!!

Spent a few hours with some friends at Giovanni's 'Mona Lisa' last night.  The New Year was ushered in with a great fireworks display as well as the traditional Berliner (that's a jelly doughnut, to those of you who can't remember John F, Kennedy.)

The place was full, with a lot of dancing and camera flashing, lively conversation, and camaraderie.  Simple, elegant way to say Happy New Year.

I am not, as anyone who knows me, a wildly enthusiastic marker of anniversaries.  For me, every time I open my eyes after sleep, it's the start of something new, which makes everyday an anniversary, and for celebrations on such a grand scale, it wouldn't leave time to live a quiet life. If you believe that time is linear, that is, but that's a topic for the next entry.

Advent in the Old New World

The Weihnachtsmarkt is in full swing, the neighbors are in good spirits, the weather is extraordinarily unlike any December I've experienced (except for a few I prefer to forget) and I'm enjoying it all.  The seasonal depression of years gone by has been defeated (momentarily, I cannot predict the future) and the alcoholic haze that was my home-grown remedy is unnecessary.  When I remember the 'Been Down So Long, It Looks Like Up To Me' days, months, years, I can smile at them at say they were, and I wish that they hadn't been, but there's no denying history until I learn how to use wormholes.....

Art in the City

Things have been relatively quiet on the street. Kuenstlertreff kicked off the fall program last Tuesday with some good music and a lot of interesting people to gawk at and the Herford Culture Night around the city was interesting. I met a good sculptor and saw a lot of interesting artwork, as well as having the pleasure of hearing Herman play horn with the fireman's brass band, a surprisingly excellent group, or maybe not surprisingly, but exceptionally, considering the always high quality of music here. Other than that, I haven't written a decent sentence in over a month, priimarily because I'm thinking visually, and plotting my next chunk or chunks of wood.

Earthquake!!!

Yesterday was my 65th birthday and that may be why the great earthquake of 2011 occurred.  It even danaged the Washington Monument for trying to kill me when I was a foolish 17 year old who tried to run up all of the stairs.  Afterall, I was Captain of the track team....

On a more serious note, I don't feel a day over 64.  Nothing much has changed between the 22nd of August and the 24th.  It may be I have less hair, but I don't think that matters.  I can still type.  I can still read.  There was sunshine today and I took a walk and ate ice cream.  If I missed anything important, I'll let you know next time....

state of the world

economy, riots in London, North Africa in revolt.  people still dying in Afghanistan and Iraq.  still pirates in somalia.  lot of people worried about whether or not the newest apps will work on their o/s.  churches still pretty much empty.  other people worried about nostradamus and the mayan calendar. 

I watched Slaughter House 5 last night and I’m started to wonder if I forgot to turn the tv off.