As some of you will know, I've been accepted to a startup program in London called Entrepreneur First. I thought I'd share the content of the presentation I made during the final interview stage, which included an "unconference" and mentioned in the Wall Street Journal blog.
The topic of propaganda is near and dear to my heart, and is so extensive and far spread, whether on the topic of Ukraine or on the "health benefits" of tobacco and the effect of burning unprecedented amounts of fossil fuels. As someone mentioned, I seem to care a lot about the Truth. Well, I do.
---
Hi, I'm Sasha, and I'm originally from Ukraine. You've probably heard about my country. Back in the good old days, many people barely knew where my country was. Now everyone knows, because there is a war going on in the Eastern border regions of Lugansk and Donetsk, where my grandfather grew up.
This war, to a great extent, has been started and fuelled through the extensive use of propaganda. Propaganda has selected, distorted and even created fictitious information.
While the example I have given you is, I hope, compelling, it is not the only one. War has been waged with information and disinformation since long ago, and goes on today. The Cold War is a prime example. But to me, the Ukraine is closest to my heart, and the information war within it shocks me the most.
Perhaps the most disturbing story that circulated many of the main Russian channels was of a child in Sloviansk who was allegedly crucified by soldiers of the "evil Kiev junta". Other similar outright lies involved alleged promises to give two slaves and a piece of land to Ukrainian servicemen.
Not less harmful were news statements saying that the new government would ban the Russian language and arrest or kill infringers. And we should not be surprised that people who did not know better, that countless people in Kiev still speak Russian, would take arms to protect themselves from "fascists".
Less blatant, but even more effective has been the campaign of misinformation around the tragedy in Odessa on May the 2nd 2014. Kremlin media have effectively depicted the event as a murderous arson of the Trade Union’s building by “fascists” leading to the death of 40 people. These accounts generally ignore the preceding injuries and deaths of pro-Ukrainian activists by gunfire, and the passiveness or controversial acts of police tasked with upholding order. This distorted version of events has been a key catalyst in bringing Russian volunteers to fight in Eastern Ukraine.
So strong is the effect of propaganda that after the shooting down of the MH17, an educated friend of mine living in Russia shared a blog post, which wondered if the people on the plane might have been the corpses of the MH370 passengers, planted there by the CIA. A Dutch friend is convinced that the plane was shot down by an Su-25 fighter plane that can't operate at the height of a Boeing 777. Many other versions of events of varying fantasy circulated the web, each creating an alternative reality of the events.
All this disinformation comes from a wealth of channels. For Russian speakers, state-owned TV channels like Zvezda, Channel 1, LifeNews and paper and internet newspapers like Argumenty i Fakty or Pravda.ru. With viewerships in the millions, they influence most of Russia's public and adjacent states, like the Baltics, Belarus and Ukraine. For the wider world, online news and analysis resources like Russia Today, Sputnik International and the Centre for Research in Globalisation attempt to influence a wealth of Western readers. And closer to the physical realm, fake conferences and exhibitions like “Material Evidence” in New York.
These are but some of the many examples of lies and distortion that have kept this conflict alive and the volunteers, from both Ukraine and Russia, coming. This concept is not new of course, states always have demonised their enemies and appealed to their fear to make them fight. But the Internet has given the information war far greater power.
Just like the physical war, the information war is sustained by both volunteers and regular recruits. “Troll factories”, like the “Internet Research Agency” one recently exposed in St. Petersburg. The Agency, for instance, has some 40 rooms with professional “trolls” who post blogs and comment in support of the Kremlin, while posing as regular citizens of not only Russia, but also Western countries.
One of the greatest dangers of information wars, is that they are nearly invisible. On the one side, it does not cause direct physical damage as a mortar or a tank may do. On the other, their indirect impact makes defense more difficult, since one often does not realise he is being attacked. They divide people into parallel realities, breaking communication, and inciting fear and submission.
I could not help myself but be reminded of George Orwell's 1984, where rewriting of history is the norm, where thoughts are policed even more than actions, and war is peace, freedom is slavery and ignorance is strength. This is not the future I want to live in, and the simplest alternative, closing the internet, even if it were possible, would come at the expense of the freedom of speech, so how can one fight back and where?
So far, one of the better examples that I have seen in fighting propaganda has been the Ukrainian site StopFake. They have been analysing the largest sources of misinformation and debunking them. However their effort has relied on considerable manual analysis and fact checking, rendering it slow and selective.
Similar to Edward Snowden and WikiLeaks in the West, some whistle blowers have attempted to expose the Kremlin's involvement in the East, by discovering or collecting information about the war. Lev Shlosberg who spoke of secret funerals of Russian servicemen. Boris Nemtsov, who gathered publicly available information into a report linking the Kremlin to the war in Ukraine. The trouble with such efforts is that they are not merely manual, but are also dangerous to perform. Snowden is a fugitive, Shlosberg was beaten by thugs and Nemtsov was murdered next to the Kremlin.
Another example has been a webapp called TrolleyBust, who try to block trolls on Facebook using crowdsourcing of opinions and the analysis of communication with known propagandists, leading to a sort of recursive clustering of trolls. However their platform does not appear to be very robust and only targets one social platform.
Despite the great volume of propaganda circulating the Internet, this medium, in contrast to radio, TV and paper press, has a distinct advantage: Availability. We can gather, analyse and react to a great wealth of data.
Also, given the volume of propaganda, it is difficult and expensive to fight it through pure human labour. Machine learning perhaps the main way forward, for surely, if we can accurately classify spam vs. non-spam, why should we not be able to classify propaganda?
But to do so, we will have to leverage a wealth of different information, ranging from social networks, news articles, maps, books and images. And then we must combine it all. Not to mention surmounting the defenses that propagandists hide behind, such as IP proxies.
This is a great challenge with currently few ready answers, but hopefully we can start asking the right questions.
Showing posts with label φιλοσοφία. Show all posts
Showing posts with label φιλοσοφία. Show all posts
Sunday, 9 August 2015
Saturday, 6 September 2014
Kill your dragons
Today I was back at my old school, the International School Hilversum. 10 years after my graduation I was to give a keynote for students who were graduating themselves.
Kill your dragons
Before I start, let me get this out of the way. I'm not the best person to give an inspirational speech to you. For one, I get awfully anxious in crowds. And especially because I see my life as more complicated than inspirational. Especially today.
You will surely understand what I mean when I tell you where I am from. I'm from Kiev, Ukraine. This last year has been tough on us. From the Euromaidan demonstrations last November to the current Anti-Terrorist Operation in the east, many innocent people have died. Holland has suffered too, since the atrocious downing of the MH17. Most of us know innocent people who have died. It would seem as if things can’t get any worse…
Uncertainty and change rule these days, and not only because of the mad things going on around the world. Many of you may feel lost, wondering what you will do with your diploma, your gap year, your career, your life. Some might be certain of where you want to go and how to get there. I hope I can speak to both of you.
You are probably wondering, how can this guy relate to us? He’s already finished university, has landed a job, he has it all figured out. I don’t now and I didn’t back then, when I was sitting where you are. So what can I give you then? All I can give you is my story.
I don’t come from money, though half my family are doctors. In the Soviet Union doctors earned rather little unless they took bribes. So my family were the poor kind of doctors. Growing up in Spain we became even poorer, up until I was 9 years old my parents and I slept together on a small mattress. I remember dreaming of going to University and saving my family, so I saved up my pocket change and gave it to my mother to put it in a savings account. I wish someone had told me to invest in Google then… My father, one hard step at a time, worked us out of poorness and things changed for the better, we then moved to Holland when I was 15. During my adolescence I had a myriad careers planned, from writer to doctor. Eventually I applied to Durham university to read Natural Sciences, since it was the broadest course I could do. But I also applied to Cambridge knowing I would not get in. Knowing this, I went to the interview wearing jeans, a leather jacket and sports shoes. I neither had a suit nor knew I should have had one, until I saw my elegant competitors. Surprisingly I got in, and doubted between doing cell biology and chemistry and psychology. Eventually, I stayed on for a PhD in Cognitive Neuroscience, might as well try and find out why my brain works the way it does. I didn’t. So I found work as a postdoctoral researcher at the Donders Centre in Nijmegen. But I learned little about the brain, of which we truly know almost nothing. But I did learn that I did not want to be in academia, but rather to apply my knowledge. How, I don’t yet know…
Right now I’m where you are, at a huge crossroads. I might look stable, maybe even confident, but that is not how I feel. I feel vulnerable and that’s ok. I do not know my direction, but what I have learned gives me a compass. You have a compass too, and it should be your own.
Your compass has grown during these years of education. Hopefully you will have learned a great many things about languages, sciences and humanities. But much more importantly, hopefully you have learned to think better, to be critical of the world. To not take anything on face value, but to test if it is true. Philosophy, or “Theory of Knowledge” as they call it here is far more useful in the “real world” than any bit of knowledge. Because to learn facts is far easier than learning how to learn.
Today this is more important than ever, when everyone around you wants to convince you of something or get you to buy something. Every single thing a person says or writes sits on top of a fragile house of cards of assumptions and prejudices. My first advice to you, be *sceptics*. Be as critical of mainstream media as you are of conspiracy theories. Be as critical of the left as of the right. Be as critical of yourself as of others. Remember that we cannot touch the truth, and yet, we should try and get closer to it.
And getting closer to truth, you will start to reach to your true calling. This will be hard, it will be awfully painful and you will need to change to get there. Success is not an end, it’s a “path with a heart”, as Carlos Castneda once said. Don’t be afraid of the pain. It will reach you whether you like it or not. Joy, on the other hand, I have only experienced in the moments that I felt fearless.
Many of you will have seen or even participated in our Argentine Tango workshops some months ago. So you will know that my joy is dance. I found my joy when I was 23 years old at the behest of my best friend, and I had no idea of what it was like. The dance, the music, the embrace, the improvisation. I knew nothing of that, imagining exaggerated music and a rose in the mouth. Instead of cliches, what I found is a sort of “meditation”, a space without words or thoughts that is mine and mine alone that is simply present and feeling and love. I could have given in to the fear of looking ridiculous, feeling uncomfortable, I was so very shy I could barely ask a girl to dance. If fear had won, I would have never known this joy. A great composer, Anibal Troilo, once said “Tango awaits you”. Sometime you will find your joy, if it has not already found you. This is my second advice to you, find the *courage* to try new things, assume nothing, be brave enough to change your life for it.
And whatever you do, help those around you find their joys, whatever these are. Each one of you is different. You are privileged in experiencing so many people who are different from you, who hail from other countries, and have other beliefs or who feel differently. I told you to be sceptics, but this does not mean you should not be tolerant. I told you to not fear pain, but do not help create it. Don’t rush to judge a person by their skin, their wallet, their gender or their sexuality. I know what I speak of, one friend was called a liar and denied justice for being a woman, another friend in mind a man but in soul a woman hid her true nature, yet another’s friend skin made people say he was meant to pave roads rather than build dreams. My third advice then: *accept* and love them as they are, and accept and love yourself, even as you change.
Be tolerant, courageous sceptics, and you will change the world if you so wish. But remember, you can only do so when you embrace change yourselves. There is no other way to change the world than to change the world is to change ourselves. There is no shortcut…
Let me finish with a story from a Soviet film. The plot is simple, a descendent of Lancelot enters a town terrorised by a great three-headed dragon. As is usual for knights, he sets to rid the town of the dragon and save the girl. But the townspeople, instead of helping Lancelot, sabotage him. They give him a copper tray for a shield and a butter knife. They try to kill him with a poisoned knife. Against all odds, Lancelot obtains a sword, a balloon and a hat of invisibility from a handful of dissidents and slays the dragon. When he returns, the townsfolk excuse themselves before him. He tells them to kill the Dragon within themselves, to stand up for themselves. Instead they kneel before him. Frustrated, Lancelot walks into the snow, only to find the dragon alive and kicking, playing amongst the children. “Now the real fight begins” he says.
Kill your dragons.
Kill your dragons
Before I start, let me get this out of the way. I'm not the best person to give an inspirational speech to you. For one, I get awfully anxious in crowds. And especially because I see my life as more complicated than inspirational. Especially today.
You will surely understand what I mean when I tell you where I am from. I'm from Kiev, Ukraine. This last year has been tough on us. From the Euromaidan demonstrations last November to the current Anti-Terrorist Operation in the east, many innocent people have died. Holland has suffered too, since the atrocious downing of the MH17. Most of us know innocent people who have died. It would seem as if things can’t get any worse…
Uncertainty and change rule these days, and not only because of the mad things going on around the world. Many of you may feel lost, wondering what you will do with your diploma, your gap year, your career, your life. Some might be certain of where you want to go and how to get there. I hope I can speak to both of you.
You are probably wondering, how can this guy relate to us? He’s already finished university, has landed a job, he has it all figured out. I don’t now and I didn’t back then, when I was sitting where you are. So what can I give you then? All I can give you is my story.
I don’t come from money, though half my family are doctors. In the Soviet Union doctors earned rather little unless they took bribes. So my family were the poor kind of doctors. Growing up in Spain we became even poorer, up until I was 9 years old my parents and I slept together on a small mattress. I remember dreaming of going to University and saving my family, so I saved up my pocket change and gave it to my mother to put it in a savings account. I wish someone had told me to invest in Google then… My father, one hard step at a time, worked us out of poorness and things changed for the better, we then moved to Holland when I was 15. During my adolescence I had a myriad careers planned, from writer to doctor. Eventually I applied to Durham university to read Natural Sciences, since it was the broadest course I could do. But I also applied to Cambridge knowing I would not get in. Knowing this, I went to the interview wearing jeans, a leather jacket and sports shoes. I neither had a suit nor knew I should have had one, until I saw my elegant competitors. Surprisingly I got in, and doubted between doing cell biology and chemistry and psychology. Eventually, I stayed on for a PhD in Cognitive Neuroscience, might as well try and find out why my brain works the way it does. I didn’t. So I found work as a postdoctoral researcher at the Donders Centre in Nijmegen. But I learned little about the brain, of which we truly know almost nothing. But I did learn that I did not want to be in academia, but rather to apply my knowledge. How, I don’t yet know…
Right now I’m where you are, at a huge crossroads. I might look stable, maybe even confident, but that is not how I feel. I feel vulnerable and that’s ok. I do not know my direction, but what I have learned gives me a compass. You have a compass too, and it should be your own.
Your compass has grown during these years of education. Hopefully you will have learned a great many things about languages, sciences and humanities. But much more importantly, hopefully you have learned to think better, to be critical of the world. To not take anything on face value, but to test if it is true. Philosophy, or “Theory of Knowledge” as they call it here is far more useful in the “real world” than any bit of knowledge. Because to learn facts is far easier than learning how to learn.
Today this is more important than ever, when everyone around you wants to convince you of something or get you to buy something. Every single thing a person says or writes sits on top of a fragile house of cards of assumptions and prejudices. My first advice to you, be *sceptics*. Be as critical of mainstream media as you are of conspiracy theories. Be as critical of the left as of the right. Be as critical of yourself as of others. Remember that we cannot touch the truth, and yet, we should try and get closer to it.
And getting closer to truth, you will start to reach to your true calling. This will be hard, it will be awfully painful and you will need to change to get there. Success is not an end, it’s a “path with a heart”, as Carlos Castneda once said. Don’t be afraid of the pain. It will reach you whether you like it or not. Joy, on the other hand, I have only experienced in the moments that I felt fearless.
Many of you will have seen or even participated in our Argentine Tango workshops some months ago. So you will know that my joy is dance. I found my joy when I was 23 years old at the behest of my best friend, and I had no idea of what it was like. The dance, the music, the embrace, the improvisation. I knew nothing of that, imagining exaggerated music and a rose in the mouth. Instead of cliches, what I found is a sort of “meditation”, a space without words or thoughts that is mine and mine alone that is simply present and feeling and love. I could have given in to the fear of looking ridiculous, feeling uncomfortable, I was so very shy I could barely ask a girl to dance. If fear had won, I would have never known this joy. A great composer, Anibal Troilo, once said “Tango awaits you”. Sometime you will find your joy, if it has not already found you. This is my second advice to you, find the *courage* to try new things, assume nothing, be brave enough to change your life for it.
And whatever you do, help those around you find their joys, whatever these are. Each one of you is different. You are privileged in experiencing so many people who are different from you, who hail from other countries, and have other beliefs or who feel differently. I told you to be sceptics, but this does not mean you should not be tolerant. I told you to not fear pain, but do not help create it. Don’t rush to judge a person by their skin, their wallet, their gender or their sexuality. I know what I speak of, one friend was called a liar and denied justice for being a woman, another friend in mind a man but in soul a woman hid her true nature, yet another’s friend skin made people say he was meant to pave roads rather than build dreams. My third advice then: *accept* and love them as they are, and accept and love yourself, even as you change.
Be tolerant, courageous sceptics, and you will change the world if you so wish. But remember, you can only do so when you embrace change yourselves. There is no other way to change the world than to change the world is to change ourselves. There is no shortcut…
Let me finish with a story from a Soviet film. The plot is simple, a descendent of Lancelot enters a town terrorised by a great three-headed dragon. As is usual for knights, he sets to rid the town of the dragon and save the girl. But the townspeople, instead of helping Lancelot, sabotage him. They give him a copper tray for a shield and a butter knife. They try to kill him with a poisoned knife. Against all odds, Lancelot obtains a sword, a balloon and a hat of invisibility from a handful of dissidents and slays the dragon. When he returns, the townsfolk excuse themselves before him. He tells them to kill the Dragon within themselves, to stand up for themselves. Instead they kneel before him. Frustrated, Lancelot walks into the snow, only to find the dragon alive and kicking, playing amongst the children. “Now the real fight begins” he says.
Kill your dragons.
Sunday, 27 November 2011
Occupy mass consciousness
Here is a brief thought in support and opposition to the Occupy Wall St. (and other places) Movement...
...so the good, wholesome kernel of the idea is right: The current wave of increasing inequality between the rich and poor can only lead to decadence and the erosion of happiness (and the economy too). Financial institutions now have an iron grip on not only the governance of states, but also on the possibilities and mindsets of people, much akin to the Catholic church, except that now the object of worship is money. Civil liberties are also being stripped away, and rights like free speech or assembly will soon have all but left. We do need to protest, if only to exercise these rights, but this will not be enough.
...the bad implementation of this protest is that a majority's wish (the 99%) being protested by a minority (e.g. only a 0.99%) will not be noticed. The Orange Revolution in Ukraine brought up to 2-3% of the population out in protest, and years later, it is merely a memory. So I believe, will be the Wall Street protests, unless they scale up to unprecedented levels, ones that a government could not blanket over, even with mass control of the media.
...but the ugly truth is that a protest is only a beginning. The financial world cannot simply be changed today by standing in the street shouting "we are the people". To change this toxic climate, it is necessary to squeeze them where it hurts. You guessed it: their pockets. We protest that we live in a consumeristic society, yet we can use our consumer power for the good for once by "voting" with our money against the unethical institutions we don't wish to endorse. A business that is squeezed this way, will have to adapt to the wishes of the populace, or perish a painful choking death. We must create financial institutions with ethics that stand proudly before profit, instead of crouching in the sidelines. So what's catch of this simple solution? It is that we must lead by example, and change our mindsets before we can expect the world to change for us... That, ladies and gentlemen, is the hard1 bit.
1 Note: this might involve cutting up your credit card and foregoing retail therapy. Proceed with this solution at your own peril.
...so the good, wholesome kernel of the idea is right: The current wave of increasing inequality between the rich and poor can only lead to decadence and the erosion of happiness (and the economy too). Financial institutions now have an iron grip on not only the governance of states, but also on the possibilities and mindsets of people, much akin to the Catholic church, except that now the object of worship is money. Civil liberties are also being stripped away, and rights like free speech or assembly will soon have all but left. We do need to protest, if only to exercise these rights, but this will not be enough.
...the bad implementation of this protest is that a majority's wish (the 99%) being protested by a minority (e.g. only a 0.99%) will not be noticed. The Orange Revolution in Ukraine brought up to 2-3% of the population out in protest, and years later, it is merely a memory. So I believe, will be the Wall Street protests, unless they scale up to unprecedented levels, ones that a government could not blanket over, even with mass control of the media.
...but the ugly truth is that a protest is only a beginning. The financial world cannot simply be changed today by standing in the street shouting "we are the people". To change this toxic climate, it is necessary to squeeze them where it hurts. You guessed it: their pockets. We protest that we live in a consumeristic society, yet we can use our consumer power for the good for once by "voting" with our money against the unethical institutions we don't wish to endorse. A business that is squeezed this way, will have to adapt to the wishes of the populace, or perish a painful choking death. We must create financial institutions with ethics that stand proudly before profit, instead of crouching in the sidelines. So what's catch of this simple solution? It is that we must lead by example, and change our mindsets before we can expect the world to change for us... That, ladies and gentlemen, is the hard1 bit.
1 Note: this might involve cutting up your credit card and foregoing retail therapy. Proceed with this solution at your own peril.
Thursday, 15 September 2011
The assassination of Henry Ford by the coward Sebastian Thrun
It all began with a conversation with my friend D.K. back in my shabby, office green carpeted apartment room with retrofitted kitchen and toilet. It was her who mentioned the Google Driverless Car project. Recently watching an overview of which you can see being given by Sebastian Thrun on TED, I was struck by the irony that his main drive was to save people's lives lost to car accidents but that its true impact may be much more profound...
There's three points to this, an ecological one, an economical one and a cultural one.
Ecology: Take a small revolutionary business project like Streetcar and merge it with the Driverless Car. What you get is a "perfect" public transportation system. It's fast since it requires no schedules (you could book a car as you book a taxi). It's cheap to operate having eliminated the expense of chauffeuring. It's efficient since it would deliver a vehicle of the right size for the transportation job. Imagine the convenience of having transportation at your disposal at any time without actually needing to "own" a car, pay its insurance, parking/garage, etc. If we join with a system where people go to work at staggered time intervals, we could make traffic jams a thing of the past and speed up transport with a car fleet many times smaller than we have today. The fall in pollution- and stress-related death and disease could easily outweigh the impact it has on motor accidents.
Economy: The system outlined above would save vast amounts of natural resources: The saving in energy is by itself worth the trouble, but so are the savings of raw materials such as metal, as well as the man-hours wasted by individuals driving to work, truckers, taxi-drivers and so forth. It is time we left routine jobs to machines, instead devising and expanding industries that make better use of human intellect and creativity.
Culture: In such a utilitarian state of affairs, car ownership becomes a mostly antiquated concept, and with it our affluenza could start to be eroded, and a different sort of status symbol could arise. Perhaps we might even start caring more about how much "happiness" we earn, and how much of a positive difference we make in other people's lives, rather than how much money is in our bank account.
So, shall we one day kill the roaming ghost ofcommunism Henry Ford? I hope so.
There's three points to this, an ecological one, an economical one and a cultural one.
Ecology: Take a small revolutionary business project like Streetcar and merge it with the Driverless Car. What you get is a "perfect" public transportation system. It's fast since it requires no schedules (you could book a car as you book a taxi). It's cheap to operate having eliminated the expense of chauffeuring. It's efficient since it would deliver a vehicle of the right size for the transportation job. Imagine the convenience of having transportation at your disposal at any time without actually needing to "own" a car, pay its insurance, parking/garage, etc. If we join with a system where people go to work at staggered time intervals, we could make traffic jams a thing of the past and speed up transport with a car fleet many times smaller than we have today. The fall in pollution- and stress-related death and disease could easily outweigh the impact it has on motor accidents.
Economy: The system outlined above would save vast amounts of natural resources: The saving in energy is by itself worth the trouble, but so are the savings of raw materials such as metal, as well as the man-hours wasted by individuals driving to work, truckers, taxi-drivers and so forth. It is time we left routine jobs to machines, instead devising and expanding industries that make better use of human intellect and creativity.
Culture: In such a utilitarian state of affairs, car ownership becomes a mostly antiquated concept, and with it our affluenza could start to be eroded, and a different sort of status symbol could arise. Perhaps we might even start caring more about how much "happiness" we earn, and how much of a positive difference we make in other people's lives, rather than how much money is in our bank account.
So, shall we one day kill the roaming ghost of
Wednesday, 21 July 2010
Predicting the future: engineering and technology 30 years after...
In connection with my essays for the Bosch Technology Horizons Award, I've had a small article published in an industrial magazine called "Process & Control", published by "Connecting Industry" here. For the magazine and article itself, go here. Here's the published article and the original unabridged article:
Ladies and gentlemen, allow me a toast tonight, 1st of January 2040, to mark our passage into the decade of quantum photonics.
We've travelled far, having pushed micro-computing as far as it would go, compressing circuits into ever tighter spaces until we could compact the tangle no further. Cloud computing helped us weather the storm thereafter, doing away with the personal computer as we knew it, replacing workstations with terminals of limited personal power yet drawing infinite might from the collective cloud of processing power. But it was only in recent years that the promise of nano-computing came to fruition, and we started to bypass the limits of simple electronics.
Nanotubes and single electron transistors became the flesh and bone of the modern circuit. Instead of painstakingly crafting each organ of our creation, we delegated our jobs to workers far more capable. Nano-robots catalyzed the raw materials into intelligent matter: self-assembling chips whose properties fell down to the choosing of our minute workers. Machines were no longer rigid but transformed in shape, size and colour according to our needs and wants, from wristwatch to telephone to full-fledged computer.
Yet the past pales in comparison with where we stand today, at the dawn of a paradigm shift. The ghost in the machine, the electron has been superseded by the photon. We have harnessed it into our microchips, using its quantum power and velocity to multiply the speed of computation a myriad times. The photon's efficiency nearly eliminates the need for energy, which is harvested directly into our devices from the bountiful sunlight at our disposal, slowly yet surely weaning technology from our carbon addiction.
Discovery began with the light of Prometheus' fire, and to feed it we burned our world piece by piece. We can finally stop.
Ladies and gentlemen, allow me a toast tonight, 1st of January 2040, to mark our passage into the decade of quantum photonics.
We've travelled far, having pushed micro-computing as far as it would go, compressing circuits into ever tighter spaces until we could compact the tangle no further. Cloud computing helped us weather the storm thereafter, doing away with the personal computer as we knew it, replacing workstations with terminals of limited personal power yet drawing infinite might from the collective cloud of processing power. But it was only in recent years that the promise of nano-computing came to fruition, and we started to bypass the limits of simple electronics.
Nanotubes and single electron transistors became the flesh and bone of the modern circuit. Instead of painstakingly crafting each organ of our creation, we delegated our jobs to workers far more capable. Nano-robots catalyzed the raw materials into intelligent matter: self-assembling chips whose properties fell down to the choosing of our minute workers. Machines were no longer rigid but transformed in shape, size and colour according to our needs and wants, from wristwatch to telephone to full-fledged computer.
Yet the past pales in comparison with where we stand today, at the dawn of a paradigm shift. The ghost in the machine, the electron has been superseded by the photon. We have harnessed it into our microchips, using its quantum power and velocity to multiply the speed of computation a myriad times. The photon's efficiency nearly eliminates the need for energy, which is harvested directly into our devices from the bountiful sunlight at our disposal, slowly yet surely weaning technology from our carbon addiction.
Discovery began with the light of Prometheus' fire, and to feed it we burned our world piece by piece. We can finally stop.
Wednesday, 21 April 2010
"Normal" people and the normal curve...
I recently had a discussion about what normal people are. It reminded me of the incredible intolerance that pervades society, and for most of us is keenly felt from childhood in one way or another. Do normal people exist, then? My answer is maybe, but they're very few.
Why? The answer lies in a weird and geeky approach: Mathematics defines "normal" in terms of an average and probability of being there. Let's say that for each characteristic we imagine, we can draw a scale that ranges from something negative to positive, or bad to good (for simplicity, let's ignore times where there can be "too much of a good thing"). In our imaginary world, there is a majority of people in the good normal range, and a 5% of people who have a negative "difference" or fault. In the normal curve it looks like this:
Why? The answer lies in a weird and geeky approach: Mathematics defines "normal" in terms of an average and probability of being there. Let's say that for each characteristic we imagine, we can draw a scale that ranges from something negative to positive, or bad to good (for simplicity, let's ignore times where there can be "too much of a good thing"). In our imaginary world, there is a majority of people in the good normal range, and a 5% of people who have a negative "difference" or fault. In the normal curve it looks like this:
In simple terms, for any one characteristic, the story looks like this. 95% "normal" and 5% "weird":
However, when we have more than one characteristic, things begin to become complicated. As we increase the number of traits, so do we decrease the number of people who are "perfectly normal" and who do not have at least one fault or weirdness. If we have barely 14 traits, the number of "different" people becomes greater than that of "normal" individuals...
...and once the number of traits hits 59, the tables turn, and it's the so-called "normal" people who are outstripped by the rest of us, the "weirdos". I'm sure we can find these 59 traits, or more (if you'd like to contribute, leave a comment :-).
The take-home message is that we should be tolerant of people's wierdnesses and faults, as well as our own. The inevitable result is that we'll be better and happier for it.
Tuesday, 1 September 2009
Sex, lies and statistics...
"There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics."
Mark Twain
Not all things can be a gender issue. After seeing an article claiming that women were more promiscuous than men I had to laugh. I laughed again when I saw one claiming the opposite. Where the articles were written and who took the time to carry out the "research" is immaterial, so let us leave those issues aside. Also, since most of these articles are driven by an agenda to either showcase men as womanisers or women as "manisers", let's only consider the heterosexual population.
My argument is the simple fact that, on average, no gender can be any more promiscuous than the other. Let's just consider the population of an imaginary world called Miscu. Its population is composed of two genders, the "pro" and the "iti".
In Miscu, each sexual union "is" a real union, for establishes an unbreakable bond between the participants.
In the above example, both individuals have engaged in sex with one other individual. The sexual bond is not directional so both individuals, and hence genders, are equally promiscuous. Since the number of men and women in our own world is approximately equal, both genders must be equally promiscuous by definition. If you don't believe my simple example above, look at this more complex one below, where 10 individuals are involved...
In the example above, the number of links between individuals (9, precisely) remains the same for both the "iti" and the "pro" genders. Both genders are still equally promiscuous, on average, meaning that the mean is still meaningless. This leads to a more interesting point though: despite the fact that both genders have an equal number of sexual partners, the distributions of these bonds in each gender are different in a number of different ways...
- The promiscuity of the "pros" is less variable, ranging between one and two partners compared with a range between zero and five in the case of the "itis".
- The median number of sexual partners (i.e. the middle number in the distribution) is smaller for the "pros" (2) than for the "itis" (3).
- The mode (i.e. the most common number), on the other hand, is greater for the "pros" (2) than the itis (0).
- I won't even start writing about the skewness and the kurtosis, as by now you'll probably have seen my point :-)
This point is that statistics at its simplest can be a dire tool of deception and delusion, but if used properly, can give us much information. So let's just go beyond our simplistic gender biases and past the typical "itis are more promiscuous than pros" headline and try get a little closer to the truth...
Thursday, 14 May 2009
Münchhausen: Byronic or Baronic
Karl Friedrich Hieronymus, Freiherr von Münchhausen, hitherto known as the Baron, is Byron's lost progeny. Historical inaccuracy and the relative non-linearity of time come to my rescue afore critics even unhinge their mouths and unfasten their minds. As the Baron never once said, "It's much more than a fact. That's how it really happened!"1
Though the Baron's blood may not belong to Byron, they do share one ink-pot. The Baron is a Byronic hero disguised by humour, but familial features manifest clearly in the traces of Raspe's plume: his rebellion against the crude rules of reality, fuelled by intellectual and creative passions that bear oft-destructive aftermaths.
But the distant nephew becomes a bastard son when Grigori Gorin (Григорий Горин) Olivetti's claws scraped out the paper a darker, melancholy, and vitally, more human Baron. From the ashes of Gorin's nigh-forgotten play "The most truthful" (Самый правдивый) rose the tragi-comic film "That very Münchhausen" (Тот самый Мюнхгаузен), which profited from Oleg Yankovsky (Олег Янковский), whose brilliant acting gave this Baron the compelling charisma, magnetic charm and keenness of a true Byronic hero.
This forgotten classic turns the concept of Münchhausen on its very head, since here "Baron Münchhausen is famous not because he flew [to the moon] or not, but because he never lies"2, therein lies his greatest strength and fatal flaw. He lives isolated from a society that regards him first as a deceiver and later as a madman, estranged from people who eagerly shift from living one lie to the next, collectively as a herd of cattle. Our Baron simply knows that one cannot hide from truth by closing one's eyes, as children do, he "can't do anything secretly, [...] only openly"3; his maturity is even more evident in his courage, since he does not "fear appearing funny. It's not something anyone can afford."4
But he exists not merely in exile from the rest of the human race, but also in disdain of all hierarchies and ranks. He acts not merely like a king, when he threatens war against England lest it declare the Americas independent, but as a God, dispelling inclement weather, defying time and brandishing the power of death and life (over a duck). He openly rejects and ridicules the relationship of master and servant, whose orders and mandates he regards as arbitrary. As a guard is about to arrest the Baron under the Duke's orders of "using force in case of resistance", he replies "who is to use force - you or I? [...] Let us both carry out the orders. Logical?"5 and goes on to theatrically caricature their execution. When he finally arrives to the plaza where the Duke has assembled his entourage, he does so unbound and followed by a band of music. For Münchhausen, society's ways and laws are incomprehensible, as someone remarks: "First we were planning the festivities, then the arrests. Finally we decided to combine them"6
But it is the very creative and destructive passion that fuels Münchhausen that also leads to his demise when he is forced to compromise for the sake of love. Like Samson, he is rendered powerless, chained by love between two pillars when on the one hand his beloved mistress Martha, bent on marriage, threatens to leave him, and on the other hand his divorce with Jacobine won't be approved lest he declare in writing that he is a liar and his stories fabrications. Reluctantly, he concedes to the request, but the weight of the columns tears his soul in twain, and though even Galileo abjured, Münchhausen "always preferred Giordano Bruno."7 His persona humiliated and destroyed, Münchhausen finally turns unstable and, revolted by his own actions, mutinies against himself and Life, murdering the Baron and turning into a common gardener - Müller...
Yet later it is that same energy leads his rebellion against Death, his resurrection three years (not days) later, when he realises that denying his nature is futile as Martha is unable to love his empty carcass: "To return her, I'll have to return myself"8. More tragic still, is that his absence sires a cult of personality whose profiteers are those who wrought his downfall. These very leeches try to thwart his return by imprisoning him, labelling him an insane impersonator and setting up a fraudulent court hearing and a sham test of his identity. The Baron easily sees through the ploy, realising that the cannon that is meant to loft him to the Moon is filled with damp gunpowder meant to result in his public ridicule, and recharges it with dry black powder. Ironically the Duke, afraid of killing the Baron, declares his identity restored and his trip to the Moon "accomplished", launching the general merriment and urging: "Join us, Baron. Join us."9 But the Baron is "too tired of dying"10 to forfeit again, a promise is a promise, he will fly to the Moon... His last, exhausted words burst out thus: "A smart face is not a sign of intellect, gentlemen! All foolishness on earth is made with precisely this expression. Smile, gentlemen. Smile..."11
I'll leave you with a mind- and tongue-twister: Is the Baron a Byronic hero, or is Byron a Baronic villain?
Footnotes (the original Russian citations):
1) Это гораздо больше, чем факт. Так оно и было на самом деле.
2) Барон Мюнхгаузен славен не тем что он летал или не летал, а тем, что никогда не врёт.
3) Я не могу в тайне. Я могу только открыто.
4) Я не боялся казаться смешным. Это не каждый может себе позволить.
5) Кому применять силу — мне или вам? [...] Тогда оба будем выполнять приказ. Логично?
6) Сначала намечались торжества, потом аресты. Потом решили совместить.
7) Я всегда больше любил Джордано Бруно…
8) Чтобы вернуть её, придётся вернуть себя
9) Присоединяйтесь, барон. Присоединяйтесь.
10) Господи, как умирать надоело!
11) Умное лицо — ещё не признак ума, господа! Все глупости на земле совершались именно с этим выражением лица. Улыбайтесь, господа. Улыбайтесь…
But the distant nephew becomes a bastard son when Grigori Gorin (Григорий Горин) Olivetti's claws scraped out the paper a darker, melancholy, and vitally, more human Baron. From the ashes of Gorin's nigh-forgotten play "The most truthful" (Самый правдивый) rose the tragi-comic film "That very Münchhausen" (Тот самый Мюнхгаузен), which profited from Oleg Yankovsky (Олег Янковский), whose brilliant acting gave this Baron the compelling charisma, magnetic charm and keenness of a true Byronic hero.
This forgotten classic turns the concept of Münchhausen on its very head, since here "Baron Münchhausen is famous not because he flew [to the moon] or not, but because he never lies"2, therein lies his greatest strength and fatal flaw. He lives isolated from a society that regards him first as a deceiver and later as a madman, estranged from people who eagerly shift from living one lie to the next, collectively as a herd of cattle. Our Baron simply knows that one cannot hide from truth by closing one's eyes, as children do, he "can't do anything secretly, [...] only openly"3; his maturity is even more evident in his courage, since he does not "fear appearing funny. It's not something anyone can afford."4
But he exists not merely in exile from the rest of the human race, but also in disdain of all hierarchies and ranks. He acts not merely like a king, when he threatens war against England lest it declare the Americas independent, but as a God, dispelling inclement weather, defying time and brandishing the power of death and life (over a duck). He openly rejects and ridicules the relationship of master and servant, whose orders and mandates he regards as arbitrary. As a guard is about to arrest the Baron under the Duke's orders of "using force in case of resistance", he replies "who is to use force - you or I? [...] Let us both carry out the orders. Logical?"5 and goes on to theatrically caricature their execution. When he finally arrives to the plaza where the Duke has assembled his entourage, he does so unbound and followed by a band of music. For Münchhausen, society's ways and laws are incomprehensible, as someone remarks: "First we were planning the festivities, then the arrests. Finally we decided to combine them"6
But it is the very creative and destructive passion that fuels Münchhausen that also leads to his demise when he is forced to compromise for the sake of love. Like Samson, he is rendered powerless, chained by love between two pillars when on the one hand his beloved mistress Martha, bent on marriage, threatens to leave him, and on the other hand his divorce with Jacobine won't be approved lest he declare in writing that he is a liar and his stories fabrications. Reluctantly, he concedes to the request, but the weight of the columns tears his soul in twain, and though even Galileo abjured, Münchhausen "always preferred Giordano Bruno."7 His persona humiliated and destroyed, Münchhausen finally turns unstable and, revolted by his own actions, mutinies against himself and Life, murdering the Baron and turning into a common gardener - Müller...
Yet later it is that same energy leads his rebellion against Death, his resurrection three years (not days) later, when he realises that denying his nature is futile as Martha is unable to love his empty carcass: "To return her, I'll have to return myself"8. More tragic still, is that his absence sires a cult of personality whose profiteers are those who wrought his downfall. These very leeches try to thwart his return by imprisoning him, labelling him an insane impersonator and setting up a fraudulent court hearing and a sham test of his identity. The Baron easily sees through the ploy, realising that the cannon that is meant to loft him to the Moon is filled with damp gunpowder meant to result in his public ridicule, and recharges it with dry black powder. Ironically the Duke, afraid of killing the Baron, declares his identity restored and his trip to the Moon "accomplished", launching the general merriment and urging: "Join us, Baron. Join us."9 But the Baron is "too tired of dying"10 to forfeit again, a promise is a promise, he will fly to the Moon... His last, exhausted words burst out thus: "A smart face is not a sign of intellect, gentlemen! All foolishness on earth is made with precisely this expression. Smile, gentlemen. Smile..."11
I'll leave you with a mind- and tongue-twister: Is the Baron a Byronic hero, or is Byron a Baronic villain?
Footnotes (the original Russian citations):
1) Это гораздо больше, чем факт. Так оно и было на самом деле.
2) Барон Мюнхгаузен славен не тем что он летал или не летал, а тем, что никогда не врёт.
3) Я не могу в тайне. Я могу только открыто.
4) Я не боялся казаться смешным. Это не каждый может себе позволить.
5) Кому применять силу — мне или вам? [...] Тогда оба будем выполнять приказ. Логично?
6) Сначала намечались торжества, потом аресты. Потом решили совместить.
7) Я всегда больше любил Джордано Бруно…
8) Чтобы вернуть её, придётся вернуть себя
9) Присоединяйтесь, барон. Присоединяйтесь.
10) Господи, как умирать надоело!
11) Умное лицо — ещё не признак ума, господа! Все глупости на земле совершались именно с этим выражением лица. Улыбайтесь, господа. Улыбайтесь…
Wednesday, 15 October 2008
Nothing is whole or part, but thinking makes it so
And last not least, this essay I wrote for the Max Perutz Science Writing Award about my first fMRI project and its philosophical implications. The marriage made in Nirvana between Buddhist mysticism and science, a la Fritjof Capra...
Physics and Buddhism. These seemingly opposite ways of knowledge share one common denominator. The Buddhist doctrine of Pratītyasamutpāda ("dependent origination") says that all within our universe is interconnected and interdependent, every apparent 'thing' depends on everything else, and ultimately on the universe as a whole. Similarly, Niels Bohr, a founding father of quantum physics, argued that "isolated material particles are abstractions, their properties being definable and observable only through their interaction with other systems."Naturally, if everything is interconnected, nothing is divided. Therefore separate objects cannot truly exist, it's the mind that creates them. Buddha realised this over two millennia before psychologists did, stating that "with Vijñāna as condition, Nāmarūpa arises". Vijñāna is "divided knowing", cognition; Nāmarūpa is "name and form" seen as one. Indeed, what is an object to our minds? It is but its form or features, and its name, a tag binding these together and separating them from the rest of the world.
Cognitive neuroscientists as myself are interested in the neural correlates of mental objects, their "name" and "form", since these help us understand how we structure our visual world, granting us insight into the nature of visual consciousness, the essence of experience. But you may ask, how can you argue that we construct the objects within our visual world if they appear so constant? Let me illustrate our mental malleability with an example:
As you contemplate this page, the very same image enters your eye, but what objects do you see? Now 'tis a paragraph, then a line, a word, a letter even, and if you focus clearly, the traces making up these letters become the objects of your awareness. And as you go back up in this hierarchy, what were once objects become parts thereof, and so on. Thus, a visual object has no objective reality, pardon the pun, but is a subjective matter dependent on occasion, task and mood.
My research is centred on finding, through visual short term memory tests combined with functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI), where within the brain we represent visual features and the cage encapsulating them into a single object. fMRI shows that they are kept somewhere in the parietal cortex at the top and back of our head, vital for organising our attention and perception of space. Indeed, it's this attention that is thought to bind features and assign them a tag, constructing objects we can perceive and play with in our mind.
To find where these two components of an object are held separate, I take advantage of an analogy of the above example: I show you a scene made up of coloured discs and ask you to remember them as groups of distinct coloured triangles or as one complex whole. The number of objects depends on how I ask you to remember the discs, since a set of features can only belong to one object at a time. Hence, by comparing brain activity related to memory for the very same discs either as an aggregated whole or a handful of parts, I can find the brain locus where features are glued into single items. Similarly, by changing the number of discs you must remember, I can alter the number of features independently from the number of objects, and locate where these features are kept.
But to what use can this knowledge be brought to bear?
Emerging brain imaging methods let us explore the topography and properties of visual maps in detail, allowing us to predict what a person sees from their brain activity and bringing us ever closer to reconstructing and viewing the content of our inner display. But to truly succeed at reading and comprehending perception we need to be able to image the spectator, the object making homunculus within.
This information can then help us better understand neural conditions arising from parietal brain damage, such as simultanagnosia, whose sufferers cannot perceive more than one object at a time, and often report illusory conjunctions by grouping disparate features into a single object.
The questions on our table are ancient, but the framework of cognitive neuroscience slowly unravels an opening in the thick unknown, promising to illuminate our ignorance and enlighten us. By learning how we structure our external world, we discover how our internal cosmos is built.
So what's the moral? Misquoting Hamlet, "Nothing is whole or part, but thinking makes it so"
Tuesday, 7 August 2007
Fear not death
Here are five reasons why one must not fear death:
I: Death is our birth.
We begin dying from the moment of our conception, and we never stop doing so. Death is linked to our life and thus is inescapable; there are no immortals - not even the Universe itself is one, but, in accord with its own laws, marches surely towards chaos. Our own life is nourished by the Death of other beings, our breath sustained by the inner blaze combusting our own matter. Death is so bound to life that its knowledge of existence surpasses no-one, not even ourselves; hence...
II: Death is an adviser.
Death is the best counselor that we have, as don Juan Matus said. Nothing knows life as well as Death, its twin sister, does. Just turn to it, as you turn to a good friend, when you need advice on how to act, how to live: "You have but a moment left to live, use it well" it will say - no better advice will you ever find. Death, this wise entity, makes such a good adviser because it is without ourselves, it is objective, outside our control; hence...
III: Death is uncontrollable.
We never choose the moment we die. All control we think we have is mere illusion, for life is a like a battlefield: as we sidestep one blade, we squarely fall onto another, there always is a most bare flank, a chink within our armor. Those who try to bend Death to their will but waste their strength and breath, as him who tries to grab a stream with his bare hands or her who tries to command fire with her voice. Indeed, all things we try to bridle lose their beauty, be they part of life or death, and lose their mystery - what we don't control, we cannot know; hence...
IV: Death is unfathomable.
Many fear death because it is unknown. But if death is the opposite of life, our self cannot know it nor experience it, only that part of us that belongs to neither life nor death can touch both. Therefore death indeed consumes life and strips us of all the earthly things we know: not only happiness and bliss, but also pain, loneliness and fear. In death old things will be forgotten and something new will be 'known', if something as knowledge indeed exists in death. So alien is death that to fear it is pointless; hence...
V: Fear is Death.
Most importantly, to fear death is to stop living. Death, instead, must be the other side of the mirror, the darkness that makes us see through the mist of life. While knowing Death opens our eyes, to fear it blinds us ever surely and turns to shadow all life's beauty. Those who covet freedom from Death's grasp become as pebbles, ever closed upon themselves, untouched by all except that which they fear. In sum, when we lost immortality in Eden's garden we gained life, since Death only helps us live; hence... Death is our birth.
I: Death is our birth.
We begin dying from the moment of our conception, and we never stop doing so. Death is linked to our life and thus is inescapable; there are no immortals - not even the Universe itself is one, but, in accord with its own laws, marches surely towards chaos. Our own life is nourished by the Death of other beings, our breath sustained by the inner blaze combusting our own matter. Death is so bound to life that its knowledge of existence surpasses no-one, not even ourselves; hence...
II: Death is an adviser.
Death is the best counselor that we have, as don Juan Matus said. Nothing knows life as well as Death, its twin sister, does. Just turn to it, as you turn to a good friend, when you need advice on how to act, how to live: "You have but a moment left to live, use it well" it will say - no better advice will you ever find. Death, this wise entity, makes such a good adviser because it is without ourselves, it is objective, outside our control; hence...
III: Death is uncontrollable.
We never choose the moment we die. All control we think we have is mere illusion, for life is a like a battlefield: as we sidestep one blade, we squarely fall onto another, there always is a most bare flank, a chink within our armor. Those who try to bend Death to their will but waste their strength and breath, as him who tries to grab a stream with his bare hands or her who tries to command fire with her voice. Indeed, all things we try to bridle lose their beauty, be they part of life or death, and lose their mystery - what we don't control, we cannot know; hence...
IV: Death is unfathomable.
Many fear death because it is unknown. But if death is the opposite of life, our self cannot know it nor experience it, only that part of us that belongs to neither life nor death can touch both. Therefore death indeed consumes life and strips us of all the earthly things we know: not only happiness and bliss, but also pain, loneliness and fear. In death old things will be forgotten and something new will be 'known', if something as knowledge indeed exists in death. So alien is death that to fear it is pointless; hence...
V: Fear is Death.
Most importantly, to fear death is to stop living. Death, instead, must be the other side of the mirror, the darkness that makes us see through the mist of life. While knowing Death opens our eyes, to fear it blinds us ever surely and turns to shadow all life's beauty. Those who covet freedom from Death's grasp become as pebbles, ever closed upon themselves, untouched by all except that which they fear. In sum, when we lost immortality in Eden's garden we gained life, since Death only helps us live; hence... Death is our birth.
Monday, 16 July 2007
It's about time
It's about time I wrote something. I found this text half finished after being neglected for over a year... I hope you have a good time:
"How could time travel be possible?" - This question has occupied my mind now and again, but a simple way of answering this question has not found its way into my mind until recently.
It is known by physicists that subatomic particles can, and do, travel in time, but few talk how such an event is possible at all. Also, many writers have thought of the eventuality of travelling to the past and how it would affect the future, but the issue of travel into the future and back is equally interesting and less charted. Putting aside cliches of flying 'time-cars', amulets and special portals, let us consider the situation where a 'consciousness' can travel back and forth into time (I will leave it to the reader to extrapolate this example to the simple physical world...).
Imagine that your mind - let us exclude the body for the sake of simplicity - could travel into the future and back again. Whether you could have changed anything in this supposed travel is so far (relatively) irrelevant. However, acquiring information about the future would likely affect your future actions, which would again change the future. This results in a paradox, since the future that you have visited exists no longer, hence, you cannot have travelled into that same Universe in the first place.
Aside from saying that a parallel universe is created, with the old one remaining, you can still 'get away' with a single Universe. Let us think of time as of a strange kind of quasi-mathematical funcion that stabilises itself after infinite reiterations.
Imagine, for example, the archetypal situation, where you witness your 'future-self' painting a still life. Having seen yourself doing this, your 'present-self' will likely change the way it paints in the future, thus changing the painting of the future-self. Such change in the painting will, no doubt, be reflected in the perception of the present-self of the painting, which will in turn change his actions again, thus again changing the painting. This could be equated to a function that loops into itself, changing the outcome each time. Such a loop could, in theory, last infinitely, but as the number of iterations tends to infinity, the situation would stabilise itself, so that a point will be reached when the beholding of the painting by the present-self will not have any effect in the way this painting is made by the future-self. However, there are two arguments that could work against this:
First, imagine now another archetypal situation where you have witnessed yourself in the future, say, dropping a cup of coffee onto the floor. Knowing this, you may check yourself and not drop it. However, this means you would not have seen yourself dropping the cup of coffee and thus should drop it, given you had no reason to check yourself. This argument is weak, however, since no action is binary; thus there should always be a way for the most stable action to be reached. Imagine it as the point of lowest Entropy, or a curved rocky terrain where a small marble is dropped and rolls downhill until it finds a trough or well where it can 'sit'.
The second, more serious problem with such an explanation is that perhaps the loop would not ever completely stabilise itself, due to the effect of the probabilistic nature of quantum mechanics, meaning that no two events could ever be exactly the same. Thus, rather than living in a time-line, we live in a sort of multi-dimensional 'time-band', which has different probabilities of existing at different cross sections of it, that varies according to the exact probabilistic make-up of the entire 'situation' - the entire universe at a moment in time (but note that time itself is likely probabilistic too!). Thus, our marble above would be constantly moving about the well, depending on the 'geography' and on the energy posessesed by the marble, which would exist in many places in the well at once, just as an electron cloud 'orbits' about its nucleus...
"How could time travel be possible?" - This question has occupied my mind now and again, but a simple way of answering this question has not found its way into my mind until recently.
It is known by physicists that subatomic particles can, and do, travel in time, but few talk how such an event is possible at all. Also, many writers have thought of the eventuality of travelling to the past and how it would affect the future, but the issue of travel into the future and back is equally interesting and less charted. Putting aside cliches of flying 'time-cars', amulets and special portals, let us consider the situation where a 'consciousness' can travel back and forth into time (I will leave it to the reader to extrapolate this example to the simple physical world...).
Imagine that your mind - let us exclude the body for the sake of simplicity - could travel into the future and back again. Whether you could have changed anything in this supposed travel is so far (relatively) irrelevant. However, acquiring information about the future would likely affect your future actions, which would again change the future. This results in a paradox, since the future that you have visited exists no longer, hence, you cannot have travelled into that same Universe in the first place.
Aside from saying that a parallel universe is created, with the old one remaining, you can still 'get away' with a single Universe. Let us think of time as of a strange kind of quasi-mathematical funcion that stabilises itself after infinite reiterations.
Imagine, for example, the archetypal situation, where you witness your 'future-self' painting a still life. Having seen yourself doing this, your 'present-self' will likely change the way it paints in the future, thus changing the painting of the future-self. Such change in the painting will, no doubt, be reflected in the perception of the present-self of the painting, which will in turn change his actions again, thus again changing the painting. This could be equated to a function that loops into itself, changing the outcome each time. Such a loop could, in theory, last infinitely, but as the number of iterations tends to infinity, the situation would stabilise itself, so that a point will be reached when the beholding of the painting by the present-self will not have any effect in the way this painting is made by the future-self. However, there are two arguments that could work against this:
First, imagine now another archetypal situation where you have witnessed yourself in the future, say, dropping a cup of coffee onto the floor. Knowing this, you may check yourself and not drop it. However, this means you would not have seen yourself dropping the cup of coffee and thus should drop it, given you had no reason to check yourself. This argument is weak, however, since no action is binary; thus there should always be a way for the most stable action to be reached. Imagine it as the point of lowest Entropy, or a curved rocky terrain where a small marble is dropped and rolls downhill until it finds a trough or well where it can 'sit'.
The second, more serious problem with such an explanation is that perhaps the loop would not ever completely stabilise itself, due to the effect of the probabilistic nature of quantum mechanics, meaning that no two events could ever be exactly the same. Thus, rather than living in a time-line, we live in a sort of multi-dimensional 'time-band', which has different probabilities of existing at different cross sections of it, that varies according to the exact probabilistic make-up of the entire 'situation' - the entire universe at a moment in time (but note that time itself is likely probabilistic too!). Thus, our marble above would be constantly moving about the well, depending on the 'geography' and on the energy posessesed by the marble, which would exist in many places in the well at once, just as an electron cloud 'orbits' about its nucleus...
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)