Hiatus

Consider this a retroactive announcement that I have been on hiatus for nearly a year.

A lot has happened.

I still want to keep this a space for rumination, so I won't be sharing a lot of personal news. I do have new and interesting ideas which I have encountered, so here's hoping they actually get written down and posted!

Research, Rabbit-Holes and the Supremacy Clause

Tonight I finally sat down to research the candidates for my area in tomorrow's election. This may seem irresponsible, but when contrasted with those who don't vote or, even worse, just check a party-line ticket, I'm downright admirable.

First up on my list is the governor's race. As is to be expected, none of the candidates matches what I want exactly. They are unfortunately in agreement over drilling the Marcellus Shale in western PA. I don't dislike the drilling out of some namby-pamby look-but-don't-touch environmentalism, but I've seen enough of the documentary Gasland to know that the drilling companies are poisoning people and no one in government seems to care.

That's not even what this post is about, but it just shows you the nature of the Internet: you start out looking up something specific, but every page has hyperlinks. Shiny, blue hyperlinks that turn your arrow cursor into a hand and underline themselves, just begging to be clicked. Naturally, one is never enough, as the first followed link has more intriguing-looking links nestled within its text…and so on. This can lead to lots of wasted time, but it also helps one stumble upon things.

In tonight's example, I eventually found myself looking at the Wiki page for the Supremacy Clause of the US Constitution. (If you're interested, the path was from a web search on Dan Alvarado, a goobernatorial [sic] candidate, and "gun control," leading to a gun rights group critique of him that mentioned state preemption, which I was unfamiliar with, prompting a Wiki search > federal preemption > Supremacy Clause.) I'm actually familiar with the Supremacy Clause, and I was trying to understand how it is used to support Federal Preemption. Perhaps I should explain that--I prefer explanation to linking, because I fear the art of integrating knowledge is on the decline and since this is My Blog, you're gonna get My Take on it.

Federal preemption, in a nutshell, means that when state laws conflict with federal laws, the federal law wins. At least, this is what our federal government would have you believe. A careful reading of the clause in question shows that an important distinction is being glossed over. The Constitution is a very well-written document. There exists some ambiguity in parts, but in general it is clear and concise and its meaning can be picked up by the layman--a far cry from much law written today! The clause in question reads,

This Constitution, and the Laws of the United States which shall be made in Pursuance thereof; and all Treaties made, or which shall be made, under the Authority of the United States, shall be the supreme Law of the Land; and the Judges in every State shall be bound thereby, any Thing in the Constitution or Laws of any State to the Contrary notwithstanding.

Emphasis mine. The bolded segment is what is continually overlooked. As it stands today, any state law that stands in contradiction with any federal law is shot down by a federal court, up to and including the Supreme Court. What the clause actually states is that federal laws that are backed by the authority of the Constitution cannot be overridden by the states. America's ugly secret is that the federal government is quite limited in what it can do, with most legislative power left up to the states. All the federal government can do is the following, based on Article I of the Constitution:

• Borrow money
• Regulate commerce among the states
• Regulate naturalization
• Regulate bankruptcies
• Coin money
• Fix weights and standards
• Punish counterfeiters
• Establish post offices
• Establish post roads
• Record patents
• Protect copyrights
• Create federal courts
• Punish pirates
• Declare war
• Raise an army
• Provide a navy
• Call up the militia
• Organize the militia
• Makes laws for Washington, DC
• Make rules for the Army and Navy

This is bad news for both established political parties because both want you to believe that they have the authority to regulate things like who you marry, what your health care plan is, what you ingest, how and what your children learn, and how much carbon you can put into the atmosphere. And the sad truth is that they are backed up by the Supreme Court time after time, despite the fact that the supposed reigning document blatantly says otherwise.

This doesn't mean the US reverts to a Wild West scenario where anything goes. Rather, it is left up to the various states to decide how they want to do things. The advantages of this method are numerous; chief among them is that instead of one giant sluggish overarching central power we would have fifty smaller labs of democracy in which to try new ideas. It means that people in Pennsylvania would have little say in how people in California live their lives, because what's best for PA isn't necessarily best for CA. At the same time, states that find methods of governing that work would see their achievements replicated throughout the union. The disadvantage is that some people would live under restrictions that are burdensome--yet how is that different from our current system? The difference is that to relieve them, one would only have to move a state or two away instead of into an entirely new country. This feat isn't possible for everyone, especially the poor, but again, this is no different from our current structure.

There is a solution to the federal government's overreach in the Enumerated Powers Act. This bill would require Congress to "reference the specific clause(s) of the U.S. Constitution that grant them the power to enact laws and take other congressional actions." It would force our lawmakers to cite the authority upon which the law rests instead of letting them do whatever they want simply because they are Congress.

I'm kind of on a roll, and I could go into all sorts of things like how the 17th amendment mandating the direct election of senators ought to be repealed, since the people control the House and the member states currently have no representation. But the sad fact is that few of my few readers will care about the constitutionality of our current situation as it is. I, as a pragmatist, certainly understand that times change and that the world today is not the same as it was in 1787, but I can also clearly see the excesses that our government has indulged in, and I can see that a nation which was founded on the rule of law yet has abandoned it is a nation whose political class is accountable to no one. The last ten years should be evidence enough of that.

Public Pressure in American Politics

Those of you who have spoken with me within the past year know that I am a big fan of Ron Paul's ideas concerning government--namely, that there ought to be less of it and that it ought to be less intrusive. One aspect of his views that has become an increasingly popular topic is monetary policy, brought to the forefront by the financial crisis.

Ron Paul is a well-versed student of Austrian Economics, a school which believes that the economy cannot be viewed as a set of mathematical equations in which a change to X will cause a corresponding change in Y and Z. The economy consists of the sum of individual sales and purchases, and individuals generally act in their own self-interest, meaning that economics is a closer relative to sociology than to physics. Austrian economists have been relegated to the fringe for much of the 20th century due to the adoption of Keynesian economics, which rests on the idea that the private sector is inefficient and that government must step in through spending (fiscal policy) while a central bank controls the money supply (monetary policy).

I won't dig any deeper than that into the two schools because reading about Keynesianism, as I must to make sure I'm not lying to you, only makes me angry. Suffice it to say that the Keynesians failed to see the housing crisis coming while the Austrian economists have been predicting something like it for decades, and even tried to call attention to the inflated housing market before prices began to plummet.

Needless to say, in many circles the Austrian school is being re-examined. One of the stances it takes is that a central bank is a bad thing to have, because its method of creating money is and cannot help but be the cause of boom/bust cycles. In short, when the Federal Reserve, America's quasi-governmental central bank, decides that interest rates on debt should be lower than they are, it floods the market with new money which lowers the interest rate on debt. This new money devalues all of the currency that previously existed, but it does not do so immediately. What ends up happening is that those who get the money first, the already rich and well-connected, can purchase real assets (land, yachts, farms, etc.) at current rates. By the time all that new money works its way down to John Q. Public, prices have risen to compensate for the decreased value of the currency. Similarly, the artificially lowered rates result in investments being made that would not be made under higher rates because they are not profitable, see for example the housing boom.

Today, the federal funds rate is as low as it has ever been, "between 0 and one quarter of one percent." We're told that this is to kick-start the economy, but what we're really doing is putting a band-aid over a bullet entry wound. In addition, the Federal Reserve has taken on $2,000,000,000,000 on its balance sheets, and another $9,000,000,000,000 in off-balance sheet transactions. This is a huge expansion of the money supply, and--get this--no one outside the Fed knows where this money went.

Which brings me, in a meandering fashion, to Ron Paul's Federal Reserve Transparency Act of 2009. This bill would give the Government Accounting Office the authority to perform a full audit of the Fed and find out what it's doing with its power to create money, and it would require a report on it by the end of 2010. The really interesting part is that people are fed up with bailouts, and when the Fed's inner workings are explained, most are a little disgusted. Consequently, the bill has overwhelming popular support even among followers of mainstream economics, who to their credit acknowledge that a poorly-run or dishonest central bank can do as much harm as good.

Legislation like this has been introduced by Paul before, but it never got anywhere. It seems that now the time is right: shortly after its introduction, Ron Paul's Campaign for Liberty and other organizations mobilized to get the word out and get people to call their congressmen. Because of the action taken and the receptiveness of the American people, Congress has received an overwhelming number of messages telling them to support this legislation. As of right now, there are 275 co-sponsors in the House, including all of the House Republicans and 38% of the House Democrats; and 17 co-sponsors in the Senate, three of them Democrats.

This is the biggest show of bipartisan support seen in years, and it came not from either political party but from the American people asserting their right to representation. The fight is far from over (witness the recent parliamentary trick performed by the Senate to keep the bill from being added as a rider), but we're out of the gate with a strong start. If public pressure is kept up, the politicans have no choice but to comply with our wishes. And this is an important point.

There is much talk of the two-party system being corrupt, inefficient, and stagnant, which is all true. It is said that we need new political parties, which we do. It is said that the only way to get real change is to vote out all the incumbent politicians and put our own people into power, and this is dead wrong. The fact is that Washington corrupts people because power corrupts people. There are a few shining lights who remain pretty clean, but they are and will always remain the exception.

It takes a lot of time and resources and popular support to vet and run a candidate, much less to form a political party. You're looking at a 5-10 year delay before your guy gets into the arena, and then what? You're going to watch his slow decline as he changes from paladin to imp, with lobbyists whispering in his ear and tying strings to money they put in his pockets. It's much easier and much, much more effective to keep whoever is currently in office accountable. The phone call remains the single most important thing you can do to ensure that you are accurately represented, with talking to other people and convincing them to call a close second.

Before the bailouts went through, while they were still being debated, I heard lots of people say, "They're going to pass this thing, and there's nothing we can do to stop them." That is true only if you let it become a self-fulfilling prophecy by doing nothing. It is not enough to get out and vote, you must bend the ear of your congressman harder than the lobbyists and the insiders. When enough people do that, they realize that their backs are against the wall and that they'll lose their job if they don't listen to you. This engagement with representatives is how American politics is supposed to work. WIthout continued conversation it becomes just another oligarchy.

Rapture of the Geeks

I'm a pretty avid Slashdot reader.  It's a news aggregator whose focus is on technology issues and developments and, mostly due to the effects of technology on our rights, politics.  It is inhabited mainly by geeks and has the best comment system I've ever seen, making it a pleasure to read.  In fact, the comments are usually better than the linked articles, resulting in the widespread practice of not even reading the articles themselves.  Anyway, one of the things that comes up almost every time a new technology is showcased (and often enough in a broad array of other topics) is the Singularity.

The basic idea behind the (Technological) Singularity is that sometime in the future, humans will either create an Artificial Intelligence (AI) that surpasses human intelligence, even if only slightly, or use technology to amplify our own intelligence.  Either way, they say, the result will be an "intelligence explosion" because once it/we can make itself/ourselves smarter, it/we will be smart enough to do so even faster and better than before in a positive feedback loop.

It's a really interesting idea and one that I subscribed to for a few years.  One of my favorite pieces of fiction, Accelerando (which you can download for free from that site), shows a possible (and entertaining!)  future based on it.  Humans making temporary copies or "ghosts" of themselves in cyberspace to truly multitask, the question of whether or not a hyperintelligent AI will have the same goals as the humans that created it, what happens when one of your ghosts decides that it is different enough from you to become its own person, and a whole slew of other issues that never existed before.

You've noted that I wrote "subscribed," past tense.  A primary reason for this is because until recently I've only looked at it from a technological perspective.  When you're immersed in new tech all the time, it's very easy to believe that there are no limits that will remain unsurmountable.  We're pretty smart creatures, and when we find something that we can't break through we are usually sneaky enough to find away around it instead.  There is also a huge amount of optimism in AI research, especially when talking about neural networks and the possibility, if Moore's Law remains in effect a while longer, of running a neural network with a number of neurons and connections on the order of magnitude of the human brain.  Proposed improvements in the medical sector are making increasingly plausible the idea of non-destructively mapping the brain's neurons, so it should be possible within ten or twenty years to simulate a human brain albeit slowly.  But is that really the case, or are Singularity proponents making some assumptions that they really shouldn't be?

Of course they are!  I wouldn't be writing this otherwise!  I should preface the following by first saying that three books were influential in my revision of my views.  The first was Hofstadter's Gödel, Escher, Bach, and the second The Emperor's New Mind by Roger Penrose.  Both of them are about the non-algorithmic nature of consciousness and while it's been some time since I last read them, their general ideas have certainly influenced me.  The third book, the one that gave me a better understanding of consciousness from a psychological perspective, is Jacques Barzun's book A Stroll with William James.  While James's ideas originate way back in the late 19th century, psychology has found them to be very sound: most have been barely modified or even left unchanged for over a century now.  (As James himself would say, that does not mean that they are guaranteed to be correct, but their longevity and the lack of alternatives in the interrim lends them a great deal of weight.)

The first assumption made by Singularity proponents is that consciousness can arise or reside in a neural network.  The fact is that while we know that neurons are the primary cells of the brain and that they are instrumental in the formation of consciousness, there's a whole lot of other stuff going on in your me-jelly than neurons zapping each other.  Often the chemical part of "electrochemical" is ignored entirely even though every neuron firing is augmented or diminished by the particular makeup of the local chemical soup it resides in at any given moment.  The makeup itself is a result of activity in various glands located throughout the body, which in turn are regulated (well, mostly) by the brain...yet another feedback loop.  The existence of even deeper levels of complexity such as this likely mean that in order to create a consciousness by computer we would need to simulate all those chemical reactions in addition to neuronal activity.  I believe that it would be necessary to perform the actual simulation rather than fudging the numbers because of the nature of chaotic systems: a minute change can often have large, unanticipated effects down the road (incidentally, this is why it is a very bad idea to attempt to control the weather).

The second assumption is the nature of I/O, input and output.  This presents in my opinion problems even larger than those of modeling the intricacies of electrochemical reactions; after all, those can theoretically be brute-forced.  Suppose for a moment that a consciousness could be constructed out of a sufficient number of neurons alone.  How would we communicate with it, and even more fundamentally, how would we know that what we are simulating is a conscious entity and not merely a non-intelligent chaotic system like weather?  We would have to be able to ask it things, or at least show it things, and in return get some sort of response.  Now, the response could be simply looking for specific changes in network activity after being shown some image a number of times, but how would we go about showing an image to something that exists only as a software construct?

We would presumably have to hook up a video camera and maybe a few microphones.  This presents a different set of challenges for either a homegrown AI or an uploaded human brain.  The homegrown AI would have to be trained to see things (more importantly, to recognize them) in its incoming video stream.  This would require an enormous amount of training, assuming that you'd be able to get the AI to recognize the video stream as something other than noise.  Given that you would presumably be working with digital video, and given the lack of progress we've had in creating conventional software to perform such a task, and given how poorly our own visual processing is understood, this seems implausible.  It's even harder for an uploaded human intelligence--we already have visual processing pathways, but hacking them to receive digital information instead of analog strikes me as being at least as difficult as creating an artifical eye.

The third assumption, and the final one I'll tackle because like most people I like threes, is that using the extremely limited (when compared to any living thing) sensory input available in electronic devices, consciousness is nonetheless sustainable.  To understand why I believe this is a problem, you have to understand consciousness as a process inseparable from its environment.  We are constantly bombarded by the external world: sights, sounds, smells; the pressure of clothes against our skin (or not!); heat and cold, etc. The body itself provides even more stimuli: hunger, discomfort, pain, pleasure, movement, excitement, and all of the other body states that we call emotion, along with everything managed by the autonomic nervous system (heart rate, breathing, etc.).  I believe that this vast amount of physical input is one requirement of consciousness.  I have no proof for this belief; it is my intuition.  What would happen if we were to put a clear plastic box around a hurricane?  Separated from the continual feed of energy from the ocean system that spawned it, it quickly loses its structure and begins to dissipate.  My theory is that consciousness is a similarly complex phenomenon that requires a vast amount of input to sustain itself.

A human in a sensory deprivation chamber still has the innumerable processes and sensations of his body feeding his mind, providing a respite from most of the external world but not in any way stopping.  Even this isolated state cannot be endured by most people for very long: there is a reason that solitary confinement is a worse punishment than communal.  Try to imagine, then, what it would be like to exist with less than a thousandth of your normal capacity for sensation.  I don't think that a man-made sensory apparatus whose sensing capacity is at least two orders of magnitude less than a human's could ever achieve consciousness, and I think it would very quickly lose its tenuous connection to the outside world if it did.

I've been wrong before.  I'll be wrong again.  I have no desire to see AI research stopped or creative thought stifled; I am simply stating my belief that the Singularity, as cool as it sounds, is not something that will become manifest.  One thing I forgot to mention is that Roger Penrose and a small yet intelligent group of other folks believe that our brains may make use of quantum effects through structures known as microtubules.  Confirmation of quantum effects as part of consciousness would add an entirely new level of complexity and mystery to our physical existence and would, IMO, put another nail in the coffin of the simulated human.

It is my hope, as you will see if you keep reading this thing, that science in the 21st century begins to find (more) evidence that our universe has stranger and more wonderful things available than smaller, faster cleverer devices, and that the interest in immortality through digital reproduction will be replaced by something more profound.

INTP

I just followed a rabbit-trail online to the Meyers-Briggs personality test and ended up with this analysis:

Introverted (I) 93%	Extraverted (E) 7%
Intuitive (N) 59%	Sensing (S) 41%
Thinking (T) 60%	Feeling (F) 40%
Perceiving (P) 82%	Judging (J) 18%

Without even having known the categories beforehand (or more accurately, having remembered the categories, as I'm pretty sure I took one of these before), this doesn't surprise me much except for the last one. However, once I read up on it, I realized that I simply hadn't understood what the P value meant within the context of this test, and that it was very accurate indeed. This shows the danger of overusing concepts (something I may write about later because it is both Jamesian and very applicable in this era).

There are links at the bottom of the results page that tell you more about each four-letter result, and reading the bullet points makes me think of me, which I suppose is the point. I was happy to see that "Computer Programmers" was on the list of suggested career paths, since I currently am one. "Forestry and Park Rangers" is also on the list and is amusing to me because I toyed with the idea of becoming one for a while; the same goes for judges except that I'm still toying with that one. Perhaps my favorite descriptive bullet point is that INTPs "have no desire to lead or follow." I never gave it much thought but I have always hated the question, "Are you a leader or a follower?" I now feel empowered to legitamately take the unspoken third option, which is mu.

Since my Thinking and Feeling scores are pretty close (keeping in mind that this is a 46-question multiple-choice test) I was curious to see the info on INFP. That also sounds a lot like me, and that list includes writers, counselors, teachers and musicians, all roles which I take on to some degree or another. In fact, the rabbit-trail started with a search for "counselor," and the impetus for that was that I feel like I have been taking that role more often recently, and I enjoy it very much. I don't like to meddle, but I also can't stand to see strained relationships. When I sense that people will be open to listening to me, I talk with them and try to find a way to improve their connections with each other. My payoff is getting to see happier human beings, and I'm hard-pressed to find things that are more enjoyable than that.

(I noticed during the course of writing the above paragraph that my Intuitive and Sensing score was closer yet--by two whole points! I will claim that my Intuition wins out and is what allowed me to first Perceive the closeness of Thinking and Feeling, because I checked out the variations with Sensing and they definitely aren't for me. "Results-oriented?" Bah! Who has time to finish things when there are so many new things to begin?)

I have all but decided that when I leave my current job, something I have no plans to do currently but will almost certainly be considering in five years' time, I will not be seeking another job in the computer field. Hell, that field might not even exist in five years! I kid, yet I am beginning to feel the stirrings of a call to do something more profound. Not necessarily something big or famous ("I'm gonna build an airport. Put my name on it.") but something that has a real, positive, lasting effect on human life, or at least on a few humans' lives. Right now, I'm thinking that's either a counselor, a judge, a musician, or an elected official, but we IN(T|F)Ps like to keep our options open ;)

-f

Inauguration, or, First Post!

I have decided, after keeping up with a few friends' blogs pretty faithfully with Google Reader, to carve out my own space.  I have made a few attempts in the past, but they never stuck--probably because I never went public, ensuring that anyone who stumbled across the thing didn't care one whit about what was written in it.  Not this time!

The title, All Thought Leads to Action, comes from the writings of William James, an American philosopher and one of the last of the classical gentleman among other things.  The statement is certainly true, even if the action taken is nothing more than the slightest twitch of an eyebrow or the tensing of a more obscure muscle.  As a prolific thinker but a meager doer, this phrase has a special significance to me.  I hope it will encourage (chastise, browbeat, etc.) me to do more.  This blog is a start, because instead of only pondering things, setting them in order in my head, and trying to act based on my conclusions, I will share them with you.  Part of the reason for this is that I like to discuss things that interest me with other people, and another part is because I believe that the truths I am learning have value and should not remain locked inside my head.

The scope of this blog is unbounded, meaning that anything and everything is fair game: philosophy, music, religion, politics, experiences...the only thing I want to exclude is whining, because there's more than enough of that on the Internet already.

I was going to write more about William James, but I am also involved in a fierce battle with uncooperative code and an unwelcome knowledge drop on Slashdot, so it will have to wait.