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Robopocalypse

Over the years, Seanbaby (who, while hilarious, unfortunately confuses biological quality with intellectual quality in his disdain for society) has expressed much concern over the future dominance of robots over society. Artciles such as Robot Holocaust, Part 1 and Part 2, God Damn Robot Escapes, Robot Escapes Lab, and The Robopocalypse clearly convery an existentialist Fear and Trembling Anxiety regarding technology.

If memes are the power behind intellect, and we create machines that are someday capable of transmitting them (dare I say "alive"?), we humans have a problem, because this is when the robots would be reaching for Dynamic Quality, the agent of change in the world.

Robots do not have biological quality. I'm not sure what you'd call it, but it'd be something else after inorganic. There is no reason to believe the robots would form societies similar to our own, so we'd end up with:

chaos->inorganic->robotic->robot society->robot intellect
chaos->inorganic->biological->human society->human intellect

Two competing lines of values. Not only would human society have to fight human biology and human intellect, but it would also have to fight robotic quality, robot society and robot intellect. That's quite a burden. Of course, robot society would be doing the same, but I daresay robot intellect, over time, would overpower human intellect. As long as the robots had access to Dynamic Quality, their greater processing power and speed of transmission would enable them to create robot societies (and in turn, robots) greater than our own.

But who knows, maybe the robot memes would create yet another memetic substrate that could wipe out the robots? Maybe, but I doubt we'd be around to find out. The point is, if another substrate for memes were available, memes would have no use for us, and human life as we know it could perish.

posted by Phlegm at 12/30/2003  (0) comments

 
Memetics and Quality

I'd like to investigate how memetics ties in with Pirsig's Metaphysics of Quality from his book Lila: An Inquiry Into Morals.

The Metaphysics of Quality is a moral order based on Quality. Levels of Quality are divided as such:

chaos->inorganic->biological->social->intellectual->Dynamic Quality

Each level has its own set of values and thus observes Quality in a different way. A rock is a stable pattern of inorganic quality. A single-celled organism is a stable pattern of biological quality. A city has social quality. A person is a mixture of biological, social, and intellectual quality. Dynamic Quality is the nebulous mechanism by which stable patterns evolve to adapt to changes in their environment, such as DNA or the US Constutition. Built-in rules that allow for change.

Each level is superior to all previous levels. The survival of an animal is more important than the survival of a television set. The survival of a city is more important than a few individuals. The survival of ideas is more important than the survival of society, because without ideas, society would not be able to adapt.

Each level can only influence its nearest neighbors. Ideas can't talk to biology or rocks. Intellect must work through society to influence biology to influence the rocks. Society doesn't want to change, so it resists intellect and biology. Society passes laws to prevent crimes that damage society.

So how do memes fit into all this? I think memes are the carrier for intellectual quality just as genes are the carrier for biological quality. Society is where genes and memes compete. People rebel against society with sex, drugs, and rock 'n roll, which all have high biological quality, but which are less moral and ultimately destroy society. People also rebel against society with ideas (which may or may not have biological quality in mind) that can either improve or destroy society. That is why society must also resist new ideas; those new ideas might not be good.

This merely supports my claim that the American media is counterproductive. It promotes biological quality. Get laid. Listen to the latest album. Buy our stuff to fulfill your biological desires. It promotes a set of biological values that are morally inferior to society and intellect. At the same time, it convinces us that education is the key to solving problems, but as Pirsig notes, you can't talk people out of pursuing biological quality. Biological quality only answers to the point of a gun. That's today's fallacy, the anti-intellectual meme that intellect alone can hold biology at bay to preserve society.

One could say this seems okay. We're merely in transition. Someday intellect will win because it's morally superior. I disagree. Right now, memes require a biological substrate (the human mind) to spread, and for now they will probably not end up destroying society, because then they would destroy themselves. Someday, however, memes may find a non-human substrate, and society will be in trouble.

posted by Phlegm at 12/30/2003  (0) comments

 
Makyo In My Mind

Not that anyone cares about my dreams (cuz I never care about the dreams of others, really), but I've created a new blog for them at Makyo In My Mind.

When one practices Zen meditation, vivid hallucinations, illusory sensations, and visions--called makyo--often occur. Philip Kapleau in The Three Pillars of Zen describes this as "...residual impressions of our life experience, including those of previous existences, going back to time immemorial...bubble up to the conscious mind...penetrates so deeply that the surface and intermediate levels of consciousness are stilled."

Makyo are not to be dwelled upon in spite of emotions they evoke, because they mean nothing; they merely hinder true enlightenment.

I equate my dreams with makyo, even though sleep is far from a state of meditation, because I've never believed in the symbolism of dreams. Obviously, in recording them, I'm not letting them go as I should. However, unlike most people, I remember most of my dreams, and if I don't record them, they continue to pollute my mind until I do (which is how I am able to have recorded dreams from infancy). My writing them down is a way of letting them go that just so happens to entertain me as well.

posted by Phlegm at 11/28/2003  (0) comments

 
The Tao of Quality

I recently stumbled upon an old Hindu proverb:

There is nothing noble in being superior to some other person. The true nobility is in being superior to your previous self.

In other words, forget about cooperation and competition and pride and honor, and simply improve the Quality of your works. The rest will take care of itself.

This reminded me of my recent blog entries, so I flipped through my old copy of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert M. Pirsig. I'd forgotten how dead on this book is (well, aside from the title, since the author admits the book isn't very factual on either Zen or motorcycles). In it, the narrator (through Phaedrus) tries to define quality and finds it impossible, which is strange; if you remove quality from the world, the world changes, so it must exist. Nobody can say what it is, and yet everyone knows what it is. It suddenly strikes him to substitute the word "quality" for "Tao" in the Tae Te Ching by Lao Tzu, resulting in an enlightenment experience. Here are a few sample lines:

The quality that can be defined is not the Absolute Quality.
The names that can be given it are not absolute names.
Quality [romantic Quality] and its manifestations [classic Quality] are in their nature the same. It is given different names [subjects and objects] when it becomes clasically manifest.

The third line is what struck me as Zen-like. Subject and object. "I" and "not-I". Quality is best achieved when subject and object do not exist--when one is in the Zone.

So I've basically arrived where people arrived millennia ago. That's okay. I guess I had to do it the hard way, as even Phaedrus did. However, if this Quality meme has existed for so long in different cultures, why is it so absent or warped in today's society? Has the constant attempt to define Quality in terms of, say, profit margins or school grades degenerated its worth, made it a weaker manifestation of the Absolute Quality? Sure. Is Quality wrongly being combined with defection and pride to distort its value? Quite definitely.

In an interview I read with Pirsig, he mentions the site www.moq.org as a good forum site with people who actually understand his writings. In fact, it seems the 70-year old author participates on it. I checked it out briefly, and it looks like there's some good stuff. My first read will be on the Economics of Want and Greed, which I'm hoping will jive with my (as-of-yet-mentioned) theses on economy.

Oh, by the way, it seems Pirsig has my shut up meme. When asked why he hasn't written in the past couple decades, he responds by saying that since he has nothing to say, he doesn't write; a virtue of Zen is that it encourages silence. It seems he once had the same "shut up" dream that I do, as taken from the book:

The thought of [removing Quality from the world] completely thrilled him. It was like discovering a cancer cure. No more explanations of what art is. No more wonderful critical schools of experts to determine rationally where each composer had succeeded or failed. All of them, every last one of those know-it-alls, would finally have to shut up. This was no longer just an interesting idea. This was a dream.

(emphasis mine) I'd like to point out, however, that he wasn't actually advocating removing Quality from the world, as it would then become a rather boring place. My counterargument to that, however, is that that would be just fine, because an enlightened person doesn't need an exciting world to be happy.

I apologize for the lack of Quality in this entry.

posted by Phlegm at 11/23/2003  (0) comments

 
Learning is not a Meme

I think it's time for a reminder.

Not everything is a meme.

The human mind learns by one of three ways: classical conditioning, operand conditioning, and imitation.

Classical conditioning is learning by association. The canonical example is Pavlov's dog, who hears a bell every time it's fed. Over time, the dog salivates in anticipation of food when it hears a bell. Normally the two events have nothing to do with each other, but the dog has learned that they do. In humans, the most obvious example that comes to my (preoccupied? thank the media) mind is sexual fetishes (why else would anyone ever want to eat shit?).

Operand conditioning comes in one of two forms: positive and negative reinforcement, or reward and punishment. Put simply, if you reward the dog for crapping in the yard and slap it silly for crapping on the couch, you're teaching it where to crap. Since the reward or punishment can vary each time, it doesn't necessarily overlap with classical conditioning, though it can.

Even without knowledge of memetics, parents these days really don't seem to understand these two very basic fundamentals. If the kid does something bad, he must be punished, no question! If you reward bad behavior (or worse, punish good behavior), it's just confusing, and no learning takes place. If a child doesn't learn, he can't change his behavior.

For some reason punishment is frowned upon nowadays, and the response to everything should be unending "that's okay" understanding. How is THAT supposed to work? Who are these hack psychologists with no knowledge whatsoever of basic neuroscience? (Ohh, right, they aren't scientists at all, but graduated in the humanities. My bad.) Of course, it doesn't help that the "that's okay" reward for failure is a highly successful meme, likely because is stalls conflict and makes everyone feel okay in the short-term.

Anyway, once again: not everything is a meme. If you can theoretically teach it to an animal, then it's not a meme.

posted by Phlegm at 11/23/2003  (0) comments

 
Positive Feed-Forward

If you hadn't noticed, there are a lot of widespread negative memes out there. Why? Well, simply because people aren't well-equipped to fend them off anymore. "Wait Phlegm...anymore?" Yeah. "You mean...once upon a time...they were?" Yeah.

See, back in the day, before the Information Age, people learned their values mostly from their parents and family. Sure, schools might have made an attempt here and there, but let's face it, the problem childs typically had problem families or neurological problems. As a result, by the time children typically came into contact with outside negative influences, they were already under the influence of their parents' positive memes. This transmission of memes from parent to child is called vertical transmission.

Today, however, most children are raised, moralistically-speaking, by sources beyond their families. Music, television, movies. Religions are well-aware of this, which is why such things were/are considered evil, sinful, devices of Satan; they can turn people away from religion, thus harming the survival of that religion's meme. No good meme wants to be wiped out. (Ironically, I think the preposterousness of religions claiming these things are "works of Satan" has somewhat backfired. I really do think that if religions are to continue to survive in a COMPATIBLE way in this modern world, then they must dispense with all the fairytales, but that'll be another entry.) This demon-spawned transmission of memes from non-parental influences is called horizontal transmission.

My point in all this--yes, there's ALWAYS a point--is that a majority of parents these days aren't brainwashing their children enough with positive memes. Many are under the impression that what protected children from evil before sitll applies today. Some ascribe to the highly successful yet horrible meme that tells them to let their children decide things for themselves. Others simply don't have any positive memes to pass along, so they end up doing the media's job for them, which is an ever-increasing problem as horizontally-influenced children themselves become parents.

As much as we get tired of hearing politicians talk about the breakdown of the American family, that is one thing they are actually right about. However, they don't have the right incentives for preaching about it, which is one reason why the meme for keeping families together is failing. It's not about only having a mother, or having two dads, or even a homo dad. Heck, I'd even argue it doesn't matter if you have a traditional family. What is needed are constant figures in a child's life to condition them with positive memes. A longer period of veritcal transmission of positive values before the negative, horizontal transmission becomes dominant. That's it. The rest (unconditional love and so on, which all us children love to abuse) is just a bonus.

I'm pessimistic whether it can be overcome. I mean, look at other countries with supposedly more stable family and religious structures than America. They too are falling prey to the slop of American media, mostly through the children. If India and Japan, countries with more tradition than you can shake a booty at, are/have fallen to horseshit American pop culture, what hope is there?

posted by Phlegm at 11/23/2003  (0) comments

 
Joriki and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

Most people have a major misconception of what it means to be "Zen". They acquaint it with being totally immersed in something, of having intense focus, of being totally one with the task at hand. To some extent, that is correct, but Zen is actually much broader than that; intense, focused concentration is a "lesser" Zen known as Joriki.

Joriki is what you have when you're "in the Zone". Nothing exists except you and your task, and you are its master, because you are one with it. You are doing something great for its own sake, for the sake of Paedrus's Quality, or for Khan's individuality. As there is nothing outside, there is no competitor, no source of pride, but nor is there a source of honor or cooperation. It just IS.

Anyone can have Joriki, and having Joriki certainly enhances your Zen, but to be "Zen" is to be enlightened.

So...Mu.

posted by Phlegm at 11/18/2003  (0) comments

 
Egocide

To quote The Guide, "In the beginning, the Universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move." I shall now explain why this is, and hopefully clear up any apparent inconsistencies in my recent posts.

Without going too much into the cosmology of the Big Bang, the initial conditions of the universe--being it was very small--were quite uniform across space. Generically-speaking, energy levels and matter density didn't vary much. This was as perfect and simple as the Universe could ever be and still deserve the name Universe.

Why perfect? Because all was one; nothing in it could be distinguished from anything else, and thus everything was the same. However, over time, the Universe expanded and a host of "things" differentiated themselves. Waves, particles, strings...whatever. That we can call them particles or strings already implies that they were separate and isolated from the rest of the Universe. And so cosmic evolution began.

As time continued, we arrived, the result of the same process on the genetic and (later on) memetic levels. We are the "result" (in quotes because there is never a finished product) of their (genes and memes) attempts to build survival machines. As a host, we are equipped to defend our genes and our memes, to keep them safe. Our genes and memes want to keep their identities. Our own sense of identity is a nifty trick they use to help ensure that.

So why is this bad? We are here because the Universe allowed itself to dissolve into entities that distinguish between self and non-self. If this were not so, we wouldn't be here to ask these questions. So it can't be all bad, right? That's true, but it's bad because it means that evolution, being based on competition and self-preserverence, is therefore based on pride!

This is entirely consistent with what I said before about a system based on pride and defection being doomed to fail. It will fail because it will evolve. When I say "fail", I mean it will not persist forever. Ironically, this selfish desire to persist is what causes evolution in the first place. "I want to persist, therefore I will evolve." How bizarre this seems at the macroscopic scale! And yet it makes sense at the replicator level.

The very "pride" that created us is the cause of all our strife. It is the constant evaluation of the world we experience in terms of "I" and "not-I" that cause all human conflict. In other words, our egos get in the way of everything. Only by dissolution of our egos is it possible to act with complete honor and cooperation. In such a scenario, it is the ego-lessness that persists. "Not-I wants to persist." That is all. It doesn't need to evolve, and doesn't care whether it does.

So how does one go about abolishing the ego? One must Awaken from the Meme Dream. I daresay this is equivalent to attaining enlightenment in Zen. Both involve the personal experience (not the same as intellectual understanding) that there is no self, that everything in the Universe is the same.

If people ceased to think of themselves as people, the creation of the Universe wouldn't make them angry.

posted by Phlegm at 11/03/2003  (0) comments

 
Fear for Sale

I've mentioned before that the American media is the most dangerous force on this planet, because it spreads harmful memes. It's the biggest WMD there is, because it's a Weapon of Mass Coercion. The best way to get people to do things is to brainwash them...or give them money.

However, the media is certainly not offering us money. Instead, it takes our money by offering us fear, brainwashing us to fear for our safety. By giving "unbiased" reports of all the atrocities in the world, or of all the things that can kill us, it coerces us to purchase products to protect ourselves. That money then ultimately funds the media to continue the fear campaign. In effect, they are selling fear, which sells fear, which sells fear.... What a great racket!

The media convinces us that such-and-such is a problem and must be dealt with. So-and-so is evil and a threat to our country. So-and-so is in financial collusion with a consortium of psychiatrists. Hey, like the Ruler of the Universe in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, "They only exist in words I think I hear." This country would be a better place if people just took care of problems in their own communities. How can we raise other nations up when we're sinking so low?

I don't understand how decisions can be made based upon the media, decisions based on the reports of a few imperfect individuals. No one person has all the facts. No political decision ever made is sufficiently informed, and yet they are made by those who are supposed to know. As such, the common person--that is, me--is not equipped to deal with such matters. "I only decide about my Universe. My Universe is what happens to my eyes and ears. Anything else is surmise and hearsay."

I'm not convinced that anything I witness in the media is reported for my benefit. It's reported to instill fear. Fear runs this country. Capitalism feeds on fear. Triumph over fear (purchasing of these products) is a form of pride, and pride is defection. Hell, freedom itself is defection! Defection is what's currently running this country, not honor, not cooperation.

America is defective. As such, it is doomed to fail. Here, have some fear. It's free.

posted by Phlegm at 11/02/2003  (0) comments

 
Safety: Our Pride and Joy

A short while back, I made a flippant (at the time) comment over at Khan's Journal that honor and pride can be equated with cooperation and defection in the Prisoner's Dilemma (you can a description here somewhere). I didn't think much of it at the time, but the extent to which he's taken the analogy over the past weeks has me convinced that it is indeed true.

In short, if people let go of their pride, they will act honorably and thus cooperate with other individuals for maximum mutual benefit over the long haul. If people retain their pride and defect--rather, screw people over, or deny others the opportunity to fullfill their honorable duties--they eventually end up hurting themselves. It's a variation on the age-old Golden Rule everyone learns in childhood--but isn't suffiently brainwashed with, apparently--to do unto others as you would have them do unto you.

Based on this logic (and what sometimes surfaces as outright childish tantrum), I've concluded that personal safety is dishonorable. I'm not talking about self-defense here (though it may be argued). I'm talking about all the things people do to make the world a safer place to live--for themselves.

For example: automobiles. Modern vehicles have an increasingly insurmountable (is that possible?) number of so-called safety features: seatbelts, airbags, anti-lock brakes, and contact patches the size of a fat woman's thighs (thank you Neal Stephenson). That's just sticking to the simple things I understand. Now, likely these features are there to counteract increases in performance, traffic congestion, and human stupidity. So what is the result? People drive more wrecklessly, putting others in danger, because they feel safe.

Contrast this with my car. I drive a classic 1964 Dodge Dart GT, a big hunk of good-old American steel fabricated in my home town. The brakes are mechanical, meaning you really need to press that pedal, so tailgating is definitely out of the question. The exhaust sphincters aren't polished, so when you hit the hammer down, shit doesn't happen (thanks again). Fortunately, it came with the optional lap belt package so that only your face will smash into the airbag-less, steel steering wheel. Consequently, I am a very, very safe driver.

Oh, I forgot to mention something else. Many modern cars have the added safety bonus of being very, very large. This yields great visibility for them at the selfish expense of reduced--or negligible, in some cases--visibility for smaller vehicles. It also puts more distance between the driver and the wreckage.

"But Phlegm, some or all of these features are valid safety devices!" Sure they are, for the individual, and they would be for everyone if they didn't change peoples' driving habits for the worse. But they do. People rely more and more on technology to save them instead of their own skill and sense. This putting one's personal safety over the safety of others is pride. It's defection. It's breaking the Golden Rule. But is it ultimately self-destructive? Well, it can be, with the wrong attitude.

"Ah, but isn't relying soley on one's personal skill and sense also a form of pride?" Absolutely! "So, what's the solution, then?" Look, I'm not saying "no" to safety features. I'm saying "no" to the attitude they come with. Besides, I'm not just talking about automobiles here.

"But isn't it just another form of Darwinism? You know, natural selection? Survival of the fittest!" Sure, I guess, but survival of what? These so-called survival advantages aren't accidental genetic mutations; they're the result of human decisions, of memetics. They are memes that piggyback on our imprinted sense of genetic preserverance, and that's what makes them so successful.

You want to know who REALLY benefits from your personal safety?

I'll answer that, but for now just know this: it isn't you.


posted by Phlegm at 10/31/2003  (0) comments

 
Plausible Time Travel in Storytelling: Is it Possible?

With the exception of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy Radio Show, I hate anything to do with time travel (at least that I've encountered), because nobody gets it right. There's a rip in the spacetime rug, characters patch it up, and paradoxes not mentioned in the story get swept underneath it. There's always a philosophical inconsistency, and that ruins the story for me. It's not realism I need, but plausibility.

Although it would make my explanations easier to understand and relate to, I'm not even going to get into all the movies that do it wrong. I hate pop culture, so I'm not going to encourage it by mentioning anything by name.

Instead, let's take the canonical example of someone going back in time and killing their father. Enter the remedial mind: "Oooh, but if they kill their father, they'll never be born, so they can't go back and kill their father! Oh, but then they WILL be born, so they can! Oh, but then they won't, so they can't! Augh! I found a paradox! Boy, am I smart for figuring that out!" Okay, now what?

There seem to be two possibilities at this point. Either time travel isn't possible, or there are many worlds. Since you can't tell a time travel story with the first, the many worlds hypothesis becomes a popular alternative, even if it is a gross misinterpretation of quantum mechanics and--like God--is not a necessary component to understanding how the Universe operates. Anyway, so then we end up with a world where your father is dead, you were never born, but you exist anyway, and a world that you existed in up until you left it to kill your father.

That in itself it not very exciting, but authors then like to consider how changing that particular event would change the world. Then the character is caught in this strange world where tons of stuff has happened that he never anticipated because of Chaos Theory and Dirk Gently's fundamental interconnectedness of all things. All fine and dandy if you're not a diehard determinist like me, EXCEPT....

Is it even a time travel story anymore? It's more like a "what if" story to me. Well, I guess that's the point of time travel, to answer the "what if" questions. But still, it's imperfect, because an agent had to go back in time to make something change. There was no random factor that just happened another way, so one can't know the true cause of the effects in the future. Maybe killing his father has little to do with what happens in the future compared to the future assassin whose life he inadvertently saved by stepping in front of him in line for the bathroom. Who knows?

Alright alright, so what would I like to see? How do I think it should work? Alright, imagine this: You get a large, round bath, made of ebony...

Okay, seriously. First, to have time travel in the traditional sense, you must at least humour that determinism is true, and that there is only one Universe (and one possible Universe). Since the Universe exists, then any time travel that's ever been done has already happened. Like a big jigsaw puzzle, as The Guide puts it. So paradoxes either never happen, or they don't destroy the Universe. Why? Let's find out.

I go back in time with the intention to kill my father. I kill him, resulting in a paradox. Like a computer program, the Universe is now caught in an endless loop. However, since everything has already happened, we know this can't be so, so something MUST be changing with each iteration of the loop. Let's call it flotsam. So we're caught in this loop until finally this flotsam value reaches a threshold that ends up changing enough butterfly flaps in the prehistoric era to result in my knife just barely missing my father's heart, and my father lives. I fail and the loop ends.

Surely there's no way I'd actually be going back in time a zillion times to kill my dad, though, right? Right. The Universe would be doing this calculation internally, and me as an observer would only see the end result: my failure. I can go back and try again and again, but I will ALWAYS fail. Someone else will get in the way, or he'll trip, or I'll get killed. In other words, I can't do anything in the past that would prevent me from going back and doing that very thing in the future.

Naturally, this could be ANYTHING, so the possibilities are endless if not maddening, and you can only tell stories about how you shouldn't mess with fate, which doesn't exist anyway, so why bother.

So unless you're Douglas Adams--and you're not, because he's dead--forget about using time travel as a literary device.

posted by Phlegm at 10/20/2003  (0) comments

 
Self-Unrealization

It's tough to lead a single life. By that I mean to live a daily life in correspondence with your beliefs. If you belong to a religion, you'll know what I mean. For many, life is compartmentalized and full of inconsistencies. People worship God and yet don't "walk with God". Something like that.

Being consistent is something I've been striving for for a while now. Ironically, I used to shun predictability and monotony, but I've realized that being predictable--whether in a good or a bad way--makes you reliable and thus easier to get along with (as long as you can avoid the trap of allowing people to take advantage of you).

Anyway, I realized something about my own beliefs tonight, and how it applies to everyday life. If I don't believe in free will, and if I don't believe in the Self, then I should not hold negative feelings toward anyone, ever. How does this come about? Well, if there is only one possible reality--the one we're in--I should accept and be therefore content with who I am, because it's the only "me" possible. If I'm content with who I am, it's also because everyone else is they way THEY are. Furthermore, if there is no Self, then there is no distinguishment between me and someone else--or anything else. When the barriers between subject (me) and object (else) are broken, there is nothing left to dislike, and nothing left to do the disliking.

posted by Phlegm at 10/08/2003  (0) comments

 
Don't Mention It

There are a lot of people rallying for a lot of causes. Most of these causes involve denouncing the objects of other, competing causes. Republicans diss the Democrats. Critics complain about a bad movie. Evolutionists rag on the Bible. To publicly support one side evidently implies you must publicly condemn the other. By presenting positive evidence for my side while presenting negative evidence for the other, I will convince everyone that my side is the correct one. That is what people think. This may work in the laboratory, but it doesn't work in society.

Ancient peoples seemed to understand at least one thing better than modern society. To give something a name is to grant it power. To recognize something's existence is to give it weight in your mind. A rose without a name is nothing. A cognitive symbol can not be reconstructed without words.

"There is no such thing as bad publicity," the entertainment industry says. When you talk about something you hate, you are inadvertenly making it more known. If you hate something you hear on the radio, you'd be better suited just turning it off instead of asking, "Who is this? That way I know never to listen to them again." Their name will then be in your head. You will probably mention your dislike of them to a future person. That person will think, "Hmm. I don't know who they are, but since I'm an open-minded person who must learn everything the hard way, I'm going to listen to them myself and make my own decision whether they're a good band or not!" Whether they enjoy it or not doesn't matter--as long as they keep replicating that meme. And they will.

So if you hate something, shut up about it.

(Actually, someone has gotten this right. Wes Craven. I wouldn't want to spoil such quality pictures, though.)

posted by Phlegm at 9/17/2003  (0) comments

 
Opera: The IDM of the Past?

I am by far no scholar of musical aesthetics, and I've only done about five minutes of research into it (yet it has sparked enough interest that I think I shall be reading a lot more on it in the near future), but I thought I'd share a fairly recent rant of mine regarding what makes makes music enjoyable, somewhat centered around my distaste for opera. I'll even avoid mentioning memes.

Elements that make music enjoyable include tension (followed by release) and repetition of self-familiar elements (Certainly there are more, but these are what seem most important to me). Tension is achieved in many ways, such as dissonance, "rough" sounds (localized insertion of noise), and vocals. Repetition is ALWAYS achieved, but varies according to scale. For instance, a piece can repeat on a scale of notes, measures, or other, larger blocks of time.

Pop music capitalizes (no pun intended) on this by creating repetitive, short tunes dominated by vocals and familiar instruments, perhaps accented with a few unfamiliar attributes (like a "cool sound"), and common 4-4 time.

I hate vocals. No, wait. I don't. I hate lyrics. Words in song. They create TOO MUCH tension, and if there is ever any release, it's only in the bridge section (another standard of pop music) of the song--never enough. They often do not fit well with the beat. They are only aesthetically pleasing to me if the effect they produce is centered solely around the sound the words make, rather than their meaning. (This is NEVER the case with popular music, which always tries to have some point to it, like how someone lost their girl. Like I want to hear about someone else's stupid problems (especially when they make more money than me). I have my own. I don't need some faceless, base musician to "relate" to. Everyone has the same problems, so shut up already.) Rap sometimes achieves this by having each syllable match the beat exactly, each line having the same assonant sound to it as the previous line, syllable by syllable. The consonants often get lost in the noise, so to speak (how many times have you misaken a cymbal crash to be a vocal "s"-sound?), so it's the vowel sounds that are important for your vocal listening pleasure (consonants give you more of a percussive listening pleasure).

Opera is ALL about the vocals. Therefore, there is ALWAYS tension. The release comes when they finally shut up. Furthermore, they attempt to tell a story, often in an unintelligible language, so you're stuck enjoying only the sound (which is good), except...the sound has no repetitive element, and often doesn't even rhyme. What are we supposed to be listening to? The melody is constantly changing. My mind doesn't know what to pick up on next. There is no pleasure in anticipating the next repetitive element (since there isn't one), and thus no pleasure gleaned from the melody.

Compare this to IDM (Intelligent Dance Music...a misnomer, in my opinion, but that's what the genre is called, nonetheless) music. IDM has crazy beats that have nothing in common from measure to measure, removing the enjoyable predictive power on a percussive level, but often has other tracks layered on top that do repeat, such as a chord progression, or a spliced up sample. However, this repetition is chaotic, and largely unpreditable. Furthermore, there is usually no release from the tension. The crazy beat could end, merely to arrive at a dissonant chord. A new listener to IDM will hate it as much as I hate opera, and for similar reasons.

However, while I hate opera, I love IDM. Why? Well, at one level, it's never boring, because even after a thousand listens, I might not be able to predict what's going to happen next in the piece. However, after a thousand listens, I still gain a sense of familiarity with the piece, so it becomes repetitive at the tune level itself. There is no self-familiar element until you loop the piece as a whole. Opera is the same way. So, again, why do I still hate opera?

Because it sucks.

posted by Phlegm at 9/13/2003  (0) comments

 
Shut Up (Pass it on)

I've caught some kind of paradoxical, masochistic, self-destructive, doomsday meme, because the more I think about memes, the more I'm convinced that they are in the "wrong hands" (actually, they're in nobody's hands, but...) and represent a real threat to society. As Douglas Adams put it in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy Radio Show, "...the Babel fish...removed all barriers to communication...consequently, it has been the cause of more and bloodier wars in the history of the known Universe." Something like that.

I see one solution as getting everyone in the world to just shut up. There may be other solutions...a society of immortals comes to mind, but I'll discuss that later. Maybe.

Anyway, my self-imposed challenge lately has therefore been to devise a meme that can make everyone stop communicating. This is naturally very difficult since communication is needed for memetic transmission (specifically, imitation is needed); a meme must have high copy number (fecundity), a long lifetime (longevity), and accurate reproduction (fidelity). (Aside: I also think there is a 4th property, some sort of spontaneous evolution rate, which would be a measure of how often the meme springs up out of "nowhere" in the population.)

The phrase "Shut up" is the simplest silence meme I can think of. However, I know it will fail simply because it's failed so far, in spite of having all the attributes outlined above. It meets fierce competition with all the other memes out there, because it's hard for a silence meme to compete. That's why I've tacked "pass it on" to the end of it. Admittedly, it's still not effective, but it's the sort of property it ironically needs to have.

Silence has spread in certain pockets of culture out there, though. Some monks take vows of silence. Natives of St. Petersburg, Russia consider it rude to speak loudly. The fictional "Ellen Jamesians" in The World According to Garp have no tongues. Whether religious, spiritual, or cultural, however, simply not speaking (or speaking softly to prevent unintended transmission) isn't enough, because speaking is only one type of communication. When I say "shut up", what I'm really saying is, "stop trying to breathe your memes down my neck." This includes any sort of information that could be processed by my mind.

One way to shut the world up would be to give it quite a big scare, somehow convincing it that communication really IS bad and must be limited. Information paranoia to replace information addiction. Seeing that I already have this paranoia to some extent, it seems theoreticaly feasible. The problem would then be in its execution. It's unrealistic to expect everyone to come up to speed on my lifetime of scientific and philosophical musings that led me to this point. Therefore, I'm certain the meme would have to enter the machine of Popular Culture in a nice manufactured package. It would be fitting.

The other possibility would be to invent a new religion. L. Ron Hubbard did it, so why couldn't it be done again? The gist would then go something like, "Shut up, pass it on, and you will be rewarded in the afterlife." As Hofstadter once noted, tacking "in the afterlife" to the end of a reward-promising phrase immediately gives it more weight, because hey, you never know!

posted by Phlegm at 7/29/2003 

 
Meme Warfare

I was watching TV the other day when this guy appeared out of nowhere with a syringe (my door was open to let wandering friends, "fresh air", and insects in). He asked if he could inject some cat shit into me. I naturally said no--because hey, who wants cat shit injected into them--but I was too passive to do anything about it, and he injected me anyway. Now I'm feeling a little strange, and a little disappointed in myself for not having developed the proper defenses against this person.

That's a lie, of course; everybody knows I don't watch TV.

The rest isn't true, either, because we all know that none of us would ever let anyone do that. At the least we'd move away. At most we'd grab that baseball bat under the couch. We all know that being physically injected with foreign substances is, on the whole, a bad thing. Even most drug addicts would want to know what's in that syringe before letting someone inject them with it.

And yet this goes on all the time, metaphorically-speaking, when it comes to our minds. We leave the TVs and radios on, subjecting ourselves to numbing sitcoms, mind-wiping political agendas, and manufacturered music. We walk down the street and get assaulted by bulletin boards, blaring car stereos, raving activists, and the occasional philosophical homeless person. We listen to everyone else's crappy opinions, crappy music, and crappy agendas because this is a free country. "No, I won't shut up, because this is America, and I have the right to free speech. What the fuck are you gonna do about it?" I wouldn't have a hand left if I punched every mouth that said that. Such is the price of freedom.

On the one hand, sure, I like being able to say whatever I want, but on the other, I don't want anyone else's crappy ideas soaking into my head, either. It's easy to stay away from physical harm, because you can just avoid it, but it's harder to protect your mind from all the invasive memes out there--especially the ones manufacturered by the media specifically to get into your head and spread--because while there are laws (not to mention etiquette) against physical harm, information broadcasting is not yet seen as something harmful. It's seen as Popular Culture.

We are bombarded by information day-in and day-out. So much, in fact, that people are becoming addicted to information itself. As Khan points out in his entry about addiction, addiction can happen with anything. This is one of those cases where it's less noticeable. When you are addicted to information, you'll take ANYTHING into your head just to get that fix, and that's pretty dangerous. Humans did not evolve in this Information Age. We, as a society, are not equipped to deal with this.

"Sticks and stones will break my bones, but words will never hurt me." What an ingenious meme that is, forcing children for generations to prematurely lower their memetic defenses! Memes are possibly the most destructive force on the planet (tell me that any ecosystem driven only by genes would ever wipe itself out, and yet we might just do it), though their effects are subtle.

"Don't even think about it" is another common phrase. I used to rebal at this, thinking to myself, "I can think whatever I WANT." I knew the reasoning, of course...if something's in your head long enough, you might eventually believe it or act on it.

So how do we keep all this crap from getting into our heads in a nation of free speech? We develop defense mechanisms, some more active than others. Passively, people wear headphones, stare at the ground, or reflexively glaze over large banners (I often miss obvious titles in papers and webpages, because my mind automatically discards anything BIG near the top margin). Actively, people turn up their stereos louder, and speak and behave in ways to bring more attention to themselves, thus competing with the other memes out there. Memes for silence are (by default) less successful than memes for non-silence, so we end up with a memetic arms race.

--Listen to me!

--No, listen to me!

Arms races happen all the time in nature. Progress for the sake of progress. However, in an arms race among memes, our minds (for the time being) are the battlefield, and I wonder how well they can handle it.

posted by Phlegm at 7/22/2003  (0) comments

 
Close Your Mind

For generations, we've been brainwashed since childhood to be "open-minded individuals", to consider the views and opinions of others as equally appreciable despite their apparent irrationality or invalidity. I say "apparent" because people would like to believe that we puny humans will never really know "the truth". Therefore, since our own beliefs are never really true, we can't judge the beliefs of others.

Nonetheless, I do believe some beliefs are more valid than others. I think most of us do, even people who claim to "...listen carefully to everyone's arguments and then make a rational decision based on the evidence." That "rational" decision is nothing but one's own relatively powerful memeplex (system of beliefs) competing against a poor lone intruder, and usually it wins. It's also the reason we tend to think we're right moreso than others.

A good belief is a consistent belief, and any consistent system of beliefs is de facto resistant to other beliefs. A person with a consistent belief system is therefore more closed-minded than one without. This is a good thing. If your beliefs are consistent, you have less inner conflict, and you find it easier to make decisions in both your daily and long-term life. It's a matter of efficiency, of utility.

Nonetheless, in today's world you're often looked down upon if you have this attitude, if you're not "open-minded". Having an open mind is so trendy, and the concept piggybacks with amateur philosophers, drug addicts, and gay paraders, all of whom are either hyppocritical--demanding you remain open to their beliefs while they stick to theirs--or decisively confused. In either case, how can you take such people seriously? Well, you can't, which is why in rare cases, the close-minded person is at least respected for being stalwart in the face of overwhelming opposition.

Religious zealots are an exception to the open-mindedness trend, of course. They believe they ARE right (or that God is right) and don't need to be open to a challenging system. However, even modern religions accept that other views are out there, telling young people to "...be strong in your faith when you go away to college, because your faith will be challenged, and you will be tempted to turn away from God."

Having an open mind is a bad thing. How can you stand for anything if you stand for nothing? What identifies you as a person? How can you constantly analyze everything and decide what is right on a case-by-case basis? How do you keep from getting duped, or believing any old thing?

An open mind is like an open wound; it's ripe for infection.

My mind is closed.

posted by Phlegm at 7/05/2003  (0) comments

 
Life Without Hope

The NPC Theory is merely selfish meme theory projected onto the ignorantly blissful background of subjective free will.

However, don't confuse genes and memes. The memes are not working for the genes. Genes want to get replicated. Memes want to get replicated. The genes did not "know" that memes would take off and replicate themselves when they gave rise to brains large enough to handle them. Genes require the human host to survive long enough to reproduce...a rather long incubation period compared to memes, which only require weeks, hours, or even seconds to propagate. Therefore, memes are not "concerned" about the welfare of their human hosts...they may even end up destroying us.

How this all works into my theory is that Character is a measure of how much meme-interplay goes on inside a single mind before another meme is spit out of it. Information processing. It's not a measure of intelligence, and yes it's dependent on the genes that created the brain, but it's also dependent on all the other memes inside that brain.

All that is just a matter of chance. My brain was genetically predisposed to acquire certain memes, and accrual of those certain memes made me memetically predisposed to acquire others. This has formed a massive meme-complex, or "memeplex", in my mind, with a tremendous ability to survive based on its longevity (it has been in my mind for some time), fecundity (ability to be spread), and fidelity (it's very consistent and hard to break down).

This entire collection, this ultimate memeplex or even set of contradictory memeplexes (as evidenced by, say, Christian Scientists), is what we call the "self". We identify with this self because we are so familiar with it. We feel continuous merely because we are such awesome predictors of what our selves will do next, though sometimes we fail at it. We rationalize these failures with quips such as "I changed my mind," or "I was drunk."

The human brain acts before we are conscious of it. I can decide to snap my fingers, but my brain will "prepare" to snap before I finally make the "conscious" decision to snap. Athletes and martial artists often refer to "muscle memory", which is really just an affirmation that the body and brain will act before you're aware of it. This whole consciousness thing is merely an illusion brought about by the memes, an illusion that allows us to philosophize about ourselves, rationalize free will, and invent memeplexes such as religions and a sense of self to help us (and memes) survive.

The only "self" is the person here NOW. You did not exist 10 seconds ago, and the "you" of the future is not you. Your cells will change, your DNA will mutate, your synapses will fire in different patterns, your brain proteins will store different information, and your memes will be competing in different ways.

Consciousness regarding your past, current, and future selves is often depressing, and the illusion of free will often instills feelings of responsibility and grief. People are happiest when they are not grieving over the past or worrying about the future (too much). A doctor in surgery, a musician in "flow", a zen master, and a Wolf player in the zone all have the same thing in common: They are in their least-conscious state, and at their happiest.

So eliminate your consciousness. Don't spread those memes. Empty your mind, get it some zen. Eliminate your inner conflict, those competing memes, and find a consistent, if temporal, "self".

It is possible to live a life without hope.

posted by Phlegm at 6/20/2003 

 
NPC Theory, Part 5 -- Processing

The remaining bit of this theory relies a little on memetics, which is a theory for the propogation/inheritance of (in short) human culture. The term "memetics" is derived from genetics, the study of biological inheritance, and was coined by Richard Dawkins in his monumental 1976 publication, The Selfish Gene, wherein he suggests the "meme" as a second "replicator" unique to humans, in addition to the gene, which is common to all life.

Whereas the Selfish Gene Theory asserts that organisms are "survival machines" that serve the selfish interests of their genes, memetics says that minds are the machinery memes use to replicate and spread. Our genes have selfish "interests" in that they want to survive (cause us to produce offspring and care for our families), and our memes have those same interests (spread a catchy tune, catch-phrase, or religion). Sometimes they conflict with interesting and telling results. For a great modern discussion on memetics, check out The Meme Machine by Susan Blackmoore.

Come to think of it, you don't need to understand anything about memetics to understand the rest of what I have to say here. Nonetheless, it's good stuff. Read it.

Our minds are made to process information. Therefore, since our minds are the replication machinery of memes/ideas/culture, there must be some mental processes associated with them. It could be as simple as hearing an annoyingly catchy song on the radio, subconsciously remembering the chorus, and then repeating it out loud in front of your co-workers, often with the response, "Oh I've had that song in my head all day, too!" It doesn't have to be a good song, either; it merely must contain elements that make it get passed on (that's a long discussion I won't get into here). That's a very simple example and requires a minimal amount of mental processing.

Not so simple would be, say, relating this NPC Theory to someone else. It requires memory retention, understanding, and communication skills. Anyone who's grown up in the United States has experienced the distortion that follows from the game "telephone". Many small errors made in duplication of a phrase result in a different phrase. There's no guarantee that everyone understands this theory the same way, or will communicate it such that it will be understood the same way. It follows that the key thing required in this case is thought. The teacher must think about the theory, its truth value, and his words, before passing it on. A great deal more mental processing.

My claim is that Character is a measure of mental processing. In other words, PCs mentally process more than NPCs. PCs will generally think more before responding to a question, reacting to a new situation, or passing along information (spreading memes). The shopkeeper has his automatic responses, but if he were to think--however instantaneously--before opening his mouth, he might be perceived as less of an NPC. This also applies to forethought. I might react automatically in many situations, but only because I've simulated conversations and situations in my mind beforehand.

Note that magnitude of thought has nothing to do with intelligence. In fact, it can be argued that since intelligent people don't have to think as much about something before passing in on, and that stupid people have to think long and hard before understanding something, then stupid people would be more inclined to be PCs. Here I'd like to emphasize processing over thought. Two people might think for different lengths of time on a math problem, but if they both solve it, they have both done the same (within the scope of the problem) amount of processing. I could've said this originally in my shopkeeper example above, but I wanted to make the difference obvious.

I mentioned that there must be physical processes in the brain associated with all this. As a former neuroscientist, I have no doubt that there are physical processes in your brain for thought, memory, and so on. Anything physical can ultimately be measured, though right now I couldn't tell you precisely what would be meaningful to measure. If such measurements could ever be made, however, tests could be devised to get a quantitative measure of a person's Character.

Next time I'll discuss the mechanisms involved in the biological and cultural development of the PC.

posted by Phlegm at 6/14/2003  (0) comments

 
Education the Hard Way

Two years ago I was sitting alone at the bar in Chile's, trying to enjoy my dinner while reading a book. In spite of my best efforts to drown out invasive sounds and conversation with my own mental voice, I overheard some NPC chick say, "...but that's the way I've always been; I have to learn everything the hard way. I guess I'll never learn [to not learn things the hard way]! Har har."

Like many common expressions, I never thought much of the phrase "learn the hard way". I mean sure, I'd applied it to myself now and then, wondering whether I was better off learning things for myself instead of being told what to believe, but while I'd always appreciated the results of learning things on my own, part of me also felt like I was wasting my time. It may be a good mental exercise, needed to solve new problems in life, but there are other ways to exercise your mind that don't have negative consequences.

Negative consequences? Like what? Oh I dunno, like what happens when you learn the hard way not to take a job just for the money, or to always be right no matter what, or let a relationship get too physical, or say things that probably shouldn't be said. Consequences that can scar your mind, emotions, finances, and happiness over the long haul. Was I better off for learning these things on my own? In my opinion: No. Wiser? Maybe. Did it build Character? Maybe in some ways, but not in others, for now I'm restricted to a certain subset of actions based on previous experiences, actions that will be irrationally influenced by classical conditioning.

By reflex, I like to take rules and phrases and turn them in on themselves, so I thought, well, the solution, then, is to learn the hard way that you don't have to learn the hard way, and this must be done before puberty, before you lose 40% or more of the synapses (and thus plasticity, or ability to change) in your brain (and no, you don't want to keep them; schizophrenics don't lose these synapses).

How can this be achieved? I'm not sure, but I can at least outline the type of problem a child would have to encounter. A situation must be devised whereupon the student will be torn between two choices: 1. Solve it the conventional way, or 2. Solve it your own way. The conventional method must be obvious, and even well-known, but it must appear at a glance that there's an easier, more appealing solution that is ultimately impossible and has horrible consequences. Let me say it another way. A problem must be designed to punish independent thought.

"Whoa, Phlegm, this is the land of freedom, man. What are you, a communist? Nobody tells me what to think, because I'm an individual!" Yes, such an individual that I predicted that response. Please. We are brainwashed from day one by the infectious ideas of others, some good, most bad, both from our parents (vertical transmission) and from others (horizontal transmission), and the only way to remain sane and good is to develop the right defenses. A so-called individual--someone with a high Character Quotient--will exhibit good judgement on whether to take advice from a wiser person or to think on his own, regardless.

Defense against the "learn the hard way" meme would be powerful, because it would instill children with the value of education, of learning from people who've already taken the damage for you. That is, after all, the point of education--reaping the benefits of your predecessors without incurring the costs.

Doesn't anybody else see this? Or is it too obvious?

posted by Phlegm at 6/12/2003  (0) comments

 
NPC Theory, Part 4 -- The Character Quotient

Last time I presented the possible contradiction in this theory that Character is relative to each observer, which would make the statement that the world is populated by NPCs and PCs quite obvious and meaningless. Does this relativism discount the notion of an absolute value for Character? Absolutely not!

Are people in the world either intelligent or unintelligent? Supermodels or uglybones? Superstars or amateurs? No, of course not. These traits all appear continuous to us; most everyone is better than a given percentage of people at some thing, and worse than the remaining percent. A moron with a 60 IQ can't tell the difference between someone with a 130 IQ and someone with a 140 IQ, but those two someones might be able to discern between different grades of morons, and they'll probably argue between each other over who has more intelligence. The same holds true for Character.

I'll therefore fabricate the Character Quotient (CQ), a measure of Character. Now, I'll admit I have no way to objectively assign number for it (yet), but...just...stick with me here. Assuming we have some kind of test (the MTT, perhaps?) to measure CQ, let's continue. Oh, but wait, I see a question: "Why do we need a test? Aren't all smart people PCs, Phlegm?" Heh, no, no. Character is not a prerequisite for intelligence. While there may be a general correlation between the two, this is not necessarily so. Consider the extreme example of, say, an autistic person. A genius in some area, but you probably wouldn't call them "intelligent", no less a PC. Can you think of any smart people you know who nonetheless are utterly predictable? Oh sure. In a bit, I'll demonstrate why IQ and CQ are not (directly) causally related.

In the meantime, let's return to our shopkeeper example, where the shopkeeper seems like an NPC to you, but a PC to his wife. While it could be the case that you simply don't have enough information to know he's actually a PC, it could also be that his wife, who happens to be an NPC, thinks he's a PC simply because they're on the same level. Rather, they have a similar CQ, just as the two morons may (very stupidly indeed) think they are both intelligent people.

Now that we have this CQ, is there even any meaning to calling some people PCs and others NPCs? Sure there is. We still call people smart and dumb, athletic and inept, beautiful and ugly, so the terms still hold. There is probably a bell curve for the world for Character, too.

"So do you see NPCs as lesser beings, Phlegm?" This question from my first installment is now answered:

Yes. NPCs are definitely inferior to PCs.

Hey, doesn't mean you can't love an NPC, or have great NPC friends. You might not want to think of it in terms of inferiority, and that's understandable, but doesn't change the way the world works. Just because you're an "A-grade" PC doesn't mean you have the IQ needed (or whichever 'Q' it is) to understand that evolution wouldn't happen if everyone were equal (whoa whoa, new topic, so I'll stop there).

Anyway, so what was all that Role Space stuff about if we just came up with all this CQ business? Well consider that while I'm a genius (yes, it's true), I might still look like a moron to, say, oh...a clinical psychologist...because clinical psychology would be outside of my "Intellectual Space". Or maybe I seem like a moron to you because you don't care about any of this stuff and it's all just elitist gobbledygook...you NPC.

Next time will be a slight digression on replicators, which will be needed to explain (among many things) how the minds of PCs and NPCs work.

Continue on to Part 5

posted by Phlegm at 6/02/2003 

 
NPC Theory, Part 3 -- Role Spaces and Character Relativism

Aziz over at Unmedia totally and completely spoiled some upcoming tidbits in this theory, so I'm going to back it up with talk about Role Spaces (RS) and PC/NPC Relativism.

In yesterday's post, I made the closing remark that two PCs must agree on the "NPC-ness" or "PC-ness" (from now on, let's just call it "Character") of any given individual. That was a flat out lie. (Actually, you'll find I tell a lot of lies, but they're necessary to present things simply and methodically, kind of like how in 4th grade your teacher said you couldn't divide seven by two (even though you KNEW you could, and the bitch would still say you were wrong).) Each individual in an interpersonal interaction has what I call a Role Space. The Role Space is dependent on the environment, as I will demonstrate.

To go back to the shopkeeper example, actions stereotypical of shopkeepers make up his Role Space. Statistical anomalies aside, a shopkeeper NPC is restricted to only saying and doing things within that RS, but only in that shop. You might be thinking, "But why? An NPC is an NPC! He'll be just as predictable outside the shop as inside!" That may be true, but his RS may change, and that's the important thing to consider when evaluating the Character of an individual.

I'm going to briefly turn things around. Imagine you are the shopkeeper and some person walks into the store. A customer. The customer buys a doughnut and a newspaper, gripes about how the weather is getting him down because it's one of the three overcast days of the year, pays, says "thanks", and leaves. What a typical customer. What a freakin' NPC! But get this--that NPC was you. "But...I'm a PC...right? How is this possible?" you yell. In spite of your Character, you nonetheless only fulfilled actions that fell well within the customer RS, such that, to the shopkeeper, you were an NPC.

Therefore it's possible that this stupid NPC shopkeeper is a PC to somebody else--say, his wife--who knows everything about him and has seen him in all possible situations. Or perhaps he's a dear PC friend of yours, and you sit here in his shop and watch him act all NPC-like to all these NPC customers (much to your amusement and his mockery later). Doesn't this seem rather paradoxical and bizarre, given what I've postulated thus far? It seems to invalidate the entire theory by indicating there is no absolute value for Character!

I'll let you all brood on that for a bit before I continue.

Continue on to Part 4

posted by Phlegm at 5/20/2003 

 
NPC Theory, Part 2 -- The Modified Turing Test for Character

In my first installment of this theory last month, I made the simple, yet bold assertion that everyone you meet is an NPC with a limited and ultimately predictable set of responses to any given stimuli. NPC in this case stands for "Non-Player Character", a person who acts according to my above statement. PC stands for "Player Character", someone who falls outside this rule.

I admit that my initial assertion was quite solipsistic and extreme, but PCs and NPCs alike give more predictable responses to extreme statements. What I should have said--and what is more useful--is that everyone you meet is either a PC or an NPC. Certainly you can't argue with that. "Oh, okay, so everyone you meet is either predictable or unpredictable. That sounds fair, Phlegm!" Good.

Given a world of NPCs and PCs, we must devise a way to determine who is whom. Before I get into that, however, a slight divergence is necessary. You are probably familiar with the Turing Test for Intelligence (by the famous mathematician, Alan Turing). In case you're not, however, the one-line thesis is as follows: if an AI can ever consistently fool people into thinking it's human (via, say, an Instant Message conversation), then that AI would be considered "intelligent" (since we humans are, of course, the end-all-be-all of intelligence ;). After a period of interaction, there comes a point when you can "just tell" you're not talking to a real person; computers tend to get stuck into certain patterns, or are limited to a certain breadth of knowledge--not to mention eloquence.

Even an NPC can guess how this applies to our situation. With slight modification, the Turing Test becomes--ta-da--the Modified Turing Test (MTT). The added advantage (or disadvantage?) of the MTT is that you can interact with people on many more levels than with an AI; you can observe body language, overt actions, and vocal inflections. In short, you talk to someone, and if they give an NPC-like response, they are an NPC.

"Waitasecond, Phlegm," says my non-existent reader, "how can you 'just tell' someone is an NPC? How am I supposed to know what an NPC-like response is?" I'm glad I asked that question for you, for now I shall answer it: how is that any different than being able to "just tell" someone isn't an AI? We know simply from experience. We've interacted with so many people during our lives that it's a fairly small task to determine who's a (non-biological) machine and who isn't. The same holds true for PCs and NPCs. If you're a PC, you've (hopefully, and if not I pity you) known your share of fellow PCs and can tell the difference. If you're an NPC, well...it doesn't matter. In fact...why are you even reading this? Seriously, though, an NPC will probably never know the difference between a PC and an NPC, just like today's AIs don't know the difference between Eliza, MegaHal, or myself.

So venture out, talk to people, see if you can determine who is whom. If you can find another PC to do this with, your results will be much more durable. You will both agree on who the PCs and NPCs of your little world are. If you don't, then one or both of you is an NPC. Sorry.

Continue on to Part 3

posted by Phlegm at 5/19/2003 

 
Ma Mignonne

I'd like to take a short break to share a piece of poetry. It's yet another translation of the poem Ma Mignonne by the 16th century French poet, Clement Marot. Douglas R. Hofstadter himself presents a multitude of his own and others' translations of this poem in his 1999 book, Le Ton beau de Marot: In Praise of the Music of Language. The poem is here interpreted and translated in many ways as a bridging theme of the book. I took it upon myself to give it a modern "leetspeak" flavor.

Here are the base criteria that Hofstadter listed as essential for a "proper" translation of this poem:

1. The poem is 28 lines long.
2. Each line consists of three syllables.
3. Each line's main stress falls on its final syllable.
4. The poem is a string of rhyming couplets: AA, BB, CC,...
5. Midway, the tone changes from formal ("vous") to informal ("tu").
6. The poem's opening line is echoed precisely at the very bottom.
7. The poet puts his own name directly into his poem.

Here is the original (please pardon my crude lack of accents on proper letters):


Here is one of Hoftsadter's translations that meets the above-listed criteria. I present it here only so that my translation will make sense (since my translation may require some of its own translation back to normal English):


Before I present my piece, I'd like to point out that the translations presented in the book reflect a wide degree of, shall we say...familiarity...between Clement and the young girl (7 or 8 years old), Jeanne d' Albret de Navarre, whom the poem was written for.


I can't decide whether to or not to leave in a lot of the unnecessary, or should I say extreme, use of numbers. Given that leetspeak--or 1337speak--or whatever--isn't a serious dialect in the first place, I really don't think it matters.

So there you have it. Possibly the first ever "published" poem in leetspeak, unless you count this.

UPDATE January 29th, 2006:

Dear [ER] -- I don't know if I ever replied to your on-line version of "Ma Mignonne", which I happened to bump into in my in-queue today. Not being very "wired" myself, I wasn't able to completely understand it, but I found it quite entertaining and original. I apologize if I never got back to you earlier, but I hope that this message reaches you and amuses you, even if very tardily.
Best wishes -- Douglas Hofstadter.

posted by Phlegm at 4/27/2003 

 
NPC Theory -- Introduction

Anyone old enough to be reading this probably remembers all the old adventure-style Sierra games, such as King's Quest, Space Quest, and (if your parents didn't know it was an adult game) Leisure Suit Larry. For those who don't, the user interacted with the environments in these games through the direct control of a single protagonist (henceforth referred to as the "Player Character", or "PC"). While exploring different areas and solving various puzzles, the PC would often have to "talk" to one of the computer-controlled characters in the game (a "Non-Player Character" or "NPC"). Each NPC had a finite number of responses to a given stimulus, such that if you asked the same question twice, they would give the same response, or set of responses, every time.

For example, suppose you (rather, the PC) walked into a convenience store in one of these games. The shopkeeper there fills a single role in the game and thus has a limited set of actions within that role's space (RS); that store is the only place you will ever encounter the shopkeeper. If you ask about an item in the store, you'll be told about that item. If you decide to purchase an item, he'll make the transaction with you. This is the expected behavior of any shopkeeper. If you ask him how he's doing, he'll say "I'm well, thank you." If you ask again, he'll say, "Fine, thanks." Ask again and you'll get the original "I'm well, thank you" response. Well that certainly isn't normal, is it? So you decide to leave the store and he says, "Thank you, Sir, and God bless your lineage!" Just for kicks, you walk in and out of the store again, and again you hear, "Thank you, Sir, and God bless your lineage!" Weird. People in real life aren't like that.

Or are they?

The NPC Theory asserts that this is exactly how the real world works. In its purest form, it states that everyone you meet is an NPC with a limited and ultimately predictable set of responses to any given stimuli. This idea was originally conceived by Irk*, relayed to me and further developed by TheyC*, and developed yet further by myself over the past two or three years.

Now you (you predictable and limited NPC, you) might already disagree with me, saying things like:

"People are more complex than that! How can you stereotype everyone like that?"
"How can you say that you are a PC? Or that I am? Or that anyone is?"
"So do you see NPCs as lesser beings?"
"Why is a person considered to be an NPC?"

If so, don't bail on me just yet. All these questions, and more, will be addressed in the upcoming months. This isn't just a whimsical theory here for my own and others' amusement. It's a model of human behavior. I observe, experience, and apply it in my own daily life.

* These people will remain anonymous unless they tell me otherwise.

Continue on to Part 2

posted by Phlegm at 4/20/2003