Who’s the bigger liar, Michael J. Fox or James Talent?

Everyone who doesn’t have their head buried in the sand is probably aware of Rush Limbaugh’s recent criticism of a political ad by Michael J. Fox in which he accused incumbent Senator James Talent of Missouri of attempting to criminalize stem cell research. Initially Limbaugh’s accusations were towards Fox for not taking his Parkinson’s medication, which he blamed for the erratic movements Fox made during the ad:

“[Michael J. Fox was] is exaggerating the effects of this disease. He was moving all around and shaking [...] and it’s purely an act. This is the only time I have ever seen Michael J. Fox portray any of the symptoms of the disease he has [...] this is really shameless of Michael J. Fox. Either he didn’t take his medication or he’s acting, one of the two.”

When it was later revealed that the erratic movements were side effects of the dopamine antagonists which Fox took in order to control his Parkinson’s, effects which occur due to malfunctions in his basal ganglia which are incredibly hard to fake through “acting”, Rush recanted. Both of his hypotheses were proven wrong, so much like the Bush Administration when they were caught with their pants down after their WMD hypothesis was empirically proven wrong, he pursued a different course of attack. Okay, his medication made him move like that, not the lack thereof, and it wasn’t acting, so what could be said?

Rush decided to save face by focusing on the specifics of Fox’s wording. Fox claimed that Senator Talent had tried to criminalize stem cell research. That’s a lie! Senator Talent, although an adamant pro-lifer who opposed stem cell research, had never attempted to criminalize it, but merely withhold taxpayer funding. Michael J. Fox overembellished a political statement. That was how Rush chose to save face when he came out and attacked a victim of a degenerative nerve disease for showing symptoms.

While it is true that James Talent has never actively attempted to criminalize stem cell research, that hasn’t stopped him from blatantly lying to prevent the passage of amendments designed to protect it. He had this to say about Missouri’s Amendment 2, which would provide protections for stem cell research in the Missouri state constitution:

“I personally cannot support the initiative because I’ve always been opposed to human cloning and this measure would make cloning human life at the earliest stage a constitutional right. I would encourage every Missourian to study the initiative carefully and make up their own minds on this very difficult moral issue.”

Here, Talent makes the issue out to be human cloning, not stem cell research. This would perhaps be a valid criticism, except the amendment also explicitly bans human cloning!

Have a look at an excerpt of the text of Missouri’s Amendment 2:

To ensure that Missouri patients have access to stem cell therapies and cures, that Missouri researchers can conduct stem cell research in the state, and that all such research is conducted safely and ethically, any stem cell research permitted under federal law may be conducted in Missouri, and any stem cell therapies and cures permitted under federal law may be provided to patients in Missouri, subject to the requirements of federal law and only the following additional limitations and requirements:

(1) No person may clone or attempt to clone a human being.

James Talent has asked his constituency to oppose this amendment to guarantee a basic set of rights for stem cell researchers on the basis that it would allow human cloning, when this is the very first provision outlined in the proposed amendment. The interpretation he gave to the voters of his state directly contradicts the text of the bill. It is both a strawman and red herring: he has informed the voters of Missouri that the bill would constitutionally guarantee the right to human cloning when it does precisely the opposite, and furthermore introduced the irrelevant detail of human cloning to a bill which is explicitly about guaranteeing rights to stem cell researchers.

If Rush Limbaugh’s real problem is with Michael J. Fox misrepresenting the position of his political opponent, then certainly he would be critical of James Talent of lying about an amendment in order to prevent its passage. But that’s not what Rush Limbaugh was doing at all, it was all a vain attempt to save face after criticizing a victim of one of the worst afflictions known to mankind of displaying his symptoms. Fox’s statements are not too far off from Talent’s actual position, while Talent’s statements are the diametrical opposite of the bill he decided to criticize. James Talent may not explicitly work towards criminalizing stem cell research, but he’s certainly willing to lie to ensure it doesn’t receive legal protections.

I think the real issue here is that the Rush Limbaughs and James Talents of this country are feeling guilty because the ad actually shows the suffering they are allowing to continue by trying to push their religious morals onto the rest of the population. Victims of Parkinson’s, spinal injuries, and a host of other debilitating afflictions need those stem cells more than week old embryos do.

The Origin of Humor

There’s all sorts of mysteries about consciousness.  One of these is the origin of humor. It’s often touted as one of the many things that a materialist theory of consciousness, that our minds are just an emergent effect of our brains, will always struggle to explain.

I think I get it.

Think of your cerebral cortex as a big pyramidal hierarchy.   At the base of the hierarchy are your senses and motor systems.  At the top is the brain structure which encodes long term memories, the seahorse-shaped hippocampus.  The whole pyramid is built out of structures called neocortical columns, that sit around analyzing patterns, classifying them, and feeding the information up the hierarchy, up toward the hippocampus.  The higher you go, the more abstract the information the neocortical columns are dealing with.  Information also flows down the hierarchy, so patterns discovered in one part of the system can be relayed to others.  The only information that gets to the top of the hierarchy are things that weren’t caught at any other level.  They are stored there, then programmed into all levels of your brain, so the system can know what it doesn’t know and use that to aid future pattern detection activities.

The important part in humor, at least the kind of humor that makes a bizarre association that you find amusing, is that downwards propigation from the higher association centers to the lower, more sensory and motor-related parts of the brain.  I believe humor arises from a pattern the higher level association centers can recognize, but one which when propogating down the hierarchy raises a “What the hell?” from the lower level parts of the cortex.

My take is that the lower  parts found patterns they thought they could recognize and passed their conclusions upward to the association centers.  And the association centers balked: “Haha, you thought you could recognize the pattern, but you didn’t!  Here’s the actual pattern”

A pattern which the lower level parts get incredibly confused about.

I think the simultaneous sense of understanding and confusion, happening in different parts of the brain, and the cross-chatter between them is what gives rise to humor.

Just a speculation.

The Search for Truth

Confusion arises from the internal conflict between what you perceive the world to present itself as and what you intuitively understand it to be. Initially the gap between what man understood the world to be and what it actually was was quite large, superstition reigned and people were largely confused as to the inner goings on of the entire process. Over time the process complexified, building upon previously attained knowledge as best as they collectively could and assembling it into a more complex structure which would provide greater benefit to larger numbers of people.

Yet the fundamental scism remains, and the more we know, the more we know we don’t know. Will we ever reach a break-even point in our knowledge, where we understand so much that we see an ultimate end to what we all unconsciousnessly and collectively been trying to attain, with only a dim or sometimes absent understanding of some overlying, ultimate goal?

As I stated in my previous post on what I would consider to be intuitive smooth exponential growth of progress as an epiphenomenon of the smoothly accelerating rate of change, reality has shown progress to follow a sawtooth pattern of periodic setbacks where despite accelerating change, overlying progress is disrupted by outside factors. Richard Dawkins described the “sawtooth” pattern of biological evolution in his book The Ancestor’s Tale, as evidence that the epiphenomenon of progress does not exhibit a smoothly exponential effect at all, but only emergent exponential pattern disrupted periodically by temporary setbacks. But over time more and more progressive enhancements are preserved, the result of which, in biological evolution, is mammals, who usurped the earth after the fall of the dinosaurs. Brains had inadvertently triumphed over brawn, as the maximize-energy-towards-growth pattern of the simply conceived, tiny baby dinosaur who would continue to grow for the rest of his life was replaced by the complexly conceived placental mammal, which fed off its mother like a paracite in order to develop progressively larger brains. Or at least, progressively larger brains were one branch of the evolutionary tree of placental mammals, and one which coincidentally lead to a solution of a much bigger problem biological evolution by natural selection had been coping with throughout its entirety, namely that it was a blind process with very primitive mechanisms for conveying and utilizing past discoveries. It inadvertently came up with a past discovery conveying and comprehending mechanism, human consciousness, which soon took over the duty that only genes and behavioral mimicry had held alone for billions of years, and directed it in a manner which put the previous process to shame.

I reject the conventional linear and teleological view of historical progress and instead advocate exponential and epiphenomnological view. I belive that one cannot consider the development of any particular piece of the modern world in isolation, but rather that the entire gestalt of the modern world is the result of a web of interconnected events, each one consisting of a person or group acting in rational self-interest with no concept of what the final, modern result would be or what their contemporaries’ actions lead to.

However, I believe the sawtooth pattern is converging. The haphazard zigzagging has been following a trend. Lots of blind stumbling in the dark, emerging from random walks across patterns of matter and energy have ultimately resulted in the society we know, love, and cherish today. The pattern continues to converge as the mechanisms of change lock themselves into an exponential upward ramping, and has started changing society in such a way that it is scarcely able to comprehend.

Slowly human knowledge, which was initially so far from the truth, in the 20/20 hindsight of modern, scientific understanding of the universe, is converging upon the truth. Ontology, the study of reality itself, and epistemology, the study of knowledge, have converged into a new type of ontology, the graph structure of information relationships which defines the Semantic Web. With the advent of Semantic MediaWiki, the semantic relationships which define the web of human knowledge will be continually revised by forces dedicated to the construction and preservation of a complete web of human knowledge. The amount of data mining that can be performed on this web, particularly by extremely intelligent data mining experts such as the ones who work at Google, is a virtually limitless resource which has only begun to be tapped.  The natural limit of the kinds of associations that can be made, based on the structure of the universe, is the truth.

Kurzweil is wrong

Kurzweil’s Law of Accelerating returns does not mean what Kurzweil argues it does. He demonstrates an exponential increase over time in the rate of telecommunication, which governs the rate of change, and a similar increase in computational power for a given unit of value, both of which to a certain extent govern the rate of human innovation, because computers can solve through stocastic or brute-force methods problems which are virtually random in terms of the time it takes for spontaneous human innovation, and communication helps the assemblage of disparate ideas into a singular whole.

However, spontaneous human innovation presents a completely unpredictable factor in futurism, and progress, as an epiphenomenon of change, is inherently unpredictable. Kurzweil’s Law does not represent an absolute metric of progress, only an absolute metric of the rate of change which only assists in the eventual convergence of progressive systems, but one which outside forces can throw askew at any time. Futurist predictions rely almost completely on predictions that after a certain amount of time innovation will inevitably emerge, but such an approach is a mistake, a logical fallacy which results from the static analysis of a highly dynamic system. There are so many random, unpredictable components to the system that it simply becomes impossible to give anything a specific deadline. The abstractions that humans build upon are going to become increasingly complex, and the ability to predict the timescales of completion of such tasks, particularly the abstraction of the entire system of the universe into a human-created universal-universe abstractor system, something known as Artifical General Intelligence (AGI), become that much more unpredictable.

Tinges of Revelation begin to peak their head out. Much like the rapture, no one will know the hour of AGI’s birth. The rate of change, accelerated by the increasing speed of the telecommunications network which drives the motivating factors for change at an ever-increasing pace, means that as time goes by the rate at which the invention of AGI could transform society only quickens. Its creation represents a trigger for sweeping change whose potential grows more profound with each passing day. The cause of this trigger remains spontaneous human innovation, but there are certain precursors we can look for which give definite assurances that AGI is near.

The first would be a revolution in neurophysiology, specifically the creation of a comprehensive and falsifiable model of the operation of the human brain. To my knowledge there is but one individual working towards this goal, Jeff Hawkins, creator of the Palm Pilot, who has since founded the Redwood Neuroscience Institute with the goal of developing a comprehensive theory of the operating of the brain, and the company Numenta who seeks to implement in software his memory-prediction framework, a conceptual model of what many see as the three most important centers of the brain surrounding consciousness: the neocortex which represents the perceiver process, the thalamus which represents conscious state perceived by the neocortex, continuously altered by feedback loops between the two of them, and the hippocampus, the brain’s archivist which saves the state of these feedback loops to permanent memory. Hawkins hypothesizes that these three parts of the brain comprise the fundamental structures which represent consciousness in his book On Intelligence, which lays out the memory-prediction framework his company is attempting to develop. This potential path is also governed by the results of the Blue Brain Project, presently using the world’s most powerful supercomputer architecture to simulate the behavior of the fundamental unity of the rodent neocortex. The results of that study will give dramatic insights to those working on a comprehensive, scientific theory of the brain’s operation, including Jeff Hawkins. It’s potential that with enough empirical scientific research into and modeling of the functional operation of the human brain, the closer we will come to having the knowledge to implement artificial general intelligence.

The second path involves increasing our intelligence of cellular and molecular biology to the point that we are able to create a computer simulation of the human developmental process from fertilized egg to human baby. In such a simulation the only limitations on the types of data we can collect are the error from imprecision of the model, the timesteps that the simulation is run over, and the storage limitations for the types of data that can be collected. The first point will likely not matter for any virtual baby which we can carry to term through a cellular model: due to the complex intracacies of the human developmental process, any simulation error apt to have an effect after the end of the virtual gestation period will likely have a negligable effect on the subsequent baby, otherwise the developmental process will fail and a human baby will never be constructed in simulation. Given the massive amounts of data that would be available from such a simulation, it’s likely the precise structure of human consciousness could be derived from the data using only analysis of the resulting simulation data. Thus the other harbinger of AGI you need to be on the look out for are computer models of multicellular organisms, which will eventually give way to full scale simulations of human beings. This potential path is governed by the results of the Blue Gene Project, presently using the world’s most powerful supercomputer to simulate the inner workings of the most complex and confounding aspect of intracellular behavior: protein folding. We are coming to understand it only through an atom-by-atom simulation of forces, particularly Gibbs Free Energy, which beomes one of the dominating factors in the folding pathways and kinetics of proteins.

While I said before that human innovation is completely unpredictable, I believe all other paths to AGI will ultimately lead to failure. While I admit that there is the potential that someone taking an unscientific, completely conceptual approach to understanding the mind may leap frog everyone else by spontaneously coming up with the “right answer”, I believe the two horsemen of the technological infocalypse to bet on are a comprehensive theory of the brain and biomodeling. I also believe these two fields represent the two most beneficial scientific studies mankind can undertake, because I believe the fruits of their labor will eventually lead to AGI more than any other type of research.

I’m sad to say that I do not believe that the MIT AI lab, the Singularity Institute, or any other group advocating direct research into AGI at the present time, or even advocating a non-biological approach towards successive steps towards AGI, will accomplish anything before the biological movement does, because while the former movement relies on the completely sporadic and unpredictable process of human innovation, the latter makes continous progress through scientific research into the problem. While the former will eventually usurp the results of the latter to create AGI, until that time comes we are floundering. There is much more we need to understand about nature before AGI becomes a possibility, and when the prerequisite natural knowlege is in place, we will make the leap to a post-AGI, post-Singularity society where were are no longer, in any way, bound by the limitations of nature, but are free to puruse our own ends in an environment free from natural consequences, a heavenly world solely of mind. However, unlike the pictured posthumous utopia of the dominant religions, this utopia would go to the survivors: those who could preserve their patterns long enough that they could forever save them from the continous onslaught of natural forces which tended towards entropy and thus the destruction of highly complex patterns, preferring diffuse apatternistic formations which tend toward equilibrium.

Exact progress towards comprehensive models of either the human brain or low-level human biology is difficult to determine. Save for Jeff Hawkins, there are no notable people working toward the former goal, and none that I have ever heard of working toward the latter. Until humanity gets its priorities straight, realizes that AGI, or rather, “Friendly AI” is a moral imperative, and chooses the best route for pursuing this goal, it will remain elusive. The more humanity becomes focused towards achieving AGI as a goal, and focuses on realistic prerequisites, the sooner AGI will happen.

I very much wish that humanity would focus its efforts on the creation of either a comprehensive theory of the human brain, or perfecting cellular biomodeling to the point that complex multicellular entites could be simulated. These two pursuits will, more than any other, bring us closer to Singularity. As to which one will win out in the end I am uncertain. At this time BlueGene is beating BlueBrain in terms of total computational power, and that is all I can say. The exact prerequisite structure for either task to fall into place as AGI is unknown and immense, so at this point, I think it’s really either discipline’s game.

May the best discipline win. I just hope the public will eventually realize the need to support you both.

The Singularity could occur within 5 years. It could occur within 50 years. Who’s to say? The sheer number of assumptions which are required to predict a timeframe are incomprehensibly immense, at least for any human. My ultimate point is that the Singularity isn’t anything to plan your life around: it will happen when it happens, and no sooner, or not at all, and we will all die. Enjoy yourselves for now, and know that the status quo, or thereabouts, is going to stick around, getting a little better all the time, until the final trigger is pulled and AGI is created. And while I may see that event happen with a head full of wetware, smirking at these remarks, until the prerequisite triggers are in place, to the general public all of you Singularitarians and transhumanists all sound like jackasses for talking about the transhuman age where we will live on as immortal transhuman entities. You can’t predict the trigger, I can’t predict the trigger, and until that happens your fantasies are merely science fiction. The birth of Friendly AGI will truly represent a day when the universe changes.