Great video from Sugimoto Kousuke. The first third is an amusing concept. And then it gets insane.
I love stuff like this that repays multiple viewings to follow all the threads. Here’s an older example by Zbigniew Rybczynski:
December 6, 2009
I had a quibble about Dennett’s conservation-of-energy argument against dualism. His argument, I’d agree, is pretty damaging for dualist theories that imply that the soul can affect the body, but there are at least three distinct forms of dualism that don’t:
1) The view that the soul is sort of like a field generated and sustained by the body, which takes its character at any particular moment from the character of the body at that moment. Probably the most popular among dualists in academic philosophy these days.
2) The view that the soul’s essence is partially separate from that of the body–that the soul takes some of its character at any particular moment from the body’s character at that same moment, but that it also has some characteristics that aren’t derived from the body. Maybe more of a theistic position than #1.
3) The view that the body and soul are entirely separate causally, and that their coincidence is the indication that the Creator made Creation to be well-ordered. Leibnitz and I think a few Indic philosophers took this view, but it doesn’t seem to be talked about much anymore.
So it’s a pretty strong argument against two-way causality between body and soul–which might be all he really needs for the arguments he’s making. But I don’t see it answering the more fundamental suspicion that there’s something above and beyond material reality. Could you clarify how Dennett’s argument changed your mind?
—weserei
You’re quite right that (1) and (2) escape Dennett’s argument unscathed. However, the price for accepting them is that the soul becomes a mere spectator, with no ability to influence the world— even to move your eyes to look left. What fun is that? Or to put it more academically, what is the philosophical gain? The appeal of dualism is that it fits our naive conception of ourselves. But that conception includes the idea that we affect the world.
Of course, this might actually appeal to some people— Calvin, for example. But I don’t get the appeal of such determinism anyway. Theologically, I think it arises from the feeling that attributing causation to anything but God somehow diminishes him. But it also makes him morally responsible for evil, which seems like a poor trade.
As for (3), it’s possible, in the same sense that it’s possible that you’re a brain in a vat. And it’s unbelievable for the same reason: the level of piddly detail required of the vat scientists or God is just too immense.
I should note that there’s a fourth possibility: there is an energy input required to move the body, and we just haven’t noticed it yet. Dennett’s argument isn’t a proof. (One might even posit that another dualistic effect causes energy to disappear at about the same rate so that one couldn’t (say) detect the soul by testing the conservation of heat. But it’s a useful heuristic in science that making phenomena hard to verify is a sign of pseudo-science.)
The other problem with dualism is that it’s something of a dead end, especially when it’s used as a rearguard fight against science. Explaining cognition is a magnificent challenge for materialists, and has huge ramifications for robotics, computer science, psychology, medicine. Even if it turned out to be wrong, we’ve already learned a lot and the failure would teach us more. Dualism has no such program; you can posit a soul, but what can we learn from it?
December 5, 2009
After reading a bunch of Dennett lately, it was fascinating to read this, by Stanislas Dehaene:
http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/dehaene09/dehaene09_index.html
In short: Dehaene thinks he’s found the footprints of consciousness in the brain. He’s got patterns of brain activation that correlate very nicely with when people report that they are aware of a phenomenon.
In some ways it contradicts Dennett’s theory: Dennett spends whole chapters warning people not to find a locus for consciousness, not to expect a Cartesian Theater where things are presented for viewing. And Dehaene does rather talk as if there were such a theater.
On the other hand, much of his findings confirm Dennett too. There isn’t in fact a particular focus of consciousness– he describes it using Dennett’s phrase, “fame in the brain”. Consciousness turns out to be a kind of wide-ranging excitement; he describes it as a particular item being made available to the whole brain: the visual system is looking at it, auditory stimulus is available, words and meanings are active, it’s there to be talked about or for action to be made. Things are connecting up, being made available to all the subsystems.
By contrast, subliminal, non-conscious activations percolate through small sections of the brain and die out in a second or so. Interestingly, they may percolate as far as awakening particular lexical meanings (that is, they go much farther than mere sensations).
Dehaene also agrees with Dennett that consciousness serves us as a sort of Von Neumann computing machine. Unconscious thought can handle some simple recognition tasks, but for a series of transformations, you need consciousness. Consciousness lets us focus on something, play with it in the mind, apply a sequence of steps to it.
The most intriguing part of the article are the claims that they’ve started to identify particular thoughts– e.g. by looking at the pattern of activation they can guess (better than random chance) what number you’re thinking of– or even more remarkably, what image you’re looking at. If this pans out, it’s going to be huge; it’s going to be a new revolution in science and society.
December 4, 2009
Charlie Stross has an interesting post on designing a society for a generation ship– a structure intended to ferry a large number of people to another star over the course of a few hundred years.
http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2009/11/designing_society_for_posterit.html
Most stories set on such ships seem to be about their failure, which is perhaps why Stross is worried about how to organize the shipboard society. Perhaps his most provocative comment:
One thing I’m pretty certain of is that the protestant work ethic underlying American-style capitalism, with its added dog-eat-dog ethos, would be a recipe for disaster aboard a generation ship — regardless of whether it’s run as a democracy or a dictatorship. American (or British) working hours are a bizarre cultural aberration — and a very local one. More to the point, competitive capitalism tends to reward increases in operational efficiency, but efficiency is most easily optimized by paring away at the margins — a long-term lethal threat to life in this situation. The “tragedy of the commons” has got to be engineered out aboard a generation ship, otherwise the residents will wake up one [virtual] morning to discover someone’s acquired a monopoly on the oxygen supply. And that’s just for starters.
I hadn’t thought about it that way, but I suspect he’s right, given the contraints we’re talking about: a tiny little ecosphere can’t take either cutthroat competition or unbridled change. But then you may face an even trickier problem on the other end: a society geared to milennial stability may be poorly adapted to actually founding a colony on the other end.
But then, I’ve always been out of sympathy with the idea of “let’s settle another planet ‘cos this one is screwed.” If we haven’t solved the problem of screwing up planets, colonization doesn’t help. If you’re an arsonist, you don’t solve your burning house problem by moving to a new house.
FWIW, I think Stross’s problem is most easily solved by extending the human lifetime. More to come in my SF novel. 
December 1, 2009
A Mefite recommended Chronicles of Riddick: Assault on Dark Athena, and it was on sale for $10, so I’ve been playing Vin Diesel. I named my profile Vinbert.
Not many games show your character in a mirror. This one does. Because it's Vin Diesel
It’s not a bad game. You wake up on the beach, jump and fight your way through a brief tutorial, and run down a corridor into a ship in the middle of interstellar space. OK, I didn’t quite follow that part, but this ship is full of mercs, the really bad kind, worse than interstellar criminal Riddick. You sneak around the ship finding elements to make your escape, and dispatch most everyone you meet. Or, you know, don’t sneak around, just kill ‘em all, because dammit, you’re Vin Diesel.
Vin provides the face, the voice, and the attitude. He’s given to saying things like:
Now the monsters have something to fear.
You don’t want me to think you’re useless.
I’m Hell’s Messenger– named Riddick.
The best way to escape a problem is to solve it.
OK, that last one doesn’t sound very badass, but he says it badass. I hear Starbreeze created a state-of-the-art facial animation system for this game, and then didn’t use it, because Vin says every line in the same deep threatening monotone, with the same utter lack of expression.
There is a mechanic for dragging dead bodies into the shadows so they don’t attract notice. Neat, except doesn’t Vin Diesel relish fighting? Maybe they should have let him put sprays next to each corpse.
But, eh, a little cheesiness doesn’t hurt a game, perhaps helps. That’s something I found running RPGs with friends: a scenario that would be cheesy in a movie can be quite fun to play, because you’re in it. The familiarity of the situation gives you motivation and clues what to do. So far in Dark Athena it works pretty well– there’s a story behind what I’m doing, Vin is pretty entertaining, the ship is beautifully rendered, and the voice acting is good.
A lot of video games explore nasty or post-apocalyptic worlds with a full complement of psychos. It’s kind of an oddity that (say) Fallout 3 and Borderlands both suggest that the psychos want to eat you. For what it’s worth, the Dark Athena baddies are more obsessed with rape, which is more realistic and perhaps more disturbing.
One more factoid about Riddick we learn from this game: apparently his eyes emit light, which is why he wears those shades.
November 29, 2009
I just re-read Daniel Dennett’s Consciousness Explained. I don’t think he quite succeeds– it’s not so much that I disagree as that I think he leaves too much open. It’s more A program for how we might someday explain consciousness.
He’s best at the negative parts: demolishing the opposition. He has the best argument against dualism I’ve seen. Dualism has great intuitive appeal and is surprisingly hard to refute– generally it’s just dismissed, not defeated. There’s no great obstacle to souls somehow getting information from the body, since we don’t know what the properties of soul-stuff are. The problem is on the other end: how does the soul send its orders back to the body (e.g. to control its muscles)? The body is matter, and matter requires energy to put in motion. Dualism requires energy to arise out of nothing, and we don’t detect any such thing.
But that’s merely a page or two. His main target is what he calls Cartesian materialism-- the idea that the brain presents a sort of TV display in the head watched by a Central Observer and Decisionmaker. Many who reject dualism, even hard-headed neurologists, still talk as if there were a “Cartesian Theater” in the brain where consciousness occurs. Dennett shows that the idea is incoherent, particularly breaking down when we look at low-level neural functions.
In philosophical tradition, introspection is sacrosanct, and that leads us to posit frankly magical things going on in our minds. Dennett outlines an alternative, what he calls heterophenomenology: modelled on anthropology, a sympathetic outsider’s careful analysis of a phenomenological world– that of a conscious subject or even a fictional character.
This allows him to point out where introspection is, not to mince words, wrong. All observation, including internal observation, is subject to distortion and error. (Geoffrey Sampson has made the same point about Chomskyan linguistics: people’s judgments about whether something is grammatical– i.e. whether they can occur in their speech– can be simply wrong; they can deny that they use or even understand some construction, then use it spontaneously.)
The main problem with introspection is that people overstate their impressions. For instance, we think we have a uniform hi-res visual field. If you say it in that careful way, no problem! But you may be tempted to say, not that you think you have a uniform hi-res visual field, but that you actually have one. And it’s easy to show that you don’t and can’t.
Your eyes have only a tiny area that’s in clear focus– the fovea. Look straight ahead and hold up a playing card by your ear. You won’t be able to see what card it is, even what color… though you can easily see if it’s moving. Move it slowly toward the center of your vision, still looking straight ahead… when can you make out its color, its suit, its number? It’ll be surprisingly close to center before you can identify all these things.
Why aren’t we conscious of the visual field being this fuzzy? Mostly because the eye is constantly, unconsciously darting about. Anything we look directly at is detailed. But more importantly, there is nothing in the brain that is looking at a TV screen. We have to break the habits of thought that require re-presenting visual material to an internal homunculus.
Dennett invites you to picture looking at wallpaper covered with images of Marilyn Monroe. Within seconds your brain recognizes it as such… though the fovea has had only time to look at a handful of Marilyns. You perceive that you’re looking at a wall of Marilyns, and you are. You are not aware of any fuzziness; but there is no neural process of filling in Marilyns, because there is no full-resolution Central Image that needs to be assembled, and no Cartesian Observer to watch it. The brain doesn’t need a filling-in process because it can use the world to store itself: if it wants more detail at a particular spot, it just looks there.
It’s even possible to use an ingenious device to fool the brain. A computer screen is displaying a text, Text A. It’s outfitted with an eye-tracker that checks where your fovea is pointing, and changes the text just at that location into Text B. An outside observer would see Text A with a fast-moving flicker of changing letters much too fast to read. But what you see is Text B, with no fuzziness or flickering. You think you’re seeing a page of Text B, and in this case you’re wrong… if your fovea hasn’t reached certain words of B, the computer hasn’t even displayed them.
(Trying to explain this on my board, at least one person went too far the other way– they assumed that the visual field is fuzzy. It’s not, unless your eyes are bad. Again, just as there is no homunculus watching a sharp picture screen, there is none watching a fuzzy one. As an analogy, think of a CEO using a data mining system with zoom-in. At any one instant, what he gets is a single table of data, but he can zoom in whenever he pleases. Is his picture of the data high- or low-detail? Neither: he has neither seen all the data that exists, nor has he seen only high-level summaries.)
Dennett develops a model for how the mind works based on evolutionary history, psychological experiments, and AI. I think on the whole he’s on the right track– it’s more or less the point of view that I expounded in my paper on Searle. But it’s too sketchy to justify his grandiose title. Still, it’s an advance over simple denials that these things can ever be explained.
He points out that computer scientists seem to most easily accept materialist theories of the mind– because we’re used to describing hugely complex systems at abstract levels. Outsiders just can’t imagine how science could explain mental functions, so they don’t try. They give up and hold that their failure of imagination proves that it can’t be done.
The weakest bits of the book are probably the sections on qualia. Dennett seems to view mentions of qualia with professional exasperation… qualia seem to have the position in philosophy that pragmatics has for syntacticians– a trash bin into which to sweep anything we don’t propose to explain. He rightly points out some of the problems, but his solutions don’t do much to explain what we think we experience.
For that, I recommend C.L. Hardin’s Color for Philosophers. Hardin doesn’t explain the qualia of color… but I don’t think you can read the book and maintain the conviction that qualia can never be explained. There are already things about color qualia that science can explain:
- why yellow is brighter than the other colors
- why we can easily imagine cyan as blue + green but can’t picture yellow as green + red
- why only certain colors exist (thus, why David Lindsay’s postulation of additional primary colors is fantasy)
- why colors shade into each other at all (as opposed to sounds, which remain distinct when presented simultaneously)
- why languages universally have color prototypes of particular hues
- how afterimages and certain optical illusions work
There’s no reason to think this list won’t be much larger in a century.
November 27, 2009
I don’t think I plugged this site before… if I did you can read it again.
How to do some idiotic things, at the Black Table
Rendered bacon fat. Add poison to make soap.
Among the things you can learn to do:
- Make soap from bacon and lye.
- Make prison hooch.
- Make cigarettes from spinach and old paperbacks.
- Cook a turducken.
- Clean your bathroom.
It’s all profusely illustrated and hilariously written.
November 21, 2009
Since ideas like cloud computing are taking center stage, are arguments against open source losing ground?
Also is the current move toward the cloud a good thing for software or not?
—Joe Baker
My last job was in a SaaS company, so I’m familiar with some of the advantages. It’s great for the seller— you get ongoing revenue instead of single sales; you can easily update all your customers— and it has advantages for enterprise customers: easily deployable, centrally manageable, presumably more reliable.
I think it makes the most sense for side apps— things like source control or survey software that you want to be widely available, but aren’t where most people spend most of their working hours. For main apps, local teams, not the head office, should be able to choose the best tools. If I’m spending most of my day using a tool, my team will make a better choice than some clueless IT autocrat.
I’m dubious about cloud computing in general, because there’s all this power in the desktop computer— why avoid it? It mostly seems like an end run around Microsoft. But if it works, it won’t produce the Open Source Utopia; it’ll produce a software world dominated by Google rather than Microsoft.
Also see Joel Spolsky’s delicious takedown of the architecture astronauts, particularly Microsoft’s version of cloud computing.
You mentioned Steam, which is an interesting model… it has cloud computing elements, in that your game permissions are stored externally (which makes it easy to change computers— a great boon as I’ve done it twice in the last year), yet the apps it manages are local desktop apps (which makes a lot more sense for games). That’s a good balance, taking the advantages of cloud computing but not forcing it to do what it’s not good at.
November 19, 2009
So I’ve been killing a lot of zombies this week. I’m probably the only person around who has mixed feelings about Left 4 Dead 2.
On the plus side– it’s a really well done game, much more polished than L4D1… and that looked mighty good just a year ago. The operative word is more… it has more zombies, more specials, more maps, more game types, more weapons, more gore. Plus melee weapons, fancier models, special ammo types, and more varied gameplay that emphasizes movement.
Zombiein' in the rain
There are some pretty amazing experiences in L4D2. The thunderstorm in Hard Rain is the most visceral and convincing I’ve seen in a game; the level also has a unique there-and-back structure, where pure mirroring is avoided by having the return journey take place at night and in a flood. The swamp in Swamp Fever would be, as a friend noted, scary enough without the zombies. And Dark Carnival is a great time, complete with clowns that attract zombies with their squeaky shoes, playable arcade games, and a rock concert.
There’s a new Scavenge mode that seems fun– a mini-versus game that takes 15 minutes or so instead of an hour and a half. Well, except when you get rolled, but in that case at least it’s over quickly.
This time the five maps form an overall story, which is a nice touch. Ellis is pretty amusing; the rest are a little generic. It’s a little strange to have a game with a disaster motif set (partly) in New Orleans… it’s not insensitive exactly, since it can get you thinking about the Katrina catastrophe. It’s just a little odd.
Never too busy fighting to get in a game of whackamole
L4D1 addresses some of the frustrations of versus mode: scoring is not so weighted toward survival; the new specials and maps discourage holing up; the additional specials also add a lot more variety– you’re not likely to be assigned Boomer three times in a row, a real drag for me. It’s sad and hilarious to watch a Charger miss his target… unless of course you’re playing him.
Cons… well, overall it feels something like Civ4: a bunch of nice improvements to a game I’m less interested in than before. I was particularly sick of Versus, and I’m not sure the changes make it enough fun to play. Playing Infected is still generally a matter of getting a single attack right or waiting half a minute to respawn, while playing Survivor is hard on new maps.
I had a really unpleasant time tonight in the bridge finale. They’ve either buffed the hordes or nerfed melee and weapons, because it’s just a horrible struggle to move, not fun at all. Pretty much all the other levels are interesting in campaign or coop mode though.
Edit: Got it. The trick is a) run along the extreme left, so the zombies are funneled into a single file; and b) aim for the heads to bring them down faster.
I do think ordinary melee has been nerfed— it takes 4 or 5 punches to down a zombie, way too slow in this level.
Some of the levels could use more clues where to go. I don’t know why they’re so restrictive about inventory… e.g. 2 pistols now work really well, but prevent you from using melee weapons; deploying the special ammo removes your health pack even if you deploy it immediately. Many of the new weapons are neat– the grenade launcher is particular fun– but they tend to run out of ammo sooner (though this is partly balanced by having more of them). And it’d be nice if they’d had some smaller maps, like Crash Course. Oh, and the game can lag out sometimes at intense moments, such as tank fights.
But I really wish they’d put the zombies to bed for awhile and go back to HL2 or Portal…
November 10, 2009
After some sort of foolish hiatus, my friend Chris has returned to playing and writing about video games with a reflective post on Dragon Age Origins.
He doesn’t like its combat system:
I can see how true fans of the genre would enjoy it — if you really want to delve into tactics and planning and manage a handful of characters down to the smallest detail, I imagine you’re in heaven. For me, it boils down to wanting to click a mouse button to swing a sword, not click a mouse button to activate an icon to swing a sword. If I hit someone or block a blow, I want it to be based on my reflexes, not on an invisible dice roll behind the scenes. Simple as that — it’s just not for me, and I knew that before I bought the game. I’m not criticizing it, it’s just not the style of combat I enjoy.
I think he’s put his finger on an oddity of Bioware games. They used to do explicit D&D games like Baldur’s Gate, and to some extent all their games are still hidden D&D games. For some reason this is particularly evident in KOTOR, where your character will fight (though badly) entirely on her own if you do nothing, and if you like (and if you are a Cheeto-stained geek) you can call up a screen that shows all your dice rolls.
Chris loved Mass Effect, which does a much better job of looking like a pure shooter, but it really has the same mechanism… you can pause combat and micromanage your party and what spells, er mass effects, they are using. I tend to agree that this is more annoying than fun. I’d rather focus on the main character and trust the others to do their jobs. There’s just something unsatisfying about the base D&D mechanic of “rolls to hit’, especially in a computer game. Look, the dude is right there, two feet away, of course I hit him. I don’t have a problem with my skill or my rusty iron blade being so bad that I didn’t do much damage, but this “you missed with a sword” stuff feels wrong. If you want to make missing a game dynamic, make me use the mouse; I guarantee I’ll miss plenty.
Jade Empire feels different, without all the micromanagement… though you don’t really have to worry about aim, you just have to keep close to your opponent.
Chris apparently feels not very connected to his character, partly due to the lack of voice. That’s kind of a poser. Do you want to be following a character (in which case you want them to have a personality, like Jade in Beyond Good & Evil, or Sam in Sam & Max), or be a character (in which case the on-screen character shouldn’t have too many reactions of their own, in case they don’t match yours)? Some games take a middle ground– e.g. Left 4 Dead, where your character may have some funny lines but remains pretty generic.
Bioware generally takes the path of letting you choose from a small set of PCs, and then making moral decisions along the way. In Mass Effect, for instance, you can choose between three possible backstories, which will be referred to throughout the game. In KOTOR and Jade Empire you play a very specific and key figure– though you can play them your own way. I think it works pretty well, but for full immersion I like Bethesda’s games, where you feel in full control of your character.
Chris also has some words that all fantasy writers should take to heart:
Basically, you’ve got orcs from Mordor running wild and the “good” races must align to stop them from taking over Middle Earth. So, nothing really new in the main storyline. (Question: if the monsters ever did take over, what the hell would they do then? Stand around roaring? Do they have other marketable skills besides stabbing villagers and operating catapults? Can any of them grow crops or improve roads or manage an inn?)
Obviously people like stories about battling eeeeeevil, but there’s always a part of my mind that rebels at this, since no real-world struggle is like this. No one is an actual minion of eeeeevil; the bad guys simply have a different conception of good, and they think we’re bad guys. Isn’t that a more interesting setup anyway?
