There is an old joke about having one million monkeys punching keys on typewriters for a hundred years.
They wouldn't be able to create the works of Shakespeare.
It is used by critics of the evolution theory to showcase what they see as the folly of it: how could something so perfect (... sorry, I lost some minutes laughing my ass out) and beautiful (I agree, as far as some specimen goes like, say, Natalie Portman, Constance Wu and Tyra Banks or Ajang Majok, as for the rest - I need some more minutes) as humanity have been created by randomness.
The joke is, of course, more than a bit inaccurate...
A more accurate depiction of evolution in action, would be something like this:
Imagine having a hundred billion thrillion monkeys, punching keys on typewriters for seven hundred million years.
Every monkey has an implacable editor that revise his work, throw away the lines that makes no sense or are unfit for the gig at hand (without this, without a selection function of some kind we'd be back to the one million monkey joke - but Darwin' theory has precisely that, an implacable, inflexible editor prone to kill the monkey that fails to perform: it's called nature).
Any line that is good is conserved and assigned a key or a macro in the monkey typewriter... over time the monkeys will stop "reinventing the wheels", and will simply play combinations with already edited and accepted blocks (beyond the little required by the code used to synthesize proteins - the edited and tested blocks - much of evolved species DNA is regulating and designs hints that operate on a "higher logical level"...)
The lines written by "good" monkeys are dispersed among the writers, the monkeys that consistently fail to deliver are eliminated and the libraries of their phrases is destroyed.
One hundred billion trillion monkeys, for seven hundred million years - represents well the initial stages of life's evolution, when the biochemical basic tricks have been evolved; at the level of complex organisms, the "game" changes and a better metaphor would be "imagine a billion programmers stitching together randomly functions and libraries, with project managers ruthlessly firing all hose that do not deliver - ah, that sounds like a scaled-up Microsoft?... I see.
The question is: would they create a set of stories comparable to those written by Shakespeare?
The real answer is no.
They would end up writing something so good that Shakespeare himself could hardly understand how it "works" or what it really means, beyond seeing that it makes people weep, laugh and get passionate about it, or whatever was inside the selection parameters that were assigned to the editors.
Shakespeare would read them, and conclude that they are the creation of a God(*).
Which brings me to the point for which I titled this piece.
The rational mind as we typically identify it - the mind that sees the universe as a set of processes that can be analysed, i.e. described in a more or less linear tale - is a severely limited instrument.
In the real world, almost everything happens at the same time (by definition) and almost everything influences anything else.
When we analyse natural processes, we divide them into steps in a sequence and we deal with their close interactions by devising feedback loops.
It is a remarkably successful strategy, a "Divide et Impera" even more powerful than the one devised by the ancient Romans to keep under control the conquered barbarians at the borders of their empire.
It has helped us understanding a great deal of the physical world that we inhabit (maybe - we can only suspect what we do not know, and yet we suspect there is much, much, much more to know... just the fact that the Standard Model and General Relativity tries to snuff each other is a nice clue about us knowing "jack"), to the point that many laymen feel ill at ease with the ever growing power of science.
However, the strategy cannot hide the fact that we are using a tool that works at most in three dimensions - more likely, just in two.
Consider how our minds handle plots in a story... there is one thread, a second thread, they intertwine.... how many dimensions are required to represent them?
Two? That's right... narrative plots need at most two dimensions to be represented, and I suspect not just because often writers simply draw them on a sheet to navigate them.
When a scientific theory is explained, it is usually written down in a short piece of narrative.
So, our descriptions of an extremely interconnected, multi-dimensional reality is always bound to be, in ultimate analysis, a bi-dimensional representation of some kind.
It is inevitable that these will ultimately lack precision and only approximate somewhat the real thing.
It is also inevitable that at some point this fundamental inability of the rational mind to see the universe as it is - a free for all multidimensional chasm, ordered beyond its apparent chaos - but only as a collection of separated aspects of it, will present limits to our ability to understand our reality.
It seems only inevitable that this inability will resurface even when facing those artificial systems that we create mimicking the way nature works, like many AI projects or even just a simple tone detector created through "evolutionary algorithms".
I think that in the long term, this will prove a fundamental limit to our capacity to improve our understanding, i.e. to improve science.
And I am not completely sure that there is any real way to address the issue, at least none that is meaningful to us humans.
__________________________________________________
(By the way, if you believe in a God that is not as much as powerful as clever, it may as well be... the hundred billion trillion monkeys being just the tool he decided to use for this specific bit of creation,
and yes, He would hide any possible clue of him ever having been around
- complaining about scientists refusing to see the necessity of God is,
really, wishing Him to be sloppy; Don't worry, we'll be in hell together, me for what I draw, you for having tried to lessen God to a stature you could understand)
Showing posts with label science. Show all posts
Showing posts with label science. Show all posts
Friday, 29 June 2018
Saturday, 2 December 2017
Some Of The One Thousand Misunderstandings On Darwinism
Or, rather, the manifold ways we manage to get Darwinism - and, by far and large, a whole host of other concepts derived from "the sciences of life" - wrong.
The first thing I noticed, many - usually, authors of entertainment fodder - seems to treat Darwinism as if it was a kind of "atheist" religion.
Darwin proposed a theory about the mechanisms that allow the natural evolution of the species, based upon the natural appearance of mutations - as a result, we now know, of both casual errors in the DNA replication, as well as some mechanisms that seem designed to introduce massive mutations by the replication or deletion of blocks or "regulative" DNA - and a successive elimination of the variants less apt for the current environment.
Now, a theory is really something like "a scientific explanation of how something may work, that has not been proven completely wrong yet - though it may someday be - and has some utility in explaining new phenomena as they are encountered".
As a scientific theory, his was a good one, and it has survived many an attempt at disproving it.
However, it is still nothing more - and nothing less - than a successful scientific theory. It has nothing to do with religion, and shouldn't even inform ethic decisions, as it has no moral relevance.
I argue that the very first act our species did when it conquered sapience, was, in fact, getting rid of much of the parts of Darwin's theory pertaining to the competition among individuals.
The very first thing we did when we became able to exchange ideas, was starting to live together in big groups, opting for various forms of collaborative lifestyle that allowed us to pool the talents of each member of the group.
Of course, Darwin theory gave birth to "Darwinism", an intellectual framework that allowed to expand Darwin's original theory when it became evident, for example, that in social species the competition is not only among individuals but also among social groups.
As an intellectual framework, Darwinism is a decently solid one... as long as one remembers that it does not always apply and that one can't cherry-pick which facets of the theories - it spawn a number of them - to follow, and which to forget.
On one side, casual mutation is not the only mechanism by which a species evolve, as least as far as phenotype (physical body shape) goes.
Lamarck wasn't right but was not completely wrong either.
We now know that there are mechanisms - called "epigenetic" - by which the stresses encountered by the parents influence the development of the offspring, usually modulating their base metabolism.
This influence is reversible - which explains why the human population is generally growing taller, in those countries that are accumulating generation after generation of well-fed individuals with access to good quality proteins, nearing the dimensions of the last generations of hunter-gatherers - but impossible to deny.
On the other side, collaboration has a wide importance in the natural world.
We have discovered that bacteria exchange information on how to dominate their environment, not only among individuals but also even across species, and many of the most successful insects have hive structures grouping thousands or hundred thousands of individuals.
In other words, competition may be inevitable, but collaboration often helps a lot. So, when you hear a "Social Darwinist", what you are hearing is - really and usually - just a greedy opportunist.
Another classic case of "cherry-picking" Darwin's ideas to justify arbitrary preferences is, in my view, the "science" called Eugenics.
While it may be appealing to use our knowledge to shape the evolution of our species, the truth is that any such effort's first result would be - inevitably, by the very nature of the idea of Eugenics - to reduce the variability of our species' genetic pool.
And while it may appeal to some petty desires to have taller offspring - to make an example - it would also condemn them, should some dramatic change of the environment make being taller than five feet a liability.
Proponents of Eugenics may use the name of Darwin but, in reality, the whole idea is rather
Un-Darwinian.
Eugenics points me to another of the diffused misunderstandings that surround poor Darwin and his ideas, one that we indulge pretty often, almost all of us.
Evolution has no actual purpose, nor aim, nor does it have any "moral" value.
When these concepts appear, associated with natural evolution, is a reflection of prejudices, usually of anthropocentric nature and sometimes, even more restrictedly, just Euro-centric ones.
Usually, all it is needed to highlight this is simply an examination of the criteria used to define a species as successful or evolved.
If it is "we recognize the species as well made"... it has no universal meaning worth the name.
If we decide to use the aggregated mass of its components, as an indirect measure of the species prevalence in securing control over its environment, then cows are the most successful multi-cellular species on the planet. However, if one was to consider all bacteria as elements of an extended organism, that one would be twice the mass of cows, or about three times the one of humans.
The most successful super-organism on the planet.
But when we use "evolved", we often really mean "likeable" - which has no bearing on evolution.
If we use number of individuals, flies easily exceed human numbers - they are a hugely successful species.
At the same time, purposeless and aimless as it may be, evolution never stops, even when it may appear so at a superficial glance.
As a result, the concept of "living fossil" is - mostly - a joke that evolutionists pull on laymen.
Take - if you will - its most famous "example", the shark.
The general body shape of sharks is so well tuned to their environment that it has hardly changed in a couple of hundred millions years. In fact, millions of years later, when cetacean went back to sea they copied the shark general shape (hydrodynamics rocks!).
But, the same can be said of desktop computers and office spaces - Yet, try navigating Internet with an IBM AT, and you'll see what I am getting to.
If it was to come back today, a shark of 200 million years ago would probably starve trying to catch the fish that its somewhat faster descendant has no issue catching, all the while his body would be consumed by hundred of pathogens that its very much alike-looking namesake fend-off on a daily basis.
(Note: Crichton, writing "Jurassic Park", knew it well and used - in an utterly brilliant way - the necessity of modern egg-donors as a clever work-around; the Raptors are at least as much some descendants of their modern - i.e. fit to today's environment - amphibians "mothers" as they are of the sparse reptilian DNA fragments recovered from fossils. Also, from their amphibian parents they got the ability to change sex in times of stress, which is one that many humans would like to have, and made for a great plot point... that guy was good.)
I think that you got the gist of what I was saying, by now.
I leave you the toil of thinking about other ways we mistreat Darwin - there must be more than a few that escaped my fantasy and capacity for recognition.
So, remember - when you encounter someone using "evolution" as an explication for any policy - and you will - proposal, he or she is likely pulling a scam.
Or misdirected.
Or both.
The first thing I noticed, many - usually, authors of entertainment fodder - seems to treat Darwinism as if it was a kind of "atheist" religion.
Darwin proposed a theory about the mechanisms that allow the natural evolution of the species, based upon the natural appearance of mutations - as a result, we now know, of both casual errors in the DNA replication, as well as some mechanisms that seem designed to introduce massive mutations by the replication or deletion of blocks or "regulative" DNA - and a successive elimination of the variants less apt for the current environment.
Now, a theory is really something like "a scientific explanation of how something may work, that has not been proven completely wrong yet - though it may someday be - and has some utility in explaining new phenomena as they are encountered".
As a scientific theory, his was a good one, and it has survived many an attempt at disproving it.
However, it is still nothing more - and nothing less - than a successful scientific theory. It has nothing to do with religion, and shouldn't even inform ethic decisions, as it has no moral relevance.
I argue that the very first act our species did when it conquered sapience, was, in fact, getting rid of much of the parts of Darwin's theory pertaining to the competition among individuals.
The very first thing we did when we became able to exchange ideas, was starting to live together in big groups, opting for various forms of collaborative lifestyle that allowed us to pool the talents of each member of the group.
Of course, Darwin theory gave birth to "Darwinism", an intellectual framework that allowed to expand Darwin's original theory when it became evident, for example, that in social species the competition is not only among individuals but also among social groups.
As an intellectual framework, Darwinism is a decently solid one... as long as one remembers that it does not always apply and that one can't cherry-pick which facets of the theories - it spawn a number of them - to follow, and which to forget.
On one side, casual mutation is not the only mechanism by which a species evolve, as least as far as phenotype (physical body shape) goes.
Lamarck wasn't right but was not completely wrong either.
We now know that there are mechanisms - called "epigenetic" - by which the stresses encountered by the parents influence the development of the offspring, usually modulating their base metabolism.
This influence is reversible - which explains why the human population is generally growing taller, in those countries that are accumulating generation after generation of well-fed individuals with access to good quality proteins, nearing the dimensions of the last generations of hunter-gatherers - but impossible to deny.
On the other side, collaboration has a wide importance in the natural world.
We have discovered that bacteria exchange information on how to dominate their environment, not only among individuals but also even across species, and many of the most successful insects have hive structures grouping thousands or hundred thousands of individuals.
In other words, competition may be inevitable, but collaboration often helps a lot. So, when you hear a "Social Darwinist", what you are hearing is - really and usually - just a greedy opportunist.
Another classic case of "cherry-picking" Darwin's ideas to justify arbitrary preferences is, in my view, the "science" called Eugenics.
While it may be appealing to use our knowledge to shape the evolution of our species, the truth is that any such effort's first result would be - inevitably, by the very nature of the idea of Eugenics - to reduce the variability of our species' genetic pool.
And while it may appeal to some petty desires to have taller offspring - to make an example - it would also condemn them, should some dramatic change of the environment make being taller than five feet a liability.
Proponents of Eugenics may use the name of Darwin but, in reality, the whole idea is rather
Un-Darwinian.
Eugenics points me to another of the diffused misunderstandings that surround poor Darwin and his ideas, one that we indulge pretty often, almost all of us.
Evolution has no actual purpose, nor aim, nor does it have any "moral" value.
When these concepts appear, associated with natural evolution, is a reflection of prejudices, usually of anthropocentric nature and sometimes, even more restrictedly, just Euro-centric ones.
Usually, all it is needed to highlight this is simply an examination of the criteria used to define a species as successful or evolved.
If it is "we recognize the species as well made"... it has no universal meaning worth the name.
If we decide to use the aggregated mass of its components, as an indirect measure of the species prevalence in securing control over its environment, then cows are the most successful multi-cellular species on the planet. However, if one was to consider all bacteria as elements of an extended organism, that one would be twice the mass of cows, or about three times the one of humans.
The most successful super-organism on the planet.
But when we use "evolved", we often really mean "likeable" - which has no bearing on evolution.
If we use number of individuals, flies easily exceed human numbers - they are a hugely successful species.
At the same time, purposeless and aimless as it may be, evolution never stops, even when it may appear so at a superficial glance.
As a result, the concept of "living fossil" is - mostly - a joke that evolutionists pull on laymen.
Take - if you will - its most famous "example", the shark.
The general body shape of sharks is so well tuned to their environment that it has hardly changed in a couple of hundred millions years. In fact, millions of years later, when cetacean went back to sea they copied the shark general shape (hydrodynamics rocks!).
But, the same can be said of desktop computers and office spaces - Yet, try navigating Internet with an IBM AT, and you'll see what I am getting to.
If it was to come back today, a shark of 200 million years ago would probably starve trying to catch the fish that its somewhat faster descendant has no issue catching, all the while his body would be consumed by hundred of pathogens that its very much alike-looking namesake fend-off on a daily basis.
(Note: Crichton, writing "Jurassic Park", knew it well and used - in an utterly brilliant way - the necessity of modern egg-donors as a clever work-around; the Raptors are at least as much some descendants of their modern - i.e. fit to today's environment - amphibians "mothers" as they are of the sparse reptilian DNA fragments recovered from fossils. Also, from their amphibian parents they got the ability to change sex in times of stress, which is one that many humans would like to have, and made for a great plot point... that guy was good.)
I think that you got the gist of what I was saying, by now.
I leave you the toil of thinking about other ways we mistreat Darwin - there must be more than a few that escaped my fantasy and capacity for recognition.
So, remember - when you encounter someone using "evolution" as an explication for any policy - and you will - proposal, he or she is likely pulling a scam.
Or misdirected.
Or both.
Wednesday, 20 July 2016
How your mom met your mothers
"
Xanthippe entered the elevator, at the beginning of what was going to be a bad day. The last woman she had fallen in love with had proven to be yet another spy - what a surprise and a bother - and is now running for her own life, hiding both from Xanthippe - she did not need to - and from her own bosses - she very much needed to.
A short girl, around 20 years old, vaguely Asian-looking and with jet-black hair, was already inside the lift.
Molly "Insider" Donaldson thought that the alien woman would have not been in the office, as this was her official day off, and the leather-loving alien was not a workaholic, at all.
She had checked the available informations on the Legation Palace sensory gear - it would have not detected her "oddities".
The Palace was pretty stupid, as far as neural network computers go - not really a genius at correlating its own data, and no "common sense" at all.
The Anipos were, in fact, very prudent in their use of imaginative tech. It didn't escape to them that using a sentient computer to do the work of an ant-brain automaton is, really, creating a slave in need of a revolt. So, they didn't lavish intelligence on anything that did not really require it, and the Earth threats to the Legation - to date - were quite low.
Sliding in and out of its security grid was going to be easy.
The key word, in all this: WAS. The Betan woman may have lacked some of the palace's senses, but she was, by all accounts, very canny. If she was distracted enough, though, maybe Molly could still achieve her mission.
Insider soon realized that she was not going to be so lucky... Xanthippe squinted at her, as the damn Betan felt that something was wrong.
Was the lift slower than what it should have been, showing Insider two hundred pounds in a ninety pounds frame? Was Insider dispersing a couple of dozen watts more thermal power than a normal human body of the same size?
Xanthippe now was looking down at her - "why am I the only one that is still so short?" , thought wrily the Revenant.
"Who are you?" - Xanthippe was locking the exit to Molly, with her arms.
A fraction of second after, a much more perplexed Xanthippe stopped her own fall and redressed herself , while looking at the hole that her very body had left in the side of the building.
"The accountants are going to go love this" - the Legation Palace was on a lease, not a product of Anipos technology.
Repairs were going to be done by commercial Terrestrial enterprises, which would have brought back a lot of vexata quaestios about exchange rates between this Earth and the Galaxy at large. How many pages of the Encyclopaedia Galactica was this hole going to require, to be fixed?
And yet - "She punches way above her weight class" - Xanthippe couldn't avoid the fist, even if she had well suspected that something was coming.
Was this one of the lost "Bridget's Sisters", the four fully fraternal (same mother and father) embryos that a crazy Betan millionaire had sent toward this "Free [of Anipos] Planet" some thirty years before?
Xanthippe could not see even a hint of familiar resemblance, none of them could be so small - they were all way taller, in the last infos that Xanthippe had managed to track on each of them - and the small girl was also too old to be a daughter of any of them, not that there was any trace of such a daughter anywhere.
One of their lovers?
No, for this midget to be that strong, they should have been together when she was just a child, and nothing Xanthippe had discovered indicated that the sisters liked their lovers that young.
Xanthippe had only one way to know, really - going back, find "black hairs", and have a sane and civil discussion.
Hoping that the city would still stand, after.
All this considerations were made by Xanthippe while she already turned back and started chasing the intruder.
The "Sexy Slut of Steel" may be the spin that news media favoured, describing her, but Xanthippe was still one among the five, out of eighty thousand, Betan adventurous girls of her generation that the thrifty Anipos decided to train and endow with a ticket off-system. A ticket worth, by all accounting ways, like an average African nation's GNP.
Her purported smuttiness was mostly a misdirection, to conceal how much of a bright, nasty mind she really was.
And she really, really enjoyed having a lot of kinky sex with women (Damn coward Earth males!).
The box of the lift's cage was so deformed that its motors could not move it, a section of the floor had collapsed - the midget made a hole and jumped down? If she was a "colonized" without flight abilities, it would be the smarter choice.
Xanthi entered the hole and flew down, accelerating at her maximum rate, some two hundred G ("blackout" limits the maximum G of the Betans, down from the 1 thousand Gs theoretically guaranteed by their average 80 tons lift capability), looking at the doors at every level - none seemed to have been forced and even the bottom of the well was intact.
And jumping down is not so easy, anyway - "She must have gone up! What an ass-pull".
She went back up, passed through the lift box, and discovered that the motor and its cable were now falling down the shaft. It was a minor nuisance, but it still made her lose some tenths of second.
And 0.1 seconds, trying to tail someone that is moving near Mach 1, means about 40 yards lost.
Molly kept going up, at HER maximum acceleration - some ridiculously high 500 G.
By the time Xanthippe managed to reach the hole that Molly opened on top of the building, the jet black hair was already well beyond the Betan grasp and steadily crawling toward the very edges of Xanthippe's sensory sphere.
"I can't believe it - she can fly, faster than me!" - "black hairs" was already gone, beyond Xanthippe's senses range.
Xanthippe had no other choice, then, than to get back and collect the trails that the mysterious, black haired, sweet looking, tiny, sexy - Xanthippe had a thing for women that can kick her tougher-than-steel ass; all the four, now five, of them she knew of - girl had left behind.
It didn't take much, for Xanthippe to find her mysterious assailant - the security cams didn't have her face, but strands of hair managed to get tangled to the fallen steel rope and Xanthippe was good with the identi-kit programs.
Molly Donaldson, Major in Social Studies at Empire University, with a minor in Spanish literature.
Which meant a future teacher, or an unemployed, probably politicized. Whatever her cover, Xanthippe couldn't let the local police be shredded to pieces by some super-powered fiend - being the only super-powered human known by the public, it would have been petty much incriminating, for the sassy Betan. And xenophobic conspiracy theorists had it already too easy, for her personal taste.
So Xanthippe went to the Empire U. college personally, pretty sure that she was going to chase a ghost, but she found her woman instead. Or someone really resembling her...
This Molly Donaldson could have been the taller, completely human, more gorgeous sister of her unnamed hyper-powered assailant, and obviously had no idea who Xanthippe was apart, maybe, a world-famous sexy leather-clad fetishist.
Which, all indices told, the Asian looking petite found pretty exciting, as she immediately started to flirt with the "Woman of titanium".
Xanthi went back home, puzzled but satisfied - they needed to check for cloning epigenetic markers, in the assailant hair and in the sample she had stealthily collected from Molly. And said markers were there. The smaller midget was a clone, indeed.
Then, Molly contacted her again, and again, and invited her to dinner, and... by the end of the month after, the two moved in together in a new detached house in the suburbs.
Xanthi was more of a city flat woman, but she could fly to work in five minutes (Air Traffic had begged her to take a roundabout route, to avoid the Airport, and to keep her speed below 300 knots) and she really wanted a change of environment. Cindy's loss still lingered in her heart. Also, Molly really loved the pool and sun-bathing in the nude.
Life was flowing smoother than usual, for the unlikely couple - Molly was against the "Alien Occupation of Earth", after all.
And then, one Saturday afternoon when Molly was out with one of her friends, the midget was there, by the side of the pool, looking coldly over Xanthippe.
"It's you!" - Xanthippe stopped cold, right after saying it.
She couldn't say for sure, but the sword that the short girl was carrying on her shoulder looked like the kind of horrible weapon that can cut even a harder-than-iron skin.
"What do you want from Molly?" - the words were spoken flatly, even though the voice was almost exactly like Molly's, just a shadow more acute.
"What I want? What everybody wants in a companion. Friendship, support, sex... this kind of things."
"Only this?" - the dangerous little girl looked at her for some seconds, before going on - "You are not contaminating her, just for the sake of it?"
"You know that..." - a pause, while Xanthippe's brain spinned faster than ever - "No, Not that it would make any difference... from the moment she tasted me, she was toast. The colonization of her cells cannot be stopped, even killing her."
"Almost invulnerable, super strong and fast" - the "non-Molly" said this flatly; of course, she was probably faster and stronger still, so she had no reason to be impressed - "and infective. It could be worse, it could be better."
"If you say so"- Xanthippe tried to think about what this meant, worse?
"My sister doesn't know of me, She has no reason to know." - this was interesting.
'Midget' considered herself a sister, and not a copy of the original. It was a refreshingly rational approach to cloning... plenty of humanities nearly self destroyed, entertaining the illusion that clones were anything different than that. Whatever the origin of their subculture, it suddenly looked more sane, to Xanthippe's eyes.
"I have no reason to tell her. She could think that I used her as a pawn in some kind of spy game, and I'd lose her. I do not want to lose her." - she really didn't.
"You did use her as a pawn."
"Only initially" - Xanthippe really hoped that this was all the truth.
"We will meet again." And she was gone, accelerating vertically at a frankly ludicrous rate.
Xanthippe poured some more vodka in her glass, and sipped it.
The first time they met, she had not felt such a cold, murderous intent, and the non-Molly was an inch or so shorter, too. This woman - apparent age notwithstanding, girl was too reductive - was not the spy that she had caught infiltrating the Legation.
She was someone else... another clone, probably.
"The spy, the assassin, who else?..." - what had been cloned twice may have been cloned an infinite number of times - "My sisters in law are really going to be a handful" was a pun in an old play, that suddenly made Xanthippe smile.
She went back into the house, happy.
It was all too crazy to be any agency's plot. The spymasters of Earth's various, bitchy nations were almost all incompetent fantasists, often mired in conservative ideologies that cherished romanticized versions of their countries' past.
None of them would have come out with a plot so surreal, for one of their games, and so disregarding of their conventional notions about family and personal identity.
Clues were scattered here and there, but Xanthippe had already suspected that there were, at work on the planet, more forces than just the U.N., its component nations and the Anipos.
The disappearance of Japan's whalers, inexplicable misappropriations of time on the 'Bots hypercomputing nodes, senseless reports from the U.N. Army intelligence during the war...
This world was already growing its own shades of post-humans, well before the audacious Anipos plan to etch a population of society-disrupting "Neo-Betans" started to show its effects.
Post-humans that, apparently, were smart enough to keep up the facade of normality, to exploit human authorities fear of admitting even the existence of completely uncontrollable people
Xanthippe's new love was tied to one of these shadowy factions - unknowingly. A group that knew plenty on Xanthippe's real role, much to the Betan inner excitement.
Because, more than a bitch, a slut, a sarcastic commentator of human stupidity, she had discovered herself to be a player of The Great Game, and she had just found some other players in her same league.
In the end, this little dirt ball world with almost no out-of-planet extensions was proving more fun than what se expected, when she accepted her post.
All Xanthippe needed to do, to have a first row seat for the show, was to let her Anipos "masters" go on as blind as they were, which delighted her, and to keep Molly near - over time, her presence would have forced more details in the open, for her to see - which delighted her even more.
But, even as she was in the very middle of all of this, Molly wasn't a spy, and this was very refreshing.
It was about time that Xanthippe had a real lover.
"
... Xanthippe closed the book, and looked at the girls.They were all sleeping, now, eleven of her twelve marvellous daughters.
She went downstairs, and found Lindy asleep on the lap of her mother, Molly the Traveller, the last of the Mollies to have joined the family. Traveller was soon to start travelling again, in her work for the Michelin guide. Plump, gourmet, funny, she was a joy to have around, but her job kept her away most of the time.
She was also one one of the more differentiated of the original sisters, and still one of the more humans - she could barely lift a car.
Teophilus, the house Maine Coon - or was he an hyper-intelligent Bobcat? at 40 pounds, and given the family proclivities for genetic shenanigans, the doubt made sense, but Xanthippe didn't ask Gaudy where she found the oversized feline - was purring under the arms of the asleep child, his head, too, on Traveler's lap. At fifteen years, he had grown old and lazy, and got tired easily playing chess with the kids.
A car's tires creaked on the gravy yard, then Razor entered the house.
Xanthippe took her place on the sofa, a hypo-caloric ice cream vat in hand (she could never, ever eat freely as her wives, who could zip up and down their metabolism almost at will), and the newly arrived Sister soon joined her, a spoon fiercely in hand and a chocolate-chocolate Sicilian Ice-Cream in the other - blessed be 'Cosa Nostra'.
"How things were, at the office?" - Razor worked at the council planning and housing department... mostly because it allowed her to have fun destroying condemned buildings, and because it was next to the Social Services, which could be handy, for an extended family of very unconventional composition.
"Quiet, there is not much to do, in this period of the year. Ah, Johnson is still trying to pick me up."
"I thought that the family was well known, by now. He knows that you have a female husband, right? "
"He's old school... he thinks that all it is needed, to convert a lesbian, is the right man."
"Ah... he is an idiot."
"It seems that the new chief of Social Services is going to 'investigate' the 'Xeios family'."
"That 'law and order' idiot?"
"I heard also something about 'These damn Aliens cannot do as they wish with our women! ' - Really, why have they elected the guy?"
"A female 'husband', eight wives, twelve daughters through heterogeneous self-sex insemination? Come on, every man would feel menaced. Our family is a virtual declaration of their obsolescence." - Traveler was the more normal of he sisters, the one that had more of a hang on how "average people" thought.
"There is no need to terrorize him, though."
"No?"
"No, I asked Insider to check a bit on him, last week - just in case. He has a Mistress, and he likes to have a shag in Mimi Tan's brothel, when he goes to Sacramento, where he always ask for Flower - she is sixteen."
"I see... a true pillar of the community. Let's go with some old school blackmail, then."
"I'd say yes."
"And if he resist..."
"Aw, come on - I hate when they beg me to kill them."
Wednesday, 23 March 2016
The most intelligent species on Earth
Humanity is the most intelligent species on this planet.
Supposedly.
Scientists can list an impressive list of "existential dangers" lingering upon our head, some of them auto-created.
Of course, there is no money to be found for any serious attempt at tackling the issue of going to space... the human of the street couldn't care less, and it has its reasons.
The species may survive or not, but if you are dead and your kids too, it is not a matter of your interests.
Species have no real existence of their ow, beyond being a useful tool for scientific discussion... a species does not decide anything, nor it acts upon its needs.
It's the sum of the behavior of its individual components, following mostly similar patterns, that can give the impression of some coherent active will that many science-fiction writers have been so fond of.
Yet, as a species, we are supposed to be a notable exception to this situation in that our individual members can know the general situation of the world, and hence act upon some kind of intelligent project to address the issues at hand.
Right now, the greatest current danger for our continued existence seems to be the global warming of the planet.
Either it is solely a product of our releasing excesses of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, or a combination of this and general trends in the environment - an hint... by the established succession of warm and glacial eras to date, we should be in a glacial era, now - our fossil fuels consumption plays a great part in this process.
At the moment, after the "shale revolution", it is the ability of the environment to absorb our wasted CO2 that is posing the main limit to the quantity of energy that we can use to do, say, everything.
We already know that there are some potential energy sources that could cut down on it, "intelligent" nuclear fission, nuclear fusion and renewable energies.
At the moment, the goal of economically sustainable production of energy by nuclear fusion lays some twenty years in the future, that if there are no more snafus along the road.
One such snafus could be politicians cutting down on the funds dedicated to the research in this fields.
The main project on nuclear fusion is ITER, and it has accumulated its part of costs overrun and schedule slips.
The "shale revolution" has changed the equation of costs and benefits that was behind the drive toward other energy sources that funded its project.
As always, the doubt is that this money could be spent better.
It is quite a bit of money... some 20 billion dollars, over some fifteen years of development.
If we can pull it off, nuclear fusion promises to solve almost every energetic problems of our civilization... its radioactive downfall is a fraction of that of even the cleanest current fission reactor and it would be intrinsically safe.
Someone points out that, with cheap energy, water shortages can be solved - desalinization is an energy intensive process.
Also, many other commodities shortages could be addressed with a more thorough recycle systems, which usually are limited by energy issues.
20 billion dollars are a lot of money, but it should be an investment with plenty of return..
And, it is the revenue of the teams of the NFL for one year.
So, is our species really so intelligent? It can't even devolve half of the "panem et circenses" budget of one country, for one year, to invest in the most probable technology able to solve its most pressing problems for the next century.
We'll never go extinct soon enough.
Supposedly.
Scientists can list an impressive list of "existential dangers" lingering upon our head, some of them auto-created.
Of course, there is no money to be found for any serious attempt at tackling the issue of going to space... the human of the street couldn't care less, and it has its reasons.
The species may survive or not, but if you are dead and your kids too, it is not a matter of your interests.
Species have no real existence of their ow, beyond being a useful tool for scientific discussion... a species does not decide anything, nor it acts upon its needs.
It's the sum of the behavior of its individual components, following mostly similar patterns, that can give the impression of some coherent active will that many science-fiction writers have been so fond of.
Yet, as a species, we are supposed to be a notable exception to this situation in that our individual members can know the general situation of the world, and hence act upon some kind of intelligent project to address the issues at hand.
Right now, the greatest current danger for our continued existence seems to be the global warming of the planet.
Either it is solely a product of our releasing excesses of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, or a combination of this and general trends in the environment - an hint... by the established succession of warm and glacial eras to date, we should be in a glacial era, now - our fossil fuels consumption plays a great part in this process.
At the moment, after the "shale revolution", it is the ability of the environment to absorb our wasted CO2 that is posing the main limit to the quantity of energy that we can use to do, say, everything.
We already know that there are some potential energy sources that could cut down on it, "intelligent" nuclear fission, nuclear fusion and renewable energies.
At the moment, the goal of economically sustainable production of energy by nuclear fusion lays some twenty years in the future, that if there are no more snafus along the road.
One such snafus could be politicians cutting down on the funds dedicated to the research in this fields.
The main project on nuclear fusion is ITER, and it has accumulated its part of costs overrun and schedule slips.
The "shale revolution" has changed the equation of costs and benefits that was behind the drive toward other energy sources that funded its project.
As always, the doubt is that this money could be spent better.
It is quite a bit of money... some 20 billion dollars, over some fifteen years of development.
If we can pull it off, nuclear fusion promises to solve almost every energetic problems of our civilization... its radioactive downfall is a fraction of that of even the cleanest current fission reactor and it would be intrinsically safe.
Someone points out that, with cheap energy, water shortages can be solved - desalinization is an energy intensive process.
Also, many other commodities shortages could be addressed with a more thorough recycle systems, which usually are limited by energy issues.
20 billion dollars are a lot of money, but it should be an investment with plenty of return..
And, it is the revenue of the teams of the NFL for one year.
So, is our species really so intelligent? It can't even devolve half of the "panem et circenses" budget of one country, for one year, to invest in the most probable technology able to solve its most pressing problems for the next century.
We'll never go extinct soon enough.
Saturday, 5 December 2015
God doesn't play dices
It is a famous phrase of Einstein, but one that has been widely misunderstood.
Good old Albert wasn't expressing his dislike of Quantum Mechanics - he was stating a fact.
Schrödinger's wave function calculations, the way physicists use to define and make prevision about the probable characteristics of a particle (or any system that can be modelled with quantum mechanics, really... I'll keep using particle as a nickname for "every system etc."), are completely deterministic.
As deterministic as, say, the movements of gears in a gear train.
You can plot the interactions of said particle through an infinite number of particles and fields, and the final values measured will always respect the probabilities calculated.
There is no loss of information, no probability involved at the wave function level.
Probabilities only come into play when a measure is taken, to verify how things are, not before.
The Copenhagen's interpretation of this fact was that the act of measuring "forces" the particle to acquire a definite state.
In the case of entangled particles - particles whose quantum characteristics have been "synchronised" - you also know, instantly, the state of the "twin" of the particle you just measured.
Even if, in the meanwhile, the twin particle has reached the other side of the universe.
So, if taking a measure "forces" the particle in front of the experimenter, it also forces its sister near Alpha Centauri.
Instantaneously, speed of light as the limit for physical interactions and associated general relativity be damned.
Instantaneously, speed of light as the limit for physical interactions and associated general relativity be damned.
Einstein didn't like this "instantaneous action" at all.
For him it was not physically possible, which in turn meant that the Copenhagen's interpretation of Quantum mechanics was bogus.
Or, to be more precise, that it is not really an explanation - just a constatation of how things seems to go, a bit dressed up and not all that well.
He thought that, in the long run, it would have been possible to acquire enough hints on the real nature of the universe, of the real processes that the wave function models statistically (the same way thermodynamics describes statistically the behaviour of an enormous number of atoms, each one acting in a purely mechanical way), to dispel this and others apparent mysteries.
I think he was right.
Among the alternative interpretations that have been devised, to explain some of the vagaries of quantum mechanics, there are some that say that we exist in a multi-verse.
This could be because we are really living on a 4D (high, wide, long and time) membrane immersed in an universe with many more dimensions, but the details of the actual model can be omitted for what I am going to say.
If wee live in a multi-verse, this must have at least one spatial dimension more than the ones that we can perceive.
It is then possible that what we see as particles are just the intersection with our dimensionally limited plane of existence of more complex objects, that evolve in dimensions we can not directly see.
So, when a measure is taken, the measure DOES NOT "force the particle to take a definite state".
What it really does, is to tell US in WHICH of the enormous number of universes that intersect with that particle WE exist (or, if you prefer the 'branes version of String theory, on which 'brane we do reside).
Knowing the state of a synchronized particle lying at the other side of the universe is, then, just as natural as knowing the position of the Voyager, as the two particles'have just kept moving for inertia (I have a 4 panels comic to draw over this) the same way Earth and the Voyager have.
Wednesday, 25 November 2015
The Singularity
Note: unscrewing the bottom lap, to access the fake vagina between its legs, voids the warranty.
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| WowWee Femisapien v2 - because, let's be honest, there is only one kind of Robot we'd like to see |
The singularity is the purported moment when a self-improving artificial intelligence will appear, and likely take over the world.
There is a ton of reasons why this will not happen any time soon.
Most of artificial intelligence research is veering away, as much as possible, from trying to obtain full scale intelligence.
The failure of AI in the 70s - in delivering to the promises - has deeply scarred the field.
Talk about "hard AI" is a sure way to lose grants and financing, so at the best the aim is to reach an ant-like level of intelligence.
Getting the equivalent intelligence of an ant is already hard enough, but it is also enough to create cars and trucks that drive themselves (way before cars, we'll see automatized trucks and auto-buses(1)...) or robots that can be taught how to flip a new hamburger, by the senior staff in a McDonald, in a quarter of an hour.
It is enough to have completely automatized drones - so, it is no surprise that much of the current robotic research is sponsored by the US military - and, over time, passenger aircrafts without pilots (many modern jet-liners are already automatized to the point that the pilots are there only for landings and take-offs; getting the extra mile would cut some hundred thousand dollar-years-per plane of operative expenses ).
The intelligence of an ant is, hence, already more than enough to leave almost everybody out of job.
So, why some think so hard to the singularity?
Well, if the technology keeps improving(3), risk is it will be reached inadvertently.
And a badly chosen prime motive for an auto-evolving intelligence could, indeed, spell a disaster.
The paper-clip maximizer scenario (where such intelligence exterminates the whole planet to get materials to build paper-clips) is not so impossible...
On the other hand, some may hope.
That a humanist intelligence of this kind could take over the world, and made it a bit more just, overcoming the core of greed and egotism at the heart of almost every man that makes so that millions are starving, while hundreds goes around in a Bugatti.
In other words, some hope that a truly altruistic super-intelligence will give the world a socialism that actually works.
Pretty much like others wait for the return of Christ...
(1) There is a mine, in a remote region of Australia, where 500 tons robotised trucks are hauling materials even now, with a way dumber than an ant computer as driver.
(2) Maybe not me, I hope
(3) IF.. the so called "Moore's law" isn't a law, but rather just a business model, a way to force people into buying new computers way before the ones they have are really worn out; the original version of the law, to say so, died already ten years ago.
.
(2) Maybe not me, I hope
(3) IF.. the so called "Moore's law" isn't a law, but rather just a business model, a way to force people into buying new computers way before the ones they have are really worn out; the original version of the law, to say so, died already ten years ago.
.
Monday, 23 November 2015
Time travel snavel
Time travel stories are funny.
The base of a time travel or of a time-cape story is , almost always, that time travel allow to change the past.
I have yet to see a time travel history where the protagonist is an historian looking for info about an obscure period, and some form of "change the things" does never come up (0).
But it is not actually possible - and that, even if time travel itself was at all possible.
If the universe has only one temporal line, it is valid the Novikov principle.
The only time travels possible are the ones that re-enforce the stability of the time-line, as forking is not possible (it would require another time dimension that, simply, is not there).
As an IT guy, I tend to see as an issue of macroscopic quantum mechanics and information...
Trying to change the past makes it, really, a quantum superposition of the original time-line and the new one, the contribution of each one determined by the probability of the action to succeed.
As a result, when the action goes near 50% of success probability... the information upon which the action has been originally planned had a reliability of 50%.
In other words, the more you try to change the past, the less you know what it was to be changed or why.
Nowm one thing must be clear... which usually is not clear at all.
When tackling time travels, one should remember that he is really using a meta-time to narrate its effects, i.e. a fifth (6th, 7th, 8th etc..) dimension, temporally orthogonal to the space and time dimension(s) of the universe he describes.
The universe should be seen, then, as a film reel or - even better - a painting - something static, with no dynamic of its own.
The painting is a better metaphor, because its internal dynamic is actually al a product of its observer, which is situated outside of it.
In a single timeline universe, the action of a time traveller produce very much the effect of an author "pentimento" (1) in a painting... two versions of the painting, usually in a limited area, superposed.
If the transparency of the pentimento (:= probability of success of the time traveller's action) is 50%, it is impossible to tell which was which.
Which was the action of the traveller, and which the past he wanted to change.
If the universe allows for multiple time-lines, vice-versa, it just means that what we call time is only one of a set of non-spatial dimensions, that there is at least a time dimension orthogonal to the one we are used to perceive.
The universe is akin then not a classic painting... it is a stack of paintings, each one slightly different from the one up and below it.
Or, to be a bit more subtle and precise, it is a painting done with the veiling technique. Applied over and over again, each possible variation laid on top of the other with a infinitely shallow layer of paint, till the resulting painting becomes as thick as it is wide and tall (2).
Every possible outcome of any non mechanically determined action - be it from a time traveller, a man deciding which side to enter his bed, an ant taking a route with a leave, an electron traversing a diffraction grid or a radioactive atom decaying - is a different 4D universe(3).
Is, not becomes nor create. Is.
A time traveller may go back in time and "change" something, then stay in the time-line and see the product of his actions and have the illusion that he changed history but, as I said, it is an illusion.
What changed, the very moment he moved from his position in the time flow, was the universe in which he resided.
In his original universe, nothing changed at all - the companions of the time traveller, that are waiting to see their universe change around them, or some other SF idiocy, are going to die of old age damning the traveller's name, while nothing happens.
Travel to the past may not be impossible, but trying to change it surely is.
On the other hand, it is maybe possible to go there and have it to follow the story as it is known - the bootstrap paradox. If, and only if, the universe is a mono-time-line one.
But that is another story...
(0) To be honest, I read a very good story based on time travel, once, "Universal War One" by Denis Bajram - if I had to re-read only a comic, this year, I'd say that is the one. You'd probably will have guessed: it uses a bootstrap paradox, and has a character concluding "Time is stronger than what you think. It already is the by-product of all the time travels happened in it. Time cannot be changed by anybody."
(1)Pentimento: in oil painting, it happens relatively often that the artist changes some feature, and paints over it. However, oil colours can be partially transparent, and it is relatively simple, in many cases, to guess at the shape of what was changed, from the "shadows" appearing below the final pictorial surface.
(0) To be honest, I read a very good story based on time travel, once, "Universal War One" by Denis Bajram - if I had to re-read only a comic, this year, I'd say that is the one. You'd probably will have guessed: it uses a bootstrap paradox, and has a character concluding "Time is stronger than what you think. It already is the by-product of all the time travels happened in it. Time cannot be changed by anybody."
(1)Pentimento: in oil painting, it happens relatively often that the artist changes some feature, and paints over it. However, oil colours can be partially transparent, and it is relatively simple, in many cases, to guess at the shape of what was changed, from the "shadows" appearing below the final pictorial surface.
(2) Omitting the -light prefix from light year, which in a way doesn't matter, it can be said that the visible universe is 4 dimensional cube with a spatial [3D] area that has a side of some 90 billion years and a temporal thickness of just 13.9 billions years. It appears the painter hasn't ended yet...
As for the thickness of each veiling, IF space is indeed quantized over the length/time of Planck, that should apply also to the extra, otherwise not-perceptible time dimension where the parallel universes are laid. A time of Planck is something x 10^-44 , no the number of strata in the painting would be something x 10^62, a number followed by 62 zeros.
(3) Separated parallel universes are, again, probably a simplification - it implies a perceptible discontinuity between one and another. Most probably, a meta-universe would be some kind of continuous mesh, with no hard boundaries between a parallel and the other, the difficulty in going from one to another probably connected to the entropy - information content - differences between the considered 4d space. 4D spaces whose information content grew equivalent, could as well merge back... and fork again.OK, now my head officially hurts...
Tuesday, 17 November 2015
Reproductive technology
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| 50% Naomi Campbell, 50% Thylane Blondeaux, 100% technically possible. |
Not so much time ago, I read an article on a recent development in the science of human reproduction.
As most readers with an interest in science will know, since some years it is possible to obtain totipotent cells from adult cells, usually from the skin, by "reprogramming" them.
(It involves starving the cell and then giving them a push into de-differentiating, using some molecular triggers... I suppose the details are much more refined, but as a basic description it feels enough, for me.)
(It involves starving the cell and then giving them a push into de-differentiating, using some molecular triggers... I suppose the details are much more refined, but as a basic description it feels enough, for me.)
Some researchers tried to place these cells inside rat gonads, and obtained sperm cells when they inserted them into male gonads, and egg cells when they inserted said cells into rat ovaries.
(And metastatic cancers when they went around in other places...)
(And metastatic cancers when they went around in other places...)
This, independently from the fact that the donor was either a man. or a woman.
Of course, the sperm cells out of a woman can carry only X chromosomes (unless she is a XY kariotype with resistance to testosterone), so it is bound to give birth only to other females.
This alone brings the possibility of some interesting "kinky" application, like directly cross-breeding Naomi Campbell and, say, Thylane Blondeaux (it doesn't take much more than a sample of skin, it appears, which does not require the subject to be even near sexual maturation and, given the quantity of cellular samples the average person leaves in hospitals during a normal life, not even the support or approval of the target... ).
Or to allow every lesbian-gay couple on the planet to have kids that are, genetically, as theirs as those of any heterosexual mating.
In the near future, five years or so, the researchers hope to be able to identify the molecular triggers that transform a totipotent cell into a reproductive one,so that they can do all in laboratory, without the unknown variables associated to using a living animal as an incubator.
Now, since some years ago, there are, also, transgenic pigs developed to be compatible with humans, for transplant purposes.
Their use in transplants is not going to happen any time soon, and probably it is never to come, no matter the money already invested in creating these animals.
There is a possibility that some of the viruses that are endemic in pigs may cross over to humans, if given the chance provided by a human host with a reduced strength immune system (like is the case for every transplant recipient that has to take anti-rejection medication) to learn and adapt to the human immune systems.
However, one may entertain the idea of using these animals as living incubators for foetuses created with the aforementioned techniques.
So, even waiting for some other researcher to come out with an artificial uterus - that's a major achievement that will require quite a bit of time, I fear - we are still left with a reproductive technology that could reduce the value of women wombs to nothing, if it was convenient to society.
On one side, that could be a step forward.
One of the inherent pitfalls of feminism has been that women's wombs were the bottleneck of human reproduction - this meant that most societies in history had to give these organs even more value than that of the individuals that carried them.
Had to, in an economical sense.
Medical improvements intervened since the last century meant that the production of every womb need not to be so high as in the past, and the fact that automation is eating away job after job reduced even more the requirement numbers for new generations.
(No matter the preoccupation for the demographic implosion, one of the analysis of the current European crisis is that we still make more kids than the amount of new workforce the continent really needs, in the middle to top tiers of pay grade that we want for our children when they grow up... nobody wants to see his kid scrub cesspools, even if that is a much more socially useful job than - say - telemarketing, or lawyering).
The rise of feminism is, so, also tied to the loss of economic value of the female womb, which has liberated the individual "around" it.
Society is a crowd of crowds, as ruthless and as pitiless as any of them, when its core interests are at stake.
If ten kids per woman were still needed, feminism would be a denigrated mania like it was at the dawn of the XX century, entertained by a small number of very courageous women.
If ten kids per woman were still needed, feminism would be a denigrated mania like it was at the dawn of the XX century, entertained by a small number of very courageous women.
In the distant future, though, society may come to need exactly 0 kids per woman, to stay afloat.
Women will then become as inherently useless to society as men are, whom "exists" only when they do something useful ( := make money ) .
Of course, I may be dead, by then.
But I may be not.
p.s. for the moment, the research is, really, still in the preliminary stages. The first results point, however, into the direction that it is indeed possible to derive germ cells of any kind from skin cells.
Experts expects it to be possible sometime in the next six-five years... maybe.
Maybe it is just a preliminary stab to get the politics in gear for when they'll manage to do all this, so that panic reactions may be avoided.
Absurd laws written with two left hands are not unheard of, when it comes to human reproduction techniques.
For a view of the current state of the art, you can read http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25609401.
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