June 2009 Archives

Today's muse, Toyota's brain wave controlled wheelchair was demonstrated to the press yesterday. The breakthrough here, according to AP, is the wheelchair's ability to change direction within 125 milliseconds of the generation of a specific brain wave, which is near instantaneous. AP also mentioned Honda's work in this area, where a thought of moving a right hand was translated into a robot lifting its right hand after several seconds.

In researching a domain name I was interested in a couple of weeks ago, I came across an Australian visual artist, Karen Casey, who is working on creating visual art using brain waves of people all over the globe, collected through the Internet, and in some cases projected live to large outdoor screens in different countries . Although this is a work in progress for now, the concept is fascinating, and the result could be truly stunning, leading I suspect, to outcomes that might even surprise and delight the artist herself. GlobalMindProject.com will launch shortly with an official project launch in October, stay tuned.... 

Given the technology leaps of the last say, 500 years, it is hard to image what the "global mind" will look like in the year 2509.  Probably the wildest science fiction that we can think of today, might just begin to describe the reality of 2509.  I can't resist just a couple of speculative thoughts on the 2509 landscape:

- Wi fi will not connect our laptops, it will connect our brains;
- we will be able communicate with our friends and co-works without talking or writing;
- keyboards will have gone the way of the Model T;
- personal privacy discussions will morph into thought privacy discussions;
- the term "mindshare" will take on whole new dimensions;
- countries may begin to be defined, not by geography, but by mindography. 

Today's muse.  What if the individual is the most unimportant concept of the whole? What if there is some complex evolutionary dance going on, that carefully mixes the individual into the whole of the present?  That the type and mix of "minds" on the planet at any give time is a careful calibration, and that the study historical studies of who was whose contemporary is more that just the social milieu of of a person's experience at the time, but also a biological milieu, with much more interconnectedness than we assume.

So rather than attribution of creation, be it artistic or intellectual, to the individual, it is interesting to think of attribution of creation to the particular biological mix, or even brain mix, on the planet at any particular time.  This concept manifests, tangentially at least, in common thought as the same idea being "discovered" by different people, far removed from each other, at roughly the same time. 

It would be interesting to develop a language of describing the characteristics of what might be called the "global personality" at any given time in history.  While this personality could of course include non-human conditions at any give time, I would propose that it would be most interesting to think about this personality in collective human terms and come up with some attributes for this "global personality" which, one would hope, be described as changing over time.  Would this "global personality" have an attribute of age, i.e., maturity?  Could it be described in truly universal cross-cultural terms, how about even cross-species terms?

This language will be challenging because we are so predisposed to the individual and to individual attribution.  But if we look at ideas and tools as coming out of the perspective of the human collective, rather than the human individual, it may enhance our understanding of current trends, like what appears to be the incredibly rapid and powerful trend of the building of human networking tools.

- What the collective is doing, the individual has very little information in this context. [Ironic this, as I could be telling you not to pay attention to this writing.]

- The intersection of biology and technology, to include biotechnology and more "hard edged" intersections, especially intersections that maybe extended beyond the planet.

- Idea "epidemics" that sweep across the global, and through many different cultures.

- The collective unconscious, hard to spot, must be looked for indirectly.

- Species transcendence when observed in collective thinking, especially when it also transcends the earth.

- "Building" that may not take any shape that we know i.e., preparing for the unexpected "building".

Today's muse, the question "what are we [humans] building?" continues to resonate, or perhaps reverberate, for me, in fact, it was the masthead subtitle here at the beginning.  I have been writing around the edges of this idea for the past month, but I would like to try and be more direct about my "working assumptions" in this piece. I suspect they will govern my writing/thinking here for a number of years, if not decades.  Here they are, and I am sure I will be refining them over the coming months:

1. While tool use has been seen in other species, there appears to be no evolutionary precedent for tool use on anything like the scale of human capabilities, this makes us special, on earth at least.

2. This special capability was "given" to us to build something greater than the species, that perhaps transcends life on this planet, and perhaps, even the biological paradigm we arose from. I know this sounds like sci-fi, at least for now I am using "given" in an evolutionary sense, not in a higher consciousness sense.

3. We as individuals are akin to cells, just as I can imagine how hard it would be for a cell to "know" the larger organism it is part of, or part of a process of, we individual human "cells" will find it difficult to "know" the the larger "organism" or "organic process" that we are a part of.  Use of the biological term here is strictly by way of analogy, I do not intend to imply that the larger process is actually organic, or not.

4. There is a lot of talk about what is commonly called the Gaia hypothesis, frequently described as the view of the Earth as a single organism, my working assumption is that "the building" transcends this concept.  If there is a single organism, it may be serving the role of "petri dish". I may be guilty of species self-centeredness, I would like to plead Nolo contendere as I am also saying that we as individuals are like cells, or maybe ants...

5. There is also a lot of popular discussion about whether or not we are creating some kind of networked "super mind".  Jamais Cascio has a nice survey piece titled Get Smarter in the July/August 2009 Atlantic, though the author also throws in lot's of lower level stuff too.  One of my operating beliefs on this quest, is that anything that is high on our individual "cellular" consciousness is probably only a portion of the building, or in this case, another tool, though certainly a collective one.  If we are really "brain" cells, look how fast we are growing in this graphic, Human Population through History 1 A.D. to 2020.  (Reminds me more of cancer than anything else, but I digress.)

There is something humbling in the idea that we as individuals are the equivalent of cells being used to build something that, almost by definition, we cannot know.  For me it is looking around the edges of life, the edges of consciousness, that may illuminating as to what we are being used to build.  I find it intriguing, and not at all surprising, that it is physicists who are starting to see parallels between collective human behavior and the atom.

Today's muse, I have been lamenting on the lack of perspective we have, as a society, on what we are building here.  There is some discourse on the tools, for example, the impact of TV or the Internet on our society.  But I view these, and all of technology as tools, and the more interesting question, is what are we building with these tools?  I think the challenge of perspective in this area, for us as humans, is that this "collective tool set" is so compelling, and so close to us, that perspective, of any value, is difficult to achieve.

While still fairly rare, there are occasionally thinkers who transcend the tools and look at the larger issues of the building.  When I run across these thinkers, I will make a point of mentioning them here.  Eventually, if there are enough references, I may consolidate them into a special section of the blog.  To start this off, I would like to mention Peter Daou's recent piece at the Huffington titled The Philosophical Significance of Twitter: Consciousness Outfolding.  It is actually not so much the content of Peter's piece that I find noteworthy, it is the method and perspective he applies to his analysis, his ability, when talking about Twitter, to look at issues of the collective mind, the "folding" of the universe and even quantum theory, all good stuff, and viewpoints that is in general, are sorely lacking in our present day social consciousness.

Today's muse, I take it to be self-evident that other intelligent life has existed, or will exist, on other planets. I also take it as equally self-evident that the chances of an intersection of two or more "intelligents" is so small, as to make the search not worth doing, except strictly as an exercise, i.e., we must exercise our "searching skills" to stay healthy as a species.

What I find more interesting is whether or not there exists what might be called, universal principles of evolution, that makes the all but theoretical impossibility of an intersection intentional, at least evolutionarily.  Or to state this another way, why is the scale of intelligent life on earth so small in size and time, as compared to the scale of the universe around us?  It is this scale contrast that makes the intersection so unlikely.  Where did the this scale, that defines our intelligent life, come from? 

There is a possibility that would increase the odds of a meet, that is, of course, that the "other" intelligent life does live on a universal scale.  However, if this is the case, and we have not found them already, then it is their intention not to be found, because they surely must be aware of us, the noisy, often rude and sometime violent adolescences down the road. :-)

Tangentially, speaking of scale, why is the fastest thing we know, light, so slow?  If makes no sense, given the scale of the universe.  Unless of course, it is not the fastest thing.... 

Today's muse, it will probably seem so obvious looking back, in 50 or 100 years.

Snapshot 1:
Our 23 year old niece was excitedly showing us her Apple Ipod Touch yesterday, with its iPhone like interface, but she said proudly, its not a phone!  It uses any local wi fi signal to hook up to the internet.

Snapshot 2:
Our 16 year old nephew is staying with us for a few days, we of course have wi fi and 2 (only) computers in the house, one notebook and an old desktop.  I have offered him use of the computers a number of times, but he seems uninterested..strange.  Yesterday, while his cousin was showing him, and us, her iPod Touch, he mentioned that he has an iPhone, though he appears to be fairly careful not to show it to us, as in, I have yet to see it during his entire stay with us, interesting that.

A couple of observations. First, and perhaps most obvious, technology is becoming highly transparent, and often, intensely personal.  It is becoming our second skin, and drifting quickly into our subconscious.  Of course a 16 year old would not want to share anything so personal as his connections with older adults, isn't it obvious?  Perhaps not so obvious, as "technology" fades into unconscious, it can only be a matter of time, perhaps much sooner than we think, where brain waves begin to control these devices rather than fingers.  It will feel pretty safe as long as brain waves are used to "simply" control the UI.  But when other brain waves starting coming down the pipe, watchout.

Today's muse, we are born into this form with no conscious sense of time, space or self, all of which are developed as we grow.  I cannot remember when I realized that my existence, in this exact form at least, was finite.  It must not have been one of the times of adrenaline imprint, that creates those long term memories, I suspect rather, it was a gradual recognition.

Quieting the mind and listening to the body.  It's a concept often talked about in a number of different forums.  The old adage that the mind/body are one and the same.  If actions are by their very nature, just another expression of thought, then the universe we see is a very thoughtful place. Or conversely, if thoughts are by their very nature, the expression of action, there is more motion on the earth, then we have led to believe.

Overlaying Einstein's key precepts, that speed is just another expression of "viewpoint", like position in the solar system, and everyone would measure the speed of light the same. Would "thinking" also be another expression of viewpoint (ironic this), and would everyone understand consciousness the same?  Giving new meaning to the phrase, "that is a warped thought" (sorry couldn't resist).    

Today's muse, perhaps it is our incredibly large "species ego", but we humans seem to place such a high value on knowledge and consciousness, while at the same time, denying the extent to which we are controlled by our unconscious, or to put in another way, controlled by forces far larger than we are, both as individuals and as a species.

If there is anything that appears to drive this species, other than war, it is this quest for knowledge.  Perhaps our "denial" is simply a tool to keep us from being overwhelmed.  I was struck this morning by today's photo on APOD, we as a species seem driven by this quest, and defined by it, as though it might even be an evolutionary aberration.

In choosing which or our primary traits to appreciate, I choose to marvel at our species pursuit of knowledge, and how unique this trait appears to be, at least in our world.  And as the power of this trait unfolds, to marvel, with knowledge and consciousness, at the grandness, symmetry, and its own way, the perfection, of the universe we find ourselves to be so much a part of.

Is not evolution defined by successful aberrations?

Today's muse, war.  There certainly is tremendous violence in our universe.  Are our vicious internecine wars simply an expression of some universal congruence?  A species skill used to annihilate all species competition, but then turned upon ourselves.  Perhaps evolution doing an "oops", that mix was a bit too strong, let's try again.  It would be unsettling to think that our species is just a failed evolutionary experiment that will soon implode.

Is war the remnants of our own evolutionary big bang?

This is the first sentence I wrote on this topic, and I was surprised to see it come out of my own hand.  I debated deleting it because it seems so ridiculous, but a sculptor acquaintance of mine told me a story about how he stopped destroying what he thought were his mistakes, because much to his surprise, others often thought that his mistakes were his best work. We truly don't seem to know what we are making most of the time.  So it stays here, unadorned making no sense to me, at least for now.

Today's muse, so much of our personal lives, and I suspect our species lives, are endless, mostly unconscious, behavioral repetition.  Perhaps it is, in part, the deeply embedded species drive to procreate, to sustain itself, that leads to this repetition i.e., that it is vital to increase the odds of "success" on an evolutionary level.  Certainly modern day humans have an almost pathological need to discount and minimize this drive.  This, what I will call "repetition awareness", is also made all the more challenging by the fact that much of our repetition transcends our own life e.g., that we are often unconsciously repeating multi-generational patterns, and maybe even multi-evolutionary patterns.

Looking at behavioral repetition in my own life, and in looking outwards at more macro-scale cultural repetition e.g., the human tendency towards tribalism, I tend to pay more attention to, and focus on, behavior that looks like it may be new, or, if not new, behavior that is new to my experience, or to the experience of the species.  It is in this light that I find the topic of technology fascinating.  At least as near as I can tell, though maybe we should ask the dophins to be sure, I can find no precedent for the rapid rise in technology, and its application, over say, the last 1,000 years of human history.  And 1,000 years in any evolutionary time frame, is but a blink of an eye.

A couple of simple points based on the above.  First, the rise of technology may have placed our species into a profound state of stress as we maybe exhibiting behavior that may not be evolutionarily "sane" (jury is definitely still out on that one), the byline might read, "Human Species Pleads Insanity".  Second, since we appear to have driven (pun intended) off the edge of the evolutionary road map, we need to be somewhat cautious about how we approach technology, especially as it relates to its impact on our species.  I have worked in various areas of technology for many years, and I am profoundly, profoundly surprised at how unconscious we generally are about the impact of technology on our species.  We pay little heed to its impacts until we are almost literally hit over the head.  As much as, some days, I might want to be a Luddite, this genie is well and truly out of the bottle. 

Today's muse, it will seem so obvious, when we look back on today, 1,000 years from now. The distinction between technology and biology will be non-existent, in fact the vary concept of a distinction will seem antiquated, and quaint, almost like what with think of 200 year old medical practices, from today's perspective.  The distinction of importance, will be consciousness, what it is, what has it, and what doesn't.

The exploration of space, and the exploration of consciousness, may have merged to become one and the same set of activities, substituting the word consciousness for space, in JFK's landmark May 25, 1961 speech, the May 25, 2961 speech becomes:

"No single [consciousness] project in this period will be more impressive to mankind, or more important for the long-range exploration of [consciousness]; and none will be so difficult or expensive to accomplish,"

This project of course, will use our advanced bioconology (madeup term, bio- con- ology) tools, to create, or maybe access (if it already exists), a consciousness energy that is separate from human biology.  But the project will not look like the technology obsessed moon shot that we are so familiar with, and that Carl Sagan used, I suspect, as his physical model for Contact; it will look more like a biological version of a solar concentration field, substituting of course consciousness for the sun. 

Alright world, let's all think together on three... one, two, three... blast off!

Today's muse, perspective as reality.  Our view of the universe is so much a function of our perspective. Perspective of our biology, perspective of our individual life span, perspective of our sensory receptors, perspective our our species life span, perspective of where the earth sits in the universe.  It takes so much work, so much intellectual horsepower, a willingness to suspend belief, which is perhaps one of the values of mathematics, to lift the shroud of our perspective, as Einstein and the physicists of the early 20th century were able to do, with gigantic impact on our species and on the earth.

How much more knowledge and power will we gain through a growing ability to transcend our perspective, is an open question?  It seems that it takes only "small" steps in our ability to transcend our perspective to have gigantic consequences in our perceived surroundings.  It is hard for me to believe that whatever we are "learning" has not already been learned countless times, which of course is the cannon fodder of much sci fi writing, Carl Sagan's novel/movie Contact comes immediately to mind.

It is perhaps not a coincidence that our current networking explosion is following on the heels of Einstein's breakthrough work.  I suspect that the future humans may find it easier to lift the shroud of perspective, with equally powerful results, but I wonder who will be waiting for us?

Today's muse, someone must have written about this, but I've not seen it.  A species equivalent of the Doppler effect, the idea of sound or light "squashing up" as it moves towards and observer, and "stretching out" as it moves away from an observer.  Or to put it another way, the relationship of the event to the observer can allow the observer to calculate both speed and direction of the phenomena as it relates to the observer.

Let's say, that the observer is not a person, but a species, let's use the human species as an example, and assume that the species is in some kind of evolutionary motion.  Due to its scale, and that fact that we are observing from within, we probably, maybe even definitionally, can't see our own motion, but we might be able to see a difference in evolutionary speed, between ourselves and other species, what would that look like?  First off, is there species based evolutionary motion? If so, is evolutionary motion different between species?  If so, can that difference in speed be measured?  If so, will it have attributes of a Doppler type effect?  If so, could we intuit the direction of the human species?

Last night I watch, not for the first time, the eleventh and last episode of the famous 10 hour BBC series, Planet Earth, the episode called "Ocean Deep".  The closing shot of the entire series was a close up of a great whale cruising alone in the ocean, and the shot pulled back, and back, and back, eventually showing the great whale from a distance of 30 or 40 miles away, and a few miles high, still barely visible as a speck in the great ocean.  Perhaps there is an evolutionary consciousness, that is protected in times of crisis, and resides in dolphins or whales.  Perhaps millions of years ago consciousness walked this earth, and had to retreat into one of these forms. 

Julian Dibbell has a wonderful piece in Wired that puts some perspective on the Twitter phenomena.  What really caught my eye was a quote from an NYU journalism professor, Jay Rosen, who calls Twitter, "mindcasting" (last para).

Today's muse, so what is the nature of thought?  Does the speed up of thought exchange create "higher level" thoughts (whatever that means)?  What is the connection between thoughts and consciousness?  Is there a thought network, independent from the biological network?  After all, thoughts are a product of a very sophisticated biological network of our brains, and we as a species, whether consciously or not, appear to be embarked on the beginnings of replicating this network model in non-biological form, at least for now.  The level of network sophistication appears to be increasing exponentially.  Just look at the O3b Networks project, which I just heard about this morning, from of all things, a TiVo stock message board.

Today's muse, as biological entities, we have a predisposition to look at the world through a perspective of what I will call vertical integration, this perspective is so deep and pervasive, that it feels almost like it comes from our DNA.  That networks are built up from smaller units, that it is the creation of the individual node, if you will, that drives everything, birth as an example.  In fact this birth/death cycle has our species so entranced and fascinated (or maybe fixated) because as we humans grow our consciousness, the recognition that we were "born" and that we will "die" is inextricably enmeshed with our developing consciousness, it colors our perception of our universe in profound ways.  No one, at least no conscious biological entity, is exempt from this connection of consciousness with life cycle, ergo, its own death.

Let's try to breakout of this "massive gravitational pull" for a moment, and imagine a system where it is the network that drives creation of its nodes.  That nodes exist only because they meet the creation needs of a network.  If we were to look at everything in this way, of course, we would have to posit that humans exist because we are part of a network, and were created to meet the needs of that network, and at a super macro level, we could even say that the biological system that we see on this planet, exists to meet the needs of a network. This is where things start to get a little Alice in Wonderlandish.  But the posit here is that our entire biological system is simply a node on a super network composed of different systems.   So our search for "life" should really be a search for other systems, if we can even know them.

What might examples of other nodes look like? Could they be right in front of us, could "light" be a node, could "time" be a node, could our awareness of these nodes only be where these nodes connect with the biological node.  Could many aspects of these nodes exist outside of their connection with the biological, so outside of our awareness?  What other nodes in this super network might exist?  Could we even have an awareness of them if they do not connect to our biological node?  And finally, what might this super network, composed of different systems, look like?

Today's muse, what if the human species is a consciousness creation machine?  Would this consciousness exist on its own, separate from the existence of the species? Would this consciousness reside in a container within our awareness, or our we contributing our consciousness to a space/thing/container, ironically, outside our awareness?

Does each human being add his or her consciousness to the equation, which would include, by way of an examples, George Washington's, Martin Luther King and Gandhi's consciousness?  Is the quality of one person's consciousness contribution, higher or lower than another e.g., Gandhi's versus Washington's?  Also, does one species create a different quality of consciousness than another e.g., dolphins versus humans versus ants?  Does the concept of time exist in this consciousness space/thing/container, which might then allow for an outflow of consciousness, balancing the inflow?  Is there a fixed amount of consciousness in the universe, that is recycled in some elegant flow like water is on earth? 

Does this space/thing/container have an awareness of itself, and purpose... does it act, and make decisions?  Are human beings, by some law of nature, by definition unable to become conscious of this space/thing/container.  Could there be subtle clues, like seeing something out of the corner of one eye, that may indicate that a space/thing/container does exist.  If we somehow succeed in becoming conscious of it, will that act destroy it, and us?

So what does a whirligig know?  Does it know it is a seed, or does it happily spin down from our trees without a thought that it is really about procreation?  I just get can not get out of my mind the vision of humans blasting off the earth as unknowing whirligigs.  But what is to grow out of this seed?

It would not make sense in the elegance of our natural system, that a seed could land only in inhospitable territory, as appears to surround us.  So one might suppose, some how, some way, that hospitable territory for germination is much, much closer than we think.  Either we are a seed in a way, and for something, that we can not comprehend, so are unable to evaluate whether or not any given environment is hospitable or not, or, what we think of as hospitable environments for germination are much closer than we think, either currently hidden, or a method for unlocking scale is much closer than we think, e.g., sci fi's "warp drive" may be more real and closer than we think.

Having done many hundreds of hours of PBSB, I perhaps have a better awareness than many, of just how much of our behavior is unconscious, and how much of our behavior is unconsciously controlled by our place in complex multi-generational family systems. In fact, I have become quite adapt at identifying clues in conscious behavior in myself, and in others, that indicate that a "current" behavior is not the result of some logical response to a present external stimulus, but in fact, a response to one or more historical unconscious stimulus.  One of the signs is simple, an overreaction to a stimulus.  And speaking from personal experience, awareness that I am moving into an area of "unconscious reaction" does not make the reaction go away.  As an aside, having worked in a number of different corporations over the years, I am convinced that most corporate behavior is driven by the unconscious, rather than the conscious. (There is probably not only a book here, but a whole field.)

Do we exaggerate the importance of consciousness as we exaggerate the importance of our species?  Is there some kind of deep seated species self-centeredness mechanism operating here?  Or, is there really the beginnings of a level of consciousness that is truly different, perhaps even some kind of evolutionary consciousness that transcends at least our species, and perhaps even our biological roots?

Today I find myself musing on the connections between consciousness and networks.  So their is a network called the Internet, connecting biological hub of humans, which also of course, has its own biological network.  So humans and the Internet could represent an example of the intersection of two different network types.  Well maybe, maybe not.

Or, is there some kind of natural evolution of networks going on, perhaps with a connection to consciousness? So once a network type reaches some level of consciousness, here it might be a biological network, it begets a new network type that treats the previous networks hubs, as just normal nodes, and creates a new network, with new hubs, and ta-da, imparts the new network with a "higher" consciousness.  Well maybe, maybe not.

Or, the distinction between biology and technology is meaningless, it is all the same, and the Internet just represents a physical manifestation of a higher consciousness that we are not, and perhaps can not, be aware of, that is busy procreating itself by shooting itself into space, just like the whirligigs I wrote about in my second post.  Perhaps this belief that we are acting on our own, is simply an evolutionary necessity, since if we believed anything else, it might alter our behavior, and screw up the system. 

I had a chance to watch the the physicist Mark Buchanan give a presentation to Microsoft Research recently.  Mark is what I would call a social physicist, trained in classical physics, but intrigued by the similarities between physics and collective human behavior, as am I (though I am not a physicist, just a creative dyslexic). As often is the case in presentations, one of the key points came in the Q&A, when one of the MS researches asked about whether or not awareness would change the outcome in one of the many experiments Mark had been siting, and he answered yes, but he didn't know how it would change the outcome.  So unawareness maybe be a key requirement here.