Brain Hammer

…Neanderthals wore make-up and liked to chat.

Alex J. Champandard has compiled “Evolving Virtual Creatures: The Definitive Guide“. Excerpt:

AI research ties into games and simulations in many ways, but one of the most fascinating is the evolution of artificial life. Here’s a compilation of the best videos and white papers about applying genetic algorithms to generating the morphology and behavior of virtual embodied creatures in 3D worlds.

One of the cool things about the following video is it’s inclusion of an animation of the creature’s neural network:

Also supercool, this one:

Normally I’d think an article that satisfied the search string “zombie +computers +Mandik” would be a good thing. Google yourself too much, and this is what you get. From wired.com “Zombie Pfizer Computers Spew Viagra Spam“:

Pfizer’s computers appear to have been infected with malware that has transformed them into zombie computers sending spam at the behest of a hacker. Oddly enough, they are spamming the public’s inboxes with ads for the company’s own product.
[…]
Much of the spam originating from Pfizer’s machines pretends to be sent from Gmail accounts, says Wesson. Products hocked include penis-enlargement products with the names “Mandik” and “Manster,” as well as pharmaceuticals like Viagra, the sleep drug Ambien and the sedative Valium. The spam also includes ads for Cialis, a Viagra competitor made by Eli Lilly.

I’m changing my name to “Manster”.

Photos (c) 2005 by Pete Mandik

I’m working on my first draft of Key Terms in Philosophy of Mind, a book under contract with Continuum Books. From time to time I’ll be posting draft entries on Brain Hammer, especially for controversial or especially difficult to arrive at definitions. Here’s “modal argument”:

modal argument, an argument for property dualism (see DUALISM, PROPERTY) in which key roles are played by the modal concepts of necessity and possibility or contingency. The basic gist of the argument involves arguing from premises concerning the necessity of identities (if x=y then necessarily x=y) and the contingency of any relation between mental and physical properties. Since, allegedly, for any physical property, it is possible for it to be instantiated without any mental property to thereby be instantiated, no physical property is identical to any physical property. According to a version of the modal argument formulated by Saul Kripke, although all identities, if true, are necessarily true, some identities, such as the identities found in natural science (like “water is identical to H2O”) seem contingent. According to Kripke, the appearance of contingency for such identities can be explained away in the following manner: what is contingently related to H2O is the watery appearance to us of H2O. While H2O is necessarily water, H2O is not necessarily water-appearing to us. So, any apparently contingent identity, that is, any apparently possible non-identity, is not really a non-identity if the appearance of contingency can be explained away in terms of a contingent relation between the appearance and the reality of a phenomenon. Contrapositively, if some apparent possible non-identity cannot be explained away in such a manner, then it is a real non-identity. Kripke offers that the apparent contingent relation between PAIN and neurophysiological events (“c-fibers firing”) does not admit of any such explaining away. Since, according to Kripke, anything that appears to the mind as a pain just is a pain: there is no distinction between the appearance of pain and the reality of pain. In versions of the modal argument due to David Chalmers, the contingency of mental-physical relations is supposed to follow from the conceivability of hypothetical scenarios such as the INVERTED SPECTRUM and the ZOMBIE.

I’m no fan of panpsychism, but I’m not going to let that stop me from posting on it. I’d like to raise questions about theories of which panpsychism is but one instance. Call such theories “pan-x-isms”. My main question is whether there are any non-controversial examples in which a pan-x-ism turned out to be a good idea.

One of the main problems that any pan-x-ism runs into is to explain the apparent differences between x’s and non-x’s. Thales’s panhydrism invites the question of what’s the difference between water and the glass that contains it. Is glass merely slow water? Another is that once everything is alleged to be explainable in terms of x, you pretty much give up hope of explaining x.

But back to my main question. When has pan-x-ism been a good idea? Post-Aristotelian conceptions of space where there aren’t distinct spaces for distinct substances (“fire goes here”) I think are pretty clearly improved conceptions, but should they count as pan-x-isms?
Pancomputationalism gets kicked around now and again but it’s about as controversial as panpsychism.

When, if ever, has there been a pan-x-ism that obviously didn’t suck?

The thing I like best about Wikipedia is its obsessively detailed coverage of shit that isn’t real. See, for instance, the absolutely gorgeous entry on fictional martial arts and the best fictional martial art of all, Gun Kata.

Gun kata excerpt:

“Through analysis of thousands of recorded gunfights, the Cleric has determined that the geometric distribution of antagonists in any gun battle is a statistically-predictable element. The Gun Kata treats the gun as a total weapon, each fluid position representing a maximum kill zone, inflicting maximum damage on the maximum number of opponents, while keeping the defender clear of the statistically-traditional trajectories of return fire. By the rote mastery of this art, your firing efficiency will rise by no less than 120%. The difference of a 63% increased lethal proficiency makes the master of the Gun Katas an adversary not to be taken lightly.”

I like thinking that the developers of Gun Kata utilized massive computer simulations to generate new karate moves previously regarded as impossible. That’s computational karate, dude. Sister fields include computational skateboarding, computational parkour, and computational cup stacking.

Thanks, Franklin Scott, for emailing me the following:

I thought you’d appreciate this passage:

Never had a symptom. The pain came like a bullet out of the blue. I was alone when it started. My wife and my daughter had gone out. The pain is often described as the worst pain you can have. The pain was so severe that I would have welcomed anything to relieve it — including death. I wasn’t going to fight it. I look upon death as a part of living, just as some trees lose all their leaves in the winter and have them replaced in the spring. But at the same time, part of me was thinking, What caused this pain? Part of me was doing a diagnosis on myself — which, as it turned out, was correct. Aortic dissection. I’d written more articles about the condition than anybody in the world, and I resigned myself to having a heart stoppage. The pain didn’t teach me anything about the heart. It simply emphasized what I had already learned.

- Michael DeBakey, Heart Surgeon

February 28, 2008, Esquire

http://www.esquire.com/features/what-ive-learned/michael-debakey-0308?src=rss

The following two videos are for those who have been enjoying the discussion threads on computation and emergence, respectively. Check out the discussion at Cognitive Daily re the emergence video.

I’m working on my first draft of Key Terms in Philosophy of Mind, a book under contract with Continuum Books. From time to time I’ll be posting draft entries on Brain Hammer, especially for controversial or especially difficult to arrive at definitions. Here’s “emergence”:

emergence, the arising of a property in a relatively unpredictable way from the interaction of other properties. Alternately, the instantiation of a property by a whole that is due to “more than the sum of its parts”, or, less colloquially, due to properties of the parts in a way more complicated than mere summing. Part of what’s difficult in supplying a viable notion of emergence is the task of characterizing a relevant notion of unpredictability that isn’t due simply to the current ignorance of investigators. Early proponents of the existence of emergent properties claimed that certain chemical properties like the liquidity or solubility of certain chemical samples were emergent on the grounds that they could not be predicted by knowledge of the nature and interaction of their atomic constituents. However, as chemistry and physics progressed, such claims were discovered to be false. Another difficulty in supplying a viable notion of emergence is in giving a precise meaning to the imprecise phrase “more than the sum of its parts”. We can see that there are clear cases in which the property of a whole is more than a sum of properties of its parts but that the properties of the whole are unlikely to be regarded by anyone as having emerged from the properties of the parts. For example, the temperature of a gas is the average kinetic energy of its constituent molecules. As such, it is thus not simply the sum of the molecule’s kinetic energy. It is instead the sum of their kinetic energy divided by the number of molecules. There’s a sense in which being a divided sum of its parts is more than the sum of its parts: since it involves division, it involves a further arithmetical operation than mere summing. However, this seems not to get at the sort of thing that emergentists have had in mind, perhaps since the result of the operation is insufficiently surprising or unpredictable. Emergentism, the proposal that there exist emergent properties, is closely related to non-reductive physicalism (see PHYSICALISM, NON-REDUCTIVE).