On consensing…

Posted on February 7, 2010 by Leona

[updated 2011-10-20].
We live in a much faster-paced world today than our ancestors did, and we have to make decisions very quickly (something that, as it turns out, I really, really suck at… but less of that, and more about what I intended to write about in the first place).

We like to reduce decision-making to the equivalent of answering a multiple-choice questionnaire. Take ordering fastfood, or the way our voting systems work, for example (pick one: candidate A, B or C, etc). This has, as intended, taken out lots of hassle from choices we must make everyday. Continue reading →

re-understanding computing

Posted on May 30, 2009 by Leona

I was reading this blog post on the expanding notion of what computing is, over at Broader perspective. I like the inclusion of ideas from the biological realm, because it’s one of those areas which proves once and for all that the universe is one giant computation, with smaller computations piggybacking off of bigger (or perhaps I should say deeper) ones.

We are too used to the idea of computation as something that a machine has to be built specifically for, and dedicated to doing. The fact of even walking over to such a machine and switching it on is itself an intricately complex computation… one that we’re not really responsible for (thank God).

Adjusting to the idea that, some computations have been going on long before we ever got here and will probably be churning out results for some unknowable process long after we’ve vanished, is one that will help every technology discipline on earth. We only need to seed our environment with processing capacity: give the things around us energy, memory and time (or some simulacrum thereof), and we might eventually be able to look back at the risibly-named ‘information age’ and see the nonsensical tautology at its core: all ages have been about, and been created from, and are destined for, the processing of information.

I look forward to the day when we don’t have to fire up a laptop or netbook and write software components.

I’d like to be able to instantiate a ‘solution space’ wherever I happen to be standing, whether it’s in the kitchen or an office or a green field, and call the elements forth.

I’d like to lie back on a lazy sunny day on an intelligent lawn, shielding my squinting eyes from the sun, and be able to say, “you, blade of grass. Can you ask all your friends to re-allocate .0001 percent of their photosynthesing apparatus and help me solve this equation? I own shares in the sprinkler botnet since I live in the nearby building and I’ll get you more nutrients this afternoon. Promise. Here. I’ll have my endocrines send you the algorithms in a drop of sweat. Is there a co-opted ladybug nearby that could walk across my finger and pick it up? Lemme know… I’m waiting..”

Information processing, the brain and self-awareness.

Posted on December 30, 2008 by Leona

What’s the point of having a self? [Updated 2010-03-21]

First off, I don’t know the answer. I never thought of it until someone asked the question. This whole post is a stab in the dark, and I thoroughly expect to be wincing and re-editing this long after I click ‘publish’.

Anyhow. This is what I’m thinking so far:

So you have reality (such as that is).
And I am told that we perceive this reality through sense organs.

And that these sense organs begin to share information and communicate with each other, leading to a nervous system.

Then these nervous systems start to evolve hubs, which eventually need a control center of sorts, and hey presto you’ve got a brain.

But the system as a whole needs some sort of edge over the environment. A sort of prescience, if you will. A better understanding of cause and effect, for solving ‘what would happen if’ scenarios, and strategies for keeping hind-legs out of predator mouths.

So. Some neuronal subnets get good at recording sequences of patterns in the outside world, and playing them back; emulating. And with a bit of piggybacking and rewiring, those subnets get coralled into a new mode of processing: Simulation. The brain begins to maintain it’s own internal model of reality, and it pays off, for the most part. So far so good.

But soon the ‘simulation’ gets out of hand, starts strutting about upstairs and calling itself “I”; forgets to maintain the vital umbilici to the ‘ground-floor’ reality it grew out of, and well… turns in on itself, in a myopic, navel-gazing stupor of self-investigation. The solipsistic qualities of the ‘simulation’ detach it once and for all from the rest of the brain’s functions, birthing the illusion of dualism. Continue reading →

Memes: biochemical feedback loops, not viral ads.

Posted on February 3, 2008 by Leona

There is a lot of mildly conflicting information about memes. They have been categorised as everything from viral ideas (from folks in the marketing / advertising camp) to copied behaviour that spreads through a culture (the behaviourist / socio-anthropologist camp).

The basic idea is that genes do for biological evolution what memes do for cultural evolution. Beyond that, however, it gets vague and fluffy very quickly… unless you’re prepared to wade through Robert Aunger’s verbose yet far more rigorous analysis of what memes might actually be… Continue reading →

Visualisation of large datasets

Posted on January 18, 2008 by Leona

Go to http://visualcomplexity.com and check out a rather interesting collection of images based on large / hierarchical data sets. Pretty neat, huh?

None of us can hold thousands of variables in our heads and not get confused. So, with some creative imagery, we can tackle monstrous datasets by offloading some of the information processing to visual centers in the brain, allowing us to grasp the overall structure of the system we’re looking at.

A lot of the ‘radial’ looking graphs are done by mapping hierarchical tree-format data to the unit hyperbolic disc. It is one of my favourite visualisation methods because it lends itself to more user-friendly methods of browsing data – panning zooming and scanning.

With obvious uses in GIS-related (mapping and earth sciences) and biological sciences (think genomics) , visualisation of complex datasets has taken off in lots of other fields – the VC site lists “knowledge networks” as it’s biggest category!