Interconnected is by Matt Webb, who can also be found at S&W.

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19 August, 2008:

Posted at 10h20. Permalink.

Lightning turns the sky into graph paper. L-- shouts 'this way,' and his bright eyes target me with reflected horizontals and verticals. The thunder plays four/four in my gut. We trip on curbs and scrape along walls, running - ricocheting - down narrow city lanes. There's a deeper sound, God making a plosive, the opening of whale song, and then light, and I realise it's another negentropy bomb, on the next street. Nothing for a second. In the gloom the city looks identical but raised to a higher octave. Potential. 4. 3. 2. 1. Then the world exhales and drops into regularity. A creak as the building next to us attempts to adjust to the sudden order imposed on its far side. The crystal structure spreads, architecture aligning, physics gentrifying, roads straightening, square paving slabs unfolding from one another. Another creak and a slump this time, L-- is caught in dust and rubble. I crouch over him; there's blood on my hands as I hold his head and the lightning is the same shape as his body. 'They're homogenising us out of existence,' he says. His teeth are red. 'Find the Deterritorial Army. Tell them the layers of emergence are becoming too tightly coupled. Tell them objects are no longer sufficiently mobile on the substrate. Don't wait.' It smells of wet brick; mysteriously I think of ferns. L--'s blood is thickening into hexagons. I turn and run.

7 August:

Posted at 8h51. Permalink.

Books read July 2008, with date finished:

If, like 2007, I want to read 104 books this year, I should've hit 61 by the end of July. I made 62, but I'm not making so much time for it right now so we'll see what happens.

101 Things got my brain fizzing and has given me language for ideas I've not been able to articulate before. But this month (I like to recommend one book a month), Stand on Zanzibar is well worth your time: it's a collage of quotes and narrative, out of which a story about an over-populated world slowly emerges. It's like watching a cloud form, or walking past Quantum Cloud.

3 July:

Posted at 9h43. Permalink.

Two kinds of training: respondent conditioning is when you perform two events simultaneously so the subject confuses cause and effect. So think of Pavlov and his dogs: the dogs salivate when he gives them food, and then he rings a bell whenever he gives them food and the dogs get used to that. Or rather, they get conditioned to that. Then they confuse cause and effect and end up salivating whenever the bell rings, whether the food comes or not.

(Pavlov cut the dogs' throats to find this out. His theory of conditional reflexes dominated institutional Soviet thinking for decades, in part leading to both the Soviet rejection of cybernetics and their late development of computers, and also to Lysenko rejecting Mendelian genetics. Lysenko directed farm policy under Stalin, and his misguided theory of agrobiology led to mass crop failure and starvation.)

Another kind is operant conditioning. It relies on consequences after the event to produce conditioning, and it's more suitable for voluntary behaviour. It's what they use on dolphins.

There are a few types: you can give a reward for good behaviour; you can remove pain for good behaviour; you can actively punish bad behaviour; you can remove a pleasant stimulus when bad behaviour occurs.

If you give me a biscuit every time I make you tea, I'll likely make you more tea.

The most powerful form is variable-interval reinforcement. That's when the reward doesn't happen every time, and you end up working harder to get it. It's as if you're trying to figure out the pattern, to get the reward to come more often. It's why email is addictive: you hit that 'get mail' button and get your reward, but not always, just sometimes, and that conditions you into checking more and more.

One weird thing that happens, in operant conditioning, is the extinction burst. There's a nice example I read, I don't recall where, about elevators. Imagine you live on the 10th floor and you take the elevator up there. One day it stops working, but for a couple of weeks you enter the elevator, hit the button, wait a minute, and only then take the stairs. After a while, you'll stop bothering to check whether the elevator's working again--you'll go straight for the stairs. That's called extinction.

Here's the thing. Just before you give up entirely, you'll go through an extinction burst. You'll walk into the elevator and mash all the buttons, hold them down, press them harder or repeatedly, just anything to see whether it works. If it doesn't work, hey, you're not going to try the elevator again.

But if it does work! If it does work then bang, you're conditioned for life. That behaviour is burnt in.

Or a baby, crying to get attention, will have one last huge attempt to get attention before learning that tactic isn't going to work.

I have a friend - again I can't remember who - who saw a talk from a fellow who trained dolphins - and I don't remember why or where - and he mentioned this extinction burst. You trail off the fish rewards for leaping through the hoop, and let extinction occur, and then when the extinction burst happens - you know, the dolphin is trying everything it knows, going crazy trying to get you to notice it and feed it fish - bang, that's when you get in with the big reward and there you go, the dolphin's hooked.

Anyhow.

It strikes me that dating, when successful, may produce operant conditioning.

It also strikes me that some people may have personalities that naturally produce operant conditioning to certain behaviours in the people around them, simply by acting with exactly the right balance of predictable/erratic or aloof/intimate.

Back to dating. It would naturally be most successful if a couple condition one another reciprocally. And it makes me wonder: could this be routinized? Or rather, could this be a pattern followed deliberately? And if so, could that be a product, for sale?

I don't believe that knowing the conditioning was occurring would interfere - my muscles still develop at the gym even though I'm working them artificially - but it would have to be done carefully.

How could you produce this artificially? I'm not sure how. Maybe a pattern of dates where one partner or the other is instructed not to show, almost at random? A system which means all communication is mediated through something which is unreliable, so it occasionally drops calls--and then that system is manipulated in order to produce the extinction, the extinction burst, and eventual pay-off?

That is: a couple dating should have available manufactured, reciprocal, variable-interval operant conditioning, with a pay-off timed to the artificially produced extinction burst, to trigger mutual addition, and they should be able to buy this in a shop.

It's an interesting design challenge. Here are my criteria: it has to be adopted knowingly by both parties (so no Rules of Seduction games); it has to be reciprocal and involve as little technology as possible; it has to be productisable--that is, it can't be the side-effect of another system: it has to be able to be actually or virtually packaged up and sold. And the usual product rules also apply: how are people going to understand and discover it; does it fit with natural flows (like, if the communication is mediated, won't they just swap phone numbers and use those instead, because it's easier); do all the halting states have ways out; how does use of this product act to expand the market for this product. Other than that, it's all open.

I am aware that talking like this makes me sound like a sociopath.

2 July:

Posted at 22h54. Permalink.

#3books. I asked people on Twitter, earlier today, to share the 3 most recent books they've read. Here are mine; you can join in by adding '#3books' to your message. The responses are brilliant: you can read them at both at Summize and at Twemes (neither site gets the full collection unfortunately). Thanks all for playing! That's my reading list for the next 6 months sorted out.

Posted at 15h50. Permalink.

Books read June 2008, with date finished:

I'm a huge fan of DeLanda. I find his language and the concepts useful operators in thinking about work and life in general. But this is my second run at A New Philosophy and while assemblage theory hits home hard, I sense that he plays fast and loose with his examples without moderating his language to compensate. That makes it hard for me to take as seriously as I'd like.

From Counterculture to Cyberculture tracks Stewart Brand's rather Count de Saint-Germain existence through the significant events of the latter half of the 20th century. I enjoy this kind of history, and in particular I have a hobby interest in the central role of cybernetics over the last 60 years in the making of the modern world; Turner did not disappoint.

This month my single recommendation is Levi, if only because he tells personal, far-reaching stories, and then drops in lines like man is a centaur, a tangle of flesh and mind, divine inspiration and dust.

Certainly, I am a centaur.

26 June:

Posted at 21h14. Permalink.

Interesting08, last weekend, was seriously tremendous. I spoke for a little bit, and my slides are now online.

10 June:

Posted at 7h46. Permalink.

"The source of a diamond is a kimberlite pipe, a form of diatreme--a relatively small hole bored through the crust of the earth by an expanding combination of carbon dioxide and water which rises from within the earth's mantle and moves so fast driving magma to the surface that is breaks into the atmosphere at supersonic speeds. Such events have occurred at random through the history of the earth, and a kimberlite pipe could explode in any number of places next year.

"...

"There is a layer in the mantle, averaging about sixty miles below the earth's surface, through which seismic tremors pass slowly. The softer the rock, the slower the tremor--so it is inferred that the low-velocity zone, as it is called, is close to its melting point. In the otherwise rigid mantle, it is a level of lubricity upon which the plates of the earth can slide, interacting at their borders to produce the effects known as plate tectonics. The so-termed lithospheric plates, in other words, consist of crust and uppermost mantle and can be as much as ninety miles thick. Diamond pipes are believed to originate a good deal deeper than that--and in a manner which, as most geologists would put it, "is not well understood." After drawing fuel from surrounding mantle rock--compressed water from mica, in all likelihood, and carbon dioxide from other minerals--the material is thought to work slowly upward into the overlying plate. Slow it may be at the start, but a hundred and twenty miles later is comes out of the ground at Mach 2. The result is a modest crater, like a bullet hole between the eyes."

--Annals of the Former World, John McPhee.

2 June:

Posted at 17h48. Permalink.

Let me speak seriously for a moment. As my parents die and my grandparents die, I feel progressively cut adrift. They precede me. They tethered me to the past, to the bedrock behind. We see the world in fives: two generations back, our children, and our children's children, and ourselves. Time is a little planet with close horizons. I find myself in the middle generation, almost cut loose with a single rope now. Let go. And it's my job to carry the torch and god help me if I stumble, because I'm it now, those towering experiences behind me have passed the baton on, and that's the burden of the middle. I don't have children and until I do it's a marathon to the far shore, a hard march every step hard won, to clasp hands finally with the next generation who will clasp hands with the next, and they'll steady me, I'll have done my job and I'll be pulled along to the future.

I know a fellow who met a fellow whose mother makes garden gnomes, and when his father died, his mother made a gnome out of the ashes and she keeps it in the front garden of the family home.

1 June:

Posted at 16h57. Permalink.

Books read May 2008, with date finished:

The books on patterns have been inspirational, as was Woodward which has opened up new ways of thinking for me. But I unreservedly recommend Annals of the Former World which is geological in topic, size, and narrative form. Astounding and volumetric.

26 May:

Posted at 16h03. Permalink.

The Geometry of Music: the cosmos of chords consists of weird, multidimensional spaces, known as orbifolds, that turn back on themselves with a twist.

Dmitri Tymoczko has created several movies of orbifolds. It's impossible, watching Chopin visualised on a Mobius strip, not to anthropomorphise the chord components, ballroom dancing around one another, the tension in the music building and held as the partners move apart, and harmonious closure achieved when they move together.

Then, watching Chopin in 4-dimensional space, I get confused with melody making in Super Mario Galaxy, where the level-select screen responds to the cursor with changes in the ambient music, and so you can use it as an instrument.

Cause and effect are confused. Which comes first, the visualisation or the music? If Tymoczko watched a partner and I dancing, could he interpret the plan view of the ballroom as an orbifold, run his algorithms backwards, and play generated Chopin that was magically in sync with our improvisation?

Michel Gondry's video for Around the World (Daft Punk) is the greatest ever made. The dancers move into and out of the video as the parts of the music they represent. The circular stage allows loops in the music to show up in the choreography.

Gondry's commentary; the making of Around the World.

And just as, finally, the blurring of music and representation Gondry further explored with Star Guitar seem to be making their way into generated music visualisations, in five years time we'll see 3d avatars auto-generating visualisations as complex as the 1997 Around the World video.

And five years after that, our dancing in clubs will alter the music which will alter our dancing, and the music and the visualisation/dancing will be translations of one another, and no way to tell which is first, because none is.

The Super Mario Galaxy orchestra recording Gusty Garden level soundtrack.

So let's let go of cause and effect as an explanatory framework. It never existed anyway, it was just easy. Let's demonise people who believe in it.

Causist people think things happen for a reason. If you make a causist, dirty causist, encounter some phenomenon, they'll point at some proceeding event or circumstance as if a. that caused the thing, or b. that explains it.

Explaining can't be done by looking at the past. The past is dead, filthy causist. If you try, the past retroactively becomes a series of events that were occurring towards a goal which, at the time, they are not. Explanations are to exist solely and entirely in the present, or not at all.

Well then, explanations are now no longer causes but networks of mutual contingencies. We can look at explanations not as predictions, but as chords that have reached closure. Seeing an explanation, we can feel relief that the world is at one.

To explain a thing is to tell the story of a lattice of things and events. To narrate a crystal.

Sometimes. Explanations dance around one another. Closure is never reached entirely, and that's why phenomena unfold like music. So mostly explanations are not complete, in which case almost every event - every note - is an exception.

Causists, dirty causists, filthy causists, are unable to see that the world is almost entirely exceptional.