Just finished reading David Brin’s Existence, a multifaceted story about the prospects for intelligent species’ survival, technological growth, and eventual exploration of the cosmos.

In view of the Fermi Paradox, will mankind find a path to the stars?  Brin offers numerous (both currently-relevant and highly imaginative near-future) reasons suggesting that the answer might be "No." These are the book’s true antagonists. The true protagonist, in my view, is humanity (ourselves) and the possibilities of what we might become (assuming we prove capable of sharing our existence with cybernetic sensoria, artificial intelligences/beings, uplifted animal species, resurrected Neanderthals, artificially augmented autistics, and perhaps simulated aliens). The message here is that humanity must eschew intellectual rigidity and fear of the unknown, must embrace complexity and strangeness, and must be prepared to endure profound change.

The tale spans multiple decades and many lives. Many pivotal events are mentioned by historical reference, but not “lived through.” The ending is less a resolution than an encouraging vision. Characters fade in and out of our notice in service to the dramatic focus on humanity’s struggle to avoid “failure modes” and find an almost impossibly difficult path to survival. Some characters stick around long enough for readers to start  caring about them, but are then snatched away as the focus moves on. The reader is left intrigued but often unsatisfied. I suspect that this is intentional.

Existence is a deeply-thought-out . . . well, not so much a novel, perhaps, as a fictionalized futurist tour-de-force. Prospective readers be advised: this is not escapist Science Fiction. 

Existence by David Brin

Originally posted 5 Nov 2012 on Google+

"Sergeant Withers, round up some volunteers. When the smoke clears and the dust settles, have a couple of your men run out there to the test site and quaff a few of those brewskis. I want to know how they taste. Got it, Sergeant?"

"Uh . . . Yes sir! Right away, sir!"

Beer and the Apocalypse

Originally posted 22 Sep 2012 on Google+

"In Earth, among millions of lineages or organisms and perhaps 50 billion speciation events, only one led to high intelligence; this makes me believe its utter improbability."
-- Ernst Mayr

Could this same line of reasoning be used to contend for intelligence's utter triviality--its ultimate irrelevance to survival? Is it simply one of countless many extreme approaches to adaptation, comparable to giraffes' necks or koalas' eucalypt diet. Are humans filling an otherwise empty ecological niche?

Originally posted 20 Oct 2012 on Google+

Belief exhibits a sort of "regression to the extreme," according to this model. Given the state of our culture, I guess I'm not surprised. But personally, I've often found extremism to be maladaptive.

" . . . when zealots are below a critical value, the system remains similar to how it started. But above a critical value, the zealots quickly convert the entire population . . ."

Why Moderate Beliefs Rarely Prevail

Originally posted 14 Oct 2012 on Google+

"Whereas books and newspapers typically are combed over by fact-checkers and carefully rewritten by editors, Facebook posts tend to be free flowing and more closely resemble speech . . ."

"If memories are the product of evolution, then the ability to remember socially derived conversations may have provided an advantage that helped early humans survive , , ,"

I wonder how precisely the authors of this study think survival-challenged early humans could have been exposed to fact-checked, edited non-conversational content. In other words, over what other content does a facility for remembering social blather give the advantage to an early human?

"Urgh! Bobo no! Stop wasting your time studying those paleolithic toxicology monographs and listen to your friends' random babbling about which roots and berries make them vomit."

"The study involved three different experiments with a sample that largely included undergraduate females . . ."

I also wonder just how much we can learn about the strategies of survival-challenged early humans from the behaviors of twenty-first century undergraduate females.

Neural Networking: Online Social Content Easier to Recall Than Printed Info

Originally posted 27 Jan 2013 on Google+

"Quality is never an accident. It is always the result of intelligent effort."
--John Ruskin 

You Had One Job

Originally posted 23 Feb 2013 on Google+

"Is it possible for something to be true but not understandable?"

"But what if it were possible to create discoveries that no human being can ever understand?"

A lot of epistemological smoke and mirrors are strewn about in this Slate article. If I get what's going on here, the point of this piece is to suggest that some physical laws or scientific facts that are fundamentally incomprehensible to human minds may be known or knowable by computers.

Didn't we more-or-less get past this with the Critique of Pure Reason? Yes, I see that picture of Karl Popper next to the lede, but he's just there to illustrate a minor point about scientific proof--one that would apply equally to artificial and human minds.

I'm answering No to the first question, based not on my sanguine esteem for the human intellect, but merely on the fact that nobody (not even the hypothetical hyper-intelligent artificial brain) will be able to make sense of what he means by "true" in that sentence. This is one of those Dinge an sich "trues" that won't stand up to scrutiny.

I'm going to answer No to the second one, too. Oh yes, it's possible that some distant race of intelligent aliens might be able to "discover" something about themselves that humans will never be able to know because we will never encounter them. That's a reasonable use of "discover." But for "discover" to make sense in any non-special-secret way, the discovery would have to be comprehensible to the human mind if it were exposed to it.

Nah, I'm going to say that I need a much better account of what a "discovery" might be like that can only be recognized and appreciated by an artificial mind.

The author of this article hides that difficult concept behind the familiar word "discovery" as if it should not be a problem. It is. A machine's iterative processes may detect patterns or relationships within massive amounts of data that no human individual would have the time or capacity to study. Is this a discovery? How would I (or anyone else, including another machine) know?

Explain It to Me Again, Computer

In this gem of a blog entry, Sabine Hossenfelder takes on the so-called simulation hypothesis (the idea that Reality is a digital simulation). She finds it just little bit too coincidental that such an idea would emerge now that we share a popular understanding of computer simulation.

"People today ponder the idea that reality is a computer simulation in the same way that post-Newtonian intellectuals thought of the universe as a clockwork." 

"Popular culture creates hypotheses, and present culture is a collective limit to our imagination."

Based on these observations, I am expecting that proponents of the simulation hypothesis will soon be telling us that we should stop worrying about someone kicking the plug on the box running our universe. Surely Reality will have been moved into the "Cloud" by now. And before long we'll all have a new TOS to sign so they can re-implement Reality as a Web services-based subscription model.

 The simulation hypothesis and other things I don't believe  

Twenty years ago the science fiction TV series Babylon 5 premiered. Despite numerous setbacks, the creative team produced some outstanding television. Here's an overview article from io9.

 The Strange, Secret Evolution of Babylon 5   

I finished this remarkable novel in August 2012. It's a bit overwrought and suffers from some unnecessary obscurity in the climax, but overall it feels well-researched and it rewards the attentive reader. It covers some thematic territory that Science Fiction has always been very well-suited to, including the nature of the mind, identity, consciousness, and perception, but is set within an alien-first-contact plot that keeps things moving at a lively pace. Published under a Creative Commons license, Blindsight is a reader's bargain. 

 Blindsight by Peter Watts     

Originally posted 24 Aug 2012 on Google+