Simulacrumbs

Unsustainability, History, and Fuck-You-Nomics: Part I

2012-02-27T14:47:00.006-08:00

Once again I've been flagging on my promise to update this blog more, but I am actually hoping to put a stop to that. I was working on an entry a couple of weeks ago that just didn't make it into here; though I'll salvage some parts.

I wanted to take a brief digression here. My interests have turned away from heavy literary theory into a combination of hands-on game design and understanding the current economic crisis through integrated complex systems. The two of those has caused me to start working on a microeconomics simulation; still deciding whether the theme will be cheese/mice or colors--they could both lend themselves to very nice systems.

But what of this on the economic crisis? As my intellectual direction changes, I feel like talking solely about aesthetics and technology doesn't cover the whole of the lens through which I look at the world. With the world economy on the brink of a profound change and the utter uncertainty that that brings to the future, I'd like to dedicate some of my time on this blog to talking about the subject.

Part I: Liquidity

So, where to begin...

It begins in my fall 2008 class on the subprime crisis; a clueless junior who had the privilege of meeting Jim Rokakis, former treasurer of Coyahoga County (Cleveland and its surrounding area.) As we all know, Cleveland was pretty awesome and then became gutted as manufacturing left the city. Apparently it experienced some revival in the early 2000s, but I don't know this, nor is it important. What's important is that it got devastated by the wave of defaults and foreclosures that ripped through its housing market.

This is where I was first introduced to the virtuous/vicious circle hypothesis that underlies what people know as "Keynesian" economics (some claim that this is a perversion; once again, I don't know.) Before that, we have classical and austrian economics talking about how the market corrects itself with supply and demand. Keynes, from what it seems, had a keen intuition for nonlinearity. Remember that term; anyone who ignores it shouldn't have an opinion on this.

Now, the reason why non-linearity is so important, is that the effects of a negative event can be disruptive in unforeseen ways. If there is a bubble in say... housing, the effects of its bursting will go well beyond the simple market connection of houses coming back down to realistic prices. With that drop, many people's savings are evaporated, and so they can't buy goods. If that happens, then they can't go out with their family to their weekly-movie night, so the movie theaters and restaurants in the area take a hit. Without revenue, they fire people; people who already may be having trouble paying off their house's mortgage. That of course means that housing prices go down even further. And of course, the people who loaned the money get screwed too. But suffice it to say, there is a cycle, so that a simple market correction can turn into a disproportionate cycle of people losing money--people who were perfectly responsible but have lost economic opportunity thanks to being at the wrong place at the wrong time.

This phenomenon is called a deflationary spiral. Why deflationary? Because the result of this is that people have less money, prices and wages lower, and so on. So money, in a sense, becomes worth more. This sounds like it shouldn't be a big deal then, doesn't the drop in prices make up for the hit to people's wallets?

Well, not really; because it doesn't quite cancel out. Economic activity, the very thing that this whole complicated system of money represents, slows down. People lose jobs, business go out; and suddenly we have a scarcity of resources to go around. That only intensifies the spiral. Like they say, you need to spend money to make money. There is also one other major factor... debt!

Huh? Debt? Oh wait, right! You still owe the same amount in dollars if you have a mortgage, silly me! Silly, silly, me! Doesn't matter whether your dollar "buys" more; if you have less money, but you owe the same amount of it, you're getting screwed! And this was happening to a lot of people. This is no good, there's got to be some way out of this. It's like the whole body is slowing down, but if only we could get someone to start moving again, this might all be fixed. If only we could get enough people to start running together that they'll bring back the momentum. Wait, we could use... *fanfare* the government!

And that is what we did, we enacted economic stimulus. This was done in the great depression; first with the new deal, and then with World War II.* If we can act early and re-invigorate enough people and businesses, then we can start growing out of it. As for the debt the government has to take on; well, in many cases, the loss will be a lot less than what we'd lose from all of the economic downturn.

But let's take a step back. Here we're talking about goods and services, but we're forgetting about one actor involved in this whole crisis: the banks. We love them, we hate them; can't live with 'em, and certainly can't live without 'em. Because of that last clause, we bailed them out. But we didn't stop there--the federal reserve, the central bank of the united states, the ones who create all of the currency in the U.S. Economy (in other words: they have infinite money; their job is simply to maintain the system of exchange that keeps everyone working together. Whether this is good or bad is not part of the point I'm making), decided to lend money to these large financial institutions at virtually no interest rate.

Now, this can all be very very very jargony to those who are new to this stuff. I'm here to try my best to explain this all in very plain English--partially because I believe that the convoluted language of economics is actually responsible for creating a lot of the sophistry that I believe is at large. But anyway, for those who are confused, you might be asking what does any of that mean? Why are they lending money at lower interest rates, or even bailing them out?

And that brings us to the word in bold from the heading, liquidity. Its logic is actually very similar to that of stimulus if you look closely. Let's have a little thought experiment. Alex, John and Christina are all playing outside when they see Jimmy and Katie kissing on a bench. They have a debate about if they're going to become an item. Alex bets Christina that they certainly will not, and willingly bets $100. Christina, however, later realizes that Alex may very well be right, but she can't take back the bet she already made. She decides to hedge her bet by making a $100 bet with John, who believes that they will become an item. He agrees.

But wait, Alex realizes if he loses, he won't have the money to pay Christina. He'll need to offset the bet. When he talks to John, he finds himself in the same predicament, so they agree to make bets opposite to what they think. Now, it turns out that Jimmy and Katie don't get together (because Alex is always right, just saying), so the bets get triggered. There's just one problem--nobody can pay back anyone. Alex needs to pay John, but he can't get the money from Christina, who is trying to get the money that John owes her. But John hasn't gotten the money from Alex yet!

They're all stressing out, not realizing that this all balances out because they all talked in private. Just as they're about to burst into tears, their parents find out and get them all together. They decide they're going to show them how this is done in the adult world. They decide to loan Alex $100, with which he pays Christina. Christina pays John, and John pays Alex back. Then Alex pays John, and John finally pays Christina. The day is saved!

What was this we experienced? A crisis of liquidity. All the bets cancelled each other out, but without any initial money to pay, nobody could get the cycle going. This is what was happening with our banks--they made similar such bets in the form of leverage, the lifeblood of economic expansion (try getting a car or a house without some kind of loan.) Without sufficient money, banks can't lend money to get businesses operating again, and the deflationary spiral gets much, much worse. And that's why the government and the central bank acted in the way they did; they believed that the pipes were simply clogged, and a temporary burst of cash could clear them out.

And so both this liquidity crisis in the banks and the idea of a deflationary spiral are the same thing. Resources were (mis)allocated in such a way that suddenly, even though they were there, the un-coordinated behavior of the group caused them to stop being used, worsening people's standards of living in a catch-22.

And that's what I believed this was about for quite some time. The economy had misallocated its resources, and letting it correct itself would cause massive disruptions that are at the end of the day are fundamentally irrelevant to the problem that needed to be fixed. Some cash would prevent the cycle of disruption, and we'd pay the relatively small cost with the inevitable growth of a healthy economy.

But then why aren't we growing out of it? Is this just an extremely nasty version of a liquidity crisis, one that would require far more stimulus and patience, or is there something else impeding growth? And what is growth, anyway?

I will leave you with this video (not made by me) as a preview of my next post.

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*This itself is subject to debate in a way. Here is a link to a good counter-point article: http://www.atimes.com/atimes/global_economy/mh24dj01.html

2012-01-26T21:23:00.000-08:00

The point of a simulation is not to quantify human behavior and complex systems. It is to set in motion a narrative from which people can take ideas and experiences.

Goals, Games, and Stories

2012-01-09T15:47:00.000-08:00

Writing a blog post on Microsoft Word makes me feel like I’m writing a paper of some sort, so all of this formal language keeps coming into my head. Even writing this sentence in MSWord is a bit weird, but if I don’t remind myself that this is for the blog, I’ll continue to write as if I had some thesis to prove (laugh track.)

But anyway, I was going to talk about The Sims. I was having a conversation with a friend the other day and I think that he hit the nail on the head when he complained that it was Taylorist. I’m not the expert on Taylorism, but it’s generally a philosophy that dominated workplaces a few decades ago by emphasizing repeated motions and compartmentalized processes that maximize efficiency at a given task. Think McDonalds—its “killer feature” being that it made food much more efficiently by using an assembly-line process in which every person does a single task. Yum!

Now, in particular, it went across that same line of reasoning a lot of us may have about the game—we obsess over making our characters eat breakfast and go to work, forgetting that we’re asking them to do the most mundane things that we’re generally avoiding by playing video games. Of course the catch is that we generally don’t operate the same way in real life—eating breakfast, going to work and engaging in seemingly rote self-improvement are generally situated in something other than a single-minded numbers game. I admit, however, I’ve fallen into that trap, and I think many others have; where the idea of self-improvement escapes any sort of idea of life and mindfulness and we suddenly hope to sit down for a few hours and mindlessly repeat some rote task while increasing some theoretical gauge or meter. And, yes, it’s a horrible way to think about life.

And this is where I think The Sims truly fell short of being a great game despite its being one of the most popular of all time. By the way, I’m only talking about the first one, I haven’t played the sequels. But I digress; a truly great game constantly demands that we make decisions of strategic depth—this means that the challenges are always somewhat novel and that there are few (if any) stretches of performing the same task repeatedly. Nor is it even that such repetition makes a game potentially boring, but rather the horrible serotonin trap that can come out of it. There are those times where I can keep getting a little kick of happiness from repeating some action and getting some minimal amount of feedback. When I give one of my Sims a promotion at work or an extra skill-point, there is a slight jolt of satisfaction that reinforces the sense of reward that will come when I pass the next tiny milestone.

What’s important to me about this dichotomy between the rote and the novel isn’t so much what it says for creating a game with great gameplay, but what it means for creating a game that offers a true narrative experience. As I’ve said before (though maybe not on this particular blog), what separates games from other mass media (if you consider games a mass medium—hard to say when such a popular thing is only taken seriously by a narrow demographic) is that it doesn’t offer any sort of real storytelling. Yes, there are backstories, cutscenes, characters, allusions and motifs within games, but most of these things are cosmetic and not at the core of the experience; even the occasional deeper theme that pervades gameplay only scratches the surface of what a real story will deeply penetrate.

As I write this I am in the passenger seat of a car, riding down a stretch of highway connecting Boston to New York, anticipating the sights of big buildings upon my eventual entry into the FDR drive. I’m listening to “Kids” by Kelli Ali—a song with lyrics that semantically mean little more than noise to my rational mind—but the ambience and percussion behind the vocalist’s low and breath-like voice brings about a feeling of mystery. It is the opposite of what Taylorism, rationalism, utilitarianism, classical economics, score cards and every other measurement that’s been mistaken for reality stands for. The soundtrack to a movie that doesn’t exist—but one that I wouldn’t want to exist anyway; a movie that maybe one day I can borrow a few scenes from but leave the rest in the unprocessed ether of the unstructured and the uninterpreted.

This is, of course, the instinct that art and storytelling invoke in us. Nobody gives a shit how many midichlorians Luke Skywalker gains between A New Hope and Return of the Jedi and when I watch Mad Men, I’m hardly thinking about Peggy Olsen’s iron march of progress (though it goes without saying that I’m rooting for her—she’s one of the only decent people at the agency.) But they do have something in common with even the most stereotypical video games, they have goals; that is, goals of a certain nature. We see change over time, infer motives in characters and follow a journey. It’s just that this journey is of an entirely different nature than that which is stamped, filed, indexed, briefed, de-briefed and numbered; it’s one in which the path matters more than the destination—what more mathematical types would call “path dependent.” At its core, it refuses to acknowledge gain without loss, pleasure without pain, joy without melancholy—a far cry from the one-track “pursuit of happiness” (as defined by what the game tells you it is) that The Sims beckons us to.

This isn’t to say that games never offer anything similar to this experience. We can satisfy the simple desire to see interesting things happen by turning up the difficulty a notch higher than we usually would, modifying the game, or (a la The Sims) treating the game like a dollhouse in which we create dramas. A medium is a means of transportation: sound through air, a signal through a telephone wire, meaning through language, a story through a novel, a vision through a painting; so at its core, this “dollhouse” idea is how the process of storytelling operates on some very deep and fundamental level—the reflection of our mind, our environment and our shared cultural discourse off a medium.

But the tools for this kind of exploration are currently insufficient for an experience that even comes close to what I can experience by turning on a movie, opening a book or listening to a song. I want to imagine a game in which people can experience this exploratory mode of play with the full spectrum of behaviors, desires, motives, personalities, webs of causality, empathy, mystery and dramatic weight that we see in stories. Perhaps game isn’t the right word—“game” in the more academic sense of the word meaning known probabilities and mathematically defined sets of outcomes. Whatever I may want to call them, it’s time to embrace the notion of goals, motives and desires that can be understood but not classified—they need to be open-ended; a catalyst rather than some suffocating essence that defines the experience. Motives are as fundamental to both stories and games as symbols are to both narratives and maps; a narrative being an open-ended set of ideas and symbols rather than a strictly delimited abstraction.

Parts of this post, such as those bits about exploration vs. destination, felt so obvious and banal, but that isn’t what’s most important to take away. What’s important is to make this distinction in a way that doesn’t throw the baby out with the bathwater. Goals, motives and desires are at the core of both the most rote gameplay and the most beautiful poetic landscapes—but in making a new kind of “game”, we must embrace it in a different way while still preserving the core ideas behind gameplay. There really is an area between story and game.

The Entropy of Morality

2011-11-15T15:06:00.000-08:00

I've had plenty of thoughts about "moral relativism", mostly that it's pseudo-intellectual garbage. I haven't bothered post exactly why I think that, but suffice it to say that it talks about everything as if its reducible to first order logic. If we can't (I mean literally can't) fully formalize math, then why the bloody hell would we expect to be able to do it with ETHICS?

But I thought of another reason why I believe morality exists. Because true morality is hard. I'm not talking about sparing someone's feelings when they ask you if they've gained weight or refraining from committing a crime. These are the easy things; social and legal forces are very overreaching and keep us in line. No, I'm talking about the hard choices. Putting yourself in physical danger because it's the right thing to do, living ascetically to escape the corruption of material wealth, quitting your job because of an ethical situation that you have little part in (like say... selling advertisements for cigarettes or dangerous pharmaceuticals that you yourself would never use.) Acts of serious courage and sacrifice are things you don't see every day; I myself confess that I've never made any risk or sacrifice great enough to stop questioning my own virtue.

What does this have to do with anything? Isn't that arbitrary? Well, no. Saying that something is hard is a way of saying that it means something. Cowardice is a dime a dozen. If I make a choice between an act of courage and an act of cowardice, it's not like both are decisions with equal weight. One is easy and common, the other rare and difficult; so it must mean more—just like it's more meaningful for me to write these words on paper than to just punch random unintelligible keys; or to solve a difficult math problem instead of make an unsubstantiated conjecture about something based on nothing.

In other words, truly moral actions will have greater information content. They prove something, even if that something may be "arbitrary", just like math; a subject in which we still value proofs (for good reason.) Just as a game means nothing if there are no rules (with the exception of Calvinball), an action means nothing without difficulty. Cowardice, greed and hatred, on the other hand, never prove anything. There's no test, no rules and no meaning.

Paradigms vs. Narratives

2011-11-08T07:50:00.001-08:00

I think I have a simple definition of a narrative:

A paradigm is a sign system that is closed.

A narrative is a sign system that is open.

This also easily explains the difference between game design and interactive storytelling (to an extent; you can think of it as a spectrum, chess is on the "game" extreme whereas something like SimCity or Final Fantasy is a lot closer to the middle. Nothing yet on the "interactive storytelling" extreme.)

I'll elaborate more on this soon and also talk about how this is shaping my work.

For that matter I decided I'm going to also be a lot more open about my work. Scrooges go nowhere.

Command and Control

2011-09-30T14:18:00.000-07:00

Why do we overeat and refuse to burn it off? Why do we procrastinate; or even burn out despite our passion for a subject? What about the state of the world? Why are politicians so disappointing; what should we trust in when we vote for them—rigid rationalism, protocol; or the feeling deep within our gut? What about the problems that we just think are never going to end—is it willpower, self-experimentation or something else?

I've benefited a lot in recent months by letting go of reliance on two sides of the same coin—declarative knowledge and conscious "willpower." Both are important and play a role in many things, but they are the exception rather than the rule. The way I came to this was through, yes, some changes to how I ate and exercised. I've never had a weight problem, but I have some other reasons, such as asthma, to look after what goes in my body.

Upon investigating these ideas, I saw that there was a general flaw in the arguments about obesity. Moralizing self-help gurus have convinced us everyday laymen have taken the truism that people gain weight because they "consume more energy than they expend" and somehow used some discursive sleight of hand to translate this to the idea that obese people are being weak-willed by overeating and not exercising. To quote one great thinker: what horseshit!

Have we learned nothing from the mistakes of Descartes or the piles of research on the body's effect on the brain? I could even wager that thousands of years of wisdom would back this; but I really don't know and could be wrong about that. We are deeply connected to our bodies; they are the source of emotions, which are by extension the source of our decision making. Don't believe me? How about the fact that even with tons of analytic knowledge ("facts"), severing the connection between our brains and our bodily dispositions disables our ability to effectively make decisions. But I digress.

The reason why this "calories-in/calories-out" argument doesn't work is that our behavior is affected by all the biochemical reactions that are going on in our metabolism. When we eat too much junk food too regularly, our metabolism breaks down and our ability to efficiently process nutrients falls apart; insulin surges through the body at unhealthy rates, we store perfectly good nutrients as body fat and our brain does not get the glucose it needs to stop yelling "I'm hungry!" The result is that we find ourselves crashing and needing more food. So perhaps we just need to burn it off? Unlikely; where would you get all the energy needed if you can't even feel satiated?

Of course, all this could be wrong too; remember that bit about syllogistic knowledge. But I am convinced that these systems work something like this—the world is just too connected and nonlinear. And for this reason I've started to wonder, in light of just how embodied our decisions are; whether we need a whole new way of thinking about how to do things. When we procrastinate, it's likely that our mind is telling us that it doesn't approve of the plan. But couldn't that be irrational? Well, yes; we're not always cut out for the modern world that we've set up for ourselves—but the wisdom of emotions seems to be seriously underestimated. Our emotions really may be what's right when we're procrastinating; an unrealistic plan really can slow us down after all.

And how surprising is this when you look at something bigger like the markets? Sometimes we like to give credit to politicans for saving or ruining the economy; but how much say do they really have? What effect does the average tax policy or stimulus plan have? I'd argue that sometimes they work; sometimes they provide a big enough jolt to shift things into another equilibrium—but that's a big maybe; the fact is, we can't even seem to predict where the markets go.

What does that tell us? That yes, there are things we can do. We have some conscious control over our choices and we certainly have times where we just need to stop making excuses and apply elbow grease. But the parallels become even more striking when we hear about the limits to our willpower; how they can be increased through certain behaviors and states of health—but those behaviors and states must be brought about in some way to begin with. We have a very fragile modicum of control over a system that is highly belligerent and, on top of that (though somewhat related), quite random. We need to understand and appreciate these systems for what they are; not only economics and nutrition, but also our habits, the social interactions of people; and of course the very stochasticity of life.

To do that, we must let go of the command and control model but not think that this is some key to "hijacking" our behavior. We talk about tricks to fool ourselves, but it's hard to believe that we can really just "trick" ourselves into doing everything. Nothing is going gently nudge me to do 8 hours of nonstop work (if only...) No, not a chance. There's something more than that. We need to look at the equilibria of our life; on the harm of deterministic thinking and the benefits of random events; on the anti-fragility behind growth and discovery.

It's hard to say for sure what it all means, but a lot of things have helped me towards this path. Eating and exercising more stochastically, cutting out certain food groups but not worrying if I cheat once in a while; not pushing the serotonin buttons of e-mail and Facebook first thing in the morning (getting bad at that), finding peace and discovery in fiction, walking, meditation and unscheduled activities; not adhering to rules too tightly.

But I'd hardly say that I read fiction for "knowledge" or take walks for "exercise"—more accurately I exercise to learn and read for the sake of my body. Exercise has a specific scent of discovery to it, it resides at the core of so many things in our hunter-gatherer past; reading makes me feel more whole, my body relaxes into a new state—just as well that I run anaerobically and weight-lift aerobically.

Maybe you agree, maybe you disagree. If you agree, how have you applied this to your life? If you disagree, you can have a say too ;)

Truth

2011-09-26T09:27:00.000-07:00

Truth (capital "T" intended) exists.

But there are no such things as platonic forms. Only forms that we imagine.

We create forms and change them when we find that they cannot adequately describe the essence that we're attempting to capture.

It's in that moment of change, that flux between isomorphisms, that we see Truth. It's an aether that can only be seen via flux.

And that may be all that reality is; flux.

Meta-Entrepreneurship

2011-09-13T07:34:00.000-07:00

I'm honestly hoping to get this blog back to being a regular thing. The past few weeks were pretty hectic, but now that we're finally getting through a long slog, I think I'll be able to start posting more.

Fear of Software should have a new demo up soon, btw, so keep a lookout for that.

There are a lot of things that I'd like to back-post about, but one concept recently came to mind that is not the most original but may well be overlooked. I called it "Meta-Entrepreneurship", and it came from the thought that the source of all entrepreneurship is problems. Now everybody knows this; every single book asks "what is the customer pain?"

And yet, everyone says that they don't have an idea. On second inspection, this claim is absurd. You're pretty much saying "I don't know of any problems." But this is silly; we cite problems every day as an excuse for not getting something done. In fact, this goes doubly for entrepreneurs. We do so many things that we seem to end up dealing with astronomical amounts of inconvenience on a daily basis. Even a fraction of our problems should be more than enough to give us new problems to solve and make some money from (or maybe change the world, if you're into that sort of thing.)

Now, of course, we all have our domains. I can't just go creating a new branch of my company that deals with the fact that I don't have a dishwasher in this house (or maybe I can); but there are plenty of inconveniences that must have some relation to our domain that if we set our minds to it, we can not only make our own processes faster but create new routes for success and profitability. That is, there's so much we can do if only we'd get a little bit more Meta about it.

I think there's also one other thing to take from this, however; and that's that if you're an entrepreneur, you shouldn't be blaming anything on inconveniences. Yes, some of them really are just that; but the whole spirit of entrepreneurship is capitalizing on the fact that there's a problem to be solved. If problems are such a, well, problem, then how can you convince yourself, let alone other people, that you're ready to solve a major one. As entrepreneurs, we have to go beyond the cliches and actually learn to love problems in every shape and size; not just the ones that we've cited to support some vision that we want to manifest:

That which rules within, when it is according to nature, is so affected with respect to the events which happen, that it always easily adapts itself to that which is and is presented to it. For it requires no definite material, but it moves towards its purpose, under certain conditions however; and it makes a material for itself out of that which opposes it, as fire lays hold of what falls into it, by which a small light would have been extinguished: but when the fire is strong, it soon appropriates to itself the matter which is heaped on it, and consumes it, and rises higher by means of this very material.

If we can do that, then every problem that we encounter, whether our own or someone else's, will be another fresh start.

Erudition and Innovation

2011-08-17T17:32:00.001-07:00

My confession is that I'm writing this post in preparation for a lecture I'll be giving in a few days to the AIESEC conference. I figured what better way to help jog my mind than present the general gist of what I'm thinking to my viewers.

So without further adieu, what will I be talking about on this post? Something that I think hasn't been paid close enough attention: the ~~usefulness~~ necessity of broad erudition and its role in innovation. So let's begin.

My story is one that some readers of this blog probably know, but if there are any new readers out there, perhaps not. It was half a year ago that I found myself signing on as the co-founder of Fear of Software, and only a couple of months ago that I quit my day job as my initiation into becoming a fully funded entrepreneur. In that time, a lot has happened as I gained erratic but valuable experience and learned from the wisdom of my co-founder Nick LaRacuente, who was wise enough to get me out of the misguided logic of thinking "I'll just build it and they will come" or expecting to have a 2 year development cycle without any kind of intermediate prototyping. And yet I can't say much about this sort of a thing because with this startup, the story is really only in its opening chapter; the most shocking, difficult and serendipitous episodes have yet to arrive.

On the other hand, there's a whole lot that led to my standing right here (or in this case; sitting in front of this computer.) My story begins, well, probably from when I was 5 or 6, but zooming forward a bit... one could safely begin in high school. In middle school, I taught myself how to program and started making video games. Most of the products were over-ambitious, but they were always fun and once in a while I completed something exceedingly simple. I remember specifically, however, in my first year of high school coming across an editorial in Game Developer magazine, which I had a free subscription to, about the potential for games to be a legitimate art form on the level of cinema, books or even fine art. The idea hit me very hard; I was your average 14 year old, mostly interested in video games, coca-cola and generally trying as best I could to look cool; but this idea for some reason was just like a shot to the head; I couldn't shake it!

Unfortunately, I didn't always have my stuff together in high school, so my projects generally got a running start and fizzled out just as fast, but something else was going on at the same time. I found myself for the first time extremely interested in literature; I started reading novels all of the time, even as it interfered with my schoolwork; for a while I even thought that I wanted to become a novelist and writing fiction of my own. Film and music also became more interesting to me; before then, I pretty much just watched whatever Hollywood blockbusters looked sufficiently entertaining and listened to whatever was loud enough to ensure hearing loss. At one point I even found myself fortunate enough to collaborate with several artists in my high school on a graphic novel; a project that actually went surprisingly well--it was certainly childish, with all sorts of elves and demons reminiscent of Lord of the Rings with a twist of Saturday-morning anime; but interspersed with poems and philosophical digressions (but don't get me wrong, it wasn't particularly good; this was high school!)

Life was actually pretty interesting in high school. Not much got done, at least not on the surface, but a lot was brewing. I still remember all of the afternoons I frittered away with friends hanging around nearby diners and walking the streets of Manhattan; but I digress, you don't want to hear that mushy stuff. But my point was something was going on in all that time; metamorphosis is never as straightforward as one things. Soon afterwards, I entered college; and luckily, a college where I'd have the same good fate of meeting friends that would help me develop further; there's another digression I need to take—good friends are important, they'll be the ones who enrich your experiences and lead you to your greatest ideas. This counts double for entrepreneurship, which is about people, your customers; not just the abstract ideas that one can go on for pages about in a novel or express in a piece of music.

Despite some initial confusion as to what I wanted to do with my time in college, I found myself as a double major in English and Computer Science; English because I had always had an interest in literature and found myself enchanted with the study of books when I tentatively took a class on John Milton and fell in love with Paradise Lost—so dense with potential criticism that I read the entire thing at a rate of about 3 pages per minute, which admittedly left me a stressed out mess as I never had enough time to get my work done and barely passed my all-important math class.

But along the way I also found a few books on my own that opened my ideas to the process by which ideas are generated. In freshman year, I came across a book by the esoteric but highly renowned game designer Chris Crawford*, which rekindled my dying interest in game design. Later, in junior year, I came across The Black Swan by Nassim Taleb—which if you read this blog (or know me in person), you know that I never shut up about it.

It's writers like these (a list of which would amount to some light name-dropping) that I hope to pay homage to in this post by using their ideas to explain the creative process and get across the simultaneously childishly erratic and gut-wrenchingly rigorous nature of innovation.

These writers, namely Crawford, left me with a new sense of purpose in my endeavors as well. I dreamed of a new kind of video game that would fit my changing self; the more serious self that found video games fun once in a while but couldn't feel engaged in them the same way as when he was a child. They were no longer as captivating, I had grown older and suspending my disbelief was not as easy as it used to be. I felt that this was what had turned most people off of gaming; and I wanted to bring the experience I had had with video games as a child to everyone. So with a new sense of purpose, I decided that I wanted to make video games that were serious intellectual challenges that engaged people's critical thinking, that would create decisions where people would have to inevitably look back and wonder about the consequences of what they did, that would make the player empathize with characters and be too engaged to move through its world as nothing more than a cold and calculating machine. I wanted to make an experience as universal as a movie or a book.

That put me on the path to today's startup, albeit in a very weird way. In junior year I applied for the honors program in computer science in order to work on a technology called Interactive Storytelling. This would be for creating games with stories that the player could change the course of through their decisions; and they would involve lifelike characters and difficult choices that would fit into complex narratives; there would be closure and catharsis, but also ambiguity. I was accepted, and soon enough I found myself overwhelmed. Luckily, a torrent of ideas came from a class in literary theory I had tentatively signed up for; which I'll talk more about soon.

To make things short, after two semesters of hard work, I cobbled together a tiny prototype and presented it to a general audience as well as the computer science department. The reviews were mixed, but I was happy nonetheless. After graduating college with Honors, I went on to work on it in my spare time before taking a hiatus and getting by with my day job as a paralegal. That is, until Nick convinced me to join forces with him to create a startup; and I couldn't say no.

Our two projects, when compared, shared a lot of theoretical qualities. But we decided to put our respective goals on hold when a new market opportunity came up. But I'm not here today to advertise our project, I wanted to talk about ideas!

So, what is "the stuff that dreams are made of?" Well, not dreams; we all know that those come from living in your parents' basement wondering when you're going to have a car—no, I meant ideas. Where do we get those?

On the most fundamental level, ideas come from metaphors. That's right, every idea starts as a metaphor; a connection we see between two ideas because of their similarity. In your brain it looks a little bit like this two fold illustration I put up once before (you can praise me on my artistic talent in the comments section):

Your brain...

...getting an idea!

So, those two dots that lit up, what are they? Let's come up with a couple of ideas for concepts... okay, right, this isn't the lecture; just a blog post. Okay, so let's say that the one on top is the business cycle in economics; and let's say the other one is... partying! Because who doesn't love a good party, especially during an economic boom! Well, these two ideas are separated because, well, they don't really have anything in common.

Or do they? Let's think about this one. What do we do at parties? We sometimes have a few too many drinks. Did I say drinks? If any of you are religious or just generally more well behaved, let's just say extra-sugary fruit punch, the kind of stuff that will make you bounce off the walls before you get dizzy from all the running around and then crash. So, either way, you feel GREAT, and then you have a big stupid hangover; and we know that that's the price we pay for it, at least I hope we're all on the same page about that...

Now, what about an economic boom? Well, sometimes these booms are caused by a bubble. People get very enthusiastic about making a killing on the hot new asset, like say... big houses in the middle of suburbia. The price goes up 20%, then 50% then suddenly they're three times as expensive as they were two years ago. It can't just continue like this though; how many people are really going to pay a million dollars to move into a new house? Are you going to do that?

So what happens? The bubble bursts! And mind you, for those who are interested in the history of finance, this once happened in Holland over the price of tulips until... guess what? Somebody realized you can just grow them yourself. So suddenly, prices have to return to a level that actually makes sense; but with everyone having spent so much money on houses and others expecting to make a lot of money selling houses and all the people who were hired to build houses because they were so profitable, guess what happens to all of them? Not very pleasant to think; a lot of jobs, money and opportunities lost. The economy goes through a recession, readjusting to the sudden change that's happened.

But wait, there's a connection there. Something caused things to go up, to become super-active, and now that it's gone, everything comes crashing back down. And that's when we get the idea that maybe there's a connection; we realize that we need lows in order to correct the highs. So there you have it, now you know that binge drinking is a lot like a bad asset bubble.

These are the metaphors that help us advance in technology and discover new customer needs. Don't believe me? Sim City, one of the most successful video games of all time, was inspired by the reproduction of cells.** The beautiful paintings by M.C. Escher are derived from mathematical concepts of recursion, topology and infinity (among many others.) More recent AI methodologies such as neural networks are inspired by biological systems rather than straight-up computations. Even our own idea of what goes on the world is shaped by far-away stories; we look at politics through the lens of historical narratives and fictional fables. People in the United States are always asking "Are we Rome?" Sometimes overtly, but also implicitly whenever they ask about the future of that country.

This happens even on a deeply neurological level. Our brains are ultimately pattern seeking devices and look to find patterns that match other patterns. We see it even in our everyday lives; have you ever seen a shadow and thought a dangerous person was waiting in a corner to attack you; only to find out that it was a garbage can? What about being startled at the sudden rustle of leaves in the middle of silence? This is pattern recognition at its most basic, and it finds its way even into our highest levels of thought.

But before dismissing it all as illogical and irrational, you should remember just how smarter you, or anybody reading this post, is than a computer. That's right, we're so good at this game because we're not computers! Embrace it, be childish and let yourself find connections wherever they are. But how do we go about doing that? Well? Two things.

First, read. Read on every subject you can and don't worry about working on your specialty. You have your entire life to learn the newest Java API or the latest updates to the .NET framework (this part is for tech entrepreneurs; ignore it if you're just a reader that happened to get this far in my rant.) In fact, you'll find that the demands of most situations are so specific and strange that you won't be able to figure out what you need to know in advance; so don't sweat it (but do study your fundamentals, they come in handy.) Pick up some fiction and poetry; or if you're the more serious kind (like myself for a while), bury your nose in some history, economics, psychology or anthropology. Be sure to learn some math too; big concepts that can help you understand things as systems. But you should all in all be looking to understand things in three categories: systems, ideas and the human condition. The third of those comes in fiction and poetry; stuff that really gets at what makes people tick, but that also requires doing another thing...

Live! There is no erudition without experience. Or put another way:

  "Experience, though no authority Were in this world, would be enough for me" -The Wife of Bath

A lot led to where I am now; much of it serendipity and a slowly accumulated pile of books, but I'm most prepared for where I am now from the experiences I've had messing up, doing the wrong thing, doing all kinds of things that left me kicking myself in frustration. If it weren't for that, there would be nothing to hold all this together, just a bunch of gobbledygook.

Mistakes, there's an important word, and it reminds me of another question. What do we do with all these crazy ideas? Where is the empiricism? Ah, there's another idea I have to credit Chris Crawford with...

A T-Rex for ideas!

That's right, our ideas are just all vulnerable little sheep, and we need a T-Rex to rip all but the toughest of them apart. That means attacking your ideas from every angle. Forget all this about being nice to yourself, be a contrarian, drive yourself crazy; be like that kid who keeps asking endless questions about why he needs to take a bath! Not only that; go out and talk to people about your ideas. This is how Nick and I figured out what to do with our own product; we went out and talked to people. And as always, you don't always hear what you want to hear; but that's good, you're growing. Finally, go out there, and just make some mistakes. Not too big though, I don't want anyone coming back here with a missing limb!

As Kanye West once said; "that that don't kill me, can only make me stronger!" So go out there and get stronger, I'm rooting for all of you. And thank you for reading.

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*He has a wonderful website for those interested: http://www.erasmatazz.com

**See John Conway's The Game of Life

Consciousness (In 3.5 Steps)

2011-08-13T14:44:00.000-07:00

I spent way too much of 2010 pondering about metaphysics, so I gave it a break until recently when I cracked open Godel/Escher/Bach by Douglas Hofstadter and read the first chapter. That was enough to fill in the blanks to a fragmented theory of existence that I had been churning around for most of 2010. Here are the basics; I will elaborate further if anyone is interested:

1) Existence and Consciousness are inseparable

From an epistemological standpoint, I don't see any way these can be safely separated. Therefore, I'm assuming that they can't. There are other reasons, which are still a mess in my head, but I am more or less working from what I consider the indisputable truth of subjective experience.

2) Experience is the friction of incomplete information

Why do we never seem to remember locking our door? Why do we remember surprises more than routine things? Because we failed to predict, thus signifying new information. In information theory, it's called information content and is measured by how many bits it takes to store; if a probability distribution has a single outcome that is 100% likely to occur, that probability distribution has no information content.

Another way of thinking about this is that information content is also called entropy*, which in physics is the irreversible disorder that arises from motion, which is very related to that other phenomenon we call friction.

Wolfgang Iser brilliantly applies this theory to the experience we have when reading books and just about everything else in life seems to follow. When are video games boring? When there's no challenge left. When do movies suck? When they're way too predictable. But thankfully, things are always at least a little bit different than we anticipated them.

3) You need identifiers to signify difference but you need difference to distinguish the identifiers from one another; this paradox creates a regress loop.

To put that in English, let's consider the colors of objects. If everything were the color red, we'd have no such thing as color. We notice things because there are differences. This ties back in to what I said about information content in the previous post; if there's a 100% probability of one particular outcome, then there is no information.

So if we want difference, we need some trait in which these things are different. But where does this trait come from? It would need to be distinguished from something else. Therefore, we're faced yet again with the same problem ad infinitum.

One last thing is needed then, to close this odd regress loop. Once we've done that, we essentially have a system in which we can continue to seek information in a cycle of anticipation and surprise but never reach the end:

While writing this, I realized that I was missing the answer to this part. I will try a basic sketch of this:

-There is some kind of self-reference that closes the loop of this problem with infinite levels of "difference"

-The result manifests itself as a paradox (or many of them--perhaps they all mean the same thing) such as Godel's Incompleteness Theorem or the Time Dilation paradox.

-This creates a dog-chasing-its-tail effects in which a recursive pattern creates a fractal of uncountable codes--the friction of these being what we know to be reality.

But feel free to take a stab at the last part and let me know what you think...

I should note that by the time I finish Godel/Escher/Bach, it may be the case that Hofstadter beat me to the punch; in fact, he says that his thesis is that Meaningless Symbols Acquire Meaning Through Self-Reference, but so far it has proven to simply be the connective link that I have been missing between the three steps that I outlined above; I just hadn't put them together the right way, but they were all there a year ago.

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*Forgive me if I've abused the poor term; I'm not a physicist.

2011-08-05T17:39:00.000-07:00

Oops, just accidentally posted on the wrong blog; was writing technical notes for the project.

Will update here soon! Maybe some links?

A definition of narrative?

2011-08-03T13:42:00.000-07:00

So many things I wanted to post about, so many work related distractions and so many excuses. Here's one for brevity.

My structural definition of a narrative:

A collection of events* that makes sense of itself without the use of axioms.

*Was hesitant about using the term "event", but I think that it's more precise than saying "signs"--there's a self similarity here I think; the idea of an event is itself inscribed in narrative.

Thoughts?

2011-06-23T19:36:00.000-07:00

Reading this amazing blog post from evolutionary psychiatry and realizing how classical and medieval theories of health and psychology show just how ridiculous our own modern theories of the mind and body must actually be. I think our overconfidence is best described in a quote by Searle about the brain:

...I cannot find the book I found it in. I will find it later, sorry. May be in a book I left downstairs.

That Old Humanities Argument

2011-06-23T09:23:00.000-07:00

We've all been asked this question before: why study the humanities? Why teach literary criticism? What is the point of learning about things that never happened and inapplicable interpretations? Math and science have certainly been hyped up in the past few years by the presidential administration with the looming economic fears of being uncompetitive in the face of rising powers and the political activism of people who want to see our money spent better.

As an English major in college, I had to struggle with this question myself; I was asked by other people and even had to deal with the prompt in a literary theory class (which I utterly failed at doing.) It is worth noting that a lot of my work in literary theory has been applicable to what I'm engineering now, but that's besides the point to me because I know that it wasn't all that this was about. I certainly see literature as an important metaphysical experiment for philosophers, but I don't know how I feel about philosophers either.

But around a year ago I had read about Stanley Fish's book Save the World On Your Own Time, which apparently* argued that trying to find some political or economic justification for the humanities denigrates it by denying the idea that it may just be good in of itself (does everything really come down to money and survival?)

While I was taking a break today that line of thinking crossed over with all the time that I've spent thinking about Edmund Burke and Nassim Taleb and it dawned on me that I had been missing the obvious for years; that perhaps the importance of literary criticism is in the fact that despite having no explicit justification for it, we still continue to read, teach, analyze and deconstruct stories; value a supposedly "arbitrary" literary canon, ask questions about things that never happened and give interpretations in the absence of right or wrong answers.

To me, asking why we value literature, spend so much time teaching it to students and even have tenured academics who spend their whole life studying it is like asking why we have religion or inauguration ceremonies or act hold doors open for other people. At this point, it's tradition and part of a deeper logic that we can't ever presume to understand--a point made tirelessly by Edmund Burke in the wake of a disastrous French revolution based on simple top-down models. Simply put, I don't think that the world would be better off if we stopped holding doors for other people and I don't think that we'd be better off not studying literature.

On a more concrete note, I think it is possible to glean the value of literary criticism and it is related to the importance of things beyond economic concerns. We live in a world richly populated by cultural phenomena. Being part of that world means understanding our cultural heritage and our shared idea of what it is to be human (cliche, I know, but isn't it true?) Would you refrain from teaching your kid table manners or how to talk to elders?

Whether it's through high school English, Hebrew School or wrestling in the grass with your classmates, we all have and all need rites of passage. Part of the humanities is spiritual training, the rest is something else.

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*No, I haven't read it, just making that clear. A second-hand summary did in fact raise some interesting points for me.

Childhood

2011-06-13T13:09:00.000-07:00

Working on my own and trying to start a business has unsurprisingly been the source of a lot of anxiety. Sitting inside all day working starts to take a toll and even the weekends can be challenging if I don't get myself out and about. But as I was taking a walk today, I started to look around the city streets and enjoy them in the way that I have for so many years and this song popped into my head:

Most people would wonder why I remember such a song, let alone have the mp3 file for it; it's a bit nerdy to say the least. But for me, it has a very strong association with my childhood and evokes a refreshing sense of playfulness; everything becomes more atmospheric and a strange grandeur imbues itself on the symbols that populate the city skyline and the scenery of downtown Brooklyn.

It takes me back to the visceral pleasure I found in a game that most people passed over and considered one of Will Wright's more mediocre works. While most people didn't care for it, SimCity 3000 was the first time that I came to an understanding of what I was looking for in games, a sense of exploring a narrative, of decisions that impact people and the often contradictory and conflicting demands that they make both as individuals and as a whole.

The music of that game, especially this song, now brings me back to a sense of childlike playfulness; a feeling that to me is the ultimate remedy to anxiety--a sense that the world is yours to explore at your leisure. I never thought of childhood as idyllic, but it always did offer the opportunity to play; it placed a priority on learning, it gave space. In my quest to find the intersection of narrative and technology, to bring to the rest of the world the visceral inspiration that lies behind the screen of a personal computer, I've come full circle in having the opportunity once more to learn, to grow, to be a kid; being an entrepreneur might be a lot of work, but I once again feel the ability to explore the world and leave my mark on it.

2011-06-03T09:21:00.000-07:00

As I begin work on Fear of Software's new project, which I will talk more about later; I find myself having to stay disciplined in order to get even the most creative and "inspiration" oriented tasks done to adequacy. An excerpt by Chris Crawford comes to mind:

"In late 1981, Dr. Alan Kay recruited me into Atari Research and challenged me to dream. Most people take a lazy approach to dreaming. They put their feet up on the desk and engage in idle mental forays for half an hour, and they call it dreaming. To me, dreaming is a much more deliberate and difficult process. Dreaming is hard work!"

The Confirmation Bias

2011-05-05T08:38:00.001-07:00

Everyone knows what the confirmation bias is. Here's an especially good article on it:

The Reason We Reason -- Jonah Lehrer

He goes on to say many things that are well known; that we look for corroborating evidence, that we're not good at hearing or processing facts that are against what we think. He cites a scientist, however, that takes this a step further and puts the whole thing together; that we don't reason in order to objectively understand the world but in order to persuade others.

Now, I'd say that it's also to persuade ourselves, but I'll get back to that in a moment. What struck me is that knowledge is mostly ornamental; our abstract reasoning is subservient to our social reasoning. As Lehrer puts it so masterfully:

"Instead, the function of reasoning is rooted in communication, in the act of trying to persuade other people that what we believe is true. We are social animals all the way down."

This seems to me to be very deeply connected with the notion of cognitive dissonance and identity. For those who haven't read my previous posts, I was suggesting that we rationalize what we do and look for evidence in order to do so because it's what regulates our identity; that acting in a totally "rational" would bring about symptoms resembling schizophrenia* Think about a computer generated actor that always makes the "optimal" choice; it would confuse the hell out of us as it would change behaviors without any warning or visible precedent. The body must fight off what is foreign and so must the mind.

This is why I say that we also look for corroborating evidence to persuade ourselves. Really, though, I didn't just bring this up to one-up Mr. Lehrer; I wanted to say that persuading others and persuading ourselves are one in the same. If we find corroborating evidence in order to construct a story for others and do the same for ourselves, then it seems fair to say that narratives are the primary way in which we perceive the world. Our instinct, when we debate with others, is to try to tell a great story; no different than when we seduce or entertain and also no different than when we make sense of our own situation by constructing an identity.

The story we tell ourselves and the stories we tell others are two sides of the same coin.

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*If anyone reading this deals with people who have serious problems such as Schizophrenia, I apologize in advance for anything presumptuous I may be saying. This blog is a loose network of working hypotheses, many of which will turn out to be extremely silly.

The Triad

2011-05-01T19:19:00.001-07:00

1) When I was in high school I was already thinking about semiotics, albeit without any knowledge of that word. One day in high school, my biology class took a trip to this art activity held by a resident artist who had us all draw "three things that we were made of." A lot of people drew funny and goofy things, I think I took it too seriously. My three things were zeroes, ones and eyes. Zeroes and ones because those are the only two ingredients you need to create information. Why eyes? What is information without something to observe it?

This is still a haunting question in semantic and semiotic theory. That said, two might be the number of symbols (difference), but three is the number of signs. Another reason that I think three is the key number is because signs are not about one-to-one relationships between terms (that's a symbol!) Signs are about multiplicity and ambiguity; a sign has connotations and ambiguities, it can be used not only to name but to give hints and even lies. You need at least three nodes in a graph (in layman's terms, network) to create something more than a simple one-to-one mapping.

2) Speaking of signs and triads, here's a quote that I found from The Name of the Rose that seems to implicitly talk about the triad of signifying/inferring/lying that I talked about earlier:

"It is of use to me as Venantius's prints in the snow were of use after he was dragged to the pigs' tub. The unicorn of the books is like a print. If the print exists, there must have existed something whose print it is. ...The idea is sign of things and the image is sign of the idea, sign of a sign. But from the image I reconstruct, if not hte body, the idea that others had of it." -William of Baskerville

Minimal Interfaces/Information

2011-04-30T17:50:00.000-07:00

I just installed Starcraft II on my new laptop because it's great to actually have a seriously powerful computer these days, but it made me think about a mix-up I had with one particular unit (Thor, for those interested.) I thought it was weak against aerial opponents because the numbers were particularly low and there was also a not very high number for rate of fire. Turns out that it's very powerful at taking out groups of aerial opponents because its salvos are more powerful than the individual missiles.

A small oversight that was corrected with experience, but this seems to be a problem in a lot of RTS games. The numbers are misleading and make it easy to misunderstand which units are good against others. Starcraft II added a lot more information than the original Starcraft (thank God, when I was a kid I really misunderstood counters because I only looked at the system), but ultimately we're not suited to read these numbers very well when there are so many of them.

Command & Conquer was much different in that it only showed vague approximations and the player figured out the strength and weaknesses of units via general descriptions and experience. For one thing, I always felt that made the game feel a bit more real; but my real point is that all that information misleads us and retards the process of learning how it actually works through experience.

I think that strategy games, in general, should do away with most of the explicit numerical information; it's more misleading than informative.

On Stories and Trying to Figure Them Out

2011-03-15T20:55:00.000-07:00

From the end of my senior capstone paper in English on interactive storytelling (and once again, no idea why the font gets periodically messed up):

The hodgepodge of theories, concepts and examples with which I’ve explained the problems of interactive storytelling has not been one that lends itself to being quickly wrapped up in a concluding page, let alone five. It would perhaps be a more fitting note to end on a story; to further interconnect the many concepts explained, and if we’re lucky, see a new idea emerge. After all, if there is one thing us academics can agree on, it’s that he who of those delights can judge, and spare to interpose them oft, is not unwise.

Only a year ago, I had been recently accepted into the Honors program in computer science to begin a project whose name was simply “Interactive Storytelling.” My proposal, although over ten pages, contained little of what was needed to understand anything of the problem at hand; my understanding of narrative was confined to narrow formalist ideas of plot and a handful of scattered critical concepts.

By chance, I ended up in a class on literary theory after not making it into a different English class. Combined with the various books with which I supplemented my project, I found myself understanding narrative in ways that finally bore fruit. Combining my knowledge of mathematics and literary theory, I began to see stories themselves in a different way, abstracting them to structures juxtaposed in varying dimensions.

Nonetheless, as every structuralist knows, rules are meant to be broken and as I found myself writing this paper, a tension between the easily imagined existence of signs within systems and the inability to clearly explain their relationships to one another within some space kept me spending an entire day wondering what I was really saying, how I could find that balance between saying what needed to be said and leaving the rest open. I saw then what Stanley Fish talked about in another part of Interpreting the Variorum, a moment of tension in the process of reading.

That tension has seemed to exemplify the work I have done on interactive storytelling in the past year more than anything else; a constant tension between the axiomatic and the narrative. Mathematics is closed; there is always a clear path to understanding it. But only narratives endow us with any kind of meaning; even the great Paul Erdös would always say after proving an exceptional mathematical theorem “it’s in the book!” I’ve been standing on the edge throughout the entire year; interpreting stories with technology, looking over as I make another carefully thought out conjecture.

Yet there has been a remarkable sense of fulfillment from it all. With each day, my own project and my own writing on the subject become increasingly robust and meaningful, even as I come to terms with this lack of understanding. Every day I am capturing narratives more, not less, even as they appear more elusive with each day. Perhaps more than anything I’m gaining satisfaction from this very lack of reconciliation. After all, this tension is the mark upon us which narrative leaves; narrative exists in the friction that comes from not quite understanding, from the vulnerability of any structure we create, no matter how simple. And if such tension is what defines a narrative, then this project, this critical technical practice, is one as well.

Lies and the Lying Semioticians That Tell Them

2011-03-08T20:22:00.000-08:00

I want you all to meditate what I'm currently meditating on:

A sign has three functions:

Signifying: ("dog" means a dog; and please, don't think too hard about that*)

Inference: (smoke is a sign that there is a fire happening nearby)

Lying

These are all related.

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*The ambiguity of semantics is reflected in this entire entry

2011-03-04T12:15:00.000-08:00

Note: It's always a good idea to take the precaution of saying "biological" instead of "natural" in order to throw smartasses off your trail.

Men In Black

2011-02-27T11:02:00.000-08:00

About a month ago I caught the second half of Men in Black on television; a superbly made movie in hindsight. There were a lot of things I liked about it, but I think the most important thing was that unlike a lot of science-fiction themed movies, which support their plot with a well articulated con-world, Men in Black simply relies on a series of quirks: tabloid style vignettes portraying the protagonists' and our own lack of understanding of everything happening.

2011-02-26T12:14:00.001-08:00

People talk to their friends and see psychiatrists in order to reconstruct their personal narratives—and yet when people do the same thing via religion, it suddenly becomes a debate about religion being "unscientific" or "misleading" or some other nonsense. Just saying.

EDIT: I just realized that the only way I can articulate my defense of religion is with these little vignettes. I have an idea of why, but I don't want to get into a long essay about it (talk to me—or leave a comment if you're interested in that sort of thing.)

The Garden of Platonic Forms

2011-02-25T11:08:00.000-08:00

More on this later perhaps; time permitting, but I may have stumbled upon the fundamental essence of post-structuralism:

Literature has no platonic forms, invalidating the underlying assumption since Aristotle that literature is a way to bring us closer to Platonic forms (Plato believed that poetry and drama was "thrice removed from nature", meaning that it was an imitation of an imitation; but Aristotle believed in the power of poetry/drama to bypass the limitations of Earthly manifestations.)

Structuralism was the most rigorous* way of doing this, but eventually saw its own limits; thus becoming a study of this very cycle of interpreting and then finding new meaning by figuring out how the interpretation contradicted itself or simply didn't apply. Perhaps that's why I have as hard a time as the French understanding any real difference between structuralism and post-structuralism.

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*Please take "rigorous with a grain of salt.

Two Social Psychology Observations

2011-02-13T19:13:00.001-08:00

Cognitive Dissonance: A long time I wrote that I thought that cognitive dissonance was an evolutionary adaptation that made people in groups more predctable and trustworthy and ultimately facilitated the use of narrative as a social heuristic. I still think this is true, but I also think its function is important on an individual level; in order to explain, I'll point out an observation by the computer scientist and cultural theorist Phoebe Sengers:

In listening to Julie, it was often as though one were doing group psychotherapy with the one patient. Thus I was confronted with a babble or jumble of quite disparate attitudes, feelings, expressions of impulse. The patient's intonations, gestures, mannerisms, changed their character from moment to moment. ...It seemed therefore that one was in the presence of various fragments, or incomplete elements of different 'personalities' in operation at the one time. Her 'word-salad' seemed to be the result of a number of quasi-autonomous partial systems striving to give expression to themselves.

out of the same mouth at the same time.

(Laing 1960, 195-196; quoted in Phoebe Sengers' "Schizophrenia and Narrative")

Sengers uses this example to make a point about how current methods in artificial intelligence (AI) operate: an optimal behavior is selected on the basis of some utility metric without any regard for what was done in the past. This disregard for consistency is optimal for any agent within a game-theoretic model (classical economics, chess, etc.), but if a person were to operate this way, their identity would be completely inconsistent, every action acting completely out of context with any other one. In more simple terms, acting in this manner requires completely throwing out one's identity.

To a theoretical economist, this might be great news; after all, it was once said that consistency is the hobgoblin of all minds; but we shouldn't dismiss the importance of a consistent identity so fast. Reading through Antonio Damasio's Self Comes to Mind, I took note of his explanation of consciousness (synonymous with subjectivity, and in this blogger's humble opinion, narrative) as a more evolutionarily advanced mechanism for self-regulation, the process by which all life forms, from prokaryotes to mammals, fight off external chaos and maintain internal order. Self-regulation is the essence of all life, and consciousness is the most advanced tool for doing so by allowing us to make complex plans and coordinate seamlessly with large groups; but more than that, consciousness regulates itself in the same manner that life-forms do—it is a consistent narrative that maintains itself and in doing so endows us with identity. Without a cohesive narrative, we cannot have a subjective identity; and without a subjective identity, our consciousness, that most crucial of means of human survival, quickly disintegrates. If you don't believe me, read the passage above one more time.

Cognitive dissonance is a way for us to fight external entropy, no different than the regulation of our body temperatures or our immune system's constant attack on what's foreign to the body.

2) Protagonists: On a much shorter note, it occurred to me that the presence of protagonists in stories is possibly a symptom-of/appeal-to our own universally shared narcissism.

If On A Winter's Night...

2011-02-10T19:49:00.000-08:00

It was cold as balls tonight as I was taking a walk in only a hoodie and some gloves after a 20 minute workout. A lot of doubts were running through my head and, of course, passing by the scenery of Brooklyn Heights and Dumbo I had the fleeting fantasy of being a twenty-something year old millionaire with a condo perfectly overlooking the East River.

Can't survive on such self-indulging fantasies; and if you have to wait for that moment in your life to find meaning, then million dollars or not, you're stuffed. That tied in with all my Taleb-inspired thoughts about randomness and how to live with it and reminded me of part of why I came to love studying narratives:

Narratives are the only thing that truly belong to us. We can't (for the most part) control what happens to us, but we can choose how to make sense of it. We can't control the material consequences of our situation, but we can choose how they shape our intentionality. I feel as if more than anything, this is what atheists misunderstand about religion; the primacy of subjective narratives over objective facts.*

Narrative lets us live for the moment as connected with the associations of the past and the projections and unknowns of the future.

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*It may be accurate to say that what religion deals with is eminently subjective; the multiplicity of narratives in our lives that can only be understood as subjective experiences.

Intuition and Mathematics: A Defense

2011-01-28T12:38:00.000-08:00

Back in my days at Oberlin College, I had a memorably good math professor who I consider to be one of my mentors. Her grasp of the subject and the toughness of her problem sets helped me learn math that I hadn't thought myself capable of learning at the time. There was one point she made, however, that in hindsight I can't help but adamantly disagree with.

She said that intuition was what messed mathematicians up. Her points leading up to the conclusion were valid; mathematics is a language—you have a set of symbols and a set of rules for manipulating those symbols; and to prove something you follow those rules precisely, moving the symbols into the configuration that you'd like. Intuition can fail; but math never lies.

This fact about math has given way to some amazing tools; not least the ability for a computer to prove new theorems by arbitrarily moving around symbols until they find something of note. Truth is, however, that, as far as I know, these automated theorem solvers have proven very little of value compared to the work of mathematicians; most applications of computers to theorem solving are programs that are custom written to deal with the details of making a particular point such as the proof of the Four Color Theorem. But I digress.

My professor was certainly right that intuition is flawed whereas following rules doesn't fail; but what she didn't acknowledge was that our intuition can always be verified by checking the logic of our hunch; we can make a guess as to what the nature of a proof might be; following which we write up a proof to see if it logically works. In fact, I think this process of guessing and verifying is essential to solving problems in mathematics.

This point can be best made by a certain concept known as computational complexity (if you're not a technical person, please don't panic! It'll be clear in a minute.) Computational complexity is a measure of how difficult it is for a computer to solve a problem; different problems are organized into different levels of computational complexity based on how hard they are to solve. I'd like to focus on two, known as P and NP. P stands for polynomial—the problem can be solved by an algorithm in a polynomial number of steps. NP stands for nondeterministic-polynomial—the problem can't necessarily be solved in a polynomial number of steps, but if you were to guess the answer to the problem, you could see whether your guess was right in a polynomial number of steps.

Now, to be fair, it might be the case that there is no problem in NP that is not in P (but it's highly suspected that this isn't the case.) Assuming that this isn't the case, however, then there are a whole slew of interesting problems that can't be easily solved in a reasonable amount of time, but could be proven were somebody to make a "lucky guess."

But how "lucky" is that guess? Our intuitions solve extremely complicated problems with a very high accuracy rate. They don't prove anything, but they make very good guesses with a very high chance of success in a very short amount of time. After all, our brains are some of the most complex computers imaginable, with complex networks made up of trillions of neurons and connections; we can recognize faces, navigate social situations with countless unwritten rules and outsmart a computer at just about anything that's not a game with transparent rules (and computers still can't play Go for shit.)

Our intuition allows us to stumble upon the answer to a problem with a very good chance of success. After that, we can use logic to see if we've done it right—as the P/NP distinction illustrates, verification isn't nearly as costly (in most cases) as solving.

[End of neat, pre-packaged entry; on to messy stuff]

(Warning: I am less sure about the following. Feel free to correct me on this; and as always, argue with me.) Another way of thinking about this is that with each level of computational complexity, the amount of solutions to the problem becomes increasingly non-linear. Logic can only go so fast (at a linear speed, I suspect) and can't keep up with the increasing complexity of problems. Our intuition has two particular strengths:

1) It runs in parallel, which allows us to detect patterns very fast. Our neurons don't even fire all that fast—their effectiveness is in that we can distinguish information using space rather than time. No computer touches us in that regard

2) It is built to approximate and work in probabilities rather than to think of things in absolutes, which is what my professor's argument encouraged mathematicians to do. Approximations don't always solve the problem, but in a lot of cases a small decrease in accuracy (say, a 10% chance you're wrong), can lead to being able to find an answer much more efficiently. So long as we can verify the answer in an efficient amount of time (that's what proofs are for), then mathematicians can have their cake and eat it too.

The Poverty of Online Information

2010-12-30T15:16:00.000-08:00

This is a post I wrote for another website, Good to Know, Inc., but I wanted to share it on this blog in its unedited form (since they're likely to make edits to my writing.) Here it is:

Also, I have no idea why the font is being so screwy.

*****************************************************************************

There are three concepts that, when one looks closely enough, can be seen as a single indivisible triad: narratives, context and memory. They all fundamentally deal with an associative way of thinking and they are noticeably robust: one doesn’t easily forget things (my cousin and I still occasionally debate who was at fault in a scuffle we had when I was seven) and we seem to understand things best when they’re told as a story. They also have another trait in common: they are often lacking if not non-existent when I try to find information from the internet.

Take Wikipedia as an example. It certainly has a wealth of raw information; just about anything one can think of seems to have an article, whether your interest is in hermetian matrices, hardcore bands, Lacanian psychoanalysis or Pokemon trading cards. Even so, I never feel the same sense of fulfillment reading material on Wikipedia that I get from reading a book; I often find myself struggling to walk away with something to hold on to after browsing through this seemingly infinite pool of collective knowledge.

Maybe I’m just of a dying breed of people who hold on to physical books, but more universal reasons seem to be at play. Our brains work in an associative manner; rather than record our memories in a serialized manner like a video camera or a computer’s hard drive, we create memories by connecting various objects, sensations, thoughts, images, sounds and other past experiences. Conversely, we recall memories from the past by seeing, hearing, feeling or thinking something that we’ve associated with it; anyone remember the scene that everybody talks about from Swann’s Way where the narrator takes a bite of a Madeline cookie and his entire past rushes back at him?

A single sensation or reference brings back a rapid cascade of memories and this same phenomenon underlies what might be our memory’s inherent preference for books: we associate its content with the distinct look and feel of the book’s cover, pages, printing, wear and tear. Simply put, you can remember something much better when you attach it to a physical object of some kind.[1] But just as the physical context of knowledge may matter more than we think, so too might the relevance of that knowledge to some larger narrative. The journalist Malcolm Gladwell might oftentimes be criticized for the lack of empirical rigor behind his theses, but I prefer any one of his books to a series of entries on Wikipedia because I believe him to be a masterful storyteller able to weave a larger number of data, anecdotes and ideas into a single story that makes sense of them. Knowledge is much more easily remembered when there is a narrative that brings it all together.

One way of thinking about this is that a narrative introduces redundancy to knowledge. It’s much easier to remember an idea when it’s linked to a number of other ideas as part of a larger theory. If you learn something in a vacuum, there will be nothing to give you any clues to it should you forget it; but by relating it to something else, we have something to remind us of the original idea.

But is it really the case that there are no narratives on Wikipedia? If I look up David Bowie, I’ll find a summary of his life and career and with it there will be hyperlinks to more detailed summaries of particular works or to biographies of his contemporaries; there’s definitely a narrative. Even so, there’s something about Wikipedia that is too summarized and distilled to be the kind of story that sticks well after I’ve finished reading an article. It offers not so much a story as a summary in which details are relegated to the various articles that it links to.

But these links on Wikipedia are inadequate to finish telling the story. They are details that are told in a complete vacuum, unaware of the fact that I came from a page talking about one thing and not another. In Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink, the defeat of the United States Navy 7^th Fleet at the hands of Paul Van Riper’s meager force in the 2002 Millennium Challenge War Games is talked about in the context of how human intuition can be more powerful than the world’s greatest computers, but a Wikipedia article summarizing the thesis of Blink could only tell it in sufficient detail by providing a link to an unrelated page summarizing the incident; one that would fail to have the interpretive richness of Malcolm Gladwell’s own retelling.

A story, as opposed to a simple summary or functional narrative, speaks to us about what is not obvious. Whereas summaries compress, stories interpret by bringing together a wealth of information and constructing a unique idea. Furthermore, through this same process of bricolage, a story is filled with a rich variety of prose and impedimenta that allow us to create a rich network of associations and have an experience that is eminently memorable. A summary, as a simple compression of one or more stories, simply doesn’t have the same informational richness as those stories and as such cannot create the strong mnemonic associations that stories do.

At the end of the day, storytelling is something that is hardwired into us. We comprehend and remember things as stories, not data, and the tradition of storytelling has been a universal ritual as far back as recorded history takes us. This natural affinity of ours towards telling stories can teach us a lot about how we learn and should be taken into consideration as we expand our educational tools into the domains of the internet and cloud computing. The ability to express ideas as dynamic and interactive programs as opposed to static texts and the interconnection of vast amounts of user-created data will doubtless allow us to inform and educate in novel ways; but these innovations must cultivate the human faculty for storytelling if they are to be truly effective as pedagogical tools. As our world becomes increasingly interconnected and hyper-abundant in information, context has become the essence of knowledge; and one cannot understand context without understanding stories.

[1] For further reading on this idea, see Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s notebook, Opacity (http://www.fooledbyrandomness.com/notebook.html)

2010-12-15T18:03:00.000-08:00

I haven't updated for a very long time, but on the agenda (soon-ish) is a series I've wanted to do on how narratives are presented in games. Most of the games are fairly old, but this is the rough sketch so far:

Forking Replays: Starfox 64 vs. The Bouncer

Fantastic Worlds: Super Mario 64 vs. Quest for Glory V

Human Behavior and Imagined Narratives: The Sims vs. Civilization

These are very tentative, really subject to change. Also, if anyone could figure out how to make Creatures work on Windows Vista or Windows 7, I'd be eternally grateful. I'd love to re-discover that old gem.

Used Bookstores

2010-11-21T12:58:00.001-08:00

Used bookstores are like crack. There are too many books in a given trip that I feel I can't leave without, and it's especially bothersome when they're overpriced.

Nonetheless, used books are much better than new ones. They're what financial people call the "long option"; you buy a ton of them for cheap in the hopes that one of them is going to have a high impact. With new books, you can't be so surprised, the books are expensive and you come in set on some book that's been published in the last two years or canonized in the last ten. Maybe you get what you were looking for, but you have not much better of an idea of how satisfied you'll be than if you were to pick up a random book at a used bookstore.

I also find that used bookstores are more likely to have some more obscure things that are maybe a little bit dated but nonetheless more illuminating to a particular field of study. Today I got three books, some more well known than others:

Postmodernism: The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism by Frederic Jameson

Empire of Signs by Roland Barthes

Essays on Non-Conceptual Content

The last one, by the way, is for research purposes. I also have a long option strategy when it comes to research on Bart. There are some books that I'll buy because I specifically think that they'll answer a question I have, but many things surprise me and give me new ideas on what to do. Of course, my reading list has gotten ever longer to the point that I'll refrain from posting it for fear of name-dropping.

I also very much enjoy buying used vinyl records, particularly aesthetically one-track house/techno/trance/trip-hop/etc LPs. I get them if they're a dollar or two and stack them up with some sound equipment I have yet to use again. Weird hobby, yes, but I dream of having some extremely lush jungle of random sounds that I can put together through all of these stripped down building blocks; making soundscapes through bricolage, to be precise.

Aesthetically, I'm a hoarder. I take many tiny fragments in the hope that the right set of them will make a whole that's far more valuable than everything I've collected.

Narratives are for Socialists!

2010-11-20T13:44:00.000-08:00

I've been linking together ideas of social interactions and narratives a lot in some of my posts. For a while, I've been continuing to develop a theory that narratives are a kind of epistemology that is rooted in social interactions. Here's an evolutionary take on the idea:

Human cognition arose from having to infer increasingly complicated patterns (for those who might get the wrong idea, this is not a logical kind of inference—it's pattern recognition in the brain.) Originally, pattern recognition was developed in order to provoke the kind of response along the lines of "Holy shit, a rattlesnake!".

As primates evolved, they became more sophisticated organisms that also worked in groups. These groups involved social relationships far more complex than schools of fish or flocks of birds (which are quite nicely simulated by programs such as Boids). In order to facilitate these social interactions, members of the group needed to traverse these in an effective way, thus the individual organisms needed to become more intelligent with regards to social interactions.

Now, this kind of intelligence had much different demands than those of basic sequential reasoning, which was first the basis for being able to competently hunt down an animal and eventually for the kind of sequential logic that gave rise to civilization. If you now turn your attention to stories, it's pretty notable that the vast majority of stories are re-tellings (fictional or otherwise) of social interactions; more so when I think about the fact that the only narratives devoid of social interactions (that I can think of) are from modern times.

If this is true, then it's safe to say that stories were originally about people. Stories also have their own internal logic and form that is very different than the kind of modularized rationalist thinking that we usually associate with knowledge. My take on this is that this unique logic was crafted over time in the human mind in accordance with the nuances of social interactions. Rather than try to learn about social interactions through empiricism, which would get your slow-thinking ass killed in the jungle, the human mind developed a vast and messy network of heuristics for comprehending social interactions—in simple terms, we developed an intuition for how people work and were able to express it to one another by means of storytelling.

But why telling stories? Why not just understand social interactions in some way on our own? Two reasons. First, there's an obvious advantage to being able to communicate this knowledge to the rest of the group—to tell one's kids why they shouldn't lie to other people or why they should stay away from the other tribe. Second, being able to transmit and modify this knowledge presents another huge advantage: just as biological evolution embraces random change as a means of creative destruction, having the capacity for storytelling allowed for traditions and arguments between people that allowed stories to change in unexpected ways. Those that were keepers stuck around and those that didn't have much value could be weeded out in time.

Since then, we've been given a large and intractable network of storytelling traditions, genres, themes, allusions and so on; all of which is worth studying, by the way. At some point, I might post about how narrative evolves, since narratives are built on other narratives through two concepts talked about by Jerome Bruner known as canonicity and breach. But I'll leave that for another time.

2010-11-17T13:11:00.001-08:00

I wasn't entirely satisfied with my last post—I started rushing myself near the end. Might go back and edit it for the sake of clarity. I got pretty lost in my own thoughts and feel like I didn't get out a simple central argument.

For the time being, sick of heavy-handed philosophizing. Will post more impressionistic journals about the city and briefer/more intelligible thoughts on aesthetics.

A New Heuristic for Language

2010-11-15T23:15:00.000-08:00

While working on my interactive storytelling engine, Bart, I've been puzzling over a few ideas about language:

1) How do you create a grammar that can sufficiently understand context? The de-facto way of understanding grammar is by envisioning it as a tree (for more technical folk, this is a phrase-structure grammar, give or take a few technicalities.):

[Source: http://july.fixedreference.org/en/20040724/wikipedia/Phrase_structure_rules]

This isn't just helpful for understanding the meaning and structure of a sentence but also for understanding more broad ideas such as an entire story. Now, I should make clear that grammar only deals with the syntax of a sentence and not its semantics. That means that it's not dealing with what the sentence means (see above) but only with the structure of the sentence.

The essence of these grammars is context. The context of the rest of the sentence tells us what words can come next in a sentence. If the sentence under construction is "Colorless green ideas sleep ____", the blank spot can't be filled with a noun; that doesn't make any sense. At the end of the day, however, these simple hierarchical phrase-structure grammars are not powerful enough to deal with the full expressive power of human language. They also don't deal with the semantics of the sentence; there's no grammar out there that can tell us the above sentence is meaningless and doesn't make any sense.

The last statement I made was loaded for a number of reasons; for those who spotted that, I'll put the question more properly: teaching a computer how to make grammatical sentences is not the same as teaching it how to communicate through natural language. I don't believe that any grammar like the one above could be used to comprehend semantics.

2) So, let's talk a little bit about semantics. The meaning of a sentence and the meaning of a story are very similar in two particular places:

First, just as a story (or a part of a story) has multiple meanings, so do sentences or parts of a sentence; not only do words and phrasings have multiple definitions ("let's talk about sex with Doug Funny" vs. "let's talk about sex with Doug Funny"), but there's also an inherent ambiguity to pronouns such as "he", "she" or "they" that can only be given definitions in the context of what the person is saying. A good analogue to the latter part would be how a story may reference that "Elvis was playing on the jukebox" and so we use what we know of Elvis in the real world to fill in the blank. The range of interpretations is changed by the surrounding context, with new interpretations added and old interpretations removed.

But there is also a corollary: just as we can use many stories to express the same thing, we can also choose from multiple words or sentences to say the same thing. Respectively, these two phenomena are called homonymy and synonymy

Now consider that synonyms create a sort of redundancy* for figuring out what a sentence means. If a word has multiple meanings then using synonymous word or description for the same meaning can make clear what the writer was getting at. Consider "Roger, who loved carrots, was a real jackrabbit" and "Roger, who didn't always show great judgment at parties, was a real jackrabbit." In each one, the surrounding context is narrowed down by the use of synonyms. It's also worth noting that context can be seen as a way of creating redundancy (or creating more ambiguity in other cases.)

3) Associativity plays a huge role in understanding things like narratives and semantics in general. The following is an illustration of how ideas, memory and everything else fundamentally works in the brain:

Your Brain (artist's rendition)

Your Brain Making an Association!

The neocortex, the area of the brain that makes us "human", is fundamentally a network of neurons that connect with one another through simple rules. There may be different parts that neurologists have identified, but none of these discoveries seem to constitute any strict unbreakable rules; different areas of the brain can fulfill the functions of other areas in cases of brain damage, a case of plasticity (a.k.a. redundancy.) To get at the importance of this, let's consider two phenomena:

Ideas: Consider the (masterful) pictures that I drew above. Think of each of the circles as a different idea/concept/description/etc, such as cell-phones or Pride and Prejudice. Now, look at the second illustration and suppose that these two ideas had something in common with each other--you notice this and bam!, they're connected! This is a huge generalization, of course; the brain is packed with quadrillions of neurons and each idea would be something more like a cluster of connected neurons, but the same basic idea is at play. Let's now move on to something more relevant...

Memory: For me, the concepts of memory and narrative cannot be separated. Everything that has "happened" to us is what we remember. I once had an argument with a friend where I insisted that dreams were just a giant dump of data from the brain and that the only reason we remember them as stories of any kind is because we make sense of that data after the fact; that that's the way our memory works. He said in return "but then you're just going into the age old question of what's experience and what's memory."

It should be clear this point that our memories do not work as some serial recording device like a computer's hard-drive or a video-casette; nature has given us a far more sophisticated device. Memory is a network of associations between sensations, ideas, stories and any other kind of experience that one can imagine—thus the reason for the insufferable amount of references to Marcel Proust's eating of the Madeline cookie in Remembrance of Things Past. We recall through association, something reminds us of something else.

4) Associativity shares much in common with the basic axioms of modern semiotics**. Consider that signs are not defined in absolute terms but assigned in relative terms. Let me try to explain this in detail.

Imagine for now that when I write a word like /this/, I'm talking about the concept. So for example, the word "automobile" is representative of an /automobile/. This is where semiotics started at when Saussure coined it; each word was an arbitrary token used to reference some object in the real world, so for example:

"Tree" --> /tree/
"Blue" --> /blue/
"Dog" --> /dog/

But now consider the difficulty of defining something in terms of absolutes. You can say that you like the color blue better than the color red, but you can't say that you like the color blue better than a tree. There's no comparison between a color and a plant. So instead, the idea of a sign system was coined, which was the idea of defining things in relation to each other so they could be compared. So red and blue belonged to the system of colors and trees and roses belonged to the system of plants. But, any one word or concept can belong to multiple systems. For example, if you're talking about what to decorate your garden with, you can say "I like trees better than garden gnomes." whereas you couldn't if you were having a discussion about plants.

I'm going to say for the record that this is all a simplification for many reasons, but I digress. Consider how this is similar to the concepts of honomyny and synonymy. The color blue can be referenced in multiple contexts. Conversely, we can think of the color blue as having multiple definitions; it can mean a color in the rainbow, or it can be part of a list of visual motifs in a movie. In order to see it this way, however, we have to accept that an idea can only be defined in opposition to other ideas. Let's take a look:

Note that while there are multiple contexts for the colors black and white, each of these contexts is defined by talking about how they are different from other things.*** That's how a sign system is formed; there is nothing explicitly defined. We can define a system of colors because of the comparable differences we see between them; same with a system of hats in Spaghetti Westerns. This is the concept that the French structuralists knew as difference. Meaning is relative.

5) So what was this all about? Where's the new heuristic?

Note the big glaring similarity between my semiotic diagram and the diagram of the brain. Did you see it? They're both networks. A sign system is created by the ability to associate ideas with one another, which requires that they have some similarity in form. One might say that in order to contrast two ideas, you first have to compare them (bonus points to those who can find a comparison between cell-phones and Pride and Prejudice.)

Right now we've been talking about the similarity in function between a semiotic network and a neural network. Now I'd like to explain why I don't think phrase-structure grammars are insufficient for understanding semantic context. From a computational standpoint, they're quite beautiful; the weakest phrase-structure grammar, a context free grammar, is itself a vast improvement over the most primitive model of computing, known as a finite state machine. But one thing that the concept of phrase-structure grammars doesn't seem to take into account very well is the concept of redundancy, which we saw was crucial for understanding how context can be narrowed down by having multiple words available as synonyms for the same concept. In simple terms, they do not have a built in mechanism for dealing with ambiguity.

As we know, using many synonyms can narrow down the range of interpretations. But here's the question that many would have: "why should words have multiple meanings? Isn't that silly and just going to confuse us?" Yes, maybe, but it also makes it much, much, much easier to describe something, because we can find a word with the right connotations and then add in redundancy in order to weed out unwanted interpretations (again, I understand this is a simplification.) In essence, when it comes to the meanings of words, sentences, stories or anything else (this concept applies to all of these things), we get something that looks like this:

We should be understanding language as a network that is capable of combining many different ideas rapidly and unpredictably but also capable of creating redundancy that allows precise and novel things to be expressed without complete confusion. Yeah, that's it.

I may post a follow up to this essay that more fully investigates the implications of this model. For now, I've actually gotten tired of writing this post. I much prefer talking about Dumbo on a winter afternoon and the like.

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*For more technical types, this is a more precise definition of redundancy.

**I don't know entirely who coined which concepts in semiotics; but the semiotic theory that I talk about is largely taken from Umberto Eco's semiotic theory.

***For those who are interested in questions about meta-languages, this heuristic may come to explain away a lot of my problems with it. One of the problems of semiotics is that we need a meta-language to evaluate sign systems. Notice, however, that in defining black and white in opposition to each other in terms of hats and colors in the spectrum, there was a difference in form. One sign system included red whereas the other one didn't, thus making them distinctly different sign systems irrespective of any explicit links.

That is to say, that if both systems solely included black and white, they would be the exact same sign system. It may actually be a little more complicated in that no sign system should be made up of a set of nodes that is a subset of another sign system's set of nodes, but I think that the same basic principle is at play here.

A Digression

2010-11-14T15:07:00.001-08:00

Will be posting soon about a new idea for understanding language through concepts taken from neuroscience and (to some degree) semiotics. It's a bit hard to explain, I'm not entirely sure where it's going, but it looks to be an alternative to grammars that doesn't necessarily discriminate between syntax and semantics. It may take a while, however, since I'm trying to come up with something that's simple and applicable enough to actually count for something.

For the time being, something different:

I've been very glad that winter is approaching. November and December are two of my favorite months, despite how many people are bummed by the cold weather and the shorter days; not as much goes on, people aren't out as late, the day ends before 5:00. I've always kind of liked that when it's in moderation.

A quiet and contemplative calm falls over everything and reveals the sacredness of so many places. When there are few people around and I can hear the wind scratch past my ears in the night, I can wander aimlessly and watch the light protrude from the buildings in Brooklyn Heights and the not-so-distant New York City skyline as if it were giving me just enough light to see where I'm going so that I can contemplate more things.

Winter might not be as fun as spring or summer, but it's much more sacred to me. May be posting pictures soon; for now, someone else's will suffice:

[Source: http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_GTU_nOCsE-s/R1NIwzc433I/AAAAAAAABcQ/qeHcRHk7Erk/s1600-R/IMG_6057_empire_state_park_snow_scene.jpg]

Why Intent "Matters" (or: why Beyonce is a bad liar)

2010-10-22T16:16:00.001-07:00

First, a disclaimer: if anybody ever tells you that an interpretation of a work is invalid because "that's not what the author intended," throw them off an overpass; they're better off coming back as a lobster.

Second, the opposite view is equally dogmatic and flawed. This is the harder point to make and I'll start by extolling some of the virtues of this view before kicking it down a notch.. A peer of mine once brilliantly said about analyzing Lolita "If we were to bring Nabokov back from the dead to ask him what he intended, he'd probably just pop out of his grave and start lying." This is quite true on many levels; on a quite literal level, there's no way you can guarantee an honest statement of intent; just because an author is saying it as opposed to writing it or phrasing it in a direct manner rather than an indirect manner (i.e. telling a story, what a concept!) that doesn't make it any more of a foundation since it isn't verifiable.

I can take this further by saying that intent simply isn't verifiable. It has no objective existence; you can tell your best friend what your intent about writing a story is and then lie to everybody else, but what you said to your best friend doesn't have any objectively verifiable basis; it only exists in your head! This seems somewhat banal, but it's a less metaphyiscal way of stating the fact that subjective ideas can only be mapped, they cannot be verified.* So it would seem that talking about intent is silly; it doesn't objectively "exist", it's something we can only infer in some unquantifiable way by privileging someone's "direct" statements or by looking at the biography of an author and using our idea of what their life was like to suggest how some events may have informed their work.

But this argument seems a bit weak. Is anything in literary interpretation ever objectively verifiable? Answering "yes" to that question seems absurd (if you think otherwise, feel free to speak up; I'm just saying that right now I really don't see any good argument.) So what are we doing then in analyzing literature? We're making sense of its impact and its relationship to the world by constructing a narrative of our own. While others may have strongly disagreed with me on the following point, I'll still make it: narratives are fundamentally about people and primarily reflect our existence as social creatures. When we read a novel or watch a TV show, we socially construct characters from the words on the page or the actors on the screen despite what's most likely a complete poverty of information; we may not know the entirety of their (imaginary) life experience, but just like a famous author, we construct a narrative from a limited biography (and body of canonical works; After the Quake isn't representative of Haruki Murakami, I swear!) and create a being with a life of its own.

One of the most important factors in our social construction of human beings is the idea of intentionality. We infer intentions when it comes to everything people do; perhaps as a way of masking all of the noisy details and deviations of a person's behavior or maybe because we really can learn who to trust and who not to.** Without ascribing intentions, we can't construct a picture of a person or empathize with someone; thus the reason why a heroic or tragic story on the news will captivate us but a statistic can only glance off the (somewhat) rational surface of our minds. The same goes for literature; not just in constructing characters but also in how we construct the story as a whole. There is always a narrative voice telling the story, however passive or indirect; and just as we listen closely to a personal story told to a trusted friend, we "listen" to a piece of literature in order to figure out what to make of the story it contains.

To put it another way, every story always has a storyteller; implicit or otherwise. Our idea of the storyteller is informed and constrained by many things; social norms, the conventions of genre, the idea that they're trying to entertain us (think about the last mystery/thriller you saw; you have a pretty good idea of why the most obvious suspect wasn't the traitor/murderer/villain,) and so forth. A former professor of mine rightfully responded to this point by bringing up the point that many of these ideas are different than a mere statement of intent because we can create a more objectively verifiable case about things like social customs and generic conventions. I agree with them insofar that making blanket statements about what someone intended isn't a good way to make an argument; our idea of someone's intention is as subjective as the author's own intent and an argument requires definite common ground. I still find it necessary, however, to acknowledge that we ultimately create an interpretation of the story that is itself a narrative and in order to do that we create an intent behind the storytelling. But I digress.

All storytellers are actually implicit; even if we know the author or are listening to an orator right in front of us, we don't know every last detail of that person's life, we've constructed a simplified version in order to relate them to the story that they're telling. The point is that this implicit storyteller informs our own effort to make sense of the story and in order to let such a storyteller inform us about the story we endow them with intentionality.*** Storytelling is fundamentally a social enterprise; it depicts complex social relationships (to the point that we can hate Nina Meyers for killing Teri Bauer) with very little information and it makes an impression on us by allowing us to read into how the story is told. From an evolutionary (and completely hypothetical) perspective, stories began as a means of communication about complex social relationships and so we're always scrutinizing the storyteller who must have borne witness to the events and who must have some motive behind telling us the story. But I (once again) digress.

We can't read a story without inferring something about the storyteller's intent and we can't have any understanding of a story without imagining a common ground between ourselves and the author. This is why Beyonce's songs will never do it for me. She talks about guys leaving her in so many of her songs (Single Ladies, Why Don't You Love Me, Say My Name...) but she's been dating Jay-Z for practically all of her adult life and is now married to him. I can't see veyr much authenticity in what she's saying. Jay-Z never left her and she started dating him when she was 21, so it seems unlikely that she has much to be going off of.

People have asked me why I continue to enjoy Lady Gaga despite the seeming artificiality of her songs about partying and seduction (she was a workaholic in school and is more of one now.) That's a good question. I suppose that most of Lady Gaga's songs in The Fame seemed somewhat reflexive and ironic to me. I know that's not a very sophisticated critique, but the difference is that Beyonce, for all of her singing and dancing talent and her picture perfect looks, just comes off to me as too damned earnest for her to have any implicit commentary in her lyrics. Of course, this is just the Beyonce that I've imagined for myself; the truth is that I don't know the first thing about her, and neither does anybody else outside of her personal life.

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*My amateur knowledge of phenomenology and semiotics causes me to think that this statement suggests the respective roles of both schools. Semiotics is the study of mappings whereas phenomenology is the study of where mappings come from.

**To be fair, narratives were much more reliable back in the Pleistocene when the world wasn't so damned interconnected. I take no credit for this idea; see The Black Swan by Nassim Taleb.

***A stronger argument that I'm tempted to make is that this idea of the implicit storyteller is necessary to create any sort of narrative context; generic conventions, social customs and even the specific language/dialect that we're reading in is some subjective phenomena independent of the physical text (how could it be a physical property of the text?) that we see as an act of communication between teller and listener. To put this in a more familiar perspective, Peirce concluded that all signs require three elements: a signifier, a singified and an interpretant. Without a social construction that binds the storyteller (imagined or not) and the listener, there's no code with which to link sign and signified.

Humans aren't Machines

2010-10-15T09:37:00.001-07:00

To some, the answer may be "well, duh." To others, it may seem that I'm making a poetically admirable but superficial statement that's obviated by the fact that everything is a collection of small atomic parts that interact to form an emergent system.

As the title suggests, I'd like to make an argument against the latter; but I'd also like to ask the former group to read along. Why? Because this isn't based on a metaphysical defiance of science but in fact something of a declaration that science and spirituality are quite compatible; in fact, I will be saying that reducing human beings to machines is deeply un-scientific. But I digress.

First thing's first: yes, using a very loose definition of machine* you can argue that all living things are machines; but it's a pretty banal and in fact misleading definition. Why misleading? Because the word machine has a whole lot of connotations and when it comes to a word, you can change the definition without sufficiently changing the connotations of the word. Machines are seen generally as artificial, unthinking, heartless, cold and calculating (I could go on, but you get the point.) But could we really make these accusations at a phenomena so general and abstract as a system that emerges from interacting parts?

These misleading connotations have a particular moral hazard; they encourage a very mechanistic and quite possibly nihilist view of the world. I'd like to note that I'm not saying that a mechanistic interpretation existence is bad in itself; that's science and I happen to think like most people that science is a very good thing. But when we take the word machine, with all its implications, and slap it on everything we see regardless of the context in which we're talking about it, our world view starts to become an outright perversion of science. This isn't just some spiritual quibble; in many ways it leads our thinking to become deeply un-scientific. This may sound odd, but in order to make this point I need to touch upon the cultural properties of machines.

Machines were historically created as something to aid and simplify human labor, starting as tools in the hunter-gatherer period. Since then, we've gotten to the point of automated assembly lines and computers. When making a machine, one generally needs to specify the problem and the solution in a way that can easily be understood as separate parts; not only in order to come up with a feasible design before building it, but also for the sake of being able to figure out what went wrong if the machine fails. For the entirety of Civilization, machines have been understood as a configuration of parts that can be understood how each part contributes to fulfilling the machine's function and whose actions are predictable. This sounds like a loaded statement, but it only comes from the logic of why and how we create tools and machines; by the fact that it was necessary to produce a reliable outcome and that in order to do so the logic had to be sufficiently simple. Note that this even applies to machines like random number generators; we may not be able to predict the number, but we can fully understand and predict how each part will contribute to the process of creating that random number.

But humans are hardly like this (or any animal for that matter.) We may be able to derive general ideas about living things by discovering the most basic moving parts or performing some specific experiments, but the interactions between these parts and the emergent patterns that come from them are well beyond our current comprehension. Unlike machines, organisms are almost entirely unpredictable. In the paradigm of physics, this doesn't matter because physics is only interested in the simplest forces and smallest parts; no physicist has to actually come up with any predictions about the human condition. In this context, it's perfectly safe to define a machine as anything that converts energy from one form to another.

But what of the many other things that we're looking to understand? By taking this definition of machine from physics and glibly applying it to every other schema through which we look at humans, we've turned a blind eye to the fundamental randomness of organisms. By this, I am not making any metaphysical argument about free-will/chance/determinism, but using randomness in the mathematical sense, which simply states that if you can't predict it (due to a lack of information or otherwise), then it's random for all intents and purposes. It's no wonder then that we've failed to create AI that portrays humans in any life-like manner, that we still wonder why shamanism or religion is sometimes a better alternative to clinical treatment** or that a thousand economists with PhDs couldn't see the imminent collapse of the world financial system.

The mechanistic view of the world is appropriate for fields and paradigms in which its objects of study can be sufficiently understood in such a light. Once we let this view pervade the rest of our thoughts, we end up looking at the map and not the territory. Calling living things "machines" in a general sense does just this by implying that their parts and behaviors are comprehensible as such and gives the world a false sense of predictability. Reducing the complexities of life in this fashion isn't just offensive, it's moronic.

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*The formal definition of machine is an object that converts energy from one form to another. By this definition, anything that materially exists is a machine.

**For the record, I am not trashing clinical treatment of people in need of help. I am the son of a psychologist and a pediatric nurse. I believe that medical professionals are oftentimes helpful because they are usually very scientific in how they rely on data. I should also note that my complaint with the mechanistic view of the universe is not with empiricism; true empiricism acknowledges what we don't know and doesn't rely on representations. What I am suggesting is that in the face of randomness, clinical treatment doesn't always make sense.

Data vs. Narrative

2010-10-12T11:07:00.000-07:00

This is an odd topic for a post, since I don't think many people think about data and narrative as particularly contrasting with each other, but I think there are important differences and similarities that should be addressed. A narrative as we know is a story, something that's told to us to make a point, to amuse us or to help us make sense of something in general. Data is a collection of raw numbers or labels that links two or more things together; the amount of young adults that have jobs, the amount of reported car accidents in America in a given year, etc.

So, let's first take care of why I'm bringing up this question in the first place. What's the point of comparing and contrasting data and narratives? Well, a narrative is, generally speaking, a way of making sense of some series of events. It illustrates causality (note to literary theorists: please bear with my questionable simplification; part of the use of this is understanding narratives better, this is just a good starting point.) If narratives explain why something happened, then they may be able to tell us something about what's going to happen next. By this definition, it's really no different than a scientific hypothesis (literary theorists: just keep running with it). More simply, we can think of this as being given a bunch of data points and connecting them with a mathematical function of some kind; i.e. fitting them to a curve:

Some data...

And a narrative to explain it!

I should make a note that it's perfectly acceptable that these narratives could be wrong. A new data point could be shown that doesn't fit with the curve that I drew, thus forcing me to draw a new curve. In fact, there are an endless number of curves I could draw to fit those points; some of which may look exactly the same close up but wildly different when you zoom out. As an interesting side-note, this illustrates pretty well what Wolfgang Iser calls the inexhaustibility of the text. What I mean by this is that when reading a book, one creates a "world" inside their head that matches what they've read; but there are an infinite number of "worlds" that could match this, with any number of (currently) unnecessary ideas unconsidered. As the reader continues, they find new statements in the book that have to be accounted for either by changing previous assumptions or by adding new details to the "world" that they've created in their head.*

So why is a narrative not just a scientific hypothesis or some formula that matches a bunch of data points? The answer can be found in part of my digression; that as we read a text, we have to consider new details in evaluating what's going on and why. A more mathematical analogy is that we have to consider more semantic dimensions; we might read a book that takes place in a Castle, and at first we only have to know the general outline of a castle, but then when the book describes how it made the characters feel alone and vulnerable, we then have to think about ways in which that castle may look or be built that would invoke that kind of a feeling. This all might be very abstract, mind you, but it still works that way on a fundamental level. Also; and this is important, the details that we come up with in the future are going to depend on the details that we've imagined now; so the set of details to be considered are not just latently laid out in the text in some finite way, the details we consider are actually going to derive from each other. So the semantic dimensions (or types of detail, for the less pretentious) are not in any way pre-determined and there could be a potentially infinite amount of them.

Data, like the sample points I showed in my illustration, is different. There are exactly two dimensions to be considered when fitting a line to these points. We already know the entirety of the semantics. Data is entirely delimited; we don't consider things outside of the traits that are enumerated, and there are values specified for each of these traits on every point. Lines drawn to fit the data are ultimately built to fit a static sign system that never changes (I hoped not to have to use the word "sign system", but I don't know how else to explain that.) But once again, there's a catch that might pull data and narrative back together, which I believe to have unknowingly been the source of conflict in a debate I had on this subject with a good friend:

Even if the points exist in a single, unchanging sign system (unlike narratives, in which the sign system changes in unpredictable ways), there's still the question of the scientific hypothesis or the line that fits the curve. Scientific data and points on a chart may both be delimited, but the hypothesis or the function isn't really. Oftentimes, a scientific discovery is made by thinking outside of the conventional data analyzed and therefore the sign system of why the data points are generated in a certain way changes. Similarly, with a mathematical function, the way in which the data points are arranged may require you to add increasing amounts of complexity to the functions; you may add another degree to the polynomial or add a trigonometric function, or something else entirely. So the actual hypothesis/function actually does have a surprising amount in common with narratives in that there is a potentially infinite amount of semantics that can be added.

The difference is that whereas a text is unexhaustible, there isn't the case with a set of data; the hypothesis that's suggested doesn't change the attributes of the data that have to be accounted for. There is an argument from literary theorists, however, that essentially says that as you find these new hypotheses, you create a new paradigm in which the attributes of the data are better changed to fit it and that therefore you have the same intractability as solving a narrative. As tempting as it seems to accept this counter-argument, it still seems to be the case that while new paradigms might introduce new ways of formatting the data, scientific hypotheses still account for the old delimitations; or else it's just solving a straw-man for all intents and purposes. Personally, this argument doesn't interest me, so let's move on to something more important:

The question on my mind from the beginning of this has been one about hypotheses and it'll take a moment to explain. New hypotheses are constantly created from new observations that may have nothing in common with the data. For example, a theory in microeconomics may spring from something in psychology that is not in the paradigm of economics; so it wouldn't show in the data, but it may be the only thing that explains the economic data. Now, let's think about how we perceive the world. When we look at the world, everything is data; our senses send discrete electric imuplses to our brains that quantify our experience as data; the semantics of our sensory experiences are finite, so how do we experience narratives, how can things be inexhaustible?

The answer lies in our neurology. The many inputs and outputs of our brains are interconnected through webs or neurons; these connections being associations between observations. These create clusters of connected neurons we know as ideas. These new ideas which are formed from connections between observations (and also from other ideas) create new conceptions of meaning that we couldn't even hypothesize about before, therefore offering us a process akin to the text in which we can create a virtually unlimited number of narratives starting with the finite amount of data that we initially perceive; in other terms, we can now draw hypotheses from outside of our our original paradigm of experience. Add to this that changes in this web of neurons essentially changes the inputs and outputs into our system (we may still have the same sensory receptors, but they get processed differently as they go further through our cortex) and we've created the reading process in which we connect data with meaning and then re-define data according to that meaning, therefore creating new semantics from semantics that we ourselves had previously created; our experience becomes inexhaustible.

I wasn't sure if I'd get to the end of this one, *phew.* It got a bit obscure near the end (my ability to write clearly is waning with my focus), so if anyone wants me to clear anything up feel free.
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*For those interested in this concept, I talk more about it in my earlier entry about the movie Inception. You can also read Iser's original theory in his essay The Reading Process: A Phenomenological Approach.

Book Review: The Next 100 Years

2010-09-24T16:14:00.001-07:00

I picked this book up in the middle of Barnes and Noble while taking a walk on a Saturday afternoon with not much else to do. I almost immediately wrote the book off due to my (still firm) belief that any prediction about something like international politics in the next few years, let alone the next hundred of them, is outright impossible to do with any precision.* I decided to pick it up, however, since it sounded like it would make for an entertaining piece of fiction about futuristic warfare and geopolitics.

He may not have convinced me that he'll be able to predict anything in the long run, but I was impressed by just about everything else. The author, George Friedman, is incredibly knowledgeable about everything from American academic and cultural movements (i.e. pragmatism and feminism, each of which plays a large role in his assessment of future conflicts) to the relationships between geography, economic power and military dominance. Most impressively, he's suggested a number of scenarios that run completely counter to most people's intuition about what will happen next and how it will happen. I'll sum up his main points briefly, focusing mostly on his ideas about the forces that have been shaping the world in the past century rather than the specifics of his predictions, since this is where I believe the real meat of the book lies.

Friedman suggests that what we are entering into right now is distinctively the "American Age"; not so much that he believes that the United States will remain the hegemon for several centuries (although he believes its power will not be endangered until at least the turn of the next century) but that where Atlantic Europe was the economic and cultural center of Civilization for hundreds of years, North America, bordering two of the world's major oceans and practically invulnerable to invasion, will be that center of gravity for a very long time to come and that whoever dominates the continent will dominate the world.

Friedman rightfully points out that the GDP of the United States is still greater than the next several countries after it and that despite constituting less than 5% of the world's population, it still accounts for around a quarter of the world's economic output. He attributes American dominance to a number of historical factors such as its domination of North America, the tremendous power of the U.S. Navy after World War II and the spread of the American philosophy of Pragmatism, characterized by the invention and spread of computing. Pragmatism, he says, is a distinctly American philosophy that praises ideas for their practical application and scorns the metaphysical, which although being directly at odds with much of the world, also gave birth to inventions such as the computer, which vastly expanded America's cultural and economic sphere of influence.

Friedman's general assessment of the conflicts happen today and his predictions of future conflicts are drawn from his knowledge of Pragmatism among other ideologies. He attributes America's continuing "culture wars" as well as the current conflict between America and the Islamic world to ideological fault lines. In particular, the spread of Pragmatism has created resentment in those cultures which were at odds with it, but more strongly he cites the various movements and struggles coming from the ideological conflict over the status of the family, which he sees as inevitable in the face of the massive technological advancements in the 19th and 20th centuries.

Several advances drastically changed the ways in which families and individuals behaved. Rapid advances in medicine brought down infant mortality to the point that families no longer needed to have very many children to ensure financial safety. In fact, as the 20th century progressed, having a lot of kids became economic suicide for many families as economic conditions demanded a more educated workforce and parents started having to send their kids to school for longer periods of time. Meanwhile, not having as many children, women for once had a lot more time on their hands and finally had the opportunity to work full time. Divorce also became much less financially dangerous.

Of course, many continued to hold very traditional family values, especially in the early 20th century when the technological and economic revolution had not fully set in. This has since caused a massive conflict between socially conservative institutions and an increasing number of individuals who have shed socially conservative values for a more opportunistic lifestyle. Friedman sees this as being not only at the heart of the American culture war, but also at the heart of the conflict between radical Islam and the West, as evidenced by Osama Bin Laden's letters to America.

These set up many of the initial fault-lines in the world that will erupt in the future. Other fault lines include Russia's geopolitical imperative to regain the status of the now defunct Soviet Union due to a demographic crisis and an increasingly hostile Eastern Europe, the shared cultural borderland between the United States and Mexico, which fully erupts near the end of the century due to Mexico's new found economic and cultural clout in the American Southwest, and the emergence of Turkey and Japan as world powers with spheres of influence in the Islamic bloc and coastal China respectively. I should also note that Friedman believes that China is due to fragment within the next couple of decades, suggesting that its economic growth is too fragile (a la Japan in the 1980s, the then feared competitor to the U.S.) and its politics too unstable.

There's quite a lot going on in this book, so I've omitted a lot and would like to get at his main points. Friedman doesn't concern himself with global warming or the current financial meltdown. For the former, he sees a drop in world population (and thus material demand) and the emergence of new technology as more than enough to solve it. For the latter, he sees the current crisis as very nasty but ultimately nothing more than another case of the world's economic balance correcting itself. I'm a bit skeptical on these points, but I should note that he doesn't believe there will be no crises ahead. He believes that immigration policy will take a 180 degree turn in the middle of the 21st century as steadily declining populations in the West create a massive labor shortage. He believes that the opposite will happen in 2080, causing the United States to repatriate many Mexican-Americans and creating a divisive split in a largely Hispanic America.

His main point, however, is that there are in fact static forces that allow for some degree of prediction. The geographical and demographic tensions between cultures and nations are relatively fixed and will ultimately be the backdrop for conflicts emerging from ancient rivalries. America's continued control of the seas (and eventually space) mean that it's convenient for most of the world to be complicit and in return enter the world economy (or, "the American system") under U.S. protection.

The United States' geopolitical objectives will also remain the same; to maintain dominance of North America, to control the world's oceans and to not allow any regional hegemon to emerge on any continent (but really, only Eurasia matters, because the geography of South America, East Asia and Africa don't allow for this sort of a thing.) The two current wars fought today (in which he has two kids serving overseas) are a cost-effective way to disrupt a region that Al-Qaeda was trying to unite against the West. With a civil war brewing in Iraq and the gulf states horrified at America's actions, another Caliphate is unlikely to happen, he says. For Friedman, his outlook on foreign policy will define the international system in the American age.

Although the future is far from written, whether the randomness come from free-will or a lack of knowledge; Friedman is right in saying that in fact many major forces are static and the outcomes of many scenarios might just be predictable. The one wild-card where I seriously disagree with him is technology, which relies on very random and severe jumps that open up entire opportunities. It seems presumptuous, and too in line with conventional wisdom, to say that space flight, robotics and genetics will advance in some predictable way and define the balance of power in the 21st century. That, in my opinion, is reason enough to distrust his prediction, however well informed it may be.

Most importantly, he has little opinion on any leader now or in the future. America is in a state of manic-depression, he says, blaming its supposedly imminent decline on the actions of past presidents and bitterly divided between exuberance and gloom about our current one. But, he suggests, leaders don't really have all that much say. As he describes it, world politics are like a game of Chess (please, bear with the cliche for a minute) in which many moves may be possible, but if you understand the game well, then there are fewer and fewer moves that actually make sense; however much it might seem to the contrary. That is, with the exception of that one amazing and unexpected move by the grand master that turns the entire game on its head; but I don't possibly see how Friedman can fully account for that.

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*That is to say that yes, you can guess that something's going to be happen and be right about it, but that doesn't mean you've predicted it. Thus my saying "with any precision"; I'll believe in these kinds of predictions if someone can show me a consistent level of accuracy over time.

My Interpretation of Inception

2010-07-24T15:23:00.000-07:00

I saw Inception a few days ago, and from my collective experience with my other friends who've seen it, it's the kind of movie that you have a strong opinion about; you either love it or you hate it and there's always a reason or five.

I personally loved the movie, I thought that in spite of its flaws that the plot was extremely complex, well-informed and theoretically adventuresome. I saw it as a metaphysical thought experiment that follows in the footsteps of Christopher Nolan's last non-Batman movie, The Prestige. My fascination with the movie came from my seeing the movie as an extremely ambitious thought experiment on narrative, epistemology, language and consciousness; which in itself is funny because it made me realize what a structuralist I've become. I used to always get annoyed when I talked to diehard Freudians because they kept bringing up the same interpretive framework for everything, but it's hit me that whenever I watch a movie or look at a piece of art, I end up seeing it as addressing some question or another about narratives and signs that only a structuralist would really care about.

I'm going to write my interpretation in the form of small vignettes since I don't feel that I could give a single elegant interpretive framework. It's also hit me that I've always worked very hard at linearizing my non-linear way of thinking and that it might be okay for me once in a while to present things in a more free-form fashion that doesn't take up so much energy.

Also, if you don't like things that are "pretentious", then you may not want to read this entry; it attempts to connect a lot of very strange concepts. You've been warned.

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1) Mal (Marion Cotillard) is quite clearly insane. There is no two ways about it; she's mad. That seems like a rather banal observation, but it is tempting at first to empathize with her after seeing so many layers of dreaming throughout the movie and actually believe that she has a valid reason to be skeptical. But when it comes down to it, Mal has no basis for believing that she's in a dream when she kills herself. She can say "Well, dreams seem real, so there's no way I can prove that this isn't a dream", but she would have to ask that on ANY level of consciousness; in other words, if she was right that she was in a dream, then she would still have to ask the same question when she woke up in the next level up.

2) So there's an epistemological question that goes on with these dreams. You can't know whether you're in a dream if there's no reference to the waking world. This is equivalent to Bertrand Russel's problem of meta-languages. You cannot verify the statement "this statement is true" on its own merits. There needs to be some metalanguage that can say whether that statement is true or false and that can directly compare two statements. If anyone's ever told you that you're comparing apples and oranges, it means that you're dealing with two or more objects that do not have a shared system of comparison, i.e. a metalanguage. Of course, if we constantly concerned ourselves with trying to find a transcendent metalanguage (or for all of you postmodernists out there, a transcendent signified), we'd never get anywhere. Narratives in general, especially religious narratives, help us deal with this kind of problem; from the common ground of shared narratives, we reach some sort of understanding of the world through dialogue.

Madness is epistemic nihilism, a belief that nothing is sacred (which may yet explain people's reactions to my sense of humor). In my last entry, I pondered about how cognitive dissonance allows us to participate in a collective narrative. In Luigi Pirandello's Henry IV, the main character, a disgruntled and possibly schizophrenic impersonator of the German monarch Henry IV raves about the freedom he's gained from dropping the mask and living in a state of constant flux without worrying about contradicting any narrative he or others may have made about himself. He's become quite literally anti-social, a sociopath. On an interesting digression, he is faced with the choice, after murdering his ex-wife's fiancee, whether to keep his mask as Henry IV and trap himself in the narrative of madness, or face the consequences of his crime the minute he stops acting like the supposed lunatic who murdered him; a Madman suddenly forced to sanely masquerade as a madman.

Mal is an epistemic nihilist, and she faces the worst possible consequence for it.

3) The way in which dreams operate is based on a phenomenological theory of storytelling in which the reader's consciousness fills in the semantic gaps left by the text. If I say "He walked down the street" you have to come up with your own idea of what that person looks like, what kind of street they walk down and perhaps how they might be walking. In fact, maybe you don't even think about some of those things until I point them out, or until I give a second phrase that reads "and people laughed at the way he walked." Of course, now that I told you that he was laughed at, you accommodate this whole sentence by giving him a funny way of walking.

In Inception, the shared dream is populated with an arbitrary landscape, perhaps a city, a tundra or a hotel. There are people walking around and perhaps even some familiar locations, but for the most part, these are all arbitrary landmarks. The dreamer populates the dream using his subconscious, filling in for what's left blank with their own personal thoughts. The initial setup of objects demands that the dreamer forms some causality between initial objects in the dream and, as a result, the dreamer creates a narrative out of the objects that reveals information about themselves. This is how the process of extraction works.

4) The process of extraction mirrors how we use language and narratives. Words on their own are arbitrary, meaningless symbols; mere parts of a (very very messy) syntax. By drawing connections between the words that somebody says, that person can communicate with us by allowing us to draw connections between the words and extracting information from the context that emerges when multiple words or sentences are arranged in a particular way.

Narratives work in the same fashion. The "dream defenses" in inception are a perfect example. I personally thought that the dreams having some literal military looked silly, as many people may have. Despite the fact that we know that it wouldn't really look like that in real life, we understood what the military men signified by seeing them try to kill any and all intruders. Every metaphor requires at least two juxtaposed symbols; they are an invariant representation of a pattern. By juxtaposing two or more symbols, you can imply some sort of causality or context that mirrors something that people understand and therefore turn meaningless symbols (such as say... a bunch of talking farm animals) into something that helps us understand the world (such as, just for the sake of argument... Animal Farm.)

5) Extraction works by framing a person's consciousness with arbitrary symbols and then causing them to involuntarily fill in the blanks with parts of their personal life. We're simply hard-wired to look for patterns and try to make predictions by accounting for the unseen. The dreamer reveals their secrets by allowing the intruders to see how they connect the dots and account for what isn't present in the dream.

In other words, it is the context of what somebody is saying that reveals the truth. Otherwise, the person could be lying or telling the truth or just saying nonsense; but if we compare it to what they've said before and under what circumstances, then we can assign some sort of information content to the words. The logical conclusion of this is that the truth about a person comes from what isn't present in what they say, that it's always looking between the juxtaposition of somebody's words, sentences or actions. This is why our English teachers always tell us to "read between the lines."

6) As an extension of (3), art and religion make for very good learning tools because they utilize our brain's incredible talent for storing patterns as invariant representations. Stories represent a wealth of highly abstracted shared wisdom accumulated over the course of civilization; all in a convenient narrative form. But I digress.

7) The dreamscapes created by Ellen Paige use logical paradoxes in order to "close the loop" of the dream. Most notable was the infinite stairs reminiscent of M.C. Escher. I don't fully know what to make of it, but such paradoxes seem to tie in well with Bertrand Russel's metalanguage problem. The dreams have within them some sort of "incompleteness" in that the dream simply cannot account for all possible questions the dreamer might ask. By making the dream physically loop on itself in a seamless fashion, Ellen Paige can make sure that the dreamer will simply not be able to answer certain questions such as "does this dream end or is it infinite?"

In real life, we're faced with a similar phenomenon. Many logical paradoxes exist within our world, one of which has shown that some true statements in mathematics simply cannot be proven. This is called Godel's Incompleteness Theorem. In this sense, the dream is arguably just as real as "real life" because it has a set of symbols upon which we are able to endow a narrative and has logical paradoxes which shroud certain epistemic questions about reality.

8) And logical paradoxes might just be the most essential thing to the fabric of reality. If we had "total knowledge" by which all things were proven with a consistent set of axioms, then we would no longer have any sort of experience because there would be nothing left to learn. All experience is caused by the activity of the brain making sense of its inputs and all narrative is us drawing causal links out of an infinite amount of possibilities to account for some series of events (or more accurately, some set of symbols.) The existence of epistemic limits means that we continue in the activity of learning and creating narratives.

In my opinion, narratives are the essence of experience because they're about imagining what isn't there; we live ineffably. Things continue to be ineffable in the absence of irrefutable proof. But perhaps it's also because reality works just like the dreams featured in Inception; that the universe just doesn't have enough material to answer all of our questions and so reality closes itself under a logical paradox that leaves us to continually guess with narratives. The universe is hardly the static, sound and complete ontological entity that the Enlightenment envisioned, it's a constantly fluctuating narrative where ideas like "true" and "false" are far less understandable than we think.

And I think that's why Christopher Nolan made the last scene such a cliffhanger. To be honest, I actually hated that scene, I think it was an extremely un-subtle way to address a question that the movie already implied and I believe that by putting it in the forefront, it made people take the problem so literally without wondering whether it even mattered whether Leonardo DiCaprio was still dreaming.

Cognitive Dissonance and Narrative Troglodytes

2010-07-08T16:33:00.000-07:00

So, this is a theory that I've been thinking about for a long time and I decided I may as well put this up for a first entry.

For those who know about Cognitive Dissonance, you'll know exactly what I'm talking about. If you don't know what it is, I'll put it very simply. You're more likely to like somebody if you help them rather than if they help you. Following this pattern: if you act unfriendly to someone, you're more likely to dislike them. A little bit counter-intuitive, but nonetheless supported by a great deal of scientific data. The best explanation as to why this happens is that people feel the need to have a consistent narrative of their actions--if certain occurrences don't fit into that narrative, or run completely counter to it, then you're going to have to use up more mental energy to keep multiple narratives running in your head. Considering that both intuition (which constitutes, I'd venture... 95% of our thinking) and memory are associative phenomenon, that means that you expend a lot of mental energy holding unassociated and seemingly contradictory ideas.

But that explanation (or just-so story, you decide) isn't the point of this entry. Just to show how general the idea behind cognitive dissonance is, I'd like to talk about a related phenomenon. The face has some dozens of muscles that can be either active or at rest. All of our facial expressions are created by activating combinations of these muscles. But by moving any one of these muscles, we send a special electric/chemical impulse that causes us to feel what we're communicating with that muscle. That is, if I make an angry face, then I will feel angrier. If I smile more, I'll feel more jovial.

For yet one more example, think about how hard it is for people to lie. People fidget, sometimes break out into laughter (although I used to get nervous when telling a story when I was little and my sister would accuse me of lying, which would of course make me smile or laugh more), our palms will get sweaty, which is why polygraphs can (admittedly unreliably) detect lies. Taken together together, there seems to be a general pattern here that escapes our everyday intuitions: that what we show on the outside is not simply a manifestation of how we feel but that in fact the connection between our feelings and our actions goes both ways.

This isn't very shocking on its own; I think most of us understand what I said to some degree. But I think that the implications of this idea have not been thought through. Consider, for starters, why we would evolve in such a way that it's hard to lie or to operate independently of what our own actions may infer; after all, if we know everything that's going on in our own heads, shouldn't we not try to make inferences about our own actions? I know that the question is more complicated than simply that (and I'll get to that in a moment), but consider the utility to a band of hunter-gatherers of nobody in the group having an easy time lying.

In fact, take it one step further and consider what cognitive dissonance (and everything related) does for us. It gives both our actions and our thoughts narrative continuity. I've preferred chocolate to vanilla my entire life; I may order vanilla whimsically once in a while, but I know that I generally prefer chocolate ice cream. It would be very hard for me to know what ice cream to stock the house with if several times a day, based on my temperament and not on past actions, despised the flavor of ice cream I liked two hours ago and loved a flavor that I was lukewarm about.

Of course, that's a mere nuisance compared to what it could do with myself and people. What if I suddenly, for no reason, despised my best friend while we were hanging out and then the next day I was fine with him again? I may have reasons in my own head for it, but if there was no precedent in my actions, then to other people it will look completely random; both initially despising him out of left field and suddenly being cool with him the next day. Most of our understanding of the world is based on narratives; we use narratives to make predictions (which would explain why we don't do so well at prediction in a more interdependent modern world) and we rely on predictions to know whether we can hang out with a friend the next day or trust our neighbor to feed the cats. Therefore, cognitive dissonance assures that most changes will happen gradually; a friend of mine might suddenly have an outburst and storm off once in a while, but I can be pretty sure that that friend is not going to have a change of morality overnight and sell my kidneys on the black market.

So cognitive dissonance is a social mechanism that helps the survival of groups of people. Evolutionarily, this seems in line with the fact that our closest relatives are more social than our more distant relatives. This also leads me to believe that Rousseau had it entirely wrong when he said that humans were meant to be solitary creatures; solitary schmolitary, we're open books!

We're not just social creatures, however; we're also narrative creatures (however much those two concepts are independent, but I'll leave that to another essay.) For those who don't live entirely under a rock, you know as well as I do that people love reading and telling stories. You also know from high school English class that people also love interpreting stories. This instinct, to me, seems to be reflective of the inferences that we make about other individuals as well as groups of people. We fit our own actions into a story that other people can read and by extension we all participate in a collective narrative.

And narrative is in fact the operative word here. Narrative interpretation has much more to do with associations between ideas than deductive logic. The brain itself works primarily by finding patterns through association, also known as intuition. Deductive logic, by contrast, is a trick that we seemed to formally coin in the classical era and is still used in small doses. The basis for our interactions with other people (and perhaps even our conception of the self) is one based on being able to infer patterns and construct a narrative. Without the narrative continuity of cognitive dissonance, people would be black boxes from which we could only stand to learn about them by deductively testing rigid hypotheses, since there would be too many significant hidden variables for us to know how somebody is going to behave (social conventions also matter in this regard, but they themselves come from the same concept of a shared narrative, which I'll once again have to save for another essay.) So instead of telling you to wear a condom when you go on a date, your parents could remind you to bring your notepad, your data tables and your TI-86 Scientific Calculator. Sounds perfect to me.

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Also, if you extend the logic of this post, you can forget the "enlightened" political theorists Hobbes, Rousseau, Locke, Shmocke, Crocke. It seems to me that only Edmund Burke was on target about societal behavior.

2010-07-08T10:39:00.001-07:00

Hi everyone,

For those who know me (the short version): I have a lot of idle thoughts about narratives, technology, math, uncertainty, systems, subjectivity (blah blah blah) and I thought that I should write them down.

For those who may not (won't be that long): I'm a recent college graduate with a B.A. in Computer Science and English. I study (and mess with) the intersection between narratives, technology and math. I'm working on several projects, one big one that I talk about here. I like just about any subject or idea that I can fit into a larger framework. This blog is meant to contain a lot of my thoughts about subjects ranging from literature and philosophy to neuroscience and economics. Just about every entry in this blog will draw from at least two "disciplines"--I rarely like thinking in a vacuum. Oh, yeah, I also dislike departments and the "specialization" of knowledge rampant in academia, but that's another story.

So if you're interested in any of the subjects I talk about, keep an eye out for new entries. And if you're a contrarian, please be sure to attack my ideas; keep me honest.