Can metal remember?

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I’ve mentioned in the past an idea that I freely concede may be crazy but it’s interesting enough to keep afloat: the possibility that consciousness is a basic property of all things and when matter interacts in complex and networked ways (like it does in a human brain or an advanced computer) higher, self-aware consciousness develops.

This L.A Times article offers more food for thought. It’s about a UCLA scientist who has developed a microchip that he claims can remember. How does it do it? Well, the science writing in this article is so vague that I’m pretty sure the reporter doesn’t understand and I sure don’t. It basically sounds like the scientist is creating neuron-like connections with metal strands and passing electricity through them.

In a lab, they placed a series of copper wire posts, mounted on a silicon wafer, into a solution of silver. As the copper dissolved, the silver formed intricate hair-like strands, as complex as the human cortex. It was the birth of the dust ball.

Building the chip is “extraordinarily simple,” Stieg says. Once the strands are created, they are exposed to sulfur, which provides electrical and ionic conductivity, and when electrical signals are sent through them, atoms migrate through each intersection of silver, each strand over strand.

Much as stimulus changes the brain by building over time synaptic patterns that can be associated to memory, the signals over time change the structure of the chip. Bridges form between the strands, further altering the chip.

What I find interesting here is the default behavior of the components of this chip seems to be to seek out “connections”, to create bridges. Much like neurons in the human brain branching and creating new synapses.

What causes neurons and silver strands to seek connections? I believe it is the fundamental need of all things to seek love!

No, seriously, I dunno. But if there’s a basic property of matter to, in some way, attract other matter, then it’s not that amazing that connections of the sort that could engender consciousness would arise.

Group produced art

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In a recent acid logic article I claimed that authorship is dead. By this I meant that the notion of one person being responsible for a piece of art, writing, film etc. was faulty. I’m thinking this might point towards some interesting new ways of creating art.

Let’s consider rock music. The conventional approach is that there’s a band and usually within that band there’s one or two people who do the bulk of the writing. For example, on my two recent albums I am the sole credited writer. But, of course, I am not 100% responsible for every note you hear. There are many improvised solos and parts that I had little to do with (though I do tend to be a “guiding force” when people are laying down their tracks; I approve and reject ideas.)

Now, there’s a lot going for this auteur approach. One person can have a grand vision and make sure the final work matches that vision. But why not have all band members contribute ideas? Why not have dozens if not hundreds of people contribute ideas? (Thus really eliminating the idea of “a band.”)

But how would this work? Let’s say one person presented a template for a piece of music. Something like, “The song will start out slow and sad, then move into an uptempo happy section, then a driving but angry section, then back to an uptempo section then end with a variation of the slow and sad intro.” Perhaps people could contribute submissions for each of these “song parts” and then vote on how they go together. Or maybe they submit contributions to an authoritarian fascist leader (e.g. me) who decides how they go together.

The result may be that no one is completely happy with the work. But that’s kind of my point. The piece is satisfying a different kind of entity, a different kind of intelligence… a sort of “group intelligence.” The group would have to have a certain faith that the results are worthwhile and will bring to light interesting musical aspects that are not be available in more conventional “auteur style” writing.

Obviously this idea could be applied to other forms of art – film, visual arts, fiction etc.

Strangely, I’m reminded a bit of the Agetha Christie story where the killer turns out to be a group of people, each who stabbed (I think) the victim once. If one considers murder an art (and I see no reason why one shouldn’t) this may be the first conception of what I’m talking about.

I should also be clear that what I’m describing is probably what a lot of existing art collectives around the world are already doing. But I think I might be shading it a little differently and uniquely.

Finally, I should concede that why this is an interesting idea, it may not be something I would excel at. I am still rather ego driven and seem to be moving towards wanting more control over every aspect of what I create, not less. But maybe I’ll give this a shot.

Devo’s Bob Casale is dead

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Sad news that Bob Casale, founding member of Devo (my favorite band), has died. The CNN article on his death includes this interesting nugget.

“He was excited about the possibility of Mark Mothersbaugh allowing Devo to play shows again,” Gerald Casale wrote in his brother’s death announcement. “His sudden death from conditions that led to heart failure came as a total shock to us all.”

There’s always been a bit of a Mick/Keith vibe to Gerry Casale and Mark Mothersbaugh’s relationship. This public jibe that Mothersbaugh controls whether or not Devo plays shows seems an example of that. Who know what the truth is?

I interviewed Gerry Casale years ago.

On Mozart and pop music

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A lot of people, myself included, complain about the music of Mozart. It often seems long winded and verbose, weighed down with endless scale passages and ornamental frills.

I think, by the standards of modern music, these complaints are valid. But I’m starting to “get” an aspect of Mozart’s music that I find quite interesting. Mozart’s music is really about conversation—it’s about the different “voices” (e.g. instruments or melodic characters) talking to each other. And the voices all have different personalities and “say” different things. In this sense his pieces are really like ensemble character dramas. Of course it’s not only Mozart who composed this way; many, perhaps all classical composers did. But I think the trait is especially pronounced in his music.

This is, in many ways, at odds with modern pop music. With pop music there is one voice, one point of view (usually the singer) and they are supported by the backing instruments. The singer says “I state this observation…” and the instruments say, “we agree and support you.” What doesn’t happen (for the most part) is a conflict between the singer and the instruments. You wouldn’t, for example, have a singer singing about tender love while a thrash guitar plays distorted chords in the background.

In this sense, I think modern music is more individualistic and ego driven. It’s about my opinions (me being the singer) and my emotional pain and nobody else’s. Music from the classical era is more communitarian—it’s about the group and how they interact. Something can be said for both styles, but as someone who has written modern, individualistic music for most of my life, I find a challenge in the more conversational style. And Mozart, despite his verbosity, is a good model.

The downsides of mindfulness

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I’ve read a bit about the practice called mindfulness which, for lack of a better description, is a kind of focused attention on your surroundings. But paying close attention to your sensory experiences of the moment you can, the argument goes, transcend a lot of your worries and break the limiting tether to your ego or self. I’ve made passable stabs at mindfulness, often at a park or in nature, and it can be quite refreshing—a sort of mental reset button.

Part of the idea of mindfulness is that you focus one a specific thing, say your breathing. If a disruptive thought comes in, say, “I have to do my taxes” (Shit! I DO have to do my taxes!!!), you recognize it and let it dissipate, then return your focus to the now. As you train your mind in this practice, you experience less disruptive thoughts.

I’ve wondered if there’s a potential downside to this. Much of creative thought is of the sort that pops in to your head your while you are thinking about something else. Wouldn’t mindfulness, with its focused approach (albeit a rather gentle focus), eliminate these moments of inspiration? The answer, according to this NY Times article, appears to be yes .

But one of the most surprising findings of recent mindfulness studies is that it could have unwanted side effects. Raising roadblocks to the mind’s peregrinations could, after all, prevent the very sort of mental vacations that lead to epiphanies. In 2012, Jonathan Schooler, who runs a lab investigating mindfulness and creativity at the University of California, Santa Barbara, published a study titled “Inspired by Distraction: Mind Wandering Facilitates Creative Incubation.” In it, he found that having participants spend a brief period of time on an undemanding task that maximizes mind wandering improved their subsequent performance on a test of creativity. In a follow-up study, he reported that physicists and writers alike came up with their most insightful ideas while spacing out.

“A third of the creative ideas they had during a two-week period came when their minds were wandering,” Schooler said. “And those ideas were more likely to be characterized as ‘aha’ insights that overcame an impasse.”

And that’s not all…

Another potential drawback to mindfulness has been identified by researchers at Georgetown University. In a study presented at the Society for Neuroscience annual meeting in November, they found that the higher adults scored on a measurement of mindfulness, the worse they performed on tests of implicit learning — the kind that underlies all sorts of acquired skills and habits but that occurs without conscious awareness. In the study, participants were shown a long sequence of items and repeatedly challenged to guess which one would come next. Although supposedly random, it contained a hidden pattern that made some items more likely to appear than others. The more mindful participants were worse at intuiting the correct answers.

“There’s so much our brain is doing when we’re not aware of it,” said the study’s leader, Chelsea Stillman, a doctoral candidate. “We know that being mindful is really good for a lot of explicit cognitive functions. But it might not be so useful when you want to form new habits.” Learning to ride a bicycle, speak grammatically or interpret the meaning of people’s facial expressions are three examples of knowledge we acquire through implicit learning — as if by osmosis, without our being able to describe how we did it. (Few of us can recite the rules of grammar, though most of us follow them when we speak.)

The solution is probably moderation in all things, including mindfulness.

Amazon’s robots

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A subject I’ve been interested of late is the affect the advent of robots will have on the nation’s workforce, employment rates and economy. I was particularly interested in this post (and fascinating video) about the use of robots at Amazon. These robots are changing the nature of a job I used to have. I worked at Amazon’s Seattle warehouse as a book picker and packager for one month in the mid nineties.

The article states…

[The robots] job in the warehouse is to deliver shelves of items to Amazon workers, effectively reversing the typical “picker” job. Instead of walking across the warehouse all day to retrieve different items, workers can be given fixed stations and let the shelves come to them. When a shelf arrives, they select the appropriate item off it, box it, and place it on the exit conveyor belt.

The article says that so far, no human jobs are being replaced. But for how long!!!???

Can recommendation engines really work?

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I often comment here about the fact that the emergence of the internet has enabled the production of (and the cheapening of) content. By content I mean writing, music, video, art etc. It used to be that if you wanted to hear a song you had to either buy the cd it was on, or listen to the radio and hope you heard it. Nowadays most songs can be found on Spotify, youtube, pirate sites etc. Additionally there are gazillions of content creators, myself included, posting all kinds of content on various sites like soundcloud, youtube, Noise Trade (which is now offering free books) etc.

For content consumers (e.g. most of us) this is great. Lots of choice, lots of free or cheap stuff. But there’s an obvious problem. Most content is shit. It’s actually beyond shit—it’s utterly amateurish prattling devoid of nuance or refinement. (My work is an obvious exception.) And plenty of other content is not shit, but not all that great either. Only a small percentage of content really hits the mark. So how do you weed out the crap?

One idea is by having people rank content. This is how Amazon reviews, youtube “thumbs up and thumbs down” buttons, Facebook likes and similar concepts work. But they’re somewhat problematic. It turns out there’s a lot of people out there with no taste, so you really can’t trust their opinion on anything. How do I know the person doing the ranking is the kind of person I can trust?

Amazon has kind of gotten around this with their recommendation engine. It basically follows the logic that “this guy liked a lot of stuff you liked so you’ll like this new thing he said he likes.” It’s the obvious idea that like-minded people like the same stuff.

It kind of works, I guess. But I’m starting to wonder about another issue. All these processes assume that whether we will like something is fairly static. I see a movie on Sunday afternoon and like it. The presumption is that had I seen the movie on Thursday evening, or Tuesday morning I would have liked it just the same. But what if our liking something is more flexible? What if our mood before we examined the content affects whether we like it? What if whether we just ate a good meal affects our liking it? Then it matters less what some guy who has liked things we’ve liked thought. Maybe he liked it because he just ate a delicious Fettuccine alfredo?

And, I suspect there’s some truth to this supposition. Sometimes no music or TV, no matter how good, is going to keep my interest. And there are other times when anything seems pretty amusing. I may also like something simply because I like the person making the recommendation. There’s a lot of x-factors at work that are hard to weed out of the process.

You might say that I’m saying appreciating content is subjective (e.g. it depends on the person.) But I’m really saying it’s beyond subjective. The person I will be Saturday may not like stuff the person I am today likes.

Peeling the onion of consciousness

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This post may reiterate some points I’ve made in other recent writings but it may also reveal the fundamental truth of all life and existence so I think some repetition can be forgiven.

I’ve been thinking again about this ethereal thing we call consciousness. I find myself musing on the question, “what can I be conscious of?” Obviously I can be conscious of things I see, hear, smell etc… all my sensory sensations (including subtle ones like vestibular/balance sensations and internal body states.) I can also be conscious of thoughts and ideas. This can be great thoughts such as the content of this blog, or more pedestrian musings like, “I need to buy toothpaste” or even thoughts that aren’t thoughts at all: just general sensations of being bored or wondering what Harrison Ford is up to. Even recognizing objects—seeing a car and being aware that it runs on gas and gets people around—is a thought-like mental activity. So too is simply being aware of the passage of time.

Let’s perform a thought experiment and remove some of these elements. Can I envision what it would like to not have my sensory data? Certainly; it’s easy enough to close one’s eyes, to blot out noise etc. I can’t absolutely turn off my sensory systems but I can envision the gist of what it would be like to do so. Can I also turn off my internal thoughts and my object recognition? This is much harder. It’s probably similar to what babies—new to the world and devoid of human knowledge— experience, though even they have intuitions and reflexes that require no learning. However, I think we’ve all had that feeling of just momentarily zoning out, of existing with not much going through your head. Maybe that’s similar to what stripping out this kind of thought awareness is like.

So, if I strip away all this “stuff” what am I left with? Consciousness with nothing to be conscious of. It’s possible there’s nothing at that point; you are essentially dead. But what if consciousness/self-awareness is, as some would argue, a kind of property of the universe, a bit like gravity*? It’s everywhere and when it interacts with a complex network like a brain, it results in a sense of self—an identity with an awareness of its past and its thoughts and whatnot. But the “self” is not really what’s aware; this consciousness field is. And this field is everywhere, in the same sense that forces like gravity, electromagnetism, the strong and weak forces are everywhere.

*Frankly, I’m describing something pretty close to the force from the Star Wars movies. Of course that concept was largely lifted from Asian philosophy.

I realize this is quite new-agey and almost impossible to prove, but it does nicely align itself with certain aspects of human spiritualism. Maybe what many spiritualists—shamans and monks of yore—experienced via drugs and meditation was a stripping away of the “content” of consciousness (sensations/thoughts etc.) and an arrival at the raw, empty experience. (This actually ties in with the experiences of Jill Bolte Taylor described here.)

At worst, I’ve got an interesting premise for a science fiction novel.

UPDATE: Feb 25 2014
I was never under the impression that I was originating this theory and I have to say it’s quite similar to Benjamin Libet’s “Conscious Mental Field Theory.” It’s described at this wiki page and includes the following quote from him about the idea.

The process by which the CMF arises from its contributing elements is not describable [sic]. It must simply be regarded as a new fundamental ‘‘given’’ phenomenon in nature, which is different from other fundamental ‘‘givens,’’ like gravity or electromagnetism.

Return of the Rockets!

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Oddball electronic duo Daft Punk recently won a Grammy for their song “Get Lucky.” Below is their Grammy performance of the tune; they are joined by several artists including Stevie Wonder. The robot-suited members of Daft Punk don’t appear until a couple minutes in.

I have to point out that the French Daft Punk are clearly influenced by another French pop group. The Rockets, who were active during the 70s. Compare and contrast.

I, being one who feels we need more robots in music, enjoy both groups.

Can plants think?

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This is serendipitous. Recently, I wrote, “If we presume that consciousness arises “naturally” out of complex networks (like the human brain), then we have to concede that consciousness might arise out of non living things that are as complex.”

Today I come across an interesting New Yorker (December 23, 2013) article on the possibility of plant intelligence. At one point it states:

The hypothesis that intelligent behavior in plants may be an emergent property of cell exchanging signals in a network might sound far-fetched, yet the way that intelligence emerges from a network of neurons may not be very different. Most neuroscientists agree that, while brains considered as whole function as centralized command centers for most animals, within the brain there doesn’t seem to be any command post; rather, one finds a leaderless network. That sense we get when we think about a plant—that there is no there there, no wizard behind the curtain pulling levers—may apply equally well to our brains.

Now the article doesn’t allude to my essential point: that complex networks like brains (and according to this article, plants) may birth not only intelligence (whatever that is) but consciousness (whatever that is.) But the article does seem to imply that we are starting to break down these barriers between different forms of life. (You might recall a recent link I posted arguing that the very barrier between living and non living is false.)

To be clear about a possible confusion arising from my initial quote in the first paragraph; I was suggesting that non living things like storms might have some form of consciousness. I’m aware that plants are living things. 😉