Quest or Quiescence?

After three and half years of hindsight, I think it's time to once again ask the central question of our time:

Do we husband our values, or do we export them?

If it is true that a Healthy Set of Beliefs and Motivations is one that enables a human being--like a cell, a tissue, etc.--to assimilate into higher and higher levels of organization (this, I think, is intuitively obvious), then it is vital to our long term interests as free individuals that we spread those realities that facilitate complex bonding potential and flexibility, i.e. the values of the Declaration of Independence and Rawls' Theory of Justice (in its fundamental abstraction, not as it manifests itself in redistribution).

In Iraq, we are seeing the consequences of an infertile mental substrate. The culture of Arabia is stuck revolving around its own Lorenz attractor of stagnant beliefs and practices. Only intervention or massive war will break the generational transfer of these detrimental values. That is, for me, still the issue in the War on Terror.

Our technology will continue to find its way to the mal-adjusted. Adjustment qua memetic evolution (genetic?--probably not, but a scary thought) is the only way out of the coming slaughter, yet most ignore it. It's all about how to manage Iraq's dissolution, or how to bring our boys home, all the while the real problem--the problem that brought us 9/11 and will continue to do so--is forgotten.

So the question remains: do we draw up the bridge, cement the boundaries around our American system and treat all other undeveloped cultures as "environment" (see J.G. Miller's Living Systems); or do we embark on a costly quest to beneficently, and perhaps even forcefully, evolve the belief structure of almost half the people on the planet?

The Origins of Music: Innateness, Uniqueness, and Evolution

Publication by Josh McDermott and Marc Hauser, here (.pdf file). Excerpt:

Music stands in sharp contrast to most other enjoyable human behaviors (eating, sleeping, talking, sex) in that it yields no obvious benefits to those who partake of it. The evolutionary origins of music have thus puzzled scientists and philosophers alike since the time of Darwin (1871). [...]

Every culture in the world has some form of music, and most cultures have apparently developed music independently from each other. At the very least, therefore, there seems to be some innate machinery motivating the production and appreciation of music. [...]

Infants pose an experimental challenge because unlike an adult subject, they cannot verbally report on their experiences. Instead, developmental psychologists make use of the fact that changes that are salient to an infant attract its attention, which can be measured via nonverbal behavioral responses. Although the behavioral assays vary, the fundamental logic underlying the method is the same: Exemplars from one category are repeatedly presented until the infant’s response -— sucking a non-nutritive pacifier for neonates, looking or orienting to a stimulus presentation for older infants -— habituates, at which point exemplars from either the same or a different category are presented. In a classic setup, a sample of music is played repeatedly from a speaker. Once the orienting response to the music habituates, the experimenter conducts test trials, some of which introduce some change to the music sample, such as a change in key or a rearrangement of the notes. If the infant is sensitive to the change that is made, then they will tend to look longer at the speaker following the trials containing the change. [...]

Lullabies—songs composed and performed for infants—are a particularly striking musical phenomenon found in cultures across the world and appear to represent a true music universal. Lullabies are recognizable as such regardless of the culture (Trehub, Unyk, & Trainor, 1993), even when verbal cues are obscured by low-pass filtering (Unyk, Trehub, Trainor, & Schellenberg, 1992). This suggests that there are at least some invariant musical features that characterize infant-directed music; this aspect of music directly parallels studies in language of infant-directed speech are often characterized as simple and repetitive by adult listeners, and may feature more descending intervals than other melodies (Unyk et al., 1992). Both adults and children perform lullabies in a distinctive manner when singing to infants; listeners can pick out the version of a melody that was actually sung in the presence of an infant. Infant-directed singing tends to have a higher pitch and slower tempo than regular singing and carries a particular timbre, jitter, and shimmer (Trehub, Hill, & Kamenetsky, 1997b).

The characteristics of lullabies, as well as the particular acoustic properties that adults and children imbue them with when sung to infants, appear to be tailored to what infants like. When infants are played both lullabies and adult songs under similar conditions, adults who watch them on videotape judge the infants to be happier when played the lullabies than when played adult songs (Trehub, 2000). The fact that the preferred characteristics of lullabies are culturally universal suggests that infant preferences for lullabies are indeed innate. Further, because no other animal parent vocalizes to its offspring in anything resembling motherese or a lullaby, this style of musical expression also appears to be uniquely human. At this point the origin of lullabies and their particular features remain unknown, but their existence suggests that at least one major genre of music is predominantly innate in origin and uniquely human.

Lyotard and The Postmodern

An excerpt from Jean-Francois Lyotard's The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge:

"What, then, is the postmodern? What place does it or does it not occupy in the vertiginous work of the questions hurled at the rules of image and narration? It is undoubtedly a part of the modern. All that has been received, if only yesterday (modo, modo, Petronius used to say), must be suspected. What space does Cezanne challenge? The Impressionists'. What object do Picasso and Braque attack? Cezanne's. What presupposition does Duchamp break with in 1912? That which says one must make a painting, be it cubist. And Buren questions that other presupposition which he believes had survived untouched by the work of Duchamp: the place of presentation of the work. In an amazing acceleration, the generations precipitate themselves. A work can become modern only if it is first postmodern. Postmodernism thus understood is not modernism at its end but in the nascent state, and this state is constant.

Yet I would like not to remain with this slightly mechanistic meaning of the word. If it is true that modernity takes place in the withdrawal of the real and according to the sublime relation between the presentable and the conceivable, it is possible, within this relation, to distinguish two modes (to use the musician's language). The emphasis can be placed on the powerlessness of the faculty of presentation, on the nostalgia for presence felt by the human subject, on the obscure and futile will which inhabits him in spite of everything. The emphasis can be placed, rather, on the power of the faculty to conceive, on its "inhumanity" so to speak (it was the quality Apollinaire demanded of modern artists), since it is not the business of our understanding whether or not human sensibility or imagination can match what it conceives. The emphasis can also be placed on the increase of being and the jubilation which result from the invention of new rules of the game, be it pictorial, artistic, or any other...[sic]...The postmodern would be that which, in the modern, puts forward the unpresentable in presentation itself; that which denies itself the solace of good forms, the consensus of a taste which would make it possible to share collectively the nostalgia for the unattainable; that which searches for new presentations, not in order to enjoy them but in order to impart a stronger sense of the unpresentable."

Hence was born hip-hop, punk rock, avant-garde cinema, Wes Anderson, Michel Gondry, Michael Barney, and the future of all good art to come, art that will do no less than re-create the world. -KWG

Pensees

By Blaise Pascal, here. Excerpt:

When we wish to correct with advantage and to show another that he errs, we must notice from what side he views the matter, for on that side it is usually true, and admit that truth to him, but reveal to him the side on which it is false. He is satisfied with that, for he sees that he was not mistaken and that he only failed to see all sides. Now, no one is offended at not seeing everything; but one does not like to be mistaken, and that perhaps arises from the fact that man naturally cannot see everything, and that naturally he cannot err in the side he looks at, since the perceptions of our senses are always true. [...]

All great amusements are dangerous to the Christian life; but among all those which the world has invented there is none more to be feared than the theatre. [...]

Words differently arranged have a different meaning, and meanings differently arranged have different effects. [...]

Man loves malice, but not against one-eyed men nor the unfortunate, but against the fortunate and proud. People are mistaken in thinking otherwise. [...]

As Americans, it might be prudent to keep that last aphorism in mind.

Order for Free

By Stuart Kauffman, here. Excerpt:

What kinds of complex systems can evolve by accumulation of successive useful variations? Does selection by itself achieve complex systems able to adapt? Are there lawful properties characterizing such complex systems? The overall answer may be that complex systems constructed so that they're on the boundary between order and chaos are those best able to adapt by mutation and selection.

Chaos is a subset of complexity. It's an analysis of the behavior of continuous dynamical systems — like hydrodynamic systems, or the weather — or discrete systems that show recurrences of features and high sensitivity to initial conditions, such that very small changes in the initial conditions can lead a system to behave in very different ways. A good example of this is the so called butterfly effect: the idea is that a butterfly in Rio can change the weather in Chicago. An infinitesimal change in initial conditions leads to divergent pathways in the evolution of the system. Those pathways are called trajectories. The enormous puzzle is the following: in order for life to have evolved, it can't possibly be the case that trajectories are always diverging. Biological systems can't work if divergence is all that's going on. You have to ask what kinds of complex systems can accumulate useful variation.

We've discovered the fact that in the evolution of life very complex systems can have convergent flow and not divergent flow. Divergent flow is sensitivity to initial conditions. Convergent flow means that even different starting places that are far apart come closer together. That's the fundamental principle of homeostasis, or stability to perturbation, and it's a natural feature of many complex systems. We haven't known that until now. That's what I found out twenty-five years ago, looking at what are now called Kauffman models — random networks exhibiting what I call "order for free."

A Possible Solution for the Problem of Time in Quantum Cosmology

By Stuart Kauffman and Lee Smolin, here. Abstract:

We argue that in classical and quantum theories of gravity the configuration space and Hilbert space may not be constructible through any finite procedure. If this is the case then the "problem of time" in quantum cosmology may be a pseudoproblem, because the argument that time disappears from the theory depends on constructions that cannot be realized by any finite beings that live in the universe. We propose an alternative formulation of quantum cosmological theories in which it is only necessary to predict the amplitudes for any given state to evolve to a finite number of possible successor states. The space of accessible states of the system is then constructed as the universe evolves from any initial state. In this kind of formulation of quantum cosmology time and causality are built in at the fundamental level. An example of such a theory is the recent path integral formulation of quantum gravity of Markopoulou and Smolin, but there are a wide class of theories of this type.

Excerpt:

The argument that time is not a fundamental aspect of the world goes like this. In classical mechanics one begins with a space of configurations C of a system S. Usually the system S is assumed to be a subsystem of the universe. In this case there is a clock outside the system, which is carried by some inertial observer. This clock is used to label the trajectory of the system in the configuration space C. The classical trajectories are then extrema of some action principle.

Were it not for the external clock, one could already say that time has disappeared, as each trajectory exists all at once as a curve g on C. Once the trajectory is chosen, the whole history of the system is determined. In this sense there is nothing in the description that corresponds to what we are used to thinking of as a flow or progression of time. Indeed, just as the whole of any one trajectory exists when any point and velocity are specified, the whole set of trajectories may be said to exist as well, as a timeless set of possibilities.

Time is in fact represented in the description, but it is not in any sense a time that is associated with the system itself. Instead, the t in ordinary classical mechanics refers to a clock carried by an inertial observer, which is not part of the dynamical system being modeled. This external clock is represented in the configuration space description as a special parameterization of each trajectory, according to which the equations of motion are satisfied. Thus, it may be said that there is no sense in which time as something physical is represented in classical mechanics, instead the problem is postponed, as what is represented is time as marked by a clock that exists outside of the physical system which is modeled by the trajectories in the configuration space C.

Richard Feynman

Here's Richard Feynman's Nobel Lecture: The Development of the Space-Time View of Quantum Electrodynamics. Here's an excerpt:

We have a habit in writing articles published in scientific journals to make the work as finished as possible, to cover all the tracks, to not worry about the blind alleys or to describe how you had the wrong idea first, and so on. So there isn't any place to publish, in a dignified manner, what you actually did in order to get to do the work, although, there has been in these days, some interest in this kind of thing. Since winning the prize is a personal thing, I thought I could be excused in this particular situation, if I were to talk personally about my relationship to quantum electrodynamics, rather than to discuss the subject itself in a refined and finished fashion. Furthermore, since there are three people who have won the prize in physics, if they are all going to be talking about quantum electrodynamics itself, one might become bored with the subject. So, what I would like to tell you about today are the sequence of events, really the sequence of ideas, which occurred, and by which I finally came out the other end with an unsolved problem for which I ultimately received a prize.

Here are four of Feynman's lectures on video.

Here is Feynman's famous talk on nanotechnology.

Enjoy.

Americans and their Myths

Here's Sartre's 1947 essay. Excerpt:

There are the great myths, the myths of happiness, of progress, of liberty, of triumphant maternity; there is realism and optimism--and then there are the Americans, who, nothing at first, grow up among these colossal statues and find their way as best they can among them. There is this myth of happiness: black-magic slogans warn you to be happy at once; films that "end well" show a life of rosy ease to the exhausted crowds; the language is charged with optimistic and unrestrained expressions-"have a good time," "life is fun," and the like. But there are also these people, who, though conventionally happy, suffer from an obscure malaise to which no name can be given, who are tragic through fear of being so, through that total absence of the tragic in them and around them. [...]

There are the thousand taboos which proscribe love outside of marriage--and there is the litter of used contraceptives in the back yards of coeducational colleges; there are all those men and women who drink before making love in order to transgress in drunkenness and not remember. There are the neat, coquettish houses, the pure-white apartments with radio, armchair, pipe, and stand--little paradises; and there are the tenants of those apartments who, after dinner, leave their chairs, radios, wives, pipes, and children, and go to the bar across the street to get drunk alone.

States Of The Union

It is a pity that more people are aware of the YouTube flavor-of-the-week than singer-songwriter-genius Sufjan Stevens. After releasing his mythographical-cum-personal "state albums" for Michigan and Illinois, Stevens has boldly declared his intention to create an album for all fifty states in the Union. To many the ambition seems more than audacious, to some absurd, yet a close study of Stevens' music gives one the hope that not only will he complete his 50 opuses (opii?), but that he will continue to make each state album as personally affecting and sprawling as his first two. Much pabulum in the New York press has been made of Sufjan Stevens: he has had to endure labels such as "Wonder Boy" and other monikers that sell magazines but neglect the justice and brilliance of his music. This post is not meant to be a history of his musical training, his prodigious and capacious abilities as a musician, but, rather, his devotion to uniting through music an America never more polarized than it is today.

For the Sufjan (pronounced Soof-yan) uninitiated, a good place to begin delving into an already astounding body of work for a 31-year-old is his 2005 Illinois album, Come On Feel The Illinoise!. The album is impossible to categorize as mere anti-folk or post-punk, as its various symphonic arrangements and softly sung ballads defy the expectations of most indie rockers. The rollicking train of a song "Chicago" may be the most popular on the album, gaining enough notoriety to be tapped for use in the superb film Little Miss Sunshine. The choice of the song for the film, whose narrative engine is a road trip, should surprise no one, as its melodic and orchestral impulses signify motion toward a destination. For this critic, however, the album's best song is "Casimir Pulaski Day," a heart-wrenching ballad about a friend dying of bone cancer. The song is replete with rich and full characters - the dying girl and shards of the singer's memories of stolen kisses from her, the father whose incomprehension of his daughter's death has made him a veritable ghost. But it is the objects and places - personal and familiar - that resonate so seismically with the listener: Golden Rod ice cream, a 4-H stone, an anonymous hospital room, a Tuesday night Bible study, the floor of a bathroom stall on The Great Divide. Stevens' sincerity, a rarity for so many these days, is without doubt his greatest gift. The song is as much about a reconciliation with an illogical God as it is his friend, as much about the singer making sense of a greater and overwhelming America through the tiny keyhole of a single lyric in a single state.

Sufjan Stevens' music makes anonymous people matter, makes forgotten historical figures suddenly relevant again, makes words count for more than illusionary prisms of style or image. Stevens does not bring "sexy" back - he brings America together over dinner tables, church picnics, funerals, garden shows, softball games. He makes us weep over what we are capable of, smile over what we can do as a nation.

Invasion Percolation and the War on Terror

Marc Schulman, at American Future, has a good post up about Iraq, and what we should do with it going forward. His advice is to quarantine it:

We are where we are, and I believe that the American national interest can best be served by redeploying our troops to Iraq's borders with Saudi Arabia, Iran, and Syria to limit the ingress and egress of current and future terrorists. Iraq's perimeter should become a no-fly zone. Our navy can guard Iraq's small coastline.

This is not an obviously wrong suggestion, which, sadly, means it is one of the better ones about Iraq, but I think there is a better strategy.

This is from the book Complexity and Network Centric Warfare:

In natural systems, we can consider the movement of a boundary through a medium (for example, the boundary of an atomic surface, the boundary of a growing cluster of bacteria, or the front of advance of a fluid "invasion" of a medium such as a crystalline rock).

What happens if we restrict ourselves to looking at the boundary between two different regimes (such as two different nationalities or two opposing armed forces), and how this would move over time depending on the local coevolution of the elements involved?

The most relevant case from our point of view is the front of advance of fluid "invasion" of a medium. We can represent the medium itself as consisting of a lattice of cells, each with either a 1 or 0 in it. A "1" represents the fact that that cell can be wetted. The proportion of cells containing a "1" is defined as p. For large configurations, we can also interpret p as the probability that a particular cell contains a "1." A "0" represents the fact that the cell cannot be wetted–it thus "pins" the advance of the fluid through the medium, at least locally.

It turns out that for this case, when the pinning probability p is greater than a critical value pc, the growth of the interface is halted by a spanning path of pinning cells. Such models of interface or boundary movement exhibit fractal properties of the interface. We shall see similar effects later in our discussion in Chapter 4 of the control of the battlespace using ideas based on preventing the flow of opposing forces and/or third parties through the space. Rather than choosing the next cell to invade at random, as in the DPD model, we can use a model of the process that is more akin to the manoeuverist principle of applying your strength where the opponent is weak–in other words, the cell next to be wetted is the one where the local pinning force of the medium is weakest. Such a model of the boundary movement is the Invasion Percolation model.

If this is correct, then it is quite possible that the entire War on Terror has been misconceived from the beginning.

It is important to realize that we, the West and Western Values, are not the advancing boundary. Radical Islam is. Whether it's flowing into failed states, power vacuums, or segregated Muslim enclaves in Europe, it is following the optimal strategy of wetting where the "local pinning force of the medium is weakest." We have responded by attacking the places where the local pinning force of anti-Westernism is strongest. If this continues, it seems certain that Radical Islam will succeed in wetting a critical number of Muslim clusters. And then comes the conflagration.

To battle this, we must build up the anti-jihadist pinning force where it has the greatest potential to work. While this has several implications for our global struggle, the most immediate is what to do with Iraq, should it all fall apart:

The answer, I believe, is Kurdistan. If there is one place to make a stand in Iraq, it is there, protecting the most pro-American and pro-Western people on the planet.

More on this later.