Absolute Dictatorship of the Flatted Fifth

I guess I should pack this thing with mothballs, huh?

If for whatever reason we're not in touch but you want to be, e-mail me at !apperception983! at #gmail# dot %com%, and I'll give you links to my current online haunts. I still have a very active online presence; I just don't like being here for some reason.

And if you don't want to keep in touch, that's fine too. Hope you're all well. Enjoy life!

ROCKVILLE, MD and San Diego, CA (May 20, 2010)— Researchers at the J. Craig Venter Institute (JCVI), a not-for-profit genomic research organization, published results today describing the successful construction of the first self-replicating, synthetic bacterial cell. The team synthesized the 1.08 million base pair chromosome of a modified Mycoplasma mycoides genome. The synthetic cell is called Mycoplasma mycoides JCVI-syn1.0 and is the proof of principle that genomes can be designed in the computer, chemically made in the laboratory and transplanted into a recipient cell to produce a new self-replicating cell controlled only by the synthetic genome.

...

As in the team’s 2008 publication in which they described the successful synthesis of the M. genitalium genome, they designed and inserted into the genome what they called watermarks. These are specifically designed segments of DNA that use the “alphabet” of genes and proteins that enable the researcher to spell out words and phrases. The watermarks are an essential means to prove that the genome is synthetic and not native, and to identify the laboratory of origin. Encoded in the watermarks is a new DNA code for writing words, sentences and numbers. In addition to the new code there is a web address to send emails to if you can successfully decode the new code, the names of 46 authors and other key contributors and three quotations: "TO LIVE, TO ERR, TO FALL, TO TRIUMPH, TO RECREATE LIFE OUT OF LIFE." - JAMES JOYCE; "SEE THINGS NOT AS THEY ARE, BUT AS THEY MIGHT BE.”-A quote from the book, “American Prometheus”; "WHAT I CANNOT BUILD, I CANNOT UNDERSTAND." - RICHARD FEYNMAN.

The JCVI scientists envision that the knowledge gained by constructing this first self-replicating synthetic cell, coupled with decreasing costs for DNA synthesis, will give rise to wider use of this powerful technology. This will undoubtedly lead to the development of many important applications and products including biofuels, vaccines, pharmaceuticals, clean water and food products. The group continues to drive and support ethical discussion and review to ensure a positive outcome for society.

A few weeks ago I mentioned mendaciloquent's retarded kitten, and some of you were curious. To clear things up for you, I sent him some questions via e-mail which he was kind enough to answer.

1) How is the kitten retarded?

She has cerebellar hypoplasia. She lacks fine motor control, gait coordination, etc. Since all cats are stupid, the condition does not affect her intelligence. She can clean herself and use the litter box.

2) Though the kitten is well past the point of kittenhood, it is still considered a kitten. Why?

Mostly because of her small size. She is smaller than an adult cat.

3) How would you rate the softness of the retarded kitten as compared with the non-retarded cat?

She is much softer. For a long time we feared that her fur would become more coarse with adulthood, but it hasn't. She has remained extremely soft.

4) There are rumors that the retarded kitten smells better than the non-retarded cat. Is this true? And do certain parts of the retarded kitten smell better than others?

The retarded kitten smells very good, although the goodness varies depending on several factors, such as: how recently has she washed? And did she nap in the sun after washing? Sun-warmed kitten appears to smell better than kitten not warmed by the sun.

There is a patch of white fur above the kitten's stomach that is both particularly soft and fragrant. It's a little bit like the smell of warm laundry just taken out of the dryer.

5) Anything else?

I would add two things. The first is that the kitten can hunt. Watching her chase and kill something is both funny and sort of pathetic.

I would also mention that she does go outdoors and, when excited, can actually cover ground pretty quickly. Her gait when agitated is a kind of exaggerated prancing hop that is pretty hysterical to watch. It's a little weird to be working outside and see, in the distance, a small cat leaping across a field in a completely unnatural way. It kind of makes me sick.

Somehow I missed this:



I'll give you a brief synopsis. Bill Gates—third richest person in the world and head of the largest philanthropic foundation in the world—is saying we need to get to zero carbon emissions by 2050.

You might think to yourself "so what?" but then remind yourself that this is Bill Gates saying this, and "zero carbon emissions" is not a mainstream idea at all. The fact that Gates supports such an idea lends tremendous credibility to it. The fact that he's putting his vast fortune behind the effort to achieve this goal is meaningful (to say the least).

To this end he's putting money into research into building a traveling wave reactor, which is a kind of breeder reactor which requires minuscule amounts of enriched uranium. You can take the entire world's supply of nuclear waste (which is largely U-238) and use it to power the whole earth for 60 years, producing no carbon emissions.

Like my friend is fond of saying, "Build it out of garbage."

But the fact that Bill Gates has set a goal of zero emissions for 2050 might be more important than the funding or the research itself. It's one thing if an environmental yahoo says it. It's another thing when one of the most successful capitalists in history says and proves he's willing to put his money where his mouth is.

Sir Isaac Newton



Herr Immanuel Kant

I think Heidegger's challenge still stands. What he's asking isn't all that controversial. It's something like, "Is human experience a kind of computation of the mind on basic inputs?" He doesn't ask that question explicitly, but that's the position he's challenging all throughout the first part of Being and Time.

It's not a wild question. There's two parts to it. "Are there raw inputs?" and "Do we compute them?" They're kind of connected, since if there are "raw" inputs, you better do something to them. Kant, Hegel, Husserl, Merleau-Ponty, Sellars, Rorty, Brandom, and McDowell have all challenged the inputs dimension. Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, Sartre, Adorno, Dreyfus, and Brooks have all challenged the computation dimension. This doesn't exactly break down across culture war lines.

It's a reasonable question that reasonable people are led to if they think about experience and information. There's no excuse in 2010 to react with scorn and dismissiveness toward Heidegger. If Being and Time is too hard for you, maybe you should pick something easier than philosophy?

Dreyfus is Heidegger's loudest and (with regard to information technology) most relevant follower. What he said in the 70s with regard to the AI program turned out to be true. But he's a naysayer. He thinks the whole program is doomed to failure because there's something special about human experience (following Heidegger, let's call it "facticity") which defies computation. In other words, no matter how hard you try, you're never going to create a strong AI, because the basic foundation or Urgrund of human existence is non-computable.

Be that as it may. That's not the real problem. The real problem is that facticity doesn't matter. What if you created a model of human experience that wasn't human experience? In other words what if you were able to create something which matched—from a purely behavioral point of view—human subjectivity but which had no actual subjective interiority? What if you were able to create, from inert, "dead" matter, something which was able to fool everyone else into thinking it was a person with an inner life, a being to whom belonged its own, personal experience—and yet there was no such thing inside?

What if the entire human race (or a large enough portion of it) convinced itself to switch over to such a mode of existence or way of being? What if, going by all outward appearance, no one could tell the difference?



That's what's really at stake here. Not whether machines are capable of thought, or whether a strong AI is possible. Thinking is a behavioral phenomenon. Given the right theoretical perspective, my ballpoint pen is capable of thought, since I can click the pin on the end and switch it between an "on" state (point extended) and an "off" state (point retracted). As for strong AI, I count myself amongst those who believe a machine will pass the Turing Test around 2030. Whether it happens in 2030, 2040, 2140, or 2015, there's no philosophical puzzle here. There's nothing worth thinking about in the philosophical sense, since there's nothing at stake in a mere technical problem. It's like asking when someone can run my Perl script to the ten trillionth term in under 5 seconds. Who cares? The real question is—What is the fate of interiority? Does inner truth matter? Does subjectivity have a future?

I think this is what Vonnegut was making fun of in Cat's Cradle.

I don't relate to most of academic leftism. I don't mean the heavy theoretical stuff, because I don't know much about it aside from the little chunk I focused on. I mean the worldview people come away with after they attend a small liberal arts college or major in English or Women's Studies. I find the focus on privilege and political correctness about as alienating as most people feel if they had never associated with the academy in the first place.

I don't identify by default with the oppressed. I never have and probably never will. Just because some person or group is oppressed, that doesn't make them noble and it doesn't make every complaint of theirs valid and deserving of frothing-at-the-mouth ire. Yet to hear some people speak, you'd think a person were racist or sexist or whatever just because they don't jump out of their seat when someone yells "racism" or "imperialism". Compared with the way I'm used to looking at and thinking about the world, it appears overreactive and emotional.

Policy-wise I consider myself a tax and spend liberal. And I adhere to a theory of history in which things bend toward the good and the just over the long-run and in the aggregate. I'm generally optimistic about the human race, but I don't think individuals change all that much. Not without a tremendous amount of focus, effort, and awareness—on their own part—which most people seem to lack and never acquire. So I don't think much of the "the personal is political" dogma. If your sole form of political activism is going around the internet and correcting people for being impolite or trying to raise their "awareness", I'm sorry, I just don't consider that political activism. And the more smug and self-satisfied people are about this, the more contemptuous I feel.¹

In these matters—when it comes to individuals and their beliefs, assumptions, values, how they want to live, what they want to do with their time, how they want to treat each other—I'm much more libertarian than "leftist". I have a strong "live and let live" ethos. If something effects me personally, like if someone is saying or doing something that might impact my reputation in a negative way, then I intervene. Otherwise, I don't care. I'll stop someone if they're hurting or attacking someone in my presence, of course, but you will never catch me "calling somebody out" on the internet, and you will probably never see me act non-dismissively toward someone who tries to do it to me. You have your process, I have mine.

So, that's that.

---

¹ My jaw almost hit the floor a few weeks ago when I saw someone had written that soliciting money for their (extremely PC) blog was one of the "most feminist" things this person did. We all say and do goofy things we come to regret later, but the lack of self-awareness or irony in that statement absolutely astonished me. In case you're wondering, the blog was Shakesville.

British MP won't travel second class because "there's a different type of person there"

Can't access an original article on this from work, but I did find that quote.

Frankly, I feel the same way. People on public transportation act like filthy animals. They bring their loud, filthy children on the train and don't supervise them. They get drunk on the train and spill alcohol and urinate in places other than the toilet. Trashy people upset me. I try to avoid rubbing elbows with them.

I wish there were a place for elitism in public political discourse in the United States. People here should say things like this more often.

I was having dinner with my parents at a restaurant yesterday afternoon, and across the restaurant there was a family with a young child who was shrieking. It shrieked throughout my whole meal. The family thought it was great fun. I kept giving them dirty looks.

My mother said, "You were always so well behaved when we took you out to restaurants." I said, "That's because we were a different class of family from these people."

Not that I have so much family pride, but you know, it's true. Why not bring a band saw to the restaurant, plug it in, turn it on, and leave it running for the duration of the meal? It would show about as much consideration as bringing your unruly brat spawn to a public place and using it to ruin real people's meals.

Someone should pass a law.