Books read September 2008, with date finished:
This month I've also picked up an original 1955 printing of the Rand Corporation's A Million Random Digits with 100,000 Normal Deviates (which will go with my copy of Ulysses - with the words rearranged in alphabetical order - from Simon Popper's Borromean), and a reprint of 507 Mechanical Movements, but neither of those I'll read so they won't be included here.
It's been a month of sci-fi and Westerns (I've been watching a bunch of films too), which has left me dreaming of clear blue skies, long clear vistas, desert scrub, C beams glittering in the dark near the Tannhauser gate... I'm not kidding, this is manifesting as a heart-breaking yearning, a pining for frontiers and wide-open scale. I really don't know how to deal with it.
So Zane Grey was magical, and it's incredible to see the Western being written for the first time--the seed that turns into a genre. Egan's Diaspora was as poignant as the first time I read it: the hardest of hard sci-fi that delves into what it means to be human and opens it way, way up. The universe is a lot bigger after I finish reading that book. Ian Watson I'm pleased to have discovered as a sci-fi author: his stories have ideas I've read nowhere else, and I'm happy to find he has a large back catalogue to work through.
Lem was hilarious (oh and, like the best satire, true. Or was it the mascons telling me the book was good?); Jerome was also hilarious--it had me laughing out loud, so rare.
Heims' double bibliography of Wiener and Neumann paints the characters and context of early cybernetics, and in that way sits as a great companion piece to his later book Constructing a Social Science for Postwar America: The Cybernetics Group, 1946-1953. But here's the thing: you also get a picture of Wiener's humanity (and the surprising humanity in cybernetics), and the horrendous contingency of the Cold War and the arms race, which appears to have rested heavily on one of the quickest and most convincing minds of the the 20th century - Neumann - understanding people like machines, refusing to have faith in humanity, and being a warmonger. Heims makes a powerful case for a science better embedded in society, and produces this marvellous quote from Paul Goodman:
Whether or not it draws on new scientific research, technology is a branch of moral philosophy, not of science.
Recommended.
Volition
When I was young my family included Indigo, a golden retriever with his own towel and a wide smile. I would sit and watch him as he lay sprawled with his chin on one leg, staring into the middle distance. Suddenly he would leap to his feet and trot, tail wagging, a few paces before hurling himself at the carpet, twisting as he did so to roll and throw himself around and generally have a good old time right there in the hall. What was it Indigo, hey? What did you see, did you see a ghost who said -Come play? Why that moment, hey boy? Just as quickly he would stand and shake himself down, and come back to his spot near the kitchen where I could see him and he could see me, and I'd be laughing. Where did it come from, that abrupt desire for play? How come that exact second for decanting some of the internal flywheel into rolling about with his belly in the air and legs waving? It reassured me that I couldn't see any cause, that it was something inside. It meant Indigo had his own internal life, and so I could love him more.
Newly single I sit at the table in my flat, shuffling papers, wondering how I'll know what to do next, and wishing I could be like Indigo. I drink water because I'm thirsty; I pack because tomorrow I fly to Oslo.
I was 10 years, 9 months, 3 weeks and 3 days old the day they activated the Large Hadron Collider. I was at college in a lecture the day I found out they'd found the Higgs boson, which gives particles mass. Mass gives momentum, and momentum is what keeps you moving. The Higgs is where it comes from:
the universe is a house, and you're a particle - let's say a proton - and the house is packed full of ghosts, from wall to wall like a carpet, and from foundations to rafters like roaches. You're dancing in the ballroom - there's a ballroom in this house - and as you dance the ghosts tap at your arm and tug at your collar and rest their hands on your shoulder. You turn for a second to see who it is, but the face of the ghost is hard to make out, and besides the ghosts are restless so it has already mixed back into the crowd, and perhaps there aren't any ghosts anyway - you've had a few glasses of wine after all, maybe you're imagining things - but that aside, it means that your otherwise smooth dance is slowed and shaped by the constant contact of a million touches.
The ghosts are Higgs bosons, which fill the universe so they slosh over the sides, and the contact they have with particles - like you and me - as they pass by is what we see as mass.
The lecture that day was one on particle physics, and Dr L-- came into the hall with a grin and bright eyes.
-Gentlemen! he said. He always called us gentlemen, whatever the mix.
-Gentlemen, your notes are out of date! My colleagues at Cern let me know this morning. On slide, uh, 20 from last week, where we declared the existence of the Higgs boson was unknown, well that's no longer the case. We have it.
It shouldn't have hit me so hard. We assumed the existence of the Higgs, or something like it, in most of our mathematical models. But to have it confirmed! It didn't need to have come out this way: there could have been a field that created mass, like an electromagnetic field, covering the universe. Or each particle could carry within itself mass, just like charge or spin.
But to have it confirmed... it wasn't right that mass was an external quality, I was thinking, it belonged inside. I felt violated, like someone had knocked me to the ground and emptied my pockets. I walked up the Banbury Road with my head in turmoil, each iron bar on each iron fence looked empty to me, each paving slab on the ground looked hollow, and I eyed the so-called empty air with suspicion for hoarding mass to itself, for withholding the Higgs from me.
It's funny how these things hit you.
The way you show the existence of just one of these ghosts is you stop dancing and you barrel across the dance floor as hard as you can, shouting and roaring, barging ghosts and dancers alike hither and thither, scattering them and knocking them flying. If you get it just right, you splash a clearing in the ghosts, and if you're luckier still there's a moment before they get to their feet where you can grab one, sit on his chest and hold him down by his neck and grab his chin so you can wrench his dirty face round to look straight at yours and lean in real, real close and, panting, whisper straight at him through your gritted teeth: you little fucker: gotcha.
Post-doc I studied the origins of volition.
It's not enough to know that Higgs makes things slow down. What makes 'em move to begin with? Okay, so this proton dances with that proton and that's why that one moves... but why was the one before that moving? And the one before that? And the one before that?
-You're obsessed with work, you said, the day my paper outlining the experimental procedure for isolating volition was published. -Why do we never do anything? (That was the first time. I was at my computer, watching comments and cross-linkings appear on arXiv as my ideas rippled across the community. Physics changes fast when it wants to.)
With hindsight I see you were right. I didn't know how to do anything but work, anything but respond to comments and questions. But it was also unfair: we were as active as any other couple, popular round the faculty and taking full enjoyment from the art and music that sticks to any town with a population of students. We scoured the event sheets for unusual plays and exhibitions in new gallery spaces.
Maybe that slipped. The questions to field more than filled the day, as the detector moved closer and closer to coming online.
The ghosts that fill my head can be scattered and isolated, briefly and with much effort, and I can hold one down and recognise his face: my father, say. My very own Higgs; these are the things that join me to the world.
Volition strings, if they exist, are the faintest of the faint to see. We have to look for the ragged ends of the superstrings that comprise the real substance of the universe. Most strings exist in knotted loops, which are particles. Some strings, after the Big Bang, had their loops severed and the ends of these thrash around like the end of a hose with the water turned full on. They whip, their ends moving at light speed and their middles faster still, although it's impossible to ever detect those except indirectly.
The open ends of volition strings, when they touch a particle - which is rare and fleeting - impart it some unpredictable shove. They push it into a new orbit. And so: movement.
Seeing this in action is what the detector is for. The detector is lined up such that the cut-off end of the volition string will pass through the distant star σ Octantis, which is dense and should slow it just a little, and then through the Earth, which should slow it just a little more and focus it, and then we have our detector placed flat, facing down, in the Arctic Circle of Norway looking through the rock and the mantle and through the core, and we use the entire planet as a kind of lens, and we look close, and we hope we see a twitch in the fabric of the cosmos. Volition.
-You're inert, you said, there's been a year of trying, and we agreed it was best if we parted, and as to whether this decision was right - it has to be said - I numbly say it was. That was three months back.
But you're going to be there in Tromsø, in the calibration and operations team, as the detector is activated, and in three days we'll see one another again.
I'm here because I first suggested a form of this experiment in a paper years ago, a kind of honoured guest except that the details have been refined and revised by hundreds of physicists and mathematicians since. We crowd round the screens, and although really there's no need for personal presence these days, it's a happy moment to be in, with my fellow hunters. I think of Indigo and my father and Dr L-- and you and I see my life as a careering country dance, passed from one hand to another, swung from person to person, kept moving in do-ci-dos up and down and round and round. Somehow I'm standing behind you and, as the lens cap comes off - the culmination of my work - I find myself unable to think of anything so much as the nape of your neck just ahead of me, and it would be the work of a second to rest two fingertips gently on its soft concave curve; and I fancy that the end of a volition string passes right through me, skewers me from my head through my soul itself, or maybe volition is inside me all along and I just need to grasp it, to fan its spark to life, and I understand that what I'm facing now is a decision: to connect or to not connect, that there is no default choice, there is no momentum or inertia or carrying on as you were before; that every millisecond is a choice, an opinion, an act, and it can't be avoided because volition fills us, floods us, drowns the ghosts: and I look at your neck, and my hand, and I have a choice to make.
Hyperlinks are blue which is the colour of sky, of potential. The @ symbol looks like a whirlpool, the mouth of a wormhole. A rabbit hole we fall through. This is the internet.
In the Sweat-Shop: I ran across this excerpt in Heim's biography of John von Neumann and Norbert Wiener. It's the first stanza "In the Sweat-Shop," from Leo Wiener's translation of the Yiddish poems of Morris Rosenfeld.
The machines in the shop roar so wildly that
often I forget in the roar that I am; I am
lost in the terrible tumult, my ego disappears, I
am a machine. I work, and work, and work with-
out end; I am busy, and busy, and busy at all time.
For what? and for whom? I know not, I ask not!
How should a machine ever come to think?
It reminds me how the processes that surround us drown and re-cut us.
The collection is online: Songs from the ghetto (1898).
Books read August 2008, with date finished:
I read a lot or a little when I'm feeling glum, and this month I read a whole bunch plus there was some travelling. (For those of you keeping count, this means I need to average 7.5 books/mo. for the rest of the year. So if I'm lagging behind in November, look for me to instigate a personal crisis or two to get the reading rate up. You have been warned.)
The Black Swan points out that big, rare events dominate continuous trending (50 years of stockmarket movement is mostly accounted for by 10 days), and that you should put yourself in positions where black swans - when they do occur - will be positive. A good framework. Ashby's 1956 Introduction to Cybernetics is a straight-forward argument from one end of cybernetics to the other: enough to see why it was believed to hold so much promise. There are foreshadowings of both the inevitability of order (autocatalytic loops) and selfish gene ideas in there, which shows how much was nascent in that early crystal seed.
I've had David Byrne on my to-read list since the book came out, and I can't believe I waited. Intelligent art and wise words: the cake results as least as much from the shape of the pan, the cooking and the timing than from its ingredients.
Ways of Seeing is also enlightening and brilliantly designed.
There's nothing in this month's reading I'd shy away from recommending if it took your fancy--we'd be able to have a good chat about it whatever you picked up. Le Guin's short stories are actually better than I remember; both Piercy and Ferris I couldn't put down; Doc Smith's space opera is pacier even than his subspace drives; and although Essays in Love seems a little childish now, and the protagonist is a dick, love is childish, and we are all dicks. Well, I am.
Okay, but I need to recommend one book and it's between Byrne and Berger. I'm going to say Berger's Ways of Seeing because it's rescued art for me and given me a way into a new world.
Lightning turns the sky into graph paper. L-- shouts 'this way,' and his bright eyes target me with reflected horizontals and verticals. The thunder plays four/four in my gut. We trip on curbs and scrape along walls, running - ricocheting - down narrow city lanes. There's a deeper sound, God making a plosive, the opening of whale song, and then light, and I realise it's another negentropy bomb, on the next street. Nothing for a second. In the gloom the city looks identical but raised to a higher octave. Potential. 4. 3. 2. 1. Then the world exhales and drops into regularity. A creak as the building next to us attempts to adjust to the sudden order imposed on its far side. The crystal structure spreads, architecture aligning, physics gentrifying, roads straightening, square paving slabs unfolding from one another. Another creak and a slump this time, L-- is caught in dust and rubble. I crouch over him; there's blood on my hands as I hold his head and the lightning is the same shape as his body. 'They're homogenising us out of existence,' he says. His teeth are red. 'Find the Deterritorial Army. Tell them the layers of emergence are becoming too tightly coupled. Tell them objects are no longer sufficiently mobile on the substrate. Don't wait.' It smells of wet brick; mysteriously I think of ferns. L--'s blood is thickening into hexagons. I turn and run.
Books read July 2008, with date finished:
If, like 2007, I want to read 104 books this year, I should've hit 61 by the end of July. I made 62, but I'm not making so much time for it right now so we'll see what happens.
101 Things got my brain fizzing and has given me language for ideas I've not been able to articulate before. But this month (I like to recommend one book a month), Stand on Zanzibar is well worth your time: it's a collage of quotes and narrative, out of which a story about an over-populated world slowly emerges. It's like watching a cloud form, or walking past Quantum Cloud.
Two kinds of training: respondent conditioning is when you perform two events simultaneously so the subject confuses cause and effect. So think of Pavlov and his dogs: the dogs salivate when he gives them food, and then he rings a bell whenever he gives them food and the dogs get used to that. Or rather, they get conditioned to that. Then they confuse cause and effect and end up salivating whenever the bell rings, whether the food comes or not.
(Pavlov cut the dogs' throats to find this out. His theory of conditional reflexes dominated institutional Soviet thinking for decades, in part leading to both the Soviet rejection of cybernetics and their late development of computers, and also to Lysenko rejecting Mendelian genetics. Lysenko directed farm policy under Stalin, and his misguided theory of agrobiology led to mass crop failure and starvation.)
Another kind is operant conditioning. It relies on consequences after the event to produce conditioning, and it's more suitable for voluntary behaviour. It's what they use on dolphins.
There are a few types: you can give a reward for good behaviour; you can remove pain for good behaviour; you can actively punish bad behaviour; you can remove a pleasant stimulus when bad behaviour occurs.
If you give me a biscuit every time I make you tea, I'll likely make you more tea.
The most powerful form is variable-interval reinforcement. That's when the reward doesn't happen every time, and you end up working harder to get it. It's as if you're trying to figure out the pattern, to get the reward to come more often. It's why email is addictive: you hit that 'get mail' button and get your reward, but not always, just sometimes, and that conditions you into checking more and more.
One weird thing that happens, in operant conditioning, is the extinction burst. There's a nice example I read, I don't recall where, about elevators. Imagine you live on the 10th floor and you take the elevator up there. One day it stops working, but for a couple of weeks you enter the elevator, hit the button, wait a minute, and only then take the stairs. After a while, you'll stop bothering to check whether the elevator's working again--you'll go straight for the stairs. That's called extinction.
Here's the thing. Just before you give up entirely, you'll go through an extinction burst. You'll walk into the elevator and mash all the buttons, hold them down, press them harder or repeatedly, just anything to see whether it works. If it doesn't work, hey, you're not going to try the elevator again.
But if it does work! If it does work then bang, you're conditioned for life. That behaviour is burnt in.
Or a baby, crying to get attention, will have one last huge attempt to get attention before learning that tactic isn't going to work.
I have a friend - again I can't remember who - who saw a talk from a fellow who trained dolphins - and I don't remember why or where - and he mentioned this extinction burst. You trail off the fish rewards for leaping through the hoop, and let extinction occur, and then when the extinction burst happens - you know, the dolphin is trying everything it knows, going crazy trying to get you to notice it and feed it fish - bang, that's when you get in with the big reward and there you go, the dolphin's hooked.
Anyhow.
It strikes me that dating, when successful, may produce operant conditioning.
It also strikes me that some people may have personalities that naturally produce operant conditioning to certain behaviours in the people around them, simply by acting with exactly the right balance of predictable/erratic or aloof/intimate.
Back to dating. It would naturally be most successful if a couple condition one another reciprocally. And it makes me wonder: could this be routinized? Or rather, could this be a pattern followed deliberately? And if so, could that be a product, for sale?
I don't believe that knowing the conditioning was occurring would interfere - my muscles still develop at the gym even though I'm working them artificially - but it would have to be done carefully.
How could you produce this artificially? I'm not sure how. Maybe a pattern of dates where one partner or the other is instructed not to show, almost at random? A system which means all communication is mediated through something which is unreliable, so it occasionally drops calls--and then that system is manipulated in order to produce the extinction, the extinction burst, and eventual pay-off?
That is: a couple dating should have available manufactured, reciprocal, variable-interval operant conditioning, with a pay-off timed to the artificially produced extinction burst, to trigger mutual addition, and they should be able to buy this in a shop.
It's an interesting design challenge. Here are my criteria: it has to be adopted knowingly by both parties (so no Rules of Seduction games); it has to be reciprocal and involve as little technology as possible; it has to be productisable--that is, it can't be the side-effect of another system: it has to be able to be actually or virtually packaged up and sold. And the usual product rules also apply: how are people going to understand and discover it; does it fit with natural flows (like, if the communication is mediated, won't they just swap phone numbers and use those instead, because it's easier); do all the halting states have ways out; how does use of this product act to expand the market for this product. Other than that, it's all open.
I am aware that talking like this makes me sound like a sociopath.
#3books. I asked people on Twitter, earlier today, to share the 3 most recent books they've read. Here are mine; you can join in by adding '#3books' to your message. The responses are brilliant: you can read them at both at Summize and at Twemes (neither site gets the full collection unfortunately). Thanks all for playing! That's my reading list for the next 6 months sorted out.
Books read June 2008, with date finished:
I'm a huge fan of DeLanda. I find his language and the concepts useful operators in thinking about work and life in general. But this is my second run at A New Philosophy and while assemblage theory hits home hard, I sense that he plays fast and loose with his examples without moderating his language to compensate. That makes it hard for me to take as seriously as I'd like.
From Counterculture to Cyberculture tracks Stewart Brand's rather Count de Saint-Germain existence through the significant events of the latter half of the 20th century. I enjoy this kind of history, and in particular I have a hobby interest in the central role of cybernetics over the last 60 years in the making of the modern world; Turner did not disappoint.
This month my single recommendation is Levi, if only because he tells personal, far-reaching stories, and then drops in lines like man is a centaur, a tangle of flesh and mind, divine inspiration and dust.
Certainly, I am a centaur.
