2004-02-11

Dinner conversations


the conversation at dinner today was really cool: ben on one side, molly on the
other. i'm not sure who the 3 guys over the table were but they were involved
too.

first ben asked me What's Next?

i said smell would replace sight. or at least, we flip flopped between the two
and we were due for smell again.

sight is spectacle. surface. abstraction. farming. separation of person from
land. anticipation. request/response. get input, make cognition, do output.

smell is a potential field, extelligence. you live in it. a dog walking round is
a nomad, not moving but travelling through its consciousness. smell is about
insides, not outsides, about visibility being implicit.

moving through a city is a smell sense but mediated by photons: if you're in a
bad neighbourhood there's no locus of that badness, and you have to be embodied
within it, embedded, in order to sense it.

biosemiotics, said ben, pre sentient cognition: creatures in oceans with
potential fields very early on are smell based: their cognition is smeared out
across the ocean itself. the brain is not a locus of the intelligence.

1st order cybernetics is spectacular.

2nd order cybernetics is simulating potential fields with request/response.

3rd order cybernetics is potential fields, smell.

after that we discussed music, and spam.

the guy opposite talked about evolved music, generated by an AI, impossible to
tell from real.

so we said: get it in the charts, use as input to evolve music -- how long
before music attains sentience?

if individual pieces can be context sensitive, music can be like bees,
distribute drone music to make a baseline and other tunes which are really
successful.

music is the perfect protein: crude features that can be whistled, but you get
more by looking closer.

so evolve it. what will music sound like? like birdsong say i. says molly: only
the best birdsong *ever*.

and also like static that games your brain interfaces (subliminal messages,
molly again). so that's my birdsong plus static thing.

next is spam. spam is in a very evolutionary position (but might wipe itself out
environmentally if it pollutes that top 6m of the ocean and we stop using
email). the way to solve spam is:

to increase the pressure so it evolves faster and adapts to context better;

and increase the franchise so *anyone* can send spam.

spam becomes micro, the interface-shape of spam closes up to the interface-shape
of information, and spam now holds use.

ben also corrected me on grey goo, which i said would never happen because
entropy says we should keep structures until they're needed and JIT assemble (no
disemblers). but the strange attractor of failure states is unknown and not
designed in, so it's dangerous to even have that ability.

oh yeah, finally: i want to visit ivrae and see what's happening there. sound
like some cool stuff. and there's people i need to talk to to find out about RCA
and some other stuff happening in the UK.

ha, and later, after dinner! birds have an enlarged portion of the brain that
deals with patterns, music. they see more there. reminds me that dolphins have
larger social computing sections than us: they see more dimensions of sociality
than we do.

two last things:

1. the killer app for glancing is running on my mum's computer running with me
and my sister in the group. we tentatively come to an encounter, but instead of
a group chat it's a phone call. it's a way to let us come together for a proper
chat when we're all in the mood for it without offending anyone, with an
interface so easy anyone can use it.

2. danny said i look like the should-be next doctor who.