E. R. Schneider comments on "Revenge of the Nerds"

I've received many letters in response to my latest BH column, Revenge of the Nerds. In particular, I've received an overwhelmingly supportive response from the autistic community. One such response was from autistic activist and author, Edgar R. Schneider:

I have AS and am married to an HFA woman. (I only found out about my autism 10 years ago by reading an article by Dr. Oliver Sacks.) Not to shill, but I have had two books published by Jessica Kingsley Publishers, Ltd. The second is titled "Living the Good Life with Autism," and among its theses is precisely the point you make in this article. I should like to add that our interests (writing for me and photography and web sites for Alix) have gotten both of us listed in /Who's Who in America/. I have to wonder how people who consider it a "disease" intend to "cure" us of that.

I have written and spoken about a hypothesis of mine concerning the nature and causes of autism.

The nature of autism is a deficit of the intuitive emotions caused by improper wiring of that part of the brain, which has been confirmed by several authorities with whom I have been in contact. (Indeed, the subtitle of Dr. Sack’s article read, "Can an artist make art without feeling it?")

As to the cause, I attribute my own autism to brain damage caused by infectious diseases in early childhood. A young woman friend of mine, who, because of an automobile accident, suffered damage to her left temporal lobe (the seat of the intuitive emotions), lost that faculty, i.e., became autistic. However, I have also read of the recent identification of genes that affect brain development. Thus, I have concluded that autism can have causes that are both environmental and genetic. As a result, given current medical knowledge and technology, a "cure" is nowhere in sight.

Given this, autistic people are limited (if I may use that word) to learning about, and dealing with, the world strictly through the intellect. I believe that you can imagine the sociability problems, arising from this, that these people have, although they may be quite intellectually gifted, especially considering that their values and priorities might be quite different from the non-autistic. The best that can be done, as you have pointed out, is enabling them, given their limitations, to function in society. An essential starting point is an understanding of who and what they are. It was certainly the case with me. I called my discovery "liberating". It enabled me, to paraphrase Kipling, to understand myself while others misunderstood me, yet also make allowance for their misunderstanding.

A few short notes in closing. Jasmine O'Neill, who has become a good friend of mine, has recovered her ability to speak. You mentioned a number of people who were very likely Aspies. I wonder about Mozart and Beethoven, but, among composers, I would certainly list Anton Bruckner and Richard Strauss. Lastly, in October 2000, I gave a talk in Mansfield, OH, to a group of parents and professionals. One of the attendees was a school psychologist, who sent me a beautiful letter afterward. Among other things, he wrote that, after hearing my talk, he would be willing to require that all major candidates for high public office have AS. That got me thinking as to whether or not, 25 centuries ago, Plato might not have known some AS people when, in his "Republic", he came up with the idea of philosopher-kings.

It was a pleasure reading your article.

Links for Jan 7/05

Most Powerful Eruption In The Universe Discovered
"Astronomers have discovered the largest explosion in the universe--one that has endured for more than 100 million years and generated as much energy as hundreds of millions of gamma-ray bursts. The source of this mayhem? An apparently insatiable supermassive black hole." Read this for a frame of reference on the power of one gamma-ray burst. This thing is truly a galaxy buster.

Revising the Torino Scale
Tom Hill argues that's it's time to rethink the Torino Scale, the system that warns of possible NEO impacts.

Destroy All Planets
The asteroid threat provided a perfect fantasy counterpoint to very real fears aroused by the tsunamis, writes Annalee Newitz.

The Dhamma of Natural Disasters
When Nature Misbehaves Humans Have to Weep
Buddhist perspectives on the tsunami disaster

By Jupiter, the Astrologers Missed a Trick
Catherine Bennett wonders why astrologers didn't predict the tsunami disaster.

You Must Remember This
Sue Halpern wonders if there are memory-enhancement products that actually work.

Do Drug Companies Kill Poor People?
Ronald Bailey shows how for-profit medicine helps even the poorest.

Is Anything Mightier Than This Sword?
Michael Fumento considers the potential for robot soldiers.

South Korea Now Allows Human Cloning, Embryonic Stem Cell Research
Starting tomorrow, South Korean scientists will be able to destroy human embryos to obtain their stem cells for research thanks to new guidelines finalized by the South Korean government. [caution: LifeNews is a pro-life site]

Ancient DNA Provides New Insights into the Evolutionary History of New Zealand's Extinct Giant Eagle.
A phylogenetic analysis reveals the rapid increase in size of a New Zealand eagle, demonstrating the speed at which evolution can act on islands. [very cool article]

Technology and Happiness
Does technological progress inevitably make us happier? James Surowiecki explores.

Fukuyama's Penguin
Ross Mayfield has a theory that open source will realize the end of history.

Mike Treder on Nanotech and Poverty
My bud Mike Treder's got a link on WorldChanging: Plausibly Surreal – Scenarios and Anticipations

And finally, here some unbelievably cool things you can do with Google.

Links for today

Human Performance Enhancement in 2032: A Scenario for Military Planners
Futurist John Smart looks at the way human performance enhancement is likely to be viewed by army planners 30 years hence, and explores some of the military implications of accelerating information technologies, specifically the linguistic user interface, personality capture and the valuecosm.

Life Interupted
Plugged into it all, we're stressed to distraction.

Higher States of Consciousness
Can we tweak our brains to achieve altered conscious and emotional states?

What Do You Believe Is True Even Though You Cannot Prove it?
This year's Edge.org question asks a number of prominent thinkers
to guess the truth before they have either the evidence or the arguments to prove it.

Was the tsunami an act of God?

Needless to say, the recent tsunami has shaken even those strong in faith. How could God have allowed such a thing?

The BBC asked a number of religious thinkers to explain how they have come to terms with the events in south Asia. Specifically, they spoke to a Hindu, Christian, Muslim, and Buddhist--and (thankfully) an atheist as well. Here are some excerpts:

Atheist - Hanne Stinson, executive director of the British Humanist Association.

Religion cannot provide an explanation for the tsunami, and while prayer for the victims may comfort those who pray, it will not provide practical help to the people whose lives have been devastated by this appalling disaster. Science can explain earthquakes and tsunamis, even if we are still unable to predict where and when they will happen. Our response to this and other disasters, as compassionate human beings and regardless of our religious or non-religious beliefs, must be to provide whatever help we can.

Faith in god does not protect people from disasters or give the victims what they need to survive and rebuild their lives. We need to accept responsibility for our fellow human beings. We need to put our efforts into practical ways of preventing disasters when we can, preparing for disasters that cannot be prevented, including investing in early warning systems for tsunamis, and helping those affected by disasters. We cannot rely on any god to solve the world's problems. We - the people of the world - are humanity's only hope.

I found the Buddhist response utterly unsatisfactory, most because I'm more of a secular Buddhist, and this answer smacks of some of that ol' time religion:

Buddhist - Lama Ole Nydahl

We all die, sooner or later. Some have conditions for living long lives and some for short lives. That is your karma - the total effect of one's actions and conduct. What might have precipitated the tsunami was a lot of people coming together who had the karma for a short life and, to an extent, this is perhaps a reflection that these areas were over-populated.

The shifting of tectonic plates is inevitable, but fewer people in the areas affected would have led to a much smaller loss of life. When watching the TV news, reading the papers or thinking about the tsunami, we are thinking about the Buddha we like the best - perhaps the Red Buddha, the Buddha of limitless light. We do this so that when those who died in the disaster wake up from the shock of dying - we believe it takes about three days to do so - they will be sent up to the Buddha we have in mind. Buddhists think the mind is indestructible so, after a while, if one wants to and is able, they will have the choice to take rebirth in society as beings who help others.

Be sure to read the entire article, especially the reader comments at the end. You won't want to miss out on such zingers as,

"I believe that God has everything in hands and that He permitted this disaster to happen in order to punish human beings for their sins and for not believing in His Son Jesus that will come back soon to judge us all according to our deeds. So I believe that we have to give these events the proper attention to avoid them happening again." -- George Tudor, Romania.

In other words, God punished the heathens out there in south east Asia--they had it coming.

Meditation charges the brain

Marc Kaufman has an article (registration required) in the Washington Post about the latest scientific insight into the benefits of meditation:

Brain research is beginning to produce concrete evidence for something that Buddhist practitioners of meditation have maintained for centuries: Mental discipline and meditative practice can change the workings of the brain and allow people to achieve different levels of awareness.

Those transformed states have traditionally been understood in transcendent terms, as something outside the world of physical measurement and objective evaluation. But over the past few years, researchers at the University of Wisconsin working with Tibetan monks have been able to translate those mental experiences into the scientific language of high-frequency gamma waves and brain synchrony, or coordination. And they have pinpointed the left prefrontal cortex, an area just behind the left forehead, as the place where brain activity associated with meditation is especially intense.

"What we found is that the longtime practitioners showed brain activation on a scale we have never seen before," said Richard Davidson, a neuroscientist at the university's new $10 million W.M. Keck Laboratory for Functional Brain Imaging and Behavior. "Their mental practice is having an effect on the brain in the same way golf or tennis practice will enhance performance." It demonstrates, he said, that the brain is capable of being trained and physically modified in ways few people can imagine.

Here's the entire article.

Latest column: Revenge of the Nerds

My latest column for Betterhumans has been posted:

Revenge of the Nerds
Once outcasts, some autistics now see their condition as a cognitive gift and even the next stage in human evolution—at the dawn of the transhuman age, who's to say they're wrong?

[B]ecause of their enhanced cognitive skills, many autistics consider themselves to be the way of the future. In a world where science, programming and math skills are increasingly desirable, where pending neurosciences promise diverse modes of consciousness and psychology, and where interpersonal shortcomings can be made up with communications technologies and social training, monotone neurotypicality may indeed be on the way out.

Randian Idiocy

Get this: David Holcberg, a research associate at the Ayn Rand Institute -- yes, the institute that promotes the philosophy of psuedo-philosopher Ayn Rand, author of Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead -- argues that the U.S. should not help tsunami victims:

As the death toll mounts in the areas hit by Sunday's tsunami in southern Asia, private organizations and individuals are scrambling to send out money and goods to help the victims. Such help may be entirely proper, especially considering that most of those affected by this tragedy are suffering through no fault of their own.

The United States government, however, should not give any money to help the tsunami victims. Why? Because the money is not the government's to give.

Every cent the government spends comes from taxation. Every dollar the government hands out as foreign aid has to be extorted from an American taxpayer first. Year after year, for decades, the government has forced American taxpayers to provide foreign aid to every type of natural or man-made disaster on the face of the earth: from the Marshall Plan to reconstruct a war-ravaged Europe to the $15 billion recently promised to fight AIDS in Africa to the countless amounts spent to help the victims of earthquakes, fires and floods--from South America to Asia. Even the enemies of the United States were given money extorted from American taxpayers: from the billions given away by Clinton to help the starving North Koreans to the billions given away by Bush to help the blood-thirsty Palestinians under Arafat's murderous regime.

On a related note, and one that more closely resembles sanity/reality, Canada today doubled its aid contribution, bringing the total aid package to $80-million. When comparing Canada to the U.S. I tend to invoke the 1/10th rule, as the U.S. is fiscally about ten times the size of Canada. This means that, in order to match Canada's effort per capita, the U.S. should be donating $800-million, which is well beyond the current $350-million that was donated.

Diamond: The Ends of the World as We Know Them

Jared Diamond, who won the 1998 Pulitzer Prize in general nonfiction for "Guns, Germs and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies" and the author of the forthcoming "Collapse: How Societies Choose or Fail to Succeed" has published a new OpEd in the New York Times. Called The Ends of the World as We Know Them (registration required), Diamond complemplates the questions surrounding humanity's future in the face of numerous previous societal extinctions.

When it comes to historical collapses, five groups of interacting factors have been especially important: the damage that people have inflicted on their environment; climate change; enemies; changes in friendly trading partners; and the society's political, economic and social responses to these shifts. That's not to say that all five causes play a role in every case. Instead, think of this as a useful checklist of factors that should be examined, but whose relative importance varies from case to case.

Ultimately, suggests Diamond, we will need to choose between the status quo or adaptation:

History also teaches us two deeper lessons about what separates successful societies from those heading toward failure. A society contains a built-in blueprint for failure if the elite insulates itself from the consequences of its actions. That's why Maya kings, Norse Greenlanders and Easter Island chiefs made choices that eventually undermined their societies. They themselves did not begin to feel deprived until they had irreversibly destroyed their landscape.

Could this happen in the United States? It's a thought that often occurs to me here in Los Angeles, when I drive by gated communities, guarded by private security patrols, and filled with people who drink bottled water, depend on private pensions, and send their children to private schools. By doing these things, they lose the motivation to support the police force, the municipal water supply, Social Security and public schools. If conditions deteriorate too much for poorer people, gates will not keep the rioters out. Rioters eventually burned the palaces of Maya kings and tore down the statues of Easter Island chiefs; they have also already threatened wealthy districts in Los Angeles twice in recent decades.

The entire article can be found here.

Institute of Biomedical Gerontology (IBG) Survey

Is an Institute of Biomedical Gerontology (IBG) devoted solely to the development of engineered negligible senescence viable? John Schloendorn has set-up a poll to find out:

With the increasing support that the anti-aging movement has gained lately, we might soon be able to commence a new phase of active goal-directed research and development. I have set up a brief survey to estimate the human and material resources that the community is willing and able to throw at a major anti-aging R+D project today.

You have probably heard of Aubrey de Grey’s proposal to set up a large Institute of Biomedical Gerontology (IBG) devoted solely to the development of engineered negligible senescence. As many of you know, the ingenuity of Aubrey’s plans to reverse aging is only surpassed by nearly everyone else’s lack of courage to actualise them.

The IBG is proposed as a coordinated project involving many scientific groups to cure first mouse, and then human aging. It will represent a goal-directed, problem-solving approach to aging, which is often absent in the fundamental biosciences. If you have not heard of the IBG before, please take a look into Aubrey’s proposal before you go into the survey.

To participate in the survey,

Click here!

Happy New Year

Don't feel much like celebrating tonight given the situation in South Asia. Rob Cockerham has compared the death count from the Tsunami to the deaths at the World Trade Center. Here are some videos of the tsunami.

Today's links:

Managing Care Through the Air
Growing old in a wireless world will mean not just keeping your body healthy but keeping it online.

The New and Improved SETI
SETI's Seth Shostak reveals the latest technology and techniques used in the search for extraterrestrial life.

Robots and Emotion: Tetchy the Turtle Meets Sonny and HAL
Affective Media is planning for a future in which it will be important that machines are able to understand the different states of their human colleagues.

Small Wonders
Nanotechnology will give humans greater control of matter at tiny scales. That is a good thing, says Natasha Loder

Is Mechanosynthesis Feasible?
The nanotechnology debate moves up a gear.

Conversation with Dale Carrico on denaturalization

I've been corresponding with Betterhumans columnist and Amor Mundi blogger Dale Carrico about his latest set of articles, The Trouble with Transhumanism Parts I and II.

Dale's been engaging the fine people at WorldChanging about enviro related issues, particularly the issue of humanity's tenancy to denaturalize itself and its environment. In Part II of his BH column, Carrico made the very astute observation that both bioconservative and tech-progressive sensibilities, positions and politics have arisen and exert their force uniquely in consequence of what he describes as the ongoing denaturalization of human life in this historical moment. "This denaturalization is a broad social and cultural tendency," writes Carrico, "roughly analogous to and even structurally related to other broad tendencies such as, say, secularization and industrialization." He continues:

It consists essentially of two trends: First, it names a growing suspicion (one that can provoke either fear or hopefulness, sometimes in hyperbolic forms) of the normative and ideological force of claims made in the name of "nature" and especially "human nature," inspired by a recognition of the destabilizing impact of technological developments on given capacities and social norms. Second, it consists of an awareness of the extent to which the terms and pace of technological development, and the distribution of its costs, risks and benefits, is emerging ever more conspicuously as the primary space of social struggle around the globe.

It is a truism that the technical means to eliminate poverty and illiteracy for every human being on Earth have existed since the 18th century, but that social forms and political will have consistently frustrated these ends. The focus for most tech-progressives remains to use emerging technologies to transform the administration of social needs, to provide shelter, nutrition, health care and education for all, as well as to remedy the damaging and destabilizing impact of technology itself on complex, imperfectly understood environmental and social orders on which we depend for survival. To these ends, a deepening and widening of democratic participation in development and accountability of governance through emerging networked information and communication technologies is also crucial. Beyond this, many tech-progressives also champion the idea of morphological freedom, or consensual practices of genetic, prosthetic and cognitive modification considered as personal practices of self-creation rather than as the technological imposition of social conformity figured questionably as "health."

A couple of days ago I wrote to Dale to congratulate him on his articles. Here's the conversation that ensued:

George:

Dale, what an excellent set of articles! Your second one was particularly strong. Your notion that denaturalization follows along such trends as secularization and industrialization is a zinger.

Dale:

I agree with you that the discussion of "denaturalization" is especially promising, but maybe you can help me think through some of the quandaries of the term.

I have heard some criticisms among environmentalists I respect about this “anti-nature” aspect of my argument. I can see the point of arguments that would say that technology is the *form* human "nature" takes, and I can see the point of arguments that say we depend for our survival on complex systems we imperfectly understand (which seems to be what some people mean by "nature") even if we impact them with our own activity and this must make us especially careful.

But I can't for the life of me figure out a way to weave these insights into the point I was making myself about technological destabilization as a risky but promisingly emancipatory force, and "nature" as a word people mostly use just to defend customs that have outlived their usefulness. I want to say culture trumps nature, and human dignity must come from critical freedom not uncritical customs from now on -- but I don't want to deny there is some sense in these objections.

George:

Another way of describing denaturalization is the steady encroachment of intelligent interventions in what are normally autonomic processes; consequently, we must be wary of the motives that underlie these interventions. But we must also be wary of those arguments that take a non-interventionist approach, which can sometimes be an indifferent hands-off approach for merely romantic reasons, or sentiments that arise from the fear that we might make the situation worse (and that certain systems are optimized before intelligence intervenes -- a hard argument to sell).

Once thing I don't buy, however, is that the complexity found in natural systems are ineffable and/or intractable. Because complexity is often merely a data or mapping problem, it's just a matter of time and diligence.

Another angle would be to include practical applications of personhood ethics in consideration of how it applies to utilitarianism. A trick will be to show a kind of cost/benefit analysis of non-intervention versus intervention in terms of its impact on all living, emotional, and experiential creatures. To do so, the value of say, maintaining a certain biological function for aesthetic (romantic) reasons, would have to be qualitatively determined, and then set against what we value through intervening in the process.

Non-interventionists need to be careful, however, in that they risk applying Darwinianism to their ethical worldview, which is not IMO tied into our collective set of values as thinking and compassionate creatures; rather, we need to be Lamarckian as we apply non-anthropocentric personhood values in our dealings with living creatures and systems.

Dale:

I agree with all of this! When I tell people culture should trump nature I've been trying to say in a sloppy too-intuitive way what you are saying here, I think. It's funny, once "culture" is set in motion "hands-off" is always a *kind* of intervention itself, there is no way to not "intervene," the process of intervention has already begun. The question becomes where and how one intervenes, and non-intervention is always non-intervention in processes stamped by ongoing interventions. That's why I agree with you that the very notion of non-intervention is always a romantic mystification, pure ideology.

This stuff speaks to the Precautionary Principle discussion too (another topic on which I seem to swim against the tide) -- though for me the key thing with the Principle is not whether it generally recommends stagnation or development but *who* gets to participate in the decision-making about what forms intervention takes.

Ain't nature grand?

It's looking like 100,000 dead, with prospects for even more than that. Unreal. This is emotionally affecting me. I feel helpless and I wish I could be out there helping these people dig themselves out. I made a small donation today to the relief efforts in an attempt to assuage my anxieties and feelings of helplessness. I read that Canada gave a paltry $4-million. Our government should be ashamed of itself. [Canada has upped its aid donation to $40-million dollars--much better.]

NASA speculates that the megathrust earthquake may have shifted the Earth's axis, causing the Earth to wobble by an inch or so. The quake altered regional geography by a few meters and cut the length of the day by a few millionths of a second. The tsunami itself was felt as far as Mexico and right on into the Pacific.

And for all the nature worshipers out there, the deep ecologists and gaianists, this should serve as a reminder of just how much Mother Nature cares for the Earth's inhabitants. Here are some examples of how ant-like we truly are when confronted with the elements:

- Bangladesh was hit by a cyclone in 1970 killing 500,000 people. Winds of up to 230 km/h whipped up massive waves that took away entire villages.

- An 8.3 earthquake obliterated the Chinese city of Tangshan in 1976. The official number of people killed was put at around 250,000, although some said the figure was more like 750,000.

- Chinese provinces Shanxi and Henan lost more than 800,000 people when hit by a quake in 1556.

- In 1887, about 900,000 people died when China's Yellow River burst its banks in the worst-ever recorded flooding.

And if you think all this is bad, that's nothing. Of course, the Earth's creatures have suffered through phases of mass extinctions, many of them facilitated by catastrophic events like celestial object impacts. But worse still is what's happening across the Universe on a near daily basis as the result of gamma-ray bursts (GRBs).

A gamma ray burst, the single most powerful cataclysmic force known to us, occurs at a rate of about 1 per minute across the entire Universe. That's a rather terrifying figure considering the terrible punch that these explosions pack.

Likely the result of a black hole being created from a dying star, a GRB radiation blast spreads out evenly, with the gamma-ray energy released by the burst being equivalent to that which would be produced by converting the entire mass of a star 1.3 times the mass of our Sun completely into gamma radiation. Put into perspective, if a GRB were to happen as far away as 2,000 light years, it would shine twice as bright in our night sky as the Sun does during the day. Given a GRB close enough to Earth, it would rip apart our ozone layer and likely extinguish life on our planet.

Consequently, it is speculated that GRBs are a major factor in regulating the presence of extraterrestrial civilizations across galaxies. Some believe that a GRB can sterilize as much as a quarter of an entire galaxy. Given even modest guesses about the number of extraterrestrial civilizations per galaxy, and given that a GRB happens at a rate of 1/minute across the Universe, it's safe to assume that mass civilization extinctions are happening across the Universe on a daily basis.

The Universe, it appears, is a very dangerous and indifferent place. What's not indifferent, however, are the sentiments and actions of its intelligent inhabitants.

Tsunami from hell

At least 56,000 dead. My puny paleolithic brain is having a hard time comprehending the totality and humanity of this natural disaster. Time for a prayer:

Dear God,
as we marvel at Thy creation,
this tiny planet Earth on which we dwell,
we stand in awe and reverence in the Universe's unfolding.
As we continue to stand by You and worship Thee,
and as You in turn answer our prayers and watch over us, Your blessed children,
we remain in blissful ignorance as to Thine divine plan.
But far be it for us to question the motives of God,
for You have blessed us with brains too small and weak to comprehend Thine divine logic.
Surely there is great wisdom in sweeping 56,000 souls out to sea, 18,000 of them children.
For certain Thou has shown great mercy by granting these people a life of poverty and their subsequent reward of death by tsunami.
And absolutely must there be kindness in the disease and strife that will inevitably ensue.
And in addition to this holy earthquake,
we thank You for rectal cancer, male nipples, and for all the hopeful mothers who get to live through a miscarriage.
We welcome our ignorance and confusion, and pray that you continue to bless us with Thy merciful bounty and guardianship.
Amen.

Hapgood: More Than Human

Fred Hapgood has an interesting article about the transhumanist potential in Bio-IT World. Called More Than Human, the article describes numerous posthuman possibilities, particularly as they pertain to neural enhancements and integration with IT. Says Hapgood:

Transhumanism might be described as the technology of advanced individual enhancement. While it includes physical modifications (diamondoid teeth, self-styling hair, autocleaning ears, nanotube bones, lipid metabolizers, polymer muscles), most of the interest in the technology focuses on the integration of brains and computers — especially brains and networks. Sample transhumanist apps could include cell phone implants (which would allow virtual telepathy), memory backups and augmenters, thought recorders, reflex accelerators, collaborative consciousness (whiteboarding in the brain), and a very long list of thought-controlled actuators. Ultimately, the technology could extend to the uploading and downloading of entire minds in and out of host bodies, providing a self-consciousness that, theoretically, would have no definitive nor necessary end. That is, immortality, of a sort.

He also cautions against the blanket condemnation of enhancement technologies, complaining about the impracticality of enforcing such a policy of restraint:

Still, it's not clear that boycotting neurotech will be a realistic option. When the people around you — competitors, colleagues, partners — can run Google searches in their brains during conversations; or read documents upside down on a desk 30 feet away; or remember exactly who said what, when and where; or coordinate meeting tactics telepathically; or work forever without sleep; or control every device on a production line with thought alone, your only probable alternative is to join them or retire. No corporation could ignore the competitive potential of a neurotech-enhanced workforce for long.

And as a CIO, Hapgood also offers some practical solutions to mind violations of the kind depicted in Ghost in the Shell:

One possible approach to neurosecurity might be to implant a public-key infrastructure in our brains so that every neural region can sign and authenticate requests and replies from any other region. A second might be maintaining a master list of approved mental activities and blocking any mental operations not on that list. (Concerns about whether the list itself was corrupted might be addressed by refreshing the list constantly from implanted and presumably unhackable ROM chips.) It might also be necessary to outsource significant portions of our neural processing to highly secure computing sites. In theory, such measures might improve on the neurosecurity system imposed on us by evolution, making us less vulnerable to catchy tunes and empty political slogans.

Definitely give this article a read.

Favourite albums of 2004

In no particular order, here are my favorite albums of 2004:

Wilco: A Ghost is Born
Air: Talkie Walkie
Ghost: Hypnotic Underworld
Joanna Newsom: The Milk-Eyed Mender
The Beta Band: Heroes to Zeros
Ron Sexsmith: Retriever
Feist: Let it Die
The Black Keys: Rubber Factory
Fiery Furnaces: Blueberry Boat
Interpol: Antics
Madvillain: Madvillainy
Modest Mouse: Good News for People Who Love Bad News
PJ Harvey: Uh Huh Her
Probot: Probot
Beastie Boys: To the Five Boroughs
Loretta Lynn; Van Lear Rose
The Streets: A Grand Doesn't Come for Free
Freescha: Casino Versus Japan

[Oh, forgot another good one, Arcade Fire: Funeral (revision 01/16/05)]

Jared Diamond: Collapse

Jared Diamond's latest book: Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed.

Description:

"In his million-copy bestseller Guns, Germs, and Steel, Jared Diamond examined how and why Western civilizations developed the technologies and immunities that allowed them to dominate much of the world. Now in this brilliant companion volume, Diamond probes the other side of the equation: What caused some of the great civilizations of the past to collapse into ruin, and what can we learn from their fates?

As in Guns, Germs, and Steel, Diamond weaves an all-encompassing global thesis through a series of fascinating historical-cultural narratives. Moving from the Polynesian cultures on Easter Island to the flourishing American civilizations of the Anasazi and the Maya and finally to the doomed Viking colony on Greenland, Diamond traces the fundamental pattern of catastrophe. Environmental damage, climate change, rapid population growth, and unwise political choices were all factors in the demise of these societies, but other societies found solutions and persisted. Similar problems face us today and have already brought disaster to Rwanda and Haiti, even as China and Australia are trying to cope in innovative ways. Despite our own society’s apparently inexhaustible wealth and unrivaled political power, ominous warning signs have begun to emerge even in ecologically robust areas like Montana.

Brilliant, illuminating, and immensely absorbing, Collapse is destined to take its place as one of the essential books of our time, raising the urgent question: How can our world best avoid committing ecological suicide?"

...in the palm of our hands

I like this image--the idea that our genetic constitutions will soon be within our very grasp. Very transhumanist.

The End of the World

This week's Economist has a cover article on humanity's propensity for conjuring up doomsday scenarios. In the article A Brief History, the Economist discusses a number of historial scenarios and antecedents, including such things as the religious underpinnings of apocalyptic scenarios and the recent Raelian phenomenon:

The Raelians' claim to be atheists who belong to the secular world must come as no surprise to Mr Cohn, who has long detected patterns of religious apocalyptic thought in what is supposedly rational, secular belief. He has traced “egalitarian and communistic fantasies” to the ancient-world idea of an ideal state of nature, in which all men are genuinely equal and none is persecuted. As Mr Cohn has put it, “The old religious idiom has been replaced by a secular one, and this tends to obscure what otherwise would be obvious. For it is the simple truth that, stripped of their original supernatural sanction, revolutionary millenarianism and mystical anarchism are with us still.”

The Economist also notes the contributions from political science, including Hegel and Fukuyama:

Hegel saw history as an evolution of ideas that would culminate in the ideal liberal-democratic state. Since liberal democracy satisfies the basic need for recognition that animates political struggle, thought Hegel, its advent heralds a sort of end of history—another suspiciously apocalyptic claim. More recently, Francis Fukuyama has echoed Hegel's theme. Mr Fukuyama began his book, “The End of History”, with a claim that the world had arrived at “the gates of the Promised Land of liberal democracy”. Mr Fukuyama's pulpit oratory suited the spirit of the 1990s, with its transformative “new economy” and free-world triumphs. In the disorientating disconfirmation of September 11th and the coincident stockmarket collapse, however, his religion has lost favour.

And in a refreshing surprise, the article also brings up the contributions of Kurzweil and Moravec:

Noting an exponential acceleration in the pace of technological change, futurologists like Hans Moravec and Ray Kurzweil think the world inhabits the “knee of the curve”—a sort of last-days set of circumstances in which, in the near future, the pace of technological change runs quickly away towards an infinite “singularity” as intelligent machines learn to build themselves. From this point, thinks Mr Moravec, transformative “mind fire” will spread in a flash across the cosmos. Britain's astronomer royal, Sir Martin Rees, relegates Mr Kurzweil and those like him to the “visionary fringe”. But Mr Rees's own darkly apocalyptic book, “Our Final Hour”, outdoes the most colourful of America's televangelists in earthquakes, plagues and other sorts of fire and brimstone.

Cosmetic Extraocular Implant

Check out this cool ocular mod:

The Cosmetic Extraocular Implant (JewelEyeTM) was developed by the Netherlands Institute for Innovative Ocular Surgery. The device can be implanted within the superficial, interpalpebral conjunctiva. The implant does not interfere with the ocular functions, ie the visual performance and ocular motility. The implant is made of a specially designed material that can be molded in all kinds of desired shapes and sizes.

The JewelEyeTM device is 3.5 mm in diameter and available in the following shapes: ring, heart, star. ring. The devices are packaged in a box with 10 sterile devices and the guidelines for use.

In the Netherlands, a Cosmetic Extraocular Implant is not considered a medical device.

Patent applications for the Cosmetic Extraocular Implant are pending.

Links

Holy light blogging, batman. Sorry about the lack of posts. Very busy. Here are some cool links I've discovered lately:

Brain versus Machine Control: Dr. Octopus, the villain of the movie Spiderman 2, is a fusion of man and machine. Neuroscientist Jose Carmena examines the facts behind this fictional account of a brain-machine interface

Religion and Science: Buddhism on the Brain: Many religious leaders find themselves at odds with science, but the head of Tibetan Buddhism is a notable exception. Jonathan Knight meets a neurologist whose audience with the Dalai Lama helped to explain why.

You, Robot: He says humans will download their minds into computers one day. With a new robotics firm, Hans Moravec begins the journey from warehouse drones to robo sapiens.

Natural Selection Acts on the Quantum World: Objective reality may owe its existence to a 'darwinian' process that advertises certain quantum states.

Betterhumans columnist Dale Carrico's The Trouble with "Transhumanism": Part One and The Trouble with "Transhumanism": Part Two.

Does Transhumanism Suck?: Annalee Newitz In Conversation With R.U. Sirius

Robots Suffer for Art's Sake: Through his art, Fernando Orellana is turning the public fear of robots and future technology on its head by creating fearful and shy robots.

How About Not 'Curing' Us, Some Autistics Are Pleading: "We don't have a disease," said Jack, echoing the opinion of the other 15 boys at the experimental Aspie school here in the Catskills. "So we can't be 'cured.' This is just the way we are." (NYT registration required)