Sentient Developments Retrospective: Part III

This week marks the 5th anniversary of Sentient Developments. Over the next several days I will be reflecting on some of my favourite posts from the past 5 years (note: these hi-lites won't include my Transitory Human columns written for Betterhumans; that's a different retrospective altogether). Today's retrospective reviews the best of 2005 and the first several months of 2006.

Early last year Spanish socialists wanted to give apes human rights prompting me to write about the myth of our exalted human place. I also proclaimed that cows are people, too and predicted the end of livestock.

I wondered if active SETI was imperiling humanity and if science fiction was bad for bioethics. I looked deep into my crystal ball and saw a very bald future.

I wondered if we live in a non-arbitrary universe.

I wrote about James Lovelock's Gaian despair and his thoughts about environmentalist sabotage.

I tolerated David Irving's bullshit.

The future of warfare was on my mind, including cyber warfare and the "blogger threat", neurohacking, and the perils of miniaturization on the battlefield. I also worried that the anthropic principle did not imply future gain.

I wrote about the end of gender.

Consciousness and brains: I wrote about how you could think faster by altering your perception of time, extreme 'natural' brains, and the phenomenon of blindsight.

And finally, I wrote about how pop art will gets proletarianized, or how technology will enable anyone to play guitar like Eddie Van Halen.

Sentient Developments Retrospective: Part II

This week marks the 5th anniversary of Sentient Developments. Over the next several days I will be reflecting on some of my favourite posts from the past 5 years (note: these hi-lites won't include my Transitory Human columns written for Betterhumans; that's a different retrospective altogether). Today's retrospective reviews the best of 2004.

In January 2004 I had an amazing 3-way conversation with John Smart & Milan Cirkovic where we discussed the Fermi Paradox, megascale engineering projects and the Singularity.

In March 2004 I co-developed the Panspermia Equation, an attempt to determine how many solar systems the Earth has 'infected' with its bio-ejecta.

Damien Broderick and I debated vegetarianism and personhood back in March 2004.

Peter Pasarro talked to me about AI, the Brain, and Techlepathy in April 2004.

In May 2004 I posted the first draft of my astrosociobiology concept. Compare that version to the one that now resides on Wikipedia.

In September 2004 I blogged about Nick Bostrom's rebuttal to Francis Fukuyama and the claim that transhumanism is the world's most dangerous idea.

Anders Sandberg and I talked about antimatter weapons and the possibility of deliberately engineering NEO impacts.

After watching Contact I felt that building a machine designed by ET was not a very good idea.

In November 2004 we launched the IEET.

I blogged about how we have a very special sun.

After the East Asia tsunami disaster in December 2004 I wrote about our extremely dangerous universe.

IEET featured in NY Times article on disabled sprinter

I was quoted today in a New York Times article about disabled sprinter Oscar Pistorius. The piece is titled, "An Amputee Sprinter: Is He Disabled or Too-Abled?" Excerpt:

"A sobering question was posed recently on the Web site of the Connecticut-based Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies. 'Given the arms race nature of competition,' will technological advantages cause "athletes to do something as seemingly radical as having their healthy natural limbs replaced by artificial ones?" wrote George Dvorsky, a member of the institute's board of directors. 'Is it self-mutilation when you're getting a better limb?'"

The quote was sourced from my article, "Is the world ready for cyborg athletes?"

Conceptualization beyond human capacity: mapping a 248-dimensional structure

It's been said -- somewhat infamously -- that science is all but finished. The claim is that all the great scientific breakthroughs have already been made and now it's just a matter of dotting the i's and crossing the t's. Worse, others have speculated that we puny humans, due to our limited cognitive capacities, cannot advance our science much further; we simply lack the wiring to comprehend truly advanced concepts [Brian Greene has used the analogy that you can't teach physics to a dog].

I'm not sure I buy into either assertion. There is still plenty of terra incognita for us to discover. Moreover, because our technologies are steadily advancing, we will have new tools that will help us to better see and understand our Universe.

Take supercomputers, for example. These number crunching monsters can process horrific amounts of data and reveal aspects of our world that were previously invisible to us.

Such a discovery was recently made by mathematicians who successfully mapped a 248-dimensional structure. Called a Lie group E8, it took a team of 19 mathematicians four years to develop. They produced almost 100 times more data than the Human Genome Project. There are 205,263,363,600 entries on the matrix, many of them vastly more complicated than a straightforward number; some are complex equations. If all the numbers were written out in small type, they would cover an area the size of Manhattan.

None of this would have been possible without supercomputers. The basic idea was conceived over 120 years ago by Norwegian math genius Sophus Lie -- but he didn't have a Sage supercomputer. It wasn't until now that such a process could be executed.

Why is this a big deal?

Because mathematicians have mapped out the most complex abstract structure ever conceived -- a structure that could conceivably help with work in string theory and provide a clue in the struggle for unification.

According to the standard model, all particles and forces can be represented by Lie groups. Consequently, their study has become an integral tool for understanding the laws of nature.

As computers get more and more powerful, one can reasonably assume that they will continue to act as assistive devices and help us better conceptualize and comprehend concepts, patterns and phenomenon beyond the limits of our biological minds. Many things exist which we as yet cannot see.

As Carl Sagan once said, "Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known."

Sentient Developments Retrospective: Part I

This week marks the 5th anniversary of Sentient Developments. Over the next several days I will be reflecting on some of my favourite posts from the past 5 years (note: these hi-lites won't include my Transitory Human columns written for Betterhumans; that's a different retrospective altogether).

Quantum Consciousness and Telepathy?

Back in August of 2002 I began to dabble in quantum consciousness theory and the treacherous realms of parapsychology. It was during this time that I became fairly convinced that something like telepathy actually exists (a claim I now tend to be more wary of). I was fairly convinced that the interplay between consciousness and quantum effects had something to do with it. I wrote the following,

My consciousness is tied to both the physical and quantum realms. As I observe and measure the universe, it falls perfectly into place just for me (i.e. the observer forces the collapse of the wave function). The same thing happens to you, independent of my observations. We are all living in our own 'worlds,' and these 'worlds' are being revealed only to the specific observer; our personal-worlds are only as large as our observational field, and anything not observed is in a state of indeterminancy. For example, if we have a face to face conversation, everything behind me in my 'world' is in a state of unobserved indeterminancy, so it's not really there. But in your personal-universe, because you're looking at me and the world behind me, it has collapsed into a perceptually coherent world. Yet, I can interact with you. When we communicate, we are truly interfacing, but it only appears that we are in the same physical environment (or world). Thus, even though we can interact in the same room together, we are actually in our own physical worlds. So, the physical world is an illusion of sorts, or at the very least, it is one of our two environments. The other place we reside is the quantum dimension. Thus, by virtue of the fact that we can communicate and interact in the physical world (our interaction is not an illusion), our consciousness must be linked in the quantum environment...

...One way of looking at it is that a consciousness has tunneled through the quantum maze to get to another consciousness. It has tuned into the proper frequency.

I was so excited about this revelation that I contacted quantum mind theorist Stuart Hameroff and asked him about it. He responded by informing me that at the Quantum Mind Conference in 2003 there would be "compelling" evidence in favour of "telepathy."

These days, while I'm not so much interested in the parapsychological aspects of quantum consciousness, I am still very much intrigued by notions of consciousness and how it relates to reality, as well as such philosophical propositions as panprotopsychism.

The TTA rails against Kass, Raelians

In late 2002 the newly founded Toronto Transhumanist Association began to express itself as an activist organization. Leon Kass, chairman of the US President’s Council on Bioethics at the time, was scheduled to speak at the University of Toronto in December 2002.

Kass, a notorious bioconservative and so-called deathist, was bad news as far as we were concerned. We used his Toronto visit as an opportunity to declare that 'Bush Bioethicist Thinks Canadians Should Die.' We issued a statement to the press to this effect. Here's an excerpt,

What’s worse, while claiming to be a defender of human dignity, Kass has essentially declared that not all people are equal when it comes to the care they can come to expect. “Kass represents an affront to the rights of the elderly,” says TTA vice-president George Dvorsky. “The aging Baby Boomer population needs to take heed of this man and his stance against progressive health technologies, particularly as they apply to medical practices that can extend life and the treatment of suffering and aging itself. Kass is trying to convince all elderly people that they should complacently accept and deal with all aging-related diseases and simply shut up and die. As a result, he has not only revealed a discriminatory stance that targets the elderly and the kind of care they are legally entitled to, but he has also exposed his pro-death agenda.”

One month later the Raelian cult announced the birth of a human clone. This proved to be a hoax, but we didn't know it at the time. Concerned that the Raelians would give transhumanists a bad name, the TTA issued a statement in condemnation of the experiment. We stated that,

In their haste to produce the first human clone, the Raelians and their renegade Clonaid biologists exposed babies to these sorts of risks. Yes, critics should be directing their disgust at the Raelians and the maverick scientists who helped them clone a human before the procedure was safe. But they should be careful about saying that all scientists and ethicists are against reproductive cloning, or that the act itself is evil.

At the same time, we wanted to re-frame the prospect of human cloning in a positive light,

“Human cloning will someday be a good thing,” says TTA vice-president George Dvorsky. “For infertile couples who cannot make babies with sperm and eggs, cloning is a medical breakthrough that will provide them children of their own. Similarly, it will help gay and lesbian couples produce genetically related offspring. And for those individuals with inheritable genetic diseases, reproductive cloning will give them an increased chance of having a healthy child."

“Transhumanists believe that humans deserve the right to clone themselves should they choose, so long as the process isn’t harmful to others," says Dvorsky. "It is hard to imagine parents of clones being any less loving and caring than parents of regular children. Clones are nothing more than delayed twins, and are just as human and as deserving of rights and respect as anyone.”

Measuring Scientific Progress

When attending TransVision 2003 at Yale University I had the pleasure of meeting Michael Vassar. We immediately hit it off and have continued to correspond since that time.

One of the projects we embarked upon was to test the assertion that breakthroughs in science were continuing to happen at a steady, if not accelerating, pace. We both felt that major scientific progress was actually slowing down despite the rapid rate of technological progress.

To test the theory we created a list of humanity's most important scientific breakthroughs and noted how much time had elapsed since each development:

• Advent of religion as primitive metaphysics (100,000 to 45,000 years ago)
• Meditation Pantojoli, Forest Vedas (1000 BC)
• Advent of science in Ancient Greece (350 BC)
• Arabic Mathematics (800 AD)
• Revival of Ptolemaic Astronomy (early 1500s)
• Copernican Astronomy/Heliocentrism (1543)
• Advent of Mechanistic Dynamics (17th century)
• Statistics & Probability Bayes, Pascal, Fermat, etc. (17th century)
• Calculus Huygens, Newton & Leibniz (late 17th century)
• Newtonian Dynamics (1680s)
• Optics Newton, etc. (1680s)
• Idea of Progress/Enlightenment (18th century)
• Thermodynamics (early 19th century)
• Biochemistry (early 19th century)
• Non-Euclidean Geometry Lobachevsky, Bolyai, Gauss, Riemann, etc. (early 19th century)
• Electro-Magnetic Induction Faraday (1821)
• Natural Selection Darwin (1858)
• Geological Uniformitarianism (mid to late 19th century)
• Mendelian Inheritance (1866)
• Maxwell's Equations (1884)
• Periodic Table of the Chemical Elements (mid to late 19th century)
• Microeconomics (mid to late 19th century)
• Germ Theory of Disease Pasteur (late 19th century)
• Advent of Speculative Science Fiction, Futurology (late 19th century)
• Unification of Chemistry and Physics (late 19th, early 20th century)
• Experimental Psychology (early 20th century)
• Undecidability (early 20th century)
• Einsteinian Relativity (1905)
• Quantum Physics (1909) Planck, Einstein, Bohr, Schrödinger
• Universal Computing Turing, Gödel, Hilbert (1928)
• Advent of Cosmology (early to mid 20th century)
• Idea of force carrier Einstein, Bose, Higgs (mid 20th century)
• Standard Model of Particle Physics (mid to late 20th century)
• Neo-Darwinian synthesis with Mendelian Genetics Williams, Dawkins, etc. (mid to late 20th century)
• Chaos Theory or Complex Systems Theory (1960s)
• Memetics/Semiotics Dawkins, Eco (1970s)
• Sociobiology Wilson (1970s)

Based on this list we concluded that science had experienced a 'golden age' of sorts from the 17th through to the 19th century, and that major breakthroughs were becoming less and less frequent.

Conversation with John Smart

I had an excellent conversation with John Smart back in July 2003 where we discussed the developmental Singularity:

GD: "The system you describe cannot be a perfectly deterministic system - any evolved system needs at least some dynamism built in to it to guarantee a certain degree of mutatability. Therefore, nothing is "guaranteed" in this universe, nor any universe for that matter, especially if one wants to introduce the infinite spectra of variable quantum worlds and multiverses."

JS: "Certainly. An 'evolutionary developmental' system (see singularitywatch.com for more on that concept, or put this word into any biological textbook search) is not perfectly deterministic. It is developmentally (not evolutionarily), highly statistically determined however, in standard development environments. And I don't need to tell you this looks like a very standard development environment."

GD: "Obviously, if you're right, intelligences (like ourselves right now) become self-aware of their deterministic drive towards a developmental singularity. Thus, one could argue that the drive to the singularity may be a conscious one, or even a self-directed one."

JS: "Yes, yes. Rationality being the latest emergent tool for searching the evolutionary phase space, etc. Kind of an interesting and humbling realization, isn't it? Certainly keeps reductionist materialist and rationalist philosophers from sleeping too soundly at night, I'd bet."

GD: "Aren't you really applying the same kind of pre-Copernican human-centric arrogance to assume that we're special? How are we less epiphenomenon than ants or other cosmic phenomenon?"

JS: "This perspective isn't anthropomorphic, its infopomorphic, as you point out below. Either the universe is a very efficient massively parallel evolutionary developmental learning system, or there's something major wrong with the model."

More from this conversation here.

Sentient Developments 5th Anniversary

This week marks the 5th anniversary of my blog, Sentient Developments.

Back in 2002, as I immersed myself in all things transhumanist, I launched this blog as a way to help me think out loud and better articulate my thoughts and concerns. It was also a good way to vent some frustrations and do a bit of shouting (something I still do from time to time).

Soon after the creation of Sentient Developments I joined Simon Smith over at Betterhumans and became its deputy editor. Around the same time we co-founded the Toronto Transhumanist Association. Over the course of the next 5 years I joined the World Transhumanist Association, served on its board of directors from 2004-06, did some editing work for the Journal of Ethics and Technology, organized TransVision 04, and now sit on the Board of Directors for the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies.

During this time Sentient Developments has served as my "home base." It's been a labour of love.

Starting tomorrow I will be revisiting some of my favourite blog posts from the past 5 years.

William Crawley interviews Peter Singer

When hypergiants go hypernova

Scientists predicted that something like this could happen, and now they have actually observed it: a hypergiant star went nova.

About 238 million years ago a star in galaxy NGC 1260 ended its life. To say that it was a powerful explosion would be a gross understatement; the amount of explosive energy expelled by supernova SN 2006gy defies human comprehension.

Prior to its dramatic death, the hypergiant star, which was 150 times larger than our own, suffered a sudden and violent collapse. Extremely high levels of gamma radiation from the star's core caused its energy to transform to matter, and the drop in energy in turn caused the star to collapse. This resulted in a dramatic increase in the thermonuclear reactions that was burning within it. All this added energy overpowered the gravitational attraction causing the star to explode.

And explode it did.

Scientists claim that the supernova was over 150 times more powerful than any other observed to date. Physical models suggested that such a supernova was theoretically possible, but astronomers believed that such events were limited to the early Universe when stars tended to be hypergiant.

A hypernova like SN 2006gy can instantly expel about 10X46 joules. This is more energy than our sun produces over a period of 10 billion years.

According to the Astroprof blog,

At discovery, it was already as bright as a Type Ia supernova at its peak. But, instead of getting dimmer, SN 2006gy continued to get brighter for several weeks. The peak brightness seldom comes much more than a week after the explosion. Theoretical models suggest that SN 2006gy gets its light from both the expanding cloud of gas and a shock front as the cloud of gas expands into very dense gasses surrounding the progenitor star. But, the expanding gas cloud is so bright that it requires substantially more radioactive decay to heat it that would be present in almost any other supernova. The best way to get that much radioactive material, according to the model that the theorists have come up with, is for basically the whole core to be thrown out into the supernova, leaving little or nothing behind to form a neutron star or black hole. So much material is thrown out, that the supernova continues to be heated long after the explosion itself. In fact, even months later, SN 2006gy has faded in brightness only to as bright as the peak brightness of a Type Ia supernova!

In fact, astronomers were able to observe the hypernova's peak brightness for an astounding 70 days.

Supernovas can wreak tremendous havoc in its local area, effectively sterilizing the region. These explosions produce highly collimated beams of hard gamma rays that extend outward from the exploding star. Any unfortunate life-bearing planet that should come into contact with those beams would suffer a mass extinction (if not total extinction depending on its proximity to the supernova). Gamma rays would eat up the ozone layer and indirectly cause the onset of an ice age due to the prevalence of NO2 molecules.

Supernovas can shoot out directed beams of gamma rays to a distance of 100 light years, while hypernovas and gamma ray bursts can impact areas as far as 500 light years away.

Thankfully, hypergiant Eta Carinae, which is on the verge of going nova, is well over 7,500 light years away from Earth. We'll be safe when it goes off, but you'll be able to read by its light at night-time.

Dilbert's ethicist

Zizek!

Chris Burden's extreme performance art

Chris Burden took performance art to unprecedented extremes during the 1970s. During his performances he would often put himself directly in harm's way; the point of his art, in addition to making political and social statements, was to illicit discomfort in the audience/observers.

His first performance was Five Day Locker Piece (1971). He spent 5 days locked in a two-foot by two-foot locker. Immeidately above Burden was a 5-gallon supply of water, while the locker below him contained an empty 5-gallon jug. He remained crammed in this space for the entire 5 days without food.

His best-known performance, called Shoot, came a year later when he had a friend shoot him with a .22 rifle from a distance of 5 meters. Burden wanted the bullet to graze his bicep, but he flinched when the rifle went off and the bullet went right into his arm. Interpretations of Shoot often relate the piece to the Vietnam war, the political assassinations of the 1960s, and the frightening realization that anyone could be shot at any time -- and most likely by a familiar person.

In 1974 Burden performed Transfixed in which his body was stretched along the roof of a Volkswagen Bug while a friend drove spikes through his hands nailing him to the car. The vehicle was then driven out into the street where it obstructed traffic. Aside from the strange religious connotations of this piece, the point of Transfixed might have been merely to shock and disturb.

But is it art?

In a word, yes. The fact that the artist makes the claim that it is art and that there are observers who experience the performance are criteria enough -- never mind the fact that these pieces evoke extreme reactions in the audience.

How not to prepare for an alien invasion

This is the most ridiculous book I've seen in quite some time: An Introduction to Planetary Defense: A Study of Modern Warfare Applied to Extra-Terrestrial Invasion by Travis S. Taylor et al.

Book description

"This book describes a serious look at defending the planet in the event of an extra-terrestrial invasion. Travis Taylor, et al, have written the definitive book on the defense of earth against a potential alien incursion. Whatever your beliefs on the subject...the book also serves as an important primer on the potential future of warfare on every level. It is tightly grounded in current day realities of war and extrapolates thoughtfully but closely about future potentials. It should be on the reading list of anyone who is serious about national security and the future of war."

The authors believe that there is a "high probability" that one or two intelligent alien species visit Earth every century. They also reject Carl Sagan's famous assertion that advanced space-faring civs have by necessity (i.e. selectional processes) advanced beyond the need for war. "It's a wonderful idea that has no basis in reality," claims Taylor.

Consequently, they feel that the world, or more specifically "America," needs to be on the ready. They advocate asymmetric warfare to combat the extraterrestrials. The authors argue that the likely technological imbalance would force defending forces to adopt guerrilla-like tactics -- warfare along the lines of what is currently being experienced by troops in Iraq and Afghanistan. "[I]if we were attacked by aliens, this is our best defense," writes Taylor.

Post-Singularity warfare

There is so much wrong with all this that I don't know where to begin. Their line of argumentation seems to belong in the 20th century.

The idea of the United States defending the planet with guerrilla tactics reminds me of one of the most absurd films of all-time, Independence Day. In this movie, America experiences a supreme ass kicking until the alien invaders are thwarted by the Fresh Prince and his Apple Newton (remember those?).

Okay, time for a 21st century reality check. And let me put it this way: setting aside hand-waving dismissals of the Fermi Paradox (and that's a BIG caveat), if an advanced space-faring intelligence were to arrive at Earth with hostile intentions, their attack would be over before we could say, "E.T. phone home."

Specifically, I'm imagining a post-Singularity machine intelligence with access to artificial superintelligence, advanced robotics, genetically designed phages, and Drexlerian nanotechnology (if not femtotechnology). It would be like the Terminator and Matrix worlds on steroids. And that's if they want a planet to recover; the use of anti-matter weapons would make quick work of our planet should they want to destroy it. Alternately they could set the atmosphere aflame using grey-goo nano. Or how about robotic locust swarms, autonomous hunter-killers, and neurowarfare?

Moreover, malevolent ETIs wouldn't even need to visit the Earth -- they could send their forces by proxy in the form of Von Neumann probes, or what has also been dubbed berserker probes. These are self-replicating space-craft that could conceivably reproduce and travel across the Galaxy at an exponential rate. These devices could carry a number of nasty weapons with them for their attack.

As an aside, the theoretical prospect of berserkers poses a conundrum that's related to the Fermi Paradox. Any malevolent or misguided advanced intelligence could spawn a fleet of these probes to sterilize the Galaxy in fairly short order. That said, we clearly don't live in a sterile Galaxy as witnessed by our ongoing existence. We appear to live in a Galaxy that's devoid of berserkers for non-obvious reasons.

So, my advice on preparing for an alien invasion?

Simple: don't bother -- you won't even know what hit you.

Why the discovery of a nearby Earth-like planet is bad news

Wow, the blogosphere has been absolutely gushing these past few days over the news that an Earth-like planet may have been discovered in the 'hood. This planet may boast a moderate climate that could conceivably support life and is only 20 light years away.

Not surprisingly, this news has caused a number of pundits to fantasize about jumping into their rocketships and bidding adiós to our polluted, war-torn and diseased planet.

But not so fast, amigos. While many have misguidedly jumped on the bandwagon to the stars, a number of bloggers have gotten it right.

In his article, "'Don't Pack Your Bags Just Yet", Jamais Cascio notes that, "By the time we have the technology that would make a 20 light year trip even remotely plausible (the fastest space craft yet made would still take thousands of years to get there), we probably won't be all that interested in living in a watery gravity hole anyway. Nope -- give us some nice, massive gas giants to convert to computronium!"

Michael Anissimov points out that we have a human hospitable planet right here that we’ve barely even begun to use. He also argues that "even if we did need to leave the Earth, there is a tremendous amount of raw materials for space colonies right next door in the form of carbonaceous asteroids, which make up about 75% of known asteroids." Moreover, warns Anissimov, "we should think carefully before sending off colonists to far-away places without ensuring that they’re capable of protecting the fundamental freedoms of their citizens." Specifically, he worries that a blight may come back to haunt us (which also reminds me of the Honored Matres of the Dune series).

And as Tyler Cowen noted, "Are earth-like planets so common? That probably means lots more civilization-supporting planets than I had expected. But where are the alien visitors? As suggested by the Fermi paradox, we must revise our priors along several margins, one of which is the expected duration of an intelligent civilization."

Indeed, Cowen is on the right track. A primary argument used to reconcile the Fermi Paradox is the Rare Earth Hypothesis. This line of reasoning suggests that we haven't been visited by ETI's because life is far too rare in the cosmos.

But if we have discovered an Earth-like planet as little as 20 light years away, it's not unreasonable to suggest that our Galaxy must be absolutely teeming with life. This would seem to be a heavy blow to the REH.

So why is this bad news? It's bad news because our biophilic universe should be saturated with advanced intelligence by now...but it's not. The Fermi Paradox is very much in effect as a profound and disturbing unsolved mystery in astrosociobiology, philosophy and futurism.

Are all civilizations doomed before getting to the Singularity? Or is there something else at work here?

Is the world ready for cyborg athletes?

Look out professional athletes, here come the cyborgs -- and they're aiming for the Olympics.

Double amputee Oscar Pistorius, a sprinter who uses a pair of carbon fiber prosthetic limbs, is hoping to run the 400 meter dash at the next Olympics. And he has the numbers to prove that he can compete; Pistorius has run the 400 meter dash in 46.56 seconds and the 100 meters in an impressive 10.91 seconds.

But speed is not his problem. As it turns out, his prosthetic limbs have become a matter of great contention. Consequently, Pistorius, or 'Blade Runner' as he's called, has more to contend with than just his disability.

Technical Aid?

The International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF) recently concluded that Pistorius's artificial legs give him a decided advantage over athletes who run with naturally endowed legs. He is using what they have termed a "technical aid." Subsequently, Pistorius is not eligible to compete at the 2008 Olympics should he qualify.

Pistorius sees this as a form of discrimination. He argues that his sprinting talents are latent and the result of his hard work and dedication to the sport. "There's a fear of change," he says.

That said, the IAAF has a point. Pistorius's artificial legs have been dubbed 'cheetahs' -- and not by accident. They resemble blades more than feet, allowing Pistorius to take long strides as he springs from step to step. Some claim that his strides are as long as three to four meters. This is no attempt to mimic normal human running; it's a new form of locomotion altogether.

Pistorius and his team argue that this is nonsense, that the blades couldn't possibly offer such an advantage.

The end of normal human functioning in sports

This issue is a snap-shot into the future of sports. Governing bodies will have much more to contend with than just performance enhancing drugs. Technological endowments, particularly those that are cybernetic in nature, are poised to upset the apple cart that is professional sports.

The Pistorius issue is a case in point. The IAAF was compelled to created a new rule stating that "the use of any technical device that incorporates, springs, wheels, etc is forbidden." They argue that these endowments change the nature and spirit of sporting events to an unacceptable degree. This is undoubtedly a precursor to future rulings that may ban genetic modifications, cognitive enhancements, and cybernetic implants.

Looking at it from another perspective, established sports like the 100 meter dash assume a specific morphology, namely that of a normal functioning human. Athletes can use subtle methods to improve their performance, whether they be expertly designed running shoes or highly refined techniques.

But there is something inherently unsatisfactory about all of this. A certain arbitrariness exists when it comes to determining which technologies are acceptable and which are not. Moreover, given the strong likelihood that advanced prosthetics will greatly surpass what is natural, at what point do we concede defeat and allow 'cyborgs' to compete alongside 'naturals?' Are groups like the IAAF discriminatory by insisting that para-athletes conform to 'normal' human morphology?

And given the 'arms race' nature of competition, will these positional advantages cause athletes to do something as seemingly radical as having their healthy natural limbs replaced by artificial ones? Is it self-mutilation when you're getting a better limb?

New capacities, new sports

The advent and application of cybernetic technologies will redefine what has typically been regarded as normal human functioning. Future humans, as they adopt novel sensory and physical endowments, will establish new modes of living and being. This will in turn normalize within society and become the dynamic norm.

The long term impact of enhancement in sports, however, is still unclear. There may be schisms within specific sports causing the emergence of rival leagues. There may be leagues for enhanced athletes and those for 'naturals.' Over time, however, the naturals will increasingly appear anachronistic.

Imagine a hockey team that communicates techlepathically, or basketball players with improved peripheral vision. There could be ambidextrous switch pitchers and skeet shooters with enhanced visual fields.

And new capacities will mean new sports altogether.

As for Pistorius and his particular dilemma, I agree with the IAAF. He should not compete with normal humans. Instead, he should continue to race against other para-athletes and keep pushing the envelope of what is physically possible.

Eventually, performances by cyborgs will surpass those of unaugmented humans. It's the disabled, after all, who will inherit the earth.

Here's a video clip of Pistorius in action:

No observer, no reality

Found this on PhysicsWeb: Quantum physics says goodbye to reality.

Description:

Some physicists are uncomfortable with the idea that all individual quantum events are innately random. This is why many have proposed more complete theories, which suggest that events are at least partially governed by extra "hidden variables". Now physicists from Austria claim to have performed an experiment that rules out a broad class of hidden-variables theories that focus on realism -- giving the uneasy consequence that reality does not exist when we are not observing it (Nature 446 871).

Entire article.

Chimps 'more than human' in some respects

Read about how this chimp is kicking a human's ass at this task.

British miltary thinktank cites "synthetic telepathy" as a future threat

A UK Ministry of Defence thinktank led by Rear Admiral Chris Parry, a controversial senior officer, has outlined a number of challenges British forces might face in the period up to 2035.

In its rolling Strategic Trends Programme document, the MoD's Development, Concepts and Doctrine Centre (DCDC), they note that,

"By 2035, an implantable information chip could be developed and wired directly to the user's brain...Developments might include the invention of synthetic telepathy, including mind-to-mind or telepathic dialogue. This type of development would have obvious military and security, as well as control, legal and ethical, implications."

More can be read here and here. Be prepared to read about the threat of 'brain-chipped middle class goths in flashmob revolution by 2035' and middle class revolutionaries taking on the role of Marx's proletariat.

Mmmmmm, middle class cybergoth proletariat revolutionaries. Where do I sign up?

SIAI video series, 2007 updates

Our friends over at the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence (SIAI) have been busy. For those of you unfamiliar with the SIAI, they are,

a nonprofit research institute based in Palo Alto, California, with three major goals: furthering the nascent science of safe, beneficial advanced artificial intelligence (self-improving systems) through research and development, research fellowships, research grants, and science education; furthering the understanding of its implications to society through the AI Impact Initiative and annual Singularity Summit; and furthering education among students to foster scientific research.

They've recently released a video series from the Singularity Summit featuring presentations by such thinkers as Ray Kurzweil, Nick Bostrom, Douglas R. Hofstadter, Cory Doctorow and K. Eric Drexler.

Their Spring 2007 updates can be found here. You can find out more about the SIAI here.

Bisphenol A 'inherently toxic'

If you eat canned food or drink from a can or hard plastic bottles, chances are good that you've ingested Bisphenol A. A controversy is now raging over the safety of the chemical, which acts like a synthetic female sex hormone. Bisphenol A may be responsible for a number of health risks.

Here's an excerpt from the Globe and Mail article, 'Inherently toxic' chemical faces its future,

It seems obvious that a high dose of a poison would be more dangerous than a lower one, but bisphenol A is creating a stir because it doesn't follow this seemingly common-sense rule. Researchers say this oddity results from the fact that bisphenol A isn't a conventional harmful agent, such as cigarette smoke, but behaves in the unconventional way typical of hormones, where even vanishingly small exposures can be harmful.

This is why some environmentalists and scientists contend that bisphenol A, which leaches in trace amounts from food and beverage packaging, is among the scariest manufactured substances in use, an eerie modern version of the vaunted lead water pipes by which ancient Romans were unknowingly poisoned.

Extrapolating from the results of animal experiments, they suspect bisphenol A has its fingerprints all over the unexplained human health trends emerging in recent decades hinting at something going haywire with sex hormones, including the early onset of puberty, declining sperm counts, and the huge increase in breast and prostate cancer, among other ailments.

Look for this issue to gain increasing public attention over the coming months and years.

'Jesus Camp' and the art of brainwashing children

I recently picked up the DVD of Jesus Camp and I let it sit on the shelf for a couple of weeks. I was reluctant to watch it because I knew how upset it would make me. Well, I finally watched it, and let's just say that it didn't disappoint.

A lot of what I saw in Jesus Camp was expected, such as the ideologically far-right evangelical bent and the insane close-mindedness. But what I didn't expect was the sophistication of evangelical proselytizing techniques. Even more disturbing is how American evangelicals are using these strategies to brainwash their very own children.

These kids don't have a chance.

Far right theocratic ideology

American evangelicals are quite clearly situated at the extreme right of U.S. politics. They are polarized so right of center that their outlook is nothing less than ideological. They have framed the world in such a way that they only perceive things in black and white: there are the true believers and then there's everybody else. As one parent noted in the documentary, "We believe that there's two kinds of people in this world: people who love Jesus and people who don't."

The paranoia and sense of fanatical mission is palpable throughout Jesus Camp. The struggle to spread the Good Word has escalated beyond door-to-door evangelizing. The spread of liberalism and scientific naturalism in the U.S. has forced evangelicals to take it to the next level. They've declared war against their enemies and assumed ownership of the United States; they are working to reclaim what they see as God's country.

The language is not merely rhetorical. “This means war!" shouts an evangelical teacher to her young students, "Are you a part of it or not?” A cardboard cut-out of George W. Bush looks on. The allegiance to the Republican Party is assumed and undeniable, and for this the evangelicals make no apologies.

And it's not merely a battle for political power -- it's a culture war in which ideas themselves are under attack. Evangelical children are recruited into this struggle at a tender and suggestible age.

They are shown expertly produced and highly entertaining videos that mock evolutionary biology and laud creationism. "Do you really think we come from goo?" asks the man in the video, his hand covered in green slime. The children laugh at the absurdity of the suggestion. The word 'science' is bantered around like a pejorative.

In one scene a boy named Levi is shown at home being schooled by his mother. She asks, "Did you get to the part yet where they say that science hasn't proven anything?" She then turns his attention to global warming. If it's something that scientists have informed us about, like 'evolution,' then the evangelicals feel that something fishy must be going on. Climate change is dismissed out of hand. Silly scientists, what do they know?

Expert evangelical techniques

Ironically, evangelical parents and teachers are unknowingly applying memetic and neurolinguistic techniques in their practice. They teach their children to frame the world in a very specific way -- and they do it in such a way that they become 'locked-in' to that frame.

They teach and reinforce complete submission to God and are told that people are nothing more than vessels. As a result, children learn to see themselves as tools rather than free thinking agents. They are taught that independent and 'out of the box' thinking is deviant behavior and a sign of evil or weakness.

They are also taught how to identify those ideas that could subvert God's mission and how to deal with those contingencies. Children are instructed to recognize aspects of the world in one of two ways: it is either pure and righteous, or dirty and defiled. The idea that certain things are unclean and impure are anchored into their psyche. In one scene children are given an opportunity to cleanse themselves as the teacher pours bottled water over their hands. The look of desperation on the children's faces as they wait their turn is disturbing. Evangelicals have mastered the art of teaching shame.

It should come as no surprise that fundamentalist Muslims use similar lock-in techniques. This is an example of convergent memetics -- a similar phenomenon to what's often seen in evolution when different species acquire the same trait independently. Religions, particularly those with an evangelical focus, have independently acquired and refined those tactics which ensure practitioner lock-in and a desire to spread and defend the memeplex.

This is why fundamentalist religions are so hard to escape from psychologically. The mind has been programmed to respond to certain stimuli in a preconceived way and to perceive that response as a guide to action. Moreover, the desire to transcend the programming has been subverted by feelings of guilt, shame, or uncleanliness. At a deeper level, doubt or independent thinking is rationalized as the work of an outside force, namely the devil or non-believers.

As an interesting aside, when asked how they can justify the proselytizing of their children in this way, the evangelicals counter by claiming that the Muslims are doing it as well. The difference as they see it is that they have the true word of God, and it is better to get to their children before someone else does -- namely the enemy. As Camp organizer Becky Fischer noted:

"It's no wonder, with that kind of intense training and discipling, that those young people are ready to kill themselves for the cause of Islam. I wanna see young people who are as committed to the cause of Jesus Christ as the young people are to the cause of Islam. I wanna see them as radically laying down their lives for the Gospel as they are over in Pakistan and Israel and Palestine and all those different places, you know, because we have... excuse me, but we have the truth!"

Child abuse in the name of God

Children are also taught how to deal with non-evangelicals, particularly if they are teased or rejected by them. They talk about how non-believers build walls around themselves and how they refuse to be happy or fulfilled. Children are encouraged to 'help' these people by proselytizing. They learn how to do cold approaches and are given opening scripts. They apply field tested techniques to help in the interaction and offer the target some literature.

At the Jesus Camp itself, the organizers recruit a series of expert speakers. These are presenters and teachers who excel at interacting with children. They know how to reach out to kids, maintain their interest, impart information, and keep them entertained.

And they do this extraordinarily well. Too well.

Children are treated as puppets to be manipulated and are frequently brought to tears. There are more scenes of kids crying in Jesus Camp than I care to mention. Speaker after speaker reinforce different points, and you can practically hear the doors of cognition slamming shut in the minds of the children. In turn, when the children actually speak and articulate their thoughts they sound as if they're channeling adults.

In one scene Levi says, "At five I got saved...because I just wanted more of life."

Say what? Now, what five year old feels he needs "more of life." I'm sorry, but five year olds do not talk or think in this way. This is a sad case of children regurgitating scripts fed to them by their parents and instructors.

Indeed, the evangelicals know exactly what they're doing and they're consciously going about the business of not just conversion but of refining their techniques as well. "I can go into a playground of kids that don't know anything about Christianity," says Fisher, "lead them to the Lord in a matter of, just no time at all, and just moments later they can be seeing visions and hearing the voice of God, because they're so open. They are so usable in Christianity."

Outspoken religious critic Richard Dawkins has a term to describe these types of individuals: child abusers. He believes that teaching religion to children is a form of abuse because they have not yet developed the psychological faculties to defend themselves against proselytization.

The trouble is, moderates and liberals cannot and will not struggle against evangelicals with equal fervor. Moderates are, well, too moderate. Moreover, the damage inflicted by ideas is much more difficult to ascertain than something like physical abuse. At the same time, religious and free speech rights are held with high esteem.

The answer, it would seem, is elusive. A good place to start, however, would be to ensure that each and every child receives a liberal and diverse education. Children deserve at least this much.

What happens at home may be beyond the purview of the state, but at least they can be given a chance at school.