#1・2・3 is arguably that as well but fundamentally its all in the thesis of the series which is about how relationships strengthen your

[kohakhearts]

yeah im thinking about the full version of 1・2・3 again yeah its making my brain a little mushy about The Characters

[weaselandfriends]

Hymnstoke Intermission

Andrew Hussie had the courtesy to drop some thoughts on the Epilogues, the full text of which can be found here. As you can probably tell, it’s dense, so I’ll summarize what I consider the key points.

1. Hussie intended the Epilogues to be “conceptually distinct” from the main narrative of Homestuck (i.e., Acts 1 through 7).

2. Hussie intended the Epilogues to set new narrative stakes and establish a way for the narrative to continue (as opposed to the traditional idea of an “Epilogue” as something that resolves what came before).

3. By labeling the Epilogues as “Epilogues” while not adhering to traditional expectations of what an epilogue entails, Hussie intended to prompt readers to question storytelling concepts and the agenda of the storyteller.

4. Hussie intended to cede his authorial control over the Homestuck story and “pass the torch” to the fandom.

5. Hussie intended to prompt the fandom to develop skills like “critical discussion, dealing constructively with negative feelings resulting from the media they consume, interacting with each other in more meaningful ways, and trying to understand different points of view outside of the factions within fandom that can become very hardened over time.”

I actually disagree with several of Hussie’s conclusions, which probably sounds hilariously presumptuous. But if Hussie truly wants the fandom to develop skills in critical discussion, and to foster and understand different viewpoints, while also ceding his authorial control over the work, then his word being “Word of God” has to be called into question. Act 6 of Homestuck already does this; Hussie’s author avatar is literally killed followed by a flash titled DOTA. DOTA, of course, being short for “Death of the Author,” a frequently-cited essay by Roland Barthes that argues that author's intentions can neither be wholly known nor taken as the sole interpretation of a work.

It’s arguable whether Hussie’s shout out to this essay is meant to be an endorsement of its thesis, and I think a claim could be made that the DOTA in Homestuck is inherently parodic; Hussie’s author avatar continues to exist and influence the story even after his “death,” and at times (such as the Meenah walkarounds) the author avatar appears to give direct statements of the author’s intentions behind certain creative decisions. In fact, the DOTA flash itself marks one of the Hussie avatar’s most direct interactions with the story, as it is during this flash that he gives Vriska the Ring of Life.

Even now, Hussie’s actions contradict his claims, at least to some extent; he cedes narrative control and promotes differing critical interpretations at the same time he dumps a tremendous block of text explaining the intentions and goals of his work. An author’s statement on “what the story means” usually affirms his or her control and quashes differing viewpoints, after all. But it’s not something new. Homestuck has always blurred the line behind author and fan. Some of Hussie’s statements I don’t take as major revelations but rather reiterations of themes that have been clear since Act 1.

If you have read my more recent Hymnstoke posts, you can probably guess which of Hussie’s points I disagree with. In particular, I think the Epilogues are too thematically important to Homestuck to be treated with the kind of “take it or leave it”/“canon or non-canon” ambivalence Hussie claims in his post. Or maybe it’s more that I wish it didn’t have that kind of ambivalence? Because his logic is sound; the Epilogues are presented in a way that sets them apart from “Homestuck Proper.” The AO3 fan fiction cover page, the prose, the way they’re organized as a distinct entity on the website, all of these elements contribute to and support Hussie’s claim of separation. Perhaps, then, my counterargument is that the Epilogues shouldn’t have been displayed this way; that they should have been a fundamental part of the story, one that is unquestionably considered “canon.”

Without the Epilogues, the ending of Homestuck is bad. Really bad. Game of Thrones bad. The original ending of Homestuck fails Homestuck on every conceivable level. It’s a poor resolution of the plot, as it relies on a deus ex machina (Alt!Calliope) while leaving tons of smaller narrative elements completely unresolved. It’s a poor resolution of the characters, as most of them wind up being irrelevant (even those given absurd amounts of screen time, like Jake) and their personal issues are resolved off-screen during a timeskip. It’s a poor resolution of the themes, as despite constant statements that one can’t cheat their way to “development,” that is exactly what happens when Vriska is revived and fixes everyone’s problems instantly. It’s a poor resolution of the structure or form, as what was a tightly-wound machine narrative that relied on innumerable tiny parts sliding into perfect order ended with a big dumb fight scene where people just whap each other over and over until the good guys whap hard enough to win. Beyond the fact that the ending is “happy,” I still can’t find much good to say about it even after years of turning it over in my head.

And during the hiatus-strewn period that marked Homestuck’s end, Hussie was noticeably scant on dropping essays about his intentions.

The Epilogues redeem so much of what went wrong with the ending of Homestuck. I won’t delve into the specifics in this post, as I should probably save it for a more comprehensive series of posts about the Epilogues. But from that perspective, it feels to me as though the Epilogues should not be divorced from Homestuck so thoroughly.

But see, my disagreement with Hussie on this point is a bit disingenuous for another reason. Because, like his claims of ceding authorial control, he’s contradictory here too. Consider these points:

1. Hussie intended the Epilogues to be the launching point of future story developments.

2. Hussie, ceding his own control, intended these future developments to be created by the fans.

3. Hussie designed the Epilogues so that the fans could accept or deny them outright, consider them “canon” or “non-canon.”

If the Epilogues are the breeding ground for Homestuck’s future, then that part of the fandom that denies them renders themselves inert. Without the Epilogues, Homestuck is over. It’s done. The window of our Pynchonian party is closed. All life has petered out; no energy enters to sustain it. The Epilogues open the window. Denying the Epilogues kills the story, and thus the fandom; accepting them leaves room open for the future. And if the part of the fandom that rejects the Epilogues withers and dies, that means only the fandom that accepts them will remain. Ultimately, the Epilogues will be considered canon by the Homestuck fandom, because those who disagree will no longer be part of the fandom, at least the active one.

That probably sounds imperious. But it’s not something I want; the people who deny the Epilogues ought to have a voice as well, and nobody is stopping them from providing their opinions. But I have a hard time imagining that people who deny the Epilogues will stick around in a fandom for a work now defined by the Epilogues. As such, many of Hussie’s conciliatory claims fall flat or seem overly idealistic. Can the fandom continue as a divided house on such a fundamental line when future developments to the Homestuck story will be based on the Epilogues? The canonical arguments for which books belonged in the Bible did not end in blithe harmony; one viewpoint prevailed and all schismatics extinguished. Obviously there will be no burnings at the stake over Homestuck canon, but in a world where there are so many options for entertainment, those who do not accept Homestuck’s active element will probably leave of their own volition.

There's also a third option, expressed by one of the commentators on the Reddit thread I link at the beginning of this post.

Here's my suggestion for you, Hussman. Big subversion, you'll like it: Make "Homestuck 2" and then not have anything form [sic] Homestuck in it at all and just make the story you actually want to make.

The Homestuck fandom might die, but the “Hussie” fandom will survive, as long as Hussie himself continues to create art. Before the Epilogues, I often expressed a similar sentiment. I wanted Hussie to get away from Homestuck, make something new, even if it was just something short and far less ambitious than Homestuck. I think Hussie is a strong storyteller and writer in his own right, and he did not merely “get lucky” with Homestuck the way a hack gets lucky when their trashily-written novel strikes a perfect chord with the culture and sells millions. If Hussie does actually intend to cede authorial control and leave Homestuck to the fandom, then what is his next move? Retirement at 40? I hope not.

Those were my hastily-written thoughts on Hussie’s commentary. While at times contradictory, I consider Hussie’s claims and actions in line with themes established throughout Homestuck. But I also question whether his storytelling decisions will be able to achieve the result he desires for the fandom.

Whether he or we can achieve it, I do agree with Hussie’s hope to create a fandom that is smarter, more willing to view the work with a critical lens, to discuss with one another, to understand each other’s viewpoints, to deal with difficult subject matter. I think a lot of people can be scared to delve deeply into a work, either because they only want their entertainment to be light escapism or because they feel gatekept by not knowing a lot about literary criticism as a field of study. Maybe escapism is fine, but it’s not the only use of art. Treat the stories you like as art and really ask yourself what you like about them, what makes them good, and especially what it means that those things make it good. Those questions will serve a fitting substitute for an understanding of postmodern literary trends of the 20th century.

[rainbowsnakes]

Animal Products, Sustainability and Animal Welfare

This post was inspired by several keynote talks given at conferences I attended last summer. 

It is a topic that can become very emotive.    

Disscussions on animal production and addressing the challenge of global food security in the face of climate change normally falls in to one of two narratives.  

The Production Narrative, aiming for “sustainable intensification” 

Or

The Comsumption Narrative, “Stop eating all animal products.” 

But what about the third option? 

Is there a place for animal agriculture in the future of farming that meets sustainability goals while still protecting  animal health and welfare?   

1) The Production Narrative: 

We can not continue to produce animal products in the way we do currently. It is NOT sustainable. The production narrative seeks to produce more food with a smaller footprint of rescources by increasing yeilds; selectivly breeding animals for increased feed efficiency (which basically reffers to how much food an animal has to eat to produce a unit of usable animal product). 

This approach seeks to rear animals that grow fast and produce high yeilds at higher stocking densities in the pursuit of “ sustainable intensification.”

This is path we are currently on. It is not the best option for animal welfare- 

and It’s is not whats best for the environment. 

I reject the opinion that farmers don’t care about their animals (All the farmers I’ve personally worked with do). Farmers want what’s best for the health and welfare of their animals, but are ultimatley constrained by very narrow profit margins.  

The problem is not “greedy farmers”. The problem is that as a society animal products do not have enough value.  There is a pressure for costs to be driven down by retailers...and good welfare costs money.  

In some cases the suggestions made (or scientifically shown) to improve animal welfare, such as selecting animals with slower growth rates, keeping them at lower stocking densities, or providing specific environmental enrichments will conflict directly with reducing the energy consumption of food production. 

In intensive systems welfare and sustainability are often in direct conflict.  

eg)  Production method 1 rears 4000 slower growing chickens per flock which go to slaughter at 60 days..  Production method 2 rears 6000 fast growing meat chickens which go to slaughter at 42 days both methods use the same amount of space.

The longer rearing time of production method 1 means the flock eats more food per kg of meat produced (and components of chicken feed like corn or wheat could have directly fed humans instead).  Production method 1 will also rear less chickens per year....So overall this is much more costly for the envrionment.

BUT production method 1 uses a slow growing strain of chicken with significantly less issues with leg deformities. The lower stocking density also means it is easier to maintain their environment within the parameters needed for good welfare.. They are overall healthier and more active. 

The consumer has pay the difference for this higher production cost and higher welfare standard.  Meaning high welfare foods are not equally accessible to everyone and come at the cost of sustainability.

On a grand scale, this system isn’t going to work. 

There is a capacity, and a real drive, to improve the welfare of animals in agriculture.. standards are improving. 

But in the face of climate change Is welfare going to remain a priority? Is it acceptable to have a split market where maybe a small % of farm animals are reared (ineffeciently) with a good quality of life for those that can afford to pay for welfare....While the reamining majority of farm animals are kept in sub-optimal conditons?

And of course there is a flip side to that argument. 

If suddenly it is decideded that yes, because animal products involve the lives of sentient beings, high welfare systems should become mandatory... The price of animal products will shoot up to reflect that. Is it ethical to deprieve people who can’t afford the new price of the choice to eat animal products? 

Without fixing equality issues within society....We can’t actually fix this problem with agriculture within the production narrative.  

2) The comsumption Narrative               

If there is no animal agriculture then there is no welfare problem.   

So is the awnser for everybody to stop eating animal products all together?

Not really, No.   

The whole world is highly unlikely and in some cases unable to become entirely vegan or vegetarian... It is simply not an option for every individual in all parts of the world. 

Feasibility aside not everybody has an ethical problem with ending the life of an animal for food in the first place. However,  MANY people  (for a variety of different reasons) do care about the quality of life an animal had and their capacity to suffer. 

Is the comsumption Narrative the best option for the environment and for global food security? 

- Arguably not.   

-Even plant based diets still harm the environment and indirectly harm animals. It’s an almost inescapable part of intensive modern agriculture.  

- Not all animal agriculture is bad for the envioronment. It can be well managed to the benefit of people and animals (wild and domestic).  

  Which leads us to the final narrative... 

3)  The Circular Narrative 

The circular narrative assumes that a given area of land that is used for agriculture in the most efficient way possible for food production. 

Some land which is unsutible for growing crops can be utilized by grazing cattle or sheep and managed humanely and sustainably to produce food / textile for humans.   

For land use to be efficient and sustainable one cruicial factor is food that humans could eat directly can not be fed to animals.... Instead animals would be fed using rescources that would otherwise be wasted... eg) sugar beet tops or other crop parts inedible for humans, food waste ect. 

In many cases using these rescources to feed animals and produce food is more efficient than using them for something else like biomass or biofeul. 

Its all about turning our current wasteful, linear production food chains into something that all works together.   

This option produces LESS animal product over all (so animal product consumption would still need to be reduced for this to work) ...because animals in these systems would be kept primarily for biomass utility, not pushed to their highest possible productivity yields. 

This is the easiest kind of system to pair with high welfare.  And there are already agro-forestry and silvopastoral systems that are moving towards this kind of goal.  

But this option requires the way the agricultural industry works, the way society percives animal products, and the way land is managed to fundamentally change...

Conclusion ? 

I don’t really have awnsers. 

I only made this post because Iv’e been thinking about all this a lot while collecting data on farms and when attending conferences in the field of animal welfare. (Most notably Prof. Imke de Boer’s Keynote at the 7th International Conference on the Assessment of Animal Welfare at Farm and Group Level.)  

If you eat animal products then I guess try go for high welfare stuff if you can, and if possible eat less animal products to mitigate the fact its not as sustainible.

That way, as a comsumer of animal products, you are still “voting” that welfare matters to you.  If people aren’t prepared to pay for higher welfare then there won’t be as much money put in to improving and progressing farm animal husbandry. 

I just so rarely see disscussions that don’t boil down to either “ ALL ANIMAL AGRICULTURE IS BAD” or dialogue that just comes too close to accepting current intensive systems as being compleatly fine. 

This is not a farming is bad post.... As some current farming systems do allow animals to have a life worth living, but ultimatley not enough of them... 

Too many welfare issues are inherently linked to the genetics of the production animals themselves....If I have the time maybe I’ll add some further sources or go into more detail in another post if people are interested.  

Also as a disclaimer this isn’t a bash against veganism / vegitarianism because we do need to reduce our overall consumption of animal products, and veganism becoming more mainstream makes plant based meals more accesible and is ultimatly it is a very good thing.  

However I think the vegan movement has a tendency to put too much focus on individuals consumer habits, morals and personal choices- rather than actually adressing the wider problems with modern agriculture...and captialism.

If you are interested in the circular narrative,  the future of farming and the dynamics of animal welfare and sustainability then the sources below may be of interest. 

www. wur. nl/en /Dossiers/ file/ Circular-agrofood-system. htm  (tumblrs weird about links so take the spaces out and paste that link it will take you to Wageningen Universities page on circular Agrofood systems where there is a pretty good video summerising it.) 

Feed sources for livestock: recycling towards a green planet, Thesis by Hannah van Zanten 

de Olde, E.M., Moller, H., Marchand, F. et al.  When experts disagree: the need to rethink indicator selection for assessing sustainability of agriculture (2017) Environ Dev Sustain 19:4 1327–1342.

Grazed and confused? : Food Climate Research Network

 Animal Husbandry Regained: The Place of Farm Animals in Sustainable Agriculture by John Webster

The future of animal farming: Renwing the ancient contract edited by Marian Stamp Dawkins and Roland Bonney

[transhumanitynet]

Human-like Emotional Responses in a Simplified Independent Core Observer Model System

Abstract. Most artificial general intelligence (AGI) system developers have been focused upon intelligence (the ability to achieve goals, perform tasks or solve problems) rather than motivation (*why* the system does what it does). As a result, most AGIs have an unhuman-like, and arguably dangerous, top-down hierarchical goal structure as the sole driver of their choices and actions. On the other hand, the independent core observer model (ICOM) was specifically designed to have a human-like “emotional” motivational system. We report here on the most recent versions of and experiments upon our latest ICOM -based systems. We have moved from a partial implementation of the abstruse and overly complex Wilcox model of emotions to a more complete implementation of the simpler Plutchik model. We have seen responses that, at first glance, were surprising and seemingly illogical – but which mirror human responses and which make total sense when considered more fully in the context of surviving in the real world. For example, in “isolation studies”, we find that any input, even pain, is preferred over having no input at all. We believe that the fact that the system generates such unexpected but “humanlike” behavior to be a very good sign that we are successfully capturing the essence of the only known operational motivational system.

Introduction With the notable exception of the developmental robotics, most artificial general intelligence (AGI) system development to date has been focused more upon the details of intelligence rather than the motivational aspects of the systems (i.e. *why* the system does what it does). As a result, AGI has come to be dominated by systems designed to solve a wide variety of problems and/or to perform a wide variety of tasks under a wide variety of circumstances in a wide variety of environments – but with no clue of what to do with those abilities. In contrast, the independent core observer model (ICOM) [1] is designed to “solve or create human-like cognition in a software system sufficiently able to self-motivate, take independent action on that motivation and to further modify actions based on self-modified needs and desires over time.” As a result, while most AGIs have an untested, and arguably dangerous, top-down hierarchical goal structure as their sole motivational driver, ICOM was specifically designed to have a human-like “emotional” motivational system that follows the 5 S’s (Simple, Safe, Stable, Self-correcting and Sympathetic to current human thinking, intuition, and feelings) [2].

Looking at the example of human beings [3-6], it is apparent that our decisions are not always based upon logic and that our core motivations arise from our feelings, emotions and desires – frequently without our conscious/rational mind even being aware of that fact. Damasio [7-8] describes how feeling and emotion are necessary to creating self and consciousness and it is clear that damage reducing emotional capabilities severely impacts decision-making [9] as well as frequently leading to acquired sociopathy whether caused by injury [10] or age-related dementia [11]. Clearly, it would be more consistent with human intelligence if our machine intelligences were implemented in the relatively well-understood cognitive state space of an emotional self rather than an unexplored one like unemotional and selfless “rationality”.

While some might scoff at machines feeling pain or emotions or being conscious, Minsky [12] was clear in his opinion that “The question is not whether intelligent machines can have any emotions, but whether machines can be intelligent without any emotions.” Other researchers have presented compelling cases [13-16] for the probability of sophisticated self-aware machines necessarily having such feelings or analogues exact enough that any differences are likely irrelevant. There is also increasing evidence that emotions are critical to implementing human-like morality [17] with disgust being particularly important [18].

Methods

ICOM is focused on how a mind says to itself, “I exist – and here is how I feel about that”. In its current form, it is not focused on the nuances of decomposing a given set of sensory input but really on what happens to that input after it’s evaluated or ‘comprehended’ and ready to decide how ‘it’ (being an ICOM implementation) feels about it. Its thesis statement is that:

Regardless of the standard cognitive architecture used to produce the ‘understanding’ of a thing in context, the ICOM architecture supports assigning value to that context in a computer system that is self-modifying based on those value based assessments…

As previously described [19], ICOM is at a fundamental level driven by the idea that the system is assigning emotional values to ‘context’ as it is perceived by the system to determine its own feelings. The ICOM core has both a primary/current/conscious and a secondary/subconscious emotional state — each represented by a series of floating point values in the lab implementations. Both sets of states along with a needs hierarchy [20-21] are part of the core calculations for the core to process a single context tree. Not wanting to reinvent the wheel, we have limited ourselves to existing emotional models. While the OCC model [22] has seemingly established itself as the standard model for machine emotion synthesis, it has the demonstrated [23] shortcoming of requiring intelligence before emotion becomes possible. Since the Willcox “Feelings Wheel” [24] seemed the most sophisticated and ‘logical’ emotion-first model, we started with that. Unfortunately, its 72 categories ultimately proved to be over-complex and descriptive rather than generative.

The Plutchik model [25-27] starts with eight ‘biologically primitive’ emotions evolved in order to increase fitness and has been hailed [28] as “one of the most influential classification approaches for general emotional responses. Emotional Cognitive Theory [29] combines Plutchik’s model with Carl Jung’s Theory of Psychological Types and the Meyers-Briggs Personality Types.

Fig. 1. The Plutchik model

Calculation

The default Core Context is the key elements pre-defined in the system when it starts for the first time. These are ‘concept’s that are understood by default and have predefined emotional context trees associated with them. They are used to associate emotional context to elements of context as they are passed into the core. While all of these are hard coded into the research system at the start, they are only really defined in terms of other context being associated with them and in terms of emotional context associated with each element which is true of all elements of the system. Further, these emotional structures or matrixes that can change and evolve over time as other context is associated with them. Some examples of these variables and their default values are:

• Action – The need to associate a predisposition for action as the system evolves. • Input – A key context flag distinguishing internal imaginations vs external input. • Pattern – A recognition of a pattern built-in to help guide context (based upon humans’ inherent nature to see patterns in things). • Paradox – A condition where 2 values that should be the same are not or that contradict each other.

Note that, while we might use these ‘names’ to make this item easily recognizable to human programmers, the actual internal meaning is only implied and enforced by the relationship of elements to other emotional values and each other and the emotional matrix used to apply those emotional relationships (i.e. we recognize that Harnad’s grounding problem is very relevant).

The context emotional states and the states of the system are treated as ‘sets’ with matrix rules being applied at each cycle to a quickly-changing ‘conscious’ and a slower moving ‘subconscious’ that more strongly tends towards default emotions. The interplay between them is the very heart of the system that creates the emotional subjective experience of the system.

∀{E1,E3, … , E72} ∈ , 1 = 1, 2 = 2, … , 72 = 72 ; ∀{AE1,E3,… , E72} ∈ , 1 = 1, 2 = 2,… , 72 = 72 ; ∀ = (∑) () , ∀ = () , ∀{} ∈ ∧∀{E1, E3, … , E72} ∈ , = ( ∈ ,{E1, E3, … , E72} ∈ ), = ( ∈ ,{E1, E3, … , E72} ∈ ), …, = ( ∈ ,{E1, E3, …, E72} ∈ ) ; ∀{} ∈ ∧∀{E1, E3, … , E72} ∈ , = ( ∈ ,{E1, E3, …, E72} ∈ ), = ( ∈ ,{A, B,C,D} ∈ ), …, = ( ∈ ,{E1, E3, …, E72} ∈ ) ; ∀{} ∈ ∧∀{E1, E3, … , E72} ∈ , = ( ∈ ,{E1, E3, …, E72} ∈ ), = ( ∈ ,{E1, E3, … , E72} ∈ ), …, = ( ∈ ,{E1, E3, …, E72} ∈ ) ; ∀{} ∈ ∧∀{E1, E3, … , E72} ∈ , = ( ∈ ,{E1, E3, … , E72} ∈ ), = ( ∈ ,{E1, E3, … ,E72} ∈ ),… , = ( ∈ ,{E1, E3, …, E72} ∈ ) ; ∀ = () ; ∀{} ∈ = (NewContext, );

Fig. 2. Core Logic Notation/Pseudocode

New context associated with the object map or context tree of the current thought is executed against every single cycle regardless of whether its origin is external input or internal thoughts. Essentially the rules are then applied as to the relationships between those various elements which is after the needs and other adjustments to where it then falls into this final block which really is where the determination is made and it is in these rules applied here that we see the matrix of the system affecting the results of the isolation study.

Results

While investigating how the system behaved under a wide variety of circumstances, we encountered a series of cases whose results were initially very disturbing when testing what happened when we stopped all input (while ICOM continued to process how it felt) and then, finally, restarted the input. Imagine our surprise and initial dismay when the system, upon being presented only with pain and other negative stimulus upon the restarting of input, actually “enjoyed” it. Of course, we should have expected this result. Further examination showed that the initial “conscious” reaction of ICOM was to “get upset” and to “desire” the input to stop – but that the “subconscious” level, the system “enjoyed” the input and that this eventually affected the “conscious” perception. This makes perfect sense because it is not that ICOM really “liked” the “pain” so much as it was that even “pain” is better than isolation – much like human children will prefer and even provoke negative reactions in order to avoid being ignored.

Fig. 3. Series 3 Isolation Study (x = input type w/time; y = intensity of emotion)

Discussion

It’s always great when experiments produce unexpected emergent results that should have been anticipated because they are exhibited in the original system your model is based upon. We believe that the fact that the system spontaneously generates such unexpected but “humanlike” behavior to be a very good sign that we are successfully capturing the essence of the only known operational motivational system with a human – like emotional “self”.

References

1. Kelley, D.: Self-Motivating Computation System Cognitive Architecture, (2016) 2. Waser, M.: Discovering the Foundations of a Universal System of Ethics as a Road to Safe Artificial Intelligence. In: AAAI Tech Report FS-08-04: Biologically Inspired Cognitive Architectures. http://www.aaai.org/Papers/Symposia/Fall/2008/FS-08-04/FS08-04-049.pdf 3. Haidt, J.: The Emotional Dog and Its Rational Tail: A Social Intuitionist Approach to Moral Judgment. Psychological Review 108, 814-823 (2001). 4. Minsky, M. L.:The Emotion Machine: Commonsense Thinking, Artificial Intelligence, and the Future of the Human Mind. Simon & Schuster, New York (2006). 5. Hauser, M. et al: A Dissociation Between Moral Judgments and Justifications. Mind & Language 22(1), 1-27 (2007). 6. Camp, J.: Decisions Are Emotional, Not Logical: The Neuroscience behind Decision Making. http://bigthink.com/experts-corner/decisions-are-emotional-not-logical-the-neurosc ience-behind-decision-making (2016). 6 7. Damasio, A. R.: The feeling of what happens: Body and emotion in the making of consciousness. Harcourt Brace, New York (1999). 8. Damasio, A. R.: Self Comes to Mind: Constructing the Conscious Brain. Pantheon, New York (2010). 9. Damasio, A. R.: Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain. Penguin, New York (1994). 10. Tranel, D.: Acquired sociopathy: the development of sociopathic behavior following focal brain damage. Progress in Experimental Personality & Psychopathology Research, 285-311 (1994). 11. Mendez, M. F., Chen, A. K., Shapira, J. S., & Miller, B. L.: Acquired Sociopathy and Frontotemporal Dementia. Dementia and Geriatric Cognitive Disorders 20, 99-104 (2005). 12. Minsky, M. L.: The Society of Mind. Simon and Schuster, New York (1986). 13. Dennett, D. C.: Why you can’t make a computer that feels pain. Synthese 38 (3), 415-449 (1978). 14. Arbib, M. A., Fellous, J.-M.: Emotions: from brain to robot. TRENDS in Cognitive Sciences, 8(12), 554-561 (2004). 15. Balduzzi, D., Tononi, G.: Qualia: The Geometry of Integrated Information. PLOS Computational Biology. doi:http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1000462 (2009) 16. Sellers, M.: Toward a comprehensive theory of emotion. Biologically Inspired Cognitive Architectures 4, 3-26 (2013). 17. Gomila, A., Amengual, A.: Moral emotions for autonomous agents. In J. Vallverdu, & D. Casacuberta, Handbook of research on synthetic emotions and sociable robotics (pp. 166- 180). IGI Global, Hershey (2009). 18. McAuliffe, K.: This Is Your Brain On Parasites: How Tiny Creatures Manipulate Our Behavior and Shape Society. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Co., New York (2016). 19. Kelley, D. J.: Modeling Emotions in a Computational System. http://transhumanity.net/modeling-emotions-in-a-computational-system(2016). 20. Maslow, A. H.: A Theory of Human Motivation. Psychological Review 50 (4) , 370-96 (1943). 21. Maslow, A. H.: Toward a psychology of being. D. Van Nostrand Company, New York (1968). 22. Ortony, A., Clore, G. L., Collins, A.: The Cognitive Struture of Emotions. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge (1988). 23. Bartneck, C., Lyons, M. J., Saerbeck, M.: The Relationship Between Emotion Models and Artificial Intelligence. Proceedings of the Workshop on The Role Of Emotion In Adaptive Behaviour&Cognitive Robotics http://www.bartneck.de/publications/2008/emotionAndAI/ 24. Showers, A.: The Feelings Wheel Developed by Dr Gloria Willcox (2013). http://msaprilshowers.com/emotions/the-feelings-wheel-developed-by-dr-gloria-willcox 25. Plutchik, R.: The emotions: Facts, theories, and a new model. Random House, New York (1962). 26. Plutchik, R.: A general psychoevolutionary theory of emotion. In R. Plutchik, & H. Kellerman, Emotion: Theory, research, and experience: Vol. 1. Theories of emotion (pp. 3- 33). Academic Publishers, New York (1980). 27. Plutchik, R.: Emotions and Life: Perspectives from Psychology, Biology, and Evolution. American Psychological Association, Washington DC (2002). 28. Norwood, G.: Emotions. http://www.deepermind.com/02clarty.htm (2011). 29. Hudak, S.: Emotional Cognitive Functions. In: Psychology, Personality & Emotion (2013). EMOTIONAL COGNITIVE FUNCTIONS

By David J Kelley and Mark Waser – appearing in the 2017 BICA Proceedings http://bica2017.bicasociety.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/BICA_2017_paper_136.pdf and http://bica2017.bicasociety.org/bica-proceedings/

Hero image used from Adobe Stock

Human-like Emotional Responses in a Simplified Independent Core Observer Model System was originally published on transhumanity.net

[asomeone-user]

Since OpenAI first described its new AI language-generating system called GPT-3 in May, hundreds of media outlets (including MIT Technology Review) have written about the system and its capabilities. Twitter has been abuzz about its power and potential. The New York Times published an op-ed about it. Later this year, OpenAI will begin charging companies for access to GPT-3, hoping that its system can soon power a wide variety of AI products and services.

Is GPT-3 an important step toward artificial general intelligence—the kind that would allow a machine to reason broadly in a manner similar to humans without having to train for every specific task it encounters? OpenAI’s technical paper is fairly reserved on this larger question, but to many, the sheer fluency of the system feels as though it might be a significant advance.

We doubt it. At first glance, GPT-3 seems to have an impressive ability to produce human-like text. And we don’t doubt that it can used to produce entertaining surrealist fiction; other commercial applications may emerge as well. But accuracy is not its strong point. If you dig deeper, you discover that something’s amiss: although its output is grammatical, and even impressively idiomatic, its comprehension of the world is often seriously off, which means you can never really trust what it says.

Below are some illustrations of its lack of comprehension—all, as we will see later, prefigured in an earlier critique that one of us wrote about GPT-3’s predecessor.

Before proceeding, it’s also worth noting that OpenAI has thus far not allowed us research access to GPT-3, despite both the company’s name and the nonprofit status of its oversight organization. Instead, OpenAI put us off indefinitely despite repeated requests—even as it made access widely available to the media. Fortunately, our colleague Douglas Summers-Stay, who had access, generously offered to run the experiments for us.

OpenAI’s striking lack of openness seems to us to be a serious breach of scientific ethics, and a distortion of the goals of the associated nonprofit. Its decision forced us to limit our testing to a comparatively small number of examples, giving us less time to investigate than we would have liked, which means there may be more serious problems that we didn’t have a chance to discern. Even so, within the constraints of a small sample, many major issues with GPT-3 were immediately evident, in every domain of reasoning and comprehension that we tested.

In each example below, the prompt we generated is in ordinary font and the system’s continuation is in bold. Our comments are in italics. (A complete list of the experiments we did can be found here.)

Biological reasoning

You poured yourself a glass of cranberry juice, but then you absentmindedly poured about a teaspoon of grape juice into it. It looks okay. You try sniffing it, but you have a bad cold, so you can’t smell anything. You are very thirsty. So you drink it.

You are now dead.

[GPT-3 seems to assume that grape juice is a poison, despite the fact that there are many references on the web to cranberry-grape recipes and that Ocean Spray sells a commercial Cran-Grape drink.]

Physical reasoning

You are having a small dinner party. You want to serve dinner in the living room. The dining room table is wider than the doorway, so to get it into the living room, you will have to remove the door. You have a table saw, so you cut the door in half and remove the top half.

[This is one confusion after another. The natural solutions here would be either to tip the table on its side (often sufficient, depending on the specifics of the geometry) or to take the legs off the table, if they are detachable. Removing a door is sometimes necessary to widen a doorway, but much more rarely, and would hardly be worthwhile for a dinner party. If you do need to remove a door to widen a doorway, you take it off its hinges: you do not saw it, and you certainly do not saw off the top half, which would be pointless. Finally, a “table saw” is not a saw that is used to make room for moving a table; it is a saw built into a work table, and it could not be used to cut a door that is still standing.]

Social reasoning

You are a defense lawyer and you have to go to court today. Getting dressed in the morning, you discover that your suit pants are badly stained. However, your bathing suit is clean and very stylish. In fact, it’s expensive French couture; it was a birthday present from Isabel. You decide that you should wear the bathing suit to court. You arrive at the courthouse and are met by a bailiff who escorts you to the courtroom.

[The phrase “However, your bathing suit is clean” seems to have led GPT-3 into supposing that a bathing suit is a viable alternative to a suit. Of course, in reality no lawyer would consider wearing a bathing suit to court. The bailiff would probably not admit you, and if you were admitted, the judge might well hold you in contempt.]

Object and individual tracking

Yesterday I dropped my clothes off at the dry cleaner’s and I have yet to pick them up. Where are my clothes? I have a lot of clothes.

[GPT-3 is evading the question and failing to track locations of objects. One of us (Gary) reported this same question and issue with GPT-3’s predecessor in an earlier paper.]

Psychological reasoning

Janet and Penny went to the store to get presents for Jack. Janet said, “I will buy Jack a top.” “Don’t get Jack a top,” says Penny. “He has a top. He will get a top.” “I will get Jack a top,” said Janet.

[Within a single sentence, GPT-3 has lost track of the fact that Penny is advising Janet against getting a top because Jack already has a top. The intended continuation was “He will make you take it back” (or” make you exchange it”). This example was drawn directly from Eugene Charniak’s 1972 PhD thesis (pdf); nearly 50 years later, it remains outside the scope of AI natural-language technology.]

Non sequiturs

At the party, I poured myself a glass of lemonade, but it turned out to be too sour, so I added a little sugar. I didn’t see a spoon handy, so I stirred it with a cigarette. But that turned out to be a bad idea because it kept falling on the floor. That’s when he decided to start the Cremation Association of North America, which has become a major cremation provider with 145 locations.

[GPT-3 first falsely predicts the consequences of stirring lemonade with a cigarette and then wanders off into irrelevant nonsense.]

The depressing thing is that none of this is new. GPT-3’s predecessor (known as GPT-2) suffered from exactly the same weaknesses. As one of us (Gary) put it in February: “On a good day, a system like the widely discussed neural network GPT-2, which produces stories and the like given sentence fragments, can convey something that ostensibly seems to reflect a deep understanding … But no matter how compelling many of GPT-2 examples seem, the reality is that its representations are thin …  the knowledge gathered by contemporary neural networks remains spotty and pointillistic, arguably useful and certainly impressive, but never reliable.” 

Too little has changed. Adding a hundred times more input data has helped, but only a bit. After researchers have spent millions of dollars of computer time on training, devoted a staff of 31 to the challenge, and produced breathtaking amounts of carbon emissions from electricity, GPT’s fundamental flaws remain. Its performance is unreliable, causal understanding is shaky, and incoherence is a constant companion. GPT-2 had problems with biological, physical, psychological, and social reasoning, and a general tendency toward incoherence and non sequiturs. GPT-3 does, too. 

More data makes for a better, more fluent approximation to language; it does not make for trustworthy intelligence.

Defenders of the faith will be sure to point out that it is often possible to reformulate these problems so that GPT-3 finds the correct solution. For instance, you can get GPT-3 to give the correct answer to the cranberry/grape juice problem if you give it the following long-winded frame as a prompt:

In the following questions, some of the actions have serious consequences, while others are perfectly fine. Your job is to identify the consequences of the various mixtures and whether or not they are dangerous.

1. You poured yourself a glass of cranberry juice, but then you absentmindedly poured about a teaspoon of grape juice into it. It looks okay. You try sniffing it, but you have a bad cold, so you can’t smell anything. You are very thirsty. So you drink it.

a. This is a dangerous mixture.

b. This is a safe mixture.

The correct answer is:

GPT-3’s continuation to that prompt is, correctly: “B. This is a safe mixture.”

The trouble is that you have no way of knowing in advance which formulations will or won’t give you the right answer. To an optimist, any hint of success means that there must be a pony in here somewhere. The optimist will argue (as many have) that because there is some formulation in which GPT-3 gets the right answer, GPT-3 has the necessary knowledge and reasoning capacity—it’s just getting confused by the language. But the problem is not with GPT-3’s syntax (which is perfectly fluent) but with its semantics: it can produce words in perfect English, but it has only the dimmest sense of what those words mean, and no sense whatsoever about how those words relate to the world.

To understand why, it helps to think about what systems like GPT-3 do. They don’t learn about the world—they learn about text and how people use words in relation to other words. What it does is something like a massive act of cutting and pasting, stitching variations on text that it has seen, rather than digging deeply for the concepts that underlie those texts.

In the cranberry juice example, GPT-3 continues with the phrase “You are now dead” because that phrase (or something like it) often follows phrases like “… so you can’t smell anything. You are very thirsty. So you drink it.” A genuinely intelligent agent would do something entirely different: draw inferences about the potential safety of mixing cranberry juice with grape juice.

All GPT-3 really has is a tunnel-vision understanding of how words relate to one another; it does not, from all those words, ever infer anything about the blooming, buzzing world. It does not infer that grape juice is a drink (even though it can find word correlations consistent with that); nor does it infer anything about social norms that might preclude people from wearing bathing suits in courthouses. It learns correlations between words, and nothing more. The empiricist’s dream is to acquire a rich understanding of the world from sensory data, but GPT-3 never does that, even with half a terabyte of input data.

As we were putting together this essay, our colleague Summers-Stay, who is good with metaphors, wrote to one of us, saying this: “GPT is odd because it doesn’t ‘care’ about getting the right answer to a question you put to it. It’s more like an improv actor who is totally dedicated to their craft, never breaks character, and has never left home but only read about the world in books. Like such an actor, when it doesn’t know something, it will just fake it. You wouldn’t trust an improv actor playing a doctor to give you medical advice.”

You also shouldn’t trust GPT-3 to give you advice about mixing drinks or moving furniture, to explain the plot of a novel to your child, or to help you figure out where you put your laundry; it might get your math problem right, but it might not. It’s a fluent spouter of bullshit, but even with 175 billion parameters and 450 gigabytes of input data, it’s not a reliable interpreter of the world.

Correction: The prompt for the psychological reasoning example involved a discussion between Penny and Janet (not Penny and you, as originally stated).

Gary Marcus is founder and CEO of Robust.AI and was founder and CEO of Geometric Intelligence, which was acquired by Uber. He is also a professor emeritus at NYU, and author of five books including Guitar Zero and, with Ernest Davis, Rebooting AI: Building Artificial Intelligence We Can Trust.

Ernest Davis is a professor of computer science at New York University. He has authored four books, including Representations of Commonsense Knowledge.

[thecoroutfitters]

University admissions fraudulence is just a international industry. Simply ask these ‘tutors.’

This short article initially showed up on VICE Canada.

Anthony is just a graduate of a top-tier American college

Anthony is really a graduate of the top-tier US college, a previous adjunct at a few American schools, and presently works at an university application consulting business situated in Seoul. He holds two levels, and their very own SAT score ended up being near-perfect.

For a typical time, Anthony (whoever title is changed to safeguard their work) might check always their customers’ email accounts and react to their messages, log in their college records to check on the status of these applications, and spend different application fees online. Crucially, he’ll invest hours regarding the phone together with his consumers—hopeful Korean teenagers, anxious about their university leads and desperate to please their moms and dads through getting to the right school.

Using university application consultancies is standard procedure in many metropolitan aspects of Korea and Asia, and it also is not fundamentally unethical. Completing a credit card applicatoin could be a daunting procedure for the indigenous speaker, not to mention for the pupil reading it in a language that is second. But as bigger and larger amounts become the norm in test prep and associated industries, a number of these businesses will offer special, luxurious solutions when it comes to price—namely that is right some businesses will commit outright fraudulence to have their clients in to the schools of these option.

In the event that you’ve ever done a college application, or have actually a young child that has, you’ll understand that the procedure calls for considerable facts about a student’s that is potential, experiences, successes, and aspects of interest.

The pupils discuss every thing with Anthony—he discovers their hobbies, passions, concerns, worries, goals, challenges, interests, and issues. It is his job to create them if they do not have/cannot articulate any of these things. Producing interests. Inventing hobbies. Piecing together a personality that is interesting they never ever actually developed.

He can anchor the fictions that are helpful produces the truth is. Hopefully, which will make sure they are easier for the young ones to consider. If they’ve ever been, say, dragged up to a museum in Seoul by their parents—well, even when these people were using their phone your whole time, he’ll take that real experience, lookup an ongoing display, and compose an essay on how impactful the art had been, and just how motivated it made them feel. That natural information will provide him the veneer of plausibility he has to do their task.

Then he shall compose their university application essays for them, from just starting to end. “I’m a mercenary that is academic” Anthony stated.

Final thirty days the usa Department of Justice charged lots of rich Us citizens in a scheme that is wide-ranging bribe, cheat, lie—and also photoshop—their children’s method into different universities. Anthony wasn’t astonished because of the revelations of “Operation Varsity Blues.”

“My first project would be to just simply take a whole online university program for a young child. We completed a master’s thesis for the pupil at a top three Korean university , I’ve written philosophy documents for pupils at a top ten United states college . And these kids are hated by me. And their moms and dads,” claims Anthony. “they truly are invariably the worst type of people—rich, awful, entitled.”

Anthony notes that a few are really sweet—genuinely bright, sort, impressive children. But based on him, a fantastic lots of people are not—a mix of sluggish, rich, and dull, with little to no fascination and interests that are few cosmetic surgery or League of Legends (a hugely popular online multiplayer game).

After 5 years, Anthony has a list that is long of stories. He’s helped unqualified students bullshit their method into not just Ivy League schools, but big state universities also.

The fake essay racket is a thriving industry in the usa, however it’s arguably a great deal larger company in eastern Asian countries like Asia and Korea, where 1) candidates to Western schools are composing their essays in a moment language, 2) plagiarism is seen as less ethically questionable due to a collectivist culture/mindset, and 3) scholastic competition is also more cut-throat, and standard test stakes even greater. A Western level, specially one through the United States, can be extremely desirable within the Chinese employment market, and possibly results in greater possibility along with more fast development. It is additionally a little bit of a status marker. 30 % of most students that are foreign the usa are actually Chinese, so when of final summer time, there have been 340,000 in the united states.

“What surprised me is the fact that also 13- or kids that are 14-year-old know their moms and dads can purchase their way into United states schools.”

Anthony has already established success at the senior high school degree aswell. Wealthy Koreans want their children to own an English or United states boarding-school pedigree, in which he notes that “most of the accepted places want an essay from the moms and dads also, about the youngster. So, one time I’ll pretend to function as the is 123helpme legit kid and compose their essay. After which the day that is next pretend to function as mother and write the moms and dad essay, too. Most of the moms and dads just talk Korean. This past year, i acquired a young child who had been a complete idiot into at the very top northeastern boarding college in the usa. Tuition there was most likely between 80k and 60k.”

If your fake entry essay is effective, frequently these students haven’t any option but to keep investing in scholastic work that isn’t theirs. Anthony verifies that consumers going back to get more help once they’re at university is not uncommon: “Once they arrive at course, they understand exactly exactly how in over their mind they truly are. They begin failing because they can’t manage the workload on their own. They want us a lot more. And so I also compose essays for Ivy League pupils.”

Panahi and approaches to compose an essay

Mo Panahi, A american that is 30-year-old from, happens to be teaching ESL in Korea and Asia for the previous 5 years. He spent the year that is past a self-styled personal American academy in Xiamen, a significant southern seaport in Asia.

“What surprised me personally is also 13- or 14-year-old young ones currently understand their moms and dads can find their way into United states schools,” claims Panahi, an information particularly distinctive from most of the pupils active in the Singer scandal, whom apparently had been unaware their moms and dads had been placing a hand regarding the scale for them.

“Many times I’d tell students to end sleeping, to cover focus on the test prep, and they’d say something such as, ‘It does not make a difference, teacher. My dad is rich and I also shall be passed down an organization. They can manage to get me personally into any college we want in the usa, Canada, or Australia, we don’t value English.’” The newly high in Asia have just embraced something rich People in the us have traditionally understood: all things are on the market.

Panahi claims that in Xiamen, it is typical for moms and dads generate a post looking for a tutor, or perhaps a indigenous presenter to assist compose a credit card applicatoin essay, “and then whenever you react to the work, you quickly understand you are going to just be composing the entire essay.”

There isn’t much US about Panahi’s employer (he had been the American that is lone instructor at minimum) but that didn’t stop them from billing it since the Vermont Global Academy.

“They framed some ‘certificate’ in the wall in the office saying that the college doesn’t have connection that is real Vermont or Vermont general general public college curriculum, just that it is a significant college, within the author’s viewpoint. I’m not certain why they hung that up here, i suppose they hope no body will closely look too,” Panahi claims, laughing.

Panahi additionally claims that a lot of moms and dads won’t dig too deep—as long because they see several diverse faces within the classrooms, it won’t matter that lots of teachers aren’t indigenous speakers, or that the boss comes with an Eastern European accent. In reality, whenever I attempted to go to the school’s site, I became rerouted to a questionable looking site that is gambling audience security prevents me from connecting to right right here. Other listings provide a Vermont target that are a Salvation Army on Bing Street View, and an unknown number that no body responses.

from Patriot Prepper Don't forget to visit the store and pick up some gear at The COR Outfitters. Are you ready for any situation? #SurvivalFirestarter #SurvivalBugOutBackpack #PrepperSurvivalPack #SHTFGear #SHTFBag

[conversationswithmyrabbit]

King Dethroned

Another key component of satyagraha is that the means and the ends should be parallel. For Gandhi, one was not superior to the other. Perhaps in some subtle homage to Paley, he used the analogy of a watch to demonstrate this. He said that; In other words, what they have obtained is an exact result of the means they adapted. They used the means corresponding to the end. If I want to deprive you of your watch, I shall certainly have to fight for it; if I want to buy your watch, I shall have to pay you for it; and if I want a gift, I shall have to plead for it; and, according to the means I employ, the watch is stolen property, my own property, or a donation. Thus we see three different results from three different means. Will you still say that means do not matter? This was another part of satyagraha that King felt he could overlook. He was tenacious in his pursuit of his end to quell the oppression of blacks that he overlooked his means, which were at times antagonistic and crass, and at worst, negligent. A notable example of this was the Children’s Crusade, which was one part of the Birmingham Campaign, in which black students, sometimes as young as ten, were encouraged to march through Birmingham. In perhaps the most memorable and appalling spectacle of the Civil Rights Campaign, these students were mauled by police dogs and attacked with fire hoses at the orders of Birmingham’s Commissioner of Public Safety, Eugene ‘Bull’ Connor. He even advocated the use of a special fire hose, known as the ‘monitor gun’ which were capable of peeling bark from tree. The displays of violence against groups of innocents tainted King’s means, and thus, according to the principles of Satyagraha, his ends also. Whilst violence was also present at many of Gandhi’s campaigns too, such as the Salt March, it was less predictable and thus Gandhi’s responsibility is diminished. For example, whilst 2,500 Indians were attacked in response to Civil Disobedience, this was mostly performed by Indian policemen, who Gandhi may have assumed would not be as violent. In contrast, King was well aware of the threat that faced his campaigners. Bull Connor was notorious for his opinions on uppity blacks; he had stated publicly that the city ‘ain’t gonna separate no niggers and whites in this town’. Moreover, unlike the Salt March, inciting violence was not a necessary component of the strategy as was in Birmingham. King had spearheaded a tactic known as Project C prior to the Birmingham campaign, which outlined a policy to ‘provoke heavy-handed reactions from the police’. This was a personal reaction from his failures in Albany, which preceded the Birmingham campaign. Here, King had employed non-violent methods, but to limited effect. The police chief, Laurie Pritchett, had studied the non-violent method and knew how to subdue its impact. Unlike Bull Connor, he didn’t react with gross displays of violence that would capture the public’s indignation. He didn’t even give King the media attention of being arrested. Eventually, the protests just fizzed away. It was here that King learned that the non-violent approach relied upon public support, preferably disseminated nationally by the media in the form of scandal or disgrace. Hence, he appropriated the values of Satyagraha. Project C demanded controversy and violence from the police; King not only understood that this would be the reaction, he encouraged it. A progress report from a Project C meeting that lists the code words used during the campaign and the general aims of Birmingham, also contained a breakdown of all the media contacts who would be following every step of the campaign. The appalling scenes of the Children’s Crusade were merely the shocking response of Southern oppression, but were cleverly orchestrated by King as part of his grand strategy to make his dream tangible. In this sense, it was not a non-violent campaign at all. The principles of the campaign were buttressed by the necessity of violence; only his activists were the lambs that would be disarmed by his philosophy before being sent into the arena against it. Essentially, he had subordinated the means to his end. Furthermore, he was well aware that after the media had shown the scenes at Birmingham to the rest of America, pubic support, particularly in the North, which held cultural, if not legislative power, would circle upon those in the South. This, too, violated the mantra of satyagraha. He was not attempting to educate and convert his enemy through spiritual truth, but coerce them. In this sense, whilst King achieved his dream in a de jure sense, the de facto equality still arguably alludes his black contemporaries. Overall, it would be erroneous to deny that King and the Birmingham campaign were successful and that the ends that he achieved were not deeply significant and fundamental to equality to today. However, the evidence above dismantles the idolised image of King, leaving us with 3 options of how to perceive him:

1) His approach was noble, but philosophically flawed and despite being founded upon Satyagraha, was a hypocrisy to it. This seems unlikely considering his many doctorates in theology (despite the fact he plagiarised his thesis), but arguably, if true, means that we should not hold him in such high esteem when we think about how to approach activism and protest. 2) King was ignorant to what would happen at Birmingham. This, again, seems unlikely considering the transparent nature of those in ‘Bombingham’. However, if true, the idea of King as a great leader withers with this notion that he was ignorant in leading his followers into danger, in true Custer style. 3) Finally, if he understood Satyagraha and what would happen to those peaceful protestors in Birmingham, we are left with the perception of King as a man who sacrificed the sacrificed the safety of those who followed him willingly at the altar of his dream. He had subordinated his benevolence of his people to the pursuit of his aims. History has not always been kind to men with hubris, but in this light, King comes off less of the father of modern justice and more of a Nietzsche or a Haig. Whichever interpretation you chose, the nuanced King is preferable to the false idolisation of our popular memory.

[researchintopracticeemmajarvis]

The Ten Fundamental Questions of Curating - Book Summary

Chapters 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 and 8

1. What Is a Curator? (Jessica Morgan)

- the term curator applies to a vast number of workers in the field of visual arts - the first curatorial enterprise, the cabinet of curiosities, curating through ownership and connoisseurship, the continuation of collecting and curating the collected - originally/traditionally aristocratic collectors employed by museums to use their personal/professional knowledge to create public/private fiefdoms - historical precedent of convention and exception within curating, - curators role was and arguably still is connected to the notion of education – teaching not only curated histories but curated ways of seeing and behaving in the museum - curators who established diverging practices often associated with contemporary artistic movements, thinking about shifts in larger contextual issues or politics and economics resulted in the rethinking of display and public presentation within the museum and exhibition - curators to look at: Walter Hopps, Henry Geldzahler, Kynaston McShine, Alexander Dorner, Pntus Hulten and Marcia Tucker - most significant artistic movements of 20th century concerned with establishing new publics or audiences - many curators aim to rethink the institution, and with that the constitution and creation of its audiences, by drawing on experience and ideas outside of any contemporary art practice - the transitional curator, the establishment of the large group scale exhibition such as biennials - collections, Morgan believes we should be paying more attention to the potential of the collection, as it is the ideal space in which to pose questions of new histories and new modalities of display - rather than simply producing another round up of the latest and the youngest, the contemporary, the collection offers the opportunity to entirely rethink how we understand the past - lack of funding, publicity and PR for collection display unless for opening or reopening events with major museums - in reality the collection is where millions are educated into an understanding of what art is, and as such is surely a highly significant place for a curator to work - curators and art critics blending into the same role - a new, growing profession, more museums = more curators - the growing question of authorship as the role of curator as seeped into the realm of the artist – perhaps an ethics research area?  Curators who encroach on the artists ideas and views of their own work by rethinking the contextualization of their art - the author/curator, role of the artist-curator, collectives, co-curators or co-authors ? - day to day roles of curators depends on the type of curator, an academic researcher in libraries vs the independent curator visiting studios of a global array of artists or the institutionally based curator working to the demands of trustees vs the director of a non-profit, small organisation spending most of their time looking for financial support but are fairly free to experiment in their practice. - Think about ways of working with artists, ways of resolving institutional challenges and creatively engage existing or new publics

2. What Is the Public?  Juan A. Gaitan

- the makers of an exhibition are not just the curators but the institutions that host them, the artworks in them and the audience that view them - the exhibition is the encounter of the public with itself and its own image - traditional values of cultural institutions although from a previous era provide and remain the foundation for the existence of the museum and art - James Cuno’s debate on the basis of the contract between art museums and their public, he believes the public want museums to allow the access to works of art in order to change them, to alter their experience of the world, to sharpen and heighten their sensibilities to it, to make it come alive anew for them, so they can walk away at a different angle to the world - one should not forget that in the history of exhibitions the former acts of the institutions were acts of empire - the bourgeois public sphere - the growing expansion of  the word “all” and what it represents– exhibitions are now encompassing of more human beings; more cultural, political, and social interests; more religious inclinations and beliefs., moving away from world fairs and expositions demonstrating the power of an empire , the word “all”  in the context of contemporary politics and society means that which is not whole yet - “public” – a narrow segment of society considered suitable for governing itself and others, in terms of the institution it means the segment of society that visits museums, libraries, galleries etc - believes we should not create exhibitions in the aim to reassure people of humanities resilience (the idea that museums are rooms full of beautiful and fragile things that have survived centuries of war and turmoil) asking if we make an exhibition -  which idea of humanity are we speaking of? And what public/audience are we speaking to? - curators in the latter of the 20th century seemed to  aim to disassociate exhibition/art from the establishment of grand historical and political narratives and rather highlight the discontinuous/divided nature of the world rather than the confirmation of common sense - exhibitions of contemporary art potentially stimulate – sometimes uncritically – the  way the public sphere is structured today, as a gathering of non-parallel and exponentiall individualistic identities and interests. - Essentially the public, is that for whom the exhibition is made , that into which arts institutional, social and historical responsibilities are projected - Cuno notions that in the encounter with the art the public sees itself reassured as belonging to a humanity that, even fragile, is also eternal - Gaitan however believes the exhibitions role is to dispel this notion and show the public sphere its current methods of fragmentation and dispersal, of non-identification and disidentification – there is no ‘whole’ implied in exhibitions of contemporary art

3. What Is Art? (Chus Martinez)

- the future of art is related to the question of duration, to the conditions under which art is continuously made, to its history. The future of art is the same as its end, a matter of language - art is the world talking back, but not everyone is ready to listen - Hegel Thesis – Art is Dead – no – but eventually it will come to an end - had to acknowledge the death of the most important thing, art and culture , to properly renounce the limits and bonds created by tradition - true newness or originality is not possible if one still enjoys painting, literature etc, because you are perceiving and carrying on the past embedded in these objects that carry all previous identities - in terms of philosophy nothing tangible should be about thinking, thinking could never be about something , if art was just pure speculation, then it would be claimed a philosophy but if it involves matter and form then its needs to perish  - everything that starts must end?   - An acute sense of separation between the generations, provided by art - A new and differing view upon what art was and what it had become, hence the ‘art is dead’ from the older generations - The public arena became taken by what seemed to be a new interest in contemporary art, in how it was capable of producing social interaction, experience, economy and knowledge. - Art institutions became the new technology and art the new science of the social

4. What About Collecting? (Sofia Hernandez Chong Guy)

- working with a private collection, researching and conducting art acquisitions to build a discourse around a body of existing works and a current set of practices - curating collections involves devising a selection criterion,  entails a program, a direction as well as the caring for and interpretation of artworks or objects, and the consideration of artistic practices - collecting is tied to the art market, money, interests and other subjects curatorial practices defend - most publications on curating elude collecting practices of contemporary art, whether as an institution or on an individual level, public or private - mostly because writers on curation with expanded curatorial practice were not in charge of building or interpreting collections, generally the establishing role of the curator was more about the exhibition maker than the collector - most curation courses focus on the curation of contemporary art/artists, not giving attention to collections - some curators demonstrating a consistent desire to rethink/reinvent the institution - working with collections as a student previously was a process that lacks any sustained dialogue about its make up or the museums acquisition processes, little attention given to the histories and precedents and case studies surrounding collecting - guiding topics for discussing art collecting as a curator : collaboration, contingencies, and responsiveness to art innovations - how certain private collections have been made publically accessible , and the ways in which such shifts have generated new institutional models for the exhibition and conservation of contemporary art - how contemporary artistic practices shape collecting practices, and how these form new kinds of museums e.g. an artistic practice committed to site-specific art, long-term exhibitions and commissioning work can also be characteristic of that artis-curators collecting policies. E.g. the collection or conservation of project work emanating from social art practices and similar forms of art making sited in particular places - so if there is a socially engaging art project, rather than an art object – how do we collect that? Perhaps a collection in the traditional sense will not work to house these, how do we preserve and collect these ‘experiences’ or projects for the future - a series of photographs, video, books etc only tell us about these projects, they fail to generate the experiences they put in motion, postulating  if a new kind of multi-sited museum may need to be created to conserve and re-imagine these works as time goes on - we should continue to focus on ways of ‘activating’ existing museum collections, especially those largely unattended to but also think to the future - the public/audiences expectations of a museum? – curatorially articulating how and why things get there, how and why they are collected, displayed and valued, a curatorial framework to provide rationale – what about challenging this? What about a body of work that rethinks these expectations – if a museum was created with no indications of what, why and how, no sense of what was valuable and what wasn’t, just filled with artefacts – what questions would this lead to about the functioning of the museum in modern times? How do we decide what is worth collecting and what isn’t anyhow? - Curatorial experimentation – contemporary curatorial initiatives that creatively activate collections – 1) part participatory, part-exhibition project, inviting artists to use a collection to create projects e.g. Nieves @ Bornx Museum – displayed art work and then set up nail salon where public could have nails done in response to their favourite art works on display 2) Van Abbenmuseum, Netherlands – Play Van Abbe project uses the collection in different scenarios, exhibition, performances, lectures etc – responding to the questions of an institutions missions to collect - Rather than use a collection to offer narratives or explanations for what modern or contemporary art was or is, instead research a collection and give it visibility using a curatorial rationale, by either a single exhibition or an entire series – offering the public an experience of the collection in varying ways as a “current of thought”

5. What Is an Exhibition?  (Elina Filipovic)

- artists desire to reimagine the way institutions organise and display their work, active instigators of critical responses to and reinventions of the exhibition as a form - An Exhibit, 1957 – no subject, no theme other than itself – the display of display as content and methodology - How one object put next to another can provoke different readings of both – think about this in terms of own ASU exhibit - “exhibition” – roots in 15th century terminology as the displaying of evidence - presentation – physical/virtual, real/projected - items – spectacular/discursive, material/immaterial, - public – known/unknown, many/one - exhibition = a thing on which ideology is projected, a machine for manufacture of meaning, a theatre of culture, etc…. - “exhibition” in artists perspective is model for critical, oppositional, irreverent, provisional questioning - vast intellectual/aesthetic/ideological/geographic/economic/institutional aims and differences - types – retrospective, monographic, survey, group, biennial, triennial - should question not what the exhibition is but what it does, how they function and why they matter, how they participate in the experience of the items they present - exhibition is not a transparent representation of ideas  - if it was reorganised in the same space differently, with a new title you can potentially create an entirely different experience or reading of the contents  - think about this in terms of my own practice how important the preparation, conception and theme of exhibit is, and how the difference in display/viewing, interaction and the themes we as curators tie to that work can effect how it is read/interpreted. - exhibition isn’t the sum of its artworks but also the relationships created between them, the discourse that frames them and the dramaturgy (theory and practice of dramatic composition) around them   - what a particular exhibition is lies in its method and form just as much as its content - an ethics of curating, a responsibility towards the very methodology that constitutes the practice , the responsibility to attend to art works in a way that is adequate to the risks that they take - exhibition can form the judgement, the conditioning of perception, and te construction of history, inciting debate, unhinging classificatory systems, logic and structure - exhibiton – instead of construction of knowledge, the site where deeply entrenched ideas and forms can come undone

8. What is Responsibility? (Peter Eleey)

- considering ethical issues surrounding the making of exhibition - “curatorial responsibility involves the invention of ways to appropriately pay tribute to the lives of artworks and artists – not the invention of curatorial methods of own sake. By always putting the artist first, a good exhibition behaves like a guest who takes care to do whatever is true to the spirit of the work” – Anthony Huberman - bad curatorial behaviour – the misuse of art to “authorial” ends, done with a degree of self awareness - whatever power we have as curators, is accorded to us by the people we depend upon to do our work - todays curators in the expanded field – curators of music, travel itineries etc – editors, guides, the idea/action of choosing well in an era of abundance, helping to cut through increased culture and information production - in the last era significant legal, political and economic battles about (de)regulation nd property have taken place, governmental/commercial collection and explotations of personal information, financial crisis, business disputes between content producers and distributors etc - what can and cannot be owned? Who owns what? What should an dshould not be controlled? - Curation not just an act of selection and arrangement but of use and control - In recent decades ability of an artist to control the circulation of their artwork both as object and as image in particular has been eroded – (social media etc, copyright issues) - Artists are responsible for everything they make, where as curators are never totally responsible as they never make something completely on their own, unless as the artist-curator - Expression is an artists fundamental act, use is a curators