#and you thought fundamental logic is so abstract exactly because it is more general than just numbers

[jucomx]

Surprising absolutely noone except undergraduate math students, it turns out math actually is only about numbers in the end!

[autumnblogs]

Day 9: Troll Time

Time to get trolled.

https://homestuck.com/story/1527

This is the first of the events that I’ve noticed enough to talk about in Homestuck that alludes to the Alpha Kids. While Roxy on the other side of the scratch is the one actually responsible for the disappearance of Jaspers and the Pumpkins, at this point in the story, we have some pretty good suspects for exactly who disappeared both of them.

I could see myself guessing that Jade’s penpal is one of the trolls, but it wouldn’t be my first guess. I’m going to pay close attention to all of the events on one side of the scratch that are caused by the other side of the scratch, because my theory is that a Scratched Universe, more than anything else, is really terminated rather than truly being retroactively erased. Too much doesn’t make sense from a causal perspective (not necessarily from a temporally linear one) if a scratched universe is actually erased entirely, or even if it is closed off from the rest of existence - why can information enter and leave a Scratched Universe at all from an outside perspective, for example?

Are Side A Side B teleporters, appearifiers, and so on and so on, loopholes? Maybe it has something to do with the nature of Void, the Furthest Ring, and their seeming exclusion from the rules the rest of Paradox Space is required to follow.

The Doylist answer, which in Homestuck is also allowed to be the Watsonian answer, might be that while a Scratched Universe is *materially* erased, information about it is still permitted to propagate through narrative contrivances such as the author. Fenestrated planes can easily be considered narrative contrivances, but if we use this as our theory, it seems like Appearifiers and Sendificators would also have to be Narrative Contrivances (which I’m going to spell with a capital NC from here on out.) I... actually don’t have a problem with this hypothesis, so it’s what I’m going with. Also, since a friend of mine who’s reading this liveblog asked, I’m going to post a link to the tvtropes article on those two terms at the start of this paragraph for anyone who doesn’t know what I’m talking about.

Perhaps, given the proclivity for the Void to preserve lost information in the form of dreams and memories, and given the nature of Space as the medium through which events normally propagate (as well as the fundamental medium of storytelling from which all other storytelling mediums derive their medium-ness), and their proximity on the Aspect Wheel, Narrative Contrivances are objects which have are shared between these two domains - as objects associated with the Void, Narrative Contrivances are permitted to follow their own set of rules which to someone outside of the universe are obvious, but to anyone inside the universe are a complete black box, and as objects associated with Space, Narrative Contrivances function as a means by which to propagate information in such a way as to preserve causality, the logical topology of Paradox Space, and with them, the self-fulfilling nature of Paradox Space. They allow the world-line of objects travelling through the narrative to remain consistent, even when they would violate material geographical conventions.

This description of Narrative Contrivances makes me think a lot of things could be Narrative Contrivances, like First Guardians, for example, who can violate the speed of light.

This is all a lot of silly bullshit, but it’s fun to come up with theories to describe and predict Homestuck (and future Homestuck works, even though I’m not terribly invested in them.)

This has been a long Cold Open. More after the break.

https://homestuck.com/story/1529

John gets cyberbullied!

Man. Cyberbullying has really gone from being an individual concern to being an apocalyptic issue. Who knew? Maybe in writing the trolls and their cyberbullying as being inextricable from the apocalypse, Andrew Hussie predicted this.

I’m not trying to understate John’s issues by comparing them to stuff like massive social media disinformation campaigns - receiving Death Threats as a thirteen year old is terrifying, and on a general level, the fact that this kind of horrible shit was commonplace in the earliest days of social media should have been a big indicator that what was yet to come was going to be so, so much worse.

I’m also not trying to jocularly exaggerate the threat that almost completely lawless social media has on society. If you haven’t already, check out the excellent documentary The Social Dilemma, and then delete your Facebook account if you haven’t already (and since you’re reading my extremely anti-capitalist anti-patriarchy liveblog on tumblr, you’ve probably already done that. If you have, good for you!) And your twitter for good measure, come on, you know who you are. Mabe your tumblr too while you’re at it.

Cyberbullying is part of a larger theme in Homestuck, another one of those things that it’s Capital A About. As a work that is not only about growing up, but specifically about growing up in the information age, Homestuck is repeatedly about the ways that Social Media don’t just bring us together, but keep us apart from one another. Cyberbullying is one of the effects of Social Media pushing people apart - it’s so, so much easier to threaten to kill someone when you don’t have to look them in the eye while you’re doing it, and when you have the anonymity of a string of alphanumeric characters as a name to hide behind.

https://homestuck.com/story/1537

The Black Queen is a very bad woman. It’s always intrigued me that the Queens allow their counterparts’ agents free movement through their territory like this even on the eve (or the advent?) of full-scale war between their kingdoms. PM is just allowed to wander around Derse unsupervised.

I suppose that if even God and Satan can afford each other a bit of token civility while discussing the fates of sinners, so can Prospitians and Dersites.

https://homestuck.com/story/1542

@zeetheus​ John’s definitely proceeds Rose’s bluh.

Rose sips her Mom’s martini for the same reason that she later falls prey to alcoholism. Trying to grow up without help, Rose interprets the martini as a symbol of parental authority, the same way that she interprets the partaking of beverages in general as being a ritual of intimacy with her Mother. Empty signifiers.

https://homestuck.com/story/1549

Jack Noir’s grating voice is so outrageously distracting that it prevents itself as an intrusive thought in the Narrative for PM.

Actually, come to think of it, *all* of the Carapacians talk pretty much exclusively via narration. I wonder if that’s representative of an altered relationship with their narrative reality, which is the first time ever I’ve had that thought pretty much at all.

I always just chalked it up to one of the quirks of Andrew’s writing style, but especially when we take into account the fact that Homestuck is as metanarrative as it is, and that Carapacians are the only characters in Homestuck Proper who interface with the narrative prompt except for the audience, Andrew, and Caliborn himself, I can’t help but wonder. Maybe as living gaming abstractions, in spite of their limited intelligence and abilities, Carapacians have a unique relationship with the narrative laws of Paradox Space (perhaps in the same way that Narrative Contrivances do?)

https://homestuck.com/story/1569

Riffing a little more on the “Fetch Modus as analogous to thought processes” motif previously introduced, Jade’s excellent visualization abilities and vivid imagination serve her well as a Space Player, but tend to misfire, running wild, and seeing patterns where they don’t exist (intrusive thoughts make her see Johnny 5 in her Eclectic Bass and whatever the fuck mecha she’s about to accidentally imagine, I don’t know, I’m not a weeb.) Jade sure does think about robots a lot.

https://homestuck.com/story/1579

I have to say, I consider Terezi’s manipulative abilities to be genuinely pretty strong. I have never known a better way to strongarm me than by pointing out traits that I don’t know whether I feel good or bad about - it just terminates my thought processes.

Although in John’s case, it helps that he is, in fact, a weenie, a stooge, and most importantly, a nice guy. All these facts make him extra manipulatable.

https://homestuck.com/story/1584

<3

I have no reason to believe everyone in Homestuck’s universe isn’t stupidly badass, but I choose to believe that no one is as stupidly badass as the leads because it makes me happy to imagine that these kids are just ridiculously OP superhumans.

(That said, it’s kind of fucked up the level of violence that these literal children are involved in, maybe I shouldn’t get so excited about it. Should we be enthusiastic about the kids’ triumph over their dangerous enemies? Horrified by the travails they are being put through? Probably both motherfuckin’ things.

https://homestuck.com/story/1588

I think about this page a lot.

Rose Lalonde is a very dangerous young lady. She is ruthless, pragmatic, calculating, and cool. She’s even a killer, and literally just killed two imps before fighting this Ogre!

Why is she choosing to show mercy to it now? Is she just trying to get Dave’s goat? Maybe the answer is, deep down, she doesn’t really want to hurt anyone or anything.

https://homestuck.com/story/1589

Kanaya and Dave have a great relationship and I love them as friends very much. I wish dearly that there was more of them in the webcomic. They have approximately the same relationship with authenticity, which is to say that they don’t have an insincere bone in their respective bodies, but practice insincerity nonetheless to impress someone they care about.

For Kanaya relating to Rose, I think it’s a lot more innocent.

https://homestuck.com/story/1590

The least eloquent character in Homestuck has his brief, and I’m pretty sure only encounter with the most eloquent character in Homestuck.

Poor, poor Tavros. While Rose is pretty much always on this level, it seems a lot more innocuous when she’s talking to her friends, or the more mean-spirited and (relatively) competent trolls, the way she treats Tavros almost feels like bullying because of how obviously pathetic he is.

That said, he turns right around, and invokes exactly what’s coming to him. Y’know as much as Tavros is an authentic abuse victim and Vriska gaslights him into thinking a lot of the bad things that happen to him are his fault, there are a lot of times where he does stupid shit that invokes the justifiable wrath of the people around him.

https://homestuck.com/story/1592

While I could pontificate about the fact that Kanaya and Rose are my favorite couple, and squee enthusiastically, instead I will call attention to the fact that, by way of mixing her metaphors, Kanaya has been the victim of an authorial pun - she’s a Fruit Ninja. (Unless Fruit Ninja didn’t exist at the time of writing? It may very well not have.)

https://homestuck.com/story/1596

As the Page of Breath, Tavros sucks at communicating. Here, he sucks at communicating because in spite of his objectively pretty sick rhymes... he is talking to someone who just can’t be arsed.

https://homestuck.com/story/1602

This is one of those absurd moments that at first blush seems meaningless, but I think helps to decipher the kinds of things that John Egbert cares about. It’s one of the moments where he ritualizes an action that one of his heroes takes - John Egbert thinks that Nic Cage is cool, and wants to be like him, so he roleplays Nic Cage for a little while.

https://homestuck.com/story/1603

We’ve barely met the trolls, and they are *already* using the humans as a convenient method to troll each other instead of staying on task.

Karkat also establishes his love of RomComs before his introduction even rolls around.

https://homestuck.com/story/1618

Conceding ground to implacable enemies is generally the correct means to win in Homestuck, usually by getting them to destroy themselves or each other purely by their own unsustainably wicked or stupid conduct. Only a being as powerful as Lord English is sufficient to destroy the Significance-hoarding antagonist that is Vriska, as she threatens to overshadow everyone else in the universe by her own inflated self-importance. Only Vriska, so arbitrarily lucky, could possibly get into position to destroy Lord English. They were made for each other. They deserve each other.

One of my favorite dialogues in the whole comic. Man, I sure love Act 4. There’s something indescribable about the dialogue Andrew writes for this part of the comic. Homestuck at its best whiplashes from silly to scary to heartbreaking to heartwarming, and back to silly again, from beautiful to ugly, and I don’t think that even Act 5, as it piles up layers upon layers, well past the number of parts needed to make a whole, captures the essence of Homestuck as well as does Act 4.

Homestuck is different in every part, of course, and for everyone who says that Act 4 is peak Homestuck you will meet someone who says that Acts 1 through 3 were peak Homestuck, or who says that Act 5 was Peak Homestuck, or that Act 6 was Peak Homestuck. I do not mean to demean any portion of the work by saying that Act 4 is my favorite. The things I like in Homestuck the most are just the most themselves in this portion of the story.

https://homestuck.com/story/1627

I’m feeling less and less intelligent as I read more and more of Homestuck, because honestly, my theories read less like honest-to-god insights, and more like somebody who just wasn’t paying any fucking attention. Here, Jade spells out basically what I’ve been saying.

https://homestuck.com/story/1640

We’ll pause here for the evening. Reading was a little sparse today, but it’s a good place to leave off, especially since for some of these I wrote just stacks of theorizing.

Until tomorrow, Cam signing off, Mostly alive except for a bit of a cough, and not alone.

[emptymanuscript]

Reflecting the Author

Ok, now referencing this post and, more importantly, the video behind it for a broader subject, the opening quote gets me thinking. 

I cordially dislike allegory in all its manifestations… I much prefer history - true or feigned - with its varied applicability to the thought and experience of readers. I think that many confuse applicability with allegory, but the one resides in the freedom of the reader and the other in the purposed domination of the author.

-JRR Tolkien

This dovetails nicely with other opinions I have heard that  trying to force a meaning on readers tends to malfunction. Along with the idea that trying to make a direct reference to current events tends to only last as long as the current events while making something more universal can reflect current events and then go on to reflect other later events as well.

The problem, I suspect is in the definition of allegory though I also suspect JRR Tolkien is right now turning over in his grave to snap at me, “Did I F*ing Stutter?”

Allegory can be the metaphorical recreation of other culturally significant stories by characters, figures, or events as a reference within a narrative, drama or picture. Aslan acts out the Christian narrative of Christ’s sacrifice. It’s not meant to be interpreted any other way. That is the purposed domination of the author as in the quote. C.S. Lewis has a specific interpretation that he wants the reader to walk away with.

But Allegory can also be the broader representation of just abstract ideas or principles by characters, figures, or events in narrative, dramatic, or pictorial form. A form put in to the story by the author without a demand for a specific interpretation.

This is one of the things I fold under the idea of MORAL. That if I make my text reflect the idea that “Power Corrupts,” then any time the real world throws up that truth - and I wouldn’t use it if I didn’t think it was true - then the story incidentally mirrors the real life events and feels more real because of that. The abstract representation and the real world events mesh to create something stronger than I feel I could create with purpose.

And here I think this may be what Tolkien might mean by applicability. That instead of trying to reproduce a unique event in metaphor, it may be a stronger tactic much of the time, to apply the lesson of the event. In the video about the ring, Power is Corruptive as a statement of principle. The internal logic of the story states that as fundamentally true and hews close to it.

One of the things I loathe about the Peter Jackson movies is that Faramir succumbs to the corruptive influence of the ring rather than being resistant as he is in the books. I get why the movies did it. Philippa Boyens has been clear that they did it to preserve dramatic tension that they didn’t think they could keep if Faramir simply helped Frodo. And it doesn’t actually contradict this principle. Faramir is corrupted by the opportunity for power, it’s just interpersonal social power, the capability to force his father’s affections by deeds, rather than a desire for rulership or military might. And that has merit and is a good discussion.

But I loathe it because it takes away one of the very few contrary sophistications of that moral. What Tolkien himself expresses is much closer to the idea that power corrupts but that also the refusal of power insulates you from corruption in an unequal way. You may still get power thrust upon you but the lack of corruption makes it possible then to be a “good” wielder of power. Tolkien shows over and over again that those who wish power the least are the most effective at wielding it.

That’s not terribly controversial. But Tolkien goes the extra mile with it, particularly with Faramir, changing it from a vague moral based on a general truism to something he actually personally believes. And I think that’s a fair part of Tolkien’s authorial power. Tolkien is a monarchist, he did believe in the concept of the good king and what made one, which means the application of his ideals ring true not only in the work but also as applied to the real world. It’s fairly difficult to work oneself around from reading about Faramir and Aragorn to the idea that the very idea of monarchical power is bad.

Which I think is the other element: the more you, as the author, buy it, the more you, as the author, delve into the idea to the spaces where you do not share the general opinion, the more polished your reflection will be because it is brightened by specific application.

I can see this in my own work. One of my constant struggles is getting into the morality of my character JJ. I love JJ. AND I am under no delusions that she is a good person. JJ was originally designed to be a monster and she is. So, the question becomes, what do I say morally about her. And I feel that the application, the reflection that peers deepest into me, even where I am very uncomfortable, so that it will reflect brightest to others is putting in my own actual attitude toward her. That she is awful AND she gets away with it. JJ doesn’t get punished. JJ isn’t defeated. JJ gets loved, treated like a hero, and vindicated. Which I honestly feel guilty about. And would not want expressed as a moral, little m. I dislike that monsters just get away with it. That they might even succeed because of it. But that statement also feels true. And by looking at how she gets pardoned that to me gives a greater reflection of who we are if not who we would like us to be. It  also generally means that what I produce will not look like what someone else produces because I’m not quite falling in line with either usual camp.

And for many others, who might be trying to depict thinly veiled political leaders, that deep dive might be better reflective for you as well. I am definitely not saying to excuse them in your work. But by getting deep into where you are uncomfortably comfortable with how they run things if it were somebody else and by getting deep into where you might be uncomfortably comfortable with how their opposition acts, even though it might not be exactly that political leader, it might end up reading as many more and reflecting better how you view it all.

The point, I think, is that by delving deep into what you personally deeply feel, good or bad or both, you’ll generate something much more resonant than you will by taking the prepackaged allegory of someone else’s story that most people might already have made their moral decision on.

It’s a thought anyway. Or at least a ramble.

[azerosumrp]

happy sunday, everyone! keeping in the vein of characters, we’d like to give you all a sneak peek of our member groups!

the member groups of zero sum are based off the infinity stones.  in general, these groups are rooted in a fundamental concept that is important to the character. for this reason, it’s paramount to think about the character’s motivations when choosing a group, rather than personality traits which may not always line up perfectly. if you have any questions about these groups, feel free to message and admin and we’ll help you pick out one for your characters!

MIND

these are the most cerebral of the group, bound by their desire and pursuit of knowledge. these are individuals who are rational to a fault, completely guided by their need to learn and figure everything out. they can’t settle for ‘close enough’ or ‘maybe.’ these are individuals who think faster than they speak, who have a better grasp of language than most, who sometimes get lost in themselves searching for answers. they are introspective, thought provoking individuals whose depths are boundless. they live in a world of definites - sometimes contradictory ones. they don’t see gray, only one shade or black or white. these are individuals who appreciate closeness and the nuisance and knowledge that comes with it. they value lasting friendships, because figuring people out can be hard, time consuming, difficult even if some of these individuals are known for enjoying a good challenge. these are individuals who are calm under pressure, rational to the end, and always analyzing situations to discern a plan. at their worst, they become consumed by their quest for knowledge. at best, they freely share it and know exactly how to walk away from a problem they can’t solve even if reluctantly. aesthetics: firewood, smoke, loves the sea but hates lakes, contradictive, articulate, well-read, introvert, wants to live in a cabin, tea over coffee, game of thrones, smiles at strangers, inside jokes

POWER

people who belong in the power member group are those who are both longing for or seeking power as much as those to win the respect and admiration of those around them, creating power. at their best, these individuals are focused, pragmatic leaders who know how to rally people to their side and inspire those around them. at their worst, they are tyrannical controlling individuals who seek power for power’s sake. these individuals tend to be ambitious individuals who will not fall short of their goals regardless of the obstacles in their way. theirs is the will and power to drive through them and reach their destination. loyalty is optional and many have fallen by the wayside as individuals have sought more of that very thing that yearn for and the very thing that could easily be their downfall. power is a fickle thing, it can be given and it can also be taken away. these individuals often struggle with relinquishing that control and as such, are often controlled individuals themselves - individuals who will never let you see them break, not even for a moment. sometimes, they have a reputation of being heartless individuals, but nothing could be further from the truth. they may be driven, but they are driven by something. whatever that singular source might be - an idea, an event, or even a person. power cannot come from nothing. aesthetic: blood, spearmint gum, morning person, plays to win, dinner parties, high connections, direct flights, red lips, doesn’t smile, will break for their dream. 

REALITY

reality is often disappointing. for these individuals, they know that best of all. While some reject the reality in front of them, vehemently, some relish in the possibilities available to them. they are unafraid of hard truths and much prefer to see the ugliest, dirtiest parts of the truth rather than be blinded by the beautiful lie. these are people that strive to see beyond the illusions and smokescreens people put up, because they’ve been lied to. because they’ve been hurt by the beautiful lie and know that pain well enough to never desire to see it happen again. these are individuals who appreciate and respect the fine arts, more so than other groups, because these individuals see the beauty in absolute creation - new realities, new ideas, new developments. at their worst, they can be cold, brutally honest people whose bluntless leads to friction with others, who determine that living without lies is better than finding truth. at their best, these individuals are creators, confidants, who relish wit, intelligence, and honesty above all. aesthetic: sleeping in, space dust, believes in aliens, misses vine, laughs loud, would marry their best friend, surrealist/abstract art, museums, they’ve been hurt before but are still so full of love

SOUL

those in the soul member group are emotionally driven individuals. some recognize this and have mastered their emotions, using them as a guide. others are a slave to them, unable to break away from it. they are emotional, sometimes temperamental individuals who feel deeply, whether it’s healthy or not. they are people attracted to the simple pleasure of things, chasing experiences and pursuing meaningful, lasting relationships. these are loyal individuals who value those around them, immeasurably, and will do anything for those around them. these are the true empaths of our groups, who instinctively discern the feelings of others and naturally come to their sides to comfort and console. at their worst, these individuals are entirely ruled by their emotions to the point of self-destruction - too kind, too gentle, too breakable. they are gossamer strands against the wind. at their best, they are the greatest supporters of those around them who have rich, well-developed ties. most of the time, they are somewhere in between. aesthetic: feels everything too deeply, sensitive, loyal, sunflower fields, late afternoon sun, dancing under a full moon, decent grades, pretty handwriting, small towns, old cathedrals

SPACE

we define space by how much they create around them. how little or how much, it doesn’t matter, but they are marked by it. these are individuals who either share too much of themselves - vulnerable to a crippling point, clingy, unable to let go of those they love even if the sentiment is not returned or they are those who have created too much space, built too many walls, and hide in their ivory towers away from those that could harm them. these are people who live for moments of sheer freedom, who thrive in dangerous situations and come alive in the dark. they can be smart and logical or spontaneous and free, but they all crave to create more space or remove it. sometimes, they are stuck between the two. these are individuals who cannot be contained or controlled, maintained or immobilized. they don’t always follow orders well and have a habit of breaking more than a couple of rules without much fear of the consequences that wait for them on the other side. they are the stargazers, the dreamers, the individuals constantly looking up at the sky and thinking about how they’re going to get up there, planning their next trips, and striving to make each day a little bit better than the last. aesthetic: thunderstorms, hair slicked back with an insane amount of product, new york at night, adrenaline, early morning jogs, physics, fast cars, doesn't know where they are going until they get there

TIME

those ruled by time are individuals who can be completely stagnated - held and imprisoned by some idea or themselves or an event that refuses to let them go. they are, effectively, stuck. while, they can also be forward-thinking futurists who lack be ability to live in the present or look back for any reason ranging from the horrors they’d rather not face or a place they simply do not fit. these are individuals who can be loners, isolated for one reason or another. they rally around the things that bring them joy, sometimes too much. these are wise individuals who have seen much and learned even more. at their worst, they are cynical individuals who can’t see the joy between the horror and at their best, positive forward thinkers who strive to create change, but all are never naive. even if their lives have been short, none know what it means to live “easy.” aesthetic: ancient souls, audrey hepburn movies, dusty books, classical music, soft smiles, natural makeup, probably plays piano, bakes, walks so softly you can barely hear them, trying their best to be happy

[ganymedesclock]

How do you think Zant and Ghirahim would interact? Likewise, how do you think Ganon would treat the two in a setting where we could explore such a relationship?

My particular read on Zant is he’s not wild about social interaction unless he’s already decided the person is okay; I interpret him as the specific flavor of autistic where he’s only really comfortable in a social situation by shadowing a particular person for comfort’s sake. In which case I think he’d have a lot of sideways interactions with other people, but, not a lot of super direct engagement.

Ghirahim superficially is much more polite, but, given his particular complex relationship with his master and his childhood (a friend of mine, @golvio draws a lot of comparisons between how they imagine Ghirahim’s treatment under Demise and the Pearls in Steven Universe) it’s just that- superficial. He wants to be well-mannered because he feels keeping up aristocratic airs is an imperative he has to justify avoiding, but unless something really catches his intellectual curiosity, he, scientifically speaking, tends to not give a shit.

So I feel like you could have Ghirahim and Zant cohabiting in the same area and just sort of operating with a mutual regard to not say anything to each other unless the other’s hair is on fire and someone else isn’t already intervening. They could absolutely take more interest in each other, but, they’d need to at least get shoved into some kind of buddy cop adventure story to shake the topic loose. Just leaving them around each other, they’d never get anywhere. They would politely ignore each other. You would ask Ghirahim what he thought of Zant and after asking you to clarify who you’re talking about, he would make an idle note of “So that’s what his name is.”

With regards to Ganon and Zant, I sort of like the vein that Hyrule Warriors took with it in the sense that Ganon seems to regard Zant as a protege and student- not something as warm as “like a son” but that’s because Ganon’s not exactly the type to hand out familial affection very easily if at all. I imagine him taking a sort of scholarly, educational angle; Zant is his apprentice. Even if the guy lives for centuries, he’s significantly younger than Ganon himself, so there would be a certain degree to which Ganon looks towards Zant as someone in need of guidance, rather than a peer and equal.

That’s not to say Zant doesn’t impress him, or ever surprise him; Ganon might have a certain compassion for the downtrodden but he doesn’t seem the type to have patience for slackers or the talentless in his inner circle. But there’s definitely a distance between them, that would be altogether reinforced by the overly-reverent pedestal Zant puts Ganon on, though I think as time goes by and they had more time to interact with each other, or even just Zant operating on his own for a time because Ganon hasn’t been resurrected yet, he’d become a little less starstruck by Ganon, for the better- creating an environment where they can actually talk to each other and Zant isn’t fountaining the glories of his god, because Ganon might be cocky but I think the last thing he’d want to be is someone’s deity.

That would also affect Ghirahim; not the mentorship, because Ghirahim is one person who can not only match Ganon in age but actually surpass him- though I think this would average to them seeing each other as peers because the gaps in Ghirahim’s resurrections are much larger and they’re both at a certain level of time abyss where what’s a century give or take, actually- but the thing where Ganon has no particular desire to be regarded as a god. Distant reverence is fine on paper- it certainly flatters his ego- but in practice it just means people project a lot of expectations and perceptions onto him and that would make him shift a little uneasily in his skin considering the whole situation he had as king of the Gerudo.

It also doesn’t help that the person Ghirahim would be reminded of looking at Ganon is Demise- there’s no way to ignore that Ghirahim would be comparing Ganon to Demise. And the thing about Demise is, they are, in brief, an abusive tyrant; Ghirahim is someone deeply marked by the fact that he was raised from the cradle to disregard his personhood and feelings for Demise’s benefit.

This is completely counter to how Ganon operates, and would be a wall he would inevitably run into hard, dealing with Ghirahim- Ganon’s nice and cozy with Zant as a protege because Zant has all of his hopes and desires right there on the surface. All Ganon has to do is play the genie in the bottle, feed those hopes, encourage them, and, when Zant becomes more of a favored student than a useful tool, he can still use them to prop Zant up. Zant wants to feel powerful, Zant wants to feel valued, heard, supported- Ganon knows exactly what words to cook up to feed a flagging spirit.

Ganon operates selfishly on a certain level, and, he also works best with others who are also operating selfishly- not necessarily maliciously, but, what do they want? They want something for themselves.

Ghirahim is a standout among many Zelda antagonists in that he really doesn’t want anything. His resurrection of Demise is because he sees it as his responsibility. If he attaches emotions to it, it’s that he’s pleased to feel like he belongs, like the world makes sense, like he’s filling his role, and then, slowly, that he’s actually a bit curious about this person who’s so good at thwarting him.

But that’s one selfish desire, and it’s clear Ghirahim writes it off as a petty and ridiculous thing. Him, wanting things for himself, even if it’s something as simple as having the pleasure of figuring out who the hell this twerp in his way is.

And I think Ghirahim’s sense of self-denial would logically be a lot harsher any context in which he’s interacting with Ganon- because Ghirahim would have to deal with the keen awareness that Demise threw him away. He is not alive now because of Demise’s grace, but as an oversight, in a world Demise may well be incapable of returning to, and the sense is that this is just fine to them; they don’t need him or want him back.

I can see Ghirahim falling into step behind Ganon if he’s at a particularly low point and just needs to feel like someone actually wants him to be here, whoever that is, but I also feel like Ganon would galvanize Ghirahim in interesting directions- because coming from someone who is inevitably going to superficially remind Ghirahim of Demise, Ganon’s entire stance is going to be “but you’re a person, you’re made of metal and you’re a sword, that’s great, I’m largely made of meat slime that grows eyes, physiological construction is completely irrelevant here, the point is, you think, you have opinions, and no matter how hard you’re trying to pretend you don’t, you want something.”

Ganon focuses on the idea that people want things. He himself is so driven by this you could argue that his less-corporeal forms are basically one big grudge spirit. While textually, Ganon’s dying words in Ocarina of Time and Demise’s curse intend to mirror each other, it’s worth noting how Ganon’s words are basically pure spite- while Demise’s curse is methodically, systematically worded, functionally aloof; it’s the patient explanation of an adult to someone they perceive as a none-to-bright child that no, actually, you haven’t won anything of meaning. You’ve inconvenienced them. And they will not forget that you did that.

So Ghirahim would inevitably initially see Ganon as an entity similar to Demise, and that perception would inevitably come utterly torn down around the edges because Ganon and Demise are such fundamentally different people.

Frankly, my perception of Ganon and Demise is their relationship is comparable to that between Hylia and Zelda- the first Zelda was bodily born out of Hylia, making her a sort of mortal-incarnated demigod, but, the more Zelda became aware of Hylia, the less she was able to stand Hylia and was repulsed by Hylia’s thought process and the way she viewed Link. That’s continued through all of her descendants; Breath of the Wild Zelda suffers a huge amount of misery trying to connect with Hylia only to be given a repeated cold shoulder, and even awakening her powers, it’s only to be a pawn in the face of Hylia’s scheme.

Hylia is, in short, Zelda’s sort-of removed divine mother, and, she’s also an incredibly cold, neglectful parent.

I think the same goes for Demise and Ganon- they in a sort of abstracted manner had a hand in Ganon’s origin, but, this isn’t a family that could so much as sit through a very uncomfortable holiday dinner. And this is relevant to Ghirahim, because Demise’s treatment of Ghirahim obviously aligns with a lot of Demise’s attitude as a creator and towards the world in general- an attitude they actually share with their sworn enemy, Hylia. (both Fi and Ghirahim are ultimately discarded once they’ve “served their purpose” in the eyes of their respective creators)

Ganon, conversely, is heavily drawn towards the suffering outcast, and, as I talked about in my long post about what Ganon’s healing power means about him, that draw isn’t “I can exploit this” nearly as much as it appears to be genuine compassion. A lot of his narratives and behavior suggest that he feels that way himself- that as someone who has spent much of his life marked as a pariah, he has a certain visceral empathy for the discarded.

More than Ganon would not want to treat Ghirahim the way that Demise did, he would be loath to tolerate someone who treats fully loyal servants like Demise does. If Ganon stabs someone in the back, it’s because he’s either sure they would do the same in a heartbeat or because from his perspective they’ve already put a dagger in him. He’s not the kind of person who gets rid of someone he knows would never betray him, or has no reason to believe they’d do so.

If anything, this makes me wonder if Ghirahim would initially find Zant revoltingly whiny and needy- he can’t imagine why Zant would utterly humiliate himself and Ganon both by drawing Ganon’s attention to his needs and wants, or even just openly expressing distress in front of Ganon. 

And then after a while Ghirahim starts to feel a little weird watching them interact because the fact that Ganon actually responds to Zant and encourages him, or even just, irritably orders someone to see Zant to his bed after the latter’s magically overworked himself, would just sort of start to contextualize for Ghirahim the gaping void of affection or even basic care that he received in his own development.

[kdtheghostwriter]

SNK 115  - “OMW”

I mean...

Let’s be real. As far as Deus Ex goes, I’ve seen more preposterous this week.

If any of you are wondering why this post took so long, it isn’t for lack of time I assure you. This chapter was…a lot. And god damn, Isayama, I wasn’t expecting to dig up my Junior Year debate notes for this one blog post but here we are lads. Quick recap before we get into writers’ mumbo-jumbo.

Flashback

Deus EX

#HeelFloch

Sad Hange

RESURRECTION

We all know Isa loves his religious imagery. He isn’t quite as egregious as Zack Snyder (who is, tbh?) but it’s definitely a thing. He also loves mythology of all types. And while Norse mythology seems to be his area of expertise, it isn’t mine - which is why seeing Stupid Sexy Zeke emerge from his Titan Incubator made me think of another Stupid Sexy God from the Ancient Greek Canon.

I speak of the Goddess Aphrodite, who has dominion over love, beauty and its various trappings. Admittedly, this comparison is drawn in relation to aesthetics only. Zeke’s aloof temperament doesn’t really mirror that of the Greek goddess. Even though Aphrodite did technically help start the Trojan War but that’s neither here nor there.

Zeke’s appearance from the steam of the felled Titan is nearly identical to the foam that appeared during Aphrodite’s spontaneous conception in the Ionian Sea. For the sake of transparency, I must point out that long ago, a fanfic author by the name of Homer relayed to us that Aphrodite was the daughter of Zeus and Dione. This is not technically wrong but it is quite boring. And it was also pre-dated (shout-out to Hesiod). Uranus, the primordial god of the sky, got into a spat with his children as deities are wont to do. This particular dust-up ended in Uranus being castrated by his son – the Titan, Cronus – who usurped the throne. The disembodied testicles fell into the sea like a pair of primordial bath bombs and out of the resulting effervescence appeared a full-grown Aphrodite in all of her Tumblr-banned glory.

Zeke, with nothing left of him after the explosion than a head and torso, was taken into the gut of a waiting Titan. Let me clarify, here. He was not eaten, no. The mindless titan scooted itself along the river banks and inserted the dying Zeke into its stomach cavity. Then OG Ymir with her trademark PATHS Magiks,  crafts the golden boy a brand new body and sends him on his merry way.

Like I said up top: of all the examples of Deus Ex, this isn’t even the third-most severe I’ve seen. The implications of it are…a lot. And it actually makes sense if you consider what we know about Titan Biology.

Back to the beginning. Once upon a time, the Founder Ymir Fritz made a deal with the Devil of All Earth that gave her untold power after coming into contact with the “source of all living matter.” With that power, Ymir became the Progenitor of Titan Power. Upon her death 13 years later, her soul was split into nine pieces and connected via a metaphysical system known only as PATHS. These PATHS transcend space and time and bind together every subject of Ymir, even those who have been long dead.

We also know that the Titans themselves are a conundrum of theoretical physics. Their mass and energy are created from nothing. They generate massive amounts of heat, but don’t appear to need fuel. They have no digestive system and regurgitate the contents of their stomach when it becomes full. Even though they are huge creatures, their actual limbs and body parts are incredibly light. Even though Zeke has little recollection of what happened to him post-explosion, he’s likely smart enough to infer, as we can, exactly how and why he emerged from the carcass of a Titan with a brand new body.

This is all before we mention that Zeke Jaeger is a part of the Fritz family tree. The Royal Family line that descends directly from Ymir herself.

I also thought about Lazarus of Bethany while reading this section. Lazarus was a good friend of Jesus, the lad from Bethlehem. Maybe you’ve heard of him. Jesus was told that Lazarus had fallen ill, but has business and doesn’t set out until a few days later. Jesus and his crew arrive in Bethany only to discover that Lazarus has already passed away. This leads to the Gospel’s shortest verse.

Jesus wept. [John 11:35, KJV]

Perhaps the better comparison for her is to Abraham (with the whole “making a great nation” stipulation). But! I’m trying to do something pithy here, so bear with me.

The story of Lazarus might be the Good Book’s most well-known resurrection (besides that other one). The idea here is that the world’s most Holy Figure decided that this man’s time on Earth wasn’t done. Jesus was too late to heal Lazarus and felt so guilty as to weep. Lazarus was then called forth from his tomb, still wrapped in his death robes.

For the Eldian Empire, no figure is more Holy than Ymir Fritz. She’s the Founding Titan and, if this chapter is to be inferred upon, her spirit still influences the will of her subjects to the day. An entire cult has formed with the sole purpose of returning her to her former glory. I should also point out that Zeke essentially committed suicide.

Like, yeah, maybe the injuries were a bit too extreme for an old shifter to be able to regenerate from, but even if that’s the case there would have been the telltale signs of an attempt to do so, like Pieck in Liberio. There wasn’t even that. He was so tired of the fight – so done with Levi torturing him – that he was willing to abandon his years-long plan entirely and sacrifice his powers to the shadows of death. He chose to die; the Founder chose differently.

The rainstorm clearing to make way for the sun. The beautification of Zeke Jaeger. The visage of his tall, strong frame standing firm as his hated rival lays broken and mutilated at his feet. It’s all very hard to miss. Who knows where his head is at following this? I do, however, finally know why I get so many Spidey Sense tingles whenever Zeke opens his mouth.

  The name is Immanuel Kant: German scholar and one of the godfathers of modern philosophy. I first learned of Kant and his teachings as a teenager on my high school debate team as I prepared my cases for the Lincoln-Douglas competition. It was my first tournament and I placed second out of dozens of students. After I was done for the day, a girl came up to me and gave me congratulations for understanding Kant. I thanked her, but the truth was that I didn’t fully grasp Kantian philosophy until I got home that night and studied a bit more. Kantian ethics can be hard to grasp because they are often in conflict with each other. (Gee, that sounds familiar.)

Kant’s ethics are deontological in principal. This is a fancy way of saying that the main concern is the Deed That Must Be Done. It is a separation of morals from emotion. Kant rejected the Utilitarians of the day and their schools of thought regarding the inherent “goodness” of an action. Specifically, he had a big problem with Determinism, saying that things like free will were inherently unknowable; also, basing the morality of a decision around perceived outcomes was impossible, because consequences existed outside of physical existence and therefore could not be quantified. Kant set out to quantify the question of moral relativism with his most famous work: The Categorical Imperative.

This is a terribly complex system that has been repurposed and reinterpreted countless times over the past two centuries so I’ll spare you any ballywho. Basically, CI is the inverse of Consequentialism where everything but the consequences matter. Saving a person from drowning isn’t inherently a good action unless there is a logical reason for doing so. This is admittedly a very simplified summation, but even the expanded version leads to some dissonance of reason.

If we look at the Abstract of Categorical Imperative, it tells us: “Do not impose on others what you do not wish for yourself.” This line is very similar to the Golden Rule, which Kant famously opposed. The American scholar Peter Corning pointed this out, saying, “Kant’s objection is especially suspect because the Categorical Imperative sounds a lot like a paraphrase…of the same fundamental idea. Calling it a universal law does not materially improve on the basic concept.” To borrow an idea myself, it’s like playing the Super Mario theme in a minor key. It’ll sound more dour than usual, but it’s still the Mario theme. Joking aside, what’s important here is that the whole point of CI is to quantify the question of morality and it appears to do that in part by using the qualitative philosophy of the Golden Rule.

Another big beef came from Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard. He felt that Kantian autonomy was insufficient in holding people to the standards of CI’s universal truths. In his words: “Kant was of the opinion that man is his own law – that is, he binds himself under the law which he himself gives himself. Actually, in a profounder sense, this is how lawlessness or experimentation are established.” In other words, if the only thing that matters is reasoning, you can justify almost anything to serve your immediate reasoning.

EXAMPLE

Here is where the dubious nature of the Categorical Imperative fully rears its head, as it displays BOTH the morality and immorality of Zeke’s plan.

On one hand, this plan is fucking awful. There are numerous and many arguments to be made against it; working solely in the context of Kantianism, it is irrational to presume that sterilizing the Eldian people will lead to a more peaceful world. It relies on a ludicrous number of assumptions – the least of which isn’t that Marley will one day stop being a total bell end. Besides that shit, it violates the nature of Kantian philosophy by attempting to foresee the outcome of the situation.

The other hand? It actually makes sense. CI says that only reason matters. It’s ethics through the lens of rational thought. No matter your thoughts about the Great Titan War, how it started and ended, whether or not the Eldians’ preceding subjugation was just or not, it’s a fact that the Titans have caused a great deal of suffering for many people. Only one race of people can transform into these beasts, so the idea of stripping their ability to reproduce isn’t a great leap to make. It is rational specifically in the context of this universe.

(Apologies for any details missed. I haven’t read any Kant in several years and this is a very condensed version of a concept I would encourage you to look into further. Thinking about this all now, the fact that I ever made it to out-rounds while arguing any of this is frankly absurd.)

It makes sense then, finally, why Yelena is so devoted to Zeke’s plan. Titans destroyed her home and slaughtered her people. The rational course of action is to remove this weapon from the hands of those (Marley) that would abuse them. And if those same perpetrators get screwed over during the course of this plan then…[Shrug Emoji]. She claims what she wants is justice. What she really wants, of course, is revenge. Just like her sensei, Jaeger-san, who wants revenge still. Which Jaeger, you ask? The answer is yes.

Situations have been reversed. The volunteers (and Onyankopon) are seated at the head of the table while the officers of the Garrison and Military Police that held them captive are under their thumb. Color-coded armbands are divvied out to the Eldian forces, juuuuust in case you forgot which period of history we’re sending up here. Armbands are assigned based upon when a person surrendered to the Jaegerists. Those higher ups (and Falco) that partook of the wine get their own special armband, because Everything Is Awesome!!

Then there’s this fucking guy. Before I revisited the world of epistemology, I had a much less astute take prepared about character psychology and the concept of the “Double Turn.” I may still write that as a separate post; it won’t do any good here. Reiner didn’t appear, firstly (even though it appears that he and the Warrior Unit are on Paradis), and the visage of a disembodied child using Titan Magiks to bring Zeke back from the precipice of death brings up some very real questions about how real the Curse really is. We don’t know how Ymir Fritz died originally. Given the way mythology tends to work, I’d say patricide is highly plausible.

As usual, all we can do is speculate. One thing that doesn’t need speculation is Pieck. As usual, she’s right on time. As expected, she’s exactly right.

 Stray Thoughts

- As I noted last time, Levi was sent flying into the river. Evidently, he had enough strength to make it back to shore, just not much more than that. I suspect he’s alive for now but, goddamn did he get messed up. Levi underestimated Zeke’s suicidal tendencies, just as Zeke underestimated Levi’s tenacity. For two fellas that spent months in direct contact with each other, they have almost no clue.

- Not to stir the pot here but, here’s an in-story example of Kantian Ethics in case you’re still not quite sure. On the roof in Shiganshina – if Kant had been there (lol) – he would have disputed Levi giving the serum to Armin. Not for the reason you think. Categorical Imperative is all about reason. The reason Levi chose to save Armin is because he refused to rob his loved one of their humanity and instead chose to let him rest as opposed to reviving him for the sake of continuing a senseless, endless war. As Momtaku has said before: Levi chose Erwin over Armin. This was a choice made on emotional, borderline selfish, grounds and thereby irrational, which in Kant’s eyes makes it immoral. Just a little extra nugget for you. Discuss, friends!

[roguelike-theory-blog]

Pure waste of bandwidth

A few Girard-inspired, mathematical-theological stories for my friends.

Voting for itself. Girard dismisses the Hilbert’s programme, comparing the attempt to prove mathematics using mathematics to “the parliament voting for itself”. It is a correct comparison, yet its value as a criticism is ambiguous. As a french logician, Girard might actually know that the French Republic – and arguably the modern politics – has actually been founded with the parliament voting for itself. In 1789, the new-founded National Assembly of France was concerned with the question, whether it actually does represent the general will? This question was resolved affirmatively by the notorious Abbé Sieyès, who took the structure of his argument from the catholic thinker Nicolas Malebranche.

Malebranche was concerned with proving prothestants wrong, as catholics usually are. The problem was, whether the Catholic Church, that is, its body of cardinals was the one, unique representation (in the yet religious sense, from which we will later found the legal concept of representation) of God on Earth – as opposed to the possibility of the multiple, partial, conflicting representations of his will favored by the protestants. His thought experiment was simple: “Say we gather all of the cardinals together and let them take a vote, whether they, together, do or do not represent the god’s will. The ones who say ‘no’ are obviously not real cardinals: you can’t be a cardinal if you don’t believe in the institution. So everyone who is a real cardial will say ‘yes’, thus determining by unanimous vote that the Catholic Church is indeed the one and unique representant of God”.

Now let us postpone the matter of the obvious begging-the-question; let us also not indulge for now in the beautiful ways with which Malebranche tries to fix it; let’s focus on how this argument is still at work in our very lives. Abbé Sieyès used this very same argument to prove that the Assembly is the real representative: if your particular will is against it, you’re just not of the Republic and your will doesn’t count. The whole seeming ridiculousness of the argument pales in comparison with its incredible effectiveness: the modern politics was born with all its representative-democratic weirdness. There’re likely philosophical ways to ground this idea onto something more fundamental, yet the notoriousness of such an ouroboric event is clear, and the break that happened here is on the level of a new self-supporting thought from which, however, the ‘real things’ are being created on a daily basis.

Can’t we say that Hilbert’s programme is the same type of event, just imposed kind of retrospectively onto the history of mathematics? The mathematics voting for itself, let the naysayers be damned into luddistic hell? In this case we can go on living with its theological form while embracing the fruitful mathematical content it gave us. And then our next move, the move of the ones who dares to respect and use mathematics without believing in it, should obviously be to look for the heretics and the heretical thoughts. We should not be content with those who just dismisses mathematics altogether (the boring, impotent atheists) – the real heretic is the one who is of the mathematical practice, but questions its belief structure. How do you call the hagiography but about heretics? Heretography?

Hysterizing the computer. Now one of those heretics is Brouwer, whose whole project was about questioning the givenness of the a priori. Insane idea, completely against Kant, of course, as it questions the very distinction between thinking and praxis. A priori as something completely given assumes some kind of a collapse of the process of thinking in time, with all of the theorems already there somewhere, indeed nothing more than Anselm’s ontological argument, but about mathematics. Brouwer scouted this a priori and found his own fixed point theorem, which states that there’s something that exists but can’t be found. Now that’s unsettling for Brouwer who is, by the way, of a Schopenhauer’s persuasion. To question the whole thing, Brouwer looks for the most extreme point of this a priori givenness, and it’s nothing else but the law of the excluded-middle: it’s only there if you can always do the anselmnian jump to the farthest conclusion. Brouwer slows down this seemingly instantaneous jump by denying it, inventing the intuitionistic logic, and actually somehow manages to get pretty far with it, reformulating even a part of topology in this new light. However this heresy was not approved by his holiness Hilbert, already too influential on the continent – isolated Brouwer loses his mind and dies, never seeing any hope of his work being useful.

A different development was up at the same, however, concerned a piece of metal to be called computer. There were a few of those machines already, and it was obvious that there’s going to be more. On the other hand, it didn’t actually take very long for people to notice how incredibly useful the intuitionistic logic was for this machine: much more than the ‘classical one’. The computer became the redeeming object of Brouwer’s logic – he never saw one, never even thought of one, yet turned out to provide the most important concept for its study. The depth of Brouwer’s premature contribution to Computer Science is beyond the wariness of tertium non datur: his work predicted the notorious problems with the floating-point numbers, and his topology turned out to be a weird tool to study computable functions, which is a cross-sub-disciplinary link of strange awesomeness for the easily excitable people like me.

So if we’re desperately looking for any escape from the horrible weight of the Kantian-Hilbertian mathematical theology, shouldn’t we look into the computer? One of the weird things about the computers is how easily we all were persuaded, not so long ago, that everything in the computer is “virtual” (not in the sense in which philosophers use the epithet, but in the sense the marketers use it), that is, not exactly material… Which is nonsense, a structure of disavowal, which has to be thoroughly contradicted on all the levels, starting on the level of primitive processor instructions which, according to the simplest laws of thermodynamics, can’t perform any destructive operation – can’t forget any value of any variable – without wasting some energy, emanating some heat. This kind of thought is as material as it can be.

Right here, right now, I can show you how the materiality of computer affects our everyday life in a very noticeable, annoying fashion. Let us recall that to study the whole population of computers a special concept was invented, ‘the Turing machine’. It was a strange abstraction, seeking to provide an ideal type for those machines, a link between their real bodies and the computable functions which are performed by them. It is used in science, yes, but it is also used too much in the arguments between the adolescent programmers, if you ever dared to talk to them – “C and Lisp are the same thing because of the Turing machine”... But let’s leave them be. Where’s the Turing machine’s fault?

Turing machine is imagined to have an infinite time and an infinite memory space. That’s what we can sometimes believe about our computers. When our computers run out of time – that is, we subjectively feel that they are slow – we’re annoyed and happy to fix it. The existence of the computer as a time-consuming device is obvious and we’re perfectly equipped to notice it; every second it’s slowing down we’re feeling it, I think, already at the level of our bodies; yet there’s no realistic limit to how long a computer can run. What is harder to notice, yet much more objective, is the limit of its memory: the computer runs just happily, using as much memory as it can, until there’s no more memory at all. Then strange things begin to happen.

What does exactly happen when the computer is out of memory? Of course, it can just kill the hungry program: it’s not part of the algorithm’s mathematical abstraction, but at least predictable. Usually, however, stranger things happen. One of the ways the computer pretends to have more memory than it actually does is by “swapping”: using the HDD instead of the RAM to store whatever is to be stored in memory. HDD is 10k times slower than RAM: when it’s used for memory too much, nothing crashes, but everything is suddenly very slow. We hear strange noises. The computer starts misbehaving. Random things crash because of the timing issues brought by the lack of speed.

Now we can allow ourselves to see this “lack of memory” in the aristotelian-lacanian light, as something that is material by being actively opposed to the (mathematical) form, not-reducible to it (if only to escape the attempt to inscribe the whole OS, other programs and the hardware into one big ad hoc mathematical structure making any mathematical study of the algorithms pretty much useless). I say “lacanian”, faithfully to Lacan (his Real was Aristotle’s matter), because this is indeed the very point where the subjectivity of computer in the lacanian sense is obvious: it lacks memory (desire) – it acts out (hysteria). If we consider how hackers use a similar problem, the buffer overflow, to do whatever they want to the computer, the analogy becomes rich enough.

The materiality of the neural network. In 1892, one W. E. Johnson described “symbolic calculus” as “an instrument for economizing the exertion of intelligence” (btw, Johnson is described by Wikipedia as “a famous procrastinator”). Far from enabling new types of intelligence by itself, the thing was to save on the wasted expenditure of the old ones. With this I want to introduce another dimension of the materiality of the computer: the one which I’ll describe from a paranoid-marxist perspective, following the Adorno’s belief in the truth of the exaggerations.

Neural network is an amazing shiny new thing, it economizes our exertion of intelligence all right, yet the weirdest part of it all is that we kinda have no idea how it works. We can describe the output (in our terms which we impose on it), and we can describe the inner structure (it’s all matrix multiplication), but there’s no translation between the output and the inner structure except for the one that is by running the neural network themselves. The neural network’s thinking, in general, lacks the conceptual content we’re so much used to, it doesn’t exactly distinguish the parts of bodies and stuff like that. It operates on a belated, not-yet-conceptual level. We can actually through pain identify some general things that it actually notices on the images and stuff like that, but only partially and constantly recognising that it’s we who’s pulling the vague ideas of the NN to this conceptual level.

To illustrate how the NN works there’s no better example than the notorious network which draws cats upon sketches of cats: http://affinelayer.com/pixsrv/index.html . Try it out, you can do it online. Now, what are the concepts with which the neural network thinks about cats? It’s… well, it knows an eye, but that’s more-or-less it. Everything else is more like a texture of a cat, in a very weird sense of a texture, the one available to us after we discovered the 3D rendering.

So there’s knowledge of things in the NN, yet it’s either not on the human level, or it’s somehow hidden. To explain this, Schopenhauer comes to mind: “an entirely pure and objective picture of things is not reached in the normal mind, because its power of perception at once becomes tired and inactive, as soon as this is not spurred on and set in motion by the will. For it has not enough energy to apprehend the world purely objectively from its own elasticity and without a purpose”. That is to say: NN understands cats exactly as much as it needs to (with the need imposed by its operators, most of the time the Capital), and no more.

Now the paranoid-marxist intervention: what is this lack of knowledge? Who has it? Is it not the proletariat? If we have a training set of thousands of pictures, on which a neural network is trained to recognize dozes of features, those features had to be tagged beforehand by some pure workers (most likely from India, am i right?), who themselves were likely constructed through a cheap-labor marketplace such as Amazon’s Mechanical Turk (the name familiar from Walter Benjamin), pretending to be machines to create a neural network which pretends to do the human work. Can’t we say, exaggerating, that the neural network is a labyrinth of numbers in which anyone looking for the human [labor] is to lose his track?

[man-i-dont-know]

BNHA Chapter 165: Thoughts and Spoilers

This chapter is lacking on action, so bombastic commentary won’t be present, sorry, but this chapter is interesting to think about, and I did do quite a bit of thinking. Anyway, getting into it (this chapter is a gold mine for background character faces, so I recommend going through it once just to see them).

This test is exactly like what we thought it would be, a test of personality. The teacher fears for her students, because they are going through the years that form who they will be, and right now they are turds. The high school students are here to set an example and to help settle the kids and make them more understanding, though the people suppose to be setting the example are not exactly.... ummm... role models? That is probably the best term, and we’ll get more into that later.

Bakugou immediately devises a plan, and I love seeing this, it really solidifies his character for me. In the past he has been described as a ball of instincts, reflexes and battle knowledge, and his standing in class also proves his intelligence. Due to his personality however, I came to the conclusion that he thinks like this: “What? Of course I got the answer right. Show my work? Well isn’t it obvious?” This kind of intelligence seems to sprout straight from the mind, but Bakugou’s plan showed that his thoughts are grounded in logic. He immediately realizes that they lost the initiative, and that there is a “boss” lurking within the crowd somewhere. This knowledge was probably gained from first hand experience of being the “boss,” but the fact that he understands and can verbalize this dynamic impressed me greatly. Knowing and verbalizing are two very different skills, and I assumed that Bakugou could not verbalize his intentions quite like that before. It is possible that this is proof of growth, that he is actually talking with comrades and setting down some base work (even though his ultimate plan is to humiliate the boss... he still has a ways to go). Though I personally believe that the boss is, pretty obviously, that weird side-part kid who has already dissed Bakugou. Bakugou is put on the side after the supposed boss says that violence won’t work and accurately guesses about his upbringing, stealing the advantage once again.

Inasa then tries, and he makes considerable progress compared to Bakugou. He starts with something safe, heroes, and works from there. His personality is much better for this type of thing (as the meat grinder guy says in his 100% necessary narration), and starts telling the kids what type of people they should be. This gets shot down too however, since the kid he was talking too pointed out that he wasn’t in any place to talk from either. This made me think some. Inasa took a good approach, no B.S. and just told them what a good person should do and two thoughts hit me. 1.) If Inasa admitted his mistake and continued to push the thought, would he have succeeded? Would humility work in this scenario or would the kids see that as completely destroying his credibility? And 2.) Was lecturing them in the first place a good idea? This could very well be showing that lecturing about something good with good intentions is still lecturing and no one really has any moral high ground, so a fundamentally flawed approach. Inasa apologizes for overstepping his bounds and he tags out (with a fiery flare).

Then we get a handful of panels that show... something. Bakugou wants to settle this with violence (shocker), but Todoroki stops him, and says that there is a better way. Bakugou claims this was how he was raised, but he remembers when he accidentally eavesdropped on Todoroki confessing to Deku about the abusive upbringing he had and the overwhelming hatred that Todoroki still carries. Bakugou stops, and lets Todoroki do it his way. This is improvement, this is consideration and empathy. Bakugou has impressed me twice this chapter, and his growth and improvement may appear small, but it is certainly there, he is growing and learning.

Endeavor is also growing in the stands slightly. He admits to All Might that he understands the difference between them as heroes, but in his words it shows that he also rejects the part of All Might that made him the Number One Hero, Endeavor rejects the so-called “crowd-pleasing,” because he wants to be the strongest. I have already shared my opinions on why All Might was ranked higher (a general feeling of security), but All Might took the conversation in an unexpected direction (at least it was nothing I predicted, though it makes sense). All Might states what made him want to be the symbol that he was, he spoke about wanting to be hope for the innocent and a warning (”warning,” is not aggressive) for criminals. He spoke about the sacrifices that he made for it, which Endeavor knows about Sir Nighteye, but he says it passively, with no meaning, for such a terrible guy, being respectful of the dead was surprising. All Might also shares some understanding, he knows the situation Endeavor is in and tells him this, “you don’t have to be the same type of symbol.” This struck me. I always wanted Deku to grow into something different than All Might, but I feared him falling into All Might’s legacy, but here is All Might, telling a man who hated him for years to be a different symbol. A different symbol was something I hadn’t imagined for anyone other than Deku, I suppose I imagined a symbol-less place until Deku matured. As much as everyone hates Endeavor, I see genuine potential from him. He is already growing and maturing and seeking advice, he won’t be any symbol of hope, but he certainly could become a symbol of strength. If he mellows out, becomes calm, confident, swift and determined, he could set people at ease, or at least ward off crime for a time. A good analogy would be this: Endeavor is a standing army, scary yes, but it would be comforting to know that it stands with you rather than against you. We might have a couple symbols before Deku takes the stage, and I am okay with that, plus, the fan art could be really cool. Blue background All Might, “Peace,” Red background Endeavor, “Strength,” some other primary or secondary color background hero, “some abstract idea.” It could be cool.

Unfortunately, Endeavor does not comprehend the word “chill,” and whips around when Todoroki steps up to bat and screams his support once more. Todoroki understands the generals of what you have to do to get people to trust you, but he can’t seem to execute it. He basically gives a character description of himself and the kids lose interest, or they are amazed by his total lack of social skills. Todoroki is forced to retire and try again later.

The next idea is brought up by Camie, and Bakugou agrees. Show off our quirks and show them who we are. This is a good take, “lead by example,” but those leading kinda don’t know restraint... so this could get rough. But once again, the kids steal the initiative. They activate their quirks as well, but only after a brief discussion that explains where all this confidence comes from. The live in a world where they hear all the criticisms of heroes all the time, and with the fall of the symbol of peace, the raise of the League of Villains, and several other social factors, to them, this generation of heroes can not be trusted or that they are unreliable, thus, they believe that they can be better. This is good in moderation, but it seems that the presence of this “boss” has jacked up their pride one hundred-fold. The boss probably took advantage of this social criticism of heroes to wreck havoc, meaning, the boss is a turd. The display of quirks by the high schoolers is the best way to show that they are competent and that their unease and pride are... unfounded? That seems a little harsh, maybe just the realization that they are safer than they believed will settle their spirits.

Well, that’s all. I said this my last post, but I am glad that this arc is right after the raid arc. It is a good change of pace and it looks more closely at the specifics and technicalities of what it means to be a hero instead of just punching villains. The only other comment that I want to make is this: I am curious as to what Camie’s quirk is, we haven’t seen her use it yet since last time we saw her do anything was actually Toga. So I am curious as to what it is, how well she can control it, and what her role will be in appeasing the children. Thank you for reading this and I hope you have a great day, and happy new year.

[logh-icebergs]

Episode 7: Iserlohn Taken!

May 14th, 796/487. Infiltrating Iserlohn fortress in the guise of a damaged Imperial ship, the Rosen Ritter swiftly overpower the control room. The quick thinking of one Imperial soldier temporarily locks them out of the fortress computer, forcing Yang to stall for time while Schenkopp and co. rush around Iserlohn kicking ass and taking names—names and computer passwords, I guess, since they unlock the system and allow Yang’s ship to dock. The Thor Hammer makes quick work of a large chunk of the Imperial fleet, although Oberstein flits away like the cockroach he is.

Technical Aside: Character Redraws

As I mentioned, when LoGH was released on DVD the episodes were remastered. By and large this involved evening out the colors, fixing the lighting when it was too washed out, sharpening lines, etc., and it’s beautifully done and deserves a lot of credit for making this show such an aesthetic joy to watch.

However. For reasons lost to the sands of time (at least, unknown to us) some scenes were entirely reanimated, primarily in the first and early second seasons. These redraws go beyond the touchups of other episodes—sometimes in ways that have little consequence (changing backgrounds, slightly different positioning of the characters in the scene), but sometimes in ways that significantly alter the emotions conveyed on the characters’ faces. This poses a problem for us, since the whole thesis of this project is that the animators of LoGH intentionally conveyed a ton of important information about emotions, thoughts, and relationships of the characters specifically via the details of the expressions and body language.

As an example of an inconsequential but unfortunate change, they made this random dude’s hair way more boring. Poor guy.

The original here conveys much more character though the body language.

Our policy will be to base our analysis off of the original animation when we believe there’s a real difference. In these cases we’ll give a heads up and include plenty of screenshots for those who don’t have access to the laserdiscs on which it was first released. Episode 7 is one of the handful of episodes that was actually about 90% redrawn, including a few key character moments, so in some of the discussion below I include both versions to illustrate the differences. In the future we may not even show the comparison, but just analyze the original animation. It’s annoying that the version on hidive is the redrawn version, yes, but these are the hurdles one must contend with in pursuit of true LoGH scholarship…

Believe it or not, changing poor Julian’s outfit and pose here is not the most egregious example of straightwashing in the redraws—we’ll come to that later in the season.

Ideals, Pragmatism, and Tea

Okay, with that out of the way, let’s get into the substance of the episode. One main theme that’s woven throughout the entire Iserlohn mission (dipping back into episode 6 as well) is Yang’s distaste for the abstract ideals that are commonly invoked as justification for the continuing war and destruction. We saw this a bit in his reactions to Trunicht’s speech in episode 3, and we see it again when he addresses the newly-formed 13th fleet:

(From episode 6.)

I love the tea speech. While at one level it’s humorous—silly Yang, so awkward and out of his depth giving a speech to thousands of people—it’s also a really pithy expression of Yang’s priorities. In two sentences Yang undermines the fundamental concept of this war: that they’re fighting for an ideal, for honor or love of their country or hatred of the empire. Circumstances have led the people in this fleet to find themselves facing a battle, and given that reality, the motivation he offers them for fighting is that living is preferable to death. And not just living, but living pleasurably. For Yang it’s drinking good tea that pops into his head, but it’s not a leap to substitute a more general idea of tangible, visceral experience of the world: being alive to do the things that make life enjoyable.

Yang believes that life is the sum of choices and experiences, and he hates the war not just because of the unnecessary death, but also because of the way it cuts off people’s choices and individual agency—his own, for example, and as he sees it, Julian’s.

Never mind that Julian claims to *want* to fight; in Yang’s view Julian’s agency is an illusion since it’s so shaped by societal forces. Hmm, projecting much, Yang? We’ll come back to this, of course. (From episode 6.)

Toward the end of this episode we see again how frustrated Yang gets with rigid adherence to ideals of honor at the expense of actual lives. We saw this in episode 1 when his commanding officer refused to abandon the already-defeated fourth fleet; here Admiral Seeckt of the Imperial Iserlohn fleet refuses Yang’s offer to let them withdraw, instead responding with haughty phrases about the honor and glory of soldiers. Yang’s reaction here is the single biggest difference between the original animation and the redraws, so I’ll show both here:

The redraw exaggerates Yang’s reaction in a way that feels inconsistent with his character. He is angry here, yes, but the composed, sad anger of the original fits him more than the seething, almost explosive rage of the redraw.

Also he is just so much more beautiful in the original, damn.

Yang’s hatred of the rhetoric of war is palpable here, and his reaction—to concentrate fire on the flagship—accomplishes the dual goals of allowing the rest of the fleet to go ahead and withdraw, and eliminating the Admiral whose attitude he found so harmful.

But despite hating the war and wanting it to end, Yang accepted this mission; and when Schenkopp grills him about it in episode 6 we get insight into his specific goals.

Yang’s pacifism is of a highly pragmatic flavor: As a historian he views cycles of war as inevitable and lacks the hubris/ambition to think that anything he does will change that in a lasting way. But the value he places on individual freedom and self-determination means that he sees full surrender to the autocratic government of the Empire as worth avoiding, and his hope in taking Iserlohn is that it might be the bargaining chip they need to conclude a peace treaty that would allow the Alliance government to remain independent.

His desire for peace is intimately tied in with his desire to leave the military and go back to the life he finds more enjoyable: drinking tea and studying history. And indeed when the mission succeeds, he initially attempts to do exactly that, going so far as to hand over a letter of resignation to Admiral Sitolet.

This is obviously a huge turning point for Yang. Nothing is actually stopping him from resigning here; it was his plan from the beginning of the mission and he has the power to do it. But Sitolet, who was his instructor back at the military academy so has known him for a long time, knows exactly how to play him. 

While Yang scorns the typical lofty ideals that his government puts forward to justify the continued death toll of the war, he believes deeply enough in the value of individual human lives that Sitolet’s guilt trip works on him. He can’t quite bring himself to put his own aspirations above the futures of the people in his fleet when faced with what amounts to a threat on their lives. Yang has served under other commanders and seen them, for example, advocate suicide attacks in order to play a game of attrition; Sitolet’s words are not abstract to him. While he urged his soldiers to fight so they don’t die, he himself feels the burden of fighting so that other people don’t die, so that other people have the choices he’s turning down himself.

I introduced Yang as a man of paradoxes, and we see that here: his belief in the ideals of freedom and self-determination pushing him to stay on this path he doesn’t feel suited for.

Oberstein

We already met Paul von Oberstein when he accosted Kircheis in episode 4. (In fact he’s been around lurking in the background since “My Conquest.”) Here I would just like to point out that Oberstein is set up as a clear parallel/foil to Yang. Remember in episode 1 when Yang is the only one to see through Reinhard’s plan but his commanding officers won’t listen until it’s too late? Oberstein plays exactly that role here, seeing right through Yang’s delay tactic of pretending to control the weapons of Iserlohn before they actually did, but Seeckt refuses to listen to his logic.

(Yang shots from episode 1.)

Like Yang, Oberstein is deeply pragmatic and keenly intelligent. His vibe here comes across like “what if Yang but no soul?” We’ll keep an eye on the parallels and contrasts between them as we get to know them better. (Well, get to know Yang better anyway; can anyone ever really be said to “know” the enigma that is Oberstein…?) 

The Rosen Ritter

In case you thought the Rosen Ritter were all sexy swagger and no action, here we get to see them actually doing their thing—hacking people to death with battle-axes. This fight sequence is beautifully choreographed, incredibly badass, and starkly brutal to watch. 

Yang may be sitting out in his flagship doing his best to craft a strategy that minimizes loss of life, but that doesn’t mean much to these soldiers who are sacrificed to his plan. Again, war at all levels of zoom.

Stray Tidbits

I can’t resist ranting a bit more about how much they change Yang when they redraw him. Fortunately it’s pretty rare—we won’t see redrawn!Yang much more until episode 39. But just...why...did they change the shape of his face and make his skin so red? Why? Original!Yang is so beautiful and sad and sleepy. 

This scene makes me crack up every time. Between this and the waitress scene in the last episode we’re amassing quite a “Blumhart waves awkwardly at random women” collection.

[sagebodisattva]

Idealism, Materialism and Solipsism

Alright so getting back onto the topic of solipsism, we will undergo an expansive examination concerning concepts surrounding idealism, materialism and solipsism. We will periodically cite wiki documents on the subject as just a general reference guide for the purposes of this particular disquisition. So, starting out, the wiki article states, quote:

“One of the most fundamental debates in philosophy concerns the "true” nature of the world—whether it is some ethereal plane of ideas, or a reality of atomic particles and energy. Materialism posits a real ‘world out there,’ as well as in and through us, that can be sensed—seen, heard, tasted, touched and felt, sometimes with prosthetic technologies corresponding to human sensing organs. (Materialists do not claim that human senses or even their prosthetics can, even when collected, sense the totality of the 'universe’; simply that what they collectively cannot sense cannot in any way be known to us.) Materialists do not find this a useful way of thinking about the ontology and ontogeny of ideas, but we might say that from a materialist perspective pushed to a logical extreme communicable to an idealist (an “Away Team” perspective), ideas are ultimately reducible to a physically communicated, organically, socially and environmentally embedded 'brain state’. While reflexive existence is not considered by materialists to be experienced on the atomic level, the individual’s physical and mental experiences are ultimately reducible to the unique tripartite combination of environmentally determined, genetically determined, and randomly determined interactions of firing neurons and atomic collisions.“ Unquote.

At one time, the true nature of the world may have been the most fundamental debates in philosophy, but it’s over. The question has been resolved, and now the debate should move on to broader concerns… like: what is the context of the fundamental debate about the true nature of the world? Yet even this postulation isn’t succinct, as it is a malformed proposition… due to a faulty presupposition taken as a default axiom. Of course the materialist wants to frame the argument to encompass a concern about the true nature of the world, as staging the discourse in this way provides a slanted bias towards materialism, as the focus of disputation is concerned with an inquiry into an object, in this case being a world, which already gets it wrong before the commencement of even one word of argumentation. We could just as easily say one of the most fundamental debates in philosophy concerns the true nature of a walnut. Or perhaps the true nature of tuna salad on rye. Nice try. But if you wanna propose the existence of a fundamental debate in philosophy you should at least get the subject of the dispute right. It isn’t a contention concerning the true nature of worlds, walnuts or tuna salads… the contention is concerned with the true nature of reality… Materialists don’t like to call it a question of reality, because if you call it a debate about the nature of reality, it frames the discussion more honestly, and begins the inquiry from more neutral grounds. But from this standpoint, you can’t even begin the debate about the true nature of reality before you have defined what reality actually is. This is why the materialist favors the advocacy of a world. Not only because this supposition gives him the advantage in discourse by biasing the rules of the discussion towards objectivity, but also because it offers a false dichotomy within the false assumption; that is, that the debate about the true nature of the world comes down to a choice of either an abstract ethereal plane, or a defined solid environment. Once again, this is the attempted advancement of an erroneous premise trying to pass itself off as a dictum of consensus. Let’s get it straight: this isn’t a question about the true nature of a location. To regard this as a foregone conclusion is an unwarranted, and possibly intentionally dishonest, assumption. Patience grasshopper. Don’t rush to get ahead of yourself. The properties of locations are of little concern to us, because locations are like walnuts or tuna salads. They are features of reality… and we are concerned with the fundamental nature of reality itself, not of the features of reality. If we can understand the true nature of reality we will know all about the composition of it’s features. But, as said before, we cannot discuss the possible true nature of reality before we have defined what reality is; and this is where materialism becomes defeated, for as much as the materialist would like to attribute reality to an object, he cannot deny that an object is just an inventory item within the perception of an experience, hence not something that is at all foundational. To identify what is foundational, one must simply discern that which gives all else it’s context, and in this case, it isn’t an object, or even the perception of an experience, as we must also continue to uphold the standard and establish what is the context of the perception of experience. This is where awareness can be established as the undeniable irrefutable fundamental default axiom of existence. And awareness isn’t a thing, nor is an extension or application of any thing. Awareness is no thing. A nothing. Pure potentiality with no identifications. The static suspended field of possibilities that gives rise to all things. And this is just a way of alluding to it with language, as the word "field” suggests some kind of spacial locality, but in truth, the truth of it is ineffable, as the essence is without quality or quantity. So much for reality being an object, huh? And I know you want to employ inferences and attributions in an attempt to respond to this dismissal, but philosophical integrity must be upheld, and the science, which is really just applied philosophy, finds it’s grounding in the truth, not in faith, superstition, deception or fiction… which is exactly what one is doing when they seek to employ inferences and attributions, reducing awareness to a mere byproduct of the phenomena found within the sensory perception experience. So do you see the difference here? It’s important to be able to discern between the evident and the imagined. There is pure awareness, the undeniable reality that needs no words, thoughts or narratives; completely free from any inferences or attributions, prefect and whole, unexpurgated in the immediacy of the all encompassing totality… and then there is delusion, the imagined reality that supplants pure awareness, which is a debatable chosen assumption that needs words, thoughts and narratives to support it, completely dependent on inferences and attributions, flawed and fragmented, transient and impermanent, divided in the latency or emergence of time relativity. One is raw truth, the other is a delusion that one chooses to assume as a truth. Materialism will implore you to consider awareness as abstract and objects as concrete, but this itself is an exercise of mental abstraction; as, it were actually the case, then materialism would have no need to implore you to consider it as such. If we understand that awareness is primary, then the source of projections becomes clear. The further you focus away from the center, the more you extend the attention into the realm of conceptualization; only, it isn’t actualized as it’s so often proclaimed to be represented. Pure awareness is what is actually most real, revealing the projections of external space and it’s inventory as the content of the abstract, projected and reflected back to the senses as a perceptual model. And this seems to be the major stumbling block that the materialist gets caught up on: perception. For the materialist, it is the be all and end all, which is why it would posit a real world out there, and maintain that anything that cannot be sensed cannot be known. It’s simple ignorance; as the truth shows that there isn’t any universe existing anywhere, so never mind the imagined inaccessible parts of a universe. This type of mindset is a debilitating delusion and it turns an existential explorer into an externalist; where now, everything and anything is attributed to extrinsic factors. Hence, the truth becomes reducible. The truth becomes a game of pointing. The truth becomes anything but the truth. This is how the truth of reality becomes an idea of physicality, communication, organics, sociality, environments, biology, physiology, elements, or genetics.

So, continuing on with the wiki document, it states, quote:

“As a correlative, the only thing that dreams and hallucinations prove are that some neurons can reorganize and 'clean house’ 'on break’ (often reforming around emergent, prominent or uncanny cultural themes), misfire, and malfunction. But for materialists, ideas have no primary reality as essences separate from our physical existence. From a materialist "Home Team” perspective, ideas are also social (rather than purely biological), and formed and transmitted and modified through the interactions between social organisms and their social and physical environments. This materialist perspective informs scientific methodology, insofar as that methodology assumes that humans have no access to omniscience and that therefore human knowledge is an ongoing, collective enterprise that is best produced via scientific and logical conventions adjusted specifically for material human capacities and limitations.“ Unquote.

This is basically a paragraph of junk, but again, more expressions of the same convoluted misconceptions. Explaining dreams or hallucinations as a result of fluctuating neurons is an attribution made through the workings of an ideological utility. And assumptions that ideas have no primary reality as essences separate from the physical existence are yet even more of the same thing: inferences and attributions. It’s true that there is no separation between the mental and the physical, but it isn’t true that the physical is the context of the mental, or that the physical and mental are 2 distinct equal aspects that function in a correlative relationship. No, it isn’t a dual. Let us not forget the resounding implications of non-duality. There is only one medium, if you could call it that, and this framework informs the reality; which is a much better consignment of information then any biased perspective that establishes a methodology based on it’s abstractions formulated through the very same perspective. And so, if this is the perspective approach of materialism, it isn’t peak efficiency… as any approach that isn’t rooted in the truth, even if very rational, very reasonable, very pragmatic and very scientific, will still fall short of it’s mark. Idealism holds true to many of the same values purportedly revered by materialism, but founds these standards on the absolute undeniable truth, as opposed to on an inaccurate conditional chosen assumption. There is a slight difference.

And concluding the wiki document, it states:

"Modern Idealists, on the other hand, believe that the mind and its thoughts are the only true things that exist. This is the reverse of what is sometimes called classical idealism or, somewhat confusingly, Platonic idealism due to the influence of Plato’s Theory of Forms, which were not products of our thinking. The material world is ephemeral, but a perfect triangle or "beauty” is eternal. Religious thinking tends to be some form of idealism, as God usually becomes the highest ideal (such as Neoplatonism). On this scale, solipsism can be classed as idealism. Thoughts and concepts are all that exist, and furthermore, only the solipsist’s own thoughts and consciousness exist. The so-called “reality” is nothing more than an idea that the solipsist has (perhaps unconsciously) created.“ Unquote.

I don’t think one should generalize and portray all modern idealist belief as being in some unified consensus. The mind and it’s thoughts are not the same, and there are those that believe in the mind alone, those that believe in the thoughts alone, and those that believe in a combination of both. And then there are those that believe in none of these, preferring to remain idealist neophytes and cling to esoteric concepts of god and divinity, which gets even further splintered down, as the definitions and interpretations of god also vary widely. The Plato concept about eternal forms, or the notion of subjectively realized universal archetypes that transcend any particular subject, are nice ideological novelty items, but these proposals are more ventures into the realm of abstractions, and hence can be mostly dispensed with as extraneous materials. There are many different styles and positions in idealism. You have classic idealism, pluralistic idealism, actual idealism, absolute idealism, objective idealism, transcendental idealism, subjective idealism, and Neoplatonism; but the one that most resembles pure solipsism is a form of idealism not listed in this enumeration and was forged into being by the Meta Sage himself. It’s called Meta Idealism, aka, Pure Potentialism. Meta Idealism is the indivisible truth, not a position or view, that awareness is the absolute foundation upon which all formulations of existential manifestation are established. This is the most pure form of solipsism. Perhaps even better described as meta solipsism; which is a non-position that is not really all that concerned with classifying what the only thing that can be known for sure to exist is, then it is with dropping attachments to false identifications with existential phenomena, in order to uncover an obscured oneness with true empty nature. This is the most pure and unadulterated form of solipsism. This is where idealism and solipsism become indistinguishable.

[anghraine]

unpopular 🔥opinion: fandom's characterization of cassian (because i know you have FEELINGS about this lol)

Hahaha, yeah. A few >_>

Probably my firmest “what? no” is the idea that he’d grown detached from either his own actions or the Rebellion in general, or was just going through the motions, or was losing faith, or was repeating rote statements that he no longer really believed, or was obeying without really thinking about what he was doing, or anything of the kind.

No. Cassian’s entire character revolves around his unfaltering conviction in the cause. What he does for it fucks him up, absolutely. We see him go dazed and blank more than once, and this after twenty years—he’s not temperamentally suited to war. (One of the ways he most contrasts with Jyn, whose trauma gets channelled into violence rather than leaving her shaken by it. It’s easy to believe that she was a natural soldier, which Cassian manifestly is not.) But that does not in any way diminish his dedication to the overall cause. If anything, it only deepens it. 

He believes in the Rebellion, in the cause of fighting the Empire, with his entire being. There’s—I think it was Diego Luna who said that the hope of freedom for the galaxy is everything for Cassian. It really is. Fighting for it doesn’t make him happy, because he hates the methods required by his role and feels trapped in that, but no one could believe in the virtue and necessity of liberation more fiercely.

Relatedly, his arc is not about blindly following orders. He’s not blindly following them at all (he knows perfectly well what he’s doing; that’s why it haunts him). He mentions following orders exactly once, and he never says that he was “just following orders”—only that it was a big deal for him to disobey them, yet he did anyway, which is a much more limited and fair statement.

His establishing character moment has absolutely nothing to do with orders: moral compromises are integral to his work, whether he’s told to make them(Galen) or chooses them independently(Tivik). That’s what his arc is about. “You can’t ever compromise personal morals or you’re as bad as them” is facile and something he rightly dismisses as an easy way out for those who won’t commit to the work and sacrifice of large-scale organizational effort when the stakes are tyranny and genocide. But even then, there have to be lines somewhere, and his development is about squaring the common good with the cost of specific actions.

(FWIW, I actually think that’s what he’s talking about when he tells Jyn that he disobeyed orders, and that it matters but she doesn’t understand. I don’t think Cassian cares that Jyn isn’t an obedient person in general, but he cares a whole lot that she won’t commit to systematic effort in which obedience and cohesion are necessary.)

I think for a lot of fandom, the Rebellion is bad for him, but I don’t see it that way. For Cassian, the Rebellion on the whole is a force for good. The specific role he fills is bad for him (though unfortunately, it’s where he can accomplish the most for the Rebellion, before open war). But the cause itself is his bread and water. Leaving the Rebellion would be vastly worse for him than anything they might ask him to do.

Also relatedly: I think Cassian’s pragmatism, self-control, intelligence, and eloquence make him seem more cerebral than he really is. At his core, Cassian is governed by his emotions. He has plenty of reasons behind fighting the Empire, but as he himself points out, the conviction he feels as an adult is fundamentally the same conviction that struck him as a six-year-old child and has fueled him for the rest of his life. It’s not a conclusion he reached through logic or any sort of systematic reasoning, but something he instinctively feels.

(In fandom terms: that’s why Cassian is a Gryffindor, though he can look superficially like a Slytherin or even Hufflepuff. He can seem like an Enneagram Six, but he’s actually a One. He mimics an ISTJ, but is really a closet INFJ.)

Likewise, there’s no real thought process that leads him to keep going after Jyn, even at risk to the mission. He feels the need to do it, so he does. It’s the same thing back in the beginning, with the blaster—Kay is right that there’s no earthly reason for him to let her keep it. Cassian himself is clearly annoyed over the whole thing, and has no actual rationale for himself or others. But the thing with Cassian is that, whatever he might tell himself, he doesn’t really need logical reasons. Something in him says to let her have it, so he does.

I’ve pointed it out quite a few times, but I think it’s important and overlooked—Cassian does not decide against shooting Galen in that pivotal moment. He can’t make himself do it. It’s not an intellectual decision but overpowering emotional imperative that he feels miserable and helpless about.

I think we really see that aspect of him with the paired luxury lines. I was talking with @ladytharen the other day about those, and one of the things we noticed was that—okay, both unfairly accuse the other of things that aren’t luxuries at all (anti-fascism, survival). But they don’t frame the luxuries in the same way. She says the luxury is the opportunity to form and act on opinions. He says the luxury is the capacity to not care, or to be able to limit the extent of it to personal convenience. For Jyn, luxury is about thought; for Cassian, it’s about emotion.

You can see that in their calls to action. Jyn has sat and reflected and when the time comes to make her case, she has a list of reasons, cerebral and emotional. Cassian takes a read of the room, decides it’s pointless, and ditches the whole thing to inspire his own sort of people. He doesn’t supply an argument for why he believes her; he just announces that he does, and his belief carries others with him. In a way, it’s like Jyn’s adoption of “rebellions are built on hope”; he doesn’t argue the point, he just informs her of it as an objective fact, and she’s influenced despite herself.

(WRT Galen’s message, it’s clear that he believed her all along; he very much wanted a reversal of his orders after he sent updated information post-Jedha. “I’m not the one you’ve got to convince” is a deflection, but it’s also—true. He doesn’t need to be convinced.)

…even more tangential, but I think it’s also part of the reason for the distinction in their speech. Cassian’s internal world is dominated by feeling and instinct, and it’s natural for his emotions to flow into language. That’s probably why he’s so good at his job—making people feel the inspiration that he himself does. Or the urgency, as with Tivik: but it’s fundamentally a vehicle for expressing emotion.

So, say, in the fight on Eadu, Jyn should be in a much stronger position as the wronged party; the other characters are very evidently on her side. But her usual choppy style is hobbled further by her overpowering emotion. She struggles to find the words, and the ones she does find are fumbling at best—like, the notorious stormtrooper line gets attention for being inconsiderate, but it also just doesn’t make sense as a response to Cassian saying that he disobeyed orders. You can see where it comes from, but it’s awkward and inappropriate (rhetorically; I’m not talking about morality). 

Cassian, though, only gets more talkative as he gets upset; and the angrier he is, the more powerfully he speaks. I think it’s where the otherwise-??? “you can’t talk your way out of this” comes from. Cassian isn’t really trying to talk his way out of it in the usual sense. Everything he says is entirely heartfelt, and by and large in direct response to what she says to him. But there is a reason it feels that way to Jyn. 

He’s able to get the upper hand (or something like it) in the argument, not by any diminishment of actual guilt, but simply because he’s so much better at articulating what he feels and where he’s coming from. So her frustration specifically attaches itself to his talking—it seems like he’s bullshitting his way out of trouble to her, while that’s nonsensical to him.

Aaaand it’s there in the hangar. Jyn has her sarcastic one-off, but when he’s all earnestness and loyalty and heart-eyes, she’s largely at a loss for words. Cassian has that whole (quite lovely!) everything-I-did-I-did-for-the-Rebellion speech, and meanwhile we see the emotion she feels in her face, her gulp, her smile, her body language as they draw together, but all she can say is the awkward “not used to people sticking around.” Cassian, though, immediately responds with the beautiful “welcome home.” 

Again in the shuttle: Jyn meanders through a speech that has some good phrases, some awkward ones (Saw’s sharpened stick), some near-cringeworthy (find a way to find them!). Cassian bypasses all of that for the much more powerful “make ten men feel like a hundred.” It’s even there on the beach, where Jyn is obviously full of emotion, but she doesn’t have words. She does express herself, but it’s physical: she’s the one who reaches for his hand, she strains to hold him tightly. Cassian, also tactile, significantly more injured, can’t help but speak. And, as ever, what springs to his tongue is exactly the right thing to say.

We can consider their expressions, too! They’ve both been afraid and determined through the mission, but in those final moments, resolve seems uppermost with Jyn, fear with Cassian. Her eyes are firmly open the whole time; Cassian squeezes his eyes shut until the last moment. It’s not any weakness of his; it’s just that, for all their deep similarities, Jyn is dominated by her head and Cassian by his heart.

(This has gone on and on and on, but it’s one of the things I find most interesting about them. Cassian is the more controlled, cautious, articulate, by-the-book, abstracted—all things we tend to associate with ‘the head.’ Jyn is reckless, impulsive, violent, defiant, individualistic—things we tend to associate with ‘the heart.’ But it’s at once the other way around and completely consistent.)

[owl-eyed-woman]

Attack on Titan Season 2 Episode Reviews - Episode 4 (Episode 29)

This week, it’s finally time for some pay-off. With the boring (but necessary details) set up last week, this episode can focus on tone, character and tension, giving its conflict all the development it needs to soar.  

After briefly re-establishing this episode’s major set piece as titans surround the tower, we flashback two hours before this battle begins. The first chunk of the episode focuses on giving context to this conflict and the character threads that will come into play. But more than this, by first placing us in the midst of a life-threatening struggle, our cognizance of this coming conflicts causes a potent feeling of anticipation and tension to pervade these flashback scenes.

In this calm moment before the storm, the 104th cadet corps finally have time to ponder the perplexing situation they’ve found themselves in and, more importantly, establish their understanding of their world and its mysteries. Despite being (ostensibly) safe, they are unable to rid themselves of the uneasiness caused by the day’s discoveries. Christa vocalises the question on everybody’s mind; if the wall is intact, where are the titans coming from?

Though we, the audience, have realised that humans within the wall are turning into titans, for realistic, believable writing, these characters need to come to this conclusion organically and earn this knowledge through sacrifice and toil.

Connie is the closest to understanding the truth behind the titans. In this moment of safety, Connie finally begins to process what exactly has happened to his hometown and, most importantly, his family. Recounting his experience, Connie postulates that, since there was no sign of violence, his family must have gotten out alive. Even as he asserts this to those around him, he can’t help but confess that the titan crushing his house reminded him of his mother.

Some part of Connie realises the horrifying truth of the matter but he is still unable to make the logical leap and fully comprehend its implications. He’s so close to grasping the truth that he can’t help but acknowledge the connection between the titan and his mother. But emotionally and intellectually, he is unable or perhaps unwilling to put the pieces together.

But maybe I’m reading too much into this situation. Ymir appears to think so as she starts raucously laughing at the suggestion that his mother is a titan and openly insults Connie for even considering it. It’s crude, it’s callous and it’s calculating. This reaction appears natural, but Ymir is a complicated character to say the least, and is doubtless concealing something. Is Ymir doing this as a kindness, as Reiner believes? Connie certainly forgets his troubles, as outrage replaces pensiveness.  Or, rather, is she concealing something, distracting Connie so he won’t connect the dots? I honestly don’t know at this point. While I want to believe this is a selfless act, Ymir’s motivations and feelings are so well obscured, either seem possible.

Finally, we learn something concrete about Ymir’s identity and what she might be hiding (and there’s more to come at the end of the episode too!) Whilst confronting Ymir about her treatment of Connie, Ymir casually passes Reiner a can of food. As he inspects it, Reiner realises that, while he doesn’t recognise the language on the can, Ymir can read it. Does this mean that Ymir is from outside of the wall?  

Before we can ponder this any further, we’re back to the present and the titans are here and very hungry. Now it’s time for the armed scouts to jump into battle and get into some good ol’ fashioned titan slaying. While the armed scouts hold off the titans outside, our 104th cadet corps are given a daunting task; as they are useless without their ODM gear, they must ensure that no titans get into the tower by barricading the doors and defending themselves to the best of their abilities.

From this point onwards, AOT really hones in on the horror aspects of its premise, as the next chunk of the episode becomes a tight little collection of horror set-pieces. The conceit itself is classic horror; a small group of people trapped in an enclosed space where they must contend with quintessential human fears, specifically their own disempowerment, isolation and vulnerability. Essential to this horror dynamic is the suffocating feeling that any success is meaningless and momentary, as they are ultimately powerless against the force that seeks to destroy them.

This genre shift is accentuated by AOT’s measured use of cinematic language and pacing. As Reiner rushes ahead to investigate if a titan has entered the building, separating from the group, the music shifts from more typical action fare to foreboding silence. As he opens the door, rather than immediately revealing the room, the camera remains on Reiner’s face, heightening the suspense by depriving the audience of clear information as to the whereabouts of the threat. While the next shot confirms the titan’s presence, dread only increases as its sinister and uncanny smile, showing off his teeth and gums, suggests a type of disturbing excitement about what is coming next. The heretofore slow pace suddenly cuts off, as the titan lunges just as Reiner closes the door. As Reiner is about to be crushed in the titan’s grasp, time slows down, lingering on his thoughts and emotions as he confronts his death, selling to the audience that this could very well be his end.  

Luckily, Reiner dodges at the last moment. Through quick-thinking and co-operation, they are able to defeat the titan, crushing it with a cannon. However, a door is destroyed in the process, decreasing the number of barriers that keep them and the titans separate. Considering this episode’s structure more generally though, its overarching conflict is characterised by this type of war of attrition, where each small victory prolongs their survival while simultaneously weakening them and ultimately bringing their inevitable doom ever closer. To survive in the moment, something of use must be sacrificed, such as a weapon or a door, further disempowering them as a whole and heightening the fear and tension.

At this point, everything is going as well as it possibly could in such a dire situation; the scouts have killed off most of the titans and the door has been successfully barricaded. Just as they begin to feel complacent, the beast titan catapults rocks at the tower, killing two soldiers, and sets another horde of titans on the tower. The power dynamic shifts in the titan’s favour, as the humans start to lose this war of attrition and the end seems nigh.  

In this final part of the episode, with our characters facing the prospect of their own death, the over-arching theme of this episode becomes startlingly apparent: death through heroic sacrifice. In war stories, this type of death is frequently idealised as perhaps the most noble and selfless way to go. By contrast, AOT interrogates this idea, challenging any character who idealises such a fate.

Take Reiner: after seeing someone sacrifice their life to save his own as a child, it’s clear that he views it as his duty to do the same. For Reiner, a true soldier is always ready to die in the place of another. With this mindset, he unflinchingly charges ahead, putting his life on the line for those around him.

While his actions are undeniably brave, in the context of these scenes this impulse is either entirely unnecessary or ultimately unhelpful. Without any hesitation, Reiner was prepared to hurl a titan and himself along with it out of a window. Only Connie’s relatively simple solution is able to stop him. Reiner is practically blinded by his devotion to the ideal of sacrificing himself for others, complicating situations and missing other, less deadly solutions. In the end, what ultimately ensures his friends’ survival is not Reiner’s willingness to sacrifice himself unnecessarily, but rather teamwork, communication and ingenuity.  

Christa desires a heroic death as well, and is outright criticised by Ymir because of it. Christa has always been one of the most selfless characters in the show, but this episode fascinatingly complicates this, challenging our perception of Christa, and perhaps Christa’s understanding of herself. Dying for others appears to be, on the surface, an inherently selfless act – I mean, you literally sacrifice yourself for the good of others. What’s more selfless than that? However, in Christa’s case, it’s important to consider not just the act itself, but rather the motivations behind it. Examining these underlying motivations, AOT shows us how even ostensibly altruistic or selfless actions can hide a selfish, self-serving core.

Fundamentally, Christa is drawn to this type of death because she wishes to be seen as a hero. Yes, heroically sacrificing herself may save lives, but this is not the impetus behind this act for her. The fact that she might save lives through her sacrifice is, ultimately, incidental to her motivation, rather than central. Instead, Christa places herself at the centre of this act of sacrifice, with anyone she might aid functioning primarily as tool to give herself meaning. While heroic sacrifice as an ideal is perceived as inherently selfless, through Christa, we see here how easily this ideal is corrupted by selfish motivations and self-serving desires.

Finally, through Gelgar’s death, the show sees a heroic sacrifice through to its inevitable conclusion and shows us the suffering and emptiness at its core. After hours of killing titans, heroically holding them off, Gelgar is finally faced with the prospect of his own death. In this moment, his doesn’t feel pride that he will die a ‘noble’ death; instead, he is filled with remorse that he couldn’t have one last drink. For Gelgar, the abstract ideal of a heroic sacrifice and the supposed honour that comes with it is ultimately worthless compared to the small but tangible pleasures that we find in life. What more is a heroic sacrifice than just another way to die horribly?

There is no reprieve from the cruelty of death for Gelgar. Seeing the bottle of alcohol he discarded earlier, he shakily goes for a drink, hoping to be sated in his last moments. No such comfort comes though, as the alcohol was used up earlier to treat Reiner’s minor injury – a perfect metaphor for the emptiness of such a death. As he is grabbed by a titan, Gelgar petulantly laments the cruelty of this world before he slams his head against a wall and is unceremoniously knocked out – he doesn’t even to get to go out with dignity. Through Gelgar’s end, AOT strips away any pretence of nobility or heroism in death and shows it for what it truly is – unfair, unhappy and cruel.

In every possible way, this episode tears down the ideal of heroically sacrificing your life for others. This could have so easily been an uncomplicated episode, honouring the deaths of noble soldiers. Instead, this episode challenges this idea, refusing both the characters and the viewer any easy empowerment and instead acknowledging the dark, unpalatable reality of all death, no matter how noble it may seem. In the end, AOT shows us that heroic sacrifice isn’t noble or selfless or meaningful; it’s foolhardy, it’s selfish and it’s ultimately empty.

In the face of all this, with the senior soldiers dead and the cadets almost certainly doomed, Ymir takes action. Taking Connie’s knife, she says that she going to fight. Unlike Christa or Reiner though, Ymir is not planning to die; she is fighting so they can live.

Before she takes the plunge, Ymir entreats Christa to remember their promise and live a life she can be proud of as the sun rises gloriously behind them – it’s a sincere, hopeful moment between Christa and Ymir in a dark, dark episode. Then, jumping off the tower, we finally discover what Ymir has been hiding all this time, as she cuts her hand and begins to transform into a titan…

AND then, the episode ends because of course it does. Now that’s a cliff-hanger!

Overall, this was a super compelling episode on all levels. It contains tense scenes, thrilling action and some genuinely thought-provoking ideas. This is AOT at its best.

[perspectivepodcast]

[Transcript] Side A: Tea

When I speak about my preference for tea with coffee lovers, most of the time the reason they offer for not really liking tea is that it’s just something you drink in the hospital, or when you’re sick, to warm yourself up and stay hydrated.

Actually, I recently read an article on Nature entitled: ‘Understanding the role of bitter taste perception in coffee, tea and alcohol consumption through Mendelian randomization’. This is an abridged version of the article’s abstract: ‘Consumption of coffee, tea and alcohol might be shaped by individual differences in bitter taste perception […]. Our results reveal that bitter perception is causally associated with intake of coffee, tea and alcohol, suggesting a role of bitter taste in the development of bitter beverage consumption.’

So basically, our perception of bitter taste is genetic, and your preference for tea or coffee depends on that.

Isn’t it interesting that bitter taste can taste differently for different people? Even more interesting, for me, is how we can often easily apply these mostly anatomic conclusions to more metaphoric contexts. I’m sure that perception of bitterness doesn’t only vary from person to person at a physical level, for example. But it’s true: coffee was just always too bitter for me.

 What I think about when I think about tea, is that which my grandmother used to make for me. I have no idea how she made it. I mean, it was just the simplest thing: black tea with lemon and sugar. Maybe it was the water she used, or that she knew how much time to leave the tea in infusion. My theory, however, is that her secret was the lemon. Her very special dosage of lemon drops was what made it. It really was nothing special, you know: she used common teabags, not infused tealeaves. Maybe it was just the fact that I absorbed that taste when I was a child, that I associated that taste so much with winter afternoons at my grandparents’ place, with the design on the sugar bowl, with the round brown table, with the smells and rituals of my childhood.

The fact is that I was never able to recreate the same tea she used to make. It’s one of those tastes that I will probably never taste again. Just like the bean soup she used to make.

I’m not really a fan of living in the past, but as much as I believe that in life at some point you need to move on and grow out of the stuff that holds you back, I also believe that it’s important to pay respect to that melancholic sting the memory of something lost will always give you. So in some way, every time I drink tea, I’m also, somehow, paying my respects to the memory of the taste of tea that I have lost.

 The main reason why I drink tea, though, is that it’s warm. In the winter all my body heat concentrates in my guts, and my feet and hands simply aren’t there most of the time. So tea helps me feel my hands again, and it warms me up inside. It’s more than just physical heat. It’s also comfort. Hot water bottles have the same effect on me.

Speaking about comfort, however, I believe that the true nature of tea is just to be an excuse for cookies. And there are very few things on this planet that I love more than cookies. You can’t eat cookies with coffee. That’s why coffee is useless in my mind.

I always thought that Cookie would be a really good name for a cat, or a dog. In general, I think that you should give pets names of food. Although, it’s better not to call your dog anything that would sound weird when shouted in the middle of the street, like Whisky, or Tequila. But if your cat never leaves the house, you can call it Scotch or Gin without a problem.

It’s funny how, now that I think of it, so many useless, forgotten, and yet fundamental words were spoken over cups of tea.

Some teas remind me of certain people. This tea I tasted thanks to this friend, this tea is made with flowers that have the same name of another friend, and so on.

 At a certain time of my life, I noticed I wasn’t drinking as much tea as I was used to because in the room I was living in I didn’t have a desk. I didn’t have anywhere to put the mug on without risking to spill some of the tea, so I just automatically, almost unconsciously stopped making myself tea. Now that I think of it, this apparently logical connection in my mind between a mug of tea and a desk says a lot about my tea drinking habits. Maybe in my mind drinking tea without a stable surface next to me is just inconceivable. Tea has to do with time, with having time, with taking the time. It has the taste of a pause. So it just cannot be associated with unstable surfaces or me worrying about spilling the tea on the bedsheets. Tea means that I am giving myself permission to take a break from worrying. Sure, I might drink tea also when I’m working, or in general when I’m concentrated in doing something that is not necessarily just relaxing. But working and worrying are two very different things. You can work and not be worried. You can worry and that can be a job in itself. You can work and be worried at the same time: probably about your work.

What I want to say, is that I think I have come to the conclusion that drinking tea requires of me a certain degree of concentration that does not interfere with the concentration needed to work, but that I inherently and apparently also subconsciously refuse to be coupled with the concentration required for worrying.

 When I say that drinking tea requires concentration, I’m not speaking metaphorically. You need to be careful. Don’t believe me? Okay, let’s make some examples. I told you that tea in my opinion fundamentally was invented as an excuse for eating cookies along with it. Have you ever tried dunking a cookie in tea? If you did, you probably realized that it’s kind of an art. In the 2011 movie The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, directed by John Madden, there’s a scene in which wonderful Dame Judi Dench’s character, Evelyn, explains what they use English Breakfast tea for in Britain: ‘We dunk biscuits into it’, she says.

(Side note: of course, this is a British woman we’re talking about, so she must eat biscuits, she just can’t eat cookies with tea. Did you know that actually the word ‘biscuit’ comes from the Medieval French ‘bis + cuit’, meaning quite literally ‘cooked twice’? In Italian we still use the Latin adverb ‘bis’, which means ‘twice’, to ask for an encore, or also that’s what we call a second helping, or a pair of something.)

Anyway, we were talking about Judi Dench and biscuits. The man she is talking to in the scene asks her to explain what dunking a biscuit means, and she memorably replies: ‘[It] means lowering the biscuit into the tea and letting it soak in there and trying to calculate the exact moment before the biscuit dissolves, when you whip it up into your mouth and enjoy the blissful union of biscuits and tea combined. It’s more relaxing than it sounds.’

That’s exactly what I mean when I say that dunking cookies, or biscuits, in tea is kind of an art.

 Another thing that is kind of an art is squeezing the tea out of the teabag as you take it out of the mug, in order not to spill everything around. You need to take the little thread at the end of the teabag in one hand, and the teaspoon in the other: you place the soaked teabag on the teaspoon, and then you pull delicately the thread over the teaspoon, under and then around the teabag, squeezing as much and as many times as is necessary to make the tea leak away. It isn’t as easy as it seems, because if you pull the thread too strongly, the teabag will just slip away from the teaspoon, and normally when it happens it ends up splashing inside the mug again and spilling the tea all around.

So you see? This is what I meant when I said that you need to be careful with tea.

But that’s actually not all that I meant. You need to be careful also because boiling tea is not a nice thing to find yourself soaked in. Cookies can take it wonderfully, but human skin is not really meant to be dunk into tea the same way a biscuit is. Once, years ago, I had just poured the boiling water in the mug, and I think my body didn’t really understand how much space it was actually occupying because instead of sitting down like a normal person on the chair in front of the table my mug was peacefully resting on, I did something with my arm and I spilled the whole content of the mug on my left thigh and my left forearm. To this day, after years, you can still see the marks of that burn on my skin quite clearly.

 But I like that you need to be careful with tea. I like that tea gently forces you to pay attention.

In Nora Ephron’s 1998 classic You’ve Got M@il, Tom Hanks, aka Joe Fox, brilliantly observed that ‘the whole purpose of places like Starbucks is for people with no decision-making ability whatsoever to make six decisions just to buy one cup of coffee. Short, tall, light, dark, caf, decaf, low-fat, non-fat, etc. So people who don't know what the hell they're doing or who on earth they are can, for only $2.95, get not just a cup of coffee but an absolutely defining sense of self’. Well, if Starbucks’ purpose is to offer an absolutely defining sense of self to people with no decision-making ability whatsoever, tea in my opinion offers people who worry too much the chance to not only worry only about very small and practical things, but also the redeeming satisfaction that comes from concentrating on a task which is very democratically achievable, but that at the same time is somehow closer to caring, to art. Tea is basically telling you: you can have the comfort of warmth, but also the comfort of having been able to do this one thing neatly, without spilling, without burning yourself, without letting the cookie fall into the mug. And even if you did, you pursued the dream of perfection: you invested thirty-seven seconds of your time calculating ‘the exact moment before the biscuit dissolves’. In Zach Helm’s sweet 2007 movie, Mr. Magorium wisely declared that ‘thirty-seven seconds well used is a lifetime.’ Well, tea gives you the chance to see that well used time can also be that spent being careful about, paying attention to something very small. Who cares if you actually do spill some of the tea.

 In Chris Cleave’s novel The Other Hand (which was published with the title Little Bee for American and Canadian readers), there is this scene in which the main character, Little Bee, upon arriving in Britain and being sent to an immigration detention center, tastes tea for the first time. This is what Cleave writes through her voice: “When they put me in the immigration detention center, they gave me a brown blanket and a white plastic cup of tea. And when I tasted it, all I wanted to do was to get back into the boat and go home again, to my country. Tea is the taste of my land: it is bitter and warm, strong, and sharp with memory. It tastes of longing. It tastes of the distance between where you are and where you come from. Also it vanishes—the taste of it vanishes from your tongue while your lips are still hot from the cup. It disappears, like plantations stretching up into the mist. I have heard that your country drinks more tea than any other. How sad that must make you—like children who long for absent mothers. I am sorry.”

Once, I read somewhere that the measure of the ease with which you live your life is the distance between the place you are in and the place you were born in. I could never find the article I read this theory on again, and I still don’t know if I believe this, but it certainly is a thought that I could never really release from my mind.

What I do believe is that Cleave’s words are in my opinion the most beautiful I have ever read, written about tea.

 I don’t know what it is about tea that makes it so easily associated with contemplation, with wistfulness, with rainy days.

For me, tea simply creates a special moment of astral coincidence in which absorption and rest are perfectly aligned. You are there, but you can be there without struggle.

A long time ago, when I needed to write my thoughts down because I felt that speaking them aloud, or Zeus forbid sharing them with somebody else, would mean indulging a part of myself that I was trying to forget existed, I remember writing on this particular day. I had just returned to a place that did not promise me any happiness, and on that day, I had spent the whole day taking care of the space around me. I remember writing down a list of the things I had done to make the place nice: the luggage was unpacked, the desk was tidy, the house was clean. I didn’t have much money back then and even buying a bunch of flowers meant I should buy less food. But I needed those flowers more than I needed food. I remember that in my list I added that the flowers were sitting beautifully in their vase in front of me, and that next to them was my cup of vanilla tea, with just a drop of milk in it. I found that diary entry again: the flowers were twenty pink roses.

The roses gave color; the tea gave warmth. Together, was it just comfort or was it life that they offered? I don’t think that matters so much. I think that what matters is that I was grateful to every single bunch of flowers and every single cup of tea that kept me warm and kept me company during those times. Because if every now and then I could feel the unexplainable certainty that things could have been worse, that I was loved and that I wasn’t so empty after all, it was also thanks to the moments when I could just stop and look at my flowers while sipping my tea. So you see, sometimes it’s even okay to drink tea without cookies.

[clarenceomoore]

Voices in AI – Episode 84: A Conversation with David Cox

[voices_in_ai_byline]

About this Episode

Episode 84 of Voices in AI features host Byron Reese and David Cox discuss classifications of AI, and how the research has been evolving and growing

Listen to this one-hour episode or read the full transcript at www.VoicesinAI.com

Transcript Excerpt

Byron Reese: This is Voices in AI, brought to you by GigaOm and I’m Byron Reese. I’m so excited about today’s show. Today we have David Cox. He is the Director of the MIT IBM Watson AI Lab, which is part of IBM Research. Before that he spent 11 years teaching at Harvard, interestingly in the Life Sciences. He holds an AB degree from Harvard in Biology and Psychology, and he holds a PhD in Neuroscience from MIT. Welcome to the show David!

David Cox: Thanks. It’s a great pleasure to be here.

I always like to start with my Rorschach question which is, “What is intelligence and why is Artificial Intelligence artificial?” And you’re a neuroscientist and a psychologist and a biologist, so how do you think of intelligence?

That’s a great question. I think we don’t necessarily need to have just one definition. I think people get hung up on the words, but at the end of the day, what makes us intelligent, what makes other organisms on this planet intelligent is the ability to absorb information about the environment, to build models of what’s going to happen next, to predict and then to make actions that help achieve whatever goal you’re trying to achieve. And when you look at it that way that’s a pretty broad definition.

Some people are purists and they want to say this is AI, but this other thing is just statistics or regression or if-then-else loops. At the end of the day, what we’re about is we’re trying to make machines that can make decisions the way we do and sometimes our decisions are very complicated. Sometimes our decisions are less complicated, but it really is about how do we model the world, how do we take actions that really drive us forward?

It’s funny, the AI word too. I’m a recovering academic as you said. I was at Harvard for many years and I think as a field, we were really uncomfortable with the term ‘AI.’ so, we desperately wanted to call it anything else. In 2017 and before we wanted to call it ‘machine learning’ or we wanted to call it ‘deep learning’ [to] be more specific. But in 2018 for whatever reason, we all just gave up and we just embraced this term ‘AI.’ In some ways I think it’s healthy. But when I joined IBM I was actually really pleasantly surprised by some framing that the company had done.

IBM does this thing called the Global Technology Outlook or GTO which happens every year and the company tries to collectively figure out—research plays a very big part of this—we try to figure out ‘What does the future look like?’ And they came up with this framing that I really like for AI. They did something extremely simple. They just put some adjectives in front of AI and I think it clarifies the debate a lot.

So basically, what we have today like deep learning, machine learning, tremendously powerful technologies are going to disrupt a lot of things. We call those Narrow AI and I think that narrow framing really calls attention to the ways in which even if it’s powerful, it’s fundamentally limited. And then on the other end of the spectrum we have General AI.  This is a term that’s been around for a long time, this idea of systems that can decide what they want to do for themselves that are broadly autonomous and that’s fine. Those are really interesting discussions to have but we’re not there as a field yet.

In the middle and I think this is really where the interesting stroke is, there’s this notion we have a Broad AI and I think that’s really where the stakes are today. How do we have systems that are able to go beyond what we have that’s narrow without necessarily getting hung up on all these notions of what ‘General Intelligence’ might be. So things like having systems that are that are interpretable, having systems that can work with different kinds of data that can integrate knowledge from other sources, that’s sort of the domain of Broad AI. Broad Intelligence is really what the lab I lead is all about.

There’s a lot in there and I agree with you. I’m not really that interested in that low end and what’s the lowest bar in AI. What makes the question interesting to me is really the mechanism by which we are intelligent, whatever that is, and does that intelligence require a mechanistic reductionist view of the world? In other words, is that something that you believe we’re going to be able to duplicate either… in terms of its function, or are we going to be able to build machines that are as versatile as a human in intelligence, and creative and would have emotions and all of the rest, or is that an open question?

I have no doubt that we’re going to eventually, as a human race be able to figure out how to build intelligent systems that are just as intelligent as we are. I think in some of these things, we tend to think about how we’re different from other kinds of intelligences on Earth. We do things like… there was a period of time where we wanted to distinguish ourselves from the animals and we thought of reason, the ability to reason and do things like mathematics and abstract logic was what was uniquely human about us.

And then, computers came along and all of a sudden, computers can actually do some of those things better than we can even in arithmetic and solving complex logic problems or math problems. Then we move towards thinking that maybe it’s emotion. Maybe emotion is what makes us uniquely human and rational. It was a kind of narcissism I think to our own view which is understandable and justifiable. How are we special in this world?

But I think in many ways we’re going to end up having systems that do have something like emotion. Even you look at reinforcement learning—those systems have a notion of reward. I don’t think it’s such a far reach to think maybe we’ll even in a sci-fi world have machines that have senses of pleasure and hopes and ambitions and things like that.

At the end of day, our brains are computers. I think that’s sometimes a controversial statement but it’s one that I think is well-grounded. It’s a very sophisticated computer. It happens to be made out of biological materials. But at the end of the day, it’s a tremendously efficient, tremendously powerful, tremendously parallel nanoscale biological computer. These are like biological nanotechnology. And to the extent that it is a computer and to think to the extent that we can agree on that, Computer Science gives us equivalencies. We can build a computer with different hardware. We don’t have to emulate the hardware. We don’t have to slavishly copy the brain, but it is sort of a given that will eventually be able to do everything the brain does in a computer. Now of course all that’s all farther off, I think. Those are not the stakes—those aren’t the battlefronts that we’re working on today. But I think the sky’s the limit in terms of where AI can go.

You mentioned Narrow and General AI, and this classification you’re putting in between them is broad, and I have an opinion and I’m curious of what you think. At least with regards to Narrow and General they are not on a continuum. They’re actually unrelated technologies. Would you agree with that or not?

Would you say like that a narrow (AI) gets a little better then a little better, a little better, a little better, a little better, then, ta-da! One day it can compose a Hamilton, or do you think that they may be completely unrelated? That this model of, ‘Hey let’s take a lot of data about the past and let’s study it very carefully to learn to do one thing’ is very different than whatever General Intelligence is going to be.

There’s this idea that if you want to go to the moon, one way to go to the moon—to get closer to the moon—is to climb the mountain.

Right. Exactly.

And you’ll get closer, but you’re not on the right path. And, maybe you’d be better off on top of a building or a little rocket and maybe go as high as the tree or as high as the mountain, but it’ll get you where you need to go. I do think there is a strong flavor of that with today’s AI.

And in today’s AI, if we’re plain about things, is deep learning. This model… what’s really been successful in deep learning is supervised learning. We train a model to do every part of seeing based on classifying objects and you classify a lot – many images, you have lots of training data and you build a statistical model. And that’s everything the model has ever seen. It has to learn from those images and from that task.

And we’re starting to see that actually the solutions you get—again, they are tremendously useful, but they do have a little bit of that quality of climbing a tree or climbing a mountain. There’s a bunch of recent work suggesting… basically they’re looking at texture, so a lot of solution for supervision is looking at the rough texture.

There are also some wonderful examples where you take a captioning system—a system can take an image and produce a caption. You can produce wonderful captions in cases where the images look like the ones it was trained on, but you show it anything just a little bit weird like an airplane that’s about to crash or a family fleeing their home on a flooding beach and it’ll produce things like an airplane is on the tarmac at an airport or a family is standing on a beach. It’s like they kind of missed the point, like it was able to do something because it learned correlations between the inputs it was given and the outputs that we asked it for, but it didn’t have a deep understanding. And I think that’s the crux of what you’re getting at and I agree at least in part.

So with Broad, the way you’re thinking of it, it sounds to me just from the few words you said, it’s an incremental improvement over Narrow. It’s not a junior version of General AI. Would you agree with that? You’re basically taking techniques we have and just doing them bigger and more expansively and smarter and better, or is that not the case?

No. When we think about Broad AI, we really are thinking about a little bit ‘press the reset button, don’t throw away things that work.’ Deep learning is a set of tools which is tremendously powerful, and we’d be kind of foolish to throw them away. But when we think about Broad AI, what we’re really getting at is how do we start to make contact with that deep structure in the world… like commonsense.

We have all kinds of common sense. When I look at a scene I look at the desk in front of me, I didn’t learn to do tasks that have to do with the desk in front of me by lots and lots of labeled examples or even many, many trials in a reinforcement learning kind of setup. I know things about the world – simple things. And things we take for granted like I know that my desk is probably made of wood and I know that wood is a solid, and solids can’t pass through other solids. And I know that it’s probably flat, and if I put my hand out I would be able to orient it in a position that would be appropriate to hover above it…

There are all these affordances and all this super simple commonsense stuff that you don’t get when you just do brute force statistical learning. When we think about Broad AI, we’re really thinking about is ‘How do we infuse that knowledge, that understanding and that commonsense?’ And one area that we’re excited about and that we’re working on here at the MIT IBM Lab is this idea of neuro-symbolic hybrids.

So again, this is in the spirit of ‘don’t throw away neural-networks.’ They’re wonderful in extracting certain kinds of statistical structure from the world – convolutional neural network does wonderful job of extracting information from an image. LSDMs and recurrent neural networks do a wonderful job of extracting structure from natural language, but building in symbolic systems as first-class citizens in a hybrid system that combines those all together.

Some of the work we’re doing now is building systems where we use neural networks to extract structure from these noisy, messy inputs of vision and different modalities but then actually having symbolic AI systems. Symbolic AI systems have been around basically contemporaneous with neural networks. They’ve been ‘in the wings’ all this time. Neural networks deep learning is in any way… everyone knows this is a rebrand of the neural networks from the 1980s that are suddenly powerful again. They’re powerful for the first time because we have enough data and we have enough compute.

I think in many ways a lot of the symbolic ideas, sort of logical operations, planning, things like that. They’re also very powerful techniques, but they haven’t really been able to shine yet partly because they’ve been waiting for something—just the way that neural networks were waiting for compute and data to come along. I think in many ways some of these symbolic techniques have been waiting for neural networks to come along—because neural networks can kind of bridge that [gap] from the messiness of the signals coming in to this sort of symbolic regime where we can start to actually work. One of things we’re really excited about is building these systems that can bridge across that gap.

Listen to this one-hour episode or read the full transcript at www.VoicesinAI.com

[voices_in_ai_link_back]

Byron explores issues around artificial intelligence and conscious computers in his new book The Fourth Age: Smart Robots, Conscious Computers, and the Future of Humanity.

[babbleuk]

Voices in AI – Episode 84: A Conversation with David Cox

[voices_in_ai_byline]

About this Episode

Episode 84 of Voices in AI features host Byron Reese and David Cox discuss classifications of AI, and how the research has been evolving and growing

Listen to this one-hour episode or read the full transcript at www.VoicesinAI.com

Transcript Excerpt

Byron Reese: This is Voices in AI, brought to you by GigaOm and I’m Byron Reese. I’m so excited about today’s show. Today we have David Cox. He is the Director of the MIT IBM Watson AI Lab, which is part of IBM Research. Before that he spent 11 years teaching at Harvard, interestingly in the Life Sciences. He holds an AB degree from Harvard in Biology and Psychology, and he holds a PhD in Neuroscience from MIT. Welcome to the show David!

David Cox: Thanks. It’s a great pleasure to be here.

I always like to start with my Rorschach question which is, “What is intelligence and why is Artificial Intelligence artificial?” And you’re a neuroscientist and a psychologist and a biologist, so how do you think of intelligence?

That’s a great question. I think we don’t necessarily need to have just one definition. I think people get hung up on the words, but at the end of the day, what makes us intelligent, what makes other organisms on this planet intelligent is the ability to absorb information about the environment, to build models of what’s going to happen next, to predict and then to make actions that help achieve whatever goal you’re trying to achieve. And when you look at it that way that’s a pretty broad definition.

Some people are purists and they want to say this is AI, but this other thing is just statistics or regression or if-then-else loops. At the end of the day, what we’re about is we’re trying to make machines that can make decisions the way we do and sometimes our decisions are very complicated. Sometimes our decisions are less complicated, but it really is about how do we model the world, how do we take actions that really drive us forward?

It’s funny, the AI word too. I’m a recovering academic as you said. I was at Harvard for many years and I think as a field, we were really uncomfortable with the term ‘AI.’ so, we desperately wanted to call it anything else. In 2017 and before we wanted to call it ‘machine learning’ or we wanted to call it ‘deep learning’ [to] be more specific. But in 2018 for whatever reason, we all just gave up and we just embraced this term ‘AI.’ In some ways I think it’s healthy. But when I joined IBM I was actually really pleasantly surprised by some framing that the company had done.

IBM does this thing called the Global Technology Outlook or GTO which happens every year and the company tries to collectively figure out—research plays a very big part of this—we try to figure out ‘What does the future look like?’ And they came up with this framing that I really like for AI. They did something extremely simple. They just put some adjectives in front of AI and I think it clarifies the debate a lot.

So basically, what we have today like deep learning, machine learning, tremendously powerful technologies are going to disrupt a lot of things. We call those Narrow AI and I think that narrow framing really calls attention to the ways in which even if it’s powerful, it’s fundamentally limited. And then on the other end of the spectrum we have General AI.  This is a term that’s been around for a long time, this idea of systems that can decide what they want to do for themselves that are broadly autonomous and that’s fine. Those are really interesting discussions to have but we’re not there as a field yet.

In the middle and I think this is really where the interesting stroke is, there’s this notion we have a Broad AI and I think that’s really where the stakes are today. How do we have systems that are able to go beyond what we have that’s narrow without necessarily getting hung up on all these notions of what ‘General Intelligence’ might be. So things like having systems that are that are interpretable, having systems that can work with different kinds of data that can integrate knowledge from other sources, that’s sort of the domain of Broad AI. Broad Intelligence is really what the lab I lead is all about.

There’s a lot in there and I agree with you. I’m not really that interested in that low end and what’s the lowest bar in AI. What makes the question interesting to me is really the mechanism by which we are intelligent, whatever that is, and does that intelligence require a mechanistic reductionist view of the world? In other words, is that something that you believe we’re going to be able to duplicate either… in terms of its function, or are we going to be able to build machines that are as versatile as a human in intelligence, and creative and would have emotions and all of the rest, or is that an open question?

I have no doubt that we’re going to eventually, as a human race be able to figure out how to build intelligent systems that are just as intelligent as we are. I think in some of these things, we tend to think about how we’re different from other kinds of intelligences on Earth. We do things like… there was a period of time where we wanted to distinguish ourselves from the animals and we thought of reason, the ability to reason and do things like mathematics and abstract logic was what was uniquely human about us.

And then, computers came along and all of a sudden, computers can actually do some of those things better than we can even in arithmetic and solving complex logic problems or math problems. Then we move towards thinking that maybe it’s emotion. Maybe emotion is what makes us uniquely human and rational. It was a kind of narcissism I think to our own view which is understandable and justifiable. How are we special in this world?

But I think in many ways we’re going to end up having systems that do have something like emotion. Even you look at reinforcement learning—those systems have a notion of reward. I don’t think it’s such a far reach to think maybe we’ll even in a sci-fi world have machines that have senses of pleasure and hopes and ambitions and things like that.

At the end of day, our brains are computers. I think that’s sometimes a controversial statement but it’s one that I think is well-grounded. It’s a very sophisticated computer. It happens to be made out of biological materials. But at the end of the day, it’s a tremendously efficient, tremendously powerful, tremendously parallel nanoscale biological computer. These are like biological nanotechnology. And to the extent that it is a computer and to think to the extent that we can agree on that, Computer Science gives us equivalencies. We can build a computer with different hardware. We don’t have to emulate the hardware. We don’t have to slavishly copy the brain, but it is sort of a given that will eventually be able to do everything the brain does in a computer. Now of course all that’s all farther off, I think. Those are not the stakes—those aren’t the battlefronts that we’re working on today. But I think the sky’s the limit in terms of where AI can go.

You mentioned Narrow and General AI, and this classification you’re putting in between them is broad, and I have an opinion and I’m curious of what you think. At least with regards to Narrow and General they are not on a continuum. They’re actually unrelated technologies. Would you agree with that or not?

Would you say like that a narrow (AI) gets a little better then a little better, a little better, a little better, a little better, then, ta-da! One day it can compose a Hamilton, or do you think that they may be completely unrelated? That this model of, ‘Hey let’s take a lot of data about the past and let’s study it very carefully to learn to do one thing’ is very different than whatever General Intelligence is going to be.

There’s this idea that if you want to go to the moon, one way to go to the moon—to get closer to the moon—is to climb the mountain.

Right. Exactly.

And you’ll get closer, but you’re not on the right path. And, maybe you’d be better off on top of a building or a little rocket and maybe go as high as the tree or as high as the mountain, but it’ll get you where you need to go. I do think there is a strong flavor of that with today’s AI.

And in today’s AI, if we’re plain about things, is deep learning. This model… what’s really been successful in deep learning is supervised learning. We train a model to do every part of seeing based on classifying objects and you classify a lot – many images, you have lots of training data and you build a statistical model. And that’s everything the model has ever seen. It has to learn from those images and from that task.

And we’re starting to see that actually the solutions you get—again, they are tremendously useful, but they do have a little bit of that quality of climbing a tree or climbing a mountain. There’s a bunch of recent work suggesting… basically they’re looking at texture, so a lot of solution for supervision is looking at the rough texture.

There are also some wonderful examples where you take a captioning system—a system can take an image and produce a caption. You can produce wonderful captions in cases where the images look like the ones it was trained on, but you show it anything just a little bit weird like an airplane that’s about to crash or a family fleeing their home on a flooding beach and it’ll produce things like an airplane is on the tarmac at an airport or a family is standing on a beach. It’s like they kind of missed the point, like it was able to do something because it learned correlations between the inputs it was given and the outputs that we asked it for, but it didn’t have a deep understanding. And I think that’s the crux of what you’re getting at and I agree at least in part.

So with Broad, the way you’re thinking of it, it sounds to me just from the few words you said, it’s an incremental improvement over Narrow. It’s not a junior version of General AI. Would you agree with that? You’re basically taking techniques we have and just doing them bigger and more expansively and smarter and better, or is that not the case?

No. When we think about Broad AI, we really are thinking about a little bit ‘press the reset button, don’t throw away things that work.’ Deep learning is a set of tools which is tremendously powerful, and we’d be kind of foolish to throw them away. But when we think about Broad AI, what we’re really getting at is how do we start to make contact with that deep structure in the world… like commonsense.

We have all kinds of common sense. When I look at a scene I look at the desk in front of me, I didn’t learn to do tasks that have to do with the desk in front of me by lots and lots of labeled examples or even many, many trials in a reinforcement learning kind of setup. I know things about the world – simple things. And things we take for granted like I know that my desk is probably made of wood and I know that wood is a solid, and solids can’t pass through other solids. And I know that it’s probably flat, and if I put my hand out I would be able to orient it in a position that would be appropriate to hover above it…

There are all these affordances and all this super simple commonsense stuff that you don’t get when you just do brute force statistical learning. When we think about Broad AI, we’re really thinking about is ‘How do we infuse that knowledge, that understanding and that commonsense?’ And one area that we’re excited about and that we’re working on here at the MIT IBM Lab is this idea of neuro-symbolic hybrids.

So again, this is in the spirit of ‘don’t throw away neural-networks.’ They’re wonderful in extracting certain kinds of statistical structure from the world – convolutional neural network does wonderful job of extracting information from an image. LSDMs and recurrent neural networks do a wonderful job of extracting structure from natural language, but building in symbolic systems as first-class citizens in a hybrid system that combines those all together.

Some of the work we’re doing now is building systems where we use neural networks to extract structure from these noisy, messy inputs of vision and different modalities but then actually having symbolic AI systems. Symbolic AI systems have been around basically contemporaneous with neural networks. They’ve been ‘in the wings’ all this time. Neural networks deep learning is in any way… everyone knows this is a rebrand of the neural networks from the 1980s that are suddenly powerful again. They’re powerful for the first time because we have enough data and we have enough compute.

I think in many ways a lot of the symbolic ideas, sort of logical operations, planning, things like that. They’re also very powerful techniques, but they haven’t really been able to shine yet partly because they’ve been waiting for something—just the way that neural networks were waiting for compute and data to come along. I think in many ways some of these symbolic techniques have been waiting for neural networks to come along—because neural networks can kind of bridge that [gap] from the messiness of the signals coming in to this sort of symbolic regime where we can start to actually work. One of things we’re really excited about is building these systems that can bridge across that gap.

Listen to this one-hour episode or read the full transcript at www.VoicesinAI.com

[voices_in_ai_link_back]

Byron explores issues around artificial intelligence and conscious computers in his new book The Fourth Age: Smart Robots, Conscious Computers, and the Future of Humanity.

from Gigaom https://gigaom.com/2019/04/04/voices-in-ai-episode-84-a-conversation-with-david-cox/

[naivelocus]

Is “information is physical” contentful?

“Information is physical.”

This slogan seems to have originated around 1991 with Rolf Landauer.  It’s ricocheted around quantum information for the entire time I’ve been in the field, incanted in funding agency reports and popular articles and at the beginnings and ends of talks.

But what the hell does it mean?

There are many things it’s taken to mean, in my experience, that don’t make a lot of sense when you think about them—or else they’re vacuously true, or purely a matter of perspective, or not faithful readings of the slogan’s words.

For example, some people seem to use the slogan to mean something more like its converse: “physics is informational.”  That is, the laws of physics are ultimately not about mass or energy or pressure, but about bits and computations on them.  As I’ve often said, my problem with that view is less its audacity than its timidity!  It’s like, what would the universe have to do in order not to be informational in this sense?  “Information” is just a name we give to whatever picks out one element from a set of possibilities, with the “amount” of information given by the log of the set’s cardinality (and with suitable generalizations to infinite sets, nonuniform probability distributions, yadda yadda).  So, as long as the laws of physics take the form of telling us that some observations or configurations of the world are possible and others are not, or of giving us probabilities for each configuration, no duh they’re about information!

Other people use “information is physical” to pour scorn on the idea that “information” could mean anything without some actual physical instantiation of the abstract 0’s and 1’s, such as voltage differences in a loop of wire.  Here I certainly agree with the tautology that in order to exist physically—that is, be embodied in the physical world—a piece of information (like a song, video, or computer program) does need to be embodied in the physical world.  But my inner Platonist slumps in his armchair when people go on to assert that, for example, it’s meaningless to discuss the first prime number larger than 1010^125, because according to post-1998 cosmology, one couldn’t fit its digits inside the observable universe.

If the cosmologists revise their models next week, will this prime suddenly burst into existence, with all the mathematical properties that one could’ve predicted for it on general grounds—only to fade back into the netherworld if the cosmologists revise their models again?  Why would anyone want to use language in such a tortured way?

Yes, brains, computers, yellow books, and so on that encode mathematical knowledge comprise only a tiny sliver of the physical world.  But it’s equally true that the physical world we observe comprises only a tiny sliver of mathematical possibility-space.

Still other people use “information is physical” simply to express their enthusiasm for the modern merger of physical and information sciences, as exemplified by quantum computing.  Far be it from me to temper that enthusiasm: rock on, dudes!

Yet others use “information is physical” to mean that the rules governing information processing and transmission in the physical world aren’t knowable a priori, but can only be learned from physics.  This is clearest in the case of quantum information, which has its own internal logic that generalizes the logic of classical information.  But in some sense, we didn’t need quantum mechanics to tell us this!  Of course the laws of physics have ultimate jurisdiction over whatever occurs in the physical world, information processing included.

My biggest beef, with all these unpackings of the “information is physical” slogan, is that none of them really engage with any of the deep truths that we’ve learned about physics.  That is, we could’ve had more-or-less the same debates about any of them, even in a hypothetical world where the laws of physics were completely different.

So then what should we mean by “information is physical”?  In the rest of this post, I’d like to propose an answer to that question.

We get closer to the meat of the slogan if we consider some actual physical phenomena, say in quantum mechanics.  The double-slit experiment will do fine.

Recall: you shoot photons, one by one, at a screen with two slits, then examine the probability distribution over where the photons end up on a second screen.  You ask: does that distribution contain alternating “light” and “dark” regions, the signature of interference between positive and negative amplitudes?  And the answer, predicted by the math and confirmed by experiment, is: yes, but only if the information about which slit the photon went through failed to get recorded anywhere else in the universe, other than the photon location itself.

Here a skeptic interjects: but that has to be wrong!  The criterion for where a physical particle lands on a physical screen can’t possibly depend on anything as airy as whether “information” got “recorded” or not.  For what counts as “information,” anyway?  As an extreme example: what if God, unbeknownst to us mortals, took divine note of which slit the photon went through?  Would that destroy the interference pattern?  If so, then every time we do the experiment, are we collecting data about the existence or nonexistence of an all-knowing God?

It seems to me that the answer is: insofar as the mind of God can be modeled as a tensor factor in Hilbert space, yes, we are.  And crucially, if quantum mechanics is universally true, then the mind of God would have to be such a tensor factor, in order for its state to play any role in the prediction of observed phenomena.

To say this another way: it’s obvious and unexceptionable that, by making observations of a physical system, you can often learn something about what information must be in it.  For example, you need never have heard of DNA to deduce that chickens must somehow contain information about making more chickens.  What’s much more surprising is that, in quantum mechanics, you can often deduce things about what information can’t be present, anywhere in the physical world—because if such information existed, even a billion light-years away, it would necessarily have a physical effect that you don’t see.

Another famous example here concerns identical particles.  You may have heard the slogan that “if you’ve seen one electron, you’ve seen them all”: that is, apart from position, momentum, and spin, every two electrons have exactly the same mass, same charge, same every other property, including even any properties yet to be discovered.  Again the skeptic interjects: but that has to be wrong.  Logically, you could only ever confirm that two electrons were different, by observing a difference in their behavior.  Even if the electrons had behaved identically for a billion years, you couldn’t rule out the possibility that they were actually different, for example because of tiny nametags (“Hi, I’m Emily the Electron!” “Hi, I’m Ernie!”) that had no effect on any experiment you’d thought to perform, but were visible to God.

You can probably guess where this is going.  Quantum mechanics says that, no, you can verify that two particles are perfectly identical by doing an experiment where you swap them and see what happens.  If the particles are identical in all respects, then you’ll see quantum interference between the swapped and un-swapped states.  If they aren’t, you won’t.  The kind of interference you’ll see is different for fermions (like electrons) than for bosons (like photons), but the basic principle is the same in both cases.  Once again, quantum mechanics lets you verify that a specific type of information—in this case, information that distinguishes one particle from another—was not present anywhere in the physical world, because if it were, it would’ve destroyed an interference effect that you in fact saw.

This, I think, already provides a meatier sense in which “information is physical” than any of the senses discussed previously.

But we haven’t gotten to the filet mignon yet.  The late, great Jacob Bekenstein will forever be associated with the discovery that information, wherever and whenever it occurs in the physical world, takes up a minimum amount of space.  Specifically, and subject to relativistic caveats worked out by Raphael Bousso, a bounded physical system can store at most A/(4 ln 2) bits of information, where A is the surface area of the region in Planck units—so, about 1069 bits per square meter.  (Actually it’s 1069 qubits per square meter, but because of Holevo’s theorem, an upper bound on the number of qubits is also an upper bound on the number of classical bits that can be reliably stored in a system and then retrieved later.)

You might have heard of the famous way Nature enforces this bound.  Namely, if you tried to create a hard drive that stored more than 1069 bits per square meter of surface area, the hard drive would necessarily collapse to a black hole.  And from that point on, the information storage capacity would scale “only” with the area of the black hole’s event horizon—a black hole itself being the densest possible hard drive allowed by physics.

Let’s hear once more from our skeptic.  “Nonsense!  Matter can take up space.  Energy can take up space.  But information?  Bah!  That’s just a category mistake.  For a proof, suppose God took one of your black holes, with a 1-square-meter event horizon, which already had its supposed maximum of ~1069 bits of information.  And suppose She then created a bunch of new fundamental fields, which didn’t interact with gravity, electromagnetism, or any of the other fields that we know from observation, but which had the effect of encoding 10300 new bits in the region of the black hole.  Presto!  An unlimited amount of additional information, exactly where Bekenstein said it couldn’t exist.”

We’d like to pinpoint what’s wrong with the skeptic’s argument—and do so in a self-contained, non-question-begging way, a way that doesn’t pull any rabbits out of hats, other than the general principles of relativity and quantum mechanics.  I was confused myself about how to do this, until a month ago, when Daniel Harlow helped set me straight (any remaining howlers in my exposition are 100% mine, not his).

I believe the logic goes like this:

Anything in the physical world that varies in space—say, a field that encodes different bits of information at different locations—also varies in time, from the perspective of an observer who moves through the field at a constant speed.

Relativity—even just Galilean relativity—demands that, in flat space, the laws of physics must have the same form for all inertial observers (i.e., all observers who move through space at constant speed).

Combining 1 and 2, we conclude that anything that can vary in space can also vary in time.  Or to say it better, there’s only one kind of varying: varying in spacetime.

More strongly, special relativity tells us that there’s a specific numerical conversion factor between units of space and units of time: namely the speed of light, c.  Loosely speaking, this means that if we know the rate at which a field varies across space, we can also calculate the rate at which it varies across time, and vice versa.

Anything that varies across time carries energy.  Why?  Because this is essentially the definition of energy in quantum mechanics!  Up to a constant multiple (namely, Planck’s constant), energy is the expected speed of rotation of the global phase of the wavefunction, when you apply your Hamiltonian.  If the global phase rotates at the slowest possible speed, then we take the energy to be zero, and say you’re in a vacuum state.  If it rotates at the next highest speed, we say you’re in a first excited state, and so on.  Indeed, assuming a time-independent Hamiltonian, the evolution of any quantum system can be fully described by simply decomposing the wavefunction into a superposition of energy eigenstates, then tracking of the phase of each eigenstate’s amplitude as it loops around and around the unit circle.  No energy means no looping around means nothing ever changes.

Combining 3 and 5, any field that varies across space carries energy.

More strongly, combining 4 and 5, if we know how quickly a field varies across space, we can lower-bound how much energy it has to contain.

In general relativity, anything that carries energy couples to the gravitational field.  This means that anything that carries energy necessarily has an observable effect: if nothing else, its effect on the warping of spacetime.  (This is dramatically illustrated by dark matter, which is currently observable via its spacetime warping effect and nothing else.)

Combining 6 and 8, any field that varies across space couples to the gravitational field.

More strongly, combining 7 and 8, if we know how quickly a field varies across space, then we can lower-bound by how much it has to warp spacetime.  This is so because of another famous (and distinctive) feature of gravity: namely, the fact that it’s universally attractive, so all the warping contributions add up.

But in GR, spacetime can only be warped by so much before we create a black hole: this is the famous Schwarzschild bound.

Combining 10 and 11, the information contained in a physical field can only vary so quickly across space, before it causes spacetime to collapse to a black hole.

Summarizing where we’ve gotten, we could say: any information that’s spatially localized at all, can only be localized so precisely.  In our world, the more densely you try to pack 1’s and 0’s, the more energy you need, therefore the more you warp spacetime, until all you’ve gotten for your trouble is a black hole.  Furthermore, if we rewrote the above conceptual argument in math—keeping track of all the G’s, c’s, h’s, and so on—we could derive a quantitative bound on how much information there can be in a bounded region of space.  And if we were careful enough, that bound would be precisely the holographic entropy bound, which says that the number of (qu)bits is at most A/(4 ln 2), where A is the area of a bounding surface in Planck units.

Let’s pause to point out some interesting features of this argument.

Firstly, we pretty much needed the whole kitchen sink of basic physical principles: special relativity (both the equivalence of inertial frames and the finiteness of the speed of light), quantum mechanics (in the form of the universal relation between energy and frequency), and finally general relativity and gravity.  All three of the fundamental constants G, c, and h made appearances, which is why all three show up in the detailed statement of the holographic bound.

But secondly, gravity only appeared from step 8 onwards.  Up till then, everything could be said solely in the language of quantum field theory: that is, quantum mechanics plus special relativity.  The result would be the so-called Bekenstein bound, which upper-bounds the number of bits in any spatial region by the product of the region’s radius and its energy content.  I learned that there’s an interesting history here: Bekenstein originally deduced this bound using ingenious thought experiments involving black holes.  Only later did people realize that the Bekenstein bound can be derived purely within QFT (see here for example)—in contrast to the holographic bound, which really is a statement about quantum gravity.  (An early hint of this was that, while the holographic bound involves Newton’s gravitational constant G, the Bekenstein bound doesn’t.)

Thirdly, speaking of QFT, some readers might be struck by the fact that at no point in our 12-step program did we ever seem to need QFT machinery.  Which is fortunate, because if we had needed it, I wouldn’t have been able to explain any of this!  But here I have to confess that I cheated slightly.  Recall step 4, which said that “if you know the rate at which a field varies across space, you can calculate the rate at which it varies across time.”  It turns out that, in order to give that sentence a definite meaning, one uses the fact that in QFT, space and time derivatives in the Hamiltonian need to be related by a factor of c, since otherwise the Hamiltonian wouldn’t be Lorentz-invariant.

Fourthly, eagle-eyed readers might notice a loophole in the argument.  Namely, we never upper-bounded how much information God could add to the world, via fields that are constant across all of spacetime.  For example, there’s nothing to stop Her from creating a new scalar field that takes the same value everywhere in the universe—with that value, in suitable units, encoding 1050000 separate divine thoughts in its binary expansion.  But OK, being constant, such a field would interact with nothing and affect no observations—so Occam’s Razor itches to slice it off, by rewriting the laws of physics in a simpler form where that field is absent.  If you like, such a field would at most be a comment in the source code of the universe: it could be as long as the Great Programmer wanted it to be, but would have no observable effect on those of us living inside the program’s execution.

Of course, even before relativity and quantum mechanics, information had already been playing a surprisingly fleshy role in physics, through its appearance as entropy in 19th-century thermodynamics.  Which leads to another puzzle.  To a computer scientist, the concept of entropy as the log of the number of microstates seems clear enough.  But then why should that information-theoretic concept be so closely connected to tangible quantities like temperature, and pressure, and energy?  From the mere assumption that a black hole has a nonzero entropy—that is, that it takes many bits to describe—how could Bekenstein and Hawking have possibly deduced that it also has a nonzero temperature?  Or: if you put your finger into a tub of hot water, does the heat that you feel somehow reflect how many bits are needed to describe the water’s microstate?

Once again our skeptic pipes up: “but surely God could stuff as many additional bits as She wanted into the microstate of the hot water—for example, in degrees of freedom that are still unknown to physics—without the new bits having any effect on the water’s temperature.”

But we should’ve learned by now to doubt this sort of argument.  There’s no general principle, in our universe, saying that you can hide as many bits as you want in a physical object, without those bits influencing the object’s observable properties.  On the contrary, in case after case, our laws of physics seem to be intolerant of “wallflower bits,” which hide in a corner without talking to anyone.  If a bit is there, the laws of physics want it to affect other nearby bits and be affected by them in turn.

In the case of thermodynamics, the assumption that does all the real work here is that of equidistribution.  That is, whatever degrees of freedom might be available to your thermal system, your gas in a box or whatever, we assume that they’re all already “as randomized as they could possibly be,” subject to a few observed properties like temperature and volume and pressure.  Crucially, we assume this despite the fact that we might not even know all the relevant degrees of freedom.

Why is this assumption justified?  “Because experiment bears it out,” the physics teacher explains—but we can do better.  The assumption is justified because, as long as the degrees of freedom that we’re talking about all interact with each other, they’ve already had plenty of time to equilibrate.  And conversely, if a degree of freedom doesn’t interact with the stuff we’re observing—or with anything that interacts with the stuff we’re observing, etc.—well then, who cares about it anyway?  This is essentially why, if you pump more bits of information into a tub of hot water, while keeping it the same volume, physicsts are confident that the new bits will have no place to go except into describing a greater range of possible speeds for the water molecules.  So then the molecules move faster on average, and your finger feels the water get hotter.

In summary, our laws of physics are structured in such a way that even pure information often has “nowhere to hide”: if the bits are there at all in the abstract machinery of the world, then they’re forced to pipe up and have a measurable effect.  And this is not a tautology, but comes about only because of nontrivial facts about special and general relativity, quantum mechanics, quantum field theory, and thermodynamics.  And this is what I think people should mean when they say “information is physical.”

Anyway, if this was all obvious to you, I apologize for having wasted your time!  But in my defense, it was never explained to me quite this way, nor was it sorted out in my head until recently—even though it seems like one of the most basic and general things one can possibly say about physics.

— Shtetl-Optimized