Month: March 2020

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Predictive Coding

March 10, 2020

Listening to Karl Friston on Sean Carroll’s Mindscape podcast this morning, something came to mind regarding the Planning Cat and the In The Moment Cat.

It seems a fundamental challenge to animal life, as itinerant systems, is motion detection. Motion can be danger and death; motion can be food and opportunity. (Same goes for sound. We need to organize the background music so that the snapping of a twig, which might mean our end, stands out. But here I’m dwelling on light and vision.)

I was sitting by a very early and successful higher organism, a dragonfly, one day. Its compound eye seems to provide one way to detect motion – by comparing change across the different views. But my type of vision is different. I focus on something, moving my head and eyes about. I need to hold peripheral vision more or less constant to minimize consumption of brain energy. So my brain makes up a story about what is going on at the edges, checking the story only periodically.

The brain is practised at making up stories when it comes to vision because, it seems, there is a huge, roughly 200ms, latency between eye and brain. This needs to be compensated for, or we would be sitting ducks for all kinds of calamity. So what we “see” is already a prediction anyway. And a prediction is a story. Is this the source of consciousness? Both cats are conscious. So is the dragonfly. But the Planning Cat strings together a story, over time, with herself as the central character – just as we do. The long-story version of ourself, which we carry around, emerges over time from the more in the moment child.

MOE

M.I.C.H. – Modernity, Intelligence, Complexity, Humanity

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Stupidity and Evil

March 7, 2020

There was a fine picture in the press the other day of scientists at a national lab showing Donald Trump a molecular model of what I presume was the coronavirus. The look on our Dear Leader’s face – a sort of obstinate petulance commonly seen in children, he clearly would rather have been on the golf course – was priceless.

The look reminded me of Werner Herzog’s comment about evil and stupidity coming together in the eye of a chicken. Except that this look was attached to an object much larger and with many more responsibilities than a chicken.

An appropriate caption might have read “Why are you showing this to Baboon? Baboon can’t eat this!”

Strange times indeed.

MOE

M.I.C.H. – Modernity, Intelligence, Complexity, Humanity

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Works Good Like A Government Should

March 1, 2020

Michelle Goldberg’s column in support of Elizabeth Warren had the by-line ” She wants to purify capitalism so that it works as it should.”

What is it that people find so hard about this to grasp? Capitalism is an economic system; government is a socialist enterprise. They do not stand in opposition to each other. In fact they have worked well together.

Yet since the Reagan era, we have been assaulted with the slogan-myth that “government isn’t the solution, government is the problem.” Want to get laughs in the right wing troll-o-sphere? Repeat their favorite stock mockism: “I’m from the government and I’m here to help.” Har har! Oddly, you don’t hear this so often after natural disasters affect them directly. But I digress.

Capitalism is a fine economic system. It has served this and other countries well. But neither it, nor any Social Darwinist underpinnings, provides a pathway to good governance. Part of the problem is that money tends to turn into power. That’s not all bad, as long as its tendency to corrode and corrupt is held in check. Money turning into power beats birthright turning into power at birth, something the Founding Fathers fought against. But it’s not all good either.

For a long time there have been corporate entities, and now there are individuals, with enough money/power to overwhelm the governments of many municipalities, counties and even some states – but not the Federal government; it’s just too big. They can rent parts of it when needed but, in the end, and at least until recently, the Federal government has retained the ultimate power. So they hate it, and decry its size as an evil. This is why the likes of Grover Norquist speak of getting government small enough it could be “killed with a shovel” (like a snake) or “drowned in a bathtub” (like a what? Like a child?).

But government is how the people make an end run on power. Capitalists get this. Why doesn’t everybody?

MOE

M.I.C.H. – Modernity, Intelligence, Complexity, Humanity