Outside the Box

Interesting that one of the most popular metaphors these days is "Think outside the box." A box is a space enclosed by a kind of skin that contains things. We (humans) are, essentially, boxes.

Is it possible that post-Singularity, we will, being outside the "box" be able to finally construct answers to the questions. Will it take literally freeing our minds before the problems of fluid dynamics become crystal (liquid?) clear?

I've often thought that what is needed is a reconceptualization of math itself. I don't know what that would be, precisely, but what if some of the unsolvable problems we have are unsolvable because of the foundations on which they lie? What if "number" is not the best way of doing math?

When I was on the inside of the math community, what I saw, primarily, were people chasing rabbit holes down to dead ends. It was very strange, to me. Very few people were interested in stepping back and saying "What is this? What can we do with this?" Instead, they chased small bugs into ever-shrinking holes that only a few people could travel down.

Perhaps it is exactly our limitations as thinking packages, flesh boxes, and the only change will be to literally think outside the box.

Existential Angst in a Pre-Singularity World

The Singularity, the point at which machine intelligence surpasses human intelligence and begins its own form of development that will be beyond anything we can understand is, according to experts such as Ray Kurzweil, inevitable. If you find this sort of technological advance to be an alienating prospect, you're not alone. Kurweil proposes that we will cease to be human beings living in bodies, and instead many will opt to become nanobot foglets, which are essentially a digitized version of you, able to interact with the world in a much different way, but free of the problems of life, such as disease and that pesky fact of death. The cost of course, is that which we understand to be human. Many of our human qualities are shaped by the singular fact that we are, to put it simply, packets of flesh. Or, as George Lakoff and Rafael Nuñez put it, we are the Embodied Mind, and our thinking, from the basest sexual act to purest of pure mathematics is shaped by this fact. We are enclosed by skin, we see the world and we interact with the world as embodied minds must.

However, even in our pre-Singularity society, we are an increasingly detached and bodiless people (I'm speaking particularly of my own experience as an American). Recently, I was living in Chicago and had a chance to meet with a friend, Jack, whom I hadn't seen in years. Meeting with a friend when you are married is a tough proposition to begin with. You bring with you an ally your friend doesn’t have. My wife and I share a certain kind of communication particular to married people, that activates primarily in each other's presence via social cues. These phrases, looks, and so forth are not meaningful in and of themselves, but for the shared memories they evoke. The point is that there is a level of connection that married people have access to that outsiders do not, so right away my friend is alienated. However, that’s something we can overcome, primarily by trying to limit our secret language and speaking to my friend in the more normal shared language. Luckily, my wife, my friend, and I all went to college together, so there are shared memories and mutual friends we can discuss.

However, the conversation that day was constantly interrupted. You see, Jack was in town not because he wanted to be, but because he was taking his sister to visit a Chicago school of psychology. So he was constantly thinking of his sister, and of his mother, and being contacted by them via cell phone and text messages. While with us he had one foot in this other realm. While he was separated from us, attention-wise, my wife and I would engage in our own conversations. The chasm grew from there, to where we never all quite meshed.

While this may seem like a particular circumstance, I think that in the pre-Singularity world, this is becoming the circumstance. Count how many times you see people disengaged from the activity they are physically performing just one day of your week. How many are talking on their cell phones while driving? Or texting their friends while on a date, or shopping with their significant other. As mass communication technology grows more portable and more ubiquitous, I think we will continue to train ourselves to constantly detach from our physical situations.

The question is, do we want this? Is such a detached realm of existence desirable? Can it survive long-term on a planet that is very cruel to life that can’t adapt to its conditions?

By the time the Singularity rolls around, and people are given a choice between embodied minds, and free-floating clouds, I suspect most people will already be free-floating clouds, and that pre-Singularity reasons for thinking this to be a bad thing will long be moot. A new form of life will face new challenges. The question of whether or not isn’t really at stake. It will simply happen as it happens.

I’m not even sure how I feel about it, except that I fear for our metaphors. An unusual thing to say, but it is after all our metaphors that set us apart from other creatures, that has given us our intelligence. On the other hand, perhaps language, metaphor, story, and even individuality in the post-Singularity world will simply be stone tools in an age of iron. Still useful, but simply no longer the way things are done, and a peril for those who insist on clinging to them.

5th of July

I set a goal last week for myself of 35,000 words. Well, I came up slightly short at 34,300. The good news is that I've been working through some plotting. I'm about halfway done with the novel and it's going very well. I have the end in site. Like I was unable to do with most of my chess matches growing up, I actually have an endgame.

The pieces are laid out, the characters are in motion. I'm 150 pages in and stuff is about to take some twists and turns. We'll see who ends up surviving on the other side of the singularity. I think this week will go well. I'm at 34,300, and I'm going to set a goal for myself of 51,800 words by the end of next Sunday, which is an average of 2500 words per day. I think it's doable because I have it all worked out, I think. Of course, sometimes when you get down to the nitty gritty, you run into problems. So, the 48,000 will be a minimum goal, but I'm shooting for 51,800 words.

In alternate news, I was re-reading a novel I started a couple of years ago called "Slingback" and I have to say I liked what I was reading so far. I think I'll try to finish it and submit it. It's a surrealist WWII story about a guy who descended from a long line of assassins and is a sharpshooter in WWII. He meets a man his family has tried to kill for generations, named the Immortal and he must try to stop this man.

That's all for now, I'll let you know next week how the current project is going, keep checking the daily word count to keep track of my progress. I update that at least once a day, usually twice, at about 7:00 am and about 3:00 pm.