This means 'little star' in Spanish.
It was around 2 am on Friday. During summer, in Barcelona, there are folk parties every week, each one in a different neighborhood. We were hanging out in a plaza near my house, drinking beer in one of those fiestas. Kids stay awake until very late and an orchestra plays the usual 80s, 90s, 00s... and the latest Enrique Iglesias lame hit. Those four kids where playing hide and seek and needed to raffle off, so they formed a ring and one little girl pointed at herself as she said "es-tre-lli-ta", while she advanced her pointing finger one person at a time with each new syllable. The kid eventually aimed at left the circle and "es-tre-lli-ta" again. She eliminated herself and "es-tre-lli-ta" one more time between the two contestants left. The last survivor was it and started counting backwards from 20 or so while the gang got scattered among the grown-ups dancing Extremoduro's Stand by.
I read it first in Dennett's masterpiece Darwin's Dangerous Idea. I haven't read Freedom Evolves yet, but from his many conferences and online lectures I guess he still has the same opinion. I'm talking about Dennett's argument for free will as a social construct. It was clear to me already: "Why do you want pure randomness unless you're gambling your entry in heaven against god?" If you're just betting against other moist robots like yourself, wouldn't a less stringent version of randomness suffice for most issues? One upon which everybody agrees, i.e. a device of which nobody can tell the outcome, even if it can be computed in principle. That's enough to create a working social randomness when needed -- if needed.
This logic, I said, was clear to me; but never before did I grasp it so deeply as when I saw those four lovely little machines, all geared up with their tender bag of algorithms, ruffling off to start the most important game of their lives.
Sunday, July 12, 2015
Thursday, April 23, 2015
An intuition pump to appreciate what lies ahead
I've got a big family, one that grows over time. Almost all of us were recently on a train bound north along the Mediterranean coast of Spain, my rugby team. We were coming back from three days sharing the oval, the field under the southern sky, our clothes or shoes when necessary, the night, our bodies, being kids. As long as we are still in our twenties...
...those kind of conversations turn up. The world is a rush and tomorrow, that undiscovered country. We work hard, though we waste ourselves pretty much too. Our steps; little, scarce steps. If a path becomes by trumping, then ours can barely be sustained, hardly be called a path. We head nowhere.
But we were bound north that night, and we needed an answer. And there it was my little intuition pump. I had developed it years ago, though I didn't know of intuition pumps at the time. Only later I realized that's precisely what my mindfuck does: to stretch our minds. It goes more or less like this: "Pick up one of those genius that populated history: Ada Lovelace, Roberto Bolaño, Marie Curie, ... your call. Learn their work by heart, because when you die, you'll discover that space-time is more fucked up than Einstein though (did you choose good old Albert?). It turns out that when we die we get a chance to go to the past and tell the person we've chosen all we remember about their works. Indeed, humankind progresses because of a few such successful regressions. If you've chosen Richard Feynman or Mary Shelley you better do your part well enough -- we will collapse otherwise! Those people where never real genius; they were just visited by you, who told them how to reach their future achievements."
What a burden!! Centuries of continuous space-time coherence depending just on you! At that moment the train derailed a little bit, but it didn't and it kept going. I swear! I noticed that bump, our wagon packing us like sardines, the sweat, our dirty socks, the life contained. All of it derailed a little bit and was lost forever because someone failed to complete one of those time regressions -- a hero vanished forever, luckily not Alan Turing...
...just a minor one, I guess, since we weren't dead for so long. Back on our tracks, the old train grumbling... because the world is a sphere, I'm convinced that it is more difficult to go north. It takes more energy, I mean, going upwards... and so the train groans with the effort. Back there stayed our southern brothers, the ones we made our rugby against -- our rugby with.
"But it gets uglier," the intuition pump follows, "indeed, you don't get to choose. You are assigned a person. You can go mad trying to figure out who (s)he is. Read as much as you can, watch as many movies, apprehend Lynn Margulis's or Ilya Prigogine's ideas about the ascent of life. Do whatever you wanna do, you won't see it coming. If it wasn't responsibility big enough to convey the works of one genius after rehearsing for a whole life... now it's like an exam in which any question is possible. And yet even worst: you have been assigned yourself; and whatever it is that you will do, no one has made it before. There is no time travel, for you have been assigned yourself at the beginning of your life. There is no cheating, no millenarianist savior but your own being; and if you don't make your part, a continuous of human-space-time will be compromised; and somewhere, sometime, a train full of girls and full of boys, full of joy and rugby and life, sometime, somewhere, it will derail and kill us all. Don't let that happen."
[Spoiler alert: What follows is not so much related to the text above, so stop here if you haven't seen the Star Trek 2009 movie!!]
...those kind of conversations turn up. The world is a rush and tomorrow, that undiscovered country. We work hard, though we waste ourselves pretty much too. Our steps; little, scarce steps. If a path becomes by trumping, then ours can barely be sustained, hardly be called a path. We head nowhere.
But we were bound north that night, and we needed an answer. And there it was my little intuition pump. I had developed it years ago, though I didn't know of intuition pumps at the time. Only later I realized that's precisely what my mindfuck does: to stretch our minds. It goes more or less like this: "Pick up one of those genius that populated history: Ada Lovelace, Roberto Bolaño, Marie Curie, ... your call. Learn their work by heart, because when you die, you'll discover that space-time is more fucked up than Einstein though (did you choose good old Albert?). It turns out that when we die we get a chance to go to the past and tell the person we've chosen all we remember about their works. Indeed, humankind progresses because of a few such successful regressions. If you've chosen Richard Feynman or Mary Shelley you better do your part well enough -- we will collapse otherwise! Those people where never real genius; they were just visited by you, who told them how to reach their future achievements."
What a burden!! Centuries of continuous space-time coherence depending just on you! At that moment the train derailed a little bit, but it didn't and it kept going. I swear! I noticed that bump, our wagon packing us like sardines, the sweat, our dirty socks, the life contained. All of it derailed a little bit and was lost forever because someone failed to complete one of those time regressions -- a hero vanished forever, luckily not Alan Turing...
...just a minor one, I guess, since we weren't dead for so long. Back on our tracks, the old train grumbling... because the world is a sphere, I'm convinced that it is more difficult to go north. It takes more energy, I mean, going upwards... and so the train groans with the effort. Back there stayed our southern brothers, the ones we made our rugby against -- our rugby with.
"But it gets uglier," the intuition pump follows, "indeed, you don't get to choose. You are assigned a person. You can go mad trying to figure out who (s)he is. Read as much as you can, watch as many movies, apprehend Lynn Margulis's or Ilya Prigogine's ideas about the ascent of life. Do whatever you wanna do, you won't see it coming. If it wasn't responsibility big enough to convey the works of one genius after rehearsing for a whole life... now it's like an exam in which any question is possible. And yet even worst: you have been assigned yourself; and whatever it is that you will do, no one has made it before. There is no time travel, for you have been assigned yourself at the beginning of your life. There is no cheating, no millenarianist savior but your own being; and if you don't make your part, a continuous of human-space-time will be compromised; and somewhere, sometime, a train full of girls and full of boys, full of joy and rugby and life, sometime, somewhere, it will derail and kill us all. Don't let that happen."
[Spoiler alert: What follows is not so much related to the text above, so stop here if you haven't seen the Star Trek 2009 movie!!]
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