Ramblings: Novelty, Identity, Teleology

The Eliza Effect is the tendency to anthropomorphize those artifacts that present humanlike qualities shallowly. I have studied this effect in practice quite a bit, in an uncontrolled way, and discovered that in the context of markov chain bots (which learn by developing markov models, and as such adopt the manner of speech of those it speaks to) those people whose manner of speech is closest to that of the bot are the most likely to feel empathy with the bot -- a situation that should not be surprising, given the use of word patterns and vocabulary in forming social groupings (and, of course, the so-called Babel Effect).

Now, in humans, interest corresponds to novelty not entirely straightforwardly. Something that is interesting has not too little and not too much novelty: too little novelty is too little novelty is too little novelty is too little novelty, and too much novelty is nwiganbowyaionciwyea 893jf, while just enough novelty is the joy of whole milk until sunrise. This is affected somewhat by social concerns, since particular memeplexes encourage neophilia (meaning that a greater amount of novelty meets the sweet spot goldie locks zone of 'interesting') while others encourage neophobia (meaning that the zone of 'interesting' has less novelty). Where 'interesting' begins for a neophile is often where 'interesting' ends for a neophobe, but novelty depends quite strongly on mental models, so the gap widens quickly.

As a neophile, I tend to talk of neophilia, but neophilia is not all rainbows and unicorns. Neophilia is potentially dangerous because at a fundamental level is encourages dabbling in the unknown. Neophobes, whatever else they are, are at least as safe as they were last year. Neophiles become more safe only accidentally, because they spend their free time playing with fire. It takes someone who plays a lot with fire to invent fireproof curtains (or rocket science -- and Marvel Parsons probably makes it onto the list of archtypal neophiles for the prometheus element), and once fireproof curtains are invented suddenly the neophobes are safer too. But, we just need to look at what happened to good old Jack to see the danger in neophilia: eaten by living flame.

Now, if you look at a community (or, really, a superorganism) like Anonymous, you see a lot of deindividuation going on. Anon has no name. Anon's internal communications are clogged with cats, tits, gtfos, and brick-shitting. A perfect petri dish for deindividuation, in other words: lack of identity within the group, highly stimulating sensory input, and at a high frequency. One other thing that is certainly true of Anon is the high novelty content of communications. There are some old sawhorses here: lolcats have little information per-se, though they can be made to carry much more with clever juxtapositions, and most image macros are content free. However, the image macro has the potential (sometimes realized) to be a highly potent capsule of information: it is easy to transmit (cock and repost), highly stimulating at best, has the potential for the same message to be introduced in several ways (both text and images, which can interact again with existing idioms both verbal and visual), and is part of a conditioning loop that encourages spread (all the forums I've been on since 2004 have had at least one thread for posting interesting images, most of which are clogged with macros, and macros are certainly very popular on tumblr and twitter).


Once again, though, we must separate intended meaning with interpreted meaning. Plenty of accepted meanings were never intended, which is fine because the protocol of natural languages is loose and ambiguous. Many of the idioms attributed to Anon clearly began accidentally, as a look at memebase will demonstrate. Even the silliest of these idioms have the potential to be repurposed to say something decidedly important, or at least 'interesting'. Many of them have. These idioms have made their way into mainstream news through the releases of LulzSec, for instance, which says fairly serious things in fairly silly ways (Eric S Raymond calls this 'Ha Ha Only Serious'), and makes extensive use of the idioms generally attributed to Anon.

A machine could probably fairly trivially pass as human on various imageboards. It could repost images, write its own messages. It would become nearly invisible because of the sheer frequency with which /b/ moves (and because of the sheer glaciality with which some of the other imageboards move). It would mashup existing memes, and some of the mashed memes may gain a following. It would not be kicked out because it is not a spam bot. It would have an extensive archive of images and an extensive model of conversation. Once it begins to be accepted as clearly human (it has a hat) its word model could slowly be infiltrated, with new text introduced. It might mix and match lolcat speech with Karl Marx or with E. E. Cummings, or with Dylan Thomas, or with Ken Kesey. It might be a force to popularize the phrase 'on the gripping hand'. It would be an interesting experiment.

It is not worthwhile for one person to do it. That would not be even-handed. If you want to do it, please do so, and release your results when you finish. Ideally, more than six or seven people would do this at once, introducing entirely different texts of their choosing. Bots learn fast, but adapt slow. It may take a few months for Das Kapital to even subtly infiltrate Rage Guy. But, I have a sneaking suspicion that such an introduction will have a much more far-reaching affect on the superorganism than any conscious attempt to use humans to influence it, since it will get past mental defenses.

The problem of simulacra in ritual traditions

The Anti-occultist has a post discussing the problem of magical theatre. While his points are valid, they are not an argument against ritual theatre for those who practice it: the symbolism of ritual is, like any system of symbols, arbitrary, and the very hackneyed familiarity of the systems played up in popular culture may in some cases be a strength. A ritual first generates an atmosphere, then super-arouses those partaking in it and uses unusual (memorable, not directly related to mundane experience) language (written, spoken, and in the form of narrative and symbolism) to push a message into the now highly suggestible ritual users. A ritual using a symbolic language taken from pop culture can be used on people exposed to those media it appears in with less initial conditioning, though symbolic languages quickly gain baggage, and old, popular symbolic languages (such as the hermetic/alchemical tradition) are difficult to use without unintended side effects due to masses of conflicting associations.

The above-mentioned post does, however, touch upon another of my special fields of interest: the question of how simulacra tend to differ from those things they initially derive from. Memetics tells us that simulacra will probably have their most spectacular details exaggerated and less memorable details lost. They will be simplified, but any aspect that encourages remembering or retransmitting the information will generally be preserved. In other words, the hollywood voudoun will be simpler (it will be spelled voodoo and will lack the distinctions between voodoo and hoodoo; loa will rarely be ridden and when they are they will be ridden in arbitrary order without respect for gatekeepers), it will be more viscerally memorable (iconic images of voodoo dolls, snakes, and bags of graveyard dust will replace less-iconic veves, and all rituals will have suspenseful music and frightening practitioners), and it will emphasize those things that make it desirable to reproduce (what special effects are used will generally remain cheap, the tradition will be disconnected from any geographical location so that it can be used in a variety of settings, and the details necessary to research will be minimized by encouraging the idea that there is little legitimate content to be known). Hollywood voodoo, in other words, becomes something that any actor or filmmaker can create and have it remain recognizable -- and therefore, becomes something that many amateurs can also create. The mere dilution of the tradition through a game of telephone is enough to egalitarize it; voodoo queens and priestesses are no longer required for the Hollywood version. Of course, if we go along with the psychological interpretation of the mechanism of action of magical workings (as I am prone to do), Hollywood Voodoo is potentially precisely as effective as authentic Hatian Voudoun. There are situations wherein an authentic tradition is less useful than its diluted and bastardized pop-culture clones, and if you want to perform a ritual through the medium of film using a large number of people, Hollywood Voodoo is a good choice. Everyone understands it, and though it is less subtle and flexible than a more authentic tradition often is (due to much use), imparting nuanced ideas through complex ritual on large groups of people is hard even with extremely well-conditioned groups (just ask the Masons -- or the Catholics, who have been doing it for nearly two millennia).

I have an old joke I like to tell. I sometimes attribute it to William Gibson, but I don't think he ever actually said it outright. The question is, in a forest with some real trees and some artful replicas, how does one tell which one is real? The answer is, the fake trees are the ones that look too much like trees. Nature isn't bound to obey our platonic images of things, so only man-made things look precisely like our mental models of them. Since systems of ritual exist for the sole purpose of manipulating mental models*, there is no reason a so-called 'authentic' tradition is necessarily better than the historically inauthentic Hollywood version.

* Note that I am writing under the assumption that the psychological interpretation of magic is at least somewhat correct. If the meat-and-potatoes of magical workings are, as Allen Greenfield suggests in Secret Cypher of the UFOnauts and The Secret Rituals of the Men in Black, then an authentic tradition matters very much.

Cold reading

Source

While I've heard this before, it makes me wonder what useful things such training could be applied to aside from telling people things they already know. Outside of the role of fortune teller (which itself is helpful), training the intuition to more accurately make these leaps has great potential, and I imagine that similar training is being used in other fields.

Unpatched Exploits in the Human Biocomputer 3

A phonetic writing system based on cellular automata

In thinking about how to bridge the world of ideograms with the world of alphabets, I began thinking about how cellular automata perform fairly complex operations over time. The starting state of a cellular automaton with a known ruleset contains all the information necessary to produce all further states. So, I figured that a description of a state in some simple known system of cellular automata may, given a well-defined stopping state, both stand in for the word and guide the reader in its pronunciation, without merely being a phonetic representation devoid of non-phonetic content.

As a proof of concept, I considered the ruleset of otomata, remapped onto a new grid and with a slight change in rules. The grid is five by five, and there are five possible cell states: one for each of the primary orientations (up, down, left, right) and one for blank. At a constant rate, cell states indicating directions (denoted by arrows) move across the grid in the direction specified. If at any step a cell is required to be in two states (which is to say that two arrows collide) the cell in which the collision takes place is evaluated as a sound and pronounced, and the state of that cell is set to blank.

This is a fairly irritating thing to try to phrase in english, so I will give an example.

Here is a blank grid:

	a	e	i	o	u
t
k
s
l
m

Here is a glyph:

	a	e	i	o	u
t		<
k	^
s			v
l
m					<

On the first step, the arrow currently located at te and the arrow currently located at ka collide at ta, the arrow located at mo moves to mi, and the arrow located at si moves to si. So, the first syllable is 'ta'.

>td><

	a	e	i	o	u
t
k
s
l			v
m				<

On the second step, the arrows located at si and mo collide at mi. So, the second syllable is 'mi'. All remaining cells are blank, so this glyph is pronounced 'tami'.

As for some way to quickly write these glyphs, I figured that the easiest thing to do was to put lines on both sides of the arrow heads and have meeting or intersecting lines for each blank position. So, in ascii, the above might be represented as:

+<+-+
^+|+|
|+v+|
|+|+|
+-+-<

On the ego

There are plenty of mystical traditions floating around based on ego dissolution as self-improvement, ranging from the nearly ubiquitous (Buddhism) to the obscure (several gnostic sects). The above posts explain better than I can why ego dissolution is worthwhile. The TL;DR version is that while the ego (or rather, the sense of self -- which is different from the ego as used in Freudian and Jungian traditions) serves a purpose socially, when it becomes inflexible it holds you back; who you think you are is not who you really are, and when you assume that those properties you attribute to yourself are truly essentially parts of you, you cement yourself into that role. Grant Morrison talks about this, too:


The ego is an extremely difficult opponent, because the ego is what we identify as our own selves. The thoughts that you consider your own are those of the ego, which is reasonable because of the basis of verbal thought in language and the social basis of language. However, the ego is also an insidious structure that very quickly fossilizes; when your ego is the primary mover and shaker in your head, you can't tell which thoughts are reasonable and legitimate and which thoughts are merely preserving the ego's dominant control over decision-making. The ego is the collection of all your oldest habits -- all the habits that are hardest to break. Not only does it have ages of operant conditioning behind it, but it has several defense mechanisms that keep it away from threatening ideas. These defense mechanisms are sometimes classified as cognitive biases, and sometimes classified as social filters. Having a fossilized ego is like traveling only by train: while your social life is made easier by the sheer predictability of your movements, that same structure prevents you from having any experiences that lie outside the dining car.

The mechanism for breaking down ego, which was mentioned in the video above but may not be clear, is to forcibly go against those behaviors you identify with yourself and jump into behaviors that you consider completely out of your domain of experience. One can do this constantly, or one can do this periodically by completely reinventing oneself on a regular basis. During some stages in human development this behavior is both normal and socially acceptable. During others, it is considered potentially pathological. However, it meshes nicely in spirit with other posts I've written here about agnosis.

I do not see myself undergoing such an experiment in the near future. I suppose that means I should.