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.

Sublim experiment rundown

Back in the day (2006 or 2007), after several years of experimentation, I coauthored a document about the use of visual subliminal messages (specifically those produced by the xscreensaver package's xsublim program) for cognitive enhancement. It hasn't aged terribly well, and I'm rather embarrassed now by the writing style, but every so often someone contacts me asking whether or not I have continued experimentation. The answer is yes. I figure now is as good a time as any to give you the run-down on my later experiments.

As a first note, I am not experimenting with subliminal advertising. If you are looking for something about subliminal advertising, rocketboom has a good video on the subject, after which you will require no other materials.

At the time of writing the original document, I had a model of the mechanism involving chain reactions of primed ideas. This may still be relevant, but there are other (more down-to-earth) attributes of the process with more literature within the field of cognitive psychology to back them up. While subliminal messages do not give a strong enough priming to significantly influence behavior in the context of advertising (or rather, they don't have the property claimed of homeopathy: subliminals are not more powerful the less they are observed), subliminal messages have been shown to affect the sense of familiarity. In situations where unfamiliarity with terminology, wording, or notation is a major stumbling block, being subliminally primed with the terminology in question can act as a gentle introduction, making the terminology no longer seem arbitrarily difficult and frightening. By producing a false sense of familiarity with the subject matter, the subject matter seems easier to pick up.

Another idea (which is strongly influenced by the excellent book The Art of Memetics) is that mental blinders (and other psychological biases that prevent the absorption of unfamiliar or conflicting information) can be modeled as the defense mechanisms of dominant memeplexes. These memeplexes subvert, assimilate, or deny newcomers since new ideas can compete with the old ones. Subliminal messages allow slow and subtle subversion by all memeplexes, regardless of whether or not they conflict with existing ones. As a result, use of subliminals can decrease the likelihood of decisions being unduly biased by unseen socially reinforced heuristics, so long as documents whose dominant underlying assumptions differ conflictingly have their words primed.

So, above we have some new models for the mechanism of action. Furthermore, new attributes have been discovered.

The physiological effects of sublims are highly dependent upon the novelty of the content. A single static document of arbitrary length will quickly cease to be enough for sublims, eventually giving none of the symptoms at all. As the use of sublims increases, necessary novelty does not increase linearly but exponentially. I currently use more than twenty gigabytes of static plaintext as a small part of my sublim input, balanced out by semi-static input (fortune databases), significantly more dynamic input (mostly via the random page feature in mediawiki installations), and less structured 'noise' input (text generated from markov models of other documents, text generated by piping other inputs through rhyme generators and other filters, text generated using context-free grammars). Too much novelty (trying to sublim with a four gigabyte video interpreted as ascii text, say) is not physiologically pleasant.

Sublims have different effective novelty ranges given different mental states. Stimulants appear to raise the required novelty level. Depressants appear to lower the maximum novelty level, but occasionally they cause the sublims to have absolutely no effect. Binaural entrainment at theta range frequencies appears to maximize the physiological effects for as long as the entrainment is occurring, but when the pattern stabilizes the physiological effects disappear.

Finally, there are a few technical updates.

Xsublim is no longer maintained by the xscreensaver project, and if you install a modern version of xscreensaver xsublim will not be installed. The last time I checked, the xsublim source was part of the source tarball but could not be trivially coaxed to compile. I have been using an old binary copied from an earlier release.

I have used the xosd package to write a clone of xsublim, called asublim. It does not operate precisely the same way. Where xsublim caches the full run of the program from which it takes its input before displaying anything, asublim caches each space-separated token smaller than 512 bytes (and cuts those larger into 512 byte pieces) and displays them in real time. As a result, asublim starts more quickly but is also more sensitive to load fluctuations. When I have used it, the asublim program itself is significantly slower than most of the programs feeding it, and so I have not had pipe underflows or noticeable delays. Asublim does not currently have support for the various command line options that xsublim supports, though support for most of them can be implemented. Asublim also has a few glitches: the self-erasing feature appears to operate differently from xsublim's implementation, and so on programs (such as firefox) that are slow to redraw their window bitmap there is a tendency for already erased tokens to obscure the contents of the canvas. I have not duplicated this problem on anything other than firefox.

If you have found this post by researching the terms found in the original Infornography document, please post your comments here rather than looking me up.