Predictive Analytics

"Bayes theorem predicts that Bayesians will win." Nate Silver

 Lingering emotions about free will and volition disappear with any growing understanding of predictive analytics. As more and more of the behaviors (and proxies or precursors for behaviors) appear as continuously collected personal data, the ability to quantify the self (the I in "I believe") gets off-loaded to cognitive means in the environment. As more and more data is indirect (moving to direct) metrics for modes of action:
1) It becomes harder and harder to surprise 'the predictor'
2) it becomes more and more costly to miss collectiing the best data.
3) it becomes easier and easier to indirectly and directly demand/suggest next steps.

The question: is the range of response of a Tachikoma predictable within error bars and if not, why not? Could the input stream (percept) run on a lab bench AI (an AI-head in a vat) produce like response? The simulation is highly dependent on initial conditions. But in a robust multi-player, massively parallel simulation what surprises are likely? That is, would the final act of the Tachikoma horde bringing down the satellite which has the download/synch occur in some, none or most forward looking simulations.
Also, in Dan Dennett's modified, limited free will -- does the Tachikoma horde have this kind of limited free will? That is, can I share my rendition of cause/effect with others and multiplex the results (recommendations) to synthesize a collective will to (strictly limited, highly constrained) power?

We cannot predict all outcomes but can we predict the behaviors that result from group action and hence the narrow range of plausible outcomes?

Nine Principles

From Joi Ito (via Bruce Sterling at SXSW), head of MIT Media Lab - Statement of Principles.

Joi Ito, not yet famous.

1. Resilience instead of strength. Yield, allow failure and bounce back.
2. Pull instead of push. Pull resources from the network as you need them as opposed to centrally stocking them and controlling them.
3. Take risk instead of focusing on safety.
4. Focus on the system instead of objects.
5. Have good compasses, not maps.
6. Work on practice instead of theory. Sometimes you don't know why it works.
7. Disobedience instead of compliance. You don't get a Nobel prize for assigned toil.
8. It's the crowd instead of the experts.
9. Focus on learning instead of education.

This is remarkably similar to NNT's Anti-fragile manifesto.

The hard question of consciousness: how do I create a subjective reality that includes these tendencies? For product development my conjecture is "write the user's manual first, write the reference manual next, build the product last."

On Religious Behaviors

The Right Brain Narrates and Judges

The unfolding realization that the subjective impulse to join hands with other members of an ad hoc community came to me fully realized as I ate my delicious Torchy's taco on Burnet Road across from Savers where I had just found a very nice shirt. I was musing on my wardrobe find when it was revealed to me by my subjective theatre of the mind that the community of folks that give unwanted clothes to Saver's and Goodwill is much like a community of religious believers joined in a communal ritual of common purpose.

I have recently recanted my angry atheist stance -- religion is a tool of sick cultural overlords bent on the subjugation of weak minds -- to grudgingly accept the true nature of good feelings that arrise from willing participation in group activity. Domesticated primates crave community and will invent communities ad hoc to ease the pain of individual, unconnected experience. Atheist participate in these rituals as well, forming chat rooms and meet-ups so that they can gather, talk and share in a comforting feeling of belonging to a group of fellow believers. Although atheists remind each other that they are free of unsupported belief -- that is their group belief. We enjoy the false sense of volition and free will that comes from subjugating our feeling that this life is just one damn thing after another. Shared narratives are the most popular kind of mind control practiced by our kind of minds.

The irrational kant of rationalist; they have only the kinds of beliefs that can stand up to rigorous peer review; is correct as far as it goes. The book of the unbeliever is not, as they would claim, tested and retested because our minds are not constructed like that. From Julian Jaynes' Bicameral Mind to Daniel Kahneman's System 1 and 2 thinking we see over and over that all of us are slaved to a narrative impulse. We seek out normative behaviors so that we are not outside the pack or the tribe. We still listen to the inner voice that seeks a narrative flow. The narrative flow assesses and re-assesses our behaviors and actions to keep us between the ditches.

Rituals do not exist to provide us with comforting belief they exist to provide us with a toolkit of shared behaviors. Whether I attend morning prayer by reading together a core of dogma in the gospel of Luke or the gospel of Think Atheist I am actually in the business of constructing and reinforcing a reality tunnel that excludes some thought and includes some thoughts about proper behavior. Whether the fish on my bumper sticker says Christ or Darwin I am still putting out the message that I am a member of a community.

So whether you are prohibited from telecommuting at your Yahoo! job or gathering at Section 9 HQ you are part of a process that reinforces normative behavior. Kneeling in prayer or driving to work becomes a sacrament or talisman that reminds us to give up free will so that group will can prevail. All chimpanzees do it but some chimps are aware that this collection of behaviors exists for the purpose of mind shaping.

Emerging Bicameral Mind

My emerging thesis -- the Rough Beast is running a simulation of me on the universe as computer -- follows both the dictates of reason and the impulse to discern an ongoing narration. All things precede the present moment or the specious present and all things flow from the now. This is the Dream Now or the envelope of perceptible events and meaningful causes.

The cyber-brains of GiTS started as bicameral minds with the mechanical embodiment of the first computing machines in the 1940's. Most modern chimpanzees treat the output of our out-sourced cognition as separate from our biological minds in brains. I claim that we have already moved beyond this old construal but we are in denial. I outsource my mental life to my laptop, my Galaxy Tablet and my Android smart phone just as the author of the Iliad outsourced volition to the right brain. The unifying synthesis is normative. We are forming a community of like minded individuals who worship this new religion just prior to our understanding of a new narrative.

Watt's Steam Engine - group intellegence

From: "The Most Powerful Idea in the World" we learn that an ability to patent an invention (the fruit of applied science and art) allowed inventors and innovators to share (not hide) improvements and modifications to existing artifacts.

The Boulton and Watt machine - 1787

Here is Watt's patent exhibit: This is based on Watt's much earlier implementation of a condensor to improve the Newcomen pump since it converts reciprocal motion to angular motion.

The system of letter patents developed from earlier philosophical ruminations in Britain about intellectual property -- the notion that ideas can spread but be jointly owned by the inventor and the smith who reduces the machine to practice. The inventor jointly participates in the commerce of the smith and his customers. The smith can broadly advertize his craft without giving away his rights because both the inventor and the smith have IP protection.
Motoko Kusenagi is both inventor and smith for an AI free from a vestigial ghost. Her repeated implantation in state-of-the-art prosthetics, re-learning perception of and response to her environment, and close inspection of a community of learning AI's put her at the edges of cognitive ensembles from which the subjective experience evolved. Similar to James Watt's gradual incorporation of shared intellectual capital with the early progenitors of the the first industrial revolution.

Tie This Thread to Roko's Basilisk
Per our peer Robin Hansen at "Overcoming Bias" -- Rough Beast has a special fondness for kooky, special, wacky and strange simulation results. The usual state changes (from hunger to satiation or from sleep to awake) offer few insights into the kinds of entanglement at the quantum level that reveal deep structure. Deep structure computation begats imaginative output. As Hansen posits; be adventurous and rejoice in failure which leads to suffering which in turn leads to investigation and novel output.

The star of "Computer Chess"

Major Kusinagi is particularly interested in investigations of odd subjective experience when she 'looks over the shoulder' of individuals who behave in unusual or strange ways. She becomes the eyes and ears (causal perception) of subjects that have been 'taken over' or hacked. On one level she is looking for disruptive behavior but not, as one might first suspect, to curtail unusual or meta-optimal simulation output but to harness the power of chaos.

Tying this to the steam engine -- the industrial revolution is easy to simulate on one level -- but on a different level the number of individuals in similar roles increases without a resultant increase in diverse behavior. The industrial revolution is a normative process that spreads across a flat earth to produce billions of DNA automatons. From a much larger pool of drones a small cadre of interesting individuals results.

Beuscher (Wiley Wiggins) in "Computer Chess" as SXSW

Section 9 is not looking for order; Section 9 exists to increase disorder, chaos and complexity that generates precious, rare and difficult to predict results. The AI's harvest unusual state changes so that the Basilisk can seed continuous disorder from which different combination of dissipative structures emerge. Section 9 wants to create negative entropy or entropy far from thermodynamic equilibrium. Simple computing machinery is an example of a dissipative structure that usually performs mere repetition or rote computation. The interaction of these machines (actually a simulation or a virtual machine construct) with the artifacts of DNA produce dissorder and novel state changes. A steam engine is an easy simulation. An adding machine is an easy simulation. A human interacting with a computing machine produces imaginative chaos.

Intercontinental Rat Brain Borg

The news that two rats, one in North Carolina and one in Brazil, share connections between two motor cortices is either The Matrix or meh. For me, this very likely results in a cautious next step to a interconnected Rhesus monkey compute hardware. I see a path to Turing Machines with sentient (an ability to sense) capability.

In summary, an encoding rat and a decoding rat have neuronal connections to sensors in their respective brains. An interesting subset of the subjective experience of the encoding rat is captured, processed and transmitted (brain egress) to electronics which interact with the motor cortex of the decoding rat (egress). Packet switched cognition.

Content is consciousness in Dennett's construal of the subjective experience. That is, my subjective experience arrises from a sparse matrix of sensory experience where almost everything is ignored by my mental machinery so that a narrow focus of input sensation is expanded in my brain/mind for a response to the world around me. I am not seeing everything I am looking at or listening to everything I am hearing. I am construing context from intervals of sparse content.

In GiTS terms, the inner voice Aramaki broadcasts (or narrow casts) to Section 9 phenotypes is a short burst of impressions (message egress) which receiving brains (message ingress) enlarge into subjective consciousness  The trick is that the rules for message interpretation improve over time through training and practice. That is, Major Kusenagi did not hear the initial commands from the first sender -- this mutualist understanding took training to advance beyond the rat to rat motor cortex experience to a fuller exchange as individual differences in precept and response changed for both parties over time.

In Matrix conscious ecosystem the interconnected brain/mind is the sensing function and the Architect's machinery interacts with sensation to achieve a DNA/XNA subjective experience juiced by ZNA AI's