On Certainty & Uncertainty

Since death alone is certain and time of death uncertain, what should I do?

Stephen Batchlo

The Father Who Mistook a Washcloth for His Sandwich*

Dear Diary,

So my 96 year old Alzheimer father fell and broke his hip. Before this fall off the bed he was able to stand up and walk reasonably well, especially for a 96 year old.

Backstory… his particular brand of Alzheimer allows him to mask, amazing well, how little he really understands. He maintains many common courtesies like “Hello” and “Thank You” or if asked if he can do something he automatically might respond “I think so” or “Oh, I don’t know”. The upshot of is that after the operation to repair his hip, as he is in bed he kept folding a white wash cloth repeatedly. He didn’t know why he was doing it, but it kept him from messing with medical monitoring leads taped to him so all the better we figured.

And at one point he folded it quite neatly and stopped and stared at it. He ended this round of folding so that his hands held it like one does with a big sandwich. So he stares at it and opens his mouth and starts to bite down on it like you do with any good sandwich. Obviously I stop him before it gets too ludicrous.

Disaster averted, so I start day dreaming. That morning us non Alzheimer people were talking about some robot receptionist and how these things will have very human qualities programmed in, to the point it will be hard to tell the difference between the robot or a person.

That reminded me of the Turing test which is a test of a machine's ability to exhibit intelligent behavior equivalent to, or indistinguishable from, that of a human. Which I always imagine will end with a Blade Runner like job for people like Harrison Ford to exterminate beings that are not human enough.

Which reminded me of two episodes of  The Twilight Zone where robots/androids think they are human but are horrified do discover they are just a mess-O-wires (The Lateness of the Hour and In His Image).

That blends into a Philip K Dick short story I once read where that lateness of time for an abortion kept getting longer since they just kept upping the age someone was considered human. In the story he had police type people chasing youths around town to “abort” them.

Which brings me to my final thought… What does it mean to be human? What if a computer program can pass the Turing test but you or I can’t? I am not making a big moral point about the sanctity of life (although maybe by accident). But from a purely practical matter, what constitutes being human?

What if being human is a not a genetic marker but rather a behavioral condition?
How will it feel when you fail the Turing test? 
Or what if you fail and don't care that you failed? 
Or what if you only fail the test when you don't care that you failed?

.   .   .  .  

Then for diversion I jumble all the above into an ill formed story idea. A world where humans and AI coexist and the only catch is all types of being have to be periodically tested (a la the Turing Test) to see if they are still human. Inevitably this leads to Human Testing prep classes, and Taking the Human Test for Dummies. Throw in some Logan's Run stuff and you got yourself a Sci-Fi classic

Good Night Diary

*(Hats off to Oliver Sacks)

 

All The News That's UN-fit To Print

From Matt Taibbi

It's our fault. We in the media have spent decades turning the news into a consumer business that's basically indistinguishable from selling cheeseburgers or video games. You want bigger margins, you just cram the product full of more fat and sugar and violence and wait for your obese, over-stimulated customer to come waddling forth.
     ...
When you make the news into this kind of consumer business, pretty soon audiences lose the ability to distinguish between what they think they're doing, informing themselves, and what they're actually doing, shopping.


http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/america-is-too-dumb-for-tv-news-20151125

Putting the "IS" in ISIS

I just wanted to bookmark this site which critiques the Atlantic article about What Isis Really Wants.

Interpretation. Every useful insight Wood has about end-times prophecy or the Caliphate is compatible with the more common scholarly view that ISIS’s version of Islam is one interpretation among many. One writer who strikes that balance well is Hussein Ibish. As he said in an interview:

Neither is ISIS authentically Islamic, nor is it in any meaningful sense not Islamic. It is a bizarre interpretation of Islam yoked to a political agenda which is very modern. If we just stop fretting about the relationship of ISIS to the religious base of its ideology and accept that it’s a bunch of extremists who come out of a tradition that they manipulate to justify their crimes and their ambitions, it’s not so complicated.

http://weeklysift.com/2015/02/23/the-islamic-state-separating-insight-from-stereotype/

Personal Bookmark

My Personal Bookmark of another thing to remember


 "In my schoolboy days I had no aversion to slavery. I was not aware that there was anything wrong about it. No one arraigned it in my hearing; the local papers said nothing against it; the local pulpit taught us that God approved it, that it was a holy thing, and that the doubter need only look in the Bible if he wished to settle his mind — and then the texts were read aloud to us to make the matter sure; if the slaves themselves had an aversion to slavery they were wise and said nothing."

 "There was, however, one small incident of my boyhood days which touched this matter, and it must have meant a good deal to me or it would not have stayed in my memory, clear and sharp, vivid and shadowless, all these slow-drifting years. We had a little slave boy whom we had hired from some one, there in Hannibal. He was from the Eastern Shore of Maryland, and had been brought away from his family and his friends, half way across the American continent, and sold. He was a cheery spirit, innocent and gentle, and the noisiest creature that ever was, perhaps. All day long he was singing, whistling, yelling, whooping, laughing — it was maddening, devastating, unendurable. At last, one day, I lost all my temper, and went raging to my mother, and said Sandy had been singing for an hour without a single break, and I couldn’t stand it, and wouldn’t she please shut him up. The tears came into her eyes, and her lip trembled, and she said something like this— “Poor thing, when he sings, it shows that he is not remembering, and that comforts me; but when he is still, I am afraid he is thinking, and I cannot bear it. He will never see his mother again; if he can sing, I must not hinder it, but be thankful for it. If you were older, you would understand me; then that friendless child’s noise would make you glad.” It was a simple speech, and made up of small words, but it went home, and Sandy’s noise was not a trouble to me any more. She never used large words, but she had a natural gift for making small ones do effective work. She lived to reach the neighborhood of ninety years, and was capable with her tongue to the last — especially when a meanness or an injustice roused her spirit."
-The Autobiography of Mark Twain

https://www.brainpickings.org/2014/10/24/mark-twain-on-slavery-empathy-compassion/

Explaining the Un-explainable

I just had to note this...I don't understand the science of it but somehow it makes sense to me. He is writing how Einstein's realization on the nature of relativity explained the previously UN-explainable orbit of Mercury (who knew? Not me.)

In other words, in that November hour one hundred years ago when Mercury dropped out of his math, he alone of all humankind knew the universe was not what it had seemed for centuries. That’s the reason his moorings snapped, however briefly. As he later wrote, to do such work, one feels “akin to…the religious worshipper or the lover; the daily effort does not originate from a deliberate intention or program, but straight from the heart.”

http://gizmodo.com/how-ta-nehisi-coates-inspired-a-book-about-the-hunt-for-1739812368

I Had A Dream!!

I had a dream like night. Somebody was doing some Kotekaishi on me.

It has been way over a year since I last practiced Aikido.