Consider Bookhling

I just wanted to urge everyone to visit wowio books.

It’s a webpage with full and legal copies of books, categorized and formatted meticulously. Unlike some of the more popular free book service like the Project Gutenberg, many of the books provided wowio aren’t copyright expired classics. There are some gems in there, so anyone with a remote streak of bibliophile in them should take the time to shop around.

I just hope they get more science related books in there, as well as some of the rarer fictions like The Thackery T. Lambshead Pocket Guide to Eccentric & Discredited Diseases, but the books they already have are still worth taking a peek.

Americans (and the modern civilization in general) had been dependent on medications since the discovery of penicillin, but recently the level of chemical commitment began to take a whole new perspective. Modification of the baseline intellectual ability through chemical agents that goes beyond simple nutrient control is something I suspect to be relatively widespread and will continue to seep into the general populace as the medications become more sophisticated and effective. The effectiveness of the medication can be surprising when controlled and monitored carefully. I can concentrate on a single task for around ten to fourteen hours at one time, depending on my condition. With proper chemical aid I can theoretically pull through twelve to twenty hours, again dependent on my prior psychological and physical condition.

It would be unrealistic to simply discredit the effectiveness of the chemical aid in intellectual pursuits when its benefits are so clear. The fields of academic studies are one of the rare fields of human endeavor that allows necessities of individual desire and social niceties to be as one, and as such any chance at improvement on one’s ability provides an irresistible allure that goes beyond the simple need to perform. I believe how this new addiction to chemical augmentation plays out and how the society deals with it in coming times will be representative of how the society and the individual will fair once the genetic and cybernetic augmentation for human beings become economic reality. There are some cautious optimism as to the possible changes the coming era of affordable chemical augmentation might in fact benefit the humanity at large, and even serve as a catalyst for a different human age. In this era where people are becoming increasingly aware of ramifications of technology (or at least becoming increasingly polarized by the awareness) on future course of humanity, such predictions take on profound foliage different from similar futurist predictions of the old.

If there is one thing I am worried about, it is our lack of knowledge on the processes of the development of human consciousness. Will learning without requisite control of one’s physio-chemical facilities pose unwanted side-effects on the learner? Will we end up with an enitre civilization of people who knows things they can’t possibly hope to utilize? I’d count on the complex natures of innate human greed and pride to act as counter to such outcome. I for one cannot wait for the day that would finally allow my body to catch upto the place sight of my mind sees.

There is a semi-community project to simulate human brain using spare computing cycle in the works.

The members of the projects seem to be looking at eventual commercialization of what they achieve using this project. I assume that it might turn off some of the more devoted advocates of GNU philosophy among us, but I still think this is project is interesting enough to devote some of my unused cpu cycles to the cause… Since, well, what’s the point of letting the spare computer time go to waste? Right?

Science is fundamentally specialist and will never be able to achieve the kind of 2.0-everyone pitch in- status afforded by larger community web services today. However, the systems such as BOINC (the system used for the simulation project as well as a number of other worthy, non-commercial projects) gives us a glimpse of what ‘open-science’ in the future might be like, in that it allows concentration of necessary energy and resources to make the research come to fruition, not through any large scale departmental bureaucracy but through a sort of grassroots recycle programs of the commonly wasted byproducts of our civilization. Indeed, I’d refer to it as making full use of the machinery of the human civilization itself.
I’d like to urge anyone even passively interested to visit the BOINC website and participate in a project of your choosing. They have a number of projects in progress and the list is likely to grow in the future. Who knows, our little contribution might make the future a bit more interesting place to live.

I couldn’t sleep last night. I rustled around the house until four in the morning until I decided to watch videodrome again, a habit I’m suffering from since about four months ago. The cycle is simple. I can’t fall asleep, so I search for something to do. When I’m looking for something to do something inevitably falls in my hand. Usually that’s a copy of videodrome. The cycle had been repeating itself with unusual frequency these days… Of course, there are other things to do, and other things to watch/read when I can’t fall asleep. Yet when I’m doing something other then watching videodrome while in the kind of semi-insomniac state, there’s this odd pressing feeling that I should be dong something else.

There’s this strange atmosphere about the movie that makes it very fitting to watch while half-asleep, dead tired and in dark. Some people watch horror movies and some people read mythos novels, I guess my thing is watching videodrome. What is it that makes people have these rather unusual kinks activating under specific conditions? Is there any parallel that can be observed in behavior of other animals? Chimpanzees and monkeys come to mind, but what about dogs and cats? Bacteria perhaps? Is brain necessary for such behavior? It’s really no surprise that Hitchcock was so interested in the obsessive behavior of human beings… Is it a coincidence that first human subjects that gave the idea of universal archetypes to Jung were patients suffering from severe cases of megalomania and obsessive compulsive disorders?

And what would all this mean when applied to the concept of the human network, wherein the physical brain, changing universe and the simulacra of the real interact with each other in complex web of interactions, positively and negatively reinforcing each other.

I’ve been incredibly busy lately, both at my school and at home. Bunch of things all happening at once and every one of them going wrong, all somehow connected and breaking together in some very strange chain reaction of the network of the world.  Anyhow, among all the things I’ve been going through I still haven’t stopped thinking about the artificial life and the whole art and science relationship I’m pursuing. As I said before I’ve been trying to learn a lot more about Jasper Johns and his way of thinking. At this stage I tend to single him out as I believe that he is very representative of the nature of what art is and what art has become, not only to the ones who actively pursue the practice and understanding of art but also to average layman like me who have no professional background in art. It’s not just formalized thoughts in his mind I’m interested in. As a human being I find him to be a very close model of what people go through when faced against the issues of the art and art like things in this world, regardless of vested interest and background… As someone whose background is from the fields of science and scientific pursuits, I feel as if I can understand him on some instinctive level, grasp the general gist of things, so to speak.

There is one thing that I can’t seem to be able to get out of my mind when thinking about Jasper Johns. He mentioned that his work is basically born of discontent, that he is in fact trying hard not to do whatever it is that comes naturally to him in practice of art. The fear and uncertainty surrounding such behavior is something I can fully sympathize with, perhaps even comprehend on logical level. The reason for me to think in such a way, is that Jasper Johns’ behavior is not unusual. The signs are strewn all over the society and culture, this civilization itself. When thinking about the human origin of creativity, the instinctive reaction of the human being which leads to creative behavior is always discontent. Yet, what it really means for a human being to be discontent is something that should be reflected upon carefully. Discontent is something a human being feels regardless of the state of his or her physical want. Those who believe that human discontent simply stem from want of survival are deluded. Even on evolutionary scales, human discontent seem to be a primordial trait hardwired into the very structure of the living itself, that goes beyond the simple psychological apparatus developed for the cause of survival. The human discontent is a trait that goes beyond the formularized reaction we commonly label as greed or gluttony, complex and multilayered mechanism whose roots remain obscure to this day. Somewhere around that root, it might be possible that the primordial and pure form of discontent as a life-form is somehow linked with the origin of the human creativity.

Human beings are physical creatures formed of biochemical components. Thus art and the creativity that leads to such act as art must be within the realm of the physical life itself, all of them stemming from some nonlinear complex emergent phenomena. Perhaps discontent is a human manifestation of a universal trait of networks of sufficient complexity. Perhaps the human drive toward creativity and all other unmistakably human pursuits stem from the fundamental structure of the life as a complex system, rather than superficial biochemical impulses or ‘mysterious’ things of unknowable origins. That, is another reason why the study of life is at the cutting edge between the science and the art, and why I pursue the study of artificial life of physical nature.

There is an interesting notion behind some of the more network oriented mathematical researches these days, regarding possible existence of universal characteristic available to all network centric systems regardless of their physical implementation. For some odd reason I find myself coming back to such thought often in recent years, though I’m not really sure why I would pay any more attention to this fascinating subject than say, chaos in life-like system.  Regardless of the reason, if I can’t help but to think about the subject I might as well do a little musing.

How about if I apply the methods of the network-link based thinking to a bit of epistemology? The structure of the human knowledge is fundamentally network oriented in that knowledge rarely if ever come without direct reason taking the form of knowledge. In order to broaden one’s knowledge one must know something first, and from there on the individual case of knowledge is built up, one thing leading to the other and the other depending on the truth of another knowledge which plays out in complex web of positive and negative feedback like any other decent complex system in nature. What if there is a certain characteristic that the structure of knowledge must take through the virtue of taking the mathematical form of complex network? What if it is possible to arrive at previously ignored possibilities of the world simply by searching for certain structural phenomena within the knowledge network itself instead of going through every single link within the network like we do right now? Even more, what if there is a pattern that all valid structure of knowledge must follow? What if there is a way to ‘know’ the structure of the knowledge itself without being aware of all the individual components forming the knowledge network?

If there is any valid point in this musing, the implications would be quite interesting. The impact such theory of knowledge would have on the nature of artificial intelligence/life studies and natural complex systems research would be most interesting, and quite a few educators would have something to think about. They might finally begin to treat learning as a development of interface to the universal structure of knowledge instead of some twisted weeding out process to erudite the gifted (which is a process most obvious in poorer schools of the inner city area, with richer private schools taking a bit more ‘democratic’ approach, strangely enough).

All this is nothing more than talk, of course. At the moment there is no way to support such claim of universal network-centric structure of knowledge in any academic detail. There are a few interesting historical cues that might suggest in thinking such a thing, like the prevalence of the Jungian collective unconscious in many forms throughout the history, or some of the things believed by Rudolf Steiner’s Anthroposophy movement, though both are not quite rigorous enough to lend credit to a full fledged academic research of scientific nature.

Regardless of the truth of such complex system based dispositions, mathematical phenomena seem to be getting ever closer to the structure of the real world. Maybe it is a sign of the future to come.

I’ve been looking around the synthetic biology scene for a while now. Although my academic specialty doesn’t revolve around the field of biology, I try to keep at least an amateur’s perspective upon the advances and techniques of the field. Considering that my passion lies in the study and realization of artificial life I find it important to keep broad view of things irregardless of specialty or the immediate requirements of my own job.

I’ve often noted that the field of synthetic biology had suffered quite a bit of misunderstanding since its inception (which wasn’t that long ago actually), so I thought I might as well do a little write up of what synthetic biology really is.

Synthetic biology is an approach to engineering biology instead of being an academic field of specific goals. Simply put, synthetic biology as a whole is an approach, which may be utilized toward a specific application dictated by the case/individual/group etc.

In order to become a tool in engineering biology its link with conventional genetic engineering is inevitable. The breakdown of the similarities and differences between synthetic biology and genetic engineering is as follows.

Conventional genetic engineering is composed of three primary stages.

1)Recombinant DNA

2)PCR (stands for polymerase chain reaction)

3)Automated sequencing

The step one and two are about writing the DNA of specific purpose, and the step three is about reading the recomposed/component DNA. While these three steps are integrated to the core of the field of synthetic biology, it includes three more stages which differentiates it from pure genetic engineering.

4)Automated construction of DNA

5)Standards

6)Abstraction

The fourth stage, automated construction of DNA refers to the divide between the designers and builders of the DNA. Within the structure of the synthetic biology the designing of a DNA sequence and actually working in forming such DNA sequence (which is an expensive and time-consuming process) is separate from each other, making student-amateur oriented biological machine design possible within currently existing technical/industrial infrastructure. However, simply having a separate industry deal with mechanical parts of the synthetic biology would be meaningless without stage five and six, formation of standards, and abstraction of genetic interface. The last two stages run along the lines of the advance of computer programming scene, where formation of standard (html) and abstraction (most users don’t type in zeroes and ones anymore. We click buttons) brought on an explosion of global userbase and subsequent integration of the computerization into the very fabric of modern human civilization. Synthetic biology as a field encompasses all the six stages I’ve written about so far, each of them an integral part that reinforces another. In a way, synthetic biology is intimately linked with the garage-biology or biohacking movement in that it allows individuals to focus on designing their own novel biological contraptions using freely available and globally present database of biological/genetic abstractions and standards, while leaving the complexities and drudgeries of bioengineering to the mechanism of economy/industry.

I personally consider the field of synthetic biology to be a movement. Nothing as pretentious as some political gather-up, but a real movement like a wave spreading across the surface of the human society, a tell-tale sign of something gigantic beneath the surface. People used to build computers in their garage. Look where we are now. I can’t begin to imagine to full impact of well-executed synthetic biology as movement/industry/economy in the course of the future. Many little children these days are aware of tools like python and java, and some of them even utilize them with surprising efficiency and familiarity. Imagine the same children in the future, not with imaginary numbers but with the stuff of life. A little risky, but it’s certainly the type of world I want to live in.

What I also find to be interesting is the method of thinking behind synthetic biology. I don’t know how to put it succinctly yet, but as I have noted in the previous write up ‘transhumanism and the human network’, there is an underlying method of thinking that is showing up in universal scales, regardless of locale and cultural background. Am I correct in assuming this peculiarly wide-spread method of thinking as a type of zeitgeist? If so, where and how did it originate? And what role does the human network and its emergent properties take in the shape of the world we live in?

Maybe, once the biological hacking is done, the little children will hack the human civilization itself.

For those of you interested in slightly more detailed insight into synthetic biology, I give you two links.

www.openwetware.org

The openwetware website, definitely worth a look.

http://openwetware.org/images/3/3d/SB_Primer_100707.pdf

A simple primer to synthetic biology, covers the basics so it applies to other fields of biology as well.

I’ve been thinking and writing about the whole steampunk and tranhumanism ‘movement’ (if it can be called as such) all over the net. Though they were nothing more than novelty writings, jumbled things that came straight out of my mind without much introspection, I think I’m beginning to see some underlying pattern here. I do not particularly believe in attitude or belief of any specific cultural movement like the steampunk or the transhumanism. As someone dedicated to the study of sciences the ideas of transhumanism does appeal to me, but I still think appeal alone doesn’t make for a sound prediction of the future, and the St. John’s apocalypse-like images espoused by some of the more enthusiastic believers of the transhumanism thinking doesn’t really help things either.

What I am really interested in, is the shape of the world that is beginning to emerge underneath all the superficial beliefs and cliques of various social/cultural movement. A human network that is being accelerated and consolidated into an emergent and concrete form by the technology of near instantaneous connection between individual members of the humanity, which seem to form the backbone of the majority of the changes that make up what we call the ‘modern age’, web 2.0 generation, and etc etc. It’s really just a thought, nothing eloquent and lucid enough to be a theory… Perhaps this is merely adaptation of the mathematical theory of networks and links in the fashion of Barbarasi to the perspective of social theory… But something doesn’t sound quite right to refer to it as such.

Formation and linking of human beings to ideas, the belief and search for the method to change/control the world through variety of means, linking which leads to a form of phase shift, the compounding between the idea and the human being… A history is a fundamentally human story… If linking between ideas and human beings, ideas and ideas, human beings to human beings is viable and displays emergent characteristics so common in their physical equivalents, the term zeitgeist begins to take more significant meaning in the structure of the world.

If the ’structure’ of the world and its interactions can be defined as such , wouldn’t it be possible to hack the system of the world to gather wanted result from it? A giant machine-construction formed of human dreams and lives, that are linked with each other so that while each part may be independent the whole remains homostatic, hacking such system to follow certain path would be tantamount to hacking the Genie of the lamp or the holy grail, since, in the end, the only thing that responds to human wishes is the human world itself. This giant human world, soon to be even bigger, is in effect a substitution of the human wish and the human will.

All the fad associated with the UCC or the web 2.0 generation will come and pass. Yet the wisdom and experience gained from this generation will invariably effect the other. Who is to say that the brave new world will bring with it social concepts and mundane practices so powerful and so fundamentally human that it would form an entity on its own, political, scientific, and artistic ideas living and traveling across the world like full-bodied life, while the human beings are both subject to its whims and a master of its path, raising and training it like pets.

Should such a day ever come, it would be the beginning of the age when arts may finally walk among the humanity.

A little something I scribbled down a moment ago. Maybe it would be an interesting read for some of you, especially when viewed in light of the digital art -social networking age we live in right now.

The term transhumanism is thrown around a lot these days. It’s almost as if it is fast becoming a whole generational movement instead of a novelty philosophy catering to a limited cadre of technophiles. The true attraction of the movement I believe, is the real possibility that many things currently considered impossible might become possible in the future, not through any institutional reform but through a technological revolution capable of suiting individual tastes and goals. In many ways the movement of transhumanism is intensely political yet at the same time as politically neutral as it can be.
It seems transhumanism is about increasing the capacity to do things on the individual level without regards to a unified direction. After getting the ability you want using technological means, you can be a hardcore communist or a hardcore libertarian. The movement of the transhumanism itself doesn’t dictate what its proponents should do after becoming ‘transhuman’, and the only political ideal directly associated with the philosophy of transhumanism is the one necessary in making it come true, free and unrestricted access to technology and information. It can be said that the transhumanism and the theory of singularity so many people attribute to the movement of transhumanism is like deus ex machina come to life, the proverbial genie of the lamp given flesh in human adaptation of technology. However, it should be noted that the post-cyberpunk transhumanism ideals aren’t quite as clean and wish-wash as some of its predecessors of the enlightenment and industrial revolution, instead opting to put its faith in the very opening of the possibilities themselves rather than what those possibilities can ultimately achieve, and I dare say that it is this new way of thinking that defines the current generation’s zeitgeist regardless of geological locale or technical proficiency. Propagation of systems of thought through generational sentiments instead of any strict governmental or academic structure (that might even go beyond regional and cultural taboo), a sort of social-blogging approach to the propagation and practice of systems of thought. Yet in this case, the physical entity of the net is not a necessity. Instead, majority of the network-forming, linking and subsequent emergent behavior results from interactions between people and ideas, the technical infrastructure only acting as a catalyst for already present elements in precipitating metamorphosis.

As the idea of physical distance becomes fuddled in the future and virtual density of the human population increases, the idea and practice of the net-less networking built into all conscious life forms in the innate interaction between life forms themselves and the life and idea-structures will become more and more profound, its effects more and more pronounced, perhaps enough to truly dictate the course of human history, and perhaps, even human beliefs.

I haven’t written a decent blog entry for a whole week now, I think. My life had been a little hectic with the things at the lab and all, but that’s not the reason for the sudden fall in my blogging output. I have been thinking about the relationship of arts and sciences in general, trying to find some way that goes further than the dictations of intuition so commonly attributed to the study of art and inspirations of science.

As I have written before, the origin of human creativity is a single topic that seem to show up persistently in some corner of my mind, bumping into me like a boogie man regardless of what I’m doing at the moment, from trying to calculate oscillation for a complex plasma to walking through a gallery of abstract expressionists. I consider the problem of the origin of creativity to be the problem of a complex system, deeply intertwined with variety of other questions regarding the nature of beauty, perception, self-recognition, origin of life-like system in nature and historic/cultural zeitgeist. And the questions are quite overwhelming for me. The more I seek, the more questions I find, without a clue as to what the answer to any one of them might be. So I decided to do what almost anyone with a science background does. Formulation and mathematical analysis, with moderation and deep retrospection given the nature of the problem I’m trying to understand. As with many artists I began with the beginning of human history and civilization viewed from the perspective of art, identifying general similarities and isolating persistent homocentric behavior that shows up on universal scale without regards to economic or technological sophistication. A search in collectively unconscious human behavior some might say. After identifying some of them, I applied the idea of complex emergence in regular complex science to those universal characteristics… To no understandable solution.

To be honest, beyond the technical jargon and back-of-the-napkin logic, the whole idea is rickety and I have no idea what exactly I’m looking for, or what I should do with what I get.

I do have an idea of some of the consistently recurring topics like formation of myth/folklore and metamyth/metafolklore, presence of ’sudden madness’ as a type of primordial force/catastrophe much in the same fashion as the ancient’s concept of flood which strangely enough also acts as a deus ex machina of sorts (like the cult of Sakhmet), near-obsession with metamorphosis on the global scale, and contributions to and from zeitgeist and its different names and understanding throughout times and cultures. But how to connect them into a persistent structure that would let me have an insight into it all? I have no idea. Or rather, I have about a thousand ideas and don’t know what to do with them all.

I’ve frequently made clear my conviction regarding the nature of arts and sciences, and I’d like to state it again. The very idea that arts and sciences somehow exist on opposites ends of a spectrum is a load of bollocks. They are meant to be together, and they are meant to be applied in similar reasoning and purpose. The question is how they would be able to be together. Simply saying that arts and sciences should both follow aesthetic conviction and reasonably sound thinking is not enough because, frankly, we had been doing it since the beginning of civilization, with mixed results. There is a strange and as of yet little understood way these things work, perhaps intimately linked with how lives and brains are formed in this physical universe. Thus study and understanding of arts and sciences require resources from variety of other academic disciplines, because in the end everything is artistic and scientific as long as human beings are involved in it. And this is the reason why I push for the study of artificial life as a zenith between the limitations of the field of art and the field of sciences, a connection between the physical world and the perceived world.

Maybe I’ll do a summary posting of my thoughts on Jasper Johns or complex plasma later. I really need time to sort out all the things in my head.