Author: admin

Yesterday the New York State legislature made it legal for gay people to marry each other. New York is only the sixth state in the U.S. to have done this, and I am very proud of New York right now. Politics in our state is far from perfect, but at least they can get the fundamentals right.

I come from an ethnic group that has run into rather extreme trouble in the past by being cast as outsiders, and the line from tolerated outsider to intolerated outsider can be very thin. So I am very aware of that slippery slope, because you never know where you will find prejudice, and you never know where it will lead.

Maybe somebody you know says they find a particular group of people “disgusting”, and perhaps they even add with pride that they will pass those attitudes on to their kids. Then you realize what this implies — that it’s ok for somebody to say the same thing about your group of people.

And you realize, in moments like this, that the prerequisite for atrocity is just those little slips and slides, those small imperceptible steps toward looking at an entire large swath of fellow citizens as the “other”.

So when something as sensible as this legislation is enacted here in New York — a bold statement that is the very opposite of prejudice — it makes me proud to live here.

Until recently I thought that no matter how advanced human/computer interfaces become, they will stop well short of direct control of thought. But recently I learned about the relatively new field of optogenetics, which allows neurons to be switched on or off by infrared light.

In particular, researchers have figured out how to insert a light-sensitive gene from algae into brain neurons. This essentially makes the neuron function as an externally controllable switch: one kind of IR stimulus turns it on, another turns it off.

Why is this so significant? Because human tissue, while fairly opaque to visible light, is translucent to infrared light. The further into the infrared spectrum, the more transparent human tissue becomes. Which means that genetically modified brain neurons could be switched on or off non-invasively — no nasty surgery required.

In the short term this won’t have much impact. But eventually, certainly sometime in the next half century, technology will have advanced sufficiently to enable real-time computer generated infrared holograms that target specific neurons and clusters of neurons from outside the skull.

Which means direct control of thought, for better or worse.

As I’m sure you already realize, there are both very good and very bad scenarios here. And it’s not really a question of whether this will be used. As with all technologies, inevitably it will be used. The question is what we will choose to do, as a society, once we can directly stimulate — and therefore simulate — sensation, experience and thought itself.

Following up on all the great comments from yesterday’s post, suppose we take as a working model the idea suggested by Alec’s comment — that our instincts toward the nearly-human “other” are not merely influenced by our past history with Neanderthals, but in particular both by warring with them and by mating with them.

This model would suggest that our instincts about monsters are informed by both a joy in killing them and a sexual attraction toward them. Which leads to what might be called the “Zombie Vampire Continuum” (ZVC) hypothesis: Because of our prehistoric relationship with Neanderthals, we have both a blood lust toward “nearly human” monsters and, well, the other kind of lust. A monster will therefore lie on a continuum between “a being that I want to kill” (Zombie) and “a being that I am sexually drawn to in a way that scares me” (Vampire).

Note how this parallels the repulsion/attraction that adolescents feel as they approach sexual maturity, which is generally reflected in archetypical fairy tales: Little Red Riding Hood wants the Wolf to be killed, but she also finds him seductive.

Perhaps our species’ unique relationship to sexuality is informed by instincts we acquired while interacting with rival sentient species, most recently the Neanderthal: We think of sex as dangerous, and at the same time we find killing sexy.

Today in his closing keynote at the Games for Change conference, Jesse Schell floated an interesting theory. Why, he asked, do we have Orcs? Or more pointedly, why do we have a pervasive cultural trope of dumb yet violent humanoid monsters that we kill without remorse?

We call them, variously, trolls, ogres, flesh eating zombies, lizard men, or a host of other names, but they are always pretty much the same. They are stupid, they are violent, there are lots and lots of them, and we create highly popular fictional entertainments around the premise of gleefully mowing them down.

We don’t do this with other species. There are no happy fantasies of killing hundreds of chimpanzees or bonobos (well actually, we do send the members of other species to outrageously painful and horrible deaths in large numbers, but we try to pretend we’re not doing anything of the sort). No, we only create entertainment fantasies around the killing of creatures that are sort of like us, distinctly human in their way, only more stupid and more violent.

Jesse’s theory for why this is so came as no surprise: That this drive to kill Orcs is a holdover from our instinct to kill off our real life near-human rivals — the most recent of these, of course, being the Neanderthals, who died out only around thirty thousand years ago.

There have been many theories as to why the Neanderthals died off, but Jesse’s theory is quite simple — we killed them. Why? Well, in his exact words: “I think we killed them all because that’s how we roll.”

It’s hard to judge these things, but to me his theory has the ring of truth. And this idea of an instinctive basis for antagonism toward “the human-like other who is different from my tribe” goes a long way toward explaining the extreme idiocy of racism.

After all, no human mind that is functioning rationally would sanction singling people out for completely nonsensical reasons, say because their ancestors happen to be from Africa, or from Italy or Ireland, or because they are gay, or Jewish, or some other artificially labeled marker of “differentness”.

And yet we know that it happens all the time. I find Jesse’s theory appealing because it explains the complete lunacy of racism. Whether they be antisemites, or homophobes, or just averse to people with red hair, people suffering from this sad affliction are simply playing out left-over survival instincts from long ago.

Deep down, on an instinctive level that their rational minds cannot access, such people think they are still fighting the Neanderthals.

Ram Dass famously said “Be Here Now”. Yesterday, really for the first time, I started to wonder whether this powerful idea has become a thing of the past.

Because yesterday I attended a talk by former Vice President of the United States Al Gore, who was giving the opening keynote at the annual Games for Change conference. Mr. Gore was quite charismatic in person, although he had an alarming tendency to answer questions any and all topics by talking about climate change (alas, an inconvenient truth).

But what struck me, sitting in the fourth row of a quite nice auditorium, was the luminescent sea of white between me and the stage. The people in front of me were all surfing their iPads, the bright alabaster glow from their screens dominating the view.

Curious, I started reading over their shoulders. Most people turned out to be “multitasking” (the polite word for it). One guy was randomly surfing the web, another was checking out the next day’s talks, and the woman most directly in front of me was closing a top-secret business deal by email (all very hush-hush).

The most surreal moment came during the Q&A, when Mr. Gore said, as part of his response to a question about the usefulness of serious games in raising consciousness (this is an exact quote):

“All of us should live completely in the present moment all the time, but none of us do.”

Definitely the spirit of Ram Dass, if not the pithiness. Yet I’m not sure, between the emailing and web surfing, whether most the people in front of me even heard him say this.

Which is, um, ironic.

A grand piano stood just as it should within the square
The young boy played aloud, there was a crowd assembled there
They smiled at the tune, for it was June. And by and by
A perfect summer day they whiled away. The Sun rose high
She smiled down with joy upon the boy. All days must end
And melt within your hand, but understand my friend
A grand piano stood just as it should within the square
So it shall ever be. For we, you see, were there.

I decided it would be more fun, and perhaps more pedagogically sound, if you could actually see the musical note you are creating.

Now the harmonics applet shows you the actual wave form as you construct it. Click on the image below to try it:

Musical notes generally consist of a mix of harmonic overtones. There’s the fundamental tone, which has some frequency of vibration, and then different amounts of overtones having twice that frequency, three times that frequency, and so on.

When I was a kid I always wanted some kind of gadget that would let me play around with the harmonics of notes, so I could hear what different mixes of harmonic overtones add to the sound of a musical note.

Now, through the magic of computers, I can make one of these for myself, and I thought it would be nice to share.

I’m sure I could find a tool somewhere on the web that does the same thing, but it was fun go all DIY and make one for myself. Click on the image below to jump to the Java applet:

Connections between
Us, so strong, like cement, that
Can never dissolve

Until one day it
Rains, and then we may find it
All come apart like

Tissue

“Pain perdu” — literally “lost bread”, the french term for what Americans call french toast. The idea of “lost bread” derives from the fact that bread in France is usually bought as a baguette, baked so as to be soft and delicious for just a single day. After that the bread starts to become hard and to lose its freshness. Bread that has been “lost” in this way is repurposed to make what we in the U.S. call french toast.

“Pain perdu” is indeed a fabulous term. When a french friend explained it to me, I told him it sounded like Marcel Proust’s famous memoir, except it would need to have a slightly different title: “À la recherche du pains perdu” — which might be a nostalgic multi-volume memoir about french toast.

When I said that, my friend laughed and told me that such a memoir would have to talk about Proust’s old girlfriend Madeleine (which makes sense if you’ve read Proust).

So I told him that in England the recipe might show up in a memoir by Lady MacBeth about her annoying little dog Spot (the one who is aways running underfoot, and never wants to go out when he’s supposed to). 😉