Theoretical change is often achieved through the reinterpretation of ambiguous data that people often didn’t realize was ambiguous.

Eagle Eye, a political thriller that features elements of 2001: A Space Odyssey and Terminator, is a thought provoking film about surveillance and inter-connectivity. However, it’s also a little silly. The reason is that “Artificial Intelligence” - i.e., getting computers to behave like adult human organisms - doesn’t really work, yet. Much of what seems like “intelligent” behaviour from computers is actually “kludges”, neat programming tricks, and so on - probably nothing like how humans actually do it.

The consensus emerging from computational intelligence studies in the last few years is that either a) the brain is much more computationally powerful than previously thought (in particular, that neurons don’t compute just by their connections to each other - inter-neural - but also that within each neuron there is a significant amount of computation - intra-neural), or b) the process by which humans and other organisms develop “intelligent” behavioural capacities is very different from how scientists are currently trying to get computers to develop these sorts of capacities. My guess is that it’s a mix of both. Brains contain a lot more sophisticated of causal processes than previously thought ( a) ) and the way to get the sort of “intelligent” behaviour typical of human organisms requires different ways of setting up those causal processes than we have currently been doing ( b) ).

The short of this is that behaviour such as Eagle Eye’s computer is nowhere to be seen in current computers. People who don’t know how computer programs work often don’t have a sense of the range of possibilities, and so science fiction writers such as Eagle Eye’s can make up stories about things happening that are absurd. This is similar to myths where fantastic things happen to the characters - if you don’t understand the limits of “magic” then saying that a woman turns into a tree or what have you doesn’t seem absurd, but once you start to develop a detailed logic of how things in this area work (biology, morphogenetics, and so on), you can start to discount these stories. This is the basic trajectory science has charted over the past several hundred years, overturning beliefs people had that nowadays seem far too credulous, but at the time didn’t seem so because they didn’t have a developed logic or model of how the world works in that area which would exclude that sort of phenomena.

Post-script: The term “computation” is also a little silly. The human brain is a complex causal process, and “computers” are also complex causal processes. There is nothing magic about computation, except that it is used to describe what “computers” typically do. When it comes to computers emulating what humans do, the programmers are trying to set up a set of causal processes in the computer that are similar to the causal processes in a human brain. In this sort of case, “computers” are just open-ended platforms for setting up relatively intricate causal processes, interfaced with typically by some “language”.

On a recent trip, I was debating the following question with a surfer dude after stopping at a Mormon Cathedral.

Imagine that you have met your dream marriage partner. For the purposes of our debate, this was a female who was what you were looking for in almost all respects (smart, good sense of humour, highly compatible values, beautiful, common interests, and so on). Again, this is your dream marriage partner. Except for one thing. She is Mormon (which in itself doesn’t bother you), but in order for her to marry you, you must convert. (Say, for example, that her familial relationships will be damaged significantly if she doesn’t marry a Mormon, and she values them highly. For the purposes of the thought experiment, imagine that this won’t involve lots of Mormon religious activities after marriage - say a couple of hours a week.)

Would you convert? I said after half a second of hesitation, yes. He said no. My reasoning was that well-being is only partly about truth, and so converting to a religion where you might not agree with everything (or have to interpret things figuratively a lot of the time) shouldn’t trump your well-being in central areas like to whom you will be married. I accompanied this with my idea of how integrity matters - in personal relationships, you want integrity, so you would of course tell her exactly what you thought about various Mormon doctrines and practices, and tell her family members if they asked, but as far as making an institutional pledge it wouldn’t matter. His reasoning was that one girl wasn’t important enough for him to convert.

Having had some time to think about it, I still would say yes to converting. I don’t think that religion should make your life worse off - and that would include interfering with marrying the right person. (To put it in perspective, a bigger problem I would have is the Mormon tithing, where the church asks for 10% of your income.)

Reading SecularRight.org, I have an uneasy feeling about much of the discussion - and I think it comes from the following question: Does it make sense to talk about religion as one kind of thing? Rather, is it full of such disparate kinds that it usually makes more sense to talk about specific religions?

Furthermore, does it make sense to talk about a religion’s affect on people, or more sense to talk about a religion’s affect on a specific kind of people (at a specific time)? In politics, you often hear talk about democracy or monarchy, for examples, as if there are no important differences within the governments that apply the general ideas we call ‘democracy’ or ‘monarchy’, or as if the policies or processes involved in them would affect all kinds of people in generally the same way.

I’m very skeptical of this sort of talk. Abstraction is often very useful, but I think most abstraction of these sorts is too abstract. Taking the cue from Aristotle, talking about religion is easy - and misleading. Talking about religion as applied towards a specific people, in a specific proportion, at a specific time, and in a specific manner - this is not easy, but is what will lead to more rewarding discussion.

In the last 100 years or so, what have been the major causes of social change? I think that the 7 major ones are:

1. Schooling.
2. Science.
3. Technology.
3a. The rise of new, powerful media technologies.
4. The downfall of Christianity (and traditional religions in general).
5. Material prosperity.
6. Urbanization.
7. Commercialization.

Obviously, these are interrelated at various levels. Technological innovation leads to mass urbanization, which leads to greater material prosperity through industrialization. The advance of science leads to the untenability of certain Christian beliefs, and so on.

Anyone who wants to change the current social scene is behooved to understand what caused our social scene to arrive at its present place. Contrary to the idea that our current social values are ‘enlightened’, I think that they are shaped more by contingent factors than ineluctable chains of noble reasoning.

This is the stuff out of which discontents - whatever their political alignment - must make their strategies.

Any other suggestions for major causes?

Sacha at DoubleBlind answers a couple questions I posed about housing, exchange rates, and the CMHC here.

Along the way he makes a few pretty interesting points - in one of them, talking about the myriad reasons given for changes in currency rates, he concludes with: “So my own speculation is that speculating on currency movements is a very difficult business.” I think the point can be extended to large areas of the financial world.

The explanations given for currency changes are one example of a larger type of post hoc explanation you often read about ad nauseum in the financial press. Something, A, happens that might be relevant to a financial market, for example. Then, the market trades up or down. Therefore, A caused the market to trade up or down. One problem with these post hoc analyses is that, typically, they are very difficult to test. Was this same person claiming this cause would have these effects before they happened? What is their track record? Is the claim ambiguous? Can we make further tests on the claim? In short, they usually aren’t very scientific.

There are some interesting analogies between astrologers (literally from: “treating of the stars,” originally identical with astronomy) in their historical prime, and many explanations or predictions made by financial analysts nowadays. Astrologers focused on mathematically-intense models of the universe in some messy, but highly important, areas relevant to daily life. In days of old, astrology was not mainly the domain of cranks on late night television or quaint personal advice columnists next to the crossword puzzle. Why were astrologers some of the best educated and most respected people in their societies? Some of this is understandable. Certain powers of prediction were attainable by watching the heavens - when is daylight going to begin its return, around when will the banks of the river swell, when will stars be in certain locations - and this sort of predictive power was important for agriculture, among other things.

Astrology eventually split into “natural astrology” (what we call astronomy) and “judicial astrology” (closer to what we think of as astrology). Nowadays, there are certain areas where we just don’t have good predictive mechanics worked out in various areas, including the financial world. Taking a cue from Sacha, perhaps we could say that the task of the prudent man is to distinguish between what he can predict, and what he cannot. Perhaps they shouldn’t put horoscopes next to the crossworld puzzle, but rather under the latest headline emanating from the business section?