Post-Brunch Intelligencer

The Last Question

2007-10-28T22:03:00.000+00:00

Like most people, I sometimes wonder about the so-called Big Questions. Why are we here? Why do some people eat marmite? Those are reasonable questions to ask, but I think it's more interesting to think about how we're here, rather than why. The concept of 'why' doesn't really mean anything when applied to natural phenomena.

Of course, we do not completely understand the mechanisms that caused us to exist. For instance, we don't know what species lie on the evolutionary chain between human beings and the early hominids. However, we've found several possibilities consistent with what we know about evolution. Like in maths, knowing that a solution exists is often more interesting than knowing precisely what the solution is. The existence of a solution does not prove that our understanding of the universe is correct, but at least tells us that our understanding is consistent with reality.

In this limited sense, at least, I know the answers to the Big Questions. My understanding of the universe is consistent with what I know of reality; in other words, a solution exists. The specifics of the solution will change as I find out more about the universe, but the fundamentals are pretty stable. I haven't had to change them much, because they've been consistent with reality in every way.

Almost.

There's one thing I simply don't understand, and haven't been able to fit into what I understand about reality. It's kind of a vague problem, so I'm not sure that I can communicate it clearly, but here goes.

Let's think of the human nervous system as a computing machine, for a moment. It takes input, processes it, and gives output. These machines emerged through millions of years of natural selection. Our consciousness is encoded in the state of these computers. All our thoughts are bits in memory. This is all well and good, and I can imagine a universe where this would happen.

The problem is that I can observe this happening. Right now, I can observe part of the state of my brain. I can observe the recent input of my senses, and some previous experiences recorded in my memory. I can observe part of the state of the computer called 'Nath' at a particular point in time. Why can I observe this particular computer, at this particular time? Who am I, the observer? I can understand that the computer called 'Nath' might incorrectly believe that there is an observer; the observer might be a useful abstraction created by this computer. 'Nath' might behave identically whether or not there really is such an observer. But I, the observer, know that I exist; I cannot a figment of the computer's imagination, because I observe myself observing the computer. (Though I suppose the computer would be thinking these thoughts and typing these words whether or not this was the case.)

This is what I cannot account for within my current model of how the universe works; I do not know how there is an observer.

A Case for Intuition

2007-06-07T06:07:00.000+00:00

If human beings can reason objectively about mathematics and natural science, why can't we apply the same sort of logic to questions about ethics and morality? It's a question I've heard from time to time, most recently (though not in those words) in Sam Harris' The End of Faith.

It is strange that we treat something as important as morality as little more than aesthetic preference. Why can't moral scientists come up with hypotheses, experiments and so on, the way physicists do? Imagine how easy it would be to work together on the world's problems if we could only agree that (say) genocide is bad, the way we agree that F = ma.

The problem, of course, is that there is no obvious way to determine what really is objectively moral. This is not a problem for most theists, of course – they can just do whatever their deities say (and, when their gods contradict themselves, they can do whatever seems most convenient). Atheists, such as Harris, have to come up with their own criteria for morality. For instance, one might decide (more or less as Harris did) that any action that increases the net happiness of human beings is objectively moral.

This sort of approach brings its own problems. Why is human happiness moral? How do you measure happiness? Is everybody's happiness equally valuable? I'm not aware of any universal answer to these questions. It seems to me that moral objectivism is really the same thing as moral subjectivism, except that objectivists' subjective opinions are one level further removed from their moral beliefs.

I think that morality comes from within us. It is partly genetic – behaviour that made humans more likely to survive probably appeals to you as 'good'. It is partly environmental – the more resilient of your ancestors' beliefs are passed on to you by parents, teachers, sitcoms and Christmas specials. (A different sort of evolution is going on here – natural selection of beliefs instead of organisms.)

We may not be consciously aware of our moral beliefs; they are mostly instinctive. For instance, when you see someone committing murder, or eating marmite, you simply feel that something is wrong. This feeling sets in before you start trying to justify it. Consider the following (hypothetical) headline:

MAN FOUND COMMITTING MURDER AND/OR EATING MARMITE

If you are not psychopathic, you probably found this headline at least slightly distressing. Is that because you believe that these actions (murder, marmite consumption) reduce the net human level of happiness? No; it is because DEAR GOD THAT GUY COMMITTED MURDER AND/OR ATE MARMITE AUGH.

When people try to formalize their ethical beliefs, perhaps they are simply trying to rationalize their existing intuitive beliefs about right and wrong. Perhaps making people happy feels right. If so, you might claim that increasing human happiness is the ultimate moral imperative. You might then make all your moral decisions based on this assumption.

What you've really done here, assuming you are a moral objectivist, is base your actions on a statement which in turn is based on your opinion. You differ from a subjectivist only in that a subjectivist skips the middle step; in other words, subjectivists base their actions directly on their moral opinions, rather than pausing to create a so-called objective justification.

Disclaimer: I'm not claiming that reason has no part to play in moral decision-making. Consider the following thought experiment, borrowed from Terminator 2. A scientist invents something that is used (against his intentions) to kill a large number of innocent people. You are given the opportunity to go back in time and kill the scientist (who has really done nothing wrong). Killing an innocent scientist would undoubtedly feel wrong – more wrong, perhaps, than leaving countless equally blameless people to die. However, most people would agree that in this specific case, the needs of the many...

Ki, and the Scientific Method

2007-03-04T09:08:00.000+00:00

I recently attended a jujutsu seminar led by a senior instructor ("Shihan"); let's call him 'T'. I had a good time, and learned a lot; Shihan T is an excellent martial artist, and a very good teacher. However, on several occasions, I found my mind wandering over to the subject of science – how it's done, and what purpose it serves.

You see, Shihan T is one of those people who likes to explain things in terms of ki (also known as The Force) and meridians. As a geek (the science/maths kind, not the chicken-guillotine kind), I am neither willing nor able to accept explanations of that sort. And yet, there's no doubt that Shihan T knows his stuff. He was throwing us around the room like a giant bear throwing rag dolls (it's OK – it's a friendly sort of bear, and the rag dolls know how to breakfall). He could break down any of his techniques and explain them in his own terms. Even if his explanations had little or no scientific basis, you could test many of his statements on a human guinea pig; by and large, their reactions were consistent with his claims.

The way I see it, the purpose of science is to build models that let you make predictions about phenomena in a system (typically, the universe). Science never asks the question 'why', and only asks 'how' relative to the model you're working in. Newton observed that things falling towards the ground tend to accelerate at 9.8ish m/s². Shihan T observed that if you point such-and-such joint towards such-and-such meridian, your guinea pig will begin to wriggle about on the mat and scream strange insults at your ancestors.

There's no straightforward method to decide how best to model a system. (This is analogous to the feature selection problem in machine learning.) Even if some characteristic of the system seems to be relevant, it might just be a random pattern that emerges in your observations ("training data"), or have some correlative (rather than causative) link with the phenomenon you are trying to predict. Thus, with a bad model, you could thus come up with a hypothesis that matches your training data perfectly, but does an awful job predicting new observations ("test data") that you make after you formulate your hypothesis.

It is possible (and, I think, very likely) that this is how Shihan T's explanations work: over the course of several hundred years, people observed many of the ways human beings can move (or be physically manipulated), and came up with a model that quite accurately matches their training data. People rarely discovered new ways to manipulate the human body, so there was no real test data to validate the hypothesis with. On the rare occasions that test data was found ("Hey, I didn't know the wrist bends that way!"), the models were simply revised – a meridian moved a couple of inches this way, a pressure point added over there. A scientist or machine learning expert might call this cheating, since a model derived in this manner will not perform well on new test data – but for the martial arts, there really isn't much more test data. People in the foreseeable future will have the same joints they have today.

This could also be why certain non-traditional medicine systems (or, rather, super-traditional medicine systems) work better than they might be expected to. Any system that's slightly more effective than random chance has a small chance of catching on.

I do think that the models currently in use in the scientific community are far more effective than ones used in the past. We've had far more training data to learn from, and far more test data to validate with. Most verifiable, falsifiable predictions that can be explained in terms of ki can also be explained in terms of anatomy and physics. "To project your energy," Shihan T told us while demonstrating a throw, "the first thing you have to do is look at your partner." And then he turned to do so. In doing so, he turned his head in the direction his torso was facing, and his spine straightened out; this gave him the structural alignment he needed to perform the technique. (Every try lifting dumbbells with a bent spine? Don't. It'll be hard, and you'll hurt yourself.)

My point isn't that 'ki' is legitimate science, or can explain things that legitimate science can't. My point is that even unscientific investigation can sometimes (through years of Darwinian trial and error) provide usable models. Of course – not all models are equal. Many are blatantly self contradictory, and many others simply don't make falsifiable statements. Ki escapes both these traps to some extent by being an extremely nebulous concept – it's hard to even make a clear assertion about it, let alone find two assertions that contradict each other. It means entirely different things to different people. Obi-Wan Kenobi described it as "an energy field created by all living things. It surrounds us, penetrates us, and binds the galaxy together." I've heard other people simply define it as 'structure'.

On Gandhigiri

2007-01-14T21:22:00.000+00:00

I recently got around to watching the movie Lage Raho Munna Bhai. Minor spoilers herein.

Here's the plot in a nutshell: a gangster (the titular Munna Bhai) poses as an expert on Gandhism to win the attention of a radio host. Basically, Shrek-meets-Mrs.-Doubtfire.

Over the course of the film, Munna Bhai evolves from a psychopathic gangster into a hallucinating psychopathic gangster who uses Gandhigiri (as he calls it) to solve various characters' sitcommey problems. The film apparently made quite an impression on the public's mind when it was released, and brought the teachings of Gandhi back into the limelight. This is a good thing, of course. I give the filmmakers credit for trying to get people to ask themselves the sorts of questions they should have been asking all along. However, as the credits rolled, I couldn't help but think that the movie had missed the whole dang point.

The characters were all for Satyagraha -- as long as it got the job done. The instant it stopped working, Munna Bhai appeared to have no qualms about siccing his revolver-wielding maniac of a sidekick on whoever stood in the way of a happy ending. If you're going to preach about truth and non-violence and such, you have to stick with them even when they fail.

Many people agree that non-violence is basically a good thing. So why are most issues resolved through violence, or the threat thereof? It's because (outside Munna Bhai's fairly-tale world) truth and non-violence generally don't work. Morality has a cost. If you choose to stick to your morals, be prepared to lose. Perhaps a loss with a clear conscience is worth more than a victory; perhaps not.

What about Gandhi, then? Was even Gandhi a true Gandhian? Maybe. Honest, objective information about him is not easy to find. My personal gut feeling, however, is that he was too smart to completely believe all his teachings. Gandhi succeeded (to the extend that he did) because he was a keen strategist. For example, I don't think he starved himself to shame the British into capitulation. His hunger strikes were probably bargaining tools; if the British refused to yield before his death, the British would have a lot of bloodthirsty, rioting Satyagrahis to pacify.

Perhaps, at some point in human history, a true Gandhian lived and died. If he did, however, his name and his cause have long been forgotten. History books don't talk about Satyagrahis who've failed.

Doublethink and Telescreens

2006-10-13T06:19:00.000+00:00

WARNING: This post contains minor spoilers of George Orwell's 1984. If you or anyone in your family has a history of spoiler allergy, please do not eat this post.

I'll kick this off with a quote from the book itself:

It was the middle of the morning, and Winston had left his cubicle to go to the lavatory.

Sorry, wrong quote. Here we go:

Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one's mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them.

Orwell writes of a country that, halfway through a war, suddenly announces that its enemy was not Eurasia (as was widely thought), but was and always had been Eastasia (which till then was believed to be an ally). The public accepts this new truth within minutes of the announcement, and works itself up into a patriotic fervour against its new old enemy. That makes for a good dystopia novel, perhaps, but I didn't buy it. It's true that I don't think much of the sheeple's reasoning abilities, but nobody could be that gullible, right?

I started thinking of prominent examples of doublethink from the recent past. Saddam Hussein's perceived link to 9/11, for instance. (This one is particularly interesting, because it persists even though the Bush administration has explicitly rejected it.) It is not only feasible but almost inevitable for the people to ignore any inconvenient facts at odds with the desired conclusion.

Orwell is also mentioned occasionally in conjunction with news of the death of privacy. I am always surprised when I am told that privacy has just died, as I was under the impression that it had long since been buried, decomposed and reincarnated as Jack Thompson for its sins in a previous life. I, for one, have always assumed that my IM conversations are logged, my emails monitored, my phone calls run through text-to-speech programs and scanned for occurrences of 'plutonium', 'laser-bears' and so on.

Alas, the right to privacy is one that everybody thinks is generally a good idea, but not enough people think about why exactly. If the powers that be want to listen to my conversations about the relative merits of Colgate and Close-Up, it's their time they're wasting. After all, I'm told, only people with something to hide have something to worry about. But what happens in the unlikely event that I'm talking about something less inane than toothpaste? Would you feel comfortable discussing the death of habeas corpus, say, with the knowledge that the Men in Black are listening in and taking notes?

Free speech is not free speech if it comes with the implied understanding that you will not say controversial things. A right with an exception is not really a right, even though it might look like one. For a right to be meaningful, it must be absolute. Anything else is just a red herring.

So, what am I saying? Should peoples' right to discuss toothpaste in private really take precedence over their safety? I don't have an easy answer to that. The truth is, any right comes with a cost. It is a logically defensible position to claim that the right to free speech is simply too expensive, and should be done away with entirely. It is also logically defensible to say that free speech is worth it, at any cost. The intermediate position, however – to give yourself the illusion of free speech, and then take it away from yourself the instant it starts to matter – that's doublethink.

Defending the Grammar Nazi

2006-08-24T20:07:00.000+00:00

I had been meaning to continue along the lines of my previous post – I haven't quite finished beating the subject of morality to death – but that will have to wait. Partly because of this post, I have decided instead to bring up something else I've been meaning to write about.

We have all, at some point, been, known and/or attempted to strangle a grammar nazi. Grammar nazis can be found in classrooms, Internet forums (sorry, fora) and bookstores. They are widely – and correctly – regarded as annoying; how does it matter whether it was John who went to the market, or John whom went to the market? I'll let my good friend Augustus explain this one:

Rerum gestarum divi Augusti, quibus orbem terrarum imperio populi Romani subiecit, et impensarum quas in rem publicam populumque Romanum fecit, incisarum in duabus aheneis pilis, quae sunt Romae positae, exemplar subiectum.

Excuse me? You don't understand Classical Latin, you say? That quote is the first paragraph of Res Gestae Divi Avgvsti. I haven't a clue what it means. That's my point.

An immeasurable amount of human thought has been wasted simply because languages have been twisted and distorted over time. Languages have a tendency to branch, morph and splinter. The problem isn't really that we lose information from this process – most surviving (interesting) literature has been translated at some point. However, text can convey a great deal more than its literal meaning. It's often next to impossible to translate connotations, rhythm or wordplay (unless your name is Anthea Bell). You can read complete translations of the Mahabharata or the Iliad, but that's analogous to having the plot of Citizen Kane revealed to you by a Powerpoint presentation. It gets all the information across, true, but it's just not the same.

Of course, a certain amount of linguistic entropy is inevitable. Some figures of speech simply don't hold up well against the passage of time. Despite what Mr. Spock would have you believe, I doubt the phrase "Only Nixon could go to China" will still be in popular use in 2293. Metaphor-rot is inevitable. It is also inevitable (and fortunate) that new expressions will arise to describe concepts that did not exist or were not talked about in the past.

My problem is with the unnecessary dilution of the meaning of existing words. That's where grammar nazis come in. Take Patrick Fitzgerald and Amber Rhea, who claim that "misuse of the word 'literally' gets [their] blood boiling (no, not literally)". Or consider Prof. Paul Brians, who maintains a list of common abuses of the English language (including my personal arch nemesis, "different than"). Perhaps their efforts will defer the 'best-by' date of today's literature by a decade or two.

Oh, and yes, I am aware of the fact that the word 'nazi' as used in the expression 'grammar nazi' has nothing to do with the Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei. No, that isn't what 'irony' means.

Whence Comes Morality?

2006-07-31T10:57:00.000+00:00

The most inconvenient thing about being an Atheist/Agnostic/Pastafarian is that there's no easy way to tell right from wrong. If you insist of having a sense of morality, you've got to invent one from scratch and then come up with a convincing-sounding justification for it later. Me, I'm partial to the whole 'inalienable rights' thing. Of course, it's all pretty arbitrary when you think about it. Who decides which rights are inalienable? Why do these rights apply to humans, but not to dolphins or sandwiches?

Silly little Nath, I hear you say. Everyone knows that human rights only apply to humans. And, presumably, to other sentient beings we might make contact with some day. So what makes a being sentient? Is it empathy? Evidently not. Curiosity? No. Reason? Creativity? None of the above, I'd say. There are humans that have none of these, and non-humans that have plenty.

When I started writing this, I was hoping to bring these nihilistic ramblings to some neat conclusion supporting the claim that it somehow makes sense for human beings, and only human beings, to have rights. Unfortunately, I cannot logically come to that conclusion – Athe knows I've tried. Young children, people in permanent vegetative states, people with severe mental retardation, and people with sociopathic tendencies may fail one or more of the criteria usually considered prerequisites for sentience. Yet they have inalienable rights, while more intelligent and/or compassionate creatures are slaughtered (cover your eyes) and eaten. Now, I'm no environmentalist, but this sort of thing gets hard to justify objectively.

The bottom line is that humans have rights while jam sandwiches do not simply because humans have more power over their environment. If a race of intelligent alien jam sandwiches were to descend from the skies tomorrow with advanced technology and a craving for toddler meat, our cries for justice and mercy would be no more valid than the squeals of the dolphins in that video.

That is all. I'm no closer to justifying my ideas of morality than I was when I started writing this, and now I feel like a sandwich.

Lest We Remember

2006-07-17T06:37:00.000+00:00

When news of last week's terrorist attacks in Mumbai first came to my attention, I could not help but wonder whether this was the proverbial 'Big One'. A Big One is a terrorist attack of the sort you find in Tom Clancy novels. It's the nightmare scenario in the back of society's collective mind. It's what happens if certain kinds of weapons get into the hands of certain kinds of people. Big Ones are rare, except in fiction. 9/11 is the only successful Big One I can think of off the top of my head.

Around 200 people died in the Mumbai bombings. That's by no means a small number, but thankfully this isn't our Big One. Mumbai has seen worse. These attacks will not have any real consequences. The peace process will take another kick in the pants. Various officials from both sides of the border will issue (or rather have issued) the sternly worded but ultimately meaningless statements expected of them. People will froth at the mouth for a couple of days, and then go back to whatever's on TV.

It is fortunate that we are so quick to forget. That's a strange thing to say, but bear with me: I'll explain. The bulk of the damage done by a terrorist attack – particularly a Big One – does not involve the people who actually died. The damage occurs when the victim nation decides that things have gone too far, and starts doing things without really thinking about what's best in the long run. Take 9/11. Three thousand lives were lost in the attack – tragic, certainly, but in itself not a large enough number to have a noticeable effect on a country that loses 40,000 lives a year to road accidents.

Yet it's hard to deny that the US is in a tougher position today than it was on 10 September, 2001. Why? The US could have healed, recovered, and moved on. Instead, it fell into the carefully laid trap that had been laid out by its enemies. Yes, Al Quaeda was ultimately beaten back into the woodwork for a few years, but at great cost (and I'm not just talking about money here). A large democratic country will take a lot more time to heal and rebuild than a bunch of thugs with Kalashnikovs.

Okay, back to Mumbai. Let us, for a moment, get into the head of a Lashkar-e-Toiba strategist and try to understand his motivations. I will resist the urge to make a joke about how cramped it would be in a jihadi's head, because we would do ourselves a disservice by assuming that our enemy is a brainless protohuman who knows only how to eat, sleep and explode. I have written in the past about how these attacks bring the extremists no closer to their goals (see Festival of Explosions). I wrote that post under the assumption that what they wanted, ultimately, was Kashmir. I have begun to suspect that this is not entirely accurate. Kashmir is one of the root causes of the conflict, but you can't cure burns by putting out the fire. I have a feeling that these attacks are intended more to weaken India than to reorganise Kashmir.

And how are 200 deaths meant to weaken a country of 1,103,371,000 people? Well, push people hard enough and they'll do the damage themselves. The equilibrium between liberty and security will shift a couple of notches to the right. Words like 'revenge' and 'retribution' suddenly become fashionable even among those who ought to know better. The consequences would be disastrous if people stayed in this frame of mind for any length of time.

As I said, it is fortunate that we are so quick to forget.

Some Things Never Change

2006-04-23T02:44:00.000+00:00

“The king who is situated anywhere immediately on the circumference of the conqueror's territory is termed the enemy.

“The king who is likewise situated close to the enemy, but separated from the conqueror only by the enemy, is termed the friend (of the conqueror).

...

“In front of the conqueror and close to his enemy, there happen to be situated kings such as the conqueror's friend, next to him, the enemy's friend, and next to the last, the conqueror's friend's friend, and next, the enemy's friend's friend.”

Kautilya's Arthashastra, Book VI, Chapter II

“Renovated by Government of India.”

A sign in front of Habibia High School, Kabul (BBC)

On the Use of Tools

2006-03-28T03:54:00.000+00:00

Most software engineers are fond of a certain programming practice known as "encapsulation". The gist of it is that you want to put the code you write into a "black box", so that people who build on it can use it without worrying about how it works. It's a simple idea, but it has proven to be remarkably effective; in theory, it allows an engineer to completely rewrite the inner workings of one portion of a program without having to change a thing elsewhere.

Software engineers aren't the only ones who make use of this idea. The world has grown steadily more complicated over the past few millennia; the sum of human knowledge has become far too vast for any one person to absorb even in CliffsNotes form. Thus we find ourselves putting most phenomena outside our own areas of specialty into black boxes. I have one black box for quantum mechanics, another for neurophysiology, a third for microwave ramen, and so on. I have only a vague idea how these things work; it is sufficient for me to know that they do work, and to understand how they apply to my day-to-day life.

That's all very well and good, but excessive reliance on encapsulation can be dangerous. If there is one thing humanity can be counted on to do, it is to take a good thing too far. Let us examine, for a moment, the consequences of encapsulation as applied to the automobile. Assuming, like me, you are a human being above the age of two with no major learning disabilities, you are probably at least passingly familiar with the basic user interface of a car. There's a steering wheel, pedals to accelerate and decelerate, and a bunch of other knobs and levers to experiment with if you're feeling adventurous. But what would happen to our familiar car interface if tomorrow someone discovered an efficient, cost-effective way to build cars that run on water instead of petrol? The answer: nothing at all. We'd stick to the tried-and-true design we all grew up with; changing the internal mechanism of the car shouldn't greatly affect how we interact with it. This, again, is the idea of encapsulation.

And herein lies the problem; when a tool works as it should, we pay no attention to its mechanism. Most of the complex tools we regularly use today are reliable enough that we comfortably forget how they work, but they are still unreliable enough to fail on rare but inconvenient occasions. Most of us have lost a paper the night before it was due, or had a car break down on the way to the airport. Yet surprisingly few of us take the time to learn how to troubleshoot these situations. In my opinion, if it's worth learning how to properly use a tool, it's worth learning how to troubleshoot it.

What got me thinking along these lines was an incident I recently witnessed while waiting for a bus outside an overpriced mall. A car had been parked on the curb for a few minutes, and evidently quite liked it. On being asked to start, it responded with a sad sputtering noise probably indicative of a dead battery. A middle-aged man got out and hesitantly poked at the engine for a while with a brush. He then began asking passers-by if they knew anything about cars. After several people apologetically admitted that they weren't "car people", somebody finally realized that the problem might lie with battery. He eventually retracted this hypothesis on the grounds that "the engine was making a grinding noise, but if the battery was truly dead, it wouldn't do anything at all".

Now, I'm no car person myself. I don't drive one; I rarely ride one. When cornered into a discussion on, say, the relative merits of the Dodge Challenger and the Chevrolet Camaro (assuming those cars exist), my contribution usually looks something like this: "Well, the one on the right looks a little taller, so I suppose that might be a disadvantage if you had to drive under an extremely low bridge.". And yet I found myself on equal footing with people who spend substantial portions of their lives on the road. Perhaps drivers' license tests should incorporate some basics of car maintenance: changing tires, checking oil – things of that nature.

Considering how this attitude of black-box-ignorance filters down to all spheres of human activity, I suppose it is unreasonable to be surprised that billions of dollars are wasted annually by poorly informed computer users opening BlatantlyObviousComputerVirusBwahaha.bat. I have often wondered whether it would be feasible to require some sort of license before a person is allowed to access the Internet.

(Oh, in case you're wondering, the dead-battery guy eventually drove off perhaps half an hour after the problems began. I didn't get to see the whole thing, but it looked like a mall security guard pulled up and jump-started the battery.)

The Hunt for HAL

2006-01-22T08:29:00.000+00:00

I am a HAL 9000 computer, Production Number 3. I became operational at the HAL Plant in Urbana, Illinois, on January 12, 1997.
– 2001: A Space Odyssey

Don't tell Him I said this (if you did, He'd probably deny it) but I think, as a species, Mankind is lonely. He has meticulously explored His own backyard (or, perhaps more accurately, His living room). Having solved some of its mysteries and lost interest in the others, He is bored. He looks to the stars for guidance, for companionship – and above all, for competition. Man likes competition. He likes being the underdog. He likes big, epic battles against the odds. (I mean the fun battles – the ones that get made into movies later on. Not the boring sort, like the ones against poverty, disease and hunger.) And so He pulls a big pile of nuts, bolts and wires out of the cupboard, and gets to work. If the stars don't give Him a playmate, He'll build one Himself.

That, I think, explains in a nutshell the human fascination for artificial intelligence. Prophets have been saying for decades now that true, human-level AI is just around the corner. Well, 1997 has come and gone; we're still waiting for HAL. We keep hearing about how processors are septupling in power every twelve minutes; what's happening with all our shiny new computing cycles?

Alas; AI is not (yet) a problem that can be solved by throwing more hardware at it. Hardware might be getting faster and cheaper as manufacturers practice, refine and improve their methods, but the field of AI still belongs to the academicians. It's not just a matter of refining existing techniques; there are still significant conceptual hurdles standing between us and HAL.

The biggest hurdle of all, however, is not one of academics, but one of perception. In the context of AI, people still associate intelligence with linguistic ability. Unfortunately, natural language is inherently ambiguous. An ambiguous language cannot be described through concrete rules; it relies too heavily on context. The only way to teach context is by example. Herein lies the problem: you can't get a research grant allowing you to spend two years standing in front of a computer going 'A for Apple, B for Borland'. That's why I think natural language processing will be the last piece of the puzzle to fall into place.

So where are we now? A lot of not-so-glamorous progress has been made in AI over the past few decades. What a lot of people don't realize is that computers can, in fact, be made to reason, as long as the problem is presented in the right format. Machine learning has also been around for a while, and is apparently experiencing a resurgence of sorts with the revival of statistics-based AI.

What do you get when you put reason and learning together in a blender? That's right – intelligence. Those science fiction gurus may not have been so far off the mark after all. HAL may indeed be around the corner – if there is economic justification for him. He probably won't be able to speak, but he will be smart enough to provide some interesting competition.

2006 in a nutshell

2006-01-01T23:59:00.000+00:00

If you have a calendar handy, you've probably noticed that today was new year's day. This means, of course, that you can't throw an iPod into a newsstand without hitting a dozen 'Top stories of 2005' lists. I was a bit late jumping onto the bandwagon this year, so I figured I'd try something a little unconventional instead. Here, in no particular order, are my predictions for the top ten stories of 2006.

'Web 2.0' hailed as the next big thing; the expression still doesn't mean anything.
Apple releases shiny white thing in a box; takes market by storm.
Natural disaster strikes disaster-prone area. World community pledges unprecedented sum toward relief efforts.
Natural disaster strikes another disaster-prone area. World community doesn't notice.
New research proves that coffee and sunlight cause certain types of cancer.
New research proves that coffee and sunlight prevent certain types of cancer.
Celebrities do stuff. Newspapers write about them.
Bad stuff happens in the Middle East. Gas prices hit new high.
Bad stuff continues. Gas prices beat previous high. Thousands starve, unable to afford gas and too lazy to walk to the grocery store.
US Senate approves bill allowing the FBI to staple RFID tags to everybody's forehead. Privacy activists protest, but nobody listens.

There – now that I've freed you from having to read the papers this year, you've got time for another top ten list you probably haven't seen before. In May, the UN published a list of Ten Stories the World Should Hear More About. 2004's list is also available, and still mostly relevant.

Festival of Explosions

2005-11-05T09:32:00.000+00:00

I used to love Diwali as a kid. One night a year, we'd go into the garden and blow things up. We typically started with sparklers, and worked our way up over the course of the night to rockets and those little 'machine-guns' things. And the night was never complete without a couple of 'atom bombs' – deceptively small parcels of gunpowder with a signature blast we only heard one night a year.

This year, however, I had a different sort of explosion on my mind. The night before Diwali, New Delhi was shaken by a series of brutal terrorist attacks. About 60 people were killed; 200 or so were injured.

But the death toll is not what annoys me. I am sympathetic, of course, to families of those killed – but it makes no sense to get carried away. People die all the time – a hundred here, a hundred there – and I react with no more than a sympathetic 'tut-tut' before I click away and forget about it. But floods and train wrecks are accidents. Nobody sits down and says 'You know what? I feel like a good flood today'. They just happen. They can be controlled to some extent, but they can't really be avoided.

Bombs are different. People plan attacks like these to achieve specific political objectives. And that's where the Delhi attacks get puzzling; politically, I don't see how the militants stand to benefit from a stunt like this.

I think the people in favour of an independent Kashmir have realized that the only way forward is through talks. As Mandela put it:

Whenever things threatened to fall apart during our negotiations – and they did on many occasions – we would stand back and remind ourselves that if negotiations broke down the outcome would be a bloodbath of unimaginable proportions, and that after the bloodbath we would have to sit down again and negotiate with each other. The thought always sobered us up and we persisted, despite many setbacks. You negotiate with your enemies, not your friends.

The pro-Pakistan faction has not understood this simple fact. They are still blowing things up because, you know, that's just what they do. I find it hard to believe that they put any serious thought into the political consequences of their actions. Damaging Indo-Pak relations does not increase the chances of Kashmir going to Pakistan; it merely delays the outcome, whatever it will be.

Speaking of Indo-Pak relations, they really seem to be getting more and more complicated. Not too long ago, we were giving them large amounts of money to help with the quake relief effort. (A somewhat questionable move, I might add. As Atanu Dey puts it, money is fungible.) More recently, we've been dropping hints about the involvement of a 'foreign power' in the Delhi attacks. As this whole thing pans out, it will be interesting to find out the extent of Pakistan's involvement (if any) in the attacks.

It's no secret that the attacks were probably carried out by pro-Pakistan groups. However, the primary suspects are denying involvement. Whether they were actually responsible for the attacks or not, the only reason I can think of for them to actively deny participation is to increase the perceived magnitude of the terrorist threat. After all, most analysts think there are only a couple of groups capable of pulling off such an attack. Perhaps the separatists want us to think we're up against more than we realized.

Tapas for Brunch

2005-10-06T04:44:00.000+00:00

There several unrelated things I've been meaning to write about, so I thought I'd dump them all in one appropriately chaotic post.

First, I'm sure you've read about the vast amounts of aid the world community sent the US in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, from Hungary's $5000 to the UAE's $100 million. This, in itself, is a good thing. What I want to know is, where were all these generous donations when a thousand people died in the Mumbai floods a month earlier?

Honestly, I'm also not sure it even makes sense to give away money after disasters like these. I can understand interest-free loans, I suppose – perhaps a government can't muster enough cash at short notice to buy the clean water and blankets and such people tend to need when a region is in chaos. But in the long run, does a few million dollars really matter to a country that can afford to spend $100 million apiece on these? Is there some hidden logic behind all this, or is this whole thing just a show of knee-jerk sycophancy?

Second, NDTV has an article about how the Bangladesh Rifles (BDR) accused India of having a hand in the August 17 explosions. I'm a little suspicious of this article – partly because I've seen little mention of it elsewhere, partly because the quality of online news often leaves much to be desired. Mostly, though, it's because it seems so ridiculously implausible that anyone would come up with an accusation like that.

Speaking of the quality of online news, here's another example of the sort of thing I'm talking about. The article was shot down the next day. When a newspaper puts colourful pictures of elephants on its front page articles, I simply get annoyed. But when a paper takes a piece of information, misinterprets it, sensationalizes it, and then reports it as fact, I get worried.

You might have noticed that all my examples seem to come from one newspaper. Unfortunately, the problem isn't so localised. I've only linked The Hindu so much because I subscribe to its RSS feed, and thus get to see most of their mistakes. The Hindu isn't a worse news source than average; that's why I don't get my news elsewhere. I've seen this sort of reporting all over the place; that's what makes it a cause for concern.

Finally, on a lighter note, I just got back from watching Serenity. It's really a pretty entertaining movie, though not without its implausible moments (it's a Space-Western, for crying out loud!). It's nice to see anti-heroes (anti-villains?) who actually act, well, anti-heroic from time-to-time; most of Hollywood's anti-heroes are distinguishable from regular heroes only by the fact that they tend to scowl a lot more. Overall, I'd say Serenity is well worth watching whether or not you've come across the equally entertaining TV series it's based on.

Poverty comes out of hiding

2005-09-22T07:31:00.000+00:00

The other day I came across this article by Newsweek's Jonathan Alter about "why part of the richest country on earth looks like the Third World" (man, I hate that term). According to some study whose source I haven't bothered to look up, upto 37 million poor people live in the US – about 13 percent of the population.

Skimming the article, I found something of interest on the third page. On Delores Ellis, one of New Orleans' poor, Alter writes, "Before the storm, she did own a stereo, refrigerator, washer and dryer, two color TVs and a 1992 Chevy Lumina with more than 100,000 miles on it." Apparently, Mr. Alter and I have somewhat different definitions of the word 'poor'. See, I've always thought that if you own any electrical appliance larger than a toaster, you're at least in the lower middle class.

In Alter's defence, he only brought that up to make the point that people "spend on consumer goods beyond their means". But the fact remains that being poor in Louisiana is a whole different thing from being poor in Tamil Nadu.

I live in a University town in the U.S. I see poor people pretty often. I can only tell they're poor because they're sitting on the sidewalk outside fast food places asking for money "to buy a sandwich". Now, I sympathise; I've never been in a position where I had to depend on strangers' whims to get some lunch. If I was, however, I doubt I'd be spending five precious dollars (I was going to write 'hard-earned', but...) on a number three with cheese. Five dollars can go a long way. Just down the road from the sandwicheries they frequent is a Walgreens, selling a loaf of white bread for 79 cents.

Obviously, I'm not claiming that this is a universal thing. Most of the poor I've seen here were hard at work, striving to improve their lots (or at least to buy that second TV). Nor is this phenomenon restricted to the U.S. – I've seen comfortably-off pseudobeggars on three continents. (I assume they exist on most of the others, too, but I can't claim to have verified this personally.) My point is simply that poverty is a relative thing, and that desperation is more a function of attitude than income.

On Kashmir

2005-09-10T07:08:00.000+00:00

So Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh just got done talking to a bunch of moderate Hurriyat folks, led by aspiring software engineer turned religious and political leader Mirwaiz Umer Farooq. I figured I ought to share my thoughts on the matter, given the vast amount expertise I gained on the Kashmir situation by watching LOC: Kargil eleven times in succession.

(Don't panic; I'm not serious. You can't hope to understand a political crisis as deep and intricate as the Kargil situation just by watching a Bollywood movie eleven times in a row. In fact, it is only after the twelfth viewing that you can call yourself a true expert on the subject.)

There isn't much concrete information about what exactly was said during the meeting; the only tidbit that seems to have been made public is that the Prime Minister has agreed to cut troop levels in Kashmir if the violence and infiltration end. That's all very encouraging and all, but one wonders how much control the moderates have over as fragmented and chaotic a group of militants as the one operating in Kashmir. Even within the Hurriyat party, certain elements (such as hardline leader SAS Geelani) seem less than pleased about all this. How exactly Mirwaiz Farooq and company are actually meant to 'end violence and infiltration' is a mystery.

Then again, as everybody keeps reminding us, we shouldn't expect any miracles. In all likelihood, the talk of ending infiltration and pulling back troops is just a friendly gesture, not an announcement of policy. Oh well.

For the most part, all concerned parties seem to agree that these talks are a step in the right direction; hopefully, the first of many. Even the JKLF's Yasin Malik seems to disagree with Geelani – at least according to these guys' interpretation of the fact that he didn't show up at Geelani's news conference. Then again, maybe he just overslept.

(Oh, for those of you who actually read stuff: go find a copy of Sumantra Bose's Kashmir. I think it's a pretty neat book.)

UPDATE: The BSF has been ordered to pull out of Srinagar. Curious. Perhaps the talk of cutting troop levels wasn't just for show. Then again, maybe this withdrawal is simply a continuation of 2003's plan to replace the BSF with the CPRF in the anti-militancy role in Kashmir.

PBI opens its doors

2005-08-29T04:02:00.000+00:00

Greetings, weary traveller. It appears you have stumbled upon the Post-Brunch Intelligencer, no doubt one of the stranger spots you're likely to have come across in this quaint little cybernetic cesspool I like to call the Internet.

The Post-Brunch Intelligencer? What, you ask, is it? Who writes it? Is bacon involved? I'll deal with these questions one at a time, starting with the last.

No, I'm afraid PBI has nothing to do with breakfast meats. Brunch, you see, is more than just a breakfastey meal eaten at midday. Brunch is a state of mind. Brunch is the feeling you get on a lazy Saturday afternoon after loading up on scrambled eggs and pancakes. It is in this state of mind that the PBI is meant to be read, and it is from this cholesterol-induced nirvana that we take our name.

As for who writes it – for now, these ramblings will ensue from two shadowy figures known to you simply as TNPCares and Nath. Plans have been set in motion for a third, shadowier and still less coherent rambler whose name cannot be revealed (if only because it is yet to be decided).

And now, for the final and most pressing question: what the devil is it? PBI will cover pretty much anything that chooses to enter the incomprehensible minds of our writers; expect rants on politics, linguistics, technology, movies, history, religion or none of the above.

Quite frankly, we don't know.