Leaky Abstractions and Uploading

The human experience of the world is built on layers and layers of abstractions--for instance, the human eye doesn't actually perceive movement. It shoots a series of little snapshots, and then your brain reassembles them, does a little calculation and tells you if things are moving. You don't actually see anything move. Also, you have a tiny blind spot in the middle of your eye where the optic nerve attaches to your retina. Also, your peripheral vision is a) blurry as all get out and b) color-blind. Your brain just fills in the blurriness for you

Now, mostly none of this actually matters. You mostly can tell when things are moving, and you mostly don't care that there's a tiny spot you can't see in the center of your eye. They're a good abstractions: they don't distract you with extraneous details, and leave you the information you need. Mostly. Sometimes though, knowing that there's a tiny blindspot in the center of your eye is important. Like when you're trying to look at a tiny, tiny speck of light--a star, say. Then it's useful to know that looking a few degrees to the left or right will get you a much clearer and brighter image.

The point of all this is: abstractions leak. Biological abstractions, software abstractions, mental abstractions, physical abstractions--all of them. When they leak, things can go wrong really fast. Auto-immune disorders, buggy code, phantom pains, dogmatism, faulty scientific theories; all of these can be traced to abstractions that have sprung a leak.

There's not really a solution for this problem. We need abstractions. Without them all there is is a mass of chaotic, incoherent data screaming at us. Without abstractions, we can't function. Before acting on anything, first we have to create an abstraction of it. The only solution is to be aware of the existence of our abstractions and be wary of their capacity to trick us. The map is not the territory, etc. If we're lucky, maybe we come up with a better abstraction every once and a while.

So what does this have to do with uploading? Well, think about it--uploading is moving our entire existence into an abstraction. Instead of moving our real arm through real space to manipulate real objects, we move an abstraction of an arm through an abstraction of space to manipulate abstractions of objects--all of which has to be processed through code running on real hardware, which may or may not have a piece of conductive dust fall across an important component. Simply put, the possibility for catastrophic abstraction failure becomes enormous. Our physical bodies have a multitude of feedbacks, some quite extreme, to keep our abstractions in line with reality--the senses, pain, hunger, exhaustion, etc. Uploading will quite deliberately trade those meaningful feeds for user-generated ones. Instead of keeping tabs on what's happening to the real physical substrate for our existence, we'll be drinking virtual champagne while having virtual sex with each other.

It strikes me as a scenario with some pretty striking fail states.

The Simulation Argument

It goes like this: "Pretty soon we're going to have really powerful computers. One of the things that people will want to do with these really powerful computers is run simulations--simulations of their own societies. Then those simulations will probably also want to run simulations! And so on. In fact, there will likely be far, far more simulated people than actual people. Wait, did I say 'will?' I meant are. Yeah, it's statistically likely that it's happening right now, and we're the simulations."

The problem I have with that is this: how can you build a computer that can simulate the existence of (as many or) more molecules than are used to build the computer? Electro-magnetic, weak nuclear, strong nuclear, gravitic forces would all have to be simulated, and the number of calculations necessary to work all that math out for a single molecule would almost certainly take more than one molecule. Take the gravitic force in particular--gravitic force extends over a monstrously huge area, so that every molecule in the entire Earth exerts a gravitic effect on every other--every molecule in the solar system, every molecule in the galaxy, every molecule in the universe. Simply working out the gravitic interactions in my left hand could take a solar system's weight in computronium.

Assuming that we are ourselves a simulation, that leaves two possibilities. Either our experience of the universe is semi-illusory, and individual atoms don't actually exist unless unless they have to in order to maintain the illusion. (Wouldn't that be an interesting explanation for the wave/particle duality!) Or alternatively, the laws of physics in our universe are grossly simplified versions of those in the simulating universe.

Now, step two of the simulation argument is that the simulations will probably run simulations of their own. So what happens if we, semi-illusory/drastically simplified simu-verse, try to run our own simulation? Either we build a computer according to the faked laws of physics and, unable to pull off a simulated quantum computer, our universe crashes. Or we are forced to simplify the governing laws of our own simulation, either by making it much smaller molecule-wise than our own, or by faking some stuff.

Imagine matrioshka dolls (those Russian nesting dolls): just as each one is smaller than the one that contains it, so too is each simulation smaller than its progenitor. Depending on how efficiently universes can be simulated, each one may be vastly smaller--an order of magnitude smaller or more. If this number is large enough, it can very much bork the entire premise.

Representation and Taxation

I had a little epiphany just now: it's not taxation that necessitates representation, it's economic entanglement.

Sure, in the American colonies taxation was the flash point for revolution. It wasn't, however, the real problem: the real issue was that America was being run as a raw resource exporter/finished goods importer to drive England's economic growth. The taxation of tea was just one of dozens of ways the colonies were milked for wealth. For every cent of taxation, dollars and dollars were extracted via private companies: furs, timber, slaves, sugar, and so on. Taxes were just the government's way of skimming a bit of those massive privatized profits off for itself.

At that point England's economy was built on the backs of its colonies and outposts in America, Asia and Africa. Together they constituted a single economic system: without the colonies to provide resources and markets, England's domestic economy would have collapsed, and the economies of the colonies were similarly dependent (deliberately and systematically so) on England for essential goods. And that's where the lack of representation became so pressing: As long as political power was concentrated in the hands of the English, they had every incentive to design a system that rewarded only themselves. Only if political power is distributed throughout the whole economic tangle is there any political incentive to spread wealth with anything approaching fairness. Economic involvement without representation leads to exploitation.

Copyright Fallacies

I'm wary of real-world analogies when discussing copyright. One of the big problems with copyright, as I see it, is that it just doesn't map onto physical reality particularly well. The idea of something that can be infinitely replicated without any additional cost is pretty alien to our real-world experience, and it tends to get pushed under the rug a lot. When questions of intellectual property come up, the reaction has almost invariably been to try to treat it like it's a physical object. Reasoning by analogy is a fundamental part of our legal system, and it really bites us in the ass when it comes to copyright. (This is, I think, essentially where the concept of Fair Use comes from: once you've bought it, you can do more or less whatever to want with it--carry it around, give or lend it to someone else, use it as much or as little as you like; anything, that is, except exploit its ease of reproduction. You can use it in all the ways that it's like a thing, but in none of the ways it's like an idea.)

This "common sense" position worked as long as there were substantial costs to reproduction. Making and buying a CD was enough like making and buying a pot or a hammer that the analogy held. Now, not so much. What used to take an entire industry of reproduction and distribution has been replaced by desktop-publishing and the internet. This has exposed the huge, gaping difference between any real-world analogy and intellectual property: if you "sell" your IP, you still have it. If I "steal" your IP, you still have it. The incentive for individual users not to distribute is absent, in a way that's impossible to duplicate in the material realm.

This is why I think that real-world analogies make for poor arguments. Copyright in the digital age is so different from what we are familiar with that any analogy can't help but mislead.

Really, the power-grab underway by the companies in the recording and distribution business is a far more honest recognition of the realities of digital reproduction than the defense of the blurry concept of Fair Use. The only people who really get the realities of the media are the recording companies and the pirates--everyone else is still trying to treat intellectual property like it's a thing. The record companies, for all their flaws, have at least figured that much out. Sure, their proposed legal framework is obviously rapacious and terrible for consumers, but at least it responds to the reality of intellectual property, and not to a poorly thought-out analogy from the material world.

A Defense of Faith

The recent tussle over Barbara's guest post on Unclaimed Territory defending liberal religion has gotten me thinking. Given the extent to which the current political climate is split along religious lines, it is unsurprising that defense of an institution so closely identified with the worst of our opponent's excesses provoked such a vehement reaction. Personally, I hate the way religion is used by the right-wing, but I remain unconvinced that religion as a whole must be thrown out. The most vocal advocate of the "baby-too" school of thought is Pharyngula, who responded to Barbara's post with this no-holds-barred assault on religion.

The problem is faith.

Faith is a hole in your brain. Faith stops critical thinking. Faith is a failure point inculcated into people's minds, an unguarded weak point that allows all kinds of nasty, maggoty, wretched ideas to crawl into their heads and take up occupancy.

Here is where the anti-religion folks leave me behind. I am, I must say, a die-hard fan of faith. I think that faith is, really, quite a positive force in the world. Like, for example, I have faith that people can create a government that is fairer, kinder, and more efficient than any that exist today. I don't really have any reason for believing that this is so, and there is much evidence to the contrary, but I do anyway. I also variously believe in the power of love, the value of forgiveness, the capacity of science to better the human condition, and many other fluffy feel-good bits of utter nonsense for which I have no proof. I do not, by the way, believe in any form of higher divinity.

I am hard-pressed to imagine a world worth living in, devoid of faith. I would also be willing to wager that PZ Myers can't either. Faith gives everything meaning--without it, life is nothing but inhaling and exhaling, and then a stop.

Now, I am willing to bet also that at this point, PZ Myers would step in and tell me that this isn't what faith is, that this sort of faith isn't what he was talking about at all. He would of course be right. But why is that? Why is it that we can have entire arguments about this subject, and not even be able to agree on what our terms mean?

In every argument I have ever had about religion (and there have been many!), that is the turn the debate has taken. PZ's was no exception. He posted a follow up commenting on that very thing. He called it a "bothersome strategy," identifying it as "an attempt to defocus religious belief." I would dispute this: it was not an attempt to "defocus," it was an attempt to refocus. The problems PZ identifies and attacks are problems no reasonable person would deny are real and threatening. But calling them "religion," as though these odious tendencies are the single defining aspect of religiosity, is to grossly oversimplify.

PZ:

The other effect of this strategy is to turn religion into a completely empty word. When someone can say they don't believe in any deities, the supernatural, or any kind of afterlife, but that they are "religious", then religion is meaningless.

The problem isn't that the word "religion" is empty of meaning--the problem is that it is overfilled with meaning. The word "religion" is wildly overdetermined--it has hundreds of different and contradictory meanings; no one can agree on which is "right." This was the problem that PZ was facing, and was unable to deal with: when he calls religion a foul and corrupting thing, he is right. When others call it an uplifting and crucial aspect of life, they are right too. He looks in from the outside and sees blank-eyed robots marching in lock-step; others look from the inside and feel a holy joy.

To summarize: If you are making an argument about religion that presumes that religion is primarily a mechanism for social manipulation, and the person you are arguing with assumes that religion is primarily a method for personal spiritual growth, you are going to get exactly nowhere, and you are going to get there real fast.

Is PZ right that this makes religion a word worthless for arguments? Yes. But that is the way it is. PZ is right: words mean nothing but what we think they mean, and we don't always agree.

Practical Advice For Shrill and Uppity Democrats

(crossposted at dailykos)

In the comments following my post on how Republicans use typical patriarchal rhetoric to shut down Democratic challenges, user high5 mentioned a post of eirs in which eir had made the same realization while listening to an interview with a Norwegian social psychologist, Berit Ås. Ås had developed a typology of these masculine domination techniques, and how to counter them. Intrepid reader Halcyon found a copy of a speech in which she outlined these techniques, and tossed it to me with the suggestion that I diary it. Thanks, Halcyon! Anyway, sucker that I am, here is my attempt to apply these hard-won feminist lessons to the current political debate. This post is a bit long, please bear with me.

The first thing I noticed while reading this is, damn, was I right. No really--nearly every technique for shutting up opponents has an obvious parallel in the way Republicans and the media treat Democrats. It's astonishing. Of course, Ås is careful to note that these techniques aren't necessarily gendered. "Both men and women use them. The strong use them against the weaker." Just going to show that feminist perspectives aren't limited to use on women's issues.

Berit Ås highlights three areas where learning to recognize these techniques will help: First, it will help you realize that it isn't you who has the problem, it is them--and since these techniques work by convincing you you aren't worth listening to, simply realizing what is going on is very important. Second, it will (hopefully) aid you in combating the use of the techniques. Lastly, she emphasizes the importance of getting a dialogue going. The more these techniques are recognized for what they are, the less power they will have.

The five techniques she mentions are these:

1. Making invisible.
   
2. Ridiculing.
   
3. Withholding of information.
   
4. Double punishment.
   
5. Heaping blame and putting to shame.

1) Making invisible. The first is in many ways the most obvious. "Making someone invisible means that a person chooses to treat an individual or a group as if the person or group were not there," says Ås. If this doesn't immediately remind you of the strange absence of Democrats and liberals in the media as documented exhaustively by Media Matters, then hey, that's a nice rock you've got. Nice and comfy under there? It also reflects the utter railroading that had been going on in the House and the Senate under Republican control--Democratic amendments are simply ignored, and Democratic bills simply go nowhere.

"This really should be a bipartisan amendment," he says, as Linder[R] crosses his arms and frowns. "This gives powers to the secretary of defense to rewrite the rules governing civil service at the Department of Defense at any time!" Linder's eyes dart impatiently around the room. "It does threaten to undermine the credibility of our civil service as a nonpartisan body," Van Hollen[D] continues--but to little avail. Linder's thoughts are clearly someplace else, someplace where there are no annoying Democrats like Van Hollen. If Linder has listened to a word, there's no sign of it.

From Ås:

"Making someone invisible can sometimes be difficult to discern because it often happens “without words”. It is expressed through body language, for instance gestures or the lack of them. Notice how some people read papers when women are speaking, chat quietly to each other, yawn, roll their eyes at each other, wander around the room, collect something to drink, in fact do everything but listen."

This has gone so far it is almost ridiculous. Somedays it seems like the media interviews a far-right-wing nut, and then interviews a republican for balance. The number of "centrist" gutless wonders who are called upon to give the left's perspective are countless: Joe Klein and Thomas Friedman are just the most egregiously stupid of them.

Berit Ås on how to deal with this strategy:

By learning to recognise this domination technique, a woman can avoid the feeling of insignificance. She can make the world conscious of what is going on and demand with a good conscience that people listen when she speaks.

I think the blogosphere has figured this one out. Now only to pound it into the politicians' heads. Onward!

2) Ridiculing. Berit Ås:

Ridiculing occurs when a woman’s efforts are scorned, made fun of, or likened to
animals (e.g. chickens), when women are presented as being especially emotional or sexual, or when women are rejected as cold or manipulative.

Ridiculing Democrats has become a cottage industry on the right, so popular that even some Democrats join in. From the unrelenting attack on "politically correct"--a stalking horse for the right-wing from the very beginning--to the derision heaped on any Democrat foolish enough to back silly, utopian ideas like "universal healthcare," a laugh and a sneer has become an easy alternative to genuine engagement. Ås' critique can be seen just in the example of the Clintons: Bill is too sexual and uncontrolled, while Hillary is practically the dictionary definition of frigid--if you believe what you hear of the news, of course.

Every Democrat learns to fear the quote marks "heaped" "liberally" around any "positive" mention of a "Democratic" "politician." They are the mark of derision and contempt. From the patronizing "analysis" of Hillary Clinton's iPod playlist, to the "flip-flopping" dorks in dolphin suits during Kerry's campaign, to the media obsession with Bill's penis, the press is willing to examine everything Democratic at excruciating length--except their politics. The narrative suggests that Democrats may be good for some gossip-column-style entertainment, but are entirely unfit to run the country.

3) Withholding of information. The Republican party apparatus is a system built to exclude Democrats in every way possible. From the K Street Project, to lying about WMD, to keeping Democrats in the dark about warrantless wiretapping and who knows what else, to the mysterious Fellowship, GOP control is maintained by a careful curtailing of the spread of information and power. Ask yourself if this sounds familiar:

Withholding information occurs when men automatically take up matters only with
other men. This way, they deny women access to information about important issues at work or in politics. Particularly in political spheres we know that information is exchanged, opinions formed and decisions taken in restricted circles, like for example, when the boys go for a beer/drink after a meeting, are out for a “business dinner”, play football or quite frankly, pass information to one another before meetings. Women are not invited into these restricted circles or, purely and simply; women just do not have the same opportunities to join in.

The Fellowship, the fundamentalist Christian group to which a large number of influential Republican politicians belong to, is the best example of the good ol' boys club. Through the connections of the Fellowship, all sorts of political alliances are formed.

Seventy years ago, an evangelist named Abraham Vereide founded a network of "God-led" cells comprising senators and generals, corporate executives and preachers. Vereide believed that the cells -- God's chosen, appointed to power -- could construct a Kingdom of God on earth with Washington as its capital. They would do so "behind the scenes," lest they be accused of pride or a hunger for power, and "beyond the din of vox populi," which is to say, outside the bounds of democracy. To insiders, the cells were known as the Family, or the Fellowship....The group was all male and all Republican....Deals emerge not from a smoke-filled room but from a prayer-filled room. "Typically," says Brownback, "one person grows desirous of pursuing an action" -- a piece of legislation, a diplomatic strategy -- "and the others pull in behind."

Are you scared yet? You should be.

4) Double Punishment. Damned if you do, damned if you don't.

Whatever you do, it's wrong. Double punishment occurs when it’s wrong if a woman does something – and wrong if she doesn’t. This domination technique is used against the victims of prejudices and stereotypes.

There are several stereotypes that the Republicans use to put the Democrats in a double bind. Race is one--if the Democrats say anything negative about a black Republican, they are accused of racism. If they protest the Republican's racist statements, they are accused of playing the race-card. However, the biggest double-bind the Democrats find themselves in is regarding the military, and military service in particular. We all thought that Kerry's sterling war record would be an advantage for him--certainly the Democratic Party did, the way they played it up at his nomination. But in the Republican's hands, it became a weapon against him. If the Democrats protest pumping billions into the Defense Department, they are a bunch of hippies. If they support the military, they are just pale imitations of the Republicans. It's lose-lose.

5) Heaping of Shame and Putting to Blame. "It's those damn liberals that are making us lose in Iraq, by not supporting the troops enough!" "It's the media's fault, always reporting the BAD news from Iraq, damn their liberal bias!" Sound familiar? Of course it does; the only refrain that one hears more often is--oh wait, there isn't one. This is it. Anonymous Liberal at Unclaimed Territory caught a great example of this rhetoric at its most transparently ludicrous. Berit Ås explains how the other domination techniques are used to inflict guilt:

Blame and shame are inflicted through ridicule and double punishment. It occurs when women are told that they are not good enough - even if the reason for not being “not good enough” may be: (1) that they think they behave differently from men and in novel ways, or (2) that they haven’t had access to the information that men have controlled.

Liberals sure do "behave differently" from neo-cons, and "in novel ways." They critically examine their assumptions and the world around them, and when in doubt, they amend their assumptions, not the world. Pretty novel! As for (2), think of all the politicians who are still unable to admit that they shouldn't have voted for the war, even though they were lied to. They were denied the information they were needed, and despite that, the admission that they were wrong is still seen as too weakening to mention. And in all honesty, they are right, in part: any Democrat who says so will be jumped by the GOP noise machine, who will paint them as a flip-flopper and coward, using all the tricks of the Republican narrative of domination.

Those are the five domination techniques that Berit Ås identifies, and how they are used against Democrats to keep them safely corraled. Remember, the most effective technique in fighting this is to talk about it--bring all these subtexts to the surface, where they can be analyzed intellectually and discarded for the cheap parlor tricks that they are.

How Republicans Discipline Uppity Democrats

It's funny, how I just now realized this. When Republicans slap down Democrats who stand up for themselves? They use the rhetoric of patriarchy to do it. They discipline Democrats with the same words and attitudes that are used to teach them damn uppity women their place. It's the same words, over and over: hysterical, frenzied, shrieking, Bush(=man)-hating, and my personal favorite: shrill. Shrill is such a dead give-away too...how did I miss it? What is that word ever used for besides to describe a woman, overexcited about some silly thing or another, busy shrieking at some poor, brow-beaten man? Besides liberals, of course.

And it goes so well with their other meta-narratives, too. The Democrats are a bunch of pansies, a pack of limp-wristed metrosexuals one frou-frou girlie drink away from belting out Barbara Streisand tunes. If they aren't, you know, actual girls. It plays to their audience, who wish they had the opportunity to impose their masculine views on the women around them, if it weren't for that whole "sexual revolution" bullshit, and now you gotta pretend to respect them as people, pay attention to them, and buy them flowers, and what is up with that shit anyway? It is a perfect accompaniment to their militaristic macho psuedo-heroic posturing--God, why didn't I see it before? The same rhetoric that exists to perpetuate the repression of women is being used to discipline the Democrats, to keep them in their well-delineated and worthless place.

On the bright side, it does mean that we have countering rhetoric waiting for us, already made: feminists have decades of material tearing apart patriarchal assumptions, some of it ought to be applicable. It means we can multi-task, if we have the guts--we can tear down patriarchal assumptions at the same time we rejuvenate liberal rhetoric. I already thought that the Democratic party ought to adopt a feminine character in order to counter the Republican's patronizing paternalism. Given that they have already established the frame, it would be an astounding act of political jujitsu.