Robot Defense Free

Today i completed the 'huge score' achievement of 50,000,000 lifetime points in Robot Defense, one of the more popular Android games. Given it takes me about 20 mins even on the highest rated game available to accumulate 200000 points, this is at least 80 hrs investment, and probably much more.

The game is well-balanced, and a very good model of drama. In the course of the game you make many choices in the dilemma of apparently equal goods - missiles or ant-air cannon? Augment the slow tower or convert it to a mine? And the opposition steadily mounts until you fail, a tragedy, for which the seeds almost always appear to have been sewn early (poor layout, not enough anti-vehicle, not enough anti-air, oh my foolish and misplaced enthusiasms!). If you complete 100 levels intact, all is well after all, a comedy, with the affirming moral that human, not robot kind will forever dominate the earth.

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The look

Frances of Bookish asked about the rather lairy site design.  I quite like it, but it is very high-energy.  The main point of reference on this subject for me is public appearances from Jim Hacker from Yes, Minister and Yes, Prime Minister.  If you have some very upsetting change to announce, if you want to depart radically from the established way of things, you announce it with a background of many leatherbound books and an atmosphere of rich mahogony*.  If you have no initiatives, solutions or changes to offer, if you want to hide the fact that its more mealy mouthed wittering and more of the same reality by dictat of the civil service, you need a high energy yellow wallpaper, and synthesised intro music.

*little Anchorman there.

Mother's Day

Hi Mum!
Happy mother's day.

Eccentric, Deluded.

My father requests a post on differentiating normalcy, eccentricity or oddness and delusion and detachment from reality.  So here goes my whole interim yet not original theory of consciousness.  There are four parts:

Experience, Recognition, Analysis (a word for what Consciousness does, but still looking for a better word), and Acts (things you do. Not resting).  You can crudely put them in a diagram.

The ERAA 'loop'

This is a very simple structure:

·         Experience really happens to you, the real you’re in.

·         Perception brings it into mental handling: there are some problems with it, so it gets its own arrow.

·         Recognition is the basic way we relate to the world.  It draws a collection of situations and the practices appropriate to them.  It is continuous, fast, parallel and automatic.

·         That collection of situations and practices is the background – a non-representational totality of familiarity accumulated from experience, which stands under words and thoughts in understanding.

·         Recognition Refers interpreted situations minimally to the conscious understanding.  The very familiar is assumed, and the unchallenged assumption becomes very familiar.

·         The Analytic part of the mind, the consciousness, is a slow-time, one thing at a time zone.  There are a bunch of different faculties and intelligences up here, and the decision making space in which you can revise understandings.

·         Resolve.  The resolving power of consciousness is often referred to as decision making, but I think it manifests a little differently for different personality types.  An insight that enables understanding can be referred to the recognition to reframe a perception and render it familiar.

·         Automaticity of recognition and of action is obvious in walking and balancing, in the way we understand other people immediately by their expressions.

·         Controlled actions are under moment to moment supervision from the analytic consciousness. We use them where there are no automatic resources available.

This structure is modestly well supported in a few fields.  Philosophy (Hume, Hegel?, Heidegger, Searle) furnished the Background.  Heidegger describes most of this, but I believe he would find the separation of a box for analytic understanding troubling.  It is a little like the notion of the pure subject at the heart of all of us, which he would say is just an artefact of things we are familiar with.  Automaticity is a well-supported interpretation of some well-known psych experiments (e.g. Stroup interference - with the off colour words (Green, Brown) words).  The whole thing is not too far from the decision ladder in Cognitive Work Analysis, nor from Recognition Primed Decision Making in Cognitive Task Analysis, although anything with Cognitive in its name is probably in some denial of Heidegger's point that the background is not fully representational - you will find it exhausting to try to enumerate the knowledge embodied there. This point is also supported by Wittgensteins investigations into how things mean. It is also mappable (in military theory) to John Boyd's Observe Orient Decide Act (OODA) 'loop' and to the Act, Sense, Decide, Adapt loop of the Adaptive Army program.

So then, to a question my father asked about eccentricity, oddness and delusion.  These are problems with recognition.  A paranoic has a problem with their brain chemistry and their world is almost literally a nightmare.  Because of the intensity of the psych distress, their recognition reads the world as situations appropriate to that.  People around them are either enemies or allies, and people who they should love but feel nothing about, they may assume are robot replacements. The problems with recognition occur when your background of practices and experiences are not applicable to your world.

Within the communal background, we stake out our little patch, and we tend to do it as if in a campsite – watching our neighbours cautiously, setting up close but not too close. Eccentricity is, I think, about taking a space at a distance from the center of gravity, but maintaining (at least in affection for it) that it is the center of some deeper reality as an important personal commitment, a defining comitment.  The eccentric may choose to move as they move through life.

Delusion afflicts us all when we misrecognize.  Delusion as mental illness is being trapped in misrecognition either because the referring function is ineffective, or because the conscious- analytic parts are not able to find a resolution, or because the resolution is ineffective.  These situations can develop because of brain damage, drugs, or commitment to propositions that are not part of the conventional background. Bad 'propositions' (in which I would include deep ideas, inchoate senses of self etc) can be received from the outside world or manufactured to protect and paper over weaknesses, flaws and incapacities.  

Zizek says the lesson of psychoanalysis is that 'our story', the account we would like to give of ourselves to justify ourselves to others, is a lie we manufacture so we can stand the sight of ourselves.  This, though, may be true of the person crowding into the center as much as the fringe.  

I feel like the question is a good one to set up an Intervention on me for maintaining a delusion as a philosophic blogger...  I may keep you posted.

Neitzsche

Poor old Nietzsche said some funny things.  'That which does not destroy me makes me stronger' is a popular one, opening Kanye West's song 'Stronger'.  'Do you go to a woman?  Remember your whip,' is usually saved for "[Category], what stupid jerks they were/are" where Category takes the value men, philosophers, 19th Century men, Germans, people with syphillus, people who go mad and so on... Still another: 'A woman is a thousand riddles, and the answer to all of them is pregnancy.'

The thing is, he is saying something that not everyone always believed was false.  In this post I will try to give a miniblog example for each which shows the sense of it.  All of them are also indefensible nonsense in many important modern contexts.  Please, ladies, there is no need to comment on that.

"That which does not destroy me makes me stronger."  Andy Morgan of Yale Uni has done some research on post-traumatic stress disorder which shows that people who are resistant to it have a high ability to produce and release neuropeptide Y, which damps the response to cortisol/stress reaction and helps people keep their heads.  It is the physical equivalent of the psychological moment of 'the fear is there to help me respond well.' Neuropeptide Y and other stress control hormones (DHEA, Testosterone) and patterns grow in strength by being released regularly but not exhausted.  If exhausted, they start to kick in later and the stress becomes higher and when they do kick in they are inadequate. You need to be stressed, but not exhausted, and you will grow stronger.  (One way to practice releasing them is exercise to beyond 30% of V02max)

'Do you go to a woman? Remember your whip.'  When I was engaged, my fiance asked how I was feeling about the approaching nuptials.  I was excited but very anxious about maintaining my autonomy, and likened marriage to being trapped in a cage with a tiger. (She was happy to hear that.)  I think that is the true sense of this.  In marriage, romantic notions of smooth peaceful self-sacrifice quickly give way to the alarming realisation that you are sharing your living space with a top predator, a member of the most successful species ever to walk the earth (except beetles I suppose. and bacteria.).

'A woman is a thousand riddles, and the answer to all of them is pregnancy.'  To save this one, I'm going to have to make it gender neutral.  My example is the ADFA cadet who distributed video of sex with a woman to his friends.  They are just an example of the theme picked up in this essay in the Atlantic - that men seem to want sex to be more. If offered sex on generous terms, there seems to be an impulse to go for more. Video her - now she's really ****ed.  But of course, she's not. Or at least, not in a way that doesn't leave you even more so. Why why why would this be part of what men do?  I think the answer might be pregnancy. It takes a special kind of motivation to cause a pregnancy, given that, as an alarming work colleague once described it 'Some o' that shit (pause to marvel horrifiedly) you wouldn't wish it on your worst enemy.'

Well, that should be a lesson for me.  Never try to defend the indefensible.

Pax Techne

In the days of man's innocency, it is believed that there was little or no war, because there was always some new land to settle. New lands could be settled, and while there might be confrontation, real killing seems to have been rare. This stage lasted tens of thousands of years before the world was so full people were squeezed to the margins and space became a matter of life and death. (This discounts the extinction of early hominids as non-war.)

Is there now, in a transition to an information age, a new landscape to subdue? Is the possibility space of humanity a new frontier, a new world? Might it extend away to infinity and give living room to everyone?

Information is tricky stuff. I rather like Claude Shannon's information quantification. He suggested that each bit informs to the extent it confirms or expectation, and a sequence of bits as much as it confirms or denies the combined probability distribution for messages. The quantity is a log of the number of bits (assuming each bit is unpredictable - probability 50% of 0 or 1) - this seems to catch the way information multiplies as it aggregates.

Being is a matter of ways, a subject for 'hows'. It is something that technology fits perfectly. The practices we learn should make us a little more capable, the knowledge of ways to be allowing the living room on actual, scarce earth to grow. The possibility of transition to a new background, a substantial one of the base material of the universe, no longer mediated through a biosphere, of knowledge taking us into a future without war is desirable.

But we'd have to get comfortable with Us. And for that, Techne is a false god.

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Of hunger pt1

The overhead light blinks.  The man looks up from a microscope.
'We have any more of those?'
'No.'  The woman gives a tight-lipped smile.
Him - 'I think its time.'
Her - 'Because of the light?'
He nods.  'We're running out, love. We can't stay down here.'
She gives the same tight smile.  'You know we can't go up there either.'
'It's time to try.'

They eat a meal - corned beef, mash made from powder, the last wine. In the morning, they toss a coin.
'Heads'
'I win.'
'And just wait till you see what you've won.'