I'm Big in Japan

My Linkback hack has been percolating around the web ecology and apparently has gotten some traction among Japanese social-bookmarking sites. I wish I knew why, but I'll take whatever attention I can get. And it gives me an excuse to quote Tom Waits:

I got the style but not the grace
I got the clothes but not the face
I got the bread but not the butter
I got the winda but not the shutter

But I'm big in Japan I'm big in Japan
But heh I'm big in Japan

Every human grouping is on the web

And we are working on getting every possible intersection of human groups, such as this lovely find: the Mormon Transhumanist Association. The mind boggles. I'm sure the lesbian midget catlovers group is out there somewhere too.

Ultramaterialism

The word "ultramaterialism" has been rattling around my brain for a few weeks. I came up with this while trying to characterize the worldview of a certain class of thinker, exemplified by Minsky, Dennett, and most recently Gary Drescher in his recent book Good and Real. These people could all be called materialists or naturalists, but in some sense their mission seems to be pushing the materialist view farther than it has gone before. Minsky was one of the inventors of AI and his late work has been devoted to finding ways of breaking down minds into networks of small machines. Dennett has applied philosophical analysis to consciousness and free will, and Drescher's work in a way synthesizes the philosophical rigor and problem space of Dennett with the technical rigor of an MIT-trained engineer.

Drescher's book, which I'm still digesting, might epitiomize this tendency. In his strict mechanist worldview, there are essentially no selves, no freedom of action. The flow of time is itself illusory (we're really just embedded in an unchanging spacetime), and hence your life is not only deterministic, it's already happened.

Strictly speaking ultramaterialism is just the same as naturalism, which seems to be growing as a movement among non-academics as an "applied philosophy". So it may not make sense to introduce this a new term. But the connotation of ultramaterialism is different. Naturalism sounds rather nice and innocuous -- we think nature is rather pretty and friendly, made out of trees and scenic vistas (although this is a recent development in human history). But hardcore materialism is actually a rather disturbing philosophy. It has at least the possibility of being deeply anti-humanistic, since it holds no privileged position for persons, and doesn't believe in autonomy or moral agency.

This is not to say that the ultramaterialists are antihumanistic, or bad people. On the contrary, they are all seem like pretty decent folks, and they are making sincere efforts to preserve human values in the face of the rather pitiless mechanical universe they are exploring. But to some extent their decency is independent of their scientific thinking -- it's ungrounded, or emerges from somewhere other than their philosophy. Drescher tries to derive ethics from his pure materialism -- I don't know if he succeeds, haven't processed that part of his book yet.

The problem I see with ultramaterialism is not that it is wrong, but that it is too impractical. Say Drescher's scheme to derive morality is successful -- will it have anything to say to practical everyday ethical decisions? What about answering questions such as the morality of abortion and end-of-life decisions, which hinge on rights and what exactly counts as a person? I don't really expect that a pure materialist philosophy can say much to these questions, although I'm prepared to be proven wrong. But even if it can, it's too much work to derive ethics from complex utilitarian calculations, as opposed to the alternative of taking them from cultural institutions (like religion). Culture is a bundle of evolved heuristics, and most people, even bright people, are forced to rely on their culture for both moral principles and factual matters -- they can't really take the time to figure everything out for themselves.

While I'm not religious myself I think I can appreciate the fear that religious people get when presented with the materialist worldview, which cheerfully undermines both tradition and intuition, leaving only machinery behind. Drescher has taken on the task of reconstructing ethics in a mechanical universe, but to believe him you have to follow a fairly complicated chain of reasoning. Not only that, you have to trust that other people will follow the same reasoning, a scary and dubious prospect.

That's why I prefer my term to naturalism -- it makes it clearer that there is something radical going on here, something disturbing. I doubt it will catch on.

Trippy

The web is full of wacky sites, but most (unlike this one) are not associated with books put out by the MIT Press.

I found this by making use of my LinkBack hack, while looking for information relating to this much more austere and respectable MIT Press book, which I'm in the process of reading. Actually that one is pretty trippy too, but it does it through relentless logic rather than saturated colors.

LinkBack hack for Newtonmass

I messed around with Greasemonkey over the holiday weekend and came up with a way to add backlinks to web pages -- something people have been wanting since before there was a web! Details here.

The Anthropic Cosmological Principle meets Computational Complexity; Hilarity Ensues

Scott Aaronson, the second-most amusing person in string theory, demonstrates how to solve NP-complete problems, about halfway through a talk:

But what could NP-hardness possibly have to do with the Anthropic Principle? Well, when I talked before about computational complexity, I forgot to tell you that there's at least one foolproof way to solve NP-complete problems in polynomial time. The method is this: first guess a solution at random, say by measuring electron spins. Then, if the solution is wrong, kill yourself! If you accept the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, then there's certainly some branch of the wavefunction where you guessed right, and that's the only branch where you're around to ask whether you guessed right! It's a wonder more people don't try this.

This is a pretty obvious idea once you hear it (those are always the best ones. As Huxley was suppoed to have said upon reading The Origin of Species, "How extremely stupid not to have thought of that").

Aaronson takes this as evidence that anthropic arguments are invalid, since he's fairly attached to the idea that NP-hard problems are hard. I tend to agree, there has always been something Panglossian about anthropic cosmology. In fact...you could implement Dr. Pangloss using Aaronson's procedure. If you are convinced that the world is not as good as it could be, you kill yourself. Then the versions of you left alive are perforce inhabiting the best of all possible worlds.

Hacking in progress

Not that you care, but: I'm using this blog to test some automatic tagging software I'm messing with, so be prepared to see various sorts of labels come and go as it gets refined. For instance, it unsurprisingly picks up doom as a category, but misses this post which has doom three times (but in the title, not the body).

This is all by way of playing with the Blogger Beta (which supports tagging), the GData APIs, the Yahoo term extraction service, and other fun stuff.

But doing this very dumb preliminary term extraction and indexing renews my dream of having a system that will actually help me organize and structure the cluttered contents of my mind. This is something that I've wanted for at least 20 years (more like 30 actually, that's when I first encountered Ted Nelson's Computer Lib/Dream Machines). I've made some stabs at building stuff like this over the years. Blogs and wikis are stabs in related directions but still aren't quite it. Still, the dream is alive.

And I see I've dreamed out loud in this forum a year or so ago, without doing much since then.