Today I felt like it was about time I write another post, but it just isn’t as easy as it seems. Emily always comes across such interesting, random internet bits, things that spur her mind off in a million directions.

My life seems very interesting, to me. I could write about my walk through Golden Gate Park, how I mindfully cleaned the apartment, my success at language learning or why The Blind Assassin is speaking to me. But most of these things that I’ve seen, heard or contemplated today seem to be messages meant just for me. (Who knew assassin had four ‘S’es in it? And how the heck to you type ‘S’es anyway?)

When I ran into Wendell Wallach at the Singularity Summit (before I knew who he was). We talked about writing. He told me he was in the midst of writing a book. I told him I was a blogger. He said that he often finds writing excruciating. At the time I thought, “Well it’s not that hard to just spout off a blog post. Put a bit of kitsch along with an intriguing premise, add in some new age speak and voila!” But today, I agree with Wendell. I am desperate for a topic. I even checked out Google Trends, hoping it would spur my mind. Evidently Jodie Sweetin is pregnant, conspiracies abound about a 9/11 mystery plane and NBA player Greg Oden is injured. I don’t really care about any of that.

Today I don’t want to write any kitsch, I have no profundity to put out there and I just don’t feel like producing. I’m in a yin phase it seems. Blog posts are rather yang.

For those of you who want a quick primer on yin and yang, luckily I just happen to have written one. (The more you know, after all.)

Yin and Yang are representations of phenomena in the natural world in the form of opposite forces. They are combined in the yin-yang symbol showing the ideal unity of opposites. Yin symbolizes the feminine, passive, receptive, soft and dark forces. Yang represents masculine, active, creating, hard and bright forces.

Yin and Yang are a way of describing complementary forces in nature and not absolutes. All forces have both yin and yang states and are in constant motion, not static. I find this an especially fruitful way of viewing the world, rather than in a strict, opposing, absolute and immutable dichotomy, such as some views of “good” and “evil.”

You may or may not have noticed from our posts (see the first paragraph of this post too), that Emily tends to be rather yangy and I am rather yiny (is that like a ninny?) Emily says that I should erase this nonsense about ninnies because it’s a term from the 1930’s. Anyway, if I keep this up, she’s going to ban me from the blog… my point is that sometimes we argue because of our tendencies towards one state or the other.

Like Emily pointed out yesterday, balance is important in our actions and within ourselves. Do you tend more towards yin or yang? Maybe you can think of ways to balance out your dominant aspect, or spend time with a friend who tends toward the opposite. For example, I am supportive of Emily’s plans to create anarchy and revolution after we watch V for Vendetta and Emily indulges my thoughtful questioning of cultural displacement after we’ve watched Lost in Translation. Maybe that’s why we get along so well. However, that’s also why Emily hates this whimsical, meandering, blog post and is spitting nickels as she tries to edit it now!

Last night Laura and I watched The Corporation, a documentary about, you guessed it, corporations and how evil they are. What I found most interesting about the film was that everyone seemed to be passing the buck. The activists, the CEO’s, everyone pointed to the system as the problem. This really bothered me for reasons that will probably be apparent to those of you who read our Psychological Numbing post and its follow up.

So, today I’m bumbling around the internet and I find this Wikipedia article on Malamatiyya, which is a particular order of Sufism. Practicioners of Malamatiyya follow the Path of Blame. The Malamatiyya “totally divorced themselves from the world and people, and give no importance to the contempt that the world has for them.“ They only focussed their energy on adhering to the word of God and following their own paths.

Here is an example of Malamatiyya behavior via Wikipedia: “One of them was hailed by a large crowd when he entered a town; they tried to accompany the great saint; but on the road he publicly started urinating in an unlawful way so that all of them left him and no longer believed in his high spiritual rank.”

How’s that for Radical Honesty? All of these ideas are pointing toward one thing, examining yourself and your own actions as the path to enlightenment and to improve the world. According to this, the Malamatiyya tradition predates Islam, with roots in the Eastern Christianity and then to the Cynics of ancient Greece:

Wealth, popularity, and power tend to dethrone the authority of reason and to pervert the soul from the natural to the artificial. Man exists for and in himself alone; his highest end is self-knowledge and self-realization in conformity with the dictates of his reason, apart altogether from the state and society. For this end, disrepute and poverty are advantageous, insofar as they drive back the man upon himself, increasing his self-control and purifying his intellect from the dross of the external.

So interesting! I love finding things that are all related, way back into history. This even relates to the Singularity Summit. There was a lot of talk about augmenting humans’ brains or bodies with new technology. A lot of the guys talking about this were overweight and socially awkward. It was so interesting to see everyone talking about using technology to improve ourselves when we all have plenty to work on already.

As you can see, the idea of personal responsibility and self improvement is nothing new. It has been around for a long, long time and crosses many traditions. Today we have a tendency to look everywhere except in ourselves. At the Singularity Summit, technology was the savior. On The Corporation, the system was the problem while the individual players seemed helpless. The Malamatiyya and the Cynics looked within themselves for the source of the problems of the world and for the solutions. There must be a balance between these extremes. Where is it?

It’s really odd that all of these things are popping up in my life just as I’ve been struggling with these issues. Coincidence?

*We had a hard time finding good information on the Malamatiyya, so if anyone knows of good sources on this topic, please let us know.

We’ve recently added a bunch of new articles to the site. If you can’t get enough Considering the Universe you should take a look at some of the new content:

Articles:

Silence
Chaos Theory
Emily’s Sand/Light/Glass Theory

Exercises:

Right and Left Brain Communication
Archetypes and Sub-personalities

Reviews:

Barfield and Steiner
Einstein’s Dreams by Alan Lightman

Personal:

Laura’s First Trip to Georgia
A Trip to Ukraine
Back in Georgia
Emily’s Peace Corps Journal
Me Contra Me

First of all, if it weren’t for Eliezer Yudkowsky I’d have hardly anything to blog about these days, so thanks Eliezer. He had a good post about the Radical Honesty movement, but honestly, the Esquire article was a lot better. Then again, maybe Esquire guys are just more my speed…

Radical Honesty is just what it sounds like: always telling the full truth no matter what. Sound hard? Sounds fun. I like to think I’m a pretty honest person already. Actually I’m sort of inspired by this whole thing. I think I’m going to try it.

So my first step is checking out the official Radical Honesty website. I think it’s kind of an ugly, site and the font is too small on the menu bar. Then again, maybe I’m just insecure about my own questionable web design skills and the way the new colors on our site are turning out terrible on Laura’s computer.

The next step was to email the person who organizes my local “Radical Honesty Practice Group”. I was honest in my email that I want to go there because I think it would be funny and interesting. Also I wrote something else that I don’t want to write here because my parents read this blog. I think saying it like that is probably a cop-out according to Radical Honesty, but I don’t care. Ha!

After that I got an email from a guy I know who annoys me sometimes, especially when he talks about money. So I told him it annoys me and I was glad. Then a guy came into the office where I’m temping and was hanging around bugging me. So when he asked me how I like temping I actually told him the whole truth. It was long and I think it made him uncomfortable so he left. Fantastic!

So far Radical Honesty is going great. I’m going to try to keep it up for the rest of the week. It’s kind of freeing and I can really see how it would help communication. Here’s a quote from the Radical Honesty founder:

Q: Do you feel we have to be honest with ourselves before we can have a relationship with someone else?
A: You can’t be “secretly” honest. Being “honest with yourself” is simply not separable from being honest with another. A person who says, “I was honest with myself, but decided not to tell…” is just another miserable liar and will have to suffer the consequences. Sharing honestly, with others present, is the way we can have an authentic relationship with another person.

That’s very interesting. Being honest is one thing. Honest all around, all the time, not internally vs. externally. It’s not easy, but it’s very important. Although, to be honest, I’m not sure how well I’ll handle the first time someone says, “Actually, that does make you look fat.”

Emily pointed out in her previous post. That one of the most important issues brought up at the Singularity Summit was the notion that the Singularity is the future of all human progress.

Essentially, all fields of study, all of human progress is leading up to the Singularity…In recent years I believe we have seen a shift from a divergence of specialized technologies, to a convergence of those parts into greater, cumulative technologies. Laser eye surgery is a great example of seemingly different fields, combining to great success. The Singularity will be the ultimate convergence of human progress.

While I’m a bit skeptical of this point, I do think it’s an interesting thought experiment to consider where the future of human progress lies. I found several speakers at the summit who had postulated futures that were surprisingly in-line with the ideas of one of the more bizarre and fringe philosophers I enjoy reading: Rudolf Steiner.

Steiner is one of the founders of Anthroposophy, his works outline the nature of the universe, other dimensions and other beings (rather broad, I know). However where I found many speakers, such as Wendell Wallach, converging with Steinerian ideals was on the issue of the evolution of human consciousness. Steiner believes the development of a:

…distinctively modern clairvoyant capability… [let us] contemplate this thought picture and recognize the present need to deepen and purify the scientific impulse by applying the kind of spiritual seeing of which the ancient world was capable, but which has not yet been applied to the external or natural world studied by contemporary scientific consciousness.

Steiner, and many singularity experts were pointing to this convergence of mystical and scientific as the direction human progress needs to take (although I grant you that just about no one at the Summit said this explicitly). How else can we begin to resolve issues of creating artificial general intelligence, especially “self improving” intelligence? It cannot be done without deeply contemplating the nature of our reality. The very heart of the issue plaguing the Singularity is how to do this.

Of course I am currently reading Steiner, so his ideas are fresh in my mind. Perhaps my conclusions are just another example for our much heralded view that thoughts create reality. I am interested in Steinerian thought and I found it in the Singularity Summit.

*From the Essential Steiner pg. 170

With all the talk about the future lately, I’ve been wondering if it’s possible to predict. Laura’s dad liked the book The Black Swan, which is about extremely improbable events having the greatest impact on our world. The author argues that since these highly unlikely events change the world so much, there is no sense in trying to predict the future other than for comfort and entertainment. That may be true, but there’s one group of people that depends on their ability to predict the future: bookies.

I’m not terribly interested in the the odds of the Dodgers going to the World Series, but I am interested in who is likely to be the next president of the United States. Slate had an article on this not too long ago and according to the odds they looked at, Ms. Clinton will be the Democratic nominee.

NewBodog.com is one site that mainly deals in sports wagering, but also has a section for high profile US politics. According to them, Stephen Colbert has an 800/1 chance of becoming the next president.

InTrade.com has even more interesting odds. They frame their business as “Predictions Markets” rather than betting, but you can still find some interesting predictions. You can buy shares in various markets such as, the US launching an air strike against Iran before certain dates, when Katie Couric will leave the CBS Evening News, and even the weather. They have handy little graphs to see the popularity of these predictions over time. Interesting stuff.

These kinds of markets combine the “wisdom of crowds” idea with actual money, so I would think, the results would be pretty good. Then again who knows? The opinion polling site OpinionRepublic.com has Hillary slated as the next president. However, their users have also voted for Stomp the Yard as the second Best Movie of All Time, second only to Titanic. Maybe some crowds are wiser than others.

Another great day at the Summit. I think I have enough new ideas swimming in my head to blog about for a year, although I don’t want to turn this into an all-Singularity-all-the-time sort of thing. I’d like to give my overall impressions of the summit here and let the rest sink in a bit more before I try to post my own ideas on the Singularity. Please keep in mind that this summit was pretty much my crash course in all things AI.

To me, the biggest issues that were raised at the summit were:

1) The Singularity as the future of all human progress.

2) The societal reactions to the coming Singularity and technological advancement in general.

3) Moral/ethical questions involved in the creation of sentient beings.

During the conference many fields were discussed: biology, physics, nanotech, philosophy, finance etc. Essentially, all fields of study, all of human progress is leading up to the Singularity. Think of it this way: the Walkman was a predecessor of the iPod, the record player was a predecessor of the Walkman, the phonograph was a predecessor of the record player. All technology will be the precursor to the Singularity. From the first stone tool, technology began to diversify. Soon we had the wheel, agriculture, medicine, etc. In recent years I believe we have seen a shift from a divergence of specialized technologies, to a convergence of those parts into greater, cumulative technologies. Laser eye surgery is a great example of seemingly different fields, combining to great success. The Singularity will be the ultimate convergence of human progress.

That is, if we ever get there. The cultural and political hurdles to the Singularity are enormous. People fear new technology, especially technologies that could be potentially dangerous. With the uproars over genetically modified food, it’s hard to imagine that people will be ready to accept something like mind uploading. Even more distressing is government’s tendency to hijack or crush new advancements. One thing I found disturbing was how much of AI and robotic research is funded by the military. Do we really want to create super-intelligent killing machines? In my mind, the greatest obstacle we face as a species is overcoming governmental and cultural pressures that hold back or corrupt innovation.

Finally, there are the moral/ethical issues surrounding the creation of super-intelligent AI’s. There was a lot of speculation as to how we could instill some sort of conscience into machines that will be vastly more intelligent than we are. Even if we are able to give them some sort of morality, whose morality will it be? Eliezer Yudkowsy suggested today that as our morals are constantly evolving (think about race relations in America over the last 200 years), we should somehow give the AI’s that trajectory of moral growth, rather than a fixed set of rules that we think of as “good” today. I thought this was a very interesting idea. Beyond creating moral AI’s, there is the question of our own behavior towards AI’s. There was a lot of disagreement on this point at the conference. Ideas ranged from programming the AI’s to be happy as our slaves to treating them just like a human. Interesting stuff.

Overall, I would say that the Singularity is very exciting and very promising. The conference really motivated me to keep learning more about this, which I hope to share with you.

Here are some links to speakers and subjects that I found particularly interesting:

SENS

Accelarating Studies Foundation

Steve Jurvetson

Christine Peterson of the Foresight Nanotech Institute

And in conclusion, a great quote from Archimedes (I’m not sure whose presentation it was in, apologies.):

Give me a place to stand and I will move the world.

We just got back from the Singularity Summit and our heads are about to explode from learning so much in one day. We’ll need a couple days to process everything to be able to write an intelligent post, but in the meantime we wanted to give you some links to our favorite speakers. Enjoy!

Speakers:

Rodney Brooks - MIT

Wendall Wallach - Yale

Ben Goertzel

More tomorrow!

Tomorrow we’re off to the Singularity Summit. Since first learning about the Singularity, we’ve been talking about AI, alien life, nanotech, reality as a simulations and all sorts of interesting futuristic topics. In researching these topics, I’ve found that everyone seems to have their pet version of the future. At the Summit tomorrow, I’m sure we will be thoroughly convinced that AI will be most important issue facing humanity in the future. Now, I think futurism is a lot of fun and very useful in understanding our universe, but no matter how much we plan and speculate, we can never predict the future exactly.

Jorge Luis Borges has a great story about this called “The Secret Miracle”. The story is about a man who has been sentenced to death by firing squad. During the night before his execution, he realizes that the future never unfolds as you imagine it will. He spends the hours leading to his execution trying to imagine every possible way he would be killed in the morning, believing that if he can think of a scenario, that scenario will not occur. I won’t give away the ending, but it’s a very interesting concept.

Think about your own life. If you’re like me, you probably couldn’t have predicted your present situation two years ago, even two months ago. Really we can’t even predict the next day most of the time. So, if we were to assume that all of the wildly differing theories of futurism are wrong, what might we end up with?

Futurism is fun because there are always new surprises around the corner. Will we be destroyed by global warming or wayward nanotech? Will the second coming of Christ save us or a super intelligent AI? Probably none of the above. The future is so exciting, we can’t even imagine it.

Note: I wrote this post on Thursday. On Friday Eliezer Yudkowsky had this similar post at Overcoming Bias. Coincidence? Maybe I’ll ask Eliezer at the Summit today.

Laura and I are very pleased to announce that our first redesign of ConsideringTheUniverse.com is complete. Let us know what you think!

(If you find any broken links, please share that with us too.)

Update: The redesign is a hitting some bumps. Bear with us. I’m hoping the Singularity Summit will solve everything.