If Songsmith is a crime against humanity, humans are fighting back!

Microsoft Inc. cements its reputation as the antidote to cool with 'Songsmith.' According to the Microsoft site, Songsmith generates a musical accompaniment to match a singer's voice.’ But what the Microsoft technicians have in fact created is a time-warp back to the 80s and the days of the Casio VL-Tone. If you don't believe me, check out this cringe-o-rama commercial on YouTube . Still, just as an arrow once fired takes on an intentionality of its own, a piece of technology once the public domain can be subverted to fulfilling functions its creators had not envisaged....

Hence the emergence a meme that combines famous vocal performance from pop classics to a 'swinging' songsmith beat (which spookily always appears to be a variation on the bossanova). As Techcrunch opined, this creates ‘a twisted breed of classic hits that are fascinating in the same way that terrible automobile accidents are.’

Check out these example of 'songsmith mashups' before the inevitable ‘copyright violation’ notices are posted:

"Roxanne" (The Police)

"We will rock you" (Queen)

"Should I Stay or Should I Go?" (The Clash)

"Somebody Told Me" (The Killers)

and best of all...

"Hurt" (Johnny Cash) "the needle tears a hole..." (salsa baby!)

Smith Recall Has anyone noticed the striking similarity between the former Home Secretary, Jackie Smith, and that woman in Total Recall (who is actually a robot disguise used by Arnold Schwarzenegger's character to travel to Mars)? Every time I see Jackie Smith on television I keep expecting her head to hinge open to reveal Arnie, and then explode.

Peirce – firstness, secondness, thirdness

All of Pierce’s philosophical thought emerges out of his categories. At a trivial level anyone who has undertaken even a cursory study of Peirce is immediately struck by his seeming obsession with the number three. This is explained simply because his categories are three in number. Peirce defines categories as a “table of conceptions drawn from the logical analysis of thought and regarded as applicable to being” (CP 1.300). In other words, if you want to understand life the universe and everything, you need to understand first how thought functions; whether in relation to perceptions about the world outside or to the ideas inside your head. Peirce asserts that all thought can be broken down into three component parts, which he calls firstness secondness and thirdness.

Each of the categories governs a particular domain of thought. 'Firstness' governs qualities, 'secondness,' forces and 'thirdness,' mediation. Firstness is a quality, Peirce says firstness does not refer to anything nor does it lie behind anything else. The first is that which whose being is simply in itself (1. 356). It is the sensation of having only one thing occupying your thoughts and permeating your consciousness; you are so mesmerized that you are not even aware of anything else. For example if you stare at the colour red, so that your mind becomes so infused with the redness of that red: you are not actually aware that you are experiencing anything else (This is not actually firstness but it gives you a metaphorical sense or what it is). Another example of firstness is experiencing the absolute present directly (if that were ever possible!). It is a kind of unmediated meditative state without unity and without parts, it just "is."

Now imagine being in this rapturous state of firstness and suddenly walking slap-bang into a lamppost. The shock of that experience, as you actually experience it, is secondness. Secondness is existential: a physical force, a shock that strikes you. Secondness is what makes a baby first realize (no doubt after it has hurt itself) that it is not the whole universe, but is part of a universe that has its own agenda, and one that is not necessarily conducive to the safety and comfort of the baby.

Now for thirdness, imagine seeing someone else walking down the street and smacking slap bang into a lamppost. We might say, 'Oh that must have hurt!' In other words, we would be putting ourselves in the place of that person and imagining their pain. Thirdness is the mediating category, it speaks of events happening of things acting upon us of things that happen in the past or (speculatively) in the future. Thirdness deals in representations not in things. When we think about something we are in the realm of representation and therefore also in thirdness. All culture to the extent that it is something communicated is thirdness. All norms, language, all expression, everything we consciously think is thirdness. This includes the experiencing of our lives. There cannot be any hard an fast ontological distinction between a physical, virtual or mental happening in the retrospective terms of memory.

More information on the Peircean categories can be found here.

Peircean categories and virtual reality

Virtual reality emphasizes the experiential, rather than the communicative, or informational aspects of media. The notion of telepresence contends that information is not just transmitted from senders to receivers; but rather that mediated environments are created and then experienced by users. Consequently, the experiences of the individual user becomes the 'unit' of analysis for virtual reality researchers (e.g. Steuer 1992). But two questions arise – first, how is one to distinguish between virtual reality and real reality? And second, if presence is to be the agreed measure, how is one to measure presence itself? These are areas where the semeiotic of Charles Peirce can make a positive contribution.

To answer question one, Peirce asks by what evidence can we immediately know what is "present" to the mind? His answer is that reality and existence are actually two different things. Existence is a special mode of reality, which, whatever other characteristics it possesses, has that of being absolutely determinate. Reality, on the other hand is a special mode of being, the characteristic of which is that things that are real independently of any assertion we can make about them (CP 7.349). Applying Peirce's rules to virtual reality, one can say firstly that direct experience is neither certain nor uncertain, because it affirms and denies nothing (CP 1.145). As Deledalle remarks, reality is not making signs to us, it is we who provide the interpretants which become signs (Deledalle 2000, 21) Everything that is thought or experienced has a reality of a kind and this includes real life, dreams or virtual reality. Therefore if we want to distinguish virtual reality from real reality, we must become aware of the particular resistances each version of reality offers - for these resistances are what shows us that something independent of us is there (CP 1.431). And moreover their relative strengths and weaknesses can determine to what degree an environment can be said to be existent.

As to the second question, Peirce avoids dualistic or subjective interpretations of Being. There is no duality between Being and existence because epistemology and ontology are in fact the same thing (Deledalle 2000, 70). The conception of Being is nothing more than a conception about a sign. Different predicates may be attached to a subject, and the job of each is to make some conception applicable to the subject. Therefore we are able to imagine that a subject has something true of it, merely due to the fact that a predicate can be attached to it - and that is what we call Being (CP 5.294).

So presence is definable in terms of signs and by its qualities, resistances and the laws which govern them, or to put this another way, by the Peircean categories of firstness, secondness and thirdness.





References

Deledalle, Gérard (2000) Charles S. Peirce's Philosophy of Signs - Essays in Comparative Semiotics, Bloomington USA: Indiana University Press.

Peirce, Charles Sanders (1931-1935), The Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce, Vols. I-VI, Charles Hartshorne and Paul Weiss (editors), Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Peirce, Charles Sanders (1958), The Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce, Vols. VII - VIII, Ed. AW Burks (editor), Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Steuer, J. (1992) "Defining Virtual Reality: Dimensions Determining Telepresence" in Journal of Communication, 42(4), 73-93, PDF document, URL http://www.presence-research.org/papers/steuer92defining.pdf.

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Very much in the style of a technological johnny come lately, I have just joined twitter. You can follow my tweets here.

MIX TAPES
There was a fascinating radio documentary broadcast a few months ago on radio four about mix tapes. Journalist David Quantick (fantastic name) reminisced about what has become a lost art. This is where people, usually young, usually male, would sit in their bedrooms all evening with a record player and cassette recorder, making up compilation tapes of their favourite music. The art involved was trying to avoid horribly audible edits between tracks, and timing the thing just right so that the last track ended just as the tape leader spooled into view (this involved a lot of close scrutiny of the tiny cassette window). Tracks of little or no running time were a boon in this regard - "Propaganda" by Sparks and pretty much anything by the Smiths at particular times in their career came in particularly handy. These tapes would be for one's own use or would be given to friends and lovers. They served as an answer to the perennial question of my youth, "So what music do you like then?" and also as a way of sharing a little piece of one's soul with a potentially kindred spirit. Of course there is a gendered aspect to this activity also: girls if you were to receive a mix tape from your man, you have to understand that this is probably the most pure form of romance, certainly a more sincere gesture than them buying you a red rose! Now don't get me wrong, the i-pod is a marvelous thing, and I especially love the way that it instantly makes compilations of your music. When I first got an i-pod, I was struck by the serendipitous way it would reorder my music, juxtaposing tracks in such a way that they unlocked all that was fresh and exciting. However, there is something equally magical about mix tapes. Especially on those admittedly rare occasions when you were the recipient of one and it turns out to contain bands that you grow to love. I do miss them.

Charles Sanders Peirce is one of my favourite philosophers, but one whose writings are difficult to get into. This is partly because the corpus of his thought consists of unpublished notes and partly because of his tendency to fly off on tangents when he is outlining an argument. I often find it useful to examine suggestive fragments of his thought as points of departure. To this end, I present here a few of my favourite quotations, in the hope that they might spark a similar curiosity. (The citations are from the Harvard editions of his complete works)

It is certainly important to know how to make our ideas clear, but they may be ever so clear without being true 5.410

All this universe is perfused with signs, if it is not composed exclusively of signs. 4.539

That truth and justice are great powers in the world is no figure of speech, but a plain fact to which theories must accommodate themselves. 1.348

That which gives actuality is opposition. We can only know facts by their acting upon us, and resisting our brute will. 1.432

All human affairs rest upon probabilities, and the same thing is true everywhere. If man were immortal he could be perfectly sure of seeing the day when everything in which he had trusted should betray his trust, and, in short, of coming eventually to hopeless misery. He would break down, at last, as every great fortune, as every dynasty, as every civilization does. In place of this we have death. 2.653

The idea that we can immediately perceive only what is present seems to be founded on our ordinary experience that we cannot recall and reexamine the events of yesterday nor know otherwise than by inference what is to happen tomorrow. Obviously, then, the first move toward beating idealism at its own game is to remark that we apprehend our own ideas only as flowing in time, and since neither the future nor the past, however near they may be, is present, there is as much difficulty in conceiving our perception of what passes within us as in conceiving external perception. An immediate, intuitive consciousness of time clearly exists wherever time exists. But once one grants immediate knowledge in time what becomes of the idealist theory that we immediately know only the present? For the present can contain no time. 1.38

Good morals and good manners are identical, except that tradition attaches less importance to the latter. 1.50.

The effect of mixing speculative inquiry with questions of conduct results finally in a sort of half make-believe reasoning which deceives itself in regard to its real character... Men tell themselves they regulate their conduct by reason; but they learn to look forward and see what conclusions a given method will lead to before they give their adhesion to it. In short, it is no longer the reasoning which determines what the conclusion shall be, but it is the conclusion which determines what the reasoning shall be. 1.56.

Conscience really belongs to the subconscious man, to that part of the soul which is hardly distinct in different individuals, a sort of community-consciousness, or public spirit, not absolutely one and the same in different citizens, and yet not by any means independent in them. Conscience has been created by experience just as any knowledge is; but it is modified by further experience only with secular slowness. 1.56

True science is distinctively the study of useless things. For the useful things will get studied without the aid of scientific men. To employ these rare minds on such work is like running a steam engine by burning diamonds. 1.76.

The evolutionary theory in general throws great light upon history and especially upon the history of science -- both its public history and the account of its development in an individual intellect. As great a light is thrown upon the theory of evolution in general by the evolution of history, especially that of science. 1.103 .

It is to be noted that existence is an affair of blind force. "The very hyssop that grows on the wall exists in that chink because the whole universe could not prevent it." 1.329.

Though "desire" implies a tendency to volition, and though it is a natural hypothesis that a man cannot will to do that which he has no sort of desire to do, yet we all know conflicting desires but too well, and how treacherous they are apt to be; and a desire may perfectly well be discontented with volition, i.e., with what the man will do. The consciousness of that truth seems to me to be the root of our consciousness of free will. "Involuntary attention" involves in correct English a contradiction in adjecto. 1.331

Some writers insist that all experience consists in sense-perception; and I think it is probably true that every element of experience is in the first instance applied to an external object. A man who gets up out of the wrong side of the bed, for example, attributes wrongness to almost every object he perceives. That is the way in which he experiences his bad temper. It cannot, however, be said that he perceives the perversity which he wrongly attributes to outward objects. 1. 335.

To be angry with sceptics, who, whether they are aware of it or not, are the best friends of spiritual truth, is a manifest sign that the angry person is himself infected with scepticism. 1.344

All thinking is dialogic in form. Your self of one instant appeals to your deeper self for his assent. Consequently, all thinking is conducted in signs that are mainly of the same general structure as words (symbols) these consist of conventional signs that bare no relation to thier object except by association of habit. 6.338.

Signs, are the only things with which a human being can, without derogation, consent to have any transaction with. The human being is in fact a sign himself. 6.344 .

Existence is a special mode of reality, which, whatever other characteristics it possesses, has that of being absolutely determinate. Reality, in its turn, is a special mode of being, the characteristic of which is that things that are real are whatever they really are, independently of any assertion about them. 6.348

If Man is the measure of things, as Protagoras said, then there is no complete reality; but being there certainly is, even then. 6.348

At first sight it seems no doubt a paradoxical statement that, "The object of final belief which exists only in consequence of the belief, should itself produce the belief"; but there have been a great many instances in which we have adopted a conception of existence similar to this. 7. 340

If it be asked us, whether some realities do not exist, which are entirely independent of thought; I would in turn ask, what is meant by such an expression and what can be meant by it? It is clear that it is quite beyond the power of the mind to have an idea of something entirely independent of thought. 7.345

Metaphysics is a subject much more curious than useful, the knowledge of which, like that of a sunken reef, serves chiefly to enable us to keep clear of it. 5.410

Consider what effects, that might conceivably have practical bearings, we conceive the object of our conception to have. Then, our conception of these effects is the whole of our conception of the object. 5.2

The essence of truth lies in its resistance to being ignored. 2.139

The first questions which men ask about the universe are naturally the most general and abstract ones. Nor is it true, as has so often been asserted, that these are the most difficult questions to answer. 1.152

[There is a] common aversion to recognizing thought as an active factor in the real world. 1.348.

Those problems that at first blush appear utterly insoluble receive, in that very circumstance.. their smoothly-fitting keys. 6.460

Higher weapons in the arsenal of thought are not playthings but edge-tools. 6.461

With your eyes open, awake to what is about or within you, and open conversation with yourself; for such is all meditation. It is, however, not a conversation in words alone, but is illustrated, like a lecture, with diagrams and with experiments. 6.461

[I]t is almost always found that when a new idea is born into the living world of thought, it labors under all sorts of inconsequential and inconvenient adjuncts. A new machine, for example, is at first needlessly complicated, and has to be simplified later. 4.661

Pragmaticism is not a system of philosophy. It is only a method of thinking 8.206

Every unidealistic philosophy supposes some absolutely inexplicable, unanalyzable ultimate; in short, something resulting from mediation itself not susceptible of mediation. Now that anything is thus inexplicable can only be known by reasoning from signs. But the only justification of an inference from signs is that the conclusion explains the fact. To suppose the fact absolutely inexplicable, is not to explain it, and hence this supposition is never allowable.

5.265

Some notes on recursion, complexity & emergence

Recursion

Recursive patters are structures that structure themselves. Examples of recursion are the ‘bases’ in mathematics, where integers (numbers) are organised into complex patterns based on some properties of the numbers themselves.

For example, each large set of numbers in base ten contains nested subsets of all the other base ten numbers – these are vastly complex patterns generated by just 10 numbers.

1
10
100
1000
10000
100000
1000000
10000000
100000000

In recursive systems. Repeating a patterns like this creates a syntax (a grammar) which organises further iterations (repeats) of that pattern.

Fibonacci
So far we have dealt with purely abstract numbers patterns. In the twelfth century, an Italian mathematician called Leonardo of Pisa (now better known as Fibonacci) came up with a famous example of recursion, which seemed to describe natural patterns. This sequence is known today as the Fibonacci sequence. It starts like this:

0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34

To make a Fibonacci sequence all you do is add to the sum of the two previous numbers together to get the next number in the sequence. So for example if you start with 0 & 1 then the next number would be 1, (0+1), and the next number would be 2, (1 + 1), then 3, (2 + 1), then 5, (3+ 2), then 8, (5 + 3) and so on……

Graphically represented, the Fibonacci numbers can be arranged as squares which results in a pattern like this.

Fibonacci numbers form a spiral pattern which occurs everywhere in nature:

They are in the branching structure of trees…


the fronds of ferns…

in the shells of crustaceans…

and in the structure of the human hand



Beyond noting their ubiquity, I am not making any claims for these spiral patters as some kind of key to existence. Fibonacci numbers only describes, they does not explain. Those who have searched through them for the answers to life, the universe and everything (and many have) discover rather that these numbers do not reveal truth, all they reveal is more iterations of the same structure - behind the patterns there are only more patterns, stretching into infinity.

Complexity

The notion that behind a structure you get more structure is known as complexity. And this is also in essence the message of another concept called self similarity. Self similarity was examined in a famous 1967 paper by Benoît Mandelbrot “How Long Is the Coast of Britain? What Mandelbrot showed in that paper was that a measured length of a coastline behaves in a similar way over a range of measurement scales. He called this behaviour fractal.

Fractals are curves that are irregular all over. Moreover, they have exactly the same degree of irregularity at all scales of measurement. So it doesn't matter whether you look at a fractal from far away or up close with a microscope-in either case you'll see exactly the same picture. If you start looking from a distance (i.e., with a "long" ruler), then as you get closer and closer '(with shorter rulers) small pieces of the curve that looked like formless blobs earlier turn into recognizable objects, the shapes of which are the same as that of the overall object itself (Casti 1994, 232).

James Gleick in the book Chaos writes;

Although Mandelbrot made the most comprehensive geometric use of it… [s]caling also became part of a movement in physics that led, more directly than Mandelbrot's own work, to the discipline known as chaos. Even in distant fields, scientists were beginning to think in terms of theories that used hierarchies of scales, as in evolutionary biology, where it became clear that a full theory would have to recognize patterns of development in genes, in individual organisms, in species, and in families of species, all at once (Gleick 1988 , 115-116)

The principle of self similarity means that repeating patterns result in similar configurations nested over different scales

Here is the pattern the retreated tidal water makes in the sand...

Which is repeated in the configuration of a river delta...

Extraordinary complex phenomena can be broken down and modelled based on this concept:

The mathematician and brilliant computer scientist Alan Turing's last published papers, before his death in 1954, had studied the riddle of "morphogenesis"-the capacity of all life-forms to develop ever more baroque bodies out of impossibly simple beginnings. Turing's paper had focused on the recurring numerical patterns of flowers, but it demonstrated using mathematical tools how a complex organism could assemble itself without any master planner calling the shots (Johnson 2001, 14).

Turing's paper on morphogenesis found its application in Lindenmayer systems. These are sets of rules which can be used to generate self similar fractals that model the morphology of a variety of organisms.

The principles of fractal geometry are used in virtual reality modelling. The self similarity of fractals create extraordinarily life-like computer generated images....



These examples illustrate how recursion can generate extremely complex patterns by repeating simple configurations nested inside one another. The outer systems repeats the patterns are found in the inner systems, but those patterns act as structuring elements across the whole system.

Descartes’ legacy
in the 17th Century, the truth of Rene Descartes’ theory of being (ontology) was seemingly confirmed by the usefulness of his analytical geometry. Descartes argued that the true being of substance was contained in the simple fact that it could be extended in space along x, y and z axes. Today it can be argued that the truth of recursion, as a theory of being, is demonstrated in fractal geometry that creates stunningly simulations of the real world. (The fact that these are incompatible truths says more about the contingent and context bound nature of truth than it does about the weakness or either theory. The point being that a theory is true so long as it helps advance human understanding - as Descartes analytical geometry undoubtedly did in the fields of mathematics.)

Emergence

In August of 2000, a Japanese scientist named Toshiyuki Nakagaki announced that he had trained an amoebalike organism called slime mold to find the shortest route through a maze. Nakagaki had placed the mold in a small maze comprising four possible routes and planted pieces of food at two of the exits. Despite its being an incredibly primitive organism (a close relative of ordinary fungi) with no centralized brain whatsoever, the slime mold managed to plot the most efficient route to the food, stretching its body through the maze so that it connected directly to the two food sources. Without any apparent cognitive resources, the slime mold had "solved" the maze puzzle.


How did such a lowly organism come to play such an important scientific role? Slime mold spends much of its life as thousands of distinct single-celled units, each moving separately from its other comrades. Under the right conditions, those myriad cells will coalesce again into a single, larger organism, which then begins its leisurely crawl across the garden floor, consuming rotting leaves and wood as it moves about. In the simplest terms, [systems like slime mold] solves problems by drawing on masses of relatively stupid elements, rather than a single, intelligent "executive branch." They are bottom-up systems, not top-down. …In a more technical language, they are complex adaptive systems that display emergent behavior. In these systems, agents residing on one scale start producing behavior that lies one scale above them… The movement from low-level rules to higher-level sophistication is what we call emergence. (Johnson 2001, 11-18)

Emergence is easier to spot in primitive systems like slime mold because paradoxically their complexity exist at the microscopic level and their individual elements are opaque to the naked eye. It is only when you move away from microscopic scales and view phenomena at a macro level that its emergent properties become apparent. The human species for instance when viewed at cosmic distances is easier to represent as an emergent system. While. at a human everyday scale of understanding, the individual entity is more salient and emergent properties are correspondingly much harder to demonstrate.

Experiencing the world ultimately comes down to the recognition of boundaries: self/non-self, before/after, inside/'Outside, subject/object and so forth (Casti 1994, 230).

From the individual’s point of view existence is diagrammed in its binary oppositions, black/white, good/bad wrong/right etc. As Mandelbrot showed mathematically, the complexity of life is always going to escape the confides of our diagrams. because "Mountains are not cones, clouds are not spheres, and rivers are not straight lines." Furthermore, as Nakagaki found out with slime mold - collectively, self-organizing systems are smarter than their individual components. If we accept that self similarity works across all scales we could presume that the human species is more intelligent at the species level than it is at the level of individual human beings. This is a notion intimated by Jung’s collective unconscious and by the idea of God.

References

Casti, J. L. (1994) Complexification. London: Abacus.

Gleick, J. (1988) Chaos. London: Sphere

Johnson, S. (2001). Emergence. Harmondsworth: Penguin.

Change has come, but a little too late for the Daily Mail.

Bush…unforgivably, exploited Americans' fear and anger by launching an unfocused war in Afghanistan - which failed in its principal objectives of capturing 9/11 mastermind Osama Bin Laden and isolating Afghans from the Taliban. Then he started a pointless, bloody war in Iraq - which had never harboured Al-Qaeda - and achieved nothing other than establishing itself as a huge drain on America's human and financial resources.

This is not a quotation from the Stop the War Coalition, but Peter MacKay writing in today’s Daily Mail. That’s right, you did read that correctly, I said the Daily Mail. It would be naïve (not to mention a rather puerile attempt at satire) merely to point out the hypocrisy of Mr McKay or the Daily Mail for writing and publishing these words. What I wish to highlight is what I think must change if we are to take my Obama’s words as a pragmatic call to action - "Let's resist the temptation to fall back on the same partisanship and pettiness and immaturity that has poisoned our politics for so long." I take these words to mean an attack not just on the pettiness of US party politics but also on hypocrisy and and intellectual cowardice generally. The man or woman who has hidden behind patriotism in the past or fear, offereing up excuses for not speaking the truth about the US initiated wars in our recent history. This is a different kind of poison. This is the poision which permeats into our moral judgements as a nation (or group of like minded nations) this is a poison which allows us to look the other way when millions of young, innocent and for the most part silent people on both sides of conflicts have lost their lives or have suffered in ways in which we can only imagine.

The issues addressed in the Mail's quotation are no revelation of course. Some of us have been saying these things even before the war in Afghanistan in 2001 and certainly before the invasion of Iraq in 2003. Saying it loud, but for the most part in isolation, without the backing of the official media, or politicians (Clare Short your cowardice still cannot be forgiven) and least of all by the Daily Mail of course. The point is that in the early years of this decade, in those times of fear and paranoia, just uttering the truth meant being ignored, insulted, accused of being unpatriotic and above all being marginalized as some lunatic fringe. Unfortunately, that time was precisely the time when the truth needed to be heard. Needed to be spoken loudly and authoritatively by all who knew it to be so, but kept quite through expediency, or ambition, or cowardice or vanity. You silence, the silence of the whole system is stained by the blood of all the countless victims of this century's futile wars. So let me now commend the Daily Mail for its honesty and express my wish that we cease to live in a culture where the only way to effect the reorientation of our moral compass is to indulge in retrospective hand-wringing and scape goating. Instead let us live in a culture where the truth is spoken and acted upon at the time when it actually matters.

"[T]he true strength of our nation comes not from our the might of our arms or the scale of our wealth, but from the enduring power of our ideals: democracy, liberty, opportunity, and unyielding hope."


Close Guantanamo. End Torture.