The Sun BabelFish Blog

Nobody is responsible

Peter Sloterdijk animates a program on the major German Television Station ZDF, entitled the Philosophical Quartet. The latest program of his, which could be translated as Risk and Responsibility: the art of being Nobody is very much worth watching (if you speak german). Sloterdijk starts off the program by reminding us of the ancient story of Ulysses and the Cyclops. In order to free himself from the blood thirsty monster, Ulysses boldly plunged a red hot stake into the sleeping monsters only eye who screaming in pain and rage asked who it was who had done that. Ulyses answered that his name was "Nobody". As the cyclops friends then arrived alerted by the screams of their fellow, and asked him who had done this deed to him, that they could avenge him, they received the answer Nobody. Thinking therefore that the Gods had done that to him, and that he was thus responsible for his deeds, they left him to die in his pain.

This story is used as a spring board by the quartet - the 2 philosohpers and 2 guests: Beatrice Weder Di Mauro swiss economist member of the German 5 wise men board of economic affairs, and novelist Bodo Kirchhoff - to look into the question that nobody seems to be to blame, or accepts the blame, for the massive financial meltdown that saw more money evaporate in a year than all the biggest robberies of all time piled one next to the other over the whole course of humanities history. Clearly something went wrong. Something needs to change, some things need to stop, some to die... The point is well made that the bankers that gave themselves such huge salaries on account that they were responsible for the huge benefits they made, seem to have lost all sense of responsibilty in the crisis. What then is it that needs changing? What criteria should be set in to avoid such errors in the future? One proposal - perhaps a very harsh one for all attempts at mergers - is that you should never allow a system to grow to such a level that it cannot fail, or better: never allow a system to grow so that when it is time to ask for responsibility for a crisis, the only answer can be Nobody.

Posted at 06:03PM Jun 19, 2009 [permalink/trackback] by Henry Story in Philosophy  |  Comments[1]

Peter Sloterdijk, radical cure to twitter

Do you feel like you are in a binary discussion on some topic, that goes back and forth with no apparent progress? Do you feel you have gotten so involved in a micro topic, that you feel that you may be missing the big picture? Is perhaps the phantasy of such a big picture you have taken as your background, itself the cause of the problem you are dealing with? Do you find yourself preaching that God is dead, or not? Are you preaching? Why?

Peter Sloterdijk, one of the most famous contemporary German philosopher, is known to write very large books that span over all domains of human activity from philosophy to history, to technology, aesthetics, biology, religion and economics, in a passionate, often humorous, sometimes jolting way, linking these in a fluid narrative that flows healthily through the barriers of all academic disciplines. Sloterdijk diffuses dualisms through fluid depth of analysis, carefully linking both sides of a debate in such a way that they can be seen to be part of the same surface reflecting a third party that had not yet been seen, the real topic of the discussion perhaps, of which he goes on to draw the history and evolution.

So in his latest book "Du mußt dein Leben ändern" ("You must change your life"), which I have nearly finished reading here in Vienna, Sloterdijk starts off with the a beautiful poem by Rilke of the same title (english translation with german original here ) where Rilke describes what could be called a religious call for transformation whilst looking at an ancient Greek stone torso of Apollo he had come across in the Louvre museum in Paris. The undeniable reality of this upward sentiment of transformation, is what Sloterdijk then goes on to describe the history of throughout his book, linking it to the exercises that Olympic athletes of our times to always further push back the boundaries of what humanity is capable of, which he then traces back to the budhist philosophers and their spiritual exercises, the ancient greek schools of thought, and the exercises the early Christians followed to break through the barriers of death, by for example entering the Roman circus' to be devoured calmly by Lions. This pursuit of transcendental improvement can then be found to have moved from the monasteries of the middle ages into the artisans workshops where the practices of meditation were put to use in the building of the Protestant work ethic...

For those who speak German here is a very interesting interview of him in October of last year on a Swiss television channel talking about the financial meltdown that occurred.

(Thanks to Michael Zeltner for the link on his very interesting blog. More parts here).

And here, for the French speaking of you here is an interview with Elisabeth Levy where they discuss modern media, rumours, and more.

For english speakers here is a talk on Reality Peter Sloterdijk gave a last year before the opening of the large swiss nuclear collider, which I think made the news. (The sounds is not very good, but the points he makes are serious and funny simultaneously):

Posted at 12:45PM Jun 19, 2009 [permalink/trackback] by Henry Story in Philosophy  |  Comments[1]

You are a Terrorist!

Every country in Europe seems to be on the verge of introducing extremely powerful legislation for state monitoring of the internet, bringing us a lot closer to the dystopia described in George Orwell's novel Nineteen Eighty Four. Under the guise of laws to help combat terrorism or pedophilia - emotional subjects that immediately get everybody's unthinking assent - massive powers are to be given to the state, which could very easily be misused. As internauts we all need to make it our duty to follow very closely these debates, and participate actively in them, if we do not want to find ourselves waking up one morning in a world that is the exact opposite of what we have been dreaming of.

Germany

In Germany a new Data Retention law passed already it seems in 2008, allows the state (quote)

to trace who has contacted whom via telephone, mobile phone or e-mail for a period of six months. In the case of mobile calls or text messages via mobile phone, the user's location is also logged. Anonymising services will be prohibited as of 2009.

Du bist Terrorist (You are a Terrorist) english subtitles from lexela on Vimeo.

France

The passage of the hadopi law in France, will create a strong incentive for citizens to place state built snooper software on each their computers in order to make it possible to defend themselves against accusations of copyright infringement. But that is nothing compared to the incredibly broad powers the state wishes to give itself with Loppsi 2 law (detailed article in Le Monde, and Ars Technica) which would give the president the power to insert spyware onto users computers (which could record anything being done of course), create a very large database of people's activities, help link information from various databases, and much more... The recent case of the sacking of the web site director of the once national, now private, TF1 television channel for having communicated his doubts on Hadopi privately to his Member of Parliament - as reported on Slashdot recently - does not give one much faith in the way privacy is being handled currently by the government.

The United Kingdom

In the UK the Home Secretary Jaqui Smith had proposed to create a database dubbed Big Brother to log every single activity of every one of it's citizens - in order of course to root out the very 21 century crimes of pedophilia and terrorism (did the IRA not operate before the internet? Are pedophile rings something that only emerged with the internet, or is it that they just became more visible?). She had to pull back somewhat from the initial proposal, and now wishes all that information still to be tracked, but only to be kept on the service provider's databases as reported by the Daily Mail, The Telegraph, The Independent...

Conclusion

So are we now all suspected terrorists, pornographers, pedophiles, murderers, subversives, ... that the governments must know all about us? We may have voted for the current government and have complete faith in their use of these tools. But what when the opposition comes in, and takes hold of those same powers? Will we be as comfortable then? The excellent 2006 film The Lives of Others shows just how intrusive the East German state was on its own citizens during the cold war - and that with the very limited tools they had available. With modern computing tools, that type of spy operation could be done at much much lower cost and so perhaps even be viable for the state.

If you feel things just can't go this wrong, then I would also recommend watching Julie Taymor's adaptation of Shakespear's Titus Andronicus. It really is important to realize that things can go badly, very very badly wrong. Ignoring a problem, not taking responsibilities in fighting them will lead to disaster, as the current economic crisis - predicted years before it occurred, but without any action being taken - should have amply proven by now. Sadly for people who predict danger, if people do act on the danger and avoid it, nobody may even notice how close to danger they really were. So our actions may remain unsung. But at least we may put some chances on our side not to wake up in a new form of dictatorship, worse than any ever dreamed of by our those who helped forge our democracies.

Posted at 09:39AM May 20, 2009 [permalink/trackback] by Henry Story in Art  |  Comments[0]

The anti-privacy/liberty law named Hadopi

The Hadopi law(en) being voted now in France, constitutes an incredible attack on Freedom of expression and Privacy. It is fascinating to see how a law that gives the state an easy route to invade people's every digital thought is being pushed through, and will very likely be accepted by the French parliament on Monday May 4, 2009.

Parliamentary Maneuverings

The maneuvers of the French parliament here take some work to understand. A few weeks ago Hadopi was rejected in the Assembly by 21 votes against, 15 for. For an Assembly containing well over 300 deputies, and for a law of such importance, it may seem odd that so few people were part of the discussion. The best understanding I have of this is that President Sarkozy, has made this a very personal issue, having promised to a lot of big media friends, with which he is very close, to put in place a system to break the problem of "piracy" on the internet. Anyone in the majority who may have been tepidly against the law, may not have wished making such a powerful enemy. Others may have thought the law was a done deal given the backing. And sadly I think most of the deputies don't really understand the issue at all, as reveled by this video asking deputies what p2p is.

The Anti-Piracy law

Having lost the first vote, Sarkozi ordered his troops together to make his majority in parliament felt by having them massively vote for the law. The problem is that the majority voting now have very little understanding of the technical issues in front of them. Their view of the issue is the one a large part of the French population have: this is simply an issue of being for or against the Pirates; being for or against the artists. "Piracy is theft" is the simplifying drumbeat which organises their thoughts.

Coming to the defence of artists is of course a very noble thing to do. I myself try to stay as clean as possible in that regard, favoring works that are clearly licensed openly. Most work I publish under very free licences, that make it close to impossible to pirate my work. This article for example is published under a Creativce Commons attribution licence. In any case I find it much easier to buy or rent DVDs than to search for content that may be broken on some other p2p network.

What the best way to defend artists is, and how to find ways of rewarding their work is a complex issue. For the past 50 years people have mostly accepted electronic work to be freely available via the radio or the television -- if interspersed with advertising. I don't want to look into this problem here. For some good ideas one should read and listen to Lawrence Lessig speak on the issue of copyright and the future of the network, or the French economist Jaques Attali write about 10 steps to solve this problem.

The Anti-Privacy/Liberty Law

However noble the issue of saving artists is, the real problem is how this law intends to go about doing what it set out to do. And if one looks at it this way, one soon gets a bad feeling of having entered a Orwellian 1984 like world! (See the public letter "Sci-Fi Against Hadopi") The law is not just anti-piracy, it is also anti-privacy, anti-freedom of expression, anti-freedom of all sorts. It is like a super DDT, a chemical that gets rid of all insects, but is so powerful that it also starts killing humans too.

The Hadopi law (pdf) will enable a newly established administrative higher authority to receive ip addresses from content owners, and ask telecommunication companies to reveal the owners of that ip address, to whom they will send 2 warning e-mails, telling them that something illegal is being downloaded or uploaded from their network, and asking them to secure this network. It seems that this warning will not even mention the work that is thought to have been illegally transmitted. After the third postal warning the internet connection will be cut off. At that point the citizen whose connection will be cut off, will be placed on a black list, making it impossible for him to seek any other telephone connection. As it will be extremly difficult for him to defend himself, he will then have to accept putting a yet undefined piece of software on his network that will snoop everything he is doing. One motion required this software to also sniff the email communications [ I am not absolutely clear this went through though.]

So in short, private companies will be able to anonymously denounce French citizens, leading their internet connection to be cut off, and then forcing them to install snooping software on their network to prove their innocence! If this is not an extreem invasion of privacy I do not know what is.

To help citizens who want to stay legal find their way around the internet, the Hadopi institution will distribute special labels for clean content. Good citizens will be safe if they don't stray too far from officially approved sites. If this is not an attack on freedom of information I don't know what is!

Where is the resistance?

So over the past few weeks as my concern grew I tried discussing this with a number of people. My initial thought was that an issue such as this would not get through in a country that demonstrates on nearly every issue that comes up. What stunned me was the silence, or the lack of interest in these issues by most people. It is instructive in my view to look at various types of responses I got.

The law cannot be implemented view

A lot of people are convinced that this law cannot be implemented. It is too crazy to be workable. Let us hope and pray that it is! The previous DADVSI law wich had set punishments of €300 000 and 3 years in prison, was so extreemly overwhelmingly powerful, that it indeed was not useable.

But that argument is very dangerous. The DADVSI may not yet have been used, but it may one day be. It is certainly what is spurring the current law, Hadopi, which comparatively seems innocuously kind. It only will ask you to install snooping software on your network. And since it is big brother the State asking this, and most people have no idea of what this implies, a lot of people may very well be frightened into accepting this. In any case it does not matter if it is not immediately applicable. It need only slowly with time work itself into people's lives. If enough people have this working, even if it is widely bypassed, then you can bet that in 10 years time, a movement will start where people who do have this installed will complain that some of their fellow citizens don't have it, and so push for harsher laws, perhaps going so far as to install this automatically on all networks.

We can bypass it

A lot of technically savvy people have convinced themselves they can bypass this easily.

So what if they do? The law need only frighten the majority into behaving a certain way. With time, and with the majority on their side, they can add other laws to make the undesirable behavior a lot more difficult. For example for those who think that anonymising software is going to be an easy way out, then they should look at the next law on the table: Llopsi which will give the State the power to block any IP address they need to. Now perhaps a good use case for Llopsi will be large anonymiser services.

Not fighting a law because one decides one will not follow it, is a very selfish and short term way of thinking. Sadly it seems to have grown in a large portion of the population that allowed itself to be tagged as Pirates. And for that selfishness we will all pay (yes, this is not just a French phenomenon, it seems to be a globally orchestrated movement - see for example blackout europe.)

It will be blocked by the constitution

It may be. But then it may not be. In any case it is extreemly worrying that a law should have to go so far as to require blocking by the constitution. Remember how Lawrence Lessig's attempt to get the Supreme court to change the provisions on copyright? It failed.

It will be blocked by the European Union

The EU is a Union of States, where the states have an overwhelming power. The EU does not have an army and cannot enforce much. France has the "cultural exception" it can use quite easily, and it may also be that similar problems are brewing in the rest of europe. Don't count on the EU. The parliament have done a great job there, but they don't have the final say, and they can be pressured. They have just watered down the telecom bill for example. The EU is not the USA.

The people will rise

This is unlikely given what I have seen. Many people don't yet really feel the power of the internet. They work with the internet via the expensive and limited cell phone networks, if at all. For them the Internet is cool, but not essential. Furthermore traditional media are still extremely powerful, and they can direct the message the way they wish. If they were not so powerful, laws such as this would not ever be able to go so far. I don't watch enough television to be able to tell if both sides of the debate here have been aired equally. My guess is not. [ Update: the major French television channel TF1 - the first french TV channel to be created, now privatised - was found to have sacked the head of their innovation center, for having sent privately a critical message on Hadopi to his Member of Parliament as reported by Libération. Thereby confirming the suspicion that other sides of this debate are not getting equal airing time]

But in the long term the people may very well rise. If the law were applied equally and without discrimination then businesses may very well be the first to rise up -- and leave. Later as the internet does become more and more part of every day life, the people themselves may rise. Most likely the younger generation will feel most strongly the difference between what is being asked and what is reasonable. They may feel these new chains most forcefully. Mass movements though are worrying, because when masses move, they can end up being very difficult to control, and can easily go the wrong direction.

All in all I think it would be much better for people in France to call their deputies before the law passes and urge them to change their mind, than to wait and fight this out on the streets.

Vote

There are a number of ways people can get their voice heard. One is the twitition petition. But I don't like the way it requires your password. Better I think to add the string JVoteContreHadopi to a blog post or tweet of yours. After a little time the vote should appear on this Google query where the votes can be counted. (We did this for when voting for Java 6 on OSX leopard.)

Posted at 05:09PM Apr 30, 2009 [permalink/trackback] by Henry Story in Art  |  Comments[7]

Possible Worlds and the Web

Tim Berner's Lee pressed to define his creation said recently (from memory): "...my short definition is that the web is a mapping from URI's onto meaning".

Meaning is defined in terms of possible interpretations of sentences, also known as possible worlds. Possible Worlds under the guise of the 5th and higher dimensions are fundamental components of contemporary physics. When logic and physics meet we are in the realm of metaphysics. To find these two meet the basic architecture of the web should give anyone pause for thought.

The following extract from RDF Semantics spec is a good starting point:

The basic intuition of model-theoretic semantics is that asserting a sentence makes a claim about the world: it is another way of saying that the world is, in fact, so arranged as to be an interpretation which makes the sentence true. In other words, an assertion amounts to stating a constraint on the possible ways the world might be. Notice that there is no presumption here that any assertion contains enough information to specify a single unique interpretation. It is usually impossible to assert enough in any language to completely constrain the interpretations to a single possible world, so there is no such thing as 'the' unique interpretation of an RDF graph. In general, the larger an RDF graph is - the more it says about the world - then the smaller the set of interpretations that an assertion of the graph allows to be true - the fewer the ways the world could be, while making the asserted graph true of it.

A few examples may help here. Take the sentence "Barack Obama is the 44th president of the U.S.A". There are many many ways the world/universe/complete 4 dimensional space time continuum from the beginning of the universe to the end if there is one, yes, there are many ways the world could be and that sentence be true. For example I could not have bothered to write this article now, I could have written it just a little later, or perhaps even not at all. There is a world in which you did not read it. There is a world in which I went out this morning to get a baguette from one of the many delicious local french bakeries. The world could be all these ways and yet still Barack Obama be the 44th president of the United States.

In N3 we speak about the meaning of a sentence by quoting it with '{' '}'. So for our example we can write:

@prefix dbpedia: <http://dbpedia.org/resource/> .
{ dbpedia:Barack_Obama a dbpedia:President_of_the_United_States . } = :g1 .

:g1 is the set of all possible worlds in which Obama is president of the USA. The only worlds that are not part of that set, are the worlds where Obama is not President, but say McCain or Sarah Palin is. That McCain might have become president of the United States is quite conceivable. Both those meanings are understandable, and we can speak about both of them

@prefix dbpedia: <http://dbpedia.org/resource/> .
{ dbpedia:Barack_Obama a dbpedia:President_of_the_United_States . } = :g1 .
{ dbpedia:John_McCain a dbpedia:President_of_the_United_States . } = :g2 .
:g1 hopedBy :george .
:g2 feardedBy :george .
:g1 fearedBy :jane .

Ie. we can say that George hopes Barack Obama to be the 44th president of the United States, but that Jane fears it.

Assume wikipedia had a resource for each member of the list of presidents of the USA, and that we were pointing to the 44th element above. Then even though we can speak about :g1 and :g2, there is no world that fits them both: The intersection of both :g1 and :g2 is { } , the empty set, whose extension according to David Lewis' book on Mereology is the fusion of absolutely all possibilities. The thing that is everything and everywhere and around at all times. Ie. you don't make any distinction when you say that: you don't say anything.

The definition of meaning in terms of possible worlds, make a few things very simple to explain. Implication being one of them. If every president has to be human, then

@prefix log: <http://www.w3.org/2000/10/swap/log#> .
{ dbpedia:Barack_Obama a dbpedia:President_of_the_United_States . } log:implies { dbpedia:Barack_Obama a dbpedia:Human . }

Ie the set of possible worlds in which Obama is a president of the United States is a subset of the set of worlds in which he is Human. There are worlds after all where Barack is just living a normal Lawyer's life.

So what is this mapping from URIs to meaning that Tim Berners Lee is talking about? I interpret him as speaking of the log:semantics relation.

@prefix rdf: <http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#> .
log:semantics a rdf:Property;
         :label "semantics";
         :comment """The log:semantics of a document is the formula.
         achieved by parsing representation of the document.
          For a document in Notation3, log:semantics is the
          log:parsedAsN3 of the log:contents of the document.
          For a document in RDF/XML, it is parsed according to the
          RDF/XML specification to yield an RDF formula [snip]""";
         :domain foaf:Document;
         :range log:Formula .

Of course it is easier to automate the mapping from resources that return RDF based representations, but log:semantics can be applied to any document. Any web page, even those written in natural languages, have some semantics. It is just that they currently require very advanced wetware processors to interpret them. These can indeed be very specialised wetware processors, as for example those that one meets at air ports.

Posted at 12:14PM Nov 10, 2008 [permalink/trackback] by Henry Story in Philosophy  |  Comments[0]

The coming postmodern era

Kevin Kelly argued convincingly that the growth in technology is creating a new world wide super organism, something Nova Spivack likes to call One Mind (OM). I argue here that this One Mind will have to be a postmodern mind: it will have to take points of view as a fundamental given. In other words it is a world of Many Many Minds (MMM) that is being born.

Concepts can take a long time from their birth to their acceptance by society. Democritus reasoned in 400BC that the earth was round, that there were other stars, and that they had planets which had life. It took a 2400 years, a trip to the moon, satellite television, mass air travel to turn these deep insights into common sense.

I think one can make the case that the massive intrusion of the Personal Computer in the 1980ies into huge numbers of household and businesses led to the strengthening of the concepts of 'efficiency' and the self. The metaphor of the brain as computer took hold silencing previous behaviorist intuitions. The computer could be programmed. It could think. Some could think faster than others. Every year they became more efficient. The PC was the icon of the age. It was alone and did not communicate. It was the era of selfish competition: the 'me' generation. As Margaret Thatcher, prime minister of Britain at the time said: "There is no such thing as society".

In the 1990ies the internet entered public consciousness, and with it the realization of how the network was overtaking the PC in importance. Information moved from being mostly on a computer to being mostly in the network cloud. The network was slow, so the experience people had was primarily of being connected to information and commerce. The experience of globalization of commerce and information blended with a modernistic view of the future unity of humanity moving towards one end: the end of history.

Behind the growth of the web and the internet, hidden to many, lay the strength of community. Unix, Linux, Apache, Open Source software, that had been the cause of the huge growth of the Network became more apparent, and became visible to the majority in the form of the read/write web under the banner of blogging. The last 8 years have been the discovery of the web as a platform for each individual voice to be heard, of community and mostly protected social networks. The end of the 20th century was also the end of the read only society as Lawrence Lessig argues so well. Millions of different points of view came to express themselves on innumerable topics.

Where next? What will happen as we move from a human readable read/write web to a machine readable one? What happens when we manage to break through the autism of current tools? What happens when software becomes widely available that can ask you if you want to reason over data you believe, or if you'd rather look at what your parents believe, or what republicans tend to believe, or what your children believe? This is as I argued recently the fundamentally new thing the semantic web is making possible; something unlike anything that humanity has ever witnessed before. The first tools that can make the step out of autism.

Of course, we mostly all come to understand around the age of 4 that other people believe different things from us, and that different people may think incompatible things about the world. But what happens when this everyday intuition becomes mechanized, objectified in tools that each year become more efficient? Most people always knew that society was very important, but the growth of the PC in the 1980ies created a strong icon in public discourse around which concepts of the self could cluster. In a similar way the growth of software that can point out contradictions between different points of views expressed in a distributed way around the web, would by doing this place a huge emphasis on the notion of points of views. If it were to make exploring these views easy, easier than it is for a normal human being living a normal life nowadays, then we can imagine that people may start exploring points of views much more often, more easily, in more detail, without thinking too much of it. Just like people now may drive 35 miles to work because they can, we can imagine people thinking more about others because some of the hard work has now been automated for them. Discovering conflicts in belief before they lead to conflicting actions could remove a lot of problems before they occur. ( Hopefully it won't lead us into some crazy world such as that described in the movie Being John Malkovitch ).

So how does this fit in with Post Modernism? Well, post modernism is a fuzzy concept, possibly even fuzzier than Web 2.0 or for that matter Web 3.0. It arose out of the disillusionment with all deterministic explanations of the future given by many of the western schools of thought, from christian evangelism to Marxism, Futurism, Consumerism ... Weary of all totalitarian explanations of everything, baffled by their sheer number, thinkers came to look at the different theories not from the inside, but from the outside, Instead of looking for a theory in which to believe trying to find a theory that would subsume all others, postmodernism, as I understand it, accepted the multiplicity of viewpoints, and found it more interesting to understand their differences. By putting more emphasis on understanding than on Truth, it was possible to look at the multiplicity of different points of view in the world. The pygmy in his tribe was no longer someone in need of conversion to the Truth, but someone one should try to understand in his context. This was felt by many to lead to a dangerous relativism, where the notion of truth itself seemed like it was loosing its meaning. In fact truth has never been better and more precisely defined: It is at its core a disquotation mechanism. According to Tarski's definition of truth:

"Snow is white" is true, in English if and only if snow is white .

  @prefix log: <http://www.w3.org/2000/10/swap/log#> .

  { { ?s ?r ?o } a log:Truth } <=> { ?s ?r ?o } .

PREFIX log: <http://www.w3.org/2000/10/swap/log#>
CONSTRUCT { ?subject ?relation ?object }
WHERE {
   GRAPH ?g { ?subject ?relation ?object }
   ?g a log:Truth .
}

Ie, if you hear someone say something, and you believe what they said to be true then you believe what they said. That is so simple it is self evident. So what has it got us? Well believing something is not neutral. Because we infer things from what we believe, and because we act on what we believe, to believe something is also to act and to be predisposed to act. And that is where the contact with reality ends up being felt at some point or another. If someone shouts "Une voiture arrive a ta gauche" in French and you understand it then you might add the following to your database:

{ _:c a :Car; 
      :moving [ :closeProximityTo :you ] .
  _:c positionleftOf :you .
} saidBy :joe .

At that point you just believe that Joe believes this. It makes a big difference when you come to believe the same content, namely

[] a :Car;
   :moving [ :closeProximityTo :you ] .
  _:c positionleftOf :you .

The disquotation mechanism (In N3 the removing of the '{' '}' ) is therefore an essential part of communication. One should not believe everything one hears - one may after all have misunderstood what was said. To remember who said what, and when one heard it is essential to good thinking. And sometimes who is right is really not that important anyway. Sometimes understanding is more important still. And that means putting oneself into other person's shoes, trying to look at things from their point of view - in essence, realizing that there are many many minds (MMM). So again what will happen when all tools we use every day make it as easy for us to explore points of view as it is to look at a web page, or take the car to work?

And where does this leave the absolute conception of Truth? Metcalf's Law gives a good explanation of the value of such a conception. Remember that this law states that the value of a network grows exponentially with the size of the network. The search for the Truth was always the search for an explanation that could explain as many things as possible: i.e. to create the biggest possible network, to predict as much as possible, to englobe all points of view, to create a framework that could link all of them together.

But what if the largest possible network has to take into account points of views as basic constitutive elements of the network?

Posted at 04:30PM Nov 05, 2008 [permalink/trackback] by Henry Story in Philosophy  |  Comments[3]

RDF: Reality Distortion Field

Here is Kevin Kelly's presentation on the next 5000 days on the web, in clear easy English that every member of the family can watch and understand. It explains what the semantic web, also known as Web 3.0, is about and how it will affect technology and life on earth. Where is the web going? I can find no fault in this presentation.

This is a great introduction. He explains how Metcalf's law brought us to the web of documents and is leading us inexorably to a web of things, in which we will be the eyes and the hands of this machine called the internet that never stops running.
For those with a more technical mind, who want to see how this is possible, follow this up with a look at the introductory material to RDF.

Warning: This may change the way you think. Don't Panic! Things will seem normal after a while.

Posted at 12:32PM Sep 12, 2008 [permalink/trackback] by Henry Story in SemWeb  |  Comments[5]

authentic paranoid fantasies

On 1 July 1936 Salvador Dali gave a fantastic presentation at the New Burlington Galleries in London. He arrived carrying a billiard queue in one hand , accompanied by 2 large dogs and determined to present his talk "Authentic Paranoid Fantasies" in a diving suite.

I read this story a year ago in Berlin whilst browsing the philosophy section of a large bookstore. On page 156 of "Spheres III: Foam", Peter Sloterdijk - a famous contemporary German philosopher, who now teaches in Vienna - quotes the following passage from Dali's Memoirs "Comment on Devient Dali", which in turn I have translated for your enjoyment below:

I had determined to give a talk during the exhibition in a diving suite as a representation of the subconscious. I was placed in the armor and even fitted with heavy lead shoes, making it completely impossible for me to move my legs. I had to be carried onto the stage. Then they placed the helmet on my head and screwed it tightly shut. I started my talk behind the thick glass in front of a microphone that clearly could not record anything. Nevertheless my mimicry fascinated the public. Soon though I ran out of air, my face turned red, then blue, and my eyes turned upwards. Clearly they had forgotten to provide me with access to air, and I was close to asphyxiation. I signaled to my friends through desperate gestures that my situation was becoming critical. One of them ran for some scissors and tried without success to puncture the costume; another one tried to unscrew the helmet, and as that did not succeed he started banging on the screws with a hammer... Two men tried to tear off the helmet and a third one continued whacking the metal so hard that I nearly lost consciousness.
On the stage one could only see a mass of wildly moving hands, from which I emerged now and again like a dismembered puppet, and my helmet sounded like a gong. The public applauded heavily to this successful Daliesque melodrama, which in their eyes clearly represented how consciousness was trying to communicate with the unconscious. I though nearly died during this triumph. As they finally ripped off my helmet I was as white as Jesus as he returned after his forty days of fasting from the desert.

Posted at 02:13PM Sep 09, 2007 [permalink/trackback] by Henry Story in Art  |  Comments[1]

Lao Tzu: Tao Te Ching

On Saturday, I walked into a bookstore in Boston, and decided to read something different for a change (I had been reading some very interesting popular science books). I decided on poetry. One of the books I picked up was Tao Te Ching. I walked out of the store down to the Boston public garden lagoon, sat down and started reading.
I did not stop until I was well through one third of the poems. No wonder this book has survived over 2600 years! It is as youthful as ever, as readable as the best dialogs by Plato, though perhaps at the opposite spectrum of philosophy. Where Plato or Confucius are Yang, Lao Tze is Yin. They are complimentary.

Here is the first poem:

The Tao that can be followed is not the eternal Tao.
The name that can be named is not the eternal name.
The namelesss is the origin of heaven and earth
While naming is the origin of the myriad things .
Therefore, always desireless, you see the mystery
Ever desiring, you see the manifestations.
These two are the same --
When they appear they are named differently.

This sameness is the mystery,
Mystery within mystery;

The door to all marvels.

Why did this book jump out at me now? I have read it twice by now.

Update Sept 2008: Another very interesting version of the Tao, with a long introduction on the huge difference between the translations, is the French Philosophes Taoistes, vol I in the luxurious La Pleiade edition. Just compare the 170 translations of the first poem to get an idea of the scope of the differences.

Posted at 07:02AM Jun 20, 2007 [permalink/trackback] by Henry Story in Art  |  Comments[3]