(today i’ll be writing in another language, you can google translate it)

sem querer ser especialmente concreto em termos de exemplos, há neste momento um método altamente duvidoso de controlo por parte da polícia portuguesa. este baseia-se exclusivamente no facto dos cidadãos desconhecerem os seus direitos.

mais que uma vez, durante um processo legal de ocupação, os agentes da autoridade entram sem autorização no imóvel e ameaçam directamente os ocupantes. estes são insultados e encorajados a reagir violentamente, e expulsos à força do imóvel ocupado.

dado que estamos a lidar com, na sua maioria, jovens, estes não têm os conhecimentos necessários dos seus direitos para reagir adequadamente e expressar a sua cidadania. para piorar a situação, os agentes da autoridade mostram pouca (ou nenhuma) tolerância, e na maior parte das vezes, total desconhecimento da lei portuguesa. aproveitam-se também do nervosismo dos ocupantes para extrair falsas confissões, aproveitando-se do facto da maioria dos cidadãos não saber que ocupar não é crime em certas circunstâncias. isto é feito dizendo coisas como “vocês estão aqui ilegalmente” ou “vai tudo de cana”, quando na verdade em portugal somos inocentes até que se prove o contrário. mas assim que um ocupante se auto-incrimina num crime que não existe a polícia usa imediatamente isso como argumento.

alguns agentes mais hábeis extraem a pseudo confissão de um crime inexistente perguntando coisas como “mas vocês sabem que estão a fazer uma coisa ilegal?” ou “têm consciência de que não podem fazer isto?”. note-se que isto é um teste à boa fé do ocupante. é essencial que o ocupante esteja bem ciente dos direitos e das coisas que não deve dizer.

não existe qualquer contexto para expulsar um cidadão de uma propriedade se a ocupação está nos termos da lei (ver Secção II (Usucapião), Capítulo VI, Título I do Código Civil da República Portuguesa), na situação em que o dono está ausente ou pura e simplesmente não quer saber, não existe ou está morto sem herdeiros. é o proprietário que terá de accionar os meios para despejar os ocupantes e não a polícia. frequentemente, o próprio dono não quer saber e prefere ocupação por pessoas de bem a ocupação por agarrados.

durante a nossa ocupação do SPCC, por várias vezes tivemos visitas deste género. a primeira, normalmente a que vem fingir ilegalidade e intimidar, foi inicialmente feita por dois agentes da judiciária e vários PSPs. as perguntas que referi acima foram feitas aos ocupantes de forma a criar situações incriminatórias. de qualquer forma, julgo ser oportuno referir alguns princípios base para evitar situações de despejo ilegal.

1. portugal não é a alemanha ou a holanda onde a brutalidade policial contra ocupas é legalizada e os ocupas são terroristas profissionais. em portugal, é preciso esquecer os estereótipos do “ocupa e resiste” de outros países. é preciso entender a realidade legal portuguesa como especialmente tolerante nestas situações e, consequentemente, a ausência de poder por parte das autoridades;

2. em portugal a maioria dos polícias são mal pagos, trabalham demais, e vêm de uma classe baixa. isto quer dizer que o discurso de esquerda, unificador de consciência de classe é essencial para uma boa negociação com a polícia. gritar e chamar nomes e faltar ao respeito é completamente inútil. é importante encarar os agentes da autoridade (no fundo, trabalhadores precários como muitos de nós com a excepção de uns meses de lavagem cerebral) com respeito e tolerância. muitos deles são inexperientes, mal treinados ou pura e simplesmente inocentes nos juízos que fazem das situações. note-se que este princípio não vale para os “chefes”, que são basicamente autoritários (por definição) e faltam permanentemente ao respeito aos cidadãos (note-se que os chefes são classes baixas que “subiram” na vida, fazendo por pertencer mais às classes dominantes que às trabalhadoras);

3. é essencial manter a calma, não estar bêbado ou com uma moca do caralho. está claro que com uma granda moca é impossível negociar decentemente com a polícia. a polícia usa luzes bastante fortes para analisar a linguagem corporal dos ocupantes e verificar se estão com comportamento perigoso (por isso é que nos apontam sempre a luz à cara). tenham disciplina e fumem a ganzita quando estiver tudo calmo. não é ilegal fumar ganzas nem beber (nem oferecer copos aos agentes), portanto basta que tenham apenas para consumo próprio e não estarão a incorrer em nenhuma ilegalidade. mesmo que a polícia faça ameaças, basta que digam que têm para consumo próprio. o pior que vos pode acontecer é irem a um psicólogo pago pelo estado, o que até pode ser visto como uma coisa boa em alguns casos;

4. definir um porta voz que conheça as leis e os direitos e que saiba falar com calma e resistir aos insultos policiais. muita gente a falar e nervosa aumenta a probabilidade de alguém fazer merda. cuspir num polícia, chamar-lhe nomes, atirar-lhe pedras, qualquer uma dessas situações de desrespeito à autoridade é suficiente para levarem todos para a esquadra ou levar porrada. falar calmamente, tratar o agente com respeito e tolerância, referir o que se faz racionalmente é essencial para uma boa negociação. atenção que é preciso sempre manter a calma, porque a polícia irá constantemente referir ilegalidades, muitas vezes inexistentes, e ameaçar com prisão ou violência. basta que digam coisas do género “senhor agente, agradecia que não me faltasse ao respeito, sou um cidadão e pago os meus impostos” ou coisas do género. se não vos disseram boa noite, dizem vocês “boa noite, como está”. por estranho que pareça, a educação vale muito para estabelecer os termos da negociação;

5. permitir que os agentes entrem na propriedade. sei que a maior parte dos ocupas odeia esta ideia, mas eu tenho uma opinião diferente. se não têm agarrados nem estão a fazer molotvs e bombas, qual é que é o problema? os polícias são trabalhadores explorados como nós. sejam hospitaleiros, convidem as pessoas a entrar, expliquem o projecto de ocupação e as motivações. no SPCC um dos polícias que nos visitou até disse que acreditava na anarquia (sim, um polícia anarquista!). mostrem que estão a exercer a vossa cidadania e que estão apenas a reivindicar os vossos direitos constitucionais (ver Alínea d), Ponto 2, Artigo 65 da Constituição da República Portuguesa, ainda que o Artigo 65 seja todo a propósito), que estão na realidade a melhorar a vossa comunidade. a resistência pacífica (deixar entrar mas não sair) é muito mais poderosa do que levar com a brigada de intervenção a arrombar a porta com caçadeiras na mão;

6. mantenham sempre que a casa estava aberta, que não sabem de nada, que não têm onde viver, que o dono não vos contactou, e que não destruíram nada. podem tentar o bluff da autorização do dono, mas isto pode dar para o torto se a queixa em causa foi feita pelo próprio dono. não vale a pena armarem-se em rebeldes e dizerem “habitação é um direito” e abanar as bandeiras okupas. basta que sejam sinceros sobre a vossa situação: trabalho precário, desemprego, falta de oportunidades, problemas na família, são todas questões reais e que são muito mais importantes que justificar o penteado e as correntes;

7. só saiam quando o dono ou alguém à ordem dele vos mandar sair, de preferência com ordem de despejo. não é preciso virem os goes para bater em toda a gente. se querem que saiam e o fazem nos termos da lei, então peguem nas vossas coisas, saiam e ocupem um sítio novo. o que não falta é casas à espera de serem ocupadas.

em relação à escolha da casa em si, é ideal que se faça uma investigação do passado do imóvel. por exemplo, procurar o registo predial, pesquisar a morada online e obter contactos e depois fazer um “phreaking”, isto é, um hacking social. telefonar e pedir informações sobre o imóvel sem dar identificação, justificar com coisas como “é para uma reportagem” ou “sou fotógrafo”, ou até, dependendo da situação, explorar a actividade antiga do imóvel. e.g., no SPCC, era da firma “SPC”, então contactámos a firma directamente para saber o que se passava com o edifício.

também é util saber a actividade diária, mantendo vigília do local frequentemente antes da entrada. isto permite saber se há agarrados na área e se o proprietário visita frequentemente o imóvel.

mais uma vez, isto não é um filme, portugal não é um país violento, nem é preciso andar aí armado em terrorista do black block. habitação é um direito constitucional e os melhores ocupas que eu conheço são os velhos que vivem nas casas de guarda da cp, nas casas antigas das fábricas, etc. mas como não dizem que são okupas nem andam aí com t-shirts de anarquia, em vez de levarem porrada da polícia, dão-lhes comida e casa e apoio social. qual é a diferença? vale a pena ser extremista se somos permanentemente desalojados? a minha opinião é que não.

este é o aviso legal (pdf) que tínhamos no SPCC. podem copiá-lo à vontade e fazer as versões que quiserem. o site do SPCC está em baixo mas deve voltar em breve.

boas ocupações!

not just that mubarak just went on holiday to sinai (i maintain my expectations on the subject). apparently he just took off with the country’s fortune.

but that’s not the only thing that apparently is old stuff. i also learned that a lot of my work has already been done, from another angle, by the influence of neural darwinism. there are many parallels to what i have been building, with a major difference. i use a more mathematical and physical definition of how information is represented, whereas this formulation is more empirical, coming from medical science which uses different methods.

there is a strong parallel, especially towards subjectivity and how subjectivity emerges in connected networks. i recommend checking out this interview with edelman about this subject. there are many other models on neural networks, and what i’ve been writing isn’t very original beyond the fact that it has sociological outlines beyond the simple pattern recognition. anyway, i’m not planning on sending my work to sinai anyway, but it’s always good to know the existing ideas.

we’ve been having several discussions over at _42 about astrology, mayan astrology, blood type divination and so on. i thought i’d give my opinion on it. i’m going with astrology because i know a bit about it. it is also coinciding with the every-now-and-then wave of “astrology is bullshit” in the media, followed by an uproar of astrologers and other like minded mystics.

but i am not going to talk about how it is wrong, scientifically speaking. let’s be clear. there is no evidence backing astrology whatsoever. read this paper if you want to know more about it, or just google science blogs for it.

this is about a different thing. let’s forget the fact that we are dealing with something that isn’t “real”, in a scientific sense, i.e., there is no possible physical connection between the stars and our own fate. to quote carl sagan, the gravitational effect of mars is nowhere near as big as the effect of the doctor that conducts the birth. most forces in nature fall with r² anyway. but as i said before, we are not driven by fact alone. human beings have other, sometimes more important, ways of asserting truth and falsehood. i call them stories, but they are mostly a way of testing each individual’s cognitive bubble.

to an individual that believes astrology is true, it will be true, not because it is factually correct, but because in their own mind it is true. a falsehood it may be, but since this individual is not willing to question its beliefs, a side effect of confirmation bias and cherry picking, it will work to prove its own perception anyway, regardless of what is testable.

so that individual will conduct its life like as usual, but using astrology as a tool like every other, regardless of whether it is real or not. faith, superstition, are all part of this human tendency to be uncritical. but in practice, being critical is not only rare, it is even misunderstood.

so someone that believes they don’t get along with a leo will, once they know someone is a leo, feel an instinctive, irrational, preconceived notion about that individual. this is a seed for prejudice. prejudice on who they are, what they do, and sometimes, even on how they live and they love. but if the two individuals engaged in this interaction share the misconception, i.e., believe in astrology, they will also believe that there is something beyond them that unites them. in a way, it will promote togetherness more than it would in some other case. in this case, the prejudice is a positive one. like arranged marriages in india, if an astrological culture is ingrained enough, and the fact that individuals share a common (yet false) belief, allows for that belief to have measurable effects on reality. one of my favorites is when two people are attracted to each other, they will cherry pick compatibility points between their signs, and once their relationship gets into trouble, it gets blamed again on some cherry picked points on their chart. the job of the chart itself is neutral. it is an endless pool of nonsense to justify intolerance and self worth.

but this makes astrology real, in the sense that its effects are measurable, but not true, in the sense that it is not the cause of the effect. the cause of the effect is human subjectivity itself. so the effect of astrology is there, but astrology itself is meaningless in this process. it could be zodiac, but it could also be blood types (very popular in japan but not elsewhere), mayan astrology, or just race or hair color.

now, this is interesting and overlooked. critical thinkers will respond to astrology believers with facts, numbers, even by doing simple tests (like the one me and a guest did, by trying to guess each other’s sign, coming out worse than a coin toss). but the fact is that astrology itself, being a story, has little to do with facts. someone that has accepted it as true for years in their life will have tremendous difficulty accepting that it is false. so much, in fact, that realizing it is not true is not enough to change the opinion of the involved. this is smugged as ignorance by critical thinkers. but what are they offering in return? what is to replace years of study of the harmony of the stars and their relationships, how mars in taurus is so different from it being in gemini? how do we tell someone that believes they are on an earthly mission given by the celestial divine, mapped out in constellations and orbits, that in fact they are just another human being on a mote of dust?

this is why we fail. this is why i fail whenever i bring up the facts on some long held belief. i have nothing to replace it with. it reminds me of the native american (and chinese) proverb tell me and i will forget, show me and i will learn, involve me and i will understand. showing and telling are easy. this is what i do. and it might even seed doubt in faithful minds. but i can never inject my years of scientific inquiry, or my deep understanding of the marvels of nature. they would have to walk with me, all those years, to understand how astrology is bullshit and how the world is better without it.

but in doing so, they would become a copy of myself, and i couldn’t learn a single new thing from a cognitive clone. talking with like minded people is, essentially, talking to oneself, a covert narcissism. it is easy to out these things as rubbish. what is hard is to understand them, why they exist, why they are necessary, and, more importantly, what can we offer that is a good alternative to it. i called it exuberantism, but there are many ways. but the most important thing is not to dismiss false beliefs entirely, since your employer might some day fire you because of some coming quadrature on his business.

some silly happy folk this time, a “llaço” from the north east

we recently saw how information exists in several levels, and how we suspiciously translate the outside world in a structure similar to the structure of our own nerve cells. perhaps it’s time to clarify.

a thing that exists on itself, before others, can itself be made of things. if we consider these things properties, for an atom for example, we could see it as mass, or dive deeper and see a specific arrangement of subatomic particles, each with its own mass, with the global “mass” as an emergent property, and so on. this is zooming in. information itself can then be encoded in several ways. the simplest and most basic alphabet would be the one comprised of the most fundamental quanta and their laws. since laws are patterns of things, they would be only available to the layer above of the simple quanta.

if things are not randomly arranged, but in specific, less likely arrangements, information is higher. i don’t want to bring in many equations, but basically the more specific (or surprising) an arrangement of things is, the more information it carries.

so the first layer of information is the physical information. the information that exists for the simple fact that things are non-randomly arranged in space and time. this is the lowest level of information possible (unless, of course, we dive deeper into what time and space are, and then we could find a deeper one, which i wouldn’t mind considering obviously).

and as these arrangements become more and more complex, so do their coherent patterns. one information is the one that exists from location, and another is the one that exists through work. work “creates” information (we saw how this is possible a long time ago), but does so using available energy and rearranging “lower level” information. so we have another kind of information, the computational agent information, or the information to encode the activities done by the said arrangements on other arrangements. this can be deduced from the “lower level” information, but it is very hard to do so. like explaining how a protein will fold based on its components, for now, our mathematics can’t model this properly, so they become abstracted for simplification. it’s not hard to imagine, though, that some alien culture has no such issues for having more advanced minds and science.

so information exists as part of things, and then on how things interact. this would be the case of DNA + Cells. they are information creating machines. they create arrangements of things, being things themselves. this is the second layer of information. not DNA, DNA is the first layer. the machinery is the second layer. but these machinery-like processes exist in simpler forms, like when gravity and magma interact creating different crystallizations, in fact synthesizing new shapes (or new information). in one case, we call the machinery “life”, in the other, we call “law of nature”. in both, information is synthesized. and both can be encoded as “transformation machines” that take information and create more information.

the same thing happens with the neuron. it has a coherent “work” function (that in fact consumes calories), which can be seen as a function that applies to a set of conditions {a,b,c,…} giving a “yes” or “no” answer, the name. when a connection is active, it becomes stronger, when a connection is useless, it tends to be discarded. like evolution, we have a system where neuron classifications evolve through death and selection. but what is making this selection?

this is where objectivity and subjectivity begin to split. so far, all our systems were objective (plus or minus scientific uncertainty). but once we have a system that classifies and creates names, what assures us that the “name” in one neuron is the “name” in another neuron? let’s not confuse these names with human names, human names will come later.

the way to know if name a and name b are the same is to see if the function that generates the names is the same, i.e., by reverse engineering the neuronal function. how can we do this?

consider the set of conditions {a, b, c} for neuron 1, and conditions {d, e, f} for neuron 2. they will represent the same information when (a and b and c) = (d and e and f). we have no way of separating the components of a name unless we have access to separate {a,b,c,d,e,f}. this is the case with black box minds like animal minds. we have no way of “tingling” every connection at a time on each subject.

so let’s see an example on how we can have equal classifications with different conditions, i.e., subjectivity. this is the case for a rudimentary classification system. as i said, i postulate that a lot of our way of thinking comes from essential characteristics of the building blocks of minds.

let’s say the “yellow t-shirt” pattern has been seen by both neurons in different situations. they both have a “yes” reply when they see a yellow t-shirt. so we can say, from the outside, that they both classify “yellow t-shirts” correctly. but how can we know they “know” the same yellow t-shirt or not? or, better put, how can we know they accurately contain the information for a t-shirt? my opinion is that we can’t. structurally, just having a valid classification might not imply valid inputs. let’s see it in practice in the above example.

neuron 1 takes {a and b and c} as inputs. when analyzed, we learned that {a} is triggered on the color yellow, {b} is triggered on the t shape and {c} is triggered on the sight of clothes. if we only had a posteriori knowledge, we could understand a t-shirt by looking up what {a}, {b} and {c} were, and in this case, end up with a working definition: “something that you can wear that is yellow and has a t-shape”. rather crude, but for a full definition we needed no more than one neuron and 3 inputs.

but what would happen if for neuron 2, their conditions were false, but out of coincidence, always true for the same situations as the classifier above? for example {d and e and f} could be {d} is a human standing, {e} is a yellow blob over the human, {f} the human is not cold.

for the overwhelming amount of the cases, the answers of both the classifiers are correct, because in every way they answer “yellow t-shirt” correctly. but if we were to break down neuron 2, we would be surprised. a “t-shirt” is a “warm human with a yellow blob”. hardly a definition of a t-shirt. but unless we had a human painted yellow and tested both neurons or had taken them to a store, we would never encounter the situation in which a contradiction occurs, and therefore, would accept the word “yellow t-shirt” as true, even though each one had different “definitions” of what it is. and it would allow us to operate with both until a contradiction, or conflict, would occur. if we never encounter it, we would never see it and expose the flaws in one of the classifiers. this would allow two classifiers to coexist with incoherent definitions of the same thing, but functionally equivalent, i.e., since they agree on the “name”, there is no feedback loop to check that {a,b,c} = {d,e,f}. this is subjectivity. we have two machines that accept a concept (the name) even though they have different definitions of them.

it might not be very clear by now how were these classifications constructed. in a perfect world, we would always have {a,b,c} = {d,e,f}. again, through educated speculation, allow me to provide another learning algorithm. to map the function {a,b,c}=name, we need some kind of feedback that says “ok” or “not ok” to a definition, i.e., something that connects the name “t-shirt” to a neuron that just fired. this, obviously, is somewhat tricky, but let’s reward the cell with chemicals instead. we feed it {a,b,c} for a t-shirt and it fires, we keep it. we feed it {a,b,c} for a t-shirt and it doesn’t fire, we don’t. it is easy to imagine the “t-shirt organism” as a simple one which has a sensory side (3 sensors for the features described), the classifier, and an utterer (says “t-shirt” whenever it sees one). and then, we define the evolutionary fitness of this concept as “when t-shirt is correctly classified, the organism survives, otherwise, dies”. over time, we can guarantee that the organism will classify the t-shirt correctly. how does it know it is correct? because our evolutionary law, which in our case is reality, is there to feed back correct and incorrect classifications.

for example, let’s say i classify a predator incorrectly. i’m dead. but if i do so correctly, i’m not. and, again, my definition of predator comes straight from my sensory input. the very symbols used are exactly the symbols that my sensory system can provide. not only they are subjective as we saw above, they are biased by their own physical constituents.

we have seen how we can demonstrate subjectivity objectively in small organisms. i will slowly approach human minds. but to recap the information levels, we have the information of things, the information of things acting on things, and now, the information of things acting on themselves. this last one is the role played by evolution (when it is “mindless”) or the role of a trainer when we deal with some kind of classifier.

whenever we feed back the “classification” to the organism as “correct” or “incorrect”, we have a new kind of information system, one that can “recode” itself, i.e., the work done is no longer just a consequence of its physical properties, but also a consequence of its own work on itself. i would consider all intelligent systems that exist today, animals, humans, etc, as part of this latter category, thanks to evolution. our machines themselves are, again, mindless algorithms tuned by another thing, us. we provide the “fitness” of machines, technology and algorithms, just like evolution did for us as animals. the principle is the same.

i hope to implement this algorithm properly and provide actual classification data for validity. even though this is more of a philosophical text, what i postulated is testable. i predict that a system composed of a classifier with n inputs and one output and a feedback loop through an environment defining fitness will, after training, provide information about the pattern it was trained to detect, but this information might or might not agree with other classifiers, hence an objective proof for subjectivity.

this is visible in neural networks as different local minimums for the cost function. in this case, i don’t have a good formulation yet for this problem, but i imagine it will end up being similar, if not equivalent, to a regular neural network.

i will move on to bigger minds, brains, and so on soon, standing on this idea that information exists as structural connections in the conditions for a name, and that they can be different in different individuals. if a neuron is already subjective, how can realities agree? this is the challenge for our following posts.

some turkish pipes, i thought it was appropriate

with the ongoing riots throughout the arab world, like yemen or egypt, and an ongoing revolution in tunisia, some of our terms might not apply. when arab nations are better at citizenship, communist nations better at capitalism, and capitalist nations better at oligarchy and feudalism, we can’t use old words that easily, nor our old stereotypes.

so the real free media can now be found in the colonies and the arab world, places where the supposed autocrats wouldn’t let it exist. hell, even wikileaks is led by an australian. and wikileaks was instrumental in these revolutions, as was social media.

these countries remind us of how it is like to rebel, like most european countries (and the us) did, a long time ago. what i am skeptical about is what will be implemented. will these countries use liberal democracy? i would expect liberal democracy as the choice for government, after all people just want new shiny things, unblocked facebook and iphones. if they do, then it’s just a matter of a couple of years until they become part of the oligarchy’s peasants. if, on the contrary, they choose a left wing democracy like what is happening in south america, then maybe, just maybe, it could work and transform the way the world works. let’s see how the new bribes that will come work with the new governments.

so far, the places that have resisted the bribes have done so on nationalist superiority, native pride, and, to some extent, racism (see china). the ones that, on the other hand, chose to join the “global economy” carelessly, became just another peasant on the oligarch’s land.

like the roman empire, that transformed into the catholic church to survive (the pope is the pontifex maximus, which was the title for the roman emperors), the authoritarian regimes are transforming too. the ruler portrait on every home and store is dated now. it is being replaced slowly, and the countries that still live it, like tunisia or egypt, are overthrowing it.

but this is a necessary transition to maintain power. we no longer have a portrait of our ruler in our homes in europe. but we have the jeans, the computers, the music and the stereotypes anyway.

so like the roman empire changed its domain from force to religion, the oligarchy is changing its power from political rule to economic rule. religion is no longer necessary. politics is no longer necessary. consumerism is the new opiate of the masses. so little has changed in essence. as usual, something has to change so everything stays the same.

but i do love these moments where naive citizens fight back, and still wish for a day when their desire is not for democracy, but for something entirely new and unheard of. but where are the other voices? who ever thought a liberal demoracy would become the best thing a liberated people would strive for? where are the new voices for different ways of organizing society?