today, something completely different. the clip has bagpipes anyway so i didn’t break any chain (background song in the end is bagpipes in the bunker).

this is Nico’s tribute to SPCC. he stayed there for 10 days and filmed amazing footage. so he generously decided to make a short documentary about the place. all i have to say is that it is an amazing tribute to what went there. make sure you send him praise through vimeo or other networks.

for anyone who followed the “SPCC saga”, here’s a good picture of the good side of things, of how amazing it all was when we weren’t getting on with our mundane issues. how we made our dreams come true every day with nothing more than will power.

an old clip, mind your ears if you have perfect “western pitch”

as we’ve been seeing in previous posts, there is a seemingly fractal quality to things. we’ve seen how wholes become more than parts and we’ve slowly crept up the complexity ladder all the way to cells. i’ll go from cells today because they are a key part in understanding all of this.

the first agents that did work were the laws of physics that are responsible for our first structural increase (or gain in information). we went from scattered disorganized particles to big blobs of complex arrangements of particles from forces alone.

and as gravity tug everything together, and as the sun fed enough energy, we managed to get new agents, this time, molecules that themselves can exert effects on other molecules, making them agents.

and as molecules became more and more complex, so did their tasks, such as the ribosome that assembles coded proteins.

but today we focus on a particular kind of cell, the neuron. i will be approaching a simplified model of the neuron. i studied a few models, neural networks and so on, but i am going to provide a different model for the neuron, completely arbitrary an according to whatever i think is correct. pure speculation.

a neuron is a cell that performs a computation described by the following:

there are many other ways. and in fact, neural networks use a different model that yields a more elegant mathematical formula. the reason i choose this one is that i believe (but can’t really prove) that each above is not a weight, but actually a condition (true or false). i didn’t use thresholds or step functions to model the “firing” either. what i am saying, instead, is that this cell, the neuron, checks if a number of conditions is present, and if so, fires. this is similar to the formulation for neural networks, and i suspect they are almost equivalent. but my focus in choosing a logic formulation instead of a functional mathematical one is to make the following more obvious.

a neuron connects its conditional tendrils to whatever is around it. these can change over time, grow stronger or weaker depending on usage. and then, it has a very long response tail, that spreads this message through thousands of other neurons. i’m not discussing this in depth, and i’m sure there are many inaccuracies here, but for the sake of my point i’m willing to accept some rough edges.

so what the neuron does is to take a group of parts (let’s call them things of layer n) and tests if it is a whole (let’s call them things of layer n+1). so a neuron, being forward only, is an analysis machine, or categorizer. feed it black and white pictures, and a white neuron will fire on the white sections, whereas the black neuron will fire on the black sections. note that “black” and “white” are mere concepts, and since our brain is concept agnostic, meaning, all senses are translated to electrical impulses, these neurons, even though being naturally designed to be sensory processors, might eventually connect to each other, and since they can’t distinguish outside electricity from inside electricity, they would be just as likely to find fictional parts in a brain and in a sensory nerve. as long as there is tingling, there is a possibility of classification. this is why we are bound to find the “brad pitt neuron” (google it, it’s real), the “tangerine dream” neuron, the “smell of mom’s cooking” neuron and so on. that’s what they do.

in my opinion, the very structure of a neuron presents abstraction, since it can categorize correctly different patterns into a single “yes” “no” pulse. let’s call that pulse a word, and use words to go through a computation in a sequence of neurons. let’s say we want to know if something is “checkered”. we will have a layer of neurons that categorize colors into black and white, then we will have a layer of neurons testing if “black” and “white” are alternating in sequence (by using the categories of previous neurons as inputs), and let’s say a neuron that evaluates spatial arrangement and sees if two dimensionally something is checkered (by using the responses of the alternating neurons and aggregating them).

what we have here is a progression in abstraction, from parts to whole. let’s see it in detail in one dimension (look up visual region neurons very interesting and similar stuff).

1. input (k is black, w is white): kwkwkw

2. color neurons:

• if(k) fire black; if(w) fire white;
• turning it into: black white black white black white

3. transition neurons:

• if(black next to white) fire black white; if(white next to black) fire white black;
• turning it into: black-white white-black black-white white-black black-white

4. checkered neuron:

• if(black-white next to white-black) fire checkered
• turning it into: checkered

what we just saw, and this has been demonstrated scientifically analyzing the visual networks of our brain, is abstraction. abstraction is not something that only big brains do. it’s something that any small neuron does. it is essential to identify the patterns we’ve been describing. neurons are a natural consequence of a “layered” universe. if parts and wholes behave differently (i.e., the wholes have properties unpredictable from the parts alone), then it is only logical that some structure would evolve that demonstrates that hierarchical view.

my model, that things are made of things, is the exact model of what i am saying a neuron is good at categorizing and processing. it takes a series of parts (things), independent of whether they are real (sensory) or fictional (internally generated) and classifies them firing the appropriate concept.

i could say my model is a description of how the brain works and how reality works and how i know the meaning of life the universe and everything. isn’t this suspicious? isn’t it the other way around? isn’t my model a consequence of how the brain works?

let’s look at this wheel. i call it the concept ouroboros. i added only a few topics for clarity.

every human activity starts with a core part, the simplest concept that is recognizable and analyzed, and then abstracts and elaborates on it. since logic is the building block of math, it is taken for granted as an encapsulated thing. physics then uses math as its thing, then chemistry uses physics, then biology uses chemistry and so on. but if we go the other way around, by analyzing what things are made of (seeing what a thing is made of), we would see that math is made of logic, which is made of philosophy, which is made of societies, which is made of humans, which are made of organs and so on.

there is no higher and lower in my perspective. it is an orouboros, eating its own tail. any study or human abstraction claiming to be the “essential” one will be ignoring that its basically just feeding on other things and eating its own tail.

why would this be?

imagine now that this ouroborus is not vertical, but you lay it down on a table. all these points on the circle are instances of the same logic of reasoning: the reasoning of parts and wholes, and laws thereof. which is suspiciously similar to what neurons do. so either this is a coincidence, or we, humans, have mostly become very good at creating an ever expanding ouroborus in the same plane. we can grow our abstraction as deep and wide as we want to. what i see here is a permanent limitation of our own cognition. if we are conscious thanks to our neurons (our parts for thinking), then is it too much to say that the whole might share some properties with the parts? like the charges affecting both atoms and molecules?

what i am saying is that it is that our perspective on reality is more subjective than we like to think. that even accepted concepts such as molecules, atoms and so on, are part of our own categorizing system, and nature is well beyond that.

am i saying all i’ve been writing is nonsense? well, yes and no. i wrote it purposefully to demonstrate its own fragility. i made it generic enough so that it would be acceptable in many fields. and then i showed how this was exactly what our brain was doing, naturally.

so now that i closed a loop and broke the logic of my previous posts, let’s continue. i will continue as if nothing happened, because, unfortunately, i don’t know how we can step out of the ouroborus conceptual world. i do not know what it is to think beyond this plane. but it is a good question that might return in the future. for now, i am going back to our ouroborus plane, and circling around as usual.

as we saw, a neuron is a mapping between parts and whole. since that whole doesn’t seem to exist except in that neuron that fires, i will refer to that firing as a word that is stored in that neural structure. so our brains are a mess of connected words, concepts, connected to each other in hierarchies, and connecting from and to the real (sensory) and the virtual (other neurons).

this means that the brain has physical information. not the information in its genes, not the information in its molecules. the information it its specific sequence of conditions that yield a word. how can we convert a neuron into a word? we have to crack its code. a checkered neuron reads (black-white white-black (…)), so if we only knew the answer (checkered), we would have to find the inverse function that the neuron does. in this case, “checkered” would translate into “black-white white-black (…)”.

contrary to the direct operation, where several conditions yield one result, knowing a word and finding out all conditions that create it is hard, if not impossible. a regular neuron has thousands of conditions for a single word. that means each word can expand into thousands of others. this is going from the whole to the part.

let’s summarize. a neuron takes parts and creates a whole, the word. the inverse, takes a word, a whole, and finds which parts exist, expanding it. this is, respectively, the act of analysis and synthesis.

so the foundation of thinking is actually present in the simplest structures of the brain. in fact, since cortex bearing creatures like us can actually generate words that replace sensory input (i.e., we can feedback words back into the first categorizers, like when we lucid dream a new perception), we are dealing with a universal computer.

i will leave more of this for later, since for now it was a lot to deal with. we are closer than ever to minds, and to demonstrate how the objective creates the subjective, even though we slightly hinted at it.

i’m slightly concerned about the slow erosion of interest in wikileaks. the us have now asked for the personal information of all twitter followers of the wikileaks account, including a member of the icelandic parliament. even though twitter refused, this is a new, and even more concerning, perspective. not only the people publishing are being prosecuted, even though they are protected by international an national laws, but even people that read the said documents are now in danger of being put in threat lists, no fly lists, interrogation lists, etc. so not only publishing is a crime, but reading is too.

but what concerns me is not that a state is using every possible way to maintain control over its citizens and neutralize every threat to the status quo. that’s very common historically. i could go back only 40 years in the history of my country to see it play exactly the same way. maybe the us were just a bit naive, thinking a state could ever be different that every other tried in human societies. their rebellion from europe is nowhere to be seen anymore even though other countries still see it as a land of freedom. the power structures are the same, and so are the vices, including their own separatist terrorist groups, popularized recently by yet another shooting. this is, just like most european countries, just another sad truth about democracy that people continue to ignore.

what is worrying is that nothing happens. nobody is being prosecuted for the crimes published, nobody has stood up for the defense of the publishers, and especially, no state has intervened to stop the sweden/us love affair that is going on, or the fact that sweden is deliberately denying rights to someone so that the us can prosecute them. or that the us have kept a citizen under solitary confinement for 6 months without trial (also illegal according to international law).

i expected it, and as i see it unfold, it is almost too surreal. business as usual. we have crossed the bounds of legality and proven there is no such thing. laws are made to starve the hungry and feed the elites. if freedom of speech exists, it exists only to allow those in power to say the most obscene, down right horrible things, and to leave those that question them and seek the truth helpless in their own demise. it is not a crime for a president to decree a genocide but it is a crime for a citizen to denounce it.

how could we fix it? how could we pretend to want to live in such a world? how could we possibly believe that living in such a system would allow us to change it from the inside? it is a joke. fighting for a better society through standard politics and law is a joke. all judges are bought by money, influence or even just blood ties. all power remains in the hands of the few.

there is no future in the society we’ve constructed. i’ve been saying this for too long. we can do better. our failure as “good people” is to try to change a “bad system”. let it be bad and let it go on in a downwards spiral until it self destructs. let’s focus on building something independent and good. a place where law is for the common good, where power is for the best decision, a place where fame and power is not a goal but a consequence of ones devotion to a cause.

it isn’t hard to build these places. we’ve done a few so far with nothing more than our will power and bare hands. but it takes everyone to stop allowing this to happen. and i’m not naive to think it will.

the most oppressed are the ones that are the most essential to society. but when a farmer sells his food, or i sell my work, i do not care who it is sold to. this leads to an unfair advantage on the ruling class side. they have more money, they will always guarantee their own survival, because money doesn’t show the blood stains it costs.

so what would happen if a farmer was to refuse selling to rich? what would happen if i was to refuse to code immoral apps? what would happen if we decided not to be hypocrites for survival? a sure social collapse. but we can’t. we can’t because we are too afraid we’ll lose what we have. and yes, one could argue we can strive to have nothing. but almost no one is capable of that anymore. i know i’m just as guilty.

one could argue we must change everyone’s life. i don’t. i’m tired of this nonsense of everyone trying to force everyone else into being part of some kind of utopian political system, just because they were brought up or read that that would be a perfect society. no. this is exactly what is wrong. that we don’t leave each other alone. we don’t let differences be differences, we don’t let people be people. what unites us as humans is the fact that we can’t agree on anything. from the color of our shirts to the music we should hear, all the way to the food we eat and the people we love.

we force everyone into being part of a big mess called a globalized society. we use all tools possible. markets, politics, laws, bills of rights, music. everything because we want to spread our own personal “we them” mentality, our own narrow minded view of a problem and our specific solution that is inapplicable to other societies.

the problem is that we want to fix what is none of our business. that we want to have what isn’t ours. that we want more of what we don’t need.

like an old troubadour from the countryside used to say, playing his junkyard guitar made of a petrol tank, the only problem is that everyone wants to live without doing any work.

it would be easy to “steer” this behemoth away. all our upperclass activists would remain in their bubbles, no loss, all gain. but that’s exactly what sinks the ship. the fact that the ship itself is poorly designed. you can steer it in any direction, it will still sink.

we are seeing an erosion of all the rights fought for in the past century, and a slow return to feudalism, this time as a capitalist oligarchy. and all activism seems focused on specifics, instead of referring to the big elephant in the room. has it gotten so big that people don’t know there are other ways to live?

why aren’t we building cities with our bare hands like our ancestors, and making them resilient enough to be an example? why are we all trying to be neutral, when neutrality is systematically instrumentalized by our rulers and employers?

we need city states again, resilient so that nobody starves while refusing to sell to the highest bidder. we must learn to refuse business. to refuse selling our work forgetting about morals, selling our research for grant money, selling our crops for blood money.

i’m not naive. i know it is not going to happen. that’s why we started the places we started, and that’s why i won’t stop. i have seen a better world in the communities we lived in. they don’t scale up, but they can be independently applied.

i’ll be continuing this topic when we unravel the series on things. for now, just a silly bagpipe with a king’s head on it, i found it appropriate.

magyar duda this time

i’ve been growing increasingly frustrated with activism in general. maybe a seed was planted in our previous project, but more and more we are seing a pattern in our “activist” guests, so here is a small note on that.

our guests claiming to be:

• human rights/political activists were just looking for a way to be arrogant towards everyone around them
• genderqueer, feminists and what not, were actually just looking for an excuse to be arrogant towards men
• anarchists were actually just looking for a way to impose their point of view over everyone else
• open minded and tolerant turned out to be the most arrogant and self obsessed
• squatters were actually just looking for a way to justify the luxurious way they lived in at home and to show up on tv during eviction
• chefs actually were just looking for a way to never do dishes
• vegetarians and vegans actually were just looking for an excuse not to eat other people’s food

our guests not claiming to be any of this, did the exact opposite:

• republicans, conservative, even shallow, turned out to be extraordinarily polite, tolerant and giving
• capitalists, economics and business majors turned out to be better at reciprocity than all the non profit supporting activists i met
• normal people turned out to be the best at helping, caring and listening
• homeless people turned out to be the best squatters i ever met, squatting places for decades

so what is going on? are we natural born hypocrites and liars?

what i think is going on is that people in the west confuse the superficial aspects with the essential aspects.

this is very obvious in an episode we had at the squat. frequently we would have young teenage punks, dressed in rigor, hanging out. one of the times, we were building a solar panel and one of the guys went down to call the kids. only one came but quickly left and the rest stayed playing cards downstairs, making time until they could get their parents’ lift to go home and post on facebook “just had a wonderful afternoon at the squat”.

what we have here is a confusion between what it is to be “X”. is it wearing the clothes, reading the books and knowing the spiel, or being something that is categorized later?

at work i had a similar case. we do a lot of logistics apps. in fact, we do amazing logistics apps, that allow you to control everything you can imagine, optimize all processes, etc. we had several customers, but here are two distinct cases, lets call them company A and company B.

company A had a problem with theft and a problem with optimizing routes. so they went on and bough many different tools to track everything that the drivers did. stopping, eating, all the way to all doors open, weight changes and so on. in fact, the system was so elaborate, one could reverse engineer all the steps of a task, with such an amazing detail it could be enough to charge someone and/or fire them. so it worked. the problems were solved by spending a lot of money and treating all the symptoms.

company B had a different approach. their accuracy was top line and they had no thefts at all. the manager, in confidence, told me one day: “you know, we don’t have thefts because we provide good job stability, good benefits and treat our employees well. they don’t steal because they are proud of what they do.”. their answer to the millions spent in software packages to optimize routes and deliveries was simple. they had a white board and a highly paid, highly specialized worker.

what is the difference between A and B? in practice, none. they both would be industry leaders. but the way they fixed the problems is radically different. one (A) is treating the symptoms. the other (B) is treating the cause.

more and more i find that we westerners tend to confuse one with the other. we think that by shouting and wearing an anarchist shirt we will become anarchists, when in fact what we are doing is replacing essence with superficiality.

in this video, a somewhat unscientific approach compares west and east. in fact, what we are seeing, is the essence perspective versus the superficial perspective. westerners don’t care if a cylinder is wood or plastic, even though the two materials are dramatically different. easterners, on the other hand, tended to choose substance, which is the strongest common thing between the objects.

to understand deeply what these things are about is essential for distinguishing flair from essence, and in my opinion, what is leading the west into a downwards spiral of unnecessary complexity.

today, i code apps that run in a browser that runs in an operating system that runs in a computer. back in the day, it used to be coding apps that run in a computer. and i expect, again, since we are depth blind in the west, to see this become deeper and deeper. more and more layers of abstraction, to the point that it is completely unintelligible whether we are dealing with a fact of flair.

and when these systems become so complex they can’t be grasped by a single mind, there will be no one that can analyze them properly, and surely they will collapse under their own cognitive weight. not because they are necessarily complex, but because they were unnecessarily built to be complex. this is the essence of business, and this is why i keep my day job. we have made computing into a behemoth that only experts can do. and this is just my tiny slice. many other areas are suffering the same illness. so i’ll end with an interesting question i heard in comparing western and eastern philosophy. if you want to know about pots, who do you consult with? the geologist or the potter? or, more appropriately, if you want to know about bagpipes, who do you consult with? the ethnographer or the bagpipe maker?

some mezoued from tunisia this time. its short range leads to a more rhythmic style of playing. i’d argue these pipes are somewhere between more melodic and more rhythmic instruments.

summarizing, first we saw how thermodynamics and information theory are similar, and how the latter is more abstract, applicable to both elementary particles, letters and numbers. by mixing the two, we have a quantitative metric for arrangements of things. then we defined things using a fractal equation. then, from the ground up, we visited the first realms of knowledge. today we continue our journey.

as molecules grow and interact, they develop strange shapes, this is, they become spatially arranged. like the water molecule, proteins for example are nothing more than very big molecules, exhibiting strange shapes. as molecules become bigger, their interactions become more complex. an example of this is a catalyst. we can see it as a special harbor of sorts. imagine you are learning to sail. you can try it in a big open ocean, plagued by storms, or you can try it in a safe harbor where the waves are not too high. a catalyst is a molecule that, for its simple properties, facilitates the reaction of other molecules.

let’s think about it for a second. different molecules can interact with each other, and their own properties (in this case spatial) can affect other molecules profoundly. note that a catalyst exists anyway, independent of whether it will ever affect other molecules or not. but for the other molecules the difference can be dramatic.

for example, though not very scientifically correct, would be using anti freeze in your car’s radiator. the anti freeze itself is just a molecule that does very little alone. but if mixed with water, it will lower its freezing temperature. this can be very important if you are trying to get to work and your car is frozen. so a tiny molecule sometimes can make a big difference.

one of these cases is life. it might be arguable whether certain moving molecules are “alive”, but as soon as molecules get big enough, they start doing work. the same work we talked about before, the one we can measure. an example of this work would be the work of the contents of a cell to assemble molecules. these are just like tiny robots. if a molecule can do work, and another can use the work to create other molecules, we can have molecular evolution.

i won’t try to explain how this works, i’m sure many experts would be better at it. but one thing i can say is that as information increases, so do these unintended consequences. the bigger and more arranged a molecule is, the more likely it can do work on others for example. so after many many years of molecular evolution, a good set of working producing molecules got together in things we call cells, . cells themselves are a multitude to explore, but what i am interested in is how to save and retrieve them, or, how to quantify them in terms of information.

it is common to say DNA (one of the in cells) is the script for life. i disagree. as the analogies i used before, it is not enough to store the alphabet, it is necessary to store the agents that can work with it (like the painter and the painting, or kolmogorov complexity). this would be a contribution of computer scientists that is overlooked. just read this interview of richard stallman (founder of the GNU free software movement), and how profound it is (search for quaternary).

DNA is a quaternary program that runs on a cell computer. to accurately describe a cell system, we need all the information of the DNA, but also the information of the computer it runs on. all the proteins, all the structure, all the constraints. DNA might be a key, but alone it is worthless.

so we have a new layer of agents. we have the laws that govern things both in groups and alone (laws), and we now have things that can do work independently. the why is easy, it is part of their properties, these small machines are just like elaborate catalysts, mindless automatons. but they function as new laws for bigger systems.

but more essential to them is the fact that their activity adds to the structure of their surrounding world. like the boy picking up pebbles to draw a circle, these molecules take in simpler forms of matter and energy and convert them in more arranged forms thereof. information must include not only the “actg” letters, but also all the machinery required. so to quantify a cell, we would have to quantify everything.

how much information are we talking about? i am leaving quantification for later. but if we survey all the constituents of a cell, which themselves are thousands, and if we compute how unlikely it is that they are all together versus apart, we can quickly realize that the information stored there is no short than a universally big number. note that physical information is not computing the “actg” unique sequence in bits, that is computational ignorance. that is not physical information, that is information we perceive as high level, us being humans. the real information includes all constituents and their structure. the names, as we’ll see soon, are a human illusion.

already we begin to see tiny minds at work. the molecules that move molecules around, following some anti-entropic imperative. that ensemble then, using the same rules, clusters itself in groups, becoming what we call organisms: . some of these will be specified, where large groups of similar cells can be called organs, systems, and so on. all these abstractions, as we’ve been saying, are just encapsulating names for things, since things themselves require no layers whatsoever.

so we continued our journey into the realms of the biochemist and now the biologist. to biologists, evolution and replication is about organisms. to a biochemist, it might be just about replication of certain molecules. either way, they are expressions of how entropy can locally be reversed, and slowly, we build up our complexity. soon, we will come full circle.