We Don't Need to Worry About Skynet Any Time Soon

Disclaimer: This is a rant, the only sources are personal anecdotes and it should be considered as food for thought and nothing else. Ranting in the comments section is welcome!

I read an article in Swedish magazine Axess the other day. In it they had interviewed a man named Ulf Danielsson, professor in theoretical physics (ie a lot of difficult maths) at the Uppsala University in Uppsala, Sweden. They discuss the dawn of AI and whether it is even possible for a program to gain consciousness. Ulf does not think so, in fact he says he doesn't believe in the duality of the body at all - the idea that we have some sort of "soul", "essence" or "consciousness" that can be spoken about as separate or even separable from the body. According to him the body is the consciousness. You don't have a body, you are the body.

I thought it was a very interesting line of reasoning that of course would have huge ramifications for science fiction. I also find it very plausible that he is correct. I don't believe in a duality either, I don't think there is something inside us that makes us "us" that isn't deeply connected and entrenched with what is also our body. Imagine all those body swap movies/animes/sci-fi books? Imagine all the fiction about downloading your consciousness into a computer or saving your brain in a jar? Would it ever be possible?

I think, therefore I am. But what am I?

If you really think about it, it seems like a daunting task. We already know that our mood, behaviour, feelings and thus everything we are come down to things like neurotransmitters. Without being an expert on anatomy, the neurotransmitters themselves are in turn affected by bodily functions that would have to be replicated as well. Could we build a machine that could successfully not only translate the function of these neurotransmitters into 1s and 0s but also make them function with a conscious mind the way they do in the brain and the body?

Even if we could, we now know that there seem to be other body parts than the brain itself that has a big impact on our personality. Lately it's become a bigger and bigger field of research to find out how our gut and the microbiome that lives in there affects everything from what we like to eat to how we feel and even think about things. While we know very little about these things yet, we can probably safely draw the conclusion that a brain without a stomach or any other microbiome would act differently to what we're used to (we're in fact more microbiome than human!). Of course we don't know how yet. And we also don't know if this extends to other body parts. How much will we ever really know about how our muscles, blood, lungs etc affect our personalities, our capability to form thoughts and what those thoughts are?

Even if I could picture us being able to take a snapshot of an active brain the way it is at any given moment, it seems like one big leap to go from that to being to progress it forward in a natural way. So I could basically have a mental image of my consciousness as it was at some date in time, but getting that to be active on its own, to be able to react to the surrounding to form new feelings, memories and thoughts?

I think what I am trying to say is that if we ever want to create an AI that could call itself conscious we would first of course have to know every intricate detail about what makes a human conscious (and call me a pessimist but I never think we will). And then we need to successfully translate that into a program that can not only run all that data in the way it needs to but also be able to react to the outside world the way it needs to. It can not be separated from input, and that input has to be a lot more than just audibly and visually.

Asimov's Robot-series is also very good.

In a way this then becomes similar to the discussion about whether we would ever be able to reliable predict the future. I know at least one really interesting sci-fi series has been written about this subject, I am of course talking about Isaac Asimovs "Foundation"-series. I believe it is theoretically possibly to have so much data about everything going on that you could predict how something, by law of nature, is going to go down (although the Foundation series is about the laws of society, but the core concept is the same. You need a lot of data). But practically it will never be possible for us to calculate all the variables. The same will be true when it comes to creating an AI.

We will probably be able to create programs that are clever enough to outsmart humans in different areas, even intricate conversations like the Turing test (didn't they already do that by the way?). But create a self-conscious robot/computer like in the books and movies? No, I don't think so.

The 12 Intelligences of WoW

I read a really interesting article in the New Scientist Magazine the other day about the 12 intelligences that they measure in modern IQ-tests. IQ-tests have been under much scorn and critique, and with all right. The question has long been - what does an IQ test measure anyway, and does a high score on it really mean that you're smart in areas that matter? When IQ-tests first were put into practice in the early 20th century many of the flaws about IQ-tests were that they were culture-bound. Also you had to be able to read and write to be able to take them at all (which still most often is the case). Question could often center around things that might be obvious to people in one culture but not in another. Even the way we see objects are affected by culture, so creating an IQ-tests that measures IQ (whatever that may be) un-objectively is really difficult. But people have been trying nonetheless for more than 100 years. And the 12 intellegences is the latest attempt to describe a number of brain functions that are important in our day-to-day life and that by excelling in you will be "smarter" than others. You'll be able to complete tasks better and faster than others.

But this isn't a post on whether IQ can be measured, whether it is important or if it even exists. It is more of an exploring post. Taken that these 12 intelligences are true, in what way do we get to use them in our everyday WoW-gaming experiences? I'll present the different intellgences, what they mean and how we use them outside a gaming experience, and then go on to explore if it is something we also use when gaming.

1. Visuo-Spatial Memory
Visuo-Spatial Memory, or VSM, is what we use when we are imagining things or process spatial information. Any time you have to think about something you don't directly see you use your VSM. VSM is "simply" any images you have stored in your brain.

This is used in anything and everything we do, just as much outside WoW as in it. Anytime you want to remember how a specific piece of gear looks or how far it is between the auction house and the mail box in some city you have to use your VSM.

2. Spatial Work-Memory
Spatial Work-Memory, or SWM, is what we use when we are trying to remember how to get from point A to point B. Everytime you walk from your home to a friend, to town, to work/school you have to use your VSM, load that information into your SWM and come up with the best route. Cues in your surrounding can give you pointers on where you have to head next to get to your goal as fast as possible. Also whenever we close our eyes and try to remember where something in the room is we are using our SWM. It's like step 2 of VSM. When using mental maps you are using your SWM.

This is something we use in WoW all the time. Any 3d-game requires that you can orient yourself in the surroundings just like you would outside the game. One can imagine that we get few better opportunities to practice this skill than by playing such a huge game like WoW. Still after 5 years there are times when I have to pause and think to remember the best way to go from Darnassus to Southshore. And I still haven't found a good way to get from Ironforge to Menethil Harbor! And sometimes I take huge detours just because I forgot that there was a better way to go.

3. Focused Attention
To cut response time, the brain likes to hardwire things. Whatever we do often, or whatever response to a certain stimuli we usually use, we'll have easier access to than other stimuli. For example when reading the word "red" you'll automatically think about the color that corresponds with "red", instead of sifting through all the colors you know and settling for one, each time you read the word. We use these kind of short-cuts in everything we do, if we didn't we would have to pause and think about everything we experienced, just as we do whenever we experience something we've never encountered before. Being able to work around these kind of mental-short cuts is what Focused Attention is all about, because sometimes you don't want to use your automatic response, sometimes it is better to use another response.

In WoW this is probably best exampled in the skilled pvp-player. Every gamer has a series of responses that work best for most situations, and in PvE where the fights usually are very predictable we don't have to go much beyond this. But to be truly awesome you have to be able to work around and away your regular play-style. You have to be able to, under a split second, calculate whether doing A or doing B (or something completely else) is the better choice. In pvp-fights this is more often true, since the opponent isn't a scripted fight, but another player that brings into the fight all the irrationality and illogical behavior that only a human can(?). In a pvp-fight you often have to supress your first respons because another might be more appropriate for that unique situation alone, and the better you are at doing this, the better pvp-er you'll be.

4. Mental Rotation
Mental Rotation is being able to rotate objects in your mind, because you don't always have the possibility to actually grab the object and flip it around. In a game like Tetris we'd use this alot (although you can rotate objects in tetris, the best gamers are the ones who can rotate coming objects before they enter the screen). Actually, Mental Rotation is an often occurring part of puzzle games overall.

Just as in real life we rarely have to mentally rotate things in WoW to be able to go about our daily business. When we explain tactics to our fellow group members we sometimes have to be able to rotate the room mentally to be able to correctly explain where stuff will happen. When doing this, do you prefer to use the screen-directions or the map-directions? Do you say "left from where we are standing now" or "west on the map"? If you use the latter then you, and your party members, are better at rotating stuff mentally.

5. Visuo-Spatial Memory + Strategy
Remembering that VSM is about using cues in your vicinity to locate yourself in the room, this intelligence means using those cues to determine the best place to be. A game like Memory, which requires you to pair objects scattered across a board and lying upside down, we use VSM and Memory. You have to remember where among all those objects a certain object (or several actually) that you need lies to win the game.

In WoW we'd use this whenever we have to move from incoming stuff during a boss fight. When you know that the area you're currently standing in soon will be filled with goo/fire/deadly beam you have to quickly locate another area to occupy. We do this by remembering the layout of the room and what other things we have to be careful off all the while standing close to tanks or enemies depending on our role in the fight. Many fights in ICC use this principle, like for example Rotface or Festergut. On Festergut HC you have to keep a distance to everyone (as ranged), watch the incoming Malleable Goo and run to a Spore whenever they are up. This means that you at all times have to keep track of your own location and the location of several other objects of the fight, and quickly calculate the best way to move when you have to.

6. Paired Associate Learning
Paired Associate Learning, or PAL, is what we use to gather Paired Information. Pairing information means whenever you think about one thing, information about that thing pops up. Whenever you think about your mom you see her face and maybe her telephone number/birthday/name etc, usually whatever information you need most at the moment. This is how we remember information about certain objects and people in our surroundings. This is not to be mistaken with conditioning in which we pair a happening with a certain response. Paired Association is about information, not behavior. Conditioning is more like Focused Attention that I already mentioned.

As with many of these intelligenses, PAL is based on basic functions of our mind and as such nothing we can work without anywhere, be it in a game or not. Whenever you hear the name of a skill and remember any information about it, you're using Paired Association. The more you know about the game, the better you're at pairing information to the relevant places and objects. So when someone screams "Defile!", Paired Association would be to know what it does. Conditioning would be to run away and Focused Attention would be to give some thought to your running. It all comes together.

7. Deductive Reasoning
Deductive Reasoning, or DR, means coming to a conclusion based on a set of rules or pre-existing data/knowledge. If the ground gets wet when it rains and the ground is wet, we might come to the conclusion that it is raining. The more information and correct assumptions about correlation one has the likelier it is that one will come to the right conclusion.

We have to come to conclusions all the time. For instance, when tanking you might have information on what mobs you're fighting, what kind of cc your group has and how good the players in your group are. Based on this you will come to a conclusion on what would be the best way to pull the mobs. Or when reading up on your skills you might find a good way to use your skills so that they synergy with eachother for more power. Most conclusions you make in the game will have come through deductive reasoning on some level.

8. Visuo-Spatial Processing
Visuo-Spatial Processing, or VSP, is being able to sort out the important things in a midst of visual information. Looking through a crowd you might want to find your friend who has a red jacket and dark hair. Being able to find him/her means you have to process all your visual information for these cues.

VSP is actually one of those things that people argue is used more in games than in regular life. In games visual cues are usually among the most important things. We can't feel or smell anything in the game so we usually only have audio and visual cues for information. This means people who play alot of games often become rather apt at quickly scanning the area and picking out the important parts. In games like Call of Duty or Medal of Honor, or any shooting game where you have to find a camouflaged target before he finds you, you'd practice this ability quite alot. I know Love is alot better at finding hidden targets among rocks and vegetation than I am. We do practice this in WoW as well, after all we have to react when we're standing in fire or we get a huge DBM warning in our screens telling us to do something special.

9. Visual Attention
Visual Attention is the next step of VSP. After having sorted out the important things in your visual field, you'll want to focus your attention more to some of them than others. If VSP is noticing, Visual Attention is deciding what to look at and what it means to you. Visual Attention is also about finding what is "wrong" in the picture, but not necessarily as fast as you do with VSP. Visual Attention is processing the details.

As with VSP we use Visual Attention alot in WoW. When we're raiding and someone says something in gchat, we might notice (but probably won't) through VSP, but keep our attention elsewhere as long as needed. Visual Attention allows us to decide whether to keep track of the tanks health bar, you standing in fire or something completely else happening in the perifery of your screen at the moment.

10. Verbal Reasoning
Verbal Reasoning is alot like Deductive Reasoning, only with written or verbal information specifically instead of just any information. Therefore not much more is to say about it.

11. Verbal Work-Memory
Whenever you read a number, or get it read for you, you might repeat the information. This is to prolong the existance of this information in your Verbal Work-Memory. The Verbal Work-Memory is "better" than the the visual one, and therefore we use these kinds of tricks to help us remember things for longer periods of time.

In WoW I can imagine people using this if they want to remember a series of tasks they need to perform. Perhaps they just got some boss tactics explained to them, and silently repeat it to themselves not to forget it. Or they want to remember how to do a certain rotation they just read about on the internet. Or what mats they needed for that certain item. There are tons of places where you would want to remember something for a short period of time, and most people use this method.

12. Planning
Sounds simple enough, but it is one of the things that makes humans so special. I'm not saying humans are the only ones who are able to plan ahead, but we're definitely able to plan the farthest ahead (at least to our knowledge). When getting children, a career, or a car we often have to plan many years into the future. But planning also means completing a series of tasks during a very short period of time, and that is generally the case in games like WoW.

Since few people expect to play the same game for several years, we usually don't plan very long ahead. In a game like WoW, that has been around for so long already, we probably do alot more planning ahead than in games generally. Any player playing the Auction House would need to plan ahead several days preferrably. Any player in a raid often has to make very minute planning of what tasks they're going to perform. Especially when being a dps, where you can hope to keep some sort of "rotation" active. Rotation could actually translate into "expecting to use a series of tasks in a predefined order".

Most importantly, all these intelligences work together to form a whole. We very rarely use only one in any given situation. In a raid fight you need to be able to scan the area, know when to move and not to, know what skills to use and under what conditions and so on. When doing this we use all of the abovementioned intelligences in some part. And whether we'd like to call it intelligences or IQ or whatnot, it's pretty dang neat what we manage to do at our keyboards everyday.

Up For Interpretation

Me and Love argue all the time. He pulls my hair, I punch him in the stomach, he throws rocks at me and I delete his favorite gear piece. All normal behavior, right? The best thing is we only argue about things that don't really matter. Like if it's better to start walking with your right or left leg. Because we noticed that we don't begin with the same leg, so when we're out walking hand in hand we always end up unsynchronous. Someone has to switch leg. But who? These are typical dilemmas we struggle with on a regular basis.

I've also noticed that we don't agree as to how exactly a sound in WoW sounds. Love calls me tonedeaf, I call him just plain deaf. But it's still interesting that our opinions on such a small matter can vary so widely. Is it really possible that two people hear different things? Let me give some examples.

Take the sound that is made whenever you abandon a quest. I think it sounds like two separate sounds, like a gong being hit twice but with slightly different strengths. Like DUN-dun. Love thinks it sounds like a gong being hit once where the same one sounds is diminished over time. Like DUu-u-nn. He's clearly wrong, but why do we even think we hear different sounds?

Obviously we hear the exact same sounds. But for some reason our brains interpret them in different ways. Mine cuts the sound up to sound like two basically separate sounds just after another, and his ties it together to sound like one single sound. Interesting! Well at least I think so. I decided to ask some guildies to find out who was right in this matter - me or Love. This was done long ago, probably over a year or so, but the matter turned up again a couple of weeks ago when me and Love yet again couldn't agree on a sound in WoW. This time it was Exorcism.

I told him I liked it because it sounded like a ghoul/undead moaning. It made the skill feel like it really did hurt undeads. Didn't matter who you used it on, some ghoul was sad over it somewhere! But Love didn't agree, he thought it sounded just like some blasting sound. So I had to place my paladin by a dummy and spammed Exorcism so that he could hear the moaning sound. It took a while, but in the end he thought he could hear something. Admittedly the moaning sound didn't make as much noise when I used exorcism on a dummy and Love has never really played a paladin so he's not used to hearing that sound as often as me. But I thought it was the prominent feature of the sound, Love thought it was something nearly indistinguishable in the background.

Another skill we couldn't really agree on was the new Devastate sound. Apparently it has two sounds nowadays, but they both sound kinda like smashing two metal bars together. Or at least that's what I thought. Love thought it sounded like pulling the edges of two knives against eachother. Sure those are similar sounds, but not the same.

So when I asked my guildies it turned out that defining just how a sound sounds wasn't so simple after all! Actually most people showed a moderate interest in my question ^^ Maybe I'm the only one who really thinks this is interesting. It might not matter in the long run, but if we interpret things so differently when it comes to sounds, couldn't we do the same when it comes to other things? We all already know that people can interpret what other people say very differently. Especially in WoW where alot of the communication is made through text we often find that we have to be extra careful to make sure our meaning comes across just as we intend it to. I find it fascinating that this applies to other things as well. Things one would think could only be interpreted in one way, like the sound a skill makes.

Have you ever been in a situation where you and someone else ended up interpreting something completely differently?

Quantum Mechanics - On Time Travel & Black Holes

Quantum physics - one of my favorite subjects to read about. And luckily for me, the science world seems to be teeming with news and reports on the latest theories in this area. I don't really understand much about it, but I think that is why I like it so much. Kinda like Fantasy, quantum theory is like magic. You don't know how people in fantasy books can turn eachother into donkeys, but you accept the idea and love that it is possible (in that fictional universe). In a way this is how I feel about Quantum Physics. I don't really understand the concepts of entanglement, multiverses or the fact that time might not exist, but I accept the idea and love that it might be true. Quarks and uncertainty principles are the reality equivalent of unicorns and dragons.

I recently read a really good book on the subject - Stephen Hawkings & Leonard Mlodinows "A briefer history of time". The two authors have set out to explain the universe, time and quantum physics for simpletons like me, and they're doing an awesome job. They start out really simple, with the very basics. A history lesson takes me briefly through the evolution of the view on how the universe has worked. All the way from the earth being a disc on the back of a bunch of turtles to the view science has today (I say science since not all agree with this view). They explain the ideas behind gravity and Einsteins relativity principle, and also some of the fallacies and traps that scientists easily fall into - the need to adapt a theory so that it works with how one already thinks the universe works. Even Einstein did this mistake, but he admitted to it afterwards.

I won't and I can't go through the entire book, but I will highlight some of my mind-boggling favorites. If you find them interesting or just don't understand what the heck I'm talking about (don't worry, neither do I), I really recommend checking it, and other similar works by Stephen Hawking & friends out!

Time is not absolute
This is probably no news to most people out there by now. Einstein showed that even something that seems as constant as time, is quite relative. Time is in the eye of the beholder so to speak. In our day to day doings we won't notice this much, the difference in time between us are so small that we don't notice them. Or rather they are so common that we don't notice them. Just like we don't notice the weight of all the air pressing down on us every day. It is a setting we're in every second of every day and are adapted to work in, so to us everything seems quite normal, and as mentioned, quite constant.

There are differences however, and thinking about them is fun even if they don't actually affect us on a bigger scale. For instance, time is affected by gravity. The closer to a gravity source something is, the slower time goes. That means that someone standing on a chair will move faster in time than someone standing on the ground beneath him! The difference in time is some 0,001 seconds (or something like it) in 80 years, but it is measurable. It would even be noticeable if we increased the distance. Wonder how slow time would go inside a black hole then?

In fact, if an astronaut was standing on a star about to become a black hole, and sending out messages to a space ship in the vicinity, the orbiting space ship would notice that the last message, the milli-second before the star turns into a black hole, would never come. To the astronaut time would flow as usual. But since the gravity in the black hole is so high, time is slowed so much that everyone outside of its force will think the final message never arrived. To the space ship, the time period between the second before collapse, and the second of collapse would be infinitely long. To the astronaut on the surface everything would be like normal.

Unfortunately, since the gravitational force of a black hole is so huge, the difference in force between the astronauts head and his feet would tear him apart. These differences are so small on earth that we don't notice them (but as mentioned they're measurable for example through the difference in passed time).

On a side note, we all know that time can be quite relative from playing WoW ;) I was sure I just re-imbued my weapons with wf, just like 3 minutes ago! And now I have to reapply it? It can't already have passed 30 min... can it?

Are our actions predestined? Do we have free will? Can we predict the future?

One interesting thing about science is the notion that if we could measure everything and understood the relationship between everything, we would also be able to predict the future. All our actions would after all be the cause and effect of other causes and effects. That means that whether I decide to write this text is all determined no matter if I "want to" or not. The action potentials in my brain that make me want to do this have been affected by outside sources and are in turn affecting outside sources. To make it more clear - picture a pool table. You're about to do the first shot, knocking all the billiard balls around. Whether one of the balls will go into a hole isn't really affected on any will of the balls itself, it is entirely affected on how you do that shot. So what if your shot in turn is affected by situations that are out of your control? In essence, we're all just billiard balls rolling around in the universe without any say about it.

It does seem probable, but quantum mechanics changes this. And here comes an explanation I don't fully understand. when it comes to quantum mechanics there is always a chance element. Even if some outcomes of an action are considerably higher than others, there is always a chance something completely else will happen. Say you throw a ball against a pole. If you know everything about the throw, the strength of the throw, the pull of gravity, the weight of the ball and etc, you can calculate the chances that the ball will hit the pole. And those calculations will be very exact. But not 100% exact. According to quantum theory there is always a chance that you'll miss the pole even with a perfect throw! Now the chance is so small that even if you threw that ball until the end of time you probably wouldn't miss. But the chance is there and it puts a small element of randomness into everything we do. It doesn't answer the question to whether we have free will or not. But it would at least make the future not entirely predictable, not even if we had all the facts. Einstein did not like this idea at all and simply said "God does not play dice". Or - there is no such thing as pure randomness. Well, who knows?

We'll probably never ever be able to measure all the factors of all events that ever happen anyway, so even if predicting the future might be theoretically possible, it probably never will be in practicality. We might become better and better at guessing, but never 100% sure.

What lies beyond space?
I bet everyone who's ever tried to understand the universe has asked themselves "but what lies beyond the boundaries of space then?". Or "what was before our universe?". There is a possibility that space not only lacks an end, but also a beginning. Try to wrap your mind around this baby. If space is curved around itself, it would go on eternally in all directions and if you travelled in a straight line you'd eventually end up where you started. Kinda like a Möbius Strip but also in time. Or like the surface of the Earth, it continues endlessly without any beginning or end somewhere.

This is a really tricky one! We see time as a line of events with something beginning and ending. That is how we see things on earth. A human is born, lives and dies. On a molecular level a human doesn't really "begin" with birth or "end" with death of course. The elements of that human existed before they were born and will continue to exist after they've died, so the notion of "beginnings" and "endings" is really an illusion. But it is a very good illusion. So good in fact that we're having an extremely tough time trying to understand something that might not begin or end anywhere, even if that is in fact the normal state of things. (Just like there really isn't any up or down in space!).

Hawkings proposes that the universe is without boundaries, both in space and in time. It curves around itself and as thus it just simply exists. If we think really, really hard about it it seems more logical for something to simply exist than having to go through the troublesome work of beginning and ending somewhere. The beginnings and endings create more questions than they answer. As such, the universe isn't created. It just is.

Can we travel in time?
I've never believed in time travel. I've never seen time as linear, but more as one moment replacing the next. I've always seen time as the change of matter, rather than it's own outside force. The idea of time travel is based on the idea that time is absolute (see above) which it isn't. The prevailing idea of time travel is that travelling in time is like swimming up or down a stream. But if we look at time the way relativity describes it and think about some of the things mentioned above, a sort of time travel would be possible.

Someone travelling at the speed of light would move slower in time than someone who doesn't. Or going back to the poor astronaut on the surface of the collapsing star, he was moving infinitely slower in time than the people in the space ship above. If this astronaut could somehow get away from the collapsing star some seconds afterwards (what would feel like seconds to him) he would have moved so slow in time (compared to the rest of the universe) that to him it would feel like travelling far into the future. The difference is of course that he has actually travelled the same distance, but he just hasn't aged at all (i.e his matter hasn't changed as much as the surrounding universes), and to him it felt like it only took a matter of seconds. He hasn't actually jumped from one time to the next. This kind of time travel would be like a sped-up cryo-sleep.
So can we travel back again from that?
Possibly.

A famous mathematician named Kurt Gödel proposed in 1949 that space was rotating. Without being too technical about it, it would mean that it would be possible to leave earth at a time and return before you left. Unfortunately no one has been able to measure whether the universe is really rotating, so this kind of time-travel doesn't seem very likely.

Another way to travel back in time would be if we could travel faster than the speed of light. That is because under these conditions the order of events would be scrambled. That means one person could experience travelling back in time - because he's experiencing things reversed as compared to everyone else, while to everyone else the order of events are as "normal". No I don't understand it either. Since travelling faster than light takes an infinite amount of energy (or so says the relativity principle anyway), it doesn't seem like it's anything we have to worry about just yet.

Phew, I was just going to pick some highlights of this book and I end up with this huge rant. As you can see it is a subject that really interests me ^^ Yet again, I strongly recommend checking out any book on this subject, and Stephen Hawking (together with Leonard Mlodinow) has made a tremendous job making this extremely difficult subject interesting and somewhat understandable for the layman!
Thanks to wikipedia for the pictures!

Star Trek and religion

I saw a really interesting episode of Star Trek the next Generation the other day. It was called "Who watches the watchers?" of season 3. It's about how Enterprise accidentally get mixed up in revealing the presence of the Federation to a greatly underdeveloped society on some backwater planet. This of course breaks the prime directive, which says that the federation may never interfere with the doings of another culture. What makes this episode so interesting is that the indigenous society (called the Mintakans), currently in what could be compared to the bronze ages, was developing towards a "rational" society. One without religious beliefs. That is until Picard and friends showed up with the pew pew lazers and beaming up and down to the ship. The Mintakans take the Enterprisers for gods, and specifically Picard whom they call The Picard. Picard is of course quite despondent about the fact of having violated the prime directive so horribly, and with such (according to the views of the Federation) devastating effects to the society of the Mintakans. According to Star Trek, religious beliefs would be a backward development of a society.

Picard tries to explain to the leader of the Mintakans that he seems to be a god to them just as they would seem as a god to cavemen. Eventually she understands his reasoning (it still takes Picard being injured by an arrow to convince the rest of the society however). When the Enterprisers encounter beings that greatly surpass them in development and/or power (like Q for example, or the Traveller), they never view them as Gods however, only as other creatures who have developed further. What is the difference between the Enterprisers and the Mintakans? At first I thought that it just was one of technical development.

It got me thinking, how far developed must a society be to stop viewing the things they do not understand as magical? Even if there are constantly things happening in the Star Trek universe that Picard and his crew can't understand or explain, they never think of it as magical, but only as something natural that they just haven't the knowledge to explain. This is a fictious setting of course, but could be compared to our own society. The less you know about how things work, the more likely is it that you ascribe it magical properties. But my question is, is there some sort of line of knowledge where you simply no longer ascribe anything magical properties, although you don't understand it, because you know so much about how other things work?

But then I realized I was looking at it the wrong way. Although I honestly believe that religion and mysticism, and whatelse there might be like it, originally stemmed from a need to explain things that could not really be explained by any other means, I think that since then religion (and the like) has gotten a whole nother purpose. It still retains it explanatory position to many, but has mainly become much of a set of moral guide lines, which doesn't really have much to with science or knowledge at all. But since then we have also gotten the means to explain many of those things that we previously weren't capable of. I don't even think the most religious fanatic honestly thinks that it is God being upset when there is thunder. Or maybe another way to look at it would be that the scientific cause for thunder is what happens when God gets upset. So it's just another step. We know what happens when there is thunder, but we don't know why. What is the meaning of it? And how can we make sure to control the meaning of it? (I of course don't think there has to be a meaning to things at all, it's just a human way to look at things. But I understand the need some feel to attribute meaning to everything).

In the episode the Mintakans argue about what they should do to please the Picard. Some of them say that since they do not know exactly what the Picard wants, they shouldn't really do anything. Some say instead that they should do something, just to be on the safe side (the something being to sacrifice Troi). And this is really what the difference between religion and science comes down to, in one way. They're both about control. But the one side says it is meaningless to do anything without turning to that which really controls (religion)(I am not saying religion is about controlling god, but about having control over your own life by understanding what god wants). The other side says that it is meaningless to do anything without turning to that which we can control ourselves (science). And in all times has there been people who've tried to explain things scientifically vs religiously (for example some greek philosophers and Gong Fu Zi who didn't turn to the supernatural to explain how the world could work). And people who don't believe one bit in the supernatural still do alot of things just to be on the safe side. "It can't hurt" they think. "At least I've covered all possibilities". So it is about control. Either you feel better about something when you think that you've got control over whoever has control (pleasing god) or feel better when they themselves have the control (experimenting, theorizing). In the end it is still about being in control. The control of what happens or the control of why it happens.

I'm not sure what makes a person prefer one over the other. Obviously they think that one mode of control is better than the other, but why that is... And although some have tried, it doesn't seem possible to combine these two forms of control (but like mentioned alot of people do, but they would never admit it). If you prefer one form, the other form is made meaningless.

I'm not sure I have a conclusion to all this (and besides I have to run to work now). Sometimes just randomly rambling about something can be quite fun too (at least to me!).

Earth Quakes make the world spin faster

In an article in the swedish news paper Dagens Nyheter (News of the Day) they've talked to some scientists at the Chalmers Institute about how huge earthquakes, like the one recently in Chile which measured 8,8 on the Richter scale, actually change the axis of the earth and thus the duration of the earth day. Of course we're not talking about anything that will ever be noticed by the lay human in thousands of years. Apparently the above mentioned earthquake had shifted the earth axis by approximately 8 cm and shortened the duration of the earth day by 1,2 millionth of a second. WHat happens is simply that the earth quake reorganizes the materia in the Earth to make it smaller or larger (mostly smaller), and this in turn makes Earth turn faster, just like if you spin and spread or pull in your arms.

Why even bother about measuring such small changes? It obviously won't turn into the Apocalypse for humanity any time soon. Apparently it matters when sending stuff, to date mostly satellites and probes, into space. Apparatus used in GPS systems use the parameters of Earth to tell people where they are, and even small differences can turn into huge errors back on Earth. Just imagine driving right into someones living room just because your GPS is misinformed by 8cm!

And for space probes that are sent off way into space, few milliseconds off in the Earth Axis data could turn into driving kilometers off once you reach Mars. What seems like small errors here on Earth will turn huge over the course of very long distances. Something quite worth to think about once we decide to colonize space.

I thought this was really interesting because I had never heard anything about earth quakes also having this huge impact on Earth, beside the already huge impact it has on human lifes wherever it occurs. These are changes on a cosmic scale! Once you know of it you realize that it is quite logical of course, just nothing you ever think about. Although earth quakes never happen in sweden (I do not count the occassional, lame shrugs that barely shakes a block of houses as real earth quakes) it makes you think about how things that happen anywhere on earth really affect everyone on it. You easily get the feeling that we're isolated from other countries just because we don't see them, and somehow I think it is important that we think "This affects me too" when distaster strikes on the other side of the Earth.

Dolphins are people (fish-people)

If you've ever read "A Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" you'll know that at least Douglas Adams thought dolphins were some pretty smart animals. Actually smarter than humans, since they knew what was coming to earth and ditched that doomed place before it was too late.

Now it seems Douglas Adams wasn't too far off (he probably was about the mice however). In an article over at sciencemag.org, it seems some scientists (and philosophers) are even starting to discuss whether or not we shouldn't be treating dolphins more like people. Many of us have heard that dolphins possess a really large brain compared to their body size, and have a brain-to-body-weight-ratio bigger even than human-like apes actually (but still smaller than humans)(... or maybe not smaller than some pugs I've had). Even more important is that they have a complex neocortex, the part of the brain linked to more "advanced" brain functions such as self-awareness, problem solving and other things we usually think of as traits of human intelligence.

The scientists argue that if the definition for "person" would be something like "being alive (duh), awareness of environment, display of personality and emotions, exhibition of self-controlled behavior and the possibility to treat other beings ethically", dolphins actually fit in the frame. This would in turn rise the need for us humans to treat dolphins more ethically. Such things as captivity for our amusement must then definitely be put under careful consideration (not to mention the mass slaughters of dolphins at some places of the earth, something I don't think should be done to anything though).

A finger must be raised in the air here however. We don't really know how the display of intelligent behavior is linked to actual intelligent thinking in any other animal than ourselves (and barely even then). Of course I'm not suggesting we should treat animals bad just because they're not intelligent (I'm not sure what the article is suggesting though...). But just because an animal is acting like people, doesn't mean it will react to the world around it like people, and might therefore have whole nother needs than people. Needs we might need to identify from their point of view instead of ours, if that's even possible.

In any case, I always find it really interesting to read about these kind of things because it makes you think about what intelligence is overall. With humans it seems our "amount" of intelligence has worked well (so far) for the species as a whole to survive, but less good actually for the individual to survive. With species like dolphins and apes, it seems to work better for individuals than for the specie. Less smart animals don't have the intellectual (?) capability to destroy their own surroundings and mass slaughter their neighbors. Then again, that could be a trait of humans that simply has nothing to do with their intelligence (not meaning that I think humans are inherently evil though :P).

Sciencemag

Since I had some studies to do today I'll only do a short little post about another site I found that provides science news. I often refer to interesting posts over at ScienceDaily.com, but I recently found a site called Sciencemag.org which is run by the American Assoctiation for the Advancement of Science or AAAS. It updates with new science articles nearly as often as ScienceDaily.com, but also offers a podcast where they talk more about some of the science news and interview some of the scientists behind the articles, to have them explain more about it. The niveau isn't too advanced and adapted for most people to comprehend, even if you don't happen to have a degree in rocket science. Really interesting and I recommend checking it out over at Sciencemag.org!

Quantum Computers

Some time ago I asked Love how computers really work. What make them go? What make them do what I want them to (and quite often, what I don't want them to). He gave me a decent explanation (well, his explanation was probably awesome, but my comprehension of it was decent), of which some was about the binary system. As I understood it, it basically means the "language" of the computer uses on and off switches, which in long series of codes mean different things. It is handy because the simplest way to use and understand the information from a switch is by either have it turned on or turned off. Either it gives a current or it doesn't. Quite the black and white world a computer lives in.

I didn't think this sounded practical though, or rather, wouldn't it be even more useful if a switch didn't just give either on or off response, but maybe also alot of inbetweens? Imagine a person who only answers everything with yes and no and then suddenly adds the option "perhaps" or "a little" or "alot". It would add alot of possibilities to their communication. I thought this would work for a computer too. Wouldn't it be able to store more information with the same set of switches if the switches could use inbetween variables?

After finding an article about Quantum Computers over at good old Sciencedaily.com, it seems scientists have had the same thought and have been looking into how to use atoms, or rather electrons, as bits or "qubits" as they call it. A bit is a computer information unit, and what they've done is trying to use electrons to work as these information units.

The problem with electrons is they don't behave as we want them to. Alot of other things in the world will try to make the electron behave in another way than we can control. The whole thing about using them as information units is to make their behavior predictable and therefore controllable. But since electrons are very small, controlling one usually means controlling a whole big bunch of electrons, which apparently isn't what the scientists want.

But now they've come a step closer to making a single electron behave over at the Princeton University. They do this by trapping them into "microscopic corrals" which puts the electron in a quantum state. In this quantum state, not only does the electron act in a way "ordered" to it, without disturbing other electrons, most importantly it can behave in a "not entirely off" and "not entirely on" kind of way. It can actually be inbetween.

Having a single information bit giving the same information as 100 do today would make the computer as we know it even smaller, maybe faster (don't know how this quantum stuff works really, so I'm not promising anything). I hope we get to see this in computers soon!

Life didn't origin from soup

Over at sciencedaily.com they've got a really interesting article about a new theory that says that life didn't originate from a sort of "primordial soup", commonly believed for about 80 years, at all. Back in 1929, J.B.S Haldane published his theory that UV light would affect substances like ammonia and methane to become the first organic matters. (Also interesting that probably nobody knows of this Haldane guy although most people know of the "primordial-soup" theory). A problem with this theory, which has been long known, is that UV light isn't enough of an energy source to kick-start life, or more technically put - UV light doesn't make things react with eachother.

This new theory instead looks at chemical gradients used by sea vents all over the world today (and always). They're all very similar to how any living organism works today, with proton gradients as the energy source. Although this might seems really complicated we've all (or at least most of us I'd guess) talked about it in school. Proton gradient is the variance of electrical potential and concentration across a membrane, like a cell (sodium and potassium in all living cells if I remember correctly).

If I understood it correctly, the difference between UV light and these chemical gradients is that UV light is electromagnetical and the chemical gradients electrochemical, the latter being an energy force more like the ones currently at work in a living body. Maybe the first processes of life were "simply" a variance on the sea vent gradients, one that didn't need the closeness to a geochemically created force to sustain it's own gradient.

The other day I had a discussion with Love about life and death (not one of them deep discussions, but more scientifically). I think it started about something like death being the end of a chain of "energy force", and in a sense continued if the person has given birth (sorry guys). We humans still don't know how to create this "energy force", or "life force" as some would call it, ourselves. As far as I know we haven't been able to synthetically create a cell from which there has grown a living being. We also don't know how to repair and /or restart a dead cell, which would be a means to bring dead people back to life. I said that most people die because the body can't sustain itself any longer, and when it dies the brain goes out of oxygen anyway and is destroyed. But if you could get the cells to start up again (and repair the damaged ones), death wouldn't be much of a problem. Like I said, death is basically just a part of a chain of energy movement.

This discussion lead me to ask how this "energy force" got started in the first place. And questions like that are part of what religion is all about. But now it seems we've got another (or better) scientific theory about it. Really interesting!

The article is here --> New research rejects 80-year theory of 'primordial soup' as the origin of life <-- in case you want to read it (and make sure I understood it correctly ;))

"The brain is a machine assembled not to understand itself, but to survive"

The title is a quote taken from Paul Churchland, a famous philosopher focusing on philosophy of the mind. I found the quote in a book I got to read from my father, during my holiday there. It's called "How to think straight about Psychology", written by Keith E. Stanovich, and aims to straighten out some common misconceptions about psychology, and science overall.

It's a really well-written book, and mainly targets the psychology student/teacher, to give them arguments to help the common people understand what psychology is all about (not Freud, first of all). But there is something in it for anyone interested in science, since it talks about what science is generally too (to explain that psychology too is a real science).

Themes the book discusses includes; What is a theory? What is an experiment? What problems does human thinking put in the way of scientific thinking? And most other things people have ever thought about science. It really opens up thoughts about what the difference between science and non-science (mainly religion) really is. (My conclusion being, there's essentially none, since most aim to understand the world, but in different ways). This is not an article about "why science is better than [insert random non-scientific belief]". It's just some notes on what science is all about, without putting any values into it.

I've picked out some of the more interesting parts of the book and will present them here shortly, but I strongly recommend reading it as well.

- Science only aims to answer questions that are measurable and/or examinable.
People tend to draw the conclusion that any question must have an answer. And they might think anything that can't answer any questions, even questions like "what is the meaning of life?" is incomplete and/or faulty. But there are question that simply don't have an answer, because the question is asked in the wrong way. Answer these questions for instance - "How far is a distance?" or "How big is a rock?". The answer would at best be - "it depends", and that would be my answer to "what is the meaning of life?". It depends. The question is not specific enough to be specifically answered, and science only answers unspecific questions with unspecific answers.

-Theories are meant to be refuted
Although of course any scientist hope they've found the ultimate theory to explain everything, having found such a theory would mean the end of knowledge. It would mean there is nothing more to learn about the world. I'm not saying that would be a bad thing, but the aim of any scientist working with a theory is to find what it doesn't explain. That is the only way to actually learn something new from it. And make a new theory, and try to find what that in turn doesn't explain. So when someone say they have a theory about something it never means "and this time it really explains everything we'll ever know about anything". It means "it explains everything we know so far, until we learn more". Refuting a theory is not defeat, it is progress.

- Truth is in the eye of the beholder
Not to science it isn't. Although some people say they've seen [insert random mythological being here] with great enthusiasm, and I don't doubt that they think they have, it wouldn't be scientifically true until anyone can see it. To science, truth is what anyone can accomplish using the same methods. If someone fails to accomplish it, science says "clearly this works in another way than we thought". Non-science would say "well you're not doing it the right way". Yet again, to science refuting is as much progress as confirming.

- Mind over body
What the human body can accomplish simply by believing in it is really astonishing. Well, saying "simply by believing it" isn't really fair, since the human mind is the base for anything and everything we've ever done. Everything we understand, do, say and think is based on the workings of the human mind. It is also from this things like "placebo" and "nocebo" (the opposite of placebo) comes from. And like the title says, things happen that we don't understand or can't explain, because the brain isn't mean to understand everything. It is meant to understand just enough to survive. Something it does really well if I may say so. The way we understand the world is meant to help us survive, not explain it. And this sets limitations to what we can understand, and it might no be something to just sit back and accept, but at least something to keep in mind (no pun intended :P) when experiencing and trying to explain the world.

- I am unique
Yes you are, and I am. And any other person in the world. And because of this and because of the fact that we can't experience the world from any other viewpoint than our own, we sometimes think we're more unique than we are. There are 6 billion other unique beings out there (and that's just counting humans!), who all live the same lives as you, more or less. Some people think that just because they are unique, what happens to them have to be unique as well. You guessed the right top card on a deck? What are the odds of that? You've got to be psychic. You're on vacation somewhere far away and stumble upon moms third cousin? What are the odds of that? It has to be fate.
People fail to think about the million times this exact event happens without a strange coincidence occuring. How many people are on vacation right now without meeting someone they know? How many people are guessing top cards without getting it right? Even in your own life you constantly do something, but it's only the unique moments that stand out, and feel special. But they're not special, they're just random chance. Or rather, they're all special, because they're all the same type of events. If you throw a hundred dies enough times, chances are they'll all turn up sixes. But that doesn't make the event any different from any other result. We just attribute some events more significane, but that don't make them any more or less significant than any other event. Not to anyone but ourselves that is.
Some long chains of events feel so full of odd coincidences one thinks "this can't just be a fluke". But it isn't until something special happens at the end of that chain that you recognize the chain at all. These chains of events have happened since forever (literaly), but it isn't until someone intelligent enough to attribute value to certain events comes along, that some events are thought of as special. And yet 99,999999% of them are never recognized as special, simply because no one knows about them (snow melting, dropping water into a puddle, making sounds that sound just like the intro to Imperial March! Yet no one was there to hear it...).

This is just some of the really interesting things Stanovich approaches in this book, and I have tried to make them understandable. They're even better explained in the book of course, and more thoroughly.

The blog of Robert Scott

Over at the internet site of the swedish newspaper Dagens Nyheter (dn.se) I found an article about a Robert Scott twittring about his trip to Antarctica between the years 1910-1912. Huh? I thought. Either he is really old or they've got the dates wrong. But no, this is really about Robert Scotts trip to Antarctica 1910-1912. But it isn't Robert Scott writing but the Scott Polar Research Institute over at Cambridge University. They thought it'd be a great idea to publish Robert Scott's log, which is quite thourough, so that anyone could get a look at it. And I agree, it's a great idea! Although Robert Scott unfortunately died in his attempt to reach the Antarctica, he came pretty far and it should make some interesting reading. Maybe his dreadful end will actually make it even more interesting to see what events lead up to it.

Scott was beat by a narrow margin by the Norwegian Roald Amundsen. On his way back he and his company of four men perished. Apparently Scott used a less good tactic to get to Antarctica, among others he used horses instead of dogs (which Amundsen used) and they couldn't stand the cold as good.

They will post the corresponding posts from his log each day, as if he was blogging. So the log from january 23d will be posted january 23d. That was three days ago, but you get the idea. It seems to be starting around end of November 1910, and I don't know when it ends. But I'll follow it and see!

The article can be found here, but it's in swedish -->http://www.dn.se/nyheter/varlden/scott-twittrar-fran-antarktis-sent-omsider-1.1033172

The blog can be found here, and it's in english --> http://www.spri.cam.ac.uk/museum/diaries/scottslastexpedition/1910/11/25/26-10-1910/

The evolutionary concept of quasi-species

About a week ago I read a really interesting post on ScienceDaily.com.
(Which you can find here -> http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/12/091231164747.htm)
It was about the darwinian evolution of so called "quasi-species", that is species who go outside the usual definition of what constitute as "life" or "alive". In this case some scientists at The Scripps Institute have found that prions, little bits of infectious proteins, are capable of evolution even though they lack DNA and RNA. Prions are what cause Mad Cows disease, which is called Creutzfeldt-Jakob when it occurs in people. Every mammalian species produces normal prion proteins. The little infectious prions simply destroy healthy prion proteins in the brain by converting them into toxic ones. These toxic cells don't function as needed for a healthy animal and also destroy surrounding tissue. All diseases known to be caused by prions are untreatable to date, and therefore eventually fatal. Another interesting disease caused by prions is the Kuru-disease which was encountered among the Fore peoples of Papua New Guinea. When it was first examined in the late 50's, one thought the causes lay in cannibalistic behaviour among the Fore. By eating the brains of diseased people one would also contract the disease. The likelihood of this explanation is still being debated though.

The "evolution" part of the prions came when the scientists found out that these prions are affected by natural selection. Apparently it was quite similar to the way viruses "reproduce" although as said, prions lack both DNA and RNA. As far as I've understood it, normally evolution means mutation, or change, of the nucleic acid (DNA). These changes occur because some DNA survive the environment and some don't. The looks of the DNA that survives is what will contribute to the next set of DNA. These are the simple genetics I learned about it school.

Originally the scientists thought that when a prion had converted, or folded as its called, a cell into its toxic form, no more changes would occur. There would always be the same folding of cells, similar perhaps to the way rock changes in cycles - lava, mountains, big rocks, smaller rocks, sand, lava and so on. The way rock changes is quite predictable and hasn't changed since the beginning of things, as far as we know. There had long been hints though, that this wasn't the case with infectious prions since they acted somewhat differently when set in different environments. When looking more closely, one found that the infectious prions change the way they fold proteins, to a way more suitable and effective of the current environment. Something that has been interpreted as a form of evolution.

One doesn't yet know however how these changes occur, only that they do occur. The article mentions that the abnormal, infectious prions replicate, but doesn't explain further what it means by "replication". The leader of the scientist team, Charlers Weissman, concludes;
"But we know that mutation and natural selection occur in living organisms and now we know that they also occur in a non-living organism. I suppose anything that can't do that wouldn't stand much of a chance of survival".

So, anything that needs to influence its surroundings to keep on existing (i.e survive) has to be able to adapt to said surroundings. Perhaps this could say to broaden the concept of "life" from everything with DNA to everything that "changes in a non-cyclic pattern to influence its surroundings in a non-predictable way".

Why females live longer than males: is it due to the father's sperm?

Why females live longer than males: is it due to the father's sperm? <-Link to original article
I found an interesting post over at Science Daily about what actually make female live longer than males on average. Apparently that is a phenomenon not just common among humans, but nearly any mammal species as the article will say. They did an experiment where they compared mice who had genes from two mothers to mice who had genes from the "normal" type of setup, one father and one mother, and found that the mother-mice lived significantly longer than the father-mother-mice. This would/could indicate that there is a father-specific gene, or male specific if you like, that makes you live shorter. Or less long.
However the article doesn't discuss the reason for this so I am wondering, what would be the benefits of living shorter? The male gene that supposedly could do this must somehow further some other mechanic that is needed but doesn't make you live long in a germ-free environment where these mice lived. Or of course - living long isn't necessarily optimal seeing from an evolutionary perspective.
I read/heard somewhere long ago that cloned creatures live shorter than their "parents" because they get "used up" genes. That is, genes that already have used for some time and somehow know about it and therefor start the aging process earlier in cloned animals because to the gene (I don't really think the gene thinks anything, it's just the human way to explain stuff :P) think it's about the right time.
It would be really interesting if one could find these genes and see what happens if you remove them? I don't think people could live forever because there are other processes affecting that, like the oxygen decay on the body and such. But I wouldn't think it impossible for people to live for 200 years. I mean afterall, 2000 years ago people didn't live much longer than to 50, today people get to 90 easily! Well in most western countries anyway, I read that in many African countries the average life expectancy is still below 50 years.