08
Mar
On Spam
Hey! Nice site, thanks. 
Take a look at this:
http://www.porn_and_gambling.com/
http://www.maybe_a_little_viagra_link.com/
I have been resisting moderating my comments, and at the same time ignoring my commitment to write regularly, since I have seen so much spam coming in. It is horrible!
But more interesting by far than my emotional reaction is what this says about - and offers for - the online world.
I like application of the word “virus” to the online world; it is quite apt, and properly characterizes a relatively simple, automatic piece of software. But as the online world grows, so too does its abundance. The plastering of spam blogging is akin to leeaches when you step in a swamp, or flies when you go outdoors in the summer; seemingly endless in number, they keep coming. We can apply repelants, but they keep coming.
To me this points at a highly controvertial point, which is consciousness. The point is best made, I think, by considering Deep Blue beating Kasparov at chess. Deep Bue, we are told, has only a programmed response, making millions of calculations and rejecting those that don’t meet preset parameters, and acting automatically. But why do we believe that is different from Kasparov? He is conditioned by his previous games, the recent books he’s read, even the annoying comment form a reporter that morning, and the cofee he had with his breakfast. He expereinces freewill, we sayy - but why do we assume that Deep Blue does not also “expereince” freewill. It will certainly be a very different, and much more limited sense of freewill than Kasparov, but why do we reject this possibility?
A generation of movies - the Matrix, Terminator - has sprung up that speculate there will be a major change in computer awareness and that at some point it will suddenly become conscious. I wonder if, instead, this is a gradual process that began a long time ago. As for self-aware, what is so special here? Is a dog not self aware when it tries to catch its tail, or a spider with a missing leg when it hobbles along on seven?
I think that we are living in the visible manifestation of the creation of online intelligence. And we, the people are seeding it with information, processing power, and interactio nwith the world, can be seen as its sense organs and its environment.
computer consciousness intelligence IT Spirituality technology
March 9th, 2007 at 8:48 pm
Language is a virsu. That’s what William Burroughs said. Actually, that’s the Laurie Anderson version; he said it’s a virus from outer space. I’m not so sure about the last part.
March 25th, 2007 at 3:49 pm
“All of language is but a mobile army of metaphors, metonyms and anthropomorphisms.”
- Nietzsche
When you think about it, he was right: most all of our words and phrases are but analog comparisons to some other notion or thing. And, what Nietzsche may not have realized (probably did) but contemporary linguists, computer scientists, AI esxperts and neurobiologists all certainly understand, is that language has an even more fundamental role in human intellect than mere communication (itself damned important!). Indeed, the way we process and store information is through subliminal use of vocabulary, syntax and grammer: the reason we can’t consciously recall things that happen in the first few years of our life is that we don’t yet have the verbs, nominatives, qualifiers, etc., to rationalize, remember an rearticulate them even in our own minds!
`just another slant on “language.”