Spirited Thought

ICANN is loosening the rules around domain suffix at the detriment of having any meaning and comprehension embodied in a hostname. URLs need more thought, not freedom. Even ICANN’s CEO brings the move down to vanity plate level contribution. Apparently, the Internet was running out of space.

The potential here is huge. It represents a whole new way for people to express themselves on the Net,” said Dr Twomey. “It’s a massive increase in the ‘real estate’ of the Internet.

We have numerous examples of shooting ourselves.

Nine kids under 19 years of age will be killed with a gun today. 30% will have intentionally taken their own life. Even if we want to dispute the fact, suicide by handgun exists and people are not managing their relationship with firearms well. Consider the recent Supreme Court ruling objecting to a Washington D.C. ban on hand guns. Sustaining laws like this one does not actually make things safer, it just makes them illegal. We have speed limits and many of us do not follow those. Yet cars kill just fine at a rate of five to six thousand teenagers per year.

Some schools in some states attempt to teach safe sex. The Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation reports that children have sex at around age 17. Include other forms of sex and those polled report almost 50% of males having received oral sex and 39% gave. So kids are sexually active and there is a movement to focus on not having sex, not how to do it safely or how to be smart about it. An NPR story reported…

…Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government finds that only 7 percent of Americans say sex education should not be taught in schools.

If we are in such agreement, we should start measuring how many of our children’s decisions around sex are well informed. Remove the issue of if their decision is something we personally agree with and simply ask if they felt they were informed.

No one disputes, though, that many were delighted to discover they were pregnant. “Sweet!” one of them shouted in the school nurse’s office. The school superintendent admitted: “They were not trying very hard not to get pregnant.”

From Financial Times, The ideology of teen pregnancy (Gloucester High School Pregnancy Pact) by Christopher Caldwell

Prescription drugs seem to be all the rage. Some might naively interpret that the war on drugs must be almost over if kids are turning to medicine cabinets. Or we could simply be inspired by Dr. Twomey and say that we have a massive increase in the ‘real estate’ of drug market.

Structured naming lets us work and communicate meaning. Our world works in abstractions. We cannot possibly consider the totality of our own lives, the community, the nation or the world without coming to a screeching halt. Abstractions allow us to consider just enough of reality to work with it. Loosely regulated naming is not a good thing. One lesson we can apply from corporate life is that things done by committee often fail or are fraught with issues. It lacks leadership and puts the idiocracy into the lead.

A recent article in the Atlantic, Is Google Making us Stoopid? by Nicholas Carr, talks about our increasing reliance on the intelligent Internet and our own asymptotic tendency away from our rich, educated and thoughtful past. One can only hope that Internet naming is just a fluke, that this is not just another data point of stupidity.

Philip Zimmermann’s Pretty Good Privacy was a critical platform for educating the world on secure communication. PGP encryption is so good, that even the most determined agencies can essentially go pound sand–it is pretty good privacy to be humble, not to disclaim. An impressive concept with PGP is the public and distributed nature of key management. Often, Public Key Encryption systems rely upon Public Key Infrastructures where there is a central authority. The genius of Zimmermann is in the notion that keys have an associated trust level. That your personal key can be trusted by you, implicitly. Your friend’s key, depending on how you came into position may have a high level of trust associated with it, that this key is in fact his or hers. Furthermore, you can sign other people’s keys, an endorsement of the validity of that key. You see, public keys are what the system uses to encrypt secure messages that only the key holder knows how to decrypt using their private key. By introducing the notion of trust and the digital signing of keys, Zimmermann started what has to be seen as an early social web–a social graph of the people you could not only securely exchange email with but a social confidence of the key itself and by extension the individual’s digital identity.

In A Crowd of One: The future of individual identity, John Henry Clippinger starts working through how much society defines good and bad. Simply put, one person’s radical is another person’s hero. The examples are uncanny and for each of us there is one with which to resonate. If you make it past the prologue and the bulk of chapter one, you will be delighted by page just prior to chapter two, which lays out where you hoped the book would go. There are heavy-eye moments in chapter one where you think Clippinger is too smart for you and his messages are going to be far too academic to appreciate–page 24 turns it around.

Clippinger talks about how biological evolution is particularly challenging in that generations of “sexual selection and reproduction” need to pass to accomplish the natural order. Societal evolution on the other hand can happen quickly and most participants in the modern world can attest, things they are a changin’.

Furthermore, it will become possible to have governance by algorithm—that is, have computer-based rules assign reputation scores, rate the performance of members of a social network, identify and expel free riders, and maintain the requisite checks and balances between competing interests.

We’re largely digital, we just haven’t appreciated what it can tell us about ourselves.

Both quotes from A Crowd of One, Page 24

Participation is often a key aspect of reputation in online venues where almost everyone is anonymous. An active forum participant rises through the ranks having established a history and dedication among participants accruing digital karma. E-Bay and Amazon have similar reputation models where the number of successful interactions connotes some degree of comfort in interacting with strangers or new products. Other social spaces like FaceBook display social graphs, implicit endorsements. Almost all of these cases either require a human to judge the content or trust in very week measures of past interaction. Regardless, as participants we leave an endless trail of social data, something Google is more than happy to store forever and bring together. Our infatuation with the social graph and the affiliation with social spaces is rooted in the quest to see our own reflection. Other people help manifest our identity (or identities) and in reflecting on our connection, attitudes and culture we participate in societal evolution. We are largely digital and while we have not yet appreciated how much of our web teaches us, we are far more ignorant of what it could tell us that we cannot see or do not know.

Some cultures have teachings of how painfully alone we are as beings, that we are very much isolated, despite our unquenchable desire to connect with others. As children moving through years four to six, we develop self-consciousness at a very specific point in time – at one point it is another child in the mirror and then suddenly we know it is us. Humans are unaware of themselves and then once aware struggle to manage their identity. We construct much of our reality as a means for creating our identity and look to others to reflect and locate how far we have come. In a digital world where the social network is out in the open, how does a more sophisticated notion of trust, identity and security come about? Is it the culmination of all I do online? Who is I? Which email address? Which identity? How many social connections do I need before I am trusted? At what cost do we ascertain identity?

Zimmermann was on to something–decentralizing authority, driving validation into the network and ensuring confidentiality. Clippinger brings us full circle, showing us that our digital fingerprints and the systems that judge us will be equal actors in constructing who we are. If the rest of this book is as good, we are in for a treat!

Neuropsychology could have easily been my first profession. My fascination for the brain and appreciation for how little and much we know of it has always captivated my logical and imaginative thought.

I just finished the book, Wider Than The Sky: The Phenomenal Gift of Consciousness, where Gerald Edelman, M.D., Ph. D. covers an impressive amount of information refuting that consciousness is solely metaphysical. While anyone can argue there is mystery to the brain, Edelman’s work is persuasive – there are neurological constructs which give rise to consciousness.

Quale (IPA [ ˈkwɑːle]) is the way something feels, an experienced conscious moment. The definition’s subtly fails to describe the complex recipe that comprises a feeling –

sensory input, consequences of motor activity, imagery, emotions, fleeting memories, bodily sensations and a peripheral fringe. (p. 61)

Our experience, being conscious of being conscious naturally contains all of these things all of the time. It would be trivializing to say it is like a movie where only audio and visual aspects are perceived. Qualia consider the past, the current and the possible future, all at the same moment, all the time, becoming part of the categorized catalog of discriminated conscious states influencing future qualia.

In order to fully understand the data set that is flowing throughout the brain, we would actually need to be that body, that brain. The information outside of that context can only be imagined. An example used was, “what would it be like to be a bat?” illustrating the complexity – it would actually be easier to understand what it would be like to be another human, but is quite literally, impossible.

Recently on CBS Sunday Morning, Mo Rocca questioned if as we live longer and medical technology continues to deliver higher quality transplant and artificial replacement, will you still be you? Assuming that the replacement of an organ is successful, the brain would read the new organ as part of new quale. What happens to the qualia associated with the failed organ? Does the brain simply treat those discriminations as part of a phantom part of a quale – similar to the sensation some people experience when losing a limb, or, is some of the data lost forever? Does the new organ have the ability to read the data stream as part of the body and brain? Does the replacement organ, know something that the failing organ did not?

So, Mo, I think the answer is yes, probably, you will still be you, but a different you.