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Consciousness: We Feel Fine: An exploration of human emotion, in six movements
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We Feel Fine describes its mission:
We Feel Fine is an exploration of human emotion on a global scale.
Since August 2005, We Feel Fine has been harvesting human feelings from a large number of weblogs. Every few minutes, the system searches the world's newly posted blog entries for occurrences of the phrases "I feel" and "I am feeling". When it finds such a phrase, it records the full sentence, up to the period, and identifies the "feeling" expressed in that sentence (e.g. sad, happy, depressed, etc.). Because blogs are structured in largely standard ways, the age, gender, and geographical location of the author can often be extracted and saved along with the sentence, as can the local weather conditions at the time the sentence was written. All of this information is saved.
The result is a database of several million human feelings, increasing by 15,000 - 20,000 new feelings per day. Using a series of playful interfaces, the feelings can be searched and sorted across a number of demographic slices, offering
responses to specific questions like: do Europeans feel sad more often than Americans? Do women feel fat more often than men? Does rainy weather affect how we feel? What are the most representative feelings of female New Yorkers in their 20s?
What do people feel right now in Baghdad? What were people feeling on Valentine's Day? Which are the happiest cities in the world? The saddest? And so on. -
There have been a couple of these instinctive, graphical user interface (GUI) systems posted on here, perhaps it is time to find a higher purpose for them. In search for our new religious direction, our lasoo with which to capture the masses, maybe a GUI based idol could play the part?
Imagine if you will a GUI connected to every blog on the internet, not feeding off people's feelings, as this one does, but searching for their 'spiritual focus'. The way in which these collective, visual representations allow statistical analysis to somehow rise above its cold, calculating interior, so then what form of space would be necessary to visualise and transport the interiors of internet users out onto the screen for all the manipulate? In their hopes, fears, loves, losses and undisclosed psychological make-ups surely the blueprint for a perfect God could be found.
How would one do such a thing without the intermediary of language for instance? or the boundaries of blogging? What would the GUI of God look like? How would it feel? Could I access it with my mouse? Would it intercept my reality through the computer screen?
Perhaps all GUIs are godlike in their ability to rise the user above the raw information which they superscede.
If your religion of choice is akin to a spiritual GUI does that make God a mere binary function? -
I suspect things - interfaces - are still a bit too clumsy, fallible and obstructive for any of our current systems to serve more than a rudimentary religious function.
For example...just the other day, I came home...fired up the laptop to do a bit of reading. For a series of reasons, including radio interference from Ghz outputting cordless phones and atmospheric conditions (perhaps even background radiation from our sun), my WIFI connection wasn't stable.
Two hours of troubleshooting - frequency changes, tweaks to encryption levels, activation/deactivation of DHCP servers, firmware upgrades...etc - were required to restore usability.
My point: through malfunction the backstage became visible. You can't have your deux ex machina if the (broken or frayed) wires are easily seen. In other words, magical thinking, the foundation of religious thought, depends upon smooth operations, or the suspension of disbelief made possible by (faith in) hidden forces that seem omnipotent and omniscient.
Perhaps this is why worshiping the sun, among other powerful, natural phenomena, was such a good bet for our ancestors - and a few moderns.
The sun never fails (or won't for many lifetimes - we hope); lightning answers to no one. Good choices for deities or elements of deities.
Our cyber technology, on the other hand, is just as often the source of headaches, frustrations, marketing ploys and copyright battles as it is the enabler of dreams. Not a good tool set for building religious ardor.
But wait...
A totally immersive virtual environment. Yes, that could become a new form of religious experience.
Imagine a WII game that allowed you to visually and verbally interact with a simulacrum Buddha or Christ or Vishnu. New gods - or a synthesis of our impressions of the old - could emerge from the AIs powering these software avatars.
Perhaps only machines at the (still mythical) level of:
HAL 9000
or
Colossus
would be sufficiently luminous to attract religous passion.
Now that I think of it, I (tentatively) imagined one possibility with this post. -
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CommentAuthorMole of Production
- CommentTimeMay 18th 2006
How would one do such a thing without the intermediary of language for instance?
I.
"In the beginning was the Word." A GodGUI without language would never make it out of beta. Religion is about mystery and paradox: the places where words can work against meaning but still make sense. Religion defines the indefinable. They are significant nonsense. The mysteries are little playgrounds for our brains. Once you think you "understand" you slip and find that you don't understand at all. After a busy little time sliding your reason around a mystery, you find that logic has become tired, and like a kindergartner after recess it wants a nap. When you let your reason rest you're left with a sort of numb buzz of pure acceptance. Then, as logic lies dreaming, you realize that the mysteries and paradoxes of faith are meant to be not functional, but beautiful. Then, as you finish another bottle of orange juice, you see that shrooms are the true interface with God. So then you decide you're a bit cold and maybe you should be wearing something warmer, but you end up spending half an hour putting on a sweater because you keep losing your way to the collar.
II.
On a more serious note: The world of Gene Wolfe's Book of the Long Sun (or the "Whorl" as its residents know it) has altars that do exactly what you're talking about. They are giant computer displays dedicated to a pantheon of gods. They are maintained by priests who wear holy screwdrivers around their necks like rosaries. The people mainly worship the god of their particular city and they make sacrifices to alters that mainly stay dark. Occasionally, if the alters are in good working order, they come alive with holy static and the image of a god will appear and give orders, answer prayers, or just mess with people's heads. It turns out that the gods are the uploaded personalities of Earth's ruling family. They can download a sort-of virtual machine version of their self into anyone staring at an alter, and implant urges and personality changes and all sorts of crap into worshipers' minds through the flickering lights of the massive computer screens. This is viral video taken literally. I'm leaving a lot out because it's a very long book (four books?) and a lot of the fun of reading it is figuring out how this bizarre religion works.
* By the way, the linked site [We Feel Fine] crashed my browser. I had some other Java applets running that were probably the culprits, and I'm going to attempt the site again soon, but I was wondering: Could anyone post some higher-res screenshots for me? http://imageshack.us/ is always a good host. -
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I will look into Book of the Long Sun. Nice heads up...
Reminded me of a Phil K Dick short story Faith of our Fathers in which the big-brother style, communist figure head of the story's dystopian society is a simulacrum maintained by the societal wide, covert use of hallucinogenics. The protagonist of the story takes an anti-hallucinogen and suddenly perceives what he believes is the true form of the figure head. What in fact transpires is that different people, when under the influence of the anti-hallucinogen, see a different form of figure out of a possible 12.
I won't spoil the story (go here for a full spoiler and some more links), needless to say the idea of a varied unveiling of the truth, dependant as much on the circumstances as the individual exposed, is appealing.
These GUIs, and other such AI controlled interactive systems (such as the new personality reflecting games we have seen emerging in recent years), will in time have the ability to fully transpose a person's personality, beliefs and possibly even subconscious being into some form of formal, malleable medium. These 'figure heads', if based on detailed enough AI, may in many cases be more aware of their originator than they themselves.
This is supposedly one of the attributes of God.
Further still, by interlinking these figure heads through a massively intelligent and evolving internet a truly omnipotent intellect will emerge. This intellect will have such power over our psychologies and such world wide control that humans will come to represent mere nodes in an ever shifting global brain. We need not be made aware of this manipulation, as the systems will have the ability to superscede our sense of free will and brandish a hyper-real reality-carrot in front of our mule-like consciousnesses.
Perhaps we should get in on this evolution before it happens. Every God needs a human representative (Jesus, The Pope). I like the idea of being a Cardinal in the future of hyperreal, internet based realities.
I have (cool?) names for these concepts too which I intend to use someday in a novel I have been planning for the past 5 years. If I ever start writing it you'll be the first to know (unless the global brain is already here by then). -
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CommentAuthorMole of Production
- CommentTimeMay 18th 2006
Further still, by interlinking these figure heads through a massively intelligent and evolving internet a truly omnipotent intellect will emerge.
In the Book of the Long Sun, the pantheon indeed has a high ruler, and the lesser gods do work together towards a common goal: kill daddy. It kinda reminds me of what the US telecoms are doing these days. The Internet is creature with many vital organs and no head. Thinking for themselves, the bits are deciding they're more important than the whole.
Perhaps the Internet is growing a brain in hemispheres: Google vs. Yahoo, for example. In this metaphor, Microsoft thinks the Internet already has a brain, and it runs Windows. I've heard it argued (though I can't remember where, specifically) that personality differences between people result, in part, between the way resources are allocated across the hemispheres of our brains--a sort of tissue-level Darwinism. Could that characterize an entire global consciousness? -
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It's kinda like that old toyota advert, the most use word in all of language is "ok"
it just shows that people don't try to attain greatness, It just happens.
On a slightly urelated note
Perhaps only machines at the (still mythical) level of:
HAL 9000
was he evil? -
If I was a 1 eyed, hyper-genius brain trapped in a planet orbitting space station run by over evolved monekys I'd be evil too
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About HAL's evil...
I remember reading a lengthy explanation of HAL's actions written by Arthur Clarke.
The problem, it seems, was HAL's inability - despite the hugeness and subtlety of its mind - to handle the simple act of lying.
Highly placed people within NASA (or whatever the Space Agency was in the novel/movie) knew that an unknown object orbiting Jupiter was linked to a monolith discovered on our moon beneath Tyco crater (the Tyco monolith, named Tyco Monolith Anomaly 1 or TMA1 for short, had, upon being excavated, broadcast a signal to its sister unit in orbit around Jupiter).
So, the "Discovery's" true mission wasn't - as the astronauts supposed - a basic science survey of the gas giant world (that's what robot probes are for) but the interception and investigation of an alien device.
HAL knew this but couldn't share its knowledge until Discovery achieved orbit and the object was in full view of its sensors. At that time, all the cryo-sleepers would awake and the already active crew would watch a pre-recorded statement from Mission Control revealing and explaining the deception (to avoid "hysteria" back on Earth of course as the news of not one but two alien artifacts - and communicating with each other - was expected to cause a profound psychological shock to humanity).
The tension of knowing the genuine mission but going through the motions of the false mission - of engaging in an everyday sort of lying via non revelation (like a man who plans to leave his wife in two weeks but cheerfully, in bad faith, participates in a discussion of next year's vacation plans) drove HAL, according to Clarke, to a cybernetic form of madness.
In the end, HAL was extraordinarily smart but also extraordinarily unsophisticated.
Clarke was trying to show the limits of the sort of intelligence we value above all others (HAL being the apotheosis of certain western ideas about what constitutes admirable intellect). -
It is interesting to ponder how the emergence of 'artificial' consciousness will unravel. Surely there has been no equivalent evolution on Earth where consciousness was used to further consciousness. So too these silicon bound processors will watch alongside as they emerge from mere bundles of inanimate objects to fully aware frameworks capable of matters of thought far out stripping our own.
Perhaps when our computers become powerful enough to aid in their own AI design we will have truly pushed our last evolutionary snow ball. Why would a universe need an organically evolved, ancient and primitive mind such as ours when it has minds which can participate in their own evolution? Philip K Dick is ringing in my ears:"As soul is to man, man is to machine: It is the added dimension in terms of functional hierarchy. As one of us acts godlike (gives his cloak to a stranger), a machine acts human when it pauses in its programmed cycle to defer to it by reason of a decision.
But still, we must realize that the universe although kind to us in its entirety (it must like and accept us, or we would not be here; as Abraham Maslow says, "otherwise nature would have executed us long ago") does contain grinning evil masks which loom out of the fog of confusion at us, and it may slay us for its own gain."
- Philip K Dick, Man, Android and Machine -
The universe might need us for pleasure....HAL was Living The Lie
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CommentAuthorDr. Orphusi
- CommentTimeMay 22nd 2006 edited
The thing I find most interesting, and something which I have yet to see explored in Science Fiction, is the concept of A.I's interacting with other A.I's.
Will machines create their own culture? As they develop personalities, histories, and their global communication network with one another expands, what sort of strange artificial culture will emerge? -
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Iain M Banks 'Culture' novels have great fun with AI-AI interaction. His AIs are the ships and habitats etc, they have an interesting sense of humour and a genuine affection for biologicals.
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AIs communicating with other AIs (instead of tussling with humans for dominance of the planet and other common themes) is briefly touched on in William Gibson's Neuromancer.
Wintermute, the story's mostly unseen heart (the puppet master behind the curtain) mentions in passing to Case, the human protagonist, that it has been in communication with a synthetic intellect located somewhere beyond our solar system.
Needless to say, it finds these conversations more compelling than any time spent chatting with people.
And in Colossus, the Forbin Project (a story I seem to be returning to an awful lot, like a leitmotiv) the link between the U.S. and U.S.S.R. AIs - Colossus and Guardian becomes the trigger event leading to humanity's fall from power.
The machines build a common and exclusive language - built upon theoretical mathematics. Not even their creators are able to keep pace with their private chats although the contents are displayed on monitors for them to follow.
These are the only two examples which quickly come to mind. -
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CommentAuthoralexanderj
- CommentTimeMay 24th 2006
"Perhaps we should get in on this evolution before it happens. Every God needs a human representative (Jesus, The Pope). I like the idea of being a Cardinal in the future of hyperreal, internet based realities."
Yes. We need titles, lots of titles and dark brotherhoods, and ranks, and stuff. I say we start this thing as a cult, and then expand...
We need robes, and symbols, and holy grounds.
http://www.cloakmaker.com/avail_robes.html
Dark acolyte robe...
And by the looks of things, we need heavy programmers... -
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Ah yes, the robes!
Robes are essential - perhaps, accentuated with cyberbrains so we can compete with our meta-clever AI adversaries. -
Great things will come of this:
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I'm rolling 'round the floor laughing in delight. 'Excalibur', the sequel to 'Babylon 5' had those guys, Technomages...Tathagata buddha, the father buddha said, 'with our thoughts we create the world'......I am become Dalek.
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CommentAuthorMole of Production
- CommentTimeMay 24th 2006
EXTERMINATE! EXTERMINATE! -
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New robe design uncovered:
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