Why Fish Didn't Invent the Fishbowl

I was recently in some deep thought about a very simple question, which is why fish didn't invent the fishbowl. Surely it is of more utility to them than really anyone else. For them, the fishbowl could revolutionize their way of life. For us, it is merely an amusement at the dentist's office to stare at while dreading being probed with an ice pick then told to use a softer toothbrush. If the fish could make somehow manage to figure out how to make a fish tank it could effectively some of the means needed to colonize the world. New World Order via Goldfish. 

Having said this, I would venture to say that the fish hasn't invented the fish tank of bowl or even the canon used to launch horny adult salmon upstream because they're way too dumb. In fact, the next closest thing to the fish bowl in terms of tools usage by a non-human species is a stick chimps use to dig ants out of a nest. Let's get this clear for the sake of understanding. While goldfish have been given a bad reputation about having 6 second memories, which to the best of my knowledge they do not, the goldfish still lost to a stick. By human standards, a goldfish's IQ would be so low that it would not only be technically be considered profoundly retarded, but if anyone were to do what the goldfish does (stare at things all day and blow bubbles), they would be declared dead*. And that is why computers will never take over the world. 

[abrupt segway]

If one considers the intricacy of a modern day cpu, the kind one finds at bestbuy, they will soon find that although it may do quite well the things it is designed to do (facebook and the obligatory Crysis on full), it does not at all do anything else. A quad-core i7 has about 1,400,000,000 transistors. How much of that is taken up to manage the "autonomic" parts of the computer, such as running the fans, managing the power supply, etc? Honestly, not too much. In fact, barely any. However, for the goldfish, a significant portion of it's neurons are taken up in moving the tail to stay afloat or getting water to run over its gills. It does this, but on a higher level. It's vision is better than Microsoft kinect, it's homeostasis is better than the temp monitor in a laptop, and it's much better at finding food than a computer is at finding electricity. Well then what about the rest of the Cpu that's running your video games and social networks? Well, what does a goldfish do besides stay alive? One simple thing. It makes decisions. Now from experience, I'm sure we can all agree that the ability to make a decision does not make you smart (*cough, politicians*). However, the ability to make forward thinking, decisive, and effective decisions does. And it's quite clear, that if a goldfish were not capable of making such decisions, it would be extinct. I am indeed now implying that a computer can not make such decisions, and it is an implication with intention. Surely, someone out there is thinking of an objection that somewhat follows the lines of "Oh, but a goldfish just follows its programming too. It gets stimulus, and reacts to it according it's instincts and what not." I don't know much about programming, but from the amount I've gathered by osmosis from my compsci friends, I think I can reasonably say that the way programming works is that a computer is told what to do in the event of what. Basically, conditions are described, and a response is coded for it. Imagine now, if you had to code for the life of a wild goldfish. Could you make it swim in a straight line? Probably. Curves? Yeah. Okay, could you have it recognize the outline of the shadow of a predator and be alert but not alarmed because it might just ignore you but surreptitiously position yourself for a fight or flight response wherein all the muscles in your body will aid you in the preservation of your life and you're shutting down digesting lunch because that's not needed right now so all the enzymes need to be reduced as much as possible which relies really on what you had, but at the same time the heart rate is going up and everything is getting tense because here comes a huge fish and you're just a stupid goldfish oh and this all has to happen in an instant because there's no loading screen on the food chain? I'd say that's a bit more of a challenge. But surely, at some point, the computer could get so smart that it programs itself, right? Goldfish do that too. It's called guess and check. The ones that guess wrong get checked by something that thinks it's delicious. In short, a computer doesn't make decisions concerning it's wellbeing and preservation. Should you try to code it to, the world's best effort will still fall short of the decision making power of a orange sliver the size of your thumb sold in plastic bags at the county fair. 

And with all their computational prowess, the goldfish still can't figure out how to put together a freaking fish bowl. What chance then does the computer have at taking over the world? If a goldfish makes a braindead vegetable of a human, then a computer surely would make a dead dead rock of one. Now according to Moore's law, the day is quickly approaching where there will be computers with as many transistors as a human has neurons, but still it will only be able to do what it has been told to do. Indeed, the aforementioned intel core has more transistors than an adult zebra fish has neurons (I tried to look up the number for the goldfish, but wikipedia declined to share that information). In light of this, it's safe to assume that the intricacy of life lay not in the algorithmic complexity of the some brainiac processor, but rather in how it works. According to Neil deGrasse Tyson, there are about the same number of neurons in the human brain as there are stars in the galaxy, so I daresay that computers have a lot of catching up to do.

*In some countries, being braindead constitutes being totally dead

Chivalry and Propriety

I hear a lot of people say these days that chivalry is dead. This statement isn't really wrong, as a definition of chivalry primarily equates it to knights and noblemen, and these days, people get knighted for writing books or being actors, and nobility definitely seems more and more simply a distinction of heredity rather than character. However, while my pedantic soul is satiated, my practical soul is not. Chivalry, as the popular definition goes, is a set of mannerism that pertain primarily to the social operations of a male and dictate that he do things for other people for no apparent reason besides that he can, in his small way, make being alive suck a little less. This, people claim, is dead.

Is it really? Because to understand this concept, one should break it down. Chivalry, according to what people seem to think (when they bother), is made up of two parts: doing things for no reason, and decreasing world suck. Surely, no one would argue that people are any more prone to adhering to reason now than they have ever been. On the contrary, many would argue just the opposite. Likewise with decreasing world suck, many people do many things that decrease world suck, even if some would say it isn't enough.

No, Chivalry isn't dead. Propriety is dead. By propriety, I mean quite simply, acting properly. Acting properly should be a social norm, like letting people step off a bus before getting on, not standing in the middle off a walkway, or moving your bag from the seat next to you so someone else can use it. This is what I mean by propriety. People haven't forgotten to be nice to each other, as the bewailed death of chivalry may suggest, we know full well exactly what nice is. What we've forgotten is what it might be like to be someone besides ourselves. The death of propriety, I believe, is one of the major reasons society today has gone to the dogs of hedonistic degradation. I hesitate to assert that people now only think about themselves and and only that, because your average person, my optimistic self wants to believe, is quite a kind person (or at the least, neutral in this regard). But there is a reason why while the individual can be affable, empathetic, and relating, groups of people somehow transcend all sense of moderation and often go to extremes and polarize themselves again and again to the side if illegality, rambunctiousness, belligerence, and most often, downright stupidity. This is because we no longer have a sense of propriety. We don't have what it takes to conceive of another person's mind, and thus, riots of people destroy everything they contact with their caustic hostility and hive mind. Senseless destruction of private, commercial, and even public places have become a norm, for the riots of this day and age.

Honestly, I have no propositions on how to solve this problem. All I know is that if I do my best to not give in to the tunnel vision of vanity that I have come to despise, maybe my life and that of those around me won't be as terrible to live. And perhaps, if we all believe this, that would be all we need.

Words and Wûrds

As humans, we are constantly trying to find ways to express ourselves. The way we dress, speak,  smile and laugh. Or more importantly, why we laugh; rather, what we laugh at. An amusing spectacle, a clever joke, the sight of something loving, or perhaps something loved. I believe that all laughter, all emotion, perhaps all expression, are caused by two things. Words, and wûrds. They sound the same, and in many respects they are, or at least they seem to be. But what they are, how they work, and move us so, is very different. What is a word? A word is something said; something spoken, written, inscribed.  A byte of sound or perhaps sight that holds a meaning all to itself. A banner written in blue text says just the same thing as one written in red. The cloth may be black, white, green, the font may be sans serif, old roman trajan, or simple ariel; the banner may be held high, pinned to a wall, or used as a rug. So long as people can read it, the words say the same thing. their meaning is clear. In this way, words can unite us. They transcend generations. The words of Plato or the apostle John can be read just as clearly in their time as ours. Words are an encapsulation of a feeling that the reader is then in charge if interpreting. A reader of Plato can learn to love his city, or despise it’s citizens. A reader of the Bible may devote his or her life to it’s cause, it’s following, or scoff and reject it. Wûrds then, are just the opposite. Wûrds are a statement of the universe, felt through an expression. A wûrd can be as simple as a color in the mind’s eye, a flutter in the heart, the taste of air between one’s teeth. When man speaks with words, he becomes a orator. A person who rouses crowds or persuades a nation, but when  man speaks with wûrds, he is called an artist. A person whose fingertips dance on keys or strings, a person whose hands beat in rhythm, a person whose throat cries in soaring arches of somber or delightful melody. These things cannot be expressed except by one man’s wûrds, but can be understood by as many as can hear it. Music, paintings, and sculpture are all things that can speak to people from all nations, upbringings, backgrounds, and languages. When these two things work together, great things are born (by great I intend to express magnitude, not necessarily positivity). Where words on a page run together in your mind in chemical reactions, forming wûrds, or perhaps where a singer’s lyric is impressed by the melody and harmonic to which it is sung. However, because humans are human, we screw up even this simplicity. People use music to try to speak in just words, and poetry is excreted into being by people attempting to state their expression. However amid this, some things last the test of time. There are still work around that speak to this greater testament, this greater consonance between the two methods of communication of the universe. Perhaps whenthoughts are shaped, channeled, and outlined; when his feelings and current of unconsciousness can be tapped and bring forth understanding and enlightenment.

The Slow Fade

I remember reading an article in National Geographic a while ago about a nomadic tribe that lived somewhere in the dry bush of Africa. What struck me most, was how the writer finished the article, which was by describing what the tribal customs were concerning the death of one of the members. When one of theirs died, there was no ceremony, there were no dances or rituals, no story telling, no wayward spirituality. The body was simply covered with dirt or leaves and the tribe simply moved on. To my western brain, this felt so... wrong. The fact that someone could die and never have existed seemed so foreign to me. But also somehow beautiful in it's simplicity.

These days, when someone dies, they never die all at one. Sure, there is the moment when they take their last breath, or their heart stops and they are declared medically dead (different definitions of medical death somewhat blur this line), but at that moment, they don't truly die. They die in bits and pieces. In fact, for some people, their funeral ceremony or wake begets more life than they have lived in a while. No, now dying only really begins with death. After death, their body is prepared, and people are amassed together to commemorate what once was. They are stuck in a box in the ground and covered in dirt. But they don't die then. They live on in the memories of those that knew them. every person has a different memory of someone that they knew who died, and those together constitute, together, what the person is now. Then one by one, things are forgotten. Phone numbers deleted, photographs thrown away, the dust from their skin swept up and thrown out. Them all that new him die, and those that knew stories of him die, then those that knew his name, until he has passed out of memory and time. However, is that possible in this day and age? Won't the coroner or city hall always have record of the death? won't there be an online yearbook with his name in it somewhere? Won't there be some hard drive with tax records or credit card statements that just sit there whirling away for decades? When will the dead truly die?

It seems impossible for someone that lives now to ever... die. There will be some version of them out their, some tether preventing them from ever leaving this earth. For this tribe, perhaps a deceased will be named no more than three generations on, and then no longer be. This is something that will seemingly never be granted those who live in a developed nation. Perhaps when the bank we used goes out of business, or there's a flood in the local courthouse or library we will be granted some reprieve, but really, most of us will just have to wait until the sun blows up and scorches everything we know into a crisp, or some alien race comes and trashes our planet. 

Treatise on Fear

It has recently occurred to me that people fear an excessive amount these days. There are rational fears, like driving near large cars and gangsters with daddy issues, then there are the every day fears. So many people complain about being afraid of missing a TV show, or being afraid of talking to a girl. All these are really the same fear- the fear of screwing up. What we fear isn't that not watching the TV show will make us miss out on vital information like what to do if some has a heart attack, and a loved one could possibly die in the near future because of you not sitting down in front of a glowing screen at a certain time of day, nor are we afraid that the girl we fear talking to is really a secret assassin that we might accidentally piss off on the wrong day and be killed. No, what we fear is missing out on the enjoyment that this show could bring us, or the possibility of a relationship. We fear missing out on the best life, or at least having a better one. You'd only be afraid of missing a show if you knew somehow that it was likely to be good, just like you'd only be scared of a woman if you had suspected that she might actually be awesome. In short, our fears are not present fears, but future ones, fears that might result in loss or failure in the future.

Human beings have a singular adaptive strategy that far propels us beyond the world of beasts, which is the ability to learn. We're not the fastest animals (though we can run ridiculous distances), we're not the strongest animals, we don't really have fangs and out claws are crap, but have the unique ability to learn. What defines an animals's evolutionary adaptiveness are not only its physical features and abilities, but behavior. A dog's fear response of tensing up and making its snarling bark is part of what makes it a dog. Humans, on the other hand, have the ability to change our behaviors over time, to an extent that is unseen in any other living thing. We can learn to drive cars and cook, use jackhammers and plant trees. These are things that are passed down the community, because humans form communities not only to birth, but raise children. This understanding, however, comes with a rather large caveat: it expanded the range of our fears. If you can now rationalize that 1. you don't have fur, so 2. you should wear a jacket because 3. the forecast said it would be cold later, then we can rationalize that a thin jacket would probably be inferior to a thicker one, and perhaps there would be a wind due to the incoming front so a jacket that's purely insulative would maybe not be the best choice. Neither would a jacket without a hood, but perhaps wearing hat and scarf would be just as useful. Well, this hat covers the ears and the jacket has a high collar, so maybe a scarf isn't needed. All the same, one should bring it because should the wind pick up or the temperature drastically drop, it would help a lot. However, if that were to be the case, one would want a thicker hat, but the one that you've got doesn't match the scarf entirely, or the outfit for that matter. It should be better to change entirely.

As much of a farce as this scenario is, this kind of thinking is more common than not. In fact, I would venture to say that nearly everyone has experienced some form of this runaway thought sometime in their life, if not on a daily basis. This future thinking is so different from the kind of thing that the limbic system is supposed to deal with that it doesn't know what to do with it, so it manifests in one way: fear. Stepping out the door now in the jacket, hat, and scarf, of your reluctant consensus, doubts start to creep back, making you fear that you've made the wrong choice. And physiologically, this fear manifests itself in much the same way as if you've just entered into a dark forrest- increased heartbeat, uncertain stride, protective body language, etc. These future fears have such a hold on people that we're always fighting through the future to be in the present.

What then should be done? Letting this fear control us, especially of something so immaterial, is nothing short of ludicrous. It's a terrible thing to give up living in the "now" for living in the "if". In all honesty, I don't know.

You May Now Disregard the Bride

I've recently noticed a disturbing trend amongst the general public that has taken over may aspects of society and popular culture in the past few years. This is trend seems simply to be a change in our relationship to information. Information has changed a lot in the past few years, mostly that now there is 1. much more of it, and 2. it is everywhere. Just 100 years ago, an average person probably saw not more than 50 books in their life, let alone read them. These days, a single shelf of a single floor of a single library in a single town of a single state is likely to contain more literature than most people will read in their lifetimes. A person could spend the rest of their life understanding the market data from the last hour of stock exchanges and probably never finish. Availability of information is in no way a problem for anyone in a developed nation. 

Why then are people more ignorant than ever? If information is everywhere, why is so much of it being ignored or discounted? I believe that our relationship to information has changed because we no longer have to earn it. This is what I mean: growing up, I had an encyclopedia set in my house. Well, two actually- One was a children's edition. Whenever I wanted to find a specific piece of knowledge, I had to get on a stool, pull down a heavy book of a high shelf, and flip through it, floundering with my third grade spelling skills until I got to the one entry that I wanted. If there was a word or an idea in there that I didn't understand, I had to look that up in a dictionary or the encyclopedia too. This laborious process of acquisition of knowledge is a mere triviality compared to how information was sought after historically, but I think it serves as an apt example for the relationship to knowledge that people used to have. We used to have to labor actually exert effort to find what it is I wanted to know. 

Now, the internet has more articles and entries than anyone could begin to compute, so we rely on google to tell me which ones are the most reliable or important. This is a fundamental change. Because people no longer have to work at it, they am much more likely to discount the information that I do find, simply because they unconsciously think that the lack of effort which which they found this information is the same as the lack of effort someone put into getting it there. Now in come cases, this happens to be true. Anyone can start a blog or write something about a a topic they know nothing about, and indeed, a significant portion of the internet is false, or at best misguided truth. However, this becomes dangerous when we take this attitude toward genuine resources of knowledge, such as the work of scientists or historians, i.e. people that actually know something about something. For them, the labour of the 20 page article you just read isn't in the writing of twenty pages, which would be the equivalent of the labour you put into attain the knowledge, it was the hours and hours of research and thinking and being very wrong so they could find out how to be a little right. It was the frantic grant applications and the long nights of slaving away at a fragment of codex or a pipette and microscope. That is what we are discounting when we don't take seriously their work. 

We used to be married to our information, and had to work and learn to love what we learned, even if what we found wasn't what we wanted. And some people still are in such a way married, and they are in no way the people I am addressing here. I'm addressing the Mitch McConnells and the Ragen Chastains of this world. Information is not just words, any more than music is just noise. If you're not a scientist, that's okay. Listen to one. If you're not a doctor, that's fine. Listen to one. There is an, for all intents and purposes, infinite supply of information in this world. If you choose to be dumb, that is by all means your right. But don't try to pass your stupidity off for anything else except what it is.