Welcome to XBox720! Now with Enhanced Brain Analysis Game Play! Please put the MS Brain Sensor Headband (tm) on. Now plug it in to the XBox720. No, not in THAT plug - that's the 120 volt AC auxilary power outl...ooops. Hello? Hello? Oh oh. (boss, can I blame this on Clippy?)
Ballmer: "Another happy though silent Microsoft customer! YEEEEEEHAHHHHH!" (dances)
Sorry, but I have trademarked the phrase 'Intellectual Property' for my new real estate firm which specializes in homes for professors. Please cease and desist usage on this forum.
On your statement, "Okay, ignoring the fact that I fail to believe that we are anywhere near even a rudimentary simulation of primitive emotional concepts, not matter how abstracted, when it comes to implementing an AI" I'll agree insofar as these particular researchers, who are nowhere near correct. (And their basing things on the 'Five Factor' model of personality, which is junk theory though widely accepted, is appalling.)
However, I can say with great certainty it is not only possible to enact emotion in a cognitive system, but is being done right now. I'm doing it and developing real software systems employing it. The standard computer model of emotion in computing, called the OCC Model, is partly wrong. It misses what's really happening in humans. I've developed a more correct model that works very very well and probably matches the mechanism people use. I haven't published it. Why? Because some of my key competitors are Google and Microsoft. (Yes, Google's working on AI, shades of Skynet, eh?) Anyway, it is far easier to build systems that accurately have and express emotion that ones that can read human emotions. In other words, having and expressing (output) are easy enough, reading deep emotion in others (input) is much more difficult.
A few ending remarks. A lot of people are working on not much more than toy AI, and I've read some DoD-sponsored papers that are so far off base they are sad. I believe the correct approach combines both symbolic and analog AI (NNs) in a new way, and that we can create reasonable emulations, if not parallels, of human cognition. But they must come from a decent merging of psychology, sociology, and computing science. I've been working on the right path, a very productive one, charting a new course, and am writing what is currently a 5 volume book set I'd like to become the 'Knuth' of Synthetic Intelligence development. It should change the face of gaming and a few other things. Finally, I'm currently trying to emulate neuron-based systems in Erlang, by the way. Boy, is it parallel. I think that holds a lot of promise.
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Some background helps to understand this in the context of the electric power industry, and administration political power grabs. There are many companies involved in the chain from power generation to power coming out of your wall socket. These companies are not all anxious to upgrade from their existing levels of technology. This has a bearing as you'll see.
The process starts at a power generating facility which is owned by some company. Power is delivered to transmission lines which are typically owned by another company. Along the route, power may be switched and routed and handed off between various companies. On the receiving end, power goes to a substation, which could be owned by another company, and finally gets delivered to you locally.
At each stage along the way, each company typically has its own technologies for monitoring and control. Connecting data to and from each stage can be done in quite different and private ways. Generating plants may use SCADA, a standard for measurement and control, and it is best practice not to connect SCADA systems to the Internet. Instead, a lot of times, proprietary or limited comm links and protocols are used. Companies are loath to spend money to upgrade older systems to connect to newer technologies. Power industry management is often pretty conservative (ie cheap) regarding this.
I think the DHS Aurora demo was concocted to run a scare; there is some ulterior motive behind it beside mere security against hacking. The media have portrayed the simulation in such a way that it's easy for the public to get a first impression it was an actual attack. Because the industry is not about to spend billions to upgrade its hardware, the demo will not change too much. But this little play did score points for DHS. My guess is Aurora's whole purpose was to provide ammunition for a hot administration salesman to run past Congress to scare it into providing more money for DHS. Drama: "Look, a generator blowed up! Yow!" Never mind it being only a simulation. Congress being as technologically illiterate as we know it to be, is likely fall for it. Yet another DHS power grab, as it were. Just watch for another budget line item to get inserted in the middle of the night.
In many universes, THIS is first post. In some universes doomed to explode very, very soon, this is NOT first post. In some universes doomed to explode right now, Darl McBride is Emperor.
I'm going to add one more thing and then quit pontificating. It's a bit long and windy, but it has relevance to Heinlein's work.
In any culture, for people who have accepted that culture, religious beliefs (or avowed non-religious beliefs, for example atheism or even science) shape how to think and often exactly what to believe. For example, in certain religious systems, there are actually accepted and non-accepted forms of reasoning. This in turns affects how the people of that culture shape their values. So I note that morals and mores are actually driven by what core beliefs one's religion allows one to think about, and which one must accept without question.
For example, if a religion mandates a belief in an all-powerful creator who you must not question, you are stuck in a limited set of reasoning rules. You must accept core principles, you cannot contradict them regardless of whether they lead to paradoxes. Indeed, some limited reasoning systems lead to what might be a form of insanity if you consider its detachment from physical and social reality. The denial of reality in some cases really does constitute mental disfunction. One area where this gets interesting is when two major religions collide. Which one is sane, and which is not? Each may view the other as crazy and irrational by its rules, and its practitioners even subhuman. You can see where this leads. It would make a fine core theme for a book - and has many times. Another extension is when two parties hold conflicting views of economics or politics. One buys into one's choice of faith, and then views the world, often inflexibly, from that view.
Heinlein once qualified stories into several kinds; The Man Who Learned Better; Boy Meets Girl; and If This Goes On. The Man Who Learned Better is about conflicting belief systems that may lead to change, or force change. Eventually causing someone or ones to change their minds about core beliefs. Stories about disruptive technology or phenomena or new concepts are of this kind too, and most hard science fiction is of this kind. Starship Troupers was in part about conflicting major belief systems about the position of a race in the universe. Stranger in a Strange Land similarly. The Puppet Masters had the same core. Heinlein's Revolt in 2100 was about what happens when a dictatorial religion takes over a state, and what conflict and change might ensue. My point is, Robert Heinlein was an excellent writer about belief systems, but he did not necessarily force his personal view on readers, only tried to open their horizons. If he wrote something controversial, it was probably because he felt that controversy was a fine way to get the audience to think.
I'm sure they will be just as competent as the TSA. Every packet will be strip-searched, cavity-probed, and required to drink its own breast milk. All packets will have to take their shoes off. And all packets named Ted Kennedy will be put on a "No Fly" - oops I mean "No Route" - list. All in the name of protecting the purity of your ones and zeros. We don't want any Muslim data sullying our clean Baptist data bits.
Although Heinlein had a down-to-earth Missouri side celebrating ethical behavior, he did indeed explore a lot of weird cultural things. In considering these, one has to take into account that what a writer writes does not always reflect his personal beliefs; one can take liberties with reality and social beliefs. Why? Sometimes as exploration to see what audiences react to, and buy. In other words, a fiction writer writes fiction, not reality, and his aim is to sell. We write for money. If we write about cannibalistic psychiatrists who bite off faces, it doesn't mean we believe in doing that. It's done to make something interesting because it's novel. Heinlein like many authors threw a lot of things into his mixes. Maybe he was trying to add sex and controversy. However, with Stranger in a Strange Land and when in his 'influenced-by-blocked brain circulation' period, he certainly wrote some weird kinky stuff. I theorize, but cannot prove, it may have been a result of actual damage to some of his brain that affected reasoning about cultural mores, as well as cut into his self-discipline. I'm pretty sure his later inability to self-edit was hammered by the organic disfunction, resulting in his terribly self-indulgent lecturing later novels. The ones where an editor should have cut out every third word, and it would have been much improved.
Certainly in his earlier years he never showed any sign I know of of having major bizarre fantasies. Okay, there was that character who was his own father and mother and impregnated himself. But that one I doubt was a personal fantasy of his. All the rest of his earlier stuff was pretty normal sexually. What is interesting is that all his earlier work, when he was married to Leslyn, who had some mental illness, was very straight. A little sex in Beyond This Horizon, and in Revolt in 2100. But straight sex. And yet while married to Virginia who was a decent enough gal but conservative, he wrote the kinky stuff. You would think she would have been appalled. Maybe she was. I should go through the UC archives and see if there's any material showing her opinions.
I only touched briefly on key themes and did not cover all within a book. But most certainly Starship Troopers concerned itself in part with the relationship between individuals and society insofar as what a person owes the environment that nurtured him. That can be called duty. As long as a society is generally fair and just, if you were raised in it and took resources from it, you owe it. He constantly spoke of this through his puppet characters, such as the schoolteacher/veteran, and the concept of franchised citizens. Society has a duty to you, and if you did your part for society, you deserved to have a say in running it. If you did not, you had lesser rights. I believe this reciprocity to be fair. Nor is it supporting a police state as fools assert.
But I do disagree with you. On your reading of Heinlein's beliefs taken to extreme ends - which he did NOT - would you say he was demanding we respect animals and not eat meat? How about bacteria? Should our aim be to avoid killing germs? Or not bait a hook with a worm? Do not eat a fish? Do not kill a cow? He did not. Heinlein as an engineer would never have posited a Scientific Theory of Morality because such a concept is inherently self-contradictory, and as a military man he would have found it pragmatically naive. I find the term to be silly and on a par with Creation Science. Had the people founding and settling America believed this, they'd mostly have died with an arrow in their head, standing there debating whether to give flowers to the nice Indian or kill him. Your interpretation is putting beliefs and words in Heinlein's dead mouth, unable to defend himself. This is exactly the type of pompous autodidactism I despise.
You can't gain credibility for a religious belief by allying it with science. And morality, in the end, comes down to religious beliefs. People from different cultures hold different beliefs about codes of behavior, most of which ultimately derive from religion or the specific rejection of religion. If the religious beliefs differ, the morals differ, and even come into conflict. Who then will decide which religion is the true and valid one and the norm for beliefs about behavior? I certainly don't agree with your personal conclusion on morality, and to bring this to what might be your real issue or agenda, I support abortions, eating meat and killing when clearly necessary to prevent harm to masses of people. On the other hand, I do not support pre-emptive war done for self-aggrandizement nor for political reasons nor for commerce, i.e. oil. And those are my religious beliefs and my morals - so - on what basis can you tell me these are not worthy religious beliefs, and that I am not entitled to them? Or that Heinlein would oppose these principles? Let our gods duel.
I think the title originally was "I Will Fear No Editor" (okay, I joke) but it read like that, too. Not one of his greatest works. However his artery blockage problem was kicking in around then.
I'll stick my two cents in here. Heinlein's juveniles and many other works (up until the period when the transition in quality coming from his cerebral artery problem deeply hurt his work) all celebrated the human condition, and the ability of man to rise to noble heights. They also were cracking good stories, too. Heinlein does not deserve the denigration coming these days from academic hacks and people unable to understand what he was really getting at. He wrote of man's responsibility to society, over and over again, and I find it offensive when some dimwitted, unimaginative 'publish or perish' academic arrogantly demeans him.
In his time - a span of decades overlapping WWII - Heinlein was a giant and an inspiration to many engineers and scientists; any current critic dismissing him as a totalitarian Nazi is getting it completely wrong. His goal was to make money entertaining, true, but he aimed to inspire, he aimed at noble mores. He was not a literary cheat or a fraud and tried to give good value for the money. He was human and he made some mistakes in later years. But overall he saluted the best in man, championed the competent man in his stories. He was in favor of can-do, and held whiny slackers in disdain. If someone finds fault in that, the problem is with them, not him. His Starship Troopers was about genuine duty to man, unlike many of today's shallow military porn 'Sci-Fi" novels. (The movie adaptation was not his fault.) His Door Into Summer inspired me as a budding engineer. Today's lightweight bookstore rack-space fillers, by contrast, are shallow and disposable. I don't see many of them lighting the right sparks in growing minds like Heinlein did.
Re first serials, did you by any chance mean Colliers? I think he had early work in that magazine.
As for the worst story, Heinlein wrote one, under a pseudonym, for The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction that was about a talking alligator and oh boy was it a bomb. He was trying to be light and comedic but it was like tapdancing in lead shoes. It may well have been that story.
There's a whole huge discussion I cannot begin to cover here. For instance, what do you mean by the term 'thoughts'? We think without language sometimes, but can output that by mapping to words in a language. Other times we think only in words of a language. So if you talk about mind-reading, you first have to define what is thought. And that's too large to cover here.
But on mindreading, I know it looks ridiculous to say it just cannot be done. But it can't with present or nearterm science or technology, and nothing is on the horizon capable of doing it. Sometimes science fiction can't be realized, and this is one of those cases. What makes me make such a bald statement? Let's look at the physics. Neuroscience researchers have looked at this problem for quite awhile. Individual neurons are small and their junctions very small. We assume they operate electrochemically, although recently someone proposed that neural transmission actually involves acousto-electro-chemical phenomena. Be that as it may. The electrical environment, in somewhat a simplified way, is: 1) neurons, and 2) the myelin-sheathed/insulated axons between them, and 3) the enormous organic environment around them which has all sorts of varying properties, most of them getting in the way. Now, cells and axons are immersed in a wet, conductive environment which propagates electric potential all over the place, and attenuates radiated signals too. So if you have, say, 100 cells in close proximity, unless you have stuck a VERY small pickup electrode into one neuron, you cannot separate out the signal from any one neuron in the batch. It's just impossible both electrically and even using, let's say, multiple electrical pickups outside the cluster of cells together with sophisticated signal processing to try to directionally isolate potential changes inside. The individual signal sources are mashed up together, superposed, both in 3D space and kind of by leakage through the medium. It's NOT like tuning a radio and separating out a channel. There is no carrier frequency.
Remember, I'm talking about the question of, can a man outside a house with a 'mind reader' device read what is happening inside the house, inside a brain, and down to the semantic level. And I'm saying, no, you can't do it. It will help if you take a look at the general problems of getting clean signals just on the outside of the skull. Something as pedestrian as a cellphone 20 feet away will mess up the low-level signals. The long and short of it is the physics of it show it's not solvable without electrodes directly in the neurons. And that is what I'm saying can't be done. Anyone saying they can read single neurons from outside is bluffing and handwaving while ignoring the raw physics of it. But unless you read down to single neurons you cannot begin to build the internal-to-external symbol mapping. You can only detect when broad general areas of the brain are active. That's not enough to read language out.
I'm going to have to go off and write an essay on this. But I'll say that while we may be born with the propensity to be able to develop neural recognizers of a certain type, I don't think we are born WITH the recognizers operational configured and ready to go. For example, we might be born with the genetically-induced propensity to develop 'face' recognizers, but until we begin to grow and learn, those potentials are not actualized. A FPLA has the innate ability to contain logic, but until it is configured, it doesn't have the organized logic for recognizing any specific input data pattern, just the raw logic alone.
How might a face recognizer come to be? It would involve a perceptual system capable of encoding specific face attributes (shape, color, texture, patterns etc.) and a separate mid-brain neural recognizer system capable of learning to recognize specific sets of conditions. Now, nature or genetics might predispose us to have general NN recognizers that could come to collate these attributes, but it has to be learned, it is not fully innate. I don't believe there can be a Halle Barry recognizer built in at birth. But a bird might have, over eons, have genetically evolved to have general recognizers for other birds. I believe there must be a plastic, though maybe somewhat predisposed, neural system, and then exposure to learning experience. But not such a thing as absolute built-in recognizers. Similarly, I would dispute that mice have a genetically innate nest recognizer ready to go from birth. I would say that maybe they have an architecture wherein the integration of sense data that leads to recognizing a nest comes easier to develop - but it is not there automatically in all mice.
I'm bothered by Tsien's concept of neural cliques being a bit fuzzy and nonrigorous architecturally. It does not drill down to the lowest semantic level at all. I also look with suspicion at his comments on finding universal clusters of cells that respond to 'nests'. By that I expect he means neural nets operating as recognizers that collate attributes of nests, taken from perceptual system observations, and respond positively. Certainly all mice would develop such response, but whether it is truly innate in a species as he seem to imply or just a learned ability of growing networks is another question and one he certainly does not answer. If he found ability in a newborn mouse to recognize a nest immediately, I'd accept this theory.
He is trying to work around the insufficiencies of rate coding and temporal coding theory, which I believe to be inadequate anyway, but his approach is like trying to find the blue marble in the barrel, using a Bobcat loader; too coarse.
My own research suggests the architectural reality of network operation is quite different than imagined. As I'm working on patentable technology on this, I can't comment much further. But I can say I believe Tsien is on the wrong track.
Okay. You're DARPA researcher Dr. Ed Frankenstein, and you aim your prototype XP-9000 Brain Reader at Joe, who's sitting on the couch watching football. You read raw neural emission data "3x54y19BFG". What does it mean? How you map that to anything usable? Can your apparatus recognize that Joe is thinking about the quarterback, or about Coors, or about Betty-Sue.
The Air Force put money into trying to develop neural pickups to fly planes. They were not able to decode down to fine linguistic meaning in pilot's brains. If you stick electrodes in specific areas of the brain, sure, you can, however, pick up certain general activity, such as seeing when a certain area of the brain is firing, and thus get general intentional data such as "oh, the amygdala is especially active, some emotion is present, but we don't know which one." That is neither practical, for general subjects, nor anything like waving a scanner at the wall of a house and reading a mind.
Maybe people confuse brains and microprocessors. A Pentium always executes the same way another Pentium does and an instruction in one chip performs the same as in another chip. Brains aren't the same way. They each evolve individually, though guided by genetics, so each one has a cerebrum, a cerebellum, etc. But the internal neuron-network in each person's cerebrum is different from that of another person. It is like fingerprints. No two people alike at that level. The internal activity on the network to store symbols is uniquely different from someone else's. No two people store 'cheese monkey' the same way. You can't read that from outside.
You can't get inside the skull to read the physical pathways, you can only read the externally-detectible SUMS of neural pulses. Even on the largest arrays of external skull electrodes, the best you can do is read averages, and no amount of esoteric signal processing or comparisons between electrodes can resolve back to individual neuron firings. So you can't get the fine data, and even if you could get the individual neuron firing data, you couldn't map it because no two people have the same mappings from their unique internal topology to external cultural symbols. I use absolutes to emphasize the impossibility of reading that data. The only ways I can see to do it are either to get inside and access the brain from above the 3rd dimension, but we don't have metadimensional technology, or we could inject nanomachines that bond into the brain and send internal data out. Possible, but not human technology yet. Was visualized in the movie "AeonFlux' btw. So I use absolutes because not in sight.
In reply to both the article poster who said "...We'll scan a person with one of these things and tell what they're actually thinking." and the above comment, I have some things to say about 'mind reading' and 'telepathy': they AREN'T VIABLE. The problem is this: each one of us, as we grow up, develops complex internal symbol systems - essentially private language. Example: a baby that learns to recognize a ball DOES NOT have to know the word 'ball' to think about a ball. He uses an internal symbol system. As we grow and integrate ourselves into society, we learn to map from this internal coding to a publicly accepted coding: 'aha', thinks Baby, this thing I know from sense impressions of red and round, is called a 'b-a-l-l'. Also, if we're American, we map to English words. If we're Japanese, we map to Japanese. Now the thing is, no matter how sensitive a brain scan is, it cannot pick up internal codings, which are partly physical/topological anyway, and make them available in any way that can be individually externally decoded at a semantic level. There is NO universal pulse train that always decodes to 'hamburger' in all human beings. So if I have a technology to read impulses in the nervous system of a test subject, there is NO WAY I can pick an arbitrary subject - a guy in a house - and decode to a meaningful word level what his brain is computing at the moment. In an analogous way, the concept of telepathy is pure fiction and could not work, because no two people have the same native internal base dictionary, and if you pick up 'radiation' from someone's brain, you still are stuck with not knowing the internal-to-external mapping. That spike sequence you just emitted - I can't know what it means outside of you. So the point is, no, they're not able to read minds and it isn't going to happen any time soon.
Ah yes. I see you went to the London School of Economics and Physics. Bang on!
(Actually, the shrinking kilogram is caused by global warming. The shrinking dollar is caused by rank stupidity and greed.)
Actually, the present administration, with its superb sense of science, has based the kilogram on the value of the dollar. In simple terms, this means we will all soon be weightless.
Just to put some perspective on this, for Bill Gates to get to Microsoft in Mountain View, he'd have to fly to crowded San Francisco Airport and drive 35 miles, or to San Jose Airport which is closer. But in neither case can he just parachute onto the campus, which Sergey could probably do onto Google. (Accompanied by Evel Kneevil carrying his laptop.) Of course, Larry Ellison is probably steaming over this too, except he's planning to take the 'lost' Minot nuke, and sink the Bay Area, so he can just sail up to Oracle headquarters' front door in his yacht. All this appears in Spielberg's new movie, "Indiana Jones and the Temple of Guys with Too Much Money".
Slashdot Mirror
Ballmer: "Another happy though silent Microsoft customer! YEEEEEEHAHHHHH!" (dances)
It does when I wear a red shirt.
Sincerely
Darl McBride
However, I can say with great certainty it is not only possible to enact emotion in a cognitive system, but is being done right now. I'm doing it and developing real software systems employing it. The standard computer model of emotion in computing, called the OCC Model, is partly wrong. It misses what's really happening in humans. I've developed a more correct model that works very very well and probably matches the mechanism people use. I haven't published it. Why? Because some of my key competitors are Google and Microsoft. (Yes, Google's working on AI, shades of Skynet, eh?) Anyway, it is far easier to build systems that accurately have and express emotion that ones that can read human emotions. In other words, having and expressing (output) are easy enough, reading deep emotion in others (input) is much more difficult.
A few ending remarks. A lot of people are working on not much more than toy AI, and I've read some DoD-sponsored papers that are so far off base they are sad. I believe the correct approach combines both symbolic and analog AI (NNs) in a new way, and that we can create reasonable emulations, if not parallels, of human cognition. But they must come from a decent merging of psychology, sociology, and computing science. I've been working on the right path, a very productive one, charting a new course, and am writing what is currently a 5 volume book set I'd like to become the 'Knuth' of Synthetic Intelligence development. It should change the face of gaming and a few other things. Finally, I'm currently trying to emulate neuron-based systems in Erlang, by the way. Boy, is it parallel. I think that holds a lot of promise.
Crow B: Jeeeze, I hate it when that happens.
Crow A: Yeah. Fscking scientists!
Crow B: Yeah. Hey, Frank, let's mess with their minds a little.
Crow A: What you got in mind?
Crow B: Remember when I made a Leatherman out of some twigs and spit?
Crow A: McGuyver ain't got nothin on you, bro!
Crow B: Yeah. Well, this time, I'm going to hack together a server out of weeds, rocks, and field mice. And install LAMP on it.
Crow A: Hey, well, if we don't get CROWNET going, we'll never catch up to Google! So, hold still, Bernie.
(He hops over to camera and raises one claw vertically.) Tool THIS, you peeping Tom bastards!
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You mean .. Star Trek ISN'T a religion? Oh, thanks. NOW you tell us.
Wait...wait.. I'm confused. Are we talking about politicians here?
The process starts at a power generating facility which is owned by some company. Power is delivered to transmission lines which are typically owned by another company. Along the route, power may be switched and routed and handed off between various companies. On the receiving end, power goes to a substation, which could be owned by another company, and finally gets delivered to you locally.
At each stage along the way, each company typically has its own technologies for monitoring and control. Connecting data to and from each stage can be done in quite different and private ways. Generating plants may use SCADA, a standard for measurement and control, and it is best practice not to connect SCADA systems to the Internet. Instead, a lot of times, proprietary or limited comm links and protocols are used. Companies are loath to spend money to upgrade older systems to connect to newer technologies. Power industry management is often pretty conservative (ie cheap) regarding this.
I think the DHS Aurora demo was concocted to run a scare; there is some ulterior motive behind it beside mere security against hacking. The media have portrayed the simulation in such a way that it's easy for the public to get a first impression it was an actual attack. Because the industry is not about to spend billions to upgrade its hardware, the demo will not change too much. But this little play did score points for DHS. My guess is Aurora's whole purpose was to provide ammunition for a hot administration salesman to run past Congress to scare it into providing more money for DHS. Drama: "Look, a generator blowed up! Yow!" Never mind it being only a simulation. Congress being as technologically illiterate as we know it to be, is likely fall for it. Yet another DHS power grab, as it were. Just watch for another budget line item to get inserted in the middle of the night.
In many universes, THIS is first post. In some universes doomed to explode very, very soon, this is NOT first post. In some universes doomed to explode right now, Darl McBride is Emperor.
In any culture, for people who have accepted that culture, religious beliefs (or avowed non-religious beliefs, for example atheism or even science) shape how to think and often exactly what to believe. For example, in certain religious systems, there are actually accepted and non-accepted forms of reasoning. This in turns affects how the people of that culture shape their values. So I note that morals and mores are actually driven by what core beliefs one's religion allows one to think about, and which one must accept without question.
For example, if a religion mandates a belief in an all-powerful creator who you must not question, you are stuck in a limited set of reasoning rules. You must accept core principles, you cannot contradict them regardless of whether they lead to paradoxes. Indeed, some limited reasoning systems lead to what might be a form of insanity if you consider its detachment from physical and social reality. The denial of reality in some cases really does constitute mental disfunction. One area where this gets interesting is when two major religions collide. Which one is sane, and which is not? Each may view the other as crazy and irrational by its rules, and its practitioners even subhuman. You can see where this leads. It would make a fine core theme for a book - and has many times. Another extension is when two parties hold conflicting views of economics or politics. One buys into one's choice of faith, and then views the world, often inflexibly, from that view.
Heinlein once qualified stories into several kinds; The Man Who Learned Better; Boy Meets Girl; and If This Goes On. The Man Who Learned Better is about conflicting belief systems that may lead to change, or force change. Eventually causing someone or ones to change their minds about core beliefs. Stories about disruptive technology or phenomena or new concepts are of this kind too, and most hard science fiction is of this kind. Starship Troupers was in part about conflicting major belief systems about the position of a race in the universe. Stranger in a Strange Land similarly. The Puppet Masters had the same core. Heinlein's Revolt in 2100 was about what happens when a dictatorial religion takes over a state, and what conflict and change might ensue. My point is, Robert Heinlein was an excellent writer about belief systems, but he did not necessarily force his personal view on readers, only tried to open their horizons. If he wrote something controversial, it was probably because he felt that controversy was a fine way to get the audience to think.
I'm sure they will be just as competent as the TSA. Every packet will be strip-searched, cavity-probed, and required to drink its own breast milk. All packets will have to take their shoes off. And all packets named Ted Kennedy will be put on a "No Fly" - oops I mean "No Route" - list. All in the name of protecting the purity of your ones and zeros. We don't want any Muslim data sullying our clean Baptist data bits.
Certainly in his earlier years he never showed any sign I know of of having major bizarre fantasies. Okay, there was that character who was his own father and mother and impregnated himself. But that one I doubt was a personal fantasy of his. All the rest of his earlier stuff was pretty normal sexually. What is interesting is that all his earlier work, when he was married to Leslyn, who had some mental illness, was very straight. A little sex in Beyond This Horizon, and in Revolt in 2100. But straight sex. And yet while married to Virginia who was a decent enough gal but conservative, he wrote the kinky stuff. You would think she would have been appalled. Maybe she was. I should go through the UC archives and see if there's any material showing her opinions.
But I do disagree with you. On your reading of Heinlein's beliefs taken to extreme ends - which he did NOT - would you say he was demanding we respect animals and not eat meat? How about bacteria? Should our aim be to avoid killing germs? Or not bait a hook with a worm? Do not eat a fish? Do not kill a cow? He did not. Heinlein as an engineer would never have posited a Scientific Theory of Morality because such a concept is inherently self-contradictory, and as a military man he would have found it pragmatically naive. I find the term to be silly and on a par with Creation Science. Had the people founding and settling America believed this, they'd mostly have died with an arrow in their head, standing there debating whether to give flowers to the nice Indian or kill him. Your interpretation is putting beliefs and words in Heinlein's dead mouth, unable to defend himself. This is exactly the type of pompous autodidactism I despise.
You can't gain credibility for a religious belief by allying it with science. And morality, in the end, comes down to religious beliefs. People from different cultures hold different beliefs about codes of behavior, most of which ultimately derive from religion or the specific rejection of religion. If the religious beliefs differ, the morals differ, and even come into conflict. Who then will decide which religion is the true and valid one and the norm for beliefs about behavior? I certainly don't agree with your personal conclusion on morality, and to bring this to what might be your real issue or agenda, I support abortions, eating meat and killing when clearly necessary to prevent harm to masses of people. On the other hand, I do not support pre-emptive war done for self-aggrandizement nor for political reasons nor for commerce, i.e. oil. And those are my religious beliefs and my morals - so - on what basis can you tell me these are not worthy religious beliefs, and that I am not entitled to them? Or that Heinlein would oppose these principles? Let our gods duel.
I'll stick my two cents in here. Heinlein's juveniles and many other works (up until the period when the transition in quality coming from his cerebral artery problem deeply hurt his work) all celebrated the human condition, and the ability of man to rise to noble heights. They also were cracking good stories, too. Heinlein does not deserve the denigration coming these days from academic hacks and people unable to understand what he was really getting at. He wrote of man's responsibility to society, over and over again, and I find it offensive when some dimwitted, unimaginative 'publish or perish' academic arrogantly demeans him.
In his time - a span of decades overlapping WWII - Heinlein was a giant and an inspiration to many engineers and scientists; any current critic dismissing him as a totalitarian Nazi is getting it completely wrong. His goal was to make money entertaining, true, but he aimed to inspire, he aimed at noble mores. He was not a literary cheat or a fraud and tried to give good value for the money. He was human and he made some mistakes in later years. But overall he saluted the best in man, championed the competent man in his stories. He was in favor of can-do, and held whiny slackers in disdain. If someone finds fault in that, the problem is with them, not him. His Starship Troopers was about genuine duty to man, unlike many of today's shallow military porn 'Sci-Fi" novels. (The movie adaptation was not his fault.) His Door Into Summer inspired me as a budding engineer. Today's lightweight bookstore rack-space fillers, by contrast, are shallow and disposable. I don't see many of them lighting the right sparks in growing minds like Heinlein did.
As for the worst story, Heinlein wrote one, under a pseudonym, for The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction that was about a talking alligator and oh boy was it a bomb. He was trying to be light and comedic but it was like tapdancing in lead shoes. It may well have been that story.
But on mindreading, I know it looks ridiculous to say it just cannot be done. But it can't with present or nearterm science or technology, and nothing is on the horizon capable of doing it. Sometimes science fiction can't be realized, and this is one of those cases. What makes me make such a bald statement? Let's look at the physics. Neuroscience researchers have looked at this problem for quite awhile. Individual neurons are small and their junctions very small. We assume they operate electrochemically, although recently someone proposed that neural transmission actually involves acousto-electro-chemical phenomena. Be that as it may. The electrical environment, in somewhat a simplified way, is: 1) neurons, and 2) the myelin-sheathed/insulated axons between them, and 3) the enormous organic environment around them which has all sorts of varying properties, most of them getting in the way. Now, cells and axons are immersed in a wet, conductive environment which propagates electric potential all over the place, and attenuates radiated signals too. So if you have, say, 100 cells in close proximity, unless you have stuck a VERY small pickup electrode into one neuron, you cannot separate out the signal from any one neuron in the batch. It's just impossible both electrically and even using, let's say, multiple electrical pickups outside the cluster of cells together with sophisticated signal processing to try to directionally isolate potential changes inside. The individual signal sources are mashed up together, superposed, both in 3D space and kind of by leakage through the medium. It's NOT like tuning a radio and separating out a channel. There is no carrier frequency.
Remember, I'm talking about the question of, can a man outside a house with a 'mind reader' device read what is happening inside the house, inside a brain, and down to the semantic level. And I'm saying, no, you can't do it. It will help if you take a look at the general problems of getting clean signals just on the outside of the skull. Something as pedestrian as a cellphone 20 feet away will mess up the low-level signals. The long and short of it is the physics of it show it's not solvable without electrodes directly in the neurons. And that is what I'm saying can't be done. Anyone saying they can read single neurons from outside is bluffing and handwaving while ignoring the raw physics of it. But unless you read down to single neurons you cannot begin to build the internal-to-external symbol mapping. You can only detect when broad general areas of the brain are active. That's not enough to read language out.
How might a face recognizer come to be? It would involve a perceptual system capable of encoding specific face attributes (shape, color, texture, patterns etc.) and a separate mid-brain neural recognizer system capable of learning to recognize specific sets of conditions. Now, nature or genetics might predispose us to have general NN recognizers that could come to collate these attributes, but it has to be learned, it is not fully innate. I don't believe there can be a Halle Barry recognizer built in at birth. But a bird might have, over eons, have genetically evolved to have general recognizers for other birds. I believe there must be a plastic, though maybe somewhat predisposed, neural system, and then exposure to learning experience. But not such a thing as absolute built-in recognizers. Similarly, I would dispute that mice have a genetically innate nest recognizer ready to go from birth. I would say that maybe they have an architecture wherein the integration of sense data that leads to recognizing a nest comes easier to develop - but it is not there automatically in all mice.
He is trying to work around the insufficiencies of rate coding and temporal coding theory, which I believe to be inadequate anyway, but his approach is like trying to find the blue marble in the barrel, using a Bobcat loader; too coarse.
My own research suggests the architectural reality of network operation is quite different than imagined. As I'm working on patentable technology on this, I can't comment much further. But I can say I believe Tsien is on the wrong track.
The Air Force put money into trying to develop neural pickups to fly planes. They were not able to decode down to fine linguistic meaning in pilot's brains. If you stick electrodes in specific areas of the brain, sure, you can, however, pick up certain general activity, such as seeing when a certain area of the brain is firing, and thus get general intentional data such as "oh, the amygdala is especially active, some emotion is present, but we don't know which one." That is neither practical, for general subjects, nor anything like waving a scanner at the wall of a house and reading a mind.
Maybe people confuse brains and microprocessors. A Pentium always executes the same way another Pentium does and an instruction in one chip performs the same as in another chip. Brains aren't the same way. They each evolve individually, though guided by genetics, so each one has a cerebrum, a cerebellum, etc. But the internal neuron-network in each person's cerebrum is different from that of another person. It is like fingerprints. No two people alike at that level. The internal activity on the network to store symbols is uniquely different from someone else's. No two people store 'cheese monkey' the same way. You can't read that from outside.
You can't get inside the skull to read the physical pathways, you can only read the externally-detectible SUMS of neural pulses. Even on the largest arrays of external skull electrodes, the best you can do is read averages, and no amount of esoteric signal processing or comparisons between electrodes can resolve back to individual neuron firings. So you can't get the fine data, and even if you could get the individual neuron firing data, you couldn't map it because no two people have the same mappings from their unique internal topology to external cultural symbols. I use absolutes to emphasize the impossibility of reading that data. The only ways I can see to do it are either to get inside and access the brain from above the 3rd dimension, but we don't have metadimensional technology, or we could inject nanomachines that bond into the brain and send internal data out. Possible, but not human technology yet. Was visualized in the movie "AeonFlux' btw. So I use absolutes because not in sight.
In reply to both the article poster who said "...We'll scan a person with one of these things and tell what they're actually thinking." and the above comment, I have some things to say about 'mind reading' and 'telepathy': they AREN'T VIABLE. The problem is this: each one of us, as we grow up, develops complex internal symbol systems - essentially private language. Example: a baby that learns to recognize a ball DOES NOT have to know the word 'ball' to think about a ball. He uses an internal symbol system. As we grow and integrate ourselves into society, we learn to map from this internal coding to a publicly accepted coding: 'aha', thinks Baby, this thing I know from sense impressions of red and round, is called a 'b-a-l-l'. Also, if we're American, we map to English words. If we're Japanese, we map to Japanese. Now the thing is, no matter how sensitive a brain scan is, it cannot pick up internal codings, which are partly physical/topological anyway, and make them available in any way that can be individually externally decoded at a semantic level. There is NO universal pulse train that always decodes to 'hamburger' in all human beings. So if I have a technology to read impulses in the nervous system of a test subject, there is NO WAY I can pick an arbitrary subject - a guy in a house - and decode to a meaningful word level what his brain is computing at the moment. In an analogous way, the concept of telepathy is pure fiction and could not work, because no two people have the same native internal base dictionary, and if you pick up 'radiation' from someone's brain, you still are stuck with not knowing the internal-to-external mapping. That spike sequence you just emitted - I can't know what it means outside of you. So the point is, no, they're not able to read minds and it isn't going to happen any time soon.
Ah yes. I see you went to the London School of Economics and Physics. Bang on! (Actually, the shrinking kilogram is caused by global warming. The shrinking dollar is caused by rank stupidity and greed.)
Actually, the present administration, with its superb sense of science, has based the kilogram on the value of the dollar. In simple terms, this means we will all soon be weightless.
Just to put some perspective on this, for Bill Gates to get to Microsoft in Mountain View, he'd have to fly to crowded San Francisco Airport and drive 35 miles, or to San Jose Airport which is closer. But in neither case can he just parachute onto the campus, which Sergey could probably do onto Google. (Accompanied by Evel Kneevil carrying his laptop.) Of course, Larry Ellison is probably steaming over this too, except he's planning to take the 'lost' Minot nuke, and sink the Bay Area, so he can just sail up to Oracle headquarters' front door in his yacht. All this appears in Spielberg's new movie, "Indiana Jones and the Temple of Guys with Too Much Money".
Agent #2: "Wow! That bastard! Let's burn all his books!"
CIA agent: "And this other guy, he seems to be totally illiterate."
Agent #2: "Bob, you maroon, that's a George Bush speech they're quoting!"
CIA agent: "Ooop."