The information is in the eye of the beholder

Nanotechnologies and biotechnologies are not merely re-engineering but actually re-ontologizing our world. Re-ontologizing is a neologism that I have recently introduced in order to refer to a very radical form of re-engineering, one that not only designs, constructs or structures a system (e.g. a company, or a machine) anew, but that fundamentally transforms its intrinsic nature.

A good example is provided by the picture you see in this blog, discovered by Wired (click on it to se the details). Do not rush to the shop yet, these contact lenses do not exist. But they might soon become available, thanks to some bio-nano-high-tech.
Once you start wearing them, you could access all sort of information not with but in your eyes. Exams? Tests? Quiz? Technical references in extreme or uncomfortable conditions? Navigation? Wikipedia? All a matter of a blink of an eye.

What sort of hacking and digital vandalism will these re-ontologizing technologies make possible? In the case of your lenses, beware of the new bug, code name "Michael Strogoff". It may blind you.

Agents and Their Optimal Thresholds

How should the next generation of the Web (or Web2) develop? Some talks of semantic capacities, some others of ontologies, many of agents able to manage one or the other. The truth is that there is no much difference, since any semantics available and usable by the sort of artificial agents we can actually engineer is really a matter of ontology, i.e. of producing huge, machine-readable catalogues and inventories of the environment in which they operate, and of the "furniture" of such environments that they need to handle and interact with.

The hope is that agents may autonomously aggregate into societies that can, as macro-agents, combine their individual functions to perform increasingly complex and demanding tasks, in view of more ambitious goals.

It is not easy. On the one hand, coarse ontologies are more easily implementable but less useful. On the other hand, the more useful ontologies are those that are finely grained, but then these are the most difficult to manage. One needs to find the right "level of abstraction" or granularity to optimize complexity in the construction and efficiency in its application.

Apparently, it is now possible to identify such optimal threshold (click on the title of this blog). In a recent study on how well agents perform at increasingly detailed levels of abstraction, it was shown that the rate of improvement of the performance of agents varied at different levels of abstraction, that performance rises slowly at the two extremes (high and low-levels of abstraction) but that there appears to be a steep rise in performance in the middle. This suggests that there may be effective levels of abstraction that may provide a method for balancing costs and benefits.

The question now left to the philosopher is whether there is also an effective threshold in biological agents too, which constrains their cognitive development. To put it more simply: is it the case that the world is what it is and that we have adapted to perceive it as it is, or is it is our specific thresholds in the cost-effective evolution of our embodied and hard-wired levels of abstraction (e.g. in the sort of light, sounds, heat etc, that we are able to perceive and process) that make our world what we perceive as the world?

Reference

Fourth European Conference on Computing and Philosophy

Is there life after ECAP? Yes, because there is always another CAP to go to next.

This year, the European Conference on Computing and Philosophy was in Trondheim, a splendid town in Norway and a great university. The program was rich, challenging and contained a major novelty wrt previous editions: a substantial track on the philosophy of computer science.
We had three keynote speakers, all very well-chosen.
The first day, Raymond Turner forced us to think seriously about the conceptual foundations not only of computing but of that peculiar science and art that is informatics or computer science. He opened up a Pandora box in which we had to look sooner or later.
The second day, Lucas Introna gave an interesting talk that provided an overview of his position in computer ethics. I was grateful to Lucas, for I lacked this synthesis.
The closing day, Vincent Hendricks managed to pack so much into his lecture that we all felt we had been exposed to a mini-course instead. Technically challenging, he showed what we should be doing in epistemology and computing if we were to took the informational/computational turn seriously.
Congratulations to Charles Ess, May Thorseth and Johnny Soraker for having organised and managed a great conference.
The good news? Next ECAP will be in the Netherlands, at Tweente University. Pencil it in your diary.
PS
many thanks to Susan Stuart for the picture.

Three mathematical fictions for the summer

Ready to travel? Eager to have a break? Are you packing all the notes to write, finally, all those papers that you've been drafting for months? Anxious to climb the hill made by the books and articles that you still haven't read? If you need some rest this summer, but you also wish to keep the brain warm and running between one academic project and the other, here are three mathematically-minded books I would strongly recommend. Trust me, you'll love them.

The Oxford Murders, by Guillermo Martinez. If you've ever lived in Oxford, you will find it remarkably accurate... (thanks Jeff!)

The Parrot's Theorem, by Denis Guedj.

Uncle Petro and Goldbach's Conjecture : A Novel of Mathematical Obsession, by Apostolos Doxiadis.


All of a sudden, those long, commuting journeys on a plane look like as many reading opportunities.

PS
the authors are all mathematically/scientifically very proficient. So you won't find any sloppy stuff as in Dan Brown's.
They know what they are talking about.

Where are we in the philosophy of information? the Bergen podcast

Many thanks to Sverre Helge Bolstad and Johannes Ringheim for the following material, which I cut and paste here:

21.06.06, University of Bergen, Norway

Luciano Floridi: "Where are we in the philosophy of information?"
(Part I, introduction to PI)

Luciano Floridi, University of Oxford, is a philosopher and has worked with the concept of information and philosophical questions connected to information technology in several books and articles. He is a pioneer in the field and has, through his activities, contributed greatly to defining the field of philosophy of information (PI). Luciano Floridi has written the book Philosophy and Computing (1999) and he is the editor of The Blackwell Guide to the Philosophy of Computing and Information (2004).

In this podcast from a seminar at the University of Bergen he talks about the foundations of the philosophy of informationt and what PI is, and why we need it in a "databased" society. He talks about dimensions of information and goals of the philosophy of information.

Listen now! (49:36min / 22.7MB)

Luciano Floridi´s webpage at the University of Oxford

This podcast is published under a Creative Commons license

Talks and Workshops

June, the month when academics migrate (I'm posting this blog from Bergen, in Norway, when I've been invited to give a seminar on the foundations of the philosophy of information).

The invited talk I gave in Siena made me realise (thanks to Claudio Pizzi!), that we might have some Quinean doubts about second order logic and modal logics in general, but we actually lack a theory of second order probability, let alone a philosophical justification for it. This is odd (sorry for the pun). Imagine: if you have a fair coin, the probability (P) that, when tossed, it will turn out to be head (h) is 0.5, obviously. So P(h) = 1/2 or 0.5. But what is the probability of this probability, i.e. P(P(h))? Does it even make sense to ask the question? If you think it does not, consider the following case: what is the probability (P1) that Othello (o) knows (K) the probability (P2) that Desdemona (d) might be unfaithful (U)? That is: P1(KoP2(Ua))?

Some people think that the two Ps are not referring to the same concept of probability, some others that P1 really modifies the epistemic operator K not P2... but the jury is still out.

The talk I gave in Ferrara was actually about a joint work with Marcello D'Agostino. Marcello is a sophisticated logician, and has invited me to join our forces to crack the so-called scandal of deduction (so-called by Hintikka). The point is simple. According to our standard theory of information and its semantic extension, the less likely a proposition is, the more informative it becomes. It makes sense rather easily if you think in terms of possible worlds (PW) and their exclusions. "The train leaves in the morning" excludes more PW than "the train leaves tomorrow", so it is more informative, but so is "the train leaves between 10 and 11 am" and so forth. This inverse relation between infomativeness and probability is classic, reasonable and intuitive but causes two problems:
a) what I defined as Bar-Hillel-Carnap Paradox: at one extreme, contradictions, which exclude all PW (i.e. they are impossible) are the most informative propositions. Unpleasant. Luckily,I solved this problem in a paper in Minds and Machines were I showed that we need to make the concept of information semantically stronger, so that it encapsulates truth. In a nutshell, if we do, contradictions fail to be informative because they are false.
b) the scandal of deduction: at the other extreme, tautologies and logical truths do not exclude any PW (i.e. their possibility = 1) so they convey zero information. But then so does logic and mathematics as a whole. Unpalatable.
Marcello and I are working now on (b). Thanks to Marcello's brilliant idea (no anticipation, but stay tuned) we might have cracked this too... it seems that travelling opens one's mind, if one can meet the right people 8)

Ethical robots?

The last issue of the Economist contains a special report (their usual Technological Quarterly, "Trust me, I'm a robot", June 8th 2006) mainly dedicated to ethical issues in robotics. It is a very interesting reading, and I suggest you don't miss it.

However, going through the pages, a sense of disappointment slowly sinks in. There is no ethics in the sense in which a philosopher would use this word. Or rather, all the ethics that is discussed is largely related to safety issues, legal responsibilities and sex (there is a bit about sex dolls and whether robosex machines looking like children should be allowed; but the whole problem of whether synthetic pornography is immoral anymore - no real people but the users are involved - is entirely missed). Which is not to say that these issues aren't relevant or significant. Indeed, it is probably one of the best ways to make sure that people understand the (increasingly) pressing nature of some of the moral questions raised by computing at large. But it seems a bit of a missed opportunity when you think about how rich the contemporary debate is.

Still, it's good to be able to point out now to an issue of the Economist when your skeptical colleagues will inevitably ask "what is it you're doing with that stuff about computer ethics?".

Agents and their social life

"If computers could create a society, what kind of world would they make? Thanks to the work of an ambitious project that adds a whole new meaning to the phrase, "‘computer society"’, in which millions of software agents will potentially evolve their own culture, we could be about to find out. With funding from the European Commission's 'Future and Emerging Technologies' (FET) initiative of the IST programme, five European research institutes are collaborating on the NEW TIES project to create a thoroughly 21st-century brave new world -– one populated by randomly generated software beings, capable of developing their own language and culture." (read more by clicking on the titlte of the blog).

Imagine a vertical line. At the bottom, some very elementary agents, simple tasks, unsophisticated lives, blind mechanisms of sort. But they get together, and a level up in our vertical line, the next family of agents are just a bit less elementary, their tasks a bit less trivial and simple. They are not so unsophisticated, so uninteresting. Move up one more step, and you will encounter societies of ever more complex agents. Then, all of a sudden, there is us, you and me and mom and dad, and Jane and Peter. But it lasts only one step. The next is your family or your group of friends, a party, a company, some sort of society of human agents which has already lost that special spark that we call mind.
From the mindless bottom of sub-atomic particles to the mindless top of the universe, we are just one of the billionth stations where Being calls at, in its journey from simplicity to complexity. The question is: can we reproduce this ontological journey?

Artificial Life Live

The Alife X conference took place on June 3-7, 2006. I gave a talk on the future impact of ICT, in the context of the workshop on Ethical Agents.

Amid discussions and disagreements, we all converged on the view that the issues raised by artificial agents and their (ethical?) behavior will become increasingly pressing in the near future. Not least, I would like to add, because we are becoming more and more hybrid agents (or inforgs), who will perceive less and less any threshold between the world online and the world offline.

A wonderful and most interesting addition to the conference was the Res-Art: Robotics and Emergent Systems exhibit.
Four pieces were outstanding, and, as it happens, accidentally, they represent the four elements:

1) (Water) Christy Georg, Attainment

(I thought, before checking on the web, that it was something new, but it seems to be dated to 2002) .

Philosophy of information (PI) take: there is an equilibrium that the artist may propose, or rather may try to make available, but that only the agent, with patience and care, may actually experience. That equilibrium, where two pieces of information, the sound and its pitch, are in perfect synthony, is unique, is fragile and may be missed, but it is repeatable, and repeatable for ever. So there is certainly a sense of uniqueness, but also a sense of circularity, since the sound will be played again, the pitch will be identified again, modulo a quantity of water that will percolate and drip, sculpturing itself and its own acoustics.

2) (Air) Andy Holtin, Contraption for the Influence of Breath

Philosophy of information (PI) take: data in, data out, but the user needs to be located in a very specific space, if breathing is going to cause any movement in the wooden mechanism. So it is presence at distance, but not telepresence in the delocalised sense to which we are getting so used. It is the difference between a fixed IP and a DHCP generated IP. This seems alright. Breathing is something the user is not at leisure to do. Its inevitability and constraining, the reminder that it is only by breathing that informational agents like us are then able to interact with the world, are subtly exploited. The apparatus in which the user must breath to make things work, to give life to the wooden robot like a god would do with some form of matter, is low and unadjustable. It forces the user to bend and adapt. Not any breathing will give life to the mechanism.

3) (Earth) Bill Seeley, Springloaded Action (this is the sculpture pictured above, thanks Bill!)
Philosophy of information (PI) take: the pebble, the "appropriate" wheel (from some mechanism in an old elevator in NY where Bill worked, if I remember the details correctly), the long pieces of steel, the restful dynamics of the composition: this is information at its purest state, earth, the beginning, the elementary, the Ur of what comes next, the old that is timeless (the wheel is not just the wheel of time, it is also a piece of an old mechanism now disfunctional and dismantled, resurrected in a new context), the stable that is easily flexed. Looking at Bill's website, this is the work I like most. It is an exportable work, independent of surrounding technologies and artifacts. The pebble were collected in situ. A touch of "arte povera" and "land art" .

4) (Fire) Max Kazemzadeh, Gesture Drawing

Philosophy of information (PI) take: dancing with digital flames, projected on a projected board. The kinetic life of the system is partly regulated by the presence and behavior of the agent/spectator. It is largely a single user application, like Holtin's. And it is an interface not in the sense that it provides a level of abstraction (imagine the map of NY underground as an interface/abstraction made to navigate easily from one station to another), but in the sense that, like Holtin's, it transduces a form of information into another. Like fire that takes some form of energy and extracts heat from it, so the installation takes movements and kinetic patterns and transforms them into a show of dancing elements in a virtual reality context. Every component of the complicated mechanism is re-appropriated, in the sense that it is used in its original function but for a different purpose and in context that could easily be considered unsuitable. The system imposes its logic on the nature of the components, which cannot but obey, slave of their own functions.

Information to rescue information

There is this funny thing about information: that it can work on itself. Nails do not hammer nails, tables cannot build themselves, lamps don't "lamp", glasses don't glass and in general things don't "thing", but information informs. So information can both harm and heal itself. The latest example is provided by the application of advanced digital information techniques (multi-spectral digital analysis to create enhanced pictures) to the oldest European manuscript, the Derveni papyrus.

I just cut and paste here some essential information.

The Derveni papyrus is the burnt remains of a scroll buried with an ancient Greek nobleman. It dates to around 340 B.C., during the reign of Philip II of Macedon, father of Alexander the Great. It contains a philosophical treatise on Orpheus, probably written by somebody from the circle of the philosopher Anaxagoras (a philosopher who might have been Socrates' teacher and who was accused of atheism). Discovered in 1962 in a grave in northern Greece, it has been studied for decades but it might now release some more information, thanks to the uncovering of some new 10/20% fragments of text from the carbonized scroll that was burned on its owner's funeral pyre. It was the fire that paradoxically saved some of the manuscript, which otherwise would have been rotted away by damp.

What is fascinating, from a PI (philosophy of information) perspective, is this capacity of information to recover the past and uncover the future.

Jobs for philosophers in the US Army?

"New 'Iraq massacre' tape emerges. The BBC obtains new video evidence that US troops may have deliberately killed 11 Iraqi civilians in March." (Thursday, 1 June 2006, 22:06 GMT 23:06 UK )

War is one of the things that best distingushes homo sapiens from other animal species. It might not be too obvious, if fought with stones and sticks. But once weapons finally become available and religion kicks in, Darwin Test is over: you know which agent belongs to our species by just looking at the puking amount of destruction and pain that he can violently and gratuitously inflict onto others.

Not so for the Turing Test. Perhaps a robot could not easily fool you into thinking that he is a warrior; but the warrior may certainly be indistinguishable from an automata. Or at least that's what the army would like him to be. I know. I was an automata myself for a full year.

Automata are trained not to think. So war, which is so quintessentially human, is unfortunately incompatible with that other trait, just about as uniquely human, that is intelligence.
This of course creates a bit of a vicious circle, but also a nice job opportunity for your philosopher. One begins by training perfect fighting automata. But then these tend to commit awful crimes, massacres, genocides, violences of all sorts. This would not be a problem if only there weren't reporters and a public that likes a good fight but gets upset when war becomes bellic. Soon it is realised that these automata should be a bit more human, that they need some further untraining, that perhaps some ethics could do. We are back full circle: we need to teach them to think again.

"Ethics lessons for US Iraq troops. US-led troops in Iraq are to undergo ethical training in the wake of the alleged murder of civilians in Haditha." BBC. (Thursday, 1 June 2006, 17:47 GMT 18:47 UK)

Digital interactions

We often live in the past; that's why, in a sense that I dislike, it's good for humanity to have a constant, generational turnover (read: dying).

Consider the way we conceptualise how things (including ourselves) are related. So often, we catch ourselves speaking in terms of action and reaction; A does this, so B does that; cause and effect; huge mechanical gears, that rustily and noisily move the machine of our lives.
We should know better. The ball does not hit the other ball, but there is a dynamic system in which two balls interact. Does the stone shatter the window, or is the glass of the window too fragile to withstand the impact of the stone? The cause precedes the effect, but there are feedbacks and balances. Things or, better, events, do not act on each other, they interact, dynamically, systemically, probabilistically, subtly. That we need to abstract some laws and regularities to make sense of this magma that's Being it's a necessity, not an option. Subtle but sharp difference.

Take a trivial example of interaction: you can walk at the pace of your diary.

1. Synchronize your cell phone (mobile) and your Google Calendar: suppose you have an electronic diary in your mobile. Now you can synchronize it with Google Calendar Beta thanks to GCalSync.
2. Synchonize your Google Calendar and your iPod: if you have an iPod with calendar functionality you can synchronize your schedules between it and Google Calendar, thanks to getCals.
3. Be imaginative with you iPod: associate a particular song to a particular item in the iPod calendar, e.g. with the alarm clock functionality.
4. Synchronize your iPod and your Nike running shoes: piece of cake, just make sure the size fits.

Mobile -> Google Calendar -> iPod -> Nike running shoes...
next time you see someone in a hurry, the simple explanation "she must be late" might be hiding a lot of interactions.