Thoughts

Written on 13th June 2009.

It's 5:56am in the morning....

I think most couples in Western society meet under the influence of alcohol. This isn't so prevalent in less westernised societies only because mating is done primarily through the process of arranged marriages. Alcohol is useful in this respect only because it reduces brain function and we rely then solely on evolutionary instinct. Choosing a mate becomes easier, and also a combination of loose inhibitions and lack of judgement result in interesting choices. This post needs to be edited for grammar later.

I think tonight has been significant for me. I'm evaluating my life so far, and discussing future options with a friend. It's not fun. I don't think I like any of my options.

Life seems to be about finding a personal utility function and then maximising it in agent-speak. I'm thinking about trying to specify the entire human experience in terms of a learning agent. Possibly an impossible thing to do, but it could be a learning experience in itself. By trying to model humans as learning agents, perhaps I can add to what a learning agent is lacking, if it is indeed lacking something.

We were told that there were four different definitions of agents in our AI class,

1. Agents that think like humans.
2. Agents that act like humans.
3. Agents that think rationally.
4. Agents that act rationally.

It seems to be the case that we are concentrating on building agents that act rationally, because that's the easiest one out of the lot, none of which are particularly easy. But why would you want to act like a human anyway, when you could be perfectly rational. The distinction between thinking rationally and acting rationally, is of course the distinction between Strong-AI and Weak-AI, at least this is my intepretation.

But then comes the question of morality, how does that fit into this agent model? Is it also part of the utility function, sort of the utility function of society that must also be maximised in order for the agent to survive? I'm not sure. The most fun way to see this would be to program rational learning agents and see if they developed society and morality on their own. The Polyworld project apparently has some instances that did show cooperation between agents as an emergent property, which is very interesting, but I'm not sure that that implies a morality. Also I don't think that a neural net is nearly complex enough to develop to that extent. But anything that is complex enough would take exponentially longer to run.

I need to think about this some more, it's too late at night/early in the morning for this.

The sun doesn't want to rise today, it's already 6:30am.


M

The Lawn Mower

The Lawn Mower

Crushed along the tiresome road,
A man carries his bag.
As he walks, his weary load,
Upon his shoulders sags.

A passing traveller of remarkable height,
Took pity upon his fellow man,
Carried his load and his plight,
Arm in arm they ran.

They ran, they ran near and far,
Occasionally they travelled by car,
Things they saw and places they went,
Museums and alleyways for the creatively bent.

Finally they reached where the man wants to be,
A horse and a deer were watching tv,
They fought for the remote, the man won on heads,
They used newspaper, plastic and jelly for beds.

Giving for a living, dressing as paint,
No one said the stunt was a feint,
But the man himself knew, this life would end,
He could see it approaching just around the bend.

When it came it was good, it was bad, it was change.
The man said he thought it a bit strange.
But dream as he might he could not find a way,
Around this plight, he decided to pray.

The gods' unsympathetic sent him a swan,
One with no feathers and a beak almost gone.
He stood on the swan like a boat in the water,
All that resulted could be termed swan slaughter.

The gods were no help, oh what could he do?
He struggled and struggled to find something new.
At last he availed, his spirit almost gone,
He became a lawn mower and mowed the lawn.

Angsty Poetry Part 1

I wrote this a month ago, during the holidays. I'm sure there's more to come :S

Shadow

It stood outside the window,
I was scared to let it in,
It waltzed in anyway, dancing on
Tiny slivers of light.

Suddenly, pulse racing, I awoke,
Little beads of sweat on my forehead.
You calmed me down.

"Breathe", you said and I breathed.
"Trust", you said and I trusted.
"Love", you said and I loved.

Change

Dream the change. Wasting the life on the tip of the iceberg, relax when you die. It’s the telephone that does it. Remotely screwing the bridge over troubled water. It’s like having a rpc suddenly pull the plug on your computer while you’re still typing a love message to your girlfriend.

Dream the change. One day you might find it. Grasping the smallness of you and the bigness of everything you might be amazed. Write, writhe in passion, fevered and otherwise. Blue is the colour…

Listen to the world. It’s talking to you, no, it’s talking at you. You know it exists. You are part of it, but it does not acknowledge you. You are the liver and the world keeps on drinking, binge drinking and it doesn’t know when to stop. But when you die the world dies and you take comfort in that fact.

Hah you spit on it. The world dies without me, but you know it’s not true. The world has a million replacement livers, there’s a factory just down the road where they build them. Nobody cares about you any more. You have no use, you lie dejected and alone. Heartbroken probably, because while you were trying to get the world to notice you, you didn’t realise that your own world was falling like a house of cards.

Then you cough and die and then your world dies with you. A fragment of the collective reality has been removed, but the shape is still the same. Can you even dream the change that could make such a mammoth into a butterfly? They aren't even the same species.

Crash

Dream, catch cold on the chest,
Shocking evolution of emotion.
Bang, and the waves are gone,
You only have seconds to duck
Before the next one appears.

Crash and cymbals, the sound
Roaring in your head.
Blink, and its gone again,
Bushfire and dance,
Breaking boundaries in your soul.

Die and you're alive again,
You can never die again.
Drift until the pain is gone,
Drown until the pain is gone,
Drink,and drift, and die and dream.

The Solitude of Despair

The Solitude of Despair
or
The Despair of Solitude

Gratuitous use of words
In times of self-loathing,
Can often be compared like
A solitary daffodil in a summer wind.

Grains of water falling
Like small brown piglets
Into the mouth of a
Partially handsome bear.

Dreams of consequences
Consequently shattered by
The Burning of a torch
A flame in the dark.

Damn the alternatives,
Evolution must survive!
Can the solitary reaper
Reap forever?

A mewling midget in
a Cavernous room will
Be consumed by darkness
As the sun sets.

A man who sees
Every face but his own,
Travels every truth until
He looks inward.

Ghosts linger
In the spaces where
Caricatures of emotion
Have found themselves.

A blinding light
In the back of one's mind,
Always approaching,
Forever infinite.

Flashes of red blue green
Assault the senses
As the mental breeze
Brushes the mind.

Land and laws
Can be torn apart,
In a cacophony of
Exalted Brilliance.

Let them linger
In the eye of the mind.
You hold on to them the harder,
They slip away.

Console yourself
In the memory of loss.
Bind yourself
In the solitude of despair.
(or)
In the despair of solitude.

Scribblings 2

The calm before the storm. The eye of the tiger. The small fires lit so that we might keep warm. The cold icy stare of denial. Denial of service. Denial of anger. Denial of fear. Denial of everything that makes us who we are, makes us real. The Grecian urn that stood in the corner of the room, the ashes in it of a man long dead, the smile on the faces of those who were happy when he died, the absence of smiles on the faces of those who weren't. The fruition of the climatic battle, the spiritual revolution. The absence of civilisation, the presence of a being, the absence of being, the complete and total annihilation of spirit. The phoenix rising, the renewal. The reward of false achievement, the anger at realisation of its falseness. The prayer rising in the hearts of the most brave, the fear of death, the fear of life. The songs of the holy, and the truth in the voices of the puppet masters.


God awoke on the first day.
He wanted to know the names of things,
The mountains, the oceans, the seas,
The valleys, the fires, the trees,
Etc.

He could not find the place cards.
So he made the names up as he went along.
Turtles may have come last.