Upgrade to Your New Personal Assistant

Image Source: imgur.

Microsoft is offering a free upgrade today to Windows 10 for all owners of Windows 7 and 8.1. Part of the free deal is Cortana, a virtual female personal assistant that collects all your data and sends it back to Microsoft. These are the paw prints of technocratic progress which may see states replaced by corporations, as described in this post. 

Quote of the Day: Earthworm Tribute

Man is but a Worm from Punch's Almanack (1882). Image Source: Tulane University via Wired.

From this week's Free Will Astrology, for anyone who still inches forward:

Charles Darwin is best known for his book The Origin of Species, which contains his seminal ideas about evolutionary biology. But while he was still alive, his best-seller was The Formation of Vegetable Mould Through the Action of Worms. The painstaking result of over forty years' worth of research, it is a tribute to the noble earthworm and that creature's crucial role in the health of soil and plants. It provides a different angle on one of Darwin's central concerns: how small, incremental transformations that take place over extended periods of time can have monumental effects.

You can read The Formation of Vegetable Mould, through the Action of Worms, with Observations on their Habits (1881) for free online here.

Anniversaries: The Moon Landing

"Tranquillity Base here. The Eagle has landed." http://t.co/Cj088OXKUH #Apollo11 July 20, 1969 #histSTM pic.twitter.com/1jfw1je6w1

— Meg Rosenburg (@trueanomalies) July 20, 2015

Unhacking the Reality of Russia's Troll Farms

Image Source: ritabrezkolin.

Recent posts on this blog have pointed to debates about how to verify memory, truth and reality. These are pressing questions. Mistaken arguments based on online information lead to outrageous conspiracy theories. These theories masquerade as products of verified data-gathering. Many people online are travelling further and further from truth, rationality and reality, while thinking they are doing exactly the opposite.  Can we map the philosophical distinctions and debates made between subjective perception and objective reality onto the distinctions between virtual reality and meatspace? How do we determine reality, based on evidence and experience from online communication and relationships? How do we write news and real-time history, and confirm events in reality, when all information, sources and historical authorities are suspect?

Image Source: Buzzfeed.

Later posts will seek to answer these questions. Today's post explores how dangerous continued confusion on these questions can be, starting with Russian leader Vladimir Putin's quest to rewrite post-Cold War history. One of the primary tools used in this regard is the establishment of so-called 'troll farms,' groups of social media actors employed by the Russian state to spread anti-American real- and faux-news that appears to come from domestic American man-on-the-street sources. This is an example of Stalinist disinformation techniques and the Russian state-media apparatus, targeting a rival national audience rather than its own.

Of course, in the Communications Revolution, everyone in governments, corporations, hackerspace and social media circles is gathering and playing with information. Today's focus on the Russian case does not deny the existence of trolls and hackers working for other powers and businesses. The point is to understand the dangers of Millennial propaganda - which is always cloaked in the pretense of its targets' commonly-held virtues - with this example. Trolls and troll farms can alter public opinion; worse: they can change their targets' perceptions of reality. They can change memory. They can change history. A great informational power struggle is taking place. The winners will define reality. On those foundations, anything can be built.

Vigilance in this regard means not just finding the evidence online which confirms the message with which you agree politically, or hearing the message you want to hear. It means hearing the message you do not want to hear, and considering it to be plausible. Unfortunately, healthy skepticism is now a breeding ground for anti-reality trolls, so caution is required on that front too. Algorithms on search engines now tailor our results based on earlier search histories, narrowing our worlds into smaller and smaller solipsistic bubbles, exposing us only to those with whom we easily agree. Rationalists believe that logically-aligned data provide solid conclusions to support their arguments. They do not, because all data are malleable. Hackers and whistleblowers supposedly topple evil authoritarian power structures by blowing them away with the cold, hard truth. Well, even if they do, does that mean that these actors are automatically 'good'? To what service do they put their revelations? And as with the links listed below about Russia troll farm whistleblowers, how can we be sure they are telling the truth?

#PlutoFlyby was staged. Stop being such sheeple.

— Nehad Kenanie (@nehadk) July 14, 2015

The recent Pluto flyby revealed how instantaneous media have confused people about the real accomplishments of Big Science and space exploration. Some thought the flyby was faked, echoing the moon landing conspiracy theory and indicating a lack of confidence in information authorities and in photographs and videos as evidence. Some complained that there was no live feed from Pluto, showing zero understanding the immense distances involved and the related scientific challenges. The vast supply of online information on these subjects has provided no online education. Instead, it has provided a false sense of confidence about being 'right' in quasi-rationalized, self-righteous and communal ways.

Image Source: CStar.

The End of History Illusion

Video Source: TED Talk (March 2014).

Harvard psychologist Dan Gilbert explains: "human beings are a work in progress that mistakenly think they're finished." We think we will always be as we are now, a phenomenon he calls, "the end of history illusion." The one thing you can rely on is that in ten years you will be a completely different person, and far more so than you can ever imagine now. The transcript is here.

Photo of the Day: Bathroom Subjectivity

Photo "found inside a stall at a gas station in Virginia." Image Source: Facebook.

You can read Bertrand Russell, Problems of Philosophy (1912), chapter two, for free online here. According to Russell, the original problem from Decartes' "I think, therefore I am" confronts the distinction between subjective and objective, rather fitting for a bathroom wall in Virginia, or anywhere else for that matter:

"'I think, therefore I am,' he said (Cogito, ergo sum); and on the basis of this certainty he set to work to build up again the world of knowledge which his doubt had laid in ruins. By inventing the method of doubt, and by showing that subjective things are the most certain, Descartes performed a great service to philosophy, and one which makes him still useful to all students of the subject.

But some care is needed in using Descartes' argument. 'I think, therefore I am' says rather more than is strictly certain. It might seem as though we were quite sure of being the same person to-day as we were yesterday, and this is no doubt true in some sense. But the real Self is as hard to arrive at as the real table, and does not seem to have that absolute, convincing certainty that belongs to particular experiences. When I look at my table and see a certain brown colour, what is quite certain at once is not 'I am seeing a brown colour', but rather, 'a brown colour is being seen'. This of course involves something (or somebody) which (or who) sees the brown colour; but it does not of itself involve that more or less permanent person whom we call 'I'. So far as immediate certainty goes, it might be that the something which sees the brown colour is quite momentary, and not the same as the something which has some different experience the next moment.

Thus it is our particular thoughts and feelings that have primitive certainty. And this applies to dreams and hallucinations as well as to normal perceptions: when we dream or see a ghost, we certainly do have the sensations we think we have, but for various reasons it is held that no physical object corresponds to these sensations. Thus the certainty of our knowledge of our own experiences does not have to be limited in any way to allow for exceptional cases. Here, therefore, we have, for what it is worth, a solid basis from which to begin our pursuit of knowledge. The problem we have to consider is this: Granted that we are certain of our own sense-data, have we any reason for regarding them as signs of the existence of something else, which we can call the physical object?"

Philosophical discussions on how to verify truth and reality have never been more relevant than they are now, with malleable truth dominating the Internet and a growing confusion about the distinction between virtual reality and everyday 'real' reality.

Bloom County is Back

Image Source: Facebook.

Bloom County, the beloved 1980s' American alt-politics comic strip that out-alted them all has returned after 25 years. Cartoonist Berkeley Breathed announced the return, which may or may not have had something to do with Donald Trump's presidential candidacy, on Facebook on 13 July 2015. Bloom County grew out of a late 1970s' comic, The Academia Waltz, from Breathed's student days and inspired sequels Outland (1989-1995) and Opus (2003-2008).

Laugh of the Day: Minute by Minute

The cartoon above is from Gary Clement at Canada's National Post (27 December 2014). Clement pokes fun at the six-volume autobiography of Norwegian novelist Karl Ove Knausgård, My Struggle (Min kamp), known for its minute-by-minute examination of all minutiae of the author's life. It was a publishing sensation. Unlike Clement's cartoon, there was nothing funny about the personal outcome. Knausgård admitted that in exposing so many intimate details about himself and those close to him, he committed an "unmoral" act and gave away his soul. But he said: "The point was not to please. It was to speak the truth. To write reality." The first volume was published in 2009, the last in 2011; the whole series is 3,600 pages long.