Sunday, May 20, 2007

Dera Sacha Sauda versus The Sikhs

The recent violence in Punjab and Haryana over the Dera Sacha Sauda chief's choice of dress highlights one of the most fundamental problems in India. This is a problem which runs deeper than something like corruption or overpopulation (not to play down the importance of those issues).

The Sikhs (or anyone else) have no right to tell anyone how to dress. Blasphemy, in any form, is not an offense in any civilized society. Everyone should have the freedom to say and do whatever they please -- as long as it is not designed to cause disturbances. Unfortunately, the Sikhs in Punjab have failed to recognize this.

The recent incidents are neither isolated nor unusual. Second year students in colleges think they have the right to rag incoming freshmen. RSS and VHP activists think it is their right to smash the offices of newspapers that publish anything they disagree with. Naga christians think they have the right to chase Hindus out of Nagaland. National governments think it is perfectly fine to imprison and torture anyone who says anything against a minister (an outstanding example: the Emergency of Indira Gandhi). Soldiers think it is normal to torture Kashmiri kids, and kill them if they refuse to cooperate. Muslim organizations think it is their right to serve death sentences on authors who disagree with anything in the Quran. The Naxalites think they can dispense social justice to (maim and kill) anyone they don't like. Marathas think they have the right to prevent non-Marathas from working in Maharashtra. The CPI(M) thought it was within its rights to order its cadres to cut thumbs off villagers who don't vote for the party. Indians everywhere thought they could attack any Sikh in the aftermath of assassination in 1984. The police everywhere think it is their right to thrash and torture everybody in jail cells.

This lack of respect for individual civil liberties is characteristic of India. Individuals and organizations suffer from a God complex: "if it is within my power, I have the right to do it". The Dera Sacha Sauda incidents just serve to illustrate a greater malaise.

Getting back to the Dera Sacha Sauda affair, police have registered an FIR against the head of the Dera Sacha Sauda. This may be proper procedure when complaints are made against him, but it is surprising that the police is doing nothing about the rioting hordes who mortally threatened Dera members.

So, what are civil liberties worth? One of the questions we Indians must ask ourselves is this: "Do we serve our collective national soul better by granting civil liberties to others who disagree with us, or by aggressively enforcing our own opinions?"


Friday, May 4, 2007

The Natures of India and the U.S.A.

In the U.S.A., there is a sense that India is on the brink of something like a world takeover and is about to catapult itself into advanced-nation-dom. Many Indians have also started believing that this will be so, without paying attention to the fundamental systemic differences between the natures of the so-called advanced countries and India. This belief is no doubt spurred by the rapid expansion witnessed since economic liberalization in 1991.

But I think our pre-1991 economic structure accounts for only part of the backwardness. The rest is due to our ancient social structures. A long time ago, Indians invented a social structure that ensured stability and internal safety and removed much of the uncertainty associated with everyday life. This had its merits, but it also led to a society that is non-confrontational, too scared to assume leadership roles and afraid to innovate if it involves taking risks. Oh, it's easy to come up with counterexamples: in a country of 1.1 billion people, there are bound to be some who do all those things. But the average Indian is more likely to be a sheep than the average American, and less likely to be a lion.

Looking at this whole issue through a Dennett-ish Darwinian lens, one can see pseudo-evolutionary forces at work everywhere. Indians are probably among the most inbred people on the planet, and it shows in the number of congenital diseases and the general state of health. Our safety nets, which include nearly guaranteed intra-tribe marriage, seem to have nibbled away at our gene pool over the centuries until we remain a tired and spent population. In social terms we remain "safe", preferring life paths that lead to stability rather than achievement. Removing the bonds of what Gurcharan Das calls the License Raj is only the first step. The important question is, can we shed the bonds of our own degenerative culture?

The answer seems to be in the affirmative, as Western influences and the powerful new media wear down cultural barriers and our own Bollywood films encourage us to rebel against ancient socio-cultural mores. Cross-cultural marriages and heterodox life patterns are increasingly taking hold. But in adopting such novelties, is India headed towards a major shark-jump? Will the India of tomorrow be so different that it is not recognizably Indian? I think the answer is yes.

The U.S.A., in contrast to India, is founded on principles of evolutionary efficiency. America is not just a country, although it is strongly tied to its real estate. America is a meme, a concept: a country defined by the intelligence and ability of its inhabitants at any given point of time. The inhabitants themselves are less important than what they can contribute to this Amerimeme. An immigrant is only as important as the brains or labour that he or she brings into America; amazingly, this also applies to its citizens. The state gives citizens the opportunity to be useful -- but if they're not, they (and likely, their bloodlines) are doomed to oblivion.

India is a little more forgiving. A less-than-important man may, and usually does, father a multitude of offspring, some of whom may end up useful. No doubt this happens in America, too -- but less frequently. America is less forgiving of inefficiency and error than India is.


Saturday, April 21, 2007

Causality Versus Determinism

Many attempts to define determinism, the philosophical notion that everything that happens in the universe is pre-ordained or pre-decided, involve the notion of causality. A causal chain or graph of events, driven by the laws of physics, is supposed to explain how determinism can be. In this view, the state of the universe at any time is determined once we have an initial state of the universe and a set of physical laws which allow us to compute the state of the universe at any time. Of course, since we are also part of the universe and are thus subject to its laws, some thinkers construct these arguments from the viewpoint of a hypothetical "demon" residing outside the universe and unaffected by the universe's laws.

In what follows, I will argue that the most common notion of causality, based on counterfactual outcomes, is meaningless in a deterministic universe. We may have to adopt a definition of causality which relies on computability within the universe: A causes B if we can start with state A and compute a sequence of state changes induced by the laws of the universe, ending in B.

Counterfactual Causality Fails in a Deterministic Universe

According to the Wikipedia entry on determinism:
Causal (or nomological) determinism is the thesis that future events are necessitated by past and present events combined with the laws of nature.
The Wikipedia entry on Causality has this to say:
The philosopher David Lewis notably suggested that all statements about causality can be understood as counterfactual statements. So, for instance, the statement that John's smoking caused his premature death is equivalent to saying that had John not smoked he would not have prematurely died.
The incompatibility between determinism and causality is now easy to see: if causality is defined counterfactually, then any event A which occurs before an event B is causally responsible for B. This is because the statement "If A had not occurred, then B would not have occurred" is meaningless in a deterministic universe. "If A had not occurred" is like saying "If 1 equals 2", because determinism says that A occurring is the only possibility. Thus, if A occurs before B, then A is causally responsible for B.

Causality as Computation

Perhaps a modified definition of causality will help take care of this problem. Suppose that, by "A causes B", we mean that a computer within the universe is able to find a chain of applications of the laws of the universe which takes the universe from state A to state B (via some sequence of intermediate events). Then we can say that A causes B. Note that this definition refers to the ability to compute or the ability to understand.

The definition is not yet valid, however. What if, given any two events A and B, we can compute such a sequence of intermediate events? Then this definition would be no more useful than the previous one based on counterfactuals. We may have to abandon an attempt to define causality as either true or false (A causes B or A does not cause B) and accept a definition based on degrees of causality. Thus, if the chain of intermediate events going from A to B is long, we say the relationship is "less causal", and if it is short, we say it is "more causal".


Sunday, April 15, 2007

A Mechanistic View of Ethics

What is Ethics? What is the foundation for ethics? Do we need religion for ethics? Can a mechanical (soulless, purely physics-driven) being have ethics? How can ethics be derived in a deterministic universe without free will? The Optimization viewpoint. Can there be an Ultimate Logical Justification for any system of ethics?

Ethics Without Soul

There has recently been a lot of controversy about Atheist ethics. Ethical systems have, traditionally, been tied to religion. Since religions became widespread, the primary motivation for ethical behaviour has been religious. Each religion has its own ethical system. Almost all religions specify carrot-and-stick reasons for behaving ethically. In the Abrahamic religions, heaven and hell are the carrot and the stick. In Hinduism, nirvana and demotion in the "highness" of being are the carrot and the stick. Not all religions insist on the existence of one universal "God", but Atheists often remain unattached to any of the usual religions in addition to a lack of belief in a "God". The question then arises: Can Atheists behave ethically?

More generally, the question can be posed for any mechanistic system (a system ruled only by the laws of physics and not by any agent, such as a "soul", connected to religion). Mechanistic systems include humans, other organisms, robots, and any other objects or phenomena. (Whether humans are mechanistic is a subject of much debate; see Strong and Weak Artificial Intelligence and Gödel, Penrose and Artificial Intelligence -- Simplified.) What does ethics mean for a mechanistic system?

The Goal of Ethics

I think ethics can be viewed as a mechanism for preservation or proliferation of complexity. Complexity is precious; the entropy grindstone is constantly trying to destroy it (the second law of thermodynamics). Every ethical principle we have can be seen as ultimately for complexity. Here are some examples.

For example, we prize human life over that of all other animals. This is consistent with complexity preservation: humans are more complex than other animals. We think killing an animal for no reason is unethical; we feel no such thing about smashing a rock. This is also consistent with complexity preservation: an animal is more complex than a rock.

A lot of things are not directly connected to complexity preservation, but come about because we need simple rules of thumb that we can follow easily. Lying is considered unethical. In the long term, this helps preserve social order and thus helps preserve the human species.

Thus mechanistic systems can have ethical behaviour - behaviour which eventually tends to preserve or increase complexity. Atheists can be as ethical as anyone else, as can a robot, as long as their actions are directed towards optimizing complexity.

Thus we have converted the problem of constructing ethical systems to an optimization problem. The objective function (which we are trying to maximize) is overall complexity. Ethics can now be viewed as rules of behaviour following whom tends to increase complexity.

Our Ethical Principles

So this tells us what ethics is about, and what ethics aims to do. But it still doesn't tell us how a mechanistic individual should develop his/her sense of ethics. A person can hardly be expected to think of some far-off big-picture complexity goal when deciding what constitutes good ethics. How can the above definition be made practical?

First, by recognizing what the eventual goal of ethics is, we have converted the construction of ethical principles into an optimization problem. This is a good first step, since we now know what it is we are trying to do when we talk about acting ethically.

Our solution to the optimization problem does not always rely on the objective function of complexity, but rather relies on the observation that various human institutions (societies, religions, legal systems) have already come up with rules of thumb for this optimization. Once we recognize this, we use our judgment to decide which of the existing rules are relevant to overall preservation of complexity and adopt an ethical system based on these rules. This solution may not be perfect, but it is more important that the ethical rules be easy to remember and follow - what use is a perfect but unintelligible and impractical rule? It is preferable, I think, to find simple and general rules, and avoid special cases and exceptions as much as possible.

What's more, once we recognize this as a valid scheme for the generation of ethical principles, we can free ourselves from the past. Faced with a new situation, we can find ethical rules tailored to the new situation, rather than trying to search for rules buried in existing religious systems that are applicable. A religious system may be able to help, but the effort of trying to reconcile religion with the new situation is often not worth it.


Saturday, April 14, 2007

Is Our Physics the only Physics?

We have a specific way of perceiving things. For example, our mind perceives the world through a four-dimensional model: 3 spatial dimensions, and one (unidirectional) time dimension. But is this the only way the world around us can be perceived?

It is clear that, as long as there is a one-to-one mapping between one representation and another, any two representations of any piece of information are equivalent. For example, it does not matter whether we store a position in polar or Cartesian coordinates - because we have a one-to-one map from one to the other.

So, imagine that we meet an alien species. Would they necessarily have a unit of distance? Could it be that, instead of (x, y, z, t), they perceive (tx, ty, tz, t^3)? Their unit of measurement would then have distance and time entangled together. They might say, "walk for 125 cube-seconds" (equivalent to us saying "walk for 5 seconds"). Our statement "the car is 10 kilometres away and the time now is 125 seconds" would translate to "the car is 50 km-seconds away". Is there a logical reason why every species should perceive in the same units that we do? Maybe not!

This needn't be restricted just to distance and time. A species might perceive taste and colour together, or even distance confounded with emotional state. "That's red-sweet, my friend, but it's happy-far!"


Thursday, April 12, 2007

The Next Big Thing

What's the Next Big Thing in technology going to be? By big, I mean something revolutionary - like the World Wide Web, or at least (a little lower on the rungs) like social networking.

I think it's going to be integration of electronic devices into the human body. We already have scientists working on:

Pacemakers (already done!)
A chip that improves eyesight.
Artificially enhanced minds: here and here.
Thought-controlled computers: here and here.

I think this trend will continue, and within a few decades human-computer hybrids will be widespread.

What then? The scary thing about this is that it will mean the rich are suddenly fundamentally superior. The biological randomness that levels the playing field somewhat, say by making a poor person smart or strong, will be lost. Those who are born with the most money can be the smartest and the strongest. Which means they'll make even more money. Which will let them buy even more hardware to become even stronger and smarter. And so on.

Will those who are poor at the start of this race be doomed?


Wednesday, January 24, 2007

Gödel, Penrose and Artificial Intelligence -- Simplified

The mathematician Kurt Gödel became famous for his incompleteness theorems, published in 1931. Gödel proved a theorem which implied that, given any consistent formal system of axioms, there exists a true statement which cannot be proved using those axioms. This statement is called a Gödel sentence for that formal system.

Surprisingly, some people -- notably, the mathematician and physicist Roger Penrose (in his books, The Emperor's New Mind and Shadows of the Mind) -- have used this to claim that human intelligence cannot be an algorithm.

Proof: How does this claim work? Loosely speaking, algorithms correspond to formal systems. Suppose, then, that we have a mathematician Mr. A, who has studied Gödel's theorems. Assume that Mr. A, a human, is an algorithm -- and hence a formal system. Find a Gödel sentence for the formal system consisting of Mr. A. Now, Mr. A has studied Gödel's theorems, so he knows that a Gödel sentence is true and can prove it, since this proof is precisely what he studied. Thus the sentence is provable using Mr. A's formal system. But this is a contradiction since a Gödel sentence, by definition, cannot be proved using the axioms of Mr. A's formal system. Thus, Mr. A can do something -- prove a Gödel sentence -- which no formal system should be able to do. Thus the statement that Mr. A is a formal system is false.

Objection 1: Proponents of AI have criticized this argument. The most common criticism is the following: look at Gödel's theorem above again. It holds only for consistent formal systems. Thus, Mr. A would have to be a consistent formal system for Penrose's argument to make sense. But who says humans are consistent? Even mathematicians like Mr. A may contradict themselves sometimes, and so are not necessarily consistent. You would first have to prove that humans are consistent for this argument to work. (Indeed, Penrose does spend considerable effort trying to prove just this, but it has not convinced his detractors.)

Objection 2: I think that there is a stronger reason why Penrose's argument fails. The problem is in the sentence "Mr. A has studied Gödel's theorems, so he knows that a Gödel sentence is true and can prove it", taken from my simplified version of Penrose's proof above. This statement has two interpretations. It is true -- only when interpreted correctly. Its two interpretations are so similar that we naturally confuse them. Here are the interpretations:
  1. If Mr. A is given a sentence and is told that it is a Gödel sentence, then he knows that it is true
  2. If Mr. A is given any sentence, he can recognize whether it is a Gödel sentence, and if it is he knows that it is true.
The first interpretation is true. The second is not necessarily true -- Mr. A may have no way of identifying that a particular sentence is a Gödel sentence for his own formal system. Thus, contrary to Penrose's claim, it is quite possible that Mr. A is handed a Gödel sentence for his formal system, and has no way to prove or disprove it -- even if it is true. This is because he does not know whether the sentence is a Gödel sentence for his system.

I believe Objection 2 provides a much stronger refutation of Penrose's argument than Objection 1. See here for a more detailed discussion of this issue.