The t-shirts of all-around opening up

Sometime in 2003 or 2004, I forget when exactly, I was in Nanjing, and on the side of the bus was a sign that said:

Nanjing: The city of all-around opening up

which is an announcement to the Nanjingites that their city was ready to be part of the world-at-large, to welcome foreigners -- investors, tourists -- to their great city, the capital of nine dynasties, and the capital of the Chinese Republic under Dr. Sun Yat Sen. And open up they did. I first came to Nanjing in the late 90s and back then, foreigners were a novelty. I was mistaken for a Japanese, a European, and a Sri Lankan, the latter by a taxi driver who kept looking at me (I was at the back seat, of course) while driving, speaking in Chinese to my colleague from Taipei (that's how I know he mistook me for a Sri Lankan -- my colleague told me). About a year later, I came back to Nanjing with colleagues from Europe and the US, and the Nanjingites, whenever we go out together, had a field day. They stared, aghast, at the novelty of several blonde people. "I dont think I'll ever get used to this," said a colleague from Belgium, as kids were following him and adults stared at him wherever he went. And he looked normal. Imagine the stares for another colleague with blonde hair with blood red streaks. Eating at posh hotels wasnt a problem; they spoke English there. But outside, even at McDonalds or KFC, all youll get from the crew were blank stares when you tried to order (they didnt discover queueing then). Fortunately they had pictures. In restaurants, we just pointed to the food ordered at the other tables if the menu didnt have pictures.

Soon after that, Nanjing undertook what looked to me like a contruction boom on a massive scale. This was after Beijing won their bid to host the 2008 Olympics. And with this construction boom, Nanjing became the city of all-around opening up. We started seeing foreigners everywhere, from all races, probably from western companies that set up shop there. Gradually, the Nanjingites got used to them and soon they wouldnt even merit a curious glance, let alone a stare. The crew at McDonald's and KFC spoke English; not perfect, but passable and understandable.* College educated Nanjingites understood English, if spoken slowly or written down, even if they had difficulty speaking it.

As their opening up the outside world proceeded apace, English became common in ads, song lyrics, magazine articles (even just a phrase), store signs, but mostly on t-shirts. This last one provided me with endless entertainment as I took to t-shirt reading to pass the time. They had the most creative t-shirt signs Ive ever seen and it was a puzzle figuring out what some of them meant. One day, in the office, a female colleague wore a pink sweater with a cartoon cat drawn on it and the sign 'Romantic Pussy' in big letters. Since then, I hunted down t-shirt signs in earnest, and wrote them down on a notebook whenever I can.

Aside from Romantic Pussy, I saw a t-shirt with the words 'Chunkily-penised boys' on it. What, is this a sign of the burgeoning sexual revolution among the young Chinese? The youth seemed sexually-active and uninhibited. Everywhere we looked, we saw couples engaged in activities that we Pinoys would practice in darkened movie theaters or bedrooms, but they do it in broad daylight, in parks, in fast-food stores, on buses, on the streets. Romantic pussies and chunkily-penised boys engaged in lip-lock and tonsil hockey. There's also this trend where boyfriend and girlfriend dress exactly alike, t-shirt-and-jeans, announcing to all their commitment to each other, through t-shirts with signs like 'I am her boyfriend' and 'I am his girlfriend'. Solo shirts also are full of romance and profession of love such as the enigmatic 'I love you. The Brane', which I assume says, I dont love you for your looks. It's your mind I find fascinating.

Other t-shirt have a patriotic bent. There's this intriguing T-shirt that said on the back, 'I love Tibet' a radical sign to be sure, inviting police questioning at least, until one sees the sign on the front that says 'I love China more than ever'. There is also a sign that says 'I love China up' which had me wondering what it meant. China up? Probably means that China is on the way up. Which it is.

Some have a mathematical bent: 'Fascinating. 100% divided by 100%', or 'Feel 100 to be different'. Others convey a positive attitude and a love of life, probably brought about by the economic boom: 'Good memory. Today, tomorrow, always', 'Io, why wouty?'. And lest we miss that Christianity has a strong foothold in China, we are reminded by this t-shirt that says 'Jesus of Mind'. Or this one that says, 'God save sweet love the rice ascend'. (God's love will provide for us even if the price of rice continues to rise?)

Others are just baffling. 'I have a goodness of a queen, sweating empathy, and a daughter', 'Sides, it stores to the thread de the air, the heat, retaining her than general', 'Party. Do you to me? Earth'. These had me puzzling over their meaning, but perhaps I was reading too much into them. And I just heeded the advice of another t-shirt that said 'The answer is fairly obvious so you shall really guess it'.

They just mean what they mean.

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*Or they did. For some reason, McDonald's and KFC crews' English skills have deteriorated. I surmise that it's because the crew who spoke fluent English were assigned to Beijing temporarily for the Olympics. The Burger King crew's English meanwhile is impeccable.

The soul of the machine

In an interview, cognitive scientist Douglas Hofstadter had this to say about Ray Kurzweil's 'singularity', that point in which machines achieve the holy grail of computing, artificial intelligence, and takes over evolution from us humans:

Well, to me, this “glorious” new world would be the end of humanity as we know it. If such a vision comes to pass, it certainly would spell the end of human life. Once again, I don't want to be there if such a vision should ever come to pass. But I doubt that it will come to pass for a very long time. How long? I just don't know. Centuries, at least. But I don't know. I'm not a futurologist in the least. But Kurzweil is far more “optimistic” (i.e., depressingly pessimistic, from my perspective) about the pace at which all these world-shaking changes will take place.

In any case, the vision that Kurzweil offers (and other very smart people offer it too, such as Hans Moravec, Vernor Vinge, perhaps Marvin Minsky, and many others — usually people who strike me as being overgrown teen-age sci-fi addicts, I have to say) is repugnant to me. On the surface it may sound very idealistic and utopian, but deep down I find it extremely selfish and greedy. “Me, me, me!” is how it sounds to me — “I want to live forever!” But who knows? I don't even like thinking about this nutty technology-glorifying scenario, now usually called “The Singularity” (also called by some “The Rapture of the Nerds” — a great phrase!) — it just gives me the creeps. Sorry!

Douglas Hofstadter still believes in AI, mind you. I think he more-or-less holds a materialist mind is brain view. His objection to Kurzweil's technological approach is one of method. "A key element in this whole vision is that no one will need to understand the mind or brain in order to copy a particular human's mind with perfect accuracy, because trillions of tiny “nanobots” will swarm through the bloodstream in the human brain and will report back all the “wiring details” of that particular brain, which at that point constitute a very complex table of data that can be fed into a universal computer program that executes neuron-firings, and presto — that individual's mind has been reinstantiated in an electronic medium." Hofstadter thinks this can't be done without first understanding the mind/brain. And in this he says we have a long way to go.

If indeed trillions of nanobots swarm through the bloodstream and create an electronic replica of the human brain, and we succeed in somehow copying all the wirings, I would think all we'll come up with is a computer, not a human mind at all. The problem I see is this: in a classical computer, a bit must be either 0 or 1. Kurzweil's nanobots will be limited to 0's and 1's because I can't imagine these nanobots operating in a quantum level. Even if the nanobots can, for example, copy a certain subatomic wiring in the brain, it'll have to contend with virtual particles, that is, particles that arent really there, but could possibly be there (or not there). Therefore, being limited to 0's and 1's it won't be able to capture everything about what a mind is. For example, humans arent limited to 0's and 1's. We can have states of both 0 and 1, or neither 0 nor 1, or it can simply refuse to decide between 0 and 1, or simply not care. Hofstadter believes that we will one day understand the mind. [And perhaps, with the development of a quantum computer (already in its infancy), we might begin to approximate the human mind. In the meantime, allow me to be skeptical of this new venture in computing.]

The interview also has Hofstadter saying something interesting. When asked to explain his claim that the "I" is 'nothing but a myth, a hallucination perceived by a hallucination', and its conflict to such things as his compassion, he says, "I can't explain this completely rationally." It is interesting because here he is admitting that reason itself can't account for his beliefs, and yet we are asked to believe (not by Hofstadter particularly, but by science ideologues in general), that the rationality of science is our way to 'salvation.'

In his critique of the Turing Test, software pioneer Mark Halpern had this to say:

The AI champions, in their desperate struggle to salvage the idea that computers can or will think, are indeed in the grip of an ideology: they are, as they see it, defending rationality itself. If it is denied that computers can, even in principle, think, then a claim is being tacitly made that humans have some special property that science will never understand—a “soul” or some similarly mystical entity. This is of course unacceptable to scientists (and even more to aspirants to the title “scientist”).

And here is one of cognitive science's champions, claiming to have no rational way of explaining something. Rationality, Im sure Hofstadter will agree, can only get you so far. The problem of rationality I suppose is its dependence on language. Language in fact is an analogue of reason itself. But humans have experience beyond language, a subjectivity that they cannot convey to others. How many times have we described an experience as 'beyond words'? Or try this: describe how a sampaguita smells like to another person who hasnt smelled one before. This 'beyond words' experience is something that has to be captured by the machine that has to follow a program that uses language.

So can machines think? Will they be able to? Sure, why not? I just dont expect them to think like humans. Artificial intelligence is just that: artificial. Mark Halpern (ibid) offers agnosticism as the most rational approach: "What I would urge on them is agnosticism—an acceptance of the fact that we have not yet achieved AI, and have no idea when if ever we will. That fact in no way condemns us to revert to pre-rational modes of thinking—all it means is that there is a lot we don’t know, and that we will have to learn to suspend judgement. It may be uncomfortable to live with uncertainty, but it’s far better than insisting, against all evidence, that the emperor is well dressed."

Change you can believe in... Not!

I do not share the enthusiasm of a lot of my countrymen on the upcoming elections in the United States of America. My reason is, no matter who wins, it won't change anything for us. Republican or Democrat, America will work for American interests -- which they should. I dont buy into the conventional wisdom that a Democratic victory this year would substantially change America's foreign policy towards its former colony. I say horsefeathers to that one.

Reports such as this only reinforce my views.

The award for the most bald-faced lie on the House floor Friday, however, goes to Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), who insisted that the bill "does not allow warrantless surveillance of Americans." She is wrong. It does.

The broader spying powers given to the executive branch by the compromise bill require intelligence agencies to "target" foreigners. But if those foreign "targets" happen to call or e-mail Americans, those communications are fair game. And since the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court is only permitted to review the broad targeting procedures government eavesdroppers use to determine that a target is abroad, and not the substantive basis for authorizing surveillance of any target, anyone is a potential target.

The bill, in other words, allows the government to conduct "vacuum cleaner" surveillance -- sweeping up international traffic willy-nilly -- then filter it for anything that looks interesting. Indeed, many believe that licensing such surveillance is precisely the point of this legislation. If so, "warrantless surveillance of Americans" could well become routine, whether or not they are the formal "targets" of eavesdropping.

Now why would they do this? They control the House and the Senate, and if polls are correct, theyll control the White House as well. It comes as no surprise therefore that they would want this sort of power. How does Obama feel about this 'compromise'? He thinks it aint bad at all.

In the past 24 hours, specifically beginning with the moment Barack Obama announced that he now supports the Cheney/Rockefeller/Hoyer House bill, there have magically arisen -- in places where one would never have expected to find them -- all sorts of claims about why this FISA "compromise" isn't really so bad after all. People who spent the week railing against Steny Hoyer as an evil, craven enabler of the Bush administration -- or who spent the last several months identically railing against Jay Rockefeller -- suddenly changed their minds completely when Barack Obama announced that he would do the same thing as they did.

Add to this Congressman Ron Paul's accusation that Nancy Pelosi removed a section from a bill passed by Congress "which would have barred the U.S. from going to war with Iran without a congressional vote".

“She [Pelosi] removed it deliberately,” Paul says. “And then, the astounding thing is, when asked why, she said the leadership in Israel asked her to. That was in the newspaper, that was in ‘The Washington Post,’ that she was asked by [the American Israel Public Affairs Committee] and others not to do that."

So you see, boys and girls, nothing will change except theyll have a better looking and articulate president.

...

I didnt want to blog about the Princess of the Stars because 1) other blogs do this sort of thing better than I do, and 2) my brother-in-law might have been on that boat and I guess I didnt want to jinx his survival. Then my wife sent an SMS from Masbate yesterday and she confirmed that her brother was indeed on that boat and is still missing. I hope she's wrong. I hope he never went on board. You can never really tell with my brother-in-law. He's, shall we say, erratic. He'll tell you he'll do one thing, assure you in fact, then turns around and does something else.

I havent seen him for years. The last time was over 10 years ago when he dropped by the house and asked if he could stay for a few days until he could get back on his feet, and I said sure, and had him do stuff around the house, which he was glad to do. Not heavy stuff; just the usual: go to the palengke, cook, stiff like that. It was fun having a regular drinking buddy on the weekends too. He offered to paint the bedroom. I said he didnt have to do that, but he insisted, so I said ok. He did a decent job, and left the next day. I found out later that he took a gun I kept on top of the aparador with him. (It wasnt loaded, so relax, Gunless Society freaks.) We didnt hear from him for years at a time: he's back in Masbate, he's in Cebu, he's in Davao. There were even rumors that he was dead, but a letter would appear and it would be from him. He couldnt come back to the house probably because he was too embarrassed, but I wouldve welcomed him I think, but he kept in touch with my wife. I didnt mind not hearing from him. In fact the less I heard from him the better.

And now...

Education

George Carlin - Education and the Elite
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Meme, schmeme

Dont you just love it when scientists and philosophers get snarky? The most famous snarky scientist is Richard Dawkins, who, his insipid The God Delusion nothwithstanding, can otherwise be sharp, witty, and entertaining when speaking live. Must be the accent. Someone who can out-snark Dawkins is the philosopher and professor of mathematics David Berlinski. I would pay to see these two go at it in a debate on evolutionary theory or religion.

Add anthropologist Greg Downey to that list. In this post in the Neuroanthropology blogsite, he eviscerates memetics. He does so by first establishing his Darwinist credentials, then he lets them have it (them in this case being Susan Blackmore and Daniel Dennett).

Finally, I resent the argument that Dennett makes, that all those who resist memetics are ‘anti-Darwinist’ or afraid of the implications of Darwin’s ideas. I’m more than comfortable with Darwin’s contribution to evolutionary theory, especially natural selection, and I think his works (not just Origin of Species) were remarkable, but I don’t adhere to ‘Darwinism’ as if it were a scholastic faith.

It’s not ‘Darwinism’ that I support, like it’s a cult or a form of thought that I must follow religiously; I believe that ‘Darwinism’ is only useful in that it is a theory that provides hypotheses to be tested, a powerful explanatory framework that explains some (though not all) phenomena. That is, when Dennett argues that some people are insufficiently Darwinist because they don’t want to apply ‘Darwinism’ to the world-wide web or Hoover Dam, I feel like he’s treating ‘Darwinism’ as a one-size-fits-all über-explanation. That’s not science — that’s a cult. In fact, most people who study evolution argue that there a LOT of things that must be added to ‘Darwinism’ to get modern evolutionary theory (like, say, ooooh, genes…).

Emphasis in the original. Im not the biggest fan of evolutionary psychology, having called it a font of science fiction once, but I admit the reason I think it's a crock is probably because how it is popularized in the media as some sort of theory of anything. (Why do men like blondes? Evolution. Why do men like brunettes? Evolution. That sort of thing.) But thank God for scientists who can save the science from the cranks.

If you could fight anyone, who would you fight?

Jose Rizal was Jack the Ripper. He was Adolf Hitler's and Mao Zedong's father. He was gay. And he was the best these islands ever produced. Had he been alive, would he have been president of the Republic? Like his friend Sun Yat Sen in China? I dont know. Aguinaldo's men assassinated Antonio Luna and murdered Andres Bonifacio. I'd like to think he wouldnt have dared do that with Rizal. The turmoil will come after he leaves, as it did in China, since no one came close to him in intelligence, erudition, and charisma.

If I could fight anyone, I'd fight Jose Rizal.

Happy birthday, JP.

[Photo from http://www.historicaltextarchive.com/USA/twenty/filipino.html]