E-cosystem

That’s probably about the cheesiest title I’ve ever come up with, but it captures the spirit of the post well enough. Let me explain.

As I’ve mentioned in previous posts (namely, this one and this one), I’ve always been interested in simulated evolution. Unfortunately, the evolutionary models I’ve built have generally been extremely. Either A) They were designed to address only a single aspect of the evolutionary process; B) They were vastly scaled-down and simplified approximations of the real thing; or C) They were based on shaky evolutionary methods that didn’t produce anything extraordinary.

Well, recently, I’ve been thinking about the biosphere more than usual, and while I was browsing through the Wikipedia article on James Lovelock’s “Daisyworld” simulation (a proof-of concept simulation of the Gaia hypothesis), I got to thinking about the complex interactions between the component species of the ecosystem. I began to realize that each organism performs some function for the ecosystem at large (except humans…more on that in a later post), for example, the way bacteria help to decompose dead organic matter, and the way ticks act as vectors for certain viruses. Being the kind of guy who’s often unsure of the limits of his abilities, I thought I’d try to write a simulation that would capture this complex “Web of Life.”

And so, the E-cosystem was born (I can’t believe it! I said it again! What’s wrong with me?) In a little more than an hour’s worth of coding in NetLogo (of course it was NetLogo. As far as I’m concerned, that’s the only way to write multi-agent simulation code), I cobbled together a working simulation.

Here’s how it works:

At the beginning of the simulation, a random number of species (between 1 and 11) is generated. Associated with each species is the list of species that it preys upon (this can include its own kind), as well as a separate list giving attributes like movement speed and energy capacity.

Once these lists are compiled, the program generates a bunch of organisms (the number is random) from each species. And with that, the ecosystem (!) is ready to go.

During the simulation, the organisms have some very simple behavior: at every step, if there’s nobody around, they wander about randomly. If there’s somebody within two squares, they move towards it (at their native speed, of course). When they get there, if that somebody happens to be of a different species, and it happens to be one of the species on the first organism’s prey list, it tries to eat the other organism. But if that somebody happens to be of the same species, then (unless it’s a cannibal) tries to mate with it (if successful, it passes on a slightly-mutated version of its attributes).

That’s all there is to it, but even in this chopped-down form, the simulation displays some nontrivial behavior. I’ve always thought pictures were much clearer than words, so here are some screenshots from a sample run.

Here’s the population of randomly-generated organisms. The little white thing hovering over each of them (if you can see it) is their species number.

Immediately, the organisms begin to interact. As the population graph makes clear, reproduction begins immediately.

Eventually, weak species and degenerate species (that is, species that have weird relationships with other species, like cannibals or organisms that can’t eat anything) are trimmed away by natural selection, and a few highly-fit species begin to dominate.

After a fairly long run, the entire ecosystem has been reduced to two or three species, with, perhaps, a few residual survivors from other groups. There’s a lot less energy (in the form of prey) to be had, and in fact, this particular ecosystem is doomed.

Free energy has run out, and all the organisms have starved to death. All of the simulations I ran before this one either ended in this state, or in what I call a “biological singularity”: an exponentially-multiplying population of slow-moving fast-breeders that are totally unstoppable. It seems to me that either my simulated biology is a bit too simple (one of my major concerns is that the system doesn’t have any input of free energy (like the Sun provides on Earth), which means that ALL of the ecosystems are doomed to be limited by their starting energy); or else, I need to increase the number of species and the size of the world so that more complex stabilizing interdependencies can develop. Even with these bugs, the simulation is a lot more interesting and robust than I expected, and I’ll post any developments later on.

For now, though, I need to take a break from typing while I’ve still got cartilage in my fingers.

The Future of Neural Networks

I found this video some time ago when I was searching YouTube for interesting demonstrations of neural networks. It is, by far, the best explanation of modern Neural-Net theory that I’ve ever encountered, and I thought that some of you out in cyberspace might enjoy it as well.

The video is presented by Geoffrey Hinton, a machine-learning pioneer. His treatment of what he calls “Restricted Boltzmann Machine” neural nets is incredibly nuanced and mathematically rigorous, a — and forgive the cliché here — must-see for machine-learning enthusiasts. An excellent presentation based on an excellent idea, and certainly the most brain-like (maybe even mind-like) system I’ve ever seen. Some of the particular Machines he explores can do some fairly amazing things, like natural character recognition and sorting documents by semantic content.  And he manages to throw in a joke or two, as well.

You can find the video here. Enjoy.

Asymptote’s Zombie Infection Simulator: Version 3.0

Since the Zombie Infection Simulator has turned out to be one of the most popular things I’ve ever done on this blog, I thought it was high time I implemented all the pretty, shiny ideas I came up with when I was working on the previoius version. Hopefully, I’ll have it running sometime soon, but for the moment, I’ve become mired in hellish nightmare of nested if-else routines that I somehow managed to screw up.

Anyway, here are the new features I’m implementing in AZIS 3.0:

• Toughness: Humans with higher toughness are less likely to panic, and more likely to become fighters, when confronted with zombies.
• Gullibility: Less-gullible humans are less likely to panic when they encounter other panicked humans, and also less likely to join a human “flock.”
• Better targeting: Zombies now pick a specific target among the humans they can currently see, and chase that human until they’re either dead, infected, or out of range.
• Vision Radius: The distance that humans and zombies can see is now equal, and can be changed with a handy-dandy little slider.

Things that I’m still working on:

• Debugging: The code is a horrendous tangle of nested ifs and if-elses, so debugging is harder than usual. I guess they say you should tab-deliniate your code for a reason…
• The South-Facing Gremlin: No matter what I do, I cannot stop the human flocks from all moving Southward on the map. I’ve tried all sorts of randomization routines (some of them almost clever), and not a single thing helps. I’m thinking that it would probably be best if we all just get used to it, because it looks like the South-Facing Gremlin (yes, I’ve given it a name. What of it?) is here to stay.

Hopefully, I’ll have more updates soon.

A Puzzle

Being the nerd I am, I enjoy puzzles. Here’s one, for your amusement:

Hidden in this paragraph is a message. The structure will unlock that secret to which I alluded above, a great, wondrous secret. Finding it is your goal. Remember, the means of decoding the sentences lie within those sentences. Once you have decoded them, a treasure of great beauty and importance lies waiting for you.

Feeling Aged at Twenty

For a while now, I’ve been noticing a disturbing innner trend: I feel old. Very old. On some occasions, I’ve unironically mumbled “damn kids.” No doubt, this is a product of the rapidly-accelerating advance of technology (Singularity, anyone?), but to me, it doesn’t bode well.

You see, I was an early member of the Internet generation, and when the much-touted “Web 2.0″, user-created internet arrived sometime this decade, it only made sense to me. I’ve always been one to try to keep up or at least keep informed of the latest technical innovations. Now, though, I’m finding that I don’t have the energy to run in the twenty or thirty different directions that my brain is pulling me. There’s too much to read, too much to write, too much to digest, too many Wikipedia queries to make. It’s all just too much, too fast.

To me, this is foreshadowing what is to come. Before long, it will be impossible for the standard human being (I like to call them MOSHes (Mostly Original Substrate Humans), after Kurzweil) to keep up, even if they’ve been — as future children will no doubt be — steeped in the nöosphere since birth. Not only is this trend going to push us towards mind augmentation and transhumanism sooner rather than later, but it hints at things to come. Maybe all this Singularity stuff is crap, a “rapture for nerds” as some of the characters in Charles Stross’s Accelerando sometimes call it, but we’re certainly steaming towards some kind of technosocial discontinuity, if a fairly hip (and wipe that grin off your face!) technophile like myself is already feeling dated and obsolete at twenty!

A Very Brief Message to the Cartoonists and Humorists of the World

Yes, gas prices are very high. Gas now costs so much that it is worth more than some items we would normally consider more valuable. Good irony. Ha ha. You can stop now.

Absurd

Being the sort of person who doesn’t get out much, I don’t often get the chance to make firsthand observations of the more absurd parts of our world. That’s okay, because, sometimes, the absurdity comes and finds me.

Today, while I was out grocery shopping, I noticed a stand set up near the entrance to the grocery store. I took only enough notice of it to build up a little half-hearted hatred of all advertising promotions, but as I parked and walked towards the store, I came to a bizarre realization. The stand, plastered with the logo of a large beverage company (which shall remain nameless), was selling lemonade.

Some cultural context is in order: I am a member of one of the last generations to have the lemonade stand as a symbol of entreperneuership. The lemonade stand was the big capitalist metaphor when I was growing up, the very embodiment of our ideal of the American small-business spirit.

And there, right there in the parking lot of the big chain grocery store that long ago supplanted the independent local movie house, right there, was yet another gigantic corporation, moving in on the territory of the little guy, the sidewalk lemonade vendor. I desperately wish I’d had my camera with me then, because the symbolism of all that was deliciously painful (or painfully delicious).

So, just remember: if you start to get worried that the world seems to be sorting itself out, don’t worry. Proof will arrive momentarily to remind you that it’s still an absolutely absurd place.

A Tribute to George Carlin

I am a child of the modern media, and thus difficult to shock. But when I hit Slashdot and came across a post proclaiming the death of comedian George Carlin, my jaw nearly hit the floor.

The denial phase was remarkably brief, and now, I am forced to admit that one of the greatest comedians of our time has died.

This may be a cliché, but I don’t care: the world is definitely a worse place now that George is gone. The rest of us are going to have to work even harder to counter-balance the tide of totalitarianism and cruelty here and around the world, adn without Carlin, it’s going to be even harder to keep a sense of humor about it.

R.I.P. George Carlin ( May 12, 1937 — June 22, 2008 )

“Shit, piss, fuck, cunt, cocksucker, motherfucker, tits.”

“Extreme Science Fiction”

Last December, I wrote a poorly-argued post about the trouble with modern science fiction. Almost immediately, someone viciously cut me down, and I put up a rather pathetic defense against it. Well, it seems the universe has a sense of irony, because only a few months after I wrote that post, I found myself in my local book shop, where I stumbled upon a hefty tome with the horrific title “Extreme Science Fiction.”

Now, that was almost enough to make me put it down, but I didn’t. I turned it over and read the back of the jacket, and I was intrigued by the premise of the book: it was intended as a collection of inventive, mind-bending science fiction from (mostly) modern authors, edited by Mike Ashley.

And by the time I’d finished reading it, I knew that all those complaints I’d made about the state of modern science fiction were completely idiotic. Everything I’d said was wrong with SF today — the lack of originality, the lack of experimentation, fear of pushing boundaries, and the rest — was rectified by the stories in that single volume.

This is not really meant as a book review, though. Instead, this is a humbled retraction of all the rubbish I said before. I have to admit, I was wrong: good science fiction really isn’t dead.

New Theme

Thanks to WordPress, I can be very cavalier about suddenly changing the theme around which TLOAMM (lovely acronym…reminds me of the sound I make between when I realize my curry is too spicy and when I actually start screaming) is based. For the moment, I’ve decided to go with a lovely, simple theme called “Garland.” If you love it or you hate it, let me know with your comments.

Movie Review: “The Happening”

My father is one of those infamous people for whom it is impossible to buy gifts. So, this father’s day, he relented and suggested that I take him to see The Happening.

I saw Signs, a previous movie by M. Night Shyamalan, who directed The Happening, and found it to be funny, atmospheric, at times absolutely frightening, and a pleasure to watch. I’ve never been a great fan of the horror genre, but there is something about Shyamalan’s films which is more engaging than the dross that usually gets placed in that genre.

The film begins in Central Park, where suddenly, people begin behaving strangely. In moments, there are people committing suicide in droves all over the city. Panic ensues, and an evacuation begins.

For the most part, The Happening follows Elliot (played by Mark Whalberg) and wife Alma (Zooey Deschanel) as they attempt to survive the continuing onslaughts of suicide-inducing poisonous gas. The plot is realistic enough (even if the science is a little “approximate” for my tastes) to be engaging, but surreal enough to also be unnerving, and at times, quite funny.

But the plot isn’t what I really noticed about The Happening. What I really noticed was the fact that, at times during the movie, my heart rate began to edge up. From a twitchy, nervous guy like me, a movie that can get my heart going is really something. Even in the scenes where the outcome is obvious, there’s often a great deal of suspense.

Interleaved with the suspenseful scenes are the aforementioned surreal scenes. We see person after person sit down calmly and come up with bizarre and disturbing ways to do themselves in. The fact that there is no real enemy, that the enemy is your self-destructive tendencies, while a little disorienting, about doubles the creep factor.

The music helps this along a great deal. It’s unfortunate how little attention some films pay to their score, but that was not a problem with The Happening. Lonely piano and symphonic melodies underscore the surrealer and creepier moments, but the film isn’t afraid to use silence when necessary.

Still — and once again, the same is true for all the Shyamalan movies I’ve seen — there’s something slightly off about The Happening. It’s not exactly clear, but there’s a sort of strange, almost hallucinatory eeriness to the whole film. It’s hard to pin down, but at times, it can get distracting, and sometimes, it manifests directly, like in a particularly sadistic scene featuring a child and a shotgun. It doesn’t detract much (if any) from the film, but it does give one the feeling that Shyamalan is not the kind of person you’d like to sit next to on a long bus ride.

All in all, though, The Happening seems to be classic Shyamalan: the normal world backlit by strange and horrible circumstances. And although it starts to drag its feet a bit in the end, it’s still interesting, entertaining, truly scary, and very engaging. Worth seeing. Not worth buying any popcorn for, though. That shit’s gotten expensive!

Things I’ve Noticed About Writing

I’ve been writing since I was pretty young, and as I’ve gotten a general sense of the craft (how’s that for a snooty word?), I’ve noticed a few things. Here they are:

• Revision is sometimes unnecessary. Most of the time, when I write something that I really like, I get it mostly right the first time. There may be some minor cosmetic changes that need to be made and spelling errors that need to be corrected, but a really good first draft is hard to improve upon.
• Flow is a good sign. When I’m writing and find myself entering that state psychologists call “flow” (that is, intense concentration and no desire to stop writing or do anything else), I know I have something good going. I’ve noticed that I almost never reach flow unless I’ve got a fairly good storyline, good characters, and I’m able to see the action in my mind’s eye.
• Imagery never hurts. Whatever I’m writing, imagery always helps. There have been times when I tried to write in the third-person limited point of view, focusing on an entity that was, for the most part, noncorporeal. Needless to say, when you’ve got an amorphous main character, it can be very difficult to build a good image. But, when I go ahead and do it anyway, I find that it’s always helpful to try to see it. If you don’t do that, there’s a pretty big risk of wandering off into unvisualizable generalities that won’t interest readers much.
• You never know where a good idea might come from. Recently, I was thinking about spiders. I can’t remember why, but I was thinking about them. I’ve always kind of liked insects and spiders, and the topic was hovering around in my mind. Then, for one reason or another, I started thinking “I wonder what would happen if human beings had natural predators” (besides bacteria and viruses and the occasional leopard, I mean). Suddenly, I had a flash of inspiration, and my short story Spiders (which is looking like it’s going to be my first officially-published short story. Yay!) was born. So, never forget that inspiration, as much of a cliché as it may be to say this, comes from very surprising places and very odd coincidences. That, incidentally, is the same sort of coincidence by which my (hopefully) upcoming (eventually) novel “The Bagger” came into existence.
• Write a lot. A whole lot. In my long-ago post “How to Write Well,” I talked about this, but it bears repeating. You have to write all the time if you want to be ready when a good idea comes your way. I can’t count the number of good ideas that have died in the deep recesses of my memory because I wasn’t in the mood to write them. I find, however, that when I’m writing fairly regularly, I’m in the mood more often, and so I lose fewer ideas that way.

There are other things I’ve noticed, but these five are probably the most general and the most helpful. I hope this is of some use.

New Short Stories

Author’s Note: Okay, this should have been published a week or so ago, but somehow, I managed to make it into a page instead of a post. Sorry about that.

Yesterday, I was thinking that I hadn’t actually written much of substance lately, so I thought I’d try an exercise I read about in some fiction writers’ book some years back. I looked around my office and tried to find inspiration in the random objects that were laying around. I tried to make a CD of the game “Risk” into something, but after a while, my eyes settled on a coffee cup sitting by my computer monitor.

And thus, The Unbreakable Cup was born. I really enjoy this kind of short-but-sweet story, mainly because my insomnia has shortened my attention span to just about that of a particularly hyperactive squirrel.

After I’d finished The Unbreakable Cup, I was struck by inspiration once more, this time in the form of a plastic cup I saw laying on my desk. The result was A Trillion Red Plastic Cups.

Enjoy!

Movie Review: “Iron Man”

In a very rare turn of events, I actually managed to see Iron Man while it was still in theaters. I’d been hearing good things about it, and since my father is still intent on seeing a lot of movies, I thought I might as well give it a try.

Not too long before I saw iron Man, I watched A Scanner Darkly for the first time. In addition to being a cinematic gem, I was fascinated by Robert Downey Jr.’s quirky style in that film. And, in Iron Man, I was treated to more of the same. Downey may very well have been the perfect actor to play the eccentric-billionaire-genius role, which he does with expertise and a kind of genuineness that’s hard to see in movie theaters these days. Watching the film, one gets the impression that his character really is a brilliant mechanical prodigy and weapons dealer.

The plot is full of interesting little details that make it better than the campy, somewhat clichéd thing it otherwise probably would have been. Like the electromagnet implanted in Downey’s character’s chest to keep the shrapnel out of his heart. The film is fairly rich with little personal touches like that which lend it an air of authenticity. In addition (spoilers ahead), Stark’s (Downey’s character) first rendition of the suit is a rough welded-together sheetmetal monster that looks (as much as is possible, I suppose) like a giant armored suit assembled out of spare parts in a cave somewhere.

This is the part where I usually say “Even though I liked the film, it had its problems.” Well, even though I liked Iron Man, it had its problems. There was a weird edge of unrealism to it, which may or may not have come from the adaptation from a comic book. And the actual plotline of the film itself, if you cut out all the little details which make it rich and believable, is really nothing but a series of meandering film clichés. Even so, Iron Man testifies to Downey’s acting ability, because the way he plays his role breathes life into a plot that we’ve all seen before. Even the stupid little jokes are funnier, just because Robert Downey Jr. has a weird sort of goofiness and hyperactive energy about him.

All in all, I liked Iron Man, even when it strayed into preachiness, even when it stumbled into cliché, and even when it meandered somewhat pointlessly. The special effects are pretty, the dialogue is fresh enough not to be boring, and even some of the more minor characters feel fairly real. A good film, and probably worth seeing, even if you aren’t a fan of the comic books.

Absence

My regular readers (if there are any still left) may have noticed that I’ve been quite inactive over the last few weeks. Well, I thought I ought to explain that. You see, last week and the weeks before that, I was laboring under a mound of late-in-the-semester homework and the preparation for final exams. And this week, I’ve spent most of my time decompressing and trying to deal with a strange case of insomnia that hit me out of the blue. I promise, though, that once I’ve got my head back together, I’ll be back with some more thoughts and speculations.

And many thanks to the readers who’ve stuck by me through my little random hiatuses (hiati?).

Whatever Happened to Revolution?

I’ve been noticing something lately, as I wander through various social groups and talk to people who seem to be the independent-minded type: nobody talks about revolution anymore.

I am not a child of the sixties. I’m a child of the nineties. But I’ve always admired the sixties- and seventies-era idea of getting tired of the way the current system works and trying to tear it down. Free love, free food, the careful and spiritual expansion of consciousness, all attempts to create a world that is better than the one the revolutionaries found themselves in.

What happened to that ethos? Although we are living in a time, it could be argued, that is just as unstable and unpleasant as the sixties, I have not heard a single young person even hinting at the idea of revolution. I haven’t heard anybody suggesting that this society needs to be changed. What I hear instead is talk of work. Of making money. I hear of drinking problems and parties and drug abuse. I don’t hear anybody trying to change the world, I only hear people trying to ignore it.

And I’m not saying that I’m immune from this. I spend a good deal of my day ignoring the world. I spend a lot of time trying not to think about $120 a barrel oil and genocide in Africa and cyclones in Burma and human-rights abuses here and abroad. Perhaps it’s a psychological defense mechanism. But it seems to me that a better way to solve the problem would be to return to the “hippie” ethic of trying to eradicate hate, to enjoy life, and to create a world that is more comfortable for everybody.

Movie Review: “The Mist”

I saw a couple of trailers for The Mist, based on the Stephen King novel of the same title, and I was wandering through the bookstore a few months ago and thought that I’d give it a read. I found it gripping, interesting, and ultimately satisfying, as I find many of King’s novels.

Since I’m a firm believer in the ancient principle that a movie will always be worse than the book it is based on, I wasn’t expecting much when today I rented The Mist. But I wasn’t quite prepared for just how bad it is.

For the first three-quarters of this two-hour (two-hour!) movie, the plot sticks very close to the plot of the novel: a strange mist descends on a town, trapping a bunch of terrified people in a grocery store. Horrible things come out of the mist and do horrible things to the people. Classic Stephen King.

Given that the plot is interesting and psychological — two things you don’t see in movies these days — you might wonder how it would be possible to screw it up. Let me give you a list of good ways, although I might make director Frank Darabont angry, since he’s really the one that came up with these:

• Atrocious dialogue. At times, it was so clumsy that I actually cringed. They took some directly from the novel, but not all of it, and the clash between the dialogue written by King and the dialogue added by the filmmakers is painfully obvious.
• Flat characters. They should be moving. They should be sympathetic. They should be interesting. But they’re not. They feel like, to use an old phrase, cardboard cutouts, which makes it especially jarring when, in a rare moment of good acting, they express genuine-looking emotion.
• They explain the mist. This is a mistake that most modern horror films make: either they explain who created the monster and how, or they tell you what’s making the zombies crazy, or something like that. The only two horror films I’ve seen where that’s been pulled off competently are 28 Days Later and I am Legend. One of the keys to the creepiness of King’s book was that they gave vague hints as to what happened, but they never actually told you. That’s always way creepier than actually coming out and saying it, which The Mist does with the same habitual clumsiness with which it does things.
• The ending is incredibly depressing. I’ll try not to ruin it for you (anyway, Darabont already did that for me), but suffice to say that, even though it’s mean to seem bleak, gritty, real, and painful, it comes across as needlessly cruel, sadistic, and depressing. So, so depressing. Now, I’ll give Darabont credit where credit is due for creating an ending that is something we haven’t often seen before, but there is a point at which a depressing ending will puke all over the entertainment value of the rest of the movie. Darabont reaches that point, pays no heed, and keeps going, until he reaches the point known only as “Mass suicide in the movie theater.”

Now, I do have more than bilious hatred to spew about The Mist. I do enjoy tearing a bad movie to shreds, but I can’t do that with every aspect of the film. For one thing, the special effects are as incredible as anything you’ll see today. The mist feels real, and the filmmakers know when to use computer-generated mist and when to use an actual fog machine. The creatures are not only fairly faithful to King’s description, but they’re also suitably creepy. Even some of the scenes they made up and threw in there are fairly grotesque in a good way, the kind of good way that makes people want to watch horror films. As I said above, the ending, while depressing, is at least fairly daring. And Darabont, some of the time, keeps very close to King’s original idea.

But that last point actually becomes a problem at times. Nobody expects any film based on a book to stay close to the original storyline and dialogue. At least not as close as Darabont stays. I’ve been hoping for a long time to see a movie that was really just a visual version of a book, but now I see the error of my ways. If every book-direct-to-movie adaptation is as contrived and clumsy as this, then I’d rather see the director change what needs to be changed.

And even though he stays painfully close to the original story sometimes, at other times, he deviates shamelessly, wandering off into irrelevant or story-crippling (see bullet point #3 above) tangents, adding things that needn’t be added (gratuitous unnecessary gore, and in all the wrong places, too), and subtracting things that he probably should have kept (that hazy, panic-induced, shocked sex scene between the main character and the girl comes to mind). But probably the most painful loss is the feeling of panic, the feeling of dread, and that sense that everybody is slowly starting to break down and go mad. King does this very well. Darabont doesn’t do it at all until very near the end, when suddenly it was as though someone slapped him on the back of the head.

One final note. In the book, Mrs. Carmody, the religious lunatic, was more of a shriveled old bat, a hag with little more to do than play with her stuffed raccoons, read tabloids, and babble about the state of the world. But in the film, she’s about thirty years old, and delivers all of her lines with a kind of sickening melodrama not seen since the Wicked Witch of the West menaced Dorothy.

All in all, a bad movie. It has its good moments, but in the end, it’s far too clumsily-executed to be interesting, and long enough to make you feel like you’ve wasted a good chunk of your life. If you’ve read the book, don’t bother seeing the movie. And if you’ve seen the movie, I’m sorry, but Frank Darabont has already ruined the book for you.

Final Judgment:

* ` ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ (1.5/10 asterisks)

A Theory of Consciousness

Lately, I’ve been reading Oliver Sacks’s new-ish book Musicophilia. While it’s not quite the tour de force that The Man Who Mistook his Wife for a Hat was, it’s gotten me thinking once again about the neurology of consciousness, and after a few days’ contemplation (and a few years spent reading neurological books), I think I finally have a rough sketch for my own theory of how consciousness comes into existence. Of course, I’m not a neurologist. I don’t know the details of how all this works, and none of it is based on empirical evidence, but that’s the beauty of the Internet: you can talk about ideas abstractly. And, since that’s what I’m good at, that’s what I’m going to do. So, here goes: consciousness.

There are a few structures which are vital to conscious experience. These are:

• The thalamus
• The brainstem
• the prefrontal cortex (and the rest of the cerebral cortex as well)

The other structures are more involved in the contents of consciousness. They are the raw material that the conscious structures process. Here’s how it seems to me that consciousness happens:

1. Sensory information enters via the brainstem.
2. The brainstem preprocesses the information and sends it to the thalamus.
3. The thalamus takes in the preprocessed sensory information and combines it with information about the state of the cortex itself.
4. The thalamus relays this information to the relevant cortical structures. The prefrontal cortex may play a role here in organizing the arrival of the information, and perhaps in weighting it emotionally.
5. The cortex processes the sensory information, and the prefrontal cortex reads the results and generates judgments based on emotional weighting from the limbic system. It may generate some of its own emotional reactions as well.
6. The prefrontal cortex sends the interpreted brain state back to the thalamus. There may also be other loops between the thalamus and the other cortical regions.
7. The processed mental state enters the thalamus, along with a new set of sensory information.
8. Repeat.

Of course, this says nothing about memory formation, which is very important for making sense of conscious awareness. It just so happens that I have a theory for how memories form as well.

1. An emotional signal is sent by the amygdala (or some other part of the emotional system) to the hippocampus, which “reads” sensory information currently being process, thus forming connections between the disparate kinds of information.
2. This association is stored in the temporal lobe. When the area where the memory structure is stored is activated, the temporal lobe re-activates the relevant structures (those whose particular activity patterns were linked by the hippocampus), and the remembered event is re-experienced.

I’m not really sure how a memory would be recalled in this model, though. I’d venture to guess that it’d have something to do with the prefrontal cortex sending a signal to the temporal lobe, in order to retrieve the memory for comparison to current events.

This little model (and I’ll say it again, I’m not a neurologist. Not even close, so think about this model in the spirit in which it was intended: as a useful idea, not as anything approaching a theory) does shed some useful light on certain kinds of mental illness and the effects caused by certain sorts of brain damage.

• Schizophrenia: It’s well known that in schizophrenia, the prefrontal cortex is not functioning as it should. Without a properly-functioning cortex, judgments based on memories and sensory information cannot be made properly, and sensory information does not get integrated properly. Also, the prefrontal cortex’s inhibitory connections are less functional as well, which would seem to explain not only the disorganized and unintegrated thought patterns associated with schizophrenia, but also the hallucinations, which could be the result of sensory information going to the wrong place or being integrated improperly. Or, perhaps, the hallucinations and delusions might have something to do with the fact that, without prefrontal cortical direction, the various cortical structures can no longer properly regulate their output.
• Anterograde amnesia: with damage to the hippocampus comes difficulty forming long-term memories. In this model, that would be because the structure which associates the various neural states with one another is either incapable of doing so, or else it is incapable of moving them into the temporal lobe for permanent storage.
• Thalamic coma: this may also apply to comas in general, as well as minimally-conscious states, but thsi model only really has something to say about thalamic comas. When the thalamus is damaged, not only can external sensory information not enter the cortex, but the cortical state itself is also prevented from being communicated to the cortex, so there is an absence of both sensation and cognition. The thalamus, however, is divided into two parts, one of which communicates primarily to the cortex, and the other of which is mostly responsible for preprocessing and relaying sensory information. If only the sensory-preprocessor (in the case of vision, this is the lateral geniculate nucleus) were to be damaged, the patient would still likely be able to achieve conscious awareness, but there would simply be no sensory information for them to process.
• Encephalitis lethargica: in patients with this disorder (which is, according to Oliver Sacks, an extreme form of parkinsonism), the patient is mostly functional, but they are unable to initiate much activity (if any). In this model, that would be because of damage or inactivity of the limbic system, which is crucial in communication emotional meaning to the prefrontal cortex. In patients with severe parkinsonism, there may be difficulty seeing the relevance of actions, and therefore, the actions are not generated. This can also occur with certain kind of brainstem and prefrontal lesions.
• Depression: in this disease, the prefrontal cortex is known to be less active. However, unlike in schizophrenia, its integrative functions must still be intact. However, its emotional functions become impaired, leading to difficulty forming memories (since the PFC cannot communicate the emotional necessity of remembering something to the hippocampus, and would likely have difficulty sending retrieval signals, too), lack of motivation (since the significance of actions would become unclear), and depressed mood or flat affect (since everything would have the same emotional significance).

I won’t go any further, for fear of over-inflating my ego and for starting to make claims that I have no hope of arguing for. But this, I think, is at least something to get people thinking. Of course, there are a billion things that I haven’t taken into account: the left versus right hemisphere functional disparity, the effects of neurotransmitters, and no doubt I’ve left out quite a few very important brain structures.

New Short Story: “The Long Wait”

After a few days’ work, I’ve finally finished another short story. Lately, I’ve been getting the disturbing feeling that, if I keep actually finishing stories like I’ve been doing lately, then I might set a precedent and accidentally amount to something.

Anyway, enough disjointed self-deprecation. I present to you: The Long Wait. It tells the story of Derek, who’s spent the last ten years trying to escape from the Harvesters, even though he knows they will find him eventually. As he wanders through the desert, trying to scratch a living out of the sand, his life becomes an a miserable burden, and he begins to wonder if there’s any reason to go on living.

(Beware: Existentialism ahead!)

Exhaustion

I haven’t really written anything of consequence for a while, and for that, I apologize. Let me explain.

For the last two or three weeks, I’ve been sleeping pretty damn badly. Every morning, at around 5 or 6 A.M., I find myself awake, and usually, unable to get back to sleep. I have no idea what’s going on, but with final exams looming, this is about the worst time that this could have happened.

The result is that I am completely and utterly exhausted. I feel stressed and moody, and generally just lousy. I’m hoping this will clear up in a week or two, and when it does, I’ll be back writing again. Until then, I may publish one or two of the posts I wrote but never released.

Cartoon Me

Greg Williams, a cartoonist for the newspaper The Tampa Bay Observer, is certainly moving with the times. He draws a comic called Blogjam for the Observer based on blog posts from various sources. He took an interest in my long-ago post about the helium shortage, and turned it into a comic. The result? A delightfully-illustrated comic of the post, including a cartoon version of me!

You can see the comic here. And be sure to check out some of Williams’s other comics here. And I’m not just suggesting that because he drew me as flatteringly less scruffy than I actually look in real life, but because it’s actually an interesting and well-executed series he’s got going there.

10,000 Views!

I can’t believe it. It was only a few months ago that I was celebrating my 5,000th view. I guess my intuition was right, people are more interested in blogs that actually talk about something interesting, rather than just blathering on about the weather. You’d think I would have figured that out before now.

Anyway, in celebration of my 10,000th view, I give you: every number less than or equal to 10,000, with the primes highlighted. Yes, I know I’ve done an image like this before, but I thought it would be fitting.

Many thanks to all of my 10,000 readers thus far, and thanks especially those of you who were nice enough to leave all those encouraging comments!

And here’s hoping for another 10,000!

Visual Numbers #2

Factors: The numbers from 1 to 500 are plotted horizontally across the top row. Along each vertical column, if N divides the number X (represented here by distance across the top row) evenly (that is, if N is a factor of X), then the pixel N pixels down from the top is black.

Prime Factors: The same general principle as above, but in this image, only the prime factors are shown.

Blue Over Yellow: Basically, a combination of the previous two images. Numbers from 1 to 250 are plotted horizontally, and factors are plotted vertically. If a factor is prime, the little square representing it is blue, otherwise, it’s yellow.

That tantalizing structure is still just slightly out of reach…Oh well, back to work!

Visual Numbers #1

This is the beginning of what I hope will be a fairly long-running series of posts, each containing one or two (or three, if I’m feeling adventurous) numerical or mathematical visualizations. If you need a concrete example of what I’m talking about, just check out the image here).

Anyway, here goes:

Meet the Primes: Every pixel represents a number from 1 to 250,000. The image wraps horizontally; that is, the first pixel of the first row is the number 1, the first pixel of the second row is 501 (since each row is 500 pixels wide), the first pixel of the third row is 101, and so on and so on. Pixels representing prime numbers are black. From this view, it’s quite obvious that there’s likely some sort of structure to the primes, but it’s hard to say what that structure might be.

A Labor of Love

A few days ago, I was mucking about in the vast swampland that the Internet has become, and I stumbled upon yet another reference to a programming language I’d heard about a few times before: “Processing.” My interest piqued, I went in search of a compiler, and found one at Processing’s website (www.processing.org), and immediately started learning the language.

Given my many previous failures trying to learn Java, upon which Processing is based, I didn’t think I’d have much chance of learning the language, but I tried anyway, and actually found it just about as intuitive and elegant as Python, which remains my favorite programming language of all times. For a while, I cobbled together various tiny programs to do things like graph functions in one and two variables, graph parametric equations by replacing x, y, and z with rgb color values (producing a rather strange-looking wave of color that wasn’t nearly as interesting as I’d hoped), and visualizing one-dimensional celluar automata (which, by the way, was a complete failure, because Python is the only language I’ve found whose array-handling I can both tolerate and understand). Then, since I’m always a mathematician at heart, I thought I’d do something that mathematicians love to do: visualize the primes.

Before I go on, I should re-iterate just how much of a godsend Processing is. I’ve been trying to write methods in Python to visualize various kinds of functions and data for many moons, and my results have never been much more than mediocre. The only graphics module I’ve learned in Python (Tkinter, in case you were interested) is clumsy and runs slowly, and really isn’t meant to handle the kind of pixel-by-pixel manipulations I’d had in mind. Processing, though, exists solely for this purpose, which is the reason for my gushing for the last three paragraphs.

Anyway, the primes. I put together a simple program that computes the gap between the current prime number and the last prime number (using the standard Sieve of Eratosthenes method), and draws a circle at the location of the current prime whose size is based on the gap between the two primes.

I suspect I could have saved these thousand words by doing as the cliché says, and just giving you the picture:

(You can see a higher-resolution version here).

There’s a great deal of hidden beauty in this picture, most of which I can’t claim responsibility for. There’s a certain order to it, even though the primes seem to be quite random. Really, the beauty comes from the delicate, elegant structure of mathematics. The structure of the primes, as the structure of pi, is an expression of the deep structure of numbers, and thus, of the deep structure of the universe itself. It can be an almost religious experience, a sort of holy communion with the Numbers, to be given a glimpse of that structure.

I don’t know why I’ve been so sentimental lately…either way, the point I’m driving at is this: visualization is a really powerful tool for understanding mathematics. And Processing is a great programming language for visualization. (And, once again, I sound like I’m on somebody’s payroll, but I’m not. As far as you know.).