Neuromancer: Then back to biznazz

So I always wanted to have this like space man David Bowie like band, in the neuromancer genre. Sensors on the brain, real sci-fi rock. Sci-fi rock is some of the best, Jimi Hendrix is always characterized as the pinnacle of a hippie, when in reality he was at heart, and by his own admission, a science fiction nerd...But in a time when an African American scifi nerd had a hard time fitting in as such, so he fit in where he could, playing the the part of the tripped out alien to adoring hippie audiences. I wonder if he would have aspired to be more like Charles Bolden, were he born a few decades later.

We are all products of our time, and there is always compromise in that.

After my Carrie Bradshaw mind control zombie magic post last night, I think I need to get back to the purpose and focus of my blog: Recording my odd thoughts on computer science.

So having digressed so far, what does the prototype of the Query/programming language look like? Well, some common sense factors.

1) Recursion: Its inherit to programming languages, but it has to be unified with queries. For example, suppose you have a table with cols "mother", "father", "child". You need to have a query that pulls all the ancestors for "John", which is by nature a recursive query. This has to be fused seemlessly with the programmatic concept of recursion.

2) You have to recognize what can't be done, what relationships (functions) can't be inverted. This introduces a new concept to databases, the table where you simply can't access the contents of col A given a value in col B, but you CAN access the value in col B given the value in col A. And like I've said, this can be good. You can pull customer address given SS number, but not SS number given address.

3) The syntax for "function" definition and "table" definition should both be intuitive and easy. For the definition of a relation, you want it to be able to look like this:

rel employee (int id, string name, int boss) {

(0, "alice", 2),

(1, "bob", 2),

(2, "charlie", NULL)

}

As easy as an SQL insert statement, but you also want program definitions:

rel product (int x, int y, int z) {

z = x*y

> y = z/x

x = z/y

}

Notice what a gross over simplification that last one was. Each line assumes two of the variables are given. Suppose x=3 and z=7 are given. y was defined as an int, so the answer of 7/3 is out of the range. So it really must look like

rel product (int x, int y, int z) {

z = x*y

if (z%x) = 0 { y = z/x } else y = NULL...(or {}, empty set)

And that doesn't even take into account the real database like behavior we want. We want to be able to provide just x = 5, and get in response a new relation, having two columns y and z, looking like this:

rel product_x_5(int y, z) {

z = y*5

y = z/5 (if mod bla bla)

Notice we can enumerate the values in this relation by enumerating integers, like a real database table. But also need to be able to do the same for product(z = 8473928) This is a more complex relation. The way I see it, in order to be able to enumerate its contents, you must factor 8473928, then take all the possible pairs of factors, the factors being (2*2*2*149*7109) for this number. That's just ugly, computationally complex. However, its interesting to note that if you are willing to make a relationship who's contents can't be enumerated, it becomes trivial:

rel product_z_8473928(int x, int y) {

y = 8473928/x

x = 8473928/y

By adding in the "NULL if not mod x == 0" functionality from above, we have a very expensive way to factor 8473928 by enumerating all int values of X, but that's not what I am talking about. I am talking about blocking the ability of certain tables to have their contents enumerated.

The thing is that a useful programming language must not make new demands on the programmer. She should be able to translate everything that has already be learned instantly into the new paradigm. But once that requirement has been satisfied, a new paradigm should let them do things that they were unable to do before. This paradigm should let them basically write

rel product (int x, int y, int z) {

z = x*y

}

just like they would write in any other programming language, where z is defined given x and y. But it should also give them the power to add in the other functionality, either explicitly or through the aid of a compiler/interpreter applying algebraic theorems and axioms to calculate inversions for them, and this new functionality should open up new worlds, like composing functions in a massively parallel fashion through something as easy as an SQL JOIN statement. ITs about letting the old bridge with the new seemlessly.

Mr. Big

I feel like all women should be subjected to a male version of Sex in the City. It would the story of a supposedly urbane and sophisticated man, who dedicates his life to writing about his shallow and superficial relationships with cartoon caricatures of women, to which he has ascribed appellations like "Ms. Bigtits" and "Hippy Girl". Women would get to hear his endless musings and questioning of how he relates to their "personalities", whilst also seeing the same women on the screen, horrified and tortured introverts desperately squeezing themselves into the cartoon caricature personalities, never able to really express themselves lest they eclipse the banal self obsessed rantings of the main character. Of course there would also his friends: Charles, who dates a woman we are told is "ugly" because she is tall and a little portly, but self-righteously goes beyond his superficial condemnation of her as ugly by announcing that "ugly sex is hot" Also, an older man who devotes himself to sex with younger women viewing them only as objects, and a supposedly smart red headed nerd who leaves the mother of his children to have sex with Tai women.

Why am I writing this? I don't know, I'm drinking wine and I feel like some kind of a male Carrie Bradshaw... Whatever this thing is that I am, I must write it all down. I must write it down for some untold future purpose even though its garbage. Who am I writing it down to? I construct this blog ever with the idea of avoiding keywords that might attract viewers. This is not fluff, this is not to convince anybody I'm important. My name isn't even on this blog. This blog is about something which happens 100 or 1000 years from now, where some child mankind has created needs it, not as the great secret or the key, but like larvae needing the next grain of sugar in the ant-hill, and hear I am, 100 or 1000 years in the past providing it. Is that the way the way John the Revelator felt?

So what is it that's important to write down? Its important to write down how REAL all of this is. That's the message I've heard that effects me, that's the message is not heard enough: This is so REAL folks. What is so real? This.

How do I feel? Like there is this sort of desperate search for Truth going on. This need to distill the underlying principles, to seize the realness of it. The fundamental search for reality in a situation that is partially unreal.

As I speak, my words are branching out like a tree. Which we to go? Is it a graph, can I take any path and get to where I am going? Bill O has said repeatedly of late: Perception is reality. That's a military saying. It has roots in mid 20th century propaganda, and mystical tie ins, that extend long before the "Men who Stare at Goats" times. But stepping back and looking aesthetically, its lacking. Milarepa was a powerful magician, but in remorse he sat in a cave practicing the dharma. Why? To escape. From what? His own power. I went to a hell once, and its called the all-powerful magician's hell. It was the thought that I was God, completely alone, alone in a universe of nothing. To escape this hell I divided my consciousness up into many forms, and provided for my self the most convincing illusion that I was a mortal man in a world of many mortal men, limited in power and knowledge. But once I was there I sought only to escape the hell of limitation of human existence, and grew in power and knowledge until I could know everything, and bend the will of every person and write every law of nature, until reality itself was just my own lucid dream, a dream from which I could awaken not from, for the awakeness was just the awareness of myself as the only thing that exists, alone in the void, creating illusary universe after universe to escape my horrible aloneness as God, the only thing that exists. Perception is reality indeed. How much power DO you want, really?

The all-powerful magician is NOT the Buddha. The way to become the Buddha is not through power. What one seeks to become is humble, the dust beneath the feet. The high achievement is through the reduction of oneself to blissful nothingness. Does this illusion matter? Maybe very much indeed. Maybe the limitation and mortality is the frame of eternity, the context through which it is interpreted... Maybe the dark magicians hell and the Buddhist's heaven are the exact same place, maybe this is what the Christian tradition is getting at with its heaven and hell.

I heard a story from a preacher or somebody when I was a little kid. He said the worst thing in hell looked like the best thing, it was a tour bus that goes to heaven. People in hell would get on the bus, and go to heaven, no strings attached. But when they got to heaven, the very nature of it was painful; the light hurt their eyes, the grass cut their feet. Why? Because it was all to REAL. The pure REALITY of heaven would send them all of them back onto the bus, yearning for the comparatively mild tortures of hell, which was structured on non-realities, on lies.

"This is so REAL folks."

But what exactly IS reality? Phil k Dick has give the best definition: "Reality is that which does not go away when you stop believing in it". Notice how this implies a limitation of will, a separation of what you perceive to be true from What IS true. Reality is that which is beyond yourself.

But what exactly IS your SELF? Its quite a nebulous concept. We live in the year 2011, a strange dream like time when many things are possible. I read recently about some scientists who controlled the minds of worms through light, making them do this and that. They named it ColBeRt or something, hoping to get on the comedy show. The mechanisms of neural control are universal, and their work could, in time, be applied to humans...One of many such projects (In fact we live in a time where technology originating with Tesla is being released by MIT researchers as new and exciting, so its difficult to tell when the first time any technology has been development. The advent of the bomb really ended science as a public endeavor.) I also came across some research talking about implanting thoughts in humans, and the big deal was the humans identified the implanted thoughts as being their own: So the impulses were sent to pick up a ball in the room, and the humans followed, but when interviewed they all said that it was their own thought to pick up the ball in the room. This latter research was real, and shows the difficult nature of 'self' as a defining concept: An implanted thought to do something was viewed as an act of free will by the person it was implanted in, even though it came from another person. In this sense, the will of the researcher and the subject were one, their egos were not differentiable in the context of that action. the self of the subject was an extension of the self of the researcher implanting the thought - they were for a moment the same entity.

Many paths lead to the same outcome, I will keep talking, choosing some random path.

Mind control is a big deal. Its real. This is SO real folks. And its a bigger deal than atomic proliferation. From any classical perspective, its checkmate for humanity once somebody gets it and makes it go viral, there is no crawling out of the fallout shelter and rebuilding. I would be tempted to say anybody working on it should be shot, but that could just be the implanted thought from the person who already has it, and is trying to wipe out the competition. So I think a non-classical perspective is in order.

This here is the burden of my argument, what I have to say, what really matters tonight: The key is in looking at concepts of ego. We have established that a person under mind control identifies the implanted actions as being their own, their ego is the same as the controller for that moment in time. But that ego itself remains undefined. What does the reality of the supreme mind controller look like, he who makes people do things believing that they willed it themselves. Is it new? Is it powerful? Remember the words of Tao te Ching: "The great ruler is but a shadowy presence to his people, and when his work is done, the people say it happened naturally"And also the words of of the Bible:

What has been will be again,
what has been done will be done again;
there is nothing new under the sun.

This is all is "New Skin for Old Ceremony" as Cohen put it, the ego of the ruler has always been able to be dissolved to into unity with those of the people, so that the wills of both become the same for a time. Modern technology is merely old magic in a new form.

So the people will do what they do, blissfully unaware of any controller, but it is the mind controllers soul with which we should be concerned. Give him power Lord! Show him what I myself have seen! Give him a world where nothing goes away that he does not believe in! Show him my hell of the all powerful magician! (Or in his case the hell of a world where all are nothing but robots who's behavior is dictated by physical law).

Let him have his reality. Let him show only to himself that all people are soulless robots, looking at his dark aloneness in a mechanical crying out in agony: "This is SO REAL!" And let him be aware that his place is another voice, that of the Buddha, crying out in ecstasy: "This is So REAL!" Both sitting in the same place, but the former being tortured by its reality, the latter being raptured by it. Heaven and Hell in an instant.

Many paths lead to the same place, but it matters which choices and paths you take.

Back To Query Logic

Life is life being adrift on a sea, the winds of fortune carry you away from something, then back to it. At least with ADHD.

But I wanted to return to this subject. What the hell was I talking about? Oh yes, a talk on UWTV reminded me of it today, one of those gentle and philosophical type CS guys from Princeton, the kind the tech nerds mock but have the real insights if you take the time to listen to them. He was talking about the role of significator and signified in computer science, Turings intuition to to stop looking at cognition as binary, (brain/observer vs. observed) and look it as trinary (observer vs. brain vs. observed). I've mentioned something similar here; Quantum mechanics stops looking weird when you take your brain out of the equation and set it on the table, then you are talking about non-local entanglements between natural systems, one of which just happens to be your brain. But that's beside the point.

What I was talking about was good old computer science. There are two things you do in a program, you observe (compute) the values of things, and you define the values of things. its historically been awkward enough to our old math intuitions that we still have two equals in programming languages, '=' and '==', the former being that which assigns equality and the later representing observed equality. (sometimes written as ':=', '=') in math, the former tended to be manifest in the words "let" and "where" historically: A+B = C where B = X/Y (assignment of B) but didn't seem to deal that formally with it .... The philosophical underpinnings of math assume a sort of timeless eternal truth to the principles, rather than then programmers world where something is true because he says it is, so assignment and definition are something less formally defined, the mathematicians job.

But the computer revolution is here because of the programmers reality, the world where we can make things true by defining them as such formally, in the language allowed by our programming paradigm. Every programmer knows that that the assignment of functions, classes and variables is as important as the evaluation of those things at runtime. But still, programming is the former, computation is the latter. Though users of python and other modern languages are confronted with a blurring of the line between the definition of the program and the execution of it more and more, the fact is that the potential for the complete blurring between these lines goes back to the very definition of of the Turing machine: Its a system where the program can write itself, where the result of a function can be the definition of a new function, the essense of the lambda calculus. The model allows observation and definition to be one in the same.

But, just as we have spent the last 4 decades visiting web 'pages' which simulate symbols written on dead tree, so have we been unable to face the complete liquid continuum between definition and evaluation that is possible with Turing's model, that in fact most accurately models the universe of Heisenberg. So where do we start?

THAT'S what query logic is about. Its a pathetic stab in the dark at the simplest system where observation and definition are inseparable attributes of the same process. The evaluation of a logical statement should be able to result in a new logical statement, which can then be requeried to give yet new results, even with the same inputs. The Kleene-Rosser paradox wasn't the refutation of the lambda calculus, it was the glorious completion of it, the crowing jewel which showed us that computation is dependent on recursion, on iteration, on a system changing states across numerous layers of evaluation, nay, numerous instances of observation. The process which then unfolds is facilitated by G. Boole, but governed by Maxwell, by Boyle, and more than anybody, by Shannon. Its an entropic process, where the final result of evaluation is equivalent to maximum entropy.

But I'm a nuts and bolts guy. Maybe going back to Codd's model is a good place to start. Baby steps, right? Codd deserves credit for good work, a businessman who contributed to science. The key thing is that his model takes shortcuts. In SQL, these manifest as INSERT, UPDATE, and DELETE. The mathematical relational model states that these operations result in a new table, and behind the scenes the "relvar" (table name) associated automatically links to the new table. The SELECT statement on the other hand acts as a sort of passive observer, making no changes. So what you see is this schizophrenic duality, between the passive observer and the active creator. IF I were to give this philosophy a name, it would be called the father of failed websites, where there is this god called the publisher, and these peons called the readers, and the roles are ever separated. Now the alternative, where the roles of the readers and the creators are blurred, is called the father of great websites, essense of Facebook: Those who come to observe also create. Great power in this model. Yet computationally this simple fact is not explicitly expressed.

Nuts and bolts: I've worked out that there is very little reason to index anything in a database. If you are searching through an unindexed column, an index can easily, and in very little computational time be built each time this is done (using an algorithm like quicksort), so that after it is done several times the index is completely built. This is observation (search) resulting in state change. The acts of the deleting, inserting, or updating eye are essentially the same...observations who presumptions - facts assumed at observation time - result in state changes.

Why?

the woman who walked into the water at the mall whilst texting was a milestone for humanity, the realization that the weak link in this whole process is at this point, (and has been for decades) ourselves. Its not computers who have to catch up to us, its we who have to catch up to them. OOP is equivalent in its expressiveness to binary, yet the former is empowering to humans, the latter is not. When we understand that observations create changes in the observed, than we partake in an economy of knowing, where every observation is an investment, not to be made lightly.

And this is alignment with reality.