Category Archives: Blog


Why Fringe finale *MAY* make sense (or may not)

For me the show lost steam and interesting things to say with the end of Season 3. The end of a great show. The rest is watchable, but average TV that wouldn’t really deserve attention if it wasn’t for what came before (and Season 1 only is good because how it fits on the bigger picture revealed in Season 2/3).

So I kept watching until the end knowing it would disappoint. The finale did really nothing for me. The plot moved EXACTLY as it was described, with zero surprises or interesting development. The “emotional” moments seem well received from the internet, but they also were repetitions of everything the show already said before, and better.

Now SPOILERS.

Pretty much everyone who saw the finale thought it didn’t really make sense. A twit summarizes what I think was the common reaction. The problem everyone noticed is the following:

- How it is possible that Observers only get erased with the invasion, and not instead through the whole timeline, so preventing September to distract Walternate from the cure, causing Walter to cross universes, kidnap Peter, September again saving Walter & Peter from the lake, and then all the cascading of effects? Everything that happens in seasons 1/2/3 happens as direct consequence of the Observers’ intervention. If you erase the Observers then you remove the WHOLE story. So why is it only from the scene in the park onward that the timeline is affected? Why that arbitrary point? It is a good excuse to give the show the Happy End scene everyone wanted, but it is otherwise a huge plot hole that makes zero sense.

That’s the big problem. I saw the finale and I thought the writers just went with a something the public would enjoy, without giving much thought to the fact it made no sense. It may work for TV, but it’s actually even less consistent than what we got with LOST.

But after a while I realized that my memories of the show aren’t accurate about what ACTUALLY happened, and that with a little bit of hammerin’ one could manage to square this round peg into the square hole, maybe:

- Remember season 3 finale? Peter steps in the machine, ends up being erased. With the beginning of season 4 we got a rebooted universe. Peter only exists in phantom form, Walter lives in the lab and so on. The universe in seasons 1/2/3 was ALREADY erased. What happens then is that Peter is brought back by the Power of Love. It’s a horrible plot point, but it’s what we’ve got. The old universe is NOT restored, and only continues to exist for three people:

1) Peter. Because after he’s back he still has his memories of all that happened.
2) Olivia. Due to drugs and Peter she starts to have mixed memories and finally becomes the Olivia Peter remembered (this was a big plot in season 4, if you remember).
3) Walter. He’s touched by the Observer kid who gives him back all the memories he lost due to the reboot.

Those three, and all of us who watched the show, “witnessed” and remember those events. No one else. It’s a way the show has to tell us we got something somewhat private and exclusive to share with those characters.

When we deal with the erasure of the Observers from the timeline then we only deal with this rebooted universe in seasons 4/5, NOT the universe we got used to in previous seasons, which now continues to exist in memories only. So whatever effect the erasure of Observers will have, it will have in THIS new context.

I don’t have a good memory of how this reboot worked, but as far as I remember the Observers didn’t play a big role in season 4, and only seemed to actually affect the timeline with the invasion itself. So it *may* be possible that the total erasure of the Observers in this timeline doesn’t have other consequences, beside the invasion itself. Filling that plot hole that everyone noticed.

(Late edit: it seems I was wrong and there’s some deep involvement of Observers even in season 4. See episode 14. What I explain below could also give an excuse to why everything went as it should, but I have to admit it’s quite a LEAP. So thee finale may not make sense, after all.)

There are a few things left to explain, though. How was Walter able to send the white tulip to Peter? Well, do you really think that Walter would live happily and quietly in the future? It’s actually a powerful device, if you think about it. It’s an omnipotent Deus Ex Machina that’s entirely plausible in the logic of the show:

I’m being told that there’s a part of my explanation that does not work. They tell me in the reboot universe September STILL distracts Walternate from the cure. The only divergence is that Peter dies in the lake. I actually am not so sure about this, because I remember there was lots of speculation during season 4, so I’m thinking that this may be more a byproduct of speculative deduction than something the show has *shown* explicitly. In any case, the “logical” Deus Ex Machina I was talking about would fix both the problem of the White Tulip AND the problem of the necessity of Walternate being distracted so that things would work the way they worked. How? Do you really think that Walter goes in the future to start a luddite movement and abhor science? The “plan” was NOT to go in the future to obliterate current Observers, but to create BETTER observers. The kid Observer was needed to demonstrate how to achieve that betterment, not simply stop Observers as a destructive evolutionary trend and be done with it. Which means that what we got this: far future technology + Walter at their disposal = UTTER OMNIPOTENCE. Including time travel.

Hence, it would be in the realm of possibilities that Walter and the future at large have plenty of handy tools to make sure that everything that needed to happen would happen, minus the Observers invasion. Handcrafting the past so that Peter & Olivia would have the best life possible.

The White Tulip: the sign that God/Father (Walter) sends his child (Peter). To tell him he’s being taken care of:

When I take his hand
and I lead him…

he’ll know that I love him.

The Brain is blind but it doesn’t matter

A quick summary of my two main objections to Bakker’s Blind Brain Theory. That’s essentially all I was repeating this past two months on comments on his blog. There are lots of implications, but I think these two points are at the origin. Besides, I largely accept the theory, and what I’m actually arguing are the consequences and implications of that theory.

1) Formal error. I think this is evident to Bakker already, but he may underestimate it. His intent with the Blind Brain Theory is to reverse the approach to how we can explain consciousness. Inverting the frame of reference. So he believes that if we posit that “consciousness” is a perceptive fraud/illusion, then you could explain consciousness from the “outside”. Starting from the natural world. That way, in his intention, the consequence is that consciousness should be “explained away”. In the sense that he should be able to describe how consciousness comes to be, how it works, and why it is perceived in the way it is (and why this is only a sort of hallucination).

The formal error, I think, is evident. We know the concept of “turtles all the way down”. The problem is that, even more specifically when you deal with consciousness, we know exactly the “origin”. It’s the brain/mind. The postulate is that everything begins in the brain, and so every consequent observation and description need to start from the brain. The switch Bakker makes from an internal self-description, to a “scientific” description from the outside is a formal violation. It’s like in a book switching from first person into third. So this is why I called it a literary trick. It’s a magical handwaving, and so negates exactly the possibility of what you were doing (that is: the possibility to have a description from the outside, looking in).

2) The second objection has roots in the first. I wrote this on Bakker’s blog:

I’m going to ask all of you a question.

We could postulate that all characters in fiction live deterministic stories. There is a god who supposedly knows everything and creates every small bits that becomes material substance in that story. If it’s a book, then a writer writes every single word, then is then made into thought and then projected as a world.

Have these characters free will? Obviously not, as consequence of living in a deterministic world. But what makes a “good story” is the fact that the system is closed to the god. The rules are clear and not continuously violated. And that the characters are true to themselves and the world, as they are set up from the beginning.

But does it matter to us? Does it matter that we know those characters have no free will? Do we stop reading simply because we already know “who did it” (the writer)? Or maybe we still feel compelled to continue, because we are trapped in that first person, and that’s all that matters?

So, knowing the first person is an illusion, does empty it of all its value?

The first point explains that you can’t transcend the limited point of view. Hence the formal violation. Even in science we could posit that there’s a god as a first mover. An entity that sits right outside the system of the world. Science, however advanced, CAN’T disprove this. It’s always possible, however improbable. Being this god “external”, it means the god has no power once the system is in place and starts. Everything moves accordingly to its rules. This system is deterministic, which is what science tells us. This means that if you knew a single moment at any point of the lifetime of this system, you could be able to deduce/reconstruct all its history, past and future. Because deterministic means a cascading of consequences, each having always the exact same outcome, like a very complex domino.

The question is: do people living within a deterministic system have free will? The answer is: no. Because deterministic system means that the choices people make are direct and sole consequence of the environment (where the person is itself undifferentiated part of it). But this leads to a false perception. A deterministic world doesn’t mean that there’s someone with a joystick outside the system that pilots us around. It simply means that we are bound to the environment, not independent from it. The “illusion” of free will is simply due to the limited capacity of our brain, that can’t remotely grasp the totality of reality (and if it did it would break the system, because would break the inside/outside rule, and so automatically make it non-deterministic since the system wouldn’t properly “close”, and closure being the necessary condition of a deterministic system), and so is limited to know one perspective. And that’s the key to solve this riddle.

This is a problem of relativity. A deterministic system can both have free will, and then deny it. If you had the capacity to exit the system, and looking in from the outside, then the system is made deterministic, and so free will vanishes. But if instead you are caged in one perspective, bound to it, then this makes free will something true. Whether free will exists or not depends on who’s asking. This is not just a philosophical abstraction, but a concrete thing. The discovery that the system is deterministic (if such a discovery was possible) can have no effect on the first person point of view (neither in abstract nor in concrete, since “effect” implies choice and so free will). It makes a difference if you were able to exit the system completely. But that would mean changing the perspective. It’s the perspective itself that gives or takes free will.

So my conclusion is that it makes no difference no matter how you spin the paradox. Observations are only “legal” if they don’t violate your perspective, and at the same time you know that having one perspective means that this perspective has “authority”, which means it defines what is true for you. In this case, free will is true. As long we have an identity, we have free will. Breaching the system, would still mean we have free will. Free will would be denied only if we were able to depart from ourselves, and then see us in a picture, but losing entirely the possibility to return.

Simple guide at US political elections

Following, from Italy, the Obama/Romney debate the other day I was dismayed about how simplistic was it all.

Some of the most relevant claims used from a side or the other are a constant in all political debates, in most countries I guess. On top of this, there seem to be a much greater attention in the US, about the “form” over substance. Who smiled the most, who sounded more secure of himself, who kept more control of his facial expressions. So it is a rather obvious claim I’d make: it wasn’t a “political” debate. The politic I heard from both parties was fake. It was instead just a show, theater.

A simplistic analysis could cover all the meaningful points. For example it is very obvious to see Romney’s weakness by just looking at his speech patterns:
“I know what it takes to…”
“I understand what it takes.”
“We must…”

He affirms the obvious, without ever saying HOW. Or WHAT. It evokes politics without ever saying something concrete. Every phrase he says is missing one half: how he intends to carry out the things he promises.

The “intention” is manifest. Romney intends to tell American people whatever it takes to win. It is that simple.

The entire deal stops there. Romney is not interested in explaining what he’ll do if he’s elected. He’s interested on winning the elections. Generalizing: the “now” is more important that what will happen afterwards.

This idea crosses over to the political idea. You need energy and more jobs? Then Romney gives them now. Drill more for more oil. Exploit all the natural source America has left. Squeeze it all out, right now. Because he isn’t in the least concerned to what happens long-term. Obama shows more concern for long-term impact of his choices, but long-term doesn’t pay off in a political election. Most people are selfish and think short-term by constitution.

The rest of the political debate is about the game of the three boxes:

TAXES – DEFICIT – SERVICES

The relationship between these three “boxes” is not political. It is not a subjective thing. It’s simply factual and depends on the real world. If you want to lower TAXES overall and still want to keep the same level of SERVICES, then the DEFICIT goes up. If you want to lower TAXES without affecting the DEFICIT, then you’ll have to cut SERVICES.

Romney promises that he’ll lower taxes across the board for EVERYONE. That the deficit will go down, and that he’ll provide excellent services. This is not a political plan, it’s simply an objective FRAUD. So let’s call things with the proper name empty of rhetoric.

When he brings up the example of some desperate woman without a job asking him if he can help with her situation, he says “Yes, that’s what I can do.” This isn’t just a lie, but it is speculation on other people’s suffering for personal interest. It’s a sign of how ruthless he is. It is unacceptable, disrespectful and criminal. Because the grater the NEED, the most careful and honest you HAVE to be when you promise a solution. Because not only he won’t be able to help that woman, but he’s also doing it for a personal advantage.

But Romney isn’t interested on being earnest. He’s interested on *appearing* as earnest. He’s not himself. He plays a role. He doesn’t say what he thinks, he says what you want to hear. Whatever you want to hear. He’ll say something to someone, and then the exact opposite to someone else. Romney will say that he’ll help exactly the % of people in front of him right at that moment, because it’s convenient. He can say one moment that he’ll work for 100% of people and another moment that 47% of people are govern-dependent victims. It’s absolutely logical. Why? Because when he was speaking in the second circumstance he was in front of people that wanted to hear just that. Romney says what you want to hear, so you vote for him. And that’s why a lot of the debate with Obama ends with a sort of “me too”. With the difference that Obama at least tries to restraint his political idea within the boundaries of reality, whereas Romney will say exactly what he think people want to hear. No matter how completely absurd it is. To win the elections you need to make people dream.

Romney will create more jobs, lower taxes for everyone, cut the deficit, make America autonomous with energy, take care of the environment, strengthen the use of green power, reduce criminality, crack down on China and cure cancer. Because he believes he can say whatever the fuck pleases him. He’s burden free, responsibility free. He only wants one thing: your trust and your vote.

The model he uses for himself is a winner. Real politics is about people getting involved. And not observing things from far away and nodding their approval. But the great majority of people don’t care about politics and won’t get involved. They want to delegate the choice-making and responsibilities to someone who takes charge of EVERYTHING. They want the holy savior. They want to have faith on a President that will take care of everything. And then, one day, they’ll want someone to blame for everything so that this wheel will make another turn. They do not care HOW things will be done. They only want them being done, right now. Romney knows this. He knows that people voting for him aren’t interested in HOW he’ll lower taxes, create more jobs and everything else.

On the bottom of all this there’s some real politics. One handhold Romney has is that a way to rig the game of the three boxes above is economical growth. Economical growth brings more jobs, lowers the deficit and can lower the taxes for each, because it increases directly the volume of money that those three boxes deal with. But usually economic growth requires money being spent to jumpstart it, the deficit increasing, and America can’t afford that kind of program. So if he can hope of achieving something similar then it is about removing all rules. Deregulate everything and let businessmen go wild. Let everything loose so that there can be a net earning. Go after profit AT ALL COSTS. The lack of rules can offer a short term advantage and, again, long term is not a problem because he won’t be President by then. Some people will be crushed underfoot by this process, but that’s the price to pay. They’ll be guilty of not being rich and not having taken advantage of all the opportunities America offered. The American dream is paved with bones.

The other handhold Romney has over Obama is what Obama himself exploited to become President. When Obama was elected the first time, he was something new staked against a system. He could promise change, and he won because of those promises. But today Obama IS the system. He’s stuck in a role and he can’t promise changes. This pattern is the same no matter in what country you live. The current political party is always at a disadvantage against the competitor. And that’s why Romney gains points whenever he focuses his arguments on what Obama has or hasn’t done.

On top of all this, Obama has his hands tied, whereas Romney is free to take advantage of every opportunity. For Obama this is like playing a game of chess where your opponent plays with a different set of rules. And that’s why I think Obama’s strategy should be to overturn the whole table. This is not a game where the two players are in their own fields. Obama has NO HOPE of describing a political plan that can look better than Romney’s plan, because Romney isn’t playing by the same rules. It doesn’t need to “add up”. You can’t win that kind of match if not by accepting to do the same. And if that happens then there’s zero difference between Romney and Obama. So what Obama should do is not focus on his own plan, but focus on the rules and the game that Romney’s playing. He should treat Romney as a parody to show exactly how Romney’s agenda is working. More simply: he should expose how simplistic, self-focused and dishonest is that plan.

And to do that he can’t simply state “Romney’s plan is”, and Romney then saying, “Nope, that’s not my plan, my plan is.” Because that kind of back and forth establishes the kind of balance where Romney PROSPERS. Obama can’t play the politically-correct game, because that’s where Romney built his own strategy.

Romney will keep a relevant advantage as long America continues to focus on the participants, and not on the rules.

Mo Yan, wins the Nobel

As probably most people I never heard the name of this writer, so started looking on Amazon and Wikipedia. I ended up buying a book.

Two titles I tracked that are most interesting:
Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out
The Republic of Wine

And extrapolated comments that piqued my interest:

“there are three major features in his works: extraordinary characters; language with absurd local flavor (or somewhat black humor of the absurd); and plots with symbolic meaning.”

“Whatever the subject matter is, a torrential flow of rich, unpredictable and often lacerating words remains his trademark.”

“Today’s most revered, feared, and controversial Chinese novelist offers a tour de force in which the real, the absurd, the comical, and the tragic are blended into a fascinating read.”

“He flouts literary conformity, spiking his earthy realism with fantasy, hallucination and metafiction.”

“This “lumbering animal of a story,” as he calls it, combines the appeal of a family saga set against tumultuous events with the technical bravura of innovative fiction. Catch a ride on this wheel of transmigration.”

“use of multiple narrators”

“Much of the book is very funny, especially when the narrator is one of the animal reincarnations Of Ximen Nao (he returns as a donkey, an ox, a pig, and a dog) commenting on the foibles of humans and the many reforms of the Mao era.”

“This book is written masterfully and encompasses a half century with sorrow and wit.”

“Set in the fictional province of Liquorland, this tall tale begins with a rumor of cannibal feasts featuring children as the delectable main course. In response, Chinese officials send special investigator Ding Gou’er to look into the allegations. He arrives by coal truck at the Mount Lao Coal Mine, where he meets the legendary Diamond Jin, Vice-Minister of the Liquorland Municipal Party Committee Propaganda Bureau, a man known for an epic ability to hold his booze. Almost at once, Ding’s worst fears seem to be realized when he is invited to a special dinner, given enough alcohol to stun an ox, and then served what appears to be “a golden, incredibly fragrant little boy.” Despite his hosts’ explanation that the boy’s arms are made of lotus root, his legs of ham sausage, and his head from a silver melon, Ding remains suspicious–until he is rendered so addled by wine that he ends up eating half an arm all on his own.”

“A lesser novelist might be satisfied with just this one narrative thread; Mo Yan, however, has bigger ambitions. The correspondence between fictional character and author allows Mo Yan to wax satirical on the subject of art, politics, and the troubling point where the two intersect in a Socialist society: “One of the tenets of the communism envisioned by Marx,” the hopeful Yidou writes, “was the integration of art with the working people and of the working people with art. So when communism has been realized, everyone will be a novelist.”"

“only a first-rate artist like Mo Yan could pull off such a subversive and darkly comic metafiction.”

“he waxes metafictional in this savage, hallucinatory farce.”

“The novel grows progressively more febrile in tone, with pervasive, striking imagery and wildly imaginative digressions that cumulatively reveal the tremendous scope of his vision.”

Framing devices: MS Paint Adventures

Some more speculative garbage ;)

One of the Internet phenomenons I never understood, though I tried at least a few times already, is MS Paint Adventures. Especially its last, epic and mythical, incarnation, Homestuck (somewhere around 5200 “pages” right now), that can reach a rather impressive depth in its mythology. It is easier to grasp how it started since Jail Break was modeled after a classic point&click adventure game. You can call it a typical post-modernist “deconstruction” of the medium. The guy posted an illustration on a forum, and then prompted people to suggest an action. So it was something like interactive writing, where the original author still had control over it, as he still picked one suggestion among many and showed its outcome.

Today I was going through the first “pages” of Homestuck and noticed something else instead. The story is again presented as if a “game”, complete with a parody of a rudimentary interface. The protagonist of the story is a not-so-good programmer who happens to be working on a game, called SBURB. You can play the beta. And you can see that it’s exactly the beginning of Homestuck, with very minimal differences. A game within a game. A world within a world. The protagonist of the story, putting himself into the story. All of this being the exquisite post-modernist quality: playing with frames.

“Sometimes you feel like you are trapped in this room. Stuck, if you will, in a sense which possibly borders on the titular.”

So this time my interest was tickled by this different perspective. Think of a programmer, putting himself in the game he’s making. Is it possible, from within the boundaries of the game, to reconstruct the world outside? How do you think out of the frame? How do you punch holes through it?

It becomes a parody on reality, metaphorically strong. See my analogy with dreams and reality. The creator and his creation. The dreamer and the dreamee, trapped into the dream, unconscious about the dream. And here in this case, the protagonist of a game, unconscious of himself in a game, but playing within the rules. This blinkered look at reality that makes you take everything for granted, because the brain is hardwired to make sense of what is fed to it. WYSIATI, What You See Is All There Is. Sufficiency. The brain projects a world using a severely limited set of features. An abstract.

This is exactly like in a game, where you program and defines just a few features of the world. Is it a limited top-down 2D view? So what would the characters see if they were to look up, out of the “frame”? You don’t know. You can’t know. And, more precisely, you don’t ask questions. Because the question itself is out of the frame. Not only it can’t be answered from within, but it also cannot exist. Because it’s outside the bounding rules. Out of the physics that regulate and frame your world.

Take the idea of “time” into this frame. The character of a game experiences time. The game story has a natural flow. It starts and then goes on. The character may have a sense of previous history even at that starting point, so “misperceiving” it. But is the game a “beta”, or a final version? How many iterations that world has gone through? What was written “before”, and what “after”? The timeline experienced in the game is not the timeline that exists in the world that built that game. You could perceive an embryonic state where instead there’s a final one. So it gets to the point where time collapses, like in the other example I was making.

Once again, this is all the result of reflexive properties. Things that self-describe through recursive processes. And, in these endless loops, the impossibility to escape.

P.S.
I’ve seen a similar concept mentioned here. Though I’d stay more with the world itself, “closure”, describing precisely the “binding” of these worlds. As I think the property of doing without the details, erasing them, is more meaningful than the property of “filling in”.

GNU’s Not Unix, as a model of reality

Some speculative garbage ;)

I was watching this video, and its two children. Stephen Hawking’s Grand Design, The Meaning of Life.

Quite a bombastic title. The documentaries are nice to watch, with flashy editing. Content may appear a bit superficial, though, but they are meant for the large public and not the specialized one. I wrote some comments over at Bakker’s blog.

The summary is that I think it could be possible to see progress and science as the opposite they usually represent. The more science develop, the more we think we have a better grasp on reality. We have more knowledge and disproved ideas such as the sun orbiting around earth. We know physics, we can use electricity, make fancy things and so on. All of this possible because we know better how reality works.

Though you could say that, with this kind of progress, we are emancipating from reality. We concretely live in meaning-full worlds. The internet becomes a good chunk of life. We watch movies, play games. We live into fancy cities with skyscrapers. The environment we actually live in looks nothing like a “natural” world. We still die, suffer of illness and all those things that remind us where the real world is, but there’s still a drift toward a virtual world that is made, opposed to a real world that we are subject to.

The more we achieve progress, the more we purchase virtual land. We take from reality and build anew.

Where does it lead? To a point where reality is completely reclaimed and stops existing. Reality becomes subjective. That threshold may well mean that the notion of “reality” stops to matter. Philosophically you can decide what is true and what is not.

An idea suggested in one of Bakker’s books is that all this could have already happened, in the future. So stretch that same fancy hypothesis. Take the biggest idea like the one about the many worlds, of which the one we know, from the Big Bang to the final collapse is just a grain of sand. What if this impossibly large construct is also man made?

If reality stops existing, then time stops existing. The future collapses into the now. So we have now, a reality that will be built in the future. God, making reality, in this case would be an advanced human being far in the future, who built reality as we see it.

Now think that if reality is completely virtual and man-made, then it means that the actual “real” reality we started from is lost. Men end up living within their imaginary worlds, leaving “real” reality behind. Reality vanishes.

Take the acronym: “GNU’s Not Unix!”. It’s recursive, built by itself. It’s as if the “G” is an original state that is lost and then absorbed into the rest of the body. The same way, virtual reality spawns from “real” reality, but when virtual reality becomes complete, reality disappears. It’s like a “ladder” that you use to reach an high place.

You climb the ladder, then look down. There’s no ladder. It’s like the time paradox where you go back in time to give someone an object so that in the future he’ll give it to you so you can go back in time and give it to him. Strange loops.

David Foster Wallace

Merely noticed this quote on another blog, and reproducing it:

“I gotta tell you, I just think to look across the room and automatically assume that somebody else is less aware than me, or that somehow their interior life is less rich, and complicated, and acutely perceived than mine, makes me not as good a writer. Because that means I’m going to be performing for a faceless audience, instead of trying to have a conversation with a person.”