Douglas Hofstadter speaks in the latest edition of Wired about his new book, I Am A Strange Loop. As he explains, he’s trying to figure out “What Am I?”

One good prototype [of a strange loop] is the Escher drawing of two hands sketching each other. A more abstract one is the sentence I am lying. Such loops are, I think anyone would agree, strange. They seem paradoxical and even strike some people as dangerous. I argue that such a strange loop, paradoxical or not, is at the core of each human being. It is an abstract pattern that gives each of us an �??I,�?� or, if you don�??t mind the term, a soul.

The “noosphere” (sometimes referred to as the neurosphere) can be described as “the sphere of human thought”. First used by geochemist Vladimir Verdansky, he believed that there were three stages in the development of the earth: the geosphere (inanimate matter), which was then transformed by the biosphere, (animate matter), which in turn would be transformed by the noosphere that arose from human cognition.

It’s interesting to note that Verdansky’s ideas helped contribute to a natural philosophy from the 19th and 20th Centuries called Russian Cosmism, which attempted to use empirical research combining elements of philosophy and religion to explore the origin and evolution of mankind and the universe, as well as to try and predict its future. Many of the ideas from this school helped contribute to transhumanism and is often seen as its natural precursor.

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Today’s quote comes from Bernard Meunier, Nestlé’s country manager, quoted in Business Week (2006) on why they’ve “pumped $500 million into Russia to date”:

“As soon as people step out of poverty, they become potential Nestlé customers.”

I suppose that’s really good news for Russia’s 53 billionaires, but probably bad news for the 20% that live below the poverty line, and the 30% whose wages are below the required minimum to live. It seems that the poorest segments of the population, like pensioners, the unemployed and government employees like teachers are not likely to be Nestlé customers.

(There is of course the exception to the rule, and that’s probably when they want to give free breast milk substitutes that helps contribute to the problem of 1.5 million children dying every year from inadequate breast feeding).

Great article on BBC’s “Our Correspondent” website covering a recent US conference trying to see whether there was still anything in common with Europe. Apparently not:

“The West is an outdated concept,” declared one supremely self-confident senior American official at a lunch where he was the guest of honour. “And if there is still a West, then it includes Australia, Japan and South Korea. We have a global vision now” […] Seen through American eyes, it seemed the era of fixed alliances was over.

[…]

The name of the game would be selective and loose commitments: “Like an open marriage,” said one former US official […] “In my experience an open marriage tends to work only for one side,” [said] a British academic, “and I suspect it is the Americans who will benefit.”

When all’s said and done, there’s no real change in outlook. You’re still either with US, or against US.

The term artilect is a combination of the words “artificial intellect”, and is used to describe highly intelligent machines that differ from today’s concepts of artificial intelligence by being far more intelligent than humans, almost god-like. In case you think this is taken from a book of science fiction, it’s not. The term was coined by Professor Dr. Hugo de Garis, who specialises in a field of artificial intelligence, and expanded upon in his book The Artilect War (a .pdf version can be found here).

According to de Garis, the most important question that we shall face in the coming years is “Who or what should be dominant species on the planet?” The “debate” over this question shall be so controversial that it will actually result in an all-out war sometime during the 21st Century.

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Today’s quote comes from physicist Fritjof Capra. I am just reading through his (so far) superb book, “The Hidden Connections“, which aims to describe “the unified systems that integrate the biological, cognitive and social dimensions of life”.

At any rate, the quote comes from page 9, where Capra is talking about the nature of life, in particular the process of “autopoiesis” (self-making or auto self-creation) where “living networks continually create, or recreate, themselves by transforming of replacing their components”. Here, he demonstrates that “viruses are not alive, because they lack their own metabolism”, but he then goes on to add:

Similarly, a robot that assembles other robots out of parts that are built by some other machines cannot be considered living. In recent years, it has often been suggested that computers and other automata may constitute future life forms. However, unless they were able to synthesize their components from “food molecules” in their environment, they could not be considered to be alive according to our definition of life.

I found this particularly interesting because he approaches the idea of a “living” robot from a biological point of view rather than simply using consciousness or self-awareness as the criterion for a future life form.

Capra has his own webpage, and there is a really fascinating interview with him at intuition.org. Some of his other books include: The Tao of Physics, The Web of Life, The Turning Point, and Uncommon Wisdom.

Ever wonder how all the money pumped into fighting the War on Drugs is used? Well, here’s one indication from the Associated Press:

The U.N. found that Colombia’s army - the largest recipient of $700 million in annual anti-narcotics and counterinsurgency aid from the United States - had participated in killing civilians in 21 of Colombia’s 32 states.

The U.N. said the numbers of civilian killed in those areas showed an increase over 2005 but did not provide death toll figures.

In many cases, the victims were falsely presented as leftist rebels killed in combat, crime scene evidence was tampered with and the investigation was led by the military’s questioned criminal justice system.

The report said such killings with “characteristics of extrajudicial executions do not appear to be isolated incidents” and may have been prompted partly by the government’s use of combat deaths as a benchmark to measure success against leftist insurgents.

But there is some good news out of all this. The UK is probably making a decent amount of money selling arms to Columbia, after having identified it as one of a few “priority” markets for arms sales.

You can tell a lot from someone’s bookshelf. In fact, when I go to someone’s house for the first time (and if they don’t mind) I always make a point of looking to see what books they have. So it was with interest that I had a read through Jim Lobe’s recent piece on Bush’s reading list. Most of the books mentioned seem to conform to a general pattern of strengthening Bush’s world-view: right-wing and neo-conservative with a dose of Islamophobism thrown in for good measure. Of course, Lobe wouldn’t be able to name every book on Bush’s shelf, but it would be nice to know that he owns one or two that challenged his world-view instead of strengthening it, all things considered.

A griefer is considered to be someone who plays an online game with the sole purpose of causing grief to the other players, normally through harassment; this is normally referred to as “griefing”. Originally used in baseball as a derogatory term by away teams talking about the home side, it began being used to refer to gamers by around the year 2000.

Recently, the term has been used (such as in the More4 News video clip available from this page) to describe protesters in the online world of Second Life, such as the SLLA (Second Life Liberation Army).

Today’s quote comes from an old (1995) interview in Wired with AI researcher Douglas Hofstadter where he talks about the complexity of the human spirit:

“If such minds of infinite subtlety and complexity and emotional depth [like Bach] could be trivialized by a small chip, it would destroy my sense of what humanity is about - what humans are about, what love is about, what caring about people is about, and what humor is.”