I am truly sorry for this folks, but I am afraid there will be no Friday Science Whatever this week, because there sincerely has been no science stories that I find interesting thing to share this week.

I am boggled that this is even possible, but I look at my folder, and my websites, and absolutely nothing strikes me as worth mentioning. It has, apparently, been a bit of a slow news week in terms of science and discovery. Either that, or I am just being too fussy because the heat is making me grumpy.

But either way, this is not going to be your usual Friday.

The closest bit to science news that I have on hand is this rather well executed bit of science fiction satire about Life in the future :

Now I warned you it was satire, and hence, it’s a tad on the dark side, but funny in it own dark way, and just plausible enough to be considered legitimate science fiction. And well done, too. I am always intrigued by what can be done with just voice and graphics, no “live video”, so to speak, and I would say that the person who did this, Tom Scott, has done a great job of using writing and simple, iconic graphics to create an all too plausible corporate dystopia.

(Seriously, Windows Dictionary? You don’t have the word “dystopia” in you? The closest match you could come up with is “dystrophy”? Seriously? Sheesh. )

Of course, like with all science fiction, questions are left unanswered. Like, if there is no money in it for them, why is the big bad corporation bringing you back in the first place? I am guessing that some kind of government mandate would have to be involved. Something that legally compels the Life corporation to revive everyone who dies with a backup, but which does not guarantee that you will enjoy it or have anything like a decent virtual existence at all.

The real issue, thought, to me anyhow, is one of identity. Who says that pattern of electrical activity in some computer somewhere is really me, just because they were in some sense based on me? Even if my entire brain has been simulated down to the lowliest quark, is that really me?

My gut reaction is, no, it is not. That is very clearly not me. I am me. That program is something else. To me, the clincher is that, presumably, the computers could run a simulation of me without me dying at all, and then which one of us is the real me?

I might be biased, but I would say it is the meat and gristle version of me that was born from my mother and father’s genetic data and walked around being a live human being for all those years before I met my end. The one that had all those experiences, memories, opinions, idea, and so on for the computer to scan in the first place.

And to be fair, I was here first!

But then you have to ask, well, what exactly am I, me, Michael John Bertrand, in the first place? Certainly I do not consider myself to be this sack of meat and bone and adipose tissue that is the current host of my consciousness. If I lost an arm in an accident, or if I lost all my excess fat and hence lost enough mass to make an entire other person, I would not consider myself to be a whole different person. I would just be MJB, reduced, but still here.

So if all I am, deep down, is a pattern of electrical activity running in a glob of fatty tissue we call a brain, what is the big deal whether it is running in a brain or a computer? I am no mystic, I do not insist that there must be “something more”, something magical and special that no computer could reproduce. I am, in that sense, a materialist. We are just stuff, matter, substance. We no more have a soul than our computers do.

We are just extremely complicated and marvelously adaptable and potent biological machines. We are special… amazingly special. Just being alive makes us special, far different from all the other matter in the universe. We are living matter, matter that increases order within itself, matter with mobility and reproduction and opinions.

And being sentient, we know it.

But that specialness is a function of the same rules and processes that apply to everything else. We have no special set of rules that apply to only us and that safeguard our uniqueness against the uniformity of the universe. We are a part of it, and it of us. We are inseparable.

So I cannot claim that the version of me running on a computer is not the real me simply because it lacks that certain special something that makes us human. Given sufficient computer power, everything about me, the person, could be reproduced and simulated to all meaningful degrees of fidelity.

Yet identity insists on uniqueness. There simply cannot be more than one of me. One of the fundamental truths of conscious existence is that we are here, in our bodies, right now, and nowhere else. We cannot imagine being in two places at once. That other thing cannot be us. The mind simply balks at the very concept. No matter how accurate the reproduction, that thing over there is not us. It’s someone else. We are, at best, close relatives.

And speaking of relatives, perhaps I will be repeating this conversation some day when the young people are badgering me to upload my brain into the WetWeb and I keep insisting that I do not want some simulated version of me hanging around after I’m dead claiming to be me.

Perhaps I will die without ever availing myself of the new miracle of technology. After all, I can be hellaciously stubborn sometimes.

Or maybe I will have a deathbed conversion, figuring a simulated me around is better than nothing at all. I am devious too.

If a future virtual me is ever reading this, hey, good going, you lived long enough to live forever! Don’t feel bad about caving in at the last minute.

We always kind of knew we would, didn’t we?

Another scratch on the wall
Of my self-made cell
Keeping track of the days
In my personal hell

So yeah, I am in a great mood.

This is getting to be my lifestyle now. I am always in this exact mood when I do my writing, because I am always coming out of sleeping all afternoon and into the evening. And it is never happy good wonder sleep, that elusive and wonderful sleep where, as legend has it, you actually feel less tired than when you went to sleep when you wake up.

No, it is always that hot sweaty confusing dream laden sleep that feels like I am going through some kind of intense drug trip every time and leaves me feeling depressed and confused and hopeless and heavy and lumpy and disgusting and unworthy, and like I want to just crawl into a hole and disappear.

And so I end up writing about the same stupid pointless crap day after day, a thousand words of futility at a time, banging the same old tired dusty drum because it is marginally better than doing nothing.

It makes me wish I could do something really meaningful. Like this guy did.

Hey, it’s the World’s Meatiest Sandwich. That has to count for something, right?

Actually, now that I think about it, that is pretty stupid. I mean, the thing is a foot tall. So unless you can unhinge your jaw like a snake, there is no way you can take a bite out of the thing. Arguably, that is therefore no longer a sandwich. It is a vertical smorgasbord with the bread inconveniently placed on the top and bottom. You could only eat it by putting a slice of it on a plate sideways, and then it is just basically a plate full of meat with a few garnishes. Stupid.

Wow, you know, taking it out on others really does make you feel a little better. I totally see why mean people do this all the time. Good thing I am a nice guy, or this could get addictive.

Plus, you know, I mean what I say. That sandwich is stupid. So there.

Or take this guy, Nick Hanauer, and “the idea TED didn’t consider worth spreading”.

Apparently, this guy thinks that the idea that the middle class are the real job creators, not the rich, is his alone, and the fact that his talk was ultimately rejected by the TED conference was rank censorship of an idea just too radical and earthshaking for even the famously open minds at TED to handle, and so they rejected it out of close minded fear and desire to maintain the status quo.

Give me a break, dude. I have not watched your talk ( I feel like if I did watch it, somehow he would win) but from what was said by TED head curator…

“Our policy is to post only talks that are truly special. And we try to steer clear of talks that are bound to descend into the same dismal partisan head-butting people can find every day elsewhere in the media.”

… it sounds to me like your speech was simply too partisan and polemic for the rarefied air of the TED conference’s Olympian point of view.

And you know what? I am totally cool with that.

Full disclosure : I love TED. It is an outstanding forum for truly good, interesting, world shaping, significant ideas. It is a center for the encouragement and dissemination of truly excellent thinking, and that is something I can get behind one million percent. I am all about the quality of thought. Better thinking leads to better solutions, and better solutions lead to better tomorrows.

And as a lover of TED, I am quite happy that they keep partisan politics out of it. And I am hardly apolitical. Odds are, I would agree with a lot of what this dude said. But not all denial of access is censorship. Sometimes it is just plain selectivity. If someone sent a badly written, poorly spelled, childishly scrawled and obscene racist diatribe to the New York Times and they declined to print it, that would not be because they cowered in fear before the power of the ideas contained therein and feared the wrath of their all-controlling masters.

It would be because it sucked. Think about it, Nick Hanauer.

There has to be a place beyond the thrust and parry of politics, above the day to day concerns that keep us from seeing the big picture, someplace where there are no teams, no sides, no cliques, no groups, just people and the quality of their ideas.

TED is such a place, and I love it.

Like how about this idea : just plain canceling the massive personal debt that came from the 2008 crash.

That is what Iceland is doing, and it is working great. Its banks have written down (or forgiven, canceled, erased) debt equal to 13 percent of the nation’s GDP, and it has worked wonders for their economy, which has bounced back amazingly well given the crippling blow dealt it in 2008.

Now the economist lackeys of the banks and the corporations and the powers that be say that this would never work, that by canceling debt, you are taking money out of the economy, destroying wealth, and that can only lead to utter ruin and disaster.

After all, when you worship wealth, what could be more sacrilegious than making it go away?

But the thing is, that already happened. That is what the whole 2008 crisis was about : a bunch of high finance charlatans convinced the world that trillions of dollars of value existed where it did not, and because everyone was eager to unload the worthless assets to bigger dogs than then, the scam lasted just long enough for the world economy to truly believe that money existed before they woke up one morning to find it all had disappeared.

All personal debt forgiveness does is make it so that the average person on the street does not have to suffer because of that high level con job, and hence, suddenly relieved of massive debt, the people’s consumer confidence skyrockets, they spend more freely, and the economy bounces back.

Ta da! And they said it could not be done.

What they meant was, it could not be done without the people who caused it suffering.

And they were right.