For a very long time, western culture has had a strong undercurrent about naming. Conceptually, it starts with the recognition that the ability to name a thing gives you power over it. This is reflected in many deep and ancient cultural mythologies.

The creation story in the Bible begins with:

In the beginning,…the earth was a formless void…. Then God said: Let there be light. God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night.

So God is able to create the Earth with only his Word, and give life to mankind with only his breath. This power is nearly transferred to Adam, when he is given the task of naming all the plants and animals. Only mankind is given this linguistic power.

Jewish mythology picks up on this issue with the story of the Golem.

In many tales the Golem is inscribed with magic or religious words that keep it animated. Writing one of the names of God on its forehead, a slip of paper in its mouth, or inscribed on its body, or writing the word Emet (אמת, “truth” in the Hebrew language) on its forehead are examples of such words. By erasing the first letter aleph in Emet to form Met (מת, “dead” in Hebrew, when the aleph letter א is cancelled) the golem could be deactivated.

Jewish culture continues this tradition with the Kabbalah’s search for the True Name of God. Other cultures also demonstrate this idea. In witchcraft, a demon is both summoned and controlled by speaking its name. In the Hindu tradition AUM is the sacred word that encompasses everything, and is the sole syllable upon which focus is kept during meditation. The idea is also reflected in more modern works, as clearly expressed in Ursula LeGuin’s A Wizard of Earthsea:

Ged sighed sometimes, but he did not complain. He saw that in this dusty and fathomless matter of learning the true name of each place, thing, and being, the power he wanted lay like a jewel at the bottom of a dry well. For magic consists in this, the true naming of a thing.

Or the so recently popular, Harry Potter, where Dumbledore advises Harry:

Call him Voldemort, Harry. Always use the proper name for things. Fear of a name increases fear of the thing itself.” (PS17)

But how does this relate to Computer Science? Being a very textual discipline, we have many conventions that relate to naming. In Computer Science, we have the ability to create virtual worlds, and thus we need systems of naming the objects within those worlds. At the Language level we see a focus on naming conventions:

• Hungarian notation, in which variables have a prefix that describes their type, such as strName for a string, or pX for a pointer to X.
• Fortran, which had an implicit typing scheme, where any names beginning with I, J, K, L, M, N were always integer and the rest were reals.
• The Ruby on Rails framework, which has the ability to automatically map a model named “Person” to the “people” table in the database just by name inspection.

But naming actually turn out to be a much deeper issue than these linguistic examples show. In the Distributed Systems world, we have a large focus on naming, for a remote resource can only be accessed through its name, in what’s called name resolution. The easiest example to pick on here, is DNS, the system that allows a person to reference a remote computer by using an easy to remember domain (such as www.example.com) instead of a hard to remember physical address (such as 127.0.01). We can also identify a confluence of two separate concepts: The name of a machine can be used to locate it. This allows machines to operate with the previous cultural ‘power of naming’, knowing a machines name gives one access to that machine.

Since my research focuses on computer security, this duality between names and locations can be really critical. For example, there is a model for building secure software, called the object capabilities model, that not only identifies this power of naming, but actually explicitly states it as an axiom of the model:

• Objects (actors) can interact only by sending messages to unforgeable addresses.
• An object acquires knowledge of other objects in one of two ways:
  1. It is created with addresses that it receives from its creator
  2. It receives a message with an address to another object.

So, the security of the system is brought down to names. Communication and therefore power over other objects can only be obtained by learning their true names, which must be kept secret (unforgeable). For if a malicious object were able to easily guess the names of other objects in the system, it could quickly wreak havoc.

As such systems work their way into our daily lives, our personal names (read: personal identification) have also become much more important recently, as anyone that has been a victim of identity theft can attest. But this is an issue I won’t go into here. There are also other cultural impacts, for names change the way we think about each other.

Ok, so I’ve been away awhile. I visited the Maker Faire, and San Deigo Amphib Base (twice). Two days ago I read Benford’s Cosm, start to finish. And learned that the nucleus of heavier elements are ellipsoidal rather than spherical. Anyway, while I wait on preparing back-date posts of the aforementioned activities, I found out some interesting stuff today.

I was reading Geodesic Discrete Global Grid Systems (Kevin Sahr, Denis White, and A. Jon Kimerling. 2003. CaGIS 30(2): 121-134). I went out to search for code that does a grid <--> lat/lon conversion for Fuller’s Dymaxion icosahedron. Gray, R.W. actually wrote such code, for a flattened (2d) layout of the icosahedron, which might be useful in the future. These searches led me far afield, to the wikipedia article on Buckminister Fuller himself, where I leared that he was much better about recording events in his life than I am in mine. In fact,

Fuller documented his life every 15 minutes from 1915 to 1983, leaving 80 meters (270 feet) of journals. He called this the Dymaxion Chronofile. That is said to be the most documented human life in history.

And he also had lots of fun playing with words, and argued, quite rightly, that certain words impede clear thinking:

The words ‘down’ and ‘up,’ according to Fuller, are awkward in that they refer to a planar concept of direction inconsistent with human experience. The words ‘in’ and ‘out’ should be used instead, he argued, because they better describe an object’s relation to a gravitational center, the Earth. ‘World-around’ is a term coined by Fuller to replace worldwide. The general belief in a flat Earth died out in the Middle Ages, so using wide is an anachronism when referring to the surface of the Earth � a spheroidal surface has area and encloses a volume, but has no width. Fuller held that unthinking use of obsolete scientific ideas detracts from and misleads intuition. The terms sunsight and sunclipse are other neologisms.

What an awesome dude.

Finally, I should make note of some articles that I wasn’t able to find online, but that I think would be good to read later.

• Gray, R. W. 1995. Exact transformation equations for Fuller’s word map. Cartographica 32(3): 17-25.
• Gray, R. W. 1994. Fuller’s Dymaxion Map. Cartography and Geographic Information Science 21(4): 243-246.
• Snyder, J. P. 1992. An equal-area map projection for polyhedral globes. Cartographica 29(1): 10-21.

Once a long time ago (2003) I took an English course to satisfy UCLA’s bureaucratic notions that I should have a ‘well-rounded’ education. As part of this course we read short stories, and were required to write a mini-essay each week about those readings. The grading system was arranged such that 1 of the grades on those essays was to be dropped, essentially we were given 1 freebie. About the middle of the course, I became rather tired of writing essays about short stories, and thought it would be more instructive to write a short story myself, and hand that in instead. (I was also feeling rebellious, and curiously wondered about how the graders would respond to this ‘daring creativity’). It was customary to receive last weeks graded essay in the TA session when we turn in this weeks homework. To my great amusement my paper was marked “see me after class”, whereupon I had a small discussion, and stated my reasons for rebellion, and ultimately caved in by agreeing that this was how I chose to use the freebie. My grade didn’t really suffer, but I was disappointed that the TA and teacher didn’t really seem to care that I’d tried my hand in creativity rather than analysis. So much for English majors caring about creativity.

During this process, I also learned that I’m not especially good at creative acts, my talents lie more in analysis, picking apart logical deductions and revealing the fallacies, or in applying work that others have already done to solve problem. This is why I’m a programmer, It’s a relatively well-defined task, and offers the constraints that I need to bounce off of during algorithmic construction. When presented with the much freer realm of linguistic expression of pure Ideas, I feel presented with too many choices and not enough of a formalism to help guide me towards the ‘optimal’ choice. I can construct when my world is made of Legos but not when made of clay.

Fortune is Fated.

Fusilli was painting a portion of the New Jersey coast, grand and with a truly beautiful sunrise; a masterpiece of Meaning, Purpose, and Form. Thousands used these docks everyday, loading and unloading ton after ton of raw cargo with giant skeletal cranes, while millions more depended on the efforts of this monotonous labor. None of this was reflected in the painting. In place of a fish carcass was rendered a glint of sunlight, the cargo ships were transformed into pastoral dinghies holding fisherman bronzed from the sun, the entirety of the docks were sunk into a deep blue ocean, rich with aquatic life. The New Jersey coast was replaced by something resembling the Ideal.

At the pinnacle of his career as an artiste, Fusilli’s work was compared to the grandmasters of the business, Da Vinci, Raphael, Rembrandt. He produced works of Beauty owned by financial tycoons but held in museums and frequented by the public. Through his renditions patrons caught a glimpse of Truth. The hidden meaning of their experience was communicated by still shape and color alone, an utterance beyond words.

As the sun made its slow path toward midmorning Fusilli realized that further painting would have to wait for another day, he had to prepare himself. Tonight he must make an appearance at an exhibition of his work hosted by the Guggenheim. Many fabulously wealthy capitalists and persuasively powerful art critics would be in attendance. His personal servant washed his brushes and stowed the canvas in the trunk, while he entered the limousine and reflected on the Beauty he had so far recorded.

As expected, the museum was populated by batty intellectuals, accompanied by their silenced mistresses adorned in the most expensive jewelery and precious gowns, in fervid discussion over the artwork. There were grand and eloquent speeches together with diminutive cocktail weenies. The artwork supported the walls and was gazed at in awe. When Fusilli finally arrived, having planned a fashionable entrance, he was much praised and fawned over. With people lauding him as he traversed the halls he waded to his favorite piece, The Grandure of New York.

He stood to gaze and appreciate the majestic power he had captured in this piece. So absorbed was his admiration that he became immune to all around him, without sound or movement he stared. It was a gigantic work, 10 feet high, it caught the Empire State as cleanly as an architectural landscape. With lofty cotton clouds and royal blue sky the building stood as a monument to mans constructive power. The windows, like mirrors, sublimely reflected the surround structures as if they were made of Oriental porcelain.

Slowly, Fusilli came back to reality, and in so doing became aware of snappy conversation near him. An elderly man, bedecked in ordinary tuxedo, enhanced with a crimson rose that was mirrored by impeccably shined pearl black shoes. His aged face held noble austerity with twinkling eyes framed behind gold rimmed glass, which spoke more of his vast wealth that the old fashioned silk top hat. He was nonetheless enjoying himself in heated conversation with some creature left vilely garbed in a raincoat. Though young, his eyes lacked the sparkle of the old mans, and were kept hidden as he refused to speak in any forthright manner. His shoes were beaten and ragged, his hat an ordinary bowler. Indeed, having dressed minimally for the occasion, his entire demeanor seemed to subversively seek out and destroy all the pretensions of fashion.

“But don’t you see what is behind the painting?” cried the gentleman.

Curtly, and with no attempt to look deeper, the truant replied, “Impossible, the painting covers it up.”

Fusilli had to put a stop to this conversation. This man’s view was dangerous. Ideas like that could infect the entire art community. They’d stop funding his work, he’d be destitute once again. Oh! How hard it was to appreciate Form and Beauty when only he could see it. Bitterly, he remembered the hunger that ate him alive as he sacrificed food for canvas and paint. He must stop this foreigner.

“But the Beauty, It is real!! I captured it for you to look at,” Fusilli tried in vain to tell the man.

“All you did was put some color on some matte, and not very well at that.”

Pleading hopefully, “You see the Form, though, behind the work. Its Meaning and Purpose?”

“If by form you mean the blobs of color, yes. But meaning and purpose, there is none. Not in anything. You haven’t even painted the real thing. We’re in New York, it looks nothing like that.”

This man was obviously stubborn. He wouldn’t be swayed by visual appeals to the idealistic, nor would he listen to statements of the Divine. Fusilli needed desperately to convince this critic. “I was on an observation deck when I painted this, And this is what I saw. I painted Life: the Air that gives it breath, the Water that quenches its thirst, the Fire that ignites passion, and the Earth that supports us all. Can’t you see the Divine?”

Cold-heartedly, came the crushing response. “You painted a fantasy, a delusion in your mind, though shared by many. You have painted the Maya. That is no skill; to paint what you think you see.” The cloaked man turned and left. Walked slowly away with the burdened footsteps of Atlas.

Fusilli with tears in his eyes, on bent knees, his World being taken away called out “I painted Beauty!! I painted Beauty!!” while other critics and investors eyed each other knowingly.

Ok, It’s been more than a week since I last wrote down any of my thoughts. I recently went on travel for work, and gave a presentation of the software that I’ve been working on. I was received well, and I now have a list of improvements to make. I also visited my grandparents in Texas, which was loads of fun. While I was vacationing I was able to read Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash.

I very much enjoyed the book. It had wonderful mix of virtual reality, linguistics, and ancient religious history. It also centered around the idea that if a human encounters carefully crafted input, then their brain might crash, akin to crashing a computer. I know that this is a fairly recent idea (It couldn’t possible predate computers) but it’s really captivating from a linguistic perspective. Stephenson touches on religion by tying the story of Babble to a biological virus that infects the learned linguistic wiring of the brain, meaning that you can crash peoples biohardware if you can carefully craft the right message. A touching form of Neuro-Bio-Linguistic-Hacking.

I believe that linguistics and thought are intimately related. You cannot truly have a thought without verbalization, and yet, a particular phrasing will color the thought. Humans can develop new ideas without first having the language to express them, but this requires the creation of new words or terms in which to adequately express the new forms of thought. Naming really is akin to creation (at least in the Noosphere). The language we use to express ourselves also affects the types of thoughts that you can think, it is very difficult to consider things for which you have no words. Having no words, the most immediate feeling is one of frustration, which is unfortunately not conducive to the creation of new vocabulary.

Seeing that others recognize that the linguistics of thought, and the thought of linguistics are intimately locked into a feedback loop, has come as a welcome relief. I was beginning to suspect that my viewpoint on this was unique, but now I see that the observation of this connection is old enough to have entered into popular SciFi. It really excites me that Stepenson was able to translate this observation into a novel, and spread the idea out to so many.

His attack on religion as a viral meme was also really interesting. The book wouldn’t be nearly as good without the grafting of neuro-linguistics to the ancient Sumerians and the story of Babel was fascinating. Recognition of the very existence of viral memes together with their particular relation to the major religions has started to enter the global consciousness (thanks mostly to the crusading Richard Dawkins). There is so much that isn’t widely known about our religious and cultural mythologies (most of that knowledge is still considered heretical) that we are still largely sheep to a veneer of symbology and iconography that stirs the emotions rather than the intellect. Humanity still has alot of growing up to do.

Disclaimer: I haven’t researched the historical info that Snow Crash was based on, and so I assume that most of it is inspired fiction.

I was reading Hofstadter’s latest book, I am a Strange Loop, and encountered some rather provocative statements. Hofstadter is one of the only authors that I’ve read that is not afraid of explaining in great detail why materialism is both necessary and sufficient for all the complexity of human life.

This quote starts out on page 289 in Chapter 20: A Courteous Crossing of Words. The characters in the dialog were labelled “Strange Loop #641″, the viewpoint of the book, and “Strange Loop #642″, a skeptic. I’ve renamed them.

Searle: Ouch. Now just listen for a moment. My question is very straightforward. Anybody can understand it (except maybe you). Why am I in this brain? Why didn’t I wind up in your brain, for instance?
Hofstadter: Because your “I” was not an a priori well-defined thing that was predestined to jump, full-fledged and sharp, into some just-created empty physical vessel at some particular instant. Nor did your “I” suddenly spring into existence, wholly unanticipated but in full bloom. Rather, your “I” was the slowly emerging outcome of a million unpredictable events that befell a particular body and the brain housed in it. Your “I” is the self-reinforcing structure that gradually came to exist not only in that brain, but thanks to that brain. It couldn’t have come to exist in this brain, because this brain went through different experiences that led to a different human being.
Searle: But why couldn’t I have had those experiences as easily as you?
Hofstadter: Careful now! each “I” is defined as a result of its experiences, and not vice versa! To think the reverse is a very tempting, seductive trap to fall into. You keep on revealing your tacit assumption that any “I”, despite having grown up inside one particular brain, isn’t deeply rooted in that brain — that the same “I” could just as easily have grown up in a band been attached to any other brain; that there is no deeper connection between a given “I” and a given brain than the connection betweer an give canary and a given cage. You can’t just swap them arbitrarily.
Searle: You’re still missing my point. Instead of asking why I ended up in this brain, I’m asking why I started out in that random brain, and not in some other one. There’s no reason that it had to be that one.
Hofstadter: No, you’re the one who’s missing the point. The key point, uncomfortable for you though it will be, is that no one started out in that brain — no one at all. It was just as uninhabited as a swinging rope or whirlpool. But unlike those physical systems, it could perceive and evolve in sophistication, and so, as weeks, months, and years passed, there gradually came to be someone in there. But that personal identity didn’t suddenly appear full-blown; rather it slowly coalesced and came into focus, like a cloud in the sky or a condensation on a windowpane.
Searle: But who was that person destined to be? Why couldn’t it have been someone else?
Hofstadter: I’m coming to that. What slowly came to pervade that brain was a complicated set of mental tendencies and verbal habits that are now insistently repeating this question, “Why am I here and not there?” As you may notice, this brain here (mine, that is) doesn’t make its mouth ask that question over and over again. My brain is very different from your brain.
Searle: Are you telling me that it doesn’t make sense to ask the question, “Why am I here and not there?”
Hofstadter: Yes, I’m saying that, among other things. What makes all of this so counterintuitive — verging on the incomprehensible, at times — is that your brain (like mine, like everyone’s) has told itself a million times a self-reinforcing story whose central player is called “I”, and one of the most crucial aspects of this “I”, an aspect that is truly a sine qua non for “I”-ness, is that it fluently flits into other brains, at least partially. Out of intimacy, out of empathy, out of friendship, and out of relatedness (as well as for other reasons), your brain’s “I” continually makes darting little forays into other brains, seeing things to some extent from their point of view, and thus convincing itself that it could easily be housed in them. And then, quite naturally, it starts wondering why it isn’t housed in them.
Searle: Well, of course it would ask itself that. What more natural thing to wonder about?
Hofstadter: And one piece of the answer is that to a small extent, your “I” is housed in other brains. Yes, your “I” is housed a little bit in my frustratingly dense and pigheaded brain, and vice versa. But despite that blurry spillover that turns the strict city-limits version of You into Greater Metropolitan You, your “I” is still very localized. Your “I” is certainly not uniformly spread out among all the brains on the surface of the earth — no more so than the great metropolitan sprawl of Mexico City possesses suburbs in Madagascar! But there is another piece of the answer to your question “Why am I here and not there?”, and it is going to trouble you. It is that your “I” isn’t housed anywhere.
Searle: Come again? This doesn’t sound like your usual line.
Hofstadter: Well, it’s just another way of looking at these things. Earlier, I described your “I” as a self-reinforcing structure and a self-reinforcing story, but now I’ll risk annoying you by calling it a self-reinforcing myth.
Searle: A myth?! I’m certainly not a myth, and I’m here to tell you so.
Hofstadter: Hold your horses for a moment. Think of the illusion of the solid marble in the box of envelopes. Were I to insist that that box of envelopes had a genuine marble in it, you’d say that I had fallen hook, line, and sinker for a tactile illusion, wouldn’t you?
Searle: I would indeed, although the feeling that something solid is in there is not an illusion.
Hofstadter: Agreed. So my claim is that your brain (like mine and like everyone else’s) has, out of absolute necessity, invented something it calls and “I”, but that thing is as real (or rather, as unreal) as is that “marble” in that box of envelopes. In that sense, your brain has tricked itself. The “I” — yours, mine, everyone’s — is a tremendously effective illusion. and falling for it has fantastic survival value. Our “I”’s are self-reinforcing illusions that are an inevitable by-product of strange loops, which are themselves an inevitable by-product of symbol-possessing brains that guide bodies through the dangerous straits and treacherous waters of life.

And there you have it. None of our selves really exists. Well we do exist, but that existence is a software symbol running on the hardware of our brains. We are neither incorporeal spirit nor materialistic bodies. Children and retards aren’t as human as adults, and are therefore subject to different laws; There isn’t an afterlife when the body dies, because the mental patterns cease; We have internal conflict, because the self is a symbol just the same as all the others in your brain; Multiple personalities can inhabit the same hardware just as virtual machines contain different operating systems; Consciousness is the sublimely subtle dance of memes; It explains the inherent difficulty of sharing the qualia of experience with another being.

And thus Hofstadter reveals the lies we tell ourselves. But it won’t be prooven until we successfully build a fully-fledged artificial intelligence using this concept of cognition; and even then people will doubt because the self-reinforcing myth is more compelling than objective reality.

Today I read TRUE NAMES by Vernor Vinge, as recommended by Andreessen.

It really is a a good novella. I’m am shocked and amazed that it was written in 1984, as it has elements not seen until much later in authors like Charles Stross (Accelerando) and David Brin (Earth). The Afterword (by Marvin Minsky) is also quite good and contains such elements as:

Now it is easy enough to say that the mind is a society, but that idea by itself is useless unless we can say more about how it is organized. If all those specialized parts were equally competitive, there would be only anarchy, and the more we learned, the less we’d be able to do.

I’m also quite surprised that anything written in 1984 about technology would seem very dated and drab by today’s standards, but it remains scant enough on details and strong enough on philosophy that it shall continue to be applicapable for a long time yet.