How many intelligence organizations?

I originally wrote this entry on August 23, 2004, and published it on blogs.sun.com.

Judge Richard Posner has written about breaking up the CIA.

The most important benefit of multiple intelligence organizations is a certain fault-resilience that they together introduce into the system. That fault resilience will be lost in a single organization.

If there's a single organization, and that single organization gets things wrong, lives could be ruined. Multiple organizations add ability to view facts from multiple angles and with different attitudes. They are also harder to subject to a single political force.

The problem of U.S. security is not one of organization but one that is caused by a global posture that breads enemies through the carnage it unleashes. (The intentions are almost irrelevant.) To minimize backlash, we need to reduce the asocial, conflictual attitude in dealing with the world and build an attitude based on "commerce" and "exchange."

East Asia and Europe seem to be the masters of that transformation.

The importance of multi-lingualism

I originally wrote this entry on August 19, 2004 and published it on blogs.sun.com.

I have already written about the importance of multi-lingualism and multi-cultural living as a response to some who have written about Balkanization on the Web, the inadequacy of automatic translation and the promise of universal, artificial languages.

I accompany a farmer from Vila Dara hot springs, Ardabil Provice, Iran, July 2004, on the foothills of Mount Sabalan. Language: Azeri and Persian.

To become truly multi-cultural, you actually have to live the lives of different cultures. There are people who do that and who have no trouble crossing linguistic boundaries because they have lived both sides, if not more than two sides. Young people, children in fact, do it all the time. We just don't foster it as a society, and we should have arrangements that encourage such living at a global level. Where I live, there are already children of Western European and South Asian descent, who are going to bilingual, public-private elementary schools that cater to an already large Chinese population. Many people in California already speak Spanish. Also, to appreciate other cultures and languages, one doesn't necessarily need to be a very competent writer in multiple languages although there are many who can do that, very proficiently.

As an example, while I know of many great multi-linguals who speak, write and read many very diverse languages (not all of which are Indo-European), I can only speak competently in three languages and quite badly in two others, read in six different languages, three of them quite competently and three with various degrees of competency, and can write competently in two and quite badly in the rest, if at all. (Competency in reading or speaking can generally be accomplished in a larger set of languages than competency in writing.) I certainly cannot speak all world languages, or all "important" world languages but I can connect with more people because I can speak, read and write in more than one language.

This expansion effect is always true, no matter how large or a small the linguistic community.

So, opportunities for diversity are much better and more rewarding than the opportunities for an invented, uniform global language, which will often lack a living culture, rich literary history and tradition. (By the "living culture" of a language, I mean the culture of communities that primarily speak that language.)

Diversity comes at a well-spent cost. It requires dedication and hard work. I doubt anyone who's neither tried to learn nor read nor written Chinese and has not learned or lived it could translate (not literally, but figuratively speaking) that living, that history, that tradition in full into some other language, whether Esperanto or English.

Poets learn other languages because they know the difficulty of translating the music of each into the other, and also because they want to boraden their poetic horizons.

Musings on Mass Culture

I originally wrote this entry on August 5, 2004, and published it on blogs.sun.com.

In his 2003 Aspen Institute information technology roundtable comments, John Seely Brown draws a distinction between mass and popular culture. As summarized by rapporteur, David Bollier:

In mass culture, meaning is generated and disseminated centrally, through television, radio, and film, for example. In popular culture, however, meaning is actively generated through a dynamic social process in which everyone can participate. People appropriate and change meaning as it suits their needs, tastes, and circumstances—a process that cultural anthropologists have called bricolage. The new forms of social participation and collaboration enabled by the Internet are creating new structures of identity and meaning.

I will try to write about Brown's ideas on a later occasion, but here are some immediate musings, not necessarily last thoughts, that follow along the lines Brown has set up.

The development of personal identity depends on social participation. Pure, non-participatory consumption creates only mechanical beings lost in the world.

Mass culture assumes, creates and regenerates consuming machines.

Popular culture requires participating creatures.

Andy Warhol's work celeberated mass culture and its icons but also tranforms them through a kind of participation which may, today, raise copyright issues. I'm not sure if such issues were raised when Warhol produced his work, for example, his Micky Mouse images.

Writing of weblogs is certainly a participatory activity but of course the possibilities and realities of disembodied communities and their resilience is a different matter all together worthy of a real dialogue.

As an example of popular culture, consider Tai Chi, as I saw it in Daqing, Harbin, Bejing, Chengdu, Xi'an, Kunming and Shanghai. People wake up in the morning, meet friends, do Tai Chi, have tea, walk to work, home or finish breakfast. One does all of this with no payments necessary and as the city walks by, or at least, that used to be the case in 1990 - 1991, when I lived and worked in China's north eastern provinces.

As an example of mass culture, consider aerobics exercises to the music of Britney Spears with the required equipment and the payments made to your local club. (I have to admit, I could be totally wrong with this particular example. There may be a real feeling of participation and community involvement that one feels when one joins these exercises or clubs for at least a short period while in the club. I doubt the feeling extends when one goes out into the city. In any case, there's nothing in the commercial activity of the usual clubs that would facilitate that. I'm basing my observation on limited personal observation as an outsider, not any real involvement of my own.)

When the producers of mass culture become overzealous in the perpetual protection of their revenue streams from cultural products, they lobby for laws that effectively banish to oblivion other cultural material. Lawrence Lessig's Free Culture describes this very salient point.

The trouble is that the vast majority of the U.S. public rely on non-participatory television, the greatest instrument of non-participatory mass culture, as a source of news and views.

Free Culture

I wrote this entry, originally, on July 6, 2004.

In the very beginning of his book, Free Culture: How big media uses technology and the law to lock down culture and control creativity, Lawrence Lessig, the Stanford Law Professor and reknowned Internet intellectual seems to be taking a rather narrow approach when describing the sense of the word "free" in the title of his book: Free Culture.

Although I may be mistaken, in the following passage from the preface, Lessig seems to be confusing "free" with the freedom to put the past behind, to become free of its control over us.

A free culture supports and protects creators and innovators. It does this directly by granting intellectual property rights. But it does so indirectly by limiting the reach of those rights, to guarantee that follow-on creators and innovators remain as free as possible from control of the past. A free culture is not a culture without property, just as a free market is not a market in which everything is free. The opposite of a free culture is a "permission culture"--a culture in which creators get to create only with the permission of the powerful, or of creators from the past.

Let us first attend to the question of "permission" and then to "freedom".

It is hard to see how creators of the past could give any "permission" one way or the other. It appears as if Lessig is taking some poetic license with the word "permission". So, perhaps my whole enterprise of interpreting his definitions in any serious way is just off the course … but I have to assume he is somewhat serious about his definitions … and go on giving my own interpretation of them …

Turning to freedom "from" the control the past exercises on us, I would like to observe that we don't have any such freedom.
We only imagine we do.

The freedom we do have is a freedom to review, interpret, re-mix and learn from the past and move towards a possible future, disclosing its various aspects and possible realizations. I think later on in his book, Lessig is really focusing on that type of interpretive and creative freedom. So, it is a pity that he defines "free" as he does in the first few pages of Free Culture. I find that definition at best unnecessarily narrow and at worst inconsistent with the force of the rest of his argument.

As Heidegger has pointed out in his Was heißt Denken?, rootedness is the very essence of meditative thought. Without rootedness it is impossible to grasp the past, the present or the future in a context that relates to our being. So, to state that "free culture" is about freedom from the "control of the past" is to confuse the very meaning of the past and of culture.

A rooted culture, e.g. the Shiite Muslim culture, is not to be confused with a culture where only what the old version of that culture has permitted receives expression. On the contrary, a free culture has a capability to re-interpret what has gone on up to the present moment. In fact, elsewhere in his book, Lessig gives expression to this understanding of what "free" means.

Lessig should have defined "free culture" as one where:

… follow-on creaters and innovators remain as free as possible to re-interpret the past, and do so for all of the past, not just a selected portion of it that is perpetuated by commercial activity protected by copyrights …

Furthermore, the opposite of "free culture" is not a "permission culture" but a "shackled culture," where the past is shackled either by neglect (or otherwise by purposeful forgetfulness) from being re-interpreted in creative ways. A "shackled culture" or a "culture of slavery" only allows certain interpretations and ideas to survive. All other ideas are banished into the abyss of silence and fall forever out of reach. In a free culture, all ideas have an opportunity to florish and be interpreted anew.

It is that sense of "freedom" that the rest of Lessig's book is about.

Finally, to what extent big media is involved in purposefully using "technology and the law to lock down culture and control creativity," as Lessig's book title suggests, is open to question. While big media's use of technology and the law in pursuit and protection of their commercial interests may lead to such lock-down and control, it is the job of policy-makers and the government to set the rules of the game to strike a sustainable balance between private property and free culture. If the giants of media business care little about Free Culture, that lack of care is more a by-product, not flowing from their direct intent, but a derivative consequence of their calculative, profit maximizing mode of being. One may still argue, from an economic point of view, that a shackled culture is bad for profit in the marketplace of ideas but that requires a separate, more in-depth consideration.

Note: I wrote this note on July 5th while waiting in the Mumbai International Airport for my flight to Frankfurt. I had just flown in from Bangalore and had to wait until 2:55 am, July 6th, to get on my flight to Frankfurt. It would be 19 hours in total before I can make it from Bangalore to Frankfurt. I entered it as a blog while sitting at 54f offices in Darmstadt. 54f is an architecture company my brother and three others from Darmstadt University founded some time ago . . . More on 54f to come later.

Alzheimer Epidemic and Being-in-the-World

I am one of those very rare Americans who rarely watch T.V.

In fact, I watch TV so rarely that some people have argued that I'm not even an American. (Some other people have reached the same conclusion from wildly differing points of origin but that's a different matter.)

Why am I sharing such odd facts with you?

Well, there are those rare times that I do watch TV, for example when I'm traveling for business, say for a visit to one of Sun's telecommunications partners in Europe or for an Open Mobile Alliance working group meeting, as was the case this past week.

That's how I ended up glimpsing through parts of a PBS program on the epidemic and growing spread of Alzheimer in the U.S. while resting in my hotel room in Kona. (My best other alternative, perhaps from an anthropologist's point of view, was KWHE TV 14, a religiously inspired TV station running long ads for vacations to Israel, interdispersed with news casts about evil deeds of various Muslim governments. Why does that remind me of the case of the Holy Land Foundation?)

Obviously, most neurobiologists, neurosurgeons and other scientists and clinicians pay a great deal of attention to what happens to the brain, physically, when one is afflicted with Alzheimer. In other words, they look at the brain and they see synaptic and neural atrophy with an onset of fibrous bodies within the neurons. I'm summarizing things here and certainly don't claim to know very much in this field of scientific enquiry although I did take as much biology, organic chemistry, biochemistry, embryology and physiology as any pre-med student, if not more, when I was an undergrad and then a grad student. In those years, I even took a graduate course on physiology of language, with some real human brains used as instructional material.

In any case, what's the problem with the conventional scientists' approach to the study of Alzheimer's Disease?

In my view, the conventional "scientific" enquiry is missing a whole set of possible reasons and sources for the epidemic affliction of short-term memory loss followed by Alzheimer's devastating degradations.

The "scientists" seem to be looking primarily at the symptoms of something that may be much deeper. In their efforts, they are trying to correct those symptoms head-on, delay their onset or biochemically alter their operations.

But handling symptoms directly rather than seeking the root causes of the physiological changes and afflictions could be putting the cart before the horse. According to a proper method, root causes should not be claimed to be known unless we have a proper and a well-understood explanation connecting cause and effect.

Well, what are the causes of Alzhemier?

I'm not a doctor, and what I write here are my own views and are based on a quick philosophical analysis of the problem with some informed understanding of some of the biology involved. So, instead of directly answering the question, I'd like to share some hypothesis regarding short-term memory, how it is stressed and how it may be damaged. [Note: From a conceptual point of view, the damage to our short-term memory organs can be operating very much like how our inner ear's cochlea can be damaged and rendered useless for particular sound frequencies. However, in the brain the various "frequencies" or "duration" organs of memory are much more integrated and networked than the organs of sound frequency audition in the cochlea itself. In other words, any damage in the brain will probably spread much more easily than any damage in the cochlea.]

Martin Heidegger has effectively said that "being" is "being-in-the-world," and that we're the only being (among the rocks, animals and other inanimate and animate objects that surround us) whose being is a concern for itself. In other words, the lion in the forest may not be so concerned about why it, i.e. the lion, is, but we are. That's what distinguishes us as a being-in-the-world.

Now, how do we come to be a being-in-the-world? How do we absorb the world? (I'm coining "absorb the world" as a phrase to use here.)

Let us look at two cases: In the first one, we're walking in the Henry Cowell State Park in the Santa Cruz Mountains, here in California. In the second case, we're driving between between 60 and 70 miles per hour (or say 70 - 90 miles per hour when in Europe) on a stretch of freeway where we see a variety of cars and other objects passing us at a dizzying speed.

How would you absorb the world (the physical environment) in each of these cases?

Of course, absorbing your physical environment is simply an instance of "absorbing the world" not the whole experience involved when you "absorb the world." (For example, when you absorb the "world of physics" or the "world of high-performance computing," there is something more than simply absorbing some physical environment.)

In any case, the point I'm trying to make is that short-term memory is crucial for absorbing the world through the gradient of variations that pass the field of our perception.

If the gradients in the field of our perception are sharp, for example when objects pass our field of vision very quickly with no chance for us to integrate them into a larger experience, we lose the connection to the world, we cannot absorb and interpret it within the context of our experience. We cannot build on a sequence of sensations. Our short-term integrative cognitive apparatus is strained. (Why do people listen to soothing music in their sound-proof luxury cars while driving at dizzying speeds on the freeways of the Silicon Valley? Could a will towards continuity in the field of auditory perception in order to counter-balance the sharp gradients in the field of visual perception provide a possible answer?)

A fast-paced life--a life of constant and unpredictable change in the perceptual world--drastically increases perceptual gradients and reduces our ability to properly absorb and integrate what goes on around us. This is a true malady and must have some physiological consequences. However, I don't see any of these questions being raised or asked by the Alzheimer researchers, whether those conducting behavioral or biochemically rooted research.

With the absence of such alternative research approaches, we may be missing many interesting questions which could be tackled in the way I've just described. Such an enquiry may conclude that we may have to do something to the way we live before we can root out early onset of memory loss and Alzheimer's Disease.

Thank you for listening !!!

The importance of multi-lingualism

I have already written about the importance of multi-lingualism and multi-cultural living as a response to some who have written about Balkanization on the Web, the inadequacy of automatic translation and the promise of universal, artificial languages.

I accompany a farmer from Vila Dara hot springs, Ardabil Provice, Iran, July 2004, on the foothills of Mount Sabalan. Language: Azeri and Persian.

To become truly multi-cultural, you actually have to live the lives of different cultures. There are people who do that and who have no trouble crossing linguistic boundaries because they have lived both sides, if not more than two sides. Young people, children in fact, do it all the time. We just don't foster it as a society, and we should have arrangements that encourage such living at a global level. Where I live, there are already children of Western European and South Asian descent, who are going to bilingual, public-private elementary schools that cater to an already large Chinese population. Many people in California already speak Spanish. Also, to appreciate other cultures and languages, one doesn't necessarily need to be a very competent writer in multiple languages although there are many who can do that, very proficiently.

As an example, while I know of many great multi-linguals who speak, write and read many very diverse languages (not all of which are Indo-European), I can only speak competently in three languages and quite badly in two others, read in six different languages, three of them quite competently and three with various degrees of competency, and can write competently in two and quite badly in the rest, if at all. (Competency in reading or speaking can generally be accomplished in a larger set of languages than competency in writing.) I certainly cannot speak all world languages, or all "important" world languages but I can connect with more people because I can speak, read and write in more than one language.

This expansion effect is always true, no matter how large or a small the linguistic community.

So, opportunities for diversity are much better and more rewarding than the opportunities for an invented, uniform global language, which will often lack a living culture, rich literary history and tradition. (By the "living culture" of a language, I mean the culture of communities that primarily speak that language.)

Diversity comes at a well-spent cost. It requires dedication and hard work. I doubt anyone who's neither tried to learn nor read nor written Chinese and has not learned or lived it could translate (not literally, but figuratively speaking) that living, that history, that tradition in full into some other language, whether Esperanto or English.

Poets learn other languages because they know the difficulty of translating the music of each into the other, and also because they want to boraden their poetic horizons.

Who's Right? Who's Wrong?

Tehran, Iran (Nov. 2006)
Originally uploaded by M.Mortazavi

Who's Right? Who's Wrong?

The papers, some say, have it all.

Some philosophers saw them as a menace.