Luca Badoer

(with apologies to Hugh Laurie)

History
My name will go down in F1 history
For qualifying in last place twice consecutively
I am worse than any Ferrari driver in
History

1863
I last drove an F1 car in 1863
By Monza I will be history
Why did they let me drive at all? Well, I guess it's just a
Mystery

Hello world

Hi.

Since I'll be taking over the management of this blag during Michael's absence, I thought I'd do a little introductary post.

So: hi.

That should cover it. Now, some substance.

Lately there's been quite a bit of discussion about Pirate Party in Finnish media. I'd like to present an example of one of the things Pirate Party supports and copyright holder organizations absolutely oppose: free noncommercial use of protected content.

!WARNING! The creation and publishing of the following video was a crime. It was made by a thief illegally using content protected by copyright. By viewing this video you are supporting criminal activity.

If you do choose to view it, why don't you think about that while you watch?

The wheels turn, if ever so slowly

As the next step in the process leading to my eventual imprisonment, I now know when I'll get to know when I'm going to prison. Hooray! Today, I received a letter recommending (fin. kehottaa) that I arrive at the Espoo courthouse on September 1st to find out where I'm going, and when I'm going. So basically, I'll be here until some point in September. That means I'll get to spend the holidays in prison.

I like how they're recommending I show up. As if I have a choice.

Finnish recording industry: Pirate Party can't be allowed

AFP: Pirate Party swashbuckles into Finnish politics

Copyright holder organisations in Finland were outraged at the news of the group's formation.

"We are absolutely against the idea that any political party can give their support to the idea of free use of protected content," said Arto Alaspaeae[sic], the director of IFPI Finland (International Federation of the Phonographic Industry).

There you go: if the record companies called the shots, Finnish political parties wouldn't be allowed to have "wrong" opinions on copyright. Read it closely. They're against the idea that any political party can give their support to cutting down copyright.

I wonder if anyone has told them this is at least supposed to be a democracy.

For more on the topic, here's Cory Doctorow: Economists call for patent and copyright abolition.

Mary had a little room

I've been reading too many Dinosaur Comics, so I'm now going to make like T-Rex.

**

The Mary's room thought experiment was proposed by Frank Jackson in 1982 as a counterargument to physicalism, physicalism being the belief that the universe consists of nothing more than its physical characteristics. In other words, physicalism is what used to be called materialism: the denial of any kind of mind/body or matter/spirit dualism.

To quote from Wikipedia:

Mary is a brilliant scientist who is, for whatever reason, forced to investigate the world from a black and white room via a black and white television monitor. She specializes in the neurophysiology of vision and acquires, let us suppose, all the physical information there is to obtain about what goes on when we see ripe tomatoes, or the sky, and use terms like ‘red’, ‘blue’, and so on. She discovers, for example, just which wavelength combinations from the sky stimulate the retina, and exactly how this produces via the central nervous system the contraction of the vocal cords and expulsion of air from the lungs that results in the uttering of the sentence ‘The sky is blue’. [...] What will happen when Mary is released from her black and white room or is given a color television monitor? Will she learn anything or not?

In other words, we are to imagine a scientist who knows everything there is to know about the science of color, but has never experienced color. The interesting question that Jackson raises is: Once she experiences color, does she learn anything new?

Fair enough. Here's my problem:

[...] if Mary does learn something new upon experiencing color, physicalism is false. Specifically, the Knowledge Argument is an attack on the physicalist claim about the completeness of physical explanations of mental states. Mary may know everything about the science of color perception, but can she know what the experience of red is like if she has never seen red? Jackson contends that, yes, she has learned something new, via experience, and hence, physicalism is false. Jackson states:

It seems just obvious that she will learn something about the world and our visual experience of it. But then it is inescapable that her previous knowledge was incomplete. But she had all the physical information. Ergo there is more to have than that, and Physicalism is false.

I have a very real problem with that, as I don't believe it follows at all. I'll set it out, as the Wikipedia page didn't address this particular problem with the main argument, and I consider it decisive.

The philosopher Daniel Dennett, a capital man who writes about zombies, has objected. According to Dennett, if Mary really knew everything about color, she would learn nothing upon first experiencing color. I tend to agree with him: if, by definition, Mary really had all possible physical knowledge of color, then presumably that would include knowledge of the experience of seeing color.

In my opinion, the whole Mary's room argument is nothing but what Dennett calls an intuition pump: a thought experiment designed to evoke an intuitive response by misleading us.

Specifically, I believe the Mary's room scenario makes use of an intuitive division between theoretical knowledge and experience. On reading it, most of us assume that Mary has all the theoretical knowledge of color, but has no practical experience of it. The difference is similar to knowing how to drive a car but never having driven one. From a common sense standpoint, we will automatically assume that when a person who has been taught all about cars but has never driven one actually does, they will, indeed, learn something.

Notice, though, that that isn't what Jackson said. He said Mary has all the physical information. Isn't the experience of seeing a color also physical information? Basically, in claiming that Mary's knowledge does not include the experience of color, Jackson is claiming that experience, in this case experience of a qualia, is not physical information.

The entire thought experiment is set up to justify the existence of qualia as non-physical information. In my opinion, it does this by simply assuming the existence of qualia as non-physical information. If we assume that the experience of seeing a color is physical information, then by the premise of the experiment, Mary doesn't learn anything new on stepping out of the room.

Dennett's further objection is very relevant here. He says we can't imagine such a comprehensive amount of knowledge: Mary would really need to know literally everything about color before stepping out of the room for the experiment to make any sense. We find that difficult to imagine, so we transpose "all theoretical knowledge of color" for "all possible knowledge".

Basically, the way I see it, the whole thought experiment doesn't prove anything. It only begs the question. If, if, you assume that the experience of seeing a color is not physical knowledge, then Mary will learn something new the first time she sees a color, and then physicalism is false. If, however, we assume that the experience of seeing a color is physical knowledge, then Mary possesses a practically supernatural level of knowledge while still in the room, and will, in fact, learn nothing.

The question that any solution to the thought experiment boils down to is very simple: do you believe that the experience of seeing a color is physical knowledge? In other words, when you see the color blue, what happens? Physicalism asserts that something happens in your brain: at the end of the day, a physical process. This physical process could, theoretically, be recreated, so it would be possible for someone to upload the experience of having seen all the colors into Mary's brain. Therefore she, already possessing this superhuman knowledge of things she has never seen, would indeed learn nothing upon leaving the room.

On the other hand, if one chooses to believe in the transcendent existence of qualia, and the existence of a transcendent mind above and beyond the brain, then it is possible to postulate that something transcendent happens to the mind when it sees a color for the first time. I, as a physicalist, would kindly suggest applying Occam's razor to all these assumptions.

So, in short, my opinion of the Mary's room thought experiment is that it only proves the existence of qualia and the falsity of physicality if one presupposes qualia to exist outside physical knowledge. Therefore, it proves nothing: it only begs the question that it supposedly answers.

I love Susana Spears

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The Surveilled Isle

It's not exactly a secret to most people that, in the words of Carl "CJ" Johnson, "I wanna emigrate from here". One of the destinations I'd been considering was Great Britain, but over the last ten years or so, I've had to drop it off my list of prospective countries to live in for good. Why? Because it's turning into the most frightening surveillance society in the history of the world.

A pinko conspiracy theory? Maybe. Here's an excellent article on the topic from a communist propaganda rag owned by an infamous Bolshevik:

Bloomberg: George Orwell Was Right: Spy Cameras See Britons' Every Move

Almost 70 years after George Orwell created the all-seeing dictator Big Brother in the novel ``1984,'' Britons are being watched as never before. About 4.2 million spy cameras film each citizen 300 times a day, and police have built the world's largest DNA database. Prime Minister Tony Blair said all Britons should carry biometric identification cards to help fight the war on terror.

``Nowhere else in the free world is this happening,'' said Helena Kennedy, a human rights lawyer who also is a member of the House of Lords, the upper house of Parliament. ``The American public would find such inroads into civil liberties wholly unacceptable.''

During the past decade, the government has spent 500 million pounds ($1 billion) on spy cameras and now has one for every 14 citizens, according to a September report prepared for Information Commissioner Richard Thomas by the Surveillance Studies Network, a panel of U.K. academics.

And it doesn't stop there. Just this week, two people in Britain were convicted for refusing to unencrypt data they own.

The Register: Two convicted for refusal to decrypt data

Two people have been successfully prosecuted for refusing to provide authorities with their encryption keys, resulting in landmark convictions that may have carried jail sentences of up to five years.

That's right. Five years in prison if you encrypt files on your hard drive and refuse to hand over the keys to the police.

Speaking of the police, it must be said that they're certainly doing their part. As part of their preparation for next month's Labour Party conference in Brighton, the British police are going to do door-to-door searches of the entire city to find Muslims.

The Daily Express: POLICE ‘GESTAPO TACTICS’ OVER TERRORIST FEAR AT LABOUR CONFERENCE

POLICE plans to quiz thousands of people in a seaside resort to check they are not terrorists were branded “Gestapo-style” tactics last night.


Squads of officers will carry out door-to-door interviews to weed out potential threats to the Labour Party Conference in Brighton next month.

Home owners and workers will have to produce passports, birth certificates, driving licences, proof of employment, and even provide the names of referees to show they are of good character.

They will also be quizzed on their religion to see if they have connections with Muslim fanatics. Critics said the “Gestapo” tactics were another sign that Britain is lurching towards an autocratic state.

An autocratic state? Nonsense! Autocracy, dear critics, means a system of rule by a single individual. It is patently absurd to suggest that Great Britain is becoming an autocracy. Try something like this instead:

After all, door-to-door searches to find people suspected of a heinous offense like an ethnicity or a religion were a specialty not of autocracies but of certain other forms of government that tended to have "soc" somewhere in their name.

I suggest anyone even slightly interested in this topic read the brief article from Bloomberg.com that I linked to above. Great Britain is turning into a truly terrifying place. I'll close with a last quote from that article:

In the bowels of New Scotland Yard, the headquarters of the London police force, a windowless room contains a giant bank of TV screens where the city is monitored around the clock. At the touch of a button, officers can focus on any neighborhood and zoom in on people's faces.

Police hunting the killer of five prostitutes in Suffolk were able to gather 10,000 hours of footage from in and around Ipswich.

By 2016, there will be cameras using facial recognition technology embedded in lampposts, according to the Surveillance Studies report. Unmanned spy planes will monitor the movements of citizens, while criminals and the elderly will be implanted with microchips to track their movements, the report says.