I received an email today from a “boutique” PR firm asking me if I’d be interested in writing about one of their clients, a company that provides enterprise IM. The email msg was personalized to the extent that it had my name and my weblog’s name at the top of it.

The product seems not particularly interesting and the pitch is rather naive – I’m not really going to get excited because people can IM with other team members when they’re on a conference call with a client – but I am curious about whether we’re being spammed. Did you get this pitch today, too?

If so, maybe we can do something to help educate the PR firm; I don’t want to be at the receiving end of their pitches and press releases.

I heard back from the PR guy who sent it to me. They went through MediaMap and sent the pitch to about 25 bloggers and 100 media outlets. “To my delight, I have received several positive responses which should result in some great coverage for our client. Yes, the idea of IM is nothing new, but in the context of a real live application story and how a real business uses it, I thought it would be of interest.”

I wonder why.

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We had one of those lunches last week where right after the first glass fell and broke, a bowl cracked. And for breakfast, I had dropped one of the mugs we’d gotten from a penniless friend for our wedding 24 years ago.

The glass that broke at lunch had been one of our “good” ones, a cheap blue tumbler that we use pretty much only on the sabbath. My wife picked up a couple of replacements today. They’re blue and tumbler-shaped, but no one is going to confuse them with the originals.

I found this depressing. I am not sentimental about glasses. I didn’t even care hardly at all about the wedding gift breaking. It’s just stuff. (Yeah, well, try saying that about my computer.) What bothers me about the replacements is that they’re plastic. And it bothers me not for environmental reasons.

I’m 52. We’re still re-using cheap plastic cups our children got at kiddie events over 15 years ago, the sort of cup movie theaters use for their $4.00 small size soda. Occasionally one of them cracks. But we have a shelf of far more substantial Disney character cups brought back from Disney on Ice® and Disney on Parade® and Disney on Crack® and Disney Owns Your Freakin’ Ideas® that show fewer signs of age than I do. When my time comes, I will be handing them down to my children, along with my coffee can of miscellaneous screws and the Cuban cigar hidden in my closet that is now twelve years too old to smoke. (The Cuban cigar is legal because I only intended to burn it as an anti-Castro protest.)

So, if we get good quality plastic glasses, I am going to be drinking from them for the rest of my days. I don’t like them enough for that. I like the idea of them even less. I don’t want to be outfitted for life. Because I’m a middle class American, I like shopping, I like novelty, I like assuming that in five years — if I have another five years, if we have another five years — my stuff will be different and better. I don’t want to buy a new suit that’s so durable that as it’s being fitted I’m thinking, “Yup, this is definitely the suit I’m going to be buried in.”

I’m not saying any of this is rational or justifiable. I’m just saying it is.

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Yup, it’s back in the shop. I never did get the !@#$-er to work and I don’t think they will either. My attempts include: Taking out the ATA card. Replacing the graphics card. Turning off hyperthreading. Turning off the onboard ethernet and putting in my old ethernet card. Running the virus checker every night. Running chkdsk several times. Spending about $20 on the Radeon support line finding out that they don’t know nuthin’. Contacting ASUS and being told that it could be lots of things. Nevertheless, all day long it’s gotten worse and worse, crashing to a re-start at closer and closer intervals. You’d almost think it was a heat thing except the motherboard monitor says it’s a cool 90F in there.

So, I’m thinking about my alternatives. I spent a chunk of money on the new mobo, RAM and case. I don’t know that the store will take it back since it seems to work when they take my drives out so it seems to have something to do with my software. (After a clean install of XP and with only Office XP added, it was still crashing.) So, I may have a major piece of metal on my hands. Suppose I were to try linux on it? (I forgot to try booting up knoppix before I dropped it off at the PC shop. Damn!)

I do need Windows for a few reasons. First, I want to know what the rest of the world is experiencing (=suffering). Second, there are some business docs that I work with that use Office features that Star Office doesn’t offer. Third, I play games. So, maybe I take my high-end graphics card out of my current machine and replace it with something simpler. I build a new new machine, not as high-end, to run games and Office and Quicken. I use the current new machine as my daily linux box, even though the new machine is way over-spec’ed for linux.

Hmm.

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Note: I have a financial relationship with Steve Yost, the creator of QuickTopic. But I have that relationship in large part because I’m such a big fan of Steve and his digital progeny. I believe I’d be saying what I’m about to say even if I didn’t know Steve.

QuickTopic, my favorite fast-and-easy discussion board, is now offering a Pro (= for pay) version. For $49/year, you get to make it look visually like a part of your site, get administrative tools, and get to use QuickThread which lets you create a QuickTopic thread out of any existing email thread. QuickTopic’s normal version is still completely free to users.

Steve created QT because he saw a need and, as a Good Citizen of the Web, he’s invested thousand of hours in making QuickTopic work like a charm. I’m happy to see him try to make a few bucks out of it. In fact, I hope he makes buckets of bucks.

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I’m woefully behind in this area, so I’m sure others have proposed this and then disposed of it. But here’s a question for the Moravek/Kurzweilians who think it’s obvious that if we model a brain’s 100B neurons in software, the computer is conscious: If we were to model an entire body’s molecules or atoms in software, would the computer now be alive?

By sheer coincidence, Steve Talbott’s fabulous newsletter today takes on Rodney Brooks’ new book, Flesh and Machines: How Robots Will Change Us. In particular, Talbott argues against the idea that humans are “just machines.” Talbott’s aim in this relatively brief essay is to remind us of how non-machine like we are as we look ever more closely at what’s “really” going on. And it’s not just quanta that are non-machine-like; cells themselves cannot be understood solely at the level of molecules:

Moss is one of many researchers looking at the complex chemical dynamics of the cell as a whole, and noting that there is no one-way chain of cause and effect determining the cell’s order. This order (which is passed from one generation to the next) is irreducibly manifested in the cell as a whole, with each part (including the DNA) being effect as well as cause.

I like that Talbott then broadens the question to: Why are we so willing to hear this? He proposes an answer:

In a society where the cry echoes from all sides, “You are nothing but a machine”, we can rightly ask whether what we are really hearing is “I sense that I am becoming nothing but a machine and, dammit all, I won’t tolerate anyone else being more than I am”.

I am a big fan of Talbott’s.

Rodney Brooks was staying at the same B&B as I was at a Pop!Tech conference a couple of years ago, and we had a drink together one night. I liked him a lot, and I think his approach to robotics is brilliant. He told me that night that he was thinking about investigating the nature of life. Looks like he’s headed in that direction.

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Jerry Ash has opened up his Knowledge Management site to anyone who wants to see what’s there; previously it had been open only to members.

Isn’t it nice to see the world trending in the right direction every now and then?

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My friend Paul English doesn’t write a blog. But he does write blog-ish essays on topics which he then aggregates on his site. It’s like a blog turned sideways and sorted alphabetically by topic. See, for example, this on judging people by how they treat waiters.

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Dave points to a Terms of Use statement written by Diane Cabell and some law student interns for weblog hosting at Harvard Law. It’s actually understandable! Cool! (They also have a privacy policy drafted.)

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Continuing to crash the ol’ PC. The latest was more polite than usual. As I was working, my screen snapped to 640×480 with 4-bit color. A message box said that there was no driver for my graphics card (Radeon 9700). It rebooted to the minimal resolution, but I was able to get it back to a reasonable display by using Display Properties as usual.

So, is there a problem with my graphics card, or did something else wipe out its drivers? (XP’s error reporting system says that it’s a problem with the ATI driver, but I had already installed the latest and greatest.)

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Gerry Gleason responds in the comment area to my blogging on Kurzweil’s fallacious (well, I think so anyway) reasoning about the self. Kurzweil thinks that consciousness is a pattern of neural states caused by the “software” that runs the brain. If we instantiate that pattern and its rules on a computer, that computer should be considered conscious, according to Kurzweil. Gerry wonders:

But following [Buckminister] Fuller, the essence of this particular “pattern integrity” is something related to emergence through evolutionary linking of system and environment; by what argument do you exclude this evolution based pattern of development and emergence from all possible complex synthetic systems?

Great question. Too hard. But I don’t think the argument against Kurzweil, as put forward brilliantly by Searle, rules out all synthetic systems. The argument is against considering symbolic processors — today’s computers — as conscious. And the reason is that they are only instantiations of the patterns of consciousness because we take them as such.

Let’s say we did the Kurzweilian experiment successfully: through advanced science, we model his 100 billion neurons and their states and we figure out the rules by which they work. The computer chugs along and answers questions as if it were Kurzweil. We can grant all that and still say that the computer isn’t conscious. Let’s say it takes a byte of information to represent one neuron. The fact that memory address 100-107 represents neuron #212 in Ray’s brain is completely arbitrary. The pattern of high and low voltages in those transitors only represent a neuron because we say so. The relationship between the computer and Ray’s brain is symbolic.

Consider a different scenario. You’re getting a tour of the M&M factory. There are 20 huge bins that together hold 2 trillion M&M’s. Giant paddle arms are stirring them to randomize the mix. By freakish luck, if you count an M&M with the M showing on top to be “on” (or 1) and one with the M on bottom to be “off” (or 0), the paddles stirring the first 10 bins — which hold 100 billion M&M’s — happen to be producing a series of brain states identical to what’s going on in the computer. (We’ll have to slow the computer down or speed the paddles up to get them in sync.) Are those bins conscious? No, because the pattern is only there because we chose to see up-facing M&M’s as on and because we happen to be looking at the first ten bins: we could just as sensibly look at every second bin or count down-facing M&M’s as on. Or maybe if we count raindrops larger than n to be on and ones smaller than n to be off, yesterday’s rainstorm was also conscious.

You want the formal proof? If the candy bin is conscious because we take up-facing as meaning on, then it is simultaneously unconscious if someone else takes up-facing as meaning off or as meaning nothing. Thus, the candy bins are both conscious and non-conscious in the same way at the same time, which is a contradiction. QED.

Now, because the computer is running a program rather than acting randomly, we can probably learn stuff about Kurzweil that we can’t from the candy bins. But so long as the pattern exists only because we see it as a pattern, it can’t be conscious.

This doesn’t mean that only carbon-based flesh like ours can be conscious. But it does mean that patterns aren’t enough and that there’s something special — not necessarily unique — about flesh.

If this is right, what does it mean for theories that stipulate that the universe is itself a computer? What does it mean for Wolfram’s attempt to explain It All through a few simple programs?

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