Midweek stuff

[prog]

Zarf lent me Hofstadter's new I am a Strange Loop yesterday. Between him and the reviews I've read the consensus seems to be "Eh... it's worth reading." It covers the same ground as Gödel, Escher, Bach, examining how consciousness can emerge from unconscious material, but is both shorter and much more explicit about it - GEB is often seen and even loved by its readers as an almanac-style funhouse of art and logic not arranged around any particular topic, and though the book helped set him for life Hofstadter has always regretted its unintended ambiguousness. I read two chapters of the new book in bed last night and am already convinced that if nothing else it contains enough new angles to stay interesting throughout, so I'm cool with it.

The review I read suggests that I can expect him to spend a lot of ink alternately and mourning his dead wife and thrashing John Searle's anti-AI arguments, which I've already seen him do years ago in Le Ton Beau de Marot (highly recommended reading, by the way, if you haven't heard of that one). But this time he's doing it in a GEBby context and not a linguistic one (though these are certainly related to begin with) so we'll see. If I trust any author, I trust this one.

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I touched base with my client on Sunday evening, reminding them that they gave me zero hours of work last week but adding that this was OK given my webclient push, and I wouldn't complain if they chose to withhold for another week. The response has been uncharacteristic silence, such that I've been peeking in on their ticketing system just to make sure that I hadn't missed anything. Well, I'm getting what I asked for.

I don't think that I've overtly noted here yet that doing paid web work on the side of Volity has been good for my own project. Facing and overcoming challenges that don't originate from my own needs forces me to learn new web programming and styling techniques, broadening the arsenal I bring to Volity webwork. In June, for example, paid work encouraged me to get up to speed with CSS - all the books I own on the subject are from 2003 and therefore nearly useless - and for this reason the web client has a beautiful layout without a single <table> involved (except for the actual tables).

Yes, I still have to see how badly it fails on MSIE6. If it is full of fail I will be tempted to just lock that damn thing out and require MSIE7, or the non-shitty alternative browser of your choice. We'll burn that bridge when we come to it.

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Speaking of 2003, I've been thinking lately that as of this summer I've been working on Volity for the length of a typical American undergraduate education. All that time on a single project! It makes me feel a little panicky until I look at it sideways and figure: yeah, that's about right, actually.

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I can't wait to show y'all the webclient prototype. I can't until daerr builds a proxying solution that will let the webserver freely make AJAX calls to my Jabber connection broker daemon. For the time being, I have been having the daemon itself serve all the static HTML bits as well as the Jabber stuff, and just hit itself with the AJAX. This... does not scale. Heh, it might scale actually but it would be utterly unmaintainable and I don't even want to feint in that direction, not even for the sake of a demo.

My voice of experience speaks here. This is how paranoid I am of a "oh, we'll just do it this way for the time being" hack becoming the permanent solution. No, I'm not giving that an inch.

I have been threatening to just shoot a video of the alpha running, and I just might resort to this if I can't do anything else this week.

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Heh, the Diesel finally put up polite-but-firm little placards in its booths asking that they be used only by parties of three or more during "busier hours". It's 10am now and I see only couples and singles-with-laptops. Wonder how well this works when it's time. Oh, here comes a guy now... and he reads the card... and he keeps walking! Wow.

I used to stretch out in the booths by myself all the time, but at some point I lost the ability. The last time I did, earlier this year, I thought I could feel waves of resentment beating down on me from everyone else. I might have even picked up and moved to a table before I left!

Twice, attractive young women I do not know have asked to share the booth with me, and this always gives my day a little lift but it's probably a weak reason to seek to sit in the giant booths alone. I wonder whether mutual strangers might now recognize the look of argh-I-can't-sit-anywhere in each other as they wander around the cafe, and propose to become one-time Booth Buddies.

Comments

[hahathor.livejournal.com]

Does I am a strange Loop have that Hofstadter ego thing going on? Cuz I found it a bit annoying in GEB (which I otherwise loved) and damned near insufferable in Ton Beau. In fact, on finishing Ton Beau I did my own version of the poem, which I no longer can find, but which started:

My big brain
Can explain
Math and Art
God! I'm smart!

[prog.livejournal.com]

Ha ha ha :)

What many see as an inflated ego I see as someone having a lot of fun and eager to explain why they are having a lot of fun, but I can understand the slipperiness in the interpretation.

[brentdax.livejournal.com]

It's 10am now and I see only couples and singles-with-laptops.

All couples, then.

[dougo.livejournal.com]

John Searle is a doofus. I hate that people have to spend so much effort debating him.

[prog.livejournal.com]

D'ya think his influence is mainly because he's got the best-sounding appeals to most folks' basic intuitions about consciousness? Chinese boxes and all that?

[dougo.livejournal.com]

Sure, some of the things he says sound like common sense. "Of course a room can't be 'conscious'! It's just a room! Consciousness is more than that! Duh!!" But he seems to just take consciousness as this mystical undefined thing that is simply not allowed to be present in anything besides a human brain.

[radtea.livejournal.com]

I once had the opportunity to debate a Searlean at close quarters. He was a philosophy professor who should have known better.

I got him down to the level of action potentials and ion exchange membranes in the brain, and got him to admit that there was nothing else there. At this point Searle's contention that computers can't be conscious because there's nothing but bits looks like the completely silly bit of vitalism/spiritualism it is.

The philosopher retreated to the position that "he didn't know what Searle would say about that argument", which sidestepped the point: I wanted to know what he, as a by now surly Searlean, would say about it.

One cannot be both a materialist about human consciousness and deny the possibility of conscious entities that are inorganic, although there are still good arguments as to why computers as we know them today will never achieve that state.

[radiotelescope.livejournal.com]

Hofstadter is all ego. This doesn't bother me because, (a), he reminds me of me and I love that.

And (b), he really does investigate math and memory and consciousness and logic by looking into a mirror. His ego is his biggest test subject. And he's an excellent observer of it, and writes well and insightfully about it. That's what's good about his books.