@T: ALWAYS THE TWAIN

2010 is the Year of the Tiger and also an important election year in the UK. Current polls suggest that it will be a hung Parliament and the vote from minorities will be the deciding one on the fates of the Conservative, Labor and Liberal Democrat’s electoral endeavors. That was the theme at the Chinese New Year reception at Westminster. Every MP, councillor and the six Chinese PPCs (prospective parliamentary candidates) who attended made this the focus of their speeches in addition to the reminder that it is critically important for the Chinese community to register to vote and mobilize themselves to find out more about the political process.

At the moment there are no Chinese MPs so attendees were and are hopeful that 2010 could prove to be a breakthrough year for the community.

A by-product of the evening is that a BBC World Service producer wants to include me in various program strands in the lead-up to the general election. This is because she asked why people are so apathetic to the political process in the UK and how the Chinese community seems to be part of that apathy and lack of engagement. I shared with her that my family isn’t representative of that apathy; as soon as the electoral registration forms appear I ensure that we register and on polling day we make time to put our ticks in the ballot boxes. In fact, there was one recent occasion where there was a local council election and an anomalous oversight meant that my mother wasn’t able to vote and she was upset about this.

So……..MY FAMILY ARE REGISTERED AND WILL DEFINITELY BE VOTING IN THE MAY 2010 ELECTIONS.

Now, as a general rule we are apolitical — in the sense that we each have our own political affiliations (independent of anyone else in the family), we vote and we discuss global politics, but we don’t get into political stand-offs with other people. We respect that perspectives and political philosophies are diverse because the nature of human experience varies, culturally and ideologically.

Moreover, in our family history, politics has been the source, cause and solution of various situations. Without going into too much information, on the maternal side of my family there have been some important Chinese community figures.

In my own case I would say that I was more involved with political processes and interests when I was younger. At college, I was elected Chair of the Political and Social Studies Group (even though I wasn’t a humanities student like the other participants) and Treasurer of the Student Council. Later, at university, I was elected to the Student Council and subsequently to the Academic Board. All of these experiences involved listening to fellow students about improvements and changes they wanted, ensuring their interests were appropriately communicated to the teaching body and/or providing a platform for students to explore issues that mattered to them.

What I will say is that anyone who is elected into a position of responsibility and representation needs to be genuinely committed to their audience’s interests and to convert any concerns into implementable actions.

The reason people disengage from the political process and elected officials, I noted to the BBC producer, is for the simple fact that the operational turnaround of policy manifesto to legislative passing typically takes at least one term of office (4 years) and the small progress steps are rarely and inappropriately communicated. Ergo, people question what the point of voting is if they can’t directly EXPERIENCE any policy changes. This then makes them perceive politics and politicians as abstracts, removed from them, rather than as realities implementing solutions.

Anyway, amongst the 6 PPCs, there was one candidate I thought represented their party and themselves in an articulate and coherent way and has a good chance of being elected — despite campaigning in a constituency which is a long-time stronghold of another party. They also seem to have a smart online approach to communicating and engaging with their potential voters which will make a difference. People want candidates and information which are accessible, easy to track and comprehensible.

Now here are the pictures and some accompanying comments. Yes and, alas, the iPhone doesn’t take great pictures at night.

(1.) To enter the Westminster complex, there is a thorough security process to pass:

(2.) This is the Great Hall which has recently been renovated:

(3.) The speakers in a group photo and the 11-year-old girl is standing for Junior Parliament:

(4.) The photographers and press show their presence:

(5.) A side room for press and video interviews:

(6.) Simon Woolley, Chair of Operation Black Vote, tells the audience, “The Chinese Barack Obama could be in this room!”:

(7.) Later I open the Chinese fortune cookie handed out to me:

(8.) The message reads, “The opportunity to show your leadership will soon be here.”

LOL!

No, I will not be standing as a Prospective Parliamentary Candidate in 2010 and have no plans to become the first elected Chinese MP in the UK.

I’d much prefer to be the person who contributes to cracking the conundrums of synergizing global human and machine consciousness to interconnected on+offline spheres of coalescence, coherence and contextualization.

Yesterday in the Times there was an article entitled, ‘Babies’ brains are more sophisticated than we ever believed’:

* http://women.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/women/families/article6793658.ece

Quite a few of the readers’ comments on the Times’s article are interesting, revealing and worth reading.

TWAIN’S VIEWS

Well, I’ve known how much brighter babies are than adults give them credit for ever since I was a baby myself, later when my younger brother was born and now when I see babies out and about. Yesterday, the whole of London seemed to bloom with babies since the sunshine brought out all their proud parents and their prams. Some were also in harnesses on their mothers’ backs or making their first attempts at walking. One little baby girl in a bright pink baby suit decided she couldn’t figure out which order her feet were supposed to go to make a step, so she plunged herself onto her derrière in protest — LOL. She’ll probably grow up to be a campaigner and do sit-ins. Another baby decided he wanted to show off his ability to put his big toes into his mouth. Cute.

Anyway, I didn’t need any Barbies / Sindys / teddy bears as a kid because I had a real live, kicking, screaming, gurgling, learning human (Twain) experiment, bundle of joy in our family in the shape of our youngest. There was enough of an age gap between us for me to actually treat him like a scientific study case rather than just go “Goo-goo-ga-ga, awwwwww,” over him!

I used to put him through his paces to test his mental, physical, audio-visual and emotional dexterity and consciousness. That started happening when he was 3 months old and my parents decided they could trust us to help him do his muscle strengthening exercises. This involved putting him on his back and gently stretching out his limbs, whilst counting to him in Mandarin with each movement and then holding up brightly colored objects to see whether he was:

(1.) able to follow the object around;

(2.) able to detect when an object had been swapped; and

(3.) able to anticipate whether we were going to put the object near his nose / his hands / us.

He was pretty good at all of these tests. His special talent was more audio than visual, though. Once he could walk the first thing he tried to do was switch the TV on for the sound. Maybe that explains his musical talents now.

Before he arrived though, I’d been experimental with kids younger than me when I was about 4. I babysat a neighbor’s little 2-year-old and earned HK$2 per day for my efforts. That baby, though, was definitely not as bright or inquisitive as my younger brother. She was quieter and more introspective.

With my own children — the ones that will make my mother a grandmother — I plan to record and document all my experiments with them. That’ll be fun!

T-MODEL OF CONSCIOUSNESS

So I was thinking about this whole issue of, “What’s consciousness and where is it,” my father’s coma situation and was also wondering whether the Internet’s version of the Global Brain might enable us to produce a proxy for our natural brain, the location of consciousness and this is what’s emerging as my model:

By medical definition, my father was considered to be “unconscious” which meant that the ECG (electrical conductivity graphs) couldn’t detect any discernible voltage that might indicate electrical activity in his brain. He also seemed to be unresponsive to instructions and actions from the nursing staff. Yet when I visited I got the distinctive impression that he was conscious so I set about doing my own experiments to test for his responsiveness — over and above whatever the ECGs and daily physical routines / procedures the hospital staff were doing.

I reasoned that, according to medical literature, we’ve identified certain areas in the brain which relate to cognisance (or recognition of faces / voices), communication and command/control over our physical limbs. Similarly, in the way in which the Net is forming we have ways of cognisance (via avatars and images), communication (text, images, IMs, emails etc) and a command/control function in the coding which paths all those IF mouse is clicked, XYZ happens or WHEN text is input, insert into database type commands which appear in Boolean, Javascript, AS3, Squeak and every other OOP (object-oriented program) which makes up what we call the World Wide Web or Net.

So I started to make the connections between all the literature (including business psychology models) I’d read since childhood, my own observations of how the brain works in situ (including young children and spending time with my grandparents as much as daily interactions with people @ work and @ play), my father’s situation and my work on the Net and this realization sparked:

* WE HAVEN’T DISCOVERED CONSCIOUSNESS YET BECAUSE WE’RE LOOKING IN THE WRONG PLACES AND WITH THE WRONG TOOLS! What if it’s not via ECGs and MRIs alone?

Then the challenge becomes, “Well what model or framework can we build to detect it and guide us to finding the right tools?”

Through the interactions with my father it became apparent that he had cognisance of who I was and also of Elvis and Pavarotti when I plugged in his music headset. His facial expressions would change subtly but perceptibly. There was also moistness which formed in his eyes and showed up on his lashes. He could sense and was moved by the music, that’s how I interpreted this moistness. I can imagine how frustrating it must have been for him: an intelligent and articulate person who was in a vegetative state.

To the hospital staff, he was a patient number. To us, he was ORGANIC: our fellow journeyer through Life’s ups and downs, evolving and mutating along the way. He was the one who — together with our mother — taught us how to walk, talk, read, write, laugh, cry, imagine, be and a billion other shared experiences (good and bad). Just as he had comforted us, washed our faces and held our hands when we were relatively young and dependent, so it was our turn to hold his hand, wash his face and do whatever we could to comfort him. The sensation of touch was another way for me to gauge his state of being.

Here too I got the sense that he was conscious and aware he wasn’t alone and that we were with him. He couldn’t grip my hand back but occasionally there was a pulsation on the tips and it would become warmer.

After a few days, it struck me that whilst he’d lost functional ability of his communication, command/control, collaboration and coherence faculties I didn’t (and still don’t) personally believe that he’d lost consciousness entirely — only the consciousness as currently defined by medical information and the tools available.

What’s irrefutable is that we haven’t definitively found consciousness or its location yet. If we had, I’d probably have read about it in The Lancet, New Scientist, Wired, Nature, Scientific American, British Medical Journal, Neurosurgery Quarterly etc. (i.e., any of the specialist medical publications listed here: http://www.medic8.com/Journals/All.htm).

So I started to think about, “What are the core elements of consciousness then — if the medical one is incomplete? Maybe once we find the core elements we might be able to narrow down the zones within the cortex where consciousness is triangulated.”

Culture, I thought, must be in there somewhere. Each of us is born into a particular culture and that DNA inherited from our parents must contribute to our consciousness, its course and its shaping in our histories, here and now and futures.

My father had a sense of his own culture because when I spoke with him in Chinese, again there were those subtle changes in his face. When the nurse(s) came to follow through with their procedures and addressed him in English I could see that his face was expressionless. If I read a passage to him from a book on plants, that expression was different from when I read a passage from a historical Chinese novel. When he was listening to Pavarotti there was a glow to his face which was different from if I played a Chinese female singer from the 1940s and 1950s.

Anyway, more recently whilst tracking developments on the Net and the building of “The Global Brain” I realized that culture is a core component here too. We talk about Semantics and yet the definition of semantics means different things to different people (around the world, across genders, traversing cultures and educational / professional reference points).

To Tim Berners-Lee and the W3C it means a set of ontologies to help us classify data objects. To me, it means those ontologies PLUS taking into account cultural and perceptual factors like subtle nuances, double entendres, potential lost in translations, the differences between male-female communication etc.

I think also of the coherence component. We can have ontologies which stand up in their own right and yet are not coherent in the whole. So, for example, the logic of their classification doesn’t synch with another’s. Paris in RDF form is a location, a proper noun and a fictional character from Homer’s Odysseus but, presently, if we went on the streets and asked people, “What does Paris mean to you?” the answer would not be “Capital city of France / Paris Hilton / Paris, Prince of Troy.” John / Jane Doe on the street is more likely to say:

* It means romance.

* It means the Eiffel Tower / Sacre Coeur / the Louvre / La Rive Gauche (the Left Bank) etc.

* It means Sartre / Voltaire / de Beauvoir etc.

* It means an eye line that’s different / compact / elegantly distinguishable from London, New York and Toyko: fewer skyscrapers, more central planning.

* It means expensive / chic / beautiful / etc.

So is this set of classifications coherent with the noun set? No, it’s not. That’s because the adjectives set hasn’t yet been accounted for in the W3C design (I’ve accounted for it, though, in my model and algorithms).

Within the coherence component we also have to think about the clustering approach and whether the Bayesian tree filter approach is the optimal model for clustering. I would argue not (but that’s another post and some more emails between me and the MIT Collaboratorium team).

Once we crack the coherence component, the next ones to focus on would be consideration and creativity. What tools can be developed to harness or enhance those?

Again, if we compare the Net’s potential Global Brain with the actual human brain we can see that according to my model, if we can establish the definitive components and where they reside (cognisance, communication, command / control, collaboration, coherence, creativity, consideration and culture) we may pinpoint the holistic manifestation of consciousness itself.

That’s something good and positive to work together towards…….