Rick Wayne's Blog, page 5

(Art) The Insect Samurai of Theo Stylianides

LA-based designer Theo Stylianides imagines an alternate Japan where samurai clad themselves in the armor of giant insects. It works, not least because, like most things in Japan, samurai armor was actually inspired by nature.

Find more by the artist, including some Star Wars work, here.

“Pepé looked suspiciously back every minute or so, and hi...

“Pepé looked suspiciously back every minute or so, and his eyes sought the tops of the ridges ahead. Once, on a white barren spur, he saw a black figure for a moment; but he looked quickly away, for it was one of the dark watchers. No one knew who the watchers were, nor where they lived, but it was better to ignore them and never to show interest in them. They did not bother one who stayed on the trail and minded his own business.” —John Steinbeck

(Sunday Thought) That’s Not How It Works

This article from Nautilus on common myths about the brain is important enough that it’s worth it to summarize the three myths for those hesitant to read the whole thing. I also add a fourth.

Myth 1: The brain is compartmentalized

“Myth number one is that specific parts of the human brain have specific psychological jobs. According to this myth, the brain is like a collection of puzzle pieces, each with a dedicated mental function. One puzzle piece is for vision, another is for memory, a third is for emotions, and so on.

“…not that every neuron can do everything, but most neurons do more than one thing. For example, a brain region that’s intimately tied to the ability to see, called primary visual cortex, also carries information about hearing, touch, and movement… In addition, the primary visual cortex is not necessary for all aspects of vision.

“Perhaps the most famous example of puzzle-piece thinking is the ‘triune brain’: the idea that the human brain evolved in three layers. The deepest layer, known as the lizard brain and allegedly inherited from reptile ancestors, is said to house our instincts. [But] brains don’t evolve in layers, and all mammal brains (and most likely, all vertebrate brains as well) are built from a single manufacturing plan using the same kinds of neurons.”

[Note: It’s fine to use the “lizard brain” as a metaphor. I’ve done it. But just like when we talk about genes “wanting” things, we have to be careful we don’t start to think that’s actually how it works.]

Myth 2: The brain is a passive observer

“Myth number two is that your brain reacts to events in the world. Supposedly, you go through your day with parts of your brain in the off position. Then something happens around you, and those parts ‘light up’ with activity. Brains, however, don’t work by stimulus and response. All your neurons are firing at various rates all the time. What are they doing? Busily making predictions.

“You’re not a simple stimulus-response organism. The experiences you have today influence the actions that your brain automatically launches tomorrow.”

[Note: Other researchers would say that those neurons are constantly manufacturing a holistic sense of reality by means of an integrated, controlled hallucination.]

Myth 3: Dualism

“The third myth is that there’s a clear dividing line between diseases of the body, such as cardiovascular disease, and diseases of the mind, such as depression. The idea that body and mind are separate was popularized by the philosopher René Descartes in the 17th century (known as Cartesian dualism) and it’s still around today, including in the practice of medicine.

“Your brain creates your mind while it regulates the systems of your body. That means the regulation of your body is itself part of your mind.

“When it comes to illness, the boundary between physical and mental is porous. Depression is usually catalogued as a mental illness, but it’s as much a metabolic illness as cardiovascular disease, which itself has significant mood-related symptoms. These two diseases occur together so often that [it’s possible] one may cause the other.”

Myth 4: The brain is a computer

In every period of history, our image of the brain has changed to reflect the latest fad. In Descartes’ time, when science was divorcing the natural from the supernatural (which had previously existed together), it was dualism. During the industrial revolution, phrenology saw the brain as a physical mechanism made of functionally distinct interchangeable parts.

In the era of computers, the brain is supposed to be hardware to the mind’s software. Thanks in no small part to science fiction, people expect we will soon be able to transplant brains from one body to another, like swapping a hard drive, or even to transplant minds from one brain to another.

But the brain is not a computer. It’s an organ. Like the liver, it has many overlapping functions, one of which is to cause a mind. Your brain causes your mind.

That doesn’t mean your mind is immutable. People with certain brain lesions can develop different personalities, for example. But it’s almost certainly not possible to instantiate your spouse’s mind on your brain, or vice versa.

The brain is so wholly integrated into the body that I’m not sure we’ll ever transplant brains either, but I’m sure someone will try. I suspect it will be easier to develop a substrate that replicates a mind and to transplant that instead.

I also expect the brain is doing a lot more than we think or even expect. One of the early lessons of biology for me was that many of the behaviors we associate with intelligence do not require it. An organism can exhibit complex behaviors with the simplest of “programming.”

Eight smart things slime molds can do without a brain

There’s a species of wasp, for example, that checks its hole for predators every time it comes home with a bee. It sets the corpse a specific distance from the opening and then goes inside. If the bee gets moved, the behavior is reset. The wasp will return it to the appropriate spot and go in to check again, on and on forever, illustrating the difference between intelligence and memory.

Indeed, the wasp will theoretically repeat this loop an infinite number of times, although the sadistic scientists who kept moving the bee only did it thousands of times (or something like that).

As the article notes, slime molds also exhibit complex behaviors, despite that they are basically a single giant cell. A wasp at least has a nervous system, however primitive. Slime molds are just multinucleated bags of protoplasm.

But they are, in a sense, “smarter” than the wasp. For example, they get around the memory problem by leaving chemical tags everywhere they go. If they encounter such a tag, they “know” they’ve already looked there for food and go somewhere else, avoiding the infinite loop.

They can even remember things without leaving a chemical trail. More than that, they can teach others. Slime molds that are cut will form two new organisms, but the reverse is also true. Slime molds next to each other will merge into a new organism, like The Thing. That new organism will “remember” what the other two had learned.

It matters because we are now commercializing robots that seem intelligent. They exhibit complex behaviors, including context-dependent responses, and yet, unlike slime molds, they are not even alive, let alone conscious.

Part of the way we achieve this effect with machines is simply by giving them a REALLY BIG memory. If you gave the slime mold the ability to create new chemical tags and to encode a binary response (attraction/aversion) to each, it would also learn behaviors that seem highly intelligent.

We know this because it already does this to some degree. As the article points out, slime molds don’t like strong light, but they do like good food sources, and they balance the attractive/aversion responses in novel ways. They also adapt to harsh environments and can share that adaptation. (Per the article, they can already approximate the complexity of the Tokyo rail system.)

Of course, as I keep pointing out, intelligence is not consciousness. It is also not memory, although people with big memories often seem intelligent.

A machine can be intelligent but not conscious. It can also be intelligent and have no memory, just as a person with a certain brain disorder can be alive and conscious but have no memory (and may or may not be very intelligent).

Couple very clever details in this art by AranniHK. First...

Couple very clever details in this art by AranniHK. First, of course, are the armed robots, having taken the place of the police, who are protecting those protesting them, which makes the entire act appear ironic, if not outright impotent.

Second is the inclusion of both blue and red in the banner, hinting that the class struggle crosses party lines — because these fictional people aren’t protesting robots. They’re protesting other humans, the ruling class, that have replaced them with robots.

Third, the caption at the bottom seems to indicate that what these people want is their soul-crushing menial jobs back. These are exiles who want back in the Matrix, but because they’re peaceful and contribute neither power nor wealth to the ruling class, they will almost certainly be ignored.

(Art) The Mind Libraries of Paul Rumsey

I stumbled across the mind libraries of Paul Rumsey on Twitter the other day and was immediately blown away by how evocatively simple they are. At first, my eye wanted a little more detail than a fuzzy medium like charcoal can provide, but upon reflection, I think the shadowy, blurred representation is perfect for the subject matter — a lossy memory, a misattributed quote, the conflation of a friend’s experience with our own.

The libraries in our minds are vast, but like an endless dune sea, they’re always shifting. Our subconscious, that shadowy imp, endlessly architects and re-architects the stacks. If the self adheres, it’s only because everything on which it stands is constantly changing.

Find more by the artist on his website.

(Sunday Thought) Life Expectancy is the Barometer of Society, and It’s Falling

As this article points out, COVID-19 isn’t the only thing shortening American lives. This past decade, life expectancy in the US began declining for the first time in generations.

This reversal, which COVID only exacerbated, is arguably the biggest news story in the country, or should be, because as the ultimate lagging variable, life expectancy encapsulates everything that’s wrong, from perpetual war to the opioid crisis (and what it implies about our quality of life) to the decoupling of the upper and lower classes in the trickle-down era.

From the link: “For two to three decades, life expectancy has been improving much more rapidly for higher earners than for lower earners, and 2020 has probably made these gaps worse.”

Unlike some on right and left, I doubt the cause is any specific moral or economic decline. Rather, sometime in the latter 20th century, we hit the wall of diminishing returns on the economy of abundance.

Extreme deprivation is not healthy, either for individuals or society. There’s a reason people in the ancient world were much shorter, for example, and more prone to disease. Child labor, malnutrition, poor sanitation, domestic abuse, slavery, and other severe deprivations bound both the soul and the economy in debilitating ways.

You can’t foster innovation without education and property rights, so giving individuals what they want — access to education, ownership of their labor — is good for the whole, or at least significantly better than what we had under a feudal economy.

Similarly, you can’t have an efficient and effective labor force (or army) if they’re constantly dying of cholera, or if caregivers are all getting TB and there’s no one to watch the kids. Hence, public sanitation and a hospital system.

The reforms of the industrial era, however hard-won, were in a sense “easy” because what was good for both society and the individual was also what individuals desperately wanted — an end to deprivation: clean water, good food, rule of law, access to health care and education, a place to live, a decent job.

And for a while, it worked. Abundance bred more abundance. Paying people a living wage meant they didn’t have to worry about where their next meal would come from and could concentrate on activities with positive downstream effects, like actual parenting or seeking an education for themselves or their children, which stimulated well-being, further increased productivity, etc.

At the lower end of the scale, then, consumption isn’t bad. No one faults you for consuming the meal that saves you from starvation.

At the other end, Twinkies are now so cheap that I can effectively eat as many as I want, even though the cumulative effect of that is probably to shorten my life.

The industrialized world has reached the point where what’s good for us — both as individuals and society — is no longer what feels good. And I’m not just talking about eating healthy. I’m talking about everything, from energy policy to marriage to education.

It used to be that going to college — on the GI Bill for example — was not only a ticket to personal advancement, it was also good for society as a whole. After the war, we needed scores of technically capable office workers to fill the ranks of the post-industrial economy.

But skilled labor is expensive. It costs a lot more to hire (and retain) a software developer than a factory worker, and by the 1980s, the ruling class realized that if they could flood the market with skilled labor, they could drive down real wages and keep productivity improvements for themselves.

And that’s exactly what happened. In 1990, the first Bush administration created the H-1B visa program, which allowed employers to import a rotating pool of skilled labor from overseas. Domestically, the Clinton administration made sure financing for college become too liquid, which triggered massive inflation in higher education. But rather than allow the market to correct the imbalance, in the early 2000s, the second Bush administration made student loan debt non-dischargeable in bankruptcy. At the same time, changes in both technology and policy pushed manufacturing jobs overseas, which left capable workers little choice but to run the college debt gauntlet, or else take low-paid service jobs increasingly filled by unskilled immigrants.

Similar stories can be told about almost any aspect of society over the past 40 years. (In the 1950s, everyone dreamed of a spacious home in a suburb not too far from the city. Now, the breadth of urban sprawl keeps us locked in commutes so long they are having measurable effects on our mental health, not to mention the environment.) There is not the space to recount them all here. The important point is that, for the first time in modern history, the changes that must be made are not the ones we already want as individuals. We can’t “abundance” our way out of our problems. We can’t solve them by doing what already feels good.

This is a completely novel problem and the fundamental reason democracy is struggling in the 21st century. Just as we have not ever, in the history of our species, asked the bulk of people to marry as equals, or to treat marriage as something more than an economic arrangement, so too we have not ever asked the bulk of people to voluntarily agree to self-restraint. And so we’ve stagnated.

Crises of debt, drug addiction, veteran suicides, housing, health care, and more continue to accumulate and drive down life expectancy, which had been growing consistently through the modern era. Any change we make will no longer be one that “feels good.” So instead, we treat the world as a sitcom, where every crisis, from the housing collapse to Covid, breeds a moral that we choose to forget before the start of the next episode, when everything goes back exactly as it was before.

Davetopia’s Review of The Zero Signal

Dave makes some really fantastic observations (and you can tell he’s a writer).

“Nio is an engaging and apposite protagonist. A product of a massive genetic experiment, she embodies both the potential for exceeding “normal” human limits and the dislocation being created “special” can bring. While not something readers are likely to have experienced, her situation is eminently easy to empathise with and her reactions to challenges as realistic as the scientific foundation.”

Get it here: https://rickwayne.com/zero-signal

Davetopia

Part biopunk thriller, part speculation on post-industrial social advance, this novel will appeal both to fans of fast-paced gritty action and thought-provoking futurism.

In a possible future, advances in gene manipulation allow people to edit their own bodies as easily as we hack technology, leading to a thriving mod community. Most modders are good intentioned, if not always technically skilled, but some have darker motives. Arrested while chasing a psychopath who turns their victims’ bodies against themselves, Nio is looking at a long time in prison; however, when her world-famous brother inexplicably dies on stage, the FBI offer her limited freedom in exchange for her assistance. The terms of her parole are strict and she genuinely wants to solve her brother’s death, but how can she let a criminal no one else even realises exists act without opposition?

This review is based on an advanced copy of the novel. As…

View original post 438 more words

Review of The Zero Signal

Dave makes some really fantastic observations (and you can tell he’s a writer).

“Nio is an engaging and apposite protagonist. A product of a massive genetic experiment, she embodies both the potential for exceeding “normal” human limits and the dislocation being created “special” can bring. While not something readers are likely to have experienced, her situation is eminently easy to empathise with and her reactions to challenges as realistic as the scientific foundation.”

Get it here: https://rickwayne.com/zero-signal

Davetopia

Part biopunk thriller, part speculation on post-industrial social advance, this novel will appeal both to fans of fast-paced gritty action and thought-provoking futurism.

In a possible future, advances in gene manipulation allow people to edit their own bodies as easily as we hack technology, leading to a thriving mod community. Most modders are good intentioned, if not always technically skilled, but some have darker motives. Arrested while chasing a psychopath who turns their victims’ bodies against themselves, Nio is looking at a long time in prison; however, when her world-famous brother inexplicably dies on stage, the FBI offer her limited freedom in exchange for her assistance. The terms of her parole are strict and she genuinely wants to solve her brother’s death, but how can she let a criminal no one else even realises exists act without opposition?

This review is based on an advanced copy of the novel. As…

View original post 438 more words

The Zero Signal by Rick Wayne

Dave makes some really fantastic observations (and you can tell he’s a writer).

“Nio is an engaging and apposite protagonist. A product of a massive genetic experiment, she embodies both the potential for exceeding “normal” human limits and the dislocation being created “special” can bring. While not something readers are likely to have experienced, her situation is eminently easy to empathise with and her reactions to challenges as realistic as the scientific foundation.”

Get it here: https://rickwayne.com/zero-signal

Davetopia

Part biopunk thriller, part speculation on post-industrial social advance, this novel will appeal both to fans of fast-paced gritty action and thought-provoking futurism.

In a possible future, advances in gene manipulation allow people to edit their own bodies as easily as we hack technology, leading to a thriving mod community. Most modders are good intentioned, if not always technically skilled, but some have darker motives. Arrested while chasing a psychopath who turns their victims’ bodies against themselves, Nio is looking at a long time in prison; however, when her world-famous brother inexplicably dies on stage, the FBI offer her limited freedom in exchange for her assistance. The terms of her parole are strict and she genuinely wants to solve her brother’s death, but how can she let a criminal no one else even realises exists act without opposition?

This review is based on an advanced copy of the novel. As…

View original post 438 more words

(Fiction) They’re Coming

NOTE: One of the cooler things I did with this story is have the ladies rescue the guys at the end, not for any big political reason. Just because it was fun.

John settled into the manual wheelchair, now locked and immobile. He grimaced through another spasm. Were they bothering him less these days? Hard to tell. Maybe he just didn’t care anymore.

He began again.

“People want the world to make sense. They want there to be a clear reason why the murderer on TV did what he did. If he was abused as a child, then the world is sane, because a sane world has room for insanity. When there’s a reason.

“But life’s not clean like that. Not really. Some guys will hold on, push through the torture, for their kids. But then, I’ve seen guys with everything to live for, good fighters even, experienced soldiers with difficult missions under their belt and two kids and a pregnant wife back home . . . just get to that point where they give up. I don’t mean surrender. I mean they just can’t take anymore. They’d rather it just be over, they’d rather be dead, despite everything that would mean.

“I’ve seen other guys, some of them with almost nothing, hold on for weeks. For a dream. A wish, even.

“I guess what I’m saying is, that’s hope. There’s no rhyme or reason to it. Some guys will hang on for a loved one. Others will say goodbye. Some guys will find it in spite, or rage, or a job left undone. There’s just no telling where it’ll come from, or what will be enough. To endure. And we can endure. All of us.

“When I was at the hospital, I tried giving folks a little hope. That’s where I learned you just never can tell what someone’s Big Important Thing will be. You have to find it. Sometimes it’s easy. Sometimes you have to go digging, ask a lot of questions. Wrestle, even. But you can never tell in advance. And sometimes it’s the craziest thing. Like a picture of someone who isn’t even born yet.

“I knew this one gal. Ex-Navy. She was going through months of painful rehab, just attacking it, showing up every day before the therapist, going all out, enduring the humiliation of falling down in front of strangers, the agony of someone forcing a leg straight that don’t want to go, of drooling on yourself because it takes every ounce of what you got to make it one more palm-width down the bar. And I’m pretty sure she was doing all that just so she could walk up to her ex’s door, ring the bell, and see the look on his face when she stood there—stood, on her own two feet—and threw his ring on the ground.

“Hope is like that. It ain’t always pretty.

“Most of the time, of course, most folks don’t have to think much about it. Not hard to come up with a reason to live when livin’ is good.

“What I’m saying is, I don’t know what will do it for you. No one does in advance. Not even you. Not till the pain starts. But I do know this: there’s always something. Always. There’s always a reason to keep going. Because you don’t have to make it to the end. It’s never, ever about making it to the end. It’s only about making it to tomorrow.

“Just tomorrow. Okay?

“I’ll never ask for more than that.

“Not that that’s easy. I know how hard it is. I thought for the longest time I was hanging on for a chance to walk again. I thought that’s why I kept running. When that got taken away, I thought, ‘Well, shit. This is it. No reason to keep going now.’ May as well give up. It’s too hard. I’m too damned tired. Of the pain. And the looks. All of it.

“And I am. Damned tired.

“But there was that day, back at the garage. Xan had spent the whole afternoon dead-lifting stacks of crushed cars and you sneezed in the bathroom and teleported yourself and exactly two-thirds of the toilet out into the yard, and she screamed—more at your bare ass and the magazine in your hand than that you came out of nowhere—and she let go of the chain and the stack of cars fell and shook the ground and almost crushed Roger the cat, who ran into the building and ended up right behind one of Wink’s doohickeys and spent the next three days floating weightless and randomly appearing and disappearing all over the place. And later that night we were all sitting around that little table in the kitchen and Xan was making quadruple-decker pizza sandwiches and Wink was sticking green peppers up her nose and the whole lot of us were just laughing and carrying on.

“I didn’t know it could be like that. After Mom.

“Anyway.

“Like I said.

“You never can tell.

“The world doesn’t make sense. That’s for sure. Not like people want it to. Or maybe it makes perfect sense and it’s people who are messed up. Doesn’t much matter.

“Believe it or not, my time in the cave wasn’t the hardest thing I ever had to endure. There was this one time. I came home from school. Dad was still at work. My sister was locked in her room, wouldn’t come out, wouldn’t say why. Turns out my step-mom had taken my little brother to the hospital. He’d acted out in class, and she’d had to pick him up early. Her story was that he was playing with the cigarette lighter in the house where she couldn’t see. That he had stole it from her purse. And that’s why she had hit him.

“But the burns . . . she said the burns were his own doing.

“I had football practice, so my sister came home and it was just the three of them in that house for the longest time. She never would say for sure she saw it. My step-mom holding my little brother down, all of seven years old, and flicking that lighter under the skin of his elbow until it blistered and smoked.”

John looked down.

“She was only ten. She probably figured she’d be next.

“Torture is hard.

“Sometimes family is harder.

“Shit. You’re probably wondering why I’m telling you this. I guess I just wanted you to know. Why I did it. Why I got myself captured. That’s the big question, right? That’s what everybody wants to know. You. Mr. King. Everybody.

“My step-mom took away something that day. And I think, on some level, that’s why she did it. Like with these assholes trying to break you. Not just anger. Control. Things were never the same with my brother and sister after that, that’s for sure. I held on as long as I could, but I was a bigger kid. Harder for her to get ahold of me. And other adults, teachers at school, they might listen if I had stories to tell. So she let me off easy.

“But they weren’t so lucky. And whatever was left of my mom . . . of my family, got taken away.

“I had a lot of guilt. Lemme tell ya. For the longest time. About not being able to protect them. About not being able to hold onto that. That thing I didn’t even know we had until it was gone. That thing my step-mom destroyed. It was the doc, ya know, who really got me to see it . . .”

John thought about Amarta.

“Part of my old job was recruitment. We all had to help. Guys who passed always had to help identify candidates for training. It starts with something called Hell Week. You can probably figure out what that is. We make those guys lift downed trees over their heads and set them on the ground, over and over, for no other reason than to make them puke and then have them do it some more.

“Part of it, of course, is that we need strong guys. But there’s a real limit to how much shit like that matters. We need fast guys, too. And smart ones. The real point is to see when they give up. So we make them run through peat bogs, waist-deep in water, until their legs give out and they have to crawl on their hands and knees five hours in the dark to make it back to camp. If they’re one of the faster ones, they’ll get a couple hours’ sleep before we wake them up with bugles and blindfold them and drive them out to the middle of nowhere and leave them there in their underwear and make them navigate back with nothing but a star chart. Only they can’t talk to each other. No sound. We got guys up in the trees in full brush camo, listening. One guy speaks, he’s out. Game over.

“But most of the time, like with the log-lifts, we wanted them to tap out. We wanted them to quit. On their own. Because we weren’t looking for the strongest or the fastest or the best marksman or some guy with forty kills to his name. That’s where the movies get it wrong. They always show us picking the super-soldiers who can snipe a target silently through the throat from half a mile away in high wind. That’s all well and good for the line services, but in my experience guys with all kinds of crazy awards turn into assholes more often than not. My team needed something different. We needed the guys who were above average marksmen, sure. Guys who were reasonably strong, reasonably fast, definitely. But who, on top of all that, just wouldn’t quit. Ever. No matter how bad it got.

“In my line of work, you never knew what was gonna go sideways. Guys on the front line have support. Sure, they get cut off sometimes. But what they’re trained for is to hold a line. And to advance it.

“My job, there was no support. There’s only the team. Anyone gets caught, their existence is disavowed. So the other men in your unit are everything. You get a mission, you divvy it up. You have to. And so, at some point, you’re gonna have to run intrusion and show up with the hostages at the rendezvous point having entrusted your life to the man who’s supposed to meet you there with transport. And you need him to be there. No matter what—bleeding, with a broken leg and a fractured jaw, holding his own intestines, driving an old beat-up Chevy rather than the chopper he was supposed to have. Whatever.

“Shit.” John snorted.

“I’m talking a lot.”

He shook his head. “Funny how much easier it is to open up when the person you’re talking to can’t talk back.

“Point is, I had a decision to make. Back in Texas. I had to decide whether or not that guy was gonna show up with the transport. If not . . . well, let’s just say I had a good run. I was ready to call it quits.

“But it didn’t come to that. In the end, it was an easy decision. For me. I didn’t know where you all were. I didn’t know where you’d be. And I couldn’t chase you all down. So. Yeah. I got myself captured. Because . . .”

John took a deep breath.

“Because I knew, of all the places in the world, this was where you all would be.

“Do you understand?

“I knew it.

“And look at you. Out there trying to finish the mission. By your damned self. Ha. And here I said you weren’t a fighter.

“But I knew you all would come. And that’s why I’m here. On the inside. Ready. Waiting. And that’s why you gotta hang on. You hear me? You gotta hang on.

“Because Ian . . . man . . . you might be the only one in the world who would believe this. But . . .

“They’re coming.”

John looked down at the armrest of his chair. He knocked his fist on it twice. “The ladies . . . I promise you.” He grasped it again as if it were the foundation of the very pillar of the world.

“They’re coming.”

Excerpt from from my superpowered sci-fi thriller THE MINUS FACTION. Sale on the Omnibus edition supposed to end bright and early Monday morning, but I forgot, so it ends tonight.

cover image by Ron Wimberly