We Can Worry About That Later

As I've been in the middle of purchasing a house, my life has been extremely hectic. The past several weeks have been filled with housing inspections, mortgage application, reviewing and signing legal documents. And naturally every detail has someone who wants to renegotiate it. After closing, we'll still have painting, moving, decoration, and furniture purchases to handle. My life is really stressful.

A few days ago my wife and I were reviewing the upcoming task list and for one item I mentioned, "we can worry about that later". I then realized I use that phrase an awful lot, and to me it means "we can handle that later". In other words, to me worrying is synonymous with work. Put negatively, I don't stop worrying until the work has been completed.

It was an excellent moment of self reflection. I simultaneously realized why I'm so driven, intense, productive, and stressed. This life attitude has its benefits, but it's certainly not healthy in the long term. A few weeks ago I wrote about how the secret of a successful marriage is reducing stress. Perhaps it's better to say:

The secret of happiness is reducing stress.

After all, what else is stress but discontent about the possible future? It's a tricky balance though. If you live life in the future, you'll solve all these potential problems but always be tense as a result, never enjoying the present. If you live in the present you'll enjoy it only until something happens that you should have dealt with. How do you focus on the present while building your future? Personally, I feel like I don't balance these constraints very well.

So I've been thinking about different ways to manage stress. Some common things people try include:

• Eat and/or drink
• Have Sex
• Exercise or spend time outside
• Sleep or practice deep breathing
• Read a book, watch a movie, or play a game
• Daydream or imagine good things
• Procrastinate by doing less important work
• Remove the source of stress

Personally I spend a bit too much time on the last two items. Classifying these options, they seem to fall into one of three categories:

• Solve the issue
• Ignore the issue
• Accept the issue

Unfortunately if the only mechanism for relieving stress is to solve the problem, you're in for a rough life-- there's always something else you can worry about, and many things you can't fix Ignoring issues seems fine for small problems. And acceptance is the only option available for problems too large to be solved or ignored.

I believe the real secret to happiness is properly identifying which problems should be accepted and which should be solved. And then realizing that most problems are of the former type. It's easy to get caught up in trying to fix everything, especially as a perfectionist. But the more you genuinely accept misfortunes as Not A Big Deal, the more you can enjoy the truly good things in your life.

If that's true, then the real secret to happiness is forgiveness.

Being Mr. Right

I've been happily married for the past nine years, and we dated over four years before that. Like everyone, we've had ups and downs, but the experience has been overwhelming positive. We have very much grown together. We complement each other well. Not everyone has the same experience, however. I'm conscious that our happy marriage is in large part because of the effort we've put into it, not because "we're so totally in love" or "we're perfect for each other". Those things are true, and they're required for a successful marriage. But neither being in love nor being compatible are sufficient. Contrary to popular opinion, love isn't all you need. If you want your marriage to be a success, or any relationship for that matter, it helps to understand the purpose of that relationship.

When we were teenagers, my brother said something really insightful to me:

Americans don't get divorced when they fall out of love. They get divorced when it's less trouble than staying married.

His point was that many people stay in unhappy marriages because to them, it's better than being alone. But ultimately he's hinting at a rather pragmatic view of marriage. There's so much description of marriage in terms of love and everlasting commitment, but I think that glosses over this simple fact:

People get and stay married because it improves their life.

Simply stated, people think they are happier married than single. The list of common causes for divorce looks strikingly like common causes for depression:

• Financial trouble
• Child raising issues
• Sexual incompatibilities
  
• Infidelity
• Lack of Communication
• Physical or Mental Abuse
• Addictions
• Lack of Compatibility

Really, all these issues boil down to one root cause:

• Stress

Either the couple disagrees about how to handle an issue and knows it (a disagreement) or they don't know they've disagreed (a miscommunication). Suppose one person wants to spend money on food, housing, and a fancy car. And the other person wants to spend it on food, housing, and travel. If they buy all four things and get into debt, they'll end up in a situation where they can buy neither fancy cars nor nice vacations. Financial stress will tear a marriage apart.

But so can any stress. When parents disagree about how children should be raised, they are likely to blame problems the children create on the other spouse's decisions. If one spouse wants sex once a day and the other wants it once a month, then at least one person will be unhappy, but probably both.

The secret to a successful relationship is using it to reduce life stress rather than create it.

That's why love is necessary but insufficient. Love is merely the motivation that makes you decide the other person is worth the effort. The secret ingredients are solid communication skills and a willingness to compromise.

Good communication prevents small problems from becoming large problems. For example, suppose one partner says, "Lets talk about that later" whenever she's feeling a bit overwhelmed with an issue and needs some time to process alone. But her husband interprets that as, "I don't want to talk about this at all." He might end up feeling emotionally shut out by her. And she might feel neglected because he never initiates the conversation at a later date. This problem is completely avoidable as long as both people take the time to express how they interpret what the other person says and does. The misinterpretation would be immediately clear. Without taking time for that though, these irritations build up into years of needless emotional pain.

Of course, sometimes both people understand each other perfectly well but disagree about what they want to do. In the case of a husband who wants to buy a fancy car and a wife who wants to travel abroad, trying to do both will put them in financial trouble, so that's not an option. Sometimes they just have to compromise on what they want for the sake of the other person. Maybe that means buying a Nissan instead of a BMW, and that they travel to Miami instead of Paris. Or maybe it means they travel to Paris this year, but they buy a BMW in two years. Both people need to realize that their needs can't be the first priority 100% of the time, nor can the same be true of the other person. The overall happiness of the couple needs to be more important than any one particular desire.

There are also situations where couples understand their differences of opinion and are unwilling to compromise. Abusive relationships fall under this category. When the husband believes it's okay to beat up his wife and the wife disagrees, they shouldn't compromise by saying it's only okay to beat her on certain days of the week. If you can't agree to disagree, that's a sign the relationship needs to end. No amount of love or compromise will stop an abusive spouse or convince someone to quit their drugs. They've declared what they want out of life, and it's simply not compatible with what you want.

This is really the category of "irreconcilable differences", and applies to innocuous things as well. For example, desired frequency of sex. If one person is unwilling to have sex more than once a month and the other person wants sex daily, there aren't a lot of options. One person could start having an affair, they can agree to an open relationship (essentially a sanctioned affair), they can "compromise" by only having sex monthly and building long term resentment, or they can break up. Breaking up seems like it causes the least emotional pain in the long run in most cases, which means it's often the best choice. There's no shame in breaking up when you realize things won't work out. You just weren't the right people for each other.

Best of Both Worlds

A while ago I spoke with the head of a computer game development company. He explained to me that from an economics perspective, it's really important to keep the perspective on the player as a client of your company:

Imagine a graph of the player's enjoyment over time. The ideal arcade game starts the player with an amazing level of enjoyment, like eating chocolate cake with naked supermodels. Then after a minute or so, the enjoyment drops to zero so they put in another quarter.

Retail games are totally different. You only get their $50 once, meaning you want them playing the game as long as possible. This is so they'll recommend the game to friends. Having an absolutely amazing first minute isn't as important as long term playability and the general amount of content.

His comments stuck with me. A game designer needs to understand why players are supposed to enjoy the game, and whether it's more important to spend resources in one area or another. An arcade style game should focus on eye-candy and general visual "bling", including modern pay-as-you-go online games. The latest flavor of PC and console games only need enough eye-candy to initially attract people, and then get more mileage from more content. No one is happy with a pretty game that's finished in 3 hours.

He implicitly made one other point. Games are a tool for invoking emotional responses. He measured enjoyment, but games have the power to make us laugh and cry. They can frustrate us and make us rejoice. They can make us feel fearful and triumphant. It takes a truly brilliant game to do all of these things.

For me, that game is Thief: The Dark Project, from Looking Glass Studios. And by Thief, I also include the amazing sequel, Thief 2: The Metal Age. If you are unfamiliar with the game, I recommend watching Yahtzee's review at Zero Punctuation. It's delivered in his usual style of sarcasm and obscenities, but it's a very good review.

To summarize, Thief is a game that's the categorical opposite of a standard shooter. Rather than being armed with a dozen different firearms and enough ammunition to kill an entire brigade of bad guys, you play the role of Garrett, the master thief. Garrett is so weak that he's likely to die if he's involved in a fair fight with even one guard. Your whole job is to make sure that you never have to fight fair, ideally by avoiding fights altogether. The missions generally involve breaking into and out of heavily armed facilities, with every level providing a multitude of ways to approach it.

For example, to break into a manor, you might climb up onto the second floor and break a window to get in, sneak around to the back door and pick the lock, or knock out man guarding the front door. Each option has different challenges and benefits. Breaking a window is noisy and sure to attract guards to investigate, but being on the second floor means you're much closer to wherever the lord is keeping his valuables.

As a character, Garrett is a typical anti-hero, something I found refreshingly more believable than the standard do-gooder hero of today's games. Garrett is self-centered, distrusting, arrogant, and apathetic. He just wants to steal enough valuables to retire in style. But he's also extremely clever, and as a character, he is manipulated into both putting the world in danger and saving it through his natural reactions. Garrett only wants to save the world because it implicitly saves his own skin, and he'd rather not put himself in that much danger. But he doesn't have a choice, and the puppeteers in the game know this and take advantage of him because of it. To me, that's a much more believable character than an obscenely powerful special ops soldier who fights evil terrorists Just Because He's That Nice Of A Guy! I won't spoil the story because even after 10 years, it's still excellent.

I found the gameplay intense because it was the first game where I felt genuine fear. I'm not talking about the kind of frightening situations they'd put in a game like Resident Evil, where a zombie pops up out of nowhere and charges at you. That contains all the subtlety of a carnival funhouse. There's a difference between frightening and feeling fear. True fear comes from an impending sense of dread and worry, and that's something a zombie surprise cannot deliver. In Thief, however, you spend the entire game as a weakling. You know that if you make a single mistake, a whole slew of guards can appear and bring a world of hurt. So the entire game is spent wondering if you are hiding in a dark enough shadow, or if you can find a nearby window to jump through if things go downhill.

I'm so impressed that a game could do such a great job of bringing out a variety of emotions. In the space of one minute, you can go from suspense to fear to terror, and then feel extremely pleased with yourself by barely escaping death and finding a well hidden piece of treasure. And never have I played a game where the main character was so despicable, and yet I found myself liking him anyway.

I know that games should either be a lot of fun for a little bit of time, or a little fun for a long time. But somehow Thief manages to be the best of both worlds. The gameplay is always intense, and the story is so good that it hasn't gotten old in the half dozen times I've replayed the game. Somehow, this game embodies the best of both worlds. And while Looking Glass Studios is no more, I hope that someday someone makes another game as good as Thief.

I Like This Duke

As I've mentioned before, the book Dune shaped much of my adult thinking. In Dune, Liet Kynes meets the Duke Leto Atredies to give him a tour of Arakis, the planet the emperor has given to Duke Leto. Kynes is a servant of the emperor as well as imperial planetologist-- think head of the EPA on a galactic level. Kynes is also a member of the Arakeen native population, and Duke Leto has come to the planet to mine it for spice, an obscenely valuable commodity. So Kynes has good reason to hate Duke Leto. Leto is consuming resources from Kynes' home planet, undermining Kyne's task of protecting and understanded the planet. Leto is an external force that could disrupt the planet's entire ecosystem and destroy Liet Kynes' people.

Yet the second time Kynes meets the Duke Leto Atredies, Kynes changes his opinion on the duke. The two go out to survey a spice mining operation. Something goes wrong with the harvester which has almost a full load of spice. The load was worth rough one million times a worker's lifetime wage. Yet rather than worry about the spice, Leto goes through extraordinary means to save every last person working in the harvester. He shrugged off the value of the spice without a second thought, arguing that they could always get more later. In the words of Liet Kynes,

"This Duke is more concerned over his men than the spice! I must admit, against all better judgement, I like this Duke."

My interest in politics stems from the fascinating drama of the story. And politically, I'm very jaded. I believe that almost invariably, politicians act in their own best interests. They only helping the populous out of self-motivation. For example, senators get additional funds for their state so that they will be re-elected, and they try to get elected so they can acquire "campaign contributions" (essentially bribes) in return for passing laws that favor wealthy organizations. Politicians do both good and bad things with their power, but nothing is motivated out of selflessness. Even their good deeds have selfish motivations. So when politicians promise change and a renewed pledge to defeat corruption, I don't think anything of it.

I find myself in a similar position to Liet Kynes as I watch President Barack Obama. I'm not expecting a miracle from the man, and his promises of hope and change strike me as typical campaign messages from younger politicians. As a politician, Barack Obama is untrustworthy until proven otherwise, and even then he's still suspect. But against all my better judgment, I like this President. The feeling is extremely disturbing.

As I have very different expectations for President Barack Obama as other people have, I suspect I like him for very different reasons. I think a lot of people like Obama simply because he's not George Bush. Certainly many people like Obama because he's not white. Obama is empirical proof that minorities can earn just as much success as white people. He is also a symbol of a new generation, being the youngest president America has had in decades.

Symbols inspire, and living symbols have high expectations. But I'm unmoved by Barack Obama, the symbol. Rather, I am inspired by Barack Obama, the man. In many of the decisions he's made so far, I feel like he is paying well more than lip service to his promises. For example, his secretary of energy, Steven Chu, is a professor with a Nobel Prize in Physics. Who was the last secretary of energy that even had a PhD? I know the standard decision is to choose a board member of an oil company like Exxon and have them recommend policies that involve deregulating polution control and not investing in alternative energy. But actually chosing someone who is respected by the entire science community as a top member of his field? That's totally unheard of, and well beyond my low expectations of who would be selected for a political position.

Similarly, Obama's adamant stance on closing the Guantanamo Bay detention center is beyond the standard political posturing statements. Normally politicians will decry how human rights are being violated, but they won't actually do anything about it, or they risk losing votes from people who think that they can secure safety for the nation by torturing potential enemies. Obama seems very intent on doing something about the situation even if people disagree with him.

I believe George Bush initiated the two wars with Afghanistan-based terrorists and the country of Iraq out of vengeance. As a man, Bush views loyalty as something to be rewarded and dissent as something to be punished, and this is the extent of his motivations. Even though Bush claims he always "does what he feels is right", his definition of whether someone is right or wrong seems eerily correlated with whether or not they agree with his opinions. It's a bit of circular logic which always concludes, "I'm going to do what I'm want no matter what." The true test of whether you do what is right is how often you do things you don't want to do.

In contrast, Obama is very pragmatic man. He wants peace in Iraq because destabilizing the middle east makes life worse for America, not better. He wants to continue the fight in Afghanistan because the terrorists intend to strike America again. And he wants the US government to stop torturing prisoners for two main reasons. First, it makes many other nations hate America. And second, torture simply does not work. Studies have shown time and again that information extracted from torture is highly unreliable. Torture has no use as a tool of interrogation. It is only a tool of revenge, which is why it was used in the Bush administration and why Obama wants nothing to do with it.

I still think Obama is a politician, and his objective is to get reelected. But his apparent plan for reelection is to do as much good for America as possible, picking the most practical and pragmatic solutions rather than the solutions with the best image. If he wants to make America a better place for selfish reasons, that's fine by me. I hate to say it, but I like this president.

Ride With Hitler

"Hitler ruined that mustache for the rest of us."


It's true too. Culturally, western society so strongly associates Hitler's mustache with a genocidal dictator that even seeing it conjures up an emotional connection. I find it fascinating that a man has been so thoroughly associated with his mustache that more than 60 years after his death, people would face social stigma if they wore it. This is a testament to the effectiveness of the the World War 2 propaganda. Hitler's mustache and right-to-left hair part became icons that were easy to caricature:


That meant American propaganda wasn't America versus Germany; it was America versus Hitler. Mentally it's much easier to view a person as evil than an entire nation, so Hitler became the face of evil. Here's one of my favorite propaganda posters:


Yes that's right. When you ride alone, you ride with Hitler! The poster's message was that you waste gasoline when you don't car pool, and this in turn hurts the war effort. Technically stated that wasn't true. Commodities like gasoline, bread, and meat were strictly rationed on a nationwide level, so that the war effort would always have enough of these things. From an economic perspective, if the general public consumed more gasoline, then the price of gasoline that the public had access to would increase, but it would have no effect on the quantity of gasoline the soldiers could use. The rationing merely makes publicly accessible gasoline more price sensitive. Put another way, you don't even have access to gasoline until the army says it has enough, so buying more gasoline only affects what you and your neighbors will pay.

Of course, the poster's message is still in the viewer's best interest even if the logic is incorrect. Somehow "When you ride alone, you pay more for gasoline" just isn't as compelling as "When you ride alone, you ride with Hitler." Propaganda works because most people don't think rationally. The emotional connection of "Hitler is a bad guy so I won't help him" is easy to reinforce through caricatures. But the logic of "Because gas prices are high, I should save myself money by using less of it" is too subtle to convey through a simple poster with a one line slogan.

The propaganda is a lie that encourages people to do things in their own self interests. Do the ends justify the means in this situation? I don't think so, but then again I'm a purist. I can certainly understand why people would disagree with me.

The Year In Review

Today marks one year since I publicly released the source code for BrainWorks, the artificial intelligence rewrite for Quake 3. I've written slightly more than once per week, giving roughly equal time to the technology behind BrainWorks and general philosophical topics related to AI. While I have more things to write about, I feel like I've covered the basics of BrainWorks in sufficient detail. If people want to hear more about a specific algorithmic part of the code, please let me know and I'll write about it. But for this next year I'm going to focus on more abstract topics likes philosophy, ethics, religion, and the meaning of intelligence. And of course there will be computer science related topics like programming style, structure, game design and so on.

I confess I'm been a bit disdainful of blogs. This is primarily because they are so many of them, and they always focus on the same thing: whatever the author finds interesting. The problem is that so few people have interesting thoughts. And now internet fads like Twitter have made it even easier to share information no one cares about. That's the reason I rarely link to other blogs: It's only when they have something profound to say. If I can only regurgitate someone else's ideas rather than writing new thoughts myself, those ideas had better be very meaningful. The only things worth writing are those things worth reading, and 99% of blogs break this rule.

With that in mind, I plan on doing posts once every two weeks rather than once a week. Quality is far more important than quantity, and good posts can take several days (or weeks) of thinking to best articulate. Here's a rundown of some topics I'd like to cover:

• Reading between the lines (extracting truth from lies)
• Living as a non-Christian who still has Christian ethics
• What does it mean to have feelings?
• Designing games that invoke emotional responses
• Intellectual consistency (why I'm not offended when people pray for me)
• Learning how to learn

If you want to hear my opinions on other topics, now is your chance to make your voice heard.

First Causes

In recent years, I've come to realize the most formative event in my life occurred when I was three years old. My parents took us kids out on a walk, and for reasons that aren't clear to me, we didn't take the dog alone. My parents put him out on the deck so he could get fresh air, but kept him on a leash tied to the deck so he wouldn't run off and get lost. When we got back an hour later, I ran ahead to the house and discovered the body of our dog hanging from the deck. He had jumped over the railing to follow us and accidentally hung himself on his leash.

This would have been a traumatic experience for any child. I'm certain that if my parents had found the body first, they would have tidied things up a bit and told me a good lie to lessen the blow of what actually happened. But I found him first, and the memory is firmly etched in my mind. As my three year old mind tried to make sense of the situation, I was confronted by an overwhelming sense of loss and waste. I wasn't just sad that my dog had died. I was particularly hurt by how needless the death had been. If my parents had taken my dog along, left him in the house, or tied him to a low post on the deck staircase, none of this would have happened. I didn't blame my parents for not thinking of this. It was just an unlucky situation that could easily have been avoided.

I didn't recognize it until decades later, but that experience framed the rest of my life. It wasn't framed with an objective or a rationale, but with an emotion:

I despise waste.

I've lived my entire life in a constant struggle against inefficiencies and minimizing potential risks. I work hard to prevent problems before they occur. For example, when I get out of any car and shut the door, I always try the handle to make sure the door is locked. I always check that I bring my wallet with me when I take my keys and vice versa. If I have to be somewhere in an hour and it will take forty minutes to get there (including the margin of error), I find something to do for exactly twenty minutes.

I think this is why I was attracted to computer programming as a profession, and why I'm so good at it. Good programming means you can teach a computer to do menial tasks that would otherwise cost a human lots of time. I'm anal about error checking and commenting in my code because I absolutely do not want things to go wrong. Carefulness has become a way of life for me, so "clean" programming is second nature. Many programmers complain that writing good code takes a lot more time than sloppy code, but I don't agree. I've been writing good code so long that it's actually faster than writing "bad code".

As the story left off last week, I had finished writing the most impressive homing missiles ever. And for game balance reasons, I couldn't use the work the way I wanted to. Obviously this pushed my buttons about wasting time and effort, so I designed a Quake 3 game modification (aka "mod") using the homing missiles. Thus Seeker Quake was born. As this was released over eight years ago, it's a bit hard to find sites where you can download it, but I believe it's still available from this site.

The PlanetQuake article does a good job of summarizing the game, but here's the basic gist. Each player starts with a rocket launcher and gets one seeker shot active at any point in time. When you shoot, it selects a random person with higher score than you and mercilessly tracks them down. They can try to outrun it, but they absolutely cannot hide from the seeker. While your seeker is active, all other rocket shots act like normal rockets. And of course, you can use any other weapon available on the level too.

It's a pretty simple twist but it has a really interesting effect on game balance. I tried games with four to eight players on it of varying skills. On a typical level with a point limit of 20, the scores would probably range anywhere from -2 to 20. But in Seeker Quake, final scores were generally in the 13 to 20 range. The best player still pretty much always won and the worst player always lost, but the range was much tighter. Seekers act as handicapping mechanic, as the best player got targeted with a lot more seekers. He has to work harder to maintain his edge. Meanwhile, the worst players on the level have almost no seekers targeting them, so they have more time to catch up.

Here's the bottom line: When a bunch of players with widely varying skill play Seeker Quake, everyone has a good time and everyone is challenged relative to skill. The game is a total blast.

My life hasn't been all cupcakes and roses. But I've worked hard to turn bad situations into good ones. I'm glad I've taken the time to do so.

A Change of Perspective

This past Thursday was the American holiday of Thanksgiving. President Abraham Lincoln instituted the holiday as an annual occurrence, although the story hearkens to a tale in 1621 of how the native American ("Indians") welcomed the British colonists ("Pilgrims") to American, and how the Pilgrims gave thanks to God for the safety of the Atlantic voyage. Over the centuries, the religious factor was de-emphasized and the holiday was rewritten as a story of the Indians greeting the Pilgrims with a feast, and the Pilgrims thanking the Indians for their hospitality.

It's a fabricated holiday in that the actual feast probably didn't occur, but instead captures the spirit of thankfulness the Pilgrims had. These days, Thanksgiving is a holiday to get together with family and (hopefully) be thankful for the good things in your life. So for most people that means travel, a big meal, and the stress of being with people you might not get along with. But you still have the opportunity for thankfulness if you want to take it.

There's a lot of value in thinking positively. I'm not talking about pretending bad things are good, or completely ignoring things that are obviously issues. Rather I'm referring to appreciating the good things, and not letting problems get in the way of that appreciation. When nine things go well and one thing goes wrong, it's easy to focus on the negative-- it's the part that needs your attention. Everyone sees their current set of problems as the biggest mountain in the world, even if it's really just a molehill in the grand scheme of things.

I've written a lot about the importance accepting that things can't be perfect, even though it's good to strive for it. But that's different from being happy. When you work hard on something and some parts work out while others don't, you can accept this fact with a depressed attitude or with a joyful one. The attitude you pick won't change the world at all, so you might as well pick what makes you happiest. Focusing on the positive things can be hard, but it's a simple thing that makes your entire life better.

So with that in mind, I'm taking this opportunity to remember the successful portions of BrainWorks:

• Highly realistic aiming
• Intelligent item pickup selection
• Context dependent weapon selection
• Awareness and scanning that lets players try to outsmart bots
• Dynamic feedback systems that let bots learn as they play

If you've read this blog for a while, you'll know there's a few things I'm not happy with. But to me at least, the project was overall a big success. I met or exceeded the objectives I set and I'm very happy with the results of the AI.

Last, working on this project provided an enormous amount of personal growth which I am also thankful for:

• Increased self-confidence
• More self-responsibility
• Freedom from the burdens of Christianity
• Less perfectionistic
  
• More optimistic
• Greater joy in life

Working on BrainWorks forced me to take an enormous amount of responsibility. I thought my God would come through for me, but things only came together when I took responsibility for myself. I'm sure the Christian readers will say that this was just God's way of building me up in strength. My perspective is that I finally realized there was no Christian God. But if what really happened was God gave me strength by teaching me not to believe or trust in him anymore, then praise God for that, and I'll continue following his instructions of relying on my own strength.

In short, I feel like I've won at life. This isn't the hardest project I'll ever work on, and not everything in my life is perfect. But working on BrainWorks gave me so much joy and freedom that I know I can handle whatever else life has in store for me. I'm still relatively young (barely into my thirtys) and I figured out the purpose of my life. I love making awesome things, and I plan on doing that as long as I'm alive.

Social Mentality

I cannot help but comment on the results of the recent American presidential election, in which Barack Obama became the first non-white to be elected president. As a jaded American, I recognize that America has its share of both wonders and problems. But I have never been more proud of America than I was on this past election night. To me, the election of Barack Obama is symbolically a major victory in America's war against racism. And were Obama the Republican candidate and McCain the Democratic one, I would be no less overjoyed. Some things in life are more important than what percent of a candidate's positions we agree with.

I want to stress that this election is a victory over racism, not slavery. Most cultures in pre-modern times practiced slavery, but it was enslavement of people from the same ethnic background. Slavery in America and the Caribbean isles differed from other forms in slavery in that the belief was also coupled with a sentiment of racial superiority. So even after the abolition of slavery in 1863, the underlying tone of racism permeated much of American life. In contrast, the Britain empire outlawed slavery in 1833, but their enslavement wasn't particularly racially biased, so their past two centuries haven't been filled with racial tension. Abraham Lincoln won the war on slavery in 1865, but completely decimating the southern American states couldn't change the racist opinions that much of the country still retained. The election of Barack Obama to the office of President is proof that a large percent of America is now racially blind-- the ethnic background of a candidate is not a reason to select against them.

Of course, not all of America feels that way. That's why this election is a sign of major progress on the issue of racial discrimination, but it doesn't represent the end of it. Looking at the final electoral vote distribution, this election was heavily slanted towards Barack Obama but unanimous. For example, Alabama and Mississippi again voted for the conservative candidate as they've done for decades. But Virginia and North Carolina both voted for Barack Obama, two states that split away from America during the American Civil War because they wanted the right to keep slavery legal (among other things).

This might seem like a trite point, but each major population center in America has its own local way of thinking. People in Los Angeles are more liberal than people in Salt Lake City, for example. The southern states tend to be more conservative than New England states. And the way they vote is a reflection of their local societal beliefs. If this were not the case, every city and state would vote exactly the same way. There's nothing magical about the geography that makes people think in certain ways. The social mentality is a purely contained in the minds of all people in that local society, and if you think about it, that is an incredible thing.

For North Carolina to vote for a black man 147 years after it tried to secede from the United States, the entire cultural mentality had to change. It does not change quickly either. It wasn't until all the adults of that generation died, along their children and grandchildren, that the majority of the state decided that maybe blacks and whites were equals. That should be a sign of how easy it is to believe the first thing you're told and how hard it is to consider outside opinions.

More often than not, people belong to the political party and religion of their parents, quite apart from the actual merits of those positions. Over 90% of America is Christian and well under 10% of India is Christian, despite extensive missionary work. Even if there were strong, logical reasons to believe in the Christian religion, it's clear that those reasons are not why America is a Christian nation. If those reasons were so logically compelling, then India would be a Christian nation too.

Like it or not, if your political and religious views closely match your family's and city's views, the odds are high that you haven't thought very hard about them. That doesn't mean your beliefs are wrong, but if they are right, you probably don't know why they are. It means you accept the basic beliefs of society's "hive mind", and you've ceded some of your thinking.

While this can be dangerous, accepting society's beliefs without too many questions can be really helpful. I'm not advocating, "question everything", but, "question everything important". You might be wondering why that is, and what this has to do with Artificial Intelligence. Next week I'll explain what I mean.

Anatomy Of The Brain

Last week I wrote in brief about the differences between conscious and non-conscious thought, and how experiments show humans use both. Even the most primitive animal brain is an extremely complicated organ, and the human brain is obviously the most advanced brain we've encountered. Conceptually there are three main sections of the human brain, corresponding to the evolutionary processes that produced the brain.

Pardon the aside, but I wanted to say a word to the Christian readers who believe in Intelligent Design instead of evolution. Feel free to interpret "evolution" with "how God chose to create life". Your personal belief about how humans came to exist won't change your interpretation of what I have to say, so don't let my choice of language get in the way. Remember, I was a Christian for 30 years. I was taught creationism by my parents. In high school I believed the theory of evolution, and just said "God used evolution to create humans". Now I just think "humans were created through evolution". I still think people who believe in Intelligent Design are wrong given the data, but I see no reason to be condescending or judgmental about it.

As I was saying, there are three main sections of the brain. At the core is the so called "Reptilian Brain", or more formally the brain stem. This section handles basic reflexive responses such as "fight or flight", mating instincts, and the fear of other species. It also handles exactly one emotion: rage. Next is the Mammalian Brain, or Limbic system. This is the area of the brain that handles all other emotions, as well as concepts like family, culture, and attachments. Some aspects of conscious thought and self-identity are handled by the mammalian brain as well. Last is the Neo-cortex, which is responsible for higher level thought such as speech, reasoning, imagination, and speculation.

While there's a clear physical boundary between the reptilian and mammalian brains, the division between mammalian (limbic) and neo-cortex is not as clear, and there seems to be a stronger bleed between the functions. For example, some conscious thoughts are handled by the mammalian brain while others are handled by the neo-cortex.

Humans have all three brain sections, as do higher mammals such as other primates and larger mammals. Small primates such as rodents do not have a neo-cortex, although they do have the limbic system and reptilian brain. And as the name implies, all reptiles have the reptilian brain, but lack the mammalian brain and neo-cortex. So the brain sections correspond to different evolutionary forks. The primary feature that separates mammals from reptiles is not hair or internal gestation, but a more advanced brain.

If that's true, then reptiles don't actually have conscious thought. They simply respond to stimuli in the same fashion every time. But mammals, having a memory, can learn from past experiences and modify their behavior. Perhaps this is how mammals survived the dinosaurs after a natural disaster hit the earth. Dinosaur brains weren't programmed to handle the "meteor crashed into the earth and all your normal food dies" situation, whereas mammals could learn to find new food sources.

In computer science terms, the reptilian brain is analogous to a state machine, or a simple circuit board. It's pure hardware, and if you give it the same set of inputs, it produces the same set of outputs every time. It has no memory. The mammalian brain is more like a simple computer program, in that its responses are based both on sensory input and on past memories and experiences. Running the same computer program multiple times might produce different results. Mammals have the ability to learn throughout their life while reptiles do not. And since the neo-cortex handles imagination, reasoning, and "what if?" scenarios, it's closer in function to an operating system. An OS can run multiple programs in parallel, similar to the neo-cortex's ability to think about multiple thoughts at the same time, even conflicting thoughts.

This biological framework provides an interesting context from which to answer the questions "What are emotions?" and "Can a computer have emotions?" Some day I'll write on that, but there's a lot more to say than should be stuffed at the end of this column. In the meantime you'll just have to speculate.