Wikiworld is now out as a Pluto Press book. The basic arguments are there, but more sharpened. In addition to our revisions, the text has been thoroughly copy-edited by the fine people of Pluto. The major change pertains two final chapters and the idea of educational superabundance by which we mean learning and being that is superfluous compared to the usual utilitarian education as appropriated in capitalist life; it is something more than is commonly tolerated in school or corporate bureaucracy. Educational abundance creates passionate and responsible collaboration among teachers, students, colleagues, and other fellow human beings.
Tän uutisen mukaan USAssa olis välillä huhtikuu-lokakuun puoliväli sikaflunssaan sairastunut 22 miljoonaa ihmistä, ja kuolonuhreja olis 4000. Eli sairastuneista 0,018% on kuollut.
No, mua kiinnosti tietää, että mikäs olis joku sellanen normaali “taustakuolleisuus”, että kuinka paljon tollasessa ajassa 22 miljoonasta ihmisestä kuolee ikään kuin “joka tapauksessa”. Googlasin “background mortality” ja löyty tällanen:
The death rate among influenza vaccine recipients ranged from 0.01 to 0.02% within 7 days and 0.09–0.10% at 30 days
ScienceDirect – Vaccine : Deaths following influenza vaccination—background mortality or causal connection? (17 November 2009)
Toi viikon yläraja ja noi 30 päivän luvut on siis suurempia kuin toi sikaflunssa-kuolleisuus, eiks vaan?!?
Tossa Israelissa tehdyssä tutkimuksessa siis vissiin tarkasteltiin influenssa-rokotuksen vaikutusta yli 55-vuotiaisiin:
We used data from a large HMO to estimate mortality in influenza vaccine recipients aged 55 and over during four consecutive winters (2003, 2004, 2005 and 2006). Date of immunization was ascertained from patient treatment files, vital status through Israeli National Insurance Institute data. We calculated crude death rates within 7, 14 and 30 days of influenza immunization, and used a Cox Proportional Hazards Model to estimate the risk of death within 14 days of vaccination, adjusting for age and comorbid conditions (age over 75, history of diabetes or cardiovascular disease, status as homebound patient) in 2006.
Selittäkää nyt joku mulle pliis että tarkottaaks nää tiedot, että
a) yli 55 vuotiaista influenssarokotetuista kuolee joka tapauksessa nopeemmalla tahdilla kuin jenkkilässä sairastuneista sikaflunssaan
vai
b) yli 75 vuotiaista diabeetikko-sydänongelma influenssarokotetuista kuolee joka tapauksessa nopeemmalla tahdilla kuin jenkkilässä sairastuneista sikaflunssaan
Tä?
Oil running out far faster than predicted: report | Business | guardian.co.uk (13 November 2009)
Kjell Aleklett, professor of physics at Uppsala and co-author of a new report “The Peak of the Oil Age”, claims oil production is more likely to be 75m barrels a day by 2030 than the “unrealistic” 105m used by the IEA in its recently published World Energy Outlook 2009.
The world is much closer to running out of oil than official estimates admit, according to a whistleblower at the International Energy Agency who claims it has been deliberately underplaying a looming shortage for fear of triggering panic buying.
The senior official claims the US has played an influential role in encouraging the watchdog to underplay the rate of decline from existing oil fields while overplaying the chances of finding new reserves.
It is huge for what it says, but also for who says it and how; an anonymous source inside the IEA.
Many inside the organisation believe that maintaining oil supplies at even 90m to 95m barrels a day would be impossible but there are fears that panic could spread on the financial markets if the figures were brought down further. And the Americans fear the end of oil supremacy because it would threaten their power over access to oil resources,” he added.
So after 20 years of on-and-off studies on the subject, I’m ready to express my current provisional argument against the claim that the brain is a particular type of machine, namely a computer or other information processing system. It goes like this.
Laws of physics (Newton & al.) describe, e.g., how the planets move around the sun. The planets themselves need not perform calculations according to the laws in order to move. The laws are a way for us to organise our empirical observations, the planets need not pay any attention to them. Laws of neurophysics (or whatever) may at some point be able to describe how the brain works. If that happens, the brain need not calculate according to those laws in order to function. Deep Thought and Garri Kasparov both play chess, and their capacity may in both cases be explained in terms of executing an algorithm. However, this does not mean that both function in the same way, or are similar. One is engaged in embodied skillful coping (GK), the other in passing along electronic currents in a systematic way that humans interpret as moves in the game of chess (DT). In the case of the brain it is very easy to confuse the description (the theory, the laws, etc.) with the described, simply because we ourselves in some sense are our brains, and we can and do calculate the laws and in that sense function as machines. But that intermittent “functioning-as-a-machine” does not mean that this is all or fundamentally what a brain does (not any more than a planet following the laws of physics means that a “planet-moving-around-the-sun” is a machine, an equation or a solution to an equation). To be blunt, the brain does not calculate even when we do. When we calculate, the brain does whatever it does in a way that, when successful, closely approximates abstract descriptions of algorithmic activity. Most of the time there is no such approximation.
This can be augmented by adding a bit from Searle’s Chinese Room. Typically, if the brain is said to be a machine, people mean an information processing machine. However, not one piece of information or any type of symbolic code has ever been found in a brain, independently of pre-existing theories of brains as computers. The brain is, by and large, a yoghurty-bloody mush. It is at the same time much too a) easy and b) hard to find information processing in a brain. A) too easy: any large enough collection of atoms can successfully be described as running/functioning according to any (arbitrarily selected Turing-computable) program. Take a cubic meter of air: there are enough atoms and their interactions there to implement any conceivable computer program (sometimes the “population of China” is used in the same role in the literature). Does that mean that in the cubic meter there “is” a computer? B) too hard: no real (in the sense of currently existing) biological, chemical, medical, physical, neurological description of the brain essentially or absolutely needs the concept of information. Everything that can be explained in terms of information processing, can be explained without the hypothesis. There is no proof that there is information in the brain. (In fact, there can not even in principle be such proof, because information is not a natural kind, but relative, in the eye of the beholder. It is impossible to build a scientific “information counter” that starts ticking whenever there is information around. This, really, is the crux of the matter. If we wish we can describe anything and everything as information processing. Such a description, even when successful [you can choose your own criteria of success, it does not matter], does not imply that there really is information processing going on.) The only “proof” is a metaphysical assumption that everything in the universe is a machine. (If you insist that everything that is, is a machine, I can not prove you wrong. Likewise, if you insist that everything is deterministic, I can not prove you wrong. This because both are metaphysical assumptions that can not be proven, only argued about. However, metaphysics cuts both ways. If I insist that there is only physical stuff going on in a computer, no information processing whatsoever, you can not prove me wrong. Whatever you point to, I can insist on seeing atoms, energies, fields and so on.)
(Ain’t it funny, btw, that when La Mettrie was writing, the most amazing machine in the world was a clock, and La Mettrie thought that the brain was a complicated clockwork, while in Freud’s time the leading technology was the steam engine, and Freud’s scientific image of the brain was one of pressures and releases, and now that we have computers, the brain is supposed to be one. Come quantum machines, I’m pretty sure that … Furthermore, people will see the move from digital computers to quantum computers as the model as a smooth and continuous augmentation of our understanding of cognition, even though in some important respects digital computers and quantum computers are like fire and water).
