On Free Will, Decision Making and Sovereign Awareness

Let's start here:
Our brains reveal our choices before we're even aware of them, study finds
Mar 2019, phys.org

Our thoughts can be predicted 11 seconds in advance by looking at patterns in brain activity.

"We believe that when we are faced with the choice between two or more options of what to think about, non-conscious traces of the thoughts are there already, a bit like unconscious hallucinations," Professor Pearson says.

"As the decision of what to think about is made, executive areas of the brain choose the thought-trace which is stronger. In, other words, if any pre-existing brain activity matches one of your choices, then your brain will be more likely to pick that option as it gets boosted by the pre-existing brain activity."
-Professor Joel Pearson, Director of the Future Minds Lab at UNSW School of Psychology

*note, researchers caution against assuming that all choices are by nature predetermined by pre-existing brain activity.
Roger Koenig-Robert et al. Decoding the contents and strength of imagery before volitional engagement, Scientific Reports (2019). DOI: 10.1038/s41598-019-39813-y

Aside from the idea of biases in general, This all reminds me of another article on digital telepathy:

A bunch of people each have a tetris game controller with only one button, so that one person's button rotates, the other slides sideways, etc. Together they have to make decisions by consensus, verbally, while they collaboratively control the tetris-block.

The division of labor is ruthless (only one button) but the communication is rich (human speech). The result is a complex procedure that has been stripped-down to operate in a digitally-mediated environment.

Then there's the straight telepathy style collaboration where they bypass the verbal communication and go straight to brain waves:
How you and your friends can play a video game together using only your minds
July 2019, University of Washington News

A University of Washington team is doing telepathinc collective problem-solving. It's called BrainNet. Three people play a Tetris by talking to each other with their brain waves and wireless signal.

As in Tetris, the game shows a block at the top of the screen and a line that needs to be completed at the bottom. Two people, the Senders, can see both the block and the line but can’t control the game. The third person, the Receiver, can see only the block but can tell the game whether to rotate the block to successfully complete the line.

Each Sender decides whether the block needs to be rotated and then --passes that information from their brain, through the internet and to the brain of the Receiver.-- Then the Receiver processes that information and sends a command — to rotate or not rotate the block — to the game directly from their brain, hopefully completing and clearing the line.  

The screen also showed the word “Yes” on one side and the word “No” on the other side. Beneath the “Yes” option, an LED flashed 17 times per second. Beneath the “No” option, an LED flashed 15 times a second. Once the Sender makes a decision about whether to rotate the block, they send ‘Yes’ or ‘No’ to the Receiver’s brain by concentrating on the corresponding light [which then sends frequency-specific signal downstream].
-University of Washington

If we take this splintered form of decision-making, and combine it with the fact that we don't seem to be making decisions in the way that we think we are (the decision is already made seconds before we realize it), then it would be expected that as we get better at collaborating and complexifying our distributed cognition network, we will have robots, i.e., artificially intelligent entities, helping us, and becoming part of us.

Scale this up and imagine 700 people collectively coordinating a robot's movements, but not just one robot, hundreds and thousands. All semibots, no more line between us.

Notes:
We have come a long way since Emotiv's EPOC headset almost a decade ago; just imagine 2030.

Try Not to Think
Network Address, 2017

All Your Brain Are Belong To Us
Network Address, 2012

Playing Tetris by committee
May 2019, BBC

^Developed by Patrick Lemieux of UC Davis, California, the Octopad single button controllers mean each player can only trigger one kind of movement in the game so it forces co-operation and conversation between players.

Post Script:
Shared control allows a robot to use two hands working together to complete tasks
May 2019, phys.org

A team of researchers from the University of Wisconsin and the Naval Research Laboratory has designed and built a robotic system that allows for bimanual robot manipulation through shared control.... a technique that enabled a robot to carry out bimanual tasks by sharing control with a human being. ... The robot did not progress to the point of performing the task on its own—instead, it learned to serve as a more fully capable augmented assistant.

Pedestrians at crosswalks found to follow the Levy walk process
Apr 2019, phys.org

As people cross an intersection, they interface each other in predictable ways. 

"Rather than people continually meeting face to face, walkers would simply follow a person moving in the same direction, preventing the constant need to shift their path. ... Doing so increased efficiency both for the individuals and for the crowd as a whole."

They also found that these streams followed a Lévy process.

...
The Lévy walk process is a mathematical description, which means it's predictable. It says that as you walk, or as your eyes dart across a screen, or as you do a whole bunch of repetitive actions, you will move in short stops interspersed with long stops. Many short strides intermittent with some long strides. But the ratio of short to long, and the distances of each, are determined by a power law distribution that is the Lévy process. That our walking follows a Lévy process means we can predict how many steps you will take as you cross a given intersection.

And if you happen to be walking funny because you have a shotgun in your trousers, that can now be recognized by a persistent surveillance system, to either alert in advance of atypical behavior, or to aid in identifying individuals of interest in footage of an event after it has taken place. 

White Out

Political Correction Fluid (ie White Out).

I always thought it was weird; glad I'm not the only one. When I decided to slap together a barebones Asus ten years ago, I was surprised to find the configuration referred to as master-slave. I didn't think too much of it at the time, but whenever it comes up, a part of me does wonder why we don't put this higher on the politically correct priority list, like somewhere above he/she/xe.

Like is the terminology we use for computers hundreds of years old or something, where we just keep using the same words even though their original meaning is completely lost? (Oh wait, but is that part of the hegemony of the privileged, ie, it's so ubiquitous it's invisible?)

Turns out that yes, these terms do come from a place long before Mr. Babbage's scribbles. Well, not too long before that - they're from the world of motor control, when we started to make really complicated machines; maybe it goes all the way back to watchmaking. But it stops here, 2018.

As far back as 2003, folks in California were asking manufacturers to come up with a better alternative that doesn't make us all really uncomfortable. Maybe we're not all really uncomfortable. Then again, maybe the people who are uncomfortable don't really matter. Or they don't matter enough, in comparison to how important it is to maintain the lexical inertia of engineering.

Regardless, one of the main programming languages of our time has now decided to rearrange the playbook, or the instruction manual, as it were. Personally, however, I'm really not happy at all with the results. Parent-helper and parent-worker sound stupid to me.


Notes:
Master/Slave Terminiolgy Removed from Python
Sep 2018, VICE
https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/8x7akv/masterslave-terminology-was-removed-from-python-programming-language

Got Your Semiotics Right Here

Running on Trumpism but without Trump
Nov 2017, BBC

Nothing to do with the president. Rather, this is a great example of what semiotics is. If I'm holding a sign that says "Trump" but what I really mean is "Gillespie", then I'm playing with semiotics. The sign itself is one part, and the meaning another. The sign can say lots of different things, and it can mean lots of different things too. And "no" doesn't always mean "no". And vice versa. And "would you like to come up and see my etchings" doesn't mean lets check out those etchings.

The fact that we can talk about things that aren't even there is what makes us special. They say, although I'm sure it'll be discovered otherwise one day, that if a monkey doesn't see something happen, then it doesn't happen. They can't talk about things that aren't there, but we can. And not only that, we can use signs that stand for one thing and use it to mean something else. So cerebral.

Color Conspirators

Anybody remember when triangles brainwashed the entire world for like three years? And galaxy print, i.e. indigo-purple-pink.

The people who know what colour you'll like in 2019
Apr 2017, BBC

For those of your who like conspiracy theory, maybe you should know that there are people, in fact entire incorporated business ventures, who's sole purpose is to "offer information on current and future trends in fashion, interior design and lifestyle."

"Know what's next" is the tagline of WGSN, a London-based company. And one aspect of their prescience regards color. And in this linked article above, the woman spotlighted is working on 2019. So yes, there is a global conspiracy to predict and affect the colors you will like years from now.


A couple snips from the article:
Popular colours often reflect what's happening culturally and socially.

The growth of the sharing economy, in which people rent beds, cars and other assets directly from one another, means lighter colours such as pale blues could come into fashion.

"Sharing means lightness, you don't want to be bogged down so you're not looking at a heavy palette." -Laurie Pressman, vice president of the Pantone Color Institute

Colours such as brown, which a couple of decades ago was linked to the earth and dirt but is now associated with coffee and chocolate, reflects the growth of those industries, she says.

---No idea 'sharing was light-colored' but I do remember the world getting browner for a minute, like the whole back-to-the-earth movement, actually, the one that followed the green movement, when people were feeling all guilty that they couldn't live up to their sustainability expectations, and they decided to make all white things brown, to make it look like they were using shitty detergent. jk. But really, even Starbucks changed their paper cups from white to very, very, off-white.

A "vast movement of grey" began to emerge after the 2008 financial crisis.
-Mark Woodman, a product consultant and a former president of US-based colour forecasting trade body Color Marketing Group

The color purple became more popular circa the 2012 US presidential election, when undecided and neutral states began to be identified as purple by the media.


Further, about the practicality of choosing a color-of-the-year:
"Making sure the colours are easily achievable is critically important" -Laurie Pressman, vice president of the Pantone Color Institute

---What does she mean by this, "easily achievable?" I reviewed a book on the birth of color in the modern world, called the Color Revolution, which explains how we take for granted that products are colored consistently. For example, when you buy a telephone (haha) you don't think twice that the hard plastic handset and the flexible rubberized cord are the exact same color, but that was really, really hard to do, because all these things are made with different base materials, so the coloring agents interact differently with each of them.


Finally, favorite:
The names are important too. They (Pantone) almost chose "pea soup" as the color for 2017. Settled on "greenery" instead.


And some research for good measure:
ice hockey teams wearing darker-coloured tops were more likely to be penalised for aggressive fouls
-study link

wearing the colour red could increase the probability of winning sporting contests
-study link

Note that ultimately any link between color and behavior is bound to be culture-specific, because colors mean different things in different parts of the world. (And across time as well; don't forget that the pink/blue dichotomy was originally reversed.)


POST SCRIPT

Book Review of The Color Revolution
ReginaLee Blaszczyk, MIT Press 2012

Culture as Learned Probability System
2012, Network Address

Seeing Red
2013, Network Address

Cultural Evolution of Basic Color Terms
2013, Network Address

Quantum Question Equality

Quantum theory reveals puzzling pattern in how people respond to some surveys
phys.org, June 2014

Researchers used quantum theory – usually invoked to describe the actions of subatomic particles – to identify an unexpected and strange pattern in how people respond to survey questions.

"Human behavior is very sensitive to context. It may be as context sensitive as the actions of some of the particles that quantum physicists study," said Zheng Wang, lead author of the study and associate professor of communication at The Ohio State University.

"By using quantum theory, we were able to predict a surprising regularity in human behavior with unusual accuracy for the social sciences in a large set of different surveys."

These new findings involved an issue that has long faced researchers using survey data or any self-report data: question-order effects. Scientists have known that the order in which some questions are asked on a survey can change how people respond. That's why survey organizations normally change the order of questions between different respondents, hoping to cancel out this effect.

"Researchers have thought of these question-order effects as some kind of unexplainable carry-over effects or noise," Wang said. "But our results suggest that some of these effects may not be mere nuisance, but actually are something more essential to human behavior."

Take, for example, one of the surveys used in the study. This was a Gallup poll that asked Americans, among other questions, whether Bill Clinton was honest and trustworthy and whether Al Gore was honest and trustworthy.

The survey changed the order in which these questions were asked between respondents and, as expected, there were question-order effects found. When respondents were asked about Clinton first, 49 percent said that both Clinton and Gore were trustworthy. But when respondents were asked about Gore first, 56 percent said that both were trustworthy.

The pattern that quantum theory predicted – and that the researchers found – was that the number of people who switch from "yes-yes" to "no-no" when the question order is reversed must be offset by the number of people who switch in the opposite direction.

Indeed, in this case, the number of people who said "no-no" – that both Clinton and Gore were not trustworthy – went from 28 percent when the Clinton question was asked first to 21 percent when Gore was asked about first.

That 7 percent decline essentially cancels out the 7 percent increase in the number of people who said "yes-yes" when the question order was reversed.

Likewise, the number of people who switched from "yes-no" to "no-yes" was offset by the number of people who switched in the opposite direction.

The researchers called this phenomenon "quantum question equality." They found it in every one of the surveys studied. [marked as suspicious]

"When you think about it from our normal social science perspective, the finding is very bizarre," Wang said. "There's no reason to expect that people would always change their responses in such a systematical way, from survey to survey to create this pattern."

But from a quantum perspective, the finding makes perfect sense, Wang said. "It is exactly what we would have predicted from quantum theory. We mathematically derived this precise prediction of quantum question equality from quantum theory before we looked at any data. This had to be true if our theory is right."

"Usually, in the social sciences we're talking about parameters: If we can predict that one factor is always larger or smaller than another, we consider that a strong finding," she said.

"But here we found a quite precise answer that is always nearly zero – the number of people who switch an answer one way are always offset by the number of people who switch in the opposite direction. That number never changed. In other words, their difference is always nearly zero. And that level of exactness is almost never found in social science research."

The larger question brought up by this study is "why?" Why must the number of people who switch from "yes-yes" to "no-no" when question order is reversed be offset by the number of people who switch in the opposite direction?

Wang said there is nothing yet proposed in standard psychological theory that would explain why this is true.

Paper: Context effects produced by question orders reveal quantum nature of human judgments
PNAS
Provided by The Ohio State University

Culture as Learned Probability System

Music, the Arts and Ideas

Leonard B. Meyer, U. of Chicago, 1967

CULTURE

“It is impossible to stand outside of culture, for the models and categories we use on conceptualizing and ordering the world are necessarily limited to, if not determined by, those which are provided by our particular culture.” (viii)

“A culture, like a musical style, is a learned probability system.” (p17, footnote 21)

MEANING

“Meaning is when stimulus does not fit expectation.”

“Meaning is the difference between expectation and actual.”

Meaning, being also a measure of the uncertainty between antecedent and consequent is also related to probability.

PROBABILITY SYSTEMS

“Once a musical style has become part of the habit responses of composers, performers, and practical listeners it may be regarded as a complex system of probabilities. That musical styles are internalized probability systems is demonstrated by the rules of musical grammar and syntax found in textbooks on harmony, counterpoint, and theory in general.”

In the Tonal Harmony of Western Music, the tonic chord is
-most often followed by the dominant
-frequently by the subdominant
-sometimes by the subdominant
In Counterpoint, after a large melodic skip, the melody
-usually moves in the opposite direction, filling in the tones passed over.

DEVIATION
occurs by:

Delay – of expectation/norm
Antecedent Ambiguity/Uncertainty – equally probably constituents may be envisaged
Unexpected/Improbable – within the specific context

-deviation requires meaning, or more specifically: active creation of new meaning, which occurs within the temporal/tonal expectations

INFORMATION

Information is measured by the randomness of the choices possible in a given situation. If a situation is highly organized and the possible consequents in the pattern process have a high degree of probability, the information (or entropy) is low.

If, however, the situation is characterized by a high degree of shuffledness so that the consequents are more or less equi-probable, then information (or entropy) is said to be high.

Perception:

“What we perceive as the present is the vivid fringe of memory tinged with anticipation.”
-A.N. Whitehead, The Concept of Nature, in G.J. Whitrow, The Natural Philosophy of Time, p83, in Meyers, p89.

“The practically cognized present is no knife-edge, but a saddle-back, with a certain breadth of its own in which we sit perched, and from which we look in two directions in time.”
-William James, Principles of Psychology, 1950, p609

Predictions create the future:

“Prediction itself – that is, belief about the probable future – may make an incalculable difference in it.”

-Herbert J. Muller, “Misuses of the Past”, p12, Horizon 1 (March 1959), on Meyer, p90

The Determinism vs. Free Will Problem

Might it not be that the problem stems from a failure to distinguish between the relatively undetermined, non-statistical processes characteristic of the level of individual choice and those forces which, more determined and quasi-statistical, are operative on the higher levels of sociocultural history. It may be that the problem of determinism vs. free will stems from a confusion of hierarchic levels of analysis. (p97)

Relevant Links

The Anatomy of a Joke: Describing Meaning and Information

as a Function of Probability

TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 27, 2012

The Dual Processing System

SATURDAY, OCTOBER 6, 2012

On Hindsight and Blindness, aka Greta Garbo Lips:

TUESDAY, DECEMBER 4, 2012

Cultural Evolution of Basic Color Terms

TUESDAY, JULY 10, 2012

The Anatomy of a Joke

Describing Meaning and Information

as a Function of Probability

-what makes a joke funny

“Meaning is when stimulus does not fit expectation.”
–Leonard B. Meyers

The funniness of a joke exists within an antecedent-consequent relationship, where expectedness of the consequent (the punchline) is plotted against both the ambiguity/clarity of the antecedent, and the time delay between the antecedent and the consequent.

The longer one waits to hear the punchline, the more possible punchlines one predicts. The longer one waits, then, the higher the probability that they will already have predicted the punchline, or something similar, rendering the joke less effective.

The more unexpected the punchline, the less the probability that one will guess it beforehand. This distance between what we expect, and what we get is what we might call the funniness of the joke.

Note: One can heighten the tension, or draw contrast by modulating the clarity or ambiguity of the antecedent, but this aspect of the dynamics of meaning will differ in a system of iteration, such as knock-knock jokes, or ‘inside’ jokes (internet memes/macro image series’), where one has “heard this joke before”.

For example:

“What happened when Chuck Norris got stabbed in a dark alley?” [antecedent]

“He punched his assailant in the face.” [consequent, highly probable]

--this is a reasonable outcome; it could have been predicted easily

“The knife bled to death.” [consequent, less probable]

--this is unexpected

--note the difference in effect, however, if one is already familiar with Chuck Norris jokes, as it changes the probability of prediction.

-something music 

IN MUSIC, a system of repetition, the interplay between antecedent and consequent is much more developed, but still derives the intensity of its meaning from the modulation of ambiguity/clarity of the antecedent, expectedness of the consequent, and the time delay between the two. Music can act as a very accessible entrypoint into thinking about information and meaning.

-something information network interaction
source: Ebon Fisher, Media Rituals, 1990-2000?

FROM INFORMATION,

“Meaning is the difference between expectation and actual.”

(Meyers, p9-10)

“If we want to explain this absence of meaning [caused by the cognitive semiotic] and with it the emergence of a specifically human sense of reality, of time, space, and self, we have to assume that human cognition is based upon a very peculiar system of representation (or ‘pattern matching’) which allows us to process what is seen and heard at the same time, both in terms of stable patterns and of global, concrete and necessarily ‘fuzzy’ patterns. This double processing generates a difference between the stable pattern, which corresponds to what we have called memory, on the one hand, and an instable, always changing pattern corresponding to what one could name the ‘here and now’ or the ‘present’, on the other hand. In a conscious human mind the two patterns never merge completely.”
(Cognitive Semiotics, p122)

“Deviation requires meaning, or more specifically, active creation of ‘new’ meaning.”

(Meyers, p9-10)

Aside: Between the passages immediately referenced above, we can begin to see the interplay of the past, the present and the future, and how they work to construct our world. Out of the double-processing of the past and the present, we create the present; and out of the simultaneous processing of all possible futures, we create the future. I would interject here furthermore, for there must be something said about the individual vs. the collective. The individual has the most power over the present, and the least over the future. The collective, though it conditions individual behavior (absolutely, though?) and helps to solidify the past (without any say from an independent self?), is largely more responsible for creating the future. Individuals cancel each other as they move forward, each on their own way. You can create your present, you can modify your past, but you cannot create your future, unless, of course, you are not.

TO ENTROPY,

Information is measured by the randomness of the choices possible in a given situation.

[does this read as ‘lack of connections’ between the choices?]

If a situation is highly organized and the possible consequents in the pattern process have a high degree of probability, the information (or entropy) is low.

[can this read as a ‘dense network’?]

If, however, the situation is characterized by a high degree of shuffledness so that the consequents are more of less equi-probably, then information (or entropy) is high.

[what is the relationship between network density and entropy?]

(Meyers, p11)

EPILOGUE,

“Both are looking at the world, and what they look at has not changed. But in some area, they see different things and they see them in different relations to one another. […] The transition between competing paradigms [^expectations] cannot be made one step at a time [via the left brain], but forced by logic and neutral experience. Like the gestalt switch, it must occur all-at-once [the right brain] or not at all.”

(Kuhn, p150), (“all-at-once”: Mass Transference Device, p50, p74)

NOTES:

Music, the Arts and Ideas

Leonard B. Meyers, 1967

Cognitive Semiotics

“Dealing with Difference: From cognition to semiotic cognition”, Barend van Heusden

Issue 4 (Spring 2009), pp. 116–132

http://networkaddress.blogspot.com/2012/10/the-dual-processing-system_6.html

The Structure of Scientific Revolutions

Thomas S. Kuhn, 1962

Mass Transference Device

2012

Bursts

A.L. Barabasi, 2010

A Reason for Irony

A response to The Stone article: How to Live Without Irony

credit: Leif Parsons

IRONY: “It pre-emptively acknowledges its own failure to accomplish anything meaningful. No attack can be set against it, as it has already conquered itself [do I even need to cite Anonymous here]. The ironic frame functions as a shield against criticism […] to dodge responsibility…to secretly flee…”

-OR, are we just unconsciously recognizing, finally, the fallacy of causality?

Irony is a defense, “a shield against criticism” but it also a weapon, or rather, a tool. It is what we use to sift through the bullshit. It is what we use to shift the power structures.

Value? From whence, for whom? In the old clothesline paradox, as value recedes, retreats, packs it bags and gets on a plane to Iceland, we use irony to make sure it doesn’t come back home. Back home to the banks and the corporations.

Irony is a shield, not just for us the users, but for the value itself, the lambswool that hides the wolf, but, in this case, not to penetrate and attack, instead to escape, like Iranian-crisis hostages.

It is not us who are hiding. We are hiding something, a game of hot-potato, or hide-and-seek, or just keep-away, just long enough for Big Everything and Big Everyone to lose track, or lose interest.

MEANING: “Moving away from the ironic involves saying what you mean, meaning what you say and considering seriousness and forthrightness as expressive possibilities, despite the inherent risks.” Sounds as if being absurd were a cop-out, yet the author says just prior, that being a hipster entails processing “several stages of self-scrutiny”.

In a world where it is almost possible to predict the future, (Barabasi’s Bursts, Sandy and the success of meteorological prediction, election forecasting, speculative futures, financial engineering, predictive analysis, etc…), how else can you avoid being a foregone conclusion unless you completely make no sense.

Absurdity is the antidote to the probabilistic world. Interestingly, Hipsters ^here are referred to as Harlequins; John Twelve Hawks, in his 2005 future-fiction, also writes of  Harlequins’ using random number generators to help them make decisions randomly, thus subverting the Vast Machine (or as PKD called it, the Vast Active Living Information System).

If Big Data has given us anything thus far, it is “The Search for Meaning”, and if culture has offered any comfort, any insulation, as is its purpose, it is giving us new ways of meaning, new ways of being.

How do you make meaning out of absurdity? That, of course, is the new frontier. Artists, in all regards, are  always one step ahead; Hipsters, with their slieght-of-hand tautologies, giving us a glimpse of the future, ghettouflaged in junk data – an encrypted program for a ‘way of living’: a generation not-yet has the cipher.

partially unrelated image

MODUS OPERANDI:

As my own page for a few years now has read in its subtitle: ‘Clarification, Contradiction, and Confusion’, I somehow seemed to have fallen victim to this pre-emptive defense. Or have I?

I gave feliz navidad christmas cards to my family for years (we don’t speak Spanish). It is not because I fear dislike, however, it is because I’ve tried to give away all my fucks, like an anti-Scrooge McDuck.

If I do not speak in the language of the world around me, how can I live? And yet, as such, I write, for cultural critics of the future to point out with effortless accuracy, the Greta Garbo Lips of my portraits.

BONUS:

ART THOUGHTZ: To Catch A Millennial (Live at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago 9-07-11)
Hennessy Youngman

NOTES:

How to Live Without Irony

CHRISTY WAMPOLE, THE STONE November 17, 2012

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/11/17/how-to-live-without-irony/

Bursts: Can Human Behavior Be Predicted And Controlled?

Albert-Laszlo Barabasi, 2010

http://barabasi.com/bursts/

“Sandy shows storm-prediction progress”, Business of Federal Technology

Frank Konkel, The, Nov 05, 2012

http://fcw.com/articles/2012/11/05/sandy-hurricane-center.aspx

[Argo, the 2012 film]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argo_(2012_film)

“Hidden Economies and the Shifting of Value”
http://networkaddress.blogspot.com/2012/10/hidden-economies-and-shifting-of-value.html

Stevens Institute, “Financial Engineering”

http://www.stevens.edu/sse/academics/graduate/financial-engineering

The Traveler, John Twelve Hawks, 2005

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Traveler_(novel)

VALIS, Philip K. Dick, 1981

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VALIS

Greta Garbo Lips and the Van Meegeren effect, in:

The Forger’s Art, Denis Dutton, ed., 1983

http://books.google.com/books/about/The_Forger_s_Art.html?id=wV_CHAAACAAJ

POST SCRIPT:

U.S. Cities Relying on Precog Software to Predict Murder
KIM ZETTER 01.10.13
The software parses about two dozen variables, including criminal record and geographic location. The type of crime and the age at which it was committed, however, turned out to be two of the most predictive variables.
“People assume that if someone murdered then they will murder in the future,” Berk told the news outlet. “But what really matters is what that person did as a young individual. If they committed armed robbery at age 14 that’s a good predictor. If they committed the same crime at age 30, that doesn’t predict very much.”
-Richard Berk, criminologist at the University of Pennsylvania who developed the algorithm
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2013/01/precog-software-predicts-crime/