Recombinant Memetics and Narrative Networks

Structural Forces

Macdonald Educational (A Unit For Teachers), published for the Schools Council by MacDonald Educational Ltd., London, 1972-1973

Recombinant Memetics

This one's quite speculative, and it's technically speaking still in the proto-science phase. But it'll only be a matter of time before scientists get a better handle on the human noosphere (the collective body of all human information) and how the proliferation of information within it impacts upon virtually all aspects of human life.

Similar to recombinant DNA (in which different genetic sequences are brought together to create something new), recombinant memetics is the study of how memes (ideas that spread from person to person) can be adjusted and merged with other memes and memeplexes (a cohesive collection of memes, like a religion) for beneficial or ‘socially therapeutic' purposes (such as combating the spread of radical and violent ideologies). This is similar to the idea of 'memetic engineering' — which philosopher Daniel Dennett suggested could be used to maintain cultural health. Or what DARPA is currently doing via their ‘narrative control' program.

11 Emerging Scientific Fields That Everyone Should Know About, George Dvorsky 27 Feb2013

The Narrative of a Japanese by Joseph Heco [link]

How to Tell a Story

Mark Twain once tried to distinguish between the storyteller’s art and tales that a machine could generate:

To string incongruities and absurdities together in a wandering and sometimes purposeless way, and seem innocently unaware that they are absurdities, is the basis of the American art, if my position is correct. Another feature is the slurring of the point. A third is the dropping of a studied remark apparently without knowing it, as if one were thinking aloud. The fourth and last is the pause.

The pause is an exceedingly important feature in any kind of story, and a frequently recurring feature, too. It is a dainty thing, and delicate, and also uncertain and treacherous; for it must be exactly the right length--no more and no less--or it fails of its purpose and makes trouble. If the pause is too short the impressive point is passed, and [and if too long] the audience have had time to divine that a surprise is intended--and then you can't surprise them, of course.

Mark Twain [source]

tadar via Urban Ticks 11.05.2009

Darpa Wants to Master the Science of Propaganda

Dawn Lim 10.18.11http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2011/10/darpa-science-propaganda/

[clipped]

Darpa is asking scientists to “take narratives and make them quantitatively analyzable in a rigorous, transparent and repeatable fashion.”

The program is called “Narrative Networks.” By understanding how stories have shaped your mind, the Pentagon hopes to sniff out who has fallen prey to dangerous ideas, a neuroscience researcher involved in the project tells Danger Room.

http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/

In the first 18-month phase of the program, the Pentagon wants researchers to study how stories infiltrate social networks and alter our brain circuits.

Once scientists have perfected the science of how stories affect our neurochemistry, they will develop tools to “detect narrative influence.” These tools will enable “prevention of negative behavioral outcomes … and generation of positive behavioral outcomes, such as building trust.”

When the project enters into a second 18-month phase, it’ll use the research gathered to build “optimized prototype technologies in the form of documents, software, hardware and devices”.

In fact, it’s calling for devices that detect the influence of stories in unseen ways. “Efforts that rely solely on standoff/non-invasive/non-detectable sensors are highly encouraged,” [beyond micro-facial feature analysis, dilation of blood vessels/ pupils].

NARRATIVE NETWORKS Oct 07, 2011

Request for proposal, clipped [source]

 DARPA is soliciting innovative research proposals in the areas of (1) quantitative analysis of narratives, (2) understanding the effects narratives have on human psychology and its affiliated neurobiology, and (3) modeling, simulating, and sensing-especially in stand-off modalities.

Motivation: Narratives exert a powerful influence on human thoughts and behavior. They consolidate memory, shape emotions, cue heuristics and biases in judgment, influence in-group/out-group distinctions, and may affect the fundamental contents of personal identity.

Story Diagram

One: Narrative Analysis. Ascertaining exactly what function stories enact, and by what mechanisms they do so… […] This goal serves to ascertain who is telling stories to whom and for what purpose, and to discover latent indicators of the spread and influence of narrative tropes in structures such as social networks, traditional and social media, and in conversation.

1. Develop new, and extend existing narrative theories. …nature of stories, including, but not limited to, a list of necessary and sufficient conditions that help distinguish narrative stimuli from other stimuli. …kinematics and dynamics of story ontology. …structure and function of narratives, including identifying and discussing aspects of narratives that are universal versus aspects that vary considerably across cultural or social contexts.

2. …role of narrative in security contexts. …role and extent stories play in influencing political violence. …political radicalization and how they can influence a person or group’s choice of means (such as indiscriminant violence) to achieve political ends. …influence bystanders-to-conflict in terms of shaping their attitudes and perceptions. …shape the process of negotiation, especially between key stakeholders. …relationship between narratives and the mechanisms that generate and reinforce psychiatric or clinical conditions. …impact of narratives on attitudes and perceptions.

3. …quantitatively analyzable in a rigorous, transparent and repeatable fashion. …establish a framework for the scientific study of the psychological and neurobiological impact of stories on people. …how stories propagate in a system so as to influence behavior. Identify temporal and spatial dimensions of narratives in different media...

Narrative Power: Encounters, Celebrations, Struggles - edited by L. Timmel Duchamp, with an introduction by Eileen Gunn, 2010

Two: Narrative Neurobiology. Since the brain is the proximate cause of our actions, stories have a direct impact on the neurobiological processes of both the senders and receivers of narratives. …explanations of salient narrative psychological phenomena such as engagement, transportation, immersion, and synchronization are highly encouraged.

1. Assay narrative effects on our basic neurochemistry. Determine if narratives uniquely modulate human hormone or neurotransmitter production. […] Determine the manner in which narrative effects change during ontogeny and/or due to socio-economic and other environmental conditions.

2. …impact on the neurobiology of memory, learning and identity. […] Explore the differential influence of stories on neurotransmitter systems as compared to other environmental stimuli. Determine how stories impact the neurobiology of important identity-related judgments, such as whom you consider to be a member of your in-group and whom you count as an out-group member.

3. …neurobiology of emotions. Identify impacted neurobiological emotions…

4. …neurobiology of moral judgment. …neural mechanism or mechanisms by which narratives affect judgments about moral guilt and innocence, or the moral permissibility and/or impermissibility of certain actions.

5. …brain mechanisms related to social cognition. Determine how narratives differentially affect the neurobiological basis of theory of mind and judgments of the mental states of others. Identify and explore how stories influence neural mechanisms responsible for the generation and sustainment of collective action or group behavior. [MTD] Determine if and by what mechanisms stories uniquely synchronize or sustain the neural mechanisms of shared attention, collaboration, joint problem-solving and trust.

Narrative Structure [of Sucker Punch, the movie]

Three: Narrative Models, Simulations and Sensors. …understand others, detect narrative influence, and predict responses. …enable prevention of negative behavioral outcomes… …predict and quantify how and why our behavior changes as a result of narrative interaction.

1. …modeling and simulating influence. Baseline against existing models of the influence process to determine the best extant methods of understanding and forecasting influence. …consideration of narrative-driven mental and neurobiological states and the variables which influence them. …capturing the transition from changes in beliefs, desires and attitudes to actions. [MTD]

2. […] Identify whether existing influence models can be improved by the addition of a narrative “layer.” …ontology and transition states of this layer. Validate and verify the model in at least one potentially iterable testable domain (such as forecasting the success of advertising, movies, public relations campaigns or reception of disaster relief interventions).

3. Develop non-standard and novel sensor suites keyed to the variables and processes identified in new or improved influence models. Baseline against current technologies for detecting and measuring indirect indicators of neural activity (such as capillary dilation, galvanic skin response, eye pupil dilation, gaze direction, micro-facial feature analysis, etc.), and against current standoff technologies for more direct detection and measurement (such as sensing neurobiological compounds). […]

[…]

Racter: Writing Robots

03-2013

Meme Wars

05-2013

Notes on Cognitive Fiction

via Joseph Tabbi, Cognitive Fictions, 2002

Agency Panic

-the panic of attributing consciousness to all kinds of systems, and about the difficulty of locating control at any one level of existence – the difficulty, in other words, in deciding what a person is. (p34, Tabbi referencing Timothy Melley’s agency panic of humanist backlash in contemporary U.S. culture)

We are at a loss to grasp how discursive social structures might impinge on individuals without depriving them of all capacity for autonomous action.

Knowledge, Fact and Contingency

Knowledge is the holding, or accumulation of facts, which in themselves exist, or are constructed anthropically, as an extension/precipitating of agreed-upon units. A fact is a product of prior facts, irreducible, infinite, like fractals. And they require a structure, held up by the beliefs of a society. And so facts are contingent upon the facts that make them up (in infinite recursion) and upon the subjects, the participants, the observers that agree upon their validity, and cement their sturdiness for further knowledge.

Programming vs Selection

Evolution is a process of selection rather than programming and thus the brain, and consciousness as well.

Reading Cognitive Fiction

-Can be thought of as interpreting/criticizing texts either analytically or psychologically

-Can stimulate a latent recognition

-Can force the question of how to represent thought and construct subjectivity

One cannot map consciousness onto cognition, or derive communication from hardware. One can only fluctuate between incompatible theories, and accommodate linear writing to multi linear thought, the conscious mind to the unreflective medial ecology. (p120)

The Imminent Mind

The imminent mind is not only in the body. It is imminent also in pathways and messages outside the body; and there is a larger Mind of which the individual mind is only a subsystem.

-Gregory Bateson, Steps to an Ecology of Mind, p460

-cited in Wolfe, “In Search of Posthumanist Theory”, p50

-found in Tabbi, Cognitive Fictions, p34-35

Notes:

Brainless slime mould has an external memory

http://www.bbc.co.uk/nature/19846365

Slime mold uses an externalized spatial “memory” to navigate in complex environments

http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2012/10/04/1215037109

On Memory Non-Neuronal

http://networkaddress.blogspot.com/2012/11/on-memory-non-neuronal.html

Vista:

Microsoft’s Windows are opaque.

More Algos

copyright bots fail

The Algorithmic Copyright Cops: Streaming Video’s Robotic Overlords

BY GEETA DAYAL 09.06.12

"As live streaming video surges in popularity, so are copyright “bots” — automated systems that match content against a database of reference files of copyrighted material. These systems can block streaming video in real time, while it is still being broadcast, leading to potentially worrying implications for freedom of speech."

The volume of content is overwhelming, encouraging the use of automated filters, working via video/audio-monitoring algorithms.

...article goes on to mention various embarissing incidents where public feeds (by any definition) were automatically suspended by autonomous bots, which are apparently not 'smart' enough to see what is quite obvious to us humans.

"Given all that, it’s likely that this collision between algorithmic defense of copyright versus spontaneous speech isn’t going to be resolved soon."

http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/09/streaming-videos-robotic-overlords-algorithmic-copyright-cops/

"Intellectual Property"

Electronic Frontier Foundation

POST SCRIPT:

YouTube Upgrades Its Automated Copyright Enforcement System | Electronic Frontier Foundation


M.I.T. Computer Program Reveals Invisible Motion in Video
[video link]
Eulerian Video Magnification for Revealing Subtle Changes in the World
[via]


So It Begins: Darpa Sets Out to Make Computers That Can Teach Themselves
BY ROBERT BECKHUSEN, 03-2013
“Probabilistic Programming for Advanced Machine Learning”
When Darpa talks about artificial intelligence, it’s not talking about modeling computers after the human brain. That path fell out of favor among computer scientists years ago as a means of creating artificial intelligence; we’d have to understand our own brains first before building a working artificial version of one. But the agency thinks we can build machines that learn and evolve, using algorithms — “probabilistic programming” — to parse through vast amounts of data and select the best of it. After that, the machine learns to repeat the process and do it better.

The Inward Turn of the Narrative

Erich Kahler

1970 (German), 1973 (English trans: Richard and Clara Winston, Princeton U. Press)

“Erich Kahler’s view of the modern world is “the steady evolution of consciousness in the direction of the demythification and secularization of wider and wider areas of human life”.

-Joseph Frank in the forward, p ix-x

[…he continues…]

The part of mankind living in advanced industrial society “has thus become detached from the ancient certainties provided by religion and cultural tradition; it lives mentally and physically in a universe it has not yet learned how to assimilate emotionally. The spiritual crisis of the modern era is precisely this gap between the mind of the human species and its psyche”.

Literary history as the history of consciousness (preface, p3):

“The evolution of artistic forms of expression is one of the most important evidences we have for the changes in man’s consciousness and the changes in the structure of his world.”

The Denaturing of Nature (preface, p6):

The individual, by conscious objectification of reality, denatures nature.

The Nature of Narrative

from the very first sentence of ‘Part One’

Initially, the process of internalization of narrative consists in gradually bringing the narrated material down to earth and breathing into it a human soul. Narrative begins with cosmogonies and theogonies. Slowly, then, the themes descend to the level of annals and chronicles, to the recording of earthly events.

CHRONOLOGY

Early Occidental Epics (Homer)

-representing “complex elaborations and reshapings of real happenings”

-mingling myth and history, not mere fictions, i.e. not pure invention

-reproducing believed realities

-mythic, heroic human

“The biblical kings and prophets are not invented fictional characters; they are historical figures, though somewhat distorted by the narrative, for narrative always distorts.” (p54) [ref: Big Fish film]

“[They] are not fictional characters…they were not created for the sake of symbolizing, for the sake of meaning; they are the actors in real events, or events believed to be real…If we feel that they represent certain universal human attitudes, we are responding to a naïve symbolism which the authors were unconscious.” (p55)

Christian Influence

-deliberate, imposed meaning

Renaissance Influence

-collapse of Holy Roman Empire and feudal hierarchy/Roman Catholic Church/Christian Cosmos:

“Emperor, Pope, and Divine Ruler of the Universe as single unified power lost their claims to unlimited hegemony. God was displaced by human reason; knowledge derived from faith shattered by empiricism…Men began themselves to observe nature directly… This was the beginning of natural science” (p35)

[The displacement of God by human reason is a getting-rid-of the Great Middleman. He is disregarded; change is affected directly, by the individual.]

Renaissance Influence

-dawning of individual consciousness

“When the acceptance of supernatural authority is shaken and each individual begins to act entirely on his own responsibility, the secretiveness, caution, and a close watch on the conduct and character of other individuals becomes essential.” (p21)

“One’s fellow man, as well as one’s own inner life, become objects of conscious observation.” (p21)

Fiction at Last

-Don Quixote, first modern novel

-(new) ascending symbolism vs. (old) descending symbolism

“[^]…proceeds not from a supernatural, extrahuman, or prehuman event whose reality is assumed, but because it rises from below, from a purely human natural world, from individual characters and events which from the outset possess only a representative, not an actual reality. In fact, then have been invented by the artists for the sake of this representation.” (p57)

“To the creators of the new symbolism there is no pre-existence, no premise outside the work itself. The whole symbolic structure is built up by the artist; it is entirely integrated. This complete integration is internalization. ” Nothing more is imposed, “The whole world is now inside the artist.” (p58)

1700’s: Reciprocal Creation of Consciousness and Reality

From the 1700’s on, “A new intertwining of inner and outer life began, within the onset of a more developed consciousness. … The interpenetration of consciousness and reality, and the accelerating interaction between the two, have greatly complicated the two.” (p75)

“For the first time, then, then actual process of change is drenched with ideas, permeated by the products of consciousness.” (p69)

“Conditions become far more important than actions; dealing with them in a practical way demands abstraction. … The stuff which becomes the object of the artistic consciousness, and thus of the narrator’s consciousness – the sheer raw material of reality – is no longer a merely physical or even psychological primal substance.” (p70)

“Nature for the first time becomes an independent object of reality” (p75)

[footnote] “As was the case with the development of perspective, the graphic arts took the lead here. During the Renaissance, Altodorfer and Durer painted the first landscapes devoid of human figures.”

-technology as “the systematization and practical application of scientific results”, “strews abstractions throughout the whole field of reality”

The First Description of a Thunderstorm

--“Die auf ein starkes Ungewitter erfolgte Stille”, or “The Silence After a Thunderstorm”, by Brockes, 1735, translated in Winston’s Narrative

“…Apogee of the transfer from mystical imbuement of nature to cold, analytical, categorical description.” (p84)

“The creator was inadvertently removed from creation, his presence remained, however, as the guardian of morality.” (p89)

The ‘New English Novel’

-began in 1719 with Daniel DeFoe’s Robinson Crusoe, he describes it himself as “homely, plain writing”

-first use of naturalistic language in the history of the narrative

-“Defoe’s naturalistic exactitude is mean to reinforce the credibility of the story.” (p93)

Kahler lists a “variety of fresh motives” introduced in this phase:

-scientific empiricism

-puritan moral scruples

-bourgeoisie’s attentiveness to material things

-overseas exploration w accompanying emphasis on description

-middle class hunger for ‘true history’, in the light of which the narrator must strive harder to achieve credibility

-The development of science in the 1600-1700, the telescope and the microscope, brought about a metaphysical insecurity (later Kahler references Gulliver’s Travels in this context)

1700’S

Gulliver’s Travels, Marivaux’s Vie de Marianne, Rousseau’s Confessions

-satire served as an expression of revolt or a vehicle of moralistic intention and conversely [DeFoe’s] didactic intention sometimes served as a pretext for dwelling upon prohibited subjects

-first-person narrative becomes semi-autobiographical

-the modern dilemma of the artist

-transformation of readership and narrator and the relationship between the two

-the audience becomes less easily satisfired and a new strategy is required to hold the reader

-the new inwardly coherent narrative demanded concentrated attention. This develops a more intimate relationship (btw narrator and reader).

[I am not sure what Kahler is saying anymore; here are a couple snippets.]

-an artificial aloofness where the real narrator interposes a fictional intermediary between narrator and subject [and in footnote 29, p175] making the story more convincing by objectifying it

-Broch on “The Death of Virgil”: “It’s really no longer readable”

-The narrator is now addressing an imaginary recipient.