My 2010 Wish or How Can Computanomics Contribute To A Much Better Society

Yesterday, I went and saw at Toho Cinemas (Tokyo, Ginza) the latest movie from Michael Moore, Capitalism: A Love Story .
It was of course completely cynical towards the U.S.A and presented Capitalism globally as a "sin", "evil", "contrary to Compassion" and even destructive for Society and Progress.
But independently of the expressed political tonality, it made an impression on me. 
In fact, it was a bit of a revelation. I realized somehow that economic problems that we are facing like Poverty, Wealth Distribution or even the last Financial Crisis could be solved by finding just the right conceptual paradigm to think about them. In other terms, just by the power of ideas.
And here we are, it triggered the writing of this post.
By the way, George Soros has been attempting to find new paradigms for years with his Theory of Reflexivity, which is charming but I think too complicated to be efficient.


My take on Capitalism after the screening of the movie is the following.
On the one hand, we got the proponents of Capitalism who see it as the only system that allows anyone to do what one has freely chosen to do for a living (and hence maximize one's utility).
And on the other hand, we got the critics who see it as a system allowing the ones who own already something to own even more on the basis on what they already own (and hence find potentially themselves exponentially richer and richer, to the contrary of the poor who find themselves exponentially poorer and poorer...)
I'd say both are right but lack a lot of precision and exactness in their view.


The proponents of Capitalism are clearly unconvinced that improving the condition of other Society members and caring for them, directly impacts and improves (and I believe, actually improves in an exponential fashion) their own wealth and conditions for the very reason that they fail to see that our Society is in fact a Computational Society ruled by the Law of Accelerating Returns. Their egoistic greed is arguably naive.
The critics of Capitalism are clearly unconvinced that it's fair that there should be a direct correlation between work/merit/social utility and wealth for the very reason that they fail to see that each man and woman represents no less, no more a proper and a certain amount of computation within the Computational Society. Their ideal that everybody is "equal" is fallacious and naive too.


You see the idea coming... 
My wish for 2010 is to construct a new paradigm to approach Economics, which I have let myself coin Computanomics, so that we might solve the issues raised by the movie.


The paradigm is based on the main axiom that the human brain is a computational device running software. Other propositions (that are assumptions at this stage, but hopefully will be proven later) state that Money is an approximation of Instruction and that our Society is a computational one, that is as per my definition "a hierarchized and organized network (i.e. Society) of computational devices (i.e. human beings, electronic devices, machines, cyborgs, animals, robots etc...) exchanging literally Information and Instructions."


Please help me in my endeavor! :)  by reading, spreading the word or contributing to www.computanomics.org , BunkerSofa's wiki and of course www.bunkersofism.com 

An epistemology of the sense of taste

[This post was translated by Pascal Hideki Hamonic from the Japanese original post "味覚の認識論" written by Michinori Fukushima]


The sense of taste is particularly a virtual sense. What the body feels like eating is perceived as delicious?

Strangely enough, oftentimes you would find yourself eating up a dish that you dislike, or find yourself eating repeatedly the same dish that you dislike. Sometimes, even if you think that a particular dish is good, you won't eat it twice.

"The sense of taste is something unique. First, your tongue will feel it as quite refreshing. Then, your tongue will deeply feel the light sweetness."

This quote from the famous manga "Oishinbo" illustrates one wonder of taste. (By the way, hotness and "mattari" are tactile perception, they are not exactly savors.)
Now, let's say that your tongue is paralyzed and you feel nothing. What would happen? Below is an excerpt from a report.

"Dysgeusia, the disorder of taste is very tough. Whatever you eat, you feel like chewing sand. It's as if someone was forcing you to eat rubber or clay. In some cases, you even vomit what you have just ingested. You may become hypersensitive to sweetness.
Healthy individuals are certainly unable to understand that situation."

The world is completely changed. Completely transformed.
Tastiness, light sweetness do not exist anymore. They become completely virtual, only entities produced by your brain.

From now own, I'd like to express my personal opinion. Transmitted from the sensory system of the tongue, the taste of something may be perceived as lightly sweet and therefore interpreted as good or it may be perceived as disgusting. But I think that those perceptions are based on a mechanism related to Evolution.
Originally, the five senses of taste were all informational inputs and in order to determine whether or not something was positive or favorable for the human body and brain, the question was not "Is it delicious?" but "Is it nutritious?". Also "Is it necessary for my brain?", "Is it poisonous?" were other such questions.

That means that even if that tastes terrible at the beginning, as long as it's nutritious, you will find it eventually very tasty. That's my point.
In other words, let's say that you wanna sell something that tastes terrible. Well, you just need to put on top of it nutritious elements and ultimately people will find it tasty and buy it.
That's possible. Why not?

To test the idea explained above, I tried and had some of Aojiru....It tasted terrible...orz

A virus remover for your body

This post was originally written in Japanese by Takako Endo and has been translated into English by Pascal Hideki Hamonic
The original post is: "ウイルス除去ソフトを体内に。"


[Don't you dream of a body that will never catch a cold?]
With such a virus remover, you'll be able to input a software inside your body, that will be constantly updated whenever a new virus comes up.

That will result in a body that is constantly healthy.

If possible, I want to get it right now but it still seems difficult to accomplish such a biological virus remover.
Is it a fantasy or delirium from my side?
Well I think that it's in fact realistically possible.

An example: the ranking of the most deadly diseases from 1900 to 2001.
http://www.ipss.go.jp/syoushika/tohkei/data/popular/05-24.htm
1920's first cause of death is pneumonia.

Nowadays almost nobody dies from pneumonia. Why? Because there are vaccines for pneumonia.

In 90 years of scientific progress, the mechanisms that lead to pneumonia have been discovered. Therefore vaccines have been created.
In addition, the speed of progress is increasing.
Therefore, we don't die anymore from AIDS if we use the right drug. It's even said that medicine whose goal is to reduce the
activity of the virus has already been created in the USA.
This is what has been told recently.

No doubt that 2010 is the year of the 3D: 3D cinema, 3D TV...
LG, the Korean company has already released such TV sets.
But why 3D has been become possible?.
Well, because the mechanisms that lead to a 3D perception have been isolated.
The 3D feeling is produced when each eye sees the same 16 images per second.
And the human brain is fooled.

Once the mechanism is understood, then innovation becomes possible.
In not too distant years, it will be possible to get a software that will remove almost instantly all the viruses living inside your body.
And it's also possible that a new world, the world of 4D, will show up.
But we have to assume that there will be no "evil" people that would want money and power, to the detriment of technological progress...

味覚の認識論

味覚は特にバーチャルだ。体が欲するものを、「美味しい」「食べたい」と「変換」している。

不思議なことに、ある料理を「特に好きじゃない」、と言いつつも残さず食べてしまう、あるいはリピートしてしまう時があるし、「美味しい」と思いつつも、なかなかリピートしない、ということは良くある。

味も独特でひんやりと舌がすずしいような感じがする、そしてその甘さは軽やかなのに深く舌にしみこむ。

-『美味しんぼ』より

などと味覚を表現したりするが、実のところ感じているのは、甘味、酸味、塩味、苦味および最近発見された「うま味」などの、「味覚の五感」の複合である。（ちなみに辛味や、「まったり」は触覚であって、正確には「味」ではない。）

この感覚刺激が麻痺するとどうなるか。あるレポートより抜粋。

だが味覚障害はとても辛いと言っていた。何を食べても砂を噛むようだったり粘土やゴムを無理やり食べるような感じだったりすると言う。場合によると戻してしまう。甘いものを過敏に感じることもあるらしい。この感覚は健康な人にはわからないだろう。

まったく世界が激変するのである。

つまり「美味しさ」も「軽やかな甘さ」も実在しない、認識上のもの、すなわちバーチャルな存在なのだ。

さてここからは個人的な見解ですが、

舌から伝わる感覚刺激が、言葉になって「軽やかな甘さ」などになり、好意的な印象が残ったり、「不味い」と記憶されたりするわけですが、そこは進化のメカニズムでそうなったんだろうと思う。

本来は「味覚の五感」がすべて（input）であり、そのデータを好意的に評価するかどうかは、「美味しいかどうか」ではなく、「栄養があるか」で「評価」されていると思うのです。または脳が欲しているとか、心理的なもの、すなわち中毒。

ということは、

非常に栄養があれば、不味くても、いずれそれを美味しい、と思えるようになるのではないか。

逆に言うと、不味くても売りたい「物質」がある時、それに高い栄養をトッピング出来れば、美味しいと思われてバカ売れするかも？

・・と思って試しに「青汁」を飲んでみたが、不味かった。orz

2010 is the year of the meme

[this post is a translation of the post originally written by Fukutopika.]


It's 2010. Mankind has entered a new era.
2009 was a year where social media, Web 2.0's essence, have spread significantly.

Based on a social function, Twitter, blogs, bookmark-sharing, video sharing, Tumblr and Flickr, all of them have become truly social media.

"Social" is just an objective adjective for a subjective service where the user wants to have a good time sharing stuff with the peers.

But I have a question.
When you add "social" to "media", wouldn't it make media even more able to propagate?
In fact, a "social media" is a media that is highly distributed, right?
It is as if an inorganic substance was able to reproduce itself and propagate everywhere.
In other words, that constitutes a meme.

When you look back at the post whose title is "An attempt to define a meme in simple terms", written by "Professor" PASKALAMONIK, you realize that a social media matches all the characteristics of a meme.
Let's imagine a piece of Information PI. PI is transmitted from a brain to another brain, then undergoes some mutation. If PI is trivial, then it's highly likely to get eliminated by selection.
Conversely, an "attractive" information will survive and spread.

Of course, the definition of "attractive" depends on each person.
A person that likes unique things, a person that likes popular things, a person that likes limited-time products, a person that likes glasses-wearing males, all those folks have a different taste.

Anyway, the important thing here is not only to note that the information as a meme is reproducing itself inside the social media, but also to note that the medium itself (also called a platform) as a substrate bearing that information was reproducing itself.
It is as if the gene was spreading while at the same time the corresponding substrate, the human body was covering the planet entirely.
After joining Ameblo, Shokotan's popularity made a huge leap. Why? Because Shokotan is "giza" cute ("giza" meaning "very" was a term coined by Shokotan and constitutes in itself a powerful meme)
I believe that those social media are not only social, they have also a behaviour close to the behaviour of a meme.

Right. From this year, 2010, let's use the term of Meme-Media.
Also, through the evangelism of Bunkersofism, I predict that the word "meme" will be mainstream this year.
2010 is the year of the meme, i am telling you folks.

ウイルス除去ソフトを体内に。

【もう風邪を引かない健康な体を
手に入れたくないですか？ 】

つまり、ウイルスバスターのような 、

ソフトウェアを 体内に入れる事ができ、

新しいウイルスが世の中に出ると

常にアップデートされ、

新しいウイルス情報を得て 、自動検知し

体内で自動除去してくれるのです。


結果、いつも健康な体でいられる。



実現可能ならば、手に入れたいけど、、、と今の段階では 誰しも思うはずです。

空想か夢物語かと。。。

でも、現実的に可能だと思います。



例えば、

【死亡率によってみた死因順位：1900～2001年】データをみると
http://www.ipss.go.jp/syoushika/tohkei/data/popular/05-24.htm

１９２０年代の死因第一位は肺炎です。

現在では、肺炎で死ぬなんて考えられません。

肺炎にかからないためのワクチンもあります。



90年の間で科学と、人間の技術が進歩して 肺炎になるメカニズムが解析され、

結果ワクチンが出来上がりました。 さらには、その進歩のスピードは速度が上がっています。

もうＡＩＤＳで死なないとか。 ウイルスの働きを抑制する薬がアメリカで 発明されているとか。。。

いないとか。。。 とさえ近年では言われています。



そして、 ２０１０年は３Ｄの年になることは、間違いないでしょう。

３Ｄ映画館に、３Ｄ家庭用ＴＶの発売、 すでに韓国のＬＧ社では発売されています。

なぜ３Ｄが可能になったか？

３Ｄに見えるメカニズムが解析されたからです。

脳が右目と左目それぞれに１６枚ずつの同じ画像を見ると ３Ｄと脳は認識するそうです。

脳の錯覚をうまく利用してますね。

そのメカニズム自体を解析できれば イノベーションが可能になります。

方法が見つかるというわけです。



そう遠くない〇年後、

誰もが風邪を引かないソフトウェアを 当たり前に手にしているかもしれません。

そして、きっとまだ見ぬ４Ｄの世界も開けてくるでしょう。

技術と進歩を金と権力欲しさで阻む者がいなければ・・・・・