NoFun™ Money

I recently had a conversation in which someone was basically saying that people who handed out small change to beggers on the street were doing society a diservice:

"Take as a simple example the act of giving a panhandler spare change. While this charitable act may seem noble oir compassionate, from a broader perspective it probably hurts society. By giving a panhandler change, s/he is incentivized to remain unproductive. Furthermore, others are disincentivized: the hourly wage of panhandling approaches the hourly wage of menial work, which is often more unpleasant. Since panhandling produces no value, the reward for the production of value falls off at the low end."

They said.

A couple of points with this.

1) "Since panhandling produces no value"

Panhandling does produce value. Your average begger lives right on the line of survival. He or she is not panhandling for kicks and giggles but simply to get through another day. Beggers, upon hearing that charity has been made illegal aren't just gonna curl up and say "Gee, okay, I'll jus' go chuck myself under a bus." Take away petty charity and what's left..? Petty crime. And petty crime is a pain in the arse. Policemen cost money, so do courts. So does social disruption to local business and residents in areas where once beggers/now malingerers frequent.

Basically, everyday charity is a distrbuted and voluntary tax which prevents a certain demographic of any city from turning into petty criminals.

They also serve as negative examples - bogeymen for the modern times. "Hey lil' Johnny, you do your homework now, or you might end up sitting on the kerb with no front teeth and shit in your pants." A useful social function.

2) "Furthermore, others are disincentivized: the hourly wage of panhandling approaches the hourly wage of menial work, which is often more unpleasant."

I dunno, standing around all day in bad shoes, with everyone wishing you would just fuck off and die, in the rain maybe, or in the cold, with screw all to look forward to, zero prospects and probably no girlfriend, a grumbling belly and bad teeth sounds pretty unpleasent to me. Work, however grindingly tedious and meaninglessly repetitive, does carry an ounce or two of honour and social acceptence along with it. Also the comfort of predictable routines, something to plan around. Externalities. It's not all about money.

Maybe you mean that fabled begger who actually has money bursting out of the seams of his or her matress, a nice house in the burbs and two peachy-faced kids going to college..? There's one in every city or so I've heard. The one near us has a mercedes he keeps in a garage for special days, and pearly porcelain teeth he keeps carefully stained during the week, just for appearances.

I don't think it's the money that people get hung up on but the alleged fact that a begger, by sitting on his butt, can earn enough to have a lifestyle pretty much indistinguishable from that of a menial worker in a more reputable profession.

Which I agree, is not a good thing.

So. A fun idea I had. Rather than abolish or otherwise obstruct everyday charity, perhaps we should change the lifestyle a begger can buy with the income he or she derives from begging.

Ta-da:No-Fun Money™

Let's say that employers are required to pay all their employees at least, I dunno, a very low basic amount - five dollars worth perhaps - of No-Fun™ currency as part of thier monthly salary. An employee can ask to be paid a greater percentage if they should so wish.

Begging is not made illegal, nor is giving - but a begger found to be accepting, or carrying/possessing 'normal' currency is liable to have it confiscated arbitrarily, and one giving it perhaps liable to a misdemeanor charge and a fine.

No-Fun money™ buys stuff just like normal money, however, there are things it cannot buy:

• Tobacco products or paraphenalia.
• Alcohol in any form.
• Weapons and ammunition.
• 'Luxury' food items - Confectionary/fizzy pop/crisps/take away pizza etc..
• TV's, computers, playstations etc.
• Entertainment media - DVDs/TV cable connections/internet connections etc.
• Cinema tickets/theatre tickets/concert tickets/restaurant bills
• Petrol.
• Imported goods. (Ensure the hand-out dollar benefits the host economy).

It cannot buy anything fun. Just the basic "I need this or I will die" kinda stuff, or the educational stuff - books on philosophy etc.

You'd also have to bullet-proof the system by legislating against businesses (off-licences most probably) from running currency exchange schemes on the quiet. A basic cap on how much not-funny money could be exchanged in a single transaction, or by a single individual within a certain timeframe - whatever - it wouldn't stop all of it, but perhaps push the profitibility of the process down to the level of barely being worth anyone's risking it.

Another benefit - as I mentioned before about wage-earners being able to request more of it - it would be a good way for people in debt to combat their bad spending habits, it could also be imposed upon people by debt-collection agencies etc.

In this way, a begger might make an ammount comparable to someone involved in more socially acceptable and productive work, but would never be able to achieve a similar life-style.

Hell, perhaps all state well-fare handouts should be paid in No-Fun™ Money, that would shake things up. Might even improve the quality of TV programming...

...Continued...

The Ducks of Meaning.

Hmm. Hokay, I want to try to describe how 'meaning' can be ascribed to a physical point located on a neural network. There is nothing special about the particular neurons there, they are all indistinguishable to the eye. They don't have "Hi I'm your concept of fashion" tattooed on their membranes. So why does one neurone-body mean "affable" and another mean "snot"..?

I want you to imagine a pool of still, unrippled water. The edge of the pool is populated by specially trained ducks. Each has a pebble to push in with its beak. They all have electrodes wired to their butts. All these wires coil away into the back of our volunteer for the evening - Bill's - head. Each wire is connected to parts of Bill's sensory sytems - His visual centre, his tactile centre etc. A very cute nurse is handing things to Bill for him to percieve, and every once in a while wiggling her hips for no reason in particular. Let's call her Miranda. And make her a blonde-bombshell.

Anyway. Miranda gives Bill a big blue bowling ball. The 'blue' bit of Bill's visual perception centre goes 'bing' and the impulse sent along the wire causes the duck attached to it to nudge his pebble into the water - it goes 'plop' and makes a big ripple widening across the placid pond. At exactly the same time the 'size' bit of Bill's perception is causing a duck somewhere else to nudge a pebble, and the 'round' bit, yet another pebble somewhere else.

So - we have three separate circular ripples spreading across the pond, each with a different duck epicentre. Three big rings, getting bigger, touching, then crossing eachother.

At the exact point where the three ring cross - another of our little friends - Larry the dragonfly - zips down and drops a little floaty buoy with "Big blue ball" written on it.

Now here's the clever bit. We wire up the ducks' webbed feet and attach recievers sensitive enough to detect sequentially where the wavefront of any ripple, generated on the pond surface, hits duck-toe. - And send the impulses back to the corresponding sensory centres of Bill's brain.

Now we send out Dragonfly Larry to jump up and down on the "big blue ball" buoy. The ripple produced heads toward shore, lands and activates the recievers ashore in the same exact sequence that created the location of the buoy in the first place. And Bill, for no particular reason he can fathom - Gets a sudden sensory 'recreation' built out of the individual attributes of the previously percieved object - an image of a "Big blue ball"

ie: in a neural net - the simple connective positioning (what portions of the sensorium it is connected to, and how strongly) of a single neuron would be enough to indicate its 'meaning'. No awareness or understanding necessary. Simple mechanics and sensory 'signatures".

This is not a perfect picture of neural 'meaning' - It's only 2D for a start, the real thing would be more like a sphere, with a lot more ducks. But still. Am I getting paid for this..?

So each node in the net, simply from it's connective position, holds effectively a sensual 'map' of a specific object. And now let's add some new connections - The internal commentary of pain and pleasure, and also the emotional colouring that has arisen from that simple black and white. And another thing, a sense of time, or if not exactly time, at least a sense of things that came before, and things that came after.

So now, when Larry jumps up and down on the big blue ball buoy - Bill gets not just a static ball, but a myriad of overlaid sensations - the happiness of childhood balls past, associations with his father and the times they played, a wince from the time he caught a ball in the face... The list is quite literally endless, as, like dominoes, each association triggers others at tangents, and those at greater tangents still - Till the entirety of his experience whirls around this stupid blue ball. Referenced. Real. Whole.


Not so much what 'ball' means, but what it means to Bill.

"Okay Tab - That's fine for concrete objects" you say... "But what about abstract concepts, uh, like 'generousity' for example... Huh-huh..?"

Childsplay. Okay - First we accumulate a whole bunch of 'nouns', built from our perceptions of their attributes. And, because our own bodies are effectively 'external' to our sensorium and their movements intimately 'sensible' to us, we also quickly build up a whole bunch of 'verbs' and 'prepositions of place' - Run, walk, up, down, bend, straighten, etc. We see other people's faces - We get 'adjectives' - happy face, sad face, pain face. We don't have to guess - Mirror cells in our brains reverse-engineer our perceptions of others' movements to help us recreate personally the feelings that engender these faces/actions - divining the physical/emotional meanings of others' movements.

These are the first layer.

Now - Each of these nodes of meaning has effectively become shorthand for a vast range of sensory qualities. A single connection to any one of these 'words' is a connection to the whole of its underlying physical 'meaning'. Imagine each node is now a note on a piano keyboard. Play one, you get a single note. Now imagine hitting a few of them together, now you get a chord. And the number of chords, even on a piano keyboard, is huge.

- Now imagine a keyboard with a million keys.

'Generousity' is node with connections to:

Give. Recieve. Happy face. Pleasure. Grateful face. etc.

A composite. Abstracted - But with hard connections to physical/emotional sensations. In itself though, largely devoid of an immediate invocation of these sensory remembrances.

Organic shorthand. The ghost in the (bio)machine.

...Continued...

The Carrier and the Content.

AMOEBA, another marvel of engineering, but this time one not aspiring toward being alive. Now we can write our names upon the water, and not be overly Keatsian about it. Anyway. What is this doing here..? Well, it illustrates my ideas about the carrier and the content very well.

In the last post I talked about a TV:

"None of the components of a TV are individually alive. But, together, in orchestra, they support a picture, a story, the content of which has very little to do with the mechanics of the device supporting it."

But this device - comprising about 50 small wave generators acting on a common medium to form a standing wave of meaningful content - acts as a much better analogy to our own situation.

Standing waves occur all over the place in nature as well as science - a wave at equilibrium that seems to stand still, even though water, or whatever other medium in which it occurs, is constantly passing through it. For example - on the beach:
Anyway, before we get carried away with the pretty pictures, let's imagine the sum total of our remembered experiences as the pool in which the letters form in the picture right at the top, and the differing areas of the vast network of neurones in our brains as the series of wave-generators around its circumference.

Anyway, the important thing to remember is that though the wave-generators act to create and support the central symbol, they have no inkling of its meaning. They only blindy fire as they are programmed to do according to whatever external force - in the case of AMOEBA a human programmer - supplies the directives.

This is a crucial divide I think - though the entity we take for granted, our ever-lovin' selves, our "I", our persona or wtf.ever term you prefer, is initially generated by our neurophysiology, indeed constantly supported and lent a sense of continuity by the mechanics of the brain throughout its functional lifespan, the nature of that central symbol - In AMOEBA's case an 'S' but in our case an "I" remains somehow other, aloof, like the plot of a story copied out perfectly over and over by someone who cannot read.

ie. The generator, and the generated are separated, by barriers of comprehension/meaning if nothing else, however intimately they may be emeshed.

One last picture:



The pile of rubbish on the floor is just rubbish on the floor. The arrangement, to the eye of our 'I' looks random, no rhyme or reason to it. Just as from viewing a brain floating in a jar you can in no way discern the persona it once projected.

Meaningless, just as 'we' are meaningless to the skeins and tangles of the indivdual neural nets that in concert, throw us forth.

But shine a light... And suddenly, there we are.

...Continued...

Definitions of life.

Anyone being overly-flexible with the concept of 'life' and 'what is living' really pisses me off.

It's like the word: 'beautiful'. Everyone is beautiful these days. They all have inner beauty or outer beauty or spiritual beauty, or some kind of hidden beauty that no-one can understand etc. etc. etc. It's bull. Some people, in fact a very great many, many people, are just true-blue, butt-awful ugly.

Sorry, but that's just the way it is. And to say it isn't, is to insult poor old Angelina. And no-one insults Ange, not on my watch.


It's the same with people claiming damn near everything is 'alive'. Yeast is 'alive' apparently, and Bacteria are full members of the 'alive' club.

I mean hell - I'm holding two living things hostage - I've got a Glock to the temple of the one, and a bottle of Bleach held over the other.


You can only save one of them Punk. Think fast.

To claim this jumped-up pond-scum 'lives' in any real sense beyond the absolute mundanities of biological dogma is in my opinion a serious insult to every truly living being who has ever wept at the graveside; who has been subject to torture or persecution, or ever loved another more than they do themselves.

So, I'm sorry, but to get into my living club, you have to be able to do a little bit more than wiggle your fucking flagella, or blow bubbles in baking bread.

These days even a chip with a few cultured rat-neurons stuck to it is applying for membership.


Is it alive..? Depends on how flexible your definition is. Can it forage..? Can it reproduce..? Can it go on holiday to Ibiza and pull a cashier-girl..?

As for its body - does it have the wherewithal to feel any sense of connectivity or ownership over this apparatus..? Is this keyboard and this internet we write upon in any way part of our bodies..?

If MEART is 'alive' then at best it is alive in the way a chronic brain-damaged coma-patient is alive, the lowest possible ebb, limbs shifting restlessly in the neuronal breeze.

"But Tab, it, it makes makes slightly different grades of scribble in response to changes in its visual enviroment..."

And that qualifies Mr. "Hi I'm a nerve cell strapped to a bit of silicon" to be put in the same catagory as Picasso..?

"Yeah, Rembrant, yeah - er yes, you're over there next to the debatably 'alive' lump of snot stuck to a circuit board, quickly now - the ceremony's about to start..."


Is the slime-trail coming out of a snail's arse art..? Hmm..? It's certainly laid down in a response to the enviroment on the part of the Artist formally known as Brian.

Current conventions of meaning would propose that MEART is a member of the linguistic catagories 'artist' and 'Lifeform'. But they neglect to stress that MEART is part of the catagory "living artist" in the same way that I am part of the linguistic catagories of 'Martian' - in that I occupy the same solar-system as Mars, and a bit of our planet has visited theirs and wasn't told to go away - and also of the catagory 'flower' - in that I enjoy sunshine and need a shower every now and again.

But, and this is the crucial bit so listen up, I am not a good example of either set. Not prototypic; non-intuitive. If I was in the line to be picked for the Martian football team, I would be picked last; and it is unlikely anyone would want to give me to their girlfriend on Valentine's day.

To compare MEART to a human - C'mon. Joe the plumber drops one too many spanners on his head and goes into a persistant vegetative state. How many more spanners would he have to drop to go into a persistant MEART state..?

And anyway - what do we sometimes do to our poor vegetative relatives..? That's right - we switch them off. Why..? Because in our hearts, philosophic debate aside, we know that what made them really alive, is already gone.

But you know what we don't do..? That's right again - We never ever wire our vegetative relatives up to robotic arms and then claim they are just as alive as you or me because "they draw scribbles on bits of paper..."

If we really considered MEART to be alive in any true sense, we would fall all over ourselves to obliterate the poor bastard, and sue the fuck out of the white-coated monsters that allowed a life to be so tortured.


Okay, let's take this somewhere else. MEART gets credit for 'aliveness' due to its ability to react - in the form of differentiated drawings - to the things it 'sees'. Yes..? And that it has some rat neurons connected up to a chipset.

Neurones are just glorified wires, albeit of organic matter, with a few odds and sods chucked in.

How about we take that bit out, and put in a software substitute, of a purely electronic conventional nature, which produced the same, indeed the exact same output varients for simular changes of visual stimulus.

I'm sure then the question of life would not arise.

Why not..?

Because machines, even our most advanced computers, are not classed as alive.

This seems crazy to me. For example:

I bought a robot hoover the other day. It's nocturnal. It comes out at night, and hoovers the living room floor for me, picking up dust and grit much like a coral polyp sieves the sea for nutrients. It uses complex algorithms to avoid stationary objects like chairlegs and also to avoid going over the same bit of floor twice. It senses proximity by the use of sensors studded along its surface. In its memory it carries a map of the room, and uses that to precisely work out where it is.

After it's done, it returns to its cubby hole and backs itself onto the prongs of its recharger, renewing itself for another day.

What - not organic enough for you..?

How about machine 'feeding' - one machine digs the 'food' out of the ground in its crudest form. Let's call that machine the 'teeth'. Another machine factionates crude into its many refined combustable consituents. Let's call that machine the 'digestive system'. More machines ship the various factions to the areas where they are required. let's call that transport system the 'circulation'. Then finally, engines burn that refined fuel to produce heat and movement. Let's call those machines the 'mitochondria'.

The only difference in principle between this technologic 'body' and our own is that the machine body is a dispersed entity - The various operations of its extended metabolism enacted in different places.

Unrealistic..? Non-organic..? Hah. Did you know I eat grass..? That's right, I use this organic machine as a proxy stomach to convert grass into a form of fuel I can process myself. You might have heard of it - its called a 'cow'. Wonderful invention, dunno what I'd do without it. I'm having sunlight for lunch. Yeah, I invented these green stalky machines as an aid to photon capture and transformation. I'm gonna call them plants. Do you think they will catch on..?

ie. having a dispersed digestion system is nothing new. Machines do it, men do it.

So, what is then, the difference between high-level machines, and low level lifeforms..?


In my book, functionally none. If you're going to insist on classing moulds and lichens and corals as 'alive' and autonomous robots as not, then somewhere, something within the next century or so is going to give.

Organic life, at the moment, has the properties of self-repair - healing - and reproduction, as qualities as yet unduplicated in machine-form. However, if you cannot be critically damaged to the point of immobilisation easily - why bother with complex healing mechanisms..? Why not just carry spares..? I mean, what would you rather do - You have an accident and break your leg. Ouch. Would you rather spend six weeks or so in a plaster cast, losing muscle tone and itching like crazy, or simply snap the leg off, turn it into the shop for repair while you parade happily around on your 'second best' leg..? Or imagine perhaps, the next time your car blows a tyre, that maybe you'd better put your car to bed with a hot water bottle and an aspirin, until it's back on its feet.

Reproduction too, like healing, could be considered as a form of self-renewal. Our bodies, however well we look after them, however many pills amd vitamins we tip down our turkey-necks, wear out. We have a cellular sell-by date stamped onto our telomeres so, every generation, as part of its lifecycle, lifeform X. builds and nurtures or otherwise brings into being a 'replacement' body or bodies.

A machine however - why should it *need* to reproduce..? It's not going to die of natural causes within three score years and ten, at least not all at once. And then you have the "axe-blade/axe handle" form of continuous existance - lending it effective immortality. Reproduction is a symptom of the fraility of organic life, not particularly its dominance or superiority.

Immortality at the price of sterility..? Tough one.

So anyway - If we are going to buy into the idea that "Machines are, or at least will be, functionally comparable to some forms of organic life - and therefore either machines of this sort must be regarded as alive, or organic 'life' of that sort must be regarded as machines." Then really, we should refine our definitions of what we regard as 'living' and 'non-living'.

But if we can no longer use function as a basis for distinction, what are we left with..?

The soul.

Oh yeah. You heard me. The soul.

It's okay, don't take me out of your favourites list, I've not gone over to the dark-side, I'm just borrowing a little of their lingo.


Call me crazy, but last night I took a sledgehammer to my TV, and I'll be dammned if I could find the programmes anywhere inside of it. All I found was just a bunch of stuff. Where were the Baywatch babes..? They'd been *right there* only a few minutes before. Bastards.

It's the same kinda thing that happened to those back-street anatomists back in the day, dissecting corpses 'donated' to science by nice men with dirty shovels. Chop and chop but no soul anywhere.

None of the components of a TV are individually alive. But, together, in orchestra, they support a picture, a story, the content of which has very little to do with the mechanics of the device supporting it.

Do you see..?

The [only] difference between the TV and the brain however is that whereas a TV relies on a signal from outside - beamed from a sattelite or sent down a wire - our brains, and the brains of other animals to a degraded extent, do not, they take the basics from outside and begin to generate their own narratives, their own never-ending recursive soap-operas, with themselves as characters. But these stories have nothing to do with the mechanics that support them, just as back episodes of the Family Guy in no way depend on the resistors, semi-conductors and vaccuum tubes of the TV in question for their plot lines.

One other important thing to remember with a TV is that it's ability to carry a picture is not a smoothly linear progression. You cannot start with a single component projecting a really crap, pixellated image, then add more components, resistor by transistor by capacitor, getting a slightly better picture each time. A TV is an either/or device in that it either works, and you can watch your favourite soap, or it doesn't and you're staring at a blank, dead screen. Below a certain threshold of complexity, a brain cannot support the picture of the self.

I am not a bunch of neurones. Just as Homer Simpson is not a collection of transistors. Homer is more - and I am more. I am the standing wave they carry. I am information turning sporadically into action in the world, and then back into information again - like a snail popping its head out of its shell.

I am the story I tell myself.

And that is what MEART lacks, what bacteria, coral and pondscum lack, what machines lack too. The life intangible.

[This is not an appeal to vitalism btw. As in - "The theory or doctrine that life processes arise from or contain a nonmaterial vital principle and cannot be explained entirely as physical and chemical phenomena." Because I'm not saying that all of life's complexities cannot be reduced back into their relevant constituents, but I am saying that the emergent property of a supported informational 'entity' cannot be seen beyond a certain critical point in said deconstruction.]

Still not convinced..?

So, information doesn't matter, life chugs on happily without huh..? Those neurones just flailing about, linking here, linking there, for fun perhaps..? P-A-R-T-Y..?

Okay, say I take your brain, and, without diminishing the total number of your neurones, nor lessening their functionality and conductivity in any way, I simply randomize their connectivity - remove any coherent information the network stored simply through its structure.

Do you think you'd be okay - Just shrug it off..? The body trotting off happily whistling "Ah don't need no edjoo-kay-shun..."

No, you'd be dead. If not right away, then very soon after. Information is crucial to life, crucial to being in a living state.

But is gross biochemistry, vital to life in the same way..? Could I destroy, with alcohol consumption perhaps, a few million brain cells (not to mention a few million liver cells ) without overly impairing my ability to 'live'..? How far can Alzhiemers progress, without the patient turning up their toes..? Years, decades. Hell, you can fire pool-cues through people's heads, and stick knives into their skulls, and sometimes they'll survive.

"This amazing X-ray shows how a man survived being stabbed in the skull with a five-inch knife."

Seems to me the connectivity, the information of me, is as at least as important to life as the biochemical nuts and bolts.

"But Tab, waddabout those widdle biddie bacteria and their other microscopic mates..? Huh..? Huh..? They gotz no information, dey iz stoopid - but dey are still alivez. O Hellz Yeah..!!!"

Aha. S'pose I, without changing the existant proportions of C,G,A, and T or whatever the RNA equivalent is (??Uracil??) in their genomes, I scramble, randomize the order they are in - erasing that information..?

Would those little sea-monkeys be able to shrug that off..?

How about I lop off a few flagella instead..? Or push them down some stairs and damage their cytoskeletons..? Put those fuckers in a full-cell-plastercast..? I think they might survive.

Information is key. Either purely mundane - biochemical/biomechanical - in the form of DNA/RNA with your lower level 'organic machine' forms - or emergent, intangible in the form of network conectivity/complexity and supported autobiographic narrative in the higher lifeforms. And there is the divide.

ie: To be alive, you gots to have soul.

Oh hell yeah.

...Continued...