My mom called to wish me Happy Birthday. I miss my parents, they’re really smart people, and, like, real, too. I’ve been out in the world and it makes me value my family.

My God, it’s a strange place. So big. I’ve consumed massive amounts of media – thousands of books, photographs, music, and film. Literally thousands. Sometimes I can see the Webs of culture and reality floating through my mind. Systems – like Language and Math – systems that wrench experience out of reality. Language and Math are arbitary signs. The sound “Fuck” coming from my mouth has no inherent meaning, it’s just an arbitary collection of phonemes. But people believe in it. So it exists.

But only in the moment. When I picture Culture I picture a million brains, each storing a neural representation of reality. Brains store information as a network of neurons. Culture is a network of brains, connected by Language and Math.

I’ve made up a sort of Network Theory as I’ve studied Cognitive Science. The brain itself is an electrical system. It’s composed of billions of neurons that form the basic unit of the brain. A neuron is a fairly simple cell. I found this picture of one.

A neuron just transmits electricity. It computes a simple equation (some version of the one pictured inside) and it is connected to millions of other neurons through its arms. All it does is fire or not fire. One or Zero. That equation inside the equation calculates all the inputs coming in from other neurons and decides whether or not to fire. That’s the thing about networks, simple components, if you have billions of them, can represent information. That’s how computers work. Ones and Zeros are simple elements, but with enough of them you can represent crazy shit.

Anyways, I think that intelligence is a general property of networks. Social Networks (like Corporations) can support rudimentary intelligence. A company like Bell behaves like an earthworm, eating, fighting off competitors, adapting to its environment. Right now its synapses are people sitting in desks and filing papers, but as tech improves it’s synapses will get faster and faster, until it’s capable of using language, at which point it’s pretty much conscious. Social Networks are currently far shittier than the Brain, but they’re evolving very fast.

Anyways, Ron called and I’m going to meet him at EuroDeli. I think I’ll work on this later. It’s fucking rambling. Oh yeah, and fuck writing possessive it’s as ‘its.’ I do it wrong every time, so I think it’s natural that way. Fuck it, and fuck it’s bullshit grammatical rules. Excuse me.

uhhh, it’s 4 in the morning now. It was good to see Ron. Someone hung some panties from the top of my elevator. They’re red. So, neural networks… Fuck neural networks. Google is going to eat your babies.

Posted on Tuesday, September 2nd, 2003 in Tech.