thinking the television on

Cybernetic research is starting to pay dividends for quadraplegics. From BBC news:

Matthew Nagle, 25, was left paralysed from the neck down and confined to a wheelchair after a knife attack in 2001.
The pioneering surgery at New England Sinai Hospital, Massachusetts, last summer means he can now control everyday objects by thought alone.
The brain chip reads his mind and sends the thoughts to a computer to decipher.

This type of application, called BrainGate, involves placing a small chip with a hundred electrodes onto the surface of the brain itself. It directly interacts with the neurons. The chip can recieve signals from nearby neurons, and over time, the person learns to control the impulses going into the chip in their head to a greater and greater degree. This demonstrates the remarkable plasticity and adaptability of the human brain.
So currently the technology exists for quadraplegics to control a mouse on a computer screen, and switch the television on and off, with nothing more than thoughts. This technology is only going to improve. In fact, cybernetics generally is set to explode over the next couple of decades.
For example, here in Memphis, there is a company that has developed prosthetic joints for children. What's so special about them? They grow as the child grows, so that the child does not have to go in for multiple operations at different stages of development. Through slowly extending the parts of the prothesis, the child must only endure a single operation.
Brain-electrode interaction is relatively new, but it is building on a line of research going back several decades. For some time, biofeedback has been known to benefit certain types of illness, such as anxiety, blood pressure and even epilepsy. Biofeedback is where you get feedback on real-time changes in your body, so that you can learn to control it better. As noted on psychotherapy.com, using bathroom scales to monitor weight is actually a crude form of biofeedback, but this is not what we usually mean by the word.
Epileptics that are allowed to watch real-time recordings of their EEG are able to sometimes control or ameliorate epileptic spikes, which show up clearly on an EEG recording. People suffering anxiety or blood pressure, who have feedback on their heart rate, GSR (sweaty hands) and blood pressure can learn to control those symptoms.
Monitoring, accessing, and responding to internal body and brain processes has been used for various purposes for some time. Brain chips are simply the next step... and not the last.

the time travel illusion

It's been an interesting week for time travel. For those of you who have been cavorting around in the 26th Century, let me fill you in. First, there was an article saying that time travel is impossible. Then only days later, another article from a different venue virtually telling us to get our advance TARDIS bookings.
From sfgate.com comes a quote from time researcher David Miller:

"If you have the block universe view, the future and the past are not any different, so there's no reason why you can't have causes from the future just as you have causes from the past," says David Miller of the Centre for Time at the University of Sydney in Australia.

The 'block universe', by the way, is a reference to Einstein's theory that time is simply another dimension, the fourth dimension, in the space time continuum. Therefore, time unfolding is an illusion, because we are simply traveling a path through a static space-time "space".
But the nay-sayers have a different view. Over at Livescience, Charles Liu of the City University of New York (CUNY), says time travel is impossible">time travel is impossible.

Mathematically one can go backwards or forwards in the three spatial dimensions. But time doesn’t share this multi-directional freedom.
"In this four-dimensional space-time, you’re only able to move forward in time," Liu told LiveScience.

So which is it?
One argument against time travel is the existence of multiple paradoxes, explored at length in science fiction. For example, imagine you go back in time and change the past. For example, you stop World War I from happening. Okay, then wouldn't World War I already have stopped? Even if time travel is invented in 300 years from now and someone goes back and prevents World War I from ever occuring, why are we living in a universe where it happened? The standard scifi explanation for this is the creation of multiple timelines, one where it happened and one where it didn't, but that seems like a cop-out that creates more problems than it solves. For example, what if multiple time travelers from multiple timelines travel back and erase each other's timelines? The problems multiply to absurdity, and it is exactly these absurd paradoxical tangles that lead many to blow the whistle.
While time-travel paradoxes are an argument against its possibility, they are not a knock-out blow. After all, paradoxes arise quite naturally in the real world. Take Bertrand Russell's grouping paradox, which blew his mind so much that he abandoned his current research and divorced his wife. Or the simple sentence "This sentence is false." You don't need a time machine to create it, just a pen and paper. Or a voice, for that matter.
To me, the most damning evidence against the possibility of time travel is a combination of two facts. First, the fact that time moves inexorably forwards, and always has. Second, there's no hard evidence that anything else is possible. Hume's dictum "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence," tends to rule it out. Indeed there are theoretical reasons for believing in it, but no evidentiary ones.
And purely theoretical claims seem to me to be prone to unseen fallibilities.
Zeno's paradox looks particularly good on paper, for example. According to Aristotle, Zeno's paradox goes like this:

In a race, the quickest runner can never overtake the slowest, since the pursuer must first reach the point whence the pursued started, so that the slower must always hold a lead.

The classic scenario is a race between Achilles and a tortoise. The tortoise gets a hundred foot headstart. Achilles runs as fast as he can. When he gets to where the tortoise started, the tortoise has traveled ten feet. Achilles keeps running, but when he gets ten feet further, the tortoise has gone another foot. Achilles keeps running, but the tortoise has moved on again. It seems he can never catch the tortoise.
Of course, Zeno's paradox is not a paradox at all: it is simply a clever illusion created by the way the race is described. Mathematicians have had a lot of fun with finding explanations for it. I mention Zeno's paradox not to draw parallels with time travel paradoxes or the like. Rather, it is an example of a situation where the way you look at something can lead you astray.
Perhaps the way Einstein described time - it’s just another dimension - encourages us to look at time the wrong way, like a room we don’t have the key to. And perhaps thinking of time as "on a line" - like a historical timeline - encourages us to imagine something you can walk back and forth along, when in fact, an arrow or a wave might be more appropriate.
Some metaphors make time travel seem quite possible. Other metaphors, like the arrow, make the idea not just impossible, but incomprehensible. Are our metaphors locking us in or out (to use another metaphor)? Metaphors drive intuitions, especially scientific intuitions.
Perhaps it’s an arrow, perhaps it’s a river, perhaps it’s an hourglass. Perhaps it’s a road with traffic in both directions.
My money is on the arrow.

"We all have our time machines. Some take us back, they're called memories. Some take us forward, they're called dreams." -Jeremy Irons in The Time Machine (2002)

paradoxes in science fiction

A paradox is a curious thing, because paradoxes seem to emerge out of thin air.
The classic linguistic paradox is the sentence, This statement is false. If it's false, then it must be true, which means it's false, etc. The weird thing is that although someone, somewhere first invented that paradox, it has the feel of something that was already there, out there, waiting to be discovered rather than invented.
Philosphers have noted that paradoxes arise out of being an observer, a commentator trying to describe reality, rather than just an object in the universe. This statement is false works as a paradox because it is an attempt by an observer -the person who wrote the sentence- to describe one small piece of the universe: the sentence itself. In doing so, it turns in on itself, leading to a linguistic hall of mirrors.
Science fiction is fertile ground for the exploration of paradoxes, because of the ability to explore the boundaries of observation. In particular, the tools with which science fiction writers explore paradoxes are time travel (observing time in a non-linear sequence); androids (machine observers); and symbiosis (where the boundary between observers becomes blurred).
Philip K Dick is one science fiction writer who loved to explore paradoxes in his writing. He is, I believe, the heir to Joseph Heller. I recently posted an essay on paradoxes in the work of Philip K Dick at pkdick.com. Philip K Dick uses paradoxes, catch-22's, and contradictions to trap his characters, and to force them to confront their own mortal boundaries.