PhiloMadrid on Skype 6:30pm Sunday 3rd January: Cyborgs

Dear Friends,

First of all Happy New Year 2021!

This Sunday 3rd January 2021 we are discussing: Cyborgs.

This topic was proposed by Ignacio and in my short essay (really) I try
to identify relevant philosophical issues and one of them is to
distinguish between science fiction and reality. And as they say reality
is worse than science fiction.

Cyborgs
https://www.philomadrid.com/2020/12/cyborgs.html


In the meantime you can link to the current news and notices here:
https://www.philomadrid.com/2020/10/news-and-notices.html

-Alfonso has a new website and he gave us link to his latest book of
poems: Después

-Oscar's book on his reflections on COVID-19 is still available

-David J. Butler has published a new book "Absent Friends" regarding the
Cementerio Británico in Madrid

Finally if you have problems with Skype try launching it again if you
have the App or browser.


Best and take care
Lawrence

telephone/WhatsApp: 606081813
Email: philomadrid@gmail.com
http://www.philomadrid.com

PhiloMadrid on Skype 6:30pm Sunday 3rd January: Cyborgs

Cyborgs

 

“Cyborgs” topic by Ignacio

 

Essay by Lawrence

 

This topic is well documented and the entry in Wikipedia covers the subject satisfactorily. It is also a subject that is well and truly mixed up with science fiction, which is not always good news.

 

It seems that what qualifies as a cyborg is that the biological human has physical technologies attached to the person to aid the body function. Furthermore, the artificial parts are there to restore human abilities or to enhance such abilities. Under this definition anyone wearing false teeth, prosthetic devices, pacemakers and so on are cybogs. Unfortunately, we just don`t feel comfortable to call our partner or grandparents cyborgs just because they have a crown or a false tooth implant. And even more this is hardly the stuff of applied philosophy.

 

In a way restorative cyborg implants are also enhancement implants for humans. Hitting hard the coffee table with a prosthetic leg is not the same as hitting the table with one’s shin. In away being a cyborg is cheating evolution. There is no question that restorative implants are a feat of human ingenuity working for the benefit and comfort of the people in need.

 

One aspect of restorative implants is that there seems to be a biological-physical connection: the pacemaker is inside the body. However, with enhancing devises it is not necessary for the machinery to be an integral part of the biological being, it’s enough for the two to be “fitted” to each other to perform a task. Heavy lifting machinery such as bulldozers and forklift trucks can easily qualify as temporary cyborg devices if we think about them as such. Of course, the immediate reaction is to think of these devices as tools which strictly speaking is what they are.

 

In my opinion this is where reality starts encroaching onto science fiction. Replacing a biological part with a mechanical artificial part is certainly a cyborg. Unfortunately this is not the stuff of comic heroes or propaganda illusion to entertain the population. Helping people to regain their faculties and independence has never been the stuff of political propaganda. But attaching a device to one’s arm and lift the family car is the stuff of propaganda.

 

So is RoboCop (all rights respected) a cyborg? And more importantly is such a biological-physical structure possible? By our definition RoboCop is a cyborg even if it is an extreme case of cyborg. Of course, we mustn’t be influence by the weaponry and gadgets attached to the cyborg. Personally I don’t know whether cyborgs can be fitted with such weaponry today, even enhancement cyborgs. Today the military can achieve many things that a few years ago would have qualified as science fiction anyway.

 

Moving on from science fiction, let’s move on to present reality: the reality post Covid-19. It seems that the Covid pandemic has challenged the traditional definition of what is a cyborg. So far the curiosity about cyborgs has been the harmonious existence of biology and metallurgy to maintain the function of the biological being. But this sounds very much Iron Age era mentality using Iron Age solutions.

 

Covid-19 has forcefully brought to our awareness immunological technology in the form of vaccines. Indeed, vaccines have been around for decades, but all of a sudden they’ve assumed the leading role in our life. In effect our immune system is our RoboCop weaponized technology that can fight real aliens in our bodies. Except, that is, vaccines are biological entities that have been artificially manipulated to help our immune system cope with invading viruses. Vaccines not only restore the functions of a compromised immune system, but they also enhance our ability to fight really harmful “bichos”.

 

Today it is accepted that under our definition of cyborg biological materials do qualify as cyborg implants: for example artificial skin. Let’s be clear about one thing, without a functioning vaccine Covid-19 will create a lot of harm to people in the next few years. We might even have to invent miniature breathing devices to help those who have been compromised by the virus. But Covid-19 is not the only culprit here, even though it is the cross hairs of science today.  

 

In reality, therefore, and for practical purposes, are we already cyborgs?

 

Best Lawrence

 

telephone/WhatsApp: 606081813

Email: philomadrid@gmail.com

http://www.philomadrid.com

 

PhiloMadrid on Skype 6:30pm Sunday 27th December: Moderating search content

Dear friends,

Hope you are enjoying the season holidays and looking forward to the new
year.

This Sunday we are discussing: Moderating search content.

The topic was proposed by Ines and I have written a short essay about
the issues we can expect about the topic:
Moderating search content
https://www.philomadrid.com/2020/12/moderating-search-content.html

In the meantime you can link to the current news and notices here:
https://www.philomadrid.com/2020/10/news-and-notices.html

-Alfonso has a new website and he gave us link to his latest book of
poems: Después

-Oscar's book on his reflections on COVID-19 is still available

-David J.Butler has published a new book "Absent Friends" regarding the
Cementerio Británico in Madrid


Finally, the Skype Meeting is on 27th December at 6:30pm: if you don't
have the link already please send me a message. In the meantime
sometimes new members have problems connecting to Skype. Having the
desktop version helps, and the mobile phone version is also useful. For
some reason Skype fails to connect via a browser. Other times you might
need to restart your PC, but once you connect there is no problem.

Best and take care
Lawrence

telephone/WhatsApp: 606081813
Email: philomadrid@gmail.com
http://www.philomadrid.com

PhiloMadrid on Skype 6:30pm Sunday 27th December: Moderating search content

Moderating search content

 

Moderating search content topic by Ines

 

Essay by Lawrence

 

For the purposes of this essay I will not use the names of search engines for trade mark reasons. But first the subject needs clarifying somewhat. The search content is basically the results we receive when we look up something on a search engine. And by moderating we basically mean filtering the content of our search so that we exclude unwanted information and more important information that is fake or biased.

 

The thing is that it is a very long way before we reach the situation when a search engine feeds us sinister content intended to harm us. This is not to say that the content of our search is just perfect and the latest content. So before we can consider what search engines can show us search engines have to make sure they are not including anything that is illegal or defamatory. There are such legitimate documents that maybe ought not to be shared in public. But then again why would someone want to search for something that is illegal?

 

Of course, censorship is quite an emotional subject, but I would argue that if we are going to get involved with something that is subject to censorship then maybe an internet search might not be the most prudent thing to do. But this has nothing to do with our subject because search engines can only deliver what exists on the internet and they have a reference to it, and what the local government allows them to show in their results. Sometimes there are ways round this censorship but it is not the scope of this essay to suggest workarounds.

 

As far as the content of the search is concerned a lot depends on what terms we are searching for. If we just search for the term “Christmas pudding” we’ll end up with some 170,000,000 search results. This is expected, given the time of year I am writing and the subject term. But consider the term “Christmas rebellion” with 60,100,000 search results. We can safely assume that some of these results are biased, include distorted information and might not include some relevant documents. We do know that the Christmas rebellion happened in 1831 on Christmas day when some 60,000 slaves in Jamaica rebelled against their conditions; the rebellion is also known as the Baptist War amongst others.

 

In effect, the more politically sensitive our search term is the more we are likely to come across some dubious results in our search. What also matters is not only what we search for, but how we search for what we are looking for. I can safely assume that when I searched for Christmas pudding in my browser hardly any documents in Spanish would have been included in the search. And even when I searched for Christmas rebellion I am sure that Spanish documents were way back in the results if at all. It wasn’t until I searched for “rebelión jamaica 1832 es” that I go a decent count of about 165,000 in Spanish entries about the rebellion.

 

This leads us to a key problem in philosophy: language. Now it is true that by now the search engine I use would “know” that I usually search for documents in English, and I need not reveal my language settings! But usually I do get a mix of documents in Spanish and English; which is annoying when I only want Spanish documents. It is no surprise that we usually do not receive links to other documents in other countries or languages unless we push the search engine for such results. But then again how many people would want to receive relevant documents in Japanese?

 

The language problem is precisely that search engines are biased towards the language for our computer is set for, the location we are making our search from, and of course the language of our search. For better or for worse English is the predominant language on the internet although this is mitigated by many companies having multi-language web sites. And today translation sites are quite useful for functional translations. However, for our purposes what matters is not the language of our search term but rather the language of the documents we are provided with.

 

We can safely assume that most of us can cope with one or two other languages besides our native language but there are far more languages on Earth than just what we know. In other words, the internet has got more documents in the public domain than we can possible read or can read. So for the search term “covid safety” I got 5,610,000,000 results; I then cheated a bit and translated “covid safety” into Japanese (covid安全) and got 277,000,000 results. I also got no documents in English when I searched the Japanese terms. The implication is that language plays an import part in our in our searching habits. We can assume that some of the 5.6billion English entries for “covid safety” include a number of suspicious documents, but I doubt we can find an equally offending document in the Japanese results unless we are fluent in Japanese.

 

As I have already mentioned we can get a decent translation of a document on the internet, but that does not mitigate the fact that we are limited by language of what we can access even if it was true. But going back to our standard searches language might also be an issue why we do not always find what we are looking for. And this gives us a false impression that maybe what we are looking for does not exist. Well, if we’re searching for a seriously strange term it might very well be that there is nothing to find about the term. But for normal searches we can assume that the information does exist we just have to know how to search for it.

 

The 140+ search engines available on the internet do not all do the same type of searches. Many are country specific, many others specialise in images or videos and of course there many science based search engines looking specifically at science databases. But one feature all search engines have is an advanced search feature. This feature could help filter results by date and a variety of logic terms such as AND or OR. In effect search engines have many functions to help us home in on the right document we are looking for. We can, therefore, safely assume that there must be some document somewhere on the internet that I am looking for.

 

Knowing how to search the internet is one of the key skills we need to have in the information age. The second most important skill is to be able to identify the correct information we are looking for. Scepticism in philosophy is not an ideology for self immobilisation but more like not trust anything or anyone until we are satisfied we’ve got what we are looking for. Today we need to know what we are looking for before we find it.

 

Best Lawrence

 

 

telephone/WhatsApp: 606081813

Email: philomadrid@gmail.com

http://www.philomadrid.com

 

 

 

PhiloMadrid on Skype 6:30pm Sunday 20th December: TV Content today,,

Dear Friends,

This Sunday we are talking about: TV Content today.

The topic was proposed by Ignacio and is quite appropriate given that in
the next few weeks we would be doing more TV watching than the rest of
the year because of the holiday. If, that is, it is possible to watch
more television in the age of the pandemic!! In my short essay I discuss
the then and now issues of TV content.

TV content today by Lawrence
https://www.philomadrid.com/2020/12/tv-content-today.html

In the meantime you can link to the current news and notices here:
https://www.philomadrid.com/2020/10/news-and-notices.html

-FROM Miguel
Celebration of Mind monthly conferences

-Alfonso has a new website and he gave us link to his latest book of
poems: Después

-Oscar's book on his reflections on COVID-19 is still available

-David J.Butler has published a new book "Absent Friends" regarding the
Cementerio Británico in Madrid


Finally, the Skype Meeting is on 20th December at 6:30pm: if you don't
have the link already please send me a message. In the meantime
sometimes new members have problems connecting to Skype. Having the
desktop version helps, and the mobile phone version is also useful. For
some reason Skype fails to connect via a browser. Other times you might
need to restart your PC, but once you connect there is no problem.

Best and take care
Lawrence

telephone/WhatsApp: 606081813
Email: philomadrid@gmail.com
http://www.philomadrid.com

PhiloMadrid on Skype 6:30pm Sunday 20th December: TV Content today

Celebration of Mind

 

Estimado tertuliano:

Te anunciamos el evento que sigue.

Te deseamos muy Felices Fiestas y muy buen año 2021.

Tertulia de Matemáticas

Si quieres:

- impartir una conferencia en la tertulia envíanos un mensaje de correo para tratar los detalles

- darte de baja en la lista de correo envía otro con "Baja" en el campo "Asunto" del mensaje.

- difundir una noticia de contenido matemático puedes enviárnosla

We are now hosting CoM presentations every month on the 21st day. They are listed at:  https://www.gathering4gardner.org/category/com-virtual-events/ “Performing Magic on the Virtual Stage” by Nathaniel Segal will be on Monday, December 21, 2020 at 12 noon EST. See https://www.gathering4gardner.org/com-show-performing-magic-on-the-virtual-stage for full information. We will kick off 2021 with Susan Goldstine presenting on Thursday, January 21, 2021 at 12 noon EST. Check online for details closer to the event. We promise the videos of all of these will appear on our YouTube channel, the first ones will be there before 2020 is over. The 14th Gathering 4 Gardner conference (G4G14) has been rescheduled once more, due to COVID-19. The new dates are October 20 through 24, 2021. G4G14 Information After many years of service as G4G Board President, Erik Demaine has decided to step down due to his busy schedule. We would like to thank him for his numerous contributions to G4G. Vickie Kearn is the newly elected G4G Board President.   Sincerely, Katie LaSeur, Creative Director & Bookkeeper G4G Board of Directors: Nancy Blachman, Chair Vickie Kearn, President Colm Mulcahy, Vice President Robert Crease, Secretary Rick Sommer, Treasurer Jim Gardner, Board Member Bob Hearn, Board Member Robert Vallin, Board Member Jade Vinson, Board Member Scott Vorthmann, Board Member Copyright © 2020 Gathering 4 Gardner, All Rights Reserved. You are on this list because you expressed interest in Gathering 4 Gardner or Celebration of Mind. Our mailing address is: Gathering 4 Gardner 2885 Sanford Ave SW #39552 Grandville, MI  49418 Add us to your address book No longer wish to receive these emails? unsubscribe from our newsletter or unsubscribe from all G4G emails*  (*Please be aware, this includes event updates.)

TV content today

 

TV content today topic by Ignacio

 

Essay by Lawrence

 

I am not too well informed about the TV content of local terrestrial stations. I just don’t watch too much traditional TV. But this is me because I never relied on a single media source to inform and entertain myself. So this is why I also use other media such as radio, social media platforms and until recently did a low level of photo journalism.

 

The problem with TV in general and TV content in particular, is that digital technologies are much better and more efficient at moving large quantities of information to TV sets. And TV content is no longer a film, the news, a debate, but rather an investment and brands in their right with marketing strategies. The evening news programme is no longer just the news, but a 24/7 information machine that appears on your TV set, and also on social media platforms, image social media and a website that just repeats the news contents. News readers are no longer news readers but also professionals when they interview people in authority or power. Most important of all TV content is very expensive to create and requires a lot of people to be creative.

 

In effect TV viewing and TV content are now under a new operating model. In the past we just waited for the TV to give us a bunch of programmes and we had no choice. Today TV content is practically a matter of content on demand. If we don’t like the movie that is on a particular station we just look for another movie on another channel.  And if that is not enough we can also use the TV set to view videos from video social media. Indeed if we are not using the TV set to comfortably view certain social media content it is just a set occupying space and collecting dust.

 

The down side of content on demand is firstly, we have to pay for it. We have to pay for the wi-fi connection, we have to pay for subscriptions, and still need other devices to see or view content such as mobile phones, tablets and PCs. Secondly, we have to spend energy and effort to find the content we are interested. As I said, in the past we watched what was given to us, today we are hunter gatherers looking for interesting TV content. And life is not easy as a hunter gather, sometimes we are lucky but most times we are just get nowhere.

 

There seems to be an evolutionary movement with TV content. The medium is limited to the amount of information it can transmit. The more information the medium can transmit the more content it requires. Today it seems that the medium can transmit more information than what is available as unique content. Unfortunately we still haven’t solved the problem of repeats. In the past repeats were shown every number of months or years, today repeats can well be within a 24 or 48 hour period. The answer to repeats today is to channel hop until we find something interesting. In the past because content was scarce TV channels shut down for the night.

 

If we move away from the traditional TV of content push from the different channels to a content pull model from whatever source we have access to, we are then limited by the dreaded “algorithm”. Social media, which are today by far the most followed source of information and entertainment, are first and foremost for profit businesses. In effect social media are data miners and sell data packages out user based information to other businesses. It is well know that today social media companies capture a very high level of advertising dollars making them very rich and profitable at the expense of traditional media.

 

So, algorithms are used to channel watchable content to receptive audience who are more likely to click on advertising content than if they did not like the content (it’s all about the number of seconds the viewer spends watching a particular content). Feedback, our feedback, is very important today although outliers have always been a headache for most data managers thus these algorithms cannot cope with too much diversity in a viewer. Speaking for myself, today some 80% of the feed from a popular network social media is based on brexit because that is the only subject I interact most. But instead of showing me more content from the 20% subject they tend to repeat from the 80% content.

 

Unfortunately, the legal and political echo bubble of TV content also applies to social media. Content today is subject to legal and political interference not just for moral and political censorship but more for copyright and data protection. Many times we come across videos on social media not available in our country. In the case of Spain it’s because in the distant past of Spain, copyright infringement was very common and uncontrolled and some creators are afraid to show. There many other reasons why content is blocked. And even if this is not a matter of copyright other issues might conflict with the profit interests of social media platforms, for example who is a copyright holder? Of course, there are also limitations on what is available to viewers usually based on what is forbidden due to criminal indecency.

 

Political censorship has always been a factor in traditional TV content and today in social media. In the past political censorship was mostly to protect the ideology of the government, the dictatorship or the national patriotism; in the USA it was always to protect the American dream otherwise known as consumerism, or the Soviet with their Marxist communism otherwise known are oppression. Today censorship is more a task of protecting people from the reality of the world: wars without blood, an emaciated starving child rather than a pile of dead corpses. The less people know the less they are to be alienated by the doings of people who have their finger on the money printing machine.

 

In the past, information was limited and mostly inaccessible to most people, today information is available by the terabytes per seconds and includes everything there is to know. And that makes it very difficult to find the few bytes of information we need or want. Traditional TV content today as a source of information and entertainment is mostly redundant or simply a manipulative source for one ideology or another.

 

The challenge today is to wake up from the mesmerising effect of traditional TV media content and quickly relearn our hunter gatherer skills: spend more than five minutes searching a topic on the internet.

 

 

Best and take care

Lawrence

 

telephone/WhatsApp: 606081813

Email: philomadrid@gmail.com

http://www.philomadrid.com