A Knock at the Door

Note: This is structured as a report being re-assembled after it's recovered from a badly damaged server circa mid-2025; data originally assembled ~2018
=== CELLULAR AUTOMATA ===
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/cellular-automata/
"Despite functioning in a different way from traditional, Turing machine-like devices, CA with suitable rules can emulate a universal Turing machine, and therefore compute, given Turing's Thesis, anything computable."
"The mark of CA consists in their displaying 
complex emergent behavior, starting from simple atoms deterministically following simple local rules."
http://natureofcode.com/book/chapter-7-cellular-automata/
https://vserver1.cscs.lsa.umich.edu/~crshalizi/notebooks/self-organization.html
=== BEHAVIOR IN AUTONOMOUS AGENTS ===
http://natureofcode.com/book/chapter-6-autonomous-agents/
"An autonomous agent processes the information from its environment and calculates an action."
"An autonomous agent has no leader .... As we get to the end of this chapter and examine group behaviors, we will look at designing collections of autonomous agents that exhibit the properties of complex systems— intelligent and structured group dynamics that emerge not from a leader, but from the local interactions of the elements themselves."
http://www.sigchi.org/chi96/proceedings/demos/Resnick/mjr_txt.htm
"StarLogo is programmable modeling environment designed to help nonexpert users (in particular, precollege students) model and explore decentralized systems, such as ant colonies and market economies. People often have difficulty understanding the workings of such systems. By using StarLogo, people can move beyond the "centralized mindset" -- that is, they begin to understand how patterns can arise through decentralized interactions, not from the dictates of a centralized authority."
"If a person has only a hammer, the whole world looks like a nail."
http://www.slnova.org/  
https://vserver1.cscs.lsa.umich.edu/~crshalizi/research/RSBBS.pdf
"... to the extent that cognitive scientists respond to philosophers by just shrugging and going off to another room, the conversation winds down; to the extent that they argue back, it continues."
"The original considerations that led to the development of functionalism were, as it happens, primarily drawn from issues in the sciences of behavior: a response simultaneously to a simplistic behaviorist equivalence of behavior and psychological state, and to the apparent “chauvinism” of expecting that the specific mechanisms which accounted for psychological states in humans should be regarded as reductive explanations of those states in general."
"Traditional behaviorism identified mental states with dispositions to particular behaviors, and hence expected that mental states – insofar as these were of scientific significance at all – could be read directly off surface behavior, so reference to behavior could, and should, replace reference to mental states. One objection to this program pointed out that if mental states can, as seems likely, interact with one another, then there will be neither fixed nor simple pairings of mental states and dispositions to particular behaviors."
"This line of thinking suggests a place for intermediate causal roles played by (at least initially) unobservable states between stimulus and response."
"The other way of motivating functionalism is, then, to note that the 
proposed reduction is open to a charge of 'chauvinism' (Block 1980b), because even if the biconditional linking pain and C-fiber activity in humans held, there presumably could be, or already were, agents physiologically different from humans that nonetheless experienced pain. So, in what came to be the standard jargon, even if something involving C-fibers were that which realized pain in people, the role of pain could be realized in different ways in other types of agent. This, in a nutshell, is the multiple realization argument against type-type reductionism for psychological states, and, by implication, an argument for a science of psychology that spans differences in realization."
"... also allows two importantly different ways of being a functionalist. The difference turns on whether one is inclined to identify the functional states with the role they play, or with what is the realizer of that role in a given case. Put another way, a functionalist might think that “pain” or “money” pick out either the property of having some other (physical) property that realizes pain or money, or that, properly analyzed, they pick out C-fibers firing or dollar bills. Saying that the description of the functional state picks out the role indicates commitment to the view that even though their realizers could be very different, humans and, say, Martians could be in the same mental state when in pain. On the other hand, tying the function to the realizer entails that humans in pain and Martians in pain are in different states, perhaps different types of pain, just because the realizers of the roles in each case are different."
"From the perspective of realizer functionalism, the role variety rides roughshod over distinctions that need to be taken seriously. So the equivalence of a hundred dollar bill, a check for the same amount, and a bag of coins with a total value of a hundred dollars does not amount to much when we have to try and
say something about why we can only use one of them in a vending machine, or why only one of them can be bounced by a bank. On the other hand, from the perspective of role functionalism, too much attention to the realizers amounts to abandoning the apparent unity of many apparently powerful and useful generalizations. Qua 'money,' it has to be granted, there is a deep sense in which any realization of one hundred dollars just is the same." 
“His problem, therefore, is to provide an answer to the question: 'Given that every physical event that has a
cause has a physical cause, how is a mental cause also possible?' (Kim 1998, p.38). This is the problem of 'finding a place' (p.2) for mind in a physical world, given the causal closure of physics.”
hive/colony communication
differentiation within a hive/colony
command structure in a hive/colony
cell communication
differentiation between brain and eye
== One: Coucheth at the door? Or a neighbor's persistent knocking? ==
attack: San Francisco
start of traced activity from Sydney IP
attack:    Manila
substantial increase of traced activity from Sydney IP
shipping logged to Sydney IP
attack: Cabo San Lucas
traced activity from Sydney IP 
refrigerated shipping logged to Sydney IP
audio file uploaded, "live stream", private content
attack: Sydney
defensive bombing of Sydney
significant damage to infrastructure
Sydney IP address confirmed non-existent
attack: Vancouver
a collective with a linked hivemind would yield a "single" collective consciousness. The behavior of the interacting kaiju does not imply that there is any individuation at all, nor is there any reason to think that such a collective would function in a way distinguishable from a single organism. Furthermore, the fact that a collective is persistent beyond the lifespan of any individual member, combined with the lack of individuation -- and its consequential lack of the potential for loneliness -- means that with a fully linked existence there would not be any significance to or feeling of reality in such a thing as "death" beyond a cul-de-sac of the reasoning, motor, and perceptual capacity of a given creature. Cessation of function in one element of a unity which generates/produces new entities as deftly and as particularly as the kaiju colony does would mean little to nothing -- human beings do not 
appear to mourn the loss of their own blood cells, even in significant number unless it causes a cessation of function. 
Men interact with these creatures as if they were men. When men attack other men, the goal is to kill -- to end the life of an individual forever or to prevent the individual from taking a certain action -- and there is often a certain set of emotions behind the attack behaviors. But the emotion of the kaiju being(s) facing physical destruction would not be expected to correlate with that of a finite, individuated creature with social attachments to other finite individuated creatures. 
Instead, what would that emotion be? What would the motive of a creature be, who interacted with beings so utterly alien and seemingly inferior in every way? The world is not conducive to the kaiju's ease of living. There are not superior technologies to admire. Even as far as raw materials, the creatures do not seem to show any interest in anything about the material of the planet. In fact, they ignore all non-human life. 
Whom does kaiju attack? Why does kaiju attack? It is significant that, even with humans, the kaiju's sole mode is to destroy. Humans are not equipped to conceive of anything beyond the hindrance of their experience as individuals, but there is a way to obtain this information -- a way to illuminate a motive for the kaiju. Start with presuming that the interactions are worthwhile, and observe what actions are chosen.
If human beings are worth interacting with and stirring a reaction is itself a goal, what is the reaction that is being stirred up by the kaiju? Their few early and "random" encounters indicate a priority of attacking based partially on convenience and availability, but partially on population density. They like cities. They like great cost. They also appear to be focusing attacks on countries with great economic and industrial capacity. The kaiju want for nothing as far as has been observed. So, in absence of any accessible motive, humans are left to look at the behaviors and their function thus far. 
So far, kaiju have simply failed to interact compellingly with humans in any mode other than face-to-face combat. In the process of offering this face-to-face combat, the kaiju seem to have remained unchanged. But the human populace has acquired several significant new tricks: 
Humans learned to build enormous battle machines. 
Humans learned to combine their efforts on a planetary scale.
Humans have built a neural bridge. 
It is not a coincidence that the only "weapon" to have had any effect on the kaiju is the one which is built upon the strengths of human unconscious adaptability and the strengths of the greatest human social bonds. It is no accident that our only successful form in our interactions with kaiju has been achieved by overcoming the biggest difference between kaiju and human forms of mind.
The terror, and the deaths, and the destruction -- these are unignorable to human beings.
But what if these things are just the sound of a knock at the door? What does one do when there is a knock at one's door?
Necessity is the mother of invention, and there is no adaptation without challenge.
Cannot the true answer for what motivates the kaiju simply be that it is not possible for the strike of the hammer to be effective until after the iron is made hot?
https://vserver1.cscs.lsa.umich.edu/~crshalizi/notebooks/qwerty.html
"CA were not invented, however, to be realistic models of Nature. They started with John von Neumann, who wanted to study self-reproduction, and decided that the first thing to do was ignore everything biologists had learned about the way actually existing organisms reproduce themselves. This is known as hubris, and is especially galling when it works. Von Neumann was able to prove that a certain CA can have a "general constructive automaton," a configuration of states which can 
construct almost any configuration of states."
https://vserver1.cscs.lsa.umich.edu/~crshalizi/notebooks/qwerty.html
"QWERTY has become a general name for such 'lock-ins' in technology and economics, also known as 'path-dependence' (a mangled bit of physics jargon). It is held to result from 'switching costs'. These take two forms. One is what we might call pure switching costs; the opportunity cost of obtaining, installing and learning to use a new technology. (Once you've learned to touch-type, learning a new layout is a true pain.) The other form of switching cost is due to 'network externalities,' or 'external increasing returns'. Normally economic analysis assumes constant or decreasing returns, i.e. that each additional unit of resources devoted to a task brings the same return or less as the last unit. Increasing returns stand this on its head: unit of resources n+1 has a larger return than unit n. Many real-world production technologies show increasing returns, simply because they operate more efficiently at high volume, but what we're looking at here is different. The technology per se is not more efficient when it's more widely employed --- but it is more valuable. The more common QWERTY keyboards are, the more useful it is to learn them rather than, say, ABCDEF, or the Dvorak keyboard. In turn, the more people know how the QWERTY layout, the better it is to be selling that, rather than one of its competitors, and the better it is to by buying them for your employees. Hence there are increasing returns in the number of QWERTY keyboards in place, and this is due to the value of the "network" of such keyboards. Leaving that network imposes a switching cost, even if there is absolutely no difference in intrinsic merit between the product and its competitors. Note that the technology with the largest network will, all else being equal, grow at the expense of its rivals, since that is the one with the most valuable network externalities (and hence the highest switching costs to leave)."
"To put it a bit differently, lock-in can lead to market failure. Suppose that, if we could all agree to switch to some non-QWERTY keyboard layout, we would all, in the long run, be better off; so much better off that we still come out ahead after paying the switching costs. (It is claimed, for instance, that the "Dvorak" keyboard is measurably faster than QWERTY; see West below.) Normally, economists would expect that competition forces participants in markets to adopt the most efficient technology available, but that's not necessarily true in this case. If you switch, but none of your competitors do, you pay the immediate, short-run switching costs, but they don't, and you lose all the extra value from the increasing-returns-to-scale of employing the most common technology. In a word, you lose. (Technically: unless the discounted present value of the gain from adopting the new technology exceeds the switching cost, sticking with the old technology is a Nash equilibrium but not Pareto-efficient.) Some people, who have an unnatural affection for market allocation, find this prospect very troubling, and have devoted great efforts to arguing that, e.g., the QWERTY layout really is the most efficient, and indeed even that Microsoft Windows is the best of all possible operating systems."
== Two: Hammers and nails and a knock at the door. ==
"If a person has only a hammer, the whole world looks like a nail."
A collective with a linked hivemind would yield a "single" collective consciousness. 
Kaiju actions which humans and human pilots react to as indicative of the presence of an individual mind seated in the single visible and accessible Kaiju body can also be explained as initiated on behalf of collective interest. In fact, the repeated, gory, painful sacrifice of individual bodily entities suggests at an absolute minimum an overriding and strong collective identity. But there is more to it than just a simple yet compelling collective identity shared by individuals. Purposeful suicide missions among humans is a clue to what the kaiju mind may hold. 
When humans use suicide to kill other humans, the technique is often claimed to be a bi-product of desperation and lack of reason to hope in any other method. This does appear to be the case for individuals who are not already deeply invested in a collective. Humans in psychological isolation have a pattern of ending their own lives. A small percentage who reach this point, arrive at that end by lashing out at other humans with deadly force and ending their own lives -- or making an attempt -- in close succession to the application of deadly force against other humans. 
However, human beings who are not psychologically isolated also attack via suicide. A human who has a deep connection to a collective of other humans and who wishes to express the depth of their committment to the collective good will also attack other humans with deadly force irrespective of the preservation of their own life, sometimes even with the intentional sacrifice of their own life being an ancillary goal. When the sacrifice is intentional, the motivation for finite individual humans is often openly admitted to be self-preservation. The suicide-through-attack is expected to serve the attacker as a conveyance of their value as humans, their identity as individuals, or even their personalities into an eternal, deathless form. Some speak of physical experiences and consciousness promised after death, but for many the motive is solely the eternal memory of the act of suicide and the memory of the actor in the minds of those humans who were not killed.
Again, this is a human mode brought forward as a comparison. Kaiju are not human, but the idea of a permanent, undying, immortal existance as an enabler of behavior that would in humans be self-sacrificial bears examination.
The greatest and most keenly felt omission in the human experience is the absence of collective awareness. Humans address this absence in myriad ways -- through religion, through competitive sports, through spiritual endeavor, through love, through family, through the passing of narratives between individuals and generations, through societal and cultural identity, through language, through fantasy, through music, through film -- all the time and resources spent on redressing this absence show that it is unignorable to human beings. But one of the most concrete ways that humans came to address this absence of collective awareness was through building a worldwide edifice allowing realtime datasharing between individuals. All this energy spent towards bridging the consciousnesses of individual humans together suggests that human beings find their individual separateness intolerable.
During this time of contact with the kaiju, humans have finally been able  to make a technical development overcoming the absence of collective awareness through linking a minimum of three individual minds to share control of a being specifically created to meet with kaiju face to face, in combat. The process was costly -- a single individual human cannot bear the link directly with a non-human individual mind without death occuring immediately as a result. Eventually it was found that with a minimum of two, connection with a non-human individual was possible without death. 
Strangely, though all humans have a potential to link with a non-human individual, not all humans are able to do so with all other humans. A human must have a pre-existing non-neural link established with another human counterpart in order to successfully join minds in the triad required for control of a being created for combat. A human who tries to establish neural linkage with an incompatible human counterpart will experience a sudden restoration of psychological isolation/individuation via either a reflection defense or the involuntary initiation of a self-referential and infinitely iterative 
algorithm -- recorded as a retraction into hyperreality.
The only method successfully used to confirm human pairs who will be able to compatibly engage in the triad mindform is hand-to-hand combat between equals. The desired quality is that of dialogue and focus -- an ability on the part of each individual to achieve flow state while interacting with the other. 
Uncoincidentally, Kaiju have utterly devastated all human attempts to defeat without using hand-to-hand contact.
Category:Ficlet
Category:Work in Progress