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The Fuzzy Future: From Society and Science to Heaven in a Chip
Who draws the line in the digital age? Those with the most power? Does the digital age even have black-and-white parameters? Where does one country's Internet jurisdiction end and an-other country's begin? Who owns the ocean or the moon -- or even you? Would you be you if a chip replaced your brain?
Fuzzy logic has been the most explosive new concept in science since chaos theory. Now, Bart Kosko, the leading proponent of this revolutionary worldview, tackles these questions and shows how fuzzy thinking will shape every aspect of life in the digital age, from politics and genetics, to warfare and technology and art, and finally to mortality itself. The Fuzzy Future starts with a self-contained explanation of fuzzy logic and then explores how shades of gray, or fuzz, will change how we vote, pay taxes, fund science, shop on the Internet, view abortion, have children, fish the oceans, wage "smart" wars or create "smart" art, raise machine IQs, invest money, view black holes, and confide in our software agents. It also shows us how we may someday challenge death in the digital immortality of a nanochip. Today camcorders, Internet spam filters, nuclear power plants, and the new Volkswagen Beetle depend on fuzzy logic. Tomorrow we may, too, because the future is fuzzy.
Fuzzy logic has been the most explosive new concept in science since chaos theory. Now, Bart Kosko, the leading proponent of this revolutionary worldview, tackles these questions and shows how fuzzy thinking will shape every aspect of life in the digital age, from politics and genetics, to warfare and technology and art, and finally to mortality itself. The Fuzzy Future starts with a self-contained explanation of fuzzy logic and then explores how shades of gray, or fuzz, will change how we vote, pay taxes, fund science, shop on the Internet, view abortion, have children, fish the oceans, wage "smart" wars or create "smart" art, raise machine IQs, invest money, view black holes, and confide in our software agents. It also shows us how we may someday challenge death in the digital immortality of a nanochip. Today camcorders, Internet spam filters, nuclear power plants, and the new Volkswagen Beetle depend on fuzzy logic. Tomorrow we may, too, because the future is fuzzy.
384 pages, Hardcover
First published August 17, 1999
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June 18, 2024
KOSKO TAKES HIS “FUZZY LOGIC” INTO A BROAD LIST OF AREAS
Bart Andrew Kosko (born 1960) is professor of electrical engineering and law at the University of Southern California. He wrote in the Preface of this 1999 book, “Suppose we replace your brain with a computer chip. How would you change? Would you still be you?... Would you think only black-and-white digital thoughts?... Or would your mind use fuzzy logic? Would your thoughts be fuzzy or gray? This book looks at such fuzzy or gray issues as they arise in the digital age. But just what do these terms mean?... The term fuzzy means shades of gray between 0% and 100%. Most concepts are fuzzy because they have inexact borders… These concepts have opposites that shade into each other.” (Pg. xi)
He continues, “The irony of the digital age is that things are fuzzier than ever. Fuzz grows as the bits pour in. More precise ‘facts’ have not made it easier to draw a line that decides whether a fetus is alive … or whether crashing a country’s banking software is an act of war… The digital age has its own uncertainty principle:
Issues get fuzzier as their parts get more precise. Lots of small blacks and whites add up to more gray… This book reviews fuzz … and then looks at how fuzz lies at the core of both political power and scientific truth The book ends with how fuzz lies at the essence of self: … Will consciousness change when it shifts from the electrochemical reactions in three pounds of flesh to a … chip? Will religion still hold a working monopoly on the concept of soul and afterlife and heaven? Science has not killed God but it has dethroned Him… The shift from atoms to bits and from chimp brains to chip brains may not be a smooth one. But much of it will be fuzzy.” (Pg. xiii-xiv)
He explains, Fuzzy logic is reasoning with vague concepts… Fuzzy logic models a vague concept like ‘cool air’ with a fuzzy set… A fuzzy set allows partial membership. An object can belong to a set to any degree or ‘shade of gray’ between 0% and 100%... consider the concept of ‘cool air.’ We all have some feel for this concept… But what does the concept mean? Fuzzy theory gives a subtle answer: ‘The meaning of a concept is the fuzzy set that defines it.’” (Pg. 6-7)
He observes, “we all live in our own private conceptual worlds to a far greater degree than we may realize. We talk with the same sounds and write with the same symbols. But we do not mean the same things by these sounds and symbols. I call this the ‘conceptual anarchy.’ Anarchy tends to be a good thing in the digital age. User friendliness results from the conceptual anarchy. Smart machines can adapt how they perform to what we mean by our fuzzy concepts.” (Pg. 10-11) He continues, “How fuzzy is one set of concepts versus another? The vagueness or fuzziness of fuzzy sets itself admits degrees… A theorem gives the answer: The fuzziness of a concept is the degree to which the concept equals its own opposite…. Maximum fuzziness occurs when a set or concept equals its own opposite.” (Pg. 12)
He notes, “Fuzz gives choices. We can pick and choose from the shades of gray that define fuzziness. More degrees mean more options. This can increase either social power or political power. It depends on who gets to make the choices… Some people want to use force to reduce other’s choices and thus reduce the doubt about how they will choose. The result is politics.” (Pg. 26) He adds, “Fuzzy sets capture the segments of eh the left-right spectrum. Far-left socialists overlap to some degree with liberals. These overlap with moderate liberals… Each fuzzy set is vague and relative. People are liberal and not liberal to some degree…” (Pg. 29)
He proposes a ‘Fuzzy Tax Form,’ on which half of your taxes “will go to general revenues. The other half will go to the social categories of your choice.” These categories include, “AIDS Research,” “Environmental Cleanup,” “Foreign Aid,” “Health Insurance,” “Law Enforcement,” “National Defense,” “Welfare,” etc. “A fuzzy tax form would give a direct say to those who pay. How could a politician argue against that IN PUBLIC?” (Pg. 60-61) Later, he adds, “A binary tax form has no direct mechanism to match the social demand for many services with their potential supply. It relies on the goodwill of elected and appointed politicians and on their ability to accurately measure social demand.” (Pg. 64)
Turning to abortion, he states, “The debate comes down to where you draw the line between life and death. Is the fetus alive? Does it own itself? … A fuzzy view does not get caught in this Aristotelian trap. It draws a curve instead of a line… A fuzzy view sees the fetus as growing from 0% alive at or just before conception to 100% alive at or near birth. At each month the fetus is both alive and not alive to some degree. Not-life shades smoothly into life and at death it shades back… The binary view requires that someone draw a hard lie between life and death… You or the state can draw a life line anywhere you please from conception to birth.” (Pg. 75-76)
He explains, “We can now state a fuzzy Coase Theorem: ‘If most property rights are well defined and if transaction costs are small then the market outcome is approximately Pareto optimal.’ … This fuzzy Coase Theorem ranges between two extremes… Fuzzy Pareto optima lie between these extremes. These include the social states where you breathe your neighbor’s grill smoke or pipe smoke or have to listen to him play the drums … Your property rights in the air are too fuzzy and too slight to prevent this and it may not be worth the bother of trying to change that.” (Pg. 103)
In the chapter on ‘Smart Wars,’ he notes, “Somewhere along the way we cross a fuzzy threshold: For the first time in military history it will be cheaper to attack than to defend. The age of the smart war will have begun. It has always been the other way around. It has cost far more to attack than to defend. And the world has been a more stable place than it might else have been.” (Pg. 130) He goes on, “In the end smart wars only change the cost structure of conflict… The essence of war stays the same… The essence of war is the will to kill… There is no reason to expect the root of the conflicts to change in the information age. The will to kill will shift smoothly from our atoms to our bits.” (Pg. 134)
He acknowledges, “We now know that fuzzy systems slam into a wall known as rule explosion or the ‘curse of dimensionality.’ All math systems face this curse in some form. Fuzzy systems just face it in a more vivid form than most. The number of rules grows in an exponential way as you add more variables to the system to make the system more realistic. The best we can do is to patch the bumps and often we cannot do even that.” (Pg. 142)
He also admits, “This does not mean that fuzzy systems reside in brain tissue. There is little chance of that. Most wet neural nets have dense tangles of feedback loops and depend on dozens of factors that do not find their way into modern neural models. Rule explosion itself rules out any chance that brains consist of banks of fuzzy systems… But no one claims that real brains use neural fuzzy systems or geno-fuzzy systems or any other modern hybrid. We use these systems as tools to solve hard problems that we cannot yet solve as well or solve at all with standard tools.” (Pg. 177)
He argues, “You cannot prove a fact. A proof assumes that some statements or premises are true. Then it derives a conclusion from them. You would have to assume at least one fact of the world to derive a fact of the world. But to assume that a fact is true is to reason in a circle. The point is to prove that a fact is true… So logic does not help That demotes the ‘proof’ method down to the realm of evidence and witness and measurement. Formal proof gives way to mere suggestion… You cannot even be sure that you are awake or that your experience is real. It may be a dream or bad drug trip or a good ride through a virtual reality… Science can help only so far because of its fuzzy truth bounds. It can … get its math right to at most a few decimal places… Science would have to get the math right to infinitely many decimal paces to produce a 100% true fact… Even then you could not be sure that the logical fact matched something out there in the world.” (Pg. 184)
He points out, “Our digital culture is not a culture of black and white. It is an every more diverse culture of fact and opinion and art and science and all those fuzzy patterns we call ideas… But the digital medium only transmits the supply and demand of our ideas. It does not create the ideas… It transmits ideas more efficiently than have the other information mediums of the past. It transmits ideas more efficiently than have words vibrating in the air… or books or pamphlets or newspapers and state-monitored radio or network TV channels… The Internet is the emblem of the digital culture.” (Pg. 199-200)
He asks, “So why can’t smart systems displace or augment scientists? The answer is that they can and will. Neural and fuzzy black boxes are just the first step… More structured systems may help scientists look at a pool of data and map it to a set of symbolic hypotheses… The digital age will have crossed into a new frontier when a machine first discovers a new law of physics or sociology and information theory. That frontier will be truth for machine’s sake… It will be like that moment parents face when for the first time their child comes up with a good idea that they did not see. But the impact will be thousands or millions of times greater.” (Pg. 215)
He asserts, “We need a Digital Rights Act. We need a constitutional amendment or at least a federal law that ensures the ‘right to code our bits in our own way.’… A Digital Rights Act would extend the First Amendment to the Information Age…. The hard technology problem is how to design intelligent digital agents that let us share our secrets with them… Our agents may prove smart enough to find new secure schemes to encode our bit streams… The political problem presents a greater challenge. We must find ways to make sure that our agents keep the secrets we share with them. Or else the state will find the ways for us.” (Pg. 239)
He wonders, “Why do we accept death so passively? Why do e not rank each new idea or action by how well it helps us conquer death?.. why is killing death not our supreme goal in society? … Most people are ‘deathists.’ They think death is as natural and inevitable as taxes. That helps explain why fewer than a thousand of us have so far signed up for cryonic suspension in liquid nitrogen upon our death… The rest of the human race has chosen by default to avoid the experimental group of cryonicists and stay in the control group of deathists. Time will sort the winners from the losers in this ongoing social experiment. Meanwhile culture reflects the deathist view.” (Pg. 246)
He concludes, “Heaven is too wonderful a concept to restrict it to the fearful imaginings of long-dead and pre-scientific men and women… A digital soul or mind does not have these problems… Most major religions have promised… an eternal free lunch in an alleged hereafter in exchange for obedience and for donations and often for outright mind control in the here and now… But justice is measure for measure. That alone argues for term limits in heaven in direct proportion to one’s good deeds done in life. No finite sum of finite good deeds adds up to an infinite reward. So … the religious view of heaven contradicts its own assumptions. Heaven in a chip avoids this problem… Our best heaven in a chip will always be only an engineering approximation. The finite structure of the universe imposes the ultimate term limits on any heaven in a chip… the human heart craves even primate visions of immortality. Heaven in a chip can supply much of this demand… Heaven in a chip does more than solve the practical problems of religious view of heaven. It completes the rival world view of science… Biology was never more than tendency. It was just nature’s first quick and dirty way to compute with meat.” (Pg. 255-256)
This book will be of keen interest to those seeking creative perspectives on the future, technology, and related subjects.
Bart Andrew Kosko (born 1960) is professor of electrical engineering and law at the University of Southern California. He wrote in the Preface of this 1999 book, “Suppose we replace your brain with a computer chip. How would you change? Would you still be you?... Would you think only black-and-white digital thoughts?... Or would your mind use fuzzy logic? Would your thoughts be fuzzy or gray? This book looks at such fuzzy or gray issues as they arise in the digital age. But just what do these terms mean?... The term fuzzy means shades of gray between 0% and 100%. Most concepts are fuzzy because they have inexact borders… These concepts have opposites that shade into each other.” (Pg. xi)
He continues, “The irony of the digital age is that things are fuzzier than ever. Fuzz grows as the bits pour in. More precise ‘facts’ have not made it easier to draw a line that decides whether a fetus is alive … or whether crashing a country’s banking software is an act of war… The digital age has its own uncertainty principle:
Issues get fuzzier as their parts get more precise. Lots of small blacks and whites add up to more gray… This book reviews fuzz … and then looks at how fuzz lies at the core of both political power and scientific truth The book ends with how fuzz lies at the essence of self: … Will consciousness change when it shifts from the electrochemical reactions in three pounds of flesh to a … chip? Will religion still hold a working monopoly on the concept of soul and afterlife and heaven? Science has not killed God but it has dethroned Him… The shift from atoms to bits and from chimp brains to chip brains may not be a smooth one. But much of it will be fuzzy.” (Pg. xiii-xiv)
He explains, Fuzzy logic is reasoning with vague concepts… Fuzzy logic models a vague concept like ‘cool air’ with a fuzzy set… A fuzzy set allows partial membership. An object can belong to a set to any degree or ‘shade of gray’ between 0% and 100%... consider the concept of ‘cool air.’ We all have some feel for this concept… But what does the concept mean? Fuzzy theory gives a subtle answer: ‘The meaning of a concept is the fuzzy set that defines it.’” (Pg. 6-7)
He observes, “we all live in our own private conceptual worlds to a far greater degree than we may realize. We talk with the same sounds and write with the same symbols. But we do not mean the same things by these sounds and symbols. I call this the ‘conceptual anarchy.’ Anarchy tends to be a good thing in the digital age. User friendliness results from the conceptual anarchy. Smart machines can adapt how they perform to what we mean by our fuzzy concepts.” (Pg. 10-11) He continues, “How fuzzy is one set of concepts versus another? The vagueness or fuzziness of fuzzy sets itself admits degrees… A theorem gives the answer: The fuzziness of a concept is the degree to which the concept equals its own opposite…. Maximum fuzziness occurs when a set or concept equals its own opposite.” (Pg. 12)
He notes, “Fuzz gives choices. We can pick and choose from the shades of gray that define fuzziness. More degrees mean more options. This can increase either social power or political power. It depends on who gets to make the choices… Some people want to use force to reduce other’s choices and thus reduce the doubt about how they will choose. The result is politics.” (Pg. 26) He adds, “Fuzzy sets capture the segments of eh the left-right spectrum. Far-left socialists overlap to some degree with liberals. These overlap with moderate liberals… Each fuzzy set is vague and relative. People are liberal and not liberal to some degree…” (Pg. 29)
He proposes a ‘Fuzzy Tax Form,’ on which half of your taxes “will go to general revenues. The other half will go to the social categories of your choice.” These categories include, “AIDS Research,” “Environmental Cleanup,” “Foreign Aid,” “Health Insurance,” “Law Enforcement,” “National Defense,” “Welfare,” etc. “A fuzzy tax form would give a direct say to those who pay. How could a politician argue against that IN PUBLIC?” (Pg. 60-61) Later, he adds, “A binary tax form has no direct mechanism to match the social demand for many services with their potential supply. It relies on the goodwill of elected and appointed politicians and on their ability to accurately measure social demand.” (Pg. 64)
Turning to abortion, he states, “The debate comes down to where you draw the line between life and death. Is the fetus alive? Does it own itself? … A fuzzy view does not get caught in this Aristotelian trap. It draws a curve instead of a line… A fuzzy view sees the fetus as growing from 0% alive at or just before conception to 100% alive at or near birth. At each month the fetus is both alive and not alive to some degree. Not-life shades smoothly into life and at death it shades back… The binary view requires that someone draw a hard lie between life and death… You or the state can draw a life line anywhere you please from conception to birth.” (Pg. 75-76)
He explains, “We can now state a fuzzy Coase Theorem: ‘If most property rights are well defined and if transaction costs are small then the market outcome is approximately Pareto optimal.’ … This fuzzy Coase Theorem ranges between two extremes… Fuzzy Pareto optima lie between these extremes. These include the social states where you breathe your neighbor’s grill smoke or pipe smoke or have to listen to him play the drums … Your property rights in the air are too fuzzy and too slight to prevent this and it may not be worth the bother of trying to change that.” (Pg. 103)
In the chapter on ‘Smart Wars,’ he notes, “Somewhere along the way we cross a fuzzy threshold: For the first time in military history it will be cheaper to attack than to defend. The age of the smart war will have begun. It has always been the other way around. It has cost far more to attack than to defend. And the world has been a more stable place than it might else have been.” (Pg. 130) He goes on, “In the end smart wars only change the cost structure of conflict… The essence of war stays the same… The essence of war is the will to kill… There is no reason to expect the root of the conflicts to change in the information age. The will to kill will shift smoothly from our atoms to our bits.” (Pg. 134)
He acknowledges, “We now know that fuzzy systems slam into a wall known as rule explosion or the ‘curse of dimensionality.’ All math systems face this curse in some form. Fuzzy systems just face it in a more vivid form than most. The number of rules grows in an exponential way as you add more variables to the system to make the system more realistic. The best we can do is to patch the bumps and often we cannot do even that.” (Pg. 142)
He also admits, “This does not mean that fuzzy systems reside in brain tissue. There is little chance of that. Most wet neural nets have dense tangles of feedback loops and depend on dozens of factors that do not find their way into modern neural models. Rule explosion itself rules out any chance that brains consist of banks of fuzzy systems… But no one claims that real brains use neural fuzzy systems or geno-fuzzy systems or any other modern hybrid. We use these systems as tools to solve hard problems that we cannot yet solve as well or solve at all with standard tools.” (Pg. 177)
He argues, “You cannot prove a fact. A proof assumes that some statements or premises are true. Then it derives a conclusion from them. You would have to assume at least one fact of the world to derive a fact of the world. But to assume that a fact is true is to reason in a circle. The point is to prove that a fact is true… So logic does not help That demotes the ‘proof’ method down to the realm of evidence and witness and measurement. Formal proof gives way to mere suggestion… You cannot even be sure that you are awake or that your experience is real. It may be a dream or bad drug trip or a good ride through a virtual reality… Science can help only so far because of its fuzzy truth bounds. It can … get its math right to at most a few decimal places… Science would have to get the math right to infinitely many decimal paces to produce a 100% true fact… Even then you could not be sure that the logical fact matched something out there in the world.” (Pg. 184)
He points out, “Our digital culture is not a culture of black and white. It is an every more diverse culture of fact and opinion and art and science and all those fuzzy patterns we call ideas… But the digital medium only transmits the supply and demand of our ideas. It does not create the ideas… It transmits ideas more efficiently than have the other information mediums of the past. It transmits ideas more efficiently than have words vibrating in the air… or books or pamphlets or newspapers and state-monitored radio or network TV channels… The Internet is the emblem of the digital culture.” (Pg. 199-200)
He asks, “So why can’t smart systems displace or augment scientists? The answer is that they can and will. Neural and fuzzy black boxes are just the first step… More structured systems may help scientists look at a pool of data and map it to a set of symbolic hypotheses… The digital age will have crossed into a new frontier when a machine first discovers a new law of physics or sociology and information theory. That frontier will be truth for machine’s sake… It will be like that moment parents face when for the first time their child comes up with a good idea that they did not see. But the impact will be thousands or millions of times greater.” (Pg. 215)
He asserts, “We need a Digital Rights Act. We need a constitutional amendment or at least a federal law that ensures the ‘right to code our bits in our own way.’… A Digital Rights Act would extend the First Amendment to the Information Age…. The hard technology problem is how to design intelligent digital agents that let us share our secrets with them… Our agents may prove smart enough to find new secure schemes to encode our bit streams… The political problem presents a greater challenge. We must find ways to make sure that our agents keep the secrets we share with them. Or else the state will find the ways for us.” (Pg. 239)
He wonders, “Why do we accept death so passively? Why do e not rank each new idea or action by how well it helps us conquer death?.. why is killing death not our supreme goal in society? … Most people are ‘deathists.’ They think death is as natural and inevitable as taxes. That helps explain why fewer than a thousand of us have so far signed up for cryonic suspension in liquid nitrogen upon our death… The rest of the human race has chosen by default to avoid the experimental group of cryonicists and stay in the control group of deathists. Time will sort the winners from the losers in this ongoing social experiment. Meanwhile culture reflects the deathist view.” (Pg. 246)
He concludes, “Heaven is too wonderful a concept to restrict it to the fearful imaginings of long-dead and pre-scientific men and women… A digital soul or mind does not have these problems… Most major religions have promised… an eternal free lunch in an alleged hereafter in exchange for obedience and for donations and often for outright mind control in the here and now… But justice is measure for measure. That alone argues for term limits in heaven in direct proportion to one’s good deeds done in life. No finite sum of finite good deeds adds up to an infinite reward. So … the religious view of heaven contradicts its own assumptions. Heaven in a chip avoids this problem… Our best heaven in a chip will always be only an engineering approximation. The finite structure of the universe imposes the ultimate term limits on any heaven in a chip… the human heart craves even primate visions of immortality. Heaven in a chip can supply much of this demand… Heaven in a chip does more than solve the practical problems of religious view of heaven. It completes the rival world view of science… Biology was never more than tendency. It was just nature’s first quick and dirty way to compute with meat.” (Pg. 255-256)
This book will be of keen interest to those seeking creative perspectives on the future, technology, and related subjects.
September 10, 2008
Nice book. But a little redundant over the topics, which makes the reading a little boring.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews