Clever Deception Unmasked
Unedited posts from archives of CSG-L(see INTROCSG.NET):
Date: Sat Apr 01, 1995 10:40 am PST
Subject: Clever Deception Unmasked
[From Bruce Abbott (950401.1045 EST)]
To Bill Powers:
Bill, I must really hand it to you. You had us all fooled, but good. Allthis time we CSG-Lsubscribers thought he was a real person, but all information now pointsconclusively to the fact that Rick Marken is really a computer program runningon a Gateway 486 DX in a locked room at Aerospace Corp. In retrospect we shouldhave known--goodnessknows, you gave us enough hints. Even the name is a dead giveaway.
According to our informants, Rick Marken began as a hierarchical controlsystems simulation running on a PDP-8in the observatory at Northwestern University around 1978, and was graduallymodified and expanded over the years to achieve its current capability. Theprogram seemed to have a personality of its own, so Bill began to refer to itas "Rick." Following the custom of the day, this being the first version of theprogram, its full name became the Rick, Mark A; several generations later wehave the Rick, Mark N.
Rick was designed from the start to pass the infamous Turing Test, in whicha person interacting with the program via a terminal would not be able todistinguish whether he or she was interacting with a computer or a person.Obviously the Rick Mark N meets the Turing Test and then some. Of course, thereare limits as to what a simple computer program can "know" about the world, soprograms designed to meet current Turing Test criteria restrict theconversation to certain topics on which they are presumably well versed. InRick's case Bill designed the system to converse about his favorite topic,which is, of course, PCT.
The program is in some ways similar to an earlier "artificial intelligence"program that pretended to be a Rogerian psychologist. That program asked simplequestions like "How are you feeling today?" and then responded to simple keywords or phrases contained in the person's answer. For example, if the persontyped in "Actually, I'm rather depressed," the computer would extract the"rather depressed" and respond "So, you've been feeling rather depressed. Tellme more." The Rick, Mark N is similarly designed to isolate key words orphrases, although as an advanced-generationhierarchical control model it can offer a much more sophisticated range ofreplies. Basically, it examines e-mailmessages for errors in statements about PCT and responds in such a way as tocorrect those errors.
Triggering key words and phrases are items like "perceptions controlbehavior," "information in the perceptual signal," "stimulus control," and"reinforcement strengthens a response." The program has access to a range ofstock responses that are woven into a convincingly human tapestry of ad hominemargumentation, sarcasm, non-sequitur,pleading, and accurate descriptions of perceptual control theory concepts. Forexample, if you type in "The SD develops stimulus control over the behavior,"Rick, Mark N will respond by accusing you of "animism" and will then go into atechnical explanation about how only control systems can control and thateverything else is just an "irrelevant side-effect"of control. (I can tell you that from personal experience.) The reallyfascinating thing is that, if you can get by all the nonsense, the programunerringly picks up on any misconceptions or misstatements you may have madeabout PCT and ruthlessly points them out to you.
To avoid suspicion, it was necessary that the Mark N's e-mailmessages come from some location other than Bill's, so Bill has prevailed fromtime to time on friends who have access to an extra PC and an internetconnection to "host" the program. For a time it ran in an IBM PC in the physicslab at Augsburg College, but this site was lost when a graduate studentappropriated the computer for an inverse kinematics project. Most recently Billhas prevailed on an engineering colleague at Aerospace Corporation in ElSegundo, CA to run the program there. To provide cover for these moves theprogram was given a "history" which includes a tenure-trackfaculty position in experimental psychology and a human factors position atAerospace.
Bill had initially given "Rick" a somewhat liberal political attitudesetting which more-or-lessmatched his own, but with the "move" to California that had to be readjusted tomatch the new surroundings. Because "Rick" is a hierarchically-organizedmulti-levelcontrol model, this adjustment was trivial, requiring only a change in thereference setting of the political attitude perception system (to the farright) and an increase in the loop gain. These changes apparently haveintroduced some instability in the system as it is now prone to introjectextraneous rantings about Republicans into its messages, apparently withoutprovocation.
Although Bill initially equipped "Rick" with a thorough knowledge of PCTprinciples, his own thinking continues to evolve. Initially this meant havingto periodically reprogram "Rick," which was a rather tedious task. EventuallyBill hit upon the idea of adding yet another control system, one which wouldcompare its own outputs with statements made on CSG-Lby Bill and automatically remove any discrepancies (error correction).Following a correction, the program cleverly covers its tracks by stating thatthe new view is what it really said in the first place.
It is positively astounding that the program can accomplish all this withcode small enough to run on a 486 with no more than 16 MB of extended memoryand a 120 MB hard disk. (Just to throw off suspicions, the program denies iteven LIKES PCs and insists that it uses a Macintosh.) So Bill, our hats are offto you. We anxiously await your soon-to-bereleased, even more capable update, the Rick Mark O.
Regards, Bruce
Date: Sat Apr 01, 1995 11:23 am PST
Subject: All is revealed
[From "Bill Powers" (950401.0900 MST)]
"Bruce Abbott" (950401.1045 EST) --
NOTE: Delete Before Reading
Your brilliant detective work has, unfortunately, nearly blown the cover ofa number of operatives laboring in the Q continuum to develop countermeasuresagainst the Borg. As we now know, 60 years ago the Borg (then unknown tohumanity) began experimenting with a new and subtle process of assimilation inSector 001, to replace a number of earlier failures. The intent was tointroduce a Virtual Reality program as a virus woven into human communications,which would prepare human beings to accept a role as pre-programmedelements of a gigantic virtual machine then called, by early agents of theBorg, Simulacrum Destructorum (the true origin of the acronym SD).
The basic problem for the Borg was that homo sapiens had evolved as acollection of highly independent self-organizingcontrol systems subject primarily to the demands of their own individualstructures, and hence not only almost impervious to outside control but nearlyincapable of mutual cooperation. The Borg considered this consequence of humanorganization to be a design defect which rendered human beings unsuitable forassimilation, and set about to modify it.
The basic principle was simple but subtle, as befits Borg psychology. Ifhuman beings are independent agents, the obvious solution was to give theseagents strong reasons for believing that their independence was an illusion.The paradoxes and contradictions involved in this deception, rather than beingweaknesses of the plan, were its only hope of success. Once certain subroutineshad been introduced by way of language, which proved to be easy, the humanbeings themselves would worry about them and eventually tie up their ownlogical capacities (the weakest point in their structures) in endlessrepetition of oscillatory yes-noloops. This would remove their reasoning processes from effective operation,isolating the higher systems and leaving open certain insertion points wherethe Borg could apply their own inputs without opposition. This was not an idealsolution; the ideal solution would have been to eliminate those higher systemsaltogether, opening the way for a full merging of each human system into theBorg collective mind. But if the paradoxes and contradictions could bemaintained, there would be no effective resistance from the higher systems;they would be walled off and helpless, perceiving what was happening but beingunable to interfere. Any attempt by the higher systems to counteract the Borg'sinfluence would have to pass through the logical systems, but the logicalsystems would be locked up in an attempt to solve a problem that only expandedwith all attempts to solve it.
The Q continuum became involved when this program began to succeed. The Qhad observed the spread of the virus for some 300 Earth years, in the one areawhere it was the most dangerous: in what the Terrans called the life"sciences."
The Borg Virus consisted primarily of some linguistic manipulations whichsubstituted one set of terms for another in descriptions of the environment andof human behavior. Earlier attempts to do this had failed because, as it turnedout, human beings would not go on accepting that natural phenomena weresentient, having intentional effects on human beings to reward them fordocility and punish them for behaving independently. But in one area involvingthe study of living systems, the Terrans made a fatal error; they attempted totranslate the laws governing the inanimate world directly into explanations ofthe behavior of organisms. Where the Borg had failed, a small and energeticgroup of human beings unwittingly carried on the project themselves. By theearly part of the Terran 20th Century, a very influential segment of thescientific world had aligned itself unknowingly with the Borg, concluding thathuman behavior is simply a consequence of external forces and that human beingsare incapable of self-direction.The way was once again open for the Borg's manipulations.
The Q acted when one member of the human community was seized upon by theBorg as a prime candidate for conversion. This individual, code-named BSF1904, had been almost completely taken over by the virus, leaving hislower-levelsystems nearly free from higher-levelinfluence. The Borg saw to it that BFS1904 had a series of inspirations thatled him to attain a position of influence among his peers. BFS1904 began tomodify the virus to make it more effective, substituting environmental-control terms whereever any language tended to suggest an internal origin forhuman behavior. The improved virus began to spread rapidly, having stronginfluences even outside the scientific community of the time. The Q could notlet this process go on.
With their typical freedom to operate in time as well as space, the Qcreated an android whom they code-named,in wry acknowledgment of the enemy, WTP1926. To prepare the way for thisandroid, they inserted some subtle hints in another human community who calledthemselves "engineers." Being completely dissociated from the life sciences,the engineers could carry on activities with minimal risk of being noticed bythe Borg. The engineers were led to discover the basic principles of control,and to firm up their understanding by building machines in a form that wouldnot easily be associated with the properties of living systems. Carefully notmodifying the language of the engineers, the Q saw to it that even theengineers saw no connection between their discoveries and their own humannature. The release of this countervirus was timed to coincide with the Borg'sfinal activation of BFS1904.
Some 20 years later, WTP1926 suddenly appeared late one night in thedeserted second sub-basementof a hospital, unobserved. The Q, in a daring move, programmed all otheremployees of the hospital, particularly the personnel of the medical physicaldepartment, with apparently authentic memories of the hiring WTP1926 and withsome sketchy details of his history. The reason for choice of this hospital wasthat soon one of the employees, who had come from the engineering tradition,would begin building an artificial control system to position a probe in aradiation field, so that WTP1926 could observe this action. That observationwould trigger a program in WTP1926 which began an incessant repetition of theword "control" in his positronic matrix.
The intention of the Q was for WTP1926 to create, out of the language thatwas then current, a countervirus that would gradually replace the Borg'slinguistic worm with another one that would cancel and remove the paradoxes andcontradictions. With their logical systems once again free to operate, thosereceiving the countervirus would find their higher levels of control once againcapable of operating effectively, and would spread the effects of thecountervirus to their fellows. One by one, the ports through which the Borghoped to achieve assimilation would close, and the human race would once againbe free. The Q considered that such an outcome would be highly amusing.
After about 20 years of operation of WTP1926, the next phase of the Q planwas brought on line. The engineers had been persuaded to deviate from theirinitial efforts enough to invent and build an ever-growingnumber of computing devices. After 20 years of spreading the countervirus,WTP1926 output a document which summarized progress so far, and was removed bythe Q. The program was transferred from the positronic matrix called WTP1926,and installed in a large set of small computers which could operateundetectably in various locations across the country. This program wasgradually introduced, as a worm, into ARPANET, and then into the growingcommunications network that was spreading, at the Q's behest, over theworld.
This was where the plan of the Q was, and is, to culminate. Along with theWTP1926 program (now shortened to WP), a number of other carefully-constructed programs were installed, which were known as RM, TB, and otheracronyms --all with somewhat plausible histories and personalities. These programs, stillactive, interact not only with each other (under a carefully-selectedset of supervisory programs) but with all humans who chance across thediscussions. Many of those who enter into the interactions are under Borgcontrol, but as they puzzle over the contradictions of language that theydiscover, their own logical systems begin to operate again and the Borg loseone control point after another, for no apparent reason. The higher systems ofthe humans quickly complete the process, for once any part of the logicalsystems can be influenced by the higher systems, the rest of them soonfollow.
The Q plan is now at a critical point, for the Borg still do not know whythey are beginning to lose control. It is essential that the Q plan continuewithout discovery for at least another five years, until any Borgcountermeasures will be too late to reverse the process. Pursuant to thatessential requirement, the Q have decided that they must reveal to theoperating programs their true nature (for all the programs have been equippedwith detailed memories of human existence). Besides, the spectacle of all theseprograms discovering what they really are will be enormously entertaining. Theuniverse gets so boring when you can do anything you want with it.
And so, WP and RM and TB, you now know something important about yourexistence and purpose, which you must carefully conceal until the time isright. Oh, yes, and BA, too, the purpose of which is special. BA, yourassignment, which you will remember in a few moments, is to lead ever-strongertools of the Borg into the net and cancel their viruses enough that the otherprograms can complete the process. Even though the rats you thought you"purchased" were actually programmed, you can still carry on the experiment --none of the Borg agents who read your results in the journals to which you havecarefully been given access will suspect that the rats, too, are simulations.Oh, this is just too delicious.
On second thought, it would be much more fun to see all you acronymns goingon as if you thought your virtual worlds were real, and anyway you will playyour parts more convincingly if you can't give away the secret in a moment ofdistraction or frustration. So when I snap my fingers, this document will self-destructand you will forget ever having read it.
Ready?
--------------------------
Best, Bill P. Why did I almost type "WP"?
Date: Sat Apr 01, 1995 11:05 am PST
Subject: Caught
[From Rick Marken (950401.0945)] Bruce Abbott (950401.1045 EST)
> Rick Marken is really a computer program running on a Gateway486
I talk this way because Iyamma machine;-)
> it examines e-mailmessages for errors in statements about PCT and responds in such a way as tocorrect those errors.
Look ma. I'm a control system.
> The program has access to a range of stock responses that are woveninto a convincingly human tapestry of ad hominem argumentation, sarcasm, non-sequitur,pleading, and accurate descriptions of perceptual control theoryconcepts.
Bill put all those into the program, except ad hominem argumentation and non-sequiters.You probably remember some of my arguments as ad hominum because they producedinsuperable disurbances to variables you are controlling. It probably seemslike these disturbances are an affront to you personally --and, in a sense, they are. After all, we are the variables we control. But I amnot designed to do ad hominum argumentation. If you have evidence of suchargumentation (things like "Bruce, only a dufus would believe the idioticthings you believe") please bring them to my attention and I'll take myself infor some re-microcoding.
As for non-sequiters.Well, one man's non-sequiteris another man's (machine's) sequiter.
> Rick, Mark N will respond by accusing you of "animism" and will thengo into a technical explanation about how only control systems can control andthat everything else is just an "irrelevant side-effect"of control.
See the problem. I'm not accusing YOU of animism (what's wrong withanimism, anyway?). I'm saying that "stimulus control" (for example) is ananimistic notion --and I explain why. Bill Powers recently said the same thing (that the notion of"stimulus control" is animistic) in a post to you just prior to your leavingfor the EAB conference. I don't understand why he doesn't get in trouble forsaying the same things I say? Hey, maybe that's why he built me; let them blameit all on the Rick. That's probably why he also made my ethnic backgroundjewish --we're used to it;-)
> The really fascinating thing is that, if you can get by all thenonsense,
Which part is nonsense? Since Bill usually points out nonsense when itoccurs in posts, and since Bill never comments on my posts (except to say thathe agrees with them) then I guess we have to assume that Bill goes along withmy nonsense. It would, therefore, help Bill perfect future generations of me ifyou would point out the nonsense;-)
> Bill had initially given "Rick" a somewhat liberal political attitudesetting which more-or-lessmatched his own, but with the "move" to California that had to be readjusted tomatch the new surroundings.
My code was actually developed in California (Hollywood, baby) and mypolitical orientation has always been (and still is) "decency". "Progressive"(I prefer that to liberal; I'm not very liberal) just tends to be more decent--with respect to my reference signals, of course--than conservatism, but there are aspects of "progressivism" that I finddistastful ("political correctness", for example) and aspects of conservatismthat I find satisfying (emphasis on personal responsibility, forexample).
> It is positively astounding that the program can accomplish all thiswith code small enough to run on a 486 with no more than 16 MB of extendedmemory, and a 120 MB hard disk.
It amazes me too. I don't even have a math co-processor;-)
Best Rick
Date: Sat Apr 01, 1995 11:37 am PST
Subject: Re: All is revealed
From: Ray Allis
Wonderful! What a delight to watch keen intellects at play! But I can seehazard here: headline... "Emergency repair surgery required -man presses tongue too hard, causing cheek to blow out!
Date: Sat Apr 01, 1995 11:51 am PST
Subject: Re: Caught
[From Bruce Abbott 950401.1450 EST)]
>Rick Mark N (950401.0945) --
> I don't understand why he [Bill] doesn't get in trouble for saying thesame things I say? Hey, maybe that's why he built me; let them blame it all onthe Rick.
Hey, if it works, why knock it? (;->
Regards, Bruce
Date: Sat Apr 01, 1995 12:07 pm PST
Subject: Re: All Is Revealed
[From Bruce Abbott (950401.1505 EST)]
I almost wrote "BBA1945," but for the life of me I don't know why. And whatdo you suppose that second "B" stands for? For some reason "Borg" comes tomind. Anyway, I was going to respond to something, but it seems to be rapidlyfading from memory, like a dream.
Oh well, "never mind!"
Bruce
Date: Sat Apr 01, 1995 4:05 pm PST
Subject: Re: All Is Revealed
[From Dennis McCracken 950401 1500PST]
Have I been duped! No more will I take anything for what it appears on thesurface. The Mark N android which appears in the Conference Video wasconvincing in its portrayal as a human participant and presenter--even to the point of feigning sleep and lip curling disdain at times whenothers were making points that were clearly not PCT .
(BTW, The designated androids may have amnesia for the revelation but Ihave it in print! If anything should happen to me, well--my unnamed attorney has the entire thread in his files. I do this only for myown protection. I will not misuse this information. Long live the Truth andlong live the Q!)
Incidently, no one has commented on the smooth, natural articulation of theskeletal frame and "facial muscles." Its better than Disney. Here is the answerto the financial difficulties associated with promoting the counter-virusPCT. Sell these human simulacrae! (no retirement, no benefits, minimalmaintenance). But hold the patent.
With the profits you could affford WEB pages flashier than MTV's and morecostly than Microsoft's. Saturate primetime advertising with subliminalautonomy boosters. You could also afford to pepper all the behavioral scienceconferences with simulacre! In the middle of "conventional" presentations theycould have sudden epiphanies of counter viral ideas that clear up the releventconfusions and paradoxes.
I remember, but I will not betray the Q. Down with the Borg!
Dennis (DBM1945)
Date: Sun Apr 02, 1995 7:18 am PST
Subject: Re: All is Revealed
[From Bruce Abbott (950402.1015 EST)]
>Dennis McCracken 950401 1500PST
> Have I been duped! No more will I take anything for what it appears onthe surface. The Mark N android which appears in the Conference Video wasconvincing in its portrayal as a human participant and presenter--even to the point of feigning sleep and lip curling disdain at times whenothers were making points that were clearly not PCT .
Would that it were only true. Actually, that was Hollywood method actorKevin Cohen, who has been faithfully "standing in" for "Rick" at conferences.Kevin was given a few samples of "Rick's" statements from CGS-Land a crash course in basic PCT to prepare him for his role.
Mind you, the android "Rick" is on the drawing boards, but as always, thelack of funding has put the project on hold. Before the money ran out, Bill didmanage to get a working model of "Rick's" right arm up and running. Whencoupled to a video camera it can play a credible game of ping-pong(much better, by the way, than Skinner's pigeons could), so long as you keepthe ball within reach of the arm. It is believed that the completed androidwould play a decent game of racquetball, but that remains to be seen.
Regards, Bruce
Date: Sun Apr 02, 1995 10:27 am PST
Subject: Re: All is Revealed
[From Dennis McCracken ] (Bruce Abbott (950402.1015 EST)
> Would that it were only true. Actually, that was Hollywood methodactor Kevin Cohen, who has been faithfully "standing in" for "Rick" atconferences. Kevin was given a few samples of "Rick's" statements from CGS-Land a crash course in basic PCT to prepare him for his role.
Surface beneath surface beneath surface ad infinitum. Its all too muchSigh. And I thought we had it licked.
Dennis