 technology. It should not be used as evidence for probably cause. It should not be relied upon as anything other than a pointer for law enforcement to focus their investigations on likely suspects, ruling them out with proper investigative techniques and collecting evidence on the perpetrator once they believe they’ve identified the right person.
Anything beyond pointing law enforcement in the right direction is a breach of privacy and should be outlawed.
We cannot have facial recognition software cataloging the whereabouts or actions of citizens. This is what’s happening in China now. It’s even being proposed by some Democrats, including presidential candidates. Such an intrusion is unAmerican and should be anathema to a free society.
We also cannot allow facial recognition software to be a crutch for law enforcement. As appealing as it might sound to give access to run facial recognition software through the massive network of CCTV feeds in any given city, this will invariably lead to false positives. It’s too enticing of a tool to put in the hands of anyone, even those charged with maintaining law and order. Imagine a scenario in which an suspicious spouse tracks their potentially cheating significant other using this software. Or a politician using influence in the department to track foes.
The potential scenarios don’t even need to be nefarious to breach our privacy. What if Suspect #1 is scene in video asking someone for directions to the bus station. An investigator might find this suspicious and start tracking the random person in case they’re in on the crime. This type of Big Brother power cannot be placed in the hands of anyone. There’s too much at risk.
A recent article by NBC News highlights the various uses of facial recognition software as well as the trends in law enforcement today. They rightly note that most agencies do not even mention the use of the software since they do not use it as evidence. This is understandable as an investigator is not required in most circumstances to reveal how they caught the scent, only the steps they took to secure evidence. But this lack of transparency can prevent necessary oversight into how the technology was used and if there were any breaches of privacy that occurred.
I’m all in for technology that enables law enforcement to have advantages over the criminals they seek. But that technology cannot be used against the innocent. Currently, there’s nothing preventing law enforcement from abusing it.
It is now pretty much confirmed that Kanye West will release his new album DONDA this week which should ideally mean this Friday. But as we’ve seen with ‘Ye over the past 5-7 years, nothing is confirmed until it arrives in stores and/or DSPs.
On Monday, the official artwork done by Louise Bourgeois was revealed and it was announced that Kanye will be holding a listening event at the Mercedes-Benz stadium on Thursday in Atlanta (tickets are available here). Now another event in the album rollout has been unveiled.
Kanye’s good friend Consequence has revealed that the G.O.O.D. Music head honcho will bring some kind of an experience to Rolling Loud Miami which takes place July 23rd-25th at Hard Rock Stadium in Miami Gardens, FL. “DONDA Experience. Rolling Loud Miami, FL. 07.25.21. Via KW. Summer 21′” he tweeted.
Whether ‘Ye will perform on the 23rd or just do an appearance, we don’t exactly know yet but stay tune for further details.
UPDATE: Cons deleted the tweet but we had managed to grab a screenshot of his Instagram post.
Digression and rant: On the inherent ambiguity of experimental results, the un-observability of the central subject
Experiment design and empiric findings interpretation in cognitive science, as for example regarding perception of transients, masking effects, inter-modal synchrony, sensor alterations and switching etc. is always uncertain or equivocal, given the complex array of functionally diverse units and modules of the system being studied, which are entangled further with with many environmental influences. The investigation of compound behaviors, involving sets of many coefficients, is hindered by the absence of an anchor theory, a primary hypothesis, consensus lemmas.
Consider some other examples of the entanglement of tools, cognitive system being studied and theoretical reference framework: Various protocols of TMS (Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation) have become one of the main probes in the quest to unravel the functional loci and temporal aspects of cognition, yet many experimenters do not attempt to or simply cannot separate the complex time dynamics of neural network effects of stimulation, inhibition and recovery, unfolding over a time span of approximately 100ms, that the TMS protocols trigger, from the natural behavior of the system being studied. Or consider the multitude of models applied to explain various masking effects exhibited by the complicated biological sensorineural machinery, the shakily grounded inconclusive interpretations addressing Libet’s results of several decades past etc.
Then there is the problem of microscopic to macroscopic scale translation; Neuroscience is rapidly developing greatly improved array of tools for triggering and monitoring neural activity, and a more complete picture of network, cellular and sub-cellular functions is emerging, from the macro level viewed in fMRI or MEG, through single and multi-unit measurements under various modulation/interference protocols, down to a level of intracellular/subcellular macro-molecular cascade dynamics regulated by epigenetic processes. However while these advances yield incredibly detailed knowledge of process fragments, the contribution of the growing body of data towards a general understanding of overall system function is confined to aspects of the easy problem.
Since researchers recognize the limits of scientific theory and the limitations of their tools, the subject of this section – phenomenology – is believed to be completely out of objective reach (i.e. the experience of any feeling whatsoever; e.g. the experience of content-less consciousness, quales, intentionality etc.). It is not often tackled. When it is, then if the research work remains close to the boundaries of conventional paradigms, e.g. the correlates of X, the insight driving potential of the results seems underwhelming and anemic. Conversely, bolder theories tend to stray into science fringe areas, to be dismissed, frowned upon or critically torn apart.
But the elephant is in the room, it is made of proverbial dark-matter. Un-observable does not mean undefineable or un-constrained. Perhaps to understand the principles of ‘Consciousness’ we must first develop an as yet non-existent scientific field of the physics of un-observable phenomenality. By Theorizing First perhaps we can come up with testable ideas and constraining assumptions with regards to the physical nature of consciousness.
Monism with Panprotopsychism?
Physical structural-arrangements and processes that generate the first person experience that we subjectively perceive – such as would be mandated to support any monistic, materialist, wider sense physicalist approach, inclusive of physics yet to be formulated – are expected to ‘exist’ and be amenable to third person description (inherent third person inaccessibility notwithstanding, although something like ‘shared subjectivity’ may some day be attained).
Such arrangements and processes must span many orders of physical scale, as per the interaction between experiencing agent and stimuli. Phenomenality arises from the nested set of interactions that occur between operators and operands within and across different orders of scale. Where and when-ever phenomenality arises – I believe an identity exists between the complete third person description of the physical correlates (including usage of yet to be formulated terms), on the appropriately informative respective orders of scale, and the first person experienced quality. i.e. I believe that in principle a phenomenally expressive artifact could be engineered (although it might not be possible to empirically prove that it is).
As a physical process involving some dynamics within or across some material complexes, (proto-) sensation origination is presumed to be spatially bounded and ultimately localizable. Sensation may be described as being comprised of spatiotemporal modulation imposed by neural-like computational process upon a (large) number of (proto-) phenomenality origination loci, experiential origination points manifesting quanta of (proto-) sensation.
For a stimulus to be sensed a generated (active) experiencing agent and a stimulus-reactive (or interactive) sensation origination point partaking in it should co-manifest. This suggests that the experiencing agent could be the product of modulating-correlating (compositional) patterns effected upon (proto-) sensation quanta origination points via coupling relations to the densely active dynamic core that makes the ‘I’. The (proto-) sensation is ‘in the patterns‘, because there is an embedded hardwired and learnt disposition towards activity ‘in the patterns’, corresponding to the manifestation of ‘binding’ (see below).
If phenomenality is physically grounded then phenomenal content modality imparts ontological segregation to intertwined spatiotemporal patterns. This is so because primary (proto-) phenomenal qualities manifest ‘fine-grained’ information, that is there to be bound, can be naturally combined, and is reflexively apparent and final. This last conjecture is based on speculation that some low order of scale coherence, converging on interaction, brings about autopoiesis. However, regardless of low order mechanics detail, the suggested deviates from notions of constitutivism, Russelian or non-Russelian. Consider this a temporarily ‘dual-aspect’ monistic perspective; temporary in that the dual-aspect explanatory gap is taken to be a theoretical challenge seeking scientific treatment. If a philosophical paradigmatic affiliation is called for then on this aspect Nigelian Monism (a-la Stoljar) will do. Some further embellishment of this idea can be found In the sub-section ”(proto-) phenomenality as an aspect of interaction?” below.
I.e.
- What is phenomenality to the conscious agent?
It makes up the fine-grained element of