Here is a bio from 2006:

 Xabier Barandiaran is a PhD student and researcher on Cybernetics, Neurophilosophy and Artificial Life at the University of the Basque Country (Europe), member of the autonomous server SinDominio.Net, the hacktivist laboratory Metabolik BioHacklab (located at the social squat center Undondo Gaztetxea), the spanish and european HackLabs.Org network and the recent copyleft activist campaing “CompartirEsBueno.Net” (SharingIsGood: a spanish network of hacktivists and media-activists against intelectual property regimes and the media-culture industry). He has also been involved on other grassroots movement such as alternative education, social desobedience, anti-war movements and squatting. Xabier has also co-organized and activelly participated on a number of HackMeetings (self-managed technopolitical meetings that take place in squatted social centers in europe), Copyleft Conferences and other parallel events, workshops and seminars. His work has been devoted to development and promotion of free-software tools for social movements, direct action and coordination of autonomous technopolitical networks as research on free technologies & culture, community based digital self-management and hacktivism.

What is (it like) to be a Hard Problem?

“Some books are important not because they solve a

problem or even address it in a way that points to solution,

but because they are symptomatic of the confusions of the time.”

SEARLE1Searle, 1997, p.162. Searle’s review on David Chalmers The Conscious Mind; In Search of a Fundamental Theory (Oxford University Press, 1996)

Structure of the essay:

1. Introduction.

2. The Hard Problem (HP)

3. What is (it like) to be a Hard Problem.

3.1. The dissolution of the HP and the HP of functionalism

3.2. What is (it like) to be a cognitive system

4. Recognising a conscious being.

5. Conclusion: conscious experience and scientific study

6. Discussion: pointing to a hard problem and a crucial gap

7. Acknowledgements

8. Bibliography and References.

Abstract: In this essay I argue that a systemic perspective of cognition may be sufficient to explain whatever it must be necessary to explain about consciousness. By analysing Chalmers’ diagnosis of the Hard Problem of consciousness we conclude that the only Hard Problem arises from the functionalist view of cognition. I argue that a functional explanation is not enough to explain consciousness (and that is why Chalmers’ Hard Problem arises) and that an operational explanation is required. It follows that once we have specified the structure that makes us conscious then ‘what phenomenal consciousness is’ becomes a matter of being that structure and not something to be explained. Finally I argue that considering a system conscious depends on the operational conditions under which it is legitimate to describe an entity as conscious i.e. the necessary and sufficient operational conditions for a system to be conscious.

Key words: Consciousness, Cognitive Sciences, Cartesian Dualism, Explanatory gap, Dynamical approach, Phenomenal experience, Operational explanation.

1. INTRODUCTION

Since Descartes the relation between the phenomenological world (res cogitans) and the physical world (res extensa) occupies a privileged position between the unresolved philosophical questions of the Western history. If not so much Descartes’ dualist ontology, its vocabulary and conceptual foundation remain alive in the contemporary debate (Searle, 1992) and, while consciousness is becoming an object of scientific study it’s ontological and epistemological status is still in question. And it’s not a trivial question since consciousness seems to us the highest human capacity, the more inaccessible domain, the most secret privacy, and the last hiding place of the individual against the objectivity. Can science grasp this mystery? Is there any mystery at all?

The current study of consciousness is characterised by a transdisciplinary, multidimensional and weakly co-ordinated approach. All sorts of theories and approaches inhabit the scene while they remain unconnected (at best) or incompatible. Moreover the claim of the impossibility of a scientific study of consciousness remains alive among some scientist and philosophers (Nagel and McGinn). In this context, as Searle’s Chinese Room Experiment (1980) for the problem of intentionality, Chalmers’ article Facing Up to the Problem of Consciousness (1995) became a reference point and focused the debate. Even if Chalmers’ article has been considered a steep back in the debate (Dennett, 1996) I consider it symptomatic of a profound disagreement between different views in the field. I believe the really Hard Problem stands in the deep tension between confronted underlying assumptions in the current field (specially among Functionalists) and that we shall assume a biologically grounded operational perspective in order for the Hard Problem to vanish.

But what is the, so called, Hard Problem?

2. THE HARD PROBLEM

From Chalmers’ article we will rescue the analysis of the so called Hard Problem (HP); a) because part of the current debate is focused in Chalmers diagnosis of the Hard Problem, b) because I consider (and I will try to argue) that Chalmers’ mistake is already present in that diagnosis and that the latter development of his paper is a consequence of that mistake, and, c) because the claim of the HP, seems to me, is the point where consciousness, as a philosophical debate/problem, should arrive to an end, just because there is not such a problem (or at least the problem shows to be a philosophical problem in the more Wittgensteinian linguistic viewpoint).

At the beginning of the paper Chalmers divides the problems of the study of consciousness into the ‘easy’ problems and the ‘hard’ problem.

“The easy problems of consciousness are those that seem directly susceptible to standard methods of cognitive science, whereby a phenomenon is explained in terms of computational or neural mechanisms. The hard problems are those that seem to resist those methods” (§ 3).

The easy problems: the easy problems are those concerning functional mechanisms:

·Ability to discriminate stimuli

·Integration of information

·Reportability of mental states

·Focus of attention

·Control of behaviour

·Difference between wakefulness and sleep

All those phenomena are associated to consciousness but they have a functional role in the cognitive processes of the cognitive agent; thus they can be explained in functional terms. However difficult they may turn to be in the future, Chalmers takes for grounded the conceptual frame on which they will be explained so that a good explanation is a matter of techno-scientific achievement but not one of conceptual re-formulation.

The Hard Problem: But… (Chalmers follows) if those phenomena (easy problems) are exhausted in their functional role… how is it possible that they give rise to phenomenal experience? And this is what Chalmers considers The HP. The HP, thus, is the problem of experience that carries on in the Mind-Body debate under different forms:

•Consciousness* (Harvey)

•First person ontology (Searle)

·Qualia

·Phenomenal consciousness (Ned Block)

·“What is it like” (Nagel)

·Explanatory gap (Joseph Levine)

·Knowledge argument (Frank Jackson)

•Phenomenal experience (Chalmers)

·Etc…

What makes the HP hard, for Chalmers, is that it goes beyond any performance of functions because “to explain a cognitive function we need only specify a mechanism that can perform that function” (§12) and after explaining all those mechanisms we still have something else to explain: consciousness is more than a mechanism. That’s why, again on Chalmers’ view, any attempt to explain consciousness in the current literature, doesn’t work. We need an extra ingredient, a something else to fill the explanatory gap of why this functional or neural processes are accompanied by experience (the italic is mine to highlight Chalmers’ most common expressions when describing the problem).

After analysing some case studies that fail to explain consciousness, Chalmers concludes

At the end of the day, the same criticism applies to any purely physical account of consciousness. For any physical process we specify there will be an unanswered question: Why should this process give rise to experience? Given any such process, it is conceptually coherent that it could be instantiated in the absence of experience. It follows that no mere account of the physical process will tell us why experience arises. The emergence of experience goes beyond what can be derived from physical theory. (§ 43)

At this point, considering that any given cognitive process could exist without experience, Chalmers proposes to introduce experience as a fundamental feature of the world. Then he outlines a theory of consciousness whose central claim is ‘The double-aspect theory of information’ by which information is understood as being the basis of consciousness and the link with physics through the embeddedness of information in physical processes.

3. WHAT IS (IT LIKE) TO BE A HARD PROBLEM

3.1. The dissolution of the HP and the HP of traditional functionalism.

Explanatory gap, extra ingredient, accompanied by experience, something else, and so on seems to me dangerous expressions that cover a non-existing problem. If we add to a functional explanation a structural bottom-up, operational2Here operational vs. functional will be understood following (Di Paolo, 1999). By operational we mean an explanation which is “formulated in terms of a set of elements all pitched at a same descriptional level and also in terms of law-like realtionships between these elements so that an account can be given of how the phenomena are generated” (p.16) while by functional explanation we understand an explanation where “the terms of the reformulation are deemed to belong to a more encompassing context, in which te observer provides links and nexuses not supposed to operat in the domain in which the systems that generate the phenomena operate” (p.16). We intuitivelly understand operational explanations as specifying the structure of the system by establishing the elements and the law-like relations between the elements that constitute the system as such. While by funcional explanation we will understand particularly the kind of explanations of cognition held by Traditional AI where a cognitive agent can be defined solely in terms of the causal-computational relations between inputs and outputs requiring an external observer to specify them.

I don’t deny conscious experience, the vivid sensation of perceiving a red apple or having an orgasm. The Knowledge Argument (Jackson, Epiphenomenal Qualia 1982, from Torrance, 1998) illustrates this point: it is still different to have an orgasm than knowing all the processes and biological structures involving the phenomenon. But the Knowledge Argument is not an argument against the explanation (as it has been used), it is not an argument that shows that any explanation of consciousness is not enough; it just shows that it is different to explain how a cognitive systems works than being a cognitive system (how are they going to be equal? They are not even in the same level to be compared!). Probably the narrow vision of the classical functionalist viewpoint of what a cognitive agent is makes impossible to imagine that experience is to be a cognitive system. If we take cognition (as traditional functionalists do) to be the computation of an algorithm (independently of the system that performs it) then experience (the inner vivid sensation of experience) seems to be something else and the HP arrives when we realise that phenomenal consciousness cannot be added to the list of algorithms that constitute cognition. That’s why Chalmers considers that ‘the something else’ must be explained. But, from a systemic perspective, there is nothing to be explained about being a cognitive system because there is nothing on the being that can/should/must be explained. As well as there is nothing to be explained about “what it is like to be solid“; there is nothing to explain about being conscious. The only way of explaining solidity is specifying how the microstructure makes a solid macrostructure (what we have called structural3The term structural or structure won’t be used in this essay as oposed to operational (Varela) but rather as oposed to functional.

Lets go back to the beginning of this section; now we can see how terms like explanatory gap, extra ingredient, accompanied by experience, something else, and so on, are absolutely mistaken. There is no explanatory gap because there are not two objects to be linked. From our perspective accompanied by experience is completely nonsensical, the perceptive process of perceiving red IS the experience, thus, there is no extra ingredient to be added. But Chalmers mistake is still worst since the assumption of any extra ingredient falls under the Hard Problem again (the extended HP, Torrance, 1998), and no matter how many ingredients we add we will always need another one. At this point Zhalmers could argue against Chalmers with his own arguments: “why does any aspect of information give rise to experience? We need a third extra ingredient since it is, still, conceptually coherent to imagine any physical process + informational process without experience.” and so on, and so on ad infinitum.

Chalmers’ Hard Problem itself is a problem of functionalism (whose view of the mental and cognition is disembodied and functional and never operational), not a problem of Cognitive Sciences. As Jackendorff pointed out: if consciousness has no causal effect (functional role) then ‘it is useless’ (Jackendorff, 1987 p.26, from Varela et al. 1991. P. 82). But all there is in the domain of the mental is not functional. Chalmers functionalist view of the mind (only considering the causal connections between representations) is the real Hard Problem. As Searle points out (Searle, 1997) Chalmers mistake stands on trying to hold both functionalism and property dualism or irreducibility of consciousness; and it just doesn’t work. As Chalmers itself sees, functionalism is not enough to account for consciousness. And that is because functionalism has an horizontal concept of causation. Functionalism studies relations between representations (propositional attitudes) and this is not enough to account for cognition; on the lower boundary of cognition to account for the symbol grounding problem (Harnard, 1990), embodied situated cognition (Brooks, 1991) etc.; on the upper boundary for such non-functional ‘phenomena’4I quoted ‘phenomena’ because the self and consciousness cannot be properly called phenomena because they are prior to any phenomenon as such. In fact, this is the whole point of the essay.

3.2. What is (it like) to be a cognitive system

If we now consider a dynamical-embodied perspective of cognition, the functionalist HP comes to an end: our experience is embodied (Varela et al. 1991, Varela 1996) thus if we don’t want to fall into explanatory gap problems we have to consider cognition as embodied, as realised (and only realisable?) in a biological-dynamical structure. And then take (conscious) experience as being this embodied dynamical structure. Them, ones we assume this viewpoint, what makes us being as we are, which are the concrete dynamics that constitute a conscious being, will become a scientific task to be resolved, an operational description to be made.

At this point I would like to point to a dynamic-systemic Artificial Life (A-Life) approach to cognition from which I believe the problem could be addressed in a fruitful way (as this new approach to cognitive phenomena has showed with many other problems of Cognitive Science). Within this view cognition as a process can be understood as the structural coupling between an agent and its environment and a cognitive agent can be studied as a dynamical system. The dynamical approach (van Gelder, 1993, Van Gelder and Port 1995) does not entail, necessarily, the exclusion of symbolic/computational explanations of some cognitive processes because any computational process can (in principle) be explained by dynamical system theory (even if the concrete mechanisms require a research effort not yet resolved –Crutchfield, 1998). Thus any informational and functional account of consciousness (the easy problems) is not rejected but subsumed in an embodied dynamical bottom-up explanation of cognition (at the same time an embodied perspective can solve the symbol-grounding problem, the intentionality (Searle) of some cognitive processes5It is not a coincidence that what Chalmers calls the Hard Problem is strongly related to the problem of semantic content and intentionality, which is, at the same time, one of the major problems of functionalism (are consciousness and intentionality very far from being the same problem?).

Up to now we have been addressing the explanation of consciousness to a structural-operational study. But how does consciousness emerge from the dynamics of the brain? There is an increasing work on the foundations of biology, A-life and complex dynamical systems (Varela et al., 1991), where the concept of emergence plays a central role. Collier (Collier, 1998) argues that emergent properties entail cohesion, where “cohesion represents those factors that causally bind the components of something through space and time, so it acts coherently and resists which internal and external fluctuations”. But cohesion, as causal condition for the emergence of a property can be understood in terms of transfer of information (according to Collier). Thus, Chalmers was probably not completely wrong with his double aspect theory of information after all? Well it depends on what we understand by completely wrong, which is clear is that Collier’s argument does not support any interpretation of a phenomenal side of information. On the contrary I suggest that consciousness could be understood as an emergent property of informational processes happening in the brain6In this sense my position could be compared with Searle’s biological naturalism.

4. DISTINGUISHING A CONSCIOUS BEING

Up to now we have dealt with what it could be defined as an explanatory problem. But immersed in the literature around the topic of consciousness we find another sort of problem which is strongly linked to the above one not necessarily determining it (as it happens for some authors) , i.e. the problem of distinguishing a conscious being from a non-conscious one. I find the problem quite similar to the Turing test and all the ongoing functionalist problems of Strong and Weak AI (Searle, 1997). If we reduce consciousness (the cognitive and the phenomenal side) to a functional explanation, thus to an observable behaviour, then the Hard Problem arises and Zombies enter the scene (as well as if we reduce cognition to functional computation the ‘symbol grounding problem’ arises and ‘Chinese room’ kind of arguments enter the scene).

But nor functionalism is enough to explain cognition nor we do discriminate solely by behavioural observations. Until the sciences of the artificial, and robotics arose, for a certain behaviour there was usually the same kind of physical structures performing it (i.e. a human body for linguistic behaviour). That is why we, humans, take for grounded that for a certain behaviour there is a corresponding structure performing it, with its evolutionary history, structural causality and so on. But if, by chance, a plastic ball gets out of the window, nobody will attribute to that behaviour any intentionality of willing to suicide, nor any other intentional instance, because we know that the causal relations that make that ball going out of the window are structurally different from ours.

At this point the problem can be understood as an attitude problem:

So if one accepts that the creation of robots with consciousness1-3 offers merely ‘easy’ problems (…), the additional magic ingredient for consciousness* is merely a change of attitude in us, the observers. Such a change of attitude cannot be achieved arbitrarily; the right conditions of complexity of behaviour, of similarity to humans, are required first

(Harvey:10)

But an attitude problem is not merely an ‘attitude’ problem because my attitude with my teddy bear does not make the teddy bear conscious. The problem must be addressed as under what condition it is legitimate the attitude of considering or not a certain entity to be conscious. If phenomenal consciousness is referred to that being a cognitive system independently of the performing functional behaviour of the moment, the attribution of consciousness to a certain entity cannot be a matter of behaviour but a matter of the operational organisation of the entity that performs such behaviour. This way the matter of ‘attitude’ becomes an epistemological matter of establishing the operational conditions under which it is legitimate to describe an entity as conscious i.e. the necessary and sufficient operational conditions for a system to be conscious.

5. CONCLUSION: CONSCIOUS EXPERIENCE AND SCIENTIFIC STUDY:

By the claim that being conscious is no more (nor less) than being a certain kind of cognitive system (with the appropriate structure and processes from where consciousness emerges) and thus that the HP does not entail any problem at all (but addresses a HP inside the functionalist assumptions), I don’t mean that we have no inner experience. What I suggest is that the existence of experience, of phenomenal consciousness, does not require any intrinsic explanation at all: because it is impossible a priori (by definition of the term explanation), and because the concept of intrinsic explanation entails the same problem ones again ad infinitum. Neither do I mean that there is no place in science for conscious experience. I suggest that the place of experience should be methodological rather than ontological. In this sense Varela’s proposal for a neurophenomenological framework (Varela, 1996) seems to me completely coherent with my argument. If there is anything to be explained this must be in functional and structural-operational terms, as proposed above.

But this claim does not narrow the methodological scope, it just opens it ones we realise that there is no extra ingredient nor explanatory gap. In this context, doubtless, phenomenology stands for one of the most powerful tools to take into account. Just because been cognitive systems put us in a privileged position to know how 3 trillion neurones work (and how the embodied study of those 3 trillion neurones work, as well). After all, the problem, seems to me, is more methodological than ontological. We know that something special (cognition, intentionality, consciousness) is going on in our brains, because we experience it7I want to point to the contradiction involved in this expresion, namely that we cannot experience consciousness because consciousness is not an object to be experienced or hadled by a subject but the very fact of been a subject. Language makes the whole subject/object dicotomy hard to solve since the very structure of language involves such dualism.

Probably explanable by the 40 Hz hypothesys (Crick and Koch).

6. DISCUSSION: POINTING TO A HARD PROBLEM AND A CRUCIAL GAP

I wish to finish this essay by pointing to a further discussion about some related issues that I find specially important but far from most of the efforts in the field. I will briefly note them.

In what accounts for consciousness we are dealing as well with the notion of the self (and still worst, with the experience of the self) considered as the unifying substrate of experience. I consider that the underlying problem of the self has great possibilities of becoming a real hard problem since it is one of the constitutive notions of western civilisation on which science is immersed.

On the other hand (but somehow linked with the former problem) I find the problem of the gap between dynamic experiences (understood as personal/individual experiences) and intellectual experiences (purely symbolic/abstract experiences). Following the work by Varela et al. (1991) I believe that working in this two issues is fundamental if we want knowledge to serve human purposes and not vice versa.

7. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

To my father for his help on rigour, for his patience, for being always there. To Steve Torrance and Alvaro Moreno for guiding me first steeps into Cognitive Sciences. To Alfredo for technical support on What Macintosh still can’t do (on decompressing on-line articles).

8. BIBLIOGRAPHY and REFERENCES

BROOKS, R. (1991) Intelligence without representation. Artificial Intelligence 47 (1991), 139-159.

CHALMERS, D. (1995). Facing Up to the Problem of Consciousness. Journal of Consciousness Studies. 2:200-220.

[I used the HTML version on http://cogprints.soton.ac.uk/archives/phil/papers/199806/199806022/…/cosnciousness.html]

COLLIER, J. D. (1998). The dynamical basis of emergence in natural hierarchies. From George Farre and Tarko Oksala (eds) Emergence, Complexity, Hierarchy and Organization, Selected and Edited Papers from the ECHO III Conference, Acta Polytechnica Scandinavica, MA19 (Finish Academy of Technology, Espoo, 1998.)

CRUTCHFIELD, J P. (1998) Dynamical Embodiment of Computation in Cognitive Processes. Submited as Open Peer Commentary on T. van Gelder (1998) The Dynamical Hypothesis in Cognitive Science, BBS to appear.

[Taken from the internet http://www.santafe.edu/jpc]

DENNETT, D. (1996). Facing Backwards on the Problem of Consciousness. Published in Journal of Consciousness Studies, vol.3, no.1, 1996, 4-6.

[I used the HTML version on http://ase.tufts.edu/cogstud/papers/chalmers.htm]

DI PAOLO, E. (1999). On the Evolutionary and Behavioral Dynamics of Social Coordination: Models and Theoretical. DPhil Thesis, School of Cognitive and Computing Sciences, University of Sussex.

[I used the internet version from www.cogs.susx.ac.uk/users/ezequiel/thesis.html]

DI PAOLO, E. (2000). Behavioral coordination, structural congruence and entrainment in a simulation of acoustically coupled agents. Adaptive Behavior 8:1. 25-46. Special issue on Simulation Models of Social Agents. K. Dautenhahn (guest ed.)

GUTTENPLAN, S. (editor). A companion to the philosophy of mind. Blackwell, 1998.

HARNAD, S. (1990) The Symbol Grounding Problem. Physica D42: 335-346

[I used the HTML version on http://cogprints.soton.ac.uk/archives/psyc/papers/199803/199803014/doc.html/The_Symbol_Grounding_Problem.html]

HARVEY, I. Evolving Robot Consciousness: The Easy Problems and the Rest. To appear in Evolving Consciousness, G. Mulhauser (ed.), Advances in Consciousness Research Series, John Benjamins, Amsterdam. In preparation.

[I used the internte version at ftp://ftp.cogs.susx.ac.uk/pub/users/inmanh/consc.ps.gz]

MORENO, A., UMEREZ, J. & IBAÑEZ, J. (1997) Cognition and Life. The Autonomy of Cognition. Brain & Cognition 34 (1) Special Issue Academic Press pp. 107-129.

RORTY, R. (1994).Consciousness, Intentionality, and the Philosophy of Mind. From The Mind-Body Problem (A guide to the current debate). Edited by Richard Wagner and Tadesz Szubka. Blackwell, 1994. P. 121-127.

SEARLE, J. (1992) What’s Wrong With the Philosophy of Mind?. 1st chapter of ‘The rediscovery of the mind’ (MIT press, 1992). Taken from The Mind-Body Problem (A guide to the current debate). Edited by Richard Wagner and Tadesz Szubka. Blackwell, 1994. p. 277-298.

SEARLE, J. (1997). The Mystery of Consciousness. Granta Books 1998.

TORRANCE, S. (1996). Real world: embedding and traditional AI.

TORRANCE, S. (1998). The Taste of Lemons: A New Twist to the Cosnciousness Debate. (Talk delivered in Psychology Group, Middlesex University, November 1998)

Van GELDER, T. (1993) What can cognition be if not computation? From III International Workshop on Artificial Life and Arificial Intelligence, Workshop Notes, second edition, UPV. San Sebastian, 1995.

Van GELDER, T. (1995). Mind as Motion: Explorations in the Dynamics of cognition. MIT press.

VARELA, THOMPSON AND ROSCH, (1991). The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience, Cambridge MA:MIT Press. (I used the Spanish edition: Editorial Gedisa, 1997)

VARELA, F. (1996). Neurophenomenology: A Methodological Remedy for the Hard Problem. In Journal of Consciousness Studies, “Special Issues on the Hard Problems”, J.Shear (Ed.) June 1996.

[I used the HTML version on http://www.ccr.jussieu.fr/varela/ human_consciousness/article01.html]

A life in music: Elliott Carter

‘I used to write gigantic pieces that took a long time to compose, if not to play. Now I couldn’t stand working for so long on the same thing’

Elliott Carter is sitting at the dining table of his Greenwich Village apartment. In front of him is a large pile of contracts for upcoming performances of his work. As he begins to sign them, he turns quickly to his manager to check the date. “It’s the 22nd, yes?” “Yes,” replies his manager, who adds, with a stage wink: “and the year is 2008″. Carter puts down his pen and laughs. “I really needed to be reminded what year it is.”

Next Thursday Carter will celebrate his hundredth birthday. All year has been filled with performances of his work that will culminate next week with concerts all over the world. But while these events will mark an extraordinarily long and distinguished career, they will not be exclusively retrospective occasions. New work will be as much a feature as old, especially in New York, where a “kind of piano concerto”, Interventions, will be premiered by Daniel Barenboim with James Levine conducting the Boston Symphony Orchestra. “And they’re also going to play a Schubert four-hander together, which is one of my favourite pieces,” he explains. “And there’ll be some Stravinsky, which really got me started as a composer in the first place.”

In London, two long-time champions of Carter’s work, Pierre Boulez and Pierre-Laurent Aimard, will perform recent work, including Dialogues for piano and ensemble, while another Carter disciple, Oliver Knussen, will conduct a programme comprised solely of works composed by Carter in his 90s.

Carter does admit that his production has dropped off a little this year, but insists it is not his age that has slowed him down: it is people wanting to celebrate his age. “This year has been a bit peculiar in all sorts of ways, mostly in that there has been a lot more talking about music than writing it. But I don’t really mind that. I sometimes think of my pieces as wayward children. I feel an obligation to encourage them and help them on their way, so I don’t mind talking to people about them. I can’t just let them run off on their own.”

Carter, a comparatively late starter, first built a reputation as a composer in the 1940s with work that seemed to capture a certain American expansiveness and confidence. Then, in the 50s, he reinvented himself as a harder-edged and more innovative composer in a series of monumental pieces that established him as a leading figure in the postwar avant-garde music scene. His recent output has represented a remarkable late burst of prolific creativity.

He treats his longevity with a relaxed shrug: “I know it must sound amazing, but it doesn’t really feel so odd.” He can remember the first world war starting – “actually, I can remember knocking over a goldfish bowl, but it was on the day that America entered the war” – and he has known some of the most significant musical and artistic figures of the past century. Charles Ives was a family friend, Varèse was a neighbour, he knew Bartók, Cage and Copland, and sat next to George Gershwin at the American premiere of Berg’s opera Wozzeck. Stravinsky became a friend, and Carter was witness to a legendary musical encounter when he and Stravinsky were having dinner in a New York restaurant. A waiter asked if a fellow diner could have Stravinsky’s autograph. A somewhat irked Stravinsky chose to keep the fan waiting. So it was only after an agonisingly lengthy pause that a bemused Frank Sinatra, accompanied by his then wife Mia Farrow, were signalled that they might be allowed to approach the table.

Boulez describes Carter’s career as a “résumé of the century” and contrasts its arc with that of Messiaen, who was born just one day before him: while Messiaen established his approach early in his career and then, albeit in highly imaginative ways, largely stuck to it, Carter rediscovered his “compositional voice” in his 50s and “became quite adventurous. Today,” Boulez continues, “he is more flexible, inventive, less complicated and easier to perform as a consequence. I am amazed . . . everybody is amazed that he still composes and creates so many new works.”

But such productivity also, perversely, militates against continued productivity. “I get quite a lot of musicians coming here to practise my new pieces. So things I wrote six months ago are going through my head, which means I can have a hard time getting back to the piece I’m writing. And these musicians always want me to say something. But I have to be careful about imposing my way on it, which might not be so easy for them, and therefore they might not play it so well. When I was younger, my music was not being played that often or that well. A lot of people play my music well today, but in the old days it bothered me a great deal and it made me wonder that I hadn’t written it right. So I used to change things, but always ended up going back to the first version. But it is a peculiar business. Just as there are a hundred ways of playing Hamlet, I hope there are a hundred ways of playing my music. But there is still that play, Hamlet, no matter what people do to it. And I’m now happy enough with that thought.”

Carter was born in New York, on December 11 1908, into a prosperous family of lace importers. His father would visit France four times every year, even during the first world war, and it was assumed that Elliott would take over the business. He was taught French – “for some time I could speak it better than English” – and he even accompanied his pacifist father to Europe in the early 1920s, “when there were still a lot of unpleasant things to see”. They visited battlefields, and he remembers starving waiters in Berlin stealing food off the tables.

Carter attended a renowned private school, where his best friend was the son of the playwright Eugene O’Neill. A teacher would take students to concerts, and in 1924 Carter heard Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring at Carnegie Hall. “Half the audience walked out, but I thought it was the most wonderful thing.” On subsequent trips to Europe with his father, Carter began to pick up scores of music by Schoenberg, then all but unavailable in America. A later introduction to Charles Ives – who was at that stage not composing, but selling insurance – ensured that Carter was for ever lost to the world of lace importing.

Ives wrote a letter recommending Carter to Harvard, where he studied English as well as music and was tutored, briefly, by Gustav Holst. Ever since that evening at Carnegie Hall, he “consciously didn’t like old music” and had walked out of concerts of Beethoven and Brahms because “I thought they were tiresome. But then I realised the pieces I was writing weren’t terribly good, and that I had better learn about music properly”. In 1932 Carter travelled to Paris, where he studied with Nadia Boulanger and “learnt traditional things such as counterpoint and harmony and analysis of various pieces. So I studied how people had written music in the past, which, unsurprisingly, was very helpful.”

When he returned to America in 1935, Carter became musical director of the Ballet Caravan and produced what is widely regarded as his first major work, the ballet score Pocahontas (1939), as well as beginning his first symphony. The same year, he married the sculptor Helen Frost-Jones. She died in 2003 after 64 years of marriage. When war broke out, Carter was rejected for military service on health grounds. “I had all these allergies, which made me very guilty, so I tried all sorts of things to get into the war.” For a time he was asked to spy on Germans in New York – “they were often people I knew and I didn’t want to get into that” – before working for the office of war information, where he was behind broadcasts to Nazi-occupied countries. “We played Schoenberg and all sorts of things.”

He says he knew, “more or less”, when D-Day would happen, and in 1944 wrote Holiday Overture, which reflected the liberation of Paris and linked back to his time studying in the city with Boulanger. Immediately after the war, the Carters moved into the Greenwich Village apartment where he still lives. He says he has seen the neighbourhood transformed in recent years into an adjunct of Wall Street, with mostly bankers moving in. “It wasn’t always like that. When I was in high school, and even college, there was prohibition, and Greenwich Village was one of the few places you could get an illegal drink. When we moved in, the poets EE Cummings and Marianne Moore lived down the street. So did the composer Varèse. As a young man, I would go to jazz clubs here and on 57th Street. I loved Art Tatum and was very interested in the whole movement of jazz, which is reflected in some of my music. In some ways, the whole conception of music from that time is jazz-related in terms of irregular rhythms and working against rhythms, and improvisation are things I’ve done in many of my works.”

On his return to America from Paris, Carter says, the serious music world was dominated by a group of composers, including Aaron Copland, who were writing “semi-populist” music. Carter attempted for some years to write in a similar style. “But then it dawned on me that these pieces, which were intended to be accessible and easy to understand for a more general public, were still considered modern music and the public didn’t like them. That allowed me to go back and write anything I wanted, because if the public didn’t like the music written specifically for them, I might as well write the music that I’d like.”

In 1950, he retreated with his family to the Arizona desert, where he began the next phase of his career. Over the next quarter of a century, he produced a series of newly complex and challenging works. His first string quartet (1951) featured the four instruments apparently running on quite separate tracks. Variations for Orchestra (1954-55) is now routinely described as a 20th-century masterpiece, and his double concerto for harpsichord, piano and two chamber orchestras (1959-61) was acclaimed in the same terms by Stravinsky.

“Even though I was now writing what I wanted to, I hope I wasn’t writing in a selfish way. I did have some ideas I wanted to deal with and I thought of each piece as an adventure. I tried to discover something new that I hadn’t written before. That would not normally be something that attracted a crowd, but I did seem to build an audience.”

Although Carter was honoured with prizes and posts in America, it was in Europe that he found his public. He travelled to France often after the second world war and “got to know a lot of musicians, such as Boulez, as friends. There was a big reaction after the war to the Nazis having refused modern music. So modern music was well thought of up to the level of governments sometimes, as well as by musicians and concert-goers.”

The New Yorker music writer Alex Ross has identified how “the tireless mechanism of cold-war cultural politics gave Carter’s international career an early boost. Although the first quartet had little hope of charming American audiences of the period, it went over well in the new music centres of postwar Europe.” Carter, while always politically and socially progressive, says his strong early interest in leftwing politics had been eclipsed by the realities of Stalinism and he had not adopted any other ideology.

“Of course I wanted my music to give pleasure to and interest people who might play or listen to it, but the notion that it might change the world in some way seemed to me hopeless. Remember I’ve lived through two world wars. And I saw France and Germany right after both of them. What I really wanted was just to make music that I liked.”

In the past three decades, he has done that with an astonishing frequency, producing his first opera at the age of 90. “I used to write these gigantic pieces that were very complex and took a long time to compose, if not to play. I am now much more impatient and couldn’t stand working for so long on the same thing. But also those pieces were me working out certain ideas about music. Those ideas are now part of my life, so I don’t have to think about them in quite the same way. But some things never change, in that you are still glad to finish a piece and still wonder whether it is as good as you hoped it might be when you started out.”

Carter has been so productive that, alongside works being premiered to mark his centenary, there are even newer works lined up for next year. He has a long history of setting American poetry to music, and has just finished adapting some of Ezra Pound’s Pisan Cantos for a piece of music that will be heard first at Aldeburgh next year.

“Robert Lowell had shown me certain things that he liked very much in the Cantos and I have chosen a good deal of what he told me. The Cantos were a gigantic project that was going to be something like an Americanised version of Dante’s Divine Comedy, although that only emerges now and then. Some of them are wonderful poems, and I’ve used a section in which he talks about paradise – which for him was writing the perfect poem. Of course he never succeeded and he ends the piece saying that the ‘only paradise is in the wind’. It’s a wonderful way for an artist to look at things. But my turn of mind is not quite as apocalyptic as Pound’s. I prefer to think of myself as just working along, like any other person. I could be mending shoes or something, but I’m also aware that sometimes newly mended shoes are not only useful, but beautiful. And perhaps even fascinating.”

I’ve been interested in the idea of the concerto for a long time and have written works that might be called concertos for several instruments, including the flute, oboe, clarinet and violin, as well as things like my concerto for orchestra. These have not often been straightforward uses of the form, and I’ve enjoyed playing with the ideas that concertos raise.

There is the obvious fact of the soloist contrasted against the orchestra, which is often seen as the individual set against society. It’s a very potent idea. But there are many subtle variations, starting with the fact that the individual is also within society and the society is made up of individuals. For many years I thought deeply about these things. But today, maybe because of my age but more likely because these ideas are now ingrained within me, I just write the piece.

The new piano work for Daniel Barenboim and James Levine is called Interventions because the piano intervenes with the orchestra. It is a little like a concerto, but as Levine specifically told me to write something interesting for the orchestra as well as the pianist, I hope I’ve made something in which they both can shine.

Through the Glasses Darkly

What if the between-the-lines Republican message (don’t be afraid, there will be no real change) is the true illusion?

By SLAVOJ ZIZEK

When the hero of John Carpenter’s 1988 They Live puts on a pair of weird sunglasses that he has stumbled upon in an abandoned church, he notices a billboard that once invited us to a Hawaii beach holiday now simply displays the words:

“MARRY AND REPRODUCE.” Ad copy on another billboard — this one for a new color TV — says, “DON’T THINK, CONSUME!”

The glasses, then, function as a device for the critique of ideology. In other words, they enable him to see the real message lying beneath the glossy, colorful surface.

What would we see if we were to observe the Republican presidential campaign through such glasses?The first thing would be a long series of contradictions and inconsistencies:

• Their call to reach across party lines — while waging the cultural war politics of “us” against “them.”

• Their warning that the candidates’ family life should be off limits — while parading their families on stage.

• Their promises of change — while offering the same old programs (lower taxes and less social welfare, a belligerent foreign policy, etc.).

• Their pledge to reduce state spending — while incessantly praising President Reagan. (Recall Reagan’s answer to those who worried about the exploding debt: “It is big enough to take care of itself.”)

• Their accusations that Democrats privilege style over substance — which they deliver at perfectly staged media events.

The next thing we would see is that these and other inconsistencies are not a weakness, but a source of strength for the Republican message. Republican strategists masterfully exploit the flaws of liberalism: Its patronizing “concern” for the poor that is combined with a thinly disguised indifference toward — if not outright contempt for — blue-collar workers, and its politically correct feminism that is usually combined with an underlying mistrust of women in power. Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin was a hit on both counts, parading both her working-class husband and her femininity.

The earlier generations of women politicians (Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir, British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and even, up to a point, U.S. Sen. Hillary Clinton) were what can be referred to as “phallic” women. They acted as “iron ladies” who imitated and tried to outdo male authority, to be “more men than men themselves.”

Writing in Le Point, a French weekly, Jacques-Alain Miller, a follower of the late French philospher Jacques Lacan, pointed out that Palin, on the contrary, proudly displays her femininity and motherhood. She has a “castrating” effect on her male opponents, not by being more manly than them, but by sarcastically downgrading the puffed-up male authority. According to Miller, Palin instinctively knows that male “phallic” authority is a posture, a semblance to be exploited and mocked. Recall how she mocked Sen. Barack Obama’s work as a community organizer.

Palin provides a “post-feminist” femininity without complexity, uniting the features of mother, prim teacher (glasses, hair in a bun), public figure and, implicitly, sex object, proudly displaying the “first dude” as a phallic toy. The message is that she doesn’t lack anything — and, to add insult to injury, it was a Republican woman who realized this left-liberal dream. It is as if she simply is what left-liberal feminists want to be. No wonder the Palin effect is one of false liberation: “Drill, baby, drill!” Feminism and family values! Big corporations and blue collars!

So, back to Carpenter’s They Live. To get the true Republican message, one should take into account not only what is said but what is implied.

Where we hear the message of populist frustration over Washington gridlock and corruption, the glasses would show a condoning of the public’s refusal to understand: “We allow you NOT to understand — so have fun, vent your frustration! We will take care of business. We have enough behind-the-scenes experts who can fix things. In a way, it’s better for you not to know.” (Recall Vice President Dick Cheney’s hints at the dark side of power, as he successfully orchestrated an expansion of presidential executive power.)

And where the message is the promise of change, the glasses would show something like this: “Don’t worry, there will be no real change, we just want to change some small things to make sure that nothing will really change.” The rhetoric of change, of troubling Washington’s stagnant waters, is a permanent Republican staple. (Recall former Republican House Speaker Newt Gingrich’s populist anti-Washington rise to power in 1994.)

Let us not be naïve here: Republican voters know there will be no real change. They know the same substance will go on with changes in style. This is part of the deal.

Four years ago, Sen. John Kerry lost because he was President Bush with a human face. Today, Sen. John McCain is Bush with a lipsticked face. It’s a rhetorical lipstick of “No bullshit!” When Princeton philosopher Harry Frankfurt, author of the bestselling On Bullshit, was asked which U.S. politician breaks out of the predominant bullshitting, he named McCain — and thereby tragi-comically missed a key point. Talking straight, displaying no-bullshit honesty, can be the cleverest form of bullshitting, a mere populist pose.

What if, however, the between-the-lines Republican message (don’t be afraid, there will be no real change) is the true illusion, not the secret truth? What if there really will be a change? Or, to paraphrase the Marx brothers: McCain and Palin look like they want a change and talk like they want a change — but this shouldn’t deceive us, they might very well accomplish a change!

Perhaps this is the true danger, since it would be change in the direction of “Country first!” and of “Drill, baby, drill!”

Luckily, as an electoral blessing in disguise, a sobering thing happened to remind us where we really live: in the reality of global capitalism. The state is planning emergency measures to spend hundreds of billions of dollars — if not $1 trillion — to repair the consequences of the financial crisis caused by free-market speculations.

The lesson is clear: The market and state are not opposed. Indeed, strong state interventions are needed to keep markets balanced.

The initial Republican reaction to the financial meltdown was a desperate attempt to reduce it to a minor misfortune that could easily be healed by a proper dose of the old Republican medicine (a proper respect for market mechanisms, etc.). In short, the Republicans’ between-the-lines message was this: We allow you to continue to dream.

However, all the political posturing of lower state spending became irrelevant after this sudden brush with the real. Today, even the strongest advocates of diminishing the excessive role of Washington accept the necessity for a state intervention that is sublime in its almost unimaginable quantity. Confronted with this sublime grandeur, all the “no bullshit” bravado was reduced to a confused mumble. Where, today, are McCain’s steely resolve and Palin’s sarcasm?

But was the financial meltdown really the awakening from a dream? It depends on how the meltdown will be perceived by the general public. In other words, which interpretation will win? Which “story” about it will predominate?

When the normal run of things is traumatically interrupted, the field of “discursive” ideological competition opens up. In Germany in the late ’20s, Adolf Hitler won the competition for the narrative that explained to Germans the reasons for the crisis of the Weimar Republic and the way out of it. (His plot was the Jewish plot.) In France in 1940, Marshall Petain’s narrative, that France lost because of the Jewish influence and democratic degeneration, won in explaining the reasons for the French defeat.

Consequently, the main task of the ruling ideology is to impose a narrative that will not put the blame for the meltdown onto the global capitalist system as such, but on, say, lax legal regulations and the corruption of big financial institutions. Against this tendency, we should insist on the key question: which “flaw” of the system as such opens up the possibility for — and continuous outbreaks of — such crises and collapses?

The first thing to bear in mind is that the origin of the crisis is a “benevolent” one. After the dot-com bubble exploded in the first years of the new millennium, the decision across party lines was to facilitate real estate investments to keep the economy growing and prevent recession. Today’s meltdown is the price paid for the United States avoiding a prolonged recession five years ago.

The danger is that the predominant narrative of the meltdown will be the one that, instead of waking us from a dream, will enable us to continue to dream. And it is here that we should start to worry — not only about the economic consequences of the meltdown, but also about the obvious temptation to reinvigorate the “war on terror” and U.S. interventionism in order to keep the economy running.

Anti-democratic nature of US capitalism is being exposed

NOAM CHOMSKY

Fri, Oct 10, 2008

Bretton Woods was the system of global financial management set up at the end of the second World War to ensure the interests of capital did not smother wider social concerns in post-war democracies. It was hated by the US neoliberals – the very people who created the banking crisis writes Noam Chomsky

THE SIMULTANEOUS unfolding of the US presidential campaign and unravelling of the financial markets presents one of those occasions where the political and economic systems starkly reveal their nature.

Passion about the campaign may not be universally shared but almost everybody can feel the anxiety from the foreclosure of a million homes, and concerns about jobs, savings and healthcare at risk.

The initial Bush proposals to deal with the crisis so reeked of totalitarianism that they were quickly modified. Under intense lobbyist pressure, they were reshaped as “a clear win for the largest institutions in the system . . . a way of dumping assets without having to fail or close”, as described by James Rickards, who negotiated the federal bailout for the hedge fund Long Term Capital Management in 1998, reminding us that we are treading familiar turf. The immediate origins of the current meltdown lie in the collapse of the housing bubble supervised by Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan, which sustained the struggling economy through the Bush years by debt-based consumer spending along with borrowing from abroad. But the roots are deeper. In part they lie in the triumph of financial liberalisation in the past 30 years – that is, freeing the markets as much as possible from government regulation.

These steps predictably increased the frequency and depth of severe reversals, which now threaten to bring about the worst crisis since the Great Depression.

Also predictably, the narrow sectors that reaped enormous profits from liberalisation are calling for massive state intervention to rescue collapsing financial institutions.

Such interventionism is a regular feature of state capitalism, though the scale today is unusual. A study by international economists Winfried Ruigrok and Rob van Tulder 15 years ago found that at least 20 companies in the Fortune 100 would not have survived if they had not been saved by their respective governments, and that many of the rest gained substantially by demanding that governments “socialise their losses,” as in today’s taxpayer-financed bailout. Such government intervention “has been the rule rather than the exception over the past two centuries”, they conclude.

In a functioning democratic society, a political campaign would address such fundamental issues, looking into root causes and cures, and proposing the means by which people suffering the consequences can take effective control.

The financial market “underprices risk” and is “systematically inefficient”, as economists John Eatwell and Lance Taylor wrote a decade ago, warning of the extreme dangers of financial liberalisation and reviewing the substantial costs already incurred – and proposing solutions, which have been ignored. One factor is failure to calculate the costs to those who do not participate in transactions. These “externalities” can be huge. Ignoring systemic risk leads to more risk-taking than would take place in an efficient economy, even by the narrowest measures.

The task of financial institutions is to take risks and, if well-managed, to ensure that potential losses to themselves will be covered. The emphasis is on “to themselves”. Under state capitalist rules, it is not their business to consider the cost to others – the “externalities” of decent survival – if their practices lead to financial crisis, as they regularly do.

Financial liberalisation has effects well beyond the economy. It has long been understood that it is a powerful weapon against democracy. Free capital movement creates what some have called a “virtual parliament” of investors and lenders, who closely monitor government programmes and “vote” against them if they are considered irrational: for the benefit of people, rather than concentrated private power.

Investors and lenders can “vote” by capital flight, attacks on currencies and other devices offered by financial liberalisation. That is one reason why the Bretton Woods system established by the United States and Britain after the second World War instituted capital controls and regulated currencies.*

The Great Depression and the war had aroused powerful radical democratic currents, ranging from the anti-fascist resistance to working class organisation. These pressures made it necessary to permit social democratic policies. The Bretton Woods system was designed in part to create a space for government action responding to public will – for some measure of democracy.

John Maynard Keynes, the British negotiator, considered the most important achievement of Bretton Woods to be the establishment of the right of governments to restrict capital movement.

In dramatic contrast, in the neoliberal phase after the breakdown of the Bretton Woods system in the 1970s, the US treasury now regards free capital mobility as a “fundamental right”, unlike such alleged “rights” as those guaranteed by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights: health, education, decent employment, security and other rights that the Reagan and Bush administrations have dismissed as “letters to Santa Claus”, “preposterous”, mere “myths”.

In earlier years, the public had not been much of a problem. The reasons are reviewed by Barry Eichengreen in his standard scholarly history of the international monetary system. He explains that in the 19th century, governments had not yet been “politicised by universal male suffrage and the rise of trade unionism and parliamentary labour parties”. Therefore, the severe costs imposed by the virtual parliament could be transferred to the general population.

But with the radicalisation of the general public during the Great Depression and the anti-fascist war, that luxury was no longer available to private power and wealth. Hence in the Bretton Woods system, “limits on capital mobility substituted for limits on democracy as a source of insulation from market pressures”.

The obvious corollary is that after the dismantling of the postwar system, democracy is restricted. It has therefore become necessary to control and marginalise the public in some fashion, processes particularly evident in the more business-run societies like the United States. The management of electoral extravaganzas by the public relations industry is one illustration.

“Politics is the shadow cast on society by big business,” concluded America’s leading 20th century social philosopher John Dewey, and will remain so as long as power resides in “business for private profit through private control of banking, land, industry, reinforced by command of the press, press agents and other means of publicity and propaganda”.

The United States effectively has a one-party system, the business party, with two factions, Republicans and Democrats. There are differences between them. In his study Unequal Democracy: The Political Economy of the New Gilded Age, Larry Bartels shows that during the past six decades “real incomes of middle-class families have grown twice as fast under Democrats as they have under Republicans, while the real incomes of working-poor families have grown six times as fast under Democrats as they have under Republicans”.

Differences can be detected in the current election as well. Voters should consider them, but without illusions about the political parties, and with the recognition that consistently over the centuries, progressive legislation and social welfare have been won by popular struggles, not gifts from above.

Those struggles follow a cycle of success and setback. They must be waged every day, not just once every four years, always with the goal of creating a genuinely responsive democratic society, from the voting booth to the workplace.

* The Bretton Woods system of global financial management was created by 730 delegates from all 44 Allied second World War nations who attended a UN-hosted Monetary and Financial Conference at the Mount Washington Hotel in Bretton Woods in New Hampshire in 1944.

Bretton Woods, which collapsed in 1971, was the system of rules, institutions, and procedures that regulated the international monetary system, under which were set up the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (IBRD) (now one of five institutions in the World Bank Group) and the International Monetary Fund (IMF), which came into effect in 1945.

The chief feature of Bretton Woods was an obligation for each country to adopt a monetary policy that maintained the exchange rate of its currency within a fixed value.

The system collapsed when the US suspended convertibility from dollars to gold. This created the unique situation whereby the US dollar became the “reserve currency” for the other countries within Bretton Woods.

Noam Chomsky is professor emeritus of linguistics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His writings on linguistics and politics have just been collected in The Essential Chomsky, edited by Anthony Arnove, from the New Press. This article appeared first in the New York Times

© 2008 The Irish Times

Building Dwelling Thinking by Martin Heidegger

Tuesday , September 23, 2008

By Allison Barrie     

Baggage searches are SOOOOOO early-21st century. Homeland Security is now testing the next generation of security screening — a body scanner that can read your mind.

Most preventive screening looks for explosives or metals that pose a threat. But a new system called MALINTENT turns the old school approach on its head. This Orwellian-sounding machine detects the person — not the device — set to wreak havoc and terror.

MALINTENT, the brainchild of the cutting-edge Human Factors division in Homeland Security’s directorate for Science and Technology, searches your body for non-verbal cues that predict whether you mean harm to your fellow passengers.

It has a series of sensors and imagers that read your body temperature, heart rate and respiration for unconscious tells invisible to the naked eye — signals terrorists and criminals may display in advance of an attack.

But this is no polygraph test. Subjects do not get hooked up or strapped down for a careful reading; those sensors do all the work without any actual physical contact. It’s like an X-ray for bad intentions.

Currently, all the sensors and equipment are packaged inside a mobile screening laboratory about the size of a trailer or large truck bed, and just last week, Homeland Security put it to a field test in Maryland, scanning 144 mostly unwitting human subjects.

While I’d love to give you the full scoop on the unusual experiment, testing is ongoing and full disclosure would compromise future tests.

• Click here for an exclusive look at MALINTENT in action.

But what I can tell you is that the test subjects were average Joes living in the D.C. area who thought they were attending something like a technology expo; in order for the experiment to work effectively and to get the testing subjects to buy in, the cover story had to be convincing.

While the 144 test subjects thought they were merely passing through an entrance way, they actually passed through a series of sensors that screened them for bad intentions.

Homeland Security also selected a group of 23 attendees to be civilian “accomplices” in their test. They were each given a “disruptive device” to carry through the portal — and, unlike the other attendees, were conscious that they were on a mission.

In order to conduct these tests on human subjects, DHS had to meet rigorous safety standards to ensure the screening would not cause any physical or emotional harm.

So here’s how it works. When the sensors identify that something is off, they transmit warning data to analysts, who decide whether to flag passengers for further questioning. The next step involves micro-facial scanning, which involves measuring minute muscle movements in the face for clues to mood and intention.

Homeland Security has developed a system to recognize, define and measure seven primary emotions and emotional cues that are reflected in contractions of facial muscles. MALINTENT identifies these emotions and relays the information back to a security screener almost in real-time.

This whole security array — the scanners and screeners who make up the mobile lab — is called “Future Attribute Screening Technology” — or FAST — because it is designed to get passengers through security in two to four minutes, and often faster.

If you’re rushed or stressed, you may send out signals of anxiety, but FAST isn’t fooled. It’s already good enough to tell the difference between a harried traveler and a terrorist. Even if you sweat heavily by nature, FAST won’t mistake you for a baddie.

“If you focus on looking at the person, you don’t have to worry about detecting the device itself,” said Bob Burns, MALINTENT’s project leader. And while there are devices out there that look at individual cues, a comprehensive screening device like this has never before been put together.

While FAST’s batting average is classified, Undersecretary for Science and Technology Adm. Jay Cohen declared the experiment a “home run.”

As cold and inhuman as the electric eye may be, DHS says scanners are unbiased and nonjudgmental. “It does not predict who you are and make a judgment, it only provides an assessment in situations,” said Burns. “It analyzes you against baseline stats when you walk in the door, it measures reactions and variations when you approach and go through the portal.”

But the testing — and the device itself — are not without their problems. This invasive scanner, which catalogues your vital signs for non-medical reasons, seems like an uninvited doctor’s exam and raises many privacy issues.

But DHS says this is not Big Brother. Once you are through the FAST portal, your scrutiny is over and records aren’t kept. “Your data is dumped,” said Burns. “The information is not maintained — it doesn’t track who you are.”

DHS is now planning an even wider array of screening technology, including an eye scanner next year and pheromone-reading technology by 2010.

The team will also be adding equipment that reads body movements, called “illustrative and emblem cues.” According to Burns, this is achievable because people “move in reaction to what they are thinking, more or less based on the context of the situation.”

FAST may also incorporate biological, radiological and explosive detection, but for now the primary focus is on identifying and isolating potential human threats.

And because FAST is a mobile screening laboratory, it could be set up at entrances to stadiums, malls and in airports, making it ever more difficult for terrorists to live and work among us.

Burns noted his team’s goal is to “restore a sense of freedom.” Once MALINTENT is rolled out in airports, it could give us a future where we can once again wander onto planes with super-sized cosmetics and all the bottles of water we can carry — and most importantly without that sense of foreboding that has haunted Americans since Sept. 11.

Allison Barrie, a security and terrorism consultant with the Commission for National Security in the 21st Century, is FOX News’ security columnist.

Alan Moore on ‘Watchmen’ movie: ‘I will be spitting venom all over it’