The delusions of transhumanists and life span extenders

One futurist story line is that we all will be seamlessly integrated with AI and the cloud, and bioengineered to live forever. This simplistic fantasy does not take into account the pervasive and fundamental relationships and fluxes between all living things. The cellular mass of individual humans, after all, is mainly composed of their diverse microbiotas (bacteria, fungi, protists), that influence how all organ systems interact with environmental input.  Humans dominate the planet because their brains first evolved a largely unconscious mirroring collective cooperative group intelligence from which different languages and cultures have risen. The linguistic and cognitive brain being modeled by AI's large language models is just one component of a much larger working ensemble in continuous flux with the geosphere and biosphere.

(I've been meaning to develop the above sentiments for a longer post, but have decided to go ahead and pass them on here in case that doesn't happen.)  

 

Regulating our subjective well being - our brain's axes of arousal, valence, and agency

I've now read several times through a daunting review article by Feldman et al.  in the July issue of Trends in Cognitive Science  titled "The Neurobiology of Interoception and Affect."  (motivated readers can obtain a copy of the whole article from me). The bottom line is that the subjective feelings of what is going on inside our bodies -  that taken together form our sense of well being -  rise from a an array of cortical and visceral neuroendocrine systems that are much more complex that the nerve pathways regulating our exteroception, the sensing of external signals such as sound, light, or touch.  I would recommend reading the article to get a sense of the array of players that include upper and lower cortical regions, spinal cord, the autonomic nervous system, the enteric nervous system, etc.

We can describe our feelings, our affect, along two fundamental axes, valence and arousal. Valence refers to whether something is pleasant or unpleasant,  desirable or dangerous -  do we go for it or scram?  Arousal refers to where are we on the spectrum of being calm to being excited or distressed.  A third fundamental axis is formed by our experience of agency, how powerful versus helpless we feel in a given situation.  

In this post I want to pass on a rich graphic from the article showing how we can categorize  our feelings  in language with respect to these fundamental axes.  It is based on Saif M. Mohammad's computational linguistics studies that have obtained reliable human ratings of valence, arousal, and dominance for 20,000 English words. The graphic gives us a  description of central regulators of our well being to which we have subjective (interoceptive) access. (You should be able to click on this and the following images to enlarge them.)  I have found that referencing my own subjective feelings to these axes has helped me to be more aware of them and assisted in their regulation.  

 
 

If the above looks complicated, it gets even worse. There really should be a 3-dimensional rather than 2-dimensional plot (see graphic below). The further axis of regulation used by Mohammad in generating data for the above figure is our subjective experience of dominance or agency in a given situation (where are we on a gradient of helpless to powerful?)  Here is a clip from the Saif M. Mohammad reference link shown above with some definitions:

As a footnote or addendum, I will also repeat here a more simple graphic showing these axes that I have used in my lectures, taken from the work of Lisa Feldman Barrett,  (enter 'Barrett' in the search box in left column of this page to find MindBlog posts describing her studies on understanding what feelings and emotions are).

 

 

 

The brain simulates actions and their consequences during REM sleep

During REM sleep our brains make up and work though simulated scenarios, while putting our bodies into paralysis so we don't thrash about dangerously....  Senzai and Scanziani show what in going on in mouse brains. Here is the first paragraph (abstract) of their open source text:

Vivid dreams mostly occur during a phase of sleep called REM1–5. During REM sleep, the brain’s internal representation of direction keeps shifting like that of an awake animal moving through its environment6–8. What causes these shifts, given the immobility of the sleeping animal? Here we show that the superior colliculus of the mouse, a motor command center involved in orienting movements9–15, issues motor commands during REM sleep, e.g. turn left, that are similar to those issued in the awake behaving animal. Strikingly, these motor commands, despite not being executed, shift the internal representation of direction as if the animal had turned. Thus, during REM sleep, the brain simulates actions by issuing motor commands that, while not executed, have consequences as if they had been. This study suggests that the sleeping brain, while disengaged from the external world, uses its internal model of the world to simulate interactions with it.

An epilogue

I want to pass on a clip from the epilogue of Jim Holt's  2012 book "Why Does the World Exist?  An Existential Detective Story" in which he describes his attending a small ninetieth birthday celebration for Claude Lévi-Strauss (1908-2009) the famous French anthropologist and ethnologist . The master made the following brief comments:

“Montaigne,” he begins, “said that aging diminishes us each day in a way that, when death finally arrives, it takes away only a quarter or half the man. But Montaigne only lived to be fifty-nine, so he could have no idea of the extreme old age I find myself in today” - which, he adds, was one of the “most curious surprises of my existence.” He says he feels like a “shattered hologram” that has lost its unity but that still retains an image of the whole self.

This is not the speech we were expecting. It is intimate, it is about death.

Lévi-Strauss goes on to talk about the “dialogue” between the eroded self he has become - le moi réel - and the ideal self that coexists with it - le moi métonymique. The latter, planning ambitious new intellectual projects, says to the former, “You must continue.” But the former replies, “That’s your business - only you can see things whole.” Lévi-Strauss then thanks those of us assembled for helping him silence this futile dialogue and allowing his two selves to “coincide” again for a moment - “although,” he adds, “I am well aware that le moi réel will continue to sink toward its ultimate dissolution.”

Human distinctiveness and Artificial Intelligence

I pass on some random thoughts occasioned by the previous post. What is distinctive about humans?

-There are millions of humans, there can be only a few LLMs, given the enormous amounts of material and energy required to make them.

-Many humans are required to generate and mirror shared illusions about value,purpose, and meaning that bind together and distinguish different cultures.

-For GPT engines to obtain such a capability would require that they be embodied, self sufficient, energy efficient, replicable, and interactive.... In other words, like current human bodies.

-Mr. Musk's humanoid robot, and the Chinese robot that has beat it to the assembly line, don't even come close.

 

Human Distinctiveness in Different Cultures

I want to pass on a clip of text from Samuel Arbesman's recent Substack email, on the path dependence of fundamental ideas about ourselves. I suggest checking out the links to his related writing on human distinctiveness:

The “Orang-Outang”

Awhile back I wrote about AI and human distinctiveness: basically my argument was that we should be less concerned by whether or not AI can do we what we can and care more about what we want to be doing. In other words, focus on what is quintessentially human, rather than what is uniquely human.

But perhaps some of these concerns are simply Western preoccupations, rather than universal human concerns?

In the recent book Fluke (which is fantastic!), Brian Klaas noted the following provocative point about differences between Western and Eastern thinking—and their views on human distinctness—and how it might have been due to the ecological milieu that each one arose from:

In this vision of a world humans are distinct from the rest of the natural world. That felt true for the inhabitants of the Middle East and Europe around the time of the birth of Christianity. Camels, cows, goats, mice, and dogs composed much of the encountered animal kingdom, a living menagerie of the beings that are quite unlike us.

In many Eastern cultures, by contrast, ancient religions tended to emphasize our unity with the natural world. One theory suggests that was partly because people lived among monkeys and apes. We recognized ourselves in them. As the biologist Roland Ennos points out, the word orangutan even means “man of the forest.” Hinduism has Hanumen, a monkey god. In China, the Chu kingdom revered gibbons. In these familiar primates, the theory suggests, it became impossible to ignore that we were part of nature—and nature was part of us.

This is almost a Guns, Germs, and Steel-kind of approach, but for ideas. At the risk of creating too much determinism here¹, it’s intriguing to explore the path dependence of ideas and concepts that organize how we think about the world and ourselves.

This reminds me of other research that examined how small historical distinctions can still affect our modern world, even if they are no longer relevant. For example, there is research that looks at how certain locations betray their histories as portage sites—places where boats or cargo were transported over land, allowing travel between more traversable waterways—despite this being obsolete. And yet it still has a certain long-term effect, as per this paper “Portage and Path Dependence”:

And returning to ideas, there is a paper entitled “Frontier Culture: The Roots and Persistence of ‘Rugged Individualism’ in the United States” that explores whether or not certain differences in location—areas considered the “frontier”—affect the geographical variation of ideas and beliefs in the United States. 

In the end, simply being more aware of the ideas and history that suffuse our thinking—rather than taking them for granted—is something important, whether or not we are trying to understand humanity’s place in the world, how technology should impact humanity, or why cities are located where they are.

Selections from the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS.org)

Below are URLs of journal articles  I find interesting and think might be of interest to some MindBlog readers.  Most are open source. Email me if you hit a paywall and would like me to send you a PDF of the complete article.  

The health risk of social disadvantage is transplantable into a new host. https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2404108121   (relevant to transferring immune-reconstituting cells  from a healthy donor to a cancer patient recipient.)

Can names shape facial appearances?  https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2405334121   (individuals acquire face–name congruency as they mature, suggesting
that characteristics associated with stereotypes are not necessarily  innate but may develop through a self-fulfilling prophecy.)

Dissonant music engages early visual processing https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2320378121

It matters what you see: Graphic media images of war and terror may amplify distress https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2318465121

Early-emerging combinatorial thought: Human infants flexibly combine kind and quantity concepts https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2315149121

Callousness, exploitativeness, and tracking of cooperation incentives in the human default network https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2307221121 

The Art of Pretending to Govern

Venkatesh Rao's most recent installment of his RibbonFarm Breaking Smart series has comments on the seminal ideas of James Scott, a writer who recently died.  I want to pass on clips from his piece that exactly mirrors my sentiments, expressed much more clearly that I could:

James Scott is the reason I’m 40% anarchist. I’m also 40% statist, thanks to Francis Fukuyama, 40% mutualist thanks to Hannah Arendt, and 40% individualist thanks to Douglas Adams. I am large. I contain multitudes.  

The great contribution of James Scott to our times was to characterize actually existing anarchism as not just a real thing, but as the most effective and morally defensible political stance in existence. And the functional core of how civilization actually works. Anarchy is neither the macho state of chaotic Hobbesian violence its naive critics assume it must be, nor the anodyne Le Guin pacifism that its apologists pretend it could be if practiced soulfully enough with enough women at the helm. Actually existing anarchism is, as Scott put it in the title of his third major book, simply the art of not being governed.  

It means rendering the powers-that-be as inconsequential as possible in one’s personal life, defined and scoped modestly, and defended cunningly, but never quite perfectly.  

As an homage to Scott, and for your consideration, I’d like to pose a deeply consequential question that he obliquely gets at in his works, but did not truly get around to exploring: What is the function of the state? ...by state here, I mean both the public sector and the private sector it organizes and enables through its economic institutions and military/police protections...I'd like to propose an answer:  

The function of a state is to pretend to govern more than it actually does.  

Contra Scott, and in sympathy with Francis Fukuyama, I do believe in states. I do believe they should exist, and attempt to govern. And that they do in fact manage to govern successfully up to a point. But contra Fukuyama, and in line with Scott, I stop believing in state capacity at precisely the point Scott recommends — where they get tempted into authoritarian high-modernist “schemes to improve the human condition.”... My idea of a good-enough society — 40% anarchic, 40% statist, 40% mutualist, and 40% individualist, with a strong immune system against utopianisms — rests on a balance of power resulting in what we might call the Scott Social Compact:  

The state must pretend to govern more than it does, and individuals must pretend to be governed more than they are.  

This pretense is necessary and good because a significant proportion of the population cannot tolerate the thought that the world is in fact far more ungoverned and ungovernable than they would like for their sanity; that there is no benevolent force — not the State, not the Market, not God, not Straussian Great Men, not Enlightened Bureaucracies — that renders existence necessarily blessed, meaningful, and purposeful.  

These are the people — I’d estimate they constitute about 30-40% of the population, divided about evenly between the two ends of the political horseshoe — for whom muddling through, slouching towards utopia, with some half-assed mixed of inadequate state capacity and somewhat dysfunctional markets and institutions, is not enough... They require a clear plan to get to a clearly defined vision of utopia, and the fullest possible expression of state capacity compatible with that vision. They require a glorious vision to surrender to, which a whole host of ideologues are more than willing to cater to, with every configuration of mechanisms imaginable. This essentially religious tendency cannot be eliminated (and it would be immoral to try) but can be managed.  

It is important to the collective psyche to let these people...believe that the world is more governed than it is, and that they have a decisive say in how it is being governed... But it is equally important to not let them actually try too hard or too successfully. ..his is a dynamic that I have grown to appreciate in the last decade. I no longer delight in ripping off various theatrical veils that obscure the workings of modern societies and enjoying the aghast responses from the clueless such ripping can provoke. It increasingly strikes me as not just an unkind thing to do, but a misguided thing. Even when practiced at the very minor scale at which I have in the past.  

There are enough people around with a genuine religious instincts (whether those instincts lead them to AGIs, Efficient Markets, or older divinities) that denying that instinct adequate expression is a surefire way to destroy the world. It is what they call the “meaning crisis.” A too-naked Scottian anarchy in the external world equals nihilism in the inner world for too many. Sufficiently plausible fictions of governance must be allowed to persist while everybody works their way to becoming as enlightened as you and I...Delusions of agency and the mythic consequentiality of one’s own life must be indulged enough that life for the median religious type feels meaningful enough to live. But not so much that they become threats to others.  

One part of achieving this condition is that the other 70% — the Great Middle of the distribution that does not require mythic significance and meaning piped into their lives by authoritarian high modernist schemes — must learn and practice the art of not being governed. Including the art of pretending to be governed. Scott’s work highlights the extent to which this natural aptitude has been lost in modernity...  

But the other part of achieving this condition is that art of governance must be practiced with sufficient theatricality that more governance appears to be happening than is actually possible under conditions of technological modernity. The theater requires no Machiavellian Straussian Noble Lying to produce. Simply not challenging the narratives people make up to live by, and project onto visible governance processes, does the trick.  

There is no esoteric enlightened force of governance wrought by Great Men at work behind the curtain, and there can be none. There is no Deep State either, being steered by shadowy bureaucrats staffing Adjustment Bureaus. There are certainly those who believe they are part of such entities. Their delusions of grandeur too must be humored by the ungoverned — up to a point.  

Ultimately, there is only the emergent force of billions of sufficiently ungoverned people — including hundreds of millions who are part of “states” that are supposedly doing the governing — muddling through, making it all hang together just well enough to work.  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Psilocybin desynchronizes our brains during ego dissolution

From Siegel et al (open source).:

A single dose of psilocybin, a psychedelic that acutely causes distortions of space–time perception and ego dissolution, produces rapid and persistent therapeutic effects in human clinical trials^1,2,3,4. In animal models, psilocybin induces neuroplasticity in cortex and hippocampus^5,6,7,8. It remains unclear how human brain network changes relate to subjective and lasting effects of psychedelics. Here we tracked individual-specific brain changes with longitudinal precision functional mapping (roughly 18 magnetic resonance imaging visits per participant). Healthy adults were tracked before, during and for 3 weeks after high-dose psilocybin (25 mg) and methylphenidate (40 mg - a placebo in the form of methylphenidate, (Ritalin)), and brought back for an additional psilocybin dose 6–12 months later. Psilocybin massively disrupted functional connectivity (FC) in cortex and subcortex, acutely causing more than threefold greater change than methylphenidate. These FC changes were driven by brain desynchronization across spatial scales (areal, global), which dissolved network distinctions by reducing correlations within and anticorrelations between networks. Psilocybin-driven FC changes were strongest in the default mode network, which is connected to the anterior hippocampus and is thought to create our sense of space, time and self. Individual differences in FC changes were strongly linked to the subjective psychedelic experience. Performing a perceptual task reduced psilocybin-driven FC changes. Psilocybin caused persistent decrease in FC between the anterior hippocampus and default mode network, lasting for weeks. Persistent reduction of hippocampal-default mode network connectivity may represent a neuroanatomical and mechanistic correlate of the proplasticity and therapeutic effects of psychedelics.

The Ooze is Growing

In case you haven't seen enough pessimistic predictions about the next ~10-20 years, I pass on the following clips from a recent installment of my email subscription to Venkatesh Rao's "breaking Smart" news letter: 

...world affairs are effectively on autopilot now, running on what in the control engineering world are called bang-bang laws. Bang-bang laws drive a control mechanism from one extreme to another discontinuously, like steering a car with only hard right/hard left limit steers, and regulating speed only with hard braking and floored accelerators. Or electing two opposed sets of wingnuts to govern in loose alternation...Bang-bang laws can often have nice properties like time-optimality, and making good use of limited control authority that “saturates.” And they’re simple and robust, like your thermostat, a bang-bang controller that’s in Chapter 1 of most control engineering textbooks.

...I don’t think the state of the world today is one that can be governed by the bang-bang control laws being applied to it by opposed tribes of wingnuts everywhere. It’s not the right sort of problem for the strategy. Nevertheless, it’s the strategy we’ve adopted, because it happens to be the only option available right now. Instead of an Overton window within which politics as an art and science of the possible operates, we have two narrow slits representing the bang-bang limit positions, separated by a stretch of impossible positions. This situation has been contrived by people who don’t like to think very much or at all. So we have control laws that don’t actually work in the current planetary condition...weird out-of-control behaviors unfold if you apply an ill-conceived bang-bang strategy to a system unsuited to it...you brace for weird fallouts. Just as if you’re a passenger in a car being driven in a bang-bang way, you brace for a crash...You prepare for a world that will go out of control when the bang-bang strategy fails. It’s a question of when, not if.

The world is becoming ungovernable even as visions and attempts to govern it are getting ever more outlandishly delusional and ineffective.

The only conclusion we can reach is that we’re in for a period of increasingly ungoverned anarchy. Sure, some sort of theater of governance will continue everywhere. There will be bang-Left and bang-Right theaters piously strutting about on their respective stages pretending to govern, to captive audiences desperate to believe they are being governed, confined within ever-shrinking and increasingly exclusionary islands of stable prosperity, secured with growing amounts of low-grade localized boundary-integrity-maintaining violence. Lots of individual lives will get destroyed in the process. There will also be marquee showcase things built just so there are things to point at as examples of governance doing something, even if not well. The facade will last longer than we expect, even if you’re expecting it.

But all around, the ooze will grow. The ungovernability will grow.

But the ooze is not inevitably good or bad. What will make it good or bad is the quality of the attention and care we bring to thinking and feeling our way into it. It only feels shitty-shitty right now because we are attending to it in bang-bang ways, blinded by too-simple ideas and a fear of words.

How do you ignore and sidestep the bang-bang governance theaters, and feel and think your way into the ooze, to begin co-evolving with it? That’s the question. Fortunately, it’s mostly not a question for you or me, but for the next generation.

How we got to where we are

In the beginning was the cosmos, fundamentally as incomprehensible to our human brains as quantum chemistry is to a dog’s brain.

What our human brains can understand is that our ultimate emergence from countless generations of less complex organisms can be largely explained by a  simple mechanism that tests the reproductive fitness of varying replicants.

Systems that try to predict the future and dictate whether to go for it or scram - from the chemotaxis of bacteria to the predictive processing of our humans brains - have proved to be more likely to survive and propagate.

Modern neuroscience has proved that our experienced perceptions of sensing and acting are these predictions.  They are fantasies, or illusions, as is our sense of having a self with agency that experiences value, purpose, and meaning. Everything we do and experience is in the service of reducing surprises by fulling these fantasies. An array of neuroendocrine mechanisms have evolved to support this process because it forms the bedrock of human culture and language.

We are as gods, who invent ourselves and our cultures through impersonal emergent processes rising from our biological substrate.

Personal and social dysfunctions can sometimes be addressed by insight into this process, as when interoceptive awareness of the settings of  our autonomic nervous system's axes of arousal, valence, and agency allows us to dial them to more life sustaining values and better regulate our well-being in each instance of the present.

We can distinguish this autonomic substrate from the linguistic cultural overlay it it generates, and allow  the latter to be viewed in a more objective light. This is a deconstruction that permits us to not only let awareness rest closer to the 'engine room' or 'original mind' underlying its transient reactive products, but also to derive from this open awareness the kind of succor or equanimity we once found in the imagined stability of an external world.

Hopefully the deconstruction that takes us into this metaphorical engine room makes us more able to discern and employ illusions that enhance continuation rather than termination of our personal and social evolutionary narratives. 

(The above is MindBlog's 10/25/23 post, repeated here and given a new title.)