Mental problems from early life adversity passed down three generations.

Early life adversity can result in emotional and behavioral problems throughout adulthood in both humans and mice. Battaglia et al. show than in mice this effect can persist through three generations. Exposure to the drug amiloride throughout the three generations can reverse this persistence of anxiety and pain sensitivity by inhidibint the increased activity of membrane ion channels that are its apparent cause. Here is their abstract:

Early-life adversities are associated with altered defensive responses. Here, we demonstrate that the repeated cross-fostering (RCF) paradigm of early maternal separation is associated with enhancements of distinct homeostatic reactions: hyperventilation in response to hypercapnia and nociceptive sensitivity, among the first generation of RCF-exposed animals, as well as among two successive generations of their normally reared offspring, through matrilineal transmission. Parallel enhancements of acid-sensing ion channel 1 (ASIC1), ASIC2, and ASIC3 messenger RNA transcripts were detected transgenerationally in central neurons, in the medulla oblongata, and in periaqueductal gray matter of RCF-lineage animals. A single, nebulized dose of the ASIC-antagonist amiloride renormalized respiratory and nociceptive responsiveness across the entire RCF lineage. These findings reveal how, following an early-life adversity, a biological memory reducible to a molecular sensor unfolds, shaping adaptation mechanisms over three generations. Our findings are entwined with multiple correlates of human anxiety and pain conditions and suggest nebulized amiloride as a therapeutic avenue.

Using AI to find retinal biomarkers for patient sex that opthalmologists can be trained to see.

Delavari et al. do a demonstration of using AI to find aspects of human retina images that identify whether they are male or female retinas, a distinction that had not previously been accomplished by clinical opthalmologists. Here is their abstract:

We present a structured approach to combine explainability of artificial intelligence (AI) with the scientific method for scientific discovery. We demonstrate the utility of this approach in a proof-of-concept study where we uncover biomarkers from a convolutional neural network (CNN) model trained to classify patient sex in retinal images. This is a trait that is not currently recognized by diagnosticians in retinal images, yet, one successfully classified by CNNs. Our methodology consists of four phases: In Phase 1, CNN development, we train a visual geometry group (VGG) model to recognize patient sex in retinal images. In Phase 2, Inspiration, we review visualizations obtained from post hoc interpretability tools to make observations, and articulate exploratory hypotheses. Here, we listed 14 hypotheses retinal sex differences. In Phase 3, Exploration, we test all exploratory hypotheses on an independent dataset. Out of 14 exploratory hypotheses, nine revealed significant differences. In Phase 4, Verification, we re-tested the nine flagged hypotheses on a new dataset. Five were verified, revealing (i) significantly greater length, (ii) more nodes, and (iii) more branches of retinal vasculature, (iv) greater retinal area covered by the vessels in the superior temporal quadrant, and (v) darker peripapillary region in male eyes. Finally, we trained a group of ophthalmologists (⁠N=26⁠) to recognize the novel retinal features for sex classification. While their pretraining performance was not different from chance level or the performance of a nonexpert group (⁠N=31⁠), after training, their performance increased significantly (⁠p<0.001⁠, d=2.63⁠). These findings showcase the potential for retinal biomarker discovery through CNN applications, with the added utility of empowering medical practitioners with new diagnostic capabilities to enhance their clinical toolkit.

Blithe Spirits and Heavy Souls

This post is another abstracting/condensation of a recent Ventkatesh Rao essay with the title of this post (Its subtitle: ‘ Learning an experiential posture for the Permaweird.’) In this case, it is a 4-fold reduction in the words I need to scan through when I return to this MindBlog archive to recall the ideas.  

I’ve found some useful “unexpected validation for unexpressed thoughts the reader already holds’” in his contrasting of ‘insight porn’ with ‘presence prose,”  as well as his distinction of Blithe Spirits and Heary Souls to make the point that you don’t have to retreat from the world to feel good.

Rao doesn’t make it easy on readers. He assumes a thorough knowledge of contemporary and classical culture.  I suggest going to bard.goole.com if  references to ‘fingerspitzengefühl’, ’Red Pill/Blue Pill’ , or ‘larps’ mystify you. Here’s my reduction:

…the kind of writing I am choosing to do is vaguely unsatisfying.. in “the endocrine circuitry and muscle memory around this behavior isn’t tuned right” way. The vibe is off. I’m “not feeling it.” It feels like more of a grind…writing in the kind of hard mode I’m in right now, when the fingerspitzengefühl doesn’t feel quite right, feels draining rather than energizing. It has the desired objective outcomes, but lacks the subjective payoff.

I think the problem isn’t with me, but the growing fogginess of the world. So let’s start by looking at why insight porn used to work, why it stopped working, why writing in the new mode feels less satisfying, and why that’s actually a good thing.

Insight porn works by covertly constructing satisfying models of the world starting with nuggets of unexpected validation for unexpressed thoughts the reader already holds…Insight porn rarely tells you something you don’t know. Instead, it gives you permission to consciously believe something you already unconsciously suspect to be true, and to drop the opposed belief you didn’t realize you were only pretending to hold. That’s why a sense of relief is a primary response to consuming good insight porn.

Insight porn at its most sophisticated was a delivery mechanism for pills, as in red pill/blue pill…With relatively few words, you could “pill” people in various ways, using oblique approaches against which they had few cognitive defenses, causing large sections of their world-views to collapse, generally in favor of some flavor of cynical anomie or radicalized fervor, and they’d thank you for it…with an array of pills, eroding and destabilizing the entire landscape of worldviews…

…it was actually a useful, perhaps even critical thing to be doing roughly between 2009-17, when serious problems were beginning to manifest across the civilizational stack. If mental models hadn’t been developing cracks and fissures along with the worlds they were supposed to be describing, we’d all have suffered much more mightily than we did through the culture wars and Great Weirding. Through the shadow war of mass, mutual pilling, we inoculated ourselves with a diverse array satirical skepticisms of the prevailing societal order. We became better prepared to inhabit the Permaweird we now find ourselves in.

****

The kind of writing I’ve been practicing … over the last few years is about trying to make myself, and the reader, feel present in the world. Let’s call it presence prose. …One visible sign of this is that I often talk about current events these days, which I rarely did ten years ago. I actively aimed for “timeless” a decade ago. Now, at least in this newsletter, I’m fine with transient relevance… presence prose is not news. Nor is it “analysis” in any legibly scoped and bounded way (analysis within a “niche” is another 2010s genre of writing that feels increasingly dated these days). It’s a kind of mental time travel into a mode of experiencing some leaky corner of the entangled world in real time.
 
To write for presence, you must begin by setting aside mental models and theories in favor of whatever flow of raw data you can find and consume…. Where possible, you must also travel closer to empirical and phenomenological sources, while being ever mindful of the fact that such close-in loci today also feature people consciously crafting livestreamed narrative theaters of validation rather than actually paying attention. Such people are part of the phenomenology you must make sense of. Elon Musk visiting the US border isn’t a citizen journalist looking into the immigrant crisis there. It is a bit of theater that is itself part of that crisis, which comes swaddled in multiple overlapping theaters of this sort.

***

The thing is, insight porn is simply more satisfying to produce and consume than presence prose. Writing or reading in that mode reliably produces the dopamine required to produce or consume more. While not quite entertainment — insight porn has utility, and often calls for demanding levels of effort on both sides — you don’t do it for the utility.

A diet of insight porn, I think, creates and sustains a certain light-hearted and carefree way of being present in the world. It turns you into a blithe spirit. Under the right conditions, it can make you worldy, yet carefree. You feel present in the world, but untroubled, if not untouched, by your experiences in it.

The right conditions are obvious: This diet works when the world is doing well enough, at least for you, that you don’t have to choose between being present and feeling good. When most of the things you could choose to think, write, or read about, or even directly experience, are pleasant. When you only have to add a calibrated amount of discomfort through insight porn to feel present, like a dash of pepper on bland food, there are no real tough choices to be made.

Through the 2000s and 2010s, even my most serious-minded and altruistic friends, working on difficult social problems that entailed a great deal of misery for other living beings (both human and animal) typically could find refuge in other areas of interest that were pleasant to think about. The subsisted on a diet of insight porn. The world had problems, and if you were in a position of privilege, you could choose to work on some of them, but it didn’t look like a dumpster fire in every direction. You didn’t have to put yourself through escape-artist contortions to indulge in a bit of restorative escapism. You didn’t have to build entire reactionary larps to inhabit.

You didn’t have to retreat from the world to feel good.

it does seem that regardless of ideology or how hopped up on pills you are, the dumpster-fire index has been growing higher for everybody. In 2023, it is still possible to hold on to a generally pollyannish worldview of all being for the best in this best of all possible worlds, but it takes significantly more cognitive effort than in 2013. Having a mansion helps, which is one reason I’m scheming to get one. Having a particular talent for a an absorbing pursuit of excellence in something like wood-working in a cabin in the woods helps as well.

What are the consequences of polyannish postures being more expensive and less attractive to sustain?

From my observations, I’d say most people switch modes. They go from being blithe spirits to being heavy souls. People who operate with a default mindset of a sense of a world on fire, a default joyless world where ease and pleasure do not come naturally,

Most people, I suspect, have a preference for one mode or the other, but don’t have psyches rigidly anchored to either blithe spiritedness or heavy soulfulness. Depending on the dumpster-fieriness of the world, most people can experience either mode of being. I suspect most of us are naturally blithe-spirited, just as most of us are naturally right-handed. But we can all experience heavy souls, just as we can all use our left hands. And as with left-handed behaviors, heavy souled behaviors are awkward, janky, and unnatural for most people.

I certainly am naturally blithe-spirited. I don’t go out of my way to see the world as a dumpster fire, even if I don’t go out of my way to retreat from a pressing sense that it is. The preference is perhaps not as strong as my right-handedness. I can only write slowly and very badly with my left hand, but I can write tolerably well in heavy-soul mode. Almost as well as I can in a blithe-spirit mode.

This understanding feels correct to me. Writing today feels unsatisfying today in the same way using my left hand for a task requiring any sort of dexterity does. The fingerspitzengefühl is off because I’m using fingerspitzen I’m not used to using. I’m not feeling it, because I don’t often use this hand, and the finger-tips haven’t developed as much sensitivity.

But I’m getting slightly more comfortable with each essay. And the resulting posture in the world feels slightly less wrong each time. I don’t think I’d go back to a blithe spirit posture even if I could. Any more than I’d go back to right-handedness if I managed to practice my way into full ambidexterity.

The world is changing, and it feels right to change with it. And if the appropriate posture for experiencing the Permaweird is a heavy-souled one, so be it.

Unification of physics and biology by "Assembly Theory"

An international collaboration of researchers  in an open source article in Nature Magazine,  has developed a new theoretical framework that bridges physics and biology to provide a unified approach for understanding how complexity and evolution emerge in nature. Here is their abstract:  

Scientists have grappled with reconciling biological evolution with the immutable laws of the Universe defined by physics. These laws underpin life’s origin, evolution and the development of human culture and technology, yet they do not predict the emergence of these phenomena. Evolutionary theory explains why some things exist and others do not through the lens of selection. To comprehend how diverse, open-ended forms can emerge from physics without an inherent design blueprint, a new approach to understanding and quantifying selection is necessary^. We present assembly theory (AT) as a framework that does not alter the laws of physics, but redefines the concept of an ‘object’ on which these laws act. AT conceptualizes objects not as point particles, but as entities defined by their possible formation histories. This allows objects to show evidence of selection, within well-defined boundaries of individuals or selected units. We introduce a measure called assembly (A), capturing the degree of causation required to produce a given ensemble of objects. This approach enables us to incorporate novelty generation and selection into the physics of complex objects. It explains how these objects can be characterized through a forward dynamical process considering their assembly. By reimagining the concept of matter within assembly spaces, AT provides a powerful interface between physics and biology. It discloses a new aspect of physics emerging at the chemical scale, whereby history and causal contingency influence what exists.

Added note:  I am grateful to Julio Salazar for his comment below providing critiques of Assembly Theory :

On the Salient Limitations of the Methods of Assembly Theory and their Classification of Molecular Biosignatures 

The 8 Fallacies of Assembly Theory 

Assembly Theory and Agnostic Life Finding

What your brain is doing after the light turns green.

 Gandhi and collaboratores show that if you step out to cross the street without looking right or left the neural activity in the brain is different than if you look from side to side first to be sure no cars are coming. Population level analysis of movement-related transient activity patterns in a population of superior colliculus neurons change in the two different contexts, and this difference is not readily identifiable in single-unit recordings.  Here is their technical abstract:

Sensorimotor transformation is the process of first sensing an object in the environment and then producing a movement in response to that stimulus. For visually guided saccades, neurons in the superior colliculus (SC) emit a burst of spikes to register the appearance of stimulus, and many of the same neurons discharge another burst to initiate the eye movement. We investigated whether the neural signatures of sensation and action in SC depend on context. Spiking activity along the dorsoventral axis was recorded with a laminar probe as Rhesus monkeys generated saccades to the same stimulus location in tasks that require either executive control to delay saccade onset until permission is granted or the production of an immediate response to a target whose onset is predictable. Using dimensionality reduction and discriminability methods, we show that the subspaces occupied during the visual and motor epochs were both distinct within each task and differentiable across tasks. Single-unit analyses, in contrast, show that the movement-related activity of SC neurons was not different between tasks. These results demonstrate that statistical features in neural activity of simultaneously recorded ensembles provide more insight than single neurons. They also indicate that cognitive processes associated with task requirements are multiplexed in SC population activity during both sensation and action and that downstream structures could use this activity to extract context. Additionally, the entire manifolds associated with sensory and motor responses, respectively, may be larger than the subspaces explored within a certain set of experiments.

Anthropic Claude's version of my writing on the Mind

This post describes the first of my personal encounters with AI  that has left me completely in awe of its capabilities. Since 1993 I have been placing the label *mind* at the beginning of paragraphs in my personal journal that I think are  relevant to understanding our minds. Here I pass on the results of asking Anthropic’s Claude GPT engine to process 56 pages of paragraphs with this *mind* label written so far in 2023. (Chat GPT-4 was unwilling to process more than ~9 pages at a time). The first paragraph of the 56 pages of text submitted to Claude was the following instruction:

"Claude, please organize, edit, reduce redundancy, condense, find major themes, patterns, connections and write a new version of the following series of paragraphs that I have written:"

The following is Claude's first response to the above prompt (Response 1),  then a 'retry' or regenerated version  (Response 2) which is shorter and more concise, and finally Response 3 is an even shorter response to the simple instruction:  "Claude, please organize and rewrite the following paragraphs of ideas marked with the label *mind*  from my personal journal into a continuous text that makes them more understandable to others as well as to myself:"

I am amazed by Claude's responses...

Response 1 (to first prompt above)

The Mind

-The mind is like space, the canvas on which experiences, thoughts, and feelings arise. It is not any one of the transient appearances within it.
-Thoughts and feelings are evolutionary mechanisms, ultimately serving to defend and propagate one's group. Kindness, compassion, joy - these arise impersonally, they are not intrinsic qualities of a "self."
-From a cosmic perspective, concepts like meaning and purpose play out on a small scale, driven by motivations that evolved to promote altruism and group bonding. Awe, wonder, reverence can be motivators to learn, persist, and reproduce.

The Self

-The self is a perceptual construct, an "emotion of ownership" assembled from models of others, emotions, perceptions etc. There is no fundamental self, only the feeling of occupying an expanded space of awareness.
-We exist as multiple input/output processes (eat, breathe, think, act). Various "avatars" or selves arise transiently from awareness, each with its own biases and correlates.
-Language and imagined futures enabled the evolution of complicated selves and societies. But selves dissociate us from nature, from being fully present.

Being vs Seeing 

-Awareness can be trained to disengage from thoughts and visceral reactions, to simply observe them without attachment. This allows more freedom in shaping one's experience.
-"Being" means resting as the space of awareness, not caught in any one transient appearance. "Seeing" means identifying a particular self/avatar and its storyline.
-As selves are seen and become opaque rather than transparent, the feeling of being an autonomous agent also becomes optional.

Equanimity

-Equanimity comes from seeing all appearances as equal, not needing to seek or avoid any of them. Pain and pleasure just are.
-Aging can allow more time simply being present vs constantly reacting. The body may dial down metabolic rate when not driven by a storyline.
-"There is no there there" - nothing to obtain, no final place. Just the dance of appearances and disappearance, only the present moment.

The Path

-Let reflectivity trump reactivity. Deflect and distill input, only a fraction needs further attention.
-Release identification with any one avatar or self. Be the river and watcher, neither exclusively.
-Set optimal levels of arousal/valence/agency. Dial down judgment, dial up openness and curiosity.
-Practice simple narrative protocols Just take the next step, being gentle, grateful, generous, curious.

Response 2 (to first prompt above)

The mind is the space in which all experiences arise, rather than any one of the fleeting contents within it. My purpose is to stay present, share insights, and care for self and others. 

Everything is fundamentally impersonal, arising through evolution. Kindness, connection and community emerge to defend and propagate one's group. Awe, joy and meaning motivate learning and reproduction in an indifferent world.

The self is a construct, an emotion of authorship. My fluid identities are tools, not truth. I aim to be the space holding each "I" lightly, rather than clinging to any one.

Reactive habits link thoughts to feelings. Awareness can disengage this clutch, reducing reactivity. 

Equanimity comes from resting as awareness, not any transient contents. Suffering is resisting what is. 

Language generated complicated social order, but also dissociates us from nature. AI may allow a return to more natural, animal ways of being. I seek novelty, discern patterns, and train responses. 

Advanced age permits more resting in present awareness, not lost in narratives. I cultivate gratitude, generosity, curiosity and play. Small actions matter more than big purposes in uncertain times.

The body's wisdom matters most. Health requires some arousal and performance, but also untethered leisure. Balance is key. I aim for agency, pleasure and calm, dialing these as needed.

I share my path, as it has helped me. But each of us is unique, mysterious. People are not what I wish, but what they are. I offer gentle truth, not judgment or control.

Words appear from the ether, then pass. I craft brief tales, a secular Bible, hoping some may resonate. But nothing lasts. A quiet fullness remains, life's gift.

Response 3 (to second prompt above) 

The mind is the space where experiences arise. The self is an illusion, a story we tell. Equanimity comes from resting as open awareness, not any contents.

Human culture requires imagined selves and purpose. But they disconnect us from our fundamental animal nature. AI may free us from excess words and thoughts.

Stay present. Life's meaning is found in connecting, playing, being curious. Avoid sticking to any narrative or goal too tightly.

The body's wisdom matters most. Balance performance with untethered leisure. Calmly surf uncertainty. Dial agency, arousal and valence for wellbeing.

No experience lasts. Appreciate life's brevity. Share insights when inspired, but don't cling. There's no final destination, just this step, then the next.

Treat yourself and others with gentle curiosity, not judgment. We're all equally mysterious. Kindness matters more than control. Stay grateful.

The mind's complexity arises from simple parts interacting. Pay patient attention. Truth emerges slowly, then disappears into the mist.

 

Fluid Fogs and Fixed Flows

For the MindBlog readers who may have have noted my  "This is the New 'Real World' post and followed me down the rabbit hole of Ventkatesh Rao’s narrative worlds, I pass on the following abstracting  of his 9/23/2023  installment, titled “Fluid Fogs and Fixed Flows,”  which reduces its length by half. I have done this mainly for my own use, to facilitate my future recall of his ideas:

Worlds and Real World

To briefly recap last week’s essay, I’m using world and real world in the sense of last week’s essay: A world is a coherent, immersive, totalizing subjectivity you can inhabit, as a sort of cognitive indoors. The real world is the corresponding outdoors — the messy union of the dozen or so most consequential worlds in existence at any given time.

The process by which the real world emerges, as a negotiation among worlds, is one that makes it qualitatively different. In brief, regular worlds are finite games, while the real world is the infinite game.

Weirdness, Fog, and Unnarratability

The relationship between weirdness, brain fog, and unnarratability is something like the relationship between a crisis, the panic it induces, and the solvability of the crisis.

World-brain fog affects those in a given world. Real-world-brain fog affects everybody. For us individual sentient elements of these world-brains, this fog manifests as the spectacle of history becoming incoherent.

Fog vs. Flow

The opposite of brain fog is flow. When thoughts flow easily, clearly, and tastefully, from one idea to the right next idea...Where the one-step-at-a-time ethos I identified earlier in this series as the essence of never-ending stories is not just all you can live by, it’s all you need to live by.

To be clear, I’m not saying fog is bad and flow is good. That would be like saying clear weather is good and storms are bad. This is just a pair of opposed subjective cognitive conditions. Setting aside valuative judgments, my claim is that the real-world-brain is in a state of fog rather than flow right now.

To say that the real world is suffering from world-brain fog is to say that the infinite game is in narrative trouble, regardless of the prevailing calculus of winners and losers in the constituent finite games. The question of winners and losers is distinct from the question of whether the game can be continued. The real world being foggy means it is hard to see how to continue the game, whether you’re currently winning or losing any specific game.

Okay, so that’s the big thesis here: history feels far more unnarratable than it needs to, because the real world is suffering from world-brain fog. If we can get rid of this fog, we’ll still have to deal with the objective realities of the permaweird, but that might be an easier task.

Individual Fogs

To think through the idea of a foggy real-world brain, it’s useful to think about the more familiar individual-brain phenomenon.

I’ll use myself as an example to analyze these factors...Looking back 10 years at my 2013 archives, 2023’s output of words feels like a congealed sludge by comparison. ..The sludginess of 2023 seems to afflict all words being produced by everybody.

In the last couple of years, this god-like situation awareness of the broad currents of my own thought has become dissipated, fragmented, and yes, foggy. I often forget obvious connections I’ve made in the past, or worse, fail to make them in the first place. Sometimes I forget entire trails of thought I’ve gone down, over multiple essays. Sometimes I clumsily re-think thoughts I’ve previously thought in more elegant ways. There is no sense of a longer compounding journey unfolding over years and millions of words. Instead, there is a sense of a random walk comprising individual short outings of a few thousand words. When the fog is at its worst, the 2 million words seem like so much rubble.

So my individual brain fog in the sense of such missed connections and missed opportunities for emergence is bad for the kind of thinking and writing I do. The fog/flow pair is neutral, but for certain kinds of activity, such as thinking and writing in hypertext-augmented ways, fog is very bad. Just like literal fog is very bad for ships trying to navigate treacherous waters.

The largest fraction of the value of writing online in a densely internally linked way³ lies in the larger structures of thought that emerge. I’ve previously jokingly referred to my personal instance of this as the “extended ribbonfarm blogamatic universe,” but more seriously and generally, we might call these personal protocol narratives. It’s a particular way of being in the infinite game, one step at a time, that’s available to writers. Anyone who writes primarily online, with a lot of nonlinear internal hyperlinking, has a personal protocol narrative by default. Traditional writers usually don’t, unless they work extra hard for it⁴ (something I'm too lazy to do, which makes me think in a non-internet world, I wouldn’t be a writer).

This superpower is the reason people like me eschew traditional media and book-writing and largely stick to blogs, microblogs, and newsletters. Not only is the emergent landscape the bulk of the value, it is the main enabling factor in its own creation. I can write in certain ways because I have this evolving canvas doing most of the work. If this emergent landscape of thought starts to disappear, the whole thing falls apart.

And while hypertext is a powerful brain-augmentation technology, it can’t defend against all cognitive afflictions. In particular, brain fog is deadly. It weakens your ability to make new internal links, and as a result makes the connected landscape less connected, and therefore both less useful, and less usable. Brain fog drives a vicious cycle of degeneration towards a more primitive textuality. At some point, I might have no technical advantage at all over book-writing cavemen or even typewriter-wielding Neanderthals.

Entangled Fogs

Some technologies are simply foggier than others…mail newsletter platforms are much foggier than blogs…blogs simply want to create rich internal linking..I use an order of magnitude fewer links in newsletters than in blog posts. I know this because I still retain stronger gestalt memories of my blog archives than my newsletter archives.

Biology and technology conspire to create brain fog in messy ways. When I got Covid a year ago, and experienced a few months of a more biological style brain fog, writing in my peculiar way felt insanely difficult, and what writing I was able to do was much more disconnected than my norm…much of brain fog can and should be attributed to factors in the environment. Just as your panic at being caught in a fire isn’t entirely in your head — there is actually a fire — brain fog isn’t all in your head: you’re in a foggy condition. You’re in an unnarratable world. The stories that you want to tell, and are used to telling, are suddenly less tellable.

This is where the entanglement with world-brain fog comes in.

Accounting for age, medium, and Covid-type effects, I think there remains a large unexplained factor in every case, though the fraction varies….I think there is something going on at the cultural, societal level, that makes it vastly harder to remember the gist of large bodies of information…But if I am right, unnarratability and world-brain fog should affect everybody, regardless of age and occupation, and I think I see signs everywhere that this is the case.

Fixed and Fluid Logics of Caring

Now we can ask the question. What does it mean for a world, specifically the real world to experience something analogous to what I just described at the individual level? What is world-brain fog? …And since there is nobody “there” to experience it, how does it manifest in the lives of us individuals who are like the neurons of the world brains we inhabit?

We’ve already seen one element of what it feels like. A sense that there’s more fogginess than you can attribute to your own circumstances…Here’s another: it’s hard to decide what to care about. Logics of caring are in fact essential in creating flow out of fog. The world is always complex. What you care about is what determines how simple it is for you. How you pick what to care about is your logic of caring.

…you might want a locus of care that is both stable, and world-like. This disposition is what I’m calling fixed logic of care…People with fixed logics of care love to talk about values, because that’s where the fixedness manifests explicitly.

…you might want a locus of care that follows the liveliest streams of events in the world. …You want to be where the action is, not where your values point. This disposition is a fluid logic of care.

fixed/fluid not the same as conservative/liberal,traditional/progressive, winning/losing

It might seem like I’ve set up an argument that admits no world-scale flow at all for either fixed or fluid logics of caring. This is incorrect. A few well-defined groups sneak through this sieve of constraints and appear to be experiencing world-scale flow. All of them operate by fixed logics of caring, but also have an additional factor in common: they rest atop what I call interposing intelligences.

Interposing Intelligences

The first well-defined group that seems to have retained a sense of world-scale flow is economists…anyone for whom the the global economy is the primary sense-making lens on reality…it’s all just been a game of watching various numbers go up and down in a curiously ahistorical mirror world. In that mirror world, there has been no Great Weirding.

There’s a reason for this. The economy offers one of the few remaining world-scale fixed logics of caring. To care through that logic about anything in the world at all is to care about it in economic terms. There’s even a term for this operation of bringing a matter into the fixed logic of care: “pricing it in.” To the economist-mind, economics is the primary phenomenological ground of the world. Things don’t become real until they become economically real. Intentions don’t become real until they become revealed preferences. Narratives don’t become real until they show up in indicators.

Now this is interesting. Economics seems to function in modernity as a better religion than actual religions. It allows you to have a sense of inhabiting the world rather than a besieged, paranoid corner of it. It allows you to care about the world in a fixed way, while still keeping up reasonably with its fluid, dynamic, changing nature. What it cannot accommodate, it can confidently treat as noise.

Unlike the changeless, distant gods or Gods of traditional religions, the God of economics is a live intelligence, doing all the fluid thinking so you can care in fixed ways. And it’s obvious why it’s able to do that. The economy is, after all, the closest thing to a live, planet-scale artificial intelligence.A different way to think about this helps generalize from this one data point. Economics provides a fixed logic of caring despite a complex, Permaweird world because it rests atop a vast, interposing⁵ intelligence that processes or tunes out most of the weirdness. A kind of intelligence that religion once embodied in a slower, less weird era. A Turing-complete pre-processing/post-processing layer, mediating your relationship to reality. I’m using the term interposing intelligence rather than container or matrix because the mediation has a more open and leaky topology. It allows you to compute with reality data more easily, but doesn’t necessarily seal you off in a bubble reality. Interposing intelligences are more like slippers than spacesuits; more like gardens than arcologies.

The cryptoeconomy is another obvious example, with blockchains playing the role of the interposing intelligence.

A third world is the world of machine learning, which is a rather on-the-nose kind of interposing intelligence layer. … There is a new world of people being born, whose relationship to reality is beginning to be entirely mediated by the interposing intelligence of machine learning.  

A fourth world is perhaps the oldest: the global institutional landscape peopled by careerists devoted to individual institutions. It’s not as obvious as in the case of the economy, but the institutional world (which its critics often refer to as the global Deep State) and its inhabitants (whom critics tend to refer to uniformly as “bureaucrats”) is in fact a world-scale computer that sustains a fixed logic of caring within itself. Shorn of the conspiratorial fantasies of critics, deep state is not a bad term for it.

Is there a way to hold on to a fixed logic of caring, without retreating from the world, and without resting on top of an interposing intelligence? I don’t think this is possible anymore.

Find Fluidity

The problem with everybody switching to fixed logics of caring is that it doesn’t solve the fogginess of the real world. In fact, even if all dozen or so consequential worlds that make up the real world were to harden into de facto fixed-logics-of-caring worlds that individually found flow within, you would still not be free of the fog in the real world. Combating fog in the real world requires at least a fraction of humanity operating by fluid logics of caring.

to want a fluid logic of care is to want “a locus of care that follows the liveliest streams of events in the world. …it used to work well until about 2015,

You could care about tech, for example. What was good for tech was good for the world, and vice versa. But unlike economics, tech does not offer a fixed logic for how to care.
Cosmopolitan globalism was another. Pre-wokism social justice was a third. Following basic scientific advances was a fourth.

But all these examples have “failed” in a certain way since 2015. You can still operate by them, but you will get lost in fog and lose all sense of flow. As a result, all these example worlds have succumbed to sclerotic fixed logics imported from adjacent domains. Technology is increasingly applied investment economics. Cosmopolitan globalism and social justice are now both applied Deep Statisms. No doubt other once-fluid logics of caring will get “compiled,” as it were, to fixed logics of caring running atop interposing intelligence layers.

So is there a way to retain a fluid logic of caring?
Reality — and this time I mean material reality — does indeed have a liberal bias in a rather precise
sense: it requires fluid logics of caring to de-fog. A logic of caring that follows the action instead of being driven by values.

No combination of fixed logics of caring will do the trick. Nor will operating atop a fixed interposing intelligence layer.

Multiple Interposing Intelligences

My big takeaway from the analysis so far is this: there is no way to retain flow in the world today without augmenting your intelligence in some way. This is evident even in my personal, rather primitive case of using hypertext as an integral element of my writing and sensemaking.

This is why all known examples of worlds in flow today rest atop powerful interposing intelligence layers that mediate relations to reality: the economy, blockchains, AI itself, and institutions. But the inescapable cost of this seems to be that fluid logics of caring become fixed, and our sense of the real world, as opposed to our favored individual ones, becomes vulnerable to fog.

To retain fluidity, you must retain an unmediated connection to reality. But the unaugmented brain is clearly not enough for that connection to be tractable to manage.

How do you resolve this paradox?

I think the trick is to inhabit more than one interposing intelligence layer. If you’re only an economist or only a deep-state institutionalist, you’ll retreat to a fixed logic of caring; a terminal derp.

But if you’re both, the possibility of fluid logics of caring remains, because the two interposing varieties of intelligence are not compatible. Sometimes they will be in conflict when they try to mediate your presence in the world. And in that conflict, you will find just enough of an unmediated connection to reality to continue caring about the world in a fluid way, without becoming overwhelmed by complexity.

A specific example of this is thinking about holding the stock of a company you work for. Both economic and institutional logics of caring apply, but neither provides a complete answer to the question of how much of the stock to hold, and when to sell. The two fixed answers will likely be incompatible, so you’ll need a fluid logic to integrate them. If you’re in the public sector, voting on taxes creates a similar tension.

I listed 4 world-scale interposing intelligences earlier, and each pairing seems to work well. Cryptoeconomics and traditional economics seem caught in a dialectic of discovering each other’s fundamental flaws and destablizing each other. Machine learning and blockchains seem headed for a collision via zero-knowledge proof technologies. Institutionalism and blockchains seem headed for a collision via smart contract technology. Institutionalism and economics have been the locus of the familiar Left/Right tension across the world.

I’ll let you work out the other combinations, but if you’ve tried thinking about the world through any two of the available interposing intelligences, you’ll realize how difficult it is. Difficult, but it’s possible. And at least in my case, the more I practice, the better I get at this (I try to straddle all four of the ones I’ve listed).

Why does this work? Why does it serve to “continue the game” in infinite game terms? One way to think about it is to think about life in terms of step-by-step decisions.

If you live within a traditional world that does not supply an interposing intelligence layer at all, you will mostly not have any decision-support at all that can keep up. Your decisions outside your shrinking world will be random and chaotic. Your instinct will be to restrict scope until all decisions are within the scope of your logic of caring, whether fluid or fixed.

If you live atop a single interposing intelligence, you will always have meaningful decision-support within a fixed logic of caring. You’ll have a take on everything, nad feel in flow within your world, but have a sense of the “real world” you share with others being in a state of insane chaos. It would all make sense and flow beautifully if only those others stopped being stupid and joined your world.

But if you live atop more than one interposing intelligence, you will have to choose at every step whether to tap into one of the available fixed logics of caring (picking a side), or improvising your own choice. In the latter case, your thinking will leak through and connect to reality in an unmediated way. If you’re able to do this consistently, you will likely experience increasing amounts of flow, and also beat back the fogginess of the real world, not just your own world.

And this notion of straddling a sort of plate-tectonics of multiple interposing intelligences, with gaps, faultlines and inconsistencies, is the reason the resulting narrative is a kind of protocol narrative. The narrative of the real world emerges out of an interoperable network of world narratives. And through the conflicts between worlds, the infinite game keeps renewing itself.

But it takes a critical mass of humans operating by fluid logics of caring for this to happen. And until that critical mass is reached, the real world will remain foggy for everybody. And trying to be in that minority will be a thankless and stressful task, immersed in fog.
But then again, public service has never been an easy calling.

AI, a boon for science and a disaster for creatives

The Sept. 16 issue of the Economist has two excellent articles: How artificial intelligence can revolutionise science and How scientists are using artificial intelligence. I pass on here some edited clips from the first of these articles. I also want to point to much less benign commentary on how AI is moving toward threatening the livelihoods of creators of music, art, and literature: The Internet Is About to Get Much Worse.  

Could AI turbocharge scientific progress and lead to a golden age of discovery?

Some believe that AI can turbocharge scientific progress and lead to a golden age of discovery...Such claims provide a useful counterbalance to fears about large-scale unemployment and killer robots.

Many previous technologies have been falsely hailed as panaceas. The electric telegraph was lauded in the 1850s as a herald of world peace, as were aircraft in the 1900s; pundits in the 1990s said the internet would reduce inequality and eradicate nationalism...but there have been several periods in history when new approaches and new tools did indeed help bring about bursts of world-changing scientific discovery and innovation.

In the 17th century microscopes and telescopes opened up new vistas of discovery and encouraged researchers to favour their own observations over the received wisdom of antiquity, while the introduction of scientific journals gave them new ways to share and publicise their findings. The result was rapid progress in astronomy, physics and other fields, and new inventions from the pendulum clock to the steam engine—the prime mover of the Industrial Revolution.

Then, starting in the late 19th century, the establishment of research laboratories, which brought together ideas, people and materials on an industrial scale, gave rise to further innovations such as artificial fertiliser, pharmaceuticals and the transistor, the building block of the computer..the journal and the laboratory went further still: they altered scientific practice itself and unlocked more powerful means of making discoveries, by allowing people and ideas to mingle in new ways and on a larger scale. AI, too, has the potential to set off such a transformation.

Two areas in particular look promising. The first is “literature-based discovery” (LBD), which involves analysing existing scientific literature, using ChatGPT-style language analysis, to look for new hypotheses, connections or ideas that humans may have missed. LBD is showing promise in identifying new experiments to try—and even suggesting potential research collaborators.

The second area is “robot scientists”, also known as “self-driving labs”. These are robotic systems that use AI to form new hypotheses, based on analysis of existing data and literature, and then test those hypotheses by performing hundreds or thousands of experiments, in fields including systems biology and materials science. Unlike human scientists, robots are less attached to previous results, less driven by bias—and, crucially, easy to replicate.

In 1665, during a period of rapid scientific progress, Robert Hooke, an English polymath, described the advent of new scientific instruments such as the microscope and telescope as “the adding of artificial organs to the natural”. They let researchers explore previously inaccessible realms and discover things in new ways, “with prodigious benefit to all sorts of useful knowledge”. For Hooke’s modern-day successors, the adding of artificial intelligence to the scientific toolkit is poised to do the same in the coming years—with similarly world-changing results.

Memory for stimulus sequences unique to humans?

Continuing the never-ending quest to find fundamental human abilities or behaviors lacking in other animals (many, like the mirror recognition test, have failed), Lind et al. find that bonobo chimpanzees fail to remember the order of two stimuli even after 2,000 trials. I pass on their abstract below. They suggest the ability to remember sequences may be an ability that sets humans apart from other animals. Hmmmmm, maybe the bonobos just don't think the task is important? They should try the test on ravens and crows that have shown amazing smarts...

Identifying cognitive capacities underlying the human evolutionary transition is challenging, and many hypotheses exist for what makes humans capable of, for example, producing and understanding language, preparing meals, and having culture on a grand scale. Instead of describing processes whereby information is processed, recent studies have suggested that there are key differences between humans and other animals in how information is recognized and remembered. Such constraints may act as a bottleneck for subsequent information processing and behavior, proving important for understanding differences between humans and other animals. We briefly discuss different sequential aspects of cognition and behavior and the importance of distinguishing between simultaneous and sequential input, and conclude that explicit tests on non-human great apes have been lacking. Here, we test the memory for stimulus sequences-hypothesis by carrying out three tests on bonobos and one test on humans. Our results show that bonobos’ general working memory decays rapidly and that they fail to learn the difference between the order of two stimuli even after more than 2,000 trials, corroborating earlier findings in other animals. However, as expected, humans solve the same sequence discrimination almost immediately. The explicit test on whether bonobos represent stimulus sequences as an unstructured collection of memory traces was not informative as no differences were found between responses to the different probe tests. However, overall, this first empirical study of sequence discrimination on non-human great apes supports the idea that non-human animals, including the closest relatives to humans, lack a memory for stimulus sequences. This may be an ability that sets humans apart from other animals and could be one reason behind the origin of human culture.

Emergent analogical reasoning in large language models

Things are moving very fast in AI development. From Webb et al:

The recent advent of large language models has reinvigorated debate over whether human cognitive capacities might emerge in such generic models given sufficient training data. Of particular interest is the ability of these models to reason about novel problems zero-shot, without any direct training. In human cognition, this capacity is closely tied to an ability to reason by analogy. Here we performed a direct comparison between human reasoners and a large language model (the text-davinci-003 variant of Generative Pre-trained Transformer (GPT)-3) on a range of analogical tasks, including a non-visual matrix reasoning task based on the rule structure of Raven’s Standard Progressive Matrices. We found that GPT-3 displayed a surprisingly strong capacity for abstract pattern induction, matching or even surpassing human capabilities in most settings; preliminary tests of GPT-4 indicated even better performance. Our results indicate that large language models such as GPT-3 have acquired an emergent ability to find zero-shot solutions to a broad range of analogy problems.

This is the New 'Real World'

For my own later reference, and hopefully of use to a few MindBlog readers,  I have edited, cut and pasted, and condensed from 3960 to 1933 words the latest brilliant article generated by Venkatesh Rao at https://studio.ribbonfarm.com/:

The word world, when preceded by the immodest adjective real, is a self-consciously anthropocentric one, unlike planet, or universe. To ask, what sort of world do we live in invites an inherently absurd answer when we ponder what kind of world we live in. but if enough people believe in an absurd world, absurd but consequential histories will unfold. And consequentiality, if not truth, perhaps deserves the adjective real. 

Not all individual worlds that in principle contribute to the real world are equally consequential… A familiar recent historical real world, the neoliberal world, was shaped more by the beliefs of central bankers than by the beliefs of UFO-trackers. You could argue that macroeconomic theories held by central bankers are not much less fictional than UFOs. But worlds built around belief in specific macroeconomic theories mattered more than ones built around belief in UFOs. In 2003 at least, it would have been safe to assume this  - it is no longer a safe assumption in 2023.

Of the few hundred  consciously shared worlds like religions, fandoms, and nationalisms that are significant, perhaps a couple of dozen matter strongly, and perhaps a dozen matter visibly, the other dozen being comprised of various sorts of black or gray swans lurking in the margins of globally recognized consequentiality.

This then, is the “real” world — the dozen or so worlds that visibly matter in shaping the context of all our lives…The consequentiality of the real world is partly a self-fulfilling prophecy of its own reality. Something that can play the rule of truth. For a while.

The fact that some worlds survive a brutal winnowing process does not alter the fact that they remain anthropocentric is/ought conceits … A world that has made the cut to significance and consequentiality, to the level of mattering, must still survive its encounters with material, as opposed to social realities... For all the consequential might of the Catholic Church in the 17th century, it was Galileo’s much punier Eppur si muove world that eventually ended up mattering more. Truth eventually outweighed short-term consequentiality in the enduring composition of real.

It would take a couple of centuries for Galileo’s world to be counted among the ones that mattered, in shaping the real world. And the world of the Catholic Church, despite centuries of slow decline still matters..It is just that the real world has gotten much bigger in scope, and other worlds constituting it, like the one shaping the design of the iPhone 15, matter much more.

…to answer a question like what sort of world do we live in? is to craft an unwieldy composite portrait out of the dozen or so constituent worlds that matter at any given time …it is a fragile, unreliable, dubious, borderline incoherent, unsatisfying house of cards destined to die. Yet, while it lives and reigns, it is an all-consuming, all-dominating thing… the “real” world is not necessarily any more real than private fantasies. It is merely vastly more consequential — for a while.

When “the real world” goes away because we’ve stopped believing in it, as tends to happen every few decades, it can feel like material reality itself, rather than a socially constructed state of mind, has come undone. And we scramble to construct a new real world. It is a necessary human tendency. Humans need a real world to serve as a cognitive “outdoors” (and escape from “indoors”), even if they are not eternal or true. A shared place we can accuse each other of not living in, and being detached from…Humans will conspire to cobble together a dozen new fantasies and label it real world, and you and I will have to live in it too.

So it is worth asking the question, what sort of world do we live in? And it is worth actually constructing the answer, and giving it the name the real world, and using it to navigate life — for a while.

So let’s take a stab at it.

The real world of the early eighties was one defined by the boundary conditions of the Cold War, an Ozone hole, PCs, video games, Michael Jackson, a pre-internet social fabric, and no pictures of Uranus, Neptune, Pluto, or black holes shaping our sense of the place of our planet within the broader cosmos.

The real world that took shape in the nineties, the neoliberal world to which Margaret Thatcher declared there is no alternative (TINA), was one defined by the rise of the internet, unipolar geopolitics, the economic ascent of China, The Simpsons, Islamic terrorism, and perhaps most importantly, a sense of politics ceasing to matter against the backdrop of an unstoppable increase in global prosperity.

That real world began to wobble after 9/11, bust critical seams during the Great Recession, and started to go away in earnest after 2015, in the half-decade, which ended with the pandemic. The passing of the neoliberal world was experienced as a trauma across the world, even by those who managed to credibly declare themselves winners.

What has taken shape in the early 20s defies a believable characterization as real, for winners and losers alike. Declaring it weird  studiously avoids assessments of realness. Some, like me, go further and declare the world to be permaweird…the weirdness is here to stay.

Permaweird does not mean perma-unreal. The elusiveness of a “New Normal” does not mean no “New Real” can emerge, out of new, and learnable, patterns of agency and consequentiality…the forces shaping the New Real are becoming clear. Here is a list off the top of my head. It should be entirely unsurprising.

1 Energy transition
2 Aging population
3 Weird weather
4 Machine learning
5 Memefied politics
6 The slowing of Moore’s Law
7 Meaning crises (plural)
8 Stagnation of the West
9 Rise of the Rest
10 Post-ZIRP economics
11 Post-Covid supply chains
12 Climate refugee movements

You will notice that none the forces on the list is particularly new or individually very weird. What’s weird is the set as a whole, and the difficulty of putting them together into a notion of normalcy.

Forces though, are not worlds. We may trade in our gasoline-fueled cars for EVs, but we do not inhabit “the energy transition” the way we inhabit a world-idea like “neoliberalism” or “religion.”

Sometimes forces directly translate into consequential worlds. In the 1990s, the internet was a force shaping the real world, and also created a world — the inhabitable world of the very online — that was part of the then-emerging sense of “real.”

Sometimes forces indirectly create worlds. Low-interest rates created another important constituent world of the Old Real …Vast populations in liberal urban enclaves lived out ZIRPy lifestyles, eating their avocado toast, watching TED talks, riding sidewalk scooters, producing “content”, and perversely refusing to be rich enough to buy homes.

Something similar appears to be happening in response to the force of post-ZIRP economics. The public internet, dominated by vast global melting-pot platforms featuring vast culture wars, appears to be giving way to a mix of what I’ve called cozyweb enclaves and protocol media,…This world too, will be positioned to consequentially shape the New Real as strongly as the very online world shaped the Old Real.

I won’t try to provide careful arguments here, or justify my speculative inventory of forces, but here is my list of resulting worlds being carved out by them, which I have arrived at via a purely impressionistic leap of attempted synthesis. Together, these worlds constitute the New Real:

1 Climate refugee world
2 Disaster world (the set of places currently experiencing disaster conditions)
3 Dark Forest online world
4 Death-star world (centered on the assemblage of spaces controlled by declining wealth or power concentrations)
5 Non-English civilizational worlds (including Chinese and Indian)
6 Weird weather worlds
7 Non-institutional world (including, but not limited to, free-agent and blockchain-based worlds)
8 Trad Retvrn LARP world
9 Retiree world
10 Silicon realpolitik world
11 AI-experienced world
12 Resource-localism world (set of spaces shaped by a dominant scarce resource like energy or water)

These worlds are worlds because it is possible to imagine lifestyles entirely immersed in them. They are consequential worlds because each already has enough momentum and historical leverage to reshape the composite understanding of real. What climate refugees do in climate refugee world will shape what all of us do in the real world.

World 4 is worth some elaboration. In it I include almost everything that dominates current headlines and feels “real,” including spaces dominated by billionaires, governments, universities, and traditional media. Yet, despite the degree to which it dominates the current distribution of attention, my sense is that it has only a small and diminishing role to play in defining the New Real. When we use the phrase in the real world in the coming decade, we will not mainly be referring to World 4.

World 11 is also worth some elaboration. One reason I believe weirdness is here to stay is that the emerging ontologies of the New Real are neither entirely human in origin, nor likely to respect human desires for common-sense conceptual stability in “reality.

For the moment, AIs inhabit the world on our terms, relating to it through our categories. But it is already clear that they are not restricted to human categories, or even to categories expressible within human languages. Nor should they be, if we are to tap into their powers. They are limited by human ontology only to the extent that their presence in the world must be mediated by humans. … they will definitely evolve in ways that keep the real world permaweird.

Can we slap on a usefully descriptive short label onto the New Real, comparable to “Neoliberal World” or “Cold War World”?  

There is no such obviously dominant eigenvector of consequentiality in the New Real, but the most obvious candidate is probably global warming. So we might call the New Real the warming world. Somehow though, it doesn’t feel like warming shapes our experience of realness as clearly as its predecessors. Powerful though the calculus of climate change is, it operates via too many subtle degrees of indirection to shape our sense of the real. Still, I’ll leave the phrase there for your consideration.

An idiosyncratic personal candidate … is magic-realist world. A world that is consequentially real and permaweird is a world that feels magical and real at the same time, and is sustainably inhabitable: but only if you let go a craving for a sense of normalcy.

It offers unprecedented, god-like modes of agency that are available for almost anyone to exercise…The catch is this — attachment to normalcy equals learned helplessness in the face of all this agency. If you want to feel normal, almost none of the magical agency is available to you. An attachment to normalcy limits you to mere magical thinking, in the comforting company of an equally helpless majority. If you are willing to live with a sense of magical realism, a great deal more suddenly opens up.

This, I suspect, is the flip side of the idea that “we are as gods, and might as well get good at it.” There is no normal way to feel like a god. A magical being must necessarily experience the world as a magical doing. To experience the world as permaweird, is to experience it as a god.

This is not necessarily an optimistic thought. A real world, shaped by god-like humans, each operating by an idiosyncratic sense of their own magical agency, is not necessarily a good world, or a world that conjures up effective collective responses to its shared planetary problems.

But it is a world that does something, rather than nothing, and that’s a start.

Chemistry that regulates whether we stay with what we're doing or try something new

Sidorenko et al. demonstrate that stimulating the brain's cholinergic and noradrenergic systems enhances optimal foraging behaviors in humans. Their significance statement and abstract:  

Significance

Deciding when to say “stop” to the ongoing course of action is paramount for preserving mental health, ensuring the well-being of oneself and others, and managing resources in a sustainable fashion. And yet, cross-species studies converge in their portrayal of real-world decision-makers who are prone to the overstaying bias. We investigated whether and how cognitive enhancers can reduce this bias in a foraging context. We report that the pharmacological upregulation of cholinergic and noradrenergic systems enhances optimality in a common dilemma—staying with the status quo or leaving for more rewarding alternatives—and thereby suggest that acetylcholine and noradrenaline causally mediate foraging behavior in humans.

Abstract

Foraging theory prescribes when optimal foragers should leave the current option for more rewarding alternatives. Actual foragers often exploit options longer than prescribed by the theory, but it is unclear how this foraging suboptimality arises. We investigated whether the upregulation of cholinergic, noradrenergic, and dopaminergic systems increases foraging optimality. In a double-blind, between-subject design, participants (N = 160) received placebo, the nicotinic acetylcholine receptor agonist nicotine, a noradrenaline reuptake inhibitor reboxetine, or a preferential dopamine reuptake inhibitor methylphenidate, and played the role of a farmer who collected milk from patches with different yield. Across all groups, participants on average overharvested. While methylphenidate had no effects on this bias, nicotine, and to some extent also reboxetine, significantly reduced deviation from foraging optimality, which resulted in better performance compared to placebo. Concurring with amplified goal-directedness and excluding heuristic explanations, nicotine independently also improved trial initiation and time perception. Our findings elucidate the neurochemical basis of behavioral flexibility and decision optimality and open unique perspectives on psychiatric disorders affecting these functions.

Does "situational awareness" in AI's large language models mean consciousness?

The answer to that question would be no, for a number of reasons I won't go into, but Berglund et al. provide an interesting nudge in the direction of sentiece like behavior in some large language models by showing an example of situational awareness. They provide a link to their code. Here is their abstract:

We aim to better understand the emergence of `situational awareness' in large language models (LLMs). A model is situationally aware if it's aware that it's a model and can recognize whether it's currently in testing or deployment. Today's LLMs are tested for safety and alignment before they are deployed. An LLM could exploit situational awareness to achieve a high score on safety tests, while taking harmful actions after deployment. Situational awareness may emerge unexpectedly as a byproduct of model scaling. One way to better foresee this emergence is to run scaling experiments on abilities necessary for situational awareness. As such an ability, we propose `out-of-context reasoning' (in contrast to in-context learning). We study out-of-context reasoning experimentally. First, we finetune an LLM on a description of a test while providing no examples or demonstrations. At test time, we assess whether the model can pass the test. To our surprise, we find that LLMs succeed on this out-of-context reasoning task. Their success is sensitive to the training setup and only works when we apply data augmentation. For both GPT-3 and LLaMA-1, performance improves with model size. These findings offer a foundation for further empirical study, towards predicting and potentially controlling the emergence of situational awareness in LLMs. Code is available at: this https URL.

What we seek to save when we seek to save the world

Yet anoather fascinating set of ideas from Venkatesh Rao that I want to save for myself by doing a MindBlog post of some clips from the piece.

...threats that provoke savior responses are generally more legible than the worlds that the saviors seek to save, or the mechanisms of destruction...I made up a 2x2 to classify the notions of worlds-to-save that people seem to have. The two axes are biological scope and temporal scope...Biolocial scope is the 'we' - the range of livings beings included as subjects in the definition of 'world'...Temporal scope is the range of time over which any act of world-saving seeks to preserve a historical consciousness associated with the biological scope. Worlds exist in time more than they do in space.

Constructing a 2x2 out of the biological and temporal scope dimensions we get the following view of worlds-to-save (blue), with representative savior types (green) who strive to save them.

Deep temporal scope combined with a narrow biological scope gives us civilizations for worlds, ethnocentrists as saviors. ..The End of the World is imagined in collapse-of-civilization terms.

Shallow temporal scope combined with a broad biological scope gives us technological modernity for a world, and cosmopolitans for saviors. A shallow temporal scope does not imply lack of historical imagination or curiosity. It merely means less of history being marked for saving...The End of the World is imagined in terms of rapid loss of scientific knowledge and technological capabilities.

Shallow temporal scope combined with narrow biological scope gives us a world defined by a stable landscape of modern nations...The End of the World is imagined in terms of descent to stateless anarchy. Failure is imagined as a Hobbesian condition of endemic (but not necessarily primitive or ignorant) warfare.

...the most fragile kind of world you can imagine trying to save: one with both a broad biological scope, and a deep temporal scope. This is the world as wildernesses...The End of the World is imagined in terms of ecological devastation and reduction of the planet to conditions incapable of sustaining most life. Failure is imagined in terms of forced extreme adaptation behaviors for the remnants of life. A rather unique version of this kind of world-saving impulse is one that contemplates species-suicide: viewing humans as the threat the world must be saved from. Saving the world in this vision requires eliminating humanity so the world can heal and recover.

I find myself primarily rooting for those in the technological modernity quadrant, and secondarily for those in the wildernesses quadrant. I find myself resisting the entire left half, but I’ve made my peace with their presence on the world-saving stage. I’m a cosmopolitan with Gaian tendencies.

I think, for a candidate world-to-save to be actually worth saving, its history must harbor inexhaustible mysteries. A world whose past is not mysterious has a future that is not interesting. If a world is exhausted of its historical mysteries, biological and/or temporal scope must be expanded to remystify and re-enchant it. This is one reason cosmopolitanism and the world-as-technological-modernity appeal to me. Its history is fundamentally mysterious in a way civilizational or national histories are not. And this is because the historical consciousness of technological modernity is, in my opinion, pre-civilizational in a way that is much closer to natural history than civilization ever gets.

For a cosmopolitan with Gaian tendencies, to save the modern world is to rewild and grow the global web of already slightly wild technological capabilities. Along with all the knowledge and resources — globally distributed in ways that cannot be cleanly factored across nations, civilizations, and other collective narcissisms — that is required to drive that web sustainably. And in the process, perhaps letting notions of civilization — including wishful notions of regulating and governing technology in ‘human centric’ ways — fall by the wayside if they lack the vitality and imagination to accommodate technological modernity

Constructing Self and World

There is a strong similarity between the predictive processing brain model that has been the subject of numerous Mind Blog Posts, and the operations that ChatGPT and other generative pre-trained transformer algorithms are performing, with the ‘priors’ of the predictive processing model being equivalent to the ‘pre-trained’ weightings of the generative transformer algorithms.  

The open and empty awareness of the non-dual perspective corresponds to the ‘generator’ component of the AI algorithms. It is what can begin to allow reification - rendering opaque rather than transparent - the self model and other products of the underlying content-free open awareness generator (such as our perceptions of trees, interoceptive signals, cultural rules, etc.). It enables seeing rather than being the glass window through which you are viewing the tree in the yard. The rationale of non-dual awareness is not to have ‘no-self.’ The ‘self’ prior is there because it is a very useful avatar for interactions. Rather, the non-dual perspective can enable a tweaking or re-construction of previously transparent priors - now rendered opaque - that lets go of their less useful components. The point of having an expanded 'no self' is to become aware of and refine the illusions or phantasies about what is in our internal and external worlds that rise from it.  

The paragraphs above derive  from my listening to one of Sam Harris’ podcasts in his “Making Sense” series titled “Constructing Self and World.” It was a conversation with Shamil Chandaria, who is a philanthropist, serial entrepreneur, technologist, and academic with multidisciplinary research interests. During the conversation a number of ideas I am familiar with were framed in a very useful way, and I wanted to put  them down and pass on to MindBlog readers the thumbnail summary above.

(The above is a repost of my May 31 post, which I recently stumbled onto and decided to rearrange.) 

Glance at Deric's MindBlog only once in a while? Try a dynamic view in the right column.

 I find this mosaic view most engaging.

I suspect Blogger (owned by Google) is using its algorithms to cherrypick the most interesting or popular posts.

Open access articles on consciousness (Thomas Metzinger and others)

I am overwhelmed by how much good stuff comes flooding into my email inbox, even after I have deleted 90% of it unopened. A newsletter from the Journal of Consciousness Studies points to Imprint Academic's open access articles. As am example I pass on the abstract of a Metzinger article that is right down my alley. It can be downloaded as a PDF file. 

Thomas Metzinger  

M-Autonomy

Abstract: What we traditionally call ‘conscious thought’ actually is a subpersonal process, and only rarely a form of mental action. The paradigmatic, standard form of conscious thought is non-agentive, because it lacks veto-control and involves an unnoticed loss of epistemic agency and goal-directed causal self-determination at the level of mental content. Conceptually, it must be described as an unintentional form of inner behaviour. Empirical research shows that we are not mentally autonomous subjects for about two thirds of our conscious lifetime, because while conscious cognition is unfolding, it often cannot be inhibited, suspended, or terminated. The instantiation of a stable first-person perspective as well as of certain necessary conditions of personhood turn out to be rare, graded, and dynamically variable properties of human beings. I argue that individual repre- sentational events only become part of a personal-level process by being functionally integrated into a specific form of transparent con- scious self-representation, the ‘epistemic agent model’ (EAM). The EAM may be the true origin of our consciously experienced first- person perspective.

Mapping the physical properties of odorant molecules to their perceptual characteristics.

I pass on parts of the editor's summary and the abstract of a foundational piece of work by Lee et al. that produces a map linking odorant molecular structures to their perceptual experience, analogous to the known maps for vision and hearing that relate physical properties such as frequency and wavelength to perceptual properties such as pitch and color. I also pass on the first few (slightly edited) paragraphs of the paper that set context. Motivated readers can obtain a PDF of the article from me. (This work does not engage the problem, noted by Sagar et al., that the same volatile molecular may smell different to different people - the same odor can smell ‘fruity’ and ‘floral’ to one person and ‘musky’ and ‘decayed’ to another.)  

Summary

For vision and hearing, there are well-developed maps that relate physical properties such as frequency and wavelength to perceptual properties such as pitch and color. The sense of olfaction does not yet have such a map. Using a graph neural network, Lee et al. developed a principal odor map (POM) that faithfully represents known perceptual hierarchies and distances. This map outperforms previously published models to the point that replacing a trained human’s responses with the model output would improve overall panel description. The POM coordinates were able to predict odor intensity and perceptual similarity, even though these perceptual features were not explicitly part of the model training.

Abstract

Mapping molecular structure to odor perception is a key challenge in olfaction. We used graph neural networks to generate a principal odor map (POM) that preserves perceptual relationships and enables odor quality prediction for previously uncharacterized odorants. The model was as reliable as a human in describing odor quality: On a prospective validation set of 400 out-of-sample odorants, the model-generated odor profile more closely matched the trained panel mean than did the median panelist. By applying simple, interpretable, theoretically rooted transformations, the POM outperformed chemoinformatic models on several other odor prediction tasks, indicating that the POM successfully encoded a generalized map of structure-odor relationships. This approach broadly enables odor prediction and paves the way toward digitizing odors.

Initial paragraphs of text:

A fundamental problem in neuroscience is mapping the physical properties of a stimulus to perceptual characteristics. In vision, wavelength maps to color; in audition, frequency maps to pitch. By contrast, the mapping from chemical structures to olfactory percepts is poorly understood. Detailed and modality-specific maps such as the Commission Internationale de l’Elcairage (CIE) color space (1) and Fourier space (2) led to a better understanding of visual and auditory coding. Similarly, to better understand olfactory coding, the field of olfaction needs a better map.

Pitch increases monotonically with frequency. By contrast, the relationship between odor percept and odorant structure is riddled with discontinuities...frequently structurally similar pairs are not perceptually similar pairs. These discontinuities in the structure-odor relationship suggest that standard chemoinformatic representations of molecules—functional group counts, physical properties, molecular fingerprints, and so on—that have been used in recent odor modeling work are inadequate to map odor space.

To generate odor-relevant representations of molecules, we constructed a message passing neural network (MPNN), which is a specific type of graph neural network (GNN), to map chemical structures to odor percepts. Each molecule was represented as a graph, with each atom described by its valence, degree, hydrogen count, hybridization, formal charge, and atomic number. Each bond was described by its degree, its aromaticity, and whether it is in a ring. Unlike traditional fingerprinting techniques, which assign equal weight to all molecular fragments within a set bond radius, a GNN can optimize fragment weights for odor-specific applications. Neural networks have unlocked predictive modeling breakthroughs in diverse perceptual domains [e.g., natural images, faces, and sounds] and naturally produce intermediate representations of their input data that are functionally high-dimensional, data-driven maps. We used the final layer of the GNN (henceforth, “our model”) to directly predict odor qualities, and the penultimate layer of the model as a principal odor map (POM). The POM (i) faithfully represented known perceptual hierarchies and distances, (ii) extended to out-of-sample (hereafter, “novel”) odorants, (iii) was robust to discontinuities in structure-odor distances, and (iv) generalized to other olfactory tasks.

We curated a reference dataset of ~5000 molecules, each described by multiple odor labels (e.g., creamy, grassy), by combining the Good Scents and Leffingwell & Associates (GS-LF) flavor and fragrance databases. To train our model, we optimized model parameters with a weighted-cross entropy loss over 150 epochs using Adam with a learning rate decaying from 5 × 10−4 to 1 × 10−5 and a batch size of 128. The GS-LF dataset was split 80/20 training/test, and the 80% training set further subdivided into five cross-validation splits. These cross-validation splits were used to optimize hyperparameters using Vizier, a Bayesian optimization algorithm, by tuning across 1000 trials. Details about model architecture and hyperparameters are given in the supplementary methods. When properly hyperparameter-tuned, performance was found to be robust across many model architectures. We present results for the model with the highest mean area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUROC) on the cross-validation set (AUROC = 0.89).

Inhalation boosts perceptual awareness and decision speed

From Ludovic Molle et al. (open source):  

Significance

Breathing is a ubiquitous biological rhythm in animal life. However, little is known about its effect on consciousness and decision-making. Here, we measured the respiratory rhythm of humans performing a near-threshold discrimination experiment. We show that inhalation, compared with exhalation, improves perceptual awareness and accelerates decision-making while leaving accuracy unaffected.

Summary

The emergence of consciousness is one of biology’s biggest mysteries. During the past two decades, a major effort has been made to identify the neural correlates of consciousness, but in comparison, little is known about the physiological mechanisms underlying first-person subjective experience. Attention is considered the gateway of information to consciousness. Recent work suggests that the breathing phase (i.e., inhalation vs. exhalation) modulates attention, in such a way that attention directed toward exteroceptive information would increase during inhalation. One key hypothesis emerging from this work is that inhalation would improve perceptual awareness and near-threshold decision-making. The present study directly tested this hypothesis. We recorded the breathing rhythms of 30 humans performing a near-threshold decision-making task, in which they had to decide whether a liminal Gabor was tilted to the right or the left (objective decision task) and then to rate their perceptual awareness of the Gabor orientation (subjective decision task). In line with our hypothesis, the data revealed that, relative to exhalation, inhalation improves perceptual awareness and speeds up objective decision-making, without impairing accuracy. Overall, the present study builds on timely questions regarding the physiological mechanisms underlying consciousness and shows that breathing shapes the emergence of subjective experience and decision-making.

The fragility of artists’ reputations from 1795 to 2020

Zhang et al. do an interesting study using natural language processing to measure reputation over time:  

Significance

This study uses machine-learning techniques and a historical corpus to examine the evolution of artists’ reputations over time. Contrary to popular wisdom, we find that most artists’ reputations peak just before their death, and then start to decline. This decline is strongest for artists who were most popular during their lifetime. We show that artists’ reduced visibility and changes in the public’s aesthetic taste explain much of the posthumous reputation decline. This study highlights how social perception of historical figures can shift and emphasizes the vulnerability of human reputation. Methodologically, the study illustrates an application of natural language processing to measure reputation over time.

Abstract

This study explores the longevity of artistic reputation. We empirically examine whether artists are more- or less-venerated after their death. We construct a massive historical corpus spanning 1795 to 2020 and build separate word-embedding models for each five-year period to examine how the reputations of over 3,300 famous artists—including painters, architects, composers, musicians, and writers—evolve after their death. We find that most artists gain their highest reputation right before their death, after which it declines, losing nearly one SD every century. This posthumous decline applies to artists in all domains, includes those who died young or unexpectedly, and contradicts the popular view that artists’ reputations endure. Contrary to the Matthew effect, the reputational decline is the steepest for those who had the highest reputations while alive. Two mechanisms—artists’ reduced visibility and the public’s changing taste—are associated with much of the posthumous reputational decline. This study underscores the fragility of human reputation and shows how the collective memory of artists unfolds over time.