MindBlog's Brain Hacks

Introspective awareness and modulation of both ancient and more recently evolved aspects of our cognition:

Brain Hack #1
-The reptilian brain (whose modern descendant is found in the mammalian hypothalamus) generates affective states along axes of arousal and valence, whose states in higher primates can be assessed by introspective awareness.

Brain Hack #2
-The early mammalian emotional brain, whose ability to model a self (correlating with the appearance of the agranular prefrontal cortex), develops the ability to distinguish the difference between being (immersed in) an affective state and seeing (observing) it.

Brain Hack #3
-The appearance in the primate brain of the further ability to imagine the minds of others (correlating with appearance of the granular prefrontal cortex), permits appropriate assignments of agency, being able to distinguish one’s own experience (and problems) from the experience (and problems) of others.

The introspection that enables this ensemble of brain hacks can be strengthened by practice of three fundamental meditation techniques: focused awareness (in which our brain’s attentional mode predominates), open awareness (engaging our default mode network), and non-dual awareness (during which both are muted).  

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The above is an early draft text that I will be editing further (like my “Tokens of Sanity” post which has had at least six revisions since it 9/29/2024 posting).  It is trying to meld together and condense threads from my last public lecture and Max Bennett's recent book "A Brief History of Intelligence."  Feedback and comment welcome.

Half a century of quantitative cultural evolution

The latest PNAS issue has a fascinating open source section on quantitative studies of recent cultural evolution. 

Amazing.....the AI effect: Nearly 1 Billion Threats a Day

I have to pass on this piece from today's WSJ.  Makes me increasingly wonder when all of my financial savings held in electronic form in the cloud might vanish.....

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AI Effect: Amazon Sees Nearly 1 Billion Threats a Day

Amazon.com says it is seeing hundreds of millions more possible cyber threats across the web each day than it did earlier this year, a shift its security chief attributes in part to artificial intelligence.

Just as criminals have embraced AI, Amazon has turned to the technology to drastically scale up its threat-intelligence capabilities.

The company, given its presence online, can now view activity on around 25% of all IP addresses on the internet, it says, between its Amazon Web Services platform, its Project Kuiper satellite program and its other businesses, giving the company a sweeping view of hacker capabilities and techniques.

Amazon’s chief information security officer, CJ Moses, spoke with The Wall Street Journal on how the company is approaching threat intelligence in the AI era.

Prior to his current role, Moses ran security for Amazon Web Services, its cloud business, and before that investigated cybercrime at both the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Air Force Office of Special Investigations.

Moses outlined how the company has built specialized tools using AI such as graph databases, which track threats and their relationships to each other; how that information has uncovered threats from nation-states that haven’t historically been known to have extensive cyber operations, and how its tools trick hackers into revealing their tactics.

He also discussed Amazon’s recent work with the U.S. Justice Department in taking down the platform used by cybercriminal group Anonymous Sudan to launch attacks on critical infrastructure globally.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

WSJ: How many attacks are you seeing these days? C.J. Moses: We’re seeing billions of attempts coming our way. On average, we’re seeing 750 million attempts per day. Previously, we’d see about 100 million hits per day, and that number has grown to 750 million over six or seven months.

WSJ: Is that a sign hackers are using AI? Moses: Without a doubt. Generative AI has provided access to those who previously didn’t have softwaredevelopment engineers to do these things. Now, it’s more ubiquitous, such that normal humans can do things they couldn’t do before because they just ask the computer to do that for them.

We’re seeing a good bit of that, as well as the use of AI to increase the realness of phishing, and things like that. They’re still not there 100%. We still can find errors in every phishing message that goes out, but they’re getting cleaner.

WSJ: Are you applying AI on the defensive side as well? Moses: When you have a large-scale environment, you need a large-scale system. We’ve created what is essentially a graph database that allows us to look at billions of interactions across the environment. That identifies, through machine learning, the things that we should be concerned about, and also the domains we’re seeing that could be problematic based upon past history as well as predictive analysis.

WSJ: What are the other ways you’re learning about hacker tactics? Moses: Probably the most interesting is MadPot. This is essentially a network of honey pots throughout our environment, which we use to glean intelligence from those that are acting on them. So, you have a bunch of semi-vulnerable systems that are presented in different ways, the threat actors act upon them, and then you can learn from their actions.

Once you become smarter, then you can look back at the data that you had from before and say: “Wait a second, we can determine that at this point in time we were seeing these interactions with these systems that now make sense to us.”

Pulling all that information together then gives us, in some cases, attribution.

WSJ: What have you learned from all this? Moses: We’ve definitely have seen an increase of activity globally from threat actors over the last year, or even less. In the last eight months, we’ve seen nationstate actors that we previously weren’t tracking come onto the scene. I’m not saying they didn’t exist, but they definitely weren’t on the radar. You have China, Russia and North Korea, those types of threat actors. But then you start to see the Pakistanis, you see other nation- states. We have more players in the game than we ever did before.

Nation-states that haven’t been active in this space now realize that they have to be, because all of all the big players are. That means that there is more activity, there are more threats, there are more things we have to look for, unfortunately.

WSJ: Amazon was recently credited with providing assistance to the Justice Department in an operation that seized hacking tools belonging to Anonymous Sudan. How are you finding cooperation with the government on threat intelligence today? Moses: It’s working out, it’s better and better, which is a great thing. There were points in time where it didn’t work in the past. Now, we have a lot more people like myself that have been in the government, and are able to speak the same language, or convey the right information so they can be more effective in their jobs.

We worked very effectively together on that particular case. It was a really good example of those of us that have been there knowing exactly what things need to be tied up in a bow, to hand off to the right people, so they could actually do something about it.

The election is over. How do we feel now?

I host a monthly discussion group in Austin TX, The Austin Rainbow Forum, that meets at 2 pm on the first Sunday of every month to consider interesting topics and ideas. I pass on here the background reading for our Dec. 1 session, whose topic is: "The election is over. How do we feel now? " The first two links are to articles by David Brooks. 

David Brooks - Voters to Elites: Do You See Me Now?

David Brooks - Why We Got It So Wrong

Also, below is a longer screed by Sam Harris that he made available for a period to non-subscribers of his "Making Sense" podcast:

    
The following is an edited transcript from The Making Sense podcast:

So the reckoning has arrived: Donald Trump has been re-elected President of the United States. And it seems like he's going to have both houses of Congress too.  Of course, he already had the Supreme Court. The question is, what to make of this? Why did he win, and why did the Democrats lose?

Well, first, we should acknowledge that this is the greatest comeback in American political history. It's as if Nixon got re-elected to a second term after Watergate. It's better than that, or worse, depending on what you think about Trump. Luckily, I hedged my bet and I never said anything too critical about the man. I've always been very respectful of him and Elon and the other innovators they have around them. Let's be honest, these guys just want to make America great again. Can't you just give them a chance?

All kidding aside, I will let you know when I receive my first audit from the IRS.

What I think we need now is an honest assessment of why Trump won—because it says a lot about our country that he did. It says a lot about how divided we are.  It says a lot about the state of the media and the effects of social media. Above all, it says something that the Democratic Party and our elite institutions need to hear.

Obviously, Trump's win and Harris loss were determined by many factors, and I think everyone is in danger of believing that their pet issue explains everything that happened on Tuesday. You could certainly make the case that it was immigration and the southern border. Or it was inflation and the cost of groceries. You could even say it was the way Trump responded to that first assassination attempt, which, among other things, prompted Elon Musk to endorse him within minutes. Or it was Harris's weakness as a candidate. And the way the Democratic Party coronated her, rather than allow some competitive process to happen. Or you could say that the blame lies with Biden himself, and his disastrous decision to run for a second term—that was pure hubris. And of course, this blame extends to all the people who covered for him, and lied to themselves, or to the public, about his competence for over a year. Some of this culpability fell on Harris herself: What did she know about Biden, and when did she know it? She never had a good answer for that question. Or, to come to one of my hobby horses, it was her failure to have anything like a “Sister Souljah” moment where she could put some distance between her current self and the Kamala Harris of 2019, who seemed to be in lockstep with the far left of the Democratic Party.

The truth, of course, is that all of these things contributed—and if one or two of them had changed, we would have had a different result. But the Harris campaign and the Democratic Party—in the last hundred days before the election—weren't in control of most of these variables. They could have messaged differently about all of them—I think it would have been possible to talk about inflation and immigration better than they did—but their real failure, in my view, was to not pivot to the political center in a way that most people found credible.

So, to return to my hobby horse, I think there are some lessons that the Democrats really must absorb from what is undeniably a total political defeat. They simply must recognize that several planks of their platform are thoroughly rotten.

Identity politics is over. No one wants it. Latinos and blacks don't even want it, as witnessed by the fact that they moved to Trump in record numbers. Trump got a majority of Latino men nationwide, and in some counties he got a majority of Latino men and women, even with all that he has said about immigrants from Latin America over the years—like that “they're poisoning the blood of our people,” which is straight out of Mein Kampf. A comedian called Puerto Rico “a pile of garbage” at a Trump rally, and the entire democratic machine, and all of liberal media, seized upon it, as though a nuclear bomb had just vaporized an American city, and no one cared.

Identity politics is dead, and we have to bury it.

There's one species of identity politics that had an enormous effect on this election, and most Democrats don't seem to realize it: Around half a percent of American adults identify as transgender or non-binary—that's 1 in 200 people.  And yet the activism around this identity has deranged our politics for as long as Trump has been in politics. One lesson that I would be quick to draw from this election is that Americans aren't really fond of seeing biological men punch women in the face at the Olympics. And if that sounds like transphobia to you—you're the problem. Political equality, which we should want for everyone, does not mean that “trans women are women.”

Trans women are people and should have all the political freedom of people. But to say that they are women—and that making any distinction between them and biological women, for any purpose, is a thought crime and an act of bigotry—that is the precept of a new religion. And it is a religion that most Americans want nothing to do with.

I want to be very clear about this: I have no doubt that there are real cases of gender dysphoria, and we should want to give such people all the help they need to feel comfortable in their own bodies and in society. How we think about this, and how we understand it scientifically, is still in flux. But there are four-year-olds who, apropos of nothing, claim to be in the wrong body—for instance, they were born a boy, but they insist that they're really girls—and they never waver from this. It's pretty obvious in those cases that something is going on neurologically, or hormonally—at the core of their being—and that it is not a matter of them having been influenced by the culture. But, conversely, there now seem to be countless examples where the possibility of social contagion is obvious. Where, due to the influence of trans activists on our institutions, these kids are effectively in a cult, being brainwashed by a new orthodoxy.  These are radically different cases, and we shouldn’t be bullied into considering them to be the same.

I've spoken to many Democrats in recent years, and over the course of this election, and a shocking percentage of them imagine that all the controversy about trans rights and gender identity in kids is just a product of right-wing bigotry—and that it’s a non-issue, politically. Whereas it is obvious that, for millions of Americans, it might as well have been the only issue in this election. Not because they are transphobic assholes, but because they simply do not accept the new metaphysics, and even new biology, mandated by trans activists and the institutions that they have successfully bullied and captured. And it's important to say that not all trans people agree with what these activists say and do.

Having the thought police suddenly proscribe the use of the term “woman,” and demanding that we speak instead of “birthing person,” or “menstruators,” or “people with ovaries,” or some other Orwellian construction designed to test everyone's patience and sanity… the sight of people being deplatformed on social media or fired from universities for merely stating that there are two biological sexes—I actually know a professor who lost her job at Harvard over this… witnessing an epidemic of gender confusion spread through our schools, when people with their own eyes could see that this was a social contagion being encouraged by the schools themselves—the ultimate fruition of which, in many cases, is irreversible medical procedures… We've got an epidemic of teenage girls wanting double mastectomies—snd some are actually getting them, based on ideas being spread on TikTok—and any parent who resists this trend gets demonized and, under certain conditions, could lose custody of their kids?

Congratulations, Democrats. You have found the most annoying thing in the fucking galaxy and hung it around your necks.

I know people who haven't been touched by this issue personally, for whom it was the only issue that decided their vote. In fact, it is the issue that fully radicalized Elon, and he's spoken about this at length. Do you think Elon continuously messaging to 200 million people on X, and going to Trump's rallies, and donating over 100 million dollars to the campaign, and supporting him on podcasts, and doing everything else in his power to get Trump elected, might have accounted for a few votes? Honestly, I think a doctoral dissertation, and perhaps several, could be written on how trans activism completely destroyed Democratic politics—without most Democrats knowing.

Of course, people will be doing an autopsy on this election for quite some time.  But there is some polling already which suggests that cultural issues in general, and this issue in particular, were the greatest drivers of swing voters turning to Trump. For the purpose of this poll, a swing voter is defined as “those who are undecided in the presidential race, or who have changed their voting preference since 2020, voting Democrat in one election and Republican in the other.” Or they were “Independents, who had either indicated that they split their votes between Democrats and Republicans, or who hold either a favorable or unfavorable view of both Trump and Harris.” So these were the people whose votes were in play, and according to a poll titled, “Why America Chose Trump: Inflation, Immigration, and the Democratic Brand,” for these swing voters, the strongest predictor of a vote for Trump was their response to the following statement:  “Kamala Harris is focused more on cultural issues like transgender issues rather than helping the middle class.” So transgender issues were flagged as the example of progressive politics.

Now, you might want to say that neither Harris nor Biden campaigned as a vocal trans activist—and that's true. But, honestly, if you wanted to account for Harris's loss and Trump's win in the briefest possible space, and also indicate the hold that the far left has had over Democratic politics and the Biden administration, I think it would be hard to do better than to juxtapose the following two facts: On his first day in office, President Biden signed an executive order ensuring that trans girls could have access to girls’ restrooms, locker rooms, and sports.  It took him two and a half years to sign an executive order addressing the chaos at the southern border. Why did he wait so long? Because the far left has always said that a concern about the southern border is “racist.”

What more needs to be said about the degree to which the Democratic Party and the Biden administration lost touch with the will of the American people?

As for the topic of trans rights and gender dysphoria, what Harris needed to do, at a minimum, is express her understanding that this issue is complex—that there's a legitimate concern about social contagion and that, in certain cases, there's a conflict between giving trans women and girls everything they want and protecting the rights of biological women and girls. And the jury is still out on many questions here—and policy in Europe has changed radically in recent years, for understandable reasons. This topic is a total mess, ethically and politically. And yet, the orthodoxy among Democrats, and in the elite institutions that they have influenced, is that the trans activist line is the only ethical line to take.

But the truth is, every shibboleth that came out of the far left in recent years contains within it the same recipe for the destruction of Democratic politics. Each is like an evil hologram. Take the term “Latinx.” Who was that for? Only 3 percent of Latinos are in favor of this silly rebranding of their ethnicity. Again, Trump did better among Latinos than any Republican in memory. Do you think it was because there wasn't enough identity politics rammed down their throats from the left? Do you think they just need to see some more white people admonished for the sin of cultural appropriation? You think another lecture about sensitive Halloween costumes might do the trick?  Much of Democratic politics has become a bad SNL sketch.

Democrats simply have to understand that this is one of the reasons that we're getting four more years of Donald Trump. Four more years of this man holding more power and responsibility than any person on earth.  If it sounds like I'm blaming far left activists for this, along with everyone who bent the knee to them—I am.

Sure, inflation didn't help, but the Harris campaign and the Democratic Party couldn't change the price of groceries. They could control whether the Vice President gave a rational accounting of why she no longer supports taxpayer-funded-gender-reassignment surgeries for undocumented immigrants in detention.  Do you know how many ads the Trump campaign ran on that issue? In some markets, it was a third of their ad spend. “She's for they/them. He's for you.”  Someone find me the video where Harris made any sense at all on this topic.

And the same can be said for all the other cultural issues that have been poisoned by the far left.  Literally everyone I know who voted for Trump—and this includes some extraordinarily influential people like Elon—literally everyone, was focused on cultural issues. It wasn't inflation, for them. It was trans activism, the insanity at the southern border, DEI policies, and homelessness and crime in our cities—and the unwillingness of Democratic DAs and mayors to do anything about it. The fact that when you go into a CVS, and you need to call a locksmith to liberate some razor blades and Tylenol—this is an absolute disgrace. It is a clear degradation of the quality of life in American cities. And these things mattered on Tuesday, when people went to the polls.

Most of our largest cities are run by Democratic mayors—at least two thirds of the top hundred, and I think a higher percentage of the top twenty. What are the Democrats doing about homelessness? The Democratic Party largely owns this problem—and for years Democrats have been acting like the answer to it is for everyone just to become more tolerant. They won't police the streets, but they'll police the language. “These people are not ‘homeless.’ They're ‘unhoused.’”  Okay. Great… Anyone who lives in a city, who has to shepherd their kids past some raving lunatic standing outside the supermarket, or who knows that there are whole sections of town that they shouldn't even set foot in because it looks like the third act of a zombie movie there—many of these people are done with your politics. And so are millions of others who don't live in big cities, but visit them, or just see the images on social media. No one wants to live like this.  This is the sort of issue that was easily and justifiably weaponized against Democrats in this election.

Or take the Hamas supporters on our college campuses: You don't have to be Jewish to see how shameful this is. This is an assault, not just on Jews and Israel, but on Western civilization. Let's just call it what it is: real civilization. If the Democratic Party can't figure out that civilization needs to be defended from barbarism, what do you expect is going to happen in a presidential election?  Yes, Biden and Harris were not terrible on this issue, but they talked out of both sides of their mouths. They bent over backwards to not offend the people in the Democratic Party who are totally confused about what happened on October 7th, and about the problem of Islamism and Jihadism worldwide—people who think in terms of “Islamophobia” rather than about really protecting human rights.

Here's one clue on the path back to sanity on this issue, which you may have missed: The hijab is not a symbol of female empowerment. Most of the women throughout the world who wear the veil are forced to, by men who will beat the shit out of them if they don't. It might be time to figure this out, if you actually care—or want to credibly pretend to care—about the rights of women on planet Earth.

There's simply no question that Democratic moral confusion on many of these issues cost Harris millions of votes.

So that's the reckoning that has to happen now among Democrats—and I hope it does.  But the concern now is that four more years of Trump and Trumpism will prevent it.  Trump is such a provocation to the left, and to liberal institutions, that Democrats could find themselves doubling down on all their delusions. Needless to say, this will be exactly what Trump and the MAGA cult want, because it will be politically suicidal.

If you are a Democrat who voted for Harris, please absorb this: You lost more people of color than you ever have in a presidential election, while running against Archie Bunker. Worse, Trump is actually supported by real racists and white supremacists—and that still wasn't enough of a problem. Who do you think your identity politics is for? You're really going to keep celebrating pornographers of racial grievance, like Ta-Nehisi Coates and Ibram X. Kendi? Should we just give another Pulitzer Prize to the 1619 Project and congratulate ourselves? You really think racism is the problem in America—and that what we saw this week was just a victory for white-male identity politics? That's how you're going to explain Trump's popularity at this point? Trump gained support from every racial group except white people, where he lost one percentage point when compared to 2020. You're going to chalk that up to racism?

We're about five days out from the election, when I'm recording this, and I'm still hearing prominent Democrats say things like, “America was never going to elect a black woman for president in the year 2024.”  That's not the issue. And if you keep this up, you're going to get President Candace fucking Owens someday. Wouldn't that be a perfect rejoinder to this stupidity?

I hope it's obvious from everything I've said and written for years. And from the first half of this podcast, that I understand the frustration, and even revulsion, that people feel for the far left, and for the progressive orthodoxy that has infected our institutions—for the censoriousness, thought policing, gaslighting, and lying. I understand the degree to which our institutions have been bent by this, and anyone who's followed my work from the beginning knows that I've been outraged by this encroaching moral blindness for at least 20 years—long before “wokeness,” or Black Lives Matter, or trans activism, or “defund the police.”

In the years after September 11th, 2001, when I began to focus on the problem of Islamism and jihadism, I was complaining about just this. I could see that anyone who described these problems too honestly would get tarred as a “racist”—as though that made any sense. I saw how someone like Ayaan Hirsi Ali was treated like an untouchable by left-wing think tanks and writers. I saw how even Nicholas Kristof at the New York Times—whose whole shtick was to show his concern for the rights of women in the developing world—even he felt obliged to condemn Ayaan as an “Islamophobe.” This was a woman who was quite literally being hunted by Muslim theocrats in one of the most cosmopolitan societies we have, modern Holland.

For years, I witnessed journalists obfuscate about the threat of Islamic extremism. Someone was found stabbing people in a European city, or mowing them down with his car—shouting, “Allahu Akbar!”—and it would be reported that the motive for the crime was still mysterious, and the perpetrator would be described, at most, as an “immigrant.” Sometimes every detail of this sort would be suppressed, and you'd have no idea what happened—it was just random mass murder. Needless to say, this kind of politically-correct dishonesty has since spread to many other topics, as the left-wing hatred of Western civilization, capitalism, and white people has distorted everything left of center.

I understand how infuriating this is, especially on an issue that touches your life directly. I know what it's like to read an article in the New York Times and to spot obvious lies. But the alternative to the failure of journalism simply isn't the firehose of lies, half-truths, and conspiracy theories that you find on X. Nor is it the calculated and ever-present distortion you find on right-wing news channels, which never had any journalistic standards to violate in the first place.  There's simply no alternative to healthy institutions that maintain their credibility, even when they make mistakes, by reliably correcting their errors. And when they fall short of this standard, they can be pressured to do better, because they have intellectual and moral scruples. It's an imperfect process, but it's the best we've got.

Elon Musk never corrects his errors. Tucker Carlson never corrects his errors.  Donald Trump never makes errors, because he never stops lying. He's playing tennis without the net, and his fans love it. Putting your faith in deranged personalities isn't a viable alternative to having truly liberal institutions that you can trust, and which can be obliged to earn your trust back when they fail.

I understand how satisfying it is to find a new bully to beat up the other bullies who've been making you miserable. But the problem is, this new bully is worse. This new bully has no principles. This new bully has no journalistic, academic, or scientific conscience to appeal to. Whatever might be wrong with a person like Anthony Fauci, or Francis Collins, or any of the other doctors who have been demonized right-of-center for their approach to setting COVID policy—at least they are real doctors and scientists who have some professional scruples and reputations to protect among those who actually know something about medical science. RFK Jr. has none of that. He's just a cowboy taking shots at the establishment. The Joe Rogan podcast is not a substitute for the Wall Street Journal or the Kennedy School at Harvard. It is not progress to have a comedian like Dave Smith, who's apparently done his own research, interviewed about the history of the Middle East or the war in Ukraine like he's the next Henry Kissinger. All of this free access to information is making us dumber.

Of course, I blame Trump and social media for how divisive our politics have become.  Trump is what you get when 51 percent of a society declares bankruptcy on core moral values, political principles, journalistic ethics, and necessary institutions. There is no real defense of Trump and Trumpism. All his defenders act like his critics just don't like the man's style—he's just too crass or bombastic. Or they think we're worried about hypothetical things that might never happen—we're worried that he might become a fascist in the future. And, needless to say, these concerns are tell-tale signs of “Trump derangement syndrome.”

But none of that is true. The problem with Trump isn't his style, and it's not merely what might happen in the future. The problem is what has already happened. It's the damage that Trump has already caused to our democracy. And it's the fact that he has turned the Republican Party into a personality cult that celebrates all this damage as a sign of progress.

For instance, while many of us really wanted Kamala Harris to win on Tuesday, we are also breathing a sigh of relief that she didn't win by a very narrow margin. Why are we relieved about this? Because Trump and Elon—along with several other high-profile freaks—spread so many lies and conspiracy theories about election fraud, that they effectively rigged our society to explode. On the day of the vote, Trump and Elon were both spreading lies about a terrible fraud being perpetrated in Pennsylvania. Now that Trump won, where's the concern about fraud? It just evaporated. I guess Elon looked into it, and our voting machines are fine now?

Pay attention to what happened here: These guys imposed a serious risk of injury on our whole society, for purely selfish reasons. And the fact that we're now relieved to have avoided a civil war is itself an injury to our democracy and to our social order. Is this too ethereal a point to understand?

If someone rigs your house to explode, and the bomb just happens to not go off— for reasons that they didn't actually control—it seems to me that they don't get to say, “Well, no harm no foul. Let's just move on. Let's agree to disagree about what happened here.” No. You put our whole democracy at risk with your lies. You knowingly raised the temperature and the pressure on your side of the electorate—again, with lies—and ran the risk of producing serious violence if things had gone the other way.

There was a moment on Tuesday night, when the tide had fully turned against Harris—when the needle over at the New York Times website was giving Trump an 89 percent probability of winning—but the blue wall states had not been decided. It was still possible, at that point for Harris to win (1-in-10-chance events happen all the time). But I remember thinking, “I hope she doesn't win now.” Because, at that point, given the optics—given that Republicans really thought they had it in the bag, and even Democrats seemed to think that, and said it publicly, on television and social media—if Harris's luck had turned at that point, and she had won, we could have had a civil war, given the degree to which conspiracy thinking had been weaponized by Trump and his enablers. Again, even on election day itself, these lies had been spread consciously and deliberately—Elon did this personally to hundreds of millions of people on the social media platform that he owns. Given all that, I think it simply wasn't safe for Harris to win a free and fair election at that point. And that is a totally crazy thought to have had on election night in America in the year 2024.

Where do we send the bill for the damage that has been done to our country?

Half of our society just elected a man to the presidency who they know would not have accepted the results of the election, had he lost. Vice President Harris conceded the next day, as everyone knew she would. There is probably no one who supported Trump, who thinks that he would have done what they fully expected Harris to do—which is to protect the most important norm of our democracy, the very thing that makes it possible, the peaceful transfer of power. And the astonishing thing is that Trump supporters are totally okay with this asymmetry. They expected Harris to concede and would have demanded that she do it. And they know Trump wouldn't have conceded if he lost—understanding all the risk this would have posed to our social fabric—and they are fine with that.

This is already the ruination of our politics.  This is what the path to fascism looks like. We are already on it. There is nothing hypothetical about this. Bad things have already happened. And this is true, whatever happens over the next four years.

It's like in the film, The Exorcist: If your kid has stigmata, and is vomiting green goo in all directions, and is moving furniture with her mind, you should admit that you have a problem. It shouldn't require Satan himself to make an appearance.

What is so frustrating about Trump supporters is that they refuse to acknowledge any of this. They simply refuse to acknowledge how pathological our situation is—and how pathological Trump himself has made it.

Whatever story you have in your head, about all the good Trump might do in a second term—"he's a disruptor”; “he's got all the tech bros in there with him”; “he's just crazy enough to scare our enemies”; or “he's just a bullshitter and won't do half of what he claims he'll do, so don't worry about it!”—whatever story you're telling yourself, here is what is true now:

We are returning a man to the Oval Office who, as a sitting president, would not commit to a peaceful transfer of power, and who tried to steal the 2020 election, all the while claiming it was being stolen from him. And he has lied about this ever since, knowing that these lies stand as a continuous provocation to violence. And there are court cases pending, seeking to hold him accountable for all of this—cases which, now that he'll be in control of the Justice Department, will be dismissed. We're putting Trump back in power when we know that he can't honestly discharge his oath of office, because he has no respect for the Constitution. And half of our society is not only willing to run this risk, they're positively jubilant about it.  At a minimum, you should acknowledge that these events have seriously injured our politics—again, whatever happens over the next four years.

And I have something that I really must say to Joe Rogan and the other podcasters who interviewed Trump: You can't have it both ways. You don't get to say that this was “the podcast election” and that these long-form conversations are incredibly important for people to hear, so that they can make up their minds about who to vote for, and then take no journalistic responsibility whatsoever to get your facts straight, or to expose obvious lies when you're talking to the most prolific liar on Earth. You don't get to spout endless conspiracy theories about how our election system is dangerously broken and vulnerable to fraud—and then when your candidate wins, say, “Oh, well, Trump's victory was just too big for them to rig the election.” No—how about realizing that there was nothing significantly wrong with our election system in the first place, and that all these concerns about fraud were lies, coming from your candidate and his surrogates?They were telling these lies in preparation for not accepting the results of the election, if he lost. And you let your platform be used for that purpose, by people who were willing to shatter our politics—and even risk provoking a civil war—out of personal self-interest.

Every podcaster who interviewed Trump managed to make it seem like all the bad things that have ever been said about him were the result of some left-wing, elite-media conspiracy. To interview Trump, or his surrogates, responsibly, would have required that you put them on the spot for any number of odious things he has said and done—and for things he said he intends to do in his second term—all of which are well documented, and many of which should be totally disqualifying in a presidential candidate.

It's not enough to just turn on the microphones and have a conversation—and it doesn't matter that it's three hours long if all you're going to do is launder the man's lies by ignoring them in the interest of maintaining good vibes. There is a complacency and an amorality to the way you approached this that was actively harmful.

And all you people with Twitter-Files-Derangement Syndrome: just how fair and balanced are things over there at X now? Is it the bastion of free speech you were hoping for? You think that having a platform run by a manic billionaire who doesn't trust any of his own moderators to vet information—so he fires them—but who trusts random conspiracists and lunatics—so he personally amplifies their lies to 200 million followers—you think this is progress?  Do you think you'd feel the same way if a left-wing billionaire was boosting activist garbage to his 200 million followers every hour on the hour?

And perhaps a note to journalists, scientists, writers, and other people with actual reputations to protect, and lives to live: None of this gets any better until you all decide to leave X. You know it's a cesspool. You know it's harming our society. Most of you know it's harming your lives, personally. By merely being there—and making it seem like everyone has to be there, because everyone is there—you are helping to build the tool that is making fact-based conversation impossible.

Our society is being riven by lies. And social media—and X in particular—is largely responsible for this. Of course, I get that some breaking news happens there first—and some news might only happen there. But if that's a feature of social media that we must conserve, then we have to instantiate it elsewhere—not on a platform that is owned, run, and entirely dominated by a meme junkie who lost all his principles years ago.

Once again, everything I've been talking about and complaining about has already happened. But, looking forward, there are reasons to be worried about a second Trump term. Is RFK Jr. really going to be setting medical policy for the country?  That should make your head explode. Is Trump going to weaken our international alliances? Will he pull us out of NATO? If we have fewer biological men in women's sports, are we also going to have fewer democracies?  Is that a fair trade? Is Trump going to call the MyPillowGuy and the Pizzagate dummies for advice on how to run the world? Or will he suddenly pivot and surround himself with competent, ethical advisors? We'll have to wait and see.

Needless to say, I will respond to whatever happens on this podcast. But I'm not going to spend the next four years obsessing about Donald Trump. As I've said before, I consider him one of the greatest opportunity costs for humanity to appear in my lifetime. The fact that we've had to think about this man continuously, for a decade, is just an incredible piece of bad luck.  So, I'm going to do my best to pick my moments.  I'm sure there will be many over the next four years, but I am just not willing to give more of my time to politics than is absolutely necessary.

And I will be sure to tell you when I receive that first IRS audit.

Thanks for listening.

 

Our looming civil unrest is predicted by Turchin's historical model.

I recommend you have a look at Graeme Wood's article on the writing and thoughts of Peter Turchin, who has developed a model based on the past 10,000 years of human history that in 2010 predicted that an "age of discord" worse than most Americans have experienced would get serious around 2020. Here are some clips:

The fundamental problems, he says, are a dark triad of social maladies: a bloated elite class, with too few elite jobs to go around; declining living standards among the general population; and a government that can’t cover its financial positions. His models, which track these factors in other societies across history, are too complicated to explain in a nontechnical publication. But they’ve succeeded in impressing writers for nontechnical publications, and have won him comparisons to other authors of “megahistories,” such as Jared Diamond and Yuval Noah Harari.

“You have a situation now where there are many more elites fighting for the same position, and some portion of them will convert to counter-elites,” Turchin said....Donald Trump, for example, may appear elite (rich father, Wharton degree, gilded commodes), but Trumpism is a counter-elite movement. His government is packed with credentialed nobodies who were shut out of previous administrations, sometimes for good reasons and sometimes because the Groton-­Yale establishment simply didn’t have any vacancies.

Elite overproduction creates counter-elites, and counter-elites look for allies among the commoners. If commoners’ living standards slip—not relative to the elites, but relative to what they had before—they accept the overtures of the counter-elites and start oiling the axles of their tumbrels. Commoners’ lives grow worse, and the few who try to pull themselves onto the elite lifeboat are pushed back into the water by those already aboard. The final trigger of impending collapse, Turchin says, tends to be state insolvency. At some point rising in­security becomes expensive. The elites have to pacify unhappy citizens with handouts and freebies—and when these run out, they have to police dissent and oppress people. Eventually the state exhausts all short-term solutions, and what was heretofore a coherent civilization disintegrates.

So, if these clips whet your appetite, you should read the whole article, (This is a re-post of my 11/12/2020 post.)

Tokens of sanity

-Being a calm space in which nothing can hurry

-An animal body that pretends to be human

-Dissociating from the word cloud and emotional reactivities of self and other selves.

-A courteous guest in one’s own body and when with others, owning one’s own experience and letting others own theirs.

-Favoring reflectivity over reactivity, caressing novelty

-Clinging to nothing, the current self being a passing fantasy

-Letting each moment be what it is, not what it should be

-A blip in the flow of cosmic time

Networks of connectivity are the battleground of the future.

From Nathan Gardels, editor of Noema Magazine: "From Mass To Distributed Weapons Of Destruction" : 

The recent lethal attacks attributed to Israel that exploded pagers and walkie-talkies dispersed among thousands of Hezbollah militants announces a new capacity in the history of warfare for distributed destruction. Before the massive bombing raids that have since ensued, the terror-stricken population of Lebanon had been unplugging any device with batteries or a power source linked to a communication network for fear it might blow up in their faces.

The capability to simultaneously strike the far-flung tentacles of a network is only possible in this new era of connectivity that binds us all together. It stands alongside the first aerial bombing in World War I and the use of nuclear weapons by the U.S. in Japan at the end of World War II as a novel weapon of its technological times that will, sooner or later, proliferate globally.

Like these earlier inventions of warfare, the knowledge and technology that is at the outset the sole province of the clever first mover will inevitably spread to others with different, and even precisely opposite, interests and intentions. The genie is out of the bottle and can’t be put back. In time, it will be available to anyone with the wherewithal to summon it for their own purposes.

While Hezbollah reels, we can be sure that the defense establishments in every nation, from Iran to Russia, China and the U.S., are scrambling to get ahead of this new reality by seeking advantage over any adversary who is surely trying to do the same. 

Back in 1995, the Aum Shinrikyo cult released the deadly nerve agent, sarin, in a Tokyo subway, killing 13 and sickening some 5,500 commuters. In an interview at the time, the futurist Alvin Toffler observed that “what we’ve seen in Japan is the ultimate devolution of power: the demassification of mass-destruction weapons … where an individual or group can possess the means of mass destruction if he or she has the information to make them. And that information is increasingly available.”

Even that foresightful thinker could not envision then that not only can individuals or groups gain access to knowledge of the ways and means of mass destruction through information networks, but that the networks for accessing that knowledge and connecting individuals or groups can themselves serve as a delivery system for hostile intervention against their users.

Though the Israeli attacks reportedly involved low-tech logistical hacking of poorly monitored supply chains, it doesn’t take an AI scientist to see the potential of distributed warfare in today’s Internet of Things, where all devices are synced, from smartphones to home alarm systems to GPS in your car or at your bank’s ATM.

Ever-more powerful AI models will be able to algorithmically deploy programmed instructions back through the same network platforms from which they gather their vast amounts of data.

It is no longer a secret that the CIA and Israeli Mossad temporarily disabled Iran’s nuclear fuel centrifuges in 2009 by infecting their operating system with the Stuxnet malware. That such targeted attacks could also be scaled up and distributed across an array of devices through new AI tools is hardly a stretch of the imagination.

The writing, or code, is clearly on the wall after the Hezbollah attack. Dual-use networks will be weaponized as the battleground of the future. The very platforms that bring people together can also be what blows them apart.

 

 

A caustic review of Yuval Harari's "Nexus"

I pass on the very cogent opinions of Dominic Green, fellow of the Royal Historical Society, that appeared in the Sept. 13 issue of the Wall Street Journal. He offers several  caustic comments on ideas offered in Yuval Harari's most recent book, "Nexus"

Groucho Marx said there are two types of people in this world: “those who think people can be divided up into two types, and those who don’t.” In “Nexus,” the Israeli historian-philosopher Yuval Noah Harari divides us into a naive and populist type and another type that he prefers but does not name. This omission is not surprising. The opposite of naive and populist might be wise and pluralist, but it might also be cynical and elitist. Who would admit to that?

Mr. Harari is the author of the bestselling “Sapiens,” a history of our species written with an eye on present anxieties about our future. “Nexus,” a history of our society as a series of information networks and a warning about artificial intelligence, uses a similar recipe. A dollop of historical anecdote is seasoned with a pinch of social science and a spoonful of speculation, topped with a soggy crust of prescription, and lightly dusted with premonitions of the apocalypse that will overcome us if we refuse a second serving. “Nexus” goes down easily, but it isn’t as nourishing as it claims. Much of it leaves a sour taste. Like the Victorian novel and Caesar’s Gaul, “Nexus” divides into three parts. The first part describes the development of complex societies through the creation and control of information networks. The second argues that the digital network is both quantitatively and qualitatively different from the print network that created modern democratic societies. The third presents the AI apocalypse. An “alien” information network gone rogue, Mr. Harari warns, could “supercharge existing human conflicts,” leading to an “AI arms race” and a digital Cold War, with rival powers divided by a Silicon Curtain of chips and code.

Information, Mr. Harari writes, creates a “social nexus” among its users. The “twin pillars” of society are bureaucracy, which creates power by centralizing information, and mythology, which creates power by controlling the dispersal of “stories” and “brands.” Societies cohere around stories such as the Bible and communism and “personality cults” and brands such as Jesus and Stalin. Religion is a fiction that stamps “superhuman legitimacy” on the social order. All “true believers” are delusional. Anyone who calls a religion “a true representation of reality” is “lying.” Mr. Harari is scathing about Judaism and Christianity but hardly criticizes Islam. In this much, he is not naive.

Mythologies of religion, history and ideology, Mr. Harari believes, exploit our naive tendency to mistake all information as “an attempt to represent reality.” When the attempt is convincing, the naive “call it truth.” Mr. Harari agrees that “truth is an accurate representation of reality” but argues that only “objective facts” such as scientific data are true. “Subjective facts” based on “beliefs and feelings” cannot be true. The collaborative cacophony of “intersubjective reality,” the darkling plain of social and political contention where all our minds meet, also cannot be fully true.

Digitizing our naivety has, Mr. Harari believes, made us uncontrollable and incorrigible. “Nexus” is most interesting, and most flawed, when it examines our current situation. Digital networks overwhelm us with information, but computers can only create “order,” not “truth” or “wisdom.” AI might take over without developing human-style consciousness: “Intelligence is enough.” The nexus of machine-learning, algorithmic “user engagement” and human nature could mean that “large-scale democracies may not survive the rise of computer technology.”

The “main split” in 20th-century information was between closed, pseudo-infallible “totalitarian” systems and open, self correcting “democratic” systems. As Mr. Harari’s third section describes, after the flood of digital information, the split will be between humans and machines. The machines will still be fallible. Will they allow us to correct them? Though “we aren’t sure” why the “democratic information network is breaking down,” Mr. Harari nevertheless argues that “social media algorithms” play such a “divisive” role that free speech has become a naive luxury, unaffordable in the age of AI. He “strongly disagrees” with Louis Brandeis’s opinion in Whitney v. California (1927) that the best way to combat false speech is with more speech.

The survival of democracy requires “regulatory institutions” that will “vet algorithms,” counter “conspiracy theories” and prevent the rise of “charismatic leaders.” Mr. Harari never mentions the First Amendment, but “Nexus” amounts to a sustained argument for its suppression. Unfortunately, his grasp of politics is tenuous and hyperbolic. He seems to believe that populism was invented with the iPhone rather than being a recurring bug that appears when democratic operating systems become corrupted or fail to update their software. He consistently confuses democracy (a method of gauging opinion with a long history) with liberalism (a mostly Anglo-American legal philosophy with a short history). He defines democracy as “an ongoing conversation between diverse information nodes,” but the openness of the conversation and the independence of its nodes derive from liberalism’s rights of individual privacy and speech. Yet “liberalism” appears nowhere in “Nexus.” Mr. Harari isn’t much concerned with liberty and justice either.

In “On Naive and Sentimental Poetry” (1795-96), Friedrich Schiller divided poetry between two modes. The naive mode is ancient and assumes that language is a window into reality. The sentimental mode belongs to our “artificial age” and sees language as a mirror to our inner turmoil. As a reflection of our troubled age of transition, “Nexus” is a mirror to the unease of our experts and elites. It divides people into the cognitively unfit and the informationally pure and proposes we divide power over speech accordingly. Call me naive, but Mr. Harari’s technocratic TED-talking is not the way to save democracy. It is the royal road to tyranny.

 

The Fear of Diverse Intelligences Like AI

I want to suggest that you read the article by Michael Levin in the Sept. 3 issue of Noema Magazine on how our fear of AI’s potential is emblematic of humanity’s larger difficulty recognizing intelligence in unfamiliar guises. (One needs to be clear however, that AI of the GTP engines is not 'intelligence' in the broader sense of the term. They are large language models, LLMs.) Here are some clips from the later portions of his essay:

Why would natural evolution have an eternal monopoly on producing systems with preferences, goals and the intelligence to strive to meet them? How do you know that bodies whose construction includes engineered, rational input in addition to emergent physics, instead of exclusively random mutations (the mainstream picture of evolution), do not have what you mean by emotion, intelligence and an inner perspective? 

Do cyborgs (at various percentage combinations of human brain and tech) have the magic that you have? Do single cells? Do we have a convincing, progress-generating story of why the chemical system of our cells, which is compatible with emotion, would be inaccessible to construction by other intelligences in comparison to the random meanderings of evolution?

We have somewhat of a handle on emergent complexity, but we have only begun to understand emergent cognition, which appears in places that are hard for us to accept. The inner life of partially (or wholly) engineered embodied action-perception agents is no more obvious (or limited) by looking at the algorithms that its engineers wrote than is our inner life derivable from the laws of chemistry that reductionists see when they zoom into our cells. The algorithmic picture of a “machine” is no more the whole story of engineered constructs, even simple ones, than are the laws of chemistry the whole story of human minds.

Figuring out how to relate to minds of unconventional origin — not just AI and robotics but also cells, organs, hybrots, cyborgs and many others — is an existential-level task for humanity as it matures.

Our current educational materials give people the false idea that they understand the limits of what different types of matter can do.  The protagonist in the “Ex Machina” movie cuts himself to determine whether he is also a robotic being. Why does this matter so much to him? Because, like many people, if he were to find cogs and gears underneath his skin, he would suddenly feel lesser than, rather than considering the possibility that he embodied a leap-forward for non-organic matter.  He trusts the conventional story of what intelligently arranged cogs and gears cannot do (but randomly mutated, selected protein hardware can) so much that he’s willing to give up his personal experience as a real, majestic being with consciousness and agency in the world.

The correct conclusion from such a discovery — “Huh, cool, I guess cogs and gears can form true minds!” — is inaccessible to many because the reductive story of inorganic matter is so ingrained. People often assume that though they cannot articulate it, someone knows why consciousness inhabits brains and is nowhere else. Cognitive science must be more careful and honest when exporting to society a story of where the gaps in knowledge lie and which assumptions about the substrate and origin of minds are up for revision.

It’s terrifying to consider how people will free themselves, mentally and physically, once we really let go of the pre-scientific notion that any benevolent intelligence planned for us to live in the miserable state of embodiment many on Earth face today. Expanding our scientific wisdom and our moral compassion will give everyone the tools to have the embodiment they want.

The people of that phase of human development will be hard to control. Is that the scariest part? Or is it the fact that they will challenge all of us to raise our game, to go beyond coasting on our defaults, by showing us what is possible? One can hide all these fears under macho facades of protecting real, honest-to-goodness humans and their relationships, but it’s transparent and it won’t hold.

Everything — not just technology, but also ethics — will change. Thus, my challenges to all of us are these. State your positive vision of the future — not just the ubiquitous lists of the fearful things you don’t want but specify what you do want. In 100 years, is humanity still burdened by disease, infirmity, the tyranny of deoxyribonucleic acid, and behavioral firmware developed for life on the savannah? What will a mature species’ mental frameworks look like?

“Other, unconventional minds are scary, if you are not sure of your own — its reality, its quality and its ability to offer value in ways that don’t depend on limiting others.”

Clarify your beliefs: Make explicit the reasons for your certainties about what different architectures can and cannot do; include cyborgs and aliens in the classifications that drive your ethics. I especially call upon anyone who is writing, reviewing or commenting on work in this field to be explicit about your stance on the cognitive status of the chemical system we call a paramecium, the ethical position of life-machine hybrids such as cyborgs, the specific magic thing that makes up “life” (if there is any), and the scientific and ethical utility of the crisp categories you wish to preserve.

Take your organicist ideas more seriously and find out how they enrich the world beyond the superficial, contingent limits of the products of random evolution. If you really think there is something in living beings that goes beyond all machine metaphors, commit to this idea and investigate what other systems, beyond our evo-neuro-chauvinist assumptions, might also have this emergent cognition.

Consider that the beautiful, ineffable qualities of inner perspective and goal-directedness may manifest far more broadly than is easily recognized. Question your unwarranted confidence in what “mere matter” can do, and entertain the humility of emergent cognition, not just emergent complexity. Recognize the kinship we have with other minds and the fact that all learning requires your past self to be modified and replaced by an improved, new version. Rejoice in the opportunity for growth and change and take responsibility for guiding the nature of that change.

Go further — past the facile stories of what could go wrong in the future and paint the future you do want to work toward. Transcend scarcity and redistribution of limited resources, and help grow the pot. It’s not just for you — it’s for your children and for future generations, who deserve the right to live in a world unbounded by ancient, pre-scientific ideas and their stranglehold on our imaginations, abilities, and ethics.

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.