Panic - Part 1

With BC in a state of emergency caused by record flooding and me sitting in the middle of it, I think it is at last time to roll up my sleeves and address the emergencies that confront all of us.

Several times in my career I have found it useful to "collapse" a problem that looks like a time series (where you need data points over time and you want to predict what happens in the future) into a picture of what is going on now. The current situation contains the past and tells us what we need to know (all we can know) about the future.

Throughout my essays on this subject, I hope you will actually consult my sources. What I tell you is built on what I learned from much smarter people who are, thanks to the miracle of the internet, available at your fingertips. This is important stuff. Far more important than all the stuff you forgot from High School. And my sources are far more entertaining than your High School teachers. 

I will start with a great book, recommended by Bill Gates, about how to think about the state of the world now and how most of us do no better than chimpanzees when asked critical questions about it. To get a taste of Hans Rosling, take a look at this video. Better yet, buy the book. Sit back, read carefully as if you are studying for an important exam. Struggle to be one rational human being in a crowd of chimpanzees You need to know 

• what's going on in the world 
• how to think about what's going on 
• why you are so actively stupid about it (worse than random)  
• what makes you so stupid and 
• how to think better - maybe.

I will also get around to telling you about a few very smart people who ought to know better. People who are actively lying to you and trying to make you stupid. But first, two smart people.

Rosling's central concept is "dollar street". To get a big picture of the human race, it helps to arrange people by income - not by "us" and "them", not by "rich and poor", religion, nationality, or any other popular simplification. The great majority of humanity exists in the "hump" in the middle of the curve - rather "poor" by our standards but not anything like as "poor" as what we imagine. To be sure, "we" are fabulously rich by world standards, but we propose "fixes" for the rest of humanity that don't take into account who these people really are.

For the analysis that comes, one of the central concepts is how different levels of income are impacted both by moving "up" by "progress and technical change" and by sliding "down" by catastrophes of any nature.

I thank Rosling for his list of the major catastrophes he worries about:

• Pandemic
• Financial Collapse
• War
• Climate Change
• Poverty in General

What is important here is to understand that we face multiple "big problems", not just one. They have a nasty way of interacting. Linking these big risks to "dollar street", we can see that catastrophe tends to push individual people down the street to lower-income and a lower standard of life. Even to the point of threatening life itself.

For example, when you hear that climate change will "disproportionally" affect the poor, this is what they are talking about. But it's the same for any catastrophe, such as the war in Afghanistan, Syria, or Yemen, where the "poor" can no longer afford to eat. They die.

Right now, through the lens of "dollar street", I am watching catastrophe hit British Columbia, whose "poor" are systematically ignored. We see people on the roofs of their RVs waiting for helicopter rescue. We do not see the homeless junkies or the Natives on reserves without potable water. Many of the flooded-out farmers will see their incomes fall (moving down dollar street). Many of the junkies will die. By the way, drug overdose, not COVID, is the biggest preventable cause of death in BC.

It's a question of resilience. If you live in the high numbers on dollar street, you have the means to bounce back. If you are in the low numbers, any "little problem" can spell death. Opportunities to move up are scarce. But that's BC - my backyard. We need to open our lens and look at the whole world.

Let me introduce you to another serious thinker on the big issues. You already know him, or think you know him: Bill Gates. You will not be surprised to learn that Gates is an uber-nerd. A nerd's nerd. He is astonishingly well-informed about just about everything (except perhaps keeping his marriage together). We have no shortage of video talks from Gates. I invite you to watch one or two. 

Gates (and his team of course) have written a great book (How To Avoid a Climate Disaster) that is packed with the kind of facts we need to have about the current state of the climate and what tools we currently have to make a difference.  He has a lot to tell us about what is currently in the pipeline. He's the one to know since he is personally financing a lot of it. Among the many takeaways in this book is the insight that the "experts" at COP26 vastly under-estimate the task at hand (whether or not you agree that the "task" is needed). The book is packed with graphs and fascinating detail behind ideas that can get us to "zero-carbon" by 2050. But you can really sum it all up by the simple fact that the human race gets over 80% of its energy from fossil fuels and the optimists are proposing we get rid of all of it in the next 30 years. So how, exactly, would that work?

The obvious conclusion is that it can't possibly work, but Gates has an engineer's optimism. We can fix it and here is how. If you don't know what it would take, you really need to shut up about the whole issue. You should see that all the brave proposals coming out of COP26 are more or less beside the point - seldom coming close to the stated goal - sometimes even claiming short-term "band-aids" that will hinder our chances in the long term.

Gates and Rosling are acknowledged giants in their own fields. They know what they are talking about.  They are both "hands-on" and "fact-based".

I'll conclude this essay for the moment. so I don't swamp my reader(s). I have a few more characters to invite to the stage. Next time.

What, if anything, is the "self"?

What is the "self"?

Among proponents of mindfulness and Zen, it is common to say that the "self" is an illusion - that the "self" does not really exist. Such talk leads us immediately into paradox, but Zen loves paradox. Vast amounts of ink are spilled in discussions about how, if the self doesn't exist, who or what it is that knows it doesn't exist. The self seems to be a matter of daily experience. Saying it's an illusion is little more than an attention-getting opinion or a device to sell books.

To me, the problem seems to be a shortcoming of language.

I just read a treatment of this issue that purported to solve it all by claiming that the self is a verb not a noun. This poor individual was trying to tackle one of the hardest problems in the world using his tenuous grip on the grammar he learned in school. He dimly perceives that the "self" is not an ordinary "thing", so he concludes it must be the only other kind of grammatical entity he remembers: a verb. As an amateur philosopher, he imagined that the problem can be solved by re-defining a few terms and then solving the whole issue by talking about it.

If he had been awake in High School physics, he might have heard about other types of "thing" - such as force fields and processes. Since the "self" is obviously connected in some way with living human beings, and life itself is clearly a process, it makes sense that the mind (the self) must be come kind of process. The problem with that is that there are millions of types of process and probably billions more awaiting discovery. Calling the "self" a process doesn't do much for us, but it does free us from "thing think", such as the image that "we" are a "soul" that somehow drives our bodies around durning life and migrates to another plane of existence when our body dies.

My own personal experience is with the "process" described by a computer program. Since very few people are aware of the power of modern computer languages. Let me briefly digress to describe how they work:

• "things" are described as "objects" which can be totally abstract or perhaps an abstract representation of a "thing", such as a person or a bank account. To control an ICBM, the missile would be represented and controlled as a "thing".
• Objects have behaviours that can be as simple as adding numbers together or or as complex as driving down the road without hitting anything
• Objects have a "state", which can be thought of as a kind of memory that influences behaviour. For example, a bank account with zero balance will respond with an "insufficient funds" message if asked to transmit money to another account.
• Objects send messages to each other, which can be instructions, "inputs", "outputs" etc.

While these ideas are almost childishly simple, the elements of object oriented architecture can be used to describe a stunning range of "things" in the world, especially the "things" we build. There are architectural rules and "best practices" that describe how to create design objects that are fairly robust descriptions of "things" that are likely to exist in the "real world" or at least ideas that are "orthogonal" (describing the world with a minimum of non-overlapping concepts).  The idea is to extend the language in a way that the "words" have a meaning outside of the context that lead to them being invented in the first place. This creates such things as the vast zoo of objects underlying the Java language - the language of the Internet. But I digress ...

When you send a line of text (object) to Google, thousands of messages are sent between objects in Google computers, chatting back and forth, to assemble a big long list of links (another type of object) that are displayed on your computer (another object). You can click on one of them (a message), to trigger a server somewhere (another object) to send a message back to you (a web page object).

The underlying language and architecture we are dealing with is incredibly powerful - far more powerful in some ways that any human language. It can, for example, completely describe the operation of a machine that will land on Mars and proceed to explore the place.

On the other hand, we must not slip into thinking that "object oriented" computer languages can describe anything that the human mind can conceive. But we can go a long way to describe the operation of the brain in object oriented terms. For example, neurons are "stacked" in a pattern endlessly repeated in the grey matter of the brain. At least to the first approximation, these "stacks" can be simulated using object-oriented architecture. 

Think of it this way. Suppose the "self" is somehow "like" a giant conventional machine, like a jet aircraft. Now imagine that someone wants to explain this machine in a giant essay. It's easy to see that words will fall short of the task - you need blue prints, graphs, engineering diagrams, demonstrations and a lot of training just to understand any of it. Words will just not cut it. In fact, the more words you use, the less likely it is that the description will make any sense. The human mind is, by definition, exactly as complex as anything anyone can ever possibly know. Any non-trivial description of the operation of one mind, let alone the interactions between multiple minds can be expected require a few powerful descriptive conceptual tools that require specialized knowledge to use.

Chimpanzees can make tools out of twigs and have probably done so for a million years. They will continue to do so for another million years. But they will never make a telescope out of twigs. Philosophers pretend to discuss the most difficult problems of existence using ordinary words, the bluntest of descriptive tools and the oldest tools available to human beings. In fact, to me, their entire dialogue seems to be about re-defining and mis-using words. They are paid by the word and the more they add to the store of words, the less they describe anything in a useful way. But I digress ...

From the examples of twigs and jet transports, it should be noted that even sophisticated technical tools of description don't cover all we need to know or describe about our subject. For example, many of the aircraft components are made from special alloys using sophisticated manufacturing techniques. Awkwardly, we are not always sure why some alloys have the properties they do. They just do. We are quite sure that the same is true of the mind - it's not just a machine processing information. It's also a chemical reaction of nasty complexity and, of course, it's alive, meaning that its biological nature must be factored in to any useful description of its operation.

Having said that, allow me, for a moment, to imagine that the "self" is an "object" in the sense that a running computer program is an "object". I imagine the "self" as a "program" running in the brain, just like the operating system runs (most of the time) in your computer. It's a process, but a special kind of process. This is a way of thinking of the self as a kind of machine, but a very sophisticated machine. We can then ask a few things about what's going on a "self".

• It's easy to see that sensations are messages received by the senses of the body
• Memories are part of the "state" of the self
• Actions are output messages

That's all pretty obvious, but it gets interesting when you start to ask about what kinds of "things" are "ideas", "beliefs", "intentions", "regrets"  and "thoughts". Those are obviously coming into the mind and popping out of it and running around inside it without obvious external signs. There are very good reasons to suspect that "ideas" cannot be reduced to the kind of formalism that we'd like. The closest we have come so far is the meme, an interesting analogue of the gene. Since meme theory originated in 1976, progress in "memetics" has resembled philosophy more than physics.

In this little note, I don't intend to nail down exactly what it is that the mind "contains" or works on: only to suggest that this metaphor of the mind (the self) is much more productive and probably closer to reality than saying the self is an illusion or a "verb" or a "soul".

We are also free to ask about what aspects of the mind are not covered by this metaphor. For me, the most glaring omission is the fact that human minds work in huge assemblies called "societies" and all the "thoughts" running through individual human minds run through the entire society. It seems to me that interactions that add up to culture are not so easy to think of in object oriented terms. To begin with, machines don't hate, mate, have children, die and fear death.  They are not honest or dishonest, good or evil.

Come to think of it, they don't have theories about their own programming ...