The flow of ideas

Assuming everything is observable in principle at least, we have two sets of interest:

• Meme space available to the individual (roughly their "vocabulary" of ideas
• Meme space available to the group (what ideas can be communicated)

Any model is made exponentially more useful if it can be made dynamic.

• We can make the model dynamic by observing what ideas are communicated at any time. We can spot trends.

"Big Data" techniques allow is to scoop up vast amounts of data from the Internet, providing good maps of how "memes" turn up down to the individual level. We can also see what ideas are being shared between individuals and groups.  Along the way of using the model, we are bound to discover its limitations. One obvious one is defining the slippery concept of "meme." The common meaning of meme these days refers to anything that gets spread on the internet, especially some catchy picture. We need to pay attention to this concept since "ideas" are not spread by words alone but by visual images.

I'd attempt to get closer to the original idea proposed by Dawkins. Much can be learned by tracking individual words and phrases, such as "fake news", "democracy" and "climate". What you trace depends on what you are interested in. This type of study can actually reveal groups such as "echo chambers" and clusters of influencers, such as Fox News.

An important type of study would watch the evolution of memes - how they pop up, die and replace each other in an "evolutionary" way. An example would be how "anti-abortion" competes with "pro-life".

A very wide range of related projects is ongoing under the heading of network visualization. A slightly older idea, requiring less fine-grained data, is mapping of information access - following links. Such information is fundamental to how Google works. "Meta" information can identify patterns of information flow with relatively coarse "content". 

The "Hard Problem" and the Meaning of Meaning

We all know what we are saying when we talk about what is meaningful to us. These are first-person statements. If the Universe is imagined as "outside" and the mind is "inside", meaning is on the "inside".

Einstein remarked that he was amazed that the fundamental laws of nature are discoverable and, by the way, beautiful. There is something behind this observation that seems almost spiritual - in fact, people talk about "Einstein's God".

Wilczek asks the same question on "A Beautiful Question". He's noting the same deep beauty Einstein is talking about and asking the subtle question - is the Universe "really" beautiful?

So here's a possible road to a "solution" to the hard problem: How do we experience meaning in the Universe? How does it feel to find meaning? Damasio builds his account of "mind" on this very question. This is not merely an "outside" mechanical idea. It's about how it feels to have a mind.

Damasio provides an account of how living organisms evolved central nervous systems - ultimately to discover what is meaninful to the organism.  He provides an account of how these twin phenomena (mind and brain) evolved* together. What binds these two concepts together is meaning, which makes perfect sense on both sides of the "hard question". Damasio firmly roots the feeling of being in physical reality - both the physical nature of the organism and the physical nature of the environment.

In "The Strange Order of Things", Damasio raises his sights to consider how "meaning" arises how meaning works at many levels - from cellular to "organism" to groups of organisms (such as human society). In my view, individual humans are programmed by culture to perceive (feel) "meaning". We imagine we perceive "meaning" as individual organisms, but, in fact, we simply cannot think without our cultural "programming" - most obviously the language we learned as children.

A question that arises is whether these "super beings" (cultures) are alive in some sense or even "conscious". It may be that this question as important but possibly just a matter of definition. However, we would scarcely doubt it if members of the culture were "wired together" by some kind of physical nerve cable. My feeling is that nerves "merely" transmit information and that their function depends on what information is transmitted, not the medium. Great sections of our brains are devoted to sending and receiving messages from other human beings - for example, by language. Again, the medium doesn't seem to matter. The fact is that cultures are "wired together". Individuals in a culture can, at times, pay attention to the same thing, care about the same thing and find the same meaning in the same experience. When we say that two people are "of the same mind", it is more than a figure of speech.  I have discussed ideas along these lines elsewhere.

--------------

* Damasio's account doesn't depend on "evolution" - it's just a fashionable way of speaking of how organisms differ. While plausible, there is no need to drag in the idea that "consciousness" evolving for some reason imagined by the author - usually by imagining how there is some adaptive advantage to whatever phenotype the author is talking about. Personally, I'm not sure that consciousness is adaptive in the long run. The vast majority of organisms on the planet do very well without it.

The central idea of evolution is common descent, which means we can learn a lot about how our bodies work by seeing how other bodies work. We can look around to the billions of living things around us in the current world - postulated by Darwin to be our "relatives" to discover degrees and kinds of how different organisms "calculate" and "feel" meaning. Damasio's central arguments involve organisms with and without a "central nervous system" and how this particular structure is essential to providing a "model" of reality - the organism looks to the "model" rather than directly to "reality". In other words, the mind is a model of the world (and the internal status of the organism).

Mind and Machine - An Outline

The project draws an extensive parallel between computer technology, specifically computer programming languages and the open-ended aspect of culture that includes language but also the wider methods, especially those aspects of technology that are used to explain or communicate culture. Humans interact with computers in many other ways, including paying for them and using them to "make money" (computers become actors in the "real economy" with huge impact on the "economy", which is right-wing word for "society").You can't entirely ignore the broad issue of "automation", which is perhaps the topic of most interest to the average reader. Seen from this angle, Part 1 (below) is a primer on the nature of automation, especially "computerization". Most primers on computers ignore the way computers actually "work" in the world and focus on aspects that most people do not need to know (such as CPU's, disks, RAM etc.)

This project drills down to the history of computation before "computers". Many of the problems we blame on computers are thousands of years old.

I'd like to make some approximate distinction between language and art as means of communicating culture, but there is an overlap and a lot of cross-talk, which should provide material for a chapter. These are not distinct capabilities that you see in discussions of "bicameral" brain (left and right brain). In fact, this project may be seen as documenting the complex relationship between "logic" and "art".

"Intelligence" is embedded in the language and only appears in the individual through a process of assimilation. The parallel to this in the machine world is virtualization, where some part of the class library is loaded into a specific hardware platform for a specific purpose. This "purpose" is ultimately a bridge between the machine and the mind - a "User Interface" in some cases or in others, simply the purpose that a human designer has "baked in" to the program. An important topic is therefore to describe how the machine "mind" maps to the human mind in specific situations. Interesting special cases can be described as a specific human interacts with a specific device, such as a smart phone.

The mapping of the human mind, especially "purposes" to machine design is a particularly interesting facet of the discussion. Russel's ideas are relevant, where he includes the goals of society as a whole along with ideas like "uncertainty" in his ideal AI implementation. A machine can't "learn" unless it knows what it doesn't know - a tricky proposition even for a human.

Part 1: From machine language to AI

• My summer as a computer
• Logic as the free-floating computer. The abacus. Logic as both human and computer language.
• Clay tablets - the first external memory. Written language first used to count and only gradually to "account" - slow acceptance of modern idea of money.
• From machine language to COBOL - surely we can just "talk" to the computer
• Structured programming and the Object model - the role of symmetry, elegance and aesthetics
• Virtual machines and the Cloud - Java. Software floats free from hardware platform.
• The shifting role of the computer - from the math department to sexting
• The emerging role of the computer as generic master of logic games, especially the logic game of money
• Rising anxiety 

Part 2: Models of Mind

• Descartes creates the "mind body problem" by a quaint machine analogy
• Dennett struggles to "explain" the mind as "kinda" like a computer
• Hofstadter and Jaynes hint at how the mind actually works 
• The "cloud" paradigm calls for a total re-think of what we mean by a "computer" and hints that a similar re-definition of "mind" is called for
• Common buried assumptions in language and computer applications
• Models of value. The rocky road to our current assumptions about money and the value of life itself.
• Models of human decision-making
• The bureaucracy as a machine (Dragon Theory)

Part 3: The User Interface

• Primitive user interfaces - switches, paper tape ...
• The smart phone as an example of a 2017 "User Interface". Who is the "user"?
• Who is the "designer"?
• How computers and people are embedded in the logic of money
• How are humans and machines embedded in the same culture, especially when it comes to economics and connectivity?
• Considering the total role of the computer and the individual, in what sense does a computer replace a human being?

Affordances, biology, physics and problems of interfacing logic with biology. A broader definition of the "user" of the machine, including the designer, the "end user", the end user's employer, the designer's boss, the marketing system that connects them all together and so on. Like the individual, the machine is embedded and assimilated into a specific culture with countless points of contact, many of which are deeply buried in long-forgotten assumptions and arbitrary decisions. Modern computers are part of the Internet of "hosts" which has been specifically used to visualize the corresponding network of human connections - the "social network". They are also embedded in the "economy" in a symbiotic relationship with humans - sometimes replacing humans in that role. Possible amusing anecdote about my job as a "computer" in an oil company circa 1967. Focus on the concept of "work" and how automation can "take jobs" from "real people". "jobs", "work" and "money" are all models of the real world where ruthless "logic" competes with art and "quality of life". Money is a language of its own and computers "speak" that language very well.

Part 3: Essential Analogies

• Logic and value
• The brain as a super fast "value computer"
• The Cloud and the Brain
• Is a neuron "like" a bit?
• What is it to "know" something?
• What is "attention"?
• Can value and beauty be computed?
• The problem of accountability

Part 4: Computing Value

We allow machines to make such judgments all the time with the effect that we can forget the assumptions and escape accountability for our errors. For centuries, philosophers have attempted to reduce ethics and value to logic. We must not pretend that this problem has been solved. Ethical and value judgments must be left to human beings, whatever the shortcomings of brains may be. The brain justifies such judgments using language (pseudo-logic) which is prone to rhetorical tricks, selective memory and hidden assumptions "baked in" to our way of talking about the world.

• Does automation tend to boil away value? 
• Does it make sense to sell life itself, one hour at a time? Is this perhaps the root "computation"? If a laborer costs $15 per hour, 100 cost $1,500. How much would 1,000 Paul McCartney's cost? Are we buying millions of cheap robot Pauls?
• Technology itself challenges human values and turns people into machines
• Can current technology reverse the long term trend and allow machines to be machines and people to be people?
• What are the fundamental challenges that face us as we "automate" human choices to maximize value? Whose value? 
• The ultimate role of the machine is to "disappear" and become an extension of human will. Optimizing "value" is the core issue.

This line of thought is continued here

Where Is The Mind?

I must apologize to the reader in advance for what will seem to be a rather difficult set of ideas laid out in this post. At the outset, I want to lay out some ideas that are basic to me but strange to many. These ideas are developed more fully in other posts in the series and specifically in Zen philosophy an the Western version of it (Mindfulness). I am deeply influenced by Hofstadter and Dennett, whose ideas are strange, radically new and far from obvious.

• I take it that "mind" and "soul" both refer to the experience we all have of being "something". An essential idea of all religions is that this "something" survives death and is therefore separable from the body. I believe this to be mistaken, but I am left with the problem of "locating" the mind.
• Skeptics who reject the religious view tend to take it for granted that the mind is an "epiphenomenon" of the brain - somehow arising from the interaction of billions of neurons in our heads. I think this is also mistaken. You need a brain to have a mind but that is not all you need. In fact, we can learn a great deal about "mind" without reference to the brain at all.

Our theories about reality "bootstrap" themselves by searching for appropriate analogy. Very often, we forget that we are dealing with an analogy and we confuse the phenomenon itself with what we think it is "like". For example, electromagnetic waves are "like" waves in water - an analogy that lead people to postulate the luminous ether, the "something" that "waves". In fact, waves such as the electromagnetic fields are not "in" anything, but it took a great deal of experiment and intellectual struggle to figure out that these fields area a new "thing", quite unlike anything else.

Ideas about mind and soul depend on an analogy. We seem to wear our bodies like we wear our clothes, or ride around in our heads just behind our eyes. If we treat this analogy as fact, not metaphor, it is a short step to picture ourselves shedding the clothing of the body or stepping out from behind our eyes into a life beyond death.

The "epiphenomenon" idea seems more sophisticated but it's also an analogy - most recently treating the brain as a kind of computer. We know that computer logic can be amazingly sophisticated but it's ultimately built on zeros and ones. The analogy proceeds by painting the picture of neurons as being "like" bits in a computer, even though the neuron is totally unlike a memory bit in a computer. In fact, the neuron is an analog device and a living thing in its own right. A massively complex computer program can simulate the behaviour of a neuron, but only so far as we understand how neurons work (which is a work in progress). There is no evidence that neurons work together to produce mental phenomena in anything "like" the way computers "compute". The fact is that our brains are not "like" computers at all but we are hard pressed to say what they are like, so the computer analogy is better than nothing.

Even if we don't have a computer in mind, the "epiphenomenon" idea is also an analogy. We know that properties of matter "emerge" mysteriously as complexity grows. For example, we can't explain even simple properties of water using quantum physics that "explains" behaviour of sub-atomic particles. Nor can we "explain" the weather knowing all about water. But this is basically an argument from ignorance. Saying that the mind somehow "emerges" from the complex behaviour of neurons is simply saying we don't know where this behavior comes from but it "must" come from the brain somehow-therefore it does. But there are lots of other things around for the mind to emerge from. Why just the brain?

We can't really escape the need to explain one set of phenomena using an analogy with other things. This is simply he way our minds work - it is the structure of our ideas. Fortunately for us, reality itself seems to somehow "prefer" ideas we also find beautiful and attractive - we find fruitful new ideas by the close examination of reality itself, ultimately saving us from building our picture of the world out of pure fantasy. One task of the modern intellectual is to build up a store of phenomena that are unique in themselves - not "like" anything else. Quantum mechanics bristles with phenomena like this and can be used in new analogies as long as we don't forget these are analogies. I will soon get around to sketching an idea that consciousness itself is "like" a quantum field but I am not saying it is a quantum field. The mind is something quite different - it's a thing of its own. Paradoxically, it is the "thing" we know best but we are like fish who cannot discover water.

How can we escape the assumption that our minds are in our heads? I claim, along with Douglas Hofstadter that language is the royal road to the mind. If we want to know about how the mind works and where the mind lives, we can learn a lot by studying how language works. Hofstadter claims that language is a tapestry of analogies.  These analogies are "like" the classes that build computer logic or the categories of formal logic. But Hofstadter exposes the limitation of this analogy. To put it simply: language is not logic. Language is a "thing" in its own right. In fact, language turns out to be an important special case of powerful analogy-making which includes the powerful analogies behind totally new ideas like Relativity. It is important to remember that language is about something. It is not "floating free": it is anchored in shared human experience in the world.

I don't think analogy is the whole story. Daniel Dennett has pursued a parallel hunt for the essence of thought and his most recent vision is outline in  From Bacteria to Bach and Back: The Evolution of Minds. Dennett and Hofstadter together have provided us with a new "toolkit" of "things" that the mind might be "like". In Dennett's case, the Richard Dawkin's vague analogy that ideas might be "like" genes (the "meme") has been sharpened down to the point where we can see that "ideas" exist in the world without anyone "having" them. You might cautiously say that they have a "life of their own",  quite independent of the human minds that "hold" them. This echoes the fundamental Zen idea that the mind is nothing but ideas and sensations - the mind doesn't have ideas and sensations: the mind is ideas and sensations. 

So where does Quantum Mechanics come in to it? Once you get past "undergraduate" physics, you are let in on the dirty secret that particles don't exist. There are only "fields". Particles such as quarks are a useful fiction. The equations of Quantum Mechanics refer only to fields. A field is something that has a value in every point in space. So the analogy goes like this: culture (especially language) is "out there" with a life of its own. We perceive it by virtue of its effect on our brains. Loosely speaking, our minds are the "collapse" of the culture wave, just as particles are the "collapse" of the Shrodinger wave equation.

This leaves us on the brink of making the luminous ether error: wondering what the "culture field" is "in". Of course, the Shrodinger wave is not "in" anything, but is the "culture field" "in" our brains? If so, this almost brings us back to thinking our minds are in our brains - or perhaps in lots of brains operating in loose cooperation. This is where Dennett comes in. Ideas exist without anyone "having" them. This is a totally new insight and hard to grasp without actually checking in with Dennett in the talk cited above (or better yet the book).

Or is it new? I'm reminded of Plato's world of "ideals". To Plato, the world of ideas (especially geometry) was what was "real" and the rest was illusion - an illusion made necessary by he limitations of minds of mere mortals. The idea is tempting. Where does mathematics "live" in the Universe? The Universe seems to "obey" mathematical rules. Are these rules part of the universe or do they have a home of their own? It's quite clear that mathematics can dream up worlds that are perfectly consistent but don't happen to correspond to the Universe we inhabit. Is mathematics a figment of the human mind (the brain)? It seems intuitively clear that mathematics is somehow "discovered" and not simply "invented". It is "out there" somehow but not in our heads and not in the physical Universe. Physicists have no trouble imagining a universe where he "laws" are different, but they don't imagine a universe in which 1+1 is not 2.

Perhaps language, culture and the mind are "like" mathematics. They have a structure and a reality of their own, without a "medium" in space and time.

Let me bring it all together with a question. Obviously I need a brain to think - to "have" a mind. But what is it that I "have"? Is it nothing but the sensations of the world, plus the ideas "floating around" in the sea of culture into which the mind is born? Is it possible that the ultimate reality of mind lies not between my ears but "out there" in the world of ideas, ultimately grounded in realty itself? Or maybe grounded in physical reality but not entirely dependent on physical reality. Do our minds have an independent existence like the facts of mathematics?

Virtualization and Understanding Consciousness

Virtualization is a huge topic, worthy of a dozen posts, but let me sketch it out here in the hope of making some details clear later.

ARCHITECTURE

I'm no fan of using computers as models of "mind". Our minds are not computers, nor do I expect that the AI dream of making a mind out of computer chips will happen any time soon. However, it is clear that both computers and minds process "information" in some broad sense of the term and we should not be surprised to find that designers of computers and "mother nature", the "designer" of our minds, have face similar problems and come up with similar solutions.

COMPUTER ARCHITECTURE

If you know a bit about computers, you know a bit about "virtualization" in computer design. The Central Processing Unit (CPU) of a computer manipulates a very small amount of information very quickly. This information is swapped in and out of the CPU from "on board" memory - Random Access Memory or RAM. RAM has always been relatively expensive, so computers have been swapping RAM in and out of memory to some version of the "hard disk" since the 1960's. So there is a kind of "bucket brigade" or hierarchy of storage, that makes huge amounts of information accessible to the CPU in a fairly painless way. A lot of this swapping takes place more or less invisibly or "under the hood" and does not concern the computer programmer.

THE CLOUD

Most recently, with the advent of languages like JAVA and object-oriented design (which cares not where the object "lives") location of the information (data or program) has become irrelevant as chunks are swapped in and out of the "cloud" and between "hosts" with all the "plumbing" functioning automatically. We wind up with our CPU's manipulating information from all over the world, selected automatically from a vast amount of information made available on hosts all over the planet.

That's virtualization.

VIRTUAL MINDS

Something similar goes on in our minds.

What we call "working memory" is very similar to what we call "attention" or "consciousness". It is what it feels like when a portion of our brain activates a very small subset of what the brain "knows". This process is powerful and mysterious - quite unlike what goes on in a computer - but it works in a similar way to address similar problems that we see in computer design. For example, we can "pay attention" to about half a dozen "things" at once. We can switch things in and out of attention a few times per second, producing the continuing experience we call "consciousness" - the flow of "things" through our CPU of working memory. What's more a "thing" can be as simple as pressing the "E" key on a keyboard of the idea of representative democracy. Our minds are perfectly capable of flipping around "things" very quickly as we type away furiously on the keyboard thinking and writing about political philosophy while trying to remember how to spell "philosophy". Almost magically, "ideas" that we have packed away in our brains pop in and out by means of their connections to ideas held in attention a fraction of a second earlier.

LANGUAGE AS THE GREAT VIRTUALIZER

Language is a great virtualizer.  A word like "Canada" can be used to reference a vast amount of information stored away in the brain awaiting unpacking, resorting and repacking. What's more, such a word can be transmitted via speech to another brain, whereupon it proceeds to unpack "meaning" in the second brain. The equivalent of the "cloud" is what we call "culture". Those plugged in to "culture" have access to a vast ocean of information shared among members of that culture. Most of us belong to more than one culture - for example there is an international culture of Scientists and Intellectuals for whom language differences are a mere inconvenience to sharing of ideas.

Without getting too spooky or mystical, I think it's not entirely wrong to see the cultural equivalent of the "cloud" as a group mind - something that is alive and purposeful and not a mere information store.

BEES

Consider the bees ...

An individual bee is an incredible product of evolutionary engineering. Its ability for controlled flight would be the envy of a veteran helicopter pilot. With a microscopic brain, it is capable of navigation and able to communicate the location of promising flower beds to its hive mates.

But it doesn't know it's a bee. 

Everything the bee does is in the service of the hive. It lives and dies to ensure that the hive will survive through the winter. The hive as a whole seems to "know what it's doing", yet the hive has no mind of its own. Hive "behavour" and hive "knowledge" somehow emerge from the collective, individual behavour of bees. I won't go wandering off into abstract speculation to speculate on how this happens. My point is simply that it does happen. The hive mind is distributed among the minds of tens of thousands of bees, each with a lifetime measured in months at most, each with a remarkable ability to sense the world and act in it, but each totally "unaware" of what it is doing.

It is also important to note that the "hive mind" has been shaped (and is being shaped) over millions of years in a wonderful dance with the flowers, who "use" the bees to reproduce sexually and thereby maximize the chance of evolutionary variation. And of course, a rose doesn't know it's a rose.

DO WE KNOW WE ARE HUMAN?

So we are tempted to ask, do we know we are human beings? Is there a level of reality in human history that is forever beyond our ability to understand, just as a bee will never understand the hive it dies for and a rose doesn't know it smells sweet? This is hardly an original question. Religions pretend to answer it by somehow uncovering the secret thoughts of "God", along with the heavenly "big picture". I don't think I'm alone in thinking these efforts result in little more than childish fairy tales, much smaller than the phenomena they attempt to "explain".

NOT SURE WHAT IT IS, BUT HOW DOES IT WORK?

I think we can step back from telling ourselves mystical stories and learn a lot simply by looking at the architecture. There is a hierarchy of information processing that goes all the way from individual "attention" to cultural knowledge. Indeed, since cultural knowledge relies at least in part on experience of the real world, we can regard physical reality as our ultimate "cloud" storage, just as the story of the bees is incomplete without accounting for the role of the flowers. However, like bees, we are restricted by this architecture from experiencing any of it except through a tiny window of "working memory" - less than a dozen "chunks" at a time. Language itself is our "operating system", providing reasonably efficient ways to "download" chunks from our "cloud", process them and store them back in the form of new "mash ups" of old ideas. Human language plays a similar role in our minds as Java plays in the computer you are looking at now. Ideas are popping into your head through words and it makes no difference where these ideas came from. The only requirement is that both the author (me) and the reader (you) are both human - running the basic operating system, capable of turning ideas into words and vice versa.

Of course, this insight applies far beyond the realm of language and "words", but that's a topic for another essay ...

Another Look at Dragon Theory

The premise of "Dragon Theory" is that we get "assimilated" into intelligent machines - social structures based on mechanical rules - thereby losing our fundamental humanity. The assumption of Dragon Theory is that this "assimilation" is a "bad thing", even a dangerous thing. Perhaps even a threat to the continued existence of human beings on the planet.

On the other hand, I have a thread of reasoning in Diary of a Christian Skeptic that recognizes that there is little or nothing in my personal "meme world" that doesn't come from other people, many of which can be identified by name. According to this picture, my mind is simply a kind of eddy, through which the memes of mankind flow. According to Zen, there are no borders to the individual mind. Properly speaking, the mind is infinite and contains "reality". The mind of a modern intellectual "contains" a lot more "reality" than the mind of an educated person 200 years ago because the insights of modern science are readily available to reach deeply into the workings of reality itself. This is the result of being "assimilated" into a world that today might be called the "Google World".

This idea can be forcefully illustrated by picking up a dictionary (Do you still have one of those around?) This is a massive list of all the words (each one a meme) that I have inherited just by being born in an English speaking country and subjected to the kind of socialization that is lamented in "Dragon Theory". In fact, Dragon theory explicitly acknowledges the fact that language itself is a powerful force for assimilation, even more powerful than another assimilating meme: the idea of money.

But it's also true that Math, Physics and Philosophy are woven into the culture I'm embedded in. In fact, what aspect of my "humanity" does not owe itself to "assimilation"? Is it no true that the fantastic richness of human experience that is so threatened by assimilation is also due to assimilation? Unlike other animals, human beings thoroughly adapt to their environment and the tools available (both physical and intellectual). A man with an axe is a different animal from an man with no axe. Every tool, every sweeping change to he environment (now mostly "man made") changes what it is to be human.

Turning back to the "Dragon" image of a machine made up of human components, can we not imagine a "meme machine" constantly re-working and exploring its store of memes?  The "thinking" of this machine includes the exponential growth of human knowledge in every field, described in Kurzweil's "Singularity". In this vision, we are "assimilated" into a thinking, dreaming, creating machine that is growing bigger and more powerful by he second. In fact, this "group mind" can't be described as a machine at all, since he creative, human energies of individuals add to produce much more than any one individual could produce. "Dragons" drag individuals to the "lowest common denominator", for example, reducing their lives to a scramble for money. Is it not true that we lament this process precisely because we benefit from centuries of thinking about what is meaningful and worthwhile about human existence? We want the benefits of civilization without surrendering the imagined purity of he "noble savage".

In this context, it's worth remembering "The Real World of Technology" which outlines the intimate connection between technical progress and dehumanization of the individual.

Perhaps it is a mundane observation that "assimilation" is a two-edge sword. We are swept along in the stream of history, constantly being redefined as human beings. Is it possible to step outside this process and say which changes to the definition of "human" are acceptable and which are not?

At the very least, this line of thinking challenges Dragon Theory's pessimistic view of our future as a species.