Now What?

We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time. 

T. S. Eliot - Little Gidding

I have been writing for a long time about the concept of "supermind" and the "dragon". Groups of humans - armies, governments - have a life of their own and thrive at the expense of the humans that oppose them - even their own members.  These groups steal our identity and prevent us from thinking for ourselves. It's all true, of course, but what is new is the total acceptance of the situation. Comfort almost. This is the human condition. Our "minds" function as part of a whole. It may be a mistake to "analyze" - to break things down into pieces, but indulge me for a moment while I describe things that make up our "minds" that are usually regarded as something happening between our ears.

• The brain, especially considered as part of the body (Damasio). The function of the brain is primarily to support the organism - the efforts of that organism to thrive. 
• "Reality" - what "scientists" observe and explore. Quantum mechanics has taught us to think of "reality" as a set of shared observations and models - strictly speaking, that is what we "know". Actual "reality" (apart from what we can measure) always seems to be just out of reach.
• "Society" - from birth, we are knit into a human milieu. We parse reality in words we learn as children, we grasp and learn tools that reflect hundreds of thousands of years of invention and ingenuity.  

It is not wise to separate these three except for the purposes of discussion. The brain is "hard-wired" into the body and the body is a real thing - an object in reality. We cannot speak of any of this or learn the simplest task of existence without drawing on what we are told and shown by the people around us.

In short, our minds are not "our own", nor does it make much sense to insist that we "think for ourselves". Our minds are constrained by what they are - or, if you want, the fact that they are embedded in reality in a certain manner - a manner that is inescapable.

So what is new (and perhaps an echo of thoughts I have had for half a century) is to see all this at once.  This leads to experiences that are somehow kissed with new insight. For example, I see scenes of happy congregations hugging and greeting each other in a new way. I would normally harrumph in the background about how silly their beliefs are and shake my head at how amazing it is that so many people can all be so deluded about the core nature of reality. But now I see this as a whole and don't separate what is supposedly going in between the ears of the believer. What is going on is happening to everyone in the room and has roots that go back centuries. The "mind" at work is what I used to call "supermind", but what I have been missing is that the individual experience of mind is just what goes on in our own minds. We are mostly unaware that we are not "thinking" our own thoughts, not being motivated by our own motives, not intending what we individually intend. The process works so smoothly and so naturally that we know as little about it as do bees in a hive.

This perspective puts an end to the "supermind" blog. It is an error to think of mind and supermind separately, just as the behavior of bees makes no sense without reference to the "goals and intentions" of the hive. This insight also marks a new direction for this blog, which started out trying to find a rational, skeptical way forward in a sea of myth and misdirection. In a way, I see the name of this blog (The Christian Skeptic) as a theme to which I must now return, knowing that we are all in a state of tension between our "heritage" and what comes next. Skeptics, like Christians, don't "think for themselves".

Of course there are many, many layers involved in this process.  You can go on splitting and analyzing to your heart's content. For example, in "Behave", Sapolsky analyzes our reasons for doing what we do, going up the ladder of detail from the way nerves move our limbs to the way society tells us what is "right" and "wrong'. If nothing else, Sapolsky ties human behavior into the physical structure of the brain - everything from the chemistry of enzymes to the modular structure of brain "systems". The brain is a thing - an object in reality.

Drilling Down to Motivations

Sapolsky reluctantly concludes that there is no place for "free will" in his analysis. Perhaps that is because he, like others, is stuck with the image of the "self" as being some kind of puppet master between the ears of the individual. The truth is that the borders of "self" are extremely fuzzy, both in time and space. What happens in our heads is the result of an astronomically complex calculation whose inputs go back to the swamps when life first emerged - a point that structures Damasio's story of who we are - the Strange Order of Things. We have motives - feelings - that Damasio sees at the very root of being and Sapolsky confirms are rooted in biology - the term "computation" for this process is misleading. We are not computers.

In Damasio's account, to live is to thrive, which means that living things don't just "try" to continue their existence, the "try" to push themselves further into the future (persist). They reproduce, grow and grab all the resources they can to do it. In corporate turns (which Damasio hates), living things don't just break even, they make a profit. Damasio walks right up to considering human groups to be alive in their own right (since they satisfy his criteria for being alive), but balks at the conclusion since human groups overlap. For some reason, he feels that a single organism can't be part of two superorganisms at once. There is no particular reason for this criterion, which seems to emerge out of the blue - unconnected to any of his other arguments. In any case, as pointed out by one very early reader of the "Dragon" blog, it's mainly a matter of terminology. What is important is to recognize the actual relationship between the individual human and society, whether you call society "alive" or not.

Strangely, Damasio is quite willing to consider a beehive as alive (and even conscious) in its own right.  His arguments for this are convincing and I really don't see why they would not apply to human society, which is quite happy to "brainwash" its citizens so that they throw their lives away for the sake of their country or even corporate profits - profits that they themselves never see.

But the trick is to see that we are all brainwashed all the time. Otherwise, we could not speak, find our way around or feed ourselves. This is who we are, what we are.

Great sections of our brains are devoted to fitting our individual existence into the group. We have "speech centers" in the (normally) left brain devoted to generating and understanding speech. We have forebrain modules that are constantly doing "social" calculations to determine what is the socially appropriate thing to do (Sapolsky). On a more subtle level, our brains seem to work in such a way as to parse the world in terms of "objects" and "events" that lend themselves to verbal communication.  In other words, "language" is deeply embedded in the way our brains actually work - an insight spelled out in great detail in "Surfaces and Essences" - Hofstadter.

What is often overlooked is the fact that all this functions according to the laws of physics, chemistry, and geometry. We are embedded in a real world. It is commonplace to remark that we only see part of what is "out there". What is overlooked is that what we do see is actually "out there". One image I have in my head is the way our brains are packed into a finite volume but fold the surface to maximize the amount of cortical area. One imagines that we would have had big, spherical brains except that they would be unwieldy. It's just the way I see geometry placing constraints on what and how we think - who we are.

Along these lines, I see "society" and culture as a way of escaping constraints that we inherited from millennia of evolution - the "design concept" of individual organisms, reproduction and all that. Human societies "thrive" by a new mechanism - one involving "information" breaking free of its DNA shackles to exist out in the open as the blood and bones of human society.

My First Introduction To Zen

Key to this insight is the analogy between DNA - the "program" that determines the physical shape and behavior of an organism - with "Information", the physical, real-world "tools" that society uses to thrive. In the latter category are not just what is usually seen as "information" (books and computer files etc) but the physical creations of society, like telescopes, automobiles and language itself. When you sit behind the wheel of a car, you are being absorbed into the skills and thought processes of tens of thousands of people who invented everything from the dash ornaments to the theory of internal combustion. This is an insight that goes back to "Zen and The Art Of Motorcycle Maintenance", a book I read when it came out (1974). The book is not about Zen or Motorcycle Maintenance, but I did take away the idea that a motorcycle is an idea cast in metal. I come back to the same place and know the place for the first time ...

It is worth noting that I come back to this idea having absorbed many of the key ideas of Zen. I'd say "motorcycle" actually extends Zen in an exciting way. Perhaps Pirsig, like the rest of us, knew more about Zen than we thought at the time. Specifically, the insights here vastly expand what we think of as "mind", "attention" and "consciousness". These are the central concerns of Zen. There is no particular reason why those who follow the path of self-discovery should be stuck with the metaphors created thousands of years ago.

Back in 1974, I would frequently point out that a man with an ax is as different from a man without an ax as a zebra is from a horse. Our tools accelerate evolution in a new way. But back then I didn't quite grasp that the tool exists in its own "space" - the supermind - that is using the man as much as the man uses the ax.

So it is that today, in 2018, I have the unusual comfort of having a big insight that has been bubbling up from below for half a century. It makes sense.

But now what?

The Creation Myth of Money

(Originally posted in "The Zen of Value")

Discussions about how money originates often start with the assumption that it evolved to facilitate trade and "store value". Otherwise, so the story goes, you and I would simultaneously want something somebody else had (say, you have more fish than you need and I have extra sheep).

There is scant evidence for "cash" arising out of this situation. Evidence for another narrative can be found in human behavior that naturally arises when "cash" is in short supply.

Say, you go fishing and catch 5 nice big salmon. It would not be unusual at all for you to show up at my door and offer me a fresh salmon "for free". On the other hand, we would tacitly understand that this establishes a debt. Perhaps at some point, I'd mow your lawn or give you a basket of berries, or jam from my last berry picking trip. The math doesn't need to work out. If I'm in bad shape and have nothing to give in return, it would not be unusual for the fish to keep appearing at my door (perhaps even more frequently).

Such a system is not "communism", where all goods are held in common, no matter how and by whom they were produced. It's based on sharing, generosity and reciprocity between friends and neighbors. It is embedded in a wider set of customs that add up to encouragement of behaviours that tend to bind he community together while discouraging freeloaders and cheaters. All the great apes seem to behave in this way to some degree.

Bringing the discussion into the 21st century, we see that money is just a standardized form of an "IOU". A dollar bill is an IOU from the Government. If I give you a dollar, the Government owes you one more dollar and me one dollar less. Most of my "dollars" are actually numbers in a bank account, which record an IOU from the bank to me.

If there were no banks and all cash magically vanished, we would instantly go back to an IOU-based economy. This apparently happened in Ireland during a 6 month strike of bank employees. Magically, the economy boomed without "money".

Money based on specie (such as gold) is actually a step backward from the natural system. It quickly converts itself back into an IOU system. Gold certificates (IOU gold) replace actual gold for all but the smallest transactions. Banks naturally step in to the void to "do the math" in a complex web of who owes what to whom. Quite naturally, we evolve into a system where most debts directly or indirectly are owed to or from a bank. Nations establish "central" banks and currency that is, in effect, an IOU from the central bank (the Nation).

Of course, "official" money has a serious drawback. The assumption is that all things traded (or "owed") can be measured in money, which flies in the face of both everyday experience and the way our "great ape" minds work. Value is based on what one individual perceives to be needed at a particular time. Such needs are not subject to the rules of arithmetic. Failure of money as a proxy for value results in all kinds of distortions, including the illusion that

1. The more money you have, the more goods and services of value you will be able to access.
2. If you don't have enough money for food and shelter, you are allowed to die, establishing a rather precise money "value" of a human life.
3. Any given object has the same value to anyone at any time
4. Anything of value has a price

Violation of rule 3 results in the common situation where person A values the same object less than person B, resulting in his willingness to "sell" the object to B. We sometimes forget that the result of this transaction is an increase in total value, while the amount of money in the system remains constant. The increase is a direct consequence of the fact that money is not a proxy for value.

The trouble starts to arise when we separate the role of the "social IOU" from the context of community. Money is an abstract IOU from an imaginary "person" - a debt that no longer contributes to strengthening the social fabric. Our money transitions that buy and sell, hire and work are conducted with strangers or even completely abstract theoretical "persons". 

Or are they? Does it make sense to re-introduce the social aspect of money through things like customer loyalty, "nepotism", referring friends to friends ...

It does appear that, as societies grow larger and more complex, there is a tendency to:

• minimize the value of human effort (driving wages to the bottom)
• ignore "externalities" such as the decrease in common values such as clean air, open space, personal choice etc.

Evolution of Mind - Evolution of Machine

I'm wary of the term "evolution" - especially when it is used in a vaguely Darwinian sense to sprinkle scientific fairy dust over wild speculation. I think it makes sense to use "evolution" in a fairly narrow sense, in which we can see that some object, "thing" or situation exhibits the following qualities:

• It's in some "state" of current interest. The analysis of the "state" has some non-trivial explanatory power over the thing in question even when it is considered as a current, static object.
• The "thing" has obviously, necessarily undergone change over time - it wasn't always the same as it is now. It must have been in some other state, usually a simpler state, at some time in the past.
• There is strong evidence that the thing has undergone versions, where one version incorporates design features of previous versions.
• It is legitimate to ask what changes have taken place over time to get from the "simpler" state in the past to the current state.
• Some kind of specific process should be proposed, even if somewhat tentatively. For example, Darwin started with the observation that species are related, asked what we mean by "species" and only gradually came to theorize that species must have emerged over time.  He could only speculate about the mechanism (He liked, but did not use, what we call "survival of the fittest". He didn't know about genetics or DNA). 
• The specific timeline of change will inevitably be speculative. It's nice to establish milestones and approximate dates but this must regarded as secondary to analysis of the change itself. Darwin was famously off by orders of magnitude with his time line but this turned out to be irrelevant to his core ideas.

With those provisos, there are a few questions in the "evolution" of humans that are interesting:

• Speech
• Language
• Writing
• Money
• Social Structure (small bands to cities, craft to corporation, tribe to Nation State)
• Religion
• Nation States
• War

It is useful to speak of the evolution of computation or perhaps the wider and broader term "information processing" rather than the "evolution" of the computer. The other aspect of this evolution is characterized by "information storage". Clay tablets and fingers have their place in this history. It doesn't begin with Babbage or Turing. I like to avoid terms such as "information processing", which would be perfectly acceptable except that virtually all readers will conjure up an image of modern computers when this phrase is used. It is, in fact, still fashionable to call the Computer Department at a University the "Information Technology" department, even though they don't teach about clay tablets or even money. The common thread seems to be progress in externalizing or delegating the task of computing and remembering to machines that grow in complexity and power over the years. Questions can be asked about the progress of mechanical information processing and they are woven in to the above questions about human society:

• Writing
• Counting
• Money
• Computation
• Stored programs ("software as data")
• Networks
• Virtualization
• Class libraries (divorce of design from platform)
• Social networks - close integration of human and computer "societies"

An important thread of this evolution is the way that we gradually shift attention to aspects of reality that can be computed and stored while pushing other aspects of reality aside. This is perhaps the fundamental way that human evolution is linked to the evolution of computation. Wittgenstein's famous saying pops into mind: What can't be said must be passed over in silence.

Several common themes emerge when discussing the parallel evolution of humans and machines:

• Information processing and the evolving nature of what counts as "information"
• Compression
• Virtualization (platform independence)
• Information embedded in language
• Communication
• Formalization and standardization 
• Efficiency

We gain special insight into these common themes by comparing and contrasting their history in the two streams of evolution. In the case of computation, many of the "landmarks" are very clear and have firm dates. Others, such as the appearance of money, have a more complex and debatable history but there is clearly a time when money did not exist and a time when it did. 

In some cases, important innovations appear in one stream and they are not obvious in the other, at least at first glance. For example, "virtualization" is a very clear and specific engineering concept in the computational field. What, if anything, can it mean to speak of a virtual "mind"? One clue is in the fact that philosophers have always felt free to describe the inner workings of the mind without reference to how the brain "works". When they do make reference, their ideas are remarkably sketchy and dated. Tellingly, their ideas about how the physical mind works are not much affected by the specifics. The ideas are "fairy dust". This leaves us free to propose that the "hardware" doesn't matter at all, leadinging in the extreme case to ideas such as Kursweil's - "uploading the mind to silicon" seem perfectly reasonable. This is an argument firmly based on ignorance, like the idea that humans were created out of nothing by God, which made sense until the facts were known.

The evolution of "society" in computation also exhibits some fascination and non-obvious parallels. One precondition of "society" is standardization of components and protocols. Such standards in human history have lead to sweeping changes in human society, including capitalism, cultural genocide and waves of economic crisis when policy is about "jobs" rather than human well being. Standardization of weapons, protocols and military "jobs" has played a key role in the evolution of modern warfare to the point where a single instruction can now spell the destruction of civilization through a "fan out" through standard protocols to standardized weapons and human beings turned into standard components of the military "machine". In the case of the military "economy" (legalized mass murder), there are many milestones on the road to standardization, along with a rich set of parallels between the kind of society humans can form compared to the kind of structure a computation can take.

Society can be usefully regarded as a machine than as collections of living things. In this sense, our two streams have been steadily converging over recorded history. The evolution of this aspect of society is worth discussion in its own right, as I have done in "The Programmable Ape". By regarding machines and humans as co-evolving along very similar paths, it becomes possible for me to describe the human machine (the "dragon") in more precise and familiar terms. This can possibly overcome the common perception of what a machine is. 

So what is a "machine"?

• Machine "language" is tiny, formal and inflexible. 
• Machines are formed of components which exist for no other purpose than to serve the purpose of the machine.
• Very few machines are "unique". They are themselves "cogs" in a larger system that demands precise standardization of components. 

In contrast, in a human ...

• Language is vast, informal, open-ended and general
• Humans are famously difficult to organize into coherent groups with coherent purpose. In practice, this involves stripping them of what makes them human in the first place.
• Humans are unique. This uniqueness is built in by the way DNA works and the inherent limitations of their nervous system. 

Over time, these differences become blurred:

• Humans become "standardized" into "jobs" in order to fit into the larger economic machine. Unique human qualities are suppressed or even punished.
• Human "machine languages", especially the language of economics, become more and more rich and complex. To many, it starts to sound like talk about the "real world" and not "machine language".
• Machines are more and more frequently referred to in anthropomorphic terms, such as what "Wall Street fears" or what "Germany wants".
• Individuals are increasingly "programmed" by tremendous pressures of living in a man-made world of things and information. Thinking "outside the box" is difficult if all of language - including your inner voice - speaks only about boxes.

You can get a lot of fun out of taking these analogies seriously at face value. There is usually a kernel of truth - a way of seeing that machines and men are really the same in important ways. For example, if someone is talking about "efficiency", they are talking about a machine. Think of the situation they describe in terms of machines, computation and the history of such things. When they talk about "profit", think about computer games. When they talk about what is "best" for a corporation, take them at their word and imagine the corporation to be alive and part of human history. Ask how such an abstract machine can possibly acquire a desire to survive and thrive.