The Programmable Ape

FROM SECOND LIFE: http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/MetaLES/59/98/21

THE PROGRAMMABLE APE

This post summarizes a synthesis of several lines of thought, bringing together meditations from Diary of a Christian Skeptic, Zen of Value (suspended), and previous posts from this blog, previously called "Dragon Theory".

I will attempt a "quick and dirty" summary of this synthesis, hoping to come back later to provide more detailed links and arguments, but, for the moment, I just want to make sure I capture the most relevant facets of the insights behind "The Programmable Ape".

All the blogs mentioned above are dealing with a single question: What is it to be human? I take it for granted that we are related to the Ape family. I make a serious effort not to go much further than this in my observation that we are apes. I consider most discussions that attempt to justify some theory of human behavour in terms of "adaptive" characteristics sorted out by evolution to be straightforward bullshit - not much different from theological arguments. They seem to be simply attempts to make some theory of human nature to "sound scientific".

ANALOGIES

One of the key inspirations for this blog comes from "Surfaces and Essences" by Hofstadter and Sander -"Surfaces". This argues that thinking is, at least to a large extent, accounted for by the analogies we make. The mind is an analogy making and processing machine.

In "Godel, Escher, Bach" (GEB) Hofstadter asks the impertinent question:

"To what extent are our thoughts channeled by language?"

At the time, in the 1970's, Hofstadter was preoccupied by languages, including computer languages of the time. However, in GEB, he weaves together an elabourate tapestry of analogies that include human language, computer language, languages invented for the purpose of making his point, music (Bach) and art (Escher). In "Surfaces", we see a focus (with the presumed assistance of Sander) on the varieties of analogy in language, but in the final chapters, we see analogies in mathematics and physics (Hofstadter has a Ph. D. in Physics). So, to consider the above "impertinent question", we must extend our idea of "language" to include virtually all symbolic methods humans use to communicate with each other, including the symbolic methods they use to think. For example, a physicist covering the blackboard with symbols and arcane diagrams is "thinking" in a symbolic language and we may ask, To what extent his thoughts are channeled by language"?

A somewhat amusing side-issue can be followed in the case of music - especially "Country Music", which confines itself to three-chord melodies in a major key along with a small subset of human experience - usually to do with romance. The category of "Country Music" (Surfaces) is easily recognized by the family resemblance between its members - especially those who don't like Country Music. I won't carry this argument much further except to say that it illustrates how the ideas in "Surfaces" are easily extended beyond language into other domains such as music - a topic that fits nicely into Hofstadter's earlier thought - in GEB.

GED was written in a time when some sources of analogy were "in the air". As well as the computational idea, we had the powerful idea of evolution - newly energized by the implications of the discovery of DNA, creating (at least in the minds of believers) a mechanical image for life itself. 

We have come a long way since the 70's. Almost everything we know about the brain has been discovered in the decades following 1990. Computer technology has moved far beyond the naive descriptions we find in the mandatory chapters inserted in books like "Consciousness Explained". Even our understanding of genetics and evolution has been immensely refined, leaving behind the facile use of the concept in books like "The Selfish Gene".

It's time to re-tool our analogies. The main contribution of "Surfaces" is to remind ourselves that they are analogies. The ancient insight of Taoism applies here. The "real world" and our ideas about it are quite different.

The Tao that can be spoken is not the eternal Tao
The name that can be named is not the eternal name
The nameless is the origin of Heaven and Earth
The named is the mother of myriad things

I will return later to a closer look at "Surfaces", which is a deep dive into the nature of analogy. First, I'd like to place one particular rich source analogy under the microscope: "Computation".

THE COMPUTER ANALOGY

It's hard to find a book on the mind that doesn't assume that the brain is some kind of computer. In fact, even in ordinary conversation, the analogy is so compelling that it's hard to draw attention to the fact that it is an analogy. What, after all, would be alternative analogies? What's wrong with the analogy?

In GEB, Hofstadter goes to great lengths to discuss the nature of analogies (though, at that stage, he's talking about "Isomorphisms" or "mappings" between one domain and another). Some isomorphisms (analogies between entire systems of ideas) are better than others - chiefly because some mappings map more from one system to the other or vice versa in a way we can, for example, learn about system A by studying an isomorphic system B. As a computer expert, I must say that attempts to "map" properties of the mind into analogous properties of computers have been more or less laughable. They survive only because the general reader is not familiar with the properties of either brains or computers. To a certain extent, the also depend on "cherry picking" - mapping supposed familiar aspects of thought into more-or-less "well known" computational processes but leaving aside the vast amount of what we actually know about brain function.

CLASSES, CATEGORIES AND OBJECT-ORIENTED DESIGN

Modern computer systems are not designed or used according to the quaint system of concepts you will find in philosophical texts like "Consciousness Explained". Such ideas were what we learned about computers in the late 1960's but were still taught to undergraduates decades later. These included the idea that the computer had a CPU that marched through a series of instructions, pulling data out of memory, doing simple operations on the data and shoving results back in memory. Any attempt to describe, for example, how your smart phone works in these terms would be like trying to understand the behavour of your dog in terms of basic physics.

Especially for grad students, like myself, we went through a phase where the idea of computation was formalized with a deep and broad analogy with human language. You can see this influence in GED. Interestingly, "Surfaces" is also preoccupied with language, but the idea that language is some kind of computation that a computer could perform is abandoned. In fact, Surfaces can be read as a convincing refutation of the idea that the mind is some kind of computer. As mentioned, "Surfaces" also marks escape from the tyranny of language as the analogy for the way humans communicate and think. The concept of "language" must, for example, be extended to include mathematics, economics and engineering.

By the 1990's, the "language" analogy was fading from computer systems design. In its place, a new discipline called "Object Oriented Design" emerged. This revolution also arrived in the hands of computer users in the form of "Graphical User Interfaces". Users no longer filled in blanks and read piles of printout. They manipulated ghostly objects on the screen with pointing devices or even their fingers.

There is a two-way analogy going in with Object Oriented Computer design. Examined deeply, the analogy is between the model the computer has of the world and the world itself, which consists of objects that we observe with our eyes and manipulate with our hands. This analogy is extremely "tight" and "isomorphic" (in the GEB sense). It's also an analogy that gets to the "Essence" of things in the sense discussed in "Surfaces". This is why the analogy works so well. I will refer to this analogy as the CLASS/CATEGORY analogy or "CCA"..

But are our minds computers running an "Object Oriented" view of the world. That would be the obvious conclusion and it would repeat all the mistakes made in the 1970's when we forced ourselves to conceive (for example" that neurons were somehow "like" bits of memory or little CPU's.

No, the brain is an object that is "like" no other. Any analogy will be approximate. It will tell us something but not everything. I will get around to showing another analogy between the brain and a hologram that will allow us to "map" certain brain properties to holograms in a way that the computational model cannot. Whatever the merits of the "holographic" analogy, at least it provides a way to shake off the idea that our brains are "really" computers.

CLASSES AND CATEGORIES (CCA)

Two very similar ideas lie at the heart of both Object Oriented Design and the analogies discussed in "Surfaces". "Surfaces" discusses the idea of "category" in breathtaking depth. The central thesis is that the mind forms categories by means of analogy and does so in surprisingly arbitrary ways. There is nothing inherent in categories, although some categories seem like they are "out there" - like "chair", others, like "viral video" are clearly creations of culture.

On the other hand, the "Class" at the heart of Object Oriented Design is a very different kind of animal. This difference becomes apparent to computer systems designers when we attempt to build an "App" which is a little "toy" world full of classes that (more or less" correspond to categories and objects in the real world. Problems include:

• Classes need to be very cut and dried. An object can't be both a member and not a member of a class. Changing an object from one class to another is a dangerous and possibly illegal operation in most systems, but we do it all the time in "real life". 
• Real "categories" are "fuzzy" and arbitrary. 
• Class libraries (like Java) are maintained at great cost to be consistent across platforms (the source of endless update headaches), whereas everyone can walk around with major differences in his or her set of perceived categories. This is most blatant when you look at human languages itself. Great swaths of categories are not common, for example, between Chinese and English, yet both Chinese and English speakers manage to get by perfectly.

CLASSES ARE NOT REAL

Classes are "software". They exist in the world of ideas, like poems and stories. Even instances of classes ("objects") are "materialized" in structures of electronic bits and bytes in a computer that have no meaning apart from the (mental) interpretation of the designer and the user. The mapping between instances and classes is assumed to be perfect and unambiguous. For example, a bit of memory is or is not treated as an integer. Any attempt to treat an object as a member of a class that it doesn't belong to is a "type error". It's interesting to note philosophers have attempted to declare "type errors" as out of bounds in everyday speech. GEB goes to great lengths to expose the futility of this effort.

While categories may be "totally imaginary" (like Leprechauns) with instances that are still "in the mind" of the believer, many are definitely real, 3-D, tangible objects, like chairs, planets and thunder storms. This "binds" our world of categories to the "real world" and accounts for the fact that many of us "think" by "tinkering" with real objects, such as bits of wood or telescopes.

ANALOGIES AND CATEGORIES ARE THE "SOFTWARE" OF THE MIND

Allowing ourselves to use the Computer/Brain analogy (or the Category/Class analogy), we can see that virtually all computer software part of class libraries (like the Java Class Library), whereas our brains use categories that are part of language (as extended above) as their "software". 

This is the central metaphor of this blog: that humans are uniquely capable of being "programmed" by the "software" of language. It must be remembered that this "software" (categories) maps (in some cases) directly to objects in the real world, such as sticks, stones and automobiles.  To a great extent, our "tools" of thought are real things in the world. Our ability to impose categories and analogies on to the real world is, to a great extent, arbitrary. However there are also limits: we must assume that "reality" imposes significant constraints on the analogies that expose the "essence" of things.

To explain this thesis to the general public, it will be necessary to introduce both sides of it. "Surfaces and Essences" does a great job of describing how the "software" of analogy works in real brains. Fortunately, it's much easier to explain object oriented computer systems design to the general public since almost all of us own a smart phone or other product of this design discipline. Our task is much easier than, for example, Dennet's in "Consciousness Explained", where he attempts to communicate his own shaky understanding of computers to an audience wholly unfamiliar with the concepts.

EVOLUTION AND THE CLASS LIBRARY

As mentioned, I make little or no reference to "evolution" in my explanations here. The analogy simply doesn't apply and I feel no need to "sound scientific" by mentioning it. In its place is the concept of the "Class Library", the immensely powerful concept that underlies all of modern information systems design.

Class libraries "evolve" by "intelligent design". The rules that govern their "evolution" have little or nothing to do with Darwinian evolution, but their development follows fascinating rules of its own. Many of these rules turn out to have subtle implications for the analogous system: language as "programming" the human brain.

The Class Library is a concept that will be new to most readers, but is easily explained with a short tour of a smart phone or the desktop being used to read this blog.

THE MOUNTAIN

One of my favorite images of the Zen journey is the mountain. I visualize myself and fellow seekers following a steep, winding path up a mountain. Most of humanity is visualized as semi-asleep in the village below, lacking all curiosity of "higher issues". It is certainly quite clear that the esoteric issues considered in my blogs are of zero concern to the average "Joe Six Pack". Using the Programmable Ape analogy, Joe Six Pack his happy to be programmed. He is empty except for the program. No ideas or goals of his own.

RETURNING TO "DRAGON THEORY"

"Dragon Theory", the previous focus of this blog, proposes that humans are assimilated to large social entities that can be considered to be alive in their own right. Such entities include armies and corporation.

Previous entries hint at where the blog is now heading, including the idea that the language of economics is a powerful force for assimilation, including money as a part of language and language itself, in general, as being a powerful assimilating factor.

In a sense, the view of "Programmable Ape" is even darker than "Dragon Theory" since there seems to be no escape from assimilation through language and culture, whereas "Dragon Theory" held out the slight chance that human beings can avoid assimilation and somehow recover the true nature of humanity.

THE ZEN OF VALUE

I sketched in a previous blog devoted to the analogy we draw between value and money. This can now be seen as a special case of what we're talking about here, since the language of money is deeply embedded in the way we talk and think. The fact that we can all understand a sentence like "This hamburger costs $5" is as remarkable as the fact that (some people) perfectly understand "I have been saved by the blood of Jesus".

Daniel Dennett: "From Bacteria to Bach and Back: The Evolution of Minds"

This talk introduces a recent book by Dennett, rehashing and updating his theories on the mind. I have the hard copy of the book on order. These comments refer to his summary of it delivered as part of the Google Talks series.

It is much to Dennett's credit that, as he goes along, his ideas become more precise and articulate. His examples are more apt, his analogies closer to the "essence". He never seems to say, "I was totally wrong about this", but he does make progress - partly by not taking himself too seriously. It is much to Dennett's credit that he is rarely caught in an "argument" -- he sees an element of truth in almost everything, always putting his own ideas on the table without allowing opposition to get personal. This is good because he gets a lot of opposition.

"Consciousness Explained" (1991) was a serious over-reach. Rather a mess that didn't come close to delivering on the promise in its title.

Yet, in the intervening 25 years or so, Dennett has wrestled with the ideas in "Consciousness" and made them almost work. There are many signs of progress ...

COMPUTERS

His facile understanding (1971) of the way computers work has been replaced by a deeper insight -- especially contrasting the machine with the living cell. Yet he manages to navigate the tricky issue of what is and is not alive ("Animus"). It's about "internationality" - behavour that makes little sense if you don't take into account a future "purpose". He's very good at showing that this behavour does not necessarily involve consciousness. I note that this particular talk was delivered to the folks at Google, who arguably know more about computers than anyone else on the planet. There were not patronizing giggles from the audience. Questions from the audience were respectful - it was a dialogue between peers.

COMPETENCE

He makes it clear that some entities are more "competent" than others even if they don't actually know what they are doing. Increasing competence is happening in evolution even though it is a mindless process. It is, in the end, governed by a close partnership between the entity and its environment. Not all things are possible but "R&D" is required to find out what is actually possible. In a sense, "thinking" takes place in partnership with reality! How very Zen!

It's worth noting that he sees his pet 3D vision of the evolution of mind from blind chance to intelligent design as not a picture of what is real but an arbitrary choice of 3 axes for the purpose of explanation. In other words, he's very aware of the role of analogy (as brilliantly explained in "Surfaces and Essences"). There are good analogies and bad ones. Dennett is aware of these things as "memes" - (thinking tools) things that evolve to become more useful or are discarded as misleading. This applies to the meme of the meme itself, which may become much more useful than it was when it was born in the pages of "Selfish Gene".

REDUCTIONISM

In his early years, Dennett was literally the poster child for "reductionism", the idea that behavour of systems was "merely" the result of the behavour of their constituent parts. Dennett has become very good not only at accepting the idea of emergence (the whole is more than the parts) but explaining how this becomes true. A good theory of emergence (the classic being the theory of gases based on basic Newtonean physics) don't just explain emergent behavour but explicity tie it down to what is going on at a simpler level. This is never easy.

MEMES

Dennett is still very respectful of the ideas of his friend Richard Dawkins and recommends the book that made Dawkins famous (Selfish Gene). It is interesting to note that Dawkins has since downplayed the idea of memes presented in that book. Dennett, on the other hand, has picked up the idea and run with it. Dennett's "memes" are useful and, in fact, it's possible for Dennett to talk about memes without using the word. An echo of the talking points of "four horsemen" of Atheism is still to be found here, as Dennett speaks of the virus-infected ape - the viruses being memes. This is gratifyingly close to my term: "The Programmable Ape". In both cases, we are referring to the fact that our minds consist largely of culturally determined "memes". To understand this idea, it is not necessary to see the genetic evolution theory of memes as literally true (it is hopelessly imprecise) but it's a great analogy and points precisely to what Zen would claim the "mind" is an illusion - there are only "ideas" running around in our heads. No "observer".

It is culture and especially language that is evolving and getting smarter at an exponential rate over the last 100 years or so.

Dennett's little talk is perhaps the clearest explanation I've seen of what is going on and why. My old "Dragon Theory" (now Programmable Ape) blog explores a special case of this insight - especially the darker implications.

LIFE ITSELF AND "ANIMUS"

Dennett does us a big favor by breaking down the concept of "life" (not merely consciousness). We still don't know how life arose but Dennett has provided a way of talking about the emergence of life without the need for mystical language, a mysterious miraculous event or a whole set of new words to describe what is going on.

What is "Supermind"?

This blog started three years ago as "Dragon Theory". I was particularly taken by the "corporation", a legal "person" with rights powers vastly exceeding ordinary persons. Then and now, I consider the "corporation" to be a threat to individual rights and freedoms.

I was also inspired by the ultimate evil in the Star Trek series: the Borg. As time went on, I became more curious as to how people are assimilated into "the dragon".

By 2017, assimilation had become my focus and I changed the name of the blog to "The Programmable Ape". I had come to look beyond the mass phenomena like the corporation to see that humans are uniquely engineered to be "assimilated". Our language is a way of "programming" us. This involved a subtle change in outlook. What does it feel like to be programmed? Is it possible to have a thought, experience or perception that is not deeply colored by the thoughts of others?

"Assimilation" as an isolated, evil phenomenon, was beginning to make less sense. "How to Think" put the final nail in the coffin. "Thinking" is a social phenomenon. In fact, we can't think for ourselves.

Yikes!

Is it possible that all aspects of "mind" are social? This went against the prevailing theory that "mind" was something going on in a brain. Surely you need a brain to have a mind, but could you have a mind without people around you?

I was studying a lot about the brain at this point. It was plain that big sections of the brain were devoted to language. Damage to this part of the brain could result in the inability to form thoughts, let alone express them. Another interesting find is that any part of the cerebral cortex (or all of it) can be destroyed without loss of consciousness. This goes against the hand-waving conclusion that "somehow" our sense of self arises in the cortex - usually imagined as some kind of computer. Damasio restores the old idea that fundamental "I" (core consciousness) is a phenomenon of the brain stem, which is intimately involved in "images" created in the cortex. It's just one step to realize that these "images" are, to a great extent, socially created. At a deep, intimate level, our minds are shared.

All this combined with my long admiration for the book "Surfaces and Essences", which explores the nature of analogy as the very basis of thought. Intuitively, I regarded the cerebral cortex to be in the business of analogy-making. Language itself, based on analogies that were mostly made by others was where our "minds" live! 

Finally, I looped back to the "dragon" perspective.  Our "minds" are shared - we think and experience the world only by participating in "superminds". The "dragon" had lost its body, but its mind was real and all-pervasive.

Is "supermind" alive? This lead me to check out other forms of life. It seemed to me that "supermind" was a bit like the "wild west" genetic world of bacteria. Each of us is an individual in the sense that we experience a unique package of "supermind" ideas and influences.

"Identity and Destiny" brought back the ominous nature of "assimilation", drawing attention to the fact that our "identity" defines who we imagine ourselves to be. In many cases, this is total fiction. "Identity" is also behind the most brutal aspects of human nature.

That's the current status of the idea. There is a certain consistency all the way back to 2015, with the idea connecting to a broad range of insights by others while blowing off the quirky "dragon" language and even the "programmable ape". It has become a meditation on who we are from a rather surprising perspective.

Interlude March, 2017

Back in 1969, I appeared in Grenoble, France, eager to start on my Ph. D. in Computer Science at what was then the leading IBM research center in Europe. It did not go well.

At the time, the idea of "Time Sharing" on a computer was in its infancy. Very few people had access to the big mainframes using slow text-only terminals. Yet, I imagined a time when everyone would have access to the same computer system. All of human knowledge would be accessible. People could share their projects and extend that knowledge together, online. The group mind of humanity would be implemented in a vast computer network.

In short, I imagined the Internet. World Wide Web 3.0, a bit beyond what we have now. Artificial Intelligence (my field) played a big role in this vision. I called it the "Spirit System".

The idea quite literally blew my mind. Weakened by days without sleep and culture shock I had the first of my numerous "nervous breakdowns". My hopes of an academic career were over.

Even now, after a dozen or so of these episodes, I quibble with health care workers over what to call what happened. For years, I was "schizophrenic" and medicated as such. Eventually, I was re-classified into to the newly-fashionable category of "bipolar", even though I did not "check all the boxes" - specifically not being subject to the depressive side of the condition and therefore not swinging between two states, as the word "bipolar" and the definition of "Bipolar I" requires*. Nonetheless, treatments for "bipolar illness" were more or less successful (Lithium and Prozac). The problem was that, over the long term, they were destroying my kidneys. I switched to another medication, but that's another story.

So if I don't like the "bipolar" term, what is going on with me? It's pretty much textbook mania. When I'm sick, I score "off the charts" on the mania test. Normally, such as now, I'm "normal". So there is nothing strange about what's happening. There is something wrong and it has a name. I like the test I referred to because it hints at what mania feels like from the inside.

Mania is an affective disorder. Mania gives its sufferers a unique glimpse into the importance of affect - the way you feel about what you are experiencing.  I'm encouraged to write about this right now because I recently ran across the writings of Antonio Damasio. To make a very long story short, Damasio uses extensive research into the way the brain works to support his theory that feelings are the very root of human experience in the world. Everything we experience is "marked" by feelings. In the case of mania, the world is basically painted in technicolor feelings. It's just an amazing, exciting place. As an episode unfolds, feelings overwhelm "rational" perception and the sufferer slips into psychosis - the endpoint of quite a few mental disturbances, including the one that afflicts the current President of the United States (malignant narcissism).

There is a philosophical issue with the definition of psychosis since it involves the idea of "reality" and the failure to grasp it like the rest of us do (so-called "objective reality" which probably doesn't exist). But in practice, the condition is crystal clear.

Damasio is relevant to me and this blog in several ways. For one thing, his writings fit into a much wider set of ideas that support and extend the concept behind this blog - the "superorganism" or "dragon". For another, it's important that I watch out for the feeling of elation as the last few pieces of this theory snap into place. In the past, this kind of situation has lead to a "manic break" where great ideas drive me off the cliff into psychosis. Not this time. I'm feeling fine and I'm very aware that there is a ton of work that remains to flesh out these ideas, connect them, document them and explain them. There is nothing crazy or spooky here - just a lot of notable thinkers talking around the concept of the superorganism groping for words to describe it - the appropriate set of analogies.

To kick off a new phase in this project, I have changed the title of this blog slightly, from "programmable ape" to "supermind" (URL "emergentsupermind). Of course, this choice is limited by the titles available, but the shift also reflects the fact that the "programmability" of humans is just one way to see the emergence of the supermind.  Another key concept is the loss of individual identity, exhaustively documented in Amartya Sen's "Identity and Violence", which provides not only an expert analysis of the phenomenon but also a harrowing account of the suffering caused by this loss. There is also a shift in metaphors from a "superorganism" to a "supermind". As organisms ourselves, we are attracted to thinking of something "superior" as like us, an organism. This thinking is behind the old idea of God: the old man in the sky. The supermind is not smart: primitive rage and cruelty are more common that the "wisdom of crowds". Sen provides an essential ingredient to my project: a reason to care. It's not just a new way of seeing things: it's a way of seeing a danger that poses an immediate threat us all, precisely by crushing the individual human being into "little boxes" of "identity".

I have not failed to notice the similarity between the 2017 "supermind" and 1969 "Spirit system", but there are many, many differences between the two ideas. I have not been thinking of this for 48 years for nothing.
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* "Old timers" with a hard-won experience with mental illness are constantly annoyed with the professionals are unaware of the history of their classifications - which often dance to the tune of  drug companies who have a pill that "treats" a previously un-classified condition. Prozac being the best-known example ("treating" mild depression). Valium and Viagra are another. There is some evidence that "treatment" for whatever it was that afflicted me in Grenoble actually caused the epidemic what was eventually called "bipolar illness". All that can't distract us from the fact that mental illness is real, serious and debilitating. But we are not very good at treating it, nor do we have a convincing explanation of what causes the majority of common problems. That said, we are a lot better off than we were even in 1950.

A Good Place to Start

"I think, therefore I am". So began Descartes in his attempt to build a comprehensive picture of reality, starting with what he knew for sure. Like many philosophers, he pretended to mimic the newly-discovered certainty of Mathematics.  Descartes was barking up the wrong tree and his "axiom" instantly hit a dead end. Strangely enough, there are more than a few mystics, philosophers and neuroscientists who would doubt even Descarte's "axiom". The "self" may turn out to be an illusion.

In the Universe we happen to inhabit, there is no sure path from "simple" to "complex". We need to start somewhere else. That's good news, since it turns out that we all know a Hell of a lot more than we thought we did. As Descartes realized, it's all uncertain to some degree, but that need not stop us from exploring an uncertain world. After all, we don't have an option.

We learn very little about our minds by comparing them to the "minds" of chimpanzees, cats and frogs. If we assume that our minds are "nothing but" two pounds of meat on our shoulders, we succeed in explaining nothing while ignoring everything we know about our minds from first-hand experience.

I'd like to share with you some ideas that I have found helpful in the hope that you will too. My aim is to be intelligible, not necessarily "right" or "wrong" (that's up to you). This turns out to be a key policy for moving forward. Descartes was preoccupied with certainty. He wanted to find things that were absolutely true. Our goal is much more modest: to talk about the ideas we share, whether they are right or wrong. The most important aspect of ideas is that they are shared [4].

We will be wandering through a maze of connected ideas. Feel free to wander. There is no "start" or "end". My hope is that we will gain some valuable experience by wandering around together. Our journey starts where Descartes' left off: by understanding what Descartes meant (or should have meant) by "I and "think" [5].

Historically speaking, great advances are made not by answering the great questions but by realizing we were asking the wrong questions and we need to replace them by new, more productive lines of thought.  What we need is a way to conduct a dialogue that makes sense to all parties, together with a way to understand our differences, especially those differences that seem so important, heated and intractable.

I have worked on many other blogs. While I will probably update them from time to time, this blog continues and replaces two of them. I'll attempt to cross-link the blogs where that seems preferable to copying posts wholesale from one blog to another.

• Diary of a Christian Skeptic documents the long "spiritual" path I took from an early age to the present in search of answers to the "big questions". I no longer consider Christianity or any particular religion to be of central importance, but, being born in a "Christian" culture, I needed to fight my way through the assumptions of this culture that were woven into the my thought patterns from childhood.
• The Programmable Ape documents my struggle to understand social organizations as living things in their own right, together with the way we are "assimilated" into these organizations, often resulting in surrender of humanity to mechanical rules and non-human goals. The current blog will continue to expand this theme, making such concepts as "assimilation" more precise and useful while adding precision to the "dragon" concept itself." I don't think you can understand human organizations simply by understanding the human beings that make them up. It turns out that this is a special case of the futility of reductionism, of which I will have much to say.
• Zen of Value is a related blog - a "work in progress" that is devoted to the study of one meme: value. The "Mind" is a super computer between our ears that can instantly calculate value. Computers and economists work only with money, which is not the same thing at all.

Notes: (I will try to provide comments and important off-page links at the bottom of the topic, like this, to make it easier to verify the links are all working and to avoid too much clutter in he main text).

[1] A detailed biography is supplied [here]

[2] "Mind" is a central topic, introduced [here]
[3] Deleted
[4] This a radical transformation of the way we think of language. It is certainly not "like" a branch of Mathematics and not mainly concerned with "truth or falsehood" or even conveying "information" in the modern sense. Language events take place in the "Universe of Discourse" described by Hofstadter [here].
[5] Douglas Hofstadter helps us out by shedding a bright light on "I", the most important idea of all which turns out to tell us what "you" means and a lot about the "meaning of meaning".

I warmly welcome your comments. 

The Birth of Soul

The "soul" is perhaps the poster child example of a "meme". What is essentially "us" survives death. Stripped to its fundamentals, this is the idea that the "mind" exists in some kind of parallel universe, independent of the physical world we all inhabit on a daily basis.

Modern versions of this idea set aside the parallel universe and assume that we can somehow "upload" ourselves into computers. This preposterous idea flies in the face of anything we know about the brain, but it has roots in the ancient lore of the soul. We just can't let go of the idea that we are ghosts that can be somehow set free.

"Idealism" takes the view that we can know only the world of the mind - indeed reality itself is the illusion. This is simply another variant of the concept that mind and world are fundamentally disconnected.

Where did this idea come from?

I think there is a simple answer. Imagine yourself to be a hunter-gatherer way back tens of thousands of years ago. Somebody dies. What do you make of this? What do you think has happened? Reasoning as humans do, you look for something similar. The only similar state of affairs that would occur to you is sleep. The person must be asleep but can't wake up. You know from personal experience that, during sleep, you dream. You do all kinds of normal things in your dreams, like hunt and avoid dangerous animals. You do strange things too, like fly and talk with the dead. It is perfectly logical to assume that your dead companion is dreaming but can't wake up. In fact, he is stuck in an alternate universe - a "dream world". From time to time, you may even visit this person in the dream world and chat with him. Conclusion: the essential nature of the person survives and does not depend on the physical body. Everyone has a "soul".

This is all very logical and not, as some would claim, "superstitious". It is not, as many assume, simply the result of wishful thinking or denial of mortality. It was a good theory based on a available evidence.

Over thousands of years and hundreds of civilizations, this meme has morphed into a myriad of religions, all based on the fundamental assumption that death is like sleep and we go on after death to live in a realm eventually populated by dead people and gods. Eventually, the oldest profession (the priesthood) arose, providing a living for those who claim to have special knowledge of he alternate universe and a unique ability to communicate with the spirits who inhabit that world. By the time we arrive in historical times, religions have become competing unwieldy tangles of mythology and guesswork. People are willing to kill over the precise details of religious theories. It's good to remember the assumption they all make: the existence of the soul. Imagine a world where all of a sudden people stopped believing in the "soul". To cite just one example, Islam would vanish like a popped party balloon. The attitude we characterize as "extremism" absolutely depends on belief in the immortal soul.

Even the minority of us who reject the idea of the immortal soul are still stuck with the idea that the "mind" (the modern word for soul) is a rather small, personal thing, rattling around in our brains. Our "mind" is something that mysteriously arises in the brain. Something to do with "consciousness". But this is just the soul stripped of its immortal qualities and trapped in our heads.

Many of the posts in this blog and the sister blog "Programmable Ape" explore the idea that "mind" is only partly a private thing. For example, you cannot understand the "mind" of any person without taking into the account language of his "inner voice" or the "programming" provided by his culture. It's also true that one evolutionary purpose of the mind is to accurately model the real world [1]. While it is true that this model is imperfect, it must also be admitted that the "real word" plays a large part it our experience - the "contents" of our minds. It almost seems that we don't learn a lot of useful information about "mind" from the fact that we seem to need a brain to have a mind. This is why we have entire branches of Science devoted to the study of how minds work in general without any specific reference to how the brain works. On the other hand, we see a million papers published every year in neuroscience but few that shed any light on how the mind actually works and none that tell us why it feels the way it does to have a mind (or does it feel this way to have a part of a mind?)

I conclude that we need to seek analogies and models for the mind that don't rely on the "trapped soul" metaphor. The mind is not an "epiphenomenon" arising out of  the complex neural structure of the brain, nor are our minds some kind of ultra-sophisticated computer. While it is far from the whole story, we can start by imagining the mind to be an active subset of the incredibly subtle and powerful "software" of human language [2]. If we imagine a brain that lacks this capability, we wind up with brains that lacks language - the brains possessed by the rest of the animal kingdom. The vast gap between the mind of a human and the smartest non-human animal gives a hint of the importance of this single capability. The example of language hints at the fact that "mind" is something shared among many humans and ultimately bound to the universe humans inhabit (what language is about). This is very far from the "dream world" theory of the mind. If there is to be an "alternate universe", it must be the world of the mind itself, which we all understand (in non-mystical terms) to differ from the "real world" in specific ways revealed in laboratory experiments and everyday experience. If we reject idealism, we must accept that both realms (mind and the real world) are real and in intimate communication with each other. Neither is "imaginary".

This view of "mind" also takes us away from the fashionable assumption that the mind is somehow identical to the brain. No amount of billion-dollar brain initiatives will uncover the secrets of the mind. The mind is not to be discovered in a "wiring diagram" (the "connectome"). It is more likely to be discovered in studies that reveal he structure of language, human society and reality itself. The brain is neither necessary nor sufficient for the existence of "mind", although in humans, it seems to be necessary but not sufficient. Accordingly, the wiring diagram of the human brain will not tell us much about what mind is.

In parallel to our efforts to re-imagine the "mind", it makes sense to reconsider what we mean by "self". How are these two ideas related? Modern psychology and experimental philosophy is teaching us a lot about the "self". For example, we learn that our sense of continuity with the past is very fallible (which is not the same thing as an "illusion"). We learn that our concept of free will is elusive in the laboratory.  We learn that "personality" depends as much on context as on some innate attribute of the soul. In general, the "self" is subject to exploration from the "outside". In fact a case may be made for the view that the "self" is the way we explain our behavior to others and even to "ourselves". Behind all this data gathering is the unstated question: What is it like to be X? What is i like to be me? That is a question that endlessly fascinates us and drives many forms of art. In all our investigations, we find that the "self", like the "mind"often seems like a small wave in a vast ocean of real people in the real world.

It is difficult to accept the Zen contention that the self is an illusion. It is illusive, dynamic and ephemeral, but this does not make it "unreal". It is, in fact, the mysterious foundation of all experience.

[1] It is always dangerous to assume that evolution has a "purpose". To me, such claims don't pass the sniff test. It is equally possible that the primary job of the mind is to support society by, for example, supporting face recognition and fidelity of communication.

[2] While we use the term "language" for the way we instruct computers, computer languages differ from human languages in many respects, the most important being that a speaker of a human language knows (or thinks he knows) what he is talking about.  Computers don't "know" the information they manipulate any more than a car knows about internal combustion.

Focus - November 19, 2017

I have a lot of time on my hands - perhaps too much. I read a lot, usually 2 serious books per week or maybe more if you count the books I check into and decide not to read or put on the back burner for later. In the "later" category is the emerging genre of books explaining all the details of Donald Trump's horrible personality and personal history. I get it. No further information required.

There is a danger of being pulled into a rabbit hole, following "click bait" until starvation sets in. Sometimes I wonder if I'm doing something similar on a larger scale, taking advantage of the cheap and easy access to books (Kindle) and general information (Google/YouTube).

So here are, in theory, the "topics" I'm following.

THE SELF & COLLECTIVE INTELLIGENCE

This is a hold-over from the main thread in my "Christian Skeptic" blog. At the moment, it concerns questions about the nature of the self (aka, "soul"). I'm convinced that this issue is very widely misunderstood. Most recently, I have wondered if we should have another pronoun, similar to the "royal we", that refers to the conventional "I" plus all the myriad of influences that determine what "I" know, what "I" want and how "I" make decisions. See The Knowledge Illusion and Behave. Perhaps "I" should just refer to the immediate experience of consciousness in the moment - a result of all those influences. This perspective is not unrelated to long-standing questions coming from "Dragon Theory". How is it that we are deeply "assimilated" into "dragons" like religions and corporations? What does assimilation feel like?

The distinction between "I" and the "Royal We" is important on a day to day personal level - what I might call the "Zen" outlook. I increasingly separate the pseudo-spiritual aspects of Zen from the simple discipline of mental and moral clarity implicit in the practices and traditions. In this case, there is not much more to learn - only the day-to-day struggle to apply what I already know. It's also a conscious effort to be "assimilated" into the right traditions, groups, political parties, and social media "bubbles". To some extent at least, we can determine what our personal "royal we" is.

Perhaps the easy way to understand this perspective is to note that human intelligence, like bee intelligence, is collective. The bee doesn't "know" how smart it is, or why it performs its wiggle dance or why it feels compelled to fly off in a given direction after watching a wiggle dance. Yet, when seen from the viewpoint of the hive, the behavior is perfectly intelligible. This idea applies on many levels to human behavior, but the interesting one applies to everyday experience - the fact that almost all of what we "know" is actually signaled in some way from other humans. Just think of what we "know" as we drive a car across the city.

CHRISTIANITY

I found "Fantasyland" to be a particularly scathing critique of religion - especially the American fundamentalist "Christian" version. However,  I still take the Christian ideal of forgiveness as an antidote to the current witch hunt "outing" all men who have ever behaved in an outrageous manner to any woman. Let him who has no sin throw the first stone. I expect a few stones to be thrown my way when I express this idea. For my own part, I am trying to banish "moral outrage" from my emotional toolbox. In spite of the widespread acceptance of moral "relativism" (acceptance of "gays" for example), most of us are unwilling to go the entire (Christian) distance to recognize that we all have things we are ashamed of and we all need forgiveness: the permission to start over.

Can all my reading and thinking serve to address practical questions, such as What kind of person should I be, How should I act? This has nothing to do with celestial "carrots and sticks." These are questions of personal and public morality. The current tsunami of moral outrage illustrates that many of us are addressing important moral issues with rather blunt instruments. 

ASSIMILATION

The idea behind "Dragon Theory" (now "Programmable Ape") can be seen from two perspectives: "top down" from the "dragon" or "bottom-up" from the assimilated human "component" of the dragon. I started from the "top," asking such questions as Is the "dragon" alive? Quite rightly, one of my readers pointed out that this is chiefly a matter of definition. Subsequently, trying to define the dragon has been quite a project, not unlike the effort to define a "meme." There are similar problems when one attempts to say anything that can not be said without the concept or to say anything that sheds a special light on the phenomenon. Accordingly, I now consider the original vision of the "dragon" as a first draft or glimpse of the phenomenon that is in need of a major overhaul. "The Corporation" remains as one of the most accessible introductions to this idea. On the other hand, my early versions of the idea, namely the "Creedal Group" and the "Spirit System" (dating back to 1970) seem to be surprisingly durable.

I have been encouraged by seeing the progress that some have made with the "meme" idea, especially by Daniel Dennett - most recently in "Bacteria to Bach." Really durable memes are be formed as a result of environmental constraints or the laws of physics. In other words, our "ideas" don't (always) grow out of unconstrained fantasy. In a sense, our ideas connect us to the "real world." Duh. To put it in another way, our "minds" are a (perhaps muddy) reflection of the world we live in. 

I continue to be well served by "Surfaces and Essences," the classic study of how analogies form the very basis of human thought. I'm always on the lookout for the analogies that underlie my ideas. Some analogies are better than others, but they are all analogies. It is wise to use analogies as a "whiteboard" sketch of a concept but always be on the alert for the need to drill down to the details of a phenomenon - especially those that challenge your favorite analogy. For example, from the beginning, "Dragon Theory" set itself up to be a promoter of confirmation bias, especially ignoring the substantial contribution made by individual decision making and constraints imposed by the environment. For example, by definition, the corporation operates in a financial environment, resulting in "behavior" that is more accurately seen as a result of the environment. To use an analogy, the behavior of a fish is, to a great extent, determined by the physical properties of water.

I have made more progress coming from the "bottom up", asking how it is that people get "assimilated." Early on, I realized that part of the answer is to be found in common assumptions, most notably in language and money. Most recently, that has been generalized with the aid of an AI concept: the "fitness function." For example, in the case of a for-profit corporation, the fitness function is entirely expressed in terms of money. This translates directly into the way that humans are assimilated, through hiring practices, employee incentives, customer relations and investor participation. All this is increasingly implemented by AI algorithms, but this only goes to reveal the fitness function that was there all along. By automating a fitness function, we create a monster. This is eloquently pointed out in "Weapons of Math Destruction" and supported by quite a few other sources such as "WTF." "WTF" is an instructive tutorial in how the simple idea of "money" as a fitness function actually works in Silicon Valley. You'd be surprised ...

Special assimilation issues arise in fantasy-ridden, fundamentalist American culture (See "Fantasy Land").

"Wiser" gets into the nuts and bolts of how "herd instinct" works in small groups such as juries and corporate boards. "Wiser" is a road map of how people are assimilated into a group, allowing the group as a whole to be more stupid than any particular member.  "Polarization of opinion" and "race to the bottom" are psychological phenomena subject to laboratory study. There is a large literature about exactly how corporations make stupid decisions. It comes as no surprise that we don't need fancy analogies to explain how the "brain" of the dragon - the prefrontal lobe - makes wrong decisions.

CLIMATE CHANGE

This issue used to literally keep me up at night. I now regard it as a kind of background fact - one of the "givens" that we all need to deal with, such as Calgary weather. It's been awhile since I have read anything new or important on this issue, although I try to connect the skeptics to information on the subject if they chose to actually learn something about it. Strangely, I often find myself in the awkward position of pointing out that there are other things besides climate change going on. Climate change is the background, but sometimes disasters are "ordinary" things like hurricanes, floods, and droughts. We need to deal with these events whether or not they are the result of climate change. To put another way, our preparation and response are within our control. It is useful to think this way since it calls for action from all quarters, including the climate change skeptics.

Zen plays a large part in my ability to retain a cool head while the world heats up. It is important to accept what you cannot change. In particular, we must accept impermanence - even the impermanence of life on Earth.

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.

Tragedy

THE HUMAN TRAGEDY

There has been a lot going on since my last "status report". A few little insights have added up to quite a change in outlook - not so much from a logical point of view, but from the subtle emotional impact of it all. This post builds on some previous fragments and may seem to ramble a bit, but here goes ...

The Sam Harris podcast on consciousness made a few interesting points that take awhile to sink in.

• Sam points out that it is hard to imagine what an "explanation" of consciousness would look like. There is something about it that puts it in a different category from even the most notoriously difficult to explain things such as quantum mechanics and the Schrodinger wave equation.
• Thomas Metzinger plugs a powerful meme into my head when he suggests that final acceptance of our mortality leads to a "tragic" view of human existence.

That word, "tragic" seems to chew around the edges of everything I have intellectually decided to make it all feel real and more urgent.

Making things "feel real" is the subject of a book on neuroanatomy: Decarte's Error: Emotion, Reason and the Human Brain. For me, This built on the excellent "Behave: The Biology of Humans at Their Best and Worst.", along with "Zen and the Brain", which I read a few years back and started me on my "Zen Phase". Taken altogether, these texts have made me more and more comfortable with the general workings of the brain, along with some respect and awe. We know a lot, but there is a lot we don't know - perhaps a lot we will never know - cannot know (see Sam's first point). The issue of consciousness (the inexplicable "first-person" perspective) is fascinating and worth an essay or two on its own, but I will leave that for now.

It is obvious that we are a brain - more precisely we are a body with a brain (turns out you can't ignore the body when you consider emotions, which are phenomena in the brain). Through experiments and injury, you can disassemble the personality and, by inference, the mind itself - the "soul". Even major injury to the "body" (apart from the brain) can result in major changes to "personality" - who we are.

We have an unknowable soul that is mysteriously identical to the very fragile and mortal body (seen from an inexplicable first-person point of view). This is the tragedy.

UNIVERSAL IGNORANCE

As Metzinger points out, the vast majority of human beings deny the tragedy itself or respond in ways that completely deny the reality of the human condition. The "Abrahamic" religions, deny mortality in a direct way-we survive death (for better or worse - new problem). Buddhism and Hinduism, assume that the "soul" lives on to be reborn. This creates additional problems that were never far from the mind of the Buddha. All of these religions assume with no evidence that there is a kind of "moral machinery" behind the world, that cares about the minutiae of human behavior. 

Perhaps  Buddha* saw this most clearly. Life is unavoidable suffering. But his response was to withdraw from life and escape from the imaginary "wheel of rebirth". If life is awful, we need to avoid being continually re-born into it. So both his response (withdrawal) and the reasons for it were, to say the least, flawed. It's worth asking if life really is unavoidably awful but that's a subject for another essay ...

Over history, Buddhism has become just another religion, split into dozens of factions, including the one sponsoring genocide in Myanmar (Burma). As in all religions competing "schools" of authority lead to endless fragmentation and violence over fundamentally irreconcilable issues. This doesn't happen when authority is about something real, such as quantum mechanics, which enjoys its own controversies, rarely resulting in death. In science, evidence counts. In religion, only authority counts. But I digress ...

Religious wars and persecutions were sponsored by the Christian religion from the beginning (there are echoes in the New Testament over whether Jewish law applied to new Christians), through the middle ages (the Crusades) but also the Catholic/Protestant divide which still claims lives in Ireland. Again, the dispute is over who is right (the authority) about a subject that bears no relationship whatever to verifiable reality. Disputes like this can never be resolved - they simply fester and become more and more divisive over finer and finer points of mythology. The only way you can be "right" is to kill off those who disagree with you. That's the "solution" that has appeared in history for thousands of years and continues to this day.

Those who reject "organized" religion fail to fully re-think the question. We hear vague bullshit like "Things happen for a reason" or "There must be a power greater than us". Those who reject even this can claim to be "spiritual", which usually means attributing some cosmic significance to the soul or life in general, denying its indispensable connection to the physical brain along with the alarmingly contingent nature of human existence. 

Those who reject all of the above tend to deny the existence of the "soul" altogether. Supposedly, our feeling of being in the world is an "illusion". This idea seems to be a modern spin on the ideas from some minority sects of Buddhism - usually explicitly acknowledged by the modern Guru in a faint claim for authority. We also see quite a few philosophers and scientists who make grand claims to "explain" consciousness (usually "explaining it away") while never peering into the consequences of a worldview stripped of the most fundamental assumptions of religion - the existence of the soul.

Finally, we are left with hardcore skeptics who sweep aside the whole issue as not worth discussion. The problem is that who and what we are matters. Adopting a sensible position on this matter would seem to form the basis of any other decision, both personal and public.

So that's the second aspect of what I am calling the "tragedy" of the human condition. We live in a tragedy but tragically fail to recognize it. The mythical Buddha* would have advice for us on this score. Step 1 would be to accept the fact as an unavoidable circumstance, not a problem to be solved (by ritual, prayer, or living right for example). Step 2 is to realize we are all in this together, which should inspire genuine compassion for all living things. Or so it seems to me.

BEING ALL IN IT TOGETHER - GOOD NEWS/BAD NEWS

One thing that neuroanatomy teaches is that a great deal of our human neocortex (the gray matter) is taken up with getting along with / cooperating with other human beings. Specifically:

• We have extensive areas on the left side of our brains devoted to speech and speech recognition. This makes sense only in the context of communication with other humans. Speech is instinctive and fundamental to who we are. We are not born knowing a language but we are hard-wired to learn one.
• We have brain areas that specialize in face recognition. We are also great at voice recognition.
• Our logic centers, in the cortex that govern our ability to make decisions in social situations - such as what to say when your wife asks if her dress makes her ass look big. Social calculations play a huge role in our lives but we pretend that mathematical logic governs what we do or at least should govern it.

In my "Programmable Ape" blog, I have explored the idea that we somehow "clump" into entities ("dragons") that acquire a life of their own - sometimes having aims that work against the interests of the human beings that make up the "clump". Neuroanatomy provides the details of how we are "wired in" to such organizations, often to the detriment of ourselves and any other human being. We are assimilated. Resistance is futile.

THE TRAGEDY OF LANGUAGE

The "glue" that binds us together in clubs, nations, religions, corporations, and armies is primarily language. But language is, to say the least, imprecise. We can lie with language much more easily than by any other means. We can use language to sound like we are talking about something real (such as what "God Wants") when there is no substance behind the words. It is language that makes the poison of religious conflict possible. It is language that inspires young men to kill and die for causes spun out of thin air.

The Koran praises itself and mandates that the believer trust words over reality in these words:

This is the Book; in it is guidance sure, without doubt, to those who fear Allah.

Mysteriously, the word of God has required entire libraries of interpretation ("scholarship") and spawned dozens of sects at war with each other over fine points of interpretation. It is taken for granted that the ordinary believer cannot figure out what the Koran is saying without consulting one of many dozens of self-styled "authorities". This is only possible if there is no evidence behind the squabbles. It's solely about authority. Squabbles over authority are made more violent when the parties speak different languages (as do the Shia and the Sunni). The Shia (who speak Persian) remark in hushed tones that it seems that Allah only understands Arabic.

It is easy to see the entire history of religious conflict as one inspired by language itself: the use of language to support spurious claims of authority and the role of language to make different parties unintelligible to each other.

Of course, language plays the same role in International conflict and many conflicts within nations, including my own (Canada), which. 150 years after its birth as a nation, struggles over "language rights" for French and Indigenous peoples.

Language is the main instrument in the toolbox of those whose agenda is based on "us and them". This is the third face of our tragedy. We are helplessly tossed in a bag with our friends and neighbors, weighted with our superstitions and assumptions, then thrown overboard into an uncaring world.

LIVING IN A TRAGIC DRAMA

Tragedy has long been recognized as a rich theme in drama. Even our comedies - the good ones - encourage us to smile at our own foolish nature. We are not entirely uneducated in this way of seeing the world. Even in tragedy, the dignity of the human soul can shine. One might even say it is only in tragedy that we find deeply inspiring meaning. We are not living in a Walt Disney version of Jungle Book. We are living in a dangerous world where our lives and the lives of those we love can be snatched away at any moment. This is the curse of human consciousness: to know our ultimate fate. To my way of thinking, this is where we need to start if we are to face life and find meaning in it.
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* What we learn about Buddha in the "West" is the "Walt Disney" version. For those of us who have traveled in the birthplace of Buddha, Buddhism seems like a rather jarring example of ignorant religion. Study of the actual writings of Buddha reveals a man deeply caught up in the superstitions of his day. The way of life he recommends seems right and sensible only when viewed through the spectacles of an individual hungry for an authority to show the way. The same considerations apply to Zen, which has been laundered for the West as "mindfulness" and Hinduism laundered as "Yoga". Even self-appointed 21st-century sages such as Sam Harris seem unaware of how much they rely on the ersatz authority and (lack of) standards of evidence coming from "Eastern Wisdom" doctrines.