With the exceptions of climate change, abortion and Artificial Intelligence (which are usually addressed in emotion laden rather than logical and scientific terms), there's not much discussion in American politics about science- especially not science concerning the future of our species. Here's an update on recent advancements in that science which, given their importance, we should be referring to in our political discussions, but are not:
Wednesday, August 31, 2022
Science should be political
1. MRI machines, with help from Artificial Intelligence (AI), are now able to "read" simple thoughts in human subjects by scanning their brains ("Mind-reading AI decodes thoughts from brain scans," New Scientist Magazine, 10/22/22).
2. Scientists are learning how to manipulate human thought. They will soon be able to erase real memories and implant false ones; difficult emotions, such as grief over death or unrequited love, will be susceptible to elimination with drugs (“Finding a way to erase harmful memories,” Boston Globe, http://www.bostonglobe.com/2014/01/17/mit-researchers-find-drug-that-helps-erase-traumatic-memories-mice/6mYYOM1SGW8C2XPYpCgDjM/story.html).
3. There will be no need for fathers in human reproduction in the future, and perhaps no need for mothers (New York Times, “Men, who needs them?”, http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/25/opinion/men-who-needs-them.html).
4. Current struggles about race will become moot as biology mixes and matches to produce new races adapted to new technologies and environments, as in Aldous Huxley's Brave New World (see below).
4. Current struggles about race will become moot as biology mixes and matches to produce new races adapted to new technologies and environments, as in Aldous Huxley's Brave New World (see below).
5. Humans will combine with machines, interactively at first, then increasingly via prosthetics, in which, for example, AI's will be implanted in our brains. [Update, Los Angeles Times, 12/2/22, "Musk venture sets ambitious plans for implants in humans": "Elon Musk has long argued that humans can keep up with advances being made in Aritifical Intelligence only with the help of computer-like augmentations."] [Update, 12/12/22: Artifical human thought took an abrupt and unexpected leap into visibility this week with release of the app, ChatGPT (see above), which, given a prompt, will write credibly in any style, often seeming to "think"- taking sides on controversial subjects with novel arguments.] [Update, 1/12/23, Automation via AI enhanced machines will displace human workers on a mass scale, including such workers as judges, doctors and teachers, as described in Yuval Harari's Homo Deus.] [Update, 1/14/23, New Scientist Magazine: "AI will advise a defendant in court," describes the opening moves in the displacement of lawyers] [Update, 1/17/23: NPR News, "Send in the clones": Simulated voices and images- "Deep Fakes"- have become nearly indistinguishable from the original person's image and voice, opening up new realms for misrepresentation and slander.][Update,1/26/23, Los Angeles Times: A group at Northeastern University has unveiled a working model of an AI that accurately predicts Covid outbreaks many weeks earlier than has been possible, using "a volume of information that is far too much for humans to manage, let alone interpret."]
Many scientists predict an end to current, flesh-based humans by 2045 (see the writings of Vernor Vinge and the "Singularity”).
These developments are not prominent in U.S. political news and, predictably, very few people appear concerned about the imminent re-definition of our species. Newspaper headlines should be proclaiming: "Human race has 20 years tops, per prominent scientists" Instead, we get front page headlines like this from today's Los Angeles Times: "Netflix to pay to keep stream smooth!" Talk about living in the moment.
That's how it is at this historical juncture. We see the scientific revolution coming to save us from ourselves- and we look away.
There is no consensus on the future humans, no discussion or awareness, at least not in the voting public. That doesn't mean we won't be able to master the technology; we're mastering it now. Research and development will continue as a free-for-all that won't fret about a few papers on bioethics that no one will read.
It's enough to make a guy run through the streets shouting, "They're here! You're next!" like Kevin McCarthy (no relation to the former House Speaker) in the 1956 movie Invasion of the Body Snatchers, where the science is plied by extraterrestrials. I try to restrain my own impulses to run shouting in the streets, since that approach didn't do much good against the body snatchers.
There is plenty of science coverage in the media, but not in the political stories. What if the end of humanity as we know it were a topic front and center in the 2024 U.S. presidential campaign? Can you imagine the candidates debating the best way to design a new human consciousness? A passing extraterrestrial would think humanity is a rare haven for high-order critical thinking.
Unfortunately this is unlikely to happen. We are comforted by the pabulum of the two-party struggle, the endless repetition of pro and con positions for solving the puzzles of our age: relations between nations, ethnic groups and religions; regulation or its absence regarding abortion, guns, sexuality. We vociferously strive to win our battles, though we lack even common definitions of terms. The lack of common definitions in itself kills any hope of dialogue, because our "hot button" political issues are only superficially about the subjects they purport to be about.
Opposition to abortion, for example, is ultimately about a future where not only fetal human life is treated as non-sentient and disposable, but adult human life as well. Future humans, in many credible scenarios, will be no more than production units. In Brave New World, by Aldous Huxley (1931) human eggs are fertilized in vitro on factory assembly lines (the state religion deifies Henry Ford) and the resulting children are reared by technicians. There are no biological parents to get in the way (the most obscene word in the language is "mother"). Children are required to gather around hospital deathbeds to watch people die so that death becomes prosaic. Relationships, when permitted, are superficial and temporary. The unloved and disposable embryo in a petri dish is extrapolated to the disposable developed human.
Even when science does become political, as with abortion, there is a staggering gap between science and emotional idealism, for instance with abortion opponents who do not address post-partum concerns, even though the sensible thing for a self-aware species to do, if we're going to make a great fuss about a fertilized egg, would be to consider the rest of its life too.
Huxley re-figures the modern preoccupation with race using a genetic scientist's sense of evolution. In Brave New World our myriad races have been replaced by four "castes." The lowest caste, the Epsilons, are designed to do menial work. Their neural beauty receptors have been deadened so they won't mind ugly factories. They are bred to be shorter and less attractive than the higher castes. For the upper, managerial castes, culminating in the Alpha's- who are bred to be the tallest and most attractive- mandatory recreational drug use and promiscuous sex distract from consideration of their pre-programmed fates (essential to Huxley's nightmare is the placid acceptance of it).
Unfortunately this is unlikely to happen. We are comforted by the pabulum of the two-party struggle, the endless repetition of pro and con positions for solving the puzzles of our age: relations between nations, ethnic groups and religions; regulation or its absence regarding abortion, guns, sexuality. We vociferously strive to win our battles, though we lack even common definitions of terms. The lack of common definitions in itself kills any hope of dialogue, because our "hot button" political issues are only superficially about the subjects they purport to be about.
Opposition to abortion, for example, is ultimately about a future where not only fetal human life is treated as non-sentient and disposable, but adult human life as well. Future humans, in many credible scenarios, will be no more than production units. In Brave New World, by Aldous Huxley (1931) human eggs are fertilized in vitro on factory assembly lines (the state religion deifies Henry Ford) and the resulting children are reared by technicians. There are no biological parents to get in the way (the most obscene word in the language is "mother"). Children are required to gather around hospital deathbeds to watch people die so that death becomes prosaic. Relationships, when permitted, are superficial and temporary. The unloved and disposable embryo in a petri dish is extrapolated to the disposable developed human.
Even when science does become political, as with abortion, there is a staggering gap between science and emotional idealism, for instance with abortion opponents who do not address post-partum concerns, even though the sensible thing for a self-aware species to do, if we're going to make a great fuss about a fertilized egg, would be to consider the rest of its life too.
Huxley re-figures the modern preoccupation with race using a genetic scientist's sense of evolution. In Brave New World our myriad races have been replaced by four "castes." The lowest caste, the Epsilons, are designed to do menial work. Their neural beauty receptors have been deadened so they won't mind ugly factories. They are bred to be shorter and less attractive than the higher castes. For the upper, managerial castes, culminating in the Alpha's- who are bred to be the tallest and most attractive- mandatory recreational drug use and promiscuous sex distract from consideration of their pre-programmed fates (essential to Huxley's nightmare is the placid acceptance of it).
Another issue, gun control, is not just about whether you can bear arms in an urban environment; it’s about whether we will need an armed insurrection to protect us from a scientific state. Most pro-gun groups have extensive literature arguing that without our guns we will be sitting ducks for fascism, though our household guns have proven of zero effectiveness against America's nexus of intelligence agencies and the tech sector, which together generate an almost total knowledge of our doings (predicted, in 1949, in George Orwell's “1984"). The Fourth Amendment battle for privacy is already lost without a shot fired.
Today's "War on drugs" will be revealed as a "War for drugs," as in George Lucas' pre-Star Wars masterpiece, THX-1138, in which a highly stressed human population, forced underground by an unnamed holocaust on the earth's surface, is coerced into taking mind numbing tranquilizers to facilitate boring factory work and avoid feelings of romantic love, claustrophobia and the resulting social unrest. The protagonist, whose name is THX-1138, falls in love with a co-worker after avoiding his dose and is charged with "drug evasion."
The struggle over homosexuality is not just about whether men or women can have sex with their own gender or get married; it’s about a world where any kind of couple is superfluous, reproductively speaking.
If science is not political news, there will be little understanding that we are living in a transition to a revised humankind. The ignorance will grow if we are distracted by domestic strife and war [Update, 2/24/22: The long heralded kickoff to WWIII supposedly happened today with Russia's incursion into Ukraine. What are the odds that tonight's network news will report the latest on human evolution, or that tomorrow night's will, or the night after that?] [Update, 10/18/22: The network news continues to prominently feature the Ukraine/Russia war every evening- and avoid the scientific revolution- as if this war would rank above the end of historical humans in viewer interest][Update, 2/7/23: President Biden's State of the Union Address, as well as the recent U.S. midterm elections, were exercises in "sound and fury signifying nothing," unless you give Biden's support of Intel semiconductor factories in a "field of dreams" equal importance with the extinction of our species] [Update, 2/10/23: With the revelation of Chinese spy balloons, distraction such as that from the Russia/Ukraine war will be significantly enhanced, as exploding China-phobia envelopes people who may not care about Ukraine] [Update, 12/11/23: The Israel/Hamas war has become the biggest distraction yet, not in the sense that it isn't important- it's extremely important- but in the sense that it distracts us from an even more powerful end to the status quo]. Diminished attention to events outside the prescribed battle zones will make a covertly planned transition possible. It will be over before we understand it.
There is a lot of potential for good in the coming science: relief from suffering, enhancement of intelligence and physical well-being. But we are taking the next steps in human evolution with only a faint element of self-determination, becoming something of unknown design, by unknown designers.
In the U.S., there's no way to be an actor in the politics of science except through the Democratic or Republican parties, but those parties have specialized in putting us to sleep, not in waking us up. Any chance that the 2024 American presidential campaign might direct our attention to the future of the species is rapidly diminishing, replaced by partisan, reactive outbursts to recycled issues like those noted above, not to mention a noisy red vs. blue shoot-out. While we indulge our love of yelling at each other, technocracy will fill the void, determining our fate without public polemics, and without elections.
In the U.S., there's no way to be an actor in the politics of science except through the Democratic or Republican parties, but those parties have specialized in putting us to sleep, not in waking us up. Any chance that the 2024 American presidential campaign might direct our attention to the future of the species is rapidly diminishing, replaced by partisan, reactive outbursts to recycled issues like those noted above, not to mention a noisy red vs. blue shoot-out. While we indulge our love of yelling at each other, technocracy will fill the void, determining our fate without public polemics, and without elections.
Wednesday, August 17, 2022
Conspiracy theories
"Conspire" means "breathe together" in Latin. Conspiracy is intimate; the conspirators are vulnerable to each other, open with their thoughts because they have common interests. The conspiracy must remain secret because it only serves those interests. From this point of view conspiracies, and by extension conspiracy theories, are as natural as communication. Why then are people today reluctant to say, "I have a conspiracy theory"?
Perhaps the rumors are true, that the CIA promoted a negative connotation for the phrase "conspiracy theory" to embarrass people who doubted the Warren Report on President Kennedy's assassination. If that conspiracy theory is true, it was a brilliant move, stunningly successful.
It's interesting too that the word "paranoia" is understood by almost everyone, while its opposite, "pronoia" (referring to denial that there are people conspiring against one when in fact there are) is mostly unknown.
Of course, even if someone overcomes the stigma of vocalizing a conspiracy theory, and even if everyone who hears the theory thinks it's true, you still face the question: What are you going to do about it? You can't take legal action because a conspiracy theory is a theory; it is not designed to be a formal allegation, as there is generally little or no evidence to back it up.
For instance, I have a conspiracy theory that Big Pharma is behind the current move away from attributing significance to dreams, which are referred to in many medical journals as "neural trash" to be flushed down the toilet of sleep. My theory is that the downgrade occured because there is no money in dreams, as there is in drugs. If dreams have meaning and are studied, as was the fashion in Freudian times (e.g. Beverly Hills, circa 1960), and if people are able to assuage life's problems by talking about dreams- as believed not only by Freud but by numerous human cultures- that's not good news for a system in which mental health is addressed with prescription drugs, which means it's not good news for stockholders.
The term "depression," too- in my conspiracy theory- has been co-opted by Big Pharma. In the past, a state of depression (previously melancholia) indicated that a person was "sad," a term that is avoided in the pharmaceutical world because we understand that sadness can be caused by the world outside the sad person, and there's no Rx for that. Today, the person is affected not by the outside world but by chemical imbalances within. That's where the money is.
But what can I do with my conspiracy theory about Big Pharma other than blog about it? There's no legal action to be taken since I have no evidence, and because the pills often work, there's little prospect of a pro-dream movement against medical science. People would ask: What have dreams done for me lately?
The only struggle with some hope of success would be to work towards reattaching a neutral connotation to the phrase "conspiracy theory," so that if you laugh at my theory about Big Pharma, it will have to be because you can prove it isn't true, not because I can't prove it is true.
Thursday, August 11, 2022
Bertrand Russell's house
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Last spring my wife and I bought tickets for a flight to London for a walking tour of Wales in August with our son (who planned the trip) and daughter-in-law. As the months swept by, each with its own presaging of the apocalypse that most people are expecting, I wondered if this was the best time to fly overseas. The Friday before we left, LAX was closed for two hours, stranding thousands of people both inside and outside the terminal, because someone spotted a child's toy wrapped in a way that you might wrap a bomb. I'm claustrophobic anyway so additional time over the minimum trapped in a metal cylindar with two hundred other claustrophobics is not to be desired. However, several days before departure I found my solution by adopting, at last, a religion I can truly believe in: Fatalism, which suggests that since you can't do anything about anything, if things go wrong it's not your fault.
Once the terrifying and humiliating (though uneventful) flight and the three-hour schlep from Heathrow to the Welsh border were over, it was unearthly to be in Wales, or should I say it was quite earthly? As the National Museum in Cardiff makes clear, the land we call Wales is composed of parts plucked from an array of eons, having achieved their present forms via molten flows, or being blasted to smithereens, or squeezed by incredible pressures into very solid things. These footprints are spread across Wales in unusually unchanged forms, just as the elements of Welsh humanity, from Celts, the earliest arrivals of the modern British inhabitants, circa 1,000 BC (the current Welsh people are Celts, speaking a pre-Roman language devoid of Greek or Latin) or the Ango-Saxons or the Normans- significant portions of what each group created when they came to Wales are still standing, relatively unchanged, at least by Los Angeles standards (Wales offers a contrast to the San Fernando Valley- farmland when we moved there in the '50's, home to 1.7 million people now- where the one testament to the Chumash culture that once spread across a lovely plain is a grimy plaque fixed onto the asphalt of the parking lot of the Encino Pic 'n Save, under which are whatever atoms remain of a Chumash village).
Things are so well preserved in Wales that often their spirits can be felt. I was a bit unsettled, in fact, by the Norman castles. The solidity of the stone structures is fearsom. In particular, Tretower Castle in Brecon Beacon National Park seemed to fizzle with the Norman life-essence. This is the essence that created the United States, after all. The Normans were actually Vikings who, a generation before their invasion of Britain in 1066, had invaded Normandy- named for them, the "Northmen"- where they adopted the French language, bringing Greek and Latin across the Channel. They were able to defeat or at least subdue the warlike Celts, Anglo-Saxons et al, transforming Britain into an extension of the Roman order rather than the wild steppes. It took a strong and often destructive hand to dominate those fiercly autonomous tribes, and the Normans had it. Warfare, both physical and political- the manly arts- are where the Normans excelled, and then, to top it off, it turned out they were powerful at running governments too. They created modern England, which created the United States.
As it happened, my son, Andrew, picked the Welsh town of Penrhyndeudraeth (pronounced Pen-ren-die-druth) on the coast for one of our lunch stops (we ate at the wonderful Eating Gorilla vegan cafe). Andrew had not known that I visited Bertrand Russell in Penrhyndeudraeth in 1969, when Russell was a world famous philosopher, historian and mathematician. He was 97 and I was 23.
After discussion at the Eating Gorilla, we agreed to seek out Russell's house after lunch.
Russell was my hero when I visited him, a Gandalf-like figure of profound wisdom. Here are some Russell quotes showing the kinds of things that hooked me:
I would never die for my beliefs because I might be wrong.
Our great democracies still tend to think that a stupid man is more likely to be honest than a clever man, and our politicians take advantage of this prejudice by pretending to be even more stupid than nature made them.
Most people would sooner die than think; in fact, they do so.
One of the symptoms of an approaching nervous breakdown is the belief that one’s work is terribly important.
One thing I didn't appreciate at the time was the significance of Russell's aristocratic background to his ease with speaking his mind. It's a lot easier when you're the 3rd Earl Russell.
The Russells found their foothold in nobility in the 16th Century through crafty maneuvering in the Wars of the Roses, mainly betting on the right horse: the House of Tudor (Roger, the Lord of Tretower Castle mentioned above, was a Yorkist who was beheaded for this mistake). Bertrand was born well-connected; he had two Prime Ministers in his ancestry, his godfather was John Stuart Mill, etc., but he was a freethinker and something of a revolutionary who didn't want to be associated with aristocracy and privilege, so he did not use his titles.
I had wondered if there would be a statue commemorating Russell as we entered the town, but there was not. No one at the Eating Gorilla had heard of him. We found mention of his home, Plas Penrhyn, online, and googlemaps was able to lead us there, about a 30 minute walk from the cafe.
My family was in England the summer of my first visit to celebrate my dad's being able to afford the trip. With my parents' support, I visited Russell's secretary in his London office, a man named Ralph Schoenman- an anti-Vietnam War activist- and begged for a visit. He eyed me skeptically at first, but then called Russell, who assented to the visit.
It was a long, lonely train ride, full of anxiety. Why was I doing this? Here's another Russell quote:
There are two motives for reading a book; one that you enjoy it; the other that you can boast about it.
Did I just want to score a big point with everybody? Partly, I wanted to see what an idealized icon was like in person- was the icon really the person? How do idealized icons act when you're just sitting with them? Do they get quickly tired because they always have to be "on," at an expected level of excellence?
The house was a pleasant, two-story structure plastered white and surrounded by flowers and vines. An elderly housekeeper answered the door and led me into the library, which was huge, shelves up to the ceiling along every wall, seemingly housing every book Russell had ever read. Puzzlingly I did not see any paperbacks (what will be left of one's library in the age of the Kindle beyond a twisted bit of black plastic?). The tea was set. After about a minute Russell opened the door and came in. He seemed very tiny. He was not a tall man, and age had shrunken him more. He smiled at me and my mind went blank, except for a faint voice calling: "You idiot, you'd better have a plan for this!"
Russell asked me polite questions about where I was from, and I discovered that he was nearly deaf and that to be heard I needed to almost shout. This I could not bring myself to do, so it was difficult, when he asked me what my interests were, which I took as an opening for talking about his ideas, to reference complex passages he had written 40 years earlier, such as:
My desire and wish is that the things I start with should be so obvious that you wonder why I spend my time stating them. This is what I aim at because the point of philosophy is to start with something so simple as not to seem worth stating, and to end with something so paradoxical that no one will believe it.
Finally, in despair, I mentioned the Vietnam War, which I knew was on his mind, and something about Lyndon Johnson bombing Hanoi. Russell lit up and proclaimed that Johnson was a "war criminal." The rest of the conversation consisted of my keeping up my end of an anti-Vietnam War exchange, a terrible retreat from the meeting of minds I had hoped for. After about 15 minutes, Russell rose and walked me down to the gate, where he shook my hand. As I walked away, I turned and saw him still watching me. We waved. I had the idea that he understood my frustration, and that somehow we had connected anyway.
Russell died the following year.
These days I fault Russell for underestimating the role of biology in refashioning human society. He was versed in dictators, statesmen, academicians, pholosphers, not in the cloned uniformity of our probable replacements, who will buzz around us, loving us to death, with much more ease and "buy-in" than the peasants who toiled for the Russells. I don't blame Russell for that, of course. He saw more of the future than most, and told what he saw without hesitation. He went to jail for opposing World War I, then angered the pacifist community by supporting the allies in World War II. He said what he thought.
Thank you, Lord Russell, for sharing your aristocracy. The American experiment is to see if people can say what they think without being aristocrats. So far so good.
Plas Penrhyn, Wales, August, 2022
Tuesday, August 09, 2022
Extreme Friendliness Disorder
The dog pees in big puddles
in the hall, down from our room
as if to punctuate, to add
but I don't want to complain
and drain the precious, you know,
dog pee is just, just to get me
sitting in the vet's waiting room
where I read Bark Magazine
as if The New Yorker
would be called Speech Magazine
Ha! Ha! Bark! Bark!
And it seems the domestic dog originated
in the Middle East, not Asia
but the real bark of the study was that
Williams Syndrome, which brings the curse of
Extreme Friendliness Disorder
is traceable, can be seen in dog genes
Bark Magazine does not deal, I think, in irony
in sadness
Domestication a syndrome
Civilization a disorder
Friendliness...oh God no...
my tail is wagging!
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