Chris Anderson suggests that it's time to chuck the scientific method in favor of a new methodology that serves up facts the way Google serves up ads -- through calculations on massive sets of data:

But faced with massive data, this approach to science — hypothesize, model, test — is becoming obsolete. Consider physics: Newtonian models were crude approximations of the truth (wrong at the atomic level, but still useful). A hundred years ago, statistically based quantum mechanics offered a better picture — but quantum mechanics is yet another model, and as such it, too, is flawed, no doubt a caricature of a more complex underlying reality. The reason physics has drifted into theoretical speculation about n-dimensional grand unified models over the past few decades (the "beautiful story" phase of a discipline starved of data) is that we don't know how to run the experiments that would falsify the hypotheses — the energies are too high, the accelerators too expensive, and so on.

There is now a better way. Petabytes allow us to say: "Correlation is enough." We can stop looking for models. We can analyze the data without hypotheses about what it might show. We can throw the numbers into the biggest computing clusters the world has ever seen and let statistical algorithms find patterns where science cannot.

I think there's a lot to be learned from statistical analysis of data in the cloud, but I'm not sure that theory and models can be put away so quickly. There has to be a framework of questions we are asking, and we need to interpret the data once we have it. The theory may be moved to the algorithms or the interpretive methodology, but it still has to be in there somewhere.

Posted by Phil Bowermaster at 09:16 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

The other night on the podcast, I asked whether there is an advantage to having a bleak outlook on the future. I believe that there have been some historical advantages to having a negative outlook, but that the advantage has been variable throughout human evolution --sometimes you get a boost from being a pessimist, sometimes from being an optimist. But seeing as life was riskier in the short term for our ancestors, the more risk-averse pessimistic outlook took hold. We developed a natural fear of the future not too unlike our natural fear of the other.

In an evolutionary context, fear of the other is not necessarily a bad thing. If were talking about Homo Sapiens vs. Neanderthals or (earlier on) mammals vs. reptiles, an innate revulsion to the threatening other served to keep evolution moving in the right direction. Back then. Today, we need our fear of the other a lot less than we used to. I think it kicks in correctly if, say, you come home and find a stranger in your bedroom. But a "fear" of other cultures, races, religions, lifestyle choices, etc. is not helpful, notwithstanding the fact that major cultural artifacts, lets call them memeplexes, have been developed around this fear. These we know as xenophobia, ethnocentrism, racism, and other delights.

Today we recognize that basic animal instinct as one that we need to control, and the memeplexes that developed around it as not only unhelpful, but morally wrong. What, then, about that closely related animal instinct, our natural fear of the future? Again, it was a fairly useful guide back in the days when human life was one unbroken chain of existential threats. Back when we needed to find prey or starve, avoid predators or be eaten, stay out of the flood plain or drown, keep warm at night or freeze to death, and so on, a healthy fixation on everything that could go wrong and an expectation that many such things would go wrong was key to survival.

Continue reading "The New Racism" »

Posted by Phil Bowermaster at 06:44 AM | Permalink | Comments (24)

In a follow-up to a couple of recent pieces on Ray Kurzweil and his unusual views of the future, John Tierney has dared to ask a question that we deal with all the time here at The Speculist: Why Not Perpetual Progress? The answer that comes through loud and clear in the majority of the comments to these posts is a resounding because.

Because the Law of Accelerating Returns is just an illusion.

Because Kurzweil's ideas aren't really science.

Because climate change is going to wipe us out.

Because all the accelerating improvements in the world can't stop the inevitable catastrophe that's going to get us.

Tierney links to this almost two-decades-old article about the great debate between Paul R. Ehrlich, author of The Population Bomb, one of the most highly respected ecologists of his day, and Julian Simon (who died in 1998), a researcher whose work in the same field has received scant attention over the years.

Beginning in the late 60's, Ehrlich began making dire predictions about where the world is heading. A few choice examples:

"The battle to feed humanity is over. In the 1970s the world will undergo famines . . . hundreds of millions of people (including Americans) are going to starve to death." (1968)

"Smog disasters" in 1973 might kill 200,000 people in New York and Los Angeles. (1969)

"I would take even money that England will not exist in the year 2000." (1969)

"Before 1985, mankind will enter a genuine age of scarcity . . . in which the accessible supplies of many key minerals will be facing depletion." (1976)

So basically, Ehrlich has been making these outrageous and demonstrably inaccurate predictions of catastrophe for some 40 years. For this, he has been lauded as a genius -- literally -- he received a MacArthur Foundation Genius award, among his many honors and distinctions. Ronald Bailey, in a review of one of Ehrlich's books for the Wall Street Journal, described the situation thusly:

So why pay him any notice? Because he is a reverse Cassandra. In "The Illiad," the prophetess Cassandra makes true predictions and no one believes her; Mr. Ehrlich makes false predictions and they are widely believed. The gloomier he is and the faultier he proves to be as a prophet, the more honored he becomes, even in his own country.

Ehrlich reverses the Cassandra story one way; Julian Simon, another. Unlike Cassandra, Simon predicts a positive and hopeful future. Like Cassandra, nobody believes him. (Well, okay, some do. But his work doesn't receive anything like the attention that Ehrlich gets, and he is widely viewed as a crackpot.)

Oh, and like Cassandra (and unlike Ehrlich) he appears to be right.

Simon famously wagered with Ehrlich in 1980 as to whether the prices of copper, chromium, nickel, tin, and tungsten would go up or down by 1990. Ehrlich's position was that -- with demand increasing and total supply impossible to increase -- these metals would have to go up in price over a decade. Simon predicted they would go down. On paper, they purchased $200 of each metal ($1000 total) with the agreement that in 1990 the winner would pay the loser the inflation-adjusted difference in price. If they went up in price, Simon would pay Ehrlich. If they went down, Ehrlich would pay Simon. In the end, Ehrlich wrote Simon a check for $576.07 -- reflecting a substantial net decrease in the price of those metals. Interestingly, Simon would have collected a small amount even without the inflation adjustment.

Julian Simon was just getting started on proving his thesis.

His book It's Getting Better All the Time, co-authored with Stephen Moore, lists 100 verifiable ways in which the human condition has improved. (Our own Better All the Time feature was inspired by Simon's book.) His book The State of Humanity provides a more in-depth exploration of these issues.

Simon enjoyed cataloging the overwhelming evidence for improvement of the human condition, and he believed that the evidence was readily available for anyone who wanted to bother to look:

Test for yourself the assertion that the physical conditions of humanity have gotten better. Pick up the US Census Bureau's Statistical Abstract of the United States and Historical Statistics of the United States at the nearest library. They're accessible to any schoolkid. Start at 1800. Those books have half the data you need for almost anything.

With such evidence so readily available, you have to wonder why Ehrlich's views -- so consistently wrong -- have received so much acclaim, and why all those commenters over at the NYT website were ready to jump down Tierney's throat for daring to suggest that there might be something to all that talk about "accelerating returns." The idea that the world is going to hell in a handbasket is a powerful memeplex. It is supported by the view that anyone who draws a grim picture of the future is "serious," and that anyone who takes a positive view is suspect.

This is a memeplex that needs to challenged. If we are to take full advantage of what the future promises to be, the first thing we have to do is get past the idea that catastrophic failure is inevitable. Catastrophes, even civilization-ending catastrophes are a definite possibility, and we need to do what we can to prevent them. But to assume any of them to be inevitable is a mistake. To assume improvement of the human condition to be inevitable would also be a mistake, but -- based on the record -- it's the most likely outcome. Somehow, people need to start coming to terms with that.

How do you start a new memeplex?

Posted by Phil Bowermaster at 09:44 PM | Permalink | Comments (8)

Via InstaPundit, check out this excerpt from the introduction to Chris Hedges' new book, I Don't Believe in Atheists. (The excerpt begins about a quarter of the way down the page.)

Hedges argues that the both secular and religious fundamentalists are a threat. Both groups have lost sight of the notion of sin -- the idea that human nature is at its core limited, flawed, fallible. Once people forget about sin, once they believe in human moral progress, all manner of trouble ensues:

Yet the belief persists that science and reason will save us; it persists because it makes it possible to ignore or minimize these catastrophes. We drift toward disaster with the comforting thought that the god of science will intervene on our behalf. We prefer to think we are the culmination of a process, the result of centuries of human advancement, rather than creatures unable to escape from the irrevocable follies and blunders of human nature. The idea of inevitable progress allows us to place ourselves at the center of creation, to exalt ourselves. It translates our narrow self-interest into a universal good. But it is irresponsible. It permits us to avert our eyes from reality and trust in an absurdist faith.

"For every age," Joseph Conrad wrote, "is fed on illusions, lest men should renounce life early and the human race come to an end."

The belief that rational and quantifiable disciplines such as science can be used to perfect human society is no less absurd than a belief in magic, angels and divine intervention. Scientific methods, part of the process of changing the material world, are nearly useless in the nebulous world of politics, ideas, values and ethics. But the belief in collective moral progress is a seductive one. It is what has doomed populations in the past who have chased after impossible dreams, and it threatens to doom us again. It is, at its core, the enticing delusion that we can be more than human, that we can become gods.

The real problem, it seems to me, is not the belief that human moral progress is possible; the real problem is the idea that it's inevitable. It's not. And if, as we have suggested, humanity takes one step back for every two forward, even a fairly significant trend of moral progress would have to be marred by many horrible setbacks which, when added together, could make a strong case for a complete lack of moral progress or even for an observable trend of moral decay.

It's easy, for example, to look back over the past century of human history and see one example after another of technological advancement being put in the service of human exploitation and destruction. The examples are many. They are appalling, and they are unavoidable.

Even so, they don't tell the whole story. As we have noted before, research shows that human pre-history was significantly more violent than any period in recorded history -- including the 20th century. A modern human living in the 20th century was less likely to die from violence at the hands of a fellow human being than a hunter-gatherer living 50,000 years ago. In fact, in order for the 20th century to reach the carnage level of the hunter-gatherer era, we would have had to see a total death toll from wars of about 2 billion.

I can't find a good estimate of the total death toll of all wars in the 20th century, but let's take the high-end estimate for all World War II deaths as listed in Wikipedia, 75 million, and let's double that. And then, just for good measure, let's double it again. So that gives us an estimate of 300 million total war-related deaths in the 20th century.That means that the technologically powered depravity of that century managed to achieve a death rate of only about 1/7th of what our hunter-gatherer ancestors faced.

What if we go back just a couple thousand years. What percentage of the world's population lived in slavery at that time, or a condition we would find indistinguishable from slavery? Yes, it is horrifying to think that pockets of slavery and slave-like conditions still exist in our world today -- but how many billion would have to be slaves today to match the percentages of the era of Julius Caesar?

How many women voted (anywhere, for anything) 300 years ago? All around the world, how many vote now?

How many environmental groups existed 150 years ago? How many exist now?

How many animals benefited from prosthetic technology 25 years ago? How many benefit now?

Technological development doesn't make us better. It gives us more choices. And sometimes we choose to make things better with the increased capability we have been given. It's not inevitable that we will make things better, but it does seem built-in for us to try. Hedges is right that we shouldn't view ourselves as the culmination of a process of advancement. We aren't the culmination; we're just the latest step. Nor should we view human nature or the human condition as perfectible. Rather, we should see them for what we have demonstrated them to be time and time again throughout our history -- vastly improvable.

As for that "enticing delusion" that we can become more than human, I think I have to hang on to that one for a while. Even the idea that we will become "gods" isn't out of bounds, relatively speaking. I have at my fingertips capability that would make me seem vastly godlike to one of those hunter-gatherer ancestors we were just talking about. I believe that our descendants will surpass us even further than we have surpassed the hunter-gatherers. The thing to remember is that, when they reach that state, there will be nothing godlike about it.

Hedges is right to point out our limitations and the risks we face. But I think he is missing out on something important. The future is never the future. All you ever get is the present. The utopia we live in (relative to our ancestors) is not utopia at all, as we well know. And transcending what it means to be "human" does not make one a god or even put one into a transcendent state of humanity. Transcending limitations is the natural human state. To reject the human ability to advance may be the biggest delusion of them all.

Posted by Phil Bowermaster at 10:34 AM | Permalink | Comments (20)

A while back, I wrote about the possibility of updating the Three Laws of Robotics as goals in order to make them a more practical means of getting at a friendly artificial general intelligence. This kicked off some interesting discussion, including some debate as to whether my "goals" really aren't just rules rephrased. In which case, the argument went, they probably wouldn't help all that much. Michael Anissimov commented:

What would work better would be transferring over the moral complexity that you used to make up these goals in the first place.

Also, as you point out, these goals are vague. More specific and useful from a programmer's perspective would be some kind of algorithm that takes human preferences as inputs and outputs actions that practically everyone sees as reasonable and benevolent. Hard to do, obviously, but CEV (http://www.singinst.org/upload/CEV.html) is one attempt.

That's really the crux. Moral complexity does exist in algorithmic form...within our brains. And that goes to the difference between laws and goals. My goals are what I'm trying to do, both morally and in other areas. There are some sophisticated software programs running in my brain made up of things that I've been taught, things I've figured out for myself, and things that are built in. All of these add up to provide me the tendency to act a certain way in a certain situation. The strategies that drive that software are my moral goals.

Laws, on the other hand, exist outside of myself. I am not specifically programmed to do unto others as I would have them do unto me. I have some tendencies in that direction, but there's nothing stopping me from acting otherwise, and -- let's face it -- I often do. I have tendencies to be nice, fair, just, etc., but I also have tendencies to try to get what I want, to get even with those who have wronged me, to try to be a bigshot, and so on. These tendencies compete with each other, and my behavior overall is some rough compromise.

An artificial general intelligence (AGI) built as a reverse-engineered human intelligence would be in the same position. It would have the "moral complexity" Michael mentioned, but also the baggage of competing tendencies. You could no more guarantee such an intelligence's compliance with a rule or set of rules than you could a human being's.

A law like the Golden Rule is a high-level abstraction of certain strategies (algorithms) that produce a desired set of results. On a conscious level, I can use that abstraction to determine whether my behavior is where I want it to be:

Wife complained of being chilly when I got up at 5:00 AM to work out. Covered her with blanket. Good.

Sped up on highway in attempt to keep a guy trying to merge from going ahead of me. Not so good.

Commenter on blog revealed that he doesn't really understand the subject at hand. Ripped him to shreds. Bad.

Through discipline and practice, I can "program myself" with it to try to move my tendencies in that direction. But I can't write it into my moral source code and set it as an unbreakable behavioral rule. That's partly because it's too vague and partly because I simply lack that capability.

Presumably, I could be externally constrained always to follow the Golden Rule, no matter what. If my actions were being constantly monitored, and I was told that the I would be killed immediately upon violating the rule...I'd certainly do my best, now wouldn't I?

Still, I'd have a hard time believing that anyone holding me in such a position was much of a practitioner of that rule him or herself. If the people trying to enforce the rule on me in this manner told me that it was for my own good -- that they were trying to make me a better person -- I don't know that I'd buy it. And if I figured out that they were only doing this to protect themselves from harm I might to do to them, I think I would pretty annoyed with them (to say the least.)

I would expect a reverse-engineered human intelligence to feel the same way, so I don't think attempting to constrain an AGI in such a manner would be a particularly good idea, especially not if we have a reasonable expectation that it will eventually be smarter and more powerful than us. On the other hand, letting it use the process I described above -- evaluating its own behavior against a defined standard -- an AGI might achieve far better results than I have, if only because it can think faster and would have much more subjective time in which to act. This is the notion of recursive self-improvement that matoko kusanagi referred to. The trouble with recursive self-improvement on its own, as Eliezer Yudkowsky and others have pointed out, is that if the AI starts "improving" in a direction that's bad for humanity, things could get out of hand pretty quickly.

If the artificial intelligence is a modified version of human intelligence, or new intelligence built from scratch, we raise the possibility of building a moral structure into the intelligence, rather than trying to enforce it from outside. That's the idea behind the the Three Laws and my Three Goals -- that they would somehow be built in. But they certainly can't be built in in anything like their current form. Michael Sargent (and others) pointed out the weakness of that approach, the less important goals have to take the back seat to the more important ones:

Each Goal must have a clear and unbreakable priority over the others that follow it and thus, in the order stated, collective continuity trumps individual safety ("The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few, or the one."), individual safety (broadly construed, 'stasis') trumps individual liberty ('free will'), and happiness ('utility', a notoriously slippery concept for economists and philosophers to get a firm intellectual grip on) trumps both individual liberty and individual well-being (allowing potentially self-destructive behavior on the individual level insofar as that behavior doesn't exceed the standard established for 'safety' in Goal 2).

I see the reasoning here, but I'm not 100% convinced. Consider the goals that drive a much simpler AI, system -- the autopilot system found on any jet airliner. The number one unbreakable goal has got to be don't crash the plane. But there are many other goals that might drive such a system:

Don't move in such a way as to make the passengers sick.

Don't waste fuel.

In landing, don't go past the end of the runway.

Above all, the system will seek to ensure that first goal. But within the context of ensuring that first goal, it also has to do everything it can to ensure the others. And, yes, it can and must sacrifice the others from time to time in service of the first. So the plane might temporarily move in a nauseating way, or it might waste fuel, or it might even slide past the end of the runway if doing any of those things help ensure the first goal.

Reader TJIC suggested that an AI programmed to meet the Three Goals as I defined them...

1. Ensure the survival of life and intelligence.

2. Ensure the safety of individual sentient beings.

3. Maximize the happiness, freedom, and well-being of individual sentient beings.

...would end up creating a nanny state wherein human freedom is always sacrificed to individual safety. And he may well have a point, but I would argue that just as an autopilot can be calibrated to allow whatever what we deem the appropriate relationship between having the flight not crash and not make us sick, so could these three goals be calibrated in such a way so as to maximize human freedom within an acceptable level of individual risk -- whatever that might be.

Getting back to the vagueness problem, it's hard to calibrate the goals as stated, seeing as they are written in an awkward pseudo-code that we call human language. If we want to improve on the algorithms that are built into human intelligence, or develop entirely new ones -- in other words, if we're going to come up with algorithms that will provide us the ends stated in the goals -- we're going to have to do it mathematically.

But that isn't necessarily going to be an easy thing to do. Eliezer Yudkowsky argues that developing an AI and setting it to work on doing some good thing are relatively easy compared to the third crucial step, making sure that that friendly, well-intentioned AI doesn't accidentally wipe us out of existence while trying to achieve those good ends:

If you find a genie bottle that gives you three wishes, it's probably a good idea to seal the genie bottle in a locked safety box under your bed, unless the genie pays attention to your volition, not just your decision.

Again, I think this goes to the issue of calibration of the system. Eliezer wants to calibrate what the AGI does with the coherent, extrapolated volition of humanity. Volition is an extremely important concept. Earlier, I mentioned the golden rule. If I decide that I'm going to do unto others as I would have them do unto me, I might start handing out big wedges of blueberry pie to everybody I see. After all, I like pie and I would love it if people gave me pie. But if I give my diabetic or overweight or blueberry-allergic friends a wedge of that pie, I wouldn't be doing them any favors. Nor would I be doing what I wanted to do in the deepest sense.

Eliezer describes the concept of extrapolated volition as meaning not just what we want, but what we would want if we knew more, understood better, could see farther. Coming up with a coherent extrapolated volition for all of humanity is a tall order, especially if we're doing it not just for the sake of conversation, but in order to enable a system which will try to realize that which is within our volition.

I like to think that humanity's CEV would look a lot like the three goals that I've written. And I honestly believe that the algorithms that power human progress do work, in a rough and general way, towards those goals, which is why people are generally freer, safer, and happier than they have been in the past -- though obviously not without many, many, appalling and horrific exceptions. So perhaps our calibration efforts involves feeding the AGI algorithms that will enable it to speed our progress towards those goals while cutting the exceptions way down. Or eliminating them, if that's somehow possible.

So to finally come around to it, what will those algorithms look like?

Maybe we can take hint from the study of Game Theory. Robert Axelrod held two tournaments in the early 1980's in which computer programs competed against each other in an attempt to identify the optimal winning strategy for playing the iterative version of the the famous Prisoner's Dilemma. In the one-off version of the game, the optimal strategy is to screw the other guy. (This is not the sort of thing we want to go teaching the AGI, at least not in isolation!) However, when multiple rounds of the game are played, something else begins to emerge:

By analysing the top-scoring strategies, Axelrod stated several conditions necessary for a strategy to be successful.

Nice
The most important condition is that the strategy must be "nice", that is, it will not defect before its opponent does. Almost all of the top-scoring strategies were nice. Therefore a purely selfish strategy for purely selfish reasons will never hit its opponent first.

Retaliating
However, Axelrod contended, the successful strategy must not be a blind optimist. It must always retaliate. An example of a non-retaliating strategy is Always Cooperate. This is a very bad choice, as "nasty" strategies will ruthlessly exploit such softies.

Forgiving
Another quality of successful strategies is that they must be forgiving. Though they will retaliate, they will once again fall back to cooperating if the opponent does not continue to play defects. This stops long runs of revenge and counter-revenge, maximizing points.

Non-envious
The last quality is being non-envious, that is not striving to score more than the opponent (impossible for a ‘nice’ strategy, i.e., a 'nice' strategy can never score more than the opponent).

Therefore, Axelrod reached the Utopian-sounding conclusion that selfish individuals for their own selfish good will tend to be nice and forgiving and non-envious. One of the most important conclusions of Axelrod's study of IPDs is that Nice guys can finish first.

Bill Whittle has written recently that the qualities listed above underpin western civilization, and help to explain why the West has out-competed other civilizations, who operate using different strategies:

Now, this is where my own analysis kicks in, because frankly, nice, retaliating, forgiving and non-envious pretty much sums up how I feel about the West in general and the United States in particular. The web of trust and commerce in Western societies is unthinkable in the Third World because the prosperity they produce are fat juicy targets for people raised on Screw the Other Guy. Crime and corruption are stealing, and stealing is Screwing the Other Guy. It’s short-term win, long-term loss.

I would add that if we look at the three goals as goals for humanity rather than for artificial intelligence, we see better progress towards them in western societies than elsewhere. In the tournament, the winning strategy, embodying all of the above characteristics, was called tit-for-tat. Interestingly, the computer program driving that strategy consisted of only four lines of BASIC code. That's very interesting, and it suggests a startling possibility -- like a simple recursive formula producing a complex Mandelbrot image, the moral complexity we're looking for might just be packed into a very simple set of mathematical relationships.

So in order to develop and calibrate an Artificial General Intelligence that carries out our three top goals (or that helps us to achieve our coherent extrapolated volition) one of the important parameters to explore is how the AI relates to us and to other AIs. The secret might ultimately lie in playing nice with the AI, and teaching it to play nice with us and with other AIs. Not just because we want it to be nice, but because nice turns out to be -- at a mathematical level -- the best way to play.

UPDATE: This entry has been republished at the website of the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies.

Posted by Phil Bowermaster at 12:46 PM | Permalink | Comments (7)

You get three guesses:

Here at the start of allergy season, it kind of reminds me of a magnification of something I wouldn't want to inhale. But no.

Or maybe it's some multi-colored cotton candy?

Nope.

Some sort of network diagram?

Ah, getting closer, but not exactly. Give up?

[Answer below]

[Almost there]

Continue reading "What Is It?" »

Posted by Phil Bowermaster at 06:25 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

We had a wonderful time in Arizona last week. Here are a few photos and some random thoughts.

We stayed in the city of Sedona, located at the bottom of Oak Creek Canyon, about 20 miles south of Flagstaff. The area is famous for its dramatic red rock formations. I took several hundred pictures, none of which begin to do the subjects justice. Here's the second-best picture I took of Cathedral rock.

Interestingly, the best picture I got of Cathedral Rock was before sunset at a place called Red Rock Crossing, and it isn't actually a picture of the rock. At least not directly. Its reflection in Oak Creek begins to capture some of the mystery and grandeur of the place.

While I have no problem (in my sort of half-baked poetic mode) ascribing mystery and grandeur to the Sedona red rocks, there are those who will credit them with a good deal more than that. Sedona is home to a cottage industry of explaining, teaching about, and generally helping people to tap into the mystical powers of the rocks. A few select spots are believed to be intense centers of mystical energy. In the New Age parlance of the region, such a place is called a "vortex":

These vortexes are swirling centers of subtle energy coming out from the surface of the earth. This energy is not exactly electricity or magnetism, although it does leave a slight measurable residual magnetism in the places where it is strongest. There are four main energy vortexes in Sedona. The subtle energy that exists at these locations interacts with that which is inside every person. It resonates with and strengthens the Inner Being of each person that comes within about a quarter to a half mile of it.This resonance occurs because the vortex energy is very similar to the subtle energy operating in the energy centers inside each person.

Well, okay, sure. Or maybe we can all agree that they're pretty, anyhow?

On the other hand, there is a longstanding tradition of believing the rocks to be sacred. Our first full day in Sedona, we visited the Palatki ruin just west of town, where we saw what's left of a Sinagua Indian village. The Sinagua were a pre-Columbian civilization who lived in the region over a period from 500 to 1,500 years ago. They are believed to be the ancestors of the Hopi tribe. The rocks were sacred to the Sinagua, as they are to the Hopi and all other tribes in the region. There is no clear explanation as to why the Sinagua abandoned their longstanding villages, but the Wikipedia article linked above makes the intriguing assertion that the Hopis believe their ancestors left for religious reasons.

The Sinagua people lived in simple two-story brick structures which used a cliff wall for backing.

The Palatki ruin is home to a mysterious grotto featuring petroglyphs and other etchings created over several thousand years. The earliest of these are very simple geometric patterns, criss-crossings etched in the stone that could be as much as 10,000 years old. Obviously, these pre-date the Sinagua by a considerable margin, and if they go back that far would have been left by some of the earliest people in North America. Over time, we see more sophisticated images left by the Sinagua as well as by the people who came before and after them.

What's interesting is that people kept coming to this same spot, a few walls at the base of a particular cliff, and leaving their artwork. The ranger/guide at the ruin told us that it was believed that the original criss-cross patterns may relate to imagery associated with religious ceremonies. If so, and even if those etchings are "only" 5,000 - 6,000 years old, we can conclude that these rocks have been considered sacred for a very long time, indeed.

So who knows? Maybe just saying they're "pretty" isn't quite enough. We did visit another place, a short distance to the north and west of Sedona, which defies both description and photography. If I have ever beheld sacred land in my life, I think the Grand Canyon would have to be it:

Even the geographic features of the canyon have been given religious names. There is a Temple of Isis, a Temple of Osiris, a Temple of Shiva, and a Temple of Zoroaster (there may be more; those are the ones I saw.) Below is a shot of one of the "temples" -- I'm not sure which, but it's definitely not Isis, which has a more dramatic dome.

Whether sacred or not, there is definitely something deeply moving about these sites. It's no wonder that we have dubbed them cathedrals and temples.

Posted by Phil Bowermaster at 08:38 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Phil Tetlock, speaking in a seminar for the Long Now Foundation, gives some thoughts as to why politics tends to make people dumb. He asserts that there are some trans-ideological benchmarks that we can look for in how people think about political issues that enable better predictions.

Tetlock is a psychologist who has been doing research in prediction for some time. He became interested in how political thinking relates to prediction around the end of the Cold War. During the Reagan administration, many liberals believed that Reagan was risking nuclear war (and massively wasting resources on a military build-up) when the Soviet Union was a highly stable entity, much more likely to engage with us in a nuclear holocaust than to back down or collapse. And, in fact, many conservatives believed that Reagan was right to confront the Soviets not because they thought we were going to win, but simply because they believed the Soviets were here to stay and we needed to keep pushing back against them in order to maintain our own credibility. The dominant view was that nothing good could happen.

When the largely unexpected outcome of Soviet collapse occurred, Tetlock observed that no one seemed to acknowledge that they were wrong in their thinking. He refers to this as an outcome-irrelevant learning situation. It then occurred to him that someone should be keeping score on these things. His research is all bout identifying a way to keep score. A major learning from the research is summed up by a quote from the Greek poet Archilochus:

The Fox knows many things, but the Hedgehog knows one big thing.

As Tetlock explains is, one can be a Marxist hedgehog or a Libertarian hedgehog. The content of the ideology is not important. The important thing is that you approach current events with a few limited principles that you want to use to explain what you see. Foxes, on the other hand, take a scattered approach, bringing a lot of different principles into play. Foxes are skeptical of grand ideas, and skeptical of their own ability to predict things. But they are, generally speaking, much better predictors than hedgehogs, especially in the short term.

What do hedgehogs do well? They assign higher probabilities to big changes that do, in fact, occur. For example, those who predicted the downfall of the Soviet Union were hedgehogs. But they are right at a high price. You get a lot of false positives. Hedgehogs were also predicting the downfall of, for example, Canada. Others were predicting Dow 36000, a neo-Stalinist coup in Moscow that would bring back the USSR, and lots of other big stuff that never happened.

He explains that reality is not a horse race between the two viewpoints. Foxes and hedgehogs need each other. Foxes are intellectual scavengers who pick bits and pieces of big hedgehog ideas. They tend to be contrarian. They annoy people across the political spectrum.

Tetlock makes some interesting comments about the War in Iraq as it relates to the subject, and I would have liked to hear more on that. During the ensuing Q&A period, it becomes clear that the audience pretty much thinks that hedgehog=conservative, which is at odds with the basic premise. But overall, it's fascinating stuff. Give it a listen.

Posted by Phil Bowermaster at 04:27 PM | Permalink | Comments (7)

Once when I was living in the heart of a pomegranate, I heard a seed saying, “Someday I shall become a tree, and the wind will sing in my branches, and the sun will dance on my leaves, and I shall be strong and beautiful through all the seasons.”

Then another seed spoke and said, “When I was as young as you, I too held such views; but now that I can weigh and measure things, I see that my hopes were vain.”

And a third seed spoke also, “I see in us nothing that promises so great a future.”

And a fourth said, “But what a mockery our life would be, without a greater future!”

Said a fifth, “Why dispute what we shall be, when we know not even what we are.”

But a sixth replied, “Whatever we are, that we shall continue to be.”

And a seventh said, “I have such a clear idea how everything will be, but I cannot put it into words.”

Then an eight spoke—and a ninth—and a tenth—and then many—until all were speaking, and I could distinguish nothing for the many voices.

And so I moved that very day into the heart of a quince, where the seeds are few and almost silent.

Posted by Phil Bowermaster at 04:54 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Lots of good stuff here. My favorite one (looking specifically at those which I hadn't seen before) comes, interestingly enough, from John Sculley, the anti-Jobs himself:

The best way to be ready for the future is to invent it.

2007 -- as good a time as any to start making some future, folks.

UPDATE: This one, from Ronald Bailey, is pretty good, too:

I have my own nomination for an "idea that, if embraced, would pose the greatest threat to the welfare of humanity": Banning technological progress in the name of humility.

Likewise, we run a certain risk if we decide to ban humility, or any virtue, in the name of technological progress. Which is not to say that virtues can't be understood in a new light. That's what the buzzkills don't get. There's something to be said for the via media, for keeping our harp strings at a nice level of tension as we hurtle into the future.

Posted by Phil Bowermaster at 04:26 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

What is the future? It should be an easy question to answer.

One way to look at it is to say that the future is a point in time which we have not yet reached. This assumes a linear, forward progression through time. Since we all pretty much experience a linear, forward progression through time – those of us who aren't drugged or mentally ill, that is – such a progression seems an okay thing to assume. Today and yesterday are not the future, tomorrow and the day after are. Of course, it's all relative. Today isn't "the future," but later today is. And at some point, the day after tomorrow will be the day before yesterday – and thus no longer the future.

So the future has this mirage quality. We are always in the same relationship to it. It recedes from us one instant at a time. The future is never any closer and never any farther away. Tomorrow, as Little Orphan Annie reminds us, is only (and always) a day away. This definition of the future works, but it doesn't tell us much.

Let's try a different definition. Rather than looking at the when of the future, we look at the what. The future is everything that hasn't happened yet. So we had this future in which the Democrats would take control of the House in the 2006 elections. And here we are today. Unlike “tomorrow,” a content-defined future either arrives or it doesn’t. The “Democrats take the House” future arrived; the “Republicans retain the House” future did not.

Content-defined futures don’t have that mirage quality. Thanks to probability, they get closer or farther away as we approach them. Three weeks ago, the “Broncos win the AFC West” future was farther away in time than it is now, but much closer in probability. At the time, they were tied for first place in the division. Now they’re three games back, with most of the season already spent. I don’t think that, as of this date, their winning the division has been absolutely eliminated in the mathematical sense, but it’s so unlikely now that it has been virtually counted out. Now we’re looking at the “Broncos get the Wild Card” future, which still has a fair shot of coming into being.

However, there is more at work here than simply probability. Take a look at this possible future:

On Friday, April 13, 2029, Earth Has a 99.7 Percent Chance of Being Missed by an Asteroid–Is That Good Enough?

I would say that the Broncos have a (slightly) better chance of winning the division this year than that asteroid has of hitting us. But I take the chances of the latter happening seriously, while disregarding the former. Why? The asteroid is less likely to hit us, and even if it does it’s a long time from now – whereas the AFC West divisional championship will be decided within a few weeks, most likely next Sunday when Denver plays San Diego.

The answer is so obvious that it hardly bears stating. Superfans notwithstanding, who goes to the NFL playoffs this year doesn’t matter. Careers may be affected, money may be won or lost, some people will be happy and others sad, but it’s pretty much a wash. Whether a monster asteroid hits the planet, however, does matter to everyone. It’s one of those existential risks we hear about.

So let’s put our definitions together and see what we have so far. The future is…

A point in time beyond where we are right now

By which certain things will or will not have happened

Some of those things being far more significant than others

Adding significance to the mix complicates things, but there’s really no getting around it. Which of my rose bushes will come into bloom first next spring? It’s a wide-open question, hinting at numerous possible futures. But I don’t care. I’ll start to be interested only if none of them do, or if one seems to be taking a particularly long time. There are many, many more insignificant (or seemingly insignificant) outcomes yet to be realized than there are significant ones. I’m considerably more interested in whether the Broncos make it the playoffs than I am in which rose bush blooms first, and even more interested than that (by a much wider margin) in whether the asteroid is going to hit Earth.

When we talk about the future, generally what we’re talking about is the realization of significant outcomes which are currently unresolved.

The mountain itself is a set of random outcomes; this caption is a set of intentional ones. Welcome to the future.

Continue reading "Intention and the Future" »

Posted by Phil Bowermaster at 01:37 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Lacking the controversy of Borat and the hype of Casino Royale (hype which we have enthusiastically been a part of here at The Speculist), the new Will Ferrell / Emma Thompson film Stranger than Fiction has not received an awful lot of attention. And that’s too bad. Stranger than Fiction entertains an idea that we have largely scorned here at The Speculist: a proposition often cited by opponents to life-extension research. In fact, it’s an idea that has been endorsed by no less than Leon Kass himself.

Simply put, the idea is this – the eventuality of death gives life meaning and beauty that it would not otherwise have. In a paradoxical way, death is what makes life meaningful. So it would be a great loss, Kass and others have argued, to delay death in any substantial way. To do so is to cheapen life, and it’s just not worth it.

Up to now, you could count me among the supremely unconvinced. But this movie – that’s right, a Will Ferrell movie – has given me cause to rethink this significant philosophical question and I find that, upon reflection, my views on the subject have changed. Somewhat.

[Spoilers follow, but I won’t give away the end.]

As many of you know from seeing the trailer, Stranger than Fiction tells the story of a man (Will Ferrell) who wakes up one morning to find that his life is being narrated by someone “with a better vocabulary.” Via a mechanism never explained, he is living his life in parallel to the writing of a novel about a character who is…him. For example, while brushing his teeth, he hears the author (Emma Thompson) explaining in great detail how and why he brushes his teeth the way he does.

The whole situation is a bit of an annoyance until the moment when the narrator, indulging in some foreshadowing enabled by the third-person omniscient POV, let's it slip that our hero is going to die. In fact, the event that will lead to his death has already occurred, although he has no way of knowing how this seemingly innocuous moment is going to prove fatal. Needless to say, the whole life-plus-voiceover situation now takes on an air of urgency that previously it lacked. Ferrell needs to find out who this woman is and get her to stop dictating his life.

He elicits the help of a literary theorist (Dustin Hoffman) and eventually the author is identified. But there’s a hitch. The literature professor reads the novel in manuscript form (the ending exists only as a sketched outline) and declares it a literary masterpiece. It all comes down to the ending. The book must end as the author originally intended or a masterpiece is lost.

But surely, in the scheme of things, a man’s life is worth more than a literary masterpiece? The glib and easy answer is yes. The film’s answer is, well, maybe. But then again, maybe not. A literary masterpiece is worth quite a bit, after all. And even if we do decide that the man’s life is worth more, we ought not to pretend that nothing has been lost in the transaction.

I won’t tell you how this issue is resolved, but I will tell you that I was impressed by how seriously these issues were addressed. The Will Ferrell character chooses to tow the Leon Kass line – he decides that the novel’s ending will add meaning to his life that it lacked before. In so deciding, he displays a courage and a stoicism – and most importantly, a desire that his life be worth something – that is both compelling and deeply moving.

It's better to die, he reasons, and have his life count for something than go on living and have it mean nothing. (One of the interesting paradoxes of the film is that, by the time he reaches this conclusion, his life is significantly more meaningful than it was – at least to him.) That line of reasoning is the essence of the literary / aesthetic argument against life extension as summarized above.

Along similar lines, in describing the merits of actual (as distinct from virtual) parenting a while back, Stephen made the following observation:

A virtual kid would definitely be less trouble. But the trouble is indispensable to the experience. There are definitely times I'd like to pause the four-child reality at my house and leave town for a week. But I can't. And the fact that I can't directly effects the commitment I have to my children and, ultimately, the love I have for them. Where your treasure is – your efforts, your commitment, your time, and your money – there will your heart be also.

Whether we're talking about our jobs or our relationships or our lives in their totality, commitments that can't simply be turned off and situations where there really is risk involved, where something truly is at stake, are bound to be more meaningful and more real to us than experiences lacking those qualities. So I guess I'm with the buzzkills on that point – life extension may very well take some of the immediacy and poignancy out of human life. And, yes, we really will have lost something there.

I just can't make the same leap the buzzkills do. Let's look at another example of the same kind of thing. When air travel substantially replaced rail travel (at least in this country) and ocean liners, travel became less romantic and glamorous. We really did lose something, there, too. Of course, what we gained in the transaction made it a good deal, and I certainly wouldn't make the boneheaded argument that air travel should be eliminated to bring the glamour and romance back.

Or let's put it another way. If we can all agree that an average lifespan of 70 years possesses a poignancy and urgency that a 500-year lifespan might not, shouldn't we also agree that an average lifespan of 30 years would be even more beautiful and meaningful? Isn't it time we started rolling back the clock on sanitation, nutrition, medicine, and public safety so that people can lead more beautiful / meaningful lives?

No. I didn't think so.

Finding the meaning in much longer lives or in relationships with nonhuman intelligences will pose tremendous challenges. How can a life be meaningful if it lacks the inevitability of death -- or at least what we would think of as the inevitability of death? How can a relationship be meaningful if it comes with a Pause button? Won't life be too frivolous and easy? Can life really amount to anything with all the hard stuff taken out?

There are no easy answers to such questions. But it's safe to say that people faced with such choices will still take their lives very seriously, and will find that there's plenty of hard stuff yet to go around. After all, we still consider our lives difficult and challenging, even though our hunter-gatherer ancestors might think we live in some kind of paradise. So on the question of meaning, there's good news. Our ancestors of a couple centuries ago who had those poignant and urgent 30-year lifespans also struggled with figuring out the meaning of life. As do we. As will our offspring.

But the nice part is, they’ll get more time to work on it.

Posted by Phil Bowermaster at 12:18 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Over the past few days, I've been reading this book...

...which is quite entertaining and eye-opening. I highly recommend it to anyone who doesn't mind seriously messing with their perceptions of how much we truly understand of what's happening in the world around us. It turns out we have this tendency to put patterns around random events. I mean, sure, we all knew that, but I had no idea how pervasive the problem is.

While reading, it has occured to me that the author would probably not have much use either for the content of this site or L2si. We suffer from some pretty severe biases on these blogs. First off, we consistently engage in...

Selection Bias

Selection bias, sometimes referred to as the selection effect, is the error of distorting a statistical analysis due to the methodology of how the samples are collected. For example the sample selection may involve pre- or post-selecting the samples that may preferentially include or exclude certain kinds of results. Typically this causes measures of statistical significance to appear much stronger than they are, but it is also possible to cause completely illusory artifacts. Selection bias can be the result of scientific fraud which manipulate data directly, but more often is either unconscious or due to biases in the instruments used for observation. For example, astronomical observations will typically find more blue galaxies than red ones simply because most instruments are more sensitive to blue light than red light. If the selection bias is not taken into account then any conclusions drawn may be invalid.

So for example, when I report that nearly 50% of Speculist readers believe that the first permanent moon colony will be established by private developers, I am failing to take into consideration the fact that readers who aren't interested in space -- or who hate online surveys -- might significantly skew the data in a different direction if their perspectives were included. Or put another way, space enthusiasts might might be more highly motivated to respond to the survey than others, with private-space-development-enthusiasts the most highly motivated of all. In that case, all the poll has shown is which group is the most motivated to respond.

Of course, what mitigates this bias is the fact that we never claim anything remotely like statistical significance to our surveys. They are primarily intended for entertainment and to generate discussion. But then there's the interesting matter of...

Survivor Bias

Survivorship bias (or "Survivor bias") is a statistical artifact in applications outside of finance, where studies on the remaining population are fallaciously compared with the historic average despite the survivors having unusual properties.

Mostly, the unusual property in question is a track record of success (like the successful funds). For example, the scrupulous parapsychology researcher Joseph Banks Rhine believed he had identified the few individuals from hundreds of potential subjects who had powers of ESP. His calculations were based on the improbability of these few subjects guessing the Zener cards shown to a partner by chance.

In the book, Taleb talks about the Survivor bias displayed in a book like The Millionaire Next Door, which purports to identify the characteristics of regular folks who make good -- frugality, optimism, and enthusiasm -- without taking into account how many of us non-millionaires next door possess precisley the same qualities. Or to put it in Speculist terms, a very strong rebuttal to our Better All the Time thesis is that it ignores all those for whom the world is not getting better or that it is merely a gussied up "survival of the fittest" tautology. Take those penguins, for example. Sure life is pretty good for the ones who got cleaned up. But what about the countless other waterfowl over the years who haven't been so lucky where oil spills are concerned?

Bon voyage, liitle birdies indeed.

On the other hand, unlike the Millionaire Next Door argument, we need the failure cases to be there in order for our argument to make any sense. The fact that lots of birds have died from oil spills in the past helps make the case that now, when even a handful of penguins receive the care and attention they need to make it through the experience okay, we've turned some kind of corner. The Better All the Time principle might be restated in survivor bias terms. The universe itself seems to have a strong survivor bias (or is it a selection bias?) in favor of us, as reflected by concepts like the anthropic principle and the law of accelerating returns.

The numbers don't seem to add up on their own. Am I being fooled by randomness? Very likely I am. But then again, maybe some patterns really are real, after all.

Posted by Phil Bowermaster at 11:53 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

If one were interested in re-starting the tiresome argument, it seems to me that this discovery provides a good case for defining the beginning of human life at around 31 days after conception:

KurzweilAI.net, July 24, 2006

Researchers at Yale School of Medicine and the University of Oxford have identified the very first embryonic neurons in what develops into the cerebral cortex.

They are in place 31 days after fertilization. This is much earlier than previously thought and well before development of arms, legs or eyes.

The researchers found that the processes form a vast network and they speculate that this web of processes might be used to control neuronal production, guide the migration of cells and determine the regional specification of the cerebral cortex.

I'm not personally arguing that human life begins at 31 days after conception. I don't know when human life begins, or even what that phrase means. A fertilized zygote is definitely a living human organism, but I'm not convinced that the biological definition "living human organism" equals the philosphical / ontological definition "human being" in all instances. (Insert horrified slippery-slope argument and comments about how I want to create slaves / unleash monsters / eat babies on toast here.) And if there is sometimes a distinction, does the phrase "human life" mean the same thing when applied to a living human organism as it does when applied to a human being?

Deep waters for a Monday morning.

In any case, the 31-day mark now presents itself as a potential marker along the way from the proverbial "clump of cells" to the outright, no-question-no-argument human being. Who knows, in future debates about stem cell research and the like, perhaps the 31-day mark might open up the opportunity for a compromise. Granted, there appears to be no compromise with the life-begins-at-conception crowd -- for them, destroying a 10-day-old embryo is exactly the same as killing a three-year-old. On the other hand, there appears to be precious little room for compromise on the other side. I read what appeared to be a serious comment in SlashDot a while back in which a vehement pro-choice / pro-stem-cell research advocate argued in favor of what he called "post-natal abortion."

So there's your range of opinion -- from those convinced that humanity is conferred immediately upon conception to those who aren't even convinced that birth necessarily grants full human status. With the battle lines so drawn, would anyone really want to look at criteria such as the presence or absence of a cerebral cortex?

Probably not.

Posted by Phil Bowermaster at 09:56 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Hmmm, for some reason, I can't seem to stop linking to old stories as though they were new. Actually, I'm pretty sure Stephen wrote something about the super-fuel-efficient car back when it was actually news, but I can't find the link.

So this gives me the chance to do one of two things:

1. Wax philosophical about how there is a persistent "nowness" to the web, evocative of a timeless, eternal existence currently beyond our ability to grasp.

2. Link to some new stuff.

Obviously, item one is my preferred approach, seeing as it allows me to divert attention from the issue at hand with a healthy dose of going on and on about something, but I have to get over to Home Depot this morning to pick up about a half ton of wood bark chips to spread out amongst the rose bushes. Seriously cuts into my available waxing time. So with that in mind...

Look, everybody! Battery-powered airplane!

Posted by Phil Bowermaster at 08:30 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

But one worth opening, for discussion purposes at least. Randall Parker opines:

I do not see a clear dividing line between what is human and what is not human. This problem is going to become more obvious to the general population when biotechnology allows the creation of beings that are sentient and yet very unlike the average human.

Also (and I'm digressing here) as another sign that I'm a thorough heretic from secular liberal dogma: I do not see how all humans can be classified as having equal human rights. Humans do not have equal capacities to respect the rights of others (don't believe me? want your kids to live next to a pedophile?). So how can they have equal rights? Seems to me that rights flow from the capacity to respect rights. Seems to me one has to embrace a supernatural belief (God loves us all and we all have spirits) or become thoroughly unempirical about the nature of this world in order to believe we all should have equal rights.

A good discussion ensues in the comments. Various approaches as to how rights can be assigned and recognized are debated. I personally believe that coming technological advances will provide as many answers as they do problems. Technology will enable us to expand the assignment (or recognition) of rights to entities who don't currently exist or whose rights are hotly contested today.

Take animal rights. Today, only a few of us are ardent animal rights activists (although there are many more than there used to be.) Personally, I enjoy fishing and I like to eat meat. And I think it's okay for people to ride horses for fun. But when technology provides effective substitutes for each of those activities, I doubt that I will object if their real-world counterparts become illegal.

The nice interpretation is that technology allows us to be kinder than we were. The cynical interpretation is that technology puts us in a position where we have less to lose in recognizing the rights of others, so we go ahead and do it. Previously, I used the abolition of slavery as an example of this principle at work.

Randall then adds in the comments:

Scientific and technological advances will inevitably provide us with greater technical means for measuring a person's competency to respect the rights of others and to conduct their own affairs. Suppose technological advances allow us to state with confidence that some 15 year old is more competent to drive or more competent to form opinions to vote or enter into contracts than some 19 year old. Should the 19 year old be allowed to drive and vote and form contracts while the 15 year old is denied these rights?

What people said hundreds of years ago about human rights was based on a rougher approximation about human nature than what we know today or that we will know in future decades. I think the law should incorporate new information and adjust to become more accurate in how it treats people differently than it has been in the past.

I think the law will adjust to become more accurate, and that generally that will mean an expansion of rights -- for humans at all stages of development, for animals, and for new intelligences.

Posted by Phil Bowermaster at 05:41 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

So the old question of Free Will (link takes you to a teaser; paid subscription required to read the article) is once again rearing its head:

Underneath the uncertainty of quantum mechanics could lie a deeper reality in which, shockingly, all our actions are predetermined

"WE MUST believe in free will, we have no choice," the novelist Isaac Bashevis Singer once said. He might as well have said, "We must believe in quantum mechanics, we have no choice," if two new studies are anything to go by.

Early last month, a Nobel laureate physicist finished polishing up his theory that a deeper, deterministic reality underlies the apparent uncertainty of quantum mechanics. A week after he announced it, two eminent mathematicians showed that the theory has profound implications beyond physics: abandoning the uncertainty of quantum physics means we must give up the cherished notion that we have free will. The mathematicians believe the physicist is wrong.

"It's striking that we have one of the greatest scientists of our generation pitted against two of the world's greatest mathematicians," says Hans Halvorson, a philosopher of physics at Princeton University.

I think Isaac Bashevis Singer got it right. Whatever they prove, life must be lived with the assumption of free will. Even if we know we don't have it -- and my guess is that we're still a long way from knowing for sure -- we have to assume that we do have it.

We may have free will; we may not. But life without the presumption of free will is absurd.

Posted by Phil Bowermaster at 08:05 AM | Permalink | Comments (4)

I'm an adherant, but only recreationally.

That is to say, I will acknowledge the fact that there's a world somewhere out there in which I, Phil Bowermaster, am captain of the USS Enterprise, but I don't let it change what I do day-to-day.

Not much, anyhow.

Via Reality Carnival.

Posted by Phil Bowermaster at 05:21 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Reader D. Vision, responding to yesterday's piece about the need for a new Enlightenment, has some recommended reading for us:

Have you read Atlas Shrugged? It's a must. Rand put her finger directly on the problem: the parasites of collectivism.

In a strange nexus, it's all the same: anti-reason, anti-logic, anti-freedom, anti-life. It's about control and distribution, equality, and dependence rather than freedom, production, quality, and independence. All such delusions are necessary to float collectivism--to maintain feelings above reason.

In the next century there will be great potential for collectivism to harness if its delusions are not countered and disarmed. The creep of "need" threatens to swallow us all in a mutually dependent liability that cannot allow freedom.

I did, indeed, read Atlas Shrugged a number of years ago. My main reaction to the book at the time was annoyance at having been forced to plod through an awful lot of really long speeches to get to the few sex scenes, which weren't that great, anyway, seeing as I tended to picture Dagny Taggart as Ms. Rand herself...and that just sort of spoiled it. On an only slightly more serious note, I did write about Atlas Shrugged on this very blog a couple of years ago.

I tend to think that Rand diagnosed the problem along the way to coming up with a cure that is just as bad as -- if not in fact a restatement of -- the problem itself. D. Vision is absolutely right about the destructiveness of the anti-reason, anti-freedom delusions that manifested themselves in the 20th century (and remain with us today) via collectivist theories put into practice. But as Whittaker Chambers -- himself a former communist who had seen the light -- pointed out in his review of Atlas Shrugged some half a century ago, collectivism isn't the only error into which we can fall, and it isn't the only foundation on which massive delusions can be constructed:

One Big Brother is, of course, a socializing elite (as we know, several cut-rate brands are on the shelves). Miss Rand, as the enemy of any socializing force, calls in a Big Brother of her own contriving to do battle with the other. In the name of free enterprise, therefore, she plumps for a technocratic elite (I find no more inclusive word than technocratic to bracket the industrial-financial-engineering caste she seems to have in mind). When she calls "productive achievement" man's noblest activity," she means, almost exclusively, technological achievement, supervised by such a managerial political bureau. She might object that she means much, much more; and we can freely entertain her objections. But, in sum, that is just what she means. For that is what, in reality, it works out to. And in reality, too, by contrast with fiction, this can only head into a dictatorship, however benign, living and acting beyond good and evil, a law unto itself (as Miss Rand believes it should be), and feeling any restraint on itself as, in practice, criminal, and, in morals, vicious (as Miss Rand clearly feels it to be). Of course, Miss Rand nowhere calls for a dictatorship. I take her to be calling for an aristocracy of talents. We cannot labor here why, in the modern world, the pre-conditions for aristocracy, an organic growth, no longer exist, so that the impulse toward aristocracy always emerges now in the form of dictatorship.

Nor has the author, apparently, brooded on the degree to which, in a wicked world, a materialism of the Right and a materialism of the Left first surprisingly resemble, then, in action, tend to blend each with each, because, while differing at the top in avowed purpose, and possibly in conflict there, at bottom they are much the same thing. The embarrassing similarities between Hitler's National Socialism and Stalin's brand of Communism are familiar. For the world, as seen in materialist view from the Right, scarcely differs from the same world seen in materialist view from the Left. The question becomes chiefly: who is to run that world in whose interests, or perhaps, at best, who can run it more efficiently?

If I take exception to Chambers' analysis, it's only because I always saw a real-world implementation of Rand's ideas as leading to a completely different kind of disaster. Near the end of Atlas Shrugs, we see a scene in which a retired judge is marking up a copy of the US constitution to make it a fit with the new world that's emerging. (I will remark in passing that, as an intellectual exercise, I see nothing wrong with doing this kind of thing.) He adds the following to the beginning of the constitution:

Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of production and trade.

Imagine courts applying this principle with the same zeal by which they now use the Interstate Commerce Clause to give the federal government final authority of every aspect of our lives. Under such a system, there could be no speed limit, nor health code, nor -- presumably -- requirement that an individual be properly certified before practicing medicine. The sale and distribution of any conceivable weapon, drug, or toxic substance would have to be legal. Child pornography would be legal. Maybe child prostitution as well.

Of course, such a system would not be tenable for any long period of time and would eventually break down into chaos or the dictatorship that Chambers describes. It's hard to imagine that codifying Rand's ideals of individual liberty into law would result in a dictatorship, unless we take the time to contrast the rhetoric of Marxism with the reality of its implementation. Abstract principles always work great on paper. In the real world, their success rate is a lot spottier.

One other thought: Chambers' observations about Rand's idolizing of "productive achievement" are interesting. If a Singularitarian religion were ever to emerge, the sacred nature of productive achievement -- or just flat-out technological development -- would likely be a core doctrine. The trends and movements and evolutionary leaps that we look at today are no less subject to delusional thinking than any that have come before. We must be ever vigilant.

UPDATE: Interesting related thoughts atOne Small Voice.

Posted by Phil Bowermaster at 10:33 AM | Permalink | Comments (6)

Via Geekpress, Catholic scholars are tossing around some interesting questions:

VATICAN CITY (CNS) -- Galaxy-gazing scientists surely wonder about what kind of impact finding life or intelligent beings on another planet would have on the world.

But what sort of effect would it have on Catholic beliefs? Would Christian theology be rocked to the core if science someday found a distant orb teeming with little green men, women or other intelligent forms of alien life? Would the church send missionaries to spread the Gospel to aliens? Could aliens even be baptized? Or would they have had their own version of Jesus and have already experienced his universal or galactic plan of salvation?

So does E.T. have a soul?

And if we encounter aliens, what does that say about humanity, our place in the universe, our relationship with God? Will aliens have their own religions? Do human believers have the same duty to share their religious beliefs with aliens as they do with fellow humans?

Those are the kinds of questions that Brother Guy Consolmagno, a Jesuit astronomer and member of staff of the Vatican Observatory, wanted to address when he recently authored a 48-page booklet on the religious implications of discovering extraterrestrial life. Entitled Intelligent Life in the Universe? Catholic Belief and the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligent Life, the booklet deals with the questions that Brother Consolmagno often encounters when talking to Catholic groups about his work with the observatory.

A man whose job title includes the words "Vatican" and "astronomer" can only expect to have such questions thrown at him. But should the day ever come that we actually do encounter an extraterrestrial civilization, these questions will take on a significance that far transcends the occasional post-lecture bull session amongst a few catholic astronomy buffs. Suddenly, everyone will be asking them.

There are those who would argue that the first and most important questions we should ask an alien civilization are:

Do you believe in God?

and

What do you believe about God?

Others might argue that our first questions to the extraterrestrials should be about science rather than theology. Or maybe the questions should be even more practical than that: Are you friendly? Do you mean to kill us or enslave us? Did we mention that we have nukes?

But irrespective of the order, it's clear that inquiries into the spiritual lives of our friends from the stars will be of universal interest. What might we expect to learn about them, and from them?

To begin with, the question of whether aliens have souls is a non-starter. If they are intelligent, sentient beings, they get the same presumptive metaphysical accoutrements as we. In other words, if you tend to think that humans have souls, chances are you'll extend that to aliens. If you think that we don't, then you'll almost certainly think that they don't, either. Yes, a few fundamentalists will insist that we have souls and they don't, and a few total flakes will insist that they do and we don't -- but the overall debate about the existence of the soul will be largely unaltered.

If and when we encounter aliens, we will likely find that they have several religions, as well as competing non-religious and anti-religious modes of thought. The science fiction commonplace of mono-cultural alien races -- like the geographically homogenous desert, swamp, and ice planets these beings hail from -- seem improbable. Alien civilizations are likely to enjoy (or endure) the same intra-species diversity of cultural expression as we do, including religion. Some of their religions may look strikingly similar to some of ours, at least at first glance, while others will look completely unlike anything ever believed or practiced on Earth. In any case, it's doubtful that we will find an exact match between any two.

Those who want to find confirmation of their religion via alien religions will find it; those who want to find a refutation of all religion through the differences will find that. Very likely some new interplanetary variety of syncretism will emerge -- Whom we call Zipxonfyr-Abtl, you call Buddha -- that sort of thing.

From reading their history, we will discover that they count certain religious leaders among the most influential members of their species and contributors to their civilization. Religion itself will have had a long and spotty history: nurturing the loftiest of ideals in one place and time and sanctioning atrocities in another. One day a tool of oppression plied by tyrants and scoundrels, the next day a tool of liberation used to smash the oppressors' chains. Here the friend of learning, there it's enemy.

In other words, meeting aliens will teach us exactly nothing about religion or about ourselves; nothing, that is, that we shouldn't already know.

Posted by Phil Bowermaster at 10:56 AM | Permalink | Comments (5)

Our ability to look into the deep past has never been greater:

NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope may have detected the infrared glow from the very first generation of stars, a new study reports. If confirmed, the work would reveal the structure of the universe a few hundred million years after the big bang, when the galaxies that exist today were just beginning to take shape.

Is it ironic or somehow symmetrical and appropriate that the wave of technological advances which enable us to see so far into the past also make it next to impossible even to imagine -- much less predict -- what kinds of changes will be occuring over the next century or so?

Posted by Phil Bowermaster at 01:06 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

UPDATE: While we're talking about these kinds of things, Dean Esmay has a link to a news story about chimeras, which kicks off a very interesting discussion.

I would never have believed what a can of worms republishing my old post about Leon Kass and therapeutic cloning would open up. (Of course, the Instalanche was a major factor.) First off, Daniel Moore took me to task on definitional grounds. (Note the excellent comments by co-blogger Stephen Gordon and M104 member Karl Hallowell.) Grace at Orthodox and Heterodox found my views "chilling," while Justin Katz and friends at Dust in the Light went to some trouble to show that my views amount to advocacy for slavery and other evils. Gumby at Two Docs and a Shovel comments as follows:

This is why the hair on my neck sticks up. No longer does this blastocyst exist as a potential person, it is an object. A thing to be grown and discarded at the whim of the donor.

Continue reading "The Tiresome Argument II" »

Posted by Phil Bowermaster at 10:20 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)