Author: linas

(I posted this on #scuttlebutt yesterday, in response to a discussion about revolution.)

The current reality that I am faced with is almost half of the US and A voted for Trump and I don’t see how any amount of revolutionary fervor will change that. The reality is that these people live in a different mental universe than we do. That’s the “system” that we’re dealing with.

Let me talk about systems.There is the overtly visible system: the elected politicians, the 0.01%’ers who pull the strings, the networks of lobbyists who glue it all together. A very big complex system. Relatively unchanged for decades, centuries.

There is the brand-new system: the Fox News, the #propaganda mills, the delusional posts that is called #facebook, or social-media in general. Social media allows mind-viruses to spread, unchecked. There’s no mask. It’s daunting: its not just human psychology, its also #neurobiology. The circuits in your brain that make #nicotine addictive are related to the circuits that make political affiliation addictive.

Then there’s the reality: half of the US somehow managed to overlook or not notice Trump’s crimes. How is that even possible? What, exactly, is the “system” that causes this to happen? I mean, sure, I can hand-wave about echo chambers and social media and addiction and #capitalism, but honestly, I don’t understand it.

The closest I’ve come was hanging out on an alt-right, sharply 100% pro-Trump social media site and it was … shocking. People talked about being raped as children, by parents, by relatives, by school-teachers. People talked about losing fingers, arms, eyes from dangerous machinery. People complained about having a terrible education – in primary school, grade school. Unprepared for high-school, couldn’t hack it. Not ready for it. All kinds of mental issues, depression, hopelessness, anger. There was one guy, I’m imagining him as bearded redneck wiseman, trying to hold things together, playing the role of pastor, tending to his flock of broken-down chewed up human beings. And yes, of course, the above is interspersed with talk of libtards and guns and bigotry and utter hatred/contempt for Democrats.

Honestly, it was shocking. The mainstream media are happy to report on the gun-toting bigotry; we all know about that. A casual perusal for facebook gives absolutely everyone who cares to look a nice sampling of alt-right insults and hateful behavior and general stupidity.

What is invisible is the pathos. The decrepit and the broken will spew vile bile on facebook. They won’t open up about the absolutely horrible lives that they’ve endured, until they are in a safe space, where they can open up to each other about how completely broken they are.

As revolutionaries, we here in #ssb are, in a sense, very lucky to be able to rationally discuss revolution and the Matrix movies. But we’ve got this problem: this 49% of America that has been so screwed over by the system, so badly, that like a drowning man who can’t swim, they are grasping for straws, enthralled in the delusional belief that Trump will #MAGA, that Trump will save them, heal them, shelter them from the depredations of “the system” aka “the #Democrats” that have screwed them over (too blind, too deluded to the fact that the #GOP is actively making things much worse for them, while playing them for fools (that they are…))

That’s the revolution, that’s the system we have to fight.

As a physicist, I get to think about free will just like the rest of ’em.  I was recently prompted to set my thoughts to writing on the talk page of the Wikipedia article free will theorem. I think I can string together a few more pieces, and clarify how it actually “all works”. Caution: the rest of this article is about physics and math. So good luck with that, if you are not widely read.

The free will theorem starts with three postulates: an upper bound to the speed of information; the importance of spinors, and quantum entanglement. Not a bad foundation. Lets see how it plays out.

In some theories of entanglement, the resolution of wave function collapse happens via propagation of the phases of the wave-function into the past, see, for example, the two-state vector formalism. Here, it is not information that is travelling backwards in time, but rather the geometric phase (aka the holonomy). There is a U(1)-connection relating the phase of the quantum-mechanical particle (taken to be the phase of the spinor on a spin manifold); that phase has to be consistent across time (and not just space, as it is in the Aharonov–Bohm effect); to describe this consistency, one has to use the holonomy of the connection. If the phase in the future, after wave function collapse, is going to be consistent with the past, then you have to propagate it “all the way around”, “into the past” as well as “into the future” — to close the loop — the holonomic loop (aka the Wilson loop). That’s what makes the two state-vector formalism work. Roughly speaking, it is not “information” in the sense of “classical bits”, that propagates into the past, its the qubits. Anyway, that’s the general idea, as I understand it. The article on Aharonov–Bohm effect has a tortured, painful explanation of the space-like only version of this; I’ve seen far more elegant explanations elsewhere. Aim your search-engine at “U(1) holonomy” for details. Maybe throw in “Dirac string” into the search.

Anyway, that is my understanding of wave-function collapse. There’s no speed-limit in this. Basically, you can think of the past as being “not yet fully frozen” or “not yet fully determined” until the future forces those holonomic loops to close; when they finally freeze up, that wave-front of “freezing up” is what necessarily propagates at the speed of light. (I suppose if you are bold, you can claim that the U(1) of the quantum mechanical phase its exactly the U(1) of electromagnetism; this would explain why its the “speed of light” and not some other speed that is involved. I don’t know if one can be that bold, or not, but it sure seems reasonable.) The loops are what is carrying the “classical bits” of information, the classical bit corresponding to the question “is this loop closed yet, or not?” which has a clear yes/no answer.

The elegance of this is that it replaces a fairly nebulous concept of “causality” with something very concrete and algebraic: the holonomy, and Wilson loops, more generally, with which one can do explicit calculations: it is the cornerstone of algebraic topology. You can do calculations with loops, things like spectral sequences or more generally the Postnikov tower. You cannot do comparable calculations with “causality”. You can’t stick “causality” and “determinism” into some equation and turn the crank. It doesn’t work.

The other problem with the naive concept of the “speed of information” is with what happens at the event horizon at a black hole. My (faulty and naive) understanding is that, again, this is where the holonomy plays a key role; the holonomy in a certain sense “escapes” the black-hole information paradox. The holonomic loops are free to thread through the event horizon; that is because they are not “physical particles” and have no “speed” and thus no “speed limit”. Whatever is entangled inside the horizon must still be phase coherent across the horizon with whatever is going on outside. The evaporation is what “tunnels” the phase from the inside to the outside. Thus, it is not “information” that is being radiated away during during evaporation, it is the end-points of the holonomic loops; when these finally close, the “information” that they are closed is now outside of the BH. For evaporation (Hawking radiation), the end-points happen to be entangled spinors. They carry no information by themselves, the information is “created” when the wave-functions that embody them are a part of collapse. That is where “information” comes from. It is also “why” it looks like information “lives on” the event horizon; the information is a count of the not-yet-closed loops that are waiting for closure. This is consistent with the replica trick (from spin glasses) that is used to resolve the ER=EPR suggestion. The ER’s are the places through which the Wilson loops thread through.

In more abstract terms, information is a cobordism, or rather, the content of what is required to specify a specific cobordant arrangement. From what I can tell,  its got something to do with spectral triples, but I don’t entirely get it. The spectral triples describe the operators needed for the operator product expansion across  the event horizon boundary. Or something like that. I dunno.

So, the above is a sketch that offers up the mathematical details for why “causality” and “determinism” are faulty concepts. John Baez explained one aspect of this elegantly  where he argued for getting rid of category “Set” and replacing it by category “nBord” and category “Hilb”. (See “Quantum Quandaries: A Category-Theoretic Perspective” in “The Structural
Foundations of Quantum Gravity” (2006)) It gets rid of the stupidities with set theory and functions, which are the same stupidities of “causality” and “determinism”, that everyone gets so hung up about, and replaces them with e.g. the infinity category (or the infinity groupoid as that’s more appropriate.)

So where does “free will” come from? Roger Penrose suggests a path. Let me suggest a revised model. Modern physics uses the Standard Model to describe particle interactions.  For this discussion, let’s fall back to a simpler description, which can be used in generic settings (including in curved space-time): this is the resonant interaction. In this case, the conservation of energy becomes a Diophantine equation. Now, Hilbert’s tenth problem asks for the enumeration of such solutions, and it is now known that this is algorithmically impossible — there is no computer program that can achieve this. What does this mean? Well, “determinism” or “causality” is that thing which results when you use digital algorithms; such systems have no “free will”.

Put it this way: whatever free will is, it is certainly not a deterministic coupling. When you say “1+1=2”, it is what it is and there can be no other way. Any set of equations that couple together a bunch of different things “determine” those things. For example, mathematical proofs are “determined” by their premises; they proceed in a purely mechanical way unto their inevitable conclusion. When a certain path is not Turing computable, one gains a certain freedom, as it were; one is not forced to march down that path. So, for example,   when pondering the conservation of energy in the resonant interaction, the resonance condition is “fixed”: one must have a balance of energy. Re-interpreting this as Diophantine equations, we equally see that they are “fixed”, determinate. Balancing these against Hilbert’s tenth problem, we’ve got a rub: A certain set of deterministic, unbreakable equations have solutions that are not recursively enumerable. It is, as it were, that these equations can “make a choice”: they can say “I choose to be solved like so, or like so.”  There is no algorithm forcing their hand.  From the point of view of the Conway-Kochen free will theorem, an electron can choose to do this, or to do that. I’m being crazier here: a Diophantine equation can “choose” to express itself this way or that way.

This is how one builds the bridge from undecidability (Turing incompleteness) to “free will” in physics. To be crystal clear: the outcome of the interaction between physical (quantum mechanical) particles (in a curved space-time background) requires a decision problem to be solved, that cannot be solved using algorithms/Turing machines. Ergo “free will”.

(Footnote: It is not clear whether or not geometric finite automata (GFA), for example, the quantum finite automata (QFA) can evade these non-computability results. That is, can a QFA or GFA ever be an oracle? That is an interesting question in itself.)

This is a collection of supporting articles and footnotes for some of the other blog posts here. It focuses on biochemistry, neuroscience and the physics and mathematics of phase transitions in networks. It is meant to be a complement to the Social Network Crisis Reading List, which describes social media (facebook, youtube) as networks, and  the Capitalism Reading List, which focuses on the political and economic fallout from the crisis in social media (in the context of neurobiology). Articles on ecology too, as ecology is the science of complex biological, environmental systems.

• Mitochondria May Hold Keys to Anxiety and Mental Health. (Quanta Magazine). What the title says. Synapses communicate with neurotransmitters. Synapses communicate over social media. Mitochondria provide power to drive synapses. Electricity provides power to drive fiber optic amplifiers in trans-Atlantic fiber optic cables. Duh. And facebook/google algorithms coordinate this complex dance of interacting systems.
• The medications that change who we are. By Zaria Gorvett, 8th January 2020 BBC Future. A single dose of LSD makes one person hallucinate. A single dose of speed gives a single person superpowers for a day. A single dose of anti-depressants makes one person slightly happier for a day. An entire society high on pervetin…
• Speaking of an entire society high on Pervetin, there’s “The Very Drugged Nazi’s“,  by Antony Beevor, The New York Review of Books.  We’re talking Pervetin (trade name for methamphetamine), Eukodal (trade name for Oxycodone), Benzedrine, and Heroin (everyone knows that: trademarked name for diactyl morphine).
• How to use chemicals responsibly: “Wireheading Done Right: Stay Positive Without Going Insane“,  by algekalipso, Qualia Computing. August 20, 2016.

A few words about what chemicals do:

• Slime molds solve the two-armed bandit problem. Original article: “Decision-making without a brain: how an amoeboid organism solves the two-armed bandit” Chris R. Reid, Hannelore MacDonald, Richard P. Mann, James A. R. Marshall, Tanya Latty and Simon Garnier,  Journal of the Royal Society Interface, June 2016.
• Slime-molds, explore vs. exploit pop-sci: “Thinking while Brainless: Slime Mold Gives Insight into the Intelligence of Neuron-Less Organisms“, Patricia Damm , June 2016
• The jellyfish does one better: it invents the neuron. A signalling molecule enters a synapse here, comes out at another synapse 2 feet away, in only a millisecond. So 10000x faster than diffusion. And no cross-talk, either. The neuron is a kind-of stargate, star-trek teleporter for signalling molecules! Jellyfish have trouble deciding if they should eat, or if they should flee from predators. So they usually do both at the same time. The bilaterian does one better, by inventing a split brain… “Forced moves or good tricks in design space? Landmarks in the evolution of neural mechanisms for action selection”, Tony J. Prescott (2007)

Neurochemistry and it’s manifestation in Politics:

• Aljosa Puzar,  (2021). Towards a critical cultural epidemiology. Academia Letters, Article 570.
  https://doi.org/10.20935/AL570.  This article is ostensibly about the sociology of pandemics. Careful reading shows that it is a far more careful study of the topics I try to broach here. For example: the Great Toilet Paper Shortage of 2020 is presented as a coupling of primal fear, neurochemically and socially expressed, to neoliberal competitiveness, capitalist supply chains and “neuro-politics”.

Notable stuff I’ve stumbled across, worth checking out.

• The  Dark Forest Theory of the Internet by Bogna Konior. If you just search for the title, you’ll get lots of hits to … something else. The one you want to read is this one: because Bogna is a far superior author.  What’s it about? Well, clearly inspired by the Liu Cixin books.  Written as a companion piece to a sculpture:  Black Market : Zero Hedge (2019) by Andrej Škufca.  Wait, what’s it about? Oh, right. Its about the kinds of things I sometimes write about. In my other posts here.  Except Bogna writes better than I do.  So there. It’s about that. (7 Sept 2020)
• Facebook is a Doomsday Machine by Adrienne LaFrance  Since the title is left-explanatory, I decided to wallow in photos of decommissioned Titan nuclear missile silos instead.  Afterwards, I forced myself to read the article. It mostly states the obvious, if you think about such things, but let me re-iterate: 1) the algos drive engagement, and that means promoting extremist posts. 2) Zuckerberg is the most powerful man in the world. (yes, he’s more powerful that the POTUS. Good luck with that, Biden. You’re screwed. We’re screwed. We’re all screwed.)  3) His activities are detrimental to humankind. 4) There’s pretty much nothing we can do about it.  5) Lots of other curious commentary.  Misses the point that we are living in a phase change. But whatever, that’s a topic too big, too abstract.  (18 Dec 2020)

If you are imprisoned by reality, is it wrong to suffer from the Stockholm syndrome?  I read this quote: “People who are addicted to Twitter,” Lanier said, “are like all addicts—on the one hand miserable, and on the other hand very defensive about it and unwilling to blame Twitter.” Another word for this is doomscrolling — you keep scrolling down, looking for one more post…

Wait, how is this different than, I dunno, club-hopping (or bar-hopping?) Sure, the idea is to dance/get drunk, but along the way, you hope to find one more really great club/bar.  At the end you’re exhausted or drunk or both.  Is this addictive behavior?

Before there were clubs, before there were cities or towns, there were villages and hikes in the forest, and if you wanted to get so far out that you could never return, you could hike clear across some continent. Were such hikes pleasant, or did they end in misery? Both. Hiking is (physically) healthy: it triggers anabolic growth of muscles and assorted other positive physical changes. You feel pleasantly tired at the end of the day, because assorted endorphins are released, as well.   This is reality. This is the physical world the human animal  was born into, evolved into.

We’ve taken aspects of that physical world, and concentrated it, distilled it, enhanced it, and tried to make it even better. Clubbing is like … hiking in a forest … with friends …  finding a visually, spatially, architecturally stunning clearing … taking a rest, but then getting excited enough to dance.  Such clearings are rare.. but we can build them. Perhaps Stonehenge was the first nightclub ever. (OK, so the dolmen in Gaudalperal, Spain are maybe 2,000 years older… but you get the idea.)

Unlike a hike in the forest, clubbing is easier to get to. It’s safer: without wild animals to attack you, or poison ivy to roll around in, you can enjoy some intoxicants.  Sure, dancing can make you sweat, but you don’t even have to dance, if you don’t feel like it. And then there is the sexual tension… and, for some reason, its always hot, and the air is always bad. Why is that?  This is where things skew sideways. We’ve distilled the awesomeness of a hike, made it even better, but in some ways worse.

Every human activity began as wild animals living in nature. We’ve taken everything to an extreme: The hike in the forest has become the life-threatening hike across the Arctic, or the top of Mt. Everest. The clubbing scene can turn into living for (the Brazilian) Carnival (so, cosplay, before cosplay was invented). Quiet moments reflecting becomes published mathematics. Cracking a joke has become a vast entertainment industry. All small things can be, are plumbed to their most extreme depths.   Is this reality, or is this hyper-reality?

What’s the driver for extreme behavior? What pushes? Addictive neural circuitry pushes.  Sometimes the results are flawed: nicotine addiction, gambling addiction. The utility of any action is always in question: are the right-wingers correct in decrying this or that activity, or are the liberals correct in saying its harmless? Clearly, planting crops (or any overtly economic activity) is beneficial: it provides you with the food, the energy, the money to pursue extreme behaviors.  This is the basic premise of “capitalism”: it creates wealth, and without wealth, once cannot pursue extreme activities. We applaud STEM because it lies along an indirect path to wealth. Not so clear about music and Hollywood, even thought there’s much money there. But drug dealers also have a lot of money, so being profitable is not a clear-cut signal of social good.  Addiction feels good, at least for a while, at least in certain ways, but it’s a kind of sophisticated paper-clip maximizer:  we’re maximizing the utility function for … something, but was it really “good for you”?

Our neural circuitry enables the relentless exploration of extreme situations.  Sometimes it fails, and we paper-clip-maximize useless addictive behavior. Sometimes it works, when we’ve harnessed  it the achieve great new feats.  Ever notice how some (many?) of the driven over-achievers,  the burning hot, live-wires have a crazed look in their eye? They need to go farther, push harder, do more, be more, and there’s an obsessive quality to it.  Doom-scrolling for greatness. Stellar star-dom or bust.  What  exactly, is going on here, and why must I compulsively write about it?

A list of stories I’ve read, that I found notable, pertaining to economics and capitalism (and so, ultimately, deeply political). I might update it occasionally. Reverse chronological order (roughly). This is a complement to the Social Network Crisis Reading List, which describes the memetic, epidemiological crisis fanned by social media (Facebook and Youtube, I’m lookin at you), and the Neurochemistry and Bionetworks Reading List, which focuses on the brain, biochemistry at the cellular level, and the interaction of neurotransmitters, society and capitalism (e.g. nicotine).

• How Suffering Farmers May Determine Trump’s Fate – As rural Wisconsin’s fortunes have declined, its political importance has grown. By Dan Kaufman– New Yorker Magazine – August 10, 2020.
  A story of the demise of the small farm, the deterioration of rural living conditions. A closer look at the specifics of the larger theme that shows in other articles listed here:  the damage caused by capitalism, free markets, free trade and the destruction of cooperatives and social services.  The wanton destruction caused by Republicans, the willful neglect by Hillary-ite Democrats.
• Flailing States -Pankaj Mishra on Anglo-America – London Review of Books – Vol. 42 No. 14 · 16 July 2020.
  An examination of how 150 years of  social policy in Germany has kept it strong, even as  the US and  Britain flail and fail. An examination of how we got here: capitalist and neoliberal policy, free trade, globalization, Reagan and Thatcher, and also a look at India, China and South Korea.  There have been many social experiments, many alternatives to naked capitalism, that have been tried around the world, and have been found to work.  These offer more than a few alternative realities to the broken dysfunction here in the US. It’s high time we tried a few of these ourselves.
• Everything You Know About Global Order Is Wrong – If Western elites understood how the postwar liberal system was created, they’d think twice about asking for its renewal. – by Adam Tooze – Foreign Policy – 30 January 2019 (above links the getpocket version, the original is here.)
  Adam  Tooze writes prolifically about the “Global Order” – the globalized neo-liberal capitalistic corporate order under which we live. Envisioned and sold as a way of fighting off the Soviets,  it has out-lived its purpose and is now central for causing wide-spread harm throughout the US. I think he’s right – if the self-styled defenders of free markets understood what they were actually advocating, they might not be such boosters. This is in Foreign Policy magazine, because the wrong-footednes of free trade is actively damaging US interests globally. It’s damaging not just to farmers in Wisconsin, its damaging to our international power.
• The West Has a Resentment Epidemic – Across the West, the main trigger of populism has been the growing inequality—and hostility—between urban and rural regions. – by Roberto Stefan Foa and Jonathan Wilmot – Foreign Policy – 18 September 2019 – (above links the getpocket version, the original version is here.)
  There’s lots of good reading in Foreign Policy. This looks at the correlation between wealth inequality and political populism, here in the US, and world-wide. Perhaps no surprise, if you follow this stuff, but this provides good ammo. Populism is damaging – its a pseudo-cure, a crackpot cure that is as bad as the disease. The cure is to deal with the causes of populism, rather than trying to fend off the damage it creates.
• How the American Worker Got Fleeced – Over the years, bosses have held down wages, cut benefits, and stomped on employees’ rights. Covid-19 may change that. – July 2, 2020 Story by Josh Eidelson Data analysis and graphics by Christopher Cannon.
  Who isn’t getting paid, and why. Social safety nets aren’t just Social Security and Universal Healthcare – it also the relation between the employee and the employer. Labor rights have been gutted in the US, which is one reason Americans are loosing their jobs under covid-19 (but not the Germans, as explained in the Mishra article, above).  This article fails to mention co-operatives, which just might offer one of the best ways out of this mess.
• To Unreality and Beyond – An examination of the “propaganda of unreality” and why age-old principles of resistance to manipulation don’t work against today’s style of unreality. – by Peter Pomerantsev 23 October 2019 Journal of Design and Science –
  This article might not belong in in this blog listing, but it serves to link to the other things I blog about — unreality, mental processes, delusion, disinformation, mass hysteria, propaganda, brainwashing, and the difficulty of perceiving reality. This article examines Russian disinformacya, and how it has been used to delude Russian voters over the last few decades, and how the same methods are now being deployed against Americans. That is to say, American workers were not just fleeced of their salaries, America farmers were not just dispossessed of their family farms, but they went along willingly – even worked themselves into this mess, willingly voting for those GOP Republicans who cared not one bit for their health, wealth,  jobs or livelihoods.  (My cousin Tommy voted for Trump!) They vote this way because they are literally being deluded, they are literally being pushed into delusional states of mind by GOP operatives.
• Yale psychiatrist: Trump’s psychosis has infected his followers. Here’s how to get them better. Without rallies, it’s harder to pass his contagious mental disease to his MAGAites. By Bandy X. Lee – Salon – 22 July 2020.
  Well, since we wandered off into unreality land, this offers a different take on the social process of mental disturbance.
• Trade-Off. Financial System Supply-Chain Cross-Contagion: a study in global systemic collapse. By David Korowicz – 30 June 2012 – Metis Risk Consulting & Feasta.
  This pertains to another one of my interests: network science. In molecular biology, we have DNA and proteins, signalling molecules and cell membranes all interacting with one-another to up/down-regulate genetic expression and generally alter cell metabolism and communicate with the world via ionic channels and other membrane processes. So also, it seems, in economics.  There are two notable processes at work. First, biological death is the result of the accumulation of many small, tiny injuries and breakages to functional systems. Second, systemic collapse is similar to sand-pile collapse, when the network of places where sand-grains touch each other suddenly shifts, as the slope of the sand-pile approaches criticality. So also in economics. This paper looks specifically at the supply chain.
• The Real Class War – By Julius Krein – November 2019 – America Affairs Journal –
  Here, Julius Krein argues that the real class war is not between labor and capital – labor lost that one half-a-century ago, but rather, between the professional elites and the capitalists (the 0.1%). This is because the capitalists – the 0.1% of the population that controls almost all the wealth in America, need the remaining top 10% to actually make things work: the professionals – the lawyers, the accountants, the managers, the functionaries, the engineers, the software programmers – the college-trained elite who actually know how to run organizations, who actually know how to make computers work, who actually know how to go about making laws and winning legal cases, how to market products and run supply-chains. Without these people, nothing works. This class, the professional class, shifted to the GOP in the 1980’s. They are now shifting away from it, as they too are starting to feel the pinch of income and wealth inequality. In case you haven’t noticed, stockbrokers are loosing their jobs, and they’re none-too-happy about it.
• Explaining the Trump Movement Through the Lens of the Social Organism – by Fergus Thomas – Irban Group – 19 Dec 2016 –
  Marvelous article reviewing the basics of memes and network theory. Recall how I talked about the collapse of sand piles, cellular death, and supply-chain contagion as explainable by network theory? Well, the same applies to the spread of memes on social media, and the incredibly invasive power of memes into the thought-patterns of humans.  The article on “Trump Psychosis” makes it sound like its all about psychology – what individuals think (in a group setting). The article on “Russian Disinformacya” makes it sound like its just social, informational manipulation.  This article  bridges over into the network theory — its the network that matters! The things that are bouncing around between brains — the messages and the memes — are one thing, but the network topology — which brains are talking to which ones, is really the key.
• The Wisdom and/or Madness of Crowds – Nicky Case. So in case you’re not following what I mean by “network theory”, and how that applies to politics, economics and psychology, the above is a simple, fun game that explores the mathematics (gasp!) of network theory. Its a game. you can play it in your web browser. Its short – maybe 20 minutes – its fun! Do it now!

OK,  I’m running out of steam here. Some other notable things to read and ponder:

• Smart, Young and Broke – by Melinda Yiu and Marije Vlaskamp – 19 June 2010 – Newsweek – Chinese universities creating more graduates than the economy can absorb. http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2010/06/19/smart-young-and-broke.html – link-rotted.
• The Federal Budget is not Like a Houshold Budget: Here’s Why by L. Randall Wray – 12 April 2010- Roosevelt Institute  – Seven balanced budgets lead to seven depressions:
  http://www.rooseveltinstitute.org/new-roosevelt/federal-budget-not-household-budget-here-s-why – link-rotted. – Explained MMT in simplified terms.
• When Droids take your job. 28 November 2011 LA Times Opinion – A duo from MIT argue that rapid computer advances may be vaporizing careers faster than workers can train for new ones.
• Douglas Adams on electing lizards:  http://wso.williams.edu/~rcarson/lizards.html – link-rotted
• The Roving Cavaliers of Credit – Steve Keen’s Debtwatch 31 February 2009 –  This is a “classic” article, written at the height of the 2009 economic collapse, outlining the basic idea of “endogenous money” – It seems to be contradicted by the next one below:
• Understanding the Modern Monetary Theory – this URL has link-rotted and now redirects to  My View on MMT – by Cullen Roche 16 May 2011 – maybe the links there are still OK.
• The fundamental difference between MMT’ers and Austrians – by Cullen Roche – 28 December 2011 – Pragmatic Capitalism.
• Maximizing shareholder value is the dumbest idea in the world.  – by Steve Denning – 28 November 2011 – Forbes Magazine
• Nobody Understands Dept – Paul Krugman Opinion piece – 1 January 2012 – NYTimes.  Trivialization of MMT theory for the masses.
• How Republicans Made Congress Stupid – Th0rn – 10 June 2014 – Daily KOS. Congressional staffs were gutted during Regan era, leaving the various staffs and committees quite literally stupid!

Oh and in case all of the above is still too intellectual for you, here’s how Cracked Magazine explains it all: How Half Of America Lost Its F**king Mind – by David Wong  – October 12, 2016. I’ve got nothing against MAD Magazine, but David Wong is educational at a whole new level.

David Chapman offers a critique of rationality at his meaningness.com site.  Interesting reading. To define the word “ontology”, he offers up a rather striking list, a categorization of animals,  from Jorge Luis Borges, from the Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge. The list is at first absurd, and humorous:

1. those that belong to the Emperor,
2. embalmed ones,
3. those that are trained,
4. suckling pigs,
5. mermaids,
6. fabulous ones,
7. stray dogs,
8. those included in the present classification,
9. those that tremble as if they were mad,
10. innumerable ones,
11. those drawn with a very fine camelhair brush,
12. others,
13. those that have just broken a flower vase,
14. those that from a long way off look like flies.

Chapman goes on to note: “This is a bad ontology, for any imaginable purpose, but it is not false.”

I’m not so sure. It has a purpose, and the purpose is to portray the inner workings of the mind.  Which Borges does so well. There is a marvelous consistency to the list.

It documents the workings of the inner mind of a country peasant – the earnest thinker, the one you might encounter at the end of a long pleasant summer’s day, after all work has been done, and one has rested a bit. The question is a reasonable one to pop into thought, as there were animals seen throughout the day: chickens in the yard, wild beasts at the fringes of field and forest. The mind wanders: What is an animal?

Of course, all the King’s beasts are the King’s, and there will be unbearable trouble if the warden catches you hunting them. So of course, 1. The warden doesn’t know about the stuffed muskrat in the shed, but that was already found dead, so can’t be blamed for that. So, of course, 2. the embalmed ones. Oh gosh, there are so many animals! How could one list them all? There are dogs, they’re good at hunting. Let’s say, 3. those that are trained. (….)

Summer’s feast is coming up. Just a few weeks away. Much work left to be done, to prepare for it. There will be a roast. Pigs. 4. suckling pigs. Roast suckling pigs. Mmmm. There will be many guests. You must come! Much work left to be done.

I can’t think of anything else. That’s pretty much it. What else could there be? (……) 5. Mermaids. Do you think dragons count as animals? There are so many, gryphons and things. Surely they’re animals. 6. Fabulous ones.

Argh! There’s that damned dog again. Go dammit. How am I gonna deal with it? Thief. 7. stray dogs. Stray dogs are animals. Everything included in the present categorization is an animal, so 8. Of course. That stray dog reminds me of the fox I saw yesterday. I must have surprised it, it was hunched over something, trembling. But strangely salivating, teeth bare. Maybe rabid. 9. those that tremble as if they were mad. I guess anything is an animal, there are so many. 10. innumerable ones. I once saw a book, and it had pictures in it, very fine. If I could show it to you. Pages and pages, you would just open it, and there would be a picture of an animal. A drawing. A painting. That’s not what its called. An engraving? I don’t remember what they called it. Here: 11. those drawn with a very fine camelhair brush. There were so many. 12. others.

Wife steps to the door. Says I’ll have to mend the vase before summer feast. Cat broke it. 13. those that have just broken a flower vase. Evening is upon us, time to go inside. Standing up, straightening one’s legs. One last glance towards the distant edge of the woods, a hint of movement. A shimmering, maybe a breeze in the aspens. 14. those that from a long way off look like flies.

This is my pastoral classification of animals. It’s very natural. It’s complete. It lists them all. We’ve thought about everything in the entire universe. Mermaids! My man! Think it! All of them! It’s a good listing. Proper work for an evening.

A social media acquaintance on scuttlebutt recently posted:

“I have a friend that has gone full #QAnon on #facebook. I haven’t visited my account in over a year but now find myself visiting daily for about a week to see what they have posted. I guess this is why Facebook doesn’t want to limit stuff like this. It gets clicks!

Truthfully I don’t even know what I am getting out of visiting it, but I continue to do it. Am I getting a laugh out of the absurdity? Am I enjoying getting angry at some of the ridiculousness? I don’t even know. It likely somehow is making my life worse.”

I could not let that one just sit there. I replied:

Before #social-media, most folks got opinions from TV news, books, papers, etc. and stuff like QAnon would be dropped like a hot potato by TV/News editors. So #mainstream-media filtered out (most of) the crap and insanity. (There were always fringe publishers, but they were fringe… that’s why the TV shows like X-Files and Fringe were so much fun.)

Not like that any more … bad memes can circulate like bad bacteria, and anyone can catch it. Social media allows direct person-to-person, brain-to-brain contact, allowing crazy thoughts to become highly infectious. I mean this in the literal sense, not the poetic sense … this is very much like a #neuroscience network #disease process, and needs to be treated as such.

I should mention that the “Great Firewall of China” is at least partly about this (to be very charitable …) – by controlling who can post what on social media, they control the infection rate of assorted memes. They can suppress both bad and good memes, so not only scams and frauds but also valid criticisms of the government. I’m told that the best way of criticizing the government is to quote #confucius – that’s so patriotic, the censors don’t dare suppress it. See: American Affairs  – Missionaries of Humanity: Popular Confucianism in China.

So, yeah, basically I’m saying that censorship might not be entirely a bad thing.

Addiction

He asked “I don’t even know what I am getting out of visiting it.” Well, I must explain:

1. What you are getting out of it is a perverse pleasure of watching a train-wreck. Kind-of like surfing #covid statistics and hoping the numbers go up. It’s a certain set of neural feedback loops in the brain that trigger a pleasure response.
2. facebook hires psychologists and #neuroscience people who know exactly how this works, and use them to perform research on increasing the addictiveness of facebook. You are literally being manipulated.
3. facebook is not the only one. There are help-wanted job ads from assorted political-marketing manipulation outfits which explicitly ask for neuroscience/psychology experience, so that they can tweak their #algorithmic-propaganda algorithms. Somewhere I have a browser tab open with one of these ads in it. I meant to study it in greater detail, it was … interesting.
4. So #phillip-morris the #cigarette company is aware of this, and they are looking to diversify out of nicotine. I was supposed to sign an NDA at the door but they screwed up and forgot (I wasn’t told about the NDA till weeks later, so not my fault) so I can tell you: they are keenly aware that they service an addiction mechanism in the brain, and they are dimly aware that there are other addiction circuits, including addiction to gambling, gaming, and addiction to facebook, and addiction to #qanon. They were there to brainstorm new neuro-products for the market. Both chemical-based and non-chemical-based. I talked about wireheading. So, yes, basically, I helped an evil company try to come up with new addictive products.

Addiction is such an ugly word. I try to explain this in another blog post: Endorphin Supply Chains. A better slogan might be “Better living through chemistry”, or “Enhancing your mood throughout the day”, or even “Tastes great, less filling!” – no one runs around accusing Starbucks of selling psychoactive drugs, but that is exactly what they do.

FWIW, the Scientific Revolution might be due to coffee. In the Middle Ages, there was a problem with water purity, and beer was clean and safe to drink. Unfortunately, it puts you in a stupor. When coffee arrived (the first coffee shops in London in the early 1600’s (?)) you could drink, and get smarter, not dumber.

Algorithmic Cancel Culture

So my buddy Rumblestilskin makes the brilliant observation:

“I doubt we will see the level of censorship in the West like we see in China anytime soon. I still think there will be some response (natural, grassroots?) that can combat these extreme memes in society.

I think Cancel Culture is in someways a response to these extreme memes and also a response to remove old ideas from society that are no longer useful. Cancel Culture may go too far sometimes, but I see it as an overactive immune response that can eventually be regulated to the correct level.”

Its hard to see how to improve on that comment. This will require deeper thought. Yes, censorship is a very blunt tool. Kind of like chemotherapy for cancer: its just a poison, and you hope the cancer gets more poisoned than the rest of the body. Of course, chemotherapy is administered by MD’s with some sense of ethics. Censorship … not so much. Overwhelmingly powerful state actors administer censorship. And here in the West, we sense the danger of this, we know this innately and call it “free speech”.

Facebook has kicked me off of facebook. Why? They won’t say: maybe because I called out more than a few racists (aka “violated terms of service”).  Maybe because they cannot tolerate inflammatory, rabid posts like this one – they are more interested in giving QAnon and assorted deranged right-wingers a protected safe space to be nurtured and grow. A walled garden for trumptards and snowflakes and malevolent, twisted souls.  This makes facebook into an evil corporation: they intentionally breed toxic memes.  And they have state-actor type powers to kill and suppress ideas such as the ones that I spread.  And, to re-iterate: toxic, racist memes are literally harmful, they are very much like a bad disease, a mental disease, and it is literally communicable, catching.

If it were only as easy as it was for John Snow, when he broke cholera by putting a padlock on a water-well in London in 1854. We can’t remove racism from the brains of the infected, and we cannot depend on corporate censorship to “do the right thing”. But maybe we can do something useful with Cancel Culture.  This is an idea worth exploring.

Before neurotransmitters, there was bacterial signalling, for example, quorum sensing in bacteria. Signalling with small polypeptides can solve certain kinds of decision problems, for example, the exploit vs explore problem in slime molds (basically, the trade-off of effort searching for new food sources, vs. “exploiting” (eating) the current food source). It can be shown that the slime mold solves the two-armed bandit problem quite well, but not as well as the best possible algorithm (explore vs exploit is a mathematically known as the “two-armed bandit problem“). There are two problems: speed of processing is limited by the rate of diffusion of the signalling molecules, and there is a huge amount of cross-talk, because the signalling molecules spread everywhere.

Jellyfish solve this problem by inventing the neuron. Its really the neuron that is the star-gate for neuro-transmitters: neurons provide point-to-point connections, so little or no cross-talk, and extremely fast — milliseconds for a neuron spike (a soliton) to travel a meter, which is tens of thousands of times faster than diffusion for the same distance. The result really is a star-trek like increase in the information-processing ability of structural arrangements of biomolecules.

The problem with jellyfish, though, is that they have trouble deciding when to eat, and when to flee predators. So they don’t … they do both at the same time. Which maybe is not so good for survival. Deciding “what to do” is called “action selection”. Here’s a nice article explaining how brains are smarter than neural nets (and no, they are not the same thing). Tony J. Prescott (2007) “Forced moves or good tricks in design space? Landmarks in the evolution of neural mechanisms for action selection“.

The point of the story about the global brain is that things don’t just stop with the brain: we have all of sociology and civilization in front of us. A reasonable place to start is with the idea of a “psychotechnology”: for example, that a 24-letter phonetic alphabet, spread by Ancient Phonecian sailors, really is better than Egyptian Hieroglyphics. John Vervaeke has a 50-part lecture series on this: “Awakening from the Meaning Crisis“. Some more advanced conceptions of meaning are explored in the books by David Chapman on meaningness.com. There is a vast amount of material there, so maybe starting in the middle is a good place.

Beyond the concept of a meme is the “teme” – roughly, a “technological meme”. The tobacco industry is a great example. It co-exists with a set of neural feedback loops, that reinforce nicotine craving with time-scales varying from milliseconds to minutes, with distinct feedback loops operating at 15-minute, multi-hour, week-long and multi-month-long scales. Each of these feedback loops is distinct from the others, but inter-coupled, which is why quitting smoking is so hard. Even if, through sheer will-power, you’ve gone without a cigarette for a week, there is one more feedback loop that is still running that is still saying “nicotine feels good.”

But scientists don’t know everything… it was politicians who figured out that there was yet one more feedback loop, this one involving advertising and marketing. To break addiction, you have to break the advertising/marketing feedback loop. This is a formidable loop, because a trillion dollars a year is very powerful.

This is not my idea: apparently, Nicolas M. Kirchberger talks about this in a book which I have not read: “The Evolving Self”, which someone else described as so:

“Most manufactured goods enter in this category, like cigarettes being a kind of replicator that uses smokers to replicate; once they start replicating, they can’t be stopped so easily and tend to grow as much as they can to fill the market regardless of ‘people’s intentions’. Seen like that, those kind of problems appear much more complex to manage…”

To rephrase more accurately, all temes are of this form: they consist of global manufacturing lines and supply chains interacting with small peptide molecules, up- and down-regulated DNA and RNA, ribosomes and protein expression, neural feedback loops, individual humans, fiber-optic trans-oceanic networks and cloud computers, corporations, laws that restrict marketing and promote product safety, all operating at or near the edge of a phase transition. I say”phase transition” because this is where mathematics meets systems theory. Don’t let high-school physics fool you: our mathematical understanding of phase transitions exploded during the 1980’s and 1990’s, and has become quite sophisticated, with tentacles into analytic combinatorics, number theory and even string theory. If you want to understand complex systems, you have to understand this theory.

What does this long footnote have to do with AGI? Well, AGI slots into this system of global supply chains and manufacturing systems. Existing AI algorithms are used to not only inform/misinform voters on political issues, but also improve manufacturing and shipping. The AGI algorithms will be deployed into this infrastructure, as a particularly powerful controlling feedback loop. The boundaries of AGI are fuzzier than you think, and the future is closer than it appears.

The above blog post used to be a footnote to my earlier post, AGI Career Advice. But that footnote wanted to be free, so here it is. This post also appears in medium.com.

A younger student, Ben Schultzer,  emailed me yesterday, to ask about AGI.  Since I like writing, I wrote a long answer. I’m reproducing some of it below.

1. Evidently (because of OpenCog), you have at least some belief that symbolic/classic techniques are valuable towards the development of AGI.

Do you think that a hybrid approach is the best way of getting there (compared to, for examples, purely deep learning, purely symbolic, or even simply simulating all 100 billion neurons of the human brain)?

Yes, but … symbolic vs. neural is the wrong perspective. Sparse representations vs. dense representations is the correct distinction to make. Both involve numbers and vectors and probabilities; the difference is the density of the interconnections between “things”.  I will expand on this answer in a new blog post on the OpenCog Brainwave blog later today (tomorrow?)

2. What is …

3. Could you give a rough estimate for the minimum amount of computing resources required to establish and run an AGI?

The next problem is the term  “AGI”. It’s not what you think it is. Most people seem to think of it as a nice chap you can invite over for dinner, and have a good chatbot with it. It’s not like that. Let me explain.

If you were the only human in the world, your brain would be all there is. But no, there are others, and your brain uses words to communicate with other brains, the network forming a giant global brain.  For example, I stub my toe; there’s a chemical reaction that releases assorted signalling molecules in my toe, that tweaks some neurons, that pulse some solitons up my spine to my brain, and I yell out “ouch” which makes air vibrate which makes neurons in your brain know that I stubbed my toe. Natural language is a Star Trek teleporter for acetylcholine and dopamine.

What is the global brain doing? Well, on facebook, its is a quivering blob of jello getting delusional about flat-earth, global warming, BLM and #defund.  More stable structures in the global brain are universities and rule-of-law, both having been stable configurations for about 800 years now, and corporations and nation-states, which have been around for about 400+ years. (Sure, Rome is older, but Rome was agrarian.)

Starting in the 1980’s, a significant portion of the computing performed by the global brain has been done in silicon, first by spreadsheets in corporations, but also desktop-publishing in local communities. Then, in the 2000’s, social media completely rewired the global brain. Before 2000, individuals used sound-waves to communicate with neighbors, friends, bosses, and radio waves and television to communicate with mass audiences. After 2000, with facebook and other systems, individual brains are now connected electronically with fiber optics, directly, point-to-point, without intermediaries, without having newspapers in the middle, filtering out who can say what to who.  The network topology of the global brain is radically different now.  (This is one reason why everything is so “crazy” now — without the filtering of newspaper editors suppressing crackpot stories, the global brain has started to amplify the insanity – flat-earth, chem-trails, magenta-people, trump derangement syndrome… its all because the network topology is different. The Great Firewall of China is an attempt to tamp down and modulate the crazy-making of social media. At least, that’s the benevolent description of it.)

Besides communications, silicon electronics also provides RAM storage for the global brain. For example, Wikipedia, but also blogs and PDF’s.  The long-term memory ability of the human brain has dramatically improved — in the 1980’s, it took the typical human a minute or two to recall one fact out of a small number of facts. Now it takes only seconds, thanks to google and duck-duck-go. And you can remember much much more: you can remember all of Wikipedia, for example, which was impossible in the 1980’s,  unless you walked to the library to read a book. Which the global brain usually didn’t do, preferring to drink and party.

So, anyway, I estimate that currently, silicon electronics makes up about 0.01% to maybe 0.2% of the processing power of the global brain. It’s still  poorly integrated. Cell-phones are OK, augumented reality would be better, and a neural lace: wires directly implanted in the brain would provide the highest bandwidth.  But do you really want a permanent facebook party wired to your brain? Hmm. Anyway, by Moore’s law, if we are at 0.01% to 0.2% today, then…

Well, the point of this long story is that you are already a participant in AGI: its just called “corporations” and “communities” and “courts of law” and “police stations”, and that AGI that you are already a part of is just 0.01% in silicon, although that fraction is increasing exponentially.

The point is: AGI is not going to be like this super-smart robot, individual and distinct, the nice chap we can invite over for dinner. It will be part of “us”.  It will be intimately connected to us, literally fucking with our brains.  If you thought algorithmic propaganda was problematic, well, that’s just the first baby-step on the path to AGI. True AGI is a kind of atom bomb going off, and instead of splitting uranium atoms, it’s splitting memes. You know — those memes that show a picture of the Corona-beer guy, and the caption says “I don’t always vote for Trump, but when I do, I prep for the end of the world.”

5. Do you have any advice for a younger person who hasn’t established their career yet?

If we actually have an algorithmic-propaganda bomb go off, do you think “careers” will still matter?

In the short term, having reliable access to a monetary income is important. Capitalism may take more than a few decades to implode, so having money is still very useful.  Also, having a high IQ is also useful for survival. So, high IQ is partly determined by genetics, and partly determined by social milieu — so I recommend Ivy League Universities, and hanging out with the very smartest people possible, the smartest ones who will admit you to their social circle. In the old days, this was called “social climbing”, and there’s a nasty way to do it, and a nice way, where you don’t have to leave wreckage behind you.

Exactly how this will help you when the algorithmic propaganda bomb goes off, I dunno.  How much time do we have? I dunno. Will it end wonderfully? I dunno. It will be different, though.

Footnotes

I need to find a footnote plugin for wordpress. Because the above text deserves footnotes. So, instead, a backgrounder post here: called “Endorphin Supply Chains.”

What does that long footnote-post have to do with AGI? Well, AGI slots into this system of global supply chains and manufacturing systems.  Existing AI algorithms are used to not only inform/misinform voters on political issues, but also   improve manufacturing and shipping. The AGI algorithms will be deployed into this infrastructure, as a particularly powerful controlling feedback loop.  The boundaries of AGI are fuzzier than you think, and the future is closer than it appears.