Book Review: Superintelligence by Nick Bostrom

Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies [Goodreads] by Nick Bostrom is a big idea book. The big idea is that the development of truly intelligent artificial intelligence is the most important issue that our generation will face. According to Bostrom, it may be the most important issue the human race has ever faced. This view suggests that how we approach the development and response to AI will be more important than how we respond to nuclear proliferation, climate change, continued warfare, sustainable agriculture, water management, and healthcare. That is a strong claim.

The sale of Bostrom's book has no doubt been helped by recent public comments by super entrepreneur Elon Musk and physicist Stephen Hawking. Musk, with conviction if not erudition, said

With artificial intelligence we are summoning the demon.  In all those stories where there’s the guy with the pentagram and the holy water, it’s like yeah he’s sure he can control the demon. Didn’t work out.

One almost wishes that Musk didn't live in California. He provided ten million US dollars to the Future of Life Institute to study the issue three months later. Bostrom is on the scientific advisory board of that body.

Hawking agrees with Musk and Bostrom, although without the B movie references, saying,

Success in creating AI would be the biggest event in human history. Unfortunately, it might also be the last, unless we learn how to avoid the risks.

Bostrom, Musk and Hawking make some interesting, and probably unfounded, presumptions. This is hardly uncommon in the current public conversation around strong AI. All seem to presume that we are building one or more intelligent machines, that these machines will probably evolve to be generally intelligent, that their own ideas for how to survive will radically differ from ours, and that they will be capable of self-evolution and self-reproduction. 

Jeff Hawkins provides the best answer to Elon Musk, Stephen Hawking, and Nick Bostrom that I have read to date:

Building intelligent machine is not the same as building self-replicating machines. There is no logical connection whatsoever between them. Neither brains nor computers can directory self-replicate, and brainlike memory systems will be no different. While one of the strengths of intelligent machines will be our ability to mass-produce them, that's a world apart from self-replication in the manner of bacteria and viruses. Self-replication does not require intelligence, and intelligence does not require self-replication. (On Intelligence [Goodreads], pp. 215)

Should we not clearly separate our concerns before we monger fear? The hidden presumptions of self-evolution and self-reproduction seem to be entirely within our control. Bostrom makes no mention of these presumptions, nor does he address their ramifications.

At least Bostrom is careful in his preface to admit his own ignorance, like any good academic. He seems honest in his self assessment:

Many of the points made in this book are probably wrong. It is also likely that there are considerations of critical importance that I fail to take into account, thereby invalidating some or all of my conclusions.

Beautifully, a footnote at the end of the first sentence reads, "I don't know which ones." It would be nice to see Fox News adopt such a strategy.

Another unstated presumption is that we are building individual machines based on models of our communal species. Humans may think of themselves as individuals, but we could not survive without each other, nor would there be much point in doing so.

We have not even begun to think about how this presumption will affect the machines we build. It is only in aggregate that we humans make our civilization. Some people are insane, or damaged, or dysfunctional, or badly deluded. Why should we not suspect that a machine built on the human model could not, indeed, would not, run the same risk? We should admit the possibility of our creating an intelligent machine that is delusional in the same way that we should admit the mass delusions of our religious brethren.

Is my supposition too harsh? Consider the case of Ohio bartender Michael Hoyt. Hoyt is not known to have had any birth defects, nor to have suffered physical injury. Yet he lost his job, and was eventually arrested by the FBI, after threatening the life of Speaker of the House John Boehner. Hoyt reportedly heard voices that told him Boehner was evil, or the Devil, or both. He suspected the Boehner was responsible for the Ebola outbreak in West Africa. He told police that he was Jesus Christ. Is Hoyt physically ill, or simply the victim of inappropriate associations in his cortex? We have many reasons to suspect the latter.

Bostrom originally spelled his name with an umlaut (Boström), as befits his Swedish heritage. He apparently dropped it at the same time as he started calling himself "Nick" in place of his birth name Niklas. Bostrom lives in the UK and is now a philosopher at St. Cross College, University of Oxford. Perhaps the Anglicization of his name is as much related to his physical location as the difficulty in convincing publishers and, until recently, the Internet Domain Name System, to consistently handle umlauts. His Web site at nickbostrom.com uses simple ASCII characters.

According to Bostrom, we have one advantage over the coming superintelligence. It is a bit unclear what that advantage is. The book's back jacket insists that "we get to make the first move." Bostrom's preface tells us that "we get to build the stuff." I tend to trust Bostrom's own words here over the publicist's, but think that both are valid perspectives. We have multiple advantages after all.

Another advantage is that we get to choose whether to combine the two orthogonal bits of functionality mentioned earlier, self-evolution and self-replication, with general intelligence. Just what the motivation would be for anyone to do so has yet to be explained by anyone. Bostrom makes weak noises about the defense community building robotic soldiers, or related weapons systems. He does not suggest that those goals would necessarily include self-evolution nor self-replication.

The publisher also informs us on the jacket that "the writing is so lucid that it somehow makes it all seem easy." Bostrom, again in his preface, disagrees. He says, "I have tried to make it an easy book to read, but I don't think I have quite succeeded." It is not a difficult read for a graduate in philosophy, but the general reader will occasionally wish a dictionary and Web browser close at hand. Bostrom's end notes do not include his supporting mathematics, but do helpfully point to academic journal articles that do. Of course, philosophic math is more useful to ensure that one understands an argument being made than in actually proving it.

Perhaps surprisingly, Bostrom makes scant mention of Isaac Asimov's famous Three Laws of Robotics, notionally designed to protect humanity from strong AI. This is probably because professional philosophers have known for some time that they are woefully insufficient. Bostrom notes that Asimov, a biochemistry professor during his long writing career, probably "formulated the laws in the first place precisely so that they would fail in interesting ways, providing fertile plot complications for his stories." (pp. 139)

To be utterly picayune, the book includes some evidence of poor editing, such as adjoining paragraphs that begin with the same sentence, and sloppy word order. I would have expected Oxford University Press to catch a bit more than they did.

Bostrom, perhaps at the insistence of his editors, pulled many philosophical asides into clearly delineated boxes that are printed with a darker background. Light readers can easily give them a miss. Those who are comfortable with the persnickety style of the professional philosopher will find them interesting.

Bostrom does manage to pet one of my particular peeves when he suggests in one such box that, "we could write a piece of code that would function as a detector that would look at the world model in our developing AI and designate the representational elements that correspond to the presence of a superintelligence... If we could create such a detector, we could then use it to define our AI's final values." The problem is that Bostrom doesn't understand the nature of complex code in general, nor the specific forms of AI code that might lead to a general intelligence.

There are already several forms of artificial intelligence where we simply do not understand how they work. We can train a neural network, but we cannot typically deconstruct the resulting weighted algorithm to figure out how a complex recognition task is performed. So-called "deep learning", which generally just means neural networks of more than historical complexity due to the application of more computing power, just exacerbates the problem of understanding. Ask a Google engineer exactly how their program recognizes a face, or a road, or a cat, and they will have no idea. This is equally true in Numenta's Cortical Learning Algorithm (CLA), and will be true of any eventual model of the human brain. Frankly, it is even true of any large software program that has entered maintenance failure, which is almost always an admission by a development team that the program has become too complex for them to reliably change. Bostrom's conception of software is at least as old as the Apple Newton. That is not a complement.

We will surely have less control over any form of future artificial intelligence than it will require to implement his proposed solution. Any solution will not be as simple as inserting a bit of code into a traditional procedural program.

Critically, Bostrom confuses the output of an AI system with its intelligence (pp. 200). This equivalence has been a persistent failure of philosophy. To quote Jeff Hawkins again, who I think sees this particularly clearly,

But intelligence is not just a matter of acting or behaving intelligently. Behavior is a manifestation of intelligence, but not the central characteristic or primary definition of being intelligent. A moment's reflection proves this: You can be intelligent just lying in the dark, thinking and understanding. Ignoring what goes on in your head and focusing instead on behavior has been a large impediment to understanding intelligence and building intelligent machines.

How will we know when a machine becomes intelligent? Alan Turing famously proposed the imitation game, now known as the Turing test, which suggested that we could only know by asking it and observing its behavior. Perhaps we can only know if it tells us without being programmed to do so. Philosophers like Bostrom will, no doubt, argue about this for a long time, in the same way they now argue whether humans are really intelligent. Whatever "really" means.

Bostrom's concluding chapter, "Crunch time", opens with a discussion of the top mathematics prize, the Fields Medal. Bostrom quotes a colleague who likes to say that a Fields Medal indicates that a recipient "was capable of accomplishing something important, and that he didn't." This trite (and insulting) conclusion is the basis for a classic philosophical ramble on whether our hypothetical mathematician actually invented something or whether he "merely" discovered something, and whether the discovery would eventually be made later by someone else. Bostrom makes an efficiency argument: A discovery speeds progress but does not define it. Why he saves this particular argument for his terminal chapter would be a mystery if he had something important to say about what we might do. Instead, he simply tells us to get on studying the problem.

I find that professional philosophers often slip in scale in this way. One moment they are discussing the capabilities and accomplishments of an individual human, generally assumed to be male, and the next they switch to a bird's eye view of our species as if the switch in perspective were justified mid-course. I find this both confusing and disingenuous. It is as if the philosopher cannot bear to view our species from the distance that might yield a more objective understanding.

The actions of individuals, both male and female, are inextricably linked to our cognitive biases. We do not make rational decisions, we make emotional ones, even when we try not to. We make decisions that keep our in-groups stable, by and large. A few, a very few, spend their days trying to think rationally, or exploring the ramifications of rational laws on our near future. A few dare to challenge conventional thinking aimed at in-group stability. Those few are not better than the rest. They are just an outward-looking minority evolved for the group's longer term survival. But the aggregate of our individual decisions looks much like a search algorithm. We explore physical spaces, new foods to eat, new places to be, new ways to raise families, new ways to defeat our enemies. Some work and some don't. Evolution is also a search algorithm, although a much slower one. Our species is where it is because our intelligence has explored more of our space faster and to greater effect. That is both our benefit and our challenge.

The strengths and weaknesses of the professional philosopher's toolbox are just not important to Bostrom's argument. Superintelligence would have been a stronger book if he has transcended them. Instead, it is a litany of just how far philosophy alone can take us, and a definition of where it fails.

I could find no discussion of the various types of approaches to AI, nor how they might play out differently. There are at least five, mostly mutually contradictory, types of AI. They are, in rough historical order:

1. Logical symbol manipulation. This is the sort that has given us proof engines, and various forms of game players. It is also what traditionalists think of when they say "AI".
2. Neural networks. Many problems in computer vision and other sort of pattern recognition problems have been solved this way.
3. Auto-associative memories. This variation on neural networks uses feedback to allow recovery of a pattern when presented with only part of the pattern as input.
4. Statistical, or "machine learning". These techniques use mathematical modeling to solve particular problems such as cleaning fuzzy images.
5. Human brain emulation. Brain emulation may be used to predict future events based on past experiences.

Of these, and the handful of other less common approaches not mentioned, only human brain emulation is currently aiming to create a general artificial intelligence. Not only that, but few AI researchers actually think we are anywhere close to that goal. The popular media has represented a level of maturity that is not currently present.

The recent successes of the artificial intelligence community are a much longer way from general intelligence than one hears from news media, or even some starry eyed AI researchers. There are also good reasons not to worry even if we do manage to create intelligent machines.

Recent news-making successes in AI have been due to the scale of available computing. Examples include the ability for a program to learn to recognize cats in pictures, or to safely drive a car. These successes are impressive, but are wholly specific solutions to very particular problems. Not one of the researchers involved believes that those approaches will lead to a generally intelligent machine. These are tools and nothing but tools. Their output makes us better in the same way that the invention of the hammer or screwdriver, or general purpose computer, made us better. They will not, cannot, take over the world.

Bostrom is, at the end, pessimistic about our chances for survival. Perhaps this is what happens when one spends a lot of time studying global catastrophic risks. Bostrom and Milan M. Cirkovic previously edited a book of essays exploring just such risks in 2011 [Goodreads]. More information is available on the book's Web site. The first chapter is available online. These three paragraphs from Superintelligence anchor his position in relation to AI:

Before the prospect of an intelligence explosion, we humans are like small children playing with a bomb. Such is the mismatch between the power of our plaything and the immaturity of our conduct. Superintelligence is a challenge for which we are not ready now and will not be ready for a long time. We have little idea when the detonation will occur, though if we hold the device to our ear we can hear a faint ticking sound.

For a child with an undetonated bomb in its hands, a sensible thing to do would be to put it down gently, quickly back out of the room, and contact the nearest adult. Yet what we have here is not one child but many, each with access to an independent trigger mechanism. The chances that we will all find the sense to put down the dangerous stuff seem almost negligible. Some little idiot is bound to press the ignite button just to see what happens.

Nor can we attain safety by running away, for the blast of an intelligence explosion would bring down the entire firmament. Nor is there a grown up in sight.

One could imagine the same pessimistic argument being made about nuclear weapons. They must be reigned in before "some little idiot" gets his hands on one. Is that not what has happened? The Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons has been a major force for slowing the spread of nuclear weapons in spite of the five countries that do not adhere to its principles. Separate agreements, threats, and sanctions has so far worked just well enough to plug the holes. Grown ups, from Albert Einstein to the current batch of Strategic Arms Limitation Talks negotiators, have come out of the woodwork when needed. Not only has no one dropped a nuclear bomb since the world came to know of their existence at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but even the superpowers have willingly returned to small, and relatively low-tech ways of war.

Bostrom urges us to spend time and effort urgently to consider our response to the coming threat. He warns that we may not have the time we think we have. Nowhere does he presume that we will not choose our own destruction. "The universe is change;" said the Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius Antoninus, "our life is what our thoughts make it." Bostrom might learn to temper his pessimism with an understanding of how humans relate to existential threats. Only then do they seem to do the right thing. He might also observe that unexpected events should not be handled using old tools, as noted by the industrialist J. Paul Getty ("In times of rapid change, experience could be your worst enemy.") or management theorist Peter Drucker ("The greatest danger in times of turbulence is not the turbulence; it is to act with yesterday’s logic.") We will need new conceptual tools to handle a new intelligence.

Our erstwhile fear mongers seem also certain that any new general intelligence would, as humans are wont to do, wish to destroy a competing intelligence, us. People fear this not because this is what an artificial intelligence will necessarily be, but because that is what our form of intelligence is. Humans have always feared other humans and for good reason. As historian Ronald Wright noted in A Short History of Progress [Goodreads],

"[P]rehistory, like history, teaches us that the nice folk didn't win, that we are at best the heirs of many ruthless victories and at worst the heirs of genocide."

This raises the fascinating question of how we, as a species, would react to the presence of a newly competitive intelligence on our planet. History shows that we probably killed off the Neanderthals, as earlier human species killed off Homo Erectus and our earlier predecessors. We don't play well with others. Perhaps our own latent fears will insist on the killing off of a new, generally intelligent AI. We should consider this nasty habit of ours before we worry too much about how a hypothetical AI might feel about us. If an AI considers us a threat, should we really blame it? We probably will be a threat to its existence.

It is possible that a single hyper-intelligent machine might not even matter much in the wider course of human affairs. Just like the natural, generational genius does not always matter. The history of the human race seems to be more dominated by the slow, inexorable march of individual decisions than it is by the, often temporary, upheavals of the generational genius. How would human development have changed if the Persian commander Spithridates had succeeded in killing Alexander the Great at the Battle of the Granicus? He almost did. Spithridates' axe bounced off Alexander's armor. Much has been made of the details, but people would still spread through competition, and contact between East and West would still have eventually occurred. The difference between having a genius and not having a genius can be smaller than we think in the long run.

Bostrom's main point is that we should take the development of general artificial intelligence seriously and plan for its eventual regulation. That's fine, for what it is worth. It is not worth very much, really. We are much more likely to react once a threat emerges. That's what humanity does. Bostrom is at best early at delivering a warning and at worst barking up the wrong tree.

Writer's Notebook - 13 January 2015

Various epistemological "razors"

• (William of) Occam's Razor: Among competing hypotheses, the one with the fewest assumptions should be selected. ("Plurality must never be posited without necessity")
• (Christopher) Hitchens' Razor: "What can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence"
• (Robert J.) Hanlon's Razor: "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity"
• (David) Hume's Razor: "If the cause, assigned for any effect, be not sufficient to produce it, we must either reject that cause, or add to it such qualities as will give it a just proportion to the effect"
• (Mike) Alder's Razor (AKA "Newton's flaming laser sword"): "What cannot be settled by experiment is not worth debating."
• (Ayn) Rand's Razor: "The requirements of cognition determine the objective criteria of conceptualization." (This is Occam's Razor with a corollary: Concepts are not to be multiplied beyond necessity nor are they to be integrated in disregard of necessity.)
• (Albert) Einstein's razor: "Everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler." (possibly originally, "It can scarcely be denied that the supreme goal of all theory is to make the irreducible basic elements as simple and as few as possible without having to surrender the adequate representation of a single datum of experience.")

Quote of the day

"Mathematics stipulates structures by axioms: anything that satisfies the group axioms is a group, etc.. Programming takes given structures and builds new ones out of them, and the basic stock of building blocks is centrally important. Very different ways of thinking." -- Pat Hayes

Je Suis Charlie

Like so many, I am appalled at the destruction of people and property, and the suppression of ideas, that occurred at the Charlie Hebdo offices in Paris on the 7th of January, 2015. Unlike so many, I cannot accept that the attacks "had nothing to do with religion", a view expressed by a French Muslim today on NPR's Morning Edition. The attacks were carried out by religious extremists for religious reasons. That is, of course, not to suggest that the majority of Muslims condone extremist violence, any more than the majority of Christians, Jews, Hindus or Buddhists condone violence. It is to say that religion, when believed literally, is a powerful and dangerous motivator.

Religion is only dangerous when it is believed.

I also cannot agree with the decision of many news organizations to refrain from publishing the Charlie Hebdo cartoons that are said to spark the violence. The cartoons are not, and never were, the issue. The issue is whether freedom of speech trumps religious sensibilities. It simply must do so.

Freedom of speech is a cornerstone of all freedoms in that it allows, and encourages, civil discourse. We accept the risk that it may sometimes cause offense because the benefits strongly outweigh the detriments. Freedom of speech is even more important than freedom of religion in that free speech allows for free expression in religious and other contexts. It is, in fact, only in a climate of free speech that religious tolerance can thrive.

Freedom of speech is more important than the fear of giving offense to others in that there is no end to what may, in some sense, cause offense. I choose not to be stifled by a few fanatics - even if they arm themselves and perpetrate violence.

For those reasons, I have decided to join a few brave (and mostly online) news organizations in republishing one of the Charlie Hebdo cartoons. I do not intend to cause offense. I do intend to stand for the one principle that underlies pluralistic society for the benefit of all.

The cartoon below is entitled "If Mohammed returned" and features the prophet being beheaded by a Muslim extremist. Mohammed is saying, "I am the prophet, fool!". The extremist responds, "Shut up, infidel!". I can think of no more poignant satire of the Charlie Hebdo tragedy than that.

Writer's Notebook - 8 January 2015

Notes on the Tabula Rasa

The tabula rasa is the philosophic concept that the human mind at birth is blank and without form; only experience is thought by adherents of this school of thought to create a human being.

The term tabula rasa comes from the Latin, which literally means "scraped tablet" and is a reference to a wax tablet used for writing in Roman times. The translation "blank slate" is more commonly heard in modern English.

• Aristotle recorded the first usage in de Anima (he called it an "unscribed tablet", Book III, chapter 4).
• ibn Sīnā, known as Avicenna in the West, first used the term tabula rasa in his translation of and commentary to de Anima.
• John Locke in Essay Concerning Human Understanding (he used the term "white paper" in Book II, Chap 1, Sect 2, and said that "there was in the understandings of men no innate idea of identity" in Book I, Chap 3, Sect 5, and "Whole and part, not innate ideas" in Book I, Chap 3, Sect 6), but see also his (contradictory?) idea that children may learn something in the womb (Book II, Chap 9 Sect 5).
• Jean-Jacques Rousseau used the idea of the tabula rasa to suggest that humans must learn warfare (18th century).
• Sigmund Freud used the idea to suggest that personality was formed by family dynamics.

The short course is that the tabula rasa was incredibly important to the historical development of philosophy right into the twentieth century. Unfortunately for those twenty three hundred years of history, the idea was simply wrong in its extreme form.

The philosophical schools contending over the existence and degree of tabula rasa in the human mind are known as Rationalism vs. Empiricism.

The current debate seems to have coalesced around an understanding that human babies are in fact born with innate cognitive biases, and this would seem to negate any idea of the tabula rasa as the term was initially used. However, many philosophers argue (because this is what they do) that of course that is not what was really meant. I think it was exactly what was meant by Aristotle and ibn Sīnā. What Locke and later thinkers thought is much more up for discussion.

I am a rationalist, in that I believe that the Innate Concept Thesis is correct ("We have some of the concepts we employ in a particular subject area, S, as part of our rational nature" -- Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy): We are born with cognitive biases that implement those concepts, such as mirror neurons and Theory of Mind. I discussed these features in more detail in my book review of Why We Believe in God(s) by J. Anderson Thomson.

Modern opponents of the tabula rasa include the linguist Noam Chomsky and the psychologist Steven Pinker. Chomsky is known for his theories of rationalist epistemology, including his theory that aspects of language are innate to a newly born child. Pinker claimed in his The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature [Goodreads] that the tabula rasa was responsible for "most mistakes" in modern social science, urging his colleagues to view humanity through the lens of evolution first and forgo preconceived notions gleaned from philosophic thought alone.

The Computational Theory of Mind, the relatively recent idea that human cognition is a form of computation (although implemented in a way very different from an electronic computer), was formulated partly by the rejection of the tabula rasa. The theory was developed primarily by mathematician and philosopher Hilary Putnam, philosopher Jerry Fodor, and extended in recent times by Steven Pinker.

The intellectual heritage of the Computational Theory of Mind can be summarized as follows, where red arrows indicate theories that have been replaced with new understanding and black arrows stand:

Quote of the Day

"Pristine prose or voice or funny or a brilliant simile in the first page or a great title or a great character name or authority or what the fuck or whole new world or something intangible but moving or alarming or surprising or terrifying or consoling or titillating or suicidal." -- Betsy Lerner on what makes a "perfect" book manuscript, in an interview by LitStack.

Writer's Notebook - 6 January 2015

Relationship Between the Brain and the Mind

Scientists seem to have accepted that the mind is created by the brain, e.g.:

• "[O]ur brain creates the experience of our self as a model - a cohesive, integrated character - to make sense of the multitude of experiences that assault our senses throughout a lifetime and last lasting impressions in our memory." Bruce Hood, The Self Illusion: How the Social Brain Creates Identity, Oxford University Press, 2012, pp. xiii [Goodreads]
• "Everything we think, do, and refrain from doing is determined by the brain. The construction of this fantastic machine determines our potential, our limitations, and our characters; we are our brains." Dick Swaab, We Are Our Brains: From the Womb to Alzheimer's, Allen Lane, 2014, pp. 3 [Goodreads].
• "the human brain, in all its electro-chemical complexity, creates what we call our minds. The neurological functioning of the brain, like the structure and functioning of other parts of the body, is a a human universal." David Lewis-Williams and David Pearce, Inside the Neolithic Mind: Consciousness, Cosmos and the Realm of the Gods, Thames & Hudson, 2005, pp. 6 [Goodreads].
• "[T]he mind is not the brain but what the brain does, and not even everything it does, such as metabolizing fat and giving off heat." Stephen Pinker, How the Mind Works, Norton, 2009, pp. 24 [Goodreads].

The idea is not new, just newly accepted:

It should be widely known that the brain, and the brain alone, is the source of our pleasures, joys, laughter, and amusement, as well as our sorrow, pain, grief, and tears. It is especially the organ we use to think and learn, see and hear, to distinguish the ugly from the beautiful, the bad from the good, and the pleasant from the unpleasant. The brain is also the seat of madness and delirium, of the fears and terrors which assail us, often at night, but sometimes even during the day, of insomnia, sleepwalking, elusive thoughts, forgetfulness, and eccentricities. -- Hippocrates

But note how recently the scientific establishment has come to accept the thesis that the mind is what the brain does. in 1997, Pinker needed to add a huge and careful caveat to his book:

The evolutionary psychology of this book is, in one sense, a straightforward extension of biology, focusing on one organ, the mind, of one species, Homo sapiens. But in another sense it is a radical thesis that discards the way issues about the mind have been framed for almost a century.

The so-called mind-body problem has been discussed and argued for millennia. Plato thought they were separate, Aristotle thought they were two aspects of the body. The combination of religion and respect for classical culture confused philosophers on the issue so deeply that real progress was obliged to wait for modern neuroscience in the post-computing era. Even twentieth century philosophers like John Searle did no better than repeat Aristotle's argument of a false dichotomy.

Today we tend to think of the mind as transient, malleable software running on the brain's hardware. That is a poor analogy, but it is the analogy of our age. Earlier ages uses steam engine or clockwork analogies and no doubt future ones will choose new analogies. A better way to think about the mind is that it is an emergent property of the brain's general ability to learn, as in Jeff Hawkins Cortical Learning Algorithm.

Quote of the Day

"If an elderly but distinguished scientist says that something is possible, he is almost certainly right; but if he says that it is impossible, he is very probably wrong." -- Arthur C. Clarke

The Testament of Gideon Mack by James Robertson

The Testament of Gideon Mack [Amazon, Goodreads] by James Robertson has a single unambiguous theme: doubt. That is the only unambiguous feature of the book. Robertson manages masterfully to question every aspect of his own story until one is forced to question nearly everything. Upon finishing the book, I was almost certain that I had, in fact, read it.

The book's notional plot describes the fantastic story of the eponymous Gideon Mack, a Presbyterian minister in a small Scottish seaside village, and his encounter with the Devil. At least, it might have been the Devil. Mack thought so. Sometimes. He might have just been insane. Many of the signs were there, from the fantasies of his loveless childhood to his literal howling at the base of a standing stone that might, or might not, have been imagined. Mack wrote his testament and it supposedly made its way to a publisher who doubted whether he should publish it. The publisher's notes frame Mack's version and supply both context and, following Mack's death, a conclusion of a sort. In a nice twist in the endnotes, the supposed publisher assures us that each sale of The Testament of Gideon Mack will benefit an aged care home in the fictional town described in the story. Robertson leaves us little choice but to doubt his word from beginning to end. This is fiction that will demand that you think.

Mack himself is a classic anti-hero, a characterization that Robertson uses in a footnote to describe another author's character. Robertson draws on many literary references. His characters read, and are influenced by, novels and histories both real and fictional. The author himself holds a Ph.D. in history from Edinburgh University; His dissertation on the works of Sir Walter Scott, a fellow Scotsman and author of such famous early nineteenth century works as Ivanhoe , echoes in The Testament. The women in Mack's life, Jenny the unloved and now deceased wife, Elsie the lover, and diseased Catherine the disputant, find their archetypes in nineteenth century English and French literature such as Gustave Flaubert's Madame Bovary and Lord Byron's Don Juan .

The real publisher, Hamish Hamilton in Scotland, part of Penguin Books, assures us in a standard disclaimer, "This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental." I would personally be saddened to think that our playful Dr. Robertson did not sneak in an intentional resemblance to a living person or two, just to carry his device to its logical conclusion.

Robertson authored two novels prior to The Testament and has authored two since. Hamish Hamilton is publishing a new short story by Robertson every day of 2014, each one 365 words long. None of the dozen or so I read included Robertson's broad Scottish vernacular. The Testament relies upon it. Having a copy of the Oxford English Dictionary handy is critical for American readers and others who are unfamiliar with the meanings of hunkers, boaks, or a smirr of rain. He is forced to explain commonly used words such as kirk (church) and manse (minister's house). Where the Scots Gaelic becomes too thick, Robertson helpfully supplies footnotes from his fictional publisher. The scene feels Scottish, from the persistent rain and angry young men to the shale beaches and craggy topology. The result is a novel that is fresh and genuine in its love of setting.

Robertson is also a partner in the grant-funded Scots language children's publisher Itchy Coo. Itchy Coo's Web site proudly offers a Hame page and an Aboot Us description. A character in The Testament amusingly pokes fun at authors who try to set Scots down in print. In fact, The Testament fairly brims with jibes at authors. One character is a perennially unpublished novelist. Another complains that "everybody thinks they have a novel in them" before declaring that writing is "a refuge from confusion". The process of writing does facilitate a certain clarity of thought, in my experience, if only because one must decide what to say.

Robertson holds out much hope for the written word, as if warding off a merely spoken evil. Mack laments the premature telling of his story by saying, "if people could have read this full and honest account rather than heard me announce it amid the din and confusion of that day, then perhaps they might have reacted with more open minds." At least three of his characters are writers.

The core of the book, though, is our relationship to truth. What is it? Can we know it? Would we understand it if it were presented to us? Why do people believe as they do? What are the costs of their beliefs? The Testament asks the big questions, explores them from many angles, and leaves you to answer them as you see fit. Robertson explores truth from many angles, including the ability to trust "facts" as they are presented, asks what we can truly perceive, informs on the limitations of human thought, wonders about the wisdom of teaching fairy stories to children, and worries about passions left uncontrolled.

Mack's justification for writing his testament is repeatedly referred to as a drive toward truth. But the absolute truth can be amazingly harmful to a community, as Robertson explores. Mack is shunned by everyone by the end of his truncated life for his effort. Robertson's story does not lend credence to Sam Harris' more recent thesis that we should all just tell the unabashed truth at all times (in Lying [Amazon, Goodreads]).

Naturally enough for a book set in Scotland, the central pole around which the book swings in its discussion of truth is religion, and its antipode, doubt of religion. "What is religion if not a kind of madness, and what is madness without a touch of religion?" Robertson asks.

We are told, "Human beings are at one and the same time utterly splendid and utterly insignificant." Could there be a more succinct description of the confusion of our times? Our Western civilization has advanced from an ego-centrism under the sky of the only world to one in which we are simultaneously the only intelligent life form we know and yet a mere speck in the vastness of an impossibly large universe. Robertson plays on our confusion from all angles. He gives us the character of Peter Macmurray, elder of the church and Mack's institutional nemesis, who represents the authority of religious institutions, and the character of Lorna Sprott, a fellow minister who is both a true believer and a sad alcoholic crushed under the authority to which she has submitted herself.

Robertson's tight writing shines in his description of Macmurray: "By day he is an accountant and by night, as Jenny used to say, he adds the saved and subtracts the damned, and always comes out with a minus figure."

Robertson deeply questions the role of the Church of Scotland and its relationship with Scottish culture. The nasty element of control in Western religions does not escape Robertson's notice. He has Mack speak of "the overwhelming weight that bears down on most people who enter a church - the weight of years of learning not to disrupt, not to object, not to speak out against authority." At one point he declares that, "The great age of religion had passed", only to suggest that the Kirk could still have a role in society. It is this Gaelic sensitivity to culture and identity that makes The Testament a wonderfully human book. Robertson recognizes and acknowledges non-traditional roles for traditional institutions but can only hope that they will come to see the world in the doubting way that he does. To not is tantamount to denying our recently-won knowledge and risks living with a permanently entrenched cognitive dissonance. Such dissonance is clearly evident in America's science-denying evangelicalism. Robertson informs us that the same stresses exist within other societies.

Lest one consider Robertson's religious beliefs clearly defined, he dithers. His characters are true believers, agnostics, fakers, atheists, vacillators. Elsie's husband John exclaims, "There are no answers, don't you see?", but John is a troubled and desperately unhappy man. He has not replaced religion with a working philosophy that might, as Aristotle suggested, provide him a replacement comfort. Robertson subtly pokes at the religious who express belief in the Devil while steadfastly finding Mack's claims to have met him utterly ridiculous. "The whole religion thing - not being able to reject it and not being able to embrace it", as Elsie says, seems to come closest to his position.

"The present", Robertson says, "was a mere waiting room for the future." That lovely observation is the exact opposite of the mindfulness of the present encouraged by Buddhism. It is also perhaps an unintended or unwanted consequence of our society's current affair with invention and discovery. The scientist or the engineer works toward a future in which theEureka moment will happen. The teenager waits for the new model mobile phone. The salaryman waits for retirement. We are a society of delayed gratification. Those who defer gratification until after death are religion's real losers.

There are many minor recurring themes in The Testament. Perhaps the most central to the book's exploration of truth is the tendency of people to see intelligent action where it is not. This is known to psychologists as hyperactive agency detection. If I suppose a tiger is responsible for the rustling of leaves I just heard and I am right, I might save my life by running away. If I am wrong, little harm is done. This instinctive survival trait causes no end of confusion for the modern person, living as we do with the distinct absence of tigers.

Gideon Mack's life is dominated by hyperactive agency detection. Upon seeing a bee fly out of a drawer, Mack "wondered if there was a message in it; any kind of meaning at all." When confronted with the appearance of the standing stone, he noted:

• "It seemed to me that the Stone had provoked this crisis, had engineered it in some way."
• "Because the Stone prevented it."
• "Perhaps the Stone was wielding some strange power over events and had brought her to my door at this moment."
• "The Stone did not want to be photographed. I no longer wished to share the Stone with anybody."

The last, of course, makes one immediately think of J.R.R. Tolkien's characters Bilbo and Frodo Baggins and the One Ring.

Later, in a museum exhibition, "I got up on the wooden step, and this seemed to trigger the tape." Mack jumps to unfounded conclusions quickly, seemingly just to avoid missing one. Robertson, whether consciously or not is impossible for me to say, seems to warn against such actions.

Failures of imagination, and another attendant willingness to jump to conclusions, similarly haunt Robertson's characters. Chance appearances of plot devices seem "incredible" to them. When faced with an experience that he cannot readily explain, Mack races to cognitive closure. He seems unwilling or incapable of keeping an open mind until additional facts are acquired. The unnamed being that he (possibly) encounters must be the Christian Devil. God must exist if the Devil does. All of this is wrapped in layers of tortured logic by means of justification. When Mack feels that he could not have reasonably survived his near death experience, he proclaims, "I was of the opinion, therefore, that I must be dead."

Robertson's characters are not an unrealistic stretch from everyday human experience. We have all met the gullible, but Robertson's exploration goes deeper than pedestrian gullibly. He probes the limits of humankind to judge likelihood. It is something that we do poorly.

Radiolab, a weekly radio show syndicated across the United States by National Public Radio, recently illustrated our intuitive problem with comprehending statistics in an episode called Stochasticity. Stochasticity is a florid academic word for randomness. The study of stochasticity provides techniques to understand events whose results can only be measured statistically. We cannot know whether a particular coin toss will result in a "heads" or a "tails", but we can know that, given a high number of tosses, the results should be about half of each.

My caveats (a high number, about half) are important and point to our difficulties in understanding the random world. Radiolab interviewed Deborah Nolan, a professor of statistics atUC Berkeley, who demonstrated how poor we are at understanding random acts. She asked a group of students to make up a list of 100 coin tosses. Simultaneously, the Radiolab hosts were asked to toss a real coin 100 times and record the results. Nolan immediately spotted which list constituted the real coin tosses. How? By choosing the list that contained a run of seven "tails" in a row. The students felt that such a run would not appear to be random, but real random sequences include such apparent patterns quite often. Our misunderstanding of randomness stems from the simple fact that the human cortex is a very effective pattern recognition engine. We seek patterns for our own survival. They guide our actions. Lack of patterns, randomness, confuses us. We seek, and often find, patterns that do not exist.

The phenomenon of seeing patterns that aren't there is common enough that there is a word for it: apophenia. Psychologists associate the onset of such persistent delusional thinking with schizophrenia - unless it is associated with an established religion.

Pascal's Wager appears and reappears throughout The Testament. The French mathematician Blaise Pascal famously argued that everyone should believe in God because "If you gain, you gain all; if you lose, you lose nothing." The problem with Pascal's Wager is that it postulates a lack of cost to belief in a god. Nothing could be farther from the truth. Pascal did not acknowledge that belief requires a separation from reality, and that bad things happen to the human brain when it is forced to close cognitive dissonance based on too few facts. Wild leaps of the imagination or other mental gymnastics are required to make sense of nonsense. Robertson compares authorial leaps of imagination, which are the very basis of creativity, to leaps of faith. But in admittedly extreme cases, leaps of faith may also lead to anything from standing on a street corner with a sign reading, "The End is Nigh" to suicide bombing to the Toronto family that left a corpse in their house for six months expecting resurrection. We do ourselves no favors by encouraging delusion.

Or do we? We often think of evolution as a search algorithm that fits an animal to its environment. People have been around long enough to evolve to fit people-dominated environments. We have evolved to cooperate with other people. Sometimes, really quite often in fact, that means that we need to compromise our understanding of the world in order to get along with others. Robertson explores the prices of compromise and failures to compromise by presenting us with characters who span the gamut. 

Both real and fictional Presbyterian ministers make their appearance in The Testament. Their interests, with the single exception of the true believer Lorna, transcend those of traditional Christianity. Robertson neatly brings in the nineteenth century minister Robert Kirk and his book of folk tales, The Secret Commonwealth of Elves, Fauns and Fairies[Amazon, Goodreads] to make this point. The book makes a variety of appearances across the generations. Robertson intertwines folk myths, mainstream religion, doubt, love, lust, friendships, vanity, and self-obsession into a tapestry that approaches the complexity of real-life thought.

It is almost not worth bothering to mention the fatherhood obsession shared by Gideon and, more subtly, his father James. It is too obvious. However, this does lead to some brilliant foreshadowing with Elsie's daughter Katie and her imaginary friend. The friend seems to be Mack's Devil, lending yet another bit of support for the reality of an illusion that one had just decided was an illusion. Similarly, Elsie's eleventh-hour admission of the length of her affair with Mack, and the depth of it, questions Mack's veracity just after others had established it. Robertson's misdirection took some careful construction.

Robertson, while pillorying religious belief, does not spare non-religious thought. The atheists in The Testament are generally unhappy, and the one professed agnostic is depicted as physically crippled and verbally vitriolic. Robertson asks, but does not answer, what makes one happy to live one's life. Perhaps, being Scottish, he has no idea. More likely he simply was not aware of modern scholarship which has started to unravel this conundrum, such as this study of coping strategies of the irreligious.

Robertson employs some beautiful metaphors throughout The Testament. My personal favorite is this:

"Walking through a deserted city in the hours before dawn is sobering way beyond the undoing of the effects of alcohol. Everything is familiar, and everything strange. It’s as if you are the only survivor of some mysterious calamity which has emptied the place of its population, and yet you know that behind the shuttered and curtained windows people lie sleeping in their tens of thousands, and all their joys and disasters lie sleeping too. It makes you think of your own life, usually suspended at that hour, and how you are passing through it as if in a dream. Reality seems very unreal."

Walking past the sleeping multitudes is a wonderful depiction of the atheist experience. One often feels the weight of the mass delusion that grips our world. Naturally, and very Robertson, true believers must feel the same way. One is left to make of it what one will.

My one substantial criticism stems from an experience that Robertson could presumably not personally explore. Mack's character undergoes a near death experience, but Robertson, it seems, could not pull from observation to make his description plausible. My own near drowning left me uncomfortable with Robertson's portrayal. Although I recognized Mack's reported lack of panic, I experienced no flashing of my life before me, nor a feeling that I had left too much unresolved. The immediacy of the situation dominated my mind, even as I began to think that perhaps I should try breathing water after all. Those who told me I could not could have been mistaken. I do not fault Robertson overly much for his reliance on clichés for this part of his story. I am glad for him that he has not gained the insight.

The Testament of Gideon Mack should not have been long-listed for the 2006 Man Booker Prize. It should have won it. Perhaps it didn't because some members of the review committee were themselves religious. The book is designed in a certain sense to offend. It would not offend a doubter, but it threatens the homey comfort of the believer. "How can it be blasphemous? It’s the truth. There isn’t a word of a lie in what you’ve heard." Gideon Mack tells his friend and fellow minister Lorna. She replies,  "Of course it’s blasphemous. It goes against everything we stand for. You simply mustn’t repeat it." I urge you to ignore her advice.

Book Review: Can War be Eliminated? by Christopher Coker

In Can War be Eliminated? [Amazon, Goodreads], Christopher Coker takes only 108 pages to provide his answer. No, says Coker. The fault, as Shakespeare's Cassius told his friend Brutus, is not in our stars but in ourselves.

Coker is a professor of international relations at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE), although he is described on the book's back cover as an "internationally known philosopher of war" - a much more fetching title to be sure. Coker's "expert's page" at the LSE lists his academic publications since 2000 and prominently includes the cover image for this book. It is easier to see a list of his books on his Amazon author page, which stretches farther back in time.

The book is marketed using a clever summary taken from Coker's prologue: "This book challenges the view that war is an idea that we can cash in for an even better one - peace." It is perhaps more instructive to provide that quote its context:

In this brief essay, I will argue that, contrary to what many would argue, war is not pathological, any more than it is socially dysfunctional, and it most certainly is not just a bad idea that we can cash in for a better one, peace. It has played such a central role in the human story because it is embedded in our cultural evolution and, unfortunately, this is likely to remain the case for some time yet. (pp. xiv)

Coker has been recently prolific, breaking his two-decade pattern of slow and steady publication. He published Warrior Geeks: How 21st Century Technology is Changing the Way We Fight and Think About War [Amazon, Goodreads] in 2013, followed closely by Can War be Eliminated? in early 2014 and Men At War: What Fiction Tells us About Conflict, From The Iliad to Catch-22 [Amazon, Goodreads] in mid 2014. Both Warrior Geeks and Men at War are substantially longer works.

One might wonder why he chose to highlight Can War be Eliminated? on his LSE expert's page instead of his larger volumes that have frankly attracted better reviews. The answer may lie in the not uncommon criticisms to his books that they are laden with academic speech, relatively inaccessible by the general reader, and are heavily historical. I do not fault Coker for either of those. He is, after all, a philosopher of war. His outlook is deeply historical by design and his understanding sufficiently deep to warrant the use of a large vocabulary. His miserly social media presence (his profile on Linked In has only one connection and he does not seem to be present on others) strongly suggests that the general public is not his target audience. It would seem that he is an ivory tower academic, struggling to comprehend his subject rather than to profit by it. Can War be Eliminated? may be more than the most recent book he placed on his LSE page. It might represent his answer to his most vexing question.

Let us examine Coker's thesis that war is neither pathological nor socially dysfunctional. War is unfortunately not pathological in its most common sense, as being associated with a disease. Our species wars by its very nature. Coker is particularly critical of the political scientist John Mueller who has argued that war is "just an idea" and may thus be cast aside if we choose to do so. Mueller argues that war is a cultural construct. Coker disagrees, as do I. War is, however, pathological in the sense of "behavior that is habitual, maladaptive, and compulsive" (from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition). Culture can make us more willing to war even to the point of compulsion. Coker dances around this second sense, exploring it by example more than by clear-eyed acknowledgement.

Coker's first chapter is entitled simply "Evolution", and his second simply "Culture".  These two chapters hold for me the key to Coker's way of thinking. We are evolved to war and we have built cultures that universally acknowledge that central fact of our existence. How could it have been otherwise? Our ancestors, hairless, relatively weak, and fearful as predators go, had but two small advantages to allow them to live in a hostile world; the opposable thumbs that we heard so much about in school, and the social brains that developed in ratchet with them. We banded together and made tools.

It is interesting to note that in Ernest L. Schusky and T. Patrick Culburt's 1967 anthropology textbook, Introducing Culture [Amazon, Goodreads], the index entry for weapons reads: "see also Tools". Indeed, the words are used interchangeably in that text. Perhaps that tells us all we need to know. Our weak, vulnerable species would be in serious trouble in any jungle or forest of the world were it not for our ability to cooperate and make tools. That it is only catching up to us recently is what should amaze us.

The psychiatrist Andy Thomson has noted that "We are all trapped in a Stone Age brain." Coker agrees, commenting that "we remain linked to our prehistoric past." (pp. 108). That brain has left us with an ability to racket inventions and yet fear our own results. It is perhaps not surprising that the Christian Bible's most highlighted passage on Amazon's Kindle is from Philippians 4:6-7. The passage provides advice to lessen anxiety. We live, as so many have lived before us, in a time of great turmoil. Our turmoil tends to be of the kind seeking purpose rather than the existential kind our forebears so often faced. Regardless of media hype, we in the West have few truly existential threats at the moment.

We have difficulty separating real problems from relatively minor ones. It is ridiculous, for example, to characterize the Islamic State in the Levant as an existential threat to the United States. A proper existential threat occurs when one's food supply runs out or when your enemies have killed your neighbors and are on their way to kill you. The Yazidis of Eastern Kurdistan face an existential threat from the Islamic State. The Munda tribal people of India's Jharkhand state face an existential threat as their forests are destroyed, as do the Sarayaku people of Ecuador. One might feel an existential threat from climate change if holding ocean front land in Kiribati. One may not reasonably fear an existential threat if gasoline prices rise or Walmart finds it more difficult to source cheap travel mugs.

It is not even reasonable to fear an existential threat from the ebola virus, whether in the United States or even in West Africa. About 5,000 people have died from the recent ebola outbreak as I write this. Between a quarter million and a half million people die annually from influenza. The World Health Organization estimates that more than 600,000 people die annually from malaria and roughly half the world's population are at risk of contracting that disease. If we choose to fear diseases, where should our fears reasonably lie? Our stone age brain ensures that we do not always choose our fears based on reason.

We are, as a species, particularly poor at judging long term risks precisely because our brains clamor for attention when short term risks, however unlikely, present themselves. This is a legacy of our stone age brains that Coker rightfully highlights. It is also why we can so suddenly stumble into war.

That is not to say that I agree with all of Coker's evolutionary outlook. In fact, one particular sentence fussed me rather greatly. "Devoid of anti-social instincts we probably might have led a peaceful life," Coker assured, "but that is not how we are designed biologically." (pp. 5) There is much wrong with that. Firstly, it is our social instincts that have led to warfare. Our natural state, as Coker rightly points out, is in small hunter-gatherer tribes. Such tribes are tiny by modern standards, 25-75 people with a mean somewhere well shy of the average. Life in tribe was as simple as putting up with the oddities of your extended family group for your own protection and steadfastly defending it against anyone in other groups. Other humans, your "out group" in the phrasing of sociologists, constituted the greatest threat to your existence even in the presence of lions, tigers and bears. Oh, my.

Coker acknowledges this strong linkage between in-group bonding and out-group hostility:

Generally speaking, the more co-operative a species is within the group, the more hostility there is between groups. When there is a very variegated society, such as in New Guinea, which more than 800 languages, out-group enmity can be fierce.

It seems odd that he seemingly misses the point that our social instincts and our anti-social instincts are two sides of the same coin. We bond for survival and that causes us to fight with others. One immediately comes to think of modern religions. "Oh, the Protestants hate the Catholics; And the Catholics hate the Protestants; And the Hindus hate the Moslems; And everybody hates the Jews." goes the lyrics to Tom Lehrer's satirical song National Brotherhood Week. We are simply incapable of defining an in-group without inadvertently defining an out-group. We make our brothers and sisters into perceived enemies by the very act of creating society.

Secondly, what life would we be living if our species hadn't evolved to war? It is a counterfactual thought experiment that is impossible to answer, but one strongly suspects that the entire evolution of our species would have been drastically different, so different in fact that "we" would not be here.

Lastly, we were certainly not designed at all. That might be just loose speech. The philosopher Daniel Dennett spent much time in The Intentional Stance (1987) explaining why it is perfectly acceptable to view the products of evolution as if they were "good for something", an idea he reprised in Darwin's Dangerous Idea (1995). Nevertheless, given the contention in my home country related to the theory of evolution, I propose that more a careful characterization is necessary. It is only by being focused on what we are, as evolved animals, and being conscious of our own tendencies to fall into cognitive traps, that we can approach some form of objective truth.

Coker notes the opinion of the English philosopher Thomas Hobbes that war is "central to the human condition". Hobbes' most famous quotation on the subject is undoubtedly from his masterwork Leviathan, "the condition of Man... is a condition of Warre of every one against every one" and it is reasonable to presume that it was to this that Coker referred. It always seems learned to quote from ancient philosophers on the topic of your writing, but I do not believe that Coker has Hobbes rightly aligned in this particular case. The quotation comes from Chapter XIV of Leviathan, entitled "Of the First and Second Naturall Lawes and of Contracts" (sic). The context is Hobbes' discussion of liberty and natural rights and is part of his definition of what became known as social contract theory. It is from Leviathan that we get the idea that the natural state of humanity was "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short" and that only the imposition of authority (government) has lifted us from that fate.

There was no room in Hobbes for the innate notions of humanity's group cohesion, or other inborn cognitive mechanisms that encourage us to foster stable social structures. Hobbes' natives are out for number one, always at each others' throats, locked a deadly competition to get ahead. We know now that hunter-gatherer tribes do not function like that at all. They are certainly not the noble savages of Hobbes' contemporary, the English poet John Dryden, who coined the term in 1672, just 21 years after Leviathan was published. These two competing concepts of the natural state of humanity, cruel and competitive versus noble and uncorrupted, had been strongly debated during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Modern philosophies and legal systems, from Henry David Thoreau and Karl Marx to Bertrand Russell and Jean-Paul Sartre, still echo with the struggle to resolve these competing views. So too Jared Diamond's The World Until Yesterday: What Can We Learn from Traditional Societies? [Amazon, Goodreads], a recent and brilliant description of primitive societies and our relationship to them. Coker notes that Diamond "makes short work of the idea that primitive societies are innately peaceful". (pp. 4)

My view is that the argument is purely a matter of scale. Humans do have innate cognitive biases that encourage us to form groups for survival. These traits, coupled with other cognitive features, ensure that the groups we form are rather small, most often just 25-50 close individuals with some much larger number of acquaintances. We consciously and subconsciously protect our group even at to the extreme of shunning or killing individuals who threaten group cohesion. That puts lie to Hobbes. However, we also are naturally fierce when we are both crowded and presented with an out-group that threatens our in-group. That puts the lie to the noble savage.

Onto culture. Coker's chapter romps lightly from Richard Dawkins' "selfish genes" to religion to action films to women warriors. In the middle of this scree, he has left out a few key aspects of our love affair with war. Chief among these is the culture of war production and how it can become a self-fulfilling prophecy through economic incentives. US President Dwight D. Eisenhower, himself famously a career military man and the Supreme Commander of the Allied Forces in Europe during World War II, warned against the growth of such a culture in 1960:

In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.

We now live with the consequences of ignoring Eisenhower's words. It is an almost shocking omission by Coker.

He does better when discussing what historian Ronald Wright has labeled a "progress trap" in his excellent book A Short History of Progress [Amazon, Goodreads]. Wright tells us that our pattern of overconsumption causes collapse and cycling, and that with each cycle the cost increases. To make the same point, Coker brings in Charles Darwin, Richard Dawkins, the military theorist Carl von Clausewitz, the political activist Barbara Ehrenreich, the poet and soldier Wilfred Owen, the artist Yoko Ono and others.

Coker slides along well-trodden paths by informing us that the Wright Brothers (inventors of the airplane) saw their invention used for war before being widely used for peaceful purposes. He adds in quotes from Guglielmo Marconi (radio) and Hiram Maxim (the machine gun), just to make sure we got the point. Somehow he missed Alfred Nobel (the inventor of dynamite).

The book brims with quotations. They appear when randomly opening the book to almost any page, especially near the beginning. Here is a random sample:

• "War is not the best way to settle differences, but it is the only way of preventing them from being settled for you." -- G.K. Chesterton
• "War: thunder against it." -- Flaubert
• "War is the art of embellishing death" -- Japanese proverb
• "War is always a matter of doing evil in the hope that some good may come of it" -- Basil Liddel-Hart
• "[War] is a protean activity... like disease, it exhibits the capacity to mutate, and it mutates fastest in the face of efforts to control or eliminate it" -- John Keegan

Sometimes Coker follows a thread of his own making long enough to drop an insight. "Technology is simply the further evolution of evolution;" we are told, "and technological evolution produces a variety of gadgets, machines, tools and techniques which help us to evolve its power to evolve." He nearly (seemingly independently) recapitulated Stuart Kauffman's theory of the adjacent possible. Typically, though, he fails to follow through. These insights are worth mining from the book if one is willing to piece them together oneself. Coker won't do it for you.

Coker does an excellent job summarizing the many aspects of the small-scale culture of warfare in a short space, but fails to address many large-scale cultural phenomena. The problem with using culture as the only solution to our social problems is that culture is fragile. Very fragile. It doesn't require a social collapse to decimate a culture. All it takes is parents who don't teach their children. An entire spoken language can become endangered within a single generation if it is not taught, as has been the case with many of the native languages of the Americas, from Yupik Eskimo speakers in Alaska to the Ona of Tierra del Fuego. Although a language can amazingly survive for generations with a handful of speakers (often shamans), one could hardly call such a culture healthy. In rare cases, a language and a culture can make a comeback, as with Irish since the independence of that country, but that is not the most common result. The linguist Andrew Dalby reports in Language in Danger: How Language Loss Threatens Our Future [Amazon, Goodreads] that the world loses a language every two weeks.

The multi-generational linguistic research project Ethnologue currently estimates that there are 7,106 known living languages. At the current rate, we could reach monoculture in a mere 68 years. Let's hope that doesn't happen. I agree with Dalby that a world rich in linguistic diversity helps to make us resilient to a changing world. Unfortunately, loss of languages reduces our societal resilience much as modern warfare has become less adaptive to our long term survival.

Of course, cultures can be destroyed more quickly by the simple expediency of genocide. That ugly term is used so often in relation to Hitler's twelve million strong butcher's bill in Europe that we tend to forget that 3-4 times that many people were killed in Mao Ze-Dong's China and that Leopold II of Belgium's reign of terror in the Congo Free State has been estimated to have killed many more than Jozef Stalin's sickening but, by comparison, paltry seven million. We have a much harder time guessing the decimation of native peoples throughout the age of empire for which no good numbers exist. Hideki Tojo, prime minister of Japan during World War II, and the Cambodian communist Pol Pot don't even make the short list with their scant millions.

Having referenced Jared Diamond to good effect in his chapter on evolution, Coker fails to mention Diamond's later work such as Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed [Amazon, Goodreads]. That book informs us of the many reasons that societies can fail, most of which come down to overoptimism. Negative political and economic reactions to Al Gore's book An Inconvenient Truth: The Planetary Emergency of Global Warming and What We Can Do About It [Amazon, Goodreads] provide an example of such maladaptive optimism from our own time and place. We most often act as if we can afford to pursue short term goals at the expense of long term ones. Messengers who dare to warn of long term consequences are invariably pilloried.

That we invariably consider short term challenges to be more important than long term ones is another mammalian feature driven by evolution for our own immediate safety. Our ancestors could not afford to plan for the future when hunger and danger existed on a daily basis. Further, our brains ensure that we both overreact to any perceived immediate threat and also ascribe an intelligence to it. This is known in psychological circles as hyperactive agency detection. That is certainly a necessary survival skill but it works against us as societies get larger and we create long term problems for ourselves.

Criticisms of Collapse, for example, such as a review in The Economist, often take Diamond to task for not being optimistic enough. This should not be surprising. We humans areoptimistic by nature and have a terrible aversion to bad news. Must all writing be formulaic such that it end on a high note? Jane Goodall's Reason for Hope: A Spiritual Journey [Amazon, Goodreads] is really quite a depressing book in spite of its title. Why should we have hope in the face of facts to the contrary? Because it sells books? Or because there is actually reason to be hopeful? Because, it seems, we need to hope in order to continue to act. Warnings like Diamond's, Gore's and Goodall's tell us in no uncertain terms that we can hope all we like, but we need to act as well. Cultural adaptations to avoid or limit warfare, such as strategic arms reduction treaties, proxy wars and the United Nations, are some of the ways that we can act. Coker does not explore these ideas nearly enough nor does he acknowledge their limitations.

It would have been useful to hear Coker's thoughts on the geopolitical analyst George Friedman's works, such as The Next 100 Years: A Forecast for the 21st Century [Amazon,Goodreads]. There is no question in Friedman's mind that geopolitical realities will cause continued warfare. Coker does not cite him.

Where Coker focuses his prognostication on combined human-robot battlefields of the near future, Friedman is spends his time attempting to convince us that warfare will inevitably spread to space. Friedman's position is seemingly at odds with both history and international treaties. Although the United States unilaterally withdrew from the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty with the former Soviet Union in 2002 (an event that led to the formation of the US Missile Defense Agency), space-based weapons are prohibited by the older 1967Outer Space Treaty. Most of the world's countries have signed that treaty, and over a hundred have ratified it including the United States, Russia and China. Only three attacks have been conducted in space to date: two satellites destroyed by the United States in 1985 and 2008 and one by China in 2007. All three were considered to be tests and, tellingly, all three were launches from the Earth. There is no current sign of Friedman's space-based weapons.

That may not be the end of the story. Friedman is probably correct when he worries that the military exploitation of space will not stop with communications and surveillance. All it takes to start an arms race is for one party to pursue advantage. I doubt very much that the United States would go to war with a country for withdrawing from the Outer Space Treaty. Friedman's arms race scenario would be a more natural result. It would have been useful for Coker to consider it.

Coker leaves out some surprising aspects of warfare. The nuclear powers have withheld from conducting a nuclear war since the dropping of the atomic bombs Fat Man and Little Boy by the United States on the Empire of Japan, but few think we are completely done with nuclear weapons. Coker fails to address the world's nuclear arsenal at all.  This might be due to his focus on the so-called "Western way of war", which is, in a word, limited.

Coker's book is, at its end, quite seriously dissatisfying. Although it is clearly written and well researched, it is also a collection of contradictions. In it is the fascinating and the mundane, the insightful and the obvious, the frightening and the comforting. It spans the ways people think and have thought about war from the ancient Greeks to the robotic battlefields of our near future. It leaves one with little room to doubt the negative conclusion he gives to his strawman question. The common wisdom, and that used by Coker, is that no individual society dare give up war any more than they dare give up agriculture.

Yet one is left to wonder, as Coker occasionally seems to do, how the situation might need to change anyway. For war is not the academic exercise that the book paints. War is the horrible suffering of millions so that a few in power can pursue their goals. War is death on a massive scale. War is dead sons, scarred daughters, homeless children. War is grown adults, irredeemably reduced to wounded animals, crying out shamelessly to their absent mothers. War leaves a trail of broken people, lost in alcoholism, drugs, domestic violence and private pain. It is war that teaches us the meanings of PTSD, POW, MIA, and KIA much more often than it presents us with heroes. War leaves farmland strewn with land mines and cities plagued with unexploded ordinance. These hideous presents to the future are rediscovered by livestock, children and the elderly. It is war that teaches us to hate so much that we yearn to try it again. War is a drug to which we are addicted and a high we dare not allow ourselves when we wield tools of mass destruction. 

I am left dissatisfied with Coker's book for its easy answer as much as for its failings of content. There simply must be a better way to conduct our affairs than to allow war to dominate us, even if it means changing ourselves. Is it possible to give up war if other conditions apply, such as expansion into new frontiers off of our planet or by daring to make fundamental changes to the human brain? We should really think this through before we have the technologies to accomplish them. Coker does not dare to discuss any of the more radical alternatives.