Writers Notebook - 28 Dec 2015

Relationships with Technology

• The historian Ronald Wright has noted, "From ancient times until today, civilized people have believed that they behave better, and are better, than so-called savages." But this is just not so. It is a belief that is unjustified specifically because we have the same stone age brain as those savages. Their cultures are different from our own, but we cannot be said in any meaningful way to be "better", either individually or as a group. Hunter-gatherers can be just as friendly, brutal, caring, dismissive, helpful and murderous as modern, civilized people. The difference between the two would seem to be simply a matter of technology. Use of technology certainly changes brain structures, but does not change the fundamentals of emotion, including compassion and fear.
• The word in the Pashto language for an AK-47, the world's most ubiquitous military assault rifle is, disturbingly, "machine". The AK-47 may be the only machine rural Pashtun children ever see. Trucks are rare in their mountain villages, time is told by the sun, and plumbing is unheard of.

Quote of the Day

• "The literal mind does not understand the ironic mind, and sees it always as a source of danger." -- Christopher Hitchens, in chapter 2 of God is Not Great, when discussing Salman Rushdie's death sentence.

Writer's Notebook - 7 July 2015

On Pandering

The 2016 US presidential campaign is seemingly in full cajole. This gem was uncovered in the Economist news magazine in the Lexington column of their 20 June 2015 issue:
"Rick Perry, a former governor of Texas, rode to the barbecue on a Harley belonging to a disabled war hero, accompanied by exNavy SEALS, to raise funds for a charity that gives puppies to military veterans."

Mr. Perry spent five years in the US Air Force from 1972-1977, three years of which he was a pilot of C-130 cargo planes. As the Economist journalist noted, his appearance in Iowa reached the level of performance art.

My wife points out, "I would laugh at that if I read it in a Terry Pratchett book." Indeed. Perhaps my next business venture should be a family game called "Truth or Pratchett?". One would vie with peers to guess whether a ridiculous quotation actually happened, or was rebranded from a Pratchett novel.

Quotes of the Day

Both of today's quotations are from the classicist Edith Hamilton, from her masterwork The Greek Way.

• "The ancient priests had said, 'Thus far and no farther. We set the limits to thought.' The Greeks said, 'All things are to be examined and called into question. There are no limits set to thought.'"
• "Before Greece the domain of the intellect belonged to the priests. They were the intellectual class of Egypt. Their power was tremendous. Kings were subject to it. Great men must have built up that mighty organization, great minds, keen intellects, but what they learned of old truth and what they discovered of new truth was valued as it increased the prestige of the organization. And since Truth is a jealous mistress and will reveal herself not a whit to any but a disinterested seeker, as the power of the priesthood grew, and any idea that tended to weaken it met with a cold reception, the priests must fairly soon have become sorry intellectualists, guardians only of what seekers of old had found, never using their own minds with freedom."

Writer's Notebook - 19 January 2015

Teaching Evolution to Martin Luther King

On this Martin Luther King Day, I would like to explore the differences between the way we see the world and the way it really is. Specifically, we often come to understand human behavior as if it is solely driven by culture. This is just not so.

Consider Dr. King's thoughts on why people hate:

"Men often hate each other because they fear each other; they fear each other because they don't know each other; they don't know each other because they can not communicate; they can not communicate because they are separated." -- Martin Luther King, Jr.

It sounds plausible. The underlying presumption is that we could stop hating if we learn to communicate. Unfortunately, this is only partially so.

Like so much of our cultural conversations, Dr. King failed to take human evolution into account. Our ancestral ground state, life in small hunter-gatherer groups, colors our relationships with other people as much as, perhaps more than, the relatively recent geographical diaspora of our species has colored our skins. We constantly define an in-group, which leaves everyone else in the out-group. To our consternation, we have learned to create multiple, confusing, and sometimes contradictory in-groups. Cubs fans, military organizations, fellow hobbyists, church goers. The list is nearly endless. Ten thousand years ago almost all of us would have lived and died in the same in-group.

My revised version of Dr. King's statement looks like this:

Humans hate outsiders because they fear outsiders. Evolution taught us to fear anyone outside of our group. This can be overridden by creating a culture, by redefining an in-group, but it cannot ever become universal without changing what we are as a species.

Quotes of the day: On responding to technological change

• "The unleashed power of the atom has changed everything save our modes of thinking, and we thus drift toward unparalleled catastrophes." -- Albert Einstein
• "Most of our assumptions have outlived their uselessness." — Marshall McLuhan
• "The greatest danger in times of turbulence is not the turbulence; it is to act with yesterday’s logic." — Peter Drucker
• "In times of rapid change, experience could be your worst enemy." — J. Paul Getty

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

Writer's Notebook - 11 January 2015

Religious Freedom in the United States

The Virginia Statute of Religious Freedom was drafted 238 years ago in my town of Fredericksburg, Virginia. It was introduced to the Virginia legislature two years later and finally enacted into law in 1786. The statute formally separated church from state in Virginia and was the model for the First Amendment to the US Constitution (adopted in 1791).

Those who suggest that the principle of religious freedom allows citizens of the United States to choose a religion, but does not protect those who profess no religion whatsoever, should read the statute more carefully. The final paragraph makes clear that in the Commonwealth of Virginia, "all men shall be free to profess, and by argument to maintain, their opinions in matters of Religion". There is no requirement to select a religion.

The statute's echo in the First Amendment is slightly less clear and has been widely debated in the last two centuries. The First Amendment states,

“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press, or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”

That short passage guarantees six rights to US citizens and is the basis for many of the "rights" so often taken for granted:

1. freedom from establishment of a national religion (the "establishment clause")
2. freedom to freely exercise religious choice (the "free exercise clause")
3. freedom of speech
4. freedom of the press
5. freedom to peacefully assemble
6. freedom to petition the government for redress of grievances

The Virginia Statute of Religious Freedom is celebrated annually in Fredericksburg. The Annual Fredericksburg Religious Freedom March and Celebration includes a march from the Fredericksburg train station to the statute's monument on Washington Avenue. Other events are generally held in the area. This year's events include a presentation by University of Mary Washington Professor Mary Beth Mathews, who will speak on the topic  "Religious Freedom: Always Approaching, Never Reaching".  There will be a presentation of awards for the three winners of the middle school Importance of Religious Freedom Essay Contest that was sponsored by the University of Mary Washington and Fredericksburg Coalition of Reason.

Quote of the Day

"Human beings are at one and the same time utterly splendid and utterly insignificant." -- James Robertson

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

Writer's Notebook - 3 January 2015

David Wheeler on Indirection

David Wheeler, the first person to receive a Ph.D. in Computer Science, has been widely quoted on the topic of indirection. The basic quote is "All problems in computer science can be solved by another level of indirection", but many variations exist:

• The current Wikipedia article ("All problems in computer science can be solved by another level of indirection, except of course for the problem of too many indirections.") quotes a non-authoritative source: Andy Oram; Wilson, Greg; Andrew Oram (2007). Beautiful code . Sebastopol, CA: O'Reilly. ISBN 0-596-51004-7.
• The Wikipedia page on Indirection suggests that the corollary "...except for the problem of too many layers of indirection." was added by  Kevlin Henney, not Wheeler. I tend to believe this because I do not recall hearing this ending until after 2008.
• The Wikipedia talk page contains an important variation reported by Markus Kuhn, who reports speaking to Wheeler prior to his death in 2004: 'He did however stress that he considered the inclusion of the – often omitted – second part "But that usually creates another problem." as significant.' This matches my memory of the original quote.
• There are also variations which substitute the word "layer" for "level", which Kuhn reports Wheeler as feeling are insignificant.

My preference is therefore for "Every problem in computer science can be solved with another layer of indirection - but that will generally create another problem." The thought is important enough to put a stake in the ground.
Note that Maurice Wilkes, David Wheeler, and Stanley Gill invented the closed subroutine as an implementation of this idea. Compare to an open subroutine ("macro").
Question: Does Wheeler's insight apply to any sufficiently complex system?
Possible answer: Yes, maybe. It applies to software because software is abstracted from its implementation on hardware (see the Church-Turing thesis for proof that software is not tied to an implementation). Is not any complex system (e.g. modern culture) also highly abstract, and possibly abstracted from its implementation in human beings?

Earth's Biosphere

Astrophysicist René Heller suggests that Earth is nearing the end of its time as a habitable planet in an article entitled Planets More Habitable Than Earth May Be Common in Our Galaxy in Scientific American's January 2015 issue.

• The Earth is 4.54 ± 0.05 billion years old (see Wikipedia article and USGS Age of the Earth page).
• The earliest (scientifically) undisputed evidence for life on Earth is 3.5 billion years ago (see Abiogenesis Wikipedia article and bibliography).
• The Sun's radiation output is increasing as it ages, thus slowly pushing the Goldilocks Zone, where water can exist in a liquid form, outward.
• Within 500 million years, Heller calculates that multi-cellular life will not be able to sustain form.
• Within 1.75 billion years, water will not be able to be in a liquid state on the Earth's surface. This will remove the ability for uni-cellular life to exist on the Earth's surface.

Ronald Wright has noted, "Each time history repeats itself, the cost goes up." (A Short History of Progress [Amazon, Goodreads]).
Question: Were humanity to fail, would another intelligent species have time to evolve?
Possible answer: Maybe not. Our species is only 3 million years old since the last common ancestor with chimpanzees, but the earliest mammalian fossils are "are dated about 167 million years ago in the Middle Jurassic" (according to Wikipedia). A new species surely could not push the 500 million year date since environmental pressure on development would presumably be severe long before multi-cellular life ceased to be viable. Also recall that:

• There is no such thing as a "ladder" of evolution. Evolution does not direct life toward any goal other than survival in ecological niches. Another intelligent species is not guaranteed to evolve.
• Humanity is currently causing a mass extinction event. This massive reduction in biodiversity will surely have an impact on any future evolutionary possibilities.
• We are heating our planet faster than Heller's analysis alone suggests. The human impact on climate may last for 100,000 years even if we stopped now (which we are not). See Deep Future by Curt Stager. We might cause a runaway greenhouse effect, which could significantly limit our time horizon.

We might need to survive as a species, and possibly as a civilization, long enough to get off of the planet. This might be our only chance.

Quote of the Day

"I can explain it to you, but I cannot comprehend it for you." -- New York City Mayor (1978-1989) Ed Koch