Limits for the Unlimited Mind

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I’ve had a longer-than-usual hiatus from posting due to adding a new living arrangement to our small collection. Acquiring and moving furniture, appliances, toiletries, bedding, audio equipment, and cleaning supplies between spaces has an almost unlimited ability to distract. And when a quiet final settles in, there remains a restlessness about optimizing experiences and priorities that takes time to psychically draw down. It’s the clattering opposite of focusmaxxing. On the positive, new places constantly reset and tune expectations about what is important and what matters little in a life, with people, ideas, and new experiences always rising above the glimmer of these damn possessions.

This rich inner life, this sense of a self that powers the great religions and mystical traditions of the world, this atma and soul, these ideas of impermanence, justice, and wonder—can they all be a product of a versatile connective matrix that computes these optimizing decisions while simultaneously creating a vital subjective sense of identity? There is a theory called unlimited associational learning (UAL) that posits exactly that. Our adaptation to the world is one of temporal superiority. A plan and a reaction for a conscience entity is a function for pulling time apart and predicting the future, from the cause-effect of seasonal migrations of herd animals to estimating the supportive and defensive capabilities of mates.

The essential hinge is that this consciousness, this sense of being someone, must on average be more effective than the other trajectories through the phylogenetic, epigenetic, and ontogenetic state spaces. And that’s even with all the flaws like misperceptions, biases, neurological injuries, and schizophrenia. Proving this with any sort of mathematical precision has an almost impossible bar to meet since it would require that a model first is shown to be conscious with the set of UAL-sufficient hallmarks, like global accessibility, integration over time, agency and embodiment, and so on.… Read the rest

Liberalism and New Fictions

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A current theme among the commentariat is that political movements like MAGA are illiberal, tapping into old ideological currents like fascism and religious totalitarianism. And, according to Yuval Noah Harari, the fictions that drive movements like these pose a unique problem for liberalism because it does not, in turn, have nourishing narratives that provide the utopian clarity of religious or ideological fables. For the communist, utopia comes from class purification. For the fascist, Xanadu arrives from ethnic and racial purity. For the religious, there is only God’s will. But for liberalism, we accept there is no perfection, only problems, checks and balances, eternal struggle, and a simmering gradualism that emerges from squabbling interests. No one is happy. No one can be happy with a narrative that is the worst of all possible systems except all the others. The reality is grinding, truth is grinding, and the vague struggle in an unrelenting system makes for a blurry tale with no focus, corrupt heroes, and complexity rather than epic arcs of resolution.

I am an optimist about the project of liberalism, nonetheless, and think we see its progress throughout the world. There are astonishing statistics like the reduction in poverty rates in the world even while supporting massive populations. These achievements came about despite the chaos arising with the end of colonialism and the structured Cold War alliances of the mid-20th Century. The stories are simple enough that they are easily forgotten, like the Green Revolution and the spread of health care. The stories are often contested, as well, like the rise of social insurance and welfare policies, where extreme corners of the liberal worldview take exception to the the costs imposed by this kind of organization.… Read the rest

Intersecting Orbits

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My orbit keeps intersecting with Milla Jovavich. When I was in the Peace Corps in Fiji, she shot Return to the Blue Lagoon on the island of Taveuni. I was on nearby Vanua Levu teaching mathematics, physics, and economics for five hours a day. She was apparently just 15 or 16. Since I taught Forms 6 and 7 students, she was likely younger than most of my students. There was a buzz about the film production in the paper and on the radio and I think I saw it a couple of times when it ran in the theater, though not because it was any good; theaters and banks were the only places with air conditioning. I spent my 25th birthday on Taveuni, drinking beer on both sides of the 180th meridian and pretending I had a 48-hour birthday.

She went on to a mixed career, from a brief appearance in Dazed and Confused to Chaplin, and on to The Fifth Element and the infamous Resident Evil films, which had a certain visual style despite otherwise being empty video game spin-outs.

In 1997, while I was a researcher at the now-defunct Computing Research Laboratory at New Mexico State University, my wife and I bought a house in the old downtown of Las Cruces, New Mexico. I was an adaptable researcher, leaning into our institutional funding for natural language processing, computational linguistics, and information retrieval in support of the defense-intelligence community. I had side interests in evolutionary algorithms, artificial neural networks, and inference via minimum description length and related ideas that I pursued as extra projects. I also served as the faculty sponsor and as an artist in a performance arts group that had a cyberpunk edge to it.… Read the rest

Post New Atheism

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I recently watched a short debate between columnist Ross Douthat of New York Times and cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker of Harvard and Enlightenment Now fame, among his many titles. The discussion rang like an update to the so-called New Atheist period of around 2006-2010, a period of time that was partly informed by the religion-adjacent wars in the Middle East, where Islam was a part of the ethno-religious identity driving asymmetrical warfare against outsiders. In this new discussion, there was a focus on the utility of religion, or how it might help improve individual lives and societies, regardless of whether there is any factual truth to their central claims and organizing principles.

I was an active participant in the New Atheist phase, writing Teleology as a novelistic exploration of ideas about religious conflict, creation, souls, simulated realities, and weirdly presaging language inference as a path towards artificial general intelligence. I swear I had no idea what was coming with the current state AI! It was just a chance convergence.

That era exposed many Americans to critiques of religion that had been implicit in the zeitgeist, but that were rarely argued publicly. I would watch late-night preachers on cable in the 80s and marvel at the washed-out colors of the sets with pale reverends discussing social trends and asking for donations. It was a strange corner of television that was a revealing window into the (perhaps sincere) hucksterism that corporatization of evangelical Christianity used to grow in influence and scale. In the New Atheist era, Christopher Hitchens took on the socio-economic influence of contemporary religion, while Richard Dawkins worked the side of naturalism and science. Sam Harris bent and shaped objective morality into the form of thriving landscapes, an exploration that was interesting but largely unnecessary since we can easily dispense with any notion of objectivity in morality.… Read the rest

Consciousness and Uncertainty Schematization

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If consciousness is an evolved function, the immediate question is what exactly is the currency of evolutionary selection in terms of traits and functions? In almost all of these kinds of arguments there is an explicit requirement that there is on average (or slightly greater than on average) value to survival that results in the maintenance and promotion of the relevant functions. In my Berggruen essay, I argued for a primarily social role to consciousness. Consciousness is a central monitoring framework for the complex web of social interactions that creates a reflective model of a person (and partially and uniquely in certain other species) that can be used to evaluate and plan for sexual pairing and other life choices related to status within social hierarchies. There are other hypotheses, as well, like the idea that predator-prey planning and avoidance is enhanced by a central consciousness experience, including some intriguing work on dreaming (when there is no active consciousness) that shows enhanced dreams for game players who are in the role of being prey within the game context as well as other forms of cognitive activation.

Abstractly, evolution is a distributed adaptation and learning algorithm that is the only robust solution to the complexity of natural environments. Wasteful though it may be, it is the invisible hand that drives forward enhanced prediction and survival using the knobs of genetics and the social relationships that are an extended phenotype in social species. There are a few theories of abstract learning that can be brought to bear on this topic, with the obvious candidate being inductive optimality via Kolmogorov complexity: minimize the model parameters to bottleneck against overtraining and avoid overfitting. This is central to all distributed learning but has layered complexity when considering the how to predict larger, more distal patterns, both temporal and spatial in activation and extent.… Read the rest

Shriekings and Windings

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I like to critique intellectual history—more the armchair type than the academic varietal—because it often reflects the open biases of the commentator rather than having been developed by a neutral analysis of the past and its relationship to our pending futures. So when I read about Husserl’s ideas of geometry and Galileo or the relative merits of Adam Smith’s The Theory of Moral Sentiments, I leave the critical analysis to the experts, equipped as they are with the proper academic insights. But columnists are not generally subject-matter experts, just enthusiasts who are driven by profession to justify their insights and prognostications by reference to history and ideas. And they substitute biases for depth far too often. This is true again today, with Leighton Woodhouse’s op-ed in The New York Times, “Donald Trump: Pagan King.” It begins gently enough, with a quote by Canada’s Mark Carney from Thucydides about power in international relations, but then quickly dissolves into an unsupportable argument about how Christianity was uniquely civilizing of the pagan world by introducing all the positive morals that we associate with the gentler, humbler aspects of the religion, mostly on the back of a single source.

This through line is embarrassed by the theology, history, and facts of how Western civilization matured, as I and hundreds of other commentators pointed out (this chestnut is getting repetitive, too). This is not meant to rob Christianity of its influence in the last two thousand years, just to temper it responsibly and note that however one scopes “paganism,” Enlightenment rationality, high and low, shared aspects of pagan forms of thinking, and was clearly influenced by it as we move into the formative phase of the modern state period and formulations of democracy.… Read the rest

The Fourth Branch

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The unprecedented abuse of power by the Justice Department against US citizens, institutions, and organizations needs correcting. And the sickening abuse of the president’s pardon power needs taming. Here’s the 28th Amendment:

All powers to investigate, indict, prosecute, and punish under the laws of the United States are vested in the Enforcement Branch of the government, except in the case of military tribunals. An Attorney General shall be elected every six years by a majority of the citizens of the United States, the District of Columbia, and territories, and is the executive authority for the Enforcement Branch. All appointments of cabinet members and district attorneys to the Enforcement Branch shall be approved by the Senate. In cases of negligence or abuse of power, the Attorney General may be removed by impeachment.

The power to pardon by the President is amended to require two-thirds approval by the Senate.

I’m fine with changing the election to use the Electoral College mechanism. Controlling tariff madness is up to Congress.… Read the rest

Consciousness as Functional Information

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Congratulations to Anil Seth for winning the Berggruen essay prize on consciousness!  I didn’t learn the outcome until I emerged from one of the rare cellular blackout zones in modern America. My wife and I were whale watching south of Yachats (“ya-hots”) on the Oregon coast in this week of remarkable weather. We came up bupkis, nada, nil for the great migratory grays, but saw seals and sea lions bobbing in the surf, red shouldered hawks, and one bald eagle glowering like a luminescent gargoyle atop a Sitka spruce near Highway 101. We turned around at the dune groupings by Florence (Frank Herbert’s inspirations for Dune, weirdly enough, where thinking machines have been banned) and headed north again, the intestinal windings of the roads causing us to swap our sunglasses in and out in synchrony with the center console of the car as it tried to understand the intermittent shadows.

Seth is always reliable and his essay continues themes he has recently written about. There is a broad distrust of computational functionalism and hints of alternative models for how consciousness might arise in uniquely biological ways like his example of how certain neurons might fire purely for regulatory reasons. There are unanswered questions about whether LLMs can become conscious that hint at the challenges such ideas have, and the moral consequences that manifold conscious machines entail. He even briefly dives into the Simulation Hypothesis and its consequences for the possibility of consciousness.

I’ve included my own entry, below. It is both boldly radical and also fairly mundane. I argue that functionalism has a deeper meaning in biological systems than as a mere analog of computation. A missing component of philosophical arguments about function and consciousness is found in the way evolution operates in exquisite detail, from the role of parasitism to hidden estrus, and from parental investment to ethical consequentialism.… Read the rest

Imagining Transparent Iron and Other Crazy Things

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There are some real doozies of arguments that have tied up religious and philosophical thinkers for centuries. Take the Kalam Cosmological Argument or the Ontological Argument. In both of these arguments there is a required reduction of the properties of the universe (or cosmos) to some kind of skeletal representation. In Kalam (and variants) there are assumptions built into the idea of nothingness, for instance, that have no relationship to what we know about the actual cosmos now—specifically that there is no example of such a thing; even in vacuums there are pervasive quantum fields and we have no clear scientific evidence or theories that point to a “philosopher’s nothingness.” In the Ontological Argument, there is the assumption that possibility and existence are inherently combined together, regardless of whether we are talking about a concept of God or a real thing in or supporting the existence of the cosmos. Another example of this philosophical craziness is in the modal argument for the existence of philosophical zombies, where there are people just like us in every way but lacking a phenomenal experience of being conscious beings.

There is a category of thought called “modal skepticism” that argues we should be cautious about making assumptions about things extremely outside of ordinary experience. Whether it’s gods or nothingness or consciousness, the trouble arises when trying to sketch out the properties that apply to these things. Even before modal logic in its modern form, Kant argued that existence is not a predicate and therefore the existence of God can’t be contained in an a priori definition of God. We are making an incorrect assumption. In Kalam, nothingness is not definable in a way that meaningfully separates it from a posteriori discoveries about the cosmos, where it does not seem to exist.… Read the rest

Civilization, Erasure, and Immaculate Conceptions

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Jeff Koons’ Venus figure from Barcelona’s MOCO Museum. You can see me with my phone trapped in her belly.

There is a persistent fear of societal erasure that permeates contemporary social and cultural criticism. South Korea, Taiwan, Italy, and Eastern Europe all have very low birthrates and face the reality of drastic change or erasure in the next fifty or so years. Even the leaden National Security Strategy (NSS) document of the Trump administration outright proclaims there is a “stark prospect of civilizational erasure” in Europe due to low birthrates and immigration. In the United States there is worry over young people not being interested in sex, and birthrates, while not as low as in other countries, have not been at replacement rate for more than a decade. Among working-class whites in America, young women often just find their male counterparts not good husband or father material. The same is true of college-educated women, who increasingly outnumber their slacker male counterparts

Some commentators reflect that what is needed is a religious revival that somehow reverses the liberation of women and gets them back to raising children in a celebration of God’s aims. Less dreamy policy ideas include paying couples for children and eliminating the economic barriers to working women who have children.

There is, of course, an inherent racism built into some of these fears; the thought is that American or Japan or Italy are losing something important if waves of immigrants gradually come to dominate the civilizations. The decline and fall of Western civilization is driven not by the LA punk scene but by this nebulous replacement idea driven by some kind of global elite (often with antisemitic overtones).… Read the rest