purpose or telos: how it explains how brains (and souls) really work

If you really want to understand how brains work ("to create mind", a certain level of consciousness), I claim that the best starting point today is the open access paper Werbos, P. J., & Davis, J. J. (2016). Regular cycles of forward and backward signal propagation in prefrontal cortex and in consciousness. Frontiers in systems neuroscience, 10, 97. (It reviews the big picture, and cites lots of further sources.)

Why should you believe me?

Quick answer: this paper was a major watershed for the TELEOLOGICAL approach, which assumes that the brain is not just any old complex systems, but a system evolved to serve ultimate values or TELOS ....

Here is what I posted this morning to a neuroscience discussion list, where one of the people wants to understand brains as "intentional shystems":

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in·ten·tion·al·i·ty

/inˌten(t)SHəˈnalədē/

Learn to pronounce

noun

1. the fact of being deliberate or purposive.

   • PHILOSOPHY

     the quality of mental states (e.g., thoughts, beliefs, desires, hopes) that consists in their being directed toward some object or state of affairs.

   
   

Getting past your debate with Shiva (which I leave to you two).. it is important to ask "What is the REALITY behind this word 'intentionality'?" That is perhaps less a matter of choosing a definition, and more a matter of how we understand reality.

The word "intentionality" in SOME version is of central importance to neuroscience. The behaviorist approach of BR Skinner has largely been limited and put on a leash in the study of human psychology, but in neuroscience there is still a dominant tendency of many people to study the brain "without using their own mirror neurons." Many people model the neural networks of the brain as if the brain were any old complex system, the same mathematics they would use to model the motion of clouds or pond scum. Some people even imagine that sheer complexity is enough to produce intelligence/consciousness/mind, in a way which suggests that a pond full of scum without soul should be more conscious than a human brain. 

The alternative approach, which needs to guide neuroscience more than it now does, is the frank out-of-the-closet TELEOLOGICAL approach. 

Teleology is not exactly the same as intentionality. People talk about "intentionality" in neuroscience more than "teleology," because the word "intentionality" seems softer. But some of us are not called to be softies. The issue is important, and we need to be clear about it.

I would claim that we cannot begin to understand how brain-level consciousness works without accounting for the central role of TELOS or purpose. And yes, the paper by Werbos and Davis (which anyone can find easily via scholar.google.com, if you know to click on the usual three lines) expounds that approach, reviewing a lot of the work building up to it. 

In technical terms, what is the difference between intentionality and teleology?

In discussions with the usual fuzzy world, I wouldn't try to make that distinction, because the conflict between goal-free affect-free psychology and BOTH of these related ideas is a more urgent issue here and now. Why obsess on conflicts between good guys, when both are being marginalized (in computational neuroscience at least) by a great mass of affect-free zombies?

But in discussions within the realm of good guys... I remember a great debate on "intelligent systems" led by Albus and Meystel (famous in parts of AI and robotics) which I contributed to.

A key debate: are intelligent systems (minds) systems which learn to achieve GOALS, TARGETS... (intentionality)... or do they maximize some measure of happiness or telos (teleology, the tradition from Aristotle to Bentham to Von Neumann and Raiffa)? I still support the SECOND position. Goals are a big part of human life, just as "predictive analytics" and pattern recognition are, but they are SUBSYSTEMS, subordinate to the larger teleological system which they evolved to serve.  

I see no reason to believe that souls or noospheres are any different. I say that after rather intense exploration both of the phenomenon and the history of the explorations of others. Even the Lagrange-Euler equations which Jack and  others have discussed for centuries are a special case of the more general Von Neumann/ Bellman systems for maximizing or minimizing a utility function over time. Without a firm grasp of the ever-present issue of purpose, one can never really engage with any of these realities in a deep way. 

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(The Werbos and Davis paper maps the mathematics of optimization systems to specific structures, and shows how real-time empirical data from a couple of the key parts of the brain fit with that mathematics.) 

Message to engineers about regulation of Facebook Cryptocurrency

One advantage engineers can have in bringing other folks to reality is that many of us deeply appreciate how concrete testbeds are vital in helping us appreciate even the most general of cosmic principles. 

There is a new testbed out there on the issue of privacy and security... the growing emerging issue of privacy and security connected to facebook's new cryptocurrency, which was preceded by a whole lot of industrial strength planning and analysis. Lots of people I know will be deep into that testbed for its own sake, which is reasonable, but someone ought to be approaching it in a more fundamental way, seeing what lessons we might get from it. DC and EU will be paying LOTS of attention to this testbed, but muddling through in the usual fuzzy ways. 

My first (yet informed) impression is that it teaches us that none of us on earth knows what he/she is doing enough to avoid disaster.

Many people pushing cryptocurrencies have argued that they can help us avoid really gross dangerous and growing problems, like the Panama papers scandal, with billions and billions of dollars going into hidden, criminal and corrupt activities, helping to destabilize the world political systems and even to degrade social networks into instruments of propaganda and state control... and facilitate the corruption of the state apparati themselves. If cryptocurrencies could help... we really could USE the help. Criminals would object, but we probably still have enough honest and well-meaning people to get something better implemented, if enough of us can agree on what to implement. 

OK... if a system of registered qualifying cryptocurrencies were accepted by enough people worldwide... analogous to qualifying ISOs and RTOs following FERC rules,or registered internet domains... what rules on privacy and security should be required to qualify? (So instead of asking "how well regulated and monitored will Facebook be?", a question which reeks of Chinese gumshoes, we may ask "what should the general rules be which it should follow, and how can automated systems be designed to ensure compliance?")

Should all entities which hold any of the cryptocurrency be registered as entities in a kind of global register or ledger, a kind of metaledger, like internet domain names? Should the set of total holdings of any registered entity across all the cryptocurrencies be a matter of public record, annually or in real time? 

What does "public record" mean?

David Brin has argued that the only viable solution to the security/transparency issue is to accept the need for all of us to live in glass houses, where everyone has access to everything. "The antidote to Big Brother is Big Family of everyone. the antidote to all-knowing State is all-knowing everyone." I wouldn't agree, because creativity requires exploring domains of thought and possibility and understanding which no gumshoe would tolerate, and I don't see a clear credible path to making humans SO mature that they could live that way. At NSF, it was important to respect the privacy of people with new ideas, because theft is still rampant out there. However, what of total net worth or net worth by currency? Could it be that the benefits outweigh the costs of greater transparency in THAT sphere?

Or could the rules allow a LIMITED kind of public access to the information, access by authorized state agents for purposes like law enforcement? If so, how do such agents get registered to the system? Who qualifies? (I seem to recall some fuzzy confusion even at NSA on who gets access for what purpose, and how to prevent fuzzy random misjudgments about that which can backfire to an incredible degree.) Should the developer/owner of each cryptocurrency in the system have the right to decide who qualifies for access to the information, subject to general rules? What rules? Who is to prevent a cryptocurrency as bad as the scandalous bank branches which ended up serving criminals?  

Furthermore, if the world switches to such a system (or, worse, an messy informal reflection of that)... WITHOUT a vast and fundamental upgrade of cybersecurity affecting chips, operating systems and communications, informed by the coming transformations of quantum information science and technology (QuIST), all of this may simply be setting us up for a discrete shock ever so much worse than the market problems which brought us the Great Recession of 2008/2009 (and Obama). 

The technical level of present fuzzy discussions of the future simply is not concrete or detailed enough to offer much hope yet of avoiding such a shock. 

Best of luck. We need it.

The tortuous path to avoiding war with iran

Edited from a listserv discussion...

Here we are, possibly even on the brink of a global nuclear war which could kill all of us and all of those responsible, and we are talking about (an allegation about CIA) ... perhaps, if God exists and the CIA exists, they might be paying more attention to that right now, and not at all to ... Even I am tracking it, and am deeply sad we live in a world which now limits discussion of a path to avoid the worst, just as economists in China have been silenced re the huge immediate economic problems which China now faces which could have been avoided... Dialogue is perhaps the most important variable which separates the realm of destructive groupthink and real collective intelligence; new mechanisms which block dialogue threaten our very survival for that reason. 

"But why digress to such small things as all of humanity dying, and the role of the actions of the mind in affecting the probability of that? Why not get back to the subject, the really important thing, ... (ego stuff)". 

...

Since I have wandered the world quite a bit by now, I have probably been in the company of all kinds of intelligence operatives from many countries. When ... speculated (in a typical random episode) that I am an "agent of the deep state," he seemed to feel ... And once I was an employee of the US government.

Just as sinister folks are trying to manipulate US and Iran into an all-out war now, they were doing the same back at the start of the Iraq war, when I was an NSF employee. (No security clearance, but still in the government.)

I remember very well the day when our Indian division director asked for a little meeting in a small conference room. 'We have received a warning through the chain. One of you has severely overstepped his bounds -- not violating any laws, but seriously getting in the way of the plans (of Cheney). You need to know you are being watched, and are not appreciated." At that moment, a guy named Larry Goldberg smiled a smile full of joy and said that yes he had opposed the plans for a war in Iraq very loudly and unmistakably. "They recognize me! they recognize me!" But then she (the Division Director) sadly said"No, not you, Larry..", and she turned towards me with a sad nod. Larry practically blew up: "HIM???? You can't even tell whether he's a Republican or a Democrat, or which side he is on.... why would HE get this honor?" She sadly, softly said: "The difference, Larry, is that there are people who actually listen to him." Well, that was another time. Like Pandolfi, I had an official position which did give me some access to speak to some people, but neither of us was in charge. (I never met Pandolfi, so far as I know.) But even now, I suggest to people who send me emails to allow for the possibility that anything they send will end up in the files of Google, NSA and China, and perhaps others as well, and that I have enough of a history of being interesting that someone might actually read them. That does inhibit me a bit, not only on the less important subject of ...,  but on the more important subject of whether we get drawn into a bigger war than the Iraq one. 

One key thing I don't know: has Khamenei been driven into a state of insanity (e.g. Quds doing to him what Chris has sometimes done to Jack) that he really did choose to start a war? Or is he telling the truth that he did not order the crime in the Gulf (or sane enough to act as if that were true)? If MBS had a little talk with him, in a place safe from Quds ambush, would he agree to a joint effort to root out, expose and terminate the criminals? (Attempt to create a world nuclear war is not a mere venial sin.) 

Whatever.

Back to trying to make sense of a much greater level of weirdness.

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Later I asked a group of folks:

Please forgive my taking up your time with a question, but the question is of some importance to us all, even those of us who like me get no income from thinking about it.

Does anyone here know of any credible serious intuition about who recently destroyed the tankers in the Gulf?

It is clear that someone with strong means and opportunity deliberately tried to start a war between the US and Iran, or at least to"show them we mean business" in a way which has the same implications. It is scary to me that we do not really know who it is, let alone how to stop them and prevent what could become global nuclear war. I see five obvious general possibilities, and really do not know.

(1) Trump has given full support and free rein to folks who say that Khamanei ordered it. Though Kahamanei denies it, Trump says he has evidence, and expects Kahamanei to lie in any case either for political advantage or as a Middle Eastern way of saying "in your face" to add insult to injury. Maybe. That belief could lead to a new war sooner than most of us expect, just like the WMD story which led to the previous war in Iraq. 

(2) Khamanei hints that Trump did it, in much the same way. After all, even few Republicans in Congress expect Trump's words always to be literal exact truth. Maybe, but I tend to doubt it. Still, who knows? It would not be SO far from various things in the Mueller report.

(3) What serious analysts in the US tend to gravitate towards: could it be that the Quds force of Iran simply acted on its own, without authorization, in part to force Khamanei to give them more power, and in part to express a kind of millennialist narcissistic self-image similar in nature to what moves some guys to be flashers? Maybe.

(4) What of the mirror image of (3), a kind of "American Quds force," NOT the deep state as Bannon imagines it, but something of that flavor? Some people I know have referred to that as "the gestapo," but my wife rightly points out that this tends to lead to gross misunderstanding as bad as Bannon's. I do not picture such a thing as being either unfunded, or as funded from Russia or Israel; there are other more realistic possibilities.

(5) What of a "third party" such as a salafist equivalent of the Quds force, equally fundamentalist and equally ruthless and even better funded from all the oil money sloshing around in the Middle East?

 The uncertainty here suggests it would be ever so important to get an international investigation going with the power not only to track down the culprit but to eliminate their ability to cause this kind of trouble in the future. But who is it? Where should people even look? 

My fun and games with intuition, such as they are, point to (5), which is not what I would have expected before fun and games. I would be very interested to hear what others feel, with of course the caveats that any rational person would have in such a situation.

Best regards,

   Paul

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The most interesting feedback was, roughly, "Your list is incomplete. Quds has been sending lots of very advanced weapons to Houthis, who, like the Syrian militias who went over to ISIS, may be trading withpirates. Think Somalia."

Of course, it could actually be a situatoin fitting three of the six options, mutually consistent... ust as Syria is inherently multifacted.

What level of advanced technology should anyone rightly let out in such situations?

As I watch this on France24, and also note the coverage of the Morsi event (which very much connects with what I picked hp before I sent out this question)... I am surprised about the false assumptions taken for granted both about Erdogan and about the rest of the Moslem Brotherhood. It was never just a political party in Egypt, as even a simple web search should show.

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The day when Trump announced he had decided FOR NOW not to push the button... and one of the folks told me about it... I replied:

That's step one. But now can US split Quds from Khamenei and president of iran? Are we so skillful? Or can a serious investigation get going, such as my MBS/Khamenei suggestion with support? What of MB and US Quds?

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Later, a further discussion on this:

On Fri, Jul 5, 2019 at 1:09 PM ...  wrote:

Paul,

  .. just figured out that MSB means the crown prince of Saudi Arabia. Which reminds me that my understanding of the motives of him and of his counterparts is rather muddled.

  This principally stands on the mystery of the Sunni and Shiite division, the causus belli at the root of this confusion. Why the respective religious leaderships cannot entertain a future with harmony is really beyond me.

I sometimes think of a movie "Being There" recommended to me long ago from an old friend, one of the two or three who was fluent in Aramaic, his native language. It depicts a billionnaire type very well meaning but a bit out of touch with regular life. One of the great pillars of the MB is exactly that kind of money going to old guys out of touch -- and MBS does seem to be quite aware of that.

But Erdogan and many of his minions oppose it very violently and successfully, and folks like France24 somehow swallow what should be such transparent propaganda. We seem blind to 

how serious the internal war is for the soul of Sunni Islam. 

I received some very severe objections today from one of the oil folks working in the Gulf. Can I prove all this more than I have? Well, when I encountered the bad guys (especially shocked on 7/14/14), and learned of many others who had, first hand, a friend urged me to put documentation with lots of detail on the secure web, and make it available to a very few very trusted friends. I really do not plan to get into it, but if I have misjudged how short my leash is as a US citizen not employed by anyone, folks will know. It is not speculation, and understated not exaggerated, 

 

  Some may imagine or even know there are evil motives in the US and Israel to sustain and rip this divide. None more than Israel, cognitively & existentially threatened by the union of two branches of Islam.

Whoever the bad guys are, they exaggerate both Israel and Russia (and play on naive fellow travelers who echo that, and play on Putin's love of being depicted as all powerful) -- just one more distraction technique, not all that original. (Choosing Jews as scapegoats and illusory dreams of empire are SUCH boring Jaws 15 reruns... !!)

 

  It is no doubt the Moslem Brotherhood (MB) has played a long and stealthy game, and it is also no doubt they serve as a stick that stirs the imagination since their covert behaviors, as much of Islam's traditions of taqiyah (systemic lying to protect the faithful), establishes the large theater of conspiracies that plays out widely in South Asia, Africa, and Europe. 

  The hyper-intense surveillance state behavior of China wrt the Uighurs has made 10 or 20 Turkish citizens in China disappear. 

  One may not wonder at that and the larger concentration camps of Uighurs if the tea leaves of the MB are seen in every reading.

Many Chinese do have sources of information other than Fox News, CNN and France24. I remember discussions with them in Xian of what they have tracked traveling along the silk road, and I have been confronted very directly and personally by political operatives from the Middle East in Xinjiang. I still remember when my wife said: "Paul, you have no ability to handle THIS kind of situation. Let ME go out there.." God, I am so grateful she puts up with me.. 

But Han China has its own very serious internal problems. Even as US, Sunni Islam and Iran are at risk from evil subversive internal wolfpacks, China has lots of scary tigers, which remind me a lot of their number one classic novel Journey to the West. They too are caught up in the same global time of troubles, when no one really believes anything seriously, and even MB survives based on its use of minions aiming for money and rape and violence. This and Easter Island are not the only examples in human history of this kind of time of troubles! Spengler discusses misplaced and futile classicism in many decaying civilizations/cultures; it is amusing see to see Maoism and Marxism-Leninism taking over the same role that Hinayana Buddhism had in Journey to the west!!!

And it certainly affects India as well, with many species beyond wolves and tigers, as Ghandhi's resignation warns us. 

 

  It is apparently the case that the Chinese government wants to know what everyone is thinking, or rather, believing. That will provide a satisfactory outcome for stability, the primum bonum of the Party, and no wonder given the MB stealth that you ID.

  On global problems of immigration, the arms merchants of our day are revealed by Hasan Minhaj's Netflix episode on the NRA. The NRA is revealed as the political force promoting gun sales to Central and South America by circumvent of regulations. This pipeline is the one that bad policy built by exporting gang members rather than incarcerating them. 

  The gun trade in the Americas and Africa is similar to the opium trade by the Brits and others in 19th Century China built on the effective enslavement of the Indian producers (read the Ibis Trilogy, Amitav Ghosh).  The mendacious care only for their own wealth, not the pain of others, not the disruption and impoverishment of the exploited African and Central American republics.

When the big animals create chaos, little rats and leeches can have local feasts. I was sad to hear of how certain movie makers may have blocked efforts to create the kind of secure social contract we need on the It side to reduce the criminality (especially bad uses of big money) emerging everywhere...  Dialogue and new foundations MIGHT be enough for us to muddle through.. if we face up to the need for more momentum to get past periods when there is no solution based on any kind of static stability.

As for the Party -- whatever they say, people in China know that they are now primarily the Cocktail Party. Needs a new Journey to the west...

If we return to the moon, why not aim to get real value/money from it?

Last week, I got an update on many aspects of space policy and technology at the International Space Development Conference. Two days were devoted to the challenges of getting energy beamed from space at a cost low enough to make a real difference to the energy and climate problems of earth. There were exciting new results from CalTech and other serious places. It looks feasible and justified from a technical point of view, but sheer lies in Washington from folks trying to take money without delivering a real product, either on energy or on lower launch costs, are a huge barrier.

Today, in an email discussion of leading space power engineers, there was a consensus that the DC folks have tried to limit the discussion too much to a narrow set of choices which may be unworkable in the end (because of the high cost of getting to space today, and even tomorrow under the current SpaceX and SLS plans).

One key conclusion: Trump is getting bored with the ho-hum rerun of "let's get to the moon again to stay." He should be. Why not change it: "let's return to the moon to MAKE money." REAL money, not the phony nonsense of stealing money from taxpayers with no return. Let's structure our investment in the moon strategically, to get as soon as possible to the time when more value flows out of the moon than we spend to keep our base going. That requires EXPORTS... and I learned that this is much closer at hand as an option than I knew last week.

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So with that introduction out of the way, here are some details, which I posted to that list just now:

I share your feeling that there has been some premature closure here.

The two days on SSP last week at ISDC were a great experience for me... with good news and bad news both.

Some things exciting and encouraging, others bummers.

The worst bummer for me by far was at the panel on the second day, when it was clear that political and sales type incentives have been at work here, not so different in nature from the forces which turned NASP and the space shuttle from something truly positive and great to something... not so great... as the plans got chewed up by political game plans. Premature closure was part of it.

Before Abdul Kalam died, NSS placed great emphasis on opening up new cooperation with India, with great respect for his understanding (not complete, but a lot better than what we see in the political class here). He and his people were firmly convinced that mirror technology is a real and important option. Gary's Brayton ideas and Cassiopeia also sounded worthy of more attention, so far as I could tell, and I was not impressed by how they were treated in the end. It is not that I am advocating any one of them VERSUS SPS ALPHA, which I still view as the "A team" approach to SSP (especially as formulated by Paul Jaffe, by Kaya and by CalTech)\,

nbuilding on Mankins' important book The Case for Space Solar Power). But life has taught me that new "B team" approaches can often work better, and even sooner, if justice is done for them. Various photonics approaches also fit. 

What I found most deeply disturbing was the claim that the problem of low cost launch has been solved.

That reminded me of a time in the late 1990's, when a guy I funded had demos showing how to solve the unsolved problem of hit to kill GNC in missile interception. When I discussed this with a key AF guy, he said that: (1) "you are wrong" in alleging that the Patriot missile has a 3% success rate; it is more like 1%"; (2) we cannot consider new approaches, because it is officially a solved problem, and billions of dollars to big stakeholders are based on selling the idea that it is a solved problem. It took incredible effort and special circumstances to get that problem solved, to the point where in 2009 I heard the Lockheed guy tell Congressional staff at the Marshall Institute: "NOW we can do real missile defense, thanks to .. (the guy I had funded)." But even now, Scientific American reports that we are only up to 50%, and the program has been re-Washingonized, sending the money to the right people, who are adamantly not going to allow the Phase II which would make us more likely to survive in the event that we finally tick off north Korea or Iran, let alone anyone else. 

Low cost launch is crucial not only to SSP but to simple defensive protection of our people, and to our options to deal with extreme climate change, which is not politically popular any more than vulnerability to North Korea is popular... but also ever so real. Mirrors COULD reduce the risk, IF launch costs could be reduced. 

Chip Proser at ISDC was putting together videos on our current knowledge of climate change, knowledge which is woefully in need of improvement, but is far beyond the silly partisan debates which are all that most people seem to have access to on either side. 

There was also good news and bad on launch costs and technology at ISDC, but this email is long enough already.

There has also been premature closure on Gerard O'Neill's vision of how to cope with launch costs. 

If mass comes from the moon, we may not need quite so low as $1000/kg-GEO. I was delighted to hear from Steve Leete of Grumman (formerly SSI) that we really could set up mass drivers near any new human settlements at the poles of the moon, providing a way to export stuff from the moon, and maybe get to a zero trade balance for lunar settlements sooner than I had thought possible. Not easy, but a truly rational plan for lunar settlement would be based on a "decision tree" optimal strategy to get to zero trade balance as soon as possible, at minimum cost and risk. I am not arguing that SSP work should wait for the culmination of that strategy.. but I was also surprised on Thursday that folks would kowtow to Trump on the climate issue but ignore the Pence/Trump interest in the moon.

I have heard that Trumpexpfressed worry that return to the moon would not seem novel or exciting enough, and that he has second thoughts. Well, if anyone offered him a chance to say "We will make money from the moon," THAT would be novel (at the presidential level).. and it would not only make more sense technically, it would resonate more with what Trump's supporters want from him. 

One may hope... 

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By the way, I also got an update on the ways we are ready to USE what could be sent up from moon to orbit by these mass driver systems. And I was delighted to hear that Jeff Bezos might have a role, if all goes well... 

but I also learned about a couple of additional bases which need to be touched to build a real low-cost launch system from earth, in addition to what I usually talk about when given a chance..