Lessons of history: is our real choice Terminator versus The Matrix?

Some futurists have asked us: what future do we CHOOSE? I thought a lot about that long ago in middle school, and then asked more and more: "What our our ACTUAL choices? What kinds of states are attainable and sustainable as a kind of attractor state? If you think that all you have to do is dream up what YOU think is the best social/economic/political system, yes, do dream big... but then ask yourself what would happen if your new social contract were staffed and implemented  by a family of chimpanzees?" That reminds me of a lot I have seen in this world...

I was so lucky that kids in my school could talk about Toynbee's World and the West, a book which asked important hard questions back in those years, and showed me a path to other work by Toynbee, Spegler, McNeill and others (yea unto Marx and Weber and Jefferson and more of Aristotle in college). "Those who do not learn the lessons of history are doomed to repeat them." And "those who assume dynamics without actually studying time-series data and facing up to their initiale rrors should change jobs."

I was delighted to hear of an open  journal continuing that tradition, Cosmos and History, and published a paper recently in that journal. But where is the intellectual community continuing that analysis? We have lots of well-connected would-be dictators now in the US who revere Trajan, but where are the folks who know the REAL lessons from what Trajan did to the Romans (which many folks start to do to us)?

That being so, I was delighted to hear of a major new thrust based IN JAPAN which tries to fill in that very important gap, to help inform some very serious (even urgent) decisions in front of us now at the  crossroads of history.

Here is the link I was sent today on that thrust:
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On Sun, Dec 29, 2019 at 10:56 PM Bill Daul <bdaul@nextnow.net> wrote:

https://www.japantimes.co.jp/opinion/2019/12/25/commentary/japan-commentary/big-history-helps-understand-todays-issues/

Big history helps understand today's issues

BY HARUAKI DEGUCHI

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My reply:

Thank you, Bill, for informing us of this very important strand of thinking. (See his post and newspaper story below.) 

Recently, I had a paper published in the online journal Cosmos and History  (I think),

but was deeply disappointed not to find an internet venue (google groups? special package?) to dig deeper into the issues which that journal talks about addressing.

DO YOU HAVE a URL to suggest to dig deeper into those basic questions?

i4j has another mission. It can help and linkup, but a more dedicated, more cross-cutting thread is needed.

I looked up NextNow, and it too seemed to have very different goals.

In the past, I was excited by the mandate of a Lifeboat discussion list: to discuss what are the most serious threats to the very existence (extinction) of the human species, and rational strategies to minimize the risk?

Learning from past history is one of the important starting points or resources for that discussion, but it has petered out in recent years. (People told me that David Brin built on that to create a viral blog, but is he into two-way asking of tough questions?) SO WHAT WOULD YOU RECOMMEND NOW TO GET DEEP INTO IT, EITHER THE BIG HISTORY TOPIC OR THE LINK TO SURVIVAL?

For what it's worth, I was invited by JS&T to fly to Japan myself this month, to give a talk on how we can avoid a kind of future history collapse due to misuse of AI and other internet technologies, already a pressing challenge to governments around the world as the dynamics of history actually change in a serious way. Rather than fly, I chose instead to record a video talk:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6togqN9Cvt4&t=12s 

(They tell me it has been translated into Korean, and gotten some real circulation there.) TWO of the eight slides actually depict extinction challenges discussed at Lifeboat, with the kind of details and evidence to make it more than just the usual BS. I was also asked to give a talk in Seoul on worst case climate change, one of the four:

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sPccNVHRFIM

For my PhD at Harvard in crossdisciplinary applied mathematics, I was asked to defend two possible topics in an intense oral examination in 1971 or 1972. One was the coupling between biological evolution of humans and the rise and fall of civilizations, with lots of reference to Toynbee and Spengler as well as Eisenstadt, McNeill ( https://www.amazon.com/Rise-West-History-Human-Community/dp/B0006AYML2/). The senior Harvard faculty became very excited by the topic. I still remember when Karl Deutsch, my adviser and president of the International Political Science Association became very uncomortable when I cited studies showing big shifts in some motivation variables in a mere 7 to 10 generations, and stated how everyone in that field knows that such shifts have effects only over millions of years. Then the top mathematical biologist, a close associate of E.O.Wilson, gently explained how political science needs to learn more about reality, and cited a host of papers himself. After an hour of listening to their debates, and saying almost nothing myself, I meekly walked out, having graduated with flying colors, but not having talked about the OTHER topic, the mathematics of intelligence or mind, which is what I actually chose. (At scholar.google.com, the version of that in Asian languages is my highest citation. US AI people are not so far along yet in using what I did long ago.) I wanted to understand brains better first, and get some practical experience with history, before trying to nail down the other topic. Now would be a great time to get back to it, in a really serious way, if anyone is able and willing to discuss it.

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On the Millenniums Project list, someone recently asked "what future would YOU choose"? 

I wish that were a real discussion list, but it has other purposes. If it were an open-ended discussion list, I might have started by mentioning how I started worrying a lot in high school "What are our realistic CHOICE?" We can fantasize til hell won't quit what kind of world we WANT to live in, but that is simply not realistic. I once said to a friend: " Try to design what you think is the BEST form of government, fitting your values. And then try to picture what will happen if the entire system is staffed by chimpanzees." (I have certainly seen hearings and trials which reminded me of that sentence.) Identifying what are realistic choices, informed by the empirical data of how history works over long times (for humans and also other species), is a key part of any honest, useful response to the question.

For the moment... as I look at how money and DNA once ruled humans, but computers are on track to ruling money, my gut feeling this morning is: The most accurate depiction of our real choices may be a lot like the deep, inspired science fiction series Hyperion by Dan Simmons. It starts out as something we don't understand, which turns out to be a war between a Terminator kind of AI (slightly gentler?) and a Matrix kind of AI, in which our best hope for now is to help the Matrix side win and more fully value human beings.(Of course, there is also a choice of new internet apps so primitive and devoid of real intelligence that we all fall apart like some folks' tax returns under an IRS audit. Current governments' policies actually look more like that one, a more Spenglerian possibility.) 

I doubt the Terminators would even listen to talk about people-centered internet, but that fits well in the Spenglerian options for the future.

Please forgive if I close with a photo I took in Japan a few weeks ago, which somehow seems to fit here. It is a picture of the gateway to the future, entry to the highest and most sacred of Shinto (sanzan) shrines... with an icon of the macroscopic Schrodinger cat just past the gateway. We have CHOICES now about our future history, and this multifurcation point in that dynamical system, but physics has been more and more clear that many choices actually DO HAPPEN in the multiverse we live in. Deepak Chopra sent me a link yesterday, for example, to a new article MIT Tech Review, which appears to attack objective reality but describes yet another new experiment which proves that macroscopic Schrodinger cats actually exist. Meow. 

Thanks again for your post... and I look forward to further discussion in another venue (unless others here want to dig in as well).

    Paul 

Trump impeachment hearings: a Rorshach test for the world?

trump Impeachment hearings

Do you remember what a Rorshach test is? Basically, they show you and image which is somehow very compelling, but different people have  very different strong reactions, all thinking they know what they are really seeing.

I suppose that a majority of the people look at these hearings thinking EITHER "We really need to save the world by getting rid of this evil person fast" OR "Those evil Democrats are scheming to destroy us all and must be destroyed first."

An intelligent Democrat recently said to us: "I don't understand why the Republicans don't join this. Don't they understand that they too will be destroyed if this guy continues?" My reply to her: "Maybe some of them want to wait until after the election, when they think THEY will get to decide who replaces him." But that was a big "maybe"; many possibilities are in play.

My own immediate response was: this reminds me of the severe importance of those internet design issues I have not committed enough to solve, issues which the rest of the world somehow can't see straight on, so much so that disaster seems to loom on every one of the alternative paths now in clear focus.

It reminds me of how humans alone, as the only REAL intelligence making decisions on earth, but empowered by ever stronger technology, seem to be on a path to extinction well before the hundred year climate stuff. The hearings make me think of humans killing themselves. Yes, we see one overloaded guy at the center of the hearings, lashing out in dozens of disastrous ways. But we know that there are many others in play, on far right and far left, who may not speak as openly as he does, who have even  crazier things to say.

The war between the left and the right (NOT the only war in play) reminds me a lot of Lotfi Zadeh, the famous father of fuzzy logic,whom I had a lot of contact with when he was alive. He rightly attacked irrational extreme black and white thinking. But what was his alternative? A fuzzy middle?
When I look at the choices for US President, the best I really see in the neighborhood (in a fuzzy way) would be Klobuchar, whom I think of as "the candidate from that weird unappreciated place called planet earth." Will Iowa bring her at least to consideration? Yet when I hear her echo the party lines on the Middle East... which Trump has rightly resisted... it limits my enthusiasm. And in any case, what chance does she have? (Sure I would vote for her if I lived in Iowa.)

What this REALLY tells me is that humans alone may not be on a path for survival. Even if human life is number one on the list of what we care about, is it not time to think about  the need for a bit more real coherent intelligence on this planet? Could a well designed automated dialogue system run a less silly and confused management of BOTH sides in events like this hearing and the one to come in the Senate? Or even to the messes which CAUSED the hearing, messes due to ANY President (or chairman) having greater and vgreater power not really restrained by objective reality?

No, I am not a devotee of Ethereum. I do not believe that Elon Musk or Ethereum are the salvation of humanity, Karl Schroeder's novel Stealing Worlds is closer to the spirit of what may really be coming as IT changes the entire world game, but  the reality is more than that.

BUT: instead of the misleading, cartoon promises of Musk and of Ethereum, can we come up with designs which really make good on those promises, which have a really solid mathematical foundation?

The sad fact is that I do not know anyone else on earth who knows nearly as much as I do about that stream of applied math. And yes, I know the players and the field. I see partial answers, which are important, but how could we avoid a grossly dehumanizing endgame?  Why are humans today so oblivious to how serious the threats are?

Part of it, I suspect, is that they don;pt understand basic principles which culminated in Von Neumann's book Theory of Games and Economic Behavior. We are heading today towards a Nash equilibrium, which means death in the new game, and do not appreciate the needs and possibilities for a realistic progress towards Pareto optimality (building on important foundations which many of us know a little about, but not enough). Some folks think that AI is about a bunch of little apps on their smart phones (or independent robots) which will just fight it out.

But an integrated market style system implies further risks.

In the end, in the struggle between silicon and  carbon, I see a mess as bad as these hearings. We need more from a third player, which I view as dark matter and energy ... the authentic spiritual side of human life. But where is THAT in the hearings? Nancy Pelosi has said a few things suggesting she might remember a bit about soul...

What if your best hope is something clearly present but very hard to focus on?

As a tangent... there is research which might help a bit in injecting dark matter and energy into computer systems, as well as enhancing human life in that natural way. But will people even remember it after I die of old age (the timing of which is ever harder to predict in my case)? Will humans even remember that self-destruction and extinction are not the only choices? 

A discussion of the meaning of meaning and of the meaning of life

Your question was (I think) roughly:

What is the meaning of meaning, without falling back on using some kind of quantum explanation?

My first reaction to this question was to remember all the weird debates which result from people assuming such different meanings for the word "consciousness". To understand reality at all, we need to get used to working with multiple sensible definitions, and not getting hung up[on less sensible ones.

But what of the meaning of "meaning" itself? Of course, it too has multiple sensible meanings. One is the usual interpretation of the first word in the previous sentence -- "meaning" as in the meaning of as word or phrase, which naturally leads into discussions of language. We have already discussed the basics of how language works. The world does need better support for "natural" language dialogue than what Facebook provides; a better computer network system would be better grounded, among other things, in the issues of multiple meaning in English, and of how such confusion can cause sincere confusions and fights of all kinds. 

But yesterday, another group reminded me of another meaning of "meaning." What of meaning in life, of purpose? That is even more central than language itself in our lives. After all, creatures who do not know English will often have a strong and important sense of purpose, even just in mundane neural aspect of their consciousness.

That group sent out data suggesting that the whole world has a growing problem with a lack of purpose and sense of meaningless in recent years (or decades). That is serious too. Can Cosmos and History help address THAT kind of thing? Can anyone else do so, without falling back into animal noises?

On the other list, I responded with:

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John's post is an example of an issue which it is challenging to really account for analytically, scientifically and in strategic policy -- yet it also of utmost importance, demanding that any sane person should try to pay real attention, while not pretending there is an easy solution.

I have to admit that the issue of purpose becomes a personal issue for me in recent years. For example, what is the purpose in trying to explain and prove certain new directions in quantum foundations at a time when other issues are likely to kill us a lot sooner, and people's ability to care and understand seems ever more problematic lately?

For me.. believe it or not, I was heartened somewhat by some of the comments of Pope Francis, as he visited some of the same places which my wife and I visited and probed just a week or two before.

What struck me hardest: when he said (roughly): We cannot save the life of the earth unless we first learn to really love it.

On Facebook (or youtube) it is easy to locate the back to back talks of Ban Ki Moon, Jerry Glenn (leader of www.themp.org) and myself on climate, Monday (two weeks ago) on Korea TV. But the sheer craziness I see on that subject in my neighborhood (near DC) really saps morale and effort and effectiveness and so on. It was very helpful to me that my wife arranged visits to dozens of centers of nature and life in Japan, and two days in Korea before the conference, reminding me in such a direct and personal way how much we really do love the life of this planet, and really do care enough to try to strengthen the connections to it and do the best we can, however daunting the obstacles from those who do not seem to be speaking from love or from sanity. (Caveat: for me, "sanity" is a technical term, referring to a concept which this list may not want to get deep into. If anyone cares, one of my papers last year says more: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s41470-019-00038-z. )

And yes, a coherent sense of purpose is fundamental to "sanity" as I use that term, but in some environments the way ahead is much clearer than in others even at an equal level of sanity.

And that can affect anyone. Design of a better environment for humans is a crucial challenge in integrative IT design, among other areas, but I see a lot more lip service than effective design grounded in the basic principles of AI, etc.

                                                                                                             

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By the way, my direct, personal feeling of connection to life in general... as I experienced it in Japan last month....is illustrated in the photo album I posted at https://photos.app.goo.gl/aX9eKnuLmPLybxWc6

That was so good for morale!!! But it would take another long essay to explain the meanings and connections of all the many ... images...