There are two dominant annual conferences on the Science of Consciousness. The founder of one of them, the hard core realistic conference (author of the Global Workspace Theory of Conscioussess, explained in the classic advanced book on the brain by Freeman and Kozma), recently posted an argument that race war is basically inevitable. Sometimes he has deduced that we should support Trump, but this time he suggested we need new measures t get sex under control.
These are very serious issues. Here are my responses, first to sex and then to race and how human society works:
(I) SEX
Have you ever noticed how often we can write two or 20 pages, on a serious topic,
but human readers react intensely to just one sentence, often out of context, and neglect all the rest?
We humans all have such "hot buttons," which Freud discussed in detail and which we even have mathematics for.
In YOUR post below, you finish by proposing the abolition of sex. Well, sorry, since I am human, that really hits a very powerful hot button for me. Freud would say that this is evidence of sanity.
Seriously -- our lives on earth this year have become SO complicated, SO confusing, SO out of the old bounds and diverging even more... Fighting alcohol and fighting despair are HUGE parts of life all over the earth lately. For ME, an important way to fight despair
is to get my thoughts together in the early morning, in many ways, and forcibly remember the ancient pgradse LLL: Life, Love, light.
That's something I really can feel complete commitment to, resonating at all levels of myself. And in truth, it really helps to focus on that lying in bed in the early morning, after a basic "cosmic consciousness" episode, rolling over and looking at my wife, who is an equally complex and entangled personality, with another whole world of connections. No, I didn't go THAT far this morning (reaching 73 has reduced certain hormone levels, to my regret), but even so, forcible renunciation is something I forcibly reject. Likewise, when cdertain TYPES of Zen Buddhists renounce mind and consciousness as such, I, like the Us spokesman for Tibetan Buddhism, forcing reject THAT, and strive always for MINDFULNESS, even though that implies work and effort (and life) forever. And yes, we have to pay a price, appreciate what it is and how it is justified to pay it.
In truth, I tend to think of that time of communication with my wife as a kind of next stage above that pure typical cosmic consciousness. She too can be pretty cosmic. It would be a VERY serious error to underestimate that, but
let me get back to what YOU wanted to talk about, which is also important.
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RACE AND THE DYNAMICS OF HUMAN HISTORY:
On Mon, Dec 7, 2020 the scientist I referred to wrote:
Paul, are you seriously proposing that there are any humans who are
not, in a broad sense, racists? If ethnic loyalty is racist, so are
all 9 billion of us. AND, of course, there is an enormous moral
difference between ethnic loyalty and murdering x number of human
beings.
I certainly understand that race is comparable in importance in the human brain to sex and love themselves.
(Not AS important, but visible on the same scale of fundamental reality.) People often have good reason to control or suppress their discussion of sex, BECAUSE it is so important -- but I am glad that some of us can handle such discussions better and can avoid neglecting such basic issues.
But race is also a BIG subject, multidimensional, which can be viewed from so many true viewpoints (as well as many hallucinations hanging over it like bad ghosts). Where should I start?
Certainly humans do not HAVE TO destroy their species through the escalation of race wars. We have that option now, but we have other choices just as real in our deep minds. I certainly remember seeing Donald Trump on the stairs of an Episcopal Church I have visited, imitating George Wallace holding a Bible, hoping to use the resulting racial conflict as a way to get re-elected. Some Black Lives groups were eager to join Trump in creating such a race war, but he chose an Episcopal Church in the shadow of George Washington himself (whose land I may sitting on right now as I type this) who remembered OTHER ways of establishing viable social contracts more sustainable for all of us. DON'T ASSUME I am just throwing empty words here; I am actually doing what I can to give you a concise English translation of more complex and complete mathematical analysis; see http://drpauljohn.blogspot.com/2020/03/reformulating-game-theory-mathematics.html . (Xi Jinping really knows what a win-win solution, aka Pareto optimum, is; more of us need to understand that basic principle and how it works.)
DO human brains have deep seated primary instincts to fight for THEIR race at all costs, as in a zerosum game where intelligent players do automatically seek the opposite of what THe OTHER PLAYER seeks? No. The history of life on earth DOES
include lots of cases where species ended up getting to extinction, but many others where n player games ended up with stability and diversity, even though selection and DNA were inevitable facts of life. Diversity WITHIN groups is a source of competition more than differences between groups, though a correct analysis simply cannot be scalar.
Honorable competition, subject to intelligible rules, is our best hope forwards, based on PEOPLE and their connections much more than race as such. Fixation on one binary variable, like black versus white, is a recipe for a kind of brain with only one brain cell in it,'not exactly an intelligent or capable creature.
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On another list, which has some Black Lives type participants, I recently posted:
This morning, a guy in India sent us a link to an article arguing that philosophy in the US has become very sterile and ossified because it is 90% Euro. I agreed, but remembered how radically different it was in Engineering.
When I worked in the Engineering Directorate of NSF, heads of leading departments would come and complain about how hard it was to find qualified graduate students born in the US, less than 10% in some cases.
I remembered when I attended the annual conference of the IEEE Industrial Electronics Society (meeting inNorth Carolina that year), when an Afro American guy strode up to me with a big smile and a hearty handshake saying: "Brother! It is always great to meet another of us underrepresented minorities here in these meetings."
Thinking back -- I remember a huge plenary session where the leaders in many design arrears (e.g.appliances)
spoke, and the were asked: "WHY is policy made in Dc so hopelessly out of touch with reality? Why do they keep doing things which any of us know are utterly stupid? " The chair (whom I still know) said: "My guess is that the policy offices all use US-born US citizens, and none of them were trained to know what all of us know."
So now, as a new VP takes over key roles like climae, without those old racial barriers, will it be fixed?
Yet on TV, I see how active racial lobby groups want to define the candidates for high decision making positions.
Will there be consideration of folks NOT on their radar, folks who are only just the world's leading technical (or microeconomisc) experts knowing what changes would be needed to meet the larger climate goals IN REALITY,
not just empty symbolism?
How could such a grand thing as climate change have any relation to humble stuff like the technology to make electricity? But what if 80% of the actual CO2 emission comes from making electricity (in utilities and industry both_ and from vehicles which can be electrified?
I funded much more than my share of minorities when I handled electric power at NSF, and certainly James Momoh of Howard did so too when he ran the area. But that was a NATURAL CONSEQUENCE of looking for new ideas and high capability, without any race aspect -- just getting past conventional biases and thinking. On the other hand, some groups would fund important areas based on racial correctness, and they ended up doing little EITHER for
diversity or for the actual research challenge.
Kamala Harris's priorities, and Kerry's understanding of the precautionary principle, could be great for climate change AND diversity, for the entire world... but not if the flood of usual DC lobby groups and gatekeepers keep selling the same old stories, neglecting the very specific kinds of people who really could save our skin. Our skin needs saving.
I do wonder lately how Lonnie Johnson of Atlanta is doing. Unlike most of the other great minority engineers, he might even be a Democrat, but I doubt that Kamala would be opposed to supporting minority Republicans who also get real things done for minority education (like Momoh or Venayagamoorthy or...).
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In the last century we've seen black people in Africa massacring other
blacks who look much like them (Hutus and Tutsis, in Rwanda); we've
seen Saudis murdering Americans (9/11), we've seen Japanese sinking
most of the US Pacific fleet at Pearl Harbor, and even more Japanese
killing Chinese in the rape of Beijing. Today we are seeing Chinese
killing Uighurs and also other Chinese who worship along the lines of
the Falun Gong.
Yes, I have seen all that and more with my own eyes. (Well, I did not DIRECTLY see blood dripping in Xinjiang, but I saw the
militant groups in action and the knives, and a big confrontation between police and separatists in Zhong .... airport on the way to Urumqi). In truth, there has been a lot of blood and war in human history, and a lot of serious efforts to understand how that works, and what choices await us now in the new period of history. Many people know that m Harvard 1974 PhD thesis was the actual origin of "backpropagation" and of deep learning in general (e.g. scholar.google.com), but few know that this was the SECOND of two topics I tried to defend at my PhD oral exams. the Harvard faculty was much more excited by the FIRST topic, the interaction of evolutionary biology and the ups and downs of human civilizations. I chose the second topic, mathematics of intelligence, instead, because it is a kind of prerequisite to a full rounded understanding of the first, which has complexities it took me decades to figure out. Perhaps someday I should try to post the initial paper on topic ONe? But oswald Spengler is one of the essential sources to understand these ups and downs; a full understanding of Spengler requires accounting for the role of the noosphere, which I understand a lot better now than then. In brief, it is a multivariate dynamical system: race, and the other inputs to our
built in mundane U system (hypothalamus and epitathalmus primarily), are only PART of the story, and they interact with the other parts, and with our hopes and risks for the future, in a complex way.
Given the complexity, the question which REALLY has haunted me lately is: are humans just too stupid, too unable to cope with complexity, to be able to find a way to survive? Can they even cooperate enough to build the new institutions and computer apps necessary to accommodating their limitations enough to allow simple mundane survival, let alone a full development of human potential?
Best regards,
Paul
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