The Robot's Rebellion

In a new book, Keith Stanovich of U. Toronto invokes a "Robot's Rebellion" as way of "finding meaning in the age of Darwin". I learned of the book through a Point of Inquiry podcast distributed by the Center for Inquiry, which can be accessed with the link attached to the title of this post.

I still haven't read this book, but have at least scanned the table of contents carefully and listened to the POI podcast a couple of times with attention to detail. It's a fascinating book and I am going to buy it if I can't find it otherwise, but my current feeling is that the thesis is fundamentally flawed. That's unfortunate, but perhaps the book leads us in the right direction in any case.

The basic idea is an extension of Richard Dawkins' concept of "the selfish gene" using the concept of memes, also credited to Dawkins, who set up an adversary relationship with our genetic code, by attributing "selfishness" to a macromolecule. Stanovich sets out to help us find meaning in world where evolution is held to be a fact of life. He suggests this can be achieved if humans will seize control of their lives from their genes and memes, and insist on guiding themselves instead. Much as I love Dawkins prose and his delightful explorations of evolutionary science, his supposed deep insight into sociobiology now seems misguided to me. As engaging as Stanovich's writing also may be, I'm suspicious than any meaning that is found in this way may well be misguided.

Not everyone is enamored with the idea of memes. A chapter subheading from "Robots' Rebellion" is "The ultimate meme trick: Why your memes want you to hate the idea of memes." So Stanovich would hold that many have fallen into this "trick" that memes play on us. They don't "want" us to understand that a host can be taken over by an idea that treats its carrier solely for the immediate advantage of the parasite. The joining of religious cults, and suicide bombings, are cases in point.

So what is the fundamental flaw? Well, let me quote Peter Fields: "Those who are not proud of their heritage will never amount to anything, because they are in contempt of themselves from the start." This may be a bit sentimental, but I think it is a profoundly huge mistake to adopt an adversarial relationship with our genetic heritage, regarding one's own genes as an alien replicator that has "taken over the body" for its own purposes. Shades of "Men in Black"! Here we must hold Richard Dawkins responsible as the source of the "selfish gene" meme, which is at the root of this mistake.

It's a natural enough error, until we recognize that a human body could never have been assembled in the first place without the presence of the genetic information. It's not as if a pre-existing and self-sufficient body has been invaded by an alien parasite. Rather the genes have guided the development of the material body with which they are able to preserve and propagate themselves. The body and the genes cannot be separated into distinct entities with different interests; they are the same. It could just as well (and erroneously) be argued that the dumb matter of the world has exploited the information contained in foundling scraps of DNA to assemble itself into living bodies.

Stanovich argues for a robot's rebellion, in which humans would extrapolate the evolution meme to take over from the genes who are exploiting us against our better interests. He imagines that this will release us from the constraints of "subpersonal" optimization, by which I think he means the interests of genes in expanding and developing the gene pool and the species. This will, in his view, free us to be more rational beings who figure out what we want for ourselves and pursue it. This concept has a lot of appeal as it echoes the spirit of the 60's counterculture within which many of us matured (or failed to do so). It rejects the wisdom of "anyone over 30" and challenges us to figure things out for ourselves and find new solutions.

But this looks all wrong to me from my present perspective. Genes and memes are distinguished by their temporal orientation and scale. Instead of being "selfish" invaders, genes are encyclopedias of the accumulated wisdom of the ages, distilled into individually unique, yet thematically consistent, forms that have dealt effectively with reality to sustain and propagate life. One of the resultant life forms has now developed its own facility for the creation and storage of information in encyclopedias, known as memes or memeplexes. Some of the memes provide models of reality that support successful prediction of the future, and how it depends on our current actions. And that allows us to practice rationality on a new time basis that is forward looking rather than backward looking, that is, experience based.

Bottom line: thinking of ourselves as robots planning a revolt is both demeaning and dumb. It's wiser by far to heed the message of the genes, while looking ahead to predictable changes that could revise genetic wisdom and allow "anticipatory adaptation". Perhaps it can be said that a truly intelligent species goes beyond trial and error.

Oil in the Alaskan National Wildlife Reserve

My uncle-in-law forwarded me this provocative piece of nonsense:

"A lot of folks can't understand how we came to have an oil shortage here in our country.
~~~
Well, there's a very simple answer.
~~~
Nobody bothered to check the oil.
~~~
We just didn't know we were getting low.
~~~
The reason for that is purely geographical.
~~~
Our OIL is located in Alaska, California, Coastal Florida, Coastal Louisiana, Kansas, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania and Texas
~~~
But Our DIPSTICKS are located in Washington , DC !!!
Any Questions ???"

Well, that made me check into my conventional liberal wisdom, and I came up with my typically wonkish rebuttal:

It's easy for folks to blow the type up to 40 points and color it, but it doesn't make the conclusion a "no-brainer". It makes it an "urban legend". But as always, don't take my word for it:

Wikipedia on "Peak Oil"
Wikipedia on Alaskan National Wildlife Reserve Controversy
Petroleum News on World Reserves
American University on Alaskan Reserves

From the above:
* Most optimistic world supply: ~75 yrs = 2300 Billion barrels / 30 Bb/yr
* Most optimistic supply in ANWR: 0.5 yr = 15 Billion barrels / 30 Bb/yr
30 Bb/yr worldwide is the current production rate, which could increase a bit if we invest in more capacity. But the world supply estimates have been constant since the 60's, so don't delude yourself about unknown supplies saving us. The projections include future discoveries using models based on experience.

So the Alaskan National Wildlife/Oil Reserve is pretty much a drop in the bucket on a global, or even national scale, since we consume much of the world's supply, or did until recent increases in China and India. And now Indians are making a $2500 car that many more can afford. That's about the price of a dual sequential gearbox for a VW, Audi, BMW!?

The naturalist/liberal prescription for the ANWR is then: "let's save it for a far rainier day than today." Damn, we're beginning to sound like conservatives, while the conservatives are dancing around the bonfire chanting "burn it, Burn It, BURN IT!"

It's a topsy turvey world!

Tom
"Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away." -- Phillip K Dick

The Metaphysics of Quality Rears its Head Again

Ok, I admit it: beyond college courses, my philosophical awakening was "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance" and I'm a sucker for Robert Pirsig. I bought Lila in '91 or '92, but I must admit it made less impression on me than ZAMM did. However, I recently came across someone touting the Metaphysics of Quality as a way of resolving the apparent gulf between science and religion, and I zeroed in on that, visited the MoQ.org site, pulled out my copy of Lila, and began to root around to see if it had anything to say with which I now identify.

I clearly recall the single biggest message I took from ZAMM. It comes from an episode that is fresh in my mind after 30 years plus (which, if Steve Grand is right, means that none of the atoms of my present body were part of my body back then!). The traveling companions of Phaedrus and his son develop loose handlebars on their BMW motorcycle. It seems that some shim stock is required so that the handlebar clamp can regain a grip on the bars. Now, the BMW Company likes to cultivate an aura of high quality surrounding its products, and likes to charge a premium for that aura. Part of this is a strident insistence that only approved parts and supplies should be used on BMWs, and that only approved BMW mechanics should work on them, to assure observance of BMW's ultra high quality standards. Well, Phaedrus proposed to cut a shim from an aluminum beer or pop can, but this approach was roundly rejected by the owner of the BMW, who insists on taking the bike to a certified BMW dealer where the repair is made, presumably using "official BMW shim stock" (made from aluminum can stock?). From this I took the message that Quality is a concept that can be manipulated and misunderstood. An yet, there is a clear recognition that quality is very important, difficult as it may be to define.

Now I've done a bit more reading on the MoQ site, especially the essay collection, including "Pirsig's Metaphysics of Quality," by Anthony McWatt from the Philosophy post-grad Seminar, University of Liverpool, February 12th 1998. After a lot of general discussion and background, he gets down to a Socratic Q&A exchange with himself:

How do [Pirsig's] four static patterns of quality relate? (intellectual, social, biological and inorganic)

The MOQ recognizes that the four static patterns of quality are related through cosmological EVOLUTION. A graphical representation is offered for this:

If the Big Bang is taken as the starting point of the universe, it is seen that at this point of time there were only inorganic quality patterns. That is to say chemicals and quantum forces. Since then, at successive stages of history, plants and animals have evolved from inorganic patterns, societies have evolved from biological patterns, and intellect has evolved from societies. "...the universe is evolving from a condition of low quality (quantum forces only, no atoms, pre-big bang) toward a higher one (birds, trees, societies and thoughts) and in a static sense (world of everyday affairs) these two are not the same." (letter from Robert Pirsig to Anthony McWatt, March 23rd, 1997)

As the cosmologist, Edward Kolb notes: "In perhaps nature's most miraculous transformation, the universe evolved the capacity to ponder and understand itself." ("Astronomy", February 1998, p.37)

Well! that sounds a lot like Alan Watts and Carl Sagan, who both waxed eloquent about the role of humans as the conscience of the universe. I don't care much for Pirsig's nomenclature, and I would identify biological "static quality patterns" (SQP) as being equivalent to DNA information and its refinement through evolution. And, in my view, social SQP are equivalent to the social organization of living things into communities. Finally, intellectual SQP are equivalent on the written literature of humankind, which undergoes a refinement process much like that of the information in DNA, except that it is edited much more frequently and without life and death, except possibly for memes. Of these, you can see that I'm having the most trouble finding a form of information that is social in nature.

But the next question is:

Why is evolution an important consideration in the MOQ?

Evolution is an important consideration in the MOQ as a code of ethics can be generated from the four basic levels of quality patterns. Though each level of static patterns have emerged from the one below, each level follows its own different rules i.e. there are physical laws such as gravity (inorganic), the laws of the jungle (biology), co-operation between animals (society), and the ideas of freedom and rights (intellect). It is important to note that the different laws of the four static levels often clash e.g. adultery (biological good) v. family stability (social good). The MOQ combines the four levels of patterns to produce one overall moral framework based on an evolutionary hierarchy (as seen on the MOQ diagram). The entity that has more freedom on the evolutionary scale (i.e. the one that is more Dynamic) is the one that takes moral precedence. So, for instance, a human being is seen as having moral precedence over a dog because a human being is at a higher level of evolution...

The MOQ follows a form of Darwin's "survival of the fittest" where the fittest is equated with the best. As Pirsig points out: "...'survival of the fittest' is one of those catch-phrases... that sounds best when you don't ask precisely what it means. Fittest for what? Fittest for survival? That reduces to 'survival of the survivors', which doesn't say anything. 'Survival of the fittest' is only meaningful only when 'fittest' is equated with the 'best', which is to say 'Quality'." (Robert Pirsig, LILA, Black Swan, 1991, rep.1994, p.179)

On the other hand, Darwin defined "fitness" this way: "it is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change".

In this context, the best generally refers to the choice which produces the most freedom for a given situation. It is an increase of freedom all the way. For instance, quantum forces can change their energy levels, earthworms can control their distance and direction, birds are able to fly in the sky while people manage to get to the moon.

"The MOQ says, as does Buddhism, that the best place on the wheel of karma is the hub and not the rim where one is thrown about by the gyrations of everyday life. But the MOQ sees the wheel of karma as attached to a cart that is going somewhere - from quantum forces through inorganic forces and biological patterns and social patterns to the intellectual patterns that perceive the quantum forces.

In the sixth century B.C. in India there was no evidence of this kind of evolutionary progress, and Buddhism, accordingly, does not pay attention to it. Today it's not possible to be so uninformed. The suffering which the Buddhists regard as only that which is to be escaped, is seen by the MOQ as merely the negative side of the progression toward Quality (or, just as accurately, the expansion of quality). Without the suffering to propel it, the cart would not move forward at all." (letter from Robert Pirsig to Anthony McWatt, March 23rd 1997)

I find these ideas a bit fuzzy, but it seems to me they can be made more rigorous by identifying "freedom" with "free will" and a propensity to freely respond to change, as Darwin posed it.

And finally:

So what's the value of such a moral framework?

By removing morals from social convention and placing them on a scientifically based theory of evolution the MOQ removes much of the cultural subjectivity that is inherent in many ethical beliefs.

Pirsig produces the following example:

"Is it immoral, as the Hindus and Buddhists claim, to eat the flesh of animals? Our current morality would say it's immoral only if you're a Hindu or a Buddhist. Otherwise its OK, since morality is nothing more than social convention."

"An evolutionary morality, on the other hand, would say it's scientifically immoral for everyone because animals are at a higher level of evolution, that is, more Dynamic than are grains and fruits and vegetables. But... it would add ... that this moral principle holds only where there is an abundance of grains and fruit and vegetables. It would be immoral for Hindus not to eat their cows in a time of famine, since they would then be killing human beings in favor of a lower organism." (Robert Pirsig, LILA, Black Swan, 1991, rep.1994, p.190/191)

Lila is billed as "An inquiry into Morals" and Pirsig is clearly trying to devise an objective source of morals by basing it on Quality of life and evolutionary science. So he postulates an evolutionary ordering of life forms, a pecking order of "who may eat whom for dinner." If nothing else, this is certainly an effective rationalization for human omnivorousness!

To wrap this up, note that I have mapped Pirsig's quality patterns into a hierarchy of information. For inorganic SQPs, there is no memory or medium in which to store information. When DNA came to be used as a genetic storage medium, nature began to take notes on its progress with replicating life forms, and to keep and preserve the notes from generation to generation, and to practice mutation with natural selection. The result is 3.5 billion years of evolution that has recently produced a species that keeps its own notes from generation to generation and is busily refining them using a process analogous to evolution, but using memes in place of genes. The editing is going on much more rapidly than once per generation, however, so the pace of change has speeded up greatly.

All of which is a very long preamble to the overall point I'd like to make, which I believe to be supported by the Metaphysics of Quality. And my point is that DNA plays the role that humans have previously ascribed to an "immortal soul". The genome is scrupulously specific to each individual, is preserved for millions and billions of years so that it can be refined through selection, and is a ghostly reality that can be copied from physical medium to physical medium, with no substance of its own. As argued by Richard Dawkins and artificial intelligence expert Steve Grand, matter is merely "used" by genes and memes to propagate and test themselves. While not entirely satisfying as an analogue of the immortal soul of religion, the genome clearly shares many characteristics of that hypothetical construct, and is the closest thing we are likely to find to a scientifically defensible "soul" of each living thing.

A Matter of Taste?

I came upon a seminal bit of Phillip Johnson's stuff over at ScienceMusings.com (Blog) today in a piece called "Miracles" or in the comments on it. I've linked the object of the discusion in the title of this post. Here Johnson makes the case that science does not disprove religious dogma and the supernatural; it simply assumes it to be irrelevant, through its materialist focus. It seems a fair point to me. Is it possible that science is an overreaction to the realization that humans are biased to see intentionality in everything that happens? Is science immune to admitting any possibility of a supreme and supernatural being, by assumption? It certainly could be that's true.

If so, it is clearly by application of Occam's razor, which posits that the simpler story is always to be preferred, when faced with a choice of two different interpretations, in the absence of any clear differentiating evidence. Note the qualifiers on that statement. A good intelligent design advocate would say that complexity is of itself evidence of intention and design. Whereas, a good scientist would say that complexity can arise naturally and that self-organization is a property of matter in some circumstances. It's even a property of numbers and algorithms, clear of any matter. 

So it seems that the biggest questions must be answered as matters of personal taste and the making of bets on the future, unless or until direct evidence can be found. We have our choice of attributing that which we cannot otherwise account to deliberate intentionality on the part of a supreme being, or we can regard it as a challenge to explain otherwise. That is, we can blame spooks, gremlins, or gods if we like, with no apparent guilt concerning the lack of evidence. Or we can blame the inherent complexity of nature and vow to keep seeking to understand what we do not now understand. 

Your choice! But I hope you'll pardon me if I regard ID advocates as quitters and nay-sayers who would find the universe unsatisfying if its ultimate mysteries were removed. And yet, there is common ground here, if scientists and materialists would admit that part of what they find fascinating about the universe is that which we still do not understand. 

Carl Sagan Blogathon, Year 2

However it came about, I'm really happy and excited to see that Cosmos will be on cable during prime time this holiday season (Discovery Science channel). Perhaps last year's decadal observance helped to make it happen. But I think in the future, it might be well to observe Carl's date of birth (9 Nov) rather than that of his death. Isn't that what we do for great people we wish to remember?

In any case, please follow the title link to Joel Schlosberg's blog central for this event.

Planet Finder

Geoff Marcy gives a great show as a lecturer on the discovery of planets outside our solar system (extrasolar planets). He presented it on 14 Dec 2007 at Goddard Space Flight Center's Science Colloquium. This was a special colloquium in celebration of the life of John Bahcall, one of the pioneering supporters of the Hubble Space Telescope. Marcy had a bona fide letter from Bahcall, encouraging his astronomical studies. Pretty neat!

Marcy presented many of the nitty gritty details that have been learned about over 200 extrasolar planets and nearly put me and a number of others to sleep, though a few were fascinated by every nuance. Then he got down to business, which he labeled as "speculations". That's fair, but he did attempt to make an inference from what is now a statistically meaningful collection of nearby stars that have planets. Even if one is as generous as can be, there is no way that any of the planets we have found could have life on them. And that sets a limit on how many worlds could be populated in our galaxy, or any other. Given the number of stars in our galaxy, the bottom line is that intelligent civilizations, if they exist anywhere in our galaxy, must be short lived phenomena, just a few million years at most. If that is the case, we have already reached what is apparently the typical lifetime of such civilizations. We have reached the point where they die out. And Marcy's take away lesson was that the supreme challenge faced by humanity is simply to survive for longer than the typical civilization does, assuming that they exist at all outside our solar system.

Or are we happy to have a short fling with the universe, on the way to our eventual demise? For myself, I prefer to aspire to Todd Brennan's challenge: "A truly intelligent species will outlive its home star." What about you?

Philosophy

It appears that I am a winter blogger. This weekend is the first of the fall that is cool enough here in Maryland to motivate jeans and a long sleeve shirt. Yesterday, we did the Maryland Renaissance Festival with our visiting student from Extremadura, Spain. RenFest is always wonderful, from Johnny Fox, the King of Swords (swallows them), to Jousting, the Maryland state sport! We actually had a jouster knocked off a horse this year (he was fine).

However, here's what I want to write about soon, from Panhala:

Philosophy

~ Billy Collins ~

I used to sit in the cafe of existentialism,

lost in a blue cloud of cigarette smoke,

contemplating the suicide a tiny Frenchman

might commit by leaping from the rim of my brandyglass.

I used to hunger to be engaged

as I walked the long shaded boulevards,

eyeing women of all nationalities,

a difficult paperback riding in my raincoat pocket.

But these days I like my ontology in an armchair,

a rope hammock, or better still, a warm bath

in a cork-lined room--disengaged, soaking

in the calm, restful waters of speculation.

Afternoons, when I leave the house

for the woods, I think of Aquinas at his desk,

fingers interlocked upon his stomach,

as he deduces another proof for God's existence,

intricate as the branches of these bare November trees.

And as I kick through the leaves and snap

the wind-fallen twigs, I consider Leibniz on his couch

reaching the astonishing conclusion that monads,

those windowless units of matter, must have souls.

But when I finally reach the top of the hill

and sit down on the flat tonnage of this boulder,

I think of Spinoza, most rarefied of them all.

I look beyond the treetops and the distant ridges

and see him sitting in a beam of Dutch sunlight

slowly stirring his milky tea with a spoon.

Since dawn he has been at his bench grinding lenses,

but now he is leaving behind the saucer and table,

the smoky chimneys and tile roofs of Amsterdam,

even the earth itself, pale blue, aqueous,

cloud-enshrined, titled back on the stick of its axis.

He is rising into that high dome of thought

where loose pages of Shelley float on the air,

where all the formulas of calculus unravel,

tumbling in the radiance of a round Platonic sun--

that zone just below the one where angels accelerate

and the amphitheatrical rose of Dante unfolds.

And now I stand up on the ledge to salute you, Spinoza,

and when I whistle to the dog and start down the hill,

I can feel the thick glass of your eyes upon me

as I step from the rock to glacial rock, and on her

as she sniffs her way through the leaves,

her tail straight back, her body low to the ground.

(The Art of Drowning)

Yes...

Chet Raymo has posted a meditation on William James that is sublime. Three short paragraphs say it all. What more can I say? I'll think of something later. For now, just go enjoy Chet!