The Brain Is Not a Computer

Everyone knows that the human brain is not a computer, but everyone acts as if it were.  This causes all sorts of misunderstandings and problems.  I'd like to describe some of these problems and encourage people to view the brain differently, with the goal of creating greater harmony and easier cooperation with others.

While the computer-specific metaphors are recent, popular misunderstanding of how human behavior originates has been causing cultural problems for as long as civilization has existed.  If people acted in strange or undesirable ways, they would be assumed to be possessed by demons, or accused of being witches.  A failure to understand mental illness, or a  failure to tolerate simple non-conformity has resulted in imprisonment, banishment, and execution throughout history.  The same is true today, where addicts are imprisoned, gays are beaten, and people are driven to suicide by work-related stress.  A better understanding of how the human brain shapes behavior could let us be better brain operators, and help instill compassion for those who are different or struggling.

We (Mis)Understand the Brain As Computer

Today's (incorrect) computer-based metaphor for how the human brain works goes something like this.  The brain's hardware is what was inherited via the genes, and it can't be changed.  The brain's software are the ideas and skills we download from our culture through education and training.  

When a baby grows in the womb, it's like manufacturing new computer hardware of a certain brand.  The genes the baby obtains from the parents completely determines the quality of the hardware that will be created.  Pretty much all brains will be capable of running the "watch TV" program, but only the highest quality brains can run the "astrophysics" program.  The brain simply completes its construction on its own as the child grows up, and then stops growing or changing.  Further education or training simply downloads more programs into the mature brain.

Your brain boots up in the morning when you get out of bed, and you resume the programs you were running the previous day.  You multitask as you go through your day at school or work, running several programs at once.  Learning new ideas or gaining new skills are like upgrading to the latest version of a program.  Having a false belief or a mental illness is like having a bug in a program, or getting a computer virus.  Sometimes it can be corrected, sometimes it can't, especially if it's a bug in the hardware.  People with good brains can reprogram them more readily, while people with poor quality or defective brains can't download new software.  

How the Computer Analogy Breaks Down

You could read a bunch of neurobiology and psychology books to see how wrong this model is, and I recommend a few here for those so inclined.  However, you really only need to observe how the computer analogy fails to explain phenomena from ordinary life.  If learning new facts was really like downloading new software, then people would instantly change their beliefs and behaviors when they learned new information that invalidated the old beliefs of motivations.  We see that knowledge and habits are not software precisely because they are so hard to change.  People remain attached to political parties and religions long after they've learned facts that disillusion them.  You can easily convince an addict that his habits are ruining his life and will eventually kill him.  Why doesn't he change his ways?  Alternatively, most people can eventually change their habits if given enough time and incentive, proving that they are not hardware either.

The other way the analogy breaks down is when you consider how a computer runs: it's either on or it's off.  If a program makes a single mistake, it crashes and needs to start from scratch.  We think our brains work this way too, that we always have a certain set of capabilities as long as we are awake.  That's not the case, of course, but we tend to act surprised and confused when our abilities differ from time to time.  Like all biological systems, the brain degrades gracefully.  If a computer doesn't have enough power, it shuts down.  If a human doesn't have enough power, it shuts down non-essential systems, and runs at reduced capability.  But it continues to run.

How the Brain Really Is

The brain does not have hardware or software.  Your long-term memories are not stored in anything resembling a computer's RAM in your skull, and there's no place to store software.  Neither does the brain have unchanging hardware like a computer.  If that were the case, you would never be able to learn a new skill or fact.  Instead of hardware and software, the brain is made of one thing, sometimes called wetware.

The brain's wetware (i.e., neurons and associated support cells) has the combined characteristics of both hardware and software.  Like hardware, it's persistent.  When you go to sleep, your memories aren't erased.  However, like software, wetware can be changed.  But here's the big difference, changing wetware takes two things: time and effort.  Understanding this makes human behavior much easier to comprehend.

I recently finished listening to the audiobook "101 Theory Drive", which chronicles the fascinating career of neuroscientist Gary Lynch as he has uncovered the biological basis of memory.  The fact that we actually know what memory is (at the lowest level) was news to me, and you might be equally fascinated to learn that the biological basis of it is the process of cellular change known as long-term potentiation (LTP).  This process causes shape changes on the post-synaptic neuron which gives rise to additional neurotransmitter receptors.  This strengthens the synapse, making it more likely that the neurons will fire together in the future. Moreover, this is not just the basis of how our memories store facts.  LTP is the basis of everything the brain does, from learning skills, forming beliefs, and controlling perception based on previous experience.  We also know now that the brain is extremely plastic (changable) throughout life.  The fact that a (non-demented) 90-year-old in nursing home can learn new names and faces should have made this obvious, but it's fairly recent that neuroscience has recognized that plasticity is the normal state of the brain.

It takes time and repetition to strengthen synapses through LTP.  That's why we have to practice everything we want to learn.  We do have a small short-term memory that resembles RAM, but to encode knowledge or skills long-term, we need to transfer them from short-term memory to long-term memory traces.  Long-term memory does not store data and program separately like a computer.  The wetware that originally experiences a phenomenon or idea is strengthened so that it can be used again, to recall that experience or idea.  Learning is not like storing new programs or data that the single CPU can run.  It's more like constructing a new CPU, each new CPU hardcoded to run each new program (memory).  However, all the brain circuits overlap, so no analogy to human-engineered computers can be complete.

We have also learned, though both low-level LTP research, and high-level cognitive research, that LTP, and thus change and learning, only happens when we pay attention to things.  The amazing consequence of this fact is that expending effort thinking about things literally changes your brain through LTP.  This capacity for change in the brain is explained in simple and practical terms in Dan Siegel's amazing book Mindsight.  Another way to put this is: Brains Make Minds, and Minds Make Brains.

With all of this constant brain making, there also needs to be a way to weaken or break synapses that are not needed, or else the brain would get overstuffed.  Much as we might wish for it, there is no way to consciously forget something. The only way to make a memory disappear is to not think about it, and wait for the pruning mechanism to reclaim it.  For you computer geeks, the brain has garbage collection, but it's very slow, and there's no way to explicitly invoke it.

While we now know a lot about the inner workings of the brain at a low level, we barely know anything about the higher levels of organization in the brain.  Any significant thought or memory requires not one or two synapses, but thousands or millions, arranged in complex networks that fire at certain frequencies.  Each neuron can be involved in a limitless number of networks, which is one way the brain stores so much information in such a small space.  With new experimental methods like fMRI and Diffusion Tensor Imaging, we're starting to be able to map the connections and watch the brain in action as people do various mental tasks.  In the coming decades, we will be able to build a functional model of the brain's networks to understand how it really works.  However, knowing such networks in detail is not needed to understand the points I'm trying to make in this essay.

Consequences of How the Brain Works

When you understand that human thought, memory, and habit is composed of complex networks of slowly changing neurons, it becomes clear why people behave and change the way they do.  If a brain has a complex belief like "the Democrats are the good guys", or "booze helps me survive", that belief is embodied in a large number of very complex networks comprising tens or hundreds of millions of neurons.  To change such a belief will take reorganization of a large fraction of those networks, and this will take a lot of time and a lot of mental effort, not to mention willingness.  One new fact, such as "Obama violated the constitution to invade Libya" or "your spouse will leave you if you take that drink" is not sufficient to delete the existing belief networks.  Unlike upgrading software or overwriting a file, beliefs can only be replaced over long periods of time by having the mind pay attention to new networks and neglect the old, obsolete networks.

The other thing that's helpful is to be more aware of how and why the brain degrades gracefully.  As a biological organ in a complex organism, the brain can run well or run badly, depending on a lot of pretty obvious factors.  When you learn to observe your brain and associate degraded performance with these factors, you can start to learn how to stay at peak performance more often.  In The Origin of Everyday Moods, Robert Thayer explains how not just performance and tiredness, but also moods are explained by simple facts like how much sleep you've had, how well you've been eating, and what mental stress you're under.  You may know this at least in certain cases, like the kids get cranky when they're hungry, but adults can compensate for these deficiencies pretty well, and we don't look closely enough at our behavior patterns to really be able to explain our moods.  We just have "good days" and "bad days" without understanding that this is completely predictable and under our control.  As Thayer recommends, systematic self-observation is the key to managing moods, rather than being victimized by them.  It's also important to distinguish between adequate nutrition and optimal nutrition.  The former will keep you alive and prevent diseases of deficiency, but you need the latter if you want your brain to be able to perform at the limits of your genetic endowment.  See Primal Body, Primal Mind for more information on optimal nutrition for brains.

This ties in with the brain science of Mindsight when you take the time to notice how you're feeling and consciously make associations with the factors in your recent past that affect you.  For instance, if you feel irritable because you stayed up late binge-watching a TV series, take the time to notice how you feel and consciously make the association with the late night.  Since your brain and body are a single integrated system, the association will be stored as a memory in the whole body.   Making the conscious mental effort is key to determining if this association will be made in a temporary, fleeting way, or a long-lasting way.  Then, the next time you're wondering if you should start watching that next season, you can ask your body how you will feel the next day.  The memory comes back, and you can make an informed choice.  Over time, your habits will change, if you pay attention and encourage new networks to grow.

Next time you're having a political discussion with a stubborn person on Facebook, or asking one of your family members "Why do you act that way?!", think about whether you might be unfairly expecting them to act like a computer.  It's likely that our slowly evolving wetware is more like a feature than a bug, so let's appreciate how it gives us consistency of thought over time.  And let's be patient with ourselves and our fellow humans and give our wetware time to change.

Where the Real Action Was On Election Day

While most of the post-election ink will be spilled discussing how Obama will act in his second term, or whether the Republican party can be saved, these questions are relatively inconsequential compared to where the real action was on Tuesday: state ballot questions.  The national presidential race represented the false choice between Wall St. Approved Warmonger #1 vs. Wall St. Approved Warmonger #2.  The state ballot questions, most created by people-powered initiative petitions, represent the ongoing movement of the national mood, that is, the will of the people.  Where the people lead, the politicians may eventually follow.

There were a variety of questions, but I'm going to focus on two big categories: marijuana and same-sex marriage.  These issues are indicative of what's on our minds, and happen to be issues I care about a lot.

Three more states legalized same-sex marriage, bringing to nine the number of states that support full-on marriage for gays.  Other states have various civil union laws or some sort of protection or recognition of marriages from other states, and of course many states explicitly ban gay marriage.  Minnestoans defeated a constitutional ban on gay marriage on Election Day.  The success of these new measures reflects a growing national acceptance of gay rights, including marriage rights. It's clear where history will come down on this one.  We're basically just waiting for some old people to die before we can accept that everyone's equal and move onto real issues.

There were two medical marijuana initiatives; the one in Massachusetts passed, and the one in Arkansas failed.  This makes 19 states that have some sort of medical marijuana law.  Yet the federal government still categorizes pot on Schedule 1, the list of the most harmful drugs, with no known medical uses.  How will this conflict be resolved?  I don't think the states are going to reverse course, so what's the holdup at the federal level?

Even more remarkable, two states (Colorado and Washington) fully legalized marijuana, allowing recreational use by adults.  A similar measure in Oregon was defeated.  I think this is the most consequential result of the whole election, because it sets up a direct conflict between state and federal law.  How this plays out, in both the streets and the courts, will be interesting to watch.  The Feds have busted medical marijuana dispensaries that were in compliance with state law (despite an Obama promise to not do so), but the Feds lack the resources to police all of the recreational users in Colorado and Washington.  What will they do?  Just let it happen?  Will state officials or residents of those states challenge federal law?  Will the Feds see the light of progress and legalize (and tax!) pot?  Just kidding on that last question.  I don't see the current crop of Feds ever doing anything so sensible.

I think the lack of personal freedoms are at the heart the decline of this country.  Prohibition still doesn't work.  If we can learn this lesson about alcohol, why not pot?  If only governments (and people who care about government spending) would mind their own business, we could have a country and an economy instead of a prison-industrial complex.  Imagine if we taxed pot instead of policing it and sending all the profits to the violent Mexican cartels.  And freedom to marry?  It's just seriously none of your business what my spouse's characteristics are, including his or her gender.

Below are the full results, with percentages, obtained from Politico's handy election map, which has all sorts of other good info:

Arkansas - medical marijuana - defeated 51% to 49%
Massachusetts - medical marijuana - passed 63% to 37%
Colorado - legalize marijuana - passed 55% to 45%
Oregon - legalize marijuana - defeated 54% to 46%
Washington - legalize marijuana - defeated 55% to 45%
Washington - legalize same sex marriage - passed 52% to 48%
Maine - legalize same sex marriage - passed 54% to 47%
Maryland - legalize same sex marriage - passed 52% to 48%

Minnesota - ban same sex marriage - defeated 51% to 48%

How To Make A Difference By Voting

Several of my Facebook friends are adamant in their belief that we should not vote.  These are very sophisticated and informed citizens who have concluded that the system is so corrupt that the act of voting is providing material support of that corruption, and so is immoral, not to mention devoid of the possibility of improving the situation.  I suspect the majority of my friends, most of whom don't talk much about politics, see voting as a civic duty, and are planning to practice the tried-and-true method of lesser evilism in choosing their candidates.  My purpose in this essay is to convince both of these groups that 1) their attitude towards voting will not have the effect they want it to have, 2) there is a way to have a greater impact, and 3) it involves voting.

I wrote about lesser evilism about a year ago, when I was deep into the Ron Paul campaign.  I'll quote the relevant portion of that essay:

Many people believe that politicians are generally self-serving liars, but they are willing to live with this because they feel they have no choice.  The TV show South Park is generally too low-brow offensive for me, but I recently agreed to watch an episode my wife said would explain why she doesn't get involved in politics the way I do.  The episode centered around the election of a new mascot for South Park Elementary School.  The candidates jokingly offered by students were "Big Douche" and "Turd Sandwich".  Despite the obvious offensiveness of the candidates and the resulting meaninglessness of the race, the episode revolves around the community's efforts to show how important voting is to the one student who refuses to participate.  The accuracy with which this fictional scenario mirrors our actual presidential elections is frightening.  Is Obama "Big Douche" and Romney "Turd Sandwich", or is it the the other way around?  Why do we get so worked up about elections when these are the choices offered to us?

This dynamic, and the lack of real choices is in fact that reason why many people don't vote.  The 2012 Presidential Election is a very clear example of a race where nobody really wants to vote for a candidate, they just want to vote against the other guy.  Obama has disappointed the Left, and the Right knows that Romney isn't really one of them.  However, they feel they have no choice because these are the candidates the two major parties have offered.  And given how all the attention is on the Democrat and Republican candidates, people feel that voting for the less evil one of them is the only viable way to defeat the more evil one of them.  Unfortunately, doing this for decades is how we got into this mess in the first place.

Which brings me to the central theme of this essay.  Those who follow my Facebook posts will have seen this coming, but in fact there are other choices available to you.  Voters in Massachusetts, which is typical, will have two candidates on the ballot who are neither Republican nor Democrat.  The fact the most voters will be surprised by this plethora of choices when they enter the voting booth is an epic scandal.  The perpetrators of this scandal are not the major parties, who are simply looking out for their own interests, as everyone does.  They are evil, but garden variety evil.  The real scandal is being perpetrated by our so-called journalistic media, who are in fact nothing but the public relations department for the military-industrial-government complex which is now in power in the United States.  The fact that they are pretending to be journalists makes their evil sneaky, insidious, and much more dangerous.

Voting for a third party candidate for President is by far the most impactful thing you can do this November to upset the political status quo that is killing this country and jeopardizing the entire planet.  I'm not going to spend time in this essay on anti-Romney or anti-Obama rhetoric, though I would be happy to tell you how either one of them is directly opposing your interests and principles.  If you are unfamiliar with the arguments that the two major parties are really two sides of the same fake coin, see this recent essay by Glenn Greenwald.  The point of my essay and his is that the limited choices are the problem.  Voting for either Obama or Romney puts your stamp of approval on the two-party system and guarantees more of the same for decades to come.  Whatever your reasons for preferring one party over the other, please consider the possibility that by perpetuating the two-party system you are participating in a larger evil than any one party can commit by itself.  The self-serving parties we have today are the result of people choosing the lesser evil for generations.  It's time to stop voting for evil.  Only if a vanguard of citizens is willing to vote third party, cycle after cycle, knowing their candidate won't win, will we be able to eventually point to a history of sustained and growing interest in alternative parties, and the media and mainstream parties will eventually have to pay attention.

Many people like to talk about what message they are sending with their vote (or their not voting), and I agree that this is important.  The media will certainly spend ample time debating what message the voters were sending, and this will shape rhetoric for years to come.  The key point to realize about this angle is: the message you intend to send may not be the  message that is received.

The point about messaging is most clearly illustrated by the non-voters.  When interpreted by the media, your sophisticated, principled non-voting will be lumped in with all of the other non-voters and boiled down to a single number, the turnout or participation rate.  Analysts will try to interpret this single number with the one or two most likely reasons why so many people chose not to vote.  The most likely reasons identified will be slacker apathy and an inability to get to the polls because of daily responsibilities.  Maybe some of the most sophisticated analysts will identify a general sense of dissatisfaction with the candidates as a possible reason some people decided not to vote.  But in general, your neo-anarchist message of resistance to the Illuminati will be completely lost in the noise.  And for the candidates themselves, your non-participation is a delight, since you don't matter at all for them if you don't vote, so they need not consider your opinion the whole time they're governing or campaigning in the future.  Seriously, do you think that if by some miracle you can convince everyone else to stop voting that the powers that be will demurely acknowledge the lack of support and voluntarily retire from power?  If it came to that, they would simply make voting mandatory or illegal, and either result would ensure they could never be driven from power again.  Please, while we still have something resembling effective voting, use it to change the system from within.  Be as anarchist as you want the other 364 days of the year, but take this one day to vote while you still can.

Messaging is equally important for those of you who are thinking of voting for one of the major party candidates.  And given our Electoral College system, messaging is actually all you have, unless you're in one of the half-dozen swing states where the outcome is uncertain.  If you actually live in a real swing state and firmly believe that Obama is better than Romney or vice-versa, then I will not begrudge you voting for him.  For most of you, however, this is not the case.  For example, it is a certainty that Obama will win Massachusetts by at least 10%.  Therefore, nothing could be less consequential than voting for him in Massachusetts.  Your vote will simply be lost in a sea of identical actions, and interpreted however the media and candidates want to interpret it.  However, a vote for Jill Stein will stand out, and actually send a message to Obama and future Democrats that their constant appeasement of the Right has been noticed, and that they had better pay attention to their base if they want to keep them.  A vote for Gary Johnson would send a message to both parties and the media that there are people who are dissatisfied with the status quo of big, violent government.

For many citizens, voting is the only political act they do.  For many of my Facebook friends, it is only a small piece in the continuous life of activism that makes them feel they are contributing to society.  Your vote is private, and need not necessarily be consistent with every opinion you've ever voiced.  I hope this essay has helped you think about voting strategically, and to clearly consider what effect your actions on November 6 will have.  Even if you don't think the Presidential election is important, there are likely to be some consequential ballot questions (Massachusetts has four).  So please make this one day about voting, and consider casting a vote for President that will send a clear message that you want more choices.

Humanity's High Priority Problems

One issue with political discourse in our modern world is that a large amount of time and energy is spent debating what are really quite trivial issues.  For instance, many people, myself included, have very strong opinions about gay marriage, and how it should be either banned or enshrined as a basic human right.  This is important, but it is not as important as certain other issues which receive far less attention.  This post is an attempt to bring attention to these issues, which I'm calling humanity's High Priority Problems.

The main characteristic that gets an issue on my list of High Priority Problems is whether or not it credibly poses an existential threat to humanity.  While some religious fundamentalists believe that tolerance of homosexuality may provoke lethal vengeance from their god, these nutcases are a small minority.  As important as equal rights are to human political progress, whether or not gay marriage is banned or accepted has little influence on whether or not humanity will continue to survive as a species.  While I don't want to stop talking about these lower priority items, I want to start talking more about the high priority items, because I want the human race to survive.  If we don't start addressing these high priority problems, the most pessimistic dystopian dreams of our most creative artists could become our reality, and then the lower priority items will become completely irrelevant.

To further clarify what goes on my list, let me explain why the issue of climate change is not on the list.  I believe anthropogenic climate change is real, and that it will cause dramatic changes to the human world in the decades to come.  It will cause massive dislocation, starvation, and economic shocks.  However, I don't believe it poses an existential threat to the species.  I have a pretty good imagination, and the worst case I can imagine for climate change outcomes is that the human population is reduced to 20% of its current levels, living a difficult existence on a much less hospitable planet.  Ultimately, however, our species and its knowledge would survive and adapt to the new circumstances, presumably wiser for the experience.

The items on my list of High Priority Problems have possible outcomes that are worse than that.  If a problem credibly could result in the literal extinction of the human race, don't you think we should all be paying a bit more attention to it?  Sadly, we are not, and the reason is spooky.  The reasons we are not paying attention to these High Priority Problems is that the people who are on the dangerous side of them are the people who wield power in our society and control the cultural narrative.  We need to change this if we want to prevent these people from destroying our species, and much of the rest of the world with it.  Without further ado, here is the list.

High Priority Problem #1 - Nuclear Armageddon

If a major nuclear war were fought, where hundreds or thousands of warheads were launched, the resulting explosions and radiation would literally kill billions of people immediately or within days.  Worse than that, however, is the dust that would be kicked up into the atmosphere, where it would persist for months or years.  The resulting reduction of sunlight would result in the well-accepted phenomenon of nuclear winter.   It's not known exactly what it would take to produce a nuclear winter, or how bad it would be, but recent research concludes that

A nuclear war between the United States and Russia today could produce nuclear winter, with temperatures plunging below freezing in the summer in major agricultural regions, threatening the food supply for most of the planet.

It could be argued that this prediction is no worse than the climate change prediction I minimized earlier.  However, I think the nuclear disaster is much less predictable, given the nuclear fallout component, which is absent from climate change scenarios based on greenhouse gasses.  Like climate change, we don't know exactly what nuclear winter would be like, and some serious predictions go as far as to postulate human extinction as a realistic possibility.  

The other reason nuclear Armageddon makes it on the list ahead of climate change is that the cause and the cure are so much more clear and easy.  The threat of nuclear Armageddon, however likely or unlikely, is caused by nuclear weapons, plain and simple, and the solution is disarmament.  The fact that the United States alone possesses a nuclear arsenal capable of wreaking destruction that approaches human extinction, and that the power to launch that arsenal has been vested in one human being is insane beyond measure.  Anyone who created this situation or insists that this situation must persist is clearly a deranged psychopath who must be imprisoned for the safety of humanity.  Once that is done, we can set our engineers to the task of dismantling the weapons and converting the nuclear materials to safe, peaceful usage.

The causes of climate change, e.g, cars and factories, are arguably good and necessary parts of human culture.  Climate change is controversial precisely because people see climate change alarmists as attacking these pillars of of society.  What is the similar case in favor of nuclear weapons?  The intended use of nuclear weapons is death and destruction on a grand scale.  Their ostensible reason for existing unlaunched, i.e., defense, can be more ably and safely accomplished by many other strategies.  Anyone who argues otherwise is psychopathic or recklessly endangering humanity for financial gain.

The fact that my thoughts on this issue are considered fringe is a result of the fact that psychopaths control our country and media debate.  If this were not the case, why would the idea of peaceful coexistence be fringe and the status of being one President's bad day away from extinction be considered normal?  Those who are in power are preying on our fears, making us believe our lumbering, bloated military is keeping us safe, when in fact the opposite is true.  This is not the only issue on the list which raises the idea that the United States Military is the most dangerous organization on earth, much too dangerous to be allowed to exist.  Raising this debate to the forefront of our culture is of the utmost importance.  Oh, and if climate change really is your issue, the U.S. military is also the world's largest polluter. 

High Priority Problem #2 - Artificial Intelligence

Artificial Intelligence is coming.  Not the narrow AI that wins chess tournaments or analyzes stock markets; that's already here.  The real AI that's coming is sometimes called AGI, for Artificial General Intelligence, which means an adaptable intelligence that's as good as or better than human intelligence.  Sure, scientists have been predicting that true AI is ten years away for the last fifty years, but eventually the reality will catch up with the predictions.  When that happens, would you rather the reality resemble the humble personage of Robin Willlams' character in Bicentennial Man, or the man vs. machine fight to the death depicted in stories like The Matrix and The Terminator?

Which reality we get will be determined by our sustained actions over the coming decades, during which AI will take shape, mature, and proliferate.  One of today's most respected futurists, inventor Ray Kurzweil, predicts in his book The Singularity Is Near that computing power equal to a human brain will be available for $1,000 in the year 2020.  By 2050, that thousand dollars will buy you computational power equal to all human brains combined.  The software needed to turn that computational power into strong AI is not far behind, previous failed predictions notwithstanding.  The central theme of Kurzweil's book is that we always mistake progress as a linear phenomena, when in fact history shows it's always exponential.  Progress builds on progress, and the future will always progress more quickly than the past.  I often wonder what my children's generation will accomplish, being the first generation to grow up with the Internet seeming to provide instant access to all of humanity's knowledge, which they effortlessly call up at a whim. 

You may not have paid much attention to AI, but a lot of incredibly smart and supremely ambitious people have paid an extraordinary amount of attention to it.  What do you know about these people's intentions and progress?  It is my contention that you know almost nothing, and that this oversight could be even more fatal than allowing our military to control the nuclear arsenal it does.  Of the two groups who have paid a lot of attention to AI, it's hard to decide which is more dangerous.  The academic researchers are in love with knowledge and invention for their own sake, and often spend little time mulling the possible implications of their work beyond the confines of the particular project they're currently working on.  I think academic researchers are the most likely to accidentally create a strong AI that might turn malicious.  On the other hand, the second group, the military and intelligence organizations of the world, are scary precisely because malicious AI is bound to be an explicit goal of some very expensive programs that are running right now.  Think about it.  They would be neglecting their duty if they were not pursuing these goals, and pursuing them in secret. And if there's one thing the military is good at, it's doing what they perceive to be their duty.  Unfortunately, in the paranoid world we encourage them to live in, they find it not only OK, but necessary to create new weapons and release them into the world.  Foremost among organizations of concern is the U.S. military, the only group to have used nuclear weapons, and the only group known to have used cyber weapons to attack other nations (Stuxnet and Flame).  Imagine what they must be doing that we don't know about.  Surely they are developing, or at least researching software and hardware that could manipulate or crash financial markets and transportation systems, AI to design even more powerful weapons, and ultimately technology for controlling human thought, either directly or indirectly.  If a Terminator future is going to arise, I predict it will do so from the careful, deliberate nurturing of the U.S. military-industrial-intelligence complex.  And you're enabling that if you're voting for Democrats or Republicans.

Given the possible negative implications of computer technology, some people will suggest a solution involving regulation or prohibition of the technology.  Such solutions are so naive and sure to fail that further comment is hardly necessary.  No aspect of human progress has ever been held back by the decrees of a supposed authority.  People who have thought a lot about this, such as Kurzweil, suggest a more practical strategy with a higher likelihood of success, which is to nurture and guide AI in the direction we want it to grow.  Azimov's Three Laws of Robotics are a classic example of a small set of principles that could be built into AI systems to ensure that they remain human-friendly as they evolve.  Kurzweil suggests we invest, as matter of high priority, in the research of ethical, guardian AI whose main reason for existence would be to search for a protect us against the malicious AI that is bound to arise.  Given the amount our government is spending on new technologies to destroy, it seems reasonable to suggest that we invest similar amounts researching new ways to protect.


High Priority Problem #3 - Attack of the Abstractions

The Matrix is actually several movies in one.  The primary story, which was referred to above, is an overt war between humanity and intelligent machines.  The metaphorical story behind this is the more important one, which informs a lot of my political thinking.  Morpheus sums it up most succinctly in the "woman in the red dress" scene:

The Matrix is a System, Neo.   That system is our enemy.  But when you're inside, you look around, what do you see?  Businessmen, teachers, lawyers, carpenters.  The very minds of the people we are trying to save.  But until we do, these people are still a part of that system, and this makes them our enemy.  You have to understand, most of these people are not ready to be unplugged.  And many of them are so inured, so hopelessly dependent on the system that they will fight to protect it.

All good science fiction is metaphorically a social commentary on the society in which the artists live.  In this respect, the system of The Matrix symbolizes the institutions that drive human culture, particularly commerce and the law.  In the service of these systems, individuals routinely harm other individuals.  But what are these systems?  They are abstractions of the human mind.  If advanced aliens came down and liquified all human brains, corporations and governments would cease to exist.  Their physical artifacts might remain, but without anyone around to understand their "meaning", the use to which they would be put by earth's remaining life would make clear the distinction between a physical artifact and its meaning within a system of abstractions.

Yet, as ethereal as these systems are, they dominate our thinking, and cause us to take many concrete actions in the world.  However, we spend about as much time thinking about these institutions as fish spend thinking about water.  In other words, not much.  Since they are so ubiquitous, so assumed before any conversation starts, we never examine what they are and what they are doing to us.  Instead, we usually focus on the other human beings, and engage in conflict with them, even though it is often a system we are fighting, and our supposed enemy is merely another human being, who is acting, often reluctantly or unknowingly, as an agent of an abstract system.

The way I see it, humanity is already locked in a life or death struggle with an interlocking set of intelligent alien races.  The main species are corporations and governments.  While these are human-created entities, they are even more alien than little green men or the bugs of Starship Troopers, since they have no physical bodies which can be seen and attacked.  They are parasites residing in the human mind, only visible to those who use their inner eyes to view abstraction space.  These parasites use us for their own ends, which are the same as our ends, namely self-preservation.  And like us, their self-interest is not always enlightened.  Many a parasite has failed by proving excessively lethal to its host.  Just because these abstractions depend on us for their existence doesn't mean they won't destroy us, either accidentally, or on purpose if they're able to discover a more reliable host.  Corporations and governments would be happy to play out their dramas in a world of computers, devoid of human beings, so don't become complacent due to the fact that they currently need us.

Corporations and governments are not all bad.  They have certainly enabled humanity to achieve momentous and useful things.  But unless we pay attention to them and shape them and control them while we still can, we can not ensure that they will remain human-friendly.  It's already arguable that we spend more time serving them than they spend serving us.  If we want human life to continue as one of the best existances available on this planet, we must learn to control our abstractions.


High Priority Problem #4 - Human Psychology

Our culture is kind of a mess.  A glorious, beautiful mess to be sure, but certainly suboptimal, to put it mildly,  War, exploitation, bigotry, and unnecessary cruelty and unpleasantness of all kinds abounds in all nations of the earth.  Many of our most spiritually advanced people recognize that nations themselves, along with other cherished institutions like religions are actually afflictions that are holding us back.  However, the ubiquity of these issues suggests that they are not some superficial, temporary problem that can be solved by some new policy.   The mess seems to be a deeply embedded feature of the tangle of human culture and individual human psychology.  The psychologies of individuals are at once culture's constituent parts and the products of its machinations.  Unraveling this interrelationship and figuring out how to create a more nurturing environment for new humans must surely rank at the top of the list of humanity's High Priority Problems.  If we could all be as healthy as possible, we would create better societies, and all of today's societal problems would melt away.  So you could say that the problem of human psychology is the granddaddy of all the other problems that could go on this list.

The study of human psychology is not exactly in its infancy, but it can hardly be said to be much beyond toddlerhood.  Prejudice, hidden agendas and ignorance abound, and extremely fundamental issues exist in almost all forms of psychological research.  For instance, it has been shown that any study that relies on people's self-report of their own mental activities or states is notoriously unreliable.  Yet a large fraction of psychological or sociological studies are based on self-report, or the only slightly more reliable report of trained observers, since no other measures exist for mental states.  This is starting to change with the advent of functional MRI, which allows researchers to objectively observe brain activity as mental tasks are being performed.  If properly nurtured, this type of research could help us understand how humans work, both on average, and in individual problematic cases.

Unfortunately, the general public still doesn't believe for the most part that human behavior is explained by brain physiology and dynamics.  For instance, most people eagerly judge drug addicts as simply "bad people", despite the fact that scientific evidence shows addiction corresponds to specific brain abnormalities which have specific societal causes.  How can we shift our culture from one that is quick to judge individuals and condemn them to circumstances that prevent their healing to one where compassion and harm reduction is the first response?  This question can be rephrased as, how can we put human psychology first in solving problems of human behavior?  The question is perhaps most accurately described as a spiritual problem for our culture.  Compassion can not be bullied or argued into other people. 

There is danger here too, even from those with the very best intentions.  After all, most people believe in the essential rightness of their actions, no matter how ignorant, deluded, or psychopathic they may be in truth.  Humans and human institutions are notoriously fallible, and many historical horrors, such as religious wars and genocides, have been unleashed by ambitions people who sincerely believed they had the answer for how we should all live most successfully.  Some consider Western medical science to be the most evolved approach to healing humans, but low success rates and unintended side effects cast doubt on this assessment.  Proper nutrition and avoidance of repressed emotion could probably do more to cure the world's mental suffering than all the pharmaceuticals dispensed by the harried physicians of today's industrialized disease management system. 

Given how easy it is to make mistakes in psychology, I would not want some centralized authority to dictate the ways in which all children should be raised and educated.  In fact, the very notion that any small group could know the best way for all humans to be themselves is at the root of many of our cultural diseases.  Accordingly, I believe that the way forward to is introduce more freedom and tolerance into our culture.  If our institutions focused less on prohibition and control, more people would be allowed to simply live their lives.  Beyond protecting life and property, we have no natural right to interfere in the lives of others, and this constant meddling, often in the most disagreeable and violent ways, is the direct cause of many societal problems, even when done by government programs with good intentions.  For instance, America's War on Drugs is a poster child for destructive, wasteful, and counter-productive government programs with good intentions.

Even more important, however, would be the long-term effects of increased freedom.  Once people were allowed to live how they liked, this would allow people to experiment with alternative lifestyles, families, and institutions.  Perhaps the ideal environment for nurturing new humans looks nothing like today's America.  Given the problems of today's America, this seems likely.  How can we ever discover what the ideal configurations are unless we allow free experimentation?  Evolutionary biology produced us.  If we want to produce the most evolved culture, we need to allow cultural evolution to occur.  For evolution to occur, variation from the norm must not only be tolerated, but encouraged.

Cultural evolution seems to me to be the most fruitful avenue for us to pursue for creating better and happier humans.  Therefore, I see cultural conformity and obedience to orthodoxy and tradition as the largest impediments to human progress. So maybe promoting acceptance of gay marriage is, in fact, the most important thing in the world today.  It's funny how discussions of human culture tend to mirror the thing itself, and wrap around in strange and wonderful ways.

If you got this far, you are obviously interested in humanity's big problems, and I would love to hear what you think about my list.  How would you suggest we address these problems?  What would you add to the list?

Can a Mobile Game Make You Smarter?

For the past couple of weeks, I've been playing a game called Brain Builder, which claims that it will literally make you smarter.  There is actually some research to back this up, and after playing the game for a while, I'm starting to believe it myself.

The basic concept is pretty simple.  The game consists of a grid of nine squares (like a tick-tac-toe board).  The game will display a blue square in one of the spaces every few seconds, accompanied by a spoken letter.

Your job is to press the buttons on the bottom of the screen if the position of the blue square or the spoken letter matches what was displayed or spoken previously.  If the job was to simply match the previous position or letter, the game would be trivially easy for anyone over the age of three.  However, you have to match based on not the very last item, but the one that was 2 back.  The match may be to the position, the spoken letter, neither, or both.  That's it!

This deceptively simple game is really, really hard.  When deciding if the latest item matches, you need to temporarily skip over the previous item and match to the one that's two back in the sequence.  But you can't forget the previous item, because it will be two back in a couple of seconds!  In this way, you need to keep three things in mind (the current, the previous, and the two-back), and keep shifting the old ones out of your memory and the new ones into their new positions.  Even so, this would be relatively easy if only one thing needed to be remembered.  But the visual stimulus (position) and auditory stimulus (letter) need to be separately remember and weighed in your decision, since they may match or not match independently.  These combinations of challenges make it very difficult.  I've gotten better at it, but it's still very challenging.  It really feels like a workout!

What the game is really exercising is your working memory and your attention.  If your attention wanders even slightly, you will start messing up, and it's very hard to get back on track.  I can already feel that my powers of concentration are improving as a result of playing this game.

The version of the game I'm playing, from developer High Secret, has its flaws.  For a non-free program ($1.50) it should really have a volume control and an Android menu.  It also has no levels.  What I've described is the whole game.  It's been plenty for now, and will continue to be plenty for a while.  But I just learned that other versions of this game (generally called N-Back) are available, and this one from developer Philip Nguyen, has a 3-back level, and is free.  I will certainly be trying this one soon.  There seem to be iPhone versions as well.  Search for "brain n-back" in the App Store.

I definitely recommend this type of N-back game for anyone who wants to use their gaming time to feel like they're actually improving their brain!

Book Review: "About Time" Is Worth the Time

About Time is a substantial book, 432 dense pages in hardcover, and about 13 hours in the well-narrated audiobook (which I listened to).  It requires a bit of concentration to get through, since it covers a lot of ground and weaves together several threads of thought.  The author, Adam Frank, provides just the right amount of repetition to keep us mindful of the threads of time in both cosmology and the daily lives of people in the cultures that he follows through 50,000 years of human history.  Frank's skill, along with the many fascinating historical facts he describes, make the book an informative and enjoyable journey that I would recommend for anyone interested in how we perceive time.


Though the focus is on cosmology (the study of the universe as whole), the book is almost a complete history of science, at a very high level.  There is no math, and the explanations are very clear, at least for the well-understood stuff like Ptolemy's astronomy and Newton's mechanics.  Things get a little murkier towards the end of the book, when Frank tries to explain the myriad astronomical and cosmological theories of today.  There is so much ground to cover there that the intertwined threads of cosmology and culture get lost for a few chapters, and that part of the book was not as enjoyable as the earlier parts.  This is not entirely Frank's fault, since the many mutually incompatible or vague theories of today are simply murkier for everyone.  While these later chapters loose some of the enjoyable interplay of ideas, the densely presented scientific facts are a great overview of the frontiers of today's physics.  


About Time really shines when Frank describes how the human experience of lived time has evolved over the millennia and centuries.  Our hunter-gatherer ancestors and neolithic farmers lived by the seasons.  As agriculture enabled humans to settle in permanent cities, the day began to be divided more and more precisely.  The invention of mechanical clocks and their placement in city squares enabled a shared time to be experienced, and also brought about new cosmological theories of clockwork universes.  The descriptions of time's role in the industrial revolution and how radio and the washing machine shaped the human experience of time in the twentieth century opened my eyes to a lot of new facts and ideas about our civilization.  Throughout the book, Frank does a great job describing the intertwined forces of material engagement through technology, cultural conceptions of time, and cosmological theories.  


Reading About Time gave me a new appreciation for how culture and human ideas shape our experience of time.  It should be enjoyable for any fan of physics, technology, and history.

The Lipid Hypothesis

As far as I know, I never reached 300 pounds, but there were a couple of months when I avoided stepping on the scale because I didn't want to know.  There are two main reasons why I was able to loose over 100 pounds in the last three years.  The first reason is that I stopped taking a certain prescription medication, but that's a story for another day.  This post is about the second reason, which is diet.  By that I mean what kinds of foods I eat, not some sort of counting program.  I follow a specific variant of the Paleo diet.  The premise of this diet is that, as a species, we have not yet had time to adapt to the types of food available to us in agricultural societies.  This means that some individuals are unable to properly digest many foods that are ubiquitous in our society, including all sugars, grains, starchy vegetables and processed foods.  We unlucky ones can only eat what our hunter-gatherer ancestors ate in the Paleolithic period of pre-history, primarily meat and vegetables.

I most definitely did not loose 50 pounds by "eating less, moving more".  This "common sense" advice assumes the human body is like a car that takes only one type of fuel, which is clearly not the case.  There was virtually no exercise involved in my weight loss, except for walking a few times a week, only beginning in recent months.  I eat as much as I want--of the foods that are allowed--and this can be a substantial amount.  This diet is simultaneously more challenging and easier than counting-type diets where you simply eat less of everything.  Fully 80% of the average grocery store or restaurant menu is off limits to me, which means I generally have to plan ahead and provide my own food in many places.  The surprising upside of this is that shopping and restaurant ordering are much easier and quicker, because there are so few options.  I find it much easier to have hard-and-fast rules on food type and not have to worry about quantity.  And except for sugar cravings that go away after a few days, I feel more full and satisfied now than I ever did when I was chowing cookies and ice cream all day.

In addition to the unlimited quantities, the specific diet I'm on achieves high tummy satisfaction by making sure you get enough fat.  While the diet is wholly compatible with the Paleo concept, it goes a bit further, positing a specific malady called gut dysbiosis.  I never thought I had troublesome digestive symptoms, but again, this is a case where we tend to oversimplify our bodies.  Just because you don't have constipation, diarrhea, or painful gas doesn't mean all is well within your gut.  Digestion is a system of hundreds of interlocking chemical reactions, producing many different products your body needs.  Your intestines contain more bacterial cells than there are human cells in the rest of your body, and many of these microbes are performing absolutely essential digestive functions.  Unless, that is, certain harmful microbial species have taken over and are suppressing the beneficial bacteria.  Gut dysbiosis tends to run in families, but by environmental transmission, not heredity.  Various types of life events, including taking broad-spectrum antibiotics, can cause populations of harmful vs. benign and beneficial species of gut flora to shift in an unhealthy direction.  A diet high in sugar feeds the baddies, and the gut lining becomes damaged from their toxic output.  This "leaky gut" allows partially digested products from our Neolithic diet, such as wheat gluten, to pass into the blood stream where a host of subsequent reactions occur, including neurotoxic and auto-immune responses.  The GAPS diet aims to cure many modern medical conditions by restoring the dominance of beneficial bacteria in the gut so it can becomes a source of nutrition rather than toxins.

I used to eat TUMS like candy, but when I stopped eating sugar, I never got acid reflux again.  I used to get sleepy in the afternoons, but when I stopped eating grains, this stopped happening.  Sometimes things that we think are unavoidable, or are part of the way our body works, can be changed dramatically by changing the type of fuel we put into our bodies.  When I was at my heaviest, I had sleep apnea and type II diabetes. Mainstream medicine gave me a pharmacological mechanism for getting my blood sugar down, but that was maintenance with side effects, not a cure.  Nutritionally, they told me to count grams of carbs, which is extremely difficult and resulted in feeling deprived all the time, since I still had all the cravings.  After only a few months on a Paleo diet, my type II diabetes had completely disappeared, and I went off the medication.  The sleep apnea also went away, presumably from weight loss.

Dr. Natasha Campbell-McBride created the GAPS diet to cure her son's autism, which she did successfully.  You read that right; many conditions that are considered incurable diseases by mainstream medicine can be completely reversed by eating real food instead of the chemicals that come from today's large agri-businesses.  Due to the spectacular nature of these claims, the GAPS diet has been met with a lot of skepticism, but I predict anecdotal successes such as my own will gradually increase participation until medical research is forced to take a closer look at it.  Some conditions are reversed more are easily than others, and the average person may not be able to follow the required diet in today's world.  In order for this type of healing to become available to more people, we need to address the biases of our Western medicine and demand local, natural whole foods from our grocers.

One big reason GAPS is meeting resistance is the emphasis on getting enough fat, which is healing to the gut and provides vital nutrients.  Indeed, any doctor knows the essential role fats like cholesterol play the the body, so why would a high-fat diet be such a seemingly controversial suggestion?  Three words: The Lipid Hypothesis.  You may not have heard the phrase before, but you know the lipid hypothesis well.  This is why we have so many low-fat and fat-free products on our supermarket shelves, and why everyone "knows" that fat in the diet is what causes heart disease.  So then, why is heart disease still our major killer, after decades of declining fat and cholesterol consumption?  Why do certain cultures who eat high fat diets have low prevalence of heart disease?  Simple: the lipid hypothesis is unproved, and I believe, dead wrong.  From Wikipedia:

German pathologist Rudolf Virchow in 1856 suggested that blood lipid accumulation in arterial walls causes atherosclerosis. An accumulation of evidence has led to the acceptance of the lipid hypothesis as scientific fact by the medical community; however, a small but vocal minority contend that it has not yet been properly validated, and that vascular inflammatory mechanisms prevail independent of blood cholesterol levels. 

When my blood cholesterol levels rose after starting the diet, my doctor was suitably alarmed.  But when I protested that inflammation causes heart disease, she had no counter-argument, being a good, progressive doctor.  Now I may have a heart attack tomorrow, so the jury will remain out until I have decades of history, if indeed my cholesterol levels remain high.  If I can start running again regularly, my HDL/LDL ratio ought to change, even if the total level doesn't.  There are certainly a lot of pieces to the puzzle, and everyone is different. 

The main thing the lipid hypothesis has going for it is the consensus agreement of the medical community, along with, of course, the media, the food industry, and the makers of statin drugs.  Other ideas that once had to battle scientific consensus include the notions that the earth is a sphere and that small, invisible entities called "germs" are the cause of most diseases.  Confusing wide acceptance of an idea with proof of its validity is a common logical fallacy, according to the list my tenth grader showed me a couple weeks ago.

There are other low-carb diets which help people lose weight, most notably the high-fat Atkins diet and low-fat South Beach diet.  These diets work by starving the body of sugars from which to make glucose, forcing it to switch to an alternative process known as ketosis for powering cells.  I lost a lot of weight when I was on Atkins many years ago, when I constantly ate little but steak, eggs, and bacon.  However, like many people, I found the diet very unsatisfying, and could not stick to it.

Depending on implementation, GAPS may be a ketogenic diet, but this is not its primary purpose.  GAPS is based on the Specific Carbohydrate Diet, which, as its name implies, is based on restricting the specific types of carbs consumed, not the amount.  The purpose of the SCD is to address gut dysbiosis.  Unfortunately, there are no tests for gut dysbiosis, so following an SCD-based diet is as much trial and error as anything else in medicine.

Again and again in my medical history I've discovered that doctors know almost nothing about what my body is doing or how the treatments they prescribe will affect it.  Modern Western medicine is based on statistical models and trial-and-error.  If treatments are found to be effective in a large enough percentage of the population, these treatments are then prescribed to individuals on the presumption that the individual probably falls into the group which is helped by the treatment.  If this turns out to be not the case, then other treatments are tried.  When multiple treatments exists, or when a treatment doesn't work for everyone, there is almost never a test which will tell you in advance if the treatment will work for you or not.  I started taking statin drugs because I had high cholesterol and the statistical models showed that many people with high cholesterol develop heart disease which can be prevented by the drugs.  There were no tests done to see if I was actually developing the early stages of atherosclerosis, nor any tests done to see if I would be one of the ones who benefited from taking a statin.  In retrospect, taking the drug probably didn't do much except help encourage the development of type II diabetes. 

Medical science is amazing, having worked out many fantasitcally complex systems, as illustrated by the following chart that illustrates how statins affect the levels of cholesterol in the blood. 

 However, once you start to see that the actual practice of modern medicine is often nothing more than taking shots in the dark, it begins to look more like pseudo-science.  Yes, many lives are saved, but mostly by luck, when you fall into the norm that the treatment model was designed to address.  Demand to know why your doctor is prescribing a treatment for you, and how you will together measure whether or not its being effective.

It would be absolutely impossible for me to be on this diet if it wasn't for my wife Carol constantly cooking for me: homemade soups, roasts, ghee, and yogurt, just to name a few.  Thanks, love.

Book Review: The End of Faith, by Sam Harris

I'm very glad Sam Harris wrote The End of Faith, and it took great courage for him to write it. He travels with bodyguards now, due to multiple death threats. What did he say to earn such hatred? Paraphrased, he said, to the believers in the God of Abraham, "Your faith is dangerous nonsense." This is very much against the mainstream current of our culture, to dare to directly criticize someone's religious beliefs. Just recently, the President of the U.S. apologized publicly because some Korans accidentally got burned by the military. Apparently, showing even unintended disrespect for this book is much worse than killing and maiming innocent children, something President Obama does every time he authorizes a drone strike, but for which he has never apologized. In daring to criticize Islam most severely and directly, Sam Harris is taking exactly the opposite approach. It remains to be seen which approach will bear the fruit of peaceful coexistence in the long run, but I applaud Harris for having the guts to state the unpopular position and bringing up some very troubling and important questions about the prevailing moral beliefs of our age.

As you may know, I am a devout atheist myself. I think believing that the Bible is literally true, or that a God like the one described there exists is at best extremely unlikely, and in my judgement, preposterous and absurd. I don't feel the need to offer an alternative explanation for the origin of the universe in order to say that Rick Santorum's God is as silly as all the other creation myths created by all the other cultures which do not share his Christian traditions.

While Harris is clearly a nonbeliever, he is not really pushing an atheist agenda. His main premise is that the existence of fundamentalism, in particular Muslim fundamentalism, is a threat to our existence as a species in this age of Weapons of Mass Destruction.  Given the number of well-documented suicide attacks carried out by radical Muslims, it's hard to deny that significant danger exists unless we learn to quell the anger of these people or control access to WMDs.  As Harris describes, neither outcome seems likely, certainly not as long as "freedom of religious expression" is allowed to enjoy its privileged place in our world of ideas.  Harris gives religious moderates a thorough drubbing as well, given the enabling role they play for allowing literalist interpretations of our sacred texts which inspire extremists.  He does, however, leave a door open to religion, particularly Islam, "fixing" itself by downgrading its sacred texts to the status of myth, and accepting modernity.  In order for us to survive, Harris contends, we must remove faith, i.e., certainty without evidence, from its privileged place of being off-limits to criticism.

There is much I dislike about The End of Faith, particularly with regard to Harris' prescriptions for what we should do about the danger posed by faith.  The book is decidedly alarmist, trying to rouse us to action to face this danger.  Harris spends considerable time tearing down ideas that I still hold dear, even after reading his book: that preemptive war is evil, and that American foreign policy, such as military intervention in the Middle East and our support of secular Arab tyrants is partly responsible for Muslim terrorism against the West.  Harris argues that said tyrants, while undeniably evil, are holding back the greater evil of the theocratic states which would inevitably arise if the Muslims of the Middle East were given self-determination.  And while he admits that a nuclear first strike against a nuclear-armed Islamist state would be a horrible crime, he defends this possibility as the lesser evil compared to allowing Islam to conquer the Western world.  I personally would rather live under sharia law than be responsible for the nuclear annihilation of all Muslims.

Harris also spends time defending the excesses of Israeli occupation and oppression of minorities by saying that nobody else would be more restrained and reasonable in a similar situation.  Maybe so, but the situation could be changed.  I believe Harris fails to see the bigger picture in his support for Israeli oppression and apartheid, and his promotion of the idea that the West is, in fact, at war with Islam.  Since questions of religious identity form the basis of the Israeli-Arab conflict, it's a little frustrating for atheists like myself, who see the whole conflict as people fighting over who has the best imaginary friend.

Harris argues that Western meddling in the Muslim world is not the main reason for Islamic terrorism, and that the central tenets of Islam would invent reasons to war with the West if we had not provided them with reasons such as our support for Israel and secular Arab tyrants.  I disagree.  I think if contemporary politics did not provoke the anger of Muslims, there would be room for moderation and modernization in Islam.  The greatest evidence for this comes from Harris' own data, which shows that sentiment regarding the West and the justification for terrorism varies by nation, with the most extreme views being held in those parts of the world most torn by recent violent conflict.

Harris' imagination also fails when he holds up militarism as the best response to the threat of militant Islamism.  Granted, Harris would prefer that we would all give up our faith and turn to reason in conducting human relations.  That is why he wrote The End of Faith, and why he founded Project Reason.  In this respect, our ideals may be the same, and our missions overlap (Project Reason's tagline is "Spreading Science and Secular Values").  However, I believe these values can only be spread by persuasion, not by bombs and guns.  Harris charts a confusing zig-zag path of moral calculus by trying to simultaneously acknowledge and condemn the atrocities the U.S. has carried out in the world while also elevating them above the atrocities of Muslim terrorists by claiming intent is what matters.  First, I am sure Harris does not know everything our leaders know when they plan their bombing raids, and to claim that they do not intend civilian casualties seems very naive at best.  But more importantly, I don't think the victim of violence really cares whether his injury or death resulted from intentional harm or the sloppy violence of collateral damage.  Harris' own text seems to indicate his confusion and self-contradiction.  The footnote to his sentence "Where ethics are concerned, intentions are everything." concludes "Intentions matter, but they are not all that matter."

Harris' defense of American collateral damage as morally superior to the intentional civilian carnage of the suicide bomber relies on thought experiments about how different people would use "perfect weapons" (those which can be employed risk-free without collateral damage).  Such weapons do not exist, so debating how George Bush might use them vs. how Osama bin Laden might use them is an exercise in mental masturbation.  We must judge people's actions in the real world in which we live.  Harris also criticizes pacifism as a deeply immoral philosophy, on the grounds that failure to defend ourselves and our neighbors against antisocial, destructive people is permitting suffering to occur needlessly.  I basically agree with Harris that a dogmatic, absolute pacifism does give too much leeway to immoral, violent people, but this is a straw man argument.  Harris himself acknowledges that hardly any of us are pacifist to this degree.  People like myself believe not in complete non-violence, but in non-aggression, that is, against taking the first swing.

Harris argues that a transition to civil society cannot be made without forcing people to be civil at the point of a gun.  Fundamental to this belief is Harris' criticism of pacifism and subsequent justification of preemptive war.  Following this logic to its extreme shows its absurdity: we should just kill everyone, since the potential for violence exists everywhere.  Back in the real world, preemptive war is a self-fulfilling prophecy.  Hate and violence breeds hate and violence.  Contrary to Harris' obsessive need to control all risk, no matter what the cost, we could, in fact, wait and see if any Islamic terrorists obtain and use WMDs.  If they do, it would be a tragedy for sure, but then we could respond, militarily or otherwise, to a proportional degree, and with real moral superiority, since we would not be violating the non-aggression principle.  If we reject preemptive war, maybe the feared massive terrorist attacks will never come.  In fact, if the President of the U.S. said publicly that we would no longer invade other nations, this would do much to quell the fear which drives the terrorism in the first place.  If the United States condemned nuclear weapons and unilaterally destroyed much of its current arsenal, that might be a sign to the world that maybe they are not a good idea.  Instead, we invade non-nuclear states and leave alone the nuclear ones, all but guaranteeing that any rational head of state will want his own nuclear weapons.

Harris thoroughly rejects moral relativism, the belief that we should not judge other cultures based on the standards which developed in our culture.  I believe Harris has again gotten his head too much in the clouds on this one, and is arguing an abstract debate which has little relevance in the real world.  I agree with him that absolute moral judgement can and should be made, but I think these judgments should be few and far between.  I also feel that cultural relativism is is very important and relevant in determining what solutions should be applied to injustice.  The simple fact of the matter is that the Christian-dominated West has a long history of making problems worse by the particular means we choose to solve them.  We simply don't know enough and are not perfect enough ourselves to suggest or enforce solutions to moral injustice.  Again, intentions do not matter as much as results.  People and nations of the world must be left to self-determination if evolution to peaceful coexistence is to be achieved.  We can lead by example, but we cannot force people to be moral by our standards by bombing them.

Ultimately, acceptance of Harris' ideas on the moral appropriateness of preemptive war relies on how much one agrees with his conclusion that the survival of civilization depends on eliminating Islam and other faith-based judgments from public discourse.  He sees the situation as very dire, life and death.  I do not.  While one or two nuclear or biological terrorist attacks would be horrible tragedies, civilization as we know if would not end with such an occurrence.  In fact, the only real existential threat humanity faces now is nuclear winter, which can only be caused by the massive nuclear arsenals held by those "well-intentioned giants" such as the United States.  If only Harris would put his attention to reducing this danger, then I would accept he is actually concerned with the fate of humanity, rather than the survival of Western culture above Muslim culture.

Despite its flaws, I very much appreciate the contribution Harris has made in writing The End of Faith.  We would all like a more rational world, and the book makes crystal clear that in order to get there, we must completely rethink what we mean by freedom of religion and freedom of conscience.  Only when religion can be criticized, like all other beliefs may be, can we throw off the final, lingering drag of the Dark Ages on human progress.

Book Review: The Grand Design, by Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow

The Grand Design is a short affair, 200 small pages, or just four and a half hours for the audiobook, which is how I ingested it. It also doesn't present any new original work by Stephen Hawking or his co-author, Leonard Mlodinow. Nonetheless, I got a lot out of it, and would recommend it to other physics buffs. I think people who are not already familiar with the field will have a tough time making much sense of the book. So much material is crammed into this small package that you won't really get the full message unless you already know something about things like Classical vs. Quantum theories, The Standard Model of Particle Physics, and String Theory. However, I would recommend that people who might not be ready for the whole book could gain a lot from the first two or three chapters.

The book is basically a condensed history of physics. They cover everything, from the earliest recorded philosophers, through Newton's founding of something we would recognize as science, to today's active string theorists and LHC jockeys. For me, this breakneck-paced survey of thousands of years of human thought was very helpful in pointing out patterns of scientific activity, and how these patterns have changed over time. Again, I think I got a lot out of it because I already have a fairly deep appreciation of the significance of things like Maxwell's Equations and the history of astronomy. The Grand Design helped me understand more deeply how paradigm shifts occur, and what it looks like before the paradigm shifts. For instance, they spend some time talking about how when experiments failed to detect the ether, it took decades before most people stopped trying to "fix" the ether theory and began to look at the implications of the fact that electromagnetic waves can apparently travel through a vacuum (whatever that is).

The first three chapters can probably be understood by anyone, since they cover ancient history and mostly classical theories. The authors talk about many individual philosophers and scientists, the context in which they worked, the experiments or theories which made them famous. These people are not as well known as famous politicians, entertainers, and sports figures, but they should be. Reading this book and learning the names of the greats seems like the least we can do to thank them for making the discoveries which make it possible for you to be reading this now.

Quantum Theory is presented by spending a long time discussing the double slit experiment. This unsettling and versatile experiment involves a particle source, a wall which may have one or two slits in it, and a screen behind the wall which can detect where the particles hit. When both slits are open, and the particles are electrons, photons, and the like, a pattern of interference is found on the detector which "proves" that the particles are behaving as a wave. If you want to understand what this means, and what it is to "know" something, The Grand Design will do a good job of helping you get there. The thing that really blew my mind was hearing that the double-slit experiment has been done with buckyballs, which are 60-atom molecules of carbon. Even these relatively "large" objects showed interference patterns, even when shot one at a time with several seconds between shots. The particles interfere with themselves, because all of the possible paths the particle could take are visited simultaneously by the wave-like nature of the "particle". Trust me, this makes more sense when they explain it.

The double slit experiment is so strange, yet so compelling, that Hawking and Mlodninow's focus on it greatly increased my acceptance of the reality of quantum physics. It doesn't make it comprehensible, but it made it more acceptable for me. I think this acceptance will help a lot in the future of my study of physics.

I was a little disappointed that The Grand Design presented string theory and M-theory as the best candidates we have for a Theory of Everything, without even acknowledging, let alone addressing, the criticisms Lee Smolin levels at string theory in his book, The Trouble with Physics. If you haven't read this, you must immediately do so, if you care about phsyics, science, and education. The Grand Design doesn't even do much in the way of explaining string theory at all. So the first two-thirds of the book is really the part I'm recommending.

Overall, The Grand Design is much less technical than other general audience physics books I've read by authors such as Smolin, Roger Penrose, and Brian Greene. There is no math at all in The Grand Design, and very few diagrams. It's a good candidate for an audiobook.

Just as The Trouble with Physics got me interested in Variable Speed of Light Theories and Quantum Gravity, The Grand Design has spurred further interest in my mind, this time on the implicatioins of the Alternate Histories interpretation of quantum physics. The experiments described leave no room for doubt that spooky actions at a distance are not only possible, but are the law of the universe. And travel across space is not the only thing quantum effects can do. It's unescapable that we actually create the past by observing the present. What could that mean if we could understand and manipulate these forces? What implications does this have for ideas like the notion that we can cause good things to manifest in our lives by thinking about them? What do you think will happen when they try the double slit experiment with a virus? The Grand Design has inspired all sorts of remarkable thoughts in my mind, and I hope it will in yours too.

Look Who's Unelectable Now

The damning "unelectable" label has been most often applied to Rep Ron Paul, usually with no rational argument about why that label is appropriate.  Now that actual results from actual voters are starting to come in, we can test some of these proclamations about electability against reality.

Rick Santorum's last minute surge brought him to a virtual tie with Romney for first place  in the Iowa caucuses with about 24.5% of the vote each.  Ron Paul's third place finish, at about 21.5%, put him twice as close to the winners as to the fourth place finisher (Newt Gingrich at 13.3%).  Quite respectable, in any realistic accounting.  The only candidate who determined she was unelectable was Bachmann, who dropped out of the race after finishing sixth with only 5% of the vote.  If any of the lower-tier players weren't in this race, would their voters have gone for Romney?  Not likely in my opinion, except maybe the Newt supporters. While I believe Paul's showing legitimizes his campaign, Santorum's does not.  The reason is the same, and it's the very different results these two candidates are seeing in New Hampshire.  While Santorum's harping on the evils of gay sex may play well in Iowa, New Hampshire's "Live Free or Die" residents don't appreciate that kind of paternalistic government intrusion.  He is being heckled, jeered, and badgered by freedom-loving citizens across the state.  This type of unwanted attention would dog him on both coasts and in other liberal enclaves nationwide, should he go on to get the Republican nomination.  This baggage, not to mention Santorum's "Google Problem" make him very, very unlikely to prevail over Obama in the general election.

Dr. Paul, on the other hand, appeals quite strongly to the libertarian-minded, independent folks in New Hampshire.  If the Occupy Movement ever realizes how strongly Rep. Paul has supported their causes for decades, his appeal on the left could catapult him past Obama, who is being abandoned by principled liberals who supported him in 2008.  The fact is, Paul is to the left of Obama on war, civil liberties, and drug policy.  Paul voted against the bank bailouts, and opposes all corporate giveaways.  Due to the diversity of his message, Dr. Paul can appeal to people across the political spectrum.  This makes him eminently electable, compared to a one-sided conservative candidate like Santorum.

We'll see what happens on Tuesday, but I predict Paul finishing a close second behind Romney, cementing his status as a viable alternative to the painfully unlikable Mitt.  Santorum finishing a distant third or forth should take the wind out of his sails, though he may stick in for the long haul, hoping some good showings in very conservative states will give him the air of electability.  He will eventually be destroyed on Super Tuesday, when a variety of states vote, and the candidate with the broadest appeal has the advantage.

Only Romney and Paul can claim to have broad appeal, and I believe the latter has the best chance to beat Obama.  Romney is simply too similar to Obama to give anyone a good reason to switch.  Paul, on the other hand could legitimately capture the "Change" badge Obama won with in 2008, riding the wave of discontent of which the Occupy Movement is a symptom.