Internalized Beliefs

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Sep 212012
 

Speaking of Among Others, I had an interesting conversation with Anaea Lay about the ending when we were at WorldCon.

Warning, here there be spoilers.

One of the things that you notice as you’re leaving religion is that almost nobody acts like they believe in an afterlife. With few exceptions, no one acts like it’s going on to the next stage of life – like going through puberty, or moving to a different city. Everyone treats it like it is the annihilation of a human soul. It’s one of the clues that tips off observant children that this whole religion thing is probably bullshit.

As I mentioned in my book-club review, there’s two ways to read Among Others. One way is as a fantasy, that actually contains fairies and ghosts and magic. The other way is as the story of a girl struggling with mental illness. Specifically, she’s written as someone who is succumbing to schizophrenia, in a family with a history of schizophrenia. I’ve been told that Jo Walton based many of the things that happened in the book on events in her life, as she did grow up with a mother suffering from schizophrenia. As such, there’s two ways to read the ending.

The naturalist reading is a triumph. Mor overcomes her mental problems and doesn’t commit suicide. She goes on to live a happy, prosperous life as a Sci-Fi author.

The supernaturalist reading is a horror story. Mor casts her sister half-mauled into some unknown afterlife, having robbed her of the chance to be eternal and happy as a fairie, with the knowledge of magic running in their veins. She chooses instead to go be with her new boyfriend.

As was pointed out by Anaea, it is akin to having a choice between moving to a different country with your sister, or delaying moving to that country for a few decades so you can hang out with your new crush and knowing that this will cause you sister’s legs to be crippled and her left arm amputated. Sure, it sucks that you’re forced to make that choice. In an ideal world you wouldn’t have to choose between your new romance and your sister’s limbs. But once you’re in that position, there is NO WAY that not saving your sister is the correct moral choice.

This did not occur to me, because I was committed to the naturalist reading. But this also did not occur to Jo Walton or almost anyone else who read this with the supernaturalist view, even though it should have. Because just like all the religious people out there who profess to believe in an afterlife but still treat it as annihilation, the characters in the story act like there is no afterlife. In a world with no afterlife Mor’s choice was correct, and most readers in this world cannot suspend that feeling even when we’re presented with a world in which there IS an afterlife. We still react as if there isn’t one.

(It’s similar to how many readers of Movement couldn’t get past the fact that autistic children require compassion and acceptance in OUR world to realize that not treating them in a fictional world where a treatment is available is immoral, as I argued).

I consider this another good reason to stick with the naturalist reading of the book. I prefer to have a heroine that is strong and relatable, rather than an amoral beast.

Power vs Survival

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Sep 182012
 

This article from Alone is extremely good. I’d recommend reading the whole thing, but in summary it states that people expect a higher power (god, government, society, dad, etc) to provide an environment where the most terrible things are not allowed, and this allows us to accept less responsibility for ourselves. It is a reminder that the world is beyond the reach of god. It is a continuation of the idea of Heroic Responsibility.

He points out that humans create institutions to make their environment safer, and then offload their own responsibilities onto these institutions. He accuses us all of shirking our Heroic Responsibility. I’m not sure this is fair. An individual human can only do so much. I’ve avoided vulnerability to a somewhat silly degree in the past (avoiding caring for others or owning much more than I can carry at a dead run… caring for too much makes you vulnerable). Turns out too much independence can be far more harmful than not enough, because individual humans are weak and small, and we can do things of Power only by combining our efforts. To do something noteworthy, we much focus on our specialty and trust others to do focus on theirs. To create a strong meta-individual, we cannot all be completely responsible for everything – we need some specialists in responsibility as well. Not every cell in the human body can fight off hostile invaders, most of them have other vital tasks.

On the other hand, cells are cheap. They are destroyed and discarded and replaced constantly. A single person/cell can’t expect their survival to be prioritized over the meta-being (or even over that of the comfort of a large number of other persons/cells, hence Torture vs Dust Specks). We are powerful in groups, but what is the point of that power if we trade away our existence to achieve it? It is, perhaps, important that we are working and trusting others sufficiently like ourselves, lest we find ourselves re-purposed for the interests of hostile beings.

Adapting to Survive

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Sep 172012
 

A recent episode of Planet Money described the process of “creative destruction”.

“By 1991 Walmart has taken over Woolworth’s place on the Dow Jones, by 1997 Woolworth’s has closed down all of its stores […] Why isn’t Woolworth’s prepared to make that change, they should be better prepared than anyone. They could’ve been Wal-Mart, why didn’t they go out to the rural areas and build giant stores? […] When you have an incremental innovation, where it’s just about trying to do what you already do a little bit better, the established firms are really good at that, they’ve got all the resources and all the expertise. But whenever there’s a disruptive innovation that comes along, a totally different way of doing something, that causes a problem for the established firms.”

10% of companies go bankrupt every year. If a major cause of death for powerful, established companies is failure to adapt, it is important that anyone who plans to live for thousands of years be willing and able to adapt to changing conditions. This includes being willing to change your values. Maybe not drastically, and maybe not the most fundamental values. But inflexibility is a death sentence, and it is far better to keep yourself mentally limber than to default to brittle conservatism. If you resist all minor changes for long enough you can become so entrenched in your old positions that once change is finally inevitable you may be unable to adapt in time, and go the way of Woolworth’s.

Hive Minds

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Sep 102012
 

If you have both a dog and an SO you live with, you’ve probably thought to yourself “That dog must think our entire species has RAGING Tourettes.”  There he is, quiet almost all day long, just enjoying being his doggy self. And here we are, making noise non-stop for no conceivable reason. It’s rare for us to be in the same room for even a half hour without some sort of verbal exchange. What the poor doggy doesn’t understand is that we’re constructing a very basic form of hive mind, and that this process has been so critical in our species’ survival that we feel uncomfortable if we aren’t doing that whenever we’re around others.

It has been observed that when the corpus callosum of the brain is severed (separating the left and right sides of the brain) two different mental agents appear within one body, sometimes with different personalities. It seems that individuation happens when the bandwidth between thought processors is too low. The bandwidth of human speech is far too low to form any sort of single conscious entity*, but it can be rich enough to form the beginnings of a proto-agent when a group of people get together and begin to think alike and act in concert.

Most people seem to need to be part of a group. Isolation is intensely painful for humans, it is used as punishment for criminals already in jail, and long periods of it will often drive people past sanity. Infants who grow up in isolated environments die at an astounding rate, are physically sicker, and are often unable to function in society when they mature.  Neuro-typical humans seek out others to be around, creating surrogate families if the ones they were born into don’t fit them. I’m not implying that we have evolved for the purpose of being sub-agents of larger meta-individuals. This desire is seen in many social species and is probably simply a side-effect of kin selection. However this desire, combined with our ability to mingle our mental processes through language, has made us uniquely suitable to form super-individual agents.

These meta-agents we form are macrocosms of our own minds. As postulated by Minsky, our various mental sub-agents often do not agree, and sometimes are at odds with each other. Some agents are strongly involved in some processes and not at all in others, and which agents compromise what we consider “ourselves” changes from moment to moment.

Much like individuals, meta-agents often propagate their own survival. They can issue statements that are supposed to represent the group as a whole. The biggest difference between our society of mind and the society of a meta-mind is that our society of mind is physically trapped within a single skull, whereas a meta-mind is distributed.

 

*A great exploration of a species that can do this is found in Vernor Vinge’s Fire Upon The Deep, wherein individual “Tines” are quite feral and dumb, but their high-bandwidth vocalization allows them to form conscious minds when in close proximity.

How Many of Me Are There?

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Aug 232012
 

In trying to continue my posts on mental plasticity, I’ve found I need to expand on a related subject before I can continue. The following was originally posted at LessWrong.

 

If an AI was asked today how many human individuals populate this planet, it may not return a number the several-billions range. In fact I’d be willing to bet it’d return a number in the tens of thousands, with the caveat that the individuals vary wildly in measure.

I agree with Robin Hanson that if two instances of me exist, and one is terminated, I didn’t die, I simply got smaller.

In 1995 Robert Sapolsky wrote in Ego Boundaries

“My students usually come with ego boundaries like exoskeletons. […] They want their rituals newly minted and shared horizontally within their age group, not vertically over time,” whereas in older societies “needs transcend individual rights to a bounded ego, and people in traditional communities are named and raised as successive incarnations. In such societies, Abraham always lives 900 years–he simply finds a new body to inhabit now and then. ”

Ego boundaries may be more rigid now, but that doesn’t make people more unique. If anything, people have become more like each other. Memes are powerful shapers of mental agents, and as technology allows memes to breed and compete more freely the most viral ones spread through the species.

Acausal trade allows for amazing efficiencies, not merely on a personal level but also via nationalism and religion. People executing strong acausal trading routines will out-compete those who don’t.

Timeless Decision Theory proscribes making decisions as if choosing the outcome for all actors sufficiently like yourself across all worlds. As competition narrows the field of memeplexes to a handful of powerful and virulent ubermemes, and those memeplexes influence the structure and strength of individual’s mental agents in similar ways, people become more like each other. In so doing they are choosing as if a single entity more and more effectively. To an outside observer, there may be very little to differentiate two such humans from each other.

Therefore it may be wrong to think of oneself as a singular person. I am not just me – I am also effectively everyone who is sufficiently like me. It’s been argued that there are only seven stories, and every story can be thought of as an elaboration of one of these. It seems likely there are only a few thousand differentiable people, and everyone is simply one of these with some flare.

If we think of people in these terms, certain behaviors make more sense. Home-schooling is looked down on because institutional schools are about making other people into us. Argument and rhetoric isn’t just a complete waste of your free time, it’s also an attempt to make Meta-Me larger, and Meta-SomeoneElse smaller.

Added Bonus: You no longer have to have many children to exist. You can instead work on enlarging your Meta-Self’s measure.

We Need Aurors

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Aug 212012
 

“Free will” could be exercised in defining the field of battle, not when and how my enemies would attack. Whenever I heard them ask “Would you like that super-sized?” I knew they were really saying “It’s already too late.

 – from This Article by Ta-Nehisi Coates

It’s unfortunate this was sparked by the soda-size restriction, since I think it’s kinda dumb, and I’m interested in the principle rather than that case. I’m of the opinion that all drugs should be legal, so I wouldn’t argue for restrictions on something like soda. But I don’t think “it’s their own choice” makes a good rebuttal because it portrays humans as agents, which is… an exaggeration, at the least. That is the heart of this article. The soda restriction is a very poorly thought out reaction to that human problem. It is, at best, a treatment of one particular and minor symptom. You don’t stop the mafia by making it illegal to say the words “It’d be a shame if something happened to your store.”

When I was originally discussing this with some friends, I was asked –

how do you balance the inability of some people to effectively act as their own agent with allowing drugs to be legal?

Any time a product is sold which is known to be harmful to the user, the seller takes a responsibility to not engage in predatory actions, and to warn the buyers. Predatory action will be prosecuted (and ideally also strongly socially stigmatized), the insanity surrounding the housing/financial crisis of 2008 would have started landing people in jail back in 2004. Certain forms of marketing (colloquially known as “Dark Arts” where I hang out) would be treated the same way, regardless or what the product is.

This would be combined with large-scale education. Every public school would include a Defense Against The Dark Arts class which demonstrates such attacks and attempts to train defense against them, as well as teaching the proper loathing for such violators. And yes, addiction would be treated more like a mental disorder/disease and public health initiatives would include treatment, rather than incarceration. And while I’m at it, everyone gets a pony and a castle and their own flying car.
And for Man’s sake, the government would immediately stop doing this as well. The lottery should be abolished immediately. The government is there to protect us from this shit, not push it on us.

 

Where is the line which delineates predatory action? Who will define that line? I think what a lot of us are saying is that government is not there to protect us from our own stupidity. It’s there to protect us from the tragedy of the commons, and possibly rein in some of the excesses of capitalism. I would also like to add that I love the lottery. There are few better non-cumpulsory sources of revenue for the government.

Where is the line which delineates age of majority? Who will define that line? There are some 14-year-olds out there mature enough to sign contracts, consent to sex, and drink alcohol. And there are some 28-year-olds out there who aren’t. Sometimes we have to draw arbitrary lines, because to not draw any lines is even dumber.

I consider the lottery downright immoral. It’s one thing for a random asshole to set up a casino. It’s another thing entirely for the people who are supposed to defend us to jump in on the action. It’s like the difference between some thug mugging you, and a police officer mugging you. The betrayal makes it more abhorrent. Or, to hearken back to last month, a comedian attacking the defenseless. The lottery is a hostile attack by its nature. It is an exploit no less than any computer virus. The fact that we can spend time/money on anti-virus software to defend ourselves doesn’t make it any less of an assault.I’m not saying the government is there to protect us from our own stupidity per se. But it is there for society to defend itself from outside attacks. The physical attacks are easy to see. But as long as people keep thinking of humans as agents, rather than as biological systems, they’ll have hard time seeing the less violent ways in which humans are hacked. If you believe strongly in individualism I would submit that you’d profit from efforts to defend people from subversion of their volition. I think there’s a big difference between someone being stupid, and a malicious person intentionally targeting others.

 

There have been numerous government agencies set up to defend the public. Police, military, firemen, EPA, FDA, FDIC. There needs to be an agency to fight practitioners of the Dark Arts as well.

Would You Cooperate With Yourself?

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Aug 162012
 

Game theory book The Art of Strategy included a great Prisoner’s Dilemma experiment. The experimenters spoiled the game: they told both players that they would be deciding simultaneously, but in fact, they let Player 1 decide first, and then secretly approached Player 2 and told her Player 1’s decision, letting Player 2 consider this information when making her own choice.

The results: If you tell the second player that the first player defected, 3% still cooperate (apparently 3% of people are Jesus). If you tell the second player that the first player cooperated………only 16%  cooperate. When the same researchers in the same lab didn’t tell the second player anything, 37% cooperated.

For those unfamiliar with The Prisoners Dilema, this YouTube video from a British game show will give you an emotional understanding of it in under two minutes (you can keep watching for the awesome twist).

 

The previous was from this Less Wrong post. From the comments:

More surprising [IMO] is the fact that 16% co-operate when they know that it costs them to do so. I have no idea what that 16% were thinking.

In Reply:

This brings me back to the issue of self-identification.

Would you cooperate against yourself?

I realize there are Pansy Parkinson’s out there, I try not to know any. If we achieve an em-future it’ll be important for self-copying entities to have a value set which puts a strong emphasis on cooperating with oneself. The real question (as always) is what counts as me when the simple convention of a continuous physical body is no longer sufficient. As I’ve written before, I adopt a wide enough view that I suspect there may be some people alive right now that count as “close enough”.

Let’s assume I would cooperate against myself. If the only piece of information I have about this other person is they just cooperated, I know that they cooperated with me. I would also cooperate with me. On that axis, they are identical to myself. As I cooperate with myself, I will cooperate with them. (Added bonus: this strengthens the meta-individual)

If I know more about them I can better approximate who they are, and this might change my decision, especially if I expect our groups to come into conflict in the near future. But a simple “if they cooperate, I defect” strategy is self-destructive. A world of everyone running your decision algorithm would result in no player ever cooperating.

Targeting Lust

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Aug 152012
 

Continuing from my last post on working with the human sex drive, describing an Orthodox belief that one should be attracted to one’s mate and no one else.

 

I’d said such selective mental engineering is currently in the realm of magic. It is interesting to consider if we should encourage this once we do have the ability to self-edit at that level. What would be the benefits of such a mental architecture?

The first obvious benefit is that it would free up more time and energy for non-mating pursuits. Apocryphally, Nicola Tesla never pursued women because it would take too much time from his scientific work. I can’t even begin to describe how much more time I had for other work before I met my girlfriend. But redirecting sexual attention to only one partner doesn’t seem to impact this very dramatically, as mating activity seems to follow the familiar 80/20 Rule – 80% of the time is spent on 20% of the work (or in this case, 80% of the time is spent on the primary partner). So if increased productive time is the goal, it’d be far more efficient to remove the sex drive altogether.

The second obvious benefit is in providing a stable single-couple partnership to raise children. I suppose more traditionally-minded people may take this approach when they decide to have children, but I think they’re short-changing themselves. There doesn’t seem to be any reason that an open couple can’t provide and care for children just as well as a closed couple, so there isn’t any inherent reason to strip out the ability to be attracted to others. (In disclosure, I don’t have children of my own. This is based on observation of child-having open couples.)

As the primary function of sex seems to be in creating strong emotion bonds between people, the best (and perhaps only good) reason I can imagine to re-work the sex drive in that way is to form a very strong two-person unit to accomplish a long-term goal that is best executed in two-person teams. The only thing that comes to mind immediately is sniper groups. I see this being used much more frequently in isolated small units that need to cooperate well and trust each other strongly, such as astronauts on long missions or start-up companies. Perhaps the em-teams Robin Hanson postulates. This is not as narrowly focused as the two-person binding originally postulated, but it seems the most practical application of this sort of mental editing.

Engineering Can Fix Your Problems, But It Isn’t Magic

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Aug 142012
 

I stumbled upon an article that described a device you place over your glasses that keeps near objects clear, but blurs your distance vision. Its purpose is to prevent ultra-religious men from seeing a woman and becoming filled with lust.

Lets put aside for a moment the seemingly weird belief that feeling lust is Bad. If one accepts that it is, than this is a clever partial solution that doesn’t intrude on anyone else’s rights. Straight men certainly appreciate the female form, and avoiding it may help with avoiding lust, much like avoiding walking by that delicious-smelling bakery may help with not breaking your diet. Yay Science!

But why did they stop there? Chemical castration has been around for a long while. Like any other tool, it can be used for good or evil. It has been used in the oppression of gays in the past. But I’m glad it is a tool we have available, because sometimes our genes fuck us over. The most horrifying thing I can imagine is being a good person who is stuck with the sexual desires of pedophile. I am grateful I was not dealt that hand, but I thank Man that we’ve created an option for such a person – that if it was me I could have my sex drive removed. Why don’t these men use this tool? If they fear possible permanent damage, couldn’t the ones who’ve fathered all the children they want start a drug regimen? It seems that at least some of them are willing to inconvenience themselves enough to wear blurring glasses – this solution is much more elegant and far less crippling.

An acquaintance who was raised in Orthodox Judaism provided this insight:

they’re supposed to have sex drive…for their wives…when they’re not ‘impure’, that is.

And it dawned on me that I had assumed far too much. They are supposed to be attracted to their wives, but no other women? Do they not realize how humans work?? The characteristics that a man finds attractive in his wife he will  find attractive in other women as well! If he didn’t then he wouldn’t find them attractive in his wife! They don’t even have to be physical characteristics – a man attracted to smart, sarcastic women will find that attractive in any woman.

To remove lust is a problem engineering can help with. But to encourage lust for one person while snuffing it out in all other cases is so far beyond that it’s akin to magic. What kind of deranged memeplex convinces you that you’re a bad person unless you can do magic? No wonder the people harboring them are damaged.

Mental Plasticity or Mental Stagnation

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Aug 102012
 

Continuing from the previous post on mental plasticity. Warning – spoilers for Total Recall and major spoilers for Diaspora.

 

Value drift is the term for the incremental changes that occur to people as they go through life that slowly turn them into different persons.

It has been said that value drift is akin to dying. The personality transplant is a common example. Total Recall is a cheesy movie, but it is fun, and it serves as a fine example. Quaid hates Hauser, and works against his interests. They are very much two different people who happened to both inhabit the same body at different times. What does it matter if the personality change happens over a period of minutes, or a period of decades? Either way the first individual is effectively dead, and has been replaced by the second. Why should I strive for immortality if I am destined to fade away anyway, if my labor is for the benefit of some individual I may hate? Thus the argument for preservation of values.

I disagree. Life is a process of change, it cannot be static. A static body is a dead body, and a static mind is a barren mind. In Greg Egan’s “Diaspora”  the protagonists search for a civilization of ancient trans-dimensional spacefarers. They eventually find their legacy – a structure of such immensity it’s difficult to describe*. In a single dimension it is the size of a planet, but it spans uncountable dimensions, a total mass so great it would collapse into a super-massive black hole should all that matter be gathered in a single dimension. It is composed of memory diamond, and is hypothesized to store the complete mental run states of every person in the civilization across their entire existence. Everything everyone has ever thought in every second, preserved eternally in a solid state. And they even shaped it to physically resemble a typical member of their species.

That is true static perfection. To win against value drift one needs only to create such a statue of themselves, preserving their entire existence across time in an indestructible physical form. Never will they change.

One may argue that this is not life, this does not accurately capture their values, because one thing they value is to interact with reality. I’ll pick this up and continue with it in the next post in this series.

 

* This is from memory, I don’t have the book in front of me, so my details may be off.

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