"The Singularity?"

Lots to catch up on. Cheryl and I have quietly been out of town for a week (SF Bay Area, and Las Vegas). I'll be following up topically ASAP on material relevant to my prior David Eagleman "Inner Cosmos" post. Got a good bit of reading down while gone.

 

New book coming shortly, reviewed in Science Magazine.

     

 

apropos, see "AI Slop and Scientific Publishing."

 

"Uncertainty?" "Two Cheers for Uncertainty." 

 

SUBSTACK UPDATE: THE LATEST FROM BEN GOERTZEL

Proposing an experimental OmegaHive loop for turning agentic coding into cumulative, testable progress toward human-level AGI and maybe beyond — we are actually building this now, and playing with preliminary versions!

Among the many interesting things that popped up at the AGI-26 conference last week in San Francisco, one of them stuck out for me as being of particular “meta-level” importance.

What I’m talking about is how many conference attendees I talked to who were trying to have their agent hives code AGI for them, by taking a whole bunch of papers off the internet (including my own papers, and others from the Hyperon team) and asking their agents to bash them all together into an AGI codebase and make it tick.

One form this takes uses our own OmegaClaw system. OmegaClaws are agentic loops that wrap up LLMs together with knowledge graphs built on the Hyperon AtomSpace infrastructure, with fairly sophisticated reasoning and pattern matching running over them. The symbolic component supplies the agents with more episodic memory, more long-term memory, more of a sense of self than a vanilla coding agent has. So you take a system like that — not yet an AGI, but possessing a powerful agentic loop, some memory, some reasoning, some notion of who its mother is — and you tell it: download these 25 of Ben’s papers, turn them into code, integrate them into your memory, reason with them, extend yourself.

I think this sort of process has in it the seeds of a workable approach to building AGI. 

The main problematic issue here, as anyone who has done a lot of AI research will tell you, is the gap between having a software component that sort of works in some small test — and/or, say, whose workings you can even prove correct with some nice math — and having something that really works at scale and in real life…

Okeee Dokeee, then. I'm a reasonably intelligent guy with a fairly lengthy and varied digitech Sheet, but this cat is well above my pay grade. 

 

Ben is involved with this AGI academic offering:

 

Tuition for the M.S. will set you back about $32k. Worth it? Were I not 80+ and increasingly physically ailing, I'd consider ponying up.

 

Another Ben Goertzel thingy:

 

Click

ON DECK: THE INFINITY MACHINE

 

This is yet another riveting book. Read a ton of it while returning home to BWI from LAS on Southwest. Lotta dots starting to connect. All of the current Usual Suspects and then some. Musk, Thiel, Zuckerberg, Altman, Page, Brin, Karp, Amodei...

QUICK SAMPLE

...I was shown into Hassabis’s office. Almost immediately, the enormity of AGI bubbled up again in conversation. 

“So it will be bigger than the Industrial Revolution?” I asked, curious to hear more about the post-scarcity future. 

“Yeah, I think so,” Hassabis reiterated. “Maybe AI is more like fire and language. Or maybe it’s as big as the emergence of the prefrontal cortex in humans. I mean, it’s on a level with those caves where tens of thousands of years ago some brilliant person had the idea of making handprints on the wall. 

That’s the dawn of consciousness, isn’t it? “Look, the Industrial Revolution, let’s not minimize that. Power and energy and steam engines. That’s the first information age, by the way—Maxwell’s equations.” 

Hassabis was referring to the four equations published in 1865, describing the relationship between electricity and magnetism and paving the way for everything from telescopes to electrical engineering to Einstein’s general theory. 

“Now we’re in the second information age: We’ve gone from physical information to pure information, thanks to computers. 

“And then maybe now we’re about to enter the third age, which is the AI age, where the information comes alive. It starts to process itself, to generate itself. It becomes autonomous.” 

I wondered what it was like to live in the familiar, pre-AGI world, the world of chessboards and seared bream, but also to imagine a future with AGI so vividly. 

“For me, science is a spiritual endeavor,” Hassabis answered, circling back to our discussions of religion. 

“Maybe ‘spiritual’ is too mystical a word. But I feel I’m communing with the universe whenever I am trying to understand it. 

“It’s very deep for me, building AI. Because it will help me to understand the universe and realize my purpose. 

“I mean, this is what Spinoza said,” Hassabis went on, referring to the seventeenth-century Dutch philosopher. “That God is present in nature, so understanding nature is a spiritual endeavor. And Einstein, although he was not conventionally religious, agreed. He said he believed in the God of Spinoza, and I think he meant what I mean. 

“People assume, oh, religion’s over here, science is over there, it’s weird to put them together. But in my world, humanism and spiritualism and science all go together.

“It’s like with Leonardo da Vinci. His anatomical drawings are beautiful art as well as unbelievable biology. Da Vinci is my favorite because everything’s just flowing into one river. And that’s how I try to live. Everything’s fluid.” 

I read out a line from a biography of Spinoza, which Hassabis had recommended in one of our earlier conversations. The line reminded me of the intensity with which Hassabis pursued his scientific mission. 

“Philosophy was for Spinoza, not a weapon, but a way of life, a sacred order whose servants were transported to a supreme and certain blessedness.”[7] 

“I agree with that 100 percent,” Hassabis interjected. 

“If you ask what life is really for, it’s to do with knowledge or self-knowledge. And I think that is our purpose because why otherwise would the world be constructed like this? Why would science be possible? Why should computers be possible? What about semiconductors? Why should sand, with a bit of copper, do anything?

“These things are, strangely, set up for scientific endeavor. So whether you want to call that God’s design, or whether it’s just the universe, or a simulation, I’m open-minded about all of that. I think that’s part of what we’ll find out, when we’re on this journey. 

“But in the meantime, it feels like the flow of the universe is going in this direction, towards discovering the answers. And I’m part of that flow, I’m going with that flow, and it’s exhilarating.”

Mallaby, Sebastian. The Infinity Machine: Demis Hassabis, DeepMind, and the Quest for Superintelligence (pp. 113-115). (Function). Kindle Edition.  

  
This is one helluva book. About a 15 hour read (I'm not finished yet).

 

RETURN TO SOME EVOLUTIONARY GROUNDING

 

Click

What is "life?" What is "the purpose of life?" (Assumes there is one.)

 

WHAT IS "INTELLIGENCE," FOR THAT MATTER?

 

Doris & David Jonas:

   

UPDATE: BREAKING NEWS

 

Kai-Fu Lee, the C.E.O. of the artificial-intelligence company 01.AI, lives in a mirrored high-rise in Beijing, near a procession of landmarks that emperors considered the center of the cosmos. Lee takes early meetings at a nearby hotel that could be in any country, except that the room service is delivered by robots painted in the livery of butlers and maids. State propaganda hails these robots as emblems of China’s ascent; in the hallway, most people sidestep them with the kind of indifference usually reserved for a Roomba.

Over breakfast one recent morning, Lee, wearing a white polo shirt and rimless glasses, spoke about the future with an air of sanguine curiosity. He was born in Taiwan in 1961 and built his career by following the moving frontier of opportunity. He got a degree in computer science from Columbia in the eighties and went on to Carnegie Mellon to study the fledgling field of A.I.—which he described back then as a “most promising science” that would be “men’s final step to understand themselves.” He ran speech recognition at Apple, and in 1992 appeared on “Good Morning America” to show off a prototype computer that used voice commands to record the news on a VCR. (The host, Joan Lunden, marvelled, “It’s almost going to be like a friend.”) During a stint at Microsoft, he recalls, he urged Bill Gates to buy an ambitious startup called Google, but Gates declined. Lee later became the head of Google in China…

A 64-minute excellent New Yorker lomg-read that could not be more timely. Yeah, likely paywalled. Totally worth it.
 

More ASAP...  

"I want to talk to you tonight about 'Anger'."

Malcolm Gladwell comes to Baltimore.

    

On deck. He was excellent. Canadian Wry Bred. Dude, if your current career goes south on you, you would utterly kill at Stand-Up.

 

Certainly no shortage of anger around the world these days. Interesting that he was so self-deprecatingly funny.

 

Tangentially: 

 

"THE TIPPING POINT?"

 

OK, once more, "two cheers for uncertainty."

 

More to come... 

What is “Consciousness?“ Is the question unanswerable?

“Two Cheers for Uncertainty?“ “Untying the knot of self.”

The Age of Grievance

“Measuring misfortune is no strategy for living.”

 

Click

2, A Good Word Spoiled

Not all grievances are created equal. I want to say that again. I want to be clear. And not all expressions of grievance raise identical concerns. Some don’t raise any at all. There are wildly disproportionate outbursts, mildly disproportionate outbursts, and ones scaled defensibly and even commendably to their trigger. There is January 6, 2021, and there is everything else. Attempts by leaders on the right to minimize what happened that day and lump it together with protests on the left are as ludicrous as they are dangerous.

What’s more, the fruits of the grievances on the left don’t match the fruits of the grievances on the right, and for all the talk about how illiberal both camps have become, it’s the right that currently poses the much greater threat to the country, both in terms of its disregard for democratic institutions—for democracy itself—and the behavior it provokes, sanctions, and sometimes even glorifies. The foiled plot to kidnap and possibly assassinate a prominent elected official, Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer, was hatched by right-wing terrorists. It’s Marjorie Taylor Greene, an enormously popular right-wing lawmaker, who’s infamous for statements such as one in a speech at a gala for the New York Young Republican Club in December 2022, when she made light of January 6 by saying, “I will tell you something. If Steve Bannon and I had organized that, we would have won. Not to mention, it would’ve been armed.”

It’s Ron DeSantis, the Republican governor of Florida, who lashed out at the federal bureaucracy and indulged the darkest fantasies about the dimensions and depravity of the “deep state” by saying that if elected president, he’d “start slitting throats on Day One.” It’s Kari Lake, the failed Republican candidate for governor of Arizona in 2022, who seemed to be emulating Greene (what a thought) when she reacted to Trump’s federal indictment for treating classified documents like a personal stamp collection in June 2023 by saying: “If you want to get to President Trump, you are going to have to go through me, and you are going to have to go through 75 million Americans just like me. And I’m going to tell you, most of us are card-carrying members of the NRA.”

It’s Trump himself whose response to the far-ranging, grave legal predicament that he brought upon himself went beyond any sort of rebellion and resistance that a Democrat of comparable stature in modern times had called for. He waged an unfettered verbal assault on the American government and issued an unqualified vow to demolish certain American institutions. As the indictments rolled in, as the civil trials in which he was a defendant commenced, and as his fury pinballed from one courtroom and judge to another, his language grew ever darker, ever more dangerous. He labeled the Department of Justice, the FBI, and other byways of the federal bureaucracy in general and the Biden administration in particular “a sick nest of people that needs to be cleaned out immediately,” “fanatics,” “fascists,” and “sinister forces” who were engaged in “vicious persecution.” No, no, make that “demented persecution.” He called Letitia James, New York’s attorney general, a “monster” and, on the first day of his civil trial on the fraud charges that she’d brought against him, publicly stated that people “ought to go after this attorney general.” That chilling directive belonged to a lengthening sequence of violent musings, including his insinuation that General Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff during Trump’s presidency, should be executed for treason and his recommendation, during a speech to California Republicans, that shoplifters be shot as they left stores. His remarks increasingly amounted to sputtering thesauruses of thuggery with which he seemed to be pledging bloody payback. As Andrew Coyne, a columnist for the Globe and Mail of Toronto, wrote: “This is not the reaction of a normal person. It is not even the reaction of a mob boss. It is the reaction of a Batman villain.”

And that was before Trump used the occasion of a Veterans Day speech in New Hampshire in November 2023 to say that if he won the presidency anew in 2024, he would “root out” what he referred to as “radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country.” Challenged about the echoes of Nazism and fascism in that pledge, a Trump campaign spokesman defended it, exulting that the “sad, miserable existence” of its critics “will be crushed when President Trump returns to the White House.” The tenor of that vow matched the totalitarian fantasies of Trump, his advisers, and his allies, who envisioned and made plans for a federal workforce meticulously stocked with Trump loyalists and an army of federal prosecutors intensely focused on Trump’s enemies.

What’s more, there’s no left-wing analogue to Fox News, no media enterprise of commensurate reach that consciously pursued a commercial strategy of lying to its viewers, as Fox did about one of the most consequential matters of all: who won a presidential election in the most powerful country on earth. That’s what led to the settlement with Dominion, a maker of voting machines and the butt of hour upon hour of Fox programming that aired baseless claims—claims that Fox’s hosts and executives knew to be laughable: that those machines were rigged to switch votes from Trump to Biden.

But it’s also true that on both sides of the political divide, there’s a quickness to grievance, a tendency among many people to identify themselves and interpret events in terms of past, current, and looming hurts. There’s a psychological and emotional impulse—a way of approaching and assessing the world—that transcends partisan affiliation. It’s not so much bipartisan as it is pan-partisan or supra-partisan, and it’s getting worse. It exiles nuance. It rejects the kind of triage that a checks-and-balances government, which can deal with only so much so quickly, must do, even as it lengthens the odds of that government being able to do anything at all. It places personal over public interest. It turbocharges conflict.

That was one of the saddest revelations of the coronavirus pandemic, which posed a threat so universal and dire that it should have put the usual animosities on ice. At the start, I naively thought—or, more accurately, hoped—that it would. As we confronted a previously unthinkable shutdown of life as we knew it and fumbled our way through remote work, contactless grocery shopping, virtual family get-togethers, and the whole surreal rest of it, I wondered whether the suspension of normalcy would include an abnormal (but welcome!) discovery of the kind of solidarity that the country had experienced for a brief period after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, when President George W. Bush suddenly had an approval rating north of 85 percent. (The intensely pitched debates about national security versus civil liberties and about the wisdom of invading Iraq came later.)

But much had changed in the nearly two decades between the shattering of the World Trade Center and the shuttering of all of New York City, and by 2020, national solidarity was a political yeti. Battle lines were quickly drawn. Rival camps promptly emerged: people who wanted to err on the side of epidemiological caution and those who felt that individual preference took precedence over any government edict, no matter how well intentioned, especially given how fledgling and fluid our understanding of the pandemic was; people who gave experts the benefit of the doubt and those who rebelled against what they saw as facile groupthink; people who instinctively admired Dr. Anthony Fauci and people who reflexively abhorred him; masking evangelists, some of whom muttered the wish that the virus would winnow the ranks of the reckless, and masking apostates, for whom all the shutting down and covering up was rank liberal opportunism…

Bruni, Frank. The Age of Grievance (pp. 13-17). Avid Reader Press / Simon & Schuster. Kindle Edition. 

So, I was randomly working away online yesterday when an Amazon book recommendation pinged into my inbox. Being long familiar with and a NY Times reader fan of Frank Bruni, I clicked.

About ten pages into the "look inside" preview. I'd seen enough. Notwithstanding that I already still have a good half-dozen fine books in play, this was/is too good to pass up. Download with 1 Click.

Do yourselves a serious favor. Read this book. In light of our most recent events, it could not be more timely. Beyond that, his writing style has me repeatedly, painfully laughing out loud. Dude, yer killin' me.

Peeps, didja all know that, if you are routinely successful at reining in your High Dudgeon Outrage Reflex, you are guilty of snooty Woke Liberal Grievance Able-ism.

ERRATUM

 

Anxiously awaitng.
 

And, I would be fine with this.

POST-PRESSER RECAP

OK, then. “Two cheers for uncertainty.“

More shortly...

 _________

  

nullius in verba;

nonetheless, strive hard to maintain an attitude of curiosity and humility—what Zen Buddhism refers to as a “beginner’s mind.”

  

...We are not just helpless victims of fate but are the agents in charge of our own narrative, for better or worse, victorious or defeatist. This forceful shaping of our attitudes to events beyond our control has profound consequences for well-being and sickness…

How experience comes into the world has been an abiding mystery since the earliest days of recorded thought. Aristotle warned his readers more than two thousand years ago that “to attain any assured knowledge about the soul is one of the most difficult things in the world.” Mind is radically different from the stuff that makes up the brain and everything else. Quantum mechanics and general relativity, the periodic table of chemical elements, the endless strings of ATGC nucleotides that make up our genes—these appear to describe the physical, not the mental (I write “appear to” as quantum mechanics demonstrates that there are no observer-independent events, opening the door for consciousness to enter, at the ground level of reality). Yet we awaken every day to our subjective world of experiences.

The intellectual position that has garnered the most respect in contemporary Anglo-American philosophy departments is the ever more strident denigration or even outright denial of subjectivity. What is real is people talking obsessively about their experiences and acting on them; there is nothing above and beyond these speech acts and other intended or actual behaviors. The feeling part of consciousness, called phenomenal consciousness, is a big illusion. Philosophers in the know dispense with the “awful painfulness of my toothache” in the manner that Ebenezer Scrooge dealt with Christmas: “Bah! Humbug!” Furthermore, free will, our ability to deliberate about an upcoming fork in the road and to decide which path to take, is also thrown under this “illusion” bus. This rejection of the reality of lived experience constitutes a mind-boggling repudiation of what is immediately and indubitably given to us. It is also profoundly antihumanist, depriving us of those attributes that make us different from machines—indeed, equating us with machines.

It’s an absurd adjuration, akin to Cotard’s delusion, a rare psychiatric disorder in which able-bodied patients, often severely depressed, vehemently insist that some of their limbs are missing, that their bodies are rotting from the inside, or even that they are dead. When confronted with the fact that they are having a conversation, right now, with their doctor, they do admit that the situation is a bit baffling, but the fact is that they are dead, and that’s all there is to it. So it is with some contemporary thinkers who insist, against the evidence of their own senses, that experiences don’t exist. Truly astounding—gaslighting all of us into believing that our experiences are fake!

Fortunately, consciousness can’t be cancelled forever. The mental, having refused to yield, is returning with a vengeance. Indeed, the wheel is turning back to much more ancient understandings of experience, including idealism, the proposition that ultimately even matter and energy are mental manifestations, and panpsychism, the school of thought that all creatures, and perhaps even matter itself, are ensouled, that it feels-like-something to be anything, not just a human or even a bat. Modern science is supporting aspects of this remarkable turn of events…

What about nonhuman, artificial minds, rivaling or even exceeding ours? This topic is treated last. Sentient machines have been a recurring theme in science fiction. In 2022, this topic burst into public view with the startling claim by a Google software engineer that the company’s “large language model” was sentient and had to be considered a person with associated legal rights. The linguistic skills and knowledge of these models and their competitors, most famously ChatGPT and GPT-4 by OpenAI, trained on a vast trove of books and online documents far beyond what any human can read in a lifetime, are astonishing by the standards of even a few of years ago. They write summaries, emails, jokes, (bad) poetry, computer code, letters of recommendation, and dialogue indistinguishable from human-generated material, including plausible-sounding fabrications. They are evolving at an astounding pace and will transform society in fundamental ways.

These chatbots seemingly constitute living proof of the dominant narrative of liquid modernity: the mind is software that can be as readily embodied within silicon wafers as it is within flesh, echoing a pernicious Cartesian dualism. Smart money in Silicon Valley thinks so, most engineers and many philosophers think so, and popular movies and TV shows reinforce this belief.

Against the grain, integrated information theory radically disagrees with this functionalist view. It argues from first principles that digital computers can (in principle) do everything that humans can do, eventually even faster and better. But they can never be what humans are. Intelligence is computable, but consciousness is not. This is not because the brain possesses any supernatural properties. The critical difference between brains and digital computers is at the hardware level, where the rubber meets the road—that is, where action potentials are relayed to tens of thousands of recipient neurons versus packets of electrons shuttled back and forth among a handful of transistors. As we’ll see, the integrated information of digital computers is negligible. And that makes all the difference.

It means that these machines will never be sentient, no matter how intelligent they become. Furthermore, that they will never possess what we have: the ability to deliberate over an upcoming choice and freely decide.

The brain is the most complex piece of self-organized, active matter in the known universe. By no coincidence, it is also the organ of consciousness. Unlike scientific advances in genomics or astrophysics, progress in understanding the brain and the mind directly relates to who we are, our strengths and infirmities, how we can live a contented life, and whether we partake of some larger, ultimate reality. Humanity is not condemned to walk around forever in an epistemological fog—we can know, and we will know.

Koch, Christof. Then I Am Myself the World (pp. 14-21). Basic Books. Kindle Edition. 

BLURB

—Bernardo Kastrup, Executive Director, Essentia Foundation

"ADVERSARIAL COLLABORATION?" 

 

 Click link, read on. Christof Koch is involved with this Foundation.

 

Interesting.

 

UPDATE

 

Christof's book is a gold mine of illuminating quotes.

 

 Coheres wonderfully in many ways with Brian Klaas's Flukes.

Also apropos, "Sentience," anyone?

I can see that Dr. Christof's book themes may require several posts to do all of the implications justice. Toward that end see also
  

UnlikelyCollaborators.com

TinyBlueDotFoundation.org

BigThink.com

FreeThink.com 

"THE PERCEPTION BOX?"

 

It's a metaphor. Who is Elizabeth Koch?

 

You buyin' this?
  

OK. Unequivocal declarative sentence "truth claim" (assertion of fact). Perception is an Illusion.

Well, what of the sensory inputs and outputs converging and culminating in that claim? Bit of a quibble perhaps wafts up.

Whatever. Also relevant in line with factors adverse to clear, logical thinking: Claude Steiner's "Script Theory."

 

All of this stuff goes to my chronic Jones going to so-called "Deliberation Science."

 

Also, I am reminded of my episodic David J. Linden riffs. 

   

A DIGRESSION (SORT OF)

   

Didn't see this coming. But, oddly, it resonates broadly with the current topic.

 

 

What might have been and what has been

Point to one end, which is always present.

Footfalls echo in the memory

Down the passage which we did not take

Towards the door we never opened.

—T. S. Eliot, Burnt Norton

 

I ran across this disarming mind-bender "SciFi" miniseries on Apple TV+. Hmmm... Perception Box, Quantum Superposition Cube? Stay with me here...

 

Another book comes to mindm re: "Dark Matter."

   

Click

An ordinary family man, geologist, and Mormon, Soren Johansson has always believed he’ll be reunited with his loved ones after death in an eternal hereafter. Then, he dies. Soren wakes to find himself cast by a God he has never heard of into a Hell whose dimensions he can barely grasp: a vast library he can only escape from by finding the book that contains the story of his life...

A fun read.
 

UPDATE: TAKE IT BACK TO THE TOP

"...We are not just helpless victims of fate but are the agents in charge of our own narrative, for better or worse, victorious or defeatist. This forceful shaping of our attitudes to events beyond our control has profound consequences for well-being and sickness…"

Agents in charge? What would Sapolsky say? 

 

 

"Two Cheers for Uncertainty?"

 

More to come...

_________

   

"It doesn't matter what’s true," continued.

The Allure of Certainty (Kathryn Schulz)

The trouble began, as it so often does, with taxes. In AD 6, the Roman Empire, ramping up its policy of territorial expansion and control, decided to impose a tariff on the Jews of the province of Judaea, in what is now Israel and the West Bank. By then, the local Jews had been living under a capricious and often cruel Roman rule for seventy years, so the tax issue was hardly their only grievance. Still, it rankled, and the question of what to do about it caused a schism in the community. The majority heeded the counsel of the high priest Joazar and reluctantly agreed to pay up in the interest of keeping the peace. But a handful, led by one Judas of Galilee, rebelled. Disgusted by what he saw as Joazar’s complicity with Roman rule, Judas vowed to establish a new sect of Jews whose members, in the words of the first-century Jewish historian Josephus, “have an inviolable attachment to liberty, and say that God is to be their only Ruler and Lord.”

That sounds like an honorable attitude. And a courageous one: Judas and his followers, a small and marginalized minority, took on one of history’s most formidable imperial states. As such, they seem like good candidates for hero status in the eyes of their fellow Jews, ancient and modern—and some people view them that way. But to Josephus, and to many others before and since, they were little better than villains and murderers. Judas’s sect practiced a scorched-earth policy (including against other Jews, to deprive them of food and shelter and thereby force them to join the sectarian fight), advocated the outright murder not only of Romans but also of Jewish “collaborators” (essentially, anyone with less single-minded politics than their own), and contributed to the destruction of Jerusalem and the ferocity of Roman reprisals through their own extreme violence and unwillingness to negotiate. Josephus records a characteristic raid—the sacking of the Jewish enclave of Ein-Gedi, where the able-bodied men apparently fled, and, “As for such that could not run away, being women and children, they slew of them above seven hundred.” The historian sums up the sect and its legacy this way:

All sorts of misfortunes also sprang from these men, and the nation was infected with this doctrine to an incredible degree; one violent war came upon us after another, and we lost our friends which used to alleviate our pains; there were also very great rob beries and murder of our principal men…. Such a change was made, as added a mighty weight toward bringing all to destruction, which these men occasioned by their thus conspiring together; for Judas and Sadduc [another leader of the rebellion], who excited a fourth philosophic sect among us, and had a great many followers therein, filled our civil government with tumults at present, and laid the foundations of our future miseries.

Who were the members of this “fourth philosophic sect,” in all their unphilosophical brutality? These were the original, capital-Z Zealots. History doesn’t record the fate of Judas, but most of the other Zealots perished in the first Jewish-Roman war, which began in AD 66 and ended four years later, with the destruction of the temple in Jerusalem and the defeat of the Jews. A small band of survivors retreated to a fort at Masada, near the Dead Sea, where they held off a Roman siege for three years. When the Romans finally breached the fort, they discovered that its 960 inhabitants had organized a mass self-slaughter, murdering one another (suicide being forbidden in Hebrew law) rather than letting themselves be captured or killed by the RomansAs the generic use of their name suggests, the legacy of the Zealots was not ideological but methodological. Murdering in the name of faith, religious or otherwise, was hardly unheard of before they came along, but they clarified and epitomized it as a practice. In the two millennia since the last of Judas of Galilee’s Zealots perished, a thousand lowercase zealots have kept that legacy alive—meaning, they have killed in its name. These latter-day zealots have hailed from many different backgrounds and held many different beliefs. At heart, though, and paradoxically, they have all shared a single conviction: that they and they alone are in possession of the truth. (The very word “zealot” comes from a Greek root meaning to be jealous of the truth—to guard it as your own.) What zealots have in common, then, is the absolute conviction that they are right. In fact, of all the symbolic ones and zeros that extremists use to write their ideological binary codes—us/them, same/different, good/evil—the fundamental one is right/wrong. Zealotry demands a complete rejection of the possibility of error.

The conviction that we cannot possibly be wrong: this is certainty. We’ve seen a lot of this conviction already, in the form of people who are sure they can see, or sure of what they do see (mountain chains, pregnant women), or sure of what they believe or predict or recall. Most of the time, this garden-variety certainty seems far removed from zealotry—and in a sense, it is. There’s a very big difference between, say, insisting that you are right about Orion and, say, murdering the Protestants, Muslims, Jews, bigamists, blasphemers, sodomites, and witches who are defiling your country. Not everyone who is filled with passionate certitude is Torquemada…

Schulz, Kathryn. Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error Chapter 8 (pp. 159-162). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition.

Kathryn published those thoughts in 2010. Still reads much like yesterday (arguably moreso). Being Wrong is one of my favorite books. Do yourselves a favor. Get it. Study it closely.

I bought the book in hardcover when it first came out, then later also bought the Kindle edition, for ease of further study and citation. I've long read her work in The New Yorker. She is a fabulous writer and thinker. This post is intended to continue the riff begun in the prior post. No timely "Zealotry" flying around these days, right? Hmmm... let us not forget today's Christian Nationalist Warriors, either.

"Two Cheers for Uncertainty"

What?

Yeah, that always gets 'em going.

UPDATE ERRATUM

I diverged into downloading and reading Kathryn Schulz's memoir. Hit 'pause' on the world while I finished it.

   

I am rarely at a loss for apt words, but, this is one of those times.

_________

 

Define "Civility."

Spoiler alert: it's not a synonym for "politeness," "manners," "decorum," "agreeableness," "deference," "passivity," or "humility."
  

 

I don't recall at the moment how I ran across this book. Deep into it at the moment. Much to recommend thus far.
 

Impressive woman. Master’s degree in social policy from the London School of Economics. Now adjunct faculty at Indiana University (in her “spare time“). A stickler for precise etymology-grounded definitions of core terms—very helpful in de-conflating widespread misunderstandings which only serve to routinely throw sand in the gears of discourse.

I'm particularly liking the author's long walk through the major historical philosophers. When I began my studies toward my Master's in Ethics & Policy Studies in the mid 90's, my first seminar, "History of Ethics," had 11 required texts. It was basically a history of (mostly western) philosophy beginning with Plato, and winding up amid 20th century philo thought leaders. I can attest to both Alex's broad & deep coverage and her assessments. Excellent.

(I had a 2nd seminar that fall: "Argument Analysis & Evaluation" (pdf). Lordy. I was still working at my Medicare QIO analyst day gig at the time.)

Worth it to recall again the foci on my interest in this stuff. We have no shortage of serious issues to attend and resolve constructively and peaceably (Klingenstein's War Against Evil Woke Communists a.k.a Democrats notwithstanding). To that end, in 2019 I asked "is there a Science of Deliberation?"

   

What do you think? And what have I missed in my (somewhat overlapping) tabulation?
 

UPDATE

 

One thing leads to another. Got onto this via the video interview above.

 

The Utah Republican Governor Spencer Cox and my Maryland Democratic Governor Wes Moore. Will have to dig in to all of this stuff. 

Disagree Better: Healthy Conflict for Better Policy

Americans need to disagree better. And by that we don’t mean that we need to be nicer to each other, although that’s helpful. We need to learn to disagree in a way that allows us to find solutions and solve problems instead of endlessly bickering.

The “exhausted majority” of Americans want this, and the science is clear about interventions that reduce polarization. As doers and builders, Governors are in a unique position to model what healthy conflict looks like.

The Disagree Better initiative will look at the problems of polarization, elevate the solutions that groups around the country are already implementing, and feature Governors showing what disagreeing better looks like. Through public debates, service projects, public service announcements and a variety of other tactics, Americans will see a more positive and optimistic way of working through our problems...

There are others (some of whom I've previous;y cited) working this turf (click the logo graphics).

 

All quite worthy.

UPDATE, ON "CURIOSITY"

Indeed.

Nothing could be more important to true "learning." I've riffed on the topic for a long time. e.g., see one of my posts from a decade ago (some link rot at the bottom).

 

We have to care about getting at truths. Being curious implies that we're OK with not knowing things a priori. Our current know-it-all western culture impedes that motivation.

Two Cheers for Uncertainty (???)

WHAT IS THE RATIONAL FUNCTION OF "INFLUENCE" (PERSUASION)

IN EFFECTIVELY & BENEFICIENTLY RESOLVING ISSUES

Who doesn't want to be "influential?"

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UPDATE: ERRATUM GOING TO A PRIOR POST

  

 

See "Spiritual Warriors, 2024."

 

BACK ON THE "CIVILITY" TOPIC: OTHER VOICES

 

The Promise of Strong Civility

Civility is strategic and pragmatic and so not just a matter of niceness. We can use strong civility in the service of persuasion when we think carefully about our communicative interactions with others and the necessity of preserving social democracy. Communication practices matter when we are faced with questions about how to live well with others, and strong civility holds the promise of pointing us toward the kind of communication practices that might both build relationships and make sociopolitical change through persuasion possible. We foreclose opportunities for persuasion when we treat others with incivility, and we replace persuasion with the kinds of rhetorical forms of division that can only end in victory or defeat. We cannot build a democratic way of life with those kinds of communication practices as a foundation. We do not mean to offer civility as a cure-all or an antidote to the erosion of democratic institutions and the laws and policies that surely preserve and protect our democratic system of government. Analyses that ask questions about those institutions of governance are essential to fulfilling the promise of our democratic future but so are analyses of the communicative practices that we use within the social spaces that make up the deliberative imaginary. The promise of strong civility is that it offers us a set of specific practices and habits capable of building a democratic culture and not just a democratic system of government.

We can see the promise of strong civility more clearly if we return to our description of democracy as a wicked problem. Wicked problems are multilayered and elusive, which means that we will not ever find a perfect democracy. Instead, our description of democracy as a way of life is meant to highlight the fact that no perfect set of principles or institutions will ever give rise to an ideal form of democracy. Instead, our commitment to democracy as a way of life is supposed to return us to the rough ground of “wicked problems” that we will never solve perfectly but that we continue to work at collectively anyway—problems like how best to achieve a free and equal society when some members of that society, when granted freedom and equality, will look to oppress and demonize others. The promise of civility lies in its usefulness in traveling the rough ground of wicked problems that are always already part of our democratic culture. Strong civility remains the best available means of preserving social relationships with strangers while still seeking out provisional and uncertain solutions to intractable problems. In other words, strong civility opens up possibilities for collaboration and cooperation in such a way that the social fabric remains intact while we are working with strangers who might think differently and have different values. As communication scholars and rhetorical theorists, we prefer the rough ground of imperfect and practical solutions to intractable problems rather than ideal sketches or perfect forms of life that we can never achieve. Civility might not be the ideal weapon to wield in the fight to save democracies from dying, but it is a necessary value for temporarily holding together disparate groups of people so that we can find the best possible solutions to some impossibly difficult problems.

On Reddit, a subforum (“subreddit”) called “Change My View” gives us a glimpse of how persuasion is made possible by civility. Founded in 2013 by Kal Turnball, a Scottish teenager, “Change My View” promotes and requires respectful conversation. Strict rules essentially prohibit the use of incivility, but more important, the subreddit demonstrates how persuasion is more a matter of meeting people where they are instead of where you want them to be. Strong civility, in this case, is also a matter of listening with respect and for the purposes of understanding, but those modes of communication are also understood as key factors in the process of persuasion. This is perhaps where the greatest promise of civility lies: in the ability to teach us all how we might more productively approach the project of persuasion in ways that will hold our democratic culture together while generating the kind of change we want but do not know how to get. In other words, if we lose civility, we may lose the best means we have of changing people’s minds, and it is hard to see how we might live a democratic life without healthy and robust practices of persuasion. “Change My View” might give us a small window into how we might save our democracy, or the fact that it remains a subreddit tucked away in a distant corner of the internet might be a sign that it is too late. We cannot say whether our democracy will die or thrive in the coming years, but we do know that if it thrives, it will do so through communication practices that foreground care, cooperation, collaboration, and forms of civility that allow us to live well with others.

Keith, William; Danisch, Robert. Beyond Civility: (Rhetoric and Democratic Deliberation) (pp. 170-172). Penn State University Press. Kindle Edition.

I've cited them before. Another fine read. 

 

AHHH... THE "WICKED PROBLEM"

We can see the promise of strong civility more clearly if we return to our description of democracy as a wicked problem. Wicked problems are multilayered and elusive, which means that we will not ever find a perfect democracy. Instead, our description of democracy as a way of life is meant to highlight the fact that no perfect set of principles or institutions will ever give rise to an ideal form of democracy. Instead, our commitment to democracy as a way of life is supposed to return us to the rough ground of “wicked problems” that we will never solve perfectly but that we continue to work at collectively anyway—problems like how best to achieve a free and equal society when some members of that society, when granted freedom and equality, will look to oppress and demonize others…

Recall my prior post?

 

UPDATE: FINISHED ALEXANDRA HUDSON'S BOOK

The author wraps up nicely.

We may think that anger gives us power. But in fact it drains us of it, because we are trying to change the behavior of others through harboring a lethal emotion. Maybe it’s the Irish in my blood, but I have a long memory and sometimes find it difficult to forgive quickly—and to let past grievances stay forgiven. For some reason, it seems safer—and makes me feel less vulnerable—to stay angry instead of letting go. Often, hurts and frustrations I’ve endured manifest in unhealthy ways. At other times, I’ve found many life-giving outlets for the frustration—journaling, kickboxing, talk therapy—that have been helpful. But I’ve found that forgiving eradicates the root cause of the hurt, and is the ultimate solution.

Too often, it seems that people use woundedness as an excuse to lash out at others. They use their wounds to fuel their righteous anger, and justify harming anyone who gets in their way. People forget that violence—verbal, emotional, or physical—hurts themselves as much as it does others. It debases them. Harming others makes them less human. Our hurts are never an excuse to hurt others, and hurting others will never make the world a better place.

I fall short of the ideals of both civility and of quick forgiveness daily, and it often has negative consequences for how I interact with others. Without creating a fresh slate each day, it’s easy to operate in the world hobbled, wounded and bumping into other wounded people without the grace and emotional wealth required for life with others. I continue to remind myself of these lessons, and have found encouragement in the words of the apostle Paul, who wrote “As far as it depends on you, live at peace with everyone.”

As far as it depends on you. We are more in control of our emotions—and of our responses to our emotions—than we realize. When we fill our souls with endeavors that give us life, such as curiosity, friendship, and beauty—we are less likely to be litigious about the small things in life. We are less likely to walk through our every day running into and up against others—our self-love is less likely to bump up against the self-love of others. We are not on our own. We are not monads, and we don’t live in a vacuum. Adopting a reverence for life in all of its forms, choosing to be kind to all living things, ennobles us and the world around us.

Conversely, when we harm others, even in the name of pursuing a greater justice, we, too, are also hurt. When we are hurt by others, as William Blake noted, we hurt ourselves if we choose to drink the bitter poison of resentment—when we let our anger fester—and fail to forgive. This is how Erasmus defined civility in his handbook for young people five hundred years ago. This principle of good living together in community, alongside the many others that we have explored in this book, is remarkably timeless.

Together, as we’ve discovered throughout this book, they comprise the soul of civility. [The Soul of Civility, pp. 367-368].

Much to recommend in this book. apropos,

"WHEN YOU THINK ABOUT the individual genetic and developmental differences that impact the sensory portions of our nervous systems, it’s remarkable that we can agree on a shared reality at all."—David J. Linden

ON DECK

 

New book coming out.

Amazon blurb:

A clear-eyed and urgent vision for a new system of political governance to manage planetary issues and their local consequences.

Deadly viruses, climate-changing carbon molecules, and harmful pollutants cross the globe unimpeded by national borders. While the consequences of these flows range across scales, from the planetary to the local, the authority and resources to manage them are concentrated mainly at one level: the nation-state. This profound mismatch between the scale of planetary challenges and the institutions tasked with governing them is leading to cascading systemic failures.

In the groundbreaking Children of a Modest Star, Jonathan S. Blake and Nils Gilman not only challenge dominant ways of thinking about humanity's relationship to the planet and the political forms that presently govern it, but also present a new, innovative framework that corresponds to our inherently planetary condition. Drawing on intellectual history, political philosophy, and the holistic findings of Earth system science, Blake and Gilman argue that it is essential to reimagine our governing institutions in light of the fact that we can only thrive if the multi-species ecosystems we inhabit are also flourishing.

Aware of the interlocking challenges we face, it is no longer adequate merely to critique our existing systems or the modernist assumptions that helped create them. Blake and Gilman propose a bold, original architecture for global governance―what they call planetary subsidiarity―designed to enable the enduring habitability of the Earth for humans and non-humans alike. Children of a Modest Star offers a clear-eyed and urgent vision for constructing a system capable of stabilizing a planet in crisis.

Saw ir reviewed in Science Magazine.

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