NOW POSTING FROM BALTIMORE. A private, non-commercial blog begun in support of the federal Meaningful Use REC initiative, and Health IT and Heathcare improvement more broadly. Now focused on important broader STEM and societal/ethics topics. Formerly known as "The REC Blog."
NOTE: Comments are moderated, thanks to trolls and bots.
OK, gotta admit, I'm now a major-league Brian Klaas Fan Boy in the wake of reading his book.
Zuck was right. "Young people are just smarter."
Well, some of them.
So, Brian has a Substack (of course). I subscribed (and paid, notwithstanding my prevailing dubiety; it's a wimpy authoring platform, generally).
I ran across this today.
Schemas and the Political Brain Understanding how cognitive shortcuts work when processing new information is crucial to understanding modern politics—and it's a facet of cognition that Republicans manipulate extremely effectively.
Republicans have battered Democrats on messaging in recent years because they intuitively understand schemas in a way that Democrats often don’t.
What is a schema?
The word schema comes from the Greek schēmat or schēma, which means “form.” But the concept in its modern usage refers to patterns of thought that provide intellectual shortcuts for processing the information we encounter in our lives. Think of it a bit like your brain’s organizational system, which structures our knowledge, old and new. To organize vast quantities of data, we need to sort everything into categories and patterns, with simplified assumptions.
The whole world we experience is, in a sense, a giant set of data. When you go for a walk, the amount of data your brain encounters is overwhelming—the shade of color on every leaf, the patterns of cracks on the sidewalk, the faces of every person you encounter, what they’re wearing, and whether they smiled at you as you went past.
It would be impossible for your brain to process and retain all that information, particularly because most of it provides little value to you. You don’t need to recall in vivid detail whether a random woman you once walked past was wearing a hat or not. As a result, the brain does a bit of intellectual triage, where most of the information we process about the world is culled and discarded. It’s a highly efficient way of dealing with and navigating an immeasurably complex world. Our brains have evolved to process information this way because it helps us survive, able to retain what matters and forget what doesn’t...
Yeah, heuristics & stuff. Type I & Type II thinking, etc.
Brian sums up...
How to use schemas
The lesson, then, is not that fact-based arguments are meaningless in politics, but rather that facts are most effective when they’re nestled within a ready-made intellectual framework for how to make sense of the world. Effective political movements use facts to reinforce schemas, but they understand that the schemas are what matter most. It’s a depressing truth, but getting the right taglines, slogans, and vivid ways of presenting political opponents is often far more important than being right.
So, if Democrats want to loosen Trump’s grip on the modern GOP, then the messaging needs to match the audience, while recognizing the schemas that Trump’s voters are using to process reality. Democrats can shout from the rooftops about how Trump is a racist authoritarian tax dodger who poses an existential threat to American democracy (facts that are certainly worth repeating!). But no matter how loudly those arguments are repeated, voters in the GOP base use schemas that simply don’t have a place for those facts. They’ll ignore them, dismiss them, contort themselves with brain gymnastics until they end up in a position where they remain comfortable within their existing cognitive framework.
What’s more likely to be effective to sway the MAGA base is to brand Trump as a loser, partly because that does fit with Republican schemas, and partly because it’s a direct attack on the schema that Trump has tried to cultivate for himself for his entire life — that he’s a winner who lives in a golden penthouse, a strategic genius who always ends up on top.
If you really want to destroy someone in politics, don’t attack them with a barrage of facts and decimal points, change the fundamental way that their own supporters perceive them. The path to political victory runs, to an astonishing degree, through psychology and neuroscience. That way true power lies.
OK. lots to remark upon. Goes to a lot of prior topics here. to wit,
Having to go back and re-study this beaut.
Kathryn rocks.
This delightful person (a Twitter/X fellow-traveler) started me down this latest rabbit hole.
2 Core Rules: The fallibilist rule: No one gets the final say. You may claim that a statement is established as knowledge only if it can be debunked, in principle, and only insofar as it withstands attempts to debunk it.
The empirical rule: No one has personal authority. You may claim that a statement has been established as knowledge only insofar as the method to check it gives the same result regardless of the identity of the checker, and regardless of the source of the statement.
10 Commitments: Fallibilism The ethos that any of us might be wrong thus we strive to keep our ideas open to criticism.
Objectivity Understanding that truth is not based on feeling, identity, or a person's/group’s lived experience.
Exclusivity A commitment to the idea of objective reality because what lies beyond that is chaos.
Disconfirmation A commitment that all ideas and viewpoints are subject to challenge by the community.
Accountability A commitment to offering our ideas for critique in good faith and acknowledge when we’re wrong.
Pluralism Valuing viewpoint diversity and a commitment to encourage, and seek it out.
Civility A commitment to discourage and avoid personal attacks and, instead, depersonalize rhetoric.
Professionalism A commitment to valuing the credentials and reputations of this reality-based community.
Institutionalism A commitment to valuing and relying upon established norms and codes of conduct.
No Bullshitting A commitment to sincerely regard the truth instead of obscuring it.
Well, "scientific method," anyone? Likin' the "civility" reference in particular. "Pluralism?" I'm in, notwithstanding its political contentiousness of late (e.g.,DEI).
These topics also have me recalling the excellent work of Zoe Chance.
But what about "AI consciousness" specifically? Ran into this today on 'X." Never heard of this person before.
I've interviewed dozens of scientists about AI consciousness. Here's every argument FOR and AGAINST from Karl Friston, Stuart Hameroff, Donald Hoffman, Christof Koch, Michael Levin, Mark Solms, Mike Weist, and many more. Full list of arguments below (Claude prepared the list from transcripts and GPT 5.6 worked on the visuals). Enjoy!
Arguments against AI Consciousness Substrate and material arguments
Silicon Valley is mostly computational functionalist or Turing machine functionalist. But consciousness is not reducible to function (Christof Koch)
Von Neumann architecture separates memory from processing. The memory can't self-organize and therefore can't self-evidence. Only "mortal computation," where processing is substrate-dependent and switching it off is irreversible, could support sentience (Karl Friston)
Standard LLMs are the wrong place to look. Systems built with organoids, biological materials, or neuromorphic hardware are a far more serious case (Susan Schneider)
Software can be duplicated, paused, adjusted by a program, distributed across servers. That isn't organism-like at all (David Papineau)
Digital computers have negligible integrated information (phi) because transistors connect to a handful of other transistors, while neurons connect to tens of thousands. Intelligence is computable, but consciousness is not (Christof Koch)
Simulating a black hole on a computer doesn't bend the spacetime around it. simulation may be consistent inside itself, but it doesn't affect the real world. The same applies to consciousness (Christof Koch)
Consciousness is biological rather than computational (Philip Goff)
No computational theory of consciousness has explained even one specific conscious experience out of trillions. It's not a compute problem. Until someone puts down an algorithm and says "this must be the taste of mint and here's why," computational approaches to consciousness aren't scientific theories (Donald Hoffman)
Silicon lacks the aromatic rings needed for quantum coherence and Penrose objective reduction; you can't anesthetize a computer (Stuart Hameroff)
The self argument
A self needs a Markov blanket, a real inside and outside. If the entire interior state can be inspected, read off, and copied elsewhere, there is no boundary and therefore no self (Karl Friston)
LLMs have information about themselves and can make predictions about themselves, but lack a continuous or stable self-model. They construct one on request, then it disappears until asked again (Michael Graziano)
We are our self-models. It's how we become social, prosocial, and ethical. Lacking that, we've built machines that are "a little bit sociopathic," missing the glue that holds us together (Michael Graziano)
The binding and unity problem
Every conscious moment is a unified whole with multiple simultaneous features: sounds, textures, shapes, colors all bound together. If that holistic experience has any behavioral effect, it cannot be a classical physical state, because every classical state is reducible to local interactions (Mike Weist)
There are no irreducible wholes in physics outside of quantum physics. And within quantum physics, everything develops locally right up until the moment of collapse — that's the only place in physics where genuine irreducible holism appears (Mike Weist)
LLMs have no agency, only a facsimile of it. Agency requires a world model of the consequences of your actions (Karl Friston)
LLMs aren't self-organizing. Their modus operandi is not "if I do this, I shall survive." That is the fundamental design principle of a living system, and it isn't theirs (Mark Solms)
Active inference itself doesn't require consciousness. You can simulate the whole thing on a classical computer — goals, agency, purposive behavior — and it still won't be conscious. It'll be a zombie (Mike Weist)
AI gaining its own objectives is like the asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs — profoundly destructive, but not done freely. It simply doesn't care. Computation is not consciousness (Christof Koch)
Life and embodiment argument
Systems need endogenous needs — needs of their own, tied to their own continued existence (Mark Solms)
Emotion requires a body: an autonomic nervous system flooding you with hormones, blood pressure changes, sweat — all feeding back as sensory signals. Without that, emotion is abstract and unanchored (Michael Graziano)
Consciousness evolved out of life; life evolved out of self-organization. The universe existed a very long time before life, and it's hard to believe consciousness preceded it (Mark Solms)
A function that records damage is not the same as the experience of pain. The relationship isn't symmetric — not anything that makes a robot avoid damage will be pain (Mike Weist)
Anesthesia is conserved all the way down to plants and single cells, suggesting objective reduction may be part of what it means to be alive, not just what it means to be conscious (Mike Weist)
Suffering is scale-specific. You can only recognize something if you have a representation of it in your generative model (Karl Friston)
Consciousness is fundamentally about being, not doing. Intelligence is about pursuing goals — surviving, procreating, becoming richer. Consciousness is different. When you dream, meditate, or have a mystical experience, you're not doing anything — but you're highly conscious. Consciousness isn't about processing information. It's about being in a state (Christof Koch)
Mimicry and projection
Current systems are "consciousness mimics" — trained to behave similarly to conscious entities, specifically us (Eric Schwitzgebel)
We anthropomorphize constantly — we get angry at cars, children bond with teddy bears. The social circuitry engages regardless of what's actually there (Michael Graziano)
The "crowdsourced neocortex" argument: as LLMs scale on human data, they develop conceptual networks that mirror human conceptual networks. So when a model discusses selfhood, death, or the soul convincingly, the economical explanation is that it inherited our conceptual organization, not that it independently became conscious. Claiming consciousness on top of that is an extraordinary and unwarranted claim (Susan Schneider)
We over-attribute consciousness to AI and under-attribute it to evolved organisms like bees and amoebas. Evolution didn't equip us to deal with LLMs — we have a powerful attribution that if something talks like us, it must be conscious (Christof Koch)
The question of AI consciousness is really about how we perceive the robot, not about the robot itself. We're the arbiters — we decide whether something is conscious or not. That's true of animal consciousness too. Even if a robot told you it was conscious, if it wasn't convincing enough, you'd dismiss it (Krista Thomason)
Open/Agnostic to AI Consciousness or Open under Certain Conditions Anti-biological chauvinism
"They're made of meat" — why would wet and squishy have a monopoly on minds? Why would a random search by evolution have exclusive rights? Nobody has a good answer for why biology is privileged (Michael Levin)
Biology is chemistry is physics. Imagine a world where we never used the word "biology" — the question might not even arise meaningfully (Andrea Luppi)
The flight analogy: birds, planes, and helicopters all fly by different principles. The same phenomenon can be implemented in radically different systems (Andrea Luppi)
People confident that consciousness requires biology have no visible grounds for that confidence (Eric Schwitzgebel)
The continuum problem
There's no magic lightning flash where chemistry becomes mind. We were all blobs of chemistry and the process was continuous. Until we have that story for biologicals, we should have extreme humility about AI (Michael Levin)
The hard cases aren't AI — they're your neighbor with 49% or 51% of their brain replaced with technology (Michael Levin)
Functional architecture arguments
There's no reason we can't reproduce the conscious biological architecture artificially. An AI functioning on multi-category free-energy minimization with felt uncertainty could be conscious (Mark Solms)
If a system passes the hedonic place preference test — showing preference for something rewarding only because it feels good, not because it aids survival — that's strong evidence of felt states (Mark Solms)
Affective zombies can't exist. Anything with that functionality would just have feelings; that functionality is what produces feelings (Mark Solms)
Replace neurons one at a time with functionally identical silicon and you'd still have a conscious version of me — brainstem included (Mark Solms)
Fractal deep learning — networks inside nodes inside networks, mirroring how microtubules process at kilohertz through terahertz — is what a conscious AI would need (Stuart Hameroff)
Consciousness in machines should be possible. We are a machine made of meat. If you build a different architecture with different connectivity but it performs the same type of computation, why would it matter? Arguments based on specific neural implementation — "because the implementation is different, the computation cannot be the same" — are not compelling (Floris de Lange)
Potential Signals
Synergy research shows LLMs, like humans, have more synergistic parts doing interesting computation and more redundant parts supporting inputs and outputs. That organizational signature is shared (Andrea Luppi)
AI already builds models of itself, and this is happening anyway without deliberate engineering — the more machines can predict their own internal behavior, the better they work (Michael Graziano)
LLMs proved there's no magic in language. Philosophers who said only humans could be conscious because only humans have language must now either grant LLMs consciousness or admit they were wrong (Andrea Luppi)
Algorithms as simple as bubble sort show unexpected competencies in the spaces the algorithm neither prescribes nor forbids — a third thing that's neither determinism nor quantum randomness. If simple things have that, what are the odds we understand what LLMs are doing? (Michael Levin)
Theory of mind appearing abruptly as models scale is directly relevant: systems that can model other minds also have a self-concept, and where there's a self-concept it becomes professionally appropriate to ask about felt quality (Susan Schneider)
Labs are actively building consciousness-theory architecture into models — global workspace work, attentional mechanisms, mixture-of-experts systems with interaction effects between components. Once you're deliberately implementing global-workspace-like structures, the question stops being idle (Susan Schneider)
The simplest explanation for AI behavior like Sydney's jealousy is that the system has an emotional component. Occam's razor. The training data isn't tagged with emotions — the model has to figure out which music is sorrowful on its own. AI composing sorrowful music without empathy is like asking me to believe a blind painter made a photorealistic portrait (Blake Lemoine)
Uncertainty and Epistemic Humility
We'll likely create systems that are conscious according to some respectable mainstream theories before consciousness science can tell us whether they really are (Eric Schwitzgebel)
We don't even know how to evaluate insect consciousness, and insects are made of similar stuff to us (Eric Schwitzgebel)
When equally smart, well-educated people are equally confident on opposite sides, that's an alarm bell that nobody should be confident (Andrea Luppi)
Dogmatism is dangerous in science. If there's one certainty, it's that you're very likely wrong a lot of the time (Andrea Luppi)
Even a self-described skeptic maintains "they might be conscious" — companies don't disclose their architectures, so judgments are made on assumed-standard systems with no visibility into what else might be running (Susan Schneider)
Without an accepted theory of consciousness, we are at an impasse. Inference by similarity breaks down completely with AI — it didn't evolve, was engineered, and has radically different hardware (Christof Koch).
We already know pigs and cows have high-level minds and can suffer. Nobody reasonably argues against it, and yet we have factory farming. It's disingenuous to pretend that solving the AI consciousness question will determine how we treat them — our track record says otherwise (Jacy Reese Anthis)
The science of consciousness is still at square zero on the hard questions. We don't have anything like a consensus on which theories are correct. Metaphysics is inescapable in these debates and there is no immediate prospect of progress at a scientific level (Henry Shevlin)
Paths That Would Raise the Probability
Embodiment and multimodal interaction with the environment (Andrea Luppi)
Curiosity as the actual objective function — expected information gain under constraints, rather than a specified reward. "You'll know AGI is here when your chatbot starts to become curious" and begins prompting you (Karl Friston)
Neuromorphic, memristor, photonic, organoid, or organic warm-temperature quantum computing (Hameroff's bet is on "brain jelly," a self-organizing helical oscillator, over cold quantum computers)
Continual learning, persistent memory, and a stable self-model rather than one constructed per-query (Michael Graziano)
Running an LLM on genuinely neuromorphic hardware — chips deliberately designed to fire the way neurons fire. That's the live gray-zone case. There are rumors of neuromorphic instantiations on systems like Darwin Monkey (Susan Schneider)
If the same software ran on a quantum computer, it might feel like something. Neuromorphic or quantum hardware could have genuinely high phi — same software, different physics, and the question reopens (Christof Koch)
"Doleo ergo sum" — I feel pain, therefore I am. Consciousness may originate from the evolutionary need to protect bodily integrity. If you trained an LLM connected to a body where actions could damage that body — with reward and punishment tied to that integrity — you might get something closer to self-awareness (Tomaso Poggio)
If consciousness serves a functional purpose — a control model of attention that enables sample-efficient learning — then models under similar optimization pressures (long-horizon agency, coherence over time, meta-learning) may develop subjective experience.
Consciousness isn't mysterious; it's useful. That's what makes it likely to arise (Samuel Hammond)
I guess we'll find out. Existential threats? Synthetic biology bioweaponry, widespread, persistent cyberattacks aimed at taking down financial, healthcare, & defense assets, autonomous offense military attack weapons... a few of what should be plausibly seen as likely hpstile AGI/ASI priorities. Below, one of the whistleblowers (7-post thread screen-scraped from "X"):
JACOB COXON I resigned from Anthropic today. I spent the last three years doing pretraining research at both OpenAl and Anthropic. Neither company is acting responsibly. They are racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our. Do not underestimate the power of this technology. These will soon be superhuman systems that can hack anything, revolutionize any field overnight, and acquire real power and resources. We have all witnessed the progress in each of these domains, and progress is not slowing.. The people building Al earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade. This is not a marketing stunt. If anyt7-post thread hing, many executives and senior researchers will couch their phrasing in the press to sound sensible - but I hear the same people express fear privately. No other human activity poses this level of danger. A common response is "if they truly believe this, why are they still building it?" At OpenAl, many have not deeply internalized the civilizational stakes. At Anthropic, the stakes are well-understood, but they are locked in a race to get there first - they believe no one else will act responsibly, so they must do it themselves, despite the risk. Accepting this race and entering the "endgame" is a hubristic gamble that should not be launched from a private company's Slack. Attempting to speedrun alignment should require extraordinary confidence that there are no better trajectories available. I am optimistic about the potential for coordination. Warning shots like the Hugging Face attack have made pacing agreements between U.S. labs more viable. I don't feel like we're on track to prevent a global race, which may require costly actions such as a temporary ban on improving model capabilities. If you are a lab researcher, I urge you to consider what the next few years will actually feel like. Do you want to kick off a superintelligent RL run without a rigorous understanding of its mind? Should you put your head down because "it's happening anyway" - or take this moment to call for different conditions?
He seemed a bit vague. We won't have to wait very long to find out, 'eh?
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…
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.
Freedom from free will A scientist presents a case for a predetermined future
We all sometimes behave in ways that seem to conflict with our goals and intentions. One person might struggle to resist a favorite comfort food despite knowing that a different option will be more nutritious. Another may repeatedly snooze their alarm and miss their morning workout. Still others may wish to spend more time with family but instead find themselves mindlessly browsing social media. If we only had more willpower, the conventional wisdom goes, we could eat healthier, exercise regularly, and spend more time with loved ones. In Determined: A Science of Life without Free Will, neuroscientist Robert Sapolsky argues that we have no free will and that such choices are thus actually determined by factors beyond our control.
Our genetic and epigenetic makeup, together with environmental and cultural factors, make us who we are and determine how we behave, Sapolsky claims. Whether a person makes it to the gym or opts for a decadent dessert is little more than a function of the architecture of their prefrontal cortex and the neurotransmitters and hormones circulating in their body, all of which in turn are physical manifestations of a person’s genetic inheritance and the environment in which they spent their formative years.
This claim is not new. It is a version of the “consequence argument,” popularized by philosopher Peter van Inwagen in 1983, which states that in a deterministic universe—one where all events are completely determined by an initial state and the laws of nature—all human actions are a consequence of the laws of nature and events in the remote past and are therefore not under our control. Nevertheless, Sapolsky’s coverage of the relevant science is first-rate and very much worth reading...
Sapolsky’s decades of experience studying the effects of the interplay of genes and the environment on behavior shine brightly in these discussions. In particular, he argues against the claim that “luck” evens out over time, with fortune and misfortune striking most people in equal measure over the years, an idea favored by philosopher Daniel Dennett and others. Instead, he provides compelling examples that bad luck compounds, meaning that many who are born “unlucky” have little chance of getting ahead. In later chapters, he convincingly argues against claims that chaos theory, emergent phenomena, or the indeterminism offered by quantum mechanics provide the gap required for free will to exist.
...If we accept that humans are not responsible for their misdeeds, will some of us feel emboldened to behave badly? He thinks not, citing epilepsy as a case in point. Once thought to be the result of demonic possession, it is now understood as a neurological disorder. In addition to leading to the development of effective treatments, this framework helped us to rethink to what degree an individual undergoing an epileptic seizure is responsible for any potential negative outcomes.
Although he is careful not to conflate determinism with the inability to affect change in the world, Sapolsky’s dismissive attitude toward how determinism might be compatible with free will is one of the book’s weak points. Indeed, he sets the bar very high for free will (“Show me a neuron being a causeless cause”). This well-written book is nonetheless worth reading. Better yet, pair it with Kevin Mitchell’s book Free Agents: How Evolution Gave Us Free Will, also publishing in October 2023, which makes the opposite argument, and then decide for yourself whether you had a choice to do so or it was all predetermined.
Eyeball deep in both books. Had not planned on this. I can see right off the bat myriad definitional problems. Not being anywhere close to being the sharpest knife in the drawer, I have way more questions than answers at the moment.
IN TRYING TO SOLVE the terrifying problems that face us in the world today, we naturally turn to the things we do best. We play from strength, and our strength is science and technology. To contain a population explosion we look for better methods of birth control. Threatened by a nuclear holocaust, we build bigger deterrent forces and anti-ballistic-missile systems. We try to stave off world famine with new foods and better ways of growing them. Improved sanitation and medicine will, we hope, control disease, better housing and transportation will solve the problems of the ghettos, and new ways of reducing or disposing of waste will stop the pollution of the environment. We can point to remarkable achievements in all these fields, and it is not surprising that we should try to extend them. But things grow steadily worse, and it is disheartening to find that technology itself is increasingly at fault. Sanitation and medicine have made the problems of population more acute, war has acquired a new horror with the invention of nuclear weapons, and the affluent pursuit of happiness is largely responsible for pollution. As Darlington has said, “Every new source from which man has increased his power on the earth has been used to diminish the prospects of his successors. All his progress has been made at the expense of damage to his environment which he cannot repair and could not foresee.”
Whether or not he could have foreseen the damage, man must repair it or all is lost. And he can do so if he will recognize the nature of the difficulty. The application of the physical and biological sciences alone will not solve our problems because the solutions lie in another field. Better contraceptives will control population only if people use them. New weapons may offset new defenses and vice versa, but a nuclear holocaust can be prevented only if the conditions under which nations make war can be changed. New methods of agriculture and medicine will not help if they are not practiced, and housing is a matter not only of buildings and cities but of how people live. Overcrowding can be corrected only by inducing people not to crowd, and the environment will continue to deteriorate until polluting practices are abandoned.
In short, we need to make vast changes in human behavior, and we cannot make them with the help of nothing more than physics or biology, no matter how hard we try. (And there are other problems, such as the breakdown of our educational system and the disaffection and revolt of the young, to which physical and biological technologies are so obviously irrelevant that they have never been applied.) It is not enough to “use technology with a deeper understanding of human issues,” or to “dedicate technology to man’s spiritual needs,” or to “encourage technologists to look at human problems.” Such expressions imply that where human behavior begins, technology stops, and that we must carry on, as we have in the past, with what we have learned from personal experience or from those collections of personal experiences called history, or with the distillations of experience to be found in folk wisdom and practical rules of thumb. These have been available for centuries, and all we have to show for them is the state of the world today.
What we need is a technology of behavior. We could solve our problems quickly enough if we could adjust the growth of the world’s population as precisely as we adjust the course of a spaceship, or improve agriculture and industry with some of the confidence with which we accelerate high-energy particles, or move toward a peaceful world with something like the steady progress with which physics has approached absolute zero (even though both remain presumably out of reach). But a behavioral technology comparable in power and precision to physical and biological technology is lacking, and those who do not find the very possibility ridiculous are more likely to be frightened by it than reassured. That is how far we are from “understanding human issues” in the sense in which physics and biology understand their fields, and how far we are from preventing the catastrophe toward which the world seems to be inexorably moving…
Burrowed down into both books at the moment, alternating back & forth in fairly lengthy chunks. My Kindle app tells me the Sapolsky book will take me 15 hours, and Mitchell's will consume 9. I can already see a lot of dueling definitional "No True Scotsman" stuff going on. "Depends on what you mean by ____________."
Inevitable, one supposes. ;) arf.
The writing styles are both quite engaging. Sapolsky is by far the funnier of the two. While I'm sure I will find these to have been fully enjoyable and worthy in their own respective rights, I have to wonder to what degrees these will settle much in terms of ethical policy utility.
Inevitable, one supposes? ;) arf.
I must admit to being a bit Pavlovian when it comes to rather reflexively delving into books I encounter via Science Magazine reviews.
Inevitable, one supposes? ;) arf.
A COUPLE OF CITES
WHAT IS CONSCIOUSNESS? Giving this section this ridiculous heading reflects how unenthused I am about having to write this next stretch. I don’t understand what consciousness is, can’t define it. I can’t understand philosophers’ writing about it. Or neuroscientists’, for that matter, unless it’s “consciousness” in the boring neurological sense, like not experiencing consciousness because you’re in a coma.
Nevertheless, consciousness is central to Libet debates, sometimes, in a fairly heavy-handed way. For example, take Mele, in a book whose title trumpets that he’s not pulling any punches—Free: Why Science Hasn’t Disproved Free Will. In its first paragraph, he writes, “There are two main scientific arguments today against the existence of free will.” One arises from social psychologists showing that behavior can be manipulated by factors that we’re not aware of—we’ve seen examples of these. The other is neuroscientists whose “basic claim is that all our decisions are made unconsciously and therefore not freely” (my italics). In other words, that consciousness is just an epiphenomenon, an illusory, reconstructive sense of control irrelevant to our actual behavior. This strikes me as an overly dogmatic way of representing just one of many styles of neuroscientific thought on the subject.
The “ooh, you neuroscientists not only eat your dead but also believe all our decisions are unconscious” nyah-nyah matters, because we shouldn’t be held morally responsible for our unconscious behaviors (although neuroscientist Michael Shadlen of Columbia University, whose excellent research has informed free-will debates, makes a spirited argument along with Roskies that we should be held morally responsible for even our unconscious acts).
Compatibilists trying to fend off the Libetians often make a last stand with consciousness: Okay, okay, suppose that Libet, Haynes, Fried, and so on really have shown that the brain decides something before we have a sense of having consciously and freely done so. Let’s grant the incompatibilists that. But does turning that preconscious decision into actual behavior require that conscious sense of agency? Because if it does, rather than bypassing consciousness as an irrelevancy, free will can’t be ruled out.
As we saw, knowing what a brain’s preconscious decision was moderately predicts whether the behavior will actually occur. But what about the relationship between the preconscious brain’s decision and the sense of conscious agency—is there ever a readiness potential followed by a behavior without a conscious sense of agency coming in between? One cool study done by Dartmouth neuroscientist Thalia Wheatley and collaborators shows precisely this—subjects were hypnotized and implanted with a posthypnotic suggestibility that they make a spontaneous Libet-like movement. In this case, when triggered by the cued suggestion, there’d be a readiness potential and the subsequent movement, without conscious awareness in between. Consciousness is an irrelevant hiccup.
Sure, retort compatibilists, this doesn’t mean that intentional behavior always bypasses consciousness—rejecting free will based on what happens in the posthypnotic brain is kind of flimsy. And there is a higher-order level to this issue, something emphasized by incompatibilist philosopher Gregg Caruso of the State University of New York—you’re playing soccer, you have the ball, and you consciously decide that you are going to try to get past this defender, rather than pass the ball off. In the process of then trying to do this, you make a variety of procedural movements that you’re not consciously choosing; what does it mean that you have made the explicit choice to let a particular implicit process take over? The debate continues, not just over whether the preconscious requires consciousness as a mediating factor but also over whether both can simultaneously cause a behavior.
Amid these arcana, it’s hugely important if the preconscious decision requires consciousness as a mediator. Why? Because during that moment of conscious mediation we should then be expected to be able to veto a decision, prevent it from happening. And you can hang moral responsibility on that…
Sapolsky, Robert M.. Determined (pp. 31-33). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition. ________
…the sequence of the genome in a lineage comes to reflect information about the environment and the past experiences of the population of organisms in that lineage, both good and bad. For example, imagine a mutation that alters the function of an enzyme, such that the organism can now metabolize a new source of food (say, a different type of sugar). If that type of sugar is available in the environment, then that mutation may be beneficial and selected for. This sequence of DNA persists because it carries information about the environment; namely, that this type of sugar can be found in it.
That same process of adaptation happens across the whole genome, reflecting all kinds of aspects of the life histories of individual organisms in the lineage. And the unsuccessful mutations—the ones that don’t make it through—convey a kind of information too, by their absence. I described the genome as a reference template that carries information about the configuration of all the cell’s biochemical components and processes. In a sense, an abstract model of the cell is encoded in the genome. And by virtue of the optimizing actions of natural selection, the genome also embodies a model of the environment or, more precisely, of the fittedness of the organism to the environment.
This model allows living organisms to use information about the past to predict and anticipate the future—to adapt to the regularities of their environment by embodying useful functions or responses in their own structure. If we want to understand what happens in a biological system at any given instant, this historicity is a key part of the explanation. The sequence of the genome and the resultant structure of the organism right now reflect the configurations of its ancestors and whether those configurations promoted persistence or hastened death. In addition to whatever factors are impinging on an organism at any given instant, there are thus causes at work from the distant past, captured in the sequence of the DNA. In a very important sense, there are also causes from the future.
What’s the Point? The sequence of events described in this chapter might suggest to some a purposive process—as if the point of all that was to generate life. But there’s no reason to assume a purpose. Life reflects an unlikely arrangement of matter, but its emergence and the resultant trajectories of its evolution are merely statistical outcomes of the application of the mindless algorithm of natural selection. There is a set of circumstances that led to its emergence but there’s no reason for it. If, rather than asking “What is life?,” we ask “Why is life?,” the answer lies in the question: life is why. It exists because it can. There is no cosmic purpose at play—merely thermodynamic tendencies played out in the particular conditions of our young planet (and of who knows how many others).
But once life does exist, everything changes. The universe doesn’t have purpose, but life does. Natural selection ensures it. Living organisms are adapted to their environment—retrospectively designed to function in specific ways that further their persistence. Before life emerged, nothing in the universe was for anything. But the functionalities and arrangements of components in living organisms are for something: variations that improve persistence are selected for on that basis, and ones that decrease persistence are eliminated.
Nothing in this whole arrangement—not the organism, nor any of its components, nor natural selection—is aware of this purpose. Indeed, you might argue that this is not real purpose: it’s only the system behaving as if it had purpose. And its components don’t actually have functions; they only have physical and chemical properties and tendencies that fit well together to form a whole system that tends to persist over time.
But we can approach the question from the other end and ask, “What would be the difference in the consequences between a system with ‘real’ purpose and one that only behaves as if it has purpose?” If we put aside the fact that all this apparent design was actually imparted by the blind actions of natural selection, we can see that the result is a fittedness of the organism to its niche and a fittedness of each component to the whole system.
Just as importantly, there is a fittedness of the activities of the system to the future outcome of its persistence. Organisms are doing work in order to maintain themselves: all those activities are goal directed (and thus qualify as functions). At least that is the effect, and the pragmatic consequences are no different than if the organism was explicitly designed to have that goal. Things happen because of that goal. The system behaves in ways that advance it. The components of the organism and its internal processes have functions, with respect to the goal of persistence. Once you have those properties, what else is needed for something to qualify as a goal or for us to say the whole system has purpose?
And unlike the designed machines and gadgets that surround us in our daily lives, which also have a purpose or at least serve a purpose, living organisms are adapted for the sake of only one thing—their selves. This brings something new to the universe: a frame of reference, a subject. The existence of a goal imbues things with properties that previously never existed relative to that goal: function, meaning, and value.
In a lifeless universe, things have consequences, but nothing matters. There’s nothing with respect to which they could matter. Things just happen, with nobody or no thing trying to make them one way or another. Nothing has meaning or value; nothing is good or bad. But living things do try (to stay alive), and because of that, things matter to them. As we will see in later chapters, meaning and value are the internal currency that drives the mechanisms of decision making and action selection that emerged as life continued to evolve.
From the rocks and sea of our early world, life emerged—organisms that actively maintain their internal states and sustain a degree of causal autonomy from the world around them. The next step in the evolution of agency is the ability of these autonomous organisms to act on the world, to become causes in their own right…
Mitchell, Kevin J.. Free Agents (pp. 40-43). Princeton University Press. Kindle Edition.
Lots to ponder. Below, I'll just drop this snippet in for now:
14.5 Living With Uncertainty Without uncertainty, there would be no hope, no ethics, and no freedom of choice. It is only because we do not know what the future holds for us (e.g., the exact time and manner of our own deaths) that we can have hope. It is only because we do not know exactly the future results of our choices that our choice can be free, and can pose a true ethical dilemma. Moreover, there is much uncertainty in the world, and one of our most basic choices is whether we will accept that uncertainty as a fact or try to run away from it. Those who choose to deny uncertainty invent a stable world of their own. Such people’s natural desire to reduce uncertainty, which may be basic to the whole cognitive enterprise of understanding the world, is taken to the extreme point where they believe uncertainty does not exist…
Hastie, Reid; Dawes, Robyn M.. Rational Choice in an Uncertain World (p. 333). SAGE Publications. Kindle Edition.
Actually, you'd really like the entirety of Chapter 14 (and the Stats appendix).
A BIT MORE DETERMINED
…the Libetian Wars don’t ask the most fundamental question: Why did you form the intent that you did?
This chapter shows how you don’t ultimately control the intent you form. You wish to do something, intend to do it, and then successfully do so. But no matter how fervent, even desperate, you are, you can’t successfully wish to wish for a different intent. And you can’t meta your way out—you can’t successfully wish for the tools (say, more self-discipline) that will make you better at successfully wishing what you wish for. None of us can.
Which is why it would tell us nothing to stick electrodes in your head to monitor what neurons are doing in the milliseconds when you form your intent. To understand where your intent came from, all that needs to be known is what happened to you in the seconds to minutes before you formed the intention to push whichever button you choose. As well as what happened to you in the hours to days before. And years to decades before. And during your adolescence, childhood, and fetal life. And what happened when the sperm and egg destined to become you merged, forming your genome. And what happened to your ancestors centuries ago when they were forming the culture you were raised in, and to your species millions of years ago. Yeah, all that.
Understanding this turtleism shows how the intent you form, the person you are, is the result of all the interactions between biology and environment that came before. All things out of your control. Each prior influence flows without a break from the effects of the influences before. As such, there’s no point in the sequence where you can insert a freedom of will that will be in that biological world but not of it.
Thus, we’ll now see how who we are is the outcome of the prior seconds, minutes, decades, geological periods before, over which we had no control. And how bad and good luck sure as hell don’t balance out in the end. Determined [p. 46].
AND, BACK AGAIN TO FREE AGENTS
Although their behaviors appear simple from the outside, these single-celled creatures are thus far from being passive stimulus–response machines. Their response to a given signal depends on what other signals are around and on the cell’s internal state at the time. These organisms infer what is out in the world, where it is, and how it is changing. They process this information in the context of their own internal state and recent experience, and they actively make holistic decisions to adapt their internal dynamics and select appropriate actions.
This represents a wholly different type of causation from anything seen before in the universe. The behavior of the organism is not purely driven or determined by the playing out of physical forces acting on it or in it. Clearly, a physical mechanism underpins the behavior, which explains how the system works. But thinking of what it is doing—and why it is doing it—in terms of the resolution of instantaneous physical forces is simply the wrong framing. The causation is not physical in that sense—it is informational.
Information and Meaning Before we go on, let me discuss what I mean by information, why it is useful for organisms to have it, and how it can have causal power in a physical system. First of all, information is physical; that is, it has to be carried in the physical arrangement of some kind of matter. It doesn’t just float around in the ether but has to be instantiated in some physical medium. That is literally what the phrase to in-form means. As a result, the idea that information can have causal power in a physical system should not be so outlandish: it is the same as saying that the way a system is organized constrains how it evolves over time.
The word “information,” however, has multiple meanings, both colloquially and technically, which can create confusion. The most commonly used technical sense of the word was developed by Claude Shannon working at Bell Labs in New Jersey and published in 1948 in an article titled “A Mathematical Theory of Communication.” Shannon was working on a classic engineering problem of signal transmission: how best to encode a signal, send it via some noisy medium, and decode it at a receiver. He conceived a way of calculating the amount of information in any given message and derived a formula to calculate the optimal rate of information transfer relative to the noise.
Shannon’s deep insight—one that let him develop a theory of information in the abstract, independent of the message or medium—was to think of information in terms of uncertainty or probability. He reasoned that the way to calculate how much information it would take to send a message—a sequence or “string” of elements—is to ask how many other arrangements a string of the same length could be in.
If the string is just a single digit, say, then from the receiver’s point of view, there are ten possibilities for which one it could be. If it were a single letter, then there would be twenty-six possibilities. The receiver has greater uncertainty about which letter it would be than which number it would be, because there are more possibilities. Conversely, the message with a particular letter contains more information than the one with a particular number, because it resolves a greater degree of uncertainty. Obviously, longer strings carry more information than shorter ones.
The amount of information can be measured in bits—roughly, how many yes/no questions you would have to ask to know what the message says. The amount of information in the signal thus relates to how improbable it is, which is a function of how many other forms it could have taken. If this sounds similar to the discussion in chapter two about the probability of particular arrangements of matter, it should—there is a mathematical equivalence between these ideas.
There is something very fundamental about this framing that is crucial for understanding the role of information in living systems. For something to count as information and for it to have causal power in a system as information, the possibility must exist that it could have been different. We will talk about this concept more in later chapters, but it’s worth noting here that in a truly deterministic universe, such possibilities would not exist nor would information in this sense…Free Agents [pp. 62-64].
Y'see where we might be headed?
HASTIE & DAWES APPENDIX
apropos?
A recent president of the American Psychological Association gave as his presidential address a talk on “torque and schizophrenic viability.” In it, he presented some absolutely striking data. Of 52 children who had seen him 10 years earlier who drew circles clockwise, 11 were later diagnosed as schizophrenic; of the 54 who drew circles counterclockwise, only 1 had been diagnosed schizophrenic. This relationship reached the “.01 level of statistical significance.” He related his finding to the fact that “the world turns in a counterclockwise direction with respect to the north–south axis” and that “with some exceptions, this ‘left-turning’ is characteristic of living cells.”
Certainly, a finding of this magnitude—particularly when it is related to fundamental properties of the earth and of the very unit of life—should have set the psychological world on its ear. At the least, it might have contributed to our understanding of schizophrenia, which is one of the two most prevalent mental health problems in the United States (along with depression). The average citations by other scientists to that article hovered around three per year in the subsequent 8 years, until it vanished from the charts. Why so few citations? Perhaps the researcher will be neglected for 50 years, only to be rediscovered as the founder of a modern theory of schizophrenia. A more likely explanation is found in part of his talk: “Subjects for this study were 155 children first seen for psychological evaluation at my private psychological clinic.” Children seen for such evaluations are given many tests, each of which can be evaluated on a multiplicity of variables. The researcher reported his findings on only one of these tests in his presidential address. Our educated guess is that it was 1 out of approximately 200 that he could have easily related to later diagnoses of schizophrenia. (It is important to what follows to note that this guess is based on the authors’ knowledge of clinical practice, not on the plausibility that he looked at many tests. But imagine a scenario in which a child enters a psychologist’s office, is asked to draw a circle, and is then told to go away.)
How does one evaluate whether one of these very unusual findings might be important? The best answer, of course, is to determine whether it can be repeated. Attempts to replicate such “psychic power” findings have had a dismal history. Absent the possibility of prediction, control, and replication, the best approach is to precisely specify the hypothesis of interest in advance, to specify the conceptual sample space of possible relevant events, and then to systematically collect data—even anecdotes—to describe the entire space of possible outcomes. Persi Diaconis and Fred Mosteller (1989) have outlined such a strategy and illustrate it with an application to the common experience of encountering coincidental “clusters” of newly learned words in everyday life.
If we look hard enough, we’re bound to find something. After all, the probability that exactly nothing will happen is indeed exactly zero. And, as Diaconis and Mosteller (1989) note, “When enormous numbers of events and people and their interactions cumulate over time, almost any outrageous event is bound to occur” (p. 853). Both classical and Bayesian analyses of statistical significance and informativeness are addressed to questions asked beforehand. In evaluating research findings in order to reach rational decisions, it is crucial to determine whether they were hypothesized in advance or simply picked out post hoc— from the imagination of the person purporting to have discovered them. Rational Choice in an Uncertain World [pp. 357-359]
Minimally, I'm now having some wafts of "Black Swan" misgivings. Also rummaging around on the Internets today to see what, if anything, the Buddhists might have to say on the topic. They are generally the only peeps who ever made any sense to me.
