It's just that the decision-makers and experts don't know anything about biology or medicine, all they know about is their brain-dead, corrupt industry and government.
Listen to O'Neil at 3 mins 35 secs. Then watch this:
If people listened to women more, and alpha-males less, then new ideas would come quicker than ... I dunno what!
At 9 mins 53 secs "Most people, unfortunately, view themselves as puzzle-builders, ..." This illustrates the central problem with current approaches to AI, which Jade explains beautifully at 6 mins 12 secs here: Jade on Artificial Intelligence.
And this is why a culture of alpha-males kills innovation: alpha-males don't like making the other guy look like a genius, they prefer to knock them down.
Now, to get back to Jade's AI problem, which we can now state as the problem of how we program a community of quiltmakers, rather than a community of puzzle-builders, listen to Max Tegmark on the so-called hard problem of AI. Which you can restate fairly simply as "Why is any arbitrary rearrangement of food not necessarily conscious?"
So at 5 mins 10 secs, Tegmark has reduced the hard problem of AI to the question "What are the patterns of material arrangement which are conscious?" Knowing this would allow us to ask questions such as "Is consciousness a necessary feature of the physical world, or is the evident consciousness in the world right now, just an accident? In other words, we are asking whether consciousness is something a priori uncertain, or is it something which is an inevitable property of the Universe? So the hard problem of Tegmark, would be well on the way to being solved if we knew which particular rearrangements of food lead to conscious beings, and which ones lead to dead bodies, riddled with cancer, say, or antibiotics and inti-biotic resistant bacteria?
So to solve the hard problem of AI, in Tegmark's formulation, we need to understand what is special about the human digestive system, that means it is a pattern which rearranges food into a pattern which happens to be conscious. This means we need to understand the physiology of human nutrition and how this produces nervous systems which are conscious:
And this is almost as unpopular a specialization in medicine as nutrition, but not quite. But the gut is so complex that this could hardly be called specialisation:
Now consciousness is always consciousness of something being. But precisely what being it is that we are conscious of depends on the rational judgement we make about the meaning of our sense-perception at the time, and this process of making judgements is something we learn, in one way or another, sometimes at school or from our parents and friends, but mostly through life experience. And creative thinking is our ability to adapt to changes in the world around us. But changes in the world around us are changes in our own knowledge about that world. So the capacity to adapt depends crucially upon our ability to notice these changes as they occur, and this make these changes in the world around us simultaneous with the changes in our knowledge of the world around us. Ann Hermann-Nehdi's father was director of Management Training at General Electric, and a scientists, and when she was a kid, her father did experiments on her to see whether or not creative thinking could be taught to managers at GE. So there was once a time when the General Electric corporation was interested in the ability of its senior management to adapt to changes, ...
At 6 mins 11 secs, she talks about mind hacks. A mind hack is a conscious way to get your thinking out of a patterned auto-response and to shift the context so that you can see new possible solutions that weren't apparent in your prior patterned state. One of the most pervasive patterned auto-response networks in most people's lives is the goal-oriented one. Formulating a plan, and working through the necessary steps to achieve the goal. And it turns out that illness is one of the "mind hacks" which makes dramatic changes to people's lives. Mariah Mansvelt Beck's illness will very likely turn out to positively affect the lives of billions of people all around the world, but it was a result of several failures; of her career, her personal life and her health.
So now we know that Mariah's seminal third-world-toilet experience, and the antibiotics she took afterwards had a dramatic effect on her career. This small change in initial conditions having dramatic effects on the long-term behaviour of a system is called the butterfly effect:
In that simulation, Clarissa changes her major from marketing to biology. In most people's mind, these are radically different careers. As different as Mariah's change from international development fieldwork to marketing tampons and towels. But why is there such a big difference between marketing and international development? Marketing is international development of a kind, isn't it? But it's typically not the kind of international development that is good for people who really need the help of international development. What sort of economics would we need, then, which would make someone whose goal was to be successful, happy and do good for other people who need help, able to achieve that with equal likelihood, whether they majored in marketing or international development, or biology, or pharmacology, or business administration? The reason this question is important, is because it will allow us to consciously build a society which, as a whole, is intelligent, in so far as it can quickly and efficiently adapt to changes, the most common of which are changes in human knowledge as it is shared amongst people. Such a society would be an example of what Tegmark calls a conscious mathematical pattern.
Now if such a pattern could exist, we can ask the question "Would that pattern necessarily need to be an object of the conscious awareness of any one or more human individuals in order to be an effective, creative consciousness in the world? By effective, I mean simply that some group of people could know this pattern phenomenologically, i.e. through observing its effects on them as subjects, in the way, for example, that medical science knows the placebo effect through clinical trials, even though there is nothing within the conscious knowledge of medical practitioners which can explain why it is real effect, principally because of it's essentially subjective character: the placebo effect depends upon the state of belief of the subject:
Now, when we think about the idea of the Pachamama, who is the pagan earth-goddess in the Kolla and various other Andean cultures, then we can see fairly easily, through modern scientific lenses, that there is a certain inevitability about this idea arising in populations living in the sort of traditional societies Helena Norberg-Hodge would describe as wholesomely integrated: communities people who share an ancient common connection with their environment and with each other. See DW Documentary on the Life of the Kolla People in Northern Argentina.
Now we can better understand the evolution of human consciousness if we consider the enteric nervous system in the human gut, and how many plants contain active neurotransmission inhibitors and stimulators. This is a subject which has had even less research attention from mainstream medical science than has nutrition in general, but is precisely this connection between human conscious subjective experience and the neurologically active compounds in plants and gut flora that lies behind the traditional science of shamanism. It was the shamans or curanderos in the traditional Andean and Native Central and North American Indian cultures who were the group who had a conscious intellectual knowledge of this mathematical pattern in a healthy society which pattern was itself conscious. And what I am suggesting here is that it was these shamen who consciously developed the ideas behind the traditional pagan religions, not only in the Andes, but in Greece and Europe too. See On Psychobotanics and Neurology.
This lecture by Eric Matzner looks promising, but I have not been able to watch more than the first 75 seconds, because the poor guy's videos are obviously being blocked in one or another, by someone. Nevertheless, the idea at 1 min 17 seconds, that human beings once "took evolution of their cognitive capacities into their own hands", is the one I am propsing here. And if this is true, then they took plant evolution into their own hands at the same time, and so we will discover that agriculture, or horticulture, is in fact older than hunting as a way of social life.
Now watch this:
And think about just some of the economic and social factors in our choice of food:
Now tell me just how smart an idea "medicare for all" is, without addressing any of this? Here is a place to start:
And also consider how our civil life, in terms of the institutions where people are physically colocated whilst they work, affects the mental processes people go through when they make decisions. See Jessica Green on Architecture for Living Spaces.
Now listen to Danna Pycher talking about how the immune system's inflammatory response is affected by the subject's state of mind, and how psychological trauma symptoms respond to subconscious states of mind which can be affected by hypnosis.
As the notes say, this is an area where there has been little or no clinical research, except possibly in studies where Chinese traditional medicine has been used together with Western medine to treat physical trauma symptoms of chemotherapy, for example.
And I think Danna Pycher's ideas make the psycho-somatic link from trauma and stress to immune system function very clear, and also how "gut feeling" intuition can actually give us real information about the world around us. And this also explains Mariah's response to the trauma of being suddenly moved from a comfortable, safe world with which she was familiar, into a very different, very uncomfortable and dangerous world of a Doctor's Without Frontiers field camp in South Sudan affected her immune system, and resulted in a very dramatic "life hack". Now listen to Chris Nickerson on the difference between hacking and quilt-making, and what security really is.
Hackers want to repurpose stuff. Quilt-makers want to make building blocks. Good teachers, like Chris, are meta-quiltmakers. The aim is to inspire others to do good things. So, if we want global security, we need to make sure we are surrounded by quilt-makers who are skilled at improvisation and who inspire others to learn how to reason creatively together to build societies which are mutually supporting, so that every society is angaged in a mutually supportive relationship with all the other societies with which it interacts. This global intelligence will then become the source of our sense of security, giving us the ability to have faith in our own collective capacity for intelligent adaptation to any changes of circumstance which may chance to come our way; and that as a result of this perpetual learning machine in which we all live, life on earth will continue to get better and better with each passing day.
Now, after listening to Chris Nickerson's talk, about how his "push the button" attitude, and his curiosity, and how, as a result of his attitude, his career became a protracted "Stanford University Tour" but his campus was the whole world, not just one California university. Now listen again to Tina Seelig's talk on creativity, and you will see an example of the complexity-simplification Hannah Fry talks about, which makes some complex systems with inherently strong dependence on initial conditions, produce identifiably similar career paths for two quite different individuals. One is a woman who is a professor at Stanford, the other is a man who runs a security consultancy. This is an example of a substrate independent process Max Tegmark talks about in the context of Integrated information theory:
We can now say something about Tegmark's gnomic slogan "Consciousness is how information feels when it's being processed". For something to feel a sensation of some kind, that something must be affected physically by something else which is in some sense independent of the feeling subject. So that thing, or onta, from which we get the greek suffix -on in words such as electron and photon, and also the greek word μόνος which is the root of the word monad which Euclid uses for arithmetical unit. From Wikipedia page Monad_(philosophy)
So I hope I have given physicists, whether in sheep's clothing or otherwise, some motivation to listen careully to Jade's lecture on Entropy and Information.
Now you will better be able to understand her lecture on the arrow of time, I hope. Hint: what does the entropy of the English language do over time? How does that happen? What is education, essentially? I think education is synthetic intelligence. In other words, human beings construct their own essential nature through education. And who was the first teacher?
For more on the remarkable physical effects of increasing literacy, see The Psychology of Self-deception and Lori on the Wash Post Losing Control of the Narrative. Also listen to Ariel Bissett on magical realism in politics:
And on books about maths. The cool thing is, maths is substrate independent, just like God, so it doesn't much matter which of any decent maths boooks you read, and you can safely take your peers' advice. Hardy's book is great, to which I would add Bertrand Russell's Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy, which he wrote in prison during WWI and which is quite possibly the best book he ever wrote.
Listen to O'Neil at 3 mins 35 secs. Then watch this:
If people listened to women more, and alpha-males less, then new ideas would come quicker than ... I dunno what!
At 9 mins 53 secs "Most people, unfortunately, view themselves as puzzle-builders, ..." This illustrates the central problem with current approaches to AI, which Jade explains beautifully at 6 mins 12 secs here: Jade on Artificial Intelligence.
And this is why a culture of alpha-males kills innovation: alpha-males don't like making the other guy look like a genius, they prefer to knock them down.
Now, to get back to Jade's AI problem, which we can now state as the problem of how we program a community of quiltmakers, rather than a community of puzzle-builders, listen to Max Tegmark on the so-called hard problem of AI. Which you can restate fairly simply as "Why is any arbitrary rearrangement of food not necessarily conscious?"
So at 5 mins 10 secs, Tegmark has reduced the hard problem of AI to the question "What are the patterns of material arrangement which are conscious?" Knowing this would allow us to ask questions such as "Is consciousness a necessary feature of the physical world, or is the evident consciousness in the world right now, just an accident? In other words, we are asking whether consciousness is something a priori uncertain, or is it something which is an inevitable property of the Universe? So the hard problem of Tegmark, would be well on the way to being solved if we knew which particular rearrangements of food lead to conscious beings, and which ones lead to dead bodies, riddled with cancer, say, or antibiotics and inti-biotic resistant bacteria?
So to solve the hard problem of AI, in Tegmark's formulation, we need to understand what is special about the human digestive system, that means it is a pattern which rearranges food into a pattern which happens to be conscious. This means we need to understand the physiology of human nutrition and how this produces nervous systems which are conscious:
And this is almost as unpopular a specialization in medicine as nutrition, but not quite. But the gut is so complex that this could hardly be called specialisation:
Now consciousness is always consciousness of something being. But precisely what being it is that we are conscious of depends on the rational judgement we make about the meaning of our sense-perception at the time, and this process of making judgements is something we learn, in one way or another, sometimes at school or from our parents and friends, but mostly through life experience. And creative thinking is our ability to adapt to changes in the world around us. But changes in the world around us are changes in our own knowledge about that world. So the capacity to adapt depends crucially upon our ability to notice these changes as they occur, and this make these changes in the world around us simultaneous with the changes in our knowledge of the world around us. Ann Hermann-Nehdi's father was director of Management Training at General Electric, and a scientists, and when she was a kid, her father did experiments on her to see whether or not creative thinking could be taught to managers at GE. So there was once a time when the General Electric corporation was interested in the ability of its senior management to adapt to changes, ...
At 6 mins 11 secs, she talks about mind hacks. A mind hack is a conscious way to get your thinking out of a patterned auto-response and to shift the context so that you can see new possible solutions that weren't apparent in your prior patterned state. One of the most pervasive patterned auto-response networks in most people's lives is the goal-oriented one. Formulating a plan, and working through the necessary steps to achieve the goal. And it turns out that illness is one of the "mind hacks" which makes dramatic changes to people's lives. Mariah Mansvelt Beck's illness will very likely turn out to positively affect the lives of billions of people all around the world, but it was a result of several failures; of her career, her personal life and her health.
In that simulation, Clarissa changes her major from marketing to biology. In most people's mind, these are radically different careers. As different as Mariah's change from international development fieldwork to marketing tampons and towels. But why is there such a big difference between marketing and international development? Marketing is international development of a kind, isn't it? But it's typically not the kind of international development that is good for people who really need the help of international development. What sort of economics would we need, then, which would make someone whose goal was to be successful, happy and do good for other people who need help, able to achieve that with equal likelihood, whether they majored in marketing or international development, or biology, or pharmacology, or business administration? The reason this question is important, is because it will allow us to consciously build a society which, as a whole, is intelligent, in so far as it can quickly and efficiently adapt to changes, the most common of which are changes in human knowledge as it is shared amongst people. Such a society would be an example of what Tegmark calls a conscious mathematical pattern.
Now if such a pattern could exist, we can ask the question "Would that pattern necessarily need to be an object of the conscious awareness of any one or more human individuals in order to be an effective, creative consciousness in the world? By effective, I mean simply that some group of people could know this pattern phenomenologically, i.e. through observing its effects on them as subjects, in the way, for example, that medical science knows the placebo effect through clinical trials, even though there is nothing within the conscious knowledge of medical practitioners which can explain why it is real effect, principally because of it's essentially subjective character: the placebo effect depends upon the state of belief of the subject:
Now, when we think about the idea of the Pachamama, who is the pagan earth-goddess in the Kolla and various other Andean cultures, then we can see fairly easily, through modern scientific lenses, that there is a certain inevitability about this idea arising in populations living in the sort of traditional societies Helena Norberg-Hodge would describe as wholesomely integrated: communities people who share an ancient common connection with their environment and with each other. See DW Documentary on the Life of the Kolla People in Northern Argentina.
Now we can better understand the evolution of human consciousness if we consider the enteric nervous system in the human gut, and how many plants contain active neurotransmission inhibitors and stimulators. This is a subject which has had even less research attention from mainstream medical science than has nutrition in general, but is precisely this connection between human conscious subjective experience and the neurologically active compounds in plants and gut flora that lies behind the traditional science of shamanism. It was the shamans or curanderos in the traditional Andean and Native Central and North American Indian cultures who were the group who had a conscious intellectual knowledge of this mathematical pattern in a healthy society which pattern was itself conscious. And what I am suggesting here is that it was these shamen who consciously developed the ideas behind the traditional pagan religions, not only in the Andes, but in Greece and Europe too. See On Psychobotanics and Neurology.
This lecture by Eric Matzner looks promising, but I have not been able to watch more than the first 75 seconds, because the poor guy's videos are obviously being blocked in one or another, by someone. Nevertheless, the idea at 1 min 17 seconds, that human beings once "took evolution of their cognitive capacities into their own hands", is the one I am propsing here. And if this is true, then they took plant evolution into their own hands at the same time, and so we will discover that agriculture, or horticulture, is in fact older than hunting as a way of social life.
Now watch this:
And think about just some of the economic and social factors in our choice of food:
Now tell me just how smart an idea "medicare for all" is, without addressing any of this? Here is a place to start:
And also consider how our civil life, in terms of the institutions where people are physically colocated whilst they work, affects the mental processes people go through when they make decisions. See Jessica Green on Architecture for Living Spaces.
Now listen to Danna Pycher talking about how the immune system's inflammatory response is affected by the subject's state of mind, and how psychological trauma symptoms respond to subconscious states of mind which can be affected by hypnosis.
As the notes say, this is an area where there has been little or no clinical research, except possibly in studies where Chinese traditional medicine has been used together with Western medine to treat physical trauma symptoms of chemotherapy, for example.
And I think Danna Pycher's ideas make the psycho-somatic link from trauma and stress to immune system function very clear, and also how "gut feeling" intuition can actually give us real information about the world around us. And this also explains Mariah's response to the trauma of being suddenly moved from a comfortable, safe world with which she was familiar, into a very different, very uncomfortable and dangerous world of a Doctor's Without Frontiers field camp in South Sudan affected her immune system, and resulted in a very dramatic "life hack". Now listen to Chris Nickerson on the difference between hacking and quilt-making, and what security really is.
Hackers want to repurpose stuff. Quilt-makers want to make building blocks. Good teachers, like Chris, are meta-quiltmakers. The aim is to inspire others to do good things. So, if we want global security, we need to make sure we are surrounded by quilt-makers who are skilled at improvisation and who inspire others to learn how to reason creatively together to build societies which are mutually supporting, so that every society is angaged in a mutually supportive relationship with all the other societies with which it interacts. This global intelligence will then become the source of our sense of security, giving us the ability to have faith in our own collective capacity for intelligent adaptation to any changes of circumstance which may chance to come our way; and that as a result of this perpetual learning machine in which we all live, life on earth will continue to get better and better with each passing day.
Now, after listening to Chris Nickerson's talk, about how his "push the button" attitude, and his curiosity, and how, as a result of his attitude, his career became a protracted "Stanford University Tour" but his campus was the whole world, not just one California university. Now listen again to Tina Seelig's talk on creativity, and you will see an example of the complexity-simplification Hannah Fry talks about, which makes some complex systems with inherently strong dependence on initial conditions, produce identifiably similar career paths for two quite different individuals. One is a woman who is a professor at Stanford, the other is a man who runs a security consultancy. This is an example of a substrate independent process Max Tegmark talks about in the context of Integrated information theory:
So this movement from phenomenological to ontological description, which Itegrated Information Theory attempts to describe, is essentially the process of model building. In other words, the development of an underlying ontology, which gives us a set of building blocks which we can then use to synthesise systems which faithfully reproduce the sorts of behaviors produced as a result of our analyses of the systems we started with, is an instance of the same kind of pattern we see in the development of mathematics itself, as Penelope Maddy explains in her paper "How Applied Mathematics Became Pure". Early mathematics started out as a process whereby men abstracted certain forms which described generalisations of observed physical phenomena which appeared to them in their perception of their immediate concrete environment. The most general such abstraction was that of number, but that soon gave rise to notions such as quantity and proportion. Then theoreticians such as Isaac Newton were able to turn these abstract patches into a quilt, which described some aspects of phenomena in observed in the physical world which had not been amongst those phenomena, analysis of which gave rise to these abstractions in the first place. Thus the idea that through observing the phenomena around us, we could abduct an underlying ontology, became the basis for scientific explanation. Here's Feynman talking eloquently about this:David Chalmers has argued that any attempt to explain consciousness in purely physical terms (i.e. to start with the laws of physics as they are currently formulated and derive the necessary and inevitable existence of consciousness) eventually runs into the so-called "hard problem". Rather than try to start from physical principles and arrive at consciousness, IIT "starts with consciousness" (accepts the existence of consciousness as certain) and reasons about the properties that a postulated physical substrate would have to have in order to account for it. The ability to perform this jump from phenomenology to mechanism rests on IIT's assumption that if a conscious experience can be fully accounted for by an underlying physical system, then the properties of the physical system must be constrained by the properties of the experience.Specifically, IIT moves from phenomenology to mechanism by attempting to identify the essential properties of conscious experience (dubbed "axioms") and, from there, the essential properties of conscious physical systems (dubbed "postulates").
We can now say something about Tegmark's gnomic slogan "Consciousness is how information feels when it's being processed". For something to feel a sensation of some kind, that something must be affected physically by something else which is in some sense independent of the feeling subject. So that thing, or onta, from which we get the greek suffix -on in words such as electron and photon, and also the greek word μόνος which is the root of the word monad which Euclid uses for arithmetical unit. From Wikipedia page Monad_(philosophy)
Monad (from Greek μονάς monas, "singularity" in turn from μόνος monos, "alone")[1] refers, in cosmogony, to the Supreme Being, divinity or the totality of all things. The concept was reportedly conceived by the Pythagoreans and may refer variously to a single source acting alone, or to an indivisible origin, or to both. The concept was later adopted by other philosophers, such as Leibniz, who referred to the monad as an elementary particle. It had a geometric counterpart, which was debated and discussed contemporaneously by the same groups of people.On the face of it then, Tegmark's slogan sounds like solipsism. Why should information feel anything? "Because it imagines it does!", says Tegmark. Again from Wikipedia: Solipsism
Solipsism (/ˈsɒlɪpsɪzəm/; from Latin solus, meaning 'alone', and ipse, meaning 'self') is the philosophical idea that only one's mind is sure to exist. As an epistemological position, solipsism holds that knowledge of anything outside one's own mind is unsure; the external world and other minds cannot be known and might not exist outside the mind. As a metaphysical position, solipsism goes further to the conclusion that the world and other minds do not exist. This extreme position is claimed to be irrefutable, as the solipsist believes themselves to be the only true authority, all others being creations of their own mind.The answer I think is to change our definition of information. The information doesn't feel anything itself, it is the concrete physical system which we imagine that information describing, which is itself the concrete subject we observe and which we describe as a conscious being. And on this view, information is not itself concrete, it is an abstraction. So this type of system which Integrated Information Theory describes is the type of system which Rovelli et al describe in the relational interpretation of quantum mechanics which I wrote a bit about in 2010 here: Relational Semantics subtitled "The Evils of Lego".
So I hope I have given physicists, whether in sheep's clothing or otherwise, some motivation to listen careully to Jade's lecture on Entropy and Information.
Now you will better be able to understand her lecture on the arrow of time, I hope. Hint: what does the entropy of the English language do over time? How does that happen? What is education, essentially? I think education is synthetic intelligence. In other words, human beings construct their own essential nature through education. And who was the first teacher?
For more on the remarkable physical effects of increasing literacy, see The Psychology of Self-deception and Lori on the Wash Post Losing Control of the Narrative. Also listen to Ariel Bissett on magical realism in politics:
And on books about maths. The cool thing is, maths is substrate independent, just like God, so it doesn't much matter which of any decent maths boooks you read, and you can safely take your peers' advice. Hardy's book is great, to which I would add Bertrand Russell's Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy, which he wrote in prison during WWI and which is quite possibly the best book he ever wrote.
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