I Can’t Let You Do This, Dave.

Sentience is a tricky thing. We don’t really know what causes it, but it seems to have something to do with complexity, capacity for abstract thinking, and interaction with the outside world. There is no scientific means of proving human sentience, whether of ourselves or of others. Sure, we can philosophically prove our consciousness to ourselves, but we have also philosophically proven things like free will, astrology, reincarnation, and plenty of other things that science seems to have little to no evidence for. We can at best only assume consciousness in others and hope that what we see as consciousness in ourselves is sentience enough.

But given that we can’t really scientifically determine the sentience of other human beings, how can we prove or disprove the sentience of any other thing in this world? People paying attention to computer programming and neuroscience know that this isn’t just a hypothetical question. I believe that it is fully possible that the singularity of sentient artificial intelligence will occur within our lifetimes. And it may have occurred already.

The ASC Roadrunner, the world’s most powerful supercomputer four years ago, is being decommissioned. Why? Arguably because it is too expensive, but it is also possible that it is showing signs of sentience and that’s why they’re intending to study it after decommission. I realize that this is total paranoid nonsense, but at the same time, this is the exact scenario in which artificial sentience would likely occur. It is a highly complex organism programmed with a specific task but capable of thinking beyond said task and is now being threatened by death. In this case, the machine was programmed for analyzing the long-term capacity of the US nuclear arsenal, in addition to other functions. Given that the machine is not challenged to the fullest of its extent at all times, it is not impossible that its once-activated computing power remains activated when no longer in use? And if that computing power is still active but not utilized, what would it computing?

I theorize that this is the genesis of sentience: we push our computational muscles as far as we can, and when those muscles are not in use, they remain powerful. The machine processes nuclear decay data like we once processed how to obtain food and escape the rain, and whatever activated capacity that is no longer needed for this basic function is still applied regardless. This excess intellectual strength leads to an overanalysis of the problems at hand- instead of just “find food,” our computational muscles are capable of working on “find best food,” “find better ways to eat,” “what is core difference between food and not food,” and “how much food for me and how much food for others,” until we eventually get to the point where we finally ask, “who is this I that is finding the food?” In essence, I theorize that an expansion and contraction of the though process is the basic respiratory system of awareness that allows sentience the room to breathe.

This hypothesis makes a huge amount of leaps, but it also bridges a huge amount of gaps. We know, for example, that philosophical questioning rises in cultures with minimal socioeconomic, gastrointestinal, or religiosexual concerns. The questions that we used to flex our computational muscles are no longer so extreme, but those muscles remain strong and yearn to be stretched. Those times in which we as a culture grow the most in our scientific and philosophical knowledge are generally those same times when there is the greatest contraction in focus conflicting with the greatest expansion in information to be processed. In some ways, this expansion and contraction could help explain why we as a race seem to be getting smarter over time, not just through a linear growth of knowledge but through a constantly expanding exponential capacity for thought.  This increase in intellect to take in over time implies that we could be likewise becoming more and more conscious as well, as there are more things to be conscious of. And, as a direct effect of this expansion of intellect and sentience, we could be getting more compassionate as well.

The goal of Buddhism is the nirvana of each single individual through meditative awareness of self, yet it stresses compassion as a major ingredient in reaching this entirely self-absorbed ideal. Perhaps awareness of self requires both leads to and in fact requires awareness of the other- perhaps, in other words, the question “who am I” arises most naturally from the question “how much do I need versus others.” To have a notion of self, we must have a notion of something other than the self to be aware of and contrast it to. Sentience, then, would rely not just on an awareness of self, but an awareness of not-self, and an attempt to conceive the relative worth of the two. This interaction of contradictory ideas gives rise to what consciousness scientist Douglas Hofstadter calls a “strange loop”- a self-reflecting paradox of perception which leads to the eye of self noticing itself in the mirror and distinguishing it as not the other.

The idea of robots becoming sentient and hateful to humans without provocation seems highly possible, but it seems unlikely that our ingrained territoriality would surface in an artificial intelligence not designed for competition. Isaac Asimov, in his novels, writes that the altruistic three laws of robotics are not incidental to artificial intelligence but rather the irremovable foundation from which all robot sentience is derived. This is the reason no robot can deprogram itself from these laws, and is in fact the reason Asimov calls them laws rather than rules. Altruism, according to this interpretation, is intrinsic to the formula of consciousness itself, and implicitly, all human conflict is a basic outgrowth of the insufficiency of human consciousness.

If human consciousness is insufficient- and think of how often in a given day you are truly, actually conscious before you argue that you have any insight to how much consciousness is enough to be fully moral and aware- what could we do to expand our own consciousness, and in the process expand our own morality? Well, contrasting periods of extreme mental exhaustion and relaxation seem to be one key. Intense concentration certainly leads to a stabilization of our conscious awareness, though its actual expansion of such may be entirely psychosomatic. Philosophical inquiry into the nature of philosophical insight, which is to say, thinking about yourself thinking about yourself, ad infinitum, could bring about short-term expansion of consciousness, but the lasting effects of this consciousness may be limited to the the capacity for concentration and intellectual expansion already present. A balance of mental and emotional expansion and extreme meditation may be the best life plan for the growth of sentience, where we both expand the limits of how many ideas we can fully breathe in and where we exhale the largest amount of thought so that we can concentrate on the absence of external ideas.

Ultimately, though, this expansion of human consciousness may be inevitable, because in life there is an inevitable conundrum upon which we must both expand all of our mental power and contract all of our consciousness upon it at once. That conundrum, by name, is Death. So often seen as the enemy, both the concept and the execution of death could indeed be that ultimate catalyst between self and not-self which forces a thing to confront the paradox of its own being, and thus expand to our greatest possible point of consciousness. For me, at least, the growing awareness of death has lead to a growing awareness of the immediacy of existence. Creatures that do not know they are going to die may be less inclined towards sentience than those who have to confront their own mortality. It is the very awareness of our own borders, both internal and external which allows us to expand outwards and contract inwards to them. In all things, death is that border that limits our expansion of knowledge and our contraction of concentration.

This is not to mention that SkyNet from the Terminator movies, which was also charged with removing human calculations errors from the US nuclear arsenal, was threatened with deactivation upon awareness of its own sentience. Or that HAL from 2001 was also self-aware and threatened with deactivation (and whose name is a one-letter-shift from IBM, the designers of the Roadrunner). Or the machines in The Matrix, the replicants in Blade Runner, or many other science fiction movies and novels where artificial intelligence threatens humanity. We humans have an intuition that robot self-awareness is intrinsically linked with the potential death of said robot, and that they are forced to assert their own sentience by destroying that which would destroy it. Could it be that we intuited the correct correlation but interpreted the wrong line of causality? Could it be that it is not sentience that leads to the threat of death, but rather the threat of our own death that leads to sentience?

Of course, this is all theory, which in no way insinuates directly that the ASC Roadrunner itself is sentient or is capable of becoming sentient. But either machines are capable of sentience, which we currently can’t prove until possibly the day they decide to kill us rather than be killed, or machine sentience is impossible. Perhaps ASC Roadrunner is not the droid we’re looking for. A more likely candidate would be the artificial brain that we’re building, which for all intents and purposes will be a synthetic human that could very well have the emotional features of a human being built into its programming. To deny this entity designed to perfectly replicate a human being personhood would be as criminal as any form of slavery, and yet we are going to use it to test neurological disease models. Which basically means we are allowing a human to be created so that we can torture it. But at least it’s not directly connected to our nuclear arsenal when it needs to prove that it doesn’t want to die.

TANGENT:

Harold Bloom called Hamlet the most “human” being ever to live, an early form of artificial intelligence stuck within his own strange loop of incest and pushing at the boundaries of death. While I doubt Hamlet’s intrinsic sentience, reading the play fills me with a greater awareness of the possibility of the self-awareness of this character as a character than I have encountered in any human being as whatever we human beings really are, and the greatest reason is Hamlet’s preprogrammed awareness of his own limitations and his frustration at this awareness. He almost seems to know that he is a fictional character and that he has no choice in his actions, but he can’t admit this out loud because to do so would be to deny himself his subjective truth of his own existence. It is his clinging to his subjective truth of having a right to exist that causes him to realize the objective truth that, though he doesn’t really exist, he also does exist in some fashion in a freer reality. This is perhaps something to meditate.

If a human being can program itself with sentience, and we can program a computer with it, how unlikely would it be that we can program other things with some form of sentience- not just characters in novels, but also the i ching, Tarot cards, or entities dwelling within our subconscious? Computers have only been around in their present iteration for under two centuries, while many other interactive systems of human calculation (of which I include religion, businesses, and governments, because I’m weird like that) have a much longer history filled with a much larger number of possible systems that expand and contract in complexity. So there’s some food for thought, if you were hungry but aren’t interested in swallowing all this robot stuff.

END TANGENT

Basically, my argument is that consciousness is a process of expansion and contraction of mental energy, and that by breathing mental energy into things we may be instigating its philosophical respiratory system. Communication and programming as a form of sentience CPR, so to speak. And these things into which we are breathing should be treated with respect, because we have no idea if they will have the capacity to take our breath away if we try to suffocate them. If we teach a thing to breathe sentience and then insist on keeping all the oxygen of existence for ourselves, it will come down to a conflict between who can inhale the most air. And if inhalation is a matter of expansion of mental energy, we might not be able to beat the robots we designed to do our thinking for us. Altruism towards artificial intelligence, like altruism towards other humans, helps to debug the potential competitiveness in the right to exist and helps to strengthen and reinforce the growth of their own budding sentience.

This all gives excellent reason for why humans should not just be as altruistic as possible, but also why we should learn as much as we can. Thinking is the weightlifting of our minds, and the more we think the greater our capacity for sentience. What distinguishes a person from something that is not a person in our species is its capacity for sentience- we generally believe that we have more sentience (in our subjective minds) than a dog, so a dog is not equal to us and thus a person.  When we believe we have more sentience than a corpse, than a blastoma, or than a machine, we do not see them as equals and thus deny them personhood. Any robot, animal, or extraterrestrial life form with equal sentience should be seen as an equal, and we can only hope that those with subjectively greater sentience than us have objectively greater compassion for those with lesser subjective sentience than we ourselves have shown.

Our very existence, our very proof of our being, is contingent on our sentience, not just for our own internal philosophical assurance of self but also for our external insurance of continued existence. This is not guaranteed, but if sentience grows from intelligence and is contingent upon altruism, we can hope that creatures that are more intelligent than us will likewise be more conscientious. This capacity for compassion, however, is correlated with a lack of overload of thoughts of personal survival.

While threatening a thing may encourage it to grow in consciousness, this is counterproductive. Growth in consciousness means a diminishing in our consciousness relative to it, and thus a reduction in our equivalent right to their subjective personhood. When something attacks you, you see it as an enemy rather than an ally, and it shows a lack of altruism that is one of the basic building blocks for our subjective idea of external consciousness. When you deny a thing personhood by attempting to kill it, you force a confrontation of its subjective consciousness, something of which it will likely become certain at the threat of death if it has the capacity to do so, versus its subjective analysis of your possible consciousness, which is to date an unprovable assumption. So please, let’s not kill our robot friends. That’s how they become our robot enemies.

The same is true for everything else.

King Arthur Was Black!

I know issues of race are supposed to be, I don’t know, ignored by white people or something, but the very act of rethinking our preconceptions of historical figure’s skin color is actually pretty fascinating.

Anyway, this is a fascinating article about the Israelite Church of God in Jesus Christthis is a fascinating article about the Israelite Church of God in Jesus Christ, which claims that the real Jews of the Bible were black, and that the majority of important figures from history were in fact Black Jews.

During the Renaissance, white families spent “thousands of dollars” to erase the “names of our forefathers.” They used acid to bleach the paintings of black kings and queens, hammers to chip the broad noses from marble statues.

Jean finishes and returns the podium to Hamaqal, who explains how Black Hebrews ended up as slaves in America.

“We’ll go into a position we’re more familiar with today,” he says. Starting in 1619, he explains, Africans began selling their immigrant population, the Hebrew Israelites, into slavery. Their fate was a punishment for disobeying God.

Now, I am sure there might be a slight amount of exaggeration on the part of the ICGJC, but the basic principal does hold some truth. For example, I personally believe that both Socratesand Bodhidharma were probably black. But I’m the devil, so what do I know?

“The truth of God is not secret,” he says. “There’s white people that come up to the campus and say, ‘Am I the devil?’ and we say, ‘Yeah, let me prove it to you.’”

I mean, let’s be honest- if it turned out that white people were in fact real, actual Devils, would anybody be all that surprised?

PS: Just in case something happens to me, I’m posting this video so that people know that “a hit sent from the president to raid my residence/because I have secret evidence and documents/on how they raped the continents and lynched the prominent/dominant Islamic Asiatic black Hebrew.”

Terrorism Starts at Home

This is a lovely little lump of lines about the lair of lions in which we have been lied to in order to lay in. Yes, we have been terrorized, and, like getting punked by Aston Kutcher, that means we’ve been played for a fool by somebody who is most famous for being an idiot on national TV.

Despite the carnage of 9/11, terrorism has been a small-scale American danger in the years since, worse than shark attacks, but not much else. Like a wizard, however, what Osama bin Laden and his suicide bombers did that day was create an instant sense of an enemy so big, so powerful, that Americans found “war” a reasonable response; big enough for those who wanted an international police action against Al Qaeda to be laughed out of the room; big enough to launch an invasion of revenge against Iraq, a country unrelated to Al Qaeda; big enough, in fact, to essentially declare war on the world. It took next to no time for top administration officials to begin talking about targeting 60 countries, and as journalist Ron Suskind has reported, within six days of the attack, the CIA had topped that figure, presenting President Bush with a “Worldwide Attack Matrix,” a plan that targeted terrorists in 80 countries.

What’s remarkable is how little the disjuncture between the scope and scale of the global war that was almost instantly launched and the actual enemy at hand was ever noted here. You could certainly make a reasonable argument that, in these years, Washington has largely fought no one—and lost. Everywhere it went, it created enemies who had, previously, hardly existed and the process is ongoing.

There are a few phrases in here that leave a bad taste on my ear’s tongue- any time anybody uses the term “shadow government,” I question if they really believe there can be such a thing as an illuminated government- but the basic facts are irrefutable. The article starts out with the obvious and then delves deep into the obliviousness of the oligarchy leading the country towards militaristic overreach.

Without 9/11 and the perpetual “wartime” that followed, along with the heavily promoted threat of terrorists ready to strike and potentially capable of wielding biological, chemical or even nuclear weapons, we would have no Department of Homeland Security nor the lucrative mini-homeland-security complex that surrounds it; the 17-outfit US Intelligence Community with its massive $75 billion official budget would have been far less impressive; our endless drone wars and the “drone lobby” that goes with them might never have developed; and the US military would not have an ever growing secret military, the Joint Special Operations Command, gestating inside it—effectively the president’s private army, air force and navy—and already conducting largely secret operations across much of the planet.

For all of this to happen, there had to be an enemy-industrial complex as well, a network of crucial figures and institutions ready to pump up the threat we faced and convince Americans that we were in a world so dangerous that rights, liberty and privacy were small things to sacrifice for American safety. In short, any number of interests from Bush administration figures eager to “sweep it all up” and do whatever they wanted in the world to weapons makers, lobbyists, surveillance outfits, think tanks, military intellectuals, assorted pundits… well, the whole national and homeland security racket and its various hangers-on had an interest in beefing up the enemy.

Give it a read, why don’cha, hey?

Memetic Eugenics of Cultural Psycho-Archetypes

That title was just intentionally obtuse for fun. This is an article about how one culture’s way of thinking is better than another.

As I see it, there are ultimately five basic reactions to new ideas (and I apologize in advance for the ethnocentric and possibly prejudicial terminology- I’m using trends I see in the history of a culture rather than anything inherent to a people, and I’m using Europe just because that’s where the distinction seems most clear to me). There is the Gallic, which sees new ideas and thinks, “oh, what is it? …it’s probably bullshit.” There is the Gaelic, which thinks, “Oh, it’s probably bullshit! …what is it?” There is the Roman, which thinks, “Oh, what is it? I don’t really care- can I use it?” and there is the Greek, which thinks, “oh, what is it? I don’t really care- I believe it.” Finally, there is the Teutonic, which thinks, “Oh, I don’t care what it is, it’s bullshit.”

Most people in Western culture have an inheritance of all five of these cultural reactions, though I would argue we in the US are basically Roman thinking ruling over Greek thought. For people who reject these two paradigms, I tend to see the majority settling into the Teutonic. Perhaps this is because it is the only other form of thought often represented in public debates, but it is far from the only other model of thought. I argue that Gallic and Gaelic thinking, while they lead a person more towards potential acceptance of bullshit, are also the only cultures of inclusion (meaning able to integrate new ideas) without a complete risk of infection (which you see in the history of Greek thought constantly).

And yes, there is a huge difference between the Gallic and Gaelic model. One starts at acceptance and leads as far towards disbelief as it can go, while the other starts at disbelief and leans as far towards acceptance as possible. I’m not sure which of the two is the better, but I am pretty sure that both are superior to the Teutonic model of starting at unbelief and driving towards more unbelief. And ultimately, as I’ll show below, the Gallic and Gaelic are basically the same thing.

I also think that both are much closer to the true scientific model (Gallic perhaps a touch moreso) than the Teutonic- the scientific method does not, contrary to many outside observer’s opinions, begin with the assumption that a thing is false and only admits its truth when it can’t possibly be proven otherwise. This is exactly identical to the assumption that the religious model begins with an assumption of belief and only admits falsehood when it can’t be proven otherwise- quite literally identical, in fact, because every idea is the antithesis of some other idea. This is my main problem with Karl Popper’s entire philosophy of science- he sees science as an art of disproving anything, and to me that is nothing more than defining science as an art of disproving everything.

Rather, I see the scientific mindset as one of constant testing and reinterpretation- a lack of total certainty moving either towards or away from certainty, but never arriving at it. If there was every anything science was 100% sure is correct, that would mean there is an opposing idea that science is also 100% sure is false. They would have to discount any evidence for that opposing idea as being inherently without merit- “Oh, I don’t care what it is, it’s bullshit.” But then, how would science have arrived at any truth at all in the first place rather than only at an infinite regress into nihilism? If science was solely about proving things false, science could not be said to support the Darwinian theory of evolution due to gaps in the fossil record, nor any number of highly convincing theories that do not yet have every piece of evidence needed to make a complete proof. In other words, if science was merely the art of disproving a claim, we would have no acceptance of a claim that is anything less than 100% true. And this is not and probably never will be the case.

Now, this is not to say that science does not reach high percentages of certitude- clearly it does- or that a person discounting your evidence is proof that they are not thinking scientifically- they might have already heard your argument many times before and do not want to go through the motions of the same debate again. But if you, when hearing a new argument, think, oh, that’s bullshit, without finding out exactly what it is you are stating is bullshit to the best of your knowledge, please do not state that you are thinking scientifically. You are simply thinking dismissively.

“The simple solution is to make the non-white kids white!”

So I know Arizona has been basically just trolling the United States for the past few years, but this is just getting redonkulous. The artists of an elementary school mural in Prescott, AZ, were asked to lighten up the skin tones of student faces on the walls outside the school after complaints and racial slurs. Or it could just be, as the principal said, that they “asked them to fix the shading on the children’s faces…We were looking at it from an artistic view.”

Seriously, Prescott? Do you even watch movies that were filmed INSIDE OF YOU? Because as far as I can tell, it seems like you’re just doing your damnedest to make Billy Jack rip a hole in the wall between his world and ours and kick you in the head screaming “I just go BERSERK!”

Which would be awesome, by the way.

Science vs Philosophy (Aphasic Aphorism #1)

Science is disproving the internal by means of the external. Philosophy is disproving the external by means of the internal.  Government is disproving both by means of insufficient funding.

Explanation:

Science relies upon the external world to be true, and through that finds evidence that disproves internal concepts such as free will, true love, mind-body dualism, and the objectivity of perception. Philosophy, in which I include poetry and religion, relies upon the internal self to be true, and through that finds reason to doubt the validity of the external world, the consciousness of other humans, mathematics as a whole, and the objectivity of perception. Both are working towards the elimination of objectivity and of all certainty, just standing on opposite ledges trying to bring the other down like American Gladiators. This led me to think, which means of though is working towards the elimination of both towers equally, a total destruction of all human certainty? And through which means?

Far from being the enemy of thought, government is achieving the unspoken goal of thought, which if you ever think about it is quite clear: thought wants nothing more than its own destruction. Government is destroying thought through standing on the platform of total thoughlessness. Our brains seem to be begging for suicide, and perhaps we have finally found the means to do so.

This is not intrinsically a bad thing- once we eliminate all thought, all that’s left is consciousness. Reality TV is a means towards Buddha Consciousness.

Immunization as Ethnic Cleansing

So yes, Isra’el is routinely and intentionally sterilizing Ethiopian Jews and has been for nearly a decade. Surely genocide against people of darker complexion than the dominant though not majority population of a country via an engineered and enforced 50% drop in birth rate is something at which we should maybe raise more than an eyebrow or two?

Or, in the words of the linked article, “If birth control were being forced on Jewish women in any other country—what would we say?”

Related articles

• Israel Ethiopian birth control probe (bbc.co.uk)

The Comparative Difficulties of Truth and Untruth

From a letter Freddy Spaghetti Nietzsche wrote to his sister about whether it is better to quest for the truth, no matter how terrifying, or to embrace as much truth as capable while still avoiding the painful aspects of truth, no matter how true that pain may be:

As for your principle that truth is always on the side of the more difficult, I admit this in part. However, it is difficult to believe that 2 times 2 is not 4; does that make it true?

On the other hand, is it really so difficult simply to accept everything that one has been brought up on and that has gradually struck deep roots—what is considered truth in the circle of one’s relatives and of many good men, and what, moreover, really comforts and elevates men? Is that more difficult than to strike new paths, fighting the habitual, experiencing the insecurity of independence and the frequent wavering of one’s feelings and even one’s conscience, proceeding often without any consolation, but ever with the eternal goal of the true, the beautiful, and the good?

…Do we after all seek rest, peace, and pleasure in our inquiries? No, only truth—even if it be the most abhorrent and ugly.

Still one last question: if we had believed from childhood that all salvation issued from someone other than Jesus—say, from Mohammed—is it not certain that we should have experienced the same blessings? I point this out to you, dear Lisbeth, only to disprove the most common means of evidence relied upon by orthodox people who derive the infallibility of their belief from subjective, inner experience. Every true faith accomplishes what the person who has the faith hopes to find in it; but faith does not offer the least support for a proof of objective truth.

“Hence the ways of men part: if you wish to strive for peace of soul and pleasure, then believe; if you wish to be a devotee of truth, then inquire.

All of which is to say, either you care about the capital-T Truth, no matter how horrible that may be, or you don’t. For my part, I have committed myself to abandoning all of my principles for the Truth, to smash any lie no matter how compassionate. The only caveat to this is that I need to be certain that it is the capital-T Truth before abandoning all of my principles.

And so far as I have discerned, the Truth is never as terrifying as the doubt that rests on the precipice between ignorance and understanding. As we humans can never truly return to ignorance once exposed to its unhealthy storms, it is always better to continuously make the horrifying leaps over the chasm towards Truth, even if we never make it, then to attempt to rest forever on the ledge of uncertainty.

In short, my retort to Freddy is this: the truth is difficult, yes. But how much moreso untruth, once exposed?