In the first post in my series exploring the hard materialists' worldview, I showed that consciousness is a side-effect, and free will an illusion, because the mind is simply what the brain does. That point is more helpful in dispelling the preconceived, wrong notions people have about the human condition, but doesn't do much to show what the true nature of humans is; it merely raises the next question, namely, "If the answer to the question 'what are we?' is merely 'our brains' then just what are our brains?"
Suppose you see two guys, Chuck and Billy-Bob, arguing out in the back of a Jack-in-the-Box parking lot. You see Chuck shout, "Fuck you, asshole!" at Billy-Bob, and Billy-Bob promptly punches Chuck in the face, spraying a jet of blood and ranch sauce onto the pavement. Being the scientific rationalist you are, you note the downward parabolic arc the hemo-condiment mixture follows through the air as it exits Chuck's mouth, which has suddenly been thrust backward as the force of Billy-Bob's fist is kinetically transferred to Chuck's face. If somebody were to then come by and ask why there was a pinkish puddle of fluids on the ground, you might say that that Billy-Bob punched Chuck, causing him to spit out blood and ranch on the ground: simple Newtonian mechanics. But tracing the events back further, would you say that Chuck called Billy-Bob an asshole, causing Billy-Bob to punch him?
Normally, we wouldn't use such mechanical language. We'd say something like "Chuck called Billy-Bob an asshole, which made him mad, so he decided to punch Chuck." Or if we were feeling a little more sympathetic, we might say that Billy-Bob "lost control and punched Chuck" or "He let his anger get the best of him and he punched Chuck." (Funny the more sympathetic phrasing implies less free will on Billy-Bob's part) But we know that the anger Billy-Bob's feeling is just a side effect of the inner workings of his brain, and before he even "decides" to punch Chuck, action potentials have already traveled down his arm to prepare the attack. Somehow the auditory stimulus provided by Chuck's vocal chords has set in motion a series of physical processes whose end result is a tightly-clinched fist moving at high-velocity in the direction of Chuck's face. How does this happen? It seems a bizarre and very idiosyncratic reaction. Usually shouting "Fuck you, asshole!" at rocks or walls doesn't end in black eyes. In fact you won't even get a similar reaction if you do it at another human who doesn't understand English. What's going on here?
Now, the scientific worldview holds that, in principle, you could deconstruct this entire event and explain it in simple cause-and-effect terms of chemical reactions, or even atomic and subatomic processes. We don't do this for a couple reasons. One: there's simply far too much data; no human, and currently no computer could possibly take in all the information regarding the current position and velocity of all the particles in the Chuck/Billy Bob/Jack-in-the-Box system, much less calculate their future path through space and time with any precision. But more importantly, we don't do this because it's not very useful. Just like the brain, you can reduce the heart down to its constituent cells, chemicals, and molecules too if you want to. But doing this can make you lose sight of what the heart does: it pumps blood. When a physician considers a diagnosis of coronary heart disease, he is thinking usually thinking more in terms of "heart as pump" than "heart as aggregation of several billion cardiac cells."
What does the heart do? Pump blood. What does the brain do? Identify and respond to patterns.
Even single-celled organisms often have intracellular nervous systems of a sort that can recognize, say, light, and respond by directing the organism to move in that direction. As organisms evolved over the course of billions of years, constantly competing for the scarce resources of the earth, more complex organisms became more capable of recognizing more subtle details about the natural environment that were correlated with the existence of exploitable resources or avoidable dangers, enabling them to more efficiently sustain themselves and procreate. Thus, all animals have one or more sensory systems that respond positively to the sight, sound, or smell of food, for example.
Adding a little more sophistication to the system though and you start getting the basics of communication and abstract reasoning. Insects, for example, will leave the colony, searching more or less randomly until they stumble upon food, but when they return to the colony they will perform a little dance that varies depending upon the direction they came from and amount of food they recovered. The rest of the colony will witness this dance and respond by sending an appropriately sized team off in the appropriate direction. Insects have no intelligence in the human sense of the word and have nothing like the subjective experience of contemplation and emotion that we know, but their brains are sophisticated enough to have evolved a "program" that not only directs them to the smell of food, but directs them to perform a certain sequence of actions upon discovering food, and directs them to respond to seeing others perform that same sequence of actions in a way that leads them to more food.
Dogs have even more capable brains still. They will start salivating if you throw a big juicy steak in front of them. That much is simple mechanistic stimulus-response. But as Pavlov showed, they are also capable of recognizing situations that are often associated with big juicy steaks and will start salivating in anticipation if they encounter such a situation. It can be something as simple as a flashing light or a ringing bell (simple stimulus-response, though more removed and "abstract" from the end-goal) to something as subtle as a particular 4 note musical chord (as opposed to every other possible arrangement of 4 such notes) or a wheel spinning clockwise (as opposed to counter-clockwise). This demonstrates a capacity to recognize relatively nuanced arrangements of matter and motion in spacetime and requires a very high degree of computational power, the kind that is able to compute self-containing models of reality that give rise to subjective awareness. Dogs are not quite as conscious as us humans, but they almost certainly feel something going on inside. Though we might say the note sequence "A, G, C, F" causes Fido to salivate and the sequence "B, C, F, G" does not, if Fido could talk he'd probably say something like he gets excited when he hears the former, and frustrated when he hears the latter.
Popular depictions of the evolution of man sometimes convey a sense that we are the climax of a long and gradual process leading to ever greater and greater intelligence. This is not quite right. Before primates, animal intelligence was basically limited to responding to the natural environment: finding food and fleeing from predators. No matter how long you let that process run, it was never going to result in culture and technology. With the evolution of primates a few tens of millions of years ago, though, came a group of animals with an interesting set of anatomical features to work with: social creatures with relatively large brains to facilitate rudimentary communication (common among mammals), a long development cycle and life-span, upright posture and strong arms good for adapting to any terrain, and opposable thumbs capable of grabbing objects. These features allowed for - after the requisite millions of years of evolution - a paradigm shift in the applicability of intelligence. No longer was brain power limited to responding to nature, it could be used to manipulate nature through the creation and use of tools. Gradually the apes' brains expanded to greater model not just the world as it is, but as it could be, and what was necessary to get there. This came through the evolution of the prefrontal cortex of the brain and was an unprecedented leap in the generalization of computing power.
The capacity to imagine and plan things greatly enabled primate species to find new resources, avoid environmental hazards, expand into new territory and adapt to it, carving out a comfortable niche spanning a large portion of the globe. But the apes' strength is also its weakness: it so happens that high-powered brains don't come fully formulated out of the womb; they require time to learn. This makes primate babies especially vulnerable and means such species require a tremendous amount of cooperation in order to survive. In fact, the smarter the species is, the more help in needs. Humans might be the smartest animal to ever walk the earth, but leave one alone and naked in the middle of the wild and its just somebody else's meal.
As the brains of what would become the great apes (including eventually humans) evolved, they outsmarted their way to the top of the food chain. But as collaboration and communication became more and more sophisticated, a pandora's box opened that provided the final push to humankind's unparalleled ascent to general intelligence. As anybody who's ever worked on a group project knows, cooperation is great and can get things done a lot better than individually, but even better still if you can shirk your duties and reap all the benefits of the group without adding anything yourself... unless of course everybody takes up that attitude.
This is the sort of paradox the human brain was built for. We're all collectively better off if we join forces in providing for the tribe, but we're each individually better off if we get everybody else to do it for us. How do we resolve this conflict? This goes beyond the scope of processing sensory input, beyond manipulating simple objects to obtain immediate reward, this requires the computation of multi-dimensional game theoretic formula involving matrix algebra and Bayesian statistics. And THAT is what the human brain does, that is what you are doing whenever you feel angry, remorseful, spiteful, jealous, depressed, anxious, mournful, indignant, or in love.
So by what computational logic did Billy-Bob's brain program punch-throwing as the response to the particular input provided by Chuck? In the next post in this series I will elaborate upon how our emotions and other cognitive states are the epiphenomenal result of our brains' computing the genetically efficient behavioral response to the sort of situations we regularly faced in the particular ecological niche homo sapiens evolved in.
Wednesday, February 3, 2010
Tuesday, February 2, 2010
Just Saw: Surrogates
Bruce Willis plays a cop with marriage problems who plays by his own rules and must singlehandedly blow the lid off on a secret terrorist plot by an evil corporation in the not-to-distant future!
This movie actually had a great premise (odd that we got two shittily plotted movies about transmitting peoples' brain signals into foreign bodies within a few months of each other) that might have translated into a great movie if they hadn't written their script using a game of ad libs. Let's count the action/sci-fi cliches!
All-powerful monopolistic corporation, check
Law enforcement routinely ignores legal procedures and nobody knows their rights, check
Rag-tag resistance movement challenges the system, despite technological/organizational inferiority, check
Any computer system can be hacked with a few simple keystrokes, check
Bad guy explains his evil plan to good guy cuz "There's nothing you can do to stop it now," check
This newfangled technology is robbing us of our humanity! check
The entire movie I was praying that they wouldn't fall for the obvious Hollywood Luddite move and pull the plug on the technology at the end, but alas, it's an easier ending to write. Even though having surrogates in real life would in fact be awesome.
Kurzweil and other Singularity fanboys have mostly talked about how we'll use new customizable bodies in virtual reality, and about the kind of upgrades we'll make to our current bodies, but I'd never really come across the idea of using that same sort of technology to make ourselves extra physical bodies. The possibilities are pretty interesting though. Most of the people in the movie basically just used a better-looking version of themselves, and just the one at that. But imagine being able to use a new body every day, choosing from an assortment of different shapes, ethnicity, and sex. If this kinda technology became available before radical youth-rejuvenation and body-modification technology arrives, expect young chicks to be the early adopters. How many 200 pound pimple-faced 20something women out there would kill to look like a supermodel to the rest of the world? The initial transition might require a pretty strong shift in social mores (like in the movie, the handicapped and deformed will probably be the first commercial users), but once the ball gets rolling, expect a runaway arms race. Once the 1s and 2s of the world upgrade to 10s, you got constant downward social movement. The 3s and 4s get new bodies so that they won't be at the bottom of the sexual heap. Pretty soon even girls we'd consider pretty hot by today's standards get their own versions to stay competitive. Guys jump on board somewhere along the way.
Once your actual body is safe at home and you can live vicariously through a robot, I imagine hedonism's gotta take off like it's going out of style. Would straight girls start fucking as indiscriminately as gay men when they no longer have to worry about getting pregnant, STDs, raped or beaten, or considered a slut? Ever wonder what it feels like for the opposite sex when they're doing it? Here's your chance to find out.
The potential for anonymity oughta make things pretty interesting as well. There might be some sort of legal restriction stating that surrogates have to have some sort of mark or ID showing them as such and who they belong to, but how could you enforce such a law? Might be doable in the early days when only a few capital-intensive companies offer surrogates, but as they become cheaper and more distributed you quickly enter a world in which anybody could be anybody. The potential for criminal misuse is incredible. You could use a new, throwaway surrogate to murder somebody then quickly sever the link and they'd never know who was behind it. Presumably there'll be some law enforcement body monitoring the broadcast frequencies that would watch out for pirate transmissions like that, but considering how good governments are right now at preventing illegal downloading of files (like how I illegally downloaded Surrogates), I'm not so convinced they'd be very effective.
On the whole though I don't think there'd be all that much danger. The nanotechnology necessary to make surrogates possible would also be able to make the human body practically invulnerable. And once people got used to the idea of walking the world in a surrogate, the idea of spending all day in virtual reality probably wouldn't be far behind. Pretty soon thereafter people would abandon their fragile human bodies altogether and upload their minds to computer, switching freely between inhabiting the virtual world in a simulated body or the real world with a cyborg body. Hollywood, and by extension the lowest common denominator of humanity, still finds this scenario inhuman and unacceptable, and so Bruce Willis saves the day by destroying the whole system it's based on, but methinks that once people are offered the possibility of everlasting beauty and health and an escape from the disease, death, and decay of our rotting human bodies people will be on it like flies on shit.
This movie actually had a great premise (odd that we got two shittily plotted movies about transmitting peoples' brain signals into foreign bodies within a few months of each other) that might have translated into a great movie if they hadn't written their script using a game of ad libs. Let's count the action/sci-fi cliches!
All-powerful monopolistic corporation, check
Law enforcement routinely ignores legal procedures and nobody knows their rights, check
Rag-tag resistance movement challenges the system, despite technological/organizational inferiority, check
Any computer system can be hacked with a few simple keystrokes, check
Bad guy explains his evil plan to good guy cuz "There's nothing you can do to stop it now," check
This newfangled technology is robbing us of our humanity! check
The entire movie I was praying that they wouldn't fall for the obvious Hollywood Luddite move and pull the plug on the technology at the end, but alas, it's an easier ending to write. Even though having surrogates in real life would in fact be awesome.
Kurzweil and other Singularity fanboys have mostly talked about how we'll use new customizable bodies in virtual reality, and about the kind of upgrades we'll make to our current bodies, but I'd never really come across the idea of using that same sort of technology to make ourselves extra physical bodies. The possibilities are pretty interesting though. Most of the people in the movie basically just used a better-looking version of themselves, and just the one at that. But imagine being able to use a new body every day, choosing from an assortment of different shapes, ethnicity, and sex. If this kinda technology became available before radical youth-rejuvenation and body-modification technology arrives, expect young chicks to be the early adopters. How many 200 pound pimple-faced 20something women out there would kill to look like a supermodel to the rest of the world? The initial transition might require a pretty strong shift in social mores (like in the movie, the handicapped and deformed will probably be the first commercial users), but once the ball gets rolling, expect a runaway arms race. Once the 1s and 2s of the world upgrade to 10s, you got constant downward social movement. The 3s and 4s get new bodies so that they won't be at the bottom of the sexual heap. Pretty soon even girls we'd consider pretty hot by today's standards get their own versions to stay competitive. Guys jump on board somewhere along the way.
Once your actual body is safe at home and you can live vicariously through a robot, I imagine hedonism's gotta take off like it's going out of style. Would straight girls start fucking as indiscriminately as gay men when they no longer have to worry about getting pregnant, STDs, raped or beaten, or considered a slut? Ever wonder what it feels like for the opposite sex when they're doing it? Here's your chance to find out.
The potential for anonymity oughta make things pretty interesting as well. There might be some sort of legal restriction stating that surrogates have to have some sort of mark or ID showing them as such and who they belong to, but how could you enforce such a law? Might be doable in the early days when only a few capital-intensive companies offer surrogates, but as they become cheaper and more distributed you quickly enter a world in which anybody could be anybody. The potential for criminal misuse is incredible. You could use a new, throwaway surrogate to murder somebody then quickly sever the link and they'd never know who was behind it. Presumably there'll be some law enforcement body monitoring the broadcast frequencies that would watch out for pirate transmissions like that, but considering how good governments are right now at preventing illegal downloading of files (like how I illegally downloaded Surrogates), I'm not so convinced they'd be very effective.
On the whole though I don't think there'd be all that much danger. The nanotechnology necessary to make surrogates possible would also be able to make the human body practically invulnerable. And once people got used to the idea of walking the world in a surrogate, the idea of spending all day in virtual reality probably wouldn't be far behind. Pretty soon thereafter people would abandon their fragile human bodies altogether and upload their minds to computer, switching freely between inhabiting the virtual world in a simulated body or the real world with a cyborg body. Hollywood, and by extension the lowest common denominator of humanity, still finds this scenario inhuman and unacceptable, and so Bruce Willis saves the day by destroying the whole system it's based on, but methinks that once people are offered the possibility of everlasting beauty and health and an escape from the disease, death, and decay of our rotting human bodies people will be on it like flies on shit.
Thursday, January 28, 2010
Just Saw: Adam
A moderately entertaining movie about a guy with Asperger's Syndrome. Some funny parts, but also some pretty bad performances (who decided Peter Gallagher can act?) and ultimately not very believable. Some thoughts:
First of all, when did Asperger Syndrome become so cool? This is the second romantic comedy I've seen involving a main character with the disorder (see also Mozart and the Whale), and I've seen it used as a plot device a couple times on TV as well (and I almost never watch TV). The internet of course is filled with emo-kids self-diagnosing as Aspergers-afflicted to excuse their pathetic social skills.
I guess this is the newest fad psychopathology, just like "hysteria" and "ADHD" before it, something that might be useful in describing some rare, extreme cases but is probably grossly overdiagnosed to conveniently benefit both the psychiatric-industrial complex and the patients who get to tell themselves and others that their shitty personality isn't their fault, it's a medical disorder. In fact, we know that personality traits and intelligence (and basically everything important about humans) lies along a spectrum with a bell-curve distribution, and I'm inclined to believe that people with Asperger's have nothing categorically special about them, but rather just lie at the tail-ends of the distribution for introversion, neuroticism, intelligence, etc.
When we look at it that way, treating the Aperger's personality type as a disorder is probably counterproductive and likely to trap people in their pigeonhole. Last year I read my lord and personal savior Warren Buffet's biography and though it's never mentioned in the book, Buffet reads like a textbook case of Asperger's. Probably luckily for Buffet though, Asperger's wasn't a diagnosis when he was young, so he just had to help himself using his own hyper-analytical approach. Describing his first encounter with the works of Dale Carnegie:
Finally, one thing that bothered me a lot about the movie is that it's basically the sickeningly extreme version of the "good boy wins over the pretty girl despite himself" cliche that so many movies fall for. Some of the romantic scenes were painful to watch they were so awkward, though they did make me feel a little better about some of my more embarrassing attempts at seduction. But the idea that a girl as pretty as Rose Byrne would put up it and sleep with such a social retard is a dangerous myth that Hollywood really needs to put to bed. I know most script writers themselves are probably awkward beta-males and this is just wish-fulfillment on their part, but they're really just doing a disservice to themselves and their kind. The real world doesn't work like movies like There's Something About Mary, or 40 Year Old Virgin, or every movie ever made with Michael Cera. The hot girl doesn't go for the cute and nice but awkward, unemployed loser, no matter how many flowers he gives her or poems he writes for her. She goes for the popular, high-status, aggressive investment banker/rock star/ professional athlete on a motorcycle. Movies never depict attractive men falling in love with fat, ugly chicks. Why? Cuz it never happens. Moral of the story for fat and ugly chicks then: if you want the man of your dreams, get in shape. And so it should be with guys. Guys: don't let the movies fool you, if you want the girl of your dreams, trying to get her to accept you as you are is a lost cause. Study your subject, man up, and supply the demand. Asperger's is no excuse.
First of all, when did Asperger Syndrome become so cool? This is the second romantic comedy I've seen involving a main character with the disorder (see also Mozart and the Whale), and I've seen it used as a plot device a couple times on TV as well (and I almost never watch TV). The internet of course is filled with emo-kids self-diagnosing as Aspergers-afflicted to excuse their pathetic social skills.
I guess this is the newest fad psychopathology, just like "hysteria" and "ADHD" before it, something that might be useful in describing some rare, extreme cases but is probably grossly overdiagnosed to conveniently benefit both the psychiatric-industrial complex and the patients who get to tell themselves and others that their shitty personality isn't their fault, it's a medical disorder. In fact, we know that personality traits and intelligence (and basically everything important about humans) lies along a spectrum with a bell-curve distribution, and I'm inclined to believe that people with Asperger's have nothing categorically special about them, but rather just lie at the tail-ends of the distribution for introversion, neuroticism, intelligence, etc.
When we look at it that way, treating the Aperger's personality type as a disorder is probably counterproductive and likely to trap people in their pigeonhole. Last year I read my lord and personal savior Warren Buffet's biography and though it's never mentioned in the book, Buffet reads like a textbook case of Asperger's. Probably luckily for Buffet though, Asperger's wasn't a diagnosis when he was young, so he just had to help himself using his own hyper-analytical approach. Describing his first encounter with the works of Dale Carnegie:
Warren's heart lifted. He thought he had found the truth. This was a system. He felt so disadvantaged socially that he needed a system to sell himsefl to people, a system he could learn once and use without having to respond in a new way to each changing situation.This is pretty similar to my own experience, actually. Though I'm not as awkwardly autistic as Buffet or Adam in the movie, I do share many of the same personality traits. I am not naturally tuned in to other peoples' thoughts very well, and am more comfortable discussing abstract analytical ideas than making small talk, and I've suffered socially at times as a result. The solution for me and I think for probably most of these "extreme male brain" types was to use my asocial problem-solving capabilities and learn psychology, especially the game-theoretic underpinnings of human interaction. Anybody with Asperger's smart enough to learn about theoretical physics or financial analysis is smart enough to learn about the human brain and figure out how to fit into social settings, if not intuitively like most people then intellectually in their own way.
But it took numbers to prove that it actually worked. He decided to do a statistical analysis of what happened if he did follow Dale Carnegie's rules, and what happened if he didn't. He tried giving attention and appreciation, and he tried doing nothing or being disagreeable. People around him did not know he was performing experiments on them in the silence of his own head, but he watched how they responded. He kept track of his results. Filled with a rising joy, he saw what the numbers proved: The rules worked.
Finally, one thing that bothered me a lot about the movie is that it's basically the sickeningly extreme version of the "good boy wins over the pretty girl despite himself" cliche that so many movies fall for. Some of the romantic scenes were painful to watch they were so awkward, though they did make me feel a little better about some of my more embarrassing attempts at seduction. But the idea that a girl as pretty as Rose Byrne would put up it and sleep with such a social retard is a dangerous myth that Hollywood really needs to put to bed. I know most script writers themselves are probably awkward beta-males and this is just wish-fulfillment on their part, but they're really just doing a disservice to themselves and their kind. The real world doesn't work like movies like There's Something About Mary, or 40 Year Old Virgin, or every movie ever made with Michael Cera. The hot girl doesn't go for the cute and nice but awkward, unemployed loser, no matter how many flowers he gives her or poems he writes for her. She goes for the popular, high-status, aggressive investment banker/rock star/ professional athlete on a motorcycle. Movies never depict attractive men falling in love with fat, ugly chicks. Why? Cuz it never happens. Moral of the story for fat and ugly chicks then: if you want the man of your dreams, get in shape. And so it should be with guys. Guys: don't let the movies fool you, if you want the girl of your dreams, trying to get her to accept you as you are is a lost cause. Study your subject, man up, and supply the demand. Asperger's is no excuse.
Wednesday, January 27, 2010
Just Read: The Ten Most Beautiful Experiments
If I were a high school science teacher, I might assign The Ten Most Beautiful Experiments as class reading. It's a nice little book you can breeze through in a sitting or two and learn more about some of the most important scientific findings than you ever did in high school. For the vast majority of us that aren't going to become scientists, this is just the kind of style of science teaching we ought to emphasize: easy to understand accounts of how some of history's most important experiments were conducted and what their significance is in our everyday life, showing along the way the essential characteristics of the scientific method.
Most basic science education spends way too much time hammering in facts: memorizing periodic tables, the difference between cellular meiosis and mitosis, the equations of Newtonian mechanics. This is probably because teachers are lazy and that kind of stuff is easy to teach and to test. But the takeaway is pathetic: about half of Americans don't even believe in the theory of evolution, and the vast majority of them routinely fall for basic cognitive errors like confirmation bias that a basic understanding of the scientific method would be able to prevent.
The actual data, jargon, and mathematical methods of science should be left to those who wish to pursue the study further, everybody else is just going to forget it anyway. Introductory science in k-12 education can and should be taught more like literature is, with emphasis on critical understanding of the meaning behind the most important scientific concepts and on practicing scientific analysis the same way we practice writing skills. George Johnson does just that in this book; cheers to him.
Most basic science education spends way too much time hammering in facts: memorizing periodic tables, the difference between cellular meiosis and mitosis, the equations of Newtonian mechanics. This is probably because teachers are lazy and that kind of stuff is easy to teach and to test. But the takeaway is pathetic: about half of Americans don't even believe in the theory of evolution, and the vast majority of them routinely fall for basic cognitive errors like confirmation bias that a basic understanding of the scientific method would be able to prevent.
The actual data, jargon, and mathematical methods of science should be left to those who wish to pursue the study further, everybody else is just going to forget it anyway. Introductory science in k-12 education can and should be taught more like literature is, with emphasis on critical understanding of the meaning behind the most important scientific concepts and on practicing scientific analysis the same way we practice writing skills. George Johnson does just that in this book; cheers to him.
Sunday, January 24, 2010
The Mystery of Mind and Matter
This post will expand on some of the ideas I explored in reviewing I am a Strange Loop, and will be the first in a series of posts aimed at systematically explaining my worldview. I believe this is a good subject to build from because ultimately all our ideas about government, society, good and evil, and the right way to live rest upon our conception of the mind. In other words, everything fucked up about this world is a consequence of our collective misunderstanding of what we really are.
Basically all human moral systems, and the civilizations they are built upon, assume a dualist universe that cleanly separates animate and inanimate things. Western or Eastern, Judeo-Christian or Confucian, left-wing or right-wing, pre-agricultural or post-industrial, all humans believe, and have been encouraged by their society to believe, that people are not like objects or animals (at least not the simpler ones). Inanimate things merely obey simple laws of cause and effect, laws that have been discovered and codified in mathematically precise language. There is no choice in the matter. A falling apple does not decide to leap from the tree, it is a passive vessel acted upon by gravity in accordance with its mass and other physical properties. Humans, on the other hand, are different. We have something called free will. We make choices, which in turn have consequences on the physical world and the other humans in it. From this idea comes the concept of morality: if we are free in our actions we must also be responsible in them, and people deserve to be punished or rewarded depending upon the merits of their decisions. Virtually all our cultural norms, our entire legal system, rests upon this notion.
Funny how it can all come crumbling down with the flick of a wrist.
If you take physics seriously (and you should, cuz the computer you're reading this on, and just about everything else in the room you're sitting in is the result of people taking physics seriously) the whole notion of "free will" and the supposed difference between "inanimate objects" and "living beings" should seem a little suspicious. If all matter obeys the same laws of physics and chemistry, and humans are made out of matter, then everything we do basically boils down to physics and chemistry, right? When smart people first started worrying about this a few hundred years ago, they believed the answer was Cartesian Dualism; sure, the body and brain are just ordinary matter like everything else, but the mind is a distinct, non-physical entity that can interact with the physical world through the brain, namely, in Descartes thinking, through the Pineal Gland.
People have updated and refined this idea over the years in light of an increased understanding of neuroscience, but the basic idea remains. Unlike a reflex such as when the doctor taps your knee, people think about what they are doing, decide to act, and then that decision is carried out through the electrochemical processes of the nervous system. Thus, people, being conscious, have agency, and hence moral culpability.
Sounds nice, too bad it's wrong.
In 1985 Benjamin Libet performed a series of experiments to test just where in the process of action conscious decision-making enters the picture. He hooked subjects up to machines to measure the timing of the electrical impulses controlling their movements, then asked them to look at a large, radial stopwatch. Then they were asked to do make some simple physical motion such as flicking their wrist or pressing a button, whenever they felt like, but to remember where the stopwatch reading was when they chose to act. Now, common sense, Cartesian Duality, and basically all traditional understandings of the human condition would predict that the person would become conscious of their choice to move their hand, then some brief moment later the EEG would pick up impulses emanating out of the brain and down the arm. In fact, it was the exact opposite. Between 300 to 500 milliseconds (up to half a second!) before the person has any conscious awareness of moving their hand, electricity is already flowing from the brain to the arm gearing up for the action. This experiment has been replicated dozens of times since and the results hold up for any action you measure or situation you put the subjects in.
I've actually told people about this experiment who just flat-out refused to believe it. Libet himself was horrified with the conclusions and basically denied its implications. Clearly, it is pretty disturbing, and upsets our entire understanding of free will. But upon reflection, it shouldn't really be that surprising. The brain is made up of neurons, which react in a basically predictable way to the surrounding chemicals and electrical charge. They in turn are made up of molecules which behave in an even simpler fashion, and they in turn are made of subatomic particles, the motion of which we can predict better than anything else in the universe. Just as a billiard ball will ricochet and roll around the table precisely in accordance with the laws of force, momentum, friction, etc., so to will the human body move about according to the same laws. The only difference is that the sheer number of interacting objects (trillions of cells each composed of millions of constituent parts) makes predicting the effect of any cause computationally infeasible (at least with current technology). The subject does not choose to flick his wrist any more than the apple chooses to fall from the tree. His awareness of the action is secondary to the action itself, a side-effect.
What does this all mean, and how can we reconcile it with the inescapable feeling that we do control our actions? Certainly the apple doesn't think it actually chose to fall, the apple doesn't think or feel anything at all. If we follow the same rules, why should we be so different?
The consensus building among neuroscientists is that consciousness is an epiphenomenon resulting from the brain's ability to compute models of reality, including models that contain itself. The confusion comes from thinking of consciousness as a thing with definite physical (or even non-physical, spiritual) properties. But this way of thinking is an illusion. When we see a rainbow, it looks as though it actually exists out there along with the clouds and the trees, and if we could reach it we could study just like any other physical object or phenomenon. In fact, the rainbow only exists in our eyes as a side-effect of the bending of light. We can study the different wavelengths of light that compose the rainbow, but we will never catch the rainbow itself. And the rainbow obviously will never effect the light the same as a physical object effects the photons that bounce off it, the rainbow is the effect of the light. Similarly, just as minds (our own and others') seem real, they don't in fact exist anywhere per se; the mind is a side-effect of the bustling of the brain. The mind cannot effect the brain or body like physical phenomena can, thinking it can is getting the causal chain precisely backward.
Does this insight overthrow our entire moral framework? Yes.
Does it mean we cannot hold people responsible for their actions? No. But it does mean we need to reorient our mechanisms of moral enforcement in a way that realistically accounts for the human condition. But now I'm getting ahead of myself. I've only half answered the question of just what the human condition is (the easy half at that). The short (half) answer is this: forget souls, karma, angels and demons, Platonic ideals, astral planes, pineal glands, and all other dualist bullshit. The mind is what the brain does.
Now, to finish getting to the bottom of the human condition we must take the next step and ask, what does the brain do? That's next.
Basically all human moral systems, and the civilizations they are built upon, assume a dualist universe that cleanly separates animate and inanimate things. Western or Eastern, Judeo-Christian or Confucian, left-wing or right-wing, pre-agricultural or post-industrial, all humans believe, and have been encouraged by their society to believe, that people are not like objects or animals (at least not the simpler ones). Inanimate things merely obey simple laws of cause and effect, laws that have been discovered and codified in mathematically precise language. There is no choice in the matter. A falling apple does not decide to leap from the tree, it is a passive vessel acted upon by gravity in accordance with its mass and other physical properties. Humans, on the other hand, are different. We have something called free will. We make choices, which in turn have consequences on the physical world and the other humans in it. From this idea comes the concept of morality: if we are free in our actions we must also be responsible in them, and people deserve to be punished or rewarded depending upon the merits of their decisions. Virtually all our cultural norms, our entire legal system, rests upon this notion.
Funny how it can all come crumbling down with the flick of a wrist.
If you take physics seriously (and you should, cuz the computer you're reading this on, and just about everything else in the room you're sitting in is the result of people taking physics seriously) the whole notion of "free will" and the supposed difference between "inanimate objects" and "living beings" should seem a little suspicious. If all matter obeys the same laws of physics and chemistry, and humans are made out of matter, then everything we do basically boils down to physics and chemistry, right? When smart people first started worrying about this a few hundred years ago, they believed the answer was Cartesian Dualism; sure, the body and brain are just ordinary matter like everything else, but the mind is a distinct, non-physical entity that can interact with the physical world through the brain, namely, in Descartes thinking, through the Pineal Gland.
People have updated and refined this idea over the years in light of an increased understanding of neuroscience, but the basic idea remains. Unlike a reflex such as when the doctor taps your knee, people think about what they are doing, decide to act, and then that decision is carried out through the electrochemical processes of the nervous system. Thus, people, being conscious, have agency, and hence moral culpability.
Sounds nice, too bad it's wrong.
In 1985 Benjamin Libet performed a series of experiments to test just where in the process of action conscious decision-making enters the picture. He hooked subjects up to machines to measure the timing of the electrical impulses controlling their movements, then asked them to look at a large, radial stopwatch. Then they were asked to do make some simple physical motion such as flicking their wrist or pressing a button, whenever they felt like, but to remember where the stopwatch reading was when they chose to act. Now, common sense, Cartesian Duality, and basically all traditional understandings of the human condition would predict that the person would become conscious of their choice to move their hand, then some brief moment later the EEG would pick up impulses emanating out of the brain and down the arm. In fact, it was the exact opposite. Between 300 to 500 milliseconds (up to half a second!) before the person has any conscious awareness of moving their hand, electricity is already flowing from the brain to the arm gearing up for the action. This experiment has been replicated dozens of times since and the results hold up for any action you measure or situation you put the subjects in.
I've actually told people about this experiment who just flat-out refused to believe it. Libet himself was horrified with the conclusions and basically denied its implications. Clearly, it is pretty disturbing, and upsets our entire understanding of free will. But upon reflection, it shouldn't really be that surprising. The brain is made up of neurons, which react in a basically predictable way to the surrounding chemicals and electrical charge. They in turn are made up of molecules which behave in an even simpler fashion, and they in turn are made of subatomic particles, the motion of which we can predict better than anything else in the universe. Just as a billiard ball will ricochet and roll around the table precisely in accordance with the laws of force, momentum, friction, etc., so to will the human body move about according to the same laws. The only difference is that the sheer number of interacting objects (trillions of cells each composed of millions of constituent parts) makes predicting the effect of any cause computationally infeasible (at least with current technology). The subject does not choose to flick his wrist any more than the apple chooses to fall from the tree. His awareness of the action is secondary to the action itself, a side-effect.
What does this all mean, and how can we reconcile it with the inescapable feeling that we do control our actions? Certainly the apple doesn't think it actually chose to fall, the apple doesn't think or feel anything at all. If we follow the same rules, why should we be so different?
The consensus building among neuroscientists is that consciousness is an epiphenomenon resulting from the brain's ability to compute models of reality, including models that contain itself. The confusion comes from thinking of consciousness as a thing with definite physical (or even non-physical, spiritual) properties. But this way of thinking is an illusion. When we see a rainbow, it looks as though it actually exists out there along with the clouds and the trees, and if we could reach it we could study just like any other physical object or phenomenon. In fact, the rainbow only exists in our eyes as a side-effect of the bending of light. We can study the different wavelengths of light that compose the rainbow, but we will never catch the rainbow itself. And the rainbow obviously will never effect the light the same as a physical object effects the photons that bounce off it, the rainbow is the effect of the light. Similarly, just as minds (our own and others') seem real, they don't in fact exist anywhere per se; the mind is a side-effect of the bustling of the brain. The mind cannot effect the brain or body like physical phenomena can, thinking it can is getting the causal chain precisely backward.
Does this insight overthrow our entire moral framework? Yes.
Does it mean we cannot hold people responsible for their actions? No. But it does mean we need to reorient our mechanisms of moral enforcement in a way that realistically accounts for the human condition. But now I'm getting ahead of myself. I've only half answered the question of just what the human condition is (the easy half at that). The short (half) answer is this: forget souls, karma, angels and demons, Platonic ideals, astral planes, pineal glands, and all other dualist bullshit. The mind is what the brain does.
Now, to finish getting to the bottom of the human condition we must take the next step and ask, what does the brain do? That's next.
Monday, January 18, 2010
How to Help Haitians
Americans across the country are opening their hearts for the victims of the earthquake in Haiti in the way they know best: opening their wallets. About $10 million dollars has already poured in, and while I'm sure it'll provide some much-needed temporary relief (though even that's gonna be hard in a country that's basically become an anarchy overnight and whose transportation infrastructure has been decimated), I tend to think it's just going to be putting a band-aid on a gaping wound.
Tyler Cowen's had some interesting posts on the longer term picture for Haiti, and it ain't pretty. There is, of course, one easy way we could help Haitians a great deal: repeal all tariffs and trade barriers to Haitian goods, and allow Haitians to immigrate freely to the US. This, obviously, will never happen.
At work the other day we had a meeting and they revealed a company plan to match all donations to Global Impact for the benefit of Haitians. Afterword, I encouraged everybody to contact the White House and tell them to grant Temporary Protected Status to Haitian immigrants. A coworker turned to me and said, "What, so they can come here and take our jobs?" The funny thing is that the woman who said it is herself an immigrant. I guess as soon as they're in the door they want it shut.
People like the idea of making minor sacrifices to help faraway, poor people, but truly helping them by giving them the same rights, privileges, and opportunities we Americans enjoy could lead to all sorts of unpleasant consequences like having to earn one's position instead of being entitled to it cuz the other applicants weren't born in the right part of the world, or having to see and even talk with poorer ethnic people, they might even demand to be treated with respect! Those selfish greedy Haitians.
In most people, xenophobia and racism are still stronger motives than compassion and humanitarianism.
Tyler Cowen's had some interesting posts on the longer term picture for Haiti, and it ain't pretty. There is, of course, one easy way we could help Haitians a great deal: repeal all tariffs and trade barriers to Haitian goods, and allow Haitians to immigrate freely to the US. This, obviously, will never happen.
At work the other day we had a meeting and they revealed a company plan to match all donations to Global Impact for the benefit of Haitians. Afterword, I encouraged everybody to contact the White House and tell them to grant Temporary Protected Status to Haitian immigrants. A coworker turned to me and said, "What, so they can come here and take our jobs?" The funny thing is that the woman who said it is herself an immigrant. I guess as soon as they're in the door they want it shut.
People like the idea of making minor sacrifices to help faraway, poor people, but truly helping them by giving them the same rights, privileges, and opportunities we Americans enjoy could lead to all sorts of unpleasant consequences like having to earn one's position instead of being entitled to it cuz the other applicants weren't born in the right part of the world, or having to see and even talk with poorer ethnic people, they might even demand to be treated with respect! Those selfish greedy Haitians.
In most people, xenophobia and racism are still stronger motives than compassion and humanitarianism.
Thursday, January 14, 2010
Buddhism: the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly
Last night I went to a Buddhist meditation meeting, it was the second time I'd been to something like that and it might not be the last. While I've certainly found it more enjoyable than going to church, I'm not sure if Buddhism is right for me or not. With the disclosure that my knowledge of Buddhist history or practice is still pretty limited, here's my impression so far:
Buddhism is sometimes considered more of a philosophy than a religion, because, at least in some versions, worship of deities is not essential to the practice. The Western imported interpretations of Buddhism that I've witnessed certainly emphasize the more secular aspects. But like all the other religions, Buddhism is still a fundamentally dualist worldview. The guy leading the session (not a monk) even spent a fair amount of time talking about the different kinds of mind and how they are distinct and separate from the body, and how the "root mind" that is most central to our being survives the death of our body and will continue into a new life based on its karma. It's a pleasant thought, but ultimately it's just factually incorrect.
But that's theory, and arguably practice is more important in religion, and it's here I have to give Buddhism much higher marks than any other religion. The main thing that Buddhism basically gets right is that happiness and suffering are illusory, fleeting sensations, the default human drive to acquire ever more wealth, status, and power does not result in a fulfilling life, but rather inner peace will only come through training the mind to accept whatever the world may bring. This is an insight that psychologists have just recently been figuring out, and it really is amazing that two thousand years before the scientific method, the Buddha was able to discover such a profound truth about human nature and cultivate such a large following around it. Most religions basically appeal to your standard carrot and stick morality and serve to reinforce the biological imperative to amass wealth and power, crush one's enemies, breed to the limits of the available resources, and spread the Word by any means necessary. Buddhism is literally the rejection of this cycle, and so flies in the face of human nature.
Of course, one of the main elements of the cure to the human condition in Buddhism is spending some time simply not thinking: meditation. And that's what we were there to do. Meditation is supposed to train the mind to remain more calm and peaceful throughout the day, and there's pretty good evidence this actually works. Another way in which the Buddha was millennia ahead of his time, this is basically getting at the modern psychological idea of flow. Basically, we modern humans have way too much to think about and spend too much time thinking in general and get anxious and worrisome as a result; we'd be happier if we just found some activity or hobby or profession that we find enjoyable and takes our mind off things and spent more time getting practicing that. Meditation essentially cuts straight to the heart of this insight by practicing the intentional extinction of thought.
So how'd it work for me? Maybe it's just because I haven't practiced enough yet, but I'm really bad at not thinking. During the rounds of meditation I found myself thinking and planning against my will. Though I tried to concentrate on just being there, at that moment, my prefrontal cortex just went marching off into its typical daydreamland, planning, considering, wondering, and calculating, all against my will.
I wonder if meditation is better served in some people through more active pursuits. Though sitting in a chair trying not to think hasn't done much for me yet, I have felt the same sort of positive, peaceful extinguishing of self through other activities, such as:
Surfing/Snowboarding/Skateboarding
Playing tennis/chess against a comparable opponent
Rock Climbing
Yoga
Dancing/attending a concert
Having sex
Taking psychedelic drugs
Playing video games
Predictable of course though that I as a young male, naturally striving - consciously or not - for status, list several activities that allow me to signal my skill and physical prowess to potential mates and rivals or just involve flicking the pleasure switches in the brain. Have I achieved any enlightenment at all?
In any event, I would probably be happier if I did more of the things in the above list and less working, studying, and planning for the future. Same for most people and whatever is on their list. But, like most people, I in fact spend large parts of my days doing things that don't facilitate a peaceful state of mind or happiness but do tend to maximize my material world success. In fact, I'm more ambitious and wealth-motivated than most people. Why do I keep it up when I know how I could be more at one with the universe? Because, I tell myself, the quicker I become financially liberated, the more I can enjoy spiritual liberation later on in the things I find joyful. But it does slightly concern me that this strategy conveniently maximizes my status along the way, it seems enough like rainbow chasing to be a bit disconcerting for me.
Buddhism is sometimes considered more of a philosophy than a religion, because, at least in some versions, worship of deities is not essential to the practice. The Western imported interpretations of Buddhism that I've witnessed certainly emphasize the more secular aspects. But like all the other religions, Buddhism is still a fundamentally dualist worldview. The guy leading the session (not a monk) even spent a fair amount of time talking about the different kinds of mind and how they are distinct and separate from the body, and how the "root mind" that is most central to our being survives the death of our body and will continue into a new life based on its karma. It's a pleasant thought, but ultimately it's just factually incorrect.
But that's theory, and arguably practice is more important in religion, and it's here I have to give Buddhism much higher marks than any other religion. The main thing that Buddhism basically gets right is that happiness and suffering are illusory, fleeting sensations, the default human drive to acquire ever more wealth, status, and power does not result in a fulfilling life, but rather inner peace will only come through training the mind to accept whatever the world may bring. This is an insight that psychologists have just recently been figuring out, and it really is amazing that two thousand years before the scientific method, the Buddha was able to discover such a profound truth about human nature and cultivate such a large following around it. Most religions basically appeal to your standard carrot and stick morality and serve to reinforce the biological imperative to amass wealth and power, crush one's enemies, breed to the limits of the available resources, and spread the Word by any means necessary. Buddhism is literally the rejection of this cycle, and so flies in the face of human nature.
Of course, one of the main elements of the cure to the human condition in Buddhism is spending some time simply not thinking: meditation. And that's what we were there to do. Meditation is supposed to train the mind to remain more calm and peaceful throughout the day, and there's pretty good evidence this actually works. Another way in which the Buddha was millennia ahead of his time, this is basically getting at the modern psychological idea of flow. Basically, we modern humans have way too much to think about and spend too much time thinking in general and get anxious and worrisome as a result; we'd be happier if we just found some activity or hobby or profession that we find enjoyable and takes our mind off things and spent more time getting practicing that. Meditation essentially cuts straight to the heart of this insight by practicing the intentional extinction of thought.
So how'd it work for me? Maybe it's just because I haven't practiced enough yet, but I'm really bad at not thinking. During the rounds of meditation I found myself thinking and planning against my will. Though I tried to concentrate on just being there, at that moment, my prefrontal cortex just went marching off into its typical daydreamland, planning, considering, wondering, and calculating, all against my will.
I wonder if meditation is better served in some people through more active pursuits. Though sitting in a chair trying not to think hasn't done much for me yet, I have felt the same sort of positive, peaceful extinguishing of self through other activities, such as:
Surfing/Snowboarding/Skateboarding
Playing tennis/chess against a comparable opponent
Rock Climbing
Yoga
Dancing/attending a concert
Having sex
Taking psychedelic drugs
Playing video games
Predictable of course though that I as a young male, naturally striving - consciously or not - for status, list several activities that allow me to signal my skill and physical prowess to potential mates and rivals or just involve flicking the pleasure switches in the brain. Have I achieved any enlightenment at all?
In any event, I would probably be happier if I did more of the things in the above list and less working, studying, and planning for the future. Same for most people and whatever is on their list. But, like most people, I in fact spend large parts of my days doing things that don't facilitate a peaceful state of mind or happiness but do tend to maximize my material world success. In fact, I'm more ambitious and wealth-motivated than most people. Why do I keep it up when I know how I could be more at one with the universe? Because, I tell myself, the quicker I become financially liberated, the more I can enjoy spiritual liberation later on in the things I find joyful. But it does slightly concern me that this strategy conveniently maximizes my status along the way, it seems enough like rainbow chasing to be a bit disconcerting for me.
Tuesday, January 12, 2010
Cognitive Dissonance and Financial Crisis
I'll never forget how in the first economics course I took, the professor remarked early on, "The problem with the world is that it's ran by lawyers instead of economists." Though most economists probably wouldn't put it so bluntly, this is a common undercurrent of the field. We economists have been trying to get governments to stop doing stupid shit for almost 250 years now, and the results have been less than inspiring.
Except, it would seem, for that holy grail of economic governance: monetary policy. When the Federal Reserve totally lost its shit and kicked the economy when it was down, took its wallet, and pulled its pants down back in the 30s, it was because several of the people on the board of governors had absolutely no economics training whatsoever and didn't know what they were doing. The Fed was primarily a political grab-bag, just like the rest of the government, and economists didn't have much more influence over it than any other political institution.
But over the years economists rallied around the high cause of an independent central bank managed by - go figure - economists who would actually know how to prevent depressions and severe inflation from happening. And starting in the late 70s with the appointment of Paul Volcker all our hard work finally started paying off. When Ben Bernanke took over as Chairman in 2006 it looked like the apotheosis of economics. Here was an Ivy-league academic and world premier of macroeconomics, a man who had publicly stated that the Fed had caused the Great Depression, who had written extensively on how, with proper guidance, it could be used to prevent another one, now running the most important economic institution in the world. Take that, law professors!
As central banks became more and more temples for economists, economists, including Bernanke, began hailing a new age, the "Great Moderation." With us experts at the helm, it was gonna be smooth sailing from here on; no more pesky government types getting in the way of Maximum Sustainable Economic Growth.
Well, for reasons I cannot quite fathom, at the first sign of trouble, the macro textbook went out the window, and Bernanke let those drunken government sailors back in the captain's room, with trillion-dollar corporate bailouts, trillion-dollar pork-barrel "stimulus," deflation and double-digit unemployment as a result. Now, the proper response by the economics profession to all of this should have been mutiny. Instead, mainstream macro went into hiding and Keynesianism and ad-hoc interventionism rose from the grave. I happened to be taking a course on central banking and monetary policy during Fall 2008, at the height of the crisis. We started by having to model the effects of changes in the federal funds rate or the discount window on the price level, but as events developed we had to start building models of the the Term Auction Facility, the Primary Dealer Credit Facility, the Money-Market Investor Funding Facility, the Commercial Paper Lending Facility, the Term Asset-Backed Securities Loan Facility, and the Asset Backed Commercial Paper Money Market Mutual Fund Liquidity Facility. We wrote essays on subprime mortgages, shadow banking, collateralized debt obligations, credit default swaps, and asset-backed securities. Price stability was rarely talked about. Never was it considered that perhaps all of this was bullshit.
So why did economists so quickly start cheerleading for policies and theories they would have condemned a few short years ago? I think a large part of the answer has something to do with cognitive dissonance. The thinking goes something like this:
The Fed is run by economists
Economists would do everything necessary to prevent another Great Depression
Therefore everything the Fed is doing is necessary
Throughout the Great Moderation, this was a reasonable syllogism to hold, and I think it got to the point where it became part of economists' identity. So when it got to the point that "everything the Fed is doing" had nothing to do with mainstream macroeconomic theory, indeed was the exact opposite of what mainstream macroeconomists such as Bernanke advised Japan to do under similar circumstances, the contradiction forced economists to either discard their syllogistic faith in the Fed or the power of their macro models. Unfortunately, most went for the latter, they said "This time is different" everything has been obfuscated by the complexity of the financial system, and the Fed had to use "unconventional methods" to save it from systemic collapse.
A more realistic interpretation, I think, is that power still corrupts, even economists, even world-renowned ones like Ben Bernanke. His actions these past couple years have been drawn not so much from Principles of Macroeconomics, but from Machiavelli's The Prince. Economists still consider him one of their own and so it's all glossed over. I imagine that, just as Milton Friedman shined a light on the Great Depression and showed us the true cause, economists will someday look back and realize, once again, that this time it was the Fed's fault too. But I wonder if it'll make any difference.
Except, it would seem, for that holy grail of economic governance: monetary policy. When the Federal Reserve totally lost its shit and kicked the economy when it was down, took its wallet, and pulled its pants down back in the 30s, it was because several of the people on the board of governors had absolutely no economics training whatsoever and didn't know what they were doing. The Fed was primarily a political grab-bag, just like the rest of the government, and economists didn't have much more influence over it than any other political institution.
But over the years economists rallied around the high cause of an independent central bank managed by - go figure - economists who would actually know how to prevent depressions and severe inflation from happening. And starting in the late 70s with the appointment of Paul Volcker all our hard work finally started paying off. When Ben Bernanke took over as Chairman in 2006 it looked like the apotheosis of economics. Here was an Ivy-league academic and world premier of macroeconomics, a man who had publicly stated that the Fed had caused the Great Depression, who had written extensively on how, with proper guidance, it could be used to prevent another one, now running the most important economic institution in the world. Take that, law professors!
As central banks became more and more temples for economists, economists, including Bernanke, began hailing a new age, the "Great Moderation." With us experts at the helm, it was gonna be smooth sailing from here on; no more pesky government types getting in the way of Maximum Sustainable Economic Growth.
Well, for reasons I cannot quite fathom, at the first sign of trouble, the macro textbook went out the window, and Bernanke let those drunken government sailors back in the captain's room, with trillion-dollar corporate bailouts, trillion-dollar pork-barrel "stimulus," deflation and double-digit unemployment as a result. Now, the proper response by the economics profession to all of this should have been mutiny. Instead, mainstream macro went into hiding and Keynesianism and ad-hoc interventionism rose from the grave. I happened to be taking a course on central banking and monetary policy during Fall 2008, at the height of the crisis. We started by having to model the effects of changes in the federal funds rate or the discount window on the price level, but as events developed we had to start building models of the the Term Auction Facility, the Primary Dealer Credit Facility, the Money-Market Investor Funding Facility, the Commercial Paper Lending Facility, the Term Asset-Backed Securities Loan Facility, and the Asset Backed Commercial Paper Money Market Mutual Fund Liquidity Facility. We wrote essays on subprime mortgages, shadow banking, collateralized debt obligations, credit default swaps, and asset-backed securities. Price stability was rarely talked about. Never was it considered that perhaps all of this was bullshit.
So why did economists so quickly start cheerleading for policies and theories they would have condemned a few short years ago? I think a large part of the answer has something to do with cognitive dissonance. The thinking goes something like this:
The Fed is run by economists
Economists would do everything necessary to prevent another Great Depression
Therefore everything the Fed is doing is necessary
Throughout the Great Moderation, this was a reasonable syllogism to hold, and I think it got to the point where it became part of economists' identity. So when it got to the point that "everything the Fed is doing" had nothing to do with mainstream macroeconomic theory, indeed was the exact opposite of what mainstream macroeconomists such as Bernanke advised Japan to do under similar circumstances, the contradiction forced economists to either discard their syllogistic faith in the Fed or the power of their macro models. Unfortunately, most went for the latter, they said "This time is different" everything has been obfuscated by the complexity of the financial system, and the Fed had to use "unconventional methods" to save it from systemic collapse.
A more realistic interpretation, I think, is that power still corrupts, even economists, even world-renowned ones like Ben Bernanke. His actions these past couple years have been drawn not so much from Principles of Macroeconomics, but from Machiavelli's The Prince. Economists still consider him one of their own and so it's all glossed over. I imagine that, just as Milton Friedman shined a light on the Great Depression and showed us the true cause, economists will someday look back and realize, once again, that this time it was the Fed's fault too. But I wonder if it'll make any difference.
Sunday, January 10, 2010
Just Read: I Am a Strange Loop
I Am a Strange Loop: Douglas Hofstadter
I read Hofstadter's Pulitzer-prize winning blockbuster Godel, Escher, Bach back when I was in high school, and though some of the number theory and complicated computer science ideas in the book were beyond me at the time, I thought I basically understood the theme of the book as exploration of how inanimate matter can give rise to conscious self.
Apparently I was ahead of most people; in his prologue, Hofstadter laments that "despite the book's popularity, it always troubled me that the fundamental message of GEB seemed to go largely unnoticed." I Am a Strange Loop, then, is Hofstadter's attempt, some thirty years later, to more clearly restate the ideas of GEB, attempting to answer the question, "What do we mean when we say 'I'?"
The basic idea here is that consciousness, the subjective experience of feeling you and I feel but computers and mosquitoes don't, is basically a system of perceptive inputs with the potential for infinite feedback. He makes the analogy (portrayed on the cover of the book) of a video camera pointed at its own output display, resulting in an infinite cascade of diminishing images of itself. A sufficiently complex computing system will be capable not just of responding to input given to it, but of taking its own response and taking that as input and responding to that, and so on. And so our brains are not just mechanisms that direct us to reflexively toward positive stimuli and away from negative stimuli, but run programs that model ourselves as part of the natural environment, model how our output (behavior) will affect future stimuli, model how similar goal-seeking programs will model themselves and respond, model how our modeling of others' modeling will affect behavior, and so on (I know, and you know I know, and I know you know I know...).
The inevitable result of a system as incredibly complex as the human brain, with its hundreds of billions of processes, sub-processes, and meta-processes all looping around on themselves is that out of a purely physical system of particles and proteins, synaptic fires and axon uptakes, rises this strange, non-physical seeming epiphenomenon called consciousness.
This materialist interpretation of the self has two consequences that run roughly against the grain of Western concepts of being. One is that consciousness is not an on/off switch, but runs along a spectrum in accordance with the complexity of an organism's perceptive and feedback systems. Insects have basically no consciousness at all, chickens have a bit more, dogs have more than them, humans have the most. But even among humans all are not created equal; infants have virtually no self, children have more, adults have the most, and though he doesn't put it so bluntly, Hofstadter implies that more cognitively capable (smarter) people in a very real sense have "larger souls" than others. Materialism leads us to the existentialist theme of "existence before essence." "You" are not an immortal soul that came into this world attached arbitrarily to some human body. Rather, when you were born "you" still didn't really exist yet, but only grew over time as the intricate result of the input fed into your brain and the way it processed it. And some grew more than others.
Secondly, and maybe even more disturbingly, "you" don't even really exist, at least not the way you think you do. You're more like a rainbow, something visible and appearing to have substance, but really just an illusion that fades away into nothingness the closer you get to it. Humans naturally think of themselves as singular, indivisible ("individual" = "undividable") entities that exists here, somewhere right behind our eyes, at the seat of consciousness, taking in everything in our environment, thinking it over, and responding of our own volition. In reality, there is no seat of consciousness, no CPU of the soul where all inputs leads to and all output emanates from. The various programs you run to live all run independently throughout different parts of your body and brain, and the feeling of being you is not what controls it all, but is a side effect of all these patterns and processes. In principle, all the systems comprising your nervous system could be copied and rewritten, either to another biological brain, a computer drive, or something else entirely, and the resulting program would think, act, and feel just like you. It would claim to be you, and we would have no objective reason to doubt it.
Ideas like this are some of the most fascinating and terrifying there are to think about, guaranteed to start giving you feelings of vertigo. One complaint I have about this otherwise good book on the fundamental issues at the heart of cognitive science is that it doesn't spend enough time discussing the truly dizzying empirical work that's gone into this line of thought. Since this post is already running long, I'll go into some of that again later.
Friday, January 8, 2010
Smoot-Hawley: Destroyer of Worlds
In the latest EconTalk podcast, Thomas Rustici makes an extremely compelling case for the infamous Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act of 1930 having been the main cause that triggered the Great Depression.
For me, this pretty much puts the capstone on our understanding of the Great Depression and all its causes. The consensus view of economists, going back to Milton Friedman and Anna Schwartz's Monetary History of the United States, is that the Black Tuesday stock market crash on October 1929 precipitated a series of bank runs and failures that started contracting the national money supply. As the monetary authority of the US, the Fed could and should have counteracted this calamity by buying assets, pumping enough money into the system to maintain stable inflation expectations. Instead, the Fed made the problem even worse by selling assets, pulling even more money out of circulation, leading to a deflationary spiral that saw the money supply contract by about 30% and forcing 40% of American banks to shut their doors. The sudden and massive deflation meant that wages at their current level were far too high, but various regulations and the general "stickiness" of wages meant not a readjustment of wages to the price level, but rapidly rising unemployment, peaking at 25%. What should have only been a run-of-the-mill recession was made a global economic catastrophe by the incompetence of the Federal Reserve at the time.
This is all fine and good, but something I've always wondered about was "why did the stock market crash in the first place?" In high school American history it's made to sound like divine punishment from the heavens that comes completely unexpectedly to all.
Most economists today would say that the Smoot-Hawley tariff, which sparked a series of trade battles leading to a dramatic contraction of world trade, was a bad policy, but with trade accounting for only 7% of US GDP at the time, couldn't have had too significant of an effect on the Great Depression, accounting for only 2 percentage points of the incredible 33% decline of the economy between 1929-33. And, given that the act was passed in 1930, couldn't have been what started the downfall.
Enter Rustici, who makes the point that the law was being debated in Congress going back to mid-1929, and that the stock market tracked its progress pretty closely. In fact, the crash in October came immediately after 16 pro-free-trade senators log-rolled and jumped on board Smoot-Hawley, pretty much assuring its passage into law. Before it was even signed into law, our major trading partners started enacting retaliatory tariffs. In 1930 US agricultural exports collapsed as a result of the new trade barriers, commodity prices plummeted, and the first bank failures started happening in rural communities with strong ties to exports. The same happened around the world; the first banks to go were the ones that did business with exporters. The Depression started on the farm, and the waves of bank failures went like dominoes, spreading to the city until some of the country's largest banks were toppled, the rest is monetary history.
The stock market crash didn't cause the Great Depression, it was a warning of the havoc protectionism would wreck on the world economy. A warning that unfortunately went unheeded. Smoot-Hawley begot the worst economic meltdown in history, which begot the most devastating war in history. Hopefully someday schools will teach that fear of foreign competition caused the biggest disaster of all time and anybody who says they want to "protect our jobs" really supports the Holocaust.
For me, this pretty much puts the capstone on our understanding of the Great Depression and all its causes. The consensus view of economists, going back to Milton Friedman and Anna Schwartz's Monetary History of the United States, is that the Black Tuesday stock market crash on October 1929 precipitated a series of bank runs and failures that started contracting the national money supply. As the monetary authority of the US, the Fed could and should have counteracted this calamity by buying assets, pumping enough money into the system to maintain stable inflation expectations. Instead, the Fed made the problem even worse by selling assets, pulling even more money out of circulation, leading to a deflationary spiral that saw the money supply contract by about 30% and forcing 40% of American banks to shut their doors. The sudden and massive deflation meant that wages at their current level were far too high, but various regulations and the general "stickiness" of wages meant not a readjustment of wages to the price level, but rapidly rising unemployment, peaking at 25%. What should have only been a run-of-the-mill recession was made a global economic catastrophe by the incompetence of the Federal Reserve at the time.
This is all fine and good, but something I've always wondered about was "why did the stock market crash in the first place?" In high school American history it's made to sound like divine punishment from the heavens that comes completely unexpectedly to all.
Most economists today would say that the Smoot-Hawley tariff, which sparked a series of trade battles leading to a dramatic contraction of world trade, was a bad policy, but with trade accounting for only 7% of US GDP at the time, couldn't have had too significant of an effect on the Great Depression, accounting for only 2 percentage points of the incredible 33% decline of the economy between 1929-33. And, given that the act was passed in 1930, couldn't have been what started the downfall.
Enter Rustici, who makes the point that the law was being debated in Congress going back to mid-1929, and that the stock market tracked its progress pretty closely. In fact, the crash in October came immediately after 16 pro-free-trade senators log-rolled and jumped on board Smoot-Hawley, pretty much assuring its passage into law. Before it was even signed into law, our major trading partners started enacting retaliatory tariffs. In 1930 US agricultural exports collapsed as a result of the new trade barriers, commodity prices plummeted, and the first bank failures started happening in rural communities with strong ties to exports. The same happened around the world; the first banks to go were the ones that did business with exporters. The Depression started on the farm, and the waves of bank failures went like dominoes, spreading to the city until some of the country's largest banks were toppled, the rest is monetary history.
The stock market crash didn't cause the Great Depression, it was a warning of the havoc protectionism would wreck on the world economy. A warning that unfortunately went unheeded. Smoot-Hawley begot the worst economic meltdown in history, which begot the most devastating war in history. Hopefully someday schools will teach that fear of foreign competition caused the biggest disaster of all time and anybody who says they want to "protect our jobs" really supports the Holocaust.
Thursday, January 7, 2010
Do Multivitamins Work?
Slate basically says no, they don't. The evidence has been building in recent years that not only are they generally useless in promoting health or longevity, but probably even increase mortality for certain groups such as cancer patients.
As part of my plan to live forever, I've been taking a regular multivitamin every day for a few years now, along with fish oil supplements, psychedelic drugs, and baby aspirin. But after reading this I'm considering discontinuing the vitamins. I never had any strong belief that they were doing much good anyway, but I've figured that for the less than $50 a year it takes to take supplements, if there's even a small chance of a slight boost in longevity it's probably worth it. But the health risks, however small, probably negates this logic.
I probably get adequate amounts of micro-nutrients from my high fruit/nut/veggie diet already anyway, but I have actually been more interested in some of the more esoteric supplements that you can't really get from diet, such as resveratrol and coenzyme Q10. There are good theoretical reasons to think these and a few other antioxidants have strong anti-aging effects but as far as I know there aren't any large empirical studies of their efficacy. The Slate article above and most studies I've read about only discuss the garden variety vitamin A-to-Zinc supplements.
One of my heroes, Ray Kurzweil, has long been advocating aggressive supplement use, especially of extradietary antioxidants like resveratrol, etc., and if we're to take him at his word regarding his health results, it seems to be working out pretty well for him (he does look pretty good for 61). His most recent book on the topic is on my reading list, and I'll probably get to it in a few months. I'm gonna hold my judgment on supplements until then.
As part of my plan to live forever, I've been taking a regular multivitamin every day for a few years now, along with fish oil supplements, psychedelic drugs, and baby aspirin. But after reading this I'm considering discontinuing the vitamins. I never had any strong belief that they were doing much good anyway, but I've figured that for the less than $50 a year it takes to take supplements, if there's even a small chance of a slight boost in longevity it's probably worth it. But the health risks, however small, probably negates this logic.
I probably get adequate amounts of micro-nutrients from my high fruit/nut/veggie diet already anyway, but I have actually been more interested in some of the more esoteric supplements that you can't really get from diet, such as resveratrol and coenzyme Q10. There are good theoretical reasons to think these and a few other antioxidants have strong anti-aging effects but as far as I know there aren't any large empirical studies of their efficacy. The Slate article above and most studies I've read about only discuss the garden variety vitamin A-to-Zinc supplements.
One of my heroes, Ray Kurzweil, has long been advocating aggressive supplement use, especially of extradietary antioxidants like resveratrol, etc., and if we're to take him at his word regarding his health results, it seems to be working out pretty well for him (he does look pretty good for 61). His most recent book on the topic is on my reading list, and I'll probably get to it in a few months. I'm gonna hold my judgment on supplements until then.
Wednesday, January 6, 2010
Bernanke's Doublethink
Scott Sumner's having a field day over a recently uncovered decade-old paper by Ben Bernanke advising the Bank of Japan to target inflation in order to jump-start their economy. Reading it, you'd think the Bernanke of today is an impostor from some sort of evil parallel universe. In response to Brad DeLong's asking why the Fed hasn't maintained it's historical 2% inflation rate in the midst of the present recession, Bernanke recently replied,
In the late 1980s Japan experienced one of the most fantastic stock market and real estate bubbles in history. One of my favorite factoids is that at the height of the mania, the few dozen acres of land around the imperial palace in central Tokyo was valued higher than all the real estate in California (a state roughly the same size as all of Japan). Banks spent all their deposits speculating in the markets and lending to anybody with a pulse, cuz everything was making money. When it all came crashing down in 1990 all the major banks had bullet holes in their balance sheets. To prevent an avalanche of bankruptcies, the government stepped in to recapitalize the banks, but all the money went to covering up holes, lending more and more to insolvent firms so they wouldn't have to write off the loans and take the up front loss. During all this, the BOJ's response was lethargic, and inflation expectations fell off a cliff. Japan experienced deflation throughout most of the 90s, and besides a good 5 year run in the mid-00s, their economy has never recovered. Any of this sound familiar?
I've lost several nights worth of sleep over the last couple years wondering what the hell Bernanke is thinking. His and most other economists' diagnosis of the Japanese Slump was that the BOJ failed to maintain stable, positive inflation expectations, that all the efforts to hold up the banks, to boost demand through fiscal policy were for naught. So what did he do as soon as there was a financial crisis on his hands? Let inflation expectations collapse, and call for trillions of dollars to be poured into banks' coffers and public works projects.
So why'd he do it? I've heard several ideas, none of which sit too well with me. One is that the Fed's recent rapid increase of the money supply, insufficient as it is, has scared lots of Congressmen who don't understand how monetary policy works, and who have started putting pressure on the Fed. True, lots of legislators have been making noise lately about the inflationary seeds we're sowing, but I find it hard to believe any Congressman cares more about 10% inflation tomorrow than 10% unemployment today. Maybe the only thing more outrageous than Bernanke's behavior is Congress's decision to reappoint him. Would Congress have canned him if he'd done what was necessary to maintain 2% inflation, thereby keeping unemployment below 6% and the recession very mild? Maybe, but I kinda doubt it.
Another idea is regulatory capture. When you're head of the central bank, you hang out with lots of bankers. And when you hang out with lots of like-minded, rich, powerful people, you start thinking like them. Obviously the execs at Citi, BoA, Chase, etc. wouldn't very well have preferred the plan Bernanke supported for Japan: let all banks that need to die, and simply open the floodgates of the money supply to compensate, so they convinced him that they were too important to let go. "Just give us a little more money, you know we're good for it! And try to keep inflation down real low or we won't be able to make money holding government bonds. Like, 0% would be sweet." I could see this being the case for Henry Paulson, who came from the world of investment banking and wouldn't wanna kick some of his old friends out in the street, but Bernanke's an academic, he's only been on speaking terms with Wall Street for a few years and has written extensively on what to do when they start causing trouble. It's hard to believe he could've been converted to the dark side so quickly.
The American economy is more resilient than Japan's, but I still worry we're in for a similarly long stretch of anemic growth because of our monetary authorities' inability to keep steady hands in the face of calamity. Why every economist in America isn't calling for Bernanke's head right now is itself a minor tragedy worth exploring, but I'll save that for another post.
The Federal Reserve has not followed the suggestion of some that it pursue a monetary policy strategy aimed at pushing up longer-run inflation expectations. In theory, such an approach could reduce real interest rates and so stimulate spending and output. However, that theoretical argument ignores the risk that such a policy could cause the public to lose confidence in the central bank’s willingness to resist further upward shifts in inflation, and so undermine the effectiveness of monetary policy going forward.Compare this to the Bernanke of yesteryear:
With respect to the issue of inflation targets and BOJ credibility, I do not see how credibility can be harmed by straightforward and honest dialogue of policymakers with the public. In stating an inflation target of, say, 3-4%, the BOJ would be giving the public information about its objectives, and hence the direction in which it will attempt to move the economy. (And, as I will argue, the Bank does have tools to move the economy.) But if BOJ officials feel that, for technical reasons, when and whether they will attain the announced target is uncertain, they could explain those points to the public as well. Better that the public knows that the BOJ is doing all it can to reflate the economy, and that it understands why the Bank is taking the actions it does. The alternative is that the private sector be left to its doubts about the willingness or competence of the BOJ to help the macroeconomic situation.The Japanese situation is close to my heart. I received most of my macroeconomic training while I was studying in Tokyo, and was there when Bear Sterns went bust (the ensuing appreciation of the Yen against the Dollar sent me home earlier than expected). It was a fascinating time to be studying macro, not least of all because it seemed like all the economic policy-makers were forgetting everything that I was learning. After the Bear Sterns episode, I overheard a fellow econ student ask another, "Do you think America's gonna go down the same route as Japan?" The other student said, "No, we've learned from Japan." But have we?
In the late 1980s Japan experienced one of the most fantastic stock market and real estate bubbles in history. One of my favorite factoids is that at the height of the mania, the few dozen acres of land around the imperial palace in central Tokyo was valued higher than all the real estate in California (a state roughly the same size as all of Japan). Banks spent all their deposits speculating in the markets and lending to anybody with a pulse, cuz everything was making money. When it all came crashing down in 1990 all the major banks had bullet holes in their balance sheets. To prevent an avalanche of bankruptcies, the government stepped in to recapitalize the banks, but all the money went to covering up holes, lending more and more to insolvent firms so they wouldn't have to write off the loans and take the up front loss. During all this, the BOJ's response was lethargic, and inflation expectations fell off a cliff. Japan experienced deflation throughout most of the 90s, and besides a good 5 year run in the mid-00s, their economy has never recovered. Any of this sound familiar?
I've lost several nights worth of sleep over the last couple years wondering what the hell Bernanke is thinking. His and most other economists' diagnosis of the Japanese Slump was that the BOJ failed to maintain stable, positive inflation expectations, that all the efforts to hold up the banks, to boost demand through fiscal policy were for naught. So what did he do as soon as there was a financial crisis on his hands? Let inflation expectations collapse, and call for trillions of dollars to be poured into banks' coffers and public works projects.
So why'd he do it? I've heard several ideas, none of which sit too well with me. One is that the Fed's recent rapid increase of the money supply, insufficient as it is, has scared lots of Congressmen who don't understand how monetary policy works, and who have started putting pressure on the Fed. True, lots of legislators have been making noise lately about the inflationary seeds we're sowing, but I find it hard to believe any Congressman cares more about 10% inflation tomorrow than 10% unemployment today. Maybe the only thing more outrageous than Bernanke's behavior is Congress's decision to reappoint him. Would Congress have canned him if he'd done what was necessary to maintain 2% inflation, thereby keeping unemployment below 6% and the recession very mild? Maybe, but I kinda doubt it.
Another idea is regulatory capture. When you're head of the central bank, you hang out with lots of bankers. And when you hang out with lots of like-minded, rich, powerful people, you start thinking like them. Obviously the execs at Citi, BoA, Chase, etc. wouldn't very well have preferred the plan Bernanke supported for Japan: let all banks that need to die, and simply open the floodgates of the money supply to compensate, so they convinced him that they were too important to let go. "Just give us a little more money, you know we're good for it! And try to keep inflation down real low or we won't be able to make money holding government bonds. Like, 0% would be sweet." I could see this being the case for Henry Paulson, who came from the world of investment banking and wouldn't wanna kick some of his old friends out in the street, but Bernanke's an academic, he's only been on speaking terms with Wall Street for a few years and has written extensively on what to do when they start causing trouble. It's hard to believe he could've been converted to the dark side so quickly.
The American economy is more resilient than Japan's, but I still worry we're in for a similarly long stretch of anemic growth because of our monetary authorities' inability to keep steady hands in the face of calamity. Why every economist in America isn't calling for Bernanke's head right now is itself a minor tragedy worth exploring, but I'll save that for another post.
Tuesday, January 5, 2010
Just Saw: Avatar
I basically have to agree with what everybody else on the internet is saying: it's too long, the plot is predictable, the characters are flat, and it's totally worth it. Viscerally enthralling, intellectually stupefying. Go see it in Imax 3D, and try to turn your brain off before you enter the theater.
*Spoilers ahead*
I'm not the first one to point out that what the people in this movie do makes no sense, but here goes my hyperbolic overanalysis anyway:
First of all what struck me was "why is this planet entirely under the control of one corporation?" Is there no competition in the future? Is this the East India Company all over again? "Here guys, here's a planet to exploit, have at it." Not only are there no rival commercial forces on Pandora, there apparently isn't a single person on the planet who's not there on behalf of The Corporation. The exec in the movie repeatedly mentions that he'd rather not exterminate the natives cuz it's bad for publicity, what publicity? There's no media anywhere on the planet, or government agents, or scientific researchers (besides the ones in the employee of The Corporation).
And for an all powerful monopoly, the people running The Corporation are awfully short-sighted. The exec tells Jake at one point that there's nothing the shareholders hate more than a bad quarterly report. It takes six years to send stuff from Pandora back home. Given the massive amount of capital poured into planet, it seems pretty clear that investing in Pandora doesn't start paying off for a generation or so. Any enterprise willing to undertake such a large-scale, long-term project would have to have a unusually patient corporate culture (maybe that's why they're the only ones there). And yet the guy in charge of it all acts like he just got kicked out of a frat house. When Dr. Augustine tells him that the planet itself is apparently a giant supercomputer worth more than all the unobtainium it holds, he asks what they've been smoking, and proceeds to blow up large chunks of biocomputational mainframe.
But the irrationality of the humans is small compared to the nonsense of the Navi natives. One of the things I liked about the movie is that, unlike in most other sci-fi films, the aliens are not just inexplicably humanoid, but justifiably so. Their evolutionary trajectory developed parallel to our own: tree-swinging land dwelling omnivorous mammals with complex hierarchical social organization and symbiotic relationships with other animal species. Their religion and rituals are a pretty accurate depiction of life in human tribal societies. Despite all this excellent biocultural anthropological background, though, the Navi are just yet one more fictional depiction of the Rousseauian Noble Savage who's At One With The Forrest and don't need none o' that technology jibber jabber. Every human society that has the opportunity tries to modernize itself, but the Navi have no need for our silly education, medicine, and abundant food supplies.
Jake at one point says that "We have nothing that they want." I know something they might've liked, how bout fewer dead babies? Or longer life (with nanotechnology as advanced as to allow the sort of cybernetic connections depicted in the film, the humans should've been basically immortal, but nevermind)? Or no more famine? Or not having to shit in latrines? All of this is of course swept under the rug in Avatar, the Navi live in a primitive utopia where none of the ills of premodern society exist, cuz they've learned to respect mother nature.
Sure, maybe the Navi were able to cultivate an equilibrium state where their population was Goldilocks just right and they mostly avoided disease, famine, and tribal warfare, say, by making sure every male and female made one reproductive paid bond and having exactly 2.3 children, but the body dimorphism of the male and female of the aliens suggests that sexual competition is alive and well with the Navi. The male Navi are bigger and stronger than their female counterparts, just as with humans, suggesting that the better hunters and more powerful leaders got more nookie and had more surviving children (just watch the girl Navi practically cum in the seats when Jake descends from the sky in his hot new red pterodactyl), leading to the sort of constant downward social mobility and population growth that evolution controls by starving and infecting pestilence upon the weaker members of society.
The Navi are remarkably similar to primitive humans right before the dawn of the agricultural revolution, with their sexual marketplace and technological proficiency they were well on their way to building harems, invading neighboring lands, founding empires, raping the earth, and paving it over with superhighways and strip malls (Go Progress!). The Corporation wouldn't have had to bother exterminating the Navi, they could have sold them a truck-load of small arms and ammunition for all the unobtainium they had to offer and just sit back and watch as they killed themselves off. But that's a movie without a hero to root for. Might as well just watch the news.
P.S. Am I the only one who couldn't stop looking at alien crotch for anatomical comparison?
*Spoilers ahead*
I'm not the first one to point out that what the people in this movie do makes no sense, but here goes my hyperbolic overanalysis anyway:
First of all what struck me was "why is this planet entirely under the control of one corporation?" Is there no competition in the future? Is this the East India Company all over again? "Here guys, here's a planet to exploit, have at it." Not only are there no rival commercial forces on Pandora, there apparently isn't a single person on the planet who's not there on behalf of The Corporation. The exec in the movie repeatedly mentions that he'd rather not exterminate the natives cuz it's bad for publicity, what publicity? There's no media anywhere on the planet, or government agents, or scientific researchers (besides the ones in the employee of The Corporation).
And for an all powerful monopoly, the people running The Corporation are awfully short-sighted. The exec tells Jake at one point that there's nothing the shareholders hate more than a bad quarterly report. It takes six years to send stuff from Pandora back home. Given the massive amount of capital poured into planet, it seems pretty clear that investing in Pandora doesn't start paying off for a generation or so. Any enterprise willing to undertake such a large-scale, long-term project would have to have a unusually patient corporate culture (maybe that's why they're the only ones there). And yet the guy in charge of it all acts like he just got kicked out of a frat house. When Dr. Augustine tells him that the planet itself is apparently a giant supercomputer worth more than all the unobtainium it holds, he asks what they've been smoking, and proceeds to blow up large chunks of biocomputational mainframe.
But the irrationality of the humans is small compared to the nonsense of the Navi natives. One of the things I liked about the movie is that, unlike in most other sci-fi films, the aliens are not just inexplicably humanoid, but justifiably so. Their evolutionary trajectory developed parallel to our own: tree-swinging land dwelling omnivorous mammals with complex hierarchical social organization and symbiotic relationships with other animal species. Their religion and rituals are a pretty accurate depiction of life in human tribal societies. Despite all this excellent biocultural anthropological background, though, the Navi are just yet one more fictional depiction of the Rousseauian Noble Savage who's At One With The Forrest and don't need none o' that technology jibber jabber. Every human society that has the opportunity tries to modernize itself, but the Navi have no need for our silly education, medicine, and abundant food supplies.
Jake at one point says that "We have nothing that they want." I know something they might've liked, how bout fewer dead babies? Or longer life (with nanotechnology as advanced as to allow the sort of cybernetic connections depicted in the film, the humans should've been basically immortal, but nevermind)? Or no more famine? Or not having to shit in latrines? All of this is of course swept under the rug in Avatar, the Navi live in a primitive utopia where none of the ills of premodern society exist, cuz they've learned to respect mother nature.
Sure, maybe the Navi were able to cultivate an equilibrium state where their population was Goldilocks just right and they mostly avoided disease, famine, and tribal warfare, say, by making sure every male and female made one reproductive paid bond and having exactly 2.3 children, but the body dimorphism of the male and female of the aliens suggests that sexual competition is alive and well with the Navi. The male Navi are bigger and stronger than their female counterparts, just as with humans, suggesting that the better hunters and more powerful leaders got more nookie and had more surviving children (just watch the girl Navi practically cum in the seats when Jake descends from the sky in his hot new red pterodactyl), leading to the sort of constant downward social mobility and population growth that evolution controls by starving and infecting pestilence upon the weaker members of society.
The Navi are remarkably similar to primitive humans right before the dawn of the agricultural revolution, with their sexual marketplace and technological proficiency they were well on their way to building harems, invading neighboring lands, founding empires, raping the earth, and paving it over with superhighways and strip malls (Go Progress!). The Corporation wouldn't have had to bother exterminating the Navi, they could have sold them a truck-load of small arms and ammunition for all the unobtainium they had to offer and just sit back and watch as they killed themselves off. But that's a movie without a hero to root for. Might as well just watch the news.
P.S. Am I the only one who couldn't stop looking at alien crotch for anatomical comparison?
Monday, January 4, 2010
Shouting From the Rooftops (What, Why this Blog)
The first famous quote I ever bothered to remember, back when I was a child, was Ralph Waldo Emerson: "There is no knowledge that is not power." For all my life, I've been probably the most curious person I know; I *devour* information on a wide variety of topics from every possible source, and this is because I've always felt Emerson's dictum in my bones. I crave knowledge not just for its own sake - ivory tower intellectualism - but because I know that every obstacle I face, every goal I aspire to, is a problem that can be solved if I have the right information. The more I learn, the more possible problems I can solve, the more I can achieve the practical ends of greater health, wealth and happiness in my life.
So, I enjoy reading, thinking about all kinds of different ideas, and now I have decided to start writing about them as well. I will write on this blog to organize the many disparate thoughts that swirl around in my head, and hopefully to contribute to the universe of ideas through anybody who may read this blog.
This blog will be rather ambitious in its scope. I intend to write about a wide variety of topics across disciplines that aren't typically thought of as having much if anything to do with each other. The thread holding it all together will be my conviction that there, in fact, is a thread holding it all together. That is, the rules of the universe are fundamentally the same no matter what scale you are on. The scientific method and mathematical reasoning can help you build particle accelerators, predict the rise and fall of nations, and get you laid.
Most people construct their worldview (to the extent they have one) from a patchwork of non-verbalized intuition, religious doctrine, what they were taught in school, and whatever's in the latest New York Times bestseller. As a result, most people have an incomplete and inconsistent understanding of the world, often to their great detriment. A recurring theme of this blog will be that instead we should build our worldview upon the consensus views of the various scientific fields, and that doing so leads us to some interesting conclusions about how to get what we want out of life.
Life is very frustrating for me sometimes. Everywhere I look, I see bad ideas inflicting needless harm upon the people of the world, myself included. The tragedy of the human condition is not the result of a conflict of interests, a limited supply of resources, or the existence of evil in the world, but of a failure of knowledge. A nearly perfect world is available to us; it only lies off the equilibrium path, blocked by our bad beliefs. I will attempt to clear the way.
So, I enjoy reading, thinking about all kinds of different ideas, and now I have decided to start writing about them as well. I will write on this blog to organize the many disparate thoughts that swirl around in my head, and hopefully to contribute to the universe of ideas through anybody who may read this blog.
This blog will be rather ambitious in its scope. I intend to write about a wide variety of topics across disciplines that aren't typically thought of as having much if anything to do with each other. The thread holding it all together will be my conviction that there, in fact, is a thread holding it all together. That is, the rules of the universe are fundamentally the same no matter what scale you are on. The scientific method and mathematical reasoning can help you build particle accelerators, predict the rise and fall of nations, and get you laid.
Most people construct their worldview (to the extent they have one) from a patchwork of non-verbalized intuition, religious doctrine, what they were taught in school, and whatever's in the latest New York Times bestseller. As a result, most people have an incomplete and inconsistent understanding of the world, often to their great detriment. A recurring theme of this blog will be that instead we should build our worldview upon the consensus views of the various scientific fields, and that doing so leads us to some interesting conclusions about how to get what we want out of life.
Life is very frustrating for me sometimes. Everywhere I look, I see bad ideas inflicting needless harm upon the people of the world, myself included. The tragedy of the human condition is not the result of a conflict of interests, a limited supply of resources, or the existence of evil in the world, but of a failure of knowledge. A nearly perfect world is available to us; it only lies off the equilibrium path, blocked by our bad beliefs. I will attempt to clear the way.
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