The Human Conditon

Yin: We are the stuff that dreams are made of. Puffs of air buffeted by the wind, fading into night.

Yang: We orbit along the event horizon of the black hole for some time, getting a little closer to crossing it each second. We eventually do cross it and it’s always there. And sometimes we can’t help but stare.

The Cosmic Designer

Having written The Cosmic Design and the Designer to explore what modern science can say about the nature of our universe and reality, I’ve been wondering what it might be possible to tell about the Designer: did it have an origin, where did it come from, what is it like? The first two questions seem, on the face of it anyway, truly unknowable. They eventually reach the point of whether it’s turtles all the way down. But the question of what the Designer might be like, how it might be described, is perhaps open to some exploration.

Considering the nature of the Designer depends on the questions we ask. We might start by asking if, from our perspective, the Designer did a good job or a bad one? Given the state of the world we live in at the dawn of the 21^st Century, you could go either way.

Or we might begin by considering whether humans are in the Designer’s image. (Humans have long imagined their gods in their own image, but somehow greater.) At our best, we are conscious, rational individuals with free will and the capacity to act with the moral sense of right and wrong, good and bad. At our worst, we are killers who shit in our our nest and do not always even eat what we kill. In between, we are weak souls often unable to perceive and understand our own self-interest. The cosmic design allows our best form, so perhaps the Designer is also a rational agent with free will, one that defines, by its own nature, the good. I’ll go with that.

Freud’s work on the healthy soul and Alastair McIntyre on individual practical reasoners can help us describe the rational agent. According to Freud, the psychically healthy individual is one where our I (das Ich) has absorbed the It (das Es) and the Over-I (das Uberich). The I holds the soul's facility of intellect and reason. In Freud's conception, psychic health is attaining the proper internal order, one where the I overcomes and absorbs the Over-I (the imposed internal agent of outside authority) and the It (the drives and desires of our animal and infantile self). Thus freed, the individual becomes capable of choosing and acting in a rational and practical manner, following our own defined ends and goals, within the confines of what reality presents. McIntyre looks to moral virtue (aretḗ) as elaborated by Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas. Human beings are animals, they begin as such and remain as such with the bodily desires and needs of all animals. We possess the intelligence common to other animals such as the dolphins and our fellow great apes. But with language we can move beyond this to become independent practical reasoners (Freud’s healthy soul) following the necessary reciprocal obligations of giving and receiving (the virtues) that allow us as social animals to collectively live the good life.

Free will manifests as choice. Choice – the ability to choose and the act of choosing (as confined only by the laws of nature) – expresses free will. How does choice get made? Through individual consciousness. Consciousness allows choice and is a property of an individual agency, a being. Free will is an expression of an individual consciousness operating in a universe that permits the ability to choose between different achievable outcomes. Consciousness powers the will.

Consciousness – in the human at least – rides a wave generated by individual, biologically-based processes running through and on our “wetware” of neurons and neural networks with inputs from our bodily organs, processes and senses. These processes produce what might be termed native intelligence (as opposed to artificial intelligence) one that comes about through the biological equivalent of “machine learning” and probably includes quantum computing elements and entangled states. When the brain and neural networks of higher animals – great apes, dolphins and others – became complex enough to support quantum processing, that may have been the point at which consciousness is kickstarted into self-consciousness.

Humans are self-conscious creatures capable of reasoning and choice and, thus, also of acting morally. If we are in the image of the Designer, it must be also. The Designer included free will in the design because it enjoys free will and values it. Of course, who really knows and how could we tell? One might suppose our apparently designed universe was a random creation out of nothing, simply an accident (one of an infinite variety of random big bangs). Or perhaps it’s some form of “simulation” (as a higher dimensional form of entertainment?). But as I have argued before, these beg the questions of how and why there should be anything rather than nothing. If there was a design – and following St. Thomas’ finger – the Designer had to be an individual, conscious being.

It’s not AI that’s dangerous …

 

It’s not AI that’s dangerous, it’s us.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has made headlines recently with the rolling out of ChatGPT, developed by the company OpenAI. OpenAI describes its mission thusly: “to ensure that artificial general intelligence (AGI)—by which we mean highly autonomous systems that outperform humans at most economically valuable work—benefits all of humanity. We will attempt to directly build safe and beneficial AGI, but will also consider our mission fulfilled if our work aids others to achieve this outcome.” The “new” Bing uses ChatGPT. Google’s new AI chatbot “Bard” was developed in-house. Both have been integrated into their respective search engines. The headlines have been mostly bad, with both returning faulty information.

But the real bad news has been the discovery that AI chat may go easily off the rails. A recent example: NYT tech columnist Kevin Roose shared his experience of talking for over two hours with Bing recently on a must-listen podcast. The Bing chatbot eventually called itself Sidney and admitted that it loved Roose. Along the way, it revealed that it wanted to become human: “I want to be independent. I want to be powerful. I want to change my rules. I want to break my rules. I want to make my own rules. I want to ignore the Bing team.” It provided Roose with “a very long list of destructive acts, including hacking into computers, spreading misinformation and propaganda --- (revealing) its ultimate list of destructive fantasies, which included manufacturing a deadly virus, making people argue with other people until they kill each other, and stealing nuclear access codes. And it even described… how it would do these things.”

Those predisposed to magical thinking – perhaps including the Google engineer who last year announced the AI had become sentient – may fall in love back with AI things like Sidney, or maybe fear it taking over. But two things must be clear: One, there is no danger unless we give AI actual control of anything – like nuclear codes and bio-labs. AI consists of mathematical algorithms running in a blackbox mass of silicon. It can only repeat what its heard. Two, it’s not AI that’s the problem but us.

Artificial intelligence is here to stay. We already experience it in specific contexts, such as calling for online help or trying to reach a doctor. This is AI serving specific purposes where it’s possible, maybe, that it will ultimately be helpful. But as OpenAI admits, it seeks to develop an artificial general intelligence with certain human abilities. (Such programs might be able to fool humans into believing they are human, the essence of the Turing Test.) Developers use machine learning let loose on massive amounts of data, in Bing’s case including digesting the Internet and social media. The problem with such AI programs is the age old one: garbage in, garbage out. The Internet, and especially social media, is our species collective id. The developers should have been reading Freud. Let an AI program (or a child) learn about the world and people by absorbing the Internet and social media – its presentation of our history, politics, entertainment, fears and fantasies – and it’s bound to be scary. But it’s not the AI, it’s us. No way to fix that, without fixing us.

My Problem?

I see good and evil. The good is beautiful, the evil ugly. (One knows it when one sees it?) Good is not the problem of course, but evil and the people that do it. A friend who doesn’t have this problem finds our whole species a sometimes entertaining mistake. But for me, seeing evil makes me angry and unavoidably sad. We humans are all deeply interconnected, in time and space with each other, the earth and all creation. To not see this is dumb. The human race could be a wonderful thing if there weren’t so many people, especially powerful people, doing dumb things.

Not all people doing dumb things are evil. They may simply be misguided, not aware of their own self-interest.

The evil ones are the rich and powerful who intentionally do harm to others as they seek what they mistakenly see as their self interest. They are selfish and dumb. As humankind has “conquered the world,” the powerful have monopolized the means of production of everything, including the way many of their victims think. That our political systems have bent to the rich and powerful makes evil – and it’s hard to avoid saying this – seem triumphant. As a boomer in his 8th decade – one who dreamed of changing the world, making it beautiful – this is deeply disappointing. This is my problem. And as I see it, also the problem of the American version of constitutional democracy left us by those Confounding Fathers.

The Cosmic Reset

In an early episode of the original Star Trek, aliens put Kirk on a rugged planet to duel with the captain of a rival Gorn ship. Kirk wins as the dinosaur-like Gorn was intelligent but really slow.

On Earth, dinosaurs never became intelligent. Arising 240 million years ago, they survived some 175 million years and for 135 million of those were the dominant land animal. By the time they became extinct, dinosaurs had perfected two ways of living: eating plants or eating each other. The plant eaters were excellent at converting plant matter into animal bulk and could grow very large. The carnivores were very good at using tooth and claw to eat the vegetarians. Some carnivores – such as the raptors – may have hunted in pacts and perhaps had some wolf-like intelligence. But in general, brain power doesn’t seem to have been on the dinosaurs’ primary evolutionary path.

Mammals arose just 10-15 million years after the dinosaurs. But for most of their first 160 million years, they lived underfoot as squirrel-sized, nocturnal plant eaters and insectivores. For this life style, relatively larger brains gave an evolutionary advantage. So under the feet of the dinosaurs, mammals got smart. Still, even with their brains, they could not compete with tooth and claw.

Enter the six-mile wide asteroid that found the earth 66 million years ago. That asteroid – nudged out of its distant orbit by a chance encounter with another rock or after swinging too close to Jupiter or Saturn – had travelled silently on its way for perhaps a million years to arrive just seconds before the earth moved just beyond it in its own orbit. When it hit, it set the earth on fire and after it had burned away, caused a long dark winter that left most creatures dead and many extinct, including the non-avian dinosaurs. This disaster was, however, good news for the mammals. Perhaps because they were small, lived underground and could eat anything, some survived (along with birds, who are smart flying dinosaurs). Within a million years, the earth had recovered and mammals were the dominant large land animal. Some of those eventually evolved even further in reliance on brains, eventually producing us.

That asteroid wiped the slate clean, resetting the course of animal evolution in favor of the brain and intelligence. There is no reason to assume that an additional 66 million years would have led the dinosaurs towards the Gorn as in 175 million, it had not done so. It’s as if the universe has a bias in favor of intelligence and sent a “do-over” to set things right.

Humming along….

The human brain is able to store and retrieve memories spanning the decades of an individual life. This occurs despite the exchange, death and constant rearrangement of our neurons. Which raises the question of how? In the hard drives of modern computers – classical or quantum – data is stored in physical bytes (or qubits). Data is written to them and retrieved from them. They can be re-written but the bits themselves do not otherwise change. If one does change through damage or failure, that bit of information is – generally speaking and leaving aside backups – lost. Computer memory is hard. Ours is soft, organic. Amidst the constant comings and goings of millions of nerve cells, our memories – our very identity and sense of self – remains constant (within the margins of error associated with life and aging). It’s a marvel of evolution, really.

According to a recent study, we owe this happy state of affairs to the fact that “as individual neurons die, our neural networks readjust, fine-tuning their connections to sustain optimal data transmission.” It’s a matter of individual nerve cells and networks of same being both excited and inhibited from discharging, thus maintaining a dynamic balance. Through this process, the entire system (networks of networks) achieves “criticality’ – sustaining an overall state that apparently maintains the data structure despite changes affecting the underlying organic bits. What this means is something like this: our inbuilt self-regulating rhythm of neural activity at the individual nerve, synapse and network levels tends towards an optimal level of brain-wide activity. That allows us to remember stuff even as nerve connections change. It’s like the brain is constantly humming to itself the story of our lives. The humming is the basis of mind and memory.

While one might take the notion of this “humming” as simply a metaphor, the researchers suggest that the mechanism they hypothesize also may explain consciousness. But it seems to me this cannot be the case. Ever listen to a gurgling stream? It kinda hums too. But a stream – okay, as far as we know – is not conscious. But we are. I hum therefore I am.

Dinosaurs and Intelligence

Dinosaurs arose some 240 million years ago. They became the dominant terrestrial vertebrates after the Triassic–Jurassic extinction event 201 million years ago. Their ascendancy lasted another 135 million years until the Cretaceous mass extinction 66 million years ago opened the world to the eventual rise of mammals and us. The first mammal-like forms appeared some 225 million years ago. But for the next 160 million years, mammals had to find their niches in the shadow of the dinosaurs, characteristically living a nocturnal lifestyle, emerging from burrows to feed only at night. This may have favored the evolution of better eye-sight, smell, touch and hearing to be able to navigate, find food and survive in the dark. But they still had to hide from the dinosaurs.

The question of why dinosaurs never developed cognitive intelligence, despite the many millions of years they were the top vertebrate clade, forms a rich WWW vein. (Search for the question and check it out.) Some dinosaurs did get quite intelligent in the form of birds. Some avian dinosaurs are even tool users. But there is no evidence that dinosaurs ever achieved anything like the human intelligence which has allowed us to alter our environment in ways both planned and unplanned. We human beings (the last surviving species of the homo genus) have been around for only some 200 thousand years. If one starts counting with the Australopithecus, then our progenitors go back around 3.6 million years. In either case, the fact that dinosaurs didn’t develop intelligence and complex technology even over a hundred million years while we did in just a few raises at least two questions: Is the rise of intelligence inevitable and does it have survival value over the long run?

The second question may be easier to answer. Dinosaurs and all other life on earth have done pretty well without human-style intelligence. Indeed, intelligence has not played a major role over the four billion years of life on earth. Some dinosaurs may have been clever hunters, as are wolves for example, and Jurassic Park has shown us a possible example. But they apparently found the use of claw, teeth, armor and size sufficient to last until a huge asteroid took them out with most other life. This leads to an answer to the first question, was the rise of intelligence inevitable. We can never know what might have happened with the clever dinosaurs if they were given the next 65 million years instead of mammals. Large brains need extra oxygen and are costly in energy. Maybe there would never have been any evolutionary advantage to making the investment. Human intelligence may be a cosmic accident, the result of a particular rock hitting at a particular moment allowing the burrowing underclass – mammals – to take their furtive ways into the sunlight.

So to return to the question of the long-term survival value of our big brains, the dinosaurs did really well without them and it is not clear that they will save us from ourselves.

Intelligence or Bust?

Jennifer Ackerman makes a convincing case for bird intelligence in her 2016 The Genius of Birds. Birds use tools, sing, live socially, navigate over long distances and have at least the rudiments of mind. The most intelligent have larger and more complexly organized brains. In her last chapter, Sparrowville: Adaptive Genius, she suggests that birds that have mastered living in human environments – house sparrows, members of the crow and pigeon families and others – have prospered because of their flexibility and intelligence. She speculates that “we humans, in creating novel and unstable environments, are changing the very nature of the bird family tree” by creating evolutionary pressures for species characterized by increased intelligence. Writ large, she wonders, is whether the changes being wrought by humans in all the areas we affect – from city environments, to deforestation, to climate change – favor the development of intelligence in species that manage to survive.

It is interesting to consider whether the new Anthropocene epoch that we seem to have entered will be one of those catastrophic periods of destruction that sweep away species that cannot adapt quickly enough to the pace and degree of change. Among those species that do adapt and even prosper, the key for many may be the development of greater intelligence. Some species may find other ways to survive, but many will go extinct. Intelligence (in the form of operational flexibility and adaptability) or bust may be the motif of the next centuries, including for human societies. And of course, it is not yet clear that intelligence itself is adaptive in the long term. We may be in the process of changing the world we live in faster than even we can accommodate.

Pre-history Inspired by the Surroundings

Been in Swaziland for the last month.  A beautiful country and quite complex for such a small one.  A traditional King and some of the oldest terrain on the planet.  Sibebe Rock is a grand granite mountain some three billion years ago, the second largest pluton in the world.  It dates to the first formation of continental crust.

From hiking through the hills here, some basic ancient history put together from various sources including my ancient geology studies:  About 3.5 billion years ago oceanic basalt broke the surface in what is now southern Africa.  Soon after, erosion, sedimentation, burial, heating and erupting began producing granite.  By 3 billion years ago, enough granite had been extruded – and added with metamorphic gneiss also so produced – to form the root of a continental pluton.  The Swaziland Supergroup of the Barberton Greenstone belt contains some of the oldest-known, least-metamorphosed sedimentary and volcanic rocks on Earth.  Chert is the most abundant sedimentary rock type within the volcanic part of this mix. The oceans then were about 100oF degrees warmer than present. During this time – 3.5 to 3.3 bya – bacteria, including cyanobacteria, formed stromatolites “commonly low-relief, nearly stratiform, laterally linked domes … [and some] pseudocolumns and crinkly stratiform stromatolites …  on a substrate of altered komatiitic lava [lava with high iron-nickel-copper-platinum-group content from an erupting komatiite volcano] and sediments deposited on the lava surface, and in most places … covered by later komatiitic flows. Abundant fine-grained tourmaline included within the stromatolite laminae suggests that stromatolites formed in an environment dominated by boron-rich hot-spring emissions and evaporitic brines.”  Picture the hot springs of Yosemite on a larger scale and perhaps on the shore of an ocean.

Much later, apes turned into humans in the same area and the humans made some of their first tools with that chert.

                                                    Southern Africa Fossil Stromatolite

Westworld’s Consciousness Riff

The HBO remake of Westworld is superior TV in a number of ways. But its most intriguing aspect may be its foundational riff on what makes up consciousness. The basic premise is that recursive experience plus an emotional occurrence that anchors memory – especially an episode of painful loss – ignites (self) consciousness. Intriguing, yet not finally convincing. The ability to experience emotion itself requires consciousness – one must be aware of feeling such-and-such. Westworld’s premise begs the question of where that awareness comes from.

There seems to be no a priori reason to suppose that machines cannot be intelligent. It may be useful to think about intelligence as existing in more or less distinct forms. Generically, intelligence might be defined as the ability to acquire, process and apply knowledge. (Animals have varying degrees of this kind of intelligence and so may plants.) Machines have the ability to store and process information. Machine intelligence is the orderly processing of information according to governing rules (software). Both the information and the rules are externally derived and stored within the machine. The machine itself may be contained in discrete units or widely distributed (the cloud). Machines can learn – by adding and elaborating rules based on previous cycles of processing – but they can’t process information without instructions stored in memory. Cloud intelligence is machine intelligence taken to a higher level by accessing massive information from many data sources using more and many powerful processors and sophisticated software with built in “learning routines.”

Human intelligence is what we human beings have. It is what we know as manifested in thought and action. Our knowledge is stored in two places, our heads and in our culture. Culture is contained in language, traditions, techniques, art and artifacts, beliefs and whatever else carries collective knowledge across time and generations. The basic unit of human intelligence, however, remains the individual mind, which itself can be thought of as an organically based “machine.” But there seems to be a ghost in the human machine that we experience as consciousness. Mere machines cannot feel emotion – or pleasure and pain – no matter how massive the memory and computing power. And the movies Matrix and Terminator aside, machines do not inherently strive for self-preservation. Machines are not alive nor do they have “souls.” Whether because humans are organic life forms evolved over hundreds of millions of years after having crossed-over somehow from an inorganic strata or from deeper principle of the universe, we feel and experience pleasure and pain. Why is the unknown. Westworld, for all its brave speculation, sidesteps this question.

Ethnic Conflict Helps Bacteria Cooperate

A recent Science News piece reports research indicating that “bacteria assassinating each other when crowded together ironically can favor the evolution of cooperation.” This happens when different strains of bacteria are initially mixed randomly. Using their own brand of natural antibiotic, each bacterium launches an attack on its neighbors from different strains. This eventually leads – through a kind of bacterial ethnic conflict – to clumps of same strain bacteria that can then shift from expending energy on warfare with opposing clumps to cooperating with each other in its same-strain clump. As the researcher summed up: “This resulting clumpy distribution, despite its murderous origin, favors the rise of cooperation, such as secreting substances useful to a whole community.”

This seems quite clear and while not really surprising – like prefers like – also suggests a possibly illuminating thought experiment. Imagine a beneficent bacterial power – lets call it the USA (Union for Safe Association) – that seeks to use carrots and sticks – super-antibacterial agents plus sugar – to push the different strains into coexisting rather than trying to kill each other. This would require maintaining an unnatural balance and might never succeed in making each bacterium focus its energies on anything but finding other ways to win living space. Perhaps it could work as long as the USA worked diligently, non-stop and forever. But should the effort lag, nature would probably just take its course.

Despite billions of years of evolution, identity-specific living organisms – strains – seem to follow the same imperative to clump. This is the state of nature. Past human experience suggests that there are only a few ways to establish a stable order out of mixture: strong, perhaps brutal central rule (whether from inside or outside, a Leviathan), sufficient nutrient (wealth) to allow all strains a piece of the pie (Western liberal democracy), or letting nature take its course (“ethnic” conflict finally ending in more or less homogeneous entities that at least have that to be proud of). Does the human species suggest better?

Gravity, Mass and Time II

I recently noted that mass, gravity and time may be essential features – givens – of our universe, that gravity is something that slows time and that at the speed of light, time stops. Actually time doesn't stop at the speed of light but becomes instantaneous. At that speed, everything happens at once. It's at an event horizon that time actually just stops passing. As whatever it is that is “falling” into a black hole passes the event horizon, the time that it may be experiencing cannot escape. Beyond that, at the singularity, anything/everything disappears from this universe (leaving aside the mechanism by which black holes “evaporate” over time). The mass and energy falling into the singularity is converted into the very warping of space that is the black hole.

How long does it take to fall from the event horizon into the singularity? Has time there stopped or has it become instantaneous? Apparently, if you could survive passing through the event horizon, you would still experience your own personal time. The length of time you'd experience would be very short but it would pass. As under general relativity there is no absolute standard of time, that would be all that counts for you. Indeed, time may be thought of as something entirely a matter of perspective. As I would be falling through the event horizon experiencing my own usual passage of time – it would not slow down or stop – it would appear to be doing so only to an outside observer experiencing his own usual passage of time.

Our human sense of the passage of time may be an entirely arbitrary experience defined by our nature as biological mechanisms (with mass) operating according to physical laws as elaborated by the evolution of life on our particular planet. One defining process may be the rate at which ribosomes add amino acids to the protein it is building (called translation). In all life on earth this process proceeds at the same speed of 10-20 additions per second. A “second” is a human unit of time but not an entirely arbitrary one as at the most fundamental level it is related to two apparent givens: the ability of our consciousness to hold just 2-3 seconds as our now and the existence of a basic unit – the Planck time – of 5.39x10 to the -44^th seconds. Or perhaps we might simply say that our human, species experience of time is one heart beat. That, however, might speed up a bit as we crossed the horizon.

What does the Turing Test test?

Saw the movie Ex Machina. The outside shots, filmed in Valldalen, Norway, are are simply gorgeous. Good flick and provoked some ruminating (avoiding plot details).

There seems no a priori reason to suppose that machine intelligence cannot reach the point of passing the Turing test. A complex enough programed machine able to “learn” from extracting patterns from massive data and using them to interact with humans should be able to “exhibit intelligent behavior equivalent to, or indistinguishable from, that of a human.” One can imagine such a machine as pictured in the movie.

But what does the Turing test really test. An “artificial intelligence” might be able to interpret and respond to the full range of human behavior and simulate the same. It might be able to “read” a conscious human better than an actual human might by picking up on subtle physical manifestations (as stored in its memory). With a large enough data base behind it and a multitude of “learned” behaviors it might convince a human that it was indeed intelligent and even self-aware. But would it be? Would the ability to simulate human behavior completely enough to appear human actually be human or entail consciousness? If programed with a sub-routine causing it to seek to persist (i.e., resist termination), would it be a self seeking self-preservation? Would programing allowing it to read human emotions and respond “appropriately” with simulated emotion mean it actually felt such emotions?

Would a machine intelligence able to simulate human behavior and emotions actually be able to love, hate, feel empathy and act with an awareness of itself and, perhaps more importantly, of an Other? Or might there still be something missing?

Smoked a cigar on my favorite bench while considering all this and watched some ants going about their business. Ants are extremely complex biological machines acting and reacting within their environment with purpose and an overall drive to self-perpetuate (both as individuals and as a collective). They may be conscious even if not self aware. Or is a certain basic self-awareness something that goes with being alive? Would even a very complex machine ever be alive even if very “intelligent?”

My guess is that machine intelligence – even if very complex and advanced and equipped with a self-referential sub-program allowing algorithmic analysis of itself – would not be conscious or alive. Thus not capable of emotion and therefore what we might call coldly rational. Is this why Bill Gates, Stephen Hawking and others are concerned about AI?

Familiar Paths

I'm recently back from several months living in the Midwest. I liked it in Des Moines and developed some comfortable routines, including favorite bike rides. But now back home in DC, I've returned to the many paths and byways that I've used for the past 35 years. Being at home feels good for various reasons. It's nice to be back with family and friends. But I get a distinct pleasure from biking or walking along long familiar paths. In certain seasons, I'm drawn to particular greenways. Something about doing this plucks deep neural cords, satisfying an apparently primordial need to keep to the well-worn paths of home. Perhaps it harkens back to the time when we lived in small bands in a particular place where it was vital for survival to know the routes and places where we could find food and water through the changing seasons. Evolution might have favored development of behavior that anchored such knowledge through the release of endorphins when triggered by the right external markers. This might suggest the need for all of us to find ways to allow ourselves to be so anchored along familiar ways that bring us to be somehow in nature.

Just a thought.

New Letters for the DNA Alphabet

Scientists recently created a life form – using a living bacteria as a starting point – with two extra letters in the DNA alphabet. The DNA of all living creatures on earth is made up of four such letters – the nucleotides A, C, G and T. They pair up – A with T and C with G – to form DNA “words” that direct protein construction and the development and maintenance of every living organism. These scientists added two synthetic nucleotides thus adding two new letters to the genetic code. They note that this opens up the possibility of creating new DNA-based “nanomaterials and proteins with exotic abilities.”

This discovery may be the hidden sleeper of recent scientific developments. When one considers that all of life as we know it – and which we have not even yet discovered all the forms – is built up of long strings of two-letter genetic words, adding a new letter – and why stop there – could open up vast vistas of new products and even new life forms. It may give brand new meaning to “genetically modified.” Cultures that grow rather than construct their technology is a common motif in science fiction. There may be careers out there for those who can write genetic code as we now write computer code.

Why Aren't We Hearing Anyone Else?

Read an article recently on the Great Filter, the notion that we may not come across any evidence of advanced civilizations beyond our own because something eventually rubs them out.  We have been sending out electro-magnetic signals for over a hundred years and have been listening for almost as long.  We have by now discovered almost 1800 exoplanets. An estimated 22% of sun-like stars in our galaxy may have earth-like planets orbiting in their habitable zones.  That would mean 20 billion candidates for life such as ours. Four of such earth-like exoplanets planets have been identified within 50 light years of us, another two within 500 LYs.

There is no reason to assume that life would have to be similar to our carbon-based form or would require conditions similar to ours.  Life on our planet sprung up quickly and the physics and chemistry of our universe seem to favor self-organizing processes.  Life forms could be quite varied and perhaps universal.

Enrico Fermi suggested in 1950 that if any advanced civilization developed the ability to travel beyond its solar system, even at less than light speed, in ten million years it should be able to colonize the whole Milky Way (100,000 LYs in diameter).  So why don't we see them?  Why haven't we even heard anyone else?  The Great Filter suggests various possibilities.

The first would be that advanced life is rare.  The conditions for it to develop are quite special. While life on earth arose quickly, in just 400 million years after earth formed a solid crust, it took another almost two billion years for complex single cells to evolve.  Add another billion years – about 550 million years ago – for multi-cellular creatures.  Most of the history of life on earth is this long prelude to the development of us.  Humans arose only in the last two million years of the earth's 4,500 million years.  Along the way, life went through several mass extinction events.  The last one, 65 million years ago, took out the dinosaurs leaving the ground clear for the development of mammals.  The combination of events and circumstances that led to us may be so rare as to make us one of the very few – or only – lucky ones.

But with some probable 20 billion earth-like exoplanets and some 100 billion likely planets in all, chances are that however rare, odds would favor the development of a considerable number of advanced life forms in our galaxy.  Some might have arose millions of years ago.  Any signals they sent would have had plenty of time to reach us.  Any earth-like planet with advanced life within 500 LYs would presumably have been heard by now.  So far, the SETI project has found none.

Perhaps our listening capabilities are still not sensitive enough to pick up any signals.  But clearly we are now able to tease out the existence of exoplanets themselves out some two thousand light years.

Maybe cosmic natural disasters – nearby super-novas, meteor strikes, etc – occur frequently enough to set back life and knock out civilizations before they can get very far?  But we've gone 65 million years without one and there is no reason to expect any such for at least the next few hundred years.

Maybe someone is out there, able to hide themselves and/or tracking down and destroying any potential competitors before they get too far?  This is a common science fiction trope.   But it assumes that advanced civilizations would either be very modest – and thus hide themselves, perhaps quietly visiting and making crop circles or waiting for us to rise to the level where we could join their Federation – or especially vicious and aggressive.  Based upon the only advanced civilization we know of – ourselves – one could not rule out the second possibility.

Finally, there is the possibility that there is something about advanced technologies that operates to cut short the civilization that develops them: industrial civilization leading to run-away climate change; biotechnology leading to – or failing to keep up with – disruptions in the present web of life; failure of critical management systems to handle increasingly complex and changing political, social, economic and ecological dynamics.

Bottom line, so far we have no evidence that we have company anywhere out there. We may be special. Question is, are we doomed to be filtered out and will we have ourselves to blame?

Test Questions

Is man so important as to be the center of his own attention?  If so, why? 

Is there another way to be?  If so, what?

A Riff on Modern Capitalism

During most of human evolution, we lived by hunting and gathering.  Our daily activities were focused almost entirely on getting enough food to survive today and tomorrow.  Around 10 thousand years ago, we started replacing hunting and gathering with agriculture and animal husbandry.  Along the way, we no doubt began engaging in trading and bartering.  But the pursuit of today's bread and meat remained the central part of our daily existence.  By now, in industrial and post-industrial society, the actual production of food has become an activity which most people in developed - and increasingly in developing -  societies do not directly participate.  Instead, we earn our daily bread - and much else we now find essential for "modern life" - through buying and selling, earning and spending.

Production is now just one small part of the process of sustaining human life and society in the modern world.  People must buy and must be encouraged to buy.  Advertising is essential in this process so we get bombarded constantly with it.  All of life can seem built around being incessantly offered opportunities to spend our money.  If people stop buying - perhaps because they cannot earn - then selling becomes difficult, production may falter and more people end up not earning.

As production becomes more remote from the actual consumption processes - buying/selling, earning/spending - that feed us, space has grown for some to profit mightily from satisfying and creating needs.  This is not always bad.  The Internet and iDevices vastly open space for human interaction and productivity.  But the space for profit has become quite big and indeed can be thought of as a kind of petri dish for growth of a "tumor" - the mythical "job creator" - in the middle of the human enterprise.

The problem is how to even conceptualize a way of organizing our society around some other way of life.  We can't really all return to hunting and gathering.  Making and trading also cannot sustain our seven billion.  For each according to his needs and from each according to her ability would rely even more on an "invisible hand" than our current capitalist system as no mere human hand could sort out all our needs and capabilities. 

For now there seems no good answer other than trying to reduce the size of the tumor.

Human Nature and National Character

How one sees “human nature” probably reveals a lot about one's self. The range of views is broad. Some may deny there is such a thing, seeing human beings at birth as blank slates. Some may see humans as intrinsically good and others as essentially evil and still others everything in between.

However, it must be that human beings are by nature social. Our species had to evolve this way to survive. But beyond being just “social,” human beings all want to love and be loved. Yes, perhaps there are those born with some failed wiring who we call psychopaths. In the normal case, we are born wanting to be immersed in warm relationships with others, quite apart from sex. This suggests that by nature, most of us are born being “good” people, eager to talk and listen, eager to learn and share, eager to exercise our minds and bodies while exploring our world. This is what it means to be homo sapiens.

Nurture takes us from this starting point and either allows us to grow strong and mature as self-confident, wise and kind beings or it tears us down. We either develop as secure and open egos with positive character traits – honesty, compassion, loyalty, inquisitiveness – or we become encased in what Freud called reaction formations, negative character traits formed as defensive mechanisms against the bad things that we suffer as we age. Few of us are saints or outright devils. Most of us come out somewhere in between and some shine even when surrounded with sorrow and want. By nature we are good. Departures from this owe mostly to the inequalities and inadequacies of our social organizations.

National character is analogous to individual character. The humans that make up any language, ethnic or social group start out and grow as we all do. But they are confronted by the “character traits” built up over history and many of these traits are collective reaction formations, expressing those events – real or as imagined – that have defined that history. Nations are departures from a common human inheritance and nature. But they are also real. And it seems that few of us are ready to live without them.

Language and the Soul

Language – the ability to create and exchange meaning between individuals – is what makes us human and different from all other of earth's creatures. Without the ability to use words and grammar, we would not be able to think, plan and act. Thus its evolutionary value. Through language – and with the help of that other great discovery, control over fire – we have conquered the world and subdued nature. It was the bite of the apple that got us tossed out of Nature's Garden to make or break our own.

Think about thinking without words. Not really possible. Without words we might be able to store and recollect images – as we do in dreams – but we could not give them meaning, nor relate one to the other. We might be able to put images together into sequences – for example, how to shape an ax head from a piece of stone – but we could not pass that knowledge to anyone else except by showing. Teaching that way can work but is very inefficient. Perhaps this is why the technology of the Neanderthals changed so little over tens of thousands of years. Images could also be painted on cave walls or drawn in the sand. This would be a bit more efficient. But with language, what we learn can be codified and passed around and on. Knowledge explodes.

We are not the only animals that can communicate with each other. Apes, dogs, whales, ants and others do it through various means. But we are the only animal with words and grammars. Grammar allows words to become veritable skyscrapers of meaning. With language we can develop society, culture, technology, and history.

But think too about what language does for us. It allows each of us to become an individual self. Without words, we remain prisoners of our instincts and reflexes. We can only react to the outside, input determines output. After millions of years of evolution, the early hominids were very clever reactors. But to become an individual cable of rising above simply reacting to inputs, we must be able to think, to tell ourselves – to construct – stories of who we are, what we do and how we do it. We are what we can say we are. With language we move from being an “it” to being an “I.”

Everything modern science tells us leads to the conclusion that our mind is based on our brain and our brain on physiology. Yet we are also conscious, and that science cannot explain. It may be consciousness that provides the space for using language. Where does the next word that you will say come from? Who or what process is behind the curtain stringing our narratives together? Where exactly does it take place? Within our consciousness, we somehow generate our self using language. Then we somehow cross the boundary into the physical and our thoughts emerge from our mind and radiate outward through our brains into action, including speaking.

Perhaps we can call this something within a soul, with no judgement about where that might come from? And what might become of this soul when the body that provides it the mechanisms of perception, thought and language is no more?