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.
Social media and the Internet enable the formation of virtual crowds. Crowds may always be, or become, dangerous.
A friend recently asked me to explain why such large numbers of people – in this case Americans – have come to accept the same body of extreme beliefs. In my mind, this meant the extreme white nationalist and anti-government sentiments that erupted on January 6, 2021. I immediately thought of Freud’s Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego. For Freud, society rests on the coercive agency of the Superego (das Uberich) implanted as the child faces its dependency on the world beyond it. This explained for him the peculiarities of crowd psychology – the ready response to Leaders, the need for authority and the eagerness to use or accept repression.
For Freud, the Leader defines the crowd (Masse), taking the place of the internal agent of outside authority (the Superego) left behind by childhood. A crowd is a collection of people mobilized not around a common interest or purpose per se but around a stand-in for the father, be it a collective Superego (ideology or belief/faith instrumentality), a Leader, a hero or a personalized god. This state of dependence is based upon shared feelings of fear and guilt that give outlet to the ambivalence the child directs at the father. Erotic ties (Eros) bind together individuals to each other and to the Leader, around whom all revolves.* The Leader serves as the object for this longing and defines, as father-surrogate, the relation in which all are united as "brothers" in submission to him.
The erotic tie between Leader and follower takes the form of an identification that brings the former into the psyche via the Superego, repeating the process that established it through identification with the first parental authority. Individuals in a crowd thereby come to share the same Superego, submitting to it, in like manner, their individual selves. Crowds, says Freud, are made up of "a number of individuals who have one and the same object in the place of their ideal self and have consequently identified themselves with one another sharing the same [surrendered] self (das Ich)." This bond through identification denies the crowd any critical faculties the individuals, as individuals, may possess and leaves them vulnerable to control by "suggestion."
The crowd represents a return to the primitive horde; in both we find "an individual of superior strength among a troop of equal companions." Freud suggests that fear and anxiety are always at the edge of crowd behavior, tending to increase, not decrease, in the face of challenges to the ties that bind individuals together. The individual in a crowd feels a need for authority that manifests in the submission of his self to the Leader. The Leader has this role because in "...the mass of mankind there is a powerful need for an authority who can be admired, before whom one bows down, by whom one is led and perhaps even ill treated."
For Freud, the principle phenomenon of mass psychology is the individual's "lack of freedom." Civilized man has exchanged a portion of his liberty for a portion of security. Submerged in a crowd, people behave like a collective neurotic. Freud saw such behavior as symptomatic of society, with its origin in the repression of desire and the consequent implantation within each individual of a Superego serving as the internal agent of that repression. The individual is directed toward submission to a Leader or to the over zealousness of compulsive morality continuing the infantile relationship to authority. Over a lifetime, the individual's character and identity are built, largely unconsciously, around that ready submission. The exercise of consciousness is never fully developed and the self is never free to author its rational being.
Culture's reliance on repression (and the other forms of psychic defense) and its extraction of surplus control subjects the individual to an ever increasing burden of guilt even as actual control of desire diminishes. As culture – especially in its Western, capitalist guise – affords humanity more and “better” ways of gaining satisfaction, it creates a larger and larger realm of potential satisfaction it must control. Control inevitably weakens and results in a situation where the erotic drives are only weakly held in check. The aggressive drives, always hard to restrain, become ever more difficult to control as they are increasingly deployed to master the erotic drives. The individual, trapped in this escalating conflict and spiral of anxiety, suffers increasing existential unease (Unbehagen). For we Americans – with a shallow history, a consumer-oriented culture and relatively vast riches unequally distributed – many are ready to "break loose" at any time.
I’ve taken this dive into Freud to get to my further point. In the age of mass social media, crowds may now form virtually. Without direct face-to-face contact, people can come to share a collective consciousness built around submission to some shared beliefs personified by a Leader. The social media niches where such virtual crowds mingle can intensify these beliefs into extreme forms. When the members of these groups actually do come together, they are vulnerable to the Leader’s suggestion and to the apparent dictates of their shared belief system, rational or mostly not. Then all hell can break loose.
* For Freud, Eros is more than sexuality, it’s a longing for something we do not have, for completeness, for other, for beauty, for the good.
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 21st 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 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.
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.
"They say and do not." But the kingdom of God is not in word, but in Power. He talketh of prayer, of repentance, of faith, and of the new birth; but he knows but only to talk of them. I have been in his family, and have observed him both at home and abroad; and I know what I say of him is the truth. His house is as empty of religion as the white of an egg is of savour. There is there neither prayer nor sign of repentance for sin; yea, the brute in his kind serves God far better than he. He is the very stain, reproach, and shame of religion, to all that know him; it can hardly have a good word in all that end of the town where he dwells, through him. Thus say the common people that know him, A saint abroad, and a devil at home. His poor family finds it so; he is such a churl, such a railer at and so unreasonable with his servants, that they neither know how to do for or speak to him. Men that have any dealings with him say it is better to deal with a Turk than with him; for fairer dealing they shall have at their hands. This Talkative (if it be possible) will go beyond them, defraud, beguile, and overreach them. Besides, he brings up his sons to follow his steps; and if he findeth in any of them a foolish timorousness, (for so he calls the first appearance of a tender conscience,) he calls them fools and blockheads, and by no means will employ them in much, or speak to their commendations before others. For my part, I am of opinion, that he has, by his wicked life, caused many to stumble and fall; and will be, if God prevent not, the ruin of many more.... Paul calleth some men, yea, and those great talkers, too, sounding brass and tinkling cymbals.
John Bunyan, The Pilgrims Progress
Came across this while reading Bunyan. Not sure how I got into it but it's difficult to put down. The Pilgrims Progress is deep at the source of the evangelical stream of Christianity. Bunyan eschews human law, secular morality and government in favor of the Bible as written. He urges ignoring the visible in favor of the invisible, i.e., the Biblical God. Trump finds his support base among those immersed in this Pilgrim stream. And he's all Talkative.
Annaka Harris' fascinating book makes the case that consciousness may be an inherent property of all matter and for the possibility of modern theories of panpsychism. However, she suggests that the concept of the self is an illusion and cannot define consciousness. Consciousness may well be — I believe is — a fundamental property of the universe. But I do not believe that the concept of the self is an illusion. Rather the self is a construct arising from the complex information processing in our brain that allows experiencing. Harris follows Thomas Nagel in defining consciousness as "being like something," i.e. having subjective experiences. But seems to me that there can be no “being like something“ without a self to be like. (A rock has no self.) Consciousness may be everywhere and in everything but to become an experience, it needs language — to tell its story — and gives birth to culture. Culture is perhaps the most powerful result of consciousness. Culture includes science, politics and social ordering and is the basis of civilization.
Harris also discusses the "combination problem" of panpsychism raised by David Chalmers. (How could the many little bits of consciousnesses attached to everything come together to form one consciousness like ours?) But there is no combination problem in a fundamental approach to panpsychism because consciousness is simply a potential or tag-along property of matter, perhaps available to or forming a higher level self. (Might a star — possessing vast complexity — have an experience of self, of being a star?) When connected to processing capable of forming a self, that bit of consciousness “pinches off” from the sea of consciousness (and perhaps from a higher order of complexity). (See my The Cosmic Design and the Designer.)
