Unintended Consequences

An article on National Geographic.

Real quick: unintended consequences. Any system is in a constant state of cyclical flux, (feedback loops, if you will) that is in balance at any point in time. The more complicated the system, the less obvious the connections between individual constituents of the system. For example, the dynamic of a two-child family is more complex than the heating system of their house, and the operation of their society is infinitely more complex than the family.

The more complex the system, the less likely it is that consequences of changing one element can be predicted.

We're seeing this across the board when it comes to climate change, which is why certain pundits now prefer the phrase "global weirding" to "global warming."

Again: 1- the earth's ecosystems are about as complex as they come.
2- We are seriously screwing with them.
3- Anybody who does not take this uncertainty (or, looking at historical examples of assuredness in the face of complete unknowability, the relative certainty of disaster) as the number one most important thing in any talks about climate change has the race handicapped poorly.

Of course, we're not just fudging with one or two things at a time here. We are fudging with everything in the global ecosystem, upon which humanity is precariously balanced. Who knows what's going to happen? Nobody. But, rather than write it off and say, "well, whatever happens isn't likely to be that big," we should be saying, "we're in a balance that has suited us well for thousands and thousands of years, and the likelihood of a new balance being in our favor is probably small."

It's ironic that this conservative value is so outside the mindset of the majority of today's political conservatives.

And, though this is an environmental example, it relates to almost every human choice. At the outset, options may appear clear, but one can never correctly judge what the consequence of the first choice will be. Instead of blindly trudging forward through ever changing circumstances, we need a much more flexible way of operating, one that makes a choice, looks at what happens, and only then moves on. Kaizen: my favorite Japanese word.

Four Philosophical Questions on the BBC

This is a response to a piece on the BBC's website, containing four knotty philosophical questions. I can answer each of them to my satisfaction, so I'd like to put my answers out there.

It would be helpful to read the original piece, as I'm not going to put the whole, lengthy questions here.

1- Should we kill healthy people for their organs?

No. While, in all three cases, the phrase "saving five people by killing one" applies, in the first case, "Bill" is in no jeopardy. It would be wrong to kill someone healthy who is not in danger of death against his will. In the second case it is not immoral to kill the individual, because all six people are already in jeopardy. If you don't kill one of them yourself, that person will die anyway, whereas Bill is in no such danger.

Now, in the third case, while the choice of which track to set the train rolling down seems to be taking someone who is not in danger, the single person tied to the alternate track, and killing him/her, it is not equivalent to Bill's case because Bill isn't tied to any train tracks! So, although in both cases you appear to be making a deliberate choice sacrificing one person (kill Bill for his organs, flip the switch to kill the individual on the tracks) to spare five people, the fact that the individual in the train example is tied to active train tracks places him or her in a danger that Bill is not in. I think this is why most people intuitively answer that it is not okay to kill Bill, but okay to let the train kill the individual tied to the tracks, and okay to kill the one hostage to set the five free.

2- Are you the same person who started reading this article?


The dichotomy between the statements "everything is constantly changing" and "nothing changes" is false, as the two statements of truth are only apparently different. In reality, all of these concepts we think of as being fundamentally opposed (say, motion and stillness, or freewill and fate) are different ways of looking at the same phenomenon, "being." Concept and language view separate phenomena, and the mistake is to say that they are separate, and therefore NOT UNIFIED. The paradox in "everything is in constant change" is, of course, that that rule itself is not subject to change, but this paradox doesn't mean there's something wrong with the world, or that this truth itself is wrong, it's pointing to the inability of language to grasp the nature of reality as being constantly changing, continuously unchanging, both constantly changing and unchanging, and neither changing nor unchanging, and all necessarily so. There is no possibility of "being" being anyway other than this, a can of worms for another time.

Similarly, the dichotomy between the subject and the object is conceptual/ perceptual, and built into the structure of reality, but not itself ultimately real. Again, reality is neither subjective nor objective, it is both at the same time. Everything in the phenomenal world is in constant change and only a part of the whole, and also at the same time ultimately the same as what does not change, being itself. The sense of unchanging identity comes from this center of your unchanging being, and this does not change, though everything phenomenal is fluid and changing.

So, what you think you are is totally different from what it was at the beginning of the article, and even from moment to moment. What you actually are, everything, has not changed.

3- Is that really a computer screen in front of you?

Closely related to the above, this question hinges on the belief in some "thing" that is "real," as opposed to "things" that are not real.

There is no "independent" check on your senses because there is no true "independence." There is no "thing" in the universe with any reality separate from the reality of the rest of the universe, a sticking point of materialism. There's no getting outside the system, because everything conceivable in any time point in space or dimension is the system.

But it's not just that it's impossible to verify what's really really real (say, where exactly the buck stops,) it's that the idea of something being really really real independently is mistaken.

Basically, the sentence "There is a computer screen in front of me" loses any meaning if it is meant in an ultimate sense, and not a practical one. Practically, there is a computer screen in front of you, right now. Ultimately, reality doesn't work this way.

4-Did you really choose to read this article?

Again, closely related to the above two questions.

All of these "stickler" questions come at the logical conclusions of two seemingly obvious lines of thought.

Again, we're placing too much emphasis on the "really real, independently real, truly and ultimately real" nature of our concepts and what they refer to. Free will and determinism are not contradictory, they are two ways of looking at determination of process, and are each shortcuts.

All is the Universe, and you are this as well, so, whatever you do is determined, ultimately, by whatever it is that determines everything, and that is also what you are in any real sense, so, really, you have ultimate free will, enough to seriously frighten most people. Saying that all of your choices are pre-determined doesn't rule out that you determined them yourself, but, again, our concept of the free agent of choice is only a shorthand. On the other side of the coin, let's say that the result of a choice is one of two extreme possibilities, either at that moment the universe splits and BOTH happen, ultimately meaning that every infinitely small moment creates an infinite amount of second-moments, and so on (which, though it seems perhaps counter-intuitive that there could be infinite to the infinite worlds out there, is less so if you remember the fact of infinity), or only one thing happens, and all the other possibilities fall back into nothing. Either way is entirely handcuffing the very free will affirmed above. Either every choice is played out in every possible fashion, in which case who "you" are is just an accident of whichever line you happen to be watching, or you can never un-choose what has happened, and can't say whether (since there is only one universe) what happened ever actually had a choice option, both deterministic in their ways. At the end of the day all of this conjecture is meaningless, it all rests on the incorrect assumption that free-will and choice are different possibilities. Things happen. You are a part of what makes them happen, in fact what "you" are is also what this is, so you have free-will, and further, you are not different from what is happening. Even the idea of acting on something different from you is mistaken, it is practical. There is also never any real alternative to what is, so there is no free will. These are both true at the same time, and really, neither of them is true at all, they're only ways of talking, of wrapping words (though not fruitlessly) around something that cannot be corralled. The universe is not what it appears, and, it is. Everything is oneness, everything is nothingness, oneness is nothingness.

Okay, feel free to add your own thoughts.

A way of thinking about Dennett's theory of consciousness: a vote, and decision making.

I was just thinking about an article I wrote about here when I thought of a much better (and topical) metaphor for the way consciousness works in the human brain according to Daniel Dennett.

For the non-clickers:

(From Dennett:)

'"I claim that consciousness is not some extra glow or aura or "quale" caused by the activities made possible by the functional organization of the mature cortex; consciousness is those various activities. One is conscious of those contents whose representations briefly monopolize certain cortical resources, in competition with many other representations. The losers—lacking "political clout" in this competition—quickly fade leaving few if any traces, and that’s the only difference between being a conscious content and being an unconscious content."'

(From myself:)
"Basically, there is no "little man" of consciousness sitting in your brain, editing what comes in and then sending it up to "you," a separate medium, to become conscious content. It is the sum total of the activities of the neurological system that is consciousness itself."

It was the term "political clout" that got me thinking about this, along with a few weeks of staring at polls every day, and a metaphor popped into my head, more helpful perhaps than the negative example of the little man in explaining what (I think) Dennett means: the vote for president.

What Dennett is saying, with this analogy, would be, "the final determination of who becomes the next president of the United States (the outcome of the process, or "consciousness,") is not some extra capital "V" vote, (quale or aura,) it is the activities of millions of voters voting. This may seem like no more than a tricky accounting method, but the distinction is important. It is also fairly obvious when talking about a vote, but perhaps not so much when talking about our own consciousness. There is no president in your head, no controlling piece that decides what to do and what to show, what becomes conscious and what not, but millions of separate components all clamoring for attention (millions of voters with their own individual preferences and requirements.) When they reach a critical mass, they "monopolize certain cortical resources," and you become aware of something.

In fact, when we choose a president we are basically doing what everybody intuits we are doing
and what Dennett says we are precisely not doing: putting a "little guy" in charge of it all at the top of the head who makes the decisions. We choose an arbitrary point (the first Tuesday in November on a four-year cycle) to gather the input of all these little contributors, and then, ceremoniously and ritually assign, for the next four years, the one person that was able to align himself most broadly with the contributors, the voters, to the job of "decider."

There is some feedback, in terms of media and public opinion polls, but for the most part this is not what is happening in our brains: it's what we think is happening. What is really happening, according to Dennett, is more as if there were a constant election, not for a representative but on issues of state, and whenever a person decided to throw his or her vote in a different direction, her or she would do so, and whenever a voting level reached some critical threshold, it would be enacted, or changed, say, at 65% approval a new law would be passed, or at 30% disapproval something would be revoked.

In this way, the brain is a tyrannic democracy.

Some other random thoughts that sprang from this idea:

In this light it becomes much more apparent how ritualized government is, how we try to approximate power and make it more practical and benificial to the most people, and how that changes over time due to the evolution of social and religious (ritual) beliefs, as in how a King, standing in for God, makes decisions that are the best for everyone in the kingdom in aggregate top-down, versus how a president, standing in for a symbolic unity of the country and the opinions of the people, makes decisions informed by the will from below (the people) and not imposing them from above (this is an ideal, obviously a certain current president feels somewhat more like a king according to this way of thinking, at least at times.)

Similarly, what we call the "ego," is no more than a fiction we put in place as a shorthand way of understanding the millions of little bits of information inside, outside, and created in the relation between inside and outside. As noted in my earlier blog, this is why I think buddhist philosophy would be quite comfortable with Dennett's work.

This is why government is ritualistic, the ultimate power is never coming from it, it is legitimized only in so far as it reflects the will of God, or the will of the people, the ultimate powers. What we call the ego is a puppet standing in for the real thing, standing in for "will," (wherever you think that is coming from, an entirely different discussion) acting out ritually as if in a play. It is, first and foremost, an abstraction.

This idea of a threshold being met that changes everything is rather prevelent in nature, and seems to be one of the key ways in which things work. (Chronicled from a slightly different angle in Malcolm Gladwell's book Blink.) Neuron firings are a good example. Neurons constantly exchange ions coming in and out of their cell bodies, and electrical gradients are constantly changing, without triggering a change in the cell. But as soon as a critical charge is reached, as soon as the electrical gradient is overwhelmingly positive, for example, the electron fires.

Anyone who has watched a baby grow or learned something new him or herself (especially as an adult, when you tend to be more aware of these types of things) would likely be familiar with this as well. Practice (as discussed in the book Mastery) alternates between brief periods of incredible progress, followed by long plateus where nothing seems to change. I have noticed this playing the guitar, and also learning Chinese, as well as in practicing tai ji/ qi gong. Every day for four months it seems like I can't string two freaking sentences together, and then, as if by magic, two weekends ago, I'm babbling along without stopping, my accent got better exponentially, and my accessible vocabulary improved. I had, of course, been working on all of these things the whole time, but they didn't show any tangible improvement, or any steady improvement, until they all did all together all at once.

Think of it this way, perhaps: you are on a certain "level" of your practice, and there are 100 buttons. You need to push 70 of them to move on to the next level, but you also need to learn a certain technique to push each one individually, and learning each takes time and practice, and the buttons only stay depressed a certain amount of time. As you get better and better at pushing certain buttons individually, more and more stay depressed, until finally it "clicks," you've gotten 70 of the buttons depressed simultaneously and suddenly you're in a whole new world, you're on another level, and you have to start all over again exploring from here. Of course, on this new level, the options open to you are much much wider. And, of course, this is a only a silly analogy, though there may be some truth to it.

The worry about global warming stems from this idea. People aren't concerned that gradually, over the next hundred or two hundred years, things will change. Those concerned are worried because in a comparative instant, thousands of species will go extinct, the earth will become five degrees warmer, sea levels will rise in the meters, and floods will inundate lands. Again, not in isolated and separate incidents, but basically all together. The havok that this will wreck on civilization is one thing, but it may knock out the whole species. We just don't know, we don't know what will happen after the moment of change.

There's a variety pack for you to chew on.

China, and Sloppy Thinking (v. David Brooks)

An Op-Ed in the Times by David Brooks, where he summarizes an extremely important cultural difference between the West and China, and talks about several theories on why it may be, though, obviously, who knows?

But there are great problems in thinking this way. I don't have the answers, of course, but I would at least like to add something to the conversation.

"When the psychologist Richard Nisbett showed Americans individual pictures of a chicken, a cow and hay and asked the subjects to pick out the two that go together, the Americans would usually pick out the chicken and the cow. They’re both animals. Most Asian people, on the other hand, would pick out the cow and the hay, since cows depend on hay. Americans are more likely to see categories. Asians are more likely to see relationships."

There are other famous studies exploring the difference in the way citizens of developed nations organize information from rural people in developing nations. What they found was similar to the above: Asked to pick out which object didn't fit in a group, the developed nation's citizens picked "wood," from a group that included "wood, saw, hammer, and ax," noting the relationship between tools, but the rural people were confused, seeing basically no connection, and most often picked "hammer," since both a "saw" and an "ax" can be used to cut "wood."

The point, though, is that there is a relationship between "cow," and "chicken," but it's not a practical one, it's an abstract one. The study, if I remember correctly, was about the effect of education and reading on the way the brain organizes information, and it also showed that adults who learned recently to read also began to make abstract rather than practical connections, that it was not simply children who had been well educated that made this connection.

So, is this an East-West difference, or a difference in educational methods? The East is famous for rote learning, while the West values (ideally) the fostering of thinking itself, as a way to make previously unnoticed connections and to problem-solve. Ask any High school student in China what date an historical event happened, and they'll likely be able to, especially if they're preparing for the Gao Kao, a test that compares to our SATs as The Joker compares to your average bank robber. Ask them why that date is important, and they may be strapped to think of anything. A western student may just be b.-s.ing, but they'll be able to construct some sort of argument, which is ironic due to Brooks' statement that the context is so important to the Chinese. (Obviously, both what and how are important in learning.)

I do not know what the difference is due to, but I would be wary of making claims one way or the other.

He continues:

"But what happens if collectivist societies snap out of their economic stagnation? What happens if collectivist societies, especially those in Asia, rise economically and come to rival the West? A new sort of global conversation develops."

Really? What about Japan? Famously, Japanese companies are run like feudal empires, and are loathe to change (not change of, say, methods or reacting to markets, with this they do very well (look up Kaizen) but structurally, and yes, culturally. But even this is changing. Articles in the Times a few months ago chronicled the rise of employees suing their companies for various damages. Japanese mainstream society has only existed outside of strict feudalism for seventy years, and China, it could be argued, is still mostly a peasant, folk culture, growing towards modernity and away from traditional roots, and it has only been doing this for thirty years. Change appears to happen quickly, if not all-at-once, but, in reality, it is often a painstakingly slow process, especially in the earliest stages. It takes generations, plural, not twenty years. I cannot say that China will become more liberal and Western internally (though externally they have co-opted quite a bit) but I would certainly be sensible enough to be more patient about it. After all, the Enlightenment started hundreds of years ago, and people still aren't all that enlightened, even though they may personally think they're great.

And then:
"For one thing, there are relatively few individualistic societies on earth. For another, the essence of a lot of the latest scientific research is that the Western idea of individual choice is an illusion and the Chinese are right to put first emphasis on social contexts."

This is certainly true, which is (conversely) why I think it is so important to emphasize every individual's development along the lines they wish to pursue. Like economics, where local conditions reflected in prices contain far more "knowledge" overall than central planners can ever have, the individual knows what is best for him/her, and can make choices accordingly, whether those choices are driven by "free-will" or by the context the choices are made in (obviously, this is far too complex a subject to tackle here.) Ultimately, I think the distinction is irrelevant. No matter how the choices are being made, the individual and the society are better off if someone can make a personal "choice." The problem with putting the emphasis on social contexts is that, as in China, where this is overtly so, it leads to a very rigid social structure where one is expected to do one and only one correct thing according to the circumstances, entirely denying that individual difference exists (I have come up against this again and again here. Fortunately, since I am not Chinese, my choices and conduct are taken with a grain of salt, and quite often admired, in the "Oh I wish I could do that" sort of way.) Again, wherever the "choices" are coming from, it is clear that offered different options, different people will do different things.

In any case, the West is not done developing either. Yes, we're depressed, yes, we need healthier communities, yes, we need more social ties etc. etc., but we're coming to see that, and, as individuals, choosing to deal with it. Isn't that preferable to somebody sitting in an office looking at statistics and saying, "hmmm, we should somehow coerce older people into more exercise." Perhaps the example goes to far, but I'm sure you get the point.

This is why I think this article is dangerous, almost.

"The rise of China isn’t only an economic event. It’s a cultural one. The ideal of a harmonious collective may turn out to be as attractive as the ideal of the American Dream."

This dream, as we have seen throughout history, and this way of thinking about humans and the rights of individuals, has led to the worst tragedies of human history, not the least of them in China itself, during the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution. Importantly, free societies never do this, and Authoritarian societies really like to.

And, as hinted at above, the American Dream has always included a social dream. Making it to the top certainly does not preclude community, and often those who have won their American Dream are the most prominent of social benefactors.

"It’s certainly a useful ideology for aspiring autocrats."

Exactly.

I will be writing later on the rise of China economically and politically, hopefully before the Olympics are done.

Keep Thinking.