Everyone Speaks

My nine year old son failed a grammar test at school. He is an A student so this was unusual. In talking with him about it, most of his mistakes were careless. Some mistakes were the using of non-words like “funner”. The conversation gave me a spooky feeling of déjà vu. It is exactly what I would have done at his age.

At that age, I would have used the non-word “funner” because it seemed logical to me. I would have looked at “more fun” as an arbitrary and confusing. I would have been suborn about this and frustrated my teacher.

Now that I am older, I have a deeper understanding of grammar that I wish my teacher could have explained to me. It is based on a simple and obvious observation: everybody speaks.

We do not all speak that same language but we all speak a language. We do this naturally, no matter our culture or education. Language is a natural capability of the human brain and thus so is, to some extent, grammar. It is located in the temporal lobes. It is not logical the way a computer is or even the way the cerebral cortex is. It is the product of evolution. The brain’s rules of grammar are, for the most part, not explicitly known.

The grammar we learn in school is a social convention that attempts to place rules on the brain’s grammar. It is full of exceptions because the way we naturally speak is full of exceptions due to the structure of the human brain. The non-word “funner” just naturally sounds a bit awkward compared to “more fun”. That could be due to some difficulty in hearing or pronouncing the double “n”. Or it could be due to something in the temporal lobe of the brain that science has not yet figured out.

The grammar conventions are important so we can talk to a very large number of people easily and automatically and without the distraction of unexpected grammar. If I had this insight when I was nine years old, I would have understood the value of learning grammar and put more effort into it.

Being aware of your temporal lobe is an opportunity for creativity. You can play with words like “You are funner than the funnest funster.” This awareness and cross-connecting of different parts of the brain is the essence of deep thought.

Moore's Law

In 1970, when I was in third grade, I went on a field trip to a laboratory at Stanford. A scientist showed me some little gold chips and said something like “remember these, they will be important in your life”. I did not understand at the time but I remembered and he was right.

In sixth grade, my teacher was giving me a hard time about my inability to spell. I remember telling her that, when I got older, machines would do my spelling.

Moore's Law states that computing power doubles roughly every two years. It is why your cell phone has more computing power than an Apollo rocket. Moore’s law has held up amazingly well for the last 40 years. Many have predicted an end to it and have been proven wrong. But it is mathematically impossible for Moore’s law to continue indefinitely and I think we are reaching the end, probably within the next decade. We are hitting physical limits where transistors are getting close to atomic level in size and quantum effects will prevent them from getting any smaller.

I have never been a big fan of artificial intelligence or what cyberpunk writers call "The Singularity”. It might make for an interesting story but it is not real. Computers are tools with limitations.

As we hit the limits of semiconductor technology, I think we have an opportunity to discover some fundamental truths about the nature of information and about who we are and what we are not.

Self Awareness Matters

It is impossible to do science without presupposing free will. Someone has to create the experiment and observe the results. This is a paradox. Science assumes the world is deterministic yet the observer cannot be.

We all behave as if we have free will. Some may believe that it is an illusion and if we only knew enough about the brain we could determine someone's thoughts and actions. But I do not think so. Studying the brain will only tell us what free will is not. It will tell us about the tools we have to observe and interact with the world. It cannot tell us what free will is in a deterministic way because science requires free will to exist in a non-deterministic way.

Historically, both determinism and non-determinism have been part of human thought since the beginning. But, historically, determinism has not held the dominant position in thought that it does today. Today, people get so amazed by the wonders of technology that they forget this fundamental paradox.

For me this paradox is a window to spirituality. I was raised Catholic, going to parochial schools and mass on Sundays. I struggled with religion in college and eventually gave it up. I agree with my educated friends that organized religion has a lot of superstition but I do not dismiss it as only being that.

Prior to free will and determinism, there is self awareness. To exercise free will you must be aware of "you". And, by extension, aware of others. A psychopath may have a brain defect that prevents this self awareness but that does not mean this awareness is a deterministic function of the brain. In means the brain is necessary for self awareness but not necessarily sufficient.

Dolphins are self aware in many respects, probably more self aware that any other species besides human. This would appear to be a case of convergent evolution. But convergent evolution occurs in similar environments and humans and dolphins have completely different environments. Science may one day resolve this but for now it would appear to be a fantastic coincidence. There is another possibility. Perhaps the evolution of self awareness is not completely deterministic.

We are alone

We have been listening for radio signals from extraterrestrial intelligent life for over 50 years now and have found nothing. If intelligent life existed in our galactic vicinity and was interested in contacting us, we probably would have pick something up. The data we have is limited but so far it indicates that no intelligent life exists nearby.

Evolution has a core principle that humans are nothing special. We may in fact be maladaptive and drive ourselves extinct through destruction of our environment. According to evolution, roaches are much more successful than humans.

But what if we humans, as intelligent, self aware, space travelers are a million to one chance happening, a billion to one chance, a trillion to one chance. At some point, the story of evolution becomes totally inadequate as a description of who we are, where we came from, and where we are going. It is not that evolution is wrong. It is just that as a human core narrative, it is about as meaningful as gravity.

Just consider the possibility that we humans are alone in the universe. It is scary to contemplate as it puts enormous responsibility on us. On our survival rests the survival of intelligent life – period.

The Highlander

When I was on the sub, a fascination developed among the crew over the movie The Highlander.

The movie is about an immortal born in Scotland in 1536 who can only be killed by decapitation. Through the centuries, he meets other immortals, some of whom he allies with and some he battles. The final showdown is with his arch enemy, a Slavic looking barbarian.

On the sub, men would make costumes and props from the movie and re-enact scenes. Lines from the movie would often find there way into conversations. Though no one in the crew ever mentioned it and I am not sure they were even aware of it, the parallels to the Cold War are obvious. The Highlander was adopted as a myth that personalized the titanic fight we were in. Something we also never really talked about.

In the build up of Operation Desert Shield, I asked the wardroom what they thought about the coming war. They unanimously responded that we were not going to war. As if we were going to deploy half a million men to Saudi Arabia and just sit there. Or worse, remove them and tell Sadam “just kidding”. The men on my ship did not understand even the basics on world politics. It was not that they were dumb, in fact, they were the smartest people I ever worked with. But they were engineers and technicians concerned with keeping the ship running and just did not care about politics.

On a deeper level, they did understand. They were The Highlander, and, when it comes to immortals, there can be only one.

Where are the aliens?

The Fermi paradox is that, if Earth is not unique, there should be many alien civilizations. Given that the galaxy is 13.2 billion years old, has 100 billion stars and is 100,000 light years across, and we should have been contacted. So where are they? One obvious answer is that the Earth is unique and there are no aliens. There are lots of possible explanations for this such as the unexplained evolution of eukaryotic cells.

The other explanation I find plausible is the aliens do not want to contact us.

There are many possible reasons why an alien civilization might not want to contact us. Perhaps they consider it risky. Not so much that we would attack them but that we would give away their location to another civilization that would. Perhaps the universe is a dangerous place and we are being foolish to broadcast that we are here. Another possibility is that the aliens consider us more valuable without contact. Like we are some kind of experiment that will yield useful information.

If we discover aliens, it will be the greatest discovery ever. If we discover aliens do not exist, it will be the greatest discovery ever. Work on this discovery can progress on several fronts. We can build better telescopes, we can send a probe to another star, we can figure out how eukaryotic cells (and thus multi-celled organisms) evolved.

Reserve Officer Training Corp (ROTC)

"The Nation that makes a great distinction between its scholars and its warriors will have its thinking done by cowards and its fighting done by fools." Thucydides (c. 460-400 B.C.).

In this quote, the Greek historian is trying to explain how Athens, the world's first democracy, has lost a war with Sparta, a smaller nation that makes absolutely no distinction between scholars and warriors.

The debate is raging again about the ban many liberal arts colleges have on ROTC. ROTC is a program where the US military pays a student's college tuition. The student is commissioned as an officer upon graduation and must serve on active duty for 4-8 years. During the Vietnam war, many top liberal arts colleges baned ROTC and that ban remains in effect today.

I re-invented ROTC at Emory University during my freshman year in 1982. I drove across town to Georgia Tech and walked into the Navy ROTC building and asked for a scholarship. I was the first ROTC student at Emory since Vietnam. The following year, four more Emory students join Navy ROTC: eight more the year after that. Then the Emory faculty voted to ban students from joining ROTC through Georgia Tech and there were no more Emory ROTC students after the thirteen of us.

While at Emory, I attend a new class called "Perspectives on Nuclear War". It consisted of series of lectures from the heads of various departments: Physics, English, History, Political Science, Medicine. President Carter gave a lecture to this class. At the beginning of the class, we were asked if we knew of anyone who would be a good speaker for the class. I said that the commander of my ROTC unit was a ballistic missile submarine captain and I could ask him to speak. The faculty was not interested. The reason they gave was that the military was under civilian control.

This was at a time of high Cold War tension. Russia had almost launched a first strike due to misinterpreting a NATO war game (we did not know this at the time). Communication with our handful of ballistic missile submarines at sea is extremely limited and unreliable. In a war, it would be men like the commander of my ROTC unit that would be making the critical decisions.

The military needs liberal arts educated officers and ROTC is the most effective program for attracting the brightest minds to serve. Otherwise, the military will be totally dominated by the graduates of the military academies. I served with many graduates of Annapolis. They generally thought very differently from me. For starters, they were all trained as engineers which is valuable since our Navy relies heavily on technology. But they were generally poor at thinking creatively and at dealing with people. This dynamic between the Annapolis officers and the ROTC officers is the theme in several classic Hollywood films: The Caine Mutiny, Mr Roberts, Crimson Tide. The military needs the ROTC officers in order to adapt quickly to changing situations in war. Otherwise you end up with situations like leading charges against entrenched machine guns in WWI or having your fortresses bypassed by a blitzkrieg in WWII.

It is ironic that the military understands the need for ROTC while the faculty of the liberal arts universities, who profess to be open minded, do not.