Self awareness matter II

What is the computing power of the brain?  Well, it is so vast, no one really has any idea.  There are some expensive research programs that are using some of the fastest arrays of supercomputers to model a neuron.  But these programs are only modeling  the inputs and outputs of a neuron, not the processing that goes on inside a single neuron, which is vast.  The human brain has about 80 billion neurons with 100 trillion connections. 

Current technology (microscopes and phosphorescence) can record 80,000 neurons firing a second.  That is one millionth of the number of neurons in the human brain.  Neurons fire at a rate of about once a millisecond so that is one thousand times faster than is currently recordable.  So just to record the neurons firing in the human brain, current technology is nine orders of magnitude short.  Plus a neuron firing is not a binary operation but a very complex phenomenon that transmits much more than one bit of information.  No one really knows how much data is transmitted in a neuron firing.  And again this take no consideration of the processing going on inside the neuron.  Plus, the tools to analyses the information from recording 80,000 neurons firing a second is still quite basic and has not yielded much of use.  I am sure this technology will continue to improve and make useful discoveries but it is so far from modeling the  human brain that it is just guess work to know even how many ordered of magnitude it has to go.  We do not understand many basic questions about how the brain operates such as how the brain stores information.

The movies like to show us robots that look, think, and act like humans (The Terminator series, Ex-Machina, on and on).  It is easier for the movie makers to use humans for robots than to try to build an actual robot.  The same goes for time travel.  Instead of trying to build a whole new futuristic set, they just have the future travel back to our time and look like us.  They just saved millions of dollars in production costs.  But these are just stories.  You can not go back in time and you can not build a human brain out of silicon chips.  It is just never going to happen.

Many reasonable people are quick to assume that the brain is simply a deterministic machine.  I am sure many scientists at the dawn of the industrial age thought the brain was some kind of hydrolic or mechanical geared machine like a stream engine, the leading technology at the time.  Now people think the brain is some kind of digital information processor.   They will tell you that consciousness and free will are illusions.  If pressed, they will often resort to ad hominem attacks, which I find ironic.  I find no basis for giving up on the idea of free will.  Free will is an experience that I have prior to the deterministic world.  Extrapolating the relatively paltry processing power of computers to what the brain does seems a particularly ludicrous argument against free will.

The Cartel

When Walmart successfully sued Visa/MasterCard for monopoly practices, Visa/MasterCard appealed to the Supreme Court.  Several industry trade associations petitioned the Supreme Court to overturn the decision.  These trade associations were:

Banking
Insurance
Automobile Manufacturing
Pharmaceuticals
Railroads
Oil
Chemical
Fertilizer

Why would these trade associations weigh in on the side of Visa/MasterCard in an antitrust suite?  It is because they are concerned about a similar lawsuit against them.  All these industries are operating as monopolies.  This is a rare and clear showing of what I will call "The Cartel" that has control of our economy.  The Cartel is the 800 pound gorilla in the room that no one is talking about.

For example, the oil industry operated as a cartel.  The price of oil is volatile and seems to currently be fluctuating between $40/barrel and $120/barrel on a roughly five year cycle.  The price at the gas pump roughly follows this.  But the price of oil company stocks has almost no relation to the price of oil.  How can this be?  It is because the oil market is not operating as a free market.  Investors can not invest directly in oil as a commodity like they can in virtually all other commodities.  An investor, such as a hedge fund, can not buy a barrel of oil and sell it five years later.  The price of a barrel of oil is a totally artificial price set by the oil companies.

Breaking up the cartel would have an enormous positive impact on the US and world economy.  It is THE source of most of our economic problems.  The problem is not that the US economy is facing greater competition from abroad.  This should be a good thing.  The problem is that we are not competitive at home. 

The way to fix this is straight forward.  Antitrust laws already exist.  They just need to be enforced.

Break the deadlock, balance your vote.

I am going to get preachy.  That’s normally a bad thing but, for this particular topic, it is necessary.  I would like you to consider balancing your vote and by that I mean voting for at least one candidate in each of the two parties every election.  Now before you freak out, let me finish.

There is more to a candidate than just party affiliation.  There is more to a candidate than the issues.  Candidates should be judged on who they are as a person.  Qualities like honesty, work ethic, charisma, management skill, relevant experience, intelligence.  Can this candidate inspire people to do their best?  Can this candidate get things done?  These are the questions we need to ask.

When you vote all for one party, you are not considering these qualities.  The odds that one party has all the best candidates for every position are pretty much zero.

I bet you are wondering why when your party gets elected, very little of what they promised gets done.  Well if you always vote for the same party, the problem is you.  Your party leadership knows all they need to do is pay lip service to your issues and you will vote for them regardless of how much they deliver or who they run for office.  They know as long as they can keep the election about the issues and not the candidates, they have your vote.  It is easy for them.  It is lazy of you.

So consider this.  The deadlock is not in Congress.  The deadlock is in your head.  Find a candidate in the other party to vote for in the next election.

The Protests

Seoul - 1991

When I got out of the Navy, I had several weeks of vacation time that I was never able to take.  I went on what the Navy calls “terminal leave”.  I processed out of the Navy but continued to get paid for several weeks.  I was technically still in the Navy during this time and I was allowed to keep my ID card.  I hopped on an Air Force cargo plane and went to Korea.

At the time, there were videos on the news of large student protests in Seoul.  The students would gather on a street at a time and place that was not announced to the public.  The Korean government responded with tear gas and water cannons.  By the time I got there, the US military had banded its personnel from entering Seoul but I went anyway.

I found the city mostly deserted that day.  There were Korean soldiers at most intersections and armored cars with water cannons at the larger intersections.  A few businessmen were going to/from work.  There were no tourist, women, or children on the streets.  No shopping.  The museums were open and eerily empty.

For lunch, I bought a bowl of noodles from a street vender and sat down at a picnic table in a park to eat it.  A man dressed in a suit in his late 50’s sat down across from me.  He was friendly and spoke fluent English.  He told me he had been an interpreter for the US Army during the Korean war.  He asked me who I was and what I was doing there and I told him.  He could tell I was military from my haircut.  We talked about politics and Korean history and American culture.  I had a map of Seoul and had marked out several tourist places I wanted to see.  He studied my map carefully and said he would go with me.

As we walked through Seoul, each time we passed a group of soldiers, he would stop and talk to the squad leader.  I could not tell what he was saying but I could tell he outranked everyone we passed.  I never saw any protests that day.  The whole city was quite.  At the end of the day, he rode the bus with me halfway back to the air base I was stay at.  He asked me to write down my name and contact information for him, which I did.  I got the impression that he was grateful to the US military for saving Korea.  I enjoyed our conversations that day and I never had any trouble with him or the Korean government.

Colombia - 1995

I went on a human rights fact finding mission to Colombia with Witness for Peace.  There were seven of us, five Americans and two Colombians.  There was widespread violence in Colombia and virtually no foreigners.  US embassy personnel were not allowed to leave Bogotá. 

Shortly after we arrived, we found out about a protest that was going on in a small town named Castillo in the Colombian Amazon and decided to go.  It was an extremely remote.  As we approached, we noticed the small farms were abandoned.  In the town we found about a thousand people camped out in the plaza and the Colombian army patrolling the parameter.  We shocked everyone when we showed up.

We had a letter from the president of Colombia explaining who we were and granting us freedom to move around the country.  We showed it to the Army officer in charge and there was a tense moment where he decided what to do with us.  He let us pass.  He could just as easily arrested us.  Inside the plaza, people were living in tents they constructed out of plastic sheeting.  They had been there for a week.  Sanitation was poor.  These people were substance farmers, peasants, campasinos.  The campasinos had put up a rope around the plaza and asked the military to say out of it, which they did.  I videoed the whole scene. 

They had come in from the countryside because they were being killed by a gang supported by the region's large cattle ranchers.  The process was simple.  The gang would put a notice on the door of the farmer’s house telling him to get off his land.  If he did not leave, he was killed.  There was a communist rebel group in the area too that was fighting the rancher’s gang.  The communist would take food and supplies from the campasinos but generally did not kill them.  The army actively fought the communist rebels and allowed the rancher gangs to operate freely.

We met with the town’s elected communist mayor who was in his early twenties.  He was feeding his baby Coca-cola while we talked to him.  Several previous majors had been assassinated.  He struck me as a nice, honest, simple guy who was either very brave or unaware of the danger he was in.  

The campasenos could not hold out much longer.  They needed to get back to their farms and take care of their animals.  An agreement was reached in which the government promised to help protect the farmers and they went home.  We went back to Bogota and debriefed the CIA at the US Embassy.   Then we went to Medellin. 

The mayor of Castillo was assassinated shortly after our visit.  A nun that had helped us get there was threatened and had to leave the country.

In meeting with human rights activist throughout Colombia, I always asked them what I could do, as an American, to help them.  The US government had minimal influence in Colombia so this was not an easy question to answer.  The answer I got was always the same – “close the School of the Americas”.

School of the Americas  - 1997

There was a big difference between the Colombian army and the US Army.  You could see it in the eyes of the civilians.  The Colombians were terrified of their army.

The School of the Americas is a US Army school located at Fort Benning, Georgia that trains soldiers from Latin American.  The school has trained some of the world’s worst thugs who have committed many massacres.  By 1997, documents had leaked showing that the school taught torture techniques.  This was before Guantanamo and was a major scandal.  Father Roy had created and ran SOA Watch to shut down the school.  I joined their protest at Fort Benning in the fall of 1997.

There were thousands of protesters at the gate to Fort Benning and I was among 600 people who walked into the base.  We were quickly arrested.  We were taken to a fenced field.  We were processed at a tent where our pictures and fingerprints were taken.  We were treated well.  We were given hot soup and sandwiches.  A school bus was driven in so the elderly could get out of the cold.  After about six hours, we were released.

The Army decided to prosecute 21 of the 600 of us.  These were the people who had trespassed at Fort Benning the previous year and I was not among them.  I watched the trial.  The Federal judge was demented and could not stay awake during the trial.  The only thing he was capable of was declaring a guilty verdict and sentencing the maximum.  The 21 charged spent six months in jail each.  The judge had no business being there and should have been forcibly retired.  But the Army knew this would happen and did it anyway.

The protests continued with thousands of people and hundreds of arrests and prison sentences to people who were acting selflessly on their consciences.  The Army changed the name of the school but nothing else about the school changed and it remains open today.  The protests continue.

Today

Today the US has Guantanamo and probably secret CIA prisons were we torture suspected terrorists.  I would not have imagined this possible twenty years ago.  We seem to have done a serious backslide on human rights.  I have kids now so I do not do protests anymore.  Maybe I will do protests again when my kids are older. 

Men are animals.

Gonochoristic is the opposite of hermaphroditic. In gonochoristic reproduction, individuals are either male or female but not both. About 3-4% of plant species are gonochoristic. The rest of plant species are hermaphriditic. A few animal species are hermaphraditic, mostly mollusks. The vast majority of animal species are gonochoristic. Hermaphroditic reproduction is much more efficient than gonochoristic reproduction because all individuals can reproduce. Hermaphroditic reproduction can be obligatory out breed to achieve the similar genetic diversity as gonochoristic reproduction.

So what is it about a species' mobility that makes gonochoristic reproduction such an advantage?

Insects are gonochoristic and they are the epitome of mobile. They are highly adaptable, with short life spans and large numbers of offspring per generation. The variety of insects is staggering. Butterflys and dragonflys migrate with the seasons hundreds of miles over several generations. Butterfly metamorph to completely different body plans. Yet in all their adaptation, no insect species is hermaphroditic.

Gonochoristic reproduction is faster adapting than hermaphriditic reproduction. By having two distinct sexes, a species can divide its risks. Males can take on more risks than females. This allows the species to reap the benefits of the risking with half the exposure. Lets take for example the amount of fur a mammal grows to protect itself from the cold. Suppose the females could grow and loose fur with the temperature change while males must keep a fixed amount of fur. Male fur follows a normal distribution with some males having a lot of fur and some having little but they do not grow more or less of it. Now suppose the climate radically cools down to the point that half the males freeze to death while most of the females grow more fur and survive. The next generation will have much more fur since they inherit this trait from the surviving males. Also, the population is little impacted since most of the females survive. Now imagine this same scenario with hermaphroditic reproduction. Almost all the individual grow more fur and survive. The hermaphroditic species is very slow to adapt at the genetic level and can not compete with the gonochoristic species.

This could explain things like why men have weaker immune systems than women. It is adaptive to the survival of the species. By some of the men dying of disease, the next generation is more resistant. A species with a stronger male immune system could not compete with a species with a weaker male immune system.

Gonochoristic reproduction is faster adapting while hermaphroditic reproduction is more efficient.  So one possibility is that mobility makes the faster adaptation of gonochoristic reproduction more significant than the efficiency of hermaphroditic reproduction.

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.