Never been one to let the carrier drop

1) Bernie supporters, while it would be great if the government would become more socialist, we don’t actually have to wait for it to live in a more socialist world. If your financial situation is above average, help your friends. If it’s below average, share the problems you’re having so people can help you, and accept help. Whenever possible, trade skills for skills to stay outside the tax system entirely. I’m sure we can think of a whole lot of ways to live in a more socialist way without needing the government’s help or permission.

2) As we’re woe-is-meing about the horrible horrible “other side” in political situations, remember my discussion earlier about how the conservative or liberal neurons in a natural neural network are both playing important roles. If you removed either the right-bias or left-bias neurons from a NNN, the results would not be good. The same is very likely true for big systems of humans. We probably need to find a better way to make this a blending of signals rather than a war – machine assisted telepathy is one of the things I like for this – but whatever your political bias, we need both you and your opposite number to make good decisions.

3) Look at the big picture. Most of us are fed, most of us are clothed, most of us have power, most of us have the ability to send a message anywhere in the world in milliseconds. Increasingly, we’re aware of the places where there are fundamental problems and we’re trying to fix them. Overall, the long term curve for Earth is very positive. If you doubt this, go read some history. The immediate situation often looks very screwed up, but if you look at the big picture, stuff is getting better.

I remember the first Prince song I ever heard. I had bought a FM radio at a yard sale with a misaligned IF, and after twiddling a few tuning slugs in the back, it started bringing in some New York pop station. One of the first songs I heard on my newly operational radio was ‘Kiss’.

I of course loved it. I loved a lot of his music. Since hearing of his death, I’ve only played one Prince song (let’s go crazy), but the playlist in my head has included a lot more of them (Seven, Kiss, Little Red Corvette, When Doves Cry, among others)

I like writing music about sex, which gives me something in common with Prince. I imagine I have some other things in common with him as well, but there are also some striking differences – religion, mostly. I suppose right now he knows whether he was right or wrong. Or he doesn’t know anything at all.

I first heard he was dead on Brig. I think I was laying in my bed. My first thoughts were that it was too soon.

So, I have a humble suggestion for making a good electronic voting network. What we need is widely deployed, hardened, secure, reliable computer terminals with some ability to identify the user. What’s that you say? We already have those, and they’re called ATMs? Why, yes, that’s exactly what I’m thinking.

I figure there aren’t that many models of hardened ATMs, and they’re all X86 based. It would not be that hard to deploy voting software to them. While we’re at it, let’s use modern crypographic methods to make sure that our votes were really counted. The ATM can print a receipt with a signature that you can go look up to make sure your vote made it to the vote aggregation centers.

The government could issue a ATM-esque card to every voter, that they could use to verify their party registration, vote, etc. The way the current ATM network works is probably a perfect model for how to handle this. People who already have bank accounts could even just use their current ATM card to authenticate themselves, although that might be going a little far.

So, watching Human has me thinking.. the general prevailing wisdom of religions is that we were engineered by a perfect being. But we’re clearly full of bugs, which people usually call a fatal flaw. If we were engineered, isn’t it more likely we were engineered by a previous version of ourselves?

I’ve talked about the bottom-up rather than top-down model a fair amount in various bits of this blog. I don’t see any advocates for it – people either believe we were created by flipping bits at random and testing the result against the environment, or they believe that we were created by a diety, which for the moment I assume to be a much, much larger and more advanced NNN.

But the bottom-up model makes the most sense to me.

So, I have to wonder, if you could build a exact carbon copy of me – with the same neural nets connected in the same way – would it be functionally identical to me? Is there any ‘magic’ to us beyond the mechanics of thought? Would it experience the world exactly the way I do? Is it possible our whole world is the result of someone doing a exhaustive search for a particular neural configuration, one that responds in particular ways to particular inputs? Is it likely?

One of the thoughts I had recently is that we’re always encouraged to ‘be ourselves’. Except that the band of ways you can ‘be yourself’ without getting into trouble is very small, and shrinking all the time. A friend of mine posted on facebook that his community had passed a law against wearing your clothing in such a way that your underwear show. He was pleased – I am not. I am alarmed at how little freedom we have in the “land of the free”, and how fast it is eroding. What you wear is a form of freedom of speech.

Anyway, I seem to have wandered off my original point. Certainly, we don’t want a sociopath to “be themselves”. Of course, “Be yourself within certain boundaries” doesn’t sound nearly as nice.

I think I have widely different definitions of which those boundaries should be than most people. And it scares me that those boundaries get smaller every year. I like the idea of a widely diverse population. But it seems like unless you’re riding the exact middle of human behavior, there’s someone who doesn’t want you doing what you’re doing. And I guess I feel like they should be free to want that, but not able to enforce that. Some percentage of them have some political power, and they *do* enforce their beliefs on our behavior.

As a side note, increasingly it seems there is a move to force people to provide services even to those they disagree with, to fight discrimination. And, don’t get me wrong, I’m not a fan of discriminating against gays or blacks or what have you – but I’m not sure this is the solution. I do think there should be a minimum subset of rights we all have. I do not think that owning weapons is on the list. I do think the freedom from having them aimed at you ought to be.

I do know that every law passed makes us less free – and we never delete laws, and we add new ones all the time. At this point only someone who does nothing but study the law could even keep track of what is and isn’t legal.

I don’t seem to have any consistent point or even thread of thought here, so I’m going to stop for now.

Reading about Donald Trump makes me think my friend Steve is right.. I should buy some land as far away from everyone as possible.. Okay, I’m joking, but only somewhat. I read the polling numbers, and there’s more than 40% of my fellow citizens who would vote for this guy? I wonder if the people talking about ‘kicking the illegals out’ realize that the illegals are the people who are adding the most value in a lot of places – a lot of them are really hardworking folk! If you forget the bullshit money politics and look at where that strawberry actually came from, you realize that if you kicked them out, our economy would fail in large and impressive ways. Now, I’d really like it if robots were picking the strawberry and the illegals were A: legal because we’d adopted a open border policy and B: taking a siesta, but I recognize that’s still a few years out, so for the moment, please don’t kick out the people who are actually doing the work.

Trump does, however, bring up a interesting ethical question. What is your ethical responsibility if Hitler gets elected? Suppose Trump does get elected, and he starts putting Muslims in concentration camps, a la the Japanese in WWII? What form should my resistance take? Writing blog articles is probably not enough at that point.

Of course, if that does happen, I assume I’ll also be placed in a concentration camp, shortly after the secret police discover this blog on the wayback machine.

By the way, if Bernie doesn’t get elected, I will take it as a sign that it’s too soon for socialism – at some point, at some level of automation and computer science, socialism is going to become the only sane answer. At that point more than 50% of the US will, I really hope, be able to figure that out. We aren’t quite there yet – we *need* a bunch of people to work their asses off for a few more years. One thing I do love about things like Minecraft – and the web – is that it has taught millions of people to program, and millions of people to understand automation and building automated systems. Guys, there is still some work left to do before we can truly live in a socialist paradise where the only people working are the ones who want to..

So, I see in my inbox a invitation to block offshore drilling in the Atlantic. I see my mother campaigning for not running a CNG pipeline in West Virginia. And yes, all these things sound good, but.. well, no, they don’t.

Here’s the problem. I have been a champion for nuclear power for a long time – based on the fact that it kills less people per kilowatt-hour than any other form of fueled power we know. (I don’t have data for solar and wind – hydro obviously kills people making dams and also tends to kill people when those dams fail). I also don’t think we’ve come anywhere near making the safest nuclear plant we can – we’re still using some really outdated ideas which A: make it difficult to extract even a fraction of the energy out of the nuclear fuel and B: make a unpowered nuclear plant a disaster waiting to happen because of the waste heat issues. We know of a number of ways to build reactors that don’t suffer from these issues, but the money people who pay to build nuclear plants are inherently conservative and so we’re not building them yet. Also, some of the best plant designs are based on things that are not in any way making-nuclear-weapons friendly, and we don’t like that at all. It probably makes a lot more sense to get power out of thorium than uranium, for example, because of the vastly higher energy density, but there’s no way we’re going to make weapons-grade anything out of thorium.

Anyway, I digressed there for a moment, but here’s my point. We like having energy. Energy makes our lives easier. Energy can turn salt water into fresh water, it can make it possible to grow crops in Alaska, it makes getting to work a lot easier, it makes things like Google possible. We like having energy, but we don’t want to have to pay the piper.

The reality is, that power has to come from somewhere. Solar is not a acceptable option for baseline load because I’d like to have heat at night. (Solar plus pumped storage might be, but we’re not building that just yet). Coal is a really bad answer because large numbers of people die in the production of coal, plus the ecological costs are not insignificant. Oil is a finite resource and is really more useful for manufacturing. Natural gas is actually a pretty reasonable way to generate power if one insists on using non-nuclear fuel. So, yes, we’re going to have to run some gas pipelines. I for one am not ready to opt out of having twenty kilowatts at my beck and call.

Nuclear actually does a good job of highlighting the fact that we as a planet have a somewhat stupid decision-making process. If we’re going to ban something nuclear, let’s ban the *#%# bombs – as for a way to produce power, nuclear is about the best answer I think we’re going to find. I am the first to admit that ionizing radiation is dangerous, but so are a whole lot of things, and it’s a well-understood danger that we can work around. Why are so many people so rabidly against nuclear – often without understanding it at all? I suspect it’s because every incident at a nuclear power plant gets plastered all over the news, because it’s lovely and sensational and apparently we like to be frightened.

By the way, a side note, someone was ranting against CFLs and one of the things they talked about was that they ’emit radiation’. I’m not sure what type they meant.. I’m going to guess they were talking about the EM field – but it’s a very bad light bulb indeed that does not emit radiation. I’m going to assume all my readers get the joke here.

Anyway, my point is, don’t protest energy extraction unless you want to give up using energy. Protest *stupid* energy extraction like fracking – yes, absolutely. And encourage energy companies to use wind, solar, hydro, geothermal, nuclear, tidal, and other forms of energy that are not scarce and don’t come with a huge body count. But we are going to need some CNG pipelines, and we are likely not done pumping oil from under the ocean just yet.

As most of you know, I want a lot to see things like Battery 500 succeed, and I want to see us move to a long-term-sustainable transportation grid. I would really like us to no longer have anything to fight wars over, and wars over resources that destroy resources in the process strike me as extra-stupid. But that doesn’t mean I want to stop using power. I *like* my house climate controlled, my water clean and delivered under pressure, and my ability to publish anything I create to the entire world and to learn about everything we know about without leaving my home.

I saw a post on facebook’s evolution vs. ID group the other day that asserted that intelligent design is creationism. I think that this is a hugely narrow view of the world. I am a proponent of intelligent design as a likely hypothesis (In fact, I think both evolution and ID are likely, because a intelligent designer will use evolutionary algorithms when they make sense) but I am not a creationist in the traditional sense. My personal hypothesis, discussed elsewhere in this blog, is that we do a fair amount of editing of our own DNA across the millennia. However, even if that is not the case, I can think of many ways that intelligent design might be true without there being a single word of truth in the bible.

One possible way is the endpoint-bound design process – i.e. we’re inside a quantum computer which has been asked to find a path between zero and a particular life form. Ancestor simulation, I think this is called. One can actually think of a lot of ways that you can have intelligent designers without talking about traditional creationism. There’s the oldie-but-a-goodie of us being the product of alien genetic engineers. There’s the classic of us being inside a time-based mobeus loop, and we’re genetically engineered by our future selves.

I really think science should be approaching this with a wide open mind – and increasingly I suspect they are. One of the things that I really like are scientists that don’t hypothesize until *after* they have the data – just go out and take some measurements and see what you can find out. It does not strike me as that likely, given that there are a number of competing religions, that we’re going to find a correct and honest origin story in a religion.

For that matter, I’ve talked about a number of times how your intelligent deity would almost certainly be working with us inside a virtualization container, which increases the unknowability factor by quite a bit. Of course, a intelligent deity would also know that *they* might be in a virtualization container, which means that no deity could honestly say, with any certainty, that they were omnipotent and omniscient. That’s a subject I’ve already harped on enough in this journal, I think.

Anyway, my point is, it’s a lot of a leap to assume that just because someone thinks intelligent design is a reasonable explanation for our existence, they’re a creationist. Especially that they’re attached to any mainstream religion.

I will now take off my tinfoil hat.

This article is almost entirely conjecture. We sadly are not yet at a point where we can actually say exactly what is going on inside the human mind. Hopefully soon.

That said..

The way that we’re raised, and the society that we’re in, leads to a inevitable neurological war.

It’s built into us for physical touch to feel good. Depending on whether you’re wearing your evolution hat or your ID hat, this can either be the inevitable result of us needing to get very close to each other to reproduce or a design goal. (I have to say, building in things that feel good would certainly be a design goal if *I* was the designer)

On the other hand, it’s memetically built up – as far as I can tell, for very stupid and destructive reasons – for us to think that it’s wrong to be in love with more than one person, that it’s wrong to want to be involved in sexual contact below a certain age – in fact, I see some of my facebook friends encouraging the idea that trying to frighten the lovers of your female child is “protecting” her and a desirable thing to do. (In fact, teaching her about consent would seem to be a much healthier type of protection, but I digress).

Our mainstream religion – despite it not ever being clearly spelled out in the bible in the negative (the bible says that sexual love within a marriage is good, but does not actually state that sexual love outside a marriage is bad – that’s something we decided to tack on later) – teaches that if you ‘go too far’ before marriage, you’re a bad person – that sexual contact, despite feeling good, is a sin. It also teaches the idea that your lover is your property, that if someone else wants to experience sexual contact with them, they are breaking one of the “ten commandments” – even *thinking* about it is a crime against God.

Now, we all know what I think of Christianity. But another question is what do I think about what all this does to our minds? Well, by definition, it creates two sets of subnets that are always going to be in opposition. It’s wired in – on a deeper level than even any religion will ever be able to reach – that touch feels good, that petting and loving is *right*. It’s something that I personally find myself drawn to as a experience I want to have again and again. It’s what I want to dream about.

In the meantime, our parents try very hard to keep us from sexual contact – or even, in my case, nonsexual/cuddling contact that’s too prolonged. They program into us a subnet that says “this is sin, this is bad, this is wrong”. The idea that your virginity is something precious that you should give to your first and only lover also underlines this. This creates a subnet that says sex is bad, dirty, should be looked at with shame and guilt, isn’t something you should want, except in the situation of marriage – and probably not even then, if one reads the writings of the Victorians.

What happens when you have two subnets at war with each other? Well, first of all, you end up feeling the tension between them. Second of all, they eat capacity. Each one tries to claim a certain percentage of the neural Go board, and each tries to defeat the other.

So, I think some of this is jealousy.. our parents get attached to us, and don’t want to lose us to our lovers. Some of this is a amplifying effect of stupidity across the generations – one generation made something up, and then lied about it being the word of God. (If it was really the word of God, God would still be around and saying it. Probably in person. Certainly in some way that left no doubt to the fact that we were hearing from a deity). Some percentage of each successive generation after that was duped into believing they were hearing holy wisdom when in fact they were hearing damaging bull.

I don’t think that it’s immoral to love and be loved. Nor to express that love sexually if you’ve a mind to. I think that thinking of sex as shameful and wrong is a sign of a deeply broken set of memes. I think that people who think we should slut-shame are deeply confused about a whole lot of things, and are far more immoral than the sluts they would shame. I think it is a sign of how broken our culture is that we think that people who participate in a act that generally feels good and improves the attitude and mental health of both participants are immoral, while the people who seek to hurt those people for choosing to participate in something that feels good are given radio shows.

I also think that in general wars between subnets – beliefs that are diametrically opposed to observable reality tend to build these – are something we should try to remove from the meme pool, especially when it comes to things we pass on to our children. We are trimming their wings because our grandparents were afraid to fly.

So, one of the problems that I think we’re going to keep bumping up against here on Earth, at least in the USA where we ostensibly have a democratically elected set of people driving the boat, is that we all have different definitions of what winning means.

Like, I’d love to live in a world where we have sex with our friends, where automation does any job a human doesn’t care to, where we all try very hard to be excellent to each other. A world where no one conceives without having chosen to, where children are raised by all of us under the precept of being excellent to each other. Where education and mental health are based on a solid understanding of what’s happening on the iron of our minds – understanding based on science, on taking measurements and learning what’s really happening, rather than based on narrative and our storyteller nature, which clearly often is quite capable of diverging completely from what’s actually happening on the iron.

I’d love to live in a world where the video games are immersive, and so are the movies and the books – where we build each other up, where we help each other experience the things we want to experience.

I’d love to live in a world where no one was designated ‘less than’, where we have finally noticed the curve for history (blacks, gays, etc) and just started accepting that everyone is worthwhile and everyone matters.

I recognize that people should still have the option of suffering – that Hell still needs to exist, because that’s what some people are going to choose to experience. But I want to live in a world where no one is forced to suffer, either via their biology or via the actions of the group as a whole or mean-spirited individuals.

I for some reason doubt if my utopia is the same as the Christian one. If everyone who’s not religion X is going to be tortured for all eternity, I want out – not just that I want heaven, I want out of the system. I want a different deity. And I do not think I’m alone in this.

However, because my utopia and the utopia of, say, the religious right do not align, the goals we think are important to persue and the way we want to spend the resources in the public pool are going to be radically different. Putting both my people and their people in a box and trying to come to some agreement politically about what we should be doing is likely to be problematic. And I don’t think they should be denied their utopia, except where to do so would infringe on my rights to be free and loved and happy and complete.

I wonder how many different views of what a utopic experience might look like there are? I also wonder why some people need other people to be hurt as part of their utopia. I’m starting to think that might be one of the attributes commonly found in what we somewhat tropishly refer to as evil.

I do wonder what’s happening inside my neural net vs what’s happening inside the neural nets of those who fit in the mold I just described. There’s got to be something fundamentally different going on, and I don’t know what to make of it.