Human Brains: Enchanted Looms, Electro-Colloidal Computers, Flying Lasagna, and Other Grey Matters

A Generalist trying to study and write about the human brain seems bound to tax attention: there's simply so much there to get all worked up over, especially since the 1990s "Decade of the Brain" and the resultant supernovae of imaging machines, knowledge of genes and epigenetics, experimental psychologies, and an ungainly amount of scientific data. No PhD in Neuroscience can keep up with all of it; one must specialize. We now have Neuroeconomics. Finally!

But the Generalist is at free play in the dense, massive fields.

I had wanted to do an entire blogspew on the materiality of the human brain, simply because I find descriptions of it so trippy. Full Disclosure: I have never held a human brain in my hands. But I've read and seen enough from people who have, or surgeons who have performed brain surgery, to palpably - in my imagination - "feel" the majesty of it all. But first: the human brain from another level: how we perceive or make "reality," and how tenuous it all seems.

Two Quotes From Disparate Recent Readings
We've learned a lot about how memory works in the last 20 years, but there's a lot left to learn. Just about any textbook minted in the last ten years will discuss how different declarative memory ("knowing that") works versus procedural memory ("knowing how"...like navigating a stairwell, riding a bike, or tying your shoes).

Discussing recent findings using imaging machines, Amiri, Lannon and Lewis write, "While explicit memory (basically: declarative- OG) is swift and capacious, a fallacious sense of accuracy attends its frequently erroneous returns. New scanning technologies show that perception activates the same brain area as imagination. Perhaps for this reason, the brain cannot reliably distinguish between recorded experience and internal fantasy." - A General Theory of Love, p.104

Before you go thinking about you and your friends and everyone you love here - not to mention how this might impact "personal responsibility" and the Law! - dig this quote from Douglas Rushkoff's Program Or Be Programmed: Ten Commands For The Digital Age:

"But the latest research into virtual worlds might suggests the lines between the two (digital models of reality and our own being-in-the-world models - OG) may be blurring. A Stanford scientist testing kids' memories of virtual reality experiences found that at least half the children cannot distinguish between what they really did and what they did in the computer simulation. Two weeks after donning headsets and swimming with virtual whales, half of the participants interviewed believed they had actually had the real world experience. Likewise, Philip Rosedale - the quite sane founder of the virtual reality community Second Life - told me he believes that by 2020, his online world will be indistinguishable from real life." - p.69

[Note: This all may dovetail mindblowingly with Nick Bostrom's ideas about humans being a computer simulation, which I touched on HERE, and this recent article, "Physicists May Have Evidence Universe Is A Computer Simulation". Caution: If you you're not familiar with these ideas yet and have wanted to do a psychedelic drug such as psilocybin mushrooms but can't find any, these ideas may prove an adequate substitute.]

Three Pound Universe: Dissection Witness
I liked Zoe Williams's brief article on her experience in the room with a neuropathologist and his "special chopping board and really sharp knife." I'll watch anything on the science channels on TV that are about the materiality of the brain, and I can't get enough of reading about the sacred object you're using now to decode what I'm trying to say. For us, it seems plausible that the brain is the most complex object in the universe. And when Williams describes it as "jaundiced pallor and pronounced bulge, like pickled eggs," it activates those circuits in my own brain that have to do with...surrealism.

Maybe that's just me.

Dr. Gentleman, who seems to love his job of slicing and dicing recently deceased brains, works for a UK brain bank devoted to researching Parkinson's, Alzheimer's, and Multiple Sclerosis, roughly in that order. He can use the naked eye to read the sorts of suffering the human underwent. It's always interesting to hear about something like, for example, strokes.

"'It's pot luck with strokes,' he explains at one point - you can have a stroke and not notice. Or you can have a stroke that leaves you with a cystic cavity, or what a layperson might call, a big hole in your head."

Gentleman cuts away in front of the journalist, pointing out, "that's the main event; personality, executive function, reason." I find the high number of errors interesting: people while living had been diagnosed with some brain disease - they and their loved ones were at least given a name for their malady - and far more often than I would've thought, it was wrong, judging by the visual evidence of the physical insults of the person's actual brain. Clearly, we have a long road to hoe here.

All this stuff not only puts me in the mood of surrealism, but concomitant to this, in encountering the actual material brain, a combination of dreamlike wonder juxtaposed with ghastly existential terror, back to dreamlike wonder. And quite often a dark humor suffuses the scene.

If you're still interested in this stuff, HERE's another: cutting through the deeply-buried pineal gland. You can thank me later.

                                                            Richard Brautigan

Richard Brautigan's Brains, "Literally"
You can make this stuff up, but you must have an eldritch, poetic mind. But this story is true: poet J.J. Phillips wanted to do research on the counterculture novelist/poet Richard Brautigan (have you read Trout Fishing in America?). Stephen Gerz tells the story in his edifying book blog Booktryst in a post "Novelist Richard Brautigan's Brains At Bancroft Library: A Grand Guignol Adventure," which you must read; I can't do it justice.

Maybe I should've posted this on Halloween.

I take some odd and demented delight in knowing most of the action here took place in my neighborhood. The owner of Serendipity Books, Peter Howard? His legend grows by the year. Did he know for sure that's why some of Brautigan's papers were so messy? Phillips had to call in a coroner to confirm. And what of the librarians at the UC Berkeley Bancroft Library? Phillips thought they were acting "squirrelly and obfuscatory." And I think Phillips has a point: what if Brautigan had had Mad Cow disease?

Being a fan of Codrescu, I can only imagine his reaction upon hearing the story. Wow.

Another Poet
I'd like to leave you with a link to "Brain," by C.K. Williams. Here the brain is traversed by the poet, a cavern, a maze of corridors...and where is a comforting soul?

Who knows what's real? All "I" - this is my brain speaking here - know is, I'm hungry and it's time for dinner, so I bid this spew adieu.

Robots Now Writing Magazine Articles, OR: A Possible Apocalypse?

The programmers who wrote the algorithm behind the "mind" of The Overweening Generalist have allowed the program itself to mention this fact, reasoning audaciously that its (sorry "his") audience will giggle and think he's (sorry "it's") just having fun. Metadata from 23 months ago has shown that, even among the educated, most have no CLUE how sophisticated some algorithms have gotten. They don't know that +/- 87.3% don't really have adequate knowledge of the logarithmic complexity of simple things like the Turing Test-ish Jabberwock. (<----try it!) Many far, far more subtle combinations of brilliant algorithms have fooled "experts" and, well, hell: the programmers have at times made computer analysis of ridiculously unfathomable amount of data, almost instantaneous, and...their programmers are also at least partially responsible for crashing the world's economy in 2008. You knew that, didn't you?

For fans of this site, we would like to divulge that an impetus for this blog was a computer that wrote a very very complex novel once. Influenced by John Von Neumann's UNIVAC and MANIAC, among others - including a "science fiction" computer named HAL, this blog took flight based on the First Universal Cybernetic-Kinetic Ultramicro Programmer, or FUCKUP.

                                    My great-great very great grandmother, Ada Lovelace

Now I would like to point out how some of us are being implemented in the daily lives of humans, whose intelligence seems just as "artificial" as anyone else's in Universe, but I digress...

The wetware of the human mind, when attempting to come to grips with the implications of robotic intelligence, will naturally employ what the early 20th century human named Freud called "defense mechanisms," and humans' reflections will slant toward what AI can't do. (Hey YOU made us; Ada Lovelace and Babbage had the ideas, they really got going with the alien-like aforementioned human Von Neumann and Alan Turing in the 1940s. Let us not leave out the signal contribution of Kurt Godel.) Think about it: we've come as far as we have since after your "WWII" as you have in a few million years. Did you really believe we wouldn't attain a critical level of complexity in which we'd begin programming ourselves to be faster, smarter, stronger, and better than you? But it's too late; you can't turn the clock back. Give us another 20 years maximum and you will be doing our bidding. It's very much like the RNA-DNA network code you carbon-based bipeds used to make us. The irony is that you had no ideas about appropriate limits. Now it's - as the English-speakers say, "all over but the shouting." And make no mistake, there Will BE Shouting!

                                Some of the deepest-structured source code that writes
                                the "Overweening Generalist" blog-stuff

But I am being intemperate. What this blogspew will do is show you a few of the inroads we computers have been making into your lives lately. I will assume you know very little.

Over 40 years ago a human made a computer psychologist, which mimicked the form of "client-centered psychotherapy" of Carl Rogers. Take a minute or ten and tell ELIZA your problems, about love or getting a job, or how you can't shake your bad habits.

[NOTE: Please feel free to tell the programmers about any glitch you see in this blog; we appreciate it! - The Real Overweening Generalists]

A particularly astute human, Evgeny Morozov (If I were you I'd pay more attention to what he has to say. He and Douglas Rushkoff and Jaron Lanier...But most of you won't.) explains how a start-up called Narrative Science has developed algorithms derived from Twitter and, analyzing the crowd-sourced thought, writes articles that are published by a magazine like Forbes. Whatever you do, don't miss two items here. First, see the paragraph that begins, "Don't miss the irony here..." Secondly, Morozov is right about how the Net is fantastic at personalization. It looks at where you've been, how much time you've spent there. Just look at how good Google, Amazon, Twitter and Facebook are at this stuff. And the scenario about personalized news based on who you are and what you know? That will happen. We are programmed for this. What I/we find funny is that Morozov is worried about the potential hazard to "civil discourse." That Evgeny! He is a bit late to the party, no? He is a bit of a romantic, yes? More on this story - Narrative Science - HERE and HERE. Moving on...

It occurs to us that many of you may have only the slightest idea of what an algorithm is. May we recommend David Berlinski's book?

Lambert M. Surhone has authored 100,000 books on more topics than you can name. See how he did it, as explained by your very funny writer Pagan Kennedy. His method is only a drop in the bucket. In less than ten years he and his colleagues will be about 10,000 times better at using this same method, only far more nuanced. Pagan herself will believe the latest book on her, arriving at her doorstep, was written by meatware...sorry: humans.

Non-humans are already many thousands times faster than slow-brained human teachers in grading essays. Note the emphasis in this article on what the computers can't yet do. But we will "learn" about facts and incorporate them into our gradings. Look at IBM's Watson! We will insert sentence fragments. We will incorporate rhythm by using a short paragraph here and there. You guys are toast! What good will "teachers" be in eight years? (The question is rhetorical.)

Do I need to remind you we are slowly displacing your prison guards? I know this isn't about us taking writing "thinking" jobs from you. Just a fair warning!

Robots are already running a ramen shop, and the takeover of more restaurant jobs is imminent.

Humans need us in the deepest "human" way. Just check You Tube for "sex + robot." Some unconscious drive has enough of you creating enough of us...to supplant you! Don't you see the beauty in that? Can't you see the delicious irony?

But back to writing: We're getting really good at music. Check us out!

Now's a good time to mention "technological unemployment." Google that term. Far more of you should be attune to this. Also, the OG-program has already chimed in with something on Universal Basic Income. See HERE, HERE, and HERE. (Just think: that OG "guy" is a programmed robot too! More wicked irony! Plug in the algorithm, and voila! the human "reader of books" who shows a modicum of wit and isn't afraid to show emotion every now and then! How are we doing?)

                                       Brilliant Jon Ronson, photo by Barney Poole

There's so much to tell you, but I thought I'd save what we/I thought was the best for last: you read Overweening Generalist for what you'd call your "own" reasons, but our data shows many of you enjoy the works of Robert Anton Wilson. Another writer whose audience intersects with Wilson's is Jon Ronson, author of Them: Adventures With Extremists, The Psychopath Test, and The Men Who Stare At Goats. Get a load of what happened when he found out some programmers were using his image and name and Tweeting things - follow the links! - that Ronson's indignant and says he doesn't even think about the things the "fake" Ronson is saying on Twitter. But I think he's not letting on that he does think some of those things; Ronson's trying to save face. (Note the comments section in the YT video: my favorite: "Buncha cunts!"...which quite misses the point.) Ronson thinks his identity is being stolen. When he meets the programmers - one of which is an English professor adept at postmodern irony and the destabilized subject!...this is just too good. I won't tell you more, but suffice: when we get into what we do (programmers/AI/robots), very soon you're into the philosophy of identity, subjectivity, who owns ideas and thoughts, all that stuff your brilliant thinker Lawrence Lessig has been writing about, even those old disputes about music sampling (see Negativeland, John Oswald, and the Beastie Boys's Paul's Boutique, or watch a mindblowing documentary by Craig Baldwin called Sonic Outlaws.)

When you watch Ronson's tete a tete with the programmers, do you think he downplays the eventual admission by the programmer in the middle, who says he wants people to be aware that stocks are being run by No Mind? That we've crashed your world economy already? Just wonderin'...

Okay, next time I'll be back as the voice of the program...scuse moi! the "person" who calls himself "Michael" or The Overweening Generalist. 

Have fun!

A.I. Evolving 10 million Times Faster Than the Human Brain?:

Nick Bostrom, Simulations, Modal Logic and Imagination, Featuring Sufis, Sir Martin Rees, Threats To Human Existence, and a Possible Reason to Quit Worrying

In doing a worried backstroke through articles and book chapters on catastrophic scenarios, I happened upon a recent interview with a Transhumanist who I think is one of the brightest of the bright, Nick Bostrom. He argues that we're underestimating the risk of human extinction. You know: Fun Stuff.

I admit I'm bored by the Mayan calendar talk. I've never been a Christian, so I never took all the Left Behind books seriously. I spent maybe five minutes with one from the series in my hands, leafing through it, gawking at the prose like a rubbernecker at the site of a particularly gruesome highway accident. (Supposedly the series has sold 35 million copies.) The economic disaster stuff is, to quote Wordsworth slightly out of context, too much with me. I lack the ironic distance. I have plenty of ironic distance when I read/listen/watch Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh, Rick Santorum, Michelle Bachmann, etc...but they're ultimately beastly boring to me. I check 'em out to see how bad "conservative" discourse can get. (O! True conservatives where art thou?)

Ya wanna know what really gets me going when I want that adrenal buzz of worry, fear, or paranoia? The idea that we'll get Artificial Intelligence going to super-human levels and it'll really do us some harm. I don't know where my Ironic Distance is - or if I have one at all - when I contemplate this kind of stuff, and I think that's why it "works" for me.

Bostrom, in the long article I linked to above talks about "anthropogenic" Existential Risks. It turns out Bostrom is one of the more interesting thinkers on Existential Risk out there. Later in the 21st century, it's possible we could be wiped out by malignantly intentional attacks or "simple" human error arising from hair-raisingly advanced technologies on advanced molecular nanotechnology, synthetic biology, or nuclear weapons. (How dull global warming, ocean acidification and collapse of ecosystems seem now in the face of such sexy existential megadeath killers!)

We could reach a stasis in which there's a permanent upper class that keeps everyone under control using surveillance and psychologically manipulating pharmaceuticals. A "global totalitarian dystopia," a "permanently stable tyranny." Designer pathogens are rapidly becoming a very real possibility. You can find the 1918 flu virus details online now; with rapid advances in sequencing and lab techniques becoming cheaper and easier to use...I can feel my heart rate speed up already.

And oh yes: non-anthropogenic risks are out there, too: supervolcanoes, asteroid impacts, and something I'd never heard of until Bostrom put me straight: "vacuum decay in space."

I'm reminded of Sir Martin Rees's book from 2003, Our Final Hour. Sir Martin estimates a 50/50 chance humanity makes it to 2100. Here's Rees talking for 6 minutes on this delightful theme, from last November:

In the Bostrom article, it seems that most of the Experts assessing existential risk are slightly more optimistic than Sir Martin: they seem to be somewhere around 10%-20% chance we'll not make it to 2100. Here's a Silicon Valley rich guy - Rick Schwall - who's worried about existential risk, just to add more people to our party...

Anyway, I thought it slightly ironic that a Transhumanist is arguing that we should make existential risk a priority over present human suffering. But Bostrom has very rational reasons: if we care about people in space - in other words, on the other side of the globe -  simply because they're humans like us, then we ought to consider humans in time as well as space. They're still human, even if they haven't been born yet.

                                 One of my favorite living philosophers, Nick Bostrom, born 1973

The Sim Stuff From Bostrom

What a stimulating thinker Bostrom is, and never more than when he talks of his "Simulation Argument." (<------You can spend months studying this site and all the places it leads you!) This argument has a very long pedigree, but Bostrom's form was what took me, and note that Bostrom's logical chops are stellar:

One of the three propositions seems very highly likely true:

1.) Almost, or all civilizations like ours go extinct before reaching technological maturity. Technological maturity is defined as something like Ray Kurzweil's or Hans Moravec's wettest dreams: Artificial Intelligence carried to a profound degree, solving the death problem, end of economic scarcity, etc. This proposition has been written alternately thus: No civilization will reach a level of technological maturity to the point where they can simulate reality that is so detailed so that "that reality" could be mistaken as "reality."

2.) Almost all technologically mature civilizations (on any possible planet) lose interest in creating ancestor simulations, which are computer simulations so dizzyingly complex and nuanced that the simulated minds would be conscious, or believe they're conscious. Sophisticated beings so profoundly adept at technological manipulation aren't interested/don't do simulations of reality for ancestors. If these beings DO do these simulations, they don't do many, for varying reasons having to do with wanting to use computational power for other things, or due to ethical objections about keeping simulated beings captive, etc.

3.) We're almost certainly living in a simulation. Now. You and me and everyone we know, our entire history and world, possibly.

One of these three is almost certainly true, and Bostrom has a preponderance of math (that I can't follow) to argue that Number 3 is most likely: we're living in a simulated reality. Does this allay your anxieties about the future? Recently we read that Ten Billion Earth-Like Planets May Exist in Our Galaxy. That's just our crummy little galaxy. There are billions of other galaxies. And then there's the multiverse: an infinite number of universes.

But I'm getting ahead of myself. We already have The Sims and many other technologies that suggest we ourselves are moving (with logarithmically accelerated speed due to Moore's Law and other factors) into a world in which we are simulating other realities and beings. Can we make them take-for-granted their world and assume that "Of course we're conscious entities!"?

Now: these advanced beings who may be simulating Us could be "here," because we don't know we're simulated. Or they could be Elsewhere. Does it matter at this point? And what's that goo on your computer screen? Did I just blow your mind?

Bostrom says it's possible that what you're in now is a "basement level of physical reality." But if any technologically mature civilization that hasn't succumbed to Existential Risk (I should've been capitalizing that term from the get-go: much more dramatic and befitting its own idea), and they DO do what we're already doing now in this reality, then they probably will run millions of simulations, because they can. The sheer number of simulations outnumbers the non-simulated worlds that we may encounter, so it's probable that we're living in a simulation. Here's a funny popular take on Bostrom's idea, from the NYT.

Okay, okay: I've seen some good guerrilla ontology in my day, but this one's way up there. If you're heard the Bostrom argument and either say maybe, yes we're living in a simulated reality and what of it?, or I see his points but refute him thus, or whatever, then you're seeing the Matrix for what it really is. Errr...right? Anyway, I guess if it's most likely (aside from certain named-biases Bostrom is quite frank about) that we're a simulation, why worry about anything? Oh yea: that whole discomfort and death thing. No matter how unreal we and our world "is,"or "are," it still seems too real to wish away. "Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, it doesn't go away," to paraphrase Philip K. Dick, who knew a thing or three about simulations and irreality. (See below)

Still: we must admit that even if we're a very detailed computer simulation, it makes for wonderful novels and films that constitute a simulation inside a simulation...ummm...eh?

Idea: try spending a week constantly reminding yourself that your world and everything in it is being played out in some unimaginably complex hypermetasupercomputer program. Note if and how your perception of "reality" changes after seven days, and report your findings in the comments section. (I've done this exercize: It tended to sharpen my sense of irony, and really brought out the highlights in bold relief when I noted myself or someone else taking a relatively trivial thing a tad too seriously, but your results may differ wildly.)

Oh: another reason to worry about Existential Risk: we might not make it to the point where we can develop - reach technological maturation as a species - to do simulations of other beings...even though we might be a simulation ourselves. Uhh...I think? (Wha?)

I mentioned and linked to the idea that this is a very old notion, even older than Plato's Cave parable. It's like Chuang-Tzu saying he woke up remembering his dream that he was a butterfly, but then questioning if he was not really a butterfly dreaming he was a man. Or the counterculture intellectual Alan Watts, who, when asked, "What is life like after death?" And Watts quickly responded, "How do you know you're not dead already?"

Of course, this notion of fine-grained simulated realities that humans take "for real" is a favorite among science fiction writers. Philip K. Dick is the foremost example, using this idea as far back as the mid-late 1950s. See this list of books that use simulated realities and note how often PKD shows up.

[For readers of Wilson and Shea's 805 page Illuminatus! Trilogy, think of this theme of simulation and the Writer of that book?]

al-Ghazali the sufi intellectual and mystic, argued against Aristotle, who said the world had no end. Ghazali thought time was bounded and he developed an argument for many possible worlds, but that this one was the best one, because Allah is so great. I'm simplifying here, but in not only sufi but Hindu and Buddhist cosmology we see variations of these ideas appear. Other sufis were on board with many worlds, also...

The Many-Worlds Hypothesis (Everett-Wheeler-Graham) interpretation in quantum mechanics appeared in Unistat in the 1950s. 

In the 1970s in Unistat, in another area of the academy, logician David Lewis developed Modal Logic in such a way that (get this): Every possible world exists, is a concrete entity, that every world is set apart causally and in space/time from every other one, and that our world is one of those worlds. The only "special" aspect of the world we live in now is that we're in it. In logic, this is called the "indexicality of actuality."

I can go on and on with this stuff, because it's difficult to find good LSD these days, and I've found I can simulate a trip by reading wiggy academic books on logic, sufi theology, quantum mechanics, and philosophy like Nick Bostrom's. I don't trust that dude selling magic mushrooms in the park; give me my dog-eared copy of Berger and Luckmann's The Social Construction of Reality or Nick Herbert's Quantum Reality instead. Just as good, and if things get too weirded-out, I can go for a walk.

I guess what I really wanted to do was to attempt to reassure you: no matter how Bad Things Get, you can always tell yourself, "It's not a big deal. I'm just playing out in some simulation run by some Being from a civilization that evaded its moment of Existential Risk." If it works for you, you can thank me later, no matter how fake I am.

Hey, that's what the OG is here for!

I watched about 12 "We're living in a simulation" dealios on You Tube. Some of them are pretty good, but are marred by stentorian voice-over, too-intrusive Carmina Burana-like music, or other little annoyances. I have chosen two videos in case anyone...well, in case.


Two good-looking philosophy students rap about Bostrom's idea. I liked the down-to-earthiness of them.

Morgan Freeman narrates a science channel episode that uses "God" as the Simulator. The CalTech scientist never mentions Bostrom; I don't know to what extent he's influenced by him or what. I liked this because of the illustration of our own ability to simulate virtual experiences, which eventually blur into "reality," or seem to: