Evolving to Entropy

From Wikipedia:

Evolution is the change in the inherited characteristics of biological populations over successive generations.

Note that there is no stated goal, nor is there any implication that the process is positive or negative. Now, I'm not trying to sell Wikipedia as the ultimate source of definitions, but this one is essentially the same as you will find from any other noted source.

Evolution must be good, right? I mean, we're the result of evolution, and we're pretty awesome, right? Right? Not really. Evolution just means change. We're the result of evolution through a long history of natural selection. In the minds of ordinary people, evolution equals progress. We think that it means that because social scientists tell us it does. The truth is, there is no evidence that the entire process is in any way benevolent toward us. There is no evidence that we are evolving toward something better; only that we are evolving toward something different.

Most evolution through natural selection favors those new characteristics that are the most successful given the enclosing environment. Human beings wreak havoc on natural selection because we have evolved the ability to change our environment. We put clothes on. We grow food. We live in houses. We have central heat and air conditioning. It was inevitable, if you think about it. Natural selection among species passive to their environments resulted in a lot of dead ends. Dodo birds and dinosaurs. It makes sense that the ability to change the environment to be less hostile would be more a more successful characteristic.

Except now, we're busy creating an environment that is increasingly more hostile toward us. Technology and socialism, both the economic system as well as the societal trait, are making us stupid and lazy. We're making our world more dangerous, and we're not evolving in a direction that allows us to adapt to it. In the past, our evolution took many tens of thousands of years to make small changes. I offer that we have evolved many noticeable changes just over the last century or so. We're fat. We're soft and weak. We eat poison and survive for a while. We breath poison and survive for a while. But, we're not evolving fast enough to keep up with how fast we are changing the environment. At the current rate of progress, we'll extinct ourselves in a century or so.

So what happened? How is it that the pinnacle of evolutionary natural selection has gone so wrong? The answer is entropy. Entropy is the process by which everything tends toward its lowest potential energy. Thermodynamic equilibrium. The end state of maximum entropy is a universe of inert atomic dust evenly dispersed across the void. If there is a ghost in the evolutionary machine, its goal is maximum entropy. The whole process is blindly oblivious to our existence. In actual fact, we aren't the pinnacle of natural selection because our potential energy is too high. We're one of those evolutionary side trips. We'll keep evolving toward maximum entropy.

If maximum entropy is the end state, how did we get as far as we did? We've actually been pretty successful. Our control over our environment let us avoid entropy for a long time. However, evolution into entropy is a difference engine, and we have made a pretty wide variance. The differences are catching up with us quickly.

If there is a pinnacle of natural selection here on planet Earth, it is likely the cockroach, or maybe the shark. Cockroaches are born, they eat, they breed, they die. They are the most entropic life form on the planet. There is no need for them to evolve toward anything until the entropy of the rest of the universe catches up with them.

Depressing? Not really. It's inevitability, and there is no reason to be depressed about the inevitable. Get on with what you were doing and don't worry about it. Seek maximum psychological entropy. Just evolve.

Of Knowledge and Memory

Knowledge and memory aren't the same thing. They are, however, built at the same time.

Dr. Marvin Minsky has a theory of memory called Knowledge Lines, or K-Lines. Dr. Minsky believes that our minds (not our brains) are constructed of multitudes of mental agents, each with a particular function. The function can be very simple, or it can be very complex, involving relationships with many other agents. In any given situation, some number of these agents work together and separately to create an idea or solve a problem. If the same, or similar, problem comes along again, we want the same agents to try to solve the problem in the same way. In order to accomplish that, the agents are wired together by K-Lines. The structure of the agents and their connecting K-Lines represents knowledge. Mental agents can be connected to many K-Lines. The simpler the task of the agent, the more K-Lines it is likely to be connected to. When a K-Line is "activated" for a problem that is similar, but not identical to the original situation, new K-Lines can be created or new agents can be connected to the existing K-Line. K-Lines can be connected to other K-Lines to form especially complex sorts of knowledge.

Memory isn't a passive collection of events. Memory isn't stored in our minds like books on a shelf. Our memories are based on our reactions to events and the knowledge we gain from them. Even when we are passive observers of events, our minds are forming ideas about what we witness and trying to solve what we do and don't understand about it. Later, when we try to solve the same problem or a similar problem, the K-Lines are activated and they put the mental agents in a particular state. It is the state of the agents that forms the memory. Our mind recreates the situation that resulted in the association of the agents. It is literally restoring our state of mind at the time of the situation. Memory is built by the agency that creates the K-Lines.

K-Lines and agents are built and activated by our sensory inputs and by other K-Lines and agents. We are born with a fundamental set of mental agents, and from the instant we gain consciousness, we start building more agents and K-Lines. For the first years of our lives, the mental agencies with their K-Lines are built at a furious rate. By trial and error, we process our sensory inputs, building knowledge and memory, and driving our coordination with the world around us. A baby has to work out how to pick up the toy by trial and error. She has to process the colors, shape, and weight of the toy to associate it with the desire to grasp it. She has to discover which parts of the toy are suitable for grasping it. She has to coordinate all of the muscles and tendons and bones in her hand to lift it. The best she can do at first is to simply touch the toy. As her efforts proceed, she will drop the toy and try again. In our view, she is clumsy and inept, but there is an amazing amount of work going on in her mind, just in the effort of reaching out and picking up the toy. Once she masters the task, she will do it over and over again, strengthening the newly built K-Lines and building new ones for the minute variations in the experience of picking up the toy.

If the K-Lines are there, and the agents are there, waiting to be activated, why don't we remember everything that happens to us during our entire lives? The answer is that the vast majority of our experiences, from instant to instant, are somewhat unique. Every instant of our existence is taken up with activating and deactivating mental states. Over time, certain K-Lines fall into disuse because the identical or near identical situation that created them doesn't occur. As they fall farther into disuse, their connections to agents become weaker and weaker. Sometimes two agents have similar functions. When there is conflict, the agent with the stronger connection to the K-Line will be activated. As any situation recedes over time, the exact state of the mental agents that form the memory of the situation becomes harder and harder to recreate. Sometimes, a situation that activates a similar set of K-Lines and agents will reactivate certain K-Lines that have been dormant in an effort to solve a problem or in the formation of an idea, and the long disused state will be reactivated. We've all said, "That reminds me of..." It is reasonable to assume that all of the K-Lines we have built and every agent we have created are still in our minds. it just takes a situation or event that is close enough to reactivate any state. We don't remember being in the womb because there is never another situation even close to it that occurs in our everyday lives, but in theory, we could, because the agents and K-Lines are still there.

Pleasant memories everyone!

Third Rail, But Just For A Minute.

This post is about religion. You've been warned.

Leviticus 11:12 says, "Whatsoever hath no fins nor scales in the waters, that shall be an abomination to you." Some people, on both sides of the believer aisle, interpret this to mean that you could go to Hell for eating shrimp. Actually, the Jews don't believe in Hell and never did. Their closest concept of Hell is a kind of spiritual washing machine where sinners go to get their souls cleaned in preparation for the coming of the Messiah and the resurrection. The Torah, or the Law, is more intended as a set of rules for living your life, here and now. Violating them risks irritating God, which is a big no-no for Jews, as He might neglect to wake you up when the resurrection comes. Remember that concept of Hell. It's important later.

Leviticus 15, verses19 through 33 contain an entire set of rules surrounding menstruation. Menstruating women were considered unclean. Obviously, sex was not allowed, but it went further, you weren't allowed to sit in a chair, or lie on a bed which a menstruating woman had occupied. If you did, you were unclean until evening. It's not clear what is exactly meant by evening. Eight days after her period, a woman is supposed to bring two birds to the temple for the priest to sacrifice. Leviticus is full of weird shit like this.

So, how is it that Christians come to believe that we are bound and not bound, as we see fit, by Jewish law? Step deep into the Bible Belt, and you definitely won't find preachers sacrificing birds to cleanse a woman after her period. In a congregation of any size, the preacher would be sacrificing several birds a day, all month, every month. Christians do certainly believe that we are bound by what are called The Ten Commandments, but those are a very small part of the Law. It is filled with things like how to deal with someone who sells you sick livestock all the way to what you should do if you find out your wife wasn't a virgin when you married her. Christians tend to cherry-pick the Law, especially for things like its prohibitions on certain types of sexuality.

In breathtaking feats of twisted logic, Paul comes up with several reasons why Christians are no longer bound by the Law. The very early Christians were Messianic Jews. They tended to still try to keep the Law. As more and more Gentiles were converted, there was a problem with making them follow the Law. In Acts, Luke specifically mentions circumcision, saying that the uncircumcised cannot be saved. Paul then tries to solve the dispute by asking why the early Christians would test God by putting the burden of the Law on the Gentiles when their forebears couldn't keep it. (Testing God is one of those warning flags when you are reading Paul. You know something tricky is headed your way when you read it.) So, in other words, the Law is too hard, so let's not make the Gentiles live with it. Besides, your grandpop couldn't manage it anyway. Later, Paul says that being a Christian is hard, but stop whining about it. The Law is too hard, so let's not do that, but being Christian, which arguably entails at least some of the Law, is hard, and we need to suck it up. See what I mean about twisted logic? In his letter to the Galatians, Paul further explains that the Law was just a tutor for righteousness, and now that Jesus was here and we were saved by his death and God's grace, we don't need the tutor any more. At various times, Paul assures his readers that he will let them know how to be good Christians. Apparently he nominated himself tutor in place of the Law. In his first letter to Timothy, he goes on to say that the Law doesn't apply to the good guys, only to the bad guys, and that the righteous are welcome to beat the unrighteous over the head with it.

Ah hah! Official sanction for Christians to wield the Law as they see fit to beat heathens into submission, without actually having to live it themselves. At this point, it is worthwhile to mention that throughout the Gospels, one of the things that irritated Jesus most was hypocrisy. There is a whole chapter in Matthew devoted to it. I think the irony was probably lost on Paul.

You may have figured out by now that I'm not a fan of Paul. Aside from the arrogance of summarily assuming the mantle of arbiter of everything Christian, he is directly responsible for creating the twisted swamp that Christianity became. He was an angry, misogynistic, ascetic zealot. It's doubtful that Jesus saw him as a suitable successor. But, that's for another post if I decide to hazard the third rail again.

In Matthew 5, verses 17 through 20, Jesus says, "Think not that I am come to destroy the law, or the prophets: I am come not to destroy, but to fulfill. For verily I say unto you, until Heaven and Earth pass away, one jot or one tittle shall in no wise pass from the law, until all be fulfilled. Whosoever therefore shall break one of these least commandments, and shall teach men so, he shall be called the least in the kingdom of heaven: but whosoever shall do and teach them, the same shall be called great in the kingdom of heaven. For I say unto you, that except your righteousness shall exceed the righteousness of the scribes and Pharisees, ye shall in no case enter the kingdom of heaven." (Jesus really didn't like the scribes or the Pharisees). There's a lot going on there. Some Evangelicals will use the first two sentences to explain that Jesus did indeed fulfill the law and the prophets, so it's OK not to worry about them any more. A sterling example of cherry-picking. It's the third sentence that gets interesting, which is probably one of the reasons some Christians avoid it. First of all, it's unconditional. Whoever violates even the tiniest bit of the law is in deep yoghurt. But, and here's the interesting part, breaking the Law won't keep you out of heaven, you just have to go live on the South side of town. The fourth sentence really rounds the whole thing up. The scribes and Pharisees were lawyers.  That chapter on hypocrisy in Matthew that I mentioned is full of what Jesus thought of them. So, part of what he's saying here is that if you are intent on enforcing the Law without actually holding yourself to it, no heaven for you. Oops. But even more to the point, if you try and fail to keep the Law, you're still better off than the lawyers who point at it and say, do as I say and not as I do.

So, what are we to do if we want to be Christians without passing up the shrimp cocktail or buying new furniture every month? Well, on one level, if all you're worried about is staying out of Hell, then relax, the worst thing that can happen is that you'll have to take a bath and live in the poorer section of Heaven (remember that Jewish concept of Hell and the stuff about being the least in the kingdom of heaven?). Sounds snarky, but it's hard to avoid. The totality of rules and regulations for being a literal Christian at all, let alone a good one, would make a lawyer weep. It is the big problem with being a Bible literalist. It can't be done by anyone with a sane, rational mind. The Bible isn't an instruction manual for how to be a Christian. It's full of extraneous material. What theological purpose is served by the "begats?" As beautiful as it is, how is the Song of Solomon relevant to Christianity?  And, who knows what the deal is with the Apocalypse of John, a.k.a. "Revelations," other than that it could mean just about anything and the author had been reading waaay too much Daniel.

In John 13, Jesus says, "A new commandment I give unto you, that ye love one another; as I have loved you, that ye also love one another. By this all men shall know ye are my disciples, if ye have love one for another." That seems pretty clearcut. In Matthew 22, he is asked what is the greatest commandment of the law, to which he responds that "Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, with all they soul, and with all thy mind" is the greatest, but second "and like unto it, Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself." He said that upon those two commandments hung the Law and the prophets. If you can't keep those two, then the whole rest of the Law is meaningless. The first time (in my example, not chronologically) he said it was right before Judas turned him over to the Romans. The second time was in answer to a lawyer of the Pharisees who was trying to trick him into saying something blasphemous. In both cases, it seems that this was important for him to say. He didn't say it was important to avoid eating shrimp, or sitting on random chairs, or taking your neighbor to court over the sick oxen he sold you, or taking the proof that your new wife wasn't a virgin to the priests so they could decide whether she needed to be stoned to death. No. He said love God first, closely followed by loving one another. The Law is still in effect, and will be until stars burn out, but if nothing else, live up to those two commandments.

So, can we be good Christians when we don't adhere to "every jot or every tittle" of the Law? My opinion? Yes. To be Christian is to be Christ-like. He loved all of us, publicans and sinners too. He wanted us to love each other as he loved us. Loving one another is proof that we are his disciples.  He wouldn't suffer the prostitute to be stoned, neither should we. "Judge not, that ye be not judged." It's not our job to interpret the Law especially when we can't live up to it ourselves. Don't point at the guy with the shrimp cocktail in front of him when you've got seafood sauce on your napkin. Got it? Motes and beams, right? Live the two great commandments, you must; live as much of the Law as you can. I refuse to believe that the man who taught love and forbearance would set us up to fail so spectacularly. And, by understanding the totality of what the Gospels have to say, I don't have to.

In Dreams

Some think that dreams are a continuation of our internal dialog after we fall asleep, but presented in terms our conscious mind doesn't find obvious. They think there is some plot and narrative meaning to them. They believe that dreams are the way our minds work things out that they couldn't handle during waking hours. They believe that, in some cases, our minds are working out issues we didn't even know that we had. Freud said that dreams are the way that our subconscious, usually tightly reined in by  our ego, blows off some steam. He said that glimpses of our primal urges would be so disturbing that some agent of our unconscious mind translates the urges into highly symbolic images. Decoding the symbolism allows one to glimpse the underside of consciousness. There is even a cottage industry built around regurgitating some of the symbolism that Freud described in his writing.

Others say that dreams are just random synapses firing, activating bits and pieces of your experiences in a haphazard way. They say that there isn't any special meaning to them. Often as not, they are jumbled elements of your everyday existence and the memory of past experiences. In fact, every fundamental element of a dream is based on some past experience. Your dreams may put together people and places that couldn't possibly have been together. Your grandmother scuba diving with your ex-boyfriend. It matches people of the wrong ages and times. Being a toddler while watching your younger sister drive you to the store. We may even create houses and landscapes that never existed, or at least never existed together. But, no matter how bizarre the plot and the characters are, every single basic element is something we have experienced at one time or another. Even people who claim to have fantastic dreams will tell you that the unicorns are just horses with a horn on their heads. There is no symbolic narrative. A cigar is just a cigar, and a tunnel is just a tunnel.

Either way, the fact that you can remember your dreams at all means that they are connected in some way to your conscious mind. However, the connection is usually tenuous. Most people forget the minute details of their dreams shortly after waking up. Many people can't remember even the gross (as in big, not as in yucky) details within minutes. Still more don't remember anything at all about the dream by mid-morning. I would bet real money that most of you reading this can't remember with clarity more than a dozen or so dreams you've had in your entire life. Of those, you likely don't remember the full story line, just the details that stuck with you. L. Strumpell, a contemporary of Freud theorized that we don't remember the particulars of dreams because we don't learn from them. He theorized that we learn by association and repetition. Dreams are usually so random and the plot lines so vague, that nothing sticks with us. That would seem to lend credence to the second theory I outlined above.

At one time, it was believed that dreams are connected to REM (Rapid Eye Movement) sleep. Most of us experience a period during sleep in which our eyeballs move back and forth very rapidly. Tying dreams to REM sleep raised an interesting paradox. REM sleep generally only lasts for a few seconds to a few minutes, while the subjective plot lines of dreams can go on for hours, or in some less common cases, days. Nowadays, it is believed that REM sleep and dreams are not connected. Sleep studies have shown that people experience vivid dreams without ever going into REM sleep.

Dreams are dreck that our mind drops on the ground as it starts up the dialog once again after sleep. They show us events that would certainly jar us if they happened during our waking hours. However, they don't give us glimpses into a hidden realm, other than what we glue together from available bits and pieces of experience. It certainly isn't useful to build the goals of our lives on the contents of our dreams. Artists and authors have based their work on their dreams, but many of the rest of us, talented as we may be, don't have dreams that are universally interesting enough to make a living by selling them.

For one, I just enjoy having a laugh at how utterly bizarre my dreams tend to be.

Mind vs. Brain

Brain is not mind, and mind is not brain. Just as the symphony isn't the orchestra, and the orchestra isn't the symphony.

Your brain is the most amazing feat of engineering humanity has ever encountered. It's made mostly of fatty cells called neurons. Neurons look sort of like tadpoles with lots of fingers. The fingers are called dendrites and the tail is called the axion. Dendrites and axions can connect neurons to other neurons. But, they don't touch one another. There is where the magic is. The neurons talk to each other using electrical pulses that jump across gaps called synapses. The electrical activity is caused by different chemicals that are released and withheld at the right times.

Scientists and philosophers have been looking for the mind for millennia. Mind and spirit have been related to one another countless times. René Descartes was the first to put forth the idea that mind and body are separate. Later, Sigmund Freud would divide mind into conscious and subconscious. Much more recently, it was believed that mind is contained in the electrical impulses that constantly fire across the trillions of synapses in the human brain. Yes. Trillions.

We've mapped the brain pretty well. That is, as far as cognition goes. We know which parts of the brain control sight, hearing, and motor functions like breathing and keeping our hearts beating. We even know which parts of the brain become more active during extreme emotional events. We know that you can scramble the frontal lobe and the patient can still walk and talk, but their emotions and motivation have been suppressed. Lately, we've discovered that certain chemicals in the brain cause behavior and mood disorders like depression, bipolar disorder, and schizophrenia. We discovered that certain other chemicals can control the creation and suppression of brain chemicals that cause the disorders. Lobotomies with chemicals and without that messy brain scrambling. But, none of that is mind.

With all of what we know, we think we're on the verge of discovering mind. According to people who have tried to discover mind scientifically, as opposed to philosophically, we're nowhere near it. Many of them say the the human mind is incapable of understanding the human mind. We may never understand the processes we use to think. We understand cognition quite well. We create all sorts of machines that mimic human cognition. We call it artificial intelligence, but that's a little arrogant. Cognition isn't mind. Cognition is incapable of learning by testimony. Cognition isn't self-aware. Cognition isn't innovative.

Your mind might actually be rattling around inside your head, but maybe not. Maybe it is something even more separate and apart from the body than we thought. After all, we thought epilepsy was caused by bad air at one time, didn't we?

The Individual

I've been reading Society of Mind by Marvin Minsky. It's about the mind and how it works from an artificial intelligence point of view. This quote struck me:

...without the concept of an individual, we would have no sense of responsibility.

Dr. Minsky does that. He makes profound statements in an offhand sentence.

A little background. The context is a discussion of self and Self and how we perceive them. The lower case self being the general concept, and the upper case Self being our perception of it. Upper case Self manages our internal dialog and steers the ship. Lower case self differentiates us from the furniture. That leads to the individual, which differentiates us from the other selves and Selves.

The question that opened up to me when I read that was, why? Why does responsibility follow conceiving the individual? As I said above, individuality is a boundary between our selves and everything else. At the most basic level, we act to survive. We seek food and shelter. We act to preserve the species. We reproduce. But those things not really responsibility. They are instinct. You can't assign responsibility to instinct unless you want to split hairs and say that we have a sense of responsibility to act on our instincts. What Dr. Minsky seems to be saying is that there is some kind of causality between individual and responsibility. Instinct and individual don't have a causal relationship. Consider reproduction. That is a purely instinctual urge. There is no immediate benefit to the individual. The individual doesn't have any conscious sense of responsibility to the species.

To my mind, responsibility involves another Self. Think about aboriginal communities. They weren't formed for the purpose of abstract society. They were for survival. One guy with a spear trying to take down the woolly mammoth was suicide. Ten guys with spears was dinner and shelter. One guy had to sleep and risk being dinner for a saber toothed tiger. Ten guys could rotate keeping watch. Also, in an example of purely instinct driven behavior, the bigger the society, the deeper the gene pool. But, in these societies, each member had a responsibility to pull his/her weight or get the boot and become carnivore fodder. But, that doesn't exactly link the individual to responsibility.

An aboriginal community wasn't exactly socialist. The tribe was important, but not more important than the individual. It was a community of individuals who took responsibility for the tribe. Inevitably, there was eventually going to be a leader. Cats are individuals, too, but we know how hard it is to get them to work together. At some point the tribe progressed from simple survival to larger goals. Territory. Advancing from hunter-gatherers to agrarians. But, the tribal leader who built his position purely from the collection of power didn't stay leader for long, one way or the other. Leaders who built the tribe on the importance of the individuals well as the tribe survived for a long time. American Indians built a society truly based on the consent of the governed. The tribe followed the chief as long as he acted in their best interest, when that wasn't true any more, they moved on. And there it is. Individuals responsible to themselves and to the tribe.

In socialist and communal systems, the individual gives up his sense of self for the good of the community. The basis of such systems is sacrifice, not responsibility. One of the most widely heard political sound bites is on the subject of personal responsibility. It preaches that personal responsibility will cure the ills of the current system, but it has it backward. The system has to be fixed to restore the individual and repair our sense of responsibility.

And, I think that's what Dr. Minsky meant by his offhand comment.