Thanks to reader Jacob Horner. Here's a partial transcript of this True Detective video.
I'd consider myself a realist, alright? But in philosophical terms I'm what's called a pessimist... I think human consciousness is a tragic misstep in evolution. We became too self-aware.
This is correct if our consciousness is a misleading trick. After all, the Buddha was right to say life is suffering. It's a raw deal (see below). Raw awareness of the human tragedy is very painful. In Flatland, by definition, self-awareness is limited. This fundamental incapacity to grasp our true condition makes human life, such as it is, possible.
On the other hand, one might turn this around and argue that we do not have enough self-awareness. More self-awareness might beget true self-knowledge (i.e., wisdom) leading to better outcomes and less human-caused suffering, whereas limited self-awareness is an unmitigated disaster. There's are paradoxes here. For example, our limited self-awareness fools us into believing we are outside nature, whereas we never left behind our natural origins and evolutionary baggage.
Nature created an aspect of nature separate from itself — we are creatures that should not exist by natural law... We are things that labor under the illusion of having a self, that accretion of sensory experience and feelings, programmed with total assurance that we are each somebody, when in fact everybody's nobody... I think the honorable thing for our species to do is to deny our programming. Stop reproducing, walk hand in hand into extinction — one last midnight, brothers and sisters opting out of a raw deal.
Between ISIS attacks, Russian aggression in Syria and Ukraine, and Brexit, it can feel a lot like the world has been falling apart these past few years.
So it’s surprising — and perhaps a little disconcerting — to learn that Susan Rice, President Barack Obama’s national security adviser, is actually optimistic about the state of the world right now.
"This is a much more hopeful and positive period in history than we have seen certainly in our lifetimes," she told me in early August when I sat down with her in the White House to talk about the Obama administration’s foreign policy.
"I tell my kids this: that they couldn’t be luckier to be living in this world at this time."
Yes, I was just meditating on just how lucky, how truly fortunate, we are to be living in 2016, the best time in human history.
Yesterday evening, about 6:15, it started to rain. And it kept raining. Really hard. Then there was hail and very high winds, winds strong enough to knock down a lot of trees, lots of power wires, basically anything that's not already laying on the ground.
I'm guessing we got about 3 inches in approximately 90 minutes in my neighborhood. This morning, looking out from my back porch, there were two large trees sprawled across a neighbor's fence laying on the ground in front of the garages. Almost all my back porch plants were damaged, the terracotta pots destroyed.
In the 2 months previous to yesterday's storm, and especially late last week, the daytime temperatures reached the low 90s and the dewpoints were also very high, which meant that we often had a "heat index" over 100°. The weather people, trying to be helpful, would tell us it "feels like 106°" — hey, thanks! Now I know why I'm so miserable!
On these really bad days, when the sun finally went down, which seemed to take forever, it didn't feel any cooler for hours afterwards. It's weird and disconcerting to be so hot at night. The air felt like a smothering blanket. It wasn't like daytime heat. The signature of climate change is all over this summer's weather. It doesn't cool down much at night, warmer air holds more moisture, etc.
I don't have a car, so I have to walk to the store with my trusty backpack. In recent weeks, going to the store became a slow-moving death march of sweat and heat exhaustion.
I'm pretty sensitive to the heat, so if I didn't turn on the AC, I couldn't do much except sweat for days on end. That was also disconcerting, and depressing too. Turning on the AC helped a bit, but wasn't very pleasant either, it feels strange, fucks up my sinuses, and costs lots of money. Not to mention making global warming worse.
I understand that this story is not much in the big scheme of things, but I felt like writing it down. All this, and knowing future years will be this bad or worse. Some years now it feels like there's no fall. We simply go from summer to winter.
They say things are looking up later in the week. I sure hope so.
And even if we don’t [manage to] explain consciousness, our investigations will surely yield lots of practical applications, such as neural prosthetics and bionic upgrades.
Say what? WTF?
But that raises another question. What if science boosts our minds’ power without giving us greater self-understanding?
[The Brain Initiative's] biggest funder is the Pentagon, more specifically the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. According to the White House, Darpa is putting up $50 million, more than the National Institutes of Health ($40 million) and National Science Foundation ($20 million).
There's nothing new about the militarization of brain science. Ten years ago, when I was writing an article on how information is encoded in the brain, Darpa was already a major funder of research on neural coding and neural prosthetics.
Darpa program manager Alan Rudolph told me back then that the agency was interested in a wide range of potential applications, including "performance enhancement" of soldiers via either implanted or external electrodes linked to electronic devices.
One specific possibility, Rudolph told me, was a brain-machine interface that would allow soldiers to control a jet or other weapon system through thought alone, as in the 1982 Clint Eastwood film Firefox.
That "performance enhancement" bullshit apparently didn't fly, so later on we see DARPA floating some new bullshit (another meaningless post-hoc rationalization).
... over the last decade is that the Pentagon has become much cagier about its motives in supporting brain research.
Darpa now claims that its primary interest in brain science is treatment of injured soldiers.
As the White House put it, Darpa hopes that brain science will "dramatically improve the way we diagnose and treat war fighters suffering from post-traumatic stress, brain injury and memory loss."
Whatever. Maybe this new bullshit will gain traction. It sounds so humane! Of course if you want to avoid PTSD in war veterans, you might stop fighting wars.
Just kidding! Sorry! Couldn't help myself! I'm better now!
We also learn that "leading neuroscientists, including Floyd Bloom and Michael Gazzaniga," are writing reports advising other neuroscientists how they too can "tap into military funding."
Again, I've gotta ask — what's consciousness good for? Fucking hopeless in Flatland.
Reader Mike Roberts pointed us to a slew of articles on the so-called "mind-body" problem in a comment yesterday. So I started reading them. These posts were written by John Horgan for Scientific American. Horgan is a reasonable guy.
Those working on the mind-body problem seek the origins of consciousness in the physical brain. Horgan goes through the current theories, noting that this scientific endeavor is regressing. Many researchers have simply thrown up their hands, saying that the problem is unsolvable. And to my mind, the current theories, for lack of a better word, are ridiculous. So I won't comment on them.
The mind-body conundrum is a Flatland problem, as I will explain in part below. Instead, let's work on a couple of non-Flatland questions — what is consciousness good for?What are its limits? To my knowledge, nobody has examined both sides of that problem.
Let's explore the positive side. What does consciousness allow us to do? Alternatively, once it arose, why might evolution have selected for consciousness?
Straightforwardly, consciousness, along with language, allows us to hold things in the mind. Consciousness permits directed focus. All of culturally transmitted knowledge — I do mean all — depends on the ability of the brain (mind) to sustain directed focus. Thus do ideas and technologies get invented and transmitted over time from one generation to the next. It goes without saying that not only are we in thrall to those ideas and technologies, but our very survival depends on them, and has for a very long time now. That's the good news.
The bad news is that consciousness is utterly silent about the actual motivations underlying characteristic human behaviors arising from instincts, biases, defenses, etc. Let's work through this by asking some embarrassing questions which I've grappled with on DOTE, to wit—
Can consciousness help humans create a large, complex, egalitarian society? Apparently not.
Can consciousness prevent future wars and tribal conflicts? Apparently not.
Can consciousness prevent ubiquitous predatory human behaviors, both toward other humans and other species? Apparently not.
Does consciousness give us the ability to know when we are bullshitting and when we are not? Apparently not.
And so on, ad nauseum. Consciousness seems impotent in these and many other cases.
In short, where important large-scale behaviors are concerned, consciousness lacks efficacy. It is weak and does not determine (or even influence) important outcomes. It seems that humans have no idea what they're actually doing or why, at least where these important behaviors are concerned. And when paramount life & death matters are at stake—existential threats, whether they are immediate or longer term—consciousness is pretty much useless. That much seems apparent. History and experience tell us so.
Moreover, consciousness has a very unfortunate property—consciousness is misleading, consciousness is a trickster in so far as consciousness has no insight into motivations arising in the physical brain, the workings of which are opaque to it. That is to say, consciousness is post-hoc in the sense I've discussed on this blog; it is the end point of behaviors, not the starting point. The starting point and final arbiter seems to lay in the inaccessible physical brain (i.e. what psychologists call the unconscious).
But consciousness tells us we are powerful. And our power derives from our endless cleverness, right? Behold the temples we have built! (But why did we build them?)
We have all these astonishing technologies, all these sophisticated economic and political theories. We can deploy those technologies and implement those ideas. We can talk about them all day long. We can tweak them if they don't serve our conscious purposes. We know what we're doing, right? And how do we know that? Because what appears in consciousness tells us so!
And yet, we can not get positive answers to the kind of important, nagging questions listed above. And so we understand (better, hypothesize) that consciousnessis the tail wagging the dog. This is consciousness as trickster. We strive to avoid wars, but wars always come. We talk a good game about ending poverty once and for all, but the poor are always with us. We talk endlessly about addressing dangerous global warming, yet do virtually nothing to avoid it. We are actively destroying ocean ecosystems but can hardly bear to bring the subject up.
But if consciousness is a trick the brain plays on us, it sure is an amazing trick! Consciousness helps us to do all this really powerful, very effective stuff via cultural transmission (of technologies, social rules and arrangements, etc). Homo sapiens is a big success, right? This consciousness thing is really something! We humans are really hot stuff! Do we not live in the Anthropocene, a human-dominated world? Hah!
And that's pretty much where those studying the mind-body problem come down on the issue, one way or the other—consciousness makes humans really special! They are fooled by the apparent efficacy of consciousness, just like everybody else in Flatland.
As devastating human failures pile up in the 21st century, which may be the last for our benighted species, the inadequacy of human consciousness on this pale blue dot will become more and more obvious ... to a few people, or so I hope.
As Hillary hobnobs with the rich and famous in California and on Martha's Vineyard, she assures us that she will visit rain-ravaged Louisiana when her regal presence will not disrupt relief efforts there.
Clive Hamilton is put out about what we might call the trivializing of the anthropocene. His recent Nature commentary Define the Anthropocene in terms of the whole Earth argues that "researchers must consider human impacts on entire Earth systems and not get trapped in discipline-specific definitions." To understand what Hamilton means by "Earth-system science," watch the video below.
The Anthropocene was conceived by Earth-system scientists to capture the very recent rupture in Earth’s history arising from the impact of human activity on the Earth system as a whole. Read that again.
Take special note of the phrases ‘very recent rupture’ and ‘the Earth system as a whole’. Understanding the Anthropocene, and what humanity now confronts, depends on a firm grasp of these concepts, and that they arise from the new discipline of Earth-system science.
Earth-system science takes an integrated approach, so that climate change affects the functioning of not just the atmosphere, but also the hydrosphere, the cryosphere, the biosphere and even the lithosphere. (Arguably, anthropogenic climate change is more an oceanic than an atmospheric phenomenon.)
In the canonical statement of the Anthropocene, the proposed new division in the geological timescale is defined by the observation that the “human imprint on the global environment has now become so large and active that it rivals some of the great forces of Nature in its impact on the functioning of the Earth system” (W. Steffen et al. Phil. Trans. R. Soc. A369, 842–867; 2011).
As such, the Anthropocene cannot be defined merely by the broadening impact of people on the environment and natural world, which just extends what we have done for centuries or millennia.
Yet this is how many scientists are trying to define it...
Scientists in various disciplines (e.g., ecology, archaeology, geology, geography) have appropriated and redefined the anthropocene concept, and then tried to date the start of this new Earth epoch. Each discipline dates the start differently, depending on the focus of that area of study (read the Nature commentary).
Hamilton says, correctly in one sense, that this misses the point.
One thing all these misreadings of the Anthropocene have in common is that they divorce it from modern industrialization and the burning of fossil fuels.
In this way, the Anthropocene no longer represents a [recent] rupture in Earth history but is a continuation of the kind of impact people have always had.
This thereby renders it benign, and the serious and distinct threat of climate change becomes just another human influence...
Some scientists even write: “Welcome to the Anthropocene.”
Others like Andy Revkin or so-called "eco-modernists" refer to a "good anthropocene," which is absurd.
At first I thought they were being ironic, but now I see they are not. And that’s scary. The idea of the Anthropocene is not welcoming.
It should frighten us. And scientists should present it as such.
Long story short, we should be frightened because if humans continue on their current course, we are very likely fucked according to Hamilton.
National mainstream journalists have talked endlessly about Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton (and others) for many months now. Mostly they've rehashed every fucking thing Trump says in order to demonstrate his unfitness for office.
This is the hottest year on record in the United States (and the globe). That has led to many devastating extreme weather events, a good number of which are >500-year events.
Naturally I was thrilled to learn that Uber's First Self-Driving Fleet Is Arriving In Pittsburgh This Month (story in Bloomberg, August 18, 2016). I live in Pittsburgh.
Near the end of 2014, Uber co-founder and Chief Executive Officer Travis Kalanick flew to Pittsburgh on a mission: to hire dozens of the world’s experts in autonomous vehicles. The city is home to Carnegie Mellon University’s robotics department, which has produced many of the biggest names in the newly hot field...
“Travis had an idea that he wanted to do self-driving,” says John Bares, who had run CMU’s National Robotics Engineering Center for 13 years before founding Carnegie Robotics, a Pittsburgh-based company that makes components for self-driving industrial robots used in mining, farming, and the military. “I turned him down three times. But the case was pretty compelling.” Bares joined Uber in January 2015 and by early 2016 had recruited hundreds of engineers, robotics experts, and even a few car mechanics to join the venture.
The goal: to replace Uber’s more than 1 million human drivers with robot drivers—as quickly as possible.
The plan seemed audacious, even reckless. And according to most analysts, true self-driving cars are years or decades away. Kalanick begs to differ. “We are going commercial,” he says in an interview with Bloomberg Businessweek. “This can’t just be about science.”
This year humans got an up-close and personal view of a 1.5-degree world (C) and it hasn't been pretty. For example, Louisiana is experiencing a 500-year deluge right now. There have been literally hundreds extreme weather events all around the world this year. Speaking personally, the limits of my own endurance are being tested by tropical dew points which haven't subsided in the last six weeks. With that much moisture in the air, I sweat even when I'm sitting still.
According to a five-year prediction from the [UK] Met Office, global temperatures may fall slightly over the next year or two, as the El Niño wanes and temporarily cooler ocean temperatures associated with La Niña take hold.
But global warming will make that respite brief: 2018, 2019 and 2020 will likely be warmer than 2015, and the warming trend is expected to continue long after that. Sixteen of the 18 years that followed the last big El Niño (1997-98) were warmer than 1997.
The sanest response to all this would be to bend over, put your head between your knees and kiss your ass goodbye. But hope springs eternal, so scientists are having another meeting, this time in Geneva. They will write yet another report, which will be published in 2018, which is about 3 years before the date when we have only a 66% chance of staying below 1.5-degrees "forever" (relatively speaking). Here at DOTE we know the actual odds of staying below this ceiling are effectively zero.
