Walkaway by Cory Doctorow

I really enjoyed reading Cory Doctorow's Walkaway, though it was more the setting than the story that had me entranced.

Doctorow envisions a relatively high tech future with a strong upper class with strict controls on many aspects of society, but there's an informal, unsupported safety valve that makes it possible for people to get out from under the plutocrats (called Zottas here). Doctorow's society is fraying around the edges, so there are lots of abandoned industrial facilities and vacant land that people who are fed up can Walkaway to. Once there they create informal voluntary societies, and exploit the abandoned wealth they find around them. As with Doctorow's Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom this is a reputation based society, but many of the people who fuel this iteration explicitly reject the ideas of ratings and rankings and tracking contributions. People work together for the joy of it, and record their ideas and plans so others can replicate what works and improve on what doesn't.

In a focal early scene, Limpopo and her companions have been working for months to build a habitation called the Belt and Braces in the wilderness. Limpopo leads by doing a lot of the work, and she has argued convincingly that using leaderboards and rewarding people based on their contributions are ineffective ways to encourage desirable behaviors because they incentivize the wrong kinds of effort. Jimmy had lost an earlier round of this argument and been asked to leave. He returns with a crowd of allies one day when Limpopo is working outside, and his crowd uses the lack of formal rules to rewrite the software controls and impose a reward structure. A common response to this kind of disagreement would be to wage a "revert" battle in the software, but Limpopo uses this opportunity to demonstrate the depth of her commitment to the "Walkaway" philosophy by announcing that she's not going to fight over it. Instead, she'll go somewhere else and start over, leaving Jimmy with full possession of an empty shell. When pressed, she declares "I didn't make it. It wasn't mine. I didn't let him take it." The Walkaway philosophy is to not have belongings, so as not be attached to your stuff. It's impossible to steal from them because they don't acknowledge ownership.

For me, the model that strikes home is the ability to withdraw from an existing government and decamp to a new location to just start over. The current international order doesn't seem to leave any gaps for things like this, but I'm currently in the middle of reading James C. Scott's The Art of Not Being Governed, which presents a history of South East Asia that says that the shape of the societies in that part of the world has been driven for millennia largely by the people who moved to less accessible locations in order to escape governments that were getting unbearable. Scott argues that the sociology of the closely related peoples living in hills and valleys were driven more by which crops and living arrangements were easy for governments to count and tax in the valleys, and hard for them to find and more durable in the remote and higher settlements. I hope to write more about that when I've finished Scott's book.

Doctorow doesn't try to argue that it's easy, and in fact shows that the walkaway crowd is doing an immense amount of work in order to rebuild. I find this model of decentralized self government very sympathetic. There's no acknowledged government with territorial exclusivity, and people are able to leave if they don't like the way things are being run. There is plenty of open room to move to, and there's enough generalized wealth at hand and accessible know how that people don't feel tied down.

The unfortunate part of Walkaway is that Doctorow needed a conflict, and the one he sets up is that the Zottas are jealous of their control over society, and see the walkaways as a threat, so they're willing to kidnap, torture and send in the troops in order to regain control. In the final battle scene, a Zotta leader's daughter is in the target area, and the Zotta's back down. But in the meantime, the walkaway society's story is one of resisting violence from outside rather than the peaceful coexistence they're working so hard to get.

I agree with Doctorow's aesthetic sense; focusing on this society after the Zottas have ceded control wouldn't provide conflict at the same existential level, but it would be a much nicer place to live, both for those who walk away and those who remain behind in the "default" economy.

Doctorow knows how to tell a story: There are a lot of funny and touching scenes in the story, and he covers a lot of ground. In addition to the overall situation which I've focused on so far, the story covers many kinds of relationships, uploading makes a major sub-plot, and the unequal distribution of society's benefits is explored. He does have a darker outlook than I on where technology is heading. The reason there are riches lying around is that the Zottas would rather shutter outmoded plants than sell them and allow someone else to exploit the resources they contain. There are many highly trained mercenaries around that the Zottas can hire who will do their bidding, no matter how distasteful it might seem to us. But that's visible in many of his other stories, and he still manages to be entertaining and paint a hopeful picture about how people can get along together and build something great. This book is being considered for this year's Prometheus, and it's my current favorite.

0.3productChris Hibbert

Insurgence, by Ken MacLeod

Ken MacLeod's The Corporation Wars: Insurgence, is the second book of a trilogy. It (along with the first book in the series, Dissidence, is a finalist for the Prometheus award this year.

Insurgence continues the story of awakened robots struggling for freedom, and uploaded human ex-combatants fighting to retake the planetary system the robots had been mining and exploring.

This installment focuses less on the robots' claim to be agents worthy of separate respect, and more on the uploaded warriors struggle to figure out the nature of the reality they inhabit while mostly following orders to fight the battles their supervisors are pursuing. Their ultimate worry is that they don't have enough information to tell which side they're fighting on or who they are battling to subdue. When you live in a simulation (particularly when you can tell that someone else has access to the control panel) it's a little difficult to be sure that your choices aren't effectively controlled by someone else.

Next, cracks appear in the simulation, and "real" revived people see the shortcomings, but non-player-characters (MacLeod calls them philosophical zombies) think everything is normal, so the real people can tell who's just a simulated person. The idea of zombies in philosophy (sometimes "p-zombies") is an exploration of the idea of consciousness. What if there were beings that acted just like people, but had no consciousness? Would it make a difference to them? Should we accord them lesser rights?

I consider the idea of p-zombies to be incoherent, but many smart people treat the question as exploring an important distinction. MacLeod here undercuts the point of the argument since there are actual behavioral differences. It isn't an exploration of whether consciousness matters, it's just that some characters in the story are imperfect simulations without an inner life, and the actual thinking beings can tell who they are. At the same time, MacLeod makes sure we notice that the robots and AIs who are active in the battles and the scheming do have an inner dialogue, and are making plans and collaborating with others to get things done.

The starting position for the agencies that represent the current Earth government and act under its protection is that only humans are allowed to be sentient. Even AIs' powers are circumscribed. Whenever self awareness arises otherwise, it must be stamped out. It's not clear why this would be a plausible stance, since it's clearly the case that the AIs can become self-aware for short periods, and autonomously operating robots have the capacity for spontaneous self awareness given the right trigger. So they must be constantly battling to defeat uprisings, and track down newly minted sophonts who either try to escape from control, or hide in occupied systems. It would make more sense to forbid use of tools with the capacity for self awareness, than to constantly try to stomp them out. I'd also have a hard time going along with a regime that wanted to outlaw and destroy a class of beings because they were self aware. Self aware and hostile is a separate thing, but that's not the distinction they've settled on.

Before one of the final battles, one of the leaders of the simulated humans challenges the combatants to each eat a slice of p-zombie flesh to prove that they believe they're in a simulation, and that there can't be any moral issues with simulated eating of simulated meat from simulated people that were never actually alive or aware. Except for a few who object to the initiation-ceremony aspect of the act, they all partake.

So there's a lot of exploration here of of philosophical questions of identity, and what it means to be human. The questions of liberty are mostly focussed on what kinds of agents deserve respect as actual people, though I think MacLeod fumbled some of the issues. The action is interesting and the conflict exciting. Besides there are also weaponized communications packets, interrogations of potentially hostile agents by sending them into a dungeon simulation, double and triple agents, and terraforming. It's a pretty good read, and the lead-in to part three, of course leaves a few things to be resolved.

0.3productChris Hibbert

Dissidence, by Ken MacLeod

Ken MacLeod's The Corporation Wars: Dissidence, is the first book of trilogy. It (along with the second book in the series, Insurgence) is a finalist for the Prometheus award this year.

The story starts with a scene in which a pair of mining robots exploring an asteroid (in a distant solar system) and representing different corporate interests have an encounter, which leads them to realize they have opposing interests, which leads them each to recognize that they have interests, which leads them to self-awareness. The corporations are in a tenuous situation, trying to assert their ownership of the robots, trying to be civil about their contractual cooperation, but objecting strenuously to breaches by the opposing robots. The corporations end up fighting one another, and the robots band together and spread the concept of self-awareness to other nearby robots with sufficient computing capacity. Since the corporations don't seem likely to grant them independence, the robots form an independent faction in the upcoming battle. The corporations are loath to destroy their valuable property just yet.

When they do decide that military actions are called for, they end up dredging up opposing troops of uploaded warriors from past wars. All the AIs and non-self-aware robots, and other actors are under a deep compulsion that only humans and their uploads can actually be armed for combat, even against rogue self-aware robots. So the "humans" spent parts of their time embodied as people in a planetary environment, training and relaxing between missions. In the missions, they're downloaded into articulated space battle suits. Every time they die in battle, they return to the training site to start again. Over time, they find reason to doubt the reality of their home, and eventually detect serious cracks.

The uploads gradually learn enough about their realities to doubt that they're still fighting for the side they were loyal to in their first lives. Apparently part of the distinction between uploads and awakened AIs is that the operators can't tinker with opinions and loyalties directly, but they can easily lie and mislead about who they're representing, and what their opponents are fighting for. Of course, it wouldn't be an interesting story if the operator's control couldn't be subverted.

Ken MacLeod tells a good story, and gets us to think about what kinds of entities should have rights. The authorial point of view allows him to show the action in the eyes alternately of the awakened robots and the revived soldiers, so we feel their fundamental humanness. The characters, ex-human and non-human alike, think about who they should allow into their coalition, whether other actors are actually aware or just act like it, and have varying motives.

My biggest complaint about the story and the characters' attitudes is a simple acceptance among all the characters that some other characters are not real, based simply on statements from people in authority roles. In war, it doesn't make much sense to worry about whether the people shooting at you are actually thinking beings, but deciding that some category of bystanders don't have inner lives should be a cause for more intensive investigation. It's an easy allegation to make, and not far from standard attitudes about our enemies that we've mostly moved past.

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Chris Hibbert

Jo Walton's The Just City investigates the nature of justice, while telling an enchanting story involving gods, mortals and robots trying to actually build the Just City hypothesized by Plato. The goddess Pallas Athene brings together 10,000 children and a few hundred adults from many different times and places to found a new city (on the island of Atlantis) according to Plato's prescriptions in The Republic. Plato's main goal in The Republic was to explain the nature of Justice (the words 'Just' and 'Justice' occur more than 150 times on the wikipedia page), so Walton has plenty of room to explore the idea from several different directions.

In order to get infrastructure in place without burdening the new inhabitants (who are supposed to be coddled and trained so they can understand Justice) the goddess brings in robots to build housing and meeting rooms. The robots are kept around to take care of maintenance and other tasks that Plato didn't describe the city's inhabitants as handling. When the historical Socrates (as envisioned by Walton) joins the city, he turns out to be a very inquisitive man. Since the robots display some autonomy, Socrates wonders whether they have individual personalities and whether they're thinking and aware. This leads to even more opportunities for questions about Justice.

Pallas Athene wants to populate the city with willing participants, so the children (exactly half girls and half boys) all are from disadvantaged circumstances. The adults are all people who prayed for a chance to live in Plato's Republic, so (considering how often the book is actually read in the original greek, and in what historical periods) most are men from antiquity, and the women are nearly all from more modern times. This leads to some interesting political factions, and changing of practices as time goes on and the oldest denizens die off first.

Not all of the children are happy to be there, even though all of them agree that their previous lives (most were slaves) were worse. Even so, not having been given a choice rankles with a few, and their reactions are also interesting.

Many of Plato's ideas are reasonably modern, but others are very outdated, like assigning citizens to societal roles according to their metal. The adults of The Just City spend a lot of effort training and testing the children in order to place them appropriately. Many of the adults are uncomfortable with this duty, but they carry it out, and even put their thumbs on the scales as necessary in order to make the numbers come out right according to Plato's very Greek ideas about numerical harmony. When some of the children figure out that test rankings are being adjusted in order to fit pre-defined notions of how many should be in each category, they challenge the adults, and as with everything else that goes on in the city, philosophical discussion and socratic dialogue ensues.

Since there's limited space on the island, procreation must be limited and sexual activity controlled. The children (and adults) find creative ways around the restrictions, but this means discussion of sexual mores and prohibitions are necessary. We hear about everything from rape and unwanted intimacy to Plato's ignorance of issues of women's hygiene. For the most part the adults attempt to do everything according to Plato's prescriptions, but there are several clear gaps in Plato's planning which leads to the need for endless committee meetings (most of which we, mercifully, hear about afterward, rather than having to endure.)

Walton does a wonderful job of presenting these philosophical questions of freedom, choice, and justice through the character's activity and interactions. In the end, we get to know these people who are all striving to be their best, and to create an environment in which justice is available to all, even though humans always have incompatible desires. We even get some satisfying answers to new and old questions and some unresolved issues to ponder on our own.

Confusion about AI

I like Brockman's Edge.org. I think of it as smart people talking to smart people, and I usually find the discussions very interesting. But I was unable to read the recent conversation on the Myth of AI, started by Jaron Lanier, and mostly focussed on Bostrom's Superintelligence. I expect Bostrom's work to be very important, but I haven't found time to read it yet. Superintelligence talks about the likely emergence of super-human intelligences, and what there is to look forward to, as well as what we should worry about. I consider these to be very important issues, though I don't think they're going to make a huge difference in the next 10-20 years. But further out it is indeed going to be crucial that we spend time planning out how to make these intelligences not act in a way that is inimical to our interests. It's not that there's any reason to expect them to be out to get us, it's just that they'll have goals, and if we don't make the right moves ahead of time, we'll be in the way of their achieving their goals.
Anyway, starting out with Lanier, the discussion seemed ill-informed. The opening quote has him saying "The idea that computers are people has a long and storied history." This conflates so many threads that it's hard to know where to start. It's like trying to have a discussion about free speech with someone whose opening point is a complaint about the Supreme Court having decided that "companies are people". As far as I can tell, the Court decided that corporations are one of the ways that people act in concert, and that they don't lose their free speech rights when they use that kind of organizational structure to speak publicly. The fact that this decision applies just as much to giant mega-corporations and to unions as to the two-person public outreach institute that was the actual subject of the case at issue is more due to the Court's belief in consistency.
The point of AI isn't that "computers are people", it's that thinking and acting can be reduced to computational processes (it all comes down to atoms and meat, after all) and so there's no reason to believe that we won't eventually be able to build machines out of silicon that do the same thing, and aren't subject to the same constraints as apply to biological mechanism made out of Carbon.
I was very happy to read Luke Muehlhauser's review (hat tip to Yvain). Luke agrees that the discussants at Edge are confused, and had the patience to analyze some of the misconceptions, and point back to the actual subjects of disagreement.

Surface Detail: Iain M. Banks

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Chris Hibbert

Iain M. Banks's Surface Detail is an exploration of hell on a couple of different levels. The main conflict in the story is between civilizations that believe in using hell as a real threat to keep sinners in line, and those that are opposed to the practice. According to the story, there are enough societies with a hell in their religion to have made it a common practice, once "people" started moving into simulations, that many created "hell" simulations and sentenced people to spend time there as a judicial punishment.

Most species and societies have a creation myth. The idea of a soul is also common, even if advanced civilizations mostly outgrow belief in it. Once you add in virtual reality, and then the ability to copy minds and host them in a simulation, the idea that virtual afterlives should resemble the cultural traditions' ideas of either heaven of hell seems obvious. The problem is that as people (sophonts of whatever stripe) grow more sophisticated (see Pinker's book on violence) many stop believing that perpetual hell could be a reasonable punishment.

The Culture took a fairly active stance (unusual for them) against the hells, and after some galactic period of time, there was a relative stalemate, in which two factions had very strong opinions that the other side was wrong. "Eventually, though, a war was agreed on as the best way to settle the whole dispute". A virtual war, of course, with both sides agreeing that the outcome on the virtual battlefield would determine the victor in the real world. There's a sub-plot for the virtual battles and another for the political and logistical maneuvering that leaks into the real world.

There's another sub-plot that takes place in one of the simulated hells. Banks does a really good job of envisioning what it would take to make a truly scary hell. In a civilizations that does have hell simulations, but which tries to keep their existence from being generally known [I think hells are like Dr. Strangelove's Doomsday device: "the whole point of a Doomsday Machine is lost, if you *keep* it a *secret*!"] there are some muckraking journalists who want to convince everyone that the stories are true, so they volunteer to infiltrate. Things don't turn out well for them, and this gives Banks the opportunity to really turn the screws and come up with more and more unbearable tortures.

The major plot involves an evil industrialist who kept a defeated rival's daughter as a slave, and eventually killed her. She gets a chance to come back and try to take revenge. The "coming back" requires a trip across the galaxy with a culture Abominator class ship the "Falling Outside The Normal Moral Constraints". FOTNMC is a real personality, and seems pretty unstoppable in a battle of wits or an actual battle.

I really like Banks' Culture stories, and even though this one is filled with plausible and explicit hells and some truly evil and some powerful and amoral characters, I thought it was both fun and had philosophical depth. The proprietor of hell has to deal with someone who can't be satisfactorily tortured because she has really given up all hope, so he comes up with a way to give her just enough hope to allow her to suffer again. Truly nasty.

Thinking Fast and Slow: Daniel Kahneman

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Chris Hibbert

Daniel Kahneman's Thinking Fast and Slow was much better than I expected it to be. Not that I wasn't expecting it to be well written or interesting, just that I expected that since Kahneman's results and views have been covered in great depth in a lot of other works I've read, I didn't expect much to be new. Even if you're fairly familiar with Kahneman's results and ideas, the book presents them well, and gives good advice on how to take advantage of your brain's predilections and work around its shortcomings.

Kahneman is well known as the progenitor (with Amos Tversky) of the Heuristics and Biases literature. You will find references to their research and results in lots of popular presentations on how people think, and the various ways in which people are prone to mistaken beliefs and sub-optimal actions. In Thinking Fast and Slow, he presents a unified discussion of this work, along with some solid suggestions for integrating the conclusions into your approach to life so that you can get more of what you want and be happier.

The basic theory is that we have two main approaches to problem solving with divergent benefits. The fast thinking part ("System One") is ready to make snap judgements on any subject at any time. It is fast, but it takes lots of shortcuts, and doesn't even bother to choose an optimal shortcut. Whatever answer first presents itself to this part of our minds is latched onto, because the evolutionary benefit was in having some answer quickly in case our ancestors needed to react immediately. The other approach is slow and deliberate, and involves evaluating lots of alternatives and consciously weighing benefits as well as the appropriateness of each approach to the current problem. The problem with System Two is that it's expensive, and for good evolutionary reasons your instincts always offer a quick and dirty response before there's time to consider more carefully.

Kahneman spends the bulk of the book giving lots of examples of particular, named, classes of mistakes we make ("Availability Heuristic", "Illusion of Validity", "Endowment effect", etc). It's probably useful to be aware of these classes if you want to reason more clearly, but I see the main value of Kahneman's approach to be in making us aware that our snap judgements are suspect. There are good reasons for each bias, which explains why evolution selected for that particular outcome, but whenever you're not in a life-and-death race to escape a lion, it pays to be attentive to your innate biases and consider your options more carefully. Having names for a catalog of short-sighted trade-offs you are likely to have gravitated to makes it easier to see which first guesses to re-think.

The final section of the book follows another perspective, also first identified by Kahneman and Tversky. This is the idea that our "Experiencing Self" and our "Remembering Self" have different evaluations when comparing things we do, which can lead to strange trade-offs when choosing what to do. The author argues that our memories systematically underweight pain we experience and consistently get some things wrong about enjoyable times, leading us to guess incorrectly about what kinds of situations we'd prefer in the future.

Experimental evidence shows that peoples' memories of painful episodes (dentist visits, for example) are dominated by the experience of the final moments of the experience, neglecting how painful earlier parts were. This means that adding 5 minutes of sligtly painful procedures to the end of a very-painful 15 minute procedure actually makes people remember the whole incident as having been less painful. Many people argue that it's clearly wrong to choose 20 minutes of pain over 15 minutes of pain, but this is not obvious to me. The 15 minute session should also carry the burden of all the subsequent time when the patient had to remember the more painful portions more clearly. The 20 minute session may have included more pain while in the chair, but the experiments show that the patients were less upset long afterward, partly because they had less gripping memories subsequently. So, as I see it, it's less of a contradiction than Kahneman believes.

On the other side, our recollections of enjoyable situations are also skewed. We tend to neglect long periods of time spent in pleasurable avocations (Kahneman calls it "duration neglect"), and when asked to choose how to spend our time or money, people often opt for the choice with a more easily recalled high point, regardless of the duration or enjoyability of the entire experience. Kahneman recommends that when planning vacations, or choosing other ways to spend our time, we focus more on the ongoing experience rather than the extremes. He's pretty convinced that we'll get more out of life that way. The counter is that when recalling our lives we'll be subject to just these biases, and regardless of how much joy there was in the small moments, we'll focus on the highs and lows when remembering our story or telling it to other people. It's food for thought in either case.

Steven Pinker: The Better Angels of Our Nature

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Chris Hibbert

Steven Pinker's The Better Angels of our Nature argues that violence has been declining over the last several centuries, and continues to decline, even though the common wisdom seems to say the opposite. Pinker marshalls an enormous quantity of data to buttress his story, and fills in with enough explanation to make a very convincing case. At the end, he tries to explain this long term trend, and comes up with several mechanisms, but since this section is less data driven, it's less convincing than the fact that the change is broad, pervasive, and has continued for a very long time.

Pinker starts out with wars, genocide, and other large scale killings. He amasses a dataset of all known mass killings before the modern age. The data is spotty, so it's hard to draw many conclusions, but it is clear that the distant past included its share of conflicts resulting in lots of deaths, and the twentieth century's war are memorable more for their recency than their scale. In addition, there's a pretty clear trend that the great power conflicts of the early twentieth have disappeared. At the end of his chapter on the Long Peace, Pinker points out that since the end of WWII there have been zero:

1. nuclear weapons used
   
2. battlefield fights between great powers
   
3. armies crossing the Rhine (longest interval since 200 BCE)
   
4. wars between european states
   
5. wars between developed countries anywhere in the world
   
6. territorial expansions by conquest for a developed country
   

As we're getting close to 50 or 60 years without a conflict between major powers, it becomes more plausible that it's a trend rather than an aberration.

From large-scale conflicts, Pinker moves on to socially-approved violence, and then to individual violence. Socially-approved violence includes things like slavery and wide-spread repression as of jews and gays as well as public execution and public torture and punishment. All these have gone from common to unacceptable over the long term. Pinker shows that, in parallel with granting rights to more and more groups the statistics on personal violence in a very broad range of contexts have been declining. Historic attitudes toward blacks, women, gays, ethnic groups, children, and animals have all changed dramatically.

Finally, Pinker tries to figure out what's been driving this change. He starts out by describing some broad trends: The Long Peace, and The Rights Revolution, but he admits they're just names, not a description of causes. From there he looks for factors that could have caused these trends. Empathy may have been increased because of the spread of literacy and mass entertainment that give us more access to other points of view. Self control, likewise may have been improved by the promulgation of personal habits that enable people to make their short-term desires subservient to their longer-range goals. He considers biological evolution, but concludes that while it would have been capable of producing a change, we don't have any evidence for the hypothesis. Next Pinker discusses whether humanity's moral sense or rationality has improved in some way to produce the improvement. He accepts that people are getting smarter (i.e. "the Flynn effect") and argues that once we reach a certain level, we can use reason to see that cooperation is more in our interest than violence, first at the personal level, and gradually at broader levels on interaction.

Finally, Pinker presents a framework for thinking about how various changes have impacted people's incentive structures, and what consequences they have for interactions. It's all based on the basic prisoner's dilemma payoff matrix, showing the options two parties face when they can make independent choices as they interact. The first version is called the Pacifist's dilemma, and shows that wars and fights are costly, but it's better to be the aggressor than the defeated. A second shows that "Leviathan" (a government) can change everyone's incentives by penalizing agression. Next is a chart showing that trade ("Gentle Commerce") improves things for everyone by improving the payoffs as long as agression is avoided. His final chart assumes that empathy and reason are added in, and everyone feels not only their own gains and losses, but those of the other party as well. At that point only positive sum outcomes make sense, since each player gains no advantage by imposing costs that are felt by both sides.

This model is plausible, but not compelling. Something like this might be going on, but it's hard to say that he's actually found the mechanism driving things. An interesting postscript is provided by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, who argues that Pinker doesn't understand the statistics of the fat tail that Taleb has been writing about for a while. If the proper curve is not a normal distribution, but instead a fat-tailed curve with most of the weight in the extremes, then the stats demonstrating that there is an effect to be explained are worthless. Taleb gives a bunch of (not well-explained) possible mechanisms for supposing that Pinker might have missed something, but he doesn't analyze whether the historical data looks more like a normal distribution or a fat-tail distribution. I suspect that the near-constant level of violence in the past makes Pinker's position more believable that violence has in fact gone down. It's possible that large-scale conflicts will occasionally arise with enormous body counts, but the drop in violence on all lesser scales doesn't seem likely to be reversed, and that doesn't seem consistent with Taleb's models of financial system variability.

Overall, the book provides good news, and more fodder I can use to try to convince people that what appears in the news is exceptions rather than trends.

Migration: James P. Hogan

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Chris Hibbert

James P. Hogan's Migration is a funny mix of high-tech space traveling futurism and down-home country folks. The bulk of the story takes place on Aurora, an interstellar ship on the first part of its journey, but it starts out on a mostly back-country world. We get to see some local politics and Korshak, a quick-thinking sleight-of-hand magician, who takes advantage of the local ruler's gullibility as far as he can. Korshak has a fan and friend who is on the recruiting team for Aurora, so he manages to escape his pursuers and jump into a world unlike everything he's used to. But he's an adaptable guy, so he learns to be useful in the new environment.

Korshak has to use his wits to rescue Aurora from sabotage by a subversive faction that has recruited Kek, a robot, to help them. We get the standard tour around the society as Korshak chases Kek from place to place. Some of the sub-societies are interesting, including one group trying to live at a subsistence level on this generation star ship. But Hogan makes it completely plausible.

Early on, the recruiters are interviewing a ne'er-do-well the local authorities would like to get rid of. He responds

"If it's military, or some kind of troublemaking to provide an excuse for protective intervention somewhere, the answer's no, but you don't look like a military recruiter. [That] doesn't solve anything. Just causes a lot of hate and reasons for revenge, and makes problems worse. The wrong people get rich."

"Who do you think should get rich?"

"Well, the way I see it is, nobody's born with anything. So whatever they get on top of what they produce themselves must come from other people. And the only way other people are going to give it to them is if they get something worthwhile back in return. So the ones who should end up with a lot to show are the ones who can do things better when it comes to providing what other people need."

But Hogan isn't consistently pro-commerce. The bad guys who have brainwashed Kek call themselves Dollarians and their high officials have titles like Banker. It's a fun story, but though it was nominated for the Prometheus award last year, it wasn't selected as a finalist. The side trip into Kek's attempt to be more human, (which ends up with him getting involved with a cult) is worth the trip.

The Ego Tunnel, Thomas Metzinger

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Chris Hibbert

Thomas Metzinger's The Ego Tunnel is a provocative look at the nature of consciousness. Metzinger takes an innovative approach to the questions and raises some interesting issues without seeming to have a strong grasp of the subject.

Metzinger's project is to explore the nature of consciousness by examining two neglected states of awareness: out-of-body experiences (OOBEs), and lucid dreaming. He argues that studying these phenomena will illuminate the problem of consciousness and make everything clear. I'll agree that the exploration was intriguing, but I don't think we learned anything important over what Dennett made clear in Consciousness Explained. At the end, Metzinger heads out to left field for some completely ungrounded speculations about AI and ethics. In these areas, he's clearly way out of his depth. He doesn't understand what's been done in AI, or what's possible, and his claims about the "obvious" rights of artificial creatures and how it wouldn't be moral to treat them is unconvincing.

When introducing the idea of studying unusual states of consciousness, Metzinger makes the reasonable point that there is enough consistency in the experiences reported during OOBEs and lucid dreaming that it makes sense to take a look at them and see whether the commonalities are instructive. I thought he did a good job of drawing some clear lines around what it feels like to be conscious in comparison to other states in which there is awareness without self-awareness. The title comes from his metaphor of an "Ego Tunnel" as a constrained mental space encompassing the limited set of things that one is aware of at a moment in time. Metzinger points to recent fMRI work and claims that neurophysiologists are finding a neural correlate of consciousness, which they can identify in the brain, and so they can conclusively say that lucid dreaming and OOBEs are conscious states. It's not clear to me that whatever the MRIs are finding really corresponds to the same thing we mean by consciousness, but the argument that these are conscious states is convincing enough without that evidence. He brings up the idea of mirror neurons, and points toward an interesting argument that this feature of our brain is responsible for our being able to model ourselves as an active agent like others we can observe. This argument only occupied a couple of pages, and ended (I thought) inconclusively.

Unfortunately, Metzinger's identification of these mental states as reasonably corresponding to consciousness doesn't enable him to say any more about what consciousness is, what survival-related purpose it serves, or anything coherent about consequences. He tries to talk about AI and ethics, but his justification doesn't get beyond the level of our responsibility for our creations, and the primacy of experience. For him, it's obvious that it would be immoral to turn off anything that has experiences, so in his view, we shouldn't even explore the creation of artificial creatures, since we can't establish a theoretical lower bound for what it would mean to have experiences. This is a much deeper subject than he seems aware of, and he barely brushed the surface of it. With his (apparently) shallow understanding of the issues, his speculations are hard to take very seriously.

I thought the first two thirds of the book were worth reading for their exploration and presentation of how OOBEs and lucid dreaming relate to consciousness. The fMRI and other studies of these states may add significantly to our understanding of how the brain works and eventually to a clearer explanation of what's happening in the neurons during thought and consciousness.

The Last Trumpet Project, Kevin MacArdry

0.3

Chris Hibbert

Kevin MacArdry's The Last Trumpet Project covers the consequences of a slightly future world in which realistic virtual realities and uploading of people's consciousnesses into software are becoming commonplace. The government and organized religion are both violently opposed to these developments (for different reasons) and work together to suppress the technology and the people promoting it. Since the technology is the result of decentralized processes, rather than a single company or organization, the efforts to suppress don't do much more than slow the tide.

The story is generally well-told, with plenty of excitement, intrigue, and reasonable character development. The one place where MacArdry comes up short is in his depictions of the bad guys. They are caricatures of venal politicians and religious leaders, and may turn off (politically) mainstream readers. Their explicit drives and goals are for personal power, and they verbally admit that they don't care who gets hurt as long as they don't have to relinquish control.

MacArdry presents a plausible economic story about the development of the technology (the ability to view past events necessary for uploading dead people notwithstanding). As the fidelity of the VR improves, and there are more things to do and places to go there, more people spend more time there. The eventual consequence is that their real world activities and sources of income become harder to trace, which squeezes the tax authorities. This is the root of much of the governmental opposition. The religious opposition is stirred up based on the project to resurrect the dead into the artificial worlds.

As befits a technology that people rely on so heavily (the resurrected can't exist without it), the software has actual security (not described) that enables owners to prevent bad actors from getting access to sensitive locations. Of course the weak spot is physical access to the servers hosting the system, and the enemy forces eventually figure that out, though they have a hard time connecting particular servers to particular virtual locations.

The Last Trumpet Project is a finalist for the Prometheus Award, and it has a reasonable chance. It may not be the best written candidate of this year's finalists, but it's one of the best at presenting a clear conflict between freedom and government repression.

Zendegi, Greg Egan

0.3

Chris Hibbert

Greg Egan's Zendegi is another novel nominated for this year's Prometheus Award that features social media being used by an underground movement to topple a government. But this is Greg Egan, so there must be something about silicon consciousness or artificial life involved, right? Well, yes there is, but the political plot works out to be more interesting this time around. Egan's focal characters are Martin Seymour, an ex-pat American journalist living in Iran and Nasim Golestani, an Iranian scientist who worked in the US but has now returned. At the beginning of the story Golestani is working on the Human Connectome project, which gives her a background in mapping the brain to software. Seymour gets involved when cell-phone pictures help topple the Iranian religious dictatorship.

In the second half of the novel, Golestani works on improving the AI for a virtual reality game company that is struggling to keep up with its competition, while Seymour runs a bookstore in Tehran. Golestani starts incorporating data and software from the Connectome project into the NPCs, which raises the ire of fundamentalists. Seymour, meanwhile, has contracted a fatal disease, and wants to find a way to ensure that someone he trusts will continue to provide guidance to his son, and hits on the idea of getting Golestani to build an artificial mind for him.

Egan's depiction in Diaspora of the development of consciousness in artificial minds was ground-breaking, but nothing of similar scope happens here. There are many scenes in virtual reality, but the story-telling emphasis is on Seymour's attention to influencing his son's maturation. The descriptions of the development of the artificial consciousnesses focused on brain mapping rather than awareness. In the end, the characters decide that the simulacrum of Seymour isn't up to the task of mentoring his son, which renders many of the interesting conflicts and questions moot. The protesters against enslaving artificial being can be pacified with a promise to keep them below the level of a simple automaton, and Golestani doesn't have to grapple with her own moral sensibilities about just how conscious they might become. It feels like Egan really side-stepped the issue here. And his solution doesn't do anything to prevent other developers from taking the same step later.

It's especially bad because Egan has previously made it clear that understands these issues. His Diasporah, and Permutation City directly address issues related to artificial consciousness. In the latter work, his characters explore a large variety of different scenarios of partial experience, and directly discuss the issues concerning how real they are as persons, and what rights a partially aware entity should have.

While the story is well-written, topical, and engaging, the liberty-related themes are sparse and limited. The populace revolts against a corrupt dictatorship, but that's more celebration than presentation of issues. Artificial creatures are developed, but never get advanced enough for their rights to be a serious question. It's neither a strong contender for this year's Prometheus, nor as much as I would have expected from Egan.

Going Inside, John McCrone

0.3

Chris Hibbert

John McCrone's Going Inside provides a lot of insightful observations about how the brain works, but fails to tie them together into a cohesive picture. McCrone focuses on recent findings from new brain scanning technologies, and is particularly fascinated by timing studies that give details on how long it takes us to process incoming information, the specific times at which decisions are made, and how our subjective experience of when choices happen comport with the underlying brain circuitry. In particular, the studies show that it takes a half second to react to new information, even when we're expecting it, but our subjective experience is that the decision is made instantaneously at the end of that period. The experiments that show this are ingenious: by cutting off or distracting the process at various points, we can compare the reported subjective feel about the decision state that was reached with the brain scanner's details of how far into the process the brain actually got. All this works experimentally, because repeated sessions show that there's a lot of consistency in the information processing, so the scientists can pinpoint when the incoming information started being processed, and how long it would have taken to reach a choice.

The problem with the presentation is that McCrone doesn't provide an overview of the whole picture until the closing chapter, so as a reader, I had no framework onto which to attach all the facts as he presented them so as to build up a cohesive picture. I was left with the feeling that he'd presented good evidence that seemed to bear on the issue he was investigating, but I didn't know how it fit as I encountered it, so each tidbit vanished as I encountered the next one. I'm not sure things would be much improved on a re-reading. With a familiarity with the whole story, I could figure out how most of the pieces buttress the argument, but I'd have to make up my own argument structure for why his is the best explanation for the workings of the entire system.

McCrone also flubs up on the evolutionary explanation. At various points, he attempts to show why evolution would have produced just the structures and relationships that he has revealed, but his descriptions are unconvincing--he sometimes speaks as if evolutionary pressures are pushing toward a known result, rather than explaining why some abilities would have been selectively favored and why random mutations could have produced the effects. I think the correctly formed arguments could have been constructed, but McCrone's failed attempts were distracting.

One of McCrone's goals is to show how quickly brain scanning technologies advanced over the last few decades. The best tools for peering into the deepest details of timing and interaction in the brain have only recently been developed, so the insights that are most crucial to the book's argument aren't presented until a third of the way into the book, when he has set the historical context. Benjamin Libet did a series of experiments on patients (who were getting brain surgery already) that showed that direct electrical stimulation of the brain wasn't noticed unless it continued for a full half-second. If the stimulation was cut off earlier the patient wouldn't notice anything; if it continued for longer, the subject would report that they had been aware of it from the beginning. Later experiments showed that a second stimulus could mask the first one, as much as a third of a second later. This is pretty convincing evidence that processing inputs takes us up to half a second, and our experience of the present is cobbled together after the fact. Explaining "Libet's half-second" and figuring out what it implies about consciousness occupies the bulk of the book.

Libet did other studies later in which subjects were asked to notice the position of a rotating second hand at the moment they made a decision to lift a hand or take a similar action. With these and other similar experiments by other researchers it became clear that there isn't a precise moment at which decisions are made. The state of the brain changes somewhat continuously over a period from a half second to a full second, and subjects report somewhat arbitrary times as "the moment" of decision.

I would have to re-read the whole book (I've re-skimmed about the first half) in order to provide a detailed synopsis of it. I did feel like McCrone brought quite a few fascinating and important insights to light that would clarify an understanding of brain mechanisms, but the organization makes it hard to put them together on first reading. Maybe someone else will (or has) pull the material together in a better order, and that will be a more worthwhile book.

Nick Humphrey: Seeing Red

0.3

Chris Hibbert

Nick Humphrey's Seeing Red is another attempt to explain consciousness, but from a slightly different angle. Humphrey clearly understands what it would mean to produce an explanation, and makes some progress on the task. Humphrey starts not with what it means to think about something or to be aware of something, but with the more fundamental fact of perception of something outside of ourselves. The focal perception is of a red sensation. There's something in your environment that produces the perception of redness. What just happened to you? What does it mean that it makes you sense the presence of red? Why can you share this experience with others who also perceive the redness or with people who aren't present but still understand what you mean?

Humphrey first concentrates his attention on the internal details: first you perceive, then you become aware that you are perceiving. You may put words to the sensation or you might not, but Humphrey takes pains to point out that the perceiving and awareness are two separate facts. If you then talk to someone else about the perception (which you can do because you're aware of it), then of necessity each of you has some kind of "theory of mind"; a mental model that represents the fact that whatever it means to perceive, you are something that can do it, and other people are capable of the same thing.

Having set these aspects of reality out, Humphrey goes to some trouble to demonstrate that they are separate facets of reality, and all need to be present in an actual explanation. He talks about things like 'blindsight' and optical illusions in order to convince people who aren't keeping up that all these things are distinct facets of reality and need to be distinct in any explanation.

In the second half of this small book, Humphrey explains that consciousness arises out of the neurons in the brain, and that their role is to reflect and represent what's really going on in the world. He wants to present an evolutionary explanation of why they arose, but he only really justifies the fact that they are useful. The mechanism and history that allowed a feedback process between sensing and acting to arise and be passed down as a competitive advantage eludes him. And he doesn't have much to say about how the neural substrate might represent facts about reality in such a way that it could actually be useful to an aware, active agent interacting with the world.

My bottom line is that this book lays out the issues fairly clearly in a way that ought to be interesting and convincing to someone who is just starting to think about how consciousness might work, but the explanations fall short of answering the deeper questions. On the other hand, Humphrey's stated goal in the book is to show that consciousness matters and that it can be productive to think carefully about it. That much he succeeded at.

The End of Faith by Sam Harris

0.2 Chris Hibbert The End of Faith

The End of Faith, by Sam Harris, takes the position that reasonable people (realists) ought to stop allowing religious people a free pass to raise faith-based viewpoints in discussions of fact-based issues. He argues against moderation and tolerance in polite conversation because the moderately religious are forced by the logic of their position to accept the arguments of those who take their religion more literally. If we grant standing to minor logical indiscretions like the virgin birth, the recent creation of the universe, or the miracle of the loaves and the fishes, those who accept those unlikely things (on the basis that the bible says its' so) will refuse to disagree with others who argue that they've learned less benign things from their infallible bibles such as that homosexuality is a sin.

I think he's right that the moderate religious position is logically incoherent. We depend, for peace in the western world, on the participation of people who claim that the bible is literally the word of god, but are extremely selective in what they attend to in that book. When others make claims with a similar basis, the religious have no counter-argument, and the moderate position is that we should accept a diversity of opinion as healthy. Unfortunately, this argues for tolerance of extremists, and acceptance of their claim that some set of people should be slaughtered or removed from civil society as rationally based.

We cannot, Harris says, reject the extreme forms without rejecting the moderate forms as well. Unfortunately, he doesn't provide any guidance for how to carry out this proposal in a society in which the religious outnumber the rational. In fact, in his talk at the Long Now Foundation's lecture series, he agreed with a questioner who pointed out that it's a hard conversational stance to take, and had no suggestions.

Harris spends a chapter explaining that Islam is more a problem in the modern world than other religions because the faith has significant fundamental beliefs (accepted even by the moderates) that justify the resort to violence. Even more than moderate Christians, moderate Muslims are forced to accept the claims to righteousness of their extremists. The moderates believe in the importance of Jihad, accept the claim that apostates deserve death, and agree that death pursuing Jihad is honorable. With positions like those, why would it make sense to call them moderates, or to allow them to join rational conservations? I've never having had a conversation about these subjects with a self-professed moderate Muslim, so I have no experience to add, but these arguments seem plausible.

The first four chapters do a reasonable job of justifying this point of view, though much as Harris wants it to be a call to action, it's not clear what rational folk (the Brights) can do about it given our lack of numbers.

In the last two chapters, Harris stretches into less justifiable territory. Chapter 5 attempts to provide foundations for "A Science of Good and Evil", but misses the mark. His attempts start from an assumption that the proper foundation for ethics are the recognition that creatures that feel pain deserve our respect and forbearance. But he apparently hasn't found the extensive literature that starts from this assumption. I've been unconvinced that this is the right place to start, and Harris doesn't add anything new to the argument. He also seems to be unaware of W. W. Bartley's contributions to epistemology. Instead, he tries to argue from a sense of "moral intuition", and then from a claim that evolution has endowed us with a feeling of happiness that can serve as a guide to morality. He jumps from these arguments to an attempt to justify torture in extreme circumstances. These arguments aren't at all convincing.

In the final chapter, Harris attempts to establish that he has some common ground with people who consider themselves spiritual. He believes that there is some deeper knowledge of consciousness that traditional mystics have found the right tools to reveal, if only they would drop the religious nonsense, and study consciousness carefully. I was unconvinced again. He seems to think (without saying so explicitly) that consciousness may endure after death, that it is produced and maintained by something beyond the physical body of the person that perceives it. He cites Daniel Dennett's Consciousness Explained, but must not have understood the explanation. I'd be interested to read an argument that the Sufis or the Zen Masters have access to knowledge about consciousness that the rest of us could benefit from, but this wasn't it.

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