I'm not sure where to save this post. It touches so many issues, it's hard to classify. Let me start with the "raw data". I had a dream last night ... I was teaching a physics course (for ladies? children?) in a community center.  The previous lesson had something to do with the rules of baseball. I remember illustrating a triple play to the kids in a small room. The *next* lesson was to deal with "power" as a physical concept. I was concerned that I knew nothing about it. In physics, power is the ability to do work . As I thought about ways to present the subject, I stumbled on the idea of options for mowing the lawn (what my gut equates with "work"). I could use a mower, different mowers or I could pay one or more people to mow the lawn. AHA! There was an equivalence between money and power. Hardly an original insight, but usually advanced in a political conversation, not physics. Still, in the dream, I realized that there was a physical basis o

Zen and its Western cousin, "Mindfulness" were a stop on my long journey to self-discovery. They introduced me to a line of investigation through subjective experience. In spite of the strong tradition against a philosophical interpretation in Taoism and Zen, all this came with a certain amount of "theory". To make a long story short, these disciplines challenge our idea of the "self" and, following ancient Buddhist tradition, regard the self (whatever that is) as impermanent**. Some would go as far as to claim that the self is an illusion. The Western "scientific" branch would claim that there is no "self" to be found in the brain. Sam Harris is a leading popularizer of this view and he claims extensive subjective experience (hundreds of hours of meditation) as his "evidence". Antonio Damasio takes a different view, based on thousands of case studies (a more trustworthy kind of "evidence"). His view is that our fee

This blog started three years ago as " Dragon Theory ". I was particularly taken by the " corporation ", a legal "person" with rights powers vastly exceeding ordinary persons. Then and now, I consider the "corporation" to be a threat to individual rights and freedoms. I was also inspired by the ultimate evil in the Star Trek series: the Borg . As time went on, I became more curious as to how people are assimilated into "the dragon". By 2017, assimilation had become my focus and I changed the name of the blog to " The Programmable Ape ". I had come to look beyond the mass phenomena like the corporation to see that humans are uniquely engineered to be "assimilated". Our language is a way of "programming" us. This involved a subtle change in outlook. What does it feel like to be programmed? Is it possible to have a thought, experience or perception that is not deeply colored by the thoughts of others? "

Warning: This post contains more speculative bullshit than (most) of the others. The reader is encouraged not to take it too seriously. It's a meditation on an idea I've long regarded as fundamentally important: the Tao and how the idea lines up with what we think "science" is telling us. The Tao that can be named is not the eternal Tao "Tao" is an elusive concept in the Tao Te Ching . Our physical laws borrow their appearance of solid reality from the reality they describe. The famous saying above (which lead me to become a part-time Taoist) points out the profound difference between a description and the thing itself *.  I had earlier learned the same hard lesson in Physics 101, when the instructor firmly insisted that all science does is describe , not " explain ". A "description" is a system of statements "about" the "real world" out there. One particular kind of description I discuss here is a "program"

The Superbowl as an illustration of supermind to be elabourated ... Attention of millions simultaneously directed to a football; Intention of millions; Feelings; The role of rules; The role of identity; Ephemeral nature - supermind is like a hurricane;

To be extended and elabourated later. The "blind watchmaker" is a key idea ... Dennett introduces improved terminology for the "blind watchmaker" - design without a designer. In a way, perhaps our own minds "design" this way - I think Dennett would say so. In this sense, there is no such thing as intention. That's a philosopher's substitute for reality, however: getting excited about a clever distinction that exists in language only. But it does make sense to ask if all mind, including the blind watchmaker, exist in this space where "purposefulness" seems to be an emergent, after-the-fact phenomenon. "Teleological" descriptions are just another way of describing the situation, leaving us with emergent purposeful behavior not "owned" by any entity.

Placeholder for a more detailed treatment ... The modern emphasis on "evolution" challenges the old creation myths. While "evolution" technically simply means "change", the concept has come to mean: slow change over "deep" time; change that runs against entropy (increasing randomness), leading to increasing complexity and increasing local order The idea applies to many areas other than biology. For example, the heavy elements were not always here. They evolved through a process of stellar evolution, death, and reconstruction. These elements, like carbon, oxygen and all the rest are more complex than what was there at the beginning (hydrogen, helium, and lithium) and it took billions of years to form them. The popular concept that "evolution" is virtually identical to "survival of the fittest" is misleading. The related idea that "life" cannot exist without some kind of "Darwinian" evolution is likewise wi

This is a place-holder for a longer article. The gist of it is that analogy, as outlined in Surfaces and Essences is the way to think of "cultural" evolution - the evolution of the super-mind - that exploded especially in the last 10,000 years. The stage was set by the prodigious growth of the cortex - a tissue best characterized as an analogy-creating machine.

Here is a quick summary of how "primitive" bacteria replicate their DNA. It's quite obvious that this process didn't pop up "out of the blue". This is not a description of a "chemical reaction". " Horizontal Gene Transfer " is also extremely important, especially in providing bacteria with a means to evolve by "borrowing" genes from other, unrelated organisms. At this level of life on Earth, evolution is about gene transfer by any means possible. It is, in effect, a "wild west" scenario where genes struggle for survival with the survival of hosts (bacteria) being a side-effect. This is the scenario where Dawkins' " The Selfish Gene " seems most applicable.  At the time he wrote this book (as a young student himself), the seemingly mathematical rules of evolution were very much "in the air". The facts are more complicated. As you would expect, "Selfish Gene" was accidentally right abou

In this blog, I introduce two categories of "life" that may be regarded as controversial or "merely" a matter of definition. "Supermind" is at the "high" end. At the low, primitive, "old" end is "proto-life" - life before (or simply without) DNA ("before" being evolutionary speculation I avoid). Here is a good presentation on work on "proto-life". I'll try to add more examples as I come across them. Current work in this field can be regarded as an "existence proof": if there is any way we can make "life" out of non-living molecules, there may be others, one of which presumably actually happened. For my purposes, it's sufficient to see how such systems are possible, at least in theory. I leave the discovery of actual evolutionary processes to others. I avoid using "evolutionary fairy dust" to support the ideas put forward here. This blog does not put forward or support

Just a few notes on the subject, hoping to move on. It's almost impossible to say anything about religion invokes anything but a spirited defense of whatever your listener thinks about it. The actual exchange of ideas on this subject is, for the most part, impossible. One lesson I got from slogging through Medieval philosophy  was the centuries-old attempt to figure out what was true about God without admitting that it was all about human experience - the proverbial elephant in the room. Failure to take this into account largely accounts for the deadening boredom of most church services and the surprising success of the evangelical movement and the "black" Church. While community and authority are more important than doctrine in holding a religion together "on the ground" - in the congregation, we must also acknowledge that we all accept the authority and bow to community standards every day of our lives. So-called "religious" people are no different i

Last night I attempted to introduce the idea of "Spinosa's God" to a MENSA group. I got my head torn off. Although these people are in the top 3% on the IQ scale, they are all over the map on the "emotional intelligence" scale, nor can one assume that they are widely informed outside of their various specialties, even though they tend to assume that. It is famously difficult to know what you don't know, but especially difficult for smart people. I call this the Donal Rumsfeld syndrome. But don't get me started ... "Spinosa's God", defended by Einstein and the coincidentally recently deceased Stephen Hawking refers to the unexpected deep order in the Universe. This "God" is not a person behind the scenes, pulling the strings to punish the bad guys and reward the good guys. "He" is totally impersonal - another name for physical law, which turns out to be comprehensible by the human mind - mostly in terms of mathematics. I

Sen points out the ephemeral nature of "identity" along with the catastrophes that can be caused when humans are swept up by the illusion that such identity is real. Such identity may be seen as "belonging" to the supermind. While being literally a work of fiction, while it gains hold of human lives, the supermind has the destructive force of a hurricane - with a comparable amount of "wisdom'.

It's hard to argue with the goal of democracy, which is to set things up for the benefit of the population at large. It's easiest to define democracy in terms of what it isn't. It is not tyranny, not slavery, not corrupt or injustice. The idea is as old as the Biblical prophets but attempts to implement it are very modern. There is no reason to assume they will succeed. The problem comes with the assumption that a group of people organized as a democracy can make the best decisions by somehow "putting their heads together" or voting. The connection between the goals of democracy and the means is so confused in people's minds that many assume that "voting" is virtually synonymous with "democracy". A bit of research will quickly dispell this idea.  In fact, elections are a mud-slinging match specifically intended to distract voters from issues that actually affect them. As long as we have the idea that good decisions can be made through the b

A "design" is an abstract concept. We can speak of the "design" of the human heart without expecting to find a blueprint somewhere. Even in cases where we know there was a human designer, the design of a human creation remains even if no documents or memory of the design exists. We see design where we see purpose. "Design" and "model" are closely related concepts and both may be seen to live in the same "space". DNA can be seen to embody the design of a life form, but the physical embodiment of the design in the DNA is not essential. In fact the non-essentiality is a characteristic of models/designs. We could imagine creating a process that would produce all the machinery of the cell by some other means - even such a simple means as switching the chemical structure but not the "meaning" of one of 4 letters of the genetic code. At the "mind" level of model and design, we know that our minds are somehow implemented in

Back in 1969, I appeared in Grenoble, France, eager to start on my Ph. D. in Computer Science at what was then the leading IBM research center in Europe. It did not go well. At the time, the idea of "Time Sharing" on a computer was in its infancy. Very few people had access to the big mainframes using slow text-only terminals. Yet, I imagined a time when everyone would have access to the same computer system. All of human knowledge would be accessible. People could share their projects and extend that knowledge together, online. The group mind of humanity would be implemented in a vast computer network. In short, I imagined the Internet. World Wide Web 3.0, a bit beyond what we have now. Artificial Intelligence (my field) played a big role in this vision. I called it the "Spirit System". The idea quite literally blew my mind. Weakened by days without sleep and culture shock I had the first of my numerous "nervous breakdowns". My hopes of an academic career

Antonio Damasio, director of the Brain and Creativity Institute at the University of Southern California, is one of the most original thinkers in neuroscience today. Recently, he sat down with The WorldPost to discuss his new book, “The Strange Order of Things.” Damasio Comments on his new book ... I'm waiting for this book - on order to the library - but Damasio seems to be missing the emergence of a new super-organism. Even so, his discussion strengthens the analogy, adding new parallels to the "metabolism" in the single cell and organism level. "Metabolism" in the super-organism involves energy balance, waste removal and all the factors present at the organism level but adds things like linguistic communication, mythology and economics (the numeric measure of value).