This keeps me awake at night ... I think of a synapse as a chemical quantum computer. The synapse is about 20 nm. I visualize blowing it up to a box about 10 cm on a side. That's a magnification of 5 million. If I spread out a human cortex flat, it's about 1 m on a side and 3 to 6 cells deep. At this magnification, it's a square 5 km on a side.  The size of a small city. Neurons at this scale are 5 m cubes - room size. We have a kind of city layouts of 3 to 6 story buildings from 15 m to 30 m high. On this scale, we can walk around in our quantum computer like exploring the streets of a city. Under our feet (under street level), we picture te humming and throbbing business of general city maintenance (like waterworks, electricity). That's the brain stem and cerebellum. Essential parts of the brain that we can ignore for the time being. Back to the synapses. Each one is modeled in three parts: the upstream synaptic vesicle (axon), the downstream vesicle (dendrite) and th...

There are  at leas t  100 trillion synapses in the human brain.  For comparison, there are about 1 billion "hosts" (Unique devices) on the internet. So there are 100,000 synapses in  one  brain for all the computers in the world. I compare synapses to "hosts" (computers) rather than "bits" for reasons that will become clear. In theory, a synapse is either "open" (permitting a signal from the "upstream" neuron to pass to the "downstream" neuron) or "closed" (resting or somehow blocking the signal). Call this state variable S=1 or 0 for open or 0 for closed. So one might naively think of the synapse as a "bit" in a computer analog. Every neuron in the brain is only a few synapses away from any other neuron, so one might think that the brain could be like a 100 billion x 100 billion matrix with the synapse "bit" telling whether the signal passes from neuron i to neuron j. That would be a pretty big m...

In his brilliant overview of human behavior , Sapolsky challenges our intuitive sense that there are reasons for the way we behave. This can be taken as a license to challenge the very idea of "free will". It occurs to me that the issue is more subtle. Perhaps we are just very bad at explaining our reasons. We certainly lie about them all the time, using "rationalizations" to explain our actions in a way to place ourselves in the best possible light. There is strong evidence that this tendency is much stronger in some people than others. For example, it's an open question whether the narcissist really believes himself to be super special and immune to accountability. In extreme cases, we see instances of confabulation, where the brain "explains" its action in ways that are transparently wrong. In spite of difficulties with the concept of motivation, we are quick to attribute motivation to others - pretending to peer into their minds and extract reasons...

Sam's latest podcast: " Is Life Worth Living " illustrates Sam at his best and worst. He seems to be getting better and better with his turns of phrase, such as when he characterizes a rhetorical trick as "putting the rabbit in the hat". But Sam is stuck with a couple of very fundamental assumptions that pollute his entire worldview. You won't see it more clearly than in this podcast. The discussion is all about value . What is "good", what is "bad" and whether X is better than Y.  Specifically, whether it is "better" for a hypothetical person to exist or not. Is it "good" to exist? The problem with this is that value is neither  fungible  nor ordinal . In spite of Sam's lifelong, heroic efforts to do so, it is not valid to take two situations, X and Y, and say that there is "more" good in situation X and Y. This is trivially obvious in daily life. While we may say that spinach is "good" and gas...

This continues my discussion of an analogy between the human situation and that of a bee. I contend that neither of us knows the most important fact about our existence, namely that we are embedded in a "hive". " Surfaces and Essences " reminds us that analogies underlie our thinking, but to watch out. Some analogies are better than others. Humans are not bees. For one thing, as far as the hive is concerned, the individual bee is expendable and interchangeable with any other bee. We are tempted to regard our enemies this way. Enemy soldiers are robots but ours are heroes with families back home. But the fact is that humans are far from interchangeable. Even if we have been exposed to the same environment and the same education, we manage to draw different lessons from it. It's also true that humans are not expendable, or at least they have different degrees of expandability. The skills of individuals often contribute to the fate of the "hive"...

(Originally posted in " The Zen of Value ") Discussions about how money originates often start with the assumption that it evolved to facilitate trade and "store value". Otherwise, so the story goes, you and I would simultaneously want something somebody else had (say, you have more fish than you need and I have extra sheep). There is scant evidence for "cash" arising out of this situation. Evidence for another narrative can be found in human behavior that naturally arises when "cash" is in short supply. Say, you go fishing and catch 5 nice big salmon. It would not be unusual at all for you to show up at my door and offer me a fresh salmon "for free". On the other hand, we would tacitly understand that this establishes a debt. Perhaps at some point, I'd mow your lawn or give you a basket of berries, or jam from my last berry picking trip. The math doesn't need to work out. If I'm in bad shape and have nothing to give in retu...

In a previous post , I wondered about how debt becomes the "civilized" mechanism to form the skeleton of a structure that recognizably similar to the kleptocracies documented in "Thieves of State". The theory is that over time (and a few political revolutions), "Western" societies settle into a way to suck the blood out of the poor "legally", eliminating the need for overt corruption such as bribes and kickbacks. In many of these "democracies", bribery continues to be important in the form of "dark" political contributions that constantly outweigh the desires of the general public. Money itself becomes a corrupting influence. But let's take a look at debt first - especially its connection to "capital" or "wealth" - the material goods of a society. Especially with the appearance of cryptocurrency, we find people believing the myth of "fiat currency" - the idea that the government can print piec...