Let's Read: Neuropath (Bakker, 2009)

Neuropath (Bakker 2009) is a dramatic demonstration of the eliminative materialism worldview of the author R. Scott Bakker. It's very bloody and rapey, but it's probably necessary to get the radical implications of eliminative materialism across.

If you want to read the novel but are short on time, I recommend that you read the afterword first, where the author overviews what's real and what's not-yet-real (hint: it's too real for comfort). Then read the last chapter, where Neil lectured on and on about his eliminative materialism Argument, accompanied by gripping manipulations on the protagonist's and his ex-wife's brains.

Word list

Person words:

• Tom Bible/Thomas/Goodbook: protagonist, cognitive psychologist. 
• Neil Cassidy/Ocean Voice: neuroscientist, friend of Tom, used to be employed by the NSA, but has gone rogue. Hunted by the FBI throughout the story. Seems to be born with a psychopathic personality.
• Nora: ex-wife of Tom. Neil used to fuck Nora, and that made Tom feel hurt.
• Samantha (Sam) Logan: FBI agent, second protagonist. Very understanding to Tom, kind of a romantic partner to Tom as the story went on. Also an agent of FBI.
• Shelly Atta: FBI agent. Not nice.
• Cynthia Powski "Cream": a porn starlet from Escondido, California. Killed by Neil.
• Theodore Gyges/the Chiropractor: captured by Neil for a demo. His alter-ego is the Chiropractor, a serial murderer who removes the spines from the victims.
  

Other words:

• Low-field fMRI: fMRI using magnetic fields that are "low", that is, does not need massive magnets with cooling. Those are small, cheap, and easy to hide. Used by the government to do mindreading, as an extremely advanced form of surveillance cameras.
• Disney world: a phrase used by Neil to refer to the commonsense reality model that normal people construct in their heads. The "Disney world" model is destroyed by a full understanding of neuroscience.
• Moscow: a city destroyed by climate change.
• The Argument: neuroscience shows that eliminative materialism is true, and folk psychology is wrong. Usual morality, based on folk psychology, is also wrong. 
• End-user illusion: A metaphor for consciousness. The phrase came from The User Illusion (Nørretranders, 1991), or perhaps Consciousness Explained (Dennett, 1991)
• The semantic apocalypse: Meaning is a brain phenomenon, and with neurotechnology for changing brains, multiple species of humans would appear, such that they are mutually incomprehensible. Their actions would seem meaningless to each other -- a meaning-apocalypse.
• Derealization: effect of bellyfeeling the end-user illusion theory of consciousness. After bellyfeeling it, you would realize that you are in a waking dream. A dream yoked to reality through the sense organs, but still a dream. 
• Depersonalization: effect of bellyfeeling the Argument. You realize that there is no "self" or "free will" or just about all the folk psychological concepts. Your self is only a useful model constructed by the brain.

Let's Read: The conspiracy against the human race

The conspiracy against the human race (Ligotti 2010) is a collection of essays that explore all corners of pessimistic thinking. Ligotti, usually a horror fiction writer, has a habit to ramble and use difficult sentences when he really could have used something easier to digest. Because of that, I did not finish the whole book, but only the first half. I believe little value is lost by my skipping.

The Amazon description states:

Drawing on philosophy, literature, neuroscience, and other fields of study, Ligotti takes the penetrating lens of his imagination and turns it on his audience, causing them to grapple with the brutal reality that they are living a meaningless nightmare, and anyone who feels otherwise is simply acting out an optimistic fallacy.

The Nightmare of Being

Psychogenesis

Humans are unique in being self-conscious, and knowing that life is full of suffering, they would die. This makes them awake and aware of the nightmare of existence.

Ante-Mortem

Most people, and most philosophers in particular, thinks that "being alive is alright". They are the optimists. The pessimists think the opposite: "being alive is bad, and it's best to never have been born".

"What should we say about being alive?" Overwhelmingly, people have said, "Being alive is all right." More thoughtful persons have added, "Especially when you consider the alternative,"

Pessimists are unpopular, but still they have a cult following. Some readers read pessimists' work as a kind of therapy, to keep themselves from going mad from sadness.

there exist readers who treasure philosophical and literary works of a pessimistic, nihilistic, or defeatist nature as indispensable to their existence.

Varieties of rational-irrational subjugation

A rational self subjugating an irrational self

Some people write advanced directives saying "If I am going to get dementia, euthanize me." This is a subjugation of a future irrational self to a past rational self. Whether it actually works is another question. It can lead to very amusing situations, as in this report:

It involves a dementia sufferer who had asked to be killed when the “time” was “right”, but when her doctor judged this to be the case, she resisted. The patient had to be drugged and restrained by her family before she finally submitted to the doctor’s fatal injection. The doctor who administered the dose – who has not been identified – has defended her actions by saying that she was fulfilling her patient’s request and that, since the patient was incompetent, her protests before her death were irrelevant. Whatever the legal merits of her argument, it hardly changes what must have been a scene of unutterable grimness.

Some people argue that people should not suicide because their future selves will thank them for that. The unspoken assumptions are: 

1. That suicide is irrational and lifelove is rational (I disagree).
2. That the future selves will be rational.

With those assumptions, this is a subjugation of a past irrational self by a future rational self.

A rational self subjugating a rational self

A key assumption in rationality is consistency, that is, past and future rational selves do not disagree. If I am rational today and tomorrow, then we should agree on all decisions that can be made using what I know today. With that assumption, there is no need for subjugation from or to the future self. This is why some people intuitively believe that if a society is full of rational people, then they should be able to move around in harmony, with every disagreement resolvable by sharing their knowledge. They assume that a rational society is consistent.

Assuming that, there can be no example of rational selves subjugating each other.

An irrational self subjugating an irrational self

Political history gives enough examples of that.

An irrational self subjugating a rational self

An irrational past self can subjugate a future rational self by destroying its options. 

In a game of chicken, you can win by throwing out the driving wheel. It's arguable whether this is rational. Indeed, if you are sure your opponent is cowardly, then throwing out the driving wheel is rational, as it assures you of victory. If you are not sure though, then it's irrational.

I've wanted to quit school, get into hard drugs. By destroying my future self's options, I hope to stop it from living on. Personally I think both lifelove and deathlove are beyond rationality, so it is neither rational nor irrational, but from normal understanding, this is irrational past self subjugating a rational future self.

Can a future irrational self subjugate a present rational self? It's hard to find uncontroversial examples. 

Perhaps imagine a society of intelligent cows who live with a strong sense of purpose: to die for human consumption. The first intelligent cows were made by humans with some genetic engineering that increases their intelligence. The intelligent cows was then implanted with deep brain stimulation devices that make them see humans as godly devourers. The cows learned to make the device themselves, so that they can perpetuate this religion on their own.

(It is not necessary to use brainstim device. Theoretically, mere words could work too. But from the history of religious technology, conversion by brainstim device is much more reliable than conversion by words, so for this thought experiment, I'll use brainstim device.)

The device is implanted when the cows were calves about 3 years old. From the viewpoint of a genius calf, this cow society could very well be a massive scheme for subjugating past rational selves (intelligent calves, without implant) by the future irrational selves (intelligent cows loving the implant device and humans).

In the eyes of an antireligious person, a religious society that strongly recommends a "leap of faith" would be such a subjugation from the future.

Some old people can see quite clearly that they would grow more demented over time, and as their bodies decay, they will dwindle to an annoying machine for suffering and producing incontinent waste, and yet tenaciously refusing euthanasia out of an irrational lifelove instinct. Yet they cannot write advanced directives for forcing that future self to die. This is a case of a future irrational self subjugating the past rational self.

But how to subjugate the past or the future without time travelling?

With agents on the ground, of course. A distant absentee landlord holds their estate by hiring a real estate company. A future self holds their past self in check by the social structures who carry out its wish. The past rational self writes a contract, a will, an advanced directive. The future rational self has less powers, but still substantial one, by anti-suicidal social institutions that save first and ask questions later.

Jorge Luis Borges' foreword to Star Maker (William Olaf Stapledon, 1937)

The foreword to a Spanish translation of Star Maker by Borges as follows:

Around 1930, well into his forties, William Olaf Stapledon approached the practice of literature for the first time. This late initiation is due to the fact that he never learned certain technical skills and that he had not developed certain bad habits. Examination of his style, which shows an excess of abstract words, suggests that before writing he had read much philosophy and few novels or poems. As for his character and his destiny, it is better to transcribe his own words: 

I am a congenital bungler, protected (or spoiled?) By the capitalist system. Only now, after half a century of effort, have I begun to learn to perform. My childhood lasted about twenty-five years; it was shaped by the Suez Canal, the small town of Abbotsholme and the University of Oxford. I tried various races and periodically had to flee in the face of impending disaster. At school, I memorized entire chapters of the Bible, the eve of the sacred history lesson. In an office in Liverpool I messed up cargo lists: in Port Said, I candidly allowed the captains to carry more coal than was stipulated. I set out to educate the people: mine laborers and railroad workers taught me more than they learned from me. I remained peaceful during WWI. On the French front I drove a Red Cross ambulance. After: a romantic marriage, children, habit and passion for domesticity. I woke up as a married teenager at thirty-five. I painfully passed from the larval stage to a shapely backward maturity. Two experiences dominated me: philosophy and the tragic disorder of the human hive... Now, with one foot on the threshold of mental adulthood, I notice with a smile that the other steps on the grave.

The trivial metaphor of the last line is an example of Stapledon's literary indifference, if not his almost limitless imagination. Wells alternates his monsters — his tentacular Martians, his invisible man, his underground and blind proletarians — with everyday people; Stapledon constructs and describes imaginary worlds with the precision and much of the aridity of a naturalist. His biological phantasmagorias are not contaminated by human mishaps.

In a study of Poe's Eureka, Valery has observed that cosmogony is the oldest of the literary genres; Despite the anticipations of Bacon, whose New Atlantis was published at the beginning of the seventeenth century, it can be said that the most modern genre is the sci-fi or fantasy. It is known that Poe approached the two genres in isolation and perhaps invented the latter; Olaf Stapledon combines them in this unique book. For this imaginary exploration of time and space, he does not resort to vague unconvincing mechanisms but to the fusion of one human mind with others, to a kind of lucid ecstasy, or (if you will) to a variation of a certain famous doctrine of the Kabbalists, who supposed that many souls can inhabit a man's body, as in the body of a woman who is about to be a mother. Most of Stapledon's colleagues seem arbitrary or irresponsible; Stapledon's work, on the other hand, leaves an impression of sincerity, despite the singular and sometimes monstrous of his stories. He does not pile up novelties to distract or astonish readers; he follows and records with honest vigor the complex and dark vicissitudes of his coherent dream.

Since chronology and geography seem to offer the spirit a mysterious satisfaction, we will add that this dreamer of Universes was born in Liverpool on May 10, 1886 and that his death occurred in London on September 6, 1950. To the mental habits of our century, Star Maker is, in addition to a prodigious novel, a probable or plausible system of the plurality of worlds and their dramatic history.

Jorge Luis Borges

A few stories by Peter Watts

Peter Watts writes good hard scifi that illustrate good ideas. But unfortunately, like just about all "good" storywriters, he writes stories that bury good ideas under heaps of obfuscation, fragmentation, recombination, misdirection, personal touches, and irrelevant asides. 

And what's worse, NONE of his stories have an Abstract section, like any good scientist would do... But again, no story, EVER, has an Abstract section.

Today I write the Abstracts for him, for some of the stories available here.

I put in quotations, because sometimes Peter Watts just writes so beautifully. They can still be skipped. Think of them as turning my abstracts into extended abstracts.

Ambassador

A heavily genetically modified human is sent on a spaceship Zombie to meet an alien ship, codenamed Kali. Zombie sent some greetings to Kali, and Kali replied with a short message that promptly crashed all the quantum computers on Zombie. The pilot of Zombie started running by hyperspace jumps, but Kali kept finding it.

Eventually Zombie and Kali simultaneously jumped into the homerange of Super-Kali. Super-Kali hit Kali with a missile and that destroyed Kali. For some odd reason, Zombie was left alive. The pilot turned off all but the essentials, as if holding its breath, afraid to draw Super-Kali's attention.

Over the course of a few days, the pilot observed quietly. Turns out Super-Kali is like a space spider: it has somehow managed to turn spacetime such that hyperspace jumps often end up in its homerange (a ball of space, two or three light-days across). Super-Kali fires missiles at those preys it caught to utterly destroy them. But there are some preys that manage to escape.

The pilot contemplates about why everyone is so hostile out there. It thinks back to the human sociologists' theory:

Any intelligence capable of advanced spaceflight must also be able  to   understand  peaceful  motives;  such  was  the  wisdom  of Human sociologists.   Most had never left the solar system.   None had actually encountered an alien.   No matter.   The logic seemed sound  enough;  any  species  incapable  of  controlling  their aggression probably wouldn't survive long enough to escape their own system.  The things that made me nearly didn't.

The pilot decided that this theory is wrong. Instead, life is war, and technology implies belligerence.

I've stopped trying to reconcile the wisdom of Earthbound experts with the reality I have encountered. The old paradigms are useless. I propose a new one: technology implies belligerence.

Tools exist for only one reason: to force the universe into unnatural shapes. They treat nature as an enemy, they are by definition a rebellion against the way things are. In benign environments technology is a stunted, laughable thing, it can't thrive in cultures gripped by belief in natural harmony. What need of fusion reactors if food is already abundant, the climate comfortable? Why force change upon a world which poses no danger?

Back where I come from, some peoples barely developed stone tools. Some achieved agriculture. Others were not content until they had ended nature itself, and still others until they'd built cities in space. 

All rested, eventually. Their technology climbed to some complacent asymptote, and stopped—and so they do not stand before you now. Now even my creators grow fat and slow. Their environment mastered, their enemies broken, they can afford more pacifist luxuries. Their machines softened the universe for them, their own contentment robs them of incentive. They forget that hostility and technology climb the cultural ladder together, they forget that it's not enough to be smart. 

You also have to be mean. 

You did not rest. What hellish world did you come from, that drove you to such technological heights? Somewhere near the core, perhaps: stars and black holes jammed cheek to jowl, tidal maelstroms, endless planetary bombardment by comets and asteroids. Some place where no one can pretend that life and war aren't synonyms. How far you've come 

The pilot decided to initiate a trade with Super-Kali. The pilot would tell Super-Kali everything it knows about humans, hoping it would buy its life. It has no idea whether it will work, but the alternative is certain death.

Terror Management Theory

Sources of this post: Thirty Years of Terror Management Theory: From Genesis to Revelation (2015). The Denial of Death (1974).

TMT was proposed to answer 3 basic questions:

• Why do people need self-esteem?
• Why do people need to believe that their own way to understand the world is the only correct one?
• Why is it so hard for different people to get along?

Self esteem

First though, what's self-esteem? A theory of self-esteem (2002):

an individual's overall positive evaluation of the self. It is composed of two distinct dimensions, competence and worth. The competence dimension (efficacy-based self-esteem) refers to the degree to which people see themselves as capable and efficacious. The worth dimension (worth-based self-esteem) refers to the degree to which individuals feel they are persons of value.

The part about "competence" is pretty simple: it is your evaluation of how likely it is for you to reach your goals. Since thinking is for moving, we should always give examples in motion. So here are some ur-examples are the motor questions:

• How high can I jump? Can I outrun this person? Can I climb this tree? How far can I throw this rock?

Let's read: Immediate-Return Societies (Martin, Shirk, 2008)

All modern societies are "delayed return societies", but there are some societies called "immediate return societies". They look very weird to us. Today we read from Immediate return societies: What can they tell us about the self and social relationships in our society (Martin, Shirk, 2008)

Immediate-return societies represent an extreme minority in the world today. They are scattered across the world (e.g., Africa, India, South America, Asia), but their combined population can be counted only in the tens of thousands (Stanford, 2001). Despite their small numbers, these societies are important to us in at least two ways. First, they are the best approximation of what life was like for our evolutionary ancestors (Marlowe, 2002)

Immediate-return hunter-gatherers live in small, temporary, autonomous camps spread out among the landscape as part of a larger population. There is frequent movement of individuals in and out while a camp remains at one site, and the camps themselves may move every few weeks (Woodburn, 1979). When it comes time for a camp to move, the members may either move together or they may move separately, and they may either establish a new site or they may move to a camp already established by others. There are no special criteria for acceptance in an existing camp. When members from one camp arrive at an established camp, they are allowed to share equally in the camp’s resources while they live there. 

In immediate-return societies, it is very easy for individuals to leave and join different camps. This so-called fission and fusion is simply a part of their life. Because the composition of camps changes so frequently, each camp is defined primarily in terms of its present membership. There may be some stability in the composition of a camp (e.g., a family may move with the wife’s mother), but nothing formally holds the members together except each individual’s involvement in the current round of activity. 

There are no formal long-term, binding commitments (Woodburn, 1979). In immediate-return societies, individuals generally choose which relationships to pursue or abandon. They do so through visits, meal sharing, cooperative work, and even through the positioning of the openings of their huts.