Vivid Diary February 2005

Diary
Tudor Boloni
On Autonomy and Imperfection

February 2005

Mainly, my diary records fragments of broken systems and incomplete patterns. The details are sanitised and reduced to the most fundamental issues, allowing instead an almost exclusive focus on the abstract interplay of the participating forces in any subsystem or networked structure I find novel. The systems I monitor range from natural ecologies networked via energy flows, to systems comprised of humans that metabolise perceptions and power in their various forms, to informational systems that are unrestricted in their organisation and development, seeking only to efficiently quantify and understand the signals they are given. Sometimes, to help pay the rent, I interrogate a few systems using the relationships stored in the pages of past diaries, hoping to get usable predictions and strategic insight for my clients. So far those clients have included governments, banks, and very influential families, but no one has asked for anything truly interesting, so the full implications of what's in those diaries remain mysteries even to me.

One system that seems to be getting more unstable, in spite of its historic opportunity to transcend its past limitations, is the class divide. While the economic class divide merits its own alarm bells (judge each society by its weakest members), there are others more motivated to start that chorus. I’ll take the less visible but harder to fix, intellectual class divide, as the topic for this forum. In the words of one of the founders of transhumanism, humans all must evolve to being always reflective, never reflexive.

The problem can (and has been) referred to as the growing Intellectual Proletariat, a divide that is now creating the vast pool of future indentured servants (most family lines will go straight from one servant class to the next while foolishly believing they have escaped their plight generations ago). As a contextual reference, we need to understand that science is feeding back on its own discoveries with increasing speed, while cross pollinating ideas of such complexity and beauty, that most scientists I sit with sound almost euphoric about the paths their work is taking. From neuroscience to quantum optics to machine intelligence to synthetic biology, everywhere there appears to be eternal springtime. Researchers in these fields and others are being driven by passion, and the thrill of original discovery. We know this, because if they had more money they would be buying more equipment to discover more things by ever faster means. These pioneers are driven by the search for truth and beauty, while most of our fellow humans are driven by comfort and happiness (bread and circuses). Both of these two facts bode poorly for the vast majority of humans.

First, we need to realise that science, by its very nature, is vigorously reverse engineering the essence of what it is to be a subjective human (a path dependent, hierarchically organised pattern matching engine, with massive chemical addictions and limited reasoning capacity (where does the image of the loving parent staring into the eyes of his child figure into this description you may ask, well, go back and read it again because that is exactly what was described)). Also, realise that the motivation of scientists is asymmetrical, namely, maximum passion and attention until someone figures out the question, then on to novel ground and minimum interest in the by now ‘old discovery’, unless a corporation hires one of them to exploit the new technology against consumers (some may object to the wording, but I maintain that it is those people specifically that need to be more honest in their interactions with reality). So we have an international swarm of geniuses in an unrelenting, concerted effort to expose humans for the programmable super-chimps we secretly have always known ourselves to be, while no one motivated by more than money and/or personal issues (I couldn’t bring myself to say psychologists outright), is around to clean up the mind shrapnel left in the wake of progress. The result is fairly predictable, with most people (and without a little irony, scientists too are overwhelmingly a part of the Intellectual Proletariat) being herded by financial and political interests into a cascading set of behaviours that are less conscious or beneficial to themselves than they could be.

To avoid being one of the glorified chimps whose life is but a stream of moods and predictable response behaviours, a higher order self awareness is critical. There are four masters that modern humans obey. The first master is your genetic code that prewires the greater part of your personality and mood palette. While the biological picture isn’t complete, the results are obvious to most researchers already: genes set up nearly every aspect of our decisions (which is why we are horrible decision makers (I know, 'not me', 'not me', shouts the crowd, but keep a line-graph of how fulfilled you feel daily, then shout at yourself)), with extensive blind spots, irrational biases, and the chemical background to influence further analysis. Nurture and learning could at best act as a veto to desire, but more often than not, the intelligent mind is busy rationalising actions, not deciding them. As an example, stereotyping is the very essence of human learning, so imagine how difficult breaking free of unwanted genetic mechanisms must be. With proper cognitive models of the human brain, advertisers will sell perceived happiness more than any actual product (this is well on its way today, but will get much more insidious and effective within the next few years).

The second master is your memetic code. Memes (i.e. ideas or beliefs) could be viewed as the genetic material of a social group, and are passed from brain to brain during communication. If the receiving human is not wearing intellectual protection, the meme will gladly occupy a healthy region of mindshare, and through our genetic tendency to reduce cognitive dissonance, may start to push out potentially valid but conflicting memes. Meme wars are usually won not by the most beneficial meme to the host super-chimp, but by the most-memorable-while-not-visibly-harmful meme (easy to remember memes have the added benefit of acting like secret handshakes, used by other super-chimps that are only too happy to confirm how smart you are for having stored a similar meme). You now store sufficient memes for a trained researcher to map the critical aspects of your life, like the spatiotemporal and socioeconomic conditions of your and your parents' upbringing, along with everyone’s media and reading habits.

The third master of humans is harder to spot. Do we understand that each day the productive assets of the entire human race, including all of its physical labour, are deployed according to the wishes of the owners of those assets or of the companies employing those humans? Are those massive forces of productive change in the hands of the many, of too few, a few but smart, one but an enlightened king? The point is that each day the earth changes in a direction not chosen by a majority, and this isn’t necessarily problematic. Yet the earth that could have been, but isn’t, the systems that could have been developed but have instead been suppressed or never tried, those are the regions of our collective experience space that are now closed off. Depending on how much of a super-chimp you may be, this could be of no consequence, or a massive obstacle to fully actualising your vision for self development in harmony with like minded others (it turns out that my like minded chimps don’t own enough assets to change the image of the world to our tastes yet, so we’re still stuck looking at a bunch of alien handshakes between tribes of self-styled super-baboons). The possible paths of the earth’s development are highly restricted, and becoming more so as owners fear instability and are willing to deploy the earth’s productive resources toward increasing measures of control and ‘friendly-hands’ wealth generation. Our chance here is to collectively vote our dollars/euros/yen so that our opinions (once they have been decontaminated of unhealthy reflexive thinking and parasitic memes squatting in our belief structures) can make a difference.

The fourth master that prevents humans from achieving true autonomy is also the most abstract. Nietzsche alluded to it when he claimed that optimisation and reasoning are signs of degeneration. If it were not for its key role in understanding our own conflicting desires and instincts as humans, I would have left these parting thoughts buried in my diary. All of our thinking and learning is circumscribed by a more or less rigid set of logical axioms that have been derived from some absolute beliefs. Wherever we look, we receive confirmation of the most basic truths holding, so we tend to rely on them as permanent fixtures of reality. For example, all known biota (living entities) exist and evolve in an economy of limited resources. To optimise the use of limited resources one follows logical reasoning that improves the expected outcome desired under probable scenarios. The birth of planets and solar systems seem to follow similar rules of classic physics and logic, but the birth of new galaxies is a stretch for logic, and the genesis of the first something out of a true and total nothing, is hyperlogical (beyond the logic domain). Our thoughtspace has the ability to reside and evolve within an environment decoupled from any limits imposed by available energy (energy is arguably the only resource in this universe, though available in a wide variety of quanta, forms and states). Unless we utilise our thoughtspace entirely as a domain of transfinite reasoning, a realm devoid of necessary logic, we preclude ourselves from entering the creative class of sentient beings.

A goal of humanity is to achieve autonomy from all masters. While most of us are not even aware of a choice, there are those that see only autonomous humans as equals already. This divide is as fundamental as any other, but even more dangerous given its genetic roots, and the propensity for that to be interpreted as a merit based split in the species. The imperfection is that the human design itself forces a transfinite creativity engine to be tethered to an energy optimising gene replication vehicle. The exhausting attempts by humans to bridge this imperfection is what I call ''Living in the Dead Space'', but that’s another diary entry.

Tudor Boloni is a Managing Director with the specialist investment bank BAC Romania. He can be reached at
tudor@bac-romania.com