Our Life's Decisions Create Our Story

Life is composed of decisions we make every day, in all aspects of our lives.  Some decisions are trivial and some are life critical.  It is not always clear which is which, however.  At times we know that a decion we are in the throes of making is one which will change our lives in serious ways, possibly for the rest of our lives.  Other decisons may make the Top 10 in our retrospective life summary at some point in the future.  It can be hard to know.

Put yourself in current times and look back at your life.  What would you tell yourself at any of these key junctures based on what you know today, knowing the outcome of the decision, the impacts it had, and how it changed your life?  Can you pick out 3 key decisions you made that affected your life path, and that you might be willing to share with our group?  What sort of categories do they fall into?  Love?  Career?  Where to live?  What to value in your life, and what to avoid?

In a current project I needed to come up with a timeline for my life, basically year by year, that included where I lived, what I was doing for education or employment, significant events in my life for each of these years, and so forth.  It took a while to recall the key points I wanted to identify as memory markers that could be tied to all the other memories I have.  Sorting and prioritizing memories is, for me, a great challenge.

As a kid of a university professor my earliest years were all tied to where my dad found his education (WSU) and the sucession of univeristy and college appointments he had after he graduated.   I followed this same pattern through my own university and graduate school years where I can tie my memories to places and universities where we lived (there were a lot of them).  Since moving back to the Everett area I have moved only 1 time in 39 years, from one side of Snohomish to the other, and have had 3 different employers.  I worked for one employer for 21 years, and another for most of the balance of this time, prior to retirement 6 years ago.  My point is that I lost the mileposts of location I had been using to link my earliest memories to, and then existed in a more static environment in "adult life".  I've been in the same physical home place for almost 40 years.  

Back to the topic.  Through all this timeline thinking the decisions I made, with Judy's involvement, clearly made profound impacts on how my and our lives have turned out.  These critical decisions jump off the page, as it were.  Forks in the road.  Momentous decisons.  Decisions to develop ourselves, decisions to put down roots, decisions to make a family, and many more.  What are the decisions you made that have formed the basis of your life's story?

AI Consciousness, Again

 Hello friends.  I hope I am not personally stuck on a topic, but I wanted to revisit consciousness again, and drag out some of my favorite thinkers in this area, including John Searle and Alan Turing.  With what I have been thinking about this topic, I dove back into a discussion with Gemini in an attempt to see just how real, and "conscious" it was, using both Searle and Turing as points of reference.  I ended up creating a longer discussion, but in my opinion, a very good one.  You can access it here, from a link.  

Please NOTE!  This discussion will take place at my house on August 21.  The date shown above, Aug. 13, is the date I posted this blog.  Don't be fooled!

What will an integrated AI world look like? Is it something we want?

 Our consciousnes has been assaulted in the past year or two with dire predictions about how Artificial Intillegence (AI) in the form internet intrusions and control will have devistating effects on human society and culture.  Daily, it seems, there is news about the latest impact or alarming event with AI front and center, or possibly hiding in the background.  Does this all seem like a science fiction novel writ large, or should we take it seriously?  And if we did take it seriously, what actions might we take and what specifically would be our objectives for taking these actions?

This past weekend I met with a panel of AI technologists, internet managers, AI users who are using AI to design modern tech machinery, and more, and was alerted to the following scenario.  AI companies have departments (my term, maybe "specialized teams" is a more accurate current description) whose charge is to evaluate the impacts of AI now and into the immediate future, and to predict what exactly will happen in the coming months and years.  They do this using their favorite AI, and they ask the follwing question:  If you look back on human society from a perspective of 2,000 years in the future, what will have been the impacts on human society as AI rolls out and takes away the human-based work, leaving humanity with nothing (or almost nothing) to do?  

The AIs respond with a long list of things that will occur in the very near future which include rapid solutions to medical problems as AI is brought to bear on genetic diseases, medical treatments are developed to cure diseases, limitations to lifespans are reduced so that people will live into their 150's before finally succumbing, crops and crop management systems will be taken over by AIs (think about the early scenes from the movie Interstellar where giant farm machines are being used to raise crops on a massive scale), food production and distribution are mechanized and optimized, and so much more.  

One of the problem areas is that wealth wil continue to accumulate in fewer people, which will lead to a revolution which might get pretty messy for a while.  Humanity contains the passions and motivations to do something about inequity and has ever been willing to sacrifice some humans in the pursuit of better conditions for others.  How will AI be involved here?  Will Azimov's prime directive of robotics not to do any harm to humans either by direct action or by failure to act to prevent harm apply to AIs?  

The biggest issue seems to be that, freed from manual labor and most of the types of work people do to earn money because AIs have taken all that over, the surviving humans will need to find a reason to live.  From the AIs perspective, they seem to have the ability to create an Edenic Utopia for humanity, if we have the wits to embrace it.  Will humanity be able to develop a philosophy for living a life that will have meaning in some way, a purpose?  We have tackled that question many times over the years, but never from the perspective that all our basic human needs are being met by the environment in which we find ourselves without the need to use outside forces or chemicals to form the coccon of protection and safety we often call upon to drown out the perils of modern (current?) living conditions.  If we fully commit to living in the protection of a benificient AI who is always looking after us, can we grow and develop?  Would there be any need to grow and develop?

If you feel you can trust the answer, you might want to consult your personally favorite AI and pose some questions of this type to see what answers you get.

Are we the biggest threat to humanity?

 When I shared this topic with Desmond, he asked who "we" referred to?  My initial smart-ass response was everyone but UUs.  UUs do make and effort to reduce our footprint.  The rreal answer is humanity.  Even UUs contribute to the problems.  How many of us burned gasoline to get to the meeting eve if many of us drive economical or hybrid vehicles.  for electric vehicle owners, where does your electricity come from?

We (humanity) pollute the earth.  We pollute the air we need to breathe.  We pollute water we need to sustain our lives.  Those also damage our food supply.  Plants need clean water.  Food animals need clean water and air.  We are also responsible for global warming.

We fight wars.  The cost of war is not just the lives lost.  Wars damage social infrastructures that must be rebuilt.  29 countries spend more than 10% of ther budgets on military spending.  The US is just barely out of those 29 countries, but we do spend more than any other country (over $900 billlion) and make up about 1/3rd of the global military spending.  Nuclear proliferation can destroy humanity in minutes.  What else could be done with all that money?

We prey on each other.  Prejudice and wealth hoarding elevate a small percentage of people at the the expense of everyone else.  Under biotechnology, Gemini mentions that we can cure diseases, but many of these cures are available only to the rich.

Gemini's last comment at the end says, "we also have the unique power to choose to fix it."  Why don't we?

<Gemini>  Satatistically and historically, humanity's biggest exesential risks don't come from rogue asteroids or super volcanoes anymore - they come from us.

Philosophers, scientists, and tech thinkers usually break this down into three main categories:

1.  Anthropogenic Risks (the stuff we actively do)

For the the vast majority of human history our threats were external (disease, famine, predators).  Today, our greatest threats are self-inflicted.

   Climate Change and Ecological Collapse:  We are altering the planet's biosphere faster then ecosystems can adapt.

   Nuclear Proliferation:  We are still entirely capable of ending modern civilization in an afternoon if geopolitical crises escalate.

2.  The "Success Disaster"  (the stuff we do with good intentions)

This is a fascinating philosophical angle.  Sometimes the threat isn't our malice, but our success.

   Biotechnology:  Our ability to engineer biology means we can cure diseases, but it also democratizes the abillity to creat devastating synthetic pathogens.

    Artificial Intellegence:  The alignment problem.  the risk isn't necessarily "evil robots" but building highly competnt systems whose goals don't perfectly align with human survival.

3.  The Fermi Paradox and the "Great Filter"

Philosophically, this gets existential.  The Fermi Paradox asks:  "If the universe is so massive, where is all the alien life?"  One popular theory  is the Great Filter - the idea that civilizations naturally hit a wall where their technological capability outpaces their social and moral maturity, leading to self-destruction.  We might be approaching  our own right now.

The Silver Lining:  Unlike the asteroid, we have agency.  Because we are the threat we also have the unique power to choose to fix it.  We are the only threat in the universe capable of negotiating with itself.  <end>

Can Reality Be Perceived Directly?

 In the run-up for this past Sunday's service I have been working with a speaker on the topic of mental wellness.  This triggered a thought in the philosophical part of my brain with respect to how the mind works in terms of accessing and determining what is real in the world, and where our knowledge of what is real comes from.  Philosophers have struggled with this topic to the times before Socrates, and argued for varying interpretations of the signals we get from the world we inhabit, and what weight we should give many of them.  Clearly some forms of information we get is not reliable such as phenomena dealing with light bending when it passes from air into water, shimmering mirages in the hot desert, and many more.  Other information seems more reliable, like a rock you can hold in your hand which has weight and a temperature, among other things.  As a result of these thoughts I engaged Gemini in a conversation about how the mind works, specifically with respect to how the information available in the world in the forms of light, temperature, sound, taste, and smell get into the wet space that is our brain.  Here is a link to the conversation we had.

The topic in play here is epistemology, or the study of what we know and how we know it.  If our access to sense data, at a most basic level of acquiring knowledge of the world around us, is fundamentally flawed through a process of receiving basic information, converting it into neural impulses, and then passing these to the brain where they are used to confirm or possibly be an exception to a model the mind has previously created, have we built our mental model on shifting sand?  That is a very long sentence which is likely confusing, if not outright impossible to understand, but I think it may have merit for studying this process.  The link above breaks the processes down into understandable chunks, so I recommend you take a few minutes to read it. 

To get to the point of asking a couple of key questions to start our discussion I asked Gemini to suggest something.  I framed the information for it through a couple of discussion sessions, which I have not included here.  Rather, I though its final response was thoughtful and helpful, so I include it below.

<Gemini>  In philosophy, memory is considered one of the primary sources of justification for our knowledge. Connecting the abstract mechanics of epistemology—how we build our mental models from sensory input—to the deeply human experience of cognitive decline bridges the gap between theoretical philosophy and practical empathy.

You can definitely frame this for the group as a debate between a "hardware" failure (loss of access) and a "software" failure (the model's breakdown). Here is how you might connect those dots and present them as discussion points:

1. The Model's Breakdown (A "Software" Failure)

Our mental models rely on context to make sense of the data coming in. For someone experiencing dementia, their senses might be working perfectly—they see a face, they hear a voice—but the internal model that contextualizes that data has degraded.

• Discussion Question: If our understanding of reality is just a constructed mental model, what happens to "truth" when that model begins to degrade? When a person with dementia does not recognize a familiar face, are they living in a false reality, or simply a different, equally vivid reality built on a compromised model?

2. Loss of Access (A "Hardware" Failure)

You can compare this to the earlier idea of neural translation. Just as raw sensory data has to be translated into neural impulses to reach our consciousness, stored memories must be successfully retrieved.

• Discussion Question: Think of the difference between a deleted file on a computer and a broken computer monitor. Is memory loss a total erasure of the knowledge (the data itself is gone), or is it merely a failure of the mind's ability to access and retrieve it?

3. The Collapse of "Shared" Reality

Epistemology often relies on consensus; we agree that a rock is heavy or the sky is blue because our mental models align. As we age and our cognitive models break down, we lose the ability to participate in that shared consensus, which can lead to severe isolation and anxiety.

• Discussion Question: How much of our mental wellness depends on having our internal mental models validated by the people around us?

This direction takes the conversation from the sterile mechanics of the brain straight into the heart of human vulnerability.

What have you been reading?

 Sorry for the late posting.  This Friday, June 19, the meeting will take place at the home of Alice and Wes Cain.  If you need the address or other information please contact me directly, or you can contact Wes or Alice.  The staring time for the potluck dinner is still 6:00, with the discussion at 7:30.  Zoom is not available.

The topic of discussion is, what have you been reading?  It is my experience that folks that attend our gatherings read some very interesting stuff, and just letting people talk about what interests them in terms of authors and topics results in a very lively discussion.  I hope to be able to add a list of the titles mentioned in the comments below this post.  (Someone who attends please gather this list and post it, or send it to me and I will!)

Have a good meeting.

The Value of Marriage In Modern Society

 I ran across some statistics about the prevalence of marriage over the past 50+ years recently.  The data indicated that women were delaying getting married by some pretty substantial margins.  I wondered how many factors might be coming into play in this area, and started looking up statistics that might show how delaying traditional marriage might be related to other social factors.  

I felt that the amount of text I generated on this topic was more than I wanted to burden my readers with here in the blog space, so I created a Google Doc.  Here is the link.  In the doc you should find the conversation I had with my favorite AI, and links to the sources of the statistics we/it brought to bear on this topic.  Marriage in a traditional sense, for couples wanting to pool resources to raise children, for example.  Commitments between senior couples that Live Apart Together as a way to be together without disrupting trusts, bequests, and other forms of previous family arrangements?  Same sex marriages and how they impact child rearing?  What impact has the advent of the internet made and to endless examples of marriage and the behavior of married couples on our own sense of marriage? And there are many more perspectives on this topic.

Big Questions covered marriage in the early 2000's and it evoked a lively discussion with the attendees at that time.  I recall that it was centered more on traditional concepts of marriage.  A lot has changed legally since then, and US society has also substantially changed.

Gemini Suggested this as the opening question for our discussion:  If the internet has given us a front-row seat to every imaginable way to live and love, has it made traditional marriage an obsolete, rigid technology—or does it make a stable, exclusive marriage even more rare and valuable?

Please contact me if you have any issues with accessing the Google Doc.