Consciousness Studies from Wikibooks

One of the many nice things about the internet is the ability to find reference materials and textbooks about a very many relevant topics. I consider the dissemination of instructive and illuminative information so important that have made it a point to provide links to several different websites that provide free online ebooks. One of the recent sources of free ebooks to come to my attention, is Wikibooks. Wikibooks is provided on the web in the same format as Wikipedia.

Consciousness Studies is one such Wikibook. It provides a useful introduction to consciousness research for those who are new to the field. It also provides a good introduction to neuroscience for people coming to the field from philosophy, linguistics, computer science, or other non-biological areas.

Wikibooks has ebooks in many categories. Another way of browsing the categories of ebooks is here.

Do It Yourself and Self Teaching

Here is a useful set of links to do it yourself webpages of several types. Enjoy thesedo it yourself science links for kids from a number of different sites, courtesy of The Science Club.org.

Here is some information on self teaching resources. These are several links to homeschooling organisations in the US and around the world, including Canada. This is an excellent source for Canadian homeschooling information.

Online Great Books, freely available for the price of a mouse click.

As a special added bonus, a one-time only link to a never-ending list of eclectic science links. Keep scrolling. Just when you think there is nothing more, another big group of surprising links appears.

The Well Educated Mind

Curious. Most curious. Children are the most curious creatures you will ever find. They want to learn, and they learn fast. If nourished properly, this natural love of learning would last a lifetime. If developed wisely, the child would educate himself with very little adult enforcement. In medical school, we first watched a procedure, then we did that procedure, then we taught that procedure. We were still children, in many ways. And we thrived performing procedures of incredible sensitivity.

On a less life-threatening level, children are capable of learning. Children can learn declarative knowledge--factual knowledge, and procedural knowledge--how to do things.

The Well Educated Mind is the kind of book that shows anyone how to learn on their own, from readily available resources. Our culture is drowning in available knowledge resources, but most adults are not prepared to use them for lifelong growth. Here is a pdf excerpt from one of the chapters.

Procedural knowledge is somewhat different, and involves learning long sequences of actions, along with contingencies. Diagnostic skills and real time monitoring skills are vital for skilled procedural knowledge. Here are two popular sites for acquiring how to knowledge for basic everyday skills.

ehow.com
howstuffworks

It is important for children to learn basic skills fairly early, so that they can build on the basics in learning more advanced skills. Our children are being shortchanged in this area by the system that is supposed to prepare them for the future, and by their own parents who should know better, but were unfortunately taught by the same system that is ruining their children.

The best way children learn "how to" is by watching the people around them who can already do something well. That is one of the advantages of homeschooling, having an adult around who likely has some actual real world skills. See one, do one, teach one. It is not just for medical students.

Most Vile Murder by School

The government school system has become an organised crime racket. So much money changes hands that quasi-criminal vested interests have achieved control of the established mechanism. Just like an organised crime syndicate, it will take a great deal of effort, perhaps violent effort, to dismantle the abbatoir, the gas rooms, the areas of mass execution.

The remarkable scholar Dorothy Sayers had much to say about the absurdity of the school system, several decades ago. Sine then things have become immeasurably worse.

When we think about the remarkably early age at which the young men went up to university in, let us say, Tudor times, and thereafter were held fit to assume responsibility for the conduct of their own affairs, are we altogether comfortable about that artificial prolongation of intellectual childhood and adolescence into the years of physical maturity which is so marked in our own day? To postpone the acceptance of responsibility to a late date brings with it a number of psychological complications which, while they may interest the psychiatrist, are scarcely beneficial either to the individual or to society.

We shut children away in isolation chambers, confined with many others of the same age and state of ignorance, expose them to an indoctrination into political correctness and unimaginative drivel for several years--keeping them from as much responsibility and real personal challenge as possible--and somehow expect them to grow into capable and responsible adults. This is an absurdity and a crime.

Please go to Ms. Sayer's essay linked above, and read it thoughtfully. Remember it was written several decades ago, before the political correctness police and postmodern idiocy took hold of teacher's training colleges. Now things are much worse.

Here's an excerpt from This and That blog, discussing the above essay and one other that bears on the same topic. I have shamelessly copied from This and That, out of pure laziness on my part.

Ms. Sayers is best known as the author of the Lord Peter Wimsey mystery novels (you should read them, they’re awesome). She was an accomplished scholar of languages, and among the first recipients when Sommerville College at Oxford began granting degrees to women. At Oxford she was one of the cool kids in the clique with J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis.

Mr. Whitehead was best known as a mathematician and physicist. He coauthored the gigantic Principia Mathematica with Bertrand Russel at the turn of the 20th century. That three volume set attempted to define the foundations of mathematics from the ground up. Years later his theories on gravity were the main competition to Einstein’s general relativity. Mr. Whitehead’s theories held merit until 1972 when they were finally discredited by experimentation.

Both of them were taught with the trivium method and both believed that England was being damaged by the abandonment of that technique in its schools.

The Lost Tools of Learning
by Dorothy L. Sayers

When she first presented this in 1947 she was already warning us of the dangers we would face if we grew up in a world full of advertisements, bombarded with claims of every sort. How would we know how to separate the truths from the fallacies when schools no longer taught logic? You don’t have to stretch your mind very far to understand how many thousands of times more important that message is given our information-overloaded society.

I also particularly like her argument for having students learning Latin or Greek (or other highly inflected language) at an early age. The reasoning being that by learning the formal mechanics of language first, the rules of proper grammar in our modern non-inflected languages can be more easily understood. It sounds better the way she presents it.

The Place of Classics in Education
by Alfred North Whitehead

Mr. Whitehead presented this essay in 1929 in his bookThe Aims of Education and Other Essays . One paragraph begins:

The function of Latin literature is its expression of Rome.

He goes on to say that you need to understand Rome if you are going to understand Western culture (which he defined as England and France). Rome was the pinnacle of Mediterranean civilization and shaped everything we know today.

There’s a great bit in there on why he believed it was important to read the Classical works in the original Latin rather than in translation. I’ll leave it to you to find out his reasons.

But then that might be expecting too much, since it is rare to find a government school teacher capable of reading Latin, much less capable of teaching Latin.

Death by School

I am referring to the "cognitive death", the murder of the mind, a ghastly crime committed against millions of north american students every year, by government schools. Here is a quotation from a conversation between cognitive scientist Seymour Papert and Brazilian radical Philosopher Paulo Freire:

Paulo Freire: Yes. Absolutely. To me this is not a statement yet. I state that school is bad, but I don't state that school is disappearing and will disappear. That's why I am appealing to all of us who have escaped cognitive death by school -- who are the survivors here -- to work on modifying it. For me, the challenge is not to end school, but to change it completely and radically and to help it to give birth from a body that doesn't correspond anymore to the technological truth of the world. . . . .
. . . . .
Seymour Papert: Will there be school? I'm not saying that school is going to go away. It depends what we mean by school, but I think that what we need to note and very clearly … and this is something else I learned from you, actually - is that we must be conscious and critical of what it's about fundamentally.

And now what's wrong with schools is not details. What's wrong with school is absolutely fundamental. It is so fundamental that to say you're going to correct that is not very far from saying we don't have school.

Freire wants to radically modify school so it will stop killing the minds of its students. Papert is suggesting something more radical.

As the slow evolution of school lags further and further behind the rapid evolution of society, increasing numbers of students all over the world see school as irrelevant to life. Many drop out. Many more drop out mentally, emerging from school with poor skills and negative visions of themselves and the society they are entering.

Throughout Papert's work on education, the theme recurs of replacing the total obsolescence of modern schools with something more effective, more stimulating, and more relevant to the future the students will be forced to face.

Here's Bill Gates: America’s high schools are obsolete.

By obsolete, I don’t just mean that our high schools are broken, flawed, and under-funded – though a case could be made for every one of those points.

By obsolete, I mean that our high schools – even when they’re working exactly as designed – cannot teach our kids what they need to know today.

Training the workforce of tomorrow with the high schools of today is like trying to teach kids about today’s computers on a 50-year-old mainframe. It’s the wrong tool for the times.

Our high schools were designed fifty years ago to meet the needs of another age. Until we design them to meet the needs of the 21st century, we will keep limiting – even ruining – the lives of millions of Americans every year.

It is much worse than Papert and Gates might lead you to believe. Not only are today's schools poorly designed for the challenges of tomorrow (even today), they are being run so incompetently, corruptly, and even maliciously, that even if well designed they would be destroying children.

But it gets worse. Schools are not only inept, poorly designed, corrupt money sinks, and welfare programs for bad teachers, they are also actively at war against boys.

Boys have brains that on the average fit the demands of engineering, theoretical computer science, physics, and mathematics, at the higher levels of difficulty. If boys are being "warred against" by schools, no wonder there is a dificit of qualified engineers, high level computer scientists, and physical scientists. Schools are driving away the very sort of mind that can work with mathematical and spatial concepts the best. Death by school. Societal suicide.

This is a huge problem, because north america is running a severe engineering deficit. "America is experiencing an engineering deficit. Compared to twenty years ago, 20,000 fewer U.S. students now graduate college with engineering degrees. Europe and Asia now graduate 3 to 5 times as many engineers as the U.S." Excerpted fromengineeringand.com . What is true for the US is true for Canada. Canada is importing more and more of our engineers, like the US.

Government schools are incubators for all manner of delinquency. Government schools are best seen as preparation for being dropouts. Any type of social problem you can identify in north america is made worse by an order of magnitude by government schools. Crime, unemployment, bad race relations, teenage pregnancy, drug abuse, lack of civility, obesity, sloppy thinking, ignorance.

Why do taxpayers continue to support the people who are ruining their children? The people running the north american school systems are causing far more damage to our societies than any muslim terrorist or saboteur. We are being gutted and roasted on the fire by our own cooks and utensils.

5% of people do 95% of the work. That may be the magic goal for proportion of next levels in a post-singularity world. We are creating entire generations who will not be able to adapt to the rapidly changing future. We will have to take care of them. Feed them, clothe them, shelter them from the elements, entertain them, heal their wounds, injuries, and illnesses, diagnose and treat their depression, help them live long, healthy, satisfied lives. This will be our obligation, our burden, our privilege.

Memory Prediction Theatre

Carl Carpenter lays out his theory of the science of consciousness, entitled "The Memory Prediction Theatre." Drawing on the work of Jeff Hawkins, Bernard Baars, and D. Antanitus, Carpenter briefly presents a theory that ties together various strands of consciousness concepts. Update: Carl Carpenter has a blog where he updates his efforts. He is providing a valuable service in helping to promote and clarify these important concepts.

Understanding consciousness will be difficult for most people, perhaps because they have been trained in government schools, trained in politically correct, hyper-static dogma of the acceptably banal. Anyone who studied in government schools in the past ten to twenty years is handicapped in trying to understand our complex reality. A Jesuit education is far more useful, but not available to a large proportion.

Consciousness is a dynamic process dependent upon a large number of cells, some in proximity to each other, and others far distant. Each cell depends upon thousands of organelles, and tens of thousands of genes, with their regulatory networks. The complexity of what is happening is mind-boggling.

Perhaps that is why people with backgrounds in physics, engineering, and computer science, are contributing so much to this field. They have training in mathematical modeling and conceptual abstracting, that is necessary in achieving a meaningful and falsifiable simplified model.

The plot is thickening, far faster than most people realise. Too many are stuck on the limitations imposed by Searle, Weizenbaum, and Dreyfuss. The possibility of circular path around the obstacles was not foreseen. More of the "straight line" thinking, when lateral thinking was called for.

A lot of work remains to be done. The surface is still barely scratched. Opportunities abound.

Dreaming, Flying, Falling, Away

Searching for a dream, for a wonder, for the magnificent moment when everything fits. Troubled by the incongruity of the pleasure of perfect flow with the comfort of luxurious attainment. You cannot hold a crashing cataract still in a crystal goblet. A dynamic mind perfectly balanced on the wave of flowing ions will not rest contented in the food or drug sated condition.

While the masses pursue the calm of slumber, the repose of intoxicated diversion, the eccentric and exceptional few cultivate the vintage of growth, forward momentum, evolution. The euphoria of discovery, the enchantment of invention, the elation of creativity. These intoxicating enterprises demand long hours of exacting effort, to reach the point of effortlessness, of completion.

Yet if the world of reality is a fractal entity, there can never be completion. Merely the attainment of another level. Retirement is not an option. The chase goes on as long as contenders step forward to the pursuit.

Most between levels humans will be content to rest, to eat, to drink, to sleep. The commonwealth will provide the provisions for their survival. It is presently an exacting and exorbitant obligation, but necessary. Even after the attainment of millions of next level humans, the need will remain to support the many billions of between levels who will never achieve the transition.

The lion's share of next levels will devote their time to the goals of understanding space, time, matter, energy, and mind. A few will feel an ancestral obligation to devote a tithe of their time to providing support for those who cannot cross the gulf. Intelligent machines and automated factories and plantations will provide the goods and foods for the between levels who cannot or will not work. For the between levels who wish to work, ample opportunity will be given for the creation of small scale economies. The only prohibitions will be on weapons of great lethality, and on acts of violence. Coercion and inequality will be inevitable in any between levels society. At least the basic necessities will be provided.

Most of earth's land mass will be devoted to the housing, recreation, and well-being of between levels humans. Next levels will tend to occupy islands, and mini-cities located in more isolated areas of continents.

Everyone dreams of something. A utopian dreams of more utopia. A creator dreams of more creation. A drunken sot dreams of more drinking. A criminal dreams of more satisfying crime. A playboy dreams of flocks of willing and seducible females. A slut dreams of ever more men, and plenty of time. A lot of people seem happy with 500 channels of cable, high speed internet, and a surfeit of snack food and full beer or wine bottles in the pantry.

Humans fear the nightmare of hell, of eternal slavery and subjugation to something evil, something that demands everything and gives nothing. The fear of being nothing but an object for something more powerful. The fear of being sucked dry by vampirish exploiters who cannot be denied. That was indeed the experience of life for those under Pol Pot, for those under the Taliban, for those under Idi Amin, Kim Jong Il, Khomeini, and Robert Mugabe. These modern vampires of state gladly expand their empires of blood as far as possible. You see the fangs of an Osama bin Laden, or an Iranian theocrat, a wahabi imam. You watch the blood drip from the ever thirsty lips of a third world dictator. Hell on earth. That is the future without next levels.

Next level humans will require little in terms of land area. For the time spent on the planet's surface, little acreage will be needed. If next levels become prolific in numbers, that will take place away from this planet. Dispersal of next levels is likely to be profound.

Clash of Civilisations

Paris is burning, and typically most of the world's news media studiously ignores the implications of widespread muslim lawlessness in the middle of the City of Light. The City of Love, the gentle city of intimate passion, is being overrun by barbarians that spilled over from decaying Islamic civilisation. Night by night the riots extend further across France, and into neighboring nations. Germans are in denial about their own precarious position, very much like France's. All of Europe is under a de facto siege from the barbarous excess of a bankrupt culture.

This was predictable and widely predicted, if somewhat premature. A smarter group of barbarian invaders might have waited for more opportune circumstances. These invaders are anything but intelligent. Violence is their primary feature, what they consider their best feature. It must be prominently displayed or they fear they will be seen in less than their best light. They have no choice.

For a civilisation to propagate through the centuries, and millenia if fortunate, it must be able to defend itself while nurturing the best of its own. If the civilisation grows too weak to defend itself, or too decadent to nurture its best, it will collapse and be overrun.

In the tens of thousands of years between the origins of spoken human language, and the origins of written human language, what civilisations may have come and gone, lost to time? If we could only observe those far-flung human laboratories of genuine sociology. The rise and fall of religions, tribes, cults, ideologies. Limited in time and place due to limitations on indoctrination of followers to spoken word propagation. No less poignant for all that.

The insurrections of modern day France are preliminary skirmishes on the home front of western civilisation. Not since the gates of Vienna has Europe been threatened by outsiders. Will these clashes be the needed innoculation against decadence that the west has needed? Or will they be the signal of collapse of Europe?

Western civilisation must survive in some form, or the next few hundreds of years will be horrible for humanity. If the future of humanity rests in the hands of Iranian mullahs, Saudi Imams, or Chinese communists, the outlook will be bleak. Western civilisation is not perfect, but compared to every other it is incredibly enlightened.

Will the barbarians win by default? It is not an academic question.

Enter the Chakra

The East, land of mysticism, oriental land of subtlety and enigma. Yogic mind and body control, buddhist meditation, acupuncture, subtle body energies and chakras. Exquisite control of motion in the tea ceremony, or the aikido throw. Mastery of the self.

Westerners scoff at anything that cannot be seen, measured, and visibly manipulated. That attitude has served the west in its dominance of the planet. Yet westerners are running headlong into the fractal nature of reality. Getting from here to there is no longer accomplished by traveling a straight line. Brute force cannot accomplish many of the necessary intermediate and long term goals. More subtle means of sensing the flow of knowledge may be necessary.

Information science and other problem solving disciplines utilise indirection and lateral thinking in solving complex logic problems. Such methods begin to stray from the stereotypical western "straight-on" approach. Chronic pain has so burdened employees of western enterprises, that western physicians finally accepted acupuncture as a valid discipline. Acupuncture lacks the dependency problems that often come from the pharmaceutical treatment of chronic pain.

Western music has often been a path to the mystical, from medieval monastic chants, to modern new age and trance music. Manfred Clyne, a neuroscientist and musician, discovered a path to spiritual regeneration when researching emotions and their connection to music. For westerners, Clyne's method of exercising and purging the emotions would be an extremely useful practise.

The eastern concept of chakra is another portal through which westerners might possibly step into fractal reality. The act of visualising various energy centers within one's body could conceivably tap into the body's proven [PDF]neuroendocrine axis. Since white blood cells carry neurotransmitter and hormone receptor proteins, the immune system is part of the same axis. Norman Cousins explored the territory in his own battles with serious disease.

Western civilisation has developed amazing tools for analysis and exploration. The overwhelming dominance of the western world attests to this. Even China, center of the eastern world, has only been able to shake itself partially out of its age-old slumber through adopting many western methods in finance, engineering, and science. It is past time to admit that the western world is capable of learning from other civilisations. Matter without energy is inert. Energy without mind is blind. Mind without spirit is futile. Spirit without freedom is despair. Update: Aristides
demonstrates that freedom without spirit is also despair. Many thanks.

Reality is fractal. To understand and deal with reality, the west needs the east. The straight on, brute force approach must be supplemented with indirection and subtlety. The mind must make peace with the body, and emotions, each working with the others. Together they must reach out to something higher: a possibility, a dream.

By embracing a larger complexity of life and possibilities, humans can incorporate a larger portion of enchantment into their realities.

Society of Mind

The book On Intelligence by Jeff Hawkins, was mentioned in a recent post here. Another book that fits well with the same general theory of intelligence, is Society of Mind by Marvin Minsky.

Taken together they begin to sketch out a general outline for the theoretical underpinnings of a basic machine intelligence. The early machines will be crude imitations of human intelligence. Artifice imitates nature, inevitably. As the craft matures, divergence from the model will occur naturally.

Society of Mind is a much older book, and I was surprised that Hawkins gave no credit to Minsky in his references or index. Regardless, the rest of us are under no obligation to imitate Hawkins in that regard. Society of Mind is a seminal work that should be read and re-read by anyone who is serious about breaking into the machine intelligence field. Minsky fleshes out the concept of mental hierarchy in a clear and detailed fashion.

Hawkins focuses on neocortical examples of hierarchy, pattern sequencing, pattern invariance, and pattern auto-association. These are all powerful concepts that are well illustrated by actual neocortical functioning. Minsky touches on these concepts, but muses about a great deal more than Hawkins deals with. Hawkins zeroes in on the aspects of human consciousness that he feels hold the key to designing a machine intelligence. Minsky is far more general. Hawkins talks explicitly about neocortex, how it functions, how it might be imitated. Minsky stays away from the neuroscience, for the most part. Both books are highly inspirational.

The earliest functioning machine intelligences will copy a lot from the biological proof of concept. I would expect many graduate neuroscience students to perform "experiments" using machine models of neocortex, and possibly models of thalamus and hippocampus. The nascent field of neuro-prosthetics will probably be given a boost by these early neocortical models.

It is easy to conceive of "wearable sensors" that record the experiences of their human wearers, for later transfer to a neo-cortical machine. In this manner a type of record of a person's life might be maintained in parallel with the actual person's memories. As machine/neural interfaces improve, the record could easily become more accurate. These machine "parallel personalities" should not be confused for a real person. Not for a long time.

In later posts, I'll muse on possible means of utilising these neo-cortical machine personalities to augment the intelligence of biological humans.

Sleep Less, Do More?

Polyphasic sleep is one method devised to reduce the overall need for sleep. Discovered and practiced by many people over the centuries, it has a cult following now, with its own blogs and no shortage of halfhearted experimenters prepared to sacrifice a few hours sleep for the greater knowledge of mankind.

How it usually works is that a person gets enthusiastic about the idea of sleeping only four or five hours of sleep a night while retaining good energy levels and high levels of alertness. Then once the person starts radically changing his sleep patterns, he quickly loses enthusiasm for the experiment. This is the way the world is. Daily cycles of darkness and light. Humans evolved here, managing to fit personal habits within the overall scheme of things. To go outside the natural order is to tempt the fates. Who can do this and survive?

There are other methods of reducing sleep. Gradual reduction of the single block of sleep, perhaps augmented with one or two nap periods in between blocks, is a common method. Others go in for the cold turkey method of dropping 90 minutes every two or three nights until down to approximately 4.5 hours a night. Usually a single half hour nap is inserted in the afternoon.

An allowance of two weeks of pure hell is expected in the beginning, before the body somehow adjusts itself to the new schedule. Advocates of the shorter sleep cycles claim great things for energy levels and alertness, as long as the schedule is followed closely and good nutritional habits are adopted.

Modern life is not oriented around a schedule that demands naptimes. During the daylight and early evening hours, most people are expected to be flexible in order to meet occupational and social demands. Nevertheless, a lot of things are changing, thanks to the 24 hour internet and news/financial cycles. Freeing up two or three hours a night for creativity, work, and personal enrichment, might be the same thing as adding a month or more to your year.

Think about it.

On Intelligence

Much time and capital is expended toward the goal of developing a machine intelligence that could perform many of the thinking skills currently done by people. The motivation for this expenditure is obvious, especially when one looks at the savings already accomplished through automating physical labor. Human laborers bring a tremendous overhead to every employer. The fewer humans on the payroll, the lower the business overhead in the long run.

Most of the accomplishments in the machine intelligence field have been mere "nibbling around the edges" work. Through the last half of the twentieth century most researchers in machine intelligence had done a poor job of defining what type of intelligence they were trying to replace. The results were abysmal on the whole.

In the book "On Intelligence" Jeff Hawkins, founder of Palm Computing and Handspring, presents his theory of human intelligence, with the aim of developing a machine intelligence patterned after the basic abstract concept of the human neocortex. Go to onintelligence.com to get a closer view of the contents of the book, and to read more about the underlying idea. Hawkins has even founded a new company called "Numenta, Inc.," to pursue the goal of MI.

I will not try to do justice to the ideas in the book in a short summary. I will merely say that anyone with an interest in the underlying bases for human intelligence would probably enjoy looking through the book. Hawkins is insightful and resourceful. He is the type of investigator who will crack the code of the neocortex. It helps to understand basic neuroanatomy and concepts of feedback and informational hierarchy. Those concepts are fairly well explained in the book, however.

My bias is in favor of augmenting human intelligence, rather than putting an emphasis on machine intelligence. It is likely, though, that augmented machine intelligences would facilitate a number of approaches toward augmenting human intelligence. This is not too early to begin thinking about applying safeguards to this technology.

The approach that Hawkins seems to favor will not result in autonomous machine intelligence, not at first. That is a safeguard in itself. An "intelligent" machine without an internal will, does not present a threat unless humans with malevolent intent take control of it. That is true of any number of already perfected technologies.

It would be best to apply the problem of improving human intelligence to the earliest machine intelligences. If Hawkins' approach is valid, early machine intelligences will function very much like human intelligence. Eventually the paths will diverge, but at first there will be strong parallels.

War, Morality, World Jihad, and Iraq

The US president Bush has chosen to make a stand in the desert country of Iraq. A curious choice perhaps? Afghanistan made more sense on the surface of things. Disrupting the jihadists' base of operations and training was logical. No more large scale jihadi terror attacks have taken place. The Madrid and London train bombings were much more modest in scale, more local in execution. The world jihad movement appears in disarray, under attack even in Saudi Arabia, the very heartland of jihad.

Iraq sits atop large oil reserves, but the oil production infrastructure is so decrepit in Iraq, that gearing up oil production there may take decades. Do Bush and his neo-con friends actually plan for decades in advance? In that period of time anything at all might happen. It is certainly more likely that their goals are more proximate.

Is Iraq truly part of the global jihad? Before Saddam's Baathist was toppled, what part did Iraq play in the global jihad? Was it truly necessary to invade and disrupt the center of the Arab world, the most powerful arab nation, the flagship nation of arab ambition?

Al Jazeera and Al Arabiya function as jihadist institutions of propaganda. These satellite networks appear to conflate jihadist ambitions with the goals of the arab world. It is as if much of the elite in the arab world have taken sides with the jihadists. When did this happen? Before Saddam's removal? Before September 11, 2001? Before the Gulf War of 1990/1991?

If one looks carefully at the history of the arabs, and the history of jihadist Islam, there appears to be a waxing and waning along parallel paths for the two entities. There is an unhealthy interdependency between arabs as a culture and jihadist Islam as a movement. The September 11 attacks were merely one more group of attacks in a long series of jihadist attacks dating back to the mid 20th century. Before that, there were other clusters of attacks going back millenia in time. A waxing and waning of the jihidast movement, along with arab cultural ambitions.

The glory days of the arabs was during the height of the jihadist wars, before the Mongols and the Turks subdued the arabs. After the Turks, the European colonials divided the arab lands. Arabs have been humiliated for centuries now. The tide appears to be turning, since the newfound oil wealth of the 20th century is finding its way to devout and fanatical believers in the oil rich societies. The wealth is being diverted to those who show an aptitude for indoctrinating the young to jihad, and supplying them with weapons of mass murder. Every nation in the world where a mosque is located is also the cradle of jihadist indoctrination. Infiltration, subterfuge, covert preparation for jihad.

Under the rule of law in developed nations, there is really no way to stop this process. Combining the stealth infiltration of jihadist indoctrination with the cultural decline of the west, and demographic trends of high birthrates among muslim immigrants and low birthrates among indigenous non-muslims, and one can see that Europe's days are rapidly slipping away. Europe is destined to come under Islamic subjugation within decades.

What about the Anglosphere? What about North America and Oceania? What about Japan, Korea, India, Thailand, and Singapore? There will be outposts of free thought, of rational activity, long after Europe surrenders.

The US and the UK have chosen to confront the jihadist in the heartland of Islam. Realizing perhaps that direct experience of war with the jihadist was the only way to toughen their troops enough for the long war ahead, the US and UK chose to take the war to the place that they knew the jihadists could not ignore, the center of the Sunni arab pride.

Some say the purpose was to bring democracy to the arab lands. That may have been a long shot gamble, a side purpose. Others say the purpose was access to oil. But we have seen how far in the future any meaningful oil production in Iraq will be. More likely the purpose was to bring a familiarity with the jihadist tactics to the military commanders, in preparation for the inevitable conflict to come. Europe's leaders had already decided on surrender long before September 11. There was no question of Europe preparing for the long war. The will to fight against oppression had been drained from Europeans half a century ago.

The post-modern concept of war is that all war is immoral. Any justification for war is mere obfuscation, excuses by the ruling classes to shed the blood of the underclasses for their own gain. This is the wisdom of the post-modernist in regard to war. There is no real post-modern wisdom regarding oppression originating from third world entities such as the jihadists. Such a thing is considered unlikely in the extreme and not worth analysing. That is the weakness of the post-modern. Ideological hatred for western civilisation to the point of denying the uniqueness and liberating aspects of western civilisation, while simultaneously denying the barbarism and mindless homicidal tendencies of virtually every other civilisation ever known to history.

Iraq is a target of opportunity. Iraq was invaded because Iraq was there, at a particular time and place and state of being. Iraq was chosen by Bush as a place to make a stand. It was a multitude of gambles thrown together in one large toss of the dice. A monumental disruption to the overall scheme of things, such a challenge as not to be ignored by the jihadist, or the arab supremacists who stand one hundred strong behind every single jihadist.

Western civilisation is the cradle of the next level. No other civilisation has approached to a fraction of the enlightenment of the west. All other civilisations have been based on slavery and arbitrary justice, and a far less favorable balance of power between groups and classes, than western civilisation.

Next level humans will be more intelligent. They will live ten times longer. They will balance their emotional brains with their rational brains. They will not fight wars because they will not have to. They will understand the underlying dynamics of power far better than primitive and between-levels humans.

The anti-jihadist wars may be the last wars that enlightened humans will be forced to fight. Forced to fight for the sake of the next civilisation to come. As they say, a war to end war. For that to be true, modern humans must forsake much of their leisure for the sake of learning and growth.

Water Into Wine

Politicians do not care about next level humans, or the evolution of the species. These concepts do not help him to get elected. Given the politicians' lack of concern, why should they budget funds for research that would lead to next level humans? The answer is, they do not and will not--intentionally.

Aspiring next levels must be familiar with the resourceful concept of "dual use." A technique or procedure developed for one purpose, might be turned to another purpose with little effort. That is why persons who believe that humans are in need of evolutionary advancement take such a keen interest in nanotechnology, molecular genetics, and information technology. The necessary advances will occur in seemingly unrelated fields that are proceeding in a parallel path. It is the application of these technologies to human evolution that will mark a discontinuity in current trends.

Politicians will oppose any such ideas because society at large will oppose these ideas. Society will oppose these ideas because the underlying cultural swamp (media/entertainment/academia) is opposed to any process that might shift control from those who currently dominate culture.

As long as current research trends continue, the alchemists' goal grows closer. Making water into wine. Lead into gold. Primitive humans into next level humans.

Making It Work

"Does it work?"

Anyone who asks that question is obviously interested in results. Does the drug cure the disease? Does the refridgerator keep the food cool? Will the automobile get good gasoline mileage and maintain its value? Will the machine work out of the box, or does it require assembly or a lot of technical support? Does the diploma guarantee a good job with high pay?

Anglospheric populations are generally results oriented. We pay our money and expect things to work in return. When things do not work we are not simply disappointed. We are outraged. Normally, we are outraged. For some odd reason, we are willing to tolerate an educational system that has failed to work for decades now.

Our educational systems have become populated with the inept, the corrupt, the indoctrinated and indoctrinators, the bigoted and intolerant, and the totally incompetent. Educational institutions have become almost totally nepotistic and anti-results oriented. We are paying large amounts of money for something that does not work. We have it within our power to correct this problem, this critical problem with ominous implications for the future. We could change it, but for some reason we will not.

Our children are being corrupted, indoctrinated in failed ideologies, made into incompetent fools. Our greatest treasures, our progeny are being smothered into mindlessness by the moronic fools who now control the institutions of learning. Why do we tolerate this suicidal absurdity?

Because it is politically correct to do so. This sheep-like march over the brink is made possible by a decerebrate dedication to a conformity that kills. The leaders of our political, educational, and mass media institutions tell us that we must conform. We must be sheep and allow them to lead us over the precipice. It is our duty, our fate. If we object, well, there is clearly something perverse about us. If we refuse to march in step toward the cliff, we acquire certain labels which designate us as being "not of the fold." Such labels can keep a person from being employed, or cause him to be released from employment without recourse.

The above portrait of a small part of a dysfunctional society is necessary to understand a small part of the forces against which pro-evolutionary forces must battle on a daily basis. Not only do dominant forces in society disapprove of the idea of improving humanity, they seem intent on destroying most of the positive elements of western civilisation. Without western civilisation, we are left with caliphates, fiefdoms, warlord kingdoms, and criminal regimes.

There are many problems that must be dealt with. Still, many humans possess an innate desire to move forward. To consolidate the gains of western civilisation, and move ahead. These are the humans who want to "make it work." They work in every creative area of human action. Before the internet, it was harder for them to know of each other. It is becoming easier to find each other. Just a relative few, among billions.

Because of the rapid convergence of institutional obstacles to progress, there is little time to lose. There is no time for mensa-style preening, or the self-congratulatory posing of extropians and transhumanists. Does it work? That is the question.

Running Screaming From Phantoms

Only a tiny proportion of humans are directly involved in pushing human evolution forward. Billions will eventually benefit from the work of a mere thousands. When contemplating the future, nothing is more important than lifting up humanity's capacity to think and live completely. For some reason most people are otherwise occupied.

What are all of these people doing? Most people in the world are too poor to do much more than subsist. Try to find food, maintain shelter, provide for a family, avoid suffering as much as possible. Life is hard, then you die.

People in the developed world are also otherwise occupied. They are hanging on the words of media reports, drowning in crass entertainments and chemical numbing agents. Are they alive? They imagine they are. Their fear makes them think so. They are afraid much of the time, their culture is based on fear and insecurity.

The propagation of fear, combined with moral outrage, is the standard staple of the news media organisations in the developed world. The hugest achievement for news media executives and producers is to create a mindless stampede, to drive the public into mass action. To do this, to create mass panic that leads to mass action, they must create objects of fear and loathing. Then they must shove these feared objects into the faces of the viewing public, in every shape, manner, and permutation possible.

There is a political force at work, a thirst for power and the collusion with the powerful. News company executives are humans, with human biases and weaknesses. They want their "team" to win. They developed the tools of inciting fear, hatred, and loathing for a reason. You cannot expect them to abstain from their use, when so much power is on the table? The executives recruit the producers, anchors, reporters, researchers, who will play on their team, by their rules. The purpose of the entire team is to use the tools of fear creation to move the public to act in ways that cause the team to win. That is what dictates the content and the flavour of the news.

Be afraid. Be very afraid. Emerging viruses, climate change, corporations, globalisation, modern science, George Bush, americans, nuclear energy, western civilisation, european males, pollution, rationality, mathematics, automation, nanotechnology, artificial intelligence, genetically modified foods, genetic engineering, Israel, Jews, the rich, Halliburton, oil companies, mining, space exploration, drug companies, the US military, fossil fuels, automobiles, insurance companies, biomedical research . . .

Run screaming from the phantom fears. It gives one a purpose, albeit a purpose originating first in the mind of a propagandist, and filtered through the propaganda machines. Mass insanity is the salvation of the modern news media. This mass media propagated delusion apparatus may or may not have an effect on the effort to lift humans into a more conscious and fruitful life. Only a few are doing the work for the benefit of the many.

When it is time for people to begin making the transition, the mass media will portray the change as a great threat to the masses. For a critical time period next levels will become another phantom, perhaps the top phantom. The mass media needs all the phantoms it can get. It is constantly on the move, seeking out new phantoms to feed the machine, to manufacture fear, to make the people scream.

A Tale of Two Cities

Hurricane Rita slammed into the Texas and Louisiana coasts Saturday, bringing strong winds and a significant storm surge. New Orleans was flooded once again, but this time the city was depopulated, and there was no repeat of the primitive lawlessness that occurred after Hurricane Katrina.

Houston, Texas, received a strong lashing from hurricane winds. Some looters tried to take advantage of the largely evacuated city, and the adverse weather. Houston was better prepared than New Orleans. Many looters were arrested, and many more were discouraged by the presence of either police officers, or citizen armed patrols. Certainly Houston contained a large number of criminals, just as New Orleans did. The state and local authorities in Houston were competent and aware, unlike their counterparts in Louisiana and New Orleans. There were none of the rapes, murders, carjackings, and other lawlessness that made New Orleans famous for all the wrong reasons.

Houston functioned as a modern, western city. New Orleans functioned as a city in Haiti, or better yet, Hades. Why the difference? Not very many miles separate the two cities. Houston was not flooded like New Orleans, but the hurricane's passage provided an excellent opportunity for the stay-behind criminal, just as it did in New Orleans.

Incompetence of local government officials, due to corrupted democratic institutions, is probably responsible for the Louisiana disaster. New Orleans had simply developed into an incredibly foul nest. It required a catastrophic event of nature to demonstrate just how foul.

The example of Houston's behaviour under duress should provide some encouragement that Louisiana is not representative of the United States, North America, or the increasingly multicultural developed world in general. That is most fortunate, since it is this multicultural aspect of the developed world which is growing the most rapidly. These new arrivals must pull their fair share of the load, rather than becoming freeloaders as many fear they will be. The technological progress required to push humans over the hump depends upon developed nations maintaining a high productivity.

Next level humans are waiting to be born.

Right Ascension

I have a confession to make. I do not really believe in "the singularity." Certainly I have links on the sidebar leading to several long discussions about the implications of the singularity, or "the omega point," as it is sometimes called. The concept is an important one, and approximates roughly what is likely to happen, unless the hyper-luddites of the left and right bring scientific progress to a screeching halt.

To actually reach the singularity is more difficult than to talk about it. It may be impossible. Like Zeno's paradoxes, you can approach the target but you can never strike it. Consider the state of affairs that would constitute a "singularity" to a modern between-levels human. Then consider the state of affairs that would constitute a "singularity" to a next-level human. They are not the same.

Humans have not reached their ultimate potential, even with the currently evolved genome. Changes in environmental parameters, particularly pre-natal environment, but also early childhood environment, have significant potential to improve mean human intelligence, by lifting some of the lower tail values. Significant statistically, but not nearly enough for our purposes.

The genome has to be modified, very carefully. Mind and brain need time to co-evolve into new realities. How long? It takes human girl infants about two years to become little chatterboxes. Human boys may take three years. Any adult humans who try to make the transformation will have to go through years of intense adjustment, similar to the early childhood years. The person who emerges may not resemble the original person very closely. No one knows.

Parallel to research in increasing human intelligence, is research into machine intelligence. Machines have no "rights organisations," so researchers can do what they like with machines, then discard them. The combination of research into machine intelligence, cognitive science, nanotechnology, and information technology, is leading inexorably toward new forms of intelligence. Humans had best do what they can to keep up.

Descent into the Inferno

Last week in the US city of New Orleans, a large number of people descended into hell on earth. Following the breach of a flood levee, the partially evacuated city lapsed into total lawlessness, as the city police joined the looters, or simply deserted their posts and left the city. As the city government collapsed into uselessness, the Louisiana state government apparently failed to fill the gap, even lacking an individual to place in charge of the logistics of relief efforts. This failure of local government to attempt to meet the needs of a devastating emergency boggles the mind.

The entire world was treated to stories of massive lootings, arson, rape, pillage, and murder. A small group of mostly European and Australian tourists, racially white, were threatened with death repeatedly by the black co-refugees inside the major evacuation centers inside New Orleans. These tourists were very afraid that the police could not protect them, and the police admitted as much. In the midst of an incredible human disaster, they were threatened because they were white. Not in Haiti, not in Cote d'Ivoire. In the United States of America, the richest nation in the world.

Thank goodness for the US military and its ability to get to disasters quickly. Despite the failure of local and state government, the US Navy, Coast Guard, and other elements of the US military were able to ultimately bring relief and order back into the chaos and impromptu human violence -- and make the place safe again for civilian forces. But what if there was no US military -- or if the US military were as incompetent and corrupt as most other militaries of the world? Things would have turned out much differently.

In order for the progress toward the singularity, toward the next level, to take place, civilisation has to maintain its hold on at least the developed world. The rule of law must be maintained, law and order must provide the stability for progress.

Various subcultures naturally develop in the freedom of the western world, where multiculturalism is celebrated, and some of these subcultures will inevitably become dysfunctional at some point. This dysfunctionality must be pointed out, and corrected both by the leaders of society at large, by the media in the society, and by respected people within the subculture itself. If the subculture has devolved too far to produce respected people from within, who will oppose its dysfunctionality, then other means of protecting society will have to be worked out, preferably while still respecting everyone's freedoms and rights.

This problem is something that will have to be dealt with eventually. I suspect that it will be contained well enough to allow the transitions I have been describing to occur among much of the population. At that point, better ideas for turning the negative devolution into a positive evolution will be produced.

It would be nice if a developed society of modern between-levels humans could come up with solutions for this problem that they themselves are responsible for, but between-levels humans are not far evolved above primitive level humans themselves. The dominance of the shit-throwing monkeys (post-modernist dogmatists and the political correctness police) in academia, government, and much of the corporate world is testimony to that.

No, it seems clear to me that the appearance of a significant number of next level humans will be necessary, before any meaningful solution to this "devolution in the middle of evolution" can be found.

More Remarks on IQ by Race and Gender

In a recent Commentary Magazine article, Charles Murray updates his findings on IQ as it relates to race. Back in 1994, before I was aware of such issues, Murray and Hernnstein published The Bell Curve, a sociological look at how small differences in IQ, evolved over tens of thousands of years in separated populations, might influence modern social dynamics. His recent article linked above refers to a significant body of research that has been done since the publication of his book.

The thrust of this blog is entirely devoted to helping all humans transition to the next level, regardless of race or gender. It is my emphatic assertion that such a transition as I envision will render any remaining differences in intelligence between groups both random and insignificant. I make a further, more emphatic assertion. The people who oppose research into group differences in intelligence and cognitive abilities, are the very people who are obstructing the transition to a higher level of intelligence for the groups they purport to help. In other words, they are only another version of shit-throwing monkey, criticising honest researchers out of an innate instinct rather than from a rational, principled counter-hypothesis.

These monkeys could learn a lot from a group that they look down upon and secretly despise. I am referring to the class of blue collar worker known as maintenance workers. A maintenance worker is tasked to keep machines and systems of varying complexity operating. If the machines or systems break down, the maintenace person is called upon to repair the system. There is no fudging to be done here. Either the system will be fixed by the maintenance person or it will not. If not, another maintenance person is called who can fix the system. The maintenance person has to understand how the system works, and what has gone wrong. If he cannot do that much, he certainly cannot repair the system, in most cases. Any maintenance person who persists in denying that a system is broken, despite the obvious fact that it does not work, will be relegated to the unemployment line rather quickly.

Shit-throwing monkeys, on the other hand, are paid handsomely to deny that the broken system is broken. The louder their denials, the more they are paid. Millions may suffer because the broken system is neglected, not properly repaired, due to the denials of the monkeys. Nevertheless, the monkeys grow old, fat, comfortably well off, and retire as legends in their own minds.

When two different populations of initially similar individuals are allowed to evolve in isolation from each other for many hundreds of generations, significant differences between the populations are bound to arise. Even when two populations are coexistant geographically, but mostly separate in terms of mating and procreation, differences will show up. Finally, even when two groups coexist geographically, and mate freely with each other, significant differences can persist if the two groups were significantly different to begin with. As in human males and human females.

Yes, the differences in IQ by race and gender do exist, at least statistically and reproducibly. Perhaps they are not significant when it comes to real life performance, or more likely, the differences are only significant in a few specific areas. All the more reason to understand what is happening, and to utilise the very best of the best in the pursuit of the keys to the next level.