Month: February 2012

Thunder and Revelation

Mark DavisLeave a comment

Adam Gopnik’s exceptional review of Elaine Pagels’ new book on The Book of Revelations in The New Yorker brings the complexity of the early 1st Millenium into stark focus. Were the Pauline tracts aberrant and Revelations an attempt to turn early Christianity back from Gentile contamination?  Why was the book so controversial and the early Christian world filled with so many heresies? Arianism, Sethianism, Valentianism, and the list goes on and on…only to be resolved by political wrangling and ecumenical councils.

Noteworthy is Pagels’ inclusion of discussion of the Nag Hammadi poem, Thunder, Perfect Mind.  Gopnik points us to a Ridley Scott commercial for Prada that includes a reading of it:

Thunder Perfect Mind – a Prada Film starring Daria Werbowy from M G on Vimeo.

Also notable is that the model uses some cherry picking of the poem content.  “I am the whore and the holy one” probably has the wrong resonance for a Prada perfume.  From mystic revelation to luxury goods…as astonishing a journey as The Book of Revelations.… Read the rest

From Ethics to Hypercomputation

Mark DavisLeave a comment

Toby Ord of Giving What We Can has other interests, including ones that connect back to Solomonoff inference and algorithmic information theory. Specifically, Ord worked earlier on topics related to hypercomputation or, more simply put, the notion that there may be computational systems that exceed the capabilities of Turing Machines.

Turing Machines are abstract computers that can compute logical functions, but the question that has dominated theoretical computer science is what is computable and what is incomputable. The Kolmogorov Complexity of a string is the minimal specification needed to compute the string given a certain computational specification (a program). And the Kolmogorov Complexity is incomputable.  Yet, a compact representation is a minimalist model that can, in turn, lead to optimal future prediction of the underlying generator.

Wouldn’t it be astonishing if there were, in fact, computational systems that exceeded the limits of computability? That’s what Ord’s work set-out to investigate, though there have been detractors.… Read the rest

Uncertainty and Ethical Obligations

Mark DavisLeave a comment

LukeProg interviews Toby Ord of Oxford and founder of Giving What We Can about what may be an even more complex problem than that of the Existential dilemma over being itself: how do we overcome uncertainty in formulating an ethical system?

Conversations from the Pale Blue Dot: Toby Ord

There are few definitive answers, of course. How could there be? But Toby does a great job of drawing a map of deontological theories (rule-based, including “divine command theory”), virtue ethics, and consequentialist theories (utilitarianism, etc.). He’s partial to the latter (and even thinks most of the ethical systems might be unified as consquentialist), and his foundation has worked to perfect the calculations concerning how an individual’s contributions to specific charities can potentially result in the future reduction in human suffering.

Here’s a quandary, though: is exuberant excess sometimes necessary for enhancing future productivity that might lead to greater reductions in human suffering?  I may just be hoping to justify my failure to follow Toby’s example or, at least, to make up for it later in life.… Read the rest

Etruscan Teleology

Mark DavisLeave a comment

I was, somewhat ironically, concocting salmon risotto with a drizzle of white wine while my wife read to me about Etruscan mythology from Wikipedia this evening.  From Seneca the Younger:

Whereas we believe lightning to be released as a result of the collision of clouds, they believe that the clouds collide so as to release lightning: for as they attribute all to deity, they are led to believe not that things have a meaning insofar as they occur, but rather that they occur because they must have a meaning.

Last year we had the opportunity to visit the National Etruscan Museum in Rome during the most unbearably tropical European summer in recent memory.

Seneca the Younger somewhat snidely detected a difference, driven at least partially by a feeling of cultural dominance, that teleological explanations are inferior to naturalistic ones, that one more entity (or a host of them) provides no additional value to the explanatory system.… Read the rest

Creativity and Proximate Causation

Mark DavisLeave a comment

Combining aspects of the previous posts, what proximate mechanisms might be relevant to the notion of artistic fitness? Scott Barry Kauffman at www.creativitypost.com rounds up some of the most interesting recent research and thinking on this topic in his post, Must One Risk Madness to Achieve Genius?

Touching on work by luminaries like Susan Blackmore and others, Scott drives from personality assessment concepts down through the role of dopamine in trying to identify whether there is a spectrum of observable traits that are linked to creativity and artistic achievement.

Notable:

Daniel Nettle and Helen Clegg found that apophenia was positively related to a higher number of sexual partners for both men and women, and this relationship was explained by artistic creative activity. Similarly, in a more recent study conducted by Helen Cleff, Daniel Nettle, and Dorothy Miell, they found that more successful male artists (who are presumably higher in apophenia) had more sexual partners than less successful male artists.

Apophenia means seeing patterns in the environment where none may be present, a central theme in my second novel, Signals and Noise.

We can hypothesize also, based on the distribution from schizophrenia through schizotypy, through to “normal,” that there must be a large complement of interacting genes involved in these traits. This is supported by the evidence of genetic predispositions for schizophrenia, for instance, but also by the frustrating lack of success in identifying the genes that are involved.  This distribution may, in fact, be one of the most critical aspects of what it means to be human:

Were it not for those “disordered” genes, you wouldn’t have extremely creative, successful people.  Being in the absolute middle of every trait spectrum, not too extreme in any one direction, makes you balanced, but rather boring. 

… Read the rest

Multilevel Selection and Proximate Causation

Mark DavisLeave a comment

A strong critique of On the Role of Males by Dawkins was, put simply, that it continues the wrongheaded pursuit of the notion of “multilevel selection” that confuses the vehicles and replicators in the selection process. In this case, selfish genetics precludes the application of a lossy filter for genetic defects because it becomes a species-level selective mechanism.

While largely a technical distinction in evolutionary theory, much remains to be explained if we presume that there are no selective pressures that operate at levels above the genetic. For instance, when human females are subject to environmental stressors, the sex ratio changes to favor boys.  From Valerie Grant’s Wartime sex ratios: Stress, male vulnerability and the interpretation of atypical sex ratio data:

At the end of war, and other times of both chronic and acute stress, remarkable changes occur in the human secondary (birth) sex ratio. At the end of a long war, significantly more boys are born; after a short war, or disaster, fewer boys than usual are born six to nine months later. Since it is commonly held that the sex of the offspring is a matter of chance, these data provide an intriguing problem; but new findings in reproductive physiology, and an increased understanding of male vulnerability, could help resolve it. It appears the sex ratio of offspring may be influenced by variations in the mother’s follicular testosterone. Under conditions of chronic stress, maternal testosterone rises, resulting in an increase in male conceptions; but these same stressful conditions also exacerbate differential male vulnerability, so more males are lost during pregnancy. At the end of war, improving conditions temper male vulnerability, leaving higher sex ratios at birth.

… Read the rest

Artistic Fitness

Mark DavisLeave a comment

Following on Wirt’s 1991 treatise, On the Role of Males, that suggests that sexual caste is a meta-trait that operates at a level above simple, beanbag “selfish genetics” by supporting eliminating genetic defects through Y chromosomes (unmasked heterozygous alleles) combined with combative behavior, we can easily ask what other traits elevate female choices for mammals because, by being selective, female choice accelerates evolution even more. And, for humankind, we can ask the most interesting question: what drives women to desire men?

From Geoffrey Miller’s Aesthetic fitness: How sexual selection shaped artistic virtuosity as a fitness indicator and aesthetic preferences as mate choice criteria:

From 1871 until the turn of the 20th century, Darwinian aesthetics was an active area of theorizing.  Darwin (1871) himself viewed the human visual arts as an outgrowth of an instinct for body ornamentation.  He pointed out that males in most cultures indulge in much more self-adornment than females, as predicted by his sexual selection theory. (He understood that men of his own culture ornamented themselves with country estates and colonial treasures rather than tattoos and penis sheaths).  Herbert Spencer argued that sexual selection produced most of the beauty in nature and culture, while Max Nordau posited a neurophysiological link between reproductive urges and artistic creativity, which Sigmund Freud appropriated in this theory of art as sublimated sexuality.   Friedrich Nietzsche developed an especially intriguing and little-appreciated biological aesthetics in The Will to Power, in the section titled ‘The will to power as art’. Nietzsche (1883-1888/1968, p. 421) also accepted a sexual display function for the visual arts, writing “Artists, if they are any good, are (physically as well) strong, full of surplus energy, powerful animals, sensual; without a certain overheating of the sexual system a Raphael is unthinkable.”

… Read the rest

Experimental Positive Morality

Mark DavisLeave a comment

Gated from Pinker’s The Better Angels of our Nature, the Dutch experiments concerning the “broken window hypothesis” are illuminating. The “broken window hypothesis” dates to the 1980s when criminologists Wilson and Kelling suggested that broken windows in an abandoned building might signal other vandals that breaking windows is permissible. This theory, though widely disputed among criminologists, informed increased enforcement efforts in the United States in the 1990s that correlated with the amazing reductions in the crime rate that have continued into the current decade.

What of the Dutch experiments? When artificial circumstances are established where people can, for instance, litter fliers, people will litter more when they are in an environment already littered or surrounded by buildings covered with graffiti. Small acts of theft also are enhanced by a shady environment.

If our moral sentiments are so heavily influenced by our environment, we don’t need convincing that our moral predispositions are socially influenced, as well. Teenagers and college students are case studies.

But what of positive influences? If graffiti enhances criminality, and a neutral environment is, well, neutral, is it possible that a beautiful, inspiring environment would promote positive morality?

In many cities and towns, artistic murals are applied to high-graffiti areas with the expressed purpose of eliminating graffiti, for example. Can astonishing architecture do similar things? Following the Dutch experimental setup, it would be easy to place fliers on bicycles around art galleries and interesting buildings, then monitor the littering rates. There are obvious problems with this methodology in that the people who live and work in some areas may have educational, class, and other differences with those who traffic other areas that are more prone to littering and graffiti.… Read the rest

Transcendent Ivory

Mark DavisLeave a comment

Alain de Botton has an interesting suggestion in the Wall Street Journal: create restaurants that are communal and that are designed to foster social interaction with an almost religious quality. This follows fairly closely on the heels of Hubert Dreyfus of Berkeley’s suggestion that maybe a good religious substitute can be found in mass sports events.

Why is a secular substitute for religion needed? It’s not completely clear. Each author argues that there is something fundamentally missing from our modern, cosmopolitan lives. What is missing is a sense of wonder, a sense of transcendence, a sense of community involvement, a sense of egoless participation, a universe of interactions based on something other than commercial interests, non-creepy greetings (de Botton)…something.

But they both neglect one of the crowning achievements of the modern world. Organized sports are largely passive events for the spectators. Restaurants are far too much about eating and not about ideas. What we do have, however, are university systems that are dedicated to the pursuit of knowledge and are accessible (with all the caveats of price) to almost all of the population. Only in university systems are people organized around a commitment to knowledge, science, and art. Economic status is less important than intellectual capacity. Ideas reign and social interaction is driven by common cause.

What we need is more ivory towers. After all, even the phrase may have been sourced from the Song of Solomon:

Thy neck is as a tower of ivory; thine eyes like the fishpools in Heshbon, by the gate of Bathrabbim: thy nose is as the tower of Lebanon which looketh toward Damascus

… Read the rest

China and the Origin of Rights

Mark DavisLeave a comment

Eric X. Li in The New York Times argues that:

America and China view their political systems in fundamentally different ways: whereas America sees democratic government as an end in itself, China sees its current form of government, or any political system for that matter, merely as a means to achieving larger national ends.

The implication developed further is that:

The West seems incapable of becoming less democratic even when its survival may depend on such a shift.

Li’s argument develops the idea that the repression of the Tiananmen movement in China was a strategic move that resulted in the underlying political stability for the current economic growth wave in China!

It’s hindsight bias, though, that builds on a kind of utilitarianism that asserts that there are political and social values that outweigh the rights of individuals (and that are predictable in their output). Indeed, Li asserts as much with:

The fundamental difference between Washington’s view and Beijing’s is whether political rights are considered God-given and therefore absolute or whether they should be seen as privileges to be negotiated based on the needs and conditions of the nation.

God is, of course, unnecessary in this equation. What is more relevant is whether an individual’s rights to freedom–whether of conscience or property–should be considered to supersede the desires of the state or collective. This was expressed as endowed by the Creator in the Declaration of Independence, but there was no particular justification provided in the Constitution. Rights are simply agreeably good in the US Constitution, subject to the same floor-plan as the rights and limitations of the Judiciary or the Legislative Branch, and even limited in some cases where just compensation for property seizures is allowable.… Read the rest