Reframing Moloch

 Let us consider the notion of Moloch in terms of the view that "All things that have a beginning have an ending". Some patterns to note:

• When the situation is not the way we would like / want / expect, we seem to need to invent a causal agent. We have invented the devil, dark matter, Moloch, the other, the system, the incentive, ....
• The connotation of this agent can be positive or negative (guardian angel vs the devil). That connotation affects our neurology. That affect colors our reasoning. Our reasoning is always (?) motivated reasoning. And that motivated reasoning is affected by our affects. (Too much affect?)
• Consciousness transformations can lead to very different perspectives on this ( and other ) issues and lead to statements like: Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they neither toil nor spin; yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these. or the four noble truths, the eight fold path, the exhortation to love, to be at peace, The Power of Now, ....
• Perspectival changes include seeing ourselves as part of the meta process of how we parse and interpret reality and try to make sense of it. Often leaving out that any perspective leaves out of it the "rest of infinity". A depth of caring and love affects us as we try to make sense of the world in that "miasma" of simulated pain
• ????????????????????

Below is a conversation I had with an ai (google bard) about this.

Meaning Crisis ?

 These thoughts arise out of watching Vervaeke's Awakening from the meaning crisis and numbers of conversations and dialogues on such topics. One of the themes in these conversations is the loss of the sacred. And one could say Nietsche's notion of "God is dead" is along the same lines. And an attempt to create a new or reawakened sense of the sacred. Or in Vervaeke's term, creating a "religion that is not a religion". The notion of sacred is a bit of a concern for me. One way to look at the sacred is that it creates a veil ( of our own making ) with which we blind ourselves to what is beyond whatever our version of the sacred is. The sacred is useful in terms of the neurological states it allows us to experience. And of course, the side effects of those states can be quite beneficial.

Another way to think of the meaning crisis is that there is a mismatch of the values we ( as a result of the culture we are in ) get programmed with and our basic biology. Part of our biological frame includes empathy, a sense of fairness. Our current cultures put a high metric on economics ( a mode of having ). This is a maladapted metric to our biology. Hence, in the process of making money we may feel a sense of meaninglessness because of the mismatch of that metric to our biology / neurology. Another factor to keep in minds is that this sense of empathy, fairness is an evolutionary addition to our biology. It seems to be present in other primates, mammals, ....? What are the earliest indicators of this biological feature in evolution?

Scapegoats, Girard, and structural frames

 Girard's notion of the origins of scapegoating:

Whereas the philosophers of the 18th century would have agreed that communal violence comes to an end due to a social contract, Girard believes that, paradoxically, the problem of violence is frequently solved with a lesser dose of violence. When mimetic rivalries accumulate, tensions grow ever greater. But, that tension eventually reaches a paroxysm. When violence is at the point of threatening the existence of the community, very frequently a bizarre psychosocial mechanism arises: communal violence is all of the sudden projected upon a single individual. Thus, people that were formerly struggling, now unite efforts against someone chosen as a scapegoat. Former enemies now become friends, as they communally participate in the execution of violence against a specified enemy.

One of the questions that arises is what are possible underlying structures of this phenomenon. One possibility is that mammalian predator neurologies generate  waste products that build up over time. There is a need to release these wastes. When a group has accumulated enough waste, it seeks a receptacle for that energy or a release mechanism. Scapegoat(s) are found as ways to release this energy.

One can also think of this process as a way to maintain stability and avoid change. If something external is the "cause" of the energy build up, then one doesn't have to deal with one's own part in the build up of this "waste product' / energy.

An example of this structure in the alpha and omega of the wolf pack. Human societies / civilizations also create their own omegas in terms of  a servant class, an ethnic group, an easily differentiated sub-group, ...

Reasoning Frames

 Watching a dialogue between Professor Gilbert Morris and Daniel Schmactenberger on "A History of Racial Conflict", came across the notion of "motivated reasoning". The question arises when is there not motivated reasoning? We have the illusion of being "objective". Since the majority of our thinking is unconscious, and we are biological beings who don't really understand their neurology, reasoning structures, motivations, limitations, ...., we categorically can not be objective in any reasonable sense. Hence, all our reasoning is motivated reasoning based on reasons we may or may not be aware of.

Next, there is the issue of the frame used for reasoning. The frame used in this dialogue was basically a "moral frame", e.g., how could persons like Jefferson, Washington profess such high morals, write the Bill of Rights and yet participate in slavery and oppress other human beings. One can tie oneself in knots trying to answer this dilemma. A more useful frame for these kinds of issues in particular, and other issues in general, is to use a "structural frame", i.e., what kinds of underlying structures create these phenomena. Part of our biology is to utilize and maximize asymmetry in our favor. And to feel special as primates or perhaps even more generally, as living beings with a perspective. We also have a reptilian heritage of identifying "blemishes" in others as a way to identify them and then use that rationalization to increase our asymmetry with them. The asymmetry is what allows us to create hierarchies - servants, slaves, worker bees, bosses, .... This creation and utilization of asymmetry is part of our biological heritage. All human societies do this, continue to do it, we are surrounded by this phenomena in all societies, past and present. It is also the basis of this existence, particles -> atoms -> molecules -> cells -> ..... Each aggregation increasing the asymmetry between itself and its components or "siblings".

The structural frame, imho, gives more of a chance of being intentional and have choice over this basic biological impulse that we have. The universe cares little, if at all, for our moral frames. It does respond to the congruency of our structural understanding to the actual causal structures of the phenomena in question.

Hard problem, Egregores, and AGI

 Given a different frame, a hard problem can become an easy / easier problem. Or point to a different way to understand the "problem". One way to think about consciousness or the hard problem of consciousness is to think of it as an egregore. With a certain combination of neural structures with certain features / characteristics, an egregore is created. We identify that as a "self" or our consciousness. Since we have such a direct experience of it, we have so many words for it - self, I, ego, my name, your name, .... There are many egregores which we have no names for, e.g., family egregore, ethnic egregore, national egregore, mob egregore, .... We can be parts of these egregores, however, we don't have a direct experience of them as an entity since we are only a part of that egregore. Our memory, our senses, etc., don't have a sense of their identity as they are parts of our egregore / consciousness.

From this framing arises the question: what are the necessary and sufficient sub-parts for the creation of an egregore? This may be a useful direction in the study / creation of a strong agi. We have early inklings of intentionality in creating egregores, e.g., metanoic teams ( a team that is greater than the sum of its parts). We don't seem to have deterministic processes for creating metanoic teams. However, on occasion we are do create them on occasion with some degree of intentionality. We are also getting inklings of how to do this from synthetic biology, genetic studies, biology, ...

Below the meta crisis

 I have been listening to various conversations about the meta crises we are in. An interesting metaphor I heard from Jordan Hall was that we are on a train on tracks that are leading us straight for a waterfall / cliff. The tracks / train being our biologies, our cultures, and our environment. Other conversations have talked about the meta crises issue from an energy perspective, multi polar traps, biological / evolutionary drivers. What I have not yet heard about is a perspective from a basic time / space perspective.

• Time - each one of us has a certain tempo to our being. As a species, we operate in a certain range of frequencies as far as information processing, sense making, .... go. Our neo paleolithic time frequencies have not kept up with the pace of development of our technologies. In particular, our modern industrial and digital environment.
• Space - we are being of a certain size. We operate, sense reality at that scale. We are mostly sensorily unaware of the micro, meso scopic structures that make our reality possible. Similarly, we are most unaware of the large scale patterns that guide our existence - solar weather, galactic orbit, climate patterns, ...

Some simple thoughts on the weighty matter.

Layers, Structure, and Semantics

 Layers of narrative structure:

• Story
• Story as a design object of author
• Genre of stories as possible designs
• Cultures in which such stories aris
• Biologies in which such cultures arise
• Chemistries in which such biologies arise
• Physics in which such chemistries arise

If you accept any layer of the structure as the final layer, the bottom turtle, then that becomes your dogma.

Narratives as evokers:

• what the story evokes in the reader
• what the author intended the story to evoke
• what the culture evoked in the author that is reflected in the story
• what the biology made salient in the culture to create stories to amplify that salience
• what the chemistry allowed the biology to experience
• what the physics allowed the chemistry to form

Layers of semantics:

• story as stopping point (sp) - dogma
• possible story lines as sp - dogma
• possible stories as sp - dogma
• possible cultures as sp - dogma
• possible biologies as sp - dogma
• possible chemistries as sp - dogma
• possible physics as sp - dogma

How does one get beyond these layers, when there is no final turtle in turtles all the way down:

Bathe in infinity -> dogma

Meta Generators

 The last post on generator functions and processes led to a conversation about how to think more clearly about these - how is a function different from a process. One can think of a function as a "class" as in an object oriented programming model. The usage of that class is the process. The usage of the class is an instantiation of that class in a particular context. So,

Generators

 We are surrounded by overwhelming complexity of form, function, process, .... One way to get some degree of grip on this complexity is to think in terms of generator functions that create this complexity. For example, Daniel Schmactenberger talks about some generator functions that are creating the existential risks to our societies.

So this lead me think about a generator process for another dynamic in our history / societies. Think of our evolution as the universe trying different patterns to form viable organisms. One aspect of the formation of an organism is the modular / functional creation of parts that create a whole organism. We start out as a cell that then differentiates into organs with different functions and capabilities and forming a viable organism as the end result of all that differentiation.

One aspect of this formation process is a generator process that determines which cells go to which function - heart, stomach, blood, brain, .... Similarly, in our societies we have a generator process for determining who ends up being in a "decision making" / "resource allocation" role. This process seems to promote people to these positions who have certain abilities to maneuver the social web. However, by and large, these same people seem to be short sighted non systemic thinkers. Hence leading to the long list of disastrous decisions with which our histories are littered.

The Perils of Geometry for Integral Theory, Spiral Dynamics, and Developmental Psychology

In developmental models, there are several factors at play:

• A developmental hierarchy of stages of development
• A transcend and include meta model of including earlier stages and adding more features

This geometry can be misleading in that it presumes that a higher stage of development is "better" in all aspects from an earlier stage. However, let us take the example of red stage vs green stage. The current world situation seems to, for the moment, clearly indicate that red strategies are superior to green strategies in getting ownership of key decision making functional areas. Hence, red states / groups are far more effective in getting political, judicial, and legislative power compared to orange and green groups.

In terms of the spiral, more options are available as one progresses up the development chain. However, fewer options are available for lower level behaviors. Hence, a red person will have more red options then a green person as exemplified by the story below.

This is a fractal pattern. We generalize one improved measure / metric to thinking that all other measures are also improved. We can see this in all sort of different contexts:

• teachers are assumed to know everything and students little to nothing
• bosses / leaders are assumed to be able to make all decisions and explain why
• parents are supposed to be "right" all / most of the time
• ...

It reminds of a story a colleague once told us. In a public argument with a two year old, the two year may often win as it he/she will resort to whatever behavior will get him/her their desired outcome. This includes public tantrums, screaming, etc., etc. This, in a public place, will push the shame / guilt buttons of many adults to give in to a two year old's demands.

Thoughts About Isms

Some thoughts from reading "The Portable Atheist" an anthology of essays about that topic. Sometimes it helps to look at the larger context of a phenomenon rather than the phenomenon itself.