Election 2019: they're off ..

When I think back to my socialist-activist years at and after university, when I was marching with the International Marxist Group contingent every Saturday afternoon in London (demos were prime recruitment terrain), it would have been tempting to conclude that I was a political activist because I was a Marxist.

This would have been incorrect - totally upside-down.

Reflecting back to my mid-teens, I was rebellious that early because I didn't like the world I was in. It didn't care about anything I cared about, and offered me no future prospects of interest. I only discovered Marxism at university: prior to that I was some kind of anarcho-libertarian but certainly not someone who had activist inclinations. I just hated the toffs who ran everything.

Today I look at all those young folk in their teens, twenties or thirties who are university-educated (half the cohort!) yet have no practicable future commensurate with the elite lifestyles they think they were promised. No well-paid, exciting jobs changing the world; no commuting between continents; no elite cultural events at posh venues.

They don't have Marxism any more: that revolutionary model has lost all credibility and rightly so. Marx was the most discerning analyst of capitalism that there has ever been - but the Leninist model should never have been generalised outside of Russia and it didn't even work there, as it turned out.

Today's 'disaffected youth' follow equally-illusory SJW banners .. and this creates a problem for the Labour Party. Corbyn is an old-time left-social-democrat - he wants to campaign on social-services (the NHS et al), increased Government spending and state controls over the economy.

He wants, in other words, to engage with the Northern (somewhat Brexit-voting) traditional working class and its perceived interests. Actually, so does Boris Johnson who both needs those Brexit-inclined votes and - more strategically - seeks to lock those people into a future 'Red-Tory' bloc.

But won't a traditional-socialist campaign leave Labour's Momentum supporters - his mass army of activists - feeling rather neglected? As well as the wider mass of SJW-inclined voters who do have a credible alternative, the revitalised Liberal-Democrats?

I think this is a problem for Labour, which parallels their trying to ride two horses at the same time contortions over Brexit itself.

The Economics of Rock-Climbing

Alex Honnold’s free, solo ascent of El Capitan

 From "Rock climbing and the economics of innovation" via Marginal Revolution.

"It’s this combination of strong and resilient nylon ropes, able to absorb the energy of a long fall, automatic braking gadgets to hold the rope when a fall happens, reliable devices for anchoring the rope to the rock, and harnesses that spread the load of a fall across the climbers body, that have got us to where we are today, where climbers can practise harder and harder routes, (mostly) safe in the knowledge that a fall won’t be fatal, or even that uncomfortable."

More.

The Stupidity of Scientism

'Scientism' proposes the methods of the hard sciences - mathematical modelling - as the preferred, or sole approach to studying any topic, no matter how inappropriately (particularly social science).

In psychology this leads to operationalism, in economics to the neoclassical synthesis, in sociology to structuralist accounts of society.

The methodology is ubiquitous in contemporary thinking: listen to any 'expert' on the radio, TV or in the press.

Friedrich A. Hayek in "The Counter-Revolution of Science" characterised Scientism thus (my emphasis):

"The persistent effort of modern Science has been to get down to "objective facts," to cease studying what men thought about nature or regarding the given concepts as true images of the real world, and, above all, to discard all theories which pretended to explain phenomena by imputing to them a directing mind like our own. Instead, its main task became to revise and reconstruct the concepts formed from ordinary experience on the basis of a systematic testing of the phenomena, so as to be better able to recognize the particular as an instance of a general rule. ...

"The social sciences in the narrower sense, i.e., those which used to be described as the moral sciences, are concerned with man's conscious or reflected action, actions where a person can be said to choose between various courses open to him, and here the situation is essentially different. The external stimulus which may be said to cause or occasion such actions can of course also be defined in purely physical terms. But if we tried to do so for the purposes of explaining human action, we would confine ourselves to less than we know about the situation."

In summary, Scientism removes intentionality from the world. It theorises as if people were Newtonian billiard balls, as if populations were classical manifolds - described by (usually linear) differential equations.

It requires severe contortions of mind to wrench-away all the common-sense complexities of the real (agent-populated social) world and to rely exclusively upon some oversimplified, reified model which then predicts counter-intuitive (and false) results.

Truly one has to be extra-smart and very-well-educated to jump through these hoops for Newsnight and Radio 4! It helps to be confident, well-spoken and well-connected too, for some reason.

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A cynic writes: "If the existing organisation of the world suits these people just fine, why not fix it for ever in some structural straitjacket from which it could never escape except by chaos?"

Atomised - Marx, Houellebecq and Wilson

Perhaps every generation wakes up one day and realises that they live in a society of apparently-atomised individuals - and that the ideologies of the day celebrate that fact.

Amazon link

It certainly came as a revelation to me, as a child in primary school, that society wasn't actually for anything, that it seemed to have no overarching purpose. Where, then, was purpose to be found?

Religion?

The purposelessness of society and - with the decline of religion - the lack of any sense of life-meaning has conjured many things. The literature of Michel Houellebecq (cf. 'Atomised'), the activist-faddism of the new petite-bourgeoisie, the fetishism of feelings over rational analysis - these are all particularly salient today. But such epiphenomena have always been somewhere present in stabilised bourgeois societies.

This is what Marx wrote in "On The Jewish Question" (1843).

"Security is the highest social concept of civil society, the concept of police, expressing the fact that the whole of society exists only in order to guarantee to each of its members the preservation of his person, his rights, and his property. ...

The concept of security does not raise civil society above its egoism. On the contrary, security is the insurance of egoism.

None of the so-called rights of man, therefore, go beyond egoistic man, beyond man as a member of civil society – that is, an individual withdrawn into himself, into the confines of his private interests and private caprice, and separated from the community.

In the rights of man, he is far from being conceived as a species-being; on the contrary, species-life itself, society, appears as a framework external to the individuals, as a restriction of their original independence. ...

It is puzzling enough that a people which is just beginning to liberate itself, to tear down all the barriers between its various sections, and to establish a political community, that such a people solemnly proclaims (Declaration of 1791) the rights of egoistic man separated from his fellow men and from the community, and that indeed it repeats this proclamation at a moment when only the most heroic devotion can save the nation, and is therefore imperatively called for, at a moment when the sacrifice of all the interest of civil society must be the order of the day, and egoism must be punished as a crime. (Declaration of the Rights of Man, etc., of 1793)."

So here Marx is counterposing the social nature of humanity, its 'species-being', with the bourgeois concept of the autonomous individual, the social-atom coolly prepared for purely formal and transactional relationships with others.

It's a point made often. People instinctively yearn for community, remember fondly their 'war years'.

Yet Marx and the Marxists have never been clear about what a society founded upon the expression of 'species-being' would actually be like. Marx's utopian vision seemed to be that everyone would selflessly strive for the communal benefit of .. well, everyone else.

After all, it seems to works for ant colonies.

Yet our best, modern, biological understanding is that people work for and with family and friends in the everyday sense. There can be a commitment, a loyalty, to the imagined-communities of larger constellations - such as companies, countries or more abstract causes (only the latter being currently lauded).

And this seems psychologically-grounded in the belief that fellow (and presently unknown) members of or adherents to these above-Dunbar's-number 'communities' will have a propensity to enter into alliances of reciprocal altruism at need. That is to say they are already marked as 'potential friends and allies'.

But nothing gets done in practice without actual links with actual people, stable over time. And so we see that, contrary to the official story of a society of empowered individuals, all existing institutions - especially elite institutions - are composed of networks of people who typically have known each other a long time, who think similarly and who broadly trust each other. (The granularity of trust-groups is particularly fine in politics!).

Survey the media families (those familiar journalists, editors, presenters in the newspapers and television networks); the political dynasties; those families with durable military traditions; the elite universities which welcome the same names generation after generation.

Biology will out. Humanity's true species-being is a network of contending, alliance-making micro-tribes, surprisingly stable over the generations.

This is what made Robert Charles Wilson's wonderful The Affinities less a piece of social extrapolation and more a simple relabelling of what we already see around us.

The transcendence of bourgeois hypocrisy about the real nature of people and its lies about human nature are not to be found in the society of ants - unless future humans are going to be a singular clone-network (I would advise against this, citing bananas).

We are what we are and we need a mode of production which is aligned with that, absent unimagined qualitative 'changes/improvements' in human psychology. I'm still looking to total automation .. and a rocky transition to that state .. on a timescale of centuries, but not millennia.

- Adam Carlton (also published on Booksie).

Neanderthal dilemmas

Cro-Magnons - early humans - entered Europe from the Middle East around 38,000 years ago. Their path took them through the Zagros mountains (Iran, East Turkey). Climate change had led to a greening of the desert and thereby permitted northbound migration.

They were entering a Eurasian continent already populated by Neanderthals.

Cro-Magnon penetration at 37,500 years before present (here)

Suppose that there had been exactly one decisive pass through the mountains, and suppose this pass was occupied by a band of Neanderthals who could in principle have engaged and repulsed the incoming Cro-Magnon tribe.

Should they have held the pass, or just dispersed and avoided conflict?

It's a thought experiment.

Let us give these tooled-up Neanderthals the future knowledge of one branch of their decision tree.

If they stand aside and let the newcomers in, then over the next 10,000 years the Neanderthals will be displaced from their range and driven to extinction. The newcomers will proceed to build a mighty civilisation which will span the Earth .. and even beyond.

On the other hand ...

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The argument

1. The Neanderthals are inherently limited: they should make way for an improved species

There is no evidence that the Neanderthals were capable - in terms of their genetic endowment - in creating an advanced civilisation. They were just too well-adapted to their ecological niche to need the expansion of cognitive competences which compensated for Cro-Magnon physical inadequacy.

However, in biological terms, what's progress? The Neanderthals went extinct. Their genes only survive today as fragmented admixtures in the successor population. The subsequent massive population expansion (8 billion humans in the world today) of another species was not to their advantage at all. So why make way?

2. We should be in favour of life as a whole rather than any one species

Sure, some people believe this. But no species which practically implemented this belief could survive. It's the ultimate prey strategy in a Darwinian world of predators. You're toast in the paws of species which do care about their own survival.

3. The Neanderthals should have fought - it was in their own genetic interest

This is superficially appealing but it misunderstands the dynamic of evolution. No single organism operates in the interests of its 'species' - which in any case is a theoretical construct, a genotype-set boundary with rather arbitrary borders.

A creature fights for the survival of those creatures which best guarantee the further propagation of its own alleles. Itself. Usually its offspring. In more caring/social species the mates, extended kin group and perhaps allies ('friends' in a relationship of reciprocal, transactional altruism).

We could talk about imagined communities but let's discuss patriotism and nationalism another time.

So in a real scenario, the local Neanderthals should have fought if it was in their immediate, localised and situated interests. No doubt their innate emotions would have backed that up: some combination of aggression and fear balancing out.

However, if they had (counter-factually) known their future prospects over the next 10,000 years or so, they should have fought. Extinction is not consistent with any kind of fitness.

But you can't know.

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Supplementary question

If we designed a more competent social creature than current humanity - some self-sustaining artificial intelligence perhaps, or some genetically enhanced human subspecies - in any event some new creature which would out-compete us, should we proceed to implement the design?

Knowing we would lose the subsequent contest? But knowing that our designed-successors would inherit the stars (or something similarly grandiose) while rendering us extinct.

This would be completely against our genetic interests as individuals. But such a glittering future is surely something to be prized. Why should we care about the underlying dynamics of DNA replication and natural selection anyway? It's just mindless applied chemistry.

But why should we care about the glittering interstellar high-civilisation either? It's still all just navel-gazing atoms.

We care only because it's a human emotion - that's all 'caring' is. And human emotions simply encode the cognitive strategies which make us a (so-far) successful social species.

You don't find universal values in physics or biology.

There are only species-specific values. And the ones we cherish so much are specifically the values of a species ecologically-genomically structured like us. They motivate us to want to bring about situations which worked for us survivors up to now.

Hegel's Absolute Idealism from an AI perspective

Amazon link

A second pass these last few days at Hegel's The Phenomenology of Mind (Spirit), a notoriously obscure but central work of the great German philosopher.

I ought to have read Hegels' book in the original German, but of course even native German speakers struggle with Hegel's technical and obscure terminology. It's never going to happen for me.

I rejected reading it in translation - it's still too hard and in any case, I'd be studying the translator's view of what Hegel really meant.

Perhaps a guide to The Phenomenology of Spirit? I have this:

Amazon link

.. but it still presupposes that the reader has grasped the problem Hegel is trying to address.

So in the end I reverted to Peter Singer (top of page) who assumes no special prior knowledge. And I learned that in the Middle-Ages under feudalism, there was no real questioning of what kind of thing the world might be (ontology) because the Bible told us that God had made it. Likewise there was no discussion about how we could come to know things (epistemology) because divine revelation was always to hand.

The rising bourgeoisie, with its campaign against superstition and arbitrary authority and its championing of transactional-rationality demanded a rethink. So we had Descartes' famous 'Cogito' and Kant's famous 'thing-in-itself' which we could never know .. and Hegel's attempt to finally resolve these issues and put Kant right.

Marxists believe that Marx in the end resolved most of these problems and I think that's right.

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There is a tradition that says that philosophers create artificial problems by over-abstracting - and then spend their careers failing to solve them. Over-abstraction means ignoring essential features of the problem - things like agency (in epistemology) and evolutionary biology (in ethics, morality and aesthetics) and social praxis (in ontology).

AI has often allowed philosophical problems of excruciating obscurity to be recast as engineering problems badly misunderstood.

What does AI (and mathematical logic) have to say about Hegel's Phenomenology of Mind?

I have some notes.

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Hegel's forms of consciousness

1. Sense-certainty

The raw elements of percepts. Like bitmaps.

The problem: uninterpreted, private and incommunicable as knowledge.

2. Perception

Codification of sensory data in a language of object and predicate names (like first-order logic). Requires a prior language. Formalised as a set of grounded atomic formulae ('facts').

The problem: where did the language come from? Not sense-experience - so must be a-priori.

3. Understanding

The interpretation of categorised sensory data in a web of knowledge and inference. Formalised as grounded atomic terms plus a relevant prior theory ('facts' + 'rules').

The problem: where did it come from? Similarly problematic to Perception above.

4. Self-consciousness

We now consider a consciousness which knows itself to be a consciousness and worries about how it comes to have facts and rules about the world. This requires a transition to named agents and epistemic logic.

Let a, b, .. be agents and K the epistemic operator.

If a knows the fact: 'the cat is in the mat' we write:

K(a, on(cat, mat)).

Trying to understand the concept of self-consciousness leads Hegel to his celebrated master-slave discussion and the notion of the 'unhappy consciousness'.

Mind becomes aware of itself as mind. It becomes aware of its theories, which give meaning to reality, as subsets of some universal theory which accurately captures all the objects and relationships which constitute universal history in its great narrative of development and progress.

Agents (individual people) are able to internalise part of this overarching theory - reflecting their partial and historically-limited experiences. But they can also be aware that absolute knowledge nevertheless exists - the upper bound of what can ever be collectively known about the universe.

Singer observes that it's difficult to understand what Hegel's ontological commitments are in his Absolute Idealism.

Consider this.

If there is some universal theory, U, then we can consider the model of that theory which comprises formal agents and their separate cognitive states in their environments over all time. The movie of the universe, if you like, expressed in a mathematical, computational sequence of states.

Yet this description is also a notated object in some 'programming language' and therefore also a theoretical construct.* Perhaps this program-plus-output is what is meant by 'universal knowledge'?

Could this be what Hegel was groping for, a century before programming languages were developed?

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* For more technically-inclined readers, what we are talking about here is a term algebra, or Herbrand universe. See the Wikipedia article.

"Freyja’s Deathbed Conversations" - Adam Carlton

Amazon link

I joined this blog a couple of weeks ago. I'm pretty aligned with its view of the world. I've been writing political and technical science-fiction on the literary website Booksie for almost a year and have just published my first book on Amazon (Kindle and paperback). Hence the picture above.

For more about me look here.

This is the description of the book.

"Adam Carlton’s thirty four stories are set in a world of total surveillance, pervasive AI and high-tech interrogation. A revolutionary organisation fights repression in the streets of Paris; in a sordid Internet sweatshop, an AI is trained - its successors will build starships and contemplate a disposable humanity; an artefact found on the moon, impervious to study, recounts an unacceptable truth. These are the stories of our times, suffused with the victories of stupidity, the deceit of our friends and the betrayal of our deepest hopes."

I'm interested in the biggest issues: future society, technological trends, where we're all going. I tend to publish new material regularly on Booksie - it's flagged on the webview blog sidebar here along with all the other blogs. I usually try to get something out once a week. Eventually the material will find its way into new published volumes.

If you want a flavour of what I'm doing, visit the Amazon site and download a Kindle sample to get the first 10% of my book for free.

I hope to publish occasionally here - book reviews (like my take on 'Serotonin') and perhaps some political stuff which I can repost on Booksie. The audience over there is not as sophisticated politically or technically as the readership here, so I may be a little hand-wavy and introductory.

More to come, anyway.

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Update Thursday November 28th 2019

I've today withdrawn my book from Amazon (both Kindle and paperback versions). It may take a day or two to take effect.

Why?

First off it hasn't sold at all. Zero sales in October and November. Four in September - to known individuals. This was expected as I'm an unknown author and did no marketing.

Instead I'm choosing the harder route, which is to seek to get past the gate-keepers of SF magazines with my short stories. Assuming I can succeed I will build up a portfolio of published work in paying outlets - this is what a published writer does.

My next step will be - on the strength of this - to seek an agent who can perhaps package my stories into a bundle which will be effectively marketed. This is the key to getting sales. But my self-publishing efforts are a major obstacle here - it makes me look amateurish and ties up material which could be better used elsewhere.

"Serotonin" - Michel Houellebecq

Amazon link

This is Wikipedia's summary.

"The narrator, Florent-Claude Labrouste, is a depressed agricultural scientist who lives in a Parisian apartment block, the Tour Totem. He commutes to Normandy to help promote French cheese.

Sympathetic to the plight of local farmers, he is powerless to help them retain their traditional methods:

    In short, what is taking place with French agriculture is a vast redundancy plan, but one that is secret and invisible, where people disappear one by one, on their plots of land, without ever being noticed.

After watching a television documentary about people who choose to disappear from their life without telling anyone, Labrouste abruptly leaves his girlfriend, a young Japanese woman who is sexually hyperactive but devoid of affection, quits his job under a false pretence and flees to a chain hotel in another part of Paris. A doctor prescribes him an antidepressant to remedy his low levels of serotonin, hence the title of the novel. Although the drug dulls his sex drive, Labrouste returns to Normandy in search of former lovers. While there, he visits an old college friend, Aymeric, a divorced and suicidal aristocratic landowner.

At the climax of the novel, farmers equipped with assault rifles blockade a motorway. Aymeric is among them and shoots himself, sparking a clash with riot police in which 10 more people die.

Later on, for a couple of weeks, Labrouste secretly observes the love of his life, Camille, who has a son from another man. Initially intent on killing the child with one of Aymeric's sniper rifles in order to win back her love, he finds himself unable to go through with it.

Finally, Labrouste moves back to Paris, contemplating suicide by jumping out of a window."

Reviews were mixed: bourgeois horror from Robert Harris in The Times; other reviews suggested it was a bit boring (as compared to "Submission").

Very superficial, these reviews.

Houellebecq gives voice to the modern petite-bourgeoisie. This vastly-expanded social stratum, left behind by the ascendant neoliberal elite (the 0.1%), is increasingly precarious, alienated and desperate. The Idealists amongst them, the Myers-Briggs NFs, increasingly assemble themselves around displacement activities: fads such as veganism, climate change, plastic waste. Meanwhile, the Rationals, the NTs, have become skeptical and nihilistic - seeing no way out.

Houellebecq speaks for the latter group.

In Houellebecq's previous novel, "Submission", his protagonist cynically converts to Islam and gets the material rewards of a remunerative position in the newly-Islamicised Parisian university sector .. and the sexual benefits of four provided nubile wives.

"Serotonin" is darker: the ministry bureaucrat has no way out except death itself. Houellebecq follows his spiritual guide, Albert Camus, to the end.

Just because the author does not see an end to the decay of neoliberalism, as here instantiated in the EU project, does not mean that there isn't one. While the Macron regime has no solutions to the excluded (most visibly the gilets jaunes), in the UK the Boris Johnson - Dominic Cummings axis is actively seeking a rebasing of post-neoliberal capitalism aimed at recapturing inclusivity.

It's not hard to see the outlines of such a solution: transfer payments for regional infrastructure, directed investments in areas which can mop up surplus (and over-educated) professionals, a non-faked sense of national purpose. It's the will to move in that direction which is so fiercely contested .. under so many fake banners.

"It is easier to imagine the end of the world ..."

This quote, "it is easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism," has been attributed to the cultural analyst, Fredric Jameson.

It bears deep reflection.

Capitalism is the first mode of production which separated the mass of people from the means of securing their own livelihood. Previous modes of production saw ordinary people as hunters, gatherers, pastoralists or farmers.

Given the economic precariousness of the proletariat, some social organising principle is needed to coordinate actions to secure the reproduction of collective life. This is called an economy.

Historically there have been only two forms of economic organisation consistent with the existence of a proletariat (a class of resourceless labourers): the privately-owned, decentralised means of production constitutive of capitalism; and bureaucratically-owned means of production in a centrally-planned 'socialism'.

We know the track record of both models. In particular we know that a statist centrally-planned economy does not work - it lacks incentives to grow and optimise, and is captured by bureaucratic elites.

There are two further models: the naive Leninist-Trotskyist model of a worker-controlled (soviet) state and economy .. and a fully-automated economy.

The Leninist-Trotskyist model was only ever theorised in the sketchiest form and founders under modern political, industrial and financial complexity .. and human nature.

The fully-automated economy is a limit point of the natural tendency of capitalism to automate (the law of increasing organic composition of capital). However in that limit the last workers are displaced and therefore surplus value can no longer be created. Profits tend to zero as competition equalises prices to costs.

So no more capitalist economy, but that does not mean no economy. A collection of fully-automated companies (perhaps with non-waged human involvement in setting objectives - and certainly in consumption) is rather like a collection of villages each of which has a monopoly of some kind of natural resources (water, fruits, meat, ...) which are essentially not scarce. Such an economy engages in exchange, because human needs straddle the portfolios of the various producers, and it's similar to petty-commodity production, albeit without the involvement of human labour.

The working class may have vanished as a social category (no wage labour) but humans certainly haven't. Provided the machines have not been so badly designed as to eliminate humanity, people experience this world as super-aristocrats: their every feasible, practical need met.

"The future is already here — it's just not very evenly distributed," said William Gibson. And if we look at the super-rich today we see a preview of behaviours which could be open to all in a society of totally-automated abundance.

As expected, the behaviour-set is just what would be expected given the innate nature of the human animal - all drives are exhibited from the most prosocial to the most antisocial.

On a sufficient timescale (a century or two) human nature can itself be engineered and hopefully there will be major speciation events. We will find it easier and more robust to adapt to Mars than to make Mars adapt to current-us, for example.

Capitalism will abolish itself not through socialism but through self-elimination. And the human race will diversify into every possible ecological niche in this awaiting universe.

Unless we're stupid about it.