Airs - Ian Lance Taylor

I went to a talk by James Randi yesterday. He used to perform magic as the Amazing Randi, although at 78 and recovering from a double bypass, he said he now merely aspires to be the Mildly Astonishing Randi. He is of course best known as a debunker of paranormal claims (though he said that he prefers to consider himself to be an investigator, not a debunker). His foundation offers a one million dollar prize to anybody who can show “under proper observing conditions, evidence of any paranormal, supernatural, or occult power or event.” They have received hundreds of applications, but the prize has as yet gone unclaimed.

Randi discussed homeopathy for a while. It is quite astonishing to consider that homeopathy has failed every scientific test, and indeed homeopathic medicines are essentially indistinguishable from water, yet homeopathic medicines are sold in every drugstore in the country. Since you can’t fool all of the people all of the time, this would seem to point to some systematic problem somewhere.

I see the following possibilities, some of which will occur together, and none of which are original:

• Homeopathic medicine may work, despite the scientific evidence.
• Most people recover from illness, so any widely accepted medicine which does no harm will continue to be accepted.
• Most people are not aware of the tests showing that homeopathic medicine has no effect, and operate on the assumption that if they sell it in the drugstore, it must do something.
• Most people don’t consider that the extraordinary advances in medicine are due solely to the scientific method, and thus continue to give unwarranted weight to older systems of medicine (not that homeopathy in particular is all that old).
• Modern medical practice heals the body but not the soul: the emphasis is on fixing problems rather than actually making people feel better.

To focus on the last point, traditional medical practice is clearly not as effective as modern medicine, as can be seen by the extraordinary increase in average lifespan during the 20th century. But traditional medical practice had the significant advantage that somebody visibly cared. Modern medicine, as we know, involves being shunted to a series of specialists, few of whom know you at all, and all of whom are paid to perform a procedure rather than to achieve a result. This is not to say that doctors do not in general care about their patients; it is to say that the system as a whole operates to minimize that care.

How can we make it better? Obviously this is a huge topic which many people think about, and one which in the U.S. is tightly constrained by ideology. If you think about insurance systems, it is obvious that they only work to guard against unpredictable events. Insurance is a sound system for protecting people from the most adverse effects of house fires and car accidents. It would also be a sound system for protecting people from the financial effects of catastrophic medical events due to accident. This is because the insurance company can pool premiums across a large number of people, and can use reasonably statistical studies to estimate the required payouts and thus the required fees. The key feature is that the payouts are randomly distributed–the clients can not predict whether they will need a payout–and that the insurance company can use historical data to predict the approximate required payouts over time.

But you can not use an insurance system to protect yourself from predictable events, such as old age or chronic illness. The whole idea makes no sense. People will naturally select the insurance plan which will work best for them: the payouts will not be randomly distributed. Over time the fees for people who need a lot of medical care will increase, and the fees for those who do not will not. Effectively people will pay the insurance company the same amount of money they would otherwise pay for medical care, plus a percentage which is the profit of the insurance company. The insurance company thus becomes a tax on medical services, rather than a useful mechanism for spreading risk.

It’s not quite that bad, of course, because large companies put all of their employees into a single pool, and small businesses pool together as well. But these pools are smaller and much less randomly distributed than the pools for which insurance systems work. The effect is that, apart from catastrophic medical care, the U.S. has chosen a system for paying for medical care which is broken by design.

Note that one of the underlying assumptions is that medical care is expensive. Despite that, as soon as you get to a problem which is beyond the ample skills of your primary doctor, there is nobody in the system whose job it is to make you feel better. As a society, I think we would be better served if such people existed. It would in essence be a new specialty: general medical counseling. Unfortunately, this kind of specialty can not be covered under an insurance system, since as we’ve seen insurance fees approximate insurance costs. It could only be covered under a system in which society covered the costs, effectively putting everybody into the same insurance pool. Note that the actual service could be provided by private organizations, and the fees could be performance based. The flaw in the medical system is not free market competition of medical providers, it is the insurance system by which they are paid.

I would like to imagine that having somebody to care about you, and who could give you sound advice about over the counter medicine, would tend to diminish the use of homeopathic medicines and other unsupported drugs. But that is probably far-fetched. I left out a reason above: people like to think that they know something which the experts don’t know. Since health is so important to us all, medical quackery will probably always exist.

The New York Times magazine last Sunday had an article on social robots: work, mostly at M.I.T., on robots which interact with humans. They interact in very very simple ways. But since we naturally impute agency to almost anything possible–e.g., the weather–it doesn’t take much for us humans to be convinced that there is really something going on inside the robot. Of course, AI researchers have known that at least since Eliza.

Can such a robot ever eventually be conscious? To a materialist like me, the answer is: of course it can. I think a more interesting question today is whether a computer can ever be conscious. The difference I’m driving at is that a robot has, by definition, a position in space, a body of some sort, and some way of interacting with the world. Can a computer program which has none of those characteristics, except for, say, text-only interaction, be conscious?

It seems at least possible that it could not. I believe (today) that consciousness is the result of the way we construct a narrative about our actions. Our consciousness then in turn informs those actions and helps us lay out future plans. I think that it doesn’t take much introspection to see that many of our actions are unconscious or preconscious. I don’t mean by that that our actions are uncaused or are somehow not done by us, or “us.” But I’m saying that the particular part of that is conscious, the “I” when we say “I think,” does not directly cause those unconscious or preconscious actions, although it does create conditions which make them more or less likely to occur.

Anyhow, a computer program with extremely limited interaction with the world has very little scope for unconscious or preconscious actions. And it similarly has a very limited ability to develop reflexes or automatic ways of handling things like walking or picking up a glass, subroutines if you will. And without that ability, it’s not obvious to me that it will develop anything like consciousness. Or at least not anything like our consciousness.

This is all pure speculation, of course, in the absence of a coherent definition of consciousness. To speculate further, what are the consequences of this for the science fiction dream of uploading personalities into computers? I think it means that for any such upload to be even remotely feasible, the upload would have to exist in a simulated world of a complexity similar to our world. And I think that our world would be extraordinarily difficult to simulate, because it is so complex. John Varley’s novel Steel Beach tries to finesse the issue by only simulating the aspects of the world which his protagonist paid attention to. But, although Varley didn’t really spell it out, that required the computer to understand the protagonist’s mind and consciousness in considerable detail.

Therefore, it seems to me that uploading personalities into a computer is not going to happen in the foreseeable future. It’s not enough to just map neurons, even if we had any idea how to do that. We have to also know what the neurons mean to the person. And we don’t even know how to start understanding it.

So if you want immortality, don’t pin your hopes on Ray Kurzweil. Biotech, perhaps some sort of genetic repair, seems to me to be a much better bet.

The current media news is about Rupert Murdoch’s purchase of the Wall Street Journal. I don’t happen to read the Wall Street Journal. And newspaper readership is declining overall. So I think it is fair to ask: does this purchase really matter? Is the media spending a lot of time on it because it is a story about the media?

At one time the media gave us a common narrative, a storyline on which we could all agree. Everybody watched Walter Cronkite, and he told us the way it is. Or at least so we would like to believe. Of course even then there were people left out of the story. Now the media has fragmented, and people get their news from many different sources. There is no longer a common narrative. Does that matter?

I tend to think it does. When I wrote UUCP, some 15 years ago now, I believed that it would help increase communication by giving more people access to cheap e-mail, and I believed that increasing communication was a good thing. Looking back, I think the first part was true; as late as 1999 it was still being used for e-mail in poorer countries. I’m not so sure about the second part. I didn’t realize then that increasing communication didn’t mean talking to everybody; what it turns out to mean is that you can now find the people who share your interests, and you talk only to them. This tends to put you into an echo chamber. Your beliefs aren’t challenged. You start to think either that everybody agrees with you, or that you are part of a small right-thinking group oppressed by society. These are only tendencies, of course, but I think they have real effects.

The fragmentation of media in the modern age has a similar effect, particularly with the spread of highly partisan outlets. You listen to the people with whom you agree. They reinforce your beliefs. You rarely see an opposing opinion, at least not one presented fairly. I don’t think this is good for our society. I have no idea what we can do about it.

So, does Murdoch’s purchase of the Wall Street Journal matter? On the terms I’m discussing here, it doesn’t. The Wall Street Journal editorial pages have a heavy right wing political slant already, and it is not significantly different from the one which Murdoch appears to espouse. The Journal news pages have always focused on business–that’s what the paper is about, of course–and I see no reason to think that introducing more slant to them, which I think is inevitable, will significantly change their popularity or the views of their readers.

And increased concentration of media ownership does lead us back toward a common narrative. So maybe that will have some small good effects, though I doubt they will last. Note that although I tend to disagree with the political views pushed by the Murdoch media, I think it can still be good for society to have a shared position from which to start to disagree.

My original plan for this blog has evidently flagged. I find myself often thinking of things I would like to write about, but I’m not making the time to actually write them. I’m switching to a new plan. My goal now is to write a new post every day (perhaps every weekday), writing for about fifteen minutes. This will most likely imply more personal notes and more random notes. I’ll see how it goes.

First up: in 2004, before the last presidential election, Ron Suskind wrote an interesting article in the New York Times magazine about the Bush administration (online here). The most interesting paragraph was this one, citing a “senior adviser to Bush:”

The aide said that guys like me were “in what we call the reality-based community,” which he defined as people who “believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.” I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. “That’s not the way the world really works anymore,” he continued. “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality - judiciously, as you will - we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”

I’ve been thinking about that off and on since I first read it when the article came out. I don’t find it a very natural way of viewing the world. But what I wonder about is the extent to which it is or could be true. The world in which we live is shaped to a great degree by the concepts which we believe. I don’t mean this in a literal sense, of course, but it is true that most of us spend most of our time in a conceptual world, whether we are at work, or watching television, or at church, or whatever.

In a conceptual world, it is certainly possible that when a powerful organization acts, they change the conceptual reality. Thus when the president says that we are at war with terror, that is a significant change in the world, even though in some sense it doesn’t really mean anything at all. In this view of the world, real power is the ability to impose your view of the world on other people. And the president does have that ability.

I think that George Lakoff was trying to get at this in his discussions of how the Democratic party needs to change their metaphors. Changing metaphors is a way to fight against the attempts of others to impose their view of the world. But it has the problem that you can’t keep up with whoever went first. And it has the different problem that when everybody sticks to their own metaphors, real communication becomes very difficult.

I think a better answer is to try to force people to cash out their ideas in terms of real action. What does the war on terror really mean? That is, what will we do differently that we would not otherwise have done? This is much harder than it may sound. Adopting a concept changes your thinking and your behaviour even while you are questioning that concept. But refusing to adopt the concept leaves you talking past each other.