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Can AI See the Value in Confusion?
(posted 2024/11/24; originally appeared 2024/08/18 in the Albany, New York, USA Times Union, https://www.timesunion.com/opinion/article/commentary-ai-see-value-confusion-19659622.php)
This month in Scientific American, Hartmut Neven, the founder and lead of Google Quantum AI, co-authored an opinion piece containing the following remarkable assertion: “You … don’t ever consciously experience a superposition of states. Any one experience has a definitive quality; it is one thing and not the other. I see a particular shade of red. … I don’t simultaneously experience red and not-red.”
Have you ever simultaneously experienced red and not-red? I have. In fact, there are common words for this kind of experience, though I confess that it took me a while to come up with one.
And it matters. Why? Because it matters how the people shaping artificial intelligence appear to understand human nature, which emerges from our conscious experience.
Recently, I was walking down Lark Street on an overcast day when I saw what looked like an American flag ahead. I’m a middle-aged physicist with slight vision loss owing to a neurological condition. My color vision is somewhat degraded. I’m aware of variants of the American flag in which red is replaced with dark grey or black. Until I got closer, I wasn’t sure whether the dark stripes I was seeing were red or dark grey or some other color.
In other words: I was experiencing red and not-red simultaneously.
Have you figured out a word for the kind of experience I was having? One word is “confusion.” The founder and lead of Google Quantum AI, writing an essay based on ideas central to his work, failed to recognize the concept of confusion when he expressed it.
Why should this bother you? The technologists creating AI are trying to align its outputs with what they see as “human values.” But people have a wide variety of values.
So which ones are the AI models trained on? What are AI systems taught about the value of life, the nature of gender, the relationship of a people to their government? How about difference vs. conformity, community vs. self, or when it’s OK to lie?
Built on a limited view of human experience, artificial intelligence could become a hard-to-gainsay Wizard of Oz, imposing a virulent homogeneity on humanity.
Humans are not always logical, constant, absolute or clearheaded. And that’s fine. In some ways, it's an advantage. Confusion is the first step to understanding. Neven and his colleagues should give it a try.
The Biodiversity Crisis: A New Model and Concrete Proposals with Catholic Attributes,
a Letter to His Eminence, Cardinal Pierre, Apostolic Nuncio to the United States, and His Excellency, Edward Scharfenberger, Bishop of Albany, New York, USA
October 30, 2024
Your Eminence and Your Excellency,
On the occasion of COP 16, the Conference of the Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity that ends this Friday, your servant writes today of the insight to be gained from examining fundamental purposes, not higher ones, and the change in the hearts of all the people that might be wrought via promulgation of that insight and implementation of related reforms with Catholic attributes.
What is the fundamental purpose of animal life on land? Certainly, each species has specialized purposes, including maintaining ecological balance via predation, but what is the overall purpose of land animals, that for the want of which the remaining system would suffer if all of us ceased to be?
Land animals tend the garden. We give plants legs and wings so that their pollen and seeds can be better dispersed. We break down organic material so that it can be recycled faster. We manage ecosystems as a whole by various means, promoting or undermining, on the most fundamental level, the well-being of plants, for plants are the basis of the system, transforming the Sun’s energy into living matter.
That much is clear. A considerable portion of human behavior can be understood via this observation. For example, we are driven to move around, to travel long distances during a climate crisis, making the situation worse. This behavior is consistent with biological imperative, including the ancient mode of gaining a living, hunting and gathering, but why was hunting and gathering favored?
Hunting and gathering fulfilled the fundamental animal purpose of giving plants legs. I was recently reminded of this point by a koan I was given long ago, “How does a tree walk uphill?” Koans come from Buddhism, so my thought process in this case illustrates for me the point that religion is very useful in understanding Nature.
I think that people are correct to question the simplistic narrative of popularized evolutionary science, rooted as it is in the program of reductionism. Religion doesn’t have to be narrow-minded. Reductionist science, on the other hand, is narrow-minded by its very nature, seeking to infer the forest from close inspection of a few trees. What some religion-speakers hate is not science but the coalition of reductionist science and political power. What some science-speakers hate is not religion but the coalition of reductionist science and stoicism.
All modes of thinking are helpful when used to complement, not exclude, one another. Spirituality and complex systems science can both help us understand causal relationships that reductionist science excludes, including emergence of effects that could not be predicted from the system’s rules and including relationships based on interactions between entities and the system as a whole, not just between the entities and their near neighbors on maps or food webs or other relationship diagrams. Reductionist science, meanwhile, can help us think very clearly about how to define fundamental entities in our models, so the models will serve us as we would want.
To grasp the effects of the agriculture-civilization causal cycle, I use reductionist science to focus on the combination of civilizations and the plants they tend as the entities in my model. Agriculture creates free time from the provision for one’s own and one’s dependents’ nutritional needs. Specialization becomes possible, including specialization to such harmful degree that as civilization grows, specialists can no longer talk to each other, a serious problem we see today and, according to one possible interpretation, in the story of the Tower of Babel.
Many humans, myself included, being a little preoccupied with our own species, tend to see our crops as serving our needs, but we serve the needs of the plants we tend, too. We destroy organisms that afflict or compete with our favored plants. By conquest, both military and cultural, we spread the taste, and hence range of cultivation, to the extent possible, of the plants we prefer. Through pronatalism, we increase our numbers, and hence the demand for the plants we prefer. We waste food, requiring that we grow more of our plants than otherwise. We satisfy our need for protein by raising animals that consume the plants we prefer, rather than by raising other plants.
Christians worship a God Whose Body is bread. Maybe the eyes could have been figs, the bread hollow and stuffed with lentils or, better yet, a variety of plant products that depended on the locale and season, but no, the Body of Christ is bread. I hope it’s clear that I’m not mocking the model of God to which Your Eminence and Your Excellency subscribe. I’m pointing out that from an ecological standpoint, our tastes determine the plants whose interests we serve in the garden. These tastes are sufficiently important to our natures and our survival to find expression in what we sanctify.
Now look at the supposed destruction humans are wreaking on our planet. We have devoted around half the habitable land area to growing crops and grazing food animals. We have destroyed two-thirds of wildlife in the last 50 years. As of about 6 years ago, 96% of all mammals were livestock or human. Our ways kill off wild pollinators. Though we know that the tipping point from rain forest to grasslands in the Amazon is close, we continue to burn the forest to create cropland or pasture. We pave wild areas profligately and in ways that reduce our quality of life, even before the environmental toll is calculated. We sod profligately and poison the ground to destroy all insects.
We are terraforming our planet for the benefit of the plants we favor, which often do not require animals for pollination and which can often distribute seeds on the wind. Grasses, including cereal crops, are examples. Even our activities that seem wholly destructive to life support the fortunes of our favored plants in the near term by destroying the system on which more vulnerable plants depend.
The most terrifying aspect of our alliance with the plants we cultivate is the growth of physics and high technology. These pursuits were made possible by the free time we gained from agriculture and may permit us to solve the problems of establishing a sustainable presence off our planet before we rethink the singlemindedness with which we pursue our biological allegiances. If this happens, we would subject the entire galaxy to the grave threat to its current life of the composite entity consisting of humans wielding high technology and the plants we favor. The gruesome rapacity of this entity has been made clear in the destruction it has wrought on Earth.
Your Eminence and Your Excellency, while spiritual leaders, were educated in an era dominated by reductionist science. If, as a result, Your Eminence or Your Excellency can’t imagine widespread acceptance of an hypothesis depending crucially on the emergent phenomenon of humanity terraforming Earth, to its own peril, for the benefit of certain plants, please consider this partial explanation presented from a reductionist perspective:
People find security and happiness as members of groups. To secure membership, people tune their thoughts to the shared beliefs of the group. This happens in schools at all levels, places of worship, the halls of power, really most anywhere that two or more humans gather. Once resonance with the thoughts of the group has been achieved by a member, there is often a price beyond their capacity to pay for thinking differently. They have achieved the state of being well-educated, they have received the gift of faith, they have become politically correct.
The resonance is for the purpose of perpetuating and growing civilization, which, as Your Eminence and Your Excellency recall, emerges from the free time that agriculture permits. It would be uncivilized to oppose the well-being of the favored plants. In fact, the state of being wild is the antithesis of civilization. Why would we hesitate to destroy any life that might cause even the slightest inconvenience to our sanctified composite biological entity consisting of our group of humans and the plants we favor?
Put another way, I am describing natural selection acting on an entity other than a species. Let’s use the word “civilants” to denote composite biological entities formed by civilizations and their preferred plant life. Let’s consider what happened in the current territory of the United States and Canada, or northern North America, as an example of one civilant overwhelming others and claiming their territory.
The European Christian civilant fed their plants to more domesticated animals and therefore developed more endemic disease than the northern North Americans, since novel disease often leaps from farm animals to people. When the disease-ridden Europeans moved into northern North America, Indigenous people died in vast numbers from sicknesses against which they had no defense. The military action and cultural assaults spurred by religiocentric racism were mopping-up exercises. The God Whose Body is bread seized the continent. The main consequence for the ecology of northern North America was that forests and grasslands were largely replaced with crops of the new dominant civilant’s grasses.
I look back at humanity’s sorry pattern of military and cultural conquest and find hope for eventual reform of human ways in just how easy the pattern can be understood as a civilized, and therefore especially grisly, exercise in spreading seeds and the culture to direct people into their service. The most important goal I have is to promote thought and discussion of our behavior as civilants before we destroy ourselves or grow sustainably beyond our planet, giving ourselves the opportunity, ultimately, to terraform an unlimited number of other life-bearing planets to serve our preferred plants.
Your Eminence and Your Excellency, there are many ways to reduce humanity’s servitude to its currently favored plants, including by increasing the share of protein we get directly from plants and from meat substitutes, instead of via the less efficient pathway of eating meat from animals that ate plants. I’m not sure why we can’t all enjoy more beans and learn how to prepare tofu and seitan in ways to make them more widely appealing, but now that there are many commercially available processed meat substitutes, isn’t it time to make meatless Fridays compulsory again? This would boost the rate of adoption of plant-based protein and processed meat substitute consumption while improving parishioners’ health. Better still would be to adopt the Orthodox version, which apparently is vegan Wednesdays and Fridays, and rebrand it not as penance but as liberation from the flesh that would otherwise be consumed and as reduction of servitude to our preferred plants.
Other easy and transformative acts are possible. Your Excellency may recall my letter of December 14, 2022, in which I suggested reforming the diocese’s groundskeeping procedures to promote biodiversity. This simple act would also save money that the bankrupt diocese of Your Excellency could add to the settlements it will eventually disburse. Every little bit helps. I’ve included the letter in a pamphlet entitled “Let Mother Earth Choose Her Own Hairstyle.” It joins an essay on golf courses and a letter to the president of the State University of New York at Albany.
We can serve our fundamental ecological purpose far better than we have of late. Your servant continues to seek more publicly noticeable assistance from Your Eminence and Your Excellency in bringing about relevant change. If Catholicism in the United States pivoted to promoting ecological responsibility to a degree consistent with the activities of His Holiness, while compassionately explaining the error some Catholics make in despising insects and other wildlife and accounting for the erstwhile cultural imperialism of the Church itself, for which His Holiness has been apologizing, the Church might bring many people and their wallets back to the pews without driving many away. In this letter, your servant has provided the outline of an intellectual basis for doing so.
Yours in models of God that can help people alter their excessive dependence on animal flesh and return to the sustainable consumption levels that prevailed until only very recently in historical terms,
James
Friends Don't Let Friends Take Two Lives to Pay for One,
A Letter to President Biden
May 12, 2024
Dear Mr. President,
Congratulations on de-escalating the Iran crisis caused by the Netanyahu government and on finally withholding some weapons from Israel in response to the slaughter of civilians in Gaza. For months, you have shown clearly that you understand the strategic situation, as you and members of your administration released trial balloon after trial balloon to see whether the winds had finally shifted toward peace. I have a new idea on why you haven’t yet managed to shut down the killing. You may find it helpful.
I’ll quickly summarize the facts. Militarily, Hamas has never been, and could never be, an existential threat to Israel. Hamas could end Israel only by precipitating a much larger war or by inducing Israel to retaliate so ruthlessly as to shock the consciences of the great majority of the world. As the slaughter in Gaza continues, each week brings new indications that the latter scenario is unfolding and that Israel is undermining itself in attempting to put every member of its enemy’s army to the sword.
All you have to do, Mr. President, is to shut off all arms shipments, reining in Israel abruptly. When you finally do this, tell the world that when a man’s friend goes beyond protecting himself against criminals who have attacked his family, and when that friend grossly exceeds the standard for punishment expressed as "an eye for an eye and a life for a life," the man must restrain his friend, lest the friend doom himself, not to mention the man, to wander the Earth alone, rejected by the rest of humanity.
I’ve been struggling to understand why you didn’t do this months ago, Mr. President. Is it that you fear the anger of friends? Is it that you see Jewish people today as no different from Jewish people of three millennia ago as they are depicted in the Old Testament, when they are said to have put all their enemies to the sword, “man and woman, young and old,” as in Joshua 6:21? Do you fear having to stand up against the bloodthirsty, evil, genocidal model of God from the Old Testament, or do you fear the anger of friends when you explain to them that scholars believe the Jericho story to have been baseless propaganda?
Are you antisemitic, or were you in youth? Your flashing-eyed fantasy, shared after the Access Hollywood tape was released in the 2016 election, of taking Donald Trump behind the gym in high school, to teach him not to attack women, forcibly raised in my mind at that time the question of who young Joe Biden would have been taking behind the gym in high school, in the 1950s, to teach with his fists. Back then, it was Black and gay and Jewish and academically talented students whom their white, Catholic peers would have been teaching violent lessons, right?
You subsequently made very clear that you did beat kids up in high school and that you enjoyed doing so. It amazes me, how often you seek ostentatiously to signal your manliness, whether by swearing or by punching your palm with your fist. Your behavior plainly shows gender insecurity and general weakness to other national leaders, though it might have impressed high school kids in the 1950s. Were you the same back then as now, unable to tell your friends to stop beating kids up, lest your friends reject you, and terrified someone might think you less than all man?
Are you just afraid of being alone? I’ll be your friend, Mr. President. Stop the murder now.
Best wishes,
James
The Silence of the Thought Leaders
(an email sent February 5, 2024 to certain members of the administration at the University at Albany (SUNY))
February 27, 2024
Dear Pres. Rodríguez,
I am an alumnus of UAlbany, having graduated with a PhD in 2020. My dissertation was on a complex systems approach to fundamental physics. Doubtless and fortunately, my dissertation will not have much effect on humanity, but facility with complex systems science can be leveraged to make useful contributions across a wide range of fields, as you know. Since I left UAlbany in July of 2020, I have essayed to improve the survival prospects of our global technological civilization. I’d like to inform you, Mr. President, of my recent findings that I judge could be of great use to the university.
Mr. President, you are a leader of thought leaders. The thought leaders you lead are sorely needed to explain to the public that all of humanity is in grave danger from the climate crisis, the biodiversity crisis, the water crisis, the soil crisis, the nuclear arms crisis, and so on, each individually and, of far greater import, the several together as a complex, or polycrisis, in which the individual crises are mutually reinforcing. Nevertheless, the thought leaders at UAlbany, like those at so many institutions, hide in their labs, creating scholarship that, in a few cases, may have relevance to human survival, but failing to communicate their fever-pitched alarm at the state of our civilization and the ecology of which it is a part. The public, understandably, concludes that not much can be all that amiss if only a few scientists are gluing their hands to buildings. Whence the silence of the terrified thought leaders?
I know from personal experience that one reaction to blind terror is freezing. This tactic can work in some situations but not when action is required, as is now the case.
Still, I think that more is behind this silence of the thought leaders. I invite you, Mr. President, to read my latest blog post [below, on this page], entitled "Babbittry in Zenith," in which I discuss clear messages being sent by aesthetics and scheduling at UAlbany, messages that promote conformity and exalt commerce at a time when inadequately restrained commerce, with its consequent excessive resource consumption and pollution output, is joined to rapidly intensifying interconnectedness between and within human societies to supply the underlying cause of the existential nature of the threat to global civilization arising from the polycrisis, according to the Cascade Institute (https://cascadeinstitute.org/technical-paper/global-polycrisis-the-causal-mechanisms-of-crisis-entanglement/, bottom of page 10 of the download).
The leadership of UAlbany has made the situation worse in recent years. The disgraceful treatment of Prof. Carpenter can only have discouraged public speech by professors (https://www.timesunion.com/state/article/renowned-ualbany-pcb-researcher-alternate-17759855.php). Your institution is not the only one in which risk aversion seems to have ceded decision-making to university counsel. I refer you, Mr. President, to the career-ending performances before Congress of the presidents of Penn and Harvard. The blind pursuit of safety is extremely dangerous and can magnify risk into existential threat. Wars of choice are examples of this blind pursuit (https://www.timesunion.com/opinion/article/Commentary-Consider-thinking-the-unthinkable-17445088.php).
I am also deeply troubled by two features within your administration. Your Dean of Undergraduate Education lists no classroom teaching experience in her professional biography and is trained in criminal justice (https://www.linkedin.com/in/joanne-malatesta-43a25418/details/experience/). Perhaps Dean Malatesta does an excellent job, but the message of her qualifications is that obedience is prized over teaching. Dean Malatesta might address this issue by writing more about the philosophy and skills she brings to her position, to eliminate the possibility of misunderstanding. (https://www.albany.edu/provost/deans/faculty/joanne-malatesta) Prospective employees and students, unlike me, will not go to the trouble of telling you, Mr. President, about any misgivings they might have in relation to Dean Malatesta’s professional history.
Even more disturbing is the fact that the same officer of your administration occupies, as I understand it, the roles of soliciting donations from people of high net financial worth, managing the fund into which donations are deposited, and occupying a seat on the board of trustees, which decides what to do with the money. Rich people have a vertically integrated hold on your administration. How is it that Vice President Sanai’s three roles do not constitute three pairwise conflicts of interest? Why is the Dean of Undergraduate Education not a member of the board, when the liaison to the money is?
This semester, I will foster a discussion at UAlbany of how to rethink the vast Collins Circle lawn so as to express values other than those of conformity and uniformity, the clear messages of close-cut, monoculture lawn, a problem about which I wrote to you, Mr. President, last May (https://www.momshair.org/letters). I congratulate you, Mr. President, on presiding over the establishment at UAlbany of at least two no-mow zones last year (https://www.youtube.com/shorts/FuHDLzyU0sQ). I encourage you, Mr. President, to publicize the efforts of your institution to undo the harms to Nature wrought by this meretricious hand-me-down from imperialists, enslavers of human beings, and 20th-century Babbitts, the close-cut, monoculture lawn.
By pursuing groundskeeping reform to a far greater extent and publicizing your efforts, Mr. President, you might provide direct leadership to the community in our city, state, and beyond, while providing an example to the silent thought leaders you lead, Mr. President, that it is now safe to emerge from their labs and practice thought leadership on a larger stage.
Thank you very much, Mr. President, for your time and all the good you do.
Best wishes,
James
James Lyons Walsh
Pronouns: he, him, his
My initiative to address the global polycrisis is at
My professional history is at
https://www.linkedin.com/in/james-lyons-walsh-92409b56/
Save miSci
February 18, 2024
A science museum named miSci, located in Schenectady, New York, USA, is threatened with closure due to insufficient funding. This has me thinking about introductory physics demonstrations.
There is beauty, fun, and educational value in simple physics demonstrations. There is also nontrivial physics in some very simple situations. Even professional physicists might find themselves stumped by a physics question at a science museum. I know a few well-established physicists who didn't see right away how to explain what was happening in this video of a slinky being dropped, edited to remove the explanation. I'm not at all sure I could have predicted the outcome of dropping the slinky, myself.
I find it fun to witness the joy of the people in the video discussing the explanation of the slinky drop. I found that teaching introductory physics informed my research, not that my work has been consequential. I wonder whether Nobel laureate Tony Leggett, whose parents were school teachers, was about to make the same point about teaching in this video clip. Simple physics benefits the soul and the mind.
I'd like to suggest building housing or funding better street sweeping in Schenectady, at least in preference to building arenas, one of which is funded while the science museum is not. Political leaders might find it illuminating to play some city-building simulation or other, maybe after being inspired by seeing one of them demonstrated at a science museum.
Are local scientists speaking out to save Schenectady's science museum? I'd love to hear far more from scientists speaking as citizens whose views are informed by their work.
February 4, 2024
Babbittry in Zenith
There’s a big story in Albany, New York, USA about the ascendancy of Babbittry. The picture above, of Collins Circle, the main approach to the University at Albany, clearly shows one of the chief symbols promoting conformity, the close-cut, monoculture lawn. Also shown are University Hall to the left and the Massry Center of Business to the right. Here are eight observations on Babbittry in Albany:
1) The University at Albany libraries were closed for the entire winter break, nominally in pursuit of energy conservation. I’m generally for reducing energy consumption, but many scholars do most of their non-teaching work over vacations. A librarian there said that this was the first time the libraries had been closed for the entire break and that it was “a big problem.”
2) The museum in the Fine Arts Building at UAlbany is open 11-4 Monday-Friday. Why isn’t it open on weekends and those evenings when performances are held in the nearby Performing Arts Building? Make parking free on weekends, and you have a perfect family activity that might get the youngsters inspired. Legend has it that there’s a nice pond or lake for walking around, too.
3) University Hall was said in this article to contain fine art from the university collection the day it opened. I went inside for the first time this week and didn’t see any art in the first-floor public area. Art can offend, and why would you run the risk of offending prospective students? It’s perfectly beige inside, now. It feels comfortable, which troubles me.
4) The enormous sign reading “Massry School of Business” atop the Massry Center for Business must make some first-time visitors overestimate how much of what they survey is part of that school. Arriving on public transportation in good weather, one enters the university by walking first between the administration and business buildings, rather than the Arts and Sciences and Fine Arts Buildings, as before.
5) I've seen art on display in the Massry Building, but that building's support of Babbittry is even more oppressive. The building is the foul-weather entrance, via tunnels, to the podium, the structure including the colonnade in the picture above, for people arriving at Collins Circle, including by public transportation. I would often plod through this palace of business on my way to the tunnels and, ultimately, the modest digs of the Physics Department. Every time I entered Massry, I was slapped in the face with the glass-fronted showcase to the aptly named UASBIG, the student-run investment fund. Do we think, despite our experience of financial collapse in 2008, that elevating the social status of market speculation is a good idea, especially with physics students passing by?
6) At the College of Saint Rose, philosophy, including the mandatory ethics class, was an early casualty of budget cuts. Art education went. The focus in recovering financially from the overbuilding that seems to have pauperized the school was on boosting enrollment and cutting costs via concentrating on practical subjects and de-emphasizing studies that help to make life worthwhile. Here's an excellent article pointing out that, for example, biology students often make matriculation decisions based on music programs.
7) Though I have no direct knowledge of this, it seems obvious to me that both Saint Rose and UAlbany hired marketing firms, maybe a decade ago. Following the lead of marketers outsources the risk of speaking publicly and promotes uniformity across the ecology of higher education. Marketing can make a sale, but it shouldn't be relied upon to generate long-term commitment.
8) How is it that UAlbany, which prides itself on its diversity, has an enormous, close-cut, monoculture lawn at its main entrance? Not only is the green monstrosity at Collins Circle an expensively maintained biological desert, from which all but one kind of life is excluded during a biodiversity crisis, but also it symbolizes cutting down anything that sticks out. Universities are places where nonconformity and free speech have traditionally been relatively safe. Lawns are the means by which Babbitts force Mother Nature to grovel before them and asphalt the threat they hold in reserve should our Mother rebel too vigorously in trying to grow Her hair a little.
Here’s a German businessman and patron of opera, a safe, high-status realm of culture, intoning on the tendency of state organizations not to “act and think commercially,” as if commerce were the only concern of humanity. I wish his complaint applied to a greater degree in the United States.
I understand how Babbitt won recent battles: Culture had been used to exclude groups of people and justify oppressing them. The idea that the victims of systemic theft lacked culture has been replaced as justification for their plight with the idea that the victims lack merit. Isn’t that the defining characteristic of meritocracy?
All humans have culture and need ample facilities for participating in it. All humans have merit, and nonconformists help others to keep this point in the front of their minds. To fight Babbittry, support tax increases, mock the exaltation of commerce, and reduce the acreage of those bright-green symbols of conformity, close-cut, monoculture lawns. Not coincidentally, these actions will promote the survival of human civilization through the current, perilous century.