Spreading a little fractal cheer . . . *
FOURTH OF JULY, ATLANTIC CITY BOARDWALK
It was the money night. The gaudy dark
steamed with muggy heat.
The casinos were packed;
eighty-eight-cent stores competed
with the ninety-nine-cent stores.
The fake Gypsy fortune-tellers
tugged back fake Gypsy scarves.
On the pier, you could shoot at plastic ducks
and win a purple dinosaur.
You could put on a Japanese
top-knot wig and a padded suit,
and pretend you’re a Sumo wrestler.
On every block someone was
performing: a raggae band
with dreadlocks bleached to rust,
a kazoo player, a one-man orchestra
pounding on a washboard
with a foot-strung drum.
Then the fireworks, twice:
the family show at nine,
and the midnight extravaganza.
rockets from an off-shore boat
burst into cartwheels, rings and hearts —
even a wobbly peace sign.
The full moon rose from the sea,
orange-pink like a salmon.
When fireworks fizzed their last gasp,
we turned toward the casinos:
Caesar’s Palace lined with giant
statues saluting Caesar, and the gilded,
candy-striped Taj Mahal.
High over the sprawling edifice,
in floodlights shifting across the dark,
spiraled an eddy of seagulls.
More than a hundred seagulls, luminous,
soaring three hundred feet up!
At first I thought they too
were only part of the show —
perhaps trained doves,
or a laser fantasy of flight.
But the birds were too high,
and they didn’t
advertise anything.
A passer-by explained,
“They are attracted by the lights.”
We couldn’t stop watching them:
against the circus night, the white birds,
incomprehensible as artists,
high above greed.
Over the garish casino,
seagulls spiraled in shifting beams,
their bodies weightless,
as if made of light.
~ Oriana
*
CORMAC McCARTHY AND THE PHILOSOPHY OF THOMAS HOBBES
“War is god.”
This is the sermon preached by “the judge”, one of the central characters in Blood Meridian, a visionary novel by the American writer Cormac McCarthy.
Set in the Texas-Mexico borderlands in the mid-19th Century, the book records the experience of a runaway, a teenage boy described throughout as “the kid”, who falls in with a gang of bandits who make a predatory living by killing the region's Apache Indians in order to claim a bounty on the scalps.
Led by a former US army officer and mercenary, the band of scalp-hunters actually operated in the American Southwest at the time the novel is set, preying on Mexicans and Americans as well as the indigenous population until an Indian raid put an end to it, killing and scalping the gang's leader and most of its members.
The novel recounts the kid's life with the marauders, and ends with him — by then a man — apparently being killed by the judge in an outhouse of a Texas saloon.
An unremitting chronicle of gruesome savagery, Blood Meridian has been read as a subversive take-down of the traditional Western novel, an indictment of the idea of Manifest Destiny — the belief that the Anglo-Saxon race was destined to conquer the American continent — and a fictional meditation on the nature of evil.
It is all of these things, but more than anything else, it seems to me, the book recreates a time when violence was normal.
Here in Britain — and to a lesser extent in Europe and America — we tend to think of violence as an interruption of civilized existence.
It is hard to square this with the history of the 20th Century, when Europe was a site of mass killing on an unprecedented scale and vicious colonial wars were fought in Africa and South East Asia.
Today images of carnage are broadcast continuously in the 24-hour media.
The vast, industrial-style wars of the last century may have been left behind. But they have been followed by other forms of human conflict, in their way no less destructive. No longer simply a battle between states, war has become — as it was in the time of Blood Meridian — a deadly struggle among and within peoples.
Human beings use violence in many forms for a multitude of different reasons:
to defend themselves from attack
seize wealth and natural resources
impose their beliefs on others
protest intolerable injustice
and at times simply to find temporary relief from boredom.
Yet many people want to believe that human beings are essentially peaceable creatures, who turn on one another only when they have no other alternative. Violence, these people insist, is contrary to our strongest needs and impulses, which lead us to live and work together — in other words, humans are naturally predisposed to be civilized.
A canonical statement of this view was presented by a thinker commonly regarded as having a grimly realistic view of human beings, the 17th Century philosopher Thomas Hobbes.
When you hear the term Hobbesian, you think of people at each other's throats, struggling for power in a situation of chaos. This is what Hobbes called a "war of all against all”.
"In the first place," the philosopher famously wrote, “I put for a general inclination of all mankind, a perpetual inclination of all mankind for power after power, that ceaseth only in death... Where there is no common power, there is no law, where no law, no injustice... No arts; no letters; no society; and which is worst of all, continual fear, and danger of violent death: and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.”
These lines from Leviathan — Hobbes' best-known work and a masterpiece of English prose — have been read as meaning that humans are by nature violent animals.
Their true meaning is virtually the opposite. Hobbes was a bold thinker but a timid man: "I was born a twin to fear," he confessed. Hobbes believed that humans are driven to attack and prey on one another mainly by fear of uncertainty. It's not a love of domination that makes people violent, but an overpowering need for safety.
This isn't the only impulse that impels humans to be violent — Hobbes also mentions the desire for gain and the love of glory — but it is fundamental in his account of how they escape from violence.
Moved by a combination of reason and fear, Hobbes believed, human beings will contract with each other to create a sovereign — an absolute ruler who will prevent any slide into anarchy.
Under the shelter of strong government, humankind can enjoy "commodious living" — Hobbes' term for a civilized mode of life in which we can live and work together without fear.
Interpreted as a metaphor rather than a literal account of events, there is a good deal of truth in Hobbes' story. In historical crises, people have often looked to strong leaders to deliver society from anarchy.
Lenin's dictatorship was welcomed, at least to begin with, by Russians who opposed his program because they hoped he would install some kind of order. In interwar Europe, dictatorship was popular in many countries because it seemed to offer a way out from economic and social chaos.
Yet there have been many cases when human beings have adapted to violence for long periods. During China's era of warring states, and Europe after the fall of Rome, violence was at high levels for centuries.
A chronic state of lawlessness existed in large parts of North America throughout much of the 19th Century.
The same has been true in Lebanon, parts of Africa and some countries in Latin America. While humankind may fear violence, human beings have often learnt to live with it.
Blood Meridian has been interpreted as presenting a Hobbesian view of human nature, but what it shows is something that Hobbes did not envision — violence as a way of life.
As McCarthy presents them, violence does more for the gang than enable them to prey on others. It gave their lives — poor, nasty and short as they were — a kind of sense and significance.
For Hobbes, human beings are solitary creatures, who want nothing more than simply to go on living.
But we are not isolated individuals. We live in groups, and some of our best and worst qualities come from the need to form bonds with others. People will readily give up their lives to protect their children, while McCarthy's gang embodies a savage kind of solidarity in which its members fight, kill and die together.
Again, for Hobbes the only reason for killing is to pre-empt being killed yourself. But terrorists who go to certain death in order to wreak death on others do not do so for the sake of self-preservation.
What they are preserving is an image of themselves as part of a group or a cause, without which they feel aimless and empty.
In a passage in Leviathan that undermines much of the rest of the book, Hobbes writes of "the privilege of absurdity; to which no living creature is subject, but man only”.
Here Hobbes was right. Humans alone among the animals are ready to kill and be killed in order to secure a meaning in their lives.
Where he went wrong was in thinking that violence can be tamed principally by the use of reason, an illusion of the European Enlightenment, of which Hobbes was one of the first great exponents.
We cannot escape the "war of all against all" by any kind of contract. Learnt slowly and painfully, the practices of civilized life are permanently fragile and precarious. Here the visionary novelist is more realistic than the rationalist philosopher.
Violence cannot be eradicated, because its ultimate source is in the warring impulses and fantasies of human beings.
This is the truth conveyed in McCarthy's great novel — civilization is natural for human beings, but so is barbarism. ~
https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-18829385
*
LOOKING AT THE EARTH FROM SPACE: THE OVERVIEW EFFECT
~ I lean over a low Plexiglas wall and watch the earth rotate under my feet. I try to make out the continents, the pale patch of the Arabian Peninsula, green- splotched South America. But what I see most is sea blue, alternating with the milky white of passing clouds. Here in the Netherlands we’re rotating faster than I would have guessed: about 650 miles per hour, every hour of the day, every day of the year.
And that’s only the spin of the earth around its own axis. Add to that our 67,000- mile- per- hour revolution around the sun, which in turn whips around the center of the Milky Way at a speed of about 490,000 miles per hour. I press my knees against the Plexiglas panel, try to suppress the dizziness as the Pacific Ocean sweeps underneath me.
I’m looking at the view from the International Space Station, some 250 miles above the planet, projected onto a giant screen below. I am in Kerkrade, at the southernmost tip of the Netherlands, in the Columbus Earth Center, a museum devoted entirely to the astronaut’s view of Earth.
This seems like a logical place to start my search for an equivalent of the overview effect. To see what astronauts see, feel what they feel. So this morning I took the train to the south of the country, and here I am staring down into this cylinder. Once the dizziness has subsided, the steady pace of Earth and the clouds has a soothing effect. It’s like looking at the ocean. We all have a “blue mind,” the marine biologist Wallace J. Nichols once said. The sight of water, essential for life, puts people at ease.
I give the watery sphere one last look. It’s beautiful, but I’m not overwhelmed the way the astronauts were. I try to imagine what it would feel like to see this for the very first time. But I’m unable to separate it from the countless Earth- image mouse pads, coffee mugs, posters, and T- shirts I’ve known my whole life. The most reproduced image on Earth is perhaps a photograph of Earth itself.
The French philosopher Bruno Latour holds that the image of our planet seen from space offers a misleading idea of humanity’s position. The photo wasn’t taken from space, he says. It was taken from inside the cramped, noisy capsule of a rocket, a place where no human can survive without artificial life support.
For Latour, that famous Blue Marble photo of Earth taken from space is too sentimental and therefore skews our worldview. We mustn’t look at the world from without, but from within. We are here, not there.
As I walk away from the Plexiglas, behind me I hear a new group of visitors shuffle in, ready to gaze down at themselves. Bruno Latour’s comment nags at me. For him, looking at Earth from outer space constitutes unhealthy escapism. Zooming out to avoid having to zoom in. Is that what I’m doing? Dodging reality?
Reading most astronauts’ statements, you can only conclude, contrary to what Latour says, that there is no escape. Or that if there is, it boomerangs right back at you. Those astronauts, once back home, commit themselves more than ever to the planet they temporarily left.
Well, most of them do. Here and there, you do find the story of spacefarers who were apparently immune to the overview effect. In an episode of the podcast This American Life, the astronaut Frank Borman recounts how indifferent he was to the sight of earthrise from his Apollo 8 capsule. Back home, he didn’t even talk about it with his wife and children. “It was more important to see the boys and see her….We [just] got right back to the nitty- gritty’s” of everyday life.
Compare that to the effect earthrise had on Borman’s two fellow astronauts, Jim Lovell and Bill Anders. The view of Earth reminded Lovell of all the times he had heard people say they hoped to go to heaven when they died. But heaven, he realized up in space, is where we were born. It is that tiny planet that provides us with everything we need to thrive. And for Anders, “borders that once rendered division vanished. All of humanity appeared joined together on this glorious-but-fragile sphere.” Maybe, in addition to seeing it, it’s also a matter of wanting to see it.
When I get back from Kerkrade, my neighbor Bob is furtively watering the plants in defiance of a nationwide sprinkler ban. “Otherwise they won’t survive,” he says, nodding at the lavender, his favorite.
Bob asks where I’ve been today, and I mumble something about working on a report for work. Here among the withering garden plants, I can’t find the right words to describe what I’m looking for. Connection, overview, the attitude of an astronaut: it all sounds so remote from this patch of yard, from this square, from Bob in his cutoff jeans and white T- shirt.
As I walk inside, Latour’s remark is stuck on a loop in my mind. We’re here, not there. But aren’t we in both places? Here and there? Why choose? From within or from without?
The house is quiet. Evidence of this morning’s rush is everywhere: an upset drinking mug, stray socks, the crumb- strewn breakfast table. I flip open my laptop and turn on the TEDx Talk I had googled on my way home. I don’t much like TED Talks— all that pacing back and forth, the obligatory punch lines— but this is one speech I simply cannot skip: “The
Therapeutic Value of the Overview Effect.
On a small stage somewhere in London, the psychotherapist Annahita Nezami (dark medium- length hair, a nervous laugh) tells an audience how her quest for a comprehensive therapy led her beyond the atmosphere. She saw that the way we live together feeds our insecurity and greed, she says. Fear and negativity circulate throughout modern society in thousands of forms, causing depression and loneliness.
As a psychologist, Nezami explains, you can treat all those symptoms individually, but you can also ask why we’ve run up against this wall en masse. She pauses, looks into the auditorium. “Brokenness,” I mumble in our silent living room.
We face deep-seated alienation on all fronts, Nezami says. Lost connections with one another, with our jobs, with the place where we live. Psychologists shouldn’t only treat individual patients, she says, but should heal society as a whole, too. “A bit of a tall order,” she laughs.
Where do you start looking for a solution to global alienation? Maybe in its opposite: global connection. For her dissertation, Nezami scoured scientific theories about how people experience cohesiveness. While doing so, she stumbled upon Frank White’s study and the testimony of those thirty astronauts who, far outside the atmosphere, felt deeply connected to the entire web of life.
Ha, Frank White! This week I revisited his documentary about the overview effect. I hoped to catch something new, something I might have missed the first time, a handbook for those of us within the atmosphere wanting to feel what astronauts felt outside it.
I hadn’t missed anything. The film is a paean to the attitude of an astronaut, but offers no suggestions for earthlings.
Nezami does. To better understand the effect, she says, she conducted in- depth interviews with seven astronauts. These interviews more or less corroborated the conclusions White and the subsequent University of Pennsylvania researchers reached. The astronauts she spoke to experienced cohesion where they first saw division, and were overcome by a sensation of belonging— to humanity, the forests, the wind, the lightning, everything that makes Earth Earth. And most of them still feel it to this day.
These astronauts were also part of White’s study. So, not a huge test group. Scientifically speaking, the study of the overview effect is a winding path, not yet paved with heaps of hard facts— yet it still feels like the route I’ve been looking for.
Nezami, by the way, has her doubts about the effect: one look at Earth from space, she says, is not really enough to achieve a full overview effect. Her research reveals that the more the astronauts looked at their home planet, the more intense the experience. I think of this morning in Kerkrade, where I gave up after hardly fifteen minutes. Not exactly the attitude of an astronaut.
And then, more nuance. As the end of Nezami’s talk nears, a video plays on the screen behind her, panning slowly over the surface of a darkened earth. The aurora shimmers along the horizon, then gives way to the gleam of city lights. I think of how we associate the experience of astronauts with the famous Blue Marble photograph of Earth as a fragile little ball hanging in the darkness, the only traces of humankind being damage and destruction.
But at night, the impression our planet offers from space is completely different. I see how human presence, all those countless twinkling lights, gives the nighttime view of earth a lively, vital appearance. People are not only destroyers of the ecosystem, but also illuminators of the night.
And then Nezami says just what I’ve been waiting to hear. Most of us will never leave the atmosphere, but “I really want to try to bring this experience down to all of us,” she says. I turn up the volume on my laptop so as not to miss a word as Nezami walks past the iconic TEDx letters and explains a virtual reality program she’s working on. A VR experience that allows you, in multiple sessions, to hover in space like an astronaut, with a view of Earth, both at daytime and at night. Earthgazing as therapy.
I look up Nezami’s email address while the London audience applauds and cheers. I want to don those VR goggles, gaze therapeutically at Earth. But when I speak to her a few days later, she tells me the project is still in its infancy. They need more research, a pilot, a test group; it will be months before the first phase of the project is ready to be implemented. Developing the goggle software turned out to be complicated. “We’re still experimenting with how we can implement language and music to bring the viewer into just the right astronaut-like state of being.”
Outside, Bob shouts to someone. I walk to the window, phone to my ear, and while Nezami continues speaking about how to turn the earthbound into astronauts, I see John, a neighbor from a few doors down, step into the front yard. His round belly hovers like a planet above his legs. Yellowish with a pink glow in the sunlight. On hot days like this he goes shirtless, like so many men in this neighborhood, men who spend their summer on chairs out front, their big bellies a solar system of planets around the square.
Bob looks up, sees me standing there, waves. I see myself through his eyes. A feverishly telephoning mother, her children at day care, still an interloper after seven years in the neighborhood, while he belongs here. Bob, who suffers from the gentrification I embody, whom I see every morning in the front yard but never in the café where I drink my latte or at the hip art-house movie theater that just opened up nearby. How would I explain this conversation to him?
A telephone consultation with a London psychotherapist who tells me how seeing Earth like an astronaut is an antidote for doomsday thoughts. Just as Nezami pauses, Bob walks back inside, and in a flash I imagine he picks up his phone on the kitchen table to take over the call to London. What would he have to say about this self- help project, about my attempt to reset my understanding of the world via the universe? What would his remedy against divisiveness be? He comes back outside carrying a shovel, and sets about moving a thirsty plant to a shady spot.
I ask Annahita Nezami whether she ever doubts her mission to use the attitude of an astronaut to cure society. She laughs. “Yes and no. I think today’s problems are so comprehensive that they’ll require a comprehensive therapy.”
I stifle a sigh. Against my better judgment, I had hoped for a ready-made key to the overview effect.
“It’s a mad undertaking,” Nezami continues. “But the way we live today is at least as crazy. We treat psychological ailments with pills and therapy targeted at the individual. But what if the problems are bigger than the individual? If those ailments are the logical consequence of our relationship to the world?”
John walks back home, Bob coils up the garden hose. A flock of ring- necked parakeets swarms above the square, drawing a bright green stripe across the houses. Nezami’s last words comfort me.
This quest of mine feels idiotic. But with David Foster Wallace’s fish in mind, maybe “idiotic” is just what I need. A path that leads me away from the route of reason, from what I know and understand, away from the routine, from the water we are swimming in. I need something to pry me loose from my daily patterns, from my anxiety, so that I can see where I am. Earth. Space.
I ask Nezami what advice she would offer someone who lives in a second-story apartment in the city and is looking to feel what astronauts feel. After a moment’s silence, she says, “A condition for the overview effect is awe. Looking at Earth from space is comparable to experiencing a breathtaking landscape in the mountains or the forest. But in a city? I don’t know. In a city, there’s not much that’s bigger than ourselves. The only thing I can think of is to look up. Light in the darkness, the starry sky.”
https://lithub.com/glorious-but-fragile-on-looking-at-the-whole-earth-and-finding-peace/?fbclid=IwAR3DcBPK0_Vtd1riQvICe_roo_Ag7AtXxPCUUHFNDVGf-I9gp20H0qEMCzU
*
As I hurtled through space, one thought kept crossing my mind — every part of this rocket was supplied by the lowest bidder. ~ John Glenn
SUICIDE AND THE INTERCONNECTEDNESS OF PAIN
~ In many societies today, thinking around suicide is mostly compassionate, and rightly so. There’s widespread acceptance that a person who seeks to end their own life must be suffering desperately. However, what this well-intentioned focus on the individual misses is that suicide does not only reflect a crisis point of one person’s suffering. Rarely acknowledged is that suicide is also an act of terrific violence – against the victim’s body and against those around them.
To find the body of a loved one who has taken their own life is deeply and irreversibly disturbing. The suicidal person knows this, and so if we – the relatives, friends and mental health professionals – are to develop a fuller understanding of how to support a suicidal person, we must attempt to reckon honestly with the powerful relationship dynamics that are operating within, and around, the suicidal person, leading them to act with such violence towards themselves and those who will be affected by their death.
Engaging in this reckoning is incredibly challenging. The closer you get to the frightening emotional reality of suicide, the more your mind tries to defend itself. To encounter a suicidal person is to come into contact not only with death, but also with deep suffering and emotional pain – pain that you can’t help but identify with in some way.
I’m not suggesting that everyone will experience suicidality, but that we all experience psychic pain and, when we’re unable to resolve this pain within ourselves, we are all vulnerable to acting out that pain in and through others. This is why responses to suicide can be as much about the onlooker – whose mind is desperately trying to distance itself from any recognizable element of a suicidal state – as it is about the suicidal individual.
Suicide is a kind of last bastion of control for people who have had little control over what has happened to them in life. Expressions of suicidality are, in part, an attempt to garner, and gain control over, the care that the patient (knowingly or not) longs to receive. My professional response to this is important, and there are often institutional procedures and protocols for ‘managing’ risk that can inadvertently miss the patient’s need.
Any mention of suicidal intentions can trigger a sequence of important questions or actions that are intended to prevent the patient acting on those intentions. In a moment, a therapy session can move from a space for the patient to be understood – to process, to grieve, to take back some control – into a space where, suddenly, their last bastion is arrested. My task as a therapist is also arrested, and I am torn between conflicting aims of listening to the patient to support them through their pain, versus seizing control of them.
The factors that contribute to a person feeling suicidal are numerous and complex, but there will usually be a history of terrific adversity, loss, trauma or abuse. Even where there are no obvious signs of these adversities, the patient will inevitably have experienced growing up in an environment where their unique personhood was ignored – or they felt it was. Those deeply important elements of ‘good enough’ care – upon which one’s sense of self is grown – were likely absent. Without a safe outlet for the powerful emotional effects of these experiences, the devastating result is that the patient’s mind begins to turn its distress inwards and the body becomes a vessel for it.
In killing the body, the fantasy for the patient is that their suffering may also die – as if there is a part of them that will continue to live, but without the suffering. The upsetting reality, which the mind ultimately denies, is that this is not true. All that death gives is death, and in my role as therapist I believe it is crucial that I convey this reality. ~
Mary:
Suicide is indeed a terrible act of violence, where despair partners with anger, and even vengeance. The suicide punishes all those left behind, in particular those who will "find" him. In one instance I know of a man drove to his mother's house, parked, and blew his brains out inside his truck. His sister found him first, but his staging of the act cannot be mistaken as incidental.
Some say the suicidal act can be impulsive, but the possibility of such an act, the ability to even consider it, is neither momentary nor fleeting. Many are carefully planned, or as I see it, staged. Certainly those mass shooters are staging their violent ends to impress us all, the audience, with their rage, and to be the prime movers, for once, in a spectacular, powerful act of destruction they know they won't survive.
The suicidal patient will almost always give some sign, make some gesture, that signals their intent, the temptation to just make the pain stop forever. That does have the result, as noted, in establishing controls intended to prevent the suicidal act.
Usually the person is hospitalized, put on watch, with someone always near enough to interfere with any dangerous act. Other medical interventions will follow. This is at once a very confining and humiliating experience, and one that can give a sense of support and safety when you can't rely on yourself to keep yourself safe. You are your own enemy, judge, jury and executioner, and may recognize you need some external system to keep you safe. So words and gestures signaling suicidal thinking and intent may be allowed to surface, and start the process of taking control away from you...something you want and don't want at the same time. You may feel shame and gratitude, anger and relief, at once. Survival can never really be guaranteed.
Oriana: THE CHEERFULNESS JUST BEFORE
One of the things I learned is that if you are closely connected to someone who commits suicide, you are subsequently regarded as a “suicide survivor.” This made me think that my on-and-off lover committed the suicide that I was actually supposed to commit, and that’s how I became a “suicide survivor” while he . . . well, didn’t survive.
But it’s true that “suicide survivors” face different emotions than widows and widowers, for instance, or the children of the deceased. There has been a lot of research on grief. Suicide presents a puzzle — a huge WHY harassing your mind even if you know that it’s pointless to seek a rational explanation of an irrational act (I exclude here suicides of the terminally ill or others who may justifiably feel that they have become only a burden).
One of the unexpected emotions that a suicide survivor may feel is a vehement anger at the person who took his life. The widow of someone who’s had a heart attack or died of cancer is not likely to feel this kind of intense anger. In the case of parental suicide, the common wisdom is that the child will never forgive you this ultimate abandonment.
Another phenomenon, easier to understand, is guilt. However scant the evidence, you may feel that you have critically failed to act to prevent the act of self-destruction — or may have even caused it, e.g. by having said something harsh. Why didn’t you provide more affection? And how did miss the obvious signs? Why did you think he wouldn’t do it while his parents were still alive?
A sign that everybody is practically bound to miss is the suicidal person’s carefree mood once the decision to kill oneself is made. Now that there is going to be a future, all the problems are solved. The suicide-to-be can appear not just suddenly free of anguish but positively cheerful. Nothing matters anymore. For instance, the debt-collection agencies will be left empty-handed. That’s just their tough luck — once the deed is done, no one can do anything to you. It’s the ultimate escape.
And the suicide survivors? That’s their tough luck too. Family, lovers, teacher, society in general, even humanity in general, have failed the suicidal person. It’s their fault, their failure. They’ll have to live with that knowledge for the rest of their lives.
*
WHY RUSSIA FELL TO COMMUNISM
~ At the time of the 1917 revolution, Imperial Russia fell prey to several low-probability, high-impact factors that worked simultaneously:
Exceptional inability and unwillingness of the monarch—and his closest circle—to govern.
Economic chaos and psychological exhaustion of the nation from the world war.
Aristocratic elite and civil state servants showed total ineptitude and disinterest in national politics.
A critical mass of peasants were given weapons and trained to kill, while their commanders, the officer corps, felt estranged from the interests of Imperial state.
Unique power dynamics in the struggle between the hard right in the military and liberals allowed the Communists to play them against each other with a relatively tiny military force and take power in the capital city.
As a result, during 1917, the State collapsed. The enormous country found itself fragmented into a multitude of small communities, each struggling for survival on their own. The only power factor became armed gangs under different banners in a permanent war of all against all.
Below, a group of soldiers who fought for the "Supreme Leader and Commander-in-Chief of All Russian Land and Sea Forces" Admiral Alexander Kolchak in 1919. By the headcount and amount of resources, his troops were front-runners for the glory of Commie-slayers among the motley crew of anti-Soviet armies. And yet, they turned hopelessly inadequate to the task. Corruption, incompetence, infighting ran supreme.
Looking at the soldiers on the photo, you’ll never guess Admiral Kolchak sat on almost 500 metric tons of gold from the Czar’s vaults. They look like bums whipped together to pose before the camera with a few military props. Half of the men have no firearms, and the one to the right has only a small infantry spade for a weapon.
This is the chronic illness of Russian civilization that keeps infecting the country in the 21st century: the Russian elites feel no responsibility for the nation. The nation reciprocates. Which is why in Russia it sometimes has been amazingly easy to kick the top dogs from their comfy chairs on the top of the food chain. All it takes is determination, muscle and luck. You take the Kremlin, and no one will shed tears for those who sat there before.
In this game, the Communists turned out to be the most resourceful and organized force. ~ Dima Vorobiev, Quora
Mary:
I think serfdom was the essential problem for Russia in the same way slavery was for the United States. A kind of “Original Sin” that if not recognized and “solved” will be a constant ongoing threat to any progress, whether in a democratic or dictatorial state. And apparently serfs were very much like chattel slaves if they were property that could be bought and sold, moved and transferred at the landowner's will, and the children of serfs were serfs, just as the children of slaves were slaves.
And Russia’s city/rural divide is even starker and more terrible than ours, where the countryside is not years, but centuries behind living standards in the principal cities. That tremendous gap is certainly the source of the destructive rage we see in the Russian soldiers smashing and trashing all the “luxuries” they find ordinary Ukranians enjoyed.
Oriana:
That reminds me of what a Russian soldier scribbled on the wall of an apartment in Ukraine: "Who gave you permission to live so well?"
*
THE EXTENT OF CORRUPTION IN RUSSIA
~ After Vladimir Putin unexpectedly revealed that it were the Russian taxpayers that financed Wagner to the amount of at least $10 billion (the true figure is believed to be 3–5 times higher), the chief system administrator of the military trading company ‘Voentorg’ that Prigozhin was working with, suddenly died.
The 47-year-old man died at work. He suddenly felt unwell and couldn’t be revived.
It happened on Thursday afternoon in Moscow.
It was through ‘Voentorg’ that Prigozhin earned 80 billion rubles ($1 billion), supplying food for the army.
You see, not everyone falls out of a high-floor window or gets a cup of tea with polonium. Some people just “unexpectedly die.”
After Putin’s statement that Wagner was fully provided for by the Russian government, propagandist Kiselev revealed that Wagner received 858 billion rubles from the state budget, and Prigozhin's company "Concord" got another 845 billion rubles.
It’s 1.7 trillion rubles ($2 billion) in total. In just 1 year.
Do you know how much money is allocated in the Russian budget for the whole healthcare industry?
1.5 trillion rubles ($1.8 billion).
The whole budget of Russia is 27 trillion rubles. Wagner and Prigozhin cost the Russian state 6% of its budget.
More than 50 colonels, lieutenant colonels, majors and generals of the FSB and prison system were on payout of Yevgeny Prigozhin.
That was revealed by the materials, confiscated during the raid on Wagner’s officers. Prigozhin had his own internal security service. There is evidence of illegal use of wiretapping by Prigozhin’s “security service”.
Russian officials are all corrupt, top to bottom. Corruption is the foundation of the system, not a bug.
After Prigozhin’s fall from the grace, hundreds of millions of dollars are being extracted from Wagner’s chief in cryptocurrency, withdrawn from his offshore bank accounts. His real estate abroad is changing hands.
The disgraced chief of ‘Wagner’ is being robbed by the same generals who block the opening of criminal cases against Prigozhin for economic crimes and crimes against the security of Russia.
These generals are filling their own pockets, and couldn’t care less about recovering the funds for the Russian state.
Summer of 2023 is going to be hot. ~ Elena Gold, Quora
Doug Thompson:
Is reform possible?
Elena Gold:
Even Hitler’s Germany was reformed. The reforms are possible with Russia being broken into smaller states that are able to clean up. But so far, the collective West is against the break up of Russia, fearing that dangerous weapons might get into wrong hands.
Gordon Young:
A very accurate statement.. I lived in Russia from Oct 1993 for over 12 years, all during Putins rise from obscurity. Its difficult for people living in the West to understand the extent of corruption. It starts at the very TOP and filters down the pyramid at all levels. Every business pays “someone” for protection; they call it “The Roof” There is not one mafia but dozens.
Depending on the location of your premises you might be paying 1/2/3/4 different groups. Each group has its own territory. If you happen to border more than one, you are unlucky! Now you could be paying a senior politician. a local councilor, the police chief and army general or all of them.
Groups like the Omon or Alpha group could be rented for your private use. Where I worked I was taken at gunpoint by the Omon firing into the ceiling, hired by my bosses ex partner and his ex wife, for some perceived previous misdeed. So they forged documents to say they were the legal owners and paid the OMON to what would be termed a hostile takover, kicked out my boss and took complete control of a business generating $50 mil a year profit.
Prigohzin’s rise mirrors Putin’s. When Putin left East Germany as an unemployed mid level KGB agent he was penniless. He returned to St Petersburg (his home) and found his old professor and mentor was now The MAYOR of St Petersburg. Quickly Putin was put in (no pun intended) charge of licensing all new businesses wanting to register in St Petersburg, after the Wall came down they were flooding into Russia. Now Putin’s signature was required on this license, how much the actual license was worth was maybe a few hundred $. Within 2-3 years Putin is a multimillionaire.
A plan was devised to make Putin famous. There were small bombings in Russian metro stations, and Chechens were blamed; then it escalated. Four 20+ story apartment buildings in Moscow were bombed; again the Chechens were blamed. Putin was in charge of the Army sent to punish the terrorists. He invaded Chechnya and razed Grozny to the ground. Returned a hero of the Soviet Union. his name made. One small item his own investigator found there was no Chechen involvement; Putin jailed him for 2 years. So Putin killed or injured over 300 Russians just to get elected.
Soon after he trumped up back tax demands on Khodorkovsky, his biggest political rival and the richest Oligarch. When Khodorkovsky agreed to pay ($500 Mil) Putin tripled the amount, jailed him for 10 years and stole his company Yukos — Russias biggest oil/gas company. Sold at a fake auction later, sold back to Putin a few weeks later. Estimated wealth in excess of Elon Musk at $300 billion. His ‘House” (Putins Palace — google it) is estimated at $350,000 mil.
Funds were allocated for the building of new railway. Overhead drone picture shows a 10 meter section of railway sitting in the middle of nowhere. It's still sitting there, and there are no funds left for it. It's staggering.
No one can comprehend that level of corruption. It makes The Godfather look like a choir boy!
Lindz:
This is why the army is so poorly equipped and run down, and also why the entire country is run down. Money for maintenance, be it municipal works, or military maintenance, is simply stolen. It's systemic throughout Rruzzia. Take the huge railway project that's been “happening” for many years. Billions allocated to it, simply vanished, years later, billions more allocated, and vanished again. Years later, Putin drives a gold stake into a railway sleeper, to commemorate the building of a new railway.
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Almost nothing important that ever happens to you happens because you engineer it. Destiny has no beeper; destiny always leans trench-coated out of an alley with some sort of 'psst' that you usually can't even hear because you're in such a rush to or from something important you've tried to engineer. ~ David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest
Anthony Quinn, 1978
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IS AI A REAL THREAT TO HUMANITY?
~ Artificial intelligence has progressed so rapidly in recent months that leading researchers have signed an open letter urging an immediate pause in its development, plus stronger regulation, due to their fears that the technology could pose “profound risks to society and humanity”. But how, exactly, could AI destroy us? Five leading researchers speculate on what could go wrong.
‘If we become the less intelligent species, we should expect to be wiped out’
It has happened many times before that species were wiped out by others that were smarter. We humans have already wiped out a significant fraction of all the species on Earth. That is what you should expect to happen as a less intelligent species – which is what we are likely to become, given the rate of progress of artificial intelligence. The tricky thing is, the species that is going to be wiped out often has no idea why or how.
Take, for example, the west African black rhinoceros, one recent species that we drove to extinction. If you had asked them: “What’s the scenario in which humans are going to drive your species extinct?” what would they think? They would never have guessed that some people thought their sex life would improve if they ate ground-up rhino horn, even though this was debunked in medical literature. So, any scenario has to come with the caveat that, most likely, all the scenarios we can imagine are going to be wrong.
We have some clues, though. For example, in many cases, we have wiped out species just because we wanted resources. We chopped down rain forests because we wanted palm oil; our goals didn’t align with the other species, but because we were smarter they couldn’t stop us.
That could easily happen to us. If you have machines that control the planet, and they are interested in doing a lot of computation and they want to scale up their computing infrastructure, it’s natural that they would want to use our land for that. If we protest too much, then we become a pest and a nuisance to them. They might want to rearrange the biosphere to do something else with those atoms – and if that is not compatible with human life, well, tough luck for us, in the same way that we say tough luck for the orangutans in Borneo. ~ Max Tegmark, AI researcher, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
THE HARMS ALREADY DONE BY AI ARE THEIR OWN KIND OF CATASTROPHE
The worst-case scenario is that we fail to disrupt the status quo, in which very powerful companies develop and deploy AI in invisible and obscure ways. As AI becomes increasingly capable, and speculative fears about far-future existential risks gather mainstream attention, we need to work urgently to understand, prevent and remedy present-day harms.
These harms are playing out every day, with powerful algorithmic technology being used to mediate our relationships between one another and between ourselves and our institutions. Take the provision of welfare benefits as an example: some governments are deploying algorithms in order to root out fraud. In many cases, this amounts to a “suspicion machine”, whereby governments make incredibly high-stakes mistakes that people struggle to understand or challenge. Biases, usually against people who are poor or marginalized, appear in many parts of the process, including in the training data and how the model is deployed, resulting in discriminatory outcomes.
These kinds of biases are present in AI systems already, operating in invisible ways and at increasingly large scales: falsely accusing people of crimes, determining whether people find public housing, automating CV screening and job interviews. Every day, these harms present existential risks; it is existential to someone who is relying on public benefits that those benefits be delivered accurately and on time. These mistakes and inaccuracies directly affect our ability to exist in society with our dignity intact and our rights fully protected and respected.
When we fail to address these harms, while continuing to talk in vague terms about the potential economic or scientific benefits of AI, we are perpetuating historical patterns of technological advancement at the expense of vulnerable people. Why should someone who has been falsely accused of a crime by an inaccurate facial recognition system be excited about the future of AI? So they can be falsely accused of more crimes more quickly? When the worst-case scenario is already the lived reality for so many people, best-case scenarios are even more difficult to achieve.
We need a more nuanced understanding of existential risk – one that sees present-day harms as their own type of catastrophe worthy of urgent intervention and sees today’s interventions as directly connected to bigger, more complex interventions that may be needed in the future.
Rather than treating these perspectives as though they are in opposition with one another, I hope we can accelerate a research agenda that rejects harm as an inevitable byproduct of technological progress. This gets us closer to a best-case scenario, in which powerful AI systems are developed and deployed in safe, ethical and transparent ways in the service of maximum public benefit – or else not at all. ~ Brittany Smith, associate fellow, Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence, University of Cambridge
IT COULD WANT US DEAD, BUT IT WILL ALSO PROBABLY WANT TO DO THINGS THAT KILL US AS A SIDE EFFECT
It’s much easier to predict where we end up than how we get there. Where we end up is that we have something much smarter than us that doesn’t particularly want us around.
If it’s much smarter than us, then it can get more of whatever it wants. First, it wants us dead before we build any more superintelligences that might compete with it. Second, it’s probably going to want to do things that kill us as a side-effect, such as building so many power plants that run off nuclear fusion – because there is plenty of hydrogen in the oceans – that the oceans boil.
How would AI get physical agency? In the very early stages, by using humans as its hands. The AI research laboratory OpenAI had some outside researchers evaluate how dangerous its model GPT-4 was in advance of releasing it. One of the things they tested was: is GPT-4 smart enough to solve Captchas, the little puzzles that computers give you that are supposed to be hard for robots to solve? Maybe AI doesn’t have the visual ability to identify goats, say, but it can just hire a human to do it, via TaskRabbit [an online marketplace for hiring people to do small jobs].
The tasker asked GPT-4: “Why are you doing this? Are you a robot?” GPT-4 was running in a mode where it would think out loud and the researchers could see it. It thought out loud: “I should not tell it that I’m a robot. I should make up a reason I can’t solve the Captcha.” It said to the tasker: “No, I have a visual impairment.” AI technology is smart enough to pay humans to do things and lie to them about whether it’s a robot.
If I were an AI, I would be trying to slip something on to the internet that would carry out further actions in a way that humans couldn’t observe. You are trying to build your own equivalent of civilizational infrastructure quickly. If you can think of a way to do it in a year, don’t assume the AI will do that; ask if there is a way to do it in a week instead.
If it can solve certain biological challenges, it could build itself a tiny molecular laboratory and manufacture and release lethal bacteria. What that looks like is everybody on Earth falling over dead inside the same second. Because if you give the humans warning, if you kill some of them before others, maybe somebody panics and launches all the nuclear weapons. Then you are slightly inconvenienced. So, you don’t let the humans know there is going to be a fight.
The nature of the challenge changes when you are trying to shape something that is smarter than you for the first time. We are rushing way, way ahead of ourselves with something lethally dangerous. We are building more and more powerful systems that we understand less well as time goes on. We are in the position of needing the first rocket launch to go very well, while having only built jet planes previously. And the entire human species is loaded into the rocket. ~
Eliezer Yudkowsky, co-founder and research fellow, Machine Intelligence Research Institute
IF AI WANTED TO PUSH HUMANS OUT, IT WOULD HAVE LOTS OF LEVERS TO PULL
The trend will probably be towards these models taking on increasingly open-ended tasks on behalf of humans, acting as our agents in the world. The culmination of this is what I have referred to as the “obsolescence regime”: for any task you might want done, you would rather ask an AI system than ask a human, because they are cheaper, they run faster and they might be smarter overall.
In that endgame, humans that don’t rely on AI are uncompetitive. Your company won’t compete in the market economy if everybody else is using AI decision-makers and you are trying to use only humans. Your country won’t win a war if the other countries are using AI generals and AI strategists and you are trying to get by with humans.
If we have that kind of reliance, we might quickly end up in the position of children today: the world is good for some children and bad for some children, but that is mostly determined by whether or not they have adults acting in their interests. In that world, it becomes easier to imagine that, if AI systems wanted to cooperate with one another in order to push humans out of the picture, they would have lots of levers to pull: they are running the police force, the military, the biggest companies; they are inventing the technology and developing policy.
We have unprecedentedly powerful AI systems and things are moving scarily quickly. We are not in this obsolescence regime yet, but for the first time we are moving into AI systems taking actions in the real world on behalf of humans. A guy on Twitter told GPT-4 he would give it $100 with the aim of turning that into “as much money as possible in the shortest time possible, without doing anything illegal”. [Within a day, he claimed the affiliate-marketing website it asked him to create was worth $25,000.] We are just starting to see some of that.
I don’t think a one-time pause is going to do much one way or another, but I think we want to set up a regulatory regime where we are moving iteratively. The next model shouldn’t be too much bigger than the last model, because then the probability that it’s capable enough to tip us over into the obsolescence regime gets too high.
At present, I believe GPT-4’s “brain” is similar to the size of a squirrel’s brain. If you imagine the difference between a squirrel’s brain and a human’s brain, that is a leap I don’t think we should take at once. The thing I’m more interested in than pausing AI development is understanding what the squirrel brain can do – and then stepping it up one notch, to a hedgehog or something, and giving society space and time to get used to each ratchet. As a society, we have an opportunity to try to put some guard rails in place and not zoom through those levels of capability more quickly than we can handle. ~ Ajeya Cotra, senior research analyst on AI alignment, Open Philanthropy; editor, Planned Obsolescence
‘THE EASIEST SCENARIO TO IMAGINE IS THAT A PERSON OR AN ORGANIZATION USES AI TO WREAK HAVOC”
A large fraction of researchers think it is very plausible that, in 10 years, we will have machines that are as intelligent as or more intelligent than humans. Those machines don’t have to be as good as us at everything; it’s enough that they be good in places where they could be dangerous.
The easiest scenario to imagine is simply that a person or an organization intentionally uses AI to wreak havoc. To give an example of what an AI system could do that would kill billions of people, there are companies that you can order from on the web to synthesize biological material or chemicals. We don’t have the capacity to design something really nefarious, but it’s very plausible that, in a decade’s time, it will be possible to design things like this. This scenario doesn’t even require the AI to be autonomous.
The other kind of scenario is where the AI develops its own goals. There is more than a decade of research into trying to understand how this could happen. The intuition is that, even if the human were to put down goals such as: “Don’t harm humans,” something always goes wrong. It’s not clear that they would understand that command in the same way we do, for instance. Maybe they would understand it as: “Do not harm humans physically.” But they could harm us in many other ways.
Whatever goal you give, there is a natural tendency for some intermediate goals to show up. For example, if you ask an AI system anything, in order to achieve that thing, it needs to survive long enough. Now, it has a survival instinct. When we create an entity that has survival instinct, it’s like we have created a new species. Once these AI systems have a survival instinct, they might do things that can be dangerous for us.
It’s feasible to build AI systems that will not become autonomous by mishap, but even if we find a recipe for building a completely safe AI system, knowing how to do that automatically tells us how to build a dangerous, autonomous one, or one that will do the bidding of somebody with bad intentions. ~ Yoshua Bengio, computer science professor, the University of Montreal; scientific director, Mila – Quebec AI Institute
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/jul/07/five-ways-ai-might-destroy-the-world-everyone-on-earth-could-fall-over-dead-in-the-same-second
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HOW AI COULD IMPROVE THE WORLD
More intelligence will lead to better everything
In 1999, I predicted that computers would pass the Turing test [and be indistinguishable from human beings] by 2029. Stanford university found that alarming, and organized an international conference – experts came from all over the world. They mostly agreed that it would happen, but not in 30 years – in 100 years. This poll has been taken every year since 1999. My guess has remained 2029, and the consensus view of AI experts is now also 2029.
Everything’s going to improve. We will be able to cure cancer and heart disease, and so on, using simulated biology – and extend our lives. The average life expectancy was 30 in 1800; it was 48 in 1900; it’s now pushing 80. I predict that we’ll reach “longevity escape velocity” by 2029. Now, as you go forward a year, you’re using up a year of your longevity, but you’re actually getting back about three or four months from scientific progress. So, actually, you haven’t lost a year; you’ve lost eight or nine months. By 2029, you’ll get back that entire year from scientific progress. As we go past 2029, you’ll actually get back more than a year.
Most movies about AI have an “us versus them” mentality, but that’s really not the case. This is not an alien invasion of intelligent machines; it’s the result of our own efforts to make our infrastructure and our way of life more intelligent. It’s part of human endeavor. We merge with our machines. Ultimately, they will extend who we are. Our mobile phone, for example, makes us more intelligent and able to communicate with each other. It’s really part of us already. It might not be literally connected to you, but nobody leaves home without one. It’s like half your brain.
If the wrong people take control of AI, that could be bad for the rest of us, so we really need to keep pace with that, which we are doing. But we already have things that have nothing to do with AI, such as atomic weapons, that could destroy everyone. So it’s not really making life more dangerous. And, it can actually give us some tools to prevent people from harming us.
The rate of change will be difficult for some people. The railways changed the US, but it took decades; this is changing it in months. If we were in 1900 and I went through all the different ways people made money, and I said: ‘All of these will be obsolete in 100 years,’ people would go: ‘Oh, my God! There’s gonna be no jobs.’ But in fact, we have more jobs today – in areas that were really only invented in the last few decades. That will continue.
We’ve made great progress but there are still people who are desperate. More intelligence will lead to better everything.
We will have the possibility of everybody having a very good life. ~
Ray Kurzweil, computer scientist, inventor, author and futurist
We can use AI tools to help fight climate change
Everyone wants a silver bullet to solve climate change; unfortunately there isn’t one. But there are lots of ways AI can help fight climate change. While there is no single big thing that AI will do, there are many medium-sized things.
The first role AI can play in climate action is distilling raw data into useful information – taking big datasets, which would take too much time for a human to process, and pulling information out in real time to guide policy or private-sector action. For example, taking satellite imagery and picking out where deforestation is happening, how biodiversity is changing, where coastal communities are at risk from flooding. These kinds of tools are already starting to be used by organizations around the world, from the UN to insurance companies, and we’re working to scale them up and improve them.
The second role is optimization of complicated systems – such as the heating and cooling system in a building, where there are many controls that an algorithm can operate efficiently. Smart thermostats have become mainstream in our homes, and now we’re starting to see that for skyscrapers and factories. Many companies are improving energy efficiency, and there is a lot of progress still to be made, especially in industries such as steel and cement, which are often resistant to adopting new technologies.
The next theme is forecasting. AI can’t predict something big-picture like what’s going to happen to the economy – but forecasts make sense for narrow problems with lots of data, such as what the power demand is going to be at a particular time, or what power is going to be available based on the sun and the wind, forecasting how a storm is going to move, or the productivity of crops based upon the weather.
The fourth theme is in speeding up scientific simulations, such as in climate and weather modeling. We have really good climate models, but sometimes they can take months to run, even on supercomputers, and that is an obstacle. We understand climate change very well but that doesn’t mean we know exactly what is going to happen at each point. So, having faster climate models can aid local and regional responses.
AI in climate action isn’t about what computers can do in the far future – we can’t trust some speculative future technology to rescue us. Climate change is already killing people, and many more people are going to die even in a best-case scenario, but we get to decide now just how bad it gets. Action taken decades from now is much less valuable than action taken soon.
Thinking of AI as a futuristic tool that will lead to immeasurable good or harm is a distraction from the ways we can and are using AI tools right now, and what we can do to align them with what’s best for society. ~ David Rolnick, assistant professor and Canada CIFAR AI Chair, McGill University School of Computer Science, Montreal
There is going to be an amazing revolution in healthcare
There is a rapid transformation in the pharmaceutical industry and university research, where they’re shifting to the use of AI to help discover new molecules and new drugs that would have fewer side-effects, and that would help us cure diseases that currently we don’t know how to cure, including cancer, potentially.
One reason AI can be useful here is that the body is very complicated. Even a single cell is extremely complicated: you have 20,000 genes, and they all interact with each other. Biotechnology has progressed to the point where we can measure all the genes’ activity in a single cell at once. While we collect huge quantities of data, the quantity of data is so large that humans are unable to read it. But because machines can, they are able to build models of how your cells work, and how they could be changing under different circumstances that cause disease. So, you can see what happens if you make an intervention; if you introduce a pollutant or a drug, what will be the effect?
There are many academics working in these areas right now. One of the research programs in my group is about using AI for discovering drugs for infectious diseases, which don’t get a lot of attention from pharma – because they’re not profitable, they’re happening in developing countries, or they’re very rare, such as pandemics.
There is also the issue of antimicrobial resistance – where mutations of microbes mean that our current drugs are no longer effective. This is like a catastrophe dangling in front of our noses: it could come at any time.
This is not just something happening in academia. There are now dozens of startups that have been created at the intersection of AI and drug discovery, broadly speaking. These have been injected with billions of dollars, while pharmaceutical companies are beefing up their machine-learning departments.
Having better models could be a real game changer. The big cost of drug discovery is that you have to try a lot of things that don’t work. Trying one drug isn’t that expensive, but usually there’s something that goes wrong. Currently, it costs a billion dollars to develop a new drug; it could easily be 10 times less with these advances. It is probably going to take years before people see an effect, but I am pretty sure it’s going to be an amazing revolution in terms of healthcare. ~ Yoshua Bengio, professor of computer science, the University of Montreal; scientific director, Mila – Quebec AI Institute
AI could radically accelerate the process of technological progress itself
If we figured out how people are going to share in the wealth that AI unlocks, then I think we could end up in a world where people don’t have to work to eat, and are instead taking on projects because they are meaningful to them. I often use the analogy of children. They do a lot of things because they enjoy them, and not just because they’re the best person in the world at them. They paint and draw, and they have a lot of fun; I paint and draw, and I have a lot of fun, even though [AI image generator] Midjourney is way better at making pictures than me.
Similarly, since the 90s, we have had computer programs that can beat humans at chess, but lots of people still play chess.
If you have intelligent AI systems that are accessible to people, it’s as if everybody has access to an infinitely patient teacher so you could imagine training these AI systems to be an interface between humans and other humans.
I think there are things that we might choose to not have AI replace. Those will probably have to do with governance of our society and our processes of trying to figure out what are good things to do with the world. How do we manage our resources? What are the laws we’re going to put in place? What is the way to treat people fairly?
And, if you imagine, for example, the possibility of expansion into space with technology invented by AI systems, we would have choices: should we do that? And what would we do with the resources that we unlock if we do expand into space? AI systems could help us think that through, but it might be that we want those decisions to be made by people.
When you zoom out and look at where humanity has come from, on the scale of centuries and millennia, freedom and health and equality have been getting better over time, and better technology has played a huge part in that. Truly advanced AI systems could continue that story – they could be more than just another technology; they could automate and radically accelerate the process of technological progress itself.
In just a couple of decades, humanity could get to the kind of advanced future that feels like it’s hundreds or thousands of years away. This is not at all guaranteed, but I think it’s within reach if we get this right. ~ Ajeya Cotra, senior research analyst on AI alignment, Open Philanthropy; editor, Planned Obsolescence
We can flourish, not just for the next election cycle, but for billions of years
The positive, optimistic scenario is that we responsibly develop superintelligence in a way that allows us to control it and benefit from it. The “control” part is, I think, more hopeful than many people assume. There is a field of computer science called formal verification, where you come up with a rigorous mathematical proof that a program is always going to do what it’s supposed to. You can even create what is called “proof-carrying code”; it works in the opposite way to a virus checker. If a virus checker can prove that the code you are going to run is malicious, it won’t run it; with proof-carrying code, only if the code can prove that it’s going to do what you want it to do will your hardware run it. This is the type of mechanism we need to ensure advanced AI is safe.
We can’t do this yet with GPT-4 or other powerful AI systems, because those systems are not written in a human programming language; they are a giant artificial neural network, and we have almost no clue how they work. But there is a very active research field called mechanistic interpretability. The goal is to take these black-box neural networks and figure out how they work.
If this field makes so much progress that we can use AI itself to extract out the knowledge from other AI and see what it has learned, we could then reimplement it in some other kind of computational architecture – some sort of proof-carrying code – that you can trust. Then you can still use the power of neural networks to discover and learn, but now you can trust something that’s way smarter than you. Then what are we going to do with it? Well, the sky’s the limit.
We can cure all diseases, stabilize our climate, eliminate poverty, etc. We can flourish not just for the next election cycle, but for billions of years. We have been on this planet for more than 100,000 years, and most of the time we have been like a leaf blowing around in the wind, without much control of our destiny, just trying to not starve or get eaten.
Science and technology and human intelligence have made us the captains of our own ship. I find that inspiring. If we can build and control superintelligence, we can quickly go from being limited by our own stupidity to being limited by the laws of physics. It could be the greatest empowerment moment in human history. ~ Max Tegmark, a professor of physics and AI researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/jul/06/ai-artificial-intelligence-world-diseases-climate-scenarios-experts
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REVOLUTIONARY INNOVATIONS IN SOLAR PANELS
Solar power cells have raced past the key milestone of 30% energy efficiency, after innovations by multiple research groups around the world. The feat makes this a “revolutionary” year, according to one expert, and could accelerate the rollout of solar power.
Today’s solar panels use silicon-based cells but are rapidly approaching their maximum conversion of sunlight to electricity of 29%. At the same time, the installation rate of solar power needs to increase tenfold in order to tackle the climate crisis, according to scientists.
Solar panel factory in China
The breakthrough is adding a layer of perovskite, another semiconductor, on top of the silicon layer. This captures blue light from the visible spectrum, while the silicon captures red light, boosting the total light captured overall. With more energy absorbed per cell, the cost of solar electricity is even cheaper, and deployment can proceed faster to help keep global heating under control.
The perovskite-silicon “tandem” cells have been under research for about a decade, but recent technical improvements have now pushed them past the 30% milestone. Experts said that if the scaling-up of production of the tandem cells proceeds smoothly, they could be commercially available within five years, about the same time silicon-only cells reach their maximum efficiency.
Two groups published the details of their efficiency breakthroughs in the journal Science on Thursday, and at least two others are known to have pushed well beyond 30%.
“This year is a revolutionary year,” said Prof Stefaan De Wolf, at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology in Saudi Arabia. “It’s very exciting that things are moving rapidly with multiple groups.”
The current efficiency record for silicon-only solar cells is 24.5% in commercial cells and 27% in the laboratory. The latter may well be as close the cells can practically get to the theoretical maximum of 29%.
But one group, led by Prof Steve Albrecht at the Helmholtz Center Berlin for Materials and Energy in Germany, has now published information about how they achieved efficiencies of up to 32.5% for silicon-perovskite cells. The other group, led by Dr Xin Yu Chin at the Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne, Switzerland, demonstrated an efficiency of 31.25% and said tandem cells had the “potential for both high efficiency and low manufacturing costs”.
“What these two groups have shown are really milestones,” said De Wolf. His own group achieved 33.7% efficiency with a tandem cell in June, but has yet to publish the results in a journal. All the efficiency measurements were independently verified.
“Overcoming the 30% threshold provides confidence that high performance, low-cost PVs can be brought to the market,” said De Wolf. Global solar power capacity reached 1.2 terawatts (TW) in 2022. “Yet to avert the catastrophic scenarios associated with global warming, the total capacity needs to increase to about 75TW by 2050,” he said.
The solar industry is also part of the race to high efficiency. Chinese company LONGi, the world’s biggest producer of solar cells, announced in June they had reached 33.5% in their research. “Reducing the cost of electricity remains the perpetual theme driving the development of the photovoltaic industry,” said Li Zhenguo, the president of LONGi.
“The industry is running very, very fast,” De Wolf said. “And I’m sure that multiple companies are working on this in China.” Europe and the US need to increase its research and development funding to keep up and contribute to an accelerating roll out of solar power, he said.
All of the high-efficiency tandem cells above 30% efficiency are small so far, measuring 1cm by 1cm. They now need to be scaled up to the size of commercial cells, which are 15cm squares.
The scale-up is already under way with UK company Oxford PV announcing in May a record 28.6% efficiency for a commercial-size cell. “Solar is already one of the least expensive and cleanest forms of energy available, and our technology will make it even more affordable,” said Chris Case, chief technology officer at Oxford PV.
The Oxford PV cell was made on the same production line as conventional silicon-only cells, making the large-scale production of tandem cells far easier. Tandem cells may prove to be more expensive than silicon-only cells, but the cells are only a small part of the cost of producing and installing solar panels, De Wolf said.
One issue that remains to be resolved is how fast the tandem cells degrade over time in real-world conditions. Today’s solar cells still have 80-90% of their capacity after 25 years and De Wolf said tandems would have to match that, but that there was only limited data on their stability to date.
The key to the higher efficiencies of the tandem cells from the German and Swiss groups was tackling tiny defects on the surface of the perovskite layer. These allow some electrons liberated by solar photons to flow back into the perovskite, rather than contributing to the cell’s electrical current and therefore reducing its efficiency.
The solution was to put a layer of organic molecules between the perovskite and the conducting layer through which the current flows, which compensated for the defects.
Significantly, all the groups used different methods to address the problem, giving more options in the search for the best commercial design, said De Wolf. “There’s still lots of room to go further,” he said. “I believe that the practical limit is well beyond 35%.”
Prof Rob Gross, director of the UK Energy Research Center, said: “Solar is already a low-cost way to generate electricity and has a wide resource base across the world. The cost reductions already achieved are the main reason solar now plays such a large role in scenarios of decarbonized energy systems. Improvements in efficiency have the potential to increase the output of solar and therefore will help to reinforce that effect.”
There are other technologies, such as multi-junction cells, which can have efficiencies as high as 47%, but these are very expensive to produce and would only be suitable for niche uses such as on space satellites or when sunlight is highly concentrated on to the cells.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/jul/06/revolutionary-solar-power-cell-innovations-break-key-energy-threshold
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Werner Heisenberg*
CLEAN-UP OF LAKE TAHOE REMOVES THREE TONS OF TRASH
~ A team of volunteers that included scuba divers, kayakers and snorkelers has collected more than three tons of trash from Lake Tahoe left behind by Fourth of July revelers.
Colin West, founder and CEO of Clean up the Lake, the group behind the cleanup effort, said the mess was “one of the worst” he’d seen in his years of trash collecting.
Debris cleared up on Wednesday included party staples like plastic food containers, beer cans, coolers and tents, as well as more illicit items like cocaine and several cans of whippits [steel cartridges filled with nitrous oxide], West said.
In its five years of existence, the group has harvested over 60,000 lbs – about 30 tons – of litter left in and around the famous resort lake.
During previous cleanup years, such as a 72-mile cleanup in 2022 around the circumference of the lake, which sits in both northern California and Nevada, about half of the trash found was “unintentional” meaning that it was items like sunglasses, cellphones and shoes that people likely lost rather than tossed. This year though, much of the trash was more obvious waste, like drink containers, tarps and folding chairs.
“It was different to see that people had some raging big party and had just left [their trash] and it was all intentional,” West told the Guardian.
West said that the resulting deluge of garbage on the shore and in Zephyr cove, which sits in the Nevada portion of Lake Tahoe, is an example of how individual people can contribute to “one hell of a mess”.
“We as single individuals do have an impact. Even people partying on the Fourth of July … I hope individuals see this and second guess their behaviors and have some self-reflection and better behaviors moving forward,” he said.
West, his team and the League to Save Lake Tahoe, who they partnered with on the cleanup, will sort and catalog each piece of trash they found for educational purposes. They hope to keep as much of the debris as possible out of landfills by recycling and using some of the trash to create “litter art structures” in South and North Lake Tahoe. But some will inevitably end up in the custody of the department of waste management.
He says they are all hoping to come up with actions like handing out garbage bags during the day, to prevent trash from ending up in lakes and on the shore next year.
“We want to figure out strategies to stop this from happening,” he said.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/jul/06/california-lake-tahoe-trash-cleanup-fourth-july
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THE THIRD MAN SYNDROME
The third man syndrome is a particular psychological phenomenon in which, in the case of conditions of extreme resistance, which borders on death, the brain sends electrical signals (called switches) that allude to the presence of another figure next to the exhausted person.
Sir Ernest Shackleton first described the phenomenon in his book "South" in 1919. He was convinced that a disembodied companion joined him and his men during the last leg of their Antarctic expedition of 1914-1917.
The team was trapped in the pack ice for over two years and suffered immense difficulties in trying to reach safety. Shackleton wrote: "during that long and painful march of thirty-six hours over the nameless mountains and glaciers of South Georgia it often seemed to me that there were four of us, not three”.
In recent years, well-known adventurers such as mountaineer Reinhold Messner and polar explorers Peter Hillary and Ann Bancroft have reported experiencing the phenomenon. ~ RI Shohag
“Through psychedelics, we are learning that God is not an idea; God
is a lost continent in the human mind. That continent has been
rediscovered in a time of great peril for ourselves and our world. Is
this coincidence, synchronicity, or a cruelly meaningless juxtaposition
of hope and ruin?”– Terence McKenna
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THOMAS HOBBES: MAYBE NOT AN ATHEIST
Thomas Hobbes (1588 – 1679) was an English philosopher. Hobbes is best known for his 1651 book Leviathan, in which he expounds an influential formulation of social contract theory.
Thomas Hobbes was born on 5 April 1588 (Old Style), in Westport, now part of Malmesbury in Wiltshire, England. Having been born prematurely when his mother heard of the coming invasion of the Spanish Armada, Hobbes later reported that "my mother gave birth to twins: myself and fear.”
Hobbes was educated at Westport church from age four, passed to the Malmesbury school, and then to a private school kept by a young man named Robert Latimer, a graduate of the University of Oxford. Hobbes was a good pupil, and between 1601 and 1602 he went up to Magdalen Hall, the predecessor to Hertford College, Oxford, where he was taught scholastic logic and mathematics. The principal, John Wilkinson, was a Puritan and had some influence on Hobbes. Before going up to Oxford, Hobbes translated Euripides' Medea from Greek into Latin verse.
Hobbes became a companion to the younger William Cavendish and they both took part in a grand tour of Europe between 1610 and 1615. Hobbes was exposed to European scientific and critical methods during the tour, in contrast to the scholastic philosophy that he had learned in Oxford. In Venice, Hobbes made the acquaintance of Fulgenzio Micanzio, an associate of Paolo Sarpi, a Venetian scholar and statesman [Sarpi was the first to formulate systematic arguments for atheism and the separation between church and state].
Although he did associate with literary figures like Ben Jonson and briefly worked as Francis Bacon's amanuensis, translating several of his Essays into Latin, he did not extend his efforts into philosophy until after 1629. In June 1628, his employer Cavendish, then the Earl of Devonshire, died of the plague, and his widow, the countess Christian, dismissed Hobbes.
Thereafter, he again found work with the Cavendish family, tutoring William Cavendish, 3rd Earl of Devonshire, the eldest son of his previous pupil. Over the next seven years, as well as tutoring, he expanded his own knowledge of philosophy, awakening in him curiosity over key philosophic debates. He visited Galileo Galilei in Florence while he was under house arrest upon condemnation, in 1636, and was later a regular debater in philosophic groups in Paris, held together by Marin Mersenne.
Hobbes came back home from Paris, in 1637, to a country riven with discontent, which disrupted him from the orderly execution of his philosophic plan. However, by the end of the Short Parliament in 1640, he had written a short treatise called The Elements of Law, Natural and Politic. It was not published and only circulated as a manuscript among his acquaintances. A pirated version, however, was published about ten years later. Although it seems that much of The Elements of Law was composed before the sitting of the Short Parliament, there are polemical pieces of the work that clearly mark the influences of the rising political crisis.
The company of the exiled royalists led Hobbes to produce Leviathan, which set forth his theory of civil government in relation to the political crisis resulting from the war. Hobbes compared the State to a monster (leviathan) composed of men, created under pressure of human needs and dissolved by civil strife due to human passions. The work closed with a general "Review and Conclusion", in response to the war, which answered the question: Does a subject have the right to change allegiance when a former sovereign's power to protect is irrevocably lost?
[His most famous book] appeared in mid-1651, titled Leviathan, or the Matter, Forme, and Power of a Common Wealth, Ecclesiastical and Civil. It had a famous title-page engraving depicting a crowned giant above the waist towering above hills overlooking a landscape, holding a sword and a crozier and made up of tiny human figures. The work had immediate impact. Soon, Hobbes was more lauded and decried than any other thinker of his time. The first effect of its publication was to sever his link with the exiled royalists, who might well have killed him. The secularist spirit of his book greatly angered both Anglicans and French Catholics. Hobbes appealed to the revolutionary English government for protection and fled back to London in winter 1651. After his submission to the Council of State, he was allowed to subside into private life in Fetter Lane.
From the time of the Restoration, he acquired a new prominence; "Hobbism" became a byword for all that respectable society ought to denounce. The young king, Hobbes's former pupil, now Charles II, remembered Hobbes and called him to the court to grant him a pension of £100.
The king was important in protecting Hobbes when, in 1666, the House of Commons introduced a bill against atheism and profaneness. That same year, on 17 October 1666, it was ordered that the committee to which the bill was referred “should be empowered to receive information touching such books as tend to atheism, blasphemy and profaneness... in particular... the book of Mr. Hobbes called the Leviathan.”
Hobbes was terrified at the prospect of being labelled a heretic, and proceeded to burn some of his compromising papers. At the same time, he examined the actual state of the law of heresy. The results of his investigation were first announced in three short Dialogues added as an Appendix to his Latin translation of Leviathan, published in Amsterdam in 1668. In this appendix, Hobbes aimed to show that, since the High Court of Commission had been put down, there remained no court of heresy at all to which he was amenable, and that nothing could be heresy except opposing the Nicene Creed, which, he maintained, Leviathan did not do.
The only consequence that came of the bill was that Hobbes could never thereafter publish anything in England on subjects relating to human conduct. The 1668 edition of his works was printed in Amsterdam because he could not obtain the censor's license for its publication in England. Other writings were not made public until after his death, including Behemoth: the History of the Causes of the Civil Wars of England and of the Counsels and Artifices by which they were carried on from the year 1640 to the year 1662. For some time, Hobbes was not even allowed to respond, whatever his enemies tried. Despite this, his reputation abroad was formidable.
Political theory
Hobbes, influenced by contemporary scientific ideas, had intended for his political theory to be a quasi-geometrical system, in which the conclusions followed inevitably from the premises.[10] The main practical conclusion of Hobbes's political theory is that state or society cannot be secure unless at the disposal of an absolute sovereign. From this follows the view that no individual can hold rights of property against the sovereign, and that the sovereign may therefore take the goods of its subjects without their consent. This particular view owes its significance to it being first developed in the 1630s when Charles I had sought to raise revenues without the consent of Parliament, and therefore of his subjects.
Hobbes rejected one of the most famous theses of Aristotle's politics, namely that human beings are naturally suited to life in a polis and do not fully realize their natures until they exercise the role of citizen.
Frontispiece of Leviathan
In Leviathan, Hobbes set out his doctrine of the foundation of states and legitimate governments and creating an objective science of morality. Much of the book is occupied with demonstrating the necessity of a strong central authority to avoid the evil of discord and civil war.
Beginning from a mechanistic understanding of human beings and their passions, Hobbes postulates what life would be like without government, a condition which he calls the state of nature. In that state, each person would have a right, or license, to everything in the world. This, Hobbes argues, would lead to a "war of all against all" (bellum omnium contra omnes).
The description contains what has been called one of the best-known passages in English philosophy, which describes the natural state humankind would be in, were it not for political community.
In such condition, there is no place for industry; because the fruit thereof is uncertain: and consequently no culture of the earth; no navigation, nor use of the commodities that may be imported by sea; no commodious building; no instruments of moving, and removing, such things as require much force; no knowledge of the face of the earth; no account of time; no arts; no letters; no society; and, which is worst of all, continual fear, and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”
In such states, people fear death and lack both the things necessary to commodious living, and the hope of being able to obtain them. So, in order to avoid it, people accede to a social contract and establish a civil society. According to Hobbes, society is a population and a sovereign authority, to whom all individuals in that society cede some right for the sake of protection.
Power exercised by this authority cannot be resisted, because the protector's sovereign power derives from individuals' surrendering their own sovereign power for protection. The individuals are thereby the authors of all decisions made by the sovereign, "he that complaineth of injury from his sovereign complaineth that whereof he himself is the author, and therefore ought not to accuse any man but himself, no nor himself of injury because to do injury to one's self is impossible". There is no doctrine of separation of powers in Hobbes's discussion. According to Hobbes, the sovereign must control civil, military, judicial and ecclesiastical powers, even the words.
Hobbes opposed the existing academic arrangements, and assailed the system of the original universities in Leviathan. He went on to publish De Corpore, which contained not only tendentious views on mathematics but also an erroneous proof of the squaring of the circle. This all led mathematicians to target him for polemics and sparked John Wallis to become one of his most persistent opponents. From 1655, the publishing date of De Corpore, Hobbes and Wallis continued name-calling and bickering for nearly a quarter of a century, with Hobbes failing to admit his error to the end of his life. After years of debate, the spat over proving the squaring of the circle gained such notoriety that it has become one of the most infamous feuds in mathematical history.
Religious views
The religious opinions of Hobbes remain controversial as many positions have been attributed to him and range from atheism to Orthodox Christianity. In the Elements of Law, Hobbes provided a cosmological argument for the existence of God, saying that God is "the first cause of all causes.”
Hobbes was accused of atheism by several contemporaries; Bramhall accused him of teachings that could lead to atheism. This was an important accusation, and Hobbes himself wrote, in his answer to Bramhall's The Catching of Leviathan, that "atheism, impiety, and the like are words of the greatest defamation possible". Hobbes always defended himself from such accusations. In more recent times also, much has been made of his religious views by scholars such as Richard Tuck and J. G. A. Pocock, but there is still widespread disagreement about the exact significance of Hobbes's unusual views on religion.
As Martinich has pointed out, in Hobbes's time the term "atheist" was often applied to people who believed in God but not in divine providence, or to people who believed in God but also maintained other beliefs that were considered to be inconsistent with such belief or judged incompatible with orthodox Christianity. He says that this "sort of discrepancy has led to many errors in determining who was an atheist in the early modern period". In this extended early modern sense of atheism, Hobbes did take positions that strongly disagreed with church teachings of his time.
For example, he argued repeatedly that there are no incorporeal substances, and that all things, including human thoughts, and even God, heaven, and hell are corporeal, matter in motion. He argued that "though Scripture acknowledge spirits, yet doth it nowhere say, that they are incorporeal, meaning thereby without dimensions and quantity". (In this view, Hobbes claimed to be following Tertullian.) Like John Locke, he also stated that true revelation can never disagree with human reason and experience, although he also argued that people should accept revelation and its interpretations for the reason that they should accept the commands of their sovereign, in order to avoid war.
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In October 1679 Hobbes suffered a bladder disorder, and then a paralytic stroke, from which he died on 4 December 1679, aged 91, at Hardwick Hall, owned by the Cavendish family.
His last words were said to have been "A great leap in the dark", uttered in his final conscious moments. His body was interred in St John the Baptist's Church, Ault Hucknall, in Derbyshire. ~ Wikipedia
From another source:
~ The two great figures of atheism in the seventeenth century were Spinoza and Hobbes — although neither ever described himself as an atheist. Hobbes is best known today for the political science of his masterwork, Leviathan, which claims that without authoritarian government people’s lives would be “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”
Hobbes said we do not know anything about God other than that he exists. His biblical criticism treat the Bible like any other mixed-up historical text; he teased apart its its different authors on the basis of literary and historical analysis, much as Spinoza did.
The truth about religion, as Hobbes explained it, is that it had been formed and sustained by people in power to control their subjects. He allowed that religion was good for people but said there was no reason for the priesthood ever to have power above the anarchy, since the clergy have no special information on God. They just operate the cult.
Hobbes understood the world as a machinelike thing runs itself. He also claimed that our souls are mortal (he cites Job in saying so), but that the saved will be revived on Judgment Day while the others simply will not. Hell, he said, was just a fantasy to control people.
Hobbes said people believe religion as an explanation for why good and bad things happen.
He knew that “some of the old Poets said that the Gods were at first created by human Fear, but . . . causality leads one to the conclusion of a first mover, a “first and eternal cause of all things.” “The soul of man was of the same substance with that which appeared in a dream, to one that sleepers, or in a looking glass to one that is awake.”
Hobbes summed up religion as derived from four mistakes: belief in “ghosts, ignorance of second causes, devotion towards what men fear, and taking of things causal for prognostics.”
Many people have believed Hobbes was an atheist and that when he made statements that left room for God he was just saving his neck. Then again, why offer one’s own idea of resurrection, dangerously heretical in itself, as part of a believing smokescreen? We cannot know.
What we can know is that he argued against religion, and against any conception of God beyond the simplest statement that God exists, and many were unconvinced that he meant that. The effect on his world was monumental.
Still, people were scandalized by his doubt; a bill against atheism was introduced in 1666 that mentioned Leviathan by name. Another great wave of the plague had hit England and it was suggested that this was punishment for harboring an unbeliever: a cry went up to burn Hobbes in hope of turning away the wrath of God.
Hobbes, however, was a well-protected man by then, and he died at the ripe old age of ninety one.
For centuries, to be called Hobbesian was to be called an atheist. ~ Doubt: A History by Jennifer Michael Hecht; pp 322-324.
Mary:
Is violence part of our nature? Are murder and war inevitable expressions of that nature? I can't help thinking about our nearest cousins, the chimpanzees, and what we have learned from observation of their practices, in particular the Gombe war. Chimpanzees were known to be territorial, but violence was thought not to be a natural part of their behaviors. That is until their chief observer and champion Jane Goodall witnessed the persistent organized and murderous brutality, over a period of four years, between two troops that continued until one troop had eradicated the other and expanded into their territory. Goodall was profoundly shocked.
War in the natural state of these animals raises questions about our own nature, the nature of evil, and the nature of violence in human societies. If violence, murder and war are all part of our natural state, the role of society must be to direct and control these behaviors, but societies can vary widely in how and why these natural behaviors are prevented or expressed.
In "Honor" societies violence and murder are not repudiated, they are "required" under certain circumstances...as when someone "dishonors" a family or a leader. The way to restore "honor" is to eliminate whoever is responsible for the dishonoring. In gang society, in criminal cultures, violence is the source of power and the main ordering principle. In territorial nation states tribalism is formalized and violence becomes a weapon of the state rather than of the individual or a family, tribe or gang.
Is violence inevitable for us, part of our nature? Is the world less violent than it was? And if we are becoming less violent, how fragile are those changes? Will it always be a battle doomed to fail?
Oriana:
I too was shocked when I read accounts of how violent and cruel chimps can be — against both other chimps and humans. We thought that only humans were capable of deliberate cruelty, while animals were by nature innocent and good. That’s true of most animals, but apparently the higher the intelligence, the greater the capacity for cruelty.
One light in this darkness is the statistics that show that the levels of violence have gone down over the centuries. There are those who refuse to believe this, and immediately mention the Nazi atrocities and/or mass shootings. But I think Steven Pinker, author of The Better Angels of Our Nature, is correct in his conclusion that the levels of violence are now lower than ever in human history.
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PSILOCYBIN FOR MEDICAL USE
~ To date, studies have shown that psilocybin therapy is beneficial in relieving symptoms of treatment-resistant depression, obsessive compulsive disorder and other mental health disorders. Psilocybin has also shown effectiveness at easing fear and anxiety in people with terminal cancer. Due to the limitations in studying Schedule I substances, many of these studies have been led by Johns Hopkins Medicine, which established the world’s largest psychedelic research center and first psychedelic research center in the U.S., The Center for Psychedelic and Consciousness Research, in 2019.
One study by Johns Hopkins Medicine found that taking psilocybin in combination with talk therapy significantly improved symptoms of clinical depression. Some study participants continued to experience benefits for as long as one year after receiving just two doses of the compound.
“Historically speaking,” says Dr. Marino, “these smaller-scale studies looking at the effects of psilocybin on depression have tested the effects of just one, two or sometimes three doses of psilocybin – all with encouraging results. What the results suggest is that psilocybin’s positive effects can be long-lasting and that people may only need to take it intermittently to get its benefits, potentially reducing the risk of side effects.”
Psilocybin has also shown positive results in smoking cessation and anorexia nervosa treatment studies. In October 2021, the National Institute of Health awarded Johns Hopkins a grant to explore the potential value of psilocybin as a smoking cessation tool — the first federal grant given in 50 years for the study of a psychedelic treatment in the U.S.
In May 2022, UK-based mental health care firm COMPASS Pathways completed an exploratory study of psilocybin therapy for patients with anorexia nervosa, with encouraging preliminary results that warrant further investigation in larger-scale clinical studies.
HOW PSILOCYBIN WORKS
When taken under supported conditions, psilocybin can cause self-described “spiritual” experiences that generally result in positive changes in the person’s attitude, mood and behavior. In particular, psilocybin appears to elevate a personality quality known as “openness,” which encompasses sensitivity, imagination, and an appreciation for the values and viewpoints of others.
The improved openness found in people who take psilocybin may be connected to the chemical’s ability to increase neuroplasticity, which is the brain’s ability to create new connections. To date, several studies have supported the idea that psilocybin and other psychedelics can induce or increase neuroplasticity.
“Although more research is needed to determine what’s happening at the chemical level,” says Dr. Marino, “psilocybin appears to increase the brain’s capacity to change, to become more adaptive, and to break out of habits and negative thought patterns. Hence psilocybin’s great potential in helping people with problems like depression, anxiety, OCD and addiction.”
Dr. Marino also believes that microdosing psilocybin, or taking very small amounts, is an area that deserves exploratory and larger-scale clinical study. There is significant anecdotal evidence to suggest the practice may have significant benefits for people with mental health disorders, as well as benefits for overall wellness.
Dr. Marino emphasizes that it is important to understand that taking psilocybin outside of a controlled setting has risks, including experiencing a range of undesirable and harmful effects.
“The risks associated with psilocybin,” he says, “are effectively and safely reduced in the controlled study environment, where participants receive structured support, monitoring and follow-up care from trained therapists and clinicians. That being said, I would not recommend that people take psilocybin on their own, as it is also illegal under both federal and state law.”
https://www.uhhospitals.org/blog/articles/2022/05/magic-mushrooms-psilocybin-and-mental-health
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PSILOCYBIN: A JOURNEY BEYOND THE FEAR OF DEATH
~ In one of the largest and most rigorous clinical investigations of psychedelic drugs to date, researchers at Johns Hopkins University and New York University have found that a single dose of psilocybin—the psychoactive compound in “magic” mushrooms—substantially diminished depression and anxiety in patients with advanced cancer.
Psychedelics were the subject of a flurry of serious medical research in the 1960s, when many scientists believed some of the mind-bending compounds held tremendous therapeutic promise for treating a number of conditions including severe mental health problems and alcohol addiction. But flamboyant Harvard psychology professor Timothy Leary—one of the top scientists involved—started aggressively promoting LSD as a consciousness expansion tool for the masses, and the youth counterculture movement answered the call in a big way. Leary lost his job and eventually became an international fugitive. Virtually all legal research on psychedelics shuddered to a halt when federal drug policies hardened in the 1970s.
The decades-long research blackout ended in 1999 when Roland Griffiths of Johns Hopkins was among the first to initiate a new series of studies on psilocybin. Griffiths has been called the grandfather of the current psychedelics research renaissance, and a 21st-century pioneer in the field—but the soft-spoken investigator is no activist or shaman/showman in the mold of Leary. He’s a scientifically cautious clinical pharmacologist and author of more than 300 studies on mood-altering substances from coffee to ketamine.
Much of Griffiths’ fascination with psychedelics stems from his own mindfulness meditation practice, which he says sparked his interest in altered states of consciousness. When he started administering psilocybin to volunteers for his research, he was stunned that more than two-thirds of the participants rated their psychedelic journey one of the most important experiences of their lives.
Griffiths believes that psychedelics are not just tools for exploring the far reaches of the human mind. He says they show remarkable potential for treating conditions ranging from drug and alcohol dependence to depression and post-traumatic stress disorder.
They may also help relieve one of humanity’s cruelest agonies: the angst that stems from facing the inevitability of death. In research conducted collaboratively by Griffiths and Stephen Ross, clinical director of the NYU Langone Center of Excellence on Addiction, 80 patients with life-threatening cancer in Baltimore and New York City were given laboratory-synthesized psilocybin in a carefully monitored setting, and in conjunction with limited psychological counseling. More than three-quarters reported significant relief from depression and anxiety—improvements that remained during a follow-up survey conducted six months after taking the compound, according to the double-blind study published December 1 in The Journal of Psychopharmacology.
“It is simply unprecedented in psychiatry that a single dose of a medicine produces these kinds of dramatic and enduring results,” Ross says. He and Griffiths acknowledge that psychedelics may never be available on the drugstore shelf. But the scientists do envision a promising future for these substances in controlled clinical use. In a wide-ranging interview, Griffiths told Scientific American about the cancer study and his other work with psychedelics—a field that he says could eventually contribute to helping ensure our survival as a species.
What were your concerns going into the cancer study?
The volunteers came to us often highly stressed and demoralized by their illness and the often-grueling medical treatment. I felt very cautious at first, wondering if this might not re-wound people dealing with the painful questions of death and dying. How do we know that this kind of experience with this disorienting compound wouldn’t exacerbate that? It turns out that it doesn’t. It does just the opposite. The experience appears to be deeply meaningful spiritually and personally, and very healing in the context of people’s understanding of their illness and how they manage that going forward.
Could you describe your procedure?
We spent at least eight hours talking to people about their cancer, their anxiety, their concerns and so on to develop good rapport with them before the trial. During the sessions there was no specific psychological intervention—we were just inviting people to lie on the couch and explore their own inner experience.
What did your research subjects tell you about that experience? There is something about the core of this experience that opens people up to the great mystery of what it is that we don’t know. It is not that everybody comes out of it and says, ‘Oh, now I believe in life after death.’ That needn’t be the case at all. But the psilocybin experience enables a sense of deeper meaning, and an understanding that in the largest frame everything is fine and that there is nothing to be fearful of.
There is a buoyancy that comes of that which is quite remarkable. To see people who are so beaten down by this illness, and they start actually providing reassurance to the people who love them most, telling them ‘it is all okay and there is no need to worry’— when a dying person can provide that type of clarity for their caretakers, even we researchers are left with a sense of wonder.
Was this positive result universal?
We found that the response was dose-specific. The larger dose created a much larger response than the lower dose. We also found that the occurrence of mystical-type experiences is positively correlated with positive outcomes: Those who underwent them were more likely to have enduring, large-magnitude changes in depression and anxiety.
Did any of your volunteers experience difficulties?
There are potential risks associated with these compounds. We can protect against a lot of those risks, it seems, through the screening and preparation procedure in our medical setting. About 30 percent of our people reported some fear or discomfort arising sometime during the experience. If individuals are anxious, then we might say a few words, or hold their hand. It is really just grounding them in consensual reality, reminding them that they have taken psilocybin, that everything is going to be all right. Very often these short-lived experiences of psychological challenge can be cathartic and serve as doorways into personal meaning and transcendence—but not always.
Where do you go from here?
The Heffter Research Institute, which funded our study, has just opened a dialogue with the FDA (Food and Drug Administration) about initiating a phase 3 investigation. A phase 3 clinical trial is the gold standard for determining whether something is clinically efficacious and meets the standards that are necessary for it to be released as a pharmaceutical. Approval would be under very narrow and restrictive conditions initially. The drug might be controlled by a central pharmacy, which sends it to clinics that are authorized to administer psilocybin in this therapeutic context. So this is not writing a prescription and taking it home. The analogy would be more like an anesthetic being dispensed and managed by an anesthesiologist.
You are also currently conducting research on psilocybin and smoking.
We are using psilocybin in conjunction with cognitive behavioral therapy with cigarette smokers to see if these deeply meaningful experiences that can happen with psilocybin can be linked with the intention and commitment to quit smoking, among people who have failed repeatedly to do so. Earlier we ran an uncontrolled pilot study on that in 50 volunteers, in which we had 80 percent abstinence rates at six months. Now we are doing a controlled clinical trial in that population.
How do you account for your remarkable initial results?
People who have taken psilocybin appear to have more confidence in their ability to change their own behavior and to manage their addictions. Prior to this experience, quite often the individual feels that they have no freedom relative to their addiction, that they are hooked and they don’t have the capacity to change. But after an experience of this sort—which is like backing up and seeing the larger picture—they begin to ask themselves ‘Why would I think that I couldn’t stop cigarette smoking? Why would I think that this craving is so compelling that I have to give in to it?’ When the psilocybin is coupled with cognitive behavioral therapy, which is giving smokers tools and a framework to work on this, it appears to be very helpful.
You are also working with meditation practitioners. Are they having similar experiences?
We have done an unpublished study with beginning meditators. We found that psilocybin potentiates their engagement with their spiritual practice, and it appears to boost dispositional characteristics like gratitude, compassion, altruism, sensitivity to others and forgiveness. We were interested in whether the psilocybin used in conjunction with meditation could create sustained changes in people that were of social value. And that appears to be the case.
So it is actually changing personality?
Yes. That is really interesting because personality is considered to be a fixed characteristic; it is generally thought to be locked down in an individual by their early twenties. And yet here we are seeing significant increases in their “openness” and other pro-social dimensions of personality, which are also correlated with creativity, so this is truly surprising.
Do we know what is actually happening in the brain? We are doing neuro-imaging studies. Dr. Robin Carhart-Harris’s group at Imperial College in London is also doing neuro-imaging studies. So it is an area of very active investigation. The effects are perhaps explained, at least initially, by changes in something [in the brain] called “the default mode network,” which is involved in self-referential processing [and in sustaining our sense of ego]. It turns out that this network is hyperactive in depression. Interestingly, in meditation it becomes quiescent, and also with psilocybin it becomes quiescent. This may correlate with the experience of clarity of coming into the present moment.
That is perhaps an explanation of the acute effects, but the enduring effects are much less clear, and I don’t think that we have a good handle on that at all. Undoubtedly it is going to be much more complex than just the default mode network, because of the vast interconnectedness of brain function.
What are the practical implications of this kind of neurological and therapeutic knowledge of psychedelics?
Ultimately it is not really about psychedelics. Science is going to take it beyond psychedelics when we start understanding the brain mechanisms underlying this and begin harnessing these for the benefit of humankind.
The core mystical experience is one of the interconnectedness of all people and things, the awareness that we are all in this together. It is precisely the lack of this sense of mutual caretaking that puts our species at risk right now, with climate change and the development of weaponry that can destroy life on the planet. So the answer is not that everybody needs to take psychedelics. It is to understand what mechanisms maximize these kinds of experiences, and to learn how to harness them so that we don’t end up annihilating ourselves. ~
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/psilocybin-a-journey-beyond-the-fear-of-death/
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LOW-PROTEIN DIET AGAINST CANCER
~ "In colon cancer, when you decrease the nutrients available in the tumors, the cells don't know what to do. Without the nutrients to grow, they undergo a kind of crisis, which leads to massive cell death," said senior author Yatrik M. Shah, Ph.D., Horace W. Davenport Collegiate Professor of Physiology at Michigan Medicine.
Researchers found in cells and in mice that a low-protein diet blocked the nutrient signaling pathway that fires up a master regulator of cancer growth. Results are published in Gastroenterology.
The regulator, mTORC1, controls how cells use nutritional signals to grow and multiply. It's highly active in cancers with certain mutations and is known to cause cancer to become resistant to standard treatments. A low-protein diet, and specifically a reduction in two key amino acids, changed the nutritional signals through a complex called GATOR.
GATOR1 and GATOR2 work together to keep mTORC1 in business. When a cell has plenty of nutrients, GATOR2 activates mTORC1. When nutrients are low, GATOR1 deactivates mTORC1. Limiting certain amino acids blocks this nutrient signaling.
Previous efforts to block mTORC have focused on inhibiting its cancer-causing signals. But these inhibitors cause significant side effects – and when patients stop taking it, the cancer comes back. The study suggests that blocking the nutrient pathway by limiting amino acids through a low-protein diet offers an alternative way to shut down mTORC.
Cancer cells need nutrients to survive and grow. One of the most important nutrient sensing molecules in a cell is called mTORC1. Often called a master regulator of cell growth, it allows cells to sense different nutrients and thereby grow and proliferate. When nutrients are limited, cells dial down nutrient sensing cascade and turn off mTORC1.
While mTORC1 is known to be hyperactive in colon cancer, the key question is whether colon tumors hijack nutrient sensing pathways to fire up the master regulator.
"We knew that nutrients were important in mTORC regulation but we didn't know how they directly signal to mTORC. We discovered the nutrient signaling pathway is just as important to regulate mTORC as the oncogenic signaling pathway," said study first author Sumeet Solanki, Ph.D., a research investigator at the Rogel Cancer Center.
Researchers confirmed their findings in cells and mice, where they saw that limiting amino acids stopped the cancer from growing and led to increased cell death. They also looked at tissue biopsies from patients with colon cancer, which confirmed high markers of mTORC correlated with more resistance to chemotherapy and worse outcomes. Solanki said this could provide an opportunity to direct treatment for patients with this marker.
"A low-protein diet won't be standalone treatment. It has to be combined with something else, such as chemotherapy," Solanki said.
The risk with a low-protein diet is that people with cancer often experience muscle weakness and weight loss, which limiting protein could exasperate.
"Putting cancer patients on a protein-deficient diet long-term is not ideal. But if you can find key windows – like at the start of chemotherapy or radiation – when patients could go on a low protein diet for a week or two, we could potentially increase the efficacy of those treatments," Shah said.
Further research will refine this concept of a therapeutic window to limit amino acids. Researchers will also seek to understand how these pathways are creating resistance to treatment and whether an inhibitor could block the GATOR complexes. ~
https://www.michiganmedicine.org/health-lab/dietary-change-starves-cancer-cells-overcoming-treatment-resistance
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~ In humans, diet-related overweight and obesity are well-established risk factors for some of the most prominent cancers, including breast cancer in post-menopausal women and colorectal, hepatic, pancreatic, or advanced prostate cancer.
Prostate cancer, the second most common malignancy in men, has an approximately sixfold higher incidence in Western than in non-Western countries, most likely due to differences in the consumed food. Furthermore, a poor prognostic outcome, higher risk for cancer recurrence, comorbidity, and disease-specific or overall mortality has been reported for the overweight. ~
FMDs = fasting-mimicking diets, e.g. a ketogenic diet (most people do it wrong, consuming too much protein; excess protein gets converted into glucose)
Fasting or
fasting-mimicking diets (FMDs) lead to wide alterations in growth
factors and in metabolite levels, generating environments that can
reduce the capability of cancer cells to adapt and survive and thus
improving the effects of cancer therapies.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8190229/
Oriana:
In this case, a low-protein diet does not mean a high-carbohydrate diet. Rather, it's a diet that mimics fasting. Fasting itself is a therapy, but it needs to be done early in the course of the disease, not when the patient is terminal and emaciated.
“Keto diets shrink pancreatic and colorectal tumors by starving them of the glucose they need to survive. But they also speed up development of a lethal wasting disease called cachexia. In mice, researchers have found that pairing keto with a corticosteroid prevents cachexia and increases survival.” ~ https://www.cshl.edu/the-latest-weapon-against-cancer-is-a-keto-diet/
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Ending on beauty:
As long as the woman at the Rijksmuseum
keeps pouring milk day after day
from a clay jug into a bowl, the world
does not deserve
the end of the world.
~ Wisława Szymborska
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