Step Away From the Machine

First, the image seen above is from a series of protest photos by a man named Chauncey Hare. That's him in his own photo, sitting in his cubicle at the EPA. He thinks big business and their big owners are taking over the world, and he's probably right. 

One thing that's pretty certain -- we are not in control, not of the world at large, and not even of ourselves. 

Image credit: Chauncey Hare - Self Portrait at EPA - 1980 [Protest Photos]

Chauncey Hare, "Self Portrait at EPA" (1980), from Quitting Your Day Job: Chauncey Hare’s Photographic Work by Robert Slifkin (MACK, 2022), Chauncey Hare Photograph Archive, BANC PIC 2000.012.14:023- 024—ffALB. This photograph was made by Chauncey Hare to protest and warn against the growing domination of working people by multi-national corporations and their elite owners and managers. (© The Regents of the University of California, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley) https://hyperallergic.com/741181/chauncey-hare-quitting-your-day-job/

Researcher offers new explanation for consciousness

Oct 2022, phys.org

https://medicalxpress.com/news/2022-10-explanation-consciousness.html

Deepak Chopra's pissed:

"In a nutshell, our theory is that consciousness developed as a memory system that is used by our unconscious brain to help us flexibly and creatively imagine the future and plan accordingly," explained corresponding author Andrew Budson, MD, professor of neurology. "What is completely new about this theory is that it suggests we don't perceive the world, make decisions, or perform actions directly. Instead, we do all these things unconsciously and then—about half a second later—consciously remember doing them."

"Even our thoughts are not generally under our conscious control. This lack of control is why we may have difficulty stopping a stream of thoughts running through our head as we're trying to go to sleep, and also why mindfulness is hard," adds Budson.

via Boston University School of Medicine: Andrew E. Budson et al, Consciousness as a Memory System, Cognitive and Behavioral Neurology (2022). DOI: 10.1097/WNN.0000000000000319

https://dx.doi.org/10.1097/WNN.0000000000000319

Scientists identify pathway that triggers mice to scratch when they see others do the same

Oct 2022, phys.org

https://medicalxpress.com/news/2022-10-scientists-pathway-triggers-mice.html

"Contagious itching" is controlled through a visual pathway, that surprisingly, operates independently of the visual cortex.

You can see without a visual cortex. What else do we not-see?

via Washington University School of Medicine in St Louis: Fang Gao et al, A non-canonical retina-ipRGCs-SCN-PVT visual pathway for mediating contagious itch behavior, Cell Reports (2022). DOI: 10.1016/j.celrep.2022.111444.

https://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.celrep.2022.111444

A handful of universities seem to control flow of ideas, people in academia

Oct 2022, phys.org

https://phys.org/news/2022-09-universities-ideas-people-academia.html

Just network science telling us what to do, as usual:

The structure of the American professoriate -- five U.S. universities have trained 1-in-8 tenure-track faculty members serving at the nation's institutions of higher learning.

(University of California, Berkeley; Harvard University; University of Michigan; Stanford University; and University of Wisconsin-Madison)

via University of Colorado at Boulder: Daniel Larremore, Quantifying hierarchy and dynamics in US faculty members hiring and retention, Nature (2022). DOI: 10.1038/s41586-022-05222-x

https://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41586-022-05222-x

Post Script:

Scientists obtain effects through virtual reality comparable to those of psychedelic drugs

Sep 2022, phys.org

https://medicalxpress.com/news/2022-09-scientists-effects-virtual-reality-psychedelic.html

They design virtual reality intersubjective group spaces where participants experience together the collective emergence, fluctuation and dissipation of their own bodies, and which produce responses similar to those triggered by psychoactive drugs.

Something about this says Robert Heinlein to me. A social science fiction perhaps. 

via Intangible Realities Laboratory at the Citius Intelligent Technologies Research Centre, Santiago de Compostela, Spain; and ArtSci International Foundation in Bristol: David R. Glowacki et al, Group VR experiences can produce ego attenuation and connectedness comparable to psychedelics, Scientific Reports (2022). DOI: 10.1038/s41598-022-12637-z

https://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41598-022-12637-z

Soul Controller

When you spend as much time as I do scrolling hundreds of science press, stuff like this is very exciting - these two images were the thumbnails for two different articles one right after the other. Mostly unrelated to the article below.

Researcher seeks to understand the regret behind social media use

Nov 2021, phys.org

https://techxplore.com/news/2021-11-social-media.html

Twenty-nine Android users ages 19–27 installed Finesse and let the app collect data on their phone usage for a week. After certain sessions on a social media app, Finesse would ask the users to select which features they regretted using.

The data showed that the users regretted at least some part of their social media use in 60% of sessions and regretted all their use in nearly 40% of sessions.

Features that offered recommended posts or content were most often regretted. 

In their research, people felt regret when the reward from scrolling recommended posts on social media did not match up to the alternative reward from focusing more on an assignment or lecture, spending more time with friends, or getting more sleep.

The apps are designed to suck people in and keep them scrolling. Frequently, people have to bypass addictive features to get to the content they initially sought.

The robots will control us.

via Carnegie Mellon University, Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) and the University of Maryland: Hyunsung Cho et al, Reflect, not Regret: Understanding Regretful Smartphone Use with App Feature-Level Analysis, Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction (2021). DOI: 10.1145/3479600

http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/3479600

On the Invisibility of Ideology

It's precisely its 'spontaneous' quality, its transparency, its 'naturalness', its refusal to be made to examine the premises on which it is founded, its resistance to change or to correction, its effect of instant recognition, and the closed circle in which it moves which makes common sense, at one and the same time, 'spontaneous', ideological and unconscious. You cannot learn, through common sense, how things are: you can only discover where they fit into the existing scheme of things. In this way, its very taken-for-grantedness is what establishess it as a medium in which its own premises and presuppositions are being rendered invisible by its apparent transparency.
-Dick Hebdige quoting Stuart Hall in Subculture: The Meaning of Style, 1979 (p11) 

Ideology has very little to do with 'consciousness'. It is profoundly unconscious...Ideology is indeed a system of representation, but in the majority of cases these representations have nothing to do with 'consciousness': they are usually images and occasionally concepts, but it is above all as structures-that they impose on the vast majority of men, not via their 'consciousness'. They are perceived-accepted-suffered cultural objects and they act functionally on men via a process that escapes them.
-Abridged, from Dick Hebdige quoting Louis Althusser in Subculture: The Meaning of Style, 1979 (p12)

Post Script:
Hindsight and Blindness, a post on the inability to see our own culture.

Thoughts on memetics and the power of physical cultural artifacts, from buildings to door handles, to program our evolution:

In memetics, the meme may be stored in the brain, in synaptic weights of networked neurons, or they may not. They are most certainly stored in the physical artifacts that make our world, the Anthroposphere.

Buildings, by their design, make us interact in a certain way, at a basic level, and one which depends on the laws of physics before anything else. We live on a two-dimensional grid, via bipedal locomotion, with an average height, weight and range of movement.

These are the base limitations from which the more complex requirements of chemistry, biology, and later psychology, sociology, anthropology are formed. The shape of a handle has encoded within its form the instructions for use, at a base level, and because we all have the same hands.

When these artifacts are combined in their totality -- buildings, tools, circuitboards and spaceships -- they set the substrate for memetic propagation.

So much of what we consider Culture, and the arena for memetic propagation, is already encoded in our anthroposphere -- that is, the physical things around us that we make and use. Trees are not part of the anthroposphere, until they become timber for building. Copper is not a part of the anthroposphere until it becomes a piece of plumbing. A language is not part of the anthroposphere until it is written down, and becomes fixed in the physical world, as in a book or engraving or the digital archive of a memory stick.

I am making an argument here, and in response to a recent binge on memetic scholarship:
Darwinizing Culture - The Status of Memetics as a Science, R Aunger ed., 2000

There is no need to look for how ideas combine and transmit and where they are stored. The ideas are manifest in the anthroposphere, and it is by using our anthroposphere, all of it and all of us all at once, that the emergent phenomena of memetic evolution occurs.

Save the studies on internet memes for the anthropologists. A rigorous study of memetics must begin with the physical. Until you can get a model based on this, Beethoven's Fifth will have to wait. But don't tell me, for example, that the evolution from the harpsichord to the piano didn't have something to do with it.

Ideology may be invisible, but it is not intangible.

Sans Agency Humans

aka Sociothermodynamics

People get all bent out of shape thinking about the eminent takeover of artificial intelligence. Personally I think we're already robots, or rather, we've always been.

Bees in a hive, wolves in a pack, gas molecules in a prescribed volume. Do we really make decisions or does something else do it for us? And I don't mean God, I mean physics.

A nice string of headlines surfaced lately that alludes to this idea of humans being driven by forces well beyond our control:

Research finds tipping point for large-scale social change
Jun 2018, phys.org

Roughly 25% of people need to take a stand before large-scale social change occurs. This idea of a social tipping point applies to standards in the workplace and any type of movement or initiative.

How physics explains the evolution of social organization
Jun 2018, phys.org

A scientist at Duke University says the natural evolution of social organizations into larger and more complex communities that exhibit distinct hierarchies can be predicted from the same law of physics that gives rise to tree branches and river deltas. 

[Author] outlines how these seemingly disparate phenomena are actually connected through the constructal law of evolution in nature. Penned by Bejan in 1996, the law states that for a system to survive, it must evolve over time to increase its access to flow. [...] and the true nature of an innovation is simply a local design change that increases the efficiency of the distribution of a resource to the entire population. While the individual innovator may benefit greatly from the idea, the entire community also gains better access to that resource, which serves to reduce overall inequality.

Study of Google search histories reveals relationship between anti-Muslim and pro-ISIS sentiment in U.S.
Jun 2018, phys.org

Researchers suggest, targeting [Islamic] groups in countries such as the U.S. might be causing home-grown radicalization to occur. 

[They] found a common theme—in low income communities where there were a lot of anti-Muslim searches, there were also a lot of searches by people looking for more information about radical Islamic groups. Such communities, the researchers further noted, tended to be homogeneous in nature, mostly white, with few people of color. People from the Middle East, they point out, stand out in such communities. This finding, they claim, suggests that anti-Muslim activities such as discrimination and being targeted by government officials might actually be pushing some of those targeted people toward becoming extremists.

Adding a bit of moderation, we should note that humans lack agency in this context the way that smoking one cigarette takes 0.05 seconds off your life. Assertions like this come from absolutely huge, unimaginable numbers of people and variables working in concert and across time.

Our little brains can't handle it. This is why it's so hard to connect that one cigarette to lung cancer (especially in the face of nicotine addiction) and also why many if not most of us can't handle the possibility that neither we nor an omnipotent entity have control. It is instead the interaction of myriad forces, generating every-increasingly complex arrangements. Coincidentally, it is Liebniz bday (thanks google doodle); he is the guy that said things don't exist in themselves but only in their relation to others - an idea that has yet to be fully incorporated into our universal model of this thing we live in.

image source: valve steam controller

Programmed By Who

(No Wires) Free Roam above the Mist, Jonathan Zawada

Hod Lipson on Programmable Matter: Shape of Things to Come
OTV Big Ideas Lecture, 2011

"...Breeding robots in a simulated, Darwinian environment..."

Humans don't design them per se.

The designer doesn't get so specific, you just explain what you want and the program/AI/bot/algo/software figures it out.

Only because they feel the strings on their fingers do they say they have done it. It was really someone else.

-Mass Transference Device

Crows Don't Understand Shit

Crows can 'reason' about causes, a recent study

18 September 2012, BBC

If I only had a brain...

Time and again, I can't help but think it is us who are more animal than we think. Even our thinking is a product of evolution. We don't make the decisions; ours is to produce variety. Something else makes the decisions, something else calls the mind rational. Perhaps crows do understand. If so, then, we do not.

clipped article:

Tool-making crows have the ability to "reason", say scientists.

In an experiment, researchers found that crows were more likely to forage when they could attribute changes in their environment to a human presence.

This behaviour may suggest "complex cognition", according to a study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The study is the first to suggest that animals have the ability to make reasoned inferences, although scientists added that the phenomenon could be more common among animals than previously thought.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/nature/19626912

see also:

Joshua Klein: The intelligence of crows

FILMED MAR 2008 • POSTED MAY 2008 • TED2008

Watch him explain how he taught crows to recycle, as well as pickpocket

http://www.ted.com/talks/joshua_klein_on_the_intelligence_of_crows.html

Dogs understand human perspective, say researchers

Sean Coughlan, 11 February 2013

They found dogs were four times more likely to steal food they had been forbidden, when lights were turned off so humans in the room could not see.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-21411249