An Open Missive for Federico Faggin - Goodreads Review

Irreducible: Consciousness, Life, Computers, and Human Nature by Federico Faggin
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I was very excited to hear of this new book, by way of Bernardo Kastrup. Kastrup is very compelling about his insights, and I have found Faggin similarly compelling. I have, myself, come to similar insights from a different perspective, and his write-up has been extremely helpful for my own thinking.

My thinking certainly harmonizes with the conclusions of Irreducible, though I would love to engage Dr. Faggin about what I think may be mistakes in his analysis. I don't claim so much that he is wrong, but rather that he needlessly elaborates concepts in a way that many readers might associate with other unprovable belief systems. He might be getting in the way of a more convincing argument.

We most certainly agree that what is called AI is not very similar to human intelligence, but I think his systematization is overly complex, especially with his introduction of new and, to me, unnecessary technical terms.

It has been my adult pursuit to find someone with whom I might communicate those insights I gained from an experience while in my twenties, not dissimilar to what Faggin describes in the introduction to Irreducible, where he describes feeling a kind of cosmic love. I arrived at that place by cognitive breakthroughs; insights about love would follow.

The main elements of my own preparation before my breakthrough were physics and a reasonably deep study of Chinese poetics, together with a practiced understanding of how things work. I was living at the time aboard a wooden boat that I'd rebuilt. I am less proficient at designing or building new things. I am even (or have been) demonstrably great at troubleshooting computer networks.

I am no inventor or innovator, except perhaps conceptually with words. I left behind childish pursuits of gizmos and gadgets, having experienced early on the mayhem of industrial pollution and its analog of spiritual confusion from an economy fundamentally tied to warfare. These problems would not be fixed by use of the masters' tools. Dr. Faggin may have the pride of an inventor, which allows him to lay claim to more than he should in his formulations. I humbly ask that he open his mind to a much simpler rendering.

As do many of us, I now feel a sense of emergency, based on my own advancing age as well as on what I feel has become the moral emergency of mankind's misapprehension about the nature of existence. I think that much more than the future of mankind is at stake. Faggin also identifies our evil tendencies in the distortions which derive from competitive self-aggrandizement.

Along with many, if not most, thinking people, I feel alarmed about the state of humanity. Our collective behavior is certainly understandable in light of exponentially accelerating transformations which began with the industrial revolution and are now culminating in a communications revolution. Hopefully, humanity is integrating just prior to the awakening which Dr. Faggin urges. In competition with that awakening is misplaced triumphalism about the glories of materialism.

It has been convenient to put aside deeper aspects of our existence so that we may almost blissfully enjoy the triumphs of our materialistic certainties. They are certainties because they work. It has been convenient to put aside conventional morality as the atavistic holdover from an ignorant theistic past, while we glory in newfound bodily comfort and thrill.

The trouble is with replacing one theology with another.

Here's a tiny rehearsal of how evil works: I find it convenient that my phone offers up news items according to my interests. But this is not serendipity, as Faggin amply defines such things. I read more and more and inevitably fall into a false sense that by understanding more and more detail, I can alter my behavior in ways to make the world, and my world, a better place.

But of course all of the computed suggestions are motivated by algorithms for monetization. The root of all evil. By comparison, wanton recreational sex is a sin on the level of using the f word in every sentence. Bad, but not so bad. And yet our political body is once again motivated by the same kind of moral absolutes which power terrorists. How can we better align ourselves?

Because I feel still alone with my own realizations, and apparently remain incapable to share them, It is hard for me to find any good outcome for not just our current trends; it is also difficult to circumvent my sense that we have already passed the point of no return.

Collectively, we are experiencing a moral failure, which is firmly based in dangerous assumptions about the meaning of progress, the proper purposes for technology, and especially on economic arrangements which incentivize inhuman behaviors. But, it is in the nature of moral failure that it can be rectified much more quickly than can other sorts of ignorance.

It is still not inconceivable to me that we shall pull ourselves together and arise from our man-made muck by tugging at our bootstraps once the obvious truth of what Kastrup, Faggin, and I'll add myself, are struggling to share starts to infect a sufficient portion of intellectual mankind.

In some fictional cosmos - a fiction which I don't endorse - our global collectivization will entail spontaneous contact and potential communion with some other global collective of consciousness. A more realistic scenario to me would be our moral awakening to a collective responsibility for life in the largest sense. That is sine-qua-non for transcendence of our contemporary benightedness.

In a related, though subtly different fantasy, we will solve all of our problems by the application of new technologies derived from objective materialist science. It already seems far too evident that this fantasy stokes human competitive greed much faster than human compassion.

My own interpretation involves deeper definitions for familiar terms. I combine those definitions with a fuller definition for time than what we currently understand.

Firstly, I would extend to emotion the universal quality that Faggin extends (as does Kastrup) to consciousness. Consciousness is surely much more common than is conscious mind, but the term loses its meaning if made universal to the level of paramecia. Mind pervades everything, in the way that Faggin would have consciousness do, while conscious mind is rather rare, and on earth that designation should probably be reserved for humans. I think both Faggin and Kastrup misuse the term consciousness to mean mind, with which the smallest entities must always participate, even though mostly without consciousness.

A different way to speak about this, as Faggin does to an extent, would be to observe that the separation of individual conscious entities from all else is a very dangerous exaggeration. Digital either/or reality is by definition not connected. I would observe consciousness in individuated animal species as "primitive" as a lizard. That would be the starting point for "free will," or the ability to initiate causation in the world "outside" the conscious being. It would be the boundary between reactive unconscious vegetative participation and a more proactive animal posture. All boundaries are fractal, and therefore not measurable or precisely locatable, so this starting point must be intrinsically arbitrary. Proactive conscious decisions are prompted by emotive (gut) impulse, conditioned by cognitive understanding. No creature reasons its way out of emergency. Emotion provides the quickening.

I would claim that conceptual reality is ontologically equivalent to perceptual reality. Concepts exist in minds (or are of mind), and generally require rough material representations before they can be spoken of and shared. There is no conceptual circle in perceptual reality, though there must be approximations near enough to the idea(l) to provide the basis for shared comprehension.

Ideas are not born of themselves - they are not the initiator of what we call invention - but result from the interplay of objective material reality and the conceptual work of mind.

I don't think that the philosopher's term 'qualia' adds anything useful to our understanding. That term exists because of an unthinking denigration of conceptual reality. We have no more trouble being certain that our compeers perceive our own "red" than we do with more instrumental perception. In this I agree with materialist Daniel Dennett.

I don't find any of the newly coined technical terms which Faggin uses to add anything useful to this discussion. I mean such usages as seity, CU, as well as qualia. To some extent, Faggin is urging a belief system based on his own quasi-religious awakening. I don't think he's really furthering understanding.

The consequence of the realization of the ontological equivalency of conceptual reality with perceptual reality is the realization that mind pervades the cosmos.

The nut of my realization has been that emotion is (the apprehension of) change in conceptual arrangements. To put that another way, in the perceptual world, movement means that force is present - the exchange of gauge bosons, as described in the standard physical model. In conceptual terms, there is movement without force, and that movement constitutes or provokes the emotional response of the conscious mind. That response ranges from "aha" to the love felt when deeply in communion with cosmic mind. To understand is to feel a more encompassing conceptual arrangement.

Of course, there is no final or ultimate understanding. This realization is where hope resides. The world which we co-create will never be complete. Its natural laws evolve along with its creatures.

As regards ultimate matters, Dr. Faggin doesn't address time except implicitly. It is my realization that directional time is defined by the course and direction of evolution in life. A sort of complement to entropy, which might be called love, but might better be called eros.

I don't believe that there is any consistent physical description for time's direction without life. As with the big bang at the beginning - according to some exponents of the standard model - without life, the ending of the cosmos would be as instant and as beyond time (as we currently understand and sense it) as "was" the Big Bang. Emotion is a not time and force-bound any more than is quantum entanglement. The universe as we experience it is not composed of 3+1 dimensions. It is composed of four.

The non-reproducibility of quantum nature constitutes the identity of all electrons with all other electrons. Faggin mistakes the mistakes the uniqueness - the non-clonability - of each collapsible cloud of probability, just as he extends the uniqueness of each individual conscious being by introducing the needless concept of seity. No other conscious being can exist in my space. My "interiority" is sufficiently defined by my social, physical, linguistic and emotional "position;" my uniqueness requires no further mystification. Electrons or other quantum particles are sufficiently unique according to their approximate position. It isn't helpful to equate this uniqueness with some supposed "interiority" of consciousness. Personally, I tend to believe that we all wear our special qualities on our sleeves.

In brief, usages for both "consciousness" and "time," as that relates to history and development, are not sufficiently examined or consistent as described in Irreducible. If he has a kind of faith that the interconnected lived world of consciousness will get us out of our current mess, I also differ with that fundamentally religious position. What is required is the exercise of moral will.

In some obvious sense, each of us is individuated enough that our being doesn't end when our body does. Based on a personal experience of death by drowning, I also know that, upon death, individual human consciousness grows exponentially toward full consciousness of one's entire life at once. Analagous to the Big Bang, death of consciousness, identical to birth of consciousness, has no boundary, no finality, and is metaphorically identical to time dilation to massless eternity at light-speed.

Humans are now organized in a state of confusion probably greater than any previously experienced in our history. Various styles of religious belief proliferate willy-nilly, and an alarming number of people have evidently abandoned any and all natural (versus rule-bound) quality to morality and moral behavior. Our seeking individual fault is counterproductive at best, and is more likely an accelerant to our collective misbehavior, as I'm certain Dr. Faggin would agree.

Ours is a crisis of understanding, though its terms are based on morality, rather than on cognitive understanding. Accepting the fundamental reality of emotion allows for at least as much "progress" toward rulemaking for behavior as materialism (R.I.P.) has afforded us the means to control our environment. Meanwhile, we've run amok both conceptually and materially.

I wish that I could develop a compelling narrative, but I seem first to require an interlocutor open-minded and informed enough to work with me on that. So far, there has been nobody. It would be a contradiction in terms for me to be able to accomplish this understanding on my own. My goal in blogging is to make contact. I have no finished description or explanation on my own.

I'll be grateful for any help in the contact.

View all my reviews

Exhausting AI

I want to focus on a small set of the absurdities of so-called Artificial Intelligence. I'm motivated in the first place by some misapprehension about what general intelligence is and isn't. Human intelligence, for instance, can't be understood apart from random. Random is that uncontrollable part of reality, which human intelligence deals with reactively and/or intuitively. There is emotion involved.

Sometimes humans proactively measure how the future is likely to be disposed and change present decisions accordingly, in a proactive way. The decision is only logical if there is time for that. Otherwise, I would contend that it's mostly emotional. We'd never survive if all our decisions were made logically. 

Now, I'm sure that computer-based AI can also deal with slings and arrows, perhaps even better than humans can. Perhaps it will be enough better than humans to price out human reaction, no matter the cost in electrical power and design to prime our intuition pumps with artifice. The trouble is that once the raw speed of AI decidering takes over, emotion will be essentially banished from our world.

I have maintained for quite a while that AI doesn't and didn't start with computers. AI is the kind of intelligence to which we delegate our human choices when we wish to take credit for our good luck on the basis of our cleverness. Sometimes, while knowing the morally good choice, we make the clever choice to advance our individual interests. 

This is what our economy is designed to reward, and most of us are familiar with the blowhards who claim credit for their inherited social capital, which includes social placement, good luck, and frankly for their vacuity in the morality department. 

Artificial intelligence leaves no room for morality in decision-making, except in the extremis of legal sanctions against certain plays, and possibly when morality can be reduced to a set if rules for compliance. But legality and rule-making is its own realm of AI, not able to touch the global decision-making which most, or at least many, of us still leave to the Gods. 

But the Gods won't decide such things as how ridiculous it is to build electric vehicle recharging stations along the interstates. Sure, if mandate number one is to preserve private vehicle saturation, which it certainly is in our economy, then it only makes sense to get them on the prized contributor to the economy from the military-industrial complex, which is the Interstate Highway System.

From a more human perspective, it surely makes more sense to retrofit those rights of way with comfortable high-speed rail. Leave the electric vehicles for those benighted souls who still want to live in the suburbs, and leave the smartphone distributed autonomous vehicles for the urban centers. Make them mostly trolleys, please.

If you're lucky enough to be a C-level deciderer, you know that it would be considered immoral of you to forgo the collective, corporate, interest according to your personal or religious morality. You only job is to maximize profits, though that might be accomplished by pleasing a certain religiously guided segment of your customer base. 

While what we mean traditionally by religion is dying, we collectively behave in ways concordant with religious empires just simply because no matter how sophisticated we think that we've become, we have as much ability to trust our collective knowledge as we did before Darwin when we trusted religious authorities. Where's the progress, I ask. 

For good reason, we've tried to ban religious thinking from the marketplace, from the education space, and especially from government. The trouble is that we don't know what to do about morality short of the law. Or long of the law, if you will. 

Now for certain, I think that the notion of a personal god has become nutty, but not quite so nutty as the notion that there is no god. And I don't mean a God, which tends toward nutty but God. As in there is God. 

You can say it's just lazy to attribute to God what is beyond humans, but really that's only if you think humans are ultimately capable of understanding everything. Which would mean, ultimately, to banish random except as a mathematical concept. Which is probably the same thing as to banish God, since many of us find God in the distinction between random events which make no difference, and random events which do. We're somehow supposed to believe, scientifically, that it's wrong to attribute meaning to happenstance. I think that's a rule impossible to follow myself. 

Let's take if for granite [sic] that machines don't fall in love. While machines having a certain sort of sophistication to their logic pumps, their LLMs, might imitate forms of language or music or imagery which trigger emotional response in humans, those machines themselves are never taken in.

Now, jumping ahead of myself for a moment, do we really wish to live in a universe of what used to be called MUZAK (c) ?? Surely AI can anticipate our emotional responses better than any superstar, especially when that superstar is immediately digested by the AI replicating monster.

Machines aren't taken in, in part, at least, because of an inbred inability to make decisions by random selection. At it's extreme, that's because digital is cut off from that continuum which living creatures are part of and not apart from the way that AI is, by definition. 

Sure, throw in random from the "real world" beyond the AI and you can get something that might nearly replicate the processes of evolution, for example. But apart from the performative sort of falling in love, which arguably most humans practice now, especially given the ubiquity of performative sex on screens everywhere, there won't be any machine falling in love. Whoops, I've turned you off!

It's funny, in a weird way, that those of us who grew up under the shadow of the scary population bomb have now been presented with an equally scary baby-shortage bomb, itself under the shadow of the climate bomb. 

Our economy depends, in addition to amoral AI, on perpetual growth. At its root remains perishable humans. Perishable humans who can't separate the mechanics of sex from the emotions of sexual engagement, and ultimately, of reproduction.

I know that sounds primitive of me. I wish to say precisely nothing about the amorality of hooking up, of trans sex, of recreational sex whatever gender to whichever. Those things don't quite make it into my morality either. 

I'm just talking about the necessary and eternal connection between whatever it is that we feel in communion with our fellow humans, and whatever it is that we physically do. Love can take at least as many forms as cultures, languages, and people do. At root, there has to be some sort of reproductive process for life to be life. 

It is my contention that the overall trajectory of life is in a direction informed by love. I mean evolution in the largest possible sense. This direction has been disturbed by the forces of AI for only a few hundred years by now. Call them the years of apocalypse if you must, but the form and nature of that darned apocalypse keeps shifting, doesn't it?

The big BIG question is how are we to collectively decide anything anymore? I guess the good news is that we are in a massive liminal zone, which is wherefrom all life has always evolved. Think beaches and tides. Earth and sky. Beneath and beyond the bozone, er, ozone layer. 

Frankly all of our weirdness can be reduced to idiotic notions of individualism. The great thing about the great transformative NOW is that the skin is dissolving before our very eyes. ASMR, sure, but we don't feel a thing anymore. 

Here are some of my own practices in service to the collective good. They all seem to have the quality of having been internalized as disgust. Sort of like the digust we would feel while eating shit, but less natural than that. 

So, I can't drink Coke. If I must drink it, it tastes as good to me as it does to you, but given that I don't and can't know everything that's in it, I get more pleasure from a splash of orange juice into soda water. If I could afford it, and it didn't cost so much transportation-based wastage, I might use Perrier water, but it does so I won't.

I can't purchase plastic bags or plastic wrap, though I do clean and use the stuff that's thrust on me in the form of leftovers. I see no actual need for these things, and I feel a kind of disgust with myself to use them. 

I won't ever buy an electric car, basically because those seem to have more power to continue our addiction to automobiles than gas cars do. Sadly, I can only imagine the actual joy of plentiful and comfortable public transportation. I could use the social interaction. I love driving, though, and like a gun owner you can pry the wheel from my cold dead hands, or I'll gladly relinquish my car if you help me vote for more and better public transportation. Meanwhile I need a stick shift and the sense that I'm doing the driving. I can't imagine any other reason to want a car. I know a million reasons for needing a car, but we need to vote those out of existence.

My route to not feeling fretful or guilty all the time is to imagine that the God resolution when it comes, will look nothing like the human resolution. We obviously can't decide to end global warming. But the decision will be foisted upon us willy-nilly. Will it be population collapse? Shipping breakdown for political reasons? Hatred and warfare because of the obscenity of intrageneralational wealth transfer combined with s shrinking ratio of beneficiaries per decedent? Some seventy trillion dollars going from lots of baby-boomers to far fewer offspring.

We're already almost crippled - politically we are crippled - by all the hatred caused by the ambiguities of received truth. Meaning that we don't know who to trust, and gather toward those whose beliefs most match our own. We use things like race and culture and religion to mark our enemies. Surely that collective force will overwhelm any goodwill we might muster. 

And yet through it all there will still be love and life and happiness and sadness. Hanging on to what we have now, no matter how comfortable we think it is, is not going to make anyone happy. In very simple terms, the comforts we crave - in the same way we crave a Coke - are not sustainable. 

But many these are artificial comforts, not even worthy of the name. The real comforts are love and security and warmth and a full stomach. The gizmos and gadgets and happy-making machines just don't cut it against those basics. The more duress we bring on to the whole, the less the distinctions among us will mean anything. A wealthy person on his yacht or in his bunker is just as dead as the rest of us once the seas are roiling and the skies are hot and dry.

The sun will come up tomorrow, and many of us will still find reason to think that the likes of Trump are other than a psychopathic con artist. In the collective, we are truly no smarter than the rest of the animal mass combined. In the collective, we are Leviathan gulping oil. We take credit ourselves, never crediting God for the challenge. Shall we blame God for the fall?

The Insanity of Panpsychism and Metaphysical Idealism

For some reason that I can't quite fathom, there have been a lot of articles in the popular press lately about either or both of Panpsychism and Metaphysical Idealism. I suspect it's because they don't threaten a thing about the status quo. We're all afraid of antiracism anymore. Or anything which can be polarized.

Of course, I find these approaches to metaphysics plenty attractive. But they don't really change anything, except to get rid of the same Occam's Razor rule breaking idiocy that they replace with a still worse violation. By calling everything conscious, one doesn't solve anything about the human brand of consciousness, which is so obviously singular. By calling all reality "mind" one finds oneself in the same place. These thinkers just simply can't do both/and. 

Mind and consciousness are distinguished in nearly the same way that material reality is distinguished from woo woo reality. It changes nothing to claim universality to either of these words. There are no new strategies available to test and to understand reality. Calling both or either universal qualities is an unnecessary all or nothing play. Dangerous for that.

Now of course, nobody's asking me, and nobody's going to ask me, but if you ask me, these approaches can only come from people who know far too much. Meaning that they have dived too deeply into one discipline or another and have more they need to get rid of (but can't let go of) before allowing for more radical interpretations such as the one that I would propose. 

I'm suggesting that emotion is the universal they should be looking at. There's no real woo woo about emotion other than the evident fact that it can't be measured materially, and that it's been assigned to the realm of qualia, whose existence I contest right along with Daniel Dennett, although I'm not quite so atheistic as he and the other storied four, now three R.I.P. horsemen are. 

My fundamental knowledge that God is real is based only on the conviction that we're not ever going to understand everything, nor are any of our successors or assigns even if evolution does somehow keep going. Humanity as we now construe it is the only full stop to that. On par with such other extinction events as meteor crashes or solar death, if far more premature and technically avoidable. Which means that anthropogenic stoppage is no random matter. 

To reiterate again what absolutely nobody seems to get, I'm defining emotion as the felt pseudo motion of conceptual arrangements. Never mind qualia, concepts are real, and are related to material reality by the fact that we need material approximations of conceptual arrangements in order to be able to speak of them. Take circles and squares, for instance, or any old idea for that matter. There are no ideas which exist in material reality. There is no idea of a tiger, but our decision making emotive reaction depends on having that generalization in mind. Logic is far too slow to deploy in the face of emergent reality. Logic is required only to lay the foundation for emotive choice.

Squares transforming to circles elicit about as much human emotion as would a dandelion show evidence of consciousness. Dandelions don't react or respond to generalizations, though they sure do elicit an emotional response among humans, depending on all sorts of associations. 

Yes, Virginia, art is at the root of humanity, and no other species. We live now almost entirely bereft of art, having replaced it by artifice, so long as the artificial has economic valence. The emotions we feel toward money matters are approximately as profound and bereft of actual evaluation as are our political feelings, depending as they do on very bad actors.

Go red! Go blue! I prefer football for that stuff, and my team is both red and blue.

I'll keep pounding on these things until the moment I die, I'm sure. But no worries, that event won't be any further away than the apocalypse you all believe in but don't know what to do about, or our collective awakening, which will happen willy-nilly. Whichever comes first. Our collective behaviors just now are atrocious, but then we've never been so collective as a species until so very recently. 

Don't go blaming yourself as a member of my species. You have no more real choice than does a dandelion. The story of Jesus taught us choice, if we could only jettison the claptrap about how special we are as individuals. We are nothing as individuals unless we get it together. That's the rest of the story. 

As my mom, Virginia, always said, it's darkest before the dawn. True that!