Blog — August, 2007

From page 264 of Dawkins' The God Delusion, as one of his suggested "New Ten Commandments":

Do not discriminate or oppress on the basis of sex, race or (as far as possible) species.

Ah, so he's logically going to be vegetarian, then? Given that it's not only possible but quite easy, by now, to avoid oppressing various species of animal by simply not confining, killing and eating them?

Unfortunately not:

What I believe is that we should try to minimize suffering. And so I would have no objection to killing something to eat it, provided it doesn't suffer. So I'm much more worried about the suffering in slaughterhouses and in factory farms—the dread that might enter the mind of a cow or pig when it's being led to the slaughter. To the extent that slaughtering practices are humane, I see no objection to using animals for meat.

The objection to using humans for meat would be not just that they are human, but that they would feel fear, they would know what was coming to them, they would be in a position to suffer in a way that a pig or a cow, if it was well treated, would not.

Ah, well that's easily solved: Just sneak up behind the man or woman you're intending to eat, and chloroform the tasty bastard. He'll go to sleep and wake up as a nice, juicy steak. No fear involved, at all.

"Mind if I eat your liver, then?"

"Alright, you talked me into it."

Sometimes you just gotta wonder....

All joking aside, though, unless Dawkins is at the very least making the effort to consume free-range meat, eggs, and dairy (I haven't seen any indication either way, which would typically mean that he isn't), his public concern about minimizing animal suffering and oppression is only so much unimpressive hand-wringing and "chin music." Disagree as much as you want with the animal liberationists and their threats of violence against people doing clinical research on animals, etc., at least they "put their money where their mouth is" and take actual, personal risks to improve the welfare of those creatures.

In 2004, the Dawkins Prize—awarded for "outstanding research into the ecology and behaviour of animals whose welfare and survival may be endangered by human activities"—was initiated by Oxford's Balliol College. (Wikipedia)

Again, though, unless that also covers the welfare and individual survival of animals confined to cages in factory farms....

In terms of dietary choices (not medical research), all animal suffering is unnecessary. If you really care about minimizing that pain, then, there's an easy solution: Go vegan, or at least vegetarian. In its health benefits, that simple and easy change to your lifestyle will also ease the burden for animal testing in medical research, if you think about it at all. ("Our diet is directly responsible for well over 80 percent of the diseases from which we suffer," which is a drain not only on any health-care system—private or universal—but also on the medical research involved in the drug-based treatment of illness, etc.) If even that is too much effort, how much can you honestly claim to care about the rights and suffering of animals?

Not a whole lot, really.

Jesus walks into a hotel, puts three large nails down on the counter, and says, "Can you put me up for the night?"

—godlessgeeks.com

Ken Wilber, spouting off mindlessly (in May of 2005) about the apparent effectiveness of American court challenges to evolution:

Instead of a religious preacher like Dawkins, start with something like Michael Behe's Darwin's Black Box: The Biochemical Challenge to Evolution. And then guess what? Neo-Darwinian theory can't explain shit. Deal with it.

The extensive problems with evolutionary theory as it now stands is exactly why "creation science" has made huge inroads across the country, including standing up in court cases where scientific evidence is brought in on both sides.

Heh. So that's all there is to it, eh?

Not quite. From Richard Dawkins' The God Delusion (p. 68):

Lawyers for creationists, in court cases around the American boondocks, seek out evolutionists who are openly atheists. I know—to my chagrin—that my name has been used in this way. It is an effective tactic because juries selected at random are likely to include individuals brought up to believe that atheists are demons incarnate, on a par with pedophiles or "terrorists" (today's equivalent of Salem's witches and McCarthy's Commies).

And regarding Michael Behe (p. 131):

Behe simply proclaims the bacterial flagellar motor to be irreducibly complex. Since he offers no argument in favour of his assertion, we may begin by suspecting a failure of his imagination. He further alleges that specialist biological literature has ignored the problem. The falsehood of this allegation was massively and (to Behe) embarrassingly documented in the court of Judge John E. Jones in Pennsylvania in 2005, where Behe was testifying as an expert witness on behalf of a group of creationists who had tried to impose "intelligent design" creationism on the science curriculum of a local public school—a move of "breathtaking inanity," to quote Judge Jones....

Well, if there's one thing which the raging quack Wilber knows all about, it would have to be "breathtaking inanity," eh?

Another of Behe's favourite alleged examples of "irreducible complexity" is the immune system. Let Judge Jones himself take up the story:

In fact, on cross-examination, Professor Behe was questioned concerning his 1996 claim that science would never find an evolutionary explanation for the immune system. He was presented with fifty-eight peer-reviewed publications, nine books, and several immunology textbook chapters about the evolution of the immune system; however, he simply insisted that this was still not sufficient evidence of evolution, and that it was not "good enough."

Behe, under cross-examination by Eric Rothschild, chief counsel for the plaintiffs, was forced to admit that he hadn't read most of those fifty-eight peer-reviewed papers.

Oh, and my "Scarlet Letter" t-shirt arrived recently. No, I'm still not an actual atheist. But I sympathize with their perspective enough that I've got no problem with being mistaken for one. (Currently reading The God Delusion [torrent].) As opposed to, you know, being wrongly taken for a drug dealer or (this is a new one, from today—via some homeless idiot, up at the northwest corner of the U of Toronto), a "faggot."

"Not that there's anything wrong with that...."

I have a friend who worked for a couple of years as a teacher in Burkina Faso, so I realize that there are cultures in this world whose members do not use toilet paper for its intended purpose, instead fashioning a manual bidet from a designated water container. More power to 'em.

The problem arises when such people, in dripping water down their male asses, fail to account for the existence of the toilet seat below them. Meaning that the water serves its purpose in cleaning the asshole in question to a fresh and fragrant shine, then drips down onto the toilet seat in our shared bathroom ... and is just left there to evaporate. (He took exactly the same attitude toward the kitchen table when he spilled juice all over it ... letting it drip down onto the chairs, and from there onto the floor.) Or, left there for the next person using the facilities to sit down into.

This happened regularly enough that I got a picture of it:

(More recently, a white plastic cup which he had apparently been using for the above purpose kept finding its way up onto the sink, by the hot water tap—right where you want it if you're trying to wash your hands, eh? I took the liberty of moving that onto the kitchen table just before I walked out for the last time, in case he needs it for drinking water.)

When I moved in at the beginning of May, the kitchen garbage can was filled to the brim. "No problem," thought I. The previous inhabitants didn't clean it out when they left at the end of the term after exams; I shall do it for them. So I happily did.

A week later, it's full to overflowing again, with mango peelings tumbling down onto the floor. And there's only been one other person (Omar, of the Dripping Ass) living here since the very start of May.

Since this is my summer to live on nachos, sub sandwiches, veggie burgers and beer, I have not been using the kitchen for anything except tap water and an occasional turn at the microwave. So, there ain't no effin' way I'm taking out the garbage again for people who are too stupid to do that themselves. Even if it sits there for weeks like that, rotting and stinking.

The weekly cleaning staff, seeing that situation, ties up the top of the garbage bag so that no more crap can be stuffed into it. Easily remedied: The idiot(s) tears a hole in the top of the bag, to be able to cram more stuff into it.

It's like living with a pack of fucking raccoons.

The cleaners underlined the relevant rules in the sheet on the wall. No effect. Next week, they left a separate note on the wall. Nothing. The week after, they underlined each word in the note they had written. And circled the points on the rules sheet. Again. And again. (By the middle of the summer, those two sheets had black, red and green marker ink on them from three different weeks.) Nada.

I came out of my room when the cleaning staff was around, and they gently asked me whether I knew that it was not their job to take the kitchen garbage out!

The raccoons know how to deal with all that, though, without actually stooping to the level of cleaning up their own filth in our shared area: The lazy fools start chucking their orange peels into the bathroom garbage can!

The cleaning staff instructs us, writing in large letters on that bathroom garbage can, that we are not to put kitchen garbage into it:

What do the raccoons do then? They start their own personal garbage heap in the kitchen, right next to the garbage can there, for all of their bulky garbage (juice cartons, cereal/pizza boxes, etc.)! (To my regret, I missed getting a picture of the worst case of that, but I swear, at one time that personal trash heap—I know that the pizza boxes were from Omar the Wonder Raccoon, as I've seen him bringing them in from the elevator—was nearly as high as the garbage can itself.)

The garbage chute is at most fifteen steps down the hall. But Rocky ain't usin' it, no way, no how. 'Cause no one, not even the cleaning staff whose job it is to keep the place sanitary, is gonna tell that (psychologically) pre-rational, inconsiderate, door-slamming (starting at 6:30 am nearly every day) boor how to behave. His mommy obviously never taught him properly in the first place; and she's not around here to wipe his ass (and toilet seat) for him anyway.

A few days before I moved out, I went into the kitchen to fill a container with tap water. The kitchen garbage was stinking to such a high heaven that I couldn't even breathe in through my nose for the two minutes which that took.

If I needed a reminder that human beings, aside from being literal animals (i.e., mammals), share 98% of their DNA with the chimpanzees.... Except that chimps and even poodles would surely learn faster than these pre-rational ass-dribblers—inconsiderate jerks who will not be told, even by the cleaning staff, how to behave like rational, thinking human beings.

(And note: Much as this might look to some like just a problem with me being impossible to live with, the guy in the room right across the hall in early August consistently made the effort to take the needs of others into account, going through his door just as quietly as I go through mine, regardless of the time of day or night. I didn't even have to "teach" him that—rather, he came into the apartment already knowing how to behave considerately. Bless him! For a brief moment, it almost restored my faith in humanity. And then he moved out, leaving Prince Omar of the Wet Toilet Seat behind.)

No wonder little by little one becomes a misanthrope.

—Albert Einstein

I was telling a local bartender about some of this back in late June, and she disclosed her own shared-living travails: The construction workers she was stuck with in a nearby house had messed the kitchen up to the point where they needed to have ant traps set up all over the place, and were also leaving their smelly boots in the halls. ('Cause they obviously didn't want to have to inhale their own foot odors, preferring to let others suffer that.) So, she made up some posters (with a scanned copy of the official management logo) instructing them to not leave their boots in the hall anymore.

It worked like a charm: She even overheard them discussing how "management" had left the instruction!

You really gotta admire that kind of initiative.

Subject: Explorer

August 25, 2007

Starting a couple of days ago, Windows Explorer has been, quite without my okay, displaying files of its choice in a soothing shade of blue, while leaving the rest in the expected black:

Very pretty. Now how do I make it stop? (Yes, I have rebooted.)

---

From Ken Wilber's 2005 interview with Alan Wallace on Integral Naked:

The closure principle doesn't explain why dirt gets up and starts writing poetry. It's incomprehensible to me that somebody can actually look at you with a straight face and say something like that. Nonetheless, there are a lot of them out there at Jane Loevinger's stage five and they all seem to believe it.

Heh. From prolific inventor/futurist Ray Kurzweil's (1999) The Age of Spiritual Machines (torrent):

Ray Kurzweil's Cybernetic Poet: A computer program designed by Ray Kurzweil that uses a recursive approach to create poetry. The cybernetic poet analyzes word sequences from patterns of poems it has "read" using markov models (a mathematical cousin of neural nets [and also widely used in automatic speech-recognition programs]) and creates new poetry based on these patterns....

Just, you know, like a writer who had studied another (e.g., superior) writer's art might then try to write in the same style. (E.g., as Wilber himself wrote out Alan Watts' books, longhand, as an early exercise in teaching himself to write ... with, to put it mildly, highly varying degrees of success, particularly in his early books.)

The neural net paradigm is an attempt to emulate the computing structure of neurons in the human brain. We start with a set of inputs that represents a problem to be solved. For example, the input may be a set of pixels representing an image that needs to be identified. These inputs are randomly wired to a layer of simulated neurons. Each of these simulated neurons can be simple computer programs that simulate a model of a neuron in software, or they can be electronic implementations.

Each point of the input (for example, each pixel in an image) is randomly connected to the inputs of the first layer of simulated neurons. Each connection has an associated synaptic strength that represents the importance of this connection. These strengths are also set at random values. Each neuron adds up the signals coming into it. If the combined signal exceeds a threshold, then the neuron fires and sends a signal to its output connection. If the combined input signal does not exceed the threshold, then the neuron does not fire and its output is zero. The output of each neuron is randomly connected to the inputs of the neurons in the next layer. At the top layer, the output of one or more neurons, also randomly selected, provides the answer....

Like the mammalian brains on which it is modeled, a neural net starts out ignorant. The neural net's teacher, which may be a human, a computer program, or perhaps another, more mature neural net that has already learned its lessons, rewards the student neural net when it is right and punishes it when it is wrong. This feedback is used by the student neural net to adjust the strengths of each interneuronal connection. Connections that were consistent with the right answer are made stronger. Those that advocated a wrong answer are weakened. Over time, the neural net organizes itself to provide the right answers without coaching....

[T]he neural network is a method of choice for recognizing patterns. Humans are far more skilled at recognizing patterns than in thinking through logical combinations, so we rely on this aptitude for almost all of our mental processes. Indeed, pattern recognition comprises the bulk of our neural circuitry. These faculties make up for the extremely slow speed of human neurons. The reset time on neural firing is about five milliseconds, permitting only about two hundred calculations per second in each neural connection. We don't have time, therefore, to think too many new thoughts when we are pressed to make a decision. The human brain relies on precomputing its analyses and storing them for future reference. We then use our pattern-recognition capability to recognize a situation as comparable to one we have thought about and then draw upon our previously considered conclusions. We are unable to think about matters that we have not thought through many times before.

And from the "mathematical cousins" of such purely physical networks, passable (at its best) poetry was being written even by the computers of a decade ago. (Kurzweil himself admits that "its poems don't always make it all the way through." That is, they don't have a beginning, middle and end, or develop and/or return-to a theme. But all of that will be improved, in time.)

There is, of course, nothing whatsoever "mystical" about the physical processes involved in that, and you certainly don't need Eros or Witnessing Spirit or self-awareness to do it. Rather, all you need is the network, whether it be real and distributed in space (e.g., as a destructive or future non-destructive scan of a particular human brain) or simply a virtual model existing only in some form of computer memory; plus a modeling of the algorithms (as embodied in patterns of neural firing) utilized in its problem-solving; and a way of training the network, i.e., of telling it whether it's right or wrong in any situation, and thus of telling it whether to strengthen the connections between relevant (real or virtual) "neurons" in each "trial."

Further regarding the learning process, from a 2001 M.I.T. study:

[R]ats dream about their activities during slow wave [i.e., non-REM] sleep as well as during REM sleep....

M.I.T. researchers found that after running repeatedly on tracks, the sleeping rats' brains duplicated the firing patterns associated with the activity....

[T]he slow wave sleep replay only seemed to occur during the period of sleep immediately following the behavior and was not detectable 24 hours later, suggesting that it was part of the initial storage or processing of memory during sleep, while REM memory reactivation, which was robust even after 24 hours, might represent the more gradual reevaluation of older memories.

No one ever gets good at anything without endless mental repetition of the actions. Conversely, practice archery for half a decade or more, and yes, you will develop a proficiency at it, with or without simultaneous Zen meditation. It ain't "intuition" or "following the Tao"; it's just burning the pattern into your brain, via sheer repetition, to the point where you can "do it in your sleep" (which, heh, you were doing as part of the learning process anyway).

[W]ork in humans ... suggests that [the] amount of slow wave sleep early in the night, as well as the amount of REM sleep later in the night, is correlated with subsequent enhancement of performance on learned tasks.

It is precisely through the future work of "thinking machines"—i.e., advanced neural networks which think and learn in exactly the same way as we humans do, but which can run through the steps much faster—and advanced neural interfaces/implants that, as David Lane puts it:

[I]n the future when the Sony Reader breeds with the new IPod which mates with quantum computers and massive memory storage systems, we will be confronted with THEE BOOK.

The book of books, where everything that HAS been written, and everything that CAN be written, within certain set parameters will be pocketed (literally) and accessible to almost every human being on earth. THE BOOK will contain a database of all possible books and we will have a search engine tied with that book that can retrieve anything we ask of it.

Forget large computers, forget libraries.

This book will be IMPLANTED in us, or put in our wallet, or stamped on our foreheads, or placed on our index finger, or it will be like a pill we take daily.... which automatically uploads and updates whatever new data is added.

Further, create a sufficiently accurate and computationally powerful virtual model of a human brain, and it will "think" and create art in ways which, to any outside observer, are indistinguishable from the physical brain it is modeling. That is, the physical thinking and learning process is the same whether or not there is some mysterious, ontologically real "Witnessing consciousness" (or an astral reality) underneath (and suffusing) it all: It depends not even on whit on what consciousness "is," whether seen from a reductionistic or an integral/woo-woo perspective. It doesn't even matter how you define "intelligence." It's just replicating (and improving on) the algorithms and mathematics by which physical neural networks operate.

[One] ultimately feasible scenario will be to scan someone's brain to map the locations, interconnections, and contents of the somas, axons, dendrites, presynaptic vesicles, and other neural components. Its entire organization could then be re-created on a neural computer of sufficient capacity, including the contents of its memory.

So, within a few more decades, next-generation networks of "dirt" will indeed get up and write poetry, fiction, and non-fiction which will make your head spin. No "Eros" will ever be required for that ... not unless, you know, you stupidly imagine that "with a half-poem you are dinner."

In 1997, Steve Larson, a University of Oregon music professor, arranged a musical variation of the Turing Test by having an audience attempt to determine which of three pieces of music had been written by a computer and which one of the three had been written two centuries ago by a human named Johann Sebastian Bach.... [T]he audience selected the piece written by a computer program named EMI (Experiments in Musical Intelligence) to be the authentic Bach composition.

As Frederick Hayes-Roth put it, in John Horgan's The Undiscovered Mind (p. 202):

If somebody were to assemble a team, like a Manhattan Project, to build HAL, that team would succeed. It would take on the order of a decade or maybe two, but it's not going to be an infinite effort.

P.S. Check out the excerpts from Wilber's forthcoming "Terroritis" novel. Doesn't what that deluded quack is up to just send chills down your spine? (The stuff with "Carla" talking about "Donna's implants" in the Chapter 11 excerpt is truly the work of a psychologically adolescent moron and literary imbecile—all he's missing is, "It was a dark and integral night"—as is the uniformly inane dialog between the kleavage-possessing "Kim," and "Ken." If you thought Kensho couldn't sink lower than miming masturbation or asking for blowjobs from college girls who were also his students, you were so wrong.)

Code Project AQAL began as the join [sic] effort of literally hundreds of social scientists and researchers from around the world. They also called it "The Human Consciousness Project" (HCP). Much like the Human Genome Project, which had mapped all the genes of human DNA, the HCP was a complete mapping of human consciousness—any and all of its levels, lines, states, and types, as reported over the last several millennia. This involved hundreds of cultural experts, spiritual teachers, psychologists, psychiatrists, and sociologists—and a dozen Cray supercomputers parallel processing this information from all over the world, with enough meta-analyses to attempt to spot any recurring patterns. The result is said to be the entire spectrum of consciousness fully mapped for the first time in history....

"The Code appears to be the Code to the entire Kosmos," as a senior researcher, who asked to be anonymous, said. "It makes sense if you think about it," the source continued. "If humans are part of the universe, then when the Code to the former was discovered, it would be the Code to the latter as well—the Code for one is the Code for the other. What the AQAL Code gives us seems to be the basic structure or pattern of the known universe, as [sic] least as we understand it so far."

The pathetic joke there is, of course, that no computer or network of supercomputers, crunching and analyzing all of the knowledge available to humanity, would ever come up with the AQAL framework. Why not? Because the only way to make that framework appear to match the factual knowledge of the various fields which it (falsely) claims to integrate is to grossly misrepresent that constituent knowledge. Computers, having no "fraud chip" inside them, do not "lie through their peripherals" in the attempt to make reality conform to their pet theories, or to trick people into giving them respect and deference of which they deserve not even one iota. The same cannot, sadly, be said of the unhinged, paranoid Integral Dictator and his "second-tier" minions—nearly the last people you would want to see have anything to do with creating or controlling a "Singularity," in technology or otherwise.

Well yes. No doubt. Eight days a week. But, as Queen once sang, "Find me somebody to love." (Coincidentally, I had spent the afternoon drinking rum and Cokes, and listening to classic Queen, from "Bohemian Rhapsody" on down.)

2. You have yearning for perfection.

Truer words were never spoken. Damn, these cookies really know what they're talking about.

3. Your luck has been completely changed tobay [sic].

Well, I certainly hope so. If I had as much luck in real life as I've had on ebay, "tobay" would be enough, I wouldn't even need to worry about "toborrow."

Farewell, then, the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune (cookie)!

4. You lead a useful life no matter what riches are coming to you.

Ain't it the truth. "Rags to riches," that's my story. Well, except for the "riches" part.

5. Your luck has been completely changed tobay [sic].

Yes, so I've heard. But I have yet to see any evidence of that. "Methinks the cookie doth protest too much."

6. Watch your relations with other people carefully, be reserved.

What, even more reserved than I already am? That ain't gonna be easy.

7. An angry man opens his mouth and shuts up his eyes.

Alright, I suppose that's true. Your point being?....

8. Find release from your cares, have a good time.

Yes, that's what the afternoon of rum and Cokes was about. Later that evening, I moved the final few boxes of stuff from my summer "cottage" (i.e., the U of T student residences) into the winter "shoebox." Going through the bags of stuff the next afternoon, I was convinced I had lost my birth certificate and passport in transit. They were simply not in the bag where I knew I had put them the previous night; and there was nowhere else they could be. Defeated, I finally went looking through the bag with all my installation software CDs and DVDs, for my checkbook. Wonder of wonders, in the same bag, which I had transported nearly a week earlier, was the container with the passport and birth certificate! I was so relieved I almost cried. Goes to show you how unreliable memory is, and how you always have to double-check your facts when making formal claims based on "what you remember."

9. Your luck has been completely changed tobay [sic].

Uh-huh. Sure. "Fie on thee, foul cookie! Fie!!"

10. You will enjoy good health.

Well yeah. Hey, you may have lost everything else, had everything you've ever hoped for fall to pieces, but as long as you've still got your health....

Stupid, patronizing cookies.

Discovering Roman Technology. By Adam Hart-Davis (Sue Blackmore's partner).

I was walking through Kensington Market early this evening, and a sort-of Gothic kid with his girlfriend came up to me:

Him: Hey dude, you look like you're pretty old school. What do you know about datura?

Me: Sorry?

Him: Datura.

Me: Nothing at all, whatever it may be.

So I went right home and Wikipedia'd it.

Ah, datura. (Judging from the article at that link, whatever else it may do, it also adversely affects your spelling and grammar!)

Did I mention I was wearing my sunflower tie-dye at the time?

I've really gotta move to Amsterdam, where at least some of the stuff I'm constantly suspected of selling/doing is legal. 'Cause really, the most exciting thing I "did" today was laundry.

Far better was the snippet of conversation around me as I walked home from an open stage along Parliament Street close to a month ago. Two kids were coming from the opposite direction. First, one of them mumbles unintelligibly, where I can only pick out one word:

"Blah, blah ... hippie ... blah, blah."

But as they pass me, Kid #2 says:

"No, he's a genius. You can see it in his eyes."

Well, it's a fair cop....

A serious warning concerning Ken Wilber for all atheists.

A couple of months ago, I got into a conversation in a local bar with a spoken-word artist who possessed a keen practical knowledge of human behavior. The topic drifted to Philip Zimbardo's Stanford prison study, and the making of the Lord of the Flies (LOTF) movie. In the latter, the problem which the director encountered was not in getting the child actors into character while the cameras were rolling. Rather, the difficulty was in getting them out of character when the shooting was stopped.

The point being that, in both of those "studies," the participants who had initially voluntarily adopted their appropriate "roles" (of superintendent/guard/prisoner, tribal leader, etc.) quickly forgot that they were merely playing arbitrarily assigned parts, and instead took the role on as their whole identity.

And the question which came up, and which I had not previously thought to ask, was this: Why would human beings slip so easily into such role-playing as is demonstrated in those two (i.e., simulated prison and movie set) instances?

Well, if such behavior exists, you can guess that it must have some evolutionary advantage.

Both the simulated prison and the LOTF actors were adopting roles in (temporary) societies which featured strongly defined pecking orders or dominance hierarchies (again, as superintendent/guard/prisoner, tribal leader and followers, etc.). So, what are the evolutionary advantages of "knowing one's place" (or playing one's "role" well) in a dominance hierarchy?

[Dominance hierarchies in the wild serve] as an intrinsic factor for population control, insuring adequate resources for the dominant individuals and thus preventing widespread starvation. Territorial behavior enhances this effect.

These hierarchies are not fixed and depend on any number of changing factors, among them are age, gender, body size, intelligence, and aggressiveness. Status may also be affected by the ability to marshal the support of others. Indeed, the need to maintain social position and social knowledge may be an impetus for the evolution of larger brains in humans and other animals.

Dominance hierarchies, though often more subtle, can be observed in human societies and are important for understanding the organization of family, tribe or clan, work organizations, politics, etc., in normal and abnormal social situations. It is not clear how much of dominance hierarchy in humans is due to the intrinsic biology of our brains, derived from evolution, and how much is due to cultural factors.

Dominance relationships require the cooperation of both parties. The dominant party tacitly agrees not to kill or injure the submissive party provided the submitter concedes and does not interfere with the dominant party's access to resources or compete for mates. The ability to identify and remember members of the group along with their dominance status is also necessary. These hierarchies [with their attendant role-playing in the maintaining of each member's social position] may have developed, in evolutionary terms, for the sake of efficiency and in order to reduce the likelihood of injury among group members who may share genes.

And presumably, the way to play a social role the best (thus generating the greatest survival value) would be to forget that you are even playing a role while enacting all of the culturally appropriate signs of dominance or submission ... at least until a major change occurs in the society—either suddenly (e.g., the death of the leader) or gradually (e.g., in simple aging)—or the member needs to leave the society (e.g., to mate).

Put another way (in Horgan, p. 193):

The most effective liars, according to Trivers, are those who believe their own lies and thus project an air of sincerity.

Similarly, from Jerome Barkow in Darwin, Sex, and Status (p. 66-7):

The most effective deceiver is apparently the one convinced of his or her own sincerity, so that we apparently have been selected for a strong tendency to self-deceive in matters of sex (and in many other matters as well)....

Keeping accurate information away from the self-representation permits it to evaluate itself as being truthful, reducing the stress and making the misinformation more likely to be accepted by others. In colloquial terms, no liar is more convincing than one who believes his or her own lies.

Conversely, if I have learned one thing from my own forays into the dog-eat-dog business world, it is that being consciously aware that one is merely "humoring" others to whom one is expected to show sincere deference and obedience, leads invariably to conflicts and feelings of beings offended (on the part of the leaders) which are a good way to end up as an ostracized "lone wolf" with a vastly reduced expectation of, shall we say, "survival" outside of that "pack."

The only way to be really sincere about submission, I think, is to genuinely believe that the "dominant" persons above you actually deserve their higher social positions in the business or spiritual worlds; a proposition which I, for one, generally find laughable. Thus, it is very difficult indeed for me to play my "assigned social role" convincingly in any dominance hierarchy, instead being predictably told (e.g., at SRF's Hidden Valley) that I have a "big head" simply for doing things independently and efficiently rather than in accord with the way that the "wise managerial leaders" would dictate, etc.

A person who could "forget" that he was merely playing a disciple/prisoner role would be far less likely to cause such offense or upset the social balance of the pack. (Of course, even in dominance hierarchies there are social situations in which it is appropriate to try to move up into a higher position, etc.—e.g., in working for a promotion in the business world. But are such promotions given to persons who fail to respect their elders in the company hierarchy? Hardly. Rather, such benefits are given to those who abide by the unspoken rules, playing their subservient roles well, as distinct from failing to be properly submissive when the rules say they should.)

Of course, the superintendent/guard/prisoner dominance hierarchy is exactly mirrored by the guru/inner-circle/peon-disciple hierarchy. So, role-playing even to the point of forgetting one's prior identity in the latter social ordering arises not merely from one or another form of "brainwashing" or techniques of coercive persuasion. Rather, it's also just how we've evolved as mammals—not only in the very survival-oriented existence of such hierarchies but also in our feelings that they are familiar and natural, and then our slipping so easily into playing the roles of low-pecking-order spiritual follower ... and "alpha male" Messiah.

As David Bowie put it:

I became Ziggy Stardust. David Bowie went totally out the window. Everybody [as, logically, voluntarily placed lower-pecking-order followers] was convincing me that I was a [top-of-the-pecking-order] Messiah, especially on that first American tour. I got hopelessly lost in the fantasy.

From The End of the Road (11:00 - 12:11)—if you need a BitTorrent client, uTorrent is good—speaking about the mistreatment by police of Deadheads on tour in Las Vegas:

Don't treat these people like animals, [just] 'cause their hair is long and they smell bad....

That's [how they treated] black people years ago. They're taking away the most important right. The freedom of expression.

It was a black man who said that. And he's absolutely right. (Conversely, if freedom of expression is the most important right, then persecuting an out-group which exists only due to its members' exercise of that same expression of individuality must be worse than would be an equal persecution of a different out-group which has first been defined on the basis of other [involuntarily possessed] characteristics, and only then had its freedom of expression restricted in that persecution.)

Skeptic Michael Shermer, on a different but related topic:

Consciously and publicly, Michael Richards is probably not a racist. Unconsciously and privately, however, he is. So am I. So are you....

We are by nature sorters. Evolutionists theorize that we evolved in small bands of hunter-gatherers where there was a selection for within-group amity and between-group enmity. With our fellow in-group members, we are cooperative and altruistic. Unfortunately, the down side to this pro-social bonding is that we are also quite tribal and xenophobic to out-group members.

This natural tendency to sort people into Within-Group/Good and Between-Group/Bad is shaped by culture....

And, of course, it makes piss-all difference whether the in-group/out-group boundary is defined by skin color, or by hair length and type of clothing. That's obvious when you think about it even just a little, really. (I don't think Shermer was trying to make that point, though, or was even necessarily aware of it in connection with the psychology of "racism.")

More from Shermer:

Only when all people are considered to be members of one global in-group (in principle, if not in practice) can we begin to attenuate these out-group associations.

Which will work fine ... until we come into contact with an alien humanoid species (if such a thing exists), which will necessarily be an enmity-inducing out-group compared to us in-group Earthlings....

Well, let's cross that worm-hole bridge when we come to it, eh? At the very least, it would bring us all together for a common cause.

Oh, and as to the Grateful Dead touring community, as an in-group itself? Here's what one mohawk-sporting "punk" had to say, in Tie-Dyed (58:58 - 59:30):

It seems to me like most of what I've heard about [the friendliness of the Deadhead community] is not true because we've gotten a lot of nasty comments, nasty looks, because of the way we look.

It's like people will be open-minded towards you if you look like you belong at a Grateful Dead show, but if you don't look like you belong, then you get treated just like people treat you anywhere else where you don't belong.

Apparently it's, you know, how you look, you know, if your dreadlocks are the right length, if your skirt's baggy enough.

This is the last place I expected to be shunned because of the way I look.

'Cause even with "peace, love and grooviness" hippies, you still gotta "dress to fit in."

Thankfully, when the New Age hippies take over the world in preparation for making contact with those aliens from the Pleiades, I already look the part.... :)

So I'm out on the street practicing guitar one night a couple of weeks ago, and a kind-of-cute blonde walks by with half a dozen of her friends.

And as she struts past she points me out to her friends, and drops an H-bomb: "Look! A hippie with a guitar!"

You can't say, "Look! A nigger with a basketball!" 'Cause that would make you a racist.

Can't say, "Look! A dumb blonde with a vagina!" That would make you ... conservative.

"Get back in the kitchen where you belong. Bitch."

But drop an H-word, and no one even bats an eye. Even if it's raging "hair-ism."

'Cause hippie is the nigger of the world. If I'm in a job interview against two other people, they've both got shorter hair than I do; and as soon as the people doing the hiring see that, I'm not even in the running anymore.

So if I hear that H-word comin' out of your mouth, you damned well better have hair down past your shoulders, and at least one tie-dye in your closet.

We've never been kept as slaves, but that's only 'cause everyone knows you'll never get an honest day's work out of a hippie. Right?

"Where are the slaves, Higgins?"

"They're still pretty wasted from the acid test last night, Sir. Jerry's tripping out about dissolving into a field of cotton. And that hippie chick you've had as a concubine since last winter? She's pregnant and wants to keep the baby. She's naming it 'Moonbeam.'"

The U.S. would be a third-world country. 'Cause you'll never get an honest day's work out of a hippie. That's what makes it more than a stereotype: It's just common sense.

What have the hippies ever done for the world? Aside from Woodstock, environmentalism, recycling, organic foods, the sexual revolution, the first multimedia shows as part of the Acid Tests, and a good part of the personal computer revolution. 'Cause Steve Jobs, for one, and was a Beatle-haired, enlightenment-seeking hippie in India way before he became a respectable CEO at Apple.

When my people came to this country from ... Haight-Ashbury, all we had was hemp-fiber clothes, nothin' to eat but granola ... and I said to my hippie brothers: Some day we're gonna rise up, maaan, and be free.

Because I have a dream.

I have a dream, that one day in the financial district of Toronto the sons of former hippies and the sons of former senior VPs will be able to sit down together at a conference table of brotherhood in the boardroom of peace.

I have a dream, that the longhairs and the ... shorthairs, can work together, in a world where hippies will be given the same opportunities as the blacks, the yellow-skinned, and the rednecks.

I have a dream that the bastard kids of groovy hippie chicks will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the length of their hair but by the color of their skin.

Let freedom ring. And when this happens, when we let freedom ring from every BMW and every flower-power painted Volkswagen van, we will be able to speed up that day when the longhairs and the shorthairs will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Grateful Dead top-twenty hit: "I will survive! I will survive! Thank Jerry Garcia, I will get by!"

One of [Gary] Larson's more famous [Far Side] cartoons shows two chimpanzees grooming. One finds a blonde human hair on the other and inquires, "Conducting a little more 'research' with that Jane Goodall tramp?" The Jane Goodall Institute thought this was in bad taste, and had their lawyers draft a letter to Larson and his distribution syndicate, in which they described the cartoon as an "atrocity." (Wikipedia)

Some institutes just have no sense of humor....

Dressed, as always, in "Garcia-wear," i.e., a t-shirt, jeans and sandals, with my long hair flowing in the breeze.

Looking, that is, like a fine hippie.

Two little teenage boys, out of high school for the summer, come riding up the sidewalk on their bikes, screwing around about ten meters in front of me. (The street has explicit bike paths adjacent to the curb in both directions; they still needed to use the sidewalk. Illegally.)

And as the "alpha boy biker" rides past me, he says:

"Get a job."

'Cause obviously, a long-haired guy out playing guitar on a beautiful Saturday afternoon must be some sort of drain on society, eh?

Of course, being just a high-school kid, his idea of a "real job" is probably just stocking shelves at The Gap, or some other McWay of earning money for a new iPod. As opposed, you know, to pulling in $60K+ annually as a full-time I.T. professional, or $40 to $55 per hour as a consultant. (I've done both, at different times; the latter even occasionally over this past summer.) Not to mention having tested (unofficially) at a 157 IQ; having written three Ph.D.-endorsed books; being best-in-class at everything I've ever done academically (aside from my "drop-out" years) through electrical engineering, physics, and computer programming; and being the only person in the whole wide world who's allowed to touch the CRM installation for a certain global non-profit organization headquartered in New York City. (Bill Gates himself is a major donor.) 'Cause until they found my resumé online several years ago, they couldn't find anyone in all of NYC who was competent enough and who cared enough to do the work properly. Even for a non-profit org. How absolutely shameful is that?

But to a little snot-nosed, middle-class white bigot on a bike, all I can be is a useless hippie who needs to "get a job" (and evidently be working at 5:30 pm on a Saturday! which, ironically, is exactly what I was doing).

(Note: I wasn't even busking—which itself is uncontracted entertainment, i.e., a legitimate "job," not to be confused with begging. [That difference is well understood in Europe, even if being often missed in North America.] Rather, I was simply practicing for an upcoming gig ... for which I will indeed be paid. Besides, since when is "rising folk/rock star" not a job? For that matter, so is "drug-dealer"—which is the other thing I get consistently [and very wrongly] mistaken for.)

As a Comp Sci Ph.D. candidate (doing his research in robotics at the U of T) said to me afterwards: when such "insights" come from high-schoolers, they're likely either based in a blind rebellion against authority, or on something deeper (and more sinister).

My guess is the latter—'cause, since when am I an authority-figure?—and also that the overgrown rugrat in question (i) learned that bigoted (i.e., "hair-ist") attitude from his parents (esp. his father), and that (ii) he'll carry the same prejudices into adulthood and his career in middle-management or the like, where such attitudes will actually be "good for the company," in easily weeding out undesirable/unreliable employees who cannot in any case ever be presented to the public as appropriate representatives of the corporation. (Ask me why I have no wish to ever again "have a job" in that kind of intolerant, prejudiced short-hair environment.)

In between now and embarking on that "contribution to society" career, though, he'll surely make a fine misogynistic, conformist-mentality frat boy. 'Cause hippie-phobia, homophobia, misogyny and racism are not at all so far apart as one might like to imagine.

With the absence of "hippie rights" groups, you can still be a hair-ist in today's polite society and (wrongly) consider yourself to be better than the explicit racists in the world. But at its basis it's all just in-groups and negatively stereotyped out-groups, i.e., there's no meaningful psychological difference between racism and hair-ism.

Yes, I realize that I choose to look this way, whereas blacks (etc.) have no choice in the color of their skin. But, when you try to marginalize or otherwise crush the spirit of someone simply because he or she is creatively expressing his/her individuality, it's actually worse than mere racism.

Why? Because what separates us from the animals is not the color of our skin—there are plenty of black, white, and even black-and-white animals, after all. (And plenty of white-skinned slaves in the history of the world, e.g., in ancient Rome, where Greeks were kept as forced labor.) Rather, what makes us uniquely human is our individuality—the ability to go consciously against the "herd"—and our intelligence and degree of creativity (even just in tool usage, never mind in art and science). And those are exactly the abilities which are being expressed by individuals such as myself ... and then discriminated against by others who can only see a one-dimensional, negative stereotype where a real person exists.

A person, too, who has already contributed more to the betterment of the world than some bigoted, might-as-well-be-racist teenaged kid on a bicycle ever will, if I do say so myself.

Me: A pint of Creemore, please.

Her: And would you like anything to drink?

Me: ?

Her: I meant, eat.

It reminded me of Steve Martin's classic short film, The Absent-Minded Waiter:

Saw this from some dumbass commenting unproductively on Anjana Ahuja's entertaining science column:

Anjana's bio should read, "like a lot of other people, she holds a degree in space physics." There are 6 billion [sic] people on the planet, 60 million Mensa types. I think ya could find someone else to debate. I'd debate ya myself, though I have work to do.

Actually, the Mensa cutoff is at 130 IQ, i.e., 98th percentile (the top 2% of the population), not 99th. So there are 120 million "Mensa types" on the planet.

Nice try, though. "Genius."

(Plus, the global population is actually up to 6.5 billion by now.)

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