Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner

Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2017/01/27

Scott: I wanted to get something more from that. That is, the deep characteristics or the traits of an individual would be, as you define it, aspects of the soul or the soul as a whole. So, vices and virtues can be expressed through that definition.

Rick: Yes, when you look at Obama – Liberals, at least based on approval ratings, think of him as a good guy. He is less transparent, though, more enigmatic than President Trump. So, you’d have to make more guesses about Obama’s deep personality traits. 

Scott: What would you consider his vices and virtues?

Rick: An eagerness to or a tendency to see the goodness to people. To some people, and possibly to me, it led to him being played by the Republicans, who during the 21st century have become willing to practice politics with deep cynicism. 

Scott: What about historical figures, e.g. politicians, scientists, artists, and activists?

Rick: Let’s look at Einstein, he had some transparent aspects. Public figures tend to want to promote certain personality traits. They want to advertise their souls, without calling it that, as having certain characteristics. Einstein liked to publicize his, and this is not a deep characterization of Einstein, his childish carelessness about worldly behaviour. He turns to somebody at a big dinner and says, “I’m not wearing socks.” Apparently, when he was younger, he decided that socks weren’t worth it because socks get holes in the toes and decided if you don’t have socks then you don’t have that problem.

That tells you more about his soul than him telling somebody that he doesn’t wear socks. One is the soul indicator. Another is the PR (public relations). But there are a bunch of quotes about Einstein’s belief in an aesthetic determinant in deciding theories of the universe. That when you’re trying to understand the universe, if you come upon a theory that is elegant and beautiful, then it pretty much has to be true because God doesn’t work in ugly, clunky, ways. 

So, the sense of the beauty in mathematical physics might be an aspect of Einstein’s soul. An expectation that whatever explains the universe is going to be beautiful, simple, and elegant. Anyway, your soul can be seen as your deeper personality characteristics independent of daily trivia. A long-standing, well-established, not just specific beliefs but, rhythm behind those beliefs, which, I believe, all of those things, like daily trivia, can be seen within our information map. Beliefs can be seen in your information map teased out of it, somehow, and then even the rhythm behind your beliefs – the deep, deep themes to what you think – can probably be teased from out of your information map.

However, maybe with more difficulty, perhaps represent arrangements of information within your information map at different scales, daily trivia might be more localized in terms of the processing. In terms of the significant beliefs, they may have more complicated and larger structures, and the themes behind your beliefs might have larger structures still, or I might be making the wrong analogy there, where the deeper and larger your beliefs then the more mental landscape it will have to encompass.

The difference between consciousness and the soul is consciousness at any moment can focus on gross toes while the soul is deep rhythms of belief. More profound principles of what makes you you. It is more profound to describe me as somebody who wants to think about the deep structure of the world, but often finds himself distracted. That is a deeper description of me rather than to describe me as somebody who picks a zit that may or may not be there and picks at his toe fungus.

(Laugh)

Scott: Derivative from the soul comes vices and virtues. They represent deeper aspects, consistent long-term aspects, of an individual’s beliefs, behaviours, and thoughts.

Rick: Yes.

Scott: What can, in general, be termed vices, and what can, in general, be termed virtues within this definition because the main principles that are consistent across cultures, across time, basically amount to the Golden Rule?

Rick: Yes, I would think that most things that would come across as deeper virtues would be a love for others, which is the Golden Rule. It is that you can’t practice the Golden Rule unless you have a model of what you yourself like, and then you have an idea of other people, and that they would like the same thing, at a deep level. You see that people since Trump became a political force have been looking for signs of good in Trump. 

Many people find it. I watched inauguration coverage on CNBC, which is the stock market channel. On CNBC, they are talking about the good in Trump. That he will set America free. That as a self-driven businessman that he understands business. That he understands how to make America a good place to do business, so that the algorithm for finding good in Trump is from selfishness comes an understanding of the self, particularly the business self, that when bestowed upon another sets America free.

Whether or not that is how it really plays out with Trump, there’s some Golden Rule there. Anytime you hear the statement that includes “with a heart of gold.” Often, you hear “hooker with a heart of gold.”

(Laugh)

That means somebody with a harsh mercantile, mercenary, immediate presence, and if you scratch them at all then you find a deep tenderness under the crusty exterior, and I’d say the search for goodness among people is a search to find people’s better angels. Even when, they wear their worst angels on their sleeves, as Trump does. Trump supporters see the crusty exterior as speaking truth and speaking from a less bullshit-mediated appreciation of people, regular people, than normal politicians.

Anyway, I agree with you. The deepest virtues tend to be linked to The Golden Rule, and you can link The Golden Rule to order and persistence in the world. That we’re creations of a world of increasing order. Evolved beings are creations of long-term increasing order or, at least, long-term maintained order, and forces that favor that are seen as virtuous. Cthulhu, the soul destroyer, the soul sucker, is a deep expression of the violation and destruction of order.

It is a fearsome thing. Most, I’d say, horror movies involve destruction or corruption, certainly slasher movies. You take human bodies and the minds and personalities that those bodies support, then you hack those up. That is deep unfixable destruction. It is scary. Forces of order, the maintenance of order, are seen as virtues. Forces of destruction are seen as vices. Satan is a corrupted angel. A force of good turned bad. Everything boils down. We’ve evolved to want to persist, to want to survive, to want to carry on our values. If not through us, then through succeeding generations and society in general. Virtues are associated with order and the passing on of beliefs, and vices are destructive.

Scott: I can envision two separate diagrams. One label, soul, that bifurcates into virtues and vices, then those divide into various things relative to The Golden Rule, and then another one would be separate, to clarify. It would be The Golden Rule like a bubble with various branches coming out of it.

Rick: Yes, I keep coming back to the election. You have different models of competing goodness. People who supported Hillary supported the idea that good is accomplished through the political establishment, through an incremental at least series of social improvements across the past 8 years, e.g. gay marriage, increasing number of people being insured. These are imperfect, but incremental steps, to a greater good. A more all-encompassing good. On the other side, that entrenched political structure is seen as highly corrupt and is needing to be overthrown by a different order. An order that supports traditional values.

It will sweep away increasing corruption as seen with the purported high costs of Obamacare, and with the creeping corrosion of anything goes in terms of sexual behavior. But it is still competing interpretations of goodness, and trying to increasing goodness in the world. And it is also associated with the persistence and increase of good. That each side sees itself as being associated with a force for gradually, if not suddenly, increasing good across history, which means that I’ve heard a lot of arguments that boil down to Utilitarianism. The greatest good for the greatest number.

Scott: John Stuart Mill, who followed Jeremy Bentham, considered utilitarianism following the Nazarene. They are synonyms in a way.

Rick: A Republican congressman on MSNBC argued a weird take on greatest good for the greatest number. He said instead of trying to get the most people covered by insurance. We should be trying to get the most people the best care. So, you don’t count by how many people are covered. You instead devote your resources to making sure that sick people get the best care, even if that means fewer people are covered. He was weighting a different aspect of the system in a way that I thought was bullshitty, but somehow he was saying by, in my mind, cutting a bunch of people loose that you somehow have more resources to give better treatment to the people who need it. It just seemed to be just transparent excuse-making. Who knows, we’ll see how everything plays out.

License

In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.

Copyright

© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner

Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2017/01/26

Scott: ​​In general, what is the difference between the soul and consciousness, to you?

Rick: Before we get to me, we should get to how those terms are really nebulous and have been subject to dozens of different interpretations over the histories of their use. To me, the soul has more of a religious connotation and is some characteristic of being that may or may not be bestowed by God. 

A magic extra ingredient that exists in terms of being, which transcends the body, at least according to a bunch of definitions of the soul. It is something that can exist after the body and has lived before the body, but, in modern interpretations of that including hokey things like ‘going to heaven and coming back to Earth’ movies, there seems to be with the soul an erasing of almost all experience. 

That even when you’re reincarnated according to the rules of a bunch of movies. Maybe not Heaven Can Wait, but other movies that have to do with heavenly reincarnation, you can start over as a, more or less, blank slate. Of course, we shouldn’t necessarily trust Hollywood producers and screenwriters to have deep thoughts about the afterlife.

Scott: What about purported autobiographies by children, sometimes, and adults, other times?

Rick: I don’t place a lot of weight on that stuff. Some of that stuff was big with Elizabeth Kübler–Ross. Anyway, you die and go towards the light. If you’re lucky enough to almost die and then come back, you come back with stories about having seen the light. All of that stuff can tend to be explained away by neural events associated with your brain shutting down. 

I don’t buy that trip to heaven stuff from 6-year-olds. My view of the soul: once you remove all information from the putative soul, then it seems like you have nothing left. Now, you could argue, but I haven’t heard anybody argue, that you could remove all information from the soul and still have innate biases that if somebody is lovingly gruff. If an old person, then they come back as a lovingly gruff baby. I haven’t heard arguments about that. Arguments that are about the soul existing in a state without information. I don’t buy that. What’s left? Not anything. 

Scott: Would you hold to the position of absolute finality? With the death of the body and the brain, the death of the “soul.”

Rick: No, that’s a separate issue. The issues I’m talking about now is if you can have a soul that moves on if you have no information that moves on. In terms of “is death the end?”, there’s Pascal’s Wager, which says that if there’s any deal you could make with possible higher beings before​ you die then make that deal on the off chance that they exist. I agree with that up to a reasonable point.

Then there’s the idea of various forms of technical​ resurrection. For instance, if we exist as a Matrix-type simulation, which I don’t think we do, then there’s no reason that upon death to think that the information that you’re made of in the simulation can’t be remade. If we’re in the Matrix, there’s no reason that you can’t be re-embodied because we’re part of an information-based simulation that is being administered in some external entity. 

That entity can pretty much, as long as it has the information from which we are comprised then it, can resurrect us, but I don’​t think that we live in the Matrix. We have the potential with the technology in the medium- to long-term future to engage in some Matrix-type hocus pocus. Where, eventually, we’ll be able to codify and turn into usable information the information that exists in individual brains – be able to get in there somehow and be able to map the information, maybe even map the information to a certain reasonable extent without even sending a bunch of nanobots to crawl along your dendrites to see what neural network you have. 

Eventually, we’ll be able to codify and record the state of information in your head in increasingly strong ways with increasing fidelity and accuracy. Right now, we could resurrect – in fact, there’s an episode of Black Mirror that resurrects – somebody based on the social media trace that person left in a zillion Twitter and Facebook posts that can lead to a replication of that person, at least to the extent that that person interacts with their girlfriend based on the plot of this thing. 

It is not unreasonable to think this. People have tried to build Shakespeare simulators based on the plays that he left behind. Many modern people end up leaving behind almost as many words as Shakespeare, maybe even more. You can simulate people’s ways of being that way. In the future, we’ll take that stuff. We’ll take genetic information. It will probably take some brain mapping to build simulations of people or as people get built-in bio-circuitry. That bio-circuitry will have information about the organic circuitry that it is interacting with, the organic circuitry.

There will be increasing ways to bring out more and more information about what informationally makes a person that individual person, and making increasingly accurate resurrections or simulations of those people.

Scott: How does that relate to the relationship between consciousness and the soul?

Rick: If the soul isn’t anything that transcends information, if the soul is the feeling you have of being a person, a unique person alive in the world, that magic feeling I would more associate with consciousness, then the magical uniqueness that makes you you via your mental picture of the world, then the soul isn’t anything that transcends information. I’d argue that the soul and consciousness are pretty much the same thing.

Scott: An emergence from the broadband processing of mutually shared information among sub-processors in a larger system.

Rick: Yes and no. Let me take back a little bit of what I said about the soul and consciousness being the same thing. Backtracking from saying consciousness and the soul are the same thing, thinking more about it, I think not. As an old guy, I have terrible toenails. When I am tending to them, I am focusing on my horrible toenails. Nobody, or a few, people would argue that that says anything about my soul, by focusing on my toenails. Although, I could make that argument.

Anyway, the minutiae of moment-to-moment attention might be your consciousness, but it isn’t your soul. Your soul is your deep strokes of your personality, the deep aspects of your personality and attitudes that constitute you after a lifetime of being you. In terms of some picture of information-space, say, we don’t know what information-space looks like exactly, but you’ve got to figure that frequently used processes, nexuses, or heuristics, or subroutines that are constantly used, for instance, like words. 

Whatever heuristics generate the words that pop up in your consciousness and/or pop out of your mouth​, those structures in information-space are large and almost always on when you’re awake. You’re ​going to have words available to you to describe what’s going on with you. There are big verbal structures. There are big visual-processing structures. Similarly, there should be ​large well-developed attitudinal structures, philosophical structures. Structures that pertain to your deepest personality characteristics and attitudes about the world.

Maybe, e.g. charitableness, a belief in justice, a sense of irony, ​a tendency to make bad jokes and puns, cynicism, giving people the benefit of the doubt, all of those things that people think of you as you if people were to eulogize you. Those things might be thought of as your basic personality characteristics. When you think of different people, like Trump, today is Trump’s Inauguration Day. ​Trump’s soul might be belief in individual enterprise, egotism, easily takes offense, tends to exploit whatever is financially exploitable in a given situation, a deep seated belief in America as a place for enterprise. If you ask a hundred people what makes Trump, you would get some basic personality traits of Trump.

​ 
Scott: Those would be vices in Trump in general as aspects of the soul as deep characteristics of the individual​.

Rick: Well, vices, liberals see Trump’s deepest characteristics as being a sort of a huckster, a showman, an exploiter of ​financial schemes, but conservatives – people have been going out on the street during the last week leading up to the inauguration and asking Trump supporters what they think – find the plain spokenness and his telling-it-like-it-is preferable. It annoys non-Trump supporters because he seems to be a bullshitter to non-Trump supporters. Trump seems to have some recognizable basic personality traits. 

License

In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.

Copyright

© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen, Rick Rosner, and Marco Ripà

Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2017/01/25

Scott: What are other aspects of the dynamic IQ test?

Rick: There’s also the positive reinforcement. Somebody takes this test over and over and gradually, perhaps, improves. Another aspect of the Cooijmans model of genius is conscientiousness. Where if somebody takes your test over and over again, gets a little better, a little better, and a littler better, on average over time, it may translate into more persistence in other areas of their lives. “If I can do this, then I can do other stuff.” They have shown positive benefits from video games. People who work through incredibly challenging video games, where an average video game should take 60 hours to work through.

Marco: Take Tetris, for example, you can improve your Tetris abilities playing Tetris. I don’t know if my test is the same as this. I don’t know because I haven’t played Tetris and kept track to say, “You’re improving taking 10 tests” – say a standard deviation after 50 tests, I can’t say this. If you improve a standard deviation after 100 tests, it would, in my opinion, be a problem. If you improve a standard deviation taking 3 tests. It would be quite strange and not so good to use them in order to identify very high IQ people. Obviously, Rick, you can take the test for free, if you’re interested.

(Laugh)

Rick: I could take the test, but there’s always the chance that I’ll mess it up and ruin my reputation.

Marco: The ceiling is 172. Nobody has reached the top score. 2,000 people have tried the test. Nobody has achieved a perfect score.

Rick: That’s an awesome number. A big problem is to get enough people to be able to norm it.

Marco: It is an online test. So, it is quite challenging to take an online test using a fake name with a made up address.

Rick Rosner: You’ll know if Nick Nosner takes the test.

(Laugh)

Marco: The norm has been created using friends and so on. It is stable. More than 40 people, I have used their results. Those people, everybody has already taken a recognized test. We have about 130 zeta scores to create the norm.

Rick: That’s great.

Scott: Two points, one, the main forms of genius that have been talked about are IQ based, whether Enrico Fermi, Einstein, Newton, or Richard Feynman. Those have been the names that have been coming up. As well, the tests that have been coming up have been IQ tests. What about other forms of genius, e.g. moral genius?

Rick: We haven’t talked about creative genius. My kid is working with, and looking at, historic textiles. Jane Austen, the novelist, and her family put together a quilt with 3,000 pieces. I don’t know what the relevance is, exactly.

(Laugh)

But if you’re Jane Austen, her genius generated a bunch of novels that are universally beloved. Even though, she didn’t live to age 42. She somehow came up with these beautifully balanced works that resonate 200 years later. Of course, she and her family would create this ridiculously awesome quilt.

Anyway, with mathematical or scientific genius, there’s the idea that even without the genius science will churn forward and generate the same results, but, maybe, it takes a few years longer. But with creative genius, you have to imagine if Jane Austen was hit by a trolley or a carriage. We don’t know if anybody would ever replicate her work. Einstein would have been replicated by Poincaré or some other dude, or dudette. Jane Austen might be unreplicatable. In the future, I assume we’ll have Jane Austen software that will generate pretty good Jane Austen novels. Anyway, we haven’t talked about creative genius in fields where you’re not trying to scientifically characterize reality. You’re trying to do art.

(Laugh)

Marco: A couple geniuses I like, Newton for the math and Wozniak for the computer era. So, he had the creation of the Apple software and so on. The operative system that led to the development of the technology, which allowed the Skype we’re using now. These geniuses, in my opinion, have contributed very much to the development of human beings.

Scott: Wozniak, Newton, and Jane Austen, any other thoughts on creative genius?

Marco: Darwin was a creative genius. In that era, evolutionary theory wasn’t so close to their minds. Newton also was Catholic, if I’m not getting it wrong. He developed his theory and wrote a letter to the Pope asking why he reached that goal if it’s not a problem with the religion. If the world is as to my calculations, let me assume the universe has this form, where is the error or the missing piece of the puzzle? For this reason, I choose Newton as an example of a genius.

Rick: Newton was a miserable guy. He was a mean guy. He was given away by his mom at 10. She married a new guy. Newton was given to a local person for many years. That probably didn’t help his disposition or his mental health. Newton was a mess in certain ways. That leads to the area of comedy. With comedians, there is a common wisdom that you need to have a terrible early experience to give you a corroded view of humanity, and that makes for being a good comedian.

You can discuss about what you need to anneal to put potential geniuses through fire of miserable experience to come out with hardened genius on the other side. Probably not. Or with actors, if you look at the early lives of actors, their families moved around a lot. Like Tom Hanks, he went to like a dozen different schools. Actors always ending up in a new school developing new friends develop these fluid actor-ish personalities.

Marco: I choose Shakespeare and Dante Alighieri. They were also great geniuses in my opinion. Shakespeare was a genius in a horizontal way. He was able to embrace human beings as they are, really are. Alighieri was transcendental experience, starting with the human limited way of being and then going up and up reaching to the sky and the gods.

They are very different. Dante was 2 centuries earlier than Shakespeare. Shakespeare learned something from Dante, but developed a very different way of writing and also a different way of analyzing the world and humanity. It was very different. It is hard to make a comparison and say which was greater, in my opinion.

Rick: I’ve noticed. We talked about examples of people who died early. Shakespeare didn’t live that long. Jane Austen didn’t live that long. Newton lived for frickin’ ever. I’d say the thing that is positively correlated with genius is having at least a normal lifespan, especially in the creative endeavours – not so much in math and science – or in the arts. In the arts, it helps to live a long life.

Scott: Any concluding thoughts? We opened with Marco. We’ll close with Rick. Marco, what about the overarching discussion from tests to characteristics into minutiae like lifespan?

Marco: It is really hard to create a test to measure genius – to identify and measure genius potential and so on. Genius is a combination of abilities and aspects. It is a combination of perseverance, creativity, IQ. Different aspects such as luck and the team. Depending on the topic, the field, these aspects can be more or less important. For example, in mathematics, IQ, perseverance, and knowledge, etc., would be more important rather than in philosophy or letters. Shakespeare was a genius, but was focused on feelings and emotional aspects of people – analyzing them and creating a fast way to express these thoughts.

It was like a rock song for that period. So, the genius is different from the level of field and the period. Somebody who looks forward and is a step ahead rather than the other colleagues. It is harder to have a general definition of genius. It is hard to say if Shakespeare was greater than Einstein. I don’t know. I can’t say anything in this way. I am too small to give a judgment on Einstein or Shakespeare.

Scott: Thank you, Marco. And Rick?

Rick: I think Genius will become more common, more replicatable, as the world becomes more and more immersed in the sphere of computation and information, which isn’t a terrible thing and it will give genius the opportunity to manifest itself in more and more unusual ways and places. It won’t just belong to the, historically, the greatest geniuses, who have tended to be seen as white men – as with a lot of stuff. It has been that kind of chauvinism, which, in the future, will be more perceived across a wider spectrum of humanity. It’ll be more people having a shot at it, more different types of people will have a shot at it.

Scott: Thank you both for your time.

Rick: Marco, thank you, that was fun.

Marco: Thank you too, Rick. It is an honor for me to talk with you. Very thankful to Scott, for giving me this opportunity. Thank you very much.

Rick: Thank you, Scott. I’m going to go make myself presentable for my wife.

Scott: You both have my email. Anytime.

License

In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.

Copyright

© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen, Rick Rosner, and Marco Ripà

Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2017/01/24

Scott: What about the far future of intelligence testing? Not simply the verbal, mathematical, and spatial ones, or the culture fair/non-verbal ones, but things using advanced technology such as brain scans, and then you can give a rough estimate, the person takes the test and they get a rough estimate akin to those taken from pencil-and-paper tests.

Marco: I prefer non-verbal tests rather than verbal because the verbal tests are not so G_f (Fluid Intelligence), using Spearman’s definition.

Scott: Right, right.

Marco: However, you can mix the items on the test for a more accurate score. In my opinion, the best test, for verbal, is the WAIS-IV. It is the most complete test. It is the best test, even though it is not G_f loaded. You are not measuring pure IQ. You are measuring IQ as a potential and concrete skills. It is the best test to predict scholastic achievements, good work, and so on. Different tools for different measures.

Scott: Rick, you had something to say.

Rick: One problem with tests now is they are time consuming. IQ tests were initially designed to be fairly blunt instruments to see if kids need extra help in school. The first IQ scale went from 1-5. 1 and 2, you need help because you’re not mentally gifted. 3, you’re fine. 4 and 5, you need extra help because you might be mentally gifted. Then the Americans took over and put it on a 100-point mean scale. There is a question if you need to make a difference between an IQ of 138 and 162. According to the 1-5 scale, there’s not an effective difference between those IQs because those kids, the 138 IQ kid and the 162 IQ kid, are going to be bored in class and will need extra stuff.

But if you want to differentiate between 148 and 178. Somebody is going to have to sit down and take a long test or a tough test. That means, you miss people because a lot of people are like “That’s not my thing. I’m just going to do my stuff. I don’t care whether to know my IQ. I seem to have done okay in school. I haven’t had trouble in any of the classes I ever took. So, I am okay knowing I have this level of effective smartness. I don’t need to take an IQ test, and spend many hours practicing and taking IQ tests.”

Another problem with the history of IQ tests is they are external. You measure somebody’s thinking product. That’s not how we measure how good computers are. We look at their guts, their circuitry, and how they’re arranged. We come up with, more or less, exact numbers on the number of computations per second. In the future, as we figure out how to look inside brains better, and in the medium and far future, our brains will become more linked to external measures of computation. The measures of thinking will be these power numbers based on what’s actually going on in the brain-machine combination.

IQ tests are behavioristic. In the 1930s, there was behaviorism. Scientists looked at brains. They thought, “It is too hard right now. Let’s measure or analyze the output.” It’s like IQ tests. In the future, we’ll have a better understanding of the mechanics of brains and computing. We’ll have power numbers.

Marco: We have focused on only the development of the dynamic IQ test. It is the same thing as Raven’s Matrices. Each time, you have a different test using different parameters with a different set of solutions related to the matrices. However, the norm is stable. It is stable from test-to-test. We can develop a very large number of tests. It is about 100 billion different tests using a set of ~2,500 different figures for every cell of the matrices. You can get a very large number of different tests.

Rick: What Marco is doing important, for a number of reasons, it is hard for people to cheat because everybody gets a different test.

Marco: You can cheat on this test because every time you will see a different test, and the order of the items will be partially mixed, but it is not so easy to explain.

(Laugh)

Rick: It means people can’t share answers. You will get different problems the person before you. Like the tests in the past, like the Mega Test, it only had 48 answers. As the Internet came along, those answers became available to people who could search them.

Marco: Every test has a matrix. Every cell of the matrix can be ~2,500. If you combine the basic shapes, square, equilateral triangle, and circle, combining two of these figures, you can create about ~2,500.

Rick: That’s nice, and elegant. Another reason the technology you’re developing is important is because you can tailor the tests to people’s abilities. In America, for example, the SAT is somewhat tailored to the test-taker’s previous performance on the test. If you get some right, the SAT gives you harder problems. If you get some right, some wrong, you get some harder and some easier problems. If you get some wrong, you get easier problems. Somebody bright doesn’t have to work through 80 problems and get 78 of them right to get a result. Instead, that person might get to work through a representative sample of the easy problems, then move on to harder problems, so that in a test window you can get a more personally tailored test and a more accurate representation of that person’s abilities – and not make them do a bunch of busywork. You can tailor to somebody who is not so good, too.

Marco: My problem is the norm. It would be harder to norm the test that way. It would be interesting to create a test that made the difficulty in the middle part of the test based on your result in the first part of the test.

Rick: The purpose of IQ tests should be to give you results that can be used in things you can do in the rest of life, as with every tests. “You’re good here. You’re not so good here. You might think of doing this or this. You might think of exploring these areas of endeavour that seem to mesh well with your skill and interest set.”

Marco: I can’t spoil our goal…Our main goal is to use our test to create a test that you can use to see if your IQ or abilities in that field are increasing or not, or if they are dropping below a certain standard. So, it can be used to help you. It can be used to see if a young boy, for example, has abilities and so on. Also, the test is cheat-free. You cannot cheat in a dynamic test, especially if you take a dynamic test and are supervised.

If there is somebody watching you taking the test without your computer with you, you can’t cheat on this test. I can imagine in the future somebody can develop a program that will solve and recognize the figures. It will solve the matrices. A computer could help in this way. It would be hard to create this program. It is possible. If you take the test, and if it is supervised, it is possible to cheat. But this is online, you could take the test using a computer. But if somebody watching you take the test on this computer, it is fine.

Rick: There is a growing industry of practice games and drugs that claim to help people become smarter. There’s a lot of, I think, competence anxiety in the world today because, among other things, automation is removing work areas that don’t require much in the way of thinking skills. The world itself keeps becoming faster, more complicated, and people want to be able to keep up. It used to be said that things like the SAT, IQ, and intelligence were a lone number. Also, it stayed the same throughout life and couldn’t change it.

Now, the philosophy is that with practice, good nutrition, and supplementation could help people become smarter. Your test, Marco, by providing a baseline where people can take the test over, and over, and it has the same set of norms. People can see if there is any sort of improvement going on. Now, it is improvement on the test, but is it improvement in general or on general intelligence? For every test or task on the test, there’s probably some analysis to be done: Is this an improvement in specific skills or is this an improvement in general skills?

Marco: For improvement, in the specific abilities, it will be high, by definition, if we put it in comparison with the improvement in general cognitive abilities of the person, but this improvement wouldn’t be so high. So, if the test is different every time, you can take about 10, or a standard deviation, of improvement from the initial standard. Another issue, I think, is we need to adopt tests to be sure somebody isn’t cheating, taking drugs, for the test. It is strange. If you’re talking about IQ tests, I arrange the test, then okay. If you’re using the test in school to monitor the drop in abilities under a given standard, time-by-time. Also, you can use the same test. For example, every 6 months, you can use the same test to see if a male of about 80-years-old is losing their ability to solve a given item. If so, they might have Alzheimer’s.

Rick: Also, it can be used for fun. People might use it over and over again to see if they can improve.

Marco: It is an addicting game. Some people have written about 10 tests. Somebody bought 10 tests at a time. I don’t know if he ever expressed a big improvement.

License

In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.

Copyright

© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen, Rick Rosner, and Marco Ripà

Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2017/01/24

Scott: What else about social media?

Marco: It is not so easy to change your mind through ads on social media as well. I remember a poll on Facebook. It said about 80% of people don’t change their minds watching a post, on social media. It is not so easy. Then in Italy, our referendum, yes or no, a constitutional referendum was a bit like Trump’s victory in the USA. Our prime minister here, it wasn’t an easy referendum. Now, we have a different prime minister, in Italy.

Rick: You guys couldn’t get out from under Berlusconi for years. He’s Trump, basically.

Marco: We’ve had three different prime ministers who weren’t chosen by the people. The Italian president, of the Italian Republic, nominates the prime minister. Three different prime ministers who were against the people’s will. This is quite sad in my opinion. Now, we have the fourth prime minister who wasn’t chosen by the people.

Rick: Is he any good?

Marco: I think the world is changing a little bit in Europe too. Trump, it is an important step for Europe as well. Italy looks at the West and then also the USA. It is important to manipulate Italian minds too. This is true.

Scott: Is the system as sophisticated as in the United States, though?

Marco: People fear everything. They are afraid of change. But if they see something is changing in the rest of the world, they will take this upon themselves and will try to do the same things if they think something is wrong. They have to have courage to do this. They have to understand the rest of the world has something changing right now.

Rick: The US, we tend to ignore the rest of the world. The pipeline of information about the rest of the world flowing through our news is much narrower than I think in European countries.

Marco: With Trump, on the chair, we have suffered a kind of rebound.

Rick: Backlash.

Marco: Yes.

Rick: Maybe, the principle is that the way society and technology is changing. Genius is becoming more and more embedded in social structures that share more and more information including people who are purportedly geniuses.

Scott: We’ve identified some geniuses, identified some definitions, identified some possible issues that might arise with it. Also, some positive trends that might come with it, such as more collaboration with it. It leads to the next step. What can people do to sift effectively through this deluge of information, this pouring down of information, that is picking up pace – and new forms of information, not just more information?

Marco: Every topic is more complex if we compared it to the past. You need to work in a team to develop something greater compared to the past. It is not so easy to do something great alone. That’s the problem. The point, in my opinion, is that genius is someone who develops something, but to develop something new needs a team. Now, it is too difficult to do something new alone without help. You need to focus on a specific topic while somebody else focuses on another part of it. Another specific part of it. Then you need to put it together to strike something great.

Scott: Rick?

Rick: The barrage of information, available information, perhaps, changes what kinds of genius will be most effective in the world. Paul Cooijmans has three principles of genius. One is associative width, which is the number of analogies you can come up with to tackle a problem.

Scott: Associative width or associative horizon?

Rick: Associative width or horizon, or something, how that will work will change since everyone has almost all of human information via our devices if you know how to use it, how to access it. One of the tasks that affects genius now as compared to 100 years ago is, instead of information-getting, information-shifting. Einstein built big imaginary structures. He did gedankenexperiments, thought experiments, that led to a lot of his great discoveries. He built them in his own imagination. Now, 100 years later, there are all of the worlds you could possibly want by clicking around.

It remains to be seen if the geniuses of our era will be geniuses of synthesization, of sifting and combining all of these huge masses of information together in genius ways. Everybody has their own foibles and dysfunctions around information. My mom, for instance, is a borderline hoarder. Newspapers come in, mail comes in, and she thinks she’ll get through it all. It accumulates because she never gets through it all. But she’s barely online. For someone barely online, they will be even more snowed under by the continuous flows of massive amounts of information.

Marco: In my opinion, he had a big way, a different way, of thinking about the world, the universe, and its role, but he couldn’t win the Nobel Prize. He couldn’t win the theory with matrices. Some different pieces of the puzzle that, in the past, other people developed. He found a lot of different tools that helped to create the theory, relativity theory. There is a mathematical presentation that he couldn’t skip – to present the theory at conferences to get the achievements for the goal he was able to reach.

You can theorize, steal something from the past, and use it by yourself. Now, this isn’t possible. You have to do everything real-time with other people by staying connected and trying to proceed step-by-step together. That period, you can do a thing. This is my result, and somebody will use my achievement to do something new. Now, it is different. If you tackle a problem or topic, you need to stay with others to do it at the same time.

Rick: Where, in the past, there were fewer people marching forward in any field, but even Einstein needed his buddies that he would meet in the café to move things forward. For relativity, one of his friends said, “You have to look at this,” which was Matrix Theory or something. But if you’re in a popular field, you’re marching with 100s and possibly 1,000s of different people in different directions. One strategy for being a genius is to find a field that has fewer people in it, or to invent a field of your own.

So, you can find the stuff that is findable and aren’t competing at an Easter Egg hunt with at least 300 other people. Each in the same field. Each field has its easily found, and more difficult-to-find, results. One aspect of genius, historically, was having a different experiential background, which led to different thoughts. Darwin went on a 5-year, around-the-world voyage and sees a bunch of different geographies and creatures. Does he come up with the theory of evolution without doing that? Probably not, he certainly doesn’t come up with the 100s and maybe 1,000s of examples that he spent the next 20 years laying out without having this experience that nobody else had.

Marco: In our dynamic test, there was something similar. I came up with the idea in 2011. Then I talked about this idea in 2012, but then it took about 5 years to develop the real test.

(Laugh)

Also, I needed other people to accomplish this goal. I asked them to help me with my algorithm. I said, “This is the algorithm. You have to translate these instructions in a program.” We tried to see if something doesn’t work, and it didn’t work. We came up with a different. Finally, we have achieved the algorithm. It is online. It wasn’t as easy as I thought in 2012. It was very difficult to reach a dynamic online test without any flaws or without any colleague. Also, you can develop a collegial relationship between two different figures in the instruction field. You can’t distinguish with your eyes.

You have 3×3 square matrices. But given the chance, you can find two solutions that are the same figure using your eyes. If the computer ever presents two different strings of letters and numbers, you have to delay at least one of them to have a unique option for every different figure in the option field. This isn’t easy to predict before. You have to try to write the program and then generate a lot of different tests, and see if something doesn’t work.

License

In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.

Copyright

© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen, Rick Rosner, and Marco Ripà

Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2017/01/22

Scott: Maybe, there’s a strong positive that might come from this greater collaboration or the need for greater collaboration among the high ability set because it is too hard, as in the Enrico Fermi example you gave, Marco, to know or do everything alone. There have been examples like the Unabomber. A very anti-social person. This greater need for collaboration might work against those antisocial tendencies more. Does that seem reasonable?

Marco: I think being alone is a problem for everybody. If you’re alone, as I said before, it is a big problem for everybody, including geniuses and regular people. On YouTube, you have to deal with different creators, not only people who go to YouTube to watch a video. We are doing a lot of angles and live-streaming, also to talk about YouTube itself or to speak about something that hasn’t occurred on the platform. This is quite new for me, but I find this interesting with this period. We are working on a YouTube Italia, not only in YouTube. It is a little box, and it’s fine with me. It is my true work. 

(Laugh)

I can’t speak for television or others, but, for me, these angles and live-streaming are a good way to skip these additional problems as a creator on the platform, not only in real life.

Scott: Any thoughts, Rick?

Rick: In terms of the interactions among people, when I grew up in the 60s and 70s, it was assumed everybody was okay, and was pretty much well-served by things as they were, schools for instance. Everybody in my experience went to public school, and was assumed to be able to get a decent education and would be fine. People might have different roles in the school like jocks and nerds, and stoners, but everyone would pretty much turn out okay. 

Now, I think that there’s been certain aspects – like 80s high school movies deconstructed how schools work socially – with a certain deeper deconstruction and analysis of how people interact as part of the tech revolution, where you don’t get things like Cortana or Siri without somebody trying to figure out how human interactions go on. I think we’re served better by analysis of how people work well together and communicate with each other. I have done this on a personal level, where I have worked in a lot of bars or used to work in a bunch of bars.

I noticed that bars are good. They used to work as a place for people to meet people who couldn’t normally easily meet people because bars make it hard for people to communicate in general. They are noisy. They are dark. Everybody’s drunk. It makes it easier for everybody to think you’re more attractive than you are. So, working in bars, I would analyze how effective my interactions were. Usually, it wasn’t that great because A) I’m me and B) we’re in bar, but the whole breaking down of social interactions to make them better is helpful. 

I could bring it back to genius because, eventually, this deconstruction and reconstruction of how people work and apps based on how people and thinking work means that we’re all being glued together into a more, I hope, smarter set of interactions that make better use of people and make people, or give people the potential to be happier.

Scott: Any thoughts on that, Marco?

(Laugh)

Marco: I have no experience in a bar, but my mother owns a little shop. So, I have tried to relate to people through the little shop. Also, my point about YouTube is a lot of people are giving feedback and so on, but those people are very young, usually. My channel is about this, mathematics, and logics, and so on. It is not so accessible to younger people and boys, but the standard is young student, pupil. It’s good to analyze which kind of people go to a given video and analyze their way of thinking. I know this issue. Also, you have a lot of analytics.

You can try to construct the ranking or the set of parameters that you want to analyze. You can find with a given video if it is good for a set of girls or boys, or a given culture. It helps you to develop a strategy. If you wanted to increase your views on a given topic, you can use a given set of targets to try to increase the watching time of a video that is also important to pick above other videos or names in your channel. It is interesting.

(Laugh)

You can find out a lot about people’s interests and way of thinking, in a way. It is not as big of a platform, but it allows you to understand a lot of things about people.

Rick: I agree. I use Twitter analytics in the same way. You are able to analyze the performance of each tweet minute-by-minute. For instance, I have driven a lot of people away by looking at my stuff by making too many jokes about Trump.

Scott: People did vote for him.

(Laugh)

Marco: It is a topic on YouTube.

(Laugh)

Trump is the mirror of people’s way of thinking in the more general way. The result was a shock for the rest of the world, for Europe, but not for myself. I think this period is going to finish this era of compromises. People are trying to see black-or-white now. Not only trying to look forward to a given house, to be sure about the future, to risk, to find something new. They are upset. They are also concerned about the future, but they want to try a different way to try and approach this future. 

Rick: To some extent, I think people are – we were talking about collaboration – given a huge amount of power via social media. That makes some people less collaborative or less wanting to make sacrifices. If you look back at WWII, every country pulled together and made sacrifices to fight in that war, crazy huge sacrifices with rationing and people putting their lives on the line. Now, it’s 70 years later in America. You have Trump who represents himself as an individualist, as an individual success, versus a candidate whose slogan was “stronger together.” 

One of Trump’s promises is to dismantle Obamacare, which is a huge cooperative structure where people are able to get insurance because everybody gets insurance together. A lot of the people behind Trump or behind Brexit, or behind some of these nationalistic movements, are representing individualistic forces like “I need to take care of myself. I don’t need to look after other people. And I will be successful in doing that.” One of the things that gives people the idea that they are strong individually is how much social reinforcement you get from social media. 

Everybody’s got this feed in their hand, where it’s your friends telling you you’re great and news stories agreeing with you if you’re in your information bubble for as many hours of the day as you want to get this information. There was a study that just came out and said 1 out of 5 teenagers will wake up in the middle of the night to check social media. It is super attractive, this reinforcement. I remember 30 years ago when the Rambo movies came out. There were a lot of American men, including myself, who were strutting and thinking and feeling like we’re Rambo. I think social media gives you that feeling of “I’m strong and know what I’m doing” – to some extent.

Scott: Does that make people more exploitable if they aren’t banding together?

Rick: Then you get into the conservative think tanks, in America, for the last 30 or 40 years. They have studied how to move people, politically.

Scott: Like the Cato Institute, for instance.

Rick: Yes, they know how to label and brand things. Conservatives in America are much better at coming up with names for things. They came up with “Death Panels” for Obamacare and the “Death Tax” for the Estate Tax. The tax on inheritance – calling it the Death Tax makes it sound like you’re being taxed for passing away and it’s not fair. It sounds really negative. Pro-choice as opposed to anti-abortion. Conservatives are much better at doing that stuff, and much better at doing it.

I remember in 6^th grade. They taught us how to resist TV advertising. They taught us 8 or 10 ways that TV advertising works. I think most people at this point have become pretty resistant to TV ads. They have been around long enough for us to figure our what they’re about and to feel cynical about anything pitched on TV. New media, we’re not as resistant to it. We fall for, now, the big topic of fake news. It takes a while for people to learn how to resist new forms of information, and, with the world moving as fast as it does now, there will always be new forms of information. We can expect people to be manipulated either on purpose or by accident for the near future.

License

In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.

Copyright

© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen, Rick Rosner, and Marco Ripà

Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2017/01/22

Scott: What were other aspects of being proactive?

Marco: I used to do a lot of weight lift training, but I stopped lifting weights. Karate is a good sport, a good way to fight.

Rick: I think we both did kind of the same thing. We realized being smart isn’t the main thing, and you have to come to terms with the world and other people. There are two aspects. One in terms of modern implications, where there are more ways to connect with people than ever before, and more intimately with people via social media, I feel as if it is probably tougher to be socially isolated. I would hope that to some extent social media have reduced the stigmatization that any person with weird traits might feel. I know social media might contribute to bullying, but, on average, across the whole spectrum of kids it has led to less isolation and less teasing. 

Marco: The world is changing really fast. My experience was in the late millennium, but I think Rick’s experience was associated with a different era. Not the 2.0 era, social media, YouTube, Facebook, which are networks that connect people around the world and let you start a conversation with someone who you think is closer to your ideas. Also, social networks have an algorithm that let you see only what is relative to your interests, point of view. If you’re into politics and of a given party, you’ll find more posts within the bubble. I am Italian, but my English is really bad at times. I try to explain.

(Laugh)

Rick: It’s really good.

Scott: Your English is fine.

Rick: Being a typical American, I know zero Italian. 

Marco: English, you have to learn it on your own or practice on Skype.

Rick: In addition to social media, and the whole sphere of external computation, it means that genius will become less exceptional as everybody is made smarter by technology. 

Scott: Is that apparent, though?

Rick: Well, no, because it looks like technology makes everybody stupider because they walk around in traffic and drives while on their phones, and everybody is distracted.

(Laugh)

At some point, it makes people smarter. There are ways, like the navigation aid and others, that are external computation. All of the sudden, you’ve become a navigation genius, you know all of the shortcuts, because of the device in your hand. There will be a bunch of devices that help people function better, smarter, based on external computation instead of doing everything in your head. I would rather live now as myself rather than 100 years ago as a king because all of the tech that we have means that we’re rich informationally. We’re only going to keep getting more so.

Scott: If we take the discussion about what genius is around the examples like Feynman with the humblebrag nature, as well as the Hollywood representation of things, as well as the social isolation and outright bullying in prior generations for those that are of exceptional intelligence, and that exceptional intelligence is becoming less exceptional, where does that leave the genius in terms of its definition now and into the future? Is that the proper term if it is becoming less rare and less exceptional, except in relation to prior definitions?

Marco: I think the results come with knowledge. You have to be good at knowledge searching in Google, not only knowing it by yourself and trying to develop something good, something new. Genius as a definition is relative to your era, your period. Now, as I said before, the world is changing so fast that you can’t make a comparison between a genius in the late 20th century and a genius now. It depends on the field too. As far as I know, the last genius that had general knowledge of his field was Enrico Fermi. Now, you have to specialize your interests, applications, in a very specific topic and try to make the research towards achieving something new, something good, which can let that topic also be something started by other people.

Rick: I agree. The idea of genius and IQ have always been subject to misuse and misunderstanding since Galton. Galton, like 120 years or 150 years ago, came out with a book called Genetic Studies of Genius or something. It can’t be genetic because he was before genetics. He was the guy who brought genius into the modern era, in the 19th century. 

Genius and IQ have been used for bad things, in the 1930s for eugenic policies, which led to horrible immigration policies in the US. It led to people being sent back to Germany and killed based on IQ test scores. I remember growing up in the 60s. Kids got their IQs tested all of the time. There were a bunch of kids being told that their kids were geniuses, because they were told so in parent-teacher conferences. It is subject to all sorts of mischaracterization. Although, in terms of how actual genius functions, I agree with Marco that it is changing. I think that it is changing in the direction of collaboration.

If you think of the science of 100 years ago, and you have individual pioneers like Planck and Einstein and Dirac and de Broglie, everybody coming up with their own little additions to relativity and Quantum Mechanics, chunk-by-chunk and great person-by-great person. Now, you have science being pushed forward by CERN, which is the combined efforts of more than 10,000 scientists, and is more than 20km in diameter.

You see it in other endeavors, like Judd Apatow. He is one of the most successful comedy movie producers in America. He makes his comedy by doing table reads by inviting 20 funny friends to read scripts with each of the 20 pitching in jokes at every point in the script. So, our technology and other factors mean that genius endeavors are less individual than they used to be, in some instances.

Marco: You have to develop social skills too, to try to work in a team rather than working by yourself without others. You have to focus on your part of the project. You can build a bigger project rather than working alone and trying to find sources on Google, and so on. My personal experience with dynamic IQ tests. I developed the first spatial dynamic IQ test. I developed the algorithm, but the implementation process was a joint issue, matter. I find also another high-IQ person that is good with software and computers. We are working as a team. We have achieved this great goal for me. It is a dream come true, but working together – not only by myself. We are 50-50 now. My friend is an expert in the field that I can’t access myself…

(Laugh)

…working on Java and on these languages that I can’t do by myself, at that level.

Rick: I’ve had some of my greatest working experiences working with other people. I’ve worked with you, Scott, for years now. It has been productive.

Scott: Right.

(Laugh)

Rick: When I had a writing partner for writing comedy on TV, he actually wasn’t that great for me in terms of making my social skills better because he had great social skills and took over the social stuff and would say, “He’s the weirdo.” It was good for him to be socially smooth, but it was bad for me to be characterized as the weirdo.

But as part of a writing team on TV shows, that is an awesome collaborative experience. That’s how TV shows are done. That’s the model for a lot of shows, a lot of good shows, which is the writers’ room where everybody shares their experience to share dialogue and jokes.

Marco: Television is the best for social skill development. You have to show something to others, to a wide number of people. You have to be smart and what can be good, or not, for others.

(Laugh)

License

In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.

Copyright

© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen, Rick Rosner, and Marco Ripà

Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2017/01/20

Scott: What is genius, Marco?

Marco: First of all, I think Rick is a genius, obviously. The general definition is not so easy to understand. I think we can give two different answers. An extraordinary intellectual or analytic power, or IQ. If we set IQ as a standard, we can say that we can improve IQ through training. For example, we have developed a dynamic test. You can try it over and over and increase your skills in that field. That’s my personal opinion, just my two cents.

Rick: I agree with Marco, also a genius, except I think there’s more than two definitions. The first one being extreme skills at mental tasks. Also, IQ is tricky because a lot of things go into IQ, but a lot of things go into other forms of genius too. But there’s the way genius is used to describe people who changed or helped out human progress by coming up with things that other people may not have been able to come up with, or by coming up with those things before anyone else.

People have said, “If Albert Einstein had been hit by a bus, somebody else would’ve come up with General Relativity. He was the first one to it. He found both forms of relativity. He didn’t even get the Nobel Prize for Relativity.” He got the Nobel, for among other things, ​the atomic theory of matter. He had this one year, where he wrote 4 or 5 papers. Each of which changed the world of physics in a different fairly profound way. So, when you use genius in that way, it refers to a very limited number of people who changed humanity’s path.

Marco: Somebody who gives a contribution to mankind and develops a given field. You can use your IQ to do something in real life, but this is so strict as a definition. You can do something good with or without a very high IQ. I know that Feynman said he didn’t have a high IQ. 

Rick: There’s a thing on Twitter called a “humblebrag,” where you’re bragging without bragging. I think Feynman loved to say he didn’t have a high IQ, but at the same time was fantastically smart. He might have messed up one IQ test in 4th grade or something.

Marco: I agree with Rick’s opinion. Genius’s have to give some kind of contribution to mankind. Something important. If you have the potential, if you care to develop it in a concrete way, you have to be lucky, have to have a good team, have to be in the right place in the right moment, or time.

(Laugh)

The most important thing is to do something good with your applications and objectives.

Rick: I agree with Marco. Not only do you have to be lucky in terms of your era or your personal situation, you also have to be lucky in terms of having other aspects of your personality that reinforce genius rather than waste it. I have both. I go off on crazy tangents.

(Laugh)

That waste a lot of time. For a while, I was a genius of catching fake IDs presented by people trying to break into bars, which doesn’t save mankind. But it probably helped some people from getting into drunk driving accidents.

Marco: Perseverance and stamina, it is very important.

(Laugh)

Scott: That leads to a question. What traits does genius on the negative side exacerbate and on the virtue side enhance?

​Rick: There are stereotypes associated with genius. All you have to do is turn on CBS. Currently, every show on CBS has a genius character. They are often presented as socially dysfunctional, quirky. If they are part of a forensic team on a CBS murder solving show, then they might be goth.

(Laugh)

Though I know plenty of smart people who have super good social skills. Although, possibly with them, the genius doesn’t stand out because they function smoothly in society. The framework is Aspergery. High-functioning autism meshes with the stereotypic genius, but I live in LA where the entertainment industry has a huge number of people with the opposite of Asperger’s. 

Their social skills are too good, and makes them horrible in the opposite way of Asperger’s.

Marco: I have Asperger’s.

(Laugh)

I don’t know if you know this. I am an Asperger.

Rick: I didn’t know that.

Scott: I did.

Rick: I am too old. I am 56 years old. I grew up before the term was in widespread use. If I was 20 years younger, people would have looked at me as a kid and said, “Yea, Asperger’s.”

Scott: You’ve done jokes about Sheldon (Cooper) in some of your videos, Marco.

Marco: Yes, my YouTube channel. Asperger’s, also, is a continuum. There isn’t a given number to say, “You are Asperger. You are not Asperger. You are normal.”

(Laugh)

(Laugh)

It is important to find one of you. So, you can become a negative genius. People can start to point out everything you do, and your strange way of thinking. That’s my point of view. 

Rick: I agree. In junior high, it is terrible for everybody, but the flavor of how it was bad for me. I got a certain amount of crap from people for being a little brainy, nerdy-like. The kind of crap somebody 20 years younger would get for being Aspergery. One of the things I thought was “Dang, I wish I lived in Europe.” In American schools, athletic skills are highly prized. In Europe, it seemed there was a little less emphasis on being a jock. I thought if I lived in Europe I could be the way I am and maybe still get a girlfriend. But I don’t know.

Scott: Is that reflective of your experience in Europe, Marco?

Marco: My best answer to this problem was when I started to practice karate about 15 years ago. In that period, I was really sad, and upset, and so on.

(Laugh)

But it helped me to find a reason to fight in real life, not only during matches and so on. But this is my experience.

Rick: I did the same thing, not with karate, but with lifting weights. When I got big enough, I started working in bars, as I said, checking IDs, where I got to meet people, and occasionally somebody would punch me.

(Laugh)

(Laugh)

But I didn’t know karate. So, I would just get punched.

(Laugh)

(Laugh)

License

In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.

Copyright

© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner

Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2017/01/19

Scott: News has changed, even in the last few decades, drastically. What are some miserable aspects of the public relations industry?

Rick: The news isn’t exactly the public relations industry. The news wrestles with the same issues individual people do and groups of people do, which is how to present information in ways that don’t make people stupider or don’t introduce further bias, and how do you make a bunch of money doing it.

News used to be, for the major networks from the 40s until the 80s or 90s, a public service that was semi-mandated by the government. The government says, “We’re going to give you the broadcast airwaves for really cheap.” Radio companies turning into TV companies: NBC, CBS, ABC, Dumont.

Dumont was a network created by TV manufacturing companies to help sell TVs. It was gone by the 60s. These networks get the channels for cheap because they are expected to perform the public service of keeping the public informed via news. Maybe, some other stuff, but that tended to go away.

Nobody cared if the news made money. You threw on a 30-minute or 15-minute show around dinner time to tell people the news. It didn’t matter whether it made money or not. Then you have the coming of the, without knowing the total history, morning news shows. They are news plus 3 hours of happy chat, fashion.

These 3-hour blocks make a lot of money, then you have the coming of CNN. The first 24-hour news channel, which is designed to make money. Money starts becoming more and more of an important thing in presenting the news. Now, most news on TV is profit driven, which creates a bunch of bad habits in addition to the bad trends caused by people not being able to figure out what is the right way to try to inform people.

That doesn’t F- up the country. The news media performed particularly badly during the 2016 election. Part of it, and as with many aspects of the election, is the news channel’s own greed and incompetence, or just the need to keep existing as business entities. Another part of it was there was everyone trying to manipulate the news for their own purposes.

So, the image that popped into my head, which is probably sexist and probably not accurate, is a drunk girl at a fraternity party. People are trying to mess with her. She is doing herself no favors, though it’s blaming the victim by being drunk and dressing in party clothes. There are lots of things that are conducive to bad things going on.

Then CNN may be the most guilty party in the election of 2012 among the major news networks. Fox is going to consistently be an evil doer. It is going to consistently misbehave towards the conservative side and then present a biased and manipulative view, but everybody knows that. If you come to Fox for a fair presentation of the news, then you’re stupid or just wanting to give yourself over to manipulation.

Some overage of the news is biased to the liberal side, such as Rachel Maddow who is super well informed. She is biased towards the liberal perspective, but knows more than most people on TV news. She doesn’t hide her liberalism, and tries to get the information out. As opposed to a Hannity, not that I could watch a Hannity, who would present a bunch of manipulative conservative, craven arguments.

But then you have CNN, which is said to lean liberal, but then has a bunch of bad habits that let it get played by Trump and everything associated with Trump. The bad habits often used to be good habits, but through confusion and inability to see a better way of doing things have become exploitable. The idea of journalistic neutrality has been totally exploited by assholes mostly on the conservative side with these dumb interpretations of journalistic neutrality.

For example, if there’s an argument, then you need to give another argument, but one argument is clearly better. Like climate change, a huge and growing amount of evidence for climate change with the people who know about it best being convinced about it. 98+% of scientists, and those willing to look at the evidence, believe it is happening.

That there is at least a super high likelihood that climate change is happening. There are really good solid arguments for climate change, but then you have people with a political agenda advancing deceptive and money-driven bullshit arguments. CNN throws up a panel with people on both sides.

To somebody who’s not paying attention, who’s stupid, or willing to be manipulated, it seems like climate change is a toss-up. So, principle one that is exploitable and terrible is if there is an argument on one side then you put another one on the other side. Another is false equivalence. If one side is doing stuff and you’re covering it negatively then you better, to be equivalent, better find stuff on the other side.

It was disastrous for the democrats and frickin’ Hillary, who did some small-scale stupid stuff by using her private server, which is still debateable if this actually did harm. Probably not, she used a government server for some of her stuff. It may have been as hackable as her private server. There’s really no evidence of any great or dire harm that occurred because she used a private server.

But this becomes evidence of bad judgment, malfeasance, and bringing down America. It gets magnified by the principle of ‘if Donald Trump is doing bad stuff then Hillary Clinton has to have her stuff looked at too.’ Also, because Wikileaks steadily feeds hacked information to the DNC every day, there’s a steady drum beat of ‘Hillary did bad stuff’ for the last 2 months of the election, even though Trump is much more of an asshole than fucking Hillary is.

But people in the news media cannot effectively argue for this. There is a certain, with CNN being the worst of the channels, aspect of ‘could not be bothered’ with better ways of covering the election. Also, there’s time pressure. There wasn’t any time to consider information from the election. Also, people weren’t fully cognizant of the damage being done by the bad coverage.

It pisses me off because we see the same Trump people, same spokespeople, like the cute blond lady. They continue to spread Trump arguments, terrible bullshitty arguments, and the panel mode encourages confusion, intentional confusion, and bullshit. Even after this terrible election, CNN continued to do this stuff because people continue to be attracted to it.

They continue to pull, for them, good numbers because they focus-grouped and found that panels and town halls worked, like with Paul Ryan. CNN continues to facilitate bullshit. Without effectively calling it bullshit, without putting it into news context, it is legitimized. If you’re going to list the CNN things that are bullshit, the panels, the town halls, putting the clock up to always count down to something, the refusal to authoritatively contextualize goodness and badness.

It’s hard and, you can argue, it is not the job of a news channel to judge good or bad, but it kind of becomes their job whereby not judging good or bad you allow bad to flourish. You have to guide people if you’re facilitating people thinking bullshit stuff.

License

In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.

Copyright

© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner

Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2017/01/18

Scott: We were talking about a conversation you had a while ago about space. Someone asked you about space. We’ve talked about space. Space as an emergent property of the interactions of matter in the universe. When the person asked you about space, they asked, “What is it, and what is it expanding into?” in essence. What are some false assumptions behind that?

Rick: There are reasonable assumptions behind that. The traditional perspective of the Big Bang, to be visualized easily is the 2-dimensional surface on a 3-dimensional balloon. As the balloon is blown up, the entire balloon expands. Looking at the balloon, though it is a 2-dimensional surface, it is in 3-dimensional space.

So, it is reasonable to ask, “What is our universe, if our universe can be imagined as a 3-dimensional curved surface, embedded in?” The natural answer is that there is a 4-dimensional space that contains it. The real answer is the universe contains itself. It defines itself. It is, as you said, an emergent property of the arrangement of the universe, the relationships of information.

It is more efficiently or effectively visualized being a spatial relationship. In fact, that is such an effective visualization that we live our lives in what we consider 3-dimensional space. It works from the arrangement of information. It works so well spatially that we live in actual space. It does not mean that there is anything outside of this space.

In the same, or not quite the same, way as if you’re a dungeon master in Dungeons & Dragons, you build your play area. You could imagine realms beyond the play area, but you don’t need them in your world, I guess. It is a space that exists abstractly without needing a further space to be embedded in.

Similarly, as we’ve been talking about consciousness, if the information within an information-sharing system can be efficiently arranged spatially, that space defined by the information doesn’t really need external space for it to be embedded in. The space is an abstract-ish space.

If there’s enough information, and if it’s an efficient enough arrangement, the space can be seen as something that is a functioning kind of thing. An emergent property of the arrangement of information that is helpful in seeing how the information within the space interacts, but it doesn’t need a further space beyond the space that defines itself.

All through human history there is the saying that “no man is an island,” but we do almost all of our computation, all of our sensory and mental computation, within our head and the computation and sensation external to us are very threadbare, slender, and weak compared to the mass of information processing that goes on within our individual awarenesses.

But in the future, as those tendrils and threads and communication and links to external computation are strengthened, and we become further and further embedded in what will be a worldwide computational sphere, then it becomes reasonable to imagine connected information spaces.

Say in science fiction, 120 years from now, people who are really into each other can do a literal marriage of the minds, where they can super-link their thoughts, so that they are actually sharing thoughts via some wireless dealy. I guess a literal jacking into each other via the year 2140 version of HDMI cable, or one partner wants to or is forced to abandon his or her body due to age has his/her thoughts/thinking/mental hardware literally embedded in the other person’s head.

In each of these cases, where you have two minds super-linked, you could imagine that these two information spaces would have to expand into each other. But again, as long as those two people form their own island of two super-linked people, which they would because everybody is super-linked, except the technological Amish.

The information space describing their two minds is sufficient unto itself and doesn’t require a further abstract space for their linked mind-space to be embedded in. Until, they open a bunch of links into other links and people. In which case, you have expansions into linked other information spaces, which kind of looks like Big Bangy physics.

If you merge two mind-spaces, it looks like a bunch of stuff looks like to you like the early universe. A whole bunch of early stuff becomes visible and ages along with your mental universe, so that it eases into older and older parts of the universe because the active center of consciousness is the information in your head that at least for the moment it is being processed is the oldest information, the information with the longest history, in your head.

The older or less relevant the information is, the more it is at the more distant, apparently younger, outskirts because the further away from the center you’re looking then the younger the universe you’re seeing.

Scott: The original assumption of space was an infinite void that things expand into. You’re describing an information-based definition of space, where space is derivative of relationships developed through information processing. Time develops through that too. Time is changes in space states. Spaces with linked pasts and implied futures, right?

Rick: Yes, my buddy, Chris, talks about Liebnizian monads. Liebniz lived 3 centuries before information theory. A bunch of people have wrestled with atomic theories of existence, which is “what is the smallest little unit of stuff that could exist from which everything else could be built up from?” You either need an atomic theory with the smallest unit or some theory that says there is no smallest thing and that it is just an infinite ladder of things being built up from tinier and tinier particles and elements, or some other theory.

But those are your two big choices. Liebniz was trying to come up with the simplest building units. He came up with this monad deal, which I don’t fully know is in terms of information. It is possible to imagine a universe made up of monads with monads being the simplest possible thing. A connection between one thing and another thing. It is the basic tinker toy. There’s nothing simpler that does anything.

Scott: In other words, you have a unit, A, or a monad, A, a unit, B, and the relationship between them, C, but that’s without information theory.

Rick: Basically, anything less than that is a tinker toy that is connected to nothing but itself, and you cannot build a universe that is made of stuff connected to nothing. So, you have a universe built on these one-on-one connections that you can start to catalogue in efficient ways, in ways that make sense of them, spatially and temporally.

So, you can argue that space and time originate from efficient and effective cataloguing of, not exactly random but not exactly not random, sets of monad-type connections. You start with your simplest building blocks, and then you classify via relationship, then the classifications naturally lead to spatial divisions and structures and temporal structure.

If you have some minimization principle, which is you want to arrange things so that things in your emerging space and time where the connections are minimized spatially, you’re setting up a space where overall you’re at a minimum. That if you total up the lengths of the connections of the monads, then you’ve got some kind of minimization going on.

For time, there’s some other minimization or maximization principle, but the cataloguing with minimization or maximization naturally leads to a space arising. For instance, say that your real-world equivalent of monad-type relationships are photons, which are handshakes between two different points in space and time connected by this photon.

If you want to minimize the total paths of all photons in your universe, maybe, you would arrange stuff in stars and galaxies because in a star a photon travels, the average photon, about a millimetre before it runs into something. You’ve got massive fusion and masses around. You’ve got a zillion short-range photons coming into and out of existence.

Each of those photons considered as a monad is a little, teeny monad. Only the rare monad makes it off the surface of the Sun to travel light years across the universe. You want to minimize the number of super-long monad connections, which are these super long-distance photons, statistically, versus all of these short-range monads or photons where a photon is not able to travel more than the thickness of a piece of paper, or something which has got to be super small.

Most of the matter in the universe is in stars or in other gravitationally agglomerated collections of huge amounts of matter. Stars are further agglomerated into galaxies. Even if a photon manages to escape a star, if it is close to the center of the galaxy, its odds of running into something else before it makes it out of the galaxy are high.

Everything is agglomerated, which serves to make the universe more efficient in terms of minimizing the size of monads or connections, photon-mediated connections.

Scott: If you take Liebnizian monads, and if you take information theory to kind of give a number to it, and if you take the 10^85^th or 10^80^th particles in the universe…

Rick: …yea, the number I’m used to taking is 10^80, which is from 100 years ago…

Scott: …if you take that as the base number, and the base number of interactions without factorizations or higher-order combinatorial interactions, what would be the processing level of the universe? Only base-level amounts of processing.

Rick: There have to be, I think, many more photons than other massive particles, I guess. Maybe not, because each atom, each link between an electron and a nucleus, represents the emission of one or more photons. If you imagine that atoms, if you imagine the electron and the nucleus as initially being not linked, and then the electron becoming linked to that nucleus via emitting electromagnetic energy in the form of a photon, that, maybe not a one-to-one, relationship between the number electrons and the number of photons.

You’ve got background radiation consisting of like a zillion photons. Take 10^80^th or 10^85^th, to be fair, that is the number of active relationships mediated by current monads in the universe, say. So, that 10^85^th, say that is correct within 10 orders of magnitude, that’s some, I assume, measure of the information-processing capacity of the universe from moment-to-moment.

But you have to discuss the differences between moments. That there’s the moment that is instantaneous, which is a slice through the universe, through the world line of the universe. How many monads does that slice intersect? Then there’s the idea of a moment of the universe being, if the universe is thought of as a thinking thing, then a thought takes a certain amount of time and that time for a thought takes many tens of billions of years.

In that case, you’re then encompassing a huge multiple more of monads that took part in the computation of that moment. An instantaneous moment intercepts much fewer number of monads than are contained in a 20-billion-year slice of the universe’s timeline. Obviously, the universe, if a thought takes 20-billion-years for the universe think, will flesh out something much more complicated than the information contained in an instantaneous slice of the universe, which can be the thinking about the painting as you’re watching it.

Your eyes are only designed to see half-a-dozen inches with any degree of detail. Your eyes run out of detail pretty fast. They’ve done studies, where they trace people’s eyes as they look at the painting. It looks like a squiggle. It covers most of the painting. You develop an image of the painting over a second or two. Your built-up image of the painting interacts with your consciousness, then you have thoughts about the painting.

That is understood or contained, for a moment, in your awareness, which was well built up over a second or two. Where the instantaneous slice of the physics of your brain would contain much less information than the information contained your entire thought, which might take 2 or 3 seconds of squiggling around the painting, then having reactions to it, ditto for the universe.

The information capacity, the instantaneous information processing capacity of the universe might be way, way small compared to the effective, practical information processing in the universe because your information processes are able to stack up instantaneous processing to develop more complicated processing, more complicated thoughts in a tacit way mediated by long-distance photons tacitly sharing information with the universe as they traverse billions of light years with the information they contain being lost from the photon across billions of years and being encoded into the universe tacitly by reshaping the space of the universe.

Somebody, it might’ve been Bohm, who wrote a book called The Implicate Universe. Last time I looked at it was 30 years ago, but when I think about implicate, it implies, to me, that the universe does a lot of its business by implication, by indirect communication, via the structure of information within it.

That the universe acts as if it understands the information it contains via the physical structure of this abstract space that becomes more abstract in practical terms because of its precision and scope, and the sheer amount of information that defines that space, but with most information being understood or processable by the universe via tacit quantum Schrödinger-catty-type processes that don’t necessarily involve the direct communication of information from one single point to another. You have a bunch of different monads communicating from one point in space and time to another point in space and time, but that interaction affects the space around the interaction, so the universe understands that interaction as having happened without having directly communicated with the interaction via further particle exchange. Rather through a gravitational and spatial general relativistic slight reshaping of space, and encoding of information in space.

License

In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.

Copyright

© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner

Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2017/01/17

Scott: Let’s continue on consciousness.

Rick: I think a nice half-definition of consciousness is the feeling of shared information. As conscious beings, we know what it is like to experience consciousness, but it is hard to characterize. But you can compactly label it, the feeling of shared information.

Every part of your brain sharing information with every other part of your brain. There’s, experientially, a certain informational flavor. It feels like something, being conscious feels like being conscious. That feeling is based on massive information-sharing within your awareness.

Every other part of your brain is gossiping about everything going on in the reality you’re thinking about from moment to moment. I was thinking about other examples of consciousness that further characterize different aspects of consciousness.

People like to argue, strongly, that it is not consciousness unless there is self-awareness. That, unless you’re aware of yourself as an entity, then you’re not conscious. Does a dog know it’s a dog? Does a lizard know it is a lizard?

But that whole thing is a little off base. To be conscious, there has to be a mass of information. A stream of information that is being shared among specialist sub-systems. In living creatures, a lot of that information pertains to the status of the creature itself.

In living creatures, self-consciousness is itself a big part of consciousness. You can argue it doesn’t have to be. I argue that. With the Go machine, it can be a Go machine without experiencing itself as a Go machine.

Another example, a conscious, sophisticated security system that uses a number of different sensors and heuristics to evaluate the security situation, moment-to-moment, in a set of warehouses. The cameras consist of temperature and pressure, and visual, sensors and analytic programs that examines and evaluates people in the warehouses.

It has a bunch of sensors and tools to examine the situations in the warehouses. It doesn’t have to experience itself as a security system. It could simply experience the situation in the warehouse security system. It might have some self-evaluative machinery such as seeing if it is having power problems or various malfunctions like the loss of a camera.

Even in an engineered system like that, you would expect a degree of self-consciousness because it makes sense for a machine that would do its job well, but you could design a machine without any of that and have it conscious only of the doings in the warehouse.

Similarly, you could have some kind of Peeping Tom or security setup that watches a bunch of people in an apartment house. Say the apartment house consists of 24 units and 40 people, and somebody has wired all of the units to a system that observes everybody as they go about their lives in the apartment house, the system may take in visual information, auditory information, and could take in smells, and feelings such as the pressure as people walk around that trigger pressure sensors.

It could have analytic tools to understand what is happening in the lives of the people in the apartment house. It could even have sentiments about what is going on in the lives of the people in the apartment house based on it being programmed to have humanistic sentiments about people and to be happy when things are going well for people, and not so well when things aren’t going so well.

This thing is watching people and is conscious of the people in the apartment house, but doesn’t have to be conscious of itself as an observing system. Eventually, you would think it would discover itself and its limitations as a monitor, but it doesn’t have to have that.

In fact, you could design something specifically without self-awareness and conscious of the people in the apartment house, and not conscious of itself. But it is not conscious because it doesn’t have self-consciousness.

It is highly aware and gossiping with itself about the goings on in the apartment house with what we could consider a weird lack of self-consciousness, which we would consider similar to somebody who has had a stroke and lost an aspect of awareness that we consider pretty essential to being a conscious being.

There are plenty of examples of people who have had a stroke and lose the idea of left. Every idea about left for them is gone. You ask somebody who is missing left to draw a clock. They draw the right half of the clock, or they cram all twelve numbers onto the right side of a dial. It is a half-clock with all of the numbers.

You ask them if there is anything weird about this. They say, “No.” They are not conscious of the lack of left because that went with left in general. If you read Oliver Sacks, there are numerous cases of people who have lost large segments of what we would consider a normal identity and who can still function in many other ways, and are still conscious.

Even though, a huge portion of their consciousness has been cut out of them because of the stroke. As long as you have shared information, if you take somebody and cut away their auditory awareness and their taste, smell, and feeling awareness, then left them with visual awareness, then you could still work with them and present them information visually and still see that they are obviously conscious beings, even though 4 out of their 5 senses and the awareness of that sensory information has been cut away from them.

But any time you have massively shared information among specialist sub-systems, you still have the flavour of consciousness, which equal consciousness.

Scott: If you take the 300 sub-systems, the number you threw out earlier. There has to be a sussing out of contradictions among the mutually shared information. So, you have mutually shared sets of information that are taking different angles on a particular gestalt. There are going to be contradictions in perspectives.

If you get 300 people in a room and ask them to debate, they are going to have different perspectives. Some are going to be contradictory. So the question is “how does that get sussed out?”

Rick: There’s an F. Scott Fitzgerald quote: “The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.” It is being able to handle contradictions. You can have differing opinions among the specialist sub-systems in consciousness, in your head.

They can continue to disagree and sometimes you get interesting results behaviourally. I went to Marshalls about getting new curtains for our bedroom window because we live in LA. The old ones turn brown from pollution, probably like our lungs from living here.

I was in Marshalls standing in front of a bunch of curtains. There are probably 3 or 4 good choices of curtains, or contenders for the curtains that I will buy. So, I am standing in front of them. I know I can’t just pick the one I like at any given moment until I have spent a full 5 minutes developing the full implications of these stupid curtains until I make my choice.

I stand there. I process, “I don’t like the pattern. The horizontal might make the other pattern bad.” It was an old-school, 60s, oval pattern overlaid over a horizontal striping, which annoyed me. It was like “just lose the 60s pattern and give me the modern one.”

But they couldn’t. So, I had to look at color and analyze things. I have various sub-systems – I would think – that are aesthetic, evaluative systems running. I was aware of the various considerations.

I had to let all of the arguments build. I had to build an imaginary picture of the curtains hanging in the room, even though I got it wrong. The curtains are not blackout. They are somewhat see-through. They are teal. They have a new color with the light coming through blue-ishly.

The color when things are different than the older beige ones when the curtains are closed. It’s fine, but it didn’t enter my imaginary picture of what the curtains would look like in my internal picture.

I had to let the internal part of my mind yammer. At some point, I had to come to the point of thinking, “These are the curtains I am choosing.” I have to buy them then. Even though I am saying, “I am choosing.” It doesn’t mean I am in agreement with myself.

It means that after all of the arguments play out. I decided that, I – the construction function of myself, it is time to go with what I want to go with right now, with the strongest candidate right now.

But the I construct that decides on the curtain, which takes all of the other yammering sub-system Is and makes a choice that is not 100% ideal, but is the best I could do at the time. The curtains are fine. The curtains don’t exactly represent a unitary choice or a consensus.

Because the curtains aren’t ideal, I have an awareness of the other possible curtains. Each curtains’ pluses and minuses. My different specialist sub-systems are giving different scores to different aspects.

Although, I’m sure they’ve calmed down about it because they’ve been informed of my choice, see the curtains in the room, are aware of how they work and look, and the curtains are less of an issue then when I was actively considering which curtains to buy.

But there are all sorts of contradictions going on and disagreements going on in only 3 or 4 different patterns of curtains under consideration. So, that stuff goes on all of the time. That is what consciousness is for.

If a decision was easy, we wouldn’t need to throw it into consciousness. I put my left foot down. What foot do I put down next? It’s a simple choice. Unless, you’ve got a weird thing, like OCD. My OCD will be on the verge between concrete and grass.

It will be like “which foot has to cross this border?!” Then that Fs up my walking. “Okay, the right one! But you just put your right one down. Now, you’re going to have to hop!” OCD makes an unconscious choice conscious.

We were talking about consciousness being an epiphenomenon. I don’t think so. It is in that it shares information, but you have these consciousness-gone-wild-aspects – where consciousness begins doing jobs too well.

You have OCD as too much vigilance. It messes with things that should be unconscious. Similarly, turrets might be a vigilance thing, where your brain forces a tick to make you imagine or say the worst possible thing.

There are various little disorders of consciousness, large and small, where the business of consciousness produces the division of labor between conscious and unconscious tasks, which become a little messed up.

Consciousness serves as the central arena to hash out complicated ambiguous, contradictory information and situations because if it were simple, something you’re not entirely consciously aware of, then it would’ve been taken care of.

License

In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.

Copyright

© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner

Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2017/01/16

Scott: What about the lexical definition, in your terminology, of consciousness or the descriptive unavoidability of consciousness?

Rick: Let’s start with what I think or what we think consciousness is, which is the broadband, real-time sharing of mutually understood information among specialist sub-systems in an information processing system with each sub-system having the same approximate information under consideration.

That is, a bunch of sensory information is flowing into a system. At the same time, the system is generating a lot of processed information from the sensory information coming into and from the analytic information streaming out of each of the specialist sub-systems with each of the specialist sub-systems having the same approximate mass of external and internal information under consideration.

That is, look at us humans with our sensory bulbs on top of our necks, we’re taking in all of this information, then we’re thinking about all of this information with specialist sub-systems sharpening and compressing the information in ways that are what each sub-system has been designed for (evolved for), or is best at.

Same mass of information. 300 different sub-systems. Each spewing its own information giving its own interpretation of that information. Reasonable?

Scott: Yes, but leads to a question about time. The question about time is about another information processing system, which processes 100 times faster than us. If it looked at us processing information in its real-time, our information processing would seem much more disparate.

So, could we consider our information processing node sets inside our skulls integrated sufficiently to be called “conscious”?

Rick: I’ve got two answers for that. At some point, in arguing for consciousness – there’s an argument to be made, if it feels like consciousness to the conscious being, and if its mathematically consciousness-like based on the mathematics of consciousness that we don’t have yet, then it’s consciousness. That’s answer one, which is a bit circular. It is consciousness according to a mathematical definition of consciousness we don’t have yet.

Scott: It’s qualitative, not quantitative.

Rick: Yea, but that’s not good enough because you could build a computer that announces it’s conscious 24/7. It could announce it, “I’m conscious. I’m hot. I don’t like that. It’s warm here, and cold there.” It could make all sorts of conscious-sounding noise without actually being conscious. You need the mathematical aspect of consciousness. That includes enough different specialist sub-systems contributing to the cross-chat.

Chris, a buddy of mine, and I were talking about a Go playing computer being conscious. I argued that “not very likely” because of the tasks involved in being a Go playing computer. Unless, the Go playing computer had 300 different specialist sub-systems. Each with its own angle on what it sees on the Go table, on the Go board.

Each of those sub-systems contributing to an overall really richly painted vision of the situation on the Go board. Even then, it is pretty tough to get consciousness out of that because if you’re limited to the Go board, like 16×16 or 24×24, then it’s limited in terms of information, so you need to self-generate all sorts of internal information about the external information.

Even so, it is pretty limited. It leads to something pretty narrow. The multiplicity of information isn’t there. You could design a Go playing computer once we understand the mechanisms of consciousness that has a profound knowledge and sentiment about every situation on the Go board, but it’s still a pretty crappy form of consciousness.

Scott: In a way, it’s a ladder. In another way, things build up pretty quick. Things, as you note in an older analogy…

Rick: …the wheel…

Scott: …yea, the wheel. Things become more rounded as you add more sides. Things become pretty rounded once you add only a few sides.

Rick: After you get to an octagon, you could imagine a car with octagonal wheels. It is a rough ride, but it would move. 10 is good. 16 is better. Once you get to a 40-sided wheel, that’s not a terrible ride. The difference in quality of ride for practical purposes between a 100-sided and a 200-sided regular polygon is negligible. Things reach approximate circularity.

The curve of approaching something reasonably defined as consciousness. It is a pretty steep curve. You don’t have to do much work once you start to create something that is conscious.

Scott: I could easily see analytic programs designed to take into all accounts of the algorithms that a particular software program has, and then present a literal wheel, as a metaphor, to show how conscious a system is, to a human operator for easy interpretation.

Rick: That would be good. There are probably 20 better analogies that we don’t know yet, but for right now that is a good one. I don’t know whether, if I would find myself in another consciousness, I’d prefer being in a grasshopper or the Go computer. I’d probably prefer the grasshopper, but if you went to earthworm then I would prefer Go computer. Ants, I don’t know.

Ants, maybe, some part of their mental sophistication, to the extent that they have any – like 10% of it, is based on the pheromone system that links ants together. That Go computer consciousness. It is a narrow space to be conscious in.

We’ve got a fairly rough, but workwithable, idea of what are some of the necessary ingredients and functions of consciousness. That cumbersome definition that we’re talking about can be worked with to some extent.

Given that background, it can take us to a sentence-based, sloppy proof of the necessity of consciousness being – my buddy Chris calls it – an epiphenomenon, meaning – I’d go with epiphenomenon – something you get that goes along with the things you need. It is not needed, but arises as the result of a certain type of information processing.

Scott: It is an emotional and cognitive spandrel. Like your bellybutton, it’s almost just kind of there.

Rick: Yea, but I would argue it is more than almost just there. In fact, my buddy Chris, who I keep bringing up because I just had a many hours-long conversation with him about this stuff, brings up the example of the appendix. It has been for more than 100 years the stereotypical not-needed organ in the body. It doesn’t do anything, like men’s nipples.

Now, it turns out that the appendix may be a place for good bacteria to hang out, if you happen to wipe out the good bacteria in your intestines. A crazy amount of the cells in your body are bacteria. If they become out of whack, it makes digesting problematic and your appendix might just be a reference library to keep things in track if something bad happens to your intestinal bacteria.

Within your awareness, you could describe, which would take a gazillion sentences per second in a given moment, things in your awareness with sentences. You could summarize the knowledge in your moment-to-moment awareness with a 1,000 sentences a second. It would describe the room you’re in, which is mostly visual information. So, visual awareness described by sentences. Also, things in your imagination.

Feel information, how each part of your body feels, emotional information, taste information, and sensory information in general described in hundreds of sentences. Sentences to describe things in imagination after saying, “Tetrahedron.” You then have an image of a tetrahedron in your head. Same with “elephant.” Then you think of an elephant and have a representation of an elephant, and how you feel about your situation at the time, and how you feel about yourself and your body itself feels.

Say you’re limited to a 1,000 sentences per second, which isn’t unreasonable, somebody like a Marcel Proust of the Computer Age could write 1,000 sentences to describe, not all-encompassing descriptions, but a pretty decent summarization of your awareness. Some of those sentences, as we’ve just listed, are sentences associated with being conscious.

I would argue the feel of consciousness is itself consciousness, and is this global busybodiness of every sub-system being roughly aware of what every other sub-system is doing and being aware of this massive gob of information they share. This massive information, broadband crosstalk – at least in evolved organisms whose job it is to survive long to reproduce and raise offspring and, thus, has a self-interest.

You can imagine a conscious entity. Engineered entities without this self-interest. However, almost all conscious entities are interested in perpetuating itself, in perpetuating the species. So, you have all of this self-monitoring stuff that is, sentences that are, indicative of human consciousness, creature consciousness.

That is, they reflect your emotions about your situation. At its most basic level, your chances to live and reproduce. You have a bunch of trivial concerns, which, if you trace them back, they are traceable back to something survival-related. You have all of these sentences. It needs to be refined as an argument.

However, you have these sentences strongly indicative and reflective of consciousness. Both the mathematical form of consciousness, which is this shared gossip or information held in common, and the human form of consciousness that we are more comfortable talking about, e.g. how we feel, emotions and such.

You have these descriptive sentences that describe external sensory information, e.g. score in a football game, whether a light is green or red. Some sentences describe internal information. Some sentences indicate consciousness, which are basically the same as one another. They are based on information held in your consciousness or in your brain.

You have sentences. All of the sentences descriptive of the information in your brain are by definition reflective of the information in your brain. They are coming from the same thing. They come from your mental agglomeration of information. They are not qualitatively different from any other descriptive sentence that describes the contents of your awareness.

From there, you can describe the sentences that reflect consciousness as valid and unavoidable as the sentences that are more apparently concrete because they describe definite sensory information. There’s a sloppy proof there.

License

In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.

Copyright

© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner

Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2017/01/15

Scott: So if this is the methodology without technology, we’re talking about a large number of independent talented people, who specialized in joke writing, coming together to make better comedy. And this is Apatow and others.

Rick:He’s a writer with some other writers and some added quips and stuff from dozens and dozens of other talented people. If you watch Netflix, or if you watch an Indie Comedy on Netflix, it might not be that funny, but could have benefitted from this kind of thing.

A well-developed movie these days, whether it is an Apatow comedy, where every line has been workshopped to be the best possible line. Or a $200 million Marvel super hero movie, where every point in that movie has been workshopped to make sure it best takes advantage of the technology that has been developed for the super hero movies, such as CG, and that it makes a plausible presentation of the ridiculous mythology and backstories that lead to this point in the super hero universe.

A $200 million Marvel super hero movie has been workshopped a zillion times. If you look at an Indie movie, you have a $2.5 million budget. Only 2 or 3 people have ever gone over the script. If you look at the movie, it had the potential to be a more entertaining movie, but it just didn’t get worked over enough. We can assume analogously that people in the future will network more and more intimately to add value to more and more areas of endeavour.

The stock market is one of the biggest laboratories for technological assault and technology aided understanding of value and trends, but it is still people sitting at a bank of screens. In the future, that may be one of the places where the ‘traders are sitting at a bunch of screens’ model is changed into a more efficient form of computational exploitation of being the first to understand what’s going on.

Or being the best at what’s going on in the corner of some financial market, but you can imagine different relationships among people and machines being helpful, like medicine. Studies of doctors show that doctors make a lot of wrong diagnoses and guesses, and mistakes.

Mistakes that are overlapping. Somebody treated by 6 or 7 doctors is likely to have mistakes in treatments or medications. If your entire medical team can be jacked into, or intimately computationally linked into, a treatment gang, that will lead to better outcomes.

I read Michael Lewis’s book about human error and risk prediction, or risk-based behaviour. That includes doctors going off their gut instincts. They aren’t that great.

If you throw certain diagnostic tasks over to a computer or some kind of diagnostic machine, even though the diagnostic machines don’t have the same quality of input or experience, the rubric base, the rule-based diagnosis coming out of a machine will in a lot of cases be more accurate than the human diagnosis.

We’re going to become half-robots linking up to each other in all sorts of ways to take advantage of external computation, which will become a misnomer as the external computation becomes more and more intimate.

It will impinge of the type of art that we like, type of science that we do. I notice Captain America: Civil War came on Netflix. We have talked about how if you showed one of these super hero movies to somebody in the 60s or 70s they would have a hard time reacting to it.

Because they weren’t used to such a quick visual presentation of information, so wouldn’t be able to follow it. I noticed with this movie that the ability to compute it is so apparent that we can react to super-violent interactions with fairly real physics in real-time!

If you were watching The Six Million Dollar Man in the late 70s, there was a lot of slow-motion as Steve Austin did his super power high-jump over a wall with his bionic legs. The action slowed down so you could really appreciate what was going on. Also, so, probably, it would eat some time.

(Laugh)

But Captain America, somebody gets hit with a car in real-time, they go, splat-pada-doom-da-doom, in real-time! It is exciting to see that stuff in real-time. And it is due to the CG that let’s that stuff be simulated persuasively.

And it is a collaboration, external computation working with our educated brains, so we’re able to understand a quick little interaction that takes less than half of a second to present information that would not have been picked up by somebody 40 years ago.

A fight in a super hero movie would have made zero sense, in a contemporary super hero movie, to somebody in 1972.

Scott: What about the reverse? Somebody travelling to the past and working on a mechanical loom. Modern people would suck. It doesn’t seem better/worse. It is experience with rapid visual presentation of information or with physical manipulation on a loom.

Rick: Humans in general are attracted to helpful information. A byproduct of that is we’re attracted to information in general, like rap music. Rap music has to be the most informationally dense genre. Some might argue symphony music is more informationally dense.

Scott: Yea, but symphonies require the ability to read the musical notation, oftentimes other languages, rap is more easily accessible with the use of spoken word rather than instrument, mostly. So, there are some fundamental differences. It’s apples and oranges, to a degree.

Rick: Part of that is the love of information thing. Rap hits you with all sorts of salacious or insidery references or information – bam, bam, bam, bam, bam – and you are pleased as the information flows into you. It is rewarding to you. It is a reward system thing – ding, ding, ding, ding, ding. You are hip to this, hip to this, hip to this, hip to this, as the information flows into you.

Back to super hero movies, people now have to sit through most of the credits. You see 2,000 people make the movie in the credits. If you see the movie, now, you see much of a movie consists in people interacting with the movie in hi-tech ways, like a team of CG people in South Korea building the wire frames of your characters, fleshing them out, and animating them. Even though, you have never met them.

I am sure the amount of computation that goes into a super hero movie has to be millions of times the total computation that went into WWII. WWII was partially fought with primitive computers. There were radar sites, or there were bomb siting machines on bomber planes. That would help people zero in on their targets. They were really elementary computers. The amount of computation going on in a bomb site computer was probably among the most sophisticated of the era, and would probably be dwarfed by a home thermometer now. The thing connected to your thermostat that has your heater go on and off depending on the temperature.

License

In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.

Copyright

© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner

Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2017/01/14

Scott: The AI assistants are primitive now, but they should, just given technology trends and computer science sophistication, increase their domain generality and utility. How is this likely to going to play out into the future – stuff with AI assistants?

Rick: We already have in-home helpers like Cortana and Siri. They aren’t that helpful. Mostly, Siri frees up your hands when looking for stuff. You can yell stuff at her while you’re driving to look stuff up for you.

Those types of butlers or helpers are going to become increasingly helpful. They’ll become good at giving life advice. One area where people are particularly clueless is middle and high school, and applying for college. It has a bunch of moving parts. Social media functions as rough advisors for teens now.

But it is not the best. Teens have always been clueless, and miserable because of it and search for ideas on how to live their lives, but not very hard. Teens wallow in misery. It is a rare teen that does the makeover, which is a popular theme in high school movies.

The teen that is unhappy with his/her social position and does a radical transformation of his/her self. Mostly, teens don’t know how to ask or take advice. Teens are like most people. Most people don’t want to take advice. Most advice isn’t good, and most people don’t want to drastically change.

But there will be an increasing market for increasingly good expert advisors as people see that the expert advice can really help them. I would think that the teen market would be a good place for that. The best advisors for teens, who are lucky enough to have them, are older siblings.

If you get advice from an older sibling, whether you want it or not, they will tell you you’re stupid or not, but not everyone can have a cooler older sibling. But there will be devices that perform some of those functions, which will ask people to reconsider their appearance, behavior, and life strategies.

You’ll be able to program your personal advisor to give you the degree of input that you might want, and a personal life monitor can give you all sorts of helpful advice, like you’re mansplaining, or interrupt a lot, and can give a report on the quality of your conversation if you’re concerned about that. 

It’ll tell you if you’re being too interrupty. It will monitor other people’s faces. It will advise you if your language is either too high level, or too low level, or too many “uhms” or “you knows.” And this specific thing is one example of working with external computation.

And having that kind of thing will be a huge advantage for people who get good at working with that kind of thing, but then you have the external computation that is even more intimate. External computers that ride really close to your brain and may follow a more direct pipeline than just talking to you.

Google Glass failed, it fed information into you via your optic nerve, your eyes. At some point, there will be a wearable form of computation that feeds users information more or less continuously and doesn’t freak people out.

We’ve talked about contact lenses linked to computers, like the Terminator eye display. That is fairly intimate. Eventually, computation will be more intimate and people will have more built-ins or jacked-ins. People might have actual jacks that link up or allow neural-type feeds, directly into the brain.

You already have things that really, really roughly work like that, where, for blind people, glasses that can give a rough picture of the world via your tough, maybe, or else directly to the back of your eyeball.

Digital hearing aids that provide hearing assistant directly to auditory nerves, or just cochlear implants. The brain is super plastic it turns out. The old picture was you were born with a certain amounts of neurons. That’s not entirely true.

That’s not the entire picture because the wiring in your brain is not neuron based, but dendrite based. All of the tendrils coming off of each one of your neurons, and those tendrils are constantly being re-engineered, which is at a crazy rate. An insane rate that the dendrites are rejiggering themselves.

The brain is greedy for efficient neural connections. The brain is super eager to rewire itself to the most efficient it can be relevant to the tasks it is being asked to do, and because of that people building add-ons for your brain will not always have to know the brain’s wiring.

Because if you give the brain additional computational resources, it will tend to rewire itself given those resources. This is an overstatement, but you can slap any old crap on the brain and it will rewire itself to be able to use the information coming from that crap, if it can gain access to that information.

The future won’t be war between the humans and the robots. The future will be scrambling among various people who are better or worse at adapting to various forms of external information. It is like war between the humans and the half-bots, which is a better kind of war.

Because anybody who is sufficiently motivated can become a half-bot by learning how to exploit external computation better. A half-bot, some kind of super-digital asshole.

(Laugh)

People are still pissed at the way people in the 90s had cellphones. Not everyone had a cellphone, people who did, didn’t know how to use them in a way that didn’t annoy people. On an annoyance scale from 0-10, somebody with a cell phone was likely to come in at a 6.

Someone talking loudly in the bank. Now, it is a low-level annoyance. Everyone is at a low-level annoyance. It is about a 2 for everyone. People think, “This is how it is now.” Everyone is distracted and driving stupidly because it is pervasive.

The annoyance level is down to a 2. We will see the induced annoyance lowering. With Google Glass, it was seen as a 6 if people knew what you were wearing. People were ready to think you were a butthead.

And especially if they knew you could be recording video of them without explicit knowledge at any point with the glasses, so if you went into a bar with anyone that is tech savvy with the glasses, they might hassle you.

They might think you’re a douche, and a douche who is taking video of them. The annoyance they cause was too much to overcome any kind of benefits from the Google Glass. But at some point, the wearable digital helper, the annoyance level in other people associated with them will be lower, will have more benefits than annoyance. In the same way, it was lower over time with the cell phones.

There will be all sorts of advantages to be had with the advancements in technology. There will be the gentleman billionaire who can’t afford to be jacked in, but surrounds himself/herself with a bunch of tech jockeys who are providing the gentleman/gentlewoman with the latest insights from the devices.

That will allow them to take advantage of the technology without having to partake of it himself/herself. There will also be the gangs of people who jack into each other plus all of the added technology, to become specialized in a certain area. It isn’t a tech thing, but Judd Apatow has, I believe, the most effective model for writing comedy movies right now.

Which is the multiple table readings, Judd Apatow is friends with all of the best comedy writers and comedians in LA, when he’s got a project in development he brings in everybody to read the script. 20 people at a time, I guess. They sit around a table.

I do not know about this personally because, I guess, I am not one of the best comedy writers in LA. Apparently, you bring in 20 really funny people. At different points, people chime in a joke. I’ve been in comedy writing rooms. I have worked in them for years.

Somebody throws out a topic or something under consideration, then everybody tries to get their brains to think about the jokes on the topic under consideration. Apatow works and works his stuff under this methodology.

License

In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.

Copyright

© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner

Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2017/01/13

Scott: What about nationhood at various levels of sophistication?

Rick: You’re talking about the idea of nations or the actuality of nations throughout history. Over the past 300 or 400 years, it’s probably been the heyday of nations, where it is tough to have nations. It is tough to have a nation when you don’t know the layout of the world.

Say before the Rennaissance world, you have states, but not nation-states as we understand them with 99.8%+ of the world’s land belonging to a nation or a colony of a nation. It is difficult to have nations before, say, the telegraph.

But to really get a full national system, where we have – there are small exceptions – a world divided into about 200 nations, it is difficult to have the glue required to bring a nation together, which requires communication, decent borders – can’t when things are too rugged and things are too conducive to people taking local power.

America has a lot of things that are pre-telegraph, which makes things slightly politically weird. The electoral college satisfies a balancing act between the slave states and the free states. Slave states with smaller populations were set this way with the house and senate system too.

Slave states were generally rural and agricultural states, and didn’t want to be swayed by the popular vote and made compromises, but these compromises are based on need a week or two for information to travel across a pretty big country. So, nations function more efficiently with the telegraph and telephones, and that kind of stuff.

Nations probably function less well into the future when extremely efficient forms of communication allow people to form alliances independently of nations. You’ve always had forces that work against nations. You have local geographic interests that can cause civil war.

You have organizations such as the Masons who, for hundreds of years, have been rumored to have secret agendas and alliances, but you really get forces that can reduce the importance of nationhood into the future when people can form strong alliances via communication, when everybody is plugged into the Internet – and what will grow out of the Internet.

You see strong non-national interests forming. For the past 100 years, you’ve had increasing corporatism. That’s not necessarily a people thing. It is a corporate thing, but corporations, the world’s largest corporations, tend to think of themselves as their own primary interests or are aligned with their own interests.

Often, that doesn’t align with following the rules or being in any one country. Though corporations don’t represent large numbers of people.  We’ve mentioned this before, but Cory Doctorow talks about tribes built around common interests such as when people prefer to work.

You have the world divided into 24 time zones. One for each hour. In one of his books, people line up in each one of these 24 tribes depending on when they want to be awake, which is when their tribe is awake during their time of being awake.

Someone in Philadelphia might feel more aligned with someone in London, as a tribe, because someone might feel more comfortable with their time. But nations aren’t going away for the next couple 100 years. There’s a writer named Amy Webb.

I haven’t read her book, but I heard her on NPR. She said if you want to be a futurist and want to see what the future will hold, then you might want to back off and stop worrying about a 100 years from now and start focusing on the developments happening in the now.

Nation will almost certainly become less and less important in the next 100 years. But now, in the near future, they are extremely important, but brings us back around to America versus other large powers. Thanks to cooking the election, Russia is seen as resurgent, but that’s hard to know for sure because Putin is powerful.

But he runs a country with high levels of alcoholism, low standards of living, declining population about half the population or so of the US (half of 325 million). I don’t know how much actual clout they have. I’m sure their clout is growing. You have other large nations that are ineffective in the world.

Brazil has a large population, but it’s a mess. You don’t hear about them dominating world politics. When you’re talking abut effective nations, in wielding world power, you have the US, European nations as a group, though less so as the EU gets tattered, and India and China.

We’ve talked about what you might get from living in a nation that is a wielder of political power, more so than other nations in the world. That’s complicated. I’ve benefitted from the US being a dominating nation because I’ve worked in entertainment and the world looks to the US for entertainment.

We have the world’s most developed entertainment industry. I have worked in that for many years. Also, I was a good earner working for TV. Though I’m sure there are other places in the world where you can make a good living working in the entertainment industry. India has a huge entertainment industry.

China, based on their size, has a huge entertainment industry. At a superficial level, you feel cool living in a dominant nation. People don’t deconstruct that very much. But if you go to Twitter and looking at people with the American flag on their Twitter, there’s an unquestioning alliance to this manly Rightist conception of America.

There’s calling other people pussies on social media if they express any reservations on what conservatives think America is supposed to be about, but the feeling of coolness goes along with a lot of US patriotism. It is somewhat averse to questioning. We benefit in ways that I don’t entirely understand being the dominant power with the economy.

We dominate with the US dollar being the benchmark for world economics. People talk about we’re going to be a lot worse off if the US dollar is replaced more with the Yuan or the Chinese currency.

We benefit from the US being one of the world’s coolest countries to move to, to live in, because we get to recruit smart people from the rest of the world. If that gets screwed up via increasing xenophobia, maybe, our technological dominance is further threatened.

Scott: You mentioned something in your Genius of the Year Award from Jason Betts. The landscape of genius is going to flatten, but that’s on the assumption that people will take technology on board. Not everyone will, there are some nuances there; the technological Amish, the technologically adept, and the technologically augmented.

Rick: An immediate analogy is income inequality. You have some people becoming much richer and others’ income staying flat. We have an increasing, into the future, cognitive inequality or informational inequality, or computational resource inequality, where the technologically receptive and nimble will be able to provide themselves with power to move through society that is much greater than people who can’t make the various technological leaps.

We’re at the beginning. For all of history, all living beings have done most of their computation within their heads. One dimension of success in the human world is how good your computation is, how good your thinking is; as we move into the future, an added dimension will be how good you are at augmenting your internal computation with external computation with all sorts of specialist applications. We see various applications of that. Until the 80s, the securities market, the stock market, were not dominated by match, but by people ruggedly pursuing gut feeling.

The rough-and-ready traders, then in the 80s, physics postdocs started getting jobs on Wall Street and mathematicizing all of the vague hunches that people had in working in the stock market until then. From the 80s onward, the securities trading and analysis has become increasingly dominated by mechanical, non-human, computation.

That kind of dominance, or various flavors of dominances, will extend into more and more areas. One area, which is a dumb area, but an important one living in a congested city, is route computation. There are ways you can give yourself an advantage by travelling different ways. It means people can save themselves 5 minutes on a trip or find themselves less annoyed at the end of a trip depending on the way they travel. It is a near future thing that people will have increasingly sophisticated personal AI valets, butlers.

License

In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.

Copyright

© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner

Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2017/01/12

Scott: That leads to the third point, where Lee Kuan Yew had good relations with the United States and China. He had to balance between the two with a small city-state. He was the prime minister of Singapore for 30 or so years. He is the father of the current primate minister, Lee Hsien Loong, who became prime minister after one term of Goh Chok Tong (who became prime minister after Lee Kuan Yew).

He noted China was seen as, or many of the population (the leaders) saw China as, the middle path or middle road, where everything had to go through it, e.g. trade, but it can’t be that anymore. It won’t be that in the future because it is a multipolar world, where there will be many power countries as major poles of varying strengths. Lee Kuan Yew (and I assume Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong) knew (and know) this. Three we’ve been talking about will be on that list: United States, China, and India.

No country can claim absolute dominance. They are not going to own 50% of the world’s wealth as the United States did after WWII. Everyone will be attenuated proportionate to everyone else. There will be the rise of some older ideological empires. Some more secular than others. Others more religious. With more technology and more science, as a rule of thumb, it will liberalize and democratize much of the world.

Rick: Forces of nationalism will be challenged by other forces. Now, historically, you have religious forces challenging national forces in places where they don’t align. Some places reinforce them; some places don’t. Recently, we have forces of corporatism or don’t, and aligning, or not aligning, with national forces or interests. In the future, you will have nationalistic and religious forces losing power relative to corporatistic and informational forces.

Economic and informational forces in other words. We’ve talked about this before, where it doesn’t matter if your country is number one in the world or not. I like the feeling I get from living in LA, which is one of the world’s major cities and having been involved in one of the city’s major industries, the entertainment industry, when the US was one of the most powerful countries. It is the place you go to have your dreams come true.

If you look at your average person in Finland, they might healthier and happier on a day-to-day basis, but they don’t have the awesomeness of living in the US. They might be a boutique country, but they don’t have the awesomeness of living in the US.

Scott: What about the durability of the nation-state? Historically, it is a newer concept. Will the city-state be more viable in the future?

Rick: World-ruling countries have a run of a few centuries, historically. Rome had 5 centuries, though Rome was pretty dysfunctional because it had a model of conquest and trade. I don’t know too much about them, but Rome was kind of a mess. It led to higher standards of living for millions of people, but it still brought weird ways of living as it colonized the known world.

It had its 5 centuries. Greece had its couple 3 centuries. Spain had a few centuries. The US has had, since 1776, 240 years, but America hasn’t pushed to the forefront of nations until the 20^th century, but you could push it back and give the United States the 19^th century too – because of democracy, even though we weren’t the most dominant 19^th century country.

Can we expect any country to be the world’s leading nation for another 2 centuries, say? I think that’s unreasonable because I think the idea of leading nationhood will be beat up by the forces of technological change, where many of those forces work against nationhood and align people from all different parts of the world in entities that aren’t nationally based. Cory Doctorow considers them as tribes, but they may be tribes of tens of millions of people.

One tribe might be the technologically adept. Another might be the technologically augmented. In the future, the people who have the wherewithal or the internal orientation towards economic mobility to get themselves augmented with AI that works closely with one’s own brain. Those people will form a tribe of tens and then perhaps hundreds of millions of people who live life at a different speed and in a different way than people who are less able to rev themselves up with additional information processing capacity. That tribe of 100, 200, 300, half of a billion people may be something that runs the world for a while and only pays a half assed lip service to nationhood.

On the other hand, the nation that makes itself the most attractive home for this tribe of souped up people. That nation may buy itself another 50-100 years of nationhood. But eventually, nationhood will become less of a force, like sex, than it has been because there are a lot of other stuff going on in civilization than sex. It is a slow change. Right now, it is barely statistically noticeable, but people have a lot more other awesome stuff to be engaged in.

Similarly, in the future, people will be less likely to be nationalistic because there will be a lot more awesome stuff that functions apart from nations because America gives people a lot of things that are awesome, but we also get stuff that is awesome that don’t come strictly from America. The information feeds that come to us do not come solely from America. You can probably get the same quality of material fed to you from Canada, and England, and to some lesser extent in China. You need to do more dancing around stuff that might be censored in your country there. But your information feeds are not provided to you by national entities. So, national feeling, and power, will be attenuated over the next 100 years, though individual nations, as they evolve into places for certain types of people, will continue to lead in certain ways.

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In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.

Copyright

© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner

Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2017/01/11

Scott: ‘Hot button’ issues still in the United States. Acceptance of basic ideas in various fields. In climatology, global warming; in biology, evolution, for examples.

Rick: There’s big science, then there’s everyday science. Big science includes everything everybody thinks of when they think of science, which includes the nature of the universe, climate change, evolution, but most people in science don’t work in big science, necessarily. Most people push science forward in smaller ways and work on smaller projects.

Scott: America is the most powerful country, ever. So, whatever it does in science affects not only its internal population, but the external ones, the stances on climate change, because the policies influence many coastal peoples in the world, and evolution, because it influences medicine, are important.

Rick: If we have policies that turn us into a bunch of yahoos, then we fall out of the top leadership position within 50 years because there are other countries that have the resources to take over from us as the leading countries in science and technology. We’re a big country relative to the world population. We have 325 million people out of 7.4 billion people. We have slightly less than 1/20^th of the world’s population.

You have two countries that each consist of about 1/6^th of the world’s population. China with 1.3 billion people and India with 1.2 billion people. Together, they are a little more than 1/3^rd of the world’s population. They are both pro-technology countries. China in its recent past has been hampered by bad communistic policies, and perhaps even from the 1940s, 1950s onward China wrestled with bad communist leadership – killed a lot of its people, repressed a lot of its people, sent educated people to the countryside to work on the farms. That screwed China for many decades.

India has been a poor ass country. It remains poor, but at the same time with 1.2 billion people. There are enough people who aren’t poor and who are probably educated that they probably have at least as many people who are tech savvy as our population, even while they are struggling with being poor. China is getting better at scaling back on the communist government interference in technology, and getting better at the government facilitating the development of technology.

I think it’s fairly obvious that they think they can achieve whatever position they want to achieve in the world, which is, I assume, to run the world as much as they can via technological superiority. If we’re not going to be technologically superior in America, to use a stupid cliché, ‘eat our lunch’ – probably not in the next 10 years, but maybe in the next 50 years.

Scott: Three things come to mind there. Two are ethnic and linguistic issues. Another is a statement by Lee Kuan Yew, the deceased ex-prime minister of Singapore – for 30 years. On the ethnic and linguistic issues, India has a bigger issue because it has caste, a tremendous number of ethnicities, and a tremendous number of languages, which makes integration more difficult and processes in the country slower – which by implication can make progress slow. China, it has mostly one language with different dialects, mostly one people, at least by a large margin – the Han, and those simple pervasive factors can make it more able to develop at a faster rate.

Rick: Before you get to the third one, that’s what makes China scarier than India because China has one-time zone across one country! Which is insane with a country that’s 4,000 or 5,000 miles wide, they have more unification than India, but they’re both scary. In that, India may be chopped up into these little pieces by bad infrastructure, by caste, by lack of common language, but still they’ve got 1.2 billion people to deploy.

1.2 billion people who want the things that people want, which means they can have inefficiencies and still do very well in competition with us because they have 900 million more people than we do. They can still waste a lot of those people via those people being trapped in the wrong places, in the wrong castes. They can still do well. China, with its monolithic culture, and focus on being a technologically superior country, and having more than a billion people than we do, if we want to maintain our position, we’re in trouble.

Maintaining our position involves America being the greatest place to do technology, move to America and have freedom, it’s fun in America. If you’re a nerdy guy, you might become reasonably affluent, meet awesome women, live in an awesome place and have awesome stuff, and not have to worry about having to say the right thing, and without having to kiss the right party member’s butt.

As long as the world sees America as a place where you can become Leonardo DiCaprio in The Wolf of Wall Street via doing tech, then we’ll be kind of okay, but China seems to make it fun to do tech over there, where if you’re the head of a tech thing over there then you can live a rich person’s life. All of the things people associate with an awesome life in America.

I’m sure there might be some protocols, but a lot of those things are probably left out. And if you live in a big industrial city, and if you’re a big tech mogul, you probably get to eat great food, have great romantic partners, and cars, and places to live.

If we’re going to be a country of yahoos, where you’ve got a bunch of racist dumbshits running around and making things tough for brown people, if you’re some super smart kid from India, do you want to live in China and live awesomely or do you want to live in India and live awesomely?

If America is going to be a country of dumbshits and yahoos, where somebody is going to be roughing you up on the street because they don’t like your color, and if we have a country that starts denying tech visas to people because we want to reserve smart person jobs for America’s smart people who may or may not want them…

Scott: …You mean the H1Bs.

Rick: Yea, if we start messing with that program, then America becomes less and less promising as the country where you go to achieve your dreams. China doesn’t have to do that much. The worse we become then the less China needs to do to become the country where you achieve your dreams.

For a while, I was watching a bunch of Bollywood movies. Yea, a lot of people are poor as crap in Indian cities, but there are many places in India for people to live awesomely. Yea, there might be people living poorly two blocks away, but there are places for people to live awesomely in India.

The less awesome America is, then the easier it will be for other countries to hang onto or grab people who do want to live awesomely, and a racist or yahoo government will lose us talented people.

License

In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.

Copyright

© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner

Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2017/01/10

Scott: Back to the bigger picture, to zoom out, the Hollywood perspective is that there is the presentation of more power and influence than there is; whereas, in DC, it is the opposite.

Rick: Let’s drop in the apposite quote, though not entirely appropriate, but needs to be said when comparing DC and Hollywood, ‘DC is show business for ugly people.’

(Laugh)

Right now, when Trump tweeted Meryl Streep was overrated, you had a competition between an actor, Streep, who is relatively universally regarded as super competent and a decent person versus a guy who often acts as a bully and may, or may not, be competent because his financial and business behaviour are so sketchy that it is so hard to tell.

People who are not in favour of Trump like to say that if Trump took the investments from his dad and made reasonable investments, then he would be as or more successful than he is with his real estate shenanigans.

Scott: With Trump, moral or immoral, ethical or unethical, he is good at getting what he wants.

Rick: Yea, we’re about to find out if this loose-cannony, triumphy, bullshittyness will be successful in a president. We’ve never had this kind of huckster. This kind of PT Barnum character as president. It makes everybody nervous because it is tied to the Republican agenda for the most part, which isn’t a kind agenda.

It is an agenda that says that if everybody takes care of themselves then everything will be fine, and if not fine for you then maybe that is just too bad because we can’t save everybody. It is not an everybody pulling together agenda.

Scott: From the Utilitarians to the Social Contract Theorists, or the modern ethical theorists, that hyper-individualist perspective goes against them.

Rick: It goes against the general principle and trend of the Golden Rule. The general direction of civilization, which is to be more inclusive. The Republicans base a lot of stuff on excluding, modern Republicans. The icky republicanism seen now is based on looking at the world and the social acceptance that has been growing for non-majority types and lifestyles, and having backlash against it.

Scott: To be fair, as a lot of the perspective you’re speaking to is Left…

Rick: …yea…

Scott: For some classical liberals, traditional conservatives, and modern libertarians, they are appalled with some of the things he has said and represents.

Rick: Yea, he might screw over the Republicans as much as the Democrats because he hasn’t been historically tied to one party. He is tied to doing what he wants, saying what he wants. Any political stances that he has are either his private opinion or designed to get him what he wants. It is a big experiment that is about to happen, whether a huckster businessman can direct the nation productively.

Scott: One thing is societies function on policies and leaders. Another thing is societies function without the top-down policies and leaders. So, things will be more difficult for some people, but things will still run. It won’t be utopia, except maybe the super-rich, but it is not necessarily the end of the world as some insinuate or outright claim.

Rick: Democracy is durable. Over the past few years, you’ve had Bush as president for half of the time, who is considered by liberals to be one of the worst presidents ever. Then you have Obama considered by many conservatives to be one of the worst presidents ever, but there’s a lot of bullshit to that argument. If you look at the best presidents ever, Obama is probably ranked in the 70th percentile, where Bush is in the bottom quartile, but not among the worst.

He wouldn’t necessarily make it among the 5 worst presidents in history. He might make it somewhere between the 6th and 12th worst presidents. In any case, you have two presidents considered by two differing wide swathes of the country to be super bad, and America has survived that with its economy intact in terms of at least the stock and in terms first-level employment statistics.

Although, people like to argue, especially those that hate Obama, that the current unemployment rate is 4.7, which is good, but some like to argue it doesn’t reflect 90 million people who have given up on finding jobs, which I’m sure has a large bullshit component to it. Anyway, we’ve survived 16 years of political strife and the country is functioning well.

We’re about to see whether we can survive at least another 4 years assuming Trump serves out his term of unqualified leadership at the presidential level and Republican control at all levels including the legislative and executive, and soon to be the judicial, but with a population that is more against the soon-to-be government than perhaps ever before.

License

In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.

Copyright

© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner

Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2017/01/09

Scott: With social media and people having narrow political views, people can have more information than ever, which can help if people are active in finding the information of the day. However, as with most people, the problem is the passive intake of information, which leads people into silos, as you noted with HuffPo, Salon, and so on.

Rick: Are silos the same things as bubbles? Scott: Roughly the same metaphor, you’re in a smaller worldview, or a narrowed perspective. Rick: Most people don’t search diverse or opposing viewpoints. I only occasionally read Drudge, but not too much. It annoys me. I never go to The Blaze or The Daily Caller. I’m not sure if it is if I can’t handle the viewpoints or the dumbness. There’s this young woman named Tomi Lahren.

She was going crazy about Meryl Streep – either pro or con. Her most annoying tweet was that Hollywood wouldn’t know hardworking Americans if it bit us on the ass. It’s dumb because she’s 24, and for all I know she has worked on TV and some congressional Republican campaign; whereas, I didn’t get to join the Writers Guild until I was 35 and had a lot of menial jobs. I cleaned a lot, a lot, of toilets.

When I get to work on TV shows, the work was no less hard, and maybe harder – working for a daily TV show was pretty much an all-the-time thing. You were either working on the day’s bits or jokes or getting ready for the next day’s stuff. It was at least 10 hours and more than that. It is a lot of work to do a good job. She is saying Hollywood elites don’t know what hard work is, which is dumb, hypocritical, and bullshit.

Scott: Does Hollywood lean Left?

Rick: Yea! Truth has a liberal bias, which may not be the case for some eras and some places. But, in America, right now and for the past couple of decades, increasingly, conservatives traffic in bullshit more than liberals do. Conservatives engage in more fake news.

Scott: If you take the Left and the Right of Hollywood, does Hollywood have less influence than it thinks it has with regards to the people it has in it – actors, comedians, writers?

Rick: Hollywood has less influence than it would like to have. It probably has less influence than it thinks it has. Celebrities have less influence than they like to think they have. When you look at some celebrities who are competent and well-informed, like Meryl Streep, if you look her up, and Trump calls her overrated, on Wikipedia, she’s been nominated for 409 awards and won 157 of them including Oscars, Golden Globes, and Emmys.

Scott: She’s batting at Babe Ruth.

Rick: Yea, she’s not a dumb person. She’s well-informed. She’s made her career out of figuring out how the characters she plays feel, which is not the worst way to understand people. A lot of people come to Hollywood to make it, but there’s a bias to not being stupid to people who do make it. A lot of celebrities are smart, and make effort to be extra well-informed about things they do support, like when Clooney testifies before congress.

When they testify, they are testifying from an informed point of view. When people say they’re full of shit or dumbass celebrities spouting off, that is frustrating for those of us who believe most celebrities are well-informed and not stupid about the things they’re talking about. As with any large group of people, there are some celebrities who speak out who are idiots, at least about the things they speak out against like the anti-vaccination people.

Where if you look at the science of it, they are almost entirely a good thing and objections tend to be based on dumbness and misinformation. Let’s take an example like a Clooney, a Clooney will not hesitate to go on the internet and figure out if the things he is talking about are true or not. They inform themselves. Then if they feel they need more information, they will reach out to people with more information within the field.

DiCaprio has probably spoken to a bunch of scientists about climate change. He is a bit of hypocrite by flying on private jets because they do pollute a lot. At the very least, he knows what he’s talking about. He is an interesting spokesperson to have for a cause because people like listening to him. He will get more attention than the run-of-the-mill climate scientist.

As opposed to people on the conservative side, like the senator who held up a snowball in 2016 and said that disproves climate change, where often on the conservative side, you find people who search out information and scientists only with an eye to find loopholes in commonly held scientific truths.

Scott: Also, sociological analysis, some sociological analysis of people known to be good observers like comedians, e.g. Paul Mooney or Eddie Griffin on the presentation of race in Hollywood movies.

Rick: Yea.

Scott: Which is sometimes outside of the political or scientific analysis.

Rick: Entertainment, most good entertainment, is based on presenting a nuanced view of the world, which is based on observing things and viewing the world as it is. There are various ways the world as it is does not get to the final product, but somebody who can intelligently observe and analyze the world is more likely to have success in writing and producing entertainment than somebody who is oblivious or is chained to a semi-false agenda.

Unless, they are selling to a captive doctrinally-anchored market, like you’re selling the Left Behind books. I read a couple of those things to see what was going on with them. I mean, they’re okay, but they’re not great. They are big, thick novels. It takes like 10 of them to get through the entire Book of Revelation. I didn’t read all of them. It’s like 4,000 pages.

Scott: That’s probably bigger than Game of Thrones.

Rick: Possibly. There are characters in them. One is an airline pilot, and misses the Rapture bus. He goes through all sorts of tribulations. We know how tall he is, what he likes and doesn’t like. You wouldn’t read these books for the wonderfulness of the portrayal of the individual humans, as opposed to another book that deals with another type of Rapture, which is The Leftovers by Tom Perrotta.

He’s written a bunch of good well-observed books. I’m not sure if The Leftovers is his strongest book. His strongest book might be Election or Little Children (which was turned into a movie with Kate Winslett). That’s a brutal, sharply-observed book. Election does too. It puts characters through their paces. The Leftovers is a better work of observed humanity than Left Behind, which just needs humans in place to move through the tribulations of The Book of Revelations.

As one general rule, if you like being entertained or moved by your stuff, you want something that is more like Tom Perratta than a Left Behind book.

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In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.

Copyright

© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner

Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2017/01/08

Scott: Social media is very custom as well, and this played a role.

Rick: Social media wouldn’t be as delicious as it is if it weren’t super targeted and individualized, which is made possible through massive computation, massive information processing. Social media rests on a foundation of masses of servers, hugely complicated apps someplace, feeding us what we want all of the time. So that we’re not just computing in our head. We’re interacting more and more, and exporting more and more of our personalities. We are still at a fairly non-immersive stage. VR is just starting to become a thing.

Scott: You have mentioned Zuckerberg making Facebook ‘telepathic.’

Rick: He said a couple of years ago that we’ll be telepathic, which means the best social media will get better and better at transmitting versions of what we’re thinking. Right now, we’re mostly communicating via words, but more and more via words that we’ve either selected or either personally collected or captured via a phone camera or phone video.

And what we’re able to transmit among ourselves will become more and more, will contain more and more information, reflective of our mental landscapes, we’ll more and more export the content of our thoughts. We’ll become less and less islands and more connected with each other. While this is going on, there will be a rising tide of sophisticated and to some extent self-directed information processors that aren’t human, and we will eventually become enveloped in the worldwide thought sphere. I think some people call it the noosphere, which means thought sphere. 

Where there’s going to be a lot, a lot, of information processing going on and less and less of it going on in our meat brains, though, we will continue to participate more and more fully in this thought sphere. That will usher in the third big human, or if you want to call it post-human, because some people do, period, where humans don’t have dominion, but we share dominion with other information processors.

We become part of this worldwide information processing enterprise, which has both individualistic and group aspects. We’ll probably see all flavors of individual information processing and group information processing as we build more and more technology to make our thoughts accessible to each other and to build other things that have their own thoughts.

We can talk about some of the flavors – like some people will become the steroid abusers of thought. Where people, some people, will try to make themselves the most powerful information processors on the planet as individuals by augmenting their brains, other people will try to do this by using technology that allows people to bridge thoughts plus added thinking power – as groups. Some people will not be interested in building 19″ mental biceps that way. More people will simply be more and more linked computationally to other people. 

I haven’t seen statistics, but it looks like one of those hockey-stick graphs. The amount of information that we share with each other per minute has to be like a 100,000 times more now than it was in the 1930s. A lot of that information seems like garbage. Russian videos of crazy Russian drivers, but still information. It is not like the information in the 1930s weren’t garbage, like Tiahuana Bibles were pornographic versions of popular comic strips, can’t get more garbage than that. 

It just turns out that in the election 2016 that one of the aspects of this rise of personal information was that it kind of turns us more into pricks than perhaps we’ve been in the past, more individualistic, more entitled, more likely to say “F- you, everybody else.”

Also, more manipulable via personalized information, which is another thing. Once we get more and more immersed into the worldwide thought sphere, our ability to understand what’s going on will get worse and worse. Well, we’ll get better at not being manipulated by certain things. 

When I was a kid in 5th and 6th grade, we were taught as a lesson in civics how not to be manipulated by TV ads. You are taught the various pitches that TV makes. There were a bunch. We were taught to see through them, whether we did or not. At least, somebody was trying to teach us that. At this point, we are probably pretty resistant to manipulation. But some forms of TV ads are pretty effective. Everybody has their bubble.

The 2 or 3 places I go to see the news every day are HuffPo, Slate, and Salon, which are all pretty liberal websites. Only occasionally do I go to Drudge to see what conservatives are thinking, but I can’t stay there too long because it pisses me off. I am in my own information bubble, at least I know it. There are a lot of people who are thinking they are getting the truth and who are at least as bubble-bound as I. I think that eventually we will learn to see through a lot of the content that comes to us over the internet.  But there will be other means of streaming information into ourselves that we’ll always have something that messes with or will be beyond our ability to be manipulated by, as we move into the future – even as we learn how to not be manipulated by slightly older forms of information.

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In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.

Copyright

© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner

Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2017/01/07

Scott: This recent election with President-elect Trump was different than previous ones.

Rick:Looking back at WWII, WWII was America coming together to fight. The generation that fought WWII made sacrifices. Everybody made sacrifices. The people at war and the people at home. Gathering newspapers and scrap metal and willingly putting up with food rationing, gas rationing, people who wouldn’t normally go to work in factories going to work in factories. Americans fought WWII together. Americans did not fight 9/11 together.

Bush made it explicit. He said we tried to take action against the entities that committed 9/11 and told people to go shopping. There has been no draft for more than 30 years. Very small percentage of the population is involved with the military compared with past eras, and so most Americans were separate from the fight against people who attacked us on 9/11. We have a more individualistic way of being that is facilitated via social media and reality television shows. We always have had an individualistic streak.

Many guys in the 80s, including myself, walked around thinking of themselves a little bit as Rambo. Guys had it in the back of their mind that they could really take care of themselves in a fist fight or if we encountered a mugger or if we got involved in a road rage incident. We thought we could step out of the car and knock somebody’s block off. 

Scott: So, America had a unified vision of their direction and their group, Americans themselves. So, they had an idea of themselves as a society, and the direction and place they wanted the society to end up. 

Rick: WWII was a definitely clear war with a definitely clear enemy or series of enemies. The Germans had evil intent and the Japanese were pretty terrible too. We thought of ourselves as the injured party being compelled to enter into war because of aggression committed against us. So, we were unified in fighting a big evil threat, but then you had a lot of stuff like unified Americanism.

You had patriotism. You had the boy scouts. You had religion. You had high school. American high school was more or less a 20th century invention to give everybody an education in the general American society and principles of democracy to give everybody equal opportunity, whether it worked out that way or not. It was a comprehensive high school, meaning it encompassed everything. 

Scott: Comprehensive high schools were to give Americans complete educations in the American way of life. 

Rick: An American education, comprehensive high schools were, are, abridged versions of adult American life. They were little societies. My first high school had 2,000 students. My second-high school had 3,000 students. The first high school worked better. It was more of a society. Everybody felt as though they could be a part of something, fitting in some place. The 3,000 student high school in Albuquerque – Highland High, Beavis and Butthead’s high school by the way, was dominated by like 50 super cool students who not only dominated sports and student council, but also overpopulated the AP classes. 

So, you had a group of super cool kids and a bunch of kids putting in their time like “fuck this.”

There was less civic involvement in the affairs of high school, but in the stereotypic high school, like Grease, or every high school movie ever. You are looking at an abridged version of society, of adult society, that is more vicious because people are just learning to behave in society and haven’t learned how to be over being assholes yet.

But in real life versus movies, I’d say that people are probably nicer in high school than post-high school because most people in high school are still living in family units where they have things taken care of for them, which means there’s less at stake and means people are slightly kinder. 

I’ve been to a zillion high schools and feel that people are mostly nice in high school, or at least nicer in high school movies. Anyway, the things that drew us together in the 20th century as Americans. A lot or most of those things have eroded. The idea that being a boy scout or a girl scout. I don’t know the percentage, but it’s got to be pretty low compared to 80 years ago.

Fewer people are participating in the military. You used to have everybody getting called up or at least had to be examined to see whether every male could be a suitable soldier. He, the generic guy, had to be drafted in the 70s, where every male was at risk of being forced to join the military. 

Patriotism has eroded into various ones like conservative and liberal, which are very different flavors right now. Family life has been subject to, or at least aspirational family life with 2.3 kids with a dog and a house in addition to a mom and dad who are married, erosion. That has eroded. Monolithic culture has to some extent eroded. We went from 3 TV channels to an explosion of individualised entertainment. So, we’re more individualistic. 

So, collectivist slogans do not persuade us as much as they used to. The idea, which is probably more Republican right now, that people aren’t good at stuff should, maybe, be left to fend for themselves and live lives that aren’t as good if it is costing achievers. We can’t support everybody in the style to which everybody would want to be supported.

So, social media makes everybody feel special, or feel entitled. Drivers feel entitled. Not everybody, but a significant chunk of drivers feels entitled to drive dangerously while they absorb and interact with their social media, whether it is talking on a cell phone or more likely talking or playing games on a cell phone, or tablet, or whatever.

License

In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.

Copyright

© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner

Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2017/01/06

Scott: What was this election? We have talked about this being science fiction election. How is it a science fiction election?

Rick: The presidential election in 2016 can be seen as the first science fiction election. In some obvious ways, in the late 60s, a writer named John Brunner wrote the booksThe Sheep Look Up and Stand on Zanzibar in which the president is a figurehead, an advertising icon, called Prexy.

You can see that with Reagan. A movie star becoming president. Not the brightest guy, but the guys around him running th​e show. Then with Trump being a reality star, among the other reasons that Trump wouldn’t be president without is The Apprentice. His 10 or 11 years on The Apprentice and being on TV, being America’s boss. 

So, in a superficial way, we have that, and then you have Idiocracy. The president being a goofy figurehead. That doesn’t fit Trump exactly, or Reagan, in that they made decisions, have opinions, act on those opinions, and are not simply puppets. Although, they are more media focused than previous presidents.

They are more created by the media than previous presidents. I think there’s a deeper sense in which this was seen as the science fiction election because it showed trends in our relationships with AI and computation that will become more and more apparent and more and more important in the future. To set it up, I have to set up like 3 or 4 periods of human existence.

Let’s call Period Zero humans trying to survive like other animals on the savanna and other areas, where they tried to survive as small packs or tribes without much language, technology, or tools – scrambling to survive in the natural world and having no special sense of themselves.

 
But Period One is humans separate, beginning around 10,000 years ago when humans start to have language, toolmaking ability, and civilizations, and start to see themselves as special and different from the rest of the world. ​Until you have language, you can’t see yourself as much of anything except the way animals see themselves as individual operators, but not subject to even that much introspection because you’re trying to survive all of the time.

Period One as humans as separate and their own story, and narrative. It goes on for thousands of years. Humans interacting with the gods, and not wanting to anger the gods. ​They have their stories about the world, which, at least according to some religions, is made for us, specifically.

Period Two is human dominion, where we get the idea over the last thousand, and especially the last few hundred, years that we can ​do anything, solve anything, given technology and science and the world is ours to figure out, and that we’re not functioning at the whim of gods, which is the science point of view. ​

​I would say that is the majority opinion right now. Yea, you can do a survey and find most Americans believe in angels, but most believe if you want to get something done it takes human action and planning, and technology, instead of prayer and gods. ​

I think there’s a further period that we’re entering into, which is the rise of computation external to human thought. A rising tide of ​computation, of information processing, in which we’re beginning to be immersed. There’s that old saying that no man is an island, which is similar to that Hillary saying, “It takes a village.”​ No one exists in isolation.

Or when Obama said, “You didn’t build that.” Which was purposefully interpreted by Republicans as Obama​ denying individual entrepreneurial spirit in some collectivist way, that is Obama saying, ‘Yea, you built your business, but you could not have done it without some things external to your business. With the rest of America, your business could not have been built.’ But, computationally, we have all been, largely, islands for all of human history.

Where almost all of the computation we do, all of our understanding and perceiving the world, takes place within our brains, the means that we have of sharing information are much more narrow-banded than the information streams within our individual heads, but that is changing. The 2016 election was different from every other presidential election in human history for reasons we are still trying to figure out.

One reason is you had two non-incumbents. Both of them flawed and not real popular compared to the 2012 election, which was Obama Election Part 2. Obama Election Part 2 had a lot to do with Obama Election Part 1. For the first time in 8 years, you have 2 non-incumbents.

For the first time in more than 30 years, you had 2 super unpopular non-incumbents. So, those things alone would make 2016 different, but in science fiction ways. 2016 is different because you have social media influencing people’s voting behavior more than ever before with the step up being huge, where 2012 was still about a charismatic known candidate versus a non-charismatic and bland candidate.

Those issues overshadowed technological issues in the election, though technology played a big part. Mitt Romney’s speech about the 40% of takers, which cost him. It was caught on somebody’s cell phone, but that’s somebody happening to have a video camera in place when Mitt Romney said something unfortunate said between him and a bunch of his donors.

But in 2016, not only do you have the election influenced by the steady stream of ugly information about the Democrats obtained by hacking, you have people’s opinions and voting behavior being influenced by their relationship with social media, which is this giant external wad of computation and interaction.

With certain upshots, certain consequences, one thing is everybody feels super actualized and more important than they would feel otherwise. Hillary’s slogan was “stronger together.” But what you have with voters, thanks to their personal relationships with social media, feels more important than people felt 10, 20, or 30 years ago because everybody has a personal voice in social media, a personal megaphone. 

You can talk to anybody on social media. You can comment on any story. You can get a personalized feed on the social media you participate in: Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, which leads to a feeling of entitlement.

It is consistent with Trump’s reality show entitlement. Trump is this guy of no special ability. He is not a trained actor. He is not a beautiful actor. But through reality television, he has been able to convey his…being for more than a decade. He’s a skilled exploiter of media including social media.

License

In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.

Copyright

© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner

Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2017/01/05

Scott: That’s some background. What will be future wars?

Rick: Future wars will, obviously, be fought in a variety of ways including things that aren’t clearly combat along the WWII model. But I think when people talk about the future of war, and will there be war, I don’t think nuclear weapons can be left out of the discussion. The United States and Russia each have over 7,000 nukes.

I think in third place might be France with vastly fewer nukes, maybe around 300, then you’ve got Pakistan and India, which might have 150 each. I’ve seen the list. Israel maybe with 50 or 100. The deal with nukes, I think, is that when there’s the possibility of something being used, and that possibility exists for a long enough time. Eventually, that possibility will come to pass.

If there’s a 0.1% of an earthquake per year, there’s a fair chance that an earthquake will happen with 1,000 years. There’s a fair chance that a 1-in-a-1,000 per year thing will happen in 1000 years. And it’s almost inevitable that something like that will happen, this 1-in-a-1,000-year earthquake will happen in 10,000 years. There’s a non-zero risk of a nuclear weapon being used per year. Eventually, you will see a nuclear weapon used.

You could argue, or I tend to believe that it is probable, that the use of nuclear weapons will not be what people have feared since WWII, which is a massive use of nuclear weapons between the US and Russia, the US and China, or China and Russia. Any of those. Instead, it is more likely that you’ll have a smaller country with a smaller nuclear stockpile being controlled by a psycho a-hole not being controlled by his political system, like Kim Jong-un.

He’s more likely, I think, to launch a nuke than Russia to launch a nuclear attack. Although, the US and Russia have more to lose via a nuclear exchange, and have more controls in place. It is more likely that you’ve got a smaller crazier nation, or you have non-state actors getting a hold of nuclear material and setting off, probably not a functioning nuclear bomb but, a dirty bomb, but one that doesn’t successfully undergo fission.

Instead, it has a packet of radioactive material that gets distributed across a few hundred yards via a conventional explosive, which would scare the world almost as much as a nuke because most people don’t understand the difference between nuclear material distributed and scattered via conventional explosives and nuclear explosives.

Scott: It would set a precedent, too. It would provide the possibility in the minds of bad people.

Rick: Sure, but I think that would mean somebody managing to do that. What has captured the imagination of terrorists since 9/11 has been easy things that kill a lot of people, grabbing a plane and flying it into a building turns out to kill a lot of people without a lot of having to build weapons. More recently, hijacking a truck and driving it through a crowd kills a lot of people without having to build any weapons.

It scares people because planes and trucks are everywhere. So, if some group or person were to set off a dirty bomb, that would capture the imagination in a new horrible way, but it is not likely to happen a lot. At least, until, the first time it happens, but it is more likely than a full scale nuclear exchange among super powers.

Scott: What about narrow artificial intelligence designed to combat systems specific to nations, integral to their infrastructure? I do not a mean science fiction movie or a takedown from AI becoming conscious and destroying everything human. I mean the notion of someone design an artificial intelligence geared towards taking down specific systems within nation.

Rick: Some kind of analytic system that takes a look at the distribution of ISIS forces across Syria and Iraq, and trying to determine the optimal distribution of resources. Some kind of AI-based analytics for some specific military intelligence.

Scott: That would be half. The other half would then be the computer program can infiltrate the computer system and take it down.  You can have some nuclear reactor, and it takes down its computer system.

Rick: We know that Iraq’s centrifuges were attacked by a computer worm or something.

We took over their centrifuges and made them spin so fast they wrecked themselves. That aggression will continue. Yesterday, in the news, or the day before, it came out that there was evidence of Russia attacking or hacking into Vermont’s power grid. Anyway, it was into part of the US energy infrastructure.

All three major – the US, Russia, and China – countries have many people working. It is their normal jobs. I’m sure. It is their normal jobs to be hacking into other countries’ internet and computer systems. We are hacking each other all of the time now. You could say right now there is ongoing cyberwar. Although, mostly, there’s ongoing hacking going on. There’s the actual aggressive acts using the hacks, which are still only occasional, I guess.

You have, along with the constant hacking by state actors, state actors working in concert with private entrepreneurial hackers. In Russia, I’m sure the government hackers sometimes team up with freelance hackers to go after our stuff. I don’t know if the NSA ever uses freelancers. I assume that in the US there’s a more official division than the NSA and the CIA, and whatever other agencies do our hacking, probably like to think of themselves as competent to do it without having to bring in freelancers.

And would feel it would be kinda criminal to bring in freelancers, whereas Russia probably has less qualms about that, but there’s constant hacking among bigger countries and India’s in on it too. There’s freelance hacking going on every place. Stuff that isn’t hacking, but isn’t exactly kosher.

This isn’t war, but it is bullshit. In that, I can go online and find somebody in Bangladesh who can sell me 1,100 fake Twitter followers for ten bucks. In fact, I do this a lot. I go online. I find a vendor. Usually in a third world but technically able country, a lot of people do this in India, Sri Lanka. I try not to business so much in Pakistan because people doing this from Pakistan…I don’t want to be supporting who knows what.

It’s a big creepy world of people doing bullshit online in addition to a big world of people doing legitimate business online, the world of cyberwarfare is in itself hard to think about with the clarity that we think about WWII. There’s too many moving parts to it. Most Americans don’t know how to frame the Trump victory.

There are so many moving parts to it that it is completely confusing. It is similar to Brexit, where I’m sure if you’re in Britain or just looking at Britain – how that happened. The Trump victory and Brexit are both things that the fair majority of each nation don’t want. Yet, they still won electoral victories. It’s confusing to people. Both things consist of many forces whose affect on the process are hard to judge.

When you want to talk about the current state of war or the future state of war, those things are subject to similar confusion because there are so many moving parts, and the size and the power of each of the moving parts are hard to judge or to fit into a picture that can easily fit into your imagination.

So, we have countries and individuals who are constantly committing aggressive acts against other countries and individuals or preparing to do so. We have no idea the extent to which this is going on, and no idea the ways in which this is going on.

License

In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.

Copyright

© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner

Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2017/01/03

Scott: War is a perennial human activity. How will war affect the future durability of nations? How will this change in the future in general?

Rick: When you mentioned that we’d be talking about the future of war, I realized that I don’t know what I’m talking about when I’m talking about war, and most people don’t know what they’re talking about. When you talk about sex, sex is pretty specific in its meaning. Although, it has a lot of related activities and behaviours, but sex is pretty pin-downable. Even though, it is fairly central to the human landscape.

War is very nebulous and hard to think about clearly. If you go to Wikipedia and look at the list of wars by death tolls, you haven’t heard of most of these wars. And if you ask most Americans what the longest American war has been, most will war WWII. Some will say the Vietnam War. Some will say the Iraq War. It is pretty much the Afghan War, which has been going on for 15 years. We still have troops over there.

Even though, peace has been declared at various times. When Americans think about war, the model they have in their heads is, or Canadians or anyone in North America: what is the longest war?

Scott: If just wars, then The Hundred Years War comes to mind, or more typical ones like the Gulf War or the Korean War.

Rick: When you ask people to describe or name a big war, typically, it is WWII. It is the war on the tip of most people’s minds in America as being a big typical war. The kind we don’t want, the kind we fear, and the kind that typifies war. It was America’s last war. Vietnam, Korea, the Gulf, and Afghanistan and Iraq, none of these were declared by an act of Congress. I believe Congress has been asked to help the President declare war in some of these instances, but he pussed out. They were in support of the Iraq War, but that backfired on a bunch of people.

But WWII have aspects that make it clearly a war, war. An evil enemy, nations as enemies, nations fighting with each other, a clear beginning for us, at least, with Pearl Harbor, a clear end for us with the atomic bombs dropped on Japan. A Triumph for us. One we can feel good about; a triumph over evil. Then there are subsequent wars, we don’t like thinking about them. Korea, most people don’t know what was accomplished, if anything.

Vietnam, it seems like a loss. Iraq seems like a bummer. In that, most people feel, at least, vaguely that we shouldn’t have gone in there. Or if they support the war, they support it for bullshitty reasons. The Afghan War seems like something we should’ve done to the extent that people think we should have done it, but most people don’t even realize that it’s still going on and may not realize that it is even a war. Even though, you can argue that it is the longest war in American history.

It has only killed about 1,800 Americans in combat compared to WWII, which killed about 300,000 Americans. Vietnam killed 53,000 Americans in combat. So, our most recent wars like Iraq have killed only a few thousand. Our more recent wars have been more nebulous, haven’t required the level of national sacrifice WWII did. When George Bush said, when went to war against the people that did 9/11, he told people to go shopping and support the American economy.

(Laugh)

Even though WWII is the one that we most like thinking about, and with WWI it isn’t clear what we accomplished, WWII is our preferred war, but is atypical in its clarity. Most wars are messier. So, we have the wrong model for war when we look to WWII. So, we don’t really know what we’re thinking about when we’re thinking about the future of war because we’ve been at war since 9/11, but most people don’t feel as if we’re at war, though they do feel that things are terrible in the world because of terrorist attacks.

They feel like things are in some ways worse than ever, or can be convinced into that, but when you look at the number of casualties due to terrorism to the number of casualties due to the big wars in the 21^st century. We’re doing pretty well. Terrorism functions to create terror and also a lack of clarity. I don’t know how sophisticated terrorists are when they do acts of terror, but I don’t know if they are aware how their actions affect people’s thinking.  But terrorism causes confusion and makes people misunderstand the world via horrors.

One guy, recently, was dressed in a Santa outfit and killing dozens of people. So, we need to pin down what war means a little bit before we can talk about the future of it. We can see some trends, which may or may not be actual trends. You haven’t had a big world war since the last one ended more than 71 years ago. Unless, you count the Cold War, which was a different kind of world war. But we haven’t had one with a bunch of battlefronts, combat, planes, bombs, hundreds of thousands and millions of troops and casualties.

But you look at the timeline, and I mentioned this before, of huge world conflicts, 71 years doesn’t necessarily mean the end of big wars altogether because according to some ways of classifying wars, then big worldwide conflicts happen every 150 years. If you haven’t had a war in 71 years, or if you haven’t had an earthquake in 71 years, and earthquakes happen on average every 150 years, it doesn’t mean earthquakes are over. But if you look at the 71 years since WWII, you can see trends, which like I said can or can not be trends.

Fewer casualties in wars. Unless, you count the genocidal wars in Africa. More mechanization and remote fighting of wars. Different means of fighting wars. For the first time in American history, the American president was elected, in part, because of an act of cyberwar by Russia.

License

In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.

Copyright

© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner

Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2016/12/31

Scott: In standard Big Bang cosmology, the issue is early universe galactic formation including the black holes, which become massive – 10% of their galaxy in mass relative to the stellar masses in all of the stars in their respective galaxy.

In IC, the issue is new ideas like ultra-deep cosmic time, proton-rich and neutron-rich galaxies, and the persistence of galaxies over ultra-deep cosmic time, and the persistence representative of information processing over similar time scales. There’s a cycling of galaxies and in information processing. How do these galaxies stay lit?

Rick: One solution is that galaxy could stay lit if a black hole is constantly vomiting energy or information into the galaxy. If a galaxy is a big ‘ol information processor and stars are little sub-processors, then maybe the central black hole is spitting out an information feed in the form of matter, which is agglomerated by or absorbed by the rest of the galaxy and processed via how stars shine, via fusion.

That turns out to be a hard argument to defend because if you end up with a central black hole spitting up information for a hundred million years. You’d have to also figure out. You’ve got a lit galaxy, but there aren’t some galaxies a million times bigger than some galaxies. You might have a few, but not commo.

The ratio of the smallest galaxy to the biggest galaxy is probably not more than 2 orders of magnitude, say 100 times bigger than the smallest galaxy. If the central black holes are spitting out energy, there has to be a way for a whole unused chunk to not be part of the galaxy.

Maybe, it would fall into the black hole. It doesn’t seem that unreasonable to me. You’ve got an information feed across tens of millions of years. Under IC, a thought, a complete wave of information processing, takes roughly as long as the apparent age of the universe.

The universe changes its mind on the scale of ten billion years or so, as a clock time. So, it doesn’t seem unreasonable – unless you think the whole thing is ridiculous – that a vomity black hole will spit up stuff for tens of millions of years and old black junk will fall into the black hole at some roughly equivalent rate.

You could view, don’t know if this is geometrically right, a galaxy as a kind of a rotating donut, say. This isn’t right geometrically, but it is okay in terms of picturing something.

Imagine if you’re grabbing and rolling the sides of a donut – the you unroll a sock or unroll a condom, so that as you rotate it out of the center (you’re rotating the ring) and you’ve got ring stuff coming out of the donut and falling back into the center on the bottom.

You’ve got a shower of matter falling out of the black hole and burnt out matter falling into the other side.

License

In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.

Copyright

© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner

Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2016/12/30

Scott: With this ‘app’, with this set of persistent information processing ongoing in the structure or the material framework, how does this tie back into blackish holes and the principles of existence under informational cosmology?

Rick: Your hoping to get laid apps are probably triggered, especially if you’re a young man – but they aren’t always on. There is a zillion of them. Whenever you are awake, you are having words spontaneously form that are relevant to your moment-to-moment experience of the world.

I suspect most people have some sort of internal dialogue to help them contextualize their surroundings, things. If you’re walking down the street, you see and hear stuff. What you see and hear are a part of your consciousness, walking along, you say, “Wow, those are some ugly shoes,” or, “I hate that music blasting out of that asshole’s car.”

You don’t say those things. But there is a general word sense on. Some people have more semi-impressions of words. Your word apps are mostly on. If you were looking at, or arguing that the, universe is a model of the information that is in an information processor with our consciousness being a model of such an information processor, you would argue, or I would argue at least that, some physical presences, which would include bunches of galaxies, are always going to be a part of the active center.

The equivalent of word apps or the moving through physical space apps. You’re always going to need those when you’re awake. Those will always be in the active center. You’ll need mechanisms. Galaxies that use up their fuel will go out of the active center.

So, you’d think central black holes in galaxies might have some role of keeping galaxies lit. In that, you’d expect that a goa that is always part of the active center would have been lit for many tens of millions of years, which would mean the central black hole in IC sees a more expansive view.

Hawking, and other people in his area, has spent much of his career trying to figure out what can or can’t happens to information around and inside of a black hole because there are principles of conservation of stuff. You shouldn’t be able to get rid of all of your shit by dumping it down a black hole, or maybe you can.

No where in the universe can you erase information that you can by dumping it down a black hole, which seems to scramble it. But there are new theories that information is frozen as holograms in the event horizon. Hawking has spent decades trying to figure out and arguing with people about what happens to information going in and out of a black hole.

Under IC, with its looser rules, it is easier than standard physics to get in and out of a blackish hole. You’d expect black holes to have more flexibility in terms of what is going on in them with regards to information, from black hole to black hole across galaxies.

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In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.

Copyright

© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner

Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2016/12/29

Scott: How heavy are the blackish holes – compared to the Sun? How many stellar masses? Also, why so dense and old? How does this correspond to the armature?

Rick: Black holes at the center of galaxies run anywhere from a million stellar masses, masses of the Sun, to probably tens of billions. It is a bunch. It is as if you took up to 10% of the mass of a galaxy existing just in the black hole in the center, though not usually 10%, probably 1% or less.

Still, it is a huge number equivalent to the number of stars in just one thing. Under Big Bang physics, you’d be able to argue, I guess, that this thing formed because you had a galaxy 12 billion years ago, and things formed as they crashed into each other.

They gave up all of their mutual kinetic energy without the orbital energy in the center of the galaxy. This happened a lot in the early life of the galaxy. In the early life of large sets of orbiting bodies, you have chaos that gets straightened out by mutual collisions and interactions until in an old solar system like we have, which is probably 5 billion years old.

You don’t have crashes that often. You had crashes until things straightened out. They crashed until they formed the planets and the Sun, until things worked out. Same thing for a galaxy. Things coming together, clunking up, falling into the center.

You’d expect for there to be some totally big thing at the center of the galaxy for a lot of the early crashes on an early scale. I don’t know if that’s enough to explain the massive size of the black holes at the center of the galaxy.

Under IC, the massive black hole exists because the universe is older by many factors. If those central blackish holes in the center of galaxies had more than 12 billion years to aggregate – we also argue blackish holes are able to interact with the galaxies that contain them.

You’d expect under standard physics something different because the gravitational well is attenuated and is mediated by the exchange of information between the black hole and the stuff that surrounds it.

I suspect that galaxies have roles in processing information. Looking at your brain as it processes information, some your apps are always on when you’re awake. These are always running. Those that help you move through and understand your surroundings.

Then there are other apps that only come on when needed. How to behave when you feel as if you are in danger. Well over 99% of the time, unless you’ve got some crazy life, you don’t feel as if you’re in danger. So, your danger apps are not usually on.

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In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.

Copyright

© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner

Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2016/12/28

Scott: Why blackish hole rather than black hole?

Rick: Most galaxies have a huge friggin’ blackish hole at the center. Big Bang physics says black hole, which is just a thing which has so much matter in so small a space that even light can’t escape. It doesn’t have more suck power than something of similar mass, but large diameter.

But anything sucked in is not getting out because it would have to move faster than the speed of light to get out. It is a super suck thing if you happen to fall into it. Under IC information processing view, even though black holes are the ultimate suck things, Hawking showed that stuff can still escape, kind of, through Hawking radiation.

It is where a black hole exerts so much force on space or tension that the tension can be relieved by turning some of that tension into matter, where something right on the horizon of the black hole.

The space on the horizon of the black hole can get pulled in half, into a couple particles. One of which escapes the black hole and the other is sucked into it – like a snapping rubber band, like -ba-ding! It hauls ass away from the black hole.

It reduces the black hole’s mass until eventually over ridiculous amounts of time, which can include quadrillions and quintillions of years, a black hole could evaporate via particles created by the tension that the black hole exerts on space because the tension contains energy.

Even a Hawking black hole is only blackish, it is not fully black because stuff can’t escape because in a crazy event horizon, or some horizon, creation. Where else would it be? Under IC, black holes are even less black and more blackish.

In that, the gravitational, extreme gravitational, field that the black hole exerts on itself and surrounding space under IC is a collaboration between the black hole and surrounding space. Some aspects of black holes’ extreme gravitational force are attenuated because the clack hole itself has pulled itself out of the affairs by having a lot of interactions just with itself.

You could view the blackishness, the degree of blackness of a black hole, is a measure of the ratio of physical interactions just within the black hole, and those physical interactions going on between the black hole and the rest of the universe.

Since it is a ratio of a finite physical interactions inside of the black hole and a finite physical set of interactions outside of the black hole, that guarantees you’ll never get the number needed to get to the infinity. That’s why blackish rather than black hole.

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In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.

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© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner

Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2016/12/27

Scott: With respect to the galaxy-size, so we’re going to scale down and away from apparent T=0 to individual galaxies, those are in either of two classifications: proton-rich and neutron-rich, which are new.

Proton-rich are likely to be younger, active, and not burnt out. Neutron-rich are after all of the proton energy has been burnt out. When you’re burning high-proton galaxies, and they are alight, they expand space and time moves fast(er).

But over time, the space they inhabit collapses, over deep time, and the protons run out, and they neutrons fill them up. You get a neutron-rich galaxy, like embers left burning after a fire.

Rick: The universe has roughly 10^11 galaxies. New research says it might be more than that by a factor of 10, and the average galaxy contains about 100 million stars. If you’re developing a model of the universe as information processors, you’d expect galaxies to be some kind of processing unit.

Given that there are so many galaxies, and they fall roughly or have a not completely wild variation in structure, a galaxy is a blob of stars. The blobs can have a number of different structures. They can have gas and lots of other stuff going on.

But a galaxy is a relatively definite agglomeration of matter. You’d expect, if the universe is an information processor, then a galaxy has fairly specific roles with the processing and storing of information. It seems like it could be a given. There are other units that fit, if indeed the universe is an information processor.

Galaxies are made of a hundred million stars on average and other stuff like interstellar gas, quasars, blackish holes, and stuff like planets. A bunch of stuff within galaxies. One thing you definitely have in galaxies, for sure, are stars. Stars have a specific information processing role, and stars are made of atoms. So, atoms have a fairly specific information processing role.

You’ve got cars made out of atoms. Atoms stick together in specific ways that are useful for making your car go. Tires, the tire assembly that include the wheel too. Altogether, the car works like a car. But you can break down the cars functions are various scales to talk about the roles of tire atoms. Atoms in a tire are linked together flexibly so the tire can grab the road.

The atoms in the engine block are linked together fairly rigidly so the engine can work like the engine. But you can talk about the various components and their various functions and how they fit into some larger thing. You would expect galaxies to have some larger function in the overall business of the universe.

You were talking about new galaxies that were burning protons through fusion, nuclear fusion, which means you take an element that is richest in protons, which is hydrogen. It is close to 100%. Its nucleons are close to 100% protons.

When you can burn it through fusion turning it into helium, where its nucleons and helium, around half of the nucleons are now neutrons, they are protons who have fused and become neutrons. You can’t burn neutrons.

But you can probably do somethin’ with them in a neutron star, but under normal physics a neutron is basically a burnt proton. A young galaxy, according to big bang theory, starts out being a bunch of gas, interstellar or intergalactic gas, that has come together – tighter and tighter and tighter as it forms a blob gravitationally.

And that gas is roughly ¾ hydrogen and ¼ helium left over from the big bang and some trace elements, as the gas further coalesces into proto-stars the gas clumps up even further to the point that the pre-star.

There’s enough gravitational pressure, the pre-star coalesces, and eventually there’s enough pressure to cause nuclear fusion when you start turning protons into neutrons when you smash them together under tremendous pressure.

Hydrogen nuclei quickly progress from deuterium. A hydrogen nucleus is one proton, and you can fuse them and make deuterium which is one proton-one neutron, and then tritium which is one proton-two neutrons.

Then you hit a stable point when you get to helium, which is two and two. When you do enough of this, you can burn helium and turn them into even heavier elements. Under most circumstances, depending on the size of the star, oxygen is a stopping point for a lot of stars and iron is a stopping point for a lot of larger stars.

And then you’ve run out of fuel. Same way, you can only burn a piece of paper once. All of the chemical potentials to release energy have been released and now the paper is ash. You’d have to turn the ash into something that can burn, chemically. You have new young universes that are proton-rich, able to light up and burn all of their protons.

Then you have all of these neutron-rich universes in which everything is burnt up, and burnt out. You’ve got white dwarfs, brown dwarfs, blackish holes. This is after 20, 40, 50, 100 billion years. Most of everything is burned out.

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In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.

Copyright

© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner

Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2016/12/26

Scott: What does this definition of T=0 imply under IC? It’s an older universe.

Rick: In fact, a lot older because it would take many millions of light years to get to that star, but under IC we suggest that T=0 is not simply an echo of olden times close to when the Big Bang was, but that the Big Bang expands part of the universe at a time. There is more than one Big Bang. The universe is a series of biggish bangs that open up parts of that universe from across time. It is a series of expansions and contractions, not an oscillating universe, but more like a boiling universe.

Different parts of the universe bubble up over time, but there is always kind of an active center that is the bubbled up part. Some parts of which are always existing in the center because they are made of bubble power because they are relevant informationally. They were part of the outskirts that are bubbled up into activity as it is needed, as the information they contain becomes relevant and the stuff that is not bubbled up exists in a space and time that we call near T=0, where it looks like the conditions are time is slow, space is more collapsed, and it looks more like the beginning of the Big Bang around a time 13.8 billion years after the Big Bang. We talk about T=0 as an entity that exists more or less simultaneously with us.

By the time you would get back to T=0, it wouldn’t work because it would take you 28 billion years even travelling at the speed of light before you got anywhere near T=0. I started thinking about this stuff in 1981. I saw that there should be at least a metaphorical relationship between the structure of the universe we live in and the structure of the information in human consciousness or any consciousness. Ideally, there would be more than a metaphorical relationship.

There would be an exact mathematical tool set to translate from physical space and time and its rules (the rules of universe) to the rules of information within a conscious entity, or within a self-consistent information processing entity. One promising metaphorical aspect is that the neighbourhood around T=0 – the apparently young part of the universe – looks like it would be a good place to store information, which is contained in a system of information – but that isn’t relevant and active given the current set of information being processed in the active center of the universe.

Like your brain, you have a bunch of apps in your brain that are running and relevant to what you’re doing or experiencing, and then you have a bunch of other apps that don’t apply to your current situation or current needs. The information contained in the dormant apps may not even be consistent with the information contained in what you’re currently processing.

Inconsistent information systems can become consistent if you bubble them up and crash them into each other. F. Scott Fitzgerald said the mark or the sign of an intelligent mind is being able to keep simultaneously contradictory ideas in mind. You can entertain contradictions.

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In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.

Copyright

© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner

Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2016/12/25

Scott: Define T=0.

Rick: In Big Bang physics, in any reasonable physics, the farther away you look into the universe on huge scales, many millions and billions of light years, the further away you look the further away a star and galaxy is then the more in the past you’re seeing it because the light has taken millions and billions of years depending on the distance to get to you. 

Since you’re looking at something in the past, you’re also looking at something younger. The universe is suffused with Big Bang radiation, which consists of super old photons that are close to 13 1/2 billion years old and they come from a time when the universe was very small and very young, close to what we’re calling T=0. 

But under Big Bang physics, the whole universe ages and expands at the same rate, so even though you’re getting photons from a young universe. There is no young universe to be found anywhere in a big bang universe. By the time you got to the place, to the star that you saw as being very young, it would take you so long to get to the star plus other effects, the star would be at least the same age as where you left.

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In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.

Copyright

© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner

Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2016/12/23

Scott: Why isn’t arbitrarily large prohibited?

Rick: Multiple Worlds Theory is annoying because it implies all of these worlds have to exist, but IC is similarly annoying in that it has a large set of permitted worlds. We don’t have to deal with them because we live in a definite world that we know to exist and we don’t have to give every possible world in the set that same consideration of the world we live in ourselves, but you have to give it a mathematical existence. If it is not prohibited, it has to exist. That is an annoying part of multiplicity. Also, the Ladder of Minds if all universes need a containing armature, then they need a ladder all the way up. 

You can say that parsimony is only applicable in certain contexts in the way entropy is only applicable in certain contexts and you get trouble if you overextend it. 

Scott: Because it is a principle not a law, and Ockham came up with it in the 14th century. He came up with it in a conceptually simpler universe.

Rick: But it is a good law because it works all of the time. In most cases, it works. Entropy is similarly a powerful concept. It allowed human thought to move forward, but it doesn’t mean that those principles apply in every single context. 

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In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.

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© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner

Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2016/12/21

Scott: When I think about structures like the Sun or the shell, the very hot shell, of things being sucked in or rotated around the black hole, or even the radiation that it has, in a way, over long periods of time, it is like having a heater in your room.

It is keeping things at a certain relevant temperature for some balance between order and disorder that might be necessary for certain types of information processing that are more efficiently done, from our perspective, temperatures or, from the universe’s perspective, kinds of information processing. It could be the speed of processing. It could be the complexity of processing. It could be the precision of processing.

Rick: It’s like you’re asking, “What might be the information processing nature of the universe as seen in solar systems, and other places, that has consistent long-term inputs of energy?”

Scott: Yea, big, definite, durable structures – solar systems, suns, planets, galaxies, upwards to filaments – big stuff relative to us. Some of them, like the Sun, are keeping heat. They’re keeping things – things are still cold – relatively warm. Like emotional values, they aren’t precise. They are fuzzy. There might be a helpfulness in fuzziness in some informational valuations rather than high levels of precision.

Rick: In terms of solar systems and the development of increasing levels of order in the creation of life, you need an energy gradient. You need an energy source. Energy needs to flow through a system to generate order. It can’t stay in the system. Energy has to enter the system, do work that increases order which also creates waste energy, which has to leave the system before it swamps the system with disorderly waste energy. 

One way of looking at it is Maxwell’s Demon. It is imaginary. He is like the less well-known version of Schrodinger’s Cat. He is an imaginary being you use to discuss a scientific idea. Maxwell’s Demon works to reverse entropy. Let’s say you have a coffee cup, your coffee cup is divided between the outside and inside. Put in a barrier to divide the coffee, and say your coffee is lukewarm, you hire Maxwell’s Demon that is able to grab hot coffee molecules, dump them on one side, and cold ones and dump them on the other. He does a bunch of work and after he does a special amount of work. You have warm molecules on one side and hot molecules on another side and you can enjoy your coffee. 

The deal is, if you can do the math on that and can imagine Maxwell’s Demon doing that, if you’re in a closed system, say there’s a dome over the coffee cup, by the work the demon does separating the cold and the hot molecules generates so much waste heat that everything heats up and when you’re done you don’t have a cold side and a hot side. You’ve got everything hot because the demon has created so much waste heat separating the molecules. 

The deal is, the work it takes to increase order and separate hot from cold itself generates disorder. You need to attach a vacuum hose to the demon’s suit, say space suit, that sucks away waste heat. Otherwise, that waste heat contaminates the work you’ve done and in fact negates it. It is part of the deal that in a closed system disorder can only increase. If you have a demon that only increases order, the work he does by increasing order actually creates waste heat that destroys the work, you need an open system, which we have and solar systems are.  

Heat comes from the Sun, is absorbed by plants, is stored in chemical bonds via chlorophyll. Photons from the Sun build energy storing molecules that can be tapped later to release energy to do other stuff, for movement and thought and for plants to be able to build the plants bigger to be able to store more energy, but when you build the molecules via absorbing photons there’s waste energy from doing that. 

You got to get rid of it, which the Earth does by radiating waste heat out into space. So, when you have climate change, schmutz in the air, C02, blocks a lot of the waste heat from escaping. You have problems on Earth if you can’t dump waste energy. The Earth, the Solar System, are open systems that can dump energy into space. Space itself can dump energy by photons traversing space and it too can be considered an open and entropic system.

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In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.

Copyright

© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner

Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2016/12/19

Scott: If the universe is net negentropic, what happens a quintillion or quadrillion years into the future? What if the universe is net entropic?

Rick: The universe is defined, I believe and quantum mechanics suggests, by its interactions. An entropic universe or heat death universe, or open universe, keeps getting bigger and bigger. How does it define itself? If things get farther and farther away. There’s less and less energy. All of the photons have already flown away. 

If the universe is basically a giant gun fight among all of the particles and the particles understand where they are versus everything else – pa-choo, pa-choo, pa-choo, pa-ting, pa-ting, pa-ting, then an entropic universe can’t even be defined because there’s very little exchange of defining information via radiation. Everything is too far away and too cold. So, F- that universe. 

A negentropic universe is defined by the information in it as long as that information is interacting, where if the universe is a giant gun fight then you can have the active center where everybody is communicating with everybody else via radiation.

You’ve got the more collapsy T=0 outskirts, where information is preserved even though it’s not part of the gunfight. There’s not enough time for that stuff to need to be defined. The lack of stuff going on means a lack of time, which means the information doesn’t have time to break down.

So, you’ve got a cold storage, which is near zero-time storage. If you had the best refrigerator, the best one you could have, it would be a silver sphere where you put your Chinese food in it and no time passes within the sphere. It doesn’t even have to cool down. Put the food in, it is a stasis sphere.

You go on vacation, comeback 3 weeks later, take out the Chinese food that has experienced no time. So, the food is still fresh because it has experienced no time. T=0 is like storage. You might be able to store inconsistent information in a stasis sphere, basically, because say the universe knows more.

Our brains know more than we can know at any given time. We have more information stored than we access at any given instant, and given that the information is accurate within different contexts – one aspect of persistence is the absence of contradictions because everything fits with everything else, but with contextualized information, maybe, you store the stuff that is, the stuff you know, known within a specific localized context.

Your brain can only know so much at any given time even though you only know so much in the aggregate because you can only know the aggregate. There might be, if not inconsistencies in the aggregate, then at least contexts in which things are known that require the limited contexts at the time because the contexts cannot all be known at the same time.

Your brain doesn’t have the information processing capacity to present your complete knowledge at any given moment. The size of your brain’s limited capacity to know stuff at any given moment. There may be informationally based reasons why not all information can simultaneously exist. 

That there is some kind of contradictory structure to information in the aggregate, so non-pertinent information has to be stored in a relativistically rotated, zero space and zero time, or limited space and time, or attenuated space and time, context, which would naturally be around T=0.

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In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.

Copyright

© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner

Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2016/12/17

Scott: Persistent structures at all scales in the universe have evolved to be resistant to decay, informational decay. They’re like buffers – like the shielding of solar systems from the interstellar medium because of the heliosphere. What about these informational decay buffers?

Rick: Solar systems are stable orbitally for the most part because all of the stuff that has crashed into stuff has either been knocked away from the solar system or agglomerated into planets or settled into stable orbits across the 5 billion or more years that the Solar System has taken to form.

The Solar System has been formed during the 99% of that time. During the initial 1% or 8%, there was crashing into everything all of the time. However, over time, that became more stable. The universe has solar wind coming and knocking some stuff away. The Earth is protected. One reason we’re able to live reasonable lifespans on Earth is because of the Van Allen Belt.

We’ve got a rotating iron core that generates a massive field that deflects incoming radiation, cosmic rays, away from the temperate parts of Earth and towards the poles. There are protective deals, shields, and dynamic systems that contribute to continued stability. It is structures like solar systems and galaxies, where an average galaxy consists of 10^11^th stars. The vast majority of which are not crashing into each other at any given time.

The vast majority of galaxies are not crashing into each other at any given time too. This happens at various scales. In a time-based system that includes increasing order, persistent things persist. That seems to be a base deal. There are reasons why persistent things persist. The big reason is that they are resistant to outside disturbance.

The Solar System is resistant to disturbance because it, over a period of time, got rid of most of the disturbing objects. Also, the Solar System is part of a universe that is itself persistent and part of the universe’s persistent nature is there is an ass load of space.

With all of this space, it makes it less likely for things to have to crash into each other because there’s so much space for things to not crash into each other. If you look at the night sky, if you viewed the night sky as a sphere, as a globe, only 1 trillionth of the globe is painted star color. That is, it has the disc of a star there. The rest is pretty much empty space.

Empty space, where a photon can go 10 billion light years without crashing into anything, but I think it can; once something can become gravitationally deflected, it can probably get diffracting in some ways by passing through clouds of sparse matter without getting absorbed, but they can get messed with.

Living in a persistent universe, living in a universe with an apparent age of 13.8 billion years, there are things that you can look at as contributing to the persistence of that universe with the major things being gravitational locking and clustering in vast and mostly empty space.

For most things, there’s a combination. If it’s gravitational locking, it is something that happened once among the things that collided and locked together. Now, they’re stable together – either on increasingly large scales or as planets, or stars. Then you have a bunch of systems that are stable because they’re locked together in orbit.

They’re not going to crash into each other in the few billion years because the bodies that are part of an orbital system, and are orbiting bodies, have sufficient kinetic energy to keep themselves from crashing into the things that they are locked to. You have permanent locks from things that lock together and form matter clusters.

And then you have permanent locks in the things that form systems, in a big empty universe, that are highly persistent. The closest star from us is 4 light years away. I don’t know what the average distance between galaxies is. But it is probably millions of light years, I guess.

At the very least, many, many tens or hundreds of thousands of light years. Even if 2 galaxies are on a collision course, it is going to take 400 million or a billion years before they crash into each other. Even when they do crash, all of the stars in a galaxy have sufficient kinetic energy that they don’t fall into the center of the galaxy. Galaxies themselves are sparsely enough stringed in space that even when 2 galaxies crash into each other the vast, vast majority of stars do not slam into each other. They spin around each other and have different trajectories and things are chaotic, but those settle down.

First, into a new globular galaxy, then over a few billion years of getting things figured out, then a spiral galaxy.

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In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.

Copyright

© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner

Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2016/12/15

Scott: Matter in the universe represents structures. Information-based structures representative of external structure, a material framework.

Rick: You and I have been poking at what are the matter equivalents of informational structures. Looking at our universe, if our universe has an informational structure, then galaxies have to perform a very important and fairly informational thing because they have to be a specific informational thing as there are so many of them and their arrangement is so extensive across the universe.

Stars within a galaxy have some kind of sub-speciality. That is fairly well-defined because there are 10^22^nd stars.

License

In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.

Copyright

© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner

Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2016/12/13

Scott: What about concept clusters?

Rick: The concept clusters, or the chunks of information in your brain, are in the order of 100,00 things in your brain. The concept of running. The concept of farting. It includes the word fart and all of the variations on it. Scoffing! If you watch TV with the closed captioning on, scoffing is one of the hugest things people do on TV. Some character is always scoffing at another. Although, in real life, there is not nearly as much scoffing.

But on TV, there’s a bunch of scoffing. I have a concept cluster in my brain somewhere that include scoffing. The idea that I say something and somebody reacts to it, visibly, as if it is bullshit. That may be a concept cluster that is reflected by a bunch of or a swirl of information in information space. A galaxy of information. There may be around a 100,00 of those if you could map our information spaces.

That seems like the right magnitude. It could be less. It could be that we form our concepts on an impromptu basis with concept clusters, where maybe we don’t have concept clusters that are reserved specifically for pomegranate because we don’t use it much. But to get pomegranate. We need a bunch of them.

Or it could be that real estate development in our brain is easy as pie and we could throw up a million of them or every little thing, where you have 100,000 plus or minus one power of 10. It seems like a reasonable guess at the size of our mental universe if you could map it informationally – which we’ll be eventually able to do and you might have a 100,000 galaxies.

License

In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.

Copyright

© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner

Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2016/12/11

Scott: How would you estimate the information in the universe?

Rick: There are various estimates. You could look at the average density in the universe. Some people have estimate that the number of particles, basically hydrogen atoms or protons, in the universe is around 10^80^th (plus neutrons).

You could look at 10^80th in other ways such as the ratio of the diameter of a proton to the diameter of the universe is 10^40^th. Those ratios, even if I got it wrong, are some measure of information in the universe. It takes a lot of information to specify this much space where a proton is only 10^40^th as big as the universe – where a proton is so well-defined it is only one 10^40^th the size of the universe.

In IC, galaxies are some kind of information. They have specific informational roles, either as information processors or as a concept cluster that expresses an idea or the name for an object in the mind of the universe. You have 10^22^nd of these things, whatever they are in terms of information.

If 10^22^nd stars, if 10^11^th galaxies, then galaxies might be the concept clusters. It doesn’t seem unreasonable that we’re living inside of an information space of a system that has 10^11^th components on a galaxy-size scale with each of those galaxies considered as a concept cluster – maybe being a word in the informational consciousness that is inherent to the universe.

But if you want to do a similar analysis on us, people and their information spaces have vocabularies of between 10,000 and 25,000 words. Maybe, each word or most words are associated with little concept clusters in our information spaces.

There’s a word for most of the things that we think about. You can argue that there are things that we have senses of, which we don’t express in word unless we make it explicit. We have the ability to take things is perspective, like when something is in front of something else.

I am looking at a plant in front of bricks in front of a box of DVDs. I have this whole deal where I can tell because my brain has trained to tell. I understand without thinking about it much at all – on top of, in front of. I understand when I am in a room that is roughly cubicle and how the various corners work.

There are some right-angles in what I am viewing, but there are many more angles that don’t look like right-angles to me. But I know because I stored them. So, I can walk without falling over, so does a 2-year-old. I don’t need to put all the thoughts of walking into words. A 2-year-old definitely couldn’t.

A lot of people would have a lot of trouble of putting the dynamics of walking into words. There are a lot of things we don’t need or have words for. But it makes sense and is reasonable to think that the number of concept clusters in our brain is on the order of 100,000.

If you have a memory, it is not necessarily encapsulated a lot. If you use that memory a lot, like first memory, my first memory is being in my basement looking at Raggedy Ann and Andy curtains probably in 1962. I can put it into words because I’ve accessed that memory a lot.

When you access it a lot, it is easy to put a word tag on it. Most tags are not tagged with a when. It is triggered when some associations are popped up. Now, you can characterize that time a put up a big goober in the vista cruiser I was driving.

If you live to 100, you live 36,500 days. In the future, people will have brain buddies that record every single moment, so you can remember what you were doing on ay given hour on any given day. If you were to pull up a brain buddy on somebody 100 years old and with a functioning brain, you could cue them up for every adult day of their life.

You say, “Remember when you were, remember when,” They say, “Oh yea, they were wear that dress with brass buttons.” You’re able to pull up memories when enough cues from that memory are cued.

License

In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.

Copyright

© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner

Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2016/12/10

Scott: Are most photons not captured by other things in the universe? They traverse, lose energy.

Rick: The craziest statistics that nobody knows. There’s many of them, but one of them is that only one trillionth of the night sky is covered by stars. That means if you shot a photon into empty space, then you would need to shoot a trillion of them to have a good chance of hitting a star. Most sight lines in space don’t end up at a star. We can talk about Olbers’ Paradox. We don’t have time to talk about that.

It is like standing out in the middle of a forest, but only having a trillionth of your sightline has a tree in it. If you shoot a trillion bullets and only hit one tree, then those trees are fairly sparse. It is the same with space and photons.

Most photons are not intercepted within a couple billion or ten billion, or the vast percent, of photons don’t run into matter within the first ten billion light years of their travels. There are certain caveats.

We are in a Solar System, where we have the star that takes up a huge amount of the sky relative to the amount of the sky that stars usually take up. Still, even in daylight, if you’re looking around and in the orbit looking at the Sun, the Sun doesn’t even add a percent of the sky covered.

So, yea, most photons get away. They go, and go, and go, and go. We can probably assume that they eventually run into something, but I’m not sure that’s a necessary assumption. It rests on the curvature of the universe, where as the photon zips across everything.

We’ve got this theory where T=0 is spatially different from where we’re at. So, things are going to be more compactified in an actual future as opposed to the past of a big bang. Things start getting mushed together in a T=0 area. So, a lot of photons will be captured.

What you can say whether you believe in a T=0 with the rest of the universe, most photons get loose. They keep going. They get redder and redder. Their wavelength gets longer and longer as they traverse space that is large enough to be subject to the Hubble Constant, which Big Banger says is velocital.

But if you believe the universe is informational, you can say it is gravitational or structural. In an case, photons lose energy. It is that loss of energy that makes the increase in order possible and helps breed large-scale order. Order on the scale of galaxies and all of that stuff and actually helps determine the Arrow of Time

Scott: IC in that framework has two separate theories. Two distinct from standard Big Bang cosmology. One, where T=0 is apparent T=0, large collections of matter functioning as storage. Where time is virtually frozen, that would be global negentropy. Two, we have global entropy, but localized negentropy with the shedding of waste heat in persistent structures like solar systems.

Rick: If you can segregate information that is not actively being used, if you can store it around T=0, that is a nice sink. I don’t know exactly how it works, but it is part of a system that is negentropic.

Scott: In general, that would be storage. That storage would be subject, like all storage systems, to information decay, but over extraordinarily deep cosmic time.

Rick: In the cosmology that we’ve been poking at, we live in an information space. It is not our information. It is information that is the universe. You’ve got storage, but it is information that is supported by an armature that is a material support frame like a hard drive or a CPU some place in a universe not our own – like the brain. Some place that can store information because information can’t store itself.

The information we have in our brains. That information can’t store itself. It is stored in our brains. The information in computers is stored within computers. Information stored within the universe, if it is made of information, is stored someplace else.

The material thing that supports our information universe is, we can assume, subject to having stuff happen to it. Stuff happen to our brain. Stuff happens to our computers. Information is lost when the system brains, whether permanently or temporarily.

With us, our information is way, way lost when we get Alzheimer’s or die. In the case of a computer hard drive, it depends on what is going on. It is based on information. In decay that is based on information, that decay that can be both within the information as information contradicts itself and you have to rejigger everything as new information comes in.

But more importantly, information can decay because the vessel for that information is subject to decay. That looks like the heating up of the universe. A negentropic universe goes from tiny and hot to cool – to 3.7 degrees above absolute zero. That being the average temperature of interstellar or intergalactic space.

That 2.7 degrees being the temperature of the background radiation. But if you want to erase information, you raise the temperature. Things get hotter. Information contained in the universe is contained in spatial segregation and clustering. Things join up.

Subatomic particles join up. Atoms join up. On a planet and star, individual atoms form planets, to form stars, which are part of solar systems, which are part of galaxies, which are part of superclusters and filaments.

The universe is a bunch of matter that is collapsed via us being closely associated with other matter. The universe is a bunch of clumps of matter at various scales. If you want to get rid of the information that is contained in the clumping, you heat up the universe. Things start breaking apart and the Planck wavelengths probably get longer and things get fuzzier, and you start losing the empty space between things.

At the point where all information is gone, all things are back to a hot, fuzzy mess with everything overlapping everything else, but nothing has a distinct existence and has the look of a Big Bang proto-atom or proto-whatever it is. A big, tiny, fuzzy point, that can be seen as a fuzzy point out of which everything, if conditions were right, could spring.

License

In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.

Copyright

© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner

Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2016/12/09

Scott: In informational cosmology, what is the bias towards complexity, towards information, towards order – negentropy?

Rick: I think one of the biggest discoveries in physics was the discovery of entropy, which is the measure of order or disorder within a system and entropy being the tendency of things to move from order to disorder.

However, understandings of entropy can be a little wobbly. That can happen when you talk about negentropy, which is the increase in disorder in a system. Negentropy is even more wobbly than entropy. I am not sure how pinned down beyond the definition people’s understanding is. I am sure for most people it is not even a word.

In an even more general sense, we are talking about the increase in order in a system, which strikes scientifically minded people as wrong because they have the idea of increasing entropy or disorder pounded into their head that a cup of coffee can’t heat up for no reason. That it has to be lukewarm or the temperature of the room.

That the universe will keep expanding, keep cooling down, and stars will run out of energy and the universe will have a lukewarm death. So, the idea that order can increase, even though we live on a planet where order has increased to create us, life, and everything else on the planet, it strikes people as weird.

Entropy applies to closed systems, in systems in which order can increase involves open systems in which you can shed waste heat that sheds noise. If you can get rid of the waste heat, you can have nice stuff like us.

Entropy is such a powerful idea that it has been extended to the entire universe and even though entropic characteristics of the universe are somewhat contradictory. The universe seems to have some very unentropic characteristics. It, according to the Big Bang, exploded from a point or expanded from a point, but even at that young, chaotic age had to have gone from being a big hot mess to being a very ordered place.

Things mostly don’t crash into each other like galaxies in which life arises, at least like ours. There are arguments to be made that you can set up a universe-scale system, or systems, that can be unentropic as long as you’re able to get rid of excess energy.

In fact, the universe has ways of getting rid of excess energy. That is the loss of energy via photons as they traverse billions of light years. Photons turn red as they traverse the gradient of space.

License

In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.

Copyright

© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner

Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2016/12/08

Scott: What about information rather than nothing?

Rick: The idea of information being in charge rather than nothing is more hopeful. If everything is part of information contained in some consciousness, if consciousness is the containing framework of information, then that’s not as bleak as there being no overall consciousness, nothing in charge, basically nothingness with life and consciousness being accidental.

It is less bleak, but it has some bleak aspects. If everything is structured, if every consciousness is subject to the same constraints of our consciousness, then, perhaps every conscious being comes to an end. No matter how vast, which means we are subject to the universe coming to an end in the vast future. We are still stuck with no absolute permanence. Only the permanence embodied in vastness.

The bigger something is, the more likely it is to persist given its high level of self-organization.

Scott: We talked about a narrative structure to the universe.

Rick: If consciousness is the vessel containing information, if largely self-consistent information systems can’t exist without a ride-along consciousness – which is the experience of information being shared in a large system among all of the sub-systems in a real-time manner, then you have a narrative.

Generally, each consciousness or systems of consciousness – in fact, we’re probably moving towards something like that with budding and moving of consciousness unlike unitary consciousness for decades like human consciousness; we grow up in our skulls. We stay in our skulls our entire lives with limited melding of minds our entire lives.

The best we could do for most of human history was talking and writing. We are getting more and more intimate ways of communicating. In the next couple of decades, as we get less islandy, as we get to move consciousness around and share it, there are narratives for isolated consciousnesses such as ourselves moving through the world. There are more complicated narratives you can imagine related to budding and collapsing consciousnesses moving through the world.

Scott: There is a beginning, middle, and end.

Rick: Narrative is going to be attached to all of that stuff. Narrative is attached to cause-and-effect worlds of linear time. Plus, if consciousness is unavoidable as an aspect of information, then that makes narrative more unavoidable. A cold universe with nothing in charge is a shitty narrative. It blew up from a point, then it’s going to keep expanding forever, get cold, then inert.

Or, it is going to run out of expansive energy and collapse back into a point, losing all information as it collapses, then will expand again. There aren’t that many narratives. They aren’t that exciting. They are only exciting insofar as they explain the dynamics of the entire universe. They are pretty bleak.

Scott: Information, as you’re positing it, as we’re positing it, implies both gradual increase in complexity dependent on the amount of time, amount of space, and amount of stuff in the universe with the eventuality of consciousness. Is there a bias towards increasing complexity? If you take three variable: space, time, and stuff.

Rick: Is there a bias in the universe towards the unfolding of a narrative with the idea of a narrative being increasing complexity and the universe’s increasing ability to support beings that understand it or the universe? Are there processes that resolve non-information to information?

Scott: Yea, a negentropic bias.

Rick: Yea, it is slightly off it. I have been thinking about it. Time is seen as one-dimensional. It is obvious because we move from moment to moment to moment along the timelines. However, it is reasonable to imagine that as we get more complicated or whatever we become in combination with artificial intelligence.

That one major function of consciousness is to provide safety by creating and weighing alternate futures and choosing the best future among them. That is one way of saying it. A more natural way of saying it is one function or the function of consciousness is to make choices moment to moment.

Scott: By analogy, if you’re reading a book, as you’re going through the story, you’re taking relevant information, more or less, into account as you read the text, but you’re also putting up hypotheticals about what the next section or chapter will bring.

To me, you’re putting up hypotheticals about the probable paths, but then you read the next section or chapter and then you collapse the probabilities into certainties.

Rick: It is collapsing possibilities into a single present moment, but the present moment still contains a lot of possibilities. Your immediate circumstances have been collapsed into definiteness. The idea that we’ll have quantum computers riding on our bodies helping us simulate a range of possible futures and then help us choose what next steps to take for the more favorable moments. We already do that without seeing it as that kind of thing.

It is a little less than 2 miles for me to drive to the closest gym in Ventura Boulevard in Studio City. There are so many asshole drivers along this stretch. Not as many if I go the other way because I have a cycle I go through. I go on the counter-clockwise cycle. It is a less than 2-mile trip going East 2 miles on Ventura Boulevard. You encounter a bunch of A-hole drivers. If you go left to the West, it is a short drive along douche alley. It is only a few blocks. In douche alley, you’ve got people walking about with yoga mats, stopping in the middle of the street for no reason.

Either way, whether you go down douche alley or 2 miles down Ventura, it is like a video game of asshole driving. Yet, you’re constantly forced to anticipate what stupid shit people are going to do around you, and to figure out what stupid shit you’re going to do to win at driving versus the people around you.

But then I thought about when the constant process of avoiding accidents on Ventura Boulevard suddenly locks into an inevitable accident. I have had some. There’s a time when it is probably like half of a second, but it seems like longer. Once you’re locked into this thing, all of your attention is locked into this thing that is going to happen.

You spend a significant amount of time locked into inevitability. That is a weird feeling because you’re used to not inevitability. You’re used to having to run a perception plus thought framework about possibilities to choose from. Those possibilities can be seen as incompletely sketched future worlds or future sets of circumstances. They are all nebulous and smeared out. They are all based on risks and possible rewards.

But when your breaks are locked and you’re skidding inevitably into the front of another car or the back, the loss of possibility is usually dreadful because you’re about to get into a wreck. It is weird. I don’t know if it dreadful because you know it will suck when you hit the car, or if it partially dreadful because the loss of the possibility or the resolution before the actual future hits is inherently dreadful.

But regardless of where the dread comes from, it is weird not to be in a position of having a smeary, vague realm of different possible futures. Even in the middle of a wreck, you’re don’t know exactly what will happen – but that pins everything down.

License

In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.

Copyright

© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner

Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2016/12/07

Scott: What about the unification of the operations of the universe under a scientific framework?

Rick: Starting around the time of Newton. Galileo did some stuff under the scientific umbrella, but Newton was the first creator of a truly effective unified theory: Universal Gravitation. It described things from the falling of a bowl of porridge to the motions of planets. Universal Gravitation was the first effective universal theory. You might go to Kepler and planetary dynamics. Although, when did people invent the idea of the clockwork universe? There might have been some obscure Greek guy, but it was until Newton.

People thought, “Hey, the universe can be a coldly mechanistic set of articles and bodies moving in completely deterministic ways.” That’s not exactly Newton himself because Newton was fanatically religious. So, whatever he thought about determinism, he thought about a universe ruled by God.

But people coming after him that looked at his work, in the 3 centuries after him, a lot of scientifically-minded people see a cold universe with nothing, no creator, behind and no processes other than cold valueless physical processes with nothing in charge. It is processes that happen due to the laws of physics.

But what you’re going to see, I think, is a change from nothing really mattering – you’ve got the mid-20^th century existentialists saying, “Life is absurd,” which you can’t wholeheartedly say unless you don’t believe in God and begin to embrace the cold scientific idea of nothing mattering – and everything playing out, not exactly in a quantum manner because quantum mechanics makes things not entirely determinate but still playing out in a mechanistic manner according to some basic rules of physics, to information being in charge.

Throughout the 20^th century, science tried to account for how life could arise through cold, physical processes without a Creator, without teleology. Some powerful being getting in there and pushing things around and making stuff happen. To the extent that everyone thought would be achieved, life was this afterthought. Not necessary for the universe to operate; not having much to do with the business of the universe, it was a thinking froth. A meaningless icing on the cold face of empty space, largely, empty space.

In existence, with the universe eventually expanding out to cold nothingness as stars spend their fusion energy and burn out, you have the entropic death of the universe. That point of view – life is an accident and doesn’t matter in the big affairs in the universe, and there’s no powerful outside observer, where things play out – will be erased in the next 2 or 3 generations with the view that information is in charge.

That is, information based structures are able to persist across time. In fact, it is due to the formation of information that things can persist across time. It is impossible for things to exist without being part of a self-consistent information containing system and information containing systems have some agency.

They have some role to play in even the very largest structure of things. It does a couple of things. There has bee a struggle over the past couple centuries to bring things into the fold of physics based processes. It has been tough to bring life into it. However, more scientists say, “Yea, we have a handle on how things work and how life could have arisen through physical processes with some of the holdouts being consciousness.”

Consciousness is still tough to fold into confident science. If you ask most science-minded people, they might say, “We don’t know yet, but we will figure out how consciousness arises from basic physical processes without spiritual hocus pocus, or hidden forces or realms, independent of physics.”

It is nice to have everything under a single, non-mystical umbrella. It is probably helpful to the advancement of science. It might be helpful in eventually mitigating and limiting belief based assholery.

License

In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.

Copyright

© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner

Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2016/12/06

Scott: If “guarantee” and “can” have similarity there, the winking out you’re talking about is imperceptibly small, to us, moments linked together with an implied past and set of possible futures.

Rick: The way I look at it is to see if a consciousness-based theory of the universe makes sense. If each of our awarenesses can be expressed as an information space, can you express the physics of what happens to consciousness when somebody is shot in the head with a bullet and their brain is basically exploded?

The physics of that, looking at the information map of a brain that’s suddenly obliterated, is all that information collapses into a super-hot, primordial, zero-information, system. Suddenly, everything becomes undefined, the Planck wavelengths of everything expands effectively a quadrillion-fold, everything overlaps everything else, and there’s no longer any available information.

What happens at the speed of light, since nothing can happen faster than the speed of light, though effectively, since everything is happening at the speed of light, maybe, if the universe evaporates at the speed of light everywhere, you probably don’t have to wait for the evaporation to happen in one place and wait for the evaporation to reach you.

The universe loses any capacity to hold information. The tendency of things is to not expand at the speed of light due to quantum interaction and entanglement with other quantum things. Suddenly, nothing is entangled. Everything expands at the speed of light and everything is erased.

Though, I don’t know how that looks for a strict physics point of view. We know what the agent is working on – the hardware that contains the information, but there needs to be an assistant picture of that happening to the information – even though you don’t know what is actually happening to the hardware.

But it seems like a physically plausible thing that that could happen. Maybe, there are limits on how predictive physics can be from within the universe. In that, we have existed for, maybe, trillions or quadrillions, based on the apparent age of the universe, of moments, what we consider moments.

Based on that, there is an expectation that for each further moment then it is the end of moments, but, maybe, there is a limit to the predictive validity of something like that given that the universe’s existence under this is dependent on the continued existence of hardware that is perceived by us from within the universe or by the universe itself.

Scott: Effective theories fit here. You can describe individual particles. You can describe momentum, spin, etc. It is impossible, in practical terms, to explain that with current and near future technology.

So, that puts a limit on our descriptive capacities about clouds or water. Collections of atoms of things. Effective theories are what we have. We have theories effective enough to describe clouds without having to describe every particles’ properties and interactions.

I think it can be expanded. It can be expanded to most disciplines that are serious such as physics, chemistry, and biology, even in some social sciences like psychology and neuroscience. Where you aren’t describing every particular thing, but you are getting degrees of accuracy by going with effective theories. So, based on these general principles, these general things will unfold and these formulations will provide varying degrees of predictability, validity, and accuracy about the phenomenon.

We don’t have infinite accuracy about even orbits of planets, but we have a high degree of accuracy – much more so than orbits of bodies in other solar systems. I think it can be spread across fields. For instance, we’ve talked about artificial intelligence. We talked about Neil Degrasse Tyson brains in an artificial intelligence or a synthetic intelligence that is 90% accurate.

Let’s say the technology in the future gives more than 90% accuracy to one instantiation of Neil Degrasse Tyson’s brain. That’s an effective theory in neuroscience of a Neil Degrasse Tyson brain. I think IC is about that in a lot of ways. It just takes a highly informational framework for it.

Rick: It is an offshoot of that. It does, in a hand wavey way and in a perhaps less hand wavey way later, explain the way things work. It gives a rough framework for why stuff might exist and why certain things might work and why simple patterns work in a variety of contexts. They are the things most likely to exist and persist. Let’s talk about Neil Degrasse Tyson’s brain.

When I’m not totally freaking out about Trump, I view Trump as at least a part of technical change causing social upheaval in a way that perhaps has not happened to this extent before. Social media is partially responsible for the results of this election. Besides that, there is the job upheaval due to AI and increased abilities of mechanization to replace human work.

We’re not always going to elect Trump. Hillary Clinton got about 2.7 million more votes than Trump, but it is just due to the distribution of those votes that Trump won. It took a lot of stuff for Clinton to not get elected: campaigning style and strategies, Russian interference, fake news whether it came from Russia or not. There’s a lot of stuff.

Trump is not inevitable. So, we will not always be electing clowns. However, from now on, science fictioney social disruption, societal disruption, will be a part of the political landscape, even though politicians are fairly slow to acknowledge that. Not only social and political disruption, we’re going to have, not ‘existential’ because it can mean a lot of different stuff, but existential disruption.

I mean by that the discounting of consciousness. If you created a Neil Degrasse Tyson simulation that was 90% accurate, then you told Neil Tyson, “This is all you’re going to get. We’re going to kill you, but we built this 90% accurate version of you.” He would say, “This is not good enough.” But if you said to him, “This one is 99.1% accurate.” By this point, Neil Tyson is in his 80s. He might say, “I can pass on feeling okay with that.”

But that’s one manifestation of what I see as the discounting of consciousness, that we have a world in which human consciousness is fairly well understood and there are a bunch of alternate consciousnesses and augmented consciousnesses at various levels of sophistication comparable to human consciousness and even go beyond human consciousness.

The value we place on human consciousness will probably become discounted. It is similar to the way that we don’t give that much of a crap about pig consciousness, chicken consciousness, or cow consciousness. We kill 40 billion chickens per year. If we cared about the consciousness of chickens, we wouldn’t do that. Mostly, we don’t think about that.

Pets, most people with pets acknowledge pets have an inner life, an emotional life, and we feel bad when a pet dies or when they are too old to be living well. But we don’t feel overwhelming angst at the cessation of a pet’s consciousness. So, the angst that is attached and the emotional import that we attach to human consciousness may be discounted.

Somebody arguing with a Neil Tyson, say the heirs to Neil Tyson. He’s 86. He wants to spend another $2.2 million to upgrade his simulation from 99.1% accurate to 99.7% accurate. His heirs are like “that in our minds is bullshit because you’re spending all of this money to have slightly more accurate memories about what happened to you in high school and college. Really, why? You’ll have memories.

They’ll be .6% less accurate. You’ll have memories, but they won’t be as potentially accurate as your brain would provide. But so what? You don’t recall what car your friend drove back in the day. You’re a hoarder, a mental hoarder and using all of this money.”

So, I feel as if these kinds of issues will eventually erode our foundations of human society. It doesn’t mean it will be replaced with chaos, but it will be replaced with something else that will be perceived as a kind of a ‘fuck you’ to traditionalists of our era. Again, the Trump thing is at least in part a reaction to change, whether or not people are conscious of it. You can read all sorts of documents on these sorts of things. The people who are voting Trump are voting against their best interests, or voting for illusions.

I’d argue some of that pressure is sci-fi pressure. Weird-world-coming pressure.

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In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.

Copyright

© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner

Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2016/12/05

Scott: One thing comes to mind. The separation in magnitudes between the quantum and the relativistic. Persistent structures such as electrons being locked into orbit around nuclei, protons and neutrons. Those are informationally something. Higher-up, you can get larger persistent structures.

Rick: That’s another deal. Where macro world stuff has particular claim on existence, you can’t have whatever you want. What you have are things that can exist sitting on a foundation of quantum randomness, the only things that can successfully exist on a macro level are things that can exist in a way that are consistent with quantum laws by taking advantage of the statistics of large numbers.

Where if you can’t count on a single atom behaving in a particular way 100% of the time because it is a quantum thing, because it is incompletely defined, and that incomplete definition that allows for a range of possible outcomes, the only way that something can exist at a macro level is by being part of a system that has so many quantum parts to it that quantum uncertainty is statistically dampened to near zero.

So, the same way Hamiltonians and cause-and-effect can exist in a persistent world, a time-based world, because they embody persistent principles, so do macro objects; they can exist in a macro sense across large spans of time, and definitely in space because they have worked from a quantum foundation. They have existence in a way that defies quantum uncertainty. The basic principles of existence and non-existence. The things that get to exist are those that are consistent with those principles, which we have some idea of – but not a complete idea of.

Scott: In the macro world, there is fraying of the information that is locked down too. I mean, disorganization happens. Things break down.

Rick: Hawking had the inkling of a theory about 30 years ago. There is the theory of knots. Knots are a weird thing theoretically. The existence of a knot is not quite a thing in itself. It is a thing defined by logical constraints in the structure of a thing that wraps around itself in three dimensions. Hawking – knot theory was popular a couple decades ago, postulated some theory based on knots in space ad the weave in space, which, I believe, is the interactions among particles seen as woven timelines of these particles.

I think it is a legitimate point of view. That you have particles that are woven together by history of interaction, which is entanglement – almost literally, or literally. If you have enough entanglement among particles, it creates a durable weave of causality and persistence that generates a durable, persistent world, but is still woven and still, as you say, can unravel at the edges.

Where most things are fairly well-defined because of their history of interaction and most macro interactions and because of their continuing interactions, but you can pull at the weave experimentally; you can isolate and magnify uncertainties to make situations and objects arbitrarily large. You can pull causality away from them to create islands of uncertainty if you want to do an experiments with uncertainty.

Also, you can create islands of super-certainty. There’s a natural level in our world given the scale of our world of pin-downedness, of definiteness, but you can mess with that. You can manipulate that according to the laws or principles of quantum mechanics. There is always a potential unravelling. When you talk about entropy, you have these examples that there is always a non-zero chance that you’ll suffocate because due to random motion all of the air molecules will be not where you are.

They’ll always be in the opposite corner, but the odds of that are so low that it has never happened.

Scott: Terence Tao has worked on formulations to see if water can spontaneously blow up.

Rick: It probably can, but by can you’re stipulating. A lot of things can happen, but that depends on a definition of can including everything that a non-zero probability. Once you limit can to anything that has enough of a probability that it can happen within a reasonable universe, then not everything can happen. The math on the air molecules or the math on water exploding is low enough that it can’t happen or won’t happen within the lifespan of the universe.

Scott: So, can is spatially and temporally variant. It depends on the number on time and the number on space. How much space? How much time? Rick: They diamonds aren’t really forever. (Laugh)

Rick: They really have a lifespan. Because they are tightly packed, there’s a lot of binding energy. That carbon molecules tend to pop off the surface at a certain rate. It is like tempered glass – Pa-ting! Pa-ting! Pa-ting! The rate at which carbon molecules pop off is such that even after 4 billion years. You’ve still got a diamond. It hasn’t evaporated, but if you had a trillion years then it would largely evaporate.

Scott: That would amount to a medium world object with fraying at the edges. Same with DNA. Macro objects would be galactic clusters shedding off stars, planets, galaxies, and so on.

Rick: The universe itself is subject to fraying from two points of view. From the universe as we experience it, being in it, there are various catastrophes that could happen with low probability as far as we know, which is collapse in heat death. It is the loss of all information in the universe. We get obliterated along with all of the information in the universe. Then there’s the framework where the universe is an information structure within the armature world.

Based in some kind of hardware somewhere, that fraying, that loss of the universe, is a low probability possibility across any framework from which you view the universe – as hardware, as a self-consistent mass of information, and as the place in which we exist. It is not guaranteed to continue to have existence. As long as you characterize guarantee the way you characterize can, you can’t guarantee anything that has a non-zero chance of happening.

I mean, you can guarantee the existence of the universe for the next 2 minutes because the probability of the universe winking out in the next two minutes is infinitesimally, almost, small. It is the same issue with can as with guarantee.

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In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.

Copyright

© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner

Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2016/12/04

Scott: What form would the math of IC take into account? What would it describe informationally? How would this involve metaphysics?

Rick: A lot of stuff in math and science works independent of ultimate framework. Eugene Wigner said one of the most basic things is the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics in describing the universe. At some point, as science and philosophy become better, the surprising effectiveness of math would have to be explained, but all we need to know short of and independent of that explanation is that math works to a great extent in describing a great variety of things.

Ideally, there needs to be an explanation as to why that stuff works. However, we know that stuff works. We know things boil down to the simple, practical methods that we’ve developed and have survived for centuries. For instance, everything in Newtonian Mechanics.

Newton had a vague theoretical framework. He explained how things worked mechanically. He didn’t have much of an explanation as to why, only a little bit. Over the past 100 years, we’ve understood Newtonian Mechanics as a subset of Einsteinian Mechanics, when you’re not dealing with extreme velocities or other extreme conditions.

We understood Newtonian Mechanics within the framework of Einsteinian Mechanics, but why Einsteinian Mechanics are the ones that rule the world, the non-quantum world, isn’t understood very well. People go with Einstein’s half-explanation that the equations are beautiful and simple, and that somehow God, by which Einstein means some principle of simplicity and elegance in the universe which favors simplicity and elegance. Obviously, it is a circular explanation.

So, we’re used to using scientific ideas and method without knowing why they work at some deep level. Although, you and I, if we’re at all right, looking at IC, we see a tendency for persistent structures to persist within a temporal framework.

The processes we see being effective in the world are effective across the unfolding of time and we are creatures who live, and our existence is, pinned to the unfolding of time, which favours persistent structures – and persistent structures tend to be self-consistent and simple like a lot of mathematical structures. It seems circular, but not really because persistence is a process that requires that property in the things that participate in persistence.

I would argue that things that persist embody principles that are durable and persistent as time unfolds. They are effective at working within a temporal, cause-and-effect, self-consistent framework.

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In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.

Copyright

© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner

Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2016/12/03

As a preface to all of this, we’re two guys having fun, think for yourself on this. Regardless, if it’s true, then it’s true, conceptually with a little math at the moment. Informational Cosmology is an extension of BB cosmology, which comes from digital physics, not entirely… 

Let me interrupt you right there, one problem with digital physics is that no one has made a convincing argument as to how it matches up with the daily business of the universe, the moment-to-moment business of the universe. 

At some point, people can say the universe is a giant information processor or giant computer. There has to be a scheme that fits how our electrons locking into orbit around protons looks informationally. 

What are protons locking together in nuclei through fusion? What is that informationally? 

This is for large-scale cosmic structures as well. 

Yea – what’s a black hole informationally? 

Galactic groups, clusters, superclusters, filaments, even the Cosmic Web.

Yea, and what are we? We’re people doing people stuff. But how does people doing people stuff fit into a scheme where the universe is a computer. Does that mean if our minds are information processors then do we have primitive homonculi little people – Minecraft version people doing Minecraft business? It’s hard to say. But IC, at least, offers a framework for saying this might be a deal. 

A conceptual mapping with a little math at the moment. 

Conceptual because I’m shit at math. I’m okay at math. I’m a guy who when I was supposed to be taking math classes. I was in a bar and being a stripper. If anything offended me in a math or physics class, then I would blow it off and take a dance class to be a better stripper. My founding in Hamiltonians, action potentials, and quantum matrices is bad. If I weren’t so bad at math, there might be more math and less energetic hand waving.

License

In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.

Copyright

© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.