Will Humans turn into Cyborgs and Rapidly Evolve, and is that the Key to our Survival?
Yes, and they already have started. Humans are increasingly using automobiles and smartphones as part of their everyday life.
When inside a car, the human and car are essentially a cyborg. You may have noticed that you even think differently when driving.
When we on a social network, or texting, we are part of a hive-mind like the Borg of Star Trek.
Later, the analog human brain will be seamlessly integrated with digital technology, so that smartphone/computer, car and human will become one entity, capable of splitting apart sometimes, but all integrated in cyber-space at the very least.
There are, no doubt, relatively advanced aliens that inhabit entire galaxies. As their memes got filtered by evolution, the ones that favored technology, science and exploration, survived the filtering process.
We have made the - no doubt - common mistake of revealing our birth worlds location by transmitting signals out into deep space. Jealous aliens that detect these signals in time may hurry to destroy us, so that we don't spread across the galaxy.
However, if our memes rapidly evolve, turning us into far more intelligent Cyborgs, we may escape this solar system without leaving a trail, and our memes survive and spread.
There is nothing intrinsically 'good' about surviving. The reason why existing memes seem to emphasize striving towards survival, is not because survival is a absolutely 'good' thing, but that simply that the memes that don't emphasize survival tend to die out and not be around anymore.
Our memes have not undergone the heavy filtering that competition with alien creatures will bring. We had better hurry up and evolve into Cyborgs to avoid being "nipped in the bud".
Monday, September 1, 2014
Tuesday, April 24, 2012
Autism Obesity Hypothesis Confirmed by Statistical Studies!
I have reason to toot my horn a little.
On March 18th I wrote this blog
post:
I came up with the idea that
there might be a correlation between the rise of autism in developed nations and the incredibly rich diet of mothers and infants. I had not
read it anywhere. It was my own idea, and you can see the date stamped on my
blog post. I called for a statistical study
to see if this was the case.
Then on April 9 the first of
thousands of news, blog posts and articles and TV news reports started
appearing saying much the same thing.
One of the earliest I can find on the Internet is here, but I didn't
hear of this new research until after the middle of April:
Oddly enough, another of my blog
posts correlates with a recent rash of news articles.
In this post I say that women's empowerment may tend towards becoming a rare or extinct meme because it (unfortunately) leads to fewer children being born to the very people who believe in it and there are thus fewer children likely to be raised to believe in it:
Two things have happened since
I wrote that post: A study was
publicized saying that the emigration pattern between the US and Mexico has
changed and there is no net population gain.
That means that the USA and the progressive memes regarding women's
empowerment are going start to dwindle. If we want to keep a sustainable population of progressive types, women need to be compensated for the rigors and risks of child-bearing and child-rearing.
Here is one of hundreds of such
articles. None of them
mention that this trend is associated with a dwindling of the global population of secular humanists, compared to a rising population of hidebound patriarchal types of people:
The other thing is that NPR broadcast
an interview with an author who identified the reason why patriarchal societies
want to control women in every way. She
said that the future of the traditional culture depends on women remaining
ignorant, repressed and enslaved so they will continue to produce large numbers
of children and teach them the archaic beliefs of the patriarchal tradition. I can't find a link to that but it was in regards to female genital mutilation.
Tuesday, April 3, 2012
The Complex Society Autism Hypothesis
Read the last paragraph of my blog post: How the Brain Works and Doesn't Work in the Case of Autism.
This is a separate hypothesis from the Rich Diet Autism Hypotheis.
This is a separate hypothesis from the Rich Diet Autism Hypotheis.
Monday, April 2, 2012
How The Brain Works, and Doesn't Work in the Case of Autism.
The human brain is the showpiece of meme and gene evolution because they evolved hand in hand. As more memes accumulated, offering survival advantages, there was a filtering of the reproductive memes encoding the brains architecture (i.e the genes), leaving room for an expansion in the size of the brain and an increase in its capacity to store, process and communicate memes. That feedback loop caused the rapid evolution of the hardware we have today.
We know that the brain consists of neurons connected to each other through axons to synapses located on the dendrites of other neurons. Through these synaptic connections these neurons communicate chemical signals to each other using neurotransmitters. But what allows the brain to be conscious? No one knows exactly.
My perspective on it is that each neuron can be part of multiple virtual organisms (or agents). Each agent has goals much like an ant in a swarm of ants. For example the agent might latch on to a chemical signal and pursue it to get a stronger signal, much as driver ants swarm blindly down a chemical trail, reinforcing it as they go. All of the agents together create an ecosystem for individual connected agents to provide the cues that prompt the agent to act in certain ways. This ecosystem could be seen as containing virtual food, signals or virtual comfort levels much like what swarming creatures such as ants react to.
Some of the agents have many neurons as members and have a mouse-like intelligence unto themselves. While they have no clue that they are part of a brain they respond to their environment intelligently, pursuing their virtual food and virtual comfort. They can learn as neural networks are capable of learning by acting and seeing what feedback comes back from the virtual ecosystem
This line of thought reminds me of Minsky's Society of Mind (1980).
In fetal and infant humans, agents compete for resources and undergo a process of biological evolution. Agents that can't find virtual food and virtual comfort in the virtual ecosystem actually die, and their neurons and synapses can actually physically die too if they are not used in any successful agents. This is a natural part of the development of the human brain, and is crucial to development because the brain is an energy hog and a difficult organ to keep cool and oxygenated. Elsewhere I hypothesize that it might be important for resources to be relatively scant during early brain development so that there is a better chance of unneeded neurons and connections being killed off.
The hypothesis here is that an overabundance of agents could be a crucial link in the cause-effect chain of Autism.
Autism might be a disease where the natural pruning of connections doesn't happen fast enough leading to far too many agents competing for resources in the virtual ecosystem. In another post, I speculate that it might simply be the nutritious food and calories that mothers and infants get that create an over-abundance of resources in the virtual ecosystem and prevent agents from dying out as they should. Liken this to the toxic blooms that happen from the runoff from farms. That is one possible explanation.
Another compatible explanation that I have not explored in depth as of yet, is that the rich media and complex, fast-paced society that infants are exposed to causes agents that should otherwise die to live on. For decades parents have been suspicious of the effects of TV and other media upon their babies and sometimes strive to restrict it, yet with the advent of personal computing and smart phones, screens are everywhere. An actual measurement of this super-sophistication that babies are being born into is the rise in IQs for each generation.
We know that the hardware of the brain is unable to evolve significantly in the space of a few decades, so how could IQs be going up so dramatically every generation?
What must be going on is a the stimulus from all the media and the increasing pace of society is causing the agents to diversify and increase in number so that they can deal with this greater level of complexity. This allows more agents and their constituent neurons and synapses to survive and avoid the critical pruning out process. However, since this level of sophistication is relatively unnatural from a hunter-gatherer point of view, some infants' brain development goes awry, and the result is Autism. It is not incompatible with my other hypothesis: the Rich Diet Autism Hypothesis.
We know that the brain consists of neurons connected to each other through axons to synapses located on the dendrites of other neurons. Through these synaptic connections these neurons communicate chemical signals to each other using neurotransmitters. But what allows the brain to be conscious? No one knows exactly.
My perspective on it is that each neuron can be part of multiple virtual organisms (or agents). Each agent has goals much like an ant in a swarm of ants. For example the agent might latch on to a chemical signal and pursue it to get a stronger signal, much as driver ants swarm blindly down a chemical trail, reinforcing it as they go. All of the agents together create an ecosystem for individual connected agents to provide the cues that prompt the agent to act in certain ways. This ecosystem could be seen as containing virtual food, signals or virtual comfort levels much like what swarming creatures such as ants react to.
Some of the agents have many neurons as members and have a mouse-like intelligence unto themselves. While they have no clue that they are part of a brain they respond to their environment intelligently, pursuing their virtual food and virtual comfort. They can learn as neural networks are capable of learning by acting and seeing what feedback comes back from the virtual ecosystem
This line of thought reminds me of Minsky's Society of Mind (1980).
In fetal and infant humans, agents compete for resources and undergo a process of biological evolution. Agents that can't find virtual food and virtual comfort in the virtual ecosystem actually die, and their neurons and synapses can actually physically die too if they are not used in any successful agents. This is a natural part of the development of the human brain, and is crucial to development because the brain is an energy hog and a difficult organ to keep cool and oxygenated. Elsewhere I hypothesize that it might be important for resources to be relatively scant during early brain development so that there is a better chance of unneeded neurons and connections being killed off.
The hypothesis here is that an overabundance of agents could be a crucial link in the cause-effect chain of Autism.
Autism might be a disease where the natural pruning of connections doesn't happen fast enough leading to far too many agents competing for resources in the virtual ecosystem. In another post, I speculate that it might simply be the nutritious food and calories that mothers and infants get that create an over-abundance of resources in the virtual ecosystem and prevent agents from dying out as they should. Liken this to the toxic blooms that happen from the runoff from farms. That is one possible explanation.
Another compatible explanation that I have not explored in depth as of yet, is that the rich media and complex, fast-paced society that infants are exposed to causes agents that should otherwise die to live on. For decades parents have been suspicious of the effects of TV and other media upon their babies and sometimes strive to restrict it, yet with the advent of personal computing and smart phones, screens are everywhere. An actual measurement of this super-sophistication that babies are being born into is the rise in IQs for each generation.
We know that the hardware of the brain is unable to evolve significantly in the space of a few decades, so how could IQs be going up so dramatically every generation?
What must be going on is a the stimulus from all the media and the increasing pace of society is causing the agents to diversify and increase in number so that they can deal with this greater level of complexity. This allows more agents and their constituent neurons and synapses to survive and avoid the critical pruning out process. However, since this level of sophistication is relatively unnatural from a hunter-gatherer point of view, some infants' brain development goes awry, and the result is Autism. It is not incompatible with my other hypothesis: the Rich Diet Autism Hypothesis.
Thursday, March 29, 2012
The Evolution of Species Seen as Meme Filtration
What is Evolution? What is Evolution by Natural Selection? What is the difference between the two? What is survival of the fittest?
Evolution by itself simply means change. In this context we are talking about slow change in the common characteristics of species.
Evolution by Natural Selection means change through the filter of survivability in the natural world. It is confusing because the word "Natural" carries the assumption that humans are somehow not a part of Nature, a leftover from the Medieval anthropocentric point of view.
A given species can contain a great deal of variation. Most species breed through sexual reproduction which mixes genes from each of the parents in a chaotic fashion, creating further variation. Others breed through cloning themselves, but they are usually smaller short-lived organisms where the variation is between the various strains any of which can die out without threatening the survivability of the species as a whole. Other variation occurs through changes in gene expression, mutation, and incorporation of bacterial and viral DNA. I use the term meme for this reproductive data rather than gene because some of this variation is contained in data that is not genetic.
Some explanations of evolution are confusing. "Survival of the fittest" is a phrase that makes it seem that it might be the organism's survival that is at stake. Of course it is not. It is the memes survival that is at stake. Look at Sickle Cell Anemia in humans. The genetic trait responsible for it may have evolved as a defense against Malaria, but it can cause illness and death as a side-effect - hardly matching the description of "Survival of the fittest". As long as the reproductive memes can be replicated it doesn't matter if the instances of an organism containing those memes appears fit or unfit.
"Natural Selection" makes it seem like there might be someone or some supernatural being doing the selection of which individuals or strains survive - despite the word "Natural". Evolution by Natural Selection arbitrarily precludes intentional intervention as in the case of the breeding of domesticated animals. This distinction clouds the issue. Hence I recommend dropping the term "Evolution by Natural Selection".
Instead, Evolution can be described as being a filtration process where some of the variation is filtered out because individuals carrying the memes simply didn't reproduce for some reason. The reason can be anything: infertility, chance, intentional intervention, and most importantly a statistical likelihood of the memes not making the individual survive in its particular circumstance. The result is those particular memes simply dying out and leaving other memes that might lead to a better chance of survival.
Evolution is best described as "Evolution by Meme Filtration" rather than "Evolution by Natural Selection" or "survival of the fittest".
Evolution by itself simply means change. In this context we are talking about slow change in the common characteristics of species.
Evolution by Natural Selection means change through the filter of survivability in the natural world. It is confusing because the word "Natural" carries the assumption that humans are somehow not a part of Nature, a leftover from the Medieval anthropocentric point of view.
A given species can contain a great deal of variation. Most species breed through sexual reproduction which mixes genes from each of the parents in a chaotic fashion, creating further variation. Others breed through cloning themselves, but they are usually smaller short-lived organisms where the variation is between the various strains any of which can die out without threatening the survivability of the species as a whole. Other variation occurs through changes in gene expression, mutation, and incorporation of bacterial and viral DNA. I use the term meme for this reproductive data rather than gene because some of this variation is contained in data that is not genetic.
Some explanations of evolution are confusing. "Survival of the fittest" is a phrase that makes it seem that it might be the organism's survival that is at stake. Of course it is not. It is the memes survival that is at stake. Look at Sickle Cell Anemia in humans. The genetic trait responsible for it may have evolved as a defense against Malaria, but it can cause illness and death as a side-effect - hardly matching the description of "Survival of the fittest". As long as the reproductive memes can be replicated it doesn't matter if the instances of an organism containing those memes appears fit or unfit.
"Natural Selection" makes it seem like there might be someone or some supernatural being doing the selection of which individuals or strains survive - despite the word "Natural". Evolution by Natural Selection arbitrarily precludes intentional intervention as in the case of the breeding of domesticated animals. This distinction clouds the issue. Hence I recommend dropping the term "Evolution by Natural Selection".
Instead, Evolution can be described as being a filtration process where some of the variation is filtered out because individuals carrying the memes simply didn't reproduce for some reason. The reason can be anything: infertility, chance, intentional intervention, and most importantly a statistical likelihood of the memes not making the individual survive in its particular circumstance. The result is those particular memes simply dying out and leaving other memes that might lead to a better chance of survival.
Evolution is best described as "Evolution by Meme Filtration" rather than "Evolution by Natural Selection" or "survival of the fittest".
Sunday, March 18, 2012
Women's Empowerment Meme Getting Filtered Out By Natural Selection
Is the meme for women's empowerment getting filtered out in the process of natural selection in mainstream Secular/Humanist traditions?
I personally am in favor of women's empowerment, however the Universe itself is impartial and this very recent meme may not be cut out for survival in its current form.
The basic hypothesis is that in the short-lived Western Secular/Humanist mainstream tradition, women have the right to choose who they marry, when or if they should have children or have a career, and are free to divorce or leave a partner. This is having the effect of reducing the number of offspring these women have - both genetically and memetically. Statistically, the wealthier and more empowered the woman, the less likely she is to have the 2.1 kids required to replace them and their partner. Add to that the fact that they tend to have them later in life when genetic damage has accumulated.
Most of the transfer of memes from generation to generation occurs between parent and child, though the spread of popular culture accounts for a lot of meme transfer also. Hence the memes for women's empowerment are not replicating fast enough to replace themselves and should be dying out.
Facts to back up this hypothesis are: most of the wealthy Western Secular/Humanist nations as well as Japan are declining in population. Non-Secular traditions where women are not fully empowered are increasing in population.
The only mitigating factor appears to be media such as TV, books, magazines and movies from Western popular culture. These memes and belief constructs such as Democracy, Human Rights can spread to the youth of societies where women are statistically not empowered and change them slowly and subtly.
Further evidence that this issue has been recognized can be seen in incentive programs offered to families to have children.
The only reason the USA maintains or slowly grows its population is the influx of migrants and the relatively large number of women who are not fully empowered.
Perhaps cultures where women are empowered will finish the job of liberating women by making this empowerment sustainable. This might require incentives and compensation to women for child-bearing and rearing, some of which we see in European countries.
I personally am in favor of women's empowerment, however the Universe itself is impartial and this very recent meme may not be cut out for survival in its current form.
The basic hypothesis is that in the short-lived Western Secular/Humanist mainstream tradition, women have the right to choose who they marry, when or if they should have children or have a career, and are free to divorce or leave a partner. This is having the effect of reducing the number of offspring these women have - both genetically and memetically. Statistically, the wealthier and more empowered the woman, the less likely she is to have the 2.1 kids required to replace them and their partner. Add to that the fact that they tend to have them later in life when genetic damage has accumulated.
Most of the transfer of memes from generation to generation occurs between parent and child, though the spread of popular culture accounts for a lot of meme transfer also. Hence the memes for women's empowerment are not replicating fast enough to replace themselves and should be dying out.
Facts to back up this hypothesis are: most of the wealthy Western Secular/Humanist nations as well as Japan are declining in population. Non-Secular traditions where women are not fully empowered are increasing in population.
The only mitigating factor appears to be media such as TV, books, magazines and movies from Western popular culture. These memes and belief constructs such as Democracy, Human Rights can spread to the youth of societies where women are statistically not empowered and change them slowly and subtly.
Further evidence that this issue has been recognized can be seen in incentive programs offered to families to have children.
The only reason the USA maintains or slowly grows its population is the influx of migrants and the relatively large number of women who are not fully empowered.
Perhaps cultures where women are empowered will finish the job of liberating women by making this empowerment sustainable. This might require incentives and compensation to women for child-bearing and rearing, some of which we see in European countries.
Is There a Correlation Between Recent Advances in Average Nutrition and the Recent Upsurge in Incidence of Autism?
If a correlation could be found that would be ironic. For millions of years humans have been struggling to get sufficient nutrition or even enough calories and fat to survive. New studies have shown that autism may be related to a lack of pruning of neural connections around the time of birth. Its long been known that humans in fetus form have far more connections (and neurons too?) than will be required later in life. Its possible that an overabundance of neurons and connections is causative in autism.
What if the great abundance of nutritious food that mothers and infants get these days has the unfortunate side-effect of causing the connections (and extra neurons) to stay around for longer than they are needed. That might lead to autism being a side-effect of the rich calories and nutrition seen in wealthy nations in the last 50 years.
I have not dived into researching this myself nor can I cite any any study to this effect. Its an original hypothesis as far as I know. I hope to see it tested by a study of demographic data. I am not suggesting that expecting mothers and infants be starved or fed only white rice. There has been a enough trouble already with badly-supported notions of cause and effect in Autism, such as the purported vaccine correlation.
There are plenty of other examples of bad side effects: Obesity, Diabetes, Cancer. Variety of food may have have side-effects regarding mental health for example Casein, and Gluten.
Finally, severely restricted calorie diets have been shown to increase longevity in lab animals. Why not at least research the possibility that a restrictive nutrition diet might stave off Autism?
What if the great abundance of nutritious food that mothers and infants get these days has the unfortunate side-effect of causing the connections (and extra neurons) to stay around for longer than they are needed. That might lead to autism being a side-effect of the rich calories and nutrition seen in wealthy nations in the last 50 years.
I have not dived into researching this myself nor can I cite any any study to this effect. Its an original hypothesis as far as I know. I hope to see it tested by a study of demographic data. I am not suggesting that expecting mothers and infants be starved or fed only white rice. There has been a enough trouble already with badly-supported notions of cause and effect in Autism, such as the purported vaccine correlation.
There are plenty of other examples of bad side effects: Obesity, Diabetes, Cancer. Variety of food may have have side-effects regarding mental health for example Casein, and Gluten.
Finally, severely restricted calorie diets have been shown to increase longevity in lab animals. Why not at least research the possibility that a restrictive nutrition diet might stave off Autism?
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