#21. The Cogs of Armageddon [evolutionary psychology]

EP

Red, theory; black, fact

How does everyday human behavior eventually accomplish the biological function of dispersal for the human race? 

Dispersal is things like dandelions shedding airborne seeds, slime molds developing into spore cases on stalks and releasing the spores into the wind, territorial systems of birds and mammals forcing the unlanded young to seek widely for their own territories, and humans going into space because our science fiction writers keep scaring us about the possibility of meteor crashes wiping out life on Earth. 

The slime mold Dictyostelium is triggered into its dispersal program by the food supply running short; I will adopt the assumption that the human dispersal program is also triggered by the end of the good times, that is, the price of bread rising relative to wages.

Human neural pathways may potentiate aggression when the hard times come, but of an elaborate kind adapted for ensuring efficient dispersal (i.e., with minimal loss of life). It begins with a two-person feud of the sort illustrated in cultural references too numerous to mention. An arbitrary stimulus, made offensive by some piece of Pavlovian conditioning, is traded back and forth with rapidly increasing energy. 

The emotional component is strongly threatening because the participants must be induced to seek allies, which people do when threatened, until all of society is eventually polarized. The acts of provocation being traded back and forth become progressively more outrageous, as they must, to keep the polarization process going. Eventually, one side gets the upper hand and forces the other to flee.

The result is a diaspora, i.e., dispersal. Because of the long polarization process, an entire group is expelled, not single individuals one at a time. Thus, members of such a group can assist each other to survive and relocate, thereby reducing the mortality associated with dispersal, thereby making the dispersal event more efficient in terms of number of people relocated. The group who flees is then seen by the international community as the blameless victim, and the group who stays is seen as the unprincipled aggressor. This tends to elicit a sheltering of the refugees and an intimidation of the "aggressor," who is deterred from pressing his advantage, that is, pursuing the refugees and slaughtering them to the last man, which is what each side would like to do to the other by this point. This, again, is an efficiency from the point of view of producing dispersal.

However, if each side is continually threatening the other, why don't they flee each other's presence during the very early stages? Humans may have a reflex that converts feeling threatened into a wish to injure the threatening party, possibly a behavioral leftover from some earlier adaptation, such as an anti-predation defense; to injure, you have to stick around. 

Finally, settled refugees usually do not integrate completely into the host society, instead forming ethnic neighborhoods. Being seen as ethnic by the host society, due to slow integration, could improve the reproductive success of refugees because of disassortative mate-choice effects evolved to favor genes that produce dispersal.

The dispersal-producing dynamic just outlined is powerful, because it must overcome all the reasons a person would not leave their homeland forever at some arbitrary time: expense, risk of mortality in transit, opportunity costs, temporary loss of livelihood, need to learn a new language and customs, vulnerability to exploitation in the new country, etc.

#20. Is Higher Math Really Undiscovered Physics? [physics]

PH

Red, theory; black, fact

This post was inspired by the realization that to progress in physics, we need to accept the Newtonian position that absolute space exists. Not only that, but that it is complicated, like a network, crystal, or condensate. Too many fundamental constants of nature (20, according to Lee Smolin) are required to explain the behaviour of supposedly elementary particles with no internal structures to which such constants could refer.

Thus, the constants must refer to the vacuum between the particles, now more readily understood as a complex medium. Looking at the pattern set by the rest of physics and cosmology, such a medium is more readily understood as a condensate of myriad "space-forming entities." Matter would be flaws in this condensate, entropy left over from its rapid formation. Energy may have the same relation to time: irregularities in its rate of progression.

To theorize about how space formed and what came before it, we have to give up visualization, obviously. I suspect this will be a big deal for most physicists. However, the abstractions of higher math may be an island of understanding already existing on the far side of the spatial thought barrier.

In other words, sets, integers, categories, mappings, etc., may be concrete things, and not abstractions at all. Presumably, our spatial and temporal reality still bears the properties it had from the very earliest stages of the universe, co-existing with later-developed properties, which have enabled mathematicians throughout history to access the deepest levels of description of reality, deeper than space-time itself.

Consider set theory. Can the familiar concepts of set, union, intersection, and complement be placed into correspondence with physical processes and objects in today's space-time to make a case that set theory is pre-spatial physics, so primordial as to be unimaginable if thought of as the rules of a real universe? To get started, we have to begin with Leibniz's monads, the "empty set," now considered a real thing. (If you must visualize these, visualize something ridiculous like Cheereos™ floating in milk, when the bowl has reached the single-layer stage.)

The physical process of binding is prefigured by the set-theoretical operation of union. In the simplest case, two monads combine to form a second-order set.

The physical process of pattern recognition, which is, in essence, energy release, is prefigured by intersection. Note that with intersection, the internal subset structure of the set is important, suggesting that the "operating system" of the universe at this stage must keep track of such structures.

We can associate a size measure with a set, namely the total of all the monads inside it once all subsets have been accounted for. The usefulness of numbers in dealing with the world is explained if this size measure is the basis of laws governing what sets may combine as unions and in what frequency (i.e., fraction of all sets extant.)

The fact that most of physics seems to be governed by differential equations may be prefigured by a tendency of these combining laws to depend on the difference of two sizes. The set-theoretical operation of complementation may prefigure the existence of positive and negative charge and the Pauli exclusion principle of fermions, on which molecular complementarity interactions depend.

#19. The Two-clock Universe [physics]

PH

Red, theory; black, fact

The arrow of time is thought to be thermodynamic in origin, namely the direction in which entropy (disorder of an isolated system) increases. Entropy is one of the two main extensive variables of thermodynamics, the other being volume. I would like to propose that since we live in an expanding universe, the direction of cosmological volume increase makes sense as a second arrow of time; it's just not our arrow of time.

One of the outstanding problems of cosmology is the nature of dark energy, thought to be responsible for the recently discovered acceleration of the Hubble expansion. Another problem is the nature of the inflationary era that occurred just after the Big Bang, introduced to explain why the distribution of matter in the universe is smoother than predicted by the original version of the Big Bang.

Suppose that the entropy of the universe slowly oscillates between a maximal value and a minimal value, like a mass oscillating up and down on the end of a spring, whereas the volume of the universe always smoothly increases. Thus, entropy would trace out a sinusoidal wave when plotted against volume.

If the speed of light is only constant against the entropic clock, then the cosmological acceleration is explainable as an illusion due to the slowing of the entropic increase that occurs when nearing the top of the entropy oscillation, just before it reverses and starts down again. The cosmological volume increase will look faster when measured by a slower clock.

The immensely rapid cosmological expansion imputed to the inflationary era would originate analogously, as an illusion caused by the slowness of the entropy oscillation when it is near the bottom of its cycle, just after having started upward again.

These ideas imply that entropy at the cosmological scale has properties analogous to those of a mass-and-spring system, namely inertia (ability to store energy in movement) and stiffness (ability to store energy in fields). The only place it could get these properties appears to be from the subatomic particles of the universe and their fields. Thus, there has to be a hidden network of relationships among all the particles in the universe to create and maintain this correspondence. Is this the meaning of quantum-mechanical entanglement and quantum-mechanical conservation of information? However, if the universe is closed, properties of the whole universe, such as a long circumnavigation time at the speed of light, could produce the bounce.

These ideas also imply the apocalyptic conclusion that all structures in the present universe will be disassembled in the next half-period of the entropy oscillation. The detailed mechanism of this may be an endothermic, resonant absorption of infrared and microwave photons that have circumnavigated a closed universe and returned to their starting point. Enormous amounts of phase information would have to be preserved in intergalactic space for billions of years to make this happen, and here is where I depend heavily on quantum mechanical results. 

#18. Explaining Science-religion Antipathy also Explains Religion [evolutionary psychology]

EP

Red, theory; black, fact

The Darwinian selective advantage to humans of having a propensity for religion is that it regulates the pace of introduction of new technology, which is necessitated by the disruptive side effects of new technology.

If this sounds like a weak argument, perhaps people have been chronically underestimating the costs to society of the harmful side effects of new technology, ever since there have been people. Take the downside of the taming of fire, for instance. You can bet that the first use would have been military, just as in the case of nuclear energy. Remember that everything was covered in forests in those days; there must have been an appalling time of fire until kin selection slowly put a stop to it. The lake-bottom charcoal deposits will still be there, if anyone cares to look for them. (Shades of Asimov's story "Nightfall.")

The sedimentary record does not seem to support the idea that the smoke from such a time of fire caused a planetary cooling event sufficient to trigger the last ice age. However, the mere possibility helps to drive home the point, namely that prehistoric, evolutionary-milieu technology was not necessarily too feckless to produce enough disruption to constitute a source of selection pressure.

Natural selection could have built a rate-of-innovation controller by exaggerating people's pleasure at discovering a new, unexplored phenomenon, until they bog down in rapture at that moment and never progress to the next step of actually experimenting or exploring. The latter activities would be just upstream of the nominally controlled process, the introduction of new technology. People's tendency for "rapture capture" would be causally linked via genetically specified neural pathways to the kinds of hardships caused by technological side effects, thereby completing a negative feedback loop that would work like a steam engine governor.

I conjecture that all present-day religions are built on this phenomenon of "rapture capture." This may explain why the most innovative country, the USA, is also the most religiose, according to Dawkins, writing in "The God Delusion." An Einsteinian sense of wonder at the cosmos that, according to Dawkins, most scientists feel, could be a mild, non-capturing version of the same thing. The unlikely traits attributed to God, omnipotence, omni this and that, could have instrumental value in intensifying the rapture.

Another possible name for what I have been calling rapture could be "arcanaphilia." A basic insight for me here was that religion is fundamentally hedonistic. I do not seem to be straying too far from Marx's statement that "Religion is the opiate of the people."

These ideas help to explain why some sciences such as astronomy and chemistry began as inefficient protosciences (e.g., astrology, alchemy): they were inhibited from the start by an excessive sense of wonder, until harder heads eventually prevailed (Galileo, Lavoisier). Seen as a protoscience, the Abrahamic religions could originally have been sparked by evidence that "someone is looking out for us" found in records of historical events such as those the ancient Israelites compiled (of which the Dead Sea Scrolls are a surviving example). That "someone" would in reality be various forms of generation-time compensation, one of which I have been calling the "intermind" in these pages. Perhaps when the subject of study is in reality a powerful aspect of ourselves as populations, the stimulus for rapture capture will be especially effective, explaining why religion has yet to become an experimental science.

By the way, there is usually no insurmountable difficulty in experimenting on humans so long as the provisions of the Declaration of Helsinki are observed: volunteer basis only; controlled, randomized, double-blind study; experiment thoroughly explained to volunteers before enrollment; written consent obtained from all volunteers before enrollment; approval of the experimental design obtained in advance from the appropriate institutional ethics committee; and the experiment registered online with the appropriate registry.

Religions seem to be characterized by an unmistakable style made up of little touches that exaggerate the practitioner's sense of wonder and mystery, thus, their arcanaphilic "high." I refer to unnecessarily high ceilings in places of worship, use of enigmatic symbols, putting gold leaf on things, songs with Italian phrases in the score, such as "maestoso," wearing colorful costumes, etc. I shall refer to all the elements of this style collectively as "bractea," Latin for tinsel or gold leaf. I propose the presence of bractea as a field mark for recognizing religions in the wild. By this criterion, psychiatry is not a religion, but science fiction is.

It seems to me that bractea use can easily graduate into the creation of formal works of art, such as canticles, stained glass windows, statues of the Buddha, and the covers of science fiction magazines. Exposure to concentrations of excessive creativity in places of worship can be expected to drive down the creativity of the worshipers by a negative feedback process evolved to regulate the diversity of the species memeplex, 

This effect should indirectly reduce the rate of introduction of new technology, thereby feeding into the biological mission of religion. Religion could be the epi-evolutionary solution, and the artistic feedback could be the evolutionary solution, to the disorders caused by creativity. Bractea would represent a synergy between the two.

#17. Hell's Kitchen [evolutionary psychology]

EP

Red, theory; black, fact

Ever since the assassination of JFK in '63, people of my generation have been wondering why the Americans kill off their best and brightest. It's not just the Americans, of course. The same thing happened to Gandhi and Our Savior no less.

I think a homey kitchen metaphor nails it. Once you have emptied the milk carton of all its milk, you can use it to dispose of the grease. That is, by the logic of "The Insurance of the Heart," once tremendous acclaim has been conferred on someone's name, the physical person no longer matters for the purposes of enhancing the name their descendents will inherit, and so can safely be used to draw the fire of the genetic undesirables; the resulting tremendous indignation will confer bad odor on the name of said undesirable for quite long enough to eradicate their meh genes in all copies.

Thus, Booth's genes were eradicated to make way for Lincoln's, and Oswald's genes were eradicated to make way for Kennedy's, without overall change in population density.

If the intermind could be said to have thoughts, this is what they would be like. Clearly, it's not God.

#16. The Intermind, Engine of History? [evolutionary psychology]

EP

Red, theory; black, fact

The "genetic intelligence" may construct our sociobiology in an ad hoc fashion, by rearranging a knowledge base, or construction kit, of "rules of conduct" into algorithm-like assemblages. This rearrangement is blindingly fast by the standards of classical Darwinian evolution, which only provides the construction kit itself, and presumably some further, special rules equivalent to a definition of an objective function to be optimized. The ordinary rules translate experiences into the priming of certain emotions, not the emotions themselves, 

This part could be named the intermind, because it is intermediate in speed between classical evolution and learning by operant conditioning. (All three depend on trial-and error.) The name is also appropriate in that the intermind is a distributed intelligence, acting over continental, or a least national, areas. It has an objective function, which is simply whatever produces survival. This will be explicitly encoded into the genes specifying the intermind. (For more on multi-tier, biological control systems with division of labor according to time scale, see "Sociobiology: the New Synthesis," E. O. Wilson, 1975 & 2000, chapter 7.)

The intermind may account for evil because it is only concerned with survival of the entire species and not with the welfare of individuals. Therefore, it will have been created by group selection of species. Higher taxonomic units such as genus or family will scarcely evolve because the units that must die out to permit this are unlikely to do so, because they comprise relatively great genetic and geographical diversity. However, we can expect adaptations that facilitate speciation. Imprinted genes may be one such adaptation, which might enforce species barriers by a lock-and-key mechanism that kills the embryo if any imprinted gene is present in either two or zero active copies. Species group selection need act only on the objective function used by trial-and-error processes.

In these times, we have come to know that species survival is imperiled by loss of range and by loss of genetic diversity. Thus, the objective function will tend to produce range expansion and optimization of genetic diversity. 

However, all this is insufficient to explain the creativity of humans, starting at the end of the last ice age with cave paintings, followed shortly thereafter by the momentous invention of agriculture. The hardships of the ice age must have selected genes for a third, novel component, or pillar, of the species objective function, namely optimization of memetic diversity. Controlled diversification of the species memeplex may have been the starting point for cultural creativity and the invention of all kinds of aids to survival. Art forms may represent the sensor of a feedback servomechanism by which a society measures its own memeplex diversity, measurement being necessary to control.

A plausible reason for evolving an intermind is that it permits larger body size, which leads to more internal degrees of freedom and therefore access to previously impossible adaptations. For example, eukaryotes can phagocytose their food; prokaryotes cannot. However, larger body size comes at the expense of longer generation time, which reduces evolvability. A band of high frequencies in the spectrum of environmental fluctuations therefore develops where the large organism has relinquished evolvability, opening it to being out competed by its smaller rivals. 

The intermind is a proxy for classical evolution that fills the gap, but it needs an objective function to provide it with its ultimate gold standard of goodness of adaptations. Species-replacement group selection makes sure the objective function is close to optimal. This group selection process takes place at enormously lower frequencies than those the intermind is adapting to, because if the timescales were  too similar, chaos would result. For example, in model predictive control, the model is updated on a much longer cycle than are the predictions derived from it.

#15. The Insurance of the Heart [evolutionary psychology]

EP

Red, theory; black, fact

We live in an uncertain world, the best reason to buy insurance while you can. Insurance is too good a trick for evolution to have missed. When food is plentiful, as it now is in my country, people get obese, as they are now doing here, so that they can live on their fat during possible future hard times. They don't do this consciously; it's in their genes.

However, eating has only an additive effect on your footprint on society's demand for resources; how many kids you have affects your footprint multiplicatively. Thus, the effectiveness of biological insurance taken out in children foregone during times of plenty would be greater than that taken out in food consumed. Such a mechanism exists; how well and long remembered the family name you bequeath to your children affects your footprint exponentially. I assume that a good or bad "name" affects the reproductive success of all your descendants having that name until you are finally forgotten. Compared to exponential returns, everything else is chump change. ("Who steals my purse steals trash." - Shakespeare)

There remains the problem of food going to waste during times of plenty because social forces prevent a quick population increase. I conjecture that the extra energy available is invested by society in contests of various sorts, for example, the Circus Maximus during the heyday of ancient Rome, that act as a proxy to evolutionary selection pressure, whereby the society accelerates it's own evolution. Although natural selection pressure is maximal during the hard times, relying on these to do all your evolving for you can make you extinct; better to do some "preventative evolution" ahead of time.

Since future environmental demands are partly unforeseeable, a good strategy would be to accelerate one's evolution in multiple directions, keeping many irons in the fire. Indeed, in the Olympics just concluded, thirty-nine sports were represented.

The power of these contests is maximized by using the outcomes as unconditioned stimuli that are associated with the family names of the winners and losers: the conditioned stimuli. In this way, one acquires a good or bad "name" that will affect the reproductive success of all who inherit it, an exponential effect. To ground this discussion biologically, it must be assumed that the contests are effective in isolating carriers of good or bad genes (technically, alleles), and that the resulting "name" is an effective proxy for natural selection in altering the frequency of said genes. To keep the population density stable during all this, winners must be balanced by losers. The winners are determined and branded in places like the ball diamond, and the losers are determined and branded in the courts.