Answers
What is consciousness?
Consciousness is a positive feedback loop - the brain takes in a ton of information and pings it around, bouncing and augmenting the signal off memories, impressions, feelings, and all the power and knowing of the unconscious (see "God?"). That augmentation and distortion—like holding a microphone next to its speaker—creates something new, which one might technically call a complex emergent phenomenon. But—I promise—that is not just hand waving and big words to hide something we do not understand.
Complex emergent phenomena are proven and classifiable events wherein a bunch of one thing changes into something else that couldn't be predicted from the original thing. For instance, a single bird likes to fly, eat bugs, and poop on pessimists (and good for them, I say). But a thousand birds becomes a flock that does things you could not predict by looking at a single bird. This also happens all the time with matter. The big bang—after all—just kicked out hydrogen atoms. Why are there suns, planets, and birthday balloons at all? And why isn't the universe one replicating and kaleidoscoping shape in all directions? Why are there seemingly random variations when Newtonian laws would just predict a consistent fractal pattern of atoms and matter from so much material exiting so small a spac?. Well, it’s because particles and other things "level up" in a process studied in the science of emergence. So it is with consciousness. All that signal-pinging "levels up" into Hey who am I? What am I doing here. And hey what should I do now?.
Do we have free will?
To the questions above (Hey who am I? What am I doing here. And hey what should I do now?) you answer: “I should think about it while I go get a nice, cold apple.” Bully for you, sir or ma’am. Keep those doctors away. But don’t get cocky, kid. You did not invent the apple, the language, the fridge, and you had no free will when you were first exposed to apple sauce as a baby.
Nor can you anticipate all the effects the apple may have on the direction of your life – glucose for the brain? A sticky right hand at your next meeting? Revenge from the colleague whose apple you accidentally pilfered while leaving your own gross mealy apple behind? But take heart, my dear. While you munch, crunch, slurp, and think about who you are, those little pings feed back into the signals in your positive feedback loop and make you more conscious. And to the itty-bitty extent that you take time to contemplate and have a fractionally correct understanding of how your choices and actions might affect a tiny piece of time in a tiny piece of the universe, then you, my friend, are contributing something uniquely yours, from the conscious part of you that identifies as you, into the universe.
Yes, yes, that “consciousness“ or “will“ is part of, and grown out of, the grand whoop and weft of it all, but this is the point of the science of emergence: the act of you “free willing“ (thinking and making decisions) is affected by your thoughts and takes a novel shape based on them. It is a complex emergent phenomenon that is different from the sum of its parts. And learning – as you are doing now (whether you are listening to or reading this of your own volition or simply because you are my mom) enhances the laughably small likelihood that the actions you take will have the consequences you intend.
That's what I think anyway. This smart guy and I wrote an article and we talk about it here:
Is there a God?
Sort of. But not YOUR God.
It’s absolutely crackers how cool the thing is that created God. And (spoiler) it’s not us. It’s “the elephant”.
How should we live?
Work
Find things that call to you and find a way to play to your strengths. Here’s a piece of technology I invented: www.trees.app
I show you this for two reasons:
- The tech attempts to help with this process by finding out who you are and playing to your strengths or shoring up your weaknesses. It also gives you efficient paths through the muck of self management and other management (bureaucracy) so you can spend more time doing what you can do rather than what you have to do.
- This is my website after all, so here’s why this was something good for me to do:
- A) I loathe wading through the muck of time-wasting bureaucracy. It kills me that somebody else has already figured out how to register a car, pay taxes, use a calendar, or build a website, but I have to learn it all over again. I could be spending that time reading classics, watching Rick and Morty, parenting children, or running trail. Instead I’m sitting in some plastic chair in front of some professional nagger, writing my name and the date over and over on subsequent pages.
- B) I wish I were funnier, lighter, quicker, and more empathetic but I am instead systematic and dispassionate. Alas for my wife, but I should, thus, use my strengths to imagine and build a system that dispassionately helps people.
Holy crap it’s fun to spend time with your very own two-year-old. It’s like a super-smart 26lb pet monkey that wants to be cuddled and tossed around, and that you can carry around on your shoulders and show off to friends and watch females melt over, except it has half of your brain. And anything you do that’s good for that progeny feels like you’re doing it for you. It’s selfishness without the guilt. I can go kitesurfing to engage and satisfy my own genes (who want adventure, skill development, and endorphins) or I can take my toddler on a playful hike to engage and satisfy her genes, which are also my genes, so I take the same joy from it plus some extra due to the dopamine and oxytocin of human connection.
Getting married and having a buddy for everything is positive too. It’s different and hard because basically you’re not allowed to be a loser anymore, but it’s good.
Growth
The unconscious knows what to do. Society sometimes does too, but let’s start with the unconscious. “You“ are only allowed glimpses. You simply don’t have the processing power. The unconscious telling “me“ what I should do would be like me telling a ferret what it should do. It’s better done with nudges, rewards, and punishments.
Nudges are dreams, feelings, hunches, interests, attractions. Don’t follow them all. Contemplate them systematically. In my analogy, you don’t want to be a ferret that eats a golf ball because your owner sneezed.
Rewards are dopamine, oxytocin, status, money, harmony, peace, love. You can play a game for short term rewards—I think cocaine wins the prize, but I wouldn’t know—or long-term rewards. The happiest people are connected, healthy, proactive, spiritual, and make over $40,000 per year.
Punishments are dread, anxiety, depression, pain/loneliness, and not being invited to reproduce your genes.
While $500 can get you lots of rewards and no punishments—via cocaine perhaps, or prostitution, alcohol, or Amazon—in the medium-to-long term you get a lot of punishment. The same is true of the news and social media, of course, except that they are more like a day-drinking problem, wherein a lunchtime martini makes you feel in control but you get less and less joy from the rest of your life and pretty soon you’re in the toilet stall with your flask (phone) on your lap, dead to the world, telling yourself you’ll stop any minute now.
Which political view is correct?
The moderate one that listens, considers, and measures, while investing in education and research.
Things are getting better. This means the overall system is working. Communism doesn’t work and systems that are made up and implemented by well-intended individuals with too much power all at once turn into massacres. It’s not that it was the wrong people, it’s that societies have to evolve organically—like a forest or ecosystem—rather than by planning or by fiat. It doesn’t matter how smart or well-intentioned you are. Your knowledge is limited. It would be like letting the smartest monkeys plan how to build the jungle. The results would be just bananas.
The same example is in the canon of artificial intelligence philosophy, wherein you ask an AI to maximize paper clip production and it turns the planet into paper clips. The point is that an individual human or even a very smart group of humans are not capable of doing the analysis required to determine how things should evolve organically. All we can do is put systems that have worked into place, and try out new ones while measuring carefully and humbly because they are probably going to have different results than expected by the implementers, and those implementers are going to want to fudge those results to save their own egos. There will be unintended side effects of the implementers' brand of banana or paperclip production, and if we ignore it we stop learning.
Humans are a mix between monkeys and artificial intelligence. Don’t give any group too much power or we are all done for. But before any right wingers get too Randy (Ayn, that is), a little government guidance is not dumb. It’s slow and inefficient and hard to find the right people, but it’s not dumb. What’s dumb is not looking at who is getting the best measurements (Norway, Sweden, Iceland for various desirable outcomes, California for creativity) and copying their homework (and also paying attention to who got the worst measurements—communism, dictatorships—to surmise that something organic is needed). It’s a complex question to be sure. California is the inarguable home of innovation while the Scandinavian countries seem harmonious. But the corporate charter is to maximize profits for shareholders, and that means by any means that's cheaper than its consequences (pollution? corruption? lobbying? manipulation? murder? why not?). The executives have their own salaries as a double-down motivator, so totally free markets, again, put too much power in one place and would lead to the 2008 financial crisis over and over again in increasingly devious schemes. It’s actually the same positive feedback loop phenomenon from “free will“ (see above), except applied to using profits to influence legal oversight (bond rating agencies in the case of 2008) to get more profits. The feedback loop takes on a life of its own.
The question is how to have a government intervention without the government going power-mad? Various countries have working systems and yours could do a better job of copying them. But if you say you want a revolution, well, you know, we all want to see the plan... and as such, one answer I would personally like to see tried out and carefully measured is transparency. The statesperson, paid by and representing the citizens, must wear a public camera. Why not? The Internet can sort and debate the right and wrong of the statesperson’s actions. If you’re fearful of other countries seeing our ideas, you haven’t been paying attention to how well open source works to foster prosperity and generativity on the web.
Another reason pure free markets don’t work is that the keys to winning the game of competition with other countries—the golden snitches—are child rearing, education, and research. The more intelligent effort you can put into these items, the better people and the better technology your society is made of. In a role-playing game this is akin to leveling up your character, armor, and weapons rather than staying at the first level dealing with the easiest and most obvious problems over and over. But no corporate board member cares about 30 years hence—they'll be dead.
As for whether to have actual weapons—actual armies—I don’t know enough to comment powerfully, but it seems like less is more. It seems like the Scandinavian countries have it about right. Analogized to a human life, you don’t want to be a wimp, but you also don’t want to be a caricature like Biff from Back to the Future, with cut-off sleeves and fists raised at every joke. The kid you want to be is compassionate, interested, self-contained, and focused on bigger things than being a bully, while also ready to intervene alongside others in clever ways when there are clear crimes against humanity. In Harry Potter, are you Malfoy or are you Potter, Ron, and Hermione? Wanting to go into other people’s countries carrying guns too often might put you in the more aggressive and competitive camp, so just try to put that killer instinct into the marketplace, would you? Preferably medicine or technology or efficiency or just something other than financial racketeering if you please?
"But you've ignored all the media that's screaming about this stuff." Yes. And I advise others do so as well. Here's the problem with the media: it's entertainment. And the cardinal rule of entertainment is "don't be boring". So, milquetoasts like me who believe in careful research and experimentation have no place in the media.
An analogy: You're interested in reducing homelessness and you think it falls under public policy, so you go to a university to say what you think and hear what others think. As you approach you hear shouting and music. How exciting. You head that way and enter a stadium. Thousands of people are wearing green or yellow and shouting in favor of green or yellow, while down below men dressed in green and yellow run at top speed and crash into each other. As you make notes, your conclusions from your public policy research at the university are initially that we should divert spending from the marching band to homelessness, then that we should consider whether other colors are also good for sprinting around and smashing into each other. But then the green team does some really good smashing and you decide to just side with green. Go green.
What went wrong? The problem is simply that you went to the stadium instead of the political science debate. Thus, should policy makers concern themselves with social media activists? Simply, no. No more than the political science debate should concern itself with football. The two have utterly unrelated aims. I'm not against entertainment. Nor activism. Individuals who want to be effective just need to be clear on what game they're playing. For activism, a number of individuals can get together, protest to get attention, formulate arguments and consequences, and bring those to a debate wherein they can hear the arguments and consequences of the other side. Any reasonable authority should be happy to receive arguments in the right fashion, and if the arguments are clear and cannot be refuted, then the activist should be able to lay out the consequences of not reforming and bring other serious-minded folks on board. Then everybody has more information for decision making. That's good. What's bad is confusing spectacle with substance and bringing Go Green! signs into the political science debate.
What’s your deal?
Erich Fromm reasoned that tiny gains in psychology and the humanities were vital because the hard sciences were becoming so potent. For instance, a tiny gain in understanding another human's perspective could be the difference between using nuclear energy to power a city or to destroy one. I think we make similar tiny gains with big outcomes via systems. I like toilets and plumbing as an example, but you could go with electricity, money, the web, or wikipedia. Psychology and philosophy can sometimes be used to set up good systems—using an understanding of ourselves and each other to help everyone thrive. (Consider common law, wherein the sovereign rights of individuals update the system via precedent. We knew we shouldn't let the laws be static or created by fiat. It’s absolutely brilliant, if a bit slow about it.) I see some good systems in many universities, most governments, some companies, and a few apps.
I try to create good digital systems, or "platforms". My first platform was my cousin's idea: We acted like a dating service but matched people for language-learning exchanges. My second platform was my idea: We allowed frustrated docs to give away free medical video education about type 1 diabetes to frustrated patients, all funded by big pharma. I sold both companies, loving applying this platform concept to novel educational models. Next, I helped (public intellectual and writing teacher) Robert McKee build a platform onto his lecture company. Then, wanting to understand the larger-scale platform space, I moved to California and worked as a Platform Evangelist for MINDBODY, a fast-growing health-tech company. Throughout I taught grad and undergrad university classes, live and online, keeping up on ed-tech breakthroughs.
All along I worked on a book on how to use your devices and the Internet so that they free your mind rather than enslave you—how they can be a flawless offboard memory and a resource for knowledge, wisdom, and connections that will best serve you. I was 55,182 words into the book when I started sharing it with people. My brother like one page. My student liked another page. My workmate liked another page. And so on. I realized that "book" is a bad content delivery mechanism for advice, which needs to be customized. I also realized that machine learning + psychometric, demographic, and situation questions + ratings, could do the customization of any advice for anybody. I had the idea for the Trees platform. I stopped everything, joined the San Luis Obispo - Cal Poly HotHouse Incubator program and the Saint Mary's University Entrepreneurship Centre (to have locations tied to both my childhood family and my present family, as well as spanning the continent with the company). Some great folks joined me. We started building.
I'm not permitted to get very aesthetic about the idea in business meetings but luckily I built this website to indulge myself (and you, hi mom) so here we go:
Nobody wants to listen when I get into things, because things—when gotten into—are always more complex anyone likes to think. Our brains prefer simple explanations (e.g. "Nobody wants to listen because..."). But freedom and beauty are rooted in complexity. And most situations are more complex than one explanation can cover, and problems often ensue as we attempt to explain complex situations with simple explanations: He’s a republican. I use my phone to relax. It’s global warming. I was born this way. Embracing complexity is less comfortable in the short run, but it unveils beauty that's missing in simplicity. A
Let’s do a thought experiment. Let’s ask a company of engineers to design a machine that removes pollution. The engineers get out their pencils and protractors, fuss away, then present you with a prototype with vents and chips and gears inside it, that will filter pollution from the air. It’s a box. Their marketing team wanted an aesthetically-pleasing shape, but the engineers turned that down because aesthetically-pleasing shapes don’t stack and boxes do. So the engineers make you a box-machine that pulls pollution from the air, and the box-machine whirrs away using minimal electricity and only three filter replacements per year. Once the box-machine is running well, the engineers’ business-development team pitches you more box machines (“You can stack them!”), and an upgrade that draws some power from wind turbines. Fine. Grand. I wish they existed.
Now consider how nature does it. With trees, goddammit. Some variety of photosynthesizing plant or tree exists in almost every place on earth, from mountaintop to ocean floor. They snake toward sunlight, they flower, they let the wind spread their seeds. Redwoods thrive in forest fires that burn off choking climbers and create fertile ash. Mangroves collect sediment from water around their roots to generate new land so they can root further into the water. The box machines need to be protected from the rain. Trees drink it. The box machines need filters replaced. Trees drop their leaves. The box machines need to be built. Trees spread into any region where they can do good. No trees are boxes. There are no simple explanations when it comes to trees. They’re beautiful because they’re complex, in reaction to a complex world.
The simplicity that we humans—and our team of engineers—favor is always functional according to one way of thinking about the issue. We want to use one mental model. But we're always shortsighted when things must be considered across multiple mental models. There is often a slightly more complex option at the end our our reach that is better, more farsighted, and more beautiful.
Why bring beauty into this discussion? What does beauty have to do with the functionality of box-machines and trees in removing pollution? What is beauty? We have a hard time describing it. Terms like symmetry or negative space don’t come close. My theory is that we find a tree beautiful because it reveals a lot of facts about the nature of the world. Branches stretch toward sunlight while bending with wind and evading shade for tens of thousands of days. That’s a lot of physics—a lot of information about the nature of reality—captured in wood. Such complex patterns fill us with awe elsewhere in the natural world: Waves crashing over rocks show us the density, tension, power, and weight of water. Fire burns wood with mesmerizing chemical transformations. In the natural world, the interplays of reality dance in front of us. It’s no wonder a calm person can stare into an ocean or a fire at length. Both are so complex that they max out our cognitive processing capacity. It’s no wonder a busy person ignores both in favor of checking their email.
The jokingly-used idiom that beauty is in the eye of the beholder is literally true in this case. A tree is pleasing to a human because it contains physical truth for anyone willing to ponder it. It’s a symphony explaining reality.
We’re glad this beauty and complexity exists in nature, but compare forests, trees, fires, and oceans to your neighbor’s lawn. That lawn is square, homogeneous, and pleasing to her only when it’s all cut to the same height. Humans can’t abide by too much complexity. It makes them feel too small.
A chance for awe exists in almost everything we do, and to enjoy complexity is to embrace a more complete model of reality. This means not getting hijacked or lost in simple explanations, or at least doing so less often. Those who love controlling us for their own ends mostly do so with simple explanations: This deodorant will make you popular. This app will make you happy. This war is about freedom. My stance is that things get better—for us and for others—when we aspire to inhabit a reality that is more complex than that. My work is about feeling small but embracing complexity anyway.
The benefits of moving into a more complex reality are plainly visible, both in the research and in daily experience. Research shows that when we get more educated (gaining mental models), we increase our sense of control over our lives. For instance, a university education is one of very few things that moves measured locus of control inward. That increased sense of control correlates with self-esteem, mental health, socioeconomic status, and just about everything else that predicts wellbeing. And we feel that we have more control, because as we get more educated we understand more about the world and that actually gives us more control over what happens to us in the world. If we instead drink in simple models of how reality works, we never feel quaffed. Instead, we feel ever-more confused and anxious.
But being narrow-minded remains tempting because it’s easier. For most of human history—which was spent as monkeys and cavepersons—if things got complex your best bet was to choose a side and listen to a leader. Then you’d know what to do. Then you wouldn’t have to think through as many options. Then you wouldn’t be worn down trying to consider all the mental models you can, let alone all the mental models you know you’re not considering. Then you'd be part of a team and the odds would improve that one of you would come up with a solution. I get it. It’s no wonder that we want simple, dichotomous, and polarizing choices—the world has gotten really damned complex. We love having someone tell us what to do to stay safe (Buy insurance! Buy all the insurance!). Our evolved instincts are telling us just to choose a side (democrat versus republican, socialist versus capitalist, Nike versus Adidas, religious versus atheist, Coke versus Pepsi, academic versus profiteer, pro-guns versus no-guns) and fight for it until things settle down a bit. But we keep tripping over our dearly-held illusion that the world is simple. We wish it all were made up of simple choices based on simple mental models, but it isn’t.
We can only make intelligent choices that take us where we want to go to the extent that our models of reality are complete. Models can never be complete, of course, and most of us have to take some action rather than staring at the ocean all day. But the information landscape—that we use to fill in our mental models of reality—is so overflowing and ever-present that by changing our information and entertainment choices and thinking a bit more about mental models, we can make a lot of progress toward happiness, effectiveness, and freedom. And if there's a valid and reliable system for doing that (like Trees) all the better. In fact, good changes that we make to our mental models in the present pay compound dividends in the future, as those adaptive mental models improve our future choices and mental models, and those improved future choices do the same. There is no final resting point—no retirement from working through mental models. There never was. There's is only getting worn out and dying to make space for your kids to keep improving our mental models. But as our systems and mental models improve, we better understand the world around ourselves, and by better understanding it we can better shape it. Complexity isn’t going away, so we might as well appreciate its beauty and use it make ourselves more free and more beautiful.
It seems like technology often gives us two steps forward and one step backward. My deal is this: What will happen if we use technology to better educate and enable humans? What if my current passion project (my company) only grows to the extent that it helps people? What if an action plan or resource, within my platform, only rises to the top to the extent that it's useful to the user? What if we create technological systems that use complexity to their advantage? Could we do two-and-a-half steps forward and and half step backward?