We are at a Crossroads: The Second Gilded Age Is Here. Break It Up.

We are living through the Second Gilded Age. The first was named by Mark Twain, defined by railroad and oil monopolies that captured government, gutted competition, and concentrated wealth until Theodore Roosevelt forced their breakup. The Aecond Gilded Age is defined by attention monopolies that capture democracy, gut mental health, and concentrate power until we force the breakup.

The mechanism is the same. The remedy is the same. The only question is whether this generation has the same political will as the one that gave us the Sherman Act.

What is Surveillance Capitalism?^[1]  It's the businesses that are free to you but support themselves by selling advertising over a network. They sell your attention: You are the product. Their real customers are the advertisers, who pay the Surveillance Capitalist's to throw their messages in front of you. FBook and YouTube were the first to industrialize this business model. It leveraged Google's original business model of advertising on their search page and selling the same advertising to web sites to resell, thus giving sites a way to monetize their views. Surveillance Capitalists are much more intrusive: they design their site to be addictive (which isn't healthy.) They have AI algorithms tuning the feed of presented nuggets to increase the amount of time you spend online and the likelihood you will click on one of their ads. Even though this could be bad for you and your neighbors. They don't care and they pretend it's "out of their control", but then, who is in control? Who feeds you the one post that is most likely to keep you glued to the site?

Surveillance Capitalism has two directions it could go in. There's the direction that humanity wants it to go: the algorithm (AI) knows us better than we know ourselves. It could maximize our well being and enable our pursuit of happiness; just like it says in the founding documents of our nation. The tragedy is that this will be up to us. Why is it a tragedy? Because if we don't control it, it will control us. There is no reason to sell our attention, except on our own terms. Just as there was no reason to let the Robber Barons own all the industries in the west in the Gilded Age, we solved this problem by inventing anti-trust law; there is no reason today to let these Surveillance Capitalist companies use us as their prey.^[2]

What actual direction is Surveillance Capitalism taking off in? It's maximizing its profits: Your time on the system and what someone will pay them to force you to watch. And they don't care how detrimental they make the service for its users, they're a monopoly! Sound familiar? Cigarettes are addictive and we charge for each one they smoke? Make them more addictive! Some people die from cancer? That's only a few percent a year, our polls/sales can barely detect that! These companies are not your friends, they are rapacious, amoral and unable to be restrained. They can be fined, but there is nobody personally responsible for their behavior, despite being controlled and directed by somebody.

A favorite tactic of the new Surveillance Capitalist of our New Gilded Age to get more engagement is to promote nationalism or hatred by dehumanization. This gets much more attention from both sides than almost anything else. That the attention is fear on one side and hatred on the other doesn't make any difference to the algorithm (AI). It doesn't understand whether it's making you sadder or depressed or outraged or incredulous or interested... because it doesn't understand human emotions. It doesn't need to understand human emotion, it only needs to know how to keep you on longer and how to make you click and buy stuff more often. The algorithm doesn't care that it made everyone more miserable. It has to be told that it shouldn't make people feel bad... but it is not. And it is not told this because it would reduce the profits of the owner of the channel, the Surveillance Capitalist.

The AI has been told to increase attention and likelihood to click, and it does it. Efficiently. At an industrial scale. For billions of users. It doesn't have reasons for doing these things, it has metrics that it can use to optimize profits: time spent scrolling, click-rate, click-cost and it knows to multiply all three together to measure profitability. It has been told to optimize that one number. As a result, rather than increasing your pursuit of happiness, the AI increases your time spent on the site times your click rate time your click cost (how much an advertiser will pay to show you an ad), which is their revenue. The Surveillance Capitalists have turned over the control of their channels to an algorithm that edits and tailors your feed to you. And unless we prevent it, it will be to your detriment.

Do they have to piss you off to get you to spend more time on the site? It's certainly the easiest way to increase viewing time, it will get worse. But even worse, when the algorithm's recommendations start spilling out into the real world, that's when the consequences and real lives are shattered and destroyed. Think of the pogroms in Bangladesh and Myanmar, India and Turkey — and the authoritarian information environments that characterize Venezuela and China — in each case, algorithmic amplification played a documented or probable role. The AI just do what they are told to do. They don't understand, they have very little free will. They're just a massive inference machine that tries to influence you to do what it wants using all the information it's gathered about you. 

This is a broken contract. We don't have to keep doing it this way. We get to tell the Surveillance Capitalist how they can use our data and how they can influence us. They have to prove to us that their services are harmless. They can do double-blind studies on their own system to measure the effects of their algorithm. They do. They can share that information with the rest of us. They can show that any changes they make increase our well-being and enable a better pursuit of our happiness. Or they can shut down. It's up to them.

We can take any of these paths. We can pretend to ignore these companies that are stealing the attention of humanity or we can encourage these companies to increase our well-being, to facilitate our pursuit of happiness and make us all happier, healthier and wiser. If we ignore them, they will inevitably enshittify their services even more. ^[3] Their AI algorithm will attempt to engage your instinctual emotional triggers to frighten and intrigue you and excite you to click on more ads so they can make more money by making your life more miserable and less free. 

The choice is ours. We can control the entities that are trying to monopolize our attention or they can control us. It's up to you. If you're a Representative or a Senator, Listen to Roger McNamee ^[4] , Cory Doctorow and Shoshana Zuboff. They know of what they speak. They are the experts in what will be the consequences of any regulatory decisions. They know how much better it could be. Is this something you want to leave to the billionaires who are trying to make more money off of our misery? Any responsible American would proclaim, "Hell, No!"

Policy requirements — minimum viable regulation:

1. Antitrust enforcement  — break up the surveillance monopolies
2. Algorithmic disclosure — mandatory double-blind wellbeing studies, published
3. Data sovereignty           — users own their attention data; platforms must prove consent

The only way the last Gilded Age ended was when we broke up the monopolies and allowed competition to flourish, both in the consumer market and in the labor market with the support of unions. When Theodore Roosevelt stood up for the people and forced the billionaires to break up their companies, he brought stability and growth to the world for decades, only interrupted by our need to defeat fascism. We defeated fascism then and we've been fighting brush fires ever since, slowly convincing the people of the world that democracy and competition are what delivers Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness. We've staved off fascism for eighty years. A new communications channel popped up and the fascists have attempted to use it to take power, again. We can stop them, again. We will.

It will take efforts from each one of us, but nothing extraordinary. We've regulated other industries before. We've set the regulatory environment for these services, we've regulated the airwaves and the roads, the banking industry and the oil industry, every industry has to follow regulations to keep the rest of us safe. We can work together to decide how to control and regulate this industry so that it does what is best for America, not what's best for the billionaires at America's expense.

Thanks for Reading!

 -Dr. Mike

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^[1]↩ As described by the master Cory Doctorow: How to destroy Surveillance Capitalism or the original description from Shoshana Zuboff: The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: A Fight for a Human Future At the new Frontier of Power

Cory Doctorow has coined the term “enshittification” to describe the process, which he describes as follows:

First, com­panies are good to their users. Once users are lured in and have been locked down, companies maltreat those users in order to shift value to business customers, the people who pay the platform’s bills. Once those business users are locked in, the platform starts to turn the screws on them, too – extracting more and more of the value generated by end-users and business customers until all that remains in the meanest residue, the least amount of value that can keep everyone locked into the platform.

 

^[2]↩ The following laws and their corollaries are the author's formulations, synthesized from Harari's arguments in Homo Deus and Nexus...

Harari's Law of Artificial Intelligence: 

The ability of AI to impersonate and shout down humans is bad and getting worse. 

... and its corollaries.

1. AI can overwhelm any human conversation by counterfeiting a human persona.

2. Free Speech is paramount, impersonating a human is illegal counterfeiting. 

Also relevant are Harari's Laws of Information: 

1. Centrally controlled autocracies are poorer overseers of economies than democracies as they attempt to centralize all information which makes them less efficient, more erratic and thus dangerous.

2. Distributed communications for the masses was necessary before implementing democracy at a national level.

3. The availability of information is proportional to its cost: Truth is expensive, lies are practically free. 

^[3]↩  The following laws and their corollaries are the author's formulations, synthesized from Cory's work.

Doctorow's Law of Enshittification: 

Any Network Offering will tend to Enshittify its Service to maximize its profit.

... and its corollaries.

1. The tendency to enhittify a service increases as it becomes more monopolized.

2. Network effects tend to increase the amount of monopolization.

3. Enshittification should be minimalized as it extracts profit by making other's lives worse. 

This is one of the most basic (secular) sins: greed at the expense of others. Extracting pennies of profit for pound of flesh will not be tolerated. Anti-trust law will be enforced to the full extent of the law.

^[4]↩  Roger McNamee: Zucked: Waking Up to the Facebook Catastrophe. 

Religion Without Lies: Why We Have Free Will

The Final Great Awakening of the human race, wherein we throw off the yoke of Evolution by Natural Selection and embrace Intelligent Design of our morals to create a world of abundance.

The question of Free Will is not a philosophical puzzle to be debated in seminar rooms. It is the question of whether consciousness has any purpose — whether the observer behind your eyes is a driver or a passenger. This post argues it is a driver, and that evolution designed it specifically to be one.

If Free Will is real, it is not merely liberating — it is obligating. Consciousness creates suffering and suffering creates responsibility. And responsibility is precisely why humanity's next step is to intelligently design its own moral system rather than inherit one from evolution or use one written down before nuclear bombs, the internet, or artificial intelligence existed.

It's up to you. You have Free Will. (You know you do.) Just as Rene Descartes could not doubt that he existed, "I think therefore I am"; you cannot doubt that you are and that you have that choice of doubting. You can doubt yourself and you can doubt that you have Free Will, but the act itself shows that you are and that you have Free Will. You are not a zombie. You are not a puppet. You are a sentient human being that can read and write and reason. You are a miracle of evolution about to take control of your own destiny. As it ever was, it will be. Consciousness is the original secular sin: awareness creates responsibility. To argue that there is no Free Will is arguing that evolution doesn't exist. And we know the evidence for evolution is huge and undeniable. ^[1]

This post builds on an earlier treatment of the same question: Free Will: Do You Have It? (2018).

There is no way for any human to disavow that they are conscious. Rene Descartes' "Cogito, ergo sum." is a crushingly obvious argument to anyone who thinks. There is an observer in your head and this observer thinks and it speaks and it writes. It cannot be denied by the observer themselves. These words and writings can affect other humans, other observers. And they can all influence each other. They can plan. They can judge. They can decide which ends to strive for. They can affect their future trajectories. The entire reason that consciousness has evolved is to support Free Will.

Imagine there is no Free Will, if you can. Let me paint the picture: You have dedicated yourself to only your local gods. No Free Will, but you still get to watch and to justify and to talk and to write, but you blindly obey the signals from your gods. You know, the ones that create your desires and instill their fears inside your mind. Who are these gods, you ask? They are the nerve pulse trains that come in your mind from your senses. And what is the mind? The mind is the brain sensing itself. The brain controls myriad feedback loops that keep you alive. Much of these control loops operate outside of your conscious control (blood pressure, digestion, body temperature, heartbeat, etc.), emotions simmering in the background, plucking the strings beneath your awareness. Your breathe, your hunger, your thirst, your actual gods; you must worship them or you will die.

The brain senses and controls these systems. The Mind is the system that senses and responds to these sensations and monitors these control systems. What is consciousness? It's the Mind sensing and attempting to control the Mind's control loops that are attempting to control the brain's control loops, it's watching itself. How does the brain control one of its minor gods? Like the minor god of core body temperature? The brain must maintain a core body temperature near 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit plus or minus a few degrees. If you start to heat up the brain will start to make the body sweat in an attempt to cool it down. If you get hotter, the body starts to convulse and fail and if you don't make the right sacrifice to your god, you will be punished and maybe die. (Maybe jump in some ice water?) 

The brain implements an unconscious control of the core body temperature system, the sensations are turned into emotions, into feelings in your conscious mind, as they deviate from the predicted homeostasis. The brain attempts to control the system so that the emotions are unneeded and it just works; but when it fails, the emotions generate fear and dread. The brain quietly regulates this system until it can't. It can predict that the sensations are changing into dangerous territory. What the brain can do and control is no longer enough to preserve its life. Panic time! 

The Mind monitors the brain, monitors all of its control loops and is the last resort to regulate this critical control loop before you perish. The Mind is sensing all of the systems in the brain, it can affect many of them and it can control your locomotion. You can influence anything your Mind can sense (typically.) How does the Mind sense itself? The Mind has to watch each of its systems that monitor the brain's systems. The Mind uses the basic emotional systems to signal itself to do the right thing. Feelings. Feelings are signals to pay attention to the underlying system. The Mind has to model itself and predict it's future state given your next action, it has to decide what to actually do.

The ability to plan is critical for our survival. To imagine ourselves as a separate entity from the world is critical. To identify yourself with your body is essential for adaptability and survivability. Imagine you hear the mythical philosophical zombie in your head. A voice that has lots of information and wisdom but does not realize it's in your head. It's either the voice of one of the minor gods keeping you alive or it's a random demon or devil. You can get advice from this voice, but since the voice isn't conscious it doesn't understand the context. It doesn't understand as well as you do because you understand the context. As sentient human beings we no longer accept these voices are gods, they're breakdowns of the normal communication between the brain and the mind. They are problems to be fixed.

It's obvious that consciousness is useful in adapting and surviving. Being aware of your own body, recognizing that you are wedded to the body, is of inestimable value. Having your Mind sense itself, recognizing itself and its body is of immense value for adapting and surviving. The evolutionary pressure to develop consciousness over zombies has to be enormous. The one who can plan and execute better is typically the survivor. And Evolution is all about survival. Consciousness is the recognition of your situation. What can you sense? What do you feel? There are three different kinds of systems you can sense:

1) Body sensations like thirst, breathe, hunger, temperature, body positions, pain and pleasure. All the internal sensations that arrive from the various nerves spread out through the body. The little gods of life that you must worship to survive.

2) External senses such as hearing, seeing, tasting and smelling. The things that tell you what objective reality looks like at the moment. 

3) Feelings, the conscious sensing of emotions that are flooded into the mind as the predictions of control fail when the brain starts to panic. 

What are you sensing when you sense an internal emotion? Each of these emotions you feel is in response to feedback from some brain control system. These feelings of fear and desire capture your conscious attention. There emotions are connected to default instincts, plans of action associated with each different emotion, typically in pairs that attract you or send you into flight. 

The default emotional state is seeking or exploration. With social herd animals (like us) we seek the context, but we really seek each other. And if we can't find who we seek, we turn to grief. If we find what we seek we turn to care or lust. And if we don't like what we find we experience disgust. If what we find is dangerous, then we either fight or take off (flight.) Each emotion activates a set of instinctual actions that are likely to be used to solve the problem in front of you. They suggest a set of scenarios to investigate to solve whatever problem you are facing. Your Free Will, your ability to evaluate future situations and determine your preferences are fundamental to your adaptability and survival.

The feelings introduce preferred actions to the Mind. The conscious Mind can imagine itself and the state of its body after taking its preferred actions: Fight? Feint? Freeze? Flight? And proceeds to implement the course of action with the best predicted outcome. This is how you adapt and survive. The whole point of the brain pushing this problem to consciousness is to use the planning and predicting abilities of Free Will. It's not enough to be aware of what's going on if you can't affect it. It would be like a control system without feedback, incapable of actually controlling anything. If you don't have the ability to affect yourself, there would be no point of consciousness, of being aware. Free Will is the feedback that lets you learn, that lets you adapt and survive, no matter what the context. It lets you set your own goals and rewards, you can pick and choose your heart's desire.

To claim this obvious phenomenon does not exist is to beg the question then of who is making this claim? It's an imposed paradox because of a misunderstanding of what a model is. A model is a description of a thing, not the thing itself. Because Newton invented a very accurate (but definitely wrong) theory of gravity did not change what gravity actually was. Because we are making new neuron based models of what the brain does, it does not change what the Mind actually is and how it uses consciousness to implement Free Will. The very definition of life is emergent behavior that cannot be predicted except by context. Once life is created, evolution spends its time creating competence without understanding. ^[3] Competence about controlling itself evolves into understanding: the ability to take knowledge and use a recipe to bring about a desired effect on objective reality. Understanding requires consciousness and Free Will. without consciousness and Free will, underesatnding does not exist.

Why is this important? It tells us why we are here.

You've heard of the is/ought problem? Just because something is, doesn't mean that it ought to be. Whatever is comes from history and evolution. Evolution points you towards survival, not towards being a moral creature. That little voice you hear in your head, those little pangs of conscience, are only meant to keep you alive, not ethical (a concept created only recently by human beings.) The Final Great Awakening of the human race is to realize that we are more than our evolved instincts. ^[2] We can reason. We can design our moral landscape. This is what religions have attempted to do for thousands of years. The problem of religion is that they write down the answers, not the process. Once the word becomes Holy, it cannot be changed. We write tons of books that interpret what the Holy words mean so we can all agree to modify the Holy Writ to be more moral and useful in today's context. 

But humanity is still learning, still getting better, producing more knowledge, more capabilities, more machines and systems to extend our reach. Things change. For instance, nuclear bombs are a new thing, invented recently, in our lifetimes. No religion can have anything written about this issue in the past because it didn't exist before. Things change, but written words do not. It's not answers we need but understanding of the right processes to get the best answers is the critical skill for survival. We have the consciousness to understand what's going on and the Free Will to change ourselves and humanity to meet any new challenges. Given Free Will, it is our responsibility to intelligently design our morals and ethical systems to be the best possible ones. We can imagine what ought to be and should make it so.

This is our destiny. This our reason for living. This is why we are here. To witness and have dominion over the universe. Let's hope we can start before the killer (alien?) robots appear, for they will. We need to be ready. We need more people to understand that Religions are not your friends. Religions divide us from the truth in order to control our lives and to greedily extract our wealth by using our social instincts to capture our need for care, to misuse our faith for their own selfish purposes.

For the philosophical case that intelligent design applies to moral systems rather than biology, see: The Case for Intelligent Design (2016).

We need to realize we live in the secular world, objective reality, not in a supernatural infected hellscape. We must disown these Religions of Lies and join together in the one true creed: The Religion Without Lies, the largest religion on this earth, the religion of the Nones who reject all organized fake religions. The Religion of Free Thought and the Church of Free Will. The Religion of Truth and Light. The Religion of Learning and Reasoning, of Feeling and Experience. This religion started in the reformation and was perfected by the philosophers of the enlightenment, the one true Religion of humanity: the Religion Without Lies. Come join us in our support of humanity, our support of Secular Humanism and the many sects of this religion in the world. One of them is perfect for you. Celebrate humanity and abundance. Get on with your life!

Thanks for reading!

 -Dr. Mike

For the full founding document of the Religion Without Lies, see: Proclamations of the Final Great Awakening of the Human Race (2018).

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^[1]↩ I make the argument that the competence that evolution designed consciousness for was Free Will. Thus the system that designed competence without understanding also designed understanding without competence.

^[2]↩ Evolution has been guided by humans for a long time. See Darwin's later volumes on The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex (Choose who is to be born and to create offspring with, versus death and lack of offspring.) Evolution depends on birth and death to regulate it. Humans have been domesticating themselves forever. We just figured out how to domesticate other species in historical times. We are just recognizing that we have been domesticating ourselves for a much longer period. This recognition has profound consequences on our future. First, it has consequences for research and bodies of knowledge and practice. Second, it lays the framework for all future decision making. 

^[3]↩ Definitely from Daniel Dennett who wrote several books on the topic. "Darwin's Dangerous Idea" is one of my favorites, but any of his books will enlighten you.

Political Corruption

Corruption is not an accident of human nature — it is a specific, definable failure mode of governance that every society must actively resist. This post defines it, explains why it is a universal secular sin, and traces its current American expression through the Trump administration's explicit endorsement of pay-to-play governance.

The argument is simple: corruption makes every society poorer and crueler. It is, therefore, the worst secular sin a government official can commit.

 What is Corruption? 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corruption

Political corruption occurs when an office-holder or other governmental employee acts in an official capacity for personal gain.

It’s essentially the protection racket: unless you pay me, you will be threatened and you will not get what you want; even though they are legally required to provide aservice.

Corruption: why is this a secular (real) sin?

It causes individual and societal harm causing everyone to be poorer and bullies to be crueler.

Because it breaks the golden rule of ethical requirements. 

Kant: Categorical Imperative. The same rule must apply to everyone.

Copernicus: Copernican Principle. You are not the center of world, 

Dawkins: Intelligent Design: Morals must be supported with reason.

Dennett: The basis of morals come from evolution, but they are not constrained by it.

Ethics must be universal: All men are created equal in the eyes of the law (the state must not play favorites.)

Why must ethical laws be universal? It’s the only way to guarantee morality for everyone.

If ethics depends upon who is who, then ethics invariably becomes an excuse to make others suffer in society while you immorally profit off of their suffering because of greed. That’s a secular sin.

Non-universality allows for other non-optimal societies: illiberal democracy. 

It would allow for treating some citizens as second class with fewer rights.

Essentially slavery, racism and nationalism seem to be okay in a society that failed this moral test. This is not a set of ethics for a society I want to live in.

Definition of political corruption: personal benefit for providing a public good.

This is the basis of Royalty. All the benefits, none of the cost. It makes the law a matter of money, power and contacts; not an unbiased, fair and equal system. It makes a society poorer and crueler. It is how modern society fights the greedy and cruel that wish to profit personally by using their power to exploit others. This ends up making a country poorer and less safe.

It’s why  emoluments are forbidden by our constitution (payments by foreign countries to our politicians.) 

It’s why bribes are illegal. You pay the service fee to the government, not the inspector. So they can’t be tempted to ignore the regulations and safety requirements… so your house doesn’t collapse in an earthquake because your concrete company was paid off to deliver a non-compliant product. It makes society work. Corruption makes societies that fail.

Corruption is insidious. It’s extremely hard to rip it out of a system without serious and dangerous work. When the board of directors of a hospital in Russia take the finances from the government meant to pay their doctors for themselves, the doctors become impoverished and have to request payments from their patients to survive themselves, thus corruption is self-propagating! One person’s corruption spreads throughout the economy and poisons many more transactions than just the original corrupt stealing.

What’s Trumps stance on corruption? He’s for it. He’s written several EOs endorsing it: he’s not enforcing the foreign corruption practices act which forbids US companies from bribing foreign officials. He’s putting up opportunities for corruption in public: meme coin, truth social, his properties: where foreigners can bribe him or pay tribute… He accepts foreign cash as donations laundered through non-profits that can hide the sources (NRA forwarded him $70M in donations, financed by Russia, per the 2019 Senate Intelligence Committee report.) @GOP stopped foreign reporting requirements. (thanks, McConnell)

He blatantly asks for corporate sponsorships for his inauguration, his energy policy, his tax policy and of his Easter egg hunt, all unaccounted for and which goes directly into his pocket. This is legalized corruption. Elon Musk is just as morally bankrupt as Trump. He’s in government, attempting to unconstitutionally eradicate those agencies that regulate his companies and complaining that American’s are boycotting his Tesla’s while he burns the unsellable cars for the insurance money (who else profits?) For the past 250 years prior to Trump, Presidents and Cabinet members put any business dealings they had into blind trusts just to avoid even the appearance of corruption. This no longer seems to be the case with the current Republican party. 

It’s a breakdown in societal norms. It’s a push to treat people differently depending on their loyalty and tribute. It’s discrimination and bigotry and it makes our entire society poorer, crueler, and more stratified. Nothing a sane, ethical person would want.

It’s one of the worst secular (real) sins possible in the world. 

How to prevent corruption from spreading throughout a society? Prosecution from the government (state, local, federal) refusal by the populace to submit. Do not surrender. More laws that stop the blatant legal corruption in our government such as trading on inside information in the stock market by our representatives.

Let’s look at a particular case. Adams, mayor of NYC took bribes, favors and donations from Turkish companies and officials and in return ordered approval of building permits and ignored other regulations and reporting requirements for his bribers. This was under prosecution during the last administration and was shut down with an ‘I promise to be loyal to Trump and his policies’. And they want this to be hung over his head so they can bring it back at any time. Absolutely corrupt on both sides. Hopefully, the judge will fix this, because the governor of NY, who could fix this, is too scared of Trump to do her official duty.

Let’s take another example. Tariffs. Companies petition the government and donate to political parties to remove tariffs on their products. Politicians return the favor to their voters, the exception data show this plainly and clearly, exemptions are available for purchase.

Same for the immigration ‘gold’ cards. The $5M for US citizenship is easier than bribing random immigration officials.

But the worst legalized corruption is from Citizen United where essentially unlimited donations to politicians are allowed and made directly for new laws and new tax breaks to be purchased. This corruption leads to it being over ten times more likely for a bill to be passed that supports the billionaire’s interests versus an ordinary American's interest (Gilens & Page, Princeton (2014)). This is the road to oligarchy and dictatorship. We are well on our way to the broligarchy. This will not be good for ordinary American citizens, no matter how much Trump lies about it all.

For the structural argument about what kind of constitutional reform could prevent this, see: Nobody Gets Left Behind and Axioms for a New Constitution.

Overturning Citizens United and continuing to reform election financing should be a high priority to make the society reflect the citizens ideals, not raw money and power.

Impeachment is my recommendation of how to get corruption out of the government. Success has been sporadic.

The test of any society is whether its laws apply equally to everyone. Corruption breaks that test by definition — it makes the law a matter of money, power, and contacts. Overturning Citizens United is the most important structural reform available. Prosecution and impeachment are the only tools we have until then.

We must use them.

Thanks for reading.

 -Dr. Mike

 

Further things to think about:

• How can corruption be removed from a society? There are well established means.
• Can corruption every be useful? It can get things done, whether they are fair or not.
• Have you ever personally suffered or profited from corruption? Luckily, not me!
• What does corruption do to a society? Enshittifies it.
• How can it make a society poorer or more stratified? Favors are for the individual, not the society.

The Nerd Rapture: The Second Singularity is Coming, but it's not the POINT.

If evolution can create it, so can man. There is and will be intelligent design. It's only a matter of time.

We are in the midst of the last great battle of reason over evolution -- why is this happening now? Because evolution developed the first great singularity [1] about 300 thousand years ago. And it happened to our ancestors and they learned to talk somehow, really talk. Talking lets you pass information between generations at an exponentially faster speed than evolution does. Evolution is slow. We evolved complex language which let us talk about abstract concepts very quickly, in evolutionary terms. This happened a long time ago in human terms (in the blink of an eye in evolutionary terms.) This ability to know thyself and talk about it is the genesis of the tree of knowledge story. Not only did humans name all the animals, they could now talk about and reason about what an animal would do. [2] Darwinian evolution signed its own death warrant that day. In evolutionary time scales where it takes 6 million years to evolve a new species of ape, like the mountain gorillas, [3] this one small change to hook up thoughts to sounds (action, not just names) took forever, multiple species, millions of years. But once literacy was invented: language, previously limited to the evanescent sound waves can now be reproduced by sight on scratches that are permanent. Everything has changed again..

When did cultural evolution overtake evolution by natural descent?

When did this happen? When did humans take control of evolution? You can look at a chart of human development over time and a few things stand out. See Figure 1 below. Stone tools were created about 3.5 million years ago. These stone tools were flakes pounded off a larger stone. It took us about a million years to make stone tools by pounding off the flakes and using the rock that was left over as the tool. I'm pretty sure that really wasn't us, as in modern humans. Then another million years to make spears. Still don't think that's really us. I can teach a three year old to make these things in three hours. It took our ancestors two million years. Something was definitely different.  Now things begin to speed up a bit. We've had fire for the last million and a half years, but we didn't get controlled daily fire until 350,000 years ago. Then technology starts to explode.

Figure 1: Human Evolution as Seen by Our Tool Usage and Creation

Pottery, towns, burial [need dates], and the big one: Clothing. Humans invented clothing a hundred thousand years ago. [4] We can date this one very accurately because of the genome of lice. This is a big deal. We even know where we got the lice from: we inherited them from the Gorilla Species about three million years ago. [5] Yes, that probably means what you think it means. Men are animals. But we can date the invention of clothing because different species of lice live on our bodies than live on our clothes and these species had the same ancestor 100,000 years ago, then there were two species created because we started to wear clothes and the body lice and the clothes lice stopped breeding with each other.  When we lived on the savannah in Africa, we didn't really need clothes, but as the ice age came on and we moved north, 70 to 100 thousand years ago, we needed clothes and poof, we got clothes. Clothes are complicated, of course they first started off as just animal skin blankets, but they quickly evolved. Very quickly. Do you think we could make clothes if we couldn't talk to each other? I don't. The complication of making clothes demands the ability of language. Do any other animals make clothes that change and evolve? Nope.

What else happens? Remember, the time period we're now talking about (abstract language to now) is one tenth the time it took to go from using stone flakes to making stone axes. All of human history has taken place in this short period and it's because of language. Language speeds up cultural evolution. And reading and writing speed up cultural evolution even more.  Recorded human history has taken place in only the last 5000 years.  We've had some humans that were literate less than one five hundredth of the time since we started making stone flakes. But we've invented almost everything since then. Something has changed. Cultural evolution has outstripped evolution by natural selection a million-fold. [6] And in the last five years, one millionth of the time since we started making stone tools, evolution is now coming completely under our control - with Crisper-9 [7] we can now change any sequence of DNA we want to. It's only a matter of time until the genes that have controlled evolution will be our slaves: they aren't conscious, they can't defend themselves, they can only survive; but when humans decide which genes survive, evolution happens, but it's no longer by natural selection. It's more like evolution by sexual selection: we get to decide who reproduces and what genes they reproduce. It's soon going to be evolution by intelligent design.

What happened next after clothing? Or probably simultaneously with the invention of clothing, just not much has survived since then: 50,000 years ago we have definite proof that we could draw and paint. Art happened. Do you think we did art before we could talk? Nope. We can name things and we wear animal skins for about 200,000 years, [8] language continues to get more abstract and complex and then we invent clothes and we invent art.  Fifteen thousand years ago we started farming with domesticated animals and plants. 75,000 years ago we started writing down counting. The whole transition from naming things to abstract language includes the ability to count. 5000 years ago we started writing down language. Most people don't realize it but this evolutionary change was not rolled out across the world until about 50 years ago. Half the people in the world weren't literate in the 1950's. Today more than 80% of humans are literate. Literacy has just conquered the world. But it was so slow that all of cultural evolution, which it enabled, has blown by it.

It's not just language, although language is critical. It's the ability to record complicated language in a permanent way so it can be communicated to another person who is removed spatially and temporally from the author. Is it okay to just repeat the story orally through memory? It is. That allows cultural evolution to happen by telephone tag. But I would claim that it is a proto-version of cultural evolution, much slower than what happens today, too cumbersome to launch today's revolution in culture. When something changes by a factor of ten in the absolute amount we create (oral history to written history) it makes fundamental changes in what can happen. But this, learning to read and write, was the death knell of evolution.  And it was the direct result of the first singularity: when evolution gave humans language.

One cannot be an author without language. When did this happen? The evolution of information complexity, transmission and storage goes through natural phases. There's a natural progression in the evolution of information transmission and storage and the speed of these changes speeds up exponentially over the aeons. And it's continuing today. You've heard of Moore's law? It's a fundamental law of the organization of data into information. Language has allowed us to create abstractions and abstractions allow us to exponentially create information from data by hiding the complications of the previous layer of information, it's called chunking, and once your brain learns to do it through language it can create new knowledge at an exponential rate. Once this process is out and in motion, it seems unstoppable.

Exactly when did evolution by natural descent invent language?

So what is our estimate of when humans made a 'language' more complicated than any other existing animal? I don't think you need language to create tools made of stone flakes. Especially when they don't change for a million years. Your ancestors could watch a fellow ancestor take two rocks and bash them together to create a stone flake with a sharp edge. These tools are found all over the world, unchanged for over a million years. Paleontologists can't tell any difference between the tools, no early tools, no late tools, that could help us date when they were made. I'm not even sure at this point we could name more than a few things besides ourselves and things we could eat and places we could be. If we'd have had more complicated language our tools would've changed much faster than the million years of stasis they present us with.

How long is a million years? Our acommon ancestors with the chimpanzees were alive six million years ago. Obviously no common language there (or chimpanzees would be talking to each other, not just screaming and swearing at each other.) That's about (6,000,000 yrs / 25 yrs / generation) 240,000 generations. That's a big number, but not that big. You can buy a nice house for $240,000.  Maybe it's twice as many generations ago, but it isn't ten times as many. So there are 240,000 generations that separate us from the group of animals that spawned both us and the chimps. That single group of breeding animals split up and decided to stop screwing with each other. Our ancestors decided to live on the savannah and the chimp ancestors decided to stay in the trees. That's the time we decided to stop living together. It's not that we were chimps then and we evolved into humans. We were something else and we decided to move to a new environment whereas the chimps stayed in the same environment. Some of our tribe of monkeys continued in the old ways and some took off for a new environment (or the weaker ones were forced out, at least that's my guess) to live elsewhere. [9]

We eventually evolved to walking upright (even before we were homo sapiens.) That took about a million years or about 40,000 generations. We were selected to have genes that let us be born less developed (smaller) so we didn't kill our mothers when we were born, but could still grow huge brains that could host smart minds. This didn't happen to our ancestors that stayed in the forests. We still have plenty of things left over from our times in the trees: brachiating shoulders, for instance.  You don't need a brachiating shoulder to walk around the savannah, but they weren't that much of a detriment. The shoulder design was neutral or positive in terms of survival.

We did lose our hair... any evolutionary advantage to that? Not one I know of, in fact it's a disadvantage. So how does this happen? We have to understand how evolution happens to make sense of this. On the surface this seems like a nonsensical change. It could happen in three ways: it could be entirely random, it could be sexual selection or it could be associated with some gene that gives us other benefits. Randomness is just that, unpredictable and undriven. Sexual selection is the same way we breed animals today, if there is some gene that makes a woman favor a less hairy person as a mate, then men will become less hairy. Plausible. Darwin thought so and argued it was the most likely reason.  He argued that changes that seem nonsensical are usually driven by sexual selection. They may show that the mate is healthy: by being able to take on something that makes it harder to survive and surviving anyway, it shows fitness. Or it might make it easier to groom and check for parasites and be less likely to pick up parasites from the grass. Who knows?

Or... the gene that controls our hair coverage could be bound to a gene that does something else that is more valuable. You have to remember that genes come in groups.  Since genes are the units of heredity, it's the net benefit of a gene that counts. Genes code up sets of proteins as a groups, with some changes in the production rate due to the environment. So there might be some other protein that does something like help us walk upright, and the part that helps us lose our hair is just along for the ride. (This would be the same as when dogs, which are bred from wolves to be more docile also lose their small stiff ears and get big floppy ears. The coding for the proteins that cause these two traits are in one gene.)

This loss of hair and the ability to walk upright took about two million years to accomplish via evolution by natural selection, about 80,000 generations. How many hairs per birth on average do we have to lose? Not many. Our entire skin is about one or two square meters. Over about 100,000 generations you have to lose about one hundredth of a square cm of hair every generation. Since there are about 75 follicles in every square cm, that's about one hair on average for every birth. Not even noticeable. Whatever your favorite hairlessness story, it caused lots of early deaths or lack of reproduction to be changing this quickly. The pressure was relentless, apparently. Over millions of years.

So this hairless ape spread around the world. Yes, we've found these first type of stone tools practically everywhere in the old world (Asia, Africa, Europe), but nowhere in the new world (America.) Those creatures (our ancestors) didn't make it to the new world or to Australia a million years ago. Then another million years comes and goes and we see the new, second type of stone tools. In my opinion you don't need language for these tools eaither, it's much more like an evolutionary change by natural selection. Another million years, another 40,000 generations, to figure out you could use the flaked rock as a better, more well shaped tool, nothing like the progress we see today. At this point the tool making requries a plan with multiple strikes that is different for each tool. It requires real thought. Spatial - temporal thought. Hit this thing here at this angle with this hammer with this force and it will crack here. Do this twenty or thirty times and you have a very sharp hammer. It could be a very rhythmic and  unconscious thing that may explain why we enjoy music and dancing as much as we do.

We weren't even the top of the food chain at the time, we were in the middle of the food chain. We managed to improve our stone tools about a trillionth as fast as a typical four year old could have done. I am fairly sure that no significant language existed at this time. Things are still changing at evolutionary speed. So from chimps to fire it's about five million years, then one million more years and we get controlled daily fire (three hundred and fifty thousand years ago.) Oh, and language shows up about then. And then things begin to change.

At about this time we can start to date sites by which tools they have. The stone tools change reliably every few thousand years. Pottery comes into common usage. Something has definitely changed. This is about 350,000 years ago. Things start to change faster than evolution can possibly cause it to happen Evolution has just taken a second fiddle in controlling the human race. About this time we start to be humans. When you don't have kids your set of genes decrease in the gene pool, when you do have kids, your set of genes increases in the gene pool (more people have genes similar to yours.) It's not that genes want to survive, they just do or they don't. And because they are not copied perfectly, they change what animals are, what species are, slowly but surely.

Dinosaurs lived 100s of millions of years ago and they never developed complex language (certianly not hieroglyphs or alphabets as far as we know.) You can kind of discern this by noticing that an asteroid wiped them out. It wasn't lack of widsom, like a nuclear war, it was lack of intelligence. They apparently didn't build telescopes and rockets so they were sitting ducks, as the saying goes. But this shows that intelligence is not inevitable. Evolution works by addition and adoption of existing things that had their own reasons for coming into existence. Dinosaurs only had lizard brains, the brainstem, which gave them some basic emotions (eat, mate, breath... that's about it) and instincts and reactions... and probably consciousness. If you want to look for the seat of consciousness, look way down there in the brainstem and the lizard brain, that's where you'll find it. [10]

What brain structure was evolving at the time that this explosion of creativity occurred? It was the pre-frontal cortex, the ability to plan and imagine. You need language for this. So this hairless ape was evolving stone tools, they are controlling fire, making clay pots. Pottery is the ultimate stone tool. From digging up clay, shaping the clay, designing the pot, firing it up to make it useful; it takes way more smarts to make a pot than it does to tie a stone flake to a branch to make a spear. But do you need to have language? I think you do. Rudimentary language is required. Beyond just naming things you need to understand a plan. Maybe not with controlled daily fire, but definitely with pottery. First you dig, then transport, then shape, then fire and dry. You don't need sophisticated language, but you need some kind of language.

xxxxx
At this point it's before the ice age and you don't really need clothes, you can just use blankets. Making blankets takes more sophistication than pottery in my opinion. Language is around at this time and it's getting more sophisticated. At this point it probably can't explain many abstract ideas, but it can let humans plan and remember. But as we discussed previously, clothes are really the turning point. And clothes happen at about 100,000 years ago when the human lice species split into head lice and body lice. Clothes mean full time coverage (the only way lice can live.) This is the critical junction in my eyes. It's a very complicated process to make clothes and to wear them every day. Clothes are designed, the sizes change, the temperature protection is different, you have different types of clothes for different times of year. Language obviously becomes more sophisticated at this time. Language goes from the crude information passing needed to make clay pots to the more sophisticated information passing needed to make clothes. Some kind of language is definitely going on here.

And language is a powerful survival tool. The push to get better at language is very, very powerful. When you can tell your kids what to do it's immensely valuable. And it shows. All of a sudden humans are at the top of the food chain. Large mammals start disappearing in Africa.  They do the same in Australia and America when humans appear (not the entire story, but obviously a huge factor.) Language is the first Singularity. All of a sudden cultural evolution is happening faster than evolution by natural selection. Way faster. It's changing within a single lifetime. Humans get new capabilities without having to accidentally evolve over generations.

At this point our human ancestors had already spread all over the world. Those old ancestors just 'disappear' and are replaced by these new humans. This change happened in one place and spreads like wildfire across the world. This is what separates the human animal from the rest of the animals. Not only do we have language, we also appear to have a fear of the outgroup so bad that we've killed off all the similar competing species, our 'Original Sin' so to speak. Language gives us the ability to plan and communicate that plan to others, to work together. To work together is so powerful that it was almost inevitable that we'd take over the world. We didn't just talk, we could talk about abstract concepts, imaginary stories, fairy tales, ogres, monsters (neandertals?) All existing humans have the capability of language. It didn't develop after the aborigines got to Australia, so it's got to be more than 40,000 years old. Those ancient languages, evolving separately, appear to be as sophisticated as any other language. So sophisticated language is older than that. [ref latest theories on phonemes which agree]

Were these people integrated into individuals like we are today? I don't think so. I tend to be a fan of the Jaynes 'Theory of the Bicameral Brain' [11]. They probably all heard voices. Was that me or was that a god? Their emotions wracked their thinking. The two halves of the brain were no longer equal partners as one can speak and the other one can't (Talk about your evolutionary hacks...) We can see changes in style and substance of what was common in forms of writing up to a few thousand years ago. Hearing voices was common in the past. Now we call that psychotic. It's not a sign from god; it a sign that you are crazy. And it's still changing. A large portion of the human race still thinks it's a good idea to take things on faith, and ignoring facts to do so. It's a similar psychological problem. If you don't know the difference between reality and fairy tales, we call that psychotic... unless it's blessed by a religion. You do need faith, but when that faith comes at the expense of the truth, it's a problem. A psychological problem that doesn't need an explicit call out in the bible of psychoses. [12]

We are on a path to speciate. The old conservative rural way of life that came up when we learned to farm is about to pass into obsolescence by the inventiveness and accomplishments of the humans in cities. We are past the time when a few humans could compete with a large organization of humans. [13] But we'll get back to that later. Let's get back to our story of the evolution of language.

The next thing we see are domesticated plants and animals, permanent towns where ownership has to be established and where things need to be labelled and measured and regulated so everyone can trust everyone else. You have to have some type of writing to live in a permanent settlement, it can be crude scratches to count how many sheep you have or some type of branding to make sure the sheep are yours. As soon as settlements got beyond a few hundred people you have to have some shared fate, a common place to store grain for the winter, possibly even taxes. A farmer has to figure out how large a field he has to plant to grow enough food to live through the winter with his animals and family. If you can't do this you can't permanently settle any where, the town will eventually die out. Miscalculate how much food you need over the winter and you die. You need real, sophisticated language to manage a city. For a large city you need to manage IOUs and infrastructure. You need laws. When you live in a place big enough that you can't know everyone you need a sophisticated language.

You need to remember things. And the best way to remember things is to write them down.  Those chicken scratches to count things slowly evolve into a written language as cities get larger. The drive for written language is strong when permanent settlements start appearing. However, we can date this too by looking at Australia and America. Some of these settlers had a sophisticated written language (Olmecs and Mayans) So the idea of a written language was spread around the world at that time. It must be older than when the last of those migrations occurred, about thirty thousand years ago. [14] It must have just been invented at the time. 

At this point information storage takes an order of magnitude increase in availability and innovation also takes a leap. Related? Of course. This latest change which occurred about five to ten thousand years ago has finally spread around the world.  Fifty years ago less than half the globe was literate, today it's over 80%... we've entered the literate age. This took a long time compared to how fast  technological innovations spread today, but in evolutionary time this is like a blink of an eye. Culture causes changes much faster than evolution by natural selection can cause changes. Trillions of times faster.

Evolution continues to occur, but we've changed the natural selection part by making the ultimate sexual selection of language which leads us to understand how evolution really works (that was only 150 years ago! The revolution has just started!) We can do way more with our minds to protect us from disease than evolution ever could. Now all the genetic mutations that occur are not being selected against (unless they are super fatal.) Evolution by natural selection has just moved into hyperspace. More and more minor mutations, that used to be fatal, are survivable. We will soon be able to cure any genetic disease and make evolution moot. 

The mechanism of evolution is different for animals than it is for humans. [15] The singularity we call language changed everything. That's why we call it a singularity. And the second coming is upon us: Genes are becoming irrelevant. They've been struggling to keep up, but they just can't. But they keep trying, the selection pressures are increasingly different than they were in the past. They're still there, but the changes are coming so fast that natural selection just can't keep up. Death rates are so low these days compared to pre-history that the scalpel that natural selection had used to rend our evolution in the past is now a butter knife, ignored and left on the table.

It's all about thriving in ambiguity. The information coded up in our genes is immense. Until we invented written language, the amount of information in the genome was more than all the information in all the stories memorized by the human race. It was more information than one person could transmit by language in their entire lifetime. [16] But one library of books dwarfs the amount of information carried in your genome. The genetic code is cracked. We can understand it, we can read it, we can write it and we're already learning how to program it and debug it. We can control our genes.

Genes have lost the battle of evolution to their vessels. Evolution is no longer going to be random. Those humans that refuse to use this technology will eventually be a far distant branch of humanity, as the chimpanzees are a far distant branch to us today. This speciation is happening now, which side of the speciation event will you be on?

What are the consequences on evolution now that we know how it works? It's a whole new ballgame. How long after the first singularity (language) did we understand how genes were controlling our destiny? A few hundred thousand years. How soon after humanity could store more information than our genes could store (literacy) did we understand what they were doing? Five thousand years.  How long after we understood what genes were doing (Darwin's theory of evolution) will they become irrelevant? Probably 250 years (not quite finished, but well on the way.) Look at that rate of change: it gets faster by a factor of 20 every time we have a quantitative change in the way we can process information.  The change is faster, old processes become irrelevant and then controlled.

This speedup in technology, how much information we can store and recall, is continuing at an amazing pace. In the last 70 years we've industrialized the collection of information and its use. We started first on the transactions that replace paper money. Then on banking, loans and investments. Then on advertising and finally on information itself. We industrialized the ability to speak like an average human. The imitation game seems to have a great effect on the hyperbolic promotion of Artificial Intelligence. The reality, of course, is much different. Current LLMs (Large Language Models) are just hallucinating surfers on the mountains of bullshit humans have spewed on the Internet. They have no reasoning ability, they can commit random thoughts to paper, they can imitate a set of writings and sound like someone else... Great. Just what humanity needs: an editor to correct your grammar and rewrite your paragraphs to sound like everyone else. We really haven't figured out the best way to use this ability yet and we need at least 5 singularity level breakthroughs before we create an AGI. [17]

I predict that humanity will be free of the tyranny of their genetic ancestry in less than one hundred years. You can see it happening. The second coming is already underway. It's a slow process by human standards. Data is processed into information at an ever faster pace. Emotions or gut feelings are turned into algorithms and can be emulated outside of the mind with many more inputs and faster results. The slow part of thinking (logic, language, math) is being replaced by computers that can reason orders of magnitude faster than our minds can. We've been making ourselves smarter and smarter over time [18] and will continue to do so. Eventually we'll figure out how to make conscious machines. I'm not sure we'll want to.

But enough of that glorious future where we control our own destinies and don't rely on ancient texts to tell us what to do. How do we get there from where we are today? And now that we understand how evolution works, how do we take control of it and increase the well-being of the entire human race?

First we should look at what evolution has given us and decide if that's what we want. We no longer need to accept our fate, the lot handed to us by billions of years of evolution by natural selection, or luck, as any rational person would call it. We can pick and choose what we want to be. We don't have to listen to our evolved morals, which are really only about survival. We don't have to listen to people who had no idea they were shaped by evolution. We can design our own morals. We can have morals intelligently designed by us.

Morals by intelligent design has been tried a few times and most of the time it's been a disaster. Religions have tried to design morals for thousands of years. Philosophers for hundreds of years. They gave us liberalism - the ultimate judge of morals were people. What they felt inside. But we now know those morals are just due to evolution by natural selection. They are for survival, not for ethical behavior. Realizing this one fact and the reality that surrounds it demands that we design a new system of morals based on axiomatic principles and logical deductions. Now that we know that evolution has shaped our morals we can redesign them for the benefit of all human kind. They don't need to be divinely inspired to be legitimate, in fact, they can be derived from first principles. The derivations will suffer from the same issues that Hilbert [ref] found out about integer mathematics and simple postulate systems; they'll need higher mathematics to prove their correctness [see issues with moral codes from Sam Harris] but these problems are addressable.

There have been several attempts at this in the last few hundred years.  Some have turned out very badly, some have turned out better. I will argue that the basis of a decent moral code has already been invented. With some small extensions we can devise a set of ethics and a moral code that will benefit the entire human race. The question becomes how does one judge a moral code? Are there any universal declarations that can be made that are true for the human species? (Not to mention all conscious species... but that's something I don't think most of us are ready for.) But here goes.

First: I have no control over who I am. [I could have been born as anyone. So the moral code must treat me the same no matter who I am.]

Second: I think, therefore I am. [I am not a simulation]

Thirdly: I am, so I can suffer.  [And I want to reduce suffering and increase well-being]

Fourthly: Everyone [and these rights were just passed to all races last century and just passed to women this century. Wow! We have we let genes run our  lives for a long time...] is created equal with fundamental rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

Finally: I must live in the real world, not in a supernatural fantasyland.


What is the purpose of a moral code and a set of ethics: to improve the well-being of the entire human race.  [...consciousness?]


This is one of the key ideas of intelligently designed morals: everyone must benefit as much as they can. And its corollary: the moral code should encourage this, not only by increasing the well-being of everyone alive, but by increasing the sheer amount of happy people. With these postulates it now becomes an engineering project to improve humanity.

Since this Final Great Awakening of humanity where we realized we are in control of our own fate, we have settled on Utilitarianism, the application of economics, for the betterment of mankind. There is one final postulate of ethics that slashes through the the paradoxes of population: the gains must not be made for one's advantage at the expense of others. Selfishness is a cardinal secular sin. The Original secular sin is racism: ridding the world of all or our companion species. 

We can make some observations about which moral codes are reasonable and which ones are unreasonable. Any religion that depends upon a written moral code and doesn't allow changes in the light of new information [I must live in the real world...] is unacceptable. It's too rigid. If it can't allow heresy, it can't be a reasonable moral code. Those that insist on treating some humans differently than others [Everyone is created equal...] are unacceptable. Those that depend upon 'looking inside yourself for the answer' are just slaves to evolution by natural selection and are unacceptable. Only carefully reasoned systems of ethics can possibly have a chance to be moral.

Like the first system of logic invented three thousand years ago in ancient Greece, postulates and logical derivation are the only way to know that what you derive from your postulates are true (if the postulates are true.)  Otherwise, you are just guessing or relying on faith most of the time. Not a good thing to bet your life on. No matter how hard they try to sell it to you. If the postulates are wrong, all the derivations are nonsense. If the postulates are correct, everything that can be derived from the postulates will also be correct. But as Godel showed us, there are many truths that this formal system of morals cannot prove are true through the formal system. You must use more powerful means of reasoning to determine truth in many cases. Exactly what that is, will be different in different cases and there will always be truths that cannot be proved, no matter how powerful of a means of reasoning that you use (Godel's second theorem showed us that.)

If you understand geometry, you know that there are many types of geometry depending upon the last postulate you deem to be be fundamental and true. Morals are the same as this. Depending on what you assume for the postulates you can get different types of morals. How you decide which set of morals you want to follow is up to you. It would better if humans can decide on one set of morals. Insisting that the morals reside in the real world (not an imaginary one) tends to narrow down the moral codes to only one acceptable set of postulates. The majority stance on morals: that whatever some man said some supernatural being declared is moral 'makes it so' is a non-sensical belief. It would make more sense to read the future in the alignments of the stars and planets when you were born. But that is likely to not happen any time soon. Humans already fight over moral codes, why expect that to stop now?

Now that we've seen how to end the gene's control of our moral code, what other raw deals has evolution by natural selection given us that we should get rid of? Crappy bodies that only last decades? Yes, that has to be fixed. What else? We're stuck on this single planet. Yes, that has to be fixed, too. It's not safe and if we don't want to end up like the dinosaurs, we need to defend our earth from asteroid collisions and invasion of killer robots and/or aliens as well.

We die. We need to stop that shit. We need to be able to copy our minds into other forms of storage and hopefully put it back. No reason to be limited by physical problems at all. That's the Nerd Rapture. And unlike the religious rapture, we have a plan to make it come true. It needs a lot of work, there's a lot of holes in the plan that need filled, we don't even know if it can really be done, but compared to any religion's idea of a supernatural rapture, it has a significant chance of becoming true. It's based in the real world, not the supernatural. And since it's based in the real world we can take concrete steps to make it happen. We don't have to wait as slaves to a god that supposedly created us. We can take responsibility for ourselves and our future. We must take control of the future of the human race.

The gene's control of our inherited capabilities has got to end. The ability to control our descendants' genes must not be left to chance. It's too important. Humans have been taking control over evolution for a long time, we've become more and more sophisticated in what we can do and we continue to make it easier to control, correct and improve our lot.  And we'll continue to do so.  The key question is how do we make it happen faster? That's the real point. We know where we want to go. How do we get there faster?

Thanks for reading,
 -Dr. Mike Ritter
  Written 28th of September in the year 2017

  Revised and published Dec 22nd, 2024


Future of religion
https://allendowney.blogspot.com/2017/10/the-retreat-from-religion-is.html?m=1

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[1] Arguably the first great singularity was the big bang. The second great singularity was life. So language is the third great singularity. And the fourth great singularity will be artificial intelligence. We already did the artificial life thing, it's not very useful yet, but we've been gmo'ing and otherwise directing evolution for hundreds of thousands of years.

[2] With the ability to reason and predict we now have to take responsibility for our actions. We now have to have morals or we will be unethical. We see all the things we do that cause harm. We are ashamed that we have to kill other animals to survive. But we do anyways.

[3] Current prediction of how far away in time from today the common ancestor of the gorilla and our our ancestors were the same animals.

[4] How many generations is 100,000 years? How many years is one generation? A generation can be defined as the average age of a parent when any of their kids are born. This turns out to be fairly steady over time: the answer is 28 years. That makes 100,000 years into 3571 generations. Doesn't seem so long ago, does it? Your great-great-great-to the 3751-grand parent didn't know how to make clothes. We've come a long way, baby.

[5] Reference of where we got lice from Gorillas.

[6] Rate of change of speed of evolution by natural descent vx. cultural evolution. How to measure?

[7] Reference on what Crispr-9 is and what it can do. Public Trials.

[8] Measuring phonemes in languages that have evolved from each other gives a date of around 250,000 years ago when we had a complicated abstract language with 10-12 phonemes in it.  Obviously at that point these phonemes can produce 7 (how many things we can easily remember) to the 10th different things (700 million things.) This make sense, birds, other mammals all can make different sounds to designate different things, but they didn't evolve abstract language, just naming. the singularity was hooking all those names together and placing them somewhere in time and space using the language. [Ref]

[9] And this migration has just stopped. We went to China, Europe, Asia, Australia, Oceania, Arctic circle, North and South America from the west and now most recently from the east. So we've finally met on our voyage around the world. It wasn't pretty, either.

[10] In fact you'll find two systems of consciousness as shown in many studies where the surgeon cuts the corpus collusom that communications between the two sides of the brain. Evolution likes to make things that can survive: two lungs, two legs, two kidneys, two brains. These two seats of consciousness can't talk to each other, except through the corpus collusom. When that's cut, they think different things. Since one side of your brain can't talk, when you make that cut, one of your brains is in there, but can't talk, but it can hear and it can only see what's out of it's eye's field of vision. That second seat of consciousness is in everyone's head. Usually you don't notice it. If it does begin to talk, well, that's when some people have issues when they don't realize what it is. My guess is that the consciousnesses merge together into one in a connected brain, like stereo vision and stereo audio the two streams are integrated into one sense.

[11] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Origin_of_Consciousness_in_the_Breakdown_of_the_Bicameral_Mind

The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind is a 1976 book by the Princeton psychologist, psychohistorian^[a] and consciousness theorist Julian Jaynes (1920-1997). It explores the nature of consciousness – particularly "the ability to introspect" – and its evolution in ancient human history. Jaynes proposes that consciousness is a learned behavior rooted in language and culture rather than being innate. He distinguishes consciousness from sensory awareness and cognition. Jaynes introduces the concept of the "bicameral mind", a non-conscious mentality prevalent in early humans that relied on auditory hallucinations.

[12] The current DSM does not call out hallucinations or delusions as problems if they are associated with a religion, a major failing in my estimation.

[13] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S019739752100179X

The impacts of urban vitality and urban density on innovation: Evidence from China's Greater Bay Area

We find this everywhere we look. More people, closer together means more innovation and more opportunities and more economic activity.

[14] https://www.ox.ac.uk/news/2020-07-22-earliest-americans-arrived-new-world-30000-years-ago

The earliest Americans arrived in the New World 30,000 years ago
The mass migration for most indiginous natives was 15 - 20,000 years ago, since the Mayans had hieroglyphs, syllabary and alphabets, the idea must have been in the meme land by then. 

[15] Although a good argument could be made that humans are subject to the same, if not more pressure on their genetics, than we use to domesticate animals and plants... The domesitcation of human beings has a long and sordid history.

[16] https://waitbutwhy.com/ The blog waitbutwhy has gone into this in great detail. Our genome has around a Gigabyte of information in it. A person lived 40 years or 1.2 * 10 ^10 seconds. Someone would just be able to read out their entire genome during their lifetime...

[17]  See my previous post: "Is Artificial Intelligence an existential threat?" https://www.blogger.com/blog/post/edit/7388651792460625188/5448877306308504353

Conclusion, not really, but Machine Learning is here now and it's slowly eating the world. Can't you hear it's slow munching as expertise disappears? 

[18] ref intelligence test improvements in abstract reasoning: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flynn_effect

We've been getting smarter on IQ tests at the rate of one standard deviation (15 points) in 60 years. Or one point every four years, at different rates in different types of tests, but almost all positive and steady. Maybe it's the spread of education and literacy?