A Proposal to Fix an Unnecessary Freeway back up in the Bay Area.

Why did they screw up my freeway when they put in a diamond lane?

I've seen this referenced in the local RoadShow columns.   Highway 280 going south backs up behind Magdelena Road exit in Los Altos Hills, just past Foothill College. This is kind of amazing since 1/4 mile past Magdelena road there is an extra inserted diamond lane? Why would adding a lane back up traffic? The answer it doesn't. The backup occurs because the the last two exits both shave an entire lane off of the freeway.




It's straightforward to do the math that these two exits become the bottlenecks when the freeway is near to capacity load elsewhere. Four lanes of traffic cruise along at 65 mph, bumper to bumper. Unless there was an an entire lane of exiting cars at full speed exiting the freeway (which there isn't, this is pretty much the middle of nowhere) this will obviously be a bottleneck and limit the throughput of the freeway. It's a simple queueing problem.  I guess they don't teach queueing to traffic engineers.

Ah, but you say they do teach queueing to traffic engineers.  So what are they trying to optimize when they design a freeway system? You've got a couple of choices. You can minimize travel time at a certain time of day or you could maximize carrying capacity. This design does neither. Are they purposely slowing down traffic before the diamond lane starts? Seems misguided, but there doesn't appear to be any other choice.

In my opinion, you should minimize the travel time (which means maximizing the average speed.) This will give you a large throughput also, probably very close to the maximum. The remarkable things about these intersections is that they have been purposely designed to cause a traffic jam. I defy anyone to come up with another explanation.  As we can see in the curve above, the WDOT claims that maximum throughput of 2200 cars per hour per lane occurs at 45 MPH and drops to half that amount at 30 MPH and 60 MPH. The latter because the spacing between vehicles increases, the former because you're just going too damn slow.

So Let's look at throughput predicted. One lane goes away to an exit, cutting the flow from four to three lanes. Then the onramp merges into those three lanes, then 1/4 mile down the road you get a fouth diamond lane back. What a nightmare.

Without the disappearing lane the maximum throughput would be 8800 cars per hour, just like it is everywhere else on 280, except for these two intersections. However, there's now a missing lane. What does this cause? First we make the assumption that Exit Flow is less than the lane flow, in fact it can only be half because it comes to a light.  And that's being generous. So this lane backs up.

We use the following notation:

• Arrival Rate = ${\displaystyle \lambda }$ = 2200 cars per hour
• Departure Rate = ${\displaystyle \mu }$ = 1100 cars per hour

Utilization Rate ${\displaystyle \rho ={\frac {\lambda }{\mu }}\,\!}$ = 2

So the expected average number of vehicles in the line is = 0? No, there's a divide by zero error (this formula is only good for when the utilization rate is less than 1, otherwise it predicts an infinite number of vehicles in line), the exit lane has infinite backup, you keep adding more cars than you take off. So if you take off exactly half of the cars you get an infinite backup. Great. Seems like a bad idea. So, let's assume that you take off a little bit less than half. The other cars have to merge into the lane next to them. Overloading that lane and driving it to a halt. No matter what you do here, the size of these exit lanes will cause a backup here at capacity. How could you get rid of it? 

Pave the lane through. That way you get exactly what you have everywhere else. Same throughput as before and you can control the back up by on ramp lights. Why don't they do this? Who knows. There's plenty of paved space. It used to be this way. They ran out of paint?

I say we should do an experiment. There are two similar to this in front of the diamond lane. Let's change the last one and see if the backup disappears. All it takes is some paint and some Bott's Dots. It should be easy. Don't tell me about it until it's done. You might need a sander, some pry bars, epoxy, a cement cutter. Okay, it's harder than it looks, but if they can do it san francisco, we can do it in Los Altos.

One of my employees, in his spare time is writing a tool that gives the average travel time between any two points on a google map (He wants to drive to work at the time that miminizes his wasted car time.) We can use this to measure the before and after speeds and capacity. If adding a lane doesn't increase the throughput... I'll not encourage anyone to do the same thing at the previous intersection. 

Time for some public activity on the roads. 

Thanks for reading,

 -Dr. Mike

Fast and Slow Thinking: Why sophisticated language makes us human.

There are essentially three different systems in the brain.

1. Fast thinking neural nets (emotions), systems that integrate sensory signals and put out a signal that indicates something else. We can't 'see' inside these systems, we can only believe their outputs are appropriate or not.

2. Slow thinking memory that uses language and ideas to make estimates and calculate future possibilities.

3. You. The thing that decides what to think about.

We know almost exactly how systems 1 & 2 work.[1]  We've given out several nobel prizes for these topics. We reproduce them in the lab and we make them better every day. We use artificial versions of them to make our lives easier every day. (Have you used Google search lately?) And they'll continue to get smarter, faster and more reliable.

We also recognize that system 2, which relies on language, is what makes us most diffrerent fromt he rest of the species on this planet.

However, we have little idea of how system 3 works. Maybe that's best. If we don't have a system 3 then we don't have to worry about the systems 1 & 2 becoming 'super intelligent' and taking over the world.  They remain black boxes that can 'think' faster than we can, but have no motivation.

Thanks for reading,
 -Dr. Mike


[1] Thinking, Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman, published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux; Reprint edition (April 2, 2013) 

• ISBN-10: 0374533555
• ISBN-13: 978-0374533557

SETI - A new proposal to search for extraterrestrial intelligence.

Why don't we see any aliens?

A significant problem is the vastness of space. Despite piggybacking on the world's most sensitive radio telescope, Charles Stuart Bowyer said, the instrument could not detect random radio noise emanating from a civilization like ours, which has been leaking radio and TV signals for less than 100 years. For SERENDIP [A3] and most other SETI projects to detect a signal from an extraterrestrial civilization, the civilization would have to be beaming a powerful signal directly at us. It also means that Earth civilization would only be detectable within a distance of 100 light-years.[89]
"With available instruments we are unlikely to detect Earthlike planets or civilizations," Airieau said. "This sort of detection will not come within our realm for another few decades." c. 1998.

The only thing that overcomes the vastness of space is the vastness of time.  The best way to detect alien civilizations is to send something to where they are, to get closer to the signals, then they'll be easy to detect. This is what we have been doing and will continue to do as long as we can.  We've been sending robots out to our solar system and beyond.  Let's assume this continues for millions of years. What would be the state of the galaxy after those millions of years?

There would be a robot in every star system.

We build killer robots, won't everyone else?

What does this imply? This implies that there is an alien robot (actually many alien robots) in our solar system. There are certain fundamental limits on how these robots can communicate. We can make some general observations of how these robots and their communications systems would be designed.

First, we can assume that they will use the most power efficient transmission systems possible. There's only a certain amount of energy in the universe, so the aliens would like to use it as efficiently as possible.  We then know how they would choose to send electromagnetic signals by some calculations that  Professor Emeritus David Messerschmitt has made in [1].  This paper assume s that the only signals that go between star systems are electromagnetic.  In our case we can relax that assumption and assume that the signal receiving civilization actually designed the signal sending apparatus (the robot) and thus has control over both ends of the system.  Professor Messerschmitt looks at the consequences of this in a newer paper [2].  He doesn't quite get all the way to robot to robot communication (or as he likes to call it, starship to starship communication) but, we can use the formulation in the paper to make that estimate.

Second, we can assume that they will try to have their robots remain undetected, as if they were detected there's a good chance they could be subverted or destroyed.  This means they are going to be fairly small, but not too small as they have to have enough power to actually get there and stop.  Let's assume that they would make themselves small so they'd be harder to detect. What are the limits on size detection? Right now we can detect 90% of the asteroids that are one kilometer in diameter, but soon. with advanced signal processing techniques, we'll be able to detect asteroids that are 45 meters in diameter. So let's assume these robots could be 10 times smaller than this (why we haven't seen them.) This would limit the robots to about 5 meters in size.  With this limit we can calculate the power that these robots would transmit per bit.

Since we are assuming that the robots will be talking to each other and there's one at every star, then the average distance they will be sending data is about 5-10 light years. The two antenna will be about 3 meters in diameter.  The transmitted power per bit will be 46 watt-hours per bit.  (See [3] Table III in [2], the only difference is the receive antenna will be 100 times smaller than one on a planet.) This then sets the limits on what we need to use to detect to find these robots.

We can use these limits to propose a new Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence.  I like to call this the Search for Alien Killer Robots (SAKR.) These assumptions point to several new methods of conducting SETI.  We can look towards all the closest stars to try and pull out these minimal energy signals from the light of the star. Another idea to detect these robots is to send our own robots out towards the nearest stars then look back towards the solar system.  The signals will be much larger since we are much closer to the transmitting robots. And if any robots are found, we can then go get them.

One proposal would be to send some wide band receivers toward each of the stars and have them listen in the direction of the star as well as in the direction of the solar system. I believe that if we sent enough of these detectors we could also have the largest synthetic aperture radio telescope in (or out) of the solar system. This array of detectors could be used to look at many other possible signals as well as being used as a transmitter to talk to those potential starships we'll be sending out.

In future posts I will go over the costs of running these new SETI searches, how to optimally design the detection systems [4], and what else we could do with such a system if we build it.

Thanks for reading,
 -Dr. Mike


[1] Optimum end-to-end interstellar communication design for power efficiency, David Messerschmitt, UC Berkely, published in astro-ph.IM on 28th July 20132. arXiv:1305.4684v2

[2] Design for minimum energy in starship and interstellar communications, David Messerschmitt, published in astro-ph.IM on 29th March 2014. arXiv:1402.1215v2

[3]
TABLE III
EXAMPLES OF ENERGY REQUIREMENTS AT THE FUNDAMENTAL LIMIT

Parameter	Starship	Civilization	Units
Tx antenna diameter	3	300	meters
Rec antenna diameter	300	300	meters
Distance	10	1000	Light years
Received energy per bit	8	8	photons
Transmitted energy per bit	0.46	0.46	Watt-hours

[4] Insterllar Communication: The Case for Spread Spectrum, David G. Messerschmitt, UC Berkeley, arXiv:1111.0547v2 [asro-ph.IM] 2 Dec 2011.

What's the matter with US politics?

One of the front runners in the race to become president of the US uses personal attacks, not logic or plans to bolster his position, but emotional appeals.  It's obviously the Donald who is using his skills honed as a reality TV show actor (Reminds me of another President and a few governors who started as actors.) Some have claimed that he is untruthful about 70% of the time (contradicts himself even) and slanders people the rest of the time. He has proposed few concrete plans, except those that would bankrupt the country or siphon off more money to the existing rich and powerful.  He panders to a set of disenfranchised constituents so that they can pour their blame on to the other: the immigrant, the government, anyone except who is really responsible. How would you assign the blame? And how would you fix it?

Donald's technique of calling people names is the classic propaganda technique of scapegoating or dehumanization. See Scott Adam's evaluation.  This isn't by accident but by design. It seems like a New York or maybe construction industry state of mind. Apparently it is acceptable to lie in a negotiation, the other side should expect it. And it's frightening to think that he might win. Many others have used these same techniques to win elections elsewhere. Here's a short list of what Umberto Eco wrote in 1995 about Fascism, which allows a small group or a single man to change a democracy into a one party state. Umberto grew up in Italy during the rise of Mussolini.  I think Umberto knows what he speaks of. So does Donald.

The best hope is that Donald is confusing the roar of the arena crowd for the will of the voters.
See if Umberto's description rings any bells...

1. The first feature of Fascism is the cult of tradition. As a consequence, there can be no advancement of learning.

2. Traditionalism implies the rejection of modernism. It is mainly concerned with the rejection of the Spirit of 1789 (and of 1776, of course). The Enlightenment, the Age of Reason, is seen as the beginning of modern depravity. In this sense Fascism can be defined as irrationalism.

3. Irrationalism also depends on the cult of action for action’s sake. Distrust of the intellectual world has always been a symptom of Fascism.

4. No syncretistic faith can withstand analytical criticism. For Fascism, disagreement is treason.

5. Disagreement is a sign of diversity. Fascism grows up and seeks for consensus by exploiting and exacerbating the natural fear of difference. The first appeal of a fascist movement is an appeal against the intruders. Thus Fascism is racist by definition.

6. Fascism derives from individual or social frustration. That is why one of the most typical features of the historical fascism was the appeal to a frustrated middle class, a class suffering from an economic crisis or feelings of political humiliation, and frightened by the pressure of lower social groups.

7. To people who feel deprived of a clear social identity, Fascism says that their only privilege is the most common one, to be born in the same country. This is the origin of nationalism. Besides, the only ones who can provide an identity to the nation are its enemies. Thus at the root of the Fascist psychology there is the obsession with a plot, possibly an international one.

8. The followers must feel humiliated by the ostentatious wealth and force of their enemies.

9. For Fascism there is no struggle for life but, rather, life is lived for struggle. Thus pacifism is trafficking with the enemy. It is bad because life is permanent warfare.

10. Elitism is a typical aspect of any reactionary ideology, insofar as it is fundamentally aristocratic, and aristocratic and militaristic elitism cruelly implies contempt for the weak. Fascism can only advocate a popular elitism.

11. In such a perspective everybody is educated to become a hero. In every mythology the hero is an exceptional being, but in Fascist ideology, heroism is the norm. This cult of heroism is strictly linked with the cult of death.

12. Since both permanent war and heroism are difficult games to play, the Fascist transfers his will to power to sexual matters.

13. Fascism is based upon a selective populism, a qualitative populism, one might say. In a democracy, the citizens have individual rights, but the citizens in their entirety have a political impact only from a quantitative point of view—one follows the decisions of the majority. For Fascism, however, individuals as individuals have no rights, and the People is conceived as a quality, a monolithic entity expressing the Common Will. Since no large quantity of human beings can have a common will, the Leader pretends to be their interpreter. Having lost their power of delegation, citizens do not act; they are only called on to play the role of the interpreter. Because of its qualitative populism Fascism must be against “rotten” parliamentary governments.

14. Fascism speaks Newspeak. Newspeak was invented by Orwell, in 1984, as the official language of Ingsoc, English Socialism. But elements of Fascism are common to different forms of dictatorship. All the Nazi or Fascist schoolbooks made use of an impoverished vocabulary, and an elementary syntax, in order to limit the instruments for complex and critical reasoning.

Donald seems to have learned all these lessons very well.

He's learned to exploit them. Can the US public withstand the siren song of Donald?

It's the easy way out, if you don't understand what's going on.

Can we take the hard way out? The way that requires us to figure out what is wrong and fix it rather than just blaming the other?

Can the US do real intellectual work? Being a racist is so much easier and very seductive.

I hope a majority of the voting electorate can avoid this.

I guess we'll just have to wait and see.

Thanks for reading.

-Dr. Mike

The Power of Big Ideas

What should be the next big ideas?
What are some of the recent big ideas?
When did the world change last?

Language. Writing. Books. Farming. Swords. Governments. Gods. Towns. 

But what have we done lately?

The Renaissance. The invention of the scientific method.  Galileo invents the telescope and observes the universe.  Humans look at the world, believe what they see and try to understand and predict.

The Scientific Revolution. How to go from observations to theory, make predictions that are reproducible.

The American Revolution. Government exists by the consent of the governed.  All people are created equal. Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.  Inalienable rights to religion, speech, press, arms, etc. Enforcement of contracts and private property.

Abolition of Slavery and Suffragism. Government exists by the consent of the governed, all of the governed. Every single one of them, whatever their heritage, whatever their sexual proclivities, whatever their beliefs. The power of the peaceful revolution. Again, all perople are created equal.

The Industrial Revolution. The invention of the steam engine makes it possible to amplify human capabilities.  Railroads.  Mills. Automobiles. Planes. Rockets. Oil and gas. Renewable energy. Exoplanets.

The Darwinian Revolution. We are all cousins, with all life. We are made from a program of DNA; all life is. If we can breed together, we are the same species.

The Medical Revolution. The Germ theory of disease. Vitamins. Double-blind studies. Immune system. Vaccines. Neurobiology.

The Electrical Revolution. The Industrial Revolution comes to the home and more. Maxwell's equations. The telegraph. Long distance communication. The light. The telephone. Radio. Television.

The Quantum Revolution. Quantum Field Theory. The transistor. Digital transmission. 

The Computer Revolution. The computer. The network. Compression and encryption. Smart phones. Artificial Intelligence.

Freedom of Movement. Free trade. Free travel. Floating exchange rates. National parks. Environmentalism. 

The Information Revolution. Google. Facebook. Amazon. Uber. 

Secular Humanism. Using the Scientific method to "improve the well-being of every person on the planet." The biggest idea. The most important idea in the last 10,000 years. 

And some big ideas that were not so good and took a long time to discredit:

Lies.

God.

Supernaturalism.

Slavery.

Religion.

Heresy.

Warlords.

Theocracy.

Royalty.

Colonialism.

Eugenics.

World wars.

Fascism.

Scapegoting and dehumanisation.

Industrial pollution.

Unpaid Externalities. More to say about this one later.

Not taking care of the average citizen.

Allowing unregulated monopolies.

Taking things on faith.

Suicide bombings.

Violence instead of persuasion.

Never stop fighting a bad idea. 

Never stop promoting a good idea.

The key: Learn to distinguish between them.

Ask who benefits? Who loses? How much does it cost? Who's paying for it? How do we increase the economic pie? How do we share it fairly?  What happens if we don't do it? What happens if we do?

And what's next? 

Mind recording and downloading. Immortality. 

Virtual reality. Manufactured religion. Hell? Heaven? The nerd rapture.

Robots? Self driving cars. Self flying quad-copters. The end of work?

Leaning how to distinguish emotions from logic when making decisions? Nope. Never going to happen. Unless the killer robots take over.

Thanks for reading.

 -Dr. Mike

How to Estimate Anything From Nothing...

or How to be a Good System Engineer

This will be a discussion of how to estimate something from little or almost no information.
We call this making a Scientific Wild-Ass Guess or a SWAG.

I've been pretending to be a system engineer for a long time.  And I have to admit that I still have to go look up the average wait time in a queue or the Poisson distribution. Typically estimates are extensions of known data, the more data the better.  But what happens when you know hardly anything about the data that answers the question, because it doesn't exist?

Something from Nothing...

The modern method of how to estimate something from no information at all is the classic paper: "Implications of the Copernican principle for our future prospects" by J. Richard Gott III [1]. Sounds innocuous, but is probably one of the best tools ever invented for doing system analysis when information is lacking. It's almost as important as Baye's theorem that allows one to adjust their estimates of a probability given new information.  With these two tricks you can make an estimation of almost anything, and correct it as you learn new information. Some might call that science, but it's more like 'practical science' or what most people call engineering.

How long will the Berlin Wall stand?

If you were standing beside the Berlin Wall when vacationing in Berlin, you might ask yourself that question.  But how could you predict something like that?  Go collect data about all the walls in all the cities in the world by type, size, lifetime and then use that data to predict how long the Berlin Wall will live by finding all the walls that are similar to it? That's a lot of work. But it will almost certainly give you a fairly accurate lifetime prediction for the Berlin Wall. We can make a SWAG without all that additional data, it will be more inaccurate, but maybe it's accurate enough for whatever other calculation you are doing.

Gott's Copernican theory goes like this: If I am at a random place and time and I observe something that is N years old, with a 95% confidence level I can say that it's extended lifetime will be between N/39 and 39N.

Or a 2/3rds chance of having a 1/6 to 6 times longer lifetime.  Why?

This is because if you are observing the lifetime of an object at random, you can be there at any time during its lifetime. This means that if you assume that lifetimes are randomly distributed and your appearance is random, half the time you will be in the last half of the object's lifetime and half the time you'll be in the object's first half of its lifetime. Continuing on, there's a 2.5% chance you'll be in the object's first 2.5% of its lifetime or 1/40th of its life. Double that for a 95% confidentiality limit, so 1/39th and then 39 times for the odds in the other direction.  For instance, Gott was a tourist in Germany in 1966.  He saw the Berlin wall.  He read a plaque that told him the wall was built in 1957. He then concluded that he was seeing the wall at a random time during its lifetime.  He wasn't there to see the wall, he just happened upon it. Since at that time the wall was 9 years old, with 95% confidence, he expect it to last another 9/39 years (12 weeks) to 39*9 years (351 years). It came down in 1984 after 27 years. He expected it to be there 1.5 years to 54 years 2/3rds of the time. Whats the most likely time to live? 50 % of the time it is between 3 and 18 years. The most likely time is 9 more years.[2]

How Long will North Korea's communist state survive?

They were founded in 1952.  That was 64 years ago.  With a 95% confidence level the state of North Korea will be around for 64/39 years (1 year, 7 months) to 64*39 years (2500) years. Wow, that's scary. Maybe we should figure out some way to 'nudge' that around.

See how easy it is! There's been many arguments about why exactly this formula actually works.  Its been tried on Broadway show run lengths and found to be accurate and I've read about it on the Internets, so it must be true. Let's use it to calculate something interesting: How long will the human race survive? (From [1]) The human race is a species. It's been around for about 200,000 years. You are alive today at some random time.  The human species, with a 95% probability will be around for another 200,000/39 years (6000 years) or 200,000*39 years (9,321,000 years.)  Hmm. Looks like not enough time to settle the galaxy, but it depends upon how fast you can travel. It doesn't say that we might not create some other species to settle the galaxy... but it seem unlikely that we could by ourselves. Seems like it's going to take killer robots to settle the galaxy or nothing.

Thanks for reading,
 -Dr. Mike

[1] Nature, Vol. 363, 27 May 1993
[2] reference

The Case for Intelligent Design.

What is the Case for Intelligent Design? 

First we have to define Intelligent Design.  In the common sense of a replacement for "creationism" it is obvious that there is no case for it.  It's actually a negative argument: since things are so complicated they must be made and could not have happened by accident. That makes some sense: particularly complicated things are unlikely to be made by accident, so things that look like they are designed probably are. This doesn't apply to humans, though; we haven't evolved by accident: we evolve by the random mutations but they are passed along by survival of the fittest.  If the mutation has a small chance of making the entity survive long enough to have a better chance to reproduce, then this mutation will eventually be passed onto more of the members of the species as time goes on.

This was the insight that Darwin (and many others) had 150 years ago.  Darwin was the first to understand that the assumption explained many, many things and he struggled to make the argument irrefutable.  And he did a great job of it, and others have admirably extended his argument. This theory actually begin a science of biology that has driven biological research ever since.  It has driven us to understand genes, DNA, and the history of life itself. The theory has been greatly expanded and the idea that anything in biology has been "intelligently designed" is not believable, there are just too many counter-examples of bad design in evolution to even contemplate this.

Except for Craig Ventnor's latest work. Craig has actually "designed" a live cell by picking fragments of DNA from multiple bacteria.  Our theory of evolution (mutations, inheritance and survival of the fittest) is a statement about the past; in the past evolution occurred without intelligent design, going forward this in no longer true. And of course, the intelligence designing creation in the future is human intelligence, not some supernatural intelligence. In fact, the new capability given by CRISPR to edit individual pieces of DNA in living beings shows us that intelligent design can happen. So I would have to say that Intelligent Design is now a fact, not in a pseudo-scientific version of creationism, but in reality.

What should be Intelligently Designed?

This leaves us with two remaining interesting questions. The first: Should people be intelligently designed? In my opinion the obvious answer is yes.  But there must be limits on the usage of this new technology. Just like there are protocols on how to handle and study dangerous infectious bacteria, there have to be limits on the study and use of gene altering techniques.  I won't go into where the limits should be, but there should definitely be protocols to contain the damage that this research could do. What other limits should there be?  Elon Musk and Sam Altman have brought up the idea that Artificial Intelligence research should have protocols and limits.  I think they are partially right, protocols need to be set up to make the research safe, not limits.

Where else should we limit Intelligent Design? The world has agreed that biological weapons and other weapons of mass destruction should only be researched under certain protocols and the actual moral high ground is to not research them at all. You want to make sure that your research won't cause the human race to earn the last Darwin Award.

And I would claim that you don't want anything to be designed by a 'supernatural' intelligence. Who would trust anything outside of your control or influence? I put supernatural in quotes because I think it is a word without a meaning in reality.  It certainly affects reality by influencing the way people think.  But the very idea of supernatural is the ultimate oxymoron.  What does supernatural mean? It means 'attributed to some force beyond scientific understanding or the laws of nature.' But what does nature mean? Nature is everything.  But maybe not?

Maybe there's an unseen space beyond what we can normally sense.  That would sort of be in a 'different' nature as it's hard to detect. And maybe beings in that space can affect things in nature.  Maybe. Has this ever been measured in a reproducible way?  Not really.  It could happen.  It's not likely.  It could explain souls.  The soul could exist in this other realm and be attached to your brain and control it. It could happen.  And if it does happen, we'll know pretty soon, so it won't go undetected.  It won't be outside of nature, it will be measurable and recognizable.  As I said, being beyond nature is an oxymoron.

What else should be intelligently designed? Other than everything.  I would argue that the most important thing to be intelligently designed are morals.  So question two: Is it moral to intelligently design morals?

Intelligently Designed Morals

Why do morals need to be intelligently designed? Hasn't this already happened? I would argue no. What's happened is that evolution has design a 'moral code' into humans, the problem is that evolution is random, driven by individual survival.  It's not a moral code but a survival code.  And a survival code is not moral, it's selfish, it's brutal, it's just not right.  This tells me that we can't depend upon our inner moral sense to design a moral code.  We have to start from first principles.

The first requirement of a moral code is that it must be designed from overriding principles.

People have attempted to design morals many times; however, I think we need to add a framework for the intelligent design of morals.  We need to set some goals. What kind of goals should a moral code have?  Why do we need a moral code?  We need a moral code to decide on how to be good vs. evil, or do we? Our internal compass is already a good guide.  We need a moral code to make sure our inner guide is correct.  There are many logical traps that we can fall into just listening to our moral intuition.  Why this is so has been studied in economics (with many Nobel prizes awarded); a great example is: "Thinking Fast and Slow" by Daniel Kahneman.  The brain has many biases and only clear thinking and real logic can prevent us from making mistakes.

It's obvious to me that all religions have been designed by men.  This doesn't mean that they can't have reasonable moral codes. Many religions claim to have been inspired by or dictated by God or gods, but they all seem basically unchanged if the gods don't exist.  Which is a good thing as there has yet to be a god that actually does anything real or useful as far as I can tell from the historical record. The idea of a god is useful, the god itself, not so much.  In my opinion religions and morality should just stay separated as they've done such a poor job of them in the past. (Slavery, equality under the eyes of the law, torture, discrimination, child abuse, wars, the list goes on...)

The second principle of moral code design is that it can't depend upon reputation for correctness.

Morals are too important to not be examined, debated and understood. Depending on God or tradition will lead to serious problems with moral codes, it can be a good start, but if the proposed morals aren't carefully vetted, you can run into big problems.  If you don't have an overriding principle, you can't verify a moral code, so principles one and two work together. 

I would claim that we want to design morals for conscious beings.  If a thing isn't conscious, morals don't apply to it. Why is that?  Only conscious beings have experiences, without experience there is no morality. So that will be our third principle: Morale codes are for conscious beings.

Moral codes set the standards for interactions of conscious beings.

If you want to design a morality for all conscious beings it leads you to start with certain postulates. You can design a moral code that is not fair for all conscious beings. Almost all religious moral codes have been designed this way.  In Christianity the moral code is for all humans to be treated equally (animals and lesser beings need not apply.) Jewish morals actually care somewhat about some animals. Islam is very clear that believers and non-believers are treated differently. I'm not an expert in religions, but this is what I see around me. I'm happy to be corrected in any assumption or manner.

It appears that morals designed by religions are sorely lacking in morality. Not to be so unexpected as they were designed thousands of years ago typically, when we were somewhat more ignorant than we are today.  Even the religions invented recently have dropped the ball.  Think of Scientology and Mormonism; not much break through in morality from either of those religions.

I'm gong to discuss moral codes that treat all conscious beings as being worthy of respect. I don't necessarily like the consequences of the moral codes they create, but that's besides the fact. How do you rank moral codes?  If we can use reputation, what can we use?  You could use the criteria of which ever moral code makes you happier or increases your well-being. Makes sense.  But I would argue that it is incomplete and leads to unfair and immoral moral codes.  You need to judge a moral code more broadly, it's not just you that needs to agree it's best, it's everyone.  This puts severe restrictions on how to judge a moral code.

A moral code needs to be evaluated in how well it treats any conscious being in any situation.

Wait, you're saying, any conscious being?  An insect? A mouse? A slime mold? Yes, any conscious being that has experiences must be taken into account by a moral code. Different levels of experience could be treated differently or expected to act differently and be treated differently (can a mouse even understand a moral code?) I think this requirement is paramount in building a real moral code. It's not just about human beings it's about conscious beings. Different beings have different levels of consciousness and different levels of intelligence that allow them to foresee the consequences of their actions, or not, so should be treated differently by moral codes.

Finally a moral code should maximize the amount of well-being or happiness (in the philosophical sense of flourishing) of conscious beings. Just like medicine works to increase your good health.  We don't know what perfect health is, but we can usually tell in what direction good health is: less pain, longer lives, more opportunities, etc.  Same for well-being.  While we don't know what the perfect well-being is, we can usually figure out what direction it is in: better health, more flourishing, less pain, more opportunities, more consciousness, etc.

A well designed moral code must maximize the well-being of conscious entities.

Let's recap. Moral codes tell us how conscious beings should interact, they must be designed from first principles and evaluated on how well they treat all individual conscious beings and how well they maximize well-being for all conscious beings. That's a tall order. All the moral codes I've seen are seriously lacking in many of these attributes, so I would claim in great need of fixing.  I'm pretty sure that the ultimate moral code has not yet been designed. However, viewing a moral code in this light gives us hope that we may be able to propose moral codes and tune them for best effects.

The world is overdue for good science and good engineering to be done on moral codes. There are many falsifiable hypothesis that can be made on moral codes given this framework (science) and many ways to run experiments to decide if one part of a code is better than another (engineering.) It's about time to stop reasoning about morals using philosophy and religion and to start reasoning about morals using the modern practices of science and engineering.

It's time for morals to be intelligently designed.

We've come a long way since we learned to speak and write. No reason to stop progressing now because someone told you they already have the answer. Question it. Evaluate it. Review it. Find the flaws. Improve it. Never forget. My inspirations:

• Sam Harris: "The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values."
• Michael Schermer: "The Moral Arc: How Science Makes Us Better People."
• Jerry A. Coyne: "Faith Versus Fact: Why Science and Religion Are Incompatible."
• Steven Pinker: "The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined."

Thanks for reading.
 -Dr. Mike