Atlas of Political Correctness

An appreciation of Cloud Atlas. (Spoiler alert!)

I recently happened across the 2012 film "Cloud Atlas", which must be one of the baggiest films ever made. Even reading the plot on the Wikipedia page leaves one befuddled. Yet it was great fun to watch, clearly an actor's feast and treasury of tropes and cultural references, six films packed into one. It is typical for science fiction films now to have huge ambitions and let plots go wild, sacrificing coherence for short-term motivation and effects. No reference to 2001 here- that would have been a harsh comparison, and overly optimistic.

The ensemble of actors get to play many roles, some have parts in each of the six stories set in different time periods. But no one crosses type. The good characters are always played by one set of actors, the bad guys by the other set. Nurse Noakes of the prison-like nursing home, in an inspired bit of cross-dressing, is played by Hugo Weaving, who also plays the killer Bill Smoke and the future executioner Boardman Mephi, among others. This helpfully keeps at least the good-guy/bad guy valence coherent, even as the rest of stories hop-scotch about wildly in time and place.

And what places! There is a matrix-like high-tech future dystopia, and even more dystopian low-tech lord-of-the-flies future beyond that, a seventies streets-of-San Francisco, Victorian shipping, wartime England, and the present. A grab-bag of well-worn settings, vivified by enthusiastic acting and propulsive, if perforated, plots.

Everything is confused. This DVD cover hints at the sprawling mess the Wachowski brothers attempted to bring to the screen.

So what is it about? Each story has a basic good versus bad armature, whether of vast world-spanning oppression countered by a Zion/Keanu Reeves-style resistance, an oil industry plot to blow up a nuclear reactor, countered by a journalist, or an evil Hugh Grant who tries to lock up his brother in a nursing home, which the latter escapes in a crazy escape and chase sequence. The various worlds / times are tenuously linked by readings from their respective pasts. The farthest future uses a climactic speech from the Zion-like resistance as its scripture. The Zion resistance watches the nursing home caper for entertainment. And so forth. The real connections, however, are the politically correct tropes of contemporary movie making. The heroes are all good, the villains are all bad, and each is ready identified (cue music) whatever the age we may be in.

The relentlessness of this good/bad dichotomy easily knits the whole thing together even without an identifiable plot, yet is also a glaring philosophical weakness. We watch movies to be uplifted and gain some hope in a difficult world, and generally expect and deserve a happy ending. But films such as these prompt the question of why... Why are bad people so common throughout the ages? Why do they dominate epoch after epoch, world after world, when every single person in the audience is cheering for the good characters, not the bad? Isn't there something deeper to be said? Indeed, isn't this easy, Zoroastrian / Manichean dramatic dichotomy damaging to a mature understanding of the world and of ourselves?

If we simply cheer for the good, and from such flacid moral exercises believe we are good, doesn't that lead right to the moral blindness that these movies try so strenuously and earnestly to "address"? Doesn't it contribute to various unwoke blindnesses like white priviledge and American exceptionalism? Unless we interrogate our own involvement in evil, the needs and compromises we routinely make, which lead through the many white-washed, green-washed, and theo-washed institutions of greed and tribalism to all the bad effects we decry in the world around us, we have not gotten very far.

• Language of fascism.
• Our position as most feudal country in the developed world.
• Lessons in Ebonics.

We Live in Each Other's Heads

Family, faith, abuse, and gaslighting- review of "Educated", by Tara Westover.

Memoir can be a powerful form, combining truth with the most personal urgency. Westover's coming of age saga tells of a prepper childhood spent far away from any school or doctor, in an isolated Mormon family in Idaho- a patriarchy of one. It was also idylic, with a mountain to themselves, horses, seven children, and the freedom roam and explore. The children, though not taught formally, were also free to roam intellectually, if they could do so on their own. The trajectory of Tara's childhood appears distinctly downhill, however, as she matures from carefree child to a girl who needs to be squeezed into the appointed role of a Mormon woman, wife, mother. The story revolves most strongly around the social pressures that she gradually comes to realize are choking her- love that curdles into control, so that time-honored roles are fulfilled, and life can go on as always.

The family eventually splits into two halves- three children who escape into the larger world, get educations, live independently, and are forced, because the family can love only those who are obedient, to break ties. And the four children who not just stay behind, but work for the family business. Tara has the most spectacular escape, getting a PhD in history at Cambridge, and using her scholarly skills to write this book which lays so much bare. She also learns a lot of philosophy ... and is no longer a Mormon.

Oh, how things have changed- the Oprah interview.

But it took a lot of agony, and some therapy, to get there. The core of the book is really about physical and mental battles with the male patriarchs- the father, Gene, and the brother, Shawn. The father is one of those cranky autodidacts who figure everything out for themselves, and then insist they are right (even writing blogs about it!) and speaking on God's behalf. He runs a junk yard, salvaging copper, iron, and other materials from junked cars in the most unsafe ways, getting various family members injured in the process. Finally, he manages to get himself half-incinerated by taking a blowtorch to unemptied gasoline tank, and, while surviving by the grace of his wife's diligent care, is hobbled for life. More striking, however is his prediction that the Y2K crisis will bring on the Days of Abomination. He is convinced that the end-times are near, society will break down, and they, on their mountain will happily be both safe and vindicated. Lectures on these themes go on endlessly. But as he and Tara watch TV that millennium night, nothing happens, and she sees him visibly diminish, brought down by a cruel reality.

The father provides the baseline fundamentalism and ultimate leadership in the family dynamic. But Shawn brings the muscle. His relationship with Tara has mostly been very close and positive. But it is also clear that he is a psychopath, and Tara's maturation brings out a dark, controlling and vindictive side. He makes a practice of calling her a whore for any transgression of the patriarchal code, then nigger if she has gotten dirty in the junk yard, then abusing her in cruel and physical ways. Afterwards, he says it was all in good fun, and she can just tell him to stop any time, right? We now call this gaslighting, though no one had a name for it back then. For a teen age girl, it was shameful, degrading, and confusing. And it is fully backed up by the family, since the father doesn't see anything wrong with a bit of horseplay and role enforcement, and the mother- well, the mother can not cross the father.

Years on, after some degree of consciousness raising, Tara has the temerity to call Shawn on his behavior. The father goes on an extensive campaign to close the family ranks, and finally comes to Tara to give he the climactic choice of the book- accept his priestly blessing, which is to say accede to the patriarchal hierarchy and squelch her own memories and growing self, or else be ostracized. Westover has told this story in excruciating detail in order to make sense of this moment, to show how powerful social control can be, capable of turning people against themselves and against their very knowledge of reality.

Why? The evolutionary argument is reasonably clear- people, living in social systems, need to have some shared understandings of each other and reality. These understandings are tied up with power and who gets to run these systems- whose interests are served. And it is historically clear that those who are disagreeable enough to buck the established narrative very often end up dead- burned at the stake, forced to drink the hemlock, run out of town, ostracized. The line between justice in some necessary civic sense, and totalitarian measures against deviance, impiety, and disobedience is not a clear one. It is a modern innovation to separate the state from religious conceptions of the social order, now leaving each religious community to police its own congregants with other tools. But over the long arc of human history and pre-history, these were closely intertwined, indeed indivisible. Being trapped in one's family and tribe meant getting along with its reality, whatever that might be.

Tara is almost crushed by the choice, and the dissonance of being loved by people who increasingly seem both untethered from reality, and intensely controlling of their communal version of it. She goes through years of depression and doubt, torn to the core between loyalty to family, and loyalty to what she is shaping as her new self, fostered on intellectual adventures that go unimaginably beyond what her former (and alternate) self could have achieved. Is it worth it? That is the frequent problem of waking up from a religion (or a family) - that one has to lose its comforts and support in order to understand it more fully and overcome its glaring limitations.

• You don't have to be smart to run a cult.
• Thanks, Tea Party.
• Stupidity is generally not the answer.
• How many times does this president need to be impeached?
• Bill Mitchell on the job guarantee, and on bandwagons.
• How's your sky?
• Some more nice piano.

Greedy, Hateful, Lustful Bastards

The shadow in Jungian psychology. Our motive force, but also our deepest secret.

As the Buddhists know very well, this thing we call the "I" is not a single thing, and may not be anything at all. It certainly isn't a coherent story of perseverence and triumph. The deeper you go, the less identifiable and singlular it is, since we knit together vast numbers and scales of activity, from the reactions of metabolism to the synapsing of neurons and the drive for social success, even to communal and shared culture, into this being entitled "I". Even on the psychological level, there are myriad unconscious elements, making the quest to know one's self a life-long and generally unsuccessful endeavor, for those who are so inclined.

In Freudian psychology, the contents of the unconscious (referred to sometimes as the subconscious) are uniformly bleak. It is the realm of lusts and drives, a pandora's box to be kept firmly repressed, in order for its custodian to be a functioning member of society. But the effort of repression is draining and costly, leading to a sort of hydraulic theory of the unconscious, where the more material there is to repress, the more effort is required, to the point that people "break down" from the strain. Likewise, releases of pressure through swearing, or watching violent films, or thrill-seeking and similar forms of "fun" relieve some strain, and help maintain the proper psychological pressure.

Jungian psychology sees the unconscious as a much larger and varied entity. It forms the basis of our positive as well as negative motivations, and operates, among many levels, at a level of archetypal symbology that is richly descriptive and informative when allowed expression via dreams, free association, and creative activities like writing and visual arts. It includes our intuition, and can be tremendously healing, persistently giving us images / glimmers of needed changes and goals.

Tibetan Buddhism hosts a large collection of monster and shadow figures. This is Palden Lhamo, who is a protector, but a wrathful one who rides through a lake of blood, spreading death and destruction to Tibet's enemies. Not enough to keep out the Chinese, unfortunately.

But even in Jungian psychology, the unconscious has a dark side- the shadow, which comprises the motivations we try to deny or hide. But can not get rid of- they are always with us and part of us. The greed, hate, and lust that undeniably drive us, but which we do not want as part of our persona- our face to the world. In the theatrical presentation of the self, we are good, virtuous, and respectful. Repression is the order of the day. While much of Jungian psychology is devoted to interpreting positive messages from the unconscious, managing the negative and the dark is very much a focus as well, as these aspects are universal and persistent. It is the work of consciousness to integrate the shadow into the ego / personality, in a controlled and accepting way.

One particular specialty of the shadow is projection, causing us to consciously reject bad traits in ourselves by ascribing them to others. Our president is a master of projection, insulting others, accusing them of the very things he himself is guilty of, as a way of keeping himself sane and narcissistically coherent. Why anyone else puts up with it is hard to fathom, but then certain bloggers have similar problems of casting stones from glass houses. There are also collective projections, like the concept of hell. An important goal of depth psychology is to come to a mature accommodation with all of one's own facets, in order to be able withdraw projections of this sort, to own one's behavior, good and bad, and thus to master the shadow, without giving up its motivating virtues.

Another way to engage with the shadow is to indulge it to a controlled extent, as happens in bacchanals, carnivals, video games, and Trump rallies. Giving free reign to our dark side is, in the hydraulic sense, very free-ing, re-creational, and possibly even an ecstatic experience. But it must be carefully bounded and controlled. It is no way to run a positive life or culture. One can grade various cultures and their religions on a sort of shadow scale, from the carnage of the Aztecs and Nazis to the perhaps unrealistic compassion of Buddhist culture as in pre-invasion Tibet. Many religions have shown shadow aspects, such as the duality of Zoroastrianism and Manichaeism, and the jihads and crusades of the Islamic and Christian varieties. The happiest societies seem to have the least shadow aspect- places like the Scandinavian countries, with their increasing mild secularity, and pre-invasion Tibet. In contrast, the unhappiest societies are heavily driven by shadow, like the Islamic countries of today, who not only valorize violence, but mix in plenty of "honor" and misogyny as well.

I think the lesson is that the hydraulic theory of controlled shadow release is not correct, rather, that more repression is better, when done consistently and intelligently. Releasing the shadow is bad, whatever the dose. The Buddhist technologies of meditation and cultivation in ways of charity, compassion, and love are clearly successful in cultivating a wider society that reflects those values. Conversely, having a president whose tastes tend to beauty pageants and WWE, and whose modus tweeterandi is hate, fosters a society that will be experiencing the opposite values.

• Single payer health care.
• Pence in charge of science?
• Annals of the credulous.
• Bloomberg's peeps. 
• Oops- OAS was wrong.
• Amazing ancient book of the week.

Toxoplasma: What's Eating Your Brain?

A large proportion of the US population is chronically infected with a psychoactive pathogen.

Do you love cats? There may be a reason, quite beyond their noble indifference to your affection. Toxoplasma gondii is a parasitic microbe that passes from cats to other animals in their environment, including humans, and is notorious for causing mental disturbances in them. For example, rats infected with Toxoplasma switch from avoiding cat urine to being attracted by it. The evolutionary logic of this phenomenon is as obvious as it is macabre, but how does it happen? A recent paper presented a small step towards understanding this pathogen, by finding one transcription factor that runs a large portion of its program of differentiation into the brain-cyst form, the bradyzoite.

Toxoplasma is a complex one-celled eukaryote, in the same family as the malaria parasite, plasmodium vivax. These pathogens lead far more interesting lives than your average bacterium and come with larger genetic repertoires. Toxoplasma generates several different cell types, starting with sperm and egg cells, which form in the cat hosts. These mate and form oocysts which are incredibly tough- they survive defecation by the cat and survive thereafter in the environment for months. When picked up by another unsuspecting mammal, (we can ingest them either as contaminating oocysts from the environment, or from undercooked pork that was infected), they proliferate in an asexual stage, and can invade any cell or tissue, causing toxoplasmosis, which can be fatal. But usually it isn't, and the immune system fights these tiny cells to a draw, prompting some to hunker down in a specially dormant form, the bradyzoite, that forms cysts full of toxoplasma cells in muscle and brain tissue. These cysts are completely impervious, not only to immune system attack, but to any drug or vaccine yet devised.

A Toxoplasma cyst in a brain, full of pathogen cells, courtesy of the USDA.

Somewhere between a quarter and half of the US population is chronically infected with this pathogen, and it would be nice to know what effects it is having. Chronic toxoplasma infection is known to positively associate with schizophrenia, pose special dangers to pregnant women, and even contribute to traffic accidents, not to mention to the proliferation of cats. While we do not yet know quite what the bradyzoites are doing in our brains, their formation is more amenable to scientific study. It is stress factors from immune pressure, specifically chemical attack from cells like neutrophils and macrophages that cause Toxoplasma to respond by differentiating, in a program that involves hundreds of genes, (of its genome of roughly 8,000 genes), to the bradyzoite cell type, which is slow-growing and communal, with special protective surface features. The current authors have finally found one gene that, when knocked out, completely abolishes differentiation into the bradyzoite state, and also, they show, is a critical part of the normal program that generates it. They call this gene BFD1, for bradyzoite formation deficient.

BFD1 is a transcription regulator, from a well-known (Myb) family, which bind DNA and frequently participate in development and proliferation, some of which are also oncogenes. In this case, not only is BFD1 itself induced during such stress and able to completely block differentiation when absent, but it can also drive differentiation all by itself, in the absence of stress. This is shown by arranging overexpression under control of the experimenter rather than by the normal stresses, which leads to cell differentiation and formation of the characteristic bradyzoite cysts. It is a rare demonstration of a true master controller of a developmental process.

Toxoplasma gene BFD1 is driven by the experimenters by adding a chemical (called Shield-1, lower panels) that releases a destruction system over an engineered and over-expressed BFD1, and leads, after 6 days, to cyst formation. The control infection (upper panels) leads instead to the obliteration of the infected cells. This demonstrates that even in the absence of normal differentiating signals, BFD1 will initiate the full differentiation program all by itself.

This is a landmark achievement in the study of this pathogen, and will open up a lot of future work on its encystment differentiation program, on how these cells defend themselves in a hostile environment, and what they are doing in our and to our brains. For example, these researchers found 509 genes to which BFD1 binds, among which are itself (for a positive feedback loop), and other genes known as markers for the bradyzoite state. Is some unusual chemical or protein being expressed that causes neural alterations, or is it the locations the bradyzoites choose for their cyst formation? Or is it the occasional release from encystement, and the ensuing immune reaction, that generates these effects? It is an area of some public health concern, and another area slowly yielding to the advance of scientific inquiry.

• More on Russia, nascent capitalism, and the botched transition.
• Where are we at in Afghanistan?
• Guantanamo- part of the slide towards state lawlessness.
• Poem of the week.

On the Origin of Facts

Bruno Latour tours the Salk Institute, finds science taking place, and has a hard time deconstructing it.

There is a production process in science, by which the educational background, institutional setting, funding decisions, social accidents, and happenstances that form directions of research, hunches, hypotheses, and insights are stripped away, intentionally and systematically, to produce "facts" in a form ready for publication. This de- / re-contextualization serves to obfuscate the process and shamanize the practitioners, but more importantly it serves to generalize the resulting fact and put it into its scientific rather than social context. And it is the scientific context- the fact's objective existence- not the social context, that makes it powerful and useful for further construction of other facts. The social context forms part of the essential background / input, but the produced facts and insights are not by nature social, nor should they be received as such.

Experiments are instrumental in this transformation process, which goes from a hunch, to a collegial suggestion, to an hypothesis, to a testable hypothesis, to the hunt for alternative hypotheses and thus for experiments designed to exclude them and to support the main hypothesis, (if true), followed by group presentations and critique, outside peer review that adduces more alternative hypotheses and possible experiments, and finally to publication and collegial acceptance (or rejection and refutation). When all this is done, the murky origins of the hunch necessarily fall away and become trivially unimportant, (other than in memoirs and reminiscences), and the fact stands alone as supported with all the armament that science can bring to bear, both in its technical testing capabilities and its social structure of critique. It thence, if lucky, becomes a sentence in a textbook. In Bruno Latour's words, it is "freed from the circumstances of its production"

The above was a recounting of the conventional (and scientist's) perspective on the evolution of scientific facts. Whether this is the case is contested by social constructivism, a movement in philosophy that adheres to antirealism, which is to say that all of what we regard as outside "reality" is socially constructed, and thus science is likewise a social institution that generates conventions that by its social power it is able to foist onto a naive public, who in turn, like sheep, contribute their taxes to keep the scientific community wallowing in money and social power, cranking out yet more obscure and artificial "facts". Indeed, the very status of truth that is given to facts is fundamentally a social construct made up of a community of believing people, whatever their reasons and supposed evidence.

A few of Latour's works over the years. He declines to be post-modern, because he disagrees with the whole frame of modernity, as being somehow different from or non-continuous with the rest of history. And this attitude comes back to his dismissive attitude towards science and the enlightenment as being a break in kind from prior ways of understanding the world. It has just been fetishes all the way down.

Bruno Latour (along with his co-writer Steve Woolgar) waded into this controversy back in the 1970s with a French philosophical and anthropological background, to investigate what really goes on in a laboratory. He embedded himself into a leading laboratory and learned how it operated, informally and formally. This is recounted in the book "Laboratory Life" (1979; recent review), which, as usual for continental philosophers, is challenging to make sense of. The authors tend to straddle the two perspectives, both respecting and recounting the normal scientific activities and perspectives, (if rather laboriously), and then also persistently suggesting their contrary viewpoint and program that they bring to the project.

"Despite the fact that our scientists held the belief that the inscriptions could be representations or indicators of some entity with an independent existence 'out there', we have argued that such entities were constituted solely through the use of these inscriptions. ... By contrast, we do not conceive of scientists using various strategies as pulling back the curtain on pregiven, but hitherto concealed, truths. Rather, objects (in this case substances) are constituted through the artful creativity of scientists. Interestingly, attempts to avoid the use of terminology which implies the preexistence of objects subsequently revealed by scientists has led us into certain sylistic difficulties. This, we suggest, is precisely because of the prevalence of a certain form of discourse in the description of process. We have therefore found it extremely difficult to formulate descriptions of scientific activity which do not yield to the misleading impression that science is about discovery (rather than creativity and construction). It is not just that a change of emphasis is required; rather, the formulations which characterize historical descriptions of scientific practice require exorcism before the nature of this practice can best be understood."

Exorcism indeed! One might posit a simpler explanation- that science is, in fact, in the business of discovery, though with the caveat that what is to be dis-covered is never fully known beforehand, sometimes not even suspected, and thus there is a great deal of intutition, creativity, variation, and social construction involved in the process, and uneven and unpredictable results coming out. While the status of the resulting fact is never perfectly secure, and is supported by another social process of conventional agreement, that agreement is routinely granted once the preceeding critical hoops have been surmounted and leads generally to the vast pool of factual and "objective" information that finds its home in the academic literature, textbooks, college instruction, Wikipedia, etc. A pool that is further confirmed routinely by succeeding work and technical developments that depend on its objective factuality.

Latour does not, in the end, adhere to the hard program of social construction, for the simple fact that the object of the scientific story he recounts, the thyrotropin releasing hormone (TRF), was found, was found to be a specific and real substance, and went on to a respected place in medical practice and the textbooks, not to mention later earning a Nobel prize. There is real comedy in the attempt, however, as the anthropologist takes on the scientists at their own game, analyzing and plumbing their depths for structures and paradigms that they themselves hardly suspect, complete with diagrams of the laboratory, pictures of the roof and other apparatus, graphs of publication trends, and verbatim interviews with protagonists, underlings, etc. It is a sort of depth-psychology of one laboratory.

"But it would be incorrect to conclude that the TRF story only exhibits the partial influence of sociological features. instead, we claim that TRF is a thoroughly social construction. By maintaining the sense in which we use social, we hope to be able to pursue the strong programme at a level apparently beyond traditional sociological grasp. In Knorr's terms, we want to demonstrate the idiosyncratic, local, heteregeneous, contextual, and multifaceted character of scientific practices. We suggest that the apparently logical character of reasoning is only part of a much more complex phenomenon that Auge calls 'practices of interpretation' and which comprises local, tacit negotiation, constantly changing evaluations, and unconscious or institutionalized gestures. ... In short, we observe how difference between the logic of scientific and non-scientific practices of interpretation are created and sustained within the laboratory."

Granted, most of this is overwrought, but the true worth of this work was that these observers came into an eminent lab and paid minute attention to what was going on, and emphasized that what comes out of the sausage machine in publication and other products is far different than the materials that go in. While the conventional approach would emphasize the preceeding scientific observations and technical developments that led the leader of this lab to even contemplate that the purification of TRF from millions of dissected brains was possible and desirable, Latour emphasizes instead, and with some success, the social contingencies that surrounded the original uncertainties, the slow progress, the false leads and constantly discarded "bad results", the huge amount of money and effort required, and other nitty-gritty that forms the day-today of laboratory life. The latter emphasis is useful in accounting for how science gets done, but discards other crucial inputs, and is ultimately not at all convincing as a general theory of what science accomplishes or is.

I think the confusion arises fundamentally (apart from professional jealousy) from the fact that social constructivism is perfectly valid for some areas of our lives, such as arts, fashion, religion, morality, and to some extent, politics. Many problems do not have an objective criterion, and are socially constructed on an ongoing basis with criteria that boil down to what and who is thought good, whether for the individual, family, collective, etc. And the insistant denial of the total social construction of one's own field- as is understandably routine among scientists- is particularly vehement (and unfounded) in the case of religion and has lent the latter bizarre and extraordinary power through the centuries, which the deconstructivist project is entirely appropriate and well-prepared to investigate. And it should be said that many forms of primitive and pseudo-science partake of this form as well, if not of outright fraud. So the line is hardly stable or absolute. But when it comes to science as practiced in the enlightnement tradition, with a variety of safeguards and institutional practices that feature competition, peer review at multiple levels, and final public transparency, the approach falls flat.

• A contemporary accounting of this scientific race, last of a 3-part series.
• TRF is one of a series of "releasing hormones", operating between the hypothalamus and pituitary. Or should the word "is" be put in quotes?
• A critique of the critique.
• Mankiw takes on MMT, and obsesses about inflation, along mainstream lines.
• MMT replies.
• Limited liberty at Liberty University.
• Notes from the Taliban.
• Birds: who cares?
• A cult is exposed.

Success is an Elixir

We are besotted by success. For very obvious evolutionary reasons, but with problematic consequences.

Why is the James Bond franchise so compelling? It got more cartoonish over the years, but the old Sean Connery embodied a heady archetype of the completely successful hero. A man as skilled in vetting wines as in flying planes, as debonair with the ladies as he was in fighting hand-to-hand, all while outwitting the most malevolent and brilliant criminal minds. Handsome, witty, and brutally effective in all he turned his hand to, there was little complexity, just relentless perfection, other than an inexplicable penchant for getting himself into dramatic situations, from which he then suavely extricated himself.

We worship success, for understandable reasons, but sometimes a little too much. As Reagan said, nothing succeeds like success. It is fundamental to our growth from childhood to adulthood, to demonstrate and be recognized for some kind of effectiveness- passing tests, graduating from school, becoming skilled in some art or profession, which is socially recognized as useful, maybe through the medium of money. The ancient rites of passage recognized this, by setting a key test, such as killing the bear, or withstanding some brutal austerity. Only through effectiveness in life can we justify that life to ourselves and to others. The role can take many forms- extroverts tend to focus on social power- the capability of bending others to their will, while introverts may focus more on other skills like making tools or interpreting the natural world.

The Darwinian case is clear enough- each life is a hero's quest to express one's inner gifts and capabilities, in order to succeed not only in thriving in the given environment, but in replicating, creating more successful versions of one's self which do so all over again. Women naturally fall for successful men, as James Bond so amply demonstrated, but as is seen in so many fields, from basketball to finance.

But all this creates some strong cognitive biases that have some influences that are not always positive. Junior high school is the most obvious realm where these play out. Children are getting used to the idea that life is not fair, and that they can communally form social standards and decisions about what constitutes success, which then victimize those on the losing end- what is cool, what is lame, who is a loser, etc. Popularity contests, like politics and the stock market, are notorious for following fashions that valorize what one generation may believe is success, only to have the next generation look back in horror and redefine success as something else. In these cases, success is little more than a commonly held opinion about success, which leads to the success of con men like our current president, who insists that everything he does is perfectly successful, and who inspires sufficient fear, or confidence, or suspension of disbelief, or is so ably assisted by the propaganda of his allies, that many take him seriously. Indeed, it is exactly the unaccountable support of his allies who surely know better that force others in the wider circles of the society to take seriously what no rational or decent person would believe for a second.

The status of minorities is typically a "loser" status, since by definition their beliefs and practices, and perhaps their very existence, are not popular. While this may be a mark of true Darwinian lack of success, it is far more likely to be an accident of, or an even less innocent consequence of, history. In any case, our worship of success frequently blinds us to the value of minorities and minority perspectives, and is a large reason why such enormous effort has been expended over millennia, on religious, legal, constitutional, and cultural planes, to remedy this bias and promote such things as democracy, diversity, due process, and respect for contrasting perspectives.

We are victimized in many other ways by our mania for success- by advertisers, by the gambling industry, by war mongers, among many others, who peddle easy success while causing incalculable damage. While it is hard to insulate ourselves from these social influences and judgements, which are, after all, the soul of evaluating success; as with any other cognitive bias, being in our guard is essential to avoiding cults, traps, and, ultimately, expensive failure.

• The news from Chris Hedges.
• Who produces value, where is the money going?
• History repeats itself.
• A look back, at Afghanistan.
• Life on earth is suffering.

The Participation Mystique

How we relate to others, things, environments.

We are all wrapped up in the impeachment drama now, wondering what could be going on with a White House full of people who have lost their moral compasses, their minds. Such drama is an exquisite example of participation mystique, on our part as we look on in horror as the not very bright officials change their stories by the day, rats start to leave the sinking ship, and the president twists in the wind. We might not sympathize, but we recognize, and voyeuristically participate in, the emotions running and the gears turning.

Carl Jung took the term, participation mystique, from the anthropologist Lucien Levy Bruhl. The original conception was a rather derogotory concept about the animism common among primitive people, that they project anthropomorphic and social characters to objects in the landscape, thus setting up mystical connections with rocks, mountains, streams, etc. Are such involvements characteristic of children and primitive people, but not of us moderns? Hardly. Modern people have distancing and deadening mechanisms to manage our mental involvement with projected symbologies, foremost among which is the scientific mindset. But our most important and moving experiences partake of identification with another- thing or person, joining our mental projection with their charisma, whatever that might be.

Participation mystique remains difficult to define and use as a concept, despite books being written about it. But I would take it as any empathetic or identification feelings we have toward things and people, by which the boundaries in between become blurred. We have a tremendous mental power to enter into other's feelings, and we naturally extend such participation (or anthropomorphism) far beyond its proper remit, to clouds, weather events, ritual objects, etc. This is as true today with new age religions and the branding relationships that every company seeks to benefit from, as it is in the more natural setting of imputing healing powers to special pools of water, or standing in awe of a magnificent tree. Such feelings in relation to animals has had an interesting history, swinging from intense identification on the part of typical hunters and cave painters, to an absurd dismissal of any soul or feeling by scientistic philosophers like Descartes, and back to a rather enthusiastic nature worship, nature film-making, and a growing scientific and philosophical appreciation of the feelings and moral status of animals in the present day.

Participation mystique is most directly manipulated and experienced in the theater, where a drama is specifically constructed to draw our sympathetic feeings into its world, which may have nothing to do with our reality, or with any reality, but is drenched in the elements of social drama- tension, conflict, heroic motivations, obstacles. If you don't feel for and with Jane Eyre as she grows from abused child, to struggling adult, to lover, to lost soul, and finally to triumphant partner, your heart is made of stone. We lend our ears, but putting it psychologically, we lend a great deal more, with mirror neurons hard at work.

All this is involuntary and unconscious. Not that it does not affect our conscious experience, but the participation mystique arises as an automatic response from brain levels that we doubtless share with many other animals. Seeing squirrels chase each other around a tree gives an impression of mutual involvement and drama that is inescapable. Being a social animal requires this kind of participation in each other's feelings. So what of the psychopath? He seems to get these participatory insights, indeed quite sensitively, but seems unaffected- his own feelings don't mirror, but rather remain self-centered. He uses his capabilities not to sympathise with, but to manipulate, others around him or her. His version of participation mystique is a truncated half-experience, ultimately lonely and alienating.

And what of science, philosophy and other ways we systematically try to escape the psychology of subjective identification and participation? As mentioned above in the case of animal studies, a rigid attitude in this regard has significantly retarded scientific progress. Trying to re-establish objectively what is so obvious subjectively is terribly slow, painstaking work. Jane Goodall's work with chimpanzees stands as a landmark here, showing the productive balance of using both approaches at once. But then when it comes to physics and the wide variety of other exotic phenomena that can not be plausibly anthropomorphized or participated in via our subjective identification, the policy of rigorously discarding all projections and identifications pays off handsomely, and it is logic alone that can tell us what reality is.

• The Democratic candidates on worker rights.
• Was it trade or automation? Now that everything is made in China, the answer should be pretty clear.
• On science.
• Turns out that Google is evil, after all.
• Back when some Republicans had some principles.
• If all else fails, how about a some nice culture war?
• What is the IMF for?
• #DeleteFacebook
• Graphic: who is going to tax the rich? Who is pushing a fairer tax system overall? Compare Biden with Warren carefully.

High Intelligence is Highly Overrated by Highly Intelligent People

AI, the singularity, and watching way too much science fiction: Review of Superintelligence by Nic Bostrom.

How far away is the singularity? That is the point when machine intelligence exceeds human intelligence, after which it is thought that this world will no longer be ours to rule. Rick Bostrom, a philosopher at Oxford, doesn't know when this will be, but is fearful of its consequences, since, if we get it wrong, humanity's fate may not be a happy one.

The book starts strongly, with some well argued and written chapters about the role of intelligence in humanity's evolution, and the competitive landscape of technology today that is setting the stage for this momentous transition. But thereafter, the armchair philosopher takes over, with tedious chapters of hairsplitting and speculation about how fast or slow the transition might be, how collaborative among research groups, and especially, how we could pre-out-think these creations of ours, to make sure they will be well-disposed to us, aka "the control problem".

Despite the glowing blurbs from Bill Gates and others on the jacket, I think there are fundamental flaws with this whole approach and analysis. One flaw is a failure to distinguish between intelligence and power. Our president is a moron. That should tell us something about this relationship. It is not terribly close- the people generally acknowledged as the smartest in history have rarely been the most powerful. This reflects a deeper flaw, which is, as usual, a failure to take evolution and human nature seriously. The "singularity" is supposed to furnish something out of science fiction- a general intelligence superior to human intelligence. But Bostrom and others seem to think that this means a fully formed human-like agent, and those are two utterly different things. Human intelligence takes many forms, and human nature is composed of many more things than intelligence. Evolution has strained for billions of years to form our motivations in profitable ways, so that we follow others when necessary, lead them when possible, define our groups in conventional ways that lead to warfare against outsiders, etc., etc. Our motivational and social systems are not the same as our intelligence system, and to think that anyone making an AI with general intelligence capabilities will, will want to, or even can, just reproduce the characteristics of human motivation to tack on and serve as its control system, is deeply mistaken.

The fact is that we have AI right now that far exceeds human capabilities. Any database is far better at recall than humans are, to the point that our memories are atrophying as we compulsively look up every question we have on Wikipedia or Google. And any computer is far better at calculations, even complex geometric and algebraic calculations, than we are in our heads. That has all been low-hanging fruit, but it indicates that this singularity is likely to be something of a Y2K snoozer. The capabilities of AI will expand and generalize, and transform our lives, but unless weaponized with explicit malignant intent, it has no motivation at all, let alone the motivation to put humanity into pods for its energy source, or whatever.

People-pods, from the Matrix.

The real problem, as usual, is us. The problem is the power that accrues to those who control this new technology. Take Mark Zuckerberg for example. He stands at the head of multinational megacorporation that has inserted its tentacles into the lives of billions of people, all thanks to modestly intelligent computer systems designed around a certain kind of knowledge of social (and anti-social) motivations. All in the interests of making another dollar. The motivations for all this do not come from the computers. They come from the people involved, and the social institutions (of capitalism) that they operate in. That is the real operating system that we have yet to master.

• Facebook - the problem is empowering the wrong people, not the wrong machines.
• Barriers to health care.
• What it is like to be a psychopathic moron.

Altruism Through Execution

Does our good behavior arise from artificial selection against norm-violators?

This is a companion piece to the prior "Altruism Through Genocide", which presented a group selection theory for our human moral nature. In that piece, group cohesiveness was the driving force that benefitted those cooperative people who could effectively conduct warfare to exterminate their enemies, who were, on balance, less effective in their in-group altruism/cooperation.

Now we are considering a new book, "The Goodness Paradox", by Richard Wrangham, which presents an alternative, only slightly less grisly, theory. The book generally argues that humans show many signs of selective domestication- a syndrome common in animals that we have domesticated- of arrest in many aspects of development, towards more juvenile characteristics, such as docility, lower aggression, floppy ears, white fur patches, and skeletal and especially facial juvenilization. That much is clear. Despite our love of warfare, we are on balance, and compared to our chimpanzee relatives and most other wild creatures, far less violent, less reactive, and far more effectively cooperative. This is not just a cognitive development, but an emotional change and a deep change to our moral natures. So who or what did the domestication?

Remember in Western movies how good it feels when the bad guy gets killled? It is an archetype of deep power, and we hardly think about its moral and genetic implications. Chimpanzees don't have this moral sense, as far as we know. Wrangham cites various experiments and natural observations to show that no matter how terrible some chimpanzees are, the others of their group will not or can not cooperate effectively to ostracize or disable them. It just isn't done. In the modern world, we have grown squeemish about capital punishment, but primitive cultures had no prisons, thus pervasively practiced ostracism or death as the only practical punishments for serious crimes and unredeemable people. It turns out to have been common for communities (typically the men of the group) to gang up on a member who got egregiously out of line and kill that person. Wrangham places this development at roughly the emergence of modern Homo sapiens, two to three hundred thousand years ago. Thus there is quite a bit of speculation about the relative backwardness of Neanderthals, who had much more limited cooperative capacities, though being roughly as intelligent as moderns, and having many advanced characteristics such as complex stone technology and control of fire.

For a Few Dollars More ... Clint Eastwood hunts down the bad men.

The development of advanced hunting and killing technologies made each person, and especially each man, in primitive human bands quite powerful. But even more important was language and great scope it offered to organize, to collude with and against others, This created enormous incentives to maintain a good reputation. Primitive societies are characterized by an almost pathological fear of rising above one's peers- there is a notable lack of ambition, for the very good reason that the group is all-powerful, and signs that one wants to rule others, abuse them, or collude against them, are all treated very harshly. The idea, then, is that the unique human ability and motivation to detect and eliminate threats inside the group led to a process of natural selection that quickly domesticated the species in superficial metrics of reactive aggression, while advancing our organizational, deceptive, and language capabilities, which have made us by far the most deadly species when it comes to organized hunting and warfare.

The explains rather easily the intense motivation that teens have to conform to their groups, to party, to bond and seek power, and to be forever uncertain about their status. It explains conventionality. But does it explain the nature of the morality that human groups generally express? The posses that hunt down criminals, and the modern state apparatus that does the same on a more legalistic basis, the value we put on altruism and kindness? Not quite. For example, the morality could have become one of extermination, where leaders would use all their guile to eliminate, one by one, each of the other males of the group, thus gaining all the females for themselves. This harem structure is common among other animals, and has occurred occasionally in humans in historical times. But it has obvious defects. If such an endpoint is common knowledge, then coalitions would be difficult to build, though perhaps not necessary since even crude technologies allow relatively easy killing, even one-on-one, given a small amount of planning. More importantly, however, such an endpoint would leave the group very weak relative to other groups.

So both overall hypotheses are relevant, I think, the group selection hypothesis and the execution hypothesis, to explain the complexity and explosiveness of our group relations, and the generally pro-social and cooperative instincts that form our group values most of the time. There is a complex calculation to be made, in light of the status of the whole group, with regard to the value of each person, each one of whom would on the face of it benefit the group in any outward encounter, but who might also be so disruptive and destructive of group cohesion as to instead be a net negative asset. Wrangham unfortunately finesses this problem, of the actual content of our moral group ethics, and suggests instead that pure relativism prevails- that our groupishness / conformity / docility is genetic, but our morals are not, and become whatever the leading (male) coalition says they should be. One can grant that human groups have adopted very unusual moral codes, like sacrificing their own children into volcanoes, or conducting constant ritual slaughter as the Aztecs did, or making a fetish of celibacy, as the Buddhist and Catholic theocracies do. Nevertheless, there is a core of cooperativity and deep-seated conceptions of right and wrong (including the rightness of killing when the target is damaging the group, or is an enemy outside the group) that demand a better evolutionary explanation, one that focuses on the value of the group as a unit.

Wrangham also finesses another issue- that of eugenics. His theory is essentially eugenic. We have been our own selective agents, however unintentionally. In an afterword, he gives a brief case against capital punishment. Though it has had such positive effects by his theory, capital punishment is now unnecessary, since we have prisons and other mechanisms of social control. Yet the deeper issue is whether genetic selection is still needed to bias reproduction towards the well-behaved and away from the aggressive, psychopathic, misogynistic, and congenitally sleazy. Not a word on this, since it is a far more explosive and difficult issue, not to mention politically tinged at the moment.

• Mind control in North Korea.
• Insurers are promoting, rather than fighting, ransomware. Make sure to keep backups!
• "This administration is ultimately driven by sociopathic disregard for our future"
• North Carolina finally puts a nail in gerrymandering.
• Figuring out common threads in the diverse genetics of autism.
• Notes by Veblen.
• Just because ....

Postmodernism: License to Lie

A continuation of the Enlightenment project turned around to burn it all down, and our political system went along for the ride.

The discontents of modernism are legion. It is soul-less, rational, scientistic, dehumanizing. And the architecture is even worse, exemplified by the glass box skyscraper. Modernism was the stage after the self-satisfied Victorian age, our last unconscious period when Westerners felt confident in our myths, our cultural superiority, and our untroubled right to all the fruits of the Earth. Modernism came in the wake of Nietzsche and World War 1, which left all those certainties in tatters, followed by an even more destructive World War 2. But from America rose a new unbounded ethos of progress through cooperation and science, leading to the UN, the EU, the conquering of air and space, and the comfortable dispensation of the fossil-fueled late Cold War West.

The long-term theme has been increasing consciousness, from the Enlightenment onwards, adopting ever more realistic views of the physical and social world. Art was first to experience this startling realism. Then politics, with the slow destruction of the myth of monarchical and aristocratic superiority. And finally religion, from the work of Nietzsche and Darwin, among many others. Throughout, science has been steadily dis-enchanting the world, removing Earth from the cosmic center, mystical vitalism from the chemistry of life, and God from among our forefathers and mothers. With modernism, we had reached a new level of consciousness. We could look at ourselves as one among many world cultures, accepting "other" forms of religion, art, and world view as good, perhaps even co-equal, with those of the West. Frills and decoration were out, myth was relentlessly exposed, and we sought to plumb the psychological depths as well, exposing our complexes and deep motivations.

Then in 1970's France, the postmodernist school took it up another notch, trying to show that all our remaining certainties were also questionable, and could be deconstructed. Whatever narratives we live by, even the most attenuated reliance on general progress through the evident workings of civic, capitalist, and scientific institutions, were unmasked as just another forum for power politics, patriarchy, and elite control of the society's metanarrative. Build all the skyscrapers and Hubble telescopes you want, it all boils down to Game of Thrones in the end. All narratives were destabilized, and not only was nothing sacred, nothing had meaning at all, since interpretation is an ever-flexible tool that gives authority to the reader/viewer, with little left over for the author (or for "reality"). Anything can be read in innumerable layers, to mean ... practically anything. The narratives we can not help but to live by are all ripe for deconstruction, but then how does reality relate to our (limited) cognition of it? That gets us right back to the foundations of philosophy in the Platonic cave.

This approach clearly follows the modernist and psychoanalytic line of excavating ever deeper into our sources of motivation, meaning, and narrative. Indeed, other disciplines, like anthropology, psychology, and even economics (in its study of institutions) have long preceeded the postmodernists. But one has to ask two big questions. First, is there some limit of analysis beyond which, even if the analysis is valid, human functioning is so destabilized that, for all the intellectual benefits, we end up inert, stripped of larger motivating narratives and reduced to mere units of immediate consumption, mediated by our TV sets and phones? Second, have they gone too far? Is the postmodernist analysis actually valid in all its implications? An excellent article in Areo chews over some of these problems.

Being scientifically and psychoanalytically inclined, I would have to answer no to the first question, and yes to the second. While unproductive over-analysis can lead some people to inertia, any correct analysis in psychological, cultural, or other terms can not help but illuminate the human condition. This is in general a big plus, and not one to be discarded because it is uncomfortable or destabilizing to our customary life and traditions. We dealt with Darwininan evolution, (well, most of us did), and can still reach for the stars. Sources of narrative and motivation are vast and perpetually self-created. Losing the old gods and myths is not a serious problem if we have new and significant tasks to replace them with. For example, nothing could be more dire than global climate heating- it is the central problem of our time, and tackling it would give us collective, indeed eschatological, meaning. What makes this moment particularly painful and fake is not that we lack an animating myth or center, but that we are dithering with regard to the true and monumental tasks at hand, blocked by a corrupt system and various defects of human nature.

The second question more pointed, for if the postmodernist analysis is not generally true, then we hardly have to worry about the first question at all. This is a very tricky area, since much of the postmodernist critique is valid enough. We live by many myths and narratives. But its earthshaking claims to destabilize everything and all other forms of truth are clearly false. Many fields, not just science, have a living commitment to truth that is demonstrably valid, even if the quest is elusive, even quixotic. Take the news media. While the tendency to endless punditry is lamentable, there is a core of factual reporting that is the product of a great deal of worthy dedication and forms a public good. Whatever the biases that go into selecting the targets of reporting, their products, when true, are immune to the postmodern critique. The school board really did fire its superintendent, or put a bond on the next election ballot. The fact that we have a president who fears "perjury traps", labels all truthful reporting about him "fake news", and allies with propaganda outlets like FOX and RT should not put anyone in any doubt that truth, nevertheless, exists.

Why some religious people have cottoned to the postmodern approach is somewhat mysterious and curious, for while postmodernism has mightily attempted to destablize reigning cultural orthodoxies, particularly those of science, it is hardly more kind to clericalism or religion in principle. At best, it may allow that these are at least honest about their (false) mythos/narrative basis, unlike the devious subterfuges by which science channels its bourgeois interests into claims to the really, really true narrative, which thus have posed the more interesting challenge in the postmodern literature. But make no mistake, if religion were the reigning cultural power, the deconstructionists would make mincemeat of it.

What makes Deepak Chopra so laughable?

But postmodernism has nevertheless filtered down from the academy to popular culture, destabilizing verities and authorities. Did they seek to have Republican policians declare that "we make our own reality"? Did they foresee the internet and its ironic capacity, not to make us all Orwellian drones with the same beliefs, but to let us stew voluntarily in propaganda-laced echo chambers, losing touch with reality all the same? At issue is the nature and status of factual authority, which we are so shockingly confronted with in this political moment. Coordinated assaults on our capacity for reason, from the wingnut right and its unhinged media, the new masters of the internet, the Russians, and the lying sleazebag who found his moment amongst the chaos, have posed this problem in the starkest terms. What is truth? Are there facts? What is an authoritative narrative of leadership, of care for the future and the nation? Should public policy be responsive to facts, or to money and nepotism? What is the point of morality in a fully corrupt world? Why is gaslighting a new and trending word?

The postmodernists insisted, as does our current president, that every category and supposed fact is a mask for power. They saw hobgoblins of social construction and violent dominance in the most innocent scientific facts and institutions. Such an attitude might be provocative and occasionally fruitful, but it has been taken way too far, rendering fields most affected (in the humanities) stripped of coherence, let alone authority. Leaving us with a modern art bereft of ideals other than shock, and the most banal literature and identity-based histories. It is also a sort of zero-sum-ism, needlessly oppositional and Manichaean. In their haste to unmask and tear down all idols and intellectual achievements that unify humanity, they have generated a sort of war against all meaning which is deeply anti-human- not just deconstructive, but destructive.

Yes, our narratives are in perpetual conflict. Different religions, political viewpoints, and cultures have distinct narratives and each seeks to win the hearts and minds in order to rule human soceity. The Reformation offers abundant examples of this, as does our current political scene. But at the same time, reality itself forms another, and very influential, locus in this conflict. For all the other narratives claim to be accurate views of reality, whether claiming that god is real, Catholicism is the true church, or that Republicans have a more accurate and effective view of economics and human nature. Each stakes its claims on discernment of how reality works, including the moral and other aspects of what people really want out of their social system. Do they want a king to look up to, or a representative government that may be more moderate and effective?

So narratives are not just thrashing our their conflicts on an entirely archetypal / mythical / power basis, as the postmodernists seem to assume. Rather, they are negotiating views of reality, including moral and social realities, which can be interrogated in large degree by reason generally and science specifically. Creationism and climate change denialism are just the most flagrant examples of narratives that seek social dominance on the backs of religious delusion and/or simple greed. And for all the equivocation of the postmodernists, they can be definitively dismissed given the knowledge we have outside of these or other narrative claims. The growth of mature consciousness means expanding our abilities to judge the reality-claims of narratives in a dispassionate way, considering both physical but also the psycho-social realities we share, and progressively leaving our psychological baggage behind.

• Coal is dead.
• The long road ahead against Alzheimer's. Though that article oversells our ignorance.
• Do shareholders come first, or workers and communities?
• Who is doing the harassing in the Persian Gulf?
• Rachmaninoff 3, after the instructive intro, ~5:30.
• Sanctity of life.
• Endless corruption.
• Better automatic stabilizers?

That's Cool: Adolescent Brain Development

Brain power and integration increases with development, particularly in the salience network and in the wakeful, attentive beta waves.

We see it happen, but it is still amazing- the mental powers that come on line during child development. Neurobiologists are starting to look inside and see what is happening mechanistically- in anatomical connectivity, activity networks, and brain wave patterns. Some recent papers used fMRI and magnetoencephalography to look at activity correlations and wave patterns over adolescent development. While the methods and analyses remain rather abstruse and tentative, it is clear that such tendencies as impulsivity and cognitive control can be associated with observations about stronger brain wave activity at higher frequencies, lower activity at lower frequencies, and inter-network integration.

An interesting theme in the field is the recognition that not only is the brain organized physically in various crinkles, folds, nodules, etc., and by functional areas like the motor and sensory cortexes or Broca's area, involved in speech production, but that it is also organized in connectivity "networks" that can cross anatomical boundaries, yet show coherence, being coordinately activated inside much more densely than outside the network. An example is the default mode network (DMN, or task-negative network), which happens when adults are just resting, not attending to anything in particular, but also not asleep. This is an example of the brain being "on" despite little conscious mental work being done. It may be our unconscious at work or play, much like it is during sleep on a much longer leash. As one might imagine for this kind of daydreaming activity, it is strongly self-focused, full of memories, feelings, social observations, and future plans. Anatomically, the DMN extends over much of the brain, from the frontal lobes to the temporal and parietal lobes, touching on regions associated with the functions mentioned, like the hippocampus involved in memory, temperoparietal areas involved in sociality/ theories of mind, etc. There are roughly twenty such networks currently recognized, which activate during different mental fuctions, and they provide some answers to the question of how different brain areas are harnessed together for key functions typical of mental activity.

Two networks relevant to this current work are the salience network (SN) and the cingulo-opericular network (CN or CO). The latter is active during chronic attention- our state of being awake and engaged for hours at a time, termed tonic alertness. (This contrasts with phasic alertness, which is much shorter-term / sporadic and reactive).  It is one of several task-positive networks that function in attention and focus. The salience network spans cortical (anterior insula an dorsal anterior cingulate) and subcortical areas (amygdala and central striatum) binding together locations that play roles in salience- assigning value to new events, reacting to unusual events. It can then entrain other brain networks to take control over attention, behavior, thoughts, etc.

fMRI studies of the activity correlations between brain networks. The cingulo-opercular and salience network connections (gray) take a large jump in connectivity to other regions in early adolescence. At the same time, fronto-parietal network connections (yellow), characteristic of frontal control and inhibition of other networks, take a dive, before attaining higher levels going into adulthood.

Here we get to brain waves, or oscillations. Superimposed on the constant activity of the brain are several frequencies of electrical activity, from the super-slow delta waves (~ 1Hz) of sleep to the super-fast gamma waves (~50 Hz) which may or may not correlate with attention and perception. The slower waves seem to correlate with development, growth, and maintenance, while the faster waves correlate with functions such as attention and behavior. Delta waves are thought to function during the deepest sleep in resetting memories and other brain functions, and decline sharply with age, being pervasive in infants, and disappearing by old age. Faster waves such as theta (5-9 Hz), alpha (8-12), and beta (14-26 Hz) correlate with behavior and attention, and are generally thought to help bind brain activities together, rather than transmitting information as radio waves might. Attention is a clear example, where large brain regions are bound by coordinated waves, depending on what is being attended to. Thus the "spotlight of attention" is characterized both by the activation of selected relevant brain areas, and also by their binding via phase-locked neural oscillations. These are naturally highly variable and jumbled as time goes on, reflecting the saccadic nature of our mental lives.

One of the papers above focused on theta and beta waves, finding that adolescents showed a systematic move from lower to higher frequencies. While fMRI scans of non-oscillatory network activity showed greater integration with age, studies of oscillations showed that the main story was *de-coupling mainly at the lower frequencies. What this all seems to add up to is a reduction of impulsivity, via reduced wave/phase coupling between especially between the salience and other networks, at the same time as control over other networks is more integrated and improved, via increased connectivity. So control by choice goes up, while involuntary reactivity goes down. It is suggested that myelination of axons, as part of brain development along with pruning extra cells and connections, makes long-range connections faster, enabling greater power in these higher frequency binding/coordination bands.

Brain wave phase coordination between all areas of the brain, measured by frequency and age. Low frequencies associated with basal arousal, motor activity, and daydreaming are notably less correlated in adults, while beta-range frequencies about 25 Hz, associated with focused attention, are slightly more correlated. 

Is this all a little hand-wavy at this point? Yes indeed- that is the nature of a field just getting to grips with perhaps the most complicated topic of all. But the general themes of oscillations as signs/forms of coordination and binding, and active sub-networks as integrating units of brain/mental activity on top of the anatomical and regional units are interesting developments that will grow in significance as more details are filled in.

• Teens and risk- more punishment is indicated!
• Status of the Muller report.
• Will the recycling industry survive?

The Power of Prophecy

What makes prophecy such a compelling narrative device in fantasy and myth, and a psychological fixation?

Humans have been obsessed, from the beginning, with the future. As the only animal conscious of the future, its inscrutibility quickly became a frustrating obsession. One wikipedia page lists 372 forms of divination. Some of the earliest far Eastern writing we have is from divination using bones with wishes or questions written on them. How natural is it, then, to imagine that there is someone on the other end to tell us the answers, or some people gifted intrinsically or through some divine possession or shamanic training to foretell the future? My newspaper still publishes the daily horoscope, a sadly watered-down echo of these most fervent longings to peer into the unknowable.

It has been a fixation in drama, from Oedipus to Harry Potter. The Greeks went to Delphi and received dramatically cryptic answers, which could be famously misinterpreted. Oedipus fell into this trap, fulfilling precisely what he had strained every nerve to prevent. When used in fiction, prophecies are relentlessly fulfilled, since otherwise, why bring them up? Like for the more generic foreshadowing technique, the magic only works when the portents are true, and the characters, while twisting every which way to evade or fulfill them, find in the end that fate has spoken with one voice out of the timeless dimension.

The Harry Potter series makes generous use of prophecy, both in its main plot lines, where Harry is marked in advance in various ways for his extraordinary fate, including the special symbol tattooed on his face, and in one particular episode, where the characters fight it out in a hall of phophetic orbs, climax of the fifth book. The bible, of course would hardly be the book it is without a flood of prophecies. The new testament was in large part composed around the supposed fulfillment of various prophecies made in the old, with some squeezing and patching required. The king of the Jews who came to save the world  bears hardly any resemblence to what the old prophets were expecting! Yet, mysteriously and gloriously, the fulfillment came about in the least expected way, etc... Then the New Testament closes with another round of even more feverish prophecies, in the form of revelations where the mundane world will finally receive its just deserts and be swept away in favor of a new and perfect dispensation.

Stonehenge, in part an astronomical prediction machine.

Obviously, it is empowering to feel even a little in control of fate, a little gifted with insight into the future. Why else are countless people betting on sporting events? Why else make such a fetish of astronomy and the prediction of what can minimally be predicted- the steady progress of the days and seasons? It is endlessly maddening to know that the future is coming, but know so little about it. But the tide has turned a bit over the last few centuries as a new mode of thought came to the fore- science. The successful analysis and prediction of Halley's comet showed on a poplular level the power of Newton's system and its ability to predict the future. Now we can predict the weather with startling accuracy, at least a week or so in advance, and can likewise predict the climate decades into the future, somewhat to our horror. Yet there is so much that still eludes prediction. Even in the physical world, earthquakes remain a frustrating challenge, apparently fundamentally unpredictable. And despite the "end of history", human affairs remain not just unpredictable, but irrational, as our current political regime so amply demonstrates.

In its humbler incarnations, prophecy is merely evidence of intelligence- a keen imagination or intuition that is able to discern where things are going sooner than the next person. This is where sports betting and stock picking get their acolytes. But beyond that it is clearly a fictional device- one that we love in its fateful foreshadowings and tragic struggles, but one that has never risen above that level to divine inspiration, reading the mind of god. Naturally, that is because such a thing does not exist. We are trapped within the plodding arrow of time, as we are under the spatial light-speed limit, as we are under our own mastery of fate, such as it is, having no other to turn to.

• Like we need more billionaires running things, and preaching about the national debt.
• Wealth is the problem, far more than income.
• And we have the candidates to solve it.
• George Will does something good.
• Protect your and your country's health- leave facebook.
• Treason and corruption, continued.
• Income tax rates have no effect on economic growth.
• But what do economists know, anyway?